And here was where lay most of the trouble with pigeon-holing, past and present. Man was lazy. It was not wholly the enlightened desire for progress which had inspired him to pigeon-holing, and was continuing to inspire. Dislike of work, and selfishness, and vanity, all played a part as well, and not a small one.
It was so reposeful to dispose of things in the large—to educate by the hundred thousand, to rest in the arms of creed, to stand at the lever of a great machine, to have your tailor plan your suits and the cook or the newspaper your meals, to have a dozen pigeon-holes into which you conveniently popped new acquaintances and had them off your mind forever. It was so much easier to force men to accept your own beliefs and plans than to take the trouble to acquaint yourself with theirs. It was so much more satisfying and final to follow mere logic and go to the end of the process than always to be engaged in that most laborious of tasks—thinking and forming judgments. To write a volume embodying all the facts was much easier than to write an essay presenting the essentials and their interpretation. A perfectly democratic or a perfectly absolute government was far less difficult to plan than the ideal commonwealth. It was much easier to act on insufficient premises than to travail with thought and find that after all there was no ground for action. It was easier to be an ignoramus or a pedant than a real scholar, a dogmatist or an atheist than a good preacher, a lecturer on education than a teacher, a slouch or a dandy than a well dressed man, a persecutor or a humanitarian than a saver of souls, a despot or an anarchist than a shepherd of the people, a censor or an abettor than a monitor and adviser, a total abstainer or a drunkard than a temperate man, a conservative or a radical than a patriot, a boor or a fop than a gentleman. It was easier to be a beast, or not to be at all, than to be a MAN.
The Essayist looked at the clock. It was twelve-thirty. Once more he had successfully pigeon-holed the hours of his morning.
THE GREEKS ON RELIGION AND MORALS
I
If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata, feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter; and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The most pressing duty of the moralist—and every man is a moralist—is to dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the Greeks.
II
The most remarkable fact in connection with the religion of the Greeks is its attitude towards the use of the reason. Of all the religions known to us this exercised the least restrictive power over the minds of those who entertained it. Over their conduct in matters of ritual it did of course exercise power both restrictive and positive, but the reason it left free. Greek religion is therefore recalcitrant to M. Reinach's definition of religion in general as "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties." All that was obligatory was ritual; there was no confession of faith, the priests did not form a class with vested interests to maintain. The absence of dogma from a religion will not recommend it to everybody, but those who regard that as a fortunate circumstance will grant that the credit rests not with the religion itself but with the people who hold it. Just as any state can have as many paupers as it cares to pay for, so any body of religionists can have as many dogmas as it chooses to encourage. Greek religion began like any other with its terrors, its taboos and its magic. If it did not tie up its adherents hand and foot, as other primitive religions have done, that was due to the psychological idiosyncracy of the Greeks. When their time of expansion was over they became the patients and the agents of dogma, but in connection with a foreign religion. It might have been expected from the history of native religions in Greece, that the strong influence of Greek thought on early Christianity would have been anti-dogmatic. On the contrary, practically the whole dogmatic structure of the fathers, though Oriental in spirit, is Greek in form. The tradition of free thought could not stand before St. Paul, and Greek religion, which for fifteen hundred years had given the world a lesson in the true function and status of mythology, lent itself in its decay to the creation of a system which, in the hands of races of very different temperament, became dogma. But though Greek religion began with magic and ended with dogma, it very early rendered the one harmless, and never submitted to the other in connection with a native cult.