We have taken the two Lamarckian factors together, in contrast with the Darwinian. But even in the two Lamarckian factors there is a great difference in grade. Undoubtedly the lowest and first introduced was pressure of thephysical environment. For evenuse and disuseof organs implies some degree of volition and voluntary motion, and therefore already some advance in the scale of evolution.
With the introduction of sex another entirely different and higher factor was introduced, viz.natural selection, among a varying progeny, of the fittest individuals. We have already seen how sexual generation produces variation of offspring and how this furnishes material for natural selection. As soon, therefore, as this form of generation was evolved, this higher factor came into operation, and immediately, as it were,assumed controlof evolution, and the previous factorsbecame subordinatethough still underlying, conditioning, modifying the higher. The result was an immediate increase in the speed and in the diversity of evolution. It is very worthy of note too, that it is in the higher animals, such as birds and mammals, where we find the highest form of sexual generation, where the diversity of funded characters and therefore the variation in the offspring is the greatest, and natural selection most active: it is precisely among these that the Lamarckian factors are most feeble, because during the most plastic portion of life the offspring is removed from the influence of the physical environment and from the effects of use and disuse, by their enclosure within the womb or within a large egg well supplied with nourishment. In these, development is already far advanced before Lamarckian factors can operate at all.
Next I supposePhysiological selectionor Romanes's factor came into operation. After the introduction of sex, it became necessary, that the individuals of some varieties should be in some wayisolated, so as to prevent the swamping of varietal characters as fast as formed, in a common stock by cross breeding. In very low forms with slow locomotion, such isolation might easily take place accidentally. Even in higher forms, changes in physical geography or accidental dispersion by winds and currents, would often producegeographical isolation; and thus by preventing crossing with the parent stock, secure the formation of new species from such isolated varieties. But in order to insure in all cases the preservation of commencing species,sexual isolationwas introduced or evolved as I suppose later, and according to Romanes somewhat as follows:
All organs are subject to variation in offspring, but none are so sensitive in this regard as the reproductive organs; and these in no respect more than in relative fertility under different conditions. Suppose then the offspring of any parent to vary in many directions. By cross-breeding among themselves and with the parent stock, these are usually merged in a common type, their differences pooled, and the species remains fixed or else advances slowly by natural selection, alongone line, as physical conditions change in geological time. But from time to time there arises a variation in the reproductive organs of some individuals, of such kind that these individuals are fertile among themselves, but sterile or less fertile with other varieties and with the parent stock. Such individuals aresexually isolatedfrom others, orsexually segregatedamong themselves. Their varietal differences of all kinds are no longer swamped by cross-breeding, but go on to increase until they form a new species. It is evident then, as Romanes claims, that natural selection alone tends tomonotypalevolution. Isolation of some sort seems necessary topolytypalevolution. The tree of evolution under the influence of natural selection alone grows palm-like from its terminal bud. Isolation was necessary to the starting of lateral buds, and thus for theprofuse ramificationwhich is its most conspicuous character.
Next, I suppose, was introduced,sexual selection, or contest among the males by battle or by display, for the possession of the female, the success of the strongest or the most attractive, and the perpetuation and increase of these superior qualities of strength or beauty in the next generation. This I suppose was later, because connected with a higher development of the psychical nature. This is especially true when beauty of color or song determines the selection. As might be supposed therefore, this factor is operative only among the highest animals, especially birds and mammals, and perhaps some insects.
Next and last, and only with the appearance of man, another entirely different and far higher factor was introduced, viz.conscious, voluntary co-operation in the work of evolution—a conscious voluntaryeffort to attain an Ideal. As already said, we call this a factor, but it is much more than a factor. It is another nature working in another world—the spiritual—and like physical nature using all factors, but in a new way and on a higher plane. In early stages man developed much as other animals, unconscious and careless whither he tended and therefore with little or no voluntary effort to attain a higher stage. But this voluntary factor, this striving toward a goal or ideal, in the individual and in the race, increased more and more until in civilised communities of modern times it has become by far the dominant factor. Reason, instead of physical nature, takes control, though still using the same factors.
Now, in this whole process, we observe two striking stages. The one is the introduction of Sex, the other the introduction of Reason.[69] They might be compared to two equally striking stages in the evolution of the individual, viz. the moment offertilisationand the moment ofbirth. As the ontogenic evolution receives fresh impulse at the two moments of fertilisation and of birth; so the evolution of the organic kingdom at the two periods mentioned. With the appearance ofsex, three new and higher factors are introduced, and these immediately assumed control and quickened the rate of evolution. With the appearance of reason in man another and far higher factor is introduced which in its turn assumes control, and not only again quickens the rate, but elevates the whole plane of evolution. This voluntary, rational factor not only assumes control itself, but transforms all other factors and uses them in a new way and for its own higher purposes.
[69] By Reason I mean the faculty of dealing with the phenomena of the inner world of consciousness and ideas, orreflectionon the facts of consciousness. Animals live inoneworld, the outerworld of sense; man intwoworlds, in the outer world like animals, but also in the inner and higherworld of ideas. All that is characteristic of man comes of this capacity of dealing with this inner world. In default of a better word I call it Reason. If any one can suggest a better word I will gladly adopt it.
This last is by far the greatest change which has ever occurred in the history of evolution. In organic evolution nature operates by necessary law without the voluntary co-operation of the thing evolving. In human progress man voluntarily co-operates with nature in the work of evolution and even assumes to take the process mainly into his own hands. Organic evolution is bynecessarylaw, human progress byfree, or at least byfreer, law. Organic evolution is by apushingupward and onward from below and behind, human progress by an aspiration, an attraction toward an ideal—apullingupward and onward from above and in front.
This great change may well be likened to abirth.[70] Spirit or Reason or the Psyche—call it what you like—was in embryo in animals in increasing degrees of development through all geological times and came to birth and capacity of free activity, became free spirit investigating its own phenomena in man. In animals the evolution of Psyche was the unconscious result of organic evolution. In man the Psyche isborninto a new world of freer activity and undertakes to develop itself.
[70] SeeEvolution and its Relation to Religious Thought, Part iii. Chap. iv, where the writer's views are more fully brought out.
It may be well to stop a moment and show briefly some of the striking differences between organic and human evolution, differences resulting wholly from the introduction of this new factor, or rather this evolution on a new and higher plane.
(1) In organic evolution the fittest are those most inharmony with the environmentand therefore theysurvive. In human evolution the fittest are those mostin harmony with the ideal, and often, especially in the early stages of evolution, during the dominance of natural selection, theydo not survivebecause not in harmony with the social environment.
(2) In organic evolution the weak, the helpless, the unfit in any way,perish, and ought to perish, because this is the most efficient way ofstrengthening the blood, orphysicalnature. In human evolution the weak, the helpless, the physically unfit, aresustained, and ought to be sustained, because sympathy, love, pitystrengthens the spirit or moral nature. But the spirit or moral nature is also sustained by, and conditioned on, the physical nature. In all our attempts therefore to help the weak we must be careful that we avoid poisoning the blood and weakening the physical health of the race. This we believe can and will be done byrational education, physical, mental, and moral. We only allude to this. It is too wide a subject to follow up here.
(3) In organic evolution theform mustcontinuallychangein order to keep in harmony with the changing environment. In other words evolution is by constantchange of species, genera, etc.; there must be a continual evolution ofnew forms. In human evolution, and more and more as civilisation goes on, man modifies the environment so as to bring it in harmony with himself and his wants, and therefore there isno necessity forchange of form ormaking of new species of man. Human evolution is not by modification ofform—new species, but by modification of spirit—new planes of activity.
(4) In organic evolution as a higher factor arises it assumes control, and previous factors sink into subordinate position. But in human evolution the rational factor not only assumes control but transforms all other factors, using them in a new way and for its own higher purposes. Thus the Lamarckian factor—environment—is modified and even changed so as to affect suitably the human organism. This isHygieneorSanitation. Again, the various organs of the body and faculties of the mind are deliberatelyused(another Lamarckian factor) in such wise as to produce their highest efficiency. This iseducation, ortraining, physical, mental, moral. So also the selective factors are similarly transformed, and natural selection becomes rational selection. This is freely applied to domestic animals and with limitations imposed by reason itself will be applied to man.
(5) The way of evolution toward the highest, i. e. from Protozoa to man and from lowest man to the ideal man, is avery narrow way, and few there be that find it. In the case of organic evolution it issonarrow, that once get off the track and it is impossible to get on again. No living form of animal is now on the way to form man, can by any possibility develop manward. They are all gone out of the way. They are all off the trunk line. The golden opportunity is past. The tree of evolution is anexcurrentstem continuous to the terminal shoot—man. Once leave the main stem as a branch, it is easy to continue growing in the direction chosen, but impossible to get back again on the straight upward way to the highest. In human evolution whether individual or racial, the same law holds, but with a difference. If an individual or a race gets off from the straight and narrow way toward the highest, the Divine ideal, it ishardto get back on the track; hard but notimpossible. Man's own effort is the chief factor in his own evolution. By virtue of his self-activity, and through the use of reason, man alone is able to rectify an error of direction and return again to the deserted way.
Just now there is much controversy in regard to the factors of evolution. Both Darwin and Spencer, the two greatest expounders of the modern theory of evolution, acknowledge and insist upon at least four factors; viz. the two Lamarckian and the two distinctively Darwinian. The only difference between them is in the relative importance of the two sets; Spencer regarding the former and Darwin the latter as the more potent. But some late Darwinians have gone far beyond Darwin himself in their estimate of the power of the most distinctive Darwinian factor, viz. natural selection. Weismann and Wallace have each written a book, and Lankester many excellent articles to show that natural selection is the one sole and sufficient cause of evolution, that changes during the individual life whether by effect of the environment or by the use and disuse of organsare not inherited at all, that Lamarck was wholly wrong and that Darwin (in connection with Wallace) is the sole founder of the true theory of evolution, and finally that Darwin himself was wrong only in making any terms whatever with Lamarck.
The argument for this view has, perhaps, been most strongly put by Weismann and is based partly on experiments, but mainly on his ingenious and now celebrated theory of theimmortality of germ-plasm. The animal body consists of two kinds of cells wholly different in function, somatic cells and germ-cells, including in this last the sexual elements both male and female. Somatic cells are modified and specialised for the various functions of the body; germ-cells are wholly unmodified. The somatic cells are for the conservation of theindividuallife, germ-cells for the conservation of thespecies. Now according to Weismann,inheritance is only through germ-cells. Environment affects only the somatic cells and therefore changes produced by environment cannot be inherited. Sexual generation was introduced for the purpose of producing variability in progeny and thus furnishing material for natural selection, as this was the only means of evolutionary advance. Weismann made many experiments on animals, especially by mutilation, to show that somatic changes are not inherited.
We shall not argue this question but content ourselves with making three brief remarks.
1. If the views presented in this article be true, then the Lamarckian factors must be true factors, becausethere was a time when there were no others. They were necessary therefore to start the process of evolution, even if no longer necessary at present.
2. But if the Lamarckian factors were ever operative,they must be so still, though possibly in a subordinate degree. A lower factor is not abolished, but only becomes subordinate to a higher factor when the latter is introduced. Thus it may well be that Lamarckian factors are comparatively feeble at the present time and among present species, especially of the higher animals, and yet not absent altogether. In the earliest stages of evolution there was a completeidentification of germ-cells and somatic cells—of the individual with the species. In such cases, of course, the effect of environment must be inherited and increased from generation to generation. But the differentiation of germ and somatic cells was not all at once; it was agradual process, and therefore the effect of the environmenton the germ-cells through the somatic cellsmust have continued, though in decreasing degree, and still continues. The differentiation is now, in the higher animals, so complete that germ-cells are probably not at all affected by changes in somatic cells, unless these changes arelong continued in the same direction and are not antagonised by natural selection.
3. It is a general principle of evolution thatthe law of the whole is repeated with modifications, in the part. This is a necessary consequence of the Unity of Nature. We ought to expect therefore and do find, that the order of the use of the factors of evolution is the same in the evolution of theorganic kingdom, in the evolution ofeach species, and in the evolution ofeach individual. In all these the physical factors are first powerfully operative, then become subordinate to organic factors, and these in their turn to psychical and rational factors. Therefore, as the individual in its early stages, i. e. in embryo and infancy, is peculiarly plastic under the influence of the physical environment and afterwards becomes more and more independent of these: so a species when first formed is more plastic under the influence of the Lamarckian factors and afterwards becomes more rigid to the same. And so also the organic kingdom was doubtless at first more plastic under Lamarckian factors, and has become less so in the present species, especially of the higher animals. The principal reason for this, as we have already seen, is the increasing differentiation of germ and somatic cells, and the removal of the former to the interior where they are more and more protected from external influence.
Some evolutionists—the materialistic—insist on making human evolution identical in all respects with organic evolution. This we have shown is not strictly true. The very least that can be said is that a new and far more potent factor is introduced with man, which modifies greatly the process. But we may claim much more, viz. that evolution is here on a wholly different and higher plane. The factors of organic evolution are indeed still present and condition the whole process; but they are not left to be used by nature alone. On the contrary, they are used in a new way and for higher purposes by Reason.
But by a revulsion from the materialistic extreme, some have gone to the opposite extreme. They would place human progress and organic evolution in violent antagonism, as if subject to entirely different and even opposite laws. But we have also shown, that although the distinctive human factor is indeed dominant, yet it is underlaid and conditioned by all the lower factors—that these lower factors are still necessary as the agents used by Reason.
We have already alluded to Weismann's and Wallace's views, but there is one important aspect not yet touched.
If Weismann and Wallace are right, if natural selection be indeed the only factor used by nature in organic evolution and therefore available for use by Reason in human evolution, then alas for all our hopes of race-improvement, whether physical, mental, or moral! All enlightened schemes ofphysical cultureand ofhygiene, although directed indeed primarily for the strength, health, and happiness of thepresent generation, yet are sustained and ennobled by the conviction that the physical improvement of the individual, by inheritance enters into a similar improvement of the race. All our schemes ofeducation, intellectual and moral, although certainly intended mainly for the improvement of the individual, are glorified by the hope that the race is also thereby gradually elevated. It is true that these hopes are usually extravagant; it is true that the whole improvement of the individuals of one generation is not carried over by inheritance into the next; it is true therefore that we cannot by education raise a lower race up to the plane of a higher racein a few generations; but there must be a small residuum, be it ever so small, carried forward by inheritance and accumulated from age to age, which enters into the slow growth of the race. If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selection of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose; then, if we are to have any race-improvement at all, the dreadful law ofdestruction of the weak and helplessmust with Spartan firmness be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts. The use of the Lamarckian factors, on the contrary, is not attended with any such revolting consequences. All that we call education, culture, training, is by the use of these. Our hopes of race-improvement therefore are strictly conditioned on the fact that the Lamarckian factors are still operative, that changes in the individual, if in useful direction, are to some extent inherited and accumulated in the race.
We have said that the new factor introduced with man is a voluntary co-operation in the process of evolution, a conscious upward striving toward a higher condition, a pressing forward toward an ideal. Man contrary to all else in nature is transformed, not inshapeby external environment, but incharacter by his own ideals. Now this capacity of forming ideals and the voluntary pursuit of such ideals, whence comes it? When analysed and reduced to its simplest terms, it is naught else than the consciousness in man of his relation to the infinite and the attempt to realise the divine ideal in human character.
One of the most curious applications, and perhaps the most practical, of Criminal Anthropology, (of that new science which has associated itself with sociology, psychiatry, and history,) is that which flows from the study of the physiognomy of the political criminal. For not only does it appear to succeed in furnishing us with the juridical basis of political crime, which hitherto seemed to escape all our researches, so completely that until now all jurists had ended by saying that there was no political crime; but it seems also to supply us with a method for distinguishing true revolution, always fruitful and useful, from utopia, from rebellion, which is always sterile. It is for me a thoroughly established fact, and one of which I have given the proofs in my "Delitto Politico,"[71] that true revolutionists, that is to say, the initiators of great scientific and political revolutions, who excite and bring about a true progress in humanity, are almost always geniuses or saints, and have all a marvellously harmonious physiognomy; and to verify this it is sufficient simply to look at the plates in my "Delitto Politico." What noble physiognomies have Paoli, Fabrizi, Dandolo, Moro, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bandiera, Pisacane, la Petrowskaia, la Cidowina, la Sassulich! Generally we see in them a very large forehead, a very bushy beard, and very large and soft eyes; sometimes we meet with the jaw much developed, but never hypertrophic; sometimes, finally, with paleness of the face (Mazzini, Brutus, Cassius); but these characteristics seldom accumulate in the same individual to the extent of constituting what I call the criminal type.
[71] 1890.
In a study that I have made with three hundred and twenty-one of our Italian revolutionists, (against Austria etc.,) nearly all males, (there were twenty-seven women to one hundred men,) the proportion of the criminal type was 0·57 per cent.; i. e. 2 per cent. less than in normal men. Out of thirty celebrated Nihilists, eighteen have a very fine physiognomy, twelve present some isolated anomalies, two only present the criminal type (Rogagiew and Oklasdky), that is to say 6·8 per cent. And if from these unfortunate men who represent to us, even psychologically, the Christian martyrs, we pass to the regicides, to the presidenticides, such as Fieschi, Guiteau, Nobiling, and to the monsters of the French Revolution of 1789, such as Carrier, Jourdan, and Marat, we there at once find in all, or in nearly all, the criminal type. And the type again frequently appears among the Communards and the Anarchists. Taking fifty photographs of Communards I have found the criminal type in 12 per cent.; and the insane type in 10 per cent. Out of forty-one Parisian Anarchists that I have studied with Bertillon at the office of the police of Paris, the proportion of the criminal type was 31 per cent.
In the rebellion of the 1st of May last I was able to study one hundred Turin Anarchists. I found the criminal type among these in the proportion of 34 per cent., while in two hundred and eighty ordinary criminals of the prison at Turin the type was 43 per cent.
================================+==========+=========| TURIN | ORDINARYCHARACTERISTICS. |ANARCHISTS|CRIMINALS————————————————+—————+————-Exaggerated plagiocephaly | 11 | 21Facial asymmetry | 36 | 60Other cranial anomalies | |(ultra-brachycephaly etc.) | 15 | 44Very large jaw | 19 | 29Exaggerated zygomas | 16 | 23Enormous frontal sinus | 17 | 19Dental anomalies | 30 | 20Anomalies of the ears | 64 | 75Anomalies of the nose | 40 | 57Anomalous coloration of skin | 30 | 8Old wounds | 10 | 26Tattooing | 4 | 10Neuro-pathological anomalies | 8 | 26
Among the 100 individuals arrested on the 1st of May, 30 per cent. were recidivists for common crimes; among the others, 50 per cent. Of true prisonhabituésthere were 8 among the former and 20 among the latter.
Thanks to the assistance of Dr. Carus ofThe Open Court Publishing Company, who has sent me many curious data and also the work of Schaack, "Anarchy and Anarchists" (Chicago, 1889), which is very partial, although rich in facts, I have been able to study the photographs of 43 Chicago anarchists, and I have found among them almost the same proportion of the criminal type, that is 40 per cent. The ones that presented this type are the two Djeneks, Potoswki, Cloba, Seveski, Stimak, Sugar, Micolanda, Bodendick, Lieske, Lingg, Oppenheim, Engel and his wife, Fielden, G. Lehm, Thiele, and Most. Especially in Potowski, Sugar, and Micolanda I mark facial asymmetry, enormous jaws, developed frontal sinus, protruding ears; and the same (except the asymmetry) in Seveski and Novak. Fielden has a turned up nose and enormous jaws; Most has acrocephaly and facial asymmetry. On the contrary a very fine physiognomy has Marx, with his very full forehead, bushy hair and beard, and soft eyes; and likewise Lassalle, Hermann, Schwab, the two Spies, Neebe, Schnaubelt, Waller, and Seeger.
In studying the chief anarchists separately,—the martyrs of the Chicago anarchists, it might well be said,—there is found in them all an anomaly, very frequent in normal men as well; that is to say the ears are without lobes; the ears are also developed a little more than normally in all (except in Spies), they are protruding in Lingg, Fischer, and Engel; the jaw is much developed in Lingg, Spies, Fischer, and Engel; all have, however, except Spies,[72] the forehead fine and full, with great intelligence. In the plates of the journalDer Vorbotewe find a Mongolic cast of feature in Engel and Lingg, both of whom should have much of the degenerative characters, enormous jaw and zygoma, and Lingg oblique eyes. But these characters are much less apparent in the photographs that I received fromThe Monistand in which the jaw of Fischer even decreases. Perhaps these photographs were taken some years before the crime, when they were very young. Certainly in both instances (in theVorboteand the photographs fromThe Monist) I find a very noble and truly genial physiognomy in Parsons and Neebe. The physiognomy of August Spies is morbid. He has a senile auricle, voluminous jaw bones and a strongly developed frontal sinus. And, it is necessary to remark, the physiognomy corresponds with his autobiography, written with a fierce fanaticism; whilst in the posthumous writings of Parsons and in the writings of Neebe we remark a calm and reflective enthusiasm.
[72] Thus according to the portrait in Schaack's book; but according to information which I later received from General Trumbull of Chicago, this portrait is not true to life. It would seem, then, that the features upon which my opinion is based do not exist.
Schwab has the physiognomy of asavant, of a student; he much resembles the nihilist Antonoff, beheaded in Russia. (See Plate IV in my "Delitto Politico.") Neebe is quite like an Italian economist well known in America, Luigi Luzzatti.
Fielden has a wild physiognomy, not without sensuality. Parsons resembles Bodio, the great Italian statistician, and in the upper part of the face, Stanley.
When I say that the anarchists of Turin and of Chicago are frequently of the criminal type, I do not mean that political criminals, even the most violent anarchists, are true criminals; but that they possess the degenerative characters common to criminals and to the insane, being anomalies and possessing these traits by heredity; as a fact, the father of Booth was called Junius Brutus, and gave to his son the name of a revolutionist, Wilkes. The fathers of Guiteau and of Nobiling, and the mother of Staps were religious lunatics; and Staps also, like Ravaillac, Clement, Brutus, had hallucinations. In the autobiographies of theVorboteI find that Parsons had a very religious Methodist mother and a father who had much to do with the movement of the Temperance League. Indeed, the Parsons since 1600 had as a family taken part in all revolutionary movements. A Tompkin, a relation of his mother, had taken part in the battles of Brandywine and of Monmouth; a General Parsons was an officer in the Revolution of 1776, and a captain Parsons engaged in the battle of Bunker Hill.
Spies was born in a chateau celebrated for feudal robberies—called on that account the "Raubschloss."
The father of Louis Lingg suffered through his labor as a workman a concussion of the brain—according to theVorbote.
The father of Fielden, an orator of power notwithstanding his occupation as a workman, was one of the agitators of the question of agricultural lands for workingmen in England; he was one of the founders of the "Consumers' Co-operative Society" and a prime mover in the society of "Odd Fellows." For those who will object that in many of these relations they see only geniuses, I have only to cite my work "L'Homme de Génie," where I have proved how often genius is nervous epilepsy, and how almost all the sons of men of genius are lunatics, idiots, or criminals.
This hereditary influence is seen also in the great number of brothers charged together, the two Spies, the two Djeneks, the two Fieldens, and the two Lehms. According to their autobiographies also their fathers or their mothers died early; from which we may presume that they were old or diseased.
The morbid impressibility of Engel has been admitted by himself. "I cannot," he said to his wife, "hold within me what I feel. I must explode. The enthusiasm takes possession of me; it is a disease." Lingg could not remain quiet an instant; in his room he always had some dynamite in store. Bodendick was a thief and a mattoid; full of cunning, mischief and mad tricks, even according to theArbeiter-Zeitung. He was always dreaming of new explosives. Though insane he was a genius as appears from his poetry, which is published by Schick and is in the style of the celebrated "Song of the Shirt." The suicide of Lingg with dynamite shows his moral insensibility, as do the words of Parsons addressed to the society of anarchists: "Strangle the spies and throw them out of the window." In Lingg we see a truly ungovernable epileptoid idea driving him to political action. "I cannot control myself;" he said, "it is stronger than I."
I repeat that among the anarchists there are no true criminals; even Schaack, the police historian, can name but two criminals, and certainly he would not have spared them if he could have stigmatised them.
Their heroic-like deaths, with their ideal on their lips, proves that they were not common criminals. Nevertheless the psychology of the leaders of the Commune shows in them a true moral insensibility, an innate cruelty, which found a pretext and a scope in politics; and which accords too well with their criminal physiognomies. Marat demands two hundred and ten thousand heads; Vallés speaks of his family with a true hatred; Carrier wrote, "We will make a cemetery of France"; Ferré smiled while by his orders they killed Veisset; and Rigault said in slang to his pistol, "Il faut peter sur le chipau." The last words of Spies before the court express a ferocious hatred towards the rich; and the project of the anarchists of Chicago (if it is true) to blow up a part of the city with bombs attests an absence of the moral sense. We know that many anarchists regard brigands and thieves, such as Pini, Kammerer, and Gasparoni, as their brothers in arms. Booth had for accomplice Payne, a true murderer by profession. See also the journal published at GenevaL'Explosion, and the Como journalLe Poignard.
But it is necessary to note that hereditary anomaly, if it provokes an anomaly in the moral sense, also suppresses misoneism, the horror of novelty which is almost the general rule of humanity; it thus makes of them innovators, apostles of progress, though the education is too rude: and the fight with relative misery of which all the anarchists of Chicago except Neebe have been the victims, not affording material for useful novelties made of them only failures and rebels, hindering them from comprehending that humanity as a part of nature, which it is, cannot progress at a gallop,non facit saltus. Spies on his last day discovered that humanity is misoneic, the slave of custom, and said, quoting the lines in German, "I now understand the poet's words,
'Denn aus Gemeinem ist der Mensch gemacht,Und die Gewohnheit nennt er seine Amme.'"
[Man has been shaped of what is common,And habit is the nurse by whom he's reared.]
Evidently if he had understood it before he would not have been an anarchist. Whoever has observed in asylums the conduct of lunatics, will understand that one of their characteristics is originality, just as in men of genius; only the originality of the insane and of moral lunatics, or of born criminals, is very often absurd or unavailable.
This is why I, although I am an extremist in my partisanship for the death-penalty, cannot approve the shooting of the Communards and the hanging of the anarchist martyrs of Chicago. I deem it highly necessary to suppress born criminals, when they reach the persuasion that being born for evil they can do nothing but evil; and I believe that their death thus saves the lives of many honest men. But we have to do with a very different thing here, where the criminal type is, as shown above, less frequent than among born criminals.
It is also necessary to consider here the youthful condition of almost all these persons—Lingg 23 years, Schwab 33 years, Neebe 32 years. For at this age men are at the maximum point of their audacity and misoneism; and I remember a leading Russian Nihilist saying to me that there was not an honest man in Russia who was not a nihilist at 20 years of age and ultra-moderate at 40 years. If the inclination to evil here exists in greater proportion than in law-abiding men, it nevertheless takes an altruistic turn, which is quite the contrary to that which is observed among born criminals, and which commands our admiration and arouses our just pity. This inclination, in associating itself with the want of the new, which is also abnormal in humanity, could, if it were properly directed and were not crossed by misery, prove itself of great value to humanity; it could trace for it new routes, and in every case be practically useful to it. A born criminal imprisoned for life will kill some gaoler, in a colony will ally himself with the savages, and will never work; while political criminals in a colony will become more useful pioneers even than law-abiding men. An example is seen in Louise Michel, who in New Caledonia was the most charitable of the sick nurses.
And then there is no political crime against which the punishment of death can be directed. An idea is never stifled with the death of its abettors: it gains with the death of the martyrs if it is good, as is the case in revolutions; and it falls at once into vacuity if it is sterile, as is the case, perhaps, with the anarchists. And then, as judgment cannot be formed of a great man during his life, so a generation cannot in its ephemeral life judge with certainty of the justice of an idea, and for that reason it is not proper to inflict so radical a punishment on its abettors.
In the moral world the law which is seen to dominate all the others is the law of inertia. This law of inertia is so powerful that even after having been overcome by the friction of ages it always leaves, even among beings that have most progressed, traces of its original oscillation, in survivals, in rudimentary organs, when it is not renewed in all its completeness in certain atavistic forms.
Inertia in the moral world.—Granting that it were possible and desirable to contest this law in the organic world, it could certainly not be done in the moral world. In fact, although we are thought to be making great progress, yet if we form a graphic chart showing the progress made on the globe, we shall see to what miserable proportions it is reduced. It may be said that all Africa, except certain points encroached on by the Aryans, Australia, and a good half part of America, are almost in the prehistoric state, or at best in the state of the great Asiatic empires of the earliest historic epochs. Or perhaps (as in South America, Hayti, and Siberia) civilisation has only changed the appearances of primitive life, by substituting for immobility an unstable equilibrium, which is almost worse still.
The most certain proof of the extension and of the predominance in the moral world of the law of inertia, is the hatred of novelty, so little noticed, which we call Misoneism, and which arises from the effort and the repugnance we experience when we have to substitute a new sensation for an old one. And this is so common among animals that it can be regarded as a physiological character.
Minds feeble, enfeebled, or primitive in character, show themselves the most susceptible of repugnance to what is novel; it being understood, however, that it is not a question here of small innovations, such as fashion for women, the change from the elliptic to the circular, tattooing for savages, and sports for children; for not only have the latter no dread of such changes, but on the contrary they wish heartily for them, as they excite the nervous centres, which require change, without irritating them, and without causing pain.
But when the innovation is too radical, it is not merely the savage and the child who repel it with dread; the great majority of men, for whom misoneism is a law of nature, are sensible of a feeling of repugnance, as the result of the pain produced by the necessity in which they are placed of causing their brains to be traversed by too rapid transitions, a task not within their power, inertia and the repetition of movements (individual or atavistic) before performed, being natural to ordinary men, as to all animals.
Misoneism in manners.—This may be seen, for example, in the manners and customs of the modern Greeks; notwithstanding the vicissitudes of time, we find in them the ancient Greek.
The French of the nineteenth century are still in many respects such as they are depicted by Strabo (IV, 4), and by Cæsar (De Bello Gallico, IV, 5), lovers of arms and of ostentation, incurably vain, facile of speech, easily carried away by words, and imprudent in their resolves.
Misoneism in religion.—As much can be said of this in relation to religion, literature, and art, where we see misoneism triumph. With respect to religion it can even be affirmed that this is the institution most completely based on misoneism; to the extent that we see the Christian religion preserve of ancient religions, not only musical harmony (the chant), sacred vestments (the mitre and fibula of the Egyptian priests), the scapular and the sandals of the Roman plebeian, etc., but also the Mithraic legends in certain dogmas which have relation to the sun, and even to ancient fetichism.
Misoneism in morality.—The misoneistic instinct, fed by religion, may leave traces profound enough to form a moralitysui generis, and provoke among savages remorse at having failed in a brutal custom, be it ever so repugnant, such as among us is provoked in good men by crime.
Misoneism in science.—In the domain of science the history of the various persecutions of men of genius, inventors or reformers, will suffice to prove the terrible influence of misoneism, which is the more intolerant and the more fanatical the more ignorant it is; and we need only cite the names of Columbus, of Galileo, and of Salomon de Caus, the first inventor of steam apparatus, who was sent to the Bicêtre by Richelieu.
Misoneism in literature.—Likewise to misoneism we owe, in great part, our admiration for old works and ancient ruins, however hideous they may be. Because admired by our fathers and by our forefathers they obtain, so to say, a way of entrance into us, to impose themselves on our veneration. Thus the Sanscrit language for the Hindoo, the Hebrew language for the Jews, and to some extent Latin for many Christian Europeans have become a kind of sacred tongue and linguistic fetich even outside the precincts of religious usage.
The enormous influence of grammarians in imperial Rome, and afterwards during the epoch of decadence, as well as in the middle ages, explains also the persistence of the modern fetichism for grammar, which seems absurd in an age of naturalists and mathematicians.
And from thence comes the not less absurd and yet unshakable faith in classicism, rooted deeply even in men worthy of respect, who cause us to lose the best years of life in stammering in an almost useless tongue.
Misoneism in politics.—The same may be said with much more fitness of many social and political institutions which are thought to be modern and which are only relics of other times; it is for this reason only that they attract the admiration and the respect of the majority of people, constituting true conventional lies, as Nordau calls them, but which have theirbourgeoisbelievers and apostles.
In fact, the past is so incorporated in our inward being that even the most refractory of us feel a powerful attraction towards it. Thus we may be as unbelieving as can be wished, and yet at every hour of the day we feel ourselves struck and attracted by the cajoleries of priests. We may be lovers of equality, but, as we have already said, we feel a secret veneration for the heirs of our barons. It is in vain that the uselessness of certain laws is accepted; he who upholds and defends them will meet with the approbation of multitudes, called forth by the sole circumstance that the laws have existed. And if civilisation progresses often, it is because it finds in the changes of climate, of race, or in the appearance of men of genius or madmen, circumstances which end in combining a great many small movements in such a manner as to make of them in time a great one. Max Nordau thinks (with some exaggeration) that progress is due more to a few enlightened despots than to all revolutionists. But this progress was very slow; he who wished to precipitate it, contravened the physiological nature of man; consequently a revolution which is not an evolution, is pathological and criminal.
Misoneism in the punishment of crimes against custom.—This is why in primitive legislation we see offences against custom constitute themaximumof delict, of immorality.
This theory of misoneism, previously expounded in my "Delitto Politico," has aroused opposition from all sides; especially in France, on the part of Brunetière, Proal, Tarde, Joly, and Merlino. "Children," say they, "women, savages are curious, lovers of novelties, and misoneists are so far from being ignorant that you yourself refer to them as being among the academicians, (these last are still it appears in the Latin world admirers of good faith); artists have success only in attempting new paths; all peoples have the love of change; they prove it by their emigrations and by their invasions; the great invasions of the barbarians were an example of it."
"Besides, if there aremisoneists, there are alsoneophiles, and the one makes up for the other."
"In each of us," writes Tarde, "by the side of habit, a sort of physiological misoneism, exists caprice; by the side of the inclination to repeat, the inclination to innovate. The first of these two necessities is fundamental, but the second is the essential, theraison d'êtreof the others."[73]
[73]Revue Philosophique, October, 1890.
In order to reply to all these objections it is necessary above all to be well understood. As to minor innovations, and caprices that satisfy the need of movement of our organs, from the very fact that they are animate, it is certain that we are all very eager for these; in proportion of course to our sex, our age, and our degree of intellectual culture. The little child will be happy with a toy, he will experience fear or dread at the sight of a mask, of a large animal or even of a small one; I have seen children frightened by a sparrow, by a fly. Woman takes pleasure in disguising herself in a striking manner, in wearing new garments in which to attend great plays in the theatres, but she has a horror of new religious rites, and of new discoveries, to such a degree that a great number still refuse to use linen and knitted work made by machinery; sewing machines themselves find their way among them only very slowly. (Merlino.)
When it is claimed (Merlino) that savages love novelties, from the fact, related by Ellis, that some of them endeavored to procure Bibles, (taking them, perhaps, for playthings,) or arms of which they had seen the useful effects, their nature is misjudged; since even after many years passed in contact with European civilisation, after having worn its clothing and ornaments, they return naked to their forests, where a warm garment would certainly not be an object of embarrassment. To believe with Cardinal Massaia that they offer themselves voluntarily for vaccination, that they even ask it, is to ignore that even among ourselves, vaccination encounters a great number of adversaries. Does not Stanley relate that in his last journey, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in the camp, many of the porters, although they saw that the vaccinated Zanzibaris did not die, refused to submit to vaccination?
According to Tarde, the superstitious admiration, the enthusiastic veneration by barbarous peoples of various forms of insanity, often baptised as prophetism and saintliness, scarcely accords with the aversion for novelties, that is to say for singularities, which I attribute to them too liberally. But the cause of that admiration is nothing else than the fear, the ignorance which leads them to take a disease for the inspiration of a God. Nevertheless, I am far from denying the influence of madmen in philoneism and in revolutions (as we shall see in the sequel of this article); yet if we observe the Santons of Africa and their obscenities, we see that it is not for their useful and innovating ideas that barbarians venerate madmen.
The Academician will admire a new species of snail, he will thrill with joy at the discovery of a Phœnician inscription that will enable him to learn the name of a tribal chief, he will go into ecstasies before a greater curvity given to a screw, but he will excommunicate the telephone, the telegraph, the railway, the new laws of Darwin.
The artist, also, will love to trace a new arabesque, to change to blue the prevailing color of the rose, but he will never attempt, directly, with success, new methods. The hatred by all the elevated and academical classes which still besets Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert, the action brought against the last named, and the universal scandals raised by De Goncourt, Boito, Rossini, and Verdi, are there to prove it. The first, at least, who attempts a new method in painting, in literature, etc., will encounter only hatred and contempt. And when we smile at models unchangeably fixed by Egyptian art, we do not think that the Madonna and the Jesus of our painters have not changed for eighteen centuries.
Horace wrote:
"Adeo sanctum est vetus omne poema.
* * * * *
Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasseCompositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper."
It is then not true, as is objected against me in France (Journal des Economistes, 1890), that in extending misoneism to the academies, its greatest intensity is excluded from among the ignorant. Each class, each caste has a proportionate ignorance, and a repugnance equally proportional for that of which it is ignorant. We have demonstrated it for genius itself, which is sublime on certain sides only to be the lowest on some others, and we could have a proof of it even in the opposition that the most ardent neophiles, the anarchists, make to this theory of misoneism, of which they are thus themselves a confirmation.
Bismarck despises parliamentarianism, peace, arbitration, and even the Latin, or rather European, alphabet. Flaubert and Rossini had a dread of railways. The statesmen who govern Europe are not all geniuses, but they are men not destitute of intellectual culture; and yet how can it be explained that they so strive with ever increasing tenacity and zeal to increase armaments and armies, to the extent of causing ruin to their peoples,—a greater and more complete ruin perhaps, than that which even a disastrous war might occasion? And this for the purpose, they declare, (and it seems to be sincere,) of more surely escaping war, when as a fact one fourth of the money spent for that end would be sufficient to assure the happiness of the peoples governed by affording the social questions which they all pretend to have at heart, a solution which, as things now are, it is ever becoming more difficult to reach. The true cause is in the repugnance they experience to the idea of starting on a fresh path, in the tendency to adhere to old habits which go back even to the epochs of the warrior castes. Indeed in the minds of a very great number, at least among the Germans, a good corporal of the guard is more worthy of consideration than a great scholar; debate in parliament on the erection of a fortress is not permitted, however costly it may be, whilst every one may speak on the establishment of a school; in France, in Italy, and in Germany, to touch the war budget, unproductive and ruinous as it may be, is to raise the hand to the ark of the covenant,—a veritable state crime. But science is a new thing, while the art of war goes back to remotest antiquity; it descends from Achilles and from Cain.
I was not guilty of a self-contradiction when I said that the modern French love novelty as much as their ancestors did. I am too much the friend and too fond of the French to flatter them, and not to tell them exactly what I think. France is undeniably at the head of the Latin races, but to the same extent, and perhaps more than they, it prefers novelties to the new. It has always had the stormy agitations, rather than the useful results, of revolutions. The great religious reform, Protestantism, touched it without affecting it; the great constitutional reform has taken but slight root, and that two centuries and a half after it was accomplished in England.
Balzac wrote: "In France the provisional is eternal although the French are suspected of loving change."
Novelties to be accepted by the French must be such as do not interfere with their habits. And it is they who have invented the wordsroutine,blague, andchauvinism. It is because they are still in the military period of Spencer. So far as that goes, they have cried out beware! to the English, then, beware to the Russians, now beware to the Germans and the Italians. They change voluntarily their dress, their ministers, their external form of government, but always there remains in them at bottom a slight attachment to the ancient druidical and Cæsarian tendencies. It is not many years since the priest still commanded in Vendée. We have seen the French, while extreme republican, make war for the Pope.
After having a Fourier and Proudhon and, what is more, universal suffrage, they have not yet a social law which gives satisfaction to the just demands of the indigent, or of workingmen, beyond that of the "probi viri."
It is true that they have had their peasant wars—their Jacquerie—and '89; but these were explosions that aroused them but for a moment only to allow them afterwards to fall much lower. Indeed, but a few centuries after the Jacquerie, they saw the same peasants who had raised the insurrection, kiss the horses of the couriers who brought good news of the health of the king. And what a king! Louis XV, who might rather be called the executioner, than the administrator of his people. And after having driven away so many Cæsars, little was wanting to make them fall again under such a trumpery Cæsar as Boulanger if the highest classes of the capital had not been opposed to it.
Moreover certain particular facts, which portray much better their physiognomy, show how fundamentally conservative they are.
Let us cite for example the veneration exhibited by the high classes for the Academies and the passion for heraldic titles and decorations. "France is academic," wrote De Goncourt inManette Salomon.
Sarcey relates that during the siege of Paris, the flesh of the animals of the Jardin des Plantes, having been put up for sale, the common people preferred to suffer hunger rather than eat of it, so that the educated classes alone fed on it.
We know what resistance the French made, under a thousand pretexts, to the reform of their orthography, which is in part merely the relics of the old pronunciation.
Recently, an engineer at Bordeaux wrote to me, that, on his inventing machinery for the easy transference of merchandise from ships to the quays, sturdy opposition was met with on the part of the stevedores of the port, who would have been the first to derive great advantage from it.
The medical faculty at Paris has not only anathematised tartar emetic, vaccine, ether, and the antiseptic method, but also the physicians who substituted the use of horses for the ancient employment of mules to expedite their visits to their patients.[74]
[74]Revue Scientifique, 1889.
Is it not in learned Germany that we find Anti-semitism in fashion? And has not Russia made it a law of the state?
In certain districts of Sicily is not the ancient method still preserved of embalming and of painting the bodies of the dead which was practised among the ancient Egyptians?
A recent law-suit tried at Turin has proved that not only the lower classes, but also numbers of persons belonging to the higher classes protect themselves by practices that distinctly recall those of the sorcerers of antiquity. All this would prove that philoneism is rather the exception than the rule.
It is objected to my position, that nations and peoples are such lovers of change that they have always emigrated. But before making this affirmation, we ought to study the causes which impel them to emigration.
Day by day the peasants see their wages decrease; yet even then they do not remove from the land that they love more than themselves, and to which they are more closely bound than they ever were by feudal laws. When epidemics produced by the bad quality of cereals, as pellagra and acrodynia, when mortal diseases and the most cruel famine destroy them by thousands, then only, and even then not always, do they come to a determination; while for many years they keep before them the remembrance of their native soil, of that country, which, like a true stepmother, gave them only diseases and sufferings.
I have listened to poor emigrants say to me: "We have only to die! The life that we lead is certain death; and it is for this reason alone that we have determined to emigrate."
As to the invasions of the barbarians, only ill-informed minds can believe that it was the effect of a sudden movement, of a caprice hurrying away masses almost without a reason. On the contrary, all now admit (as was really mentioned in Tacitus, Bk. II., Chap. 2, of the Annals) that it was a very slow movement, already begun three centuries before Christ, and of which that of the Cimbri, who came from Jutland, was an episode. The crossing of the Baltic was an easy enterprise. The inhabitants of the coast had a sufficient number of vessels, and from Carlsroon to the nearest ports of Russia and of Pomerania was only a distance of thirty-four leagues.
If the tribes of Germans, Suevians, and Goths were repulsed from Italian soil, they had already taken a firm position on the soil of Gaul. Cæsar (De Bello Gallico) speaks of Ariovistus and the Suevians whom he met there as his most formidable enemies. They did not appear to him as forming an isolated body, detached from Germany; on the contrary, he relates that the Germans time and again forced their way into Gaul. Movements within continued, for even after Augustus we find that the Romans did not always encounter the same peoples in the same countries. This is affirmed by Procopius, Paulus Diaconus, and many others.
Let us recall here that already after the death of Nero, Civilis, who was in the service of Rome, led eight cohorts from his country into Gaul where he was defeated, but he was able to make an arrangement, thanks to which he could settle as an ally at a small distance from the borders which he had betrayed (Gibbon).
The Germans (a people composed of voluntary associations of soldiers, almost savages) being hunters rather than cultivators, were naturally obliged to change their residence; we know indeed with what rapidity the game was exhausted, which obliged those who live by it to overrun an immense extent of territory and continually to transfer their residence to other places; this is why emigration is in this case the result of the law of inertia, the people not knowing how to replace a precarious form of existence by one that is more stable. They had no towns, but real movable villages that could be compared to those of the Arabs of Africa. Like all nomad peoples and hunters, when the hope of a conquest shone before them, they abandoned their forests and, desiring to reach warmer regions, went from them with their wives and children to war. During long years their efforts were impotent, because until the time of Marcus Aurelius they were divided, precisely like the savages of America, into a great number (40) of small tribes, dispersed over an immense territory and enemies of one another; it was, consequently, the more easy to subdue them, the rather that not knowing the use of the breast-plate and but little that of iron and of cavalry, they found themselves powerless against the Roman legions, of whose tactics besides they were ignorant.
But when Rome, at the decadence, commenced to recruit its army with Germans, and when less vigilant in guarding the frontiers, she allowed German families, if not even tribes, to pass the same, she found herself in great part disarmed against an enemy who had already set foot against her, bearing her own weapons, and what is worse, who knew her treasures, her tactics, and her weaknesses. Under Tiberius even, it was known that the auxiliary soldiers constituted the principal force of the Roman armies (nihil validum in exercitibus nisi quod externum); at first equal in number to the legionary soldiers, they much exceeded them afterwards, when the citizens evaded military services, and when under Gallienus the Senators were forbidden to command the army. To all these causes can still be added secondary ones.
Before the historic invasion, emigration had taken place. "When," says Gibbon, "a cruel famine befell the Germans, they had no other resource than to send a third or a fourth part of their young men to seek their fortune elsewhere."
According to the national historians, emigration was due to the disproportion between the size of the population and the means of subsistence in the region where they dwelt (Paulus Diaconus): the Germans were very prolific. As they were not agriculturists, nothing bound them to the soil; pestilence or famine, a victory or a defeat, an oracle of the Gods, or the eloquence of a chief sufficed to attract them to the warmer countries of the south. Germany was then much colder than it is at present. (Gibbon.)
The necessity of fleeing from the domination of a victorious enemy forced the Huns towards the west; religious fanaticism drove the nomad Arabs towards the great Byzantine and Persian empires; religious terror urged the Cimbri and the Teutons to throw themselves on the Gauls and on Italy.[75] Often also the taste for wine and liquors led them to invade rich countries for these gifts of God.
[75]Revue des deux mondes.June 11, 1889. Berthollet.
According to a legend, doubted by some historians, but accepted by others, among them Cipolla, the descent of the Lombards into Italy appears to have been caused by the fact that some of their companions, after having served Narses, conveyed into their country some Italian fruits which excited their curiosity.
All this will suffice to explain the movement we are considering, which commenced slowly among the Northern peoples and afterwards became unrestrainable, and to show how the law of inertia was counteracted among them.
And it is necessary to remark that this need of movement thus begun, did not end with the conquest; but, obeying perfectly the law of inertia, according to which a movement being started it continues indefinitely if friction does not occur to arrest it, it was continued by the crusades, by the Norman invasion of Sicily, and by the epidemics of pilgrimage that may be regarded as the continuation of the movement towards the South, begun three centuries before Christ, and become a habit when even the necessity was no longer so great as at other times, and when it was even no longer urgent.
Here is still another cause of philoneism; the successive movements which grow out of those first started.
As the historians very well observe, Mahomet was a continuation of the Judaic Christian revolutionary initiative. "Mahomet was a Nazarene, a Judæo-Christian. Semitic monotheism regained its rights through him, and avenged itself for the mythological and polytheistic complications that Greek genius had introduced into the theology of the first disciples of Jesus." (Renan.) There is more of this in revolutions and still more in rebellions; progress, philoneism, following the law of accelerated movement and of the same law of inertia, once begun, blindly precipitates itself to opposite excesses, the very thing that causes its ruin. Thus Cromwell in a country almost feudal and ultra-monarchical reached, or rather was driven by his party, to regicide, and to the foundation of a democratic republic in which the peers were consigned to oblivion and his partisans (of the Barebones parliament) went so far as to wish to do away with lawyers and universities, to forbid dances, theatrical representations, and even Christmas festivities, to mutilate statues on behalf of decency, and to burn sacred pictures. (Macaulay.) This led to a reaction which under Charles II. reached absolute power by consent of parliament. In Christianity castration, and even the abolition of property was reached. We know the excesses of '89.
Passion explains many of these facts, which proceed even to insanity. St. Paul, from an enemy became an apostle of Christ. Clarendon after abandoning himself to despair at seeing his son go over from the service of James to that of William, became a rebel at the end of fifteen days. The parliament of James, ultra-monarchical as it was, rebelled. The conventional Baudot said: "There are men who have fever for twenty-four hours. I have had it for ten years." "In the days of terrible crises," wrote Valbert, "the law of cause and effect seems suspended, the work is accomplished in an hour. To ask revolution to be wise, is to ask the tempest to break nothing."[76]
[76]Valbert.Le centennaire de 1789.Paris, 1889.
"In every revolution," writes Renan, "the authors of it are absorbed and suppressed by those who succeed them. The first century of the Hegira saw the extermination of the relations and friends of Mahomet by those who pretended to confiscate for their own profit the revolution he had created. In the Franciscan movement the true friends of Saint François d'Assisi, were, after a generation, regarded as heretics and as dangerous men, and were led to the stake by hundreds."
An idea in the first days of creative activity proceeds with giant steps, and we can say, the movement once begun continues by virtue of the law of inertia always to increase; its originator falls behind, and becomes an obstacle to his own idea which persists in moving forward in spite of him. The Ebionites who gave to Christianity its first start became after a century a scandal to the church; their doctrine a blasphemy.[77]
[77] Renan.L'Eglise chrétienne.
It is this very tendency, caused by the arousing of passion, that makes all revolutions abortive, that causes them through their own excesses to be the authors of their own destruction, and which neutralises or much decreases the progress made by revolutions.
The gravest objection against misoneism constitutes, accordingly, the strongest proof of it. Like the plant, the animal, and the stone, man remains motionless, unless a disturbance of his state occurs through other forces, and through the law of inertia itself, which after having at first rendered him immovable afterwards drives him to opposite excess, but to replunge him anew into immobility.
The most potent cause is that of physical environment, change of climate. Next comes the crossing of one race with another, and it is to this we owe in great part the marvellous productions of Greek art that arose in Magna Grecia. Then, often, the influence of climate is active, to which is owing the transformation of the Jew; so persecutions, and the great calamities which races experience and which determine the selection of the strongest. And to this result contribute above all the impulses impressed by geniuses and by mattoids, who, as I have already pointed out in my work on "Genius" alone possess an intense love for the new, for the very reason that their organisation is different from that of other people. The intensity of individual violence and power here unbalances the tendency to immobility; but almost always—and I show it in the work referred to—when that intensity is not favored by circumstances, when it does not arise as the final synthesis of a general desire, a latent and universal necessity, but simply as a pathological phenomenon, it becomes again valueless, for the very reason that it is individual. It is owing to this that the efforts of a madman like Cola de Rienzi, and of such geniuses as Alexander, Napoleon, Pombal, and Peter the Great, result in nothing. To beneficent geniuses, as Bolivar, the Gracchi, etc., are attributed all the merit of revolutions which triumph because they were prepared long before by history and by circumstances, and which were only precipitated by them and summed up in them. It suffices to note that the genius of Garibaldi, of Cavour, and of Mazzini, has been able to give us nothing more than Italy as it now is, in order to comprehend that in spite of geniuses and, up to a certain point, in spite of circumstances the work of revolution is durable only when the circumstances that have commenced it persist, and men are profoundly modified by it.
However, the law of inertia always prevailing, (since primitive tendencies always concern it,) these changes are but very slow and, as we have seen, give place to easy relapses; they become fixed and swell to new movements only when the causes which provoke them continue and become more intense.
In fine, philoneism, progress, also sometimes triumphs—at least with the white race and frequently with the yellow races; but it is not the result of a sudden movement or of a natural human tendency, but the effect of external physical forces, whether social, historical or the like, which have caused the law of inertia to change its direction. It is therefore the slow result, we might say, of the small and sensible variations peculiar to men according to their condition, added to grander movements, as well as momentarily barren ones, of geniuses and forces, and to those more powerful ones of the physical and historical environment. Of the resulting product we see only the effects, because without the telescope of history and of sociology we do not perceive the slowness with which they have reached us, and the smallness of the efforts which contribute to it. It is thus that we do not imagine that the great Coral Islands can be the work of billions of small zo-ophytes accumulated the one on the other during thousands of years. The organic kingdom, like the social, is made up of the sum total of slow and small efforts.
The idea of the Christ and that of Buddha, the way for which had been prepared for several centuries by other geniuses less fortunate than they, miscarries among the people in which it was conceived, and becomes fruitful elsewhere. But dating from the epoch in which its votaries, nihilists of the reverse type, began to multiply and spread, in the lowest and least intelligent strata of society, employing as arms not violence but gentleness, more than three centuries elapsed before it was tolerated and officially recognised. For two hundred and fifty years the plebeians fought at Rome for their liberty. Yet they always heard the Senators say, "Your propositions are too novel." And liberty was granted by the one, and acquired by the others, only soon to be lost, first, in anarchy, then under the dictatorship, and then under the empire.
It is in this sense, that revolutions at the start can be the work of a small number, but they represent, they are the sign of a latent universal sentiment; this is why they grow in direct proportion to time (and time is very long) and gain partisans among their own adversaries. The apostles of Christ numbered only twelve, but a hundred and fifty years later, at Rome alone, there were in the catacombs 737 tombs of Christians; and Renan calculates that at the time of Commodus 35,000 Christians existed. We know that Saint Paul himself was one of the bitterest adversaries of the Christians.
The English revolution, up to the time Charles I. sought to cause the arrest of the four parliamentarians, was anti-republican, and strictly royalist even; but ultimately revolutionary ideas spread throughout all England, and the zealous but not blind partisans of the king were the first to turn against him after his excesses and his treasons.