Chapter IV (5)

If a farmer's son is occasionally born who hates farming and loves music, and who ultimately through the force of his desire (driving him into oppositions and difficulties and penurious struggles) transforms himself into a musician, is it not also likely that occasionally an animal is born who hates the customs of his tribe, and at last (also through struggles) transforms himself into something else? Even if he does not succeed (the animal) in entirely transforming himself, he likely transmits the desire in some degree to his descendants, and the transformation is thus carried on and completed later. For everywhere among the animals there _is_ desire, of some kind or another, obviously acting; and if in man, by our own experience, desire is the precursor and first expression of growth, is there any reason why it should not also be so among animals? Lamarck gives the instance--among others--of a gasteropod; how the need or desire of touching bodies in front of it as it crawled along would result in the formation of tentacles. The gasteropod, he says, would keep making efforts to feel with the front of its head, and the determination of consciousness that way would be accompanied by a supply of nervous and other fluids, which would nourish the part and cause growth there--the _form_ of the growth continuing in the same way to be determined by need--till at last two or more tentacles would appear. True, the inward determinations of consciousness may not be so vivid and varied in animals as they are in men; but they are persistent, and by the very cumulative force of habit which is so strong in animals, must at length penetrate down through function into organisation and external form. Who shall say that the lark, by the mere love of soaring and singing in the face of the sun, has not altered the shape of its wings, or that the forms of the shark or of the gazelle are not the long-stored results of character leaning always in certain directions, as much as the forms of the miser or the libertine are among men?

Such modification as this is very different from the "survival of the fittest" of the Darwinian evolution theory. We may fairly suppose that both kinds of modification take place; but the latter is a sort of easy success won by an external accident of birth--a success of the kind that would readily be lost again; while the former is the uphill fight of a nature that has grown inwardly and wins expression for itself in spite of external obstacles--an expression which therefore is likely to be permanent. If the progenitors of man took to going upright on two legs instead of on all fours, merely because a few of them by _chance_ were born with a talent for that position, which enabled them to escape the fanged and pursuing beasts, then when this danger was removed they might have plumped down again into the old attitude; but if the change was part and parcel of a true evolution, the fulfilment of a positive desire for the upright position, a true _unfolding_ of a higher form latent within--an organic growth of the creature itself, then, though the moment of the evolution of this particular faculty might be determined by the fanged beasts, the fact of such evolution could not be determined by them. Besides, are we to suppose that Man, the lord and ruler of the animals, came merely by way of _escape_ from the animals? Do lords and rulers generally come so? Was it fear that made him a man? Were it not likelier that in that case he would have turned into a worm? He would have escaped better perhaps that way. Is it not rather probable that it was some nobler power that worked transforming--some dim desire and prevision of a more perfect form, the desire itself being the first consciousness of the urge of growth in that direction--that prompted him to push in the one direction rather than the other when he had to hold his own against the tigers? In fact is it not thus to-day, when a man has to meet danger, that the ideal which he has within him determines _how_ he shall meet that danger, and others like it, and so ultimately determines the whole attitude and carriage of his body?

On the whole then, judging from man himself (and it seems most cautious and scientific to derive our main evidence from the being that we are best acquainted with), it certainly seems to me that, though the external conditions are a very important factor in Variation, the central explanation of this phenomenon should be sought in an inner law of Growth--a law of expansion more or less common to all animate nature. Partly because, as said before, the unfolding of the creature from its own needs and inward nature is an organic process, and likely to be persistent, while its modification by external causes must be more or less fortuitous and accidental and sometimes in one direction and sometimes in another; partly also because the movement from within outwards seems to be most like the law of creation in general. Under this view the external conditions would be considered a secondary--though important cause of modification; and regarded rather as the influences that give form and detail to the great primal impulse of growth from within; while the creature's own ingenuity and good luck would occupy the ground between the two--as the means whereby the external conditions in each individual case would be turned to account to satisfy the inner needs, or the inner life would be accommodated to the external conditions.

If we take the external view of Variation--which is the one most favoured by modern science--modification or race-growth appears as an unconscious or accretive process, similar to the formation of a coral reef. There is no line of growth native in the race itself, but at any moment it is supposed to have an equal tendency to vary in any direction. Surrounding conditions act selectively; and by a process of weeding out certain types survive; small successive modifications are thus accumulated; and gradually and in the lapse of ages a more pliable and differentiated creature, and more adaptable to a variety of conditions, is produced--in whom however mind is incidental, and has played but small part in the creature's evolution. This in the main is the Darwinian-evolution theory.

If we take the internal view, growth is from the first eminently conscious. Every change begins in the mental region--is felt first as a desire gradually taking form into thought, passes down into the bodily region, expresses itself in action (more or less dependent on conditions), and finally solidifies itself in organisation and structure. The process is not accretive, but exfoliatory--a continual movement from within outwards. When the desire or mental condition, which at first was painfully conscious, has overcome opposition and established itself in altered bodily structure, it has done its work, and becomes unconscious--the bodily function continuing for a long period to act automatically, till finally it is thrown off to make room for some later development. Thus race-growth or Variation is a process by which change begins in the mental region, passes into the bodily region where it becomes organised, and finally is thrown off like a husk. This may be called the theory of Exfoliation.

To illustrate our meaning. Let us take the development of an eye. In the amoeba there is a dim pervasive sensitiveness to light over the whole body, but there is no eye, nothing that we should call vision. Still this vague sensitiveness is of use to the amoeba. The shadow of its prey falling upon the creature and exciting a sensation hardly yet differentiated from touch helps to guide its movements. On this dim sensation it relies to some extent; its attention is directed towards it. Gradually, and in some descendant form, there comes to be a point on the body on which this attention is most specially concentrated. The faculty is localised; and from that moment a change is effected there, a differentiation and a special structure; everything that favours sensitiveness is encouraged at that place, everything that dulls it is removed; and before long--there is a rudimentary eye. To-day we use our perfected eyes, and are hardly conscious that we are doing so; but every power of vision that we have was thus won for us by some lowlier creature, step by step, with effort and with concentration. Or to take an illustration from society. To-day society is ill at ease; a dim feeling of discontent pervades all ranks and classes. A new sense of justice, of fraternity, has descended among us, which is not satisfied with mere chatter of demand and supply. For a long time this new sentiment or desire remains vague and unformed, but at last it resolves itself into shape; it takes intellectual form, books are written, plans formed; then after a time definite new organisations, for the distinct purpose of expressing these ideas, begin to exist in the body of the old society; and before so very long the whole outer structure of society will have been reorganised by them. After a few centuries the ideas for whose realisation we now fight and struggle with an intense consciousness will have become commonplace, accepted institutions, more or less effete and ready to succumb before fresh mental births taking place from within.

The modern evolution theory would maintain that among many amoebas and descendant forms, one would at last by chance be born having the usual sensitiveness localised in a particular spot, and, surviving by force of this advantage, would transmit this "eye" to its posterity; or that in the progress of society, new economic conditions having arisen, that people would prosper best which most effectually and rapidly adapted itself to them. But though there is doubtless truth in this view, yet it seems, when all has been said, to be inadequate and even feeble; it omits at least one half of the problem. If we look at ourselves, as already pointed out, we see the two forces--the inner and the outer--acting and re-acting on each other. May it not be so in animals? Lamarck, poorly off, blind, derided, was a true poet. "Animals vary from low and primitive types chiefly by dint of wishing"--and the world laughed and still laughs. But it was his deep sympathy even with the worms and insects (which he studied till he could discern them with his mortal eyes no longer) that led Lamarck to see the human nature and the human laws that moved within them; and as his outward sight grew dim there arose before him the inward vision of the true relationship which binds together all living creatures--which was indeed a vision of divine things, and as different from the mere mechanism-theory of the survival of the fittest as the sight of the starry heavens is different from a governess's lesson on the use of the globes.

On the theory of Exfoliation, which was practically Lamarck's theory, there is a force at work throughout creation, ever urging each type onward into new and newer forms. This force appears first in consciousness in the form of _desire_. Within each shape of life sleep needs and wants without number, from the lowest and simplest to the most complex and ideal. As each new desire or ideal is evolved, it brings the creature into conflict with its surroundings, then gaining its satisfaction externalises itself in the structure of the creature, and leaves the way open for the birth of a new ideal. If then we would find a key to the understanding of the expansion and growth of all animate creation, such a key may exist in the nature of desire itself and the comprehension of its real meaning. It is not certain that it can be found here; but it may be.

What then is desire in Man? Here we come back again, as suggested at the outset, to Man himself. Though we see pretty clearly that desire is at work in the animals, and that it is the same in kind as exists in man, still, among the animals it is but dim and inchoate, while in man it is developed and luminous; in ourselves, too, we know it immediately, while in the animals only by inference. For both reasons, therefore, if we want to know the nature of desire--even to know its nature among animals--we should study it in Man. What then is this desire in Man, which seems to be the instigation and origin of all his growth and development? At first it seems a hydra-headed senseless thing without rhyme or reason; but the more one regards it the more clearly one sees that even in its lowest forms it is steadily building up and liberating all the functions of the human being. In its most perfect form--as in what we call Love--it is the sum and solution of human activities, that in which they converge, for which they all exist, and without which they would be considered useless. The more you look into this matter, the plainer it becomes. The lesser desires--the self-preservation desires--hunger, thirst, the desire of power--exist, but when they are satisfied they empty themselves into this one; they find their interpretation in it. The other desires are nothing by themselves--the most absorbing, avarice, ambition, desire of knowledge, taken alone, stultify themselves--but love perpetuates itself; it is a flame which uses all the rest as its fuel. And this Love, which is the culmination of desire, does it not appear to us as a worship of and desire for the human form? In our bodies a desire for the bodily human form; in our interior selves a perception and worship of an ideal human form, the revelation of a Splendour dwelling in others, which--clouded and dimmed as it inevitably may come to be--remains after all one of the most real, perhaps the most real, of the facts of existence? Desire, therefore--as it exists in man, look at it how you will--as it unfolds and its ultimate aim becomes clearer and clearer to itself, is seen to be the desire and longing for the deliverance and expression of the real human Being. May it not, must it not, be the same thing in animals and all through creation? Beginning in the most elementary and dim shapes, does it not grow through all the stages of organic life clearer and more and more powerful, till at last it attains to self-consciousness in humanity and becomes avowedly the leading factor in our development?

The desire which runs through creation is one desire. Rudimentary at first and hardly conscious of itself, throwing out a tentacle here, a foot there, developing an eye, a claw, a nostril, a wing, it seeks in innumerable shapes and with ever partial success to realise the image it has dimly conceived. The animal kingdom is the gymnasium, the school, the antechamber, of humanity; to walk through a zoological garden is to see the inchoate types of man, perched on branches, or browsing grass, or boring holes in the ground; it is to witness a grand rehearsal of some stupendous part, whose character we do not even yet fully see or understand. From such half-conscious beginnings the desire grows, its aim becomes clearer, till in the higher animals--the horse, the dog, the elephant, the bird, and many others--it becomes a marked and unmistakable force drawing them close to man, uniting them to him in a kind of acknowledged kinship, and as obviously at work modifying their structure as can be. Finally in man himself it becomes an absorbing power; love becomes a conscious worship of the divine form; generation itself is the means whereby, in time, the supreme object of desire is realised. When at last the perfect Man appears, the key to all nature is found, every creature falls into its place and finds its Interpreter, and the purpose of creation is at last made manifest.

The Theory of Exfoliation then differs from that very specialised form of Evolution which has been adopted by modern science, in this particular among others: that it fixes the attention on that which appears last in order of Time, as the most important in order of causation, rather than on that which appears first; and recalls to us the fact that often in any succession of phenomena, that which is first in order of precedence and importance is the last to be externalised. Thus in the growth of a plant we find leaf after leaf appearing, petal within petal--a continual exfoliation of husks, sepals, petals, stamens and what-not; but the object of all this movement, and that which in a sense sets it all in motion, namely the seed, is the very last thing of all to be manifested. Or when a volcano breaks out--first of all we have a cracking and upheaval of superficial layers of ground, then of layers below these, then the outflow of lava, and _last of all_ the uprush of the inner fires and forces which set it all agoing. What appears first in time, or in the outer world is--in the case of the building of a house, the making of bricks; in the case of the flower, the outermost bracts; in the case of a volcano, the stirring of the surface of the ground; and in the case of Life on the Earth, the appearance of protoplasms and primordial cells. The bricks are not the cause of the house (if indeed the word "cause" should be used here at all) but rather the house--or the conception of the house--is the cause of the bricks; and the cells are not the origin of Man, but Man is the original of the cells. The rationale of sea-anemones and mud-fish and flying foxes and elephants has to be looked for in man: he alone underlies them. And man is not a vertebrate because his ancestors were vertebrate; but the animals are vertebrate, because or in so far as they are forerunners and offshoots of Man.

It has been frequently said that great material changes are succeeded by intellectual and finally by moral revolutions--as the conquests of Alexander passed on into the literary expansion of the Alexandrian schools and thence into the establishment of Christianity, or as the mechanical developments of our own time have been followed by immense literary and scientific activities, and are obviously passing over now into a great social regeneration; but a reconsideration of the matter might, I take it, lead us not so much to look on the later changes as _caused_ by the earlier, as to look on the earlier as the indications and first outward and visible signs of the coming of the later. When a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral fact, he sees plainly enough that that fact cannot come into the actual world all at once--not without first a destruction of the existing order of society--such a destruction as makes him feel satanic; then an intellectual revolution; and lastly only, a new order embodying the new impulse. When this new impulse has thoroughly materialised itself, then after a time will come another inward birth, and similar changes will be passed through again. So it might be said that the work of each age is not to build _on_ the past, but to rise _out_ of the past and throw it off; only of course in such matters where all forms of thought are inadequate it is hard to say that one way of looking at the subject is truer than another. As before, we should endeavour to look at the thing from different sides.

We are obliged to use images to think by--_e.g._ the opening of a flower or the accretive growth of a coral reef--and possibly it would save a good deal of trouble if we did not disguise by long words the truth that all our theories in science and philosophy are simply metaphors of this kind--but the _fact_ still lies behind and below them.

Perhaps, if we are to use the word Cause at all, we should do well to use it in the old sense in which the _final_ cause and the _efficient_ cause are one (the _eidos_ of Aristotle)--to use it not so much to link phenomena or externals to _each other_ as to link each phenomenon in a group to the thought or feeling which underlies that group. The notes in the Dead March in Saul, for instance. We cannot say that one note is the cause of another, but we might say that each note stands in a causal subordination to the feeling which inspired the piece--which is the _origin_ of the piece and the _result_ of its performance--the alpha and omega of it. Similarly, the ground floor in a house is not the cause of the first floor, nor the first floor of the second floor, nor that of the roof; but these actualities and the whole house itself stand in strict relationship to a mental something which is not in the same plane with them at all, nor an actuality in the same sense.

According to this view the notion that one configuration of atoms or bodies determines the next configuration turns out to be illusive. Both configurations are determined by a third something which does not belong to quite the same order of existence as the said atoms or bodies. Chance "laws" of succession may doubtless be found among physical events, and are valuable for practical purposes, but at any moment--owing to their superficiality--they may fail. Thus, an insect observing the expansion of the petals of a chrysanthemum might frame a law of their order of succession in size and colour, which would be valid for a time, but would fail entirely when the stamens appeared. Or, to take another illustration, physical science acts like a man trying to find direct causal relations between the various leaves of a tree, without first finding the relations of these to the branches and trunk--and so solving the problem indirectly. It deals only with the _surface_ of the world of Man.

In thinking about such matters, Music, as Schopenhauer shows, is wonderfully illustrative, because in creating music man recognises that he is creating a world of his own--apart from and not to be confused with that other world of Nature (in which he does not recognise any of his handiwork). Supposing a non-musical person were to examine and analyse the score of a Beethoven symphony, he would be in the same position as a man examining and analysing Nature by purely scientific or intellectual methods. He would discover the recurrence of certain groups among the notes, he would establish laws of their sequences, would make all kinds of curious generalisations about them, and point out some remarkable exceptions, would even very likely be able to predict a bar or two over the page; his treatise would be very learned, and from a certain point of view interesting also, but how far would he be from any real understanding of his subject? Let him change his method: let him train his ear, let him hear the symphony performed, over and over, till he understands its meaning and knows it by heart; and then he will know at any rate something of why each note is there, he will see its fitness and feel in himself the "law" of its occurrence, and possibly in some new case will be able to predict several bars over the page! The symphony is not understood by examination and comparison of the notes alone, but by _experience_ of their relation to deepest feelings; and Nature is not explained by laws, but by its becoming--or rather being felt to be--the body of Man; marvellous interpreter and symbol of his inward being.

There is a kind of knowledge or consciousness in us--as of our bodily parts, or affections, or deep-seated mental beliefs--which forms the base of our more obvious and self-conscious thought. This systemic knowledge grows even while the brain sleeps. It is not by any means absolute or infallible, but it affords, at any moment in man's history, the axiomatic ground on which his thought-structures, scientific and other, are built. Thus the axioms of Euclid are part of our present systemic knowledge, and afford the ground of all our geometry structures. But as the systemic consciousness grows, the ground shifts and the structures reared upon it fall. All our modern science, for instance, is founded on the acceptation of mechanical cause and effect as a basic fact of consciousness; but when that base gives way the entire structure will cave in, and a new edifice will have to be reared. Similarly, when the human form becomes distinctly visible to us in the animals--as an unavoidable part of our consciousness--this consciousness will form a new base or axiom for all our thought on the subject, and the theory of evolution, as hitherto conceived by science, will be entirely transformed.

Thus, although the experimental investigatory coral-reef accretion method of modern science is very valuable within its range, it must not be forgotten that the human mind does not progress more than temporarily by this method--that its progression is a matter of growth from within, and involves a continual _breaking away of the bases_ of all thought-structures; so that, while this latter--_i.e._, the progression of the systemic consciousness of man--is necessary and continuous, the rise and fall of his thought-systems is accidental, so to speak, and discontinuous.

It is then finally in Man--in our own deepest and most vital experience--that we have to look for the key and explanation of the changes that we see going on around us in external Nature, as we call it; and our understanding of the latter, and of History, must ever depend from point to point on the exfoliation of new facts in the individual consciousness. Round the ultimate disclosure of the essential Man all creation (hitherto groaning and travailing towards that perfect birth) ranges itself, as it were, like some vast flower, in concentric cycles; rank beyond rank; first all social life and history, then the animal kingdom, then the vegetable and mineral worlds. And if the outer circles have been the first in fact to show themselves, it is by this last disclosure that light is ultimately thrown on the whole plan; and, as in the myth of the Eden-garden, with the appearance of the perfected human form that the work of creation definitely completes itself.

FOOTNOTE:

[39] This does not, of course, preclude the action of external conditions, or imply that organisation is determined by desire _alone_. In fact organisation may be regarded as the expression of desire acting under conditions--as in the cases of the monkey and giraffe above.

CUSTOM

"Whatever is off the hinges of custom is believed to be also off the hinges of reason; though how unreasonably, for the most part, God knows."--MONTAIGNE.

Every human being grows up inside a sheath of custom, which enfolds it as the swathing clothes enfold the infant. The sacred customs of its early home, how fixed and immutable they appear to the child! It surely thinks that all the world in all times has proceeded on the same lines which bound its tiny life. It regards a breach of these rules (some of them at least) as a wild step in the dark, leading to unknown dangers.

Nevertheless its mental eyes have hardly opened ere it perceives, not without a shock, that whereas in the family dining-room the meat always precedes the pudding, below-stairs and in the cottage the pudding has a way of coming before the meat; that, whereas its father puts the manure on the top of his seed-potatoes in spring, his neighbor invariably places his potatoes on top of the manure. All its confidence in the sanctity of its home life and the truth of things is upset. Surely there must be a right and a wrong way of eating one's dinner or of setting potatoes, and surely, if any one, "father" or "mother" must know what is right. The elders have always said (and indeed it seems only reasonable) that by this time of day everything has been so thoroughly worked over that the best methods of ordering our life--food, dress, domestic practices, social habits, etc., have long ago been determined. If so, why these divergencies in the simplest and most obvious matters?

And then other things give way. The sacred seeming-universal customs in which we were bred turn out to be only the practices of a small and narrow class or caste; or they prove to be confined to a very limited locality, and must be left behind when we set out on our travels; or they belong to the tenets of a feeble religious sect; or they are just the products of one age in history and no other. And the question forces itself upon us, Are there really no natural boundaries? has not our life anywhere been founded on reason and necessity, but only on arbitrary habit? What is more important than food, yet in what human matter is there more unaccountable divergence of practice? The Highlander flourishes on oatmeal, which the Sheffield ironworker would rather starve than eat; the fat snail which the Roman country gentleman once so prized now crawls unmolested in the Gloucestershire peasant's garden; rabbits are taboo in Germany; frogs are unspeakable in England; sauer-kraut is detested in France; many races and gangs of people are quite certain they would die if deprived of meat, others think spirits of some kind a necessity, while to others again both these things are an abomination. Every country district has its local practices in food, and the peasants look with the greatest suspicion on any new dish, and can rarely be induced to adopt it. Though it has been abundantly proved that many of the British fungi are excellent eating, such is the force of custom that the mushroom alone is ever publicly recognised, while curiously enough it is said that in some other countries where the claims of other agarics are allowed the mushroom itself is not used! Finally, I feel myself (and the gentle reader probably feels the same) that I would rather die than subsist on _insects_, such is the deep-seated disgust we experience towards this class of food. Yet it is notorious that many races of respectable people adopt a diet of this sort, and only lately a book has been published giving details of the excellent provender of the kind that we habitually overlook--tasty morsels of caterpillars and beetles, and so forth! And indeed, when one comes to think of it, what can it be but prejudice which causes one to eat the periwinkle and reject the land-snail, or to prize the lively prawn and proscribe the cheerful grasshopper?

It is useless to say that these local and other divergencies are rooted in the necessities of the localities and times in which they occur. They are nothing of the kind. For the most part they are mere customs, perhaps grown originally out of some necessity, but now perpetuated from simple habit and inherent human laziness. This can perhaps best be illustrated by going below the human to the kingdom of the animals. If customs are strong among men they are far stronger among animals. The sheep lives on grass, the cat lives on mice and other animal food. And it is generally assumed that the respective diets are the most "natural" in each case, and those on which the animals in question will readiest thrive, and indeed that they could not well live on any other. But nothing of the kind. For cats can be bred up to live on oatmeal and milk with next to no meat; and a sheep has been known to get on very comfortably on a diet of port wine and mutton chops! Dogs, whose "natural" food in the wild state is of the animal kind, are undoubtedly much healthier (at any rate in the domestic state) when kept on farinaceous substances with little or no meat, and indeed they take so kindly to a vegetable diet that they sometimes become perfect nuisances in a garden--eating strawberries, gooseberries, peas, etc., freely off the beds when they have once learned the habit. Any one, in fact, who has kept many pets knows what an astonishing variety of food they may be made to adopt, though each animal in the wild state has the most intensely narrow prejudices on the subject, and will perish rather than overstep the customs of its tribe. Thus pheasants will eat fern-roots in winter when snow covers the ground, but the grouse "don't eat fern-roots," and die in consequence. A wolf of an inquiring turn of mind would probably find strawberries and peas as good food as a dog does, but it is practically certain that any ordinary member of the genus would perish in a garden full of the same if deprived of his customary bones.

All this seems to indicate what an immensely important part mere custom plays in the life of men and animals. The main part of the power which man acquires over the animals depends upon his establishing habits in them which, once established, they never think of violating: and the almost insuperable nature of this force in animals throws back light on the part it plays in human life.

Of course, I am not contending in the above remarks upon food that there is no physiological difference between a dog and a sheep in the matter of their digestive organs, and that the one is not by the nature of its body more fitted for one kind of food than the other; but rather that we should not neglect the importance of mere habit in such matters. Custom changed first; the change of physiological structure followed slowly after. What happened was probably something like this. Some time in the far back past a group of animals, driven perhaps by necessity, took to hunting in packs in the woods; it developed a modified physical structure in consequence, and special habits which in the course of time became deeply fixed in the race. Another group saved its life by taking to grazing. Grass is poor food; but it was the only chance this group had, and in time it got so accustomed to eating grass that it could not imagine any other form of diet, and at first would refuse even oysters when placed in its way! Another group saw an opening in trees; it developed a long neck and became the giraffe. But the fact that the giraffe lives on leaves, and the sheep on grass, and the wolf on animal matter, and that custom is in each so strong that at first the creature will refuse any other kind of diet, does not of itself prove that that diet is the best or most physiologically suitable for it. In other words, it is an assumption to suppose that "adaptation to environment" is the sole or even the main factor in the constitution of well-marked varieties or genera; for this is to neglect (among other things) the force of mere use or wont, which has about the same import in race-growth that momentum has in dynamics; and causes the race, once started in any direction, to maintain its line of movement--and often in despite of its environment--even for thousands of years.

Returning to man we see him enveloped in a myriad customs--local customs, class customs, race customs, family customs, religious customs; customs in food, customs in clothing, customs in furniture, form of habitation, industrial production, art, social and municipal and national life, etc.; and the question arises, Where is the grain of necessity which underlies it all? How much in each case is due to a real fitness in nature, and how much to mere otiose habit! The first thing that meets my eye in glancing out of the window is a tile on a neighboring roof. Why are tiles made S-shaped in some localities and flat in others? Surely the conditions of wind and rain are much the same in all places. Perhaps far back there was a reason, but now nothing remains but--custom. Why do we sit on chairs instead of on the floor, as the Japanese do, or on cushions like the Turk? It is a custom, and perhaps it suits with our other customs. The more we look into our life and consider the immense variety of habit in every department of it--even under conditions to all appearances exactly similar--the more are we impressed by the absence of any very serious necessity in the forms we ourselves are accustomed to. Each race, each class, each section of the population, each unit even, vaunts its own habits of life as superior to the rest, as the only true and legitimate forms; and peoples and classes will go to war with each other in assertion of their own special beliefs and practices; but the question that rather presses upon the ingenuous and inquiring mind is, whether any of us have got hold of much true life at all?--whether we are not rather mere multitudinous varieties of caddis-worms shuffled up in the cast-off skins and clothes and débris of those who have gone before us, and with very little vitality of our own perceptible within? How many times a day do we perform an action that is authentic and not a mere mechanical piece of repetition? Indeed, if our various actions and practices were authentic and flowing from the true necessity, perhaps we shouldn't quarrel with each other over them so often as we do.

And then to come to the subject of morals. These also are customs--divergent to the last degree among different races, at different times, or in different localities; customs for which it is often difficult to find any ground in reason or the "fitness of things." Thieving is supposed to be discountenanced among us, yet our present-day trade-morality sanctions it in a thousand different forms; and the respectable usurer (who can hardly be said to be other than a thief) takes a high place at the table of life. To hunt the earth for game has from time immemorial been considered the natural birthright and privilege of man, until the landlord class (whom wicked Socialists now denounce!) invented the crime of poaching and hanged men for it. As to marriage customs, in different times and among different peoples, they have been simply innumerable. And here the sense of inviolability in each case is most powerful. The severest penalties, the most stringent public opinion, biting deep down into the individual conscience, enforce the various codes of various times and places; yet they all contradict each other. Polygamy in one country, polyandry in the next; brother and sister marriage allowed at one time, marriage with your mother's cousin forbidden at another; prostitution sacred in the temples of antiquity, trampled under foot in the gutters of our great cities of to-day; monogamy respectable in one land, a mark of class-inferiority in another; celibacy scorned by some sections of people, accepted as the highest state by others; and so on.

What are we to conclude from all this? Is it possible, once we have fairly faced the immense variety of human life in _every_ department of arts, manners, and morals--a variety, too, existing in a vast number of cases under conditions to all intents and purposes quite similar--is it possible ever again to suppose that the particular practices which _we_ are accustomed to are very much better (or, indeed, very much worse) than the particular practices which others are accustomed to? We have been born, as I said at first, into a sheath of custom which enfolds us with our swaddling-clothes. When we begin to grow to manhood we see what sort of a thing it is which surrounds us. It is an old husk now. It does not bear looking into; it is rotten, it is inconsistent, it is thoroughly indefensible; yet very likely we have to accept it. The caddis-worm has grown to its tube and cannot leave it. A little spark of vitality amid a heap of dead matter, all it can do is to make its dwelling a little more convenient in shape for itself, or (like the coral insect) to prolong its growth in the most favourable direction for those that come after. The class, the caste, the locality, the age in which we were born has determined our form of life, and in that form very likely we must remain. But a change has come over our minds. The vauntings of earlier days we abandon. _We_, at any rate, are no better than anybody else, and at best, alas! are only half alive.

If these, then, are our conclusions, is it not with justice that children and early races keep so rigidly to the narrow path that custom has made for them? Have they not an instinctive feeling that to forsake custom would be to launch out on a trackless sea where life would cease to have any special purpose or direction, and morality would be utterly gulfed? Custom for them is the line of their growth; it is the coral-branch from the end of which the next insect builds; it is the hardening bark of the tree-twig which determines the direction of the growing shoot. It may be merely arbitrary, this custom, but that they do not know; its appearance of finality and necessity may be quite illusive; but the illusion is necessary for life, and the arbitrariness is just what makes one life different from another. _Till he grows to manhood_, the human being, _he cannot do without it_.

And when he grows to manhood, what then? Why he dies, and so becomes alive. The caddis-fly leaves his tube behind and soars into the upper air; the creature abandons its barnacle existence on the rock and swims at large in the sea. For it is just when we die to custom that, for the first time, we rise into the true life of humanity; it is just when we abandon all prejudice of our own superiority over others, and become convinced of our entire indefensibleness, that the world opens out with comrade faces in all directions; and when we perceive how entirely arbitrary is the setting of our own life, that the whole structure collapses on which our apartness from others rests, and we pass easily and at once into the great ocean of freedom and equality.

This is, as it were, a new departure for man, for which even to-day the old world, overlaid with myriad customs now brought into obvious and open conflict with each other, is evidently preparing. The period of human infancy is coming to an end. Now comes the time of manhood and true vitality.

Possibly this is a law of history, that when man has run through every variety of custom a time comes for him to be freed from it--that is, he uses it indifferently according to his requirements, and is no longer a slave to it; all human practices find their use, and none are forbidden. At this point, whenever reached, "morals" come to an end and humanity takes its place--that is to say, there is no longer any code of action, but the one object of all action is the deliverance of the human being and the establishment of equality between oneself and another, the entry into a new life, which new life when entered into is glad and perfect, because there is no more any effort or strain in it; but it is the recognition of oneself in others, eternally.

Far as custom has carried man from man, yet when at last in the ever-branching series the complete human being is produced, it knows at once its kinship with all the other forms. "I have passed my spirit in determination and compassion round the whole earth, and found only equals and lovers." More, it knows its kinship with the animals. It sees that it is only habit, an illusion of difference, that divides; and it perceives after all that it is the same human creature that flies in the air, and swims in the sea, or walks biped upon the land.

_The two following chapters--though not part of the original work--are included in the present edition because they form continuations or expansions of the chapters which criticise modern Science and modern Morality respectively. The chapter entitled "A Rational and Humane Science" is in fact a reprint of an address given before the Humanitarian League in London in 1896. It was first included in the present volume in 1906. The chapter entitled "The New Morality" is, with slight alterations, a reprint of an article which appeared in the_ Albany Review _in September, 1907, under the title "Morality under Socialism"; and it now appears in the present book for the first time_.

A RATIONAL AND HUMANE SCIENCE

In bringing before you this subject of a Rational and Humane Science you will perhaps forgive me if I dwell for a few moments on some points of personal history in relation to it. After reading mathematics for some four years at Cambridge, it happened to me for the next ten years or so to be engaged in the study of the physical sciences, and in lectures on these subjects. Naturally, during the earlier part of this period I accepted the current methods and conclusions without any question. But as time went on I became aware of a certain dissatisfaction; I felt that many of the laws of Science, enounced as universal truths, were of very limited application only, that many of the conclusions, so strongly insisted on, were of quite doubtful validity; and at last this increasing dissatisfaction culminated in a rather violent attack or criticism of Modern Science which I wrote and published about the year 1884.[40]

Now, looking back, at this interval of time, though I admit that my attack was somewhat hasty and crude in detail, I feel that in its main contention it was thoroughly justified, and I do not feel the least inclined to withdraw it.

What was that main contention? It was as follows. Modern Science is an attempt (and no doubt it would accept this definition of itself) to survey and classify the phenomena of the world in the pure dry light of the intellect, uncoloured by feeling; and so far is an effort to separate the intellectual in man from the merely perceptive, the emotional, the moral, and so forth. It was in this very fact that my criticism lay; for I contended that such a separation was in the long run quite impossible.

But before proceeding to defend this position, let me admit at once that this attempt of Modern Science to get rid of human feeling and to look at everything in the dry light of the intellect was in some respects a very grand one. When you consider what the Old-time Science was, with its fancies and prejudices, its dragons pasturing upon the sun and moon in eclipses, its immolations of hundreds of human beings to appease some god of pestilence or earthquake, its panics, its superstitions, and its incapability of regarding anything except from the point of view of that thing's influence on man's own comfort and his little hopes and fears, it was indeed a grand advance to try and see _facts_, uncoloured and for themselves alone. It was an effort of Man as it were to rise above himself, to which I accord the fullest credit and honour.

And yet, during the time spoken of, it kept growing on me: first, that the attempt was an impossible one; secondly, that the Science so-called was not a true Science; and thirdly, that in its pretence to an intellectual exactitude which it did not really possess, this Modern Science was leading to a narrow-mindedness and a dogmatism as bad as the old.

There is in fact (so I think) a fallacy in the attempt. But how shall I describe it? Our relations to the world may, quite roughly speaking, be divided into three groups--those that are sensuous and perceptional, those that are purely intellectual, and those that are of an emotional and moral order. Take any object of Nature--a bird, for instance. We may look upon the bird as an object of sense-perceptions--its form, its colour, its song, and so forth. Some people attain to extraordinary skill and quickness in this department, recognising in a moment the note or even the flight of a songster. Then again we may look upon the bird from the intellectual side--we may study it in relation to its surroundings--the form of its wings, the length of its leg, the character of its beak, and their adaptation to its habits, to its locality, to its food, and so forth. Thus we may get a whole series of purely intellectual results--relations of the bird to the world in which it lives. This is the special field of the present-day Science. But, again, we may regard the bird in its emotional and moral relations to _us_. One man at the sight of it may be affected with admiration of its beauty, with tenderness towards it, or sympathy; another may be stimulated to wonder whether he can kill it, or whether it is good to eat! Modern Science is indifferent to what this last set of relations may be; it does not concern itself much with the first; but it takes the middle term, the purely intellectual, and seeks to abstract that from the others, to study the bird, or whatever the object may be, in the one aspect only. But can that really be done? The answer is, of course, No.

To show my general meaning, and why I consider the claim an impossible one, let us imagine a little cell--one of the myriads which constitute the human body--professing in the same sort of way to stand outside the body and explain the laws of the other cells and the body at large. It is obvious that the little cell, swept along in the currents of the body and swayed by its emotions, in close proximity and contact with some portions of the organism, and far remote from others, cannot possibly pretend to any such impartial judgment. It is obvious not only that it would not have all the clues of the problem at its command, but that its own needs and experiences would prejudice it frightfully in the interpretation of such clues as it had. Yet man is such a little cell in the body of Nature, or, if you like, in the body of the Society of which he forms a part.

There is, however, one way, it seems to me, in which a cell in the human body _might_ come to an adequate understanding of the body; and that would be rather through experience than through direct reasoning. It is conceivable that there might be some cell in the body which, through the nerves, etc., was in actual touch and sympathetic relationship with every other cell. Then it certainly would have the materials of the required solution. Every change in other parts of the body would register itself in this particular cell; and its little brain (if it had one), without exactly making any great effort, would reflect sympathetically the structure of the whole body--would become, in fact, a mirror of it. This will perhaps give you the key to my notion of what a true Science might be.

But before proceeding to that, I want to go a little more in detail into the fallacy of the absolute intellectual view of Science. I say, first, that a complete summary of any object or process in Nature is impossible; secondly, that such summary as we do make is, and must inevitably and necessarily be, coloured by the underlying _feeling_ with which we approach that phase of Nature.

To take the first point. You say, Why is a complete summary not possible? A watch or other machine may be completely described and defined; why should not (with a little more knowledge) a fir-tree, or the human eye, or the solar system, be completely described and defined?

And this brings us to what may be called the Machine-view of Science. It is curious (and yet I think it will presently be seen that it is quite what might have been expected) that during this century or so, in which Machinery has played such an important part in our daily and social life, mechanical ideas have come to colour all our conceptions of Science and the Universe. Modern Science holds it as a kind of ideal (even though finding it at times difficult to realise) to reduce everything to mechanical action, and to show each process of Nature intelligible in the same sense as a Machine is intelligible. Yet this conception, this ideal, involves a complete fallacy. For the moment you come to think of it, you see that _no_ part of Nature really even resembles a machine.