The Nature of Goodness

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Yet the full expression of this independent interest in nature is more recent than is usually observed. Landscape painting goes back but little beyond the year sixteen hundred. It is only two or three centuries ago that painters discovered the physical world to be worthy of representation for its own sake. As the worth of nature thus became vindicated in painting, parallel changes were wrought in the other arts. Arts less distinctly rational began to assert themselves, and even to take the lead.

The art most characteristic of modern times, the one which most widely and poignantly appeals to us, is music.

David Ross and Philip Stratton-Lake

But in music we are not distinctly conscious of a meaning. Most of us in listening to music forget ourselves under its lulling charms, abandon ourselves to its spell, and by it are swept away, perhaps to the infinite, perhaps to an obliteration of all clear thought. Is it not largely because we are so hard pressed under the anxious conditions of modern life that music becomes such an enormous solace and strength?

I do not say that no other factors have contributed to the vogue of music, but certainly it is widely prized as an effective means of escape from ourselves. Music too, though early known in calm and elementary forms, has within the last two centuries been developed into almost a new art.

The Nature of Goodness - VII. Nature and Spirit (by George Herbert Palmer)

Of all the arts poetry is the most strikingly rational and articulate. Its material is plain thought, plain words. We employ in it the apparatus of conscious life. Poetry was therefore concerned in early times entirely with things of the spirit. It dealt with persons, and with them alone. It celebrated epic actions, recorded sagacious judgments, or uttered in lyric song emotions primarily felt by an individual, yet interpreting the common lot of man.

But there has occurred a great change in poetry too, a change notable during the last century but initiated long before. Poetry has been growing naturalistic, and is to-day disposed to reject all severance of body and spirit. We all know the refreshment and the deepening of life which this mystic new poetry has brought. But it is hard to say whether poetry is nowadays a spiritual or a natural art. Many of us would incline to the latter view, and would hold that even in dealing with persons it treats them as embodiments of natural forces.

Our instincts and unguided passions, the features which most identify us with the physical world, are coming more and more to be the subjects of modern poetry. Nature, meanwhile, that part of the universe which is not consciously guided, has become within a century our favorite field of scientific study.

The very word science is popularly appropriated to naturalistic investigation. Of course this is a perversion. Originally it was believed that the proper study of mankind was man. And probably we should all still acknowledge that the study of personal structure is as truly science as study of the structure of physical objects.

Yet so powerfully is the tide setting toward reverence for the unconscious and the sub-conscious that science, our word for knowledge, has lost its universality and has taken on an almost exclusively physical character. Perhaps there was only one farther step possible. Philosophy itself, the study of mind, might be regarded as a study of the unconscious. And this step has been taken. More and more it is believed that we cannot adequately explore a person without probing beneath consciousness. The blind processes can no longer be ruled out. Nature and spirit cannot be parted as our fathers supposed they might.

Probably Kant is the last great scholar who will ever try to hold that distinction firm, and he is hardly successful.

VII. The Three Stages of Goodness

In spite of his vigorous antitheses, hints of covert connection between the opposed forces are not absent. Indeed, if the two are so widely parted as his usual language asserts, it is hard to see how his ethics can have mundane worth. Curiously enough too, at the very time when Kant was reviving this ancient distinction, and offering it as the solid basis of personal and social life, the opposite belief received its most clamorous announcement, resounding through the civilized world in the teachings of Rousseau.

Rousseau warns us that the conscious constructions of man are full of artifice and deceit, and lead to corruption and pain. Conscious guidance should, consequently, be banished, and man should return to the peace, the ease, and the certainty of nature. Now I do not think it is worth while to blame or praise a movement so vast as this. If it is folly to draw an indictment against a nation, it is greater folly to indict all modern civilization.

We must not say that philosophy and the fine arts took a wrong turn at the Renaissance,—at least it is useless to call on them now to turn back.

The world seldom turns back. It absorbs, it re-creates, it brings new significance into the older thought. All progress, Goethe tells us, is spiral,—coming out at the place where it was before, but higher up. No, we cannot wisely blame or praise, but we may patiently study and understand.

That is what I am attempting to do here. The movement described is no negligible accident of our time. It is world-wide, and shows progress steadily in a single direction.

In order, however, to prove that such a change in moral estimates has occurred, it was hardly necessary to survey the course of history. The evidence lies close around us, and is found in the standards of the society in which we move. Who are the people most prized?

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Are they the most self-conscious? That should be the case if our long argument is sound. Our preceding chapters would urge us to fill life with consciousness. In proportion as consciousness droops, human goodness becomes meagre; as our acts are filled with it, they grow excellent. These are our theoretic conclusions, but the experience of daily life does not bear them out. If, for example, I find the person who is talking to me watches each word he utters, pauses again and again for correction, choosing the determined word and rejecting the one which instinctively comes to his lips, I do not trust what he says, or even listen to it; while he is shaping his exact sentences I attend to something else.

It is not the self-reflecting persons, cautious of all they do, say, or think, who are popular. It is rather those instinctively spontaneous creatures characterized by abandon—men and women who let themselves go, and with all the wealth of the world in them, allow it to come out of itself—that we take to our hearts. We prize them for their want of deliberation. In short, we give our unbiased endorsement not to the spiritual or consciously guided person, but to him, on the contrary, who shows the closest adjustment to nature. Yet even so, we have gone too far afield for evidence.

First we surveyed the ages, then we surveyed one another. But there is one proof-spot nearer still. Let us survey ourselves. I am much mistaken if there are not among my readers persons who have all their lives suffered from self-consciousness. They have longed to be rid of it, to be free to think of the other person, of the matter in hand. Instead of this, their thoughts are forever reverting to their own share in any affair. Too contemptible to be avowed, and more distressing than almost any other species of suffering, excessive self-consciousness shames us with our selfishness, yet will not allow us to turn from it.

When I go into company where everybody is spontaneous and free, easily uttering what the occasion calls for, I can utter only what I call for and not at all what the occasion asks. Between the two demands there is always an awkward jar. That little point is continually left unexplained. Yet obviously self- consciousness involves something like a deadlock. For how can one consciously exert himself to be unconscious and try not to try?

We cannot arrange our lives so as to have no arrangement in them, and when shaking hands with a friend, for example, be on our guard against noticing. Once locked up in this vicious circle, we seem destined to be prisoners forever. That is what constitutes the anguish of the situation. But it had already attracted the attention of Shakespeare, who bases on it one of his greatest plays. When Hamlet would act, self-consciousness stands in his way. And such is our experience.

We, too, have purposed all manner of important and serviceable acts; but just as we were setting them in execution, consideration fell upon us. We asked whether it was the proper moment, whether he to whom it was to be done was really needy, or were we the fit doer, or should it be done in this way or that.

We hesitated, and the moment was gone. Self-consciousness had again demonstrated its incompetence for superintending a task. Many of us, far from regarding self-consciousness as a ground of goodness, are disposed to look upon it as a curse. Before, however, attempting to discover whether our theoretic conclusions may he drawn into some sort of living accord with these results of experience, let us probe a little more minutely into these latter, and try to learn what reasons there may be for this very general distrust of self-consciousness as a guide.

Hitherto I have exhibited that distrust as a fact. We always find it so; our neighbors find it so, the ages have found it so. I have not pointed out precisely the reasons for the continual fact.

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Let me devote a page or two to rational diagnosis. To begin with, I suppose it will be conceded that we really cannot guide ourselves through and through.

The Nature of Goodness

There are certain large tracts of life totally unamenable to consciousness. Of our two most important acts, and those by which the remaining ones are principally affected, birth and death, the one is necessarily removed from conscious guidance, and the other is universally condemned if so guided. We do not—as we have previously seen—happen to be present at our birth, and so are quite cut off from controlling that. Yet the conditions of birth very considerably shape everything else in life.

We cannot, then, be purely spiritual; it is impossible. We must be natural beings at our beginning; and at the other end the state of things is largely similar, for we are not allowed to fix the time of our departure. But Christianity will not allow this. Death must be a natural affair, not a spiritual. I am to wait till a wandering bacillus alights in my lung.

He will provide a suitable exit for me. But neither I nor my neighbors must decide my departure. Let laws of nature reign. And if these two tremendous events are altogether removed from conscious guidance, many others are but slightly amenable to it. The great organic processes both of mind and body are only indirectly, or to a partial extent, under the control of consciousness.

A few persons, I believe, can voluntarily suspend the beating of their hearts. They are hardly to be envied. The majority of us let our hearts alone, and they work better than if we tried to work them. Though it is true that we can control our breathing, and that we occasionally do so, this also in general we wisely leave to natural processes. A similar state of affairs we find when we turn to the mind itself. The association of ideas, that curious process by which one thought sticks to another and through being thus linked draws after it material for use in all our intellectual constructions, goes on for the most part unguided.

It would be plainly useless, therefore, to treat our great distinction as something hard and fast. Nature and spirit may be contrasted; they cannot be sundered.