Memoirs of a Superfluous Man
Chapter Sixteen
Quod amplius nos delect at, secundum id operemur necesse est.
—ST. AUGUSTINE.
The primary and sole foundation of virtue, or of the proper conduct of life, is to seek our own profit.
—BARUCH SPINOZA.
FROM what I have now written I think one may easily see how it came about that by the time I was in my early thirties I found myself settled in convictions which I suppose might be summed up as a philosophy of intelligent selfishness, intelligent egoism, intelligent hedonism. It may be seen also how subsequent observation and reflection confirmed me in this philosophy. With a squeeze here and a pull there, any of those terms, selfishness, egoism, hedonism, might be made to fit in a hand-me-down fashion; but I do not like them, because they connote something academic, elaborate, something which needs a great deal of explaining. My findings are too simple and commonplace for anything like that. If it were obligatory to put a label on them, I should say, with Goethe’s well-known remark in mind, that they amount merely to a philosophy of informed common sense. To know oneself as well as one can; to avoid self-deception and foster no illusions; to learn what one can about the plain natural truth of things, and make one’s valuations accordingly; to waste no time in speculating upon vain subtleties, upon “things which are not and work not”;—this perhaps is hardly the aim of an academic philosophy, but it is what a practical philosophy keeps steadily in view. Because the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius so consistently does keep just this in view, it still remains, and for those who can take it will probably always remain, the best of handbooks to the art of living.
The fundamental validity of egoism and hedonism seems to me indisputable, as it did not only to the Cyrenaics and to Epicurus, but to Christian moralists like Butler and Wilson among Protestants, to Spinoza among Jews, and to the mighty Augustine of Hippo among Catholics. But putting all such authority aside, I hold it to be a matter of invariable experience that no one can do anything for anybody. Somebody may profit by something you do, you may know that he profits and be glad of it, but you do not do it for him. You do it, as Augustine says you must do it, are bound to do it (necesse est is the strong term he uses), because you get more satisfaction, happiness, delight, out of doing it than you would get out of not doing it; and this is egoistic hedonism.
By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for “society.” When the great general movement towards collectivism set in, about the middle of the last century, “society,” rather than the individual, became the criterion of hedonists like Bentham, Hume, J. S. Mill. The greatest happiness of society was first to be considered, because in that the individual would find a condition conducive to his greatest happiness. Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found its way at once into everyone’s mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism’s principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it. It bred a numerous race of energumens, professional doers-of-good; and surrounding these were clusters of amateur votaries whose concern with improving society was almost professional in its intensity. When in the later ’nineties I first observed this fetichistic exaggeration of society’s claims against the individual I regarded it as transparent nonsense, as I still do. I also regarded the activities of its promoters as so ill-conceived and ill-advised as to be in the main pernicious, as the mere passage of time has now shown that they were.
In those days I noticed with amusement that some philosophers of “the social consciousness” had carried their speculations up into the higher realm of scholastic metaphysics. I could make nothing of Sir Leslie Stephen’s notion of a “social organism” but that society exists as an objective entity apart from the individuals who make it up. I had long known that the Church lays claim to that sort of unsubstantial existence, but I was never metaphysician enough to get a very clear idea of how this could be so. I should say that if a Church or “the Church” no longer had any members it would no longer have any existence; and I should say the same of society. Albertus Magnus and his great pupil Thomas would sniff at Sir Leslie Stephen’s “social organism” and the curious product, apparently ectoplasmic, which he calls a “social tissue,” and they would at once catch the fine old familiar fusty aroma of universals existing objectively.
For my part, although for the sake of convenience I use the term society freely enough, I am not sure but that a fairly plausible argument could be made out for the thesis that there is no such thing as society. I say this, however, with no intention of coming forward as a modern William of Ockham, to fight the nominalist-realist battle all over again. I merely observe that I have never been able to see “society” otherwise than as a concourse of very various individuals about which, as a whole, not many general statements can be safely made. The individual seems to be the fundamental thing; all the character society has is what the prevailing character of the individuals in its environment gives it. If they mostly work in factories, you have an industrial society; if they are mostly civilised, you have a civilised society; if they mostly drink too much, you have a drunken society; and so on. A tendency to disallow and disregard the individual’s claims against society, and progressively to magnify and multiply society’s claims against the individual, seems to me fatuous in its lack of logic. I have regularly had occasion to notice that grandiose schemes for improving society-at-large always end in failure, and I have not wondered at it because it is simply not in the nature of things that society can be improved in that way.
I have known many persons, some quite intimately, who thought it was their duty to take “the social point of view” on mankind’s many doings and misdoings, and to support various proposals, mainly political, for the mass-improvement of society. One of them is a friend of long standing who has done distinguished service of this kind throughout a lifetime, and is directly responsible for the promulgation of more calamitous and coercive “social legislation” than one could shake a stick at. In a conversation with me not many months ago, this friend said mournfully, “My experience has cured me of one thing. I am cured of believing that society can ever be improved through political action. After this, I shall ‘cultivate my garden.’”
Il faut cultiver notre jardin. With these words Voltaire ends his treatise called Candide, which in its few pages assays more solid worth, more informed common sense, than the entire bulk of nineteenth-century hedonist literature can show. To my mind, those few concluding words sum up the whole social responsibility of man. The only thing that the psychically-human being can do to improve society is to present society with one improved unit. In a word, ages of experience testify that the only way society can be improved is by the individualist method which Jesus apparently regarded as the only one whereby the Kingdom of Heaven can be established as a going concern; that is, the method of each one doing his very best to improve one.
In practice, however, this method is extremely difficult; there can be no question about that, for experience will prove it so. It is also clear that very few among mankind have either the force of intellect to manage this method intelligently, or the force of character to apply it constantly. Hence if one “regards mankind as being what they are,” the chances seem to be that the deceptively easier way will continue to prevail among them throughout an indefinitely long future. It is easy to prescribe improvement for others; it is easy to organise something, to institutionalise this-or-that, to pass laws, multiply bureaucratic agencies, form pressure-groups, start revolutions, change forms of government, tinker at political theory. The fact that these expedients have been tried unsuccessfully in every conceivable combination for six thousand years has not noticeably impaired a credulous unintelligent willingness to keep on trying them again and again. This being so, it seems highly probable that the hope for any significant improvement of society must be postponed, if not forever, at any rate to a future so far distant that consideration of it at the present time would be sheer idleness.
Admittedly, mankind have never shown themselves capable of devising a sound and stable collective life for themselves, or one that exhibited any actual advance of civilisation beyond the point reached by other attempts which have preceded it. As evidence of this, the collective life established in Crete has always seemed to me the most completely conclusive in history. Its conditions were unique; no such combination of favorable circumstances is known to have existed anywhere. The salient circumstance was that continuously for one thousand years, from 2500 to 1500 B.C., the Cretans lived not only free from attack by outsiders, but also free from fear of it. They traded all around the eastern Mediterranean, and there is every indication that those thousand years were a period of unexampled peace and prosperity. They built up an elaborate apparatus of civilisation perfectly suited to all their needs and fancies, singularly modern in matters of convenience and comfort, such as drainage, household water-supply, plumbing, bathtubs. The arts flourished vigorously. One would say that if ever a people had the chance to demonstrate that society is indefinitely improvable, the Cretans had it. Everything was in their favour; climate, resources, wealth, commerce and, above all, peace and immunity from interference. Moreover, a thousand years of this is a good long time, quite long enough to show some detectable results. Apparently, however, the improvement of Minoan society went static at a point not much ahead, if any, of the point where ours stopped. As with us, so evidently with the Cretans, cleverness and sagacity did wonders in developing the mechanics of civilisation, but the intelligence and wisdom requisite for developing civilisation itself were simply not there.
I can make nothing of it but that in the attempt to stabilise anything more highly differentiated than the primitive patriarchal form of society, mankind are attempting something which is quite beyond their powers. Not too often has the mass-man made any conspicuous success even with the patriarchal form. Really, when one thinks of it, what a preposterous thing it is to put the management of a nation, a province, even a village, in the hands of a man who can not so much as manage a family! Friar John of the Funnels uttered golden speech when he asked how he could be expected to govern an abbey, seeing that he was not able to govern himself Absurdum quippe est ut alios regat qui seipsum regere nescit was a good legal maxim in the Middle Ages, and it remains forever as a maxim of sterling common sense.
So seeing, with Goethe, no present prospect that mankind will become happier, wiser or better than they now are, or than they were in their highly-privileged circumstances on the island of Crete five thousand years ago, I see as little prospect that their collective life will show the marks of a civilised society any more clearly than did the Minoan collective life of 2000 B.C. To the calm and profound thought of Marcus Aurelius this reflection seems to have been always present. The things to come, he says, will certainly be of like form with the things of the past, “and it is not possible that they should deviate from the order of the things which take place now. Accordingly, to have contemplated mankind’s life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years; for what more wilt thou see?” Henry Adams ends his autobiography with a moving remembrance of two lifelong friends. Perhaps, he says, the three may be allowed to return to earth for a holiday and look things over, say in 1938, their centenary year; “and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.” No such world awaited them in 1938, as we can testify
II
In former days when I believed in the doctrine of the Enlightenment, that evolution is strictly progressive and that Homo sapiens and his society are indefinitely improvable, my “contemplation of mankind’s life for forty years” was on the whole a rather puzzling business, but by no means discouraging. True, the stretch of history from Sumer and Akkad down to 1850 did present a pertinacious sameness. But then had come the great period of Naturforschung, the progress of discovery and invention, which would surely speed up the evolutionary process. It made such swift, spectacular and salutary changes on the surface of life that beyond doubt it must effect some corresponding changes, slight as they might be, in life’s essential quality, in the essential quality of Homo sapiens himself. No such changes, however, became discernible, nor the symptoms of any. Still, I thought, the span of six thousand years is but a moment in the evolutionary course; one must be patient and content. But while I was sustaining myself with thoughts of what mankind and their society would be like at the end of sixteen thousand years of progressive evolution, the observations of de Vries and others made it clear that the Darwinian formula must undergo a far more drastic amendment than Weismann had suggested; that evolution is by no means necessarily and invariably progressive; that it may on occasion be catastrophic, and its course quite unpredictable. Then archaeology produced unassailable evidence of an order of civilisation prevailing thousands of years ago in Crete, Egypt and Mesopotamia, which was in no respect inferior to our own, and in some respects almost certainly higher; and thus the whole foundation of the overwhelming determinist optimism which pervaded the Western world at the turn of the century was blown to pieces.
I have already spoken of the uneasy premonition that this huge structure of optimism was about to collapse, and of the tone of resentful disappointment, discouragement, despondency, which appears in the literature of the period. Many gifted minds felt that the Enlightenment was a mere mirage, and its grandiose promises were only so much sweetened wind. Some, like Henry Adams, surveyed the life of mankind with gentle and amiable resignation; some, like Tourgueniev, with a profound and noble grief; some, like de Maupassant, with bitter dejection; some, like Flaubert, with almost frantic disgust. I could not share this despondency, though I was as puzzled as any one. Sometimes during the war of 1914 I suspected that I might be too insensitive, too much a creature of the moment, to get myself into the frame of mind of these great men, though actually I knew well enough that this was not so. There seemed, as a matter of common sense, something clearly wrong with the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment, but I did not know what it was, and the fact itself, if it were a fact, did not seem to call for such acute distress. Later on, Mr. Cram’s brilliant thesis showed me plainly what was wrong, and all my puzzlement evaporated. In a passage of eloquent prose de Maupassant, whose conclusion runs curiously close to Mr. Cram’s, turns his back on Condorcet and Rousseau with this sentence:
Ah, yes, we shall ever continue to be borne down by the old and odious customs, the criminal prejudices, the ferocious ideas, of our barbarous forefathers, for we are but animals and we shall remain animals, led only by the instincts that nothing will ever change.
If this be so, I thought, mankind are unquestionably living up to the measure of their psychical capacities, they are doing the best they can. Why, then, should their collective life provoke disappointment, distress, despondency, on the part of those who contemplate it “as from a height,” as Plato says it should be contemplated? I saw no reason why it should do so.
Every day I divert myself with watching, outside my window, a concourse of chickadees, woodpeckers, tree-sparrows, nuthatches and other small birds, feeding on grain, seeds and suet which the household puts out for them. They had lost no time in discovering that they could satisfy their needs and desires with less exertion by exploiting the household than by scratching up a living for themselves; hence they are always promptly on hand. Presently two jays appear, imperialist freebooters whom I have named respectively Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes. They consider the situation, then fly off and report to a lurking band of jay-profiteers who descend in a body, disperse the original exploiters, and “take over.”
This scene would disappoint no one, distress no one, because that is the way birds are, and everybody knows it, and knows also that nothing can be done about it. They are living up to the measure of their psychical capacities; they are doing quite the best they can. There is an interest and even a certain kind of beauty, in the faithfulness with which they fulfil the majestic and terrible law of exploitation, Epstean’s law, and there is beauty also in the little nefarious tricks and stratagems incident to its fulfilment. One is led to reflect deeply on the enormous scope, the innumerable ramifications and implications of this law which operates as inflexibly in the lowest range of animate nature as in the highest; and there is great profit in these reflections.
So one feels no distress or despondency at the sight of like behaviour on the part of psychical anthropoids, as when imperialist jobholders resorted to war for political purposes in 1898 and 1914, or as when in 1900 British exploiters evicted and took over from Dutch exploiters who, in their turn, had evicted and taken over from Kafirs; or again as when in 1918 British exploiters took over from German exploiters in Africa. During the war of 1914 I regarded the movements of both sides with singular indifference, sometimes scarcely knowing which was which. My little dialogue with Brand Whitlock in Brussels, which I have mentioned somewhere back in these pages shows that my reaction to the situation, although at that time almost purely instinctive, was sound. That is the way people are. The war was detestable enough, but the anthropoid jobholders who engineered it and the masses whom they coerced and exploited were doing the best that the limitations of their nature admitted of their doing, and one could expect no more than that. There was even a certain grave beauty, such as one observes in a battle of snakes or sharks, in the machinations which they contrived in order to fulfil the law of their being. One regarded these creatures with abhorrence, yes; sometimes with boredom and annoyance, yes; but with despondency and disappointment, no.
III
Like the general run of American children, I grew up under the impression that mankind have an innate and deep-seated love of liberty. This was never taught me as an article of faith, but in one way and another, mostly from pseudo-patriotic books and songs, children picked up a vague notion that “the priceless boon of liberty” is really a very fine thing, that mankind love it and are jealous of it to the point of raising Cain if it be denied them; also that America makes a great speciality of liberty and is truly the land of the free. I first became uncertain about these tenets through reading ancient accounts of the great libertarian wars of history, and discovering that there were other and more substantial causes behind those wars and that actually the innate love of liberty did not have much to do with them. This caused me to carry on my observations upon matters nearer at hand, and my doubts were confirmed. If mankind really have an unquenchable love for freedom, I thought it strange that I saw so little evidence of it; and as a matter of fact, from that day to this I have seen none worth noticing. One is bound to wonder why it is, since people usually set some value on what they love, that among those who are presumed to be so fond of freedom the possession of it is so little appreciated. Taking the great cardinal example lying nearest at hand, the American people once had their liberties; they had them all; but apparently they could not rest o’nights until they had turned them over to a prehensile crew of professional politicians.
So my belief in these tenets gradually slipped away from me. I can not say just when I lost it, for the course of its disappearance was not marked by any events. It vanished more than thirty years ago, however, for I have consciously kept an eye on the matter for that length of time. What interested me especially is that during this period I have discovered scarcely a corporal’s guard of persons who had any conception whatever of liberty as a principle, let alone caring for any specific vindications of it as such. On the other hand, I have met many who were very eloquent about liberty as affecting some matter of special interest to them, but who were authoritarian as the College of Cardinals on other matters. Prohibition brought out myriads of such; so did the various agitations about censorship, free speech, minority-rights of Negroes, Jews, Indians; and among all whom I questioned I did not find a baker’s dozen who were capable of perceiving any inconsistency in their attitude.
According to my observations, mankind are among the most easily tamable and domesticable of all creatures in the animal world. They are readily reducible to submission, so readily conditionable (to coin a word) as to exhibit an almost incredibly enduring patience under restraint and oppression of the most flagrant character. So far are they from displaying any overweening love of freedom that they show a singular contentment with a condition of servitorship, often showing a curious canine pride in it, and again often simply unaware that they are existing in that condition. Byron, one of the world’s greatest natural forces in poetry, had virtually no reflective power, but in the last lines of his poem on Bonnivard, who “regained his freedom with a sigh,” he displays a flash of insight almost worthy of Sophocles, into mankind’s easy susceptibility to conditioning.1
I do not know the origin of this idea that mankind loves liberty above all things, but the American revolution of 1776 and the French revolution of 1789 apparently did most to give it currency. Since then it has done yeoman’s service to an unbroken succession of knaves intent on exploiting the name and appearance of freedom before mankind, while depriving them of the reality. Such is the immense irony of history. The goddess of liberty, as she lay in the arms of de Noailles and Lafayette, was a beautiful and alluring figure; but after she had been passed on to the arms of Mirabeau, then handed on to the embraces of Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, Barras, Carrier, and finally Bonaparte, she was left in an extremely raddled and shopworn condition. “Good old revolution!” said one of my friends in a meditative mood, during the stormy times of 1936 in Paris. “Liberté, Égalité, Défense d’uriner. They still keep the fine old motto posted up, I see, but it doesn’t seem to mean much more now than it did when Robespierre was running things.”
I might have witnessed some of the revolutions which occurred in my time, but having a pretty clear notion of what they would come to, I paid little attention to them. Like Ibsen and Henry George, I have little respect for political revolutions, for I never knew of one which in the long-run did not cost more than it came to. Beheading a Louis XVI to make way for a Napoleon seems an unbusinesslike venture, to say the least of it. Passing from the tyranny of Charles I to the tyranny of Cromwell is like taking a turn in a revolving door; the exertion merely puts you back where you started. If every jobholder in Washington were driven into the Potomac tonight, their places would be taken tomorrow by others precisely like them. Nor have I any more respect for what the Duke of Wellingtoncalled “a revolution by due course of law” than I have for one of the terrorist type. In this country, for example, unseating predatory and scampish Republicans to give place for predatory and scampish Democrats, and vice versa, has long proved itself not worth the trouble of holding an election. I have also been extremely cautious about taking revolutionary “ideologies” at anything like their face value. I have found that the façade of ideology counts for little; it is the too, too solid flesh of the human material behind it that really counts. A very able Frenchman of the eighteen-thirties, one who wanted nothing and who steadfastly refused to enter public life, said, “Political opinion in France is based on the fact that the louis d’or is worth seven times as much as the three-franc écu.” To the best of my observation, this is the only kind of “ideology” to which political opinion, revolutionary or otherwise, has been answerable in any country. Furthermore, my sense of this has made me always look very closely at the instigators, promoters and fautors of revolutionary activity. In this I have taken pattern by an Englishman who witnessed the French revolution of 1848, and left this record:
From that day forth I have never dipped into any history of modern France, professing to deal with the political causes and effects of the various upheavals during the nineteenth century in France. They may be worth reading; I do not say that they are not. I have preferred to look at the men who instigated those disorders, and have come to the conclusion that had each of them been born with five or ten thousand a year, their names would have been absolutely wanting in connexion with them. This does not mean that the disorders would not have taken place, but they would have always been led by men in want of five or ten thousand a year. On the other hand, if the d’Orléans family had been less wealthy than they are, there would have been no firmly-settled Third Republic; if Louis-Napoléon had been less poor, there would in all probability have been no Second Empire; if the latter had lasted another year, we should have found Gambetta among the ministers of Napoleon III, just like Emile Ollivier.
So much, then, for the binding force of “ideologies.” The one phenomenon which interested me in this connexion has been a general revival of the practice which the Roman State employed when it was on its last legs, of quieting discontent by a palliative system of bribery and subsidy in the form of doles, pensions, “relief” and the like. As Mr. G. B. Shaw said scornfully, “You can buy off any revolution for thirty bob.” For obvious reasons these measures mark a long step forward in a society’s “course of rebarbarisation,” and are in fact rather desperate; their end is so plainly visible from their beginning. Dumas turned a neat phrase when he said that Necker, who had been called back to the Treasury after the fall of the Bastille, was “trying to organise prosperity by generalising poverty.” That is what such measures plainly amount to, and it is all they amount to.
IV
It would seem to be in the order of nature that the history of mankind’s efforts to stabilise a collective life should be the same hereafter as it has been in the past, a history of repetitions following a singularly exact pattern. Out of a period of anarchy and dissolution mankind have come together in the production of something which for lack of a better word may be called a culture, frail and tottering at the outset, but becoming gradually stronger, and describing an upward curve in power and importance. As it rises, the forces of Epstean’s law, Gresham’s law and the law of diminishing returns act upon it with progressively increasing energy, and when it has reached a certain height the combined play of these forces drives it down again into another period of anarchy and dissolution. There has been a curious periodicity observable in this performance; the rise and fall of these cultures has been a matter, roughly, of five hundred years each.
Hence history is on the side of those observers who see Western culture as standing today where Roman culture stood at the end of the fourth century; standing, that is, at the verge of extinction. Seven years ago I ventured a prediction with special reference to the impending fate of American culture, but a minori ad majus my findings, as it now appears, were equally applicable to the whole body of Western culture:
What we and our more nearly immediate descendants shall see is a steady progress in collectivism running off into a military despotism of a severe type. Closer centralisation; a steadily-growing bureaucracy; State power and faith in State power increasing, social power and faith in social power diminishing; the State absorbing a continually larger proportion of the national income; production languishing; the State in consequence taking over one “essential industry” after another, managing them with ever-increasing corruption, inefficiency and prodigality, and finally resorting to a system of forced labour. Then at some point in this progress a collision of State interests, at least as general and as violent as that which occurred in 1914, will result in an industrial and financial dislocation too severe for the asthenic social structure to bear; and from this the State will be left to “the rusty death of machinery” and the casual anonymous forces of dissolution will be supreme.
Seven years ago this forecast was regarded as utterly fanciful and preposterous. I doubt that the most inveterate optimist can so regard it now.
With regard to the régime of collectivism which under one-and-another trade-name has fastened itself firmly upon Western society, I can view it only as a logical and necessary step in a general “course of rebarbarisation.” Spencer speaks of society’s evolutionary progress from the militant type, which is purely collectivist, to the industrial type, which is marked by less and less of State interference with the individual. The collectivism of today is plainly a reversion from the industrial or semi-industrial to the militant type, and is therefore quite what one would expect to see coming forth at this stage of a society’s rebarbarisation.
Considering mankind’s indifference to freedom, their easy gullibility and their facile response to conditioning, one might very plausibly argue that collectivism is the political mode best suited to their disposition and their capacities. Under its régime the citizen, like the soldier, is relieved of the burden of initiative and is divested of all responsibility, save for doing as he is told. He takes what is allotted to him, obeys orders, and beyond that he has no care. Perhaps, then, this is as much as the vast psychically-anthropoid majority are up to, and a status of permanent irresponsibility under collectivism would be most congenial and satisfactory to them.
Given a just and generous administration of collectivism this might very well be so; but even on that extremely large and dubious presumption the matter is academic, because of all political modes a just and generous collectivism is in its nature the most impermanent. Each new activity or function that the State assumes means an enlargement of officialdom, an augmentation of bureaucracy. In other words, it opens one more path of least resistance to incompetent, unscrupulous and inferior persons whom Epstean’s law has always at hand, intent only on satisfying their needs and desires with the least possible exertion. Obviously the collectivist State, with its assumption of universal control and regulation, opens more of these paths than any other political mode; there is virtually no end of them. Hence, however just and generous an administration of collectivism may be at the outset, and however fair its prospects may then be, it is immediately set upon and honeycombed by hordes of the most venal and untrustworthy persons that Epstean’s law can rake together; and in virtually no time every one of the régime’s innumerable bureaux and departments is rotted to the core. In 1821, with truly remarkable foresight, Mr. Jefferson wrote in a letter to Macon that “our Government is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation first [i.e., centralisation] and then corruption, its necessary consequence.”
The idea of a self-limiting or temporary collectivism impresses me as too absurd to be seriously discussed. As long as Newton’s law remains in force, no one can fall out of a forty-storey window and stop at the twentieth storey. So, as long as Epstean’s law remains in force there can be no such thing as a ten-per-cent collectivist State for any length of time. One might just as sensibly speak of a ten-per-cent mammalian pregnancy.
It seems quite pointless to speculate upon what may succeed the present period of disintegration and dissolution, for whatever it may be, those who are now living will not see it, nor yet will their grandchildren. So much seems fairly certain, since the duration of these periods has hitherto run roughly to something like two hundred years; and therefore if we set the beginning of our period at 1870, we might say that only about one-third of its term has expired. Many observers, relying on history, expect it to be followed by another renaissance, another rise and fall, fulfilling the regular five-hundred-year cycle, and running out into another term of dissolution. This seems reasonable, but the matter is too far off to make any conjecture about its details worth while. I think it is much more profitable to spend one’s energy on the effort to get a measure of the period in which we actually are living, and be content to let the future bring forth what it may.
Henry Adams, relying on the validity of Carnot’s principle, appears to have thought that the rise and dissolution of societies would go on indefinitely, pretty much on the pattern which they have hitherto followed, until the equilibrium of physical forces should be established at absolute zero, in the silence and inanition of universal death. The later findings of physicists, however, suggest that Carnot’s law needs a radical overhauling, and that the conclusions which Adams drew from it are open to doubt. But aside from this, one can not safely predict even so much as that the periodic ups and downs of mankind’s sociopolitical agglomerations will continue indefinitely, because one never knows what nature is going to do. To the best of our knowledge nature abruptly shut down on production of the great saurians, and replaced them as abruptly with mammals. By analogy it would be perfectly competent for nature, if and when she were so disposed, to shut down abruptly on production of the neolithic psychically-anthropoid variety of Homo sapiens, which now exists in an overwhelming majority, and replace it with the psychically-human variety, which now exists only sporadically. This seems highly improbable as matters stand at present; but so, presumably, did the fate of the saurians. All one can say is that such a feat is not impossible with nature; it could happen; and if it did happen, the one sure thing is that the subsequent history of mankind and mankind’s institutions would be entirely different from what it had been in the past.
V
If there were any credit due me for the conduct of an extraordinarily happy and satisfying life, I should feel diffident about speaking of it; but there is none. The foregoing pages will show, I believe, that all I have done towards the achievement of a happy life has been to follow my nose. I can say with Marcus Aurelius in that best of all autobiographies, the first book of the Meditations, that “to the gods I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen and friends, nearly everything good.” With him I can also say that whatever unhappiness I have had was “through my own fault, and through not observing the admonitions of the gods and, I may almost say, their direct instructions.” I learned early with Thoreau that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone; and in view of this I have always considered myself extremely well-to-do. All I ever asked of life was the freedom to think and say exactly what I pleased, when I pleased, and as I pleased. I have always had that freedom, with an immense amount of uncovenanted lagniappe thrown in; and having had it, I always felt I could well afford to let all else alone. It is true that one can never get something for nothing; it is true that in a society like ours one who takes the course which I have taken must reconcile himself to the status of a superfluous man; but the price seems to me by no means exorbitant and I have paid it gladly, without a shadow of doubt that I was getting all the best of the bargain.
One evening when Amos Pinchot and I were at dinner in the Players’ Club, we heard the news of a very dear friend and fellow-member’s death. We talked of him a long time, feeling that the club would never be quite the same to us without him, nor would life itself be quite the same. “Yes, we shall miss him,” Amos said, finally, “but just think of the crowd that is going to be down at the railway-station when our train pulls in!” I thought this whimsical turn of phrase was an unusually charming expression of the great hope that has beset mankind for uncounted generations. Socrates, standing before his judges, told them with simple eloquence of the fine time he was going to have when he could talk things over with Minos, Rhadamanthus, Triptolemus and the heroes of Troy; and how happy he would be to go on looking into the order of nature and searching for the plain natural truth of things, in company with the great philosophers who had preceded him. He made it clear that he thought very little of the life he was leaving by comparison with the life that awaited him; and so when Crito asked him how he wished to be buried, he said, “Bury me any way you like, if you can catch me.” Then, laughing, he turned to Simmias and the others, and said it seemed he could never quite get it through Crito’s head that the dead body which remained would not be Socrates at all, and that the real Socrates would still be keeping on at his old line of trade, the same as ever, but under circumstances vastly more favourable.
The same dream and desire, the same hope and expectation, appear throughout the history of mankind. Cicero, the Macaulay of Roman letters, always a great rhetorician, but also, like Macaulay, probably as honest a rhetorician as he knew how to be, voices this expectation in the noble periods which he puts in the mouth of the elder Cato: “Oh, what a glorious day it will be when I can set forth to that association and companionship of godlike minds, and take leave of this crowded filthy rout and rabble!” Probably not many of us but have at one time or another indulged some such fancy. My own mind has dwelt on eschatological matters as little and as casually as any one’s, perhaps, but sometimes I have thought what a wonderful treat it would be, for instance, to pass the time of day with Rabelais and his incomparable Scots translator Sir Thomas Urquhart, as they stroll arm-in-arm through the Elysian fields to forgather with Lucian, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Cervantes and such other kindred spirits as might be happening along. Or again, to move in that galaxy of great Frenchmen who ushered the nineteenth century out into the dies tenebrarum atque caliginis which is the twentieth century. Or again, to refresh myself with the keen, well-bred, sceptical and humorous wisdom of the race of gentlefolk from whom, however unworthily, I had my earthly being. Or again, to fraternise once more with other rare souls whose acquaintance graced my passage through this life; most of them in rather humble station, superfluous persons, entire strangers to the tenets of economism, content that the sublime and exquisite quality of their lives should pass unnoticed and unpraised of men.
It is always one’s privilege to entertain dreams and desires of this order, no doubt, but when they transform themselves into anything like definite hope and expectation one must ask oneself how far they can be justified. To this there is but one answer: Not at all. The persistence or extinction of consciousness, the survival or extinction of personality, is purely a matter of evidence, and there is no available evidence tending either one way or the other. “What is there in the realms below?” cries Callimachus at the tomb of Charidas,—and the mournful answer comes, “Great darkness!”2 The mystery of consciousness has never been penetrated. Huxley and Romanes long ago observed that the transition from the physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Consciousness which, as Huxley said, is neither matter nor force nor any conceivable modification of either, is perceived by us to exist only in association with that which has the properties of matter and force. Whether or not it must always so exist, we do not know. If one says it can and does exist independently or in some other mode of association, we can only ask what evidence he has that this is so; and if one says it can not, we must ask the same question. I know of no valid ground for any a priori conclusion; the matter is entirely one of evidence, and since (fortunately for us, I think) there is not a shred of evidence available, one’s only refuge is on the safe ground of agnosticism. If evidence were ever discovered that Socrates was right,—that it is in the order of nature for those like himself who are eminent in the practice of the psychically-human life to overlive physical death,—the discovery would not surprise me. I might even go so far as to say that such a provision of nature would seem to me most agreeable to what little I know or can know of her august economy. But evidence either for or against any such provision of nature is wholly lacking, and therefore no one of intellectual integrity can say more than this that I have said.
Probably a good many, as age advances, have tried to settle with themselves whether or not they would choose to live their lives over again if they had the offer of it. The two old ex-Presidents, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, raised this question in the correspondence which they carried on after their public career had closed; one of the few truly great correspondences in literary history, and one which the deadly force of Gresham’s law has now made virtually inaccessible. Mr. Jefferson had no doubts. “You ask,” he wrote his old friend, “if I would agree to live my seventy, or rather seventy-three, years over again? To which I say, yea.” His experience of life had been so pleasurable, interesting and in all ways desirable, as to make it well worth repeating. John Adams did not see it quite that way. At eighty he was hale and alert, making his short legs carry him three or four miles a day, his mind and memory were good as ever, and he was willing to acknowledge that he had never known a day which had not brought him more pleasure than pain. He was not tired of life by any means, but as for going over it all again, he thought once was enough.
Enough is precisely the right word. One might agree that life has far more joy than sorrow, as my life has had,—immeasurably more,—and yet might feel, as Adams did, that even of the best of things one can have enough. I remember as a child congratulating an old relative on her seventy-third birthday, and wishing her many happy returns. She said, “Oh, don’t wish me anything like that; I have lived long enough.” Perhaps one’s decision is shaped largely by temperament; perhaps some incline to the ne quid nimis more readily than others. When I was five or six years old my father’s oldest brother who was visiting us, a rich man for those days, offered me a silver quarter. I thanked him with due formality, and he said gruffly, “Polite fellow, anyway,—I’ll have to give you another one for that.” I thanked him as before, and he gave me another and still a fourth, at which I drew back, and said, “No, thank you, I’ve had enough.” My uncle made no comment on this, but some time afterwards when I noticed that he seemed to be considering me attentively, he said to my mother, “Can’t make the chap out. Only person I ever saw that knew when he had enough money.” The turn of my temperament may have been stiffened later on when I was pumped full of Aristotle’s far-famed formula of virtue and the philosophical excellence of the μηδὲν ἄγαν but apparently the original turn of temperament was there, for to the best of my recollection I was never taught to be moderate in my desires, and can only suppose that some instinct, helped out by the absence of any serious temptations to be otherwise, put me in the way of it.
So while one must be unspeakably thankful for all the joys of existence, there comes a time when one feels that one has had enough. However happily one has “warmed both hands before the fire of life,” however much may remain that is greatly worth seeing and hearing, one gradually slips into a state of grateful certainty that one has seen and heard enough. For a while there survives a pleasurable interest, as Flaubert says, in “watching life grow up over one’s head, like the grass,”—in seeing how certain habits of mind, modes of thought, sets of principles, by which one’s own life has been rigorously guided, have now become for others a mere matter of history, unregarded and for the most part unknown. But this interest is slight and fitful, and does not last; and one finds oneself, like the two old ex-Presidents, surveying the scene of contemporary activity with profound detachment.
Nevertheless normally, as in the case of these superb old men, this is far from degenerating into a culpable taedium vitae. I remember once lately discussing with a friend the instance of some one we knew who had become bored with existence and had taken his own way out of it. I said I could not object to suicide on the ethical or religious grounds ordinarily alleged, and I saw nothing but uncommonly far-fetched absurdity in Rousseau’s plea that suicide is a robbery committed against society. My invincible objection to suicide is, if I may put it so, that it seems to me so distinctly one of the things that a person just does not do. An instance of the kind we were discussing always sets up a certain sharp disappointment, a sense of failure, of inability, as our slang goes, to take it on the chin;—in all, it gives rise to a regretful sense that the victim was not quite the man we thought he was. In my view, the only justification for suicide is consideration for others. If for any reason one becomes a permanent burden on others, greater than they can well bear, or should be called upon to bear, I would applaud his following the example of the learned Euphrates, whom Pliny speaks of so highly, and taking himself out of their way.
With regard to the dread of death, one has one’s worry for nothing when death comes in the course of nature, for the dread evaporates in face of the event. Indeed, in any case one has one’s worry for nothing, as every person who studiously contemplates the order of nature is well aware. Marcus Aurelius reminds himself that “he who fears death either fears the loss of sensation or a different kind of sensation. But if thou shalt have no sensation, neither wilt thou feel any harm; and if thou shalt acquire another kind of sensation, thou wilt be a different kind of living being, and thou wilt not cease to live.” This is all one can know, doubtless, but it is also all one needs to know.
- 1It should be unnecessary to say that this susceptibility exists only in respect of faculties which they possess. It is the error of those who are dazzled by illusive schemes for the mass-improvement of society to imagine that it exists in respect of faculties which they do not possess.
- 2Palatine Anthology, vii, 524.
