The great, dominant, all-controlling fact of this life is the innate bias of the human spirit, not towards evil, as the theologians tell us, but towards good. But for this bias, man would never have been man; he would only have been one more species of wild animal ranging a savage, uncultivated globe, the reeking battle-ground of sheer instinct and appetite. But somehow and somewhere there germinated in his mind the idea that association, co-operation, would serve his ends better than unbridled egoism in the struggle for existence. Instead of "each man for himself" his motto became "each man for his family, or his tribe, or his nation, or—ultimately—for humankind." And, at a very early stage, what made for association, co-operation, brotherhood, came to be designated "good," while that which sinned against these upward tendencies was stigmatized as "evil." From that moment the battle was won, and the transfiguration of human life became only a matter of time. The prejudice in favour of the idea of good is the fundamental fact of our moral nature. It has an irresistible, a magical prestige. We have made, and are still making, a myriad mistakes—tragic and horrible mistakes—in striving for good things which are evils in disguise. A few of us (though relatively not very many) try to overcome the prejudice altogether, and say, "Evil, be thou my good!" But even these recreants and deserters from the great army of humanity have to express themselves in terms of good, and to take their stand on a sheer contradiction. Evil, as such, has simply not a fighting chance. The prestige of good is stupendous. We are all hypnotized by it; and the reason we are slow in realizing the ideal is, not that we are evil, but that we are stupid.
[5] London: George Allen and Unwin, 1916.
"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens"—no one had a better right to say that than a German poet. But though the Invisible King has made a poor fight against human stupidity, it is not really unconquerable. If Gods cannot conquer it, men can. Its strongholds are falling one by one, and, though a long fight is before us, its end is not in doubt.
We may even hope, not without some plausibility, that moral progress may be all the more rapid in the future because the limit of what may be called mechanical progress cannot be so very far off. The conquest of distance is the great material fact that makes for world-organization; and distance cannot, after all, be more than annihilated—it cannot be reduced to a minus quantity. Now that we can whisper round the globe as we whisper round the dome of St. Paul's, we cannot get much further on that line of advance, until immaterial thought-transference shall enable us "to flash through one another in a moment as we will." We may before long have reduced the crossing of the Atlantic from five days to one, or even less; but in that direction, too, there is a limit to progress; no invention will enable us to arrive before we start. The conquest of physical disease seems to be well within view; the possibilities of intensive cultivation and selective breeding in plants and animals are likely to be rapidly developed. When such material problems cease to exercise the first fascination upon the enquiring mind, the mental sciences, psychology and sociology, with the great neglected art of education, may come into their kingdom. Then the atheism which avers that the world stands still, or moves only in a circle, will no longer be possible. Then all reasonable men will feel themselves soldiers in "a mighty army which has won splendid victories (though here and there chequered with defeats) on its march out of the dim and tragic past, and is clearly destined to far greater triumphs in the future, if only each man does, with unflinching loyalty, the duty assigned to him." That loyalty will then be the conscious and acknowledged rule of life, as it is now in an instinctive and half-realized fashion. It will help us, more than all the personifications in the world, to "turn away from self." It will not take the sting from death, but it will enable us to feel that we have earned our rest, and brought no disgrace upon the colors of our regiment.
Is it necessary to protest once more that this assurance of progress towards the good is not to be confounded with optimism? For it is clear that "good" is a question-begging word. The only possible definition of "good" is "that which makes for life"—for life, not only measured by quantity, but by quality and intensity—"that ye may have life more abundantly." Why is egoism evil? Because a world in which it reigned supreme would very soon come to an end, or at any rate could not support anything like the abundance of life which is rendered possible by mutual aid and co-operation. Why are order, justice, courage, humanity good? Because they enable more people to lead fuller lives than would be possible in the absence of such guiding principles. But in all this we assume the validity of the standard—"life"—which is precisely what pessimism denies. And pessimism may quite conceivably be in the right on't. It is quite conceivable that, having made the best that can possibly be made of life, a world-weary race might decide that the best was not good enough, and deliberately turn away from it. But that is a contingency, a speculation, which no sane man would allow to affect his action here and now, or to impair his loyalty to his comrades in the great terrestrial adventure.
And is not this question of the ultimate value of life precisely one of the uncertainties which lend—if the flippancy may be excused—a "sporting interest" to our position? I have said that we have two elements of consolation: the things which are sure and the things which are unsure: in other words, the axioms and the mysteries. Reason is all very well so far as it goes, and we do right to trust to it; but it may prove, after all, that the things that are behind and beyond and above reason are the things that really matter. Does this seem a concession to obscurantism? Not at all—for the things obscurantism glories in are things beneath reason, which is quite another affair. At the same time, we are too apt to think that reason has drawn a complete outline-map of its "sphere of influence," in which there are many details to be filled in, but no boundaries to be shifted, no regions wholly unexplored. It is, for instance, very unreasonable to hold that we can draw a hard and fast line between the materially possible and impossible. There is certainly a curious ragged edge to our purely scientific knowledge, and it may well be that in following up the frayed-out threads we may come upon things very surprising and important. For example, the question whether consciousness can exist detached from organized matter, or attached to some form of matter of which we have no knowledge, I regard as purely a question of evidence; and I not only admit but assert that the evidence pointing in that direction is worthy of careful examination. The interpretation which sees in it a proof of personal immortality may be wrong, but that does not prove that the right interpretation is not worth discovering. The spiritist voyagers may not have reached the Indies of their hopes, yet may have stumbled upon an unsuspected America. Nor does the fact that they are eager and credulous invalidate the whole, or anything like the whole, of their evidence.
After all, is it a greater miracle that consciousness should exist detached from matter than that it should exist attached to matter? Yet the latter miracle nobody doubts, except in the nursery games of the metaphysicians.
To define, or rather to adumbrate, the realm of mystery, which is yet as indisputably real as the realm of reason and sense, we naturally turn to the poets, the seers. Here is a glimpse of it through the eyes of Francis Thompson, that creature of transcendent vision who made a strange pretence of wearing the blinkers of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus he writes in his "Anthem of Earth":—
Ay, Mother! Mother!
What is this Man, thy darling kissed and cuffed,
Thou lustingly engender'st,
To sweat, and make his brag, and rot,
Crowned with all honour and all shamefulness?
From nightly towers
He dogs the secret footsteps of the heavens,
Sifts in his hands the stars, weighs them as gold-dust,
And yet is he successive unto nothing
But patrimony of a little mould,
And entail of four planks. Thou hast made his mouth
Avid of all dominion and all mightiness,
All sorrow, all delight, all topless grandeurs,
All beauty and all starry majesties,
And dim transtellar things;—even that it may,
Filled in the ending with a puff of dust,
Confess—"It is enough." The world left empty
What that poor mouthful crams. His heart is builded
For pride, for potency, infinity,
All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
Arras'd with purple like the house of kings,—
To stall the grey rat, and the carrion-worm
Statelily lodge. Mother of mysteries!
Sayer of dark sayings in a thousand tongues,
Who bringest forth no saying yet so dark
As we ourselves, thy darkest!
Surely this is the very truth. Man is a hieroglyph to which reason supplies no key—nay, reason itself is the heart of the enigma. And does not this lend a strange fascination to the adventure of life?