Supposea small child steals jam in the pantry. So long as he pretends that he did not do it, or did not know it was wrong, he suffers a certain oppression.
You can explain to an intelligent child that if he tells the whole truth about the thing, the telling will cost him pain and leave him happy. But you cannot save him the pain. So long as he persists in lying, some of his faculties lie under an inhibition; the vital energies flow past them instead of through them. The first shock of a through passage gives a spasm of pain, and then the child is happy. It is one of the facts of the world that moral awakening is accompanied by pain.
The quarrel that the world has with its agitators is that they do really agitate. People express this by saying that the men are dangerous or have bad taste. The epithets vary with the age. They are intendedto excite public contempt, and they embody the aversions of society. In a martial age the reformer is called a molly-coddle; in a commercial age an incompetent, a disturber of values; in a fanatical age, a heretic. If an agitator is not reviled, he is a quack.
These epithets are mere figures of speech. What they really express is suffering caused by the workings of conscience. And so in any educational movement that runs across the country, there is always a track of pain turning to happiness. When we get in the path of one of these things, we find that the division between contending ideas passes through the individual man. It does not fall between men. The struggle is always the struggle of forces within an individual. A is trying to convince B. The struggle in A’s mind is to make the matter clear, in B’s mind to make the opposite clear. In the course of time one view prevails; but the struggle continues, for B occupies A’s position and is now struggling to convince C. It is in this way that a movement runs through a community. The firing line passes through a series of individuals, and as they succumb, through them to the next.
If you take any particular case of conflict,you will find that the man is divided between two courses, one of which is disagreeable because it involves effort and sacrifice and offence. The other is agreeable because it involves personal ease or personal advancement. The two motives in man result from the structure of his brain, whose operations we are obliged to accept: we cannot amend them; they are the facts of psychology.
It would seem as if the brain of man were so constituted that at the moment of its full operation the man himself disappears. His consciousness becomes wholly occupied with impersonal interests. Thus, in the process of thought, a man begins to see his own personal interests threatened. If he continues to think, they must vanish. This is the struggle between right and wrong. It is really a struggle between two attitudes of mind. It is the experience we suffer when the mind is passing from the self-regardant to the non-self-regardant attitude.
Perhaps the discomfort of doing one’s duty is an inseparable incident of the storage of energy, and the pleasure of neglecting one’s duty, an incident of the leakage of energy. When I get up and poke the fire, because I see it will go out if I don’t, I return to mychair a more energetic being than I was the moment before. At any rate, our oscillation between two states of consciousness has preoccupied mankind from the earliest times, and has given rise to all the dualistic philosophies. The great fact as to the reality of the struggle is proved to us, not merely by our own consciousness, but because we can see the logical results of it everywhere in society.
A community is a collection of palpitating animals. Each of us is one of them, and each of us receives and transmits millions of impressions hourly. We get heard. We have our exact weight and force. There is no difficulty about our power of intercourse. Indeed it is the thing we cannot get away from. No man walks by himself. Between his feet and the ground are invisible pedals that play upon, and are played upon by other men. You cannot live or move except by transmitting influence. The whole of practical life is made up of contact with the passions of others. A lawyer or a broker is like an engineer who sits behind his machine, managing its levers and its stopcocks. A trader, a writer, or a philanthropist, a laborer or a clergyman, does nothing but open and shut valves in other people. Thereis no other way of serving your fellows; there is no other way of earning your living or of wasting your substance.
We saw that in politics it was impossible to draw a dividing line anywhere in that series of men whose joint activity and inactivity held up what we call the evils of politics. Money interest shaded off into prejudice, and that into mistaken loyalty, and that into indifference. The striking truth about the whole series was that it showed different shades of selfishness, lack of energy, and inability to use the mind accurately. So also any unselfish or accurate use of his mind by the laborer or by the journalist was, as we saw, apt to throw him out of employment.
In politics and in morals, all that we condemn, turns out on inspection to be mere selfishness. But anything in the world that we dislike, turns out, on inspection, to be self-regardant effort or avoidance of effort. Bad art may show the gross selfishness of the pot-boiler, or the refined laziness of prejudice, or the mere weakness that was unable to see the world for itself, and has been forced to see it with some one else’s eyes. It is a makeshift. So of bad carpentry or bad cooking. There is no such special provincein life as morality. Each man regards that thing as immoral which he sees to be selfish. A proofreader will show the same indignation over a careless job, that a musician shows over a weak phrasing.
The unimaginable subtlety of our comprehension enables us to detect selfishness in arts of whose methods we know nothing; we read it like large print. To speak accurately, all we get from any communication is a transcript, an image, a picture of the author’s thought, the jar of intellect and character. Is it supposed that communication between men goes forward by ratiocination, or that education is a thing taken in by linear measurement? Thought cannot creep, but only fly. It proceeds by the magic of stimulation. A good judge can read a good brief almost as fast as he can turn the pages. If a thing is well put, it is almost our own before it is said. Ideas pass into us so quickly that Plato thought we knew them in a former existence. This is due to the subtlety of our apprehension. We are not satisfied except by an appeal so refined that our only sensation is one of being made more alive. “Rien ne me choque” was Chopin’s highest praise. What wonder, then, that we resent the self-sufficiency ofany inferior mind? The whole of life is no more than a series of pulsations, and all the books and Bibles, sign-boards, music-boxes, and telegraph wires are the machinery by which in one way or another the mind of man touches the mind of man. The world has been going on for so long that we have many such devices, and out of the millions that have been made, all but the very best get discarded as old lumber. These things are the language of the unselfish force upon the globe. It is much nearer truth to think of them as a single influence than as multifarious. Their origin and tendency, their practical utility, the veneration in which they are held, bind them together and make them one. For the world values the seer above all men, and has always done so. Nay, it values all men in proportion as they partake of the character of seers. The Elgin Marbles and a decision of John Marshall are valued for the same reason. What we feel in them is a painstaking submission to facts beyond the author’s control, and to ideas imposed upon him by his vision. So with Beethoven’s Symphonies, with Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,”—with any conceivable output of the human mind of which you approve. You love them becauseyou say, “These things were not made, they were seen.”
Thus the forces of an unselfish sort upon the globe are cumulative. The dead heroes fight on forever, and the dead mathematicians expound forever. It is true that the organization of the selfish forces is overwhelmingly visible, and that of the unselfish ones invisible. Napoleon is seen by his contemporaries; Spinoza is not seen. The reason is simple. The man who wants something must have an office address. But the man who wants nothing for himself, but spends his whole time in so using his mind that he himself disappears, lives only as an influence in the minds of others. He is a song, a theory, a proposition in algebra. These two conflicting forms of force are then flashed up and down, forward and back ceaselessly, through and across every social meeting, through and across society. The novelists and playwrights deal with this instantaneous interplay of motive; and the time-honored analysis of self for self on the villain’s side, and sacrifice for principle on the hero’s side is a true thing. It is a fair abstract of the world.
You can illustrate in an instant the immediacy of these two hierarchies of power underwhich we live and from which we cannot escape. The selfish ones need not be named; they oppress us. But the unselfish ones are equally near. If you take any bit of poetry or speech or writing that you consider great, and examine it, you will find that it illustrates the logical coherence of all the ideas and feelings that make you happy; it is a digest of a law of influence. Or conversely, if you set about to illustrate some experience, and if you can get it profoundly and accurately stated as what you believe to be the bottom truth, it will turn under your hands into something familiar. If you are successful, it will be a kind of poetry.