Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but in direct line of descent, astounding as the contrast may appear, from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Samuel Butler. Shaw does not subscribe to the belief that goodness implies that “man is vicious by nature, and that supreme goodness is supreme martyrdom.” A fundamental tenet of his philosophic faith is the conviction that “progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are.” This conviction has more or less consciously animated him all through his career. Within his secret soul, Shaw has always cherished a radiant and gorgeous hope for humanity, always unconsciously trod the rainbow bridge from the real to the ideal. In his heart, he has whispered Ibsen's thought, “The expression of our own individuality is our first duty.” A dream of human perfectibility has lured him on: the dearest foe of this arrant realist has ever been—an ideal. As a youth he revelled in the Shelley of Prometheus Unbound; young manhood found him working upon the hypothesis of the Economic Man. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw sang of the new man, the sovereign individual—in Nietzsche's phrase, “the possessor of a long infrangible will, who has, in his possession, his standard of valuation.” He had found out the impossibilities of anarchism before he came to Wagner; his clearer vision and enlarged horizon enabled him to realize that “the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not Siegfrieds.” At last he began to realize that “it is necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured form of his ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of education and progress, inspired with the faith of the world-will, and resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect the human species. “To rise above ourselves to ourselves”—that is the creed of the new faith, of the humanitarian artificial selectionist concerned even more for the future of the race than for the freedom of his own instincts. Every phase in Shaw's career, it cannot be too strongly insisted upon, is the legitimate and logical outcome of his Socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his empirical criticisms of society and its present organization, founded on authority and based upon Capitalism. And to the Socialist, nothing is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that man should will it. “Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Wagner, “until by a conscious following of that inner natural necessity, which is the only true necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality or State.” The fact faced by the Shavian philosophy is that Man does not effectively will perfection. The quintessence of Shavianism is that “he never will until he becomes Superman.”[239]

The cardinal point in the New Theology as enunciated by Bernard Shaw is the identification of God with the Life Force. “There are two mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to the relative powers of God and Man,” Mr. Shaw once said to me in the course of a long discussion of his religious views. “According to the popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who, if He liked, could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to create such miserable failures as you and me?

“As a matter of fact,” he continued, “we know that in all art, literature, politics, sociology—in every phase of genuine life and vitality—man's highest aspiration is to create something higher than himself. So God, the Life Force, has been struggling for countless ages to become conscious of Himself—to express Himself in forms higher and ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary, the grub is a mere symbol of His desire for self-expression.”

To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself. At the back of the universe, according to his mystical conception, there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after innumerable tentatives—experiments and mistakes—the force has succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some more complex organism; this again into something still more complex, and finally has evolved a man, with hands and a brain to accomplish the work of the Will. Man is not the ultimate aim of the Life Force, but only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life Force will go still further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent and omniscient God.[240]

Shaw has startled and shocked many people during his lifetime by asserting vehemently that he was an atheist.[241] And so indeed he is, if orthodoxy connotes belief in the early-Victorian God of cruelty and barbarity—the Almighty Fiend of Shelley's characterization. The idea of God as a cruel Designer, vindictive in punishment of the unbeliever, then held full sway.

“Neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol, Jehovah.” Then came Darwin with his theory of natural selection, involving the corollary that all the operations of the species can be accounted for without consciousness, intelligence or design. After rapturously embracing Darwinism for six weeks, Samuel Butler turned upon Darwin and rent him—he had discovered that Darwin had actually banished mind from the universe.[242] Butler saw clearly that natural selection had no moral significance, that it did away not only with the necessity for purpose and design in the universe, but actually with the necessity for consciousness.

Philosophically and scientifically, Shaw derives directly from Schopenhauer, Lamarck and Butler. He recognizes purpose and will in the world because he is himself conscious of purpose and will. Woman brings children into the world, not for herself or for her husband, but to fulfil the end in view of which the Life Force has created her. Man produces great works just as woman brings men into the world, with travail and pain; man is continually engaged in doing things which do not benefit him. He works just as hard when there is no chance of profit as when there is. Shaw, then, is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in the view that “where there's a will there's a way.” Just as Lamarck, with his theory of functional adaptation, virtually maintained that living organisms changed because they wanted to, so Shaw believes that there is a purpose in the universe; identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization. In Shaw's view, Schopenhauer's treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck's natural history; for Will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution.[243]

Bernard Shaw's religion is the expression of his faith in Life and in the Will. He regards man as divine because, actually, he is the last effort of the Will to realize itself as God. And yet he does not believe in the doctrine of personal immortality. “I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for—scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself,” Mr. Shaw once remarked to me. “This, I believe, is the clue to my views on immortality. The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider! Or imagine me in heaven, giving forth all sorts of epigrams and paradoxes, startling Saint Peter with my iconoclasm, being paragraphed in the Eternal Herald and cartooned in the Æon Review! No, I think the trouble has come about through imagining that there are only two attributes—eternal life and utter extinction at death. I believe neither of these theories to be correct. Life continually tends to organize itself into higher and better forms. There is no such thing as personal immortality; and death, as Weismann says, is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the Life principle within us, goes on in spite of personal annihilation.

“As I told Mrs. Besant the other night,” he added, “I am looking for a race of men who are not afraid to die.”

A popular error into which many able critics fall is involved in the oft-repeated assertion that Shaw derives his philosophy directly from Ibsen, Strindberg, Stirner and Nietzsche. It is quite true that The Quintessence of Ibsenism might have been written by an ardent disciple of Nietzsche; and yet the first time Shaw ever heard Nietzsche's name was from a German mathematician, a Miss Borchardt, who had read Shaw's brochure on Ibsen, and who told him she knew where he had got it all. On being asked where, she replied “From Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Shaw at once understood and appreciated the title, and thereafter took an interest in Nietzsche; but he could not read much of the few English translations that were attempted except Thomas Common's book of selections; the German originals he never even attempted to read. “If all this talk about Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,” Shaw laughingly said to me one day, “I really will have to read their works, to discover just what we have in common. This habit of referring every idea of mine to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche comes about partly because, to people without philosophy, all philosophies seem the same, and partly because I have often referred to them to remind my readers that what they called my eccentricities and paradoxes are part of the common European stock.” As for Stirner, I have never heard Mr. Shaw mention Stirner. I recall no mention of Stirner in all of Shaw's works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him in the slightest degree. It is quite true that, like Stirner, Shaw is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirner's “Eigentum,” for the reason that though Shaw is an individualist, he is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict between Individualism and Socialism, and has actually given the striking definition: “Socialism is merely Individualism rationalized, organized, clothed and in its right mind.” Shaw has been accused of indebtedness to Strindberg also; the truth is, that he has all along been perfectly familiar with the idea of hatred of woman-idolization through the writings and conversation of Mr. Ernest Belfort Bax, whose essays attacking bourgeois morality were published before Strindberg, or Nietzsche, for that matter, had been heard of in England. But although Shaw has read very little of the marvellously prolific Strindberg, he admires him greatly, and once told me that he thought Strindberg would prove to be “the noblest Roman of us all.” Nietzsche's view of Christianity as a slave-morality was advanced in England by Mr. Stuart-Glennie, a Scotch historical philosopher, still living and much neglected, in what appealed to Shaw as a far more sensible way, Stuart-Glennie regarding it as the means by which the white races (the Supermen) enslaved the dark races and mean whites, while Nietzsche regarded it as an imposition by the slaves themselves.[244] Shaw, Stuart-Glennie and Bax are all Socialists; if “the physiologist of the mind” would seek to trace in Shaw's work early influences upon his philosophy, he must look for them in the works of Stuart-Glennie and Bax, rather than in the works of Nietzsche and Strindberg. And as for Shaw's strange complex of Socialism and individualism, I personally find it to be a mean between the extravagant individualism of Max Stirner, the intellectual anarchy of Elisée Reclus, and the practical collectivism of Jaurès and Vandervelde.

The English critics, however, continue to refer Shaw's philosophy to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, “knowing nothing about them,” as Shaw says, “except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of the Times or the Spectator.” Indeed, Shaw is an unwilling impostor as a pundit in the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. What, for example, could be more foreign to the Shavian philosophy than Nietzsche's repudiation of Socialism, his admiration of the Romans, or his notions about art? Shaw's Superman is mere man to Nietzsche; whilst Nietzsche's Superman is God to Shaw. “Nietzsche's erudition I believe to be all nonsense,” Shaw recently remarked to me. “I think he was academic in the sense of having a great deal of second-hand book-learning about him, and don't care for him except when he is perfectly original—that is, when he is dealing with matters which a peasant might have dealt with if he had brains enough, and had had the run of a library. You feel how clever and imaginative he is, and how much he has derived from writers of genius and from his own humanity about men and nations; but there is a want of actual contact knowledge about him; he is always the speculative university professor or the solitary philosopher and poet, never quite the worker and man of affairs or the executive artist in solid materials. It annoys me to see English writers absolutely ignoring the work of British thinkers, and swallowing foreign celebrities—whether philosophers or opera-singers—without a grain of salt. It shows an utter want of intellectual self-respect; and the result of it is that Nietzsche's views, instead of being added solely to the existing body of philosophy, are treated as if they were a sort of music-hall performance.”

Bernard Shaw is endowed with that persistent strain of British practicality which makes him employ philosophy as an instrumentality for the achievement of the purposes of life. In a word, Shaw is fundamentally an ethicist: philosophy to him means a guide for life. His metaphysic is basically moralistic, consisting of a series of postulates in respect to conduct.

In the manuscript of an unfinished work which Mr. Shaw once loaned to me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon Shaw's philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it may distil the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy:

“The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Puritanism, or 'some power not ourselves, that makes for righteousness' is not only useless, but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in the universe, and identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization: that is the effective man and the happy man, whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost or you may call Democracy, or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it above all his other interests.

“In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out the ways and means. And this we can do only if we conceive the will as a creative energy, as Lamarck did; and totally renounce and abjure Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-the-slot theories of evolution whatever.”