Appendix E
Isabella and Claudio
The ethics of sex-relations has always formed a crucial question in ethical systems. Let me recall a remarkable debate upon it which took place recently between a champion of the Spencerian system, Dr. Saleeby, and Mr. W. S. Lilly, who represented, of course, the view of Catholic orthodoxy.
Mr. Lilly, in an article on Shakespere’s Religion contributed to the Fortnightly Review for June, 1904, was led to dwell on “the strikingly Catholic ethos of the play Measure for Measure, informed as it is by the idea, quite alien from the Protestant mind, of the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Hazlitt, whom Mr. Lilly takes to represent the typical Protestant view, had declared himself “not greatly enamoured” of Isabella’s inflexible purity, and had expressed his want of “confidence in the virtue that is sublimely good at another’s expense.” Mr. Lilly added that Spencer’s teaching would have countenanced Hazlitt’s judgment and enjoined upon Isabella compliance with Angelo’s desire. Dr. Saleeby having denounced this as an “outrageous” perversion of Spencer’s meaning, Mr. Lilly vindicates himself in a letter to the Fortnightly as follows:—
“I pointed, in a letter appearing in your July number, to Mr. Spencer’s express declaration, in the Data of Ethics, that the elements out of which the conceptions of right and wrong are framed are pleasures and pains, and that ‘conduct is considered by us as good or bad, according as its aggregate results to self or others, or both, are pleasurable or painful.’ I concluded, therefore, that if we are to go by Mr. Spencer’s ‘scientific ethics,’ Isabella ought to have been willing to make the sacrifice of her virginity in order to prevent the disagreeable feeling which would be caused to herself through the loss of a beloved brother, to Claudio through the process of decapitation, and to Angelo through disappointed desire, and thus to have procured, as ‘aggregate results,’ a great balance of pleasure over pain to all concerned” (Fortnightly Review, September, 1906).
Dr. Saleeby’s answer to this is the obvious one that the Spencerian ethics do not contemplate immediate personal pleasures and pains, but rather ultimate utility to the race at large, and that “Isabella’s virtue, if merely by example alone, would make for the strengthening of the society in which she found herself.” Mr. Lilly then practically surrenders his first position—he admits that Spencer’s “scientific ethics” are intended to have little or no concern with the immediate sensations of Isabella, Claudio, and Angelo, but he turns to confront Dr. Saleeby and Spencer from a new and much stronger position. What claim, he asks, have “scientific ethics” on the individual? Ultimate utility for the race might (if one could estimate it correctly) be taken as giving us the what of moral action, but can it ever give us the why? Isabella was not thinking of “ultimate utility” in her refusal, but of the laws that Sophocles wrote of so memorably, “unwritten and invincible laws which ever live, and no man knows their birthplace.” She was not thinking of the effect of her example—her action would have been, and ought to have been, just the same though she had had the most complete assurance that none but Angelo and herself would ever know the reason for Claudio’s pardon. The motive which constrained her was derived from the system of ethics which Spencer’s was constructed to replace. This new system has never succeeded in supplying an answer to the demand of the individual man or woman, ‘What is the advantage of the race to me that I should sacrifice the least of my inclinations for its sake?’ But till that piercing question is answered, all hedonistic systems, however elaborate and perfect their fabric, are building on “wood, hay, stubble.” Touch their foundations with the pitiless edge of that question, and in a moment they are in the dust. So far, in effect, Mr. Lilly.
Before we go on to deal with these conflicting views of the ethical problem in Measure for Measure, let us take a parallel presentation in literature of the same problem, in which the implied judgment of the dramatist appears entirely different. Maeterlinck, in his Monna Vanna, shows us a beautiful and high-souled woman, the loving and faithful wife of the commandant of the city of Pisa. The city is beleaguered by foes, its power of defence is at an end, an assault is imminent, and the inhabitants will be exposed to all the havoc and outrage which attended warfare in the days when the conceptions so much prized by Mr. Lilly held undisputed sway. The captain of the besieging Florentine forces, a great soldier of fortune named Prinzivalle, had been an ancient playmate of Monna Vanna, and, unknown to her, had been her ardent lover. Being entreated for mercy, he sends an ultimatum. Let Monna Vanna spend a night in his tent, and he will provision the city and withdraw his army next day. Amid the indignation and distraction which the cruel dilemma causes in the household of the prince, Monna Vanna’s resolve shapes and hardens itself. She decides to sacrifice herself for the city. But Prinzivalle finds her a woman of marble. Her soul is so high-strung with heroic devotion that she regards her body as little as a cast-off rag—she is become as incapable of fear or shrinking as she is of base desire. His passion is chilled by the icy completeness of her self-surrender, while all that is noble in him responds to her nobility, and the city is saved without the terrible sacrifice which she was ready to perform.
Such is the tale of Monna Vanna, so far as it concerns our present discussion. In reading it, it is impossible not to feel that she was right, just as in reading Measure for Measure it is impossible not to feel that Isabella was right. What has a system of natural ethics, a system based on the conception of life and nature put forward in this book, to say upon the searching ethical question involved in these two great dramas? It is not an easy nor a pleasant question to subject to philosophic analysis, but it is a very important and critical one.
In the first place neither science nor sense will, I think, agree with Mr. Lilly’s estimate of “the surpassing excellence and sacrosanct character of virginal chastity.” Virginity, in itself and apart from all qualifying circumstances, is the reverse of excellent and admirable. It means death, not life; it violates nature. What is really sound doctrine in this connexion is not the sanctity and excellence of virginity, but the deep degradation of making sexual relations a subject of barter. Wherever this prevails, whatever the church and the law may or may not have had to do with the transaction, the beauty and romance of life is blighted and destroyed. There is no conquest of culture which should be guarded more devotedly than the dignity and sweetness which are brought into the relations of man and woman by love, as the great poets have understood that word, love moving in its guarded circle of mutual trust and intimacy. A life is well lost in defence of this most sacred treasure of the spirit.
Isabella and Monna Vanna both felt this truth in the depths of their nature as all good women do. Yet absolute laws of action can rarely, if ever, be laid down to cover every individual case. One can conceive either of them deciding as Monna Vanna actually did. But in the realm of high tragedy which we are now dealing with, where principles and actions have a simplicity and integrity rarely found in common life, it must be felt that neither of them could have taken up life again as if nothing had happened. Had they recognized that there were higher reasons stringent enough to compel them to tread the way to that sacrifice, they would, I think, like the Roman Lucretia, have solemnly marked it with their life-blood as an expiation, and as a warning, were it only to Prinzivalle or Angelo, that such a thing must not be done save at the most terrible cost that man can pay. For Isabella, then, the problem would practically resolve itself into the question whether she should surrender her own life for that of a single worthless relative. There was no moral obligation on her to do that. Had she loved him so intensely as to go willingly to her doom for his sake, no one could have blamed her; no one could blame her if she refused, and bade him summon up his manhood to die for his own sin.
But in Monna Vanna’s case it was not a single life that was at stake, but the life and honour of a multitude of men and women with whose protection, moreover, she was, in part, charged by the high position she held in their midst. If right and wrong are to be interpreted as Mr. Lilly would interpret them, solely with regard to the arbitrary commands of a supernatural Power, then the extent to which a given action may influence life can hardly be a matter of any moment. On the other hand, in Spencer’s scheme, with its criterion of the greatest ultimate pleasure of the greatest number, hardly anything else can matter except precisely this question of the extent or area affected by our action. In the scheme of natural ethics which I am trying to commend, and which, if I am right, grows logically out of the conception of a living universe, the element of extent has its due place in determining action, but none in fixing the character of the action. And this, it may be observed, is just what the good sense of humanity has practically arrived at in its daily judgments and doings. No ordinary man would be required by any ethical law to lay down his life as a substitute for another who had no claim on him. But for a community, or a man such as a sovran, who for the time represents a community and embodies its interests, it would be thought base not to die if occasion demanded it. And so Monna Vanna might rightly feel herself constrained to do for her city what Isabella was in no way required to do for a brother, but the quality of the action would remain in each case the same, and the tragedy could have ended nobly only in the one stern way.
On the general question of the ordering of sex-relations, it needs no argument to show that the conditions fixed by nature forbid them, in the interests of life, to be casual and fleeting. On the other hand to require that, when these relations have once been entered into, no vices, no cruelty, no variance of any kind on either side would justify the dissolution of the connexion and the formation of a new one, is surely a superstitious exaggeration of a principle in itself right and sound. Probably the law and practice in England at the present day are as good a rough approximation to a sound marriage system as man has yet devised; with, however, this large qualification, that cases of divorce when they come before the law should be heard in camera. The Anglo-Saxon has not yet got rid of all his superstitions, and his belief in salvation by publicity is distinctly one of them.
Footnotes
1 Metabolism: see p. 27.
2 J. Reinke. Die Welt als Tat, p. 173. The term ‘development’ (Entwicklung) includes both what we commonly understand by that term (as, the transformation of an embryo into a complete animal) and also what we call Evolution, the development of one species into another.
3 See p. 24.
4 Sylva Sylvarum, Century VI.
5 Zoonomia, Vol. II, p. 247, third edition, 1801. Darwin is here adopting David Hume’s conjecture, which is worked out in some detail in the Zoonomia, the conclusion being that probably “one and the same kind of living filaments is and has been the cause of all organic life” (p. 244). He attributed evolution to internal forces impressed on living matter by the Creator.
6 He taught that nature had produced a multitude of disconnected parts which afterwards combined and recombined at random until the appropriate parts had come together and remained stable.
7 Αἰὼν πάντα φέρει. δολιχὸς χρόνος οἶδεν ἀμείβειν
Οὔνομα καὶ μορφὴν καὶ φύσιν ἠδὲ τύχην.
Jac. Anth., II, 20.
8 “It has lately become the fashion, at least among the younger school of biologists, to attach small value to natural selection, if not, indeed, to regard it as a superseded formula.” (A. Weismann, The Evolution Theory, Engl. trans., II, 391.)
9 Text Book of Botany, p. 3. English translation by Dr. H. C. Porter, 1898. In the fifth German edition, which served as the basis of a revised English translation (1903), another passage (taking note of De Vries’ Mutations Theory) is substituted for the above quoted, but the essential meaning is the same.
10 Leitfaden in das Studium der experimentellen Biologie der Wassertiere, p. 67. The subject is ably treated by Keyserling, Das Gefüge der Welt, p. 190.
11 For instance, the development of an embryo in the womb takes place in strict accordance with physico-chemical laws. But withdraw the element which we call life and how different a set of processes would at once supervene! Yet the physical energies in the embryo would remain in amount exactly what they were before.
12 See Weismann, The Evolution Theory, II, 358.
13 For my own part, I may say I have a difficulty in conceiving the Divine under the human and limited category of intelligent personality.
14 Das Gefüge der Welt, Hermann Graf v. Keyserling, 1906.
15 See Appendix A.
16 See Jagadis Chunder Bose, Response in the Living and the Non-Living, passim. The following passage sums up the results of many delicate experiments in the response to electrical stimulus. “We have seen,” writes the Indian physicist, “that the criterion by which vital response is differentiated is its abolition by the action of certain reagents—the so-called poisons. We find, however, that ‘poisons’ also abolish the response in plants and metals. Just as animal tissues pass from a state of responsiveness while living to a state of irresponsiveness when killed by poisons, so also we find metals transformed from a responsive to an irresponsive condition by the action of similar poisonous reagents” (p. 188).
17 At a meeting of the British Association in 1905, Professor H. A. Miers, in a lecture on ‘The Growth of a Crystal,’ is reported to have said, The most wonderful feature of crystals was the manner in which they grew, just as though they were living things. Two features deserved special attention. The first was the remarkable power crystals possessed of healing themselves when mutilated. If a growing crystal were removed from a solution, broken at one of its corners, and re-immersed in the solution, it would continue to grow, and as it grew would restore the missing part, and become once more a completely symmetrical figure. This power of continuing to grow was possessed by a crystal even after countless ages, so soon as it was immersed into the appropriate solution. In this sense the crystal was immortal, for it never lost its vitality, or power of growing. The other remarkable feature was the growth of crystals in over-saturated solutions. In solutions only slightly over-saturated, no spontaneous generation of crystals was possible. It was true that a solution only slightly over-saturated would often begin to crystallize, apparently spontaneously, when exposed to the air, but this was because there were minute crystal fragments of the dissolved substance floating about in the air which got into the solution with the dust and so inoculated the solution with crystal germs, just as the human body might be inoculated with disease by a disease germ. If these germs were kept out, the solution would not crystallize until it was very strongly over-saturated, and then, at a certain strength, it would suddenly begin to crystallize spontaneously and with great rapidity.—Times, August 5, 1907.
18 The Nature and Origin of Life (Eng. trans.), p. 250.
19 It is not to be assumed, however, that these substances are merely passive objects in the process. The life which is in them has doubtless as much to do with the result as the life which is in the plant. This is a side of the question which calls for further investigation.
20 It is however suggested by Professor E. Ray Lankester, in his article, ‘Protozoa,’ in the Encyclopædia Britannica, that the most primitive forms of organic life did not possess chlorophyll but fed on albuminoids, etc., which constituted the earliest steps in their own evolution.
21 In Beddard’s Animal Coloration note is taken of the green fur of the sloth as a most uncommon if not unique phenomenon. It has been ascertained that the sloth has grooved or fluted hairs, which form the habitat of a minute green fungus to which the colour is due.
22 Or starch, which easily decomposes into sugar, and which is composed of the same elements.
23 Ray Lankester, op. cit.
24 Verworn, General Physiology, pp. 102, 478: “Physiological chemistry has shown that between the two kinds of substance very essential chemical differences exist, which prove that living substance experiences in dying pronounced chemical changes. A widespread difference between the two consists in their reaction. The reaction of living substance is almost without exception alkaline or neutral, and with death changes usually to acid.... Physiological chemistry has shown similar changes in death in great number. All these facts prove that in the death of living cell-substance certain chemical compounds undergo transformations; hence substances exist in it which are not to be found in dead cell-substance.”
25 In 1892. An English translation of Bütschli’s work on Microscopic Foams and Protoplasm, by E. A. Minchin, appeared in 1894. The nucleus is really a form of protoplasm, chiefly differentiated from the ‘cytoplasm,’ or protoplasm of the cell, by containing a large amount of phosphorus.
26 The Cell in Development and Inheritance, 2nd edition, p. 9.
27 By J. A. and M. R. Thomson, 1904.
28 The Evolution Theory, II, p. 391.
29 Ibid., I, p. 368.
30 Ibid., I, p. 404.
31 The Evolution Theory, I, p. 353.
32 Ibid., II, p. 52.
33 But note the transition stage exemplified in the natural history of crystals (vide p. 22).
34 “It has been Weismann’s great service to place the keystone between the work of the evolutionists and that of the cytologists, and thus to bring the cell-theory and the evolution-theory into organic connexion” (E. B. Wilson, The Cell, p. 13).
35 Prof. Wilson’s work on the cell (see note on p. 33) may be referred to for a comprehensive and detailed statement of all that is known at present on this subject.
36 According to Wilson (op. cit.) this was guessed by Haeckel in 1866, and confirmed in 1884-5 by the almost simultaneous discoveries of O. Hertwig, Strasburger, Kölliker, and Weismann.
37 Sixteen have been counted in the human cell. A grasshopper has twelve, a lily twenty-four. The number is almost always an even one, but as with everything in Nature there are exceptions to the rule.
38 The process briefly described above is that of ‘mitotic’ division (μίτος, a thread, from the appearance of the chromosomes). Amitotic division, in which the cell and nucleus simply divide in two without the formation of chromosomes, also occurs under certain conditions, but is usually an abnormal or degenerative process (cf. Wilson, The Cell, pp. 116-119).
39 “Every animal appears as a sum of vital entities, each of which bears within itself the complete character of life” (Virchow, Cellular-pathologie, p. 12, 1858).
40 Weismann, The Evolution Theory, I, 251.
41 It is cast out into the cytoplasm—the substance surrounding the nucleus—where it degenerates (see Wilson, The Cell, p. 147).
42 Amœbæ. See p. 30.
43 The Evolution Theory, I, 265.
44 The Cell, p. 178.
45 Scientific Papers and Addresses, II, pp. 862-3.
46 English trans., 2nd edition (1903), p. 159.
47 The Cell, p. 434.
48 Against this view might be quoted the fact that the unfertilized eggs sometimes laid by the workers (imperfect females) of bee and ant communities always develop into drones.
49 Pp. 262-3. The bird was examined by Prof. Max Weber, of Amsterdam, and Mr. Beddard refers to the Zoologischer Anzeiger for 1890, p. 508, for Weber’s account of the case.
50 The now famous Mendelian Law of Inheritance, first discovered in 1865 by Mendel, an Augustinian monk and Abbott of Brünn, and completely ignored till the year 1900, when it was rediscovered by De Vries and others, is also strongly confirmatory of Weismann’s analysis of the principle of heredity. According to this law it is possible, as it were, to isolate any particular characteristic of a species or even (if heritable) of an individual, and by a definite system of crossing to attach this characteristic alone to any other variety capable of crossing with the first. This means that inheritance is governed by separable units of formative energy. These units are Weismann’s determinants. The discovery of the methods of turning this principle to practical account is obviously of great importance for agriculture and stockbreeding. The law has some inexplicable limitations which are now closely engaging the attention of biologists. It is impossible to enter upon the subject more fully here, but a good account of it will be found in Lock’s Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, and in a brochure, An Address on Mendelian Heredity, by W. Bateson, reprinted from Brain, pt. cxiv, 1906.
51 The actual stimulus which prompts the division is probably to be found in the disturbance of equilibrium which arises when the cell is taking in more nutriment than its digestive system can deal with. This, of course, does not explain why it should divide instead of dying of indigestion.
52 See Strasburger, loc. cit.
53 The Evolution Theory, I, 402-3.
54 The subject of degenerated and lost organs is very fully treated by M. Edmond Perrier in his Traité de Zoologie, pp. 325 sqq. It may be noted that animals which are fixed usually lack eyes, even in light. In the depths of the sea, where total darkness reigns except for the phosphorescence emitted by certain animals, it is found that some creatures have completely lost their organs of sight, while others have them extraordinarily developed. Those which have lost them are the walkers (Crustaceæ); those which show an exceptional development are the swimmers. This goes to show that the needs of the animal, rather than the external conditions, are the determining cause.
Cave fishes are all extremely sensitive to light, which affects them disagreeably, even when the optic nerve is wholly destroyed. See Armand Viré, La Faune Actuelle des Cavernes, Revue des Idées, March 15, 1905, and La Faune Souterraine de France, 1900.
55 A. R. Wallace, Darwinism, chapters III. and XV.
56 Origin of Species, chapter II.
57 Sexual selection—the competition of males and females for their mates—is merely a form of natural selection, and need not be specially dealt with here.
58 Origin of Species, chapter V.
59 See Eimer, Organic Evolution (Eng. trans.), pp. 173-184, for a full discussion of the question from the Lamarckian standpoint.
60 ‘Right-handedness and Left-brainedness’ by D. J. Cunningham: the Huxley Lecture for 1902. Printed in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, Vol. XXXII, pp. 273-95. I may refer also to a brochure by Dr. Geo. Sigerson, F.R.U.I., Consideration of the Structural and Acquisitional Elements in Dextral Pre-eminence, Dublin, 1884. Dr. Sigerson believes that primitive man was ambidextrous, and that ‘dexterity’ is a case of specialization of function, and has supported this view by a novel and interesting line of pathological observation.
61 Op. cit., p. 285.
62 Ibid., pp. 284-5.
63 Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, Vol. XXXVI, p. 401. ‘On the relative weights of the right and left sides of the body in the foetus.’
64 Origin of Species, chap. VI.
65 ‘The Inadequacy of Natural Selection,’ Herbert Spencer. Contemporary Review, February and March, 1893.
‘Prof. Weismann’s Theories,’ Herbert Spencer. Contemporary Review, May, 1893.
‘The All-Sufficiency of Natural Selection,’ Aug. Weismann. Contemporary Review, September, 1893.
‘A Rejoinder to Prof. Weismann,’ Herbert Spencer. Contemporary Review, December, 1893.
The Romanes Lecture for 1894, by Aug. Weismann (Frowde).
66 ‘Lamarck et le Transformisme actuel’: Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, Centenaire; Vol. Commemoratif, 1903, p. 508. M. Perrier adds that the metaphysical alternative “est, en effet, à quoi le professeur A. Weismann, de Fribourg, a été conduit.” This, I think, can only be M. Perrier’s way of saying that he finds Weismann unintelligible, for Weismann’s ostensible object is certainly to steer between the Scylla of Lamarckism and the Charybdis of ‘metaphysics.’ With what success he attempts this feat we shall see.
[67] The Evolution Theory, II, p. 78.
68 II, p. 330 sqq.
69 The Evolution Theory, II., 346.
70 See p. 83.
71 The Evolution Theory, II, 264.
72 I take this from J. T. Cunningham’s Sexual Dimorphism, p. 16.
73 Useless structures and organs are regarded by Weismann, and I think with justice, as in some degree unfavourable. They make demands on the organism for nourishment, and are thus in the position of non-productive members of a working family.
74 Op. cit., p. 73. See Appendix B.
75 Wallace, Darwinism, p. 24.
76 Animal Coloration, p. 252.
77 Poulton, The Colours of Animals, p. 238.
78 Ibid., p. 237.
79 See p. 7, note 8.
80 Eng. trans. revised from fifth German edition, 1903, p. 3.
81 Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre. 1884.
82 See especially Organic Evolution, pp. 52, 3.
83 Organic Evolution, pp. 225, 433. Eimer is a believer in the inheritance of acquired characteristics; hence Oken’s conception, taken literally, offers him a ready method of disposing of the ant-problem dealt with on p. 85, sqq.
84 Organic Evolution, p. 268.
85 See Eimer, Organic Evolution, p. 135 sqq.
86 p. 62.
87 “It is,” writes Wilson, “becoming more and more clearly apparent... that Schwann went too far in denying the influence of the totality of the organism upon the local activities of the cells. It would of course be absurd to maintain that the whole can consist of more than the sum of its parts. Yet, as far as growth and development are concerned, it has now been clearly demonstrated that only in a limited sense can the cells be regarded as co-operating units. They are rather local centres of a formative power pervading the growing mass as a whole” (The Cell, pp. 58, 9).
What Prof. Wilson, absorbed like most scientists in the consideration of ponderable and visible masses, assumes to be “absurd” is of course the very thing which he is proving to be a fact The whole can be not merely the “sum” but the synthesis of its parts.
88 Die Welt als That., chap. XXIV.
89 Loc. cit.
90 Kräfte zweiter Hand. The primary forces are the chemical and mechanical forces, the secondary are those which control and guide these for certain ends.
91 Pp. 9, 10. The italics are Prof. Henslow’s.
92 This statement taken literally is, of course, quite too sweeping. Professor Henslow clearly means here by “variations” those alone which are important enough to have selection-value, favourable or otherwise. Insignificant variations are always occurring.
93 Henslow, Origin, etc., p. 102.
94 Ibid., p. 80.
95 Ibid., p. 40.
96 A. R. Wallace, Darwinism (1890), p. 427.
97 Marie v. Chauvin, ‘Ueber die Verwandlungsfähigkeit des mexikanischen Axolotl.’ Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Zoologie, XLI, p. 385. See also The Cambridge Natural History, sub voce.
98 Haeckel, History of Creation (English trans.), I, p. 150.
99 See also pp. 15, 16.
100 J. H. Newman.
101 See Principles of Sociology, Part II.
102 See Curtius, Griechische Etymologie, s.v., φημή, νέος.
103 Deus descends from a root meaning ‘to shine,’ hence the Day, the Sun, God; θεός is referred by Curtius to a root θες, to desire, pray—God is “der Angeflehte.”
104 Are there many Englishmen who would understand the following sentence which I lately came across in a St. Louis paper? “This graft was one of the scrap-head variety, and it was hard therefore to get the boodlers good.”
105 The ‘wheel’ is really a spiral—the line of all natural growth.
106 See p. 111.
107 Origin of Species, chapter VI.
108 Mechanisch-Physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre, p. 150.
109 Weismann, The Evolution Theory, I, p. 162.
110 Ibid., I, p. 177.
111 So the cogwheels of a machine designed for some useful purpose will lacerate the hand of a man who gets in their way.
112 See p. 85.
113 Darwinism and the Problems of Life, 1904. Eng. transl. by J. McCabe, 1905, pp. 354 sqq.
114 Orthogenesis der Schmetterlinge (1897). The passage will be found in Kellogg’s Darwinism To-day, p. 285. Instances of ‘regression,’ etc., are given by Kellogg, op. cit., p. 227.
115 When Heracleitus wrote “The One arises from the All and the All from the One” (Frag. LIX. Bywater) he was stating with his usual pregnant brevity a position of deep significance for modern scientific thought.
116 It must be borne in mind that strict physical continuity does not exist in nature. Sir Oliver Lodge has somewhere remarked that science is entirely at a loss to explain how it comes that when one picks up a stick by one end the rest of the stick comes up with it.
117 General Physiology, p. 550.
118 Published by Bell & Son, 1907.
119 Darwinism To-day, p. 377, quoting H. F. Osborn’s The Unknown Factors of Evolution. Osborn, like the writer (see p. 90), holds Spencer and Weismann to be mutually destructive. “If acquired variations are transmitted there must be therefore some unknown principle in heredity; if they are not transmitted there must be some unknown factor in evolution.”
120 Mechanisch-Physiologische Theorie der Abstammungslehre. See especially pp. 132, and 340 sqq.
121 Darwinism To-day, p. 278.
122 p. 49.
123 Ζεύς ἐστιν αἰθὴρ, Ζεὺς δὲ γῆ, Ζεὺς δ’ οὐρανὸς,
Ζεύς τοι τὰ πάντα, χὥτι τῶνδ’ ὑπέρτερον.
Frag., 295.
124 Walt Whitman, ‘The Answerer.’
125 Data of Ethics, 29.
126 See Appendix C.
127 Oxford and Cambridge Review, June, 1907. Sic also Bishop Berkeley, Alciphron, Dial. VII, 19, “A man is said to be free, so far forth as he can do what he will.” Berkeley’s analysis of this statement is substantially the same as that in the text.
128 Herbert Spencer, translating these physical terms into their psychic equivalents, declares that the illusion of Free Will “consists in supposing that at each moment the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists” (Psychology, I, p. 500). The pivot of the doctrine is the word aggregate. We have seen that the most primitive living organism is something more than that. Cf. p. 119 note.
129 Of course they are only relatively lower—there are no essentially ‘low’ motives in life at all.
130 The Will to Believe—‘The Dilemma of Determinism,’ p. 145 sqq.
131 Pragmatism, pp. 287-8. Compare Bishop Berkeley. “To me it seems, that if we begin from Things particular and concrete, and thence proceed to general Notions and Conclusions, there will be no Difficulty in this Matter. But if we begin with Generalities, and lay our Foundation in abstract Ideas, we shall find ourselves entangled and lost in a Labyrinth of our own making.” Alciphron, Dial. vii. 20. Berkeley had fully apprehended the Determinist position; see vii. 16.
132 p. 129, 5th edition, 1878. There is an evident fallacy in Mill’s position. The Deity who could make a hell and sentence men to it for not worshipping him could not also have created the conscience which would resist him. The authorship of the moral sense and of hell are not to be combined in our conception of the divine. But Mill, of course, in this flash of rhetoric, was merely taking popular religious conceptions as he found them.
133 p. 298.
134 Plato, in that great dialogue, the Phaedo, has a noteworthy passage on those who when once betrayed by Reason are apt to fall into unbelief or superstition, just as those who, when they have found bad faith among men, may fall into cynicism:—
“Would it not, Phaedo,” said Socrates, “be a lamentable condition, when a certain thesis is true, firm, and intelligible, if a man supporting something of the kind should find arguments which seemed true at one time to be false at another, and in the end, instead of blaming himself or his own want of skill, should, in his ill-temper, make haste to shuffle off the blame from his own shoulders to Reason itself, and spend the rest of his life in hating and slandering it, being deprived of the truth and science of things?”
“By Zeus,” said I, “it would be lamentable.”
“Let us take heed then, before all else, that we never admit into our minds the idea that there can be no soundness in reasonings, but rather believe that we ourselves are not yet sound, and study manfully and with a will how to be so” (§ xxxix).
135 Every mental acquisition, such as the knowledge of a new language, results in a definite alteration in a certain locality of the brain. The human brain, as an instrument of thought and knowledge, is, in fact, built up by a long series of purposeful efforts beginning in early infancy. These efforts do not, of course, originate in the matter of the brain itself, nor can the different nerves, which bring it messages from the outside world, carry with them anything of the nature of conscious purpose and will. These arise from Personality. I may refer for a full and very interesting treatment of this subject to Dr. W. H. Thomson’s work, Brain and Personality (1907).
136 In the Phaedo, xliii.
137 Microcosmus, Bk. II, Chaps. II and V.
138 Man, and man only
Can do the impossible;
He can Distinguish,
Choose, and give Judgment;
He to the moment lends
Power to endure.
139 This includes the nourishment and protection of its young while helpless.
140 This word is, I believe, used by Prof. Haeckel to describe his system of philosophy. I am very imperfectly acquainted with that system, and therefore think it well to note here that the term must not be taken with any special implications which Haeckel may have attached to it.
141 See pp. 17-20.
142 Deontology, I, p. 32.
143 Examination of Hamilton, pp. 586 sqq.
144 Data of Ethics, §20.
145 “I conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness” (Data of Ethics, §21). Happiness is always taken by Spencer as equivalent to pleasurable feeling.
146 Reason in Science, p. 252.
147 See Data of Ethics, p. 36. It has been proved by exact physiological experiment that happiness promotes healthy vital action in the living organism, and that sorrow and pain depress it. But of course human life is not conducted solely on the physiological plane.
148 Sic, Fr. Slater, S.J., in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, February, 1905. “If such a sum [£l] could be stolen without grave sin, its amount would prove too great a temptation for the virtue of large numbers of people who wish to save their souls, but make little of venial sins” (p. 109). But Fr. Ojetti is much more liberal to persons of the class described, and gives them up to £4 (p. 100).
149 I may draw attention in this connexion to a striking and valuable study of the effect of American democracy on Jewish immigrants published in the Times of January 4, 1908. As regards Catholicism, it appears from a comparison of the statistics of emigration from Ireland with those of Catholicism in the U.S.A. that about 50 per cent of the Irish Catholics abandon their religion in the New World. The Irish are also shown by the criminal statistics of the States as well as by the observation of students of the criminal classes like Mr. Josiah Flynt, to furnish a far greater proportion of criminals in that country than obtains in the case of any other nationality contributing to its population. Yet they also give to American life some of its very best elements, and they are notoriously the most crimeless of people at home. The degradation of character commonly produced by Christianizing the Hindu is so uniformly attested by residents in India that it cannot be discredited. See, in this reference, an article entitled ‘The Failure of Christian Missions in India,’ by Dr. Josiah Oldfield, Hibbert Journal, April, 1903. Of course it may be said that the original error lies in the identification of ritual and observance with religion and morality.
150 See Appendix D.
151 “Per l’ asprezza della penitenza e continuo piagnere, era diventato quasi cieco, e poco vedea.”—Fioretti, III. He had “wholly shattered his body,” says Thomas of Celano (Second Life of St. F., Ch. CLX.).
152 A discussion of the subject, with special reference to the rapid decay of the Franciscan Order, will be found in Mr. G. G. Coulton’s paper ‘The Failure of the Friars,’ in the Hibbert Journal for January, 1907. See also criticisms on this paper by two English Franciscans, Friar Cuthbert and Friar Stanilaus, in the same journal for April, 1907, and Mr. Coulton’s rejoinder, July, 1907.
153 When the ascetic ideal is regarded as admirable in a saint, it naturally leads to still more lamentable perversions by being practised by persons who have never withdrawn themselves from ordinary social relations. Thus a Catholic priest has lately given as an instance of the “spiritual tendency and unworldliness of the Irish peasant” the case of a farmer’s wife, the mother of a large family, who, by a long course of secret austerities, brought herself “to an untimely grave, and, no doubt,” adds the reverend author, “a martyr’s crown.” To keep herself in health and do her duty to her husband and children would, it appears, have been “worldliness.” Such cases, we are told, are not uncommon. (Scenes and Sketches in an Irish Parish, by the Rev. J. Guinan, C.C., 4th ed., 1906, p. 87.)
154 The Teaching of Epictetus, by T. W. Rolleston, p. 36. Dissertations, III, xxii.
155 Suns that have set return as bright,
But we, when sets our little light,
Sleep on through one eternal night.—Catullus, V.
156 The Nature and Origin of Life, by Felix Le Dantec, p. 22 (Engl. trans., 1907).
157 The Evolution of Matter.
158 Of course the question remains, What compressed the spring? If Matter and Motion are continually wasting, it follows that they must at some time have been originated, and that the power which originated them is not dependent on them.
159 The Teaching of Epictetus, p. 103. Dissertations, II, v, 24, etc.
160 See pp. 186, 187.
161 See, e.g., the opening of the Phædrus.
162 For a discussion of this subject I may refer the reader to an article by the writer in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1906: ‘The Resurrection: A Layman’s Dialogue.’
163 ὥσπερ ζῷον ἓν ὅλον. Poetics, XXIII, 1. He is speaking of the design of a narrative poem.
164 What is Art?, by Leo Tolstoy. English translation by Aylmer Maude, pp. 44-5.
165 What is Art?, chap. v.
166 I do not mean to exclude the possibility that man may have first learned his capacity for art by making signs intended for quite other purposes, such as identification of tribehood, etc.
167 What is Art?, p. 153.
168 Fifteen Sermons, III.
169 What is Art?, p. 146.
170 Ibid., p. 148.
171 What is Art?, p. 163.
172 Ibid., p. 161. How wide of the mark all this is becomes clear when we think, for instance, of the sympathetic treatment of the Trojans in Homer, or the nobility of feeling about the Moors which runs through The Cid. A great art may glorify battle, but cant and fanaticism are hateful to it.
173 What is Art?, p. 166.
174 Ibid., p. 167.
175 As, of course, it never can be in Time.
176 It is very hard to understand why, when Athens was producing some of the greatest art of the world and the profoundest philosophic thought, the attempt to develop a philosophy of the arts should not have succeeded better than it did. Plato felt instinctively that he had entangled himself in a chain of false logic, and he appeals to Art to vindicate its truth, if it can. He would yield himself to its “enchantment” only too gladly were it not “a sin to betray what seems to us the cause of truth.” But it never occurs to him that what the painter is really copying is not the carpenter’s bed, but the heavenly. Aristotle, on the other hand, well knew that there is something creative about art. Witness his famous saying that “Poetry is both a more philosophic and a higher thing than History, since Poetry looks at things in a universal, History only in a particular aspect” (Poetics, IX, 3). He was, however, still too much under the control of the popular view of Art as Imitation to be able to see the full scope of his own principle. Thus, he excluded Architecture from the realm of Art because it did not imitate anything in nature.
177 ἀλλὰ Σὺ καὶ τὰ περισσὰ ἐπίστασαι ἄρτια θεῖναι,
καὶ κοσμεῖς τὰ ἄκοσμα, καὶ οὐ φίλα Σοι φίλα ἐστίν.
178 Preface to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.
179 “I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity,” says Walt Whitman, “in either of my two volumes, because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and outlets—must possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin to Space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address’d to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odour” (Preface to Two Rivulets, p. 13).
Let me set beside this a passage from that singularly beautiful book, Kakasu Okakura’s Ideals of the East: “Shakaku in the fifth century lays down six canons of pictorial art, in which the idea of the depicting of Nature falls into a third place, subservient to two other main principles. The first of these is ‘the Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of Things.’ For art is to him the great Mood of the Universe, moving hither and thither amidst those harmonic laws of matter which are Rhythm” (p. 52).
180 I may refer in passing to the researches of A. C. Haddon and Henry Balfour, who have made it seem at least highly probable that all decorative forms originated in the copying of natural objects.
181 F. C. Penrose showed in 1851 that all the quasi-horizontal lines in the Parthenon are really arcs of circles, that the ‘entasis’ or swelling of every pillar is the true arc of an hyperbola, and that there is not a true right-angle nor a strictly vertical column in the building. All good Greek buildings are similarly full of “curves, leaning faces, irregular spacings, and other optical refinements” (Investig. of the Princs. of Athenian Architecture). This principle, called by Ruskin ‘life’ (Seven Lamps) and by some ‘symmetrophobia,’ was most daringly applied in mediæval building. A very striking and well illustrated series of articles on the subject was contributed by Mr. W. H. Goodyear to the Architectural Record, Vol. VI, 1896-7.
182 I am indebted in connexion with these remarks on Gothic architecture to a very interesting paper by Mr. L. March Phillipps in the Contemporary Review for September, 1907.
183 For example, when molecules first grouped themselves (supposing that was how it came about) into the form which resulted in living protoplasm, their action was one of a chemico-physical nature, but the response is not expressible in purely chemico-physical terms. Similarly when sensation first appeared in protoplasm.
184 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Drittes Buch, Die Platonische Idee das Objekt der Kunst.
185 Camille Mauclair, French Impressionists. “Light,” writes M. Mauclair, “becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes a purely optic art” (p. 32). “The principal person in a picture,” said Manet, “is the light” (p. 42).
186 No one who has seen “Le Penseur,” by Rodin, will doubt that plastic art can render Thought. But literature alone could tell us what he is thinking.