In the second place, we notice that, if anybody tries to sketch for us the ideal state of human life as the hedonist conceives it, we are struck with a sense of the tameness and insignificance of the whole picture. The result is strange. Here we have been making peace and harmony among men the proxi¬ mate goal of life, yet when this harmony has to be conceived in hedonistic fashion, when the hedonist gives us his picture of a peaceful society, where, in the midst of universal good humor, his ideal, the hap¬ piness of everybody concerned, is steadfastly pursued, we find ourselves disappointed and contemptuous. That harmless company of jolly good fellows is un¬ speakably dull. One listens to the account of their happiness as one might listen to the laughter and merry voices of some evening club of jovial strangers, who had been dining at the hotel in which one hap¬ pened himself to be eating a late and frugal supper, in sobriety and weariness. Those unknown crea¬ tures whose chatter in the next room the traveler dimly hears at such a time, — a confused babble of stupid noises; how insignificant their joys seem to him! Who cares whether that really wretched set of animals yonder, with their full stomachs and their misty brains, think themselves happy or not? To be sure, among them the harmony seems in some sort to have been momentarily realized. One would no doubt seem to enjoy it all just as well as they, if he were one of them. But one is viewing it at a dis¬ tance, from outside; and so looking at it he possibly sees that a mass of individual happiness is not just the ideal of ideals after all.
Just such, however, is the feeling that comes to one in considering Mr. Spencer’s description of his ideal society. And similar feelings have been awakened in many reflective people when they have considered traditional notions of heaven, and have tried to esti¬ mate the value of the life of individual bliss therein pictured. Professor William James has recently so well stated these objections in a few brilliant sen¬ tences, that we cannot do better than to quote from his recent article on “ The Dilemma of Determin¬ “ Every one must at some time have wondered at that strange paradox of our moral nature, that, though the pursuit of outward good is the breath of its nostrils, the attainment of outward good would seem to be its suffoca¬ tion and death. Why does the painting of any paradise or Utopia, in heaven or on earth, awaken such yawnings for Nirvana and escape? The white-robed, harp-playing heaven of our Sabbath-schools, and the ladylike tea-table elysium represented in Mr. Spencer’s ‘ Data of Ethics,’ as the final consummation of progress, are exactly on a par in this respect, — lubberlands, pure and simple, one and all. We look upon them from this delicious mess of in¬ sanities and realities, strivings and deadnesses, hopes and fears, and agonies and exultations, which form our pres¬ ent state; and tedium vitae is the only sentiment they awaken in our breasts. To our crepuscular natures, born for the conflict, the Rembrandtesque moral chiaroscuro, the sliifting struggle of the sunbeam in the gloom, such pictures of light upon light are vacuous and expression¬ less, and neither to be enjoyed nor understood. If this be the whole fruit of the victory, we say; if the genera¬ tions of mankind suffered and laid down their lives; if prophets confessed and martyrs sang in the fire, and all the sacred tears were shed for no other end than that a race of creatures of such unexampled insipidity should suc¬ ceed, and protract in scecida sceculorum their contented and inoffensive lives, — why, at such a rate, better lose than win the battle, or at all events better ring down the curtain before the last act of the play, so that a business 1 Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
that began so importantly may be saved from so singu¬ larly flat a winding-up.”
Now not only does all this seem true in such cases, but we have similar feelings about even so ideal a picture of happy future life as is Shelley’s, in the last act of the “ Prometheus.” There are indeed many deeper elements in that noble ideal of Shelley’s, for he distinctly says that his true ideal is “ Man — Oh! not men ”; or, as he again expresses it: — “ One undivided soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine control, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea.”
And when he says this, he gets far beyond mere he¬ donism. But yet there are other elements in his account that are not so satisfactory, and that are decidedly hedonistic. Their expression is indeed perfect. Surely if the noblest hedonism could ever succeed with us through the noblest of statements, such an advocate as Shelley would convince us. But when the poet glorifies mere individual pleasure, as he does in part of his picture, our clearest reflection is that, after all, the end of the tragedy is petty when compared with the beginning.
For consider what a world it is in which we begin the poem. At first glance it is a gloomy and terri¬ ble world of brutal wrong. But soon the picture grows brighter, even while the wrong is depicted. There is the glorious figure of the suffering Titan, there is the sweetness of the tender love that watches him; and above the tyrant himself one feels that there is somehow a heavenly might, that does not suffer him to do his worst. The world in which these things live is not intolerable. But then come the spirits that sing to Prometheus, in his anguish, of immortal deeds done on the earth, of great thoughts and lofty passions. All these are born of the conflict, and have their being in the midst of the terrors of the tyrant’s dominion. It is indeed no perfect world, this; and one needs some higher light, such as Prometheus has, to prophesy that the good will ever triumph; but one sees forthwith that from the perfect world, if it ever comes, these great strivings for good, this sublime devotion and love and heroism, must not wholly vanish. These things must not be laid aside like old garments whenever Prometheus wins and is free; their spirit must be preserved as an element in the higher life of the future. If they are worth anything, their true na¬ ture must be eternal.
And as for the real worth of this world in which the evil is so far triumphant — we learn something of that from Demogorgon. This mysterious being has indeed no very definite religious philosophy to offer. He meets plain questions with vague an¬ swers, when Asia and Panthea catechise him; and one feels it to be well for his reputation as a pro¬ found teacher that his questioners are neither men nor Socratic inquirers. But still what he tells of the deep truth that is “ imageless,” is enough to make us feel that even this world of horrors is not without a divine significance. Jove reigns, but, whatever the visible world may be, the truth of things is a world of hope and love, where the real God is somehow above all and through all, a Spirit of Eternal Goodness.
To have found this out in the midst of all the evil is surely not to have found life wholly vain.
But then what happens? By the accident that, according to Shelley, rules the world, the revolution is accomplished, and Zeus is hurled headlong into the abyss. What glorious life shall now begin? When the deep and magnificent truth that was felt to be be¬ neath all the horror of the tyrant’s reign, comes out into full light, what tongue shall be able to sing the glories of that beatific vision? We listen eagerly — and we are disappointed. Prometheus arises grandly from his bed of torture, and then — he forthwith bethinks himself of a very pretty cave, where one might be content to rest a long time in the refined company of agreeable women. There one will lie, and wreathe flowers, and tell tales, and sing songs, and laugh and weep; and the hours will fly swiftly by. And then what will become of the rest of the world? Oh, this world simply becomes a theatre of like individual enjoyments. Everybody to his cave and his flowers and his agreeable companions. And that will then be all. No organization; just good fellowship and fragmentary amusements.
No, that cannot be all. Shelley felt as much, and added the last act of the play. There we are to have depicted grandly and vaguely the life of or¬ ganized love. The world shall be all alive, and the universal life shall join in the hymn of praise. All the powers of reality shall feel the new impulse of perfect harmony, and what shall spring from their union shall be some higher kind of existence, in which there is no longer to be any talk of thine and mine; but the “ one undivided soul of many a soul,” “ where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea,” shall enter upon a life of transcendent significance, upon a task of eternal duration, and of a meaning too high for us poor mortals of this present world well to comprehend. But this is no longer pure hedonism, although the verses hereabouts are so full of the joyous outbursts and of the anticipations of rapture. In fine, the outcome is no perfect and har¬ monious conception at all. We find the joy of the freed and loving, yet still separate selves, and the higher life of the all-pervading universal spirit, both alike glorified; and we never get from the poet any clearness about their actual relation. Is the world blessed just because the tyrant no longer interferes with each man’s flower-wreathing and other amuse¬ ments? Or is the sole source of bliss the disposi¬ tion of everybody to give everybody else everything?
Or is the real source of the perfection this: that these souls, no longer oppressed by hatred, have at last come to feel not only their freedom, but also some higher aim of universal life? Shelley hints, but does not consistently make us feel, what his real result is. There was in fact always about Shelley that childish innocence of benevolent hope, to which the only evil seemed to be the hatred of men for one another, and the highest good the outburst of uni¬ versal kindliness. Now that is the beginning of moral insight, but cannot be all of it. As if the be¬ nevolence would not turn out to be utter emptiness, unless there is something beyond it! As if There could be any value in this unity of life, unless there is something to be done by the one life after it is united! As if the moral insight must not reveal some deeper truth than can be seen in its first mo¬ ments!
One expects what we are coming to. In discuss¬ ing this problem of Shelley’s we are reaching the sense that the moral insight must be yet further completed, or else it will be all in vain. The moral insight says to us all: Act as one being. "W e must come to that point; but we must also go beyond. We must ask: What is this one being to do, after the insight has made all the individuals of one will? And we already begin to see, in opposition to hedon¬ ism, that it cannot be the end of this universal will simply to make of us so and so many new separate individuals once more. The mass of tediously happy selves seems insipid to our common sense, just be¬ cause we all dimly feel the truth that we must now come to understand better, namely, that the univer¬ sal will of the moral insight must aim at the de¬ struction of all which separates us into a heap of different selves, and at the attainment of some higher positive organic aim. The “one undivided soul” we are bound to make our ideal. And the ideal of that soul cannot be the separate happiness of you and of me, nor the negative fact of our freedom from hatred, but must be something above us all, and yet very positive.
Had we deduced our principle in any other way than the one we chose, we should be unable to take this, our present necessary step forwards. The feel¬ ing of sympathy, for instance, is concerned with the individual object of our sympathy. To sympathize with all men is to wish everybody happy, each aftei his own fashion. But we rejected that emotional sympathy as such. We said: The facts of life show us a conflict of wills. To realize this conflict is to see that no will is more justified in its separateness than is any other. This realization is ethical skep¬ ticism, a necessary stage on the way to the true moral insight. The ethical doubt means and is the realization of the conflict. But this realization means, as we see on reflection, a real will in us that unites these realized wills in one, and demands the end of their conflict. This is our realization of an Universal Will. The rest of our doctrine must be the development of the nature of the universal will. This will first says to each of the individual wills: “ Submit thyself to me.” Or otherwise put, let each will be so acted out as if by One Being who combined in himself all the other wills. Hence the universal will must demand, not the indefinitely con¬ ceived or dimly and sentimentally desired separate satisfaction of everybody, but an organic union of life; such an union as this our world would try to make of itself if it were already in empirical fact what the universal will demands it to be, namely, one Self. This one Self, however, could no longer will to cut itself up again into the separate empir¬ ical selves, any more than it could in any narrow, priggish fashion set itself up for a new specimen of a lofty individual, to be obeyed as an arbitrary law¬ giver. It would demand all the wealth of life that the separate selves now have; and all the unity that any one individual now seeks for himself. It would aim at the fullest and most organized life conceiv¬ able. And this its aim would become no longer merely a negative seeking for harmony, but a posi¬ tive aim, demanding the perfect Organization of Life.
HI.
But the postulate of all hedonism, utilitarian or other, this postulate of the absolute worth of indi¬ vidual satisfaction, finds its practical refutation for every growing character in yet another form. Every¬ body has tried to realize the ideal of individualism, this ideal of a happy or satisfied self, either for him¬ self or for some loved one; and everybody finds, if he tries the thing long enough, what a hollow and worthless business it all is. If there is, or is possible anywhere, a really satisfied self, it certainly has no place in any fleshly body; and the reason is not alone what disappointed people call the “ disagree¬ able order of things in this wicked world,” but the inner contradictions of this notion of a perfected hu¬ man self. Let us remind ourselves of some of these contradictions.
Hedonism has no meaning, unless the satisfied hu¬ man self is logically possible. The ideal of hedon¬ ism, with all its vagueness, has at least one essential element, in that it demands the satisfaction of hu¬ man selves by the free supply of all that they desire for themselves. Hedonism therefore must and does assert that what a man desires is his own content¬ ment; so that, if you could, physically speaking, give him all that he asks for himself, you would have reached the goal for him. But now, if all this is a delusion, if in fact a man does not really want his own satisfaction alone, but does actually want some¬ thing more, that is not his individual satisfaction, and that is not to be attained through his satisfaction, then the hedonistic ideal does not express the truth of life. And this paradoxical experience we all get, sooner or later. We find that our little self does desire something that, if gained, would be not its own satisfaction at all, but its own destruction in its separate life as this self. So the aim of life cannot be ultimately hedonistic. For, if possessed of the moral insight, we cannot will that each self should get the greatest possible aggregate of separate satis¬ factions, when in truth no one of the selves seeks merely an aggregate of self-satisfactions as such, but when each does seek something else that is unattain¬ able in the form of separate self-satisfaction.
But possibly a reader may incredulously demand where the proof is of this self-contradictory desire that all the selves are declared to have. The proof lies in the general fact that to be fully conscious of one s own individual life as such is to be conscious of a distressing limitation. This limitation every one very shrewdly notices for the first in other people. The knowledge of it expresses itself in personal crit¬ icism. One first puts the matter very naively thus, that, whereas the rule of life for one’s own person is simply to get all the satisfaction that one can, the appearance of anybody else who pretends to be con¬ tent with Aiwzself must be the signal not for admiration at the sight of his success, but for a good deal of contempt. One sees at once that he is a person of serious limitations. One sees and feels perfections that the other has not. One despises then the other man’s complacency, because it is so plainly founded in illusion. “ If he could only see himself as others see him,” one says, “ he could not be self-satisfied.” Criticism thus seems to indicate why he ought to be discontented, and why he would, if he knew more, feel a contempt for himself. All such criticism is really an abandonment of the hedonistic principle.
If an individual ought to be dissatisfied, although he is actually satisfied, and if he ought to be dissatisfied merely because he has not some perfection that ex¬ ists in somebody else, then the doctrine that a self reaches its goal in so far as it reaches inner content¬ ment is given up. No benevolent hedonist has any business to criticise a happy man who is harming nobody by his happiness. He is at the goal, or ap¬ proximately so. Let him alone. To do otherwise, by criticising him, is a crime.
But no; every one feels that the true goal is not attained for this man. And this feeling, though in itself as feeling it proves nothing, is the first sug¬ gestion to many of some deeper truth. This truth, however, enters like iron into his soul, when some¬ body else ably and justly and severely criticises him in his turn. Here, for example, I have been for a time content with myself, and have been saying to my soul: “ Soul, take thy ease,” and here comes one who says to me, very justly, “ Thou fool,” and point j out some great lack in my conduct, or in my character, or in my knowledge. And now I have a strange experience of conflicting passions. This critic has caused me a sharp pang. Perhaps I hate him for it; but then, when I go away and think the matter over, I see that as to the fact, he is right. This great lim¬ itation does actually exist for me, and perhaps I can¬ not remove it; so I can but suffer from the sense of it. I was innocent and ignorant before, and there¬ fore happy. If the critic had not showed me to myself, I should have kept this bliss. But it is in vain now to think of returning to that innocence. I am indeed a wretch and a fool; and how shall I escape myself? Alas for my lost pleasure in con¬ templating my fancied perfection!
But no: cannot I in fact return to that ignorance, and to the blissful illusion of my own worth once more? Surely I can if I but try awhile. To flatter myself, to curse the critic, to talk of his jealousy and of his blindness: surely this will bring me back to my ignorance again in time. He will be forgotten, and I contented. But once more, my enlightened self revolts from this lie. The defect is real, and I know it. W ould my ignorance make it less real? To have this defect and to suffer from it is bad enough; but with horror do I now contemplate the state of going on forever with this defect, but still ignorant of it and so not suffering from it. My old innocence seems really pitiful. It actually adds much to my present pang of chagrin, that I previously ought to have felt the chagrin, and yet had it not. I tremble when I reflect how, amid all that selfish complacency, I really was a fool the whole time, and appeared so to discerning people, and yet knew it not. And therefore now, through all the pang of the discovery, runs the feeling that I would not if I could, no, not for any delight of complacency, return to that state of hollow, delicious, detestable igno¬ rance. It was a fool’s paradise; but I have escaped from it. I know my nakedness, and I prefer the fruit of the tree of knowledge, with bitter exile, to the whole of the delights of that wretched place. It is a contradictory state, this. My knowledge is torture to my foolish, sensitive self; yet while I writhe with the vainest of pangs, I despise utterly the thought of escaping it by illusion, or by forgetfulness, or by any means save the actual removal or conquest of the defect. And this I feel even when the defect is seen to be utterly irremovable without the destruc¬ tion of myself. Better go on despising myself, and feeling the contempt of others, than return to the delights of foolishness; or, if the pain of knowing what I am is insupportable, then it were better to die, than to live in despicable ignorance. Oh, wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me?
Is all this mere emotion? or is it insight? In fact it is a growing, though still imperfect insight, a form of the moral insight. The pangs of this wounded self-love are themselves in truth also van¬ ity, like the complacent self-love that they mourn; but only through the gateway of this pain can most people get beyond these vanities of individualism. For this wounded self-love, that refuses to be com¬ forted by any deliberate return to its old illusions, is, as Adam Smith long since pointed out, an emotional expression of the result of putting ourselves at the point of view of our critics. We see our limitations as they see them. Our will conforms itself, therefore, to their contemptuous will concern¬ ing us, because we realize the existence of that will.
In recognizing and sharing their contempt, we there¬ fore realize in part the universal will that must con¬ demn all individual limitations as such. We prac¬ tically experience the truth that a perfectly fair judge of us all would not be satisfied merely with our indi¬ vidual contentments as such, but would also demand the destruction of all our individual limitations. W e thus get practically far beyond hedonism. We see that as we are weak and wretched in the eyes of one another, we should all be far more so in the eyes of a god Our ideal of life must then be the notion of a life where no one being could fairly criticise any other at all. But such a life would be no longer a life of separate individuals, each limited to his petty sphere of work. It would be a life in which self was lost in a higher unity of all the conscious selves.
Singular may appear this conception even now, after all that we have said; but it is a practical con¬ ception in our every-day human life. That we criti¬ cise the limitations of others, and desire them to sac¬ rifice their pleasures for the sake of removing these limitations, may be regarded at first as our cruel ca¬ price, if you will so regard it. But when the edge of the sword is turned against us, when we, feeling the bitterness of criticism and seeing our limitations, long to be beyond them, hate ourselves for them, and yet refuse to escape from the pain of all this by forgetfulness of the defect, we pass from capricious criticism to something higher. We accept with ag¬ ony the point of view of the one who stands outside of us. And, so doing, we pass in effect to the accep¬ tance of the demands of the universal will. If there were a will that included in one consciousness all our separate wills, it could not will our individual de¬ fects as such. It would be absolute critic, as well as absolute harmonizer, of all of us. It would tear down these individual barriers of our petty lives, as the corporation of a great city may tear down wretched old rookeries. It would demand that we be one in spirit, and that our oneness be perfect. But if we experience this universal will, we experi¬ ence that hedonism, whose life-blood is the insistence upon individual states as such, cannot be upheld by the moral insight, either now, or at any future stage of our human life on this earth. We perceive too that we all have a deep desire for self-destruction, in so far as we recognize that our self-love means ab¬ sence of perfection.
IV.
IV.
We have seen in general the moral outcome of in¬ dividualism. Let us study some of its forms and for¬ tunes more in detail. Individualism, viewed as the tendency to hold that the ideal of life is the separate happy man, is itself very naturally the normal ten¬ dency of unreflecting strong natures, to whom happi¬ ness has been in a fair human measure already given. Children and child-like men, full of vigor, are inno¬ cently selfish; or, when they act unselfishly, their whole ideal is the making of others like themselves.
They fall into a notion about life that the author not long since heard well-expressed by a cheerful young friend, a former fellow-student, who, having early plunged into a busy life, has already won both influence and property. This man, full of the enthu¬ siasm of first success, was talking over his life with the writer, and fell to defining his opinions on vari¬ ous subjects, such as young men like to discuss. At last he was asked about the view of life that he had already formed in his little experience. He was quick, honest, and definite in his answer, as he al¬ ways has been. “ My notion of a good life is,” he said, “ that you ought to help your friends and whack your enemies.” The notion was older than the speaker remembered; for Socratic dialogues on the Just, with their ingenious Sophists making bold as¬ sertions, form no part of his present stock of sub¬ jects for contemplation. But what was interesting in the fresh and frank manner of the speech was the clearness of the conviction that a world of suc¬ cessful and friendly selves, whose enemies chanced to be all recently “ whacked,” would be at the goal of bliss. Such indeed is and must be the individ¬ ualism of the successful and unreflecting man, by whom all the world is classified as being either his or not his, as to a cow all is either cow feed or not cow feed. A man in this position has never yet known the burden of Faust’s soul when he says, Cursed be what as possession charms us. If such a man gets any