from the table at last as gladly as we sat down. We shall go to
death as unresistingly as tired children go to bed. Men are to have
a life far beyond the range of what is now considered their prime,
and their last period (won by scientific self-control) will be a
period of ripe wisdom (from seventy to eighty to a hundred and
twenty or thereabouts) and public service!
(But why, one asks, public service? Why not book-collecting or the
simple pleasure of reminiscence so dear to aged egotists?
Metchnikoff never faces that question. And again, what of the man
who is challenged to die for right at the age of thirty? What does
the prolongation of life do for him? And where are the consolations
for accidental misfortune, for the tormenting disease or the lost
limb?)
But in his peroration Professor Metchnikoff lapses into pure
religiosity. The prolongation of life gives place to sheer self-sacrifice as the fundamental “remedy.” And indeed what other remedy
has ever been conceived for the general evil of life?
“On the other hand,” he writes, “the knowledge that the goal of
human life can be attained only by the development of a high degree
of solidarity amongst men will restrain actual egotism. The mere
fact that the enjoyment of life according to the precepts of Solomon
(Ecelesiastes ix. 7-10)* is opposed to the goal of human life, will
lessen luxury and the evil that comes from luxury. Conviction that
science alone is able to redress the disharmonies of the human
constitution will lead directly to the improvement of education and
to the solidarity of mankind.
* Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a
merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works. Let thy garments be
always white; and let thy head lack no ointment. Live joyfully with
the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity,
which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity
for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou
takest under the sun. whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with
thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
“In progress towards the goal, nature will have to be consulted
continuously. Already, in the case of the ephemerids, nature has
produced a complete cycle of normal life ending in natural death.
In the problem of his own fate, man must not be content with the
gifts of nature; he must direct them by his own efforts. Just as he
has been able to modify the nature of animals and plants, man must
attempt to modify his own constitution, so as to readjust its
disharmonies… .
“To modify the human constitution, it will be necessary first, to
frame the ideal, and thereafter to set to work with all the
resources of science.
“If there can be formed an ideal able to unite men in a kind of
religion of the future, this ideal must be founded on scientific
principles. And if it be true, as has been asserted so often, that
man can live by faith alone, the faith must be in the power of
science.”
Now this, after all the flat repudiations that have preceded it of
“religion” and “philosophy” as remedies for human ills, is nothing
less than the fundamental proposition of the religious life
translated into terms of materialistic science, the proposition that
damnation is really over-individuation and that salvahon is escape
from self into the larger being of life… .
What can this “religion of the future” be but that devotion to the
racial adventure under the captaincy of God which we have already
found, like gold in the bottom of the vessel, when we have washed
away the confusions and impurities of dogmatic religion? By an
inquiry setting out from a purely religious starting-point we have
already reached conclusions identical with this ultimate refuge of
an extreme materialist.
This altar to the Future of his, we can claim as an altar to our
God—an altar rather indistinctly inscribed.
2. SACRIFICE IMPLIES GOD
Almost all Agnostic and Atheistical writings that show any fineness
and generosity of spirit, have this tendency to become as it were
the statement of an anonymous God. Everything is said that a
religious writer would say—except that God is not named. Religious
metaphors abound. It is as if they accepted the living body of
religion but denied the bones that held it together—as they might
deny the bones of a friend. It is true, they would admit, the body
moves in a way that implies bones in its every movement, but —WE
HAVE NEVER SEEN THOSE BONES.
The disputes in theory—I do not say the difference in reality—
between the modern believer and the atheist or agnostic—becomes at
times almost as impalpable as that subtle discussion dear to
students of physics, whether the scientific “ether” is real or a
formula. Every material phenomenon is consonant with and helps to
define this ether, which permeates and sustains and is all things,
which nevertheless is perceptible to no sense, which is reached only
by an intellectual process. Most minds are disposed to treat this
ether as a reality. But the acutely critical mind insists that what
is only so attainable by inference is not real; it is no more than
“a formula that satisfies all phenomena.”
But if it comes to that, am I anything more than the formula that
satisfies all my forms of consciousness?
Intellectually there is hardly anything more than a certain will to
believe, to divide the religious man who knows God to be utterly
real, from the man who says that God is merely a formula to satisfy
moral and spiritual phenomena. The former has encountered him, the
other has as yet felt only unassigned impulses. One says God’s will
is so; the other that Right is so. One says God moves me to do this
or that; the other the Good Will in me which I share with you and
all well-disposed men, moves me to do this or that. But the former
makes an exterior reference and escapes a risk of self-righteousness.
I have recently been reading a book by Mr. Joseph McCabe called “The
Tyranny of Shams,” in which he displays very typically this curious
tendency to a sort of religion with God “blacked out.” His is an
extremely interesting case. He is a writer who was formerly a Roman
Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a
resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff’s, to deny that
anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in
life except happiness, or any guide but “science.” But—and here
immediately he turns east again—he is careful not to say
“individual happiness.” And he says “Pleasure is, as Epicureans
insisted, only a part of a large ideal of happiness.” So he lets
the happiness of devotion and sacrifice creep in. So he opens
indefinite possibilities of getting away from any merely
materialistic rule of life. And he writes:
“In every civilised nation the mass of the people are inert and
indifferent. Some even make a pretence of justifying their
inertness. Why, they ask, should we stir at all? Is there such a
thing as a duty to improve the earth? What is the meaning or
purpose of life? Or has it a purpose?
“One generally finds that this kind of reasoning is merely a piece
of controversial athletics or a thin excuse for idleness. People
tell you that the conflict of science and religion—it would be
better to say, the conflict of modern culture and ancient
traditions—has robbed life of its plain significance. The men who,
like Tolstoi, seriously urge this point fail to appreciate the
modern outlook on life. Certainly modern culture—science, history,
philosophy, and art—finds no purpose in life: that is to say, no
purpose eternally fixed and to be discovered by man. A great
chemist said a few years ago that he could imagine ‘a series of
lucky accidents’—the chance blowing by the wind of certain
chemicals into pools on the primitive earth—accounting for the
first appearance of life; and one might not unjustly sum up the
influences which have lifted those early germs to the level of
conscious beings as a similar series of lucky accidents.
“But it is sheer affectation to say that this demoralises us. If
there is no purpose impressed on the universe, or prefixed to the
development of humanity, it follows only that humanity may choose
its own purpose and set up its own goal; and the most elementary
sense of order will teach us that this choice must be social, not
merely individual. In whatever measure ill-controlled individuals
may yield to personal impulses or attractions, the aim of the race
must be a collective aim. I do not mean an austere demand of self-sacrifice from the individual, but an adjustment—as genial and