estimate of the value of this evil of physical pain. For thus we can realize the strength of the will that seeks to escape it, and can act with due respect to this will. But nature generally gives us enough ex¬ perience of pain to furnish excellent material for the calculations needed. Therefore, bodily pains, save as punishments, are seldom useful instruments for our great purpose. Not thus can self be duly mor¬ tified.
It is different with certain mental pains. All those that tend to make the individual feel his own necessary limitations, and thereby to approach the realization of the great world of life about him, are necessary evils. His will must be overwhelmed, that the Universal Will may have place to establish it¬ self in him. Therefore, without considering whether we are thereby increasing or diminishing the sum of human misery, we all of us unhesitatingly set about the work of contending with blind self-con¬ fidence and self-absorption wherever it may appear. Therefore it is right that we ridicule all pretentious mediocrity that is unconscious of its stupidities. Therefore, in fact, it is right that we should criticise unsparingly all pretenders, however much they may be pained by our criticism. Therefore it is well that we should feel not a selfish but a righteous joy when¬ ever pride has a fall, whenever the man who thinks that he is something discovers of a truth that he is nothing. Therefore, also, do we put down excessive forwardness and vanity in growing children, although so to do hurts their sensitive young selfishness very keenly. In all such ways we must ask and we must 182 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY \ show no mercy, save when these keen pains of wounded vanity are so given as to inflame and in¬ crease this vanity itself. All healthy, truthful criti¬ cism of individual limitations is a duty, even if it is a present torture to the individual criticised. Foi this individual is blind to other life because he is wrapped up in himself. If by showing him his insignificance you can open his eyes, you are bound to do so, even though you make him writhe to see his worthless¬ ness. For what we here defend is not that ill-natured criticism whose only aim is to gratify the miserable self of the critic, but the criticism whose edge is turned in earnest against every form of self-satisfac¬ tion that hinders insight. Let a man be self-satis¬ fied when he is at rest, after dinner, or in merry company. It is a harmless and even a useful amuse¬ ment. But when he is at work doing good he ought to hate self-satisfaction, which hinders the moral in¬ sight, which exalts his will above the universal will, which takes the half-done task for the whole task, and altogether glorifies the vanity of vanities. If now my critic rids me of such self-satisfaction, he may hurt me keenly, but he is my best friend. My life may often be miserable in consequence, but then I am an instrument, whose purpose it is to attain, to foster, to extend, and to employ the moral insight. My misery is a drop, evil no doubt in itself (since my poor little will must writhe and struggle when it sees its own vanity and the hopelessness of its sepa¬ rate satisfactions), but a relative good, since through it I may attain to the moral insight. All such pains must be dealt with in the same way. Hence the THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE utilitarian principle of benevolent hedonism, even if right in its application to the far-off future, has but little direct practical application to a life that must to-day be judged by such standards as these.
II.
But has the principle of hedonism any truth even in its application to a world where all had attained the moral insight as an experience? If we con¬ sider the higher human activities, whose worth is not merely provisional, but permanent, the activities that men will carry on when they have freed themselves from selfish strife, is the aggregate happiness as such the goal of the action of this unselfish society?
There are existent already among men activities that belong to spheres where selfish strife is, rela¬ tively speaking, suppressed. These activities are foreshadowings of the life of the possible future hu¬ manity that may come to possess the moral insight. Art, science, philosophy, are the types of such life. These activities form still but a small part of the aggregate work of men, and so it must long be; yet, though subordinated in extent to the pressing moral needs of an imperfect state, these activities are al¬ ready among the highest in our lives. But now, are they valuable because of the aggregate happiness that they cause, or for some other reason? To judge of this we must study the definition of the second, more permanent class of human duties.
Suppose then that the first and provisional aim of human conduct had been attained, and that all men 184 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY possessed the moral insight, what would this insight then lead them to do? Here the hedonist will expect to have his revenge for our previous neglect of his advice. “ My precepts have been set aside so far,” he may say, “ as having no immediate application to the moral needs of the moment. To get this merely formal condition of harmony among men, the moral man has been advised to subordinate all direct efforts towards making people happy, to the end of making them first possess what you have called the moral mood. But now at last, in the supposed case, the great end has been attained, and men are formally moral. Now surely they have nothing to do but to be as happy as possible. So at last my plan wrill be vindicated, and the ideal man will come to be a seeker of ideal pleasures.”
The hedonist is too sanguine. His ideas of the highest state may have their value, but they are in¬ definite in at least one respect. When he says that he wants all his ideal men, in the ideal state, to be happy together, he never tells us what he means by the individual man at all, nor what inner relation that individual’s happiness is to have to the happi¬ ness of other men. All men, in the ideal state, are to be harmonious and happy together: this the he¬ donist tells us; but he does not see how many dif¬ ficulties are involved in the definition of this ideal state. He plainly means and says that in this ideal state the good of the whole society is to be an aggre¬ gate of a great number of individual happy states, which the various men of the blessed society a^re to feel. He assumes then that in the ideal state each THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE man would be able to say: “ I, separately regarded, am happy, and so are all my fellows. Now pos¬ sibly the very notion of an ideal state, in which the separate selves are as such happy, and in which the blessedness of the whole is an aggregate of the blessedness of the separate individuals, is a contra¬ dictory notion. A.t all events it is a notion whose meaning and validity every heuonist coolly and un- questioningly assumes. Yet it is an assumption that we must examine with care.
If a man sets before himself and his fellows the goal of individual happiness, as the hedonist wants him to do in the supposed ideal state, can he con¬ ceivably attain that goal? The hedonist supposes that the only moral limitation to the pursuit of per¬ sonal happiness is the moral requirement of altru¬ ism, according to which no one ought to seek his own pleasure at the cost of a greater misery to an¬ other. In the ideal state, as all would be in the moral mood, and all disposed to help one another, and to get happiness only together, this one limita¬ tion would be removed. Then, thinks the hedonist, the highest law would be: Get the most happiness, all of you. This happiness the hedonist conceives as an aggregate of states that would exist in the various separate individuals. So each individual will strive after his own joy, but in such wise as to hinder the joy of nobody else. But we oppose to this the ques¬ tion: Is there not some other limitation than this to individual search for happiness? Is not the ideal of individual happiness as such an impossible ideal, not because the individuals in the imperfect state 186 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY lack harmony, but because, even in the supposed har¬ monious state, there would be an inner hindrance to the pursuit of this ideal by any individual? Would not the moral insight detect the hindrance, and so re¬ ject this ideal? There are at least some very famil¬ iar reasons for thinking this to be the case. These reasons do not of themselves prove, but they certainly suggest, that the notion of a progressive individual happiness has in it some strange contradiction.
First, then, we have the old empirical truth that individual happiness is never very nearly approached by any one, so long as he is thinking about it. The happy man ought to be able to say, “ I am happy.” He can much more easily say, “ I was happy; ” for present reflection upon happiness interferes in most cases with happiness. So here is an inner difficulty, very well known, in the way of making individual happiness the goal of life. We have no desire to dwell here upon this difficulty, which has so often been discussed. We do not exaggerate its impor¬ tance. We consider it only the first suggestion that the hedonistic ideal of life has some inner contradic¬ tion in its very nature, so that there is some deeper conflict here going on than that between selfishness and altruism.
In the second place, we notice that, if anybody tries to sketch for us the ideal state of human life as the hedonist conceives it, we are struck with a sense of the tameness and insignificance of the whole picture. The result is strange. Here we have been making peace and harmony among men the proxi¬ mate goal of life, yet when this harmony has to be THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE conceived in hedonistic fashion, when the hedonist gives us his picture of a peaceful society, where, in the midst of universal good humor, his ideal, the hap¬ piness of everybody concerned, is steadfastly pursued, we find ourselves disappointed and contemptuous. That harmless company of jolly good fellows is un¬ speakably dull. One listens to the account of their happiness as one might listen to the laughter and merry voices of some evening club of jovial strangers, who had been dining at the hotel in which one hap¬ pened himself to be eating a late and frugal supper, in sobriety and weariness. Those unknown crea¬ tures whose chatter in the next room the traveler dimly hears at such a time, — a confused babble of stupid noises; how insignificant their joys seem to him! Who cares whether that really wretched set of animals yonder, with their full stomachs and their misty brains, think themselves happy or not? To be sure, among them the harmony seems in some sort to have been momentarily realized. One would no doubt seem to enjoy it all just as well as they, if he were one of them. But one is viewing it at a dis¬ tance, from outside; and so looking at it he possibly sees that a mass of individual happiness is not just the ideal of ideals after all.
Just such, however, is the feeling that comes to one in considering Mr. Spencer’s description of his ideal society. And similar feelings have been awakened in many reflective people when they have considered traditional notions of heaven, and have tried to esti¬ mate the value of the life of individual bliss therein pictured. Professor William James has recently so 188 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY well stated these objections in a few brilliant sen¬ tences, that we cannot do better than to quote from his recent article on “ The Dilemma of Determin¬ “ Every one must at some time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffoca¬ tion and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for Nirvana and escape? The white-robed, harp-playing heaven of our Sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer’s ‘ Data of Ethics,’ as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this respect, — lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all. We look upon them from this delicious mess of in¬ sanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and fears, and agonies and exultations, which form our pres¬ ent state; and tedium vitae is the only sentiment they awaken in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the sliifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and expression¬ less, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If this be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the genera¬ tions of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should suc¬ ceed, and protract in scecida sceculorum their contented and inoffensive lives, — why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business 1 Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE 189 that began so importantly may be saved from so singu¬ larly flat a winding-up.”
Now not only does all this seem true in such cases, but we have similar feelings about even so ideal a picture of happy future life as is Shelley’s, in the last act of the “ Prometheus.” There are indeed many deeper elements in that noble ideal of Shelley’s, for he distinctly says that his true ideal is “ Man — Oh! not men ”; or, as he again expresses it: — “ One undivided soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
And when he says this, he gets far beyond mere he¬ donism. But yet there are other elements in his account that are not so satisfactory, and that are decidedly hedonistic. Their expression is indeed perfect. Surely if the noblest hedonism could ever succeed with us through the noblest of statements, such an advocate as Shelley would convince us. But when the poet glorifies mere individual pleasure, as he does in part of his picture, our clearest reflection is that, after all, the end of the tragedy is petty when compared with the beginning.
For consider what a world it is in which we begin the poem. At first glance it is a gloomy and terri¬ ble world of brutal wrong. But soon the picture grows brighter, even while the wrong is depicted. There is the glorious figure of the suffering Titan, there is the sweetness of the tender love that watches him; and above the tyrant himself one feels that there is somehow a heavenly might, that does not suffer him to do his worst. The world in which 190 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY these things live is not intolerable. But then come the spirits that sing to Prometheus, in his anguish, of immortal deeds done on the earth, of great thoughts and lofty passions. All these are born of the conflict, and have their being in the midst of the terrors of the tyrant’s dominion. It is indeed no perfect world, this; and one needs some higher light, such as Prometheus has, to prophesy that the good will ever triumph; but one sees forthwith that from the perfect world, if it ever comes, these great strivings for good, this sublime devotion and love and heroism, must not wholly vanish. These things must not be laid aside like old garments whenever Prometheus wins and is free; their spirit must be preserved as an element in the higher life of the future. If they are worth anything, their true na¬ ture must be eternal.
And as for the real worth of this world in which the evil is so far triumphant — we learn something of that from Demogorgon. This mysterious being has indeed no very definite religious philosophy to offer. He meets plain questions with vague an¬ swers, when Asia and Panthea catechise him; and one feels it to be well for his reputation as a pro¬ found teacher that his questioners are neither men nor Socratic inquirers. But still what he tells of the deep truth that is “ imageless,” is enough to make us feel that even this world of horrors is not without a divine significance. Jove reigns, but, whatever the visible world may be, the truth of things is a world of hope and love, where the real God is somehow above all and through all, a Spirit of Eternal Goodness.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE 191 To have found this out in the midst of all the evil is surely not to have found life wholly vain.
But then what happens? By the accident that, according to Shelley, rules the world, the revolution is accomplished, and Zeus is hurled headlong into the abyss. What glorious life shall now begin? When the deep and magnificent truth that was felt to be be¬ neath all the horror of the tyrant’s reign, comes out into full light, what tongue shall be able to sing the glories of that beatific vision? We listen eagerly — and we are disappointed. Prometheus arises grandly from his bed of torture, and then — he forthwith bethinks himself of a very pretty cave, where one might be content to rest a long time in the refined company of agreeable women. There one will lie, and wreathe flowers, and tell tales, and sing songs, and laugh and weep; and the hours will fly swiftly by. And then what will become of the rest of the world? Oh, this world simply becomes a theatre of like individual enjoyments. Everybody to his cave and his flowers and his agreeable companions. And that will then be all. No organization; just good fellowship and fragmentary amusements.
No, that cannot be all. Shelley felt as much, and added the last act of the play. There we are to have depicted grandly and vaguely the life of or¬ ganized love. The world shall be all alive, and the universal life shall join in the hymn of praise. All the powers of reality shall feel the new impulse of perfect harmony, and what shall spring from their union shall be some higher kind of existence, in which there is no longer to be any talk of thine and 192 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY mine; but the “ one undivided soul of many a soul,” “ where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea,” shall enter upon a life of transcendent significance, upon a task of eternal duration, and of a meaning too high for us poor mortals of this present world well to comprehend. But this is no longer pure hedonism, although the verses hereabouts are so full of the joyous outbursts and of the anticipations of rapture. In fine, the outcome is no perfect and har¬ monious conception at all. We find the joy of the freed and loving, yet still separate selves, and the higher life of the all-pervading universal spirit, both alike glorified; and we never get from the poet any clearness about their actual relation. Is the world blessed just because the tyrant no longer interferes with each man’s flower-wreathing and other amuse¬ ments? Or is the sole source of bliss the disposi¬ tion of everybody to give everybody else everything? Or is the real source of the perfection this: that these souls, no longer oppressed by hatred, have at last come to feel not only their freedom, but also some higher aim of universal life? Shelley hints, but does not consistently make us feel, what his real result is. There was in fact always about Shelley that childish innocence of benevolent hope, to which the only evil seemed to be the hatred of men for one another, and the highest good the outburst of uni¬ versal kindliness. Now that is the beginning of moral insight, but cannot be all of it. As if the be¬ nevolence would not turn out to be utter emptiness, unless there is something beyond it! As if There could be any value in this unity of life, unless there THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE is something to be done by the one life after it is united! As if the moral insight must not reveal some deeper truth than can be seen in its first mo¬ ments!
One expects what we are coming to. In discuss¬ ing this problem of Shelley’s we are reaching the sense that the moral insight must be yet further completed, or else it will be all in vain. The moral insight says to us all: Act as one being. "W e must come to that point; but we must also go beyond. We must ask: What is this one being to do, after the insight has made all the individuals of one will? And we already begin to see, in opposition to hedon¬ ism, that it cannot be the end of this universal will simply to make of us so and so many new separate individuals once more. The mass of tediously happy selves seems insipid to our common sense, just be¬ cause we all dimly feel the truth that we must now come to understand better, namely, that the univer¬ sal will of the moral insight must aim at the de¬ struction of all which separates us into a heap of different selves, and at the attainment of some higher positive organic aim. The “one undivided soul” we are bound to make our ideal. And the ideal of that soul cannot be the separate happiness of you and of me, nor the negative fact of our freedom from hatred, but must be something above us all, and yet very positive.
Had we deduced our principle in any other way than the one we chose, we should be unable to take this, our present necessary step forwards. The feel¬ ing of sympathy, for instance, is concerned with the 194 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY individual object of our sympathy. To sympathize with all men is to wish everybody happy, each aftei his own fashion. But we rejected that emotional sympathy as such. We said: The facts of life show us a conflict of wills. To realize this conflict is to see that no will is more justified in its separateness than is any other. This realization is ethical skep¬ ticism, a necessary stage on the way to the true moral insight. The ethical doubt means and is the realization of the conflict. But this realization means, as we see on reflection, a real will in us that unites these realized wills in one, and demands the end of their conflict. This is our realization of an Universal Will. The rest of our doctrine must be the development of the nature of the universal will. This will first says to each of the individual wills: “ Submit thyself to me.” Or otherwise put, let each will be so acted out as if by One Being who combined in himself all the other wills. Hence the universal will must demand, not the indefinitely con¬ ceived or dimly and sentimentally desired separate satisfaction of everybody, but an organic union of life; such an union as this our world would try to make of itself if it were already in empirical fact what the universal will demands it to be, namely, one Self. This one Self, however, could no longer will to cut itself up again into the separate empir¬ ical selves, any more than it could in any narrow, priggish fashion set itself up for a new specimen of a lofty individual, to be obeyed as an arbitrary law¬ giver. It would demand all the wealth of life that the separate selves now have; and all the unity that THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE any one individual now seeks for himself. It would aim at the fullest and most organized life conceiv¬ able. And this its aim would become no longer merely a negative seeking for harmony, but a posi¬ tive aim, demanding the perfect Organization of Life.
HI.
But the postulate of all hedonism, utilitarian or other, this postulate of the absolute worth of indi¬ vidual satisfaction, finds its practical refutation for every growing character in yet another form. Every¬ body has tried to realize the ideal of individualism, this ideal of a happy or satisfied self, either for him¬ self or for some loved one; and everybody finds, if he tries the thing long enough, what a hollow and worthless business it all is. If there is, or is possible anywhere, a really satisfied self, it certainly has no place in any fleshly body; and the reason is not alone what disappointed people call the “ disagree¬ able order of things in this wicked world,” but the inner contradictions of this notion of a perfected hu¬ man self. Let us remind ourselves of some of these contradictions.