Part 9

With regard to the absolute datum question we have seen that Science has two alternatives before it--either to be merely intellectual and to seek for its start-point in some quite external (and imaginary) thing like the Atom, or to be divine and to seek for its absolute in the innermost recesses of humanity. We have two similar alternatives in the doctrine of Evolution, which looks either to one end of the scale or the other for its interpretation--either to the amoeba or to the man--to something it knows next to nothing of, or to that which it knows most of. Goethe, when gazing at a fan-palm at Padua, conceived the idea of leaf-metamorphosis, which he afterwards enunciated in the now accepted doctrine that all parts of a plant--seed-vessel, pistil, stamens, petals, sepals, stalk, etc.--may be regarded as modifications of a leaf or leaves. In this view the distinctions between the parts are effaced, and we have only one part instead of many--but the question is "what is that part?" It is of course arbitrary to call it a leaf, for since it is continually varying it is at one time a leaf, and at another a stalk, and then a petal or a sepal, and so forth. What then is it? For the moment we are baffled.

So with the doctrine of Evolution as applied to the whole organic kingdom up to man. Like the doctrine of leaf-metamorphosis it obliterates distinctions. Geoffroy St. Hilaire proposed to show the French Academy that a Cephalopod could be assimilated to a Vertebrate by supposing the latter bent backwards and walking on its hands and feet. There is a continuous variation from the mollusc to the man--all the lines of distinction run and waver--classes and species cease to exist--and Science, instead of many, sees only one thing. What then is that one thing? Is it a mollusc, or is it a man, or what is it? Are we to say that man may be looked upon as a variation of a mollusc or an amoeba, or that the amoeba may be looked on as a variation of man? Here are two directions of thought; which shall we choose? But the plain truth is, the Intellect can give no satisfactory answer. Whichever, or whatever, it chooses, the choice is quite arbitrary--just as much so as the choice of the "leaf" in the other case. There is no answer to be given. And thus it is that the appearance of the doctrine of Evolution is the signal of the destruction of Science (in the ordinary acceptation of the word). For Evolution is the successive obliteration of the arbitrary distinctions and landmarks which by their existence constitute Science, and as soon as Evolution covers the whole ground of Nature inorganic and organic (as before long it will do)--the whole of Nature runs and wavers before the eye of Science, the latter recognises that its distinctions are arbitrary, and turns upon and destroys itself. This has happened before, I believe--ages back in the history of the human race--and probably will happen again.

The only conceivable answer to the question, "What is that which is now a mollusc and now a man and now an inorganic atom?" is given by man himself--and his answer is, I fear, not "scientific." It is "I Am." "I am that which varies." And the force of his answer depends on what he means by the word "I." And so also the only conceivable answer to the absolute datum question is to be found in the meaning of the word "I"--in the deepening back of consciousness itself. Man is the measure of all things. If we are to use Science as a minister to the most external part of man--to provide him with cheap boots and shoes, etc.--then we do right to seek our absolute datum in his external part, and to take his foot as our first measure. We found a science on feet and pounds, and it serves its purpose well enough. But if we want to find a garment for his inner being--or, rather, one that shall fit the whole man--to wear which will be a delight to him and, as it were, a very interpretation of himself--it seems obvious that we must not take our measure from outside, but from his very most central principle. The whole question is, whether there is any absolute datum in this direction or not. There have been men through all ages of history (and from before) who have declared that there is. They have perhaps been conscious of it in themselves. On the other hand there have been men who, starting from their feet, declared that consciousness itself was a mere incident of the human machine--as the whistle of the engine--and thus the matter stands. On the whole, at the present day, the feet have it, and (notwithstanding their variety in size and boot-induced conformation) are generally accepted as the best absolute datum available.

Under the foot régime the universe is generally conceived of as a medley of objects and forces, more or less orderly and distinct from man, in the midst of which man is placed--the purpose and tendency of his life being "adaptation to his environment." To understand this we may imagine Mrs. Brown in the middle of Oxford Street. 'Buses and cabs are running in different directions, carts and drays are rattling on all sides of her. This is her environment, and she has to adapt herself to it. She has to learn the laws of the vehicles and their movements, to stand on this side or on that, to run here and stop there, conceivably to jump into one at a favourable moment, to make use of the law of its movement, and so get carried to her destination as comfortably as may be. A long course of this sort of thing "adapts" Mrs. Brown considerably, and she becomes more active, both in mind and body, than before. That is all very well. But Mrs. Brown has a destination. (Indeed how would she ever have got into the middle of Oxford Street at all, if she had not had one? and if she did get there with no destination at all, but merely to skip about, would there be any Mrs. Brown left in a short time?) The question is, "What is the destination of Man?"

About this last question unfortunately we hear little. The theory is (I hope I am not doing it injustice) that by studying your environment sufficiently you will find out--that is, that by investigating Astronomy, Biology, Physics, Ethics, etc., you will discover the destiny of man. But this seems to me the same as saying that by studying the laws of cabs and 'buses sufficiently you will find out where you are going to. These are ways and means. Study them by all means, that is right enough; but do not think they will tell you where to go. You have to use them, not they you.

In order therefore for the environment to act, there must be a destination. This I suppose is expressed in the biological dictum, "organism is made by function as well as environment." What then is the function of Man? And here we come back again to the meaning of the word "I."

Nothwithstanding then the prevalence of the foot régime, and that the heathen so furiously rage together in their belief in it, let us suggest that there is in man a divine consciousness as well as a foot-consciousness. For, as we saw that the sense of taste may pass from being a mere local thing on the tip of the tongue to pervading and becoming synonymous with the health of the whole body; or as the blue of the sky may be to one person a mere superficial impression of colour, and to another the inspiration of a poem or picture, and to a third--as to the "god-intoxicated" Arab of the desert--a living presence like the ancient Dyaus or Zeus; so may not the whole of human consciousness gradually lift itself from a mere local and temporary consciousness to a divine and universal? There is in every man a local consciousness connected with his quite external body; that we know. Are there not also in every man the makings of a universal consciousness? That there are in us phases of consciousness which transcend the limit of the bodily senses, is a matter of daily experience; that we perceive and know things which are not conveyed to us by our bodily eyes or heard by our bodily ears, is certain; that there rise in us waves of consciousness from those around us, from the people, the race, to which we belong, is also certain; may there not then be in us the makings of a perception and knowledge which shall not be relative to this body which is here and now, but which shall be good for all time and everywhere? Does there not exist, in truth, as we have already hinted--an inner Illumination--of which what we call light in the outer world is the partial expression and manifestation--by which we can ultimately see things, as they are, beholding all creation, the animals, the angels, the plants, the figures of our friends and all the ranks and races of human kind, in their true being and order--not by any local act of perception but by a cosmical intuition and presence, identifying ourselves with what we see? Does there not exist a perfected sense of Hearing--as of the morning-stars singing together--an understanding of the words that are spoken all through the universe, the hidden meaning of all things, the word which is creation itself--a profound and far pervading sense, of which our ordinary sense of sound is only the first novitiate and initiation? Do we not become aware of an inner sense of Health and of Holiness--the translation and final outcome of the external sense of taste--which has power to determine for us absolutely and without any ado, without argument and without denial, what is good and appropriate to be done or suffered in every case that can arise?

And so on; it is not necessary to say more. If there are such powers in man, then there is indeed an exact science possible. Short of it there is only a temporary and phantom science. "Whatever is known to us by (direct) consciousness," says Stuart Mill in his System of Logic, "is known to us beyond possibility of question;" what is known by our local and temporary consciousness is known for the moment beyond possibility of question; what is known by our permanent and universal consciousness is permanently known beyond possibility of question.

FOOTNOTES:

Thus the study of Geometry would be primarily an education of the eye, and the mind's eye, to the perception of geometrical forms and facts, the judgment of angles, etc.--and secondarily only a process of deductive reasoning--a body of empirical knowledge strengthened and tied together by bands of logic; the study of Natural History would be primarily an affectionate intimacy with the habits of animals and plants, and classification would be treated as a secondary matter and as a help to the former; Physiology would be studied in the first place by the method of Health--the pure body--becoming gradually transparent with all its organs to the eye of the mind--and dissection would be used to corroborate and correct the results thus attained; and so on.

Compare the Sphinx-riddle: What is that which goes on four legs, etc.

See for continuation of this subject the chapter on "A Rational and Humane Science," p. 219 infra.

DEFENCE OF CRIMINALS:

A CRITICISM OF MORALITY

The State is the actually existing realised moral life. For it is the unity of the universal essential Will with that of the individual, and this is "Morality."--HEGEL.

A criminal is literally a person accused--accused, and in the modern sense of the word convicted, of being harmful to Society. But is he there in the dock, the patch-coated brawler or burglar, really harmful to Society? is he more harmful than the mild old gentleman in the wig who pronounces sentence upon him? That is the question. Certainly he has infringed the law: and the law is in a sense the consolidated public opinion of Society: but if no one were to break the law, public opinion would ossify, and Society would die. As a matter of fact Society keeps changing its opinion. How then are we to know when it is right and when it is wrong? The Outcast of one age is the Hero of another. In execration they nailed Roger Bacon's manuscripts out in the sun and rain, to rot crucified upon planks--his bones lie in an unknown and unhonoured grave--yet to-day he is regarded as a pioneer of human thought. The hated Christian holding his ill-famed love-feasts in the darkness of the catacombs has climbed up to the throne of S. Peter and the world. The Jew moneylender whom Front-de-Boeuf could torture with impunity is become a Rothschild--guest of princes and instigator of commercial wars; and Shylock is now a highly respectable Railway Bondholder. And the Accepted of one age is the Criminal of the next. All the glories of Alexander do not condone in our eyes for his cruelty in crucifying the brave defenders of Tyre by thousands along the sea-shore; and if Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines were to appear in London to-morrow, even our most frivolous circles would be shocked, and Brigham Young by contrast seem a domestic model. The judge pronounces sentence on the prisoner now, but Society in its turn and in the lapse of years pronounces sentence on the judge. It holds in its hand a new canon, a new code of morals, and consigns its former representative and the law which he administered to a limbo of contempt.

It seems as if Society, as it progresses from point to point, forms ideals--just as the individual does. At any moment each person, consciously or unconsciously, has an ideal in his mind toward which he is working (hence the importance of literature). Similarly Society has an ideal in its mind. These ideals are tangents or vanishing points of the direction in which Society is moving at the time. It does not reach its ideal, but it goes in that direction--then, after a time, the direction of its movement changes, and it has a new ideal.

When the ideal of Society is material gain or possession, as it is largely to-day, the object of its special condemnation is the thief--not the rich thief, for he is already in possession and therefore respectable, but the poor thief. There is nothing to show that the poor thief is really more immoral or unsocial than the respectable money-grubber; but it is very clear that the money-grubber has been floating with the great current of Society, while the poor man has been swimming against it, and so has been worsted. Or when, as to-day, Society rests on private property in land, its counter-ideal is the poacher. If you go in the company of the county squire-archy and listen to the after-dinner talk you will soon think the poacher a combination of all human and diabolic vices; yet I have known a good many poachers, and either have been very lucky in my specimens or singularly prejudiced in their favour, for I have generally found them very good fellows--but with just this one blemish that they invariably regard a landlord as an emissary of the evil one! The poacher is as much in the right, probably, as the landlord, but he is not right for the time. He is asserting a right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time--when for hunting purposes all land was held in common--or to a time in the future when such or similar rights shall be restored. Cæsar says of the Suevi that they tilled the ground in common and had no private lands, and there is abundant evidence that all early human communities, before they entered on the stage of modern civilisation, were communistic in character. Some of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in the same condition. In those times private property was theft. Obviously the man who attempted to retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the common ground and--like the modern landlord--would allow no one to till it who did not pay him a tax--was a criminal of the deepest dye. Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have become the respectables of modern Society. And it is quite probable that in like manner the criminals of to-day will push to the front and become the respectables of a later age.

The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian and mediæval ages is now regarded as foolish, if not wicked; and poverty, which in many times and places has been held in honour as the only garb of honesty, is condemned as criminal and indecent. Nomadism--if accompanied by poverty--is criminal in modern Society. To-day the gipsy and the tramp are hunted down. To have no settled habitation, or worse still, no place to lay your head, are suspicious matters. We close even our outhouses and barns against the son of man, and so to us the son of man comes not. And yet--at one time and in one stage of human progress--the nomadic state is the rule; and the settler is then the criminal. His crops are fired and his cattle driven off. What right has he to lay a limit to the hunting grounds, or to spoil the wild free life of the plains with his dirty agriculture?

As to the marriage relation and its attendant moralities, the forms are numerous and notorious enough. Public opinion seems to have varied through all phases and ideals, and yet there is no indication of finality. Modern investigations show that in primitive human societies the affinities admitted or barred in marriage are most various--the relation of brother and sister being even in cases allowed; in the present day such a bond as the last-mentioned would be considered inhuman and monstrous. Polyandry prevails among one people or at one time, polygyny prevails among another people or at another time. In Central Africa to-day the chief offers you his wife as a mark of hospitality, in India the native Prince keeps her hidden even from his most intimate guest. Among the Japanese, public opinion holds young women--even of good birth--singularly free in their intercourse with men, till they are married; at Paris they are free after. In the Greek and Roman antiquity marriage seems, with some brilliant exceptions, to have been a prosaic affair--mostly a matter of convenience and housekeeping--the woman an underling--little of the ideal attaching to the relationship of man and wife. The romance of love went elsewhere. The better class of free women or Hetairai were those who gave a spiritual charm to the passion. They were an educated and recognised body, and possibly in their best times exercised a healthy and discriminating influence upon the male youth. The respectful treatment of Theodota by Socrates and the advice which he gives her concerning her lovers: to keep the insolent from her door, and to rejoice greatly when the accepted succeed in anything honourable, indicates this. That their influence was at times immense the mere name of Aspasia is sufficient to show; and if Plato in the Symposium reports correctly the word of Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human and divine love was probably of the noblest and profoundest that has ever been given to the world.

With the influx of the North-men over Europe came a new ideal of the sexual relation, and the wife mounted more into equality with her husband than before. The romance of love, however, still went mainly outside marriage, and may, I believe, be traced in two chief forms--that of Chivalry, as an ideal devotion to simple Womanhood; and that of Minstrelsy, which took quite a different hue, individual and sentimental--the lover and his mistress (she in most cases the wife of another), the serenade, secret amour, etc.--both of which forms of Chivalry and Minstrelsy contain in themselves something new and not quite familiar to antiquity.

Finally in modern times the monogamic union has risen to pre-eminence--the splendid ideal of an equal and life-long attachment between man and wife, fruitful of children in this life, and hopeful of continuance beyond--and has become the great theme of romantic literature, and the climax of a thousand novels and poems. Yet it is just here and to-day, when this ideal after centuries of struggle has established itself, and among the nations that are in the van of civilisation--that we find the doctrine of perfect liberty in the marriage relationship being most successfully preached, and that the communalisation of social life in the future seems likely to weaken the family bond and to relax the obligation of the marriage tie.

If the Greek age, splendid as it was in itself and in its fruits of human progress, did not hold marriage very high, it was partly because the ideal passion of that period, and one which more than all else inspired it, was that of comradeship, or male friendship carried over into the region of love. The two figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton stand at the entrance of Greek history as the type of this passion, bearing its fruit (as Plato throughout maintains is its nature) in united self-devotion to the country's good. The heroic Theban legion, the "sacred band," into which no man might enter without his lover--and which was said to have remained unvanquished till it was annihilated at the battle of Chæronæa--proves to us how publicly this passion and its place in society were recognised; while its universality and the depth to which it had stirred the Greek mind are indicated by the fact that whole treatises on love, in its spiritual aspect, exist, in which no other form of the sentiment seems to be contemplated; and by the magnificent panorama of Greek statuary, which was obviously to a large extent inspired by it. In fact the most remarkable Society known to history, and its greatest men, cannot be properly considered or understood apart from this passion; yet the modern world scarcely recognises it, or if it recognises, does so chiefly to condemn it.

Other instances might be quoted to show how differently moral questions are regarded in one age and another--as in the cases of Usury, Magic, Suicide, Infanticide, etc. On the whole we pride ourselves (and justly I believe) on the general advance in humanity; yet we know that to-day the merest savages can only shudder at a civilisation whose public opinion allows--as among us--the rich to wallow in their wealth, while the poor are systematically starving; and it is certain that the vivisection of animals--which on the whole is approved by our educated classes (though not by the healthier sentiment of the uneducated)--would have been stigmatised as one of the most abominable crimes by the ancient Egyptians--if, that is, they could have conceived such a practice possible at all.

But not only do the moral judgments of mankind thus vary from age to age and from race to race, but--what is equally remarkable--they vary to an extraordinary degree from class to class of the same society. If the landlord class regards the poacher as a criminal, the poacher, as already hinted, looks upon the landlord as a selfish ruffian who has the police on his side; if the respectable shareholder, politely and respectably subsisting on dividends, dismisses navvies and the frequenters of public-houses as disorderly persons, the navvy in return despises the shareholder as a sneaking thief. And it is not easy to see, after all, which is in the right. It is useless to dismiss these discrepancies by supposing that one class in the nation possesses a monopoly of morality and that the other classes simply rail at the virtue they cannot attain to, for this is obviously not the case. It is almost a commonplace, and certainly a fact that cannot be contested, that every class--however sinful or outcast in the eyes of others--contains within its ranks a large proportion of generous, noble, self-sacrificing characters; so that the public opinion of one such class, however different from that of others, cannot at least be invalidated on the above ground. There are plenty of clergymen at this moment who are models of pastors--true shepherds of the people--though a large and increasing section of society persist in regarding priests as a kind of wolves in sheep's clothing. It is not uncommon to meet with professional thieves who are generous and open-handed to the last degree, and ready to part with their last penny to help a comrade in distress; with women living outside the bounds of conventional morality who are strongly religious in sentiment, and who regard atheists as really wicked people; with aristocrats who have as stern material in them as quarry-men; and even with bondholders and drawing-room loungers who are as capable of bravery and self-sacrifice as many a pitman or ironworker. Yet all these classes mentioned have their codes of morality, differing in greater or lesser degree from each other; and again the question forces itself upon us: Which of them all is the true and abiding code?

It may be said, with regard to this variation of codes within the same society, that, though various codes may exist at the same time, one only is really valid, namely, that which has embodied itself in the law--that the others have been rejected because they were unworthy. But, when we come to look into this matter of law, we see that the plea can hardly be maintained. Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but always added to and always administered by the ruling class. To-day the code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word Respectability--and if we ask why this code has to a great extent overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side (so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because it is the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the Democratic code of the future--of brotherhood and of equality; it is the code of the Commercial age--and its distinctive watchword is property.

The respectability of to-day is the respectability of property. There is nothing so respectable as being well-off. The Law confirms this: everything is on the side of the rich; justice is too expensive a thing for the poor man. Offences against the person hardly count for so much as those against property. You may beat your wife within an inch of her life and only get three months; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be "sent" for years. So again, gambling by thousands on Change is respectable enough, but pitch and toss for half-pence in the streets is low, and must be dealt with by the police; while it is a mere commonplace to say that the high-class swindler is "received" in society from which a more honest but patch-coated brother would infallibly be rejected. As Walt Whitman has it, "There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dressed and handsome. But the people are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."

Thus we see that though there are, for instance in the England of to-day, a variety of classes and a variety of corresponding codes of public opinion and morality, one of these codes, namely that of the ruling class whose watchword is property, is strongly in the ascendant. And we may fairly suppose that in any nation from the time when it first becomes divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case. In one age--the commercial age--the code of the commercial or money-loving class is dominant; in another--the military--the code of the warrior class is dominant; in another--the religious--the code of the priestly class; and so on. And even before any question of division into classes arises, while races are yet in a rudimentary and tribal state, the utmost diversity of custom and public opinion marks the one from the other.