Parallel Paths: A Study in Biology, Ethics, and Art

[122] p. 49.

[124] Walt Whitman, ‘The Answerer.’

[125] Data of Ethics, 29.

[126] See Appendix C.

[127] Oxford and Cambridge Review, June, 1907. Sic also Bishop Berkeley, Alciphron, Dial. VII, 19, “A man is said to be free, so far forth as he can do what he will.” Berkeley’s analysis of this statement is substantially the same as that in the text.

[128] Herbert Spencer, translating these physical terms into their psychic equivalents, declares that the illusion of Free Will “consists in supposing that at each moment the ego is something more than the aggregate of feelings and ideas, actual and nascent, which then exists” (Psychology, I, p. 500). The pivot of the doctrine is the word aggregate. We have seen that the most primitive living organism is something more than that. Cf. p. 119 note.

[129] Of course they are only relatively lower—there are no essentially ‘low’ motives in life at all.

[130] The Will to Believe—‘The Dilemma of Determinism,’ p. 145 sqq.

[131] Pragmatism, pp. 287-8. Compare Bishop Berkeley. “To me it seems, that if we begin from Things particular and concrete, and thence proceed to general Notions and Conclusions, there will be no Difficulty in this Matter. But if we begin with Generalities, and lay our Foundation in abstract Ideas, we shall find ourselves entangled and lost in a Labyrinth of our own making.” Alciphron, Dial. vii. 20. Berkeley had fully apprehended the Determinist position; see vii. 16.

[132] p. 129, 5th edition, 1878. There is an evident fallacy in Mill’s position. The Deity who could make a hell and sentence men to it for not worshipping him could not also have created the conscience which would resist him. The authorship of the moral sense and of hell are not to be combined in our conception of the divine. But Mill, of course, in this flash of rhetoric, was merely taking popular religious conceptions as he found them.

[133] p. 298.

[134] Plato, in that great dialogue, the Phaedo, has a noteworthy passage on those who when once betrayed by Reason are apt to fall into unbelief or superstition, just as those who, when they have found bad faith among men, may fall into cynicism:—

“Would it not, Phaedo,” said Socrates, “be a lamentable condition, when a certain thesis is true, firm, and intelligible, if a man supporting something of the kind should find arguments which seemed true at one time to be false at another, and in the end, instead of blaming himself or his own want of skill, should, in his ill-temper, make haste to shuffle off the blame from his own shoulders to Reason itself, and spend the rest of his life in hating and slandering it, being deprived of the truth and science of things?”

“By Zeus,” said I, “it would be lamentable.”

“Let us take heed then, before all else, that we never admit into our minds the idea that there can be no soundness in reasonings, but rather believe that we ourselves are not yet sound, and study manfully and with a will how to be so” (§ xxxix).

[135] Every mental acquisition, such as the knowledge of a new language, results in a definite alteration in a certain locality of the brain. The human brain, as an instrument of thought and knowledge, is, in fact, built up by a long series of purposeful efforts beginning in early infancy. These efforts do not, of course, originate in the matter of the brain itself, nor can the different nerves, which bring it messages from the outside world, carry with them anything of the nature of conscious purpose and will. These arise from Personality. I may refer for a full and very interesting treatment of this subject to Dr. W. H. Thomson’s work, Brain and Personality (1907).

[136] In the Phaedo, xliii.

[137] Microcosmus, Bk. II, Chaps. II and V.

[139] This includes the nourishment and protection of its young while helpless.

[140] This word is, I believe, used by Prof. Haeckel to describe his system of philosophy. I am very imperfectly acquainted with that system, and therefore think it well to note here that the term must not be taken with any special implications which Haeckel may have attached to it.

[141] See pp. 17-20.

[142] Deontology, I, p. 32.

[143] Examination of Hamilton, pp. 586 sqq.

[144] Data of Ethics, §20.

[145] “I conceive it to be the business of moral science to deduce, from the laws of life and the conditions of existence, what kinds of action necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds to produce unhappiness” (Data of Ethics, §21). Happiness is always taken by Spencer as equivalent to pleasurable feeling.

[146] Reason in Science, p. 252.

[147] See Data of Ethics, p. 36. It has been proved by exact physiological experiment that happiness promotes healthy vital action in the living organism, and that sorrow and pain depress it. But of course human life is not conducted solely on the physiological plane.

[148] Sic, Fr. Slater, S.J., in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, February, 1905. “If such a sum [£l] could be stolen without grave sin, its amount would prove too great a temptation for the virtue of large numbers of people who wish to save their souls, but make little of venial sins” (p. 109). But Fr. Ojetti is much more liberal to persons of the class described, and gives them up to £4 (p. 100).

[149] I may draw attention in this connexion to a striking and valuable study of the effect of American democracy on Jewish immigrants published in the Times of January 4, 1908. As regards Catholicism, it appears from a comparison of the statistics of emigration from Ireland with those of Catholicism in the U.S.A. that about 50 per cent of the Irish Catholics abandon their religion in the New World. The Irish are also shown by the criminal statistics of the States as well as by the observation of students of the criminal classes like Mr. Josiah Flynt, to furnish a far greater proportion of criminals in that country than obtains in the case of any other nationality contributing to its population. Yet they also give to American life some of its very best elements, and they are notoriously the most crimeless of people at home. The degradation of character commonly produced by Christianizing the Hindu is so uniformly attested by residents in India that it cannot be discredited. See, in this reference, an article entitled ‘The Failure of Christian Missions in India,’ by Dr. Josiah Oldfield, Hibbert Journal, April, 1903. Of course it may be said that the original error lies in the identification of ritual and observance with religion and morality.

[150] See Appendix D.

[151] “Per l’ asprezza della penitenza e continuo piagnere, era diventato quasi cieco, e poco vedea.”—Fioretti, III. He had “wholly shattered his body,” says Thomas of Celano (Second Life of St. F., Ch. CLX.).

[152] A discussion of the subject, with special reference to the rapid decay of the Franciscan Order, will be found in Mr. G. G. Coulton’s paper ‘The Failure of the Friars,’ in the Hibbert Journal for January, 1907. See also criticisms on this paper by two English Franciscans, Friar Cuthbert and Friar Stanilaus, in the same journal for April, 1907, and Mr. Coulton’s rejoinder, July, 1907.

[153] When the ascetic ideal is regarded as admirable in a saint, it naturally leads to still more lamentable perversions by being practised by persons who have never withdrawn themselves from ordinary social relations. Thus a Catholic priest has lately given as an instance of the “spiritual tendency and unworldliness of the Irish peasant” the case of a farmer’s wife, the mother of a large family, who, by a long course of secret austerities, brought herself “to an untimely grave, and, no doubt,” adds the reverend author, “a martyr’s crown.” To keep herself in health and do her duty to her husband and children would, it appears, have been “worldliness.” Such cases, we are told, are not uncommon. (Scenes and Sketches in an Irish Parish, by the Rev. J. Guinan, C.C., 4th ed., 1906, p. 87.)

[154] The Teaching of Epictetus, by T. W. Rolleston, p. 36. Dissertations, III, xxii.

[156] The Nature and Origin of Life, by Felix Le Dantec, p. 22 (Engl. trans., 1907).

[157] The Evolution of Matter.

[158] Of course the question remains, What compressed the spring? If Matter and Motion are continually wasting, it follows that they must at some time have been originated, and that the power which originated them is not dependent on them.

[159] The Teaching of Epictetus, p. 103. Dissertations, II, v, 24, etc.

[160] See pp. 186, 187.

[161] See, e.g., the opening of the Phædrus.

[162] For a discussion of this subject I may refer the reader to an article by the writer in the Hibbert Journal for April, 1906: ‘The Resurrection: A Layman’s Dialogue.’

[163] ὥσπερ ζῷον ἓν ὅλον. Poetics, XXIII, 1. He is speaking of the design of a narrative poem.

[164] What is Art?, by Leo Tolstoy. English translation by Aylmer Maude, pp. 44-5.

[165] What is Art?, chap. v.

[166] I do not mean to exclude the possibility that man may have first learned his capacity for art by making signs intended for quite other purposes, such as identification of tribehood, etc.

[167] What is Art?, p. 153.

[168] Fifteen Sermons, III.

[169] What is Art?, p. 146.

[170] Ibid., p. 148.

[171] What is Art?, p. 163.

[172] Ibid., p. 161. How wide of the mark all this is becomes clear when we think, for instance, of the sympathetic treatment of the Trojans in Homer, or the nobility of feeling about the Moors which runs through The Cid. A great art may glorify battle, but cant and fanaticism are hateful to it.

[173] What is Art?, p. 166.

[174] Ibid., p. 167.

[175] As, of course, it never can be in Time.

[176] It is very hard to understand why, when Athens was producing some of the greatest art of the world and the profoundest philosophic thought, the attempt to develop a philosophy of the arts should not have succeeded better than it did. Plato felt instinctively that he had entangled himself in a chain of false logic, and he appeals to Art to vindicate its truth, if it can. He would yield himself to its “enchantment” only too gladly were it not “a sin to betray what seems to us the cause of truth.” But it never occurs to him that what the painter is really copying is not the carpenter’s bed, but the heavenly. Aristotle, on the other hand, well knew that there is something creative about art. Witness his famous saying that “Poetry is both a more philosophic and a higher thing than History, since Poetry looks at things in a universal, History only in a particular aspect” (Poetics, IX, 3). He was, however, still too much under the control of the popular view of Art as Imitation to be able to see the full scope of his own principle. Thus, he excluded Architecture from the realm of Art because it did not imitate anything in nature.

[178] Preface to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads.

[179] “I have not been afraid of the charge of obscurity,” says Walt Whitman, “in either of my two volumes, because human thought, poetry or melody, must leave dim escapes and outlets—must possess a certain fluid, aerial character, akin to Space itself, obscure to those of little or no imagination, but indispensable to the highest purposes. Poetic style, when address’d to the Soul, is less definite form, outline, sculpture, and becomes vista, music, half-tints, and even less than half-tints. True, it may be architecture; but again it may be the forest wild-wood, or the best effects thereof, at twilight, the waving oaks and cedars in the wind, and the impalpable odour” (Preface to Two Rivulets, p. 13).

Let me set beside this a passage from that singularly beautiful book, Kakasu Okakura’s Ideals of the East: “Shakaku in the fifth century lays down six canons of pictorial art, in which the idea of the depicting of Nature falls into a third place, subservient to two other main principles. The first of these is ‘the Life-movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of Things.’ For art is to him the great Mood of the Universe, moving hither and thither amidst those harmonic laws of matter which are Rhythm” (p. 52).

[180] I may refer in passing to the researches of A. C. Haddon and Henry Balfour, who have made it seem at least highly probable that all decorative forms originated in the copying of natural objects.

[181] F. C. Penrose showed in 1851 that all the quasi-horizontal lines in the Parthenon are really arcs of circles, that the ‘entasis’ or swelling of every pillar is the true arc of an hyperbola, and that there is not a true right-angle nor a strictly vertical column in the building. All good Greek buildings are similarly full of “curves, leaning faces, irregular spacings, and other optical refinements” (Investig. of the Princs. of Athenian Architecture). This principle, called by Ruskin ‘life’ (Seven Lamps) and by some ‘symmetrophobia,’ was most daringly applied in mediæval building. A very striking and well illustrated series of articles on the subject was contributed by Mr. W. H. Goodyear to the Architectural Record, Vol. VI, 1896-7.

[182] I am indebted in connexion with these remarks on Gothic architecture to a very interesting paper by Mr. L. March Phillipps in the Contemporary Review for September, 1907.

[183] For example, when molecules first grouped themselves (supposing that was how it came about) into the form which resulted in living protoplasm, their action was one of a chemico-physical nature, but the response is not expressible in purely chemico-physical terms. Similarly when sensation first appeared in protoplasm.

[184] Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Drittes Buch, Die Platonische Idee das Objekt der Kunst.

[185] Camille Mauclair, French Impressionists. “Light,” writes M. Mauclair, “becomes the sole subject of the picture; the interest of the object upon which it plays is secondary. Painting thus conceived becomes a purely optic art” (p. 32). “The principal person in a picture,” said Manet, “is the light” (p. 42).

[186] No one who has seen “Le Penseur,” by Rodin, will doubt that plastic art can render Thought. But literature alone could tell us what he is thinking.