Culminating Phase Of The Pagan Ethic In The West

( Originally Published 1918 )

IN England the development of the pagan revival progressed with extreme rapidity, and on every side it continued to give rise to similar phases of extravagance.

Darwin had kept mainly to the purely biological aspect of his own subject. He attempted no comprehensive or systematic study of social affairs or of political society. But in a few chapters of the Descent of Man he raised the veil for a moment, sufficient to disclose to the world the true nature of the hopeless impasse towards which that movement in thought receiving its impetus from Darwinism, so forcibly described by Sir William Huggins, was carrying the world.

Now the significance of the true application of the law of natural selection in society consists in this. The first step in understanding what lies beyond Darwinism is to recognize in all its far-reaching import that the human evolution which is proceeding in civilization is a social, not an individual integration. The individual of the primitive ages of the race, when A killed B before B was able to kill A, and left his descendants, was the individual efficient in his own interests. He was the individual of whom Darwin gave us the science, of whom Nietzsche's superman gave us the voice, of whom the empire of pagan Rome gave us the culminating stage in history, and of whom the war textbooks of modern Germany gave us some of the maxims revived in terms of the modern military State. But despite these phases the epoch of this individual represents an epoch which is passing out of account in human history. This is the meaning of the modern West. It is the psychic and spiritual forces governing the social integration in which the individual is being subordinated to the universal which have become the winning forces in evolution.

There is not, however, the slightest fore-glimpse of the principles of this wider science of evolution in Darwin. For instance, where in the Descent of Man Darwin brings us for a moment into touch with the psychic causes in civilization, he shows no comprehension of the results as the phenomenology of a larger principle of natural selection operating on a higher plane in human society. The subordinating psychic causes which are upbuilding civilization seem simply to bewilder Darwin. He sees them in civilization only as interfering with natural selection that is to say, with the natural selection of the individual efficient in his own interests. Natural selection, Darwin complained, is tending to become inoperative in civilization.

For [he continued in a surprising passage] we civilized men do our utmost to check the progress of elimination (of the unfit) : we build asylums for the imbeciles, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor laws, and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. WWW.SYLVIA.ORG Darwin did not proceed to press to practical issues the conclusions involved in this remarkable and profoundly significant passage. But the effect which such opinions involved of carrying the standards of civilization back to those of primitive man and of eliminating the psychic sense of responsibility to life from its wider function in civilization was evident.

This inevitable effect inherent in Darwinism became more and more pronounced as the militarism of Europe began openly to base itself on the theories of the Origin of Species. The reversion to the standards of the jungle as the basis of natural selection in civilization soon became clearly visible in all the literature of the modern military movement in Europe. Thus, in a passage quoted by William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience, this standpoint was put with the utmost simplicity in an Austrian military textbook. As the writer viewed the youth of the nations of civilization being called under conscription to the standards of war he says of them:

. . . War and even peace require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be everything . . . the barbaric tendencies in men come to life again in war, and for war's uses they are incommensurably good.

The same appalling practical logic was put later with more directness in the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege, the textbook issued by the German General Staff for the instruction of German officers. Professor J. H. Morgan in the Introduction to his English translation of the book thus summarizes some of its rules of war in which we see this work of eliminating the psychic sense of human responsibility to life from its higher function in civilization actually being accomplished.

Should they (the peaceful inhabitants of an invaded country) be exposed to the fire of their own troops? Yes: it may be indefensible, but its main justification is that it is successful. Should prisoners of war be put to death? It is always ugly, but it is sometimes expedient. May one hire an assassin, or corrupt a citizen, or incite an incendiary? Certainly: it may not be reputable and honour may fight shy of it, but the law of war is less touchy. Should the women and children, the old and the feeble, be allowed to depart before a bombardment begins? On the contrary: their presence is greatly to be desired; it makes the bombardment all the more effective.

In England all the first attempts to apply the Darwinian conceptions to society were carried along well-marked lines. In the early stages Huxley, Tyndall, Grant Allen, and a crowd of popular writers give currency in England to the applications of Darwinism which Haeckel was voicing in Germany and Renan in France. But the embodiment of the Darwinian theories in the policy of the State did not take place in Great Britain. The movement as a whole reached in England its high-water mark in phases of wider extravagance but all of which preserved their own peculiar characteristics.

One of the last and greatest of Darwin's con-temporaries in Great Britain was Darwin's relative, Sir Francis Galton. In the opening years of the twentieth century Galton, who in 1907 was my predecessor in delivering the annual Herbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford, embodied in the lecture for that year a conception which he had communicated shortly before to the Sociological Society in London, for applying Darwinism to the world on a grand scale. It is a conception which will assuredly live long in the history of thought.

There is nothing in any literature of the world quite like this scheme which Galton propounded for applying the standards of Darwinian efficiency to humanity. In its own particular way it exceeded in boldness even that conception developed in Germany by Clausewitz, Treitschke, Sybel, Von der Goltz, Bernhardi, and their group, for applying the standards of the Prussian military caste to civilization. Galton's scheme for improving the world formed the counterpart from the point of view of English individualism of that which Treitschke and Bernhardi desired to achieve through the methods of the Prussian military State. For what Galton by his method aimed at, although it was not a type of the State, was no-thing less than the scientific breeding on a universal scale of the Nietzschean superman. There have been those who have imagined that the greatest revolution in the history of humanity still lies implicit in Galton's conception could it only be applied to the world by the methods of the German General Staff !

Galton called his new science Eugenics. Its object, in his own words, was "to deal with all the influences that improve the inborn qualities of the race and develop them to the utmost advantage." 1 The author has as clear a view of his requirements as the German General Staff had of theirs. He found no difficulty whatever with his standards of the best specimens of the race. Even the animals in the Zoological Gardens, he said, might be expected to know the best specimens of their class. This remark was the keynote of the scheme.

In connection with the research fellowship in the University of London, endowed by Galton in 1904 for the promotion of Eugenics, the subject was defined as "the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally."

The best qualities to be bred from would, he intimated, include those such as health, energy, ability, and the like; in particular, the aptitudes required to obtain supremacy in the struggle for success in the various professions and occupations. It was in the purest form the Darwinian science of the selection of the individual efficient in the fight for his own interests. For Galton did not propose to be troubled with any of the difficulties to which codes of ethics had given rise in the past of the world. He had as short a way with moral standards as the Kriegsbrauch im Landskriege. In the scientific breeding of the race, morals, Galton said, would not be considered. He simply proposed to leave moral standards out of account altogether as involving, to use his own words, "too many hopeless difficulties."

This in all its gaunt simplicity was Galton's proposal. Its object, it will be observed, was the "scientific breeding" of humanity. Its method was by "the improvement of the inborn qualities" of the race. Almost the first question which comes naturally to the mind to ask on being con-fronted with a scheme so far-reaching as one for the improved breeding of civilized humanity is : What were Galton's qualifications in putting forward a proposal which went to the roots of every ideal involved in civilization?

As the result of his earlier observations and researches Galton had been one of the leading upholders previously of that doctrine recently so mercilessly dealt with in the history of the world and now generally discredited, to the effect that the difference between the higher races of civilization and the less developed races of men was one of marked intellectual inferiority on the part of the less developed races. In some of Galton's published researches, as, for instance, those concerning the mental faculties of uncivilized races in South Africa, 1 he went so far as to compare disparagingly the mental faculties of a highly intelligent race like the Damaras with those of the dog. In these researches and subsequent writings Galton seemed to be quite unconscious of the fact that this assumed great intellectual superiority of civilized man over the less developed races had no existence. Like Darwin, Galton had no clear comprehension as to what efficiency in civilization really consists in. He did not see that the superior efficiency of the man of the advanced races was superior social efficiency, and that this came to him almost exclusively through the social inheritance, a complex material and psychic inheritance which did not necessitate or indicate anything whatever of the great intellectual superiority which Galton supposed to be inborn in the advanced races.

Yet it was Galton, with no higher equipment of knowledge than thus indicated and the subject in the past of so misleading an illusion about a matter so fundamental, who now proposed to enter upon the stupendous task of reconstructing civilization by the scientific breeding of the race ! As might be expected, Galton's conception of civilization in such circumstances was so elementary that there was no place in it for moral standards or for any of those problems of the responsibility of the individual for the universal which have distracted the human mind since the dawn of knowledge and in which centre all the meaning and all the laws of the social integration which humanity is undergoing in civilization.

I was present as one of the members of the Council at the meeting of the Sociological Society, in London, at which Galton first made this scheme public. I remember the day as one of the landmarks of my life. It was the point at which the knowledge first came home to me :

(1) That Darwinism was the sum and flower of the peculiar science of the West, a compound of astonishing learning and incomparable ignorance;

(2) That the characteristic knowledge of the West which had been reduced to science was but the organized form of the doctrine of the supremacy of material force;

(3) That this characteristic science of force could never become the science of civilization; but that as embodied in the West, alike in the military State and in the economic struggle, it was moving through world-shaking catastrophe to irretrievable bankruptcy in history.

There were present at the meeting in London at which Galton read his paper many of the representative men of the time, politicians, publicists, professors of many subjects, doctors of many sciences, authors representing various branches of literature. The chair was occupied by Professor Karl Pearson, now holding the Professorship of Eugenics, which Galton soon after founded in the University of London. As I walked out into the Strand from the room in the London School of Economics in which the meeting had been held I well remember the state of my mind. I found myself looking round in the street for the face of a child to restore me again to the feeling and to the atmosphere of civilization. For my dominant mental impression was that never before had I been so nearly in touch with the mind and with the standards of primitive man.

It had been rumoured at the meeting that Karl Pearson, who had presided, was to be Galton's intellectual heir in carrying out this Eugenic scheme, and he afterwards accepted the Chair of Eugenics founded at the University. Karl Pearson had been one of the ablest of the group of contemporary evolutionists. To me he had hitherto appeared to have applied the Darwinian hypothesis to carry him to horizons in thought far wider than almost any one of his contemporaries had reached in England. When I arrived home it was with new interest, therefore, that I took down from its shelf his Ethic of Free Thought, the book in which most of his boldest ideas had been clothed in the language of science and philosophy.

In the light of Galton's proposals the essays of the book now presented a most remarkable study.

I followed the mind of the author through the essays as it rose against the leaders of the great wars of religion of the West, against the spirit of "the seething mass of fanaticism" that the epochs of the past presented to him, against the prejudices, the beliefs, the creeds, the tortures, the butcheries, the blood baths which represented the long struggle of the mind of the terrible pagan West, as it encountered in the integration of the universal world something greater than itself which it understood not. How the author in the name of the intellect stooped over the record, now in sorrow, anon in shame, ever in remote superiority. Yet what an inexplicable spirit appeared to me now to surge through the essays. Despite the immaculate maxims it seemed the voice of Nietzsche's superman. The Ethic of Free Thought presented itself to me, as the ethic of Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege was afterwards to present itself to Professor Morgan. It laid down unimpeachable rules which represented the ethic of civilization, and then it destroyed them by a spirit and exceptions which represented the ethic of the jungle.

For what did the sum of all the essays in the book amount to? It was expressed perhaps in the dearest terms in the essay entitled the "Moral Basis of Socialism." Professor Pearson urged the claims of his socialist ideal with the fervour of a religious enthusiast. And this was what he conceived the ideal to be. The primary educative mission of modern socialism was, he said, to preach afresh the old conception of the State as it prevailed in ancient Greece. The mind staggered before the atavism of the conception. For has not the whole meaning of the integration which the struggle in Western history has represented for thousands of years consisted in projecting the sense of human responsibility outside the State as it existed in the world of ancient Greece? All the intervening struggle of the ages for the liberty and progress of the world has consisted in making Right independent of and superior to all theories of the political State on whatever claims they may be based, by whatever force they may be backed. Despite the unimpeachable maxims, despite even the outward appeals to the universal and the infinite, I saw the book as the book of the mind of primitive man. I realized it as pagan from cover to cover.

For not only was the apostle of Eugenics in England making exactly the same claim for the ideal embodied in his socialist State that Treitschke, the apostle of militarism, was making for the ideal embodied in the military State in modern Germany. Not only did both ideals represent exactly the same essentially pagan conception of Right identified with a limited absolutism, but each was reared on the same basis of intolerant force. Bernhardi has given the world the ethic of his supreme military State. No one stands above it. Its Might is supreme Right. The whole of its ethic "turns simply and solely on power and expediency." And so also in Karl Pearson's ethic of his socialist State. Our ideal as socialists, he tells us, is this : "Society embodied in the State." No one stood above this State also. For "Socialists," said Karl Pearson, "have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. Every citizen must learn to say with Louis XIV, 'l'état c'est moi !'

These are his words. Nothing more. From the apostle of Eugenics in his ideal socialist State short shrift and the nearest lamppost for the offender at the hands of the bystander!

From savagery onwards every excess of the human mind has tended to be surpassed when it brings force to support these limited absolutisms of its own conception. But Karl Pearson seemed to have outbid all precedents, even those of the terrible drama of the Anabaptists of Minster, in his intolerance of offenders against the standards of his own ideal State. Even the zealots of the Inquisition gave the right of trial. Even the lynch law of the backwoods sometimes gave the offender a jury of his peers.

In the passage quoted above, I have given Professor Pearson's exact words. It is necessary thus to repeat them ipsissima verba. For it is not improbable that future generations will find it difficult to believe that such things could be in our time. We can imagine that to those who come after it may appear almost incredible that men could stand in the modern West and, in the name of culture and science, give currency thus to standards and conceptions which represent the childhood of the world and give utterance to them, apparently unforeseeing the bankruptcy and catastrophe in history of the intellectual movement from which they sprang.

As these manifestations of the great pagan movement in the West ran their due course in Great Britain, the incidents of the drama on other sides continued to display the same vast spirit: of extravagance. The year before the out-break of ,the world war in 1914, the Bishop of Winchester, reviewing the outlook in civilization, I emphasized in a striking manner and with a high degree of insight the nature of the principles upon which the characteristic civilization of the West had been based in history. The meaning of the movement which had produced Western civilization the Bishop summarized in a number of principles which may be briefly reduced to two, as follows:

(1) The gradual assertion in the history of the world of the value, and the equal value, of every human life.

(2) The gradual rise to supremacy in the history of the world of the principle of sacrifice and service over force.

The Bishop of Winchester upheld the ideal inherent in these two movements as a touchstone to distinguish the vitality and permanence of every current social and political development in civilization. It was a true view which represented an accurate summary of the meaning of history, and it embodied roughly in outline the fundamental law of evolution which lies at the base of Western civilization.

When with this fact in mind we turn to the further phases of the Darwinian development the interest deepens as the movement mounts towards its culminating phases. The Herbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford in the year 1912 was delivered by one of the most distinguished of living exponents of biological evolution namely, Mr. William Bateson, until a short time previously Professor of Biology in the University of Cambridge, and the leader in England of the movement and researches arising out of the Mendelian doctrine of heredity. The title of Mr.

Bateson's lecture was Biological Fact and the Structure of Society. This lecture possesses a peculiar interest, and its significance for the reasons about to be mentioned exceeds even that of Sir Francis Galton's lecture in the same series just referred to. In Germany the ruling military class had made the Darwinian doctrine of the efficient individual as he existed in primeval times the biological justification of Germany's world policy. It was Bateson who put forward in England the same doctrine as the biological justification for casting the whole set of ideas upon which Western democracy rests upon the rubbish-heap of time.

Down to the time in which we are living a great part had been played in the theories of society of nearly every school of thought in the West by the doctrine of Altruism that is to say, of the service or the love of others as an evolutionary force in civilization. Mr. Bateson proceeded in this lecture to sweep aside all views of civilization founded on this conception. They were, he said, biologically false. The only instinct, he asserted, which is sufficiently universal to supply the motive for exertion in civilization is the desire to accumulate property in the competitive struggle. Other instincts, among which he puts the altruistic emotions, might, he said, be strongly developed in some. "But, " he continues, "they are permanent in very few individuals. They are apt to weaken after adolescence, and to disappear as middle age supervenes."

In the light of this biological generalization Mr. Bateson proceeded with his own remarkable proposals for the improvement and reconstruction of the world. They were proposals which involved a direct challenge to the most fundamental of all the principles associated with the life of Western civilization. In Social Evolution I had previously summarized the central principle of the world development which the West represented in the phrase equality of opportunity. The phrase as expressing a clearly defined and fundamental ideal was immediately taken into currency in British politics, and soon after into world politics, being permanently registered as representing an international aim in the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1905. It was against this central ideal underlying all forms of social and political progress in the West for centuries that Mr. Bateson's challenge was principally directed.

The main proposals in his lecture were in principle reducible to three; which may be briefly stated as follows:

(1) Civilization was not founded on altruism. The only instinct, Mr. Bateson asserted, which is sufficiently universal to supply the motive for civilization, and without which the whole community would slacken and decay, is the desire to accumulate property.

(2) In civilization so constituted Mr. Bateson asked for the final rejection of the conception that all men are equal, and of the demand in politics that all men shall have equality of opportunity. For the conception and the demand were, he said, "founded in natural falsehood."

(3) Mr. Bateson asserted, therefore, that in civilization in the future, again to repeat his words, "the aim of social reform must' be, not to abolish class, but to provide that each individual shall so far as possible get into the right class and stay there, and usually his children after him. "

As we regard these proposals carefully they almost take our breath away. For it will be observed that what Mr. Bateson demanded in the midst of one of the oldest and most influential centres of learning and culture in the West was, in effect, nothing less than the stultification of the characteristic principles which have brought the whole modern world of the civilization of the West into existence. He demanded in particular, it will be observed, the stultification of that fundamental assumption of equality with which the Bishop of Winchester identifies Western progress and which underlies every characteristic demand and program of Western democracy. The details with which Mr. Bateson supplemented his proposals, such as Mendelian segregation rising to the sterilization of certain classes of criminals, were all in keeping with the spirit of these two demands.

Now the characteristic mark in history for all time of the modern Prussian school of militarism will be recognized to be this. Its professors gradually convinced themselves and then a whole people that the principal business of the State is the making of war. They took the Darwinian standard of efficiency as it prevailed in the childhood of the world, and boldly applied it to politics and war, imagining this primitive conception to represent the science of efficiency in civilization. They returned thereby to the standards of the pagan spirit of the West, and made force success-fully applied in aggressive war the basis of Right in civilization. So far all has been clear.

But there was a second and wider conception involved in this doctrine of war as the principal business of the State which Treitschke at first and then the leaders of modern Germany deliberately adopted. Wars of conquest are but exceptional incidents in the life of civilization. The second and more significant conception was that it is the economic exploitation of the world under the conditions of modern business and commerce which constitutes the permanent conditions of war. What Mr. Bateson did in effect in these circumstances was to put forward the same biological justification for aggressive war organized in the economic activities of civilization as the Prussian military school did for aggressive war organized in the military activities. And in applying this justification Mr. Bateson proposed to put all the characteristic doctrines of Western democracy on the scrap-heap.

The practical significance of this departure, it will be observed, lay in the proposed application to the world of a more dangerous and more wide-reaching embodiment of the pagan doctrine of Right than any that had ever been made before in history. In the conditions described in the first chapter the world of the West was a hotbed ready to receive this extended doctrine of war. Germany had accepted in full the doctrine that underlying her economic activities was the permanent state of war. But the observer had only to regard the leading political issues in any important country of the West to see that in all countries alike the organization of the world in business and commerce was gradually coming to be treated by all parties as an actual state of war.

It is evident, moreover, that the acceptance by a strong nation of the view that her economic life represented a permanent phase of war was bound to compel other nations to adopt standards in which this fact was recognized.' The same driving necessity began thus to operate in the economic world as in the military world under the phase of universal armaments. In such circumstances a large and growing section in most of the leading countries in the West had come to regard the external shock of nations in military war as only the last and external phase of the internal form of the economic and social war.

In recent times it was even to be observed how the opposition parties in most countries were ready to accept a modified form of this view. The dominant note in the programmes of all the popular and progressive parties in the leading countries of the West had come to consist in the standing accusation that governments were the expression of the war of business interests, that it was the warring overlords of business who controlled national resources and international policies,' who created public opinion, who made and unmade Governments, who were the real masters of all the resources and affairs of the people. Modern politics, as the New York World put it recently in effect, were becoming the wars of interests carried on through the Government. " Practically all the evils the people are battling with," it continued, are protected by law and buttressed in government. "

It was over this raging battlefield of the underworld of the economic life of the West, the underworld where the idealisms of mind are almost without influence, where all the enfranchising influences of thousands of years of civilization struggle against the deep, massive, primordial instincts of human nature, that Mr. Bateson unfurled his new standard. And the affirmation, which in the name of biological science he proposed to inscribe on it, was that the ruling principle of civilization was not altruism but the desire to possess property; that the conception that all men are equal must be rejected; that the demand that all men should have equality of opportunity must be finally refused. For they were all "founded in natural falsehood. "

Two years later, before the meeting of the British Association in Australia, Mr. Bateson further developed these views.' He saw civilization existing as the result of differentiation transmitted through individual heredity. His ideal was, therefore, the revival in civilization of a kind of hereditary caste system in which every member of society should be got into his right class and should stay there. The methods of government in this eugenic civilization were apparently to be almost as drastic as in Professor Pearson's ideal socialist State. Mr. Bateson proposed to begin comparatively mildly with the feeble-minded. To use his words, " The union of such social vermin we should no more permit than we should allow parasites to breed on our own bodies. "

It was an astounding spectacle. The absolute unconsciousness in the mind of the man of science of the part played by the psychic forces in the evolution of society and of the causes of efficiency in civilization could hardly be more strikingly marked. Mr. Bateson abolished with a stroke not only the principles of Western civilization the sense of responsibility to life, the value, and the equal value of every human life as they were set out by the Bishop of Winchester. He proceeded, in the frame of mind in which he was able to speak of a class of his fellow-creatures as " social vermin, " to wipe out the very spirit of that sense of responsibility to life which had created the ethos of the Western world, which was gradually raising the mind of the West to the plane of the universal, and which lay behind all the influence of the liberating ideals of Western civilization upon humanity.

The mind struggles for a time with the train of ideas which are suggested. But in this case also it is the picture of the childhood of the world which at last holds it against other conceptions. On reading through these lectures of Mr. Bateson it is almost as if we saw in imagination the primitive man of past aeons of time presenting himself before a congress of civilization, holding again a dripping head in one hand and an ensanguined spear in the other, and, entirely unconscious of the meaning of all the vast struggles for human liberties, demanding in the name of science the restitution of that primal law of the jungle by which the fittest to secure property in the fight survived and transmitted his qualities, all subsequent social conditions being denounced as "founded in natural falsehood."

Mr. Bateson was President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at its session for the year 1914 held in Australia. It was a fitting climax which awaited this surprising phase in the history of the Western mind. When Mr. Bateson and the British Association left England in the summer of 1914 the world was in a state of armed peace. Before they reached Australia the Armageddon was upon the nations, and the rulers of the German people and the German Military Staff were in the midst of the practical application in the national policy of their country of the ideas and principles discussed in this chapter. They had embarked in that great experiment in the science of social efficiency spoken of by Huxley, where the subjects are peoples and types of civilization, but where all deductions and verifications come too late, and are only in time to be embodied in great systems of history, of morality, and of religion. It was a personal part of this vast climax that Mr. Bateson should return to his native country in a ship continuously in fear of the acts of the war in progress, a war soon to be developed by Germany along the lines defined and defended in the Kriegs-brauch im Landkriege into a policy which was to shock, astonish, and awe the world of civilization.

In following the great pagan revival in the history of the Western intellect as here described the mind feels that it indicates that kind of preliminary elemental phase which separates two epochs of evolution. It is impossible to believe that the doctrines discussed in this chapter, put forward in the name of science under so many different phases in the activities of the West, but always with essentially the same meaning under all the forms, have any permanent place of authority in evolving civilization.

"Western Science, " said P. Ramanathan, Solicitor-General of Ceylon, speaking some years ago of its teaching in relation to the causes of efficiency in civilization, "is ignorant knowledge. " It was a saying so daring that the Western mind merely passed it by. But it is a saying likely to arrest the thought of the West long into the future.

The revolutionary changes that have taken place in recent times have left the essentially pagan and unimaginative mind of the West in a state of indescribable collapse as regards its higher faculties. The fighting male of the West, the product of war long before history has account of him, has turned in our time, bored beyond the last degree of sustenance, from all the problems of the intellect. From the blasphemies of his superman; from those sterile quests after the nature of the Absolute which represent the exhausted residuum of mediaevalism ; from the hopeless efforts of the intellect to hold the mind of youth at our centres of learning in the West like those displayed in the appalling records of the Moral Science Tripos for the last two generations at Cambridge University, England; from the cynicisms, the nihilisms, the paradoxes of our schools of intellectual criticism ; from the vast libraries created in the name of culture, mausoleums, houses of the dead, accumulations of books for which there are no readers, to use Lord Rosebery's description; from the futilities of Eugenics, ignorantly endeavouring to construct a science of civilization out of the Darwinism of the animal; from the sociology of the schools moved to profound depths of scholarship over the significance of totemism or the rites associated with the age of puberty in the savage maiden while remaining utterly unconscious of the significance of the psychic forces expressing themselves in the great systems of emotion and idealism, the social meaning of which envelops the planet ; from the gigantic problems of his Trusts and Corporations with their systems of graft and scandals on one continent; from the equally gigantic problems of his proletariat on another; and then again from the problems of all the races which he has alternately endeavoured to enslave, to exploit, and to enfranchise in the other continents of the world; from the Churches which have filled the world with wars of dogma while remaining unconscious of the greatest dogma of all, that the system of truth which has superseded paganism has its living credentials in its meaning as the science of civilization from all these the essential pagan of the West turned in our time to the gross unimaginative materialism of military and economic war.

But with the sense of his coming bankruptcy upon him the moods of atavism in the pagan of the West are like the moods of Saul. In one phase he is the being who has created the hell of the Armageddon. In another he is maudlin with the pity of reaction and babbles of beating his swords into ploughshares. In one phase he is emancipating his womankind, representing half the population of the earth, from the effects of the ages of the rule of brute force upon her. In another the savageries of his Schopenhauers, his Nietzsches, and his Weinigers towards her awake in his soul the fierce animal delirium of the jungle. In one hemisphere he wags his head sentimentally to the chorus of Tannhäuser. In another the echoes of his ragtime music move him to shuddering ecstasy as he hears in them the iron clang of the mills of force in the world he has created. In one phase his adventurers accumulate private fortunes in commerce and industry so vast that they are reckoned in tens of millions of pounds, so power compelling that they throw those of the age of Marcus Licinius Crassus into insignificance. In another the chief medical officer of the governing body of the largest and richest city in civilization reports that of the 172,-619 school-children examined by him in a single year one half were suffering from some definite organic defect "resulting from sheer poverty. "1 In one phase he is the champion of his civilization as the universal triumph of mind and enlightenment. In another, in the highest intellectual nation of the West, the silent verdict of the people on the conditions in which they lived at the out-break of the world war of 1914 was that they had gradually ceased to bring into being as many children as were necessary to the community.