Part 21

But if our reforming moralist acknowledges the supreme value of peace and would only make the pursuit of it more intelligent, our amoralist denies that the human heart can ever rest in peace or even really wants to. Peace, if it were complete, would mean stagnation, will-less apathy, that ennui of life Schopenhauer judges to be worse than any misery the war of aggressive wills can engender. In the Nietzschian man-of-might our amoralist sees his ideal, a will that knows no Over-will, acknowledges no loyalty, but whose motto is “Weltmacht oder Untergang.” For him, life shall at least know nothing of ennui, no static stagnant peace, no Nirvana.

Thus if we approach in an historian’s spirit the attempt to think out the world-desirable to make for which is to progress in the only sense the word can have, we find humanity divided between those who desire peace and those who want war.

On behalf of peace the moralist points not alone to the misery war brings to the vanquished, not alone to its cost to the victor and to the vanity of his ephemeral winnings; but to that utter loneliness which the war of all upon all makes the only lasting portion of each. A solitude of struggle, without one to cheer the effort, without one to share the joy (if joy it can then be called) of triumph--can any human heart endure, let alone desire war?

But the amoralist, full of the certaminis gaudia, turns in disgust from the hopeless state of the peaceful who having nothing more to fear can have nothing left to hope for. Our longing for peace is an illusion of certain moments of war-weariness, but a picture of eternal peace, stagnant, ambitionless, dead--and yet not dead enough--who could endure it, who could really desire peace?

Lonely ambition--peaceful acquiescence in a common lot! The history of human relations is a struggle, more often than not a compromise between these ideals. There is enough inspiring in each to make any man of understanding long for it, there is enough repulsive in each to turn any thoughtful soul against it. Wherefore the gruesome spectacle of world war is but the outer and visible sign of the struggle that goes on every silent moment within the heart of each, as the volcano is but the overt violence of long sullen rumblings that have gone before. And so things must last if and so long as we really want two irreconcilable ideals: compromise must follow makeshift, war must punctuate peace, world without end.

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Into a world so distraught comes that child of God, that messenger of heaven, the modest philosopher. His cheerful gospel is that all men’s ills are curable by taking thought, that men suffer only for their false philosophy. Now, of all philosophies none is so false as that which pretends one cannot have his penny and his cake. True it may be in the letter that I cannot keep a certain copper in my pocket and honestly entice a sweet-meat out of the baker’s window. But I must be a sorry philosopher if I cannot keep all the potentiality of future enjoyment the penny stands for, and yet have all the actual satisfaction I happen for the moment to visualize in the form of cake. Or to put the thought in less poetic and more general terms, the heart that thinks itself torn by conflicting desires owes its plight to the failure of its imagination to realize that only the formulas in which it has so far expressed its desires are in contradiction; the desires themselves may well enough be reconciled in a larger world-view.

Take our present problem for example. It is impossible, you say, that I should deny the ambition to conquer for the sake of the love of my neighbor without killing what is most vital in myself. And it is equally impossible that I should give play to my ambition to conquer without losing my neighbor’s love and living a lonely struggle. These things are indeed impossible in the world to which the imagination of the past has been fettered,--this little finite earth the fulness whereof is so easily emptied. If to have all that I can win of such meagre fulness is the only meaning I can give to ambition, either I must kill ambition and love my neighbor across a fence, or I must tear down the fence and kill my neighbor. But what if the fault of all this lay not with the darkness of reality, but with the blindness of untrained imagination? What if we could set before ambition a boundless prospect, so that never, far as conquest might reach, could it find cause to weep for lack of more to conquer? What if, in the very conquering of such a world, the gain of one, so far from being another’s loss, were the equal spoil of all, yes, and a weapon forged to the hand of all for new victories? Wherefore then should ambition yield or love be denied?

But perhaps you will say, this is but an imagining and a dream. Our humdrum world, the only real one, offers no such object of ambition; and if it did, our nature, just human nature, is not such as could understand, still less be fascinated and inspired by it.

Does it sound ridiculous to say that our world is one that holds out just such a prospect to all who will but see? Aye, and that many a human eye has seen, and having seen remained single to this vision? I will call the promised land the Kingdom of Nature Subdued: I will call the vision the Vision of Science.

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In the beginning, Man was Nature’s creature and her plaything. Sometimes she seems to have fondled her toy and been good to it, given it pleasant places to dwell in and let the light of her countenance shine upon it. Those who think only of these rare moments may sing, O bella età dell’ oro! O Paradise; O Paradise! They forget how rare were these moments and how capriciously bestowed. Elsewhere were many griefs of which man could not so much as guess the reason, and if he dared raise his questioning gaze to God he was mocked for his impotence and nothingness: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.”

But need makes for perspicuity. Time passed, and some few caught a glimpse of the vision of science; caught it, widened it, brightened it and passed it on. Perhaps their lives were not very happy in a world where they were much alone; but it is easier to tell of their ostensible hardships than of their enthusiasms--who knows but that even they found here their compt? Time went on, and that Nature which had begun by being so cruel and capricious a mistress became through man’s science more and more his slave. Human eyes were not so often turned to the gods in supplication. A Greek slave rang out to his fellows, “Why call ye upon the gods? Ye have hands? Wipe your own nose.”

The earth yields; step by step death itself gives ground; and shall we think of the stars only to fear them and to read our fate in them? Shall they forever whisper to us their old taunting questions: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven? canst thou set the dominion thereof on the earth?”--And shall we always answer, Alas!

But I am dreaming a dream. Is it though so ill a thing to dream, if one does not forget how to laugh the while? Yes, I know, the stars are rather big for our frail hands to play with even as all Nature once played with us. But how else am I to say that there is nothing in Nature that can forever resist the onward march of science? What else am I to say when the same master equations hold in heaven as on the earth, and Arcturus with all his sons is but a falling pebble painted large?

Let us dream then and laugh with Aesop at his frog. It is certain that neither our laughter nor our dreams can hurt our wise neighbor very much, and if we go the toilsome way toward the conquest we dream of, he or one that comes after may sometime look back on us and say, Yes, that was Progress. The measure of man’s coöperation with man in the conquest of nature measures progress.

ROYCE ON LOVE AND LOYALTY

A Footnote in Illustration

These matters are not so simple but that history, in dealing with them, shows sharp discord where it does not uncover sheer confusion. The love that sets its heart on one has been held the highest; it has also been put the lowest of all loves. Loyalty that lives on sacrifice has been prized as an enduring condition of all worth; it has not escaped disparagement as a human makeshift. Above all, “love” and “loyalty” are so mixed in men’s minds that, although any pair of lovers could tell a service of love from a servitude to loyalty, philosophers cannot always.

The brief discussion that follows seemed to the writer to illustrate a difficulty it may not have removed. He considered that it could not lack point for those who in foregoing passages on love and loyalty have found themselves more involved than enlightened. For the rest, it has seemed best to leave this “footnote” in the form and wording its original occasion inspired.]

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One who like me has gone to Royce for wisdom now this long time and never come away empty, may yet live to know that some of his receivings are more his belongings than others. Thus, if it ever happen to me that I find my hold on the ‘Absolute’ slackening and the thing slipping from me, I cannot think that even in that day I shall have forgotten two words I have heard. Love and loyalty, loyalty and love: this pair I expect will still be singing its burden in my soul after other things have left off singing there. But I hope that when this day comes I shall know better than I do now whether love and loyalty are two names for the same thing; or whether they are not the same, yet brothers and friends; or whether in the end they are not rather enemies, of which one can survive only if the other doesn’t. Nor do I know, though I should very much like to, how Royce himself would answer these questions. Sometimes the words fall in such close juxtaposition in his writings that I wonder whether they do not express a single idea whose peculiar quality is just unselfishness. But again I bethink me that to be just unselfish is not enough for an absolutist, if for anyone; that giving up can only be justified when it is a means of acquiring; and I wonder what loyalty can have to say for itself half as convincing as the things love could point to. Until at last I find myself speculating whether if love had its perfect way with us there would be any place left for loyalty in our lives, and whether we could not look back on it then as on a virtue happily outlived.

And this may be my matter in a nutshell--is not loyalty a thing to be outlived, and is not that which alone can enable us to live it down a love so perfect it calls for no sacrifices? Some such thought has long been with me, but if I am to lay my troubles before you, it is time I put aside a language too rich in sentimental associations and took up the idiom I love best, that of cold and, if may be, mathematical definition.

Any definition of loyalty that could have meaning for me must assume the existence of something many deny to have either existence or meaning, and which I shall call in my own way the mind of a group, or a group mind. The conception of a mind belonging to a group of beings each one of which has a mind of its own, yet such that the mind of the group is no more to be known from a study of its parts than is the mentality of Peter from the psychology of Paul, is a very old conception and perhaps for that reason supposed by some to be old-fashioned and out-worn. It is a mere analogy, they say, and a very thin one at that, to speak of a group of organisms as itself an organism; it is Plato, it is Cusanus, if you will, but it is not modern. Benedetto Croce even goes so far as to be polite about the matter. “The State,” he writes, “is not an entity, but a fluid complex of various relations among individuals. It may be convenient to delimit this complex and to entify it for the sake of contrasting it with other complexes. No doubt this is so; but let us leave to the jurist the excogitation of this and the like distinctions--fictions, but opportune fictions--being careful not to call his work absurd. It is enough for us to be sure we do not forget that a fiction is a fiction.”

To Royce the group mind is far from being a fiction, though he may prefer to call it by some other name than group mind--maybe universal mind or universal will. But if to him it seems natural, as it does to me, to recognize group minds, while to Croce the entity is but a polite fiction to be pleasantly dismissed, there must be some lack of definition befogging our issue. Nor can I think of any way in which old issues can better be made clear than by recalling old images.

Aristotle would not have asked when and where do new entities appear, but where and when must we take account of new forms. Now matter was informed for Aristotle when the behavior of some class of beings was recognized to be predictable in terms of purpose. Thus earth, water, air and fire sought their proper places, one below, another above, and the others in between. But we remember how no sooner had these elements reached their proper places than, transformed by the sun’s heat, they were no longer at home where they found themselves, but must needs seek their new homes anew. Thus homeward bound in opposite directions, they collided and became entangled, so that mixtures of the four appeared, which, as it proved, kept their proportions for a longer or shorter while ere they lost their equilibrium and fell apart again. Among these mixtures were vegetables and animals and men, but Aristotle is very far from defining this new class, organisms, in terms of the quantities of the elements that enter into their bodily composition. No, what they have in common and all they have in common is a new purpose, that of self-preservation (and, if we are to follow Aristotle rigorously, that of type-preservation). But why in this class of beings does a new form appear when there is nothing in any one of them but so much earth, so much water and so much of the rest? Because, I take it, in order that the purpose of the group may be realized, the purpose of each constituent of that group must be defeated: when the earth in us finds its way back to earth and our fire to fire, then we are no more. Which is the fundamental difference between us and them: if we win they lose; if they win we are done for. The whole has a purpose whose realization is only possible if the purposes defining the parts are given up for it.

I suppose Croce would say that nothing better could be offered in support of a modern fiction than an ancient fable; and I confess that I can think of nothing better fitted to set forth the complex problem of how beings of one mind can combine to form groups of another mind, than Aristotle’s account of the way elements in the form of mechanism combine to produce a group with that other form, life. Perhaps I can make out the connection between old and new ideas by a single example. I know of no fellow easier to get along with than your average Parisian: many a time have I sat at his board, looked in his eyes, listened to his amusing wit and wondered how the great-grandfather of my host could have been part of the Reign of Terror. And yet I suppose the Parisian of today is not very different from the Parisian of four generations ago, when groups of these same Parisians were ranging the streets of Paris crying, “A la lanterne!” However much it was in the character of the Pierre, Paul, Jean and Jacques Bonhomme of those old days to steer for home, their distributive tendency was contradicted by their collective tendency. A new form, a new entity had appeared; it was the spirit of the mob. It may be pleasant to call such new entities fictions; but it would be a most dangerous fiction to suppose pleasant men made pleasant mobs.

I must let this single illustration take the place of what might at some other time grow into a systematic account of the varieties of group minds that history and personal experience reveal to us. For my world is highly organized--groups within groups and groups within these in a way one might have learned at the feet of Nicolaus or by gathering one’s history from Gierke’s “Geschichte des Deutschen Rechts.” But on this occasion, instead of going into all this literature and all this philosophy, let me come back to the matter of loyalty’s worth. There would be no such thing as a demand for loyalty were there no call for a man to deny his wish for home--whether home be on earth or on high for him--for the sake of organizing himself into a group; which means, as we have seen, sacrificing his purpose for the group purpose. Now, what you think of the value of this sacrifice depends altogether on the esteem in which you hold group minds. If you can find some principle on which to estimate their dignity as something worth dying for in part or altogether, then loyalty may be the last word of virtue. But if you find that at their very best there is something rather primitive, sometimes amoeboid, sometimes tigerish about such minds, then you should seriously consider whether your biped soul owes anything more to this polypod entity than the entity owes to it. Merging oneself into something big may not be just the same as reaching for something high.