VII

IS HUMANITY AN ABSTRACTION?

Ι4Ι

a source of happiness and greatness, the history of the advance of man from brutal appetite to pure unselfish sympathy, is an endless theme for the poetry of the future.' Positivism offers us 'a religion clothed in all the beauty of Art and yet never inconsistent with Science '.1

Such are Comte's claims for the new faith of which in his later years he constituted himself the high-priest. One valuable truth in the philosophical groundwork—a truth not peculiar to Comte, though he had an important influence in impressing it on modern thought-is the repudiation of the abstract individualism of the eighteenth century, and the insistence on the concrete reality of humanity as a universal life in which individual men are sharers. Individual man is an abstraction of the metaphysicians, Comte tells us ; he cannot properly be said to exist, if severed from the community of this larger life. Now we are all of us Nominalists in our ordinary moods, and too apt to ridicule such a statement as a piece of fantastic mysticism. Accordingly, it is a common criticism of Comte that he sets up an abstraction for us to worship. But it is perhaps not too much to say that, by such a line of criticism, we cut ourselves off from religion altogether, and, with religion, from sound philosophy. The mystical union of the worshipper with his God is a cardinal article of religious faith. If humanity, as a universal, is to be dismissed as an abstraction, may not God, the supreme universal, succumb to a similar criticism?

Before taking up this Philistine attitude, let us apply the same test to the narrower case of patriotism,2 whose more vivid associations may perhaps help us to appreciate the

1 The passages quoted are all taken from the concluding chapter of the General View of Positivism.

This paragraph was written two years before the war, and I have thought it best to let it stand exactly as it was spoken.

reality of the larger and more passionless unity. Take Shakespeare's famous apostrophe to England:

This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Or Browning's 'Home-Thoughts, from the Sea':

Nobly, nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away;

Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish 'mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance dawned Gibraltar grand and gray;

Here and here did England help me how can I help

England?'-say,

Whoso turns as I, this evening, turn to God to praise and pray,

While Jove's planet rises yonder, silent over Africa.

Or these lines of a younger poet :

Never the lotus closes, never the wild-fowl wake,

But a soul goes out on the East Wind that died for England's sake.

Is England, then, an abstraction? Was Italy an abstraction to the Italian patriots who fought for her freedom and unity in the middle of last century? Italy', Mazzini said, ' is itself a religion.' Was Israel an abstraction to the pious Jew? Nay, we know that he thought and spoke of Israel in the very terms which Comte applies to Humanity, as the great Being to whom the promises of Jehovah are made and in whom his purposes are fulfilled. He himself will be gathered to his fathers, but Israel, 'the servant of the Lord,’ enjoys an age-long life. Ancient Israel is, in this respect, only the best-known example-touched to the finest issues -of a familiar historical fact. The individual, it has been said, is a late product of evolution. At an earlier stage he is largely merged in the tribal life; he does not round himself to a separate whole, with the modern sense of individual detachment and personal destiny. He acts as the organ of

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THE ANALOGY OF PATRIOTISM

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a larger life in which he is content to be, and apart from which he makes no personal claims. The growth of individual self-consciousness undoubtedly marks an advance. As Comte rightly points out, it is a mark of the perfection of the greatest of all organisms that the parts of which it consists are living beings which have an existence for themselves. But however far such development may go, it can never mean that the individuals detach themselves altogether from the nation or the race, and cease to be channels of the corporate life which makes them men. They cannot place themselves outside the 'little world' of man and continue to exist, any more than they can take up an independent station outside the universe of which they are the product and the organ.

May we not also explain by the analogy of patriotism Comte's idealization of Humanity? How can we worship (it is often said), or even reverence and love, a Being with such a history-a Being, great masses of whose members offer, even now, such a spectacle of pettiness and folly, of grossness, baseness and all manner of wickedness? Alas, is it not the same when we turn our thoughts from the patriot's England' to our countrymen in the flesh? How much that is vulgar and mean and vicious crowds with pain and shame upon the mind! Yet, though we may be chastened and humbled—and inspired, as Comte also says, with zeal to make these things better-the features of our ideal are not blurred. Ideal England still stands before us as supremely real, the just object of our unstinted devotion, sacred to us as a heritage from all the brave and good who have laboured in her service, a fabric strong enough to bear, and, as it were, to redeem or transmute, the weakness and the evil which mingle with all human things. In a spiritual organism the evil is thrown off and perishes; the good only remains and is incorporated, to become the substance of the future. So, with Comte, it is Humanity in its ideal aspect that

is offered for our worship-Humanity purged of its own dross, militant, indeed, not perfect, but triumphant over the baser elements in its constitution, transforming obstacles into stepping-stones of progress and replacing the life of selfish struggle by one of universal sympathy and mutual help. And it is plain, as Seeley says, that'the worship of Humanity belongs to the very essence of Christianity itself, and only becomes heretical in the modern system by being separated from the worship of Deity'. As Blake puts it, with a kind of divine simplicity, in his Songs of Innocence:

For Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is God our Father dear,

And Mercy, Pity, Peace and Love
Is Man His child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,

And Love the human form divine,
And Peace the human dress.

The Religion of Humanity does, indeed, emphasize elements which are essential in the Christian view of God and the world, but which have often been neutralized, especially in theological systems, by the predominance of the old monarchical idea of God, conceived, in William James's happy phrase, as 'a sort of Louis XIV of the heavens'. But, presented as Comte presents it, as a substitute for the worship of God, the worship of a finite Being, however great, offers insuperable philosophical difficulties. Most people will think, with Höffding, 'that the religious problem proper only begins where Comte's religion ends, viz. with the question as to how the development of the world is related to that of the human race and the human ideal.' It is time to return, therefore, to consider the 'subjectivity' of the Positivist synthesis.

1 Natural Religion, p. 75 (second edition).

History of Modern Philosophy, ii. 359 (English translation).

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A SUBJECTIVE SYNTHESIS

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To judge from his own language, Comte appears to consider the subjective and relative character of his synthesis a merit rather than a defect. But to fail of the objective and the absolute, while it may doubtless be inevitable, must certainly, just to the extent of the failure, be pronounced a defect. Comte's attitude, therefore, can only be held as meaning that, since, in his view, objective knowledge is unattainable, it is better to rest satisfied with a result which honestly proclaims itself subjective than to pretend to a final synthesis which is beyond our powers. The peculiarity of Comte's scheme, however, is that it entirely depends on treating Humanity as a self-contained and self-creative being-a kind of finite Absolute-which evolves all its properties, and engineers all its advance, out of the resources of its own nature. Hence it comes that at the end he crowns it as God in a godless world. Comte, of course, does not fail to recognize that Humanity is not literally self-contained, but develops in a 'medium' or environment furnished by the external or physical world. Indeed he lays stress on the fact that his synthesis 'rests at every point upon the unchangeable order of the world', as revealed by science;1 he calls this the objective basis of his synthesis. It is the function of intellect to discover the laws of this universal order, teaching us how to modify the course of phenomena when that is possible, or, when that is not the case, to adapt ourselves to an inevitable necessity. And the social education of the race depends also, as he shows,2 upon the ever-present consciousness of this external power and the coercions of its unchanging laws. But, in spite of the dependence thus acknowledged, he still proceeds, in building up his theory, as if there were no organic relation between man and the world which gives him birth. 'External fatality' is the phrase he most commonly uses of the non-human world: it appears in the light of a hostile power 1 General View, p. 19. 2 Ibid., p. 253.