Psychic Centre Of The Great Pagan Retrogression

( Originally Published 1918 )

WHEN in the autumn of the year 1914 the nations of the world entered almost without warning on the greatest war of all time, in which more than half the human race became engaged, and in which forces numbering considerably more than thirty millions of men met each other armed in the field, the world stood aghast. The magnitude of the conflagration seemed to emphasize in a special manner some gigantic failure of the West in bringing to fruition in history those high expectations of universal peace and goodwill which its leading minds had for centuries held up to humanity. The war was, indeed, an event of far greater significance than any military development that had ever happened in the world. It marked the fact that the climax had been reached in that extraordinary set of conditions described in the last chapter, in which under every phase of its civilization we beheld the West getting down to the first principles of force.

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, even in the midst of the fiercest, most prolonged and most savage wars, the West had remained consistently steadfast to its conception of civilization as ripening towards a golden age of world peace. The ideal of permanent goodwill among nations and of international arbitration as an ultimate substitute for war had continued to deepen its hold on men's minds during the whole of the period. The Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, at the close of the Napoleonic wars of conquest, although it led to reaction and was a congress of princes rather than of peoples, was held under the influence of visions of a coming age of permanent peace in the world. In 1834 Mazzini and the "Young Europe" association were dreaming of universal fraternity. In 1841 the poet Tennyson, in England, was singing in fervent anticipation of the day when the battle flags of the nations were to be furled in the parliament of man. Through the whole of this decade up to the Saxon revolution of 1848—49 the struggle in progress in most of the central States of Europe was for constitutionalism, and the dreams of their peoples were of lasting peace amongst States and nationalities. A little later many of the foremost minds of civilization were allowing themselves to think with the rulers of Great Britain under the lead of the Prince Consort, that the opening of the Great International Exhibition of 1851 in London marked the practical inauguration of such an era of universal peace.

A change radical and sudden took place soon after 185o in the spirit of the West. It was a change which did not arise from any causes merely social or political. It was due to forces which were profoundly psychic. It is necessary to understand these forces, for it is in the psychic development which preceded the world war of 1914, that we have to witness the almost incredible spectacle of the entire organized system of that knowledge of the West, which is essentially the science of force, passing gradually to monstrous forms of extravagance and failure, and at length to irretrievable bankruptcy in Western civilization.

By far the most important event in the history of the modern West is that of the publication in 1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species. There is no precedent in the history of the human mind to compare with the saturnalia of the Western intellect which followed the publication of this book. Speaking of the event in his Presidential Address to the Royal Society in London in 1905, Sir William Huggins said of the instantaneous revolution it produced :

The accumulated tension burst upon the mind of the whole intelligent world with a suddenness and an overwhelming force for which the strongest material metaphors are poor and inadequate. . . . In a way to which history furnishes no parallel the opinions of mankind may be said to have changed in a day.

The change, moreover, produced by the Darwinian hypothesis was not simply one of detail. The revolution seemed to involve the reversal of a position fundamental in Western thought which, to use Sir William Huggins's simile, "like a keystone brought down with it arch of connected beliefs" that for centuries had formed part of the permanent life inheritance of the civilization of the West.

Darwin's presentation of the evolution of the world as the product of natural selection in never ceasing war as a product, that is to say, of a struggle in which the individual efficient in the fight for his own interests was always the winning type touched the profoundest depths of the psychology of the West. The idea seemed to present the whole order of progress in the world as the result of a purely mechanical and materialistic process resting on force. In so doing it was a conception which reached the springs of that heredity born of the unmeasured ages of conquest out of which the Western mind has come. Within half a century the Origin of Species had become the bible of the doctrine of the omnipotence of force.

The hold which the theories of the Origin of Species obtained on the popular mind in the West is one of the most remarkable incidents in the history of human thought. The first effect of this presentation of the existing world as the result of selection through struggle and merciless war was immediate; Everywhere throughout civilization an almost inconceivable influence was given to the doctrine of force as the basis of legal authority.

This effect had two deeply marked phases. In countries like England and the United States the striking resemblance which the doctrine of the survival of the fittest in the war for existence bore to those doctrines of political economy which had come to prevail in business and commerce was immediately recognized. Almost every argument of the Origin of Species appeared to represent a generalized conception of the effectiveness of the war of competition. The positions resting on the social war which Maurice, Ruskin, and a crowd of writers had condemned, but which Bentham, the Mills, and the influential school of English utilitarians had long been attempting to realize in the political State, seemed to have become justified at a stroke. The central thesis of Darwin appeared as nothing less than a culminating scientific condemnation of all the labour programmes of the West conceived in a spirit of socialism. The prevailing social system, born as it had been in struggle, and resting as it did in the last resort on war and on the toil of an excluded wage-earning proletariat, appeared to have become clothed with a new and final kind of authority. Darwinism seemed to the rulers of civilization to have lifted the veil from life and to have disclosed to the gaze of the time the self-centred struggle of the individual ruthlessly pursuing his own interests, and pursuing them as in the competition of business to the exclusion of all other conceptions, and to have revealed this individual as the basal fact of the world in evolution.

This was the first phase of the effect of Darwin's conception on civilization. But although Darwinism was a product of the English-speaking peoples it was neither in England nor in the United States that it passed rapidly into the second phase of its influence. In this phase on the continent of Europe the extraordinary position was soon reached in which Darwin's theories came to be openly set out in political and military text-books as the full justification for war and highly organized schemes of national policy in which the doctrine of Force became the doctrine of Right, and in which force in a manner which had not been known for centuries was openly made the basis of all legal authority.

As the prestige of Darwinism increased and as the new ideas became intrenched in the handbooks of popular science and in systems of revolutionary criticism, it was almost as if the desert and the jungle had begun to voice themselves in human thought. The world beheld the champions of force gradually becoming again in their own right the Supermen of systems of popular philosophy. In solemn treatises of social science it saw them emerging as "efficients." In political science lectures they began to appear as "we who have the Right because we have the Power" of systems of national policy. The doctrine of the supremacy and the omnipotence of force became the doctrine of absolute Right expounded as the law of "biological necessity" in books of statecraft and warcraft, of expanding military empires. And through it all the world saw the "right of conquest " becoming justified and glorified by warlike and military organizations as civilization had never dared to glorify and justify it before. Soon after the middle of the nineteenth century and onward the history of the West takes on a new spirit. From this date forward George Peel's terrible saying that history and homicide are in-distinguishable terms' becomes a truth pregnant with a meaning which it never possessed before in civilization.

To understand clearly the character of this surprising development of which modern Germany became the life centre in civilization it is necessary to glance briefly at Darwin's central thesis. The truth of Darwin's conception may be compressed within clear boundaries. It is of great importance to grasp the characteristic outlines thereof. Darwin gave to the world the true science of the evolution of the animal in the past epochs of the world. Darwinism is essentially the science of the integration of the individual efficient in his own interests. "If A was able to kill B before B killed A, then A survived. And the race became a race of A's, inheriting A's qualities." This was Bagehot's brief and vivid summary of the Darwinian doctrine. Darwinism is, in short, the science of the causes which have made those who are efficient in the struggle for their own interests supreme and omnipotent in the world.

Now this doctrine has nothing to do with the science of civilization. It is the doctrine of the efficiency of the animal. It has absolutely nothing to do with the causes making for collective efficiency in the social and moral world founded on mind which is evolving in civilization. Darwinism represents indeed the very antithesis of the principles of that social integration which is taking place in civilization. The dividing line, moreover, is absolutely fundamental. For the first principle of evolution in the world of the efficient animal of Darwinism is the supremacy and omnipotence therein of individuals or groups of individuals efficient in their own interests. The first principle, on the contrary, in the evolution of the social world of civilization lies in the subordination of individuals. The ascending history of the human race is indeed nothing else than the progressive history of the sacrifice of the individual efficient for himself to the meaning of that collective efficiency which is being organized in civilization gradually merging in the universal.

The progress of humanity has, therefore, over and above every other feature this meaning. It is the epic of the vast, tragic, ennobling, immortalizing, all-conquering ethic of Renunciation The story of creation up to and including human savagery is simply the story of the supremacy in the world of physical force organized in the life of the efficient individual or the efficient group or the efficient State. But the story of evolution above savagery is nothing else than the story of the gradual rise to supremacy in the world of those psychic forces organized in civilization which are subduing individuals or aggregations of individuals efficient in their own interests to those universal principles which are making for the limitless efficiency of civilization.

It happens through all this that there has never been since civilization began any reconciliation between the morality of the individual efficient for himself and the morality of evolving civilization. There never will be any such reconciliation to the end of time. The two things are inherently incompatible. The meaning which underlies all forms of progress in advanced civilization is that it represents the great spiritual integration of mind which has raised the conception of Right to the plane of the Universal by projecting the sense of human responsibility outside all theories of limited interests whatsoever which rest merely on force. It has made Right independent of and superior to all interests of the individual, the group or the State resting on the successful application of Force, on whatever claim or mission they may be based, on whatever scale they may be represented, by whatever force they may be backed.

The contrary doctrine that Right rests on the successful application of Force in the individual was broken when the day of the highwayman passed in civilization. The organized form of the' same doctrines in the State that no Right is above the State, and that the State has no standard but that of "power and expediency" resting on omnipotent force, has been the standing challenge to liberty and progress in every phase of the tremendous struggles which make the history of civilization.

Now if we take up any of the superficial philosophies or false systems of social science of which the world is full, we have the clue at once to their unsoundness. It may be distinguished immediately that they have all one unmistakable mark on them. They represent endeavours to construct the science of evolving humanity without the subordination of the individual to the universal, and therefore without the iron ethic of Renunciation. They are all hopeless attempts foredoomed to failure, to set out the mere science of the animal efficient in his own interests as the science of civilization.

A name may be given to all these sham cults of civilization. They are all essentially pagan. The pagan was originally a villager, the worshipper of local and therefore of false gods. He was the antithesis of the universal. The modern definition of paganism may be put clearly and briefly thus :

The pagan man is the man whose standard of Right does not extend beyond his own interests.

The pagan state is the state whose standard of Right does not extend beyond its own interests.

The pagan man and the pagan state may con-fuse us at the present day by the profession of exemplary principles or of exemplary standards of culture from motives of expediency or opportunism in the midst of the world by which they are surrounded. But if they have as part of them no standard of Right raised to the plane of the Universal and projected outside their interests they are essentially pagan. And systems of religion, systems of ethics and philosophies are all in whole or in part pagan or the reverse in this sense, as well as men and states.

Now in the light of these facts it is a matter of peculiar interest to attempt to follow the vast effort in the life of the modern West to clothe the ideas of the great pagan retrogression resting on Darwinism in the language of science and philosophy, and then to embody them in gigantic schemes of world politics. They all conform to one type. They all represent historic efforts in one form or another to present what is essentially Darwin's science of the individual animal as the science of civilization. The task is in the nature of things impossible, for it represents a fundamental confusion of individual efficiency in the animal with social efficiency in civilization, of the non-moral with the moral, of the pagan ethics of primitive man with the advanced ethics of civilization, of the standards of the jungle with those of evolving humanity. The elemental extravagances involved reveal themselves, therefore, at every step, as almost the whole of civilization is gradually brought under the influence of these attempts.

It was Prussia first, and then the whole of Germany, which became the seat of this development. The centre of Darwinism in Germany was in the writings of Haeckel. But Darwin's theories and Haeckel's ideas were absorbed and utilized by a most powerful group of authors and men of action who, from various standpoints, perceived how closely the Darwinian doctrines of efficiency resembled the doctrines of efficiency resting on force, in which they had for long endeavoured to embody their own conceptions of the national policy of modern Germany. It was from this intellectual ferment that there gradually spread throughout civilization a surprising movement the like of which the human mind will probably never see again.

In watching modern Germany advancing to-wards the Armageddon, a psychic centre of particular interest and significance is in Nietzsche's writings and in Haeckel's effort to define the ethic of Darwinism and to compare it with that previously prevailing in Western civilization. Haeckel's popularization of Darwin began early, but its bearing may be best studied in its clearest form in his Riddle of the Universe. In this effort it may be observed that all the ideas revolve round a single fundamental conception. According to Haeckel the supreme mistake of the Christian ethic consists in this. It conceives that there exists in the ordinary man a kind of dualism, some fundamental principle of opposition, that is to say, between himself and society, between the good of himself and the good of the world, between the individual and universal.

According to Haeckel all this is undiluted non-sense. There is no place whatever, he tells us, for anything of the kind in the Darwinian ethic. Man, in Haeckel's interpretation of Darwinism, is simply a "social vertebrate." His social duties and his duties to himself are, therefore, one and the same, and grow from the same root in the past. The whole matter, in short, is that altruism or the good of others "is only enlightened egoism" for the good of oneself. And "this fundamental law of society," concludes Haeckel, "is so simple and so inevitable that one cannot understand how it can be contradicted in theory or in practice as is done to-day and has been done for thousands of years."

This is Haeckel's system of monistic ethics. What it represents in reality is the standard of primitive man. There is naturally and as a matter of course no place in it for that stupendous conflict between limited interests resting on force and the interests of the Universal which forms the main theme of human history.

Thus the categorical imperative of the moral law which demands by an overwhelming instinct the sacrifice of self, and which Kant, therefore, summarizes in the maxim, "Act at all times in such wise that the act may hold good as a universal law," becomes to Haeckel "Kant's curious idol."

Similarly, the command of the Founder of Christianity, "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you," is pronounced by Haeckel to be "as useless in practice as it is unnatural."' And as for the doctrine that "if any man will take away thy coat let him have thy cloak also," "what in the light of Darwinism," asks Haeckel in effect, "could be made of such a doctrine in the midst of the conditions of the modern world?"

Haeckel's writings gave to the pagan doctrine of force an extraordinary prestige in the minds of the millions who read the popular editions of his works in Germany, in English-speaking lands, and in other countries. But Haeckel's attempt to apply Darwinism to civilization was from the beginning made in that spirit of compromise which could not long endure. It was made in that spirit which distinguished Herbert Spencer's similar attempt in England, a spirit which has been described as essentially demoralizing in that it attempted "to combine the Christian standard of manners with a materialistic standard of values."' In this it was like the later attempt of the German General Staff in the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege so admirably summarized by Professor Morgan in his translation. It consisted in "laying down unimpeachable rules (representing the ethic of civilization) and then destroying them by exceptions (representing the ethic of savagery)." 2 It was Nietzsche who flung to the winds all such futile attempts at compromise and who first proclaimed aloud to the world the inner meaning of, popular Darwinism, the true ethic of the great pagan revival of the modern West.

The permanent significance of Nietzsche in Western literature springs from a tremendous fact. It is in Nietzsche's writings that the Western mind first beholds laid bare with unspeakable fidelity that overmastering animal soul of the West which represents the individual efficient in the struggle for his own interests, of which Darwin gave us the science. The West was born of force. Its conditions through millenniums of time have been the product of force. All the characteristic science of the West is the organized knowledge of force. Yet the world-shaping tragedy of our times is that the modern West does not stand for the supremacy of force. It represents, on the contrary, that spiritual integration of mind which is making Right superior to force. The modern West represents the doom of the doctrine of force in history. But it is Nietzsche of all the world who has voiced for us the animal soul of the past as it recognizes this terrible issue and as it rages against the meaning of the new world which it feels to be destined to overwhelm it. There is no event in humanity to compare with the drama of the meeting of these two epochs of human evolution in the life of the modern West.

There is not one of us in the dark, efficient, and terrible West who does not feel deep in him the stir of this soul of the past as he watches Nietzsche's tragic spirit go forth in modern literature casting dust to heaven as he curses the advancing armies of progress. There is no foolish and futile effort in Nietzsche as there is in Haeckel to identify his doctrines with the ethic of Christianity, "I impeach the greatest blasphemy in time-the religion which has enchained and softened us." These are Nietzsche's words. And again : "What have we to do with the herd morality which expresses itself in modern democracy? . . . It is good for cows, women, and Englishmen." He turns, therefore, to voice his soul in the doctrine of the superman the animal efficient in the struggle for his own interests: "A new table I set over you, oh my brethren. Become hard";' "For the best things belong to us, the best food, the purest sky, the fairest women, the strongest thoughts.

And if men do not give us these things, we take them." Thus do we see the ethic of popular Darwinism passing towards its embodiment in the politics of the modern State. Thus do we watch it developing into those maxims which applied to the national policy of modern Germany come in due time to carry it to the world developments which began in the opening days of August, 1914.

Nietzsche's teachings represented the interpretation of the popular Darwinism delivered with the fury and intensity of genius. They fell on unusually fertile ground in the conditions of modern Germany. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the struggle for constitutionalism was brought to a close in that country with the col-lapse of the Saxon revolution. The policy of Prussia had become the policy of the sword, and the maxim that " the destinies of the German people are in the hands that hold the sword" emerges into open light as an established principle in the aims of that State. The incomparable machine of the Prussian army was used to enforce and to justify the doctrine of force.

Bismarck, in the development of the State policy of his country, gradually brought into full view in civilization the working of Nietzsche's conception that the State founded on successful force is a law of Right to itself. The idea, inherent in the Darwinian conception of progress, that the main business of the efficient State is to wage war, came to be formulated at the same time with increasing clearness and persistence. "We have now agreed," concludes Treitschke in one of his most important lectures, "that war is just and moral, and that the ideal of eternal peace is both unjust and immoral and impossible." Law."

The tendency to exalt, at the expense of society, the absolute claim of the State thus founded on war, went hand in hand with this development. It was put in the most striking manner in a statement quoted from Treitschke: "I have never in my life given one thought to my duties to society; I have never in my life, by so much as one single thought, neglected to consider my duty to the Prussian State." 1 The intellect of Germany under the lead of those at the head followed suit and set itself almost as a body to justify and embody in the State, first in Prussia and then in Germany, the Darwinian conception of force.

The Seminars of the German universities [says Professor Morgan] were the arsenals that forged the intellectual weapons of the Prussian hegemony. They all have this in common that they are merciless to the claims of the small States whose existence seemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims.

We have to observe in modern Germany, says a recent writer, a grim development, how professor after professor, whether merely truculent like Treitschke or sedate and comparatively mild-spoken like professors of the school of Ranke and Delbrück, have always come nearer and nearer to the doctrine of force until finally the blinding light of the argument that the first object of the State is the waging of war bursts upon the professorial brain.

It was Darwinism pure and simple, embodied in the State. "If A was able to kill B before B killed A, then A survived. And it would become the destiny of the race to become a race of A's inheriting A's qualities." This in actual effect became in large measure the national policy and the national idealism of a great people for two generations in our time. And the theory of Right which accompanied it was simply that those who held the power of the State were not bound by any code of morality save that dictated by the interests of the State thus resting on successful war.

In all these developments the influence of Nietzsche on his time was profound. It exceeded in its own way even the influence of Treitschke's lectures and of Wagner's music. Nationalism, militarism, materialism became the three dominant notes in the life of modern Germany. After the death of Bismarck, Nietzsche almost took Bismarck's place. Gradually, as these developments were in progress, the voices and tendencies which up to the middle of the nineteenth century had led to the great democratic movement in the West, and in particular in Germany, became subdued and muted. Rapidly from 186o onward the spirit of the Darwinian ethic gathered towards ascendancy in the national politics of Europe. Germany fought Denmark, Germany fought Austria, Germany fought France.

After 1880 the impulse took on a wider and more intense world-phase. The Western nations, driven by the new spirit and in conditions of rivalry in which they could not help themselves, entered on the scramble for the world outside of Europe, engaging in what has been called "the most rapid and vast career of acquisition that the world had witnessed since the days of Islam."1 Within the two closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decade of the twentieth century the leading nations of the West in this period of conquest and annexation added to their dominions areas fifty times as large as that of the United Kingdom.

The spirit underlying these world movements was everywhere the same. The development accompanying it was marked by the international phase so accurately described in the last chapter in the quotation from the Westminster Gazette in which that journal saw the diplomacy of the leading European nations openly reverting to the principles of savagery. The doctrine that Right was ultimately based solely on military strength, and that military power was the supreme test of fitness and efficiency amongst civilized nations, was simultaneously being rapidly developed in textbooks of political and military science in Germany: that the Right of a State turns not on international morality, but "simply and solely on power and expediency";' that treaties and national engagements ceased to be binding and became "scraps of paper" when they could no longer be supported by the sword, were all the culminating steps by which the doctrine that irresistible force was the sole test of fitness brought the world to the brink of the cataclysm which plunged nine hundred millions of the human race into war in 1914.

The pagan doctrine of force as the supreme test of efficiency in the world which had come out thus naked and unabashed in modern Germany and which was moving towards its organized expression in national policy had its springs deep down in the tendencies of the intellectual life of every leading Western nation.

There has been nothing in the history of the human mind in the past, there will probably be nothing in the history of the human mind in the future, to compare with the phases of the intellectual movement which in other countries of the West contemporaneously accompanied the phases of the political movement in which the doctrine of the efficient Darwinian animal became embodied in the world policy of modern Germany.

Almost every reading mind of the West which attempted, under the influence of the Darwinian hypothesis, to apply the doctrine of evolution to human society became affected in the same way. Darwin's science of the animal efficient in his own interest was conceived to be the science of civilization itself. In every case the conception gave rise to some monstrous form of extravagance. In the military state in Germany where Darwin-ism from the beginning took a political direction its culminating phase was found to be in its application to Weltpolitik. Nietzsche gave Germany the doctrine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice of his superman. Bernhardi and the military textbooks in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the superman translated into the national policy of the superstate aiming at world power. Through all the many phases of the movement there ran the same dominating note of intensive self-assertion, the same fundamental conception of the supremacy of force. "Life exists for Me. All the dim eons behind have toiled to produce Me. I am the Fittest. Give Me My Rights. Stand clear of My way. I want and I will have."

All this was in Germany. But in the ultra-democratic State as represented in England, France, and the United States the development of Darwin's ideas took on different but even more surprising forms. In the article on Sociology in the current edition of the Encyclopcedia Britannica I have dealt with some of these phases. As early as 1860, the year after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, Herbert Spencer published in England his famous article on the Social Organism. The article contained the central idea around which Spencer afterwards constructed his system of Synthetic Philosophy, the principal books of which have been translated into every leading language of the West.

Nothing has ever existed in the world or will ever exist therein like the social organism which Spencer conceived in this essay. For the characteristic feature of the social organism of human society, as Spencer described it, was that it is an organism in which the interests of the individuals comprising it can never be subordinated to any supposed interest of the whole. Extraordinary as the fact may seem, this conception is actually put forward by Spencer in all seriousness. It is the leading idea in his system of Synthetic Philosophy. Yet the mind staggers and boggles at the conception. For how could there be such a thing as a social organism while the interests of the individual in it were supreme over every good of the whole organism ! Even the arrogance of Nietzsche's superman did not reach that of Spencer's individual as thus conceived.

In ages to come, as men watch the phenomenon of the passing at this time to gigantic catastrophe in the history of the West of the whole system of the knowledge of the West which is founded on force, interest will centre in the extraordinary intellectual position thus being developed in England by Spencer side by side with the political development taking place in Germany.

At the time when Spencer wrote, the German people were being rapidly enveloped in those theories of the absolute State aiming at world power and resting on militarism which had been placed on the anvil by Frederick the Great of Prussia long before Nietzsche voiced the spirit of these theories, and Haeckel clothed them in the terms of Darwinian science. But Spencer was an Ultra-democrat. He hated militarism. He lived in England. He therefore applied the Darwinian doctrine of the efficient animal in his own way.

Yet the result was essentially identical in both cases. Spencer expressed through the individual challenging with his rights the good of the whole social organism the same Darwinian doctrine of the primitive animal which Haeckel, Bernhardi, and the German General Staff were seeking to embody in the policy of military Germany challenging the world. "The Christian duty of sacrifice for something higher does not exist for the State, for there is nothing higher than it in the world's history," said Bernhardi. "The Christian duty of sacrifice for something higher does not exist for the individual," said Spencer in effect, "for there is nothing higher than the individual in the world's history." It was the same voice. Tt expressed the same overwhelming intensive self-assertion of the efficient Darwinian animal aiming to be supreme and omnipotent in his own interests. "All the dim aeons behind have toiled to produce Me. Give Me My Rights. Stand out of My way. There is nothing in the Universe higher than Me."