CHAPTER VII
THE SPIRITUAL ROOTS OF THE SETTLEMENT
‘Human Nature is always what it is’
‘YOU may argue as much as you like. All the logic chopping will never get over the fact that human nature is always what it is. Nations will always fight.... always retaliate at victory.’
If that be true, and our pugnacities, and hates, and instincts generally, are uncontrollable, and they dictate conduct, no more is to be said. We are the helpless victims of outside forces, and may as well surrender, without further discussion, or political agitation, or propaganda. For if those appeals to our minds can neither determine the direction nor modify the manifestation of our innate instincts, nor influence conduct, one rather wonders at our persistence in them.
Why so many of us find an obvious satisfaction in this fatalism, so patently want it to be true, and resort to it in such convenient disregard of the facts, has been in some measure indicated in the preceding chapter. At bottom it comes to this: that it relieves us of so much trouble and responsibility; the life of instinct and emotion is so easily flowing a thing, and that of social restraints and rationalised decisions so cold and dry and barren.
At least that is the alternative as many of us see it. And if the only alternative to an impulse spending itself in hostilities and hatreds destructive of social cohesion, were the sheer restraint of impulse by calculation and reason; if our choice were truly between chaos, anarchy, and the perpetual repression of all spontaneous and vigorous impulse—then the choice of a fatalistic refusal to reason would be justifiable.
But happily that is not the alternative. The function of reason and discipline is not to repress instinct and impulse, but to turn those forces into directions in which they may have free play without disaster. The function of the compass is not to check the power of the ship’s engines; it is to indicate a direction in which the power can be given full play, because the danger of running on to the rocks has been obviated.
Let us first get the mere facts straight—facts as they have worked out in the War and the Peace.
It is not true that the directions taken by our instincts cannot in any way be determined by our intelligence. ‘A man’s impulses are not fixed from the beginning by his native disposition: within certain limits they are profoundly modified by his circumstances and way of life.’[70] What we regard as the ‘instinctive’ part of our character is, again, within large limits very malleable: by beliefs, by social circumstances, by institutions, and above all by the suggestibility of tradition, the work is often of individual minds.