A CRITICISM OF MORALITY. 



53 



makes a mistake, it suffers an illusion, and descends into its pettiest life. 

 What is the consequence ? Thinking that it exists apart from the other 

 members, it selects food just such as shall gratify its most local self, it en- 

 deavors just to titillate its own sense of taste; and living and acting thus, 

 ere long it ruins that very sense of taste, poisons the system with improper 

 food, and brings about disease and death. Yet if healthy how does the 

 tongue act ? Why, it does not run counter to its own sense of taste, or 

 stultify itself. It does not talk about sacrificing its own inclinations for 

 the good of the body and the other members: but it just acts as being one 

 in interest with them and they with it. For the tongue is a muscle, and 

 therefore what feeds it feeds all the other muscles; and the membrane of 

 the tongue is a prolongation of the membrane of the stomach, and that is 

 how the tongue knows what the stomach will like; and the tongue is 

 nerves and blood, and so the tongue may act for nerves and blood all over 

 the body, and so on. Therefore the tongue may enter into a wider life 

 than that represented by the mere local sense of taste, and experiences 

 more pleasure often in the drinking of a glass of water which the whole 

 body wants, than in the daintiest sweetmeat which is for itself alone. 



Exactly so man in a healthy state does not act for himself alone, 

 practically cannot do so. Nor does he talk cant about "serving his 

 neighbors," &c. But he simply acts for them as well as for himself, 

 because they are part and parcel of his life bone of his bone and flesh of 

 his flesh; and in doing so he enters into a wider life, finds a more perfect 

 pleasure, and becomes more really a man than ever before. Every man 

 contains in himself the elements of all the rest of humanity. They lie in 

 the background; but they are there. In the front he has his own special 

 faculty developed his individual facade, with its projects, plans and pur- 

 poses: but behind sleeps the Demos-life with far vaster projects and 

 purposes. Some time or other to every man must come the consciousness 

 of this vaster life. 



The true Democracy, wherein this larger life will rule society from 

 within obviating the need of an external government and in which all 

 characters and qualities will be recognized and have their freedom, waits 

 (a hidden but necessary result of evolution) in the constitution of human 

 nature itself. In the pre-Civilisation period these vexed questions of 

 "morals " practically did not exist; simply because in that period the in- 

 dividual was one with his tribe and moved (unconsciously) by the larger 

 life of his tribe. And in the post-Civilisation period, when the true 

 Democracy is realised, they will not exist, because then the man will 

 know himself a part of humanity at large, and will be consciously moved 

 by forces belonging to these vaster regions of his being. The moral codes 

 and questionings belong to Civilisation, they are part of the forward 

 effort, the struggle, the suffering, and the temporary alienation from true 

 life, which that term implies. 



