Such then is our natural realization of our fellows even when we call them conscious. The imperfect realization in question extends even to the case of 152 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY closer affection. Lear realizes in his daughters, or thinks that he realizes, only the dispositions that they express. Real effort to enter into the inner life of their emotions is foreign to his simple and imperious mind. Even when I delight in another’s love, I am still apt to realize rather the disposition than the inner and more personal emotional life that is the cause of this way of behavior. The act is what I want,1 the voice, the look, the gift, or the other as¬ surance of an energy in harmony with my will. The ordinary emotion of gratitude is another very good illustration of the imperfect realization of our neigh¬ bors that accompanies even the plainest verbal rec¬ ognition of their conscious existence. As I write these words, my heart is just now going out in ad¬ miration and respect, not to say affection, to a man whom I but imperfectly know. I feel a desire to do him a favor, if it were possible. Why? Do I reflect on his true nature and needs as a being like myself? Do I feel our common weakness, our com¬ mon longings? Have I dispelled the illusion of self¬ ishness that separates us? No, — I grieve and am ashamed to confess it, — this being is to me almost as wholly external as my plumber, not much better realized than my walking-stick. I am dwelling not on his own inner life at all. In my mind’s eye I see just bis outer form. Yet he has written me a graceful and pleasing letter, expressing his interest in some of my plans, and his desire to help me. I am selfishly delighted to find such help. I have an 1 “ I ’d give all my income from dreamland 1 For a touch of her hand on my cheek.”
THE MORAL INSIGHT instinctive feeling that it demands compensation. I feel an animal delight in being in friendly company. My gratitude is here no moral emotion at all.
The emotion of sympathy does indeed often tend to make me realize the other and more completely internal aspect of my neighbor’s reality; but sym¬ pathy does this in the halting and uncertain way de¬ scribed in a previous chapter. And at all events, whatever sympathy leads to, it is not by itself the insight. And so, to sum up our present way of studying the illusions of selfishness, we find by these examples that by nature our neighbor’s conscious life is realized for us rather as an active agency that affects our fortunes, than as an inner experience, or as it is in itself, namely, as a Will; and hence it is that we are disposed to treat it with coldness, rather than to respect its true nature. Resistance, con¬ quest, employment of this agency, seem to us axi¬ omatic aims of prudence; unselfish respect for its inner accompanying experiences seems to us a hard if not a meaningless task. Such is the nature and ground of the illusion of selfishness.
If now our activity of realization were confined to the range of common-sense emotions, there would be no escape from all this. It is our critical reflection that appears on the scene, saying: “ O common sense, what thou hast realized cannot be all. We must resolve to recognize more, else will our reso¬ lutions never lose their inconsistency and darkness. Be honest, O common sense. Is not thy neighbor after all just a dead fact of nature, an automaton with certain peculiar energies?” And common 154 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY sense answers: “ No, for is he not most assuredly a conscious agent, whose action I realize? ” “ Dost thou then know that he wills, and not realize what this will means for him, namely, that he experiences it? ” “ No,” answers common sense, “ if he wills as I do, he must experience as I do.” “ Realize it then, and see what thou then wilt do with him.” And common sense must, we affirm, so realizing, simply reply, “ As he is real, he is as much an ob¬ ject for my effort as I myself am, in case I can af¬ fect him. Ours is one life.” This common sense must see, if it fully realizes the neighbor. And if it realizes his activity, as it always in some fashion does, then it must come to realize his experience, and so to realize him fully, so soon as it undertakes to complete the incomplete act by which it has be¬ gun to realize his will. This completion may be hastened by pity, or may be hindered by the weak¬ ness that pity often involves; but when it comes, it must be an act of clear insight, made possible by the rational nature of our mental life. Whatever in our thought is done in part, we are ready either to abandon wholly, or to finish altogether, so soon as we realize that we have been doing it in part. Our resolution to recognize an existence cannot remain confused or self-contradictory when we come to re¬ alize where the confusion and self-contradiction lie. And as we simply cannot give up recognizing our neighbor, we must of necessity resolve, when we see this inconsistency of our natural realization, to real¬ ize him wholly.
Such is our reflective account of the process that, in THE MORAL INSIGHT some form, must come to every one under the proper conditions. In this process we see the beginning of the real knowledge of duty to others. The process is one that any child can and does, under proper guidance, occasionally accomplish. It is the process by which we all are accustomed to try to teach humane behavior in concrete cases. We try to get people to realize what they are doing when they injure others. But to distinguish this process from the mere tender emotion of sympathy, with all its illusions, is what moralists have not carefully enough done. Our ex¬ position has tried to take this universally recog¬ nized process, to distinguish it from sympathy as such, and to set it up before the gates of ethical doc¬ trine as the great producer of insight.
But when we say that to this insight common sense must come, under the given conditions, we do not mean to say: “ So the man, once having attained insight, must act thenceforth.” The realization of one’s neighbor, in the full sense of the word reali¬ zation, is indeed the resolution to treat him as if he were real, that is, to treat him unselfishly. But this resolution expresses and belongs to the moment of insight. Passion may cloud the insight in the very next moment. It always does cloud the insight after no very long time. It is as impossible for us to avoid the illusion of selfishness in our daily lives, as to escape seeing through the illusion at the moment of insight. We see the reality of our neighbor, that is, we determine to treat him as we do ourselves. But then we go back to daily action, and we feel the heat of hereditary passions, and we straightway for- 156 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY get what we have seen. Our neighbor becomes ob¬ scured. He is once more a foreign power. He is unreal. We are again deluded and selfish. This conflict goes on and will go on as long as we live after the manner of men. Moments of insight, with their accompanying resolutions; long stretches of delusion and selfishness: That is our life.
V.
V.
To bring home this view in yet another way to the reader, we ask him to consider very carefully just what experience he has when he tries to realize his neighbor in the full sense that we have insisted upon. Not pity as such is what we desire him to feel. For whether or no pity happens to work in him as self¬ ishly and blindly as we have found that it often does work, still not the emotion, but its consequences, must in the most favorable case give us what we seek. All the forms of sympathy are mere impulses. It is the insight to which they bring us that has moral value. And again, the realization of our neighbor’s existence is not at all the discovery that he is more or less useful to us personally. All that would contribute to selfishness. In an entirely dif¬ ferent way we must realize his existence, if we are to be really altruistic. What then is our neighbor?
W e find that out by treating him in thought just as we do ourselves. What art thou? Thou art now just a present state, with its experiences, thoughts, and desires. But what is thy future Self? Simply future states, future experiences, future thoughts THE MORAL INSIGHT THE MORAL INSIGHT and desires, that, although not now existing for thee, are postulated by thee as certain to come, and as in some real relation to thy present Self. What then is thy neighbor? He too is a mass of states, of ex¬ periences, thoughts, and desires, just as real as thou art, no more but yet no less present to thy experi¬ ence now than is thy future Self. He is not that face that frowns or smiles at thee, although often thou thinkest of him as only that. He is not the arm that strikes or defends thee, not the voice that speaks to thee, not that machine that gives thee what thou desirest when thou movest it with the offer of money. To be sure, thou dost often think of him as if he were that automaton yonder, that an¬ swers thee when thou speakest to it. But no, thy neighbor is as actual, as concrete, as thou art. Just as thy future is real, though not now thine, so thy neighbor is real, though his thoughts never are thy thoughts. Dost thou believe this? Art thou sure what it means? This is for thee the turning-point of thy whole conduct towards him. What we now ask of thee is no sentiment, no gush of pity, no tremulous weakness of sympathy, but a calm, clear insight.
But one says: “ All this have I done from my youth up. Surely I hold and always have held my neighbor to be real and no automaton. Surely I have feared his reproof, have been angry at his ill- will, have rejoiced in his sympathy, have been influ¬ enced by his opinions, all my life. And yet I have remained selfish.” Nay, but just at the moment when thou hadst to act towards him so or so, thou 158 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY wert no longer quick to realize him. Then it was that thy passion made him for thee a shadow. Thou couldst not love him, because thou didst forget who he was. Thou didst believe in him enough to fear him, to hate him, to fight with him, to revenge thy¬ self upon him, to use his wit as thy tool, but not enough to treat him as real, even as thou thyself art real. He seems to thee a little less living than thou. His life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires. He is a symbol of passion to thee, and imperfectly, coldly, with dull assent, with¬ out full meaning to thy words, thou dost indeed say, when asked, that the symbol stands for something real, as real as thyself. But what those words mean, — hast thou realized it, as, through selfish feeling, thou dost realize thy equally external future Self?
If he is real like thee, then is his life as bright a light, as warm a fire, to him, as thine to thee; his will is as full of struggling desires, of hard problems, of fateful decisions; his pains are as hatefid, his joys as dear. Take whatever thou knowest of desire and of striving, of burning love and of fierce hatred, realize as fully as thou canst what that means, and then with clear certainty add: Such as that is for me, so is it for him, nothing less. If thou dost that, can he remain to thee what he has been, a picture, a plaything, a comedy, or a tragedy, in brief a mere Show? Behind all that show thou hast indeed dimly felt that there is something. Know that truth thoroughly. Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different in sort from thine. Thou hast said: “ A pain in him is not like a pain THE MORAL INSIGHT THE MORAL INSIGHT in me, but something far easier to bear.” Thou hast made of him a ghost, as the imprudent man makes of his future self a ghost. Even when thou hast feared his scorn, his hate, his contempt, thou hast not fully made him for thee as real as thyself. His laughter at thee has made thy face feel hot, his frowns and clenched fists have cowed thee, his sneers have made thy throat feel choked. But that was only the social instinct in thee. It was not a full sense of his reality. Even so the little baby smiles back at one that smiles at it, but not because it realizes the approving joy of the other, only because it by instinct enjoys a smiling face; and even so the baby is frightened at harsh speech, but not because it realizes the other’s anger. So, dimly and by in¬ stinct, thou has lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast even de¬ sired his pain, but thou hast not fully realized the pain that thou gavest. It has been to thee, not pain in itself, but the sight of his submission, of his tears, or of his pale terror. Of thy neighbor thou hast made a thing, no Self at all.
When thou hast loved, hast pitied, or hast rever¬ enced thy neighbor, then thy feeling has possibly raised for a moment the veil of illusion. Then thou hast known what he truly is, a Self like thy present Self. But thy selfish feeling is too strong for thee. Thou hast forgotten soon again what thou hadst seen, and hast made even of thy beloved one only the instru¬ ment of thy own pleasure. Even out of thy power to pity thou hast made an object of thy vainglory. Thy reverence has turned again to pride. Thou hast 160 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY accepted the illusion once more. No wonder that in this darkness thou findest selfishness the only rule of any meaning for thy conduct. Thou forgottest that without realization of thy future and as yet unreal self, even selfishness means nothing. Thou forgot¬ test that if thou gavest thy present thought even so to the task of realizing thy neighbor’s life, selfishness would seem no more plain to thee than the love of thy neighbor.
Have done then with this illusion that thy Self is all in all. Intuition tells thee no more about thy future Self than it tells thee about thy neighbors. Desire, bred in thee by generations of struggle for existence, emphasizes the expectation of thy own bodily future, the love for thy own bodily welfare, and makes thy body’s life seem alone real. But sim¬ ply try to know the truth. The truth is that all this world of life about thee is as real as thou art. All conscious life is conscious in its own measure. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee. The result of thy insight will be inevitable. The illusion vanishing, the glorious prospect opens before thy vision. Seeing the oneness of this life everywhere, the equal reality of all its moments, thou wilt be ready to treat it all with the reverence that prudence would have thee show to thy own little bit of future life. What prudence in its narrow respectability counseled, thou wilt be ready to do universally. As the prudent man, seeing the reality of his future self, inevitably works for it; so the enlightened man, seeing the reality of all conscious life, realizing that it is no shadow, but fact, at once and inevitably de- THE MORAL INSIGHT 161 sires, if only for that one moment of insight, to enter into the service of the whole of it.
So the illusion of selfishness vanishes for thy present thought (alas! not for thy future conduct, O child of passion!), when thou lookest at what selfishness has so long hidden from thee. Thou seest now the universal life as a whole, just as real as thou art, identical in joy and sorrow. The conflict of selfishness and unselfishness vanishes. Selfishness is but a half realization of the truth expressed in un¬ selfishness. Selfishness says: I shall exist. Un¬ selfishness says: The Other Life is as My Life. To realize another’s pain as pain is to cease to desire it in itself. Hatred is illusion. Cowardly sympa¬ thy, that hides its head for fear of realizing the neigh¬ bor’s pain, is illusion. But unselfishness is the real¬ ization of life. Unselfishness leads thee out of the mists of blind self-adoration, and shows thee, in all the life of nature about thee, the one omnipresent, conscious struggle for the getting of the desired. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor’s power; in the boundless sea, where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in the hearts of all the good and loving; in the dull, throbbing hearts of all pris¬ oners and captives; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope; in all our devotion; in all our knowledge, — everywhere from the lowest to the noblest creatures and experiences on our earth, the same conscious, burning, willful life is found, end¬ lessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, 162 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these im¬ pulses that even now throb in thy own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and forget it as thou canst; but if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.
VI.
VI.
But this unity that the moral insight has found for us in life must not be falsely interpreted. Rightly interpreted, the moral insight will solve for us many very difficult problems; but we must not imagine that it shows us all this individual life as in any mystical sense already actually in the har¬ mony that we seek. Not because these aims are al¬ ready in themselves one, but because we, as moral seers, unite in one moment of insight the realization of all these aims, for that reason alone is this life one for us. It is in this sense alone that the moral insight gives us a solution of the problem of egoism and altruism, as well as a foundation for a general doctrine of the Highest Good. The moral insight does not enable us to say: These beings have always actually but blindly sought what was in itself the Highest Good. We can only say: Each one has sought in his blindness onty what was to him desir¬ able. And not, save by the realization of the con¬ flict of desire, can the truly highest good be con¬ ceived. The moral insight discovers harmony not as already implied in the nature of these blind, con¬ flicting wills, but as an ideal to be attained by hard work.
THE MORAL INSIGHT We point this out in order to show that we do not fall into the hackneyed error of those moralists who insist that they merely tell men what one thing it is that men have all been blindly seeking. Such mor¬ alists often say: “ Our system is but an expression of the tendency that was always there, latent in men. It tells them in plain words what they al¬ ways wanted, and then it tells them how to get this end.” This specious pretense of so many moral sys¬ tems we have implicitly condemned in the previous part of our discourse. It constitutes in many cases that appeal to the physical facts which we have set aside as always useless and often ungrounded. If one looks the pretense fairly in the face, how flat and stale it seems! Yonder vast wealth of conflict¬ ing aims among men, base and noble, devilish and divine, — what moralist has been able to sum all of them up in any formula, save in the wholly abstract formula that we have above referred to, namely, that all these beings seek what seems to them desir¬ able. How presumptuous to say to them: “ In fact you all desire this that I formulate in my text-book of morals.” In fact they do not. And it is absurd to watch the turnings and twistings of language by which a moralist tries to make out that they do.
For instance, let the moralist be J. S. Mill, and let him declare, as he does, that happiness is the one goal of all men. If happiness includes the attain¬ ment of any possible object of anybody s desire, then indeed the theory is a truism. But with this truism, of course, no sort of progress would have been made in ethics. Mill must tell us something about what 164 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY sorts of happiness there are, and about what sorts ought to be sought most of all. He says, as we know, that there are “ higher ” and “ lower ” pleas¬ ures, and that higher pleasures ought to be sought in preference to the others, the pleasure of the intel¬ lect, of generosity, etc., instead of the sensual pleas¬ ures. What can be the proof? That happiness was the goal we were to learn, because all men ac¬ tually seek it. But that the “ higher ” happiness is the goal, rather than a lower form, how do we learn that? Because men always choose it? In fact they do not. So Mill has to shift the ground a little. They do not all of them actually seek it, but they would seek it if they knew it. Most of them are ig¬ norant of what they would prize most, namely, of these “higher” pleasures. But here again Mill meets a disheartening fact. Most men, if they ever love “higher” pleasures at all, are found loving them more for a while in the ideal enthusiasm of youth than later in the prosaic dullness of middle life. Men who have known the “ higher ” happi¬ ness do then deliberately turn away from it. This is a regular fact of life, well known, and often la¬ mented. How does this agree with Mill’s doctrine? Alas! it does not agree, and only by worthless de¬ vices can he conceal from himself the fact. The people who enjoy the higher know the lower and re¬ ject it. The people who enjoy the lower do not know of the higher, or, if they ever knew it, they have forgotten it, or if they have not quite forgotten the higher, they have “ lost capacity for it.”. As if all this could not just as plausibly be said from the THE MORAL INSIGHT side of the “ lower ” pleasures. Just as if it were not constantly said from that side in every good drinking-song, with a result precisely opposed to Mill’s. In fact Mill is driven in this controversy with imaginary opponents to the worst subterfuge possible for so skilled a thinker, when he at last says that the pleasure which seems the higher of two pleasures to the k‘ most of those who have experi¬ enced both ” is actually the higher. For thus, to keep up the show of merely interpreting to men their actual will, Mill has to appeal to the opinion of the majority, has to use a purely practical habit of de¬ liberative assemblies for the purpose of deciding a question of theory, and then has most absurdly to declare that a man’s experience about his own pleasure is worth nothing as a test of its value un¬ less the majority of his fellows agree with him in his judgment.
In fact all this is benevolent trifling. Men declare at one time one pleasure to be “ highest,” that is, most desirable, and at another time they declare an¬ other pleasure to be the only desirable one. Differ¬ ent men persist in having different aims. To de¬ fine their duty by telling them that they all have one aim is wrong. From the point of view of the moral insight all this struggling life becomes one; but that is not because it as yet ceases to struggle, but because the being possessed of the moral insight comes to realize it all at once. For him it is one, because he identifies himself with the struggling aims. He seeks their harmony, and must do so if he have the insight. But they are not in harmony 166 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY as yet at all; else would he have no work to do. Let him then not deceive himself. The conflict itself is real and not illusory. The illusion lies in the fact that no one of the fighters realizes the inner life of the others. But to overcome that illusion in any soul is not to show that all the fighters have been desiring the same thing.
J. S. Mill is by no means our only case of the ef¬ fort to convince people that they always have had one object of search, which the moralist has but to name in order to bring peace on the earth. Ben- tham undertook the same task, and showed in his blunt way as much skill in subterfuge as he ever ac¬ cused his opponents of showing, while he tried to make out that all men always have been Bentham¬ ites, to whom pleasure was the only good. Mr. Spencer in his turn tries to define the Good so that it shall agree not only with the popular usage of the word good, but also with the Spencerian notion of what constitutes the Good. If anywhere a usage of the word appears that does not agree with the Spen¬ cerian usage, Mr. Spencer insists, sometimes, that, if cross-questioned, the man who so uses it would have to come over to the Spencerian usage, and sometimes that the usage in question is a survival in culture of a savage notion, or that it is in some other way insignificant. Thus the proof of Mr. Spencer’s view about the nature of the ideal be¬ comes so simple and easy that when, a little further on, it is necessary to recognize the existence of pes. simists, Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in regarding it as perfectly plain that a man can become a pes- THE MORAL INSIGHT simist only in case he believes that the Spencerian ideal of the Good is unattainable. Thus axioms are manufactured whenever we need them.