Is Life Worth Living? by William Hurrell Mallock (the ebook reader .txt) 📖

empty dream. A certain kind of improvement, as I have said, we are no doubt right in looking for, not only with confidence, but with complacency. But positivism, so far from brightening this prospect, makes it indefinitely duller than it would be otherwise. The practical results therefore to be looked for from a faith in progress may be seen at their utmost already in the world around us; and the positivists may make the sobering reflection that their system can only change these from what they already see them, not by strengthening, but by weakening them. Take the world then as it is at present, and the sense, on the individual's part, that he personally is promoting its progress, can belong to, and can stimulate, exceptional men only, who are doing some public work; and it will be found even in these cases that the pleasure which this sense gives them is largely fortified (as is said of wine) by the entirely alien sense of fame and power. On the generality of men it neither has, nor can have, any effect whatever, or even if it gives a glow to their inclinations in some cases, it will at any rate never curb them in any. The fact indeed that things in general do tend to get better in certain ways, must produce in most men not effort but acquiescence. It may, when the imagination brings it home to them, shed a pleasing light occasionally over the surface of their private lives: but it would be as irrational to count on this as a stimulus to farther action, as to expect that the summer sunshine would work a steam-engine.

If we consider, then, that even the present condition of things is far more calculated to produce the enthusiasm of humanity than the condition that the positivists are preparing for themselves, we shall see how utterly chimerical is their entire practical system. It is like a drawing of a cathedral, which looks magnificent at the first glance, but which a second glance shows to be composed of structural impossibilities—blocks of masonry resting on no foundations, columns hanging from the roofs, instead of supporting them, and doors and windows with inverted arches. The positive system could only work practically were human nature to suffer a complete change—a change which it has no spontaneous tendency to make, which no known power could ever tend to force on it, and which, in short, there is no ground of any kind for expecting.

There are two characteristics in men, for instance, which, though they undoubtedly do exist, the positive system requires to be indefinitely magnified—the imagination, and unselfishness. The work of the imagination is to present to the individual consciousness the remote ends to which all progress is to be directed; and the desire to work for these is, on the positive supposition, to conquer all mere personal impulses. Now men have already had an end set before them, in the shape of the joys of heaven, which was far brighter and far more real to them than these others can ever be; and yet the imagination has so failed to keep this before them, that its small effect upon their lives is a commonplace with the positivists themselves. How then can these latter hope that their own pale and distant ideal will have a more vivid effect on the world than that near and glowing one, in whose place they put it? Will it incite men to virtues to which heaven could not incite them? or lure them away from vices from which hell-fire would not scare them? Before it can do so, it is plain that human nature must have completely changed, and its elements have been re-mixed, in completely new proportions. In a state of things where such a result was possible, a man would do a better day's work for a penny to be given to his unborn grandson, than he would now do for a pound to be paid to himself at sunset.

For argument's sake, however, let us suppose such a change possible. Let us suppose the imagination to be so developed that the remote end of progress—that happier state of men in some far off century—is ever vividly present to us as a possibility we may help to realise. Another question still remains for us. To preserve this happiness for others, we are told, we must to a large extent sacrifice our own. Is it in human nature to make this sacrifice? The positive moralists assure us that it is, and for this reason. Man, they say, is an animal who enjoys vicariously with almost as much zest as in his own person; and therefore to procure a greater pleasure for others makes him far happier than to procure a less one for himself. In this statement, as I have observed in an earlier chapter, there is no doubt a certain general truth; but how far it will hold good in particular instances depends altogether on particular circumstances. It depends on the temperament of the person who is to make the sacrifice, on the nature of his feelings towards the person for whom he is to make it, and on the proportion between the pleasure he is to forego himself, and the pleasure he is to secure for another. Now if we consider human nature as it is, and the utmost development of it that on positive grounds is possible, the conditions that can produce the requisite self-sacrifice will be found to be altogether wanting. The future we are to labour for, even when viewed in its brightest light, will only excel the present in having fewer miseries. So far as its happiness goes it will be distinctly less intense. It will, as we have seen already, be but a vapid consummation at its best; and the more vividly it is brought before us in imagination, the less likely shall we be to 'struggle, groan, and agonize,' for the sake of hastening it in reality. It will do nothing, at any rate, to increase the tendency to self-sacrifice that is now at work in the world; and this, though startling us now and then by some spasmodic manifestation, is not strong enough to have much general effect on the present; still less will it have more effect on the future. Vicarious happiness as a rule is only possible when the object gained for another is enormously greater than the object lost by self; and it is not always possible even then: whilst when the gains on either side are nearly equal, it ceases altogether. And necessarily so. If it did not, everything would be at a dead-lock. Life would be a perpetual holding back, instead of a pushing forward. Everyone would be waiting at the door, and saying to everyone else, 'After you.' But all these practical considerations are entirely forgotten by the positivists. They live in a world of their own imagining, in which all the rules of this world are turned upside down. There, the defeated candidate in an election would be radiant at his rival's victory. When a will was read, the anxiety of each relative would be that he or she should be excluded in favour of the others; or more probably still that they should be all excluded in favour of a hospital. Two rivals, in love with the same woman, would be each anxious that his own suit might be thwarted. And a man would gladly involve himself in any ludicrous misfortune, because he knew that the sight of his catastrophe would rejoice his whole circle of friends. The course of human progress, in fact, would be one gigantic donkey-race, in which those were the winners who were farthest off from the prize.

We have but to state the matter in terms of common life, to see how impossible is the only condition of things that would make the positive system practicable. The first wonder that suggests itself, is how so grotesque a conception could ever have originated. But its genesis is not far to seek. The positivists do not postulate any new elements in human nature, but the reduction of some, elimination of others, and the magnifying of others. And they actually find cases where this process has been effected. But they quite forget the circumstances that have made such an event possible. They forget that in their very nature they have been altogether exceptional and transitory; and that it is impossible to construct a Utopia in which they shall exist at all. We can, for instance, no doubt point to Leonidas and the three hundred as specimens of what human heroism can rise to; and we can point to the Stoics as specimens of human self-control. But to make a new Thermopylæ we want a new Barbarian; and before we can recoil from temptation as the Stoics did, we must make pleasure as perilous and as terrible as it was under the Roman emperors. Such developments of humanity are at their very essence abnormal; and to suppose that they could ever become the common type of character, would be as absurd as to suppose that all mankind could be kings. I will take another instance that is more to the point yet. A favourite positivist parable is that of the miser. The miser in the first place desires gold because it can buy pleasure. Next he comes to desire it more than the pleasure it can buy. In the same way, it is said, men can be taught to desire virtue by investing it with the attractions of the end, to which, strictly speaking it is no more than the means. But this parable really disproves the very possibility it is designed to illustrate. It is designed to illustrate the possibility of our choosing actions that will give pleasure to others, in contradistinction to actions that will give pleasure to ourselves. But the miser desires gold for an exactly opposite reason. He desires it as potential selfishness, not as potential philanthropy. Secondly, we are to choose the actions in question because they will make us happy. But the very name we give the miser shows that the analogous choice in his case makes him miserable. Thirdly, the material miser is an exceptional character; there is no known means by which it can be made more common; and with the moral miser the case will be just the same. Lastly, if such a character be barely producible even in the present state of the world, much less will it be producible when human capacities shall have been curtailed by positivism, when the pleasures that the gold of virtue represents are less intense than at present, and the value of the coveted coin is indefinitely depreciated.

Much more might be added to the same purpose, but enough has been said already to make these two points clear:—firstly, that the positive system, if it is to do any practical work in the world, requires that the whole human character shall be profoundly altered; and secondly, that the required alteration is one that may indeed be dreamt about, but which can never possibly be made. Even were it made, the results would not be splendid; but no matter how splendid they might be, this is of no possible moment to us. There are few things on which it is idler to speculate than the issues of impossible contingencies. And the positivists would be talking just as much to the purpose as they do now, were they to tell us how fast we should travel supposing we had wings, or what deep water we could wade through if we were twenty-four feet high. These last, indeed, are just the suppositions that they do make. Between our human nature and the nature they desiderate there is a deep