But the darkest part of it is that aside from the small modicum of service which you may render at top speed and with the utmost enthusiasm, Nature has not the slightest care for you or yours. With the same cavalier air with which She provides a hundred drones for the single love-flight of the queen bee, all the failures to die, so She provides a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, that one—and only one—may think the necessary thought, invent the necessary machine, build the necessary bridge or lead the necessary army. The rest may die as they will. They are chaff. Lay them out in hundreds—in millions—to be blown whithersoever the wind listeth, to poverty, to death, perchance even to fortune, a brief hour. Who cares? Not She. Only the ways of life must be kept fresh and new, the illusion of newness and vigor maintained. Only through new bright instruments will She work, and none other. A tasteful maid. In the blood-stream of your body are quadrillions of little entities—so many millions to the single blood drop—whose total destiny, apparently, is to your life about as yours is to the race—and no more. They hurry that you may live. They toil that you may smile, seek, yearn, blaze with ecstasy. A fraction of a minute each, and their little cycles have been run. So yours here. But do they know? Or care? Or do you? There is that much wisdom or tenderness or practicality in Nature, that for the majority She inhibits the power of memory or perspective or too great sensitiveness to joy or pain. Else what a cursing, else what a wailing, else what a ceasing—even in the face of Her imperial will.
THE REFORMER
AMONG the interesting phenomena of life is the periodic appearance in every walk of life of the reformer, the individual who, according to some theory based on clear perception or some delusion that has developed in his brain, seeks to readjust conditions as he finds them to something more in accord with what is agreeable to him, and who accordingly, by a process of transference akin to that which has been so adequately set forth in psychoanalysis, seeks to represent himself to himself as a world need. Always it is life, not himself, that is in need of this new condition, and so him. And what is it that as a rule he offers or seeks? Without exception, if you trouble to examine the great instances—Buddha, Christ, Confucius, St. Francis, Luther, Mohammed—it is a revision of a current, and in itself passing, condition which has become irritating to his sense of balance or proportion or equation in things mundane, his personal and physical reaction to or sensory repulsion from conditions which have become chemically (socially, spiritually, anything you will) too far removed from a norm or mean or equation which appeals to him, his eternal and special view of harmony. But this after all is chemic and natural, and when he is successful he merely represents an inevitable tendency in nature to maintain a balance or equation between one type of mood and another, only one of which can be dominant for a time and of which he becomes the passing representative.
It is the only way apparently in which the moving spirit which creates us can express—or, better yet, change—itself. Our self-propulsive emotions, moods or appetites have somehow a tendency, if uninterrupted, to lead us too far in some one direction—to the place, for instance, where a chemical or physical non-balance is threatened to that dependent equation of rival forces in which we all find ourselves immersed or held. Then, apparently, by an inhering law which compels balance or equation in all things, a counter-tendency which is most likely to first present itself in the shape of a reformer, or instructor, or warner, always chemical in his significance, appears (Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Luther), and you have a readjustment toward a happy medium again, as it were. One phase of life, let us say, grows and presses too dominantly on another. Forthwith a spokesman or mouthpiece of some kind arises, the antithesis of the dominant thing, by no means remote or divine but plainly human and simple and easily understandable, if he is to prove of any value. That is why it is always esoterically safe in gross material days to look forward to the coming of a Christ or Messiah, or reformer, or changer, of one type or another. He is in reality a chemic and psychic sign. He cannot help coming. He is merely an individual expression of the general tendency toward balance or equation. And he will surely come when things swing too far in any given direction. Any one can be a mouthpiece for an extreme lack of balance in human affairs, any one. The accident of circumstances usually distinguishes that one.
But by that we are not told that extremes, either of the gross or material, or on the other hand of the spiritual or ascetic, are to be permanently done away with or “reformed,” or that either, when dominant, is essentially evil or good, or that the replacing thing is essentially better and so should remain forever. Rather, what is new and ameliorative—be it religious, ethic or economic—is merely one or the other half or portion or face of that which was before it came, a change from, or the obverse of, the other. Indeed the essential character of God, or the biologic force, or the Universe, is not made much clearer unless we see in this tendency to change or equation in all things that it or he is both good and evil. Since chemically or spiritually we are compelled always to seek a level or balance and maintain it, roughly enough it is true; since to live is to swing to and fro, past a mean and between extremes, may we not deduce from that that equation, balance, is an attribute of God or the life force, a conditioning attribute, and one under which it must express itself?
For in life, as we may always note, and at the very moment the greatest reformers are operating, there are also working—and quite as vigorously, else the reformer would have little to do—anti-reformers, or anti-Christs, or reactionaries, if you will, creatures who represent the obverse of what is sought by the reformer or changer, and who will by no means be permanently disposed of by him. Life apparently goes on two legs, or opposites, always—heat: cold; high: low; external: internal; strength: weakness; little: much; excluded: included. Side by side with millions or billions who wish one type of thing are always millions or billions who wish another, whose impulses, desires and necessities are the very antithesis of those advocated by the reformers, saviors, adjustors then operating. Thus as Christ walked the earth there were Herod, and the whole brood of Roman, Greek and Egyptian philosophers—pagans all—scouting his beliefs and dreams, and their descendants are with us yet. About St. Francis were the millions of gourmandizers and lechers of France, Italy and the European world generally (to say nothing of the skeptical Innocent III.), too gross to perceive the significance of that which the saint represented. Yet St. Francis was little more than a chemical reaction against a too-heavy materialism that enveloped Europe—nothing more, truly. He was, as it were, poetry as opposed to the grossest and most sodden type of materialistic thought. This is equally true of Luther and so many others. Christ the same; Mohammed the same. Yet plainly the creative force which we worship as God, the underlying chemistry with its cell mechanism, was as much the maker of the fat sensualists who surrounded and enraged Luther as it was of Luther. It was and is in both, and both in it. Else how explain their joint presence and conflict, their psychic as well as chemic necessity to each other, the one useless without the other—no devil no saint, and vice versa? I for one am convinced that the Universe, or God, or Good, is no more concerned with our saints than with our sinners. Both may be essential, no doubt are. Certainly both are in it, from it, necessary to it, expressive of different moods of it, and as such necessary to each other, in order that it or life shall exist, express itself, at all. From this I see no escape by any path.
The great aim of all reformers—that of permanently reforming man in his social as well as his religious ways or intentions, in his lusts after sensuality and the like, from a (in their estimation) condition of too great license to one of none at all—is of course ridiculous. Although always “Justice,” “Right,” “Truth,” “Eternal law” are supposed to be involved in their commandments or demands, and presumed to represent a permanent and unchanging state of perfection of some kind—the all-good in some direction, and as such to be the direct commandments of God Himself—what is really, often unintelligently, sought is an easement of a too-great social swing in any one direction. Not perfection, but a better balance, is all that is really sought or ever attained. Yet so errant and nonsensical is life, its social or chemic drift—mere idle rocking of force in one direction or another at times—that man, for a time at least at one period or another, may be made to believe in or at least conform to, even coincide with, some current conception of the ideal which may or may not be in line with his greatest need, equation, in his affairs here or elsewhere at the time—which, indeed, may be absolutely inimical to his mental progress, as in the case of Mohammedanism, Shintoism, Christianity and the like. In other words, the necessity for obtaining a better equation in one place may very well upset a very excellent equation elsewhere. Thus, while it might be of passing advantage in one country—Arabia, say—that a readjustment via the thoughts of a Mohammed would be in order, it does not follow that his local “Rights,” “Truths” and homilies would elsewhere be essential. Yet essential or no, an impetus flowing from such a center may well disturb a better equation elsewhere. This was illustrated when Mohammedanism assailed Christianity in Europe.
The truth is that what the reformers are always seeking, ignorantly or otherwise, is a better balance in things social or mental or moral, less accentuated tendencies of any kind—usually away from the too-gross, although at times away from the too-ascetic also, toward which extremes life appears to swing at times. And what they do is to identify their meager, if equational, perceptions of life with eternal thought or order, and to insist that the half of the balance which they represent is the whole of it. As a rule they are quite unfitted by ignorance as well as by the time mood of which they are the expression to see that without that against which they war neither they nor their divine creator would have the least excuse for existing.
To me, not violent extremes of any kind, although these are productive of great suffering at times, but the suave inanity which imagines it wants only unchanging good or, on the other hand, unchanging evil, is the thing to be feared. Fortunately or unfortunately, as one may view this thing, a strictly median condition, while excellent as a haven of refuge from extremes, is nevertheless never wholly or easily attained in life, and never, apparently, seriously desired by it, as an end in itself, and never quite satisfactory. Indeed it is the equivalent of nothingness and would produce just that if the world sought to persist in it. Yet wise Nature is our rescuer in this as in many another plight in which betimes She places us for ends of Her own, for Nature seeks, if She seeks anything, motion, although apparently in no straight line. Her mood, if anything, is synchronic, rhythmic, pendulumic. She wishes, if one may interpret Her wishes from what may be seen here, to swing in a semi-balanced way between extremes of so-called good and evil—never all good and never all evil, but a little of both, or plenty, in order that there may be contention, strife, something to live about and for. These violent extremes of any kind—ascetic, religious, barbaric, or repulsive—which affect life and irritate our souls, or the souls of some of us, are not at all offensive to Nature in Her entirety apparently. She appears to like extremes as well as a median line, the latter as a fence or break between them, and will have nothing of perpetual anything in any one direction. And life, it seems to me, would be more understandable, less disturbing to most of us, if in hours of stress of any kind we were able to realize this—that Nature adores extremes, with always a happy medium as the guiding and dividing line to which She can return and on which She can fix, as the mariner on the North Star. And if some such more liberal conception of God, or force, or life, or the creative impulse, could be introduced, it would be better. What we really need is a better stomach for life as it is, and Nature, in the course of time, may possibly build us such.