Winds of Doctrine | Page 7

in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if
whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power is
attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or life
are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is mighty,
and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival, however,
which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not afford a
remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life, according to
Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic; but according to
William James we should be democratic, concrete, and credulous. It is
hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate the individual
spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary to declare the
spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh. In Italy, the mind
seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute creator, evoking at will,
at each moment, a new past, a new future, a new earth, and a new God.
In America, however, the mind is recommended rather as an

unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and making it do
double work.
Trustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are
characteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be
consistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less
characteristic of it. Human intelligence is certainly a product, and a late
and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently to be as
much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants. And if
life is better the more intense and concentrated it is, intelligence would
seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of intelligence which
this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that, in this instance,
it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has left
behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or
such cruelly confused things as theology it feels la nostalgie de la boue.
It was only, M. Bergson tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that
life was forced to become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills
whatever it touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would
find it sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and
bloom in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy
is an effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which it
brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion has
vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business and
society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a mean
rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their intelligence
enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is essentially
servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not free enough
themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety and partly
by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution; they
revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct or
dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the
longing to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals.
To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life
was really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one

seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by the
incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence. Life was
like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to enjoy. It was
not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of living consisted in
dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was loved, and the beauty
and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its beauty and pathos lay in
the divineness of its model and in its own fragility. No one paid it the
equivocal compliment of thinking it a substance or a material force.
Nobility was not then impossible in sentiment, because there were
ideals in life higher and more indestructible than life itself, which life
might illustrate and to which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be
meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape;
a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in