Is Life Worth Living?

by W. H. Mallock

The positive school can, and do, as we have seen, point to certain things in life which have every appearance, at first sight, of adequate moral ends. Their adequacy seems to be verified by every right feeling, and also by practical experiment. But there is one great fact that is forgotten. The positive school, when they deal with life, profess to exhibit its resources to us wholly free from the false aids of religion. They profess (if I may coin a word) to have de-religionized it before they deal with it. But about this matter they betray a most strange ignorance. They think the task is far simpler than it is. They seem to look on religion as existing nowhere except in its pure form, in the form of distinct devotional feeling, or in the conscious assents of faith; and, these once got rid of, they fancy that life is de-religionized. But the process thus far is really only begun; indeed, as far as immediate results go, it is hardly even begun; for it is really but a very small proportion of religion that exists pure. The greater part of it has entered into combination with the acts and feelings of life, thus forming as it were, a kind of amalgam with them, giving them new properties, a new colour, a new consistence. To de-religionize life, then, it is not enough to condemn creeds and to abolish prayers. We must further sublimate the beliefs and feelings, which prayers and creeds hold pure, out of the lay life around us. Under this process, even if imperfectly performed, it will soon become clear that religion in greater or less proportions is lurking everywhere. We shall see it yielded up even by things in which we should least look for it—by wit, by humour, by secular ambition, by most forms of vice, and by our daily light amusements. Much more shall we see it yielded up by heroism, by purity, by affection, and by love of truth—by all those things that the positivists most specially praise.

The positivists think, it would seem, that they had but to kill God, and that his inheritance shall be ours. They strike out accordingly the theistic beliefs in question, and then turn instantly to life: they sort its resources, count its treasures, and then say, 'Aim at this, and this, and this. See how beautiful is holiness; see how rapturous is pleasure. Surely these are worth seeking for their own sakes, without any "reward or punishment looming in the future."' They find, in fact, the interests and the sentiments of the world's present life—all the glow and all the gloom of it—lying before them like the colours on a painter's palette, and think they have nothing to do but set to work and use them. But let them wait a moment; they are in far too great a hurry. The palette and its colours are not nearly ready for them.

One of the colours of life—religion, that is—a colour which, by their own admission, has been hitherto an important one, they have swept clean away. They have swept it clean away, and let them remember why they have done so. It may be a pleasing colour, or it may not: that is a matter of taste. But the reason why it is to be got rid of is that it is not a fast colour. It is found to fade instantly in the spreading sunlight of knowledge. It is rapidly getting dim and dull and dead. When once it is gone, we shall never be able to restore it, and our future pictures of life must be tinted without its aid. They therefore profess loudly that they will employ it no longer.

But there is this point, this all-important point, that quite escapes them. They sweep the colour, in its pure state, clean off the palette; and then profess to show us by experiment that they can get on perfectly well without it. But they never seem to suspect that it may be mixed up with the colours they retain, and be the secret of their depth and lustre. Let them see whether religion be not lurking there, as a subtle colouring principle in all their pigments, even a grain of it producing effects that else were quite impossible. Let them only begin this analysis, and it will very soon be clear to them that to cleanse life of religion is not so simple a process as they seem to fancy it. Its actual dogmas may be readily put away from us; not so the effect which these dogmas have worked during the course of centuries. In disguised forms they are around us everywhere; they confront us in every human interest, in every human pleasure. They have beaten themselves into life; they have eaten their way into it. Like a secret sap they have flavoured every fruit in the garden. They are like a powerful drug, a stimulant, that has been injected into our whole system.

If then we could appraise the vigour and value of life independent of religion, we can draw no direct conclusions from observing it in its present state. Before such observations can teach us anything, there is a great deal that will have to be made allowance for: and the positive school, when they reason from life as it is, are building therefore on an utterly unsound foundation. It is emphatically untrue to say that a single example in the present day, or for matter of that any number of examples, either goes or can go any way towards proving the adequacy of any non-religious formula. For all such formulæ have first to be further analysed before we know how far they are really non-religious; and secondly the religious element that will be certainly found existing in them will have, hypothetically, to be removed.

It would be well if the positive school would spend in this spiritual analysis but a little of that skill they have attained to in their analysis of matter. In their experiments, for instance, on spontaneous generation, what untold pains have been taken! With what laborious thought, with what emulous ingenuity, have they struggled to completely sterilise the fluids in which they are to seek for the new production of life! How jealously do they guard against leaving there any already existing germs! How easily do they tell us their experiments may be vitiated by the smallest oversight!

Surely spiritual matters are worthy of an equally careful treatment. For what we have here to study is not the production of the lowest forms of animal life, but the highest forms of human happiness. These were once thought to be always due to religion. The modern doctrine is that they are producible without such aid. Let us treat, then, the beauty of holiness, the love of truth, 'the treasure of human affection,' and so forth, as Dr. Tyndall has treated the infusions in which life is said to originate. Let us boil them down, so to speak, and destroy every germ of religion in them, and then see how far they will generate the same ecstatic happiness. And let us treat in this way vice no less than virtue. Having once done this, we may honestly claim whatever yet remains to us. Then, we shall see what materials of happiness we can, as positive thinkers, call our own. Then, a positive moral system, if any such be possible, will begin to have a real value for us—then, but not till then.

Such an analysis as this must be naturally a work of time; and much of it must be performed by each one of us for ourselves. But a sample of the operation can be given here, which will show plainly enough its nature, and the ultimate results of it. I shall begin, for this purpose, with reconsidering the moral end generally, and the three primary characteristics that are ascribed, by all parties, to it, as essentials. I shall point out, generally also, how much of religion is embodied in all these; and shall then proceed to one or two concrete examples, taken from the pleasures and passions that animate the life around us.

These three characteristics of the moral end are its inwardness, its importance, and, within certain limits, its absolute character.

I begin with its inwardness. I have spoken of this several times already, but the matter is so important that it will well bear repetition. By calling the moral end inward, I mean that it resides primarily not in action, but in motives to action; in the will, not in the deed; not in what we actually do, but in what we actually endeavour to do; in the love we give, rather than in the love that we receive. What defiles a man is that which comes out of his heart—evil thoughts, murders, adulteries. The thoughts may never find utterance in a word, the murders and adulteries may never be fulfilled in act; and yet, if a man be restrained, not by his own will, but only by outer circumstances, his immorality will be the same. The primary things we are 'responsible for,' observes a recent positive writer,[12] are 'frames of mind into which we knowingly and willingly work ourselves': and when these are once wrong, he adds, 'they are wrong for ever: no accidental failure of their good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.' And as with what is wrong or vicious, so with what is right or virtuous; this in a like manner proceeds out of the mind or heart. 'The gladness of true heroism,' says Dr. Tyndall, 'visits the heart of him who is really competent to say, "I court truth."' It is not, be it observed, the objective attainment of truth that creates the gladness. It is the subjective desire, the subjective resolution. The moral end, for the positivist just as much as for the believer, is a certain inward state of the heart, or mind—a state which will of necessity, if possible, express itself in action, but whose value is not to be measured by the success of that expression. The battle-ground of good and evil is within us; and the great human event is the issue of the struggle between them.