The latest chapter in the story of the higher life is the conception of man and the world which has grown up under the influence of modern science. The most original and effective expression of this philosophy is given by Herbert Spencer. What new light does the evolutionary philosophy throw on man"s chief problem, the right conduct of his own life?
First, it defines with clearness two great forces which bear on the individual life, as Heredity and Environment. Next, it defines the ideal to be sought, by reaffirming in substance the familiar conception of human morality, showing its sanctions on purely natural grounds, and giving new applications and extensions of its principles. And finally, compared with the traditional theology, it leads to a new conception of the relation between man and the higher power, and necessitates, what Spencer does not supply, a new expression of the religious life.
The discovery of Darwin, supplying the final link to the growing proofs of the evolutionary development of man, opened an amazing panorama of the past history of the planet"s inhabitants. The predecessors and successors of Darwin added to the panorama one after another scene of wonder. The standpoint of thought seemed wholly changed, and a readjustment necessary which threatened overthrow to all the old creeds and standards. Spencer, who has been the most successful in generalizing the new knowledge, comes back to the inquiry, By what law shall man guide his own conduct? His answer is substantially a reaffirmation of the principles which good men have acknowledged for many ages. Whatever else is changed, it remains true that justice, fidelity, chast.i.ty, honor, regard for others, are man"s safest guides and his lawful rulers.
Altruism is only a new word for the golden rule. But the advance of society has brought wider and finer applications: the claim of the whole community comes closer home; the principles which have been recognized within the church and the neighborhood must be carried on to reshape inst.i.tutions, industries, the whole social organism.
The moral idea is thus reaffirmed and extended, but how can man attain that ideal? By using his free will, said the Stoic. By the grace of G.o.d obtained through prayer, said the Christian. Is man then free, or is he the pa.s.sive creature of a greater power, and of what nature is that power? Now, where theologians have sought to define the Deity, and to conceive his government of his creatures in terms of a personal affection and will, scientists, contenting themselves with observation of facts, have shown that each man is what he is and does what he does partly because of what his parents and remoter ancestors were and did before him, and partly because of the forces of climate, inst.i.tutions, education, companionship, event, which surround him from his birth to his grave. Heredity and Environment, these are
"the hands That reach through Nature, moulding Man."
It looks at first as if the old dispute between free will and necessity were settled at last, and man were indeed a creature of inscrutable fate.
Yet, in the very act of acknowledging certain ideals of character as desirable, we become conscious of an impulse and initial effort--call it automatic or call it voluntary--toward attaining those ideals. As a matter of practice, we speedily recognize that both Heredity and Environment are in a degree under human control. If they are deities, they are accessible to prayers, the prayers which are watchfulness and obedience. Man is always at work to better the environment of himself and his fellows. As he sees more clearly that his true good is character and the n.o.ble self, he shapes his environment more intelligently and resolutely to that end. As to heredity, while the individual is powerless over his own lot, he is in a degree potential over those who are to succeed him. The conception of duty is enlarged by the obligations of marriage and parenthood, in a wise selection and thoughtful care for the future offspring.
Heredity and Environment, then, are partly the servants of man. Yet largely they are his lords and masters. In a degree, but only in a degree, do we make ourselves what we are. And while the degree of that self-determining power can never be known, we learn to be charitable toward others and exacting toward ourselves.
The new philosophy has its chief bearing on conduct, not in abstract conceptions about fate, free will, and responsibility, but in the stimulus it gives to find new tools and weapons of moral achievement.
How shall we make men good? No longer by the mere appeal to reason; no longer mainly by promise of heaven and threat of h.e.l.l. Still appealing to reason, to hope and fear, to imagination, we must go on to put about men all stimulating influences, all guiding appliances. We must begin in the formative stage. The hope of the future is in the child; we must educate the child by putting him in true touch with realities,--realities of form, color, and number; of plant and animal life; of play and pleasure; of imagination; of sympathetic companionship; of a miniature society; of a firm yet gentle government. The education must go on through youth, and must introduce him to industry not as drudgery but as fine achievement. So of every phase of humanity. The criminal is to be met not with mere penalty but with remedial treatment. In the sordid quarter must be planted a settlement which shall radiate true neighborhood. The state must be so ordered as best to promote the material good and the essential manhood of its citizens. The church must serve some distinct purpose--of ethical guidance, of emotional uplift, of social service--in character-building. Such are the forces to which we now are turning. Where ancient philosophy appealed through the lecturer at his desk, where Christianity sent its missionary to proclaim a faith, or set its priest to celebrate ma.s.s, or its minister to preach a sermon,--in place of these partial resources we now realize that every normal activity of humanity is to serve in building up man, and that "the true church of G.o.d is organized human society."
The church of G.o.d,--but has man a G.o.d? There is, says Spencer, some inscrutable power from which all this vast procedure springs; its nature we know not and cannot know. The thought of it moves us to wonder and awe,--and this is the legitimate satisfaction of the religious sense.
And here it is that his philosophy utterly fails to satisfy. Yet it marks the pa.s.sing away of the attempt to interpret Deity in terms of exact knowledge. Whatever form religion may hereafter wear, the old precision of statement must be abandoned; the intellect must be more humble. And further, the Spencerian view is wholly different from atheism. It leaves the door open. It recognizes that some supreme reality exists beyond and above man. That reality is not intelligible to the intellect which a.n.a.lyzes and generalizes. But may it not be approachable through another side of man"s nature,--accessible through gates like those by which one human spirit recognizes another human spirit? The evolutionary philosophy, in an enlarged construction, raised no barrier against the access to divinity through the n.o.blest exercise of humanity.
Live the personal life toward the highest ideals, with the faithfulest endeavor,--and peace, trust, hope, spring up in the soul. So does man find access to the supreme power; so does he find himself encompa.s.sed and upborne by it; so is he drawn into closest union with his fellow-creatures and with the divine source of all. It is the old answer and the new; it is figured in the Hebrew"s a.s.surance that the Lord loveth the righteous; it gives strength and courage to Epictetus; it inspires the confidence of Jesus, the loving and holy soul finding its heavenly Father; it speaks with glad voice in Emerson,--"contenting himself with obedience, man becomes divine."
The essential truth is old, but in our day it is being disenc.u.mbered of the husk of myth and dogma which obscured it; while by the growth of new powers and finer sensibilities in man his access to highest reality becomes more intimate.
As the evolutionary philosophy has already reaffirmed, clarified, and enriched the moral life, so, blending with the clearest interpretation of man"s deepest experience, it is to reaffirm, purify, and deepen the religious life.
One disciple of Spencer has applied herself with great genius and art to creative fiction. George Eliot is a thorough Spencerian, and she is constantly, effectively, almost with over-insistence, a moralist. Life may be ruined by self-indulgence,--that is her perpetual theme. Of wide range and variety, she is powerful above all in picturing the appeal of temptation, the gradual surrender, the fatal consequence. Shakspere does not show the inner springs of the fall of Macbeth or Angelo so clearly as she shows the catastrophe of Arthur Donnithorne, of t.i.to Melema, of Gwendolen Harleth. Readers from whom the threat of h.e.l.l would fall off as an old wife"s tale, feel the dark power of reality in the mischief which dogs each of her wrong-doers. More scantly, and with growing infrequence, there are scenes of a natural gospel of redemption and salvation,--Hetty reached in her misery by the Christian love of Dinah, Silas Marner won back to happiness by the little child, Gwendolen saved from her selfishness through dire disaster and a strong man"s help.
The prevailing atmosphere of George Eliot"s later books is sad, and the sadness deepens as they go on. A labored, over-strenuous tone increases; the style loses in simplicity and is overburdened with reflection. The note of struggle is everywhere present, and shuts out repose, freedom, joy. The sensitive reader can hardly escape an undertone of suggestion,--yes, life must be made the best of, but it seems scarcely worth the cost. Is it the entire absence of any outlook beyond this life which makes the gloom of the later works? Yet this seems only partially to explain. One seeks inevitably the clew to the writing in the life.
George Eliot"s story as a woman is an open one. She took as her life companion a man who was legally united to another woman. Her justification apparently was that they were suited to each other, and that with the support of this mutual tie they could best do their work.
Stated in plain terms, the moral question involved seems hardly to admit of any debate. There is no more vital point in social morality than the relation of the s.e.xes, and George Eliot"s own teaching reverts most often to this topic, and always with its emphasis on restraint. Her actual course a.s.sumed that the established and accepted law of society may be set aside by a man and woman upon their own judgment that their need of each other is paramount to the social law. A position more contradictory to her avowed principles could hardly be stated. It was no new claim of immunity; it had been professed and preached, especially on the Continent, with results patent to all, of the subversion of social foundations; it marks the especial danger-point of a time of swiftly changing standards. It is impossible not to feel that her course was a precedent and example in flat contradiction of the teaching she so a.s.siduously gave. Doubtless she persuaded herself she was right, but such persuasion must have involved, the most dangerous sophistication which besets man in his groping struggle,--a claim by a leader for exemption from the common obligation on the plea that his welfare (that is, his comfort) is especially necessary for the good of mankind. As one reads George Eliot"s pages with her own story in mind, the shadows are heavy. In the over-active, restless reflections, one feels the working of a mind incessantly exercised by its own self-defense. The suggestion comes to us of a nature which has lavished all its energies on thinking, and lacked strength for living, and so has failed of that vision which comes not from thought but from life. The cramping horizon, the low sky, the earthly limit within which love saddens and hope dies,--all seem to bespeak that loss of truest touch with the universe which comes when one is not true in act to the law he acknowledges. The sense of a tragedy in herself, more pathetic than any she has depicted, touches us with awe, with tenderness, with compunctious thought of our own failures. We are "purified by terror and by pity."
The largest wisdom and the finest insight of our age are blended in Tennyson"s "In Memoriam." Written half a century ago, its truth not less than its beauty stands unshaken by the later thought and knowledge.
Antedating the work of Darwin and Spencer, it accepts the principles of Evolution. Its atmosphere is wholly modern. It is pervaded by the sentiment of Christian faith, but it does not lean for support on dogma or miracle. The difficulties it encounters are neither the terror in the old view of the hereafter nor the problems incident to the supernatural theology. The poet stands before the amazing spectacle of nature as seen by science, beholding along with its prodigal beauty its appalling destruction and its unswerving march. It is no longer h.e.l.l, but extinction, which seems to threaten man.
The intellectual problem of the universe is faced, but the medium through which it is seen is the experience of a human heart filled by a sacred love and then struck by bereavement. It is the old, typical, deepest experience of man,--love confronted by death.
The poem moves like a symphony, weaving together requiem, cradle-song, battle-march, and psalm, to a consummation of tender and majestic peace.
As the recurrent theme which governs the whole may be taken this:---
"How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affection bold, Should be the man whose thoughts would hold An hour"s communion with the dead."
These are the conditions,--fidelity, sanity, divinely bold affections; this is the fruition, the sense of a mystic communion with the unseen friend.
One pa.s.sage gives the reconciliation between the evolutionary view of the universe and a divine possibility for the individual. The evolutionary process of nature is regarded as the type of the development of the soul:---
"Contemplate all this work of Time, The giant laboring in his youth; Nor dream of human love and truth, As dying Nature"s earth and lime;
"But trust that those we call the dead Are breathers of an ampler day For ever n.o.bler ends. They say, The solid earth whereon we tread
"In tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last arose the man;
"Who throve and branched from clime to clime, The herald of a higher race, And of himself in higher place, If so he type this work of time
"Within himself, from more to more; Or, crowned with attributes of woe Like glories, move his course, and show That life is not as idle ore,
"But iron dug from central gloom, And heated hot with burning fears, And dipt in baths of hissing tears, And battered with the shocks of doom
"To shape and use. Arise and fly The reeling Faun, the sensual feast; Move upward, working out the beast, And let the ape and tiger die."
Thus do the moral purpose and the immortal hope define themselves in the terms of the new philosophy. How are they related to the terms of the old religion? The poet"s att.i.tude toward the historic Christ is wholly reverent. Incidents of the gospel story are vivified by a creative imagination. But Christ is no longer an isolated historic fact; he is the symbol of all divine influence and celestial presence,--"the Christ that is to be." The resurrection story is reverently touched, but it is not upon this as a proof or argument that the poet dwells in regaining his lost friend under a higher relation. That experience is to him personal, at first hand. His comfort is not solely that in some future heaven he shall rejoin his Arthur. The beloved one comes to him now in moments of highest consciousness; a.s.sociated profoundly, mysteriously, vitally, with the fairest aspects of nature, with the loftiest purposes of the will, with the most sympathetic regard of all fellow creatures.
In the experience which is supremely voiced in "In Memoriam," but which is also recorded in many an utterance which the attentive ear may discern, we recognize this: that the sense of the risen Christ which inspired his disciples and founded the church was in truth an instance--clad in imaginative, pictorial form--of what proves to be an abiding law of human nature--the vivid realization of the continued and higher existence of a n.o.ble and beloved life.
We may believe that in the progress of the race this faculty is being developed. In its first emergence it was confused by crude misinterpretations. A single instance of it was for two thousand years construed as a unique event, the reversal of ordinary procedure, and the basis of a supernatural religion. Now at last we correlate it with other experiences, and interpret it as a part of the universal order.
Tennyson expresses that present heaven which is sometimes revealed to the soul:--
"Strange friend, past, present, and to be; Loved deeplier, darklier understood; Behold, I dream a dream of good, And mingle all the world with thee.
"Thy voice is on the rolling air; I hear thee where the waters run; Thou standest in the rising sun, And in the setting thou art fair.
"What art thou, then? I cannot guess; But though I seem in star and flower To feel thee some diffusive power, I do not therefore love thee less:
"My love involves the love before; My love is vaster pa.s.sion now; Though mixed with G.o.d and Nature thou, I seem to love thee more and more.
"Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice; I prosper, circled with thy voice; I shall not lose thee though I die."
Two men beyond all others in America have interpreted the higher life.
Emerson revealed it through the medium of thought, beauty, and joy.
Lincoln showed it in action, sympathy, and suffering.
Lincoln had the deepest cravings of love, of ambition, and of religion.
His love brought him first to bereavement which shook his reason, then to the daily tragedy of an unhappy marriage. His ambition--he said when he entered his contest with Douglas--had proved "a failure, a flat failure."
In his crude youth he exulted in the rejection of Christianity; then he felt the pressure of life"s problems, and was powerless before them. He could believe only what was proved,--all beyond was a sad mystery. He bore himself for many years with honesty, kindness, humor, sadness, and infinite patience. He did not for a while rise to the perception of the highest truth in politics, but he was faithful to what he did see. He lived in closest contact with ordinary men and knew them thoroughly. His training was as a lawyer and a politician. This brought him in touch with the every-day actuality and all its hard and mean facts. He was disciplined in that attempt to reach justice under a code of laws which is the practical administration of society, distinct from the idealist"s vision of perfection.
The time came when in the new birth of politics he rose to the perception of a great moral principle,--the nation"s duty toward slavery. At the same time, his ambition again saw its opportunity. He had a strong man"s love of power, but he deliberately subordinated his personal success to his convictions when he risked and lost the fight with Douglas for the senatorship by the "house-divided-against-itself" speech.
In the anxious interval between his election and inauguration, he went through, as he said long afterward, "a process of crystallization,"--a religious consecration. He made no talk about it, but all his words and acts thenceforth show a selfless, devoted temper.
He bore incalculable burdens and perplexities for the sake of the people.
He met the vast complication of forces which mix in politics and war--the selfishness, hatred, meanness, triviality, along with the higher elements--with the rarest union of shrewdness, flexibility, and steadfastness. His humor saved him from being crushed. The atmosphere he lived in permitted no illusions. "Politics," said he, "is the art of combining individual meannesses for the general good."