John H. Finley

BY

PAUL ELMER MORE, LITT.D., LL.D.

A couple of years ago one of the most distinguished of our social philosophers, Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University, was invited to lecture at the Imperial University of Japan, and, having delivered his message in Tokyo, proceeded to China, where he was welcomed eagerly by the younger malcontents as an exponent zof Western ideas. The character of these ideas which our collegiate missioner carried across the Pacific Ocean may be learned from the little book since published by him under the title of Reconstruction in Philosophy. His thesis, indeed, is simple almost to naÏvetÉ. Hitherto, he avers, philosophy and religion have been nothing but an attempt to “identify truth with authoritative dogma.” And this attempt has a double aspect, theoretical and practical. On the one hand, mankind is prone to forget the evils of yesterday and to gloat in memory over the good, so that by the combined force of memory and imagination the past remains with us as a kind of idealized dream, a lovely, impalpable curtain hanging between our vision and the hard realities of the present. From such an iridescent dream has grown the philosophical and religious belief in an immaterial world of ideas, a glamorous make-believe under whose sway “we squirm,” as Mr. Dewey says in his pragmatic style, “dodge, evade, disguise, cover up, find excuses and palliations—anything to render the mental scene less uncongenial,” and so to escape the actualities that confront us. Buddha, Plato, Jesus, and the other great masters and doctors of the life unseen were merely juggling with words and leading us nowhere; the discipline of character proposed by them and their offers of supernatural peace were a fraudulent perversion of the facts of human experience. The only true knowledge is that which comes to the farmer toiling at his crops, and to the carpenter laboring with his tools; the real facts of life are those that we can see and smell and taste and handle, and, so far as I can understand Mr. Dewey, such things alone.

That is the theoretical aspect of the reconstruction of philosophy proposed by our tender-hearted materialist; and the practical aspect is like unto it. Existing forms of government, established order, property, the church, institutions generally, draw their support from the idealizing illusions of memory and imagination; they are in truth the dead hand of the past clutching the throat of the living present. Throughout all the ages preceding the advent of Mr.Dewey, or by a gracious inclusion anterior to Francis Bacon, it has been the task of philosophers and religious leaders to find reasons for the existence of such institutions on ideal grounds, and to justify those who profit from them at the expense of the masses. Religion and philosophy have been simply the servile allies of the predatory classes of society. The hope of the world is in the new gospel of pragmatic materialism.

I trust I have not misrepresented Mr. Dewey’s teaching. Indeed, with an individual teacher I should have no quarrel, were he not in a position of authority; but it is another matter when such doctrines are spreading out from a lecture-room all over the country, and, as I hear from Chinese friends, are persuading the young reformers of the Far East that the only salvation for their people lies in adopting the crudest materialism of Western civilization, and in emancipating themselves from all that philosophy and religion hitherto have meant to the Occident as well as to the Orient. At least here is a matter to consider.

Now in one sense Mr. Dewey’s theory of religion—I use this word preferably, since the classical forms of philosophy which he would reconstruct belonged essentially to the field of religion—in one sense this theory is so far from being revolutionary that it has been current almost from the inception of human thought. Plato knew that the religious temper was naturally reverential of the past and conservative in its influence. It was, indeed, for this reason that he gave to religion and to a philosophy of the unseen world so thorough a control over the polity of his state. Polybius, the Greek historian of Rome, not only recognized this function of religion, but went so far as to maintain that even the palpable fictions of superstition should be upheld as a safeguard against political anarchy. “Since the multitude,” he argues, “is ever fickle and capricious, full of lawless passions, and irrational and violent resentments, there is no way left to keep them in order but the terrors of future punishment, and all the pompous circumstance that attends such kinds of fictions. On which account the ancients acted, in my opinion, with great judgment and penetration, when they contrived to bring in these notions of the gods and of a future state into the popular belief.” And on this basis Polybius goes on to show how the power and permanence of Rome were connected with a national morality grounded in irrational beliefs, whereas the inquisitive rationalism of Greece was the cause of her ethical and political decline. Livy’s annals of Rome are inspired throughout by the same idea, though without the tincture of scepticism that pervades the philosophy of the Greek historian. The city on the Tiber, Livy thought, grew mighty and conquered the world because of her faith in the gods and in that mystical Fatum which presided over her destiny, and kept her, through all the formal changes of her government, true to her original Êthos. “You will find,” he writes, “all things have prospered for those who follow the gods, while adversity dogs those who spurn them—invenietis omnia prospera evenisse sequentibus deos, adversa spernentibus.” So, for Tacitus, religion was, as he expresses it in his epigrammatic way, instrumentum regni. Christianity, though it altered much, maintained this same view. The greatest preacher of the ancient church, Chrysostom, was fond of pointing to the connection of religious humility, mother of all the virtues, with the principle of orderly subordination, on which, as on the golden chain of divine law, depended the stability of society and the happiness of the people.

But I must not fatigue you with examples. Passing on to the eighteenth century, one finds the politico-religious thought of England and France dominated by the Polybian notion that religion was imposed more or less deliberately on the people by their masters as an instrument of government, only with this important difference, that in England the imposition was commonly regarded even by the more radical deists and freethinkers as a salutary and necessary fraud, whereas across the channel a more logical and less prudential habit of speech led the bolder spirits at least to spurn the whole fabric of traditional religion as an impediment to liberty and progress. It was characteristic of the British mind, then as it has always been, to stop short of final conclusions and to be tolerant of a certain penumbra of illusion about the ultimate principles of life, a trait which has resulted on the one hand in the national willingness “to muddle through,” and, on the other hand, in a deeper sense of spiritual mysteries. Bolingbroke, atheist or deist, as you choose to call him, would take the position frankly that the truths of scepticism are for the enlightened few who, as Aristotle said, have learned from philosophy to do voluntarily what other men do under compulsion. Religion, to Bolingbroke and his class, was simply an integral part of that marvellous fiction, the British Constitution. “To make a government effectual to all the good purposes of it,” he says, “there must be a religion; this religion must be national, and this national religion must be maintained in reputation and reverence.” And a little later in the century one of the correspondents of that admirable and very British gentleman, SirWilliam Pepys, condemns Gibbon for divulging to the public the sort of scepticism which he might have enjoyed lawfully in his closet. “I agree,” avows our correspondent, “that no man should ‘take the bridle out of the mouth of that wild Beast Man’ (as Bolingbroke writes to Swift).... Tho’ a man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet, he shall not be permitted to vend them as cordials.” (Which, so far as I know, is the first attempt recorded in history to evade, prophetically, the Eighteenth Amendment of our own Constitution.) Nothing is more characteristic of the ruling temper of England than the fact that this same Gibbon, he who had expended his wit and his vast erudition in “sapping a solemn creed with solemn sneer,” in his old age should have confessed admiration for Burke’s chivalry, even for his “superstition,” and should have planned a dialogue of the dead, wherein Lucian and Erasmus and Voltaire were to be heard discussing the danger of shaking the ancient faith of the people in religious institutions.

But the French mind could not rest in this severance of logic and practice. To their more incisive and less humble way of thinking, true was true and false was false, and to confound the boundaries of truth and falsehood was only to pay homage to canting hypocrisy. There was no distinction for them between an illusion and a plain lie, nor would they rest satisfied with a suppression of truth as known to individual reason, in order to leave room for a practical faith as taught by public experience. So it happened that the philosophes as a body were not theoretical sceptics merely but militant atheists. If, as La Mettrie believed, “the soul is an empty word of which no one has any idea,” if men are no more than blind “moles creeping in the field of nature,” then, o’ God’s name, out with the truth of it; society can only profit from universal knowledge of the facts. In like manner a Holbach will take up the old theory of Polybius, but without the Polybian and the British “reserve.” “Experience,” he says, “teaches us that sacred opinions were the real source of the evils of human beings. Ignorance of natural causes created gods for them. Imposture made these gods terrible. This idea hindered the progress of reason.” And again: “An atheist ... is a man who destroys chimeras harmful to the human race, in order to lead men back to nature, to experience, and to reason, which has no need of recourse to ideal powers to explain the operations of nature.”

And the French view has prevailed, or threatens to prevail, as courageous views inevitably tend to supplant timid views, however true it may be that courage in such matters may sometimes be another name for insensibility, not to say conceit. So Leslie Stephen, writing of the eighteenth century in England, with a sneer that contrives to combine the French boldness with the British reserve, declares that “the church, in short, was excellent as a national refrigerating machine; but no cultivated person could believe in its doctrines.” And at last Mr. Dewey, perhaps the most influential teacher to-day in America, is renewing the old cry and persuading our young men that religion is a fallacy of the reason devised to maintain the more fortunate classes in their iniquitous claims, and that progress and democracy are bound up with the materialistic pragmatism that emanates from his own chair of reconstructed philosophy.

Now, it will be clear from these illustrations, which might be multiplied indefinitely, that the classic philosophy, the philosophy of idealism properly so called, which underlies all religion, whether Platonic or Christian, has been regarded by most thinking men from ancient times to the present day as a conservative, or at least as a regulative, force in society. But thinking men have differed profoundly in their valuation of such a force. Those who hold this philosophy to be true are naturally undivided in their opinion that its social function is beneficial; but those sceptically and materialistically inclined, to whom the spiritual world of Plato and St.Augustine is merely an insubstantial fabric wrought out of the discontent of mankind with the actualities of life, have been divided in their attitude. By some this dream of the unseen, though a deception, has been accepted as necessary for the ordered welfare of society; the enlightened few might indulge their superiority of doubt, but without the restraining content born of superstition the turbulent desires of the masses would throw the world into anarchy and barbarism and universal misery. That was the prevalent attitude of ancient rationalism; and it is still common enough to-day among those who have a condescending respect for the church as a useful ally of the police court. To others, a rapidly growing number, it seems that the spirit of content engendered by religion, if based on a falsehood, must be detrimental to the progress of mankind. Or perhaps their position might be expressed more accurately by reversing the terms. They would not say that religious content is false and therefore must be detrimental; but, rather, religious content is inimical to progress and therefore must be false.

I am not here before you to-day to determine the truth or falsehood of the ideal philosophy which supports religious institutions; that is a question which for the present we may waive. We will not discriminate between those who hold this philosophy to be true and those who regard it as an illusion, but an illusion necessary for the preservation of society. The line for us is drawn between those who, for whatever reason, cling to a religious philosophy of the unseen and those who denounce such a philosophy as a check to the progress and prosperity of the race. And you will see at once that the issue between these two classes has been sharpened for us of the present day by the intrusion into sociology of a new theory of existence—new at least in its scope and claims. I mean the great and all-devouring doctrine of evolution.

Now the evolutionary philosophy, by which we have become accustomed, rather prematurely perhaps, to test all problems of truth and utility, has many aspects and follows various lines of argument. What it means to the working scientist is one thing, and what it means to the metaphysician may be quite another thing; but when it intrudes into the field of sociology, and more specifically when it lays its grasping hand upon that part of sociology which attempts to weigh the value of religious belief, you will find it almost inevitably taking the note so clearly defined in pages of Mr. Dewey’s typical book. Evolution is identified with progress, progress is measured by increased power to satisfy physical wants, and the effort to increase this power is conditioned on dissatisfaction with material conditions. Oh, I know that many evolutionary sociologists will demur against the reduction of their theories to a crudely materialistic formula; but many of them will not, and I am sure the formula does not misrepresent the real conclusions of their doctrine. It comes down to this: Physical progress has its source in physical discontent, and, by an extension of terms, social progress has its source in social discontent; and any doctrine which dulls the edge of this discontent is thereby an obstacle in the path of individual and racial welfare. Discontent is motion and the striving for better things, it is life; content is just stagnation and death. And here lies the charge against religion. By drawing off the mind to the contemplation of those so-called eternal things that are not visible to the bodily eyes or palpable to these fleshly hands, by injecting spiritual values into this present life and raising hopes of other-worldly happiness, religion, together with the whole range of illusory philosophy on which it is nurtured, throws the feelings of physical discomfort out of the centre into the further margin of the field of vision, into the penumbra, so to speak, of insignificance, while it imposes a stillness of content upon the naturally restless soul of man. In such a mood the past, out of which the oracles of faith seem to sound by some miracle of memory, acquires a tender sanctity, and the institutions of tradition are often invested with a reverence and awe which easily flow into vested rights. If the religious mood were really to prevail, they say, then society would sink into the slothful decay described by old Mandeville in his “Fable of the Bees,” that terrible poem which the modern humanitarian would abhor as a black parody of his doctrine, but which in good sooth told the facts of a materialistic sociology once for all:

All Arts and Crafts neglected lie;
Content, the Bane of Industry,
Makes ’em admire their homely Store,
And neither seek nor covet more.

What shall be said of these contrasted views? I think first of all we must say that the issue is confused by an ambiguity lurking in the terms employed. And this is no new thing. It is, in fact, one of the curiosities of our human warfare that the most bitter disputes on the most fundamental questions often go round about in a circle because the two parties to the dispute do not see that the same word may be used in different senses. So it is certainly of content and discontent; and a man’s attitude may very well be determined by his understanding or misunderstanding of the double meaning of these words. Cardinal Newman, perhaps the keenest psychological analyst of the past century, has insisted on this distinction in one of his sermons:

To be out of conceit with our lot in life is no high feeling—it is discontent or ambition; but to be out of conceit with the ordinary way of viewing our lot, with the ordinary thoughts and feelings of mankind is nothing but to be a Christian. This is the difference between worldly ambition and heavenly. It is a heavenly ambition which prompts us to soar above the vulgar and ordinary motives and tastes of the world, the while we abide in our calling; like our Saviour who, though the Son of God and partaking of His Father’s fulness, yet all His youth long was obedient to His earthly parents, and learned a humble trade. But it is a sordid, narrow, miserable ambition to attempt to leave our earthly lot; to be wearied or ashamed of what we are, to hanker after greatness of station, or novelty of life. However, the multitude of men go neither in the one way nor the other; they neither have the high ambition nor the low ambition.

If that sounds oversubtle, or if the preacher’s assumptions seem to beg the question, let us drop the pulpit jargon and look at the distinction as it works out practically in the lives of two highly useful members of society, the plumber and the college president. Suppose a plumber is called into your house on a raw day of January to tinker up a disordered pipe in the cellar. Probably that plumber is discontented; indeed, I cannot imagine how a plumber can be anything but discontented. Nevertheless, his discontent may be either one of two very different sorts. He may be grumbling to himself because he has to work at a cold and dirty job, while you are enjoying your newspaper up-stairs over a warm and cosey fire. In that case his discontent may take itself out in slighting his task and wasting your time and lengthening his bill. These things are said to happen. And he may even carry his discontent into a view of the organization of society which expresses itself in very hardy politics. But suppose now that his discontent takes another form. Imagine him content with his lot as a plumber, even proud of it, but dissatisfied with the common reproach of slackness and extortion, ambitious to excel in his profession. I do not cite such a plumber as a probability; but all things are possible in a Bross lecture. At any rate, such a paragon would be worthy of succeeding to that famous chair of the Harvard faculty once occupied by a gentleman whom the trustees hired as the Plumber professor of Christianity, but whom the undergraduates irreverently dubbed the Christian professor of plumbing.

And so the other end of the scale, the college president. He too is said sometimes to be discontented; and again his discontent may assume either one of two forms. He may be ambitious of size and rÉclame for his institution, and may measure his dignity by the number of students over whom he presides. His alumni are likely to encourage him in this, and I have myself known the head of an ancient university in the East who used to scan the catalogues of the great Western institutions year by year with bitter jealousy and heart-burning as their register of students gradually approached his own, and then shot beyond it. Inevitably such discontent leads to a lowering of standards, mitigated by the pious belief that that form of education is noblest which is desired by, and accessible to, the largest number of paying candidates. Thus a debasement of education becomes identified in his mind with social service. But one can imagine another kind of discontent, which should pursue just the opposite course. Its standard would be qualitative, not quantitative, and it would fear the temptation of size, not the murmurs of ambitious alumni. It would look for its reward not in a swelling registration or spreading houses or additional courses of study, but to its success in attracting the better minds and the stronger characters and in directing these in the narrow and tried paths. It might even go so far—though this is confessedly a fairy-tale—as to lay a rough, restraining hand on that most corrupting nurse of materialism in our schools, professional athletics.

However it may be with the plumber and the college president, clearly these words, content and discontent, are replete with ambiguity; they are consequences rather than motives of conduct, and we cannot safely argue upon them until we lave looked more closely into the springs of action which control respectively the religious and the natural life. And here I must beg you to indulge me in a bit of pedantry. Our English speech, with all its practical efficiency, has never developed a very precise ethical terminology, and so to get at the distinction I have in mind I am going to ask you to consider two rather outlandish-sounding Greek words which were much in use among the early moralists of our era. One of them is tapeinophrosynÊ, the other is pleonexia.

TapeinophrosynÊ is a compound word, meaning primarily lowness of mind; it embraces the idea of humility and meekness, but neither of these conveys its full significance. St.Paul uses it in the Epistle to the Ephesians, where it is translated specifically “lowliness,” but its force really runs through the whole passage: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called, with all lowliness (tapeinophrosynÊ) and meekness, with long-suffering, forbearing one another in love; endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Paul had in mind the saying of Christ recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, where an equivalent phrase is rendered “lowly in heart”: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.” And the first of the Beatitudes contains the same idea in slightly different language: “Blessed are the poor in spirit (i.e., the lowly in heart), for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This, then, is the virtue, or, rather, as Chrysostom calls it, the mother of the virtues, which was upheld by the fathers, without exception one might almost say, as the basis of Christian character and the motive of religious living—tapeinophrosynÊ. And the result of such a virtue, as it works itself out through character into content and discontent, is readily seen. It lays the axe at the very root of that restlessness, that uneasy ambition, that natural instinct of jealousy, that covetousness forbidden in the Tenth Commandment. It goes even further than that. You may have observed that the blessing bestowed in Matthew on the “poor in spirit,” in Luke is directed simply to the “poor,” or “beggars,” as the word might be translated. Now Luke, it is fair to say, introduced a disturbing element into religion by his habit of giving this materialistic turn to spiritual graces. But it remains true, nevertheless, that this glorification—the word is scarcely too strong—of poverty, or at least of the freedom from material possessions, as in itself a state of blessedness, is a note not only of all the Gospels but of most of the other great religious books that have moved the world. Always Chrysostom, to refer again to the model Christian preacher, connects humility with the twin virtue of charity. And charity, as he commends it, is not so much an act of giving out of sympathy for the sufferings of the needy and downtrodden—though this feeling is not absent—as it is a voluntary act of surrendering our worldly possessions in the belief that in themselves they may be a snare to the spirit. For Chrysostom, in a very literal sense of the word, it was more blessed to give than to receive. If religion suffered discontent to abide in the heart of a man, it would not be because he owned too few of this world’s goods, or felt humiliated by his relative rank in society, but because the world was too much with him. For true content he should look to treasures laid up elsewhere and to riches that the eye of the flesh could not count.

So much for the religious motive of humility. Pleonexia, the driving force of the natural man, might be defined as its exact opposite. Etymologically, as an ethical term, pleonexia means simply the reaching out to grasp ever more and more, whether this impulse show itself in the grosser appetite for possessions, or in the ambition to overtop others in rank and honors, or in that universal craving which Hobbes regarded as the state of nature: “A general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” To call this the natural state of man might seem to involve a libel against both nature and man, but by natural, as you see, is meant only the condition of mankind if all those restraints were excluded which we have defined as religious. And such a liberty has never lacked its advocates as being not only the natural but the rational, even the ideal rule of conduct. It would be easy to prove this by abundant citations from modern writers; indeed, the name of Nietzsche leaps to one’s lips; but as I have already trespassed on your patience by the introduction of Greek terms into my definitions, I will presume further by going for my illustrations to the people who coined the expression. In one of the dialogues of Plato, then, you may hear a respectable citizen of Athens rebuking Socrates for his fantastic notions of conduct, and arguing for what was really the popular code of morality:

The makers of laws are the many weak; and they make laws and distribute praises and censures with a view to themselves and to their own interests; and they terrify the mightier sort of men, and those who are able to get the better of them, in order that they may not get the better of them; and they say that dishonesty is shameful and unjust; meaning, when they speak of injustice, the desire to have more (pleon echein) than their neighbors, for knowing their own inferiority they are only too glad of equality.... I plainly assert that he who would truly live ought to allow his desires to wax to the uttermost, and not to chastise them; but when they have grown to their greatest he should have courage and intelligence to minister to them and to satisfy all his longings. And this I affirm to be natural justice and nobility. But the many cannot do so; and, therefore, they blame such persons, because they are ashamed of their own inability, which they desire to conceal, and hence they say that intemperance is base.

This is manifestly the Hobbian view of the natural state of man, thought out long before Hobbes, not to mention the naturalists of our own day. And it was not theory only, but practice. Turn to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, which Hobbes translated, and from which, though this is not generally known, Hobbes borrowed the principles that stirred up the seventeenth century as Nietzsche troubled the nineteenth. Read there the famous debate between the envoys of Athens and the magistrates of Melos. The Athenians are advising the Melians, whose racial affinity was with Sparta, to submit their city to the empire of Athens; and to the Melians’ argument from justice they reply with cold-blooded candor:

“We tell you this, that we are here now both to enlarge our own dominions and also to confer about the saving of your city....” “But will you not accept?” plead the Melians, “that we remain quiet, and be your friends (whereas before we were your enemies), and take part with neither.” “No,” reply the Athenians, “for your enmity doth not so much hurt us as your friendship would be an argument of our weakness, and your hatred of our power, amongst those whom we bear rule over.... As for the favor of the gods, we expect to have it as well as you; for we neither do nor require anything contrary to what mankind hath decreed either concerning the worship of the gods or concerning themselves. For of the gods we think according to the common opinion; and of men that for certain, by necessity of nature, they will everywhere reign over such as they be too strong for. Neither did we make this law, nor are we the first that use it made, but as we found it, and shall leave it to posterity forever, so also we use it.”

Such was the philosophy of the natural man in ancient Greece, and such is the philosophy of the natural man to-day, however it may be disguised and glossed over; it is based on the instinctive motive of pleonexia, the “perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” I need not dwell on the kind of discontent it begets in the soul, a discontent intrinsically and totally opposite to that which accompanies the purely religious motive.

But you will say that these principles of conduct and the feelings that go with them are mere abstractions, fictions of the analytical reason; no man is, or can be, purely religious as I have defined the term, or purely naturalistic. And that is true, is in fact the point at which I am aiming. On the one hand, no man can utterly uproot the natural impulses out of his soul; and if a few men in a generation approach anywhere near it, the saints and martyrs and lonely sages, they are by their virtues cut off from the common life of mankind. Were all men, or even a considerable proportion of men, at any time to overcome the natural discontent that drives us on to seek greater possessions and higher honors and more power, then, surely, all ambition and invention would die, the wheels of progress would slacken and stop, civilization would fail, and society would sink back into barbarism, so far at least as we measure civilization and barbarism by physical standards. Such would be the issue of “content, the bane of industry.”

On the other hand, it will be said, and by none more loudly than by the champions of sentimental naturalism who belong to Mr.Dewey’s school, that the picture of the man controlled by the “perpetual and restless desire of power,” and by that alone, is a pure caricature of human nature. Even a Napoleon, they will say, who might stand for the model of such a monstrosity, yet had thought for the glory of his land, and was a great reformer of laws and institutions. So, too, the Athenian envoys in Thucydides, cynical as were their confessions of the desire of power to rule their own people and all peoples, nevertheless were compelled to mix some honey in their gall, and tried to persuade the Melians that the hegemony of Athens would be prudently exercised and would promote the well-being of her subject states.

Such an objection we readily grant. It is perfectly true that the creature in whom the instinct of greed and the lust of power should reign without modification or mitigation would be no man at all, but a ravening beast of prey. Both the religious man and the natural man, as I have portrayed them, are avowedly abstractions, at least to the extent that no society could exist if composed of either type in its purity. They are abstractions, but they are made such by abstracting one of the two contrasted impulses that do reign together in virtually every human breast, and by showing what would result if one of these impulses were so allowed an unhampered sway over a man’s conduct. And now and then, in some rare individual, the one or the other of these types has been realized almost in its purity, the religious type in a St.Francis of Assisi, with his ideals of poverty and chastity and obedience, the natural type, if not in a Napoleon or an Alexander, yet in certain notorious criminals who have raged through life with the ferocity of a starving wolf.

The truth we must recognize is that both these motives exist in the human heart, and that the conduct of man, not as the saint would see him in the cloister nor as the evolutionist would see him in the jungle, but as we see him in the market-place and the theatre and the courts and the home—that the conduct of man is a resultant from these two contrary impulsions.

Now, it is fair to say that religion has always recognized the legitimacy of another standard of life besides the one peculiarly its own. It has seen clearly that the ideal of poverty and chastity and obedience, which would uproot altogether the natural instincts, is possible for very few men, and that the attempt to enforce such a standard absolutely on society at large would result in a world of hypocrisies, if it did not actually run counter to the command of the Creator. So the Christian Church, even in its most ascetic days, admitted that property and marriage and prestige were the normal condition of life; and Buddhism drew up two distinct tables of law, one for the religious state pure and simple, the other for the mass of mankind who are engaged in practical affairs. But both Christianity and Buddhism held that the natural instincts were ruinous if left to themselves, and that they became salutary instruments of welfare only when limited and softened and illuminated by a law not of themselves.

On the contrary, it is of the very essence of naturalism that it should admit no standard but its own. To a naturalist and materialist of the true type all the ideal philosophy of the past, with the religion which grows out of it, is a lying cheat of the imagination and corresponds to nothing real in the nature of things; its peace is a pitiful sham cherished by those who are too cowardly to face the facts; its promise to mitigate the harsher passions of greed is only a cunning pretext devised to blind the dispossessed of their rights and to fortify the owners of wealth and power in the unmolested enjoyment of their criminal advantages. From the very beginning the double standard of things spiritual and material has been the foe of progress, and only then will justice and peace and prosperity prevail, when the deceptions of priest and philosopher are swept away and our vision of material values, as known to the scientist in his laboratory and to the blacksmith at his forge, is not confused by false lights. This, I repeat, is no caricature of the sort of naturalistic pragmatism that is sweeping over the world.

I would not imply that all these enemies of religion, or even those of them who are most influential to-day, are conscious advocates of a pitiless egotism or believe that the repudiation of religion would throw mankind into that anarchy of internecine warfare which Hobbes described as the state of nature, or which Nietzsche glorified as the battle-field of the superman. It is rather the mark of modern naturalism that it is plastered up and down, swathed and swaddled, masked and disguised, with sentimentalisms. A Dewey, for instance, wields his influence over the young and troubled minds of our generation because he stands forth as a reformer with a precious panacea for the calamities of history. It is the dream of another realm, such reformers declare, that has riveted upon us the chains of lethargy and despair; shatter these, let men become aware of their real nature, let them see that the only truth is to recognize this life as all they have, and that their only hope of happiness is to get together and increase the physical comforts of existence—let this once come to pass, and at last a peace born of universal benevolence will settle down upon this long-vexed planet. Sympathy, they maintain, is a natural instinct of the heart, as surely as the lust of power and possessions; rather, it is the genuine basis of nature, and of itself will control the other natural instincts if unhampered by false ideals. That is a pretty faith; but is it true? No doubt the human heart is swayed by sympathy and benevolence; but are these the qualities of the natural man? I will not go into the answer given to this question by the religious minds from Plato down to Cardinal Newman, who all with one accord assert that sympathy and benevolence of an active sort do not spring up from the soil of nature, but result from the reaching down, so to speak, of a higher principle into the lusts of the flesh. They all maintain, with one voice, that the only effective bond of union, whether it be of friendship or of society, is through our perception of oneness in the spirit. Mercy droppeth down as a gentle dew from heaven. I will not argue from this thesis, because it would carry us into the brier patch of metaphysics. But history and science both would seem to enforce the bitter conviction that at the best the instinct of natural sympathy is a fragile and treacherous support against the assaults of a restless and perpetual desire of power. Greece learnt this, to her frightful ruin, when she followed the law of nature as avowed by the Athenians at Melos; and to-day we have rediscovered it in the same desolation of war. That, I fear, is the lesson of history. And science has no different lesson. Indeed, by the natural man I would signify precisely the realization, if such were possible, of the principle of natural selection and the survival of the fittest by which the world is governed as the scientist, the natural philosopher, as he used to be called, sees it when he eliminates the religious idea from his view. I mean nothing more than what Huxley, the protagonist of evolutionary philosophy, meant when, in his essay on The Struggle for Existence, he thus described the law of nature as actually seen in operation:

And I think, if you look closely into the social theory based on the naturalistic, or let us say the purely economic, view of life, you will find that beneath its mask of sentimental sympathy the reality is a face of greed and animal rapacity. According to this theory, progress is a result of discontent. Because men are discontented with their present state they push out for something better. And no doubt in a half-way that is true. But when discontent is associated with material standards alone, and purchasable comfort, and worldly opportunity, or, to put the matter in its most favorable light, when success and the goal of achievement are measured by the pleasures, however you may refine them, and by the pride of a few brief years of physical existence, beyond which there is nothing, and when for failure in these no compensation is held out, no supernatural hope, no refuge of peace, here and now, such as the world cannot give—when the driving force of progress is so presented, what is there in the nature of things to offer in the long run any effective resistance to the innate desire of power after power that ends only with death? What equal counterpoise will you set against that instinct of pleonexia which reaches out for ever more and more?

Philosophy is full of mockeries. These honorable gentlemen who are teaching a pure naturalism in the schoolroom, who denounce the content of religion and other-worldly philosophy as a base acquiescence, who in the restlessness of an itching egotism go out as missionaries to the people of the far Orient, may deceive themselves and may try to deceive us; their language may be sleek with the sentiment of brotherly love, but strip off its disguise, and the social theory they are proclaiming will leer forth in its true face as an incentive not to progress but to the anarchy of the jungle. These men are distilling into society a discontent that knows no satisfaction, that must engender only bitterness of disappointment and mutual distrust and hatred, and that in the end, if not checked by other motives, will bring about internecine warfare and a suicide of civilization of which the hideous years through which we have just passed are a warning admonition. And these teachers have the field to-day. We applaud them for their pretensions of philanthropy, even when we doubt the utility of their philosophy. We are browbeaten by the volume of their noisy propaganda. We are mealy-mouthed and afraid to speak out in open denunciation, even when secretly we burn with indignation at the baseness of their words. We sulk in silence, as if we had nothing to say. Meanwhile they have had the field to themselves, and the world every day is more filled with fear and disquiet.

There is no danger that by opposing other views of life to this insolent naturalism we shall put an end to that normal discontent with material conditions which may be a necessary incentive to natural and social progress. Certainly, however it may have been at other times, we need apprehend no such danger now. In a world manifestly distracted and blown from its moorings, in a society seething already with envy, it is not the part of wisdom to sow broadcast words that are calculated to inflame discontent into passionate hatred or sullen despair. That way leads to madness. What we need is rather a clearer perception of, and a firmer insistence on, those immaterial values which it is within the power of every man to make his own, whatever may be the seeming injustice of his material condition. We need rather to emphasize the simple truth that poverty is not the only, or indeed the worst, of mortal evils, that happiness does not consist mainly in the things which money can buy, that the man of narrow means may enrich himself with treasures which only he can give to himself, and which no one can take from him, that the purest satisfaction is in the sense of work honestly done and duties well met, and a mind and conscience at ease with itself. Even to the very poor, if such must be, religion may offer manifold compensations. “Blessed be ye poor,” it was said, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” Shall we say that these words were spoken in ignorance or jest or mockery? I think not. We for the moment may have lost the key to their meaning, we may have listened to teachers who turn them into ridicule; nevertheless, they are true words, rich with a gift of solid content.

But it is not the less fortunate and the poor alone, or I might even say chiefly, who need to hear the precepts which the new philosophy is drowning with its clamorous tongue. If the home of theoretical materialism is in the lecture-rooms of philosophy, the home of practical materialism is in the offices of Wall Street. If there is any truth that needs to be reiterated to-day, it is the simple truth that a man may heap up riches and increase his power indefinitely, and command all the visible sources of pleasure, and still be a poor, mean creature, a mere beggar in the veritable joys and honors of life. He that has many possessions needs be a strong man to escape their strangling grip. They wrap him about, they color all his thinking, they hang like a heavy curtain, as it were, between himself and his soul. You have heard the saying: “It is easier for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”; that is a hard lesson, but in reality it is only an Oriental way of expressing what Plato had taught long before in the Academy: “Neither when one has his heart set on gaining money, save by fair means, or even is at ease with such gaining, does he then bestow gifts of honor upon his soul; rather, he degrades it thereby, selling what is precious and fair in the soul at the price of a little gold, whereas all the gold on the earth and under the earth is not equal in value to virtue.” That is the invariable lesson of religion and the idealistic philosophy. Certainly, it is a truth we shall not recover by listening to the words of the new naturalism. It is not by a philosophy that preaches social discontent as the means of progress, and measures content by material values, however it may disguise the banality of its aims in a sentimental philanthropy—it is not by such a philosophy that justice and mercy and humility shall be imposed upon the natural pride of those who have the larger share of this world’s goods.

It is true that religion, or religious philosophy, as its friends and foes have seen from the beginning, is an alleviator of discontent and a brake upon innovation; but the content it offers from the world of immaterial values is a necessary counterpoise to the mutual envy and materialistic greed of the natural man, and the conservatism it inculcates is not the ally of sullen and predatory privilege but of orderly amelioration.