PART III. Woman in Relation to Man

WOMAN IN RELATION TO MAN

“And what about woman’s relationship to the world?”

“There is no such thing as woman.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“There are only women. To talk of Woman as a being apart from man is absurd. When I used the word Man in talking of the universal mind, I included women. The word Man as used to represent men is a falsity in that it excludes women. The word Woman is absurd, however you take it.

“Men and women are cut out of the same piece of stuff—Human Nature. The woman is cut a bit smaller, and her outline is a bit different, that is all.

“Mentally it is just the same as physically. She is cut, as a rule, a bit smaller, and the outline of her mind is a bit different. But it is only a difference in size and outline. The stuff is the same. And the outline of the one is complementary to the outline of the other; where the woman’s outline sinks in the man’s sticks out, and vice versa. Mentally and physically it is the same; they are, in fact, the two parts of that great jig-saw puzzle, Humanity.

“The Male and Female are not a necessity of Life. They are only a necessity of higher vegetable and animal life. A large number of lower organisms propagate unsexually—the monera, the ambæ, foraminifera, radiolara, etc. These increase either by splitting in two or putting out buds. The Male and Female are not, then, a radical necessity of life, but they are a radical necessity in development and in progress from a lower to a higher form of life. The Male and Female are not, as I will try to point out, of the essence of life, but of the essence of the forms of life.

“We must imagine that the first germ of life was sexless, a cellular structure that multiplied by splitting in two. We must imagine that because the rigid law of advance from the simple to the complex imposes on us the assumption that the first form of life must have been the simplest, and the simplest is the organism that develops by fission.

“There was a tremendous moment, then, when all earthly life lived and moved without sign of sex; cellular forms all alike, all developing alike, and by the same method.

“Had all these forms continued unchanged, the world would now be just as then. But a change came, due, we must suppose (from analogy), not to a change in the radical nature of these organisms, but to a change in the external conditions affecting some of them. The food environment, or the temperature environment, or the electrical environment surrounding some of these organisms, or some other unknown but always external influence, wrought a change in some of these lowly forms of life. The mother of Form—Differentiation—was the result.

“The organisms affected by Differentiation had to reproduce themselves by producing other organisms in a slightly different form, either lower than themselves, or on the same plane as themselves, or higher than themselves.

“Had they taken the first course, Differentiation would have meant destruction and death to all the organisms it touched. The second course was absolutely impossible. A simple organism cannot alter itself without ascending or descending; if it becomes the least degree more complex, it ascends; if it becomes the least degree less complex, it descends. It cannot alter its nature or its form in a horizontal direction. It is absolutely condemned to the vertical, and must go up or down.

“These basic simple organisms, then, that formed the foundation for all life, must have responded to their change in environment by ascending, that is, by becoming more complex. They must have done this, or else have descended to death. They were making for the great goal, Sex.

“How they reached that goal may be a story yet to be read by Science, but reach it they did on the day that two of these simple-minded organisms reproduced themselves, not by individual fission, but by mutual union.

“It was not a radical change in the life of the organisms; it was only a radical change in the method by which that life was reproduced.

“It was a change in business methods. It was co-operation, pure and simple, between two organisms in the production of other organisms. Before that day, the whole business had to be done by one individual; after that day it was done by partners, one called Male, the other Female.

“Now, what is the essence of partnership? Mutual assistance. In a labour partnership where the business is in the least complex, two men would be of very little assistance to each other who insisted always on doing the same job, or the same part of a job. There must always be a top sawyer and a bottom sawyer, a man who does what the other cannot do, or gives what the other has not got.

“It is exactly the same in the business of life-production, and the instant that Form could demonstrate them, the two partners appeared, and the instant that the new business of Life originated by this partnership became acute and competitive, the partners found themselves leagued together not only for the production of life, but for the defence of that life.

“But that carries us beyond my immediate point, which is that the terms Male and Female do not connote separate origins for the objects they apply to, nor essential differences between those objects. The two partners are essentially the same, only that one has got his hands horny from doing the rough jobs of the partnership and the other has kept her hands soft; one has developed mammary glands by doing her business in the partnership, the other has developed his biceps in doing his. One has developed certain attributes of mind in fighting the world, the other certain other attributes in keeping the home. One has developed certain organs for reproduction, the other—others.”

“Yet you deny the existence of Woman.”

“Absolutely. But I do not deny the existence of Sex, always holding that, though Sex is the most powerful factor in development, it has nothing to do with the essence of life. If it had, you would find men and women different from one another in essentials. They are not.

“As human beings they are exactly the same, only that you find some passions and attributes more developed in men, others more developed in women. But there is not a passion or attribute belonging to men that is not shared in by women, and vice versa.”

“But there is a vast difference between women and men.”

“Of course there is, but it is only a difference, not a division; moreover, it is only a surface difference, for the deeper you go into their natures, the less apparent is that difference. Use the touchstone of the profound emotions. Who has not seen a strong man weep like a woman, or a weak woman show the heroism of a man? Does sorrow affect men less than women? Does great joy affect women more than men?

“Is love a thing apart from man, and is it woman’s whole existence? It is not. That claptrap was born of Fancy, and the passion for saying a catchy thing. The love of men for women is just as powerful and as intimately connected with their existence as the love of women for men. Fidelity, the only true sign of real love, is exhibited by men in just the same proportion (allowing for the greater temptations of men) as it is by women.

“No; men and women are absolutely the same as human beings in all things essential, and the man who denies that is the man who sees the world with only one eye, and only uses the surface of his brain.

“Men and women are partners. Partners in a difficult business. They have been partners for millions of years, and the differences between them are caused by the exigencies of the partnership.

“Even in those surface mental differences that mark sex a man will often approximate to a woman in some particulars, and a woman to a man. These surface differences are not unalterable.

“Take the love of gossip. Listen to the talk of army men and navy men and club men.

“Take Vanity, and look at the nuts and the dudes and the macaronis.

“Take curiosity, and remember Coventry. Take love of dress—”

“And remember Mr. ——,” said she, laughing.

“Exactly. And let any one who would controvert me consider his friends and relations critically, and tell me, with his hand on his heart, are the males destitute of female attributes and the females of male?

“They are not. They are all human beings, and to class them philosophically under the two divisions, Woman and Man, is a profound error and a commonplace error.

“It has led men to look on women as mysterious beings with essential motive springs and essential mental clockwork quite different from that of men.

“It has led to frightful volumes of gas being generated in certain skulls, like the skull, for instance, of X——, and some of the leaders of the Feminist movement, and the escape of this gas is making an alarming noise.

“When Ellen Key, for instance, says that ‘Human souls can be divided into organic and inorganic,’ and that ‘Ibsen makes the masculine soul inorganic, definitive, finished, determined; the feminine soul, on the other hand, he more often makes organic, growing in evolution,’ what does she mean?

“All this loose talk about souls being organic and inorganic I would not exchange for one small concrete fact—such as that Mrs. Jones is a better man than her husband, or that John Smith ‘ought to have been born a girl,’ facts that help to prove that not only are men’s and women’s bodies and ‘souls’ made of the same stuff, but that the sex difference is so unfixed a quality that we find women who are to all intents and purposes men, and men women.

“I will be bold enough to lay down a law based on experience, History, and Common-sense.

“There is not a womanly attribute of either body or soul that has not been born of the stuff that men are made of, and there is not an attribute of women that has not been developed to its womanly pitch not by virtue of any mysterious energy rising from the source of ‘woman,’ but by purely external conditions. And the same with regard to men.

“There you have the old ‘conditions’ coming up again. Let us get at facts.

“The æsthetic sense is pre-eminently womanly. You will say, at once, ‘This is not so. Women are rarely as good artists as men.’ I was not talking of art, but of the æsthetic sense.

“Every male artist inherits this sense from his mother. I am speaking from long observation and experience. It is the woman in the artist that paints; the woman in the poet that feels; the woman in the novelist that colours the work. Every man has the æsthetic sense more or less developed, but women have it, as a mass, more developed than men. Who, for instance, puts the flowers in the cottager’s window?

“I do not believe that the æsthetic sense in the greatest artist is more developed than it is in hundreds of thousands of women who never touch art. His power of craftsmanship, purely material and mechanical, and his power of constructive imagination raise him to the heights, and these powers only come from the superior conditions favourable to them under which men have dwelt.

“Go into any house, and you can tell if a woman lives there. Some delightful trace or touch betrays the fact. It may be a few flowers—it may be this or that, but the æsthetic touch is there; and in the home it is chiefly the woman who brings it. Now, why has woman developed this delightful attribute? It is a property of the mind; but men have it, too. Why has she developed it out of proportion to the man’s development in this particular?

“Since she shares it with the man, it is a common attribute, and it is the purest common-sense to believe that she developed it simply because the conditions affecting her life were more favourable to its growth than the conditions affecting the life of the man.

“Though the first scratchings of art in the cave-men’s dwellings were, most likely, the work of a man, who gave him the æsthetic basis of his artistic sense? Arguing from what we know—his mother.

“And why did his mother cultivate this sense more than his father?

“If you had seen his father tearing through forests after, and sometimes in front of, infuriated wild beasts, while his mother kept cave and looked after the children, you would have a complete and pictorial answer to that question.

“Even the weariness of the chase is disastrous to the æsthetic sense. Look at all the hunting men and women you know, if you doubt what I say.

“So, then, without any transcendental talk about ‘souls’ being organic or inorganic, we may say, arguing common-sensically, that women have developed one of the most distinguishing ‘womanly’ attributes, not because she is a woman, but because she is a human being, and the conditions under which she has always lived have tended toward that development.

“Again—the love of a mother for her offspring, the one attribute of all attributes most distinctly and profoundly ‘womanly’: is it different in kind or essence from the love of a father for his offspring? Surely not, but it is more complex, more intimate, and more tender and more lovable, simply because the conditions under which it has grown have been more favourable to the development of this complexity, intimacy, and tenderness.

“It is the same beautiful thing, but more peculiarly cultivated, and it has grown in complexity while the man has been hunting, or trading, or fighting the world in some other way.

“Go through the whole category of those attributes whose superior development makes woman the flower of the earth. You will find not one which has developed on its own account owing to some mysterious chemistry of being peculiar to Woman,—all have developed from the common soil of humanity, owing to the superior conditions for their development in women.

“And the chief of those conditions has been Protection. The old conditions come up again. The man when he was hunting and killing beasts for his wife and children, and fighting for their existence, never imagined that he was by his labours founding Art and Poetry. He was. He was giving their germs conditions to grow in. Love, tenderness, gentleness, affection, morality: all were there in the cave with the woman. She suckled them with her children; she trained them in their growth with kisses—and slaps. They were the man’s no less than the woman’s, common to both their natures, but he left them in the cave with her to take care of, while he went hunting.

“Conditions have made woman what she is: the best and most beautiful thing in the world. And now Feminists want to change those conditions, just as Socialists want to change the conditions affecting man.

“Both strike at the Home.”

“‘Woman must have a freer life.’

“‘To evolve her genius, woman has but one need—Freedom.’

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“‘Woman must reorganize the mind and soul of humanity, for man has disintegrated it.’

“Those are some of the teachings of the Apostles of Feminism. I take them from the work of a clever American woman, and they are a fair statement of the case for Feminism.

“To the first I give an unqualified assent.

“Freedom, within limits, is the basic condition of growth.

“But what does the Feminist mean by Freedom?

“The third dictum answers that.

“‘She must be free to form her own ideas and morals.’

“One would fancy from that that ‘woman’ was an animal capable of evolving ideas and a moral code different from man. Since woman is just the same human animal, we may put this aside, and ask again what the Feminist means.

“She asks, in fact, that women may be free to change their morals (we shall leave the talk about ideas aside for the present) in any way they please.

“Now, morals cannot be changed in a horizontal direction. It’s up, or down, or stationary. Any change in morals is for the better or for the worse.

“Does the Feminist ask for freedom to change her morals for the better? She has perfect freedom to do that; most men will applaud her, and most women, too.

“Does she ask for freedom to change her morals for the worse?

“If she is making that demand, let her frankly avow that what she wants is license, not freedom.

“There is a lot of difference between the two.

“I am not arguing to get the Feminist in a hole, but simply to clear the ground of brambles.

“She does want license, as a matter of fact; one would be blind who looked at her programme and did not see that.

“And the license she wants is not the license to steal, or lie, or murder, or commit arson. When she talks of forming her own morals, she has one morality entirely and solely in view—the morality that presides over Love; and when she asks for license, it is license in Love.

“Men have more license in this matter than women. That is undoubtedly so.

“Men, since the beginning of the world, have had more license than women; but that license is a relic of barbarism. It was useful once, but it is becoming less useful every day, and pari passu men are becoming more moral.”

“Useful once?”

“In this way. Men in the past were the fertilisers of the world. Who brought Roman blood to England, Norman blood, Norse blood? Men. Roman, Norman, and Norse women had nothing to do with the matter. Their duty was to stay at home and be moral. Armed and roaming men fertilised the world, just as bees fertilise a field of clover, crossed the races, and made the vitality of them.

“Roman, Norse, and Norman virtues that make England great were born of Roman, Norse, and Norman license. The same fact applies to all Europe. But the day of the free-lance in love is gone. He who was once a world-maker is now a world-curse. He is not now a world-maker, but a Home-wrecker and a woman-wrecker.

“Nations no longer require him for a fertiliser. Men no longer travel in masses, armed with spears; they go in railway carriages, accompanied by their families, and the world can get all the fertilisation it wants by immigration.

“License still lives among men, but it lives as a reptile; among men it is dying, yet Feminists, when they ask for license, would give this dying thing a new birth among women. They forget that what was once a bad necessity is now a hideous and dying superfluity.

“I have heard it stated by Feminists that motherhood is the right of every woman.

“So is fatherhood the right of every man, and on that plea a man might base a very wide scheme of immorality.

“As a matter of fact, there is something else: the right of the child.

“A woman has no right to motherhood unless she can provide a home for her child. A father has no right to fatherhood who cannot do likewise. And by a home I do not mean shelter and food; I mean everything sacred that lies in that word Home. Love, affection, self-restraint, mutual respect, and family respect.

“Of course, if the Feminist says, Destroy the home, one has nothing more to say. She is logical.

“But to say, I shall increase license among women without injuring or destroying the home, at once reduces her to a person who is not logical.

“As a matter of fact, the Feminist movement, as far as its moral side goes, is confined to a certain number of men who desire the extension of license; to a certain number of women who do likewise; and to a certain number of women who feel acutely that women are put upon by men in the matter of morals. That men have set up a rule of conduct for women which they don’t obey themselves.

“This is not so. The sternest moralists are women, and the morality of these moralists is not an abstract quality; it arises from a profound and intuitive motherhood instinct that tells them that license is death to the welfare of the child, whether it develops and is shown in the mother or the child.

“The child must restrain itself and not steal the jam; the woman must restrain herself and not let her honour be stolen.”

“And, you will say, the man must restrain himself and not steal her honour?”

“Certainly.

“And every man, who is a man and not a cur, obeys that law as far as in him lies.

“Man, you must remember, has a lot to fight against, and nothing so much as the old rules of license under which he has lived for ages.

“They used to be a royal robe; they are now a beggar’s tatters. He is ashamed to be seen in them nowadays; he only puts them on in private; yet they are always crying to him to put them on, just as filth is always crying to a dog, Roll in me.

“That is all I have to say about the moral side of the Feminist people. Their claim for equal freedom with man in other respects is far more pleasant to notice. And it comes to this:

“Since the mass of women is just the same as the mass of men, in the name of Humanity, why should not the woman mass have the same freedom in affairs as the man, politically and socially?

“Why should the women of the nation not be free to expand their mental and bodily energy in every social and political path in which the men expand it?

“Certainly they ought. But they can’t.

“They could, in a nation whose units were individuals; they can’t, in a nation whose units are homes.

“Every woman is a potential or actual queen-bee. Her duty is to found a hive, not to make honey. Like a man, she has only a limited quantity of energy.

“The little nation of the hive or home, which is, in very fact, the nation itself writ small, makes vast calls upon the man’s energy and the woman’s. Here alone is the national life as distinct from the national affairs.

“It is the germinal spot and centre of all national activity; it is the primary school of all morality; and it is the supreme province of the woman. Here she is a world Builder.

“This is her kingdom. Her duties here are not only family, but national. There are no humble duties in a home: they are all great and national duties, directly determining the advancement of the world. Like all great duties, they imply great outputs of energy, self-denial, and restraint, and it is impossible for her to use her energies effectively in two directions. She cannot be at the hub of the wheel and the tire both at the same time. In other words, she cannot be at home and in parliament or the law courts, or the council chambers of the nation, or the studios or dentists’ parlours at one and the same time.

“‘Woman must be free to create her own conduct and to seek her own experiences for self-development,’ runs another dictum of our Feminist sage.

“In the home she is only free to create her own conduct in a manner conducive to the well-being of the home. If she swerves from this law, she is a defaulter and an enemy to good. The same may be said of her freedom in self-development.

“Certainly she must be free to develop herself, and so must the man be free to develop himself.

“But the man who develops his muscles in golf at the expense of his business time and energy is a slacker and a defaulter and a home-injurer. And the woman who develops her political instincts or her mind power at the expense of her home time and energy is the same.”

“It seems to me,” said my audience, “that you look on women as though they were all married and with household duties to perform.”

“I look on women as though they were all married women, or women preparing to enter that state. No other women are of any account at all as world-builders.

“They may be delightful, charming, pleasant, true women in every way, but if they are not married they are not true women-factors in the progress of the world. Simply because they have no hand in the physical building of the future.

“The child is the future made visible and concrete. When you lay your finger on a child you are touching not flesh only, but future ages.

“The unmarried woman-genius may influence the art or the thought of her time; the labourer’s wife who produces a bouncing boy that lives has produced the future. More than that, she has sent forth her own attributes to dwell in the future. More than that, by her care and education of that child she is laying the foundation for vast world effects.

“That is the woman’s triumphant position in the scheme of things. She is a partner in world-building, and the duties lying on her share of the partnership are patent and obvious to the meanest intelligence.

“They are both moral and material, and they imply in their performance one supreme virtue: self-sacrifice. Not freedom to develop according to inclination; not freedom to alter her morals; not freedom to imitate the worst faults of men; but slavery in the interests of her children, her husband, and her home.

“And what happy people these slaves are! Just as happy as the men-slaves who, under the dominion of good conduct, love, and the hive instinct, often work themselves to death, like the bees, that others may live and prosper.

“But, as you say, all women cannot be mothers. Yet it is essential that the mothers of the nation should be protected at all costs from the disease which lurks under the specious word ‘Feminism.’”

“They have come a long journey together, the Man and the Woman, and all through that long journey across the ages they have been leading the child by the hand.

“And if the wicked and blasphemous people who talk of sex-hate had but the scientific and poetic perception enabling them to see those three grand and mysterious figures as they are on the shores of Time, we would be spared, perhaps, from the poisonous blight of sexisms.”

“You are so positive,” said she, “that I often haven’t dared to interrupt you, and you talk so quickly that all you have said, though I understood it at the time, is now a jumble in my mind.”

“I am positive, because there is no use at all in being negative. People who believe in what they say are usually positive—even though they may be wrong.

“If I have talked too quickly, I shall write out what I have said and send it to you; then you can pick it to pieces as much as you please.”

THE END

NOTE TO PART I OF THE BOOK

In my experience, judging from the men I have met in life and the men whose lives I have read about, the really strong men of the world have been men of strong belief—and mostly men with a strong belief in a personal God.

Faith is a very wonderful thing, call it what you please. There is in Faith an enormous dynamic energy the origin of which, analyse it as much as I will, leaves me utterly baffled and bewildered.

One might say that it is an orientation of the mind, a pointing of all the thoughts in one definite direction by which the mind, as a machine, gains harmony which is expressed in power of action, and I believe the co-ordination of the functions of the mind under a common governing belief does, in part, explain the miraculous power conferred on men by Faith.

Also one might say that the mind capable of great faith is essentially a positive mind, a direct mind, and a constructive mind.

Also one might say a great many things, and yet leave the foundation of the question as deeply involved in darkness as ever, and the mind of a Newman, a Gladstone, or a Cromwell the same towering mystery.

But the fact remains clear that the man without belief in something above and beyond this world, or in something in this world, some tide, or core, or essence of which his own little life is a part, loses the alliance of that power which we indicate in the word Faith.

There is no doubt at all that the western world has lost power, and that England is losing power daily by the steady loss of Faith.

The crude, hard faith in a personal God which is vanishing from among us is a dynamic force that is passing away, and it is being replaced by what?

It is being replaced by a good many excellent things: by an increase of tolerance and sympathy; an increased consideration for the oppressed, and a re-valuation of all the considerations that come under the title Justice; but all these and many more good things that have sprung to growth in the universal mind leave the individual mind still lacking Faith.

Darwinism it was that struck the first real blow at a personal God, and men, in their minds at least, have nearly extinguished the chemical hell.

And Darwinism, destroying the old rigid, childlike faith, handed the world not Atheism, but a new Faith, which the world never seems to have grasped.

The Faith in a world ever progressing toward the good.

Once you have grasped the great truth that your life is a part of this miracle of growth, as long as you conform as far as in you lies to the growth of good in yourself, you will have a Faith that will fill you with new force.

And it is a faith that no one can refuse, for its teaching is written across the rocks and the stars, and so plainly that a child can read it, once it is pointed out to him.

Appendices

APPENDIX A

I have said very little about Anarchism—merely mentioned it by name; yet the inquiries I have made into this subject reveal an organisation and a literature astonishing to the everyday mind. To use the words of that ardent bibliophile, H. Bourdin:

“To most people the word Anarchy is evil-sounding, but it is not the same to learned men and to collectors and lovers who acquire the desire of accumulating documents for history’s sake.

“The Anarchist literature has not a determined origin, being not the expression of a system invented and progressively elaborated, but the negation of all systems, produced by the desire to batter down the despotic in all its forms, the rules and duty imposed by prejudice or by force, and to give impulse to the free development of humanity. All acts which have been accomplished and all words which have been pronounced in hatred of this constraint and in favour of this freedom are consciously or unconsciously the production of Anarchy.

“It is astonishing when one glances at the huge quantity of literature of all kinds which has been printed in the space of the last half-century for the exposition of their ideal thought; no other party or sect, for whatever cause they had to defend, can be compared to this, except Christianity, which has taken about 2,000 years over it. Consider the difficulty which they have met in publishing clandestinely their periodicals, broadsides, etc., hunted by society as wild beasts; domiciliary perquisitions destroyed their works, which were merely their thoughts.”

M. Bourdin has courteously allowed me to inspect the huge library of Anarchistical literature which he has collected, consisting of journals, broadsides, pamphlets, volumes, songs, theatrical plays, etc.

To give you an idea of the extent and nature of the Anarchistical press, I enumerate a few of the journals:

L’Anarchie, Journal de l’Ordre, May, 1850.

(In 1850, Anarchy had already a press.)

Le Libertaire, 1858–1861.

L’Egalité, 1869–1872.

L’Internationale, 1870–1873.

La Révolution Sociale, 1871–1872.

L’Ami du Peuple (Liège), 1873–1875.

Ni Dieu ni Maître, 1880. (You see we are getting on in titles.)

La Révolution Sociale, 1880.

Le Drapeau Noir, 1883.

L’Emeute, 1883–1884.

La Lutte, 1883.

Le Défi, 1884.

La Guerre Sociale, 1885. (Brussels).

La Révolte, 1894.

L’Antipatriote, 1899. (Cat out of the bag.)

Le Tocsin, 1892–1894.

La Débâcle, 1893.

L’Insurgé (Lyons), 1893.

Le Cyclone (Buenos Aires), 1895–1896.

La Cravache, 1898.

Le Cravacheur, idem.

Le Cri de Révolte, 1898–9.

Les Crimes de Dieu, 1898.

La Bastille, 1902–3.

Germinal, 1904–1910.

L’Anarchie, 1905.

L’Anarchiste, 1907.

L’Action Directe, 1907–1908.

La Mère Peinard, 1908.

La Révolution, 1909.

Les Révoltés, 1909.

La Bataille Syndicaliste, 1911.

The Anarchist (Glasgow), 1912.

And these are only a few of the journals in the great Bourdin collection.* I have only mentioned some of the French journals devoted to the cause; there are English and German as well, and there are sure to be Russian and Spanish and Italian journals to match.

* This collection is for sale, I believe.

It is a big movement. Give me the literature of a movement, and I will feel its pulse and tell you about its constitution. The literature of Anarchism tells that it is very much alive.

What is Anarchism? It is really unconstructive Socialism and Syndicalism.

The Anarchists want to destroy society as it is, and let Human Nature ramp on the remains.

The Socialist wants to destroy society, and build it again on an anti-Human-natural plan.

The Syndicalist wants to destroy the Business World and to erect a new business world on an unbusinesslike basis.

Of the three, I prefer Anarchy.

It is the only one of the three dreams based on common-sense, for it frankly aims at Anarchy, and Anarchy is exactly what it would get were it to succeed.

* * * *

I have said “The three dreams,” and though I have permitted myself to sneer at some points in the philosophy of some of these dreamers, I have no sneers at all to expend on their energy, and on their wholeheartedness. They are all trying to express something, and that something is the Poverty and the Misery of the world.

Socialism, Syndicalism, and Anarchism are all one voice speaking in different tones.

And that voice is growing and must be answered, not by Repression, but by Philosophy.

The world is not all wrong, but it is not all right. Man is speaking in no uncertain tones, and he wants some reply more apposite to his argument than the glib chirrup of Pippa.

APPENDIX B

A PASSAGE FROM HAECKEL*

Under the title of Design in the Living Organism, the famous embryologist, Carl Ernst Baer, published a work in 1876 which, together with the article on Darwinism which accompanied it, proved very acceptable to our opponents, and is still much quoted in opposition to evolution. It was a revival of the old teleological system under a new name, and we must devote a line of criticism to it. We must premise that, though Baer was a scientist of the highest order, his original monistic views were gradually marred by a tinge of mysticism with the advance of age, and he eventually became a thorough dualist. In his profound work on The Evolution of Animals (1828), which he himself entitled Observation and Experiment, these two methods of investigation are equally applied. By careful observation of the various phenomena of the development of the animal ovum, Baer succeeded in giving the first consistent presentation of the remarkable changes which take place in the growth of the vertebrate from a simple egg-cell. At the same time, he endeavoured, by far-seeing comparison and keen reflection, to learn the causes of the transformation, and to reduce them to general constructive laws. He expressed the general result of his research in the following thesis: “The evolution of the individual is the story of the growth of individuality in every respect.” He meant that “the one great thought that controls all the different aspects of animal evolution is the same that gathered the scattered fragments of space into spheres, and linked them into solar systems. This thought is no other than life itself, and the words and syllables in which it finds utterance are the varied forms of living things.”

* This translation from Haeckel’s “The Riddle of the Universe” is taken from an edition published by The Rationalist Press in England, and Harper & Brothers in the United States of America, Copyright 1900, to whom grateful acknowledgment is made for permission for its use in this volume.

Baer, however, did not attain to a deeper knowledge of this great genetic truth and a clearer insight into the real efficient causes of organic evolution, because his attention was exclusively given to one-half of evolutionary science, the science of the evolution of the individual, embryology, or, in a wider sense, ontogeny. The other half, the science of the evolution of species, phylogeny, was not yet in existence, although Lamarck had already pointed out the way to it in 1809. When it was established by Darwin in 1859, the aged Baer was no longer in a position to appreciate it; the fruitless struggle which he led against the theory of selection clearly proved that he understood neither its real meaning nor its philosophic importance. Teleological and, subsequently, theological speculations had incapacitated the aging scientist from appreciating this greatest reform of biology. The teleological observations which he published against it in his Species and Studies, in his eighty-fourth year, are mere repetitions of errors which the teleology of the dualists has opposed to the mechanical or monistic system for more than 2,000 years. The “telic” idea, which, according to Baer, controls the entire evolution of the animal from the ovum is only another expression for the eternal “idea” of Plato, and the entelecheia of his pupil, Aristotle.

Our modern biogeny gives a purely physiological explanation of the facts of embryology, in assigning the functions of heredity and adaptation as their causes. The great biogenetic law, which Baer failed to appreciate, reveals the intimate causal connection between the ontogenesis of the individual and the phylogenesis of its ancestors; the former seems to be a recapitulation of the latter. Nowhere, however, in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller, instead of the provident God, that affects the changes of organic forms by a mutual action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. And there is no more trace of “design” in the embryology of the individual plant, animal, or man. This ontogeny is but a brief epitome of phylogeny, an abbreviated and condensed recapitulation of it, determined by the physiological laws of heredity.

Baer ended the preface to his classical Evolution of Animals (1828) with these words: “The palm will be awarded to the fortunate scientist who succeeds in reducing the constructive forces of the animal body to the general forces or life-processes of the entire world. The tree has not yet been planted which is to make his cradle.” The great embryologist erred once more. That very year, 1828, witnessed the arrival of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University (for the purpose of studying theology!)—the “fortunate scientist,” who richly earned the palm thirty years afterward by his theory of selection.

In the philosophy of history—that is, in the general reflections which historians make in the destinies of nations and the complicated course of political evolution—there still prevails the notion of a “moral order of the universe.” Historians seek in the vivid drama of history a leading design, an ideal purpose, which has ordained one or other race or State to a special triumph, and to dominion over the others. This teleological view of history has recently become more strongly contrasted with our monistic view in proportion as monism has proved to be the only possible interpretation of inorganic nature. Throughout the whole of astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry there is no question to-day of a “moral order,” or a personal God, whose “hand hath disposed all things in wisdom and understanding.” And the same must be said of the entire field of biology, the whole constitution and history of organic nature, if we set aside the question of man for the moment. Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the “survival of the fittest,” or the “victory of the best”; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense). Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that, besides the predominant advance toward perfection, there are at all times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer’s notion of “design” has no moral feature whatever.

Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call “the history of the world”? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history: No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same “eternal laws of iron” as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years.

Geologists distinguish three great epochs in the organic history of the earth, as far as we can read it in the monuments of the science of fossils—the primary, secondary, and tertiary epochs. According to a recent calculation, the first occupied at least 34,000,000, the second 11,000,000, and the third 3,000,000 years. The history of the family of vertebrates, from which our own race has sprung, unfolds clearly before our eyes during this long period. Three different stages in the evolution of the vertebrate correspond to the three epochs: the fishes characterised the primary (palæozoic) age, the reptiles the secondary (mesozoic), and the mammals the tertiary (cænozoic). Of the three groups the fishes rank lowest in organisation, the reptiles come next, and the mammals take the highest place. We find, on nearer examination of the history of the three classes, that their various orders and families also advanced progressively during the three epochs toward a higher stage of perfection. May we consider this progressive development as the outcome of a conscious design or a moral order of the universe? Certainly not. (Certainly yes. Progression toward the benign is the core of all morality.—H. de V. S.) The theory of selection teaches us that this organic progress, like the earlier organic differentiation, is an inevitable consequence of the struggle for existence. (Struggle for improved conditions.—H. de V. S.) Thousands of beautiful and remarkable species of animals and plants have perished during those 48,000,000 years, to give place to stronger competitors, and the victors in this struggle for life were not always the noblest or most perfect forms in a moral sense. (No, but they were the best condition-builders.—H. de V. S.)

It has been just the same with the history of humanity. The splendid civilisation of classical antiquity perished because Christianity, with its faith in a loving God and its hope of a better life beyond the grave, gave a fresh, strong impetus to the soaring human mind. The Papal Church quickly degenerated into a pitiful caricature of real Christianity, and ruthlessly scattered the treasures of knowledge which the Hellenic philosophy had gathered; it gained the dominion of the world through the ignorance of the credulous masses. In time the Reformation broke the chains of this mental slavery, and assisted reason to secure its right once more. But in the new, as in the older period, the great struggle for existence went on in its eternal fluctuation, with no trace of a moral order.

And it is just as impossible for the impartial and critical observer to detect a “wise providence” in the fate of individual human beings as a moral order in the history of peoples. Both are determined with iron necessity by a mechanical causality which connects every single phenomenon with one or more antecedent causes. Even the ancient Greeks recognised ananke, the blind heimarmene, the fate “that rules gods and men,” as the supreme principle of the universe. Christianity replaced it by a conscious Providence, which is not blind, but sees, and which governs the world in patriarchal fashion. The anthropomorphic character of this notion, generally closely connected with belief in a personal God, is quite obvious. Belief in a “loving Father,” who unceasingly guides the destinies of 1,500,000,000 men on our planet, and is attentive at all times to their millions of contradictory prayers and pious wishes, is absolutely impossible; that is at once perceived on laying aside the coloured spectacles of “faith” and reflecting rationally on the subject.

As a rule, this belief in Providence and the tutelage of a “loving Father” is more intense in the modern civilised man—just as in the uncultured savage—when some good fortune has befallen him: an escape from peril of life, recovery from a severe illness, the winning of the first prize in a lottery, the birth of a long-delayed child, and so forth. When, on the other hand, a misfortune is met with, or an ardent wish is not fulfilled, “Providence” is forgotten. The wise ruler of the world slumbered—or refused his blessing.

In the extraordinary development of commerce in the nineteenth century the number of catastrophes and accidents has necessarily increased beyond all imagination; of that the journal is a daily witness. Thousands are killed every year by shipwreck, railway accidents, mine accidents, etc. Thousands slay one another every year in war, and the preparation for this wholesale massacre absorbs much the greater part of the revenue in the highest civilised nations, the chief professors of “Christian charity.” And among these hundreds of thousands of annual victims of modern civilisation strong, industrious, courageous workers predominate. Yet the talk of a “moral order” goes on.

Since impartial study of the evolution of the world teaches us that there are no definite aim and no special purpose to be traced in it, there seems to be no alternative but to leave everything to “blind chance.” This reproach has been made to the transformism of Lamarck and Darwin, as it has been to the previous systems of Kant and Laplace; there are a number of dualist philosophers who lay great stress on it. It is, therefore, worth while to make a brief remark upon it.

One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance with its teleological conception, that the whole cosmos is an orderly system, in which every phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is no such thing as chance. The other group, holding a mechanical theory, expresses itself thus: The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose whatever (except that it is ever growing toward the good.—H. de V. S.): what we call design in the organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in that of the crust of our earth do we find any trace of a controlling purpose (O blindness! before the wonder of development.—H. de V. S.)—all is the result of chance. Each party is right—according to its definition of chance. The general law of causality, taken in conjunction with the law of substance, teaches us that every phenomenon has a mechanical cause; in this sense there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the purpose of expressing the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena, which are not causally related to each other, but of which each has its own mechanical cause, independent of that of the other. Everybody knows that chance, in this monistic sense, plays an important part in the life of man and in the universe at large. That, however, does not prevent us from recognising in each “chance” event, as we do in the evolution of the entire cosmos, the universal sovereignty of nature’s supreme law, the law of substance.

A NOTE ON THE PASSAGE FROM HAECKEL

I do not suggest, I affirm, with the support of all science at my elbow and all reason at my side, that the world in its development has exhibited only one constant direction, and that direction is toward what we call the good or, in other words, progression toward the complex.

That the development of forms by natural selection is only a part of the real business of the universe, whose mighty labours have, from the very beginning of earthly things, been directed toward one distant ideal.

What is the Ideal? Who knows? We only know that on the covering directions of the sealed orders, which man may not open till he is fit to read them, are the words: Advancement, Love, Mercy, Kindliness, Protection, and every other word which the mind of man has marshalled under that mysterious and general term, The Good.

Blind matter carried those sealed orders in its body and the first fishes carried them under their fins, the first claw was made to catch them and to carry them through ferocious times, till the hand of the first monkey seized them. “Advancement” was the only word on the cover then; but, age after age, hitherto invisible directions began to appear letter by letter, till “Love” stood out, and “Mercy,” and all those other words that form the basis of Progress.

Accident and the stress of growth have sometimes obliterated those words for years and centuries. Civilisations have misinterpreted some of those words and barbarisms have rubbed them out, schools of Religions and schools of thought have meddled with them and altered them, yet they have always returned, and not only returned, but brought other words with them.

The aim and object of life, Haeckel, are the carriage of those sealed orders, and the implicit obedience of the directions that appear age by age on their envelope, till, who knows, some day the word “Open” may be found there, and some glimpse of the great Ideal be permitted to the eyes of man.