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    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      FIRST AND LAST THINGS
    </h1>
    <h2>
      A CONFESSION OF FAITH AND RULE OF LIFE
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      By H.G. Wells
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <blockquote>
      <p class="toc">
        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
      </p>
      <p>
        <br />
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION. </a>
      </p>
      <p>
        <br />
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>BOOK THE FIRST. &mdash; METAPHYSICS.</b>
        </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> 1.1. THE NECESSITY FOR METAPHYSICS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> 1.2. THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY.
        </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> 1.3. THE WORLD OF FACT. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> 1.4. SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> 1.5. THE CLASSIFICATORY ASSUMPTION. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> 1.6. EMPTY TERMS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> 1.7. NEGATIVE TERMS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> 1.8. LOGIC STATIC AND LIFE KINETIC. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> 1.9. PLANES AND DIALECTS OF THOUGHT. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> 1.10. PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FROM THESE
        CONSIDERATIONS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> 1.11. BELIEFS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> 1.12. SUMMARY. </a>
      </p>
      <p>
        <br />
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> <b>BOOK THE SECOND &mdash; OF BELIEFS</b> </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> 2.1. MY PRIMARY ACT OF FAITH. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> 2.2. ON USING THE NAME OF GOD. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> 2.3. FREE WILL AND PREDESTINATION. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> 2.4. A PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF MEN. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> 2.5. THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVES THE REAL PROBLEM
        OF LIFE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> 2.6. A REVIEW OF MOTIVES. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> 2.7. THE SYNTHETIC MOTIVE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> 2.8. THE BEING OF MANKIND. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> 2.9. INDIVIDUALITY AN INTERLUDE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> 2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> 2.11. THE SYNTHESIS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> 2.12. OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> 2.13. A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> 2.14. OF OTHER RELIGIONS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> 2.15. </a>
      </p>
      <p>
        <br />
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> <b>BOOK THE THIRD &mdash; OF GENERAL CONDUCT</b>
        </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> 3.1. CONDUCT FOLLOWS FROM BELIEF. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> 3.2. WHAT IS GOOD? </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> 3.3. SOCIALISM. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> 3.4. A CRITICISM OF CERTAIN FORMS OF
        SOCIALISM. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> 3.5. HATE AND LOVE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> 3.6. THE PRELIMINARY SOCIAL DUTY. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> 3.7. WRONG WAYS OF LIVING. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> 3.8. SOCIAL PARASITISM AND CONTEMPORARY
        INJUSTICES. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> 3.9. THE CASE OF THE WIFE AND MOTHER. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> 3.10. ASSOCIATIONS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> 3.11. OF AN ORGANIZED BROTHERHOOD. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0043"> 3.12. CONCERNING NEW STARTS AND NEW RELIGIONS.
        </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0044"> 3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0045"> 3.14. OF SECESSION. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0046"> 3.15. A DILEMMA. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0047"> 3.16. A COMMENT. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0048"> 3.17. WAR. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0049"> 3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0050"> 3.19. MODERN WAR. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0051"> 3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0052"> 3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER,<br />
        READING, DISCUSSION AND WORSHIP </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0053"> 3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0054"> 3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0055"> 3.24. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0056"> 3.25. OF LOVE AND JUSTICE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0057"> 3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0058"> 3.27. POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ETIQUETTE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0059"> 3.28. SEX. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0060"> 3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0061"> 3.30. CONDUCT IN RELATION TO THE THING THAT
        IS. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0062"> 3.31. CONDUCT TOWARDS TRANSGRESSORS. </a>
      </p>
      <p>
        <br />
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0063"> <b>BOOK THE FOURTH &mdash; SOME PERSONAL
        THINGS.</b> </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0064"> 4.1. PERSONAL LOVE AND LIFE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0065"> 4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0066"> 4.3. THE WILL TO LOVE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0067"> 4.4. LOVE AND DEATH. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0068"> 4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE. </a>
      </p>
      <p class="toc">
        <a href="#link2H_4_0069"> 4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION. </a>
      </p>
    </blockquote>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
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    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      INTRODUCTION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Recently I set myself to put down what I believe. I did this with no idea
      of making a book, but at the suggestion of a friend and to interest a
      number of friends with whom I was associated. We were all, we found,
      extremely uncertain in our outlook upon life, about our religious feelings
      and in our ideas of right and wrong. And yet we reckoned ourselves people
      of the educated class and some of us talk and lecture and write with
      considerable confidence. We thought it would be of very great interest to
      ourselves and each other if we made some sort of frank mutual confession.
      We arranged to hold a series of meetings in which first one and then
      another explained the faith, so far as he understood it, that was in him.
      We astonished ourselves and our hearers by the irregular and fragmentary
      nature of the creeds we produced, clotted at one point, inconsecutive at
      another, inconsistent and unconvincing to a quite unexpected degree. It
      would not be difficult to caricature one of those meetings; the lecturer
      floundering about with an air of exquisite illumination, the audience
      attentive with an expression of thwarted edification upon its various
      brows. For my own part I grew so interested in planning my lecture and in
      joining up point and point, that my notes soon outran the possibilities of
      the hour or so of meeting for which I was preparing them. The meeting got
      only a few fragments of what I had to say, and made what it could of them.
      And after that was over I let myself loose from limits of time and length
      altogether and have expanded these memoranda into a book.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is as it stands now the frank confession of what one man of the early
      Twentieth Century has found in life and himself, a confession just as
      frank as the limitations of his character permit; it is his metaphysics,
      his religion, his moral standards, his uncertainties and the expedients
      with which he has met them. On every one of these departments and aspects
      I write&mdash;how shall I put it?&mdash;as an amateur. In every section of
      my subject there are men not only of far greater intellectual power and
      energy than I, but who have devoted their whole lives to the sustained
      analysis of this or that among the questions I discuss, and there is a
      literature so enormous in the aggregate that only a specialist scholar
      could hope to know it. I have not been unmindful of these professors and
      this literature; I have taken such opportunities as I have found, to test
      my propositions by them. But I feel that such apology as one makes for
      amateurishness in this field has a lesser quality of self-condemnation
      than if one were dealing with narrower, more defined and fact-laden
      matters. There is more excuse for one here than for the amateur maker of
      chemical theories, or the man who evolves a system of surgery in his
      leisure. These things, chemistry, surgery and so forth, we may take on the
      reputation of an expert, but our own fundamental beliefs, our rules of
      conduct, we must all make for ourselves. We may listen and read, but the
      views of others we cannot take on credit; we must rethink them and "make
      them our own." And we cannot do without fundamental beliefs, explicit or
      implicit. The bulk of men are obliged to be amateur philosophers,&mdash;all
      men indeed who are not specialized students of philosophical subjects,&mdash;even
      if their philosophical enterprise goes no further than prompt recognition
      of and submission to Authority.
    </p>
    <p>
      And it is not only the claim of the specialist that I would repudiate.
      People are too apt to suppose that in order to discuss morals a man must
      have exceptional moral gifts. I would dispute that naive supposition. I am
      an ingenuous enquirer with, I think, some capacity for religious feeling,
      but neither a prophet nor a saint. On the whole I should be inclined to
      classify myself as a bad man rather than a good; not indeed as any sort of
      picturesque scoundrel or non-moral expert, but as a person frequently
      irritable, ungenerous and forgetful, and intermittently and in small but
      definite ways bad. One thing I claim, I have got my beliefs and theories
      out of my life and not fitted them to its circumstances. As often as not I
      have learnt good by the method of difference; by the taste of the
      alternative. I tell this faith I hold as I hold it and I sketch out the
      principles by which I am generally trying to direct my life at the present
      time, because it interests me to do so and I think it may interest a
      certain number of similarly constituted people. I am not teaching. How far
      I succeed or fail in that private and personal attempt to behave well, has
      nothing to do with the matter of this book. That is another story, a
      reserved and private affair. I offer simply intellectual experiences and
      ideas.
    </p>
    <p>
      It will be necessary to take up the most abstract of these questions of
      belief first, the metaphysical questions. It may be that to many readers
      the opening sections may seem the driest and least attractive. But I would
      ask them to begin at the beginning and read straight on, because much that
      follows this metaphysical book cannot be appreciated at its proper value
      without a grasp of these preliminaries.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
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    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
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    </div>
    <h2>
      BOOK THE FIRST. &mdash; METAPHYSICS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
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    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
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    </div>
    <h2>
      1.1. THE NECESSITY FOR METAPHYSICS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      As a preliminary to that experiment in mutual confession from which this
      book arose, I found it necessary to consider and state certain truths
      about the nature of knowledge, about the meaning of truth and the value of
      words, that is to say I found I had to begin by being metaphysical. In
      writing out these notes now I think it is well that I should state just
      how important I think this metaphysical prelude is.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a popular prejudice against metaphysics as something at once
      difficult and fruitless, as an idle system of enquiries remote from any
      human interest. I suppose this odd misconception arose from the vulgar
      pretensions of the learned, from their appeal to ancient names and their
      quotations in unfamiliar tongues, and from the easy fall into technicality
      of men struggling to be explicit where a high degree of explicitness is
      impossible. But it needs erudition and accumulated and alien literature to
      make metaphysics obscure, and some of the most fruitful and able
      metaphysical discussion in the world was conducted by a number of
      unhampered men in small Greek cities, who knew no language but their own
      and had scarcely a technical term. The true metaphysician is after all
      only a person who says, "Now let us take a thought for a moment before we
      fall into a discussion of the broad questions of life, lest we rush
      hastily into impossible and needless conflict. What is the exact value of
      these thoughts we are thinking and these words we are using?" He wants to
      take thought about thought. Those other ardent spirits on the contrary,
      want to plunge into action or controversy or belief without taking
      thought; they feel that there is not time to examine thought. "While you
      think," they say, "the house is burning." They are the kin of those who
      rush and struggle and make panics in theatre fires.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now it seems to me that most of the troubles of humanity are really
      misunderstandings. Men's compositions and characters are, I think, more
      similar than their views, and if they had not needlessly different modes
      of expression upon many broad issues, they would be practically at one
      upon a hundred matters where now they widely differ.
    </p>
    <p>
      Most of the great controversies of the world, most of the wide religious
      differences that keep men apart, arise from this: from differences in
      their way of thinking. Men imagine they stand on the same ground and mean
      the same thing by the same words, whereas they stand on slightly different
      grounds, use different terms for the same thing and express the same thing
      in different words. Logomachies, conflicts about words,&mdash;into such
      death-traps of effort those ardent spirits run and perish.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is now almost a commonplace; it has been said before by numberless
      people. It has been said before by numberless people, but it seems to me
      it has been realised by very few&mdash;and until it is realised to the
      fullest extent, we shall continue to live at intellectual cross purposes
      and waste the forces of our species needlessly and abundantly.
    </p>
    <p>
      This persuasion is a very important thing in my mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      I think that the time has come when the human mind must take up
      metaphysical discussion again&mdash;when it must resume those subtle but
      necessary and unavoidable problems that it dropped unsolved at the close
      of the period of Greek freedom, when it must get to a common and general
      understanding upon what its ideas of truth, good, and beauty amount to,
      and upon the relation of the name to the thing, and of the relation of one
      mind to another mind in the matter of resemblance and the matter of
      difference&mdash;upon all those issues the young science student is as apt
      to dismiss as Rot, and the young classical student as Gas, and the austere
      student of the science of Economics as Theorising, unsuitable for his
      methods of research.
    </p>
    <p>
      In our achievement of understandings in the place of these evasions about
      fundamental things lies the road, I believe, along which the human mind
      can escape, if ever it is to escape, from the confusion of purposes that
      distracts it at the present time.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
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    <h2>
      1.2. THE RESUMPTION OF METAPHYSICAL ENQUIRY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      It seems to me that the Greek mind up to the disaster of the Macedonian
      Conquest was elaborately and discursively discussing these questions of
      the forms and methods of thought and that the discussion was abruptly
      closed and not naturally concluded, summed up hastily as it were, in the
      career and lecturings of Aristotle.
    </p>
    <p>
      Since then the world never effectually reopened these questions until the
      modern period. It went on from Plato and Aristotle just as the art of the
      seventeenth and eighteenth century went on from Raphael and Michael
      Angelo. Effectual criticism was absolutely silent until the Renaissance,
      and then for a time was but a matter of scattered utterances having only
      the slightest collective effect. In the past half century there has begun
      a more systematic critical movement in the general mind, a movement
      analogous to the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art&mdash;a Pre-Aristotelian
      movement, a scepticism about things supposed to be settled for all time, a
      resumed inquiry into the fundamental laws of thought, a harking back to
      positions of the older philosophers and particularly to Heraclitus, so far
      as the surviving fragments of his teaching enable one to understand him,
      and a new forward movement from that recovered ground.
    </p>
    <p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
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    </div>
    <h2>
      1.3. THE WORLD OF FACT.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Necessarily when one begins an inquiry into the fundamental nature of
      oneself and one's mind and its processes, one is forced into
      autobiography. I begin by asking how the conscious mind with which I am
      prone to identify myself, began.
    </p>
    <p>
      It presents itself to me as a history of a perception of the world of
      facts opening out from an accidental centre at which I happened to begin.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not attempt to define this word fact. Fact expresses for me something
      in its nature primary and unanalyzable. I start from that. I take as a
      typical statement of fact that I sit here at my desk writing with a
      fountain pen on a pad of ruled scribbling paper, that the sunlight falls
      upon me and throws the shadow of my window mullion across the page, that
      Peter, my cat, sleeps on the window-seat close at hand and that this agate
      paper-weight with the silver top that once was Henley's holds my loose
      memoranda together. Outside is a patch of lawn and then a fringe of
      winter-bitten iris leaves and then the sea, greatly wrinkled and astir
      under the south-west wind. There is a boat going out which I think may be
      Jim Pain's, but of that I cannot be sure...
    </p>
    <p>
      These are statements of a certain quality, a quality that extends through
      a huge universe in which I find myself placed.
    </p>
    <p>
      I try to recall how this world of fact arose in my mind. It began with a
      succession of limited immediate scenes and of certain minutely perceived
      persons; I recall an underground kitchen with a drawered table, a window
      looking up at a grating, a back yard in which, growing out by a dustbin,
      was a grape-vine; a red-papered room with a bookcase over my father's
      shop, the dusty aisles and fixtures, the regiments of wine-glasses and
      tumblers, the rows of hanging mugs and jugs, the towering edifices of
      jam-pots, the tea and dinner and toilet sets in that emporium, its
      brighter side of cricket goods, of pads and balls and stumps. Out of the
      window one peeped at the more exterior world, the High Street in front,
      the tailor's garden, the butcher's yard, the churchyard and Bromley church
      tower behind; and one was taken upon expeditions to fields and open
      places. This limited world was peopled with certain familiar presences,
      mother and father, two brothers, the evasive but interesting cat, and by
      intermittent people of a livelier but more transient interest, customers
      and callers.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such was my opening world of fact, and each day it enlarged and widened
      and had more things added to it. I had soon won my way to speech and was
      hearing of facts beyond my visible world of fact. Presently I was at a
      Dame's school and learning to read.
    </p>
    <p>
      From the centre of that little world as primary, as the initiatory
      material, my perception of the world of fact widened and widened, by new
      sights and sounds, by reading and hearing descriptions and histories, by
      guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact,
      grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact
      until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural
      History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of Science,
      through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical telescope.
      So I built up my conceptions of a real world out of facts observed and out
      of inferences of a nature akin to fact, of a world immense and enduring,
      receding interminably into space and time. In that I found myself placed,
      a creature relatively infinitesimal, needing and struggling. It was clear
      to me, by a hundred considerations, that I in my body upon this planet
      Earth, was the outcome of countless generations of conflict and begetting,
      the creature of natural selection, the heir of good and bad engendered in
      that struggle.
    </p>
    <p>
      So my world of fact shaped itself. I find it altogether impossible to
      question or doubt that world of fact. Particular facts one may question as
      facts. For instance, I think I see an unseasonable yellow wallflower from
      my windows, but you may dispute that and show that it is only a broken end
      of iris leaf accidentally lit to yellow. That is merely a substitution of
      fact for fact. One may doubt whether one is perceiving or remembering or
      telling facts clearly, but the persuasion that there are facts,
      independent of one's interpretations and obdurate to one's will, remains
      invincible.
    </p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      1.4. SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT.
    </h2>
    <p>
      At first I took the world of fact as being exactly as I perceived it. I
      believed my eyes. Seeing was believing, I thought. Still more did I
      believe my reasoning. It was only slowly that I began to suspect that the
      world of fact could be anything different from the clear picture it made
      upon my mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      I realised the inadequacy of the senses first. Into that I will not enter
      here. Any proper text book of physiology or psychology will supply a
      number of instances of the habitual deceptions of sight and touch and
      hearing. I came upon these things in my reading, in the laboratory, with
      microscope or telescope, lived with them as constant difficulties. I will
      only instance one trifling case of visual deception in order to lead to my
      next question. One draws two lines strictly parallel; so
    </p>
    <p>
      (two horizontal and parallel lines.)
    </p>
    <p>
      Oblique to them one draws a series of lines; so
    </p>
    <p>
      (a series of parallel and closely-spaced lines drawn through each
      horizontal line, one series (top) sloping to the right, the other (bottom)
      to the left)
    </p>
    <p>
      and instantly the parallelism seems to be disturbed. If the second figure
      is presented to any one without sufficient science to understand this
      delusion, the impression is created that these lines converge to the right
      and diverge to the left. The vision is deceived in its mental factor and
      judges wrongly of the thing seen.
    </p>
    <p>
      In this case we are able to measure the distance of the lines, to find how
      the main lines looked before the cross ones were drawn, to bring the
      deception up against fact of a different sort and so correct the mistake.
      If the ignorant observer were unable to do that, he might remain
      permanently under the impression that the main lines were out of
      parallelism. And all the infirmities of eye and ear, touch and taste, are
      discovered and checked by the fact that the erroneous impressions
      presently strike against fact and discover an incompatibility with it. If
      they did not we should never have discovered them. If on the other hand
      they are so incompatible with fact as to endanger the lives of the beings
      labouring under such infirmities, they would tend to be eliminated from
      among our defects.
    </p>
    <p>
      The presumption to which biological science brings one is that the senses
      and mind will work as well as the survival of the species may require, but
      that they will not work so very much better. There is no ground in
      matter-of-fact experience for assuming that there is any more inevitable
      certitude about purely intellectual operations than there is about sensory
      perceptions. The mind of a man may be primarily only a food-seeking,
      danger-avoiding, mate-finding instrument, just as the mind of a dog is,
      just as the nose of a dog is, or the snout of a pig.
    </p>
    <p>
      You see the strong preparatory reason there is in this view of life for
      entertaining the suppositions that:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      The senses seem surer than they are.
    </p>
    <p>
      The thinking mind seems clearer than it is and is more positive than it
      ought to be.
    </p>
    <p>
      The world of fact is not what it appears to be.
    </p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      1.5. THE CLASSIFICATORY ASSUMPTION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      After I had studied science and particularly biological science for some
      years, I became a teacher in a school for boys. I found it necessary to
      supplement my untutored conception of teaching method by a more systematic
      knowledge of its principles and methods, and I took the courses for the
      diplomas of Licentiate and Fellow of the London College of Preceptors
      which happened to be convenient for me. These courses included some of the
      more elementary aspects of psychology and logic and set me thinking and
      reading further. From the first, Logic as it was presented to me impressed
      me as a system of ideas and methods remote and secluded from the world of
      fact in which I lived and with which I had to deal. As it came to me in
      the ordinary textbooks, it presented itself as the science of inference
      using the syllogism as its principal instrument. Now I was first struck by
      the fact that while my teachers in Logic seemed to be assuring me I always
      thought in this form:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
    "M is P,
     S is M,
     S is P,"
</pre>
    <p>
      the method of my reasoning was almost always in this form:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
    "S1 is more or less P,
     S2 is very similar to S1,
     S2 is very probably but not certainly more or less P.
     Let us go on that assumption and see how it works."
</pre>
    <p>
      That is to say, I was constantly reasoning by analogy and applying
      verification. So far from using the syllogistic form confidently, I
      habitually distrusted it as anything more than a test of consistency in
      statement. But I found the textbooks of logic disposed to ignore my
      customary method of reasoning altogether or to recognise it only where S1
      and S2 could be lumped together under a common name. Then they put it
      something after this form as Induction:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
    "S1, S2, S3, and S4 are P
     S1 + S2 + S3 + S4 +... are all S
     All S is P."
</pre>
    <p>
      I looked into the laws of thought and into the postulates upon which the
      syllogistic logic is based, and it slowly became clear to me that from my
      point of view, the point of view of one who seeks truth and reality, logic
      assumed a belief in the objective reality of classification of which my
      studies in biology and mineralogy had largely disabused me. Logic, it
      seemed to me, had taken a common innate error of the mind and had
      emphasised it in order to develop a system of reasoning that should be
      exact in its processes. I turned my attention to the examination of that.
      For in common with the general run of men I had supposed that logic
      professed to supply a trustworthy science and method for the investigation
      and expression of reality.
    </p>
    <p>
      A mind nourished on anatomical study is of course permeated with the
      suggestion of the vagueness and instability of biological species. A
      biological species is quite obviously a great number of unique individuals
      which is separable from other biological species only by the fact that an
      enormous number of other linking individuals are inaccessible in time&mdash;are
      in other words dead and gone&mdash;and each new individual in that species
      does, in the distinction of its own individuality, break away in however
      infinitesimal degree from the previous average properties of the species.
      There is no property of any species, even the properties that constitute
      the specific definition, that is not a matter of more or less.
    </p>
    <p>
      If, for example, as species be distinguished by a single large red spot on
      the back, you will find if you go over a great number of specimens that
      red spot shrinking here to nothing, expanding there to a more general
      redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and brown, shading into
      crimson, and so on and so on. And this is true not only of biological
      species. It is true of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral
      species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the lectures of Professor
      Judd upon rock classification, the words, "they pass into one another by
      insensible gradations." It is true, I hold, of all things.
    </p>
    <p>
      You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as instances of
      identically similar things, but these are things not of experience but of
      theory, and there is not a phenomenon in chemistry that is not equally
      well explained on the supposition that it is merely the immense quantities
      of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment that masks by the operation
      of the law of averages the fact that each atom also has its unique
      quality, its special individual difference.
    </p>
    <p>
      This ideal of uniqueness in all individuals is not only true of the
      classifications of material science; it is true and still more evidently
      true of the species of common thought; it is true of common terms. Take
      the word "Chair." When one says chair, one thinks vaguely of an average
      chair. But collect individual instances; think of armchairs and
      reading-chairs and dining-room chairs, and kitchen chairs, chairs that
      pass into benches, chairs that cross the boundary and become settees,
      dentist's chairs, thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those
      miraculous fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and Crafts
      exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax bundle in fact is this simple
      straightforward term. In co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would
      undertake to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness that you gave
      me. Chairs just as much as individual organisms, just as much as mineral
      and rock specimens, are unique things&mdash;if you know them well enough
      you will find an individual difference even in a set of machine-made
      chairs&mdash;and it is only because we do not possess minds of unlimited
      capacity, because our brain has only a limited number of pigeon-holes for
      our correspondence with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that
      we have to delude ourselves into the belief that there is a chairishness
      in this species common to and distinctive of all chairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      Classification and number, which in truth ignore the fine differences of
      objective realities, have in the past of human thought been imposed upon
      things...
    </p>
    <p>
      Greek thought impresses me as being over much obsessed by an objective
      treatment of certain necessary preliminary conditions of human thought&mdash;number
      and definition and class and abstract form! But these things,&mdash;number,
      definition, class and abstract form,&mdash;I hold, are merely unavoidable
      conditions of mental activity&mdash;regrettable conditions rather than
      essential facts. THE FORCEPS OF OUR MINDS ARE CLUMSY FORCEPS AND CRUSH THE
      TRUTH A LITTLE IN TAKING HOLD OF IT...
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying to convey in this first
      attack upon the philosophical validity of general terms. You have seen the
      result of those various methods of black and white reproduction that
      involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the sort of process picture
      I mean&mdash;it used to be employed very frequently in reproducing
      photographs. At a little distance you really seem to have a faithful
      reproduction of the original picture, but when you peer closely you find
      not the unique form and masses of the original, but a multitude of little
      rectangles, uniform in shape and size. The more earnestly you go into the
      thing, the closelier you look, the more the picture is lost in
      reticulations. I submit, the world of reasoned inquiry has a very similar
      relation to the world of fact. For the rough purposes of every day the
      network picture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it will
      serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and general knowledge
      that will be as true for a man at a distance with a telescope as for a man
      with a microscope, it will not serve at all.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is true you can make your net of logical interpretation finer and
      finer, you can fine your classification more and more&mdash;up to a
      certain limit. But essentially you are working in limits, and as you come
      closer, as you look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the
      practical purpose for which the method exists, the element of error
      increases. Every species is vague, every term goes cloudy at its edges;
      and so in my way of thinking, relentless logic is only another name for a
      stupidity&mdash;for a sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a
      philosophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of valid syllogisms&mdash;never
      committing any generally recognised fallacy&mdash;you nevertheless leave
      behind you at each step a certain rubbing and marginal loss of objective
      truth, and you get deflections that are difficult to trace at each phase
      in the process. Every species waggles about in its definition, every tool
      is a little loose in its handle, every scale has its individual error. So
      long as you are reasoning for practical purposes about finite things of
      experience you can every now and then check your process and correct your
      adjustments. But not when you make what are called philosophical and
      theological inquiries, when you turn your implement towards the final
      absolute truth of things.
    </p>
    <p>
      This real vagueness of class terms is equally true whether we consider
      those terms used extensively or intensively, that is to say whether in
      relation to all the members of the species or in relation to an imaginary
      typical specimen. The logician begins by declaring that S is either P or
      not P. In the world of fact it is the rarest thing to encounter this
      absolute alternative; S1 is pink, but S2 is pinker, S3 is scarcely pink at
      all, and one is in doubt whether S4 is not properly to be called scarlet.
      The finest type specimen you can find simply has the characteristic
      quality a little more rather than a little less. The neat little circles
      the logician uses to convey his idea of P or not P to the student are just
      pictures of boundaries in his mind, exaggerations of a natural mental
      tendency. They are required for the purposes of his science, but they are
      departures from the nature of fact.
    </p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      1.6. EMPTY TERMS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Classes in logic are not only represented by circles with a hard firm
      outline, whereas in fact they have no such definite limits, but also there
      is a constant disposition to think of all names as if they represented
      positive classes. With words just as with numbers and abstract forms there
      have been definite phases of human development. There was with regard to
      number, the phase when man could barely count at all, or counted in
      perfect good faith and sanity upon his fingers. Then there was the phase
      when he struggled with the development of number, when he began to
      elaborate all sorts of ideas about numbers, until at last he developed
      complex superstitions about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, about
      threes and sevens and the like. The same was the case with abstract forms;
      and even to-day we are scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle
      muddle of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and so on, that
      was the price of this little necessary step to clear thinking. How large a
      part numerical and geometrical magic, numerical and geometrical philosophy
      have played in the history of the mind! And the whole apparatus of
      language and mental communication is beset with like dangers. The language
      of the savage is I suppose purely positive; the thing has a name, the name
      has a thing. This indeed is the tradition of language, and even to-day,
      we, when we hear a name are predisposed&mdash;and sometimes it is a very
      vicious disposition&mdash;to imagine forthwith something answering to the
      name. WE ARE DISPOSED, AS AN INCURABLE MENTAL VICE, TO ACCUMULATE
      INTENSION IN TERMS. If I say to you Wodget or Crump, you find yourself
      passing over the fact that these are nothings, these are, so to speak mere
      blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of thing a Wodget or a
      Crump may be. You find yourself led insensibly by subtle associations of
      sound and ideas to giving these blank terms attributes.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now this is true not only of quite empty terms but of terms that carry a
      meaning. It is a mental necessity that we should make classes and use
      general terms, and as soon as we do that we fall into immediate danger of
      unjustifiably increasing the intension of these terms. You will find a
      large proportion of human prejudice and misunderstanding arises from this
      universal proclivity.
    </p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      1.7. NEGATIVE TERMS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      There is a particular sort of empty terms that has been and is
      conspicuously dangerous to the thinker, the class of negative terms. The
      negative term is in plain fact just nothing; "Not-A" is the absence of any
      trace of the quality that constitutes A, it is the rest of everything for
      ever. But there seems to be a real bias in the mind towards regarding
      "Not-A" as a thing mysteriously in the nature of A, as though "Not-A" and
      A were species of the same genus. When one speaks of Not-pink one is apt
      to think of green things and yellow things and to ignore anger or abstract
      nouns or the sound of thunder. And logicians, following the normal bias of
      the mind, do actually present A and not-A in this sort of diagram:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      (the letter A inside a circular boundary, together with the words Not A,
      all inside a bigger circular boundary.)
    </p>
    <p>
      ignoring altogether the difficult case of the space in which these words
      are printed. Obviously the diagram that comes nearer experienced fact is:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      (the word Not, followed by the letter A inside a circular boundary,
      followed by the letter A)
    </p>
    <p>
      with no outer boundary. But the logician finds it necessary for his
      processes to present that outer Not-A as bounded (Vide e.g. Kayne's
      "Formal Logic" re Euler's diagrams and Immediate Inferences.), and to
      speak of the total area of A and Not-A as the Universe of Discourse; and
      the metaphysician and the commonsense thinker alike fall far too readily
      into the belief that this convention of method is an adequate
      representation of fact.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me try and express how in my mind this matter of negative terms has
      shaped itself. I think of something which I may perhaps best describe as
      being off the stage or out of court, or as the Void without Implications,
      or as Nothingness, or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of hypothetical
      Beyond to the visible world of human thought, and thither I think all
      negative terms reach at last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever
      positive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, straight away from
      that boundary begins the corresponding negative class and passes into the
      illimitable horizon of nothingness. You talk of pink things, you ignore,
      as the arbitrary postulates of Logic direct, the more elusive shades of
      pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not-pink, known and knowable, and
      still in the not-pink region one comes to the Outer Darkness. Not blue,
      not happy, not iron, all the NOT classes meet in that Outer Darkness. That
      same Outer Darkness and nothingness is infinite space and infinite time
      and any being of infinite qualities; and all that region I rule out of
      court in my philosophy altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can
      help it about any NOT things. I will not deal with not things at all,
      except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the word "infinite" I use it
      as one often uses "countless," "the countless hosts of the enemy"&mdash;or
      "immeasurable"&mdash;"immeasurable cliffs"&mdash;that is to say as the
      limit of measurement, as a convenient equivalent to as many times this
      cloth yard as you can, and as many again, and so on and so on until you
      and your numerical system are beaten to a standstill.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now a great number of apparently positive terms are, or have become,
      practically negative terms and are under the same ban with me. A
      considerable number of terms that have played a great part in the world of
      thought, seem to me to be invalidated by this same defect, to have no
      content or an undefined content or an unjustifiable content. For example,
      that word Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, impresses me as
      being a word with a delusive air of being solid and full, when it is
      really hollow with no content whatever. I am persuaded that knowing is the
      relation of a conscious being to something not itself, that the thing
      known is defined as a system of parts and aspects and relationships, that
      knowledge is comprehension, and so that only finite things can know or be
      known. When you talk of a being of infinite extension and infinite
      duration, omniscient and omnipotent and perfect, you seem to me to be
      talking in negatives of nothing whatever.
    </p>
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      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      1.8. LOGIC STATIC AND LIFE KINETIC.
    </h2>
    <p>
      There is another infirmity of the mind to which my attention has been
      called by an able paper read this spring to the Cambridge Moral Science
      Club by my friend Miss Amber Reeves. In this she has developed a
      suggestion of Mr. F.C.S. Schiller's. The current syllogistic logic rests
      on the assumption that either A is B or it is not B. The practical
      reality, she contends, is that nothing is permanent; A is always becoming
      more or less B or ceasing to be more or less B. But it would seem the
      human mind cannot manage with that. It has to hold a thing still for a
      moment before it can think it. It arrests the present moment for its
      struggle as Joshua stopped the sun. It cannot contemplate things
      continuously, and so it has to resort to a series of static snapshots. It
      has to kill motion in order to study it, as a naturalist kills and pins
      out a butterfly in order to study life.
    </p>
    <p>
      You see the mind is really pigeon-holed and discontinuous in two respects,
      in respect to time and in respect to classification; whereas one has a
      strong persuasion that the world of fact is unbounded or continuous.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      1.9. PLANES AND DIALECTS OF THOUGHT.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Finally; the Logician, intent upon perfecting the certitudes of his
      methods rather than upon expressing the confusing subtleties of truth, has
      done little to help thinking men in the perpetual difficulty that arises
      from the fact that the universe can be seen in many different fashions and
      expressed by many different systems of terms, each expression within its
      limits true and yet incommensurable with expression upon a differing
      system. There is a sort of stratification in human ideas. I have it very
      much in mind that various terms in our reasoning lie, as it were, at
      different levels and in different planes, and that we accomplish a large
      amount of error and confusion by reasoning terms together that do not lie
      or nearly lie in the same plane.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure by a flagrant
      instance from physical things. Suppose some one began to talk seriously of
      a man seeing an atom through a microscope, or better perhaps of cutting
      one in half with a knife. There are a number of non-analytical people who
      would be quite prepared to believe that an atom could be visible to the
      eye or cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with physical
      conceptions would almost as soon think of killing the square root of 2
      with a rook rifle as of cutting an atom in half with a knife. One's
      conception of an atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and
      analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives and no men to cut.
      If you have thought with a strong consistent mental movement, then when
      you have thought of your atom under the knife blade, your knife blade has
      itself become a cloud of swinging grouped atoms, and your microscope lens
      a little universe of oscillatory and vibratory molecules. If you think of
      the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is neither knife to
      cut, scale to weigh, nor eye to see. The universe at that plane to which
      the mind of the molecular physicist descends has none of the shapes or
      forms of our common life whatever. This hand with which I write is, in the
      universe of molecular physics, a cloud of warring atoms and molecules,
      combining and recombining, colliding, rotating, flying hither and thither
      in the universal atmosphere of ether.
    </p>
    <p>
      You see, I hope, what I mean when I say that the universe of molecular
      physics is at a different level from the universe of common experience;&mdash;what
      we call stable and solid is in that world a freely moving system of
      interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and sound is there no
      more than this length of vibration of that. We have reached to a
      conception of that universe of molecular physics by a great enterprise of
      organised analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands in
      relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis of those
      elemental things.
    </p>
    <p>
      I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme instance of the
      general state of affairs, that there may be finer and subtler differences
      of level between one term and another, and that terms may very well be
      thought of as lying obliquely and as being twisted through different
      levels.
    </p>
    <p>
      It will perhaps give a clearer idea of what I am seeking to convey if I
      suggest a concrete image for the whole world of a man's thought and
      knowledge. Imagine a large clear jelly, in which at all angles and in all
      states of simplicity or contortion his ideas are imbedded. They are all
      valid and possible ideas as they lie, none incompatible with any. If you
      imagine the direction of up or down in this clear jelly being as it were
      the direction in which one moves by analysis or synthesis, if you go down
      for example from matter to atoms and centres of force and up to men and
      states and countries&mdash;if you will imagine the ideas lying in that
      manner&mdash;you will get the beginnings of my intention. But our
      instrument, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the discovery
      of perspective, appears to have difficulties with the third dimension,
      appears capable only of dealing with or reasoning about ideas by
      projecting them upon the same plane. It will be obvious that a great
      multitude of things may very well exist together in a solid jelly, which
      would be overlapping and incompatible and mutually destructive when
      projected together upon one plane. Through the bias in our instrument to
      do this, through reasoning between terms not in the same plane, an
      enormous amount of confusion, perplexity, and mental deadlocking occurs.
    </p>
    <p>
      The old theological deadlock between predestination and free will serves
      admirably as an example of the sort of deadlock I mean. Take life at the
      level of common sensation and common experience and there is no more
      indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it is his complete
      moral responsibility. But make only the least penetrating of scientific
      analyses and you perceive a world of inevitable consequences, a rigid
      succession of cause and effect. Insist upon a flat agreement between the
      two, and there you are! The instrument fails.
    </p>
    <p>
      So far as this particular opposition is concerned, I shall point out later
      the reasonableness and convenience of regarding the common-sense belief in
      free will as truer for one's personal life than determinism.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      1.10. PRACTICAL CONCLUSIONS FROM THESE CONSIDERATIONS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Now what is the practical outcome of all these criticisms of the human
      mind? Does it follow that thought is futile and discussion vain? By no
      means. Rather these considerations lead us toward mutual understanding.
      They clear up the deadlocks that come from the hard and fast use of terms,
      they establish mutual charity as an intellectual necessity. The common way
      of speech and thought which the old system of logic has simply
      systematized, is too glib and too presumptuous of certainty. We must needs
      use language, but we must use it always with the thought in our minds of
      its unreal exactness, its actual habitual deflection from fact. All
      propositions are approximations to an elusive truth, and we employ them as
      the mathematician studies the circle by supposing it to be a polygon of a
      very great number of sides.
    </p>
    <p>
      We must make use of terms and sometimes of provisional terms. But we must
      guard against such terms and the mental danger of excessive intension they
      carry with them. The child takes a stick and says it is a sword and does
      not forget, he takes a shadow under the bed and says it is a bear and he
      half forgets. The man takes a set of emotions and says it is a God, and he
      gets excited and propagandist and does forget; he is involved in disputes
      and confusions with the old gods of wood and stone, and presently he is
      making his God a Great White Throne and fitting him up with a mystical
      family.
    </p>
    <p>
      Essentially we have to train our minds to think anew, if we are to think
      beyond the purposes for which the mind seems to have been evolved. We have
      to disabuse ourselves from the superstition of the binding nature of
      definitions and the exactness of logic. We have to cure ourselves of the
      natural tricks of common thought and argument. You know the way of it, how
      effective and foolish it is; the quotation of the exact statement of which
      every jot and tittle must be maintained, the challenge to be consistent,
      the deadlock between your terms and mine.
    </p>
    <p>
      More and more as I grow older and more settled in my views am I bored by
      common argument, bored not because I am ceasing to be interested in the
      things argued about, but because I see more and more clearly the futility
      of the methods pursued.
    </p>
    <p>
      How then are we to think and argue and what truth may we attain? Is not
      the method of the scientific investigator a valid one, and is there not
      truth to the world of fact in scientific laws? Decidedly there is. And the
      continual revision and testing against fact that these laws get is
      constantly approximating them more and more nearly to a trustworthy
      statement of fact. Nevertheless they are never true in that dogmatic
      degree in which they seem true to the unphilosophical student of science.
      Accepting as I do the validity of nearly all the general propositions of
      modern science, I have constantly to bear in mind that about them too
      clings the error of excessive claims to precision.
    </p>
    <p>
      The man trained solely in science falls easily into a superstitious
      attitude; he is overdone with classification. He believes in the
      possibility of exact knowledge everywhere. What is not exact he declares
      is not knowledge. He believes in specialists and experts in all fields.
    </p>
    <p>
      I dispute this universal range of possible scientific precision. There is,
      I allege, a not too clearly recognised order in the sciences which forms
      the gist of my case against this scientific pretension. There is a
      gradation in the importance of the individual instance as one passes from
      mechanics and physics and chemistry through the biological sciences to
      economics and sociology, a gradation whose correlations and implications
      have not yet received adequate recognition, and which does profoundly
      affect the method of study and research in each science.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me repeat in slightly altered terms some of the points raised in the
      preceding sections. I have doubted and denied that there are identically
      similar objective experiences; I consider all objective beings as
      individual and unique. It is now understood that conceivably only in the
      subjective world, and in theory and the imagination, do we deal with
      identically similar units, and with absolutely commensurable quantities.
      In the real world it is reasonable to suppose we deal at most with
      PRACTICALLY similar units and PRACTICALLY commensurable quantities. But
      there is a strong bias, a sort of labour-saving bias, in the normal human
      mind, to ignore this, and not only to speak but to think of a thousand
      bricks or a thousand sheep or a thousand Chinamen as though they were all
      absolutely true to sample. If it is brought before a thinker for a moment
      that in any special case this is not so, he slips back to the old attitude
      as soon as his attention is withdrawn. This type of error has, for
      instance, caught many of the race of chemists, and ATOMS and IONS and so
      forth of the same species are tacitly assumed to be similar to one
      another.
    </p>
    <p>
      Be it noted that, so far as the practical results of chemistry and physics
      go, it scarcely matters which assumption we adopt, the number of units is
      so great, the individual difference so drowned and lost. For purposes of
      enquiry and discussion the incorrect one is infinitely more convenient.
    </p>
    <p>
      But this ceases to be true directly we emerge from the region of chemistry
      and physics. In the biological sciences of the eighteenth century,
      common-sense struggled hard to ignore individuality in shells and plants
      and animals. There was an attempt to eliminate the more conspicuous
      departures as abnormalities, as sports, nature's weak moments; and it was
      only with the establishment of Darwin's great generalizations that the
      hard and fast classificatory system broke down and individuality came to
      its own. Yet there had always been a clearly felt difference between the
      conclusions of the biological sciences and those dealing with lifeless
      substance, in the relative vagueness, the insubordinate looseness and
      inaccuracy of the former. The naturalist accumulated facts and multiplied
      names, but he did not go triumphantly from generalization to
      generalization after the fashion of the chemist or physicist. It is easy
      to see, therefore, how it came about that the inorganic sciences were
      regarded as the true scientific bed-rock. It was scarcely suspected that
      the biological sciences might perhaps after all be TRUER than the
      experimental, in spite of the difference in practical value in favour of
      the latter. It was, and is by the great majority of people to this day,
      supposed to be the latter that are invincibly true; and the former are
      regarded as a more complex set of problems merely, with obliquities and
      refractions that presently will be explained away. Comte and Herbert
      Spencer certainly seem to me to have taken that much for granted. Herbert
      Spencer no doubt talked of the unknown and unknowable, but not in this
      sense as an element of inexactness running through all things. He thought,
      it seems to me, of the unknown as the indefinable Beyond of an immediate
      world that might be quite clearly and definitely known.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a growing body of people which is beginning to hold the converse
      view&mdash;that counting, classification, measurement, the whole fabric of
      mathematics, is subjective and untrue to the world of fact, and that the
      uniqueness of individuals is the objective truth. As the number of units
      taken diminishes, the amount of variety and inexactness of generalization
      increases, because individuality tells for more and more. Could you take
      men by the thousand billion, you could generalize about them as you do
      about atoms; could you take atoms singly, it may be that you would find
      them as individual as your aunts and cousins. That concisely is the
      minority belief, and my belief.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now what is called the scientific method in the physical sciences rests
      upon the ignoring of individualities; and like many mathematical
      conventions, its great practical convenience is no proof whatever of its
      final truth. Let me admit the enormous value, the wonder of its results in
      mechanics, in all the physical sciences, in chemistry, even in physiology,&mdash;but
      what is its value beyond that? Is the scientific method of value in
      biology? The great advances made by Darwin and his school in biology were
      not made, it must be remembered, by the scientific method, as it is
      generally conceived, at all. His was historical research. He conducted
      research into pre-documentary history. He collected information along the
      lines indicated by certain interrogations; and the bulk of his work was
      the digesting and critical analysis of that. For documents and monuments
      he had fossils and anatomical structures and germinating eggs too innocent
      to lie. But, on the other hand, he had to correspond with breeders and
      travellers of various sorts; classes entirely analogous, from the point of
      view of evidence, to the writers of history and memoirs. I question
      profoundly whether the word "science," in current usage anyhow, ever means
      such patient disentanglement as Darwin pursued. It means the attainment of
      something positive and emphatic in the way of a conclusion, based on amply
      repeated experiments capable of infinite repetition, "proved," as they
      say, "up to the hilt."
    </p>
    <p>
      It would be of course possible to dispute whether the word "science"
      should convey this quality of certitude, but to most people it certainly
      does at the present time. So far as the movements of comets and electric
      trams go, there is no doubt practically cock-sure science; and Comte and
      Herbert Spencer seem to me to have believed that cock-sure could be
      extended to every conceivable finite thing. The fact that Herbert Spencer
      called a certain doctrine Individualism reflects nothing on the
      non-individualizing quality of his primary assumptions and of his mental
      texture. He believed that individuality (heterogeneity) was and is an
      evolutionary product from an original homogeneity, begotten by folding and
      multiplying and dividing and twisting it, and still fundamentally IT. It
      seems to me that the general usage is entirely for the limitation of the
      word "science" to knowledge and the search after knowledge of a high
      degree of precision. And not simply the general usage; "Science is
      measurement," Science is "organized commonsense," proud in fact of its
      essential error, scornful of any metaphysical analysis of its terms.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now my contention is that we can arrange the fields of human thought and
      interest about the world of fact in a sort of scale. At one end the number
      of units is infinite and the methods exact, at the other we have the human
      subjects in which there is no exactitude. The science of society stands at
      the extreme end of the scale from the molecular sciences. In these latter
      there is an infinitude of units; in sociology, as Comte perceived, there
      is only one unit. It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get
      classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out,
      separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one
      with another and died and reproduced just like animals, and that
      economists following List have for the purposes of fiscal controversy
      discovered economic types; but this is a transparent device, and one is
      surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their guard against
      such bad analogy. But indeed it is impossible to isolate complete
      communities of men, or to trace any but rude general resemblances between
      group and group. These alleged units have as much individuality as pieces
      of cloud; they come, they go, they fuse and separate. And we are forced to
      conclude that not only is the method of observation, experiment, and
      verification left far away down the scale, but that the method of
      classification under types, which has served so useful a purpose in the
      middle group of subjects, the subjects involving numerous but a finite
      number of units, has also to be abandoned in social science. We cannot put
      Humanity into a museum or dry it for examination; our one single still
      living specimen is all history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating
      world of men. There is no satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing
      else in the real world with which to compare it. We have only the remotest
      ideas of its "life-cycle" and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its
      destiny.
    </p>
    <p>
      This denial of scientific precision is true of all questions of general
      human relations and attitude. And in regard to all these matters affecting
      our personal motives, our self-control and our devotions, it is much
      truer.
    </p>
    <p>
      From this it is an easy step to the statement that so far as the clear-cut
      confident sort of knowledge goes, the sort of knowledge one gets from a
      time-table or a text-book of chemistry, or seeks from a witness in a
      police court, I am, in relation to religious and moral questions an
      agnostic. I do not think any general propositions partaking largely of the
      nature of fact can be known about these things. There is nothing
      possessing the general validity of fact to be stated or known.
    </p>
    <p>
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    <h2>
      1.11. BELIEFS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Yet it is of urgent practical necessity that we should have such
      propositions and beliefs. All those we conjure out of our mental apparatus
      and the world of fact dissolve and disappear again under scrutiny. It is
      clear we must resort to some other method for these necessities.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now I make my beliefs as I want them. I do not attempt to distil them out
      of fact as physicists distil their laws. I make them thus and not thus
      exactly as an artist makes a picture so and not so. I believe that is how
      we all make our beliefs, but that many people do not see this clearly and
      confuse their beliefs with perceived and proven fact.
    </p>
    <p>
      I draw my beliefs exactly as an artist draws lines to make a picture, to
      express my impression of the world and my purpose.
    </p>
    <p>
      The artist cannot defend his expression as a scientific man defends his,
      and demonstrate that they are true upon any assumptions whatsoever. Any
      loud fool may stand in front of a picture and call it inaccurate,
      untrustworthy, unbeautiful. That last, the most vital issue of all, is the
      one least assured. Loud fools always do do that sort of thing. Take quite
      ignorant people before almost any beautiful work of art and they will
      laugh at it as absurd. If one sits on a popular evening in that long room
      at South Kensington which contains Raphael's cartoons, one remarks that
      perhaps a third of those who stray through and look at all those fine
      efforts, titter. If one searches in the magazines of a little while ago,
      one finds in the angry and resentful reception of the Pre-Raphaelites
      another instance of the absolutely indefensible nature of many of the most
      beautiful propositions. And as a still more striking and remarkable case,
      take the onslaught made by Ruskin upon the works of Whistler. You will
      remember that a libel action ensued and that these pictures were gravely
      reasoned about by barristers and surveyed by jurymen to assess their
      merits...
    </p>
    <p>
      In the end it is the indefensible truth that lasts; it lasts because it
      works and serves. People come to it and remain and attract other
      understanding and enquiring people.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now when I say I make my beliefs and that I cannot prove them to you and
      convince you of them, that does not mean that I make them wantonly and
      regardless of fact, that I throw them off as a child scribbles on a slate.
      Mr. Ruskin, if I remember rightly, accused Whistler of throwing a pot of
      paint in the face of the public,&mdash;that was the essence of his libel.
      The artistic method in this field of beliefs, as in the field of visual
      renderings, is one of great freedom and initiative and great poverty of
      test, but of no wantonness; the conditions of rightness are none the less
      imperative because they are mysterious and indefinable. I adopt certain
      beliefs because I feel the need for them, because I feel an often quite
      unanalyzable rightness in them; because the alternative of a chaotic life
      distresses me. My belief in them rests upon the fact that they WORK for me
      and satisfy my desire for harmony and beauty. They are arbitrary
      assumptions, if you will, that I see fit to impose upon my universe.
    </p>
    <p>
      But though they are arbitrary, they are not necessarily individual. Just
      so far as we all have a common likeness, just so far can we be brought
      under the same imperatives to think and believe.
    </p>
    <p>
      And though they are arbitrary, each day they stand wear and tear, and each
      new person they satisfy, is another day and another voice towards showing
      they do correspond to something that is so far fact and real.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is Pragmatism as I conceive it; the abandonment of infinite
      assumptions, the extension of the experimental spirit to all human
      interests.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      1.12. SUMMARY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In concluding this first Book let me give a summary of the principal
      points of what has gone before.
    </p>
    <p>
      I figure the mind of man as an imperfect being obtaining knowledge by
      imperfect eyesight, imperfect hearing and so forth; who must needs walk
      manfully and patiently, exercising will and making choices and determining
      things between the mysteries of external and internal fact.
    </p>
    <p>
      Essentially man's mind moves within limits depending upon his individual
      character and experience. These limits constitute what Herbart called his
      "circle of thought," and they differ for everyone.
    </p>
    <p>
      That briefly is what I consider to be the case with my own mind, and I
      believe it is the case with everyone's.
    </p>
    <p>
      Most minds, it seems to me, are similar, but none are absolutely alike in
      character or in contents.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are all biassed to ignore our mental imperfections and to talk and act
      as though our minds were exact instruments,&mdash;something wherewith to
      scale the heavens with assurance,&mdash;and also we are biassed to believe
      that, except for perversity, all our minds work exactly alike.
    </p>
    <p>
      Man, thinking man, suffers from intellectual over-confidence and a vain
      belief in the universal validity of reasoning.
    </p>
    <p>
      We all need training, training in the balanced attitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of everything we need to say: this is true but it is not quite true.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of everything we need to say: this is true in relation to things in or
      near its plane, but not true of other things.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of everything we have to remember: this may be truer for us than for other
      people.
    </p>
    <p>
      In disputation particularly we have to remember this (and most with our
      antagonist): that the spirit of an utterance may be better than the
      phrase.
    </p>
    <p>
      We have to discourage the cheap tricks of controversy, the retort, the
      search for inconsistency. We have to realize that these things are as
      foolish and ill-bred and anti-social as shouting in conversation or making
      puns; and we have to work out habits of thought purged from the sin of
      assurance. We have to do this for our own good quite as much as for the
      sake of intercourse.
    </p>
    <p>
      All the great and important beliefs by which life is guided and determined
      are less of the nature of fact than of artistic expression.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      BOOK THE SECOND &mdash; OF BELIEFS
    </h2>
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    <h2>
      2.1. MY PRIMARY ACT OF FAITH.
    </h2>
    <p>
      And now having stated my conception of the true relationship between our
      thoughts and words to facts, having distinguished between the more
      accurate and frequently verified propositions of science and the more
      arbitrary and infrequently verified propositions of belief, and made clear
      the spontaneous and artistic quality that inheres in all our moral and
      religious generalizations, I may hope to go on to my confession of faith
      with less misunderstanding.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now my most comprehensive belief about the external and the internal and
      myself is that they make one universe in which I and every part are
      ultimately important. That is quite an arbitrary act of my mind. It is
      quite possible to maintain that everything is a chaotic assembly, that any
      part might be destroyed without affecting any other part. I do not choose
      to argue against that. If you choose to say that, I am no more disposed to
      argue with you than if you choose to wear a mitre in Fleet Street or drink
      a bottle of ink, or declare the figure of Ally Sloper more dignified and
      beautiful than the head of Jove. There is no Q.E.D. that you cannot do so.
      You can. You will not like to go on with it, I think, and it will not
      answer, but that is a different matter.
    </p>
    <p>
      I dismiss the idea that life is chaotic because it leaves my life
      ineffectual, and I cannot contemplate an ineffectual life patiently. I am
      by my nature impelled to refuse that. I assert that it is not so. I assert
      therefore that I am important in a scheme, that we are all important in
      that scheme, that the wheel-smashed frog in the road and the fly drowning
      in the milk are important and correlated with me. What the scheme as a
      whole is I do not know; with my limited mind I cannot know. There I become
      a Mystic. I use the word scheme because it is the best word available, but
      I strain it in using it. I do not wish to imply a schemer, but only order
      and co-ordination as distinguished from haphazard. "All this is important,
      all this is profoundly significant." I say it of the universe as a child
      that has not learnt to read might say it of a parchment agreement. I
      cannot read the universe, but I can believe that this is so.
    </p>
    <p>
      And this unfounded and arbitrary declaration of the ultimate rightness and
      significance of things I call the Act of Faith. It is my fundamental
      religious confession. It is a voluntary and deliberate determination to
      believe, a choice made.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.2. ON USING THE NAME OF GOD.
    </h2>
    <p>
      You may say if you will that this scheme I talk about, this something that
      gives importance and correlation and significance, is what is meant by
      God. You may embark upon a logical wrangle here with me if you have failed
      to master what I have hitherto said about the meaning of words. If a
      Scheme, you will say, then there must be a Schemer.
    </p>
    <p>
      But, I repeat, I am using scheme and importance and significance here only
      in a spirit of analogy because I can find no better words, and I will not
      allow myself to be entangled by an insistence upon their implications.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet let me confess that I am greatly attracted by such fine phrases as the
      Will of God, the Hand of God, the Great Commander. These do most
      wonderfully express aspects of this belief I choose to hold. I think if
      there had been no gods before, I would call this God. But I feel that
      there is a great danger in doing this sort of thing unguardedly. Many
      people would be glad for rather trivial and unworthy reasons that I should
      confess a faith in God, and few would take offence. But the run of people
      even nowadays mean something more and something different when they say
      "God." They intend a personality exterior to them and limited, and they
      will instantly conclude I mean the same thing. To permit that
      misconception is, I feel, the first step on the slippery slope of
      meretricious complaisance, is to become in some small measure a successor
      of those who cried, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians." Occasionally we may
      best serve the God of Truth by denying him.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet at times I admit the sense of personality in the universe is very
      strong. If I am confessing, I do not see why I should not confess up to
      the hilt. At times in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments,
      I come upon a sort of communion of myself and something great that is not
      myself. It is perhaps poverty of mind and language obliges me to say that
      then this universal scheme takes on the effect of a sympathetic person&mdash;and
      my communion a quality of fearless worship. These moments happen, and they
      are the supreme fact in my religious life to me, they are the crown of my
      religious experiences.
    </p>
    <p>
      None the less, I do not usually speak of God even in regard to these
      moments, and where I do use that word it must be understood that I use it
      as a personification of something entirely different in nature from the
      personality of a human being.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.3. FREE WILL AND PREDESTINATION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      And now let me return to a point raised in the first Book in Chapter 1.9.
      Is the whole of this scheme of things settled and done? The whole trend of
      Science is to that belief. On the scientific plane one is a fatalist, the
      universe a system of inevitable consequences. But as I show in that
      section referred to, it is quite possible to accept as true in their
      several planes both predestination and free will. (I use free will in the
      sense of self-determinisn and not as it is defined by Professor William
      James, and predestination as equivalent to the conception of a universe
      rigid in time and space.) If you ask me, I think I should say I incline to
      believe in predestination and do quite completely believe in free will.
      The important belief is free will.
    </p>
    <p>
      But does the whole universe of fact, the external world about me, the
      mysterious internal world from which my motives rise, form one rigid and
      fated system as determinists teach? Do I believe that, had one a mind
      ideally clear and powerful, the whole universe would seem orderly and
      absolutely predestined? I incline to that belief. I do not harshly believe
      it, but I admit its large plausibility&mdash;that is all. I see no value
      whatever in jumping to a decision. One or two Pragmatists, so far as I can
      understand them, do not hold this view of predestination at all; but as a
      provisional assumption it underlies most scientific work.
    </p>
    <p>
      I glance at this question rather to express a detachment than a view.
    </p>
    <p>
      For me as a person this theory of predestination has no practical value.
      At the utmost it is an interesting theory like the theory that there is a
      fourth dimension. There may be a fourth dimension of space, but one gets
      along quite well by assuming there are just three. It may be knowable the
      next time I come to cross roads which I shall take. Possibly that
      knowledge actually exists somewhere. There are those who will tell you
      that they can get intimations in the matter from packs of cards or the
      palms of my hands, or see by peering into crystals. Of such beliefs I am
      entirely free. The fact is I believe that neither I know nor anybody else
      who is practically concerned knows which I shall take. I hesitate, I
      choose just as though the thing was unknowable. For me and my conduct
      there is that much wide practical margin of freedom.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am free and freely and responsibly making the future&mdash;so far as I
      am concerned. You others are equally free. On that theory I find my life
      will work, and on a theory of mechanical predestination nothing works.
    </p>
    <p>
      I take the former theory therefore for my everyday purposes, and as a
      matter of fact so does everybody else. I regard myself as a free
      responsible person among free responsible persons.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.4. A PICTURE OF THE WORLD OF MEN.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Now I have already given a first picture of the world of fact as it shaped
      itself upon my mind. Let me now give a second picture of this world in
      which I find myself, a picture in a rather different key and at a
      different level, in which I turn to a new set of aspects and bring into
      the foreground the other minds which are with me in the midst of this
      great spectacle.
    </p>
    <p>
      What am I?
    </p>
    <p>
      Here is a question to which in all ages men have sought to give a clear
      unambiguous answer, and to which a clear unambiguous answer is manifestly
      unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It seems to me that I can externalize
      and think of as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains to my body,
      hands and feet, and even the most secret and central of those living and
      hidden parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing nerves, the ganglionic
      centres, that no eye, save for the surgeon's knife has ever seen or ever
      will see until they coagulate in decay. So far I am not my body; and then
      as clearly, since I suffer through it, see the whole world through it and
      am always to be called upon where it is, I am it. Am I a mind mysteriously
      linked to this thing of matter and endeavour?
    </p>
    <p>
      So I can present myself. I seem to be a consciousness, vague and insecure,
      placed between two worlds. One of these worlds seems clearly "not me," the
      other is more closely identified with me and yet is still imperfectly me.
      The first I call the exterior world, and it presents itself to me as
      existing in Time and Space. In a certain way I seem able to interfere with
      it and control it. The second is the interior world, having no forms in
      space and only a vague evasive reference to time, from which motives arise
      and storms of emotion, which acts and reacts constantly and in untraceable
      way with my conscious mind. And that consciousness itself hangs and drifts
      about the region where the inner world and the outer world meet, much as a
      patch of limelight drifts about the stage, illuminating, affecting,
      following no manifest law except that usually it centres upon the hero, my
      Ego.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seems to me that to put the thing much more precisely than this is to
      depart from the reality of the matter.
    </p>
    <p>
      But so departing a little, let me borrow a phrase from Herbart and
      identify myself more particularly with my mental self. It seems to me that
      I may speak of myself as a circle of thought and experience hung between
      these two imperfectly understood worlds of the internal and the external
      and passing imperceptibly into the former. The external world impresses me
      as being, as a practical fact, common to me and many other creatures
      similar to myself; the internal, I find similar but not identical with
      theirs. It is MINE. It seems to me at times no more than something cut off
      from that external world and put into a sort of pit or cave, much as all
      the inner mystery of my body, those living, writhing, warm and thrilling
      organs are isolated, hidden from all eyes and interference so long as I
      remain alive. And I myself, the essential me, am the light and watcher in
      the mouth of the cave.
    </p>
    <p>
      So I think of myself, and so I think of all other human beings, as circles
      of thought and experience, each a little different from the others. Each
      human being I see as essentially a circle of thought between an internal
      and an external world.
    </p>
    <p>
      I figure these circles of thought as more or less imperfectly focussed
      pictures, all a little askew and vague as to margins and distances. In the
      internal world arise motives, and they pass outward through the circle of
      thought and are modified and directed by it into external acts. And
      through speech, example, and a hundred various acts, one such circle, one
      human mind, lights and enlarges and plays upon another. That is the image
      under which the interrelation of minds presents itself to me.
    </p>
    <p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      2.5. THE PROBLEM OF MOTIVES THE REAL PROBLEM OF LIFE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Now each self among us, for all its fluctuations and vagueness of
      boundary, is, as I have already pointed out, invincibly persuaded of Free
      Will. That is to say, it has a persuasion of responsible control over the
      impulses that teem from the internal world and tend to express themselves
      in act. The problem of that control and its solution is the reality of
      life. "What am I to do?" is the perpetual question of our existence. Our
      metaphysics, our beliefs are all sought as subsidiary to that and have no
      significance without it.
    </p>
    <p>
      I confess I find myself a confusion of motives beside which my confusion
      of perceptions pales into insignificance.
    </p>
    <p>
      There are many various motives and motives very variously estimated&mdash;some
      are called gross, some sublime, some&mdash;such as pride&mdash;wicked. I
      do not readily accept these classifications.
    </p>
    <p>
      Many people seem to make a selection among their motives without much
      enquiry, taking those classifications as just; they seek to lead what they
      call pure lives or useful lives and to set aside whole sets of motives
      which do not accord with this determination. Some exclude the seeking of
      pleasure as a permissible motive, some the love of beauty; some insist
      upon one's "being oneself" and prohibit or limit responses to exterior
      opinions. Most of such selections strike me as wanton and hasty. I decline
      to dismiss any of my motives at all in that wholesale way. Just as I
      believe I am important in the scheme of things, so I believe are all my
      motives. Turning one's back on any set of them seems to me to savour of
      the headlong actions of stupidity. To suppress a passion or a curiosity
      for the sake of suppressing a passion is to my mind just the burial of a
      talent that has been entrusted to one's care. One has, I feel, to take all
      these things as weapons and instruments, material in the service of the
      scheme; one has to take them in the end gravely and do right among them
      unbiassed in favour of any set. To take some poor appetite and fling it
      out is to my mind a cheap and unsatisfactory way of simplifying one's
      moral problems. One has to accept these things in oneself, I feel&mdash;even
      if one knows them to be dangerous things, even if one is sure they have an
      evil side.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me, however, in order to express my attitude better, make a rough
      grouping of the motives I find in myself and the people about me.
    </p>
    <p>
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    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      2.6. A REVIEW OF MOTIVES.
    </h2>
    <p>
      I cannot divide them into clearly defined classes, but I may perhaps begin
      with those that bring one into the widest sympathy with living things and
      go on to those one shares only with highly intelligent and complex human
      beings.
    </p>
    <p>
      There come first the desires one shares with those more limited souls the
      beasts, just as much as one does with one's fellow man. These are the
      bodily appetites and the crude emotions of fear and resentment. These
      first clamour for attention and must be assuaged or controlled before the
      other sets come into play.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now in this matter of physical appetites I do not know whether to describe
      myself as a sensualist or an ascetic. If an ascetic is one who suppresses
      to a minimum all deference to these impulses, then certainly I am not an
      ascetic; if a sensualist is one who gives himself to heedless
      gratification, then certainly I am not a sensualist. But I find myself
      balanced in an intermediate position by something that I will speak of as
      the sense of Beauty. This sense of Beauty is something in me which demands
      not simply gratification but the best and keenest of a sense or
      continuance of sense impressions, and which refuses coarse quantitative
      assuagements. It ranges all over the senses, and just as I refuse to
      wholly cut off any of my motives, so do I refuse to limit its use to the
      plane of the eye or the ear.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seems to me entirely just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and
      taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of
      beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism and
      sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink well one
      must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye must be
      clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet and
      disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all&mdash;the joyous
      sense of bodily well-being&mdash;comes only with exercises and restraints
      and fine living. There I think lies the way of my disposition. I do not
      want to live in the sensual sty, but I also do not want to scratch in the
      tub of Diogenes.
    </p>
    <p>
      But I diverge a little in these comments from my present business of
      classifying motives.
    </p>
    <p>
      Next I perceive hypertrophied in myself and many sympathetic human beings
      a passion that many animals certainly possess, the beautiful and fearless
      cousin of fear, Curiosity, that seeks keenly for knowing and feeling.
      Apart from appetites and bodily desires and blind impulses, I want most
      urgently to know and feel, for the sake of knowing and feeling. I want to
      go round corners and see what is there, to cross mountain ranges, to open
      boxes and parcels. Young animals at least have that disposition too. For
      me it is something that mingles with all my desires. Much more to me than
      the desire to live is the desire to taste life. I am not happy until I
      have done and felt things. I want to get as near as I can to the thrill of
      a dog going into a fight or the delight of a bird in the air. And not
      simply in the heroic field of war and the air do I want to understand. I
      want to know something of the jolly wholesome satisfaction that a hungry
      pig must find in its wash. I want to get the quintessence of that.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not think that in this I confess to any unusual temperament. I think
      that the more closely mentally animated people scrutinize their motives
      the less is the importance they will attach to mere physical and brute
      urgencies and the more to curiosity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Next after curiosity come those desires and motives that one shares
      perhaps with some social beasts, but far more so as a conscious thing with
      men alone. These desires and motives all centre on a clearly apprehended
      "self" in relation to "others"; they are the essentially egotistical
      group. They are self-assertion in all its forms. I have dealt with motives
      toward gratification and motives towards experience; this set of motives
      is for the sake of oneself. Since they are the most acutely conscious
      motives in unthinking men, there is a tendency on the part of unthinking
      philosophers to speak of them as though vanity, self-seeking,
      self-interest were the only motives. But one has but to reflect on what
      has gone before to realize that this is not so. One finds these "self"
      motives vary with the mental power and training of the individual; here
      they are fragmentary and discursive, there drawn tight together into a
      coherent scheme. Where they are weak they mingle with the animal motives
      and curiosity like travellers in a busy market-place, but where the sense
      of self is strong they become rulers and regulators, self-seeking becomes
      deliberate and sustained in the case of the human being, vanity passes
      into pride.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here again that something in the mind so difficult to define, so easy for
      all who understand to understand, that something which insists upon a best
      and keenest, the desire for beauty, comes into the play of motives. Pride
      demands a beautiful self and would discipline all other passions to its
      service. It also demands recognition for that beautiful self. Now pride, I
      know, is denounced by many as the essential quality of sin. We are taught
      that "self-abnegation" is the substance of virtue and self-forgetfulness
      the inseparable quality of right conduct. But indeed I cannot so dismiss
      egotism and that pride which was the first form in which the desire to
      rule oneself as a whole came to me. Through pride one shapes oneself
      towards a best, though at first it may be an ill-conceived best. Pride is
      not always arrogance and aggression. There is that pride that does not ape
      but learn humility.
    </p>
    <p>
      And with the human imagination all these elementary instincts, of the
      flesh, of curiosity, of self-assertion, become only the basal substance of
      a huge elaborate edifice of secondary motive and intention. We live in a
      great flood of example and suggestion, our curiosity and our social
      quality impel us to a thousand imitations, to dramatic attitudes and
      subtly obscure ends. Our pride turns this way and that as we respond to
      new notes in the world about us. We are arenas for a conflict between
      suggestions flung in from all sources, from the most diverse and
      essentially incompatible sources. We live long hours and days in a kind of
      dream, negligent of self-interest, our elementary passions in abeyance,
      among these derivative things.
    </p>
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      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      2.7. THE SYNTHETIC MOTIVE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Such it seems to me are the chief masses of the complex of motives in us,
      the group of sense, the group of pride, curiosity and the imitative and
      suggested motives, making up the system of impulses which is our will.
      Such has been the common outfit of motives in every age, and in every age
      its melee has been found insufficient in itself. It is a heterogeneous
      system, it does not form in any sense a completed or balanced system, its
      constituents are variable and compete amongst themselves. They are not so
      much arranged about one another as superposed and higgledy-piggledy. The
      senses and curiosity war with pride and one another, the motives suggested
      to us fall into conflict with this element or that of our intimate and
      habitual selves. We find all our instincts are snares to excess. Excesses
      of indulgence lead to excesses of abstinence, and even the sense of beauty
      may be clouded and betray. So to us all, even for the most balanced of us,
      come disappointments, regrets, gaps; and for most of us who are
      ill-balanced, miseries and despairs. Nearly all of us want something to
      hold us together&mdash;something to dominate this swarming confusion and
      save us from the black misery of wounded and exploded pride, of thwarted
      desire, of futile conclusions. We want more oneness, some steadying thing
      that will afford an escape from fluctuations.
    </p>
    <p>
      Different people, of differing temperament and tradition, have sought
      oneness, this steadying and universalizing thing, in various manners. Some
      have attained it in this manner, and some in that. Scarcely a religious
      system has existed that has not worked effectively and proved true for
      someone. To me it seems that the need is synthetic, that some synthetic
      idea and belief is needed to harmonize one's life, to give a law by which
      motive may be tried against motive and an effectual peace of mind
      achieved. I want an active peace and not a quiescence, and I do not want
      to suppress and expel any motive at all. But to many people the effort
      takes the form of attempts to cut off some part of oneself as it were, to
      repudiate altogether some straining or distressing or disappointing factor
      in the scheme of motives, and find a tranquillizing refuge in the
      residuum. So we have men and women abandoning their share in economic
      development, crushing the impulses and evading the complications that
      arise out of sex and flying to devotions and simple duties in nunneries
      and monasteries; we have people cutting their lives down to a vegetarian
      dietary and scientific research, resorting to excesses of self-discipline,
      giving themselves up wholly to some "art" and making everything else
      subordinate to that, or, going in another direction, abandoning pride and
      love in favour of an acquired appetite for drugs or drink.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now it seems to me that this desire to get the confused complex of life
      simplified is essentially what has been called the religious motive, and
      that the manner in which a man achieves that simplification, if he does
      achieve it, and imposes an order upon his life, is his religion. I find in
      the scheme of conversion and salvation as it is presented by many
      Christian sects, a very exact statement of the mental processes I am
      trying to express. In these systems this discontent with the complexity of
      life upon which religion is based, is called the conviction of sin, and it
      is the first phase in the process of conversion&mdash;of finding
      salvation. It leads through distress and confusion to illumination, to the
      act of faith and peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      And after peace comes the beginning of right conduct. If you believe and
      you are saved, you will want to behave well, you will do your utmost to
      behave well and to understand what is behaving well, and you will feel
      neither shame nor disappointment when after all you fail. You will say
      then: "so it is failure I had to achieve." And you will not feel bitterly
      because you seem unsuccessful beside others or because you are
      misunderstood or unjustly treated, you will not bear malice nor cherish
      anger nor seek revenge, you will never turn towards suicide as a relief
      from intolerable things; indeed there will be no intolerable things. You
      will have peace within you.
    </p>
    <p>
      But if you do not truly believe and are not saved, you will know it
      because you will still suffer the conflict of motives; and in regrets,
      confusions, remorses and discontents, you will suffer the penalties of the
      unbeliever and the lost. You will know certainly your own salvation.
    </p>
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      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      2.8. THE BEING OF MANKIND.
    </h2>
    <p>
      I will boldly adopt the technicalities of the sects. I will speak as a
      person with experience and declare that I have been through the distresses
      of despair and the conviction of sin and that I have found salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      I BELIEVE.
    </p>
    <p>
      I believe in the scheme, in the Project of all things, in the significance
      of myself and all life, and that my defects and uglinesses and failures,
      just as much as my powers and successes, are things that are necessary and
      important and contributory in that scheme, that scheme which passes my
      understanding&mdash;and that no thwarting of my conception, not even the
      cruelty of nature, now defeats or can defeat my faith, however much it
      perplexes my mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      And though I say that scheme passes my understanding, nevertheless I hope
      you will see no inconsistency when I say that necessarily it has an aspect
      towards me that I find imperative.
    </p>
    <p>
      It has an aspect that I can perceive, however dimly and fluctuatingly.
    </p>
    <p>
      I take it that to perceive this aspect to the utmost of my mental power
      and to shape my acts according to that perception is my function in the
      scheme; that if I hold steadfastly to that conception, I am SAVED. I find
      in that idea of perceiving the scheme as a whole towards me and in this
      attempt to perceive, that something to which all my other emotions and
      passions may contribute by gathering and contributing experience, and
      through which the synthesis of my life becomes possible.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me try to convey to you what it is I perceive, what aspect this scheme
      seems to bear on the whole towards me.
    </p>
    <p>
      The essential fact in man's history to my sense is the slow unfolding of a
      sense of community with his kind, of the possibilities of co-operations
      leading to scarce dreamt-of collective powers, of a synthesis of the
      species, of the development of a common general idea, a common general
      purpose out of a present confusion. In that awakening of the species,
      one's OWN PERSONAL BEING LIVES AND MOVES&mdash;A PART OF IT AND
      CONTRIBUTING TO IT. ONE'S INDIVIDUAL EXISTENCE IS NOT SO ENTIRELY CUT OFF
      AS IT SEEMS AT FIRST; ONE'S ENTIRELY SEPARATE INDIVIDUALITY IS ANOTHER, A
      PROFOUNDER, AMONG THE SUBTLE INHERENT DELUSIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND. Between
      you and me as we set our minds together, and between us and the rest of
      mankind, there is SOMETHING, something real, something that rises through
      us and is neither you nor me, that comprehends us, that is thinking here
      and using me and you to play against each other in that thinking just as
      my finger and thumb play against each other as I hold this pen with which
      I write.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me point out that this is no sentimental or mystical statement. It is
      hard fact as any hard fact we know. We, you and I, are not only parts in a
      thought process, but parts of one flow of blood and life. Let me put that
      in a way that may be new to some readers. Let me remind you of what is
      sometimes told as a jest, the fact that the number of one's ancestors
      increases as we look back in time. Disregarding the chances of
      intermarriage, each one of us had two parents, four grandparents, eight
      great-grandparents, and so on backward, until very soon, in less than
      fifty generations, we should find that, but for the qualification
      introduced, we should have all the earth's inhabitants of that time as our
      progenitors. For a hundred generations it must hold absolutely true, that
      everyone of that time who has issue living now is ancestral to all of us.
      That brings the thing quite within the historical period. There is not a
      western European palaeolithic or neolithic relic that is not a family
      relic for every soul alive. The blood in our veins has handled it.
    </p>
    <p>
      And there is something more. We are all going to mingle our blood again.
      We cannot keep ourselves apart; the worst enemies will some day come to
      the Peace of Verona. All the Montagues and Capulets are doomed to
      intermarry. A time will come in less than fifty generations when all the
      population of the world will have my blood, and I and my worst enemy will
      not be able to say which child is his or mine.
    </p>
    <p>
      But you may retort&mdash;perhaps you may die childless. Then all the
      sooner the whole species will get the little legacy of my personal
      achievement, whatever it may be.
    </p>
    <p>
      You see that from this point of view&mdash;which is for me the vividly
      true and dominating point of view&mdash;our individualities, our nations
      and states and races are but bubbles and clusters of foam upon the great
      stream of the blood of the species, incidental experiments in the growing
      knowledge and consciousness of the race.
    </p>
    <p>
      I think this real solidarity of humanity is a fact that is only slowly
      being apprehended, that it is an idea that we who have come to realize it
      have to assist in thinking into the collective mind. I believe the species
      is still as a whole unawakened, still sunken in the delusion of the
      permanent separateness of the individual and of races and nations, that so
      it turns upon itself and frets against itself and fails to see the
      stupendous possibilities of deliberate self-development that lie open to
      it now.
    </p>
    <p>
      I see myself in life as part of a great physical being that strains and I
      believe grows towards beauty, and of a great mental being that strains and
      I believe grows towards knowledge and power. In this persuasion that I am
      a gatherer of experience, a mere tentacle that arranges thought beside
      thought for this being of the species, this being that grows beautiful and
      powerful, in this persuasion I find the ruling idea of which I stand in
      need, the ruling idea that reconciles and adjudicates among my warring
      motives. In it I find both concentration of myself and escape from myself;
      in a word, I find Salvation.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.9. INDIVIDUALITY AN INTERLUDE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      I would like in a parenthetical section to expand and render rather more
      concrete this idea of the species as one divaricating flow of blood, by an
      appeal to its arithmetical aspect. I do not know if it has ever occurred
      to the reader to compute the number of his living ancestors at some
      definite date, at, let us say, the year one of the Christian era. Everyone
      has two parents and four grandparents, most people have eight
      great-grandparents, and if we ignore the possibility of intermarriage we
      shall go on to a fresh power of two with every generation, thus:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      Column 1: Number of generations.
    </p>
    <p>
      Column 2: Number of ancestors.
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
     3:             8
     4:            16
     5:            32
     7:           128
    10:         1,024
    20:       126,976
    30:    15,745,024
    40: 1,956,282,976
</pre>
    <p>
      I do not know whether the average age of the parent at the birth of a
      child under modern conditions can be determined from existing figures.
      There is, I should think, a strong presumption that it has been a rising
      age. There may have been a time in the past when most women were mothers
      in their early teens and bore most or all of their children before thirty,
      and when men had done the greater part of their procreation before
      thirty-five; this is still the case in many tropical climates, and I do
      not think I favour my case unduly by assuming that the average parent must
      be about, or even less than, five and twenty. This gives four generations
      to a century. At that rate and DISREGARDING INTERMARRIAGE OF RELATIONS the
      ancestors living a thousand years ago needed to account for a living
      person would be double the estimated population of the world. But it is
      obvious that if a person sprang from a marriage of first cousins, the
      eight ancestors of the third generation are cut down to six; if of cousins
      at the next stage, to fourteen in the fourth. And every time that a common
      pair of ancestors appears in any generation, the number of ancestors in
      that generation must be reduced by two from our original figures, or if it
      is only one common ancestor, by one, and as we go back that reduction will
      have to be doubled, quadrupled and so on. I daresay that by the time
      anyone gets to the 8916 names of his Elizabethan ancestors he will find
      quite a large number repeated over and over again in the list and that he
      is cut down to perhaps two or three thousand separate persons. But this
      does not effectually invalidate my assumption that if we go back only to
      the closing years of the Roman Republic, we go back to an age in which
      nearly every person living within the confines of what was then the Roman
      Empire who left living offspring must have been ancestral to every person
      living within that area to-day. No doubt they were so in very variable
      measure. There must be for everyone some few individuals in that period
      who have so to speak intermarried with themselves again and again and
      again down the genealogical series, and others who are represented by just
      one touch of their blood. The blood of the Jews, for example, has turned
      in upon itself again and again; but for all we know one Italian proselyte
      in the first year of the Christian era may have made by this time every
      Jew alive a descendant of some unrecorded bastard of Julius Caesar. The
      exclusive breeding of the Jews is in fact the most effectual guarantee
      that whatever does get into the charmed circle through either proselytism,
      the violence of enemies, or feminine unchastity, must ultimately pervade
      it universally.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may be argued that as a matter of fact humanity has until recently been
      segregated in pools; that in the great civilization of China, for example,
      humanity has pursued its own interlacing system of inheritances without
      admixture from other streams of blood. But such considerations only defer
      the conclusion; they do not stave it off indefinitely. It needs only that
      one philoprogenitive Chinaman should have wandered into those regions that
      are now Russia, about the time of Pericles, to link east and west in that
      matter; one Tartar chieftain in the Steppes may have given a daughter to a
      Roman soldier and sent his grandsons east and west to interlace the
      branches of every family tree in the world. If any race stands apart it is
      such an isolated group as that of the now extinct Tasmanian primitives or
      the Australian black. But even here, in the remote dawn of navigation, may
      have come some shipwrecked Malays, or some half-breed woman kidnapped by
      wandering Phoenicians have carried this link of blood back to the western
      world. The more one lets one's imagination play upon the incalculable
      drift and soak of population, the more one realizes the true value of that
      spreading relation with the past.
    </p>
    <p>
      But now let us turn in the other direction, the direction of the future,
      because there it is that this series of considerations becomes most
      edifying. It is the commonest trick to think of a man's descendants as
      though they were his own. We are told that one of the dearest human
      motives is the desire to found a family, but think how much of a family
      one founds at the best. One's son is after all only half one's blood, one
      grandson only a quarter, and so one goes on until it may be that in ten
      brief generations one's heir and namesake has but 1/1024th of one's
      inherited self. Those other thousand odd unpredictable people thrust in
      and mingle with one's pride. The trend of all things nowadays&mdash;the
      ever-increasing ease of communication, the great and increasing drift of
      population, the establishment of a common standard of civilization&mdash;is
      to render such admixture far more probable and facile in the future than
      in the past.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is a pleasant fancy to imagine some ambitious hoarder of wealth, some
      egotistical founder of name and family, returning to find his descendants&mdash;HIS
      descendants&mdash;after the lapse of a few brief generations. His heir and
      namesake may have not a thousandth part of his heredity, while under some
      other name, lost to all the tradition and glory of him, enfeebled and
      degenerate through much intermarriage, may be a multitude of people who
      have as much as a fiftieth or even more of his quality. They may even be
      in servitude and dependence to the really alien person who is head of the
      family. Our founder will go through the spreading record of offspring and
      find it mixed with that of people he most hated and despised. The
      antagonists he wronged and overcame will have crept into his line and
      recaptured all they lost; have played the cuckoo in his blood and
      acquisitions, and turned out his diluted strain to perish.
    </p>
    <p>
      And while I am being thus biological let me point out another queer aspect
      in which our egotism is overridden by physical facts. Men and women are
      apt to think of their children as being their very own, blood of their
      blood and bone of their bone. But indeed one of the most striking facts in
      this matter is the frequent want of resemblance between parents and
      children. It is one of the commonest things in the world for a child to
      resemble an aunt or an uncle, or to revive a trait of some grandparent
      that has seemed entirely lost in the intervening generation. The
      Mendelians have given much attention to facts of this nature; and though
      their general method of exposition seems to me quite unjustifiably exact
      and precise, it cannot be denied that it is often vividly illuminating. It
      is so in this connexion. They distinguish between "dominant" and
      "recessive" qualities, and they establish cases in which parents with all
      the dominant characteristics produce offspring of recessive type.
      Recessive qualities are constantly being masked by dominant ones and
      emerging again in the next generation. It is not the individual that
      reproduces himself, it is the species that reproduces through the
      individual and often in spite of his characteristics.
    </p>
    <p>
      The race flows through us, the race is the drama and we are the incidents.
      This is not any sort of poetical statement; it is a statement of fact. In
      so far as we are individuals, in so far as we seek to follow merely
      individual ends, we are accidental, disconnected, without significance,
      the sport of chance. In so far as we realize ourselves as experiments of
      the species for the species, just in so far do we escape from the
      accidental and the chaotic. We are episodes in an experience greater than
      ourselves.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now none of this, if you read me aright, makes for the suppression of
      one's individual difference, but it does make for its correlation. We have
      to get everything we can out of ourselves for this very reason that we do
      not stand alone; we signify as parts of a universal and immortal
      development. Our separate selves are our charges, the talents of which
      much has to be made. It is because we are episodical in the great
      synthesis of life that we have to make the utmost of our individual lives
      and traits and possibilities.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.10. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT.
    </h2>
    <p>
      What stupendous constructive mental and physical possibilities are there
      to which I feel I am contributing, you may ask, when I feel that I
      contribute to this greater Being; and at once I confess I become vague and
      mystical. I do not wish to pass glibly over this point. I call your
      attention to the fact that here I am mystical and arbitrary. I am what I
      am, an individual in this present phase. I can see nothing of these
      possibilities except that they will be in the nature of those indefinable
      and overpowering gleams of promise in our world that we call Beauty.
      Elsewhere (in my "Food of the Gods") I have tried to render my sense of
      our human possibility by monstrous images; I have written of those who
      will "stand on this earth as on a footstool and reach out their hands
      among the stars." But that is mere rhetoric at best, a straining image of
      unimaginable things. Things move to Power and Beauty; I say that much and
      I have said all that I can say.
    </p>
    <p>
      But what is Beauty, you ask, and what will Power do? And here I reach my
      utmost point in the direction of what you are free to call the rhapsodical
      and the incomprehensible. I will not even attempt to define Beauty. I will
      not because I cannot. To me it is a final, quite indefinable thing. Either
      you understand it or you do not. Every true artist and many who are not
      artists know&mdash;they know there is something that shows suddenly&mdash;it
      may be in music, it may be in painting, it may be in the sunlight on a
      glacier or a shadow cast by a furnace or the scent of a flower, it may be
      in the person or act of some fellow creature, but it is right, it is
      commanding, it is, to use theological language, the revelation of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      To the mystery of Power and Beauty, out of the earth that mothered us, we
      move.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not attempt to define Beauty nor even to distinguish it from Power. I
      do not think indeed that one can effectually distinguish these aspects of
      life. I do not know how far Beauty may not be simply fulness and clearness
      of sensation, a momentary unveiling of things hitherto seen but dully and
      darkly. As I have already said, there may be beauty in the feeling of beer
      in the throat, in the taste of cheese in the mouth; there may be beauty in
      the scent of the earth, in the warmth of a body, in the sensation of
      waking from sleep. I use the word Beauty therefore in its widest possible
      sense, ranging far beyond the special beauties that art discovers and
      develops. Perhaps as we pass from death to life all things become
      beautiful. The utmost I can do in conveying what I mean by Beauty is to
      tell of things that I have perceived to be beautiful as beautifully as I
      can tell of them. It may be, as I suggest elsewhere, that Beauty is a
      thing synthetic and not simple; it is a common effect produced by a great
      medley of causes, a larger aspect of harmony.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the question of what Beauty is does not very greatly concern me since
      I have known it when I met it and since almost every day in life I seem to
      apprehend it more and to find it more sufficient and satisfying.
      Objectively it may be altogether complex and various and synthetic,
      subjectively it is altogether simple. All analysis, all definition, must
      in the end rest upon and arrive at unanalyzable and indefinable things.
      Beauty is light&mdash;I fall back upon that image&mdash;it is all things
      that light can be, beacon, elucidation, pleasure, comfort and consolation,
      promise, warning, the vision of reality.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.11. THE SYNTHESIS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      It seems to me that the whole living creation may be regarded as walking
      in its sleep, as walking in the sleep of instinct and individualized
      illusion, and that now out of it all rises man, beginning to perceive his
      larger self, his universal brotherhood and a collective synthetic purpose
      to increase Power and realize Beauty...
    </p>
    <p>
      I write this down. It is the form of my belief, and that unanalyzable
      something called Beauty is the light that falls upon that form.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is only by such images, it is only by the use of what are practically
      parables, that I can in any way express these things in my mind. These two
      things, I say, are the two aspects of my belief; one is the form and the
      other the light. The former places me as it were in a scheme, the latter
      illuminates and inspires me. I am a member in that great being, and my
      function is, I take it, to develop my capacity for beauty and convey the
      perception of it to my fellows, to gather and store experience and
      increase the racial consciousness. I hazard no whys nor wherefores. That
      is how I see things; that is how the universe, in response to my demand
      for a synthesizing aspect, presents itself to me.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.12. OF PERSONAL IMMORTALITY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      These are my beliefs. They begin with arbitrary assumptions; they end in a
      mystery.
    </p>
    <p>
      So do all beliefs that are not grossly utilitarian and material, promising
      houris and deathless appetite or endless hunting or a cosmic mortgage. The
      Peace of God passeth understanding, the Kingdom of Heaven within us and
      without can be presented only by parables. But the unapproachable distance
      and vagueness of these things makes them none the less necessary, just as
      a cloud upon a mountain or sunlight remotely seen upon the sea are as real
      as, and to many people far more necessary than, pork chops. The driven
      swine may root and take no heed, but man the dreamer drives. And because
      these things are vague and impalpable and wilfully attained, it is none
      the less important that they should be rendered with all the truth of
      one's being. To be atmospherically vague is one thing; to be haphazard,
      wanton and untruthful, quite another.
    </p>
    <p>
      But here I may give a specific answer to a question that many find
      profoundly important, though indeed it is already implicitly answered in
      what has gone before.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not believe I have any personal immortality. I am part of an
      immortality perhaps; but that is different. I am not the continuing thing.
      I personally am experimental, incidental. I feel I have to do something, a
      number of things no one else could do, and then I am finished and finished
      altogether. Then my substance returns to the common lot. I am a temporary
      enclosure for a temporary purpose; that served, and my skull and teeth, my
      idiosyncracy and desire, will disperse, I believe, like the timbers of a
      booth after a fair.
    </p>
    <p>
      Let me shift my ground a little and ask you to consider what is involved
      in the opposite belief.
    </p>
    <p>
      My idea of the unknown scheme is of something so wide and deep that I
      cannot conceive it encumbered by my egotism perpetually. I shall serve my
      purpose and pass under the wheel and end. That distresses me not at all.
      Immortality would distress and perplex me. If I may put this in a mixture
      of theological and social language, I cannot respect, I cannot believe in
      a God who is always going about with me.
    </p>
    <p>
      But this is after all what I feel is true and what I choose to believe. It
      is not a matter of fact. So far as that goes there is no evidence that I
      am immortal and none that I am not.
    </p>
    <p>
      I may be altogether wrong in my beliefs; I may be misled by the
      appearances of things. I believe in the great and growing Being of the
      Species from which I rise, to which I return, and which, it may be, will
      ultimately even transcend the limitation of the Species and grow into the
      Conscious Being, the eternally conscious Being of all things. Believing
      that, I cannot also believe that my peculiar little thread will not
      undergo synthesis and vanish as a separate thing.
    </p>
    <p>
      And what after all is my distinctive something, a few capacities, a few
      incapacities, an uncertain memory, a hesitating presence? It matters no
      doubt in its place and time, as all things matter in their place and time,
      but where in it all is the eternally indispensable? The great things of my
      life, love, faith, the intimation of beauty, the things most savouring of
      immortality, are the things most general, the things most shared and least
      distinctively me.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.13. A CRITICISM OF CHRISTIANITY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      And here perhaps, before I go on to the question of Conduct, is the place
      to define a relationship to that system of faith and religious observance
      out of which I and most of my readers have come. How do these beliefs on
      which I base my rule of conduct stand to Christianity?
    </p>
    <p>
      They do not stand in any attitude of antagonism. A religious system so
      many-faced and so enduring as Christianity must necessarily be saturated
      with truth even if it be not wholly true. To assume, as the Atheist and
      Deist seem to do, that Christianity is a sort of disease that came upon
      civilization, an unprofitable and wasting disease, is to deny that
      conception of a progressive scheme and rightness which we have taken as
      our basis of belief. As I have already confessed, the Scheme of Salvation,
      the idea of a process of sorrow and atonement, presents itself to me as
      adequately true. So far I do not think my new faith breaks with my old.
      But it follows as a natural consequence of my metaphysical preliminaries
      that I should find the Christian theology Aristotelian, over defined and
      excessively personified. The painted figure of that bearded ancient upon
      the Sistine Chapel, or William Blake's wild-haired, wild-eyed Trinity,
      convey no nearer sense of God to me than some mother-of-pearl-eyed painted
      and carven monster from the worship of the South Sea Islanders. And the
      Miltonic fable of the offended creator and the sacrificial son! it cannot
      span the circle of my ideas; it is a little thing, and none the less
      little because it is intimate, flesh of my flesh and spirit of my spirit,
      like the drawings of my youngest boy. I put it aside as I would put aside
      the gay figure of a costumed officiating priest. The passage of time has
      made his canonicals too strange, too unlike my world of common thought and
      costume. These things helped, but now they hinder and disturb. I cannot
      bring myself back to them...
    </p>
    <p>
      But the psychological experience and the theology of Christianity are only
      a ground-work for its essential feature, which is the conception of a
      relationship of the individual believer to a mystical being at once human
      and divine, the Risen Christ. This being presents itself to the modern
      consciousness as a familiar and beautiful figure, associated with a series
      of sayings and incidents that coalesce with a very distinct and
      rounded-off and complete effect of personality. After we have cleared off
      all the definitions of theology, He remains, mystically suffering for
      humanity, mystically asserting that love in pain and sacrifice in service
      are the necessary substance of Salvation. Whether he actually existed as a
      finite individual person in the opening of the Christian era seems to me a
      question entirely beside the mark. The evidence at this distance is of
      imperceptible force for or against. The Christ we know is quite evidently
      something different from any finite person, a figure, a conception, a
      synthesis of emotions, experiences and inspirations, sustained by and
      sustaining millions of human souls.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now it seems to be the common teaching of almost all Christians, that
      Salvation, that is to say the consolidation and amplification of one's
      motives through the conception of a general scheme or purpose, is to be
      attained through the personality of Christ. Christ is made cardinal to the
      act of Faith. The act of Faith, they assert, is not simply, as I hold it
      to be, BELIEF, but BELIEF IN HIM.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are dealing here, be it remembered, with beliefs deliberately
      undertaken and not with questions of fact. The only matters of fact
      material here are facts of experience. If in your experience Salvation is
      attainable through Christ, then certainly Christianity is true for you.
      And if a Christian asserts that my belief is a false light and that
      presently I shall "come to Christ," I cannot disprove his assertion. I can
      but disbelieve it. I hesitate even to make the obvious retort.
    </p>
    <p>
      I hope I shall offend no susceptibilities when I assert that this great
      and very definite personality in the hearts and imaginations of mankind
      does not and never has attracted me. It is a fact I record about myself
      without aggression or regret. I do not find myself able to associate Him
      in any way with the emotion of Salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      I admit the splendid imaginative appeal in the idea of a divine-human
      friend and mediator. If it were possible to have access by prayer, by
      meditation, by urgent outcries of the soul, to such a being whose feet
      were in the darknesses, who stooped down from the light, who was at once
      great and little, limitless in power and virtue and one's very brother; if
      it were possible by sheer will in believing to make and make one's way to
      such a helper, who would refuse such help? But I do not find such a being
      in Christ. I do not find, I cannot imagine, such a being. I wish I could.
      To me the Christian Christ seems not so much a humanized God as an
      incomprehensibly sinless being neither God nor man. His sinlessness wears
      his incarnation like a fancy dress, all his white self unchanged. He had
      no petty weaknesses.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now the essential trouble of my life is its petty weaknesses. If I am to
      have that love, that sense of understanding fellowship, which is, I
      conceive, the peculiar magic and merit of this idea of a personal Saviour,
      then I need someone quite other than this image of virtue, this terrible
      and incomprehensible Galilean with his crown of thorns, his blood-stained
      hands and feet. I cannot love him any more than I can love a man upon the
      rack. Even in the face of torments I do not think I should feel a need for
      him. I had rather then a hundred times have Botticelli's armed angel in
      his Tobit at Florence. (I hope I do not seem to want to shock in writing
      these things, but indeed my only aim is to lay my feelings bare.) I know
      what love for an idealized person can be. It happens that in my younger
      days I found a character in the history of literature who had a singular
      and extraordinary charm for me, of whom the thought was tender and
      comforting, who indeed helped me through shames and humiliations as though
      he held my hand. This person was Oliver Goldsmith. His blunders and
      troubles, his vices and vanities, seized and still hold my imagination.
      The slights of Boswell, the contempt of Gibbon and all his company save
      Johnson, the exquisite fineness of spirit in his "Vicar of Wakefield," and
      that green suit of his and the doctor's cane and the love despised, these
      things together made him a congenial saint and hero for me, so that I
      thought of him as others pray. When I think of that youthful feeling for
      Goldsmith, I know what I need in a personal Saviour, as a troglodyte who
      has seen a candle can imagine the sun. But the Christian Christ in none of
      his three characteristic phases, neither as the magic babe (from whom I am
      cut off by the wanton and indecent purity of the Immaculate Conception),
      nor as the white-robed, spotless miracle worker, nor as the fierce unreal
      torment of the cross, comes close to my soul. I do not understand the
      Agony in the Garden; to me it is like a scene from a play in an unknown
      tongue. The la t cry of despair is the one human touch, discordant with
      all the rest of the story. One cry of despair does not suffice. The
      Christian's Christ is too fine for me, not incarnate enough, not flesh
      enough, not earth enough. He was never foolish and hot-eared and
      inarticulate, never vain, he never forgot things, nor tangled his
      miracles. I could love him I think more easily if the dead had not risen
      and if he had lain in peace in his sepulchre instead of coming back more
      enhaloed and whiter than ever, as a postscript to his own tragedy.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I think of the Resurrection I am always reminded of the "happy
      endings" that editors and actor managers are accustomed to impose upon
      essentially tragic novels and plays...
    </p>
    <p>
      You see how I stand in this matter, puzzled and confused by the Christian
      presentation of Christ. I know there are many will answer&mdash;as I
      suppose my friend the Rev. R.J. Campbell would answer&mdash;that what
      confuses me is the overlaying of the personality of Jesus by stories and
      superstitions and conflicting symbols; he will in effect ask me to
      disentangle the Christ I need from the accumulated material, choosing and
      rejecting. Perhaps one may do that. He does, I know, so present Him as a
      man inspired, and strenuously, inadequately and erringly presenting a
      dream of human brotherhood and the immediate Kingdom of Heaven on earth
      and so blundering to his failure and death. But that will be a recovered
      and restored person he would give me, and not the Christ the Christians
      worship and declare they love, in whom they find their Salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I write "declare they love" I throw doubt intentionally upon the
      universal love of Christians for their Saviour. I have watched men and
      nations in this matter. I am struck by the fact that so many Christians
      fall back upon more humanized figures, upon the tender figure of Mary,
      upon patron saints and such more erring creatures, for the effect of
      mediation and sympathy they need.
    </p>
    <p>
      You see it comes to this: that I think Christianity has been true and is
      for countless people practically true, but that it is not true now for me,
      and that for most people it is true only with modifications. Every
      believing Christian is, I am sure, my spiritual brother, but if
      systematically I called myself a Christian I feel that to most men I
      should imply too much and so tell a lie.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.14. OF OTHER RELIGIONS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In the same manner, in varying degree, I hold all religions to be in a
      measure true. Least comprehensible to me are the Indian formulae, because
      they seem to stand not on common experience but on those intellectual
      assumptions my metaphysical analysis destroys. Transmigration of souls
      without a continuing memory is to my mind utter foolishness, the imagining
      of a race of children. The aggression, discipline and submission of
      Mahommedanism makes, I think, an intellectually limited but fine and
      honourable religion&mdash;for men. Its spirit if not its formulae is
      abundantly present in our modern world. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, for example,
      manifestly preaches a Mahommedan God, a modernised God with a taste for
      engineering. I have no doubt that in devotion to a virile, almost national
      Deity and to the service of His Empire of stern Law and Order, efficiently
      upheld, men have found and will find Salvation.
    </p>
    <p>
      All these religions are true for me as Canterbury Cathedral is a true
      thing and as a Swiss chalet is a true thing. There they are, and they have
      served a purpose, they have worked. Men and women have lived in and by
      them. Men and women still do. Only they are not true for me to live in
      them. I have, I believe, to live in a new edifice of my own discovery.
      They do not work for me.
    </p>
    <p>
      These schemes are true, and also these schemes are false! in the sense
      that new things, new phrasings, have to replace them.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      2.15.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Such are the essential beliefs by which I express myself. But now comes
      the practical outcome of these things, and that is to discuss and show how
      upon this metaphysical basis and these beliefs, and in obedience to the
      ruling motive that arises with them, I frame principles of conduct.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      BOOK THE THIRD &mdash; OF GENERAL CONDUCT
    </h2>
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    <h2>
      3.1. CONDUCT FOLLOWS FROM BELIEF.
    </h2>
    <p>
      I hold that the broad direction of conduct follows necessarily from
      belief. The believer does not require rewards and punishments to direct
      him to the right. Motive and idea are not so separable. To believe truly
      is to want to do right. To get salvation is to be unified by a
      comprehending idea of a purpose and by a ruling motive.
    </p>
    <p>
      The believer wants to do right, he naturally and necessarily seeks to do
      right. If he fails to do right, if he finds he has done wrong instead of
      right, he is not greatly distressed or terrified, he naturally and
      cheerfully does his best to correct his error. He can be damned only by
      the fading and loss of his belief. And naturally he recurs to and
      refreshes his belief.
    </p>
    <p>
      I write in phrases that the evangelical Christianity of my childhood made
      familiar to me, because they are the most expressive phrases I have ever
      met for the psychological facts with which I am dealing.
    </p>
    <p>
      But faith, though it banishes fear and despair and brings with it a real
      prevailing desire to know and do the Good, does not in itself determine
      what is the Good or supply any simple guide to the choice between
      alternatives. If it did, there would be nothing more to be said, this book
      upon conduct would be unnecessary.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.2. WHAT IS GOOD?
    </h2>
    <p>
      It seems to me one of the heedless errors of those who deal in philosophy,
      to suppose all things that have simple names or unified effects are in
      their nature simple and may be discovered and isolated as a sort of
      essence by analysis. It is natural to suppose&mdash;and I think it is also
      quite wrong to suppose&mdash;that such things as Good and Beauty can be
      abstracted from good and beautiful things and considered alone. But pure
      Good and pure Beauty are to me empty terms. It seems to me that these are
      in their nature synthetic things, that they arise out of the coming
      together of contributory things and conditions, and vanish at their
      dispersal; they are synthetic just as more obviously Harmony is synthetic.
      It is consequently not possible to give a definition of Good, just as it
      is not possible to give a definition of that other something which is so
      closely akin to it, Beauty. Nor is it to be maintained that what is good
      for one is good for another. But what is good of one's general relations
      and what is right in action must be determined by the nature of one's
      beliefs about the purpose in things. I have set down my broad impression
      of that purpose in respect to me, as the awakening and development of the
      consciousness and will of our species, and I have confessed my belief that
      in subordinating myself and all my motives to that idea lies my Salvation.
      It follows from that, that the good life is the life that most richly
      gathers and winnows and prepares experience and renders it available for
      the race, that contributes most effectively to the collective growth.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is in general terms my idea of Good. So soon as one passes from
      general terms to the question of individual good, one encounters
      individuality; for everyone in the differing quality and measure of their
      personality and powers and possibilities, good and right must be
      different. We are all engaged, each contributing from his or her own
      standpoint, in the collective synthesis; whatever one can best do, one
      must do that; in whatever manner one can best help the synthesis, one must
      exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, secrecy, the service of
      secret and personal ends, is the waste of life and the essential quality
      of Sin.
    </p>
    <p>
      That is the general expression for right living as I conceive it.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.3. SOCIALISM.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In the study of what is Good, it is very convenient to make a rough
      division of our subject into general and particular. There are first the
      interests and problems that affect us all collectively, in which we have a
      common concern and from which no one may legitimately seek exemption; of
      these interests and problems we may fairly say every man should do so and
      so, or so and so, or the law should be so and so, or so and so; and
      secondly there are those other problems in which individual difference and
      the interplay of one or two individualities is predominant. This is of
      course no hard and fast classification, but it gives a method of approach.
      We can begin with the generalized person in ourselves and end with
      individuality.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the world of ideas about me, I have found going on a great social and
      political movement that correlates itself with my conception of a great
      synthesis of human purpose as the aspect towards us of the universal
      scheme. This movement is Socialism. Socialism is to me no clear-cut system
      of theories and dogmas; it is one of those solid and extensive and
      synthetic ideas that are better indicated by a number of different
      formulae than by one, just as one only realizes a statue by walking round
      it and seeing it from a number of points of view. I do not think it is to
      be completely expressed by any one system of formulae or by any one man.
      Its common quality from nearly every point of view is the subordination of
      the will of the self-seeking individual to the idea of a racial well-being
      embodied in an organized state, organized for every end that can be
      obtained collectively. Upon that I seize; that is the value of Socialism
      for me.
    </p>
    <p>
      Socialism for me is a common step we are all taking in the great synthesis
      of human purpose. It is the organization, in regard to a great mass of
      common and fundamental interests that have hitherto been dispersedly
      served, of a collective purpose.
    </p>
    <p>
      I see humanity scattered over the world, dispersed, conflicting,
      unawakened... I see human life as avoidable waste and curable confusion. I
      see peasants living in wretched huts knee-deep in manure, mere parasites
      on their own pigs and cows; I see shy hunters wandering in primaeval
      forests; I see the grimy millions who slave for industrial production; I
      see some who are extravagant and yet contemptible creatures of luxury, and
      some leading lives of shame and indignity; tens of thousands of wealthy
      people wasting lives in vulgar and unsatisfying trivialities, hundreds of
      thousands meanly chaffering themselves, rich or poor, in the wasteful
      byways of trade; I see gamblers, fools, brutes, toilers, martyrs. Their
      disorder of effort, the spectacle of futility, fills me with a passionate
      desire to end waste, to create order, to develop understanding... All
      these people reflect and are part of the waste and discontent of my life,
      and this co-ordination of the species to a common general end, and the
      quest for my personal salvation, are the social and the individual aspect
      of essentially the same desire...
    </p>
    <p>
      And yet dispersed as all these people are, they are far more closely drawn
      together to common ends and common effort than the filthy savages who ate
      food rotten and uncooked in the age of unpolished stone. They live in the
      mere opening phase of a synthesis of effort the end of which surpasses our
      imagination. Such intercourse and community as they have is only a dawn.
      We look towards the day, the day of the organized civilized world state.
      The first clear intimation of that conscious synthesis of human thought to
      which I look, the first edge of the dayspring, has arisen&mdash;as
      Socialism, as I conceive of Socialism. Socialism is to me no more and no
      less than the awakening of a collective consciousness in humanity, a
      collective will and a collective mind out of which finer individualities
      may arise forever in a perpetual series of fresh endeavours and fresh
      achievements for the race.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.4. A CRITICISM OF CERTAIN FORMS OF SOCIALISM.
    </h2>
    <p>
      It is necessary to point out that a Socialism arising in this way out of
      the conception of a synthesis of the will and thought of the species will
      necessarily differ from conceptions of Socialism arrived at in other and
      different ways. It is based on a self-discontent and self-abnegation and
      not on self-satisfaction, and it will be a scheme of persistent thought
      and construction, essentially, and it will support this or that method of
      law-making, or this or that method of economic exploitation, or this or
      that matter of social grouping, only incidentally and in relation to that.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such a conception of Socialism is very remote in spirit, however it may
      agree in method, from that philanthropic administrative socialism one
      finds among the British ruling and administrative class. That seems to me
      to be based on a pity which is largely unjustifiable and a pride that is
      altogether unintelligent. The pity is for the obvious wants and distresses
      of poverty, the pride appears in the arrogant and aggressive conception of
      raising one's fellows. I have no strong feeling for the horrors and
      discomforts of poverty as such, sensibilities can be hardened to endure
      the life led by the "Romans" in Dartmoor jail a hundred years ago (See
      "The Story of Dartmoor Prison" by Basil Thomson (Heinemann&mdash;1907).),
      or softened to detect the crumpled rose-leaf; what disgusts me is the
      stupidity and warring purposes of which poverty is the outcome. When it
      comes to the idea of raising human beings, I must confess the only person
      I feel concerned about raising is H.G. Wells, and that even in his case my
      energies might be better employed. After all, presently he must die and
      the world will have done with him. His output for the species is more
      important than his individual elevation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Moreover, all this talk of raising implies a classification I doubt. I
      find it hard to fix any standards that will determine who is above me and
      who below. Most people are different from me I perceive, but which among
      them is better, which worse? I have a certain power of communicating with
      other minds, but what experiences I communicate seem often far thinner and
      poorer stuff than those which others less expressive than I half fail to
      communicate and half display to me. My "inferiors," judged by the common
      social standards, seem indeed intellectually more limited than I and with
      a narrower outlook; they are often dirtier and more driven, more under the
      stress of hunger and animal appetites; but on the other hand have they not
      more vigorous sensations than I, and through sheer coarsening and
      hardening of fibre, the power to do more toilsome things and sustain
      intenser sensations than I could endure? When I sit upon the bench, a
      respectable magistrate, and commit some battered reprobate for trial for
      this lurid offence or that, or send him or her to prison for drunkenness
      or such-like indecorum, the doubt drifts into my mind which of us after
      all is indeed getting nearest to the keen edge of life. Are I and my
      respectable colleagues much more than successful evasions of THAT? Perhaps
      these people in the dock know more of the essential strains and stresses
      of nature, are more intimate with pain. At any rate I do not think I am
      justified in saying certainly that they do not know...
    </p>
    <p>
      No, I do not want to raise people using my own position as a standard, I
      do not want to be one of a gang of consciously superior people, I do not
      want arrogantly to change the quality of other lives. I do not want to
      interfere with other lives, except incidentally&mdash;incidentally, in
      this way that I do want to get to an understanding with them, I do want to
      share and feel with them in our commerce with the collective mind. I
      suppose I do not stretch language very much when I say I want to get rid
      of stresses and obstacles between our minds and personalities and to
      establish a relation that is understanding and sympathy.
    </p>
    <p>
      I want to make more generally possible a relationship of communication and
      interchange, that for want of a less battered and ambiguous word I must
      needs call love.
    </p>
    <p>
      And if I disavow the Socialism of condescension, so also do I disavow the
      Socialism of revolt. There is a form of Socialism based upon the economic
      generalizations of Marx, an economic fatalistic Socialism that I hold to
      be rather wrong in its vision of facts, rather more distinctly wrong in
      its theory, and altogether wrong and hopeless in its spirit. It preaches,
      as inevitable, a concentration of property in the hands of a limited
      number of property owners and the expropriation of the great proletarian
      mass of mankind, a concentration which is after all no more than a
      tendency conditional on changing and changeable conventions about
      property, and it finds its hope of a better future in the outcome of a
      class conflict between the expropriated Many and the expropriating Few.
      Both sides are to be equally swayed by self-interest, but the toilers are
      to be gregarious and mutually loyal in their self-interest&mdash;Heaven
      knows why, except that otherwise the Marxist dream will not work. The
      experience of contemporary events seems to show at least an equal power of
      combination for material ends among owners and employers as among workers.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now this class-war idea is one diametrically opposed to that
      religious-spirited Socialism which supplies the form of my general
      activities. This class-war idea would exacerbate the antagonism of the
      interests of the many individuals against the few individuals, and I would
      oppose the conceiving of the Whole to the self-seeking of the Individual.
      The spirit and constructive intention of the many to-day are no better
      than those of the few, poor and rich alike are over-individualized,
      self-seeking and non-creative; to organize the confused jostling
      competitions, over-reachings, envies and hatreds of to-day into two great
      class-hatreds and antagonisms will advance the reign of love at most only
      a very little, only so far as it will simplify and make plain certain
      issues. It may very possibly not advance the reign of love at all, but
      rather shatter the order we have. Socialism, as I conceive it, and as I
      have presented it in my book, "New Worlds for Old," seeks to change
      economic arrangements only by the way, as an aspect and outcome of a great
      change, a change in the spirit and method of human intercourse.
    </p>
    <p>
      I know that here I go beyond the limits many Socialists in the past, and
      some who are still contemporary, have set themselves. Much Socialism
      to-day seems to think of itself as fighting a battle against poverty and
      its concomitants alone. Now poverty is only a symptom of a profounder evil
      and is never to be cured by itself. It is one aspect of divided and
      dispersed purposes. If Socialism is only a conflict with poverty,
      Socialism is nothing. But I hold that Socialism is and must be a battle
      against human stupidity and egotism and disorder, a battle fought all
      through the forests and jungles of the soul of man. As we get intellectual
      and moral light and the realization of brotherhood, so social and economic
      organization will develop. But the Socialist may attack poverty for ever,
      disregarding the intellectual and moral factors that necessitate it, and
      he will remain until the end a purely economic doctrinaire crying in the
      wilderness in vain.
    </p>
    <p>
      And if I antagonize myself in this way to the philanthropic Socialism of
      kindly prosperous people on the one hand and to the fierce class-hatred
      Socialism on the other, still more am I opposed to that furtive Socialism
      of the specialist which one meets most typically in the Fabian Society. It
      arises very naturally out of what I may perhaps call specialist fatigue
      and impatience. It is very easy for writers like myself to deal in the
      broad generalities of Socialism and urge their adoption as general
      principles; it is altogether another affair with a man who sets himself to
      work out the riddle of the complications of actuality in order to modify
      them in the direction of Socialism. He finds himself in a jungle of
      difficulties that strain his intellectual power to the utmost. He emerges
      at last with conclusions, and they are rarely the obvious conclusions, as
      to what needs to be done. Even the people of his own side he finds do not
      see as he sees; they are, he perceives, crude and ignorant.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now I hold that his duty is to explain his discoveries and intentions
      until they see as he sees. But the specialist temperament is often not a
      generalizing and expository temperament. Specialists are apt to measure
      minds by their speciality and underrate the average intelligence. The
      specialist is appalled by the real task before him, and he sets himself by
      tricks and misrepresentations, by benevolent scoundrelism in fact, to
      effect changes he desires. Too often he fails even in that. Where he might
      have found fellowship he arouses suspicion. And even if a thing is done in
      this way, its essential merit is lost. For it is better, I hold, for a man
      to die of his disease than to be cured unwittingly. That is to cheat him
      of life and to cheat life of the contribution his consciousness might have
      given it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Socialism of my beliefs rests on a profounder faith and broader
      proposition. It looks over and beyond the warring purposes of to-day as a
      general may look over and beyond a crowd of sullen, excited and confused
      recruits, to the day when they will be disciplined, exercised, trained,
      willing and convergent on a common end. It holds persistently to the idea
      of men increasingly working in agreement, doing things that are sane to
      do, on a basis of mutual helpfulness, temperance and toleration. It sees
      the great masses of humanity rising out of base and immediate anxieties,
      out of dwarfing pressures and cramped surroundings, to understanding and
      participation and fine effort. It sees the resources of the earth
      husbanded and harvested, economized and used with scientific skill for the
      maximum of result. It sees towns and cities finely built, a race of beings
      finely bred and taught and trained, open ways and peace and freedom from
      end to end of the earth. It sees beauty increasing in humanity, about
      humanity and through humanity. Through this great body of mankind goes
      evermore an increasing understanding, an intensifying brotherhood. As
      Christians have dreamt of the New Jerusalem so does Socialism, growing
      ever more temperate, patient, forgiving and resolute, set its face to the
      World City of Mankind.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.5. HATE AND LOVE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Before I go on to point out the broad principles of action that flow from
      this wide conception of Socialism, I may perhaps give a section to
      elucidating that opposition of hate and love I made when I dealt with the
      class war. I have already used the word love several times; it is an
      ambiguous word and it may be well to spend a few words in making clear the
      sense in which it is used here. I use it in a very broad sense to convey
      all that complex of motives, impulses, sentiments, that incline us to find
      our happiness and satisfactions in the happiness and sympathy of others.
      Essentially it is a synthetic force in human affairs, the merger tendency,
      a linking force, an expression in personal will and feeling of the common
      element and interest. It insists upon resemblances and shares and
      sympathies. And hate, I take it, is the emotional aspect of antagonism, it
      is the expression in personal will and feeling of the individual's
      separation from others. It is the competing and destructive tendency. So
      long as we are individuals and members of a species, we must needs both
      hate and love. But because I believe, as I have already confessed, that
      the oneness of the species is a greater fact than individuality, and that
      we individuals are temporary separations from a collective purpose, and
      since hate eliminates itself by eliminating its objects, whilst love
      multiplies itself by multiplying its objects, so love must be a thing more
      comprehensive and enduring than hate.
    </p>
    <p>
      Moreover, hate must be in its nature a good thing. We individuals exist as
      such, I believe, for the purpose in things, and our separations and
      antagonisms serve that purpose. We play against each other like hammer and
      anvil. But the synthesis of a collective will in humanity, which is I
      believe our human and terrestrial share in that purpose, is an idea that
      carries with it a conception of a secular alteration in the scope and
      method of both love and hate. Both widen and change with man's widening
      and developing apprehension of the purpose he serves. The savage man loves
      in gusts a fellow creature or so about him, and fears and hates all other
      people. Every expansion of his scope and ideas widens either circle. The
      common man of our civilized world loves not only many of his friends and
      associates systematically and enduringly, but dimly he loves also his city
      and his country, his creed and his race; he loves it may be less intensely
      but over a far wider field and much more steadily. But he hates also more
      widely if less passionately and vehemently than a savage, and since love
      makes rather harmony and peace and hate rather conflict and events, one
      may easily be led to suppose that hate is the ruling motive in human
      affairs. Men band themselves together in leagues and loyalties, in cults
      and organizations and nationalities, and it is often hard to say whether
      the bond is one of love for the association or hatred of those to whom the
      association is antagonized. The two things pass insensibly into one
      another. London people have recently seen an edifying instance of the
      transition, in the Brown Dog statue riots. A number of people drawn
      together by their common pity for animal suffering, by love indeed of the
      most disinterested sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to erect
      a monument with an inscription at once recklessly untruthful, spiteful in
      spirit and particularly vexatious to one great medical school of London.
      They have provoked riots and placarded London with taunts and irritating
      misrepresentation of the spirit of medical research, and they have
      infected a whole fresh generation of London students with a bitter
      partizan contempt for the humanitarian effort that has so lamentably
      misconducted itself. Both sides vow they will never give in, and the
      anti-vivisectionists are busy manufacturing small china copies of the
      Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes of domestic
      irritation. Here hate, the evil ugly brother of effort, has manifestly
      slain love the initiator and taken the affair in hand. That is a little
      model of human conflicts. So soon as we become militant and play against
      one another, comes this danger of strain and this possible reversal of
      motive. The fight begins. Into a pit of heat and hate fall right and wrong
      together.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now it seems to me that a religious faith such as I have set forth in the
      second Book, and a clear sense of our community of blood with all mankind,
      must necessarily affect both our loving and our hatred. It will certainly
      not abolish hate, but it will subordinate it altogether to love. We are
      individuals, so the Purpose presents itself to me, in order that we may
      hate the things that have to go, ugliness, baseness, insufficiency,
      unreality, that we may love and experiment and strive for the things that
      collectively we seek&mdash;power and beauty. Before our conversion we did
      this darkly and with our hate spreading to persons and parties from the
      things for which they stood. But the believer will hate lovingly and
      without fear. We are of one blood and substance with our antagonists, even
      with those that we desire keenly may die and leave no issue in flesh or
      persuasion. They all touch us and are part of one necessary experience.
      They are all necessary to the synthesis, even if they are necessary only
      as the potato-peel in the dust-bin is necessary to my dinner.
    </p>
    <p>
      So it is I disavow and deplore the whole spirit of class-war Socialism
      with its doctrine of hate, its envious assault upon the leisure and
      freedom of the wealthy. Without leisure and freedom and the experience of
      life they gave, the ideas of Socialism could never have been born. The
      true mission of Socialism is against darkness, vanity and cowardice, that
      darkness which hides from the property owner the intense beauty, the
      potentialities of interest, the splendid possibilities of life, that
      vanity and cowardice that make him clutch his precious holdings and fear
      and hate the shadow of change. It has to teach the collective organization
      of society; and to that the class-consciousness and intense
      class-prejudices of the worker need to bow quite as much as those of the
      property owner. But when I say that Socialism's mission is to teach, I do
      not mean that its mission is a merely verbal and mental one; it must use
      all instruments and teach by example as well as precept. Socialism by
      becoming charitable and merciful will not cease to be militant. Socialism
      must, lovingly but resolutely, use law, use force, to dispossess the
      owners of socially disadvantageous wealth, as one coerces a lunatic
      brother or takes a wrongfully acquired toy from a spoilt and obstinate
      child. It must intervene between all who would keep their children from
      instruction in the business of citizenship and the lessons of fraternity.
      It must build and guard what it builds with laws and with that sword which
      is behind all laws. Non-resistance is for the non-constructive man, for
      the hermit in the cave and the naked saint in the dust; the builder and
      maker with the first stroke of his foundation spade uses force and opens
      war against the anti-builder.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.6. THE PRELIMINARY SOCIAL DUTY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      The belief I have that contributing to the development of the collective
      being of man is the individual's general meaning and duty, and the
      formulae of the Socialism which embodies this belief so far as our common
      activities go, give a general framework and direction how a man or woman
      should live. (I do throughout all this book mean man or woman equally when
      I write of "man," unless it is manifestly inapplicable.)
    </p>
    <p>
      And first in this present time he must see to it that he does live, that
      is to say he must get food, clothing, covering, and adequate leisure for
      the finer aspects of living. Socialism plans an organized civilization in
      which these things will be a collective solicitude, and the gaining of a
      subsistence an easy preliminary to the fine drama of existence, but in the
      world as we have it we are forced to engage much of our energy in
      scrambling for these preliminary necessities. Our problems of conduct lie
      in the world as it is and not in the world as we want it to be. First then
      a man must get a living, a fair civilized living for himself. It is a
      fundamental duty. It must be a fair living, not pinched nor mean nor
      strained. A man can do nothing higher, he can be no service to any cause,
      until he himself is fed and clothed and equipped and free. He must earn
      this living or equip himself to earn it in some way not socially
      disadvantageous, he must contrive as far as possible that the work he does
      shall be constructive and contributory to the general well-being.
    </p>
    <p>
      And these primary necessities of food, clothing and freedom being secured,
      one comes to the general disposition of one's surplus energy. With regard
      to that I think that a very simple proposition follows from the broad
      beliefs I have chosen to adopt. The general duty of a man, his existence
      being secured, is to educate, and chiefly to educate and develop himself.
      It is his duty to live, to make all he can out of himself and life, to get
      full of experience, to make himself fine and perceiving and expressive, to
      render his experience and perceptions honestly and helpfully to others.
      And in particular he has to educate himself and others with himself in
      Socialism. He has to make and keep this idea of synthetic human effort and
      of conscious constructive effort clear first to himself and then clear in
      the general mind. For it is an idea that comes and goes. We are all of us
      continually lapsing from it towards individual isolation again. He needs,
      we all need, constant refreshment in this belief if it is to remain a
      predominant living fact in our lives.
    </p>
    <p>
      And that duty of education, of building up the collective idea and
      organization of humanity, falls into various divisions depending in their
      importance upon individual quality. For all there is one personal work
      that none may evade, and that is thinking hard, criticising strenuously
      and understanding as clearly as one can religion, socialism and the
      general principle of one's acts. The intellectual factor is of primary
      importance in my religion. I can see no more reason why salvation should
      come to the intellectually incapable than to the morally incapable. For
      simple souls thinking in simple processes, salvation perhaps comes easily,
      but there is none for the intellectual coward, for the mental sloven and
      sluggard, for the stupid and obdurate mind. The Believer will think hard
      and continue to grow and learn, to read and seek discussion as his needs
      determine.
    </p>
    <p>
      Correlated with one's own intellectual activity, part of it and growing
      out of it for almost everyone, is intellectual work with and upon others.
      By teaching we learn. Not to communicate one's thoughts to others, to keep
      one's thoughts to oneself as people say, is either cowardice or pride. It
      is a form of sin. It is a duty to talk, teach, explain, write, lecture,
      read and listen. Every truly religious man, every good Socialist, is a
      propagandist. Those who cannot write or discuss can talk, those who cannot
      argue can induce people to listen to others and read. We have a belief and
      an idea that we want to spread, each to the utmost of his means and
      measure, throughout all the world. We have a thought that we want to make
      humanity's thought. And it is a duty too that one should, within the
      compass of one's ability, make teaching, writing and lecturing possible
      where it has not existed before. This can be done in a hundred ways, by
      founding and enlarging schools and universities and chairs, for example;
      by making print and reading and all the material of thought cheap and
      abundant, by organizing discussion and societies for inquiry.
    </p>
    <p>
      And talk and thought and study are but the more generalized aspects of
      duty. The Believer may find his own special aptitude lies rather among
      concrete things, in experimenting and promoting experiments in collective
      action. Things teach as well as words, and some of us are most expressive
      by concrete methods. The Believer will work himself and help others to his
      utmost in all those developments of material civilization, in organized
      sanitation for example, all those developments that force collective acts
      upon communities and collective realizations into the minds of men. And
      the whole field of scientific research is a field of duty calling to
      everyone who can enter it, to add to the permanent store of knowledge and
      new resources for the race.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Mind of that Civilized State we seek to make by giving ourselves into
      its making, is evidently the central work before us. But while the writer,
      the publisher and printer, the bookseller and librarian and teacher and
      preacher, the investigator and experimenter, the reader and everyone who
      thinks, will be contributing themselves to this great organized mind and
      intention in the world, many sorts of specialized men will be more
      immediately concerned with parallel and more concrete aspects of the human
      synthesis. The medical worker and the medical investigator, for example,
      will be building up the body of a new generation, the body of the
      civilized state, and he will be doing all he can, not simply as an
      individual, but as a citizen, to ORGANIZE his services of cure and
      prevention, of hygiene and selection. A great and growing multitude of men
      will be working out the apparatus of the civilized state; the organizers
      of transit and housing, the engineers in their incessantly increasing
      variety, the miners and geologists estimating the world's resources in
      metals and minerals, the mechanical inventors perpetually economizing
      force. The scientific agriculturist again will be studying the food supply
      of the world as a whole, and how it may be increased and distributed and
      economized. And to the student of law comes the task of rephrasing his
      intricate and often quite beautiful science in relation to modern
      conceptions. All these and a hundred other aspects are integral to the
      wide project of Constructive Socialism as it shapes itself in my faith.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.7. WRONG WAYS OF LIVING.
    </h2>
    <p>
      When we lay down the proposition that it is one's duty to get one's living
      in some way not socially disadvantageous, and as far as possible by work
      that is contributory to the general well-being and development, when we
      state that one's surplus energies, after one's living is gained, must be
      devoted to experience, self-development and constructive work, it is clear
      we condemn by implication many modes of life that are followed to-day.
    </p>
    <p>
      For example, it is manifest we condemn living in idleness or on
      non-productive sport, on the income derived from private property, and all
      sorts of ways of earning a living that cannot be shown to conduce to the
      constructive process. We condemn trading that is merely speculative, and
      in fact all trading and manufacture that is not a positive social service;
      we condemn living by gambling or by playing games for either stakes or
      pay. Much more do we condemn dishonest or fraudulent trading and every act
      of advertisement that is not punctiliously truthful. We must condemn too
      the taking of any income from the community that is neither earned nor
      conceded in the collective interest. But to this last point, and to
      certain issues arising out of it, I will return in the section next
      following this one.
    </p>
    <p>
      And it follows evidently from our general propositions that every form of
      prostitution is a double sin, against one's individuality and against the
      species which we serve by the development of that individuality's
      preferences and idiosyncracies.
    </p>
    <p>
      And by prostitution I mean not simply the act of a woman who sells for
      money, and against her thoughts and preferences, her smiles and
      endearments and the secret beauty and pleasure of her body, but the act of
      anyone who, to gain a living, suppresses himself, does things in a manner
      alien to himself and subserves aims and purposes with which he disagrees.
      The journalist who writes against his personal convictions, the solicitor
      who knowingly assists the schemes of rogues, the barrister who pits
      himself against what he perceives is justice and the right, the artist who
      does unbeautiful things or less beautiful things than he might, simply to
      please base employers, the craftsman who makes instruments for foolish
      uses or bad uses, the dealer who sells and pushes an article because it
      fits the customer's folly; all these are prostitutes of mind and soul if
      not of body, with no right to lift an eyebrow at the painted disasters of
      the streets.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.8. SOCIAL PARASITISM AND CONTEMPORARY INJUSTICES.
    </h2>
    <p>
      These broad principles about one's way of living are very simple; our
      minds move freely among them. But the real interest is with the individual
      case, and the individual case is almost always complicated by the fact
      that the existing social and economic system is based upon conditions that
      the growing collective intelligence condemns as unjust and undesirable,
      and that the constructive spirit in men now seeks to supersede. We have to
      live in a provisional State while we dream of and work for a better one.
    </p>
    <p>
      The ideal life for the ordinary man in a civilized, that is to say a
      Socialist, State would be in public employment or in private enterprise
      aiming at public recognition. But in our present world only a small
      minority can have that direct and honourable relation of public service in
      the work they do; most of the important business of the community is done
      upon the older and more tortuous private ownership system, and the great
      mass of men in socially useful employment find themselves working only
      indirectly for the community and directly for the profit of a private
      owner, or they themselves are private owners. Every man who has any money
      put by in the bank, or any money invested, is a private owner, and in so
      far as he draws interest or profit from this investment he is a social
      parasite. It is in practice almost impossible to divest oneself of that
      parasitic quality however straightforward the general principle may be.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is practically impossible for two equally valid sets of reasons. The
      first is that under existing conditions, saving and investment constitute
      the only way to rest and security in old age, to leisure, study and
      intellectual independence, to the safe upbringing of a family and the
      happiness of one's weaker dependents. These are things that should not be
      left for the individual to provide; in the civilized state, the state
      itself will insure every citizen against these anxieties that now make the
      study of the City Article almost a duty. To abandon saving and investment
      to-day, and to do so is of course to abandon all insurance, is to become a
      driven and uncertain worker, to risk one's personal freedom and culture
      and the upbringing and efficiency of one's children. It is to lower the
      standard of one's personal civilization, to think with less deliberation
      and less detachment, to fall away from that work of accumulating fine
      habits and beautiful and pleasant ways of living contributory to the
      coming State. And in the second place there is not only no return for such
      a sacrifice in anything won for Socialism, but for fine-thinking and
      living people to give up property is merely to let it pass into the hands
      of more egoistic possessors. Since at present things must be privately
      owned, it is better that they should be owned by people consciously
      working for social development and willing to use them to that end.
    </p>
    <p>
      We have to live in the present system and under the conditions of the
      present system, while we work with all our power to change that system for
      a better one.
    </p>
    <p>
      The case of Cadburys the cocoa and chocolate makers, and the practical
      slavery under the Portuguese of the East African negroes who grow the raw
      material for Messrs. Cadbury, is an illuminating one in this connection.
      The Cadburys, like the Rowntrees, are well known as an energetic and
      public-spirited family, their social and industrial experiments at
      Bournville and their general social and political activities are broad and
      constructive in the best sense. But they find themselves in the peculiar
      dilemma that they must either abandon an important and profitable portion
      of their great manufacture or continue to buy produce grown under cruel
      and even horrible conditions. Their retirement from the branch of the
      cocoa and chocolate trade concerned would, under these circumstances, mean
      no diminution of the manufacture or of the horrors of this particular
      slavery; it would merely mean that less humanitarian manufacturers would
      step in to take up the abandoned trade. The self-righteous individualist
      would have no doubts about the question; he would keep his hands clean
      anyhow, retrench his social work, abandon the types of cocoa involved, and
      pass by on the other side. But indeed I do not believe we came into the
      mire of life simply to hold our hands up out of it. Messrs. Cadbury follow
      a better line; they keep their business going, and exert themselves in
      every way to let light into the secrets of Portuguese East Africa and to
      organize a better control of these labour cruelties. That I think is
      altogether the right course in this difficulty.
    </p>
    <p>
      We cannot keep our hands clean in this world as it is. There is no excuse
      indeed for a life of fraud or any other positive fruitless wrong-doing or
      for a purely parasitic non-productive life, yet all but the fortunate few
      who are properly paid and recognized state servants must in financial and
      business matters do their best amidst and through institutions tainted
      with injustice and flawed with unrealities. All Socialists everywhere are
      like expeditionary soldiers far ahead of the main advance. The organized
      state that should own and administer their possessions for the general
      good has not arrived to take them over; and in the meanwhile they must act
      like its anticipatory agents according to their lights and make things
      ready for its coming.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Believer then who is not in the public service, whose life lies among
      the operations of private enterprise, must work always on the supposition
      that the property he administers, the business in which he works, the
      profession he follows, is destined to be taken over and organized
      collectively for the commonweal and must be made ready for the taking
      over; that the private outlook he secures by investment, the provision he
      makes for his friends and children, are temporary, wasteful, though at
      present unavoidable devices to be presently merged in and superseded by
      the broad and scientific previsions of the co-operative commonwealth.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.9. THE CASE OF THE WIFE AND MOTHER.
    </h2>
    <p>
      These principles give a rule also for the problem that faces the great
      majority of thinking wives and mothers to-day. The most urgent and
      necessary social work falls upon them; they bear, and largely educate and
      order the homes of, the next generation, and they have no direct
      recognition from the community for either of these supreme functions. They
      are supposed to perform them not for God or the world, but to please and
      satisfy a particular man. Our laws, our social conventions, our economic
      methods, so hem a woman about that, however fitted for and desirous of
      maternity she may be, she can only effectually do that duty in a dependent
      relation to her husband. Nearly always he is the paymaster, and if his
      payments are grudging or irregular, she has little remedy short of a
      breach and the rupture of the home. Her duty is conceived of as first to
      him and only secondarily to her children and the State. Many wives become
      under these circumstances mere prostitutes to their husbands, often
      evading the bearing of children with their consent and even at their
      request, and "loving for a living." That is a natural outcome of the
      proprietary theory of the family out of which our civilization emerges.
      But our modern ideas trend more and more to regard a woman's primary duty
      to be her duty to the children and to the world to which she gives them.
      She is to be a citizen side by side with her husband; no longer is he to
      intervene between her and the community. As a matter of contemporary fact
      he can do so and does so habitually, and most women have to square their
      ideas of life to that possibility.
    </p>
    <p>
      Before any woman who is clear-headed enough to perceive that this great
      business of motherhood is one of supreme public importance, there are a
      number of alternatives at the present time. She may, like Grant Allan's
      heroine in "The Woman Who Did," declare an exaggerated and impossible
      independence, refuse the fetters of marriage and bear children to a lover.
      This, in the present state of public opinion in almost every existing
      social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course. It would mean a
      fatherless home, and since the woman will have to play the double part of
      income-earner and mother, an impoverished and struggling home. It would
      mean also an unsocial because ostracized home. In most cases, and even
      assuming it to be right in idea, it would still be on all fours with that
      immediate abandonment of private property we have already discussed, a
      sort of suicide that helps the world nothing.
    </p>
    <p>
      Or she may "strike," refuse marriage and pursue a solitary and childless
      career, engaging her surplus energies in constructive work. But that also
      is suicide; it is to miss the keenest experiences, the finest realities
      life has to offer.
    </p>
    <p>
      Or she may meet a man whom she can trust to keep a treaty with her and
      supplement the common interpretations and legal insufficiencies of the
      marriage bond, who will respect her always as a free and independent
      person, will abstain absolutely from authoritative methods, and will
      either share and trust his income and property with her in a frank
      communism, or give her a sufficient and private income for her personal
      use. It is only fair under existing economic conditions that at marriage a
      husband should insure his life in his wife's interest, and I do not think
      it would be impossible to bring our legal marriage contract into
      accordance with modern ideas in that matter. Certainly it should be
      legally imperative that at the birth of each child a new policy upon its
      father's life, as the income-getter, should begin. The latter provision at
      least should be a normal condition of marriage and one that the wife
      should have power to enforce when payments fall away. With such safeguards
      and under such conditions marriage ceases to be a haphazard dependence for
      a woman, and she may live, teaching and rearing and free, almost as though
      the co-operative commonwealth had come.
    </p>
    <p>
      But in many cases, since great numbers of women marry so young and so
      ignorantly that their thinking about realities begins only after marriage,
      a woman will find herself already married to a man before she realizes the
      significance of these things. She may be already the mother of children.
      Her husband's ideas may not be her ideas. He may dominate, he may
      prohibit, he may intervene, he may default. He may, if he sees fit,
      burthen the family income with the charges of his illegitimate offspring.
    </p>
    <p>
      We live in the world as it is and not in the world as it should be. That
      sentence becomes the refrain of this discussion.
    </p>
    <p>
      The normal modern married woman has to make the best of a bad position, to
      do her best under the old conditions, to live as though she was under the
      new conditions, to make good citizens, to give her spare energies as far
      as she can to bringing about a better state of affairs. Like the private
      property owner and the official in a privately owned business, her best
      method of conduct is to consider herself an unrecognized public official,
      irregularly commanded and improperly paid. There is no good in flagrant
      rebellion. She has to study her particular circumstances and make what
      good she can out of them, keeping her face towards the coming time. I
      cannot better the image I have already used for the thinking and believing
      modern-minded people of to-day as an advance guard cut off from proper
      supplies, ill furnished so that makeshift prevails, and rather
      demoralized. We have to be wise as well as loyal; discretion itself is
      loyalty to the coming State.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.10. ASSOCIATIONS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In the previous section I have dealt with the single individual's duty in
      relation to the general community and to law and generally received
      institutions. But there is a new set of questions now to be considered.
      Let us take up the modifications that arise when it is not one isolated
      individual but a group of individuals who find themselves in disagreement
      with contemporary rule or usage and disposed to find a rightness in things
      not established or not conceded. They too live in the world as it is and
      not in the world as it ought to be, but their association opens up quite
      new possibilities of anticipating coming developments of living, and of
      protecting and guaranteeing one another from what for a single unprotected
      individual would be the inevitable consequences of a particular line of
      conduct, conduct which happened to be unorthodox or only, in the face of
      existing conditions, unwise.
    </p>
    <p>
      For example, a friend of mine who had read a copy of the preceding section
      wrote as follows:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "I can see no reason why even to-day a number of persons avowedly united
      in the same 'Belief' and recognizing each other as the self-constituted
      social vanguard should not form a recognized spiritual community centering
      round some kind of 'religious' edifice and ritual, and agree to register
      and consecrate the union of any couples of the members according to a
      contract which the whole community should have voted acceptable. The
      community would be the guardian of money deposited or paid in gradually as
      insurance for the children. And the fact of the whole business being
      regular, open and connected with a common intellectual and moral ritual
      and a common name, such for example as your name of 'The Samurai,' would
      secure the respect of outsiders, so that eventually these new marriage
      arrangements would modify the old ones. People would ask, 'Were you
      married before the registrar?' and the answer would be, 'No, we are
      Samurai and were united before the Elders.' In Catholic countries those
      who use only the civil marriage are considered outcasts by the religiously
      minded, which shows that recognition by the State is not as potent as
      recognition by the community to which one belongs. The religious marriage
      is considered the only one binding by Catholics, and the civil ceremony is
      respected merely because the State has brute force behind it."
    </p>
    <p>
      There is in this passage one particularly valuable idea, the idea of an
      association of people to guarantee the welfare of their children in
      common. I will follow that a little, though it takes me away from my main
      line of thought. It seems to me that such an association might be found in
      many cases a practicable way of easing the conflict that so many men and
      women experience, between their individual public service and their duty
      to their own families. Many people of exceptional gifts, whose gifts are
      not necessarily remunerative, are forced by these personal considerations
      to direct them more or less askew, to divert them from their best
      application to some inferior but money-making use; and many more are given
      the disagreeable alternative of evading parentage or losing the freedom of
      mind needed for socially beneficial work. This is particularly the case
      with many scientific investigators, many sociological and philosophical
      workers, many artists, teachers and the like. Even when such people are
      fairly prosperous personally they do not care to incur the obligation to
      keep prosperous at any cost to their work that a family in our competitive
      system involves. It gives great ease of mind to any sort of artistic or
      intellectual worker to feel free to become poor. I do not see why a group
      of such people should not attempt a merger of their family anxieties and
      family adventures, insure all its members, and while each retains a
      sufficient personal independence for freedom of word and movement, pool
      their family solicitudes and resources, organize a collective school and a
      common maintenance fund for all the children born of members of the
      association. I do not see why they should not in fact develop a permanent
      trust to maintain, educate and send out all their children into the world,
      a trust to which their childless friends and associates could contribute
      by gift and bequest, and to which the irregular good fortune that is not
      uncommon in the careers of these exceptional types could be devoted. I do
      not mean any sort of charity but an enlarged family basis.
    </p>
    <p>
      Such an idea passes very readily into the form of a Eugenic association.
      It would be quite possible and very interesting for prosperous people
      interested in Eugenics to create a trust for the offspring of a selected
      band of beneficiaries, and with increasing resources to admit new members
      and so build up within the present social system a special strain of
      chosen people. So far people with eugenic ideas and people with
      conceptions of associated and consolidated families have been too various
      and too dispersed for such associations to be practicable, but as such
      views of life become more common, the chance of a number of sufficiently
      homogeneous and congenial people working out the method of such a grouping
      increases steadily.
    </p>
    <p>
      Moreover, I can imagine no reason to prevent any women who are in
      agreement with the moral standards of the "Woman who Did" (standards I
      will not discuss at this present point but defer for a later section)
      combining for mutual protection and social support and the welfare of such
      children as they may bear. Then certainly, to the extent that this
      succeeds, the objections that arise from the evil effects upon the
      children of social isolation disappear. This isolation would be at worst a
      group isolation, and there can be no doubt that my friend is right in
      pointing out that there is much more social toleration for an act
      committed under the sanction of a group than for an isolated act that may
      be merely impulsive misbehaviour masquerading as high principle.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seems to me remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, so obvious a
      form of combination has never yet been put in practice. It is remarkable
      but not inexplicable. The first people to develop novel ideas, more
      particularly of this type, are usually people in isolated circumstances
      and temperamentally incapable of disciplined cooperation.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.11. OF AN ORGANIZED BROTHERHOOD.
    </h2>
    <p>
      The idea of organizing the progressive elements in the social chaos into a
      regular developing force is one that has had a great attraction for me. I
      have written upon it elsewhere, and I make no apology for returning to it
      here and examining it in the light of various afterthoughts and with fresh
      suggestions.
    </p>
    <p>
      I first broached this idea in a book called "Anticipations," wherein I
      described a possible development of thought and concerted action which I
      called the New Republicanism, and afterwards I redrew the thing rather
      more elaborately in my "Modern Utopia." I had been struck by the
      apparently chaotic and wasteful character of most contemporary reform
      movements, and it seemed reasonable to suppose that those who aimed at
      organizing society and replacing chaos and waste by wise arrangements,
      might very well begin by producing a more effective organization for their
      own efforts. These complexities of good intention made me impatient, and I
      sought industriously in my mind for a short cut through them. In doing so
      I think I overlooked altogether too much how heterogeneous all progressive
      thought and progressive people must be.
    </p>
    <p>
      In my "Modern Utopia" I turned this idea of an organized brotherhood about
      very thoroughly and looked at it from this point and that; I let it loose
      as it were, and gave it its fullest development, and so produced a sort of
      secular Order of governing men and women. In a spirit entirely
      journalistic I called this the Order of the Samurai, for at the time I
      wrote there was much interest in Bushido because of the capacity for
      hardship and self-sacrifice this chivalrous culture appears to have
      developed in the Japanese. These Samurai of mine were a sort of voluntary
      nobility who supplied the administrative and organizing forces that held
      my Utopian world together. They were the "New Republicans" of my
      "Anticipations" and "Mankind in the Making," much developed and supposed
      triumphant and ruling the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      I sought of course to set out these ideas as attractively as possible in
      my books, and they have as a matter of fact proved very attractive to a
      certain number of people. Quite a number have wanted to go on with them.
      Several little organizations of Utopians and Samurai and the like have
      sprung up and informed me of themselves, and some survive; and young men
      do still at times drop into my world "personally or by letter" declaring
      themselves New Republicans.
    </p>
    <p>
      All this has been very helpful and at times a little embarrassing to me.
      It has given me an opportunity of seeing the ideals I flung into the
      distance beyond Sirius and among the mountain snows coming home partially
      incarnate in girls and young men. It has made me look into individualized
      human aspirations, human impatience, human vanity and a certain human need
      of fellowship, at close quarters. It has illuminated subtle and fine
      traits; it has displayed nobilities, and it has brought out aspects of
      human absurdity to which only the pencil of Mr. George Morrow could do
      adequate justice. The thing I have had to explain most generally is that
      my New Republicans and Samurai are but figures of suggestion, figures to
      think over and use in planning disciplines, but by no means copies to
      follow. I have had to go over again, as though it had never been raised
      before in any previous writings, the difference between the spirit and the
      letter.
    </p>
    <p>
      These responses have on the whole confirmed my main idea that there is a
      real need, a need that many people, and especially adolescent people, feel
      very strongly, for some sort of constructive brotherhood of a closer type
      than mere political association, to co-ordinate and partly guide their
      loose chaotic efforts to get hold of life&mdash;but they have also
      convinced me that no wide and comprehensive organization can supply that
      want.
    </p>
    <p>
      My New Republicans were presented as in many respects harsh and
      overbearing people, "a sort of outspoken secret society" for the
      organization of the world. They were not so much an ideal order as the
      Samurai of the later book, being rather deduced as a possible outcome of
      certain forces and tendencies in contemporary life (A.D. 1900) than, as
      literary people say, "created." They were to be drawn from among
      engineers, doctors, scientific business organizers and the like, and I
      found that it is to energetic young men of the more responsible classes
      that this particular ideal appeals. Their organization was quite informal,
      a common purpose held them together.
    </p>
    <p>
      Most of the people who have written to me to call themselves New
      Republicans are I find also Imperialists and Tariff Reformers, and I
      suppose that among the prominent political figures of to-day the nearest
      approach to my New Republicans is Lord Milner and the Socialist-Unionists
      of his group. It is a type harshly constructive, inclined to an
      unscrupulous pose and slipping readily into a Kiplingesque brutality.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Samurai on the other hand were more picturesque figures, with a much
      more elaborated organization.
    </p>
    <p>
      I may perhaps recapitulate the points about that Order here.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the "Modern Utopia" the visitor from earth remarks:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "These Samurai form the real body of the State. All this time that I have
      spent going to and fro in this planet, it has been growing upon me that
      this order of men and women, wearing such a uniform as you wear, and with
      faces strengthened by discipline and touched with devotion, is the Utopian
      reality; that but for them the whole fabric of these fair appearances
      would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, until at last, back I
      should be amidst the grime and disorders of the life of earth. Tell me
      about these Samurai, who remind me of Plato's guardians, who look like
      Knight Templars, who bear a name that recalls the swordsmen of Japan. What
      are they? Are they an hereditary cast, a specially educated order, an
      elected class? For, certainly, this world turns upon them as a door upon
      its hinges."
    </p>
    <p>
      His informant explains:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "Practically the whole of the responsible rule of the world is in their
      hands; all our head teachers and disciplinary heads of colleges, our
      judges, barristers, employers of labour beyond a certain limit, practising
      medical men, legislators, must be Samurai, and all the executive
      committees and so forth, that play so large a part in our affairs, are
      drawn by lot exclusively from them. The order is not hereditary&mdash;we
      know just enough of biology and the uncertainties of inheritance to know
      how silly that would be&mdash;and it does not require an early
      consecration or novitiate or ceremonies and initiations of that sort. The
      Samurai are, in fact, volunteers. Any intelligent adult in a reasonably
      healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five and twenty, become
      one of the Samurai and take a hand in the universal control."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Provided he follows the Rule."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Precisely&mdash;provided he follows the Rule."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have heard the phrase, 'voluntary nobility.'"
    </p>
    <p>
      "That was the idea of our Founders. They made a noble and privileged order&mdash;open
      to the whole world. No one could complain of an unjust exclusion, for the
      only thing that could exclude them from the order was unwillingness or
      inability to follow the Rule.
    </p>
    <p>
      "The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base altogether, to discipline the
      impulses and emotions, to develop a moral habit and sustain a man in
      periods of stress, fatigue and temptation, to produce the maximum
      co-operation of all men of good-intent, and in fact to keep all the
      Samurai in a state of moral and bodily health and efficiency. It does as
      much of this as well as it can, but of course, like all general
      propositions, it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. AT
      FIRST IN THE MILITANT DAYS, IT WAS A TRIFLE HARD AND UNCOMPROMISING; IT
      HAD RATHER TOO STRONG AN APPEAL TO THE MORAL PRIG AND THE HARSHLY
      RIGHTEOUS MAN, but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and
      expansion, and every year it becomes a little better adapted to the need
      of a general rule of life that all men may try to follow. We have now a
      whole literature with many very fine things in it, written about the Rule.
    </p>
    <p>
      "The Rule consists of three parts; there is the list of things that
      qualify, the list of things that must not be done, and the list of things
      that must be done. Qualification exacts a little exertion as evidence of
      good faith and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and many of the
      base."
    </p>
    <p>
      He goes on to tell of certain intellectual qualifications and disciplines.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Next to the intellectual qualification comes the physical, the man must
      be in sound health, free from certain foul, avoidable and demoralizing
      diseases, and in good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin, or
      flabby, or whose nerves are shaky&mdash;we refer them back to training.
      And finally the man or woman must be fully adult."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Twenty-one? But you said twenty-five!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five or over; then the minimum
      became twenty-five for men and twenty-one for women. Now there is a
      feeling that it ought to be raised. We don't want to take advantage of
      mere boy and girl emotions&mdash;men of my way of thinking, at any rate,
      don't&mdash;we want to get our Samurai with experiences, with settled
      mature conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly pushing back old
      age and death, and keeping men hale and hearty to eighty and more. There's
      no need to hurry the young. Let them have a chance of wine, love and song;
      let them feel the bite of full-blooded desire, and know what devils they
      have to reckon with...
    </p>
    <p>
      "We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do no great harm, but we
      think it well to forbid them none the less, so that we can weed out the
      self-indulgent. We think that a constant resistance to little seductions
      is good for a man's quality. At any rate, it shows that a man is prepared
      to pay something for his honour and privileges. We prescribe a regimen of
      food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any alcoholic drink, all narcotic drugs...
    </p>
    <p>
      "Originally the Samurai were forbidden usury, that is to say, the lending
      of money at fixed rates of interest. They are still under that
      interdiction, but since our commercial code practically prevents usury
      altogether, and our law will not recognize contracts for interest upon
      private accommodation loans to unprosperous borrowers," (he is speaking of
      Utopia), "it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a man growing richer
      by mere inaction and at the expense of an impoverished debtor is
      profoundly distasteful to Utopian ideas, and our State insists pretty
      effectually now upon the participation of the lender in the borrower's
      risks. This, however, is only one part of a series of limitations of the
      same character. It is felt that to buy simply in order to sell again
      brings out many unsocial human qualities; it makes a man seek to enhance
      profits and falsify values, and so the Samurai are forbidden to buy or
      sell on their own account or for any employer save the State, unless by
      some process of manufacture they change the nature of the commodity (a
      mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and they are forbidden
      salesmanship and all its arts. Nor may the Samurai do personal services,
      except in the matter of medicine or surgery; they may not be barbers, for
      example, nor inn waiters nor boot cleaners, men do such services for
      themselves. Nor may a man under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to
      do whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor keep one; he must
      shave and dress and serve himself, carry his own food from the helper's
      place, redd his sleeping room and leave it clean..."
    </p>
    <p>
      Finally came the things they had to do. Their Rule contained:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "many precise directions regarding his health, and rules that would aim at
      once at health and that constant exercise or will that makes life good.
      Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the Samurai must bathe in
      cold water and the men shave every day; they have the precisest directions
      in such matters; the body must be in health, the skin and nerves and
      muscles in perfect tone, or the Samurai must go to the doctors of the
      order and give implicit obedience to the regimen prescribed. They must
      sleep alone at least four nights in five; and they must eat with and talk
      to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their conversation for an hour
      at least, at the nearest club-house of the Samurai, once on three chosen
      days in every week. Moreover they must read aloud from the Book of the
      Samurai for at least five minutes every day. Every month they must buy and
      read faithfully through at least one book that has been published during
      the past five years, and the only intervention with private choice in that
      matter is the prescription of a certain minimum of length for the monthly
      book or books. But the full rule in these minor compulsory matters is
      voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alternatives. Its aim is
      rather to keep before the Samurai by a number of simple duties, as it
      were, the need of and some of the chief methods towards health of body and
      mind rather than to provide a comprehensive rule, and to ensure the
      maintenance of a community of feeling and interests among the Samurai
      through habit, intercourse and a living contemporary literature. These
      minor obligations do not earmark more than an hour in the day. Yet they
      serve to break down isolations of sympathy, all sorts of physical and
      intellectual sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccupations
      of many sorts...
    </p>
    <p>
      "So far as the Samurai have a purpose in common in maintaining the State
      and the order and discipline of the world, so far, by their discipline and
      denial, by their public work and effort, they worship God together. But
      the ultimate fount of motives lies in the individual life, it lies in
      silent and deliberate reflections, and at this the most striking of all
      the rules of the Samurai aims. For seven consecutive days of the year, at
      least, each man or woman under the Rule must go right out of all the life
      of men into some wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman
      and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They must go bookless and
      weaponless, without pen or paper or money. Provision must be taken for the
      period of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack&mdash;for they must sleep
      under the open sky&mdash;but no means of making a fire. They may study
      maps before to guide them, showing any difficulties and dangers in the
      journey, but they may not carry such helps. They must not go by beaten
      ways or wherever there are inhabited houses, but into the bare, quiet
      places of the globe&mdash;the regions set apart for them.
    </p>
    <p>
      "This discipline was invented to secure a certain stoutness of heart and
      body in the Samurai. Otherwise the order might have lain open to too many
      timorous, merely abstemious men and women. Many things had been suggested,
      sword-play and tests that verged on torture, climbing in giddy places and
      the like, before this was chosen. Partly, it is to ensure good training
      and sturdiness of body and mind, but partly also, it is to draw the minds
      of the Samurai for a space from the insistent details of life, from the
      intricate arguments and the fretting effort to work, from personal
      quarrels and personal affections and the things of the heated room. Out
      they must go, clean out of the world..."
    </p>
    <p>
      These passages will at least serve to present the Samurai idea and the
      idea of common Rule of conduct it embodied.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the "Modern Utopia" I discuss also a lesser Rule and the modification
      of the Rule for women and the relation to the order of what I call the
      poietic types, those types whose business in life seems to be rather to
      experience and express than to act and effectually do. For those things I
      must refer the reader to the book itself. Together with a sentence I have
      put in italics above, they serve to show that even when I was devising
      these Samurai I was not unmindful of the defects that are essential to
      such a scheme.
    </p>
    <p>
      This dream of the Samurai proved attractive to a much more various group
      of readers than the New Republican suggestion, and there have been actual
      attempts to realise the way of life proposed. In most of these cases there
      was manifest a disposition greatly to over-accentuate organization, to
      make too much of the disciplinary side of the Rule and to forget the
      entire subordination of such things to active thought and constructive
      effort. They are valuable and indeed only justifiable as a means to an
      end. These attempts of a number of people of very miscellaneous origins
      and social traditions to come together and work like one machine made the
      essential wastefulness of any terrestrial realization of my Samurai very
      clear. The only reason for such an Order is the economy and development of
      force, and under existing conditions disciplines would consume more force
      than they would engender. The Order, so far from being a power, would be
      an isolation. Manifestly the elements of organization and uniformity were
      overdone in my Utopia; in this matter I was nearer the truth in the case
      of my New Republicans. These, in contrast with the Samurai, had no formal
      general organization, they worked for a common end, because their minds
      and the suggestion of their circumstances pointed them to a common end.
      Nothing was enforced upon them in the way of observance or discipline.
      They were not shepherded and trained together, they came together. It was
      assumed that if they wanted strongly they would see to it that they lived
      in the manner most conducive to their end just as in all this book I am
      taking it for granted that to believe truly is to want to do right. It was
      not even required of them that they should sedulously propagate their
      constructive idea.
    </p>
    <p>
      Apart from the illumination of my ideas by these experiments and
      proposals, my Samurai idea has also had a quite unmerited amount of subtle
      and able criticism from people who found it at once interesting and
      antipathetic. My friends Vernon Lee and G.K. Chesterton, for example, have
      criticized it, and I think very justly, on the ground that the invincible
      tortuousness of human pride and class-feeling would inevitably vitiate its
      working. All its disciplines would tend to give its members a sense of
      distinctness, would tend to syndicate power and rob it of any intimacy and
      sympathy with those outside the Order...
    </p>
    <p>
      It seems to me now that anyone who shares the faith I have been developing
      in this book will see the value of these comments and recognize with me
      that this dream is a dream; the Samurai are just one more picture of the
      Perfect Knight, an ideal of clean, resolute and balanced living. They may
      be valuable as an ideal of attitude but not as an ideal of organization.
      They are never to be put, as people say, upon a business footing and made
      available as a refuge from the individual problem.
    </p>
    <p>
      To modernize the parable, the Believer must not only not bury his talent
      but he must not bank it with an organization. Each Believer must decide
      for himself how far he wants to be kinetic or efficient, how far he needs
      a stringent rule of conduct, how far he is poietic and may loiter and
      adventure among the coarse and dangerous things of life. There is no
      reason why one should not, and there is every reason why one should,
      discuss one's personal needs and habits and disciplines and elaborate
      one's way of life with those about one, and form perhaps with those of
      like training and congenial temperament small groups for mutual support.
      That sort of association I have already discussed in the previous section.
      With adolescent people in particular such association is in many cases an
      almost instinctive necessity. There is no reason moreover why everyone who
      is lonely should not seek out congenial minds and contrive a grouping with
      them. All mutual lovers for example are Orders of a limited membership,
      many married couples and endless cliques and sets are that. Such small and
      natural associations are indeed force-giving Orders because they are
      brought together by a common innate disposition out of a possibility of
      mutual assistance and inspiration; they observe a Rule that springs up and
      not a Rule imposed. The more of such groups and Orders we have the better.
      I do not see why having formed themselves they should not define and
      organize themselves. I believe there is a phase somewhere between fifteen
      and thirty, in the life of nearly everybody, when such a group is sought,
      is needed and would be helpful in self-development and self-discovery. In
      leagues and societies for specific ends, too, we must all participate. But
      the order of the Samurai as a great progressive force controlling a
      multitude of lives right down to their intimate details and through all
      the phases of personal development is a thing unrealizable. To seek to
      realize it is impatience. True brotherhood is universal brotherhood. The
      way to that is long and toilsome, but it is a way that permits of no such
      energetic short cuts as this militant order of my dream would achieve.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.12. CONCERNING NEW STARTS AND NEW RELIGIONS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      When one is discussing this possible formation of cults and brotherhoods,
      it may be well to consider a few of the conditions that rule such human
      re-groupings. We live in the world as it is and not in the world as we
      want it to be, that is the practical rule by which we steer, and in
      directing our lives we must constantly consider the forces and
      practicabilities of the social medium in which we move.
    </p>
    <p>
      In contemporary life the existing ties are so various and so imperative
      that the detachment necessary as a preliminary condition to such new
      groupings is rarely found. This is not a period in which large numbers of
      people break away easily and completely from old connexions. Things change
      less catastrophically than once they did. More particularly is there less
      driving out into the wilderness. There is less heresy hunting; persecution
      is frequently reluctant and can be evaded by slight concessions. The world
      as a whole is less harsh and emphatic than it was. Customs and customary
      attitudes change nowadays not so much by open, defiant and revolutionary
      breaches as by the attrition of partial negligences and new glosses.
      Innovating people do conform to current usage, albeit they conform
      unwillingly and imperfectly. There is a constant breaking down and
      building up of usage, and as a consequence a lessened need of wholesale
      substitutions. Human methods have become viviparous; the New nowadays
      lives for a time in the form of the Old. The friend I quote in Chapter
      2.10 writes of a possible sect with a "religious edifice" and ritual of
      its own, a new religious edifice and a new ritual. In practice I doubt
      whether "real" people, people who matter, people who are getting things
      done and who have already developed complex associations, can afford the
      extensive re-adjustment implied in such a new grouping. It would mean too
      much loss of time, too much loss of energy and attention, too much
      sacrifice of existing co-operations.
    </p>
    <p>
      New cults, new religions, new organizations of all sorts, insisting upon
      their novelty and difference, are most prolific and most successful
      wherever there is an abundant supply of dissociated people, where movement
      is in excess of deliberation, and creeds and formulae unyielding and
      unadaptable because they are unthinking. In England, for example, in the
      last century, where social conditions have been comparatively stable,
      discussion good and abundant and internal migration small, there have been
      far fewer such developments than in the United States of America. In
      England toleration has become an institution, and where Tory and
      Socialist, Bishop and Infidel, can all meet at the same dinner-table and
      spend an agreeable week-end together, there is no need for defensive
      segregations. In such an atmosphere opinion and usage change and change
      continually, not dramatically as the results of separations and pitched
      battles but continuously and fluently as the outcome of innumerable
      personal reactions. America, on the other hand, because of its material
      preoccupations, because of the dispersal of its thinking classes over
      great areas, because of the cruder understanding of its more heterogeneous
      population (which constantly renders hard and explicit statement
      necessary), MEANS its creeds much more literally and is at once more
      experimental and less compromising and tolerant. It is there if anywhere
      that new brotherhoods and new creeds will continue to appear. But even in
      America I think the trend of things is away from separations and
      segregations and new starts, and towards more comprehensive and graduated
      methods of development.
    </p>
    <p>
      New religions, I think, appear and are possible and necessary in phases of
      social disorganization, in phases when considerable numbers of people are
      detached from old systems of direction and unsettled and distressed. So,
      at any rate, it was Christianity appeared, in a strained and disturbed
      community, in the clash of Roman and Oriental thought, and for a long time
      it was confined to the drifting population of seaports and great cities
      and to wealthy virgins and widows, reaching the most settled and most
      adjusted class, the pagani, last of all and in its most adaptable forms.
      It was the greatest new beginning in the world's history, and the wealth
      of political and literary and social and artistic traditions it abandoned
      had subsequently to be revived and assimilated to it fragment by fragment
      from the past it had submerged. Now, I do not see that the world to-day
      presents any fair parallelism to that sere age of stresses in whose
      recasting Christianity played the part of a flux. Ours is on the whole an
      organizing and synthetic rather than a disintegrating phase throughout the
      world. Old institutions are neither hard nor obstinate to-day, and the
      immense and various constructive forces at work are saturated now with the
      conception of evolution, of secular progressive development, as opposed to
      the revolutionary idea. Only a very vast and terrible war explosion can, I
      think, change this state of affairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      This conveys in general terms, at least, my interpretation of the present
      time, and it is in accordance with this view that the world is moving
      forward as a whole and with much dispersed and discrepant rightness, that
      I do not want to go apart from the world as a whole into any smaller
      community, with all the implication of an exclusive possession of right
      which such a going apart involves. Put to the test by my own Samurai for
      example by a particularly urgent and enthusiastic discipline, I found I
      did not in the least want to be one of that organization, that it only
      expressed one side of a much more complex self than its disciplines
      permitted. And still less do I want to hamper the play of my thoughts and
      motives by going apart into the particularism of a new religion. Such
      refuges are well enough when the times threaten to overwhelm one. The
      point about the present age, so far as I am able to judge the world, is
      that it does not threaten to overwhelm; that at the worst, by my
      standards, it maintains its way of thinking instead of assimilating mine.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.13. THE IDEA OF THE CHURCH.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Now all this leads very directly to a discussion of the relations of a
      person of my way of thinking to the Church and religious institutions
      generally. I have already discussed my relation to commonly accepted
      beliefs, but the question of institutions is, it seems to me, a different
      one altogether. Not to realize that, to confuse a church with its creed,
      is to prepare the ground for a mass of disastrous and life-wasting errors.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now my rules of conduct are based on the supposition that moral decisions
      are to be determined by the belief that the individual life guided by its
      perception of beauty is incidental, experimental, and contributory to the
      undying life of the blood and race. I have decided for myself that the
      general business of life is the development of a collective consciousness
      and will and purpose out of a chaos of individual consciousnesses and
      wills and purposes, and that the way to that is through the development of
      the Socialist State, through the socialization of existing State
      organizations and their merger of pacific association in a World State.
      But so far I have not taken up the collateral aspect of the synthesis of
      human consciousness, the development of collective feeling and willing and
      expression in the form, among others, of religious institutions.
    </p>
    <p>
      Religious institutions are things to be legitimately distinguished from
      the creeds and cosmogonies with which one finds them associated. Customs
      are far more enduring things than ideas,&mdash;witness the mistletoe at
      Christmas, or the old lady turning her money in her pocket at the sight of
      the new moon. And the exact origin of a religious institution is of much
      less significance to us than its present effect. The theory of a religion
      may propose the attainment of Nirvana or the propitiation of an irascible
      Deity or a dozen other things as its end and aim; the practical fact is
      that it draws together great multitudes of diverse individualized people
      in a common solemnity and self-subordination however vague, and is so far,
      like the State, and in a manner far more intimate and emotional and
      fundamental than the State, a synthetic power. And in particular, the idea
      of the Catholic Church is charged with synthetic suggestion; it is in many
      ways an idea broader and finer than the constructive idea of any existing
      State. And just as the Beliefs I have adopted lead me to regard myself as
      in and of the existing State, such as it is, and working for its
      rectification and development, so I think there is a reasonable case for
      considering oneself in and of the Catholic Church and bound to work for
      its rectification and development; and this in spite of the fact that one
      may not feel justified in calling oneself a Christian in any sense of the
      term.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may be maintained very plausibly that the Catholic Church is something
      greater than Christianity, however much the Christians may have
      contributed to its making. From the historical point of view it is a
      religious and social method that developed with the later development of
      the world empire of Rome and as the expression of its moral and spiritual
      side. Its head was, and so far as its main body is concerned still is, the
      pontifex maximus of the Roman world empire, an official who was performing
      sacrifices centuries before Christ was born. It is easy to assert that the
      Empire was converted to Christianity and submitted to its terrestrial
      leader, the bishop of Rome; it is quite equally plausible to say that the
      religious organization of the Empire adopted Christianity and so made
      Rome, which had hitherto had no priority over Jerusalem or Antioch in the
      Christian Church, the headquarters of the adopted cult. And if the
      Christian movement could take over and assimilate the prestige, the world
      predominance and sacrificial conception of the pontifex maximus and go on
      with that as part at any rate of the basis of a universal Church, it is
      manifest that now in the fulness of time this great organization, after
      its accumulation of Christian tradition, may conceivably go on still
      further to alter and broaden its teaching and observances and formulae.
    </p>
    <p>
      In a sense no doubt all we moderns are bound to consider ourselves
      children of the Catholic Church, albeit critical and innovating children
      with a tendency to hark back to our Greek grandparents; we cannot detach
      ourselves absolutely from the Church without at the same time detaching
      ourselves from the main process of spiritual synthesis that has made us
      what we are. And there is a strong case for supposing that not only is
      this reasonable for us who live in the tradition of Western Europe, but
      that we are legitimately entitled to call upon extra European peoples to
      join with us in that attitude of filiation to the Catholic Church since,
      outside it, there is no organization whatever aiming at a religious
      catholicity and professing or attempting to formulate a collective
      religious consciousness in the world. So far as they come to a conception
      of a human synthesis they come to it by coming into our tradition.
    </p>
    <p>
      I write here of the Catholic Church as an idea. To come from that idea to
      the world of present realities is to come to a tangle of difficulties. Is
      the Catholic Church merely the Roman communion or does it include the
      Greek and Protestant Churches? Some of these bodies are declaredly
      dissentient, some claim to be integral portions of the Catholic Church
      which have protested against and abandoned certain errors of the central
      organization. I admit it becomes a very confusing riddle in such a country
      as England to determine which is the Catholic Church; whether it is the
      body which possesses and administers Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster
      Abbey, or the bodies claiming to represent purer and finer or more
      authentic and authoritative forms of Catholic teaching which have erected
      that new Byzantine-looking cathedral in Westminster, or Whitfield's
      Tabernacle in the Tottenham Court Road, or a hundred or so other organized
      and independent bodies. It is still more perplexing to settle upon the
      Catholic Church in America among an immense confusion of sectarian
      fragments.
    </p>
    <p>
      Many people, I know, take refuge from the struggle with this tangle of
      controversies by refusing to recognize any institutions whatever as
      representing the Church. They assume a mystical Church made up of all true
      believers, of all men and women of good intent, whatever their formulae or
      connexion. Wherever there is worship, there, they say, is a fragment of
      the Church. All and none of these bodies are the true Church.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is no doubt profoundly true. It gives something like a working
      assumption for the needs of the present time. People can get along upon
      that. But it does not exhaust the question. We seek a real and
      understanding synthesis. We want a real collectivism, not a poetical idea;
      a means whereby men and women of all sorts, all kinds of humanity, may
      pray together, sing together, stand side by side, feel the same wave of
      emotion, develop a collective being. Doubtless right-spirited men are
      praying now at a thousand discrepant altars. But for the most part those
      who pray imagine those others who do not pray beside them are in error,
      they do not know their common brotherhood and salvation. Their brotherhood
      is masked by unanalyzable differences; theirs is a dispersed collectivism;
      their churches are only a little more extensive than their individualities
      and intenser in their collective separations.
    </p>
    <p>
      The true Church towards which my own thoughts tend will be the conscious
      illuminated expression of Catholic brotherhood. It must, I think, develop
      out of the existing medley of Church fragments and out of all that is
      worthy in our poetry and literature, just as the worldwide Socialist State
      at which I aim must develop out of such state and casual economic
      organizations and constructive movements as exist to-day. There is no
      "beginning again" in these things. In neither case will going apart out of
      existing organizations secure our ends. Out of what is, we have to develop
      what has to be. To work for the Reformation of the Catholic Church is an
      integral part of the duty of a believer.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is curious how misleading a word can be. We speak of a certain phase in
      the history of Christianity as the Reformation, and that word effectually
      conceals from most people the simple indisputable fact that there has been
      no Reformation. There was an attempt at a Reformation in the Catholic
      Church, and through a variety of causes it failed. It detached great
      masses from the Catholic Church and left that organization impoverished
      intellectually and spiritually, but it achieved no reconstruction at all.
      It achieved no reconstruction because the movement as a whole lacked an
      adequate grasp of one fundamentally necessary idea, the idea of
      Catholicity. It fell into particularism and failed. It set up a vast
      process of fragmentation among Christian associations. It drove huge
      fissures through the once common platform. In innumerable cases they were
      fissures of organization and prejudice rather than real differences in
      belief and mental habit. Sometimes it was manifestly conflicting material
      interests that made the split. People are now divided by forgotten points
      of difference, by sides taken by their predecessors in the disputes of the
      sixteenth century, by mere sectarian names and the walls of separate
      meeting places. In the present time, as a result of the dissenting method,
      there are multitudes of believing men scattered quite solitarily through
      the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Reformation, the Reconstruction of the Catholic Church lies still
      before us. It is a necessary work. It is a work strictly parallel to the
      reformation and expansion of the organized State. Together, these
      processes constitute the general duty before mankind.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.14. OF SECESSION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      The whole trend of my thought in matters of conduct is against whatever
      accentuates one's individual separation from the collective consciousness.
      It follows naturally from my fundamental creed that avoidable silences and
      secrecy are sins, just as abstinences are in themselves sins rather than
      virtues. And so I think that to leave any organization or human
      association except for a wider and larger association, to detach oneself
      in order to go alone, or to go apart narrowly with just a few, is
      fragmentation and sin. Even if one disagrees with the professions or
      formulae or usages of an association, one should be sure that the
      disagreement is sufficiently profound to justify one's secession, and in
      any case of doubt, one should remain. I count schism a graver sin than
      heresy.
    </p>
    <p>
      No profession of faith, no formula, no usage can be perfect. It is only
      required that it should be possible. More particularly does this apply to
      churches and religious organizations. There never was a creed nor a
      religious declaration but admitted of a wide variety of interpretations
      and implied both more and less than it expressed. The pedantically
      conscientious man, in his search for an unblemished religious brotherhood,
      has tended always to a solitude of universal dissent.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the religious as in the economic sphere one must not look for perfect
      conditions. Setting up for oneself in a new sect is like founding Utopias
      in Paraguay, an evasion of the essential question; our real business is to
      take what we have, live in and by it, use it and do our best to better
      such faults as are manifest to us, in the direction of a wider and nobler
      organization. If you do not agree with the church in which you find
      yourself, your best course is to become a reformer IN that church, to
      declare it a detached forgetful part of the greater church that ought to
      be, just as your State is a detached unawakened part of the World State.
      You take it at what it is and try and broaden it towards reunion. It is
      only when secession is absolutely unavoidable that it is right to secede.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is particularly true of state churches such as is the Church of
      England. These are bodies constituted by the national law and amenable to
      the collective will. I do not think a man should consider himself excluded
      from them because they have articles of religion to which he cannot
      subscribe and creeds he will not say. A national state church has no right
      to be thus limited and exclusive. Rather then let any man, just to the
      very limit that is possible for his intellectual or moral temperament,
      remain in his church to redress the balance and do his utmost to change
      and broaden it.
    </p>
    <p>
      But perhaps the Church will not endure a broad-minded man in its body,
      speaking and reforming, and will expel him?
    </p>
    <p>
      Be expelled&mdash;well and good! That is altogether different. Let them
      expel you, struggling valiantly and resolved to return so soon as they
      release you, to hammer at the door. But withdrawing&mdash;sulking&mdash;going
      off in a serene huff to live by yourself spiritually and materially in
      your own way&mdash;that is voluntary damnation, the denial of the
      Brotherhood of Man. Be a rebel or a revolutionary to your heart's content,
      but a mere seceder never.
    </p>
    <p>
      For otherwise it is manifest that we shall have to pay for each step of
      moral and intellectual progress with a fresh start, with a conflict
      between the new organization and the old from which it sprang, a
      perpetually-recurring parricide. There will be a series of religious
      institutions in developing order, each containing the remnant too dull or
      too hypocritical to secede at the time of stress that began the new body.
      Something of the sort has indeed happened to both the Catholic and the
      English Protestant churches. We have the intellectual and moral guidance
      of the people falling more and more into the hands of an informal Church
      of morally impassioned leaders, writers, speakers, and the like, while the
      beautiful cathedrals in which their predecessors sheltered fall more and
      more into the hands of an uninspiring, retrogressive but conforming
      clergy.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now this was all very well for the Individualist Liberal of the Early
      Victorian period, but Individualist Liberalism was a mere destructive
      phase in the process of renewing the old Catholic order, a clearing up of
      the site. We Socialists want a Church through which we can feel and think
      collectively, as much as we want a State that we can serve and be served
      by. Whether as members or external critics we have to do our best to get
      rid of obsolete doctrinal and ceremonial barriers, so that the churches
      may merge again in a universal Church, and that Church comprehend again
      the whole growing and amplifying spiritual life of the race.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not know if I make my meaning perfectly clear here. By conformity I
      do not mean silent conformity. It is a man's primary duty to convey his
      individual difference to the minds of his fellow men. It is because I want
      that difference to tell to the utmost that I suggest he should not leave
      the assembly. But in particular instances he may find it more striking and
      significant to stand out and speak as a man detached from the general
      persuasion, just as obstructed and embarrassed ministers of State can best
      serve their country at times by resigning office and appealing to the
      public judgment by this striking and significant act.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.15. A DILEMMA.
    </h2>
    <p>
      We are led by this discussion of secession straight between the horns of a
      moral dilemma. We have come to two conclusions; to secede is a grave sin,
      but to lie is also a grave sin.
    </p>
    <p>
      But often the practical alternative is between futile secession or
      implicit or actual falsehood. It has been the instinct of the aggressive
      controversialist in all ages to seize upon collective organizations and
      fence them about with oaths and declarations of such a nature as to bar
      out anyone not of his own way of thinking. In a democracy, for example, to
      take an extreme caricature of our case, a triumphant majority in power,
      before allowing anyone to vote, might impose an oath whereby the leader of
      the minority and all his aims were specifically renounced. And if no
      country goes so far as that, nearly all countries and all churches make
      some such restrictions upon opinion. The United States, that land of
      abandoned and receding freedoms, imposes upon everyone who crosses the
      Atlantic to its shores a childish ineffectual declaration against anarchy
      and polygamy. None of these tests exclude the unhesitating liar, but they
      do bar out many proud and honest minded people. They "fix" and kill things
      that should be living and fluid; they are offences against the mind of the
      race. How is a man then to behave towards these test oaths and
      affirmations, towards repeating creeds, signing assent to articles of
      religion and the like? Do not these unavoidable barriers to public
      service, or religious work, stand on a special footing?
    </p>
    <p>
      Personally I think they do.
    </p>
    <p>
      I think that in most cases personal isolation and disuse is the greater
      evil. I think if there is no other way to constructive service except
      through test oaths and declarations, one must take then. This is a
      particular case that stands apart from all other cases. The man who
      preaches a sermon and pretends therein to any belief he does not truly
      hold is an abominable scoundrel, but I do not think he need trouble his
      soul very greatly about the barrier he stepped over to get into the
      pulpit, if he felt the call to preach, so long as the preaching be honest.
      A Republican who takes the oath of allegiance to the King and wears his
      uniform is in a similar case. These things stand apart; they are so formal
      as to be scarcely more reprehensible than the falsehood of calling a
      correspondent "Dear," or asking a tiresome lady to whom one is being kind
      and civil, for the pleasure of dancing with her. We ought to do what we
      can to abolish these absurd barriers and petty falsehoods, but we ought
      not to commit a social suicide against them.
    </p>
    <p>
      That is how I think and feel in this matter, but if a man sees the matter
      more gravely, if his conscience tells him relentlessly and
      uncompromisingly, "this is a lie," then it is a lie and he must not be
      guilty of it. But then I think it ill becomes him to be silently excluded.
      His work is to clamour against the existence of the barrier that wastes
      him.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not see that lying is a fundamental sin. In the first place some
      lying, that is to say some unavoidable inaccuracy of statement, is
      necessary to nearly everything we do, and the truest statement becomes
      false if we forget or alter the angle at which it is made, the direction
      in which it points. In the next the really fundamental and most
      generalized sin is self-isolation. Lying is a sin only because
      self-isolation is a sin, because it is an effectual way of cutting oneself
      off from human co-operation. That is why there is no sin in telling a
      fairy tale to a child. But telling the truth when it will be misunderstood
      is no whit better than lying; silences are often blacker than any lies. I
      class secrets with lies and cannot comprehend the moral standards that
      exonerate secrecy in human affairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      To all these things one must bring a personal conscience and be prepared
      to examine particular cases. The excuses I have made, for example, for a
      very broad churchman to stay in the Church might very well be twisted into
      an excuse for taking an oath in something one did not to the slightest
      extent believe, in order to enter and betray some organization to which
      one was violently hostile. I admit that there may be every gradation
      between these two things. The individual must examine his special case and
      weigh the element of treachery against the possibility of co-operation. I
      do not see how there can be a general rule. I have already shown why in my
      own case I hesitate to profess a belief in God, because, I think, the
      misleading element in that profession would outweigh the advantage of
      sympathy and confidence gained.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.16. A COMMENT.
    </h2>
    <h3>
      The preceding section has been criticized by a friend who writes:&mdash;
    </h3>
    <p>
      "In religious matters apparent assent produces false unanimity. There is
      no convention about these things; if there were they would not exist. On
      the contrary, the only way to get perfunctory tests and so forth
      abrogated, is for a sufficient number of people to refuse to take them. It
      is in this case as in every other; secession is the beginning of a new
      integration. The living elements leave the dead or dying form and
      gradually create in virtue of their own combinations a new form more
      suited to present things. There is a formative, a creative power in
      sincerity and also in segregation itself. And the new form, the new
      species produced by variation and segregation will measure itself and its
      qualities with the old one. The old one will either go to the wall, accept
      the new one and be renewed by it, or the new one will itself be pushed out
      of existence if the old one has more vitality and is better adapted to the
      circumstances. This process of variation, competition and selection, also
      of intermarriage between equally vital and equally adapted varieties, is
      after all the process by which not only races exist but all human
      thoughts."
    </p>
    <p>
      So my friend, who I think is altogether too strongly swayed by biological
      analogies. But I am thinking not of the assertion of opinions primarily
      but of co-operation with an organization with which, save for the matter
      of the test, one may agree. Secession may not involve the development of a
      new and better moral organization; it may simply mean the suicide of one's
      public aspect. There may be no room or no need of a rival organization. To
      secede from State employment, for example, is not to create the beginnings
      of a new State, however many&mdash;short of a revolution&mdash;may secede
      with you. It is to become a disconnected private person, and throw up
      one's social side.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.17. WAR.
    </h2>
    <p>
      I do not think a discussion of man's social relations can be considered at
      all complete or satisfactory until we have gone into the question of
      military service. To-day, in an increasing number of countries, military
      service is an essential part of citizenship and the prospect of war lies
      like a great shadow across the whole bright complex prospect of human
      affairs. What should be the attitude of a right-living man towards his
      State at war and to warlike preparations?
    </p>
    <p>
      In no other connexion are the confusions and uncertainty of the
      contemporary mind more manifest. It is an odd contradiction that in Great
      Britain and Western Europe generally, just those parties that stand most
      distinctly for personal devotion to the State in economic matters, the
      Socialist and Socialistic parties, are most opposed to the idea of
      military service, and just those parties that defend individual
      self-seeking and social disloyalty in the sphere of property are most
      urgent for conscription. No doubt some of this uncertainty is due to the
      mixing in of private interests with public professions, but much more is
      it, I think, the result of mere muddle-headedness and an insufficient
      grasp of the implications of the propositions under discussion. The
      ordinary political Socialist desires, as I desire, and as I suppose every
      sane man desires as an ultimate ideal, universal peace, the merger of
      national partitions in loyalty to the World State. But he does not
      recognize that the way to reach that goal is not necessarily by minimizing
      and specializing war and war responsibility at the present time. There he
      falls short of his own constructive conceptions and lapses into the
      secessionist methods of the earlier Radicals. We have here another case
      strictly parallel to several we have already considered. War is a
      collective concern; to turn one's back upon it, to refuse to consider it
      as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those who are least prepared
      to deal with it in a broad spirit.
    </p>
    <p>
      In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways
      military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the
      contemporary man steps from the street of clamorous insincere
      advertisement, push, adulteration, under-selling and intermittent
      employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane,
      into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more
      honourable emulations. Here at least men are not flung out of employment
      to degenerate because there is no immediate work for them to do. They are
      fed and drilled and trained for better services. Here a man is at least
      supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking.
      And beside the feeble and irregular endowment of research by
      commercialism, its little short-sighted snatches at profit by innovation
      and scientific economy, see how remarkable is the steady and rapid
      development of method and appliances in naval and military affairs!
      Nothing is more striking than to compare the progress of civil
      conveniences which has been left almost entirely to the trader, to the
      progress in military apparatus during the last few decades. The house
      appliances of to-day for example, are little better than they were fifty
      years ago. A house of to-day is still almost as ill-ventilated, badly
      heated by wasteful fires, clumsily arranged and furnished as the house of
      1858. Houses a couple of hundred years old are still satisfactory places
      of residence, so little have our standards risen. But the rifle or
      battleship of fifty years ago was beyond all comparison inferior to those
      we possess; in power, in speed, in convenience alike. No one has a use now
      for such superannuated things.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.18. WAR AND COMPETITION.
    </h2>
    <h3>
      What is the meaning of war in life?
    </h3>
    <p>
      War is manifestly not a thing in itself, it is something correlated with
      the whole fabric of human life. That violence and killing which between
      animals of the same species is private and individual becomes socialized
      in war. It is a co-operation for killing that carries with it also a
      co-operation for saving and a great development of mutual help and
      development within the war-making group.
    </p>
    <p>
      War, it seems to me, is really the elimination of violent competition as
      between man and man, an excretion of violence from the developing social
      group. Through war and military organization, and through war and military
      organization only, has it become possible to conceive of peace.
    </p>
    <p>
      This violence was a necessary phase in human and indeed in all animal
      development. Among low types of men and animals it seems an inevitable
      condition of the vigour of the species and the beauty of life. The more
      vital and various individual must lead and prevail, leave progeny and make
      the major contribution to the synthesis of the race; the weaker individual
      must take a subservient place and leave no offspring. That means in
      practice that the former must directly or indirectly kill the latter until
      some mitigated but equally effectual substitute for that killing is
      invented. That duel disappears from life, the fight of the beasts for food
      and the fight of the bulls for the cows, only by virtue of its replacement
      by new forms of competition. With the development of primitive war we have
      such a replacement. The competition becomes a competition to serve and
      rule in the group, the stronger take the leadership and the larger share
      of life, and the weaker co-operate in subordination, they waive and
      compromise the conflict and use their conjoint strength against a common
      rival.
    </p>
    <p>
      Competition is a necessary condition of progressive life. I do not know if
      so far I have made that belief sufficiently clear in these confessions.
      Perhaps in my anxiety to convey my idea of a human synthesis I have not
      sufficiently insisted upon the part played by competition in that
      synthesis. But the implications of the view that I have set forth are
      fairly plain. Every individual, I have stated, is an experiment for the
      synthesis of the species, and upon that idea my system of conduct so far
      as it is a system is built. Manifestly the individual's function is either
      self-development, service and reproduction, or failure and an end.
    </p>
    <p>
      With moral and intellectual development the desire to serve and
      participate in a collective purpose arises to control the blind and
      passionate impulse to survival and reproduction that the struggle for life
      has given us, but it does not abolish the fact of selection, of
      competition. I contemplate no end of competition. But for competition that
      is passionate, egoistic and limitless, cruel, clumsy and wasteful, I
      desire to see competition that is controlled and fair-minded and devoted,
      men and women doing their utmost with themselves and making their utmost
      contribution to the specific accumulation, but in the end content to abide
      by a verdict.
    </p>
    <p>
      The whole development of civilization, it seems to me, consists in the
      development of adequate tests of survival and of an intellectual and moral
      atmosphere about those tests so that they shall be neither cruel nor
      wasteful. If the test is not to be 'are you strong enough to kill everyone
      you do not like?' that will only be because it will ask still more
      comprehensively and with regard to a multitude of qualities other than
      brute killing power, 'are you adding worthily to the synthesis by
      existence and survival?'
    </p>
    <p>
      I am very clear in my mind on this perpetual need of competition. I admit
      that upon that turns the practicability of all the great series of
      organizing schemes that are called Socialism. The Socialist scheme must
      show a system in which predominance and reproduction are correlated with
      the quality and amount of an individual's social contribution, and so far
      I acknowledge it is only in the most general terms that this can be
      claimed as done. We Socialists have to work out all these questions far
      more thoroughly than we have done hitherto. We owe that to our movement
      and the world.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is no adequate answer to our antagonists to say, indeed it is a mere tu
      quoque to say, that the existing system does not present such a
      correlation, that it puts a premium on secretiveness and self-seeking and
      a discount on many most necessary forms of social service. That is a mere
      temporary argument for a delay in judgment.
    </p>
    <p>
      The whole history of humanity seems to me to present a spectacle of this
      organizing specialization of competition, this replacement of the
      indiscriminate and collectively blind struggle for life by an organized
      and collectively intelligent development of life. We see a secular
      replacement of brute conflict by the law, a secular replacement of
      indiscriminate brute lust by marriage and sexual taboos, and now with the
      development of Socialistic ideas and methods, the steady replacement of
      blind industrial competition by public economic organization. And moreover
      there is going on a great educational process bringing a greater and
      greater proportion of the minds of the community into relations of
      understanding and interchange.
    </p>
    <p>
      Just as this process of organization proceeds, the violent and chaotic
      conflict of individuals and presently of groups of individuals disappears,
      personal violence, private war, cut-throat competition, local war, each in
      turn is replaced by a more efficient and more economical method of
      survival, a method of survival giving constantly and selecting always more
      accurately a finer type of survivor.
    </p>
    <p>
      I might compare the social synthesis to crystals growing out of a fluid
      matrix. It is where the growing order of the crystals has as yet not
      spread that the old resource to destruction and violent personal or
      associated acts remains.
    </p>
    <p>
      But this metaphor of crystals is a very inadequate one, because crystals
      have no will in themselves; nor do crystals, having failed to grow in some
      particular form, presently modify that form more or less and try again. I
      see the organizing of forces, not simply law and police which are indeed
      paid mercenaries from the region of violence, but legislation and
      literature, teaching and tradition, organized religion, getting themselves
      and the social structure together, year after year and age after age,
      halting, failing, breaking up in order to try again. And it seems to me
      that the amount of lawlessness and crime, the amount of waste and
      futility, the amount of war and war possibility and war danger in the
      world are just the measure of the present inadequacy of the world's system
      of collective organization to the purpose before them.
    </p>
    <p>
      It follows from this very directly that only one thing can end war on the
      earth and that is a subtle mental development, an idea, the development of
      the idea of the world commonweal in the collective mind. The only real
      method of abolishing war is to perceive it, to realize it, to express it,
      to think it out and think about it, to make all the world understand its
      significance, and to clear and preserve its significant functions. In
      human affairs to understand an evil is to abolish it; it is the only way
      to abolish any evil that arises out of the untutored nature of man. Which
      brings me back here again to my already repeated persuasion, that in
      expressing things, rendering things to each other, discussing our
      differences, clearing up the metaphysical conceptions upon which
      differences are discussed, and in a phrase evolving the collective mind,
      lies not only the cures of war and poverty but the general form of all a
      man's duty and the essential work of mankind.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.19. MODERN WAR.
    </h2>
    <p>
      In our contemporary world, in our particular phase, military and naval
      organization loom up, colossal and unprecedent facts. They have the effect
      of an overhanging disaster that grows every year more tremendous, every
      year in more sinister contrast with the increasing securities and
      tolerations of the everyday life. It is impossible to imagine now what a
      great war in Europe would be like; the change in material and method has
      been so profound since the last cycle of wars ended with the downfall of
      the Third Napoleon. But there can be little or no doubt that it would
      involve a destruction of property and industrial and social
      disorganization of the most monstrous dimensions. No man, I think, can
      mark the limits of the destruction of a great European conflict were it to
      occur at the present time; and the near advent of practicable flying
      machines opens a whole new world of frightful possibilities.
    </p>
    <p>
      For my own part I can imagine that a collision between such powers as
      Great Britain, Germany or America, might very well involve nearly every
      other power in the world, might shatter the whole fabric of credit upon
      which our present system of economics rests and put back the orderly
      progress of social construction for a vast interval of time. One figures
      great towns red with destruction while giant airships darken the sky, one
      pictures the crash of mighty ironclads, the bursting of tremendous shells
      fired from beyond the range of sight into unprotected cities. One thinks
      of congested ways swarming with desperate fighters, of torrents of
      fugitives and of battles gone out of the control of their generals into
      unappeasable slaughter. There is a vision of interrupted communications,
      of wrecked food trains and sunken food ships, of vast masses of people
      thrown out of employment and darkly tumultuous in the streets, of famine
      and famine-driven rioters. What modern population will stand a famine? For
      the first time in the history of warfare the rear of the victor, the rear
      of the fighting line becomes insecure, assailable by flying machines and
      subject to unprecedented and unimaginable panics. No man can tell what
      savagery of desperation these new conditions may not release in the soul
      of man. A conspiracy of adverse chances, I say, might contrive so great a
      cataclysm. There is no effectual guarantee that it could not occur.
    </p>
    <p>
      But in spite of that, I believe that on the whole there is far more good
      than evil in the enormous military growths that have occurred in the last
      half century. I cannot estimate how far the alternative to war is
      lethargy. It is through military urgencies alone that many men can be
      brought to consent to the collective endowment of research, to public
      education and to a thousand interferences with their private self-seeking.
      Just as the pestilence of cholera was necessary before men could be
      brought to consent to public sanitation, so perhaps the dread of foreign
      violence is an unavoidable spur in an age of chaotic industrial production
      in order that men may be brought to subserve the growth of a State whose
      purpose might otherwise be too high for them to understand. Men must be
      forced to care for fleets and armies until they have learnt to value
      cities and self development and a beautiful social life.
    </p>
    <p>
      The real danger of modern war lies not in the disciplined power of the
      fighting machine but in the undisciplined forces in the collective mind
      that may set that machine in motion. It is not that our guns and ships are
      marvellously good, but that our press and political organizations are
      haphazard growths entirely inferior to them. If this present phase of
      civilization should end in a debacle, if presently humanity finds itself
      beginning again at a lower level of organization, it will not be because
      we have developed these enormous powers of destruction but because we have
      failed to develop adequate powers of control for them and collective
      determination. This panoply of war waits as the test of our progress
      towards the realization of that collective mind which I hold must
      ultimately direct the evolution of our specific being. It is here to
      measure our incoherence and error, and in the measure of those defects to
      refer us back to our studies.
    </p>
    <p>
      Just as we understand does war become needless.
    </p>
    <p>
      But I do not think that war and military organization will so much
      disappear as change its nature as the years advance. I think that the
      phase of universal military service we seem to be approaching is one
      through which the mass of mankind may have to pass, learning something
      that can be learnt in no other way, that the uniforms and flags, the
      conceptions of order and discipline, the tradition of service and
      devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion and universal
      responsibility, will remain a permanent acquisition, though the last
      ammunition has been used ages since in the pyrotechnic display that
      welcomed the coming of the ultimate Peace.
    </p>
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    </div>
    <h2>
      3.20. OF ABSTINENCES AND DISCIPLINES.
    </h2>
    <p>
      From these large issues of conduct, let me come now to more intimate
      things, to one's self control, the regulation of one's personal life. And
      first about abstinences and disciplines.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have already confessed (Chapter 2.6) that my nature is one that dislikes
      abstinences and is wearied by and wary of excess.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not feel that it is right to suppress altogether any part of one's
      being. In itself abstinence seems to me a refusal to experience, and that,
      upon the lines of thought I follow, is to say that abstinence for its own
      sake is evil. But for an end all abstinences are permissible, and if the
      kinetic type of believer finds both his individual and his associated
      efficiency enhanced by a systematic discipline, if he is convinced that he
      must specialize because of the discursiveness of his motives, because
      there is something he wants to do or be so good that the rest of them may
      very well be suppressed for its sake, then he must suppress. But the
      virtue is in what he gets done and not in what he does not do. Reasonable
      fear is a sound reason for abstinence, as when a man has a passion like a
      lightly sleeping maniac that the slightest indulgence will arouse. Then he
      must needs adopt heroic abstinence, and even more so must he take to
      preventive restraint if he sees any motive becoming unruly and urgent and
      troublesome. Fear is a sound reason for abstinence and so is love. Many
      who have sensitive imaginations nowadays very properly abstain from meat
      because of butchery. And it is often needful, out of love and brotherhood,
      to abstain from things harmless to oneself because they are inconveniently
      alluring to others linked to us. The moderate drinker who sits at table
      sipping his wine in the sight of one he knows to be a potential
      dipsomaniac is at best an unloving fool.
    </p>
    <p>
      But mere abstinence and the doing of barren toilsome unrewarding things
      for the sake of the toil, is a perversion of one's impulses. There is
      neither honour nor virtue nor good in that.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not believe in negative virtues. I think the ideas of them arise out
      of the system of metaphysical errors I have roughly analyzed in my first
      Book, out of the inherent tendency of the mind to make the relative
      absolute and to convert quantitative into qualitative differences. Our
      minds fall very readily under the spell of such unmitigated words as
      Purity and Chastity. Only death beyond decay, absolute non-existence, can
      be Pure and Chaste. Life is impurity, fact is impure. Everything has
      traces of alien matter; our very health is dependent on parasitic
      bacteria; the purest blood in the world has a tainted ancestor, and not a
      saint but has evil thoughts. It was blindness to that which set men
      stoning the woman taken in adultery. They forgot what they were made of.
      This stupidity, this unreasonable idealism of the common mind, fills life
      to-day with cruelties and exclusions, with partial suicides and secret
      shames. But we are born impure, we die impure; it is a fable that spotless
      white lilies sprang from any saint's decay, and the chastity of a monk or
      nun is but introverted impurity. We have to take life valiantly on these
      conditions and make such honour and beauty and sympathy out of our
      confusions, gather such constructive experience, as we may.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a mass of real superstition upon these points, a belief in a
      magic purity, in magic personalities who can say:&mdash;
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">
    My strength is as the strength of ten
    Because my heart is pure,
</pre>
    <p>
      and wonderful clairvoyant innocents like the young man in Mr. Kipling's
      "Finest Story in the World."
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a lurking disposition to believe, even among those who lead the
      normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are
      exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made. But
      indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and
      plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can
      draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has
      physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological
      classifications and moral generalities. It is not true that his absorbent
      vessels begin their task as children begin the guessing game, by asking,
      "Is it animal, vegetable or mineral?" He responds to stimulation and
      recuperates after the exhaustion of his response, and his being is
      singularly careless whether the stimulation comes as a drug or stimulant,
      or as anger or music or noble appeals.
    </p>
    <p>
      Most people speak of drugs in the spirit of that admirable firm of
      soap-boilers which assures its customers that the soap they make "contains
      no chemicals." Drugs are supposed to be a mystic diabolical class of
      substance, remote from and contrasting in their nature with all other
      things. So they banish a tonic from the house and stuff their children
      with manufactured cereals and chocolate creams. The drunken helot of this
      system of absurdities is the Christian Scientist who denies healing only
      to those who have studied pathology, and declares that anything whatever
      put into a bottle and labelled with directions for its use by a doctor is
      thereby damnable and damned. But indeed all drugs and all the things of
      life have their uses and dangers, and there is no wholesale truth to
      excuse us a particular wisdom and watchfulness in these matters. Unless we
      except smoking as an unclean and needless artificiality, all these matters
      of eating and drinking and habit are matters of more or less. It seems to
      me foolish to make anything that is stimulating and pleasurable into a
      habit, for that is slowly and surely to lose a stimulus and pleasure and
      create a need that it may become painful to check or control. The moral
      rule of my standards is irregularity. If I were a father confessor I
      should begin my catalogue of sins by asking: "are you a man of regular
      life?" And I would charge my penitent to go away forthwith and commit some
      practicable saving irregularity; to fast or get drunk or climb a mountain
      or sup on pork and beans or give up smoking or spend a month with
      publicans and sinners. Right conduct for the common unspecialized man lies
      delicately adjusted between defect and excess as a watch is adjusted and
      adjustable between fast and slow. We none of us altogether and always keep
      the balance or are altogether safe from losing it. We swing, balancing and
      adjusting, along our path. Life is that, and abstinence is for the most
      part a mere evasion of life.
    </p>
    <p>
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    <h2>
      3.21. ON FORGETTING, AND THE NEED OF PRAYER, READING, DISCUSSION AND
      WORSHIP.
    </h2>
    <p>
      One aspect of life I had very much in mind when I planned those Samurai
      disciplines of mine. It was forgetting.
    </p>
    <p>
      We forget.
    </p>
    <p>
      Even after we have found Salvation, we have to keep hold of Salvation;
      believing, we must continue to believe. We cannot always be at a high
      level of noble emotion. We have clambered on the ship of Faith and found
      our place and work aboard, and even while we are busied upon it, behold we
      are back and drowning in the sea of chaotic things.
    </p>
    <p>
      Every religious body, every religious teacher, has appreciated this
      difficulty and the need there is of reminders and renewals. Faith needs
      restatement and revival as the body needs food. And since the Believer is
      to seek much experience and be a judge of less or more in many things, it
      is particularly necessary that he should keep hold upon a living Faith.
    </p>
    <p>
      How may he best do this?
    </p>
    <p>
      I think we may state it as a general duty that he must do whatever he can
      to keep his faith constantly alive. But beyond that, what a man must do
      depends almost entirely upon his own intellectual character. Many people
      of a regular type of mind can refresh themselves by some recurrent duty,
      by repeating a daily prayer, by daily reading or re-reading some
      devotional book. With others constant repetition leads to a mental and
      spiritual deadening, until beautiful phrases become unmeaning, eloquent
      statements inane and ridiculous,&mdash;matter for parody. All who can, I
      think, should pray and should read and re-read what they have found
      spiritually helpful, and if they know of others of kindred dispositions
      and can organize these exercises, they should do so. Collective worship
      again is a necessity for many Believers. For many, the public religious
      services of this or that form of Christianity supply an atmosphere rich in
      the essential quality of religion and abounding in phrases about the
      religious life, mellow from the use of centuries and almost immediately
      applicable. It seems to me that if one can do so, one should participate
      in such public worship and habituate oneself to read back into it that
      collective purpose and conscience it once embodied.
    </p>
    <p>
      Very much is to be said for the ceremony of Holy Communion or the Mass,
      for those whom accident or scruples do not debar. I do not think your
      modern liberal thinkers quite appreciate the finer aspects of this, the
      one universal service of the Christian Church. Some of them are set forth
      very finely by a man who has been something of a martyr for conscience'
      sake, and is for me a hero as well as a friend, in a world not rich in
      heroes, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, in his book, "The Meaning of the Mass."
    </p>
    <p>
      With others again, Faith can be most animated by writing, by confession,
      by discussion, by talk with friends or antagonists.
    </p>
    <p>
      One or other or all of these things the Believer must do, for the mind is
      a living and moving process, and the thing that lies inert in it is
      presently covered up by new interests and lost. If you make a sort of King
      Log of your faith, presently something else will be sitting upon it, pride
      or self-interest, or some rebel craving, King de facto of your soul,
      directing it back to anarchy.
    </p>
    <p>
      For many types that, however, is exactly what happens with public worship.
      They DO get a King Log in ceremony. And if you deliberately overcome and
      suppress your perception of and repugnance to the perfunctoriness of
      religion in nine-tenths of the worshippers about you, you may be
      destroying at the same time your own intellectual and moral sensitiveness.
      But I am not suggesting that you should force yourself to take part in
      public worship against your perceptions, but only that if it helps you to
      worship you should not hesitate to do so.
    </p>
    <p>
      We deal here with a real need that is not to be fettered by any general
      prescription. I have one Cambridge friend who finds nothing so uplifting
      in the world as the atmosphere of the afternoon service in the choir of
      King's College Chapel, and another, a very great and distinguished and
      theologically sceptical woman, who accustomed herself for some time to
      hear from a distant corner the evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral and
      who would go great distances to do that.
    </p>
    <p>
      Many people find an exaltation and broadening of the mind in mountain
      scenery and the starry heavens and the wide arc of the sea; and as I have
      already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of mine that
      yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary wandering and
      meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is a frequent means
      of release from the narrow life as it closes about us. One man I know
      makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any passage that stirs
      and revives in him the sense of broad issues. Others again seem able to
      refresh their nobility of outlook in the atmosphere of an intense personal
      love.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some of us seem to forget almost as if it were an essential part of
      ourselves. Such a man as myself, irritable, easily fatigued and bored,
      versatile, sensuous, curious, and a little greedy for experience, is
      perpetually losing touch with his faith, so that indeed I sometimes turn
      over these pages that I have written and come upon my declarations and
      confessions with a sense of alien surprise.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may be, I say, that for some of us forgetting is the normal process,
      that one has to believe and forget and blunder and learn something and
      regret and suffer and so come again to belief much as we have to eat and
      grow hungry and eat again. What these others can get in their temples we,
      after our own manner, must distil through sleepless and lonely nights,
      from unavoidable humiliations, from the smarting of bruised shins.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.22. DEMOCRACY AND ARISTOCRACY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      And now having dealt with the general form of a man's duty and with his
      duty to himself, let me come to his attitude to his individual fellow-men.
    </p>
    <p>
      The broad principles determining that attitude are involved in things
      already written in this book. The belief in a collective being gathering
      experience and developing will, to which every life is subordinated,
      renders the cruder conception of aristocracy, the idea of a select life
      going on amidst a majority of trivial and contemptible persons who "do not
      exist," untenable. It abolishes contempt. Indeed to believe at all in a
      comprehensive purpose in things is to abandon that attitude and all the
      habits and acts that imply it. But a belief in universal significance does
      not altogether preclude a belief in an aristocratic method of progress, in
      the idea of the subordination of a number of individuals to others who can
      utilize their lives and help and contributory achievements in the general
      purpose. To a certain extent, indeed, this last conception is almost
      inevitable. We must needs so think of ourselves in relation to plants and
      animals, and I see no reason why we should not think so of our relations
      to other men. There are clearly great differences in the capacity and
      range of experience of man and man and in their power of using and
      rendering their experiences for the racial synthesis. Vigorous persons do
      look naturally for help and service to persons of less initiative, and we
      are all more or less capable of admiration and hero-worship and pleased to
      help and give ourselves to those we feel to be finer or better or
      completer or more forceful and leaderly than ourselves. This is natural
      and inevitable aristocracy.
    </p>
    <p>
      For that reason it is not to be organized. We organize things that are not
      inevitable, but this is clearly a complex matter of accident and
      personalities for which there can be no general rule. All organized
      aristocracy is manifestly begotten by that fallacy of classification my
      Metaphysical book set itself to expose. Its effect is, and has been in all
      cases, to mask natural aristocracy, to draw the lines by wholesale and
      wrong, to bolster up weak and ineffectual persons in false positions and
      to fetter or hamper strong and vigorous people. The false aristocrat is a
      figure of pride and claims, a consumer followed by dupes. He is proudly
      secretive, pretending to aims beyond the common understanding. The true
      aristocrat is known rather than knows; he makes and serves. He exacts no
      deference. He is urgent to makes others share what he knows and wants and
      achieves. He does not think of others as his but as the End's.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a base democracy just as there is a base aristocracy, the
      swaggering, aggressive disposition of the vulgar soul that admits neither
      of superiors nor leaders. Its true name is insubordination. It resents
      rules and refinements, delicacies, differences and organization. It dreams
      that its leaders are its delegates. It takes refuge from all superiority,
      all special knowledge, in a phantom ideal, the People, the sublime and
      wonderful People. "You can fool some of the people all the time, and all
      the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the
      time," expresses I think quite the quintessence of this mystical faith,
      this faith in which men take refuge from the demand for order, discipline
      and conscious light. In England it has never been of any great account,
      but in America the vulgar individualist's self-protective exaltation of an
      idealized Common Man has worked and is working infinite mischief.
    </p>
    <p>
      In politics the crude democratic faith leads directly to the submission of
      every question, however subtle and special its issues may be, to a popular
      vote. The community is regarded as a consultative committee of profoundly
      wise, alert and well-informed Common Men. Since the common man is, as
      Gustave le Bon has pointed out, a gregarious animal, collectively rather
      like a sheep, emotional, hasty and shallow, the practical outcome of
      political democracy in all large communities under modern conditions is to
      put power into the hands of rich newspaper proprietors, advertising
      producers and the energetic wealthy generally who are best able to flood
      the collective mind freely with the suggestions on which it acts.
    </p>
    <p>
      But democracy has acquired a better meaning than its first crude
      intentions&mdash;there never was a theory started yet in the human mind
      that did not beget a finer offspring than itself&mdash;and the secondary
      meaning brings it at last into entire accordance with the subtler
      conception of aristocracy. The test of this quintessential democracy is
      neither a passionate insistence upon voting and the majority rule, nor an
      arrogant bearing towards those who are one's betters in this aspect or
      that, but fellowship. The true democrat and the true aristocrat meet and
      are one in feeling themselves parts of one synthesis under one purpose and
      one scheme. Both realize that self-concealment is the last evil, both make
      frankness and veracity the basis of their intercourse. The general
      rightness of living for you and others and for others and you is to
      understand them to the best of your ability and to make them all, to the
      utmost limits of your capacity of expression and their understanding and
      sympathy, participators in your act and thought.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.23. ON DEBTS OF HONOUR.
    </h2>
    <p>
      My ethical disposition is all against punctilio and I set no greater value
      on unblemished honour than I do on purity. I never yet met a man who
      talked proudly of his honour who did not end by cheating or trying to
      cheat me, nor a code of honour that did not impress me as a conspiracy
      against the common welfare and purpose in life. There is honour among
      thieves, and I think it might well end there as an obligation in conduct.
      The soldier who risks a life he owes to his army in a duel upon some silly
      matter of personal pride is no better to me than the clerk who gambles
      with the money in his master's till. When I was a boy I once paid a debt
      of honour, and it is one of the things I am most ashamed of. I had played
      cards into debt and I still remember burningly how I went flushed and
      shrill-voiced to my mother and got the money she could so ill afford to
      give me. I would not pay such a debt of honour now. If I were to wake up
      one morning owing big sums that I had staked overnight I would set to work
      at once by every means in my power to evade and repudiate that obligation.
      Such money as I have I owe under our present system to wife and sons and
      my work and the world, and I see no valid reason why I should hand it over
      to Smith because he and I have played the fool and rascal and gambled.
      Better by far to accept that fact and be for my own part published fool
      and rascal.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have never been able to understand the sentimental spectacle of sons
      toiling dreadfully and wasting themselves upon mere money-making to save
      the secret of a father's peculations and the "honour of the family," or
      men conspiring to weave a wide and mischievous net of lies to save the
      "honour" of a woman. In the conventional drama the preservation of the
      honour of a woman seems an adequate excuse for nearly any offence short of
      murder; the preservation that is to say of the appearance of something
      that is already gone. Here it is that I do definitely part company with
      the false aristocrat who is by nature and intent a humbug and fabricator
      of sham attitudes, and ally myself with democracy. Fact, valiantly faced,
      is of more value than any reputation. The false aristocrat is robed to the
      chin and unwashed beneath, the true goes stark as Apollo. The false is
      ridiculous with undignified insistence upon his dignity; the true says
      like God, "I am that I am."
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.24. THE IDEA OF JUSTICE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      One word has so far played a very little part in this book, and that is
      the word Justice.
    </p>
    <p>
      Those who have read the opening book on Metaphysics will perhaps see that
      this is a necessary corollary of the system of thought developed therein.
      In my philosophy, with its insistence upon uniqueness and marginal
      differences and the provisional nature of numbers and classes, there is
      little scope for that blind-folded lady with the balances, seeking always
      exact equivalents. Nowhere in my system of thought is there work for the
      idea of Rights and the conception of conscientious litigious-spirited
      people exactly observing nicely defined relationships.
    </p>
    <p>
      You will note, for example, that I base my Socialism on the idea of a
      collective development and not on the "right" of every man to his own
      labour, or his "right" to work, or his "right" to subsistence. All these
      ideas of "rights" and of a social "contract" however implicit are merely
      conventional ways of looking at things, conventions that have arisen in
      the mercantile phase of human development.
    </p>
    <p>
      Laws and rights, like common terms in speech, are provisional things,
      conveniences for taking hold of a number of cases that would otherwise be
      unmanageable. The appeal to Justice is a necessarily inadequate attempt to
      de-individualize a case, to eliminate the self's biassed attitude. I have
      declared that it is my wilful belief that everything that exists is
      significant and necessary. The idea of Justice seems to me a defective,
      quantitative application of the spirit of that belief to men and women. In
      every case you try and discover and act upon a plausible equity that must
      necessarily be based on arbitrary assumptions.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is no equity in the universe, in the various spectacle outside our
      minds, and the most terrible nightmare the human imagination has ever
      engendered is a Just God, measuring, with himself as the Standard, against
      finite men. Ultimately there is no adequacy, we are all weighed in the
      balance and found wanting.
    </p>
    <p>
      So, as the recognition of this has grown, Justice has been tempered with
      Mercy, which indeed is no more than an attempt to equalize things by
      making the factors of the very defect that is condemned, its condonation.
      The modern mind fluctuates uncertainly somewhere between these extremes,
      now harsh and now ineffectual.
    </p>
    <p>
      To me there seems no validity in these quasi-absolute standards.
    </p>
    <p>
      A man seeks and obeys standards of equity simply to economize his moral
      effort, not because there is anything true or sublime about justice, but
      because he knows he is too egoistic and weak-minded and obsessed to do any
      perfect thing at all, because he cannot trust himself with his own
      transitory emotions unless he trains himself beforehand to observe a
      predetermined rule. There is scarcely an eventuality in life that without
      the help of these generalizations would not exceed the average man's
      intellectual power and moral energy, just as there is scarcely an idea or
      an emotion that can be conveyed without the use of faulty and defective
      common names. Justice and Mercy are indeed not ultimately different in
      their nature from such other conventions as the rules of a game, the rules
      of etiquette, forms of address, cab tariffs and standards of all sorts.
      They are mere organizations of relationship either to economize thought or
      else to facilitate mutual understanding and codify common action. Modesty
      and self-submission, love and service are, in the right system of my
      beliefs, far more fundamental rightnesses and duties.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are not mercantile and litigious units such as making Justice our
      social basis would imply, we are not select responsible persons mixed with
      and tending weak irresponsible wrong persons such as the notion of Mercy
      suggests, we are parts of one being and body, each unique yet sharing a
      common nature and a variety of imperfections and working together (albeit
      more or less darkly and ignorantly) for a common end.
    </p>
    <p>
      We are strong and weak together and in one brotherhood. The weak have no
      essential rights against the strong, nor the strong against the weak. The
      world does not exist for our weaknesses but our strength. And the real
      justification of democracy lies in the fact that none of us are altogether
      strong nor altogether weak; for everyone there is an aspect wherein he is
      seen to be weak; for everyone there is a strength though it may be only a
      little peculiar strength or an undeveloped potentiality. The unconverted
      man uses his strength egotistically, emphasizes himself harshly against
      the man who is weak where he is strong, and hates and conceals his own
      weakness. The Believer, in the measure of his belief, respects and seeks
      to understand the different strength of others and to use his own
      distinctive power with and not against his fellow men, in the common
      service of that synthesis to which each one of them is ultimately as
      necessary as he.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.25. OF LOVE AND JUSTICE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Now here the friend who has read the first draft of this book falls into
      something like a dispute with me. She does not, I think, like this
      dismissal of Justice from a primary place in my scheme of conduct.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Justice," she asserts, "is an instinctive craving very nearly akin to the
      physical craving for equilibrium. Its social importance corresponds. It
      seeks to keep the individual's claims in such a position as to conflict as
      little as possible with those of others. Justice is the root instinct of
      all social feeling, of all feeling which does not take account of whether
      we like or dislike individuals, it is the feeling of an orderly position
      of our Ego towards others, merely considered AS others, and of all the
      Egos merely AS Egos towards each other. LOVE cannot be felt towards others
      AS others. Love is the expression of individual suitability and
      preference, its positive existence in some cases implies its absolute
      negation in others. Hence Love can never be the essential and root of
      social feeling, and hence the necessity for the instinct of abstract
      justice which takes no account of preferences or aversions. And here I may
      say that all application of the word LOVE to unknown, distant creatures,
      to mere OTHERS, is a perversion and a wasting of the word love, which,
      taking its origin in sexual and parental preference, always implies a
      preference of one object to the other. To love everybody is simply not to
      love at all. And it is JUST BECAUSE of the passionate preference
      instinctively felt for some individuals, that mankind requires the
      self-regarding and self-respecting passion of justice."
    </p>
    <p>
      Now this is not altogether contradictory of what I hold. I disagree that
      because love necessarily expresses itself in preference, selecting this
      rather than that, that it follows necessarily that its absolute negation
      is implied in the non-selected cases. A man may go into the world as a
      child goes into a garden and gathers its hands full of the flowers that
      please it best and then desists, but only because its hands are full and
      not because it is at an end of the flowers that it can find delight in. So
      the man finds at last his memory and apprehensions glutted. It is not that
      he could not love those others. And I dispute that to love everybody is
      not to love at all. To love two people is surely to love more than to love
      just one person, and so by way of three and four to a very large number.
      But if it is put that love must be a preference because of the mental
      limitations that forbid us to apprehend and understand more than a few of
      the multitudinous lovables of life, then I agree. For all the individuals
      and things and cases for which we have inadequate time and energy, we need
      a wholesale method&mdash;justice. That is exactly what I have said in the
      previous section.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.26. THE WEAKNESS OF IMMATURITY.
    </h2>
    <p>
      One is apt to write and talk of strong and weak as though some were always
      strong, some always weak. But that is quite a misleading version of life.
      Apart from the fact that everyone is fluctuatingly strong and
      fluctuatingly weak, and weak and strong according to the quality we judge
      them by, we have to remember that we are all developing and learning and
      changing, gaining strength and at last losing it, from the cradle to the
      grave. We are all, to borrow the old scholastic term, pupil-teachers of
      Life; the term is none the less appropriate because the pupil-teacher
      taught badly and learnt under difficulties.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may seem to be a crowning feat of platitude to write that "we have to
      remember" this, but it is overlooked in a whole mass of legal, social and
      economic literature. Those extraordinary imaginary cases as between a man
      A and a man B who start level, on a desert island or elsewhere, and work
      or do not work, or save or do not save, become the basis of immense
      schemes of just arrangement which soar up confidently and serenely
      regardless of the fact that never did anything like that equal start
      occur; that from the beginning there were family groups and old heads and
      young heads, help, guidance and sacrifice, and those who had learnt and
      those who had still to learn, jumbled together in confused transactions.
      Deals, tradings and so forth are entirely secondary aspects of these
      primaries, and the attempt to get an idea of abstract relationship by
      beginning upon a secondary issue is the fatal pervading fallacy in all
      these regions of thought. At the present moment the average age of the
      world is I suppose about 21 or 22, the normal death somewhen about 44 or
      45, that is to say nearly half the world is "under age," green,
      inexperienced, demanding help, easily misled and put in the wrong and
      betrayed. Yet the younger moiety, if we do indeed assume life's object is
      a collective synthesis, is more important than the older, and every older
      person bound to be something of a guardian to the younger. It follows
      directly from the fundamental beliefs I have assumed that we are missing
      the most important aspects of life if we are not directly or indirectly
      serving the young, helping them individually or collectively. Just in the
      measure that one's living falls away from that, do we fall away from life
      into a mere futility of existence, and approach the state, the
      extraordinary and wonderful middle state of (for example) those extinct
      and entirely damned old gentlemen one sees and hears eating and sleeping
      in every comfortable London club.
    </p>
    <p>
      That constructive synthetic purpose which I have made the ruling idea in
      my scheme of conduct may be indeed completely restated in another form, a
      form I adopted for a book I wrote some years ago called "Mankind in the
      Making." In this I pointed out that "Life is a tissue of births";
    </p>
    <p>
      "and if the whole of life is an evolving succession of births, then not
      only must a man in his individual capacity (physically as parent, doctor,
      food dealer, food carrier, home builder, protector; or mentally as
      teacher, news dealer, author, preacher) contribute to births and growths
      and the fine future of mankind, but the collective aspects of man, his
      social and political organizations must also be, in the essence,
      organizations that more or less profitably and more or less intentionally
      set themselves towards this end. They are finally concerned with the
      birth, and with the sound development towards still better births, of
      human lives, just as every implement in the toolshed of a seedsman's
      nursery, even the hoe and the roller, is concerned finally with the
      seeding and with the sound development towards still better seeding of
      plants. The private and personal motive of the seedsman in procuring and
      using these tools may be avarice, ambition, a religious belief in the
      saving efficacy of nursery keeping or a simple passion for bettering
      flowers, that does not affect the definite final purpose of his outfit of
      tools.
    </p>
    <p>
      "And just as we might judge completely and criticize and improve that
      outfit from an attentive study of the welfare of plants, and with an
      entire disregard of his remoter motives, so we may judge all collective
      human enterprises from the standpoint of an attentive study of human
      births and development. ANY COLLECTIVE HUMAN ENTERPRISE, INSTITUTION,
      MOVEMENT, PARTY OR STATE, IS TO BE JUDGED AS A WHOLE AND COMPLETELY, AS IT
      CONDUCES MORE OR LESS TO WHOLESOME AND HOPEFUL BIRTHS, AND ACCORDING TO
      THE QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE ADVANCE DUE TO ITS INFLUENCE MADE BY EACH
      GENERATION OF CITIZENS BORN UNDER ITS INFLUENCE TOWARDS A HIGHER AND
      AMPLER STANDARD OF LIFE."
    </p>
    <p>
      And individual conduct, quite as much as collective affairs, comes under
      the same test. We are guides and school builders, helpers and influences
      every hour of our lives, and by that standard we can and must judge all
      our ways of living.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.27. POSSIBILITY OF A NEW ETIQUETTE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      These two ideas, firstly the pupil-teacher parental idea and secondly the
      democratic idea (that is to say the idea of an equal ultimate
      significance), the second correcting any tendency in the first to
      pedagogic arrogance and tactful concealments, do I think give, when taken
      together, the general attitude a right-living man will take to his
      individual fellow creature. They play against each other, providing
      elements of contradiction and determining a balanced course. It seems to
      me to follow necessarily from my fundamental beliefs that the Believer
      will tend to be and want to be and seek to be friendly to, and interested
      in, all sorts of people, and truthful and helpful and hating concealment.
      To be that with any approach to perfection demands an intricate and
      difficult effort, introspection to the hilt of one's power, a saving
      natural gift; one has to avoid pedantry, aggression, brutality, amiable
      tiresomeness&mdash;there are pitfalls on every side. The more one thinks
      about other people the more interesting and pleasing they are; I am all
      for kindly gossip and knowing things about them, and all against the silly
      and limiting hardness of soul that will not look into one's fellows nor go
      out to them. The use and justification of most literature, of fiction,
      verse, history, biography, is that it lets us into understandings and the
      suggestion of human possibilities. The general purpose of intercourse is
      to get as close as one can to the realities of the people one meets, and
      to give oneself to them just so far as possible.
    </p>
    <p>
      From that I think there arises naturally a newer etiquette that would set
      aside many of the rigidities of procedure that keep people apart to-day.
      There is a fading prejudice against asking personal questions, against
      talking about oneself or one's immediate personal interests, against
      discussing religion and politics and any such keenly felt matter. No doubt
      it is necessary at times to protect oneself against clumsy and stupid
      familiarities, against noisy and inattentive egotists, against intriguers
      and liars, but only in the last resort do such breaches of patience seem
      justifiable to me; for the most part our traditions of speech and
      intercourse altogether overdo separations, the preservation of distances
      and protective devices in general.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.28. SEX.
    </h2>
    <p>
      So far I have ignored the immense importance of Sex in our lives and for
      the most part kept the discussion so generalized as to apply impartially
      to women and men. But now I have reached a point when this great boundary
      line between two halves of the world and the intense and intimate personal
      problems that play across it must be faced.
    </p>
    <p>
      For not only must we bend our general activities and our intellectual life
      to the conception of a human synthesis, but out of our bodies and
      emotional possibilities we have to make the new world bodily and
      emotionally. To the test of that we have to bring all sorts of questions
      that agitate us to-day, the social and political equality and personal
      freedom of women, the differing code of honour for the sexes, the controls
      and limitations to set upon love and desire. If, for example, it is for
      the good of the species that a whole half of its individuals should be
      specialized and subordinated to the physical sexual life, as in certain
      phases of human development women have tended to be, then certainly we
      must do nothing to prevent that. We have set aside the conception of
      Justice as in any sense a countervailing idea to that of the synthetic
      process.
    </p>
    <p>
      And it is well to remember that for the whole of sexual conduct there is
      quite conceivably no general simple rule. It is quite possible that, as
      Metchnikoff maintains in his extraordinarily illuminating "Nature of Man,"
      we are dealing with an irresolvable tangle of disharmonies. We have
      passions that do not insist upon their physiological end, desires that may
      be prematurely vivid in childhood, a fantastic curiosity, old needs of the
      ape but thinly overlaid by the acquisitions of the man, emotions that jar
      with physical impulses, inexplicable pains and diseases. And not only have
      we to remember that we are dealing with disharmonies that may at the very
      best be only patched together, but we are dealing with matters in which
      the element of idiosyncrasy is essential, insisting upon an incalculable
      flexibility in any rule we make, unless we are to take types and indeed
      whole classes of personality and write them down as absolutely bad and fit
      only for suppression and restraint. And on the mental side we are further
      perplexed by the extraordinary suggestibility of human beings. In sexual
      matters there seems to me&mdash;and I think I share a general ignorance
      here&mdash;to be no directing instinct at all, but only an instinct to do
      something generally sexual; there are almost equally powerful desires to
      do right and not to act under compulsion. The specific forms of conduct
      imposed upon these instincts and desires depend upon a vast confusion of
      suggestions, institutions, conventions, ways of putting things. We are
      dealing therefore with problems ineradicably complex, varying endlessly in
      their instances, and changing as we deal with them. I am inclined to think
      that the only really profitable discussion of sexual matters is in terms
      of individuality, through the novel, the lyric, the play, autobiography or
      biography of the frankest sort. But such generalizations as I can make I
      will.
    </p>
    <p>
      To me it seems manifest that sexual matters may be discussed generally in
      at least three permissible and valid ways, of which the consideration of
      the world as a system of births and education is only the dominant chief.
      There is next the question of the physical health and beauty of the
      community and how far sexual rules and customs affect that, and thirdly
      the question of the mental and moral atmosphere in which sexual
      conventions and laws must necessarily be an important factor. It is
      alleged that probably in the case of men, and certainly in the case of
      women, some sexual intercourse is a necessary phase in existence; that
      without it there is an incompleteness, a failure in the life cycle, a real
      wilting and failure of energy and vitality and the development of morbid
      states. And for most of us half the friendships and intimacies from which
      we derive the daily interest and sustaining force in our lives, draw
      mysterious elements from sexual attraction, and depend and hesitate upon
      our conception of the liberties and limits we must give to that force.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.29. THE INSTITUTION OF MARRIAGE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      The individual attitudes of men to women and of women to men are
      necessarily determined to a large extent by certain general ideas of
      relationship, by institutions and conventions. One of the most important
      and debatable of these is whether we are to consider and treat women as
      citizens and fellows, or as beings differing mentally from men and grouped
      in positions of at least material dependence to individual men. Our
      decision in that direction will affect all our conduct from the larger
      matters down to the smallest points of deportment; it will affect even our
      manner of address and determine whether when we speak to a woman we shall
      be as frank and unaffected as with a man or touched with a faint
      suggestion of the reserves of a cat which does not wish to be suspected of
      wanting to steal the milk.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now so far as that goes it follows almost necessarily from my views upon
      aristocracy and democracy that I declare for the conventional equality of
      women, that is to say for the determination to make neither sex nor any
      sexual characteristic a standard of superiority or inferiority, for the
      view that a woman is a person as important and necessary, as much to be
      consulted, and entitled to as much freedom of action as a man. I admit
      that this decision is a choice into which temperament enters, that I
      cannot produce compelling reasons why anyone else should adopt my view. I
      can produce considerations in support of my view, that is all. But they
      are so implicit in all that has gone before that I will not trouble to
      detail them here.
    </p>
    <p>
      The conception of equality and fellowship between men and women is an idea
      at least as old as Plato and one that has recurred wherever civilization
      has reached a phase in which men and women were sufficiently released from
      militant and economic urgency to talk and read and think. But it has never
      yet been, at least in the historical period and in any but isolated social
      groups, a working structural idea. The working structural idea is the
      Patriarchal Family in which the woman is inferior and submits herself and
      is subordinated to the man, the head of the family.
    </p>
    <p>
      We live in a constantly changing development and modification of that
      tradition. It is well to bring that factor of constant change into mind at
      the outset of this discussion and to keep it there. To forget it, and it
      is commonly forgotten, is to falsify every issue. Marriage and the Family
      are perennially fluctuating institutions, and probably scarcely anything
      in modern life is changing so much; they are in their legal constitution
      or their moral and emotional quality profoundly different things from what
      they were a hundred years ago. A woman who marries nowadays marries, if
      one may put it quantitatively, far less than she did even half a century
      ago; the married woman's property act, for example, has revolutionized the
      economic relationship; her husband has lost his right to assault her and
      he cannot even compel her to cohabit with him if she refuses to do so.
      Legal separations and divorces have come to modify the quality and logical
      consequences of the bond. The rights of parent over the child have been
      even more completely qualified. The State has come in as protector and
      educator of the children, taking over personal powers and responsibilities
      that have been essential to the family institution ever since the dawn of
      history. It inserts itself more and more between child and parent. It
      invades what were once the most sacred intimacies, and the Salvation Army
      is now promoting legislation to invade those overcrowded homes in which
      children (it is estimated to the number of thirty or forty thousand) are
      living as I write, daily witnesses of their mother's prostitution or in
      constant danger of incestuous attack from drunken fathers and brothers.
      And finally as another indication of profound differences, births were
      almost universally accidental a hundred years ago; they are now in an
      increasing number of families controlled and deliberate acts of will. In
      every one of their relations do Marriage and the Family change and
      continue to change.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the inherent defectiveness of the human mind which my metaphysical
      book sets itself to analyze, does lead it constantly to speak of Marriage
      and the Family as things as fixed and unalterable as, let us say, the
      characteristics of oxygen. One is asked, Do you believe in Marriage and
      the Family? as if it was a case of either having or not having some
      definite thing. Socialists are accused of being "against the Family," as
      if it were not the case that Socialists, Individualists, high Anglicans
      and Roman Catholics are ALL against Marriage and the Family as these
      institutions exist at the present time. But once we have realized the
      absurdity of this absolute treatment, then it should become clear that
      with it goes most of the fabric of right and wrong, and nearly all those
      arbitrary standards by which we classify people into moral and immoral.
      Those last words are used when as a matter of fact we mean either
      conforming or failing to conform to changing laws and developing
      institutional customs we may or may not consider right or wrong. Their use
      imparts a flavour of essential wrong-doing and obliquity into acts and
      relations that may be in many cases no more than social indiscipline,
      which may be even conceivably a courageous act of defiance to an
      obsolescent limitation. Such, until a little while ago, was a man's
      cohabitation with his deceased wife's sister. This, which was scandalous
      yesterday, is now a legally honourable relationship, albeit I believe
      still regarded by the high Anglican as incestuous wickedness.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now I will not deal here with the institutional changes that are involved
      in that general scheme of progress called Socialism. I have discussed the
      relation of Socialism to Marriage and the Family quite fully in my "New
      Worlds for Old" ("New Worlds for Old" (A. Constable and Co., 1908).) and
      to that I must refer the reader. Therein he will see how the economic
      freedom and independent citizenship of women, and indeed also the welfare
      of the whole next generation, hang on the idea of endowing motherhood, and
      he will find too how much of the nature of the marriage contract is
      outside the scope of Socialist proposals altogether.
    </p>
    <p>
      Apart from the broad proposals of Socialism, as a matter of personal
      conviction quite outside the scope of Socialism altogether, I am persuaded
      of the need of much greater facilities of divorce than exist at present,
      divorce on the score of mutual consent, of faithlessness, of simple
      cruelty, of insanity, habitual vice or the prolonged imprisonment of
      either party. And this being so I find it impossible to condemn on any
      ground, except that it is "breaking ranks" and making a confusion, those
      who by anticipating such wide facilities as I propose have sinned by
      existing standards. How far and in what manner such breaking of ranks is
      to be condoned I will presently discuss. But it is clear it is an offence
      of a different nature from actions one believes to be in themselves and
      apart from the law reprehensible things.
    </p>
    <p>
      But my scepticisms about the current legal institutions and customary code
      are not exhausted by these modifications I have suggested. I believe
      firmly in some sort of marriage, that is to say an open declaration of the
      existence of sexual relations between a man and a woman, because I am
      averse to all unnecessary secrecies and because the existence of these
      peculiarly intimate relationships affects everybody about the persons
      concerned. It is ridiculous to say as some do that sexual relations
      between two people affect no one but themselves unless a child is born.
      They do, because they tend to break down barriers and set up a peculiar
      emotional partnership. It is a partnership that kept secret may work as
      anti-socially as a secret business partnership or a secret preferential
      railway tariff. And I believe too in the general social desirability of
      the family group, the normal group of father, mother and children, and in
      the extreme efficacy in the normal human being of the blood link and pride
      link between parent and child in securing loving care and upbringing for
      the child. But this clear adhesion to Marriage and to the Family grouping
      about mother and father does not close the door to a large series of
      exceptional cases which our existing institutions and customs ignore or
      crush.
    </p>
    <p>
      For example, monogamy in general seems to me to be clearly indicated (as
      doctors say) by the fact that there are not several women in the world for
      every man, but quite as clearly does it seem necessary to recognize that
      the fact that there are (or were in 1901) 21,436,107 females to 20,172,984
      males in our British community seems to condemn our present rigorous
      insistence upon monogamy, unless feminine celibacy has its own delights.
      But, as I have said, it is now largely believed that the sexual life of a
      woman is more important to her than his sexual life to a man and less
      easily ignored.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is true also on the former side that for the great majority of people
      one knows personally, any sort of household but a monogamous one conjures
      up painful and unpleasant visions. The ordinary civilized woman and the
      ordinary civilized man are alike obsessed with the idea of meeting and
      possessing one peculiar intimate person, one special exclusive lover who
      is their very own, and a third person of either sex cannot be associated
      with that couple without an intolerable sense of privacy and confidence
      and possession destroyed. It is difficult to imagine a second wife in a
      home who would not be and feel herself to be a rather excluded and
      inferior person. But that does not abolish the possibility that there are
      exceptional people somewhere capable of, to coin a phrase, triangular
      mutuality, and I do not see why we should either forbid or treat with
      bitterness or hostility a grouping we may consider so inadvisable or so
      unworkable as never to be adopted, if three people of their own free will
      desire it.
    </p>
    <p>
      The peculiar defects of the human mind when they approach these questions
      of sex are reinforced by passions peculiar to the topic, and it is perhaps
      advisable to point out that to discuss these possibilities is not the same
      thing as to urge the married reader to take unto himself or herself a
      second partner or a series of additional partners. We are trained from the
      nursery to become secretive, muddle-headed and vehemently conclusive upon
      sexual matters, until at last the editors of magazines blush at the very
      phrase and long to put a petticoat over the page that bears it. Yet our
      rebellious natures insist on being interested by it. It seems to me that
      to judge these large questions from the personal point of view, to insist
      upon the whole world without exception living exactly in the manner that
      suits oneself or accords with one's emotional imagination and the forms of
      delicacy in which one has been trained, is not the proper way to deal with
      them. I want as a sane social organizer to get just as many contented and
      law-abiding citizens as possible; I do not want to force people who would
      otherwise be useful citizens into rebellion, concealments and the dark and
      furtive ways of vice, because they may not love and marry as their
      temperaments command, and so I want to make the meshes of the law as wide
      as possible. But the common man will not understand this yet, and seeks to
      make the meshes just as small as his own private case demands.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then marriage, to resume my main discussion, does not necessarily mean
      cohabitation. All women who desire children do not want to be entrusted
      with their upbringing. Some women are sexual and philoprogenitive without
      being sedulously maternal, and some are maternal without much or any
      sexual passion. There are men and women in the world now, great allies,
      fond and passionate lovers who do not live nor want to live constantly
      together. It is at least conceivable that there are women who, while
      desiring offspring, do not want to abandon great careers for the work of
      maternity, women again who would be happiest managing and rearing children
      in manless households that they might even share with other women friends,
      and men to correspond with these who do not wish to live in a household
      with wife and children. I submit, these temperaments exist and have a
      right to exist in their own way. But one must recognize that the
      possibility of these departures from the normal type of household opens up
      other possibilities. The polygamy that is degrading or absurd under one
      roof assumes a different appearance when one considers it from the point
      of view of people whose habits of life do not centre upon an isolated
      home.
    </p>
    <p>
      All the relations I have glanced at above do as a matter of fact exist
      to-day, but shamefully and shabbily, tainted with what seems to me an
      unmerited and unnecessary ignominy. The punishment for bigamy seems to me
      insane in its severity, contrasted as it is with our leniency to the
      common seducer. Better ruin a score of women, says the law, than marry
      two. I do not see why in these matters there should not be much ampler
      freedom than there is, and this being so I can hardly be expected to
      condemn with any moral fervour or exclude from my society those who have
      seen fit to behave by what I believe may be the standards of A.D. 2000
      instead of by the standards of 1850. These are offences, so far as they
      are offences, on an altogether different footing from murder, or exacting
      usury, or the sweating of children, or cruelty, or transmitting diseases,
      or unveracity, or commercial or intellectual or physical prostitution, or
      any such essentially grave anti-social deeds. We must distinguish between
      sins on the one hand and mere errors of judgment and differences of taste
      from ourselves. To draw up harsh laws, to practise exclusions against
      everyone who does not see fit to duplicate one's own blameless home life,
      is to waste a number of courageous and exceptional persons in every
      generation, to drive many of them into a forced alliance with real crime
      and embittered rebellion against custom and the law.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.30. CONDUCT IN RELATION TO THE THING THAT IS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      But the reader must keep clear in his mind the distinction between conduct
      that is right or permissible in itself and conduct that becomes either
      inadvisable or mischievous and wrong because of the circumstances about
      it. There is no harm under ordinary conditions in asking a boy with a
      pleasant voice to sing a song in the night, but the case is altered
      altogether if you have reason to suppose that a Red Indian is lying in
      wait a hundred yards off, holding a loaded rifle and ready to fire at the
      voice. It is a valid objection to many actions that I do not think
      objectionable in themselves, that to do them will discharge a loaded
      prejudice into the heart of my friend&mdash;or even into my own. I belong
      to the world and my work, and I must not lightly throw my time, my power,
      my influence away. For a splendid thing any risk or any defiance may be
      justifiable, but is it a sufficiently splendid thing? So far as he
      possibly can a man must conform to common prejudices, prevalent customs
      and all laws, whatever his estimate of them may be. But he must at the
      same time to his utmost to change what he thinks to be wrong.
    </p>
    <p>
      And I think that conformity must be honest conformity. There is no more
      anti-social act than secret breaches, and only some very urgent and
      exceptional occasion justifies even the unveracity of silence about the
      thing done. If your personal convictions bring you to a breach, let it be
      an open breach, let there be no misrepresentation of attitudes, no
      meanness, no deception of honourable friends. Of course an open breach
      need not be an ostentatious breach; to do what is right to yourself
      without fraud or concealment is one thing, to make a challenge and
      aggression quite another. Your friends may understand and sympathize and
      condone, but it does not lie upon you to force them to identify themselves
      with your act and situation. But better too much openness than too little.
      Squalid intrigue was the shadow of the old intolerably narrow order; it is
      a shadow we want to illuminate out of existence. Secrets will be
      contraband in the new time.
    </p>
    <p>
      And if it chances to you to feel called upon to make a breach with the
      institution or custom or prejudice that is, remember that doing so is your
      own affair. You are going to take risks and specialize as an experiment.
      You must not expect other people about you to share the consequences of
      your dash forward. You must not drag in confidants and secondaries. You
      must fight your little battle in front on your own responsibility,
      unsupported&mdash;and take the consequences without repining.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      3.31. CONDUCT TOWARDS TRANSGRESSORS.
    </h2>
    <p>
      So far as breaches of the prohibitions and laws of marriage go, to me it
      seems they are to be tolerated by us in others just in the measure that,
      within the limits set by discretion, they are frank and truthful and
      animated by spontaneous passion and pervaded by the quality of beauty. I
      hate the vulgar sexual intriguer, man or woman, and the smart and shallow
      atmosphere of unloving lust and vanity about the type as I hate few kinds
      of human life; I would as lief have a polecat in my home as this sort of
      person; and every sort of prostitute except the victim of utter necessity
      I despise, even though marriage be the fee. But honest lovers should be I
      think a charge and pleasure for us. We must judge each pair as we can.
    </p>
    <p>
      One thing renders a sexual relationship incurably offensive to others and
      altogether wrong, and that is cruelty. But who can define cruelty? How far
      is the leaving of a third person to count as cruelty? There again I
      hesitate to judge. To love and not be loved is a fate for which it seems
      no one can be blamed; to lose love and to change one's loving belongs to a
      subtle interplay beyond analysis or control, but to be deceived or mocked
      or deliberately robbed of love, that at any rate is an abominable wrong.
    </p>
    <p>
      In all these matters I perceive a general rule is in itself a possible
      instrument of cruelty. I set down what I can in the way of general
      principles, but it all leaves off far short of the point of application.
      Every case among those we know I think we moderns must judge for
      ourselves. Where there is doubt, there I hold must be charity. And with
      regard to strangers, manifestly our duty is to avoid inquisitorial and
      uncharitable acts.
    </p>
    <p>
      This is as true of financial and economic misconduct as of sexual
      misconduct, of ways of living that are socially harmful and of political
      faith. We are dealing with people in a maladjusted world to whom absolute
      right living is practically impossible, because there are no absolutely
      right institutions and no simple choice of good or evil, and we have to
      balance merits and defects in every case.
    </p>
    <p>
      Some people are manifestly and essentially base and self-seeking and
      regardless of the happiness and welfare of their fellows, some in business
      affairs and politics as others in love. Some wrong-doers again are
      evidently so through heedlessness, through weakness, timidity or haste. We
      have to judge and deal with each sort upon no clear issue, but upon
      impressions they have given us of their spirit and purpose. We owe it to
      them and ourselves not to judge too rashly or too harshly, but for all
      that we are obliged to judge and take sides, to avoid the malignant and
      exclude them from further opportunity, to help and champion the cheated
      and the betrayed, to forgive and aid the repentant blunderer and by mercy
      to save the lesser sinner from desperate alliance with the greater. That
      is the broad rule, and it is as much as we have to go upon until the
      individual case comes before us.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      BOOK THE FOURTH &mdash; SOME PERSONAL THINGS.
    </h2>
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    <h2>
      4.1. PERSONAL LOVE AND LIFE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      It has been most convenient to discuss all that might be generalized about
      conduct first, to put in the common background, the vistas and atmosphere
      of the scene. But a man's relations are of two orders, and these questions
      of rule and principle are over and about and round more vivid and
      immediate interests. A man is not simply a relationship between his
      individual self and the race, society, the world and God's Purpose. Close
      about him are persons, friends and enemies and lovers and beloved people.
      He desires them, lusts after them, craves their affection, needs their
      presence, abhors them, hates and desires to limit and suppress them. This
      is for most of us the flesh and blood of life. We go through the noble
      scene of the world neither alone, nor alone with God, nor serving an
      undistinguishable multitude, but in a company of individualized people.
    </p>
    <p>
      Here is a system of motives and passions, imperious and powerful, which
      follows no broad general rule and in which each man must needs be a light
      unto himself upon innumerable issues. I am satisfied that these personal
      urgencies are neither to be suppressed nor crudely nor ruthlessly
      subordinated to the general issues. Religious and moral teachers are apt
      to make this part of life either too detached or too insignificant. They
      teach it either as if it did not matter or as if it ought not to matter.
      Indeed our individual friends and enemies stand between us and hide or
      interpret for us all the larger things. Few of us can even worship alone.
      We must feel others, and those not strangers, kneeling beside us.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have already spoken under the heading of Beliefs of the part that the
      idea of a Mediator has played and can play in the religious life. I have
      pointed out how the imagination of men has sought and found in certain
      personalities, historical or fictitious, a bridge between the blood-warm
      private life and the intolerable spaciousness of right and wrong. The
      world is full of such figures and their images, Christ and Mary and the
      Saints and all the lesser, dearer gods of heathendom. These things and the
      human passion for living leaders and heroes and leagues and brotherhoods
      all confess the mediatory role, the mediatory possibilities of personal
      love between the individual and the great synthesis of which he is a part
      and agent. The great synthesis may become incarnate in personal love, and
      personal love lead us directly to universal service.
    </p>
    <p>
      I write "may" and temper that sentence to the quality of a possibility
      alone. This is only true for those who believe, for those who have faith,
      whose lives have been unified, who have found Salvation. For those whose
      lives are chaotic, personal loves must also be chaotic; this or that
      passion, malice, a jesting humour, some physical lust, gratified vanity,
      egotistical pride, will rule and limit the relationship and colour its
      ultimate futility. But the Believer uses personal love and sustains
      himself by personal love. It is his provender, the meat and drink of his
      campaign.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      4.2. THE NATURE OF LOVE.
    </h2>
    <h3>
      It is well perhaps to look a little into the factors that make up Love.
    </h3>
    <p>
      Love does not seem to me to be a simple elemental thing. It is, as I have
      already said, one of the vicious tendencies of the human mind to think
      that whatever can be given a simple name can be abstracted as a single
      something in a state of quintessential purity. I have pointed out that
      this is not true of Harmony or Beauty, and that these are synthetic
      things. You bring together this which is not beautiful and that which is
      not beautiful, and behold! Beauty! So also Love is, I think, a synthetic
      thing. One observes this and that, one is interested and stirred; suddenly
      the metal fuses, the dry bones live! One loves.
    </p>
    <p>
      Almost every interest in one's being may be a factor in the love
      synthesis. But apart from the overflowing of the parental instinct that
      makes all that is fine and delicate and young dear to us and to be
      cherished, there are two main factors that bring us into love with our
      fellows. There is first the emotional elements in our nature that arise
      out of the tribal necessity, out of a fellowship in battle and hunting,
      drinking and feasting, out of the needs and excitements and delights of
      those occupations; and there is next the intenser narrower desirings and
      gratitudes, satisfactions and expectations that come from sexual
      intercourse. Now both these factors originate in physical needs and
      consummate in material acts, and it is well to remember that this great
      growth of love in life roots there, and, it may be, dies when its roots
      are altogether cut away.
    </p>
    <p>
      At its lowest, love is the mere sharing of, or rather the desire to share,
      pleasure and excitement, the excitements of conflict or lust or what not.
      I think that the desire to partake, the desire to merge one's individual
      identity with another's, remains a necessary element in all personal
      loves. It is a way out of ourselves, a breaking down of our individual
      separation, just as hate is an intensification of that. Personal love is
      the narrow and intense form of that breaking down, just as what I call
      Salvation is its widest, most extensive form. We cast aside our reserves,
      our secrecies, our defences; we open ourselves; touches that would be
      intolerable from common people become a mystery of delight, acts of
      self-abasement and self-sacrifice are charged with symbolical pleasure. We
      cannot tell which of us is me, which you. Our imprisoned egoism looks out
      through this window, forgets its walls, and is for those brief moments
      released and universal.
    </p>
    <p>
      For most of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is
      very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some
      can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of fellowship
      is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and easy when
      the thought of physical lovemaking has been banished. Then the lovers will
      pursue interests together, will work together or journey together. So we
      have the warm fellowships of men for men and women for women. But even
      then it may happen that men friends together will talk of women, and women
      friends of men. Nevertheless we have also the strong and altogether
      sexless glow of those who have fought well together, or drunk or jested
      together or hunted a common quarry.
    </p>
    <p>
      Now it seems to me that the Believer must also be a Lover, that he will
      love as much as he can and as many people as he can, and in many moods and
      ways. As I have said already, many of those who have taught religion and
      morality in the past have been neglectful or unduly jealous of the
      intenser personal loves. They have been, to put it by a figure, urgent
      upon the road to the ocean. To that they would lead us, though we come to
      it shivering, fearful and unprepared, and they grudge it that we should
      strip and plunge into the wayside stream. But all streams, all rivers come
      from this ocean in the beginning, lead to it in the end.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is the essential fact of love as I conceive it, that it breaks down the
      boundaries of self. That love is most perfect which does most completely
      merge its lovers. But no love is altogether perfect, and for most men and
      women love is no more than a partial and temporary lowering of the
      barriers that keep them apart. With many, the attraction of love seems
      always to fall short of what I hold to be its end, it draws people
      together in the most momentary of self-forgetfulnesses, and for the rest
      seems rather to enhance their egotisms and their difference. They are
      secret from one another even in their embraces. There is a sort of love
      that is egotistical lust almost regardless of its partner, a sort of love
      that is mere fleshless pride and vanity at a white heat. There is the
      love-making that springs from sheer boredom, like a man reading a
      story-book to fill an hour. These inferior loves seek to accomplish an
      agreeable act, or they seek the pursuit or glory of a living possession,
      they aim at gratification or excitement or conquest. True love seeks to be
      mutual and easy-minded, free of doubts, but these egotistical mockeries of
      love have always resentment in them and hatred in them and a watchful
      distrust. Jealousy is the measure of self-love in love.
    </p>
    <p>
      True love is a synthetic thing, an outcome of life, it is not a universal
      thing. It is the individualized correlative of Salvation; like that it is
      a synthetic consequence of conflicts and confusions. Many people do not
      desire or need Salvation, they cannot understand it, much less achieve it;
      for them chaotic life suffices. So too, many never, save for some rare
      moment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its happy abandonment, its
      careless self-giving, these things are mere foolishness to them. But much
      has been said and sung of faith and love alike, and in their confused
      greed these things also they desire and parody. So they act worship and
      make a fine fuss of their devotions. And also they must have a few
      half-furtive, half-flaunting fallen love-triumphs prowling the secret
      backstreets of their lives, they know not why.
    </p>
    <p>
      (In setting this down be it remembered I am doing my best to tell what is
      in me because I am trying to put my whole view of life before the reader
      without any vital omissions. These are difficult matters to explain
      because they have no clear outlines; one lets in a hard light suddenly
      upon things that have lurked in warm intimate shadows, dim inner things
      engendering motives. I am not only telling quasi-secret things but
      exploring them for myself. They are none the less real and important
      because they are elusive.)
    </p>
    <p>
      True love I think is not simply felt but known. Just as Salvation as I
      conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love calls
      to brain and body alike and all one's powers. There is always elaborate
      thinking and dreaming in love. Love will stir imaginations that have never
      stirred before.
    </p>
    <p>
      Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out from
      oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return. It is the
      expedition whether it fail or succeed.
    </p>
    <p>
      But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks
      mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love beautiful
      inanimate things more passionately than we do. Failing a full return, it
      makes the most of an inadequate return. Failing a sustained return it
      welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failing a return it finds support in
      accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the fulness of life
      has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love. But
      the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades definition,
      poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic statements.
      Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another, exchange
      themselves and elude every net of words we cast.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon a
      scale one from another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the Purpose
      in things I have called Salvation; the other that devotion to some other
      most fitting and satisfying individual which is passionate love, the
      former extensive as the universe, the latter the intensest thing in life.
      These, it seems to me, are the boundary and the living capital of the
      empire of life we rule.
    </p>
    <p>
      All empires need a comprehending boundary, but many have not one capital
      but many chief cities, and all have cities and towns and villages beyond
      the capital. It is an impoverished capital that has no dependent towns,
      and it is a poor love that will not overflow in affection and eager kindly
      curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh mutuality. To love is to
      go living radiantly through the world. To love and be loved is to be
      fearless of experience and rich in the power to give.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      4.3. THE WILL TO LOVE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and
      controllable, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged about by
      obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most part
      I think people are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition of
      sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us, is
      far too strongly exclusive. It is not so much when love is glowing as when
      it is becoming habitual that it is jealous for itself and others. Lovers a
      little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an alliance
      against the world. They bury their talent of understanding and sympathy to
      return it duly in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest in life lest
      the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as disloyalty.
    </p>
    <p>
      Our institutions and social customs seem all to assume a definiteness of
      preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not
      psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into
      agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement. They
      take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk at
      least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities and
      locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive lovelessness
      towards the world at large may not carry with it the possibility of
      compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally probable is a
      starvation of one's emotional nature.
    </p>
    <p>
      The same reasons that make me decide against mere wanton abstinences make
      me hostile to the common convention of emotional indifference to most of
      the charming and interesting people one encounters. In pleasing and being
      pleased, in the mutual interest, the mutual opening out of people to one
      another, is the key of the door to all sweet and mellow living.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      4.4. LOVE AND DEATH.
    </h2>
    <p>
      For he who has faith, death, so far as it is his own death, ceases to
      possess any quality of terror. The experiment will be over, the rinsed
      beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the
      waste-pipe; the duster sweeps the bench. But the deaths of those we love
      are harder to understand or bear.
    </p>
    <p>
      It happens that of those very intimate with me I have lost only one, and
      that came slowly and elaborately, a long gradual separation wrought by the
      accumulation of years and mental decay, but many close friends and many
      whom I have counted upon for sympathy and fellowship have passed out of my
      world. I miss such a one as Bob Stevenson, that luminous, extravagant
      talker, that eager fantastic mind. I miss him whenever I write. It is less
      pleasure now to write a story since he will never read it, much less give
      me a word of praise for it. And I miss York Powell's friendly laughter and
      Henley's exuberant welcome. They made a warmth that has gone, those men. I
      can understand why I, with my fumbling lucidities and explanations, have
      to finish up presently and go, expressing as I do the mood of a type and
      of a time; but not those radiant presences.
    </p>
    <p>
      And the gap these men have left, these men with whom after all I only sat
      now and again, or wrote to in a cheerful mood or got a letter from at odd
      times, gives me some measure of the thing that happens, that may happen,
      when the mind that is always near one's thoughts, the person who moves to
      one's movement and lights nearly all the common flow of events about one
      with the reminder of fellowship and meaning&mdash;ceases.
    </p>
    <p>
      Faith which feeds on personal love must at last prevail over it. If Faith
      has any virtue it must have it here when we find ourselves bereft and
      isolated, facing a world from which the light has fled leaving it bleak
      and strange. We live for experience and the race; these individual
      interludes are just helps to that; the warm inn in which we lovers met and
      refreshed was but a halt on a journey. When we have loved to the intensest
      point we have done our best with each other. To keep to that image of the
      inn, we must not sit overlong at our wine beside the fire. We must go on
      to new experiences and new adventures. Death comes to part us and turn us
      out and set us on the road again.
    </p>
    <p>
      But the dead stay where we leave them.
    </p>
    <p>
      I suppose that is the real good in death, that they do stay; that it makes
      them immortal for us. Living they were mortal. But now they can never
      spoil themselves or be spoilt by change again. They have finished&mdash;for
      us indeed just as much as themselves. There they sit for ever, rounded off
      and bright and done. Beside these clear and certain memories I have of my
      dead, my impressions of the living are vague provisional things.
    </p>
    <p>
      And since they are gone out of the world and become immortal memories in
      me, I feel no need to think of them as in some disembodied and
      incomprehensible elsewhere, changed and yet not done. I want actual
      immortality for those I love as little as I desire it for myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      Indeed I dislike the idea that those I have loved are immortal in any real
      sense; it conjures up dim uncomfortable drifting phantoms, that have no
      kindred with the flesh and blood I knew. I would as soon think of them
      trailing after the tides up and down the Channel outside my window. Bob
      Stevenson for me is a presence utterly concrete, slouching, eager,
      quick-eyed, intimate and profound, carelessly dressed (at Sandgate he
      commonly wore a little felt hat that belonged to his son) and himself,
      himself, indissoluble matter and spirit, down to the heels of his boots. I
      cannot conceive of his as any but a concrete immortality. If he lives, he
      lives as I knew him and clothed as I knew him and with his unalterable
      voice, in a heaven of daedal flowers or a hell of ineffectual flame; he
      lives, dreaming and talking and explaining, explaining it all very
      earnestly and preposterously, so I picture him, into the ear of the
      amused, incredulous, principal person in the place.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have a real hatred for those dreary fools and knaves who would have me
      suppose that Henley, that crippled Titan, may conceivably be tapping at
      the underside of a mahogany table or scratching stifled incoherence into a
      locked slate! Henley tapping!&mdash;for the professional purposes of
      Sludge! If he found himself among the circumstances of a spiritualist
      seance he would, I know, instantly smash the table with that big fist of
      his. And as the splinters flew, surely York Powell, out of the dead past
      from which he shines on me, would laugh that hearty laugh of his back into
      the world again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Henley is nowhere now except that, red-faced and jolly like an October
      sunset, he leans over a gate at Worthing after a long day of picnicking at
      Chanctonbury Ring, or sits at his Woking table praising and quoting "The
      Admiral Bashville," or blue-shirted and wearing that hat that Nicholson
      has painted, is thrust and lugged, laughing and talking aside in his
      bath-chair, along the Worthing esplanade...
    </p>
    <p>
      And Bob Stevenson walks for ever about a garden in Chiswick, talking in
      the dusk.
    </p>
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    <h2>
      4.5. THE CONSOLATION OF FAILURE.
    </h2>
    <p>
      That parable of the talents I have made such free use of in this book has
      one significant defect. It gives but two cases, and three are possible.
      There was first the man who buried his talent, and of his condemnation we
      are assured. But those others all took their talents and used them
      courageously and came back with gain. Was that gain inevitable? Does
      courage always ensure us victory? because if that is so we can all be
      heroes and valour is the better part of discretion. Alas! the faith in
      such magic dies. What of the possible case of the man who took his two or
      three talents and invested them as best he could and was deceived or
      heedless and lost them, interest and principal together?
    </p>
    <p>
      There is something harder to face than death, and that is the realization
      of failure and misdirected effort and wrong-doing. Faith is no Open Sesame
      to right-doing, much less is it the secret of success. The service of God
      on earth is no processional triumph. What if one does wrong so extremely
      as to condemn one's life, to make oneself part of the refuse and not of
      the building? Or what if one is misjudged, or it may be too pitilessly
      judged, and one's co-operation despised and the help one brought becomes a
      source of weakness? Or suppose that the fine scheme one made lies
      shattered or wrecked by one's own act, or through some hidden blemish
      one's offering is rejected and flung back and one is thrust out?
    </p>
    <p>
      So in the end it may be you or I will find we have been anvil and not
      hammer in the Purpose of God.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then indeed will come the time for Faith, for the last word of Faith, to
      say still steadfastly, disgraced or dying, defeated or discredited, that
      all is well:&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      "This and not that was my appointed work, and this I had to be."
    </p>
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    <h2>
      4.6. THE LAST CONFESSION.
    </h2>
    <p>
      So these broken confessions and statements of mood and attitude come to an
      end.
    </p>
    <p>
      But at this end, since I have, I perceive, run a little into a pietistic
      strain, I must repeat again how provisional and personal I know all these
      things to be. I began by disavowing ultimates. My beliefs, my dogmas, my
      rules, they are made for my campaigning needs, like the knapsack and
      water-bottle of a Cockney soldier invading some stupendous mountain gorge.
      About him are fastnesses and splendours, torrents and cataracts, glaciers
      and untrodden snows. He comes tramping on heel-worn boots and ragged
      socks. Beauties and blue mysteries shine upon him and appeal to him, the
      enigma of beauty smiling the faint strange smile of Leonardo's Mona Lisa.
      He sees a light on the grass like music; and the blossom on the trees
      against the sky brings him near weeping. Such things come to him, give
      themselves to him. I do not know why he should not in response fling his
      shabby gear aside and behave like a god; I only know that he does not do
      so. His grunt of appreciation is absurd, his speech goes like a crippled
      thing&mdash;and withal, and partly by virtue of the knapsack and
      water-bottle, he is conqueror of the valley. The valley is his for the
      taking.
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a duality in life that I cannot express except by such images as
      this, a duality so that we are at once absurd and full of sublimity, and
      most absurd when we are most anxious to render the real splendours that
      pervade us. This duplicity in life seems to me at times ineradicable, at
      times like the confusing of something essentially simple, like the
      duplication when one looks through a doubly refracting medium. You think
      in this latter mood that you have only to turn the crystal of Iceland spar
      about in order to have the whole thing plain. But you never get it plain.
      I have been doing my halting utmost to get down sincerely and simply my
      vision of life and duty. I have permitted myself no defensive restraints;
      I have shamelessly written my starkest, and it is plain to me that a smile
      that is not mine plays over my most urgent passages. There is a rebellious
      rippling of the grotesque under our utmost tragedy and gravity. One's
      martialled phrases grimace as one turns, and wink at the reader. None the
      less they signify. Do you note how in this that I have written, such a
      word as Believer will begin to wear a capital letter and give itself
      solemn ridiculous airs? It does not matter. It carries its message for all
      that necessary superficial absurdity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Thought has made me shameless. It does not matter at last at all if one is
      a little harsh or indelicate or ridiculous if that also is in the mystery
      of things.
    </p>
    <p>
      Behind everything I perceive the smile that makes all effort and
      discipline temporary, all the stress and pain of life endurable. In the
      last resort I do not care whether I am seated on a throne or drunk or
      dying in a gutter. I follow my leading. In the ultimate I know, though I
      cannot prove my knowledge in any way whatever, that everything is right
      and all things mine.
    </p>
    <p>
      THE END. <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
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