Even now, as we talk of sweeter and less avid processes which might be brought into play by a superior power, life is maintaining its ancient balance of evil and good, or extremities of one kind balanced against extremities of another. Even now, under the very noses of the religionists and the moralists, these processes are at work and show no sign of being abated. For every neighborhood of taste and comfort, witness the vast areas of poverty, poor taste, neglect, dull thought, inefficiency. For every comfortable man a lean one, or many. For every mind of the first order a million of a weaker, fumbling character. For every tender, Christ-like soul how many of another kind—avid, selfish, cruel, hideous almost! Are the poor governed by the rich—and well? Do the shrewd rule the ignorant, and to their advantage? Do the strong control the weak, and to their advantage? Are the inefficient well or badly housed, well or badly nourished, neglected, left to stew in their own juice of misery and live and die as best they can, or are they looked after, as the religionist and moralist suggest and hope for? Only the dull or dishonest among the moralists and religionists can, it seems to me, fail to perceive or dare deny what even the dull or the ignorant now being trampled upon do already vaguely perceive and understand.
And yet behold! the song of ultimate perfection continues yearly, from century to century, to be sung. The Divine, far-off event (which, if anything, is Nirvana) is surely coming. A sweeter and less avid process will be brought into play. Man is to be saved from hunger, cold, thirst, lust, undue material ambition, by telling him how horrible they are and asking him to be kind. Well, he may make a comfortable social organization for himself here on earth, but that will by no means prove that the universe or God is moral. For, behold—man himself is superimposed upon other forms of life, a ruthless Lord or devil to them, and thrives only by their destruction. Do you suppose the ox, the hog, the horse, the fish, or any of the multitude of creatures man slays or enslaves in order that he may be comfortable and spiritually at rest, could be made to look upon him as tender, merciful, a creature necessarily to be saved to a higher spiritual state—representing, for instance, an all-kind God? I doubt it. What about the God who allows their organization and so-called right to life to be disrupted in our favor? Where the universal harmony, justice, mercy there? We are to develop a social organization in which gentleness, mercy and harmony will prevail among us, but we do not hesitate to curb the efforts or aspirations of lesser creatures, even rival nations—the Indians, say—in the same direction. In the great days to come no man will contest with his neighbor, but only with the universe—which of course raises the question of why fight the universe. And where do the rights of the universe come in, which we are hoping to rob to our own advantage and its enslavement?
Aside from the confusion involved as to the character of man and the governing forces of life, there is no quarrel with a portion of this theory. To a certain extent harmony, or a “dependent equation,” as Spencer was pleased to term it, will always be attained between individuals assembled in vast numbers on earth or in the sea perforce, because it may not be escaped. If one reads chemistry and physics correctly it is a condition which underlies everything. An equation between matter and force and the elements to which apparently they give rise, must be struck, a balance attained, if life as we see it is to appear or go on. The slightest disturbance of the existing equations which produce life as we see it, as Loeb and Crile and others have shown, ends in monstrosities or confusion, and life as we know it ceases. In our own social life, if equation did not hold, internecine contest would soon decimate and gradually eliminate the vast majority of us. The late great war indicated as much. Indeed there is scarcely any doubt that social life as we know it will yet need to be organized upon an even more closely balanced scale than at present, since the elements and powers which make for contest and self-defense are becoming more numerous. Hunger, cold, thirst and many other ills to which the flesh is heir may yet be eliminated among men, or the individuals of one dominant state. It is now, by certain orders of men and insects; the bee-hive and the ant-colony offer suggestions. But it does not follow that the basic elements of Nature or God, or man, would thereby be changed. Is it not more likely that here and now, in a small way and for the time being, only their disruptive as opposed to their constructive characteristics are restrained? Such stabilized centers of motion do occur in Nature from time to time in small ways and places. All human and animal bodies, machines and forms of government even, are illustrations in point. But does that prove or augur that the changeful elemental conditions everywhere prevailing outside these delicate arrangements in Nature may not eventually sweep in and make over that which has been established here into such a condition as we find in the sea, for instance, where life insistently and apparently mechanistically preys on life? Why not? The glory of pagan life and art—were they saved? Or was their knell sounded by the advent of Christianity?
Many, observing only the satisfactory results of harmony or equation or balance, and entirely failing to note the essential disharmonies out of which alone harmonies may take their rise, have assumed the existence of an emasculate God whose virtues are all negative, ignoring the positive horrors by which we live and progress. For them the cataclysms of physics, the fumbling failures of biology, are meaningless, if they exist at all. Yet plainly the creative force is neither as generous nor as amiable as they think. Rather, brilliant as is all this evolutionary process, and it reveals startling harmonies, beauties and seeming intelligence, it still only argues some such fumbling hit-or-miss mechanistic scheme as the chemists and physicists are beginning to outline and which allows for far more latitude in morals and conduct, as well as invention and discovery even, than the religionist has hitherto been willing to grant. The only one who appears to sense the true process or processes of Nature is the mechanistic chemist or physicist, who does not deny the possibility of extremes and horrors existing in the Divine mind or will of the creative impulse. “Murder,” say these scientific seekers after truth, or at least their facts point to this, “is a disturbing and disrupting process. It destroys the equation best expressed in ‘Live and let live.’ It affects individual peace. If you do so unto others they will do the same unto you. Chemically and physically, according to the law of reaction or equation, they cannot very well avoid it. Therefore do not murder.” Yet where is there any Divine command in that? Is it not rather a simple and easily understandable interpretation of a very obvious and inescapable law of equation, under which nevertheless, so roughly is this law adjusted and so casually does it work, murder and many other forms of non-equation may and do take their rise and do persist? If that is God or Good, then God permits murder, repays with murder, or asks you to be the judge as to whether you will tolerate murder in your State. Rather, to the physicist and chemist, it appears to be not so much a Divine command as an accidental and inescapable condition of equation.
We are told, by way of dogmatic moral comfort, that man has achieved somewhat that the animals have not, and that therefore he is superior. But also, as is now becoming perfectly plain, he has been able to discover and perpetuate for his own satisfaction crimes and iniquities for which no animal apparently within its small range of instinct or mechanistic control has the skill. Nature makes both, yet she does not, or cannot, or at least has not, made the animals as delicately and resourcefully evil in some things as is man. That is why he is able to dominate them. In one way, then, man is worse than the animals, and in another better—a balance presumably in the favor of man, though not necessarily so. The truth is that most of the ways wherein man has been differentiated from the animals by forces over which he has no control concern not ethics, as we understand and act upon them, but mechanical articulations and utilitarian comforts, the construction and normal use of which lie entirely apart from the realm of ethics. There is nothing either moral or immoral in the development and use or non-use of steam, electricity, plumbing, the tractor engine, automobiles and so on. They are mechanistic and non-moral. Thus we have developed architecture, machinery and the arts. It is true that in so far as man himself is concerned these are helpful to him in his mass phase and provide a larger freedom, which has resulted in a large experience, hence intelligence or comprehension in every direction. Yet have they improved his morals? Or lowered them? Who would say so? Yet perceiving this development or change, and, more faintly, the need of balance and equation which runs through all and underlies all, man has set about the task of writing about it, framing the inescapable equational laws which all changes suggest and compel into definite unbreakable commands from a definite God, singing songs about Him, painting pictures of Him, and directing attention to what man has ignorantly assumed to be a universal source of supply which will or should permit the greatest possible number to live under some such scheme of equation as is here suggested. Unfortunately this has not been proved as yet, and at any rate it is not the same as the presumably provable scheme of moral order which has been foisted upon man by the dull, designing or poetically enthusiastic of all ages, and which involves the laying aside of nearly every forceful, vigorous, natural, or human or pagan, attribute. Quite the contrary.
In this connection I should like to reiterate that to the Christian and other metaphysical idealists neither dishonesty nor vice nor any crime is contemplated by God, and therefore should not exist, any more than any other variation from that perfect state, best indicated perhaps by what the Ten Commandments forbid and the Beatitudes imply. God does not will them. He personally resents and will punish their appearance. The first part of this (i. e., that He does not will them) might be accepted as true if the fact that he permits them, or at least that they are, in spite of Him, not denied. But of course religion, as all those who philosophically struggle with life now know or should, is an abstraction, an ideal, whose dogmas can only in part be approximated in life. For life, as we nearly all know by now or should, is a shifty and evasive mechanism, chemic in part at least, and material and inscrutable, with which the abstractions of the religionist have little if anything in common. The best that religion and ethics have so far done is to take credit for the inherent and necessary tendency to compromise which has previously been indicated and which is manifested by all phases of natural energy, as much by that shown in our body politic as anywhere else. Indeed, the very best that religion can show is no better than that which life, or Nature Herself, could and did long before any religion appeared, namely, a rough equation, a balance struck; so that if a man had done a consciously wrong thing in one place he was chemically or emotionally moved to do a right thing in another, and if his actions were bad in one way it might be that he was compelled by forces outside his control to counterbalance them by good ones in another. All animal forms above those merely mechanistic or tropic (those governed by tropisms of various kinds) appear to display most of the virtues exercised by humans—the care of their young, for instance, distress at their loss, loyalty, ability to organize and so observe group laws; characteristics celebrated by man, where exercised by him, as virtues, beatitudes and what not else. Yet these lower forms cannot possibly know of religious or moral precepts in any revealed or instructed sense, via a Messiah or Redeemer. Instincts or tropisms as developed and verified by oppositions or aids (accidental or otherwise)—once more the law of balance or equation—appear to have been their sole guides. Hence to the religionist and moralist, thus far at least, they have been beyond the pale of ethical consideration, things almost beyond the willing, and so beyond the care, of the Creator Himself. An especial opponent of God or Good had to be devised in order to take care of them. And yet are they not an excellent illustration of this same creative and governing force in Nature which, while apparently seeking variety in unity, is itself subject to a law of balance or harmony as well as one of disharmony or change, and this without any evidence self-conscious on its part? At least the investigations of the chemists and the physicists thus far appear to indicate as much. “Vengeance is mine” declared the old Hebraic Jahveh, and by that very assertion he admitted that he did not expect to establish the abstractions of right, truth, justice and mercy on earth but rather, since he could not, he would at least attempt to strike a balance and would exact, in the form of pain or disaster, repayment for things done in opposition to his code.
Well, that requires no Sinaitic command or religious law to make it true. It is not a matter for great churches and confessionals and pence and genuflections—or is it? It is true, whether God or Moses or any one else ever said so or not. It is a material and an economic fact as well as a chemic or psychic law. If you wish to glorify God or Nature for that, well and good. Your mood may be admirable or interesting, if not exactly necessary. But certainly, whether one admits the existence of a self-willing Creator or not, it is too much to say that man obtains exact justice or that an exact return is made anywhere for energies expended, ideals struggled for, efforts, good, bad or indifferent, made. We know that is not true. Nor is it true that there is not a counter impulse to withhold it. There is. And men, fellow-units in the great self-balancing cosmos, all too frequently reflect that impulse. Man is no more essentially just than he is unjust. He is an impulse, a will to live, a sharply reflected chemical and physical impulse in Nature, which acts or reacts as the nature of other chemical and physical stimuli in immediate contact with him suggests or compels, and which same may be by no means as moral as we think. Man, as a representation of chemical and physical impulses coming from somewhere, has an innate desire for power for extreme movement for himself; but so have all other mechanical or physical representations of that impulse. And it is but the balancing pressure of his fellows which keeps him in position at or near a median line. If you examine him carefully you will find that in the main he desires so-called “justice” for himself only, a fair balance for himself, liberty for himself, or that which is related to him via pleasure or profit, and so on ad infinitum. At the same time he is a slave, a tool, a medium for something, an intruded if not self-intruding, self-seeking insect, but without power to control or fend against major impulses and powers. Still, between man and man, tribe and tribe, nation and nation, there are these necessary equations or balances plus their internal hopes or chemic tendencies, each one for himself, to change and achieve; yet the same being but roughly worked out; on the one hand to balance or equation in favor of all the others, on the other hand to supremacy or extreme liberty of movement for each. Where only failure is achieved there is either a lull, temporary only, or a storm soon or late (revolution), or periods of horror in which chaos rules, or peace in which nothing is achieved. The world is sad over its inability to obtain freedom, great scope of emotion, for itself, or gleeful because of its triumph in this direction. But all the time it is struggling and maintaining but a rough and in the main brief balance, part with part or unit with unit.
One might go on indefinitely contemplating other phases of this same equational law, its relation to love of parents, love of country, love of home, love of one’s neighbor, love of this, love of that. Are not all of these held up as duties, virtues, perfections even Sinaitic commands, as in “Honor thy father and thy mother,” when as a matter of fact and inwardly we know that this is a matter of equation or balance and cannot absolutely as a commandment from on high exist where no reasonable return in kind is predicated. What, love a shameless, brutal, unparental or non-filial father or mother, son or daughter, in whom, let us say, exists not one redeeming trait or quality of all that we consider essential to or characteristic of those states? It is not chemically therefore not humanly possible. What is meant is that it is not only possible but natural to make a reasonable return where affection, kindness or care has been extended. Now while it is entirely conceivable that one might love one who was cruel to oneself and generous to others, or generous to oneself and cruel to others, who in some way or some one direction fulfilled some phases of balance or equation, in however weak or impossible a way, still one could not possibly love one who was in no wise kind or generous to any one, a thing without reciprocal or balancing relations in some direction. The law of balance or equation which governs in all processes, even thought, will not permit it. There must be something given in some way, directly or indirectly, before anything can be returned or evolved, even in thought. And if one reverses the picture and attempts to conceive of hating some one or thing equationally just, fair or balanced, not attempting to take from any one or thing too much and not withholding from any one or thing that which is equationally his, it is quite as psychically impossible. One cannot cerebrate inimically toward that person or thing as being evil, reprehensible or what not. It cannot be done. Sometimes, where by reason of plenty or inherent weakness of mind or force, or carelessness of thought or interest, an individual is in any way indifferent to a “reasonable” or balanced return to himself for effort made, labor given, thought expended and what not, and where this results in no injury to himself or others, it is entirely possible to look upon him with indifference or as a fool, or as one who is weak-minded or not capable of balancing himself against the shrewd and self-interested minds of others. But such indifference or lack of self-interest would not indicate that one looked upon him as being evil, scarcely even a discreditable force, save possibly where his operations, or lack of them, affected the interests or rights or privileges of another or others.
Not love of God, then, it would seem, nor fear of God, although these abstractions have come to be real enough to some minds, prevents one individual from overriding the dreams and hopes of his neighbor, but fear of retaliation which his selfishness might produce. “Thou shalt not” springs plainly from “Thou hadst best not, it is dangerous,” to which might be added the strangest quality of all, the tendency in large or small bodies or masses to quiescence, the love of peace, or inertia. Our evoluted mechanistic chemism has become so diffused or varied that we may even now speak of such intangible and yet vital forces as love of the fixed scene, which appears to be little more than a reflected form of helio, or ego, or someother form of tropism, the inherent power in everything to attract something to itself and so maintain itself, for the time being anyhow. That things are inclined to a static or inert state or to congeal and so stratify and endure in that form (Nirvana?) is as true as that they must change; and, under certain conditions, Nature seems to abhor too much speed, as too little.
Is there anywhere in this to be found that universal right, truth, justice, mercy, as we have hitherto deemed it or them to be or exist? Perhaps not, but it is all of so-called right, truth, mercy or justice, universal or otherwise, that we will ever know, all of it that is involved with life. Does this, by any chance, contain truth? Yes, indeed, it is truth, for it is a fact. Is it right? Well, for life as we find it conditioned it is apparently the only way. Who can suggest a better? Should the fact that we find ourselves thus conditioned, confronted by Nature in all Her complexity and with only this necessity for equation to fall back on, disconcert or dishearten us? Need it or must it take the savor out of life? No; not, at least, in my judgment. Life in its most terrible as well as its most halcyon aspects is at once an enticing and a fit game. It seems well enough suited to our capacities, and we to it, since essentially we are of it—it, in fact. At least it leaves or provides us much to strive for, and strife is the only key to knowledge or sensation and life that we have. Abstractions and theories are good as games at which the human mind may play if it chooses, and whenever life becomes too severe for any group or part of it it is easy enough to invent a theory or abstraction which will then make it seem different. And this is almost invariably done, as witness all the impossible religions and theories that at one time and another have filled the world. Like chess or checkers, they furnish a diversion or relief to life-weary minds. If you have nothing better to do even a religion may be worth while. At worst it can only narrow your vision, and if that is a comfort—well, it is a comfort, but you do not thus escape the essential facts of life. You merely invent a shield against their too-sharp blows. Regardless of whatever dogmatic moralities may have been dreamed, or yet may be, or attempted, life is still avid, treacherous, astounding. Our little safety, if we have any, lies not in the desires or intentions of our fellow-mortals, good, bad or indifferent, or in their churches or creeds, or ours really, but in their limitations. They dare not do unto us for fear of what we will do to them, or of what the machinery of equation which life has set up or is conditioned by and now operates, will do to them. All else is a poet’s dream.