The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting
for
civilisation, or is he past it, and mastering it?—Whitman.
We find ourselves to-day in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of
society, which we call Civilisation, but which even to the most
optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us,
indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the
various races of man have to pass through—as children pass through
measles or whooping cough; but if it is a disease, there is this serious
consideration to be made, that while History tells us of many nations
that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of
some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in
which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more
normal and healthy condition. In other words the development of human
society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain
definite and apparently final stage in the process we call
Civilisation; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested.
Of course it may at first sound extravagant to use the word disease in
connection with Civilisation at all, but a little thought should show
that the association is not ill-grounded. To take the matter on its
physical side first, I find that in Mullhall's Dictionary of Statistics
(1884) the number of accredited doctors and surgeons in the United
Kingdom is put at over 23,000. If the extent of the national sickness is
such that we require 23,000 medical men to attend to us, it must surely
be rather serious! And they do not cure us. Wherever we look to-day,
in mansion or in slum, we see the features and hear the complaints of
ill-health; the difficulty is really to find a healthy person. The state
of the modern civilised man in this respect—our coughs, colds,
mufflers, dread of a waft of chill air, &c.—is anything but creditable,
and it seems to be the fact that, notwithstanding all our libraries of
medical science, our knowledges, arts, and appliances of life, we are
actually less capable of taking care of ourselves than the animals are.
Indeed, talking of animals, we are—as Shelley I think points out—fast
depraving the domestic breeds. The cow, the horse, the sheep, and even
the confiding pussy-cat, are becoming ever more and more subject to
disease, and are liable to ills which in their wilder state they knew
not of. And finally the savage races of the earth do not escape the
baneful influence. Wherever Civilisation touches them, they die like
flies from the small-pox, drink, and worse evils it brings along with
it, and often its mere contact is sufficient to destroy whole races.
But the word Disease is applicable to our social as well as to our
physical condition. For as in the body disease arises from the loss of
the physical unity which constitutes Health, and so takes the form of
warfare or discord between the various parts, or of the abnormal
development of individual organs, or the consumption of the system by
predatory germs and growths; so in our modern life we find the unity
gone which constitutes true society, and in its place warfare of classes
and individuals, abnormal development of some to the detriment of
others, and consumption of the organism by masses of social parasites.
If the word disease is applicable anywhere, I should say it is—both in
its direct and its derived sense—to the civilised societies of to-day.
Again, mentally, is not our condition most unsatisfactory? I am not
alluding to the number and importance of the lunatic asylums which cover
our land, nor to the fact that maladies of the brain and nervous system
are now so common; but to the strange sense of mental unrest which marks
our populations, and which amply justifies Ruskin's cutting epigram:
that our two objects in life are, "Whatever we have—to get more; and
wherever we are—to go somewhere else." This sense of unrest, of
disease, penetrates down even into the deepest regions of man's
being—into his moral nature—disclosing itself there, as it has done
in all nations notably at the time of their full civilisation, as the
sense of Sin.[1] All down the Christian centuries we find this strange
sense of inward strife and discord developed, in marked contrast to the
naive insouciance of the pagan and primitive world; and, what is
strangest, we even find people glorying in this consciousness—which,
while it may be the harbinger of better things to come, is and can be in
itself only the evidence of loss of unity, and therefore of ill-health,
in the very centre of human life.
Of course we are aware with regard to Civilisation that the word is
sometimes used in a kind of ideal sense, as to indicate a state of
future culture towards which we are tending—the implied assumption
being that a sufficiently long course of top hats and telephones will in
the end bring us to this ideal condition; while any little drawbacks in
the process, such as we have just pointed out, are explained as being
merely accidental and temporary. Men sometimes speak of civilising and
ennobling influences as if the two terms were interchangeable, and of
course if they like to use the word Civilisation in this sense they have
a right to; but whether the actual tendencies of modern life taken in
the mass are ennobling (except in a quite indirect way hereafter to be
dwelt upon) is, to say the least, a doubtful question. Any one who
would get an idea of the glorious being that is as a matter of fact
being turned out by the present process should read Mr. Kay Robinson's
article in the Nineteenth Century for May, 1883, in which he
prophesies (quite solemnly and in the name of science) that the human
being of the future will be a toothless, bald, toeless creature with
flaccid muscles and limbs almost incapable of locomotion!
Perhaps it is safer on the whole not to use the word Civilisation in
such ideal sense, but to limit its use (as is done to-day by all writers
on primitive society) to a definite historical stage through which the
various nations pass, and in which we actually find ourselves at the
present time. Though there is of course a difficulty in marking the
commencement of any period of historical evolution very definitely, yet
all students of this subject agree that the growth of property and the
ideas and institutions flowing from it did at a certain point bring
about such a change in the structure of human society that the new stage
might fairly be distinguished from the earlier stages of Savagery and
Barbarism by a separate term. The growth of Wealth, it is shown, and
with it the conception of Private Property, brought on certain very
definite new forms of social life; it destroyed the ancient system of
society based upon the gens, that is, a society of equals founded upon
blood-relationship, and introduced a society of classes founded upon
differences of material possession; it destroyed the ancient system of
mother-right and inheritance through the female line, and turned the
woman into the property of the man; it brought with it private ownership
of land, and so created a class of landless aliens, and a whole system
of rent, mortgage, interest, etc.; it introduced slavery, serfdom and
wage-labour, which are only various forms of the dominance of one class
over another; and to rivet these authorities it created the State and
the policeman. Every race that we know, that has become what we call
civilised, has passed through these changes; and though the details may
vary and have varied a little, the main order of change has been
practically the same in all cases. We are justified therefore in calling
Civilisation a historical stage, whose commencement dates roughly from
the division of society into classes founded on property and the
adoption of class-government. Lewis Morgan in his Ancient Society adds
the invention of writing and the consequent adoption of written History
and written Law; Engels in his Ursprung der Familie, des
Privateigenthums und des Staats points out the importance of the
appearance of the Merchant, even in his most primitive form, as a mark
of the civilisation-period; while the French writers of the last century
made a good point in inventing the term nations policées
(policemanised nations) as a substitute for civilised nations; for
perhaps there is no better or more universal mark of the period we are
considering, and of its social degradation, than the appearance of the
crawling phenomenon in question. [Imagine the rage of any decent North
American Indians if they had been told they required policemen to keep
them in order!]
If we take this historical definition of Civilisation, we shall see that
our English Civilisation began hardly more than a thousand years ago,
and even so the remains of the more primitive society lasted long after
that. In the case of Rome—if we reckon from the later times of the
early kings down to the fall of Rome—we have again about a thousand
years. The Jewish civilisation from David and Solomon downwards
lasted—with breaks—somewhat over a thousand years; the Greek
civilisation less; the series of Egyptian civilisations which we can now
distinguish lasted altogether very much longer; but the important points
to see are, first, that the process has been quite similar in character
in these various (and numerous other) cases,[2] quite as similar in fact
as the course of the same disease in various persons; and secondly that
in no case, as said before, has any nation come through and passed
beyond this stage; but that in most cases it has succumbed soon after
the main symptoms had been developed.
But it will be said, It may be true that Civilisation regarded as a
stage of human history presents some features of disease; but is there
any reason for supposing that disease in some form or other was any less
present in the previous stage—that of Barbarism? To which I reply, I
think there is good reason. Without committing ourselves to the
unlikely theory that the "noble savage" was an ideal human being
physically or in any other respect, and while certain that in many
points he was decidedly inferior to the civilised man, I think we must
allow him the superiority in some directions; and one of these was his
comparative freedom from disease. Lewis Morgan, who grew up among the
Iroquois Indians, and who probably knew the North American natives as
well as any white man has ever done, says (in his Ancient Society, p.
45), "Barbarism ends with the production of grand Barbarians." And
though there are no native races on the earth to-day who are actually in
the latest and most advanced stage of Barbarism;[3] yet, if we take the
most advanced tribes that we know of—such as the said Iroquois Indians
of twenty or thirty years ago, some of the Kaffir tribes round Lake
Nyassa in Africa, now (and possibly for a few years more) comparatively
untouched by civilisation, or the tribes along the river Uaupes, thirty
or forty years back, of Wallace's Travels on the Amazon—all tribes in
what Morgan would call the middle stage of Barbarism—we undoubtedly
in each case discover a fine and (which is our point here) healthy
people. Captain Cook in his first Voyage says of the natives of
Otaheite, "We saw no critical disease during our stay upon the island,
and but few instances of sickness, which were accidental fits of the
colic;" and, later on, of the New Zealanders, "They enjoy perfect and
uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and
old, men and women, crowded about us ... we never saw a single person
who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers we have
seen naked did we once perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or
any marks that an eruption had left behind." These are pretty strong
words. Of course diseases exist among such peoples, even where they have
never been in contact with civilisation, but I think we may say that
among the higher types of savages they are rarer, and nothing like so
various and so prevalent as they are in our modern life; while the power
of recovery from wounds (which are of course the most frequent form of
disablement) is generally admitted to be something astonishing. Speaking
of the Kaffirs, J. G. Wood says, "Their state of health enables them to
survive injuries which would be almost instantly fatal to any civilised
European." Mr. Frank Oates in his Diary[4] mentions the case of a man
who was condemned to death by the king. He was hacked down with axes,
and left for dead. "What must have been intended for the coup de grâce
was a cut in the back of the head, which had chipped a large piece out
of the skull, and must have been meant to cut the spinal cord where it
joins the brain. It had, however, been made a little higher than this,
but had left such a wound as I should have thought that no one could
have survived ... when I held the lanthorn to investigate the wound I
started back in amazement to see a hole at the base of the skull,
perhaps two inches long and an inch and a half wide, and I will not
venture to say how deep, but the depth too must have been an affair of
inches. Of course this hole penetrated into the substance of the brain,
and probably for some distance. I dare say a mouse could have sat in
it." Yet the man was not so much disconcerted. Like Old King Cole, "He
asked for a pipe and a drink of brandy," and ultimately made a perfect
recovery! Of course it might be said that such a story only proves the
lowness of organisation of the brains of savages; but to the Kaffirs at
any rate this would not apply; they are a quick-witted race, with large
brains, and exceedingly acute in argument, as Colenso found to his cost.
Another point which indicates superabundant health is the amazing animal
spirits of these native races! The shouting, singing, dancing kept up
nights long among the Kaffirs are exhausting merely to witness, while
the graver North American Indian exhibits a corresponding power of life
in his eagerness for battle or his stoic resistance of pain.[5]
Similarly when we come to consider the social life of the wilder
races—however rudimentary and undeveloped it may be—the almost
universal testimony of students and travelers is that within its limits
it is more harmonious and compact than that of the civilised nations.
The members of the tribe are not organically at warfare with each other;
society is not divided into classes which prey upon each other; nor is
it consumed by parasites. There is more true social unity, less of
disease. Though the customs of each tribe are rigid, absurd, and often
frightfully cruel,[6] and though all outsiders are liable to be regarded
as enemies, yet within those limits the members live peacefully
together—their pursuits, their work, are undertaken in common, thieving
and violence are rare, social feeling and community of interest are
strong. "In their own bands Indians are perfectly honest. In all my
intercourse with them I have heard of not over half-a-dozen cases of
such theft. But this wonderfully exceptional honesty extends no further
than to the members of his immediate band. To all outside of it, the
Indian is not only one of the most arrant thieves in the world, but this
quality or faculty is held in the highest estimation." (Dodge, p. 64.)
If a man set out on a journey (this among the Kaffirs) "he need not
trouble himself about provisions, for he is sure to fall in with some
hut, or perhaps a village, and is equally sure of obtaining both food
and shelter."[7] "I have lived," says A. R. Wallace in his Malay
Archipelago vol. ii. p. 460, "with communities in South America and the
East, who have no laws or law courts, but the public opinion of the
village ... yet each man scrupulously respects the rights of his
fellows, and any infraction of those rights rarely takes place. In such
a community all are nearly equal. There are none of those wide
distinctions of education and ignorance, wealth and poverty, master and
servant, which are the product of our civilisation." Indeed this
community of life in the early societies, this absence of division
into classes, and of the contrast between rich and poor, is now admitted
on all sides as a marked feature of difference between the conditions of
the primitive and of civilised man.[8]
Lastly, with regard to the mental condition of the Barbarian, probably
no one will be found to dispute the contention that he is more
easy-minded and that his consciousness of Sin is less developed than in
his civilised brother. Our unrest is the penalty we pay for our wider
life. The missionary retires routed from the savage in whom he can awake
no sense of his supreme wickedness. An American lady had a servant, a
negro-woman, who on one occasion asked leave of absence for the next
morning, saying she wished to attend the Holy Communion? "I have no
objection," said the mistress, "to grant you leave; but do you think you
ought to attend Communion? You know you have never said you were sorry
about that goose you stole last week." "Lor' missus," replied the
woman, "do ye think I'd let an old goose stand betwixt me and my Blessed
Lord and Master?" But joking apart, and however necessary for man's
ultimate evolution may be the temporary development of this
consciousness of Sin, we cannot help seeing that the condition of the
mind in which it is absent is the most distinctively healthy; nor can
it be concealed that some of the greatest works of Art have been
produced by people like the earlier Greeks, in whom it was absent; and
could not possibly have been produced where it was strongly developed.
Though, as already said, the latest stage of Barbarism, i.e., that
just preceding Civilisation, is unrepresented on the earth to-day, yet
we have in the Homeric and other dawn-literature of the various nations
indirect records of this stage; and these records assure us of a
condition of man very similar to, though somewhat more developed than,
the condition of the existing races I have mentioned above. Besides
this, we have in the numerous traditions of the Golden Age,[9] legends
of the Fall, etc., a curious fact which suggests to us that a great
number of races in advancing towards Civilisation were conscious at some
point or other of having lost a primitive condition of ease and
contentment, and that they embodied this consciousness, with poetical
adornment and licence, in imaginative legends of the earlier Paradise.
Some people indeed, seeing the universality of these stories, and the
remarkable fragments of wisdom embedded in them and other extremely
ancient myths and writings, have supposed that there really was a
general pre-historic Eden-garden or Atlantis; but the necessities of the
case hardly seem to compel this supposition. That each human soul,
however, bears within itself some kind of reminiscence of a more
harmonious and perfect state of being, which it has at some time
experienced, seems to me a conclusion difficult to avoid; and this by
itself might give rise to manifold traditions and myths.
However all this may be, the question immediately before us—having
established the more healthy, though more limited, condition of the
pre-civilisation peoples—is, why this lapse or fall? What is the
meaning of this manifold and intensified manifestation of
Disease—physical, social, intellectual, and moral? What is its place
and part in the great whole of human evolution?
And this involves us in a digression, which must occupy a few pages, on
the nature of Health.
When we come to analyse the conception of Disease, physical or mental,
in society or in the individual, it evidently means, as already hinted
once or twice, loss of unity. Health, therefore, should mean unity,
and it is curious that the history of the word entirely corroborates
this idea. As is well known, the words health, whole, holy, are from
the same stock; and they indicate to us the fact that far back in the
past those who created this group of words had a conception of the
meaning of Health very different from ours, and which they embodied
unconsciously in the word itself and its strange relatives.
These are, for instance, and among others: heal, hallow, hale, holy,
whole, wholesome; German heilig, Heiland (the Saviour); Latin salus (as
in salutation, salvation); Greek kalos; also compare hail! a salutation,
and, less certainly connected, the root hal, to breathe, as in inhale,
exhale—French haleine—Italian and French alma and âme (the soul);
compare the Latin spiritus, spirit or breath, and Sanskrit âtman, breath
or soul.
Wholeness, holiness ... "if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be
full of light." ... "thy faith hath made thee whole."
The idea seems to be a positive one—a condition of the body in which it
is an entirety, a unity—a central force maintaining that condition; and
disease being the break-up—or break-down—of that entirety into
multiplicity.
The peculiarity about our modern conception of Health is that it seems
to be a purely negative one. So impressed are we by the myriad presence
of Disease—so numerous its dangers, so sudden and unforetellable its
attacks—that we have come to look upon health as the mere absence of
the same. As a solitary spy picks his way through a hostile camp at
night, sees the enemy sitting round his fires, and trembles at the
crackling of a twig beneath his feet—so the traveller through this
world, comforter in one hand and physic-bottle in the other, must pick
his way, fearful lest at any time he disturb the sleeping legions of
death—thrice blessed if by any means, steering now to the right and now
to the left, and thinking only of his personal safety, he pass by
without discovery to the other side.
Health with us is a negative thing. It is a neutralisation of opposing
dangers. It is to be neither rheumatic nor gouty, consumptive nor
bilious, to be untroubled by head-ache, back-ache, heart-ache, or any of
the "thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." These are the
realities. Health is the mere negation of them.
The modern notion, and which has evidently in a very subtle way
penetrated the whole thought of to-day, is that the essential fact of
life is the existence of innumerable external forces, which, by a very
delicate balance and difficult to maintain, concur to produce Man—who
in consequence may at any moment be destroyed again by the
non-concurrence of those forces. The older notion apparently is that the
essential fact of life is Man himself; and that the external forces,
so-called, are in some way subsidiary to this fact—that they may aid
his expression or manifestation, or that they may hinder it, but that
they can neither create nor annihilate the Man. Probably both ways of
looking at the subject are important; there is a man that can be
destroyed, and there is a man that cannot be destroyed. The old words,
soul and body, indicate this contrast; but like all words they are
subject to the defect that they are an attempt to draw a line where no
line can ultimately be drawn; they mark a contrast where, in fact, there
is only continuity—for between the little mortal man who dwells here
and now, and the divine and universal Man who also forms a part of our
consciousness, is there not a perfect gradation of being, and where (if
anywhere) is there a gulf fixed? Together they form a unit, and each is
necessary to the other: the first cannot do without the second, and the
second cannot get along at all without the first. To use the words of
Angelus Silesius (quoted by Schopenhauer), "Ich weiss dass ohne mich
Gott nicht ein Nu kann leben."
According then to the elder conception, and perhaps according to an
elder experience, man, to be really healthy, must be a unit, an
entirety—his more external and momentary self standing in some kind of
filial relation to his more universal and incorruptible part—so that
not only the remotest and outermost regions of the body, and all the
assimilative, secretive, and other processes belonging thereto, but even
the thoughts and passions of the mind itself, stand in direct and clear
relationship to it, the final and absolute transparency of the mortal
creature. And thus this divinity in each creature, being that which
constitutes it and causes it to cohere together, was conceived of as
that creature's saviour, healer—healer of wounds of body and wounds of
heart—the Man within the man, whom it was not only possible to know,
but whom to know and be united with was the alone salvation. This, I
take it, was the law of health—and of holiness—as accepted at some
elder time of human history, and by us seen as thro' a glass darkly.
And the condition of disease, and of sin, under the same view, was the
reverse of this. Enfeeblement, obscuration, duplicity—the central
radiation blocked; lesser and insubordinate centres establishing and
asserting themselves as against it; division, discord, possession by
devils.
Thus in the body, the establishment of an insubordinate centre—a boil,
a tumor, the introduction and spread of a germ with innumerable progeny
throughout the system, the enlargement out of all reason of an existing
organ—means disease. In the mind, disease begins when any passion
asserts itself as an independent centre of thought and action. The
condition of health in the mind is loyalty to the divine Man within
it.[10] But if loyalty to money become an independent centre of life, or
greed of knowledge, or of fame, or of drink; jealousy, lust, the love of
approbation; or mere following after any so-called virtue for
itself—purity, humility, consistency, or what not—these may grow to
seriously endanger the other. They are, or should be, subordinates; and
though over a long period their insubordination may be a necessary
condition of human progress, yet during all such time they are at war
with each other and with the central Will; the man is torn and
tormented, and is not happy.
And when I speak thus separately of the mind and body, it must be
remembered, as already said, that there is no strict line between them;
but probably every affection or passion of the mind has its correlative
in the condition of the body—though this latter may or may not be
easily observable. Gluttony is a fever of the digestive apparatus.
What is a taint in the mind is also a taint in the body. The stomach has
started the original idea of becoming itself the centre of the human
system. The sexual organs may start a similar idea. Here are distinct
threats, menaces made against the central authority—against the Man
himself. For the man must rule or disappear; it is impossible to imagine
a man presided over by a Stomach—a walking Stomach, using hands, feet,
and all other members merely to carry it from place to place, and serve
its assimilative mania. We call such a one an Hog. [And thus in the
theory of Evolution we see the place of the hog, and all other animals,
as fore-runners or off-shoots of special faculties in Man, and why the
true man, and rightly, has authority over all animals, and can alone
give them their place in creation.]
So of the Brain, or any other organ; for the Man is no organ, resides in
no organ, but is the central life ruling and radiating among all
organs, and assigning them their arts to play.
Disease then, in body or mind, is from this point of view the break-up
of its unity, its entirety, into multiplicity. It is the abeyance of a
central power, and the growth of insubordinate centres—life in each
creature being conceived of as a continual exercise of energy or
conquest, by which external or antagonistic forces (and organisms) are
brought into subjection and compelled into the service of the creature,
or are thrown off as harmful to it. Thus, by way of illustration, we
find that plants or animals, when in good health, have a remarkable
power of throwing off the attacks of any parasites which incline to
infest them; while those that are weakly are very soon eaten up by the
same. A rose-tree, for instance, brought indoors, will soon fall a prey
to the aphis—though when hardened out of doors the pest makes next to
no impression on it. In dry seasons when the young turnip plants in the
fields are weakly from want of water the entire crop is sometimes
destroyed by the turnip fly, which then multiplies enormously; but if a
shower or two of rain come before much damage is done the plant will
then grow vigorously, its tissues become more robust and resist the
attacks of the fly, which in its turn dies. Late investigations seem to
show that one of the functions of the white corpuscles in the blood is
to devour disease-germs and bacteria present in the circulation—thus
absorbing these organisms into subjection to the central life of the
body—and that with this object they congregate in numbers toward any
part of the body which is wounded or diseased. Or to take an example
from society, it is clear enough that if our social life were really
vivid and healthy, such parasitic products as the idle shareholder and
the policeman above-mentioned would simply be impossible. The material
on which they prey would not exist, and they would either perish or be
transmuted into useful forms. It seems obvious in fact that life in any
organism can only be maintained by some such processes as these—by
which parasitic or infesting organisms are either thrown off or absorbed
into subjection. To define the nature of the power which thus works
towards and creates the distinctive unity of each organism may be
difficult, is probably at present impossible, but that some such power
exists we can hardly refuse to admit. Probably it is more a subject of
the growth of our consciousness, than an object of external scientific
investigation.
In this view, Death is simply the loosening and termination of the
action of this power—over certain regions of the organism; a process by
which, when these superficial parts become hardened and osseous, as in
old age, or irreparably damaged, as in cases of accident, the inward
being sloughs them off, and passes into other spheres. In the case of
man there may be noble and there may be ignoble death, as there may be
noble and ignoble life. The inward self, unable to maintain authority
over the forces committed to its charge, declining from its high
prerogative, swarmed over by parasites, and fallen partially into the
clutch of obscene foes, may at last with shame and torment be driven
forth from the temple in which it ought to have been supreme. Or, having
fulfilled a holy and wholesome time, having radiated divine life and
love through all the channels of body and mind, and as a perfect workman
uses his tools, so having with perfect mastery and nonchalance used all
the materials committed to it, it may quietly and peacefully lay these
down, and unchanged (absolutely unchanged to all but material eyes) pass
on to other spheres appointed.
And now a few words on the medical aspect of the subject. If we accept
any theory (even remotely similar to that just indicated) to the effect
that Health is a positive thing, and not a mere negation of disease, it
becomes pretty clear that no mere investigation of the latter will
enable us to find out what the former is, or bring us nearer to it. You
might as well try to create the ebb and flow of the tides by an
organised system of mops.
Turn your back upon the Sun and go forth into the wildernesses of space
till you come to those limits where the rays of light, faint with
distance, fall dim upon the confines of eternal darkness—and phantoms
and shadows in the half-light are the product of the wavering conflict
betwixt day and night—investigate these shadows, describe them,
classify them, record the changes which take place in them, erect in
vast libraries these records into a monument of human industry and
research; so shall you be at the end as near to a knowledge and
understanding of the sun itself—which all this time you have left
behind you, and on which you have turned your back—as the investigators
of disease are to a knowledge and understanding of what health is. The
solar rays illumine the outer world and give to it its unity and
entirety; so in the inner world of each individual possibly is there
another Sun, which illumines and gives unity to the man, and whose
warmth and light would permeate his system. Wait upon the shining forth
of this inward sun, give free access and welcome to its rays of love,
and free passage for them into the common world around you, and it may
be you will get to know more about health than all the books of medicine
contain, or can tell you.
Or to take the former simile: it is the central force of the Moon which
acting on the great ocean makes all its waters one, and causes them to
rise and fall in timely consent. But take your moon away; hey! now the
tide is flowing too far down this estuary! Station your thousands with
mops, but it breaks through in channel and runlet! Block it here, but it
overflows in a neighboring bay! Appoint an army of swabs there, but to
what end? The infinitest care along the fringe of this great sea can
never do, with all imaginable dirt and confusion, what the central power
does easily, and with unerring grace and providence.
And so of the great (the vast and wonderful) ocean which ebbs and flows
within a man—take away the central guide—and not 20,000 doctors, each
with 20,000 books to consult and 20,000 phials of different contents to
administer, could meet the myriad cases of disease which would ensue, or
bolster up into "wholeness" the being from whom the single radiant unity
had departed.
Probably there has never been an age, nor any country (except
Yankee-land?) in which disease has been so generally prevalent as in
England to-day; and certainly there has never (with the same exception)
been an age or country in which doctors have so swarmed, or in which
medical science has been so powerful, in apparatus, in learning, in
authority, and in actual organisation and number of adherents. How
reconcile this contradiction—if indeed a contradiction it be?
But the fact is that medical science does not contradict disease—any
more than laws abolish crime. Medical science—and doubtless for very
good reasons—makes a fetish of disease, and dances around it. It is (as
a rule) only seen where disease is; it writes enormous tomes on disease;
it induces disease in animals (and even men) for the purpose of studying
it; it knows, to a marvelous extent, the symptoms of disease, its
nature, its causes, its goings out and its comings in; its eyes are
perpetually fixed on disease, till disease (for it) becomes the main
fact of the world and the main object of its worship. Even what is so
gracefully called Hygiene does not get beyond this negative attitude.
And the world still waits for its Healer, who shall tell us—diseased
and suffering as we are—what health is, where it is to be found,
whence it flows; and who having touched this wonderful power within
himself shall not rest till he has proclaimed and imparted it to men.
No, medical science does not, in the main, contradict disease. The same
cause (infidelity and decay of the central life in men) which creates
disease and makes men liable to it, creates students and a science of
the subject. The Moon[11] having gone from over the waters, the good
people rush forth with their mops; and the untimely inundations, and the
mops and the mess and the pother, are all due to the same cause.
As to the lodgment of disease, it is clear that this would take place
easily in a disorganised system—just as a seditious adventurer would
easily effect a landing, and would find insubordinate materials ready at
hand for his use, in a land where the central government was weak. And
as to the treatment of a disease so introduced there are obviously two
methods: one is to reinforce the central power till it is sufficiently
strong of itself to eject the insubordinate elements and restore order;
the other is to attack the malady from outside and if possible destroy
it—(as by doses and decoctions)—independently of the inner vitality,
and leaving that as it was before. The first method would seem the best,
most durable and effective; but it is difficult and slow. It consists in
the adoption of a healthy life, bodily and mental, and will be spoken
of later on. The second may be characterised as the medical method, and
is valuable, or rather I should be inclined to say, will be valuable,
when it has found its place, which is to be subsidiary to the first. It
is too often, however, regarded as superior in importance, and in this
way, though easy of application, has come perhaps to be productive of
more harm than good. The disease may be broken down for the time being,
but, the roots of it not being destroyed, it soon springs up again in
the same or a new form, and the patient is as badly off as ever.
The great positive force of Health, and the power which it has to
expel disease from its neighborhood is a thing realised, I believe, by
few persons. But it has been realised on earth, and will be realised
again when the more squalid elements of our present-day civilisation
have passed away.
The result then of our digression is to show that Health—in body or
mind—means unity, integration as opposed to disintegration. In the
animals we find this physical unity existing to a remarkable degree. An
almost unerring instinct and selective power rules their actions and
organisation. Thus a cat before it has fallen (say before it has become
a very wheezy fireside pussy!) is in a sense perfect. The wonderful
consent of its limbs as it runs or leaps, the adaptation of its
muscles, the exactness and inevitableness of its instincts, physical and
affectional; its senses of sight and smell, its cleanliness, nicety as
to food, motherly tact, the expression of its whole body when enraged,
or when watching for prey—all these things are so to speak absolute and
instantaneous—and fill one with admiration. The creature is "whole" or
in one piece: there is no mentionable conflict or division within
it.[12]
Similarly with the other animals, and even with the early man himself.
And so it would appear returning to our subject—that, if we accept the
doctrine of Evolution, there is a progression of animated beings—which,
though not perfect, possess in the main the attribute of Health—from
the lowest forms up to a healthy and instinctive though certainly
limited man. During all this stage the central law is in the ascendant,
and the physical frame of each creature is the fairly clean vehicle of
its expression—varying of course in complexity and degree according to
the point of unfoldment which has been reached. And when thus in the
long process of development the inner Man (which has lain hidden or
dormant within the animal) at last appears, and the creature
consequently takes on the outer frame and faculties of the human being,
which are only as they are because of the inner man which they
represent; when it has passed through stage after stage of animal life,
throwing out tentative types and likenesses of what is to come, and
going through innumerable preliminary exercises in special forms and
faculties, till at last it begins to be able to wear the full majesty of
manhood itself—then it would seem that that long process of
development is drawing to a close, and that the goal of creation must be
within measurable distance.
But then, at that very moment, and when the goal is, so to speak, in
sight, occurs this failure of "wholeness" of which we have spoken, this
partial break-up of the unity of human nature—and man, instead of going
forward any longer in the same line as before, to all appearance
falls.
What is the meaning of this loss of unity? What is the cause and purpose
of this fall and centuries-long exile from the earlier Paradise?
There can be but one answer. It is self-knowledge—(which involves in a
sense the abandonment of self). Man has to become conscious of his
destiny—to lay hold of and realise his own freedom and blessedness—to
transfer his consciousness from the outer and mortal part of him to the
inner and undying.
The cat cannot do this. Though perfect in its degree, its interior
unfoldment is yet incomplete. The human soul within it has not yet come
forward and declared itself; some sheathing leaves have yet to open
before the divine flower-bud can be clearly seen. And when at last
(speaking as a fool) the cat becomes a man—when the human soul within
the creature has climbed itself forward and found expression,
transforming the outer frame in the process into that of
humanity—(which is the meaning I suppose of the evolution theory)—then
the creature, though perfect and radiant in the form of Man, still lacks
one thing. It lacks the knowledge of itself; it lacks its own identity,
and the realisation of the manhood to which as a fact it has attained.
In the animals consciousness has never returned upon itself. It radiates
easily outwards; and the creature obeys without let or hesitation, and
with little if any self-consciousness, the law of its being. And when
man first appears on the earth, and even up to the threshold of what we
call civilisation, there is much to show that he should in this respect
still be classed with the animals. Though vastly superior to them in
attainments, physical and mental, in power over nature, capacity of
progress, and adaptability, he still in these earlier stages was like an
animal in the unconscious instinctive nature of his action; and on the
other hand, though his moral and intellectual structures were far less
complete than those of the modern man—as was a necessary result of the
absence of self-knowledge—he actually lived more in harmony with
himself and with nature,[13] than does his descendant; his impulses,
both physical and social, were clearer and more unhesitating; and his
unconsciousness of inner discord and sin a great contrast to our modern
condition of everlasting strife and perplexity.
If then to this stage belongs some degree of human perfection and
felicity, yet there remains a much vaster height to be scaled. The human
soul which has wandered darkling for so many thousands of years, from
its tiny spark-like germ in some low form of life to its full splendor
and dignity in man, has yet to come to the knowledge of its wonderful
heritage, has yet to become finally individualised and free, to know
itself immortal, to resume and interpret all its past lives, and to
enter in triumph into the kingdom which it has won.
It has in fact to face the frightful struggle of self-consciousness, or
the disentanglement of the true self from the fleeting and perishable
self. The animals and man, unfallen, are healthy and free from care, but
unaware of what they are; to attain self-knowledge man must fall; he
must become less than his true self; he must endure imperfection;
division and strife must enter his nature. To realise the perfect Life,
to know what, how wonderful it is—to understand that all blessedness
and freedom consists in its possession—he must for the moment suffer
divorce from it; the unity, the repose of his nature must be broken up,
crime, disease and unrest must enter in, and by contrast he must attain
to knowledge.
Curious that at the very dawn of the Greek and with it the European
civilisation we have the mystic words "Know Thyself" inscribed on the
temple of the Delphic Apollo; and that first among the legends of the
Semitic race stands that of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of the
Knowledge of good and evil! To the animal there is no such knowledge, to
the early man there was no such knowledge, and to the perfected man of
the future there will be no such knowledge. It is a temporary
perversion, indicating the disunion of the present-day man—the disunion
of the outer self from the inner—the horrible dual
self-consciousness—which is the means ultimately of a more perfect and
conscious union than could ever have been realised without it—the death
that is swallowed up in victory. "For the first man is of the earth,
earthy; but the second man is the Lord from heaven."
In order then, at this point in his Evolution, to advance any farther,
Man must first fall; in order to know, he must lose. In order to realise
what Health is, how splendid and glorious a possession, he must go
through all the long negative experience of Disease; in order to know
the perfect social life, to understand what power and happiness to
mankind are involved in their true relation to each other, he must learn
the misery and suffering which come from mere individualism and greed;
and in order to find his true Manhood, to discover what a wonderful
power it is, he must first lose it—he must become a prey and a slave to
his own passions and desires—whirled away like Phaethon by the horses
which he cannot control.
This moment of divorce, then, this parenthesis in human progress, covers
the ground of all History; and the whole of Civilisation, and all crime
and disease, are only the materials of its immense purpose—themselves
destined to pass away as they arose, but to leave their fruits eternal.
Accordingly we find that it has been the work of Civilisation—founded
as we have seen on Property—in every way to disintegrate and corrupt
man—literally to corrupt—to break up the unity of his nature. It
begins with the abandonment of the primitive life and the growth of the
sense of shame (as in the myth of Adam and Eve). From this follows the
disownment of the sacredness of sex. Sexual acts cease to be a part of
religious worship; love and desire—the inner and the outer
love—hitherto undifferentiated, now become two separate things. (This
no doubt a necessary stage in order for the development of the
consciousness of love, but in itself only painful and abnormal.) It
culminates and comes to an end, as to-day, in a complete divorce between
the spiritual reality and the bodily fulfilment—in a vast system of
commercial love, bought and sold, in the brothel and in the palace. It
begins with the forsaking of the hardy nature-life, and it ends with a
society broken down and prostrate, hardly recognisable as human, amid
every form of luxury, poverty and disease. He who had been the free
child of Nature denies his sonship; he disowns the very breasts that
suckled him. He deliberately turns his back upon the light of the sun,
and hides himself away in boxes with breathing holes (which he calls
houses), living ever more and more in darkness and asphyxia, and only
coming forth perhaps once a day to blink at the bright god, or to run
back again at the first breath of the free wind for fear of catching
cold! He muffles himself in the cast-off furs of the beasts, every
century swathing himself in more and more layers, more and more
fearfully and wonderfully fashioned, till he ceases to be recognisable
as the Man that was once the crown of the animals, and presents a more
ludicrous spectacle than the monkey that sits on his own barrel organ.
He ceases to a great extent to use his muscles, his feet become
partially degenerate, his teeth wholly, his digestion so enervated that
he has to cook his food and make pulps of all his victuals, and his
whole system so obviously on the decline that at last in the end of
time a Kay Robinson arises and prophesies as aforesaid, that he will
before long become wholly toothless, bald and toeless.
And so with this denial of Nature comes every form of disease; first
delicatesse, daintiness, luxury; then unbalance, enervation, huge
susceptibility to pain. With the shutting of himself away from the
all-healing Power, man inevitably weakens his whole manhood; the central
bond is loosened, and he falls a prey to his own organs. He who before
was unaware of the existence of these latter, now becomes only too
conscious of them (and this—is it not the very object of the process?);
the stomach, the liver and the spleen start out into painful
distinctness before him, the heart loses its equable beat, the lungs
their continuity with the universal air, and the brain becomes hot and
fevered; each organ in turn asserts itself abnormally and becomes a seat
of disorder, every corner and cranny of the body becomes the scene and
symbol of disease, and Man gazes aghast at his own kingdom—whose extent
he had never suspected before—now all ablaze in wild revolt against
him. And then—all going with this period of his development—sweep vast
epidemic trains over the face of the earth, plagues and fevers and
lunacies and world-wide festering sores, followed by armies, ever
growing, of doctors—they too with their retinues of books and bottles,
vaccinations and vivisections, and grinning death's-heads in the rear—a
mad crew, knowing not what they do, yet all unconsciously, doubtless,
fulfilling the great age-long destiny of humanity.
In all this the influence of Property is apparent enough. It is evident
that the growth of property through the increase of man's powers of
production reacts on the man in three ways: to draw him away namely, (1)
from Nature, (2) from his true Self, (3) from his Fellows. In the first
place it draws him away from Nature. That is, that as man's power over
materials increases he creates for himself a sphere and an environment
of his own, in some sense apart and different from the great elemental
world of the winds and the waves, the woods and the mountains, in which
he has hitherto lived. He creates what we call the artificial life, of
houses and cities, and, shutting himself up in these, shuts Nature out.
As a growing boy at a certain point, and partly in order to assert his
independence, wrests himself away from the tender care of his mother,
and even displays—just for the time being—a spirit of opposition to
her, so the growing Man finding out his own powers uses them—for the
time—even to do despite to Nature, and to create himself a world in
which she shall have no part. In the second place the growth of property
draws man away from his true Self. This is clear enough. As his power
over materials and his possessions increases, man finds the means of
gratifying his senses at will. Instead of being guided any longer by
that continent and "whole" instinct which characterises the animals,
his chief motive is now to use his powers to gratify this or that sense
or desire. These become abnormally magnified, and the man soon places
his main good in their satisfaction; and abandons his true Self for his
organs, the whole for the parts. Property draws the man outwards,
stimulating the external part of his being, and for a time mastering
him, overpowers the central Will, and brings about his disintegration
and corruption. Lastly, Property by thus stimulating the external and
selfish nature in Man, draws him away from his Fellows. In the anxiety
to possess things for himself, in order to gratify his own bumps, he is
necessarily brought into conflict with his neighbor and comes to regard
him as an enemy. For the true Self of man consists in his organic
relation with the whole body of his fellows; and when the man abandons
his true Self he abandons also his true relation to his fellows. The
mass-Man must rule in each unit-man, else the unit-man will drop off and
die. But when the outer man tries to separate himself from the inner,
the unit-man from the mass-Man, then the reign of individuality
begins—a false and impossible individuality of course, but the only
means of coming to the consciousness of the true individuality. With the
advent of a Civilisation then founded on Property the unity of the old
tribal society is broken up. The ties of blood relationship which were
the foundation of the gentile system and the guarantees of the old
fraternity and equality become dissolved in favor of powers and
authorities founded on mere possession. The growth of Wealth
disintegrates the ancient Society; the temptations of power, of
possession, etc., which accompany it, wrench the individual from his
moorings; personal greed rules; "each man for himself" becomes the
universal motto; the hand of every man is raised against his brother,
and at last society itself becomes an organisation by which the rich
fatten upon the vitals of the poor, the strong upon the murder of the
weak. [It is interesting in this connection to find that Lewis Morgan
makes the invention of a written alphabet and the growth of the
conception of private property the main characteristics of the
civilisation-period as distinguished from the periods of savagery and
barbarism which preceded it; for the invention of writing marks perhaps
better than anything else could do the period when Man becomes
self-conscious—when he records his own doings and thoughts, and so
commences History proper; and the growth of private property marks the
period when he begins to sunder himself from his fellows, when therefore
the conception of sin (or separation) first enters in, and with it all
the long period of moral perplexity, and the denial of that community of
life between himself and his fellows which is really of the essence of
man's being.]
And then arises the institution of Government.
Hitherto this had not existed except in a quite rudimentary form. The
early communities troubled themselves little about individual ownership,
and what government they had was for the most part essentially
democratic—as being merely a choice of leaders among blood-relations
and social equals. But when the delusion that man can exist for himself
alone—his outer and, as it were, accidental self apart from the great
inner and cosmical self by which he is one with his fellows—when this
delusion takes possession of him, it is not long before it finds
expression in some system of private property. The old community of life
and enjoyment passes away, and each man tries to grab the utmost he can,
and to retire into his own lair for its consumption. Private
accumulations arise; the natural flow of the bounties of life is dammed
back, and artificial barriers of Law have to be constructed in order to
preserve the unequal levels. Outrage and Fraud follow in the wake of the
desire of possession; force has to be used by the possessors in order to
maintain the law-barriers against the non-possessors; classes are
formed; and finally the formal Government arises, mainly as the
expression of such force; and preserves itself, as best it can, until
such time as the inequalities which it upholds become too glaring, and
the pent social waters gathering head burst through once more and regain
their natural levels.
Thus Morgan in his "Ancient Society" points out over and over again that
the civilised state rests upon territorial and property marks and
qualifications, and not upon a personal basis as did the ancient gens,
or the tribe; and that the civilised government correspondingly takes on
quite a different character and function from the simple organisation
of the gens. He says (p. 124), "Monarchy is incompatible with
gentilism." Also with regard to the relation of Property to Civilisation
and Government he makes the following pregnant remarks (p. 505): "It is
impossible to over-estimate the influence of property in the
civilisation of mankind. It was the power that brought the Aryan and
Semitic nations out of barbarism into civilisation. The growth of the
idea of property in the human mind commenced in feebleness and ended in
becoming its master passion. Governments and Laws are instituted with
primary reference to its creation, protection and enjoyment. It
introduced human slavery as an instrument in its production; and after
the experience of several thousand years it caused the abolition of
slavery upon the discovery that a freeman was a better property-making
machine." And in another passage on the same subject, "The dissolution
of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which
property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements
of self-destruction. Democracy is the next higher plane. It will be a
revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the
ancient gentes."
The institution of Government is in fact the evidence in social life
that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must
resort to an outward one. Losing touch with the inward Man—who is his
true guide—he declines upon an external law, which must always be
false. If each man remained in organic adhesion to the general body of
his fellows, no serious dis-harmony could occur; but it is when this
vital unity of the body politic becomes weak that it has to be preserved
by artificial means, and thus it is that with the decay of the primitive
and instinctive social life there springs up a form of government which
is no longer the democratic expression of the life of the whole people;
but a kind of outside authority and compulsion thrust upon them by a
ruling class or caste.
Perhaps the sincerest, and often though not always the earliest, form of
Government is Monarchy. The sentiment of human unity having been already
partly but not quite lost, the people choose—in order to hold society
together—a man to rule over them who has this sentiment in a high
degree. He represents the true Man and therefore the people. This is
often a time of extensive warfare and the formation of nations. And it
is interesting in this connection to note that the quite early "Kings"
or leaders of each nation just prior to the civilisation period were
generally associated with the highest religious functions, as in the
case of the Roman rex, the Greek basileus, the early Egyptian Kings,
Moses among the Israelites, and Druid leaders of the Britons, and so on.
Later, and as the central authority gets more and more shadowy in each
man, and the external attraction of Property greater, so it does in
Society. The temporal and spiritual powers part company. The king—who
at first represented the Divine Spirit or soul of society, recedes into
the background, and his nobles of high degree (who may be compared to
the nobler, more generous, qualities of the mind) begin to take his
place. This is the Aristocracy and the Feudal Age—the Timocracy of
Plato; and is marked by the appearance of large private tenures of land,
and the growth of slavery and serfdom—the slavery thus outwardly
appearing in society being the symbol of the inward enslavement of the man.
Then comes the Commercial Age—the Oligarchy or Plutocracy of Plato.
Honour quite gives place to material wealth; the rulers rule not by
personal or hereditary, but by property qualifications. Parliaments and
Constitutions and general Palaver are the order of the day.
Wage-slavery, usury, mortgages, and other abominations, indicate the
advance of the mortal process. In the individual man gain is the end of
existence; industry and scientific cunning are his topmost virtues.
Last of all the break-up is complete. The individual loses all memory
and tradition of his heavenly guide and counterpart; his nobler passions
fail for want of a leader to whom to dedicate themselves; his industry
and his intellect serve but to minister to his little swarming desires.
This is the era of anarchy—the democracy of Carlyle; the rule of the
rabble, and mob-law; caucuses and cackle, competition and universal
greed, breaking out in cancerous tyrannies and plutocracies—a mere
chaos and confusion of society. For just as we saw in the human body,
when the inner and positive force of Health has departed from it, that
it falls a prey to parasites which overspread and devour it; so, when
the central inspiration departs out of social life, does it writhe with
the mere maggots of individual greed, and at length fall under the
dominion of the most monstrous egotist who has been bred from its corruption.
Thus we have briefly sketched the progress of the symptoms of the
"disease," which, as said before, runs much (though not quite) the same
course in the various nations which it attacks. And if this last stage
were really the end of all, and the true Democracy, there were indeed
little left to hope for. No words of Carlyle could blast that black
enough. But this is no true Democracy. Here in this "each for himself"
is no rule of the Demos in every man, nor anything resembling it. Here
is no solidarity such as existed in the ancient tribes and primæval
society, but only disintegration and a dust-heap. The true Democracy has
yet to come. Here in this present stage is only the final denial of all
outward and class government, in preparation for the restoration of the
inner and true authority. Here in this stage the task of civilisation
comes to an end; the purport and object of all these centuries is
fulfilled; the bitter experience that mankind had to pass through is
completed; and out of this Death and all the torture and unrest which
accompanies it, comes at last the Resurrection. Man has sounded the
depths of alienation from his own divine spirit, he has drunk the dregs
of the cup of suffering, he has literally descended into Hell;
henceforth he turns, both in the individual and in society, and mounts
deliberately and consciously back again towards the unity which he has
lost.[14]
And the false democracy parts aside for the disclosure of the true
Democracy which has been formed beneath it—which is not an external
government at all, but an inward rule—the rule of the mass-Man in each
unit-man. For no outward government can be anything but a make-shift—a
temporary hard chrysalis-sheath to hold the grub together while the new
life is forming inside—a device of the civilisation-period. Farther
than this it cannot go, since no true life can rely upon an external
support, and, when the true life of society comes, all its forms will be
fluid and spontaneous and voluntary.
And now, by way of a glimpse into the future—after this long digression
what is the route that man will take?
This is a subject that I hardly dare tackle. "The morning wind ever
blows," says Thoreau, "the poem of creation is uninterrupted—but few
are the ears that hear it." And how can we, gulfed as we are in this
present whirlpool, conceive rightly the glory which awaits us? No limits
that our present knowledge puts need alarm us; the impossibilities will
yield very easily when the time comes; and the anatomical difficulty as
to how and where the wings are to grow will vanish when they are felt
sprouting!
It can hardly be doubted that the tendency will be—indeed is already
showing itself—towards a return to nature and community of human life.
This is the way back to the lost Eden, or rather forward to the new
Eden, of which the old was only a figure. Man has to undo the wrappings
and the mummydom of centuries, by which he has shut himself from the
light of the sun and lain in seeming death, preparing silently his
glorious resurrection—for all the world like the funny old chrysalis
that he is. He has to emerge from houses and all his other hiding
places wherein so long ago ashamed (as at the voice of God in the
garden) he concealed himself—and Nature must once more become his home,
as it is the home of the animals and the angels.
As it is written in the old magical formula: "Man clothes himself to
descend, unclothes himself to ascend." Over his spiritual or wind-like
body he puts on a material or earthy body; over his earth-body he puts
on the skins of animals and other garments; then he hides this body in a
house behind curtains and stone walls—which become to it as secondary
skins and prolongations of itself. So that between the man and his true
life there grows a dense and impenetrable hedge; and, what with the
cares and anxieties connected with his earth-body and all its skins, he
soon loses the knowledge that he is a Man at all; his true self slumbers
in a deep and agelong swoon.
But the instinct of all who desire to deliver the divine imago within
them, is, in something more than the literal sense, towards unclothing.
And the process of evolution or exfoliation itself is nothing but a
continual unclothing of Nature, by which the perfect human Form which is
at the root of it comes nearer and nearer to its manifestation.
Thus, in order to restore the Health which he has lost, man has in the
future to tend in this direction. Life indoors and in houses has to
become a fraction only, instead of the principal part of existence as it
is now. Garments similarly have to be simplified. How far this process
may go it is not necessary now to enquire. It is sufficiently obvious
that our domestic life and clothing may be at once greatly reduced in
complexity, and with the greatest advantage—made subsidiary instead of
being erected into the fetishes which they are. And everyone may feel
assured that each gain in this direction is a gain in true life—whether
it be the head that goes uncovered to the air of heaven, or the feet
that press bare the magnetic earth, or the elementary raiment that
allows through its meshes the light itself to reach the vital organs.
The life of the open air, familiarity with the winds and waves, clean
and pure food, the companionship of the animals—the very wrestling with
the great Mother for his food—all these things will tend to restore
that relationship which man has so long disowned; and the consequent
instreaming of energy into his system will carry him to perfections of
health and radiance of being at present unsuspected.
Of course, it will be said that many of these things are difficult to
realise in our country, that an indoor life, with all its concomitants,
is forced upon us by the climate. But if this is to some small—though
very small—extent true, it forms no reason why we should not still take
advantage of every opportunity to push in the direction indicated. It
must be remembered, too, that our climate is greatly of our own
creation. If the atmosphere of many of our great towns and of the lands
for miles in their neighbourhood is devitalised and deadly—so that in
cold weather it grants to the poor mortal no compensating power of
resistance, but compels him at peril of his life to swathe himself in
greatcoats and mufflers—the blame is none but ours. It is we who have
covered the lands with a pall of smoke, and are walking to our own
funerals under it.
That this climate, however, at its best may not be suited to the highest
developments of human life is quite possible. Because Britain has been
the scene of some of the greatest episodes of Civilisation, it does not
follow that she will keep the lead in the period that is to follow; and
the Higher Communities of the future will perhaps take their rise in
warmer lands, where life is richer and fuller, more spontaneous and more
generous, than it can be here.
Another point in this connection is the food question. For the
restoration of the central vigour when lost or degenerate, a diet
consisting mainly of fruits and grains is most adapted. Animal food
often gives for the time being a lot of nervous energy—and may be
useful for special purposes; but the energy is of a spasmodic feverish
kind; the food has a tendency to inflame the subsidiary centres, and so
to diminish the central control. Those who live mainly on animal food
are specially liable to disease—and not only physically; for their
minds also fall more easily a prey to desires and sorrows. In times
therefore of grief or mental trouble of any kind, as well as in times of
bodily sickness, immediate recourse should be had to the more elementary
diet. The body under this diet endures work with less fatigue, is less
susceptible to pain, and to cold; and heals its wounds with
extraordinary celerity; all of which facts point in the same direction.
It may be noted, too, that foods of the seed kind—by which I mean all
manner of fruits, nuts, tubers, grains, eggs, etc. (and I may include
milk in its various forms of butter, cheese, curds, and so forth), not
only contain by their nature the elements of life in their most
condensed forms, but have the additional advantage that they can be
appropriated without injury to any living creature—for even the cabbage
may inaudibly scream when torn up by the roots and boiled, but the
strawberry plant asks us to take of its fruit, and paints it red
expressly that we may see and devour it! Both of which considerations
must convince us that this kind of food is most fitted to develop the
kernel of man's life.
Which all means cleanness. The unity of our nature being restored, the
instinct of bodily cleanness, both within and without, which is such a
marked characteristic of the animals, will again characterise
mankind—only now instead of a blind instinct it will be a conscious,
joyous one; dirt being only disorder and obstruction. And thus the whole
human being, mind and body, becoming clean and radiant from its inmost
centre to its farthest circumference—"transfigured"—the distinction
between the words spiritual and material disappears. In the words of
Whitman, "objects gross and the unseen soul are one."
But this return to Nature, and identification in some sort with the
great cosmos, does not involve a denial or depreciation of human life
and interests. It is not uncommonly supposed that there is some kind of
antagonism between Man and Nature, and that to recommend a life closer
to the latter means mere asceticism and eremitism; and unfortunately
this antagonism does exist to-day, though it certainly will not exist
for ever. To-day it is unfortunately perfectly true that Man is the only
animal who, instead of adorning and beautifying, makes Nature hideous by
his presence. The fox and the squirrel may make their homes in the wood
and add to its beauty in so doing; but when Alderman Smith plants his
villa there, the gods pack up their trunks and depart; they can bear it
no longer. The Bushmen can hide themselves and become indistinguishable
on a slope of bare rock; they twine their naked little yellow bodies
together, and look like a heap of dead sticks; but when the chimney-pot
hat and frock-coat appear, the birds fly screaming from the trees. This
was the great glory of the Greeks that they accepted and perfected
Nature; as the Parthenon sprang out of the limestone terraces of the
Acropolis, carrying the natural lines of the rock by gradations scarce
perceptible into the finished and human beauty of frieze and pediment,
and as, above, it was open for the blue air of heaven to descend into it
for a habitation; so throughout in all their best work and life did they
stand in this close relation to the earth and the sky and to all
instinctive and elemental things, admitting no gulf between themselves
and them, but only perfecting their expressiveness and beauty. And some
day we shall again understand this which, in the very sunrise of true
Art, the Greeks so well understood. Possibly some day we shall again
build our houses or dwelling places so simple and elemental in character
that they will fit in the nooks of the hills or along the banks of the
streams or by the edges of the woods without disturbing the harmony of
the landscape or the songs of the birds. Then the great temples,
beautiful on every height, or by the shores of the rivers and the lakes,
will be the storehouses of all precious and lovely things. There men,
women and children will come to share in the great and wonderful common
life, the gardens around will be sacred to the unharmed and welcome
animals; there all store and all facilities of books and music and art
for every one, there a meeting place for social life and intercourse,
there dances and games and feasts. Every village, every little
settlement, will have such hall or halls. No need for private
accumulations. Gladly will each man, and more gladly still each woman,
take his or her treasures, except what are immediately or necessarily in
use, to the common centre, where their value will be increased a hundred
and a thousand fold by the greater number of those who can enjoy them,
and where far more perfectly and with far less toil they can be tended
than if scattered abroad in private hands. At one stroke half the labour
and all the anxiety of domestic caretaking will be annihilated. The
private dwelling places, no longer costly and labyrinthine in proportion
to the value and number of the treasures they contain, will need no
longer to have doors and windows jealously closed against fellow men or
mother nature. The sun and air will have access to them, the indwellers
will have unfettered egress. Neither man nor woman will be tied in
slavery to the lodge which they inhabit; and in becoming once more a
part of nature, the human habitation will at length cease to be what it
is now for at least half the human race—a prison.
Men often ask about the new Architecture—what, and of what sort, it is
going to be. But to such a question there can be no answer till a new
understanding of life has entered into people's minds, and then the
answer will be clear enough. For as the Greek Temples and the Gothic
Cathedrals were built by people who themselves lived but frugally as we
should think, and were ready to dedicate their best work and chief
treasure to the gods and the common life; and as to-day when we must
needs have for ourselves spacious and luxurious villas, we seem to be
unable to design a decent church or public building; so it will not be
till we once more find our main interest and life in the life of the
community and the gods that a new spirit will inspire our architecture.
Then when our Temples and Common Halls are not designed to glorify an
individual architect or patron, but are built for the use of free men
and women, to front the sky and the sea and the sun, to spring out of
the earth, companionable with the trees and the rocks, not alien in
spirit from the sunlit globe itself or the depth of the starry
night—then I say their form and structure will quickly determine
themselves, and men will have no difficulty in making them beautiful.
And similarly with the homes or dwelling places of the people. Various
as these may be for the various wants of men, whether for a single
individual or for a family, or for groups of individuals or families,
whether to the last degree simple, or whether more or less ornate and
complex, still the new conception, the new needs of life, will
necessarily dominate them and give them form by a law unfolding from
within.
In such new human life then—its fields, its farms, its workshops, its
cities—always the work of man perfecting and beautifying the lands,
aiding the efforts of the sun and soil, giving voice to the desire of
the mute earth—in such new communal life near to nature, so far from
any asceticism or inhospitality, we are fain to see far more humanity
and sociability than ever before: an infinite helpfulness and sympathy,
as between the children of a common mother. Mutual help and combination
will then have become spontaneous and instinctive: each man contributing
to the service of his neighbor as inevitably and naturally as the right
hand goes to help the left in the human body—and for precisely the same
reason. Every man—think of it!—will do the work which he likes,
which he desires to do, which is obviously before him to do, and which
he knows will be useful, without thought of wages or reward; and the
reward will come to him as inevitably and naturally as in the human body
the blood flows to the member which is exerting itself. All the endless
burden of the adjustments of labour and wages, of the war of duty and
distaste, of want and weariness, will be thrown aside—all the huge
waste of work done against the grain will be avoided; out of the endless
variety of human nature will spring a perfectly natural and infinite
variety of occupations, all mutually contributive; Society at last will
be free and the human being after long ages will have attained to
deliverance.
This is the Communism which Civilisation has always hated, as it hated
Christ. Yet it is inevitable; for the cosmical man, the instinctive
elemental man accepting and crowning nature, necessarily fulfils the
universal law of nature. As to External Government and Law, they will
disappear; for they are only the travesties and transitory substitutes
of Inward Government and Order. Society in its final state is neither a
Monarchy, nor an Aristocracy nor a Democracy, nor an Anarchy, and yet in
another sense it is all of these. It is an Anarchy because there is no
outward rule, but only an inward and invisible spirit of life; it is a
Democracy because it is the rule of the Mass-man, or Demos, in each unit
man; it is an Aristocracy because there are degrees and ranks of such
inward power in all men; and it is a Monarchy because all these ranks
and powers merge in a perfect unity and central control at last. And so
it appears that the outer forms of government which belong to the
Civilisation-period are only the expression in separate external symbols
of the facts of the true inner life of society.
And just as thus the various external forms of government during the
Civilisation-period find their justification and interpretation in the
ensuing period, so will it be with the mechanical and other products of
the present time; they will be taken up, and find their proper place and
use in the time to come. They will not be refused; but they will have to
be brought into subjection. Our locomotives, machinery, telegraphic and
postal systems; our houses, furniture, clothes, books, our fearful and
wonderful cookery, strong drinks, teas, tobaccos; our medical and
surgical appliances; high-faluting sciences and philosophies, and all
other engines hitherto of human bewilderment, have simply to be reduced
to abject subjection to the real man. All these appliances, and a
thousand others such as we hardly dream of, will come in to perfect his
power and increase his freedom; but they will not be the objects of a
mere fetish-worship as now. Man will use them, instead of their using
him. His real life will lie in a region far beyond them. But in thus for
a moment denying and "mastering" the products of Civilisation, will he
for the first time discover their true value, and reap from them an
enjoyment unknown before.
The same with the moral powers. As said before, the knowledge of good
and evil at a certain point passes away, or becomes absorbed into a
higher knowledge. The perception of Sin goes with a certain weakness in
the man. As long as there is conflict and division within him, so long
does he seem to perceive conflicting and opposing principles in the
world without. As long as the objects of the outer world excite emotions
in him which pass beyond his control, so long do those objects stand as
the signals of evil—of disorder and sin. Not that the objects are bad
in themselves, or even the emotions which they excite, but that all
through this period these things serve to the man as indications of
his weakness. But when the central power is restored in man and all
things are reduced to his service, it is impossible for him to see
badness in anything. The bodily is no longer antagonistic to the
spiritual love, but is absorbed into it. All his passions take their
places perfectly naturally, and become, when the occasions arise, the
vehicles of his expression. Vices under existing conditions are vices
simply because of the inordinate and disturbing influence they exercise,
but will cease again to be vices when the man regains his proper
command. Thus Socrates having a clean soul in a clean body could drink
his boon companions under the table and then go out himself to take the
morning air—what was a blemish and defect in them being simply an added
power of enjoyment to himself!
The point of difference throughout (being the transference of the centre
of gravity of life and consciousness from the partial to the universal
man) is symbolised by the gradual resumption of more universal
conditions. That is to say that during the civilisation-period, the body
being systematically wrapped in clothes, the head alone represents
man—the little finnikin, intellectual, self-conscious man in
contra-distinction to the cosmical man represented by the entirety of
the bodily organs. The body has to be delivered from its swathings in
order that the cosmical consciousness may once more reside in the human
breast. We have to become "all face" again—as the savage said of
himself.[15]
Where the cosmic self is, there is no more self-consciousness. The body
and what is ordinarily called the self are felt to be only parts of the
true self, and the ordinary distinctions of inner and outer, egotism and
altruism, etc., lose a good deal of their value. Thought no longer
returns upon the local self as the chief object of regard, but
consciousness is continually radiant from it, filling the body and
overflowing upon external Nature. Thus the Sun in the physical world is
the allegory of the true self. The worshiper must adore the Sun, he must
saturate himself with sunlight, and take the physical Sun into himself.
Those who live by fire and candle-light are filled with phantoms; their
thoughts are Will-o'-th'-wisp-like images of themselves, and they are
tormented by a horrible self-consciousness.
And when the Civilisation-period has passed away, the old
Nature-religion—perhaps greatly grown—will come back. This immense
stream of religious life which, beginning far beyond the horizon of
earliest history, has been deflected into various metaphysical and other
channels—of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the like—during the
historical period, will once more gather itself together to float on its
bosom all the arks and sacred vessels of human progress. Man will once
more feel his unity with his fellows, he will feel his unity with the
animals, with the mountains and the streams, with the earth itself and
the slow lapse of the constellations, not as an abstract dogma of
Science or Theology, but as a living and ever-present fact. Ages back
this has been understood better than now. Our Christian ceremonial is
saturated with sexual and astronomical symbols; and long before
Christianity existed, the sexual and astronomical were the main forms of
religion. That is to say, men instinctively felt and worshiped the great
life coming to them through Sex, the great life coming to them from the
deeps of Heaven. They deified both. They placed their gods—their own
human forms—in sex, they placed them in the sky. And not only so, but
wherever they felt this kindred human life—in the animals, in the ibis,
the bull, the lamb, the snake, the crocodile; in the trees and flowers,
the oak, the ash, the laurel, the hyacinth; in the streams and
water-falls, on the mountain-sides or in the depths of the sea—they
placed them. The whole universe was full of a life which, though not
always friendly, was human and kindred to their own, felt by them,
not reasoned about, but simply perceived. To the early man the notion of
his having a separate individuality could only with difficulty occur;
hence he troubled himself not with the suicidal questionings concerning
the whence and whither which now vex the modern mind.[16] For what
causes these questions to be asked is simply the wretched feeling of
isolation, actual or prospective, which man necessarily has when he
contemplates himself as a separate atom in this immense universe—the
gulf which lies below seemingly ready to swallow him, and the anxiety to
find some mode of escape. But when he feels once more that he, that he
himself, is absolutely indivisibly and indestructibly a part of this
great whole—why then there is no gulf into which he can possibly fall;
when he is sensible of the fact, why then the how of its realisation,
though losing none of its interest, becomes a matter for whose solution
he can wait and work in faith and contentment of mind. The Sun or Sol,
visible image of his very Soul, closest and most vital to him of all
mortal things, occupying the illimitable heaven, feeding all with its
life; the Moon, emblem and nurse of his own reflective thought, the
conscious Man, measurer of Time, mirror of the Sun; the planetary
passions wandering to and fro, yet within bounds; the starry destinies;
the changes of the earth, and the seasons; the upward growth and
unfoldment of all organic life; the emergence of the perfect Man,
towards whose birth all creation groans and travails—all these things
will return to become realities, and to be the frame or setting of his
supra-mundane life. The meaning of the old religions will come back to
him. On the high tops once more gathering he will celebrate with naked
dances the glory of the human form and the great processions of the
stars, or greet the bright horn of the young moon which now after a
hundred centuries comes back laden with such wondrous associations—all
the yearnings and the dreams and the wonderment of the generations of
mankind—the worship of Astarte and of Diana, of Isis or the Virgin
Mary; once more in sacred groves will he reunite the passion and the
delight of human love with his deepest feelings of the sanctity and
beauty of Nature; or in the open, standing uncovered to the Sun, will
adore the emblem of the everlasting splendour which shines within. The
same sense of vital perfection and exaltation which can be traced in the
early and pre-civilisation peoples—only a thousand times intensified,
defined, illustrated and purified—will return to irradiate the redeemed
and delivered Man.
In suggesting thus the part which Civilisation has played in history, I
am aware that the word itself is difficult to define—is at best only
one of those phantom-generalisations which the mind is forced to employ;
also that the account I have given of it is sadly imperfect, leaning
perhaps too much to the merely negative and destructive aspect of this
thousand-year long lapse of human evolution. I would also remind the
reader that though it is perfectly true that under the dissolving
influence of civilisation empire after empire has gone under and
disappeared, and the current of human progress time after time has only
been restored again by a fresh influx of savagery, yet its corruptive
tendency has never had a quite unlimited fling; but that all down the
ages of its dominance over the earth we can trace the tradition of a
healing and redeeming power at work in the human breast and an
anticipation of the second advent of the son of man. Certain
institutions, too, such as Art and the Family (though it seems not
unlikely that both of these will greatly change when the special
conditions of their present existence have disappeared), have served to
keep the sacred flame alive; the latter preserving in island-miniatures,
as it were, the ancient communal humanity when the seas of individualism
and greed covered the general face of the earth; the former keeping up,
so to speak, a navel-cord of contact with Nature, and a means of
utterance of primal emotions else unsatisfiable in the world around.
And if it seem extravagant to suppose that Society will ever emerge from
the chaotic condition of strife and perplexity in which we find it all
down the lapse of historical time, or to hope that the
civilisation-process which has terminated fatally so invariably in the
past will ever eventuate in the establishment of a higher and more
perfect health-condition, we may for our consolation remember that
to-day there are features in the problem which have never been present
before. In the first place, to-day Civilisation is no longer isolated,
as in the ancient world, in surrounding floods of savagery and
barbarism, but it practically covers the globe, and the outlying
savagery is so feeble as not possibly to be a menace to it. This may at
first appear a drawback, for (it will be said) if Civilisation be not
renovated by the influx of external Savagery its own inherent flaws will
destroy society all the sooner. And there would be some truth in this if
it were not for the following consideration, namely, that while for the
first time in History Civilisation is now practically continuous over
the globe, now also for the first time can we descry forming in
continuous line within its very structure the forces which are
destined to destroy it and to bring about the new order. While hitherto
isolated communisms, as suggested, have existed here and there and from
time to time, now for the first time in History both the masses and the
thinkers of all the advanced nations of the world are consciously
feeling their way towards the establishment of a socialistic and
communal life on a vast scale. The present competitive society is more
and more rapidly becoming a mere dead formula and husk within which the
outlines of the new and human society are already discernible.
Simultaneously, and as if to match this growth, a move towards Nature
and Savagery is for the first time taking place from within, instead of
being forced upon society from without. The nature movement begun years
ago in literature and art is now, among the more advanced sections of
the civilised world, rapidly realising itself in actual life, going so
far even as a denial, among some, of machinery and the complex products
of Civilisation, and developing among others into a gospel of salvation
by sandals and sunbaths! It is in these two movements—towards a complex
human Communism and towards individual freedom and Savagery—in some
sort balancing and correcting each other, and both visibly growing up
within, though utterly foreign to—our present-day Civilisation, that we
have fair grounds, I think, for looking forward to its cure.
(See p. 26) The following remarks by Mr. H. B. Cotterill on the
natives around Lake Nyassa, among whom he lived at a time, 1876-8,
when the region was almost unvisited, may be of interest. "In
regard of merely 'animal' development and well-being, that is in
the delicate perfection of bodily faculties (perceptive), the
African savage is as a rule incomparably superior to us. One feels
like a child, utterly dependent on them, when travelling or hunting
with them. It is true that many may be found (especially amongst
the weaker tribes that have been slave-hunted or driven into barren
corners) who are half-starved and wizened, but as a rule they are
splendid animals. In character there is a great want of that
strength which in the educated civilised man is secured by the
roots striking out into the Past and Future—and in spite of their
immense perceptive superiority they feel and acknowledge the
superior force of character in the white man. They are the very
converse of the Stoic self-sufficient sage—like children in their
'admiration' and worship of the Unknown. Hence their absolute want
of Conceit, though they possess self-command and dignity. They
are, to those they love and respect, faithful and devoted—their
faithfulness and truthfulness are dictated by no 'categorical
imperative,' but by personal affection. Towards an enemy they can
be, without any conscientious scruples, treacherous and inhumanly
cruel. I should say that there is scarcely any possible idea that
is so foreign to the savage African mind as that of general
philanthropy or enemy-love."
"In endurance the African savage beats us hollow (except trained
athletes). On one occasion my men rowed my boat with 10 foot oars
against the wind in a choppy sea for 25 hours at one go, across
Kuwirwe Bay, about 60 miles. They never once stopped or left their
seats—just handed round a handful of rice now and then. I was at
the helm all the time—and had enough of it!... They carry 80 lbs.
on their heads for 10 hours through swamps and jungles. Four of my
men carried a sick man weighing 14 stones in a hammock for 200
miles, right across the dreaded Malikata Swamp. But for sudden
emergencies, squalls, etc., they are nowhere."
(See p. 27) "So lovely a scene made easily credible the suggestion,
otherwise highly probable, that the Golden Age was no mere fancy of
the poets, but a reminiscence of the facts of social life in its
primitive organisation of village and house-communities." (J. S.
Stuart-Glennie's Europe and Asia, ch. i. Servia.)
(See p. 72) "It was only on the up-break of the primitive
socialisms that the passionate desire of, and therefore belief in,
individual Immortality arose. With an intense feeling, not of an
independent individual life, but of a dependent common life, there
is no passionate desire of, though there may be more or less of
belief in, a continuance after death of individual existence."
(Ibid, p. 161.)
Following is an extract from a letter from my friend Havelock
Ellis, which he kindly allows me to reprint. The passage is
interesting as indicating one cause, at any rate, of the failure
of the modern civilisations. "Your remark that you are
re-publishing Civilisation: its Cause and Cure has led me to read
it once again, and I see how well adapted it is for reissue just
now when there is so widespread a discontent with 'civilisation.' I
do not see any reason for changing the essay, though, no doubt,
much might be added to supplement it. What has, however, struck me
is that you leave out of account the reason for the greater
health, vigour, and high spirit of savages (when such conditions
exist), and that is the more stringent natural selection among
savages owing to the greater hardness of their life. You doubtless
know ch. xvii of Westermarck's Moral Ideas, where he shows how
widespread among savages (when they have got past the first crude
primitive stage), and in the ancient civilisations, was the
practice of infanticide applied to inferior babies and the habit of
allowing sick persons to die. That was evidently the secret of the
natural superiority of the savage and of the men of the old
civilisation, for the Greeks and Romans were very stringent in this
matter. The flabbiness of the civilised and the prevalence of
doctors and hygienists, which you make fun of, is due to the modern
tenderness for human life which is afraid to kill off even the most
worthless specimens and so lowers the whole level of 'civilised'
humanity. Introduce a New Hardness in this matter and we should
return to the high level of savagery, while the doctors would
disappear as if by magic. I don't myself believe we can introduce
this hardness; and that is why I attach so much importance to
intelligent eugenics, working through birth-control, as the only
now possible way of getting towards that high natural level you
aim at."—Havelock Ellis (1920).
