and if this intelligence be omnipotent and all-loving, it must follow that things will be so arranged that the proper kind of life-the ideal life, if you please will be one of pleasure rather than of pain. Such being the case, the living of an ideal life would be the pursuit of a course resulting in pleasure, and, since nothing can be more legitimate than to make life ideal, nothing can be more legitimate than such pleasures as are the factors of an ideal existence. Thus, from the standpoint of the teleologist, we come to see that the object of life is, and ought to be, the pursuit of happiness and, by implication, that the highest object of life is, and ought to be, the pursuit of such a course as will result in the greatest happiness of the greatest number. It is manifestly inconceivable that given an all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful Creator, He should adopt any course which would make the proper conduct of life result in anything but happiness. This, we submit, must inevitably follow from the teleological premises laid down-premises which, so far as we are aware - exhibit the widest community of thought to be found among the many otherwise conflicting religions of the world. That these premises and this conclusion do not, in the minds of many, satisfactorily account for the observed existence of pain, and, further, that these same critics aver themselves unable to conceive how an infinitely powerful and infinitely good Being should permit the existence of misery, is a fact to which we need call but passing attention, since it is neither our purpose to sit in judgment over contested theories, nor to emphasise the differences inevitable among minds of widely diverging faculties and habits of thought. We must content ourselves with searching for points of agreement, and among these the one that chiefly interests us is, that all philosophies and religions, with rare and relatively insignificant exceptions, hold that the end and object of human life is, and ought to be happiness. Here, then, is our common point of departure. If, now, happiness be the object of life, the act of living will tend to be a pursuit of happiness, so that whether we believe in evolution without teleology, in evolution with teleology, or in teleology without evolution, we find ourselves able to recognise that mankind will, must, and ought to, pursue happiness. This is the whole object of life, and whether life be a success or a failure, whether a social régime be beneficent or malevolent, must be tested from its ability to achieve pleasure and to avoid pain. We know the reader will not fall into the error of thinking, when we say the object of life is happiness, that we mean mere pleasuring. He will know that we refer to that ideal happiness which results, not from selfish, but rather from selfial activities. A word, however, may not be amiss in explanation of what is meant by the greatest happiness of the greatest number. We must not make the mistake of assuming that a system is to be pronounced good or bad by the total amount of happiness produced. One other consideration enters in, viz., the quality of the happiness. If there were but ten people in the world living under a given system, and we were told that this system produced what we might measure as, say, one hundred units of happiness, we could not pronounce judgment on the system till we knew whether that happiness were worthy or unworthy. If, for example, we found that in this community of ten one person enjoyed ninety of the units of happiness, and the other nine the remaining ten units, we should have to condemn the system; whereas, we might applaud another system in which the ten people living under it exhibited a totality representable by, say, a hundred units of happiness, but in which each one enjoyed his just ten units. From this it will be seen that the question of distribution is a vital factor. If, now, the matter of equitable distribution of happiness is so vital a point, why have we inferentially said that it is only necessary, when we know the amount of happiness resulting from a life system, whether individual or social,- to know further the quality of that happiness? This is the reason. The proper quality of happiness-happiness rich in nobility, sympathy, love and justice, cannot coexist with inequality and the sacrifices it entails. When we find people happy amid preventable human suffering, we need no further observation to convince us that such happiness is of a selfish and degraded sort. The highest happiness can never be attained until there be a sensible equality of happiness, any more than the highest liberty can be attained without equality of liberty. The point at which the liberty of some members of a social system transcends that of others is the point at which ideal liberty leaves the system, being replaced by privilege on the one hand, and slavery on the other. The pampered darlings of fortune living under the present régime, cannot know happiness of the highest sort. If they have the psychic structure which enables them keenly to enjoy the nobler delights of the soul, this infinitely delicate machine is perpetually racked and torn by the jargon of discordant and inequitable suffering which beats upon it like an angry sea from every quarter of the social horizon. Contrariwise, he who is so poorly evolved, so inadequately specialised, that the social discords move not his psychic ear, lacks that ineffably delicately attuned emotional structure which would enable him to hear the magnificent harmony that falls, like a soothing benison, from the domain where the greatest good is done to the greatest number. man The growing social consciousness of our times is most keenly stirred by a sense of pain. We are beginning to feel the great common processes of human life; but we feel them, at least, only when they hurt. Our individual distresses we have always felt; and have voiced our anguish and resentment more and more loudly as civilisation progressed. Earlier - and in particular the unhappy savage, with his unavoidable privations, dangers, and mishaps, and his ingenious systems of self-torture— had more to hurt him, but made far less fuss about it. For many an age the pain of human life has formed so conspicuous a fact that we have called the earth "The Star of Suffering." Our common illustrations of happiness are drawn from the lower animals: "as happy as a clam," we say; as gay as a lark; as merry as a cricket." 99.66 The world's greatest religions have rested on a conception of general human unhappiness. Divine curses are held to account for it, Divine blessings to allay it, and a future life to recompense us for it - if we are good; but the basic proposition is the unhappiness of human life. Again, we are given a theory of reincarnation; of a slow transmigration through many lines towards a plane where we do not feel, feeling being admitted to mean pain. In Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana, from the Happy Hunting Grounds and Walhalla to our most refined conception of eternal progress, the bliss of a future life is advanced as some countercheck to the misery of this one, some hope to enable us to live. Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Human Work. We are often told that it is the curse of trade unionism that it strives to reduce the pace at which men work, and to diminish the output, and philanthropists have brought English workmen over as pilgrims to learn the gospel of speed at its sanctuaries in New York and Pittsburg. But surely speed is not an unmixed blessing. To sacrifice the nerves of human beings to the manufacture of telegraph wires, to offer up flesh on the altar of cotton - is this the wisdom of civilisation? If it is more important to manufacture healthy citizens than machine-made things, then indeed the trade unions have something to say for their policy. And there is an element of insanity in this mad race of overwork between the manufacturing countries—an insanity which shows itself again and again as we examine our industrial system-an insanity which condemns chilIdren of seven years to work for thirteen hours a day (or, worse yet, a night) in our cotton mills; which considers the accumulation of money beyond all possibility of enjoyment as a rational object in life; which subordinates every consideration to gain; which makes our stock exchanges resemble assemblies of madmen, and which fills our lunatic asylums and sanitariums with broken down money-seekers, and our morgues with suicides. No unprejudiced person can go into the deafening din of one of our factories without seeing for himself that the pace is far too fast and the hours far too long, and yet our business people are calling for greater speed and higher pressure! It is madness and nothing else! Let us put a stop to this wild revel of production, and if this means smash, by all means smash let it be. Are human beings to be sacrificed forever to the manufacture of gimcracks? Let us found a community for the manufacture of sound and sane men and women; and let the machinery come in incidentally if it can, and if not, let it go. The race of manufacturing, like the race of armaments, is a symptom of the Wall Street-Washington disease. It is a horrible fever that we must get out of the blood. And the first remedy is to prevent the congestion of unearned wealth in one part of the body politic, while the rest is suffering from marasmus. Our Wall Street friends wish to cure the patient by raising his temperature and increasing his pulse. But what we want is not more fever, but more calm-less intensity, more sanity. Ernest Crosby. H CHAPTER VII AVING seen that the object of life is happiness the greatest happiness of the greatest number — and that the act of living is the pursuit of happiness, we have now to consider the methods used to obtain this object. We shall do well at the start to realise that few, if any, beings live the ideal life the life in which the greatest good to the greatest number is the dominating and unselfish purpose. On the other hand, there are none of us who are exceptions to the general law that all men seek happiness of some sort. The kind of happiness striven for varies as the individual varies, being rarely totally selfish and depraved, and seldom, if ever, ideally altruistic and unselfish. None are black, none are white, all are some shade of grey. Herein is the crux of the whole social question. The difference between the worst system which has ever inflicted the world, and the best the millennium will ever have to offer, is merely a difference in the kind of happiness pursued by the social units. Just as the survival of the fittest can never be the survival of the best until the environment becomes ideal, so can the pursuit of happiness never become the pursuit of the highest happiness, until the life which is the object of this pursuit becomes an ideal life. The whole problem of regenerating society is merely a problem of replacing selfish happiness, as an end sought, by altruistic happiness. When we realise that we can never attain the greatest possible individual happiness save as we find it in the perfect social happiness, we shall have laid down the major premise of millennial joy. Thus is it that man shall find his higher self even by losing his lower self. Remembering that the kind of happiness sought by an individual varies as the individual varies, let us consider the methods by which man pursues happiness. These methods, of course, will vary, not only as the object sought varies, and as the personality varies, but will also change as the environment changes. We have seen that the faculties of man are traceable downwards to the very roots of the biological tree, and we shall not be surprised, therefore, to find in primitive man many reminiscences of his ape-like progenitors. In order to form a clear conception of what man is to-day, it is desirable, if possible, to know him as he was throughout his past. How may this end be accomplished? Hundreds of thousands of years have unquestionably elapsed since man, as man, stood upright and walked the earth. The testimony of geological deposits and archæologic excavations prove that man had even made some considerable progress in art as far back as the age of the mammoth and mastodon. |