244 



♦ KNOWLEDGE ♦ 



[September 1, 1887. 



This larger view extends the range of human sympathy and 

 of the service of man to his fellows, as well as to the lower 

 animals, which that sympathy inspires. Terrible are the 

 ills which the misuse of knowledge in the hands of the 

 selfish and the ruffian inflicts, but those are as dust in the 

 balance against the good which has been wrought. The 

 conduct of a nation is no longer regulated solely by its own 

 interests without regard to what is due to others, neither 

 does it draw its sanction from the tribal legislation of a 

 barbaric past, but from what, after ages of dearly-bought 

 experience, has proved itself to be best for man. In this, as 

 in aught else which endures, nothing is rigid or final. Man's 

 capacity can never overtake his loftiest ideals, although in 

 their conception is the spur to their pursuit. What dead 

 weight of care do morals, thus regarded, lift from the heart 

 of man — what new energy is given to his efforts 1 Thought 

 becomes fixed on the evolution of goodness instead of on the 

 origin of evil ; time is set free from useless speculation for 

 profitable action ; evils once deemed inherent in the nature 

 of things, and therefore irremovable, are accounted for and 

 shown to be within his power to extirpate. 



In proving the unvarying relation between cause and effect 

 in morals as in physics, science gives tho clue to the remedy 

 for moral ills. Moreover, that which man calls sin is shown 

 to be more often due to his imperfect sense of the true 

 proportion of things, and to his lack of imagination, than to 

 his wilfulness ; " evil is wrought by want of thought as well 

 as want of heart." As Herbert Spencer says, " feelings, not 

 ideas, govern the world," and the lack of imagination, which 

 is itself largely due to defective training of the intellect, 

 prevents a man from putting himself in the place of others, 

 and deprives him of that sympathy which is essential to the 

 unselfish life. The terrible mass of wrongdoing can only 

 be lessened and finally removed by suppression of the over- 

 self; by the maintenance of the balance between such care 

 of one's self as shall best fit us for the service of man, and 

 such thought for others as shall inflict on them no suffering 

 through our selfishness, nor loss through our gain.* The 

 crises of history are now rare when great principles or 

 causes, demanding the sacrifice of the individual life, are at 

 stake, but the world has never lacked a C'urtius, and the 

 spread of the scientific spirit has not proved fatal to the 

 heroic. 



Especially is science a preacher of righteousness in making 

 clear the indissoluble unity between all life past, present, 

 and to come. We are only on the threshold of knowledge 

 as to the vast significance of the doctrine of heredity, but 

 we know enough to deepen our sense of debt to the past 

 and of duty to the future. We are what our forefathers 

 made us, j^his the action of circumstances on oui-selves, and 

 in like manner our children inherit the good and evil, both 

 of body and mind, that is in us. Upon us, therefore, rests 

 the dutj' of the cultivation of the best and of the suppression 

 of the worst, so that the future of the race suflers not at our 

 hands. More imperious is that duty, since nothing — not 

 omnipotence itself — can step in between us and the conse- 

 quences of our acts. Our sins are sins against our fellow- 

 man ; he alone can forrive us, although he cannot cancel 

 their effects. " Our deeds are like the children born to us, 

 they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children 

 may be strangled, but deeds never." t 



Self-conquest lies in obedience, obedience lies in know- 

 ledge ; and if to know that it rests with man to make or to 

 mar the lives of others be not sufficing stimulus to leirning 

 the true that we may do the right, no other motive can 



* Let me commend to careful study the chapter on " The Culti- 

 vation of Human Nature " in Mr. Cotter Morison's recently pub- 

 lished " Service of Man." 



■f '• Romola," p. 150. 



avail. Experience shows that the threats of punishment 

 and the promises of a reward in an after-life have the 

 smallest effect on conduct ; their remoteness exhausts their 

 power, and, moreover, the belief in them is slowly decaying. 

 For the conduct of life brief maxims are enough ; all 

 the law and commandments are in the golden rule; all 

 ethics in the teaching that if man bo true to himself he 

 cannot be f;ilse to his fellows ; while in the knowledge 

 that life's demands will always exceed its opportunities we 

 may feel 



How fair a lot to fill 



Is left to each man still. 



Evolution of Theology. — Theology may be defined as 

 dealing with man's relations to the god or gods in whom 

 he believes ; morals, as dealing with his relations to his 

 fellow-men. 



Unfortunately, the two have become a good deal mixed 

 in the degree that conduct has been made to rest on sup- 

 posed divine commands as to what men shall and shall not 

 do, an assumption which serves a useful purpose as a 

 restraint upon the brutal and ignorant, but which has been 

 a powerful engine of terrorism in the hands of the un- 

 scrupulous and fanatical. The confusion, however, disap- 

 pears when it is seen that the evolution of bcHef in spiritual 

 beings is a thing apart from the evolution of morals which, 

 as has been shown, are based on social instincts and sym- 

 pathies guided by reason and strengthened by inheritance 

 and practice. For primitive theology is primitive science : 

 it is the outcome of man's first efforts to explain the nature 

 of his surroundings, and of the divers influences which 

 affect him for good, and, still more, for ill. At this stage of 

 his mental growth the emotions have foremost play, for 

 feeling precedes reason, and its exercise is more easy, its 

 results more rapid, although, on that account, less trust- 

 worthy. Moreover, the phenomena on which experience, as 

 the sole guide to true knowledge of things, is based, are too 

 vast for a single life to compass, even were the reasoning 

 faculty capable of dealing with them. It needed the lapse 

 of time ere man found out how his senses tricked him at 

 every turn, and ere he could form any conception of orderly 

 relation in his surroundings. So far as effort to supply his 

 lower needs sharpened his wits, he did not go far astray ; 

 in his struggle against material foes the weapons of his 

 warfare were carnal ; but as against spiritual powers he was 

 defenceless. Ignorance, always the mother of mystery, 

 made him the slave of his fears. The universal instinct of 

 the savage leads him to ascriba an indwelling life to every- 

 thing that moves, from the sun in heaven to the rustling 

 leaves, and the stones that roll from the hillside across his 

 path. In this he acts as we see shying horses, timid pups, 

 and young children act, until they learn from ex])erience 

 what things move of their own accord and what things do 

 not. Shakespeare might have added Caliban to "the 

 lunatic, the lover, and the poet," as of imagination all com- 

 pact, and on whom it plays such tricks, 



That if it would but apprehend some joy, 

 It comprehends some bringer of that joy. 



Ever on the alert against enemies, man's fancy multiplied 

 them on all sides, and since he naturally attributed passions 

 like his own to the unseen beings in whom he believed, he 

 dreaded " some bringer of that " harm from every quarter. 

 The sun might shine, and the moon brighten the gloom 

 of night, but these were fitful in their coming and their 

 going, the black cloud-monsters swallowed them, and in the 

 wake of storm and lightning, dragons of the fire and the 

 wind, there followed destruction and death. Hence the 

 prominence of devil worship, of belief in baleful powers 

 amongst the lower races, and the averting of their wrath by 



