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 Cornell University Library 
 HX246.B35 09 1893 
 
 Outlooks from the new standpoint 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 030 333 979 
 
The original of tlnis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924030333979 
 
OUTLOOKS 
 FROM THE NEW STANDPOINT 
 
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 AUTHOR OP "the RELIGION OF SOCIALISM," "THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM," " THB 
 
 STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION," " JEAN PAUL MARAT," " HAND- 
 
 BOOiC TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY," ETC., ETC 
 
 THIRD 
 
 EDITIOa 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., Lim. 
 
 NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1903 
 
^'kft^ 
 
 
 First Edition, July. 1891; Second Edition (Revised), Feiruary 1894; 
 Third Edition (Furtter Revised), March 1903, 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. 
 
 No. Page 
 
 1. The Okatok op the Human Racb • - • 1 
 
 2. The Dbcat of Pagan Thought - . 39 
 
 11. 
 
 3. LiBBEALisM V. Socialism - ■ - - 67 
 
 4. The Cukse op Law - - • - 91 
 
 5. A Sociamst's Notes on Peactical Ethics - 109 
 
 6. The Economical Basis of Histosy - 125 
 
 7. ItfDiviDUAi. Rights undbe Socialism - - 143 
 
 8. Maeeiagb - - . - . 151 
 
 ni, 
 
 9. CotJEAGB - - - - . - 163 
 
 10. The Peacwicai Significance of Philosophy 179 
 
 n. Note on "Now" - - - - - 199 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 The present volume consists of various pieces on a 
 somewhat wide range of subjects, but all of them hav- 
 ing, as I believe, a common bearing. Some of them 
 have never been published before, while others which 
 have appeared have been largely re-written. The first 
 part of the volume is taken up with two historical 
 essays. The one on Anacharsis Clootz is based mainly 
 on the exhaustive "Life of Clootz," by Georges Avenel, 
 a most remarkable contribution toward the inner his- 
 tory of the French Revolution, which, so far as I am 
 aware, has never before been noticed in this country. 
 The second part contains a collection of papers all 
 bearing more or less directly upon Socialism, while 
 the third part is devoted to three philosophical papers. 
 The inner steady break-up of the fabric of bour- 
 geois civilisation becomes more noticeable year by 
 year. The economic side of this collapse, as exemplified 
 in the unceasing labour-struggle — the absorbing topic 
 of interest in all circles — is already beginning to 
 directly modify political conditions. The decisive 
 question in all elections now is the labour question. If 
 politics has to desert its old party aries, and give itself 
 the semblance of a social or labour content, not less so 
 has religion. The Christian churches, their old sp ecula- 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 tive content dead and explained away, take to advocating 
 social reforms, or nostrums, as the case may be, in the 
 name of "true Christianity." That remarkable and pro- 
 tean ignis fatuus, " true Christianity," is now engaged 
 in putting off the " old Adam " of personal holiness, 
 spiritual regeneration, and preparation for another 
 world, and taking to schemes for " ameliorating the 
 condition of the masses," etc. Again, the present 
 form of the institution of marriage has received some 
 severe blows of late. The safety-valve (from the point 
 of view of conventional marriage) of free divorce, 
 recently opened in most continental countries, having 
 been religiously sat upon by the English bourgeois, 
 we may reasonably hope that in Britain the principle 
 by which the clumsy mechanical compulsion of law 
 intrudes itself into the purely personal relations of 
 life will first receive its decisive death-blow. 
 
 The current popularity of Utopian romances, hailed 
 with such joy by some, is not, perhaps, a very edifying 
 sign. It indicates a demand for miracles, on the son 
 of which, unfortunately, the quack and the impostor 
 readily flourish. For it would be nothing less than 
 a miracle for any human being to describe in pro- 
 phetic vision the society of the future. What is 
 effected in Utopian socialist writings is merely a 
 travesty of the society of the present, or of the past. 
 We can define, that is, lay down, in the abstract, the 
 general principles on which the society of the future 
 wUl be based, but we cannot describe, that is, picture, 
 in the concrete, any state of society of which the world 
 has had no experience. For into the reality of a 
 society, even in its broader details, there enters a large 
 
Preface. ix 
 
 element of contingency, of alogicality, of unreason, 
 with which no general principles will furnish us. In 
 consequence of this, the detail, the reality, has to be 
 supplied by the Utopian romancer, from states of 
 society already realised in the past or the present. 
 The new principles are then superimposed upon a 
 basis already formed of old principles, and a hybrid 
 pseudo-reality is produced, which is neither past, 
 present, nor future. When we ourselves are part and 
 parcel of a social state, when we ourselves are a portion 
 of the reality of a given society, bathed in its categories 
 and inhaling its atmosphere, our imagination cannot 
 transcend it to any appreciable extent, if at all. Our 
 logical faculty can, indeed, as it were, dissolve the 
 present social reality for abstract thought, and show 
 the lines on which the new principle growing up 
 within it is going, but our imagination is quite incap- 
 able of envisaging the future social reality in its 
 completed shape. We can just as little conceive how 
 the men of the future will envisage our civilisation 
 of to-day — how they wiU represent to themselves 
 our thoughts and feelings, aspirations and antipathies 
 — ^for when all this social life has become objective, 
 with its categories stiff and lifeless, it wiU be seen 
 in its true proportions and significance. To illus- 
 trate the truth of the foregoing, we have only to 
 recall the impossibility the modem man finds in 
 freeing himself from the illusion of Pessimism, the 
 outcome of which is the Cynicism proper to the 
 superior person of century-end "culture." Our in- 
 tellectual insight, which tells us that this, too, must 
 pass, as surely as the pessimism of the decaying classi- 
 
X Preface. 
 
 cal world passed, or as the optimism of the eighteenth 
 century has passed, that it is a mere mood bred of a 
 mephitic social atmosphere, generated in its turn by 
 the rank overgrowth of an effete civilisation — this in- 
 tellectual insight may, I say, preserve us from the 
 priggish and ostentatious cynicism of the superior 
 person, but it does not free us from the oppression now 
 and again of the feeling (embodied in all modern 
 literature and art) that the world has grown old — 
 that for humanity, das Lied ist aus. This feeling we 
 can just as little rid ourselves of, because we know it 
 has no basis, except in ourselves, than we can rid our- 
 selves of the optical illusion that the. sun is moving, 
 because we know that the earth, and not the sun, 
 moves. 
 
 The author hopes, in conclusion, that the present 
 volume may stimulate the thought of some in certain 
 directions, as he has reason to believe its predecessors 
 have, in some slight degree, been instrumental in 
 doing. 
 
 E. B. B. 
 
THE ORATOR OF THE HUMAN RACE. 
 
 The eighteenth century was in full swing. Louis 
 Quinze furniture decorated the houses of the wealthy. 
 " Wit," " verses/' and carefully elaborated repartee 
 varied by excursions into the regions of " philosophy," 
 formed the staple of social intercourse in the salons 
 of the aforesaid houses. Travelling was not much 
 more easy or less attended with danger than had been 
 the case in the previous century. "CrackskuU Heath " 
 and distinguished highwaymen in the environs of 
 London were living realities. The superstructure 
 of feudal Europe — withered and dead — was still 
 standing in its main outlines. The new culture of 
 the " age of reason '' had not as yet penetrated to any 
 considerable extent below the surface of society, that 
 is the wealthy and educated classes, although signs 
 were not wanting of its beginning to do so. Such was 
 the world — the world of Goethe's Bichtung und Wahr- 
 heit, and the world of Rousseau's Gonfessions— into 
 which the future Orator of the Human Eace was 
 born. 
 
 Jean-Baptiste Cloots, or Klootz, first saw the light 
 on the 24th of June, 1755, in the valley of Gnaden- 
 thal, a few miles from the town of Cleves, near the 
 Dutch frontier of Westphalia. His father, the Baron 
 Von Gloots, possessed a chateau in the midst of 
 a well-cultivated domain. The Cloots family, though 
 an ancient line of nobility, had acquired wealth 
 in the then leading commercial city of Amster- 
 dam, sometime during the seventeenth century. 
 The district of Cleves, during the infancy of Jean- 
 
2 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 Baptiste, was the scene of many a squabble 
 between Frederick the Great and the French king. 
 Frederick would throw off a satirical rhyme on the 
 poetical effusions of a cardinal who happened to be 
 the favourite of one of the many royal mistresses of 
 France. The peasants of Oleves were made the scape- 
 goats. The valley was pillaged and the inhabitants 
 butchered to make a Franco-Prussian holiday. In- 
 cidents such as this occurred more than once during 
 the childhood of Cloots. The old baron thought fit 
 on such occasions to prudently make friends with 
 the mammon of unrighteousness as exemplified in 
 the invaders, by inviting the officers to his chateau 
 and handsomely entertaining them. In this way little 
 Jean-Baptiste became early acquainted with the 
 French language, French manners, and French modes 
 of thought. His one desire, on the departure of the 
 French soldiery, was to be educated in Paris with a 
 view to a career in the French court. His father not 
 being unwilling that he should make his name in the 
 leading society of Europe, consented, and before long 
 he found himself in the city of his dreams, the city of 
 that Voltaire of whom he had so often heard from his 
 French friends, and with whose renown at that time 
 all Europe rang. The clerical education he received 
 at the Sarbonne produced a strong reaction in him. 
 He took to eating omelettes au lard on Friday and 
 audaciously inviting his school-fellows to join him. 
 At the table of the Dutch banker, Vandenhyver, 
 through whom his allowance was paid, he heard of 
 the philosophers so execrated at the Sarbonne ; how 
 their writings had been burnt and how they themselves 
 existed, so to speak, only on sufferance, since hy 
 virtue of an old edict they might be hanged any 
 day. Here also he learnt for the first time that his 
 uncle, Cornelius de Pauw, although a canon, was him- 
 self a philosopher, but so far from being in danger of 
 the rope, was a leading light at the court of the King 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 3 
 
 of Prussia — the friend and protector of Voltaire him- 
 self. Jean-Baptiste, finding out that the leader of 
 eighteenth century literature did not habitually live 
 in Paris as he had thought, immediately conceived ' 
 the idea of hurrying off to Berlin to make friends 
 with his free-thinking relative. He left Paris and 
 repaired to his native valley, where he was greeted 
 with enthusiasm by his father, who now saw in his 
 rapid physical development the earnest of a future 
 officer in the land of Grenadiers. What could be a 
 nobler avocation than to serve a philosophic king, the 
 friend and protector of philosophers ? thought our hero 
 at this time. So Jean-Baptiste readily consented to 
 his father's wishes that he should enter the militarj- 
 school of Berlin. He had not been long there, how- 
 ever, before he discovered in common willi his in- 
 structors that soldiering was not his vocation, though 
 he did not definitively give up his intention of joining 
 the army for som£ years. 
 
 His sojourn in the capital of Brandenburg was 
 otherwise not unimportant for the future Orator. 
 The court was in the neighbouring town of Potsdam. 
 He there spoke face to face with the great Frederick 
 and with the great Frederick's friend, his uncle 
 Cornelius, from the latter of whom he received his 
 first distinctive intellectual bent. Cured of certain 
 intellectual vanities in which he had nursed himself, 
 he began to studj' seriously, and at last di.sgusted with 
 the slavery and brutality of the Prussian military 
 rdgime, he sought and obtained the king's permission 
 to return home — his ultimate intention being to take 
 up his abode once more in Paris. He was now 
 twenty-one years of age, and the possessor of an in- 
 come of 100,000 . livres. It was some six or seven 
 years since he had left the city which was the capital 
 of eighteenth-century culture, and everything now 
 appeared to him in a new light. He entered the 
 Parisian salons and mixed freely in society ; he came 
 
4 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 into contact with Benjamin Franklin, then on a 
 political mission to Paris. But Jean-Baptiste was 
 not destined to see his idol, Voltaire, for the latter 
 expired a few days after his arrival in Paris at the 
 Hotel de Villette. An idea already conceived while 
 in Berlin now began to take definite shape in Cloots's 
 mind — that, namely, of developing a refutation of all 
 revealed religions from one proposition, or rather, 
 syllogism. With this syllogism which he used to 
 call "his Great Argument," he was fond of dumb- 
 founding bis clerical acquaintances. It ran as follows : 
 
 (1.) A religion of which the proofs are not com- 
 prehensible by all reasonable men cannot be estab- 
 lished by God for the simple and ignorant. 
 
 (2.) Now, there is no religion of all those which 
 are pretended to have been revealed of which the 
 proofs are comprehensible by all men. Therefore : 
 
 (3.) None of the religions which pretend to be 
 revealed can be the religion established by God for the 
 simple and ignorant. 
 
 The determination to work out this argument in 
 book-form took increasing possession of Jean-Baptiste, 
 till he resolved to retire for some months to Gnaden- 
 thal for the purpose of putting his project into execu- 
 tion ; as a matter of fact, he remained there more than 
 a year laboriously working at his " Certitude of the 
 Proofs of Mahometism," designed as a reductio ad 
 absurdum of supernaturalism. The book was pub- 
 lished in Amsterdam. As soon as it issued from the 
 press, Cloots despatched the whole edition to Paris, at 
 the same time hurrying thither himself. To his 
 intense surprise, the " Great Argument " and the 
 " Certitude of the Proofs of Mahometism " alike fell 
 dead. By no device could the author succeed in ob- 
 taining even a partial success. Undeterred, Cloots 
 tried debating societies, but here the clerical opposi- 
 tion was too strong for him. At last one of the lead- 
 ing Paris clergy delivered a pulpit oration against the 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 5 
 
 " Certitudes," by which it achieved some little notoriety-) 
 though far short of the expectations of its enthusiastic 
 author. 
 
 Cloots now began to occupy himself with the second 
 great principle to which he proposed to devote his 
 life. lip to this time he had been too much engaged 
 with the notion of establishing reason on the ruins of 
 the ancient faith to think of anything else. The 
 international problem now began to occupy him. In 
 the "Yiews of a Gallophile," he offered to the world 
 his first distinct statement of the doctrine of Interna- 
 tionalism. As yet, however, his opinions had not 
 attained the breadth or definiteness of those expounded 
 in his later work, the " Universal Republic." Seized 
 with a desire to study English institutions, which he 
 had heard so much be-praised in the salons of Paris, 
 Cloots crossed the channel, came to London, was dis- 
 gusted with the dingy, brick-built houses he saw, 
 which he compared unfavourably with the masonry of 
 Paris; visited Edmund Burke at Beaconsfield, dis- 
 cussed with him the new ideas and dawning hopes, 
 and tried to imbue him with his own enthusiasm for 
 everything French. Burke, who had not as yet 
 become insane and reactionary, proved a sympathetic 
 auditor, for although old enough to be his guest's 
 father, he still retained much of his youthful fresh- 
 ness. The two men got on excellently together, and 
 Cloots left London with a pressing invitation from the 
 English statesman to pay him another visit. He 
 returned to Paris, but at the beginning of the winter 
 left for the house of a relative near Amsterdam. 
 While in Holland he had a narrow escape of being 
 victimised by a charlatan from the east of Europe, 
 who gave himself out for a descendant of Scanderbeg, 
 and as the Prince of Roumania. However, Cloots 
 came out of the adventure with nothing more serious 
 than a temporary loss of dignity. In the spring, 
 resisting the attraction which Paris once mora had for 
 
6 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 him, Jean-Baptiste resolved to enjoy the freedom, 
 instruction, and adventures of a long tour throughout 
 the greater part of Europe. This journey, however, 
 proved more often of the nature of a flight than of a 
 tour. Taking no care to conceal his views on such 
 delicate subjects as the prerogative of kings and 
 nobles and the value of a sacerdotal class, not unfre- 
 quently preaching open rebellion to oppressed peasants, 
 we may imagine his path was not always strewn with 
 roses. He was being once nearly arrested on Prussian 
 territory, while he had to fly from Hungary for protest- 
 ing against the tyrannous acts of the king and emperor. 
 In Italy he fared no better. The beginning of the 
 winter found him in the south of ^France, at Bayonne. 
 From thence he proceeded to Spain, and from thence 
 to Morocco, where the author of the ironical " Certi- 
 tude of the Proofs of Mahometism " was, it appears, 
 well received alike by the Moorish and Jewish popu- 
 lation, he having championed the Hebrew race against 
 the Christians in a pamphlet on the Jewish question. 
 After a stay of a few weeks he proceeded to Lisbon, 
 where he remained for the rest of the winter. New 
 Year's Day, 1789, found Cloots enjoying the mild sea 
 breezes and blue sky of Portugal, and looking over the 
 Atlantic with thoughts tending to America as the only 
 country of the " Rights of Man." During the winter 
 Cloots continued for the most part cut off from news 
 of the outer world, but with the approach of spring 
 came the tidings of the re-habilitation of the popular 
 idol Neckar, and of the convocation of the " States- 
 General," with a double representation of the third 
 estate. Cloots left Lisbon with the intention of pro- 
 ceeding by easy stages to Paris. Some weeks elapsed, 
 however, before he crossed the Pyrennees. 
 
 He had scarcely set foot on French soil when the re- 
 port reached him of the fall of the Bastille. With all 
 the enthusiasm of bis character he donned the new tri- 
 coloured cockade, and proceeded in hot haste to the city 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 7 
 
 which was henceforth to be for him the metropolis of 
 the " Human Race." He passed through a country 
 which pt'esented, in some respects, the aspect of 
 an invaded territory. The siy;ht of burning, 
 or recently burnt, ch^teaus — of crops destroyed — 
 of houses pillaged — was quite a common one. 
 Arrived in Paris, Cloots immediately threw him- 
 self into the thick of the political struggle. His 
 social connexions brought him into close contact 
 with several of the leaders of the " States-General/' 
 now converted into the "National Constituent 
 Assembly." This was to our hero the germ of that 
 parliament of man, of which he had long dreamed, 
 and which at last took definite shape in his mind as 
 the goal of his political aspirations. At this time 
 Cloots might have been daily seen riding about Paris 
 from centre to centre in his carriage and pair, accom- 
 panied by two servants, themselves ardent patriots, in 
 order to ascertain the true political temperature of the 
 capital. After some days he decided upon a pro- 
 pagandist journey into what was supposed to be the 
 most- benighted province of France — Brittany. He 
 found there what are described as : " Certain fierce 
 animals, male and female, scattered about the country, 
 black, living, but quite burnt by the sun, attached to 
 the earth which they hoed and dug with invincible 
 obstinacy." To Jean - Baptiste, nevertheless, these 
 degraded creatures were brothers. By means of an 
 interpreter he overcame the obstacle of the Breton 
 language, and for days and weeks he went about the 
 country preaching to them the doctrine of the " Eights 
 of Man" and of the Revolution. At first, ill-under- 
 stood, they gave him ear when he explained to them 
 the two recent decrees of the Assembly, abolishing the 
 local imposts and practically establishing the right of 
 peasant proprietory. Finally the peasants were seized 
 as if by inspiration with the spirit of revolt. Emula- 
 ting the Parisians, they stormed, torch in hand, the 
 
8 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 cMteau of their lord, the local Bastille. The move- 
 ment rapidly spread, and soon wherever Jean-Baptiste 
 had passed, the cry was unanimous of — " Long live 
 the Revolution of the National Assembly." 
 
 After establishing a Breton Olub, Cloots returned to 
 Paris in October to find the Assembly and the king in- 
 stalled in the capital, consequent on the events of the 
 5th and 6th of the month. When Cloots caught sight 
 once more of the towers of Notre Dame, he vowed never 
 again to leave the world-city, and he never did. His 
 motto — " Paris ! France ! Universe ! " was henceforth 
 to be defended from the centre itself. Famine still 
 reigned in Paris. Yet, notwithstanding the terrible 
 misery, what was Cloots' astonishment and delight 
 to find that even in St. Antoine, he heard more among 
 the groups of workmen assembled, about the " Rights 
 of Man," and the "Principles of the Constitution," 
 than about bread ! Cloots now became an assiduous 
 attendant at the Palais Royal, which was the great 
 open-air resort of patriots and the forum for popular 
 discussion. Not far off in the Rue St. Honor^ was the 
 Jacobins Club. The district was nick-named the 
 "Quartier de I'ld^e." Reports of royal conspiracies 
 filled the air. Nobles who had remained in Paris 
 were breathing out threatenings and slaughter against 
 the Revolution. Jean-Baptiste soon found their society 
 insupportable ; the only answer he got to his pleadings 
 on behalf of the people was : " Let the people perish, 
 we want our pensions." Cloots shook the dust of 
 these noble houses off his feet and cursed them bitterly. 
 His place was henceforth in the Faubourg, in popular 
 gatherings, in the public tribunes of the Assembly. 
 Meanwhile Burke had denounced the French Revolu- 
 tion in the English parliament. Cloots we may be 
 sure was not long in publishing an open letter to his 
 friend full of affectionate remonstrance and entreaty. 
 He was awaiting a reply to this missive, when all 
 thought of Burke was forgotten in the news that the 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. g 
 
 Assembly had assigned to the nation the right of mak- 
 ing peace or war. Cloots was seized with a wild 
 enthusiasm — he saw in this the beginning of the realisa- 
 tion of the solidarity of the Human Race. Was it not 
 kings and nobles who had hitherto set people against 
 people ? Once the power of declaring war was 
 removed from their hands, would not the chief cause 
 of war have disappeared ? The re-arrangement of the 
 map of France by which the semi-autonomy of the old 
 French provinces had been abolished, all tended to- 
 wards the unity of mankind, he thought. From all 
 sides was the cry — " We are no longer Provencals, 
 Bretons, Angeves, Picards — we are Frenchmen ! " 
 Cloots saw in this also a step toward the federation of 
 the Human Race, rather than, as was actually the case, 
 the embodiment of the modern principle of national- 
 ism as against the local autonomy of the middle-ages. 
 On the 5th of June, 1790, the Paris municipality, 
 after proclaiming all men brothers, proposed that 
 the Assembly should decree a great fete for the 
 ensuing 14th of July, the anniversary of the fall of 
 the Bastille, which should embrace representatives 
 from all France. Jean-Baptiste was transported be- 
 yond measure. We will have, said he, " not merely a 
 festival of France but of the Universe." He forth- 
 with proceeded to hunt up all the foreign refugees in 
 Paris he could lay his hand on. At his instigation 
 they formed themselves into a committee, with the 
 result that, on the 19th of the month, they appeared 
 at the bar of the Assembly praying for admission to 
 the National Federation. The deputation was a re- 
 markable one, thirty-six members in all ; each wore 
 his national costume ; Neopolitan, Spaniard, Prussian, 
 Dutchman, Englishman, American, all had a place, 
 while an Arab and a Chaldean were to be seen on 
 either side of the deputed Orator. Cloots began 
 (silence having been proclaimed by the usher) ; 
 " Gentlemen, the imposing group of all the banners 
 
JO "^h^ Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 of the French Empire will be displayed on the 
 14th of July in the Champ de Mars, on the same spot 
 where Julian trampled down all prejudices, and where 
 Charlemagne surrounded himself with all the virtues. 
 This civic solemnity will not only be the festival of 
 the Fiench, but also be the festival of the Human 
 Race. The trumpet which sounded the resuriection 
 of the great people, has reached to all the four quarters 
 of the world, and the songs of rejoicing of twenty-five 
 million free men have awakened nations buried in a 
 long slavery. The wisdom of your decrees, gentlemen, 
 is the union of the children of France. This ravishing 
 picture affords bitter apprehensions to despots, and 
 just hopes to enslaved peoples. . . . You have truly 
 recognised that sovereignty resides in the people. 
 Now the people is everywhere under the yoke of 
 dictators, who call themselves sovereigns in defiance 
 of your principles. They usurp the dictatorship, but 
 the sovereignty is inviolable, and the ambassadors of 
 these tyrants would not be able to honour your august 
 festival like ourselves, of whom, for the most part, the 
 mission is tacitly avowed by our compatriots, the 
 oppressed sovereigns themselves." The applause, 
 which at several times interrupted Jean-Baptiste 
 while speaking, fairly shook the house when he had 
 ended. The reply of the Assembly, from the lips of 
 its chairman, the Baron Menou, was an invitation 
 couched in terms overflowing with compliments and 
 cordiality. The Arab returned thanks in an unin- 
 telligible French, and the ceremony was wound up 
 with some dexterous phrases of the president. In its 
 transport of enthusiasm the Assembly then passed its 
 memorable decree abolishing the titles and insignia of 
 nobility. Henceforth Jean-Baptiste rejoiced in bear- 
 ing the proud title of the " Orator of the Human 
 Eace." But the enthusiasm of this memorable night 
 was short-lived, and began to give place to ridicule 
 within a few days, a result which was not diminished 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 1 1 
 
 by the discovery that the interesting figures of the 
 Turk and the Arab had been borrowed from the opera, 
 and that the would-be Chaldean had been born with- 
 in sight of the towers of Notre Dame. 
 
 At last the long looked-for day of the national fSte 
 arrived. To the great disappointment of all it poured 
 with rain. " God is an aristocrat," said some of the 
 crowd. " I could have told you that long ago," said 
 Jean-Baptiste ; but the weather made little difference 
 to our hero, who marched to the Champ de Mars at 
 the head of his international cortege in a state of 
 moral exaltation, which rendered physical discomfort 
 of no account. His description of the fete, in a letter 
 to a female friend, Fanny de Beauharnais, testifies to 
 the spirit in which he viewed the ceremony of the 
 day, which must have been, in truth, imposing enough. 
 " It transports you," he writes, " two thousand years 
 back, by I know not what colour of antiquity. It 
 transports you two thousand years forward by that 
 • rapid progress of reason, of which this federation is the 
 delectable foretaste." This state of moral intoxication 
 seems to have lasted for several days. He now be- 
 thought himself of his Christian pre-nomen. How 
 could he, the apostle of reason and the enemy of all 
 supernatural cults, continue to bear a name derived 
 from the creed which had enslaved the Hximan Race 
 for so many centuries past ? He must seek a name 
 more befitted to his position, derived from some ancient 
 hero or thinker. Turning this over in his mind, he hit 
 upon the cognomen, Anach arsis that of the Scythian 
 disciple of Greek culture, wlio had been popularised 
 by the recently published romance of the Abb^ Bar- 
 thelemy. It was the very thing as it seemed to him, 
 for he too was a barbarian who had expatriated him- 
 self in the modern Athens, and had embraced its modes 
 of thought and manners of life. Jean-Baptiste Cloots, 
 Baron of Gnadenthal, vassal of the King of Prussia, shall 
 be known from this time forward under the style and 
 
12 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 title o£ " Anacharsis Cloots, Orator of the Humao Race, 
 Eepresentative of the Oppressed Sovereign Peoples of 
 Mankind." 
 
 Cloots now hegan to jealously watch the actions 
 of the powers, and the developments of French 
 f oreign^olicy, fearing lest France should be led into a 
 trap, but he did not neglect his propaganda in Paris, 
 in connexion with his anti-religious crusade. He be- 
 came a member of the Jacobins Club, and also of a 
 society which met in the circus of the Palais 
 Eoyal and called itself the Cercle Social des Arnis 
 de la VSriU, a leading figure in which was the 
 mystical revolutionary priest and afterwards bishop, 
 Claude Fauchet, with whom the atheist Anacharsis 
 had many a passage of arms. He also busied 
 himself with addresses, pamphlets, and newspaper 
 articles, writing constantly in the " Chronique de 
 Paris," founded by his friend Charles Villette, and 
 edited by another acquaintance named Millin — for 
 notwithstanding his democratic attitude he was still a 
 welcome guest amongst the " advanced " circles of the 
 wealthy classes. Among the letters of adhesion to his 
 principles were some from notable foreigners. The 
 Countess of Hesse among others wrote proclaiming 
 herself a convert to his views. In this life of social 
 and literary activity he passed the year 1791. After 
 tlie flight of the king to Varennes, Anacharsis was 
 the first to demand the abolition of the monarchy and 
 to proclaim the French Republic as the .necessary iirst 
 step to that Universal Republic which was the goal of 
 his political action. He was one of the leaders in the 
 July meeting in the Champ de Mars with the members 
 of the Cordeliers Club, etc. ; though after the mas- 
 sacre of Lafayette, on the evening of that day, and the 
 decree proclaiming martial law which followed it, 
 Cloots, in common with the other men, of the advanced 
 party, was compelled to " lie low " for a while. Brissot 
 with his Girondin friends was already beginning his 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 13 
 
 campaign against Paris in the pretended interest of 
 the departments. 
 
 With the spring of 1792 the political horizon began 
 to show storm-clouds. The debates in the Jacobins 
 became noisier and more acrimonious. The great 
 question of the war raised its head, and mriih. it 
 previous differences between Oloots and the Girondin 
 leaders, notably Brissot, as also at times with 
 Robespierre, began to accentuate themselves. Oloots 
 was in favour of a propagandist war on a large 
 scale; Brissot of a defensive war; and Robespierre 
 of no war at all, Anacharsis thought by an offen- 
 sive war to liberate once for all the neighbouring 
 " Sovereigns " Qnen entendu sovereign peoples) from 
 the yoke of their tyrants, and therewith to inaugurate 
 the era of Universal Peace. Brissot's one thought was 
 a defensive war, which should protect the frontiers 
 and remove the centre of revolutionary interest from 
 Paris to the departments ; while Robespierre, though 
 desirous of maintaining the ascendancy of Paris, was 
 even more averse than Brissot to the cosmopolitan 
 theories of Oloots. With the declaration of war 
 and the first reverses of the French troops the 
 excitement in Paris became so intense that internal 
 dissensions among the " patriots " were for the nonce 
 laid on one side. The ascendancy of Paris seemed 
 secured for the time being at least. It was at this 
 juncture that Oloots published his famous brochure, 
 the " Universal Republic," in which he expounded his 
 views as to mankind constituting one nation whose 
 metropolis should be Paris. " The crowd," says ho, 
 "attracts the crowd, and deserts repel men. It is 
 essential for the universal harmony to have a common 
 capital where all divergent lights unite in a focus; 
 where all characters adjust each other ; where all pre- 
 judices are abolished ; where all egotisms are crushed 
 and confounded in the common interest of the Human 
 Race. It is here that the man of the Department be- 
 
14 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 coihes the man of France, that the man of France be- 
 comes the man of the Universe." 
 
 At last Brunswick, passing the Rhine, launched 
 his celebrated manifesto threatening to annihilate 
 the Revolution. The whole revolutionary city now 
 took np as with one voice the cry of " dichecbnce" 
 which had been on the lips of Anacharsis for more 
 than a year past. The movement of the 10th of 
 August began to prepare. Cloots agitated amongst 
 the Dutch and Belgium refugees, who formed the 
 nucleus of the foreign legion known as the LSgion 
 Franche. The word Sans-Culotte at this time 
 became the vogue to designate the popular party of 
 Paris. Anacharsis proclaimed himself the Orator of 
 the Sans- Culottes. In vain did his mother the baroness 
 (the old baron had been dead for some time) write urg- 
 ing him to fly from the dangers which surrounded him. 
 He only replied in a long letter explaining the prin- 
 ciples of the Revolution, and declaring his adhesion to 
 them come what might, at the same time assuring her 
 that serious disorder would never occur in Paris. " I 
 shall never quit France," he said, " and they shall never 
 take Paris except the conquerors are invulnerable." 
 He urges her not to believe the lies circulated respect- 
 ing the Revolution and its adherents. " Adieu, my 
 tender mother," he concludes, " your health disquiets 
 me more than our enemies." 
 
 In the early morning of the memorable 10th of 
 August Cloots awoke to the sound of the tocsin and 
 the alarm drum, and hurriedly rising rushed to the 
 Assembly, while two of his servants made for the 
 Tuilleries. Anacharsis remained for two days and 
 nights among the legislators. He saw the king him- 
 self appear in the Salle de Manage ; he heard the 
 decree for the summoning of a National Convention ; 
 he was the instrument in arresting a princely spy in 
 the court-yard. The next night he appeared at the 
 bar of the Assembly with some compatriots offering 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 1 5 
 
 to form a Prussian legion. The Assembly ordered the 
 printing and distribution in the departments of the 
 address he delivered on this occasion. On the 24th a 
 decree was passed for the naturalisation, with the full 
 rights as French citizens, of certain eminent foreigners, 
 amongst whom Cloots was included side by side with 
 Thomas Paine, Priestly, etc. The only member who 
 spoke in opposition to this, Thuriot, was immediately 
 voted down. Cloots as French citizen was now eligible 
 for election for the Convention, and he was nominated 
 amid general approbation candidate for the depart- 
 ment of the Oise, where he had recently bought a small 
 property adjoining that of his friend Charles Villette, 
 and also for the department of the Saone-et-Loire. 
 
 At the end of the month the news arrived that 
 Longwy had been taken by the Prussians and that 
 Verdun was threatened. This meant, as all knew well 
 enough, that Paris itself was in imminent danger. The 
 consequence was the September massacres, that ter- 
 rible act of justice and self-defence of revolutionary 
 France towards the traitors on her hearth. Ana- 
 charsis was assiduous in his attendance at the primary 
 assembly of his section during this time, although he 
 had no share in organising the work that was being 
 done. It was on the 3rd of September, and on behalf 
 of his section, that Anacharsis visited the Rolands, 
 where he remained to dinner at the special invitation 
 of the Minister of the Interior, in company with the 
 principal lights of the Girondist party — a dinner 
 alluded to in the celebrated " Memoirs " in a tone of 
 more than questionable taste, as regards the subject of 
 the present sketch. Marat, with the ready suspicion 
 characteristic of his noble but narrow nature, had 
 just been denouncing our Orator for the second time 
 as a Mouchard Berlinoia, when the same evening 
 Cloots presented himself at the Jacobins Club, He 
 was being considerably hustled and was like to be 
 driven out of the club, when the intimation arrived of 
 
1 6 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 his election for the Ai'parimi&iivt de I'Oise. At this 
 announcement the hustling and jeering ceased, hut 
 the Girondin and other Moderates were not slow to 
 take advantage of it in trying to prejudice Cloots 
 against Paris, which had rejected him, and in favour 
 of the departments which had accepted him, for his 
 election for the Saone-et-Loire was shortly after an- 
 nounced also. But the Orator was too sincere to be 
 influenced by mere personal considerations, and in 
 spite of all temptations he remained true to Paris. 
 
 The battle between the Parisian Sans-Oulottes, 
 represented in the Convention by the so-called party 
 of the Mountain and the departmental Girondins, now 
 began in real earnest. All Cloots's social connexions 
 naturally brought him into contact with the anti- 
 Parisian party, who were in power. The " Orator of 
 the Human Race" was, indeed, made president of 
 the Diplomatic Committee, one of the twenty-four 
 Committees into which the Convention had resolved 
 itself, and though he was powerless as regards the posi- 
 tive furtherance of his own principles of foreign policy 
 on this Committee, yet it enabled him to expose the 
 intrigues of the dominant Moderates with doubtful 
 generals, and with the enemy, in the hope of patching- 
 up a peace in order to have their hands free to crush 
 Paris. Singularly enough, the event which caused him 
 to take a decisive position on the summit of the" Moun- 
 tain" was the Girondist attack headed by Louvet, on 
 his subsequent persecutor and murderer, Robespierre. 
 The accusations levelled against the latter were under- 
 stood by all as in reality levelled against the entire 
 Mountain and against Paris. Anacharsis was sur- 
 rounded by Mountainist deputies, to whom forgetting 
 the speaker in the tribune, he narrated the whole 
 history of anti-Parisian chicanery. Urged by the 
 Mountain to publish what he had told them, he hesi- 
 tated to reveal the official secrets of his Committee, 
 until the open treachery of Dumouriez and others and 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 17 
 
 the discovery of actually treasonable correspondence, 
 decided him to throw away all scruples and expose the 
 whole proceedings of the Committee men. He now 
 published his pamphlet, "Ni Marat, Ni Koland," in 
 which he attacked the principle of leadership. This 
 pamphlet was greeted with applause by all patriots, 
 not excepting Marat himself, and the Jacobins ordered 
 its distribution in the departments. 
 
 The Orator a few days after launched an address to 
 the Belgians denouncing the federalism of Roland and 
 his associates, persuading them to constitute the newly- 
 acquired province into a second republic. He still 
 further exposed governmental intrigues, and concluded: 
 " Brave Belgians, choose deliberately between Depart- 
 mental unity, which combines the maximum of inde- 
 pendence with themaximum of economy.andRepublican 
 plurality, which unites the maximum of expense with 
 the maximum of absurdity." The Convention now 
 appointed a commission to investigate the incrimina- 
 tory documents discovered in the baggage left by the 
 officers who had fled across the frontier. To the con- 
 sternation of Roland and his clique, Anacharsis 
 formed one of the Committee. On the occasion when 
 this proposition was voted, he had the satisfaction of 
 making friends with Marat, who apologised for having 
 called him a mouchard under a false impression, and 
 embraced him as a "bon enfant." Cloots a few 
 nights afterwards justified himself at the Jacobins 
 against the ministerial attack. He was surrounded by 
 all the members of the Mountain, who declared he had 
 saved the country. It was at no little cost to himself, 
 however, that Cloots had taken up his position defin- 
 itely as a Sans-Culotte and Mountainist. The door? 
 of the wealthy houses he used to visit at, and where 
 he had many friends to whom he was personally at- 
 tached, were henceforth closed to him. He had to 
 break with almost all the set who had before regarded 
 him as an amiable crank. The journals in which he 
 
1 8 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 used to write now became impossible for him. The 
 Girondists and Moderates were his bitterest enemies, 
 but he had the proud feeling that he helped to save 
 the unity of France and the " idea of the propaganda." 
 He began to occupy himself with organising the 
 foreign Legion and drawing up further addresses to 
 the Dutch and Belgians. On the occasion of the king's 
 trial he voted on each issue with the majority. Active 
 work in the Convention on behalf of Paris and the 
 Mountain against the Girondists ; pamphlets, addresses, 
 journalism, especially the new Franco-Dutch organ 
 Le Batave occupied his time for the next few weeks. 
 The conflict waxed hotter. The gauntlet was thrown 
 to the Girondists by the Jacobins when the latter 
 elected Marat as their president. Next followed the 
 abortive prosecution of Marat and his triumphal 
 acquittal. 
 
 At the beginning of May, Cloots was prostrated 
 by a severe gastric attack accompanied by fever, 
 doubtless brought on, in part, at least, by the strain of 
 excitement and overwork in which he was living. 
 For nearly a month he was confined to his bed in a 
 more or less unconscious or delirious state. He re- 
 covered to find the Revolution of the second of June, 
 1793, an accomplished fact. Surely his dreams were 
 now about to be realised ! Paris had triumphed, and, 
 in spite of the treachery of generals and ministers, the 
 boundaries of the great French Republic would yet be 
 extended to the Scheldt and the Rhine. The re- 
 organised Paris Commune with Hubert and Chaumette 
 at its head, and with Pache as mayor, was in many ways 
 the principal public body in France. But the Conven- 
 tion had appointed two Committees, a Committee of 
 Public Safety, to whom the ministers were responsible, 
 and a larger Committee of General Security. These 
 Committees were the power to which the Convention 
 delegated the executive authority. They were at first 
 provisional, but their powers were afterwards prq- 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 19 
 
 longed and increased. Robespierre, the old Constitu- 
 tionalist and now Mountainist Barere, St. Just, and 
 Carnot were amongst the members of the former 
 Committee. Robespierre now began to show himself 
 in his true colours, and he soon became the leading 
 spirit in the executive. His vanity, priggishness, and 
 lack of all ideal led him to give ear to the blandish- 
 nuents of a certain Soulavie, who, at that time, repre- 
 sented the French Republic at Geneva. This person- 
 age, who was an ex-Jesuit, persuaded Robespierre that 
 it was necessary for the conclusion of peace that 
 France should immediately show her intention of aban- 
 doning all thought, once for all, of an aggressive war ; 
 should restrain her frontiers within the old limits ; 
 and, finally, should keep the revolutionary spirit 
 within such bounds as would render it acceptable to 
 the reactionary powers. This view was adopted by 
 Barere, and acquiesced in by the other members of the 
 Committee of Public Safety. Hence, in spite of diver- 
 gence of view as regards internal political organisation, 
 the party of Robespierre was just as anxious for a 
 patched-up peace on the basis of subservience to the 
 foreign coalition as the now proscribed and imprisoned 
 Girondists had been. Meanwhile, affairs on the 
 frontiers became desperate. Mainz had been surrendered 
 to the Prussians ; Valenciennes and Conde had fallen 
 into the hands of the English and Austrians; the 
 road to Paris was once more open to Brunswick ; in 
 short, the military situation at the end of August, 
 1793, appeared if anything still more desperate than it 
 had been the same time the previous year. Result : 
 the terror once more " the order of the day," this time 
 however, so far as Paris was concerned, not taking the 
 form of massacres, but of a suddenly-increased activity 
 of the guillotine. Suspicion and the wildest of 
 alarmist reports were matters of course ; hope, fear, 
 desperation, alternating and mingling in the vortex of 
 political excitement made men tigers like Carrier, or 
 
20 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 crazed fanatics like Lebon. But amid all the horrors 
 of the time, and the temporary eclipse of the dawning 
 hopes of a sudden and indefinite extension of the 
 frontiers of Sans-Culottism, there was one bright 
 streak rapidly widening on the horizon which com- 
 pensated for everything else in the eyes of the " Orator 
 of the Human Eace " — and this was the growing re- 
 nunciation by all classes of the Christian faith and the 
 open adoption of Reason as the basis of belief. Cloots, 
 now installed by the Mountain as member of the 
 Committee of Education, was daily busy in formula- 
 ting a scheme of instruction according to the principles 
 of Reason and the Revolution. He felt this no less 
 important than his speeches and action in the Con- 
 vention itself. But the most striking event in 
 which Anacharsis at this time took part was the 
 inauguration of the worship of Reason, in which, 
 in conjunction with the Hebertist party, he was 
 the leading spirit. From September onwards, the 
 number of clerical resignations puB of renunciations 
 by public bodies of Catholicism augmented daily. At 
 last the Commune agreed to demand the institution of 
 a great public fSte to celebrate the installation of 
 Reason and freedom of conscience, in the place occupied 
 by God and the Church. The twentieth of the newly 
 instituted month, Brv/maire, was selected as the day of 
 celebration. The movement received a further edge 
 from the news arriving that the Vendean insurgents 
 had re-united with the Bretons, and in the name of 
 King and Church had crossed the Loire with the in- 
 tention of marching on to Paris. The very same 
 evening at eleven o'clock, Anacharsis, fresh from a 
 crowded meeting of the Jacobins, in which the aboli- 
 tion of the " cult " had been enthusiastically resolved 
 upon, accompanied by two other deputies, proceeded 
 to the residence of Gobel, the Archbishop of Paris, to 
 demand his abjuration of the Christian faith, or, at 
 least, of his public functions, Gobel knew that the 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 21 
 
 Commune had decreed the seizure of Church property, 
 and that in accordance with this decree large quanti- 
 ties of Church plate had already been sent in for public 
 purposes ; so, after a moment's hesitation, he agreed, 
 having first stipulated that he should summon his 
 chapter. Cloots and his friends next proceeded to the 
 Pantheon, the ci-devant Church of St. Genevieve, for 
 the purpose of destroying the statue of the saint. 
 Next morning they again visited the archbishop. This 
 time he received them surrounded by his chapter, who 
 by fourteen votes to three had decided in favour of 
 abdication and of joining the f^te. Anach arsis hurried 
 oflf to the Commune to inform Chaumette of the good 
 new.s. The latter did not know the Orator personalb^ 
 
 although he esteemed his views. The two men 
 embraced each other for the first time, and the son 
 of the vine-dresser and of the privy counsellor of the 
 King of Prussia — Anaxagoras Chaumette, and 
 Anacharsis Cloots — went arm in arm to the council 
 of the department, where the councillors departmental 
 and municipal were to muster for the procession to 
 the Convention. Gobel and his chapter they found 
 already en route. Arrived at the Convention, a strange 
 scene presented itself. The archbishop and his chapter, 
 honnetrouge on head, were at the bar of the Con- 
 vention formally laying down their insignia of office — 
 cross, ring, mitre, and Gothic box — Gobel renouncing 
 in a few words the functions of the Catholic cultus. 
 Other clergy followed in the same strain. Chaumette 
 demanded that the Committee of public instruction 
 should appoint a day in the recently instituted calender 
 to be dedicated to Reason. The president then an- 
 nounced the establishment of the new religion : " The 
 Supreme Being only requires the practice of social 
 and moral virtues : such is his religion. He desires no 
 cult but that of Reason. This shall be henceforth the 
 National Religion.'' He then embraced the ex-arch- 
 bishop. A crowd more clergy followed declaring their 
 
22 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 renunciation of the old faith, and in many cases also 
 of the pensions attached to their functions. The hall 
 was brought down by tumultuous applause from the 
 popular tribunes. Oloots and his friends of the Com- 
 mune were in ecstasies. The former hurried off to 
 proclaim the joyful news to the Committee of Public 
 Safety. He burst in upon Robespierre and his 
 colleagues at the Pavilion Flore with a torrent of 
 enthusiasm, describing the events that had taken place. 
 To his intense astonishment he was greeted with a 
 marked coolness. Robespierre even ventured to take 
 him to task for alienating the Belgians by the insult 
 to the Catholic faith. A brief altercation ensued 
 which ended in the " Incorruptible " turning his back 
 upon our Orator, muttering at the same time the word 
 " masquerades." The cold-blooded traitor was already 
 contemplating the destruction of the advanced section 
 of the Revolutionary party, whose consistency and 
 idealism stood in the way of his own ambitious plans. 
 How could he become the head of a regenerated 
 middle-class France, so long as foreign enthusiasts 
 were preaching the extension of frontier in the in- 
 terests of the Republic of the Human Race, and 
 famatics, native and foreign alike, were disestablishing 
 the Church in the interests of an atheistic cultus ? 
 Oloots was depressed on leaving the Committee, but the 
 enthusiasm he everywhere encountered soon raised his 
 spirits again. The new movement for the time being 
 carried all before it. The extension of the frontier to 
 the Rhine and the universal establishment of the new 
 religion were for the nonce the rallying-cry all round. 
 The coolness and veiled opposition of the Robespierre- 
 party became a subject of general comment. The 
 Commune, indeed, declared the Committee of Public 
 Safety to have become a public danger, inasmuch as it 
 refused to keep pace with the Revolution. In the midst 
 of the apparent triumph of Sans-Culottism, the cloud no 
 bigger than a man's hand, destined to destroy it, was 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 23 
 
 already spreading. The great fSte of the twentieth of 
 Brumaire, however, was not only held as all the world 
 knows in Paris, but was the inauguration of similar 
 f^tes throughout the length and breadth of Kevolution- 
 ary France during the ensuing weeks. The allegorical 
 figure of the goddess of reason, which has so often 
 been ridiculed, was really a piece of symbolism fully in 
 accordance with the imitative classicism of eighteenth 
 century thought. The idea, when properly carried out, 
 must have been the occasion of a pleasant pageant. 
 
 Aa soon as the first excitement had died down 
 a little, Kobespierre and the Committee-men began 
 taking their measures. The immediate aim of the 
 " Incorruptible " was to win over the Jacobins Club in 
 which he had a considerable number of partizans. 
 The Cordeliers Club was hopelessly on the side of the 
 Sans-Culottists, and henceforward became their chief 
 stronghold. But Anacharsis was just now at the 
 height of his influence. In spite of Robespierre and 
 his friends he had been elected to the presidency of 
 the Jacobins. In this capacity, on the reception of 
 Chalier, the president of the Lyons branch of the Club, 
 he proclaimed: " One day all patriots will unite for the 
 maintenance of the Universal Republic, and the w^el- 
 fare of their brothers ! What do I say ? They will 
 all be brothers, and the Universe will be but one 
 temple, having the firmament for its dome ! " But 
 while the " Orator of the Human Race " was ex- 
 pounding these doctrines in the Rue St. Honord, 
 Robespierre was unfolding his scheme of foreign policy 
 at the TuiUeries, speciously promising peace and a re- 
 turn of prosperity as a reward for what was tanta- 
 mount to handing over to him complete control 
 of the reins of power. Outside the Convention 
 hall he was supported by the bulk of the middle 
 classes, especially the shopkeepers, who dreaded the 
 "excesses" of the popular party, and who found their 
 businesses at a standstill. 
 
24 The Orator of the tJuman Race 
 
 It was getting patent indeed to everyone that 
 the idealistic views and aspirations o£ Cloots and 
 the H^bertist party, which were shared in by the 
 bulk of the working-class population of Paris 
 and the large towns, were inconsistent with the 
 " respectable " subservient policy which the Committee 
 led by Robespierre was bent on pursuing. The Com- 
 mittee began, tentatively at first, to follow out the plan 
 of immolating its antagonists by the arrest of two 
 questionable deputies, Chabot and Basire. The Com- 
 mittee-men were supported in the Convention and the 
 press by what constituted now the extreme wing of the 
 moderate party, the Dantonists. The destruction of 
 Cloots was the next thing determined on by the " Incor- 
 ruptible " as an urgent act of grace towards the powers, 
 especially Prussia, which was supposed to be more 
 favourable to France than Austria. Reports were in- 
 dustriously circulated as to Cloots being a foreign 
 agent, whose design was to ruin France by inducing her 
 to enter upon impracticable schemes of foreign conquest 
 which would lay her territories open to invasion ; and 
 also through apparent zeal for the Revolution to dis- 
 credit it by excesses. 
 
 The first thing to do was to get him out of the 
 Jacobins Club. Accordingly Robespierre obtained 
 a resolution for its purification from members who, 
 on investigation, might prove undesirable. On the 
 evening of the sitting, when the obnoxious members 
 were to be challenged, two hours before the time 
 of opening, the doors were besieged by an excited 
 crowd. As much as twenty livres were .offered for a 
 seat. The spacious hall in the Rue St. Honor^ was 
 thronged with Philosophers, Jacobins, Federalists, and 
 Dantonists. Cloots was there betimes surrounded by 
 Mountainist deputies and partizans of the Commune. 
 " Purification " commenced ; several members having 
 been challenged, some passing the ordeal, others being 
 excluded, it came to the turn of Robespierre. He 
 
The Orator of the Human Jtace. 25 
 
 ascended the tribune, but (bad augury for Cloots) was 
 allowed to descend again amid a storm of applause 
 without even being interrogated. At last Cloots was 
 called upon. The usual questions as to name, birth- 
 place, occupation, etc., having been answered amid a 
 breathless silence,a Kobespierreist voice from the middle 
 of the hall was heard to croak : " I like Anacharsis 
 much, I esteem his public spirit, but I could wish to 
 have some explanation as to his relations with Vanden- 
 hyver." Vandenhyver was the banker through whom 
 Cloots had received his allowance during his student 
 years, and who had been recently guillotined on the 
 ground of Royalist intrigue with Du-Barry. Cloots 
 quietly and conclusively showed what his relations 
 with Vandenhyver had been. He had just concluded 
 when the great " Incorruptible " himself rose to his 
 feet, and in a poisonous harangue carefully adapted to 
 stimulate the suspicions and prejudices of an excited 
 Paris audience, he denounced his victim as a Prussian 
 baron who had been in the habit of visiting the counter- 
 revolutionary enemies of France. He next proceeded 
 to attack the movement against the " cult " of which 
 he sought to show Cloots to have been the mainspring. 
 This movement, he declared, tended by its violence to 
 jeopardise the entire Revolution. The interview of 
 Cloots with the Committee on the day of the abdication 
 of Gobel was then brought up against him. In lachry- 
 mose tones the arch hypocrite talked about his mission 
 and that of the Committee being finished if such 
 traitors as Cloots were permitted to work in their midst. 
 " Cloots," he wound up, " is a Prussian ; I have traced 
 the history of his political life for you. Pronounce ! " 
 The Orator was dumfounded at this succession of foul 
 blows. Immense excitement reigned throughout the 
 hall. Cloots was about to rise in reply, when from the 
 middle of the audience a proposition was made for 
 which urgency was demanded — a proposition to exclude 
 from the society bankers, foreigners, nobles, to which 
 
26 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 were added by a piece of clever trickery designed to 
 throw dust in the eyes of the Sans-Culottes — priests. 
 The motion was hurriedly put and carried. Anacharsis 
 found himself expelled from the society without having 
 had the chance of saying a word in his own defence. 
 The affair had been arranged with a fiendish ingenuity 
 by one of the greatest masters in political roguery the 
 world has ever seen. 
 
 Cloots, although staggered, did not by any means 
 give way to despair; he busied himself as much 
 as ever with his work on the Committee of Public 
 Instruction, and drew up a report which he printed 
 and distributed in the Convention. The next point 
 for the Committee-men to gain was the expulsion 
 of Cloots from the Convention itself. Needless to say, 
 Cloots had published a conclusive reply to the accusa- 
 tions of Robespierre, but this did not hinder the agents 
 of the Committee from repeating these accusations in 
 journals which were in their pay, with every fresh 
 colouring which malice could devise. The view was now 
 openly put forward that deputies who were by birth 
 foreigners ought to be no longer allowed to take part 
 in the proceediiigs of the Legislature. In his Appel au 
 gem/re Hwmain, perhaps the most brilliant of his 
 pamphlets which he now gave to the world, he reviewed 
 the whole of his public career from the beginning 
 of the Revolution. It was all of no avail. On the fifth of 
 the month Nivose, Robespierre himself was in the 
 tribune of the Convention, reading a report of the 
 Committee on the principles of Revolutionary Govern- 
 ment. " It is the function of Constitutional Govern- 
 ment," he said, " to conserve : it is the function of 
 Revolutionary Government to found." For the first 
 time the doctrines of the Robespierrean despotism 
 were formulated from the tribune of the Convention. 
 Robespierre proceeded to jus^tify the necessity of a 
 strong executive by comparing the State to a vessel 
 sailing between two rocks. Moderation on the one hand 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 27 
 
 and Excess on th& other. Turning towards Ana- 
 charsis he said, " The two extremes meet. Nothing so 
 much resembles the apostle of federalism and disin- 
 tegration as the unseasonable preacher of the 'Republic, 
 one and universal.' The friend of kings and the 
 advocate-general of the Human Race understand each 
 other sufficiently well." Anacharsis turned pale with 
 indignation as he heard the same calumnies he had so 
 thoroughly refuted in the " A'p'pd" and elsewhere, 
 being served up again for the delectation of his 
 enemies without the slightest hint of their truth ever 
 having been called in question. Robespierre continued 
 to develope his theory of an organised foreign con- 
 spiracy in Paris, of which he professed to hold the 
 threads. Barfere followed in the same strain, finishing 
 by demanding that all foreigners should be prohibited 
 henceforth from speaking or voting in the Convention. 
 This motion was carried practically without any 
 further discussion, and thus Cloots just found himself 
 for a second time the victim of a carefully -woven plot 
 of the Robespierre-Barfere conspiracy. 
 
 Two days later Anacharsis with an abstracted air 
 might have been seen walking briskly past the Place 
 de la Revolution, where stood the ominous instrument 
 of the Terror. He stood for a moment and then passed 
 on at an increased pace into the Champs Elysfes. His 
 gloomy forebodings as to his fate were suddenly checked 
 by the sight of two little children sitting by the side of 
 the road and spelling out the words of a school-book. 
 His eyes suddenly filled with tears; he seized the 
 children and covered them with kisses. His work 
 then had not all been in vain ! That education^ with- 
 out which true freedom was impossible, and which he 
 had had his share in bringing within reach of the 
 young, would bear its fruit yet ! For a few moments 
 he forgot everything but his faith in the future of 
 mankind, though as he returned past the Place de la 
 Revolution towards his own residence in the Hotel 
 
28 The Ofator of the Human Race. 
 
 de Brionne, the thought o£ the Committees and of the 
 scoundrel who was conspiring to destroy all that for 
 him made the Revolution worth having and worth 
 living for, can hardly fail to have overwhelmed him 
 again. That same evening he was arrested under a man- 
 date issued by the Committee of General Security — a 
 mandate which coupled his name with that of Thomas 
 Paine. 
 
 The Royalist and Robespierreist journals brutally 
 crowed over the fall of Cosmopolitanism in the person 
 of the " Orator of the Human Race," and the triumph 
 of French Chauvinism. The Parisian Sans-Culottists, 
 the Hebertists headed by the Cordeliers Club with 
 its branches throughout the country, rose up in in- 
 dignation at the incarceration of their leaders — 
 for Ronsin and Vincent had also been arrested. 
 The Declaration of the "Rights of Man," hung 
 up in the hall of the Cordeliers, was veiled with 
 a black cloth emblematic of the displeasure of the 
 popular party at the conduct of the Committees, con- 
 duct which they incorrectly attributed principally 
 to the influence of the Dantonist party, who had for 
 some time past been vehemently agitating in favour of 
 the abolition of Revolutionary Government, and of 
 " Moderation " generally. So threatening did matters 
 become, that the Committees were forced by pressure of 
 public opinion and the dread of imminent insurrection 
 to release Ronsin and Vincent, and to promise to 
 release Cloots and others within a few days. Negocia- 
 tions between the Sans-Culottists and the Government 
 were carried on through the Cordeliers Club, the Com- 
 missioner Collot d'Herbois who had recently returned 
 from the provinces, and been added to the Committee 
 of Public Safety, serving as go-between. The matter 
 took on more or less the complexion of a quarrel between 
 two great clubs, the Dantonists and the party of the 
 Government preponderating at the Jacobins. At last 
 the Cordeliers were beguiled by promises, for the ful- 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 29 
 
 filment of which they neglected to obtain any 
 guarantees, into removing the veil from the Declara- 
 tion of the " Rights of Man," and communicating this 
 fact to the departments. The Robespierreist league now 
 pulled itself together. On the night of the twentieth 
 of Nivose, in direct contravention of the pledges given 
 to the Cordeliers, the matter was decided in full Com- 
 mittee, and Fouquier Tinville, the public prosecutor, 
 summoned to receive orders. Hebert, Vincent, 
 Ronsin, Momoro, were decreed accused, as a first in- 
 stalment in the holocaust of Sans-Culottism. In vain 
 the Cordeliers protested. The Government had suc- 
 ceeded in inspiring the partizans of Sans-Culottism 
 with panic. In a few days all the leaders who had 
 been in the van of the revolutionary movement were 
 under lock and key. Most were taken to the Con- 
 ciergerie, but Ronsin and some others were sent to join 
 Ariacbarsis Cloots at St. Lazare. Meanwhile the 
 Committee-men and their partizans among the Jacobins 
 began with increased fury to pour forth their deluge of 
 calumnies against the prisoners now deprived of all 
 means of defence. It was even hoped by their friends 
 that in the very absurdity of the accusations levelled 
 againstthem lay their best hopeof acquittal. The masses 
 of the populace were sought to be appeased by state- 
 ments industriously circulated that the destruction of 
 Sans-Culottism and the " nationalising " of the Revolu- 
 tion meant the return of peace, and the end of the priva- 
 tions they were then suffering from famine. 
 
 FouquierTinville, who had been fairly staggered at the 
 task assigned him, and whofoundthedifiiculties of draw- 
 ing up any plausible act of accusation against men whose 
 zeal and devotion to the cause of the Revolution were 
 so notorious, to exceed even his powers, was constantly 
 resorting to the Committee for guidance. Robespierre 
 now hit upon the plan made famous in the later period 
 of the Terror, that namely of consolidating the indict- 
 ment of a number of persons into one act of ii,ccusatioo. 
 
30 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 This was the first case in which the above procedure 
 was adopted. The prisoners to be arraigned in the 
 present trial were composed chiefly, though not en- 
 tirely, of the party of the Commune, i.e., of the 
 Cordeliers Society, a few nondescript shades of Moder- 
 atism being dexterously included. It was on the first 
 of Germinal that the accused, nineteen by the tale, 
 were brought before the Eevolutionary Tribunal. 
 Amongst them was the Dutch banker, De Kock, father 
 of the novelist Paul de Kock, who besides having 
 helped to found the propagandist journal Le Batave, 
 had devoted an enormous fortune to the support of the 
 armies and the cause of the Revolution generally. It 
 was at his house in the environs of Paris that Hubert, 
 Anacb arsis and other leaders of Sans-Culottism used 
 frequently to meet for friendly discussion. Ana- 
 charsis and some of the others still believed in the 
 integrity of the jury, but Ronsin and Vincent saw that 
 a terrorism had been set up which rendered all chance 
 of escape hopeless. 
 
 The accusations, vague enough, were supported 
 by depositions of an equally ridiculous character. 
 Every time anything was said which might tell 
 in favour of the prisoners, or which might impli- 
 cate other persons whom it was not convenient to 
 prosecute, the witnesses were promptly cut short by 
 the president, Dumas. Cloots, although included in 
 the general indictment of having conspired to over- 
 throw the Republic in the interests of Eoyalism and 
 of the foreign powers, was but little referred to in- 
 dividually in the course of the proceedings. The only 
 fact that was seriously alleged against him was that 
 he had some months before, out of good-nature, en- 
 deavoured to procure the liberation of a woman who 
 was in prison as a suspect. The trial lasted in all 
 three days, and thirty-six witnesses were heard. The 
 last day the public galleries were crowded with 
 Moderates of all shades, with Robespierreists and with 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 31 
 
 Jacobin partizans of the Committee, who howled down 
 the accused the moment they attempted to say any- 
 thing in their defence, and hailed every accusation with 
 cries of "To the guillotine." Charged towards the 
 close of the day's proceedings with having treacherously 
 plotted with his theory of a "Universal Republic," 
 Cloots replied : " Citizens, the Universal Republic is in 
 
 the system of nature As for suspecting me to 
 
 be the parti'zan of kings merely because I have de- 
 clared myself the enemy of them all, you dare not do 
 it." 
 
 On some dispute occurring between two of his com- 
 rades, when the victims were brought back to the 
 prison, Anacharsis conjured them in the name of 
 fraternity in death, like himself, to sleep their last 
 night on earth in the quiet of a good conscience. The 
 following morning they were again brought up before 
 the tribunal, but the proceedings on this occasion were 
 little more than formal. At mid-day they were all 
 declared guilty and sentenced to death without respite. 
 Amidst the declarations of innocence which proceeded 
 from some of the prisoners, the voice of Cloots was 
 heard exclaiming — "I appeal from your sentence to 
 the Human Race, but like Socrates I will drink the 
 hemlock with pleasure." "The Republic is dead," 
 said Hebert to Ronsin. "It is immortal," replied 
 the general. 
 
 Late the same afternoon the tumbrils were to 
 be seen forcing their way through dense and 
 disorderly crowds, egged on to every form of insult 
 against the occupants by the partizans of Robes- 
 pierre, to the Place de la Revolution. Hubert 
 was in the first cart bathed in tears. Cloots was on 
 the last, calm and at times even smiling. The indecent 
 jubilation of the Dantonists, headed by the young 
 journalistic ruflSan, Camille Desmoulins, over the 
 downfall of all that was purest and best in the 
 revolutionary movement, was not of long duration, 
 
32 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 Robespierre and the Committee men, in making an end 
 of Sans-Culottism and the advanced section of Revolu- 
 tionists, did not intend compromising themselves with 
 the Parisian populace, by getting tarred with the ultra- 
 Moderatism and highly-dangerous, because ill-concealed, 
 intrigues of the Dantonist party. The latter, more- 
 over, were becoming extremely inconvenient to the 
 Government, especially to Robespierre, for while as 
 friends they tended to compromise him with the 
 populace, as enemies they stood in the way of his 
 ambition. They were destined soon to find out the 
 nature of the man whom they had flattered, and who, 
 until quite recently, had professed the warmest friend- 
 ship for them. He suddenly rounded on them, and in 
 a few days all the chief leaders of the party, 
 including Danton and his lieutenant, Camille, followed 
 the H^bertists to the national scaifold. Both sides 
 alike prophesied that they should be avenged on Robes- 
 pierre, a prediction which fulfilled itself four months 
 later. Both parties were to Robespierre "unseason- 
 able '* (intempestatif) — the first, because by what he 
 deemed their revolutionary excesses, they stood in 
 the way of the diplomatic relations he was endeavour- 
 ing to establish with the powers, and which he fondly 
 hoped would make him the Washington of France ; 
 and because their whole tendency, as exemplified in 
 their drastic application of the law of maximv/m, was 
 obnoxious to the merchants, shop-keepers, f ore-stallers, 
 market-riggers, army-contractors, and middle-classes 
 generally, of whose cause Robespierre had latterly 
 constituted himself the especial champion. The 
 second, if for no other reason, because their im- 
 portunate demands for what practically amounted to 
 a general amnesty, and the total cessation of the 
 Terror, did not, by any means, fit in with his 
 plans for getting rid of his opponents. But the 
 attempt of the " Incorruptible " to moderate the 
 Revolution by throwing the heads of the leading 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 33 
 
 Revolutionists to the coalition was a conspicuous 
 failure. In spite of the martyrdom of her rebellious 
 son, Prussia did not detach herself from the alliance, 
 and the war continued as before. With the middle- 
 classes at home Robespierre was more successful. The 
 merchants, shop-keepers, fore-stallers, and market- 
 riggers, accepted him, not unwillingly, as their bul- 
 wark against Sans-Culottism. He was, at all events 
 for them, the lesser of two evils. As soon as the 
 frontiers were clear, they tossed aside their wretched 
 instrument, who at last" reaped the just reward of his 
 toadyism and villainy. Unfortunately, seen through 
 the reaction which followed his fall, this blight and 
 canker of the Revolution had the good fortune to 
 acquire the halo of a doubly false reputation. On the 
 one hand he was abused by reactionary writers as the 
 embodiment of the very thing he attacked, Sans- 
 Culottism, simply because he had not dared to go to 
 the full length of abolishing the tnaxvmvi/m, and 
 because in his own personal interest he had system- 
 atically abused, for his own purposes, the system 
 which the true Sans-Culottes had been only anxious 
 to use against proven traitors during a period of crisis. 
 On the other side he has been lauded by certain 
 callow rhetoricians and popular political essayists as 
 the incarnation of the " people's cause," because, for- 
 sooth, he was followed by reactionists, who found it 
 possible to go greater lengths than he in the work of 
 " moderating " and " nationalising " the Revolution. 
 
 William Morris once said to me that he regarded 
 Jean Calvin as "quite the worst man that has 
 ever lived." I would pair with the name of 
 Jean Calvin, in this distinction, that of Maximilien 
 Robespierre. The old French province of Picardy 
 assuredly deserves the merit of having produced, 
 at an interval of two hundred years, two of 
 the most exquisitely developed scoundrels the world 
 has ever seen — Calvin in the 16th, Robespierre in the 
 
 
 
34 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 18th, century. Both alike were redolent of cant ; Calvin 
 sniffed the theological cant of the 16th century, with 
 its Christian bigotry and asceticism ; Robespierre the 
 political cant of the 18th century, with its Rousseauite 
 intolerance and affectation of Roman austerity. Both 
 alike were bloodless, bilious, blear-eyed abortions — 
 crosses between the fish and the human — who owed 
 the reputation they gained with simpletons for " clean- 
 living," "purity," and "incorruptibility," in a great 
 measure to this very fact. Shakspere must surely 
 have had these two precious Picards in the view of 
 his prophetic soul when he spoke of the " treacherous, 
 kindless villain." Poor Anacharsis Cloots had the 
 misfortune to fall into the jaws of the second of these 
 monsters, as poor Michael Servet did into those of the 
 first. 
 
 The two central ideas for which Anacharsis Cloots 
 lived and suffered martyrdom were those of Inter- 
 nationalism and of Free-Thought. It was Voltaire 
 that gave him his stimulus rather than Rousseau. 
 Willing, though he was, to sacrifice his fortune, and, 
 what is more, willing though he was that the fortune 
 of his class should be sacrificed in the cause of the 
 Revolution, supporter though he was of the drastic 
 application of the maximum, with a view of alleviating 
 the miseries of the working-classes during the crisis, 
 as well as of forcible requisitions on the property of 
 the rich for the support of the armies —it is neverthe- 
 less plain that he did not appreciate the significance 
 of economics as the corner-stone of historical progress 
 any more than did his equally well-meaning contem- 
 poraries, Hubert, Chaumette, Vincent, and the rest. 
 The conception of a classless society, it is evident from 
 various passages in his writings, had not so much as 
 dawned upon him. The only economic ideal he had, 
 was probably that of a system of peasant proprietor- 
 ship which should ensure a competence for all, com- 
 bined with a public opinion which should compel the 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 35 
 
 wealthy to voluntarily devote the greater part of 
 their riches to public purposes. This view he held 
 simply because no other had been pointed out to him, 
 and the conditions of contemporary industry did not 
 allow him to see any other. He believed, what well- 
 nigh all thinkers believed before Karl Marx, that the 
 ground- work of historic evolution was political and 
 speculative, rather than social and economic. For him 
 the " universal republic," with Paris, the home of the 
 " new culture," as its Metropolis, in which all distinc- 
 tion of nationality should disappear, and the whole 
 human family should constitute one people — in con- 
 junction with the destruction of supernatural religions, 
 and the establishment on their ruins of an atheistic 
 cultus (as represented by the worship of Reason, 
 having its head-quarters in Paris) — would, he thought, 
 alone suffice to put an end to oppression, misery, 
 and war, and to inaugurate the new era of Liberty, 
 Equality, and Fraternity. These principles he kept 
 steadily before him throughout his whole public career, 
 without swerving or compromise of any kind what- 
 ever, and for them he sacrificed his energies, his 
 fortune, and finally his life. It was in their interest 
 he unceasingly advocated a war of propaganda which 
 should extend the frontiers of what was ultimately to 
 become the World Republic without delay and as far 
 as possible. He abhorred the notion of the tempor- 
 ary and patched-up peace which the Girondists and 
 the Robespierreists were alike anxious to obtain, at 
 the price of sacrificing to the reactionary powers 
 abroad and to the reactionary classes at home the 
 central principles of the Revolution by reducing it to 
 the proportions of a mere change in the form of 
 French government. 
 
 The merit of the " Orator of the Human Race " 
 consists in his having been the first to formulate 
 Cosmopolitanism as a principle, and his having 
 been at least one of the first to insist on the definite 
 
36 The Orator of the Human Race. 
 
 abandonment by the people collectively of supernatural 
 creeds and cults as an essential condition of liberty 
 and progress. Before the French Revolution, emanci- 
 pation from priestcraft and dogma had been the 
 special privilege of the aristocratic and well-to-do 
 classes, a privilege which they were zealous of vindi- 
 cating for themselves against the " common people," as 
 all eighteenth-century literature bearing upon the 
 subject shows. Free-thought was henceforth to be- 
 come incorporated in the great popular movement of 
 European progress. Cloots, as already indicated, failed 
 to seethatthe principlesof Internationalism and Eation- 
 alism, upon whose connexion with the great revolution- 
 ary ideal of popular sovereignty he so justly insisted, 
 had their roots in the existing economic conditions of 
 society. He failed to distinguish between the " third 
 estate " and the " people." For him, as for the vast 
 majority of his contemporaries, there were but two 
 opposed classes — the first represented by kings, priests, 
 and nobles, and the second by all who were not kings, 
 priests, and nobles. The antagonism even between 
 these two classes was for him largely a political one, 
 such economical inequalities as existed being based 
 essentially on political inequality and destined to pass 
 away with the abolition of the latter. He could not 
 see that the political privileges of the first and second 
 estates were simply the sign and seal of a fundamental 
 economical privilege, and that that very "third estate," 
 which seemed to so many, indeed more or less to all, 
 to have identical interests with the whole of the 
 people, was already constituting itself a privileged 
 class, prepared to step into the place left vacant by 
 the deposition of the feudal classes — and further, that 
 " popular sovereignty," " cosmopolitanism," and the 
 "empire of reason," would only be so far tolerated 
 as they did not compromise the material interests, real 
 or supposed, of the new class — so long as that new class 
 remained the dominant power in the State, But 
 
The Orator of the Human Race. 37 
 
 these defects of intellectual vision were incident to 
 the period in which he lived, and do not in any way 
 detract from the interest attaching to our Orator as a 
 typical figure of French Eevolutionary life. 
 
 What strikes one in him, as in many writers and 
 thinkers of the period, as compared with ourselves in 
 this present century-end, is the singular and almost 
 child-like naivete of his enthusiasm. Our enthusiasm 
 to-day, even when at its highest, is always " sicklied 
 o'er with the pale cast of thought." The century which 
 divides us from the French Revolution has made the 
 world old in a sense in which not even a millennium 
 had done before. As a consequence, what to the mind 
 of the " age of reason," which could see nothing in 
 the future of humanity but the glow of a breaking 
 summer's day, appeared full of life and reality, seems 
 to us often but turgid rhetoric or vapid bombast. Let 
 us think of this when we look back on the martyr- 
 Orator, and we shall forgive him for calling himself the 
 " Orator of the Human Race," for talking about 
 drinking the hemlock with Socratas, and for many 
 another eighteenth-century flourish! We shall none 
 the less honour him as one of the indirect precursors 
 of the working-class movement of modern times, and 
 we shall love him as the single-minded hero and 
 apostle of two great ideas, which will assuredly one 
 day be realised, although not, perhaps, precisely in the 
 manr.er he expectedi 
 
THE DECAY OF PAGAN THOUGHT 
 
 It is probable that comparatively few educated per- 
 sons, even in the present day, fully realize the fact 
 that the historical Paganism of the ancient world 
 had a development. They are accustomed to repjard 
 the religion of the Homeric age of ancient Greece, 
 with its gods, goddesses, and heroes, as essentially 
 the same with the religion of the Roman Empire 
 in the fourth century after Christ — as the religion, 
 that is, which Constantine renounced, and which 
 Theodosius suppressed. Going on the assumption 
 that the god^ of Homer and Hesiod were still wor- 
 shipped, and the crude popular legends respecting 
 them still believed, where not openly rejected, by 
 even the cultivated inhabitants of the Empire, and 
 that the ancient morality with which these worships 
 were connected, still existed without noteworthy 
 change, these persons not unnaturally regard Chris- 
 tianity as a system embodying a new spirit and code 
 of ideas, theological and ethical, which suddenly burst 
 upon the world, arresting attention by the startling 
 contrast it presented to the prevailing creeds and 
 habits of thought. Their wonder at this marvellous 
 and unprecedented phenomenon is perennial, and 
 furnishes a powerful argument, as they think, for 
 detaching Christianity from the main stream of natu- 
 ral historical development. Now, without unduly 
 trenching upon theological ground, with which we 
 are not here directly concerned, we may readily 
 
 19 
 
40 "The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 admit that if the case were as stated ; if a totally 
 new view of nature, of man's destiny, and of the aims 
 of his life, had really fallen upon the world without 
 any assignable connexion with previous or current 
 thought, there would certainly have been a plausible 
 case for regarding the Christian religion as some- 
 thing organically distinct from all other creeds and 
 systems, theological and philosophical. The object of 
 the following pages is to state briefly the facts of the 
 problem. 
 
 The great change which came over the speculative 
 and ethical thought of the world, about the time that 
 the Koman dominion had finally consolidated itself, 
 or which, at least, then first became generally mani- 
 fest, has been too long neglected by the general his- 
 torian. Yet, the tremendous and far-reaching signifi- 
 cance of this change can hardly be over-estimated, 
 whether we regard it as the condition or symptom 
 of the great transition-period which followed. The 
 struggle between Caesar and Pompey for possession 
 of the world-Empire, is itself scarcely so significant 
 an event as the introduction and spread of the intro- 
 spective spirit, and of the mystical doctrines derived 
 for the most part from the East which was just then 
 beginning. The stern civic virtue of Kome, the devo- 
 tion entire and complete of the man of antiquity 
 generally to his " city " and his kindred was rapidly 
 sinking to its lowest ebb. The "gods" — the visible 
 sign and symbol of ancient city-life — had, in the case 
 of numberless cities, been transferred to Rome. And 
 what could this mean to the inhabitants, but that 
 their city as an independent, social and political orga- 
 nism, had ceased to exist, that the supreme object of 
 the devotion of their ancestors was gone ? The old 
 religion and the old morality in its most sacred form 
 had ceased to be, for them. They were enrolled as 
 Roman citizens perhaps, but what of that ? What 
 was Rome to them apart from its character as the 
 
The HecAy of Pagan Thought. 4I 
 
 metropolis of culture, but the centre of a corrupt 
 tax-gathering oligarchy and of a military despotism 
 which had forcibly imposed itself upon them ? Even 
 to the Roman himself, the city with its crowds of 
 strangers, its violent contrasts of rich and poor, and 
 its purchasable citizenship was not the Rome of 
 Mettus Curtius, or of Manlius. The ancient forms 
 if city and of family life and worship still subsisted, 
 /t is true, but as dried and mechanical usages from 
 which the life had fled. The pace BomaTia had abo- 
 lished for the provincial the duty of military service 
 in defence of his city. Its magistracies and functions 
 were reduced to sinecures, its distinctive religion as 
 such was virtually abolished. 
 
 Economically a correspondingly great change had 
 taken place. The old independent freeholder, work- 
 ing his land and his domestic slaves for his own 
 behoof, had become almost extinct — great amalga- 
 mated estates called latifundia, worked by armies of 
 slaves under a villicusor overseer, and cultivated 
 with a view to the sale of the produce, had , become 
 the rule in agriculture, while in manufacture and 
 commerce the principle of large capital and pro- 
 duction for profit was similarly applied — to the ruin 
 of ancient art. For generations past, the ancient city- 
 worship had lost its prestige. The meaning of the 
 fire burning on the pyrraneum was forgotten. The 
 public festivals, the ancient hymns, had sunk into 
 mere conventional usages for the ordinary man, their 
 investigation only interesting the antiquary. From 
 the time of Sokrates onward, and especially since the 
 conquests of Alexander had broken down the pre- 
 viously existing barriers between Europe and the 
 East, the ancient moral and religious sentiments, 
 whose object was the tribe and the city, and for which 
 the individual as such had no place, had been gradually 
 undergoing a steady process of decay from within. 
 They were now being undermined by the notions of 
 
42 l^he Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 independent individuality, or personality, of a tran- 
 scendent deity, the creator and living power of the 
 universe (as distinct from the old deified ancestors 
 and personified natural objects and powers), and of 
 a higher life of the soul after death. These ideas, 
 which had received the fullest expression in the east, 
 and the morality based on them, in which the cate- 
 gories of sin and holiness had superseded those of 
 civic virtue and its contrary, of justice and injustice, 
 &c., had been for generations steadily gaining the 
 upper hand among the cultivated classes. The Boman 
 Imperium in absorbing all the old city-cults merely 
 gave material shape to what was already accomplished 
 in the moral sphere. Another and more positive way, 
 in which the world-empire coincided with, and gave a 
 certain expression to, current speculative tendencies, 
 was in the fact of its centralisation. An all-dominant 
 city — a centre from which all power radiated — was 
 a fitting analogue of the one ultimate source of all 
 things, of which the inferior gods were only the feeble 
 refiex, to which all religions with their divine rites 
 and ceremonies pointed, and who alone was the true 
 object of worship. 
 
 These ideas which, as before remarked, had taken 
 their rise some centuries before Christ, had been 
 slowly and surely permeating the then world, till, 
 about the first century of the Christian era, they 
 had become conspicuous among all classes, and apart 
 from an exception to be presently noticed, dominant 
 among all persons possessing any claim to cultivation. 
 There was a universal tendency to look toward the 
 east, and to the oracles and literatures of past ages and 
 ancient races for the solution of the problems respect- 
 ing the soul's relation to the supreme divine power 
 and its destiny after death. The cults and literatures 
 of the oriental world were supposed to enshrine this, 
 and various mysteries and secret rites sprang up, hav- 
 ing for their object the setting forth by the aid of 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 43 
 
 symbolism, traditional and fantastic, esoteric doctrines 
 concerning God, the soul and immortality. 
 
 In considering the intellectual and religious aspect 
 of the expiring world of antiquity, it is important to 
 bear in mind the peculiarly _/Zw^ nature of ancient 
 religious conceptions. The world of personified na- 
 tural forces and objects which, in conjunction with 
 the world of ancestral spirits, constituted for the 
 ancients the field of religious thought and observance, 
 was always vague and shadowy. Its several figures 
 tended sometimes to coalesce and sometimes to sepa- 
 rate, wreathing themselves into the most varied com- 
 binations. Even the distinction between ancestral 
 hero and personified natural force or object did not 
 count for much. The ancestral hero was often also a 
 sun-god, e.g., Herakles. The ancient was ready to see 
 in every foreign divinity that was not obviously tribal 
 or local, another aspect or name of some native nature- 
 god. The essentially magical nature of early religion, 
 of which the varied cults of the Roman Empire were 
 a survival, must also not be lost sight of. The ques- 
 tion of names was of the utmost importance. Every 
 divinity was supposed to have a true, sacred, or 
 esoteric name of wondrous potency, and when invoked 
 by this name, was bound to respond. In the " mys- 
 teries " the true name of the divinity was revealed. 
 In addition to this religious magic, the whole of daily 
 life was inter-penetrated with a belief in amulets, 
 charms, and sorcery generally, to an extent which 
 might seem incredible to anyone not conversant with 
 the literature of the time. In fact, the whole in- 
 tellectual atmosphere of antiquity, and especially of 
 the period before us, is one which it is almost impos- 
 sible for any modem to fully enter into, try as he may, 
 and let his historical perception be never so keen. To 
 take a single instance only. One of the most important 
 cults of antiquity was the solar cult in its various 
 aspects. Yet how did the man of antiquity represent 
 
44 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 to himself the relations of the several objects of these 
 cults ? Did he regard them as diverse aspects of one 
 sun-god, or were they conceived each as a separate 
 personality? Was the "most high God," i.e., the 
 Sun-god as worshipped by the ancient Phoenician at 
 its meridian distinguished by him from the Baal of 
 fertility, the ripening sun-god ? Was this again dis- 
 tinct from the Sun-god as symbolising the scorching 
 or the putrefying power of the solar rays (Baal- 
 zebub) ? Again, how did the Graeco-Roman regard ' 
 Apollo and Helios or Sol respectively ? Was the dis- 
 tinction one of name only, or was the personality im- 
 plied in the solar disc distinct from the personality 
 of the god ApoUo ? Did Khu-nat-en (Amenophis IV.) 
 the Pharaoh who introduced the worship of the visible 
 sun, regard this as distinct from Ra, or only as a new 
 aspect of-Ra? These are questions very difficult to 
 answer as regards the earlier ages of Pagan thought, 
 the nearest solution being probably that the question 
 never distinctly presented itself to the ancient mind ; 
 but we may affirm with confidence that, at the period 
 under consideration, that of its decline, the tendency 
 was to regard all diversity of name and cult as exter- 
 nal and local, and to view the objects of all the 
 leading worships of the Empire as different modes of 
 approaching the same central fact — the one divinity, 
 immanent in, or transcending, the visible world, accord- 
 ing to the view of the worshipper. Still, the old 
 confusion lingered on to a great extent in popular 
 conception, till Paganism flickered finally out in the 
 sixth century, nay, lingers on in the different local 
 cults of the " virgin " to this day. To how many a 
 pilgrim to Loretto, St. Jago di Compostella, Mariazell, 
 or Einsiedeln, does not the local image enshrine a 
 "virgin" special to itself, and having only a very 
 general connexion with those of other similar estab- 
 lishments.? 
 
 We have spoken of an exception to the general 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 45 
 
 mystical tendency of thought throughout the empire. 
 From the time of Augustus onwards till about the end 
 of the second century, there was a movement of 
 thought observable among the literary class, in many 
 cases associated with the philosophy of Epicurus, but 
 also with that of the Sceptics, which ran counter to the 
 prevailing mystical syncretism, and which is reflected 
 in the works of Cicero, Lucretius, and Lucian. 
 Though the existence of this movement is unques- 
 tionable, its importance has been undoubtedly exagge- 
 rated by many historians who, like Gibbon, have 
 assumed it to have been co-extensive with the whole 
 of the educated classes. This it could never have 
 been, even when at its zenith in the Augustan age, 
 and it soon after declined, till in the third century 
 there are scarcely any more traces of it left. It may 
 be doubted, indeed, whether at any time it extended 
 beyond a few of the principal centres. The mystical 
 movement which was going on alongside of it event- 
 ually swallowed it up. The rationalism of antiquity 
 was at no period more than skin-deep. The mytho- 
 logo- magical theory of nature with which all society 
 was imbued, derived straight from the primitive ideas 
 of prehistoric times, with the modifications induced 
 by altered conditions of culture, but still essentially 
 the same, was too powerful to yield to the fitful 
 flashes of the critical spirit. These did not suffice 
 even seriously to weaken, much less to eradicate it. _ 
 
 It is curious to observe how new ideas and prin 
 ciples invariably on their first appearance assume the 
 guise of the old ones with which they are formally in 
 conflict. The early Protestant sects (the Lutherans, 
 the Anabaptists of Munster, &c.) retained much of 
 the Catholic cultus, and not a few of the Catholic 
 dogmas ; the Catholic ideal of the Christian church as 
 a divine kingdom on earth gave way by no means at 
 once to the essentially Protestant notion of religion 
 as a personal matter. The new philosophy of the 
 
46 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 Renaissance which attacked Schola,sticisin, retained, 
 nevertheless, the scholastic manner of approaching 
 problems and the scholastic modes of expression. 
 The dawning physical science of the sixteenth century- 
 was steeped in the conceits of magic, alchemy and 
 astrology, as may readily be seen from the writings 
 of such men as Paracelsus, Trithemius, Agrippa, Car- 
 danus. The rising middle-classes, or that section of 
 them which represented commercial interests, up to 
 Adam Smith's time, sought their advantage not in the 
 free competition which is the real soul of commercial 
 enterprise, but in the old notion of status as embodied 
 in guilds and monopolies. The modern Secularist, 
 whose creed is professedly a protest against church and 
 chapel, nevertheless has his regular Sunday lecture 
 or service after the approved pattern. Even the 
 architecture of the dissenting chapel is maintained ; in 
 places where the body is wealthy, the lecture-hall 
 resembling nothing so much as a modern congrega- 
 tionalist church. Instances might be multiplied with- 
 out number showing that at first it is only in one or 
 two definite points of conflict that new tendencies 
 difierentiate themselves from the old, and that the 
 consequences latent in these tendencies are but dimly 
 visible to their early advocates. It is only after hav- 
 ing passed through this early development that they 
 begin to become concrete and show what they are in 
 themselves. Thus it was to all appearance with early 
 Christianity. To the eye of the contemporary Pagan 
 it was, barring one or two peculiarities which he 
 might easily trace to its Hebrew origin, little if at all 
 distinguishable from the various other "mysteries" 
 then in vogue. They all had certain common charac- 
 teristics — secrecy of initiation, the wearing of special 
 robes, generally white, by the neophyte ; the passing 
 through sundry stages of probation, &c., &e. They all 
 professed to offer solutions of the problem of the rela- 
 tion of the soul to its suprerae^ource, and of its destiny 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 47 
 
 after death. With the third century Paganism had 
 visibly undergone a fundamental change. Long- 
 before, the current monotheistic tendencies had re- 
 ceived an expression in the ofScial religion which 
 planted the worship of the Roman Jupiter Optimus 
 Maximus (J. 0. M.) everywhere throughout the length 
 and breadth of the Empire, identifying him with the 
 principal god of every district, with the great Syrian 
 sun-god of Baalbek (J. 0. M. Heliopolitanus) no less 
 than with the local divinity of the St. Bernard pass 
 (J. O. M. Poeninus). But this personification of the 
 Roman power was not in essence the kind of mono- 
 theism to satisfy a xnystical and introspective age such 
 as the second, and still more the third century. The 
 notion of individual holiness, of immortality, of the 
 " other world," of the supra-sensible, was everywhere 
 dominant in men's minds where mere indifference did 
 not prevail, and what was required was a creed which 
 rould embrace this, and formulate it satisfactorily. 
 
 The earlier Paganism had only regarded the future 
 /ife of the soul as a shadow-life, a powerless, object- 
 less dream-existence. Only a few specially select 
 heroes were permitted the reward of the Elysian fields 
 or the islands of the blest, which was perhaps nevei 
 regarded as much more than a poetical fancj'. The 
 oriental theory of transmigration was only held by 
 the learned. But with the decline of the ancient 
 Paganism — which had its centre in the social organiza- 
 tion (clan, tribe, city) on this side the grave, and 
 to which the after life of the individual was a matter 
 of little importance — the doctrine of the Elysian fields 
 and the Happy islands became increasingly popular, 
 and was extended to all respectable persons. This is 
 shown by the sarcophagi and monumental inscriptions 
 »f the period.^ On many of the former, figures of 
 kritons and nereids are to be seen carrying the souls of 
 
 1 It should be observed that already in the first century the practice of burial 
 /iad begun to supplant that of burning, though it has been suggested that the 
 denudation of the woodlands of Italy, and the consequent scarcity of fuel, had a 
 large share in bringing this about, so fat as the Italian cities were concerned. 
 
48 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 the departed ones to the " islands of the blest," while 
 numberless inscriptions expressly testify to the devout 
 Pagan's " glorious hope of immortality." Thus we 
 read, " Ye unhappy living, bewail this death ; but ye 
 gods and goddesses, rejoice at your new fellow-citizen." 
 " Now for the first thou livest thy happy time, far 
 from all earthly fortune ; in heaven on highest thou 
 enjoy est nectar and ambrosia with the gods." An 
 inscription to a little girl of eight years old runs ; " Ye 
 adored souls of the, pious, lead the innocent Magnilla 
 through the Elysian plains to your abodes." On 
 the grave of an infant is written ; " My heavenly and 
 divine soul will not pass to the land of shades ; the 
 universe and the stars will take me up; the earth 
 has only received my body, the stone my name." A 
 son prays for his father ; " Ye gods of the underworld, 
 open for my father the plains, where, rosy-bright, 
 dawns an eternal day." ^ The notion of intercession 
 with the gods by deceased persons for their friends 
 below also appears on sundry inscriptions. Arnobius, 
 a Christian writer of the fourth century, refers 
 (Adversus Gentes, ii.) to the belief as general among 
 contemporary Pagans that a happy futurity was the 
 reward of a moral life. 
 
 The older mysteries (Samothrakian, Eleusinian, the 
 Bacchanalian, etc.), though still the same as ever out 
 wardly, were undoubtedly furnished with a content 
 changed in accordance with changed speculative con- 
 ditions. We are here chiefly interested in the new 
 mysteries, the object of initiation into which was 
 avowedly the attainment of higher knowledge regard- 
 ing the relations of the soul to the divinity, and 
 its purification from material impulses, with a view 
 to immortality. The first to notice in this connexion 
 are the Hekate mysteries, which, although they 
 existed previously, now obtained a special notoriety 
 and popularity. There is little known respecting 
 
 1 See Burkhard's "Der Kaiser Constantin und seine Zeit." 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 49 
 
 them, literature being wholly silent on the subject, 
 and our only information coming from inscriptions. 
 As is well-known, Hekate herself, the goddess of the 
 underworld, was commonly confounded with Artemis 
 (Diana), Proserpine, the Moon, etc. In the inscriptions 
 of the later period this mystery appears as one 
 of the important cults side by side with those of 
 Mithras, and of the "Great Mother," of which we 
 shall speak directly. At Hermannstadt in Hun- 
 gary there is a has relief representing the various 
 grades of initiation in the Hekate cultus. Diocletian 
 is said to have erected a Hekate temple at Antioch, 
 to which 365 steps led down, and it would appear 
 that the initiation always took place underground. 
 The cultus of Sabazios the Phrygian Bacchus, extended 
 far and wide throughout the empire. The ordinary 
 ritual of the Sabazios worship was of the usual orien- 
 tal type — comprising chanting, the clashing of cymbals 
 and the beating of drums, as the accompaniment of 
 the wild Phrygian dance. Among the secret rites 
 were comprised the donning of a stag's skin, sprink- 
 ling with milk and other purifications, the whole 
 terminating with the mystic and somewhat banal 
 words, " I fled the evil and I found the good." In 
 the third century new rites came to be added, such 
 as the passing of a golden serpent through the 
 clothes of the neophyte (ostensibly in memory of 
 the loves of Zeus and Demeter), who was then intro- 
 duced into the sanctum when he was required to repeat 
 the words, " I have eaten from the tambourine, I have 
 drunken from the cymbal, now I am initiated," and 
 sundry other apparently meaningless formulas. The 
 later Christian writers saw in the snake an evidence 
 of the direct participation of the devil in the pro- 
 ceedings. 
 
 More direct evidence of the drift of the mysteries 
 is afibrded by those of the "mother of the gods," the 
 mysterious divinity who was identified with the 
 
so The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 "Syrian goddess," whose great temple was at Hier- 
 apolis, and of whom Lucian has left so graphic a 
 description ; and also with Kybele, Urania, Khea, &c., 
 being in fact sometimes styled the " goddess of many 
 names." The new mysteries which were now im- 
 posed on the older elements of the Phcenician or 
 Phrygian cult centred in the ritual of the Tauroholia 
 which was introduced into Rome from the East about 
 the time of the Antonines, and consisted in the sacri- 
 fice of a bull and sometimes of a ram (Kriobolia). The 
 neophyte claimed on the completion of the ceremony 
 to be " re-born to all eternity " {in oBternvmi renatus). 
 The initiations into these " mysteries " in Rome 
 itself took place on the hill of the Vatican, the custo- 
 mary hour for this celebration being midnight. A 
 deep fosse was made in the ground, and covered with 
 planks, which had been bored through, and formed 
 a kind of sieve. The neophyte arrayed in symbolical 
 clothing and ornaments was placed in the fosse. The 
 sacrifices were made on the top, and the neophyte, 
 as the blood of the victim flowed through the aper- 
 tures, sought to bathe himself in it — to catch as much 
 of it as possible on his face, hair, and dress. It was 
 through this washing in the blood of the lamb or the 
 bull that he acquired his regeneration. He became a 
 taurobolus. But the initiation was not completed by 
 the ceremony alone. To be sure of his salvation he 
 had to wear the blood-stained garments for a speci- 
 fied time afterwai-ds, and to expose himself to all the 
 contumely which might befall him in consequence. 
 The notion of purification by blood is constantly 
 appearing in the Pagan "mysteries" of the empire. 
 One of the initiated into the Taurobolia, a prefect of 
 the city of Rome, and proconsul of Africa, seriously 
 thanks the gods that his soul is now safe. 
 
 The mysteries of Isis formed another of the chief 
 refuges for the subject of the empire who was in 
 distress respecting his soul's welfare. The immediate 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 5 1 
 
 object of the Isis mysteries was the representation of 
 the mutilation of Osiris and the recovery of the lost 
 fragments. This had become overlaid in the imperial 
 age by a mass of mystical and esoteric lore, mainly 
 dealing with the doctrine of personal immortality. 
 The processions and representations, which formed 
 part of the initiating ceremonies, are said to have 
 had aa their object to symbolize death, and resurrec- 
 tion by the grace of Isis. By this time Isis had, 
 of course, become mixed up with Proserpine. Here,and 
 other divinities. Respecting the mysterious signs and 
 prodigies, vouchsafed to the neophyte during his initia- 
 tion, the words of Lucius give some idea : " I passed 
 through the gates of death, I trod the threshold of 
 Proserpine, and after I had ridden through all 
 elements I returned. At midnight I saw the sun in 
 its fullest splendour. I approached the gods of the 
 upper and the underworld and I adored themrin their 
 presence." We can only guess at the nature of the 
 spectacle presented to the eyes of the initiated, and 
 whether the sights and sounds that appealed to his 
 awestruck senses were due to mechanical contrivance 
 or hypnotic suggestion or what not, we have no means 
 of determining.^ 
 
 The Eleusinian rites, though exclusively local, were 
 an important element in the religious life of the 
 decaying world of antiquity. All who could afford, 
 and who were possessed with the Zeitgeist, travelled 
 to Greece to become initiated into these most ancient 
 and famous of all the mysteries of the Greek-speaking 
 world. The Eleusinian ritual had in all probability 
 attained its completed form at a much earlier period 
 than the other mystical cults. In this, as presumably 
 in the other " mysteries," of which we have less full 
 accounts, the processes of initiation were long and 
 exhausting, involving severe fasts, penances and re- 
 ligious exercises. The Eleusinian aspirant began his 
 noviciate in February, with the so-called lesser 
 
 1 There is little doubt that hypnotism played a very largo part In the tempi* 
 " miracles " as in the temple cures. 
 
52 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 mysteries at Athens. He was admitted a Mystes at 
 Eleusis the following September, but he had to wait 
 another twelvemonth before he could enter on the 
 final stage of his initiation. Previous to doing so, a 
 nine days' fast had to be very carefully observed, 
 during which prescribed religious exercises were ful- 
 filled. Then came the initiation in the temple itself, 
 which consisted in an elaborate and gorgeous spectacle 
 listened to in devout silence. At last the votary was 
 allowed to see, handle, and taste, the sacramental 
 objects and to pronounce the mysterious formula. 
 A recent writer has observed that a modern Greek 
 church on the eve of Easter Sunday may convey some 
 idea of the scene. 
 
 But more than aU the " mysteries " hitherto de- 
 scribed, those of Mithras attained the most wide-spread 
 popularity, during the third and fourth centuries. The 
 ^vorship of the Persian Mithras, originally the God of 
 daylight, (the Mitra of the Vedas), but subsequently 
 under Zoroastrianism, the chief sun-god, was intro- 
 duced into the Roman Empire by the Cilician pirates 
 about B.C. 80. The secret cultus, however, did not 
 receive full official sanction till A.c. 100. From this 
 time it became an increasingly powerful factor in the 
 religious life of the Eoman world till its final sup- 
 pression, in the year 376, by Theodosius. 
 
 The Mithraic rites seem to have varied little from 
 their first introduction into the empire. Though all or 
 most of the mysteries had many points in common 
 with the noviciate of the Christians, in none of those 
 hitherto referred to is the likeness so marked as in 
 the Mithraic. "The principal rites of the worship of 
 Mithras," says the late Mr. King ("The Gnostics and 
 their Eemains,"p. 122), " bore a very curious resem- 
 blance to those subsequently established in the Catho- 
 lic Church. . . . The Neophytes were admitted by 
 the rite of Baptism; the initiated at their assemblies 
 solemnly celebrated a species of Eucharist ; whilst th^ 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 53 
 
 courage and endurance of the candidate for admission 
 into the sect were tested by twelve consecutive trials 
 called the 'tortures,' undergone within a cave con- 
 structed for the purpose ; all which tortures had to be 
 passed through before participation in the mysteries 
 was granted to the aspirant." Many of the con- 
 temporary Gnostic sects undoubtedly drew much from 
 Mithraism, which is also the ultimate source of much 
 of the cryptic lore of the secret and masonic societies 
 of the middle ages and of modem times. As in the case 
 of many other ancient cults, the follower of Mithras 
 was indicated by a mystic mark or sign on the fore- 
 head (cf., " the mark of the beast "). The Mithraic 
 Eucharist was celebrated with water and bread in a 
 manner precisely similar to the Christian. The bread 
 used was a round cake, emblematic of the solar disc, and 
 called Mizd,& name in which some scholars see the origin 
 of the word mAssa, as designating the sacrifice of the 
 mass, the cake of which is precisely similar in form. 
 
 During the Mithraic probation of forty days, it is 
 alleged, the aspirant lay naked for several nights on 
 snow and was afterwards scourged for the space of two 
 days. In the museum at Innsbruck are to be seen cer- 
 tain Mithraic tablets on which are pourtrayed the twelve 
 tests of initiation. Large numbers of Mithraic inscrip- 
 tions andamuletshave been preserved, many of which in- 
 dicate the horrors of initiation; besides thelyingin snow 
 and the scourging, there were terrors of all kinds (the 
 original of modern masonic "apprentice" rites) stretch- 
 ings upon a Procrustean bed, contact with fire, fastings 
 in the wilderness, &c., &c. Several distinct degrees 
 of initiation are mentioned, which seem to have been 
 arranged in series of triplets. After the primary 
 initiation the first grade was that of warrior of 
 Mithras, which was followed by the lion and the hull. 
 They were the lower or earthly grades. The candidate 
 then passed through the grades which belonged to 
 
54 T^te Decay of Pagan Thought 
 
 ths region of ^ther, those of the vvXtwee, the osh-i(ik 
 and the raven, respectively. He then reached the 
 sphere of pure fire, through the grades of Oryplwn, 
 Perses and the Sun. Last of all complete union with 
 the divine nature was attained, through the grades of 
 father eagle, father falcon, and father of fathers. Even 
 he who had attained the lowest grade, that of warrior, 
 was supposed, to consider himself separate from ths 
 world. It is alleged by Tertullian that when offered 
 a laurel crown, as for example, at some festivity, he 
 was to repudiate it with the words, "My crown is 
 Mitrhras." The rites of the Mithras-cultus were per- 
 formed in a sacred cave on the side of a hill. Several 
 of these caves have been discovered at various places, 
 including the Roman military stations on the Pannonian 
 and Rhsstian frontier. They vary in dimensions, many 
 of them being quite small. The Mithraic ritual obvi- 
 ously did not involve gorgeous dramatic representa- 
 tions such as the Eleusmian and other ancient 
 mysteries, being in fact probably altogether simple 
 in character, though the great Mithras cave or 
 temple on the Capitoline hill at Eome, which was 
 destroyed in 378 by order of Theodosius, must have 
 been of some pretensions, as was probably the case 
 with others in the larger towns of the empire. There 
 are few more numerous remains of the religious life 
 of the last ages of antiquity than the dedicatory in- 
 scriptions to Iho Solia Invicto Mithroe. The usual 
 figure represents Mithras performing the mystic sacri- 
 fice at the shrine; a young man in flowing robes is 
 seen kneeling on a bull, one hand seizing its head and 
 the other plunging a sword into its neck. A dog, a 
 snake, and a scorpion are drinking the blood which 
 flows from the wound. A raven is seated on a rock 
 beside Mithras. The sun (Phoebus), the moon (Luna), 
 and seven stars, probably representing the seven 
 Persic archangels, the sacred fires, &c., also figure in 
 many Mithraic talismans. That Mithras soon absorbed 
 
The becay of Pagan Thought. 5 5 
 
 Apollo, Helios and all other solar deities goes without 
 saying. But of the fusion of Mithras with other 
 divinities we shall have more to say presently. The 
 subject of Mithraic Symbolism is fairly exhausted in 
 King's " Gnostics," pp. 114-157. 
 
 Eivalling the worship of Mithras in popularity and 
 diffusion among the Pagan population of the Roman 
 Empire was that of Serapis, the celebrated statue 
 of whom was brought over from Sinope to Alexandria 
 by order of Ptolemy Soter in the 3rd century B.C. 
 The God of Pontus soon became identified as the 
 god of the dead with the Egyptian Osiris (Osiris- 
 Apis), and later of course with Jupiter and a crowd 
 of other divinities. The great statue and temple in 
 Alexandria constituted one of the wonders of the 
 world. The Serapeum reared its collossal structure 
 above every other building of the great city. A 
 flight of a hundred steps raised the entrance above 
 the ground. Within, the gigantic statue of the god, 
 composed of all the precious metals plated together, 
 towered up to the roof, and with its outstretched arras 
 touched either side of the great central hall. The 
 Serapeum contained numerous passages and special 
 apartments, while underneath was the great library. 
 If many Christian practices are to be found in 
 Mithraicism, scarcely fewer are discoverable in Sera- 
 peanism. The first we hear of the monastic life is in 
 connexion with the worship of Serapis, the Alexandrian 
 temple itself containing numerous cells for those who 
 intended devoting themselves to serving the God by a 
 life of abstinence. Later on, the Christians formed 
 their ascetic establishments on the precise model of 
 these. The tempje was famous for its great "functions," 
 in which awe-inspiring "miracles" were displayed. 
 The building must have been fitted up with numerous 
 mechanical appliances for producing spectacular effects, 
 including the celebrated brazen disc of the sun floating 
 in mid-air. The sick were supposed to secure their 
 
5 6 'i'he Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 recovery by advice given in a dream sent by the God 
 in the temple of Serapis, in the same way as they did 
 in those of ^sculapius. Besides the Serapeum itself, 
 the whole of Alexandria was full of shrines, pillars, 
 and other monuments to the great God. 
 
 The cultus of Serapis, more than any other of the 
 contemporary religions, succeeded in inspiring a certain 
 awe, if not actual acknowledgment, on the part of the 
 Christians. In a remarkable letter of the Emperor 
 Hadrian, preserved by the historian Vopiscus, it is 
 stated that "those who worship Serapis are also 
 Christians, even such as call themselves Bishops of 
 Christ being devoted to Serapis. The patriarch him- 
 self when he comes to Egypt is forced by some to 
 worship Serapis, by others Christ. One God exists 
 for all, and Him do Christians, Jews, and Gentiles 
 worship." This is interesting, not merely as showing 
 the loose and shifting character of the Christian religion 
 even in the second century, but as illustrating the then 
 orthodox attitude of men of culture on the subject of 
 religion. It has been remarked, as bearing on the 
 above quotation, that the conventional portrait of the 
 founder of Christianity bears so strong a resemblance 
 to the majestic head of the Serapis as to lead to the 
 inference that it was borrowed from the latter. In 
 any case, the relations between the Church and the 
 worship of Serapis would seem to have been excep- 
 tional, since, as is well known, it was the last of the 
 great Pagan cults to be overthrown, many of the 
 Christians dreading that any violence to the sacred 
 image would involve the destruction of heaven and 
 earth. The fall of Serapis gave the cowp de grace to 
 Paganism in the cities. If the great Serapis could 
 be thrown down and trampled under foot with im- 
 punity, it was obvious that the old Gods were one 
 and all impossible any longer as objects of worship. 
 The spirit animating the ancient religion had to satisfy 
 itself henceforth with images of the Virgin and saints, 
 and with relic-worship, which, from this time (the 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. S7 
 
 end of the 4th century), began to progress by leaps 
 and bounds, the impulse given to it by the suppression 
 of the Pagan rites being enormous. 
 
 It would hardly be too much to say that Mithras 
 and Serapis were the only Gods with which the 
 educated Pagan seriously concerned himself from the 
 middle of the third century onwards. The old Grseco- 
 Roman divinities, the Gods of Olympus, and of the 
 Pantheon, continued still in art and literature and in 
 official ceremonies, but they failed to secure the real 
 devotion of the average cultured inhabitant of the 
 cities. Everything tended towards a Pantheism in 
 which the sun, the source of life and light as personi- 
 fied, was regarded as the highest visible expression of 
 the divine, and with it Mithras and often Serapis were 
 identified, the older official gods being in their turn 
 identified with these. With this solar worship that of 
 the moon, as Isis, the consort of the sun, was often 
 united. For those of a more reflective turn, the Adsible 
 sun was of course only the manifestation and symbol 
 of the great spiritual power of the universe. Such 
 probably represents, as nearly as possible, the state of 
 mind of the average man of education, the citizen of 
 Rome, Alexandria, Nicomedia, Ephesus, Antioch, dur- 
 ing the third and fourth centuries. It is the view, 
 moreover, expressly adopted by Julian in his essay on 
 the "Sovereign Sun." The great part which solar wor- 
 ship played in all the ancient religions of the East, 
 which had for long been the most popular worships 
 throughout the Empire, naturally contributed to the 
 spread of this Pan-Solism. That Baal, Amen-Ra, 
 Mithras, Serapis, Dionysus, Apollo, Jupiter, were 
 different forms in which the Sovereign deity, the 
 Sun, embodied himself at different times and places as 
 the object of worship among men, became the preva- 
 lent notion. The attachment of the later Pagan Em- 
 perors to solar worship is well known. Elagabalus 
 sought to make the Syrian Baal-worship the supreme 
 cultus of the empire. Aurelian was untiring in erect- 
 
58 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 ing temples and altars to the Sun. Even Constantine, 
 after his supposed conversion, was with good reason 
 suspected throughout his life of secret attachment to 
 Sun worship ; all his coins being inscribed on the reverse 
 with the figure of the sun and the words deo solis 
 invicto. That this was the case with other less dis- 
 tinguished converts from Paganism there can be little 
 doubt. But if the more important Deities were re- 
 solved by the later Pagan into personifications of the 
 Sun, the countless host of divinities — gods and god- 
 desses; — of the second, third, and fourth rank became 
 increasingly regarded as mere daimonii, whom it was 
 necessary to worship and propitiate as vice-gerents 
 of the supreme power, and as possessing a legitimate 
 place in the divine hierarchy, but not as heretofore 
 ruling by their own right. The transition from this 
 to angel and saint-worship was obviously easy. The 
 writings of Proklos, the last great Pagan theologian, 
 which formulate this view on the Pagan side, were 
 adopted bodily by the pseudo-Dionysius and in the 
 form of his treatise became the basis of the mediseval 
 catholic theology.! 
 
 The above leads us to the consideration of the two 
 leading currents of doctrine — the one philosophic and 
 the other quasi-philosophic — which went on pari passu 
 with the rise and progress of the Neo-Paganiam. The 
 first-mentioned, the mystical reaction against the pre- 
 vious scepticism, is directly traceable to the influence 
 of oriental thought and of the mystical tendencies of 
 the age re-acting on the older Greek philosophies, 
 especially that of the Pythagoreans and of Plato. Of 
 the Neo-Cynics, who professed no doctrine beyond that 
 of the "simplification of life," otherwise expressed, 
 Asceticism, it is only necessary to make mention, as 
 showing the tendency of current thought on its prac- 
 tical side. The doctrines which received their final 
 form in the Neo-Platonic philosophy all turned upon 
 the freeing of the soul from the imperfections of sense 
 
 J See MUman's "Latin Christianity," vol. iii., pp. 246-6; also vol. vl., 2nd 
 chapter ; o.f. Heaur&u'a " Philosophie ScholasUque," vol. 1., p. 112, «( tt^. 
 
fa 
 
 The Decay of Pagan Thought. S9 
 
 and its union with the divinity. The soul in its 
 mundane state is burdened with the ignorance and 
 guilt o£ sensible matter. The aim of the philosopher 
 is to free his soul from sense, and raise it as a purely 
 intelligible essence to oneness with the supreme intelli- 
 gence, or passionless " Being," or "Unity " whence all 
 things flow. The pure intelligible principle is blurred 
 and confounded by the essential nothingness and false- 
 hood of sense. At first, the emancipation of intellect 
 from sense was conceived as attainable by reason, but 
 later on,only by a mystical ecstasy or internal illumi- 
 nation. Such was the theoretical basis of the move^ 
 ment in question. It was the philosophic formulation 
 of the problems then occupying men's attention. 
 
 The parallel and more avowedly theosophical move- 
 ment — that of Gnosticism — was an amalgam of the 
 oriental cults, chiefly those of Babylonia and Persia, 
 with a dash of Platonism, various Judseo-Christian 
 notions, especially that of an atoning Messiah, being 
 incorporated. Here everything was personified — the 
 freeing of the soul from the impurities and the bondage 
 of sense and matter was to be accomplished by the 
 possession of the gnosis or true knowledge which was 
 revealed to the elect by the redeeming CEon or Christ, 
 who, issuing from the highest God, became incarnate 
 for the purpose of restoring the human soul, immersed 
 in matter, to its native purity. The manner of this 
 incarnation was one of the points of distinction be- 
 tween the various systems, as also the position and 
 function of the series of beings or (Eons (apparently 
 conceived as in a way existent in time and space) 
 which formed the intermediate links between the 
 lowest principle or world of matter, and the highest 
 principle, "the unspeakable God." In the fourth 
 century the system of Manes (circa 214-278), with 
 its Zoroastriq,n doctrine of the perennial opposition 
 of a good and evil principle, spread widely and ab- 
 sorbed much of the older Gnosticism. We need not 
 
6o The Decay of Pagan Thought.'"' 
 
 enter in further detail into the various phases 
 of neo-pythagorean or neo-platonic and gnostic 
 thought, familiar as they are to everyone who has 
 ever opened a church history or a history of philo- 
 sophy. Those -who failed to find the Pagan cults and 
 mysteries, with their fragmentary doctrines, alone 
 satisfying as a solution of the problems which dis- 
 turbed them, thought they discovered a more com- 
 plete and systematic theory of the universe as regards 
 the dominant categories of sin and holiness, good and 
 evil, " light and darkness," in Neoplatonism or Gnostic- 
 ism as the case might be. The more thoughtful and 
 cultivated man naturally chose the philosophical 
 theory, the less cultivated and more supersti- 
 tious, the semi- mythological one. Meanwhile the 
 Christian Church gathered volume, and attained pre- 
 cision in its doctrine from its trituration with these 
 various sects, unconsciously assimilating some of their 
 theories, consciously opposing itself to others, but 
 always remaining distinct as an organization, till its 
 elevation by Constantine to supremacy over the moral 
 and intellectual life of the Roman world, from which 
 time it was safe from serious disintegration. 
 
 Yet another influence which was developing itself 
 simultaneously with the development of Neo-Paganism, 
 Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism throughout the second, 
 third, and fourth centuries was the enormous spread 
 of magical practices and the concurrent rise of astro- 
 logy as a distinct belief. It was not only a concern 
 for the future life which animated the denizen of the 
 Empire. This world also assumed a new and more 
 mysterious aspect than heretofore. The orthodox 
 official ceremonies and sacrifices were looked upon as 
 flat and antiquated, and refuge was increasingly 
 sought for in new and strange charms. Every diffi- 
 culty was attempted to be got over, every wish to be 
 fulfilled by means of amulets and incantations. Sor- 
 cery, of course, had existed from the earliest times, and 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 6i 
 
 laws had frequently been enacted against it, especially 
 against injury to agricultural property (blighting of 
 crops, &c.), by magical means ; but in early times, save 
 for the traditional rites and functions of the community, 
 which naturally all partook of a magical character, 
 systematic sorcery was an exceptional thing. Now, 
 on the other hand, when the public exercises were 
 held of small account, private magic became the 
 order of the day. Astrology had also existed as 
 the peculiar function of the Chaldeans from a 
 very early period, but in the Graeco-Roman world, at 
 least, it did not attain any great importance till the 
 time of which we are treating. Now, astrologers, no 
 less than magicians, were consulted by all, and were 
 generally to be found permanently installed in the 
 households of the wealthy. What was before merely 
 a sporadic phenomenon of ancient social life now 
 became a part of its daily round. 
 
 The issue of every undertaking, unimportant no 
 less than important, was sought to be ascertained by 
 the stars. Disease was treated by charms ; enemies 
 sought to be destroyed by incantations. Amulets 
 were worn by all. The gems and talismans of this period 
 are well-known to antiquaries. The enormous fame 
 and following of such wonder-workers as ApoUonius 
 of Tyana, Peregrinus and Alexander of Abnotichos in 
 the first and second centuries, will give us some idea 
 of what was going on on a smaller scale all over the 
 empire — in every city and village — until the final fall 
 of Paganism. The prevailing cults and philosophies 
 had all of them their necromantic side, or their theory 
 of magic. As a matter of course, Christianity ab- 
 sorbed this tendency. The miracles of saints, the 
 magical powers of relics, of the sign of the cross, the 
 invocation of Christian sacred names, the repetition of 
 paternosters and aves in course of time superseded the 
 more obAriously Pagan magic of the fourth century. 
 The ease with which the ancient creed was suppressed, 
 and the rapidity with which the Christian swelled 
 
62 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 its ranks after its official establisliment, show not only 
 the moribund character of the Pagan forms, but how 
 the difference between the two had become merely a 
 question of names and external rites. The epistle of 
 the Emperor Julian exhorting the Pagan priesthood to 
 set an example to their adherents of sobriety of hfe, 
 might easily have been the encyclical of a Christian, 
 metropolitan. The worship previously accorded to 
 Isis was now given to the Virgin, the same black 
 images, some of which exist to this day, doing duty in 
 the new role. 
 
 From this short sketch, which might be indefinitely 
 expanded on various sides, it will be evident to any 
 unprejudiced mind that Christianity ultimately became 
 the most salient embodiment of a movement of which 
 at first it was merely the symptom, and to the expres- 
 sion of which it could originally lay no exclusive 
 claim. The germs of this movement were already 
 present before it. Other expressions of introspective 
 individualism and mysticism developed independently 
 and alongside of Christianity, and to this it was 
 indebted for many of its doctrines and ceremonies. 
 The religion and philosophy of the ancient world flick- 
 ered out in a creed which they had themselves helped to 
 build up. In the fourth century, as the late Mr. King 
 well observes in a note to his translation of Gregory 
 Nazianzen's invective,^ the state of the empire under 
 Julian resembled that of England under Mary (and he 
 might have added of other countries also during the 
 latter half of the 16th century). " The new religion,'' ha 
 observes, " in each case was held by a small minority, 
 but well-organised and extremely noisy ; the rest of 
 the population, except in certain districts where local 
 causes kept up zeal for the ancient religion, were 
 entirely indifferent to principles, but eager for the 
 plunder of the temple lands and treasures, as of those 
 of the abbeys and cathedrals. This state of things 
 
 1 Bolin'? Library. 
 
The Decay of Pagan Thought. 63 
 
 clearly appears from Julian's complaints in the Miso- 
 pagon." Thus economical causes combined with 
 political and speculative, to ensure the success of the 
 new creed. 
 
 The exercise of the Pagan religion was unsuccess- 
 fully attempted to be effaced by the edicts of various 
 emperors throughout the fourth century. It was not 
 until near the close of the century that Theodosius, 
 by laws of ferocious severity, succeeded in suppressing 
 the public manifestations of Paganism. It was then 
 that whole populations were baptised en masse, chang- 
 ing their nominal belief in a day, but of course retaining 
 their old habits of thought. The indifference of the 
 urban masses in matters of religion had become 
 absolute. But even then we cannot doubt that in 
 the country districts, out of the way of the imperial 
 ministers and functionaries, the edicts were more often 
 ■evaded than not. The very word, which came to 
 denote the ancient religion — Paganism, or the belief 
 of the rural populations — itself indicates the tenacity 
 with which the peasant clung to the " creed outworn." 
 
 In looking back over a tract of time, which is long 
 past, it is difficult to keep one's sense of proportion. 
 It is hard to realise the change, economical and 
 speculative, which was gradually creeping over the 
 Roman world from the Antonines to Theodosius. We 
 know that within this long period social life must 
 have undergone a transformation far-reaching and 
 deep. Yet, viewed in our perspective, it seems com- 
 paratively slight. Too many links are wanting in 
 the chain, too many threads in the woof to give us 
 a true idea of the process. Everything seems fore- 
 shortened. The three centuries and a half which have 
 elapsed since the last great epoch of organic trans- 
 formation in societv — that which saw the overthrow 
 of the mediaeval civilisation, and which, like the pre- 
 ceding one, took the form superficially of a revolution 
 in religious belief and observance — has been fertile in 
 
64 The Decay of Pagan Thought. 
 
 such vast changes that all other corresponding periods 
 of change and transition seem to move imperceptibly 
 in comparison. The impassable gulf which divides 
 modern life externally, no less than in its habits of 
 thought, from all previous ages, dwarfs and fore- 
 shortens the other great transitional periods of history. 
 Progress, i.e., the content of time, has become immea- 
 surably compressed ; the development of a thousand 
 years is now concentrated in a hundred, a hundred in 
 ten. Thus the rapid spread of Modern Socialism 
 throughout the civilised world since 1871, either ex- 
 plicitly as a definite theory of history and of society, 
 or implicitly as a vague spirit or tendency, is on the 
 face of it a far more astounding phenomenon than 
 that of Christianity, in the three centuries which pre- 
 ceded its formal establishment. "Bloody Weeks," 
 Siberia, Anti-Socialist laws have been as powerless 
 to stem Socialism as the Christian persecutions were 
 to stem Christianity. 
 
 The change from the second to the fifth century 
 was, as far as the essentials of life were concerned, 
 though great, yet not so great as the length of time 
 would lead us to imagine at the first moment of re- 
 flection. A period of three or four centuries had still 
 to be passed over before the progressive portion of 
 society had succeeded in definitively reconstituting 
 itself on a positive basis in what we know as the 
 Middle Ages. Thus, if the ancient world was long 
 a-dying, no less long did its corpse remain unburied — 
 still the ideal of glory and beauty to thinking men. 
 
LIBERALISM K SOCIALISM. 
 
 4. LECTURE DELIVERED IN THE CONPERENCE-EOOM OF 
 THE NATIONAL LIBERAL CLUB, 
 
 What is the crucial distinction between Liberalism or 
 Radicalism and Socialism ? This is a question very 
 often asked. That they are actually often opposed is 
 not to be denied. But the general opinion among 
 advanced Liberals seems to be that Liberalism, if its 
 principles are thoroughly carried out, is not in any 
 necessary conflict with Socialism. We propose to 
 examine this position with special reference to the 
 economic basis respectively of Liberalism and Social- 
 ism. The Liberal party has always claimed to be the 
 party of progress, to be the exponent of the progres- 
 sive lines of social and political development at a given 
 epoch, and, as such, to be opposed to the party of re- 
 action. This may be termed the negative side of 
 Liberal theory, and so long as it maintains this atti- 
 tude as the party in the vanguard of progress, it must 
 necessarily become identical with Socialism — i.e., from 
 the standpoint of Socialists. But here comes the crux. 
 If Liberalism becomes identified with Socialism, it sur- 
 renders bodily all that has hitherto formed the positive 
 side of its theory, and, indeed, what has hitherto given 
 it the reason of its being. It has up till now placed 
 the freedom of the individual as the professed aim of 
 all its measures, and as its basal principle. But does 
 not Socialism also aim at the freedom of the indi- 
 vidual we shall be asked ? Certainly. But the question 
 
 67 
 
68 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 is, what do Liberals (for the most part) understand by 
 their freedom of the individual, or individual liberty, 
 and why have they always made it such a strong 
 point in their political faith ? The answer is, they 
 meant by individual liberty, first and foremost, the 
 liberty of private property as such, to be uncontrolled 
 in its operations by aught else than the will of the 
 individual possessing it. What was cared for was 
 not so much the liberty of the individual as the 
 liberty of private property. The liberty of the indi- 
 vidual as such was secondary. It was as the possessor 
 and controller of property that it was specially de- 
 sired to assure his liberty. Indeed, in the extreme 
 form of " Liberal " theory and practice, as embodied 
 in modern legislation, the individual appears merely 
 as the adjunct of property. Property is the sub- 
 stance ; the personality of its owner is the accident. 
 And why was and is this ? Because, we answer, the 
 Liberal party represented the struggle of the middle- 
 classes with expiring feudalism and absolute mon- 
 archy. It had to fight against the privileges of nobles 
 and corporations, against institutions which hampered 
 or prevented the free acquisition of wealth by indi- 
 vidual efibrt, and the free application of that wealth 
 when acquired. Its watchword was, therefore, indi- 
 vidual liberty. The middle ages contained in its 
 polity ideas of privilege and of corporate ownership 
 which, after that polity had become effete, only 
 hindered progress. Liberalism combated these effete 
 mediaeval institutions on the line in which progress 
 was moving — that of the freedom of the individual 
 and his property. Thus far Liberalism was a progres- 
 sive force. 
 
 Let us for a few moments trace the history of 
 Liberalism, understanding the word in a wider sense 
 than that of mere current party politics. Under the 
 word Liberalism I include, for present purposes, the 
 Protestant K^ovement of the 16tli century for freeing 
 
Liberalism v. Sodatism. gg 
 
 the individual from the control, spiritual and temporal, 
 of the Catholic hierarchy ; its descendant, the Puritan 
 and parliamentarian movement of the 17th century, 
 which culminated, after various vicissitudes, in the 
 Whig party of the 18th century, which again sub- 
 sequently became merged in the Liberal party of our 
 own day. This great historical movement, extending 
 over three centuries of the history of this country, 
 from the middle ages downwards, must be viewed in 
 its inter-connexion to be properly understood. In the 
 course of the necessarily brief view we shall take of 
 it, I shall endeavour to show that, while Liberalism 
 (in the broader sense of the word here referred to) was 
 at first true to its principle, and that it was really the 
 champion of the rights and liberties of the individual, 
 that in assuming that the chief of those rights con- 
 sisted in the right to acquire and control property, it 
 was really fighting the battle of the individual. For 
 it was necessary that the trammels which bound the 
 middle or capitalist classes to the feudal or landed 
 classes should be destroyed, that the middle-classes 
 should be emancipated, as the condition of all further 
 progress in the direction of individual liberty of any 
 kind. But I shall hope to show, further, that progress 
 has now turned a comer, so to speak; that the re- 
 moval of all hindrances to the acquirement of wealth 
 other than what is based upon conscious fraud or open 
 force ; that the absolute right of the individual over 
 the property he has acquired or inherited — in short, 
 that security and freedom in the tenure of private 
 property is no longer synonymous with individual 
 liberty, but often with its opposite; that individual 
 liberty now demands the curtailment and the eventual 
 extinction of the liberty of private property, and that 
 Liberalism, in so far as it aims at maintaining the 
 liberty of private property, is reactionary and false 
 to the principle which it has always implicitly or ex- 
 plicitly maintained, of the right of each and every 
 
70 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 individual to a full and free development. In so far 
 as Liberalism does this, in so far as it assumes as 
 axiomatic a state of society based on unrestricted free- 
 dom of private property, and proceeds to adjust social 
 arrangements solely or primarily in the interests of the 
 owners of private property — in so far, Liberalism and 
 Socialism are death enemies. Liberalism has been 
 negatively described by Sir Henry James as opposed, 
 alike to Toryism and Democracy, and this is, I think, 
 no unfair description of Liberalism during the nine- 
 teenth century. Liberalism has historically opposed 
 itself alike to Toryism, landed interest, and democracy, 
 working-class interest, whenever that interest appeared 
 as a distinct political party. It has been the political 
 creed of the middle-classes, which has used the war- 
 shout of individual liberty as a means for the acquire- 
 ment of individual property. The individual liberty 
 now desired by the- Socialist is the liberty of the 
 individual as man, and no longer his liberty as mere 
 property-holder. 
 
 The condition of England at the end of the middle 
 ages, i.e., at the middle of the 16th century, was a re- 
 markable one. The old system of land-tenure was 
 breaking up, the villages and smaller towns were be- 
 coming depopulated, the sheep-farming system had 
 absorbed much of the old tillage land; the land of 
 the monasteries and trade-guilds was confiscated and 
 had passed into private hands; the old peasantry were 
 therefore driven oif the soil and had become vaga- 
 bonds ; the new world-market — the extension of com- 
 mercial relations, especially the importation of corn 
 and the exportation of wool — had changed the con- 
 ditions of production and distribution ; the old guild- 
 system was breaking down in the cities ; the country 
 artificer was now everywhere a tradesman working 
 for profit, but hampered by feudal laws and customs; 
 individual capitalists were struggling with the old 
 city corporations for the masteiy, or establishing 
 
liberalism v. Socialism. 7 1 
 
 themselves in unchartered towns ; the yeomanry or 
 smaller landholders which had become an important, 
 perhaps the most important, factor in English political 
 and social life since the Wars of the Roses, were now 
 established more firmly than ever, and with a growing 
 influence. The desire to amass wealth, in the form 
 of personal property, in contradistinction to the de- 
 sire to command land and the labour of those upon it, 
 now dominated men on a scale unknown before. To 
 put the matter briefly, in England, the old dominant 
 classes of the middle ages — clerks, barons, guildsmen 
 — were dissolving and disintegrating, and new classes 
 were growing up : in the country a non-feudal, non- 
 military class of small landowners and tenant-farmers, 
 many of whom were also artisan-capitalists, distinct 
 from the mediaeval knights and their socage-tenants ; 
 and in the towns a class of independent capitalists, 
 large and small, for whom the trammels of the medi- 
 aeval guild-system had become a hindrance and a 
 nuisance. To take one illustration only of this. The 
 number of apprentices and journeymen a member of 
 the guild might employ in his workshop, the quality 
 of the material he might use in his manufactures, the 
 mode of conducting his business generally, were all 
 regulated down to the minutest detail by the ordin- 
 ances of the guild, to which the guildsman had strictly ■ 
 to conform. Now, the conditions of production and 
 distribution were outgrowing the rules of the guild 
 which were made for much simpler and less extended 
 operations. It was now obviously the interest of 
 every man to produce as much as the rapidly extend- 
 ing markets demanded, and to employ as many men 
 as suited him. In the middle ages, when the burgher 
 class was imperfectly emancipated from the thraldom 
 of noble and ecclesiastic, and where markets were ex- 
 tremely limited and extremely difficult of access, the 
 guild, with the strict discipline it involved, was a 
 necessity for the existence of the urban industrial 
 
7^ Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 community. Now that these conditions were fast dis- 
 appearing, it was no longer so, but it became the in- 
 terest of every manufacturer and merchant to have 
 a free hand to outbid his neighbour. "What is said of 
 the towns applies also ('mutatis mutandis) to the 
 country ; the small yeoman, who was also an artisan, 
 and traded on a limited scale, wanted free scope for 
 acquiring all the wealth he could by his exertions, un- 
 harassed by feudal tolls and restrictions. 
 
 The interest of these new classes plainly lay in the 
 direction of individualism, that is, of the severance of 
 all the ties which bound a man to his village, to his 
 lord, to his guild. All that stood in the way of the 
 pursuit of wealth by the individual was obnoxious to 
 the new classes. A new code of social ethics, as we 
 may term them (as distinguished from theological 
 , ethics), grew up in accordance with these ideas. The 
 shiftless class of proletarians which had formed along- 
 side of the new middle-class or capitalists, on the 
 suppression of the monasteries and the enclosure of 
 the common lands, had necessarily turned to mendi- 
 cancy. Now the new middle-classes found it to their 
 interest to engage the free labour of those unfortun- 
 ates at as little as possible, and not to let them subsist 
 on the alms of the charitable. Accordingly the old 
 mediaeval and Catholic idea that mendicancy was 
 honourable yielded to the new middle-class and Pro- 
 testant idea that mendicancy was disgraceful. This is 
 interesting as the parent of the modern bourgeois 
 notion of the stigma attaching to the receipt of poor- 
 law relief. These new middle-classes were then the 
 first individualists — the first Liberals opposed alike to 
 the feudal noble and to the prbpertyless journeyman 
 or vagabond. They ridiculed and affected to despise 
 the propertied classes which were above ^them ; they 
 laughed at their literary embodiments — a Falstaff or 
 a Don Quixote — but they and their henchmen were 
 equally zealous in keeping down the propertyless 
 
Liberalism v. SociatisM. 73 
 
 classes that were below them — in suppressing a Rett's 
 rebellion in England and a peasant's war in Germany. 
 But nevertheless, as compared with to-day, the Liberal 
 prototype of the 16th and I7th centuries was com- 
 paratively consistent. The propertyless class which 
 has no control over land and the other means of pro- 
 duction was, as yet, undeveloped and more or less 
 transient. It existed as a phenomenon of social life, 
 but, great as its proportions might be at certain 
 periods, it was not of necessity permanent. As a matter 
 of fact, after the disturbances of the first half of the 
 16th century had subsided, it was still possible for the 
 greater part of the population to earn a competency by 
 their labour. The yeoman had his plot of land, the 
 journeyman for the most part his tools and his skill 
 as yet unsuperseded by the machine industry, so that 
 the power lay with the vast majority of men of acquir- 
 ing property by their own individual labour, over and 
 above what was necessary for their immediate subsis- 
 tence in tolerable comfort. Thus the individual citizen 
 of this period might have been defined in the language 
 of the logic-books as per se a wealth-producing animal. 
 That wealth, produced in general, largely, if not en- 
 tirely, by his own individual exertions, was not un- 
 naturally held by him, the individualist, the Liberal, 
 as of right belonging to him. He objected to being 
 tied down by feudal exactions, he objected to the 
 king having the right to levy contributions and taxes 
 without his consent. In the ideal sphere the indi- 
 vidualist principle was maintained. The new classes 
 proclaimed the Protestant doctrine of individual 
 salvation in theology as opposed to the old Catholic 
 doctrine of salvation in virtue of belonging to a cor- 
 porate body — the church. 
 
 These two sides of individualist faith have almost 
 always gone hand in hand, and the salient point in 
 the social ideal of the Liberal, whether in the shape of 
 the Protestant yeoman, or burgher of the 16th century, 
 
74 Liberalism v. Sociatism. 
 
 the Puritan roundhead of the 17th, or the Whig, mer- 
 chant, farmer, or squire of the 18th, or of the (in the 
 narrow sense) liberal plutocrat and philanthropist of 
 the 19th, has been, and is, implicitly or explicitly the 
 freedom of the individual to acquire wealth in any 
 manner he pleases — perhaps barring overt fraud or 
 force — and to retain full possession and control of that 
 wealth when acquired. Property held in severalty is 
 and has been, in short, the groundwork of the Liberal 
 creed in all its phases, inasmuch as the Liberal has 
 always protested against the privileges of status and 
 the institutions growing out of the mediaeval survivals 
 of the early principle of property as held in common. 
 The fact that Individual Liberty as thus formulated 
 could ever be anything other than the only true indi- 
 vidual liberty, never occurred to the Liberal individual- 
 ist. Up till the end of last century, the economic 
 conditions incident to the continued survival, to a 
 very large extent, of handicraft-industries, and the 
 fact that the population had not as yet begun to in- 
 crease in any considerable degree, hid the real problem 
 of the freedom of the individual. He still seemed the 
 arbiter of his own fortune if only he were freed from 
 oppressive laws. The only obstacles to liberal indi- 
 vidualism seemed privilege and rank and bad laws. 
 What these were in the last century will be familiar 
 to every reader of Adam Smith, Porter, or Thorold 
 Rogers. The law of parochial settlement which 
 bound the labourer to his native village, the assess- 
 ment of wages by the authorities, and other oppressive 
 enactments and relics of old institutions served not 
 only the upper, but the middle-classes with means for 
 enriching themselves, the holders of property, at the 
 expense of the working-classes of town and country 
 alike. For it must not be supposed that having 
 acquired his own individual liberty as a property- 
 holder, the middle-class Whig was any more anxious 
 than the landowning Tory to carry out his principles 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. 75 
 
 to the extent of emancipating the labourer from the 
 oppressive customs and legislation against which he 
 protested when it was his own interest to abolish them. 
 For in the earlier phases of Liberalism there was no 
 idea even of a logical and universal carrying out of its 
 own doctrines of equality before the law and freedom 
 of contract. Still it must be admitted that these 
 principles lay in the conception of Liberalism, that 
 the bourgeois having once invoked them for his own 
 purposes against the aristocrat, could not go back 
 upon them, that their realisation only awaited the 
 economical development which would force him to 
 concede and ultimately even to champion their uni- 
 versal application as the sheet-anchor of his system. 
 The far-sighted Adam Smith saw this, and doubtless 
 other Liberals of the last century saw it too, though 
 those that saw it were comparatively few and isolated. 
 They saw it as the necessary deduction from their own 
 principles, but they could not see beyond it. As I have 
 before said, from their point of view it might have 
 seemed the ultimate goal of reasonable progress. The 
 handicraftsman could always earn a living, it appeared 
 to them, if only he could have his freedom of loco- 
 motion and of making the best bargain he could for 
 himself, to which was subsequently added freedom of 
 combination. 
 
 But a change now supervened on industry which 
 put an entirely new face on things. In the last 
 decades of the 18th and first decades of the 19th 
 century, the machine industry began that great re- 
 volution in the production and distribution of wealth 
 which is not even yet consummated. This revolution 
 meant the destruction of the system of handicraft in- 
 dustry, i.e,., of production by the personal skill of the 
 workman and its replacement by mechanical processes. 
 The handicraft system which had been modified in 
 the workshop system, where a number of workmen 
 were in dependent association, a system which obtained 
 
76 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 in many industries during the 17th and 18th cen- 
 turies, had, of course, already considerably weakened 
 the independence of the individual workman. But so 
 much still depended on skill even in combined labour, 
 and such a large field still remained for handicraft 
 labour outside the workshops and in country districts, 
 that the gradual transformation went on without 
 causing any violent disruption of the previous con- 
 ditions of labour. It was the introduction of machin- 
 ery and the increased facilities of locomotion which 
 revolutionised them, and, with them, the whole of 
 modern life. In consequence of this there arose, as 
 soon as the new factors had begun to operate to any 
 considerable extent — a double politico-social move- 
 ment — that of the working-class dispossessed and dis- 
 turbed as to their old means of livelihood, and that 
 of the younger and (even from a middle-class point of 
 view) more enlightened generation of bourgeois and 
 Liberal politicians. Some of these doubtless still 
 thought, in spite of the revolution going on before 
 their eyes in industrial affairs, that all reasonable 
 demands of the working-classes would be met by the 
 abrogation of bad laws and a more extended suffrage. 
 Others, more acute, saw that things were tending in a 
 direction in which it would be to the material interest of 
 the middle-classes to take steps towards a more logical 
 carrying-out of their own principles as implied in the 
 word Liberalism. The first of these movements — the 
 working-class movement — began with the Luddites 
 and passed over into the Chartist movement. The 
 middle-class Liberal, on the collapse of the Chartist 
 movement, succeeded in hoodwinking the working- 
 classes with the nostrums of free trade, extension of 
 the suffrage, and the like, i.e., with movements mainly 
 connected with the development of his doctrine of the 
 liberty of the individual as the possessor and con- 
 troller of property. But the two movements pro- 
 ceeded for a long while side by side. At the same 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. 77 
 
 time that that first blind outburst of the modern 
 Proletariat against the modem Capitalist class, the so- 
 called Luddite movement, and its successor the well- 
 conceived and organised Chartist movement wer« 
 going on, the middle-class Liberal was agitating £01 
 the Reform Bill whicb was to give him the franchise 
 on the strength of his property-qualification, and he 
 was also beginning his agitation in favour of free- 
 trade, and the removal of various other hindrances to 
 the propertied-individual increasing that property by 
 commerce, or other recognised means. Liberalism was 
 therefore now entering upon a new phase. The 
 middle-class was beginning to see that its interest lay 
 in a fuUer carrying-out of its ground-principles, rather 
 than as heretofore in their merely tentative and 
 limited application. The working-man, like every- 
 one else, must be freed from artificial restraints in the 
 acquirement of wealth, must be allowed free liberty 
 to make what contract he pleased ; this was the claim, 
 at least, of the more advanced section of the party. 
 He must be made equal before the law. Now the 
 working-man for a long time heeded the music of the 
 Liberal syren. Chartism went to pieces. The new 
 Liberalism carried all before it. Trades-unions even 
 at length became respectable, patronised by members 
 of parliament and lord mayors. 
 
 We come now to our own day ; we see now what 
 was at one time an advanced wing of the Liberal 
 party become the main strength of that party. Every 
 representative Liberal is now prepared to go the whole 
 length in the direction of individual liberty as founded 
 upon a property basis. He is prepared to grant the full 
 liberty of every individual to acquire property and to 
 control property. But he is seldom prepared to go 
 beyond this. Th&- primary fact with him is still not 
 the liberty of the individual man, but his liberty as 
 property-holder. Now as we have said, before the 
 rise of the great, machine industry, even as late as the 
 
78 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 last century, when work depended on skill and the 
 individual workman still possessed his own tools, 
 when in short a man could reckon upon making a 
 tolerable livelihood at most times and in most places, 
 the contradiction between individual liberty sim- 
 pUciter and individual liberty secundv/m quid — that 
 is, on the condition of possessing and controlling pro- 
 perty — was not developed as it is to-day. The two 
 things seemed more or less coincident. Keeping up 
 this tradition, middle-class Liberals, in carrying out 
 the principles of their individualism, have studiously 
 blinked the fact that the changed conditions of pro- 
 duction and distribution which have enabled them, 
 without danger to their own class-interests, to con- 
 cede in form the benefit of those principles to the 
 working-classes, have at the same time deprived those 
 classes of any material advantage from them. Pro- 
 duction and distribution now being an affair of plant 
 machinery and organisation on a great scale, the 
 workman is hopelessly at its mercy. The labourer 
 may be as free as the air, so far as legal coercion is 
 concerned, but the economical coercion of the private 
 possession of the instruments of production and dis- 
 tribution presses upon him with an ever increasing 
 force. It even affects the possessor of this property 
 in many cases; he, too, although in a less onerous 
 way, is often coerced by the economical conditions 
 under which he holds his property. 
 
 Now the Socialist, in contradistinction to the Liberal, 
 recognises to the full this contradiction between the 
 two individualisms, the individualism which centres 
 in personal property, and to which Socialism is opposed, 
 and the individualism which presupposes the abolition 
 of private property, at all events in the means of pro- 
 duction, and which is identical with Socialism. He 
 sees that the first is a purely abstract and formal 
 individualism which sacrifices the real freedom of the 
 individual to his merely nominal freedom, He findg 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. 79 
 
 that the workman is the slave of economic forces be- 
 yond his control, and that the way of real freedom for 
 the individual, as for the society, lies in a revolution 
 in economic condition which must involve the negation 
 of the liberty of private property. When the essenti- 
 ally social functions of production and distribution 
 cease to be regulated by the caprice and selfish in- 
 terest of the propertied individual who holds the key 
 to them, the time will then come, the Socialist sees, 
 when individualism, in the sense of the possibility of 
 the full and free development of the individual as 
 such — of each and every individual, in contradistinc- 
 tion to that of the individual in so far as he belongs 
 to a certain class or as he possesses property — will be 
 realised for the first time in history. The word indi- 
 vidualism has, however, almost invariably been used 
 in the former sense, that, namely, of the freedom of 
 private property, and has implied a condition of 
 things in which every man has free hand to fight for 
 himself without regard to his neighbour. This was 
 the individualism for which the so-called Manchester 
 school, the backbone of English Liberalism, has 
 fought. It could never, of course, be logically carried 
 out without the dissolution of all social relations, but 
 it has nevertheless been held up as an ideal to be 
 striven after in so far as compatible with the exi- 
 gencies of a social state and with the aspirations ©f 
 the capitalistic classes. (This latter qualification is 
 necessary, as when it has suited these classes, they 
 have not hesitated to throw their principles to the 
 winds, and employ as much coercion as answered their 
 purpose.) That production and distribution were 
 social functions, and that to allow the individual to 
 play fast and loose with them at his caprice was 
 just as suicidal in the long run as allowing him to 
 play fast and loose with human life on the highway, 
 they could not and would not see. They restrained 
 the individual liberty of the highwayman when, by 
 
8o Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 means of his own property, to wit, his pistol, the 
 latter generously oifered the belated wanderer his money 
 or his life, because they felt the conditions of the 
 contract were unfair, and that the individualism was 
 one-sided. They could not see that the manufacturer, 
 in offering the propertyless labourer the free choice 
 between his labour and his life, by virtue of his (the 
 manufacturer's) property, the factory or the mill with 
 its appurtenances, was also unfair, and the individual- 
 ism equally one-sided. In truth, there is a good deal 
 to be said for retaining the special word Individualism 
 for the sham, abstract, one-sided individualism usually 
 connoted by the word, for the term itself implies a 
 conflict between Individual and Society, and therefore 
 is no longer applicable to a state of things in which 
 there is no longer any conflict between the Individual 
 and Society; for such a state is the outcome of Social- 
 ism, that is (so far as economics are concerned) of the 
 corporate ownership and working of the land and 
 other means necessary to the production and distribu- 
 tion of wealth. This is not said in any Utopian sense, 
 but in a simple, matter-of-fact one. To take an 
 obvious case: let us suppose an individual is co- 
 operating in the making of the communal or social 
 bread. Since he, as well as the rest of the commun- 
 ity, will suffer if the bread is bad, he being one of the 
 consumers of that bad bread, and seeing that he can 
 gain nothing in any other direction by putting 
 scamped work or bad materials into the bread, his 
 purely selfish interest is identical with that of the 
 rest of the community in making the bread as good 
 as possible. The same all round. It is the interest 
 of the individual capitalist to make things as cheaply 
 as he can — cheap materials and cheap work meaning 
 of course, bad materials and bad work. But the stimu- 
 lus of self-interest to bad and dishonest production once 
 removed, and you cease to have bad and dishonest 
 p'-viuction. By sheer force of circumstances the in- 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. 8i 
 
 terest of the individual becomes identified with that 
 of the society. 
 
 There is a great deal of talk by individualists about 
 a " man's earnings," " the right of property of each 
 man in that which he produces," etc. But what I ask, 
 does each man produce of himself as an individual ? 
 Show me how much cotton any given factory operative 
 has produced in the course of a year — I don't mean the 
 amoimt of wages the capitalist has given him for the 
 exploitation of his labour-power during that period — 
 but the actual product of his labour in the manu- 
 factured article. You could not do so, because his, 
 like all modern labour, is associated ; and the work of 
 the individual producer is completely and indissolubly 
 merged in that of the group (factory, mill) to which 
 he belongs, which is again inseparable from that of 
 the machinery employed in the process and from that 
 of other groups. It is sometimes said liberty is in- 
 separable from property, and I agree. Bat the indi- 
 vidualism of private property has to-day landed us in 
 a state of things in which the majority have no 
 certain property at all, and therefore on the indi- 
 vidualist's own showing the majority are deprived of 
 liberty. Liberty, in any society, is inseparable from 
 property. Good, but this does not say it is insepar- 
 able from private property. It does not say that it 
 is not in antagonism to private property as we con- 
 tend it is, in any case, where that private property is 
 used for the social functions of production and dis- 
 tribution. No ! liberty may be inseparable frorii pro- 
 perty, but nowadays it is assuredly inseparable from 
 the common holding of property by the community. 
 
 The outcome of Socialism is, then, a real individual 
 liberty as opposed to a sham — a liberty for all indi- 
 viduals as opposed to a liberty for certain individuals 
 only — in short, a hv/man individualism as opposed to 
 a class individualism. As for the nonsense talked 
 about coercion under Socialism, does anyone suppose 
 
82 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 for an instant that Socialism implies any more coercion 
 than what is absolutely necessitated by circumstances 
 and by the nature of things — the coercion, in short, 
 which we cannot evade in any case ? This coercion 
 you have under every condition of society, and never 
 more than in the present day when the economical 
 laws of our anarchical, competitive system leave 
 scarcely a single human being free to do as he lists. 
 How many persons are there who can live just as 
 as they like, or do what they like with their time ? 
 How many can eat and drink what they like ? How 
 many can sleep as long as they like ? There is coercion 
 of circumstances dogging our steps at every turn and 
 every hour of the day. The difference between the 
 coercion of natural forces and of the economic con- 
 ditions of a free competitive society and that of 
 Socialism is that the one is a blind, unregulated, so 
 far as we are concerned, a capricious power left to 
 assert itself to the full over the unlucky individual ; 
 while the other is a consciously exercised and regu- 
 lated coercion whose aim is, by the light of economic 
 science, to minimise the former to the uttermost. 
 The one means coercion untamed, the other coercion 
 tanied. All Socialists look forward to the day when 
 even the 'minimum of rationally regulated coercion 
 involved at first in a Socialist society shall be no longer 
 necessary. But, meanwhile, our choice is only be- 
 tween coercion at its maximum, dominating every- 
 thing and everybody, as what I have spoken of as the 
 coercion of circumstances — the coercion of the capital- 
 ist world — does, and coercion at its minimum, clothed 
 and in its right mind and dominating as few (j^part- 
 ments of life as possible, as the coercion of the Socialist 
 world will do. Here, then, we have this difference : 
 Liberal individualism wants to perpetuate the unre- 
 stricted liberty of private property with the despotism 
 which circumstances, economic and otherwise, exercise 
 blindly and relentlessly upon every individual not 
 
Liberalism v. Svcialism. 83 
 
 possessed of private property, and often indirectly 
 even upon those who are possessed of it. This is the 
 basal principle of the middle-class movement of to-day. 
 On the other hand, you have Socialism, which aims at 
 getting rid of the despotic coercion imposed by existing 
 conditions upon men, and substituting in its place a 
 rationally-conceived order of society, in which coercion 
 of all kinds shall have been reduced to the minimum, 
 and a real freedom obtain for all alike. This is the 
 basal principle of the working-class movement of the 
 present day. For the working-classes, even of this 
 country, after having for more than a generation past 
 hearkened to the voice of Liberal politicians, show 
 unmistakable signs of awakening to a consciousness 
 of their true interests. 
 
 To sum up the question as between Individualism and 
 Socialism. The conflict of interest between individual 
 and society is, as a constant phenomenon of human ex- 
 istence, but a growth of yesterday, if we compare its 
 duration with that of the life of man on this planet. 
 In primitive society the individual has no interests 
 separate from that of the group — clan, tribe, or village 
 — ^to which he belongs. Land and other property is 
 held in common. He has not, as yet, awakened to a 
 definite consciousness of himself as a self-contained 
 whole. He cannot or does not think of himself except 
 as the element of a larger whole — to wit, the group. 
 There is as yet, therefore, no distinction of interest, 
 either in fact or in sentiment, between the individual 
 and the community. The distinction first asserts itself 
 with the rise of civilisation, developing more and more 
 into a formal antagonism as time goes on. Property 
 held in common gets displaced by property held in 
 severalty. This is the basis of political society with 
 its vast centralised state, as opposed to kinship society 
 with its limited autonomous group. The individual 
 holding property acquires leisure and becomes aware 
 of hiipself as a personality ; he jearns with an evef- 
 
84 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 increasing yearning for the, as yet, forbidden fruit of 
 complete individual autonomy, i.e., his complete formal 
 independence of all the ties which have hitherto bound 
 him to the community. The economic condition of the 
 autonomy of the individual is, it must be borne in 
 mind, property as held in severalty, in opposition to 
 the primitive system of property as held in common. 
 With this, as above indicated, is also involved the down- 
 fall of group-autonomy by its subordination and ulti- 
 mate extinction in a complex state-system or political 
 nation. I may remark here, of the two systems — the 
 primitive one of property held in common and the later 
 one of property held in severalty — that I refer to the 
 predominating mode of property-holding. Absolute 
 Communism and absolute Individualism in this, as in 
 other respects, have probably never been realised in 
 any society. Certain appurtenances of the individual, 
 such as clothing and weapons, have been tacitly re- 
 cognised as accruing by customary right to the indi- 
 vidual, even under the most complete and perfect 
 form of primitive Communism. Similarly with our 
 modern capitalistic society, which we may regard as, 
 in most respects, the perfect historical expression of 
 Individualism, in the common acceptation of the 
 word. Here also there are, and always have been, 
 certain things, such as public parks and museums, 
 which are, or are supposed to be, held for the common 
 benefit. This is where, in my opinion, Mr. Sidney 
 Webb fails when he seeks to draw conclusions from 
 the fact of the sporadic existence of public property 
 in the present day as to the Socialistic ten4encies of 
 the modern bourgeois world as such. The real point of 
 the distinction between Primitive Barbaric Society and 
 Modern Civilised Society is that the first was based 
 essentially on the public or common holding of property 
 — the individual holding of property, when it existed, 
 being purely accidental — while the second is based 
 essentially on the private or individual holding qf 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. ^ 85 
 
 property, the common holding of property, where it 
 exists, being similarly accidental to its main structure. 
 Now, individual autonomy (which must not be con- 
 founded necessarily with individual liberty, which is a 
 much wider conception) is the expression of an opposi- 
 tion between individual and society, an opposition or 
 contradiction which is very far-reaching, and which is 
 the keystone to a whole hierarchy of similar though 
 subordinate oppositions, whose development constitutes 
 the subject-matter of the history of civilisation. To 
 mention a few of these hap-hazard — in Economics, rich 
 and poor, landed and landless, master and servant, 
 noble and base-bom, city and country; in Politics, 
 governor and governed; in Metaphysics, soul and 
 body, subject and object, thought and thing, God and 
 World; in Ethics, sin and holiness, purity and impurity 
 (as applied to the sexual relation); in Religion, sacred 
 and profane, reverence and irreverence, world and 
 church, &c., &c. In primitive tribal society, all these 
 things were merely latent, implicitly and not ex- 
 plicitly present. What at first were undifferentiated 
 and undeveloped functions of an organism — in short, 
 accidents of a substance — primitive society — on the 
 dissolution of that society gradually acquired the char- 
 acter of independent, mutually opposing interests em- 
 bodied in classes having severally these interests for 
 their raison d'etre. Society (civilisation) meant hence- 
 forth no longer a coherent whole, but merely the 
 aggregate of these interests as embodied in their 
 respective classes. The simplicity and homogeneity 
 of tribal society was such that it knew of only one 
 opposition, that between the tribe or federation of 
 tribes and the alien. The principle of contradiction 
 in tribal society was external to the society itself. 
 Under civilisation, while the old external contradiction 
 tends to become aljolished, contradiction has appeared 
 in the very heart of the social organism. Its 
 salient expression Is the opposition of interest be- 
 
86 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 tween individual and society, as expressed in the 
 longing for individual autonomy ; and its most salient 
 embodiment is the modern Liberal individualist. 
 Modern Liberal individualism is thus, in a sense, the 
 highest formulation of the principle of civilisation. 
 The Liberal individualist is an extremely high pro- 
 duct of civilisation. He is " der Weisheit letzten 
 Schluss " of the civilised world. 
 
 But if, as we have said, progress for well-nigh four 
 centuries has been making directly for individualism 
 in the sense of the middle-class Liberal, and thus far 
 Liberal individualism has been the expression of the 
 progressive force of historical development, inasmuch 
 as it has meant the liberation of the individual from the 
 effete forms of tribal society which largely obtained 
 throughout the middle ages in a modified guise, and of 
 which the very trading-guilds themselves were an off- 
 shoot — if this be true, it is none the less true that 
 this work is now accomplished in all countries in 
 the van of civilisation. Medisevalism is broken down 
 all round ; the surviving relics of the social and 
 political organisation of the elder world are either 
 gone or fast going ; the individual is emerging free 
 and equal before the law (or as much so as he is 
 ever likely to be in a class-society). The great 
 thing which now oppresses men is, not the privilege 
 of status, but the privilege of wealth. It is not 
 the legal position into which a man is born that 
 weighs him down, it is the contract he is compelled 
 to make of his own free choice (if you will excuse the 
 " bull "). Progress therefore on the old lines of indi- 
 vidual freedom before the law has plainly reached, or 
 is fast reaching, an impasse beyond which it is impos- 
 sible, and would be useless if it were possible, to go. 
 Liberal individualism is therefore played out. Pro- 
 gress towards freedom, in short, has, as I said at 
 the beginning of this lecture, " turned a comer." Its 
 old position has landed it in a contradiction, inasmuch 
 
Liberalism v. Socialism. §7 
 
 as the attainment ctE the maximum o? formal liberty 
 has produced a maximum of real slavery. Free con- 
 tract under a system of unrestricted individual pro- 
 perty-holding has strangled liberty. We are to-day 
 struggling with this fell contradiction. To suppress 
 one of its terms is impossible. The resolution of the 
 contradiction involved in the present, social, and 
 economic situation, is, as you doubtless all know, 
 according to Socialism, the socialisation of all the 
 means and instruments necessary for the production 
 and distribution of wealth on a large scale with the 
 other changes in politics and ethics which must 
 necessarily accompany or follow this economical 
 change. 
 
 Li conclusion, let us view human development as 
 a synthesis — as an articulated whole — we shall then 
 see better the drift of the position I have sought to 
 place before you here. Humanity grows up under 
 the reign of a system of corporate or social interest in 
 which the individual has no significance, except as the 
 element of a social organism. This social organism is 
 limited by conditions of kinship, real or supposed. 
 The individual gradually attains to a self-conscious- 
 ness which chafes against his subordination to the 
 kinship-society out of which he has grown. He at 
 the same time emancipates himself from the bonds of 
 this society by means of the institution of private 
 property and the centralised " state " or political whole, 
 which absorbs and ultimately extinguishes the old 
 groups. 
 
 This is at once the condition of his autonomy, and 
 his autonomy is the condition of the further develop- 
 ment of the institution of private property. The two 
 things are reciprocally bound up together. Endless 
 anomalies result from the conflict of the old and the new 
 principle. Thus the head of the community, from being 
 its father and the steward of its interests a primus inter 
 pares, degenerates into the king or feudal lord. The 
 
88 Liberalism v. Socialism. 
 
 old idea of leadership of equals gets mixed up with 
 the new idea of individual property-holding, and the 
 king acquires a right as of possession over the lives 
 and property of what are now his subjects. 
 
 History shows us the idea of the autonomy of the 
 individual forcing itself through these anomalies ever 
 more to the front — again and again defeated — again 
 and again asserting itself, each time more logically 
 than the last, until, finally, in this nineteenth century, 
 the right of every individual to autonomy has been 
 conceded. But now when the victory is won — a vic- 
 tory necessary in the interests of progress, and without 
 which Socialism would have been impossible — it is seen 
 that individual autonomy, that is, individual liberty 
 as conditioned by private property, is a failure, inas- 
 much as the institution of private property as capital 
 is inconsistent with liberty in any other than a formal 
 sense. The middle- classes as the embodiment (against 
 the corrupt survivals of the elder world, the landed 
 aristocracy) of the principle of individual autonomy 
 are now themselves confronted with the proletariat, as 
 the embodiment of liberty, social and individual. The 
 freedom of the individual in and through the solidarity 
 of the community becomes now the watchword of pro- 
 gress. Individual autonomy, or the liberty of private 
 property — once the only conceivable form of liberty 
 at all — implied the negation of the bonds arising 
 directly or indirectly out of the crude homogeneous 
 solidarity of tribal society ; the liberty of the future 
 implies the negation of this negation. 
 
 Liberal individualism has opposed itself to the crudi- 
 ties and anachronisms of the old order and its survivals, 
 Socialism opposes itself to the anachronisms of Liberal 
 individualism, and as such represents a return to the 
 communistic principle on which primitive society was 
 based. It does so inasmuch as under Socialism society 
 ceases to be a mere aggregate of classes and class in- 
 terests, and becomes once more a connected system or 
 
Liberalism v. Socialisfn. 89 
 
 social (as distinguished from merely political) syn- 
 thesis. The functions of social life lose their character 
 of independent entities subsisting for their own sake 
 and become once more simply functions — accidents of 
 a substance, and not self -existing substances. But it 
 is a likeness in difference. The essential truth at the 
 basis of primitive Communism will be preserved. 
 The essential truth at the basis of modern Indi- 
 vidualism will be preserved also. The solidarity, the 
 associative principle of the one reappears in Socialism, 
 but fused with the definiteness and the solicitude for 
 liberty of the other in its best aspects. Modern 
 Socialism embodies the truth of both principles, but 
 purified from the crudities and limitations of those 
 principles in their original form. That in them both, 
 which was false and fleeting, dissolves. The goal to 
 which human society from its first appearance has 
 been unconsciously .struggling, the synthesis of human 
 solidarity and human freedom, will have been reached 
 in Socialism. The first cycle of human development 
 will be complete. 
 
 The problems which have oppressed humanity, 
 problems which have centred in the antagonism 
 between individual and society, will have been con- 
 quered and for ever settled. That further develop- 
 ments may arise, new problems demand solution, 
 further contradictions show themselves on another 
 plane of the nature of which we can at present have 
 no possible conception, is no concern of ours. Those 
 evils with which we are affected will be gone for ever. 
 What Socialists claim is, that the co-operative com- 
 munity for which they are fighting is the telos of 
 human development to which history points. Civili- 
 sation having accomplished its world-historic mission, 
 passes away into Socialism. Just as the principle of 
 Individualism, though often defeated by privilege and 
 rank, the survivals of the older principle, again and 
 again re-asserted itself, each time with more emphasis 
 
90 Liheralism u. Socialism. 
 
 than before, so now Socialists confidently look forward 
 to the ultimate victory, in spite of all temporary dis- 
 appointments, of the great principle of human solid- 
 arity. On which side in the struggle is liberty, in its 
 true, its real, its concrete sense, can no longer be 
 doubtful to any student of economy or history. To 
 destroy the specious counterfeit, and in its destruction 
 to realise the true liberty — to abolish the property- 
 holder and free the man, such is the aim and such 
 aaust be the outcome of the modern Socialist move- 
 ment. 
 
THE CURSE OF LAW. 
 
 Among the many inevitable curses the system o£ private 
 or individual property-holding, which is the basis of 
 what we call civilisation, has laid on mankind, none is 
 more conspicuous than "law." We here refer to civil law; 
 criminal law which, properly speaking, arrives on the 
 scene at a later stage in social development, falls under 
 a rather different criticism. The disputes between in- 
 dividuals, having their origin in the private ownership 
 of property, afforded the opportunity for a class of 
 parasites to arise who could for their own purposes 
 exploit these disputes. The earliest form of legal 
 decision in the earliest dawn of civilisation, the de- 
 cision of the Basileus, Eex or head of the tribe, or gens, 
 can hardly be reckoned as belonging to the domain of 
 law proper. It is not until these primitive social 
 unities have been broken up, or at least their cohesion 
 essentially weakened, that the reign of law and of the 
 lawyer begins. The Rome of the mythical kings knew 
 no law. Homeric Greece knew no law. The legis- 
 lator, the more or less mythical author of the legal 
 code, is a familiar figure in early history. Thence- 
 forward the curse of law has established itself. The 
 written code may only have formulated the unwritten 
 custom which had subsisted before, but this had refer- 
 ence to disputes between social groups, and not between 
 individuals, except in so far as they represented social 
 groups. It was as the importance of the individual 
 per se emerged that the written code arose and was 
 applied to the disputes of private persons, and with 
 
 91 
 
92 The Curse of Law. 
 
 this written code men appointed to administer it. 
 Thus the class which preys on all other classes ob- 
 tained possession of the field, and in certain periods of 
 civilisation has dominated society completely. 
 
 There was a fiction of the old legists, based on the 
 Roman action known as the actio sacramenti, which 
 stated the origin of law as follows : — Once upon a time 
 (as the fairy tale has it) two men were disputing on the 
 highway about the ownership of some property, a 
 third man coming up ofiiered to arbitrate between 
 them ; they assent, and as remuneration for his trouble 
 he receives a share of the property. Here, then, we 
 have origin of the judge and his salary, the counsel 
 and his fees, and the solicitor and his costs. (Many 
 persons may be inclined to wish that they had been 
 one of the disputants in question with a " six-shooter " 
 in their pockets ; in which case they might have called 
 their adversary aside, and only agreed to accept the 
 decision of this primeval representative of juris- 
 prudence on the secret mutual agreement thereupon 
 to give this individual, as a reward for his trouble, not 
 a portion of the spoil, but a couple of slugs each, im- 
 partially. This would have been less likely than the 
 former procedure to have encouraged others to pursue 
 the calling of meddler in other men's quarrels.) But I 
 need hardly say this pretty little myth is not exactly his- 
 torical, but belongs to the d priori school of Rousseau's 
 Social Contract and similar fictions of the last century, 
 and that the administrator of justice was not at any 
 period of his development to be got rid of in such an easy 
 and effective manner as it would imply. In any case 
 what concerns us here is not so much the origin of the 
 man of law or his position in ancient or mediaeval times 
 as his meaning and significance in the society of to-day. 
 
 Like every other profession or sub-class, the legal 
 class constitutes simply a privileged wing of the great 
 privileged class of the modern world, the class which 
 lives on the surplus value obtained by capital. The 
 
The Curse of Law. 93 
 
 main trunk of the capitalistic classes finds it now more 
 than ever necessary to the carrying on of its system 
 that it should have disputes officially decided, and con- 
 tracts enforced. The importance of the class which 
 is concerned in this confers upon it certain exceptional 
 privileges. It constitutes itself into a " ring," ranging 
 hierarchically from the supreme judge to the ordinary 
 attorney, a ring whose chief aim it is to promote the 
 interests of the legal profession, and openly pledged 
 by what is impudently termed professional etiquette 
 to stand in with each other, irrespective of inherent 
 right or justice. Thus, after the conduct of Sir Eichard 
 Webster in the Pigott case, many legal members of the 
 House of Commons refused to express their disap- 
 proval by voting with the minority, solely on the 
 ground of this " professional courtesy." The position 
 of advantage possessed by the legal class through its 
 knowledge of the mass of chicanery under which the 
 whole of the wealthy classes of the community, especi- 
 ally in this country, find it convenient to place them- 
 selves, enables them to assume the right to extort 
 practically any terms they please for the most trifling 
 act which they may perform for the layman whom 
 they succeed in forcing to resort to them.^ The legal 
 profession from one end to the other thus forms a close 
 corporation, and is therefore a fitting pediment to the 
 main edifice of middle-class society or modern civilisa- 
 tion. The capitalist fleeces the workman, the lawyer 
 fleeces all round, the capitalist allowing the lawyer to 
 fleece even himself, as he is hereby enabled to secure 
 his hold not only of the workman — his natural prey — 
 but of his brother capitalist who is poorer than him- 
 self. 
 
 "^ One of the most impudent legalised forms of fraud is in con- 
 nexion with the taxation of the solicitor's bill, where it is only 
 if the reduction of the bill exceeds a sixth of the total that he is 
 compelled to pay the costs of taxation. The law in other words 
 recognises his right to thieve, \n so far as he can, up to the sixth. 
 
94 Tf^ Curse of Law. 
 
 Were it not for the cost attending "law," the 
 wealthy man would obtain no special advantage from 
 it. Thus we find in countries {e.g. Switzerland) where 
 the extreme wealthy class is an insignificant minority, 
 or of recent growth, that law is relatively cheap. 
 The dominant class — the great capitalists — there- 
 fore sanction the fleecing practised by the lawyer and 
 the courts even though they themselves may some- 
 times be affected by it, knowing that it furnishes them 
 with a weapon with which to terrorise or, if need be, 
 ruin their poorer fellow-citizens. Let thus much 
 suffice (as Aristotle would say) for this aspect of law 
 as embodied in our middle-class society. 
 
 The most important question connected with the 
 present subject is the relation of law to morality. 
 Throughout the historical period there has always 
 been a covert opposition between the two, which 
 has ever and anon burst forth into open an- 
 tagonism. "Law" and "honour" have always ap- 
 peared at opposite poles. This is only natural, inas- 
 much as morality in its original intention implied a 
 social relation. It was that power which bound men 
 together in the fraternal bond, real or imagined, issu- 
 ing from the notion of kinship on which early society 
 reposed. As civilisation advanced, this primitive 
 morality was obscured by the new conceptions to 
 which I have elsewhere given the name of the " intro- 
 spective morality," which placed the Alpha and Omega 
 of ethical sentiment in the relation of the individual 
 soul to the divine being. But ever and anon the old 
 instinct manifests itself, the original sense of the word 
 was never completely lost. The ethical bond of primi- 
 tive society sprang out of the nature of the conditions 
 of that society. If it cannot exactly be described as 
 voluntary it was just as little coercive. Now, " law," 
 which has its raison d'itre not in any common tie 
 between man and man, but in the very opposite, to 
 wit, in the assumption of the isolatiop. of the indi- 
 
The Curse of Law. 95 
 
 vidual, nay, of the enmity between man and man, 
 rests definitely on the notion of forcible coercion of 
 the individual and his interest. The old principle of 
 ethics in its turn now assumes definitely the form of 
 the voluntary regulation by the individual of his im- 
 mediate egoistic impulses in favour of others, as op- 
 posed to the new principle of law which means his 
 forcible coercion. 
 
 We meet with this distinction in places where we 
 might not expect. For instance, in the Pauline epistles 
 we find it taking the form of the antagonism between 
 "law" and "grace": the principle of voluntariness or 
 spontaneity from within is here opposed to the 
 principle of forcible coercion from without. This, 
 though it is an abstract way of looking at the matter, 
 since it only records one aspect of the antithesis, and 
 is used in the interests of the Introspective Morality, 
 is none the less significant on that account. For this 
 very antagonism between law and justice is susceptible 
 of being carried out much more drastically than has 
 ever been done hitherto. These two principles, though 
 they have existed side by side during the period of 
 ciA^sation, have never really combined, but their 
 essential incompatibility has not before been so 
 flagrantly manifested as under the system of modern 
 competitive commerce, which in its operations avowedly 
 recognises no relation between man and man other 
 than that of self-interest, and consequently in which 
 the coercive principle at the basis of law is most fully 
 realised. But as a matter of fact it has never been 
 able to carry it out to its logical issue. It has been 
 obliged to supplement it with a public opinion which 
 exacts an adhesion to the rules of the commercial game, 
 apart from law and on moral grounds, and stigmatises 
 any departure from these rules as immoral and dis- 
 honourable. While on the one side it proclaims that 
 " business is business," and scorns the introduction of 
 sentiment into business operations; on the other it 
 
g6 The Curse of Law. 
 
 whiningly appeals to the sense of honour in order to 
 supply any accidental defects in its own system of 
 self-interest backed by coercion. The present writer 
 was led to reflect on this subject some years ago in 
 observing certain moral phenomena, as, for instance, 
 the readiness with which persons, whose honour was 
 unimpeachable in private relations, did not hesitate to 
 perpetrate a technical " fraud " on a Railway Company 
 (and that this went on in spite of the assurances of the 
 bov/rgeois press that it was quite as dishonourable to 
 travel in a higher class to that for which you had paid 
 your fare as to borrow money of a friend and not 
 return it) ; also the difference universally recognised, 
 implicitly or explicitly, between a debt of honour, 
 which could not or Would not be enforced legally, and a 
 tradesman's bill which could and would be so enforced. 
 Now these ethical phenomena seemed to me totally 
 inexplicable on the conventional theory which con- 
 founds legal obligations with moral obligations. Such 
 widespread instincts do not arise without a very good 
 reason. The reason I pointed out some years ago in an 
 essay on " Commerce and Conscience," as being that 
 the true moral instincts of men pierce through the 
 hollowness of the conventional sham, which seeks to 
 obtain a double sanction for the enforcement of com- 
 mercial, i.e., legal, contracts. 
 
 Pursuing the same line of argument, we have only 
 to consider the results, let us say, of a consistent and 
 all-round non-payment of obligations incurred in the 
 course of business, to see that the sole concern of 
 this bov/rgeois honour and morality is not the welfare 
 of mankind, or any other sublime principle, but mere- 
 ly the perpetuation of its own economical system. 
 The question here is one of debt. Now debts are of 
 two kinds. There is the debt incurred to a friend, 
 or to a benevolent stranger, through his volun- 
 tary act, which arises out of a personal relation be- 
 tween you and him- Suqh a debt ijj all probability 
 
The Curse of Lazv. 97 
 
 either cannot in the nature of things, or will not, for 
 personal and social reasons, be enforced by process of 
 law. Such debts, like all others which are based on 
 personal trust and bear no legal sanction, are matters 
 of honour, and the man who shirks them is a mean 
 scoundrel. So far we are all agreed. But there is 
 another class of debt which does not arise out of any 
 personal relation, but out of a purely economic or busi- 
 ness relation. In commerce, the human being with 
 whom transactions take place counts merely as an 
 engine for the transference of money. Certain Gnostic 
 sects used to teach that the oeon Christ passed through 
 the body of the Virgin (as they expressed it) " like water 
 through a pipe." The mMn in a commercial transaction 
 is in the position of the body of the Virgin. He is 
 merely a conduit for the passage of the Christ of the 
 commercial system, i.e., money. All that is asked of 
 him is that his credit should be good, that is, that he 
 should have money at his disposal, and that it should 
 be possible, if necessary, to coerce him legally to dis- 
 gorge this money. Here, then, I say, there is no ques- 
 tion of moral obligation. The two parties to the 
 transaction do not trust each other as men, brethren, 
 or fellow citizens, but merely in so far as the one sees 
 the way to coercing the other to complete his share of 
 the transaction. Commerce is the game that is being 
 played. 
 
 A friend of mine in a good way of business, but 
 whose interests as a business man do not obscure his 
 intellectual vision, very candidly recognises this fact 
 and gives instructions to his foreman when about to 
 county-court a defaulting customer, to assure the said 
 customer that he has not the least personal feeliog 
 against him, that he does not regard him as a dishonour- 
 able man merely because he seeks to evade the pay- 
 ment of goods obtained in an ordinary commercial way, 
 but that he fully acknowledges that while he as dealer 
 naturally seeks to obtain as much as he can for his 
 
 
 
98 The Curse of Law. 
 
 goods — to sell them as dearly as possible — his customer 
 as naturally seeks to get goods as cheaply as possible ; 
 to buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest 
 being the highest acknowledged principle of that com- 
 mercial system which abhors sentimentality as nature 
 of old abhorred a vacuum. Now obviously the cheapest 
 way of obtaining goods is not to pay for them, and if 
 a buyer can avoid payment for the goods he obtains he 
 has quite as much right to do so as the seller has to 
 receive for them double or treble their cost price and 
 call it profit. " We are playing a game," my friend 
 would say to his defaulting customer, " at which we 
 both seek to win, I hold the trump honours, law, in my 
 hand ; if by the aid of them I win — well ; if in spite 
 of them you win — well also (though not so well for 
 me)." "AH is fair in love and war, and in competitive 
 commerce, which is only war with a changed face." 
 No one has a right to blame the tradesman for employ- 
 ing the natural weapon of commerce, coercive law- 
 where we blame him is that when this fails he snivels 
 morality and whines that his customer is a dishonour- 
 able raan.^ For heaven's sake let us free our minds 
 of this cant and recognise that as things go there is no 
 question of morality at stake, that the one in getting as 
 much for the goods as possible, the other in getting the 
 goods for nothing if possible, is each pursuing a line of 
 conduct consistent with an individalistic basis of 
 society, logically if not economically. We have said 
 that the system of shop-keeping morality is designed, 
 not with a view to human utility but to commercial 
 utility — i.e., to the maintenance of the commercial 
 
 1 The tremendous pull the law gives the tradesman, as such, 
 over the consumer is proved by the fact that day after day claims 
 are decided in favour of tradesmen on the solt evidence of the 
 tradesman's Ledger. Any tradesman who likes to falsify his 
 books can win any number of county-court actions, the onus of 
 proof lying with the defendant that the alleged debt is not owing. 
 After this to talk of honour in connexion with ^ debt of thig 
 kind is rather naive, 
 
The Curse of Law. 99 
 
 system. This is easily seen if we consider the effects 
 of a failure to pay one's tradesmen's bills. 
 
 This is a disgraceful and immoral act says the 
 morality of the commercial system. If so, it ought 
 surely to be demonstrable that some harm results, and 
 not merely accidentally but necessarily results, to some 
 individual or to the community at large from such a 
 course of conduct. But what are the facts ? Let us 
 suppose I fail to pay my baker's bill ; as a consequence 
 my baker cannot meet his engagements with the flour 
 merchant and has to go into liquidation, paying some- 
 thing or other in the pound. The flour merchant not 
 being able to meet his engagements with the corn- 
 dealer, has to do likewise, the corn-dealer, finding his 
 relations with the factor considerably strained, is forced 
 to undergo the same operation, the importer ditto ; last 
 of all the corn-grower also. The day-labourer is not 
 affected, as the "iron law of wages " has already looked 
 after him, and reduced his wages to as near the level 
 of the means of subsistence as local circumstances will 
 admit of. Now which of the above-mentioned persons 
 is injured by my proceeding ? They all and severally, 
 as we know, go on in business after their bankruptcy 
 is settled as merrily as before. But let us suppose, 
 what is, of course, impossible, that, by some means or 
 other, legal coercion were universally suspended or 
 evaded, that not merely myself and a few of my inti- 
 mate friends, but that all society took to not paying 
 its tradesmen's bills, that in Kant's phraseology my 
 conduct came to be recognised " as a rule vaUd for all." 
 What would happen then ? Universal bankruptcy — 
 the whole commercial world paying nothing in tlie 
 pound. But in what respect does universal bank- 
 ruptcy, which pays nothing in the pound, differ from 
 universal solvency which pays twenty shillings in the 
 pound ? Immediately — ^in no respect whatever. The 
 relative positions of persons are unchanged. " Being 
 and non-being are the same." It is only in the qwjM,- 
 
lOO The Curse of Law. 
 
 tative differences which arise between these two ex- 
 tremes, within which the more concrete categories of 
 commercialism work, that human beings are affected. 
 There is just this ulterior difference, however, between 
 the positive and the negative expression, that the 
 positive, universal solvency (twenty shillings in the 
 pound) is the ideal economic expression (albeit unat- 
 tainable in reality) of a perfect commercial or indivi- 
 dualist society, while the negative, universal bank- 
 ruptcy (nothing in the pound, in short, the abolition of 
 private property) is the ideal expression of a Socialist 
 commonwealth. So that on the Kantian maxim, " so 
 act that your conduct may be a rule valid for all," it 
 is quite clear that my action, if really followed by all, 
 would, from an anti-commercial point of view, repre- 
 sent the highest morality. But this would not suit 
 the commercial system, which adjusts its morality 
 accordingly. (It may be observed, however, that since 
 my conduct neither would nor could be followed by 
 all, while under certain circumstances it might through 
 the friction it produced accidentally involve suffer- 
 ing to individuals, the most we can say for it is 
 that it is morally indifferent under ordinary 
 circumstances, and apart from any personal relation 
 unenforcible by law which may subsist between the 
 parties.) 
 
 The distinction between a legal debt and one which 
 is only morally enforcible, and the feelings with which 
 they are respectively regarded, may be illustrated by 
 the case of the dispensation of hospitality by the 
 modern hotel and the mediaeval monastery respectively. 
 Probably no traveller who has put up at that survival 
 of the mediaeval institution, the monastery on the St. 
 Bernard Pass, has begrudged the voluntary contribu- 
 tion on leaving, or has given less than an equivalent 
 for value received. But what man with human feel- 
 ings in his breast has not at times felt a desire to bilk 
 a hotel proprietor and evade the exaction of the often 
 
The Curse of Law. loi 
 
 extortionate tax which the law permits him to levy on 
 the unwary ti-aveller ? 
 
 Commerce, our individualistic method of production 
 and distribution, is but a form of war — its weapon is 
 law. " All is fair in love and war," we repeat. It is 
 only the super-addition of a personal relation which 
 gives a moral sanction to a commercial transaction. I 
 have a friend who is in business, he gives me credit, 
 not as an ordinary customer, but as a friend. I am 
 morally bound to meet my obligations with him, and 
 it is a mean and despicable thing if I do not do so. 
 Moral obligation only obtains in the full sense, in 
 short, where we know or believe that the " legal re- 
 medy " cannot or will not be resorted to. In a system 
 that rests on coercive law honour has strictly no place. 
 It is no use saying that law exists only for the man 
 who is insusceptible of honour. It creates the man in- 
 susceptible of honour. Like the negro who was will- 
 ing to accept the preaching and willing to accept the 
 flogging, but resented the preaching and the flogging 
 too, so where you hold over a man the rod of law he 
 has a right to decline to listen to your appeals to his 
 honour. If we are to be subject to coercive law, let us 
 be subject to it, if to morality or honour, let it be so, 
 but do not let us attempt to link in an unnatural wed- 
 lock the two principles, and appeal promiscuously first 
 to one and then to the other. The difference between 
 " cheating " a man as man and " cheating " a joint 
 stock company, let us say, is as the diflerence between 
 kicking a living animal and kicking an inanimate 
 object. The costermonger who kicks his donkey is a 
 cruel and immoral person. The costermonger who 
 kicks his cart-wheel is not necessarily cruel and 
 immoral. 
 
 Another point about "law," which is persistently 
 disregarded by those who celebrate it as against " brute 
 force," is that " law " is not like " conscience," some- 
 thing distinct from and in itself nobler than " brute 
 
104 The Curse of Law. 
 
 force," but simply a hypocritical form of brute force. 
 I say a hypocritical form of brute force because it pre- 
 tends to be the exponent or embodiment of justice, 
 and under this false pretence often enforces the per- 
 petration of the grossest injustice. It is in the nature 
 of things impossible to guarantee that legal decisions 
 shall be in accordance with right. Sobial prejudice, 
 personal antipathies, want of knowledge of those 
 peculiar circumstances of a case which cannot, or do 
 not, always come out before a court, in short, the pro- 
 verbial frailties of human nature which pervert the 
 judgment, render the pretence that law, under the 
 most favourable circumstances, even remotely repre- 
 sents justice, a fraud of the most impudent kind. Un- 
 der the present system of Courts the ruinous swindling 
 which, in most countries, accompanies law proceedings 
 under the name of costs makes " law," or, as it is ironi- 
 cally termed, "justice," a mere engine of oppression. 
 Many a man every day submits to the most flagrant ex- 
 tortion under the threat of " legal proceedings," because 
 he knows that, however clear his case is, he is just as 
 likely to lose it as to win it, and when the losing of 
 it means a tenfold addition to the original fraudulent 
 claim he naturally "grins and bears" the latter. As 
 against this hypocritical sham which, with all the 
 unction of solemn impartiality, forces a man to submit 
 to being plundered, the unsophisticated " brute force " 
 of the medigeval robber-knight, by virtue of which 
 without any " flam " of impartiality and justice, the 
 traveller was despoiled, cannot fail to strike an im- 
 partial thinker as noble and manly. Many persons 
 imagine that if the civil courts did not exist and dis- 
 putes were left in statu quo, injustice would have to 
 be submitted to without remedy. They forget that as 
 things are, injustice is submitted to every day, rather 
 than have recourse to the precious " remedy " civilisa- 
 tion provides, and that, generally speaking, the only 
 effect of the " remedy " is to afford an engine of ter- 
 
The Curse of Law. 103 
 
 rorism for the rich against the poor, for the strong 
 against the weak. The fact is, that the legal method 
 of settling disputes between individuals is a necessary- 
 bulwark of the system of individual pioperty-holding, 
 and of a class-society, on which civilisation reposes ; 
 it is simply a corollary of this system, and it is use- 
 less to seek any other justification for it. 
 
 We have alluded above to the essential uncertainty 
 attending legal decisions, and their liability to error 
 even under the most favourable conditions. This is a 
 crushing argument against society in its corporate 
 capacity undertaking any such function. When it 
 does so, society knowingly makes itself responsible for 
 unjust decisions, since, while it admittedly cannot 
 guarantee the accordance of all decisions of the courts 
 with justice, it still enforces all such decisions. It will 
 be said, of course, that nothing is left undone to insure 
 a fair decision, and that on the whole less injustice 
 occurs under a judicial system than if the quarrels of 
 individuals were allowed to take their course. We 
 dispute, as a matter of fact, both these assertions, 
 but even granting them does not alter the case. 
 Twenty acts of injustice for which society is not 
 responsible do not weigh against one such act 
 for which it •is responsible. Society in using its 
 collective power to enforce an unjust decision 
 commits a crime. All are parties to that crime. If a 
 man breaks a contract he has made with me, I have 
 the simple remedy in my own hands not to enter into 
 any further contracts with him and to denounce his 
 conduct in. the face of the world. Society is not re- 
 sponsible for the wrong done me. All that society is 
 really concerned with in the matter is to see that the 
 peace is not broken and to deal impartially with those 
 who break the peace, no matter whether they are 
 right or wrong in the particular question in dispute. 
 
 That ultimately civil law must disappear with the 
 last vestiges of modern civilisation, no Socialist wiil 
 
104 1'he Curse of Law. 
 
 refuse to admit. But I still maintain, as before, that 
 one of the first measures of a definitely Socialist ad- 
 ministration should be the closing of all courts for the 
 hearing of purely civil causes. Such a measure, which 
 would mean the definitive break on the juridical side 
 with the old order, is of too revolutionary a nature to 
 proceed from any other than a revolutionary body, but 
 given such a body, a modern " Convention," or " Paris 
 Commune," it could not consistently be refused. The 
 saving in expenditure and the freeing of now useless 
 hands for productive labour should alone commend it 
 from an economical point of view. The question of 
 the settlement of disputes between public bodies rests 
 on rather a difierent basis. It might be necessary to 
 retain an intercommunal or international tribunal for 
 the adjudication of such disputes after the State had 
 definitely renounced interference in contracts between 
 individuals. 
 
 A point which naturally suggests itself is, in how far 
 the foregoing observations as to the incompatibility of 
 the ethical and legal sides of civilised life apply to crim- 
 inal law. Directly, of course, they do not apply. The 
 enforcement of a penalty on the commission of a crime 
 has no direct analogy with the coercing of men in 
 their ordinary civil relations. But here no less, in the 
 interests of a higher social morality, the minimisation 
 of the sphere of law is indispensable. It may fairly be 
 doubted whether criminal law should take cognisance 
 of any other crimes than those of violence. A man of 
 average sense ought to be able to protect himself 
 against fraud. Theft only requires the restitution 
 of the stolen property flus an addition such as 
 the Eoman law provided. The ideal condition 
 of a community is that the remorse following 
 the commission of a crime should be an adequate pre- 
 ventive of its commission. Now there can be no doubt 
 that this sentiment of honour or conscience is weakened 
 and a criminal class created precisely by the action of 
 
The Curse of Law. lOj 
 
 criminal law. Where a certain penalty is enacted as 
 the price of a crime, there is a natural tendency to 
 regard one as a set-ofF to the other and to make a 
 calculation of the chance of detection, etc., etc., thus 
 reducing the matter to a commercial speculation. The 
 feeling that society provides its own remedy, pays 
 itself, so to say, out of the criminal's skin, cannot but 
 weaken the criminal's inner sense of his own duty — 
 the spontaneous ought — towards society, and we may 
 add indirectly not only the criminal's, but that of every 
 member of society. The knowledge added to this 
 that mistakes are sometimes made and cruel suffering 
 inflicted upon innocent men by society in its own de- 
 fence must stUl further tend to weaken the horror of 
 crime as crime by diverting the indignation of men 
 from the criminal to the society that punishes him. 
 The point alluded to above, that twenty acts of in- 
 justice for which society is not responsible are, morally 
 speaking, of no importance compared to one for which 
 it is responsible, applies with tenfold force to the case 
 of criminal conviction. Better a hundred murders 
 which the law does not father, than one execution of 
 an innocent person which it does. In this respect 
 barbaric " custom," which does not recognise crime in 
 the modern sense, but only restitution for an injury 
 done to the social group, has the immense advantage 
 over civilised "law." The above is, moreover, a crush- 
 ing argument against brutal punishments, or, indeed, 
 against any punishment more than mere preventive 
 reclusion. It is not too much to say that a society 
 that employs the gallows and the " cat " pretty much 
 deserves all it gets at the hands of criminals. If the 
 criminal, when he gets the chance of doing so with 
 impunity, commits the crime for which the gallows or 
 the lash is reserved, society has only itself to thank. 
 In the natural course of things mistakes inust arise, 
 and innocent persons at times sufier those punish- 
 ments. Nothing but the most dastardly and abject 
 
to6 The Curse of Law. 
 
 cowardice makes men run the risk, for the sake, 
 as they believe, of warding oif danger from 
 their own skins, of becoming collectively guilty 
 of such a hideous iniquity. It is one consolation 
 that these punishments do not succeed in their 
 object. The lash does not prevent garroting, nor 
 the " long drop " murder, and would still less, if every 
 right-minded man did his duty when on a jury, 
 and refused to convict for any offence to which (let us 
 say) capital punishment or the lash were attached. 
 
 To sum up : Law we find as one of the first sym- 
 toms of civilisation. In barbaric society when at its 
 zenith there is little or no conflict of interests between 
 individuals, inasmuch as the individual is merged in 
 the social group. When, with civilisation, the indi- 
 vidual gradually emerges from the group, conflicts of 
 interest between individuals arise — -hence law, or the 
 coercion of one individual on behalf of another by the 
 centralised power or State (now become the re- 
 presentative of private interests). The sentiment 
 of honour now assuming the form of the conscious 
 recognition of duty as opposed to self-interest grows 
 up side by side with law, but as time goes on is 
 sure to be more and more antithetical to law. 
 The one is mechanism, the other life. The notion 
 that forcible coercion from without — law — and spon- 
 taneous action from within — honour and morality — are 
 radically incompatible, constantly appears, a familiar 
 illustration in literature being the antithesis of law 
 and grace in the Pauline epistles, and in modem life 
 the distinction between a legal debt and a debt of 
 honour. Under the commercial system, the man of 
 business seeks to combine as much sentiment with his 
 system as will suit his purpose to help out the inevit- 
 able deficiencies of law and no more. To drive a hard 
 bargain with a needy man, to impose on ignorance, 
 and, in short, to obtain as much for goods as possible, 
 by fair means or foul, is not usually deemed dishon- 
 
the Curse of Law. i6^ 
 
 Durable on the part of the trader, though it may 
 be thought " sharp ; " but for the needy man in his 
 turn, in the teeth of law, to get the trader's goods for 
 nothing — oh, that's naughty ! My contention, on the 
 contrary, is that morality, honour, brotherly senti- 
 ment, " do as you would be done by," etc., presupposes 
 a reciprocal, personal, or social relation, that where 
 the relation is purely commercial and enforcible by 
 law no such moral obligation obtains. 
 
 Again, law is only a masked form of brute force. 
 In the same way that justice may be done by means of 
 mere brute force of the robber-knight order, so it may 
 be also by the brute force at the disposal of the tribu- 
 nals, but injustice may likewise be effected by the same 
 means. The important difference is that in the case 
 of individual violence or injustice, society in its cor- 
 porate capacity is not responsible, at least directly, 
 whereas in that perpetrated in the name of law it is. 
 Why should I be forced to participate as a member of 
 society in the performance of an act which I regard 
 as abominable infamy ? That any consideration of 
 mere immediate utility should outweigh this only 
 shows the utterly low moral standpoint of the man of 
 civilisation. Yet that it does outM'eigh it we see every 
 day in discussions on subjects of this kind. So long 
 as a commercial system lasts tribunals will also 
 obtain, which, under the sham of responsible justice, 
 compels individuals to submit to their decisions, often 
 in flagrant violation of justice. 
 
 That in the case of criminal law, mutatis mutandis, 
 similar remarks will apply indirectly, we have also 
 pointed out. Probably few would deny the necessity 
 for an indefinite period of criminal law of some 
 kind. All we can do is to mitigate the inevitable 
 evil : 1, by reducing the number of indictable actions to 
 the minimum ; 2, by hedging convictions round with 
 every safeguard, as, for example, by assuming the 
 prosecutor, in doubtful cases, to be a liar, until he has 
 
to8 The Curse of Law. 
 
 proved his case ; and, 3, by reducing punishment as at 
 present in some of the Swiss cantons to mere pre- 
 ventive reclusion. 
 
 The foregoing observations, we need scarcely say, 
 are designed to explode certain common bourgeois 
 fallacies as regards law rather than to further any im- 
 mediately practical proposals. The writer is fully aware 
 of the historical significance of "law," and that no mere 
 edict will suffice to root it out ; although this admission 
 does not say that such an edict should not have its 
 place with other measures in the opening of a new 
 order of things. 
 
 But the chief object of a discussion like the present is 
 to induce thinking persons to abandon current prejudices 
 which confound law and morality, which regard legal 
 coercion as something intrinsically superior to coercion 
 of another kind, etc., etc. That there exists a large 
 number of persons who need clarification of their 
 ideas on this subject no one can doubt, who, having 
 thought it out to some extent, has endeavoured to 
 elicit the views of generally intelligent and well- 
 meaning friends thereupon. 
 
A SOCIALIST'S NOTES ON 
 PRACTICAL ETHICS. 
 
 In a transitional period like the present, when the 
 society of status has been superseded by the society of 
 contract, the society of groups by the society of indi- 
 viduals in a centralised State, and when this society 
 is itself becoming fast superannuated — when, like the 
 mast of a ship on the horizon, the ideal of a new 
 society based neither on status nor on contract, neither 
 on the exclusiveness of the old Communism nor on 
 the isolation of the new Individualism, is absorbing 
 men's attention, an ideal which is as certain to be 
 followed by realisation as the ship's mast on the 
 horizon is to be followed by the ship's hull, it is but 
 natural that our moral conceptions should be in a 
 chaotic condition. We are between two moral sys- 
 tems, the Christian and bourgeois system of personal 
 holiness and commercial morality, and the communist 
 system of social morality. Hence, notions belonging 
 to either of them are found intermingled in men's 
 minds, and each man has to disentangle as best he can 
 the principles which shall guide his daily life. Many 
 of the canons of the current or bov/rgeois morality are 
 justly felt to be no longer binding on those who reject 
 the dominant system of society as an ideal. But 
 with these maxims, which have significance solely in 
 
 109 
 
no A Socialisf s Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 relation to the differentia of an individualist-com- 
 mercial or an introspective Christian society, are often 
 confounded principles which underlie all moral rela- 
 tions whatever. Many persons who have given up 
 the conventional bourgeois morality have not assimi- 
 lated a socialist morality, and hence, have no morality 
 at all. Their case is analogous to that of the savage 
 who, under the instruction of the missionary, has 
 learnt to despise the traditional and customary ethics 
 of his tribe as " heathen," and having imperfectly 
 understood the Christo-bourgeois mixture dealt out to 
 him by the broad-cloth man of God, has developed 
 into as ill-conditioned a scoundrel as it is easy to 
 meet. 
 
 Now, for those who reject the moral standards of 
 current society as such, it is of the utmost importance 
 that they should come to an understanding with them- 
 selves as to their true relation to this morality. The 
 utter confusion of ideas on this point of many persons 
 has been illustrated in the case of certain Anarchists 
 who have not scrupled to commit and to defend any 
 act of meanness or villainy on the ground of their 
 emancipation from bov/rgeois principles. There are 
 various elements in the current as in every concrete 
 ethical system, in so far as it is ethical. There is the 
 element which underlies all morality — the insufficiency 
 and the abstractness of the individual per se, or as an 
 end to himself, and the expression of this in the ougid 
 of conscience, the impulse toward the realisation of 
 self outside of self. But this element, although funda- 
 mental, is vague and abstract considered alone — having 
 no definite purpose. It receives a determinate direc- 
 tion first in the definite categories of human relation- 
 ship. Here we find certain general formulae of conduct 
 implicit, and more or less limited in their application 
 in primitive society, and becoming more and more 
 explicit and universalised in their application as civil- 
 isation advartcsia. These general categories are the 
 
A Socialist's Notes on Practical Ethics. 1 1 1 
 
 conceptions of Justice and Injustice, Meanness and 
 Generosity, Fidelity and Treachery, etc. The mere 
 indeterminate tendency is here negated, inasmuch as 
 it acquires a definite direction, the concepts embodying 
 it presenting themselves, not as the realisation of self, 
 but as something imposed upon self — upon the in- 
 dividual — from outside. The categories named are 
 the basal ground of all real or concrete morality. 
 They resolve themselves, in fact, broadly speaking, 
 into the propositions : (1) Every act necessarily in- 
 volving cruelty is per «e immoral. (2) No act not 
 necessarily involving cruelty is per se immoral. 
 
 But the categories above mentioned, each and 
 severally fall asunder into inner pairs of concepts 
 which difier in diflFerent epochs within the historical 
 period, and which are determined by the particular 
 economic and other conditions of the epoch in question. 
 Thus one age conceives justice and injustice in very 
 different ways from another. The modern tradesmen 
 would feel the regulations of the medieval guild an 
 injustice. The mediaeval craftsmen feel it no injustice. 
 Robin Hood, and those who sung of him, saw no in- 
 ■ justice in plundering the wealthy merchant or ecclesi- 
 astic on the king's highway ; nor, at a later date, did 
 Sir John Fortescue, when he praised the English for 
 being greater robbers than the French. Highway 
 robbery was an act of war, and though illegal, was 
 not immoral.^ The appropriation of the wealth of 
 another was to the average mediaeval mind only wrong 
 under special conditions — i.e., when it involved mean- 
 ness, such as the spoliation of the poor and the pilgrim. 
 In the middle ages, indeed, the categories of justice 
 and injustice always tended in the moral consciousness 
 of the people to pass over into those of meanness and 
 generosity, or treachery and fidelity. The notion of 
 justice and injustice is more abstract and later in ap- 
 
 1 Within living memory the Italian brigand has prayed to the 
 Virgin for success in his expeditions. 
 
112 A Socialisfs Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 pealing to the mind. Then, again, in the case of 
 meanness, barbaric notions of the sacredness of hos- 
 pitality, the breach of which in all early societies is 
 felt to be the most heinous of moral offences, as all 
 early literatures show, and as may be seen to-day 
 among many barbarous tribes, has disappeared totally 
 from the ethical consciousness proper in most civilised 
 societies. The categories of meanness and magnan- 
 imity in their primary sense have, in fact, lost much of 
 their ethical force in a society of commercial individu- 
 alism, even though in their secondary sense they 
 may still form a not inconsiderable element in the 
 ethics of modern life. Except in " business," which is 
 an extra-moral relation, being based on the autonomy 
 of the individual, the taking of an unfair advantage 
 — in other words, meanness — is still counted as a 
 moral obliquity. 
 
 Fidelity and treachery, which embrace the cate- 
 gories honesty and dishonesty, truthfulness and lying 
 — have also undergone an immense change. In earlier 
 ages the force of these lay in the breach of a personal 
 or rather a social relation, now in the mere abstract 
 act itself. To tell a lie to an enemy, or even merely 
 to one outside the social group was not necessarily 
 disgraceful any more than it was to rob the wealthy 
 stranger on the king's highway. On the other hand, 
 the betraying of hospitality, which is usually regarded 
 as the most despicable of crimes in all early societies, 
 would now be looked upon as legitimate under many 
 circumstances. For example, some years ago the 
 Italian Government sent some private detectives into 
 Sicily with the view of capturing a band of peasants 
 who had turned brigands, and were located in some 
 mountain fastness in that island. The plan was for 
 the detectives to personate peasant brigands and then 
 to lead the real brigand band into a trap and hand 
 them over to the authorities. The police-agents duly 
 discovered their prey, who received them warmly, and 
 
A Socialises Notes on Practical Ethics. 113 
 
 with open arms, supposing them to be brother bandits, 
 as they represented themselves. The best quarters in 
 the ruined castle were allotted the guests, the best 
 viands and wines, and a portion of the booty placed 
 at their disposal. After a few days spent in a friendly 
 and confidential intercourse, the detectives broached 
 the object of their mission. They succeeded in luring 
 the wretched brigands down to the coast and on to a 
 Government ship, under the pretence they were about 
 to transport them to a hidden store of wealth on a 
 neighbouring island. Once on board, the hospitable 
 entertainers were of course immediately made prison- 
 ers, the chief pouring forth his contempt for the 
 treacherous villains whom they had harboured. Yet, 
 to the police-agents, this was all "business." The brig- 
 ands, who took the primitive view of the duties of 
 hospitality, had offended against the law. It was the 
 police-agents' business to entrap them. But who shall 
 say that these police-agents were on a higher moral 
 level than the brigands ? 
 
 What I may term the concrete and special (as 
 opposed to general) moral principles of modern civilis- 
 ation are based entirely on the private ownership of 
 property. What divides the Socialist from the Eadical 
 is always and essentially this distinction of economic 
 standpoint. I heard a prominent member of the 
 Radical party, some months ago, say, he believed that 
 in the future the man who had great wealth would 
 regard it as a duty to devote that wealth to public 
 purposes. This exactly hits off average radical 
 ideals: — improvement of the lot of the working- 
 classes, accompanied by indefinite increase in the 
 charity and public-spiritedness of the middle- classes 
 — no conception of there heing no man of wealth, of 
 the extinction of the institution of private property, 
 in other words, no notion of a classless society. So 
 deeply engrained in us is this idea of class and of the 
 holding of property in severalty, that we with very 
 
 a 
 
114 -^ Socialist's Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 great difficulty conceive of any state substantially 
 otherwise. 
 
 For this reason so few persons appear to realise 
 how much of our ethics grow merely on the soil of 
 severalty-property — that, for example, the whole of 
 our sexual morality (as such), in so far as it has a 
 rational, as opposed to a mystical, basis, is nothing but 
 a " plant " to save the ratepayer's pockets by fixing 
 the responsibility for the maintenance of children on 
 the individuals responsible for the procreation of 
 them ; and that all " talk " of respectability, purity, 
 and the like, is but the pale reflection of this central 
 economic fact. But still it must not be forgotten that, 
 as we are living under these economic conditions and 
 not under socialistic conditions, any current standard 
 of conduct must take them into account. It may 
 deviate from the traditional and orthodox standard 
 as much as one likes, provided that in doing so it does 
 not ignore the facts which have given birth to that 
 standard. It must make up its account with them in 
 its own way, if it is not to come into conflict with 
 those deeper moral categories which all morality, at 
 present conceivable, involves. It must take them into 
 account also in another, and to some extent an oppo- 
 site, sense, if it is not to degenerate into the merely 
 fatuous attempt to carry out Socialism in individual 
 conduct in a society based on the opposite principle. 
 Bearing these facts in mind, let us see how they work 
 out in present-day social life. 
 
 Now, a man may justly reject the dominant sexual 
 morality ; he may condemn the monogamic marriage- 
 system which obtains to-day; he may claim the 
 right of free union between men and women; he 
 may contend he is perfectly at liberty to join him- 
 self, either temporarily or permanently, with a wo- 
 man ; and that the mere legal form of marriage has 
 no binding force for him. But this does not justify 
 him in incurring responsibilities which he does 
 
A Socialists Notes on Practical Ethics. 1 1 5 
 
 not intend to fulfil. It does not justify him in seduc- 
 ing his friends' wives, or committing any other act of 
 treachery. For the marriage relation, whether with 
 or without the sanction of law, rests upon a reciprocal 
 pledge of fidelity, which, although not absolutely bind- 
 ing, is certainly relatively so ; that is, until full notice 
 of the intention of withdrawal from it has been given 
 by one or other of the parties to it. Similarly, under 
 present social and economic conditions he is morally 
 unjustified in taking advantage of friendship with a 
 man for having, without his consent, a fieeting and 
 secret liason with a daughter or any other female 
 relation who may be supposed to be under his pro- 
 tection, and whom he may have met in the course of 
 social intercourse with him. Again, it is quite cor- 
 rectly regarded as a point of honour with a medical 
 man or a teacher that the female patients or pupils 
 with whom he comes in contact in a professional 
 capacity, should be treated on the maxiinta reverentia 
 principle. The same applies more or less to immatu- 
 rity at all times and places. In short, the distinction 
 of standpoint as to sexual morality may be briefly 
 summed up thus : — For the Christo-bourgeois of the 
 present day, the sexual relation is per se immoral, and 
 only becomes moral per accidentem, i.e., under a special 
 condition imposed from without. To the consistent 
 Socialist, the sexual relation is, on the contrary, per se 
 morally indiflerent (neither moral nor immoral) like 
 any other bodily function, but it may easily become im- 
 moral per accidentem, i.e., from the special circum- 
 stances under which it takes place, and whereby it 
 acquires the character of an act of injustice or treachery. 
 With the morality and non-morality of the relations 
 of modern business-life I have dealt elsewhere. I 
 have shown that the business relation per se is extra- 
 moral and can only enter into the sphere of morality 
 under certain special conditions. My relations with 
 a man who is my friend, though they may be of a 
 
Tl6 A Socialises Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 business character, are brought within the moral cate- 
 gories by virtue of that fact. I am not to him, nor 
 he to me, any longer merely the X or the abstract 
 buyer or seller of commodities, but this relation is 
 inseparable from the other, and concrete one, that of 
 friendship and social intercourse. Again, if a buyer 
 or seller of wares befriends, another, even without 
 previous knowledge of him, that is, renounces for the 
 nonce the law of the market, throws aside the weapon 
 which, as a commercial man, he is entitled to use, the 
 relation between them at once becomes moral. He, on 
 whose behoof he has thrown aside the law of the 
 market — business is business — ^is placed under the 
 moral law as regards him who does so. His obligation 
 is no longer merely an abstract, a legal, a commercial 
 one, but a concrete, a personal, a human one. If any 
 one alleges that on a consistent carrying out of this 
 principle commercial transactions would become im- 
 possible, my only reply as a Socialist is — that is no 
 concern of mine. 
 
 There is a good deal of confusion on the part of 
 many persons respecting the true moral attitude of 
 the middle-class Socialist, as to ' what is commonly 
 known as " charity," also as regards the payment of 
 wages. One need scarcely at this time refute the 
 commonplace bourgeois gibe that the capitalist, as 
 soon as he professes Socialism, ought to strip himself 
 of all his belongings merely for the sake of doing so. 
 But it may, perhaps, be said he ought to spend all his 
 wealth on the pa/rty as such. Now, there might be 
 something in this, if it could be proved that it were 
 advisable for the "party" to be taught to rely on 
 windfalls from individual members. It is not to be 
 denied that there are circumstances under which it 
 may be the duty of an individual, or, at least, ex- 
 tremely commendable in him, to sacrifice his wealth 
 for the cause. Such cases have occurred over and 
 over again in Russia, and might easily occur elsewhere, 
 
A Socialists Notes on Practical Ethics. 117 
 
 But the fact remains that, in the ordinary way, no- 
 thing tends so to demoralise a sect, party, or organis- 
 ation, as the acquirement by it of wealth without 
 exertion, or the accustoming of it to expect supplies 
 from more or less accidental sources. When a party 
 once gets wealthy in this way, it becomes a centre of 
 attraction for every worthless person and hypocrite ; 
 even men who at starting were genuine get corrupted, 
 and quarrels arise among them over the emoluments 
 to be obtained. When a cause has to rely upon re- 
 sources of this kind it has little or no real vitality. 
 Either it is dead in itself, or the time is not ripe for it. 
 And though in the latter case a little factitious boom- 
 ing of the kind referred to may be good, yet it can 
 very easily be overdone. Socialism, like every other 
 great movement, has made headway, not through the 
 lavishness of individual benefactors, but through the 
 energy of the masses themselves, through their con- 
 viction of its necessity for themselves, and through the 
 enthusiasm which has led each to contribute his quota 
 to the cause of party-organisation and propaganda. 
 Wherever there has been a systematically subsidised 
 Socialist party it has been23ro tanto a failure. Where 
 it succeeds it is by the mites of the masses and not by 
 the cheques of the classes. Certainly, a middle-class 
 man may be" legitimately expected to contribute a 
 substantial sum, according to his means, on a special 
 emergency, but in systematically subsidising the move- 
 ment, experience has proved he is injuring rather than 
 benefiting the cause he has at heart. 
 
 In matters of private "charity," as it is termed, 
 there is no special principle to guide the Socialist, as 
 such, any more than any other person. The desire to 
 relieve the present sufiering of individuals, when it 
 comes under our notice, is natural and laudable, but 
 the how, the when, the how-much, must be left to the 
 feelings of every individual in his private capacity. 
 This commendable sentiment does not, unfortunately, 
 
Ii8 A Socialists Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 by any means invariably co-exist with a readiness to 
 sacrifice class- advantages for the sake of a higher and 
 a better social system. The charitable man in private 
 life is often the most truculent reactionary in politics. 
 There is, however, one aspect of the charity question 
 which does sometimes nearly aifect the middle-class 
 man who is also a Socialist. Such a one may possibly 
 be an employer of labour in some shape or other. 
 There is a certain market-rate of value of the labour 
 he employs which may happen to be a low one. Now, 
 there is no doubt that the giving of wages above the 
 market-rate of labour, above what the labourer him- 
 self demands for his labour, is, in a competitive society 
 whose basis is the market, exactly equivalent to charity. 
 In saying this, I, of course, exclude the attempt ac- 
 tively to force down the rate of wages or to hold it 
 down when it is rising, which entirely alters the case. 
 But assuming, let us say, that in an unskilled, unorgan- 
 ised branch of labour, the labourer offers himself for 
 a certain wage, is the employer, I ask, morally hound 
 (I leave inclination on one side) to exercise charity 
 in his particular instance by giving him more than 
 such market- value of his labour ? Let us hear both 
 sides in the form of a dialogue ! 
 
 " X. How can you, who call yourself a Socialist, 
 " give the miserable wages you do ? F. I give the 
 " wage which is admitted by the conditions of the 
 "market. I have never beaten down wages; but 
 " were I to give more my business would cease to be 
 " remunerative. Besides, in conducting business I 
 ■' decline to mix up charity with it. If I were to give 
 " more, that surplus would be a matter of charity, and 
 " as much a question for me as an individual to decide 
 " for myself as any other question of private charity, 
 " as, for instance, whether I give alms to a particular 
 " beggar at a particular street corner or not. Let the 
 " workmen in my branch of industry organise and 
 " demand a higher rate of wages, and it will, of course, 
 
A Socialises Notes on Practical Ethics. 1 19 
 
 " be my duty to bow to the decisions of such a repre- 
 " sentative organisation. X. Then you take advantage 
 " of the fact that these workmen happen to be unor- 
 " ganised in order to sweat them ? Y. That sounds 
 " plausibly ugly, certainly ; but do not you, my friend, 
 " do not we all ' take advantage,' as you express it, of 
 " the system we have the misfortune to live under ? 
 " Does not everyone who goes into business at all, or 
 " who invests money, be it only in a savings' bank, 
 " ' take advantage ' of the system — does not everyone 
 " who lives under the system and who is above the 
 " worst-paid class of workmen ' take advantage,' in a 
 " sense, of those below him ? And would it benefit 
 " anybody or any cause that he should not do so ? 
 " What you, like a good many other people, confound, 
 " is the ' taking advantage ' of a system already ex- 
 " istent, by the individual who lives under it, and the 
 " exacerbation by him as an individual of the evils of 
 " that system for his own selfish benefit. X. But tell 
 "me in what way are you better than Livesey, 
 ■' Norwood or any sweater ? Y. Precisely in that I 
 "recognise the sacredness of the demand by an or- 
 " ganised body of workers for higher wages or shorter 
 " hours, as indicating the sign of a change (little 
 " though it may be), a change that I, as a Socialist, 
 " should hail with joy, even though it meant the 
 " destruction of my business. Not to do so, let alone 
 " to attempt actively to resist it, would be placing my 
 " own personal interests above the common cause of 
 "the workers. X. But you ought not surely under 
 " any circumstances to pay less wages than what are 
 " requisite for a decent subsistence ? Y. Unfortun- 
 " ately, the standard of living, even among the working 
 " classes, is very varied, and the normal standard is, 
 "therefore, difficult to fix; besides, the modern in- 
 " dustrial mechanism is so complex that even if a 
 " really tolerable standard were fixed, the individual 
 "capitalist could not, as things go, maintain it and 
 
t20 A Socialism's Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 " continue his business. X Then let him stop busi- 
 "ness. Y. Well said ; but this would only mean the 
 " throwing of a number of workmen upon the streets, 
 "and the possible reduction of the small capitalist 
 " himself to the position of a proletarian. X, Be it so 
 " then. Better let the unemployed workman starve 
 " than encourage him to accept too low wages. Y. 
 " But absolute starvation would surely be worse than 
 " even the low wages which competition compels me to 
 " pay. The workman would surely lose rather than 
 " gain by my throwing him on the street by closing 
 " my business. It is quite a different thing when, 
 " with a definite end in view, he chooses of his own 
 " accord and with an organisation backing him to come 
 " out on strike. X. But you must accustom him to 
 " the idea of not working for too low wages. Y. Does 
 " he require then to be taught this ? Does he work 
 " for the low wages because he likes it, and not rather 
 " because he must ? Will the efiect of my refusing 
 " to employ him at the market rate, and since I cannot 
 " aflford to pay him a higher one, refusing to employ 
 " him at all — will the effect of this, I ask, be any other 
 " than to drive him on to the next man in the trade to 
 " accept the same, or, if possible, a still lower wage ? 
 " In giving him the wages at which he and his 
 " fellows are compelled to offer themselves, I am not 
 " exascerbating the system, I am not taking advantage 
 " of any epecia/ circumstances in which this particular 
 " workman is placed ; I am not forcing down wages or 
 " preventing them from rising. My paying my work- 
 "men over and above the market rate, as an indi- 
 " vidual capitalist, will not raise the general rate nor 
 " prevent them having to accept that rate when they 
 " leave me. X. I repeat, after all that you may say, 
 " you have no right, as a Socialist, to employ men at 
 " wages which are below the lowest possible rate at 
 " which they can obtain decent food, etc. You ought 
 " to draw the line, at the very least, at the minimum 
 
A Socialisfs Notes on Practical Ethics. 1 2 1 
 
 " union wage, that is the lowest wage which is aamitted 
 " by any union, and recognise this as the lowest you 
 " have a right to give in any industry at any time. 
 " Y. Now you give me a definite proposition which is 
 "worth thinking about and to which I promise to 
 " give my best attention." 
 
 I leave these arguments to the consideration of the 
 reader's conscientious judgment. 
 
 We should always bear in mind that the bourgeois 
 morality regards names more than things ; the rose is 
 not as sweet by any other name, in fact when it bears 
 any other name than the one middle-class respect- 
 ability has assigned to it, it is despised and rejected 
 of respectable men. The stock exchange is a repu- 
 table institution. Staking money in stocks on the 
 chance of a rise is business (" that blessed word "), and 
 a perfectly legitimate occupation. Not so, staking 
 money on the turf, at roulette, or at baccarat. This 
 is gambling, the pursuit of frivolous, foolish and sinful 
 young men. Then again, with marriage. Advertising 
 is a disreputable form of obtaining a wife, at least in 
 this country. But the London season, with its balls 
 and garden-parties, in which the previously unknown 
 young woman is introduced by her parent or guardian 
 to the previously unknown young man, is a perfectly 
 natural and praiseworthy institution. Why on eartla 
 a man with other things to do should have to put on 
 a glazed white plaster over his chest, and wear a 
 ridiculous black coat cut away behind in a positively 
 indelicate manner, and talk platitudes for the sake of 
 meeting a previously unknown member of the opposite 
 sex with a view to matrimony, when, assuming he is 
 as yet undetermined in his sexual inclinations, he 
 might as commodiously compass his object by adver- 
 tisement, seems at first sight beyond comprehension ! 
 The real explanation is that the bourgeois, while 
 wishing to maintain the present marriage-system, 
 baaed on property-qualification, and on commercial 
 
122 A Sociatisfs Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 considerations, wishes also to keep up the sham of its 
 being based solely on idyllic emotion, and hence 
 objects to its being carried on under the outward forms 
 of commerce. The latter shocks his susceptibilities. 
 Although the legally enforced marriage of modern 
 society, is, in its nature, as much a commercial con- 
 tract as any other, it seeks to hide this under certain 
 conventional social forms. Yet again, slavery is re- 
 pugnant to the modern middle-class mind, or it is 
 pretended that it is so (chiefly because it interferes 
 with capitalistic enterprise in Africa and elsewhere), 
 but in spite of the repugnance, real or feigned, of the 
 modern man to slavery under that name, and when it 
 takes the form of " status," he finds nothing objection- 
 able in it at all in the guise of a sham " free contract." 
 The compulsory subjection of the will of one man 
 to that of another, which is the essence of slavery, 
 acquires quite a different moral character when it is 
 not called slavery, but wage-labour. So it is through 
 all departments of life. Essentially, the same act 
 which is condemned under one name is approved or 
 tolerated under another, especially where the external 
 conditions of it are slightly changed. 
 
 The ethical issues opened up by an adoption of the 
 Socialistic attitude in current society are various. We 
 have indicated a few of them. But there are plenty 
 of others which will occur to the reader. For example, 
 there are laws made expressly to obviate evils for 
 which the constitution of present society is responsible 
 — which laws in the clumsy attempt to suppress the 
 manifestations of a system, while maintaining the 
 system itself, often come into collision with our deepest 
 feelings. A noteworthy instance of this is the law 
 which makes the concealment of a felony penal. Our 
 natural and unsophisticated moral sense proclaims 
 that the duties of kinship, or friendship, require us to 
 protect the relation or friend to the best of our power 
 even from the consequences of a crime, so long as this 
 
A Socialises Notes on Practical Ethics. 123 
 
 social relation has not been definitely broken off. 
 Now, the commission of a crime may be a valid reason 
 for breaking a friendship, and thus relieving ourselves 
 of all further obligation, but it can never justify the 
 betrayal of a friend to the vengeance of the law in the 
 first instance. The feeling which revolts against the 
 surrender of a person with whom we have been on 
 terms of friendship or intimacy to his destruction, 
 which is a survival of the s6lidarity of the primitive 
 social group (whence came in later times the practice 
 of compurgation), is a much more sacred thing, and its 
 preservation of vastly greater importance to humanity 
 than aiding the police-mechanism of the modern state 
 to punish crimes for the existence of which it is itself 
 largely responsible. This is to me perfectly plain. 
 But a more difficult case arises when the act of a 
 person, hitherto a friend, is of more serious import 
 than most mere common law ofiences — as, for instance, 
 if he were to turn political police spy. Now, the 
 interest of the Socialist party requires under certain 
 circumstances that such should be killed. Here, of 
 course, there can be no doubt as to the duty of repu- 
 diating all further connexion with such a man, but 
 the question arises, should we, in this instance, be 
 justified in rescuing him from his admittedly deserved 
 fate? Perhaps even here any possible future harm he 
 might do to that party with whom we are working 
 would be less than that arising from the shock to 
 the moral consciousness which an act savouring of 
 treachery would produce — even though the treachery 
 were done to a traitor. 
 
 Then to take another point. Supposing that in 
 Russia or elsewhere, a sudden and urgent demand for 
 material resources for party purposes arose, and that 
 much hung upon its being immediately satisfied. 
 Supposing again, that, as a last resort, a female mem- 
 ber of the party were without any hypocritical pretence 
 to sell her body to raise the money. Would not this 
 
124 ^ Socialists Notes on Practical Ethics. 
 
 be a commendable act ? Given the elimination of the 
 mystical theory of the sexual relation, and I should 
 say yes. Prostitution for private gain is morally 
 repellent. But the same outward act done for a 
 cause transcending individual interest loses its char- 
 acter of prostitution, and acquires a new content ; the 
 form of mercenary love would hide the reality of dis- 
 interested devotion to a cause and love of humanity. 
 
 I may conclude this homily with an exhortation to 
 search all things ethical as the indispensable condition 
 of really and truly holding fast that which is good. 
 
THE ECONOMICAL BASIS OF 
 HISTORY- 
 
 Weitees on social development often talk of the 
 economic basis and interpretation o£ history without 
 further explaining their meaning. This I propose to 
 do in a few words in this chapter. The economic inter- 
 pretation of history rests on a well-known, simple and 
 obvious law of human nature, if I may be allowed to 
 employ that often much-abused term. There are pro- 
 bably few of my readers who. if they had had nothing 
 to eat all day, would not prefer a supper to the "sermon 
 on the mount"; or, who would not even prefer the supper 
 to the finest theatrical spectacle imaginable, let them be 
 never so fond of theatrical spectacles. The reason of this 
 is that our human nature presupposes our animal nature, 
 and that this animal nature must and will be dealt with 
 before all else. So long as we are hungry, thirsty, and 
 cold, the one object of our interest is food, cloth- 
 ing, and shelter. These things are the one visible 
 object of our desires ; we conceive ourselves happy if 
 we have them. We see, we wish for, nothing beyond 
 them. Any organic or animal discomfort, be it a posi- 
 tive pain, like toothache, or a negative pain (a want), 
 like hunger, makes us feel that its removal would be 
 the consummation of all bliss. Balzac narrates a story 
 in his Gontes drolatiquea, of a trick played by King 
 Louis XL of France upon his coui'tiers, by which he 
 prevented them, under circumstances of urgency, from 
 fulfilling a natural function of the body. " Oh," said 
 
1 26 The Economical Basis of History. 
 
 the archbishop to his neighbour, the master of the 
 horse, " what pleasure in life is equal to," etc. Now, 
 this story of Balzac's puts in an absurd form a very 
 important truth, no less than the truth upon which 
 the economic basis of social development rests — that 
 the satisfaction of material, animal, wants takes 
 precedence of all else in human affairs. The absence 
 or threatened absence of the material conditions of 
 existence obscures the desire for anything further. The 
 attainment or security. of these becomes the one visible 
 goal of energy. Instead of the groundwork they appear 
 as the zenith of human aspiration. 
 
 On the other hand, when the means of comfortable 
 living are there and secured, these material conditions 
 of existence assume their normal function as the means 
 and not the end of life. Just the same as the want 
 of the necessaries of life obscures the desire of all 
 else, so the fear of that want, when not actually 
 present, also affords a like stimulus, a like indifference 
 to all else than to the removal of the possibility of 
 want. If we have enough food to-day, but feel that 
 to-morrow we may possibly have to go without, the 
 chief end of life still seems to us the assurance of a 
 suiBciency. In short, wherever the consciousness of 
 physical, bodily, material want, as present or as 
 imminent, possesses us, we can see nothing before us 
 but the removal of this want or the danger of it. The 
 sight of superior advantages in another class also acts 
 in the same way ; the non-enjoyment of them is felt 
 as a want to be relieved ; everything, the whole object 
 of life centres in the obtainment of the coveted position. 
 Now, the endeavour after these things may either be 
 confined to the individual who seeks to free himself 
 from material discomfort and win for himself comfort 
 — in short, to desert his class — and whose end in life 
 is limited to this ; or it may become a class-instinct, a 
 class-endeavour, in which the class as such is engaged, 
 and in which the members of a class feel their solidarity 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 127 
 
 with their class, so that they are prepared to sink their 
 individual interests in those of their class as a whole. 
 We see the first illustrated to-day in the commonplace 
 man of the world, be he working-man or middle-class 
 man, and the second, in the great working-class move- 
 ments, and above all, in modern Socialism. The only 
 aim of the former man is to place himself and his 
 immediate family in a comfortable position. The aim 
 of the latter is to conquer economic freedom for his 
 class, inasmuch as he sees that there is no certainty for 
 himself, and still less for his descendants, so long as 
 his class remains in economic subjection. It is this 
 latter form of uiiselfish selfishness, of egoistic disin- 
 terestedness, which is alone the lever of historical pro- 
 gress. We saw it exhibited yesterday in the emancipa- 
 tion of the middle-classes from feudal trammels, we 
 see it to-day in the struggle of the fourth estate with 
 Capitalism. What in the individual is at best merely 
 low and sordid, though often excusable and natural, 
 becomes purified and ennobled when the individual 
 negates lumself as individual in his class, always 'pro- 
 vided that class has,or it believes it has,hvmMn equality 
 as its ultimate aim. 
 
 We see, therefore, that for economics to be the 
 motive-power of progress, presupposes, to put the matter 
 shortly, (1) a class in a position in which it is either 
 deprived of the average necessaries and comforts of 
 life possessed by another class, or in which its enjoy- 
 ment of these is precarious ; (2) a consciousness in 
 the former class of this deprivation, i.e., a conscious- 
 ness of its own inferiority and precarious state ; (3) 
 a belief in the possibility of its attaining the coveted 
 comfort, leisure, or security by class-action. These, I 
 say, are the conditions for the economic movement to 
 make itself felt in history. They are conditions under 
 which, when present in a class forming the majority, 
 or even a considerable minority in the State, it 
 must make itself felt. I do not say that they are 
 
128 The Economical Basis of History. 
 
 always distinctly formulated; the class-consciousness 
 spoken of, the consciousness of insecurity of social 
 position, or of positive discomfort or want, may be, and 
 often has been, rather instinctive than definite. But 
 be it vague or clear, its removal constitutes the highest 
 conceivable goal, political and social, for the members 
 of that disinherited body. It is almost a truism, now- 
 a-days, that throughout history, classes have existed, 
 and that there is no period throughout history in which 
 the foregoing conditions have not prevailed more or 
 less. But I maintain that in precise ratio to the degree 
 of their prevalence, has the course of history depended 
 on the question of the production and distribution of 
 wealth, in short, on economics. People used to trace 
 all historical phenomena back to speculative or literary 
 causes. How erroneous this view is, is obvious when 
 we consider that a man in want cf food is actuated, not 
 by the religious belief he may happen to hold, but by 
 the necessities of obtaining food, which necessities may 
 very likely modify his religious belief, while his mere 
 religious belief of itself is not at all likely to modify his 
 economic necessities. Religious belief, superstition, or 
 whatever we may like to call it, on the contrary, bends 
 at once before the material exigencies of life. This 
 was illustrated a few years ago in Scotland, when the 
 chief article of the Presbyterian creed, the duty of not 
 performing any useful or agreeable act on Sunday, was 
 violated under the pressing danger of the loss of a 
 harvest and consequent starvation, and when thrifty 
 Highland men and women were to be seen garnering 
 in the sheaves of corn on the Sabbath. The pulpits 
 indignantly fumed against the impious act, but still 
 it went on in different districts for three or four Sun- 
 days in succession. The Highlanders may respect the 
 Sabbath, but they respect the inexorable laws of self- 
 preservation even more. 
 
 The most striking instances of the way in which 
 class-antagonisms and economic pressure becjome th§ 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 129 
 
 direct causes even of religious change in society, are 
 discoverable in the final dissolution of mediasval and 
 the foundation of modern society, in the period, that 
 is, known as the Keformation. These causes are also 
 conspicuous in that series of great crises which 
 denoted the overthrow of the ancient world and the 
 establishment of Christianity. To take the latter case 
 first. The cities of the Roman Empire exhibited a 
 restless crowd of proletarians, emancipated slaves, 
 whom it did not pay their masters to keep, of landless 
 and moneyless freemen — the bulk of industry being 
 still carried on by slaves for the consumption of their 
 owners, such free skilled manufacture as there was 
 being rigorously " protected " by the collegia or guilds, 
 which had the monopoly of handicrafts and trade. The 
 economical history of the time of Constantine and that 
 immediately preceding is sufficiently obscure, but we 
 can see that by that time affairs were in extremis. 
 The great peasant and proletarian revolt in Gaul, early 
 in the reign of Diocletian; the laws of maximv/m 
 which followed in 303 and which covered all the 
 necessaries of life; possibly also the last great per- 
 secution of the Christians — all these things point 
 to a period of great economical pressure. The 
 wealthy provincials were continually harassed by 
 the dread of ruin. Under the name of Decuriones 
 they formed a kind of local senate and were responsible 
 to the fiscal administrator of the emperor for all 
 deficits iu the revenue supposed to come from their 
 district. The Church at this time exercised the func- 
 tion of a general insurance society. It was a mine of 
 riches which it distributed to those who had paid the 
 premium of " faith " and baptism. Its wealth, already 
 enormous, attracted numbers, and its energies were con- 
 centrated in the effort to absorb further wealth by every 
 means within its power. Monasticism was advancing 
 with rapid strides, and the ecclesiastical organisation was 
 already a refuge for thousands who were otherwise de- 
 
1 30 The Economical Basis of History. 
 
 pendent on the precarious support of patrons or the 
 pubHc donatives. A tremendous impulse was, of course, 
 given by the official establishment of Christianity under 
 Gonstantine ; the profession of the Christian faith be- 
 came increasingly a means of livelihood. 
 
 But the most significant thing of all in this con- 
 nexion is the struggle between Paganism and Christi- 
 anity, which went on during the fourth century and 
 which resulted in the final overthrow of Paganism. 
 It must be remembered that Christianity through- 
 out the fourth century was almost entirely con- 
 fined to the town populations. In the total popula- 
 tion of the empire the Christians were a minority. 
 Now what was the cause of the savage attacks on 
 the pagan cults which took place during the fourth 
 century ? I answer with the late Mr. King of Cam- 
 bridge ; it was the desire of the ecclesiastics, in con- 
 junction with the shiftless populations of the towns, 
 to obtain possession of the enormous treasures locked 
 up in the temples. That there was genuine fanaticism 
 in the Vandalic destruction which took place, I would 
 not deny, but there is to my mind just as little doubt 
 that the direct economic reason was in most cases the 
 leading one. The Christians of the fourth century 
 were a noisy minority of the total population of the 
 empire, and the overthrow of Paganism was accom- 
 plished like all other great revolutions in history by 
 ■ihis active and energetic minority. The celebrated 
 .diet of Theodosius was the official registration of what 
 lad been going on for over fifty years. 
 
 Precisely the same thing took place in the revolution 
 which gave the death-blow to the mediaeval system and 
 which also assumed the form of a change of belief. 
 Then also the newmiddleclassand the town-populations 
 generally, wished to enrich themselves with the spoils of 
 the monasteries. The Protestants in England up to the 
 reign of Elizabeth, at least, were a noisy handful. The 
 confiscation of the monasteries went on simultaneously 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 131 
 
 ■with the expropriation o£ the people from the land, by- 
 enclosures and the formation of large sheep-walks, and 
 by the transformation of industry, which gave rise on 
 the one hand to the new proletariat, and on the other 
 to the new employer class, together with the other great 
 changes which just then destroyed or jeopardised the 
 previous means of existence of large sections of the 
 population. These classes found themselves, without 
 any conscious determination on their part, forced into 
 a reformative or revolutionary attitude, alike in politics 
 and religion.^ Their great enemy they saw in the old 
 system of society with its trammels on free contract, 
 its local imposts, its independent jurisdictions, its 
 ecclesiastical organisation, and the hundred other evils 
 which crushed them down or prevented them from 
 rising. 
 
 The above are instances given very briefly of cases 
 where the economic movement is obviously the domi- 
 nant and leading one, and they might be multiplied a 
 hundredfold. But it is a mistake, as I take it, to 
 regard the economic side of things as in all periods of 
 history equally determinant. For the material condi- 
 tions of existence, the modes of the production and 
 distribution of wealth, to become the leading factor 
 in determining, the course of human affairs, it is, as 
 we have alreadyintimated.necessarythat the whole com- 
 munity, or a considerable portion of it,should be vaguely 
 or definitely conscious of the fact that its means of main- 
 tenance in average comfort are threatened if not already 
 compromised. Now it is true this has been the case 
 more or less throughout history, that is, throughout 
 the period we term civilisation, which has always been 
 based on the individual holding of property and on the 
 
 ^ I do not dwell on this period, as it has been often dealt with 
 by Socialist writers. For England, Hyndman's " Historical Basis " 
 may be consulted ; for Germany, Bngel's " Bauernkrieg," and for a 
 general view of the situation Kautsky's " Thomas More," especially 
 the Introduction up to p. 120. 
 
132 The Economical Basis of History. 
 
 existence of propertied classes over against propertiless 
 classes in some form or shape. But the economic 
 element has not been equally operative throughout 
 history. During periods of quiescence the dominant 
 classes whose means of existence has been assured have 
 not been subject to it, and certain forms of progress 
 have taken place independently of it. For we must 
 never forget the great fact that, although economics are 
 the basis of human existence, they are the basis merely 
 and not the complete whole — that we have to do with 
 a synthesis — human society — with various elements. 
 Though throughout the historical period the economical 
 side of things has operated more powerfully than any 
 other single influence, yet its operation has not been uni- 
 form, Therehavebeen periods when it has beencounter- 
 balanced by the concurrent action of other influences 
 not deducible from it. It has contracted so as to appear 
 comparatively insignificant as an active force, just as it 
 has expanded so as to dwarf all other factors. For 
 example, there is much in the history of the first two 
 centuries of the Christian era which cannot be directly 
 referred to economical causes. Fiscal exigencies will 
 account for a good deal, but they will not account for 
 all the speculative or all the political changes which 
 form part of its history. Again, it would be diflacult 
 to deduce the rise of the Saracen power from the special 
 conditions of Arabian society in the seventh century, 
 or the Crusades from the conditions of the mediaeval 
 manor of the eleventh century, In both these cases we 
 obviously have to do directly with speculative causes. 
 If we look into these periods we shall find, I think, 
 that the means of existence on the lines of the current 
 organisation of society, of the majority, or of a consider- 
 able minority of society, was not immediately threat- 
 ened, and that the dominant classes did not feel their 
 position endangered. In the case of the Europe of the 
 eleventh and twelfth centuries, for instance, though all 
 living was rough enough, no classes were specially 
 
The Economical Basis of History,- 133 
 
 threatened by the then existing organisation of society 
 as they were three or four centuries later. The Arabia 
 of Mahomet's time, again, was in a barbaric and semi- 
 barbaric state, in which classes either did not exist at 
 all in an economic sense, or were only just beginning 
 to show themselves, and we have no reason to suppose 
 that there was any greater pressure of food supply 
 on the Arabian peoples of the seventh, than of any pre- 
 ceding century. We are here clearly concerned with 
 movements having their roots in the ideological or 
 religious aspect of human nature which came to the 
 fore now that the economic side of affairs was not 
 prominent. We see the same in the case of privileged 
 classes who feel their position tolerably secure. There 
 are certain human interests whose development cannot 
 be interpreted economically, that is, referred to any 
 large extent to economical conditions. The higher 
 aspects of intellectual development usually come under 
 this heading, the reason being that philosophic specula- 
 tion, scientific research in its earlier phases, and certain 
 forms of art are developed within a wealthy and 
 leisured class, i.e., within a class for whose conscious- 
 ness economic interests are at zero. 
 
 Economic conditions are a potent factor in the first 
 stage of poetry, the epos, which takes its rise in the 
 popular consciousness at a time that class antagonisms 
 are beginning. Again, architecture is an art which, 
 owing to its subordination to utilitarian purposes, is 
 also powerfully affected in its development by economic 
 conditions. The same with all the decorative arts. 
 Philosophic speculation, on the other hand, which is 
 never popular, and which does not arise except, as 
 already remarked, within a class economically safe and 
 sound, has no positive connexion with the prevailing 
 modes of the production and distribution of wealth — 
 and, in fact, cannot in most cases even be indirectly 
 deduced from them. The metaphysic of Plato and 
 Aristotle has no assignable basis in the material condi- 
 
134 t'he kconomical Basis of History. 
 
 tions of Greek life. On the other hand, economic 
 conditions may react on the results of speculative 
 thought, may prepare the way for their acceptance by 
 the popular mind, as also the media which shall inter- 
 pret them. The great historical instance of this is the 
 popular acceptance of the introspective morality — the 
 morality of the individual and of personal holiness. 
 This, which was in the first instance merely a specula- 
 tive aspiration of isolated thinkers, fell upon a soil 
 favourably prepared by the economical conditions 
 accompanying the consolidation of the Roman suprem- 
 acy, and rapidly spread, in the form of the Christian 
 religion, among the vast free proletarian and slave 
 population of the empire. But even here it may be 
 doubted whether the political movement, the destruc- 
 tion of the ancient, independent, city life, and the con- 
 .sequent breaking down of the old barriers and of the 
 interests with which those barriers were connected, 
 did not as much contribute to the spread of Christianity, 
 and the other systems embodying the new speculative 
 and ethical principles, as the one before mentioned. 
 It was the latter, certainly, rather than the former, 
 which must be regarded as the predisposing influence 
 amongst the wealthy classes. 
 
 An economic interpretation of human evolution pre- 
 supposes in an advanced society an inequality of econo- 
 mic condition, the existence of classes, or, in other words, 
 the private holding of property. Thus it isthat through- 
 out the historical period the economic movement has 
 been a leading one, most commonly the, leading one. But 
 if this has been the case throughout history, what of the 
 pre-historic period in which the highest social develop- 
 ment was the tribal society of kinship with its economic 
 basis of primitive communism ? - What of the society 
 of the future with its economic basis of coUectivist 
 production for social uses ? Has the economic basis 
 been, and will it be the lever or motive power of 
 progress in these cases ? To take the former instance 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 135 
 
 first. Owing to the undeveloped state of early 
 man's resources over nature, tribal communistic 
 societies are always liable to economic pressure from 
 without, that is, from natural causes. Famine, drought, 
 disease, are in such societies particularly fatal in 
 character. They are always exposed moreover to 
 attacks from other societies, and may be forced 
 by stress of economic circumstances to make such 
 attacks themselves. Hence, warfare is generally the 
 most important and honourable avocation, and personal 
 prowess the highest virtue of such societies. But in 
 the internal development of such a society economics 
 does not occupy the constant predominance as an 
 active motive power that it does in civilised societies. 
 For example, the origin of the wealth and influence 
 of priesthoods, in so far as this is to be found in pre- 
 historic times, is not traceable to any economic con- 
 dition, but rather to the speculative condition of the 
 early human mind. It is true, fear of evil con- 
 sequences, economic and other, for the society, induced 
 special attention to be sometimes paid to the world of 
 conscious and willing beings with which primitive man 
 felt himself surrounded, and in whose hands he believed 
 his destinies to be. But this did not originate the 
 belief in these agencies. It was only one of the many 
 circumstances in which the aid of the gods was in- 
 voked. Ancestor-worship, which in primitive and all 
 early forms of society plays such an important part, is 
 certainly not to any appreciable extent influenced by 
 questions of mere material exigency. In primitive 
 society the general aim may be defined as the main- 
 tenance, continuance and glory of the kinship organ- 
 isation. In this stage the special goal aimed at is either 
 not consciously present at all, or only vaguely so. 
 The economic factor in the evolution of tribal society 
 is only a leading one under special circumstances im- 
 posed from without. A sudden failure of food supply, 
 or the pressure of other tribes, determines migrations, 
 
1 36 The Economical Basis of History. 
 
 and wars. But, apart from this, and under favourable 
 circumstances, there is no reason to suppose that, within 
 the tiibe or kinship-society itself, the economic factor, 
 fer se, is more operative than any other. 
 
 The real point to be remembered is that we have to 
 deal with a concrete synthesis — " social life " — and 
 that all the elements which go to make this synthesis 
 are organically dependent on each other. The basis is, 
 of course, the production and distribution of the neces- 
 saries of material welfare; but this is an element 
 merely of a synthesis, and not the synthesis itself. 
 In a primitive communistic society the several depart- 
 ments of human interests are as yet latent or implicit, 
 and it is, therefore, no such easy matter to assign 
 definite limits to each, as it is in a highly developed 
 and differentiated society, where the domestic, econo- 
 mical, political, speculative, religious and artistic 
 spheres are clearly distinguishable and separable 
 in function. Every social act in an early tribal society 
 of equals partakes at once, more or less, of all these 
 characters. Thus every public assembly of the tribe, 
 in itself primarily a political act, involves, not as a 
 mere accessory appendage, but as part of its essential 
 character, sacrifices and other religious ceremonies, 
 processions, music and dancing, the presence of the 
 image of the tribal god, often feasting and other 
 domestic functions, divination, astrological pronounce- 
 ments (the early representation of applied science), 
 while matters relating to the economical arrangements 
 or position of the tribe may at the same time be 
 decided. Now all these things are so undiSerentiated 
 in primitive social life that it is difficult to say which 
 is predominant. Under favourable natural conditions 
 the economical movement will probably not be the 
 decisive one. It is conceivable that a purely specula- 
 tive belief might be the occasion of very important 
 results. For example, it was presumably the quasi- 
 religious veneration attached to the elders of the 
 
The Economical Basis of Historf. t37 
 
 Society, connected as it was with ancestor-worship 
 which gradually undermined the primitive forms of 
 the gens and tribe and gave rise to the patriarchal 
 family and the earlier phases of monarchy. It could 
 scarcely have been on any other than superstitious 
 grounds that the assumption of wealth and power by 
 individuals was tolerated. The old modes of production 
 may have proved unsuitable as the society expanded ; 
 the plunder taken in war the capture of slaves, etc., 
 may all have facilitated the accumulation of pro- 
 perty in private hands ; but without the religious ele- 
 ment it could hardly have acquired the sanction of 
 custom, since it was manifestly opposed altogether to 
 the traditions and interests of the majority of a tribal 
 society. But whatever element it is which is the 
 immediate cause of change, the other elements which 
 go to make up the synthesis are, so to speak, dragged 
 along with it. The specific change denotes or is the 
 sign of the advent of a stage in the organic develop- 
 ment of the society. There is no such thing as a 
 fundamental economic change without a corresponding 
 political, social and religious, and even artistic change. 
 And so it was in the change from primitive communistic 
 society to civilisation. Every phase of social life 
 underwent modification in a corresponding manner. 
 The religious side of things was, as usual, the most 
 conservative, and undoubtedly hindered to some ex- 
 tent the course of the political and social revolution. 
 This is especially noticeable in the religious con- 
 servation of the old " gentile " forms. 
 
 When once the revolution which instituted civilisa- 
 tion, with its individual or private holding of property, 
 was fully accomplished and fixed in law and custom, 
 the methods of the production and distribution of 
 wealth, in other words, the economic movement, became 
 and continued in varying degrees throughout history 
 the dominant factor in social evolution. As we have 
 before remarked, this must of necessity be so whenever 
 
t38 The Economical Basis of tlistory. 
 
 the economic equilibrium of society is disturbed. The 
 private holding of property involves the existence of 
 classes, of a class possessing property and the power 
 which property brings when held in exclusive posses- 
 sion, and a non-possessing class who are dependent for 
 bare living upon the former, at whose mercy they are 
 therefore placed. Henceforward, in precise ratio to the 
 development of the civilisation, ie., to the concentration 
 of property in the hands of individuals, is the impor- 
 tance of economic condition as the measure of progress. 
 The ethical movement which is directly traceable to 
 economics, is also noteworthy. With the indirect con- 
 nexion of the new individualist ethics which ultimately 
 gained the ascendancy over the earlier social ethics and 
 the corresponding economic development, we are not 
 here concerned. I have dealt with this at some length 
 elsewhere. But there is one point which may be 
 mentioned as illustrating the aspect of the question 
 now under" discussion. It is the notion of asceticism. 
 The satisfaction of material exigencies is the conditio 
 sine qud non of all the "higher" human activities. 
 Now asceticism is, at least from one point of view, a 
 recognition of this fact in an inverted form. The 
 ascetic finds the material conditions of civilisation 
 incompatible for most men with high aspirations. 
 Instinctively feeling, therefore, the impossibility of 
 finding a foothold in the quicksand of civilised life, 
 in the sense of a satisfaction of material needs, he 
 seeks this footing in the arbitrary suppression of 
 those needs by the individual. He preaches, and 
 sometimes practises, the " simplification of life." This 
 soon becomes his chief aim. He does not stop to 
 inquire the use of all this simplification. In what 
 sense the man who succeeds in making himself more 
 uncomfortable than his fellows is better than they, 
 never seems to occur to him as a subject of inquiry 
 — at least, in the case of your Count Tolstois and other 
 cultured riiodern ascetic preachers who claim to repre- 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 139 
 
 sent rational principles. This notion of suppression 
 rather than satisfaction as forming the starting-point 
 of a higher life, which has drawn its foul trail through 
 the historical period, will assuredly pass away with the 
 economic disabilities under which the major part of 
 mankind have laboured during that period, and which 
 are accountable for the " f ox-and-the-grapes " spirit 
 to which it is due. 
 
 In primitive communistic society then, to return 
 again to our more immediate subject, the economical 
 movement only made itself apparent as the motive- 
 power of social development, owing to the interposition 
 of external causes — resulting partly from the limited 
 command possessed by early man over the forces of 
 nature, and partly from the limitations of tribal society 
 itself, which gave rise to continual hostilities with 
 neighbouring societies. Throughout civilisation, on 
 the other hand, it has been the dominant motive-power 
 in most periods, though in varying degrees, for the 
 simple reason that its prominence has resulted from a 
 cause not merely external and casual, but one inherent 
 in the internal structure of civilisation which is based 
 on Individualism,, and on the consequent existence of 
 a propertied and therefore powerful, and a propertiless 
 and therefore powerless class — the existence of these 
 two opposing classes haying implied the continually 
 recurrent want or threatened want of the necessaries 
 or average comforts of life by vast sections of the 
 population — thereby raising the mere material condi- 
 tions of life to the rank of the telos or e'Ht^-purpose 
 of all human endeavour. Hence the phenomena of 
 avarice, and the attachment to money as money — i.e., 
 as the symbol of security for the means of life — which 
 permeates all civilised society. But what as to the 
 future ? 
 
 The degree in which material conditions have 
 influenced progress in the past, has been ceteris 
 pa/ribus, in direct ratio to that concentration of the 
 
I46 The Bconcmical Basis of History. 
 
 wealth of the community in private hands by which 
 the livelihood of the majority is rendered precarious. 
 In the present day this has reached a point at which 
 the production and distribution of wealth is not merely 
 the central point of human interest, as it has often been 
 before in history, but a point at which it has absorbed 
 all other interests into itself. Other departments of 
 human activity have become the mere appendages — ■ 
 mere rudimentary offshoots — of this one. The one 
 reality of the nineteenth century is the scramble for 
 wealth ; politics, literature, science, religion, art, are, 
 apart from money -getting, mere lifeless wraiths. The 
 necessities of modern life bind men like Ixion to the 
 wheel of production and distribution. The mere 
 economic machinery enslaves us to-day in a manner 
 which it has never before done throughout history. 
 To-day, therefore, the economic factor in evolu 
 tion has acquired an unequalled importance, beinp 
 in fact the only one worth serious consideratioi? 
 But " when night is darkest dawn is nearest." Tha 
 absolute despotism of economic interests and economic 
 processes reduces life itself to an impossibility for 
 some, to an absurdity for all. The moment the 
 majority of men, the class immediately affected by it, 
 become conscious of this, its end is at hand. The 
 contradiction, whereby the means of living usurp the 
 place of the end of life once fully manifest, must 
 resolve itself ; and there is only one way in which it 
 can resolve itself — by the transformation of individual 
 or private ownership of the means of production into 
 collective or public ownership. Whereas now the will of 
 man is unconsciously determined by economic processes 
 and economic interests, then economic processes and eco- 
 nomic interests will be consciously determined by the 
 will of man, Man's power over nature is already 
 fast becoming practically unlimited ; and the interna- 
 tional organisation of the future must at once render 
 war an impossibility. The two causes, therefore, why 
 
The Economical Basis of History. 141 
 
 economic conditions influenced the development of 'pre- 
 historic society will no longer obtain in posi-historic 
 society. On the other hand, the internal organisation 
 of society under Collectivism implies essentially the 
 abolition of classes, and of the private property-holding 
 on which civilised society is based. The causes, there- 
 fore, of the ascendancy of economic condition in the his- 
 torical period will likewise no longer obtain. But this 
 pre-supposes a communistic organisation of society — an 
 organisation for all, by all. Here then, for the first time, 
 will Human Evolution have once for all subordinated 
 its economic conditions, and subordinated them, not 
 after the manner of the ascetic by the suppression of the 
 desire for their results, but rather by its gratification. 
 Men will cease to think unduly of their appetites when 
 the means of healthy satisfaction is within reach of all, 
 when they are not, as now, debarred from it by social 
 exigencies. Here, for the first time, will the economical 
 interest definitely cease to be the determining power 
 of Human progress. The material conditions of life 
 may be luxurious, or may be simple, according to the 
 needs and tastes of the new generation of men ; but in 
 a world where the resources of nature, as developed by 
 modern applied science, will be used and indefinitely 
 further developed for the common advantage and not 
 for the exclusive benefit of individuals and classes; 
 where production will be regulated, expanded and 
 contracted, from year to year, as common necessity may 
 dictate, and, therefore, where " thrift " will have 
 become an extinct virtue — in such a world it is mani- 
 fest that economic developments will follow and not 
 lead the desires and aspirations of men, and will con- 
 sequently no longer dictate the modifications and re- 
 adjustments which social life may from time to time 
 undergo. 
 
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS UNDER 
 SOCIALISM. 
 
 The opinion is commonly held by those whose views of 
 things are determined by the sound of words, that 
 the chief aim of Socialism is the annihilation of the 
 freedom of the individual, and that ergo anything that 
 tends in this direction is pro tanto Socialistic, and any- 
 thing that tends in the opposite direction is pro tanto 
 Individualistic, in the sense of anti-socialistic. Be- 
 cause Individualisin is the name given to the existing 
 system of unrestricted competition to which Socialism 
 is opposed, i.e., to the unlimited control by the indi- 
 vidual of the productive and distributive powers of the 
 community — in short to the attempt of the individual 
 to make himself absolute, by asserting himself at the 
 cost of other individuals and of society as a whole — 
 therefore these sapient critics think the essence of 
 Socialism to consist in the limitation of individual free- 
 dom. Yet the notion that the TnaxiTnium of Socialism 
 corresponds to the minimv/m of individual liberty 
 is as preposterous a travesty of any great principle 
 as ever entered the perversest head of man. Social- 
 ism demands the greatest possible liberty (or licence 
 if you will) of the individual, limited only by the 
 condition of its not infringing on the principle 
 of eqiudity of liberty. When the exercise of in- 
 dividual liberty is at the cost of equality of liberty ; 
 when it is a liberty of some at the expense of all, then 
 necessarily Socialism steps in and proclaims the cur- 
 tailmed" of such liberty. But in this case, and only 
 
 143 
 
144 Individual Rights under Socialism. 
 
 in this case, is Socialism not identical with the great- 
 est possible extension of individual liberty. For 
 example, the liberty of the individual to waste the 
 resources of society by producing wealth in the most 
 costly rather than the least costly manner, such as 
 occupying land as flower gardens which ought to be 
 used as cornfields, thereby entailing unnecessary labour 
 on the rest, is not a liberty which would commend itself 
 to a Social-Democratic community. But, on the other 
 hand, in all really " self-regarding actions," that is, 
 actions which directly affect the individual performing 
 them alone, complete freedom is of the very essence of 
 Socialism. And yet, when a protest is made by a 
 Socialist against some absurd and tyrannical infringe- 
 ment of individual liberty on the part of the existing 
 law, one sometimes hears some callow idiot tender the 
 observation, "But surely that's Anarchism, not 
 Socialism." The reply is simple. Unless Anarchism 
 had contained some element of truth in common with 
 Socialism it would never have deceived so many good- 
 hearted but misguided Socialists as it has' done. 
 
 As a matter of fact, it contains two such elements, 
 each of which it exaggerates and divorces from its 
 connexion, erecting it into a sacred principle indepen- 
 dent of all else, thereby falsifying what would be true 
 if viewed in subordination to other aspects of the 
 problem. The first element of truth in Anarchism is 
 that force is as justifiable in the hands of revolution as 
 of reaction, and that there is no inherent reason why 
 it should not be successfully resorted to. This truth 
 Anarchism travesties in its cultus of violence as the 
 one and only justifiable method of working for revolu- 
 tionary ends. 
 
 The second element of truth is that above stated, to 
 wit, the freedom of the individual, the non-coercion of 
 the individual by society, as being an end to be striven 
 for. This it certainly is, since the play of individual 
 initiative is an essential of the development of society 
 
Individual Rights under Socialism. 145 
 
 considered as an organic whole. But the Anarchist 
 travesties this truth by converting it into the holy 
 dogma of the abstract freedom or autonomy of the 
 individual at all times and in all cases. I say the ab- 
 stract freedom, for rather than coerce the individual for 
 what was obviously the collective good, his own in- 
 cluded, by limiting him in the commission of the most 
 preposterous acts of folly destructive to both, the con- 
 sistent Anarchist says : Perish society, perish in- 
 dividual ! 
 
 In the desperate attempt to preserve the abstract 
 and formal appearance of freedom the aforesaid 
 Anarchist is willing to fling its reality to the winds. 
 For the reality of human freedom, if not of human 
 existence itself, implies organisation based on social 
 evolution, which is incompatible with the absolute 
 formal autonomy of the individual. The only sphere 
 in which the individual can claim a right to autonomy 
 is in that of those self -regarding actions which do not 
 in any direct manner touch his relation to social life 
 and in these Socialism demands it as completely as 
 any Individualist can desire. But in things constitut- 
 ing the Jibre of social existence, such as the pro- 
 duction, distribution and regulation of the neces- 
 saries of life, such autonomy must inevitably mean 
 the re-enslavement of man under the forces of nature. 
 
 Yet, though the only place in which Socialism can 
 claim absolute freedom for the individual is in " self-re- 
 garding " actions, the tendency of Socialism is toward 
 the minimisation of coercion in every department, 
 especially of direct coercion. For example, take the 
 foolish talk often heard about the difficulty in a non- 
 competitive society of dealing with the idle, dissolute, 
 &c. The problem correctly stated is, how not to deal 
 with them, i.e., how best to cut them off, pro hac vice, 
 from the advantages or even necessaries of the social 
 life against which they are sinning, while leaving them 
 their formal freedom as individuals unimpaired. An 
 
146 Individual Rights under Socialism. 
 
 organised system akin to boycotting might possibly 
 serve the purpose. The aforesaid persons, assuming 
 them to be physically and mentally capable, deliber- 
 ately refuse to contribute their share to maintain the 
 organised freedom which the commonwealth of the 
 Social Democracy has devel oped. That commonwealth, 
 while refusing them the benefits of that freedom, mag- 
 nanimously allows them to retain their individual 
 autonomy and see what they can make of it. Thus, 
 the bestowal of the individual autonomy so much 
 desiderated by a certain school of Anarchists might 
 come to be the punishment allotted to that class of 
 persons who bulk so large in the estimation of certain 
 objectors to Socialism. 
 
 It is exceedingly probable that, once Social Demo- 
 cracy has gained the upper hand over Civil Society, the 
 punishment of crime (in so far, and so long as it exists) 
 will be on similar lines. The increasing revulsion of 
 the human conscience, as a rule, not only against 
 brutal punishments but against any punishment at all 
 which is of a positive nature — i.e., to the proceeding by 
 which the modern State in cold blood, and as a purely 
 mechanical act, seizes the criminal and torments him — 
 has its significance. It is one of those symptoms 
 which denote the awakening consciousness of the 
 better sort, even of middle-class persons, to the fact 
 that modern civilisation is not the best possible thing 
 in the best possible of worlds. The difference between 
 the view taken of crime by the middle-class in- 
 dividualist and his State and by Socialism, is signifi- 
 cant of the relative position of the two. To the 
 individualist, naturally, the particular criminal as 
 such, is solely and entirely responsible for the crime 
 he commits. On him, therefore, he wreaks all his 
 vengeance, To the Socialist, on the contrary, for 
 every crime committed, the State, or the society in 
 which it is committed, is as much or more responsible 
 than the individual. When yon hav^ once ceased to 
 
Individual Rights under Socialism. 147 
 
 regard the individual as an isolated and abstract 
 moral entity your ferocity against the criminal is 
 gone. As a mere matter of self-defence you may 
 reserve to yourself the right to slay the ruffian if he 
 attempts to practice upon j'^ou, or to assist any other 
 victim to that end, if you are in the way. But the 
 truly bestial ferocity with which the average bourgeois 
 gloats over the cold-blooded torture or butchery of the 
 garotter or murderer by the law becomes merely re- 
 pulsive. The humane and refined law of England in 
 the plentitude of its wisdom naturally takes the 
 opposite view. It forbids a man under pain of penal 
 servitude from preventing himself being garrotted or 
 murdered, but zealously flogs or hangs the garrotter 
 or murderer after the event. 
 
 Now, the idea of society being itself partly re- 
 sponsible — partly itself guilty in the matter of crime 
 — naturally, on reflection, and after the heat of moment- 
 ary indignation at a particular crime is over, engenders 
 a consideration for the criminal which forbids us to 
 regard him as the executive of the modern State does, 
 as a being without rights and without human qualities. 
 We feel that society deserves to pay the penalty if it 
 produces criminals, and that, though the criminal may 
 conceivably be utterly depraved, yet that he is not 
 necessarily so, and in most cases is more sinned against 
 than sinning. Hence the feeling of cowardice and 
 injustice as attached to the calculated infliction of 
 suflFering upon the individual criminal by the collec- 
 tive forces of society. This feeling, as I said before, 
 I take to be the foreshadowing of a treatment of 
 crime by which the penalty will be deduced from 
 the crime as a natural consequence of it, rather than 
 assume the form of a deliberate act of vengeance. In 
 short, the part played by society then will be nega- 
 tive rather than positive. Violence is always double- 
 edged in its moral aspect. Granted the right of 
 society to inflict suffering, in itself wanton and use- 
 
148 Individual Rights under Socialism. 
 
 less, upon the criminal and call it punishment, one can 
 hardly refuse to admit the right of the criminal to 
 similarly revenge himself upon the society or, at least, 
 the executors of its vengeance. By wanton and useless 
 suffering I mean such as merely hurts the criminal 
 without repairing the effects of the crime or otherwise 
 benefitting the community. Thus to imprison a man 
 with crank and plank-bed for a theft (we assume, of 
 course, private property as surviving) is a wanton act of 
 vengeance. But to compel him to labour till he has re- 
 stored by his labour fourfold its value, only placing him 
 under such restraint the while (if at all) as is absolutely 
 necessary to prevent him shirking his task would 
 be a punishment logically deducible from the crime 
 itself. Given the right of society to torture the 
 criminal uselessly and you at once get into a vicious 
 circle of acts of vengeance and re vengeance from which 
 there is no logical escape. The mind naturally revolts 
 against the infliction of wanton suffering. 
 
 The negative, attitude of society referred to above, 
 which was the principle on which crime was dealt with in 
 the early world, will probably be the form which, muto- 
 tis TYiutandis, its treatment will take in that later world 
 on the threshold of which we are, but which we have 
 not yet entered. The community in this case would 
 withdraw its protection from the criminal citizen, and 
 while leaving his formal liberty unimpaired, would 
 deprive him by social ostracism, if not of his bread 
 and salt as in ancient Rome, of all but the barest 
 necessities of life, together possibly with the right of 
 invoking its protection under certain circumstances — 
 in fact, place him under a ban. There are cases in 
 which the penalty might be very directly deduced 
 from the crime. Thus, supposing the case of a man 
 who whenever he got drunk was in the habit of com- 
 mitting acts of violence. Nothing further would be 
 required than to notify to such a person that the fact of 
 drunkenness placaol biin at once outside the protection 
 
Individual Rights under Socialism. " 140 
 
 Or society, which would mean that in addition to the 
 other dangers he incurred when in such a condition 
 — ^faUing down wells, area steps, steep places into the 
 sea, &c. — there would be yet another one in that any 
 assault upon him under these circumstances would 
 be regarded as prima facie justified. This, I take it, 
 would be quite as effectual a means of preventing him 
 from getting drunk as the dread of a possible three 
 month's " hard." The mechanical police-system of the 
 modem civilised State and its penal codes must inevi- 
 tably be superseded by a psychological method which 
 refuses to ignore the special motives and character- 
 istics of individuals. 
 
 Law, the positive coercion of the individual by the 
 State, will become modified into the coercion of a 
 public opinion which leaves the oifender so severely 
 alone that he dreads the alone-leaving even more than 
 the actual violence of the jail. The development of 
 penaJ methods along lines somewhat similar to the 
 foregoing, viz., the reversion to the principle of a 
 negative rather than a positive action on the part of 
 the social body as against the individual offender — 
 must, I think, without doubt be a sequel of the change 
 from Civilised to Socialistic conditions. 
 
 I may conclude by repeating what was said at 
 starting, that one of the aims of Socialism is the 
 minimisation of the positive and mechanical coercion 
 by society of the individual in all departments of 
 human life. Although the individual in a Social- 
 Democratic Commonwealth will in reality be knit to- 
 gether with that commonwealth inconceivably closer 
 than he now is with the modern State, yet it will be 
 the imperceptible union of one element in an organism 
 with the whole, rather than the connexion of a cog- 
 wheel in a complex machine with its main apparatus. 
 Direct, mechanical, coercion arose with Individualism, 
 and will fall with it. Where society exists merely as 
 an aggregate of self-centered units having separate 
 
I so Individual Rights under Socialisnt. 
 
 and opposed interests, tliere mechanical coercion is a 
 necessity. As soon as you have a veal as opposed to 
 this psettdo-society, so soon mechanical coercion gives 
 way before organic union — the antagonism between 
 individual and social interests, from being an integral 
 element in the constitution of things Human, is reduced 
 to a mere sporadic accident, or altogether disappears. 
 
MARRIAGE/ 
 
 — :o: — 
 
 There are few points on which the advanced Radical 
 and the Socialist are more completely in accord than 
 in their theoretical hostility to the modern legal mono- 
 gamic marriage. The majority of them hold it, even 
 at the present time, and in the existing state of society, 
 to be an evil. Yet, strange to say, they, most of 
 them, contract these legalised monogamic unions, the 
 excuse being the stigma on offspring and other incon- 
 veniences which are attendant upon the adoption of 
 any other course. That there is considerable incon- 
 venience in any other course cannot be denied. It 
 cannot be denied that this is largely because persons 
 who profess to be otherwise emancipated, and who 
 ought to know better, pander to the current view by 
 adopting an ostracising attitude toward at least the 
 female side of the illicit equation. They defend their 
 action in rather lame fashion, urging the conveniences 
 of current society and the general desirability on 
 grounds of expediency of legal forms. It is to these 
 persons that I chiefly address myself. 
 
 Let us see, first, to what historical period the strict 
 monogamic marriage primarily belongs. Needless to 
 say, it begins with civilisation ; but in the early stages 
 of civilisation the tie is loose ; polygamy is indeed 
 the rule here and monogamy the exception. Through- 
 out ancient civilisatioQ the right of concubinage and 
 
 ^ By the word "monogamy," as used below, is to be under- 
 stood not merely the union either temporary or permanent of 
 one man with one woman, but such union phis some form of 
 legal compulsion or interference other than that which obtains 
 in ordinary cases of contract. 
 
i^i Marnagi. 
 
 of hetarism, was recognised even in the Grceco- 
 Eoman civilisation, often also the duty of showing 
 sexual hospitality (the offering of the wife or daughter) 
 to guests. Christianity tried to impose strict mono- 
 gamy on the world, but signally failed. Whether 
 monogamy was originally any more than a counsel of 
 perfection in the Christian scheme may be doubted, 
 especially in view of the Pauline injunction that a 
 bishop was to be " the husband of one wife," which 
 looks very much as if the " humble " Christian was 
 at that time very often the husband of more than one 
 wife, like the ordinary free subject of the empire, 
 who, as a rule, had connexion with his female slaves. 
 At all events, the early Middle Ages presents a state 
 of things in which marriage was ecclesiastical rather 
 than legal. It fell under the canon law, and not the 
 common or statute law of the country. All formal 
 marriage was ultimately abolished about the eleventh 
 century in the case of the clergy, but this did not 
 prevent them from having unwedded wives, or con- 
 cubines, who, in some cases {e.g., in the kingdom of 
 Naples) enjoyed, by express enactment, the same 
 rights of immunity from secular jurisdiction, i.e., from 
 the criminal law, as their partners. Even to this day 
 in Spain and Italy, it is stated to be often made a 
 condition of a priest occupying a certain cure that he 
 should keep a concubine, with a view to the protection 
 of the parishional wife and daughter. 
 
 The open and avowed freedom of the Middle Ages 
 (a relic of the old group-marriage surviving possibly in 
 the jus primoB noctis) in the relations of the sexes, is a 
 universally acknowledged fact. Ecclesiastical anathe- 
 mas against fleshly lusts had little effect on the practice 
 of men. Unfortunately, the freedom was often con- 
 nected, as it always must be, where /ormaJ monogamy 
 is maintained, with the breach of a plighted troth, 
 that is to say, with deliberate deception. And this 
 necessarilj complicates the question from an ethical 
 
Marriage. !§3 
 
 point of view, though the recognition of the fact by 
 both parties may have tended to mitigate its evils. 
 Neither in ancient nor in mediaeval times then has 
 monogamy probably ever been any but a counsel of 
 perfection, in ancient times only existing in the loosest 
 and most conventional manner; and in mediaeval 
 times, though exalted to the rank of a religious sacra- 
 ment, never permanently maintained by public opinion 
 in this exalted position, whatever may have been the 
 case in sporadic outbursts. In the ancient world even 
 the prostitute had often a high social position ; in the 
 Middle Ages incontinence was a sin to be purged by a 
 slight penance; social ostracism, where it existed, being 
 confined apparently by a singular irony to the case 
 of unmarried females. ^ But in this as in other matters 
 the original Christian counsel of perfection present 
 throughout the Middle Ages in the background, and 
 3ver and anon making itself felt in customs, institu- 
 tions, and decrees gradually solidified as the barbaric 
 element in mediseval civilisation died down, and, in 
 proportion as the middle classes rose to power, became 
 permanently embodied in law and public opinion. 
 Puritan sentiment was, of course, severely monogamic ; 
 and in the severity of the Protestant judgment of the 
 " sin " of unchastity, we have the converging of two 
 or three lines of thought. 
 
 The original Christian counsel of perfection was 
 based on the notion that the relation between the 
 sexes was symbolical of the mystical relation 
 between the soul and the divinity, or in the 
 form which it afterwards took between Christ and 
 the Church. The sensual object thus fell into the 
 background; marriage was only a toleration of the 
 weakness of the natural man, as saith the Anglican 
 marriage service. The notion of '' purity " or absti- 
 
 1 This is the case still in many parts of the Continent of 
 Europe, where the cachet of being a legal wife or widow covers 
 a multitude of irregularities 
 
1 54 Marriage. 
 
 nence from sexual intercourse as a sign of supreme 
 virtue may be traced to three different co-operating 
 factors — (1), the totemist or fetichistic worship of the 
 sexual organs themselves — one of the earliest forms 
 of the religious instinct, which took a variety of shapes 
 being connected, sometimes it is true, with voluptuous 
 rites, but also {e.g., the Syrian goddess) sometimes 
 with ascetic rites ; (2), the dualistic notion of the in- 
 herent evil of matter as opposed to the divine nature of 
 spirit which was the speculative basis of the introspec- 
 tive morality of later times ; and (3), the notion which 
 grew up on this basis, that " holiness " consisted in the 
 mortification of the individual, i.e., the natural man, 
 his necessities and desires ; in proportion as he over- 
 came these being his approach to the divinity. There 
 exists to this day a sect of Hindoo Yogis who, in order 
 that they may not enjoy the pleasures of eating and 
 drinking, and at the same time may not lower the 
 dignity of the divine nature within them by perform- 
 ing the lower animal functions, subsist on a little milk, 
 which they leave in their stomachs for a while, until 
 the system has absorbed sufficient nourishment to 
 sustain life, and then throw up again by swallowing a 
 ball with a string attached to it, thereby averting the 
 necessity of its passing through their bodies. This is 
 aptly characterised by the late Mr. King, in his work 
 on "The Gnostics," as "the finest possible reductio 
 ad dbsurdv/m of the notion of meritorious continence." 
 These highly logical ascetics we commend to the 
 serious attention of the Social Purity League, who 
 are, we fear, as yet very far from the kingdom of 
 heaven of true continence. Out of these three elements 
 then is compounded the theoretical aspect of Protestant 
 or Puritan sexual morality. The last mentioned is de- 
 ducible from the " Introspective " or individualistic 
 ethics, which was the main element in Christian 
 ethics. 
 But behind this speculative aspect of modern 
 
Marriage. 155 
 
 monogamic morality, is a very practical economic con- 
 sideration, a consideration -which has come to the fore 
 in proportion as the belief in the speculative side of 
 things has faded. The reverence of the bourgeois for 
 the monogamic principle now rests almost entirely on 
 the fact, that he objects to being exposed to the 
 danger of having to put his hand in his pocket for the 
 maintenance of his neighbours' children. This is the 
 real core of " La Tnorale hourgeoise." Now, in an in- 
 dividualistic society like ours, this sentiment is not, 
 perhaps unnatural or particularly reprehensible, and 
 it doubtless represents a very real difficulty in the 
 solution of the problem, certainly under present and 
 perhaps under imperfectly socialistic conditions. 
 Clearly no one has a right to recklessly procreate 
 children under circumstances like those of our present 
 society without ensuring, as far as possible, their 
 adequate support. Legalised monogamic marriage, it 
 may be said, is some sort of check on this, and a 
 fortiori on possible demands on the ratepayer's pocket. 
 Granted, so much, but let us have no cant in this matter. 
 In the present day there are but two alternatives — ■ 
 the mystical sanction of monogamy, and what we may 
 term the vestryman sanction. The only rational posi- 
 tion of those who take up the strict lines of legalised 
 monogamic chastity and sniff disapprovingly at the fact, 
 or the notion, of sexual intercourse outside this relation, 
 is the mystical-christian sanction. Such a one must 
 regard marriage and the sexual relation generally, as 
 the sacred symbol bf a solemn, mystical truth, other- 
 wise he is a blatant fraud. For though he may 
 "most powerfully and potently" believe in the economic 
 or vestryman sanction, yet this alone, while it might 
 lead to reasoned remonstrance, could not possibly 
 evoke any genuine unction of the kind one is accus- 
 tomed to associate with conventional laudations of 
 chastity, and condemnations of its breach, or with 
 finger-pointings at the non-respectable woman. For 
 
iS6 Marriage. 
 
 this sanction has a quite peculiar flavour, which could 
 in reality only be caused by an outrage on our deepest 
 feelings, such as would rend our hearts, and not merely 
 by one that might possibly rend our trousers- 
 pockets. The unctuous saint, if we are persuaded of his 
 sincerity, one may respect and even love, but the unctu- 
 ous vestryman no man can love. Besides, the " vestry- 
 man" sanction — that is the one consisting of mere 
 economical expediency — Closes its direct force in at least 
 two cases within the limits of our present society. 
 It loses it where the question of offspring is eliminated 
 by " practical malthusianism,'' or other causes ; it loses 
 it where the offspring are as well provided for as they 
 would be in marriage. It loses it, as a matter of 
 course, when the economic basis of society, from being 
 individualistic, has become socialistic. Tiie vestryman 
 or trousers-pocket sanction of marriage is, therefore, 
 obviously not of a nature to give the institution a 
 fundamental ethical basis, and hence, we are justified 
 in saying that monogamy as an ethical principle 
 collapses with the collapse of theological mysticism. 
 For this reason, the various Christian sects are trying 
 to constitute themselves the custodians of monogamy 
 and the conventional sexual morality, as the only re- 
 munerative occupation left them, except philanthropy 
 after the loss of public interest in God and Christ. 
 
 In addition to the Christians there are the 
 Postivists and miscellaneous rhetoricians who seek 
 to prop up monogamy by phrases. They are, how- 
 ever, a very feeble folk, so far as this question is 
 concerned. We have already pointed out the 
 only two solid arguments for the monogamic 
 principle and the sexual abstinence it involves. 
 Now, these good people can't exactly accept either 
 the " mystical " or the " vestryman " position. Hence, 
 they take refuge in deliciously vague declamation on 
 the nobility, on the loftiness, of the ideal which hand- 
 cuffs one man and one woman together for life. We 
 
Marriage. 157 
 
 are never allowed to see precisely where the nobility 
 and tlie loftiness come in, but we are assured that 
 they are there. The mere commonplace man, if left 
 to himself, would probably think that it rested entirely 
 upon circumstances, upon character, temperament, and 
 whether the perpetual union of two persons was desir- 
 able. There are excellent men and women (possibly 
 the majority) born with dispositions for whom a single 
 permanent union is doubtless just the right thing ; 
 there are other excellent men and women who are 
 born with lively imaginations and bohemian tempera- 
 ments for whom it is not always precisely the right 
 thing. Now, the plain man of ordinary reflection 
 would imagine that all these phases of human nature 
 have their justification and their corresponding ideals. 
 No, says the Positivist, or other rhetorical upholder of 
 strict monogamy, there is only one absolute ideal, and 
 on to the proconstean bed of this ideal all men and 
 women must be stretched. An admirable specimen of 
 this school of windy rhetoric is to be found in an 
 article on marriage by Miss A. Chapman in the 
 Westminster Review for April, 1889. This interesting 
 young lady would apparently modify the institution 
 of matrimony in the sense of making it absolutely in- 
 dissoluble on the one hand and on the other by making 
 the woman supreme dictator! Then she thinks we 
 should have ideal marriage ! Of course, there is the 
 usual rant about the individual who would be preju- 
 diced by this beautiful arrangement (a rather large 
 number we are afraid), sacrificing himself for the good 
 of the whole, which we are exhorted to believe, on the 
 strength of much tall writing, is inextricably bound 
 up with it. The good of the whole, forsooth ! as if it 
 were possible for an institution which admittedly, in 
 the natural course of things, must breed sufiering for 
 individuals can, by any possibility, be for the good of 
 the whole! It may be the duty of the individual on 
 special occasions to sacrifice himself for the happiness 
 
I $8 Marriage. 
 
 of the " whole," but that is a very different thing from 
 his sacrificing himself on behalf of an institution which 
 involves, in its essential nature, a perpetual sacrifice for 
 those that succeed him. For how could a society in 
 which such an institution existed be either a healthy 
 or a happy one, either as a whole or for the individual ? 
 If this be not so, it is clearly the duty of every indi- 
 vidual to protest against it openly by word and deed, 
 rather than for the sake of gainiuj^ the. applause of 
 mawkish sentimentalists to sanction it either by 
 speech or action. 
 
 Herein we have an instance of the distinction be- 
 tween bourgeois morality and socialist morality. To 
 the first it is " immoral " to live in a marital relation 
 without having previously subscribed to certain legal 
 formalities, but it is perfectly " moral " to stifle convic- 
 tion, or to act against conviction, for the sake of 
 worldly advantage, to enter the Church without be- 
 lieving in its dogmas, to enter the army and serve in 
 wars which your conscience disapproves, to embark in 
 journalism and advocate political or other views you 
 veally despise, because it answers your purpose. To 
 the second these are the things that defile a man, 
 but to live in a state of unlegalised marriage defileth 
 not a man, " nor woman neither." There are some 
 persons even, who need enjoining to deny themselves 
 the pleasures of asceticism and the smug self-satisfac- 
 tion they derive from it. 
 
 There is a good deal of talk about marriage as 
 the union of two souls, etc., and many men, on 
 the strength of this, endeavour to persuade themselves 
 that they really find their wives' society and converse 
 interesting and elevating. By this and similar subter- 
 fuges they try to embellish and cover up the gross 
 physical fact which it expresses. That in a few cases, 
 social intercourse is the most prominent motive in 
 marriage we would not for a moment deny, but in nine 
 cases out of ten the assumption of its existence is a 
 
Marriage. 159 
 
 pious fraud which the modern man of culture practices 
 upon himself. Who has not suifered from the wives 
 of friends ? In the present day, with notions in the 
 air of the equality of the sexes, a matfs friend is apt 
 to require him to enjoy his wife's society as much as 
 his own, which is rather hard. For one may be quite 
 prepared to love one's neighbour, but yet may strongly 
 resent having to love one's neighbour's wife as well. 
 With the husband the sexual interest covers up 
 the intellectual vacuity; but, unluckily, his friend sees 
 everything in its true colour. As a matter of fact, no 
 man who can get men's society straightway desires 
 women's, for he says the men's is better. Hence the 
 institution of the "club" in this country and the 
 " caf^" on the continent. The ejfforts of noble-minded 
 men who try to find something intellectually interest- 
 ing in the subject of their monogamy when there is 
 nothing, though perhaps a praiseworthy discipline, are 
 exceedingly painful to the onlooker. 
 
 Enforced monogamy and its correlate, prostitution, 
 is the great historical antithesis of civilisation in the 
 sexual sphere, just as mastership and service is in the 
 economic sphere, or as God and nature in the specula- 
 tive sphere, or as sin and holiness in the sphere 
 of ethics generally. The group-marriage or limited 
 promiscuity of primitive barbaric society was as far 
 removed from prostitution as from compulsory mono- 
 gamy. With the rise of private-property holding and 
 of cities, monogamy and prostitution tended to super- 
 vene over group-marriage. This antithesis is the ne- 
 gation of group-marriage ; in proportion as group- 
 marriage disappears it obtains pre-eminence. Social- 
 ism will strike at the root at once of compulsory 
 monogamy and of prostitution by inaugurating an era 
 of marriage based on free choice and intention, and 
 characterised by the absence of external coercion. 
 For where the wish for the maintenance of the marri- 
 age-relation remains, th&re external compulsion is 
 
l6o Marriage. 
 
 unnecessary ; where it is necessary, because the wish 
 has disappeared, fhere it is undesirable. The above is 
 all we can foresee in the matter. 
 
 In this, as in other departments, the modern man, 
 immersed in the categories of the bourgeois world, sees 
 everything through them. For him, therefore, there 
 exists only legalised monogamic marriage and pro- 
 stitution, both of which are based essentially on com- 
 mercial considerations. The one is purchase, the 
 other hire. He cannot see the higher and only really 
 moral form of the marriage-relation which transcends 
 both, and which is based neither on sale nor hire. 
 Prostitution is immoral as implying the taking ad- 
 vantage by the woman of a monopoly which costs her 
 no labour for the sake of extorting money from the 
 man. But the condition of legal marriage— main- 
 tenance — does the same, 
 
 If it be asked, is marriage a failure ? the answer of 
 any impartial person must be — monogamic marriage is 
 a failure — the rest is silence. We know not what new 
 form of the family the society of the future, in which 
 men and women will be alike economically free, may 
 evolve, and which may be generally adopted therein. 
 Meanwhile, we ought to combat by every means within 
 our power the metaphysical dogma of the inherent 
 sanctity of the monogamic principle. Economic de- 
 velopment on the one side, and the free initiative of 
 individuals on the other, will do the rest. 
 
'■wm^ 
 
 III. 
 
COURAGE. 
 
 How shall we define Courage ? What do we mean hy 
 Courage ? Let us seek the broadest expression pos- 
 sible of courage — the bare notion of courage in itself. 
 So considered, may we not define it as tlie suhordin- 
 ation of pain or fear to resolution or purpose ? I 
 can think of no more catholic definition of the notion 
 than this, or one that more completely excludes all 
 debatable matter as to the extent of the operation of 
 will, or the degree of consciousness of the purpose, 
 involved in " true " courage, still less ulterior considera- 
 tions of the content of the purpose. No one would 
 call the indifference to danger of an infant or an idiot, 
 or the mere enforced endurance of the man powerless 
 to resist, courage, but some might affirm that certain 
 animals could be said to have courage, or that the mere 
 physical absence of fear would constitute a claim to 
 the possession of courage, and manj'^ other such things. 
 Again, no one would say that to jump over a precipice 
 without an object was a brave action. Let us take 
 this, then, as the primary abstract definition of courage 
 perse — the subordination of pain or fear to resolution 
 or pwrpose. 
 
 The corresponding formula for cowardice will, of 
 course, be the opposite of this — the subordination 
 of resolution or purpose to fain or fear. But 
 though there is a formal opposition here, there is no 
 real opposition. Courage and cowardice are absolutely 
 indistinguishable from this point of view. Thus, a 
 man, shall we say, fights to the death rather than runs 
 163 
 
164 Courage. 
 
 away. But why does he fight rather than run away ? 
 Is the doing so courage, or is it cowardice ? Does he 
 fight because he is a brave man, and does not fear death ? 
 Or does he fight the rather because he is a coward, and 
 fears the derision of public opinion which would follow 
 on his running away ? It is conceivable that, a man 
 of little imagination, he fears Mrs. Grundy, whom he 
 knows personally, more than the "king of terrors," 
 whom he does not. Or, take the case of the suicide. 
 He does not fear death, a great terror to many, but yet 
 be is called a coward by the man of correct morals be- 
 cause he fears to encounter the troubles of life. Of 
 course, the man of correct morals is here only making 
 believe ; he does not really think the suicide a coward, 
 but it is the proper thing to say in the interests of 
 conventional morality, and a rather nice doctrine for 
 himself, too, inasmuch as he probably fears the iroubles 
 of life less than death, and therefore he, Q. E. D., is a 
 brave man. But even though he may be shamming, 
 the logic of the man of correct morals is unimpeachable. 
 He has a perfect right, from a theoretical point of view, 
 to take up the position he does. Considered in their 
 most abstract expressions, courage and cowardice are 
 indistinguishable. There is no outward mark by which 
 we can affirm, on the strength of the mere abstract 
 definition of courage or cowardice, that a particular 
 action is courageous or the reverse. 
 
 In the case of the man who fights and runs away, 
 it is impossible to say that he is not actually showing 
 courage — i.e., subordinating fear to resolution in run- 
 ning away. He may run away from an overwhelming 
 sense of the duty of preserving himself to fight an- 
 other day. It may have cost him a stupendous moral 
 effort to resolve to run away and face the ridicule and 
 the contumely of his fellows rather than yield to his 
 inclination as a fighting man to hold on and die with 
 harness on his back. It may cost a man no efibrt to 
 fight and much to run away, or it may cost no eflfort 
 
Courage. ids 
 
 to run away and much to fight. There is possible fear 
 on either side ; there is possible resolution on either 
 side. So that the bare abstract conceptions of courage 
 and cowardice are, when applied to the concrete world, 
 perfectly interchangeable. We must first have a con- 
 crete and particular case before us ere we can de- 
 termine motive, and hence ere we can predicate 
 courage or cowardice of any action. To fight is usually 
 regarded as a brave action, to run away as a cowardly 
 action ; but, as we have shown, the reverse may just 
 as easily be the case. All actions to which the pair 
 of concepts — courage and cowardice — are applicable at 
 all, may, in short, fall under one or the other indiffer- 
 ently ; there being no action absolutely brave as such, 
 and no action absolutely cowardly as such. The dis- 
 tinction between the concepts — courage and cowar- 
 dice — is as yet formal and not real. All this is no mere 
 logomachy, but very important, inasmuch as there are 
 few ethical concepts with which the " general public " 
 are so fond of playing fast and loose as with this one, 
 and their ability to do so rests on the arbitrary ap- 
 plication of the concept in its purely forinal aspect as 
 though it were a real one. 
 
 We now come to the distinction between moral and 
 physical courage. Here we are concerned with the 
 degrees of consciousness of purpose involved in the act 
 of resolution — i.e., in how far it is an act of individual 
 initiation, properly so-called, and in how far merely 
 the spontaneous effervescence of animal spirits. Re- 
 flecting on courage, we find that this distinction is 
 involved therein. The question is no longer merely the 
 subordinating of pain or fear to resolution or purpose, 
 which always presents itself in a double aspect, the 
 possible fear and the possible resolution being assum- 
 able on either side, but the definiteness of the reso- 
 lution, the steadfastness, clearness, and rationality 
 with which the purpose is conceived. This latter is 
 not double-sided. Physical courage is always implicitly 
 
1 66 Couragi. 
 
 or explicitly distinguishable from moral courage in all 
 actions into which the category of courage enters. 
 Assume the courage, and the action itself tells you 
 whether it is physical or moral. To take an obvious, 
 if somewhat homely illustration. When the peasant by 
 Donnybrook Irishman goes forth to " punch a head " in 
 genera], regardless of the result upon his own, he 
 shows physical courage; but when the Irish member, 
 in the full swing of the London season, deliberately, 
 after weeks of reflection, bears the obloquy of the police 
 court and punches the head of a particularly obnoxious 
 member of a Tory Government, he may be doing a 
 foolish and even an improper thing, but he shows moral 
 courage. The Donnybrook Irishman has made the re- 
 solution to exercise his muscles in a particular manner, 
 and to this resolution he subordinates the fear of per- 
 sonal injury to himself. But the resolution here is 
 more instinctive than conscious, and not the result of 
 deliberate resolution. The mere sense of physical 
 power is sufficient to effect it. In the other case, on 
 the contrary, it is not the result of an animal in- 
 stinct but of an intellectual act. The resolution here 
 does not come of itself, but is created and sustained 
 by a conscious and definite act of will of the individual 
 as such. We see in this second stage of the analysis 
 that an opposition has arisen within the concept. It 
 has sucked up the contradiction into itself. In the first 
 place we had only to deal with the external opposition 
 of courage and cowardice. Now we have to do with 
 an internal opposition, that between physical, animal, 
 or instinctive courage, in which the resolution and the 
 purpose arise without any effort on the part of the in- 
 dividual as the mere result of his inherited animal 
 system, and moral courage, in which the purpose and 
 the resolution are created and framed by the intellect 
 and will of the individual himself. Animal courage, 
 though it may evoke a kind of aesthetic admiration, 
 can never evoke moral praise properly so-called. For 
 
Courage. 167 
 
 animal courage is outside the sphere of individual ini- 
 tiative, which consists in definite choice and not in 
 natural impulse. Animal courage involves no effort, 
 because the fear is not felt or the danger realised. 
 
 The natural impulse and all these elements in his 
 character which form part of the Logic of Nature are 
 necessary and imposed upon the individual ; it is the 
 particular or individual element ipar excellence as op- 
 posed to this universal element, that which constitutes 
 his particula/rity or his thisness, which is the decisive 
 factor. But the thisness, the hereness and nowness, is 
 the illogical and irrational element in all Reality, and 
 always opposes itself to the universal or logical ele- 
 ment. It is the Jlyle which is as yet not Ousia. The 
 much-vaunted freewill is nothing but the illogical or 
 irrational element in the essence of the individual, his 
 undetermined particularity, as opposed to the logical 
 element, or that in him which is universal and neces- 
 sary. The former corresponds to chance in external 
 nature ; it is the element which is transient and irre- 
 ducible ^0 law. But it is, nevertheless, this element 
 alone, t' 3 alogical spontaneity or thisness of the indi- 
 vidual in the act of rationalising himself, which, with 
 ■doubtful accuracy, we term freewill, with which moral 
 praise or blame is concerned. You can only praise or 
 blame this particular man for that in him which con- 
 cerns his thisness or his particularity. The other 
 spontaneity which is not identified with effort on 
 the part of the individual is reducible to so-called 
 natural law. Moral courage must then involve an 
 effort of individual initiation which may or may not 
 be accompanied by physical or animal courage. The 
 subordination of fear to resolution must take place 
 through an individual nisus here and now and not 
 through an irresponsible impulse. 
 
 The opposition between physical and moral courage is 
 sometimes realised in a striking manner, as in the case 
 of that Russian Bureaucrat spoken of by Stepniak who 
 
i68 Courage. 
 
 sheltered the Nihilist, though the doing so plunged 
 him into an abyss of terror himself. The extreme 
 form of moral courage brings us to the question of 
 how far individual interest in the ohject of the reso- 
 lution to which present fear or pain is subordinated is 
 compatible with courage. That it is -not involved in 
 the primary definition of courage is obvious, but on 
 reflection the general conscience of mankind proclaims 
 that the fullest expression of moral courage is reached 
 when pain or fear is subordinated, not to the purpose 
 of individual advantage, but to a purely disinterested 
 end. For the subordination of the individual to the 
 purpose then becomes complete. It is not merely 
 immediate fear or pain which is subordinated in the 
 ■resolution, but the whole content of the individuality 
 which is staked upon something, the interest of which 
 is outside itself. The Oriental who braves death or 
 torture rather than divulge to a rapacious tax- 
 gatherer his hidden store of wealth, or the prize-fighter 
 who exposes his life for a stake of money may show 
 a kind of courage which we instinctively accept as 
 such ; but the man who plunges into a burning build- 
 ing, and falling rafters, and suffocating smoke, to save 
 a stranger's life, our reason accepts as showing a higher, 
 more perfect and complete kind of courage. That the 
 fullest manifestations of moral courage presuppose the 
 disposition to physical courage is a proposition hardly 
 admitting of a doubt. A fine kind of courage may be 
 shown,' like that of the Eussian Bureaucrat above re- 
 ferred to, in passivity, but it is one-sided ; the com- 
 pletest manifestations of courage involve an activity, 
 and to " deeds of heroism " the mere physical disposi- 
 tion is requisite. Stepniak's Russian, though exhibit- 
 ing the highest moral courage in sheltering his friend, 
 while so keenly feeling the sense of his own danger, 
 might, nevertheless, owing to his lack of mere animal 
 courage, have fallen a victim to panic had he been set to 
 lead a forlorn hope. The completest form of courage, 
 
Courage. 169 
 
 then, may be defined as the subordination of pain or 
 fear to a resolution involving a disinterested object, and 
 realising itself indifferently whether in action or 
 passion. 
 
 The last definition, introducing, as it does, the ques- 
 tion of content, brings us to the threshold of the con- 
 crete world. We have now traced three distinct 
 phases in the concept courage. The first was the 
 mere definition, vague as regards all content, " The 
 subordination of fear to purpose." The second, the 
 well-known distinction between physical and moral 
 courage, was in apparent contradiction with the 
 primary definition, inasmuch as in physical courage 
 which is, per se, purely active in its manifestations, 
 the action seems the result of blind instinct (as in the 
 case of the Donnybrook Irishman), and it is only on 
 reflection that we discover the implicit motive (to wit, 
 in the case instanced the need for muscular exertion) ; 
 while in moral courage, which is, per se, purely 
 passive in its manifestations, the fear does not al- 
 ways, at first sight, seem subordinated (as in the 
 case of Stepniak's Russian), and it is only reflec- 
 tion which shows us that the man, though he trembled 
 for his own safety, was no coward, but brave, since 
 the fear itself was in essence fully subordinated by 
 a conscious efibrt to the end in view. Reflection 
 further impels us to introduce into our definition of 
 courage the nature of the object (as to whether dis- 
 interested or not), in addition to bringing to light 
 the one-sided nature alike of physical and moral 
 courage considered per se, and thus introduces the con- 
 cluding definition of courage in which the vagueness 
 of the primary form of the concept and the one-sided- 
 uess of the secondary form are alike abolished, while 
 the essential features of both these forms are main- 
 tained. 
 
 The Phenomenology of courage exhibits some curious 
 combinations and a good many spurious modes. There 
 
t^O Courage. 
 
 is the apparent courage of the man who is insen- 
 sible to danger, not because he subordinates fear to 
 purpose, but because he lacks imagination, or because 
 his imagination is blunted in particular directions 
 through custom, or because, maybe, he is ignorant of 
 the danger threatening him. There is no real sub- 
 ordination of fear to purpose in any of these cases. 
 Thus (to take an example referred to by Aristotle) 
 the seaman does not fear a storm as the landsman 
 does, because he may have confidence in the steersman 
 or the goodness of his ship, or what not ; or because, 
 having passed through many storms unscathed, his im- 
 agination has got blunted as to storms in general. The 
 landsman may think him brave, when in reality he is 
 not so. Let us suppose the landsman is a physician, 
 and he takes the sea-captain through a cholera 
 hospital or through a leper-house ; while the phy- 
 sician walks unmoved, taking a purely scientific in- 
 terest in all he sees around him, the mariner may in 
 his turn quake with fear and turn pale. On the other 
 hand, the seaman may fear a certain course while the 
 landsman sees the vessel taking that course unmoved, 
 not because the seaman is more timid than the lands- 
 man, but simply because he foresees a special danger 
 attending it unknown to the latter. The landsman's 
 unmoved bearing, while the ship is being driven 
 straight upon shoals, looks like that form of moral 
 courage which consists in the subordination of fear to 
 personal dignity, or the evoking for one's person of 
 the admiration of others-^and which is shown in the 
 suppression of the outward manifestations of the un- 
 pleasant — while in reality it is but the mere insensi- 
 bility of ignorance. 
 
 Then, again, the boor or the idiot, whose imaginative 
 powers are sluggish, will never have the idea of future 
 danger present to him, because he never has ideas at 
 all, and is incapable of receiving any vivid or lasting 
 impression on his imagination. Such an insensible 
 
Courage. i*?t 
 
 person will seem brave, but not be so. His imaginative 
 power is so feeble that only a very present pain or a 
 most immediate danger can affect him. It requires 
 intellect to be intelligently afraid. 
 
 The secret of a good deal of apparent courage lies 
 in this : Most persons are afraid of something, but 
 they, at times, show up brave on the background of 
 persons who are afraid of something else. For some 
 reason or other, inherited or acquired, a particular 
 thing affects the imagination of some persons more 
 powerfully, they realise it more graphically, than 
 others. I knew a man in Berlin, who had been through 
 the Franco-German War, had fought at Gravelottes, 
 seen thousands fall around him at Sedan, had stormed 
 the trenches of Metz, and been made a sergeant on 
 account of his services in the field, who yet quailed 
 before the sting of a gnat. His hand became slightly 
 inflamed, and he was thrown into a paroxysm of fear 
 of blood-poisoning. I saw him deadly white and trem- 
 bling and scarcely able to walk from fright. What 
 mitrailleuses, Gatlings, and chassepots were unable to 
 effect, that did a little summer fly. A friend of mine 
 who fears neither infection, nor mad dogs, nor infuriated 
 bulls in fly-time is prostrated with terror at the 
 presence of a wasp round about his person. All men 
 may seem brave in disposition until their Achilles- 
 heel is disclosed. The seeming coward is often merely 
 a man of exceptionally vivid imagination, the seeming 
 brave man often merely one of dull imagination. 
 
 A more specious form of spurious courage than those 
 already mentioned is the performance of an act appar- 
 ently, but not really, involving danger. For example, 
 a woman in the present day who throws herself in 
 front of a squadron of dragoons to stem their passage, 
 or tries to force her way through a cordon of police, 
 performs an act which in a man would be courageous, 
 and she wins an additional kudos from the popular 
 opinion as to the weakness of her sex. But in reality, 
 
172 Courage. 
 
 this very opinion is her protection and deprives the 
 action of all special claim to heroism. She knows the 
 dragoons will not disembowel her with their bayonets ; 
 she knows the policemen will not brain her with their 
 truncheons. Her "womanhood" is a sufficient pro- 
 tection of her. Certain women in the past, as Jeanne 
 d'Arc, the Maid of Saragossa, &c., in a time when 
 women did not enjoy the ^privileged immunities ex- 
 acted by modern sentiment, have really shown heroism 
 in braving dangers which were as real for them a j for 
 men. The same may be said of certain women during 
 the final struggle of the Commune, in 1871, when for 
 the nonce class-ferocity overrode class-gallantry. It is 
 strange, by the way, that in modern warfare the ex- 
 ploitation of the above sentiment has never been tried 
 by the losing side. A reserve corps of Amazons 
 suddenly intercepted between an attacking and a de- 
 fending force, might easily save the latter from a 
 disastrous rout. Flaubert describes how the " mercen- 
 ary " Matho protected himself from the missiles of the 
 enraged Carthaginians by covering himself with the 
 stolen veil of the moon-goddess as with a shield, none 
 daring to violate the sacred vestment. So here, a 
 regiment having fought a good fight, and being hard 
 pressed, might effect a secure and orderly retreat, having 
 drawn around itself the protecting veil of its reserve 
 womanhood. The attacking body must instantly fall 
 back, unable to follow up their antagonists. Military 
 men possibly consider, however, that the difficulties 
 of training the Amazonian " cover " would be insuper- 
 able. 
 
 There is another form of spurious or, at least, of 
 cheap bravery which is connected with the foregoing 
 subject. In a domestic squabble^ such as may from 
 time to time be seen in some of the bye-ways of Lon- 
 don, in which a man and his wife are engaged, the 
 passer-by, greedy of renown for street prowess, will 
 ostentatiously stalk up to the uioputants, and with- 
 
Courage. 1 73 
 
 out informing himself further in the matter, will take 
 the part of the woman and commence objurgating 
 and possibly threatening the man. He thinks to 
 obtain credit for pluck and determination for cham- 
 pioning what is conventionally supposed to be the 
 weaker side. He knows all the time that he will 
 probably have the bystanding profanum, vulgus on 
 his side, and that the unlucky husband will be quite 
 unable to retaliate upon him for the insults received. 
 Were he to take the side of the man he might have 
 to face half-a-dozen other individuals equally desirous 
 with himself of acquiring the local and temporary 
 renown of the street. But this might be unpleasant, 
 and more than that renown was worth, and would 
 require pluck indeed. Similarly, the murderer of a 
 seducer, though he often poses as a hero, really knows 
 that he may rely on the support of a clamorous and 
 often hypocritical section of public opinion. 
 
 By taking the mere phenomenal aspect of courage in 
 abstraction from the concept, which it presupposes, it 
 is easy to degrade the terminology of courage to silly 
 and meaningless epithets of abuse, and this is commonly 
 done. 
 
 Courage in its manifestations involves the encounter- 
 ing of pain or danger. But courage does not mean the 
 mere encountering pain or danger. Every sane person 
 would regard the man who, without any object, even 
 that of suicide, tried to cross and recross a railway 
 line before an express train only two or three hundred 
 yards distant on the off-chance of accomplishing the 
 feat safely, as a lunatic or a fool. There must be some 
 conceivably adequate motive to stamp the encountering 
 of danger as the manifestation of courage. Now it is 
 a common trick to postulate some sentiment or whim 
 of A as an adequate motive for B to encounter pain or 
 danger, and the refusal to do so is stigmatised by 
 A as cowardice. A good instance of this is to be 
 found in the dog-muzzling controversy. A well-known 
 
174 Courage. 
 
 authoress, famed for her erotic novels, zealously con- 
 tends for the freedom of every mangy cur to bite how, 
 when, and where it pleases. Being unable to support 
 this contention by any valid argument, she falls back 
 on the rather stale device of stigmatising those persons 
 who are sane enough to object to unlimited freedom 
 of biting as cowards. The contention is, of course, 
 that the trifling inconvenience which the muzzle causes 
 the cur, in preventing him from exercising his natural 
 proclivity to bite, should supply an adequate motive 
 for the man to run the risk of being bitten. Those 
 who would take steps to restrain the mordant liberty 
 of the cur, since they do not hold the doctrine of the 
 divine right of dogs to bite just because it is their 
 nature to, think that sentimental scruples as to muzzling 
 them are evidence, not so much of natural courage as 
 of native imbecility. 
 
 Or to take another instance. A neighbour practises 
 sparrow-shooting in his back garden while I am sitting 
 at my window writing. About every sixth time he 
 fires, the shot whizzes around my head; the remainder 
 of the shot is distributed between the upper air and 
 other neighbours' windows. I, in common with those 
 others, object to the practice. It is true that only at 
 about every sixth discharge of the gun the shot comes 
 in at my window at all, and even then it may not 
 touch me, since the space occupied by the window is 
 many times that occupied by my head. But, never- 
 theless, I join in the general protest. We don't say 
 that we think anything of the danger, but we insist 
 on the practice being stopped on the ground that there 
 is a lady in delicate health who is prejudicially affected 
 by the noise, just as people never mind going into a 
 house where there is scarlet fever or small-pox on their 
 own account, but only through fear of carrying the 
 infection to their families. Our garden sportsman, 
 however, thinks he sees through us. After some ex- 
 cited discussion, indignant at having his sport abolished, 
 
Courage. 175 
 
 he looks us full in the face, and says : " The fact is, 
 you're a pack of d — d cowards ; you're afraid of being 
 shot, that's what it is ! " Now it is not nice to he 
 called a coward, and after this who could refuse to 
 show his pluck by allowing the sparrow-shooter to 
 continue as before ? Just as " Ouida " considers that 
 the pleasure the canine race in general takes in being 
 free to bite, or perhaps the trouble it gives her to keep 
 her dogs muzzled (as the case may be), a sufficient 
 reason for men repressing their natural dislike to being 
 bitten by mad dogs, so the sparrow-shooter thinks 
 the pleasure he takes in his sport an adequate ground 
 for his neighbours repressing their natural disinclina- 
 tion to their persons becoming the possible objective 
 of small shot. The term " coward " is thus degraded 
 to a mere abusive epithet based on individual caprice. 
 In the history of the concept courage, we have 
 the logical determinations of courage realised or mani- 
 fested in concreto. The mere logical determinations 
 per se are abstract, the mere phenomenal manifesta- 
 tions per se are also abstract. The concept, though im- 
 bedded in them, is only discernible on analysis. In 
 History,on theotherhand— which, while no abstraction, 
 is in its true sense no mere summary of facts or pheno- 
 mena, but an ideal reproduction of a reality in which 
 the unessential is left out — the concept is realised; 
 it is clothed in flesh and blood. The first period in the 
 development of human society exhibits courage in 
 its pure and immediate form, unconscious of itself 
 as such. The clansman or tribesman fights for his 
 kinship-group because he cannot conceive of doing 
 otherwise. He lives only in it and through it Fear 
 is with him, unoonsciously but uninterruptedly sub- 
 ordinated to a purpose of which he is perhaps also 
 only vaguely conscious, and the consciousness of the 
 fear and the purpose first become apparent on the decay 
 of tribal society, when it is approaching the. transition 
 to civilisation. It is to this period that the greai 
 
176 Courage. 
 
 epics of the world belong. In the Iliad, in Beowulf, 
 in the Scandinavian sagas, we see courage first re- 
 cognising and admiring itself as such and holding, as it 
 were, a mirror up to itself. Human society had ex- 
 isted, thousands of men had fought and died for tribe 
 and kindred, but none had been found to sing their 
 acts. Human society was unconscious of itself. It 
 had not as yet become object to itself. Just as in 
 logic, every real concept is but the reproduction of 
 the abstract elements it presupposes ; as in psychology 
 every time-moment of our life contains the present- 
 ment not of itself, but of the moment passing away or 
 just past ; so in history it is a society in the act of 
 passing away, which first knows itself as it is in itself. 
 The nameless epic singer is the expression of this self- 
 conciousness as regards primitive society. Courage and 
 valorous deeds are the object of his lay, as they it is 
 which strike the awakening consciousness of society 
 most. It is now that the distinction between courage 
 and cowardice manifests itself. The first mention of 
 cowardice in literature is in the 6th book of the Iliad, 
 i.e., the Dolon incident. It is as yet a sporadic abnor- 
 mity scarcely conceivable to the average man. The 
 appearance of cowardice is one of the symptoms of 
 the dawn of civilisation, and the first faint glimmer- 
 ings of introspection. 
 
 Tribal Society becomes conscious of itself, and em- 
 bodies that consciousness in the epic long before the 
 individual becomes conscious of himself as having 
 interests apart from the society. This latter consci- 
 ousness — that of the opposition of the individual and 
 society — brings to light the further distinction between 
 physical courage and moral courage. The old courage, 
 however, the courage which knows no cowardice — 
 much less the opposition between physical and moral 
 — lingers on in a bastard form in the mercenary 
 soldier of antiquity and other historical periods. The 
 opposition of physical or active and moral or passive 
 
Courage. 177 
 
 courage is the cardinal foim of the concept courage 
 throughout the period of civilisation. The man of 
 physical courage, 'per se, sneers at the man of moral 
 ^courage, per se, as destitute of "dash;" the man of 
 moral courage, per se, dispises the man of pliysical 
 courage, per se, as a coarse ruffian, or a hare-brained fool. 
 Most manifestations of courage, most dispositions to 
 courage, fall under one of these heads to the exclusion of 
 the other, or at least the unequal balancing of the two is 
 observable. The classical instance of moral courage is 
 that of the endurance of the early Christians. Deter- 
 mination such as that described in the "Acts of the 
 Martyrs of Lyons," even if we allow a margin for ex- 
 aggeration, implies a moral courage quantitatively un- 
 surpassed. But we cannot reckon the endurance of the 
 early Christian Martyrs qualitatively to the highest 
 forms of moral courage for the simple reason that its 
 purpose was not disinterested. A firm belief in death 
 being the portal of eternal bliss and glory, in golden 
 cities, in great white thrones sustained these martyrs. 
 The purpose, therefore, to which pain or fear was sub- 
 ordinated was that of direct personal advantage or 
 reward, the same in kind as that of the Oriental who 
 endures tortures rather than divulge his hidden store 
 of wealth to the ta.x-gatherer. Moral courage has 
 probably both quantatitively and qualitatively reached 
 its highest point in the Russian revolutionary 
 movement of our own day. Hei'e the greatest 
 conceivable suffering is endured for ends which are 
 absolutely impersonal. 
 
 We see, then, courage opposing itself first to coward- 
 ice as in the grey dawn of History society first be- 
 comes conscious of itself through the individuals com- 
 posing it. Afterwards as the individual and his 
 interests become separated from, and gain the upper 
 hand over, the society and its interests, and with the 
 introspective habit of mind which follows more or le&a 
 closely thereupon, courage falls asunder into physical 
 
178 Courage, 
 
 (generally coincident with active) and moral (generally 
 coincident with passive) courage. This opposition is 
 characteristic of civilisation, and in an advanced 
 civilisation it is the exception to find a man in 
 ■whom moral and physical courage are equally and 
 indissolubly blended. 
 
 But what as to the future of courage ? In a society 
 in which present economical conditions are changed, 
 and in which an equal possibility of development is 
 ensured for each and all alike — ^what form will courage 
 take ? We cannot, indeed, expect a recrudescence of 
 that undefined, perhaps, but all-pervading enthusiasm 
 which sent forth the man of the early world to fight 
 for race and kindred, not recognising himself as .person- 
 ality distinct from them, a courage differing from phy- 
 sical courage as such, inasmuch as it was no mere 
 eifervescence of animal spirits, and yet differing from 
 moral courage as such, inasmuch as no conscious effort 
 was involved in it. But yet with men living a healthy 
 life, physically and mentally, who can doubt that our 
 present opposition between pliysical and moral courage 
 will give place to a different and an intrinsically higher 
 courage than any that have hitherto obtained, a cour- 
 age according with the changed conditions, a courage 
 perhaps no longer displaying itself, indeed, as in the on- 
 rush of the barbaric foeman, or the endurance of the 
 martyr, the need for such having passed away, but in 
 other shapes — a courage less outwardly brilliant per- 
 haps, but even more real, because more constant in its 
 disinterestedness of purpose, and more sustained in the 
 dgfiniteness with which that purpose is conceived ' 
 
THE PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF 
 PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 The Philistine said all metaphysics is a snare and a 
 delusion. Mathematics is the only abstract study worth 
 pursuing. Metaphysics deals with subjects outside the 
 range of human ken ; it is simply baseless theorising on 
 that which we can never know, etc., etc. All this sort 
 of talk may be had at a very low rate, even without 
 the asking, from any callow young man of the middle 
 classes who has a little smattering of modern " culture." 
 But let us for once " odi " this " profanum vulgus," let 
 us clear our minds of the cant of metaphysicophobia 
 for the nonce, and let ub see if this thing, despised 
 and rejected of practical men, can possibly have any 
 practical significance or not. 
 
 Philosophy or metaphysics, it is said, deals with 
 things outside the range of human experience. Does 
 it ? It is essential to rid ourselves of this popular 
 superstition at the outset. The main problem of 
 speculative philosophy, since Kant, has been to analyse 
 experience or common-sense reality into its simplest 
 elements, to discover the ultimate condition which each 
 plane of experience presupposes, and first of all the 
 ultimate condition which all experience presupposes, 
 since without this last we can have no clue to guide us 
 in our ulterior investigations. Philosophy touches 
 nothing outside experience. For phiV)sophy is 
 nothing more than the consideration and comprehen- 
 $ion of experience or reality from a new point of view, 
 
 179 
 
i8o Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 that is, a point of view differing as essentially from 
 that of science as from that of so-called common- 
 sense. The first thing, then, we have to ask ourselves 
 in entering upon philosophical investigation is — what 
 is the element or material common to all reality I 
 What is the warp on to which all experience is 
 woven ? What does all experience presuppose ? This 
 is really a very simple question in itself, notwith- 
 standing the vastness of the issues it opens up. The 
 warp of which reality^ consists cannot be space or 
 extension, for this is a mere blank form of external 
 objects ; it cannot be matter (in the physical sense), 
 for this is merely a name for a synthesis of qualities 
 ia space which are perceived or thought, and which 
 have no meaning apart from their perceivedness, as old 
 Berkeley showed ; it cannot be mind, for this is made 
 up of " impressions and ideas " derived from externa] 
 experience, or, in other words, from the physical uni- 
 verse. (Teste Hume and the empirical psychologists.) 
 Lastly, it cannot be time, for this is also merely a blank 
 form of concrete objects external and internal, or, in 
 short, of things physical and psychical, and although 
 it is thus in a sense common to all reality, it does not 
 constitute any positive element in the constitution of 
 reality. Time, moreover, itself presupposes an appre- 
 hending of itself; it is not self-subsistent. What 
 then is more fundamental than all these ? The answer 
 is the act of apprehension. All object, all existence, 
 ;^no less the things of the world than our own mental 
 %tates — is an apprehension, a bethought feeling, or, 
 in other words, feeling shot with thought. But we 
 have not yet quite got to the root of the matter. For 
 the apprehension is a synthesis, and may be analysed. 
 
 }^ The word reality is used throughout this article in its current 
 philosophical connotation as synonymous with the synthesis of 
 the concrete, and not as by Kant, and occasionally by more recent 
 thinkers, as denoting the special element of quality on feeling 
 within that synthesis, abstracted from the synthesis as a whol^, 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. i8i 
 
 All actual apprehension or concrete consciousness pre- 
 supposes the ground or possibility of apprehension, or, 
 in other words, that which apprehends. But this 
 ground of all apprehension is obviously nothing else 
 than the " I " from which the apprehension, the aware- 
 ness, the consciousness wells up. " I " is at once the 
 ground and raw material of reality. Though it identi- 
 iies itself perpetually with a definite and particular 
 series of mental states bound together by a memory- 
 synthesis and called myself or this personality, it is 
 nevertheless the eternal background of consciousness- 
 in-general. Now this indefinite and immediate that- 
 ness or nisus, which is the " I " in its pure form, the 
 Subject par excellence (and to which, indeed, the latter 
 word can alone be properly applied), is, from this 
 point of view, a mere inchoate ahstractum. Feeler and 
 feeling are at this stage undistinguished ; we have a 
 mere thatness per se, which is absurd and as such in- 
 volves its own negation, i.e., the undifferentiated feeling 
 implies feltness. The "I" per se, the matter, is 
 negated or determined (oinnis determ,inatio est negatio) 
 a-s feltness or whatness, as the form of externality, 
 as not-itself, as not-I, but this negation in its turn 
 evinces itself as untenable. Feltness is not self-sub- 
 sistent, but is thrown back on the " I " or Subject 
 as recognising itself as feeling, i.e., as distinguishing 
 itself as feeling from its feltness, and in so far negating 
 the form of externality. Now, this act of distinction 
 is the most fundamental, the most universal expression 
 of the logical synthesis — the immediate condition of 
 concrete consciousness or knowledge. Immediately it 
 is consciousness — in reflection it is reason or know- 
 ledge. Abstract the differentia of the last term of the 
 process from those which it presupposes, and you have 
 " pure thought," the " pure relation " of Hegel. Treated 
 in this way, however, it becomes mere abstraction, and 
 the conditions of a real synthesis,which always involves 
 a double ciogical element (sense and its ground, the 
 
1 82 Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 inner feeling and the outer felt, the that and the what), 
 as presupposed by this logical element, are absent, an 
 absence which cannot be atoned for by the plausible 
 manipulation of pure thought-forms or categories. 
 
 Thus the primordial subject, the " I," considered as 
 pure inness, or immediateness in its pure form, together 
 with its negation, feltness, the distinguishing feature 
 of which is outness, likewise immediate, both become 
 mediated by the negation of the latter as such, and 
 the re-assertion of the " I," no longer as pure, but as 
 limited or related to its opposite, feltness ; the thcLt be- 
 comes related to the what, and this relation constitutes 
 thought, which dominates all reality and interprets the 
 whole process in its own terms. Thought is conscious- 
 ness in posse, consciousness is thought in actu. This 
 primal synthesis, as constituting the innermost nature 
 of reality, that is, of experience or consciousness-in- 
 general (possible and actual), is involved throughout 
 its whole range, for it alone constitutes Keality. To 
 employ the usual terminology, the essence of every 
 real-gufi-real consists in these three elements or 
 momenta, a thatness or matter ( = "1"), a whatness 
 or form ( = negation of " I " or feltness), and the limita- 
 tion of each by each, whence results the relation or 
 logical category, which, so to say, suffuses with its 
 light the alogical process behind it, which it com- 
 pletes. Every real contains a non-rational as well as 
 a rational element. This is the truth at the bottom 
 of the " thing-in-itself," so much decried by the ortho- 
 dox Hegelians. To treat the thing-in-itself as a thing 
 existing and yet independent of all possible apprehen- 
 sion is, of course, absurd. But it is scarcely more 
 absurd than the reduction of reality to a mere logical 
 process, a wiere thinking and nothing more, (^ace 
 T. H. Green " Prologomena," passivn.) We recognise 
 this to be the case when we speak of the being of 
 things, which always means that element in their 
 reality which is not actually present in consciousness, 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 183 
 
 what is present being merely the phenomenon or sign 
 of the being or of the thatness which itself ever eludes 
 us. {See " Handbook to the History of Philosophy," 
 2nd Ed., Appendix.) The logical form is always 
 statical, it is a fixating, a defining of things, while the 
 strictly dynaTnical element in the real is always in- 
 capable of comprehension under logical forms — it is 
 infinite. The one is being, the other thought. The 
 purest product of thought— of the logical — is the con- 
 cept-form, that of mere relation. But under that 
 general concept are embraced an infinite possibility of 
 particulars, none of which completely realise the ideal 
 form. The common illustration of this is the geo- 
 metrical concept — point, straight line, surface, etc. — 
 which is recognised as unrealisable. But the fore- 
 going applies not only to the abstract concept — the 
 concept that is without connotation, of which the geo- 
 metrical is an instance — but also to the most concrete 
 of concepts — man, horse, tree, etc. ; the individual 
 falling under the concept never completely realising 
 the definition as such (that is, in its purity and perfec- 
 tion) but always adding to, or modifying it, so that 
 each particular, or individual within the class in ques- 
 tion, must have its own concept, embracing its own 
 differentia, the hierarchy of concepts extending to 
 infinity in accordance with the potential infinity of 
 individuation itself, if we are to regard the concept- 
 form as ultimate. This is, of course, substantially the 
 Aristotelian argument against the Ideal theory. The 
 rock on which all the great synthetic philosophical 
 systems, from Plato to Hegel, have struck, has been the 
 ignoring or the minimising of the fact that reality — 
 the concrete synthesis — as such, necessarily involves 
 an element of unreason, and that this element is as 
 essential therein as that of reason. If this be admitted, 
 and it is admitted incicfentally even by Hegel, who in 
 the main seeks to ignore it, it follows that Panlogism 
 is a dream — a dream with which is connected, we 
 
184 Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 may remark by the way, the attempt to give com- 
 pletion and finality to philosophical systems. 
 
 We must frankly admit then that Being can never 
 be finally absorbed in Knowledge, can never be com- 
 pletely reduced to rationality, although Being apart 
 from Knowledge is as unreal an abstraction as Know- 
 ledge apart from Being. Knowledge, the logical, must, 
 it is true, be of the same " stuif " as Being, the alogical. 
 Being (as objectivity) is simply transfigured Iness (if I 
 may borrow a term sometimes used in another connexion), 
 yet knowledge is none the less a reflected form of the 
 " I," the final condition of the realisation of the "I." To 
 HegeP thought was ultimate, the " I " itself was merely 
 a form of thought, and, as such, he was bound to 
 reduce the alogical to terms of the logical. 
 
 But his failure is conspicuous in many places, and 
 in none more than in the philosophy of Nature, where 
 he has continually to slur over the element of chance 
 and irrationality in Nature under the somewhat mean- 
 ingless expression "Ohnmacht " — the admission of 
 which contradicts the assumption made at starting. 
 He feels, that under the assumption of the perfect 
 rationality of the real, he is compelled to set aside the 
 alogical, wherever it presents itself, with a stroke of 
 the pen. The great master of speculation has earned 
 the immortal glory of providing for us a scheme with 
 which to work, but it is a scheme which must be 
 rectified by restoring the elements neglected by him 
 on account of the assumption with which he set out, 
 that knowledge was all in all, that the differentia of 
 the final term of the synthesis of the real (of the con- 
 crete) annihilated rather than transformed the momenta 
 it presupposes, that they were merely forms of it rather 
 than that it was a form of them, eternally presupposing 
 
 '^ A good instarice of Hegel's attempt and failure to deduce 
 what is per se alogical from the logical is his treatment of space 
 and time, the leading points in which are to be found in the 
 " Encyclopadie " (Ed. Eosenkranz, pp. 208-219). 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 185 
 
 them and never exhausting them. All that relates to 
 being or quality (sense-impression) in reality belongs, 
 considered per se, to the alogical. It represents the 
 inchoateness of the first two elements of the conscious 
 synthesis abstracted from the thought-form, which 
 completes and gives it its final reality. Time and space 
 Kant truly characterised as forms of sensibility; in 
 other words, as forms of the alogical, thought (the 
 category) presupposed them, just as they presuppose 
 the primoi'dial " I," which is at once nothing and all 
 things, wothing per se and all things per synthesis. So 
 with the content of time. This also belongs to the 
 alogical ; its thatness, its being, is but the " I " of the 
 original conscious synthesis re-appearing on another 
 plane ; its whatness, its quality, is but the "feltness ' 
 of the second term of the synthesis. The category 
 or thought-form, the " I think," is only the reciprocal 
 relation, and thereby the actualising of the as yet 
 merely potential elements of " I " and " feltness." To 
 employ the term ("thought," "idea," Logos) which 
 specially signifies this completing or actualising of 
 the synthesis for the synthesis in its totality, or as 
 concrete, can only lead to confusion. The distinction 
 may be conceived as one between the potential and 
 the actual. 
 
 If reality, objectivity, experience, consciousness- 
 in-general, concreteness, according as we choose to 
 term it, be a synthesis, it may be said that in the pro- 
 cess of analysis it disappears, and that, therefore, 
 such analysis can serve no purpose. But all that 
 philosophy does is to distinguish in abstraction (i.e., 
 .by the aid of reflection or thought on the psychological 
 plane), those elements of which thought is the issue 
 and, therefore, which thought presupposes. It would, 
 of course, be quite illegitimate to treat them as them- 
 selves " real " or as " kinds " or as " things " ; or again 
 to conceive the so-called transcendental process as a 
 time-process, as having a before and after. The 
 
tSd Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 synthesis as analysed in reflection, as sundered into, its 
 elements by thought, inevitably wears the garb of time. 
 But this is an unavoidable illusion o£ the logical faculty 
 which is accustomed to function under the form of 
 time. Of course, with a separation (were such a thing 
 possible) of its transcendental component momenta, 
 reality or the concrete would be dissolved. But this 
 is the case not only with the metaphysical synthesis 
 of the consciousness, or with reality in its most com- 
 prehensive sense, but also with the physical syntheses 
 or realities which occur within it. Thus the material 
 synthesis, life, presupposes certain chemical elements ; 
 it is nothing but these elements, but yet they exist as 
 a biological reality, as living,, only in their synthesis. 
 Dissolve this synthesis, and the reality, " life " or " living 
 thing," has disappeared. The synthesis is ■immediate. 
 The elements in abstraction are there, but not 
 the thing, the concrete itself.^ The difference is 
 that although in the dissolution of the organic 
 synthesis, the reality, life, has disappeared, yet another 
 material reality, an inorganic concrete, chemical sub- 
 stance, still remains ; whereas, with a hypothetical 
 dissolution of the ultimate synthesis of all reality — the 
 supreme synthesis of the consciousness — ^no concrete 
 would remain over. There is no other plane from 
 which its component momenta can be viewed, every 
 act of apprehension involving this synthesis. But, as 
 before said, all that philosophy pretends to do is to 
 distinguish these momenta in their concreteness. From 
 
 ^ Thus the specific real or synthesis, human society, may be 
 conceived as disappearing, while its mere material, the human 
 animal, remains over. Evolution consists, of course, in the re- 
 solution or disappearance of one real synthesis into another, which 
 we term higher ; as opposed to its resolution into its elements, 
 which we term dissolution. But in evolution the general synthesis 
 of the logical v/niverswm remains in its concreteness as the basal 
 element through all its forms — e.g., mediaeval society disappears, 
 its reality is gone just as thoroughly as in dissolution, but the 
 general synthesis, society, remains realising itself in other forms. 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 187 
 
 the primary synthesis of the consciousness, which every, 
 definite consciousness presupposes, philosophy deduces 
 its method. This method is known as dialectics. Its 
 procedure is to tear out the process which constitutes 
 the essential in every plane of existence or in every real 
 by discovering therein the same contradiction and the 
 same resolution of that contradiction into a higher 
 reality as is involved in the original bare fact of world- 
 apprehension. This key it finds will unlock the inner- 
 most secret of every reality, in psychology, in physics, 
 in biology, in anthropology. Its category is " action 
 and reaction," the reciprocal cancelling of each other by 
 contradictory elements. In this it difiers from the 
 stand-point of common-sense, the " classical " category 
 of which is "substance and accident," as also from that 
 of science, whose favourite (though not exclusive) 
 category is " cause and effect." Philosophy gua philo- 
 sophy deals in every case with the elements of con- 
 cretes, rather than with concretes themselves. Just as 
 it contemplates knowledge or consciousness-in-general 
 in the making, so it regards all departments of " reality " 
 according to the absolute conditions of their possibility, 
 rather than according to the phenomena as presented 
 in the common-sense world. The Hegelians of the "left" 
 thought they could retain the method of dialectics 
 apart from metaphysics. But the dialectical method 
 without metaphysie is a tree cut away from its roots. 
 It has no basis and therefore no justification as an in- 
 strument of research. Unless we recognise the fact 
 that thought enters into the constitution of reality, 
 that reality is nothing other than experience possible 
 and actual, and that the unity of experience and the 
 rationality which we find in the universe, or the 
 system of experience, is deducible in the last resort 
 from the primal unity of the consciousness, and from 
 the condition of its synthesis — unless we recognise this, 
 where is our locus standi in employing the dialectical 
 method ? Or in fact, where is our ground for assuming 
 
!88 Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 a determinate order in things at all ? The commonest 
 categories must then be inadmissible, and we have no 
 alternative but the Humean position in its most ex- 
 treme and impossible form. 
 
 The obvious and oft-repeated truth — so obvious, that 
 it only requires to be stated to be seen by ^ the most 
 uninitiated — to wit, that the sum of the collocations of 
 matter and motion, which we term Nature or the ex- 
 ternal world, is simply a system of categorised sensa- 
 tions, and that to gratuitously assume nonsensuous, 
 uncategorised things-in-themselves as existing some- 
 where or other behind "phenomena," is a meaningless 
 absurdity, of itself suffices to dispose of the theory of 
 the cruder materialism. Every fool nowadays knows, 
 or ought to know, that all physical facts or phenomena 
 may be interpreted in terms of matter and motion, 
 and so far every man with any pretension to culture is 
 a materialist. But this leaves the metaphysical pro- 
 blem precisely where it was before, matter and motion 
 themselves being simply general terms for sensation 
 differentiated and synthesised by thought, and appre- 
 hended by the Ego. All that the above materialism 
 really means, is that on the empirical plane — i.e., on 
 the assumption of sense- experience as already given 
 in its concreteness — mind presupposes material con- 
 ditions, or, otherwise put, this particular mind exist- 
 inghereand now, is dependent on,and subsists by virtue 
 of, a material structure, to wit an organic body, of which 
 it may be said to be the function. The individual 
 mind necessarily presupposes the whole conditions of 
 experience as given. But the object of metaphysic' 
 is to inquire how they come to be given ; what is in- 
 volved in this synthesis of which the individual mind 
 is, and on which it feeds 1 The result shows us that 
 the " matter " and " mind " of the vulgar are neither 
 of them ultimate, but alike owe their reality to their 
 apprehension or apprehensibility, which, again, merely 
 means that they are in the last sense the self-determina- 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 189 
 
 dons or functions (objects) of an " I." " Matter " and 
 " mind " having a common basis, alone constitutes 
 the possibility of abstract thought. Because of this, 
 we recognise the "law" reproduced in our minds as 
 identical with the law imbedded in the '' object." We 
 perceive the object itself, indeed, simply, because at 
 bottom "it is of such stuff" as we are made of, its 
 nature being perceptibility or apprehensibility. It was 
 Hegel himself, I think, who started the mot, " The 
 real is rational, and the rational is real." But true 
 though this is, it is sometimes used to give colour to 
 the fallacy before alluded to, which Hegel, with certain 
 qualifications, champions, that the real is all rational. 
 A completely rational or logical world, a world resolv- 
 able into pure thought-categories would at once cease 
 to be a world, as a very little reflection will sufSce to 
 show. Reality we find is compounded of reason and 
 non-reason, of logic and the alogical. Each by it- 
 self is abstract, but both alike are modes of I-nes3,and 
 involved therein, and in the Ego alone they are concrete 
 or real. 
 
 The theory of Panlogism in its strict sense is re- 
 flected in the popular theistic notion that there is no 
 such tbing as chance in the world. If there were no 
 such thing as chance there would be no such thing as 
 law. Law and chance, necessity and contingence, re- 
 presenting the logical and the alogical in the dynamic 
 of Nature, are mutually complementary. The in- 
 dividual or particular in Nature, as such, is always 
 irrational; it is the domain of chance. As given 
 in reality, of course, every particular has a uni- 
 versal or logical element, but the element of particu- 
 larity in it is always warring with and confounding 
 the logical element, the unreason resisting the reason 
 (see " Handbook of the History of Philosophy," 2nd 
 Edition, appendix). Time and space, as the forms of 
 the sensible or particular, in other words, of feeling and 
 of feltness, are the bunting-grounds of chance. The 
 
I go Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 " sensible " always tends to infinite plurality, just as the 
 " intelligible " always tends to definite unity. 
 
 Among the vain attempts of reflective thought to 
 reduce chance to law, or rather to extract a logical rule 
 from what is essentially cslogical, may be instanced the 
 " theory of probabilities " in mathematics, and, indeed, 
 more or less the whole science of mathematics. The 
 free-will controversy affords another instance of the 
 abortive attempt to discern a rule in chance, to extract 
 logic from the ctlogical. For will per se, mere nisus, is 
 nothing but a form of the " I " more fundamental, as 
 Schopenhauer rightly saw, than the logical principle 
 and presupposed by the logical. The fixation of the 
 relation between the " I " and the first form of the 
 object, namely, the " f eltness " in which it negates itself, 
 in other words, the most elementary form of the syn- 
 thesis of knowledge, involves this nisus. It is, there- 
 fore, prior in nature to thought, and belongs to the 
 "I'' or alogical principle per se. The individual, 
 psychological will, inasmuch as it operates through 
 consciousness, follows motives given, but its true nature 
 as Schopenhauer well says, " shows through ; " it is 
 known immediately as in-itself-ness, hence the impos- 
 sibility of fitting it into the logical category of " cause 
 and effect" — the category of mediateness or outness 
 par excellence. On the mechanical plane, the plane of 
 pure outwardness, all things follow the law of causa- 
 tion, all things are mediate, but it is not so here. Will 
 is not pure determination from outside, or from some- 
 thing not itself; it is self-determined, although it is easy 
 enough when viewed merely from the outside to bring 
 its phenomena under the law of causation. As we have 
 before pointed out, every concrete, every reality, as 
 such, has an alogical and a logical, a sensible and an 
 intelligible side: it is only a question of which is 
 dominant. When we take our standpoint on the parti- 
 cular, we have to do primarily with sensibility, un- 
 reason, chance ; whep we take our standpoint on the 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy . 191 
 
 universal, we have to do primarily with thought, law 
 intelligibility. The particular of common-sense (so- 
 called) or of ordinary perception, is, of course, a parti- 
 cularity already synthesised, although imperfectly, by 
 thought. The " world " of common-sense nevertheless 
 is a world in which particularity and unreason domi- 
 nate. Science by means of the categories of reflective 
 thought distinguishes the thought-element in the com- 
 mon-oense world from that of mere blind particularity or 
 being (sense-element), and reconstructs the sense- world 
 on an amended pattern. Philosophy shows the cate- 
 gories of science to be inadequate, as having the 
 particularity of being or of sense still cleaving to them. 
 It reconstructs the world of common-sense experience 
 and of scientific thought by the light of those principles 
 which all experience presupposes, after having traced 
 them up to their highest source in the primitive syn- 
 thesis of the consciousness. Thus in philosophy is 
 reproduced, or rather indicated, in the forms of reflective 
 thought, the core of the process of all reality. 
 
 If my analysis, as briefly outlined in the foregoing, be 
 correct, we may trace, as already said, in the dialectical 
 process which at once interpenetrates and embraces all 
 reality, a double alogical element underlying the logical. 
 Thus in ordinary " presentment,'' or " perception," we 
 have the apprehending, feeling, "I," negated in the form 
 of "feltness " (all perceiving is a sinking of the " I " in the 
 object), reasserting itself as thinking — assigning to the 
 "feltness" its own attribute, self -subsistence (being) 
 — but as over against itself; imparting to whatness 
 a thatness — in other words, we have the synthesis 
 subject-object. In ordinary perception, the play of 
 thought-categories in the object defining and limiting, 
 hides the element of mere apprehension, of pure 
 cesthesis. Only on one plane of knowledge is thought- 
 activity subordinated to the passivity of apprehension, 
 of feltness, and that is in the art-consciousness. In 
 the special form of contemplation implied in absorp^- 
 
192 Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 fcion in a work of art, which constitutes sesthetic enjoy- 
 ment, we have a suggestion of uncategorised " f eltness," 
 in so far that the work of art, as such, abstracts from, 
 and throws our consciousness into, a condition of 
 abstraction from the antithesis of the one and the many 
 — an antithesis wrought by that re-assertion of itself 
 by the " I," as thinking, over against itself as mere 
 "f eltness," which is the first condition of concrete 
 consciousness. Art has an ideal, in the sense of a 
 presentative, content for which time, space and the 
 categories sink to the leveL of mere accidents. The 
 demand (so to speak) of the "I" to find its own activity 
 (thought) in its other self, in its limitation as "feltness," 
 is stilled. The " feltness," the presentment, is not as 
 in ordinary consciousness subordinated to the forms of 
 thought. But here the content has an immediate mean- 
 ing which we term beauty, and which as feltness {pace 
 Burke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, etc.) is untranslatable 
 into the essentially mediate terms of thought and words. 
 Let us sum up now in a few words the practical 
 importance of philosophy in general research. Firstly, 
 it indicates the method to which all reality conforms, 
 and which is its highest formula. The presentation 
 of the dialectic of any plane of knowledge is the most 
 comprehensive expression of its law, its supreme ex- 
 planation. This method again shows us that the most 
 developed category is that of reciprocity, or action and 
 reaction, rather than that of cause and effect, and that 
 in the last resort all reality turns upon this category. 
 The relation of Eeciprocity can obviously obtain only 
 between the elements or inomenta of wholes or con- 
 cretes, and not between wholes or concretes themselves 
 as such, for it implies that the one element is as 
 essential to the whole ds the other, and that, therefore, 
 the whole can only exist in so far as they maintain 
 their inter-connexion. For example, it is sometimes 
 said that on the assumption of a law in history indi- 
 vidual efi'ort in the interests of progress would b^ 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 193 
 
 useless ; for if the individual is a product of economic 
 and other surroundings, and if every event is deter- 
 mined by pre-existing conditions, individual initiation 
 "must be excluded. But the mistake here is in con- 
 founding a relation of reciprocity with one of cause. 
 The fact that the economic conditions of an age mould 
 the men of an age does not exclude the fact that men 
 react on economic conditions. Each factor is insepar- 
 able from the other. History, or human development, 
 is a self-contained and highly-involved synthesis, and 
 as such, its salient category is "action and reaction." 
 Thpugh there be a distinct law of econoimic and social 
 development which affirms itself in the long run irre- 
 spective of individuals, this does not by any means 
 render the exertions of the individual of no avail, for 
 the following reason : The logic of human evolution, 
 like the logic of every other sjmthesis throughout all 
 reality, is in a sense independent of time and space, 
 which latter fall primarily to the sphere of the sensuous, 
 i.e., the alogical. Every logical process (assuming it 
 to be correctly stated) must realise itself sova&where 
 and &om&uJhen, but the where and the when are un- 
 determined. Now the determination of this where 
 and when is a matter of chance, of unreason. The 
 individual, this individual here and now, who, qvA the 
 totality of history, is a mere chance product,^ or any 
 number of such individuals, may therefore empirically 
 determine this a priori undetermined fact, for they 
 are working in their own element. The logical pro- 
 cesses of social development, as of every other develop- 
 ment (biological, for example), in so far as they are 
 embodied in the time series as concrete, may be arrested 
 or delayed at any stage. They must, it is true, assert 
 
 ^ I may here make the general obserratlon that a sum of con- 
 tingencies can never give necessity. One can trace back the 
 chain of antecedents of a particular event, but each link is 
 determined by something which might have happened other- 
 wise. ^ 
 
194 Practical Significance of Philosophy. 
 
 themselves in their completeness at some time or other, 
 but -not necessarily at any particular time or in any 
 particular case. Individuals, as such, may therefore 
 very easily accelerate or retard indefinitely the course 
 of progress (since they are working in their own 
 element, that of chance), in spite of the fact that pro- 
 gress is in the last resort logically determined in its 
 main outlines. Intimately connected with . the above 
 is the fallacy at the root of the denial of any general 
 law in history, on the ground of the chaotic character 
 of the phenomena of history. Owing to the great 
 complexity of the content of human society, history 
 appears like a frothing sea, without law or aim. For 
 instance, that the whole Grgeco-Roman civilisation 
 passes away, giving place to a state of society resem- 
 bling the Homeric in many important respects, and 
 that the development has to begin over again, so to say, 
 seems irreconcilable with any logical process, until we 
 reflect that this is merely an illustration of the struggle 
 ever renewed of the logical to assert itself, to realise 
 itself in the alogical. 
 
 The reason of the shrinking of speculative thinkers 
 from recognising the alogical (seose, being, etc.), as a dis- 
 tinct element in reality, is the consciousness which 
 reflection, or discursive thought, the first-bom of the 
 logical, forces upon us that its own element, thought, 
 ought to absorb sense and being, that the real ought 
 to be rational and nothing but rational. This con- 
 viction seems confirmed by the fact that the logical 
 is always encroaching on the alogical, both in the 
 physical and the psychical spheres, that mere blind 
 being ever recedes before thought, chance before law, 
 impulse before deliberation. But it is forgotten that 
 this absorption of being by thought is only approxi- 
 mative and relative. Every sphere of being comes 
 more and more under the sway of the logical — law 
 invades the realm of chance. But yet the chance- 
 element of sense-quality and of mere subsistence still 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. 195 
 
 remains — thought never becomes thing, reason never 
 absorbs feeling completely. Thought brings to light 
 endless processes in reality, but there is the thatness 
 and the whatness of reality which thought glances off. 
 They remain ■immediate in consciousness and its 
 abstract form thought, the mediating principle, can 
 fiever express them. This is the kernel of truth in 
 the hackneyed and often abused phrase of mysticism 
 respecting the inadequacy of thought and words to 
 express our deepest experiences. " Feltness," qud felt- 
 ness, can never be rendered in thought or A fortiori in 
 words — we cannot explain what being is, nor translate 
 what feeling feels. This also, as already pointed out, 
 is the real meaning of art, which suggests a perception 
 as far as possible removed from discursive thought. 
 Reason, analysis, categorisation, is the antithesis of the 
 art-consciousness. The very word cesthetic which is 
 used to express it, indicates its essentially anti-logical 
 character. Only in philosophy where the abstraction 
 of thought is carried out to its furthest limits does it 
 transcend itself, and by enabling us to regard experience 
 as an articulated whole, reveal itself as essential to that 
 whole, yet as a derivative rather than an ultimate 
 element. But if thought, or reason — the principle of 
 definition, of formulation, of relation, in short — ^is not 
 ultimate, but implies certain momenta in their nature 
 infinite, it follows that the notion of finality in philoso- 
 phy must be given up. Philosophy must be no longer 
 regarded, as Hegel regarded it, as a closed circle, but 
 rather as an endless spiral — a progressive conception 
 becoming, it is true, more and more adequate to iU 
 content, but never furnishing a solution of the world- 
 problem in a formula valid for all time. The basis ol 
 the conception remains the same, but its statement 
 varies, and must vary fromageto age. We cannot affirm, 
 indeed, that the thought-forms or categories which go 
 to makeourpresentcommon-senseexperience,the reality 
 of our present consciousness, may not be superseded 
 
196 Practical Significance of Philosopky. 
 
 at an indefinitely later stage of time-development, or 
 at least lose that leading position which they have now ; 
 just as our " world " must be a diflferent world from 
 that furnished by the consciousness — assuming such to 
 be — of lower forms of life. 
 
 Philosophy, then, is the final pronouncement of 
 thought on the great problem of life, reality, experience. 
 If it is destructive it is also constructive. It is thought 
 holding up to itself the mirror of reality, recognising 
 itself therein, and also its opposite, the not-itself, its 
 shadow, which it implies and without which it would 
 have no meaning. It is also the science which furnishes 
 us with the method to which the subject-matter of all 
 other sciences in the last resort conforms. In the in- 
 fancy and childhood of society, man vaguely felt his 
 oneness with the world. The mythological and magical 
 theory of Nature universal with primitive man, is the 
 expression of this vague half-consciousness. Man has 
 not begun to distinguish between self and not-self in 
 abstract thought. Reflection has not attained to con- 
 sciousness with him. He does not reflect in the strict 
 sense of the word. He feels the substance of himself 
 and things to be one and the same, hence fetishism and 
 totemism. All things live like himself. But no sooner 
 does reflection arise, no sooner does he acquire the power 
 of abstract thought, and his consciousness become 
 definite, than the world and himself fall apart. Every 
 department of experience splits up into two mutually 
 opposing sides. Man is now as wAnd, opposed to matter 
 Later on precision is given to this view and he becomes 
 subject (in the psychological sense) as opposed to object. 
 His soul is opposed to his body, just as God is opposed 
 to the world. Science accentuates these antitheses. It 
 necessarily adopts a one-sided materialism as opposed 
 to theology and philosophy (which is as yet theology's 
 handmaid), and which found themselves on an impos- 
 sible spiritualism or an abstract idealism, only varied 
 by a dualism which unites the absurdities of both stand- 
 
Practical Significance of Philosophy. i97 
 
 points. Everything is here viewed under the category 
 of cause and effect. But reflection itself forces us at 
 length to recognise the insufficiency of these standpoints 
 themselves, products of reflection though they are, 
 and points out the standpoint of the future to be a 
 return to Monism, not the wnreflective Monism of 
 primitive man, but a consciously reasoned recognition 
 of the metaphysical unity in difierence, in reciprocity, 
 of all things, inasmuch as all that is real is the object, 
 the thought-feeling, the determination, of the basal 
 element, "I," or Subject for which all things mental 
 and material are objects ; the Universal one and in- 
 divisible, which includes all particulars that were, or 
 that are, or that can be. 
 
NOTE ON "NOW." 
 
 What is now ? The negation of the past and of the 
 future. It is the point at which time vanishes Time 
 is duration. But now, the present, has no duration. 
 It, therefore, does not exist in time. Again it is im- 
 possible to conceive time otherwise than as infinite, 
 i.e., we cannot conceive a time before which is no 
 time, yet it is evident that if now is in time, time 
 cannot be infinite, since if an infinite time has pre- 
 ceded now, now could never have been reached. Yet 
 again, the time which succeeds now can never be 
 infinite, since it has had a beginning in now. So far, 
 therefore, as time with its one dimension of infinite 
 length or duration is concerned, now is distinctly "out 
 of it," for now has no length, no duration. What, then, 
 is now? Let us consider this now more narrowly. 
 If we do, the fiLrst thing that strikes us is that now is 
 the inseparable attribute of /. The actuality of I we 
 may say is identical with nowness. I am and now 
 are at bottom three words signifying one thing. All 
 nowness is the form of I-ness, and all I-ness is the 
 being of nowness. In itself now like I can never be 
 seized. The now which is a definite thought — an 
 object — is not the true now at all, but the conscious 
 moment just left behind. In the same way the I 
 which we think of when we say myself — which is 
 object to us — ^is not the the true /, the / that is think- 
 ing, but merely a pseudo-I, a synthesis of thoughts 
 and feelings reflected in this I which are immediately 
 or intuitively identified with that /, but which on 
 
 199 
 
200 Note on "Now." 
 
 analysis are distinguishable as such. This synthesis, 
 moreover, in so far as its content is concerned, dis- 
 closes itself not merely as distinguishable from the 
 true outlooking, thinking /, but as accruing to it only 
 by accident. Similarly the pseudo-woio or past 
 moment of consciousness, which is a definite thought 
 and which is a part of, or, indeed, the foundation of 
 time, is also identified intuitively with the true now 
 which it presupposes. This identification again has to 
 yield to the results of philosophic reflection. The I 
 that thinks is not the / that is thought of, and the 
 now that is present in consciousness and as a part of 
 time is not the now that presents that present to 
 consciousness. 
 
 We see, therefore, that the presenting now, though 
 it must necessarily involve the content of the pre- 
 sented now, does so only iynplicitly. This first 
 becomes explicit or actualised (as phenomenon) in 
 the presented or pseudo-now which constitutes the 
 minvmwm, possibile of time and which hence may 
 be regarded as the unit of time. Its content is 
 nothing other than the thinking, outlooking / 
 itself. Reality or experience is, therefore, the actual- 
 ising or explicating of I-now. I-now in its true 
 sense is impersonal, undifferentiated, potential. It is 
 always rushing into time-consciousness, but yet is 
 never exhausted in time-consciousness — always re- 
 maining behind as the infinite possibility or potenti- 
 ality of consciousness. This potentiality is reflected 
 in the plane of concrete experience or Reality it- 
 self as the bein>g or substantiality of things in con- 
 tradistinction to their mere appearance or actuality. 
 For this distinction is in the last resort traceable 
 to that between the I-now, which thinks and pre- 
 sents, and the thing thought considered per se, that 
 which is thought and presented in it. From one point 
 of view, the thinking and presenting I-now may be 
 regarded as the material, and the thought and pre- 
 
Note on "Now." 201 
 
 Sented, as the formal moment in the primal synthesis 
 of reality, or concrete consciousness. Now is the 
 eternal transition from the potential to the actual. 
 But from another point of view, or rather more 
 narrowly viewed, the now is always formal, and it is 
 the / which constitutes its material content. This 
 has already been indicated above. The filling of now 
 is I-nes8 in the infinity of its determinations which 
 we term sense. The categories or thought-forms 
 which constitute the other factor in experience are, as 
 Kant, with true philosophic instinct, saw, deducible 
 from time, which is in its turn deducible from the 
 timeless now, termed by Kant, the "Synthetic unity 
 of apperception." This is the form of sensibility from 
 which rather than primarily from the Begriff or logical 
 moment, as Hegel insisted, the universe of thought and 
 things is reconstructable. 
 
 Kant truly saw that the logical itself presupposes the 
 presented now or unit of time, although his psycholo- 
 gical prepossessions prevented him seeing that the con- 
 tent of the logical, the thing-in-itself which the sense- 
 phenomenon presupposed, was nothing other than the 
 Ego or Subject to which alone the phrase " in-itself" 
 can with any significance be applied. The in-itself- 
 ness which Kant saw behind the sense-impression was 
 of course merely the projected in-itselfness of the Ego. 
 But the further and more serious result of this mistake 
 was that Kant separated the " unity of apperception," 
 the formal now from the I of which it is the form, and 
 after attempting to deduce the fundamental thought- 
 categories from this "now," or so-called "synthetic 
 unity," (an attempt of course in itself perfectly justified 
 even if the execution was not very successful), fetched 
 the material element fron\ outside without attempting 
 to incorporate it in his deduction. He thought to 
 make an impossible separation between " Metaphysic " 
 and " Theory of Knowledge." No metaphysic is 
 worth anything that is not based on a Theory of 
 
202 Note on "Now'* '•■ 
 
 Knowledge; but, on the other hand, no "Theory of 
 Knowledge" is complete or accurate that does not 
 embrace a metaphysic. The one without the other is 
 a barren abstraction. To ^et over this difficulty 
 Kant had to separate sensibihty from thought proper.' 
 His system therefore fell asunder into a dualism. 
 His successors from Fichte to Hegel seized upon the 
 formal side of his doctrine and built thereupon the 
 theory of the exclusive dominance of the concept ov 
 completed formal activity — thought. (See " Handbook 
 of History of Philosophy," 2nd edition.) 
 
 But another and hardly less important blunder 
 of Kant was his making time to be exclusively a 
 form of sensibility. That space is a mode of sensibility 
 alone is obvious, but it is surely scarcely less obvious that 
 time is more than this, being in addition the mode of the 
 formative or active principle of conciousness, deducible 
 from the "synthetic unity of Apperception," or, as I have 
 termed it, the true now. We get rid of Kant's diffi- 
 culty when we recollect that actuality or thought is 
 merely a function or rathej the resultant of a function 
 of the /, of that which thinks, that iis mode is time 
 deducible from the timeless now. It is the thought- 
 form now that sunders or negates the /, that fixes it 
 and thereby dualises it into / and not-I, which in the 
 last resort is nothing more than possible and actual 
 consciousness. The subject, or /, is always the possible, 
 the not-I, its shadow, always the actual. 
 
 Will, I take it, is the nisus of this transition, of the 
 realising of the I, in the concrete or real world, or, in 
 other words, on the time-plane. The transcendental 
 act of self-realisation, the fixing of the I in now is re- 
 produced in the empirical sphere as will. Will is the 
 tendency of the Ego to realise itself. But what shall we 
 call will ? The best definition of will I can find is " the 
 infinite imperfection of thought." Perfect thought 
 casts out will. Will may be termed the dynamic of 
 thought, thought the static of will. Will by nature 
 
Note on "Now! 203 
 
 exhausts itself in an act, in a " real " synthesis, which 
 is its object. When once this is attained, wiU, as such 
 is abolished. Could we therefore assume d la T. H. 
 Green, a completed actuality of thought — an actual 
 thought-synthesis which has exhausted all possibility 
 of thought — ^we should arrive at a will-less God in a 
 timeless Now. Such a synthesis is of course absurd, as 
 it excludes the conditions of a synthesis — it would be 
 a form without matter, an actual without content. 
 But if we grant it, such is its nature. For now as 
 such, always represents completeness. Will in its 
 transcendental source as the becoming the fixation of 
 the /, as consciousness, is necessarily abolished in the 
 completed moment of the fixation or arrestment, i.e., 
 in the Now. Hence the Now is the negation of Will. 
 We see this illustrated (I may observe in conclusion) in 
 the empirical sphere, in the distinction made between 
 Nature, the fixed order of realised- consciousness, 
 the synthesis of all nows, and Freedom, or the lawless 
 element of will which we regard as the power of origin- 
 ating events in time without reference to natural 
 causation. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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