(shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)
in the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. the result is the maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. excepting when sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. but now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto.
man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive struggle. in a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. in a state of nature no animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. but man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and also his fellow men. so he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability to enslave and exploit them. so he destroys for his imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. and each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. so continues the growth of the colossal structure which we call civilization—in part still healthy and progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.
what is to be done about this cancer? first of all, it must be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it determined. man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided him. he has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing establishments."
shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? there are some who preach that. among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets which come in my mail, i found the other day a volume from england, "social chaos and the way out," by alfred baker read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the ancient greek practice of infanticide. every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. you might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of swift's proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken ireland. i have spent some time examining this book before i risk committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.
if we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. we cannot appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her sway. we left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and altered his diet by means of fire. therefore, it is no argument to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be "natural." bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays a british officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. and this amuses us vastly; but we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "according to nature."
civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. he means to live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his powers. yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper tissues starve. he must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth. to abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to which he can attain. he will then, by the deliberate act of his own will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. so only can man justify himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.
and then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to nature, only in a new form. nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and preserved the type. man, in his new pride of power, has invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism." he lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. now what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act of high daring: i will protect the species, i will preserve the type! i will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; i will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for the same reason. i will devise imitations of the chase and of battle in order that i may keep my physical body up to the best standard of nature. because i understand that all civilized life is based upon intelligence, i will acquire knowledge and spread it among my fellow men. because i perceive that civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore i dedicate my energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms of exploitation of man by his fellows.
professor william james is the author of an excellent essay entitled "a moral equivalent for war." he sets forth the idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. he asks, may it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? that this can be done by men, i have never doubted. that it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage than it is able to endure.
