Hedonism has no meaning, unless the satisfied hu¬ man self is logically possible. The ideal of hedon¬ ism, with all its vagueness, has at least one essential element, in that it demands the satisfaction of hu¬ man selves by the free supply of all that they desire for themselves. Hedonism therefore must and does assert that what a man desires is his own content¬ ment; so that, if you could, physically speaking, 196 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY give him all that he asks for himself, you would have reached the goal for him. But now, if all this is a delusion, if in fact a man does not really want his own satisfaction alone, but does actually want some¬ thing more, that is not his individual satisfaction, and that is not to be attained through his satisfaction, then the hedonistic ideal does not express the truth of life. And this paradoxical experience we all get, sooner or later. We find that our little self does desire something that, if gained, would be not its own satisfaction at all, but its own destruction in its separate life as this self. So the aim of life cannot be ultimately hedonistic. For, if possessed of the moral insight, we cannot will that each self should get the greatest possible aggregate of separate satis¬ factions, when in truth no one of the selves seeks merely an aggregate of self-satisfactions as such, but when each does seek something else that is unattain¬ able in the form of separate self-satisfaction.
But possibly a reader may incredulously demand where the proof is of this self-contradictory desire that all the selves are declared to have. The proof lies in the general fact that to be fully conscious of one s own individual life as such is to be conscious of a distressing limitation. This limitation every one very shrewdly notices for the first in other people. The knowledge of it expresses itself in personal crit¬ icism. One first puts the matter very naively thus, that, whereas the rule of life for one’s own person is simply to get all the satisfaction that one can, the appearance of anybody else who pretends to be con¬ tent with Aiwzself must be the signal not for admira- THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE tion at the sight of his success, but for a good deal of contempt. One sees at once that he is a person of serious limitations. One sees and feels perfections that the other has not. One despises then the other man’s complacency, because it is so plainly founded in illusion. “ If he could only see himself as others see him,” one says, “ he could not be self-satisfied.” Criticism thus seems to indicate why he ought to be discontented, and why he would, if he knew more, feel a contempt for himself. All such criticism is really an abandonment of the hedonistic principle. If an individual ought to be dissatisfied, although he is actually satisfied, and if he ought to be dissatisfied merely because he has not some perfection that ex¬ ists in somebody else, then the doctrine that a self reaches its goal in so far as it reaches inner content¬ ment is given up. No benevolent hedonist has any business to criticise a happy man who is harming nobody by his happiness. He is at the goal, or ap¬ proximately so. Let him alone. To do otherwise, by criticising him, is a crime.
But no; every one feels that the true goal is not attained for this man. And this feeling, though in itself as feeling it proves nothing, is the first sug¬ gestion to many of some deeper truth. This truth, however, enters like iron into his soul, when some¬ body else ably and justly and severely criticises him in his turn. Here, for example, I have been for a time content with myself, and have been saying to my soul: “ Soul, take thy ease,” and here comes one who says to me, very justly, “ Thou fool,” and point j out some great lack in my conduct, or in my charac- 198 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ter, or in my knowledge. And now I have a strange experience of conflicting passions. This critic has caused me a sharp pang. Perhaps I hate him for it; but then, when I go away and think the matter over, I see that as to the fact, he is right. This great lim¬ itation does actually exist for me, and perhaps I can¬ not remove it; so I can but suffer from the sense of it. I was innocent and ignorant before, and there¬ fore happy. If the critic had not showed me to myself, I should have kept this bliss. But it is in vain now to think of returning to that innocence. I am indeed a wretch and a fool; and how shall I escape myself? Alas for my lost pleasure in con¬ templating my fancied perfection!
But no: cannot I in fact return to that ignorance, and to the blissful illusion of my own worth once more? Surely I can if I but try awhile. To flatter myself, to curse the critic, to talk of his jealousy and of his blindness: surely this will bring me back to my ignorance again in time. He will be forgotten, and I contented. But once more, my enlightened self revolts from this lie. The defect is real, and I know it. W ould my ignorance make it less real? To have this defect and to suffer from it is bad enough; but with horror do I now contemplate the state of going on forever with this defect, but still ignorant of it and so not suffering from it. My old innocence seems really pitiful. It actually adds much to my present pang of chagrin, that I previously ought to have felt the chagrin, and yet had it not. I tremble when I reflect how, amid all that selfish complacency, I really was a fool the whole time, and THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE appeared so to discerning people, and yet knew it not. And therefore now, through all the pang of the discovery, runs the feeling that I would not if I could, no, not for any delight of complacency, return to that state of hollow, delicious, detestable igno¬ rance. It was a fool’s paradise; but I have escaped from it. I know my nakedness, and I prefer the fruit of the tree of knowledge, with bitter exile, to the whole of the delights of that wretched place. It is a contradictory state, this. My knowledge is torture to my foolish, sensitive self; yet while I writhe with the vainest of pangs, I despise utterly the thought of escaping it by illusion, or by forgetfulness, or by any means save the actual removal or conquest of the defect. And this I feel even when the defect is seen to be utterly irremovable without the destruc¬ tion of myself. Better go on despising myself, and feeling the contempt of others, than return to the delights of foolishness; or, if the pain of knowing what I am is insupportable, then it were better to die, than to live in despicable ignorance. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?
Is all this mere emotion? or is it insight? In fact it is a growing, though still imperfect insight, a form of the moral insight. The pangs of this wounded self-love are themselves in truth also van¬ ity, like the complacent self-love that they mourn; but only through the gateway of this pain can most people get beyond these vanities of individualism. For this wounded self-love, that refuses to be com¬ forted by any deliberate return to its old illusions, is, as Adam Smith long since pointed out, an emo- 200 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY tional expression of the result of putting ourselves at the point of view of our critics. We see our limitations as they see them. Our will conforms itself, therefore, to their contemptuous will concern¬ ing us, because we realize the existence of that will. In recognizing and sharing their contempt, we there¬ fore realize in part the universal will that must con¬ demn all individual limitations as such. We prac¬ tically experience the truth that a perfectly fair judge of us all would not be satisfied merely with our indi¬ vidual contentments as such, but would also demand the destruction of all our individual limitations. W e thus get practically far beyond hedonism. We see that as we are weak and wretched in the eyes of one another, we should all be far more so in the eyes of a god Our ideal of life must then be the notion of a life where no one being could fairly criticise any other at all. But such a life would be no longer a life of separate individuals, each limited to his petty sphere of work. It would be a life in which self was lost in a higher unity of all the conscious selves.
Singular may appear this conception even now, after all that we have said; but it is a practical con¬ ception in our every-day human life. That we criti¬ cise the limitations of others, and desire them to sac¬ rifice their pleasures for the sake of removing these limitations, may be regarded at first as our cruel ca¬ price, if you will so regard it. But when the edge of the sword is turned against us, when we, feeling the bitterness of criticism and seeing our limitations, long to be beyond them, hate ourselves for them, and yet refuse to escape from the pain of all this by THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE forgetfulness of the defect, we pass from capricious criticism to something higher. We accept with ag¬ ony the point of view of the one who stands outside of us. And, so doing, we pass in effect to the accep¬ tance of the demands of the universal will. If there were a will that included in one consciousness all our separate wills, it could not will our individual de¬ fects as such. It would be absolute critic, as well as absolute harmonizer, of all of us. It would tear down these individual barriers of our petty lives, as the corporation of a great city may tear down wretched old rookeries. It would demand that we be one in spirit, and that our oneness be perfect. But if we experience this universal will, we experi¬ ence that hedonism, whose life-blood is the insistence upon individual states as such, cannot be upheld by the moral insight, either now, or at any future stage of our human life on this earth. We perceive too that we all have a deep desire for self-destruction, in so far as we recognize that our self-love means ab¬ sence of perfection.
IV.
IV.
We have seen in general the moral outcome of in¬ dividualism. Let us study some of its forms and for¬ tunes more in detail. Individualism, viewed as the tendency to hold that the ideal of life is the separate happy man, is itself very naturally the normal ten¬ dency of unreflecting strong natures, to whom happi¬ ness has been in a fair human measure already given. Children and child-like men, full of vigor, are inno¬ cently selfish; or, when they act unselfishly, their 202 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY whole ideal is the making of others like themselves. They fall into a notion about life that the author not long since heard well-expressed by a cheerful young friend, a former fellow-student, who, having early plunged into a busy life, has already won both influence and property. This man, full of the enthu¬ siasm of first success, was talking over his life with the writer, and fell to defining his opinions on vari¬ ous subjects, such as young men like to discuss. At last he was asked about the view of life that he had already formed in his little experience. He was quick, honest, and definite in his answer, as he al¬ ways has been. “ My notion of a good life is,” he said, “ that you ought to help your friends and whack your enemies.” The notion was older than the speaker remembered; for Socratic dialogues on the Just, with their ingenious Sophists making bold as¬ sertions, form no part of his present stock of sub¬ jects for contemplation. But what was interesting in the fresh and frank manner of the speech was the clearness of the conviction that a world of suc¬ cessful and friendly selves, whose enemies chanced to be all recently “ whacked,” would be at the goal of bliss. Such indeed is and must be the individ¬ ualism of the successful and unreflecting man, by whom all the world is classified as being either his or not his, as to a cow all is either cow feed or not cow feed. A man in this position has never yet known the burden of Faust’s soul when he says, Cursed be what as possession charms us. If such a man gets any moral insight, it will be on this stage imperfect. He will seek only to multiply himself THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE in the forms of other men. These he will call his friends. That in which he does not recognize him¬ self, he will “ whack.”
But most men cannot keep this form of the illu¬ sion of individualism. They pass most of their lives in the midst of disappointment. The self cannot get its objects. The ideal independence is hampered. The stubborn world asserts itself against us. We feel the littleness of our powers and of our plans. The broken and despairing self has to seek refuge elsewhere. And so individualism most commonly assumes another shape. In inner self-development we seek what the world refuses us in outer self-reali¬ zation. Thoughts at least are free. Our emotions are our own. The world does not understand them; but the world is cold and unappreciative. Let us be within ourselves what we cannot get in the outer world. Let us be inwardly complete, even if we are outwardly failures. Then we shall outwit the cruel world, and produce the successful self, in spite of misfortunes.
The reader need not be reminded of what vast development individualism has undergone in this di¬ rection. Literature is full of accounts of struggles for inward self-realization, made by men whose outer growth is impeded. The Hamlets and the Fausts of poetry, the saints and the self-conscious martyrs of great religious movements, are familiar examples. W e have already in a former chapter studied the out¬ come of this romantic individualism in a few cases. There is no time to dwell here afresh at any length on so familiar a theme, but for the present we may 204 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY point out that all illustrations of the tendency fall into two classes, representing respectively the senti¬ mental and the heroic individualism. These are the forms of that Nobler Selfishness which benevolent hedonism defends. They are efforts to find the con¬ tented and perfected self. Their failure is the fail¬ ure of individualism, and therewith of hedonism.
As for the sentimental individualism, we have seen already how unstable are its criteria of perfection, how full of fickleness is its life. The sentimental self admits that the world cannot understand it, and will not receive it; but it insists that this neglect comes because the world does not appreciate the strength and beauty of the inner emotional life. The ideal, then, is devotion to a culture of the beautiful soul, and to a separation of this soul from all other life. Let other souls be saved in like fashion. One does not object to their salvation; but one insists that each saved soul dwells apart in its own sensitive feel¬ ings, in the world of higher artistic pleasures. Now in fact such lives may be not uninteresting to the moralist; but no moralist can be really content with their ideal. Its best direct refutation is after all a sense of humor strong enough to let the sensitive and beautiful soul see once in a while how comical is its demure pursuit of these subjective phantoms. This miserable life of deep inward excitements and long¬ ings, how absurd it seems to any critic who, standing outside, sees that there is nothing more than froth and illusion and hypocrisy in it. Heine’s anecdote of the monkey boiling his own tail so as to get an inward sense of the nature and worth of the art of THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE cookery, is what first comes to mind when we see such a man as this subjective idealist of the emo¬ tions. You have only to get him to laugh heartily once or twice, and his Philistine narrowness can no longer content him. “ Why is just my feeling worth so much?” he will say. And then he will wake up to observe that his ideal was all a bad dream; and that an experience has no more or less worth because it happens in connection with the decomposition of his particular brain-stuff. Faust discovered that, as we have seen; and so in time will any other sensible man. The real reason after all why Mephistophe- les could not get Faust’s soul was that Faust could understand the Mephistophelean wit, which was throughout destructive of individualism. The sen¬ timentalist who has no humor is once for all given over to the devil, and need sign no contract. He stares into every mirror that he passes, and, cursing the luck that makes him move so fast in this world, he murmurs incessantly, Verweile dock, du hist so schon. And so in the presence of the moral insight he is forthwith and eternally damned, unless some miracle of grace shall save him. It is noteworthy that one or two of our recent and youngest novelists in this country have gained a certain reputation by sentimental stories of collegiate and post-graduate life that precisely illustrate this simple-minded but abominable spirit. May these young authors repent while there is time, if indeed they can repent.
Less dangerous to genuine morality, and far higher in the scale of worth, is the Titanic form of individualism, the form that has given birth to such 206 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY expressions as the Everlasting No of “ Sartor Resar- tus.” The name of Prometheus at once springs to our lips when we think of this view of life. Pro¬ metheus is so fully the representative of Titan ism, that there is no better way of characterizing its whole spirit than to call it the Heresy of Prome¬ theus, the finest of all moral heresies, and the last.
The world will not grant you outward freedom, and you see the hollowness of that inward life of blessed emotions. You despise it in others; you see that the moral insight cannot approve such a form of selfish separation in you or in them. But there is another form of self - development. You must be something. Why not be heroic? Possibly the ideal is a world of courageous selves, that find their per¬ fection in their independence of action. Prometheus gave this ideal a peculiar emphasis by reason of the fact that he had a Zeus to defy. But the same ideal, in a more moderate expression, is the ideal of many a quiet, matter of fact man, who has little happiness, but much spirit and energy, who is too busy and too healthy to be sentimental, who knows little of poetry, who has never heard the name of Prometheus, but who knows what it is to hold his own in the fight with the world. This man you cannot put down; he cares little for the opinions of others. There is no judge above him save God or his conscience. He is no saint; but he is at least an admirable fellow. He belongs to the race of Achilles; he believes in the gospel of eternal warfare against whatever seems to him evil. He respects others; he wants to do good in his way. But he thinks that the best good THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE that he could do would be to make other men brave like himself. This lonely, active, indomitable self he thinks the ideal type of perfection. For him the moral insight does not go beyond the approval of such life as this, indefinitely multiplied.
It is always a delight to follow this Titanism in its various shapes. Buddhism, as we know, is a re¬ ligion wholly founded on self-denial, and it counsels austere self -extinction. And yet, by a strange freak of moral dialectics, it is Buddhism that has given us some of the best expressions of the Titanic indi¬ vidualism. In a Buddhist homily in the Sutta Ni- pata 1 one may find such an outburst as the follow¬ ing, — one of the finest of the confessions of the Titans: — “ Having laid aside the rod against all beings, and not hurting any of them, let no one wish for a son, much less for a companion; let him wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ In him who has intercourse with others, affections arise, and then the pain which follows affection; consid¬ ering the misery that originates in affection, let one wan¬ der alone like a rhinoceros.
“ He who has compassion on his friends and confiden¬ tial companions loses his own advantage, having a fettered mind; seeing this danger in friendship, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ Just as a large bamboo-tree, with its branches entan¬ gled in each other, such is the care one has with children and wife; hut like the shoot of the bamboo not clinging to anything, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ As a beast unbound in the forest goes feeding at pleas- 1 Max Muller’s Sacred Books of the East, vol. x., part ii., p. 6 sqq.
208 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ure, so let the wise man, considering only his own will, wander alone like a rhinoceros...“ Discontented are some ascetics, also some householders, dwelling in houses; let one, caring little about other people’s children, wander alone like a rhinoc¬ eros.
“ If one acquires a clever companion, an associate right¬ eous and wise, let him, overcoming all dangers, wander about with him glad and thoughtful.
“ If one does not acquire a clever companion, an asso¬ ciate righteous and wise, then as a king abandoning his conquered kingdom, let him wander alone like a rhinoc¬...“ Seeing bright golden bracelets, well-wrought by the goldsmith, striking against each other when there are two on one arm, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ Thus, if I join myself with another, I shall swear or scold; considering this danger in future, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros...• • • “ Both cold and heat, hunger and thirst, wind and a burning sun, and gadflies and snakes, — having over¬ come all these things, let one wander alone like a rhinoc¬ eros.
“ As the elephant, the strong, the spotted, the large, after leaving the herd walks at pleasure in the forest, even so let one wander alone like a rhinoceros...“Not adorning himself, not looking out for sport, amuse¬ ment, and the delight of the pleasure in the world; on the contrary, being loath of a life of dressing, speaking the truth, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros...
“ This is a tie, in this there is little happiness, little enjoyment, but more of pain, this is a fishhook, so having understood, let a thoughtful man wander al,one like a rhinoceros.
THE ORGANIZATION OF LIFE “ Having torn the ties, having broken the net as a fish in the water, being like a fire not returning to the burnt place, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros...“Not abandoning seclusion and meditation, always wandering in accordance with the Dhammas, seeing misery in the existences, let one wander alone like the rhinoc¬ eros.
“ Wishing for the destruction of desire, being careful, no fool, learned, strenuous, considerate, restrained, ener¬ getic, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ Like a lion not trembling at noises, like the wind not caught in a net, like a lotus not stained by water, let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.
“ As a lion strong by his teeth, after overcoming all an¬ imals, wanders victorious as the king of the animals, and haunts distant dwelling-places, even so let one wander alone like a rhinoceros.”...“ They cultivate the society of others, and serve them for the sake of advantage; friends without a motive are now difficult to get, men know their own profit and are impure; therefore let one wander alone like a rhinoc¬ eros.”
When one contemplates the ideal of the heroic in¬ dividualism in this its purest form, rugged, empty of sensuous comforts, yet noble and inspiring in all but the highest degree, one feels how hard the decision as to its worth will be, unless the moral insight gives very definitely and authoritatively its ruling in the matter. But fortunately, in trying to judge of even so splendid a caprice as this, we are not left to our individual opinion. The will of the Titan as to the world of life is simply, by hypothesis, not the univer¬ sal will. The one being that included in his life all 210 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY