What we have to subtract has been shown in the previous chapter; but it may again be described briefly in the following way. Life in its present state, as we have just seen, is a union of two sets of feelings, and of two kinds of happiness, and is partly the sum of the two, and partly a compromise between them. Its resources, by one classification, are separable into two groups, according as in themselves they chance to repel or please us; and the most obvious measure of happiness would seem to be nothing more than our gain of what is thus pleasant, and our shirking of what is thus painful. But if we examine life as it actually exists about us, we shall see that this classification has been traversed by another. Many things naturally repellent have received a supernatural blessing; many things naturally pleasant have received a supernatural curse; and thus our highest happiness is often composed of pain, and our profoundest misery is nearly always based on pleasure.
Accordingly, whereas happiness naturally would seem the test of right, right has come supernaturally to be the test of happiness. And so completely is this notion engrained in the world's consciousness, that in all our deeper views of life, no matter whether we be saints or sinners, right and wrong are the things that first appeal to us, not happiness and misery. A certain supernatural moral judgment, in fact, has become a primary faculty with us, and it mixes with every estimate we form of the world around us.
It is this faculty that positivism, if accepted fully, must either destroy or paralyse; it is this, therefore, that in imagination we must now try to eliminate. To do this--to see what will be left in life to us, without this faculty, we must first see in general, how much is at present dependent on it.
This might at first sight seem a hard task to perform; the interests we shall have to deal with are so many and so various. But the difficulty may be eluded. I have already gone to literature for examples of special feelings on the part of individuals, and under certain circumstances.
We will now go to it for a kindred, though not for the same assistance; and for this end we shall approach it in a slightly different way. What we did before was this. We took certain works of literary art, and selecting, as it were, one or two special patches of colour, we analysed the composition of these. What we shall now do will be to take the pictures as organic wholes, with a view to analysing the effect of them as pictures--the harmony or the contrast of their colours, and the massing of their lights and shadows. If we reflect for a moment what art is--literary and poetical art in particular--we shall at once see how, examined in this way, it will be of use to us. In the first place, then, what is art? and what is the reason that it pleases us? It is a reflection, a reproduction of the pleasures of life, and is altogether relative to these, and dependent on them. We should, for instance, take no interest in portraits unless we took some interest in the human face.
We should take none in statues if we took none in the human form. We must know something of love as a feeling, or we should never care for love-songs. Art may send us back to these with intenser appreciation of them, but we must bring to art from life the appreciation we want intensified. Art is a factor in common human happiness, because by its means common men are made partakers in the vision of uncommon men.
Great art is a speculum reflecting life as the keenest eyes have seen it. All its forms and imagery are of value only as this. Taken by themselves, '_the best in this kind are but shadows_.' We have to '_piece out their imperfections, with our thoughts_;' '_imagination has to amend them_,' and '_it must be our imagination, not theirs_.'[23] In examining a work of art, then, we are examining life itself; or rather, in examining the interest which we take in a work of art, in examining the reasons why we think it beautiful, or great, or interesting, we are examining our own feelings as to the realities represented by it.
And now remembering this, let us turn to certain of the world's greatest works of art--I mean its dramas: for just as poetry is the most articulate of all the arts, so is the drama the most comprehensive form of poetry. In the drama we have the very thing we are now in want of. We have life as a whole--that complex aggregate of details, which forms, as it were, the mental landscape of existence, presented to us in a '_questionable shape_,' at once concentrated and intensified. And it is no exaggeration to say that the reasons why men think life worth living, can be all found in the reasons why they think a great drama great.
Let us turn, then, to some of the greatest works of Sophocles, of Shakespeare, and of Goethe, and consider briefly how these present life to us. Let us take _Macbeth_, _Hamlet_, _Measure for Measure_, and _Faust_. We have here five presentations of life, under what confessedly are its most striking aspects, and with such interests as men have been able to find in it, raised to their greatest intensity. Such, at least, is the way in which these works are regarded, and it is only in virtue of this estimate that they are called great. Now, in producing this estimate, what is the chief faculty in us that they appeal to? It will need but little thought to show us that they appeal primarily to the supernatural moral judgment; that this judgment is perpetually being expressed explicitly in the works themselves; and, which is far more important, that it is always pre-supposed in us. In other words, these supreme presentations of life are presentations of men struggling, or failing to struggle, not after natural happiness, but after supernatural right; and it is always pre-supposed on our part that we admit this struggle to be the one important thing. And this importance, we shall see further, is based, not on the external and the social consequences of conduct, but essentially and primarily on its internal and its personal consequences.
In _Macbeth_, for instance, the main incident, the tragic-colouring matter of the drama, is the murder of Duncan. But in what aspect of this does the real tragedy lie? Not in the fact that Duncan is murdered, but in the fact that Macbeth is the murderer. What appals us, what purges our passions with pity and with terror as we contemplate it, is not the external, the social effect of the act, but the personal, the internal effect of it. As for Duncan, he is in his grave; after life's fitful fever he sleeps well. What our minds are made to dwell upon is not that Duncan shall sleep for ever, but that Macbeth shall sleep no more; it is not the extinction of a dynasty, but the ruin of a character.
We see in _Hamlet_ precisely the same thing. The action there that our interest centres in, is the hero's struggle to conform to an internal personal standard of right, utterly irrespective of use to others, or of natural happiness to himself. In the course of this struggle, indeed, he does nothing but ruin the happiness around him; and this ruin adds greatly to the pathos of the spectacle. But we are not indignant with Hamlet, as being the cause of it. We should have been indignant rather with him if the case had been reversed, and if, instead of sacrificing social happiness for the sake of personal right, he had sacrificed personal right for the sake of social happiness.
In _Antigone_ the case is just the same, only there its nature is yet more distinctly exhibited. We have for the central interest the same personal struggle after right, not after use or happiness; and one of the finest passages in that whole marvellous drama is a distinct statement by the heroine that this is so. The one rule she says, that she is resolved to live by, and not live by only, but if needs be to die for, is no human rule, is no standard of man's devising, nor can it be modified to suit our changing needs; but it is
_The unwritten and the enduring laws of God, Which are not of to-day nor yesterday, But live from everlasting, and none breathes Who knows them, whence begotten._
In _Measure for Measure_ and _Faust_ we can see the matter reduced to a narrower issue still. In both these plays we can see at once that one moral judgment at least, not to name others, is before all things pre-supposed in us. This is a hard and fixed judgment with regard to female chastity, and the supernatural value of it. It is only because we assent to this judgment that Isabella is heroic to us; and primarily for the same reason that Margaret is unfortunate. Let us suspend this judgment for a moment, and what will become of these two dramas? The terror and the pity of them will vanish instantly like a dream. The fittest name for both of them will be '_Much Ado about Nothing_.'
It will thus be seen, and the more we consider the matter the more plain will it become to us--that in all such art as that which we have been now considering, the premiss on which all its power and greatness rests is this: The grand relation of man is not first to his brother men, but to something else, that is beyond humanity--that is at once without and also beyond himself; to this first, and to his brother men through this. We are not our own; we are bought with a price. Our bodies are God's temples, and the joy and the terror of life depends on our keeping these temples pure, or defiling them. Such are the solemn and profound beliefs, whether conscious or unconscious, on which all the higher art of the world has based itself. All the profundity and solemnity of it is borrowed from these, and exists for us in exact proportion to the intensity with which we hold them.
Nor is this true of sublime and serious art only. It is true of cynical, profligate, and concupiscent art as well. It is true of Congreve as it is true of Sophocles; it is true of _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ as it is true of _Measure for Measure_. This art differs from the former in that the end presented in it as the object of struggle is not only not the morally right, but is also to a certain extent essentially the morally wrong. In the case of cynical and profligate art this is obvious. For such art does not so much depend on the substitution of some new object, as in putting insult on the present one. It does not make right and wrong change places; on the contrary it carefully keeps them where they are; but it insults the former by transferring its insignia to the latter. It is not the ignoring of the right, but the denial of it.
Cynicism and profligacy are essentially the spirits that deny, but they must retain the existing affirmations for their denial to prey upon.
Their function is not to destroy the good, but to keep it in lingering torture. It is a kind of spiritual bear-baiting. They hate the good, and its existence piques them; but they must know that the good exists none the less. '_I'd no sooner_,' says one of Congreve's characters, '_play with a man that slighted his ill-fortune, than I'd make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of her reputation_.' In this one sentence is contained the whole secret of profligacy; and profligacy is the same as cynicism, only it is cynicism sensualized. Now we have in the above sentence the exact counterpart to the words of Antigone that I have already quoted. For just as her life lay in conformity to '_The unwritten, and the enduring laws of God_,' so does the life of the profligate lie in the violation of them. To each the existence of laws is equally essential. For profligacy is not merely the gratification of the appetites, but the gratification of them at the expense of something else. Beasts are not profligate. We cannot have a profligate goat.
In what I have called concupiscent art, the case might seem different, and to a certain extent it is so. The objects of struggle that we are there presented with are meant to be presented as pleasures, not in defiance of right and wrong, but independently of them. The chief of these, indeed, as Theophile Gautier has told us, are the physical endearments of a man and a woman, with no other qualification than that they are both of them young and beautiful. But though this art professes to be thus independent of the moral judgment, and to trust for none of its effects to the discernment between good and evil, this really is very far from being the case. Let us turn once again to the romance we have already quoted from. The hero says, as we have seen already, that he has completely lost the power of discernment in question. Now, even this, as might be shown easily, is not entirely true; for argument's sake, however, we may grant him that it is so. The real point in the matter to notice is that he is at any rate conscious of the loss. He is a man tingling with the excitement of having cast off some burden. The burden may be gone, but it is still present in the sharp effects of its absence. He is a kind of moral poacher, who, though he may not live by law, takes much of his life's tone from the sense that he is eluding it.
His pleasures, though pleasurable in themselves, yet have this quality heightened by the sense of contrast. '_I am at any rate not virtuous_,'
his mistress says to him, '_and that is always something gained_.'
George Eliot says of Maggie Tulliver, that she liked her aunt Pullet chiefly because she was not her aunt Gleg. Theophile Gautier's hero likes the Venus Anadyomene, partly at least, because she is not the Madonna.
Nay, let us even descend to worse spectacles--to the sight of men struggling for enjoyments that are yet more obviously material, more devoid yet of any trace of mind or morals, and we shall see plainly, if we consult the mirror of art, that the moral element is present even here. We shall trace it even in such abnormal literature of indulgence as the erotic work commonly ascribed to Meursius. We shall trace it in the orgies of Tiberius at Capri; or of Quartilla, as Petronius describes them, at Neapolis. It is like a ray of light coming in at the top of a dark cavern, whose inmates see not _it_, but _by_ it; and which only brings to them a consciousness of shadow. It is this supernatural element that leavens natural passion, and gives its mad rage to it. It creates for it '_a twilight where virtues are vices_.' The pleasures thus sought for are supposed to enthral men not in proportion to their intensity (for this through all their varieties would be probably nearly equal) but in proportion to their lowness--to their sullying power.
Degradation is the measure of enjoyment; or rather it is an increasing numeral by which one constant figure of enjoyment is multiplied.
_Ah, where shall we go then, for pastime, If the_ worst _that can be has been done?_
This is the great question of the votaries of such joys as these.[24]
Thus if we look at life in the mirror of art, we shall see how the supernatural is ever present to us. If we climb up into heaven it is there; if we go down into hell it is there also. We shall see it at the bottom of those two opposite sets of pleasures, to the one or the other of which all human pleasures belong. The source of one is an impassioned struggle after the supernatural right, or an impassioned sense of rest upon attaining it; the source of the other is the sense of revolt against it, which in various ways flatters or excites us. In both cases the supernatural moral judgment is the sense appealed to, primarily in the first case, and secondarily if not primarily in the second. All the life about us is coloured by this, and naturally if this be destroyed or wrecked, the whole aspect of life will change for us. What then will this change be? Looking still into the mirror of art, the general character of it will be very readily perceptible. I noticed just now, in passing, how _Measure for Measure_ and _Faust_ would suffer in their meaning and their interest, by the absence on our part of a certain moral judgment. They would become like a person singing to a deaf audience--a series of dumb grimaces with no meaning in them. The same thing is equally true in all the other cases. Antigone's heroism will evaporate;[25] she will be left obstinate only. The lives of Macbeth and Hamlet will be tales of little meaning for us, though the words are strong. They will be full of sound and fury, but they will signify nothing. What they produce in us will be not interest but a kind of wondering weariness--weariness at the weary fate of men who could '_think so brainsickly of things_.' So in like manner will all the emphasis and elaboration in the literature of sensuality become a weariness without meaning, also. Congreve's caustic wit will turn to spasmodic truism; and Theophile Gautier's excess of erotic ardour, into prolix and fantastic affectation. All its sublimity, its brilliance, and a large part of its interest, depend in art on the existence of the moral sense, and would in its absence be absolutely unproducible. The reason of this is plain. The natural pains and pleasures of life, merely manipulated by the imagination and the memory, have too little variety or magnitude in them without further aid. Art without the moral sense to play upon, is like a pianist whose keyboard is reduced to a single octave.
And exactly the same will be the case with life. Life will lose just the same qualities that art will--neither more nor less. There will be no introduction of any new interests, but merely the elimination of certain existing ones. The subtraction of the moral sense will not revolutionise human purposes, but simply make them listless. It will reduce to a parti-coloured level the whole field of pains and pleasures. The moral element gives this level a new dimension. Working underneath it as a subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface. Here vast areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot up heavenwards. Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright on the topmost summits, is a new strange something--the white snows of purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has never as yet risen upon the world below.
With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once more dead level--still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled, will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice and virtue will be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and cease any more to be resonant.
It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living, in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and appeasing of the bodily appetites. Will anything, it may be asked, for instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital influence of a spring morning?--when the sky is a cloudless blue, and the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in it of unseen violets? All this, it is quite true, will be left to us; this and a great deal more. This, however, is but one side of the picture. If life has its own natural gladness which is expressed by spring, it has also its own natural sadness which is expressed by winter; and the worth of life, if this is all we trust to, will be as various and as changing as the weather is. But this is not all. Even this worth, such as it is, depends for us at present, in a large measure, upon religion--not directly indeed, but indirectly. This life of air, and nerve, and muscle, this buoyant consciousness of joyous and abounding health, which seems so little to have connection with faiths or theories, is for us impregnated with a life that is impregnated with these, and thus their subtle influence pervades it everywhere. There is no impulse from without which stirs or excites the senses, that does not either bring to us, or send us on to, a something beyond itself. In each of these pleasures that seems to us so simple, floats a swarm of hopes and memories, like the gnats in a summer twilight. There is not a sight, a sound, a smell, not a breath from sea or garden, that is not full of them, and on which, busy and numberless, they are not wafted into us.
And each of these volatile presences brings the notions of right and wrong with it; and it is these that make sensuous life tingle with so strange and so elaborate an excitement. Indirectly then, though not directly, the mere joy in the act of living will suffer from the loss of religion, in the same manner, though perhaps not in the same degree, as the other joys will. It will not lose its existence, but it will lose zest. The fabric of its pleasures will of course remain what it ever was; but its brightest inhabitants will have left it. It will be as desolate as Mayfair in September, or as a deserted college during a long vacation.
We may here pause in passing, to remark on the shallowness of that philosophy of culture, to be met with in certain quarters, which, whilst admitting all that can be said as to the destruction for us of any moral obligation, yet advises us still to profit by the variety of moral distinctions. '_Each moment_,' says Mr. Pater for instance, '_some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement, is irresistibly real and attractive for us_.' And thus, he adds, '_while all melts under our feet, we may well catch at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge, that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange flowers, and curious odours, or the work of the artist's hand, or the face of one's friend_.' It is plain that this positive teaching of culture is open to the same objections, and is based on the same fallacy, as the positive teaching of morals. It does not teach us, indeed, to let right and wrong guide us in the choice of our pleasures, in the sense that we should choose the one sort and eschew the other; but teaching us to choose the two, in one sense indifferently, it yet teaches us to choose them as distinct and contrasted things. It teaches us in fact to combine the two fruits without confusing their flavours. But in the case of good and evil, as has been seen, this is quite impossible; for good is only good as the thing that ought to be chosen; evil is only evil as the thing that ought not to be chosen; and the only reasons that could justify us in combining them would altogether prevent our distinguishing them. The teachings of positive culture, in fact, rest on the nave supposition that shine and shadow, as it were, are portable things; and that we can take bright objects out of the sunshine, and dark objects out of the shadow, and setting them both together in the diffused grey light of a studio, make a magical mosaic out of them, of gloom and glitter. Or such teachings, to put the matter yet more simply, are like telling us to pick a primrose at noonday, and to set it by our bed-side for a night-light.
It is plain therefore that, in that loss of zest and interest, which the deadening of the moral sense, as we have seen, must bring to life, we shall get no help there. The massy fabric of which saints and heroes were the builders, will never be re-elected by this mincing moral dandyism.
But there is another last resource of the modern school, which is far more worthy of attention, and which, being entirely _sui generis_, I have reserved to treat of here. That resource is the devotion to truth as truth; not for the sake of its consequences, but in scorn of them.
Here we are told we have at least one moral end that can never be taken away from us. It will still survive to give life a meaning, a dignity, and a value, even should the pursuit of it prove destructive to all the others. The language used by the modern school upon this subject is very curious and instructive. I will take two typical instances. The common argument, says Dr. Tyndall, in favour of belief is the comfort and the gladness that it brings us, its redemption of life, in fact, from that dead and dull condition we have been just considering. '_To this,_' he says, '_my reply is that I choose the nobler part of Emerson when, after various disenchantments, he exclaimed "I covet_ truth!" _The gladness of true heroism, visits the heart of him who is really competent to say this._' The following sentences are Professor Huxley's: '_If it is demonstrated to me,_' he says, '_that without this or that theological dogma the human race will lapse into bipedal cattle, more brutal than the beasts by reason of their greater cleverness, my next question is to ask for the proof of the dogma. If this proof is forthcoming, it is my conviction that no drowning sailor ever clutched a hen-coop more tenaciously than mankind will hold by such dogma, whatever it may be.
But if not, then I verily believe that the human race will go its own evil way; and my only consolation lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so long as they hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend, they will not have reached the lowest depths of immorality._' I will content myself with these two instances, but others of a similar kind might be multiplied indefinitely.
Now by a simple substitution of terms, such language as this will reveal at once one important fact to us. According to the avowed principles of positive morality, morality has no other test but happiness. Immorality, therefore, can have no conceivable meaning but unhappiness, or at least the means to it, which in this case are hardly distinguishable from the end; and thus, according to the above rigid reasoners, the human race will not have reached the lowest depths of misery so long as it rejects the one thing which _ex hypothesi_ might render it less miserable.
Either then all this talk about truth must really be so much irrelevant nonsense, or else, if it be not nonsense, the test of conduct is something distinct from happiness. The question before us is a plain one, which may be answered in one of two ways, but which positivism cannot possibly answer in both. Is truth to be sought only because it conduces to happiness, or is happiness only to be sought for when it is based on truth? In the latter case truth, not happiness, is the test of conduct. Are our positive moralists prepared to admit this? If so, let them explicitly and consistently say so. Let them keep this test and reject the other, for the two cannot be fused together.
[Greek: oxos t' aleipha t' egcheas tauto kutei dichostatount an ou philoin prosennepois.]
This inconsistency is here, however, only a side point--a passing illustration of the slovenliness of the positivist logic. As far as my present argument goes, we may let this pass altogether, and allow the joint existence of these mutually exclusive ends. What I am about to do is to show that on positive grounds the last of these is more hopelessly inadequate than the first--that truth as a moral end has even more of religion in its composition than happiness, and that when this religion goes, its value will even more hopelessly evaporate.
At first sight this may seem impossible. The devotion to truth may seem as simple as it is sacred. But if we consider the matter further, we shall soon think differently. To begin then; truth, as the positivists speak of it, is plainly a thing that is to be worshipped in two ways--firstly by its discovery, and secondly by its publication. Thus Professor Huxley, however much it may pain him, will not hide from himself the fact that there is no God; and however bad this knowledge may be for humanity, his highest and most sacred duty still consists in imparting it. Now why should this be? I ask. Is it simply because the fact in question is the truth? That surely cannot be so, as a few other examples will show us. A man discovers that his wife has been seduced by his best friend. Is there anything very high or very sacred in that discovery? Having made it, does he feel any consolation in the knowledge that it is the entire truth? And will the '_gladness of true heroism_'
visit him if he proclaims it to everyone in his club? A chattering nurse betrays his danger to a sick man. The sick man takes fright and dies.
Was the discovery of the truth of his danger very glorious for the patient? or was its publication very sacred in the nurse? Clearly the truths that it is sacred to find out and to publish are not all truths, but truths of a certain kind only. They are not particular truths like these, but the universal and eternal truths that underlie them. They are in fact what we call the truths of Nature, and the apprehension of them, or truth as attained by us, means the putting ourselves _en rapport_ with the life of that infinite existence which surrounds and sustains all of us. Now since it is this kind of truth only that is supposed to be so sacred, it is clear that its sacredness does not depend on itself, but on its object. Truth is sacred because Nature is sacred; Nature is not sacred because truth is; and our supreme duty to truth means neither more nor less than a supreme faith in Nature. It means that there is a something in the Infinite outside ourselves that corresponds to a certain something within ourselves; that this latter something is the strongest and the highest part of us, and that it can find no rest but in communion with its larger counterpart. Truth sought for in this way is evidently a distinct thing from the truth of utilitarianism. It is no false reflection of human happiness in the clouds. For it is to be sought for none the less, as our positivists decidedly tell us, even though all other happiness should be ruined by it. Now what on positive principles is the groundwork of this teaching? All ethical epithets such as sacred, heroic, and so forth--all the words, in fact, that are by implication applied to Nature--have absolutely no meaning save as applied to conscious beings; and as a subject for positive observation, there exists no consciousness in the universe outside this earth. By what conceivable means, then, can the positivists transfer to Nature in general qualities which, so far as they know, are peculiar to human nature only? They can only do this in one of two ways--both of which they would equally repudiate--either by an act of fancy, or by an act of faith. Tested rigidly by their own fundamental common principles, it is as unmeaning to call the universe sacred as to say that the moon talks French.
Let us however pass this by; let us refuse to subject their teaching to the extreme rigour of even their own law; and let us grant that by some mixed use of fancy or of mysticism, they can turn to Nature as to some vast moral hieroglyph. What sort of morality do they find in it? Nature, as positive observation reveals her to us, is a thing that can have no claim either on our reverence or our approbation. Once apply any moral test to her conduct, and as J.S. Mill has so forcibly pointed out, she becomes a monster. There is no crime that men abhor or perpetrate that Nature does not commit daily on an exaggerated scale. She knows no sense either of justice or mercy. Continually indeed she seems to be tender, and loving, and bountiful; but all that, at such times, those that know her can exclaim to her, is
_Miseri quibus Intentata nites_.
At one moment she will be blessing a country with plenty, peace, and sunshine; and she will the next moment ruin the whole of it by an earthquake. Now she is the image of thrift, now of prodigality; now of the utmost purity, now of the most revolting filth; and if, as I say, she is to be judged by any moral standard at all, her capacities for what is admirable not only make her crimes the darker, but they also make her virtues partake of the nature of sin. How, then, can an intimacy with this eternal criminal be an ennobling or a sacred thing?
The theist, of course, believes that truth _is_ sacred. But his belief rests on a foundation that has been altogether renounced by the positivists. He values truth because, in whatever direction it takes him, it takes him either to God or towards Him--God, to whom he is in some sort akin, and after whose likeness he is in some sort made. He sees Nature to be cruel, wicked, and bewildering when viewed by itself.
But behind Nature he sees a vaster power--his father--in whom mysteriously all contradictions are reconciled. Nature for him is God's, but it is not God; and '_though God slay me_,' he says, '_yet will I trust in Him_.' This trust can be attained to only by an act of faith like this. No observation or experiment, or any positive method of any kind, will be enough to give it us; rather, without faith, observation and experiment will do nothing but make it seem impossible. Thus a belief in the sacredness of Nature, or, in other words, in the essential value of truth, is as strictly an act of religion, as strictly a defiance of the whole positive formula, as any article in any ecclesiastical creed. It is simply a concrete form of the beginning of the Christian symbol, '_I believe in God the Father Almighty_.' It rests on the same foundation, neither more nor less. Nor is it too much to say that without a religion, without a belief in God, no fetish-worship was ever more ridiculous than this cultus of natural truth.
This subject is so important that it will be well to dwell on it a little longer. I will take another passage from Dr. Tyndall, which presents it to us in a slightly different light, and which speaks explicitly not of truth itself, but of that sacred Object beyond, of which truth is only the sacramental channel to us. '"_Two things," said Imanuel Kant_' (it is thus Dr. Tyndall writes), '"_fill me with awe--the starry heavens, and the sense of moral responsibility in man." And in the hours of health and strength and sanity, when the stroke of action has ceased, and when the pause of reflection has set in, the scientific investigator finds himself overshadowed by the same awe. Breaking contact with the hampering details of earth, it associates him with a power which gives fulness and tone to his existence, but which he can neither analyse nor comprehend._' This, Dr. Tyndall tells us, is the only rational statement of the fact of that '_divine communion_,' whose nature is '_simply distorted and desecrated_' by the unwarranted assumptions of theism.
Now let us try to consider accurately what Dr. Tyndall's statement means. Knowledge of Nature, he says, associates him with Nature. It withdraws him from '_the hampering details of earth_,' and enables the individual human being to have communion with a something that is beyond humanity. But what is communion? It is a word with no meaning at all save as referring to conscious beings. There could be no communion between two corpses; nor, again, between a corpse and a living man. Dr.
Tyndall, for instance, could have no communion with a dead canary.
Communion implies the existence on both sides of a common something. Now what is there in common between Dr. Tyndall and the starry heavens, or that '_power_' of which the starry heavens are the embodiment? Dr.
Tyndall expressly says that he not only does not know what there is in common, but that he '_dare_' not even say that, as conscious beings, they two have anything in common at all.[26] The only things he can know about the power in question are that it is vast, and that it is uniform; but a contemplation of these qualities by themselves, must tend rather to produce in him a sense of separation from it than of union with it.
United with it, in one sense, he of course is; he is a fraction of the sum of things, and everything, in a certain way, is dependent upon everything else. But in this union there is nothing special. Its existence is an obvious fact, common to all men, whether they dwell upon it or no: and though by a knowledge of Nature we may grow to realise it more keenly, it is impossible to make the union in the least degree closer, or to turn it into anything that can be in any way called a communion. Indeed, for the positivists to talk about communion or association with Nature is about as rational as to talk about communion or association with a steam-engine. The starry skies at night are doubtless an imposing spectacle; but man, on positive principles, can be no more raised by watching them than a commercial traveller can by watching a duke--probably far less: for if the duke were well behaved, the commercial traveller might perhaps learn some manners from him; but there is nothing in the panorama of the universe that can in any way be any model for the positivist. There are but two respects in which he can compare himself to the rest of nature--firstly, as a revealed force; and, secondly, as a force that works by law. But the forces that are revealed by the stars, for instance, are vast, and the force revealed in himself is small; and he, as he considers, is a self-determining agent, and the stars are not. There are but two points of comparison between the two; and in these two points they are contrasts, and not likenesses. It is true, indeed, as I said just now, that a sense of awe and of hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of the starry heavens--world upon luminous world shining and quivering silently; it is true, too, that a spontaneous feeling connects such a sense somehow with our deepest moral being. But this, on positive principles, must be feeling only. It means absolutely nothing: it can have no objective fact that corresponds to it. It is an illusion, a pathetic fallacy. And to say that the heavens with their stars declare to us anything high or holy, is no more rational than to say that Brighton does, which itself, seen at night from the sea, is a long braid of stars descended upon the wide horizon. All that the study of nature, all that the love of truth, can do for the positivist is not to guide him to any communion with a vaster power, but to show him that no such communion is possible. His devotion to truth, if it mean anything--and the language he often uses about it betrays this--let us know the worst, not let us find out the best:--a wish which is neither more nor less noble than the wish to sit down at once in a slop upon the floor rather than sustain oneself any longer above it on a chair that is discovered to be rickety.
Here then again, in this last resource of positivism we have religion embodied as a yet more important element than in any of the others; and when this element is driven out of it, it collapses yet more hopelessly than they do. By the whole positive system we are bound to human life.
There is no mystical machinery by which we can rise above it. It is by its own isolated worth that this life must stand or fall.
And what, let us again ask, will this worth, be? The question is of course, as I have said, too vague to admit of more than a general answer, but a general answer, as I have said also, may be given confidently enough. Man when fully imbued with the positive view of himself, will inevitably be an animal of far fewer capacities than he at present is. He will not be able to suffer so much; but also he will not be able to enjoy so much. Surround him, in imagination, with the most favourable circumstances; let social progress have been carried to the utmost perfection; and let him have access to every happiness of which we can conceive him capable. It is impossible even thus to conceive of life as a very valuable possession to him. It would at any rate be far less valuable than it is to many men now, under outer circumstances that are far less favourable. The goal to which a purely human progress is capable of conducting us, is thus no vague condition of glory and felicity, in which men shall develop new and ampler powers. It is a condition in which, the keenest life attainable has continually been far surpassed already, without anything having been arrived at that in itself seemed of surpassing value.
FOOTNOTES:
[23] 'Hippolyta.--_This is the silliest stuff I ever heard._ Theseus.--_The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst no worse, if imagination amend them._ Hippolyta.--_It must be your imagination then, not theirs._'--Midsummer's Night's Dream, Act V.
'_Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts._'--Prologue to Henry V.
[24] Seneca says of virtue, '_Non quia delectat placet, sed quia placet delectat_.' Of vice in the same way we may say, '_Non quia delectat_ pudet, _sed quia_ pudet _delectat_.'