INITIAL CHAPTER
HAPPINESS
The ultimate value of all effort is the production of happiness, and objects excite our interest in so far as we believe them to be conducive to that great and ultimate consummation of existence—Happiness.—J. C. Chatterji.
The age in which we live is one of great activity and general movement. We are passing out of the mindless, genetic, into the rational, conscious epochs of evolution; and while, at every stage of human history, right conduct depends objectively on relatively true thinking, and subjectively, on good impulses, a transitional period such as the present demands special efforts to attain to an adequate and clear conception of the problems of life.
If no correct philosophy of life comes to birth in the thinking centres of our social organism, general conduct will continue harmful to many and inimical to progress.
How may the truth of a philosophy be tested? No better answer, I think, can be given than that of Buddha, of whom it is chronicled that he said in reference to a projected philosophy—“After observation and analysis if it agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” Our theory of life must appeal to the developed reason of civilized man and carry a conviction of its truth. Moreover, it must be all-embracing. Sectional aims and aspirations will never suffice. The aim must be universal, i.e., directed to the well-being of all mankind.
In view of the question: “What is the primary object of human life?” two significant facts are apparent. First, the perpetual aim, conscious or instinctive, of man, as of all physical beings, is to compass the satisfaction of his desires, viz., contentment. Second, however diverse and conflicting may seem the opinions held by popular teachers on the subject, there is nevertheless an essential unity. For all point to some kind of happiness, in the present or future, for oneself, or others, for individuals, or for the race, as the ultimate end of existence.
A close observation of actual life—apart from theories of duty—reveals incontestably that the instinct to seek pleasure and avoid pain is universal and paramount. It is the general force ruling individual conduct. A child shrinks from lessons and seeks play because the one causes painful effort, the other gives pleasurable sensations, unless there are the beginnings of an intellectual sense and the child is what we call studious; in that case the sense of effort is overcome by the pleasure of learning, and there is no unwillingness. Or when the representative faculty is strong, the thought of a parent’s or teacher’s approval may be so clear in the young mind as to make the future happiness counterbalance the present effort. But it is always pleasure at the moment, or pleasure in anticipation, or fear of punishment, viz., avoidance of pain, that gives the stimulus to work. The human nature of a tender mother is much the same. She hates to hear her offspring cry, she loves to see them smile. She seems to sacrifice herself to them, but in reality it is not so; for her greatest pains and pleasures reach her through them. Her personal desires, her dearest hopes, are centred in her children. She is proud of their acquirements, ambitious for their future, happy in their success. When she strives to check and discipline them, it is because she dreads, for them and for herself, some baneful consequences should she refrain. She does not act for a selfish end. Her nature is more complex, far wider and deeper than the child’s; but her action is essentially the same. She is avoiding painful and seeking pleasurable sensations, present and future, for herself and her children.
Nor with the poor man is the position different. The pain of hunger or the dread of hunger, for himself or those beings whom he loves, stimulates to a life of continuous and wearing toil. If he submit to present pain, it is that he may avoid remote pain, and secure the satisfaction of his most pressing wants.
The leisured classes are differently situated. With conditions of life that place them above the struggle for subsistence, they seek enjoyment according to individual character and tastes. Whatever interests the mind and stirs the emotions pleasurably will be pursued. We speak of this and that career as guided by genius, ambition, benevolence, and so forth, but in every case these qualities of mind have pushed choice in the direction which will gratify the individual.
If we say goodness, not happiness, is the proper aim of life, we must allow that goodness means the aiding to bring happiness to mankind. Religions signifying less than this are unworthy the name of religion. Now it is emphatically the good who keenly suffer in the midst of an evil social state where poverty, misery and crime abound. It has been truly said—“The contrast between the ideal and the actual of humanity lies as a heavy weight upon all tender and reflective minds.” These perceive that goodness, in their own case, has depended largely on the conditions of their lives, while thousands of their fellow-creatures have had little scope for goodness, because born and brought up in degraded, vile conditions they had no power to escape from. It is no consolation to the good to point to a future happy state and to immortality for themselves. The actual is what concerns them. Their feelings get no rest, their intellects surge with perpetual efforts to conceive some means of radical reform, some method to secure more goodness and more happiness for all, i.e. for every woman, man and child, alive in the present day.
Turning now to published opinions concerning the object of life, Carlyle taught that conscientious work was the main business of civilized man. “Be indifferent,” he cried, “alike to pleasure and pain; care only to do work, honest, successful work (no futilities) in this hurly-burly world.” He directed attention from abstract ideals of the future to the actual life of the present, pointing out the miseries and shams of the evil social state and powerfully inveighing against its corruptions. To maintain an outward existence of active usefulness and an inward state of quietism and stoicism was Carlyle’s conception of an individual’s duty, but while there was to be no seeking for personal reward he believed this course would result in blessedness, and blessedness meant something purer, nobler, more desirable than happiness. If we take his own history set forth in the Reminiscences as carrying out this theory, we find that in his case it broke down. He toiled and plodded, doing successful work to the end of what appeared a noble, victorious career, but the blessedness never came, or if it did, it was not nobler and purer than happiness. It was a gloomy state, bankrupt of hope and full of querulous, dissatisfied egotism.
George Eliot gave us no theory of life in any of her works of genius. The action of her influence is, however, unmistakeable. It was to develop social and sympathetic feeling, to make individuals tolerant and tender towards their fellows, judging none without due regard to his or her surroundings. She has accustomed her thoughtful readers to the scientific aspect of human nature and social life, to watch the manifold relations between the two, the action and interaction of forces without and within, and to see the continuity of causation along with the reforming effect of ceaseless changes. The evolutional conception of life underlies all her work. The pictures are realistic, there is no false colouring and vain delusions, no perfection of character—but aspiration, effort, broad humanity—and no perfect happiness attained. She indicated, however, that the social state wants altering, and readjustments there would conduce to nobler life and greater happiness. She hoped for progress by gradual changes in the outward social system and in inward human nature. “What I look to,” she once said, in conversation with a friend, “is a time when the impulse to help our fellows shall be as immediate and irresistible as that which I feel to grasp” (and as she spoke she grasped the mantelpiece) “something firm if I am falling.” Although George Eliot formulated no theory I conceive she held the belief that happiness for all at all times is the object of life, and to be arrived at, chiefly, through the development of the altruistic or sympathetic side of human nature.
Some writers teach that culture is most to be desired. The rapid growth of wealth in this country has forced upwards in the social scale a class of people destitute of culture and refinement. This class dominates society and takes the lead in fashion. Luxury and ostentation are everywhere prominent; extravagant modes of living prevail without the comfort of the former simpler and more genial modes, and this is side by side with poverty and destitution that do not decrease. Patronage, with its demoralizing influence on both classes, is the most conspicuous bond between the wealthy and the poor, and vulgarity of mind characterizes the age. There is little to surprise us in the fact that gentle, refined natures withdraw from public life into a narrow sphere, not necessarily a selfish one, but a sphere bounded and circumscribed by their own personal tastes and temperaments. Finding solace in intellectual pursuits and a pure elevated enjoyment in the study of art and literature, they adopt the theory that culture is the proper business of man. Sweetness and light have been held up as the panacea for all the ills of life and the “elevation of the masses” as the true social progress.
Other teachers, thinking less of intelligence than of moral sentiment, point to perfection of character as the aim of life. They recognize the marked diversity in human nature. Some intellects are slow and dull, incapable of being kindled into fervour or brightened into swift reflection, and culture for such is hopeless. But in God’s sight, surely, all men are equal. Birds without song have brilliant plumage to compensate the defect, and so with man. The “law of compensation” holds throughout humanity they have said, and, for the most part, hearts are deep and tender even when heads are dull. Our finest works of literature and art may fail to give one pleasurable sensation for lack of the special faculty to apprehend their beauty, but kindness makes the whole world kin. When the noble, generous, sympathetic side of human nature is appealed to there comes a quick response. Happiness is the aim of life, but happiness implies excellence of character, the emotional and moral elevation of all mankind.
That Ruskin’s views were similar to the above we learn from his Crown of Wild Olive. “Education,” he says there, “does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know—it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave. It is not teaching the youth of England the shape of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their body and souls by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept and by praise—but, above all, by example.”
From the field of modern science there has come as yet no direct teaching on the subject of life’s duties and purpose, but two of our eminent scientists have thrown out hints that are important and significant. The late Professor Huxley says of his own career: “The objects I have had in view are briefly these—To promote the increase of natural knowledge and forward the application of scientific method to all problems of life—in the conviction that there is no alleviation for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought and action and the resolute facing of the world as it is when the garment of make-believe by which pious hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off.” (Methods and Results, Essays by Thomas M. Huxley.)
Professor Sir Oliver Lodge has stated that new paths of investigation are opening up to science. Telepathy, clairvoyance and some other allied psychic states have been tested and found in the range of actual fact. They reveal qualities in man which although special to a few individuals only, are latent it may be in all, and point to an unknown province of nature to which man seems related independently of his five senses. It becomes evident that by the “resolute facing of the world as it is,” science is altering our conception of man’s existence and nature, and extending our vista of his future.
Positivist thinkers, who base their teaching on materialistic philosophy, have bright anticipations for the human race, although ages may elapse before the realization of their hopes; and the existence of poverty and misery in our midst is fully recognized, graphically described, and feelingly deplored. The exponents of Positivism are eloquent, cultured, refined. We want a new religion, they say, and without that, no rapid progress can be made. The public mind is all at sea, floating in a chaos of unfixed beliefs, and to reach settled convictions and formulate a creed is the crying need of our times. Religion is a scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity with reference to a Superior Being which men and societies alike may serve. The Superior Being is collective humanity, and men’s true business is to understand and seek to perfect human nature and the social state.
A marked feature of present-day French literature, we are told, is a reaction of religious sentiment against the rule of scientific naturalism, and religious sentiment dominates in the strangely pathetic and fascinating journal of the Swiss author, Amiel, which has been widely read. “To win true peace,” says Amiel, “a man needs to feel himself in the right road, i.e., in order with God and the Universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. Sybarite and dreamer,” so he addresses himself, “will you go on like this to the end for ever, tossed backwards and forwards between duty and happiness, incapable of choice and action? Is not life the test of our moral force? Are not inward waverings temptations of the soul?” To the question—Will all religions be suppressed by science? he replies: “All those that start from a false conception of nature, certainly,” and adds reflectively: “If the scientific conception of nature prove incapable of bringing harmony to man, what will happen?” To which he answers: “We shall have to build a moral city without God, without an immortality of the soul.” Then, protesting against Emil de Laveleyes’ notion that civilization could not last without belief in God and a future life, he exclaims: “A belief is not true because it is useful; and it is truth alone—scientific, established, proved and rational truth—which is capable of satisfying now-a-days the awakened minds of all classes.”
I have here presented what is only a meagre reflection of portions of our mental atmosphere, but I know of no clearer, more definite thoughts emanating from influential teachers calculated to throw light on the great enigma of life. It may seem to my readers that on these mental heights unanimity exists as little as on the lower planes of man’s discordant impulses, his confused and conflicting actions. Clearly we have no philosophy of life as groundwork to orderly personal and social action, no religion of vital power to bind the nations in one, no moral code adapted to the complexities of our social relations, and, above all, no steady belief in a universal love to sweeten society from end to end and create the requisite medium in which alone the nobler qualities of human nature will bud and blossom.
Nevertheless the diverse opinions held by the above thinkers are not irreconcilable. Carlyle’s “blessedness” is the feeling of harmony with the divine order of development in humanity and the universe, therefore it is identical with Amiel’s “true peace.” The Positivists’ “Supreme Being” is the perfected man whose endowments of sympathetic fellowship, emotional sweetness, intellectual light, moral strength, kingly continence of body and soul, and knowledge of truth are specialized and pointed to by George Eliot, Ruskin, Huxley and others. All have simply given expression to aspiration from the subjective side of their human nature conformably to the evolutionary process within themselves, and the attitude of mind produced thereby in each. Partial, but not contradictory views, characterise those thinkings. Beneath superficial differences there lurks a unanimous belief that harmony of life with conditions—viz., happiness, is the legitimate aim of life. A Humanity steadily moving in a given direction may be infinitely varied in detail, and since the correct philosophy of life must be a wide generalization embracing all, we need not wonder at its slowness to appear. Modern nationalities are only now emerging from the individualistic to pass into the socialistic stage of industrial development. Our popular writers and teachers, springing from a specialized class—not the main body of the people—instinctively show their limitations by individualistic or sectional modes of thought. Mark, for instance, the insufficiency, nay, the pathetic absurdity of the thought—Culture will cure the ills of life, in face of the fact that thousands in our midst to-day possess no intellectual desires whatever, while the appetites belonging to their physical nature which forms the very basis of life have never been properly met and satisfied.
In setting forth a definition of happiness we have to recognize the marvellous complexity of human nature. We have to take into account not only variations distinctive in, and native to, separate individuals, but the gradations and variations within each individual arising from progress, or the reverse, in his or her outward condition and inward development. Contentment means the satisfaction of desire. But desire may be directed to the physical plane, the emotional plane, the mental plane, the spiritual plane. The harmony of all life is happiness, and brings blessedness or peace.
Having shown that practically infants, children, young men and women, adults and old people of every social class are similarly engaged in seeking happiness, each according to his tastes and tendencies controlled by his personal, social and spiritual development; having shown also that thinkers and writers offer no condemnation, I proceed to point out that this universal habit is in harmony with evolution. It tends to personal evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of character and capacities. Moreover, it tells favourably on general life. It tends to social evolution, i.e., to expansion and elevation of the social organism or collective society so long as the method pursued by each individual is unhurtful to the other organic units incorporated in that society.
To seek to attain happiness at the expense of other human beings whose happiness is thereby sacrificed, is of course evil. It is anti-social, or vicious, i.e., it is wholly adverse to personal evolution and social evolution, in other words, to general progress. But given a society that has carefully surrounded its units by conditions of personal freedom (harmonious with general well-being) in which to seek innocent happiness, the normal man or woman on a level with the average of his race is not in any danger of preferring the vicious course.
That we confuse a wholesome love of pleasure with selfishness arises from the fact that individual selfishness unhappily is developed by our present evil system of life. Notwithstanding, it is easy to show the real value of pleasure by its ready alliance with unselfishness. A significant feature is this—people take pleasure in uniting for pleasure. Sensuous pleasures are taken as a rule, socially, it being recognized that to civilized man the presence of the enjoyment of others enhances his personal enjoyment. The physiological effect of pleasure is to promote health and activity. “Every pleasure raises the tide of life; every pain lowers the tide of life,” says Herbert Spencer. The pleasures of love are essentially and pre-eminently invigorating and social. It is only when they are selfishly pursued that evil creeps in, and what should produce the purest happiness becomes degraded into a source of misery.
It seems hardly necessary to point out further that asceticism and purism are immoral because directed against an element in happiness. Whenever science finds out means to alleviate suffering or free the condition of pleasure from accidental accompaniments that are evil, it is clearly the duty of man to hail the discovery and apply it that he may add to the sum of human happiness.
Before touching on environment, i.e., the social condition under which alone general happiness becomes possible, I may classify desires into primary and secondary in order to make the subject clearer. Primary desires are those common to all physical beings, the satisfaction of which (in man) is necessary to healthful ordinary social life. Secondary desires are those whose satisfaction is necessary to some individuals, but not to all.
Desires for food, clothing, shelter, also for work alternating with rest, and for love, belong to the first class. They are primary and fundamental. But desires that imply a development of cultured intellect, of delicate sensibilities, of high moral and emotional attainments, of aesthetic tastes, and of spiritual life are secondary desires, i.e., they are not common to all at the present stage of the evolution of man. That they may become so is devoutly to be desired; but if we expect to reach a high standard of life in the social organism without first securing for its individual units the satisfaction of primary needs, we indulge a vain delusion. Does a tree throw out fruitful branches before it is rooted in the soil at its base? Development depends on the satisfaction of primary needs, and proportionally to these being made secure will the satisfaction of the higher desires become necessary to happiness.
Now in relation to primary needs, the conditions which it is the duty of society as a whole to secure for the individual are, first: Freedom to act for the end of securing satisfaction of desire; second, opportunity for acquiring the means of satisfaction; third, ability to adopt the means; fourth, protection of life and action. And these conditions have a wide implication. The first implies some control of individual conduct as regards propagation, that each social unit may possess a sound constitution and the comfort of physical health. The second implies access to nature. The third implies education to give knowledge and skill. The fourth implies an organized society with an appropriate, scientifically arranged system of industry.
That our present confused industrial and social system—the survival of an archaic state—is inimical to happiness, few thinkers will deny. Discontent is not confined to the poor. Where wealth abounds there is little, if any, real happiness. “The towers of Westminster,” says Edward Carpenter, “stand up by the river, and within, the supposed rulers contend and argue.... The long lines of princely mansions stretch through Belgravia and Kensington; lines of carriages crowd the park; there are clubs and literary cliques and entertainments, but of the voice of human joy there is scarcely a note.... And I saw the many menacing, evil faces, creeping, insincere worm-faces, faces with noses ever on the trail, hunting blankly and always for gain; faces of stolid conceit, of puckered propriety, of slobbering vanity, of damned assurance.
“O faces, whither, whither are you going?
“No God, no truth, no justice, and under it all no love.
“O the deep, deep hunger!
“The mean life all around, the wolfish eyes, the mere struggle for existence, as of man starving on a raft at sea—no room for anything more.
“O the deep, deep hunger of love.”
This picture of the degradation and misery of rich and poor alike is essentially true to fact. Our collective life does not supply the necessary conditions for real happiness in any section of the community; and nothing less than a reconstruction of society and regeneration of its life will suffice to meet the wants of humanity. Immense efforts are put forth in philanthropy and benevolence. Enormous energy is expended in partial or sectional reforms; for quite correctly has it been said that “Reform tends to run on a single rail, the majority of people refusing to study society as an organism of organisms resting on biological law.” (John M. Robertson.) We make no attempt as yet, to prevent waste of energy, to focus the factors of meliorism, to mass them, to direct them straight to the causes of evil and apply them effectively there—and that, because we have no carefully constructed scheme of thought and life whereby the whole effort of individual men and societies of men is concentrated in common and reciprocal activity to the end of creating happiness for all.
Social regeneration is necessarily of a two-fold character, embracing action without and action within. The first—which I call objective, signifies collective action on the physical plane adapted to promote and sustain the healthful, happy vitality of a race expected to grow steadily and uniformly in physical, mental, moral and spiritual elevation. The second, which I call subjective, signifies collective action directed to the repression of all the unsocial desires of man—those selfish emotions and narrow affections that alloy the mental and moral structure of human beings and render it impossible to develop the spiritual side of Humanity. The Darwinian laws—supposed by many to be still applicable to man—had relation, not to happiness, but to the preservation of life and the continuance of the race in the genetic, unconscious period of evolution. It is in the conscious period or stage of evolution that happiness evolves. Our present system of social life, if system it can be called, is a chaos of conflicting interests, duties, thoughts, feelings, actions—a prison-house in which the finer qualities and attributes of man can scarcely exist.
Let us put forth all our strength to create out of this chaos “the garden in which we may walk.” Let us break down the walls of our prison-house till it “opens at length on the sunlit world and the winds of heaven.” (Edward Carpenter.)