CHAPTER VII
It is impossible for a physician to prescribe a rational regimen for a patient unless he has formed some clear conception of the nature of his constitution and of the morbid influences to which it is inclined; and in judging the wisdom of various proposals for the management of character we are at once met by the initial controversy about the goodness or the depravity of human nature. It is a subject on which extreme exaggerations have prevailed. The school of Rousseau, which dominated on the Continent in the last half of the eighteenth century, represented mankind as a being who comes into existence essentially good, and it attributed all the moral evils of the world, not to any innate tendencies to vice, but to superstition, vicious institutions, misleading education, a badly organised society. It is an obvious criticism that if human nature had been as good as such writers imagined, these corrupt and corrupting influences could never have grown up, or at least could never have obtained a controlling influence, and this philosophy became greatly discredited when the French Revolution, which it did so much to produce, ended in the unspeakable horrors of the Reign of Terror and in the gigantic carnage of the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, there are large schools of theologians who represent man as utterly and fundamentally depraved, 'born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by himself of doing good;' totally wrecked and ruined as a moral being by the catastrophe in Eden. There are also moral philosophers—usually very unconnected with theology—who deny or explain away all unselfish elements in human nature, represent man as simply governed by self-interest, and maintain that the whole art of education and government consists of a judicious arrangement of selfish motives, making the interests of the individual coincident with those of his neighbours. It is not too much to say that Society never could have subsisted if this view of human nature had been a just one. The world would have been like a cage-full of wild beasts, and mankind would have soon perished in constant internecine war.
It is indeed one of the plainest facts of human nature that such a view of mankind is an untrue one. Jealousy, envy, animosities and selfishness no doubt play a great part in life and disguise themselves under many specious forms, and the cynical moralist was not wholly wrong when he declared that 'Virtue would not go so far if Vanity did not keep her company,' and that not only our crimes but even many of what are deemed our best acts may be traced to selfish motives. But he must have had a strangely unfortunate experience of the world who does not recognise the enormous exaggeration of the pictures of human nature that are conveyed in some of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld and Schopenhauer. They tell us that friendship is a mere exchange of interests in which each man only seeks to gain something from the other; that most women are only pure because they are untempted and regret that the temptation does not come; that if we acknowledge some faults it is in order to persuade ourselves that we have no greater ones, or in order, by our confession, to regain the good opinion of our neighbours; that if we praise another it is merely that we may ourselves in turn be praised; that the tears we shed over a deathbed, if they are not hypocritical tears intended only to impress our neighbours, are only due to our conviction that we have ourselves lost a source of pleasure or of gain; that envy so predominates in the world that it is only men of inferior intellect or women of inferior beauty who are sincerely liked by those about them; that all virtue is an egotistic calculation, conscious or unconscious.
Such views are at least as far removed from truth as the roseate pictures of Rousseau and St. Pierre. No one can look with an unjaundiced eye upon the world without perceiving the enormous amount of disinterested, self-sacrificing benevolence that pervades it; the countless lives that are spent not only harmlessly and inoffensively but also in the constant discharge of duties; in constant and often painful labour for the good of others. The better section of the Utilitarian school has fully recognised the truth that human nature is so constituted that a great proportion of its enjoyment depends on sympathy; or, in other words, on the power we possess of entering into and sharing the happiness of others. The spectacle of suffering naturally elicits compassion. Kindness naturally produces gratitude. The sympathies of men naturally move on the side of the good rather than of the bad. This is true not only of the things that immediately concern us, but also in the perfectly disinterested judgments we form of the events of history or of the characters in fiction and poetry. Great exhibitions of heroism and self-sacrifice touch a genuine chord of enthusiasm. The affections of the domestic circle are the rule and not the exception; patriotism can elicit great outbursts of purely unselfish generosity and induce multitudes to risk or sacrifice their lives for causes which are quite other than their own selfish interests. Human nature indeed has its moral as well as its physical needs, and naturally and instinctively seeks some object of interest and enthusiasm outside itself.
If we look again into the vice and sin that undoubtedly disfigure the world we shall find much reason to believe that what is exceptional in human nature is not the evil tendency but the restraining conscience, and that it is chiefly the weakness of the distinctively human quality that is the origin of the evil. It is impossible indeed, with the knowledge we now possess, to deny to animals some measure both of reason and of the moral sense. In addition to the higher instincts of parental affection and devotion which are so clearly developed we find among some animals undoubted signs of remorse, gratitude, affection, self-sacrifice. Even the point of honour which attaches shame to some things and pride to others may be clearly distinguished. No one who has watched the more intelligent dog can question this, and many will maintain that in some animals, though both good and bad qualities are less widely developed than in man, the proportion of the good to the evil is more favourable in the animal than in the man. At the same time in the animal world desire is usually followed without any other restraint than fear, while in man it is largely though no doubt very imperfectly limited by moral self-control. Most crimes spring not from anything wrong in the original and primal desire but from the imperfection of this higher, distinct or superadded element in our nature. The crimes of dishonesty and envy, when duly analysed, have at their basis simply a desire for the desirable—a natural and inevitable feeling. What is absent is the restraint which makes men refrain from taking or trying to take desirable things that belong to another. Sensual faults spring from a perfectly natural impulse, but the restraint which confines the action of that impulse to defined circumstances is wanting. Much, too, of the insensibility and hardness of the world is due to a simple want of imagination which prevents us from adequately realising the sufferings of others. The predatory, envious and ferocious feelings that disturb mankind operate unrestrained through the animal world, though man's superior intelligence gives his desires a special character and a greatly increased scope, and introduces them into spheres inconceivable to the animal. Immoderate and uncontrolled desires are the root of most human crimes, but at the same time the self-restraint that limits desire, or self-seeking, by the rights of others, seems to be mainly, though not wholly, the prerogative of man.
Considerations of this kind are sufficient to remedy the extreme exaggeration of human corruption that may often be heard, but they are not inconsistent with the truth that human nature is so far depraved that it can never be safely left to develop unimpeded without strong legal and social restraint. It is not necessary to seek examples of its depravity within the precincts of a prison or in the many instances that may be found outside the criminal population of morbid moral taints which are often as clearly marked as physical disease. On a large scale and in the actions of great bodies of men the melancholy truth is abundantly displayed. On the whole Christianity has been far more successful in influencing individuals than societies. The mere spectacle of a battle-field with the appalling mass of hideous suffering deliberately and ingeniously inflicted by man upon man should be sufficient to scatter all idyllic pictures of human nature. It was once the custom of a large school of writers to attribute unjust wars solely to the rulers of the world, who for their own selfish ambitions remorselessly sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of their subjects. Their guilt has been very great, but they would never have pursued the course of ambitious conquest if the applause of nations had not followed and encouraged them, and there are no signs that democracy, which has enthroned the masses, has any real tendency to diminish war.
In modern times the danger of war lies less in the intrigues of statesmen than in deeply seated international jealousies and antipathies; in sudden, volcanic outbursts of popular passion. After eighteen hundred years' profession of the creed of peace, Christendom is an armed camp. Never, or hardly ever, in times of peace had the mere preparations of war absorbed so large a proportion of its population and resources, and very seldom has so large an amount of its ability been mainly employed in inventing and in perfecting instruments of destruction. Those who will look on the world without illusion will be compelled to admit that the chief guarantees for its peace are to be found much less in moral than in purely selfish motives. The financial embarrassments of the great nations; their profound distrust of one another; the vast cost of modern war; the gigantic commercial disasters it inevitably entails; the extreme uncertainty of its issue; the utter ruin that may follow defeat—these are the real influences that restrain the tiger passions and the avaricious cravings of mankind. It is also one of the advantages that accompany the many evils of universal service, that great citizen armies who in time of war are drawn from their homes, their families, and their peaceful occupations have not the same thirst for battle that grows up among purely professional soldiers, voluntarily enlisted and making a military life their whole career. Yet, in spite of all this, what trust could be placed in the forbearance of Christian nations if the path of aggression was at once easy, lucrative and safe? The judgments of nations in dealing with the aggressions of their neighbours are, it is true, very different from those which they form of aggressions by their own statesmen or for their own benefit. But no great nation is blameless, and there is probably no nation that could not speedily catch the infection of the warlike spirit if a conqueror and a few splendid victories obscured, as they nearly always do, the moral issues of the contest.
War, it is true, is not always or wholly evil. Sometimes it is justifiable and necessary. Sometimes it is professedly and in part really due to some strong wave of philanthropic feeling produced by great acts of wrong, though of all forms of philanthropy it is that which most naturally defeats itself. Even when unjustifiable, it calls into action splendid qualities of courage, self-sacrifice, and endurance which cast a dazzling and deceptive glamour over its horrors and its criminality. It appeals too, beyond all other things, to that craving for excitement, adventure, and danger which is an essential and imperious element in human nature, and which, while it is in itself neither a virtue nor a vice, blends powerfully with some of the best as well as with some of the worst actions of mankind. It is indeed a strange thing to observe how many men in every age have been ready to risk or sacrifice their lives for causes which they have never clearly understood and which they would find it difficult in plain words to describe.