APPLICATIONS: THE ETHICS OF THE FAMILY, THE STATE, THE INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, ETC.
CHAPTER I
THE COLLECTIVE TASK OF MANKIND AND THE THREE-FOLD REVERENCE
The social institutions, the family, the organs of education, the vocation, the political organization, the organization of mankind, the ideal religious society are to be treated as a progressive series. The individual is to pass successively through them, advancing from station to station toward ethical personality.
In designating the social institutions as an ethical series, care must be taken not to confound the terms of the series as now existent with the terms as they would be did they conform to their ethical functions. For instance, even the monogamic family is as yet only in part ethically organized. School and university are adrift as to their ethical purpose. The majority of mankind are engaged in occupations which it would be absurd to call vocations, and the international group exists as yet barely in embryo. Hence when we speak of the social institutions as a progressive series through which the individual is to advance towards personality, we are describing the aim of social reconstruction, not the present state of things. The spiritual nature of man must create for itself appropriate social organs. It has been painfully engaged in the attempt to do so since the existence of our race on earth.
In each of the social institutions we are to distinguish between the empirical substratum and the spiritual imprint which it is to receive. We find in each ready to hand some natural non-moral motive or set of motives of which we are to avail ourselves in the endeavor to evoke the spiritual result. Thus in the family the non-moral motive is affection due to consanguinity; in the school sociality, the school society being the first society into which the child enters; in the vocation there is the craving for mental self-expression, in the state, patriotism, or the feeling we have for the larger whole in which we are included on the basis of similarity of language, historic tradition, etc. The natural basis of the international group of society is the empirical, and as yet in no way ethical, fact of the commercial and industrial interdependence of the different countries, a fact used by M. Bloch and his more recent followers as an argument against war.
In popular literature the empirical substratum and the spiritual relation to be produced by means of it are constantly confused. In any genuinely ethical system they must be carefully discriminated.69
In each of the social institutions, or, as we may now call them, the phases of life experience through which the individual must pass on the way toward personality, the winning of the ethical result depends on observance of the three-fold reverence. What I mean by the three-fold reverence must be explained in some detail, especially as the reader might otherwise be led into identifying my view with that expressed by Goethe in Wilhelm Meister. The three modes of reverence mentioned by Goethe in his sketch of the “pedagogical province” have for their background the poet’s pantheism. The view here set forth is based on ethical idealism.
In order to introduce my thought let me go back to the phrase repeatedly used in Book III—“the task of humanity.” Mankind as a whole, the generations past, present and to come, have a certain work to do, a task to accomplish. A collective obligation rests on our race, spanning the generations.
The spiritual conception of the collective task is the basis of the three-fold reverence. The spiritual result, as was said above, is in every instance to be superinduced upon an empirical substratum. The empirical substratum in this case is mankind considered as a developing entity, which partially reproduces in the present the mental and moral acquisitions of ancestors, partially increases the heritage and passes it on to the newcomers. I, as an individual, am also inextricably linked up backward and forward with those who come before and those who are to come after. I cannot take myself out of this web. The task laid upon human society as a whole is also laid upon me. I am a conscious thread in the fabric that is weaving, conscious in a general way of the pattern to be woven.
But viewed empirically the development of humanity is haphazard. Much is preserved from the past that ought to be cast aside. Many traces of past error remain unexpunged in the life of the present. A mixed stream, compounded of good and evil, passes through our veins into our successors’. The empirical fact is simply the fact of partial reproduction, partial augmentation and partial transmission. The ethical conception of progress depends on the view that there is an ideal pattern of the spiritual relation in the mind of man, destined to become more explicit as it is tested out and that the present generation ought to appraise the heritage of the past according to this pattern, preserving and rejecting and adding its own quota in such a way as to enable the succeeding generations to sift the worthful from the worthless more successfully, and to see the ideal pattern more explicitly.
The three-fold reverence has been described as reverence towards superiors, equals and inferiors. For this inadequate description I would substitute the following: In place of reverence towards superiors, reverence for the valid work of ethicizing human relations already accomplished in the past, reverence for the precious permanent achievements and for those who achieved them,—the “Old Masters.” The human race has gained a certain ethical footing in the empirical sphere. The general task has not to be begun ab initio. In the act of separating what is worth while from what is worthless, in the very process of revision and reinterpretation, we manifest our reverence for the past. It is thus that true historicity is distinguished from blind conservatism. And besides, by studying the old masters, we acquire a certain standard of excellence. Since those who have contributed epoch-making advances in philosophy, in religion, in science, inspire us by the grandeur of their attack on the great problems; and the spirit of their attack, is unspeakably stimulating to us, even when we reject their solutions. We cannot too humbly sit as disciples at the feet of the great masters if discipleship has this meaning.
Reverence of the first type prescribes the same attitude towards preËminent personalities among our contemporaries. They rank with the great predecessors inasmuch as they are in a way for us predecessors. They are in advance of us. To revere them is to endeavor to come abreast of them, to obtain the advantage of the forward movement which their superior capacity enabled them to initiate, and to start where they leave off, adding our small quota.
The second kind of reverence is directed toward those who are, in respect to their gifts and opportunities, approximately on the same level with us, but whose gifts differ from and are supplementary to ours. In our relation to them we may learn the great lesson of appreciating unlikeness, and working out our own correlative unlikeness by way of reaction.
The third kind of reverence is directed toward the undeveloped, among whom I include the young, the backward groups among civilized peoples, and the uncivilized peoples. We are to reverence that which is potential in all of these individuals and groups, and we do so by fitting ourselves to help them actualize their spiritual possibilities. Reverence of the third kind takes the highest rank among the three. The spiritual life of the world is a deep mine as yet explored only near the surface. The unrealized possibilities of mankind are the chief asset. But in order to effectuate our purpose with respect to the undeveloped, we must have reverence toward the great Old Masters, to gain a certain standard of excellence; and reverence towards unlikeness in others to become ourselves differentiated individualities, and in order to respect the unlikeness which we shall presently likewise find in the backward and the young. So that the three reverences play into one another and are inseparable from one another, the first two being indispensable to the third. They are in truth a “trinity in unity.” But the third reverence is the supreme one. The chief objective must be the undeveloped, because our face must be turned toward the future, because the task of mankind is as yet in its early stages. The third reverence is supreme. Now it is only when we have grasped the meaning of the triple reverence that we can fully appreciate the significance of the family as the first matrix in which the reverential attitudes are to be acquired. It is only then that we can rightly conceive of the organs of education, and of the end upon which the activities of school and university should converge. And similarly we shall find our interpretation of the vocation, the state, and the international society illuminated by this conception of the three-fold reverence.
In popular religious teaching the individual is thrust into the foreground. His salvation as a detached entity is the principal object. In positivism and evolutionalism society in its empirical aspect is exalted, and the individual tends to be regarded as a stepping-stone. In the spiritual interpretation of the collective task as outlined, the individual remains integral and sacrosanct. The spiritual society of which the image is to be imprinted on human society is a society of indefeasible ethical personalities.70 The individual even now at his station in the present attributes to himself this lofty character and the various obligations which he already recognizes, and which he endeavors to fulfil, afford him ample opportunity to vindicate his spiritual selfhood. If in addition he looks forward longingly to the future, and to the greater spiritual fulfilment that may be expected among posterity, this expectation is founded on the belief that what he already possesses in germ will then be more unfolded, that the ideal of the indefeasible worth of man of which he is already conscious in himself will then be more completely recognized and its infinite implications be more fully understood.71
CHAPTER II
THE FAMILY
The family is in process of change. We should fix attention on the kind of change that is desirable. The change desirable is the more perfect expression of the ethical ideal in the life of the family. One striking fact is that in the past the family was never supposed to exist merely for the “benefit” of its individual members. The latter view is an individualistic novelty of our age, and, as commonly understood, it is radically false.
Under the caste system the family subordinates the welfare of its members to the function of the caste. Society being stationary and stratified, the family is the organ for the reproduction of a stratified social system.
A similar view prevails under feudalism. We of today resent the idea underlying primogeniture. From the modern point of view we ask why the eldest born should be preferred to his brothers. Primogeniture appears to us to assert the inequality of individual men; but from the feudal point of view the eldest born was preferred, not as an individual, but as the steward of the family property. The family had a fixed place in the social hierarchy, and to maintain this place the estate was to remain undivided in the hands of one person.
Now what is amiss with the modern family? This is profoundly amiss—that the idea of the family as serving a larger purpose is disappearing, and that the family is supposed to exist for the benefit of its individual members, benefit meaning happiness. Frequent divorce and disintegration are the natural consequences of this view, for if the tie exists solely for the happiness of those bound by it, then it ought indeed to be dissolved when the relation entails suffering.
Society has passed from status to contract, and many seem to hold that contract is the last word, the true expression of freedom. We have passed from status to contract, we must pass on from contract to organization, and thus to true freedom.
Status is based on the analogy of the animal organism. The caste society and the feudal society, ethically regarded, are spurious organisms. This spurious type of organization is no longer viable, and now bald individualism is taking its place. The malady with which the family is afflicted is individualism. The desirable change is genuine organization on the basis of the spiritual equivalence of all functions.72 The relation of the family to the general social task of organization is two-fold. The family is the seminary in which shall be implanted the germinal principle of organization, that principle which is destined to transform all the subsequent terms of the social series, the instrumentality to be employed being the three-fold reverence. Again, the family will reach its more perfect form in proportion as the succeeding social institutions, the school, vocation, state, shall themselves be essentially organized, the influence of the later terms retroacting on the first term.
The family, in the spiritual view of it which I am sketching, differs from the family of other days, and also from the modern family, in two particulars. It does not recruit some one social class or stratum. It does not direct the offspring into a single specific vocation. It is the vestibule that leads into all the different professions and vocations. And secondly, the family does not prepare the young to enter into a vocation for the purpose of securing happiness. It does not regard the vocation as servile to the empirical ends of the individual, but as a phase through which he is to pass on the road toward ethical personality, the fulfilment of the objective aims of the vocation being the means of acquiring the ethical development which the vocation is competent to furnish. Thus we regain, but on a much higher plane, what the family possessed before it began to break down under the influence of modern individualism, namely, an ulterior greater purpose imbedded within itself and yet extending beyond itself.
When we have grasped this relation of the family to the subsequent terms of the social series, and bear constantly in mind as we should that the three-fold reverence is the instrument by which organization is to be effected, we shall then be able to give adequate reasons why the monogamic ideal alone is the true ethical ideal, why the marriage relation, if it is to be ethical, must be permanent between two and exclusive of all others.
Let me briefly point out the relation of the monogamic family to the three types of reverence. The third type ranks highest. The tie of consanguinity between parents and offspring supplies the empirical substratum. To be interested in the undeveloped, to surmise possibilities as yet wholly unapparent, to go to infinite pains to nurture and educate an immature being like a child, for all this natural affection is almost indispensable. As a rule no one can so love a child as its own parents do. The plan of state education for infants to replace home education is advocated by some on the ground that professional kindergartners and teachers are more competent to train the budding human mind than unpedagogical fathers and mothers. The function to be performed by the scientific educator in co-operation with the home is doubtless not to be missed; but taking children away from under the care of their parents, assembling them in what would be equivalent to state orphan asylums, is a procedure which precisely for pedagogical reasons would be preposterous. For the parent supplies that concentrated love for the individual child, that intimate cherishing which the most generous teacher, whose affections are necessarily distributed over many, can never give. And the child needs this selective affection. The love of the parent is the warm nest for the fledgling spirit of the child. To be at home in this strange world the young being with no claims as yet on the score of usefulness to society or of merit of any kind, must find somewhere a place where it is welcomed without regard to usefulness or merit. And it is the love of the parents that makes the home, and it is his own home that makes the child at home in the world.
It does not follow that parents in general do reverence the spiritual possibilities latent in their children. The natural affection is there, but the empirical substratum and the spiritual relation are not to be confounded. The kind of reverence of which I speak is an ideal thing to be worked towards, not something that as yet actually exists, save in exceptional cases. In the caste family and the feudal family the father incarnated, as it were, the social system so far as that stratum or class was concerned to which he belonged. He inspired awe. He demanded implicit obedience. It was the existing social system that spoke from his lips. But this system itself had an arbitrary character, and the worship of the father was hardly ethical. The modern family goes to the opposite extreme. In it the relations between parents and children are loose, and tend to become more and more so. Reverence is scarcely looked for by the parent, and is not likely to be accorded. On the individualistic theory the child at a very early age is treated as an equal, and whether encouraged to do so or not is apt to assert its independence. The members of the family are not joined in an organic connection, but resemble a collection of atomic units that easily fall apart. The ethical relation, the real reverence must spring from the service the parent renders in bringing to light the specific individuality of the child with an eye to the transmutation which it is to receive in the later terms of the social series. Not only highest gratitude but genuine reverence are due to the parent who performs this office. “You have given me physical birth, you are now giving me spiritual birth,” will be the child’s response to the parent’s efforts.
Thus much may be said as to the reason why the marriage relation should be exclusive. The principal reason why it should be lifelong, is that the office of the parent in furthering the spiritual development of the children does not end when they reach the threshold of manhood or womanhood. On the contrary, the finest touches are often added to the work of education when the sons and daughters have become established in a business or profession, and have founded families of their own. The wisdom gathered from the experience of their elders, the disinterested counsel inspired by love, will then be of the greatest use to them. The young mother, especially, confronted with the problems of child-rearing, will naturally turn to her own mother for advice. The son, who comes to close quarters with the difficulties of life, will find in the father, who is detached from life and has the tranquil vision of old age, his best friend.
In speaking of the third type of reverence I have already included all that need here be said of the first type. The reverential relation is mutual. The child will truly reverence the parent who on his side reverences the child’s spiritual possibilities. The child does not understand the word Spiritual, but is unconsciously affected by the thing itself which I am here describing. A person who has the vision, who has the gift of divining what is as yet unmanifested, will convey to others the illumination of his vision. The child will realize in his parent the presence of something higher, and will revere it, worship it. Certain looks, certain expressions of the countenance, certain gestures, though not understood in their meaning at the time, will be imprinted on memory to be recalled in later life and then understood. But it is essential, in order to evoke reverence in the young, to have it oneself. He who does not steadfastly revere something, yes, someone greater than himself, will never elicit reverence in others.
The second type of reverence, towards those who are unlike ourselves but none the less our equals, can be inculcated in an elementary way in the family through the relations of brothers and sisters. Fraternal feeling is an empirical means whereby to produce or at least prepare the way for a very notable spiritual result—the willingness not only to respect difference in others, but to welcome it. In current teaching the emphasis in fraternity is placed on likeness. It should rather be placed on the unlikeness. These exist, and are sometimes very marked between brothers, and often cause discord and separation. The novices in life should therefore be taught betimes to overcome their repugnance to those who are unlike themselves, and the common relation of the brothers to their parents will be helpful to this end. Naturally we dislike the unlike. Alienness is ever productive of disharmony. The fact, however, that the unlike person in the case of a brother is the child of the same parents draws us powerfully toward him despite the tendency to recoil.
I must not omit to mention that the triple reverence is most naturally and easily learned in the family, because of the simplicity of the relations, and the limited number of persons involved.
The question may be raised whether the single family should remain the primary social unit, or whether a group of families united in close coÖperation would better fulfil the purposes for which the family exists. The privacy and separateness of each family would not need to be disturbed, coÖperation might be limited to specific objects, such as simplifying the work of the household, providing kindergarten education for the young children, better play facilities, separate study rooms for adolescents, common entertainments for all, and a service of song at the beginning or close of the day. One obvious difficulty in constituting such a group would be: the diversities of tastes and opinions, particularly such as are not perceived at the outset, but emerge on nearer acquaintance, and as the younger members grow up and develop their idiosyncrasies. One great advantage, however, would result if care were taken to include in the group persons belonging to different vocations—scientist, scholar, architect, lawyer, artist. Young persons as they mature would then have the benefit of contact with those who are intimately familiar with different lines of vocational activity, and would be helped to know their own mind as to their future career better than they commonly do now. Personal contact with one who is engaged in a certain line of work is a far better instruction as to the nature of the work than reading about it or observation from a distance.
The ethical theory of marriage has been developed in my published addresses.73 But certain topics not there treated I would at least allude to here in passing, and among them the need of a more careful study of the causes that lead to infelicity in marriage. Kant mentions, as an instance of the discrepancy between the natural and the moral order, the fact that the sex passion is often at its height before the period when marriage may be wisely entered into. There are other seemingly radical incongruities, for instance, that between the face, the features of a person and his real character. The one may be borrowed so to speak from some ancestor, while the real nature is quite at variance with the impression created by the face, so that one who thinks he marries A really marries B. There are diversities also between partners in marriage that only show themselves in the latter part of life, when the outlines of character are apt to stand forth bare. Besides, there is assumed to be, by some modern writers, a certain fundamental sex antagonism.
The whole question of the characteristics of sex requires to be far more carefully investigated than it has been. And here let me take the opportunity to express my positive appreciation of empirical science in connection with ethical theory. The chief object of this volume is to work out the general plan of the ethical relations, or the regulative principle in ethics, and this I am deeply convinced is supersensible and non-empirical. Applied ethics, however, is dependent not only on the regulative principle but on empirical science, that is, on an extended and ever-increasing knowledge of physiology, psychology, and of the environmental conditions that influence human beings, and I am keenly desirous to ward off the possible misunderstanding that the ethical theory here proposed is intended to replace the empirical science of man, individual or social
Without the way there is no going.
Without the truth there is no knowing;
says Thomas À Kempis. The way is the empirical knowledge, the truth is the regulative principle. The way itself, as we proceed along it, will shed additional light on the truth. Nevertheless, without the outlines of the truth, without a goal in view, we should but be wandering blindly.
It is likely that the relations between persons in marriage will in future become more complex, and the difficulties of adjustment more serious, in proportion as under the influence of the new education the individualities of men and women become more developed. Problems hardly as yet envisaged will then become pressing. But whatever the difficulties, they can be overcome if the ideal purpose of marriage be kept in view, namely, that two beings of opposite sexes shall spend their lives in the spiritual reproduction of offspring. The relation is triangular. Husband and wife are each to elicit the distinctive best in the other, incited, impelled to do so in order jointly to evoke the distinctive best in the young. And the young represent posterity. What the parents do for their own children they do for posterity, since children are that portion of posterity which comes under their immediate influence. And in this sense it may be said that marriage is an organ for the spiritual reproduction and advancement of the human race.
CHAPTER III
THE VOCATIONS
The next term in the series of social institutions is the school, inclusive of its higher departments. But for reasons which will sufficiently appear to anyone who carefully reads this chapter, it is advisable to treat the vocations first.
A more ludicrous mistake cannot be conceived than that of taking the ideal for the fact, the wish for the deed, in matters touching the social institutions. Thus the term “vocational guidance” is often used, as if the occupations of the majority of men already answered to what is implied in the idea of a vocation as if, for instance, industrial labor in a factory were a “vocation” into which the young only needed to be guided, whereas guidance means, in this case, being directed into some mechanical occupation not already overcrowded, or turned into other unvocational occupations when they happen not to be over-filled. But what is true of monotonous, mechanical labor in factories is true in a greater or less degree of all human occupations. None of them at least are as yet vocations in the highest sense.
I dwell on this because, in describing the vocation as the third term in the series, I would not have the reader imagine that this third term exists in any adequate manner. Rather is it to be the task of what is often loosely called “social reform” to create the ethical series,—not only the third term (the vocation), but the whole series from beginning to end, the family, the school, the state, the international society, the ideal religious society. The phrase “social reform” is strictly correct only when used comprehensively in this way. To confine its usage to the more equable repartition of wealth, or to changes in economic conditions is unwarrantably to narrow its signification. Social reform is the reformation of all the social institutions in such a way that they may become successive phases through which the individual shall advance towards the acquisition of an ethical personality.
In sketching the ideals of the different vocations, I have to consider in what way each contributes to the formation of an ethical personality. There is an empirical side to each vocation. Every vocation satisfies some one or more of the empirical human needs; but in the very act or process of doing so, it ought, in order to deserve the name of a vocation, to satisfy also a spiritual need, to contribute in a specific way toward the formation of a spiritual personality.74 Agriculture furnishes food. The different trades minister to a great variety of wants. The scientist extends our knowledge of nature. With this empirical aspect of the vocations, however, I am not here concerned. A scientific classification of the vocations is not a task to which I need address myself. My task is an ethical classification of the vocations. As this has never been undertaken, the first attempt is difficult and perforce provisional.
I outline my topics as follows:
1. The theoretical physical sciences (including mathematics) considered from the point of view of the specific way in which the ethical personality may be developed by those who pursue them.
2. The practical counterparts of the theoretical sciences, e.g., engineering, and the industrial arts in so far as they depend on and illustrate and use principles and methods furnished by science. Work in factories, mines, and also in the fields, is to be regarded as the executive side of theoretical science.
3. The historical sciences, those which have to do with mentally reproducing the life of the human race in the past, including history proper, philology, archÆology, etc.
4. The vocation of the artist.
5. The vocation of the lawyer and the judge.
The vocation of the statesman.
The vocation of the religious teacher.
The three last mentioned are classed together as educational vocations, that is, as vocations which, in respect to their highest significance, are branches of the pedagogy of mankind, having for their object to educate the human race; the ethical object of the lawyer being to educate society in the idea of justice; of the statesman to educate society in the idea of the state; of the religious teacher to educate society in the idea of the spiritual universe.
This conception of the lawyer, the politician, etc., as primarily educators, is a point to which particular attention is directed. The significance of it will appear further on. I shall now indicate in bare outline what I conceive to be the specific contribution of the vocations mentioned to the formation of a spiritual personality.
Science
Conspicuously important in this connection is the question whether and by what means the pursuit of the physical sciences can be linked up to the supreme spiritual end of man. The scientist may develop into a great thinker in the course of comprehensive and intricate investigations, but he does not thereby necessarily develop into a personality. His mind will become in this way a mirror of the orderly procession of nature’s phenomena. He will be the accurate recorder of what happens, the knowing spectator of the play, whose eye recognizes the actors, the forces, beneath their disguises. The pursuit of knowledge of this kind for the sake of knowledge, or it may be for the sake of exercising the faculty of cognition, represents the purely scientific conception of the aim of science. Whatever moral qualities are exacted of the scientist, such as accuracy or intellectual veracity, self-abnegation, scorn of mere vulgar pecuniary reward or celebrity, and at least a provisional disregard of the practical benefits to be derived by mankind from scientific discovery—all these fine traits of character are prized as subordinate to the strictly scientific object. The ethical character of the man himself is not regarded as the supreme end to be fostered by his scientific occupation, but as instrumental to his occupation the aims of which are said to be purely impersonal.
There is thus a scientific conception of the aim of science; on the other hand, there is an ethical conception of it. The former points in the direction of the indefinite extension of knowledge which never embraces a totality of the knowable, never reaches a limit, even in idea. The latter points to the infinite, not to the indefinite, sets up an ideal of the infinite as the goal, takes the man out of the flux, centralizes his individuality into a personality by relating him to the infinite, not as the mere spectator and scribe of nature, but through his action or other potential spiritual beings like himself.
The scientist, in brief, like every one else, becomes a personality by eliciting the potential spiritual nature in other human beings. But be it noted that he is to perform this task as a scientist. His particular occupation is to be the means of producing a particular spiritual result in others as well as in himself, and by this means his occupation is to be converted into a vocation.
How? Through partial success and frustration. Partial success in the case of a scientist means for one thing, increased mental grasp, the power to hold before the mind ever more and more complex relations,—a faculty supremely serviceable in mastering complexities of relation in the economic, in the political spheres, in the sphere of international intercourse, in the sphere of the social relations in general, and wherever the ethical principle has to be applied. The scientific occupation trains powers which are to be exercised so as to illuminate obscurities in the ethical field.
The frustration which the scientist meets with when he reflects in thoroughgoing fashion on the business he has in hand is the inevitable realization that Alles VergÄngliche ist nur ein Gleichniss, that the sphere of the finite in which he labors, though capable of indefinite extension, is forever incapable of being rounded out to a true infinity, and hence that the complete unification of the manifold (in which alone the reality-producing functions of the mind can find repose and ultimate satisfaction), can never be carried out in the manifold of juxtaposition and sequence with which, as a physical scientist, he deals. He will thus be led to face in thought the limits of what is finitely attainable, not only by him as an individual scientist, but by physical science in general. And in proportion as his spiritual nature is energetic it will then assert itself all the more resiliently after this defeat, and turn in a new direction, and towards another kind of truth, the truth which is discovered in the realm of will, in the sphere of intercourse with fellow human beings. The propÆdeutic result of science with respect to ethical personality is the training of the more complex mental faculties. The positive result following the frustration is the new turn toward the spiritual, the escape from the spell wherewith the physical world enchains the mind, the dissipating of the widespread illusion that the truths of physical science are the only kind of truth, the more determined setting of the face towards a different kind of truth. The scientist, in brief, is to travel along the paths of the finite in order to arrive and stand at the gate of the infinite.
I have said that the boon of personality is gained in intercourse with others, through the influence which we exert on others. How does the scientist as a scientist spiritually affect others? The great specific service, as I have just said, which he is to render is to destroy the illusion that the material world is a finality. And it is just he, the scientist, who works most successfully in the field of physical truth who must assist the rest of us in escaping from the spell to which we are all subject. He is the one, he who more than others succeeds in unifying the manifold of juxtaposition and sequence, to whom we look to liberate others as well as himself from the deceptive belief that the reality-producing functions of the human mind can be satisfied in the temporal and spatial manifold. Not from the tyro, not from the purveyor of “popular science” can we hope to learn the profoundest lessons as to the incapacity of physical nature to appease the spirit of man. It is from the familiar friend of nature, from one more deeply read than we are in her secrets, that we are to obtain this great instruction, to receive this boon.
Ethics is a science of reactions. Each vocation reacts upon the others. The general reaction of science I have mentioned. In addition the work of the scientist reacts upon agriculture, industry, etc. The industrial arts, as has been stated, are to be regarded as the executive auxiliaries of science, receiving from it the knowledge of the uniformities of nature, and in turn setting for science new problems by attention to which scientific theory is advanced.
The relations of science to art also need to be considered at greater length than is possible here. I have in mind inquiries into the scientific basis of music like those of Helmholtz, the scientific theory of color and the like, and also detailed studies of the return gift which art confers on science, especially the value to the scientist of that cultivation of the imagination which is gained by the contemplation and study of works of art. There are different kinds of imagination: the purely artistic, the scientific, the mechanical imagination, the ethical imagination. The function of the imagination in advancing science has been discussed by Tyndall and others, but the subject is far indeed from being exhausted.
The scientist then may be defined as one who stands in reciprocal relations to all other departments of human interest and activity, who gives to each from his specific standpoint as a scientist, and receives from each, from religion,75 from art, from the practical vocations, etc. Ideally speaking, every man participates in all the principal interests and activities of the human mind. Every man is something of an artist, something of a practical or executive worker, scientist, religious being. But in each individual the different interests are colored by his special pursuit, and the influence he wields in return is modified in the same fashion.76
There are three great tasks that occupy human life:
1. To build our finite world (science and its adjuncts).
2. To create in the finite the semblance of the infinite, or spiritual relation (art).
3. To strive to realize the spiritual relation in human intercourse (ethics and religion).
This discussion of science affords me the opportunity to give an exact definition of the word “instrumental” as I use it. And the word “instrumental” is of decisive importance as to the entire ethical conception of life. Instrumental in what sense? The finite ends of man are to be the means used in the pursuit of the infinite end. But in what manner are they to be the means? To be a cheerful world-builder, to take an active and whole-hearted interest in the improvement of material conditions, in political reforms, in the embellishment of earthly life—how is it possible to do this and at the same time keep the spiritual end in view as the supreme end?
Christianity in its pristine form,77 abandons the task in dismay. Instead of seeking action in the finite world as a means, it counsels renunciation and withdrawal. Modern social reform movements, on the other hand, are devoted to finite ends, more or less ignoring the spiritual. How is it possible to work in the world, in the finite sphere, for an end beyond the finite? The answer, as I have shown in the case of science (and the same applies to all other vocations), is to be found in the words “partial success and frustration.” The finite, lesser ends, are means to the highest end in so far as we are partially able to embody the spiritual relation in the finite world, and in so far as the inevitable defeat of our effort to do so serves to implant in us the conviction of the reality of the infinite ethical ideal.
The points contained in this chapter may be briefly summarized as follows:
What is the relation of science to the ethical end? We are seeking to link up the world to spirit. Along what line can the connection be marked out in the case of science? Science is instrumental in founding more securely the empirical basis of self-respect, inasmuch as it gives to man to a certain extent a sense of mastery over nature. With the help of science he feels himself no longer the helpless sport of nature’s forces.
The training in complex thinking afforded by science is favorable to the ethical reformer. Science also incidentally encourages the virtues of veracity, and the like.
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake cannot be the final end of the pursuit of science, since the world of space and time with which science deals is not only not as yet rationalized but is not ultimately rationalizable.
While in all the respects just mentioned the pursuit of science is indirectly instrumental to the spiritual end—instrumental to the instrument—it is directly instrumental to it in so far as, at the hand of the supreme scientist, man is conducted through the finite as far as the gate of the infinite.
CHAPTER IV
THE PRACTICAL VOCATIONS
Medicine is the executive of the science of physiology, and the others, on which it depends. The physician has a certain work to do, a certain need to satisfy—the need of health, the alleviation of pain. In endeavoring to satisfy this need he uses the sciences that underlie his vocation and in turn promotes those sciences.
On the lower levels of agriculture and the industrial arts the same holds true. Our physical necessities vociferously demand satisfaction. They cannot wait. Men must have food or they perish. The agriculturist supplies the food they need. But the spiritual view of life declares that man, while engaged in satisfying his material wants, shall in so doing assert his spiritual nature. He is to hammer out his personality on the anvil of his empirical necessities. Even as human beings do not partake of food like animals, but indicate by the manner in which they take it the superior worth of the being who is dependent on food, so the agriculturist who raises the food should testify to his spiritual character. He does so in part at least by his reaction on the sciences which he applies, biology, chemistry, etc. The same holds good of the industrial occupations. The work a man does should be the means of promoting the development of his mental and Æsthetic nature, and of his will. The mental and Æsthetic development is acquired by mastering and reacting on the science and the art that enter into the trade. The development of the will, the most important of all, depends on the organic relations of the industrial workers among themselves and to their chiefs.
This raises the problem of the right organization of “industrial vocationalists” from the ethical point of view, and the following questions present themselves: Shall the present division into the two hostile camps of trade-unionists and employers continue? Or is it to be regarded as a makeshift, perhaps necessary during the present period of transition, but certainly untenable in the long run? Is the uniform arrangement contemplated by Socialism desirable, the government of every industry and indeed of every vocation by the representatives of the community as a whole? Shall what is called coÖperation be adopted, that is, the formation of independent groups of workers on the voluntary principle, associated for the purpose of equably dividing the profits?
The three alternatives mentioned may be examined from various points of view. Here we consider them from the ethical point of view. Assuming that the ethical end of life is to be supreme, what kind of industrial re-organization of society will be most in harmony with it? All three plans are open to the ethical objection that they concentrate attention on the material gain to be derived from the industry instead of on the specific service which those who follow the industry as a vocation are to render. Collective bargaining between unions and employers is after all just bargaining. Socialism differs from trade-unionism not in the object so much as in the means. Instead of securing for the workers a larger share it would secure for them at once an approximately equal share. CoÖperation aims at the same result as Socialism by voluntary association instead of by collective compulsion.
None of the three plans is ethically satisfying, and a fourth arrangement should be contemplated. Its characteristics are the following:
1. The idea of service to be pre-eminent instead of the gain, the wage or salary to be apportioned as the means of sustaining the worker in the best possible performance of the service.
2. The work done by the workers to be the means of developing them mentally, Æsthetically and volitionally, the educational features therefore to be pre-eminent.
3. The industrial group to be transformed into a social sub-organism (in the ethical sense a sub-organ of the larger organism of the nation). By this is meant that the employers cease to be employers and become functionaries, while each worker in his place and in his degree likewise becomes a functionary. A common social service group will thus be formed embracing the chiefs and the humbler workers. The chiefs will be the executive and administrative functionaries, and will be safeguarded in the due discharge of their proper functions. The workers will not attempt to wrest from their chiefs as they do at present the directive functions which properly belong to the latter (subject, however, to due control). To each of the lesser functionaries in turn will be assigned a sphere within which a relative independence would be his.
The industry as a whole will be an organ of the corpus sociale, and this its character will be expressed in its government. The workers, not required to render implicit obedience to rules imposed upon them by masters and superintendents, will have a voice in the legislation of the industry, in framing the policy of the industry, in electing the chiefs, and in this way the development of the will, upon which I lay the greatest stress, will be attained. The will of the worker, at present fettered, will be liberated by the opportunity given it to become enlightened and effectual.
I am not here describing a scheme which is to be immediately launched in its completeness. I am illustrating the ethical principle as I see it as applied to this particular vocation. I am endeavoring to show how an occupation can be changed into a vocation. The constitutional government of industries would be an intermediate stage between the present autocratic form, in which more or less absolute power is vested in the employer, and that organic constitution of industry which is ethically desirable.
Thus far the following plans have been before the minds of social reformers:
A. Competition, or life and death struggle.
B. Modified competition, or raising the plane of competition, as it is called, that is, doing away with the more ferocious and unscrupulous methods of competition.
C. Socialism.
D. CoÖperation.
I propose to add (E) organization in the ethical sense. The word “organization” is deplorably misused at present. It is commonly employed as a synonym for aggregation, which is the very reverse of organization. Thus “organized labor” really means aggregate labor, labor acting en masse.
A further remark on the difference between industrial vocationalism as outlined and Socialism may be of use in clarifying the main idea. The relative independence of the social sub-organism is the salient point. This kind of independence is based on the general conception underlying my entire ethical philosophy, that the ethical quality resides in uniqueness in distinctiveness, that ethical progress consists in driving towards individualization in the sense of personalization. This as opposed to those philosophies of life that see the ethical quality in uniformity. Socialism is on the side of uniformity. It is indeed an extreme expression of it. If sometimes it is urged that the relative independence of the vocational groups might be recognized in the socialistic state, the answer is that the tendency would be in the opposite direction. And besides, the all-important question is to what end the relative independence is to be used. Under socialism it would be used for the purpose of increasing the quantity of valuable products at the disposal of the community as a whole. From the ethical point of view, the independence of the organic group would be used to insure reciprocal relations, and by means of these the development mentally, Æsthetically and volitionally of the producers. The distinction certainly is clear enough to its members, whichever way the reader may incline.78
The Historical Sciences
I refer now briefly to historical science. The ethical aim of history and its adjunct sciences is to redeem from oblivion as far as is possible the past of the human race, its documents, its monuments, the knowledge of its political adventures, its customs, laws and institutions, its religious beliefs. In view of the lacunae in our knowledge a complete revival of the past is impossible. We must therefore principally seek to understand the ruling ideas that have governed our ancestors, in the family, in the state, etc. The task of the historian is to present these ideas as seen in the light of their consequences, so as to help us revalue them from the point of view of present experience and insight. The historian will thus enable us to carry over from the past what is truly valuable, for the business we have in hand.
There is just now a strong reaction against the kind of historical science which deals principally with wars and the actions of princes or of great leaders. Detailed attention is being given to the more obscure life of the people. But it must be remembered that mere penetration into the lower strata of bygone societies, the mere heaping up of facts concerning mass movements, is as unprofitable as the more picturesque recitals with which works on history were formerly adorned. The mass movements and the ideas which gave rise to them should be set clear as far as possible; but without the evaluation and the revaluation, or the ethical appraisement, the voluminous knowledge of details is merely stupefying, and leaves us as much at sea as ever.79
Many men have read many books on history, and filled their minds with information on subjects like the Protestant Reformation or the French Revolution, without being in the least wiser themselves, or more fitted to enlighten others in respect to the religious and ethical problems which were involved in these great movements, and which still touch us so closely today. As to the ordinary high school or college student, what as a rule does he carry away from his study of past “history”?
CHAPTER V
THE VOCATION OF THE ARTIST: OUTLINE OF A THEORY OF THE RELATION OF ART TO ETHICS
The three great directions of effort are: to work in the finite; to create in the finite the semblance of the infinite; to realize through effort the reality of the infinite. The vocation of the artist is to create the semblance of the spiritual relation between the parts of an empirical object. The object may be a vase or a lamp; it may be a human figure, it may be a group of dramatis personae. By introducing into the discussion of art the idea that a semblance of the spiritual relation is to be produced by the artist, we get rid at the outset of the barren formula of unity in variety.
Let me endeavor to elucidate the main ideas that flow from this definition of the spiritual aim of art.
1. The two points to be discussed are: What is meant by semblance? and What is meant by the quasi-spiritual relation as subsisting between the parts of a work of Art?
First, then, there is the semblance of totality. The spiritual relation is characterized by the totality of the parts related. That totality is realized only in the universal manifold. But a semblance of totality is furnished in the case of colors by the circumstance that the chromatic scale is cut off at the bottom and top in consequence of our inability to perceive the colors below and above; the musical scale likewise presents a quasi-totality, and the human figure in its contours presents a thing cut off from its surroundings, and in so far relatively complete in itself.
Because the spiritual relation involves the idea of the perfect totality, a relative totality, due to the accidental limitations of our sensory organs and power of attention, may become a semblance of the spiritual totality. I say, may become. A certain relation must be established between the parts of the relative totality in order that the semblance shall result.
One thing is clear; the subject of the work of art must possess relative completeness, and be capable of being contemplated as circumscribed and separated off. It must stand out like a tree, or like an oasis encircled by the desert, or like an island. The subject of art cannot be a mere length of cloth cut off from the fabric of things as they reel unceasingly from the loom of time—the mistake of Realism.
The point, emphasized in our third Book, namely, that an empirical substratum is to be spiritualized, and that ethics consists in spiritualizing this physical and psychical substratum, applies to art, but with the difference, that in the case of art the physical or psychical substratum cannot be spiritualized, but is to be made to take on the semblance of spirituality.
Now what is meant by this kind of transformation? I can perhaps explain by using as an illustration the color scheme of a picture. The transformation appears in the difference between the colors on the palette and the colors on the canvas. The colors on the palette represent the empirical substratum, the natural colors; the colors seen on the canvas show the same natural tints after they have taken on a new or second nature.
The second nature,—in what does it consist? In the circumstance that each color on the canvas, by its juxtaposition and its relation to the rest, is altered in tone and value, and that all the rest are altered by it. The spiritual relation is a give and take relation actually carried out. The semblance produced in art is the illusive appearance of such a relation as seen by the beholder.
We have thus set down two points—the apparent totality, and the apparent give and take relation between the parts (the second nature assumed by the parts, the illusory transformation of the substratum).
A third point involved in the second is that each part of a work of art shall remain invincibly individualized, despite the closeness of the relation which connects it with the rest. The individual member of a work of art may never be submerged in the whole, may never merely convey the abstract idea of unity amid variation. The “unity in variety” formula is not only empty but misleading, based on the same misconception which we have noted in dealing with Kant and with the Pantheists. The unity of a work of art consists in the reciprocal effect produced by the members on each other. Hence the more accentuated, the more distinctive the members are, always provided that the reciprocal relation is maintained, the more artistically satisfying will be the result. In this manner the work of art will be true to its essential character as a semblance of the spiritual relation.
I have thus far spoken of the form. In regard to content I have only remarked that it must be capable of relative detachment. It must also be capable of interior articulation. The idea that an empirical substratum is to be transformed will here be found helpful in determining what is and what is not a fit subject for art. A vase or a pitcher is a utensil. As such it is a detached thing. Is it capable of articulation without destroying its utility? If it is, as the beautiful vases show, it is a fit subject for art to treat. The embellishment of utensils, of tables, chairs, etc., that is to say, the giving of artistic form to objects with which we bodily come into contact, is a means of casting the appearance of the spiritual relation over these objects, and thus in a fine sense making them congenial to ourselves as spiritual personalities. This justifies the time spent by artist artisans on their handiwork, and also justifies our availing ourselves of their products (provided that the store set by these symbolic reminders of the spiritual relation do not divert us from the main business of life, which is to attempt to realize that relation in human intercourse). The war song sung by a primitive tribe is a detachable, empirical thing, and possesses natural articulation. It has its slow beginning, its gradual rise, its paroxysmic culminations, its wild ecstasy, its final dying down.
The love passion expressed in lyric form has for its basis the natural ups and downs, dejections and transports characteristic of that passion.
The theme of a tragedy, as Aristotle says, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Repetition (always with a difference), contrast, apparent triumph, defeat, and somehow a triumph in defeat—whatever may be the elements with which the tragic poet deals, the crude substance of them is furnished by the theme itself. And the result becomes artistic when the articulation is such that each part becomes a member of an organized whole, that is, when each part exchanges its first nature for the second nature mentioned above in connection with painting.80
The next point of interest to consider is whether beauty is to be regarded as the invariable object of art. Relative detachment and susceptibility to articulation in the manner described are indispensable. But if tragedy is to be included, beauty cannot be the exclusive object. Lear, on the heath, the harpy daughters, Lear and Cordelia perishing together, are not beautiful objects. The task of the artist is to produce the semblance of the spiritual relation in any material which is capable of bearing that imprint. In the great tragedies we are lifted into an exalted mood by the form of the work even though the subject treated evokes horror—perhaps because of the very contrast between the form and the subject-matter. Beauty, on the other hand, is produced when both subject-matter and form are satisfying to our needs or aspirations. A vase is beautiful when perfectly adapted to its use and at the same time perfect in form. For this reason any kind of embellishment, for instance, in architecture not structurally in place is offensive, while on the other hand mere structural utility without the formal touch is mechanical. It is not true that utility itself inevitably flowers into beauty.
It should be added, however, that the artistic expression even of unsatisfied desires may come within the scope of beauty. The “Lycidas” is beautiful, Wordsworth’s “Laodamia” is beautiful, the Gothic form of architecture is beautiful, and so is Keats’ “Ode to the Nightingale,” and Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” In such productions the adequate expression of the need itself affords relief and induces tranquillity. The mind ceases to strive toward a beyond longed for, and rests tranquillized in the longing itself. That it should thus aspire and long, in consequence of its higher nature, and the assurance of the existence of this higher nature, as evidenced by the longing, is peace-giving.
But it is hardly possible to discuss even in the most cursory manner the subject matter or content of a work of art without drawing attention to the ideals which at various times have been expressed in art, and to the function of art in respect to these ideals. For here the grandeur of the great art as connected with the ultimate aim and purpose of life appears.
Art in its fictions has endeavored to present to men the solution of the problem of life, the things most worth striving for. The ideals, of course, have varied. In the Greek epic the heroes contend around the walls of wind-swept Ilion. They themselves are wind-swept apparitions. Life is short; presently they too will pass out of sight, yet their names and deeds will live after them. Fate is inscrutable. There is no ulterior meaning in things. To glitter for a time in shining armor, and then to be remembered in the song of the rhapsodists is alone worth while. It is this ideal of life that Homer records.
The romantic ideal of feudalism is reflected in the poems of chivalry. The ideal of the English Renascence is found in Shakespeare. The religious ideals are expressed in the Hindu temples, in the Parthenon, in the mediÆval cathedrals, and in the poems of Dante and Milton. The ideals of the oriental monarchs are visibly embodied in the Assyrian and Babylonian palaces; the ideal of the merchant class in the stones of Venice, in the architecture of the German and Flemish cities, etc. The plastic arts especially owe their rise and prosperity to the princely and religious ideals—to the demand for temples, churches and palaces suitable for monarchs or merchant princes to dwell and worship in. The aim of the artificer is to furnish a splendid setting for princes and divinities.
Mankind at different periods is in labor to give birth to ideals representing the purpose for which man exists, or the things that make life worth while, and art assists in bringing to the birth these ideals. It seeks to express them, and in the effort to do so it helps to develop and clarify them. This, and not merely to give pleasure, is its grand function.
In an age like the present, in which a new ideal is in the early stages of formation, art is likely to become, as in fact it has become, uncertain of its function, and hence apt to lose its direction, either turning back to the servile reproduction of past art forms, or seeking to achieve progress in the perfection of technical detail, or in the ways of subjective impressionism.81
The efforts of a serious artist today, in so far as he undertakes to assist in bringing to the birth a new ideal by his endeavor to express it, must necessarily be tentative, if not crude. But such as they are their worth, if wholly sincere, can hardly be overestimated.
In the vocation of the artist, as everywhere, the three-fold reverence is the capital point. Reverence for the great masters, as shown not in slavishly copying them, but in understanding the qualities that made them great, and in delivering from past art the things that are to be reincorporated and to live on; reverence for those who in different fields are intent on the problem of art today—all this to prepare the way for future artists, for the greater art that is to come.
The relation of art to ethics, or to the spiritual life, is now sufficiently clear. In general it is to produce the semblance of the spiritual relation, and thereby to rejuvenate the world’s workers, to give them the joy of relative perfection, and thus to stimulate them to persevere in the real business of life, which is to approximate toward actual perfection. The specific task of the artist at its height is to enshrine in his creation the ideals of the age with respect to the ultimate purpose of human existence, and in the endeavor so to incorporate them as to assist in defining them.
The dangers of pre-occupation with art, however, must not be passed over. Just because it creates the illusion of perfection it is apt to encourage the indolence of our nature, which ever prefers to content itself with illusion, and to desist from effort. It is on this account that periods in which art greatly flourishes are apt to lead to the halting of progress and eventually to decay. A second danger is that the artist, in applying the ideal of present perfection, is in danger of selfishly subordinating other persons to himself (cf. Goethe as a notable example), or of setting up a special kind of morality for artists.82
In a full account of the matter, the different so-called fine arts should be specifically treated from the point of view of this chapter. The particular contribution of each to the general purpose of art should be noted, the distinctions marked between painting, sculpture, poetry, etc., and in each case the kind of art which is favorable to the spiritual development of man be discriminated from that which is hostile to it. Plato attempted to do this in the case of music.
To summarize: What has been attempted in this chapter is a theory not of art but of the relation of art to ethics. The dominating thought is this: in a work of art each line, color, sound, word, must be irreplaceable, and on that account convincing. Each member must be indispensable in its place and the connection with the rest inevitable. Substitute for line, color, sound, etc., a life—an ethical being,—conceive the members to be not a few but in number infinite, and you have the spiritual ideal, which is the reality whereof the art work is a semblance. This is the relation of art to ethics—the quality which we call in art “convincing,” in ethics we call “worth.”
NOTES
As one example architecture may be mentioned. Architecture furnishes the envelope for the social life, the dwelling, the nest of the family, the workshops that house the vocational life, the public buildings that provide a habitation for the political life, the temples, the churches that enshrine the religious life. The relation of the enshrining dwelling to the inner social life should be the same as that of the body to the soul in sculpture. That which goes on within should be significantly indicated externally. The progress of architecture will depend on its holding fast to this idea, and changing the outside as the inner life changes. Thus, we have, or are beginning to have, a conception of the family very different from that which prevailed at the time when the princely mansions of the Renaissance were built. To reproduce these princely mansions because they beautifully expressed the princely idea is a mistake. To provide a proper dwelling-place for the modern family the architect should clearly apprehend what functions go on in the family, what the distribution of functions should be, and the rank to be assigned to the different functions. There is to be, for instance, in addition to the ordinary requirements, provision for separate study rooms, places of retirement, refuges of intellectual solitude for the adult members; a playroom for children, a place of reunion for the household religion. The formation of a number of families into a larger group (vid. supra) would help in the solution of this problem.
In like manner the conception of what a religious society should be is changing. The church-building, the Mosque, the Synagogue, certainly no longer declare the spirit and the purpose that animate the new religious fellowships that are forming among us today. The progress of architecture will thus depend, not on the out of hand invention of new styles, but on a thorough understanding of the new kind of life which is to be domiciled within buildings, accepting this as the empirical substratum, and articulating it in accordance with the spiritual relation of give and take between the parts; and the architect will assist in clarifying the ideal of the new kind of life that is to be lived within the buildings by endeavoring to give it outward expression.
One more remark: The limitations opposed to the artist, for instance to the sculptor, by the material in which he works, are a helpful illustration of one of the most important ethical truths. The material is found to be intractable to the idea. The hardness of the stone, the veins that run through the marble, the unpropitious qualities of the wood, are so many hindrances to execution. The value of these hindrances is that they compel the artist to achieve a more definite grasp of the ideal itself. Before the attempt to carry it out into stone, the idea is apt to be vague in the mind of the artist. The same is true of every ideal conception—that of the author before he writes a book, that of the social reformer before he attempts to carry his scheme into practice. And it applies no less to the ethical ideal of life in general. The empirical analogue or substratum is ductile to a certain degree, else we could never achieve even partial success. But it is also hostile and mutinous in many ways, and the fact that it is so compels us to adapt our ideal to existing empirical requirements, and to make it more explicit in the process of adapting it.
CHAPTER VI
EDUCATIONAL VOCATIONS, OR VOCATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE STATE
Every vocation on its ethical side is educational. The reason for accentuating the educational aspect of the vocations connected with the state is that this educational significance is generally overlooked. The vocations referred to are those of the lawyer, the judge, the statesman, the teacher in the narrower sense of the word (the teacher in schools and universities).
The Vocation of the Lawyer
Vocation, as I use the term, invariably means related to the spiritual end of life. A profession or occupation becomes a vocation when he who follows it seeks to respond to the call of the latent spiritual possibilities in his fellowmen. If this be not the common definition of calling or vocation, yet I think it will bear scrutiny. It is the vocation of the lawyer to be the teacher of justice to his clients,—I mean of justice in so far as it is already embodied in law,—and at the same time to promote a desire for and a preliminary understanding of the justice which is not yet embodied in law.
The lawyer is commonly regarded as the learned alter ego of his client. The lawyer is the client as he would be if he were versed in the law, and skilled to employ it in his interest. The client is supposed to be an egotist, intent solely on securing his advantage to the fullest extent possible under the existing system of social regulations. The lawyer is his expert substitute. The judge appears on the scene as the impartial representative of the law.
From the vocational point of view the lawyer is an assistant to the judge, the agent not so much of his client as of justice. He is as much interested in the just issue of the suit as is his legal opponent. His educational function is to teach his client to take the same point of view. Another point, no less important, is the following: Law is a system of general rules, at best a rude social mechanics. And even as such it is constantly deflected from its ostensible purpose by selfishness and prejudice. The discriminations against women, the conspiracy laws against combinations of laborers, the laws enacted in the interests of landed aristocracies, are ample evidence in point. In every country the law as it stands is still largely infected with unfair discriminations, and it is the special duty of those who follow the legal vocation to open the eyes of their clients and of the public to these defects and to suggest remedies.
Every vocation has its special vice, that is, a kind of behavior the very opposite of that prescribed by the particular ethical function with which it is charged. The vice of the lawyer is blind conservatism (unless he is at the same time progressive and conservative he fails to fulfil his ethical function).
The judge, too, is a teacher, especially in criminal cases. The voice of the judge, when he pronounces sentence on a criminal, should reverberate throughout the whole of society, awakening all men to the fact that society as such shares the guilt.
The Vocation of the Statesman
What I have to say on this subject will find its proper setting in the next chapter. In general, it is the vocation of the statesman to teach the citizens a sublime conception of the state. He is neither to be the obedient tool of the mass—the docile “public servant” in that sense—nor yet to impose his arbitrary will upon the people, consulting only his own genius. The one type is seen in the average American politician, who is or affects to be a mere instrument executing the public will; the other type is exemplified by the supermen statesmen of ancient and modern times. The ethically-minded statesman is to evoke the spiritual conception of the State in the minds of his constituents, and in the process of doing so to become more essentially a citizen himself.
The Vocation of the Educator
It was unavoidable to discuss the vocations and their aims before considering the school, college and university; for these institutions are orientated towards the vocations, are preparatory to the latter, and the true aim of school and university cannot possibly be defined unless the vocational outlook be first distinctly spread before our eyes.
In dealing with the vocation of the teacher, I shall necessarily be led to define the purpose of the social institution in which he labors and I shall for the sake of brevity use the word school to designate the social organs of education, which cover the period of childhood, adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood.
The school is like the hundred-gated Thebes. It leads out into a hundred vocational avenues. But note the following: its aim is far greater than merely to prepare the student for that future vocation to which he is best suited. It should no less supply the incentive for creating new vocations, and for changing what are at present still occupations into vocations. The school searches out the individuality of its pupils. It undertakes to differentiate and to personalize individualities. But when it has done its part, it sends the pupils into a world where little account is taken of the finer differences of aptitude, where occupations predominate and vocations are few, and where most things, ethically speaking, are still in the rough. The school cannot indeed transform society by merely raising its indignant voice and asking society to pay heed to the finer things which it has fostered, and which often are subsequently crushed. But it can at least contribute to the vocational evolution of society by reiterating its unsatisfied demands.
Taking the three-fold reverence for my guide, I lay it down in the first place that the school is an organ of tradition. True conservatism has its place in the school. In it are preserved the knowledges and the skills of the past. The heir of today comes to his own by appropriating the products of past thinking and past labor, and the school superintends the process of appropriation and assimilation. At the same time it sifts in tradition what is clean from what is unclean, what is true from what is false, what is usable from what is dead. Reverence is shown in this very sifting process. To revere the past is to make the past live again; but only what is vital can go on living.
The teaching should be reverential in spirit. The business spirit, the drive towards mere efficiency, cannot in the long run satisfy. Efficiency as commonly understood has in view the utilities of the moment. It merely exploits the past for the sake of present interests, and as a rule is unmindful of the future. Industrial efficiency, in particular, reverses the right ethical relation between work and personality; instead of work being so contrived as to liberate personality, it is mechanized so as to sacrifice personality.
The teacher should be reverent towards the great masters of his own craft, his own art. No one is reverenced by others who does not himself habitually revere someone. The teachers should be acquainted at first hand with the master educators, such as Plato, Comenius, Pestalozzi and the others.
I pass on to speak of the second type of reverence. This involves cordial reciprocally stimulating relations between the members of the teaching staff. It is generally agreed that no other factor counts for more in shaping the character of the young than personal influence. The best personal influence, however, is not unilateral, like that which radiates from a single teacher upon his class. The best is that which proceeds from cross-relations between a number of teachers. Just as in the home it is not the father singly, nor the mother singly, but the reciprocal relations between the two that touch child life to finer issues and create a spiritual atmosphere in the learner, so also in the school the best spirit is created by the relations of reciprocal furtherance between the teachers, each doing his work in such a way as to make easier and more successful the work of his colleagues, with a strong sense of partnership in the common work of man-building.
The teachers as an organized body should also relate themselves to an organized body of parents. Home and school should not merely coÖperate but interpenetrate. The interests and efforts of both are centered on the same young lives. The home is supremely concerned in what goes on in the school, and the school in the kind of influence that prevails in the home. An organized conference of parents is in a position to render signal service to a school by appraising its ideals, by keeping tally on the extent to which acknowledged standards are carried out, and by joining in the unceasing endeavor to advance the standards. Schools must be backed by the interest and appreciation of the community. Parents whose children are pupils of a school are for that particular school the best representatives of the community.
The school is to prepare its charges, not only for vocational life, but for citizenship. Teachers must be good citizens. They cannot give what they do not possess. They must keep in living contact with the civic and social movements of the time.
The first and second types are instrumental to the third. Now here, if anywhere, a new departure in educational philosophy is called for. For when we discuss this third kind of reverence, the question of all questions is raised: To what end do we educate? What is to be the aim and outcome of all our effort? And our answer to this question will depend on our philosophy, and if our philosophy is ethical our answer must be distinctively ethical. Froebel was a pantheist, and his pantheism colored his conception of the educational end. Pestalozzi was an eighteenth century humanitarian. Many modern writers on education are biological evolutionists. Others even expressly disclaim any general outlook, and appear to be exclusively interested in perfecting the technique of schoolmastering. Reverence of the third type is reverence for the undeveloped human being,—for the new generation, for our successors. What is it that we are to revere in a child? Its spiritual possibilities, its latent personality. To bring to birth its personality is the supreme educational end. We show our reverence for the child in the effort to personalize it. Let us consider in brief some of the practical consequences of this idea.
To personalize the individual the first step is to discover the empirical substratum in his nature. There is ever an empirical substratum subject to ethical transformations. The empirical substratum of personality is individuality! Individuality manifests itself in a leading interest of some kind, a predominant bias which indicates the thing which the individual is fit to be and do. To discover the bent or bias is the first step, and the difficulties in the way of taking even this first step are admittedly great. Children and even adolescents often show no marked intellectual preferences whatever. Many adults too appear to be neutral so far as their mental life is concerned. Circumstances ran them perhaps into a certain mould—they might have been run into some other just as well. It is the task of the educator to discover the predominant interest where it exists, and to try to produce such an interest where it does not. What nature has not done in such cases art must attempt.
When the leading interest is found it should next be made the means of creating interest in subjects to which the pupil is naturally indifferent or even averse. I have illustrated the process here implied in a paper on the prevocational art school which is connected with the Ethical Culture School. Young persons devoted to art are often unwilling to take up subjects which seem to them unrelated to what they really care for, like science and history. They are obsessed by a single passionate ambition. They are all eagerness to become artists—to draw, paint, model, etc. Time spent on any other subject seems to them misspent. If indulged in this one-sided activity, the chances are that they will not even become competent artists. In any case they will lack breadth and vision. They will lack a cultural background. They will be inferior as human beings. They will not be personalized. For personality, on its mental as well as on its social side, depends on relatedness,—depends not so much on what one does, as on the interrelation between what one does and what other people do.
In order to expand the interest of the young art student, the method employed in the school just mentioned is to present those subjects which appear to be alien in such a way as to bring out the art aspects of them, the contact points between them and art. Thus in history special prominence is given to the age of Pericles, the age of Rembrandt. In science special attention is paid to the theory of color, the chemistry of etching. And all other branches of knowledge are treated similarly. The aim is not indeed to exploit the other subjects in the interest of art, but so to utilize the artistic interest as to lead the mind out to a larger comprehensive interest in other related branches on their own account. Or rather, to put my thought precisely, and thus to connect it with the underlying ethical theory, the aim is to prepare the future artist for the give and take relation between his own pursuit and the activities of men in other vocations. He should be helped to enrich his own life as an artist by drawing upon all that the sciences and the humanities can give him, with a view to eventually returning with interest the profit he has derived. What the artist can do for the scientist, the religious teacher, etc., I have indicated in the previous chapter.
Precisely the same cultural idea should be worked out in prevocational schools of commerce, of technology, of science, etc. In each case the paramount interest should be the starting-point, the center from which lines of interest are to be made to radiate out into the correlated branches.
If this ethical idea is carried out the whole educational system will be remodeled. The cÆsura in education will then fall about the sixteenth year. Before that the task will be to lay the general foundations and to reconnoiter the individuality of the pupil. After that there will be a system of prevocational schools. The college, a legacy which has come to us from a type of society unlike our own, will disappear, and the university will become an organism of vocational schools succeeding the prevocational.83
I mentioned at the end of Book I the problem of specialization, the increased necessity of restricting oneself to a limited field in order to achieve anything like the consciousness of mastery, and the inevitable fractionalizing of men which is the consequence of this very tendency toward specialization. In the idea of outreaching radiations of interest and of the give and take relation there is the promise of liberation from the narrowness of specialism without the calamity of dilettantism. That this idea cannot be fully realized, that no one can actually extend his web of interest so far, that his reactions at best will be feeble, is perhaps a palmary instance of that law of frustration which fatally besets all human effort. But the effort will be in the right direction, and the effort counts.
The University
In sketching the ethical or spiritual side of the University, initial stress is to be laid on the meaning of the word universitas. The term as at present used hardly
suggests more than all-inclusiveness. A modern university is an institution in which all the different schools, the school of engineering, the school of science, the school of philosophy, etc., exist side by side, under a single governing body, and in which the various branches of knowledge are pursued without any visible systematic connection between them! The spiritual ideal of a university is that of system, of organic connection, for this is what spiritual means.
In looking back on the history of the higher institutions of learning one cannot but be struck by the close correspondence of those institutions to the general ideals of life of the people among whom they flourished. I call to mind the Hindu education with its Brahmanic background; the Mandarin education, with Confucianism as its inspiring principle; the musical education of the Greeks; the theological education of Jews and Mohammedans; then among the Western nations, the English university a seminary for training rulers of the Empire; the German university, a training institution for the higher bureaucracy; the French university, visibly reflecting the logical tendency of the French mind.
We in America, instructed by the survey of the past, are bound to face the question: In what way shall the American university differ from universities elsewhere? What characteristic shape shall the American university take on? How can the American university correspond to the American ideal of life? At present our notions in this respect are in a formative, not to say in a chaotic, condition. The college still survives—an institution designed for the education of gentlemen. Practical tendencies, looking toward materialistic success, prevail in many of our Western universities. The German research idea has come in as a third factor, penetrating deeply in some of our institutions, less deeply in others, but inharmonious everywhere with the rival conceptions that still persist.
The principal circumstance that retards our university development doubtless is that the ideal of American life itself, which the university is to express and to promote, is as yet undefined in the minds of the American people. But without presuming to anticipate what must be the outcome of gradual and prolonged growth, it may still be serviceable to clear our minds as to the goal towards which we desire that the development shall tend. The fundamental ideal of the American people is that of freedom! The notion of freedom is crude as yet, but is capable of being ennobled and refined. To be free is to express power. To be free in the highest sense is to express the highest kind of power. The highest kind is that which is exercised in such wise as to elicit unlike yet cognate power in others. A people is to be called free when all the different social or vocational groups of which it is the integrated whole spontaneously react upon one another, and when in each group each member of it realizes some mental gift of his own. A free people is not one which is merely released from the authority of autocrats. That is only a condition of freedom, not freedom itself. A free people is not one in which strong individuals are permitted to thrive parasitically at the expense of the weak. Nor yet one in which merely equal opportunity is afforded to all in the race for material well-being. A free people is one in which the essential energies of all effectuate themselves unhindered, the life of each swelling the surrounding tide of life, and being enriched in turn by the returning tide. This to my mind is liberty,—the liberation of what is best in each. This is freedom,—the free flow of life into life. The ideal American University is one which expresses and promotes this ideal of freedom.
A university is a group of vocational schools. A truly democratic university is an organic system of vocational schools, one which in the relations that subsist between its schools affords a shining, stimulating example of the kind of relations that ought to subsist between the vocational groups in the state.
The aim of an American university should be to furnish leaders for all the various groups who will undertake the great business of truly organizing democracy.
Education for Adults
Education should be continuous through life. The University Extension movement is endeavoring to meet this demand. It has already to its credit a considerable extension of knowledge, as well as the stirring up of interest in things of the mind among those whom it reaches. But far greater tasks than it has yet attacked remain. The academic method is not suited to the instruction of adults. A method will have to be worked out for teaching a subject to mature minds different from that which is appropriate in introducing the subject to the relatively immature minds of students. The student who has not yet entered vocational life needs to be put in possession of the principles by which he can lay hold of life. A mature person who is deficient in theoretical education needs to be helped to interpret his vocational experience in such a manner as to find his way back to the principles. In the one case there is the outlook and the emptiness; in the other case the fullness of content without the comprehensive outlook.
Secondly, the stages of vocational development through which the worker has already passed in his vocation are to be borne in mind, and the teaching adapted to the different stages. I have suggested four divisions: that of apprenticeship, that of initial mastery, that of more complete mastery, and the emeritus stage.84
Thirdly, it is getting to be increasingly difficult for a specialist in any one branch to keep abreast of the progress made in other branches. Popularization of the ordinary kind does not satisfy. It means, as a rule, diluting the subject-matter, not truly simplifying it. Provision should be made, in any large and generous scheme of public education, for enabling ripe minds to assimilate the ripest fruits produced by contemporary thinkers and writers who work in other fields.
NOTE
A few outstanding points in regard to what is called Moral Education may be added to this chapter.
There should be ethical teaching in the universities. The kinds of ethics taught should be adapted to the university period of life, emphasis being put on the experiences of the student at that time of life,—on friendship, the sex relation, the vocational outlook, etc. be included in the programme for the education of adults.
Systematic moral education in schools and high schools is advisable. It is frequently criticised on the ground that it is apt to be schematic and unreal. Moral counsels given as the occasion arises are believed to be more effective. They hit the nail on the head and drive it home. The reply to this is that incidental moral advice and exhortation is not excluded, but that it by no means adequately answers the purpose. The occasions for giving the necessary guidance simply do not arise. This kind of moral teaching is apt to be patchy. In the next place, ethical instruction, when rightly planned, has two objects: the one to bring into clear relief the life axioms that underlie the entire home and school experience of the pupil, and secondly, to give to the pupil a provisional chart and compass or ethical outlook upon his future life. Ethical teaching conceived of and conducted in this manner is neither schematic nor artificial. It does not drive home a nail here and there, it constructs a mental house in which the mind of the pupil can be at home,—with windows in it, looking out upon a large landscape outside.
The capital significance of right relations, ethical relations, between the members of the teaching staff has been noted in the text. In every school clubs should be formed consisting of pupils specially interested in any one subject and of the special teachers of that subject:—or if not formal clubs, then at least more intimate personal relations should exist between the special teacher and those selected pupils, the object being through personal intercourse to introduce the young aspirant to a knowledge of the problems on which the older person is intent. There is nothing nearly so educative for the young as to be taken into the counsels of their elders.
The more gifted pupils of the school should be invited to take a personal interest in helping the more backward students. In every school, high school and university there are social misfits,—shy, sensitive, solitary youths who fail to come into easy touch with their fellows, and suffer acutely. They are objects of the most delicate, deferential charity, and the task of bringing them into fellowship offers one of the finest opportunities for ethical education.
A vital system of self-government is to be used as a means of placing real responsibility upon the students under due advice. To exercise responsibility is to acquire character. Self-government is particularly important so far as it relates to the administration of justice in a school. Cases of discipline should be used as means to create the right conception of punishment, the right attitude towards those who have erred.
The relation between the adolescent boy and girl and the parents is of prime significance as illustrating in a way that young persons can understand the general conception of the ethical relation as reciprocal. The youth should be shown that he can be not only the recipient but a giver of benefits, that he can be a real help to his parents, chiefly by sympathetically entering into the problems and difficulties with which they have to contend. The parents, instead of being regarded by the young as an earthly providence, existing only for the purpose of bestowing benefits, should be seen in their true light as struggling, and often heavily burdened human beings. At the same time the young son or daughter will in this way gain an invaluable preparation for comprehending the difficulties under which the effort to live must be carried on.
In regard to patriotism, it is important that the errors and mistakes committed by one’s nation in the past should not be overlooked or minimized.
The school should furnish to the students various outlets for social service such as they in their period of life are capable of rendering.
CHAPTER VII
THE STATE
The leading theories of the state should be kept in view for comparison with the ethical theory here set forth—the theories of Aristotle and Plato, St. Augustine and the mediÆval schoolmen, Rousseau’s contract theory, and the German conceptions of the state propounded by Kant, Fichte, Hegel. Moreover, since the ideas actually embodied in governments, in the Persian monarchy, for instance, in the Greek City State, Venice, etc., are not identical with the constructions of the philosophers, the leading facts of the history of politics should be borne in mind as well as the leading theories.
The state has two aspects: (1) It is the balance wheel of the vocational groups included within it. (2) It is the political expression of the national character, and its ethical purpose is to develop this empirical national character into a spiritual character. I shall speak of the first aspect in this chapter.
1. The state exists in order to furnish increasingly from age to age the conditions under which the reactions between the groups described above can take place effectually. In concentrating attention upon the vocational groups as the entities to be harmonized with one another, account is taken by implication of the family and of the individual. The sub-organisms are embraced within the superior organisms. A more general statement would be that the state supplies the external conditions required for development towards ethical personality by those who pass through the institutions of the family, of the vocation, etc.
The state possesses a spiritual character in so far as it supplies these conditions, and in as much as it has a spiritual character it is not merely justified but ethically required to use force. Force is spiritualized when employed to establish the conditions indispensable to spiritual life. The conditions enforced must be such as in the opinion of the preponderant number of citizens indisputably make for the development of personality. Examples of such conditions are protection of life, property, reputation, compulsory education, the maintenance of the monogamic family, protection against foreign invasion, etc. All the functions of the state commonly enumerated follow from the ethical principle. But over and above the recognized ones, new and nobler functions of the state will appear.
The redeeming thought with respect to the use of force by the state consists in regarding force as ethical discipline, and in making the extent to which it is favorable to spiritual freedom the measure and test of its rightful use.85 When men are compelled to spend the major part of their time in the protection of bare life, as was the case, for instance, in the early days of feudalism, they are to that extent unfree. Freedom consists in energizing the highest and most distinctive human faculties.
The development of the state should proceed in two directions. It should withdraw from many functions exercised by it in the past, notably from such as properly belong to the sub-organisms. At the same time, it should lay its coercive hands upon new matters, imposing new limitations on capricious freedom in the interest of spiritual freedom, as soon as the pertinency of such limitations to the ethical end becomes clear. For instance, the state may, and doubtless will, interfere with marriage to a far greater extent than it has yet done. It will forbid the marriage of the unsound. If a study of character-types should ever become advanced enough—a hazardous conjecture—to make it predictable that the union of certain character-types will lead to infelicitous marriage, the state will be justified in prohibiting such unions.
Law, ideally defined, is the sum total of conditions, capable of being enforced, which are necessary or favorable to the development of personality. The purpose of law is two-fold: to maintain the more developed members of society at the level they have reached, and, by educative penalties, to bring the backward up to the same level. In the article on “Force and Freedom” referred to above, law is compared to such bodily actions as walking, which at first are superintended by consciousness, and then become automatic, thereby setting consciousness free to attend to new and more important business. Similarly, law is designed to render the conditions favorable to personality so explicit that their observance shall become automatic, and that mankind shall be at liberty to discover new and more significant conditions which in their turn are again to become automatic.
Because of the lack of the ethical point of view, the exercise of force by the state has seemed purely arbitrary, and has given rise to a perverted and disastrous conception of sovereignty. The sovereignty of the state has two aspects: the one internal, the other external. Sovereignty means supremacy. The state is sovereign, within limits, however, with respect to its citizens. The state is also sovereign, within limits, however, with respect to other outside states.
With respect to the internal aspect of sovereignty some writers hold that citizens have no rights as against the state—only rights accorded by the state. But this from the ethical point of view is a wholly untenable position. There are rights of the individual, rights of the family, rights of the vocational group, which the state does not create but is bound to acknowledge and which its power cannot properly infringe. As against the state the individual has, for instance, the right which is commonly designated as “the freedom of conscience.” The family has rights against the state; the law cannot interfere with the intimacies of the marriage and parental relations. The vocational group likewise is only partially subject to public reglementation. I have defined law as the sum total of the conditions. The state can prescribe the conditions, but cannot trace the ways of freedom within the conditions. The state prescribes the enforceable conditions; it has no concern with unenforceable inner processes.
It thus appears that sovereignty or supremacy is an attribute not peculiar to the state, although it looms up larger and more impressive when exercised by the state. Supremacy belongs to the individual in his private sphere, to the family in its proper province, to the vocation, etc. Sovereignty or supremacy belongs to each of the social institutions within its precincts, in so far as the supremacy within that precinct is requisite for the accomplishment of the ethical end to be therein attained. But sovereignty is not absolute in any sphere; neither in that of the individual, nor of the family, nor yet of the state. The absolute conception of sovereignty is the result of the lack of an ethical conception of the social institutions. The state is sovereign only so far as the exercise of its supremacy is necessary to the spiritual end of citizenship. On this account and for this purpose it may rightfully constrain the sub-organisms within it, and may also pronounce its noli me tangere as against the larger group of states encompassing it. But so far as the spiritual ends to be achieved in the international relations are concerned, the state with respect to these is subject to international sovereignty,—a new conception which mankind is striving to bring to the birth today. The false notion of state sovereignty as arbitrary and absolute, is admittedly today a chief stumbling-block in the way of the formation of an international organization of peoples.
The System of Representation Which Is Required to Give Expression to the Organic Idea of the State.
The ethical aim of political reformation and reconstruction may be put in a single word, Organization. The state and especially the democratic state must be organized.86 This means practically that the basis of representation shall be the vocational group, that vocational representation shall replace representation by geographical districts.87 The law-making body on this basis will consist of representatives or delegates of the agricultural, the commercial, the industrial, the scientific group, etc. Women belonging to these groups will exercise the franchise within them. There will also be a distinct group of home-makers; motherhood will be recognized as a vocation.
Attention may be called to certain practical advantages of the proposed rearrangement of the representative system. It will tend to bring forward in political life the best citizens, instead of the mediocre or the base. This is likely to come about because there is no distinction that men more ardently covet than that of being considered primus inter pares; as, for instance, the first or one of the first of the city’s merchants, or one of the most eminent scientists, or an artist whom his fellow-artists select as the fittest to represent them in the great council of city, state, or nation. And if only this much can be gained by the new representative system, that the law-making body shall consist of the most experienced, the most enlightened, the wisest, the actual leaders in the various walks of life, in brief, that the elected shall be the elect, certainly one of the principal evils with which individualistic democracy is afflicted will tend to be removed.
But other advantages will accrue. This, in particular, that the constituencies, instead of merely delegating their powers, will share in the business of law-making, will be in vital touch with their leaders or representatives, while the latter conversely will politically educate the constituencies. The mode of procedure under the system here sketched will be somewhat as follows:
Take, as an illustration, the group of industrial laborers. They will first meet in a primary assembly, and discuss measures deemed by them important in the interests of their group. The leader who represents them in the legislature will take part in the initial discussions, and exercise no doubt a strong influence in bringing matter finally to a head. He will then carry into the law-making body,—which consists of representatives of the various social groups,—the sifted-out demands of the laborers, the measures which they desire to have enacted into law. He will bring forward these measures in the legislature. But there objections are likely to be raised. The representatives of the other groups will discover what the laborers naturally failed to note, that the proposed law or laws, if enacted, will have certain injurious effects on the interests of the other groups. The sifting-out process, therefore, will now begin anew and be carried on on a higher level in the legislature. The representatives of all the various groups will separate the wheat from the chaff in what is proposed by any one group. The next stop will be that the representative of the laborers, returning to his constituency, will communicate to them the difficulties that were raised, the decisions reached, and will thus impart to them the wider vision which he himself gained in the discussions of the law-making body. In this way he will be the instructor, the political teacher of his constituents. And the principle by which the value of any new measure will finally be judged will be simply this: that the supposed interests of one group cannot be its true interests unless they are found to promote the interests of all the other vocational groups.88
The law-making body should be a council of the groups. It should not be a “Parliament,” or “talking body,” but a sifting body. Nor yet a body of mandatories commissioned to merely give effect to a public opinion or a public sentiment already existing. In fact, public opinion or public sentiment in the raw is apt to be a poor index of what is really for the public good. Public opinion is apt to be unripe, haphazard, impulsive rather than reflective. Besides, it is often contaminated at its very source, the facts on which the public depend for their opinions being deliberately falsified or placed in false perspective; while the opinions furnished in newspaper editorials are almost inevitably biased. Only on great occasions, when simple moral issues are presented, can the common sense and moral sense of the people be wholly depended on. But such occasions are episodical; and the orderly business of government cannot be carried on by spurts. Government by public opinion may be and in some respects is better indeed than class government; in other important respects it is worse. A class at the head of the state at least as a rule knows what it wants, and proceeds methodically to carry out its purposes. Public opinion, on the other hand, like all opinion, is unsure, unsafe, as Plato has long since made dialectically clear. And public sentiment, like all sentiment, is fluctuating. To build the state on public opinion and public sentiment, as many of our writers on politics would have us do, is after all a good deal like building a house on sand.89
Instead of “public opinion” and “public sentiment” let us say public reason and public will!—reason and will to discover in conjunction what the public good really is. For what it really is no one as yet knows. The “public good” is a problem to be approximately solved. The public good will be consummated when the conditions are furnished necessary and favorable to the development of personality in each of the constituent groups of the social body. To study these conditions is the office of the law-making body, and therefore that body must be so constituted as to include these groups in their capacity as groups.
Another advantage to be expected from vocational representation is that the different interests of society,—I stress the fact that they are different, and often temporarily conflicting,—will be compelled under this plan to come out into the open. An industry, for instance, may require the assistance of a protective tariff, in its infant stages, and the agricultural group may rightly be asked to make the necessary sacrifices.
In the long run there will be compensation. The agriculturists will eventually benefit by the diversification of the national life. But “in the long run” means that the next generation will benefit, not the present agriculturists, a distinction sometimes somewhat cavalierly ignored. The present generation will be called upon to make a sacrifice, precisely as in the family some of the members may have to sacrifice a part of their income to provide for a weaker member. But the circumstance that the sacrifice is recognized as a sacrifice will serve to put an end to the protection when the special need for it has ceased. Under the present system, on the other hand, the state is supposed to have no concern with the special interests of any group. All the same, there are the special interests, and in consequence that which is for the interest of one group has to be advocated as if it were for the general interest of the entire community. And since general interest is easily mistaken for perpetual interest, the protection is apt to be continued long after its particular usefulness has ceased.90
I am earnestly concerned that vocational representation shall not be regarded as a mere device in the mechanism of politics, like the substitution of the long for the short ballot, or the initiative and referendum. Innovations of the latter kind leave the prevalent conception of democracy untouched, they are merely intended to improve the machinery by which that conception is to be worked out in practice; they are mechanical contrivances, not fundamental reconstructions. Vocational representation, in my view of it, is the appropriate expression of the organic idea of the state. The state is the soul. The soul must have a body. Vocational representation is that body.
Two remarks may here be added. One relates to a question which has given rise to considerable discussion, namely, the question where the state resides? In a monarchy it seems to reside visibly in the person of the king. Louis XIV is said to have declared “I am the state.” But where does it reside in a democracy? The chief executive, the law-making body, and even the constituencies, are organs of the state. But where does the state itself have its habitation? The state has no separate domicile. So far as it truly exists at all it exists in the minds of the individuals who truly conceive of it. The object of political life is to educate the citizen so that he may more and more truly conceive of the state, so that he may give birth to the state idea within himself. To do this is to pass through one of the necessary phases on the road to personality. In the family the individual is in reactive relations with a few, in the vocation with a larger number. In the state or nation he may be one of a hundred millions or more. Yet it is not the numerical extension as such that constitutes the enlargement. It is rather the diversity of the points of contact, and the complexity of the relations by which the spiritual ideal is more fully illustrated in the finite world in proportion as the circle widens. To engender the idea of the state in oneself is to place oneself ideally into reactive relations with the diverse groups embraced within one’s nation. And to do this is a spiritual achievement of no mean order. I should prefer to use the word “stateship” instead of citizenship. Stateship is attained by one who brings to birth within himself the idea of the state, and in whom that idea becomes a controlling ethical force.
A second remark concerns the perplexed subject of the conflict of duties. The nearer duties are sometimes preferred to the more remote, and at other times we are asked to sacrifice everything to the larger whole. We owe our first devotion, it is said, to the members of our family; but then again we must be willing to sacrifice life itself and the welfare of our family to our country when it calls upon us in its need. Largeness alone certainly does not serve as an ethical ground for preference. The quantitative standard implied in such phrases as “the greatest good of the greatest number” is out of place when we deal with ethical relations, which in their very nature are qualitative. Now the account of the social institutions given in previous chapters as successive stations on the road to the spiritual goal may throw some light on this difficult subject. Normally, the claims of the anterior stations are to be preferred—the claims of the family for instance to those of the vocation, because the family is the matrix of the three-fold reverence, and the individual must pass under the ethical influence of family life before he is fit to use vocational life ethically to good purpose. The anterior groups are not merely smaller, they are germinal. The training received in them is the condition on which spiritual progress depends later on. On the other hand, the later groups are the more complete and more explicated expressions of the spiritual ideal; hence if the very existence of one of the later groups is threatened, or is in danger of being denatured of its spiritual use, then the later group is to be preferred to the earlier, the terminus ad quem, precisely because it is the terminus ad quem, to the terminus a quo.
To give a familiar illustration. In our time, which is a time of transition and doubt, many a religious teacher finds himself in sore straits to decide between the claims of the vocation and the family. As a religious teacher he is pledged to teach only what in his heart of hearts he believes to be true; he is especially under obligation to use words in such a way as to convey to others the same meaning that he attaches to them himself. But this may mean exposing his family to serious privations. The situation is full of perplexity and pain, but the line of choice is plain enough. The claims of his high vocation must in this case take precedence. In like manner, when the existence or the integrity of the state is at issue, the claims of the state as the terminus ad quem override those of the vocation, the family, and the state, and may even demand the sacrifice of the physical existence of the individual himself.
NOTES
1. The idea of democracy is often neatly put—all too neatly, into the following formula: In antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state, in modern democracy the state exists for the sake of the individual. Both of these statements as they stand are mischievous and misleading and require to be qualified. It is not true that in antiquity the individual existed for the sake of the state in the sense that his separate existence was extinguished. The citizen class in Aristotle’s state, the rulers in Plato’s state, and even a member of one of the inferior classes, each in his own way fulfilled a distinct function. He was not suppressed in the state, he expressed his function by the action appropriate to his station. The philosophic rulers might do the thinking and governing. They were the head of the body politic—others the hands and feet. The underlying conception was what may be called spuriously organic, borrowed more or less from the animal type of organism.
The second limb of the formula is no less superficial. In no modern nation does the state exist, or at bottom is it supposed to exist, for the benefit of the individuals who at any time compose it. If this were the ruling conception, how could the democratic state require its citizens to give up their lives in its defense? If the state existed for the benefit of the individuals, the state would be the means, and the so-called good of the individual the end. And in that case it would surely be irrational to sacrifice the end for the sake of the means, in other words to put an end to one’s life in defense of the state, a mere instrument for the protection and prosperity of one’s own life.
To reply that the state exists for the sake not of one individual but of all (observe however that the formula says “the individual,” and is ambiguous and slippery at this point), nor even only for the sake of all the individuals now living, but also for the sake of the millions yet unborn—to say this is once more to introduce an ideal entity which it was the very object of the formula as quoted to banish. The formula was intended to give us, in place of “the metaphysical entities” of the Greeks and the Germans, a very palpable thing—the good of the individual. The good of the individual seemed to be a palpable thing, though in truth it is the most impalpable thing in the world. And by defining the state in this wise we were supposed to come onto solid ground. But now, behold, it is the good of unborn millions which is to be the object of our devotion, and who can imagine what this good of unborn millions is likely to be?
The fact is that without ideal entities the conception of the state in any noble shape cannot be construed at all. The organic conception must now take the place of the individualistic. The organic conception indeed as it was worked out in antiquity, or as it lived on in the theories of mediÆval writers, or as it survives in the works of certain German publicists, who use it to defend the feudalistic structure of society, has rightly fallen into discredit,—not because it is organic, but because it is pseudo-organic, that is, based on the type of the animal organism. The individualistic conception of the state at present current in America and in all modern democracies, is a violent reaction against this false idea of organization. The inestimable germ of truth individualism contains is that no such distinction can be allowed as between head and hands or feet in political life, that all the multitudes of “hands” who work in the factories, for instance, must be respected as personalities having not only hands but also heads and hearts. But individualism, though it affirms this idea, belies it in practice, as the actual state of society in America and elsewhere abundantly proves. And it is bound to do so, because personality implies more than material well-being, either for a single individual or for all individuals now living or for all future individuals. Personality implies truly organic relations to other fellow-beings—and this can only be achieved by organizing the society in which men live.
The way taken has been, by reaction from pseudo-organization, to extreme individualism and concomitant materialism. The way out lies in the direction of genuine organization.
2. Certain evils observable in the workings of American democracy may be traced to the following causes:
(a) The people as a whole are still in the pioneer stage. A country enormously rich in material resources stimulates wealth-production. A host of immigrants escaped from poverty abroad are stung into wealth-getting here. The frontier line is now far to the West, but the influence of the pioneer movement still in progress flows back upon the Eastern states.
(b) More important still are the evils due to the crude individualistic idea of democracy just characterized. If the state exists for the good of the individual, and if the good of the individual is conceived to be the acquisition of wealth, then private business will take precedence of the public business. Yet under the democratic system of frequent elections the public business demands constant attention. In consequence, a special class of professional politicians arises, comprising a minority of disinterestedly patriotic men, and a majority of persons whose private business is not sufficiently remunerative to divert them from the public service. The appearance of the political dictator called “boss” is the inevitable outcome of these conditions. This army of professional politicians, and in particular the vulgar figure at their hand, is the chief disgrace of the American democracy, and has been the target of incessant invective by American writers. But it is idle to stigmatize the effect and overlook the cause, to squander invective upon the symptom and at the same time to leave the malady untouched. The malady itself is the individualistic conception of democracy, and until this is replaced by a better one, the evil in question may be modified in form but will certainly not disappear.
A way must be found for the citizen to attend to his private business, which is coming to be more and more exacting, and to the public business at the same time. The system of vocational representation offers an opportunity in this direction. Citizens will be voting in their vocational groups for measures intended to advance their vocational interests, but will be taught to advance them in such a way that the related interests of other groups, or the public interest, shall be thereby promoted.
3. Proportional representation, which is at present being tested abroad, and earnestly considered in France, England and Germany, may be a bridge leading over from the present plan of geographical to that of vocational representation. The proportional system itself, it is true, is still based on the individualistic idea. It is a movement on behalf of submerged minorities. It quarrels with the present arrangement for the reason that the will of the greater number of individuals, but not of all individuals, is brought to bear on public decisions. But if adopted it may well offer, without violent change, a way for the collective representation of vocational groups.
4. Citizenship should be graded. A youth of twenty-one is scarcely prepared to exercise the duties of the citizen intelligently. As long as the view prevails that the functions of the state are to be restricted to a minimum, it is perhaps not wholly absurd to admit a mere stripling to a share in the conduct of government. But the sphere of government is steadily enlarging, and its problems are becoming more and more intricate. Twenty-five would certainly be a better minimum age. Under vocational representation there is likely to be an Upper House consisting of members who have served in the Lower House. Citizens who have attained the age of twenty-five might be empowered to vote for members of the Lower House, those who have attained the age of thirty-five for members of the Upper House, but these are details upon which it is unfitting to expatiate here. The point I have in mind is that citizenship should be graded.
CHAPTER VIII
THE NATIONAL CHARACTER SPIRITUALLY TRANSFORMED: THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY, OR THE ORGANIZATION OF MANKIND
There is such a thing as a national character.91 The national character is reflected in the language, literature, laws and customs, arts, institutions and religion of a people. Even when the religion professed by different peoples is the same in name it is strongly tinctured in the different countries by the national differences. Compare for example the Christianity of Prussia with that of France, or that of England with that of Russia.
The national character, like that of the individual, has its plus and minus qualities, its excellent and its repellent traits.
The national character is to be spiritualized by raising the plus traits to the Nth degree.
To this end, as before, the three-fold reverence and especially the third reverence is the means. The backward peoples of the earth are the paramount object of reverence. The more advanced peoples are to bring to light the spiritual life latent in the backward. In order to do so, they are to carry out the principle of reverence toward past civilization, to sift out what is vital in the work of previous generations. And further, they are to conform to the second principle of reverence, that toward contemporaries approximately on the same level, i.e., toward the other civilized nations. No single nation is really competent to undertake the great task of awaking the stationary peoples of India and China, of educating the primitive peoples of Africa. A union of the civilized nations should be formed in order that together they may jointly accomplish the pedagogy of the less developed. The educational point of view once again appears as the ethical. The relation of the less developed to the more advanced peoples should be analogous to that of the child towards the parents. Just as neither the father singly nor the mother alone can release spiritual life in the offspring, so the different civilized nations, each of which has its own gift, its own plus traits, are to interact for the purpose of jointly awakening the creative energies within the slumbering souls of the undeveloped peoples.
It follows that a nation cannot even be defined ethically except as a member of an international society, and we begin to see the help afforded by the spiritual conception in solving at least ideally the problem of right international relations. Whereas hitherto the notion of the sovereignty of each nation has been a formidable impediment to the formation of an overarching world society, the ethical conception not only permits this expansion of sovereignty, but necessitates it. A nation, ethically defined, is a unique member of the corpus internationale of mankind. As unique it maintains of right its relative independence, as a member it is bound by intrinsic ties to its fellow-members, and is subject to the greater sovereignty including them all alike.92 A nation indeed cannot even maintain its independence against other nations except by sheer might if it acknowledges none but capricious ties between itself and them, such as treaties, or Hague Conference agreements which can be dissolved at pleasure. There must be recognized an inner ethical tie between nation and nation, and it must receive legal formulation. This ethical tie is the true vinculum societatis humanÆ and supplies what has hitherto been absolutely lacking,—an ethical basis for international law.
The ethical relation between nations is founded on the fact that each nation represents a significant type of humanity, that each nation has certain plus and minus qualities, that it is dependent on other nations to supplement its defects; and more than this, that it can expurgate, as it ought, its minus qualities only by striving to evoke the spiritual life in other peoples.
One salient point I must emphasize. The national character with its plus and minus traits is empirical, and the development of the empirical character is not itself the highest aim of the state. The spiritual transformation of this empirical character, as I must take pains to repeat, is the aim.
And herein appears the difference between the point of view taken in this chapter and the political doctrine of the eminent Swiss publicist Bluntschli. He too recognizes the development of the national character as the aim of the state; and in so far as he does this he is in advance of writers who limit the state’s functions to the protection of life and property, to defense against foreign aggression, promotion of prosperity, and of power and prestige. Bluntschli has the insight to perceive that a nation is a collective entity, having a certain defined character, and the development of the distinctive national gifts is in his eyes the supreme purpose of national life, the political organization of the state being a means to this end. But he falls into a grave error by identifying the empirical with the spiritual character of the nation, and setting up the former as an end worthy on its own account. The empirical character of a collective entity is in this respect no more worthy of honor, and no more fit to be a ground of obligation, than the empirical character of the individual. And the conclusions at which Bluntschli arrives are a sufficient proof of the ethical inadequacy of his vision. Some nations, a very few he thinks, possess political capacity, and they are to rule other peoples. Here we have the “White Man’s Burden”—an obvious violation of the ethical principle of national independence. Further, the world state, which is to include all nations, is to concern itself only with their common interests. Bluntschli thus accepts the uniformity principle in ethics, excluding the idea of the reaction of differences which is of the very essence of the ethical relation; while the ideal future as he sees it is that of nations coexisting peacefully side by side, competing peacefully with each other, and doubtless borrowing from one another the best fruits produced by each. But it is idle to expect peaceful coexistence so long as the strong exist by the side of the weak without there being acknowledged an intrinsic spiritual tie between them; and competition between peoples will result, like competition between individuals, in strife and exploitation; while the mere borrowing by each of the fruits produced by the rest omits the vital point, upon which I lay the greatest stress, of the eliciting of the fruits in each by the spiritualizing influence of the rest.
Surveying Bluntschli’s doctrine as a whole, it is clear that his empirical conception of the state leaves it a purely secular institution concerned with externals, and not really related to the inner life, certainly not a station in the development of personality. He practically acknowledges as much when he says that the state is man writ large, and the church woman writ large; that the state represents the masculine principle, the church the feminine principle. For the feminine, according to him, is the spiritual principle. The state deals with externals; to the church is reserved the prerogative of entering into and transforming the inner life.93
But what shall be the motive force for the creation of an international society? I hold that the sense of national sin, or of national guilt, must supply the motive force. At present all the more advanced nations are to be censured because of their pride. Germany prides itself on its science and its efficiency, England on its political liberalism, France on its logical conception of equality, America on its democratic individualism. Each of the great nations dwells complacently upon its fair traits, and vaunts its special type of civilization as that which should rightfully prevail among mankind generally. The national defects, acknowledged perhaps by the critical few, are glozed over. Indeed the consciousness of a collective national character though latent is not yet distinct. It must be evoked. National self-knowledge must be promoted by the leaders and teachers of mankind, and with it must come, as in the case of the individual, the conscious recognition of deep defects—in the case of Germany the narrowness of the conception of the expert:94 in the case of England the discrepancy between political liberalism as applied to the white inhabitants of the British Isles and of the self-governing dominions on the one hand, and the “benevolent despotism” exercised over the subject millions of India on the other; in America the effacement of true individualism under the crushing pressure of mass opinion, etc.
Moreover not only will the defects be admitted, but their detrimental influence on other peoples will have to be frankly avowed—every nation must cry its Peccavi—the effect for instance on Europe of the French love of glory, the effect of the efficiency notion of the Germans as it is at present penetrating all other nations,95 and in the still wider view the effect of Western civilization as a whole on the stationary civilization of China, on Egypt, on the myriads of Africa. The civilized peoples of the earth have sinned their sins and are best seen when we consider:
A. The spoliation and outrages perpetrated by the Western nations, for instance at the time of the entrance of the Allies into Pekin, the wholesale destruction of human life and the mutilations of the natives on the Congo. It has been stated that some ten millions of the natives of Africa perished as victims of the white race. If these acts do not warrant our speaking of the sins of the civilized nations, what kind of human behavior does deserve that name?
B. The effect of European example in practically forcing the peoples of the Orient to adopt militarism and navalism.
C. The effect of Western individualism in undermining the religious foundation in Eastern civilization.96 The spreading of Christianity itself, despite the exemplary influence of the higher type of missionary, must yet be classed, in one important respect, among the detrimental influences exercised by the West upon the East. For Christianity, in the form in which it is usually taught, tends to break up the sense of solidarity which is often strong among the less civilized peoples, without supplying an adequate principle upon which solidarity might be reËstablished on a higher plane. Hence Christian teaching in the Orient and in Africa, however friendly and merciful in intention, and however beneficent in many ways, is yet a disintegrating influence.
The great problem of the spiritual education of the lower races will have to be taken up anew. Not only are individual missionaries of broader mental and moral horizons needed, the civilized nations as such must reach a common understanding and establish a union among themselves, the keynote of which shall be reverence for the undeveloped, that is to say divination of what, under right educational influence, they, the undeveloped, may come to mean for humanity. And a union of this kind, consecrated to a noble object, will at the same time be the means of leading the Western world out of the chaotic condition in which it is at present weltering. The object for which nations combine may not be their own peace, their own prosperity. The key to peace between the adult peoples is a common, effectual resolve to win new varieties of spiritual expression from the child and adolescent peoples of the earth. Peace must come incidentally. The common object must be disinterested, spiritual, because there is a duty on the part of the civilized towards the uncivilized to exercise a spiritual function. The task of humanity in general consists in extending the web of spiritual relations so as to cover larger and still larger areas of the finite world. The family is only partly spiritualized. The vocations, the state, are not yet spiritualized. The international society hardly exists. But what I here endeavor to sketch is the human world as it would be in the light and under the influence of the spiritual ideal. And I set down as the saving task of the civilized nations that of extending the spiritual realm so as to cover backward, undeveloped peoples, so as to embody them in the corpus spirituale of mankind.
Some of the Principal Obstacles That Stand in the Way of the Organization of Mankind.
The first obstacle is to be found in the inadequate theories that underlie international law. Seventeenth and eighteenth century thinking is still, strange to say, the theoretical foundation. Grotius and Vattel remain the chief authorities. Grotius’s theory is a system of empirical individualism with Christian individualism grafted upon it, to mitigate its harsher features. The right of conquest is admitted. A nation is allowed to punish another, punishment being taken in the crude sense, while what has been permitted under natural law is subsequently modified by counsels of perfection derived from Christian individualism.
Vattel is the intellectual grandchild of Leibnitz. He derives from Leibnitz through Wolff. Vattel envisages the various states as so many individual entities without intrinsic ties. Peaceful coexistence and unhindered pursuit by each people of its own perfection or welfare with mutual aid to be voluntarily rendered are the ultimate conceptions beyond which this thinker does not venture. And if the root principles are thus infertile, small wonder that the fruit of the tree should be what it is. In any handbook of international law, the preponderant space is allotted to the laws of war, and yet international law has proved impotent to restrain the passion of war, or even to prevent its excesses. International law binds the Samson of war with green withes which the giant snaps in derision. It is plain that we are still in the earliest stages, not only of international practice, but even of international thinking. The problem of the right ethical relations between the nations has hardly been broached.
Another conspicuous obstacle in the way of international progress is to be seen in false hopes. Among the false hopes I class:
A. The hope that increased facilities of intercourse will automatically bring about more friendly relations. To expect this is to forget that closeness accentuates repugnances as well as congenialities, increases antipathy as well as amity. When nations come within short range of each other they resemble antipathetical kinsmen who are compelled to live together. The Czechs and Germans in Bohemia would not hate each other as they do were they not such near neighbors. Spatial rapprochement, for instance, between East and West will not of itself guarantee moral rapprochement—far from it.
B. The hope that science may be relied on to bring the nations together. Science is neutral. Science is subservient to evil as well as good. Science is at present distilling the poisonous gases used on the European battlefields as well as inventing the improved methods of surgery. It has made possible instruments of destruction such as savages might have shrunk from using. Moreover, scientific as well as artistic interests are partial manifestations of a people’s life and the ethical relation is between peoples as totalities or collective entities—just as the ethical relation between man and man is between the whole man and the whole man, and not between some partial aspect of the man and of his fellows. Hence it is easy to explain why the scientists and the scholars of the different belligerent peoples were swept away by the war passion like the rest, and in their utterance have even carried animosity to greater lengths, expressing it in language calculated to wound more deeply and to leave more permanent scars. They felt that they belonged to the people as a whole, and when the occasion came for them to choose between their scientific co-workers across the frontier and their fellow-nationals, they sided with the latter.
C. The hope that reliance can be placed on international trade to bring about ethical relations between nations. But trade, like science, is ethically neutral. In its own interest it is favorable to order and security in colonies and dependencies, and when, sufficiently enlightened, to the impartial administration of justice. The European nations abolished the slave trade in Africa because it decimated the native population, and decreased the supply of labor.97 On the other hand England in the eighteenth century, even at that time the most liberal country of Europe, did not hesitate to wage war with Spain for the maintenance of the monopoly of the hideous slave-trade, and the Opium War occurred in the “full light” of the nineteenth century. But the most striking example of the ethical neutrality of the commercial mind is to be found in the recent partition of Africa between England, France, the Congo Free State and Germany. The methods which these four nations adopted in the “scramble for Africa” were marked by a perfect disregard of the rights of the native populations of the African continent. Two devices were used—proclamations, and treaties with native chiefs. The Queen of England proclaimed that a certain territory would thenceforth be a British possession, as if proclamation could convey a right to the territory. The German emperor indulged in the same fiction. And there was a veritable race between French and English in the West; between Germans and English in the East, as to which of the two could outdistance or outwit the other in treaty-making. Karl Peters came in disguise with a stock of blank treaties in his pocket. Forty or fifty treaties were concluded by the French annually for several years in the West—as if a treaty with a native chief, who might be bribed or coerced into lending his signature, could be the foundation of moral right to the territory occupied by his tribe. The European nations artfully employed the fictions of sovereignty in order to varnish their acts of plunder with a semblance of legality. Of course these proclamations and treaties were not intended to justify exploitation in the eyes of the natives—the natives were not consulted or regarded—but rather to base thereon the division of the spoils between the exploiters. A proclamation or the conclusion of a treaty with a chief was notice given to rivals not to interfere with the spoils reserved for the nation that had issued the proclamation or secured the treaty. It meant “hands off” to competing exploiters.
If it be asked whether this picture is not too dark? Whether the civilized nations of the twentieth century in their dealings with the helpless natives were merely selfish? Whether their motives are so sinister? Whether they are not animated by better, more moral aims? the answer is that the commercial mind, and it is the commercial mind that chiefly rules the world today, allays its scruples and justifies its aggressions by the fallacy that to extend trade is to spread civilization, and to spread civilization is to contribute to the advancement of the human race. The interests of trade and of civilization are simply identified. To build railroads, to stretch telegraph lines across the Dark Continent, to launch steamboats on lakes that never heard the whistle of a steam engine before, these are assumed to be the evidences of “progress.” Besides are not the natives disciplined in habits of industry, are they not encouraged to cultivate the raw products needed by Europe, and in return to receive the overflow of European markets? The instruments of civilization are thus confounded with civilization itself; the means with the end; while the real object, veiled by sophistry, is nevertheless the material benefit to be secured by the white race. Even the humane treatment of the natives, where it is humane, resembles somewhat too unpleasantly the fattening of the calf prior to its consumption by the owner.
Furthermore, the interests of Trade being supposed to be paramount, it is held that any country the people of which do not sufficiently cultivate the products desired by other peoples, or who close their doors against the industrial surplus of Europe, may be annexed, the land forcibly seized, and the inhabitants subjugated, and moreover that such action is right and proper and in the interests of humanity. So long as this view obtains, there will be no peace on earth. The competition for foreign territories and foreign markets, the scramble between the “civilized” exploiters, will be indefinitely provocative of new wars.
The root disease that afflicts the world at the present day is the supremacy of the commercial point of view. Intercourse and exchange of products is no doubt desirable. The education of backward peoples in agriculture and in industry for their own good and along their own line is indispensable. The fallacy of the commercial mind consists in erecting the means into the paramount end, in brusquing the love of independence which is so strongly entrenched, even among many primitive peoples, and in preventing their development in the direction prescribed by their own natures. All this for the sake of the immediate increase of material wealth. The white race shall have the lion’s share of the wealth; the native population are to be accorded a lesser share, with which they must be content. This is the extent of the concession to humanity. This is, in plain words, what is signified by the haughty phrase—“the spread of civilization.”
The commercial mind is neither benevolent nor malevolent—as little as science is. It seems at times to be beneficent; at other times it seems to be almost fiendish—as in the case of the atrocities perpetrated on the Congo. It is not fiendish, it is simply ethically neutral or blind.
From this series of reflections, certain conclusions may be drawn as to fundamental points of view relating to international law. The main principle is respect for the total personality of peoples, recognition of them as potential members of the spiritual body of mankind.
The territory of a people is to be regarded as the body of that people’s soul. Their independence is to be strictly respected. Expropriation or annexation is to be characterized as outrage. Intrusion, except for purposes of education, is to be forbidden. The conception which underlies the scramble for Africa and for the Far East—that the material interests of the advanced nations entitle them to force the backward to become receptacles of the industrial overflow of the West, the producers of raw material for the factories of the West must be abandoned.98
And now the main point may once more be stated. The salvation of the civilized peoples, their spiritualization in the effort to spiritualize the less advanced demands a new turn in the history of humanity. Union in a common sublime object will overcome the antagonisms and discords that prevail among the civilized nations themselves. The sword will never be turned into a plow-share until the nations come to love the work of the plow—the work of spiritual tilth in the human field. The strong peoples will never cease to harm the weak, and in so doing to harm themselves, until they see in the weak, members of the corpus spirituale of mankind, depositaries of potential spiritual life in liberating which they the strong themselves will find increased life. And the task of uplifting the lower peoples will never be successfully prosecuted until it is seen to be part of the task of humanity in general, which is to spread the web of spiritual relations over larger and ever larger provinces of the finite realm.99
CHAPTER IX
RELIGIOUS FELLOWSHIP AS THE CULMINATING SOCIAL INSTITUTION
In this chapter I shall undertake to sketch the plan of a religious society as determined by the spiritual ideal herein set forth. The religious society is the last term in the series of social institutions, and its peculiar office is to furnish the principle for the successive transformation of the entire series. It is to be the laboratory in which the ideal of the spiritual universe is created and constantly recreated, the womb in which the spiritual life is conceived. No single religious society can adequately fulfill this purpose. The spiritual ideal itself must necessarily be conceived differently by different minds; but the great general purpose will be the same, despite variations in shades of meaning and points of view.
The fellowship of the religious society must be based on the voluntary principle; membership must be a matter of free choice.100 In antiquity the boundaries of the political and religious organizations coincided. The citizen was under obligations as a part of his civic duty to worship the divinities of the state. In modern times a state church is still maintained in some countries and supported out of the public funds, while dissenting and nonconformist bodies exist more or less on sufferance at its side. But this arrangement is harmful, especially so to those whom it seems to favor. Erastianism paralyzes religious spontaneity. The state, it is true, is profoundly interested in the flourishing of ethical idealism, and in the constant rebirth in its midst of spiritual ideals. But it is not competent to determine what the character of these ideals shall be. The moment they cease to be freely produced they lose their life-giving power. The state within limits may enforce actions; it may not even attempt to enforce beliefs.
On the other hand, the “secularization of the state” has given rise to the deplorable impression that the state exists only for so-called secular purposes, and has stripped the idea of the state of the lofty attributes with which the greatest thinkers of antiquity had clothed it. It is the function of the religious society, dwelling uncoerced in the midst of the state, to reinvest the state with the sacred character that belongs to it. I do not of course intend to exalt the state after the manner of Hegel, as if it were a kind of earthly god or to set it up as an object of religious or quasi-religious devotion. The object of religious devotion is the infinite holy community, the spiritual universe. The function of the religious society is to generate the ideal of the infinite holy community, of the spiritual universe. The family, the vocation, the nation, are sub-groups of this, lesser entities. Even mankind itself is but a province of the ideal spiritual commonwealth that extends beyond it. To concentrate worship upon the state or nation as some propose, would be to usurp for the part the piety that belongs to the whole.
In describing a religious society three main aspects are to be borne in mind:
The teaching, the organization, the worship.
A. The Teaching
In the religious society as here conceived there is to be worked out a body of doctrine, and there is to be a body of specially designated teachers. An ethico-religious society cannot ignore or dispense with a general philosophy of life and statements of belief. It cannot restrict itself to encouraging practical morality without regard to what are called metaphysical subtleties. A moral society of this kind would soon become ossified. On the contrary, an ethico-religious society should excel in the fertility with which it gives rise to new metaphysical constructions and original formulations of ethical faith. The will cannot be divorced from the intellect. The active volitional life cannot be successfully stimulated and guided without the assistance of the mind as well as of the imagination.
But the relation between philosophy and formulas of belief on the one hand and volitional experience on the other should be the reverse of what it has been in the past. Here there must be a new departure. The doctrine, the formulations, whatever they may be, must not be dogmatic but flexible. Growing originally out of ethical experience, they must ever prove themselves apt to enlarge and deepen ethical experience. By this test they will be judged and they must therefore ever be subject to revision and correction. Every dogma, every philosophic or theological creed, was at its inception a statement in terms of the intellect of a certain inner experience. But then it claimed for itself eternal validity, compressing the spiritual life within its mold, and checking further development. The body of doctrine which I desire and foresee will likewise be an interpretation of ethical experience, intended to make explicit the fundamental principles implicit in ethical experience, and thereby clarifying it, and assisting its further unfolding. But it is not and should never be allowed to become dogmatic. The difference, I take it, is plain: in the one case experience contracted in procrustean fashion into a rigid formula, in the other case an elastic formula adapted to and subordinated to the experience.
Thus much for the body of teachings. There should also be a body of teachers. A teacher in an ethico-religious society will retain something of the character of his predecessors—priest, prophet, rabbi, pastor. The priest is the mediator of grace; the prophet is the seer of visions; the rabbi is learned in the Divine law, and the pastor is the helper of the individual in securing his individual salvation. But these functions will now be seen in an altered light, and will be radically modified in their exercise. The magical attribute of the priest disappears. The confident prediction of future events, based on the assumption that the moral order is to be completely realized in human society, has ceased to be convincing. The Divine law is no longer identical with the Law revealed in the Scriptures and their commentaries, and the salvation of the individual is to be accomplished by other means.
The religious teacher of the new kind is to resemble his predecessors in being a specialist. The word specialist in this connection may, perhaps, awaken misgivings, and these must be removed. He is not a specialist in the sense of having a conscience unlike that of others, or in being the keeper of other men’s consciences. Nor shall he impose his philosophy of life or his belief authoritatively, but propose it suggestively. His best results will be gained if he succeeds in so stimulating those whom he influences that they will attain an individualized spiritual outlook of their own, consonant with their own individual nature and need. But specialists of this kind are indispensable. The generality of men have neither the time nor the mental equipment to think out the larger problems of life without assistance, and the attempt on their part to do so leads to crudities and eccentricities of which one meets nowadays with many pathetic examples among those who have severed their connection with the traditional faiths, and have tried in their groping fashion to invent a metaphysic or a creed of their own.101
The preparation of the ethical teacher for his special task consists in making himself thoroughly acquainted with the great religious systems of the past, in which much that is of permanent spiritual value is enshrined.102 He is to fit himself to revitalize what is vital, not to repristinate what is obsolete. There is required of him a first-hand knowledge of the great ethical systems, and of their philosophical backgrounds: furthermore acquaintance, so far as it is as yet accessible, with the moral history of mankind, as distinguished from the history of ethical thinking; in addition, he should intensively study the economic, social and political problems of the time from the ethical point of view, and the psychology both of individual and national character, so far as that fascinating and difficult subject has been opened up by competent writers. Apprenticeship in the social reform movements of the day, direct touch with the inner life of people, on its healthful as well as on its sick side, is also presupposed.
Since no single person can be adequately prepared in these various subjects, and since a variety of gifts and talents is demanded, it follows that the teaching function shall be exercised by a body or group of teachers, not by a single pastor at whose feet the congregation are supposed to sit. Some of the persons engaged in this work will excel as public speakers, others as writers, others as teachers of the young, others as leaders of vocational groups. But all these different functionaries must learn to work, not only in harmony, but in organic, reciprocal support, themselves illustrating in their group life the spiritual relation, the knowledge and the practice of which they are to carry out into the world. The guild or group idea must be applied to the religious teachers of the future.
B. The Organization
Every religion exhibits a certain form of organization peculiar to itself and derived from its controlling idea. The organization of the Buddhist fellowship is dependent on the Buddhist ideal of preparation for absorption in Nirvana. The constitution of the Jewish synagogue reflects the conception of the relation of the Chosen People, as an Élite corps of the divinity. The organization of the Christian church is characterized by its bifurcation into an ecclesia militans and an ecclesia triumphans, and further by the idea of incorporation into the body of Christ, a difficult mystical conception as of a typical divine individual including within his body a multitude of other individuals.
The organization of the ethico-religious society has been foreshadowed in the chapter on the vocations. The society is to be divided into vocational groups. In each vocational group is to be worked out the specific ethical ideal of that vocation. In the groups the general ethical philosophy of life is to be applied, tested and enriched. The so-called ethical teachers will here come into fruitful contact with those who are in touch at first hand with actual conditions, and are cognizant of the difficulties to be surmounted in ethicizing vocational standards. The members of the groups in democratic fashion will contribute to the advancement, not only of ethical practice, but of ethical knowledge, and thus become on their side teachers of the teachers. The danger of the formation of an ethical clergy will be averted. The teachers will be in certain respects the pupils of the taught, and the relation be reciprocal, that is, ethical.
Among the groups the vocational group of Mothers will occupy the central place. The influence of women, especially of the mother group, must penetrate the religious society through and through, for the purpose of drawing the entire fellowship together into a coherent unity. Women henceforth will take a deeper interest in the ethical development of human society. A main factor, if not the only factor in the ethical development of human society, is the elevation of the vocational standards. The group of mothers will therefore be in close touch with the other vocational groups in order to gain a knowledge of the higher standards therein proposed, in order to appraise them, and to inspire the growing generation with the devoted purpose to carry these standards out in practice.
C. The Worship or Public Manifestation of Religion
The ideal of worship likewise must undergo transformation. It has meant an act of homage toward a superior or supreme individual; it has meant eulogistic affirmation of the power, wisdom, goodness, of that individual; it has meant prayer or petition for help from that individual. It has also meant spiritual edification.
In all these various modes, religious worship heretofore has focused attention on a single individual deity as one who embodies in himself the sum of perfection. In thus presenting the ideal of perfection, it has encouraged preference for unity at the expense of plurality. The salient feature of the spiritual ideal sketched in this volume is the affirmation, on ethical grounds, that plurality is of equal dignity with unity, and hence that the divine ideal is to be represented not as One, but as manifold; not as an individual, however supereminent, but as an infinite holy community,—every human being being in his essential nature a member of that community.
But can worship be offered to the members of a holy community? In a certain sense one might say, Yes, preËminently so, since worship may be taken to mean Worthship, and the worth intrinsic in our fellowmen is the object of our unceasing homage. At the same time very different associations have gathered about the word. Public worship consists largely of eulogistic singing, prayer, adoration, genuflexion, and these are appropriate only to deity conceived as an individual. We cannot even say with the Psalmist “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.” For though the beauty and order apparent in Nature is one aspect of nature on which we delight to dwell, yet we cannot disingenuously suppress the counter evidence of disorder, ugliness and suffering which Nature no less obtrudes on our sight. The argument from design implied in the Psalmist’s words is no longer tenable. Certainly we cannot any longer pray for material assistance as our forefathers did, or invoke supernatural intervention in situations where human science and human helpfulness are impotent. But worship also aims at ethical edification, by holding up to the mind the moral ideal as an object of imitation, and as a rebuke to man’s shortcomings. This indeed is its highest function. Nevertheless the moral ideal, as we conceive it, is incapable of being presented in the guise of an individual being, no matter by what superlative language the limitation inseparable from individuality be concealed. The bare attributes of omniscience and omnipotence are abstract and convey no positive meaning whatever. In actual worship a concrete image is invariably associated with the notion of the individualized Deity, such as the Father image or the Christ image. And as soon as this is done, the vast ethical ideal tends to shrink to the dimensions of a human image; and instead of the ideal in its fullness, only certain selected but inadequate aspects of ethical excellence are presented to the worshiper.
And yet in an ethico-religious society also the public manifestation of religion is indispensable. Of what elements shall it consist?
First, there are to be the public addresses by the teachers, having for their main object to arouse or intensify a certain kind of spiritual distress, and then as far as possible to appease it. Every religion in my judgment originates in a particular kind of anguish, and is an attempt to assuage it. The spiritual distress in which the ethico-religious society has its origin is the agonizing consciousness of tangled relations with one’s fellow-beings, and the inexpressible longing to come into right relations with them. He is fit to be a public teacher of this religion who profoundly experiences this distress, who desires nothing so much as to cease to be, for his part, a thorn in his neighbor’s side. We are that, each of us, inevitably. The more this feeling is strong in him the more will he arouse similar feelings in others, and thus awaken those who are spiritually asleep, the self-righteous, the self-satisfied, and he will then indicate to the utmost of his power, the way of relief.
The specific ethical ideals of life are also to be presented in public assemblies—the ideals of private ethics, of marriage, friendship, and the rest. These expressions of the specific ideals, charged with feeling, and taking on appropriate imagery, will gradually attain a certain classical fitness—classical at least for a time—and may be used as public readings.
But is there a substitute for prayer?
Among the advantages of prayer is often mentioned this: that in it the soul reaches out towards its source, and in so doing wonderfully recruits its spiritual energy. It finds, ethically speaking, its second wind. It reaches down beneath its utmost strength to find an increment of strength not previously at its disposal. The question is whether this increment of strength cannot be obtained more surely and to better purpose in another way, namely, by concentrating attention on the spiritual need of the fellow-beings with whom we are in daily touch, and by becoming aware to what an extent the finer nature imprisoned in them is dependent for its release upon our exertions. The appeal of the God in our neighbor is the substitute for the appeal in prayer to the God in heaven, the call of the stifled spiritual nature in the men and women at our side, is to draw out of us our utmost latent force, the strengths underneath the strength.
The common life we share with our fellow-members in the religious society demands expression in song and in responsive services. The high wave of this common life welling up in us, rising to the surface, makes the glow of religious meetings, gives them fervor, and a touch of rapture, not indeed the common life conceived as a uniform life, but as the life we live in others, and they in us.
The addresses that awaken and appease spiritual pain, the presentation of the various modes of right living, the songs that lift the individual above his private self and help him to live, not indeed submerged, but rather spiritually accentuated in the life of the whole, these are the public manifestations of ethical religion as I see them. They will contribute to make of the society itself the symbol of its ethical faith. We shall not have an external symbol like the cross: the fellowship itself will be our symbol.
There will also be festivals. Every religion must have its festivals. In place of Baptism the solemn taking of responsibility for the spiritual development of the child. A festival of vocational initiation, like the ancient assumption of the toga. Festivals of citizenship, inspired by the ideal of the national character as one to be spiritually transformed. Festivals of humanity in connection with the commemoration of great events in the history of our race and of great leaders who were inspired in some degree by the ideal task of humanity. Festivals of the seasons, deriving their significance from the spiritual interpretation of the corresponding seasons of human life,—youth, middle age, old age. And a solemn though not mournful festival in commemoration of the departed.
The religious assembly should itself be organized; the members of the different vocational groups should be allocated to different parts of the meeting hall, as were the Guilds in certain of the mediÆval cathedrals.
Besides the public manifestations, the private religion will receive attention. The religious society as a whole is to be the microcosm of the spiritual macrocosm, a miniature model of the ideal society, but care must also be taken for the private communion of the individual with the spiritual presences which the ideal evokes. There should be a special breviary for the sick, a Book of Consolation for the bereaved, a Book of Friendship, a Book of direction for those who pass through the experience of sin, and a book of preparation for those who face the end.
CHAPTER X
THE LAST OUTLOOK ON LIFE
The view of life that man has on leaving it is the final test of his philosophy of life. These are my thoughts: It is time to detach thyself from this earth. The shadows are lengthening. Look around you and note the strange changes that have taken place in the men and women of your acquaintance. Those that you once knew in their prime are now old and wrinkled,—and how many already dead! As you survey the procession of life, how many vacant places are there in it! How many true and loyal comrades have been swept away! Or go into the busy streets of the city, and look at the multitude passing through them. You are still one of this multitude. Presently you will drop out. There will perhaps be a little ripple on the surface, and then the stream will flow on as before. How curious is it to think that this frame of life which sustains such high faculties should crumble into a little heap of dust at the touch of the wand of death! Detach thyself, therefore, relax thy hold by anticipation as thou shalt soon relax it actually. But detachment does not mean cold inattention or unnatural shrinking from the earthly scene, like that of the monk in his cell. Relax thy hold on what is earthly in the earthly scene, and fix thy loving attention all the more on what is spiritually significant in it. Regard with a friendly eye the beauty of the natural landscape around thee—yonder lake and yonder noble mountain summit. They are earthly, yet are they also hieroglyphs and symbols.
Still more is this true of thy social relations. Detach thyself means relax thy hold on what is transient in those relations. Cling all the more firmly to what is spiritual in them. The earth is thy foundation, thou art AntÆus as long as thou remainest in contact with the earth. Until the very last thou must lean for strength upon the earthly bases and substrata.
Consider the drive of the human race through the time and space world, and its net result. Thou standest now on a high tower. Lean over the parapet and peer as far out into the future as thou canst. Thou standest as did Moses on Mount Pisgah. Strain thy eyes to catch sight of the Promised Land. But remember that the Promised Land turned out to be a land still of promise, not of fulfilment,—a land in which the prophetic soul of Israel matured its visions of a fulfilment never on earth to be attained.
Remember that as thou art linked to thy ancestry, so art thou linked to posterity. The future centuries of the human race are like the future years of an individual. Thou art keenly interested in what may happen hereafter to the race with which thou art interlinked. But the race, like the individual, will be cut off and become extinct before ever the ideal is reached. Remember, therefore, that the purpose for which humanity exists is achieved at every moment in everyone who appropriates the fruits of partial success and frustration. Whosoever standing on the earth as a foundation builds up for himself the spiritual universe attains the purpose of human existence. There is indeed progress in the explicitness with which the spiritual ideal is conceived, and we are immeasurably interested in the greater light to be attained by our posterity. But the essential fruition of the contact of the infinite that is in us with the finite world is achievable at every moment in every human being. And this gives an entirely new meaning to the spiritual gains achieved in solitude, which seem vain because there are no witnesses. But neither will there be witnesses when the last human beings perish on earth. The spiritual bravery of the shipwrecked man who sinks on the lonely ocean springs from the conviction that though the sea can overwhelm him there is that in him greater than ocean’s immensity; a conviction achieved through the experience of living in the life of others. The same is the gain achieved by the sick man who lies in solitude like a helpless log in the darkened room. The altruistic philosophy fails in accounting for the moral grandeur that attaches to the spiritual victories gained in silence and solitude.
Face the terrors of life before you leave life. Be resolute to the last not to cherish illusions. Face the terrors of life, the absence of observable design, the cruelties, the ferocities. Think of William Blake’s poem “The Tiger”: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” In your philosophy there is no question any longer of a Creator. Creation is an attempt to explain the coexistence of the imperfect with the perfect, to account for a lower stage in terms of a higher. The ultimate inability of man to understand, to explain, is one of the principal frustrations he meets with, is the crucifixion of man at the point of his intellect.
The radical incompetence of man to grasp with his intellect the world as a “universe,” is to be faced by him and accepted without qualification. It marks off this philosophy of life from those philosophies and theologies which have attempted to explain the universe, and which, while affecting humility, are the dupes of an unwarranted self-confidence. Unqualified admission of the incompetence of the human intellect to resolve the world riddle is the determining factor in the more profound humility which characterizes the religion of ethical experience. Agnosticism on the intellectual side is the very condition of the transcending ethical conviction subsequently attained. Without intellectual agnosticism there is no ethical certainty.
Consider now frustration and its supreme outcome, or the various points at which man is crucified. I have mentioned the intellectual crucifixion, due to the incompetence of the mind to understand. I must now speak of still more poignant experiences due to the incompetence of man adequately to fulfill the moral law, or to carry out the spiritual relation in finite terms.
I have reached the bourne, or am very near it. The shadows lengthen, the twilight deepens. I look back on my life and its net results. I have seen spiritual ideals, and the more clearly I saw them, the wider appeared the distance between them and the empirical conditions, and the changes I could effect in those conditions. I have worked in social reform, and the impression I have been able to make now seems to me so utterly insignificant as to make my early sanguine aspirations appear pathetic. I have seen the vision of democracy in the air, and on the ground around me I have seen the sordid travesty of democracy—not only in practice but in idea. I have caught the far outlook upon the organization of mankind, the extension of the spiritual empire over the earth by the addition to it of new provinces, and I do not find even the faintest beginnings, or recognition of the task which the advanced nations should set themselves. I scrutinize closely my relations to those who have been closest to me,—and I find that I have been groping in the dark with respect to their most real needs, and that my faculty of divination has been feeble. I look lastly into my heart, my own character, and the effort I have made to fuse the discordant elements there, to achieve a genuine integrity there, and I find the disappointment in that respect the deepest of all.
These are the various points of my life at which I have undergone the crucifixion. I am like Arnold Winkelried, who gathered the sheaf of spears into his breast, and even pressed them inward, to make a way for liberty. So do I press the sharp-pointed spears of frustration into my breast to make way for spiritual liberty. For these cruel spears turn into shafts of light, radiating outward along which my spirit travels, building its final nest—the spiritual universe.
Consider the new and profounder humility. In ethical experience is revealed the plan of the spiritual relations, but the entities or substances which are thus related are incognizable, unknowable. Did I know them I should be able to solve the riddle of the universe. I should know how it is that the finite exists side by side with the infinite. But I cannot know. I cannot enter into the counsels of the multiform godhead. There are the mighty powers that weave and interweave behind the veil, but the veil between them and myself is down, not to be lifted. Within the palace of light is the solemn and serene assembly of the gods: I, man, stand at the gate.
The world as we know it is itself the veil, the screen, that shuts out the interplay, the weavings and the interweavings of the spiritual universe. But at least at one point, in the ethical experience of man, is the screen translucent. The plan of the spiritual relation is there traced in outline. It is this plan that conveys the certainty as to what verily exists beyond, within, beneath.
As to my empirical self, I let go my hold on it. I see it perish with the same indifference which the materialist asserts, for whom man is but a compound of physical matter and physical force. It is the real self, of which the empirical was the substratum, upon which I tighten my hold. I do not assert immortality, since immortality, like creation, is a bridge between the phenomenal and the spiritual levels. Creation is the bridge at the beginning; immortality the bridge at the end. Were I able to build the bridge, I should know. I do not affirm immortality. I affirm the real and irreducible existence of the essential self. Or rather, as my last act, I affirm that the ideal of perfection which my mind inevitably conceives has its counterpart in the ultimate reality of things, is the truest reading of that reality whereof man is capable. I turn away from the thought of the self, even the essential self, as if that could be my chief concern, toward the vaster infinite whole in which the self is integrally preserved. I affirm that there verily is an eternal divine life, a best beyond the best I can think or imagine, in which all that is best in me, and best in those who are dear to me, is contained and continued. In this sense I bless the universe. And to be able to bless the universe in one’s last moments is the supreme prize which man can wrest from life’s struggles, life’s experience.
I look back upon my life once more, and am grateful for the eternal worth which it was permitted me in this frail vessel of my mortal existence to hold, for the shimmer of the spiritual reality of things which I was permitted to see; grateful especially to those who loved me, and whom I was permitted to love, and who were to me in some measure revealers of the eternal life.
Consider lastly the peace that passeth understanding. Now, if ever, this peace should descend upon me. There is a kind of peace that is accessible to the understanding, and there is the peace that passeth understanding. The peace that can be understood is that which consists in the relief of pain. It arises in various ways. After an acute attack of physical pain how like balm is felt the succeeding absence of pain. After a prolonged sickness, when the convalescent takes his first walk, what a sweet tranquillity fills his mind! There is also the mental relief that comes when some danger has been safely passed; the peace of the sheltered fireside to one who has passed through a storm. Again, there is the peace that follows pecuniary anxiety, or the removal of some carking care, as when an erring son is reclaimed, or an estranged wife or husband is found anew.
But the peace that passeth understanding is that which comes when the pain is not relieved, which subsists in the midst of the painful situation, suffusing it, which springs out of the pain itself, which shimmers on the crest of the wave of pain, which is the spear of frustration transfigured into the shaft of light.
It is upon those we love that we must anchor ourselves spiritually in the last moments. The sense of interconnectedness with them stands out vividly by way of contrast at the very moment when our mortal connection with them is about to be dissolved. And the intertwining of our life with theirs, the living in the life that is in them, is but a part of our living in the infinite manifold of the spiritual life. The thought of this, as apprehended, not in terms of knowledge, but in immediate experience, begets the peace that passeth understanding. And it is upon the bosom of that peace that we can pass safely out of the realm of time and space.
