THE BOOK OF LIFE

The
Book of Life

By UPTON SINCLAIR
[VOLUME ONE:
MIND AND BODY]
[VOLUME TWO:
LOVE AND SOCIETY]
Upton Sinclair
Pasadena, California
———
WHOLESALE DISTRIBUTORS
THE PAINE BOOK COMPANY
CHICAGO

Copyright, 1921, 1922
BY
UPTON SINCLAIR
All Rights Reserved.

To
Kate Crane Gartz
in acknowledgment of her unceasing efforts for a
better world, and her fidelity to those
who struggle to achieve it.

INTRODUCTORY

The writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years. That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and the pain.

There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast mass of people, earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the everyday information they need for the successful living of their lives.

For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his own living. Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself new is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!

There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.

The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger class, who say, "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing." You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the baseball page.

Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great American tired business man. He wrestles with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life, and mostly she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes from the unexciting kind she knows by the word "romance." Then there is the still more tired American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her husband before he falls asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup, but she is not sure that she has time to discuss the question whether life is worth living.

Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange thing this life is! What am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" I have sat chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: "By God, it's a queer thing, ain't it, mate?" I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use almost the identical words. It is not only in the class-room and the schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches.

Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a God, who watches you day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that, you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your "faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of passion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life; then you wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?"

No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.

The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then, being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how does it come to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it? Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing? Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble?

Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest language possible. I would avoid long words altogether, if I could; but some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" means something else than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his head.

PART ONE
THE BOOK OF THE MIND

CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF LIFE

(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)

If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can find is in the fact that nobody else knows either.

We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the explanation grows vague. You ask, if God made Satan, and knew what Satan was going to do, is it not the same as if God did it himself? So this explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise on the head of a snake—and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.

Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them. Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism, which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and sink back into it.

But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you assume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon who liked to make fun of eminent physiologists—then there might be the appearance of matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is pronouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.

This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided, and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only phenomena—that is to say, appearances—and their relations one with another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time, setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant[A] knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all the complicated theories which the philosophers from Heraclitus to Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness, have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of chess.

[A] See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."

The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out of his mind great masses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a trap. The person who thinks in absolutes and ultimates is led to believe that he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well—as his opponents will at once demonstrate.

If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions—such as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent? For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked out by analogy what such a world would be like. If you went into this "fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have the perfect analogy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a physical "fourth dimension" would play with—say, the prison system. A man who takes up an absolute—God, immortality, the origin of being, a first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or space, final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"—that man disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.

The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please, and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian Scientist asserts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound fracture of the femur—whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function of the brain—and because of such theories they deliberately reject the most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in human solidarity.

The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are "The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr. Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use them to their utmost capacity.

What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for practical purposes we assume them to be invariable, and base all our calculations and actions upon this assumption. Manifestly, we could not live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge is the further tracing out of such "laws"—that is to say, the ways of behaving of existence—and the extending of our belief in their invariability to wider and wider fields.

Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth." But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are beginning to analyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process, and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the permanence of nature.

In many departments of thought great specialists are now working, experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the "absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two will continue to make four.

CHAPTER II
THE NATURE OF FAITH

(Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and without which no thought could be.)

The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive, something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.

I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its powers, its growth into higher forms—that is to say, forms more complex and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean any growth, all growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito, nor growth for the house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we mean that the purpose of man's own life is any pleasure, all pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol, the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.

So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is glorified.

The reader, no doubt, has been taught a distinction between "science" and "faith." He is saying now, "You believe that everything is to be determined by human reason? You reject all faith?" I answer, No; I am not rejecting faith; I am merely refusing to apply it to objects with which it has nothing to do. You do not take it as a matter of faith that a package of sugar weighs a pound; you put it on the scales and find out—in other words, you make it a matter of experiment. But all the creeds of all the religious sects are full of pronouncements which are no more matters of faith than the question of the weighing of sugar. Is pork a wholesome article of food or is it not? All Christians will readily acknowledge that this is a matter to be determined by the microscope and other devices of experimental science; but then some Jew rises in the meeting and puts the question: Is dancing injurious to the character? And immediately all members of the Methodist Episcopal Church vote to close the discussion.

What is faith? Faith is the instinct which underlies all being, assuring us that life is worth while and honest, a thing to be trusted; in other words, it is the certainty that successful growth always is and always will be accompanied by pleasure. The most skeptical scientist in the world, even my friend the physiologist who proves that life is nothing but a tropism, and can be produced by mixing chemicals in test-tubes—this eager friend is one of the most faithful men I know. He is burning up with the faith that knowledge is worth possessing, and also that it is possible of attainment. With what boundless scorn would he receive any suggestion to the contrary—for example, the idea that life might be a series of sensations which some sportive demon is producing for the torment of man! More than that, this friend is burning up with the certainty that knowledge can be spread, that his fellow men will receive it and apply it, and that it will make them happy when they do. Why else does he write his learned books in defense of the materialist philosophy?

And that same faith which animates the great monist animates likewise every child who toddles off to school, and every chicken which emerges from an egg, and every blade of grass which thrusts its head above the ground. Not every chicken survives, of course, and all the blades of grass wither in the fall; nevertheless, the seeds of grass are spread, and chickens make food for philosophers, and the great process of life continues to manifest its faith. In the end the life process produces man, who, as we shall presently see, takes it up, and judges it, and makes it over to suit himself.

You will note from this that I am what is called an optimist; whereas some of the great philosophers of the world have called themselves pessimists. But I notice with a smile that these are often the men who work hardest of all to spread their ideas, and thus testify to the worthwhileness of truth and the perfectibility of mankind. There has come to be a saying among settlement workers and physicians, who are familiar with poverty and its effects upon life, that there are no bad babies and good babies, there are only sick babies and well babies. In the same way, I would say there are no pessimists and optimists, there are only mentally sick people and mentally well people. Everywhere throughout life, both animal and vegetable, health means happiness, and gives abundant evidence of that fact. All healthy life is satisfactory to itself; when it develops reason, it tries to find out why, and this is yet another testimony to the fact that having power and using it is pleasant. When I was in college the professor would propound the old question: "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy philosopher?" My answer always was: "I would rather be a happy philosopher." The professor replied: "Perhaps that is not possible." But I said: "I will prove that it is!"

CHAPTER III
THE USE OF REASON

(Attempts to show that in the field to which reason applies we are compelled to use it, and are justified in trusting it.)

The great majority of people are brought up to believe that some particular set of dogmas are objects of faith, and that there are penalties more or less severe for the application of reason to these dogmas. What particular set it happens to be is a matter of geography; in a crowded modern city like New York, it is a matter of the particular block on which the child is born. A child born on Hester Street will be taught that his welfare depends upon his never eating meat and butter from the same dish. A child born on Tenth Avenue will be taught that it is a matter of his not eating meat on Fridays. A child born on Madison Avenue will be taught that it is a question of the precise metaphysical process by which bread is changed into human body and wine into human blood. Each of these children will be assured that his human reason is fallible, that it is extremely dangerous to apply it to this "sacred" subject, and that the proper thing to do is to accept the authority of some ancient tradition, or some institution, or some official, or some book for which a special sanction is claimed.

Has there ever been in the world any revelation, outside of or above human reason? Could there ever be such a thing? In order to test this possibility, select for yourself the most convincing way by which a special revelation could be handed down to mankind. Take any of the ancient orthodox ways, the finding of graven tablets on a mountain-top, or a voice speaking from a burning bush, or an angel appearing before a great concourse of people and handing out a written scroll. Suppose that were to happen, let us say, at the next Yale-Harvard football game; suppose the news were to be flashed to the ends of the earth that God had thus presented to mankind an entirely new religion. What would be the process by which the people of London or Calcutta would decide upon that revelation? First, they would have to consider the question whether it was an American newspaper fake—by no means an easy question. Second, they would have to consider the chances of its being an optical delusion. Then, assuming they accepted the sworn testimony of ten thousand mature and competent witnesses, they would have to consider the possibility of someone having invented a new kind of invisible aeroplane. Assuming they were convinced that it was really a supernatural being, they would next have to decide the chances of its being a visitor from Mars, or from the fourth dimension of space, or from the devil. In considering all this, they would necessarily have to examine the alleged revelation. What was the literary quality of it? What was the moral quality of it? What would be the effect upon mankind if the alleged revelation were to be universally adopted and applied?

Manifestly, all these are questions for the human reason, the human judgment; there is no other method of determining them, there would be nothing for any individual person, or for men as a whole to do, except to apply their best powers, and, as the phrase is, "make up their minds" about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge, would decide.

It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it. And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to destroy its own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before—except that I am no longer in position to be certain of anything."

You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on, using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy, metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.

Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably rational form of conduct—and find myself in conflict with the "faith" of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its day of holiness!

If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the right of men to use their minds—and the victory is not yet. The term "free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it was established—that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful, almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings, in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious institutions.

Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid their use. It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an eternity of sulphur and brimstone.

Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.

CHAPTER IV
THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY

(Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show how the latter came to be.)

Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy the history of this long process—these facts are now the basis of all modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.

You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the élan vital, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite of love.

You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled "Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows as morality can have originated in the process of nature or can be reconciled to natural law. This statement, coming from a leading agnostic, was welcome to the theologians. But when I first read the essay, as a student of sixteen, it seemed to me narrow; I thought I saw a standpoint from which the contradiction disappeared. The difference between the morality of Christ and the morality of nature is merely the difference between a lower and a higher stage of mental development. The animal loves and seeks by instinct to preserve the life which it knows—that is to say, its own life and the life of its young. The wolf knows nothing about the feelings of a deer; but man in his savage state develops reasoning powers enough to realize that there are others like himself, the members of his own tribe, and he makes for himself taboos which forbid him to kill and eat the members of that tribe. At the present time humanity has developed its reason and imaginative sympathy to include in the "tribe" one or two hundred million people; while to those outside the tribe it still preserves the attitude of the wolf.

How came it that a mind so acute as Huxley's went so far astray on the question of the evolution of morality? The answer is that this was the factory age in England, and the great scientist, a rebel in theological matters, was in economics a child of his time. We find him using the formulas of bourgeois biology to ridicule Henry George and his plea for the freeing of the land. "Competition is the life of trade," ran the nineteenth century slogan; and competition was the god of nineteenth century biology. Tennyson summed it up in the phrase: "Nature red in tooth and claw with ravin;" and this was found convenient by Manchester manufacturers who wished to shut little children up for fourteen hours a day in cotton mills, and to harness women to drag cars in the coal mines, and to be told by the learned men of their colleges and the holy men of their churches that this was "the survival of the fittest," it was nature's way of securing the advancement of the race.

But now we are preparing for an era of cooperation, and it occurs to our men of science to go back to nature and find out what really are her ways. If you will read Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid as a Factor in Evolution," you will find a complete refutation of the old bourgeois biology, and a view of nature which reveals in it the germs of human morality. Kropotkin points out that everywhere throughout nature it is the social and not the solitary animals which are most numerous and most successful. There are many millions of ants and bees for every hawk or eagle, and certainly in the state of nature there were thousands of deer for every lion or tiger that preyed upon them. And all these social creatures have their ways of being, which it requires no stress of the imagination to compare with the tribal customs and the moral codes of mankind. The different animals prey upon one another, but they do not prey upon their own species, except in a few rare cases. The only beast that makes a regular practice of exploiting his own kind is man.

By hundreds of interesting illustrations Kropotkin shows that mutual aid and mutual self-protection are the means whereby the higher forms of being have been evolved. Insects and birds and fish, nearly all the herbivorous mammals, and even a great many of the carnivores, help one another and protect one another. The chattering monkeys in the treetops drove out the saber-tooth tiger from the grove because there were so many of them, and when they saw him they all set up a shriek and clamor which deafened and confused him. And when by and by these monkeys developed an opposed thumb, and broke off a branch of a tree for a club, and fastened a sharp stone on the end of it for an axe, and fell upon the saber-toothed tiger and exterminated him, they did it because they had learned solidarity—even as the workers of the world are today learning solidarity in the face of the beast of capitalism.

Man has survived by the cunning of his brain, we are told, and that is true. But first among the products of that cunning brain has been the knowledge that by himself he is the most helpless and pitiful of creatures, while standing together and forming societies and developing moralities, he is master of the world. He has not yet learned that lesson entirely; he has learned it only for his own nation. Therefore he takes the highest skill of his hand and the subtlest wit of his brain, and uses them to manufacture poison gases. At the present hour he is painfully realizing that his poison formulas all become known to the tribes whom he calls his enemies, and so it is his own destruction he is engaged in contriving. In other words, man has come to a time when his mechanical skill, his mastery over the forces of nature, has developed more rapidly than his moral sense and his imaginative sympathy. His ability to destroy life has become dangerously greater than his desire to preserve it. So he confronts the fair face of nature as an insane creature, wrecking not merely everything that he himself has built up, but everything that nature has built in the ages before him. He is striving now with infinite agony to make this fact real to himself, and to mend his evil ways; and the first step in that process is to root out from his mind the devil's doctrine which in his blindness and greed he has himself implanted, that there is any way for him to find real happiness, or to make any worth while progress on this earth, by the method of inflicting misery and torment upon his fellow men.

CHAPTER V
NATURE AND MAN

(Attempts to show how man has taken control of nature, and is carrying on her processes and improving upon them.)

If the argument of the preceding chapter is sound, human morality is not a fixed and eternal set of laws, but is, like everything else in the world, a product of natural evolution. We can trace the history of it, just as we trace the story of the rocks. It is not a mysterious or supernatural thing, it is simply the reaction of man to his environment, and more especially to his fellow men. The source of it is that same inner impulse, that love of life, that joy in growing, that faith which appears to be the soul of all being.

Man is a part of nature and a product of nature; in many fundamental respects his ways are still nature's ways and his laws still nature's laws. But there are other and even more significant ways in which man has separated himself from nature and made himself something quite different. In order to reveal this clearly, we draw a distinction between nature and man. This is a proper thing to do, provided we bear in mind that our classification is not permanent or final. We distinguish frogs from tadpoles, in spite of the fact that at one stage the creature is half tadpole and half frog. We distinguish the animal from the vegetable kingdom, despite the fact that in their lower forms they cannot be distinguished.

What, precisely, is the difference between nature and man? The difference lies in the fact that nature is apparently blind in her processes; she produces a million eggs in order to give life to one salmon, she produces countless millions of salmon to be devoured by other fish apparently no better than salmon. Poets may take up the doctrine of evolution and dress it out in theological garments, talking about the "one far off divine event towards which the whole creation moves," but for all we can see, nature, apart from man, is just as well satisfied to move in circles, and to come back exactly where she started. Nature made a whole world of complicated creatures in the steamy, luke-warm swamps of the Mesozoic era, and then, as if deciding that the pattern of a large body and a small brain was not a success, she froze them all to death with a glacial epoch, and we have nothing but the bones to tell us about them.

No one understands anything about evolution until he has realized that the phrase "the survival of the fittest" does not mean the survival of the best from any human point of view. It merely means the survival of those capable of surviving in some particular environment. We consider our present civilization as "fit"; but if astronomical changes should cause another ice age, we should discover that our "fitness" depended upon our ability to live on lichens, or on something we could grow by artificial light in the bowels of the earth.

So much for our ancient mother, nature. But now—whether we say with the theologians that it was divine providence, or with the materialist philosophers that it was an accidental mixing of atoms—at any rate it has come about that nature has recently produced creatures who are conscious of her process, who are able to observe and criticize it, to take up her work and carry it on in their own way, for better or for worse. Whether by accident or design, there has been on parts of our planet such a combination of climate and soil as has brought into being a new product of nature, a heightened form of life which we call "intelligence." Creation opens its eyes, and beholds the work of the creator, and decides that it is good—yet not so good as it might be! Creation takes up the work of the creator, and continues it, in many respects annulling it, in other respects revising it entirely. Whether a sonnet is a better or a higher product than a spider is a question it would be futile to discuss; but this, at least, should be clear—nature has produced an infinity of spiders, but nature never produced a sonnet, nor anything resembling it.

Man, the creature of God, takes over the functions of God. This fact may shock us, or it may inspire us; to the metaphysically minded it offers a great variety of fascinating problems. Can it be that God is in process of becoming, that there is no God until he has become, in us and through us? H. G. Wells sets forth this curious idea; and then, of course, the bishops and the clergy rise up in indignation and denounce Mr. Wells as an upstart and trespasser upon their field. They have been worshipping their God for some three or four thousand years, and know that He has been from eternity; He created the world at His will, and how shall impious man presume to rise up and criticize His product, and imagine that he can improve upon it? Man, with his cheap and silly little toys, his sonnets and scientific systems, his symphony concerts and such pale imitations of celestial harmonies!

Mr. Wells, in his character of God in the making, has created a bishop of his own, and no doubt would maintain the thesis that he is a far better bishop than any created by the God of the Anglican churches. We will leave Mr. Wells' bishop to argue these problems with God's bishops, and will merely remind the reader of our warning about these metaphysical matters. You can prove anything and everything, whichever and however, all or both; and discussions of the subject are merely your enunciation of the fact that you have your private truth as you want it. It may be that there is an Infinite Consciousness, which carries the whole process of creation in itself, and that all the seeming wastes and blunders of nature can be explained from some point of view at present beyond the reach of our minds. On the other hand it may be that consciousness is now dawning in the universe for the first time. It may be that it is an accident, a fleeting product like the morning mist on the mountain top. On the other hand, it may be that it is destined to grow and expand and take control of the entire universe, as a farmer takes control of a field for his own purposes. It may be that just as our individual fragments of intelligence communicate and merge into a family, a club, a nation, a world culture, so we shall some day grope our way toward the consciousness of other planets, or of other states of being subsisting on this planet unknown to us, or perhaps even toward the cosmic soul, the universal consciousness which we call God.

But meantime, all we can say with positiveness is this: man, the created, is becoming the creator. He is taking up the world purpose, he is imposing upon it new purposes of his own, he is attempting to impose upon it a moral code, to test it and discipline it by a new standard which he calls economy. To the present writer this seems the most significant fact about life, the most fascinating point of view from which life can be regarded. The reader who wishes to follow it into greater detail is referred to a little book by Professor E. Ray Lankester, "The Kingdom of Man"; especially the opening essay, with its fascinating title, "Nature's Insurgent Son."

In what ways have the reasoned and deliberate purposes of man revised and even supplanted the processes of nature? The ways are so many that it would be easier to mention those in which he has not done so. A modern civilized man is hardly content with anything that nature does, nor willing to accept any of nature's products. He will not eat nature's fruits, he prefers the kinds that he himself has brought into being. He is not content with the skin that nature has given him; he has made himself an infinite variety of complicated coverings. He objects to nature's habit of pouring cold water upon him, and so he has built himself houses in which he makes his own climate; he has recently taken to creating for himself houses which roll along the ground, or which fly through the air, or which swim under the surface of the sea; so he carries his private climate with him to all these places. It was nature's custom to remove her blunders and her experiments quickly from her sight. But man has decided that he loves life so well that he will preserve even the imbeciles, the lame and the halt and the blind. In a state of nature, if a man's eyes were not properly focused, he blundered into the lair of a tiger and was eaten. But civilized man despises such a method of maintaining the standard of human eyes; he creates for himself a transparent product, ground to such a curve that it corrects the focus of his eyes, and makes them as good as any other eyes. In ten thousand such ways we might name, man has rebelled against the harshness of his ancient mother, and has freed himself from her control.

But still he is the child of his mother, and so it is his way to act first, and then to realize what he has done. So it comes about that very few, even of the most highly educated men, are aware how completely the ancient ways of nature have been suppressed by her "insurgent son." It is a good deal as in the various trades and professions which have developed with such amazing rapidity in modern civilization; the paper man knows how to make paper, the shoe man knows how to make shoes, the optician knows about grinding glasses, but none of these knows very much about the others' specialties, and has no realization of how far the other has gone. So it comes about that in our colleges we are still teaching ancient and immutable "laws of nature," which in the actual practice of men at work are as extinct and forgotten as the dodo. In all colleges, except a few which have been tainted by Socialist thought, the students are solemnly learning the so-called "Malthusian law," that population presses continually upon the limits of subsistence, there are always a few more people in every part of the world than that part of the world is able to maintain. At any time we increase the world's productive powers, population will increase correspondingly, so there can never be an end to human misery, and abortion, war and famine are simply nature's eternal methods of adjusting man to his environment.

Thus solemnly we are taught in the colleges. And yet, nine out of ten of the students come from homes where the parents have discovered the modern practice of birth control; all the students are themselves finding out about it in one way or another, and will proceed when they marry to restrict themselves to two or three children. In vain will the ghost of their favorite statesman and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, be traveling up and down the land, denouncing them for the dreadful crime of "race suicide"—that is to say, their presuming to use their reason to put an end to the ghastly situation revealed by the Malthusian law, over-population eternally recurring and checked by abortion, war and famine! In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist, Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese!

Likewise in every orthodox college the student is taught what his professors are pleased to call "the law of diminishing returns of agriculture." That is to say, additional labor expended upon a plot of land does not result in an equal increase of produce, and the increase grows less, until finally you come to a time when no matter how much labor you expend, you can get no more produce from that plot of land. All professors teach this, because fifty years ago it was true, and since that time it has not occurred to any professor of political science to visit a farm. And all the while, out in the suburbs of the city where the college is located, market gardeners are practicing on an enormous scale a new system of intensive agriculture which makes the "law of diminishing returns" a foolish joke.

As Kropotkin shows in his book, "Fields, Factories and Workshops," the modern intensive gardener, by use of glass and the chemical test-tube, has developed an entirely new science of plant raising. He is independent of climate, he makes his own climate; he is independent of the defects of the soil, he would just as soon start from nothing and make his soil upon an asphalt pavement. By doubling his capital investment he raises, not twice as much produce, but ten times as much. If his methods were applied to the British Isles, he could raise sufficient produce on this small surface to feed the population of the entire globe.

So we see that by simple and entirely harmless devices man is in position to restrict or to increase population as he sees fit. Also he is in position to raise food and produce the necessities of life for a hundred or thousand times as many people as are now on the earth. But superstition ordains involuntary parenthood, and capitalism ordains that land shall be held out of use for speculation, or shall be exploited for rent! And this is done in the name of "nature"—that old nature of the "tooth and claw," whose ancient plan it is "that they shall take who have the power, and they shall keep who can"; that ancient nature which has been so entirely suppressed and supplanted by civilized man, and which survives only as a ghost, a skeleton to be resurrected from the tomb, for the purpose of frightening the enslaved. When a predatory financier wishes a fur overcoat to protect himself from the cold, or when he hires a masseur to keep up the circulation of his blood, you do not find him troubling himself about the laws of "nature"; never will he mention this old scarecrow, except when he is trying to persuade the workers of the world to go on paying him tribute for the use of the natural resources of the earth!

CHAPTER VI
MAN THE REBEL

(Shows the transition stage between instinct and reason, in which man finds himself, and how he can advance to a securer condition.)

In the state of nature you find every creature living a precarious existence, incessantly beset by enemies; and the creature survives only so long as it keeps itself at the top of its form. The result is the maintenance of the type in its full perfection, and, under the competitive pressure, a gradual increase of its powers. Excepting when sudden eruptions of natural forces occur, every creature is perfectly provided with a set of instincts for all emergencies; it is in harmonious relationship to its environment, it knows how to do what it has to do, and even its fears and its pains serve for its protection. But now comes man and overthrows this state of nature, abolishes the competitive struggle, and changes at his own insolent will both his environment and his reaction thereto.

Man's changes are, in the beginning, all along one line; they are for his own greater comfort, the avoidance of the inconveniences of nature and the stresses of the competitive struggle. In a state of nature there are no fat animals, but in civilization there are not merely fat animals, but fat men to eat the fat animals. In a state of nature no animal loafs very long; it has to go out and hunt its food again. But man, by his superior cunning, compels the animals to work for him, and also his fellow men. So he produces unlimited wealth for himself; not merely can he eat and drink and sleep all he wants, but he builds a whole elaborate set of laws and moral customs and religious codes about this power, he invents manners and customs and literatures and arts, expressive of his superiority to nature and to his fellow men, and of his ability to enslave and exploit them. So he destroys for his imperious self the beneficent guardianship which nature had maintained over him; he develops a thousand complicated diseases, a thousand monstrous abnormalities of body and mind and spirit. And each one of these diseases and abnormalities is a new life of its own; it develops a body of knowledge, a science, and perhaps an art; it becomes the means of life, the environment and the determining destiny of thousands, perhaps millions, of human beings. So continues the growth of the colossal structure which we call civilization—in part still healthy and progressive, but in part as foul and deadly as a gigantic cancer.

What is to be done about this cancer? First of all, it must be diagnosed, the extent of it precisely mapped out and the causes of it determined. Man, the rebel, has rejected his mother nature, and has lost and for the most part forgotten the instincts with which she provided him. He has destroyed the environment which, however harsh to the individual, was beneficent to the race, and has set up in the place of it a gigantic pleasure-house, with talking machines and moving pictures and soda fountains and manicure parlors and "gents' furnishing establishments."

Shall we say that man is to go back to a state of nature, that he shall no longer make asylums for the insane and homes for the defective, eye-glasses for the astigmatic and malted milk for the dyspeptic? There are some who preach that. Among the multitude of strange books and pamphlets which come in my mail, I found the other day a volume from England, "Social Chaos and the Way Out," by Alfred Baker Read, a learned and imposing tome of 364 pages, wherein with all the paraphernalia of learning it is gravely maintained that the solution for the ills of civilization is a return to the ancient Greek practice of infanticide. Every child at birth is to be examined by a committee of physicians, and if it is found to possess any defect, or if the census has established that there are enough babies in the world for the present, this baby shall be mercifully and painlessly asphyxiated. You might think that this is a joke, after the fashion of Swift's proposal for eating the children of famine-stricken Ireland. I have spent some time examining this book before I risk committing myself to the statement that it is the work of a sober scientist, with no idea whatever of fun.

If we are going to think clearly on this subject, the first point we have to understand is that nature has nothing to do with it. We cannot appeal to nature, because we are many thousands of years beyond her sway. We left her when the first ape came down from the treetop and fastened a sharp stone in the end of his club; we bade irrevocable good-bye to her when the first man kept himself from freezing and altered his diet by means of fire. Therefore, it is no argument to say that this, that, or the other remedy is "unnatural." Our choice will lie among a thousand different courses, but the one thing we may be sure of is that none of them will be "natural." Bairnsfather, in one of his war cartoons, portrays a British officer on leave, who got homesick for the trenches and went out into the garden and dug himself a hole in the mud and sat shivering in the rain all night. And this amuses us vastly; but we should be even more amused if any kind of reformer, physician, moralist, clergyman or legislator should suggest to us any remedy for our ills that was really "according to nature."

Civilized man, creature of art and of knowledge, has no love for nature except as an object for the play of his fancy and his wit. He means to live his own life, he means to hold himself above nature with all his powers. Yet, obviously, he cannot go on accumulating diseases, he cannot give his life-blood to the making of a cancer while his own proper tissues starve. He must somehow divert the flow of his energies, his social blood-stream, so to speak, from the cancer to the healthy growth. To abandon the metaphor, man will determine by the use of his reason what he wishes life to be; he will choose the highest forms of it to which he can attain. He will then, by the deliberate act of his own will, devote his energies to those tasks; he will make for himself new laws, new moral codes, new customs and ways of thought, calculated to bring to reality the ideal which he has formed. So only can man justify himself as a creator, so can he realize the benefit and escape the penalties of his revolt from his ancient mother.

And then, perhaps, we shall make the discovery that we have come back to nature, only in a new form. Nature, harsh and cruel, wasteful and blind as we call her, yet had her deep wisdom; she cared for the species, she protected and preserved the type. Man, in his new pride of power, has invented a philosophy which he dignifies by the name of "individualism." He lives and works for himself; he chooses to wear silk shirts, and to break the speed limit, and to pin ribbons and crosses on his chest. Now what he must do with his new morality, if he wishes to save himself from degeneration, is to manifest the wisdom and far vision of the old mother whom he spurned, and to say to himself, deliberately, as an act of high daring: I will protect the species, I will preserve the type! I will deny myself the raptures of alcoholic intoxication, because it damages the health of my offspring; I will deny myself the amusement of sexual promiscuity for the same reason. I will devise imitations of the chase and of battle in order that I may keep my physical body up to the best standard of nature. Because I understand that all civilized life is based upon intelligence, I will acquire knowledge and spread it among my fellow men. Because I perceive that civilization is impossible without sympathy, and because sympathy makes it impossible for me to be happy while my fellow men are ignorant and degraded, therefore I dedicate my energies to the extermination of poverty, war, parasitism and all forms of exploitation of man by his fellows.

Professor William James is the author of an excellent essay entitled "A Moral Equivalent for War." He sets forth the idea that men have loved war through the ages because it has called forth their highest efforts, has made them more fully aware of the powers of their being. He asks, May it not be possible for man, of his own free impulse, born of his love of life and the wonderful potentialities which it unfolds, to invent for himself a discipline, a code based, not upon the destruction of other men and their enslavement, but upon cooperative emulation in the unfoldment of the powers of the mind? That this can be done by men, I have never doubted. That it will be done, and done quickly, has been made certain by the late world conflict, which has demonstrated to all thinking people that the progress of the mechanical arts has been such that man is now able to inflict upon his own civilization more damage than it is able to endure.

CHAPTER VII
MAKING OUR MORALS

(Attempts to show that human morality must change to fit human facts, and there can be no judge of it save human reason.)

Assuming the argument of the preceding chapters to be accepted, it appears that human life is in part at least a product of human will, guided by human intelligence. Man finds himself in the position of the crew of a ship in the middle of the ocean; he does not know exactly how the ship was made, or how it came to be in its present position, but he has discovered how the engines are run, and how the ship is steered, and the meaning of the compass. So now he takes charge of the ship, and keeps it afloat amid many perils; and meantime, on the bridge of the vessel, there goes on a furious argument over the question what port the ship shall be steered to and what chart shall be used.

It is not well as a rule to trust to similes, but this simile is useful because it helps us to realize how fluid and changeable are the conditions of man's life, and how incessant and urgent the problems with which he finds himself confronted. The moral and legal codes of mankind may be compared to the steering orders which are given to the helmsman of the vessel. Northeast by north, he is told; and if during the night a heavy wind arises, and pushes the bow of the vessel off to starboard, then the helmsman has to push the wheel in the opposite direction. If he does not do so, he may find that his vessel has swung around and is going to some other part of the world. Next morning the passengers may wake up and find the ship on the rocks—because the helmsman persisted in following certain steering directions which were laid down in an ancient Hebrew book two or three thousand years ago!

If life is a continually changing product, then the laws which govern conduct must also be continually changing, and morality is a problem of continuous adjustment to new circumstances and new needs. If man is free to work upon this changing environment, he must be free to make new tools and devise new processes. If it is the task of reason to choose among many possible courses and many possible varieties of life, then clearly it is man's duty to examine and revise every detail of his laws and customs and moral codes.

This is, of course, in flat contradiction to the teachings of all religions. So far as I know there is no religion which does not teach that the conduct of man in certain matters has been eternally fixed by some higher power, and that it is man's duty to conform to these rules. It is considered to be wicked even to suggest any other idea; in fact, to do so is the most wicked thing in the world, far more dangerous than any actual infraction of the code, whatever it may be.

Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us take, for a test, the Ten Commandments. These commandments were graven upon stone tablets some four thousand years ago, and are supposed to have been valid ever since. "Thou shalt not kill," is one; others phrase it, "Thou shall do no murder"; and in this double version we see at once the beginnings of controversy. If you are a Quaker, you accept the former version, while if you are a member of the military general staff of your country you accept the latter. You maintain the right to kill your fellow men, provided that those who do the killing have been previously clad in a special uniform, indicating their distinctive function as killers of their fellow men. You maintain, in other words, the right of making war; and presently, when you get into making war, you find yourself maintaining the right to kill, not merely by the old established method of the sword and the bullet, but by means of poison gases which destroy the lives of women and children, perhaps a whole city full at a time.

And also, of course, you maintain the right to kill, provided the killing has been formally ordered and sanctioned by a man who sits upon a raised bench and wears a black robe, and perhaps a powdered wig. You consider that by the simple device of putting this man into a black robe and a powdered wig, you endow him with authority to judge and revise the divine law. In other words, you subject this divine law to human reason; and if some religious fanatic refuses to be so subjected, you call him by the dread name "pacifist," and if he attempts to preach his idea, you send him to prison for ten or twenty years, which means in actual practice that you kill him by the slow effects of malnutrition and tubercular infection. If he is ordered to put on the special costume of killing, and refuses to do so, you call him a "C. O.," and you bully and beat him, and perhaps administer to him the "water cure" in your dungeons.

Or take the commandment that we shall not commit adultery. Surely this is a law about which we can agree! But presently we discover that unhappily married couples desire to part, and that if we do not allow them to part, we actually cause the commission of a great deal more adultery than otherwise. Therefore, our wise men meet together, and revise this divine law, and decide that it is not adultery if a man takes another wife, provided he has received from a judge an engraved piece of paper permitting him to do so. But some of the followers of religion refuse to admit this right of mere mortal man. The Catholic Church attempts to enforce its own laws, and declares that people who divorce and remarry are really living in adultery and committing mortal sin. The Episcopal Church does not go quite so far as that; it allows the innocent party in the divorce to remarry. Other churches are content to accept the state law as it stands. Is it not manifest that all these groups are applying human reason, and nothing but human reason, to the interpreting and revising of their divine commandments?

Or take the law, "Thou shalt not steal." Surely we can all agree upon that! Let us do so; but our agreement gets us nowhere, because we have to set up a human court to decide what is "stealing." Is it stealing to seize upon land, and kill the occupants of it, and take the land for your own, and hand it down to your children forever? Yes, of course, that is stealing, you say; but at once you have to revise your statement. It is not stealing if it was done a sufficient number of years ago; in that case the results of it are sanctified by law, and held unchangeable forever. Also, we run up against the fact that it is not stealing, if it is done by the State, by men who have been dressed up in the costume of killers before they commit the act.

Again, is it stealing to hold land out of use for speculation, while other men are starving and dying for lack of land to labor upon? Some of us call this stealing, but we are impolitely referred to as "radicals," and if we venture to suggest that anyone should resist this kind of stealing, we are sentenced to slow death from malnutrition and tubercular infection. Again, is it stealing for a victim of our system of land monopoly to take a loaf of bread in order to save the life of his starving child? The law says that this is stealing, and sends the man to jail for this act; yet the common sense of mankind protests, and I have heard a great many respectable Americans venture so far in "radicalism" as to say that they themselves would steal under such circumstances.

One could pile up illustrations without limit; but this is enough to make clear the point, that it is perfectly futile to attempt to talk about "divine" rules for human conduct. Regardless of any ideas you may hold, or any wishes, you are forced at every hour of your life to apply your reason to the problems of your life, and you have no escape from the task of judging and deciding. All that you do is to judge right or to judge wrong; and if you judge wrong, you inflict misery upon yourself and upon all who come into contact with you. How much more sensible, therefore, to recognize the fact of moral and intellectual responsibility; to investigate the data of life with which you have to deal, the environment by which you are surrounded, and to train your judgment so that you will be able to fit yourself to it with quickness and certainty!

"But," the believer in religion will say, "this leaves mankind without any guide or authority. How can human beings act, how can they deal with one another, if there are no laws, no permanent moral codes?"

The answer is that to accept the idea of the evolution of morality does not mean at all that there will be no permanent laws and working principles. Many of the facts of life are fixed for all practical purposes—the purposes not merely of your life and my life, but the life of many generations. We are not likely to see in our time the end of the ancient Hebrew announcement that "the sins of the father are visited upon the children"; therefore it is possible for us to study out a course of action based upon the duty of every father to hand down to his children the gift of a sound mind in a sound body. The Catholic Church has had for a thousand years or more the "mortal sin" of gluttony upon its list; and today comes experimental science with its new weapons of research, and discovers autointoxication and the hardening of the arteries, and makes it very unlikely that the moral codes of men will ever fail to list gluttony as a mortal sin. Indeed, science has added to gluttony, not merely drunkenness, but all use of alcoholic liquor for beverage purposes; we have done this in spite of the manifest fact that the drinking of wine was not merely an Old Testament virtue, but a New Testament religious rite.

To say that human life changes, and that new discoveries and new powers make necessary new laws and moral customs, is to say something so obvious that it might seem a waste of paper and ink. Man has invented the automobile and has crowded himself into cities, and so has to adopt a rigid set of traffic regulations. So far as I know, it has never occurred to any religious enthusiast to seek in the book of Revelation for information as to the advisability of the "left hand turn" at Broadway and Forty-second Street, New York, at five o'clock in the afternoon. But modern science has created new economic facts, just as unprecedented as the automobile; it has created new possibilities of spending and new possibilities of starving for mankind; it has made new cravings and new satisfactions, new crimes and new virtues; and yet the great mass of our people are still seeking to guide themselves in their readjustments to these new facts by ancient codes which have no more relationship to these facts than they have to the affairs of Mars!

I am acquainted with a certain lady, one of the kindest and most devoted souls alive, who seeks to solve the problems of her life, and of her large family of children and grand-children, according to sentences which she picks out, more or less at random, from certain more or less random chapters of ancient Hebrew literature. This lady will find some words which she imagines apply to the matter, and will shut her devout eyes to the fact that there are other "texts," bearing on the matter, which say exactly the opposite. She will place the strangest and most unimaginable interpretations upon the words, and yet will be absolutely certain that her interpretation is the voice of God speaking directly to her. If you try to tell her about Socialism, she will say, "The poor ye have always with you"; which means that it is interfering with Divine Providence to try to remedy poverty on any large scale. This lady is ready instantly to relieve any single case of want; she regards it as her duty to do this; in fact, she considers that the purpose of some people's poverty is to provide her with a chance to do the noble action of relieving it. You would think that the meaning of the sentence, "Spare the rod and spoil the child," would be so plain that no one could mistake it; but this good lady understood it to mean that God forbade the physical chastisement of children, and preferred them "spoiled." She held this idea for half a lifetime—until it was pointed out to her that the sentence was not in the Bible, but in "Hudibras," an old English poem!

CHAPTER VIII
THE VIRTUE OF MODERATION

(Attempts to show that wise conduct is an adjustment of means to ends, and depends upon the understanding of a particular set of circumstances.)

Some years ago I used to know an ardent single tax propagandist who found my way of arguing intensely irritating, because, as he phrased it, I had "no principles." We would be discussing, for example, a protective tariff, and I would wish to collect statistics, but discovered to my bewilderment that to my single tax friend a customs duty was "stealing" on the part of the government. The government had a right to tax land, because that was the gift of nature, but it had no right to tax the products of human labor, and when it took a portion of the goods which anyone brought into a country, the government was playing the part of a robber. Of course such a man was annoyed by the suggestion that in the early stages of a country's development it might possibly be a good thing for the country to make itself independent and self-sufficient by encouraging the development of its manufactures; that, on the other hand, when these manufactures had grown to such a size that they controlled the government, it might be an excellent thing for the country to subject them to the pressure of foreign competition, in order to lower their value as a preliminary to socializing them.

The reader who comes to this book looking for hard and fast rules of life will be disappointed. It would be convenient if someone could lay down for us a moral code, and lift from our shoulders the inconvenient responsibility of deciding about our own lives. There may be persons so weak that they have to have the conditions of their lives thus determined for them; but I am not writing for such persons. I am writing for adult and responsible individuals, and I bear in mind that every individual is a separate problem, with separate needs and separate duties. There are, of course, a good many rules that apply to everybody in almost all emergencies, but I cannot think of a single rule that I would be willing to say I would apply in my life without a single exception. "Thou shalt not kill" is a rule that I have followed, so far without exception; but as soon as I turn my imagination loose, I can think of many circumstances under which I should kill. I remember discussing the matter with a pacifist friend of mine, an out-and-out religious non-resistant. I pointed out to him that people sometimes went insane, and in that condition they sometimes seized hatchets and killed anyone in sight. What would my pacifist friend do if he saw a maniac attacking his children with a hatchet? It did not help him to say that he would use all possible means short of killing the maniac; he had finally to admit that if he were quite sure it was a question of the life of the maniac or the life of his child, he would kill. And this is not mere verbal quibbling, because such things do happen in the world, and people are confronted with such emergencies, and they have to decide, and no rule is a general rule if it has a single exception. There is a saying that "the exception proves the rule," but this is very silly; it is a mistranslation of the Latin word "probat," which means, not proves, but tests. No exception can prove a rule. What the exception does is to test the rule by showing that the result does not follow in the exceptional case.

The only kind of rule which can be laid down for human conduct is a rule in such general terms that it escapes exceptions by leaving the matter open for every man's difference of opinion. Any kind of rule which is specific will sooner or later pass out of date. Take, by way of illustration, the ancient and well-established virtue of frugality. Obviously, under a state of nature, or of economic competition, it is necessary for every man to lay by a store "for a rainy day." But suppose we could set up a condition of economic security, under which society guaranteed to every man the full product of his labor, and the old and the sick were fully taken care of—then how foolish a man would seem who troubled to acquire a surplus of goods! It would be as if we saw him riding on horseback through the main street of our town in a full suit of armor!

I devote a good deal of space to this question of a fixed and unchangeable morality, because it is one of the heaviest burdens that mankind carries upon its back. The record of human history is sickening, not so much because of blood and slaughter, but because of fanaticism; because wherever the mind of man attempts to assert itself, to escape from the blind rule of animal greed, it adopts a set of formulas, and proceeds to enforce them, regardless of consequences, upon the whole of life. Consider, for example, the rule of the Puritans in England. The Puritans glorified conscience, and it is perfectly proper to glorify conscience, but not to the entire suppression of the beauty-making faculties in man. Macaulay summed up the Puritan point of view in the sentence that they objected to bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. As a result of applying that principle, and lacing mankind in a straight-jacket by legislation, England swung back into a reaction under the Cavaliers, in which debauchery held more complete sway than ever before or since in English life.

This is a hard lesson, but it must be learned: there is no virtue that does not become a vice if it is carried to extremes; there is no virtue that does not become a vice if it is applied at the wrong time, or under the wrong circumstances, or at the wrong stage of human development. In fact, we may say that most vices are virtues misapplied. The so-called natural vices are simply natural impulses carried to excess, while the unnatural vices result from the suppression and distortion of natural impulses. The Greeks had as their supreme virtue what they called "sophrosuné." It is a beautiful word, worth remembering; it means a beautiful quality called moderation. We shall find, as we come to investigate, that life is a series of compromises among many different needs, many different desires, many different duties; and reason sits as a wise and patient judge, and appoints to each its proper portion, and denies to it an excess which would starve the others. Such is true morality, and it is incompatible with the existence of any fixed code, whether of human origin or divine.

The fixed morality is a survival of a far-off past, of the days of instinct and servitude. Human reason has developed but slowly, and perhaps only a few people are as yet entirely capable of taking control of their own destiny; perhaps it is really dangerous to think for oneself! But if we investigate carefully, we may decide that the danger is not so much to ourselves as it is to others. The most evil of all the habits that man has inherited from his far-off past is the habit of exploiting his fellows, and in order to exploit them more safely the ruling castes of priests and kings and nobles and property owners have taken possession of the moralities of the world and shaped them for their own convenience. They have taught the slave virtues of credulity and submission; they have surrounded their teachings with all the terrors of the supernatural; they have placed upon rebellion the penalties, not merely of this world, but of the next, not merely of the dungeon and the rack, but of hellfire and brimstone.

I do not wish to go to extremes and say that the moral codes now taught in the world are made wholly in this evil way. As a matter of fact they are a queer jumble of the two elements, the slave terrors of the past and the common sense of the present. There is not one moral code in the world today, there are many. There is one for the rich, and an entirely different one for the poor, and the rich have had a great deal more to do with shaping the code of the poor than the poor have had to do with shaping the code of the rich. There is one code for governments, and an entirely different one for the victims of governments. There is one code for business, and an entirely different one, a far more human and decent one, for friendship. Above all, there is one code for Sunday and another code for the other six days of the week. Most of our idealisms and our sentimental fine phrases we reserve for our Sunday code, while for our every-day code we go back to the rule of the jungle: "Dog eat dog," or "Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first." When you attempt to suggest a new moral code to our present day moral authorities, it is the fine phrases of the Sunday code they bring out for exhibition purposes; and perhaps you are impressed by their arguments—until Monday morning, when you attempt to apply this code at the office, and they stare at you in bewilderment, or burst out laughing in your face.

What I am trying to do here is to outline a code that will not be a matter of phrases but a matter of practice. It will apply to all men, rich as well as poor, and to all seven days of the week. I am not so much suggesting a code, as pointing out to you how you can work out your own code for yourself. I am suggesting that you should adopt it, not because I tell you to, but because you yourself have taken it and tested it, precisely as you would test any other of the practical affairs of your life—potatoes as an article of diet, or some particular sack of potatoes that a peddler was trying to sell to you. It is not yet possible for you to be as sure about everything in your life as you can be about a sack of potatoes; human knowledge has not got that far; but at least you can know what is to be known, and if anything is a matter of uncertainty, you can know that. Such knowledge is often the most important of all—just as the driver of an automobile wants to know if a bridge is not to be depended on.

So I say to you that if you want to find happiness in this life, look with distrust upon all absolutes and ultimates, all hard and fast rules, all formulas and dogmas and "general principles." Bear in mind that there are many factors in every case, there are many complications in every human being, there are many sides to every question. Try to keep an open mind and an even temper. Try to take an interest in learning something new every day, and in trying some new experiment. This is the scientific attitude toward life; this is the way of growth and of true success. It is inconvenient, because it involves working your brains, and most people have not been taught to do this, and find it the hardest kind of work there is. But how much better it is to think for yourself, and to protect yourself, than to trust your thinking to some group of people whose only interest may be to exploit you for their advantage!

CHAPTER IX
THE CHOOSING OF LIFE

(Discusses the standards by which we may judge what is best in life, and decide what we wish to make of it.)

We have made the point about evolution, that it may go forward or it may go backward. There is no guarantee in nature that because a thing changes, it must necessarily become better than it was. On the contrary, degeneration is as definitely established a fact as growth, and it is of the utmost importance, in studying the problem of human happiness and how to make it, to get clear the fact that nature has produced, and continues to produce, all kinds of monstrosities and parasites and failures and abortions. And all these blunders of our great mother struggle just as hard, desire life just as ardently as normal creatures, and suffer just as cruelly when they fail. Blind optimism about life is just as fatuous and just as dangerous as blind pessimism, and if we propose to take charge of life, and to make it over, we shall find that we have to get quickly to the task of deciding what our purpose is.

"Choose well, your choice is brief and yet endless," says Carlyle. You are driven in your choice by two facts—first, that you have to choose, regardless of whether you want to or not; and second, that upon your choice depend infinite possibilities of happiness or of misery. The interdependence of life is such that you are choosing not merely for the present, but for the future; you are choosing for your posterity forever, and to some extent you are choosing for all mankind. Matthew Arnold has said that "Conduct is three-fourths of life"; but I, for my part, have never been able to see where he got his figures. It seems to me that conduct is practically everything in life that really counts. Conduct is not merely marriage and birth and premature death; it is not merely eating and drinking and sleeping: it is thinking and aspiring; it is religion and science, music and literature and art. It is not yet the lightning and the cyclone, but with the spread of knowledge it is coming to be these things, and I suspect that some day it may be even the comet and the rising of the sun.

We are now going to apply our reason to this enormous problem of human conduct; we are going to ask ourselves the question: What kind of life do we want? What kind of life are we going to make? What are the standards by which we may know excellence in life, and distinguish it from failure and waste and blunder in life? Obviously, when we have done this, we shall have solved the moral problem; all we shall have to say is, act so that your actions help to bring the desirable things into being, and do not act so as to hinder or weaken them.

We shall not be able to go to nature to settle this question for us. This is our problem, not nature's. But we shall find, as usual, that we can pick up precious hints from her; we shall be wise to study her ways, and learn from her successes and her failures. We are proud of her latest product, ourselves. Let us see how she made us; what were the stages on the way to man?

First in the scale of evolution, it appears, came inert matter. We call it inert, because it looks that way, though we know, of course, that it consists of infinite numbers of molecules vibrating with speed which we can measure even though we cannot imagine it. This "matter" is enormously fascinating, and a wise man will hesitate to speak patronizingly about it. Nevertheless, considering matter apart from the mind which studies it, we decide that it represents a low stage of being. We speak contemptuously of stones and clods and lumps of clay. We award more respect to things like mountains and tempest-tossed oceans, because they are big; in the early days of our race we used to worship these things, but now we think of them merely as the raw material of life, and we should not be in the least interested in becoming a mountain or an ocean.

Almost everyone would agree, therefore, that what we call "life" is a higher and more important achievement of nature. And if we wish to grade this life, we do so according to its sentience—that is to say, the amount and intensity of the consciousness which grows in it. We are interested in the one-celled organisms which swarm everywhere throughout nature, and we study the mysterious processes by which they nourish and beget themselves; we suspect that they have a germ of consciousness in them; but we are surer of the meaning and importance of the consciousness we detect in some complex organism like a fish or bird. We learn to know the signs of consciousness, of dawning intelligence, and we esteem the various kinds of creatures according to the amount of it they possess. We reject mere physical bigness and mere strength. Joyce Kilmer may write:

And that seems to us a charming bit of fancy; but the common sense of the thing is voiced to us much better in the lines of old Ben Jonson:

If we take two animals of equal bulk, the hippopotamus and the elephant, we shall be far more interested in the elephant, because of the intelligence and what we call "character" which he displays. There are good elephants and bad elephants, kind ones and treacherous ones. We love the dog because we can make a companion of him; that is, because we can teach him to react to human stimuli. Of all animals we are fascinated most by the monkey, because he is nearest to man, and displays the keenest intelligence.

Someone may say that this is all mere human egotism, and that we have no way of really being sure that the life of elephants and hippopotami is not more interesting and significant than the life of men. Never having been either of these animals, I cannot say with assurance; but I know that I have the power to exterminate these creatures, or to pen them in cages, and they are helpless to protect themselves, or even to understand what is happening to them. So I am irresistibly driven to conclude that intelligence is more safe and more worth while than unintelligence; in short, that intelligence is nature's highest product up to date, and that to foster and develop it is the best guess I can make as to the path of wisdom—that is, of intelligence!

When we come to deal with human values, we find that we can trace much the same kind of evolution. Back in the days of the cave man, it was physical strength which dominated the horde; but nowadays, except in the imagination of the small boy, the "strong man" does not cut much of a figure. We go once, perhaps, to see him lift his heavy weights and break his iron bars, but then we are tired of him. Mere strength had to yield in the struggle for life to quickness of eye and hand, to energy which for lack of a better name we may call "nervous." The pugilist who has nothing but muscle goes down before his lighter antagonist who can keep out of his reach, and the crowd loves the football hero who can duck and dodge and make the long runs. One might cite a thousand illustrations, such as the British bowmen breaking down the heavily armored knights, or the quick-moving, light vessels of Britain overcoming the huge galleons of Spain. And as society develops and becomes more complex, the fighting man becomes less and less a man of muscle, and more and more a man of "nerve." Alexander, Cæsar and Napoleon would have stood a poor chance in personal combat against many of their followers. They led, because they were men of energy and cunning, able to maintain the subtle thing we call prestige.

Now the world has moved into an industrial era, and who are the great men of our time, the men whose lightest words are heeded, whose doings are spread upon the front pages of our newspapers? Obviously, they are the men of money. We may pretend to ourselves that we do not really stand in awe of a Morgan or a Rockefeller, but that we admire, let us say, an Edison or a Roosevelt. But Edison himself is a man of money, and will tell you that he had to be a man of money in order to be free to conduct his experiments. As for our politicians and statesmen, they either serve the men of money, or the men of money suppress them, as they did Roosevelt. The Morgans and the Rockefellers do not do much talking; they do not have to. They content themselves with being obeyed, and the shaping of our society is in their hands.

And yet, some of us really believe that there are higher faculties in man than the ability to manipulate the stock market. We consider that the great inventor, the great poet, the great moralist, contributes more to human happiness than the man who, by cunning and persistence, succeeds in monopolizing some material necessity of human life. "Poets," says Shelley, "are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind." If this strange statement is anywhere near to truth, it is surely of importance that we should decide what are the higher powers in men, and how they may be recognized, and how fostered and developed.

What is, in its essence, the process of evolution from the lower to the higher forms of mental life? It is a process of expanding consciousness; the developing of ability to apprehend a wider and wider circle of existence, to share it, to struggle for it as we do for the life we call our "own." The test of the higher mental forms is therefore a test of universality, of sympathetic inclusiveness; or, to use commoner words, it is a test of enlightened unselfishness.

Every human individual has the will to life, the instinct of self-preservation, which persuades him that he is of importance; but the test of his development is his ability to realize that, important though he may be, he is but a small part of the universe, and his highest interests are not in himself alone, his highest duties are not owed to himself alone. And as the life becomes more of the intellect, this fact becomes more and more obvious, more and more dominating. Men who monopolize the material things of the world and their control are necessarily self-seeking; but in the realm of the higher faculties this element, in the very nature of the case, is forced into the background. It is evident that truth is not truth for the Standard Oil Company, nor for J. P. Morgan and Company, nor yet for the government of the United States; it is truth for the whole of mankind, and one who sincerely labors for the truth does so for the universal benefit.

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. Concerning 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.

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 cheapened by misuse, but we are now in position to use it. The things which we have just been considering are the phenomena of genius—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 somewhat from those of the old morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God, and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.

Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at from different points of view. We decide that we owe it to ourselves to develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save ourselves from a pestilence.

The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached, of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what ought we to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a civilization more static than China.

Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide what they wish to make of their lives.

To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course, a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that his disease—physical, mental and moral—has progressed to such a point that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality and fraud.

Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life, and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and be ready at any time to begin life afresh.

Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs. We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each moment.

CHAPTER XI
THE MIND AND THE BODY

(Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.)

It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems of the mind in one section of this book, and the problems of the body in another; but just as we found that we could not separate our duties to ourself from our duties to our neighbors, so we find that the mind and the body are inextricably interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one, we discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body is a fascinating problem into which we must look for a moment, not because we expect to solve it, but because it illuminates the whole subject.

The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and oxygen, and burns them, and gives out carbon dioxide and other waste products, and develops energy in proportion to the amount of carbon it consumes. This machine has its elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory organs where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them and to transform them into reactions. We know to some extent how these brain cells work. We know what portions of the brain are devoted to this or that activity. We know that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we shall paralyze the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain drug, or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensation or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We know what poisons are generated in the system by anger, and what chemical changes take place in a muscle that is tired. All this is part of a vast new science which is called bio-chemistry, or the chemistry of life.

Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, and subject to the laws or ways of being of this universe. The first of these laws that we know is the law of causation. Every change in the universe has its cause, and that in turn had another cause; this chain is never broken, no matter how far we go, and the same causes universally produce the same effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know that the ball did not move itself; you know that something struck the ball or tilted the table. You discover that the motion of the ball moves the air around it, and the waves of that motion are spread through the room. They strike the walls, and the motion is carried on through the walls, and if we had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few million years from now at the most remote of the stars. This is what is called the law of the conservation of energy, and when we discover something like radium which seems to violate that law by giving out unlimited quantities of energy, we investigate and discover a new form of energy locked up in the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a source of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use on this earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is transformed, and in what strange ways it reappears, always remains, and is never destroyed, and never created out of nothing.

My friend the great physiologist once took me into his laboratory and showed me a little aquarium in which some minute creatures were wiggling about—young sea-urchins, if I remember. The physiologist took a bottle containing some chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and instantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and swam all in one direction, toward the light. They swam until they touched the walls of the aquarium, and there they stuck, trying their best to swim farther. "And now," said my friend, "that is what we call a 'tropism,' and all life is a tropism. What you see in that aquarium means that some day we shall know just what combination of chemicals causes a human being to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When bio-chemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, perhaps day by day by means of diet or injection."

Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed far enough, you will know what combination of chemicals causes a man to vote the Democratic or Republican ticket."

"Why not?" answered my friend. (He has a sense of humor about all things except this sacred bio-chemistry.)

Said I: "When you have got to that stage, keep the secret carefully, and we will fix up a scheme, and a few days before election we will release some gas in our big cities, and sweep the country for the Socialist ticket."

But jesting aside: if the human body is a material thing, existing in the material world and subject to causation, there must be material reasons for the actions of human bodies, just the same as for the moving of billiard balls. We hear the sound of a billiard ball striking the cushion, and we are prepared to accept the idea that the thing we call hearing in us is caused by the impinging of sound waves upon our eardrums. And if we investigate human beings in the mass, we find every reason to believe that they act according to laws, and that there are material causes for their acts. If you get up and shout fire in a theater, you know how the audience will behave. If you study statistics, you can say that in any large city a certain fixed number of human beings are going to commit suicide every month; you can even say that more are going to commit suicide in the month of June than in any other month. You can say that more people are going to die at two o'clock in the morning than at any other hour. You know that certain changes in the weather will cause all human beings to behave in the same way. You know that an increase of prices or an increase of unemployment will cause a certain additional number of men to commit crimes, and a certain additional number of women to become prostitutes. You know that if a man overeats, his thoughts will change their color; he will have what he calls "the blues." I might cite a thousand other illustrations to prove that human minds are subject to material laws, and therefore to investigation by the bio-chemists.

But now, stop a moment. Here you sit reading a book. Something in the book pleases you, and you say, "Good!" Perhaps you slap your knee or clench your fist. Now here is a motion of your hand, which stirs the air about you, and which, according to the laws of energy, will spread its effects to the other side of the world, and even to the farthest of the stars. Or perhaps the book makes you angry, and you throw it down in disgust; an entirely different motion, which will affect the other side of the world and the farthest of the stars in an entirely different way. The machine of the universe will be forever altered because of that slapping of your knee or that throwing down of your book.

And what was the cause of these things? So far as we can see, the material cause was exactly the same in each case—the reading of certain letters. Two human beings, sitting side by side and reading exactly the same letters, might be affected in exactly opposite ways. It seems hardly rational to maintain that the material difference of two pairs of eyes, moving over exactly the same set of letters, could have resulted in two such different motions of the hands. As a matter of fact, the very same letters may affect the same person in different ways. The composer, Edward MacDowell, once told me how on his birthday his pupils sent him a gift, with a card containing some lines from the opera "Rheingold," beginning, "O singe fort"—that is, "Oh, sing on." But the composer happened, when glancing at the card, to think French instead of German, and got the message, "Oh, powerful monkey!" This, of course, was disconcerting to a famous piano performer, and his pupils, if they had been watching his face, would have seen an unexpected reaction. It seems manifest, does it not, that the cause of this difference of reaction was not any difference of the letters, but purely a difference of thought? So it appears that thoughts may change the material universe; they may break the chain of causation, and interfere with material events.

Compare the two things, a state of consciousness and say, a steam shovel. They are entirely different, and so far as we can see, entirely incompatible and unrelated. Can anyone imagine how a thought can turn into a steam shovel, or a steam shovel into a thought? We can understand how a steam shovel lifts a mass of earth out of the ground, and we can understand how a human hand moves a lever which causes the shovel to act; but we are unable to conceive how a state of mind—whether it be a desire for pay, or an ideal of service, or a vision of the Panama Canal—can so affect a steam shovel as to cause it to move. We can sit and think motion at a billiard ball for a thousand years, and it does not move; but when we think motion at our hand, it moves instantly, and passes on the motion to the billiard ball or the steam shovel. When fire touches our hand it sends some kind of vibration to the brain, and in some inconceivable way that vibration is turned into a state of consciousness called pain, and that is turned, "as quick as thought," into another kind of motion, the jerking back of our hand.

So it seems certain that consciousness really does "butt in" on the chain of natural causation. And yet, just see in what position this leaves the scientist who is investigating life! Imagine if you can, the plight of a doctor who wanted to prescribe a diet for a sick person, if he knew that every piece of chicken and every piece of fish were free to decide of its own impulse whether or not it would be digested in the human stomach. But the plight of this doctor would be nothing to the plight of the chemist or the biologist or the engineer who was asked to do his thinking and his planning in a world containing a billion and a quarter human beings, each one a lawless agent, each one a source of new and unforeseeable energies, each one acting as a "first cause," and starting new chains of activity, tearing the universe to pieces according to his own whims. What kind of a universe would that be? It would simply be a chaos; there could be no thinking, there could be no life in it; there could be no two things the same in it, and no laws of any sort.

So then we fall back into the hands of the "determinists," who assert one unbreakable chain of natural causation, and regard the human body as an automaton. We go back to the bio-chemist, who purposes some day to ascertain for us just exactly what molecules of matter in just what positions and combinations in the brain cells of William Shakespeare caused him to perpetrate a mixed metaphor. We go back to the belief that human beings act as they must act, because the clock of life, wound up and started, must move in such and such a fashion.

But now, let us see what are the implications of that theory! Here am I writing a book, appealing to men to act in certain ways. Of course, I know that not all will follow my advice. Some will be foolish—or what seems to me foolish. Others will be weak, and will resolve to act in certain ways, and then go and act in other ways. But some will be just; some will be free; some will use their brains—because, you see, I am convinced that they can use their brains! I am convinced that ideas will affect and stir them, in complete defiance of the bio-chemist, who tells me that they act that way because of certain chemicals in their brain cells, and that I write my book because of other chemicals, and that my idea that I am writing the book because I want to write it is a delusion, and that the whole thing is happening just so because the universe was wound up that way.

Now, this an unsolved problem, and I have no solution to offer. What I have set forth is in substance one of the four "antinomies" of Kant, and you can see for yourself how it is possible to prove either side, and impossible to be sure of either. Perhaps there is really a duality in life. Perhaps there are two aspects of the universe, the material and the spiritual, and perhaps they do not really interact as they seem to, but both are guided and determined by some higher reality of life of which we know nothing. In that case there would really be a chemical equivalent for every thought, and there would be a trace of consciousness for every material atom in the universe. Maybe the theologians are right, and in the universal consciousness of God the whole future exists predetermined. Maybe to God there is no such thing as time; the past, the present, and the future are all alike to Him.

There is nothing more painful to the human mind than to have to confess its own impotence. Yet I can see no escape from the dilemma we are here facing. There is not a man alive who does not assume the freedom of the will, who does not show in all his acts that he agrees with old Dr. Samuel Johnson: "We know we are free and there's an end on't." Without a belief in freedom we cannot get beyond the animal, we cannot become the masters of our own souls. And yet, the man who swallows that idea whole, and goes out into the world and preaches personal morality to the neglect of the fundamental economic facts, the facts of the body in its relationship to all other bodies—we know what happens to that man; he becomes a shouting fool. Unless he is literally a fool, or a knave, he quickly discovers his own futility, and proceeds to use his common sense, in spite of all his theories. "Come to Jesus!" cried William Booth, and he went out in the streets of London to save souls with a bass drum; but presently, in day by day contact with the degradation of the London slums, he realized that he could not save souls so long as those souls were dwelling in starved and lousy bodies. So William Booth with his Salvation Army took to starting night shelters and cast-off clothing bureaus!

And of exactly the same sort is the bewilderment which falls to the lot of the scientist who is honest and willing to face the facts. The bio-chemist with his test tubes and his microscopes and his complex apparatus of research sits himself down and accumulates a mass of information about the human body. He investigates the diseases of the body and learns in detail just how these diseases spread and sometimes how they are caused; he can present you with a diagnosis, showing the exact stage to which the degeneration of a certain organ has proceeded, and perhaps he can suggest to you a change of diet or some drug which will, for a time at least, check the process of the breakdown. But in other cases he will be perfectly helpless; he will be, as it were, buried under the mass of detail which he has accumulated; he will find the vital energy depressed, and he will not know any way to renew it. But along will come some mental specialist, who in a half hour's talk with the patient, by a simple change in the patient's ideas, will completely make over the patient's life, and set going a new vital process which will restore the body to its former health. A religious enthusiast may do this, a psychotherapist may do it, a moral genius may do it; and the physician with all his learning will find himself like a man on the outside of a house, peering in through the windows and trying in vain to find out something about the life of the family and its guests.

This is humiliating to the chemist and the medical man, but they have to face it, because it is a fact. In the seat of authority over the human body there sits a higher being which, without any religious implications, we may call the soul; or, if it is impossible to get away from the religious implication of that word, we will call it the consciousness, or the personality. This master of the house of life is in many ways dependent upon the house. If the furnace goes out he freezes, and if the house takes fire and burns up—well, he disappears and leaves no address. But in other ways the master of the house is really master, and is a worker of miracles. He does things which we do not at all understand, and cannot yet even foresee, but which often completely make the house over.

William James, a scientist of real authority, has a wonderful essay, "The Powers of Men," in which he sets forth the fact that human beings as a general rule make use of only a small portion of the energies which dwell in their beings, and that one of our problems is to find the ways by which we can draw upon stores of hidden energy which we have within us. Also, in a fascinating book, "Varieties of the Religious Experience," James has endeavored to study and analyze the phenomena which hitherto the physician and the biologist have been disposed to ridicule and neglect. But unless I am mistaken, every scientist in the end will be forced to come back to the central fact, that life is a unity, and that the heart of it is the spirit; that what we call the will is not an accident, not a delusion, not some by-product of nature, but is the very secret of life; and that behind it is a vast ocean of power, which now and then sweeps away all dykes, and floods into the human consciousness.

The writer of this book is now a patient and plodding teacher of a certain economic doctrine, a preacher of what he might call anti-parasitism. He has come to the conclusion that the habit of men to enslave their fellows and exploit them and draw their substance from them without return—that this habit is destructive to all civilization, and is incompatible with any of the higher forms of life, intellectual, moral or artistic. He has come to the conclusion that there is no use attempting to build a structure of social life until there is a sound foundation; in other words, until the capitalist system has been replaced by cooperation. But in his youth he was, or thought he was, a poet, and touched upon that strange and wonderful thing which we call genius. He saw his own consciousness, as it were a leaf driven before a mighty tempest of spiritual energy. And he believes that this experience was no delusion, but was a revelation of the hidden mysteries of being. He still has memories of this startling experience, still hints of it in his consciousness; something still leaps in his memory, like a race-horse, or like the war-horse of Revelations, which "scenteth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting." Because of these things he can never accept any philosophy which shackles the human spirit, he will never in his thought attempt to set bounds to the possibilities of human life. The very heart of life beats in us, the wonder of it and the glory of it swells like a tide behind us. New universes are born in us, or, if you prefer, they are made by us; and the process is one of endless joy, of rapture beyond anything that the average man can at present imagine, or that any instruments invented by science can weigh or measure.

CHAPTER XII
THE MIND OF THE BODY

(Discusses the subconscious mind, what it is, what it does to the body, and how it can be controlled and made use of by the intelligence.)

The importance of the mind in matters of health becomes clearer when we understand that what we commonly call our minds—the mental states which confront us day by day in our consciousness—are really but a small portion of our total mind. In addition to this conscious mind there is an enormous mass of our personality which is like a storehouse attached to our dwelling, a place to which we do not often go, but to which we can go in case of need. This storehouse is our memory, the things we know and can recall at will. And then there is another, still vaster storehouse—no one has ever measured or guessed the size of it—which apparently contains everything that we have ever known, perhaps also everything that our ancestors have known. A common simile for the human mind is that of an iceberg; a certain portion of it appears above the surface of the sea, but there is seven times as much of it floating out of sight under the water.

This subconscious mind seems to be the portion most closely united with the body. It has its seat in the back parts of the brain, in the spinal cord and the greater nervous ganglia, such as the solar plexus. It is the portion of our mind which controls the activities of our body, all those miraculous things which went on before we first opened our eyes to the light, and which go on while we sleep, and never cease until we die. When we cut our finger and admit foreign germs to our blood, some mysterious power causes millions of our blood corpuscles to be rushed to this spot, to destroy and devour the invading enemy. We do not know how this is done, but it is an intelligent act, measured and precisely regulated, as much so as a railroad time-table. When the supply of nourishment in the body becomes low, something issues a notice by way of our stomach, which we call hunger; when we take food into the stomach, something pours out the gastric juice to digest it; when this digested food is prepared and taken up in the blood stream, something decides what portion of it shall be turned into muscle, what into brain cells, what into hair, what into finger nails. Sometimes, of course, mistakes are made and we have diseases. But for the most part all this infinitely intricate process goes on day and night without a hitch, and it is all the work of what we might call "the mind of the body."

And just as our material bodies are the product of an age-long process of development repeated in embryo by every individual, so is this mental life a product of long development, and carries memories of this far-off process. In our instincts there dwells all the past, not merely of the human race, but of all life, and if we should ever succeed in completely probing the subconscious mind and bringing it into our consciousness, it would be the same as if we were free to ramble about in all the past. Huxley set forth the fact that all the history of evolution is told in a piece of chalk; and we probably do not exaggerate in saying that all the history of the universe is in the subconscious mind of every human being. When the partridge which has just come out of the egg sees the shadow of the hawk flit by and crouches motionless as a leaf, the partridge is not acting upon any knowledge which it has acquired in the few minutes since it was hatched. It is acting upon a knowledge impressed upon its subconscious mind by the experience of millions of partridges, perhaps for tens of thousands of years. When the physician lifts the newly born infant by its ankle and spanks it to make it cry, the physician is using his conscious reason, because he has learned from previous experience, or has been taught in the schools that it is necessary for the child's breathing apparatus to be instantly cleared. But when the child responds to the spanking with a yell, it is not moved by reasoned indignation at an undeserved injury; it is following an automatic reaction, as a result of the experience of infants in the stone age, experience which in some obscure way has been registered and stored in the infant cerebellum.

Science is now groping its way through this underworld of thought. Obviously we should have here a most powerful means of influencing the body, if by any chance we could control it. We are continually seeking in medical and surgical ways to stimulate or to retard activities of the body, which are controlled entirely by this subconscious mind. If we are suffering intense pain in a joint, we put on a mustard plaster, what we call a counter-irritant, to trouble the skin and draw the congested blood away from the place of the pain. On the other hand, we may stimulate the functions of the intestines by the application of hot fomentations, to bring the blood more actively to that region. But if by any means we could make clear our wishes to the subconscious mind, we should be dealing with headquarters, and should get quicker and more permanent results.

Can we by any possibility do this? To begin with, let me tell you of a simple experiment that I have witnessed. I once knew a man who had learned to control the circulation of his blood by his conscious will. I have seen him lay his two hands on the table, both of the same color, and without moving the hands, cause one hand to turn red and the other to turn pale. And, obviously, so far as this man is concerned, the problem of counter-irritants has been solved. He is a mental mustard plaster.

And what was done by this man's own will can be done to others in many ways. The most obvious is a device which we call hypnotism. This is a kind of sleep which affects only the conscious control of the body, but leaves all the senses awake. In this hypnotic sleep or "trance" we discover that the subconscious mind is a good deal like the Henry Dubb of the Socialist cartoons; it is faithful and persistent, very strong in its own limited field, but comically credulous, willing to believe anything that is told it, and to take orders from any one who climbs into the seat of authority. You have perhaps attended one of the exhibitions which traveling hypnotists are accustomed to give in country villages. You have seen some bumpkin brought upon the stage and hypnotized, and told that he is in the water and must swim for his life, or that he is in the midst of a hornets' nest, or that his trousers are torn in the seat—any comical thing that will cause an audience to howl with laughter.

These facts were first discovered nearly a hundred and fifty years ago by a French doctor named Mesmer. He was a good deal of a charlatan, and would not reveal his secrets, and probably the scientific men of that time were glad to despise him, because what he did was so new and strange. There is a certain type of scientific mind which sits aloft on a throne with a framed diploma above its head, and says that what it knows is science and what it does not know is nonsense. And so "mesmerism" was left for the quacks and traveling showmen. But half a century later a French physician named Liébault took up this method of hypnotism, without all the fakery that had been attached to it. He experimented and discovered that he could cure not merely phobias and manias, fixed ideas, hysterias and melancholias; he could cure definite physical diseases of the physical body, such as headache, rheumatism, and hemorrhage. Later on two other physicians, Janet and Charcot, developed definite schools of "psychotherapy." They rejected hypnotism as in most cases too dangerous, but used a milder form which is known as "hypnoidization." You would be surprised to know how many ailments which baffle the skill of medical men and surgeons yield completely to a single brief treatment by such a mental specialist.

All that is necessary is some method to tap the subconscious mind. In many cases the subconsciousness knows what is the matter, and will tell at once—a secret that is completely hidden from the consciousness. For example, a man's hands shake; they have been shaking for years, and he has no idea why, but his subconscious mind explains that they first began to shake with grief over the death of his wife; also, the subconscious mind meekly and instantly accepts the suggestion that the time for grief is past, and that the hands will never shake again.

Or here is a woman who has become convinced that worms are crawling all over her. Everything that touches her becomes a worm, even the wrinkles in her dress are worms, and she is wild with nervousness, and of course is on the way to the lunatic asylum. She is hypnotized and sees the operator catching these worms one by one and killing them. She is told that he has killed the last, but she insists, "No, there is one more." The operator clutches that one, and she is perfectly satisfied, and completely cured. Her husband writes, expressing his relief that he no longer has to "sleep every night in a fish pond." This instance with many others is told by Professor Quackenbos in his book, "Hypnotic Therapeutics."

Among the most powerful means to influence the subconscious personality is religious excitement. Religion has come down to us from ancient times, and its fears and ecstasies are a part of our instinctive endowment. Those who can sway religious emotions can cure disease, not merely fixed ideas, but many diseases which appear to be entirely physical, but which psycho-analysis reveals to be hysterical in nature. Of course these religious persons who heal by laying on of hands or by purely mental means deny indignantly that they are using hypnotism or anything like it. I am aware that I shall bring upon myself a flood of letters from Christian Scientists if I identify their methods of curing with "animal magnetism" and "manipulation," and other devices of the devil which they repudiate. All I can say is that their miracles are brought about by affecting the subconscious mind; there is no other way to bring them about, and for my part I cannot see that it makes a great difference whether the subconscious mind is affected by a hand laid on the forehead, or by a hand waved in the air, or by an incantation pronounced, or by a prayer thought in silence. If you can persuade the subconscious mind that God is operating upon it, that God is omnipotent and is directing this particular healing, that is the most powerful suggestion imaginable, and is the basis of many cures. But if in order to achieve this, it is necessary for me to persuade myself that I can find some meaning in the metaphysical moonshine of Mother Eddy—why, then, I am very sorry, but I really prefer to remain sick.

But such is not the case. You do not have to believe anything that is not true; you simply have to understand the machinery of the subconscious, and how to operate it. We are only beginning to acquire that knowledge, and we need an open mind, free both from the dogmatism of the medical men and the fanaticism of the "faith curists." A few years ago in London I met a number of people who were experimenting in an entirely open-minded way with mental healing, and I was interested in their ideas. I happened to be traveling on the Continent, and on the train my wife was seized by a very dreadful headache. She was lying with her head in my lap, suffering acutely, and I thought I would try an experiment, so I put my hand upon her forehead, without telling her what I was doing, and concentrated my attention with the greatest possible intensity upon her headache. I had an idea of the cause of it; I understood that headaches are caused by the irritation of the sensory nerves of the brain by fatigue poisons, or other waste matter which the blood has not been able to eliminate. I formed in my mind a vivid picture of what the blood would have to do to relieve that headache, and I concentrated my mental energies upon the command to her subconscious mind that it should perform these particular functions. In a few minutes my wife sat up with a look of great surprise on her face and said, "Why, my headache is gone! It went all at once!"

That, of course, might have been a coincidence; but I tried the experiment many times, and it happened over and over. On another occasion I was able to cure the pain of an ulcerated tooth; I was able to cure it half a dozen times, but never permanently, it always returned, and finally the tooth had to come out. My wife experimented with me in the same way, and found that she was able to cure an attack of dyspepsia; but, curiously enough, she at once gave herself a case of dyspepsia—something she had never known in her life before. So now I will not allow her to experiment with me, and she will not allow me to experiment with her! But we are quite sure that people with psychic gifts can definitely affect the subconscious mind of others by purely mental means. We are prepared to believe in the miracles of the New Testament, and in the wonders of Lourdes, as well as in the healings of the Christian Scientists and the New Thoughters, which cannot be disputed by any one who is willing to take the trouble to investigate. We can face these facts without losing our reason, without ceasing to believe that everything in life has a cause, and that we can find out this cause if we investigate thoroughly.

CHAPTER XIII
EXPLORING THE SUBCONSCIOUS

(Discusses automatic writing, the analysis of dreams, and other methods by which a whole new universe of life has been brought to human knowledge.)

One of the most common methods of exploring the subconscious mind is the method of automatic writing. I have never tried this myself, but tens of thousands of people are sitting every night with a "ouija" in front of them, holding a pencil on a piece of paper and letting their subconscious minds write what they please. Most of them are hoping to get messages from the dead—a problem which we shall discuss in the next chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that automatic writing and table rapping and other devices of mediumship have opened up to us a vast mass of subconscious mentality. A part of the scientific world still takes a contemptuous attitude and calls this all humbug, but many of our greatest scientists have been persuaded to investigate, and have become convinced that in this mass of subconsciousness there is mingled, not merely the mind of the medium, but the minds of all those present, and possibly other minds as well. For my part, I do not see how any one can study disinterestedly the proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and not become convinced that telepathy at least is one of the powers of the subconscious mind.

Telepathy is what is popularly known as "thought transmission." Every one must know people who are what is called "psychic," and will know what is happening to some friend in another part of the world, or will go upstairs because they "sense" that some one wants them, or will go to the door because they "have a hunch" that some one is coming. And maybe these things are only chance, but you will be unscientific if you do not take the trouble to read and learn what modern investigators have brought out on such subjects.

This much is certain, and is denied by no competent investigator: whatever has been in your mind is there still, and it is possible to find a way of tapping the buried memory. An old woman, delirious with fever, begins to babble in a strange language, and it is discovered that she is talking ancient Hebrew. The woman is entirely illiterate, and her conscious memory knows no language but her own, her conscious mind has no ideas beyond those of her domestic life and the gossip of the village. But investigation is made, and it is discovered that when this woman was a girl, she worked in the home of a Hebrew scholar, and heard him reading aloud. She did not understand a word of what she heard, and was not consciously listening to it; nevertheless, every syllable of it had been stored away forever by her subconscious mind. Innumerable cases of this sort have been established; and, as a matter of fact, we might have been prepared for such discoveries by the memory-feats of the conscious mind. It is well known that Mozart, when a child, could listen to a new opera, and go home and play it over note for note. At present there is a child in America, giving exhibitions in public, carrying on thirty games of chess at the same time. There have been others who do sums of mental arithmetic, such as multiplying thirty-two figures by thirty-two figures, or reciting the Bible backwards.

All this seems incredible; and yet there is something still more incredible. Suppose that these same powers, which are stored in our subconscious minds, were stored also in the minds of animals! A few years ago Maurice Maeterlinck published a book, "The Unknown Guest," in the course of which he tells about his experiments with the so-called Elberfeld horses: two animals which had been trained for years by their owner to give signals by moving their forefeet, and which apparently could count and divide and multiply large sums, and extract square and cube root, and spell out names, and recognize sounds, scents and colors, and read time from the face of a watch. Of course, it is easy to say that this is absurd, that the horses must have got some signals from their trainer; but, as it happened, they would do their work in the absence of their trainer; they would do it in the dark, or with a sack over their heads, and the best scientific minds of Germany were unable to suggest any test conditions which could not be met. There have been many gigantic frauds in the world, and this may have been one of them; on the other hand, there have been many new discoveries, and for my part I will finish exploring the miracles of the subconscious mind of man, before I presume to say that anything is impossible in the subconscious mind of a horse or a dog. Also I will wait for some learned person to explain to me how the subconscious minds of horses and dogs know enough to build and repair their bones and teeth, so cleverly that modern architectural and engineering science could teach them nothing. I ask, also, if it is possible to find a region in the subconsciousness which is common to two people, why is it absurd to suggest that there might be a region common to a man and a horse? Why is this any more absurd than that they should eat the same food and breathe the same air and feel the same affection and be frightened at the same dangers?

The only persons who will be dogmatic about such subjects are the persons who are ignorant. Those who take the trouble to investigate, discover more wonderful things every day, and they realize that we have here a whole universe of knowledge, to which we have as yet barely opened the doors. Consider, for example, the facts which we are acquiring on the subject of personality and what it means. You would say, perhaps, that if there is anything you know positively, it is that you are one person, and have never been anybody else, and that your body belongs to you, and that nobody else ever has used or ever can use it. But what would you say if I told you that tomorrow "you" might cease to be, and somebody else might be in possession of your body, walking it around and wearing its clothes and spending its money? What if I were to tell you that there might be in "you," or in your body, half a dozen different personalities which you have never known or dreamed of, and that tomorrow there might break out a war between them and "you," as to which of the half dozen people should hear with your ears and speak with your tongue and walk about with your clothes on? Unless you are familiar with the literature of multiple personality, you would surely say that this was unbelievable—quite as much so as a mathematical horse!

Let us begin with the case of the Reverend Ansel Bourne, who was many years ago a perfectly respectable clergyman in a Rhode Island town. One day he disappeared, and his family did not hear of him. A year or two later there was a store-keeper in a town in Pennsylvania, who suddenly came to himself as the Reverend Ansel Bourne, not knowing what he had been in the meantime, or how he came to be keeping a store. Under hypnotism it developed that he had in him two personalities, and his trance personality recollected all that had been happening in the meantime and told about it freely.

Or take the still more fascinating case of the young lady who is known in the literature of psychotherapy as Miss Beauchamp. Her story is told in a book, "The Dissociation of a Personality," by Dr. Morton Prince of Boston. Some thirty years ago Miss Beauchamp, a very conscientious and dignified young lady, became nervous and ill, and took to doing strange things, which were a source of shame and humiliation to her. Under hypnotism it was discovered to be a case of multiple personality. The other personality, who finally gave herself the name of Sally, was entirely different in character from Miss Beauchamp, being mischievous, vain, and primitive as a child. She conceived an intense dislike for Miss Beauchamp, whom she called by abusive names; at times when she could get possession of Miss Beauchamp's body, she delighted in playing humiliating tricks upon her enemy, spending her money, running her into debt, breaking her engagements, disgracing her before her friends. Sally was always well and Miss Beauchamp was always ill, and Sally would take the body, for which they fought for possession, and take it for long and exhausting walks, and leave it cold and miserable, lost and penniless, in the possession of Miss Beauchamp! And of course this made Miss Beauchamp more and more a wreck, and Sally took possession of more and more of her time. Sally knew everything that Miss Beauchamp did and thought, but Miss Beauchamp did not know about Sally. She only knew that there were gaps in her life, during which she did things she could not explain. And because she did not want her friends to think her insane, she would try to hide this dreadful condition of affairs; but Sally would spoil her plans by writing letters to her friends, and also by writing insulting letters for Miss Beauchamp to find when she took possession again.

Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless, after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a "movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to a personal God.

There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities, and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist. He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H. Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.

There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities of the psychoanalysts.

Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a death in your family within the year. Naturally this prejudices thinking people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you? Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory, and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the dream?

Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great mass of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to act upon the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the mind—shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas, the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time, and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor has relaxed its control.

This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong with this poet.

And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put them in the way of health and happiness.

Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split" personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil impulses, of sex or violence; they may be the most noble altruisms, or artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world, living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or both—"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity."

CHAPTER XIV
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY

(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live forever?)

As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.

When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any more than fairies or dragons or nymphs or satyrs. For an educated person to take ghosts seriously—well, such a person would be almost as comical as that supremely comical person, the flying-machine man. Would you believe it, in those days there actually were people who believed they could learn to fly in the air, and spent their time manufacturing machines for this purpose! There was a scientist in Washington who had this "bug," and built himself a machine and started to fly, and fell into the Potomac river. We all laughed at him—we laughed so long and so loud that we killed the poor man; and then, a few years later, somebody took that machine of Professor Langley's and actually did fly with it! But that was after I had grown up a bit more, and was not quite so ready to laugh at an idea because it was new.

I remember vividly my first meeting with a man who believed in ghosts. He was a Unitarian clergyman, the Reverend Minot J. Savage of New York. I was sixteen years old, and just breaking out of my theological shell, and Doctor Savage helped to pry me loose. He was a grave and kindly man, of great learning and intelligence, and I remember vividly my consternation when one day he told me—oh, yes, he had seen many ghosts, he was accustomed to talk with ghosts every now and then. There was no doubt whatever that ghosts existed!

He told me many stories. I remember one so well that I do not have to go back to his books to look up the details. It was in the days before the Atlantic cable, and he had a friend who took a steamer to England. One night Doctor Savage was awakened and found the ghost of his friend standing by his bedside. The ship had gone down off the Irish coast, so the ghost declared, but the friend did not want Doctor Savage to think that he had suffered from the pangs of drowning; he had been struck on the left side of the head by a beam of the ship and had been killed instantly. Doctor Savage wrote down these circumstances and had them witnessed by a number of people, and two or three weeks later he received word that the body of his friend had been found on the Irish coast, with the left side of the head crushed in.

So then, of course, I studied the subject of ghosts. I have studied it off and on ever since, and have read most of the important new discoveries and arguments of the psychic researchers. To begin with, I will mention the contents of two large volumes, Gurney's "Phantasms of the Living." In this book are narrated many hundreds of cases, of which Doctor Savage's story is a type. It appears that persons at the moment of death, or in times of great mental stress, do somehow have the power to communicate with other people, even at the other side of the world. A few such cases might be attributed to coincidence or to fraud, but when you have so many cases, attested in minute detail by so many hundreds of otherwise honest people, you are not being scientific but simply stupid if you dismiss the whole subject with contempt.

Gurney discusses the phenomenon and its probable causes. We know, of course, that hallucinations are among the most common of psychic phenomenon. Your subconscious mind can be caused to see and hear and feel anything; likewise it has power to cause you to see and hear and feel anything. In practically all cases of multiple personality some of the split-off personalities can cause the others to see and hear and feel. And the consciousness, you must understand, takes these things to be just as real as real things; there is no way you can tell an hallucination from reality—except to ask other people about it. And if we admit the idea of telepathy, we may say that phantasms are hallucinations caused by this means; that is, the subconscious mind of your wife or your mother or your friend who is ill or dying, transmits to your subconscious mind some vivid impression, which causes your own subconscious mind to present to your consciousness a perfect image of that person, walking and talking with you, and your consciousness has no way of telling but that the image is real.

So much for phantasms of the living. But are there any phantasms of the dead? Are there any cases in which the time of the appearance can be proven to be subsequent to the time of death? Even this would not prove survival, of course; it is perfectly possible that the telepathic impulse might be delayed in our own minds, it might not flash into consciousness until our own state of mind made it possible. Can we say that there are cases in which the facts communicated are such as to convince us that the person was already dead, and was telling us something as a dead person and not as a living one?

Before we go into this question, let us clear the ground for the subject by discussing the survival of personality from a more general standpoint. What is it that we want to prove? What are the probabilities of its being true? What would be the consequences of its not being true? Have we any grounds, other than those of psychic research, for thinking that it is true, or that it may be true, or that it ought to be true? What, so to speak, are the morals of the doctrine of immortality?

Well, to begin with, the survival of the soul after death and forever is one of the principal doctrines of the Christian religion. Many devout Christians will read this book, and I will seem to them blasphemous when I say that this argument does not concern me. I count myself one of the lovers and friends of Jesus, I am presumptuous enough to believe that if he were on earth, I would understand him and get along with him excellently; but I do not know any reason why I should believe this, that, or the other doctrine about life because any religious sect, founded upon the name of Jesus, commands me so to believe. I see no more reason for adopting the idea of heaven because it is a Christian idea than I see for adopting the idea of reincarnation because it is a precious and holy idea to hundreds of millions of Buddhists. I have some very good friends who are Theosophists, and are quite convinced of this idea of reincarnation; that is, that the soul comes back into life over and over again in many different bodies, thus completing itself and renewing itself and expiating its sins. My Theosophist friends have a most elaborate and complicated body of what they consider to be knowledge on this subject; yet I have to take the liberty of saying that I cannot see that it has any relation to reality. It seems to me as completely unproven as any other fairy story, or myth, or legend—for example, the seven infernos of Dante, and the elaborate and complicated torments that are suffered there.

But, it will be argued, Jesus rose from the dead, and thus proved the immortality of the soul. Now, in the first place, there are many learned investigators who consider there is insufficient evidence for believing that Jesus ever lived; and certainly if this be so, it will be difficult to prove that he rose from the dead. Again, it was a common occurrence for crucified men not to die; sometimes it happened that their guards allowed them to be spirited away—even nowadays we have known of prison guards being bribed to allow a prisoner to escape. Again, the events of the return of Jesus may have been just such psychic phenomena as we are trying in this chapter to explain. Or, once more, they may have been purely legends. A very brief study will convince a thinking person that the people of that time were ready to believe anything, and to accept facts upon such authority, and to make them the basis for a scientific conclusion, is simply to be childish.

I shall be told, of course, that it is in the Bible, and therefore it must be true. The Bible is inspired, you say; and perhaps this is so. But then, a great deal of other literature is inspired, and that does not relieve me of the task of comparing these various inspirations, and judging them, and picking out what is of use to me. The Bible is the literature of the ancient Hebrews for a couple of thousand years. It represents what the race mind of a great people for one generation after another judged worth recording and preserving. You may get an idea what this means, if you will picture to yourself a large volume of English literature, containing some Teutonic myths, and the Saxon chronicles, and the "Morte d'Arthur," and several of Chaucer's stories, and some Irish fairy tales, and some of Bacon's essays, and Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," and the English prayer book, and the architect's specifications for Westminster Abbey, and a good part of "Burke's Peerage"; also Blackstone's "Commentaries," a number of Wesley's hymns, and Pope's "Essay on Man," and some chapters of Carlyle's "Past and Present," and Gladstone's speeches, and Blake's poems, and Captain Cook's story of his voyage around the world, and Southey's "Life of Nelson," and Morris's "News from Nowhere," and Blatchford's "Merrie England," and scores of pages from Hansard, which is the equivalent of our Congressional Record. You may find this description irreverent, but do not think it is meant so. Do me the honor to get out your Bible and look it over from this point of view!

But, you say, if we die altogether when we finish this earthly life, what becomes of moral responsibility and the punishment of sins? What shall we say to the wicked man to make him be good, if we cannot reward him with a heaven and frighten him with a hell? Well, my first answer is that we have been trying this process for a couple of thousand years, and the results seem to indicate that we might better seek out some other method of inducing men to behave themselves. They do not believe so completely in heaven and hell these days, but there were times in history when they did believe completely, and not merely were the believers just as cruel, they were just as treacherous and just as gluttonous and just as drunken. If you want to satisfy yourself on this point, I refer you to my book "The Profits of Religion," page 129.

Now, as a matter of fact, I think I can discern the outlines of a system of rewards and punishments automatically working in the life of men. I am not sure that I can prove that the wicked always get punished and the virtuous always rewarded; yet, when I stop and think, I am sure that I would not care to change places with any of the wicked people that I know in this world. Life may not always be "getting" them, but it has a way of "getting" their descendants, and I could not be entirely happy if I knew that my son and his sons were going to share the fate which I now observe befalling, for example, the grand dukes of Russia and their children. Life is one thing, and it does not exist for the individual, but for the race; its causes and effects do not always manifest themselves in one individual, but in a line of descendants. "Why are they called dynasties?" asked one of my professors of history; and a student brought the session to an end by answering: "Because that is what they always seem to do!"

But this is not perfect justice, you will argue. It is not perfect, from the point of view of you or me; but then, I ask, what else is there in the world that is perfect from that point of view? Why should our justice be any more perfect than, for example, our health or our thinking or our climate or our government? And, may it not very well be that our justice is up to us, in precisely the same way that some of these other things are up to us? Maybe what we have to do is to set to work to see to it that virtue does always get rewarded and vice does always get punished, right here and now, instead of waiting for an omnipotent God to attend to it in some hypothetical heaven.

I find this life of mine very wonderful, and enormously interesting. I am willing to take it on the terms that it is given, and to try to make the best of it; and I do not see that I have any right to dictate what shall be given me in some future life. If my father gives me a Christmas present, I am happy and grateful; and, of course, if I know that he is going to give me another present next Christmas, I am still more happy; but I do not see that I have any right to argue that because he gives me one Christmas present, he must give me an unlimited number of them, and I think it would be very ungrateful of me to refuse to thank him for a Christmas present until I had made sure that I was to get one next time!

Neither do I find myself such a wonderful person that I can assert that the morality of the universe absolutely depends upon the fact that I am immortal. Of course, I should like to live forever, and to know all the wonderful things that are going to happen in the world, and if it is true that I am so to live, I shall be immensely delighted. But I cannot say that it must be true, and all I can do is to investigate the probabilities. On this point my view is stated in a sentence of Spinoza's: "He who would love God rightly must not desire that God love him in return."

To sum up, the question of immortality is purely a question of fact. It is one to be approached in a spirit of open-minded inquiry, entirely unaffected by hopes or fears or dogmas or moral claims. It is worth while to get clear that we may be immortal, even though we do not now know it and cannot now prove it; it is possible that all psychic research might end in telepathy, and still, when we die, we might wake up and find ourselves alive. It might possibly be that some of us are immortal and not all of us. It might be that some parts of us are immortal and not the rest. It might be that our subconsciousness is immortal and not our consciousness. It might be that all of us, or some part of us, survive for a time, but not forever. This last is something which I myself am inclined to think may be the case.

Also, it seems worthwhile to mention that it is no argument against immortality that we cannot imagine it, that we cannot picture a universe consisting of uncountable billions of living souls, or what these souls would do to pass the time. It may very well be that among these souls there is no such thing as time. It may be that they are thoroughly occupied in ways beyond our imagining, or again, that they are not occupied, and under no necessity of being occupied. Let the person who presents such arguments begin by picturing to you how the brain cells manage to store up the uncounted millions of memories which you have, the thousands of words and combinations of words, and the thoughts which go with them, musical notes and tunes, colors and odors and visual impressions, memories of the past and hopes of the future and dreams that never were. Where are all those hundreds of millions of things, and what are they like when they are not in our consciousness, and how do they pass the time, and where were they in the hundreds of millions of years before we were born, and where will they be in the hundreds of millions of years of the future? When our wise men can answer these questions completely, it will be time enough for them to tell us about the impossibility of immortality.

CHAPTER XV
THE EVIDENCE FOR SURVIVAL

(Discusses the data of psychic research, and the proofs of spiritism thus put before us.)

Let us now take up the question of survival of personality after death from the strictly scientific point of view; let us consider what facts we have, and the indications they seem to give. First, we know that to all appearances the consciousness and the subconsciousness are bound up with the body. They grow with the body, they decline with the body, they seem to die with the body. We can irretrievably damage the consciousness by drawing a whiff of cyanogen gas into the lungs, or by sticking a pin into the brain, or by clogging one of its tiny blood vessels with waste matter. It is terrible to us to think that the mind of a great poet or prophet or statesman may be snuffed out of existence in such a way; but then, it is no argument against a fact to say that it is terrible. Insanity is terrible, war is terrible, pestilence is terrible, so also are tigers and poisonous snakes; but all these things exist, and all these things have power over the wisest and greatest mind, to put an end to its work on this earth at least.

And now we come with the new instrument of psychic research, to probe the question: What becomes of this consciousness when it disappears? Can we prove that it is still in existence, and is able by any method to communicate with us? Those who answer "Yes" argue that the mind of the dead person, unable to use its own bodily machinery any longer, manages in the hypnotic trance to use the bodily machinery of another person, called a "medium," and by it to make some kind of record to identify itself.

This, of course, is a strange idea, and requires a good deal of proof. The law of probability requires us not to accept an unlikely explanation, if there is any more simple one which can account for the facts. When we examine the product of automatic writing, table-tipping, and other psychic phenomena, we have first to ask ourselves, Is there anything in all this which cannot be explained by what we already know? Then, second, we have to ask, Is there any other supposition which will explain the facts, and which is easier to believe than the spirit theory?

These "spirits" apparently desire to convince us of their reality, and they tell us many things which are expected to convince us; they tell us things which we ourselves do not know, and which spirits might know. But here again we run up against the problem of the subconsciousness, with its infinite mass of "forgotten" knowledge. It is not so easy for the "spirits" to tell us things which we can be sure our subconscious mind could not possibly contain. Also, there comes the additional element of telepathy. It appears to be a fact that under trance conditions, or under any especially exciting conditions of the consciousness, one mind can reach out and take something out of another mind, or one mind can cause something to be passed over to another mind; and so information can be communicated to the mind of a medium, and can appear in automatic writing, or in clairvoyance, or in crystal gazing.

One of the most conscientious and earnest of all the investigators of this subject was the late Professor Hyslop, who many years ago sought to teach me "practical morality" (from the bourgeois point of view) in Columbia University. Professor Hyslop worked for fifteen years with a medium by the name of Mrs. Piper, who was apparently sincere and was never exposed in any kind of fraud. In Professor Hyslop's books you will find innumerable instances of amazing facts brought out in Mrs. Piper's trances. You will find Professor Hyslop arguing that the only way telepathy can account for these facts is by the supposition that there is a universal subconscious mind, or that the subconscious mind of the medium possesses the power to reach into the subconscious mind of every other living person and take out anything from it. But for my part, I cannot see that the case is quite so difficult. Professor Hyslop recites, for example, how Mrs. Piper would tell him facts about some long dead relative—facts which he did not know, but was later able to verify. But that proves simply nothing at all, because there could be no possible way for Professor Hyslop to be sure that he had never known these facts about his relatives. The facts might have been in his subconscious mind without having ever been in his conscious mind at all; he might have heard people talking about these matters while he was reading a book, or playing as a boy, paying no attention to what was said.

And then came Sir Oliver Lodge with his investigations. I will say this for his work—he was the first person who was able to make real to my mind the startling idea that perhaps after all the dead might be alive and able to communicate with us. You will find what he has to say in his book, "The Survival of Man," and it seems fair that a great scientist and a great man should have a chance to convince you of what seem to him the most important facts in the world.

Sir Oliver's son Raymond was killed in the war, and it is claimed that he began at once to communicate with his family. Among other things, he told them of the existence of a picture, which none of them had ever seen or heard of, a group photograph which he described in detail. But, of course, other people in this group knew of the existence of the photograph, and so we have again the possibility that some member of Sir Oliver's family may have taken into his subconscious mind without knowing it an impression or description of that picture. If you care to experiment, you will find that you can frequently play a part in the dreams of a child by talking to it in its sleep; and that is only one of a thousand different ways by which some member of a family might acquire, without knowing it, information of the existence of a photograph.

There is another possibility to be considered—that a portion of the consciousness may survive, and not necessarily forever. We are accustomed when death takes place to see the body before us, and we know that we can preserve the body for thousands of years if we wish. Why is it not possible that when conscious life is brought to a sudden end, there may remain some portion of the consciousness, or of the subconsciousness, cut off from the body, and slowly fading back into the universal mind energy, whatever we please to call it? There is a hard part of the body, the skeleton, which survives for some time; why might there not be a central core of the mind which is similarly tough and enduring? Of course, if consciousness is a function of the brain, it must decay as the brain decays; but how would it be if the brain were a function of the consciousness—which is, so far as I can see, quite as likely a guess.

I find many facts which seem to indicate the plausibility of this idea. I notice that in trance phenomena it is the spirits of those recently dead which seem to manifest the most vitality. Of course, you can go to any seance in the "white light" district of your city and receive communications from the souls of Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas, and if the medium does not happen to be literary, you can communicate with Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles; but you will not find much reality about any of these people, they will not tell you very much about the everyday details of their lives. This fact that so much of what the "spirits" tell us is of our own time tends to cast doubt on the idea that the dead survive forever. How simple it would be to convince us, if the spirit of Sophocles would come back to earth and tell us where to dig in order to find copies of his lost tragedies! You would think that the soul of Sophocles, seeing our great need of beauty and wisdom, would be interested to give us his works! From genius, operating under the guidance of the conscious mind, we get sublimity, majesty and power; but what the trance mediums give us suggests, both in its moral and intellectual quality, the operation of the subconscious. It is exactly like what we get, for example, from dissociated personalities.

There are, to be sure, the books of Patience Worth, produced by the automatic writing of a lady in St. Louis, who tells us in evident good faith that her conscious personality is entirely innocent of Patience, and all her thought and doings. Patience writes long novels and dramas in a quaint kind of old English, and the lady in St. Louis knows nothing about this language. But does she positively know that when she was a child, she never happened to be in the room with someone who was reading old English aloud? Nothing seems more likely than that her subconscious mind heard some quaint, strange language, and took possession of it, and built up a personality around it, and even made a new language and a new literature from that starting point.

That is precisely the kind of thing in which the subconscious revels. It creates new characters, with an imagination infinite and inexhaustible. Who has not waked up and been astounded at the variety and reality of a dream? Who has not told his dreams and laughed over them? The subconscious will play at games, it will act and rehearse elaborate rôles; it will put on costumes, and delight in being Cæsar and Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Pocahontas and Hamlet and Don Quixote and Siegfried and Achilles. Yes, it will even play at being "spirits"! It will be mischievous and impish; it will be swallowed up with a sense of its own importance, taking an insolent delight in convincing the world's most learned scientists of the fact that its play-acting is reality. It will call itself "Raymond" to move and thrill a grief-stricken family; it will call itself "Phinuit" and "Dr. Hodgson," and cause an earnest professor of "practical morality" to give up a respectable position in Columbia University and write books to convince the world that the dead are sending him messages.

Consider, for example, the multiple personality of Miss Beauchamp. Remember that here we are not dealing with any guess work about "spirits"; here we have half a dozen different "controls," none of them the least bit dead, but all of them a part of the consciousness of one entirely alive young lady. A specialist has spent some six years investigating the case, day after day, week after week, writing down the minute details of what happens. And now consider the miscreant known as "Sally." Sally is just as real as any child whom you ever held in your arms. Sally has love and hate, fear and hope, pain and delight—and Sally is a little demon, created entirely out of the subconsciousness of a highly refined and conscientious young college graduate of Boston. Sally spends Miss Beauchamp's money on candy, and eats it; Sally pawns Miss Beauchamp's watch and deliberately loses the ticket; Sally uses Miss Beauchamp's lips and tongue to tell lies about Miss Beauchamp; Sally strikes Miss Beauchamp dumb, or makes her hear exactly the opposite of what is spoken to her. Yes, and Sally pleads and fights frantically for her life; Sally enters into intrigues with other parts of Miss Beauchamp, and for years deliberately fools Doctor Prince, who is her Recording Angel and Heavenly Judge!

And can anybody doubt that Sally could have fooled a grieving mother, and made that mother think she was talking to the ghost of a long lost child? Can anybody doubt that Sally could and would play the part of any person she had ever known, or of any historic character she had ever read about? And don't overlook the all-important fact that the conscious Miss Beauchamp was absolutely innocent of all this, and was horrified when she was told about it. So here you have the following situation, no matter of guesswork, but definitely established: your dearest friend may act as a medium, and in all good faith may bring to the surface some part of his or her subconsciousness, which masquerades before you in a hundred different rôles, and plays upon you with deliberate malice the most subtle and elaborate and cruel tricks.

And how much worse the situation becomes when to this there is added the possibility of conscious fraud! When the medium is a person who is taking your money, and thrives by making you believe in the "spirits" she produces! You may go to Lily Dale, in New York state, the home of the Spiritualists, where they have a convention every summer, and in row after row of tents you may hear, and even see, every kind of spirit you ever dreamed of, ringing bells and shaking tambourines and dancing jigs. And you may see poor farmers' wives, with tears streaming down their cheeks, listening to the endearments of their dead children, and to wisdom from the lips of Oliver Wendell Holmes speaking with a Bowery accent. This kind of thing was exposed many years ago by Will Irwin in a book called "The Medium Game"; and then—after traveling from one kind of medium to another, and studying all their frauds, Irwin tells how he went into a "parlor" on Sixth Avenue, and there by a fat old woman who had never seen him before, was suddenly told the most intimate secrets of his life!

It has recently been announced that Thomas A. Edison is at work upon a device to enable spirits to communicate with the living, if there really are spirits seeking to do this. It is Edison's idea that spirits may inhabit some kind of infinitely rarefied astral body, and he proposes to manufacture an instrument which is sensitive to an impression many millions of times fainter than anything the human body can feel. This should make it easier for the spirits, and should constitute a fairer test, possibly a decisive one. When that machine is perfected and put to work by scientific men, I wish to suggest a few tests which will convince me that there really are spirits, and that the results are not to be explained by telepathy.

First, assuming that the spirits live forever, there are some useful things which were known to the people of ancient time, and are not known to anyone living now. For example, let one of the Egyptian craftsmen come forward and tell us the secret of their glass-staining, which I understand is now a lost art. And then Sophocles, as I have already suggested, will tell us where we can find his lost dramas; or if he doesn't know where any copies are buried, let him find in the spirit world some scribe or librarian or book-lover who can give us this priceless information. All over the ancient lands are buried and forgotten cities, and in those cities are papyrus scrolls and graven tablets and bricks. Infinite stores of knowledge are thus concealed from us; and how simple for the ancient ones who possess this information to make it known to us, and so to convince us of their reality!

Or, again, supposing that spirits are not immortal, but that they slowly fade from life as do their bodies. Suppose that a Raymond Lodge or other recently dead soldier wishes to communicate with his father and to convince his father that it is really an independent being, and not simply a part of the father's subconscious mind—let him try something like this. Let the father write six brief notes, and put them in six envelopes all alike, and shuffle them up and put them in a hat and draw out one of them. Now, assuming that the experimenter is honest, there is no living human being who knows the contents of that envelope, and if the medium is dipping into the subconscious mind of the experimenter, the chances are one in six of the right note being hit upon. Assuming that spirits may not be able to get inside an envelope and read a folded letter, there is no objection to the experimenter, provided he is honest, and provided there are no mirrors or other tricks, holding the envelope behind his back, and tearing it open, and spreading it out for the convenience of the spirit. And now, if the spirit can read that letter correctly every time, we shall be fairly certain that whatever force we are dealing with, it is not the subconscious mind of the experimenter.

Or, let us take another test. Let us have a roulette wheel in a covered box, or hidden away so that no one but the spirit can see it. We spin the wheel, and any one of the habitues of Monte Carlo can figure out the chance of the little ball dropping into any particular number. If now the spirit can tell us each time where we shall find the ball, we shall know that we are dealing with knowledge which does not exist either in the conscious or the subconscious mind of any living human being.

Among the things that "spirits" have been accustomed to do, since the days when they first made their appearance with the Fox sisters in America, are the lifting of tables and the ringing of bells and the assuming of visible forms. These are what is known as "materializations," and when I was a boy, and used to hear people talking about these things, there was always one test required: let the materializations manifest themselves upon recording instruments scientifically devised; let photographs be taken of them, let them be weighed and measured, and so on. Well, time has moved forward, and these tests have been met, and it appears that "materializations" are facts—although it is still as uncertain as ever what they are materializations of. An English scientist, Professor Crawford, has published a book entitled "The Reality of Psychic Phenomena," in which he tells the results of many years of testing materializations by the strictest scientific methods. When the medium "levitates" a table—that is, causes it to go up in the air without physical contact—it appears that her own weight increases by exactly the weight of the table. When she exerts any force, which apparently she can do at a distance, the recording instruments show the exact counter-force in her own body.

The results of these investigations are calculated at first to take your breath away. It begins to appear that the theosophists may be right, and that we may have one or more "astral" bodies within or coincident with the physical body; and that under the trance conditions we mold and make over this "astral" body in accordance with our imaginations, precisely as a sculptor molds the clay. At any rate, our subconsciousness has the power to project from it masses of substance, and to cause these to take all kinds of forms, for example, human faces, which have been photographed innumerable times. Or the body can shoot out long rods or snaky projections, which lift tables, and exert force which has been recorded upon pressure instruments and weighed by scales.

As I write, a friend lends me a fifteen-dollar volume, a translation just published of an elaborate work by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, a physician of Munich, giving minute details of four years' experiments in this field. So rigid was this investigator in his efforts to exclude fraud, that not merely was the medium stripped and sewed up in black tights, but the "cabinet" in which she sat was a big sack of black cloth, everywhere sewed tight by machine. Every crevice of the medium's body was searched before and after the tests, and every inch of the "cabinet" gone over. The investigators sat within a couple of feet of the medium, and would draw back the curtains, and while holding her hands and her feet, would watch great masses of filmy gray and white stuff exude from the medium's mouth, from her armpits and breasts and sides. This would happen in red light of a hundred candle power, by which print could be easily read; and the medium would herself illuminate the phenomena with a red electric torch. The investigators would be privileged to examine these "phantom" forms, to touch them gently, and be touched by them—soft and slimy, like the tongue of an animal; but sometimes the things would misbehave, and strike them in the eye, hurting them.

The medium, a young French girl living in the home of the wife of a well-known French playwright, had begun with spiritualist ideas, but came to take a matter-of-fact attitude to what happened, and in her trances would labor to mold these emanations into hands or faces, as requested by those present. She finally succeeded in allowing them to separate the soft mucous stuff from her body, and keep it for chemical and bacteriological examination. All this time she would be surrounded by a battery of cameras, nine at once, some of them inside the cabinet; and when the desired emanation was in sight, all these cameras would be set off by flashlight, and in the book you have over two hundred such photographs, showing faces and hands from every point of view. There are even moving-pictures, showing the material coming out of her mouth and going back!

It is evident that we have here a whole universe of unexplored phenomena; and it seems that many of the old-time superstitions which were dumped overboard have now to be dragged back into the boat and examined in the light of new knowledge. What could smack more of magic and fraud than crystal-gazing? Yet it appears that the subconsciousness has power to project an image of its hidden memories into a crystal ball, where it may be plainly seen. We find so well-recognized an authority as Dr. Morton Prince using this method to enable one of the many Miss Beauchamps to recall incidents in her previous life which were otherwise entirely lost to her. Likewise this exploration of the disintegration of personality enables us to watch in the making all the phenomena of trance and ecstasy which have had so much to do with the making of religions. We know now how Joan of Arc heard the "voices," and we can make her hear more voices or make her stop hearing voices, as we prefer. Also we know all about demons and "demoniac possession." We can cast out demons—and without having to cause them to enter a herd of swine! We may some day be prepared to investigate the wonder stories which the Yogis tell us, about their ability to leave their physical bodies in a trance, and to appear in England at a few moments' notice for the transaction of their spiritual business!

But we want things proven to us, and we don't want the people with whom we work to be animated either by religious fanaticism or by money greed. We are ready to unlimber our minds, and prepare for long journeys into strange regions, but we want to move cautiously, and choose our route carefully, and be sure we do not lose our way! We want to deal rationally with life; we don't want to make wild guesses, or to choose a complicated and unlikely solution when a simple one will suffice. But, on the other hand, we must be alive to the danger of settling down on our little pile of knowledge, and refusing to take the trouble to investigate any more. That is a habit of learned men, I am sorry to say; the law of inertia applies to the scientist, as well as to the objects he studies. The scientists of our time have had to be prodded into considering each new discovery about the subconscious mind, precisely as the scientists of Galileo's time had to be prodded to watch him drop weights from the tower of Pisa. When he told them that the earth moved round the sun instead of the sun round the earth, they tortured him in a dungeon to make him take it back, and he did so, but whispered to himself, "And yet it moves." And it did move, of course, and continued to move. And in exactly the same way, if it be true that we have these hidden forces in us, they will continue to manifest themselves, and masses of people will continue to flock to Lily Dale, and to pay out their hard-earned money, until such a time as our learned men set to work to find out the facts and tell us how we can utilize these forces without the aid of either superstition or charlatanry.

CHAPTER XVI
THE POWERS OF THE MIND

(Sets forth the fact that knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and what science means to the people.)

We have now completed a brief survey of the mind and its powers. Whatever we may have proved or failed to prove, this much we may say with assurance: the reader who has followed our brief sketch attentively has been disabused of any idea he may have held that he knows it all; and this is always the first step towards knowledge.

The mind is the instrument whereby our race has lifted itself out of beasthood. It is the instrument whereby we hold ourselves above the forces which seek to drag us down, and whereby we shall lift ourselves higher, if higher we are to go. How shall we protect this precious instrument? How shall we complete our mastery of it? What are the laws of the conduct of the mind?

The process of the mind is one of groping outward after new facts, and digesting and assimilating them, as the body gropes after and digests and assimilates food. The senses bring us new impressions, and we take these and analyze them, tear them into the parts which compose them, compare them with previous sensations, recognize difference in things which seem to be alike, and resemblances in things which seem to be different; we classify them, and provide them with names, which are, as it were, handles for the mind to grasp. Above all, we seek for causes; those chains of events which make what we know as order in the world of phenomena. And when the mind has what seems to be a cause, it proceeds to test it according to methods it has worked out, the rules and principles of experimental science.

It is a comparatively small number of sensations which the body brings to the mind of itself; it is a narrow world in which we should live if our minds adopted a passive attitude toward life. But some minds possess what we call curiosity; they set out upon their own impulse to explore life; they discover new laws and make new experiences and new sensations for themselves. The mind forms an idea, and at first, after the fashion of the ancient Greek philosophers, it glorifies that idea and sets it in the seat of divinity. But presently comes the empirical method, which refuses authority to any idea unless it can stand the test of experiment, and prove that it corresponds with reality. Nowadays the thinker amasses his facts, and forms a theory to explain them, and then proceeds to try out this theory by the most rigid method that he or his critics can devise. If the theory doesn't "work"—that is, if it doesn't explain all the facts and stand all the tests—it is thrown away like a worn-out shoe. So little by little a body of knowledge is built up which is real knowledge; which will serve us in our daily lives, which we can use as foundation-stones in the structure of our civilization.

By this method of research man is expanding his universe beyond anything that could have been conceived in the pre-scientific days. Hour by hour, while we work and play and sleep, the mind of our race is discovering new worlds in which our posterity will dwell. For uncounted ages man walked upon the earth, surrounded by infinite swarms of bacterial life of whose existence he never dreamed. The invisible rays of the spectrum beat upon him, and he knew nothing of what they did to him, whether good or evil. He lifted his head and saw vast universes of suns, in comparison with which his world was a mere speck of dust; yet to him these universes were globes or lanterns which some divinity had hung in the sky.

One of the most fascinating illustrations of how the mind runs ahead of the senses is the story of the planet Uranus, which, less than two hundred years ago, had never been beheld by the eye of man. A mathematician seated in his study, working over the observations of other planets, their motions in relation to their mass and distance, discovered that their behavior was not as it should be. At certain times none of them were in quite the right place, and he decided that this variation must be due to the existence of an unknown body. He worked out the problem of what must be the mass and the exact orbit of this body, in order for it to be responsible for the variations observed; and when he had completed these calculations, he announced to the astronomical world, "Turn your telescopes to a certain spot in the heavens at a certain minute of a certain night, and you will find a new planet of a certain size." And so for the first time the human senses became aware of a fact, which by themselves they might not have discovered in all eternity.

Now, the importance of exact knowledge concerning a new planet may not be apparent to the ordinary man; but if the thing which is discovered is, for example, an unknown ray which will move an engine or destroy a cancer, then we realize the worthwhileness of research, and the masters of the world's commerce are willing to give here and there a pittance for the increase of such knowledge. But men of science, who have by this time come to a sense of their own dignity and importance, understand that there is no knowledge about reality which is useless, no research into nature which is wasted. You might say that to describe and classify the fleas which inhabit the bodies of rats and ground-squirrels, and to study under the microscope the bacteria which live in the blood of these fleas—that this would be an occupation hardly worthy of the divinity that is in man. But presently, as a result of this knowledge about fleas and flea diseases being in existence and available, a bacteriologist discovers the secret of the dread bubonic plague, which hundreds of times in past history has wiped out a great part of the population of Europe and Asia.

Mark Twain tells in his "Connecticut Yankee" how his hero was able to overcome the wizard Merlin, because he knew in advance of an eclipse of the sun. And this was fiction, of course; but if you prefer fact, you may read in the memoirs of Houdin, the French conjurer, how he was able to bring the Arab tribes into subjection to the French government by depriving the great chieftains of their strength. He gathered them into a theatre, and invited their mighty men upon the stage, and there was an iron weight, and they were able to lift it when Houdin permitted, and not to lift it when he forbade. These noble barbarians had never heard of the electro-magnet, and could not conceive of a force that could operate through a solid wooden floor beneath their feet.

Such things, trivial as they are, serve to illustrate the difference between ignorance and knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives. The man who knows is godlike to those who do not know; he may enslave them, he may do what he pleases with their lives, and they are powerless to help themselves. Anyone who would help them must begin by giving them knowledge, real knowledge. There is no such thing as freedom without knowledge, and it must be the best knowledge, it must be new knowledge; he who goes against new knowledge armed with old knowledge is like the Chinese who went out to meet machine-guns with bows and arrows, and with umbrellas over their heads.

Once upon a time knowledge was the prerogative of kings and priests and ruling castes; but this supreme power has been wrested from them, and this is the greatest step in human progress so far taken. "Seek and ye shall find," is the law concerning knowledge today. "Knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In this, my Book of the Mind, I say to you that knowledge is your priceless birthright, and that you should repudiate all men and all institutions and all creeds and all formulas which seek to keep this heritage from you. Beware of men who bid you believe something because it is told you, or because your fathers believed it, or because it is written in some ancient book, or embodied in some ancient ceremonial. Break the chains of these venerable spells; and at the same time beware of the modern spells which have been contrived to replace them! Beware of party cries and shibboleths, the idols of the forum, as Plato called them, the prejudices which are set as snares for your feet. Beware of cant—that paraphernalia of noble sentiments, artificially manufactured by politicians and newspapers for the purpose of blinding you to their knaveries. Remember that you live in a world of class conflicts; at every moment of your life your mind is besieged by secret enemies, it is exposed to poison gas-clouds deliberately released by people who seek to make use of you for purposes which are theirs and not yours. In the fairy-tales we used to love, the hero was provided with magic protection against the perils of those times; but what hero and what magic will guard the modern man against the propaganda of militarism, nationalism, and capitalist imperialism?

The mind is like the body in that it can be trained, it can be taught sound habits, its powers can be enormously increased. There are many books on mind and memory training, some of which are useful, and some of which are trash. There is an English system widely advertised, called "Pelmanism," of which I have personally made no test, but it has won endorsements of a great many people who do not give their endorsements lightly.

This is the subject of applied psychology, and just as in medicine, or in law, or in any of the arts, there is a vast amount of charlatanry, but there is also genuine knowledge being patiently accumulated and standardized. When the United States government had to have an army in a hurry it did not make its millions of young men into teamsters or aviators at random. It used the new methods of determining reaction times, and testing the coordination of mind and body. Recently I visited the Whittier Reform School in California, where delinquent boys are educated by the state. A boy had been set to work in the tailor shop, and it had been found that he was unable to make the buttons and the buttonholes of a coat come in the right place. For nine years the state of California, and before it the state of Georgia, had been laboring to teach this boy to make buttons and buttonholes meet; the effort had cost some five thousand dollars, to say nothing of all the coats which were spoiled, and all the mental suffering of the victim and his teachers. Finally someone persuaded the state of California to spend a few thousand dollars and install a psychological bureau for the purpose of testing all the inmates of the institution; so by a half hour's examination the fact was developed that this boy was mentally defective. Although he was eighteen years old in body, his mind was only eight years old, and so he would never be able to achieve the feat of making buttons and buttonholes meet.

This is a new science which you may read about in Terman's "The Measurement of Intelligence." By testing normal children, it is established that certain tasks can be performed at certain ages. A child of three can point to his eyes, his nose and his mouth; he can repeat a sentence of six syllables, and repeat two digits, and give his family name. Older children are asked to look at a picture and then tell what they saw; to note omissions in a picture, to arrange blocks according to their weight, to arrange words into sentences, to note absurdities in statements, to count backwards, and to make change. Children of fifteen are asked to interpret fables, to reverse the hands of a clock, and so on. Of course there are always variations; every child will be better at some kinds of tests than at others. But by having a wide variety, and taking the average, you establish a "mental age" for the child—which may be widely different from its physical age. You may find some whose minds have stopped growing altogether, and can only be made to grow by special methods of education. Enlightened communities are now conducting separate schools for defective children—replacing the old-fashioned schoolmaster who wore out birch-rods trying to force poor little wretches to learn what was beyond their power.

In the same way psychology can be applied in industry, and in the detection of crime. Here, too, there is a vast amount of "fake," but also the beginning of a science. Our laws do not as yet permit the use of automatic writing and the hypnotic trance in the investigation of crime, but they have sometimes permitted some of the simpler tests, for example, those of memory association. The examiner prepares a list of a hundred names of objects, and reads those names one after another, and asks the person he is investigating to name the first thing which is suggested to him by each word in turn. "Engine" will suggest "steam," or perhaps it will suggest "train"; "coat" will suggest "trousers," or perhaps it will suggest "pocket," and so on. The examiner holds a stop-watch, and notes what fraction of a second each one of these reactions takes. The ordinary man, who is not trying to conceal anything, will give all his associations promptly, and the reaction times will be approximately alike. But suppose the man has just murdered somebody with an axe, and buried the body in a cellar with a fire shovel, and taken a pocketbook, and a watch, and a locket, and a number of various objects, and climbed out of the cellar window by breaking the glass; and now suppose that in his list of a hundred objects the psychologist introduces unexpectedly a number of these things. In each case the first memory association of the criminal will be one which he does not wish to give. He will have to find another, and that inevitably takes time. One or two such delays might be accidental; but if every time there is any suggestion of the murder, or the method or scene of the murder, there is noticed confusion and delay, you may be sure that the conscious mind is interfering with the subconscious mind. The difference between the conscious and the subconscious mind is always possible to detect, and if you are permitted to be thorough in your experiments, you can make certain what is in the subconscious mind that the conscious mind is trying to conceal.

Here, as everywhere in life, knowledge is power, and expert knowledge confers mastery over the shrewdest untrained mind. The only trouble is that under our present social system the trained mind is very apt to be working in the interest of class privilege. The psychologist who is employed by a great corporation, or by a police department, may be as little worthy of trust as a chemist who is engaged in making poison gases to be used by capitalist imperialism for the extermination of its rebellious slaves. But what this proves is not that scientific knowledge is untrustworthy, but merely that the workers must acquire it, they must have their own organizations and their own experiments in every field. To give knowledge to the masses of mankind, slow and painful as the process seems, is now the most important task confronting the enlightened thinker.

The method of psychoanalysis gives us also much insight into the phenomena of genius, and the hope that we may ultimately come to understand it. At present we are embarrassed because genius is so often closely allied to eccentricity; the supernormal appears in connection with the subnormal—and it is often hard to tell them apart. Great poets and painters in revolt against a world of smug commercialism, adopt irresponsibility as their religion; they live in a world of their own, they dress like freaks, they refuse to pay their debts, or to be true to their wives. They are followed by a host of disciples, who adopt the defects of the master as a substitute for his qualities. And so there grows up a perverted notion of what genius is, and wholly false standards of artistic quality. There is nothing mankind needs more than sure and exact tests of mental superiority; not merely the ability to acquire languages and to solve mathematical equations, but the ability to carry in the mind intense emotions, while at the same time shaping and organizing them by the logical faculty, selecting masses of facts and weaving them into a pattern calculated to awaken the emotion in others. This is the last and greatest work of the human spirit, and to select the men who can do it, and foster their activity, is the ultimate purpose of all true science.

CHAPTER XVII
THE CONDUCT OF THE MIND

(Concludes the Book of the Mind with a study of how to preserve and develop its powers for the protection of our lives and the lives of all men.)

Someone wrote me the other day, asking, "When is the best time to acquire knowledge?" I answer, "The time is now." It is easier to learn things when you are young, but you cannot be young when you want to be, and if you are old, the best time to acquire knowledge is when you are old. It is true that the brain-cells seem to harden like the body, and it is less easy for them to take on new impressions; but it can be done, and just as Seneca began to learn Greek at eighty, I know several old men whom the recent war has shaken out of their grooves of thought and compelled to deal with modern ideas.

But if you are young, then so much the better! Then the divine thrill of curiosity is keenest; then your memory is fresh, and can be trained; your mind is plastic, and you can form sound habits. You can teach yourself to respect truth and to seek it, you can teach yourself accuracy, open-mindedness, flexibility, persistence in the search for understanding.

First of all, I think, is accuracy. Learn to think straight! Let your mind be as a sharp scalpel, penetrating unrealities and falsehoods, cutting its way to the facts. When you set out to deal with a certain subject, acquire mastery of it, so that you can say, "I know." And yet, never be too sure that you know! Never be so sure, that you are not willing to consider new facts, and to change your way of thinking if it should be necessary. I look about me at the world, and see tigers and serpents, dynamite and poison gas and forty-two centimeter shells—yet I see nothing in the world so deadly to men as an error of the mind. Look at the mental follies about you! Look at the prejudices, the delusions, the lies deliberately maintained—and realize the waste of it all, the pity of it all!

Every man, it seems, has his pet delusions, which he hugs to his bosom and loves because they are his own. If you try to deprive him of those delusions, it is as though you tore from a woman's arms the child she has borne. I have written a book called "The Profits of Religion," and never a week passes that there do not come to me letters from people who tell me they have read this book with pleasure and profit, they are grateful to me for teaching them so much about the follies and delusions of mankind, and it is all right and all true, save for two or three pages, in which I deal with the special hobby which happens to be their hobby! What I say about all the other creeds is correct—but I fail to understand that the Mormon religion is a dignified and inspired religion, a gift from on high, and if only I would carefully study the "Book of Mormon," I would realize my error! Or it is all right, except what I say about the Christian Scientists, or the Theosophists, or perhaps one particular sect of the Theosophists, who are different from the others. Today there lies upon my desk a letter from a man who has read many of my books, and now is grief-stricken because he must part company from me; he discovers that I permit myself to speak disrespectfully about the Seventh Day Adventist religion, whereas he is prepared to show the marvels of biblical prophecy now achieving themselves in the world. How could any save a divinely revealed religion have foreseen the present movement to establish the Sabbath by law? Yes, and presently I shall see the last atom of the prophecy fulfilled—there will be a death penalty for failure to obey the Sabbath law!

Cultivate the great and precious virtue of open-mindedness. Keep your thinking free, not merely from outer compulsions, but from the more deadly compulsions of its own making—from prejudices and superstitions. The prejudices and superstitions of mankind are like those diseased mental states which are discovered by the psychoanalyst; what he calls a "complex" in the subconscious mind, a tangle or knot which is a center of disturbance, and keeps the whole being in a state of confusion. Each group of men, each sect or class, have their precious dogmas, their shibboleths, their sacred words and stock phrases which set their whole beings aflame with fanaticism. They have also their phobias, their words of terror, which cannot be spoken in their presence without causing a brain-storm.

At present the dread word of our time is "Communist."

You can scarcely say the word without someone telephoning for the police. And yet, when you meet a Communist, what is he? A worn and fragile student, who has thought out a way to make the world a better place to live in, and whose crime is that he tells others about his idea! Or perhaps you belong to the other side, and then your word of terror is the word "Capitalist." You meet a Capitalist, and what do you find? Very likely you find a man who is kindly, generous in his personal impulses, but bewildered, possibly a little frightened, still more irritated and made stubborn. So you realize that nearly all men are better than the institutions and systems under which they live; you realize the urgent need of applying your reasoning powers to the problem of social reorganization.

Cultivate also, in the affairs of your mind, the ancient virtue of humility. There is an oldtime poem, which perhaps was in your school readers, "Oh, why should the spirit of mortal be proud?" My answer is, for innumerable reasons. The spirit of mortal should be proud and must be proud because life throbs in it, and because life is a marvelous thing, and the excitement of life is perpetual. Yesterday I met a young mother; and of what avail is all the pessimism of poets against the pride of a young mother? "Oh!" she cried, and her face lighted up with delight. "He said 'Goo'!" Yes, he said "Goo!"—and never since the world began had there been a baby which had achieved that marvel. Presently it will be, "Look, look, he is trying to walk!" Then he will be getting marks at school, and presently he will be displaying signs of genius. Always it will take an effort of the mind of that young mother to realize that there are other children in the world as wonderful as her own; and perhaps it will take many generations of mental effort before there will be young mothers capable of realizing that some other child is more wonderful than her child.

In other words, it is by a definite process of broadening our minds that we come to realize the lives of others, to transfer to them the interest we naturally take in our own lives, and to admit them to a state of equality with ourselves. This is one of the services the mind must render for us; it is the process of civilizing us. And there is another, and yet more important task, which is to make clear to us the fact that we do not altogether make this life of ours, that there is a universe of power and wisdom which is not ours, but on which we draw. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," said the Psalmist. We know now that fear is an ugly emotion, destructive to life; but it may be purified and made into a true humility, which every thinking man must feel towards life and its miracles.

Also the man will have joy, because it is given him to share the high, marvelous adventure of being. To the pleasures of the body there is a limit, and it comes quickly; but the pleasures of the mind are infinite, and no one who truly understands them can have a moment of boredom in life. To a man who possesses the key to modern thought, who knows what knowledge is and where to look for it, the life of the mind is a panorama of delight perpetually unrolled before him. To the minds of our ancestors there was one universe; but to our minds there are many universes, and new ones continually discovered.

The only question is, which one will you choose? Will you choose the universe of outer space, the material world of infinity? Consider the smallest insect that you can see, crawling upon the surface of the earth; small as that insect is in relation to the earth, it is not so small, by millions of times, as is the earth in relation to the universe made visible to our eyes by the high-power telescope, plus the photographic camera, plus the microscope. If you want to know the miracles of this world of space, read Arrhenius' "The Life of the Universe," or Simon Newcomb's "Sidelights on Astronomy." Suffice it here to say that we have a chemistry of the stars, by means of the spectroscope; that we can measure the speed and direction of stars by the same means; that we have learned to measure the size of the stars, and are studying stars which we cannot even see! And then along comes Einstein, with his theories of "relativity," and makes it seem that we have to revise a great part of this knowledge to allow for the fact that not merely everything we look at, but also we ourselves, are flying every which way through space!

Or will you choose the universe of the atom, the infinity of the material world followed the other way, so to speak? Big as is the universe in relation to our world, and big as is our world in relation to the insect that crawls on it, the insect is bigger yet in relation to the molecules which compose its body; and these in turn are millions of millions of times bigger than the atoms which compose them; and then, behold, in the atom there are millions of millions of electrons—tiny particles of electric energy! We cannot see these infinitely minute things, any more than we can see the electricity which runs our trolley cars; but we can see their effects, and we can count and measure them, and deal with them in complicated mathematical formulas, and be just as certain of their existence as we are of the dust under our feet. If you wish to explore this wonderland, read Duncan's "The New Knowledge," or Dr. Henry Smith Williams' "Miracles of Science."

Or will you choose the universe of the subconscious, our racial past locked up in the secret chambers of our mind? Or will you choose the universe of the superconscious, the infinity of genius manifested in the arts? By the device of art man not merely creates new life, he tests it, he weighs it and measures it, he tries experiments with it, as the physicist with the molecule and the astronomer with light. He finds out what works, and what does not work, and so develops his moral and spiritual muscles, training himself for his task as maker of life.

Written words can give but a feeble idea of the wonders that are found in these enchanted regions of the mind. Here are palaces of splendor beyond imagining, here are temples with sacred shrines, and treasure-chambers full of gold and priceless jewels. Into these places we enter as Aladdin in the ancient tale; we are the masters here, and all that we see is ours. He who has once got access to it—he possesses not merely the magic lamp, he possesses all the wonderful fairy properties of all the tales of our childhood. His is the Tarnhelm and the magic ring which gives him power over his foes; his is the sword Excalibur which none can break, and the silver bullet which brings down all game, and the flying carpet upon which to travel over the earth, and the house made of ginger-bread, and the three wishes which always come true, and the philter of love, and the elixir of youth, and the music of the spheres, and—who knows, some day he may come upon heaven, with St. Peter and his golden key, and the seraphim singing, and the happy blest conversing!

PART TWO
THE BOOK OF THE BODY