01.04 - Part 1, Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION OF PART I
I HAVE* now completed my survey of certain opinions which naturalism seems to require us to hold respecting important matters connected with Righteousness, Beauty, and Reason. The survey has necessarily been concise; but, concise though it has been, it has, perhaps, sufficiently indicated the inner antagonism which exists between the Naturalistic system and the feelings which the best among mankind, including many who may be counted as adherents of that system, have hitherto considered as the most valuable possessions of our race. If naturalism be true, or, rather, if it be the whole truth, then is morality but a bare catalogue of utilitarian precepts; beauty but the chance occasion of a passing pleasure; reason but the dim passage from one set of unthinking habits to another. All that gives dignity to life, all that gives value to effort, shrinks and fades under the pitiless glare of a creed like this; and even curiosity, the hardiest among the nobler passions of the soul, must languish under the conviction that neither for this generation nor for any that shall come after it, neither in this life nor in another, will the tie be wholly loosened by which reason, not less than appetite, is held in hereditary bondage to the service of our material needs.
I am anxious, however, not to overstate my case. It is of course possible, to take for a moment aesthetics as our text, that whatever be our views concerning naturalism, we shall still like good poetry and good music, and that we shall not, perhaps, find if we sum up our pleasures at the year’s end, that the total satisfaction derived from the contemplation of Art and Nature is very largely diminished by the fact that our philosophy allows us to draw no important distinction between the beauties of a sauce and the beauties of a symphony. Both may continue to afford the man with a good palate and a good ear a considerable amount of satisfaction; and if all we desire is to find in literature and in art something that will help us either ’to enjoy life or to endure it,’ I do not contend that, by any theory of the beautiful, of this we shall wholly be deprived.
Nevertheless there is, even so, a loss not lightly to be underrated, a loss that falls alike on him that produces and on him that enjoys. Poets and artists have been wont to consider themselves, and to be considered by others, as prophets and seers, the revealers under sensuous forms of hidden mysteries, the symbolic preachers of eternal truths. All this is, of course, on the naturalistic theory, very absurd. They minister, no doubt, with success to some phase, usually a very transitory phase, of public taste; but they have no mysteries to reveal, and what they tell us, though it may be very agreeable, is seldom true, and never important. This is a conclusion which, howsoever it may accord with sound philosophy, is not likely to prove very stimulating to the artist, nor does it react with less unfortunate effect upon those to whom the artist appeals. Even if their feeling of delight in the beautiful is not marred for them in immediate experience, it must suffer in memory and reflection. For such a feeling carries with it, at its best, an inevitable reference, not less inevitable because it is obscure, to a Reality which is eternal and unchanging; and we cannot accept without suffering the conviction that in making such a reference we were merely the dupes of our emotions, the victims of a temporary hallucination induced, as it were, by some spiritual drug. But if on the naturalistic hypothesis the sentiments associated with beauty seem like a poor jest played on us by Nature for no apparent purpose, those that gather round morality are, so to speak, a deliberate fraud perpetrated for a well-defined end. The consciousness of freedom, the sense of responsibility, the authority of conscience, the beauty of holiness, the admiration for self-devotion, the sympathy with suffering these and all the train of beliefs and feelings from which spring noble deeds and generous ambitions are seen to be mere devices for securing to societies, if not to individuals, some competitive advantage in the struggle for existence.
They are not worse, but neither are they better than the thousand-and-one appetites and instincts, many of them, as I have said, cruel, and many of them disgusting, created by similar causes in order to carry out through all organic Nature the like unprofitable ends; and if we think them better, as in our unreflecting moments we are apt to do, this, on the Naturalistic hypothesis, is only because some delusion of the kind is necessary in order to induce us to perform actions which in themselves can contribute nothing to our personal gratification. The inner discord which finds expression in conclusions like these largely arises, as the reader sees, from a want of balance or proportion between the range of our intellectual vision and the circumstances of our actual existence. Our capacity for standing outside ourselves and taking stock of the position which we occupy in the universe of things has been enormously and, it would seem, unfortunately, increased by recent scientific discovery. We have learned too much. We are educated above that station in life in which it has pleased Nature to place us. We can no longer accept it without criticism and without examination. We insist on interrogating that material system which, according to naturalism, is the true author of our being as to whence we come and whither we go, what are the causes which have made us what we are, and what are the purposes which our existence subserves. And it must be confessed that the answers given to this question by our oracle are extremely unsatisfactory. We have learned to measure space, and we perceive that our dwelling-place is but a mere point, wandering with its companions, apparently at random, through the wilderness of stars. We have learned to measure time, and we perceive that the life not merely of the individual or of the nation, but of the whole race, is brief, and apparently quite unimportant. We have learned to unravel causes, and we perceive that emotions and aspirations whose very being seems to hang on the existence of realities of which naturalism takes no account, are in their origin contemptible and in their suggestion mendacious. To me it appears certain that this clashing between beliefs and feelings must ultimately prove fatal to one or the other. Make what allowance you please for the stupidity of mankind, take the fullest account of their really remarkable power of letting their speculative opinions follow one line of development and their practical ideals another, yet the time must come when reciprocal action will perforce bring opinions and ideals into some kind of agreement and congruity. If, then, naturalism is to hold the field, the feelings and opinions inconsistent with naturalism must be foredoomed to suffer change; and how, when that change shall come about, it can do otherwise than eat all nobility out of our conception of conduct and all worth out of our conception of life, I am wholly unable to understand. 6
I am aware that many persons are in the habit of subjecting these views to an experimental refutation by pointing to a great many excellent people who hold, in more or less purity, the naturalistic creed, but who, nevertheless, offer prominent examples of that habit of mind with which, as I have been endeavouring to show, the naturalistic creed is essentially inconsistent. Naturalism so runs the argument co-exists in the case of Messrs. A., B., C., &c., with the most admirable exhibition of unselfish virtue. If this be so in the case of a hundred individuals, why not in the case of ten thousand? If in the case of ten thousand, why not in the case of humanity at large? Now, to the facts on which this reasoning proceeds I raise no objection. I desire neither to ignore the existence nor to minimise the merits of these shining examples of virtue unsupported by religion. But though the facts be true, the reasoning based on them will not bear close examination. Biologists tell us of parasites which live, and can only live, within the bodies of animals more highly organised than they. For them their luckless host has to find food, to digest it, and to convert it into nourishment which they can consume without exertion and assimilate without difficulty. Their structure is of the simplest kind. Their host sees for them, so they need no eyes; he hears for them, so they need no ears; he works for them and contrives for them, so they need but feeble muscles and an undeveloped nervous system. But are we to conclude from this that for the animal kingdom eyes and ears, powerful limbs and complex nerves, are superfluities? They are superfluities for the parasite only because they have first been necessities for the host, and when the host perishes the parasite, in their absence, is not unlikely to perish also. So it is with those persons who claim to show by their example that naturalism is practically consistent with the maintenance of ethical ideals with which naturalism has no natural affinity. Their spiritual life is parasitic: it is sheltered by convictions which belong, not to them, but to the society of which they form a part; it is nourished by processes in which they take no share. And when those convictions decay, and those processes come to an end, the alien life which they have maintained can scarce be expected to outlast them.
I am not aware that anyone has as yet endeavoured to construct the catechism of the future, purged of every element drawn from any other source than the naturalistic creed. It is greatly to be desired that this task should be undertaken in an impartial spirit; and as a small contribution to such an object, I offer the following pairs of contrasted propositions, the first member of each pair representing current teaching, the second representing the teaching which ought to be substituted for it if the naturalistic theory be accepted.
A. The universe is the creation of Reason, and all things work together towards a reasonable end.
B. So far as we are concerned, reason is to be found neither in the beginning of things nor in their end; and though everything is predetermined, nothing is foreordained.
A. Creative reason is interfused with infinite love.
B. As reason is absent, so also is love. The universal flux is ordered by blind causation alone.
A. There is a moral law, immutable, eternal; in its governance all spirits find their true freedom and their most perfect realisation. Though it be adequate to infinite goodness and infinite intelligence, it may be understood, even by man, sufficiently for his guidance.
B. Among the causes by which the course of organic and social development has been blindly determined are pains, pleasures, instincts, appetites, disgusts, religions, moralities, superstitions; the sentiment of what is noble and intrinsically worthy; the sentiment of what is ignoble and intrinsically worthless. From a purely scientific point of view these all stand on an equality; all are action-producing causes developed, not to improve, but simply to perpetuate, the species.
A. In the possession of reason and in the enjoyment of beauty, we in some remote way share the nature of that infinite Personality in Whom we live and move and have our being.
B. Reason is but the psychological expression of certain physiological processes in the cerebral hemispheres; it is no more than an expedient among many expedients by ’which the individual and the race are preserved; just as Beauty is no more than the name for such varying’and accidental attributes of the material or moral worlds as may happen for the moment to stir our aesthetic feelings.
A. Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so placed as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavour.
B. The individual perishes; the race itself does not endure. Few can flatter themselves that their conduct has any appreciable effect upon its remoter destinies; and of those few, none can say with reasonable assurance that th effect which they are destined to produce is the one which they desire. Even if we were free, therefore, our ignorance would make us helpless; and it may be almost a consolation to reflect that our conduct was determined for us by unthinking forces in a remote past, and that if we are impotent to foresee its consequences, we were not less impotent to arrange its causes. The doctrines embodied in the second member of each of these alternatives may be true, or may at least represent the nearest approach to truth of which we are at present capable. Into this question I do not yet inquire. But if they are to constitute the dogmatic scaffolding by which our educational system is to be supported; if it is to be in harmony with principles like these that the child is to be taught at its mother’s knee, and the young man is to build up the ideals of his life, then, unless I greatly mistake, it will be found that the inner discord which exists, and which must gradually declare itself, between the emotions proper to naturalism and those which have actually grown up under the shadow of traditional convictions, will at no distant date most unpleasantly translate itself into practice.