Now the essence of Bacon is not the replacement of deduction by induction, but the change of emphasis from worship to control. This emphasis, once vivid in Plato but soon obscured by Oriental influence, is one of the two dominantelements in modern thought (the other being the puzzling over an artificial problem of knowledge); and unless the Baconian element finally subordinates the Cartesian, the wordmodernmust no longer arrogate to itself a eulogistic connotation. Hence Bacon, and not Descartes, is the initiator of modern philosophy; part initiator, at least, of that current of thought which finds rebellious expression in the enlightenment of the eighteenth-century, and comes to supremacy in the scientific victories of the nineteenth. The vital sequence in modern philosophy is not Descartes, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, and Bergson (for these are the Asiatics of Europe), but Bacon, Hobbes, Condorcet, Comte, Darwin, and James.[79]
The hope of the world is in this resolute spirit of control,—control of the material without us, and of the passions within. Bit by bit, one is not afraid to say, we shall make for ourselves a better world. Shall we not find a way to eliminate disease, to control the increase of population, to find in plastic organization a substitute for revolution? Shall we perhaps even succeed in transmuting the lust for power over man into ambition to conquer the forces that impede man? Shall we make men understand that there is morepotency of joy in the sense of having contributed to the power of men over nature than in any personal triumph of one over another man?—more glory in a conquest of bacteria than in all the martial victories that have ever spilled human blood? Here is the beginning of real civilization, and the mark of man. “The environment transforms the animal; man transforms the environment.”[80]“Looking at the history of the world as a whole, the tendency has been in Europe to subordinate nature to man; out of Europe, to subordinate man to nature. Formerly the richest countries were those in which nature was most bountiful; now the richest countries are those in which man is most active.”[81]Control is the sign of maturity, the achievement of Europe, the future of America. It is, one argues again, the drama of history, this war between Asia and Europe, between nature and man, between worship and control. Fundamentally it is the upward struggle of intelligence: Plato is its voice, Zeno its passing exhaustion, Bacon its resurrection. It was not an unopposed rebirth: there is still no telling whether East or West will win. Surrounded by the backwash of Oriental currents everywhere, the lover of the Baconian spirit needs constantly to refresh himself at the fount of Bacon’s inexhaustible inspiration and confidence. “I stake all,” he says, “on the victory of art over naturein the race.” And one needs to hold ever before oneself Bacon’s favorite device: A ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules out into the unknown sea, and over it the words,Plus ultra.
More beyond!
PASSINGfrom Bacon to Spinoza we meet with Thomas Hobbes, a man from whom Spinoza drew many of his ideas, though very little of his inspiration. The social incidence of the greater part of Hobbes’s thinking has long been recognized; he is not a figure over whom the biographer of social thought finds much cause to quarrel. He is at once the materialistpar excellenceof modern philosophy, and the most uncompromising protagonist of the absolutist theory of the state. The individual, all compact of pugnacity, was to Hobbes the bogey which the state, voracious of all liberties, became two centuries later to Herbert Spencer. He had in acute degree the philosopher’s natural appetite for order; and trembled at the thought of initiatives not foreseen by his political geometry. He lived in the midst ofalarms: war stepped on the heels of war in what was very nearly a realbellum omnium contra omnes. He lived in the midst of political reaction: men were weary of Renaissance exuberance and Reformation strife, and sank gladly into the open arms of the past. There could be no end, thought Hobbes, to this turmoil of conflicting egos, individual and national, until all groups and individuals knelt in absolute obedience to one sovereign power.
But all this has been said before; we need but remind ourselves of it here so that we may the better appreciate the vibrant sympathy for the individual man, the generous defence of popular liberties, that fill with the glow of subdued passion the pages of the gentle Spinoza.
YETSpinoza was not wanting in that timidity and that fear of unbridled instinct which stood dictator over the social philosophy of Hobbes. He knew as well as Hobbes the dangers of a democracy that could not discipline itself. “Those who have had experience of how changeful the temper of the people is, are almost in despair. For the populace is governed not by reason but by emotion; it is headlong in everything, and easily corrupted by avarice and luxury.”[83]And evenmore than Hobbes he withdrew from the affairs of men and sought in the protection of a suburban attic the peace and solitude which were the vital medium of his thought. He found that sometimes at least, “truth hath a quiet breast.” “Se tu sarai solo,” wrote Leonardo, “tu sarai tutto tuo.” And surely Goethe thought of Spinoza when he said: “No one can produce anything important unless he isolate himself.”
But this dread of the crowd was only a part of Spinoza’s nature, and not the dominant part. His fear of men was lost in his boundless capacity for affection; he tried so hard to understand men that he could not help but love them. “I have labored carefully not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand, human actions; and to this end I have looked upon passions ... not as vices of human nature, but as properties just as pertinent to it as are heat, cold, storm, thunder, and the like to the nature of the atmosphere.”[84]Even the accidents of time and space were sinless to his view, and all the world found room in the abundance of his heart. “Spinoza deified the All in order to find peace in the face of it,” says Nietzsche:[85]but perhaps, too, because all love is deification.
All in all, history shows no man more honest and independent; and the history of philosophy shows no man so sincere, so far above quibbling anddispute and the picking of petty flaws, so eager to receive the truth even when brought by the enemy, so ready to forgive even persecution in the depth and breadth of his tolerance. No man who suffered so much injustice made so few complaints. He became great because he could merge his own suffering in the suffering of all,—a mark of all deep men. “They who have not suffered,” says Ibsen,—and, one might add, suffered with those they saw suffer,—“never create; they only write books.”
Spinoza did not write much; the long-suffering are seldom long-winded. A fragmentOn the Improvement of the Understanding; a brief volume on religion and the state; theEthics; and as he began to write the chapter on democracy in thePolitical Treatiseconsumption conquered him. Bacteria take no bribes.
HADhe lived longer it would have dawned perhaps even on the German historians that Spinoza’s basic interest was not in metaphysics so much as in political ethics. TheEthics, because it is the most sustained flight of reasoning in philosophy, has gathered round it all the associations that throng about the name of Spinoza, so that one is apt to think of him in terms of a mystical “pantheism” rather than of coördinative intelligence,democracy, and free thought.[86]Höffding considers it a defect in Spinoza’s philosophy that it takes so little notice of epistemology: but should we not be grateful for that? Here are men suffering, said Spinoza, here are men enslaved by passions and prelates and kings; surely till these things are dealt with we have no time for epistemological delicacies. Instead of increasing the world’s store of learned ignorance by writing tomes on the possibility of a subject knowing an object, Spinoza thought it better to give himself to the task of helping to keep alive in an age of tyrannical reaction the Renaissance doctrine of popular sovereignty. Instead of puzzling himself and others about epistemology he pondered the problem of stimulating the growth of intelligence and evolving a rational ethic. He thought that philosophy was something more than a chess-game for professors.
There is no need to spend time and space here on what for Spinoza, as for Socrates and Plato, was the problem of problems,—how human reason could be developed to a point where it might replace supernatural sanctions for social conduct andprovide the medium of social reconstruction. One point, however, may be profitably emphasized.
A careless reading of theEthicsmay lead to the belief that Spinoza bases his philosophy on a naïve opposition of reason to passion. It is not so. “A desire cannot be restrained or removed,” says Spinoza, “except by an opposite and stronger desire.”[87]Reason is not dictator to desire, it is a relation among desires,—that relation which arises when experience has hammered impulses into coördination. An impulse, passion or emotion is by itself “a confused idea,” a blurred picture of the thing that is indeed desired. Thought and impulse are not two kinds of mental process: thought is impulse clarified by experience, impulse is thought in chaos.
WHYis there a social problem? Is it because men are “bad”? Nonsense, answers Spinoza: the terms “good” and “bad,” as conveying moral approval and disapproval, are philosophically out of court; they mean nothing except that “each of us wishes all men to live according tohisdesire,” and consoles himself for their non-complaisance by making moral phrases. There is a social problem, says Spinoza, because men arenot naturally social. This does not mean that there are no social tendencies in the native human constitution; it does mean that these tendencies are but a sorry fraction of man’s original nature, and do not avail to chain the “ape and tiger” hiding under his extremely civilized shirt. Man is a “political animal”; but he is also an animal. We must approach the social problem through a very respectful consideration of the ape and tiger; we must follow Hobbes and inquire into “the natural condition of man.”
“In the state of nature every man lives as he wishes,”[88]—he is not pestered with police regulations and aldermanic ordinances. He “maydo whatever hecan: his rights extend to the utmost limits of his powers.”[89]He may fight, hate, deceive, exploit, to his heart’s desire; and he does. We moderns smile at the “natural man” as a myth, and think our forbears were socialab initio. But be it remembered that by “social” Spinoza implies no mere preference of society to solitude, but a subordination of individual caprice to more or less tacit communal regulation. And Spinoza considers it useful, if we are going to talk about “human nature in politics,” to ask whether mannaturallysubmits to regulation or naturally rebels against it. When he wrote of a primitive non-social human condition he wrote as a psychologist inferring the past rather than as an historianrevealing it. He observed man, kindly yet keenly; he saw that “everyone desires to keep down his fellow-men by all possible means, and when he prevails, boasts more of the injuries he has done to others than of the advantage he has won for himself”;[90]and he concluded that if we could trace human history to its sources we should find a creature—call him human or pre-human—willing, perhaps glad, to have the company of his like, but still unattracted and unhampered by social organization.
We like to laugh at the simple anthropology of Spinoza and Rousseau; but the laugh should be turned upon us when we suppose that the historicalmotifplayed any but a very minor part in the discussion of the natural state of man. History was not the point at all: these men were not interested in the past so much as in the possibilities of the future. That is why the eighteenth century was so largely their creation. When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.
The point to be borne in mind, Spinoza urges, is that we are still essentially unsocialized; the instinct to acquire possession and power, if necessary by oppression and exploitation, is still stronger than the disposition to share, to be tolerant of disagreement, and to work in mutual aid. The “natural man” is not a myth, he is the solidreality that struts about dressed in a little brief civilization. “Religion teaches that each man should love his neighbor as himself, and defend the rights of others as earnestly as he would his own. Yet this conviction has very little influence over man’s emotions. It is no doubt of some account in the hour of death, for then disease has weakened the emotions, and the man lies helpless. And the principle is assented to in church, for there men have no dealings with one another. But in the mart or the court it has little or no effect, though that is just where the need for it is greatest.”[91]He still “does everything for the sake of his own profit”;[92]nor will even the unlimited future change him in that, for it is his very essence. His happiness is in the pursuit of his profit, his supreme joy is in the increase of his power. And a social order built upon any other basis than this exuberant egoism of man will be as lasting, in the eye of history, as a name that is writ in water.
BUTwhat if it is a good basis? What if “the foundation of virtue is the endeavor to preserve one’s own being” to the uttermost?[93]What ifthere is a way in which, without any hypocritical mystification, this self-seeking, while still remaining self-seeking, may become coöperation?
Spinoza’s answer is not startling: it is the Socratic answer, issuing from a profound psychological analysis. Given the liberation and development of intelligence, and the discordant strife of egos will yield undreamed-of harmonies. Men are so made, they are so compact of passion and obscurity, that they will not let one another be free; how can that be changed? Deception has been tried, and has succeeded only temporarily if at all. Compulsion has been tried; but compulsion is a negative force, it makes for inhibition rather than inspiration. It is a necessary evil; but hardly the last word of constructive social thinking. There is something more in a man than his capacity for fear, there is some other way of appealing to him than the way of threats; there is his hunger and thirst to know and understand and develop. Think of the untouched resources of this human desire for mental enlargement; think of the millions who almost starve that they may learn. Is that the force that is to build the future and fashion the city of our dreams? Here are men torn with impulses, shaken by mutual interference; is it conceivable that they would be so deeply torn and shaken if that hunger of theirs for knowledge—knowledge of themselves, too,—were met with generous opportunity? Men long to be reasonable; they know,even the least of them, that under the tyranny of impulse there is no ultimately fruitful life; what is there that they would not give for the power to see things clearly and be captains of their souls? Here if anywhere is an opportunity for such statesmanship as does not often grace the courts of emperors and kings!
How we can come to know ourselves, our inmost nature, how we can through this knowledge achieve coördination and our real desires,—that is for Spinoza the heart of the social problem. The source of man’s strength is that he can know his weakness. If he can but find himself out, then he can change himself. “A passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.”[94]When a passion is tracked to its lair and confronted with its futile partiality, its sting is drawn, it can hurt us no more; it may coöperate but it may no longer rule. It is seen to be “inadequate,” to express but a fragment of us, and so seen it sinks into its place in the hierarchy of desires. “And in proportion as we know our emotions better, the more are they susceptible to control.”[95]Passion is passivity; control is power. Knowledge brings control, and control brings freedom; freedom is not a gift, it is a victory. Knowledge, control, freedom, power, virtue: these are all one thing. Before the “empire of man over nature” must come the empireof man over himself, must come coördination. Achievement is born of clear vision and unified intent, not of actions that are but bubbles on the muddy rapids of desire.
“Before all things, a means must be devised for improving and clarifying the understanding.”[96]“Since there is no single thing we know which is more excellent than a man who is guided by reason, it follows that there is nothing by which a person can better show how much skill and talent he possesses than by so educating men that at last they will live under the direct authority of reason.”[97]But how?
First of all, says Spinoza, thought must be absolutely free: we must have the possible profit of even the most dangerous heresies. If that proposition appear a trifle trite, let it be remembered that Spinoza wrote at a time when Galileo’s broken-hearted retraction was still fresh in men’s memories, and when Descartes was modifying his philosophy to soothe the Jesuits. The chapter on freedom of thought is really the pivotal point andraison d’êtreof theTractatus Theologico-politicus; and it is still rich in encouragement and inspiration. Perhaps there is nothing elsein Spinoza’s writings that is so typical at once of his gentleness and of his strength.
Free speech should be granted, Spinoza argues, because it must be granted. Men may conceal real beliefs, but these same beliefs will inevitably influence their behavior; a belief is not that which is spoken, it is that which is done. A law against free speech is subversive of law itself, for it invites derision from the conscientious. “All laws which can be broken without any injury to another are counted but a laughing-stock.”[98]It is useless for the state to command “such things as are abhorrent to human nature.” “Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the law.... Under such circumstances men do not think it disgraceful, but most honorable, to hold the laws in abhorrence, and to refrain from no action against the government.”[99]Where men are not permitted to criticise their rulers in public, they will plot against them in private. There is no religious enthusiasm stronger than that with which laws are broken by those whose liberty has been suppressed.
Spinoza goes further. Thought must be liberated not only from legal restrictions but from indirect and even unintentional compulsion as well. Spinoza feels very strongly the danger tofreedom, that is involved in the organization of education by the state. “Academies that are founded at the public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them. But in a free commonwealth arts and sciences will be best cultivated to the full if everyone that asks leave is allowed to teach in public, at his own cost and risk.”[100]He would have preferred such “free lances” as the Sophists to the state universities of the American Middle West. He did not suggest means of avoiding the apparent alternative of universities subsidized by the rich. It is a problem that has still to be solved.
In demanding absolute freedom of speech Spinoza touches the bases of state organization. Nothing is so dangerous and yet so necessary; for ignorance is the mother of authority. The defenders of free speech have never yet met the contention of such men as Hobbes, that freedom of thought is subversive of established government. The reason is only this, that the contention is probably true, so far as most established governments go. Absolute liberty of speech is assuredly destructive of despotism, no matter how constitutional the despotism may be; and those who have at heart the interests of any such government may be forgiven for hesitating to applaud Spinoza. Freedom of speech makes for social vitality, certainly; without it, indeed, the avenues of mental and social development would be blocked, andlife hardly worth living. But freedom of speech cannot be said to make for social stability and permanence, unless the social organization in question invites criticism and includes some mechanism for profiting by it. Where democracy is real, or is on the way to becoming real, free speech will help, not harm, the state; for there is no man so loyal as the man who knows that he may criticise his government freely and to some account. But where there is the autocracy of a person or a class, freedom of speech makes for dissolution,—dissolution, however, not of the society so much as of the government. The Bourbons are gone, but France remains. Nay, if the Bourbons had remained, France might be gone.
But to argue to-day for freedom of speech is to invite the charge of emphasizing the obvious. It may be wholesome to remind ourselves, by a few examples, that however universal the theory of free speech may be, the practice is still rather sporadic. An American professor is dismissed because he thinks there is a plethora of unearned income in his country; an English publicist is reported to have been refused “permission” to fill lecture engagements in America because he had not been sufficiently patriotic; and one of the most prominent of living philosophers loses his chair because he supposes that conscience has rights against cabinets. But indeed our governing bodies are harmless offenders here in comparison with the people themselves. The last lesson whichmen and women will learn is the lesson of free thought and free speech. The most famous of living dramatists finds himself unsafe in London streets, because he has dared to criticise his government; the most able of living novelists finds it convenient to leave Paris because there are still some Germans whom he does not hate; and an American community full of constitutional lawyers shows its love of “law and order” by stoning a group of boys bent on expounding the desirability of syndicalism.
Perhaps the world has need of many Spinozas still.
FREEDOMof expression is the corner-stone of Spinoza’s politics; the postulate without which he refuses to proceed. But Spinoza does not have to be told that this question of free speech precipitates him into the larger problems of “the individualvs.the state”; he knows that that problem is the veryraison d’êtreof political philosophy; he knows that indeed the problem goes to the core of philosophy, and finds its source and crux in the complex socio-egoistical make-up of the individual man.
The “God-intoxicated” Spinoza is quite sober and disillusioned about the social possibilities of altruism. “It is a universal law of human naturethat no one ever neglects anything which he judges to be good, except with the hope of gaining a greater good.”[101]“This is as necessarily true as that the whole is greater than its part.”[102]This confident reduction of human conduct to self-reference does not for Spinoza involve any condemnation: “reason, since it asks for nothing that is opposed to nature, demands that every person should ... seek his own profit.”[103]Observe, reasondemandsthis; this same self-seeking is the most valuable and necessary item in the composition of man. Spinoza, as said, goes so far as to identify this self-seeking with virtue: “to act absolutely in conformity with virtue is, in us, nothing but to act, live, and preserve our being (these three have the same meaning) as reason directs, from the ground of seeking our own profit.”[104]This is a brave rejection of self-renunciation and asceticism by one whose nature, so far as we can judge it now, inclined him very strongly in the direction of these “virtues.” What we have to do, says Spinoza, is not to deny the self, but to broaden it; here again, of course, intelligence is the mother of morals. Progress lies not in self-reduction but in self-expansion. Progress is increase in virtue, but “by virtue and power I understand the same thing”;[105]progressis an increase in the ability of men to achieve their ends. It is part of our mental confectionery to define progress in terms of our own ends; a nation is “backward” or “forward” according as it moves towards or away from our own ideals. But that, says Spinoza, is naïve nonsense; a nation is progressive or backward according as its citizens are or are not developing greater power to realizetheir ownpurposes. That is a doctrine that may have “dangerous” implications, but intelligence will face the implications and the facts, ready not to suppress them but to turn them to account.
It was the passion for power that led to the first social groupings and developed the social instincts. Our varied sympathies, our parental and filial impulses, our heroisms and generosities, all go back to social habits born of individual needs. “Since fear of solitude exists in all men, because no one in solitude is strong enough to defend himself and procure the necessaries of life, it follows that men by nature tend towards social organization.”[106]“Let satirists scoff at human affairs as much as they please, let theologians denounce them, and let the melancholy, despising men and admiring brutes, praise as much as they can a life rude and without refinement,—men will nevertheless find out that by mutual help they can much more easily procure the things they need, and that it is only by their united strength that they can avoid the dangers which everywherethreaten them.”[107]Nihil homine homini utilius.Men discover that they are useful to one another, and that mutual profit from social organization increases as intelligence grows. In a “state of nature”—that is, before social organization—each man has a “natural right” to do all that he is strong enough to do; in society he yields part of this sovereignty to the communal organization, because he finds that this concession, universalized, increases his strength. The fear of solitude, and not any positive love of fellowship, is the prime force in the origin of society. Man does not join in social organization because he has social instincts; he develops such instincts as the result of joining in such organization.
EVENto-day the social instincts are not strong enough to prevent unsocial behavior. “Men are not born fit for citizenship, but must be made so.”[108]Hence custom and law. Each man, in his sober moments, desires such social arrangements as will protect him from aggression and interference. “There is no one who does not wish to live, so far as possible, in security and without fear; and this cannot possibly happen so long as each man is allowed to do as he pleases.”[109]“That men who are necessarily subject to passions, and are inconstant and changeable, may be able to live together in security, and to trust one another’s fidelity,”—that is the purpose of law.[110]Ideally, the state is to the individual what reason is to passion.[111]Law protects a man not only from the passions of others, but from his own; it is a help to delayed response. How to frame laws so that the greatest possible number of men may find their own security and fulfilment in allegiance to the law,—that is the problem of the statesman. Law implies force, but so does life, so does nature; indeed, the punishments decreed by “man-made” states are usually milder than those which in a “state of nature” would be the natural consequents of most interferences; not seldom the law—as when it prevents lynching—protects an aggressor from the natural results of his act. Force is the essence of law; hence international law will not really be law until nations are coördinated into a larger group possessed of the instrumentalities of compulsion.[112]
It is clear that Spinoza has the philosophic love of order. “Whatever conduces to human harmony and fellowship is good; whatever brings discord into the state is evil.”[113]But discord, one must repeat, is often the prelude to a greaterharmony; development implies variation, and all variation is a discord except to ears that hear the future. The social sanction of liberty lies of course in the potential value of variations; without that vision of new social possibilities which is suggested by variations from the norm a people perishes. Spinoza does not see this; but there is a fine passage in theTractatus Politicus[114]which shows him responsive to the ideal of liberty as well as to that of order: “The last end of the state is not to dominate men, nor to restrain them by fear; rather it is so to free each man from fear that he may live and act with full security and without injury to himself or his neighbor. The end of the state is, I repeat, not to make rational beings into brute beasts or machines. It is to enable their bodies and their minds to function safely. It is to lead men to live by, and to exercise, a free reason, that they may not waste their strength in hatred, anger, and guile, not act unfairly toward one another. Thus the end of the state is really liberty.”
So it is that Spinoza takes sharp issue with Hobbes and exalts freedom, decentralization, and democracy, where Hobbes, starting with almost identical premises, concludes to a centralized despotism of body and soul. This does not mean that Spinoza had no eye for the defects of democracy. “Experience is supposed to teach that it makes for peace and concord when all authorityis conferred upon one man. For no political order has stood so long without notable change as that of the Turks, while none have been so short-lived, nay, so vexed by seditions, as popular or democratic states. But if slavery, barbarism, and desolation are to be called peace, then peace is the worst misfortune that can befall a state. It is true that quarrels are wont to be sharper and more frequent between parents and children than between masters and slaves; yet it advances not the art of home life to change a father’s right into a right of property, and count his children as only his slaves. Slavery, then, and not peace, comes from the giving of all power to one man. For peace consists not in the absence of war, but in a union and harmony of men’s souls.”[115]
No; better the insecurity of freedom than the security of bondage. Better the dangers that come of the ignorance of majorities than those that flow from the concentration of power in the hands of an inevitably self-seeking minority. Even secret diplomacy is worse than the risks of publicity. “It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs be conducted in secret.... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead.... Better that right counsels be known to enemies, than that the evil secrets of tyrantsshould be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.... It is folly to choose to avoid a small loss by means of the greatest of evils.”[116]
This is but one of many passages in Spinoza that startle the reader with their present applicability and value. There is in the same treatise a plan for an unpaid citizen soldiery, much like the scheme adopted in Switzerland; there is a plea against centralization and for the development of municipal pride by home rule and responsibility; there is a warning against the danger to democracy involved in the territorial expansion of states; and there is a plan for the state ownership of all land, the rental from this to supply all revenue in time of peace. But let us pass to a more characteristic feature of Spinoza’s political theory, and consider with him the function of intelligence in the state.
“There is no single thing in nature which is more profitable to man than a man who lives according to the guidance of reason.”[117]Such a man, tobegin with, has made his peace with the inevitable, and accepts with good cheer the necessary limitations of social life. He has a genial sense of human imperfections, and does not cushion himself upon Utopia. He pursues his own ends but with some perspective of their social bearings; and he is confident that “when each man seeks that which is [really] profitable to himself, then are men most profitable to one another.”[118]He knows that the ends of other men will often conflict with his; but he will not for that cause make moral phrases at them. He feels the tragedy of isolated purposes, and knows the worth of coöperation. As he comes to understand the intricate bonds between himself and his fellows he finds ever more satisfaction in purposes that overflow the narrow margins of his own material advantage; until at last he learns to desire nothing for himself without desiring an equivalent for others.[119]
Given such men, democracy follows; such democracy, too, as will be a fulfilment and not a snare. Given such men, penal codes will interest only the antiquarian. Given such men, a society will know the full measure of civic allegiance and communal stability and development. How make such men? By revivals? By the gentle anæsthesia of heaven and the cheap penology ofhell? By memorizing catechisms and commandments? By appealing like Comte, to the heart, and trusting to the eternal feminine to lead us ever onward? (Onward whither?) Or by spreading the means of intelligence?
It is at this point that the social philosophy of Spinoza, like that of Socrates, betrays its weaker side. How is intelligence to be spread? Perhaps it is too much to ask the philosopher this question; he may feel that he has done enough if he has made clear what it is which will most help us to achieve our ends. Spinoza, after all, was not the kind of man who could be expected to enter into practical problems; his soul was filled with the vision of the eternal laws and had no room for the passing expediencies of action. His devotional geometry was a typical Jewish performance; there is something in the emotional make-up of the Jew which makes him slide very easily into the attitude of worship, as contrasted with the Græco-Roman emphasis on intellect and control. All pantheism tends to quietism; to see thingssub specie eternitatismay very well pass from the attitude of the scientist to the attitude of the mystic who has no interest in temporal affairs. It is the task of philosophy to study the eternal and universal not for its own sake but for its worth in directing us through the maze of temporal particulars; the philosopher must be like the mariner who guides himself through space and time by gazing at the everlasting stars. It is wholesome that the historyof philosophy should begin with Thales; so that all who come to the history of philosophy may learn, at the door of their subject, that though stars are beautiful, wells are deep.
BUTto leave the matter thus would be to lose a part of the truth in the glare of one’s brilliance. We have to recognize that though Spinoza stopped short (or rather was cut short) at merely a statement of the prime need of all democracies,—intelligence,—he was nevertheless the inspiration of men who carried his beginning more nearly to a practical issue. To Spinoza, through Voltaire and the English deists, one may trace not a few of the thought-currents which carried away the foundations of ecclesiastical power, civil and intellectual, in eighteenth-century France, and left the middle class conscience-free to engineer a revolution. It was from Spinoza chiefly that Rousseau derived his ideas of popular sovereignty, of the general will, of the right of revolution, of the legitimacy of the force that makes men free, and of the ideal state as that in which all the citizens form an assembly with final power.[120]TheFrench Declaration of Rights and the American Declaration of Independence go back in part to the forgotten treatises of the quiet philosopher of Amsterdam. To have initiated or accelerated such currents of thought—theoretical in their origin but extremely practical in their issue—is thereby once for all to have put one’s self above the reach of mere fault-finding. One wonders again, as so many have wondered, what would have been the extent of this man’s achievement had he not died at the age of forty-four. When Spinoza’s pious landlady returned from church on the morning of February 21, 1677, and found her gentle philosopher dead, she stood in the presence of one of the great silent tragedies of human history.
LETus dare to compress within a page or two the social aspect of philosophical thought from Spinoza to Nietzsche. Without forgetting that our purpose is to show the social problem as the dominant interest of onlymany, not all, of the greater philosophers, we may yet risk the assertion that the majority of the men who formed the epistemological tradition from Descartes to Kant were at heart concerned less with the problem of knowledge than with that of social relations. Descartes slips through this generalization; he is a man of leisure lost in the maze of a puzzle which he has not discovered so much as he has unconsciously constructed it. In Locke’s hands the puzzle is distorted into the question of “innate ideas,” in order that under cover of an innocent epistemological excursion a blow may be struck at hereditary prejudices and authoritarian teaching, and the way made straight for the advance of popular sovereignty (as against the absolutismof Hobbes), free speech, reasonable religion, and social amelioration. The dominance of the social interest is not so easily shown in the case of Leibniz; but let it be remembered none the less that epistemology was but an aside in the varied drama of Leibniz’ life, and that his head was dizzy with schemes for the betterment of this “best of all possible worlds.” Bishop Berkeley begins withesse est percipiand ends with tar-water as thesolutionof all problems. David Hume, in the midst of a life busied with politics and the discussion of social, political, and economic problems, spares a year or two for epistemology, only to use it as a handle whereby to deal a blow to dogma; he “was more damaging to religion than Voltaire, but was ingenious enough not to get the credit for it.”[121]The social incidence of philosophy in eighteenth-century France was so decided that one might describe that philosophy as part of the explosive with which the middle class undermined thestatus quo. This social emphasis continues in Comte, who cannot forget that he was once the secretary of St. Simon, and will not let us forget that the function of the philosopher is to coördinate experience with a view to the remoulding of human life. John Stuart Mill is radical first and logician afterward; and the more lasting as well as the more interesting element in Spencer is the sociological, educational, and political theory. In Kant the basic social interestis buried under epistemological cobwebs; yet not so choked but that it finds very resolute voice at last. The essence of the matter here is the return of the prodigal, the relapse of a once adventurous soul into the comfort of religious and political absolutes, categorical—and Potsdam—imperatives. Here is “dogmatic slumber” overcome only to yield to the torpor andabêtisementof “practical reason”; here is no “Copernican revolution” but a stealthy attempt to recover an anthropocentricism lost in the glare of the Enlightenment. It dawns on us that the importance of German philosophy is not metaphysical, nor epistemological, but political; the vital remnant of Kant to-day is to be found not in our overflowing Mississippi of Kantiana, but in the German notion of obedience.[122]Fichte reënforces this notion of unquestioning obedience with the doctrine of state socialism: he begins by tending geese, and ends by writing philosophy for them. So with Hegel: he starts out buoyantly with the proposition that revolution is the heart of history, and ends by discovering that the King of Prussia is God in disguise. In Schopenhauer the bubble bursts; a millennium of self-deception ends at last in exhaustion and despair. Every Hildebrand has his Voltaire, and every Voltaire his Schopenhauer.
“In future,” Nietzsche once wrote, “let no one concern himself about me, but only about the things for which I lived.” We must make this biographical note brief.
Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Germany, 1844, the son of a “noble young parson.” He was brought up in strict piety, and prepared himself to enter the ministry; even at boarding-school he was called “the little minister,” and made people cry by his recitations from the Bible. We have pictures of him which show him in all his boyish seriousness; it is evident that he is of a deeply religious nature, and therefore doomed to heresy. At eighteen he discovers that he has begun to doubt the traditional creed. “When I examine my own thoughts,” he writes, “and hearken into my own soul, I often feel as if I heard the buzzing and roaring of wild-contending parties.”[123]At twenty-one, while studying in the University of Leipzig, he discovers the philosophy of Schopenhauer; he reads all hungrily, feeling here a kindred youth; “the need of knowing myself, even of gnawing at myself, forcibly seized upon me.”[124]He is ripe for pessimism, having both religion and a bad stomach. Because of his defectiveeyesight he is barred from military service; in 1870 he burns with patriotic fever, and at last is allowed to join the army as a nurse; but he is almost overcome at sight of the sick and wounded, and himself falls ill with dysentery and dyspepsia. In this same year he sees a troop of cavalry pass through a town in stately gallop and array; his weakened frame thrills with the sight of this strength: “I felt for the first time that the strongest and highest Will to Life does not find expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but in a Will to War, a Will to Power, a Will to Overpower!”[125]Nevertheless, he settles down to a quietly ascetic life as professor of philology at the University of Basle. But there is adventure in him; and in his first book[126]he slips from the prose of philology into an almost lyrical philosophy. Illness finds voice here in the eulogy of health; weakness in the deification of strength; melancholy in the praise of “Dionysian joy”; loneliness in the exaltation of friendship. He has a friend—Wagner—the once romantic rebel of revolution’s barricades; but this friend too is taken from him, with slowly painful breaking of bond after bond. For Wagner, the strong, the overbearing, the ruthless, is coming to a philosophy of Christian sympathy and gentleness; qualities that cannot seem divine to Nietzsche, because they are long-familiar elements in his own character. “What I am not,” he says, most truthfully, “that for me is God andvirtue.”[127]And so he stands at last alone, borne up solely by the exhilaration of creative thought. He has acquaintances, but he puts up with them “simply, like a patient animal”; “not one has the faintest inkling of my task.” And he suffers terribly “through this absence of sympathy and understanding.”[128]
He leaves even these acquaintances, and abandons his work at Basle; broken in health he finds his way hopefully to the kindlier climate of Italy. Doctor after doctor prescribes for him, one prescription reading, “a nice Italian sweetheart.” He longs for the comradeship, but dreads the friction, of marriage. “It seems to me absurd,” he writes, “that one who has chosen for his sphere ... the assessment of existence as a whole, should burden himself with the cares of a family, with winning bread, security, and social position for wife and children.” He does not hesitate to conclude that “where the highest philosophical thinking is concerned all married men are suspect.”[129]Nevertheless he wanders humanly into something very like a love-affair; he is almost shattered with rapid disillusionment, and takes refuge in philosophy. “Every misunderstanding,” he tells himself, “has made me freer. I want less and less from humanity, and can giveit more and more. The severance of every individual tie is hard to bear; but in each case a wing grows in its place.”[130]And yet the need of comradeship is still there, like a gnawing hunger: many years later he catches a passing smile from a beautiful young woman, whom he has never seen before; and “suddenly my lonely philosopher’s heart grew warm within me.”[131]But she walks off without seeing him, and they never meet again.
The simple Italians who rent him his attic room in Genoa understand him better perhaps than he can be understood by more pretentious folk. They know his greatness, though they cannot classify it. The children of his landlady call him “Il Santo”; and the market-women keep their choicest grapes for the bent philosopher who, it is whispered, writes bitterly about women and “the superfluous.” But what they know for certain is that he is a man of exceeding gentleness and purity, that he is the very soul of chivalry; “stories are still told of his politeness towards women to whom no one else showed any kindness.”[132]Let him write what he pleases, so long as he is what he is.
He lives simply, almost in poverty. “His little room,” writes a visitor, “is bare and cheerless. It has evidently been selected for cheapness rather than for comfort. No carpet, not even a stove. I found it fearfully cold.”[133]His publisher hasmade no profit on his books; they are too sharply opposed to the “spirit of the age”; hence the title he gives to two of his volumes:Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen,—Thoughts Out of Season. There is no money, he is now informed, in such untimely volumes; hereafter he must publish his books at his own cost. He does, stinting himself severely to meet the new expense; his greatest books see the light in this way.[134]
He works hard, knowing that his shaken frame has but short lease of life; and he comes to love his painful solitude as a gift. “I can’t help seeing an enemy in any one who breaks in upon my working summer.... The idea that any person should intrude upon the web of thought which I am spinning around me, is simply appalling. I have no more time to lose—unless I am stingy with my precioushalf-hoursI shall have a bad conscience.”[135]Half-hours; his eyes will not work for more than thirty minutes at a time. He feels that only to him to whom time is holy does time bring reward. “He is fully convinced,” an acquaintance writes of him, “about his missionand his permanent importance. In this belief he is strong and great; it elevates him above all misfortune.”[136]He speaks of hisThus Spake Zarathustrain terms of almost conscious exaggeration: “It is a book,” he says, “that stands alone. Do not let us mention the poets in the same breath; nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a superabundance of strength.”[137]He does not know that it is his illness and his hunger for appreciation that have demanded this self-laudation as restorative and nourishment. He predicts, rightly enough, that he will not begin to get his due meed of appreciation till 1901.[138]His “unmasking of Christian morality,” he says, “is an event unequalled in history.”[139]
All this man’s energy is in his brain; he oozes ideas at every pore. He crowds into a sentence the material of a chapter; and every aphorism is a mountain-peak. He dares to say that which others dare only to think: and we call him witty because truth tabooed is the soul of wit. Every page bears the imprint of the passion and the pain that gave it birth. “I am not a man,” he says, “I am dynamite”; he writes like a man who feels error after error exploding at his touch; and he defines a philosopher as “a terrible explosive in the presence of which everything is in danger.”[140]“There are more idols than realities in the world; and I have an ‘evil eye’ for idols.”[141]
What is this philosophy which seemed to its creator more important than even the mightiest events of the past? How shall we compress it without distorting it, as it has been distorted by so many of its lovers and its haters? Let us ask the man himself to speak to us; let us see if we cannot put the matter in his own words, ourselves but supplying, so to speak, connective tissue. That done, we shall understand the man better, and ourselves, and perhaps our social problem.
From a biological standpoint the phenomenon morality is of a highly suspicious nature.[142]Cui bono?—Whom shall we suspect of profiting by this institution? Is it a mode of enhancing life?—Does it make men stronger and more perfect?—or does it make for deterioration and decay? It is obvious that up to the present, morality has not been a problem at all; it has rather been the very ground on which people have met after all distrust, dissension, and contradiction, the hallowed place of peace, where thinkers could obtain rest even from themselves.[143]But what if moralitybe the greatest of all the stumbling-blocks in the way of human self-betterment? Is it possible that morality itself is the social problem, and that the solution of that problem lies in the judicious abolition of morality? It is a view for which something can be said.
You have heard that morality is a means used by the strong to control the weak. And it is true: just consider the conversion of Constantine. But to stop here is to let half the truth be passed off on you as the whole; and half a truth is half a lie. Much more true is it that morality is a means used by the weak to control the strong, the chain which weakness softly lays upon the feet of strength. The whole of the morality of Europe is based upon the values which are useful to the herd.[144]Every one’s desire is that there should be no other teaching and valuation of things than those by means of which he himself succeeds. Thus the fundamental tendency of the weak and mediocre of all times has been to enfeeble the strong and to reduce them to the level of the weak; their chief weapon in this process was the moral principle.[145]Good is every one who does not oppress, who hurts no one, attacks no one, does not take vengeance but hands over vengeance to God; who goes out of the way of evil, and demands little from life; like ourselves, patient, meek, just. Good is to do nothing for which we are not strong enough.[146]Zarathustra laughedmany times over the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had lame paws![147]Obedience, subordination, submission, devotion, love, the pride of duty; fatalism, resignation, objectivity, stoicism, asceticism, self-denial; in short, anemia: these are the virtues which the herd would have all men cultivate,—particularly the strong men.[148]And the deification of Jesus,—that is to say of meekness,—what was it but another attempt to lull the strong to sleep?
See, now, how nearly that attempt has succeeded. For is not democracy, if not victorious, at least on the road to victory to-day? And what is the democratic movement but the inheritor of Christianity?[149]Not the Christianity of the great popes; they knew better, and were building a splendid aristocracy when Luther spoiled it all by letting loose the levelling instincts of the herd.[150]The instinct of the herd is in favor of the leveller (Christ).[151]I very much fear that the first Christian is in his deepest instincts a rebel against everything privileged; he lives and struggles unremittingly for “equal rights.”[152]It is by Christianity, more than by anything else, that the poison of this doctrine of “equal rights” hasbeen spread abroad. And do not let us underestimate the fatal influence! Nowadays no one has the courage of special rights, of rights of dominion. The aristocratic attitude of mind has been most thoroughly undermined by the lie of the equality of souls.[153]
But is not this the greatest of all lies—the “equality of men”? That is to say, the dominion of the inferior. Is it not the most threadbare and discredited of ideas? Democracy represents the disbelief in all great men and select classes; everybody equals everybody else; “at bottom we are all herd.” There is no welcome for the genius here; the more promising for the future the modern individual happens to be, the more suffering falls to his lot.[154]If the rise of great and rare men had been made dependent upon the voices of the multitude, there never would have been any such thing as a great man. The herd regards the exception, whether it be above or beneath its general level, as something antagonistic and dangerous. Their trick in dealing with the exceptions above them—the strong, the mighty, the wise, the fruitful—is to persuade them to become their head-servants.[155]
But the torture of the exceptional soul is only part of the villainy of democracies. The other part is chaos. Voltaire was right: “Quand la populace se mêle de raisonner, tout est perdu.” Democracy is an aristocracy of orators, a competition in headlines, a maelstrom of ever new majorities, a torrent of petty factions sweeping on to ruin. Under democracy the state will decay, for the instability of legislation will leave little respect for law, until finally even the policeman will have to be replaced by private enterprise.[156]Democracy has always been the death-agony of the power of organization:[157]remember Athens, and look at England. Within fifty years these Babel governments will clash in a gigantic war for the control of the markets of the world; and when that war comes, England will pay the penalty for the democratic inefficiency of its dominant muddle-class.[158]
This wave of democracy will recede, and recede quickly, if men of ability will only oppose it openly. It is necessary for higher men to declare war on the masses. In all directions mediocre people are joining hands in order to make themselves master. The middle classes must be dissolved, and their influence decreased;[159]there must be no more intermarrying of aristocracy with plutocracy; this democratic folly would never have come at all had not the master-classes allowed their blood to be mingled with that of slaves.[160]Let us fight parliamentary government and the power of the press; they are the means wherebycattle become rulers.[161]Finally, it is senseless and dangerous to let the counting-mania (the custom of universal suffrage)—which is still but a short time under cultivation, and could easily be uprooted—take deeper root; its introduction was merely an expedient to steer clear of temporary difficulties; the time is ripe for a demonstration of democratic incompetence and a restoration of power to men who are born to rule.[162]
Democracy, after all, is a disease; an attempt on the part of the botched to lay down for all the laws of social health. You may observe the disease in its growth-process by studying the woman movement. Woman’s first and last function is that of bearing robust children.[163]The emancipated ones are the abortions among women, those who lack the wherewithal to have children (I go no farther, lest I should become medicynical).[164]All intellect in women is a pretension; when a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sex. These women think to make themselves charming to free spirits by wearing advanced views; as though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious and ludicrous to a profound and godlessman![165]If there is anything worthy of laughter it is the man who takes part in this feminist agitation. Let it be understood clearly that the relations between men and women make equality impossible. It is in the nature of woman to take color and commandment from a man,—unless she happens to be a man. Man’s happiness is “I will,” woman’s happiness is “He will.”[166]Woman gives herself, man takes her: I do not think one will get over this natural contrast by any social contract.[167]Indeed, women will lose power with every step towards emancipation. Since the French Revolution the influence of woman has declined in proportion as she has increased her rights and claims. Let her first do her proper work properly (consider how much man has suffered from stupidity in the kitchen), and then it may be time to consider an extension of her activities. To be mistaken in this fundamental problem of “man and woman,” to deny here the profoundest antagonism, and the necessity for an eternally hostile tension, to dream here of equal rights, equal training, equal claims and obligations: that is a typical sign of shallow-mindedness. On the other hand, a man who has depth of spirit as well as of desires, and has also the depth of benevolence which is capable of severity and harshness, and easily confounded with them, can only think of woman as Orientals do: he must conceive of her as a possession, as confinableproperty, as a being predestined for service and accomplishing her mission therein—he must take his stand in this matter upon the immense rationality of Asia, upon the superiority of the instincts of Asia.[168]
All this uprising of housekeepers is, of course, part of the general sickness with which Christianity has inoculated and weakened the strong races of Europe. Consider now the more virulent forms of the disease: socialism and anarchism. The coming of the “kingdom of God” has here been placed in the future, and been given an earthly, a human, meaning; but on the whole the faith in the old ideal is still maintained. There is still the comforting delusion about equal rights, with all the envy that lurks in that delusion. One speaks of “equal rights”: that is to say, so long as one is not a dominant personality, one wishes to prevent one’s competitors from growing in power.[169]It is a pleasure for all poor devils to grumble—it gives them a little intoxicating sensation of power. There is a small dose of revenge in every lamentation.[170]When you hear one of those reformers talk of humanity, you must not take him seriously; it is only his way of gettingfools to believe that he is an altruist; beneath the cover of this buncombe a man strong in the gregarious instincts makes his bid for fame and followers and power. This pretense to altruism is only a roundabout way of asking for altruism, it is the result of a consciousness of the fact that one is botched and bungled.[171]In short, socialism is not justice but covetousness.[172]No doubt we should look upon its exponents and followers with ironic compassion: they want something which we have.[173]
From the standpoint of natural science the highest conception of society according to socialists is the lowest in the order of rank among societies. A socialist community would be another China, a vast and stifling mediocracy; it would be the tyranny of the lowest and most brainless brought to its zenith.[174]A nation in which there would be no exploitation would be dead. Life itself is essentially appropriation, conquest of the strange and weak; to put it at its mildest, exploitation.[175]The absence of exploitation would mean the end of organic functioning. Surely it is as legitimate and valuable for superior men to command and use inferior men as it is for superior species to command and use inferior species, as man commands and uses animals.[176]It is not surprising that the lamb should bear a grudge against the great birdsof prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey.[177]What should be done with muscle except to supply it with directive brains? How, otherwise, can anything worthy ever be built by men? In fact, man has value and significance only in so far as he is a stone in a great building; for which purpose he has first of all to be solid; he has to be a “stone.”[178]