Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

by T. W. Rolleston

The answer to all this rises to the mind at once when we abandon the point of view of the thermometer and place ourselves at that of rational Man. This Matter, on whose states life is supposed to be dependent, is, after all, known to us only through the fact that we are living to observe it. If it disappeared, no doubt we should cease to see it, and if it were transformed we should see it otherwise, but to make the life which sees dependent on our seeing anything exactly as it appears now on this globe is surely the wildest of assumptions. We observe that life makes use of certain conditions of matter—a certain range of temperature, the presence of certain minerals and gases—in order to express itself. We regard these conditions as the product of a Power which desires life and has produced them to obtain it. But there may be many other conditions too. All we can tell is that beyond certain physical limits our senses cannot perceive life or get responses from it. M. Le Dantec would, no doubt, treat as an illusion the belief that man can communicate with and be responded to by a Power, a Life, transcending that of which the senses inform us. I am, with the multitude of men, profoundly convinced that we can. But leaving this entirely aside, is it not evident that, even as there are invisible rays in the spectrum which are now and then discovered by some unexpected chemical or electrical action, so there may be modes of living of which none of our present senses can give us the faintest conception? Whoever may deny this possibility, and on whatever grounds, it certainly cannot be denied on any grounds that physics or biology are aware of. And to those who believe that life is the central thing, and that matter exists only for it, the possibility is a certainty, for life must have been when as yet matter was not—life set it going. To convey the idea that everything that exists, however it may be transformed, is part of a divine Whole which cannot die because it is essential Life, we say that it is ‘immortal,’ and conceive ourselves as existing after death in a spiritual form just as the body exists after the bodily death in other bodily forms. Whether time and space, or even personality, will exist for us after death we dare not say; we are totally unable to imagine the conditions of such an existence. But we can perfectly grasp the broad fact that whatever we do and are, whatever we think, whatever transacts itself even in the unconscious sphere of our existence, must have eternal endurance and significance because it is knit with the eternal Whole.

“To the foot,” says Epictetus, “I shall say that it is according to Nature that it be clean; but if you take it as a foot, and not as a solitary thing, it shall beseem it to go into the mud, and to tread on thorns, and perchance to be cut off, for the sake of the whole; otherwise it is no longer a foot.
“And some such thing we should suppose about ourselves also. What art thou? A man. Look at thyself as a solitary creature, and it is according to Nature for thee to live to old age, to grow rich, and to keep good health. But if thou look upon thyself as a man, and as a part of a certain whole, for the sake of that whole it may become thee now to have sickness, now to sail the seas, and run into peril, now to suffer need, and perchance to die before thy time.
“Why, then, dost thou bear it hard? Knowest thou not that, as the foot, alone, is not a foot, so thou, alone, art not a man.”[159]

The broad fact on which a system of natural ethics must be based, if it is to have any ethical quality at all, is that the individual life finds its goal in the cosmic life, not in pleasure, or any other term by which we may choose to express a sensation of personal enjoyment. The distinction between the bonum honestum and the bonum delectabile is really a valid one—it is no invention of moralists “suckled in a creed outworn,” but is revealed by a study of life and its manifestations to have been deeply rooted in nature from a period far anterior to the advent of man upon the earth. In man, the bonum honestum takes the form mainly of what Epictetus calls the sense of “natural fellowship” among men, and what Christ expressed in the word which gave to the ideas of Stoicism the penetrating power they had lacked, the great and divine word, Love. But we must never forget that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal, eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part, whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws and inter-relations, would never have come into being. It is the “city of God,” builded without hands, the Universal Polity whose “troubled image,” as Plato says, we discern in the polity we know.

When Socrates, after his sentence, lay in prison awaiting the summons to die, his friends gathered round him entreating him to make his escape, and explaining to him the safe and easy means they had provided for that end. Freely and cheerfully as was his wont, delighting in the play of dialectical fence, he debated the matter with them. Then he laid dialectics aside, and spoke to them from the heights of vision. Rightly or wrongly, he declared, the laws of his mother-city, to which he owed all he had and all he was, had bidden him die. Whatever happened now, there could be no escape in the end. Some day he must face death, and stand before the Laws of the Underworld. What answer should he make to Them when they demanded how he had dealt in life by their brethren in the world above?

This grand impersonation of the eternal Laws in their kinship with the laws of the visible world illumines a whole region of thought, extending far beyond the limits of the particular moral question which evoked it. It strikes the note of all high thinking on man’s duty to man. The laws, written or unwritten, that govern societies of men can claim no reverence from the individual who does not feel that they are the shadows or copies of laws belonging to the sphere of the eternal.

It is one thing to admit that the social relations of mankind give the start to ethical feeling, provide it with a wide and varied field of action, and with a criterion as to what is right and what is not. It is quite another to argue that this ethical feeling is merely a product of these relations, and has, apart from them, no meaning or purpose. This is another case of the principle which I have described before[160] in speaking of Evolution and Involution. Without both of these I cannot see how any movement from one state of being to another is to be accounted for. People, or even animals, living in communities find that mutual aid is useful to them, and they practise it. The utilitarian school think, when they have demonstrated this, that the whole ethical question is solved. But in reality they have not even approached it. Mutual aid is useful? Well, then, it is useful. How are we going to get any further? How are we going to account for love, duty, fidelity, self-sacrifice? Because certain things appear in the world under certain conditions we have, many of us, got into a slipshod way of saying that they are the product of these conditions, but a strict examination of the terms will frequently show that they are nothing of the kind. There is no valid reason why social life and mutual aid should not go on for ever without producing anything higher than the sense of mutual advantage. The nobler passions do indeed come into life when the proper stage of social evolution has been reached, but their source is not within the bounds of the visible order, nor do I see how they can ever justify themselves with reference to it alone. Neither, on the other hand, can they be realized without it. The divine air which we breathe on the mountain height is not made by the mountain, but we must climb the mountain to breathe it. Every step we take upwards in the visible order is, as it were, the discovery of something in that invisible order which is its spiritual counterpart and gives it its spiritual significance.

I have said that ethics is for life; but to the individual it must sometimes appear to be rather for death than for life, unless he knows that there is a life beyond the visible life. In this faith only—in whatever varied forms the intellect of man has embodied and expressed it—are martyrdoms possible. And martyrdoms have been so often the great turning-points and inspirations of human history that an ethics which cannot justify them would seem to be an ethics at odds with nature. Consider from our point of view the significance of the two martyrdoms of history which have most deeply impressed and influenced the minds of men.

Socrates had no gospel, no new truth to proclaim. He dissociated himself from the ‘rationalistic’ theories of his time, not indeed because he was particularly attached to ancient ideas in religion, but because theorizing on these subjects had no interest for him.[161] On his trial he expressly disclaimed heretical views on religion. It is clear that these were only charged against him because the real offence was no crime in Athenian or any other law. The real offence was that Socrates was a relentless critic, within reach of whose tongue no patriotic rhetorician could feel himself confident and comfortable. It was a time of rhetorical patriotism in Athens. From the bitter humiliation of the Peloponnesian War had arisen an impulse towards national regeneration, a genuine and worthy impulse in itself, but one which unfortunately took shape not in a manly facing of facts, a courageous march forward to the future, but rather in a panic-stricken retreat to old conservative formulas and bigotries, to the abandonment of which by cultivated Athenians was ascribed all the evil that had fallen on the city. Socrates, however, delighted in taking popular convictions and reducing them by a series of ingenious interrogations to their verifiable residuum of truth, if there happened to be any. They commonly emerged from the ordeal in a dilapidated condition. At a time when the whole city was high strung with patriotic fervour while inwardly very uncertain about its principles of action, the presence of a thinker like Socrates, with his pitiless arraignment of every gaudy fallacy before the bar of Reason, was a continual scandal and offence, and was easily interpreted as a public danger. Had he consented to keep silent, and affected to fall in with the general trend of public sentiment, he would, as he well knew, have been safe. But he refused all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process. So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought, thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth his while to die for.

Turn to the death of Christ, and into how different an atmosphere we seem to pass! No philosopher has here recorded for us the death of a philosopher. Myth and legend have clustered round the great event—the Jewish conception of an expiatory sacrifice—the truer and profounder myth of a slain and re-arisen God—and these have wrapped the Crucifixion in such a cloud of mystical light and colour that the outlines of the historical fact are lost to view. When this cloud is pierced, however, an intelligible human transaction remains. In Christ the luminous purity of Greek reason was so blended with the religious fervour of the Eastern mind that he may justly be called the ideal man, the Son of Man and of God, the incarnation of the divine thought. Unlike Socrates, he was distinctly a heretic in his place and time. He appeared among a people deeply religious but one in whom religion had taken the form of an immense fabric of ceremonial and observance, guarded and administered by a special caste who conceived themselves as the appointed vehicle of the will of God for the untaught multitude. To this multitude Christ went direct. He led them straight to the ancient founts of light and life, disregarding the narrow channels hewn by Pharisaic formalism. He bade them open their eyes and see for themselves; he taught them that the truth was for all men; beside the conceptions of the authorized religion he set new conceptions which made the old seem barren or ludicrous. The people heard him gladly, and the great fabric of Pharisaism was manifestly tottering. The fury of a monopolist caste was aroused. There is no more merciless anger than the anger of the religious monopolist who sees his monopoly threatened, and to this anger Christ fell a victim. As Socrates died for the right to disbelieve, so Christ died for the right to believe, and whatever the churches have made of him he has inspired every revolt against priestcraft and authority ever since. No creed is worth living for which is not worth dying for. Christ’s death and spiritual resurrection[162] set the seal on this truth and gave the world the most signal instance in history of triumph arising out of defeat and death.