There may be, of course, an element of selfishness in the activities of poets and inventors. They may be seeking for fame; they may be hoping to make money out of their discoveries; but the greatest men we know have been dominated by an overwhelming impulse of creation, and when we read their lives, and discover in them signs of petty vanity or jealousy or greed, we are pained and shocked. What touches us most deeply is some mark of self-consecration and humility; as, for example, when Newton tells us that after all his life's labors he felt himself as a little child gathering sea-shells on the shore of the great ocean of truth; or when Alfred Russel Wallace, discovering that Darwin had been working longer than himself over the theory of the origin of species, generously withdrew and permitted the theory to go to the world in Darwin's name.
There are three faculties in man, usually described as intellect, feeling and will. According as one or the other faculty predominates, we have a great scientist, a great poet, or a great moralist. We might choose a representative of each type--let us say Newton, Shakespeare and Jesus--and spend much time in controversy as to which of the three types is the greatest, which makes the greatest contribution to human happiness. But it will suffice here to point out that the three faculties do not exclude one another; every man must have all three, and a perfectly rounded man should seek to develop all three. Jesus was considerable of a poet, and we should pay far less heed to Shakespeare if he had not been a moralist. Also there have been instances of great poets and painters who were scientists--for example, Leonardo and Goethe.
The fundamental difference between the scientist and the poet is that one is exploring nature and discovering things which actually
exist, whereas the other is creating new life out of his own spirit. But the poet will find that his creations take but little hold upon
life, if they are not guided and shaped by a deep understanding of life's fundamental nature and needs--in other words, if the poet is not something of a scientist. And in the same way, the very greatest discoveries of science seem to us like leaps of creative imagination; as if the mind had completed nature, through some intuitive and sympathetic understanding of what nature wished to be.
The point about these higher forms of human activity is that they renew and multiply life. We may say that if Jesus had never lived, others would have embodied and set forth with equal poignancy the revolutionary idea of the equality of all men as children of one common father. And perhaps this is true; but we have no way of being sure that it is true, and as we look back upon the last nineteen hundred years of human history, we are unable to imagine just what the life of mankind during those centuries would have been if Jesus had died when he was a baby. We do not know what modern thought might have been without Kant, or what modern music might have been without Beethoven. We are forced to admit that if it had not been for the patient wisdom and persuasive kindness
of Lincoln, the Slave Power might have won its independence, and America today might have been a military camp like Europe, and the lives and thoughts of every one of us would have been different.
Or take the activities of the poet. Many years ago the writer was asked to name the men who had exercised the greatest influence upon him, and after much thought he named three: Jesus, Hamlet and Shelley. And now consider the significance of this reply. One of these people, Shelley, was what we call a "real" person; that is, a man who actually lived and walked upon the earth. Concern-
ing Hamlet, it is believed there was once a Prince of Denmark by that name, but the character who is known to us as Hamlet is the creation of a poet's brain. As to the third figure, Jesus, the authorities dispute. Some say that he was a man who actually lived; others believe that he was God on earth; yet others, very learned, maintain that he is a legendary name around which a number of traditions have gathered.
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To me it does not make a particle of difference which of the three possibilities happens to be true about Jesus. If he was God on earth, he was God in human form, under human limitations, and in that sense we are all gods on earth. And whether he really lived, or whether some poet invented him, matters not a particle so far as concerns his effect upon others. The emotions which moved
him, the loves, the griefs, the high resolves, existed in the soul of someone, whether his name were Jesus or John; and these emotions have been recorded in such form that they communicate themselves to us, they become a part of our souls, they make us something different from what we were before we encountered them.
In other words, the poet makes in his own soul a new life, and then projects it into the world, and it becomes a force which makes over the lives of millions of other people. If you read the vast mass of criticism which has grown up about the figure of Hamlet, you learn that Hamlet is the type of the "modern man." Shakespeare was able to divine what the modern man would be; or perhaps
we can go farther and say that Shakespeare helped to make the modern man what he is; the modern man is more of Hamlet, because he has taken Hamlet to his heart and pondered over Hamlet's problem. Or take Don Quixote. No doubt the follies of the "age of chivalry" would have died out of men's hearts in the end; but how much sooner they died because of the laughter of Cervantes! Or take "Les Miserables." Our prison system is not ideal by any means, but it is far less cruel than it was half a century ago, and we owe this in part to Victor Hugo. Every convict in the world is to some degree a happier man because of this vision which was projected upon the world from the soul of one great poet. No one can estimate the part which the writings of Tolstoi have played in the present revolution in Russia, but this we may say with certainty: there is not one man, woman or child in Russia at the present moment who is quite the same as he would have been if "Resurrection" had never been written.
In discussing the highest faculties of man we have so far refrained from using the word "genius." It is a word which has been cheap-ened by misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have just been considering are the phenomena of geni-us--and we can say this, even though we may not know exactly what genius is. Perhaps it is, as Frederic Myers asserts, a "subliminal uprush," the welling up into the consciousness of some part of the content of the subconscious mind. Or perhaps it is something
of what man calls "divine." Or perhaps it is the first dawning, the first hint of that super-race which will some day replace mankind. Perhaps we are witnessing the same thing that happened on the earth when glimmerings of reason first broke upon the mind of some poor, bewildered ape. We cannot be sure; but this much we can say: the man of genius represents the highest activity of the mind of which we as yet have knowledge. He represents the spirit of man, fully emancipated, fully conscious, and taking up the task of creation; taking human life as raw material, and making it over into something more subtle, more intense, more significant, more universal than it ever was before, or ever would have been without the intervention of this new God-man.
CHAPTER X
MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR
(Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative importance of our various duties.)
So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and
waste and failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.
So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.
Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties
to myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?
You will note that these questions differ