We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary, degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites1 and failures and abortions2. And all these blunders of our great mother struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently3 as normal creatures, and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is just as fatuous4 and just as dangerous as blind pessimism5, and if we propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.
"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You are driven in your choice by two facts—first, that you have to choose, regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery6. The interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity8 forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts. Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature9 death; it is not merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring10; it is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the lightning and the cyclone11, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet and the rising of the sun.
We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the standards by which we may know excellence12 in life, and distinguish it from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.
We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us. This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways, and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the stages on the way to man?
First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert13 matter. We call it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it consists of infinite numbers of molecules14 vibrating with speed which we can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans, because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a mountain or an ocean.
Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade this life, we do so according to its sentience—that is to say, the amount and intensity15 of the consciousness which grows in it. We are interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm16 everywhere throughout nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and beget17 themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the consciousness we detect in some complex organism like a fish or bird. We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence, and we esteem18 the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of it they possess. We reject mere7 physical bigness and mere strength. Joyce Kilmer may write:
"Poems are made by men like me,
But only God can make a tree"—
And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:
"It is not growing like a tree
In bulk doth make man better be."
If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus19 and the elephant, we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous20 ones. We love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we can teach him to react to human stimuli21. Of all animals we are fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and displays the keenest intelligence.
Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know that I have the power to exterminate22 these creatures, or to pen them in cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly23 driven to conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can make as to the path of wisdom—that is, of intelligence!
When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was physical strength which dominated the horde24; but nowadays, except in the imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a figure. We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter25 antagonist26 who can keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can duck and dodge27 and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily armored knights28, or the quick-moving, light vessels29 of Britain overcoming the huge galleons30 of Spain. And as society develops and becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, C?sar and Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many of their followers31. They led, because they were men of energy and cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.
Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded32, whose doings are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really stand in awe34 of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed, and the shaping of our society is in their hands.
And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties35 in man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence36, succeeds in monopolizing37 some material necessity of human life. "Poets," says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.
What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness; the developing of ability to apprehend38 a wider and wider circle of existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words, it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.
Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who monopolize39 the material things of the world and their control are necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background. It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely labors40 for the truth does so for the universal benefit.
There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy41 or greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some mark of self-consecration and humility42; as, for example, when Newton tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little child gathering43 sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.
There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect, feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty44 predominates, we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might choose a representative of each type—let us say Newton, Shakespeare and Jesus—and spend much time in controversy45 as to which of the three types is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and a perfectly46 rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed33 to Shakespeare if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great poets and painters who were scientists—for example, Leonardo and Goethe.
The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually exist, whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon life, if they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's fundamental nature and needs—in other words, if the poet is not something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic understanding of what nature wished to be.
The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others would have embodied47 and set forth48 with equal poignancy49 the revolutionary idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true, and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive50 kindness of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and thoughts of every one of us would have been different.
Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked to name the men who had exercised the greatest influence upon him, and after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley, was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and walked upon the earth. Concerning Hamlet, it is believed there was once a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure, Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very learned, maintain that he is a legendary51 name around which a number of traditions have gathered.
To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon others. The emotions which moved him, the loves, the griefs, the high resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make us something different from what we were before we encountered them.
In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine what the modern man would be; or perhaps we can go farther and say that Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies52 of the "age of chivalry53" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take "Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier man because of this vision which was projected upon the world from the soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if "Resurrection" had never been written.
In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheapened by misuse54, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have just been considering are the phenomena55 of genius—and we can say this, even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal56 uprush," the welling up into the consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious57 mind. Or perhaps it is something of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say: the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully58 emancipated59, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking human life as raw material, and making it over into something more subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was before, or ever would have been without the intervention60 of this new God-man.
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1
parasites
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| 寄生物( parasite的名词复数 )； 靠他人为生的人； 诸虫 | |
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abortions
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| n.小产( abortion的名词复数 )；小产胎儿；（计划）等中止或夭折；败育 | |
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ardently
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| adv.热心地，热烈地 | |
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fatuous
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| adj.愚昧的；昏庸的 | |
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pessimism
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| n.悲观者，悲观主义者，厌世者 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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posterity
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| n.后裔，子孙，后代 | |
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premature
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| adj.比预期时间早的；不成熟的，仓促的 | |
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aspiring
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| adj.有志气的；有抱负的；高耸的v.渴望；追求 | |
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cyclone
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| n.旋风，龙卷风 | |
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excellence
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| n.优秀，杰出，(pl.)优点，美德 | |
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inert
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| adj.无活动能力的，惰性的；迟钝的 | |
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molecules
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| 分子( molecule的名词复数 ) | |
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intensity
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| n.强烈，剧烈；强度；烈度 | |
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16
swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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beget
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| v.引起；产生 | |
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esteem
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| n.尊敬，尊重；vt.尊重，敬重；把…看作 | |
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hippopotamus
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| n.河马 | |
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treacherous
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| adj.不可靠的，有暗藏的危险的；adj.背叛的，背信弃义的 | |
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stimuli
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| n.刺激（物） | |
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exterminate
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| v.扑灭，消灭，根绝 | |
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irresistibly
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| adv.无法抵抗地，不能自持地；极为诱惑人地 | |
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24
horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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lighter
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| n.打火机，点火器；驳船；v.用驳船运送；light的比较级 | |
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antagonist
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| n.敌人，对抗者，对手 | |
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dodge
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| v.闪开，躲开，避开；n.妙计，诡计 | |
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knights
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| 骑士； （中古时代的）武士( knight的名词复数 )； 骑士； 爵士； （国际象棋中）马 | |
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29
vessels
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| n.血管( vessel的名词复数 )；船；容器；（具有特殊品质或接受特殊品质的）人 | |
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galleons
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| n.大型帆船( galleon的名词复数 ) | |
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followers
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| 追随者( follower的名词复数 )； 用户； 契据的附面； 从动件 | |
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32
heeded
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| v.听某人的劝告，听从( heed的过去式和过去分词 )；变平，使（某物）变平( flatten的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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heed
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| v.注意，留意；n.注意，留心 | |
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awe
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| n.敬畏，惊惧；vt.使敬畏，使惊惧 | |
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faculties
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| n.能力( faculty的名词复数 )；全体教职员；技巧；院 | |
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persistence
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| n.坚持，持续，存留 | |
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monopolizing
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| v.垄断( monopolize的现在分词 )；独占；专卖；专营 | |
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apprehend
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| vt.理解，领悟，逮捕，拘捕，忧虑 | |
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monopolize
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| v.垄断，独占，专营 | |
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40
labors
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| v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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41
jealousy
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| n.妒忌，嫉妒，猜忌 | |
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42
humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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43
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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44
faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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45
controversy
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| n.争论，辩论，争吵 | |
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46
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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47
embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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48
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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49
poignancy
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| n.辛酸事，尖锐 | |
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50
persuasive
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| adj.有说服力的，能说得使人相信的 | |
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51
legendary
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| adj.传奇（中）的，闻名遐迩的；n.传奇（文学） | |
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52
follies
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| 罪恶，时事讽刺剧； 愚蠢，蠢笨，愚蠢的行为、思想或做法( folly的名词复数 ) | |
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53
chivalry
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| n.骑士气概，侠义；（男人）对女人彬彬有礼，献殷勤 | |
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54
misuse
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| n.误用，滥用；vt.误用，滥用 | |
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55
phenomena
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| n.现象 | |
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56
subliminal
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| adj.下意识的，潜意识的；太弱或太快以至于难以觉察的 | |
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57
subconscious
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| n./adj.潜意识(的)，下意识(的) | |
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58
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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59
emancipated
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| adj.被解放的，不受约束的v.解放某人（尤指摆脱政治、法律或社会的束缚）( emancipate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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intervention
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| n.介入，干涉，干预 | |
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