The individual, as I found, was trying to do one thing: make himself happy principally; life was plainly trying to do another, or at least what it was doing involved no great concern for the welfare of any particular individual. He might live, he might die; he might be well fed, he might be hungry; he might, accidentally or by taking thought, ally himself with successful movements, or he might inherently, by some incapacity or fatality of disposition, involve himself in the drifts toward failure; he might be weak, he might be strong; he might be wise, he might be dull or narrow. Life in the large thrashing sense in which we see it to move about us cared no whit for him. Why so many failures? I was constantly asking myself; so many early deaths, so many accidents, crass and unexplained? Why so many fires? So many cyclones? So many destroying epidemics? So many breaks in health or in trade or by reason of vice or crime or mere increasing age and mood? So many, many individuals going down into the limbo of nothingness or failure, so few attaining to that vast and lonesome supremacy which all were seeking? Why? Why? I persistently asked myself; and I have yet to find the answer in any current code of morals or ethics or the dogma of any religion.
If you should chance to consult a Methodist, a Baptist, a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, or any other current American sectarian, on this subject you would find (which after all is a dull thing to point out at this day and date) that his conception of the things which he sees about him is bounded by what he was taught in his Sunday School or his church, or what he has stored up or gathered from the conventions of his native town. (His native town! Kind heaven!) And although the world has stored up endless treasures in chemistry, sociology, history, philosophy, still the millions and millions who tramp the streets and occupy the stores and fill the highways and byways and the fields and the tenements have no faintest knowledge of this, or of anything else that can be said to be intellectually “doing.” They live in theories and isms, and under codes dictated by a church or a state or an order of society which has no least regard for or relationship to their natural mental development. The darkest side of democracy, like that of autocracy, is that it permits the magnetic and the cunning and the unscrupulous among the powerful individuals to sway vast masses of the mob, not so much to their own immediate destruction as to the curtailment of their natural privileges and the ideas which they should be allowed to entertain if they could think at all—and incidentally to the annoying and sometimes undoing of individuals who have the truest brain interests of the race at heart: vide Giordano Bruno! Jan Huss! Savonarola! Tom Paine! Walt Whitman! Edgar Allan Poe!
For after all the great business of life and mind is life. We are here, I take it, not merely to moon and vegetate, but to do a little thinking about this state in which we find ourselves, or at least to try. It is perfectly legitimate, all priests and theories and philosophies to the contrary, to go back, in so far as we may, to the primary sources of thought, i. e., the visible scene, the actions and thoughts of people, the movements of Nature and its chemical and physical subtleties, in order to draw original and radical conclusions for ourselves. The great business of the individual, if he has any time after struggling for life and a reasonable amount of entertainment or sensory satiation, should be this very thing. He should question the things he sees—not some things, but everything—stand, as it were, in the center of this whirling storm of contradiction which we know as life, and ask of it its source and its import. Else why a brain at all? If only one could induce or enable a moderate number of the individuals who pass this way and come no more apparently to pause and think about life and take an individual point of view, the freedom and individuality and interest of the world might be greatly enhanced. We complain of the world as dull. If it is so, lack of thinking by individuals is the reason. But to ask the poor, half-equipped mentality of the mass to think, to be individual—what an anachronism! You might as well ask of a rock to move or a tree to fly.
Here in America, by reason of an idealistic Constitution which is largely a work of art and not a workable system, you see a nation dedicated to so-called intellectual and spiritual freedom, but actually devoted with an almost bee-like industry to the gathering and storing and articulation and organization and use of purely material things. In spite of all our base-drum announcement of our servitude to the intellectual ideals of the world (copied mostly, by the way, from England) no nation has ever contributed less, philosophically or artistically or spiritually, to the actual development of the intellect and the spirit. We have invented many things, it is true, which have relieved man from the crushing weight of a too-grinding toil, and this perhaps may be the sole mission of America in the world and the universe, its destiny, its end. Personally I think it is not a half bad thing to have done; the submarine and the flying machine and the armored dreadnought, no less than the sewing-machine and the cotton-gin and the binder and the reaper and the cash register and the trolley-car if not the telephone, may prove in the end, or perhaps already have proved, as significant in breaking the chains of the physical and mental slavery of man as anything else. I do not know.
One thing I do know is that America seems profoundly interested in these things, to the exclusion of anything else. It has no time, you might almost say, no taste, to stop and contemplate life in the large, from an artistic or a philosophic point of view. Yet after all, when all the machinery for lessening man’s burdens has been invented and all the safeguards for his preservation completed and possibly shattered by forces too deep or superior for his mechanical cunning, may not a phrase, a line of poetry, or a single act of some half-forgotten tragedy be all that is left of what we now see or dream of as materially perfect? For is it not thought alone, of many famous and powerful things that have already gone, that endures?—a thought most often conveyed by art as a medium?
But let me not become too remote or fine-spun in my conception of the ultimate significance of art itself. The point which I wish to make is just this: that in a land so devoted to the material, although dedicated by its Constitution to the ideal, the condition of intellectual freedom, let alone art, is certainly anomalous. Your trade and your trust builder, most obviously dominant in America at this time, is of all people most indifferent to, or most unconscious of, the ultimate and pressing claims of mind and spirit as expressed by art. If you doubt this you have only to look about you to see for what purposes, to what end, the increment of men of wealth and material power in America is most devoted. Stuffy, tasteless houses crowded with stuffy, tasteless antiques, safety deposit vaults stuffed with securities, the having and holding of purely material values always. In proof of which I may add that we have something like twenty-five hundred colleges and schools and institutions of various kinds, largely furthered by the money of American men of wealth, and all presumably devoted to the development of the mental equipment of man (or so we are told), yet nearly all set with flinty firmness against anything which is related to truly radical investigation, or thought, or action, or art. The inculcation of morality and patriotism are even now laid down as the true task and province of the so-called schools of higher learning by the educators themselves, or at least the presidents of most of the leading institutions—not the getting of knowledge at any cost, patriotic or other.
As a matter of fact, in spite of the American Constitution and the American oratorical address on all and sundry occasions, the average American school, college, university, institution, is as much against the development of the individual, in the true sense of that word, as any sect or religion. What it really wants is not an individual but an automatic copy of some altruistic and impossible ideal, which has been formulated here or elsewhere under the domination of Christianity or some other ism. I defy you to read any American college or university prospectus or address or plea which concerns the purposes or ideals of these institutions and not agree with me. They are not after individuals; they are after types or schools of individuals, all to be very much alike, all to be like themselves. And what type? Listen. I know of an American college professor in one of our successful State universities who had this to say of the male graduates of his institution, after having watched the output for a number of years: “They are all right, quite satisfactory as machines for the production of material wealth or for the maintenance of certain forms of professional skill, but as for ideas of their own or being creators or men with the normal impulses and passions of manhood they do not fulfill the requisite in any respect. They are little more than types, machines, made in the image and likeness of their college. They do not think; they cannot, because they are held hard and fast by the iron band of convention. They are afraid to think. They are moral young beings, Christian beings, model beings, but they are not men in the creative sense, and the large majority will never do a thing other than work for a corporation in a routine unindividual way, unless by chance or necessity the theories and the conventions imposed or generated by their training and surroundings are broken, and they become free, independent, self-thinking individuals.”
In this connection I might say I know of one woman’s college, an American institution of the highest standing, which since its inception has sent forth into life some thousands of graduates and post-graduates to battle life as they may for individual supremacy or sensory comfort. They are (or were) supposed to be individuals capable of individual thought, procedure, invention, development; yet out of all of them not one has even entered upon any creative or artistic labor of any kind. Not one. (Write me for the name of the college, if you wish.) There is not a chemist, a physiologist, a botanist, a biologist, an historian, a philosopher, an artist, of any kind or repute among them; not one. They are secretaries to corporations, teachers, missionaries, college librarians, educators in any of the scores of pilfered meanings that may be attached to that much abused word. They are curators, directors, keepers. They are not individuals in the true sense of that word; they have not been taught to think; they are not free. They do not invent, lead, create; they only copy or take care of, yet they are graduates of this college and its theory, mostly ultra conventional, or, worse yet, anæmic, and glad to wear its collar, to clank the chains of its ideas or ideals—automatons in a social scheme whose last and final detail was outlined to them in the classrooms of their alma mater. That, to me, is one phase, amusing enough, of intellectual freedom in America.
But the above is a mere detail in any chronicle or picture of the social or intellectual state of the United States. Turn, for instance, if you will, to the legislative and judicial phases of our Government—those grand realms in which only statesmen and judicial students of our economic and social condition are supposed to move and rule, and what do we find?
As long ago as 1875 Ernst Haeckel, the eminent German scientist, complained that the judges and legislatures of his day and country had “but a superficial acquaintance with that chief and peculiar object of their activity—the human organism and its most important function, the human mind,” and that they had no time for anything save “an exhaustive study of beer and wine and the noble art of fencing.” If that could be said of intellectual Germany in his day how much more and worse could be judicated of the American jurist and legislator in America to-day. The shabby mess which finance and trade rivalries make of our laws and our halls of legislation—the mental equipment of the average politician, his henchmen, the legislator and the judge—the hall boys of finance, and at the same time of religious and therefore arbitrary moral dogma which they have become, the petty ignoramuses we see on every hand legislating for the people or interpreting the laws once they are thus formulated! Haeckel wrote sadly of the judges and law enactors in his day: “No one can maintain that their condition to-day is in harmony with our advanced knowledge of this world”—and, certainly, in America to-day, fifty years later, not a week passes in which we do not read of legislative deeds and legal decisions which make a thinking man sigh. Consider the slavish acceptance of religious and moral and financial dictation from self-interested and equally ignorant people, the running here and there to find what is temporarily expedient—what will satisfy or quiet the public for an hour; what will keep them from losing their petty jobs—by the politicians and legislators and so-called statesmen and judges; the complete ignorance of every congressman and senator and state legislator and judge and lawyer as to the commonest facts of biology, psychology, sociology, economics, and history! One president, Roosevelt, admitted that he could in no way understand economics. Yet once the average country or city law student has mastered a few hundred paragraphs of law he is ready to hire out to the nearest corporation, to legislate for the people, to prefix “Hon.” to his name and set up in business as a judge or a statesman.