On the contrary, it is of the very essence of naturalism that it should admit no standard but its own. To a naturalist and materialist of the true type all the ideal philosophy of the past, with the religion which grows out of it, is a lying cheat of the imagination and corresponds to nothing real in the nature of things; its peace is a pitiful sham cherished by those who are too cowardly to face the facts; its promise to mitigate the harsher passions of greed is only a cunning pretext devised to blind the dispossessed of their rights and to fortify the owners of wealth and power in the unmolested enjoyment of their criminal advantages. From the very beginning the double standard of things spiritual and material has been the foe of progress, and only then will justice and peace and prosperity prevail, when the deceptions of priest and philosopher are swept away and our vision of material values, as known to the scientist in his laboratory and to the blacksmith at his forge, is not confused by false lights. This, I repeat, is no caricature of the sort of naturalistic pragmatism that is sweeping over the world.
I would not imply that all these enemies of religion, or even those of them who are most influential to-day, are conscious advocates of a pitiless egotism or believe that the repudiation of religion would throw mankind into that anarchy of internecine warfare which Hobbes described as the state of nature, or which Nietzsche glorified as the battle-field of the superman. It is rather the mark of modern naturalism that it is plastered up and down, swathed and swaddled, masked and disguised, with sentimentalisms. A Dewey, for instance, wields his influence over the young and troubled minds of our generation because he stands forth as a reformer with a precious panacea for the calamities of history. It is the dream of another realm, such reformers declare, that has riveted upon us the chains of lethargy and despair; shatter these, let men become aware of their real nature, let them see that the only truth is to recognize this life as all they have, and that their only hope of happiness is to get together and increase the physical comforts of existence—let this once come to pass, and at last a peace born of universal benevolence will settle down upon this long-vexed planet. Sympathy, they maintain, is a natural instinct of the heart, as surely as the lust of power and possessions; rather, it is the genuine basis of nature, and of itself will control the other natural instincts if unhampered by false ideals. That is a pretty faith; but is it true? No doubt the human heart is swayed by sympathy and benevolence; but are these the qualities of the natural man? I will not go into the answer given to this question by the religious minds from Plato down to Cardinal Newman, who all with one accord assert that sympathy and benevolence of an active sort do not spring up from the soil of nature, but result from the reaching down, so to speak, of a higher principle into the lusts of the flesh. They all maintain, with one voice, that the only effective bond of union, whether it be of friendship or of society, is through our perception of oneness in the spirit. Mercy droppeth down as a gentle dew from heaven. I will not argue from this thesis, because it would carry us into the brier patch of metaphysics. But history and science both would seem to enforce the bitter conviction that at the best the instinct of natural sympathy is a fragile and treacherous support against the assaults of a restless and perpetual desire of power. Greece learnt this, to her frightful ruin, when she followed the law of nature as avowed by the Athenians at Melos; and to-day we have rediscovered it in the same desolation of war. That, I fear, is the lesson of history. And science has no different lesson. Indeed, by the natural man I would signify precisely the realization, if such were possible, of the principle of natural selection and the survival of the fittest by which the world is governed as the scientist, the natural philosopher, as he used to be called, sees it when he eliminates the religious idea from his view. I mean nothing more than what Huxley, the protagonist of evolutionary philosophy, meant when, in his essay on The Struggle for Existence, he thus described the law of nature as actually seen in operation:
From the point of view of the moralist, the animal world is on about the same level as a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight—whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given. He must admit that the skill and training displayed are wonderful. But he must shut his eyes if he would not see that more or less enduring suffering is the meed of both vanquished and victor. And since the great game is going on in every corner of the world, thousands of times a minute; since, were our ears sharp enough, we need not descend to the gates of hell to hear
“sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai,
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle”
—it seems to follow that, if this world is governed by [a]benevolence], it must be a different sort of benevolence from that of John Howard.
And I think, if you look closely into the social theory based on the naturalistic, or let us say the purely economic, view of life, you will find that beneath its mask of sentimental sympathy the reality is a face of greed and animal rapacity. According to this theory, progress is a result of discontent. Because men are discontented with their present state they push out for something better. And no doubt in a half-way that is true. But when discontent is associated with material standards alone, and purchasable comfort, and worldly opportunity, or, to put the matter in its most favorable light, when success and the goal of achievement are measured by the pleasures, however you may refine them, and by the pride of a few brief years of physical existence, beyond which there is nothing, and when for failure in these no compensation is held out, no supernatural hope, no refuge of peace, here and now, such as the world cannot give—when the driving force of progress is so presented, what is there in the nature of things to offer in the long run any effective resistance to the innate desire of power after power that ends only with death? What equal counterpoise will you set against that instinct of pleonexia which reaches out for ever more and more?
Philosophy is full of mockeries. These honorable gentlemen who are teaching a pure naturalism in the schoolroom, who denounce the content of religion and other-worldly philosophy as a base acquiescence, who in the restlessness of an itching egotism go out as missionaries to the people of the far Orient, may deceive themselves and may try to deceive us; their language may be sleek with the sentiment of brotherly love, but strip off its disguise, and the social theory they are proclaiming will leer forth in its true face as an incentive not to progress but to the anarchy of the jungle. These men are distilling into society a discontent that knows no satisfaction, that must engender only bitterness of disappointment and mutual distrust and hatred, and that in the end, if not checked by other motives, will bring about internecine warfare and a suicide of civilization of which the hideous years through which we have just passed are a warning admonition. And these teachers have the field to-day. We applaud them for their pretensions of philanthropy, even when we doubt the utility of their philosophy. We are browbeaten by the volume of their noisy propaganda. We are mealy-mouthed and afraid to speak out in open denunciation, even when secretly we burn with indignation at the baseness of their words. We sulk in silence, as if we had nothing to say. Meanwhile they have had the field to themselves, and the world every day is more filled with fear and disquiet.
There is no danger that by opposing other views of life to this insolent naturalism we shall put an end to that normal discontent with material conditions which may be a necessary incentive to natural and social progress. Certainly, however it may have been at other times, we need apprehend no such danger now. In a world manifestly distracted and blown from its moorings, in a society seething already with envy, it is not the part of wisdom to sow broadcast words that are calculated to inflame discontent into passionate hatred or sullen despair. That way leads to madness. What we need is rather a clearer perception of, and a firmer insistence on, those immaterial values which it is within the power of every man to make his own, whatever may be the seeming injustice of his material condition. We need rather to emphasize the simple truth that poverty is not the only, or indeed the worst, of mortal evils, that happiness does not consist mainly in the things which money can buy, that the man of narrow means may enrich himself with treasures which only he can give to himself, and which no one can take from him, that the purest satisfaction is in the sense of work honestly done and duties well met, and a mind and conscience at ease with itself. Even to the very poor, if such must be, religion may offer manifold compensations. “Blessed be ye poor,” it was said, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” Shall we say that these words were spoken in ignorance or jest or mockery? I think not. We for the moment may have lost the key to their meaning, we may have listened to teachers who turn them into ridicule; nevertheless, they are true words, rich with a gift of solid content.