VFIXITY OR PROGRESS
I amglad to say that we are emerging now from the worst of the controversial stuff, irritating and offensive, in which Mr. Belloc is so manifestly my master, and coming to matters of a more honest interest.
I have stuck to my argument through the cut and slash, sneer and innuendo of Mr. Belloc’s first twelve papers. I have done my best to be kind and generous with him. I have made the best excuses I can for him. I have shown how his oddities of bearing and style arise out of the difficulties of his position, and how his absurd reasonings about Natural Selection and his deliberate and tedious bemuddlement of the early Palæolithic sub-men with the late Reindeer men and the Capsian men are all conditioned by the necessity he is under to declare and believe that “man” is, as he puts it, a “Fixed Type,” the same in the past and now and always. He is under this necessity because he believes that otherwise the Christian faith cannot be made to stand up as a rational system, and because, as I have shown by a quotation of his own words, he makes their compatibilitywith his idea of Catholic teaching his criterion in the acceptance or rejection of facts.
I will confess I do not think that things are as bad as this with Christianity. I believe a far better case could be made for Catholicism by an insistence that its value and justification lie in the change and in the direction of the human will, in giving comfort and consolation and peace, in producing saints and beautiful living; and that the truth of the history it tells of space and time is entirely in relation to the development of these spiritual aspects, and has no necessary connection whatever with scientific truth. This line of thought is no novelty, and I do not see why Catholics should not keep to it and leave the outline of history alone. I do not say that it is a line of apologetics that would convince me altogether, but it is one that would need far more arduous discussion and merit, far more respect than Mr. Belloc’sa prioriexploits, his limping lizards and flying pigs.
But it is not my business to remind Catholics of their own neglected philosophers, and clearly the publication of Mr. Belloc’s articles by theUniverse, theCatholic Bulletin, and theSouthern Crossshows that the Catholic world of to-day is stoutly resolved to treat the fall of man and his unalterable nature as matters of fact, even if they are rather cloudy matters of fact, and to fight the realities of modern biology and anthropology to the last ditch.
So the Catholics are pinned to this dogma of the fixity of man and thereby to a denial of progress. This vale of tears, they maintain, is as a whole a stagnant lake of tears, and there is no meaning to it beyond the spiritual adventures of its individual lives. Go back in time or forward, so long as man has been or will be, it is all the same. You will find a world generally damned, with a select few, like Mr. Belloc, on their way to eternal beatitude. That is all there is to the spectacle. There is, in fact, no outline of history; there is just a flow of individual lives; there is only birth and salvation or birth and damnation. That, I extract from Mr. Belloc and other contemporary writers, is the Catholic’s vision of life.
And it is not only the Catholic vision of life. It is a vision far more widely accepted. I would say that, if we leave out the ideas of damning or beatitude, it is the “common-sense” vision of the world. The individual life is, to common-sense, all that matters, the entire drama. There is from this popular and natural point of view no large, comprehensive drama in which the individual life is a subordinate part. Just as to the untutored mind the world is flat, just as to Mr. Belloc during his biological research work in Sussex the species of pig remained a “fixed type,” so to the common intelligence life is nothing moreor less than “Me,” an unquestioned and unanalysed Me, against the universe.
The universe may indeed be imagined as ruled over and pervaded by God, and this world may be supposed to have extensions of hell and heaven; all sorts of pre-natal dooms and debts may affect the career of the Me, but nevertheless the Me remains in the popular mind, nobbily integral, one and indivisible, and either it ends and the drama ends with it, or it makes its distinct and special way to the Pit, or, with Belloc and the Catholic community, to the beatitude he anticipates.
The individual self is primary to this natural, primitive, and prevalent mode of thinking. But it is not the only way of thinking about life. The gist of theOutline of Historyis to contradict this self-centred conception of life and show that this absolute individualism of our thought and destinies is largely illusory. We do not live in ourselves, as we so readily imagine we do; we are contributory parts in the progress of a greater being which is life, and which becomes now conscious of itself through human thought.
Now here I think we get down, beneath all the frothings and bespatterings of controversy, to the fundamental difference between Mr. Belloc and myself. It is this which gives our present controversywhatever claim it can have to attention. Neither Mr. Belloc nor myself is a very profound or exhaustive philosopher. In ourselves we are very unimportant indeed. But we have this in common, that we can claim to be very honestly expressive of the mental attitudes of clearly defined types of mind, and that we are sharply antithetical types.
By nature and training and circumstances Mr. Belloc stands for the stout sensible fellow who believes what he sees; who considers that his sort always has been and always will be; who stands by accepted morals and time-honoured ways of eating and drinking and amusement; who loves—and grips as much as he can of—the good earth that gives us food for our toil; who begets children honestly by one beloved wife until she dies and then repeats the same wholesome process with the next; who believes in immortality lest he should be sorry to grow old and die; who trusts in the Church and its teaching because visibly the Church is a great and impressive fact, close at hand and extremely reassuring; who is a nationalist against all strangers because, confound it! there are nations, and for Christendom against all pagans; who finds even Chinamen and Indians remote and queer and funny. I do not think that is an unfair picture of the ideals of Mr. Belloc and of his close friend and ally, Mr. Chesterton, as they have spread them out for us; and I admit they are warm and rosy ideals. But they areideals and not realities. The real human being upon this swift-spinning planet is not that stalwart, entirely limited, fixed type resolved to keep so, stamping about the flat world under God’s benevolent sky, eating, drinking, disputing, and singing lustily, until he passes on to an eternal individual beatitude with God and all the other blessed ones. He is less like that every day, and more and more conscious of the discrepancy.
I have read and admired and sympathised with the work of Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton since its very beginnings, but I find throughout it all a curious defensive note. It may be I attribute distresses to them that they do not feel. But it seems to me they are never quite sure in their minds about this “fixed” human being of theirs—the same yesterday, now, and for ever. Mr. Belloc must be puzzled not a little by that vast parade of Evolution through the immeasurable ages which he admits has occurred—a parade made by the Creative Force for no conceivable reason, since a “fixed type” might just as well have been created straight away. He must realise that if man is the beginning and end of life, then his Creator has worked within fantastically disproportionate margins both of space and time. And in his chapters upon animal and human origins Mr. Belloc’s almost obstinate ignorance of biological facts, his fantastic “logic,” his pathetic and indubitably honest belief in his non-existent “European authorities,” his fumbling and evasionabout Palæolithic man, and above all his petty slights and provocations to those whose views jar upon him, have nothing of the serenity of a man assured of his convictions, and all the irritability and snatching at any straw of advantage of a man terribly alarmed for his dearest convictions. When Mr. Belloc gets to his beatitude he will feel like a fish out of water. I believe Mr. Belloc and his friend Mr. Chesterton are far too intelligent not to be subconsciously alive to the immense and increasing difficulties of their positions, and that they are fighting most desperately against any conscious realisation of the true state of affairs.
It happens that my circumstances, and perhaps my mental temperament, have brought my mind into almost dramatic opposition to that of Mr. Belloc. While his training was mainly in written history, the core of mine was the analytical exercises of comparative anatomy and palæontology. I was brought up upon the spectacle of life in the universe as a steadily changing system. My education was a modern one, upon material and questionings impossible a hundred years ago. Things that are fundamental and commonplaces to me have come, therefore, as belated, hostile, and extremely distressing challenges to the satisfactions and acceptances of Mr. Belloc.
Now, this picture of a fixed and unprogressive humanity working out an enormous multitude of individual lives from birth to either eternal beatitude or to something not beatitude, hell or destruction or whatever else it may be that Mr. Belloc fails to make clear is the alternative to beatitude—this picture, which seems to be necessary to the Catholic and probably to every form of Christian faith, and which is certainly necessary to the comfort of Mr. Belloc, has no validity whatever for my mind. It is no more possible in my thought as a picture of reality than that ancient cosmogony which made the round earth rest upon an elephant, which stood upon a tortoise, which stood upon God-knows-what.
I do not know how the universe originated, or what it is fundamentally; I do not know how material substance is related to consciousness and will; I doubt if any creature of my calibre is capable of knowing such things; but at least I know enough to judge the elephant story and the fixed humanity story absurd. I do not know any convincing proof that Progressmustgo on; I find no invincible imperative to progressive change in my universe; but I remark that progressive change does go on, and that it is the form into which life falls more and more manifestly as our analysis penetrates and our knowledge increases. I set about collecting what is known of life and the world in time and space, and I find the broad outline falls steadily andpersistently into a story of life appearing and increasing in range, power, and co-operative unity of activity. I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation. This is not an outline I have thrust upon the facts; it is the outline that came naturally as the facts were put in order.
And it seems to me that we are waking up to the realisation that the individual life does not stand alone, as people in the past have seemed to imagine it did, but that it is far truer to regard it as an episode in a greater life, which progresses and which need not die. The episode begins and ends, but life goes on.
Mr. Belloc is so far removed from me mentally that he is unable to believe that this, clearly and honestly, is how I see things; he is moved to explain it away by saying that I am trying to “get rid of a God,” that I am a rotten Protestant, that this is what comes of being born near London, that if I knew French and respected the Gentry all this would be different, and so on, as the attentive student of his great apology for Catholicism has been able to observe. But all the while he is uncomfortably on the verge of being aware that I am a mere reporter of a vast mass of gathered knowledge and lengthened perspectives that towers up behind and above his neat and jollymarionette show of the unchanging man and his sins and repentances and mercies, his astonishing punishments, and his preposterous eternal reward among the small eternities of the mediæval imagination. I strut to no such personal beatitude. I have no such eternity of individuation. The life to which I belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content.
Mr. Belloc is completely justified in devoting much more than half his commentary to these fundamental issues and dealing with my account of the appearance of Christianity and the story of the Church much more compactly. It is this difference at the very roots of our minds which matters to us, and it is the vital question we have to put before the world. The rest is detail. I do believe and assert that a new attitude to life, a new and different vision of the world, a new moral atmosphere and a different spirit of conduct, is coming into human affairs, as a result of the scientific analysis of the past hundred years. It is only now reaching such a clearness of definition that it can be recognised for what it is and pointed out.
The essential distinction of the newer thought in the world is in its denial of the permanence of the self and in its realisation of the self’s comparative unimportance. Even in our individuallives we are increasingly interested in common and generalised things. The older commoner life, the religious life just as much as the most worldly life, seems to us excessively self-conscious. The religious life, its perpetual self-examination for sin and sinful motives, its straining search after personal perfection, appears in the new light as being scarcely less egotistical than a dandy’s. And this new way of living and thinking is directly linked on to the idea of progress, which makes life in general far more interesting than any individual life can be, just as the self-centred life, whether it be religious and austere or vain or self-indulgent, is directly connected with the old delusions of permanence which rob life in general of any sustained interest. When one is really persuaded that there is nothing new under the sun, then there is nothing worth living for whatever outside the personal adventure, the dance between permanent individual beatitude or permanent individual damnation.
As this modern conception of life as a process of progressive change in which individuality of our order can be sometimes excessively exaggerated as it has been in the past and sometimes minimised as is happening now—as this conception establishes itself, it changes the spirit of living and the values of our general ideas about living profoundly. Lit only by a very bright light held low, an ordinary road becomes a tangle of vivid surfaces and black shadows, and you cannottell a puddle or a gutter from a ditch or a precipice. But in diffused daylight you can see the proportions of every irregularity. So too with changing illumination our world alters its aspects, and things that once seemed monstrous and final are seen to be mere undulations in a practicable progress. We can realise now, as no one in the past was ever able to realise it, that man is a creature changing very rapidly from the life of a rare and solitary great ape to the life of a social and economic animal. He has traversed most of this tremendous change of phase in something in the nature of a million years. His whole being, mind and body alike, betrays the transition. We can trace the mitigations of his egotism through the development of religious and customary restraints. The recent work of the psycho-analyst enables us to understand something of the intricate system of suppressions and inhibitions that this adaptation to a more and more complex social life has involved. We begin to realise how man has symbolised and personified his difficulties, and to comprehend the mechanisms of his uncongenial but necessary self-restraint.
The disposition of those who apprehend this outline of history that modern science has made plain to us, and who see all life as a system of progressive change, is by no means antagonisticto religion. They realise the immense importance and the profound necessity of religion in this last great chapter of the story, the evolution of human society. But they see religion within the frame of fact; they do not, like Mr. Belloc, look through religion at fact. Man has accommodated his originally fierce and narrow egotism to the needs of an ever wider and more co-operative social life, very largely through the complex self-subjugations that religion has made possible. Within the shell and cover of religion the new less self-centred habits of mind have been able to develop. An immense mass of imaginative work, of mythology, of theology, that now seems tortuous, mystical, and fantastic, was necessary for the casting of the new moral being of socialised man. We seem to be entering upon a phase in which moral and intellectual education may be able to free themselves from the last vestiges of the mythology in which that new moral being was moulded; but it is ungracious and false to the true outline of history to deny the necessary part that the priest, the sacrifice, the magic ceremonial for tribal welfare, the early tribal religions, have played in this transfiguration of the sub-human into the modern human mind, upon which all our community rests to-day.
It is because of our sense of this continuity of our present dispositions with the religions upon which they are founded that so many of us are loth to part with all the forms and phrases ofthe old creeds and all the disciplines of time-honoured cults. Perhaps some of us (the present writer in the crowd among others) have been over-eager to read new significances into established phrases, and clothe new ideas in the languages of the old scheme of salvation. It may be we have been pouring new wine into old bottles. It may be better to admit frankly that if man is not fixed Christianity is, and that mankind is now growing out of Christianity; that indeed mankind is growing out of the idea of Deity. This does not mean an end to religion, but it means a fresh orientation of the religious life. It means a final severance with those anthropomorphic conceptions of destiny, that interpretation of all things in terms of personality and will with which religion began. For many of us that still means a wrench and an effort. But the emphatic assertions of Mr. Belloc, the stand that Catholicism, as he expounds it, makes against any progressive adaptation to the new spirit in human life, may render that effort easier.