"And He saw that it was good…."

Throughout the Universe which He had created He set a Great Road, and on it was Man, at first invisible, but soon an infinite multitude. And then unto Man, as to nothing else in His Universe, He gave the power to move, and to walk on the Road, which He made to pass through all the Great and Beautiful Worlds, coming at last to where He is, where all is happy because all is good, and where nothing ends because there is the End. And as He looked and beheld Man scattered out upon the great Road as it wound about through the Universe, He thought to try His people, and show by a certain proof whether they were possessed of the goodness through which alone they could comprehend all things, and become able to enter the realm of perfect goodness. And so He sent the semblance of a great Fire into the Universe, which should seem utterly to destroy all things which He had made, and to cut off the hope and possibility of a future perception and life eternal.

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As the fire rolls on, devouring all that it meets, humanity on the Road sees its advance, and realises that in the course of a few hours the Universe will be reduced to a smouldering cinder, that its hopes for a future life, where the Road ends, is cut short and never to be realised, and that apparently its former belief, albeit a vague and ill-defined one, in a God who is all-merciful and kind, was altogether an illusion, and merely a cause for false confidence and self-righteousness. And how will it stand the test? Would the good or the bad element in human nature assert itself in the face of absolute annihilation? It is obvious that with such a position several of the possible and no doubt ordinary motives for goodness, such as the idea of doing good in order to reap benefits or escape punishment in a future existence, and of doing good for the sake of having it recognised among others, are excluded from the proposition. Even the idea of doing good because it is in accordance with a "will of God" is excluded, since the idea of destruction coming from the direction of the End is unheard of to man, and is in direct contradiction to his ideas of God. We are brought, therefore, down to the very foundation; and the question we have to answer becomes—Is one of the elements of human nature a feeling of necessity to pursue goodness for its own sake, quite apart from any motives?

In the first place, when a supreme danger such as that already described is rapidly approaching humanity, if such a thing could be, what would be the immediate result? We know that with the ordinary dangers, such as shipwreck and air-raid, the tendency among people gathered together in large numbers is to panic, to herd together and become temporarily deprived of normal reasoning powers. Would this be the result of the sight of approaching universal destruction? Surely not. Panic is the result, I believe, not of approaching danger simply, but necessarily of a danger which threatens to affect some of a number of people more than others, and which there is a possibility of avoiding. It is entirely the element of uncertainty or suspense which causes panic among numbers of people. Now this is an important point in the argument. It seems very easy to defeat it on the grounds that animals almost invariably herd together and panic in the face of danger, and that such action cannot be due to the element of uncertainty and suspense, since this necessitates the employment of calculative and reasoning faculties which animals presumably do not possess. The justification is to be found in a closer examination of the part played by the uncertainty in producing the panic which is common to men and animals. In the face of danger, as in everything else, man's first instinct is to reason and calculate, and his calculation results in finding the danger either avoidable and uncertain, which is almost always the case, or unavoidable and inevitable. If the danger is found avoidable, fear is the immediate result. Fear as we know it has come into being with reason, but at the same time, as will be seen later, it is only reason which can triumph over and destroy fear. This fear then brings about the destruction of reason, and the animal standard is reached, from which time the man behaves in the same way as the animals, to whom the danger is merely something out of the ordinary. He then comes under the domination of the instinct to panic. It will thus be seen that all the mental processes which came before the reversion to the animal standard in men, are unknown to animals, and are the outcome of the purely human faculty of reason. However, if reason can by any means retain its foothold and its entirety, there will neither be fear nor the consequent breakdown of reason and the domination of panic. Now this is the position in the other case, the case in which reason finds the danger unavoidable. In the case of a danger which is unavoidable there will be no panic. It is this fact which accounts for the bravery of numbers of people going to their death on board a sinking ship; but such a position has never—or very seldom, indeed—avoided a relapse, to a certain extent, to panic, inasmuch as there is a possibility of avoiding the danger, and a possibility that some may survive, while others are doomed to perish.

In the face of universal destruction, therefore, there will be no fear and no panic. The fact that he is facing annihilation together with the rest of humanity would have an extraordinary influence on each individual, which, of course, would be just the same if he alone was aware of the danger. I remember very well an evening at school when I was told and convinced by several boys older than myself that (I even remember the date) on June 18th the earth was going to be destroyed. It had been proved, I was told, beyond the shadow of a doubt that on that particular date some natural phenomenon would take place which would inevitably entail the destruction of everything living on the earth. This forms an interesting parallel to the present case; for at the time I was only about eight years old, and I had very scanty ideas about God and future life. To me the earth was the Universe. And, furthermore, for about an hour most of us thoroughly believed that the destruction of the earth, or the End of the World as we called it, was at hand. Of course, it might be said that there is no real parallel, since we were only children; but I believe that argument to be absolutely fallacious. In the matter of fundamental tendencies and characteristics of human nature one cannot assume such divisions. Since the present state of good and evil in human nature has taken thousands of years to become evolved, it seems unlikely that there can be caused in the individual at present any fundamental change. I therefore contend that as soon as personality and independence of character becomes evident in the individual, both the good and the evil in his nature will be present in the same way and in the same relation, although not necessarily in the same proportions or degrees, as they will be throughout the greater part of his life. This personality becomes evident without any doubt at a very early age, certainly by the age of eight; and in so far as the development of good and evil is dependent upon the development of character, it seems likely that these elements will be more clearly marked in the child of eight than in the second infancy of the man of eighty.

To return to the personal incident. I recall very vividly now the half-hour which followed my conviction of Universal destruction, and, of course, I realise my actual feelings and their probable causes more clearly now than I did at the time. The real force of my conviction only lasted for about an hour, but in that time, and aided no doubt by a rather strained imagination, I was, I feel convinced, in the same position as any one of the individuals on that great Road as they see the Fire approaching and devouring the entire Universe.

As the affair was being explained to me I remember I was terrified, but very soon, and as soon as I realised the situation, which it must be remembered the people on the Road would do almost instantaneously, this feeling entirely left me. And the next feeling, a very forcible one, was rather extraordinary, being as it was an overpowering feeling of solitude. It was evening, and twenty or thirty of us were all in a large classroom together, and for many minutes I felt more lonely than I ever had before; I felt cut off from all those around me, and I see that, as Peer Gynt would have said, "I had become myself." As has already been said, I was not frightened, and what I did in those minutes was to work. It was "prep-time," and it is an interesting fact, as bearing out what has already been said both about the establishment of individuality with consequent opportunities of concentration, and also about the maintenance of reason, that I was able to "do" in those minutes, and do better than usual, the work that generally demanded more than the allotted hour.

Very soon, however, the feeling of solitude passed away and its place was taken by a feeling of exactly the opposite nature, a feeling of Unity, of extraordinary fellowship, followed by a wonderful sensation of happiness. All this sounds rather grotesque, and the continued use of these rather meaningless epithets is very ineffectual in expressing what they are meant to convey. But it must be remembered that the position is altogether an extraordinary one; and the feelings and sensations resulting from such a position were extraordinary at the time and still are extraordinary. The position seems quite unique; it is difficult to imagine where and how else that same mental condition could be produced: older people would not have credited the story even for the short time that we did, and younger children would not have had the independence of thought and imagination to picture and contemplate the situation. At the time it was my good fortune to experience things which I have never experienced before or since, and which I believe few ever have experienced.

However, you ask for a return to the question of whether goodness is an immanent reality in human nature; you ask perhaps, in view of the incident described, "If it had been in your power to do something at that time which was supremely pleasurable but at the same time contrary to your moral ideas, would you have done it?" The answer, which is mainly contained in or drawn from what has gone before is—No; and the direct reason is, because, in the conditions produced by the position described, nothing but what is good remains in the human nature. The bed-rock has been reached, and it is good; the causes of evil and of its continuance are removed.

Ever since man has led a corporate life it seems probable that one outstanding evil has prevailed, in greater or less degrees according to the rate and amount of progress made by any community. And this evil is the lack and suppression of individuality. It seems impossible to account for it, except by simply saying that it is, and has always been a characteristic tendency of human nature; however, this is the most encouraging answer possible, because it assumes that this evil can eventually be eradicated. No one can surely deny that there is a lack of individuality at present; its chief manifestations, of course, are to be found in hatred, and in the spirit of competition and rivalry; it produces a clash between individual opinions and actions which is so apparent that it cannot be denied, and need not be enlarged upon. But, apart from these more obvious manifestations, this failing has been responsible for the production and continuance of all that is evil in man. Human nature is the foundation of our life, of that foundation every individual is entitled to partake; and, furthermore, that foundation is good. Every individual possesses a portion of this foundation as his right; and what is the result, under these circumstances, of lack of individuality? Surely the result is that some parts of those individual sections, parts which are in some cases similar to and in other cases different from parts of other individual sections, are used as the foundation, while the remainder is left unused. For, for the most part, men either employ those parts of their portion of the foundation of goodness which are common to as many other individual sections as possible, or, like Alceste, the parts which are definitely opposed to most others. In any case where the foundation is undeveloped and unused there grows, like a poisonous growth, sin, which is made of and feeds upon the material of the good foundation, which has been put to the wrong use. Sin and evil are not separate, in the strict sense, from good. It seems inconceivable that good and evil should have had different origins, and should have existed as rival elements in human nature without the one having by this time triumphed over the other.

In matters which affect every member of a body similarly, the combined influence of all those members should be brought to bear; but where every individual can "be himself" and interpret and use his portion of the foundation of goodness in the complete way for which he was made and intended, without affecting others, he should be allowed to influence them or be influenced by them, without interference on the part of any other individual. Since this has not been the case, we have had the continuance of sin, and until it is the case, there always will be sin.

Now, in the position described, complete individuality is established and evil ceases to exist and becomes a thing of the past. With the near prospect of universal destruction, there is immediately a cessation of progress; and then, as in the incident described, there comes complete individuality—every individual becomes himself. With a common destruction inevitable and with the establishment of individuality, co-operation in its true sense prevails, and with it the surpassing and disappearance of evil; and then that wonderful happiness … of all this I am convinced. I remember well the effect for an hour or so among a few of us that evening. The contrast between the atmosphere in the little room in which the most impressed of us gathered during that time, which was free, I know, from everything but good, and that of a day or two later when we made fun of the whole affair, is so marked that my opinion on the matter is very definite.

Goodness alone there was at the beginning, and goodness alone there will be at the end. No man is the cause of his own downfall, but he alone as an individual can be the maintainer of his foothold. Individuality in all that concerns the individual, alone can make and keep life clean and sweet. If this individuality could, by such means as education, be established, there would be constituted a uniting force through humanity which could lead it, in the course of time, in the way it should go.

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And as He raised the semblance of the Fire from the Universe, He looked upon Man and saw that he was good.

J. A. A. J.