Anarchist Morality
by Peter Kropotkin
Note For "Anarchist Morality"
This study of the origin and function of what we
call "morality" was written for pamphlet publication as a
result of an amusing situation. An anarchist who ran a
store in England found that his comrades in the
movement regarded it as perfectly right to take his goods
without paying for them. "To each according to his need"
seemed to them to justify letting those who were best able
foot the bills. Kropotkin was appealed to, with the result
that he not only condemned such doctrine, but was
moved to write the comrades this sermon.
Its conception of morality is based on the ideas set
forth in _Mutual Aid_ and later developed in his
_Ethics_. Here they are given special application to "right
and wrong" in the business of social living. The job is
done with fine feeling and with acute shafts at the shams
of current morality.
Kropotkin sees the source of all so-called moral
ideas in primitive superstitions. The real moral sense
which guides our social behavior is instinctive, based on
the sympathy and unity inherent in group life. Mutual
aid is the condition of successful social living. The moral
base is therefore the good old golden rule "Do to others as
you would have others do to you in the same
circumstances," --which disposed of the ethics of the
shopkeeper's anarchist customers.
This natural moral sense was perverted, Kropotkin
says, by the superstitions surrounding law, religion and
authority, deliberately cultivated by conquerors,
exploiters and priests for their own benefit. Morality has
therefore become the instrument of ruling classes to
protect their privileges.
He defends the morality of killing for the benefit of
mankind --as in the assassination of tyrants--- but never
for self. Love and hate he regards as greater social forces
for controlling wrong-doing than punishment, which he
rejects as useless and evil. Account-book morality --doing
right only to receive a benefit-- he scores roundly, urging
instead the satisfactions and joy of "sowing life around
you" by giving yourself to the uttermost to your fellow-
men. Not of course to do them good, in the spirit of
philanthropy, but to be one with them, equal and sharing.
ANARCHIST MORALITY
by P. Kropotkin
I
The history of human thought recalls the swinging
of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a
long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.
Then thought frees herself from the chains with which
those interested --rulers, lawyers, clerics-- have carefully
enwound her.
She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe
criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the
emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social
prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts
research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new
discoveries, creates new sciences.
But the inveterate enemies of thought --the
government, the lawgiver, and the priest-- soon recover
from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their
scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of
laws to adapt them to the new needs. Then, profiting by
the servility of thought and of character, which they
themselves have so effectually cultivated; profiting, too,
by the momentary disorganization of society, taking
advantage of the laziness of some, the greed of others, the
best hopes of many, they softly creep back to their work
by first of all taking possession of childhood through
education.
A child's spirit is weak. It is so easy to coerce it by
fear. This they do. They make the child timid, and then
they talk to him of the torments of hell. They conjure up
before him the sufferings of the condemned, the
vengeance of an implacable god. The next minute they
will be chattering of the horrors of revolution, and using
some excess of the revolutionists to make the child "a
friend of order." The priest accustoms the child to the
idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the
"divine law," and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the
civil law may be the better obeyed.
And by that habit of submission, with which we are
only too familiar, the thought of the next generation
retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and
authoritative, for authority and servility walk ever hand in
hand.
During these slumbrous interludes, morals are rarely dis-
cussed. Religious practices and judicial hypocrisy take
their place. People do not criticize, they let themselves be
drawn by habit, or indifference.They do not put
themselves out for or against the established morality.
They do their best to make their actions appear to accord
with their professions.
All that was good, great, generous or independent
in man, little by little becomes moss-grown; rusts like a
disused knife. A lie becomes a virtue, a platitude a duty.
To enrich oneself, to seize one's opportunities, to exhaust
one's intelligence, zeal and energy, no matter how,
become the watchwords of the comfortable classes, as
well as of the crowd of poor folk whose ideal is to appear
bourgeois. Then the degradation of the ruler and of the
judge, of the clergy and of the more or less comfortable
classes becomes so revolting that the pendulum begins to
swing the other way.
Little by little, youth frees itself. It flings overboard
its prejudices, and it begins to criticize. Thought
reawakens, at first among the few; but insensibly the
awakening reaches the majority. The impulse is given, the
revolution follows.
And each time the question of morality comes up again.
"Why should I follow the principles of this hypocritical
morality?" asks the brain, released from religious terrors.
Why should any morality be obligatory?"
Then people try to account for the moral sentiment
that they meet at every turn without having explained it
to themselves. And they will never explain it so long as
they believe it a privilege of human nature, so long as
they do not descend to animals, plants and rocks to
understand it. They seek the answer, however, in the
science of the hour.
And, if we may venture to say so, the more the basis
of conventional morality, or rather of the hypocrisy that
fills its place is sapped, the more the moral plane of
society is raised. It is above all at such times precisely
when folks are criticizing and denying it, that moral
sentiment makes the most progress. It is then that it grows,
that it is raised and refined.
Years ago the youth of Russia were passionately
agitated by this very question. "I will be immoral!" a
young nihilist came and said to his friend, thus
translating into action the thoughts that gave him no rest.
"I will be immoral, and why should I not? Because the
Bible wills it? But the Bible is only a collection of
Babylonian and Hebrew traditions, traditions collected
and put together like the Homeric poems, or as is being
done still with Basque poems and Mongolian legends.
Must I then go back to the state of mind of the half-
civilized peoples of the East?
"Must I be moral because Kant tells me of a
categoric imperative, of a mysterious command which
comes to me from the depths of my own being and bids
me be moral? But why should this 'categoric imperative'
exercise a greater authority over my actions than that
other imperative, which at times may command me to get
drunk. A word, nothing but a word, like the words
'Providence,' or 'Destiny,' invented to conceal our
ignorance.
"Or perhaps I am to be moral to oblige Bentham,
who wants me to believe that I shall be happier if I drown
to save a passerby who has fallen into the river than if I
watched him drown?
"Or perhaps because such has been my education?
Because my mother taught me morality? Shall I then go
and kneel down in a church, honor the Queen, bow before
the judge I know for a scoundrel, simply because our
mothers, our good ignorant mothers, have taught us such
a pack of nonsense ?
"I am prejudiced, --like everyone else. I will try to rid
myself of prejudice! Even though immorality be distaste-
ful, I will yet force myself to be immoral, as when I was a
boy I forced myself to give up fearing the dark, the church-
yard, ghosts and dead people --all of which I had been
taught to fear.
"It will be immoral to snap a weapon abused by
religion; I will do it, were it only to protect against the
hypocrisy imposed on us in the name of a word to which
the name morality has been given!"
Such was the way in which the youth of Russia
reasoned when they broke with old-world prejudices,
and unfurled this banner of nihilist or rather of anarchist
philosophy: to bend the knee to no authority whatsoever,
however respected; to accept no principle so long as it is
unestablished by reason.
Need we add, that after pitching into the waste-
paper basket the teachings of their fathers, and burning all
systems of morality, the nihilist youth developed in their
midst a nucleus of moral customs, infinitely superior to
anything that their fathers had practiced under the
control of the "Gospel," of the "Conscience," of the
"Categoric Imperative," or of the "Recognized
Advantage" of the utilitarian. But before answering the
question, "Why am I to be moral ?" let us see if the
question is well put; let us analyze the motives of human
action.
II
When our ancestors wished to account for what led
men to act in one way or another, they did so in a very
simple fashion. Down to the present day, certain catholic
images may be seen that represent this explanation. A man
is going on his way, and without being in the least aware
of it, carries a devil on his left shoulder and an angel on
his right. The devil prompts him to do evil, the angel tries
to keep him back. And if the angel gets the best of it and
the man remains virtuous, three other angels catch him up
and carry him to heaven. In this way everything is explained
wondrously well.
Old Russian nurses full of such lore will tell you never
to put a child to bed without unbuttoning the collar of its
shirt. A warm spot at the bottom of the neck should be left
bare, where the guardian angel may nestle. Otherwise the
devil will worry the child even in its sleep.
These artless conceptions are passing away. But
though the old words disappear, the essential idea
remains the same.
Well brought up folks no longer believe in the devil, but
as their ideas are no more rational than those of our
nurses, they do but disguise devil and angel under a
pedantic wordiness honored with the name of philosophy.
They do not say "devil" nowadays, but "the flesh," or "the
passions." The"angel" is replaced by the words
"conscience" or "soul," by "reflection of the thought of a
divine creator" or "the Great Architect," as the Free-
Masons say. But man's action is still represented as the
result of a struggle between two hostile elements. And a
man is always considered virtuous just in the degree to
which one of these two elements --the soul or
conscience-- is victorious over the other --the flesh or
passions.
It is easy to understand the astonishment of our
great-grandfathers when the English philosophers, and
later the Encyclopedists, began to affirm in opposition to
these primitive ideas that the devil and the angel had
nothing to do with human action, but that all acts of man,
good or bad, useful or baneful, arise from a single motive:
the lust for pleasure.
The whole religious confraternity, and, above all,
the numerous sects of the pharisees shouted "immorality."
They covered the thinkers with insult, they
excommunicated them. And when later on in the course
of the century the same ideas were again taken up by
Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Tchernischevsky, and a host of
others, and when these thinkers began to affirm and prove
that egoism, or the lust for pleasure, is the true motive of
all our actions, the maledictions redoubled. The books
were banned by a conspiracy of silence; the authors were
treated as dunces.
And yet what can be more true than the assertion
they made?
Here is a man who snatches its last mouthful of
bread from a child. Every one agrees in saying that he is a
horrible egoist, that he is guided solely by self-love.
But now here is another man, whom every one
agrees to recognize as virtuous. He shares his last bit of
bread with the hungry, and strips off his coat to clothe the
naked. And the moralists, sticking to their religious
jargon, hasten to say that this man carries the love of his
neighbor to the point of self-abnegation, that he obeys a
wholly different passion from that of the egoist. And yet
with a little reflection we soon discover that however
great the difference between the two actions in their result
for humanity, the motive has still been the same. It is the
quest of pleasure.
If the man who gives away his last shirt found no
pleasure in doing so, he would not do it. If he found
pleasure in taking bread from a child, he would do that
but this is distasteful to him. He finds pleasure in giving,
and so he gives. If it were not inconvenient to cause
confusion by employing in a new sense words that have a
recognized meaning, it might be said that in both cases
the men acted under the impulse of their egoism. Some
have actually said this, to give prominence to the thought
and precision to the idea by presenting it in a form that
strikes the imagination, and at the same time to destroy
the myth which asserts that these two acts have two
different motives. They have the same motive, the quest of
pleasure, or the avoidance of pain, which comes to the
same thing.
Take for example the worst of scoundrels: a Thiers,
who massacres thirty-five thousand Parisians, or an
assassin who butchers a whole family in order that he may
wallow in debauchery. They do it because for the moment
the desire of glory or of money gains in their minds the
upper hand of every other desire. Even pity and
compassion are extinguished for the moment by this other
desire, this other thirst. They act almost automatically to
satisfy a craving of their nature. Or again, putting aside
the stronger passions, take the petty man who deceives his
friends, who lies at every step to get out of somebody the
price of a pot of beer, or from sheer love of brag, or from
cunning. Take the employer who cheats his workmen to
buy jewels for his wife or his mistress. Take any petty
scoundrel you like. He again only obeys an impulse. He
seeks the satisfaction of a craving, or he seeks to escape
what would give him trouble.
We are almost ashamed to compare such petty
scoundrels with one who sacrifices his whole existence to
free the oppressed, and like a Russian nihilist mounts the
scaffold. So vastly different for humanity are the results of
these two lives; so much do we feel ourselves drawn
towards the one and repelled by the other.
And yet were you to talk to such a martyr, to the
woman who is about to be hanged, even just as she nears
the gallows, she would tell you that she would not
exchange either her life or her death for the life of the
petty scoundrel who lives on the money stolen from his
work-people. In her life, in the struggle against monstrous
might, she finds her highest joys. Everything else outside
the struggle, all the little joys of the bourgeois and his
little troubles seem to her so contemptible, so tiresome, so
pitiable! "You do not live, you vegetate," she would
reply; "I have lived."
We are speaking of course of the deliberate,
conscious acts of men, reserving for the present what we
have to say about that immense series of unconscious, all
but mechanical acts, which occupy so large a portion of
our life. In his deliberate, conscious acts man always seeks
what will give him pleasure.
One man gets drunk, and every day lowers himself
to the condition of a brute because he seeks in liquor the
nervous excitement that he cannot obtain from his own
nervous system. Another does not get drunk; he takes no
liquor, even though he finds it pleasant, because he wants
to keep the freshness of his thoughts and the plentitude of
his powers, that he may be able to taste other pleasures
which he prefers to drink. But how does he act if not like
the judge of good living who, after glancing at the menu
of an elaborate dinner rejects one dish that he likes very
well to eat his fill of another that he likes better.
When a woman deprives herself of her last piece of
bread to give it to the first comer, when she takes off her
own scanty rags to cover another woman who is cold,
while she herself shivers on the deck of a vessel, she does
so because she would suffer infinitely more in seeing a
hungry man, or a woman starved with cold, than in
shivering or feeling hungry herself. She escapes a pain of
which only those who have felt it know the intensity.
When the Australian, quoted by Guyau, wasted
away beneath the idea that he has not yet revenged his
kinsman's death; when he grows thin and pale, a prey to
the consciousness of his cowardice, and does not return to
life till he has done the deed of vengeance, he performs
this action, a heroic one sometimes, to free himself of a
feeling which possesses him, to regain that inward peace
which is the highest of pleasures.
When a troupe of monkeys has seen one of its
members fall in consequence of a hunter's shot, and
comes to besiege his tent and claim the body despite the
threatening gun; when at length the Elder of the band
goes right in, first threatens the hunter, then implores him,
and finally by his lamentations induces him to give up the
corpse, which the groaning troupe carry off into the
forest, these monkeys obey a feeling of compassion
stronger than all considerations of personal security. This
feeling in them exceeds all others. Life itself loses its
attraction for them while they are not sure whether they
can restore life to their comrade or not. This feeling
becomes so oppressive that the poor brutes do everything
to get rid of it.
When the ants rush by thousands into the flames of
the burning ant-hill, which that evil beast, man, has set on
fire, and perish by hundreds to rescue their larvae, they
again obey a craving to save their offspring. They risk
everything for the sake of bringing away the larvae that
they have brought up with more care than many women
bestow on their children.
To seek pleasure, to avoid pain, is the general line
of action (some would say law) of the organic world.
Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself
would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life
cease.
Thus whatever a man's actions and line of conduct
may be, he does what he does in obedience to a craving of
his nature. The most repulsive actions, no less than
actions which are indifferent or most attractive, are all
equally dictated by a need of the individual who
performs them. Let him act as he may, the individual acts
as he does because he finds a pleasure in it, or avoids, or
thinks he avoids, a pain.
Here we have a well-established fact. Here we have
the essence of what has been called the egoistic theory.
Very well, are we any better off for having reached
this general conclusion?
Yes, certainly we are. We have conquered a truth
and destroyed a prejudice which lies at the root of all
prejudices. All materialist philosophy in its relation to
man is implied in this conclusion. But does it follow that
all the actions of the individual are indifferent, as some
have hastened to conclude? This is what we have now to
see.
III
We have seen that men's actions (their deliberate
and conscious actions, for we will speak afterwards of
unconscious habits) all have the same origin. Those that
are called virtuous and those that are designated as
vicious, great devotions and petty knaveries, acts that
attract and acts that repel, all spring from a common
source. All are performed in answer to some need of the
individual's nature. all have for their end the quest of
pleasure, the desire to avoid pain.
We have seen this in the last section, which is but a
very succinct summary of a mass of facts that might be
brought forward in support of this view.
It is easy to understand how this explanation makes those
still imbued with religious principles cry out. It leaves no
room for the supernatural. It throws over the idea of an
immortal soul. If man only acts in obedience to the needs
of his nature, if he is, so to say, but a "conscious
automaton," what becomes of the immortal soul? What of
immortality, that last refuge of those who have known too
few pleasures and too many sufferings, and who dream of
finding some compensation in another world?
It is easy to understand how people who have
grown up in prejudice and with but little confidence in
science, which has so often deceived them, people who
are led by feeling rather than thought, reject an
explanation which takes from them their last hope.
IV
Mosaic, Buddhist, Christian and Mussulman theologians
have had recourse to divine inspiration to distinguish
between good and evil. They have seen that man, be he
savage or civilized, ignorant or learned, perverse or
kindly and honest, always knows if he is acting well or ill,
especially always knows if he is acting ill. And as they
have found no explanation of this general fact, they have
put it down to divine inspiration. Metaphysical
philosophers, on their side, have told us of conscience, of
a mystic "imperative," and, after all, have changed nothing
but the phrases.
But neither have known how to estimate the very
simple and very striking fact that animals living in
societies are also able to distinguish between good and
evil, just as man does. Moreover, their conceptions of
good and evil are of the same nature as those of man.
Among the best developed representatives of each
separate class, --fish, insects, birds, mammals,-- they are
even identical.
Forel, that inimitable observer of ants, has shown by
a mass of observations and facts that when an ant who has
her crop well filled with honey meets other ants with
empty stomachs, the latter immediately ask her for food.
And amongst these little insects it is the duty of the
satisfied ant to disgorge the honey that her hungry friends
may also be satisfied. Ask the ants if it would be right to
refuse food to other ants of the same anthill when one has
had oneUs share. They will answer, by actions impossible
to mistake, that it would be extremely wrong. So selfish
an ant would be more harshly treated than enemies of
another species. If such a thing happens during a battle
between two different species, the ants would stop
fighting to fall upon their selfish comrade. This fact has
been proved by experiments which exclude all doubt.
Or again, ask the sparrows living in your garden if
it is right not to give notice to all the little society when
some crumbs are thrown out, so that all may come and
share in the meal. Ask them if that hedge sparrow has
done right in stealing from his neighbor's nest those
straws he had picked up, straws which the thief was too
lazy to go and collect himself. The sparrows will answer
that he is very wrong, by flying at the robber and pecking
him.
Or ask the marmots if it is right for one to refuse
access to his underground storehouse to other marmots of
the same colony. they will answer that it is very wrong, by
quarrelling in all sorts of ways with the miser.
Finally, ask primitive man if it is right to take food
in the tent of a member of the tribe during his absence. He
will answer that, if the man could get his food for himself,
it was very wrong. On the other hand, if he was weary or
in want, he ought to take food where he finds it; but in
such a case, he will do well to leave his cap or his knife, or
even a bit of knotted string, so that the absent hunter may
know on his return that a friend has been there, not a
robber. Such a precaution will save him the anxiety
caused by the possible presence of a marauder near his
tent.
Thousands of similar facts might be quoted, whole
books might be written, to show how identical are the
conceptions of good and evil amongst men and the other
animals.
The ant, the bird, the marmot, the savage have read neither
Kant nor the fathers of the Church nor even Moses. And
yet all have the same idea of good and evil. And if you re-
flect for a moment on what lies at the bottom of this idea,
you will see directly that what is considered good among
ants, marmots, and Christian or atheist moralists is that
which is useful for the preservation of the race; and that
which is considered evil is that which is hurtful for race
preservation. Not for the individual, as Bentham and Mill
put it, but fair and good for the whole race.
The idea of good and evil has thus nothing to do
with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of
animal races. And when founders of religions,
philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or
metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each
ant, each sparrow practices in its little society.
Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this
hurtful? Then it is bad.
This idea may be extremely restricted among
inferior animals, it may be enlarged among the more
advanced animals; but its essence always remains the
same.
Among ants it does not extend beyond the anthill.
All sociable customs, all rules of good behavior are
applicable only to the individuals in that one anthill, not
to any others. One anthill will not consider another as
belonging to the same family, unless under some
exceptional circumstances, such as a common distress
falling upon both. In the same way the sparrows in the
Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, though they will mutually
aid one another in a striking manner, will fight to the
death with another sparrow from the Monge Square who
may dare to venture into the Luxembourg. And the
savage will look upon a savage of another tribe as a person
to whom the usages of his own tribe do not apply. It is
even allowable to sell to him, and to sell is always to rob
the buyer more or less; buyer or seller, one or other is
always "sold." A Tchoutche would think it a crime to sell
to the members of his tribe: to them he gives without any
reckoning. And civilized man, when at last he
understands the relations between himself Ind the
simplest Papuan, close relations, though imperceptible at
the first glance, will extend his principles of solidarity to
the whole human race, and even to the animals. The idea
enlarges, but its foundation remains the same.
On the other hand, the conception of good or evil
varies according to the degree of intelligence or of
knowledge acquired. There is nothing unchangeable
about it.
Primitive man may have thought it very right --that is,
useful to the race-- to eat his aged parents when they
became a charge upon the community-- a very heavy
charge in the main. He may have also thought it useful to
the community to kill his new-born children, and only
keep two or three in each family, so that the mother could
suckle them until they were three years old and lavish
more of her tenderness upon them.
In our days ideas have changed, but the means of
subsistence are no longer what they were in the Stone Age.
Civilized man is not in the position of the savage family
who have to choose between two evils: either to eat the
aged parents or else all to get insufficient nourishment
and soon find themselves unable to feed both the aged
parents and the young children. We must transport
ourselves into those ages, which we can scarcely call up
in our mind, before we can understand that in the
circumstances then existing, half-savage man may have
reasoned rightly enough.
Ways of thinking may change. The estimate of what
is useful or hurtful to the race changes, but the
foundation remains the same. And if we wished to sum
up the whole philosophy of the animal kingdom in a
single phrase, we should see that ants, birds, marmots,
and men are agreed on one point.
The morality which emerges from the observation
of the whole animal kingdom may be summed up in the
words: "Do to others what you would have them do to
you in the same circumstances.
And it adds: "Take note that this is merely a piece
of advice; but this advice is the fruit of the long experience
of animals in society. And among the great mass of social
animals, man included, it has become habitual to act on
this principle. Indeed without this no society could exist,
no race could have vanquished the natural obstacles
against which it must struggle."
Is it really this very simple principle which
emerges from the observation of social animals and
human societies? Is it applicable? And how does this
principle pass into a habit and continually develop? This
is what we are now going to see.
V
The idea of good and evil exists within humanity
itself. Man, whatever degree of intellectual development
he may have attained, however his ideas may be obscured
by prejudices and personal interest in general, considers
as good that which is useful to the society wherein he
lives, and as evil that which is hurtful to it.
But whence comes this conception, often so vague
that it can scarcely be distinguished from a feeling? There
are millions and millions of human beings who have
never reflected about the human race. They know for the
most part only the clan or family, rarely the nation, still
more rarely mankind. How can it be that they should
consider what is useful for the human race as good, or
even attain a feeling of solidarity with their clan, in spite
of all their narrow, selfish interests?
This fact has greatly occupied thinkers at all times,
and it continues to occupy them still. We are going in our
turn to give our view of the matter. But let us remark in
passing that though the explanations of the fact may vary,
the fact itself remains none the less incontestable. And
should our explanation not be the true one, or should it
be incomplete, the fact with its consequences to humanity
will still remain. We may not be able fully to explain the
origin of the planets revolving round the sun, but the
planets revolve none the less, and one of them carries us
with it in space.
We have already spoken of the religious
explanation. If man distinguishes between good and evil,
say theologians, it is God who has inspired him with this
idea. Useful or hurtful is not for him to inquire; he must
merely obey the fiat of his creator. We will not stop at this
explanation, fruit of the ignorance and terrors of the
savage. We pass on.
Others have tried to explain the fact by law. It must
have been law that developed in man the sense of just and
unjust, right and wrong. Our readers may judge of this
explanation for themselves. They know that law has
merely utilized the social feelings of man, to slip in,
among the moral precepts he accepts, various mandates
useful to an exploiting minority, to which his nature
refuses obedience. Law has perverted the feeling of
justice instead of developing it. Again let us pass on.
Neither let us pause at the explanation of the
Utilitarians. They will have it that man acts morally from
self-interest, and they forget his feelings of solidarity with
the whole race, which exist, whatever be their origin.
There is some truth in the Utilitarian explanation. But it is
not the whole truth. Therefore, let us go further.
It is again to the thinkers of the eighteenth century
that we are indebted for having guessed, in part at all
events, the origin of the moral sentiment.
In a fine work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, left
to slumber in silence by religious prejudice, and indeed
but little known even among anti-religious thinkers,
Adam Smith has laid his finger on the true origin of the
moral sentiment. He does not seek it in mystic religious
feelings; he finds it simply in the feeling of sympathy.
You see a man beat a child. You know that the
beaten child suffers. Your imagination causes you
yourself to suffer the pain inflicted upon the child; or
perhaps its tears, its little suffering face tell you. And if
you are not a coward, you rush at the brute who is
beating it and rescue it from him.
This example by itself explains almost all the moral
sentiments. The more powerful your imagination, the
better you can picture to yourself what any being feels
when it is made to suffer, and the more intense and
delicate will your moral sense be. The more you are
drawn to put yourself in the place of the other person, the
more you feel the pain inflicted upon him, the insult
offered him, the injustice of which he is a victim, the more
will you be urged to act so that you may prevent the pain,
insult, or injustice. And the more you are accustomed by
circumstances, by those surrounding you, or by the
intensity of your own thought and your own imagination,
to act as your thought and imagination urge, the more will
the moral sentiment grow in you, the more will it become
habitual.
This is what Adam Smith develops with a wealth of
examples. He was young when he wrote this book which is
far superior to the work of his old age upon political econ-
omy. Free from religious prejudice, he sought the
explanation of morality in a physical fact of human nature,
and this is why official and non-official theological
prejudice has put the treatise on the Black List for a
century.
Adam Smith's only mistake was not to have
understood that this same feeling of sympathy in its
habitual stage exists among animals as well as among
men.
The feeling of solidarity is the leading
characteristic of all animals living in society. The eagle
devours the sparrow, the wolf devours the marmot. But
the eagles and the wolves respectively aid each other in
hunting, the sparrow and the marmot unite among
themselves against the beasts and birds of prey so
effectually that only the very clumsy ones are caught. In
all animal societies solidarity is a natural law of far greater
importance than that struggle for existence, the virtue of
which is sung by the ruling classes in every strain that may
best serve to stultify us.
When we study the animal world and try to explain
to ourselves that struggle for existence maintained by
each living being against adverse circumstances and
against its enemies, we realize that the more the principles
of solidarity and equality are developed in an animal
society and have become habitual to it, the more chance
has it of surviving and coming triumphantly out of the
struggle against hardships and foes. The more thoroughly
each member of the society feels his solidarity with each
other member of the society, the more completely are
developed in all of them those two qualities which are the
main factors of all progress: courage on the one hand, md
on the other, free individual initiative. And on the
contrary, the more any animal society or little group of
animals loses this feeling of solidarity --which may chance
as the result of exceptional scarcity or else of exceptional
plenty-- the more do the two other factors of progress
courage and individual initiative, diminish. In the end
they disappear, and the society falls into decay and sinks
before its foes. Without mutual confidence no struggle is
possible; there is no courage, no initiative, no solidarity--
and no victory! Defeat is certain.
We can prove with a wealth of examples how in the
animal and human worlds the law of mutual aid is the
law of progress, and how mutual aid with the courage
and individual initiative which follow from it secures
victory to the species most capable of practicing it.
Now let us imagine this feeling of solidarity acting dur-
ing the millions of ages which have succeeded one another
since the first beginnings of animal life appeared upon the
globe. Let us imagine how this feeling little by little
became a habit, and was transmitted by heredity from the
simplest microscopic organism to its descendants --
insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, man-- and we shall
comprehend the origin of the moral sentiment, which is a
necessity to the animal like food or the organ for
digesting it.
Without going further back and speaking of
complex animals springing from colonies of extremely
simple little beings, here is the origin of the moral
sentiment. We have been obliged to be extremely brief in
order to compress this great question within the limits of
a few pages, but enough has already been said to show
that there is nothing mysterious or sentimental about it.
Without this solidarity of the individual with the species,
the animal kingdom would never have developed or
reached its present perfection. The most advanced being
upon the earth would still be one of those tiny specks
swimming in the water and scarcely perceptible under a
microscope. Would even this exist? For are not the
earliest aggregations of cellules themselves an instance of
association in the struggle?
VI
Thus by an unprejudiced observation of the animal
kingdom, we reach the conclusion that wherever society
exists at all, this principle may be found: Treat others as
you would like them to treat you under similar
circumstances.
And when we study closely the evolution of the
animal world, we discover that the aforesaid principle,
translated by the one word Solidarity, has played an
infinitely larger part in the development of the animal
kingdom than all the adaptations that have resulted from
a struggle between individuals to acquire personal
advantages.
It is evident that in human societies a still greater
degree of solidarity is to be met with. Even the societies of
monkeys highest in the animal scale offer a striking
example of practical solidarity, and man has taken a step
further in the same direction. This and this alone has
enabled him to preserve his puny race amid the obstacles
cast by nature in his way, and to develop his intelligence.
A careful observation of those primitive societies
still remaining at the level of the Stone Age shows to what
a great extent the members of the same community
practice solidarity among themselves.
This is the reason why practical solidarity never
ceases; not even during the worst periods of history. Even
when temporary circumstances of domination, servitude,
exploitation cause the principle to be disowned, it still
lives deep in the thoughts of the many, ready to bring
about a strong recoil against evil institutions, a
revolution. If it were otherwise society would perish.
For the vast majority of animals and men this feeling re-
mains, and must remain an acquired habit, a principle
always present to the mind even when it is continually
ignored in action.
It is the whole evolution of the animal kingdom
speaking in us. And this evolution has lasted long, very
long. It counts by hundreds of millions of years.
Even if we wished to get rid of it we could not. It
would be easier for a man to accustom himself to walk on
fours than to get rid of the moral sentiment. It is anterior
in-- animal evolution to the upright posture of man.
The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the
sense of smell or of touch.
As for law and religion, which also have preached
this principle, they have simply filched it to cloak their
own wares, their injunctions for the benefit of the
conqueror, the exploiter, the priest. Without this principle
of solidarity, the justice of which is so generally
recognized, how could they have laid hold on men's
minds?
Each of them covered themselves with it as with a garment;
like authority which made good its position by posing as the
protector of the weak against the strong.
By flinging overboard law, religion and authority, mankind
can regain possession of the moral principle which
has been taken from them. Regain that they may criticize
it, and purge it from the adulterations wherewith priest,
judge and ruler have poisoned it and are poisoning it yet.
Besides this principle of treating others as one
wishes to be treated oneself, what is it but the very same
principle as equality, the fundamental principle of
anarchism? And how can any one manage to believe
himself an anarchist unless he practices it?
We do not wish to be ruled. And by this very fact,
do we not declare that we ourselves wish to rule nobody?
We do not wish to be deceived, we wish always to be told
nothing but the truth. And by this very fact, do we not de-
clare that we ourselves do not wish to deceive anybody,
that we promise to always tell the truth, nothing but the
truth, the whole truth? We do not wish to have the fruits
of our labor stolen from us. And by that very fact, do we
not declare that we respect the fruits of others' labor?
By what right indeed can we demand that we
should be treated in one fashion, reserving it to ourselves
to treat others in a fashion entirely different? Our sense of
equality revolts at such an idea.
Equality in mutual relations with the solidarity
arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the
animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality
is equity.
By proclaiming ourselves anarchists, we proclaim before-
hand that we disavow any way of treating others in which
we should not like them to treat us; that we will no longer
tolerate the inequality that has allowed some among us to
use their strength, their cunning or their ability after a
fashion in which it would annoy us to have such qualities
used against ourselves. Equality in all things, the
synonym of equity, this is anarchism in very deed. It is not
only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and
authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we
declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning,
exploitation, depravity, vice --in a word, inequality--
which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare
war against their way of acting, against their way of
thinking. The governed, the deceived, the exploited, the
prostitute, wound above all else our sense of equality. It
is in the name of equality that we are determined to have
no more prostituted, exploited, deceived and governed
men and women.
Perhaps it may be said --it has been said sometimes
"But if you think that you must always treat others as you
would be treated yourself, what right have you to use
force under any circumstances whatever? What right have
you to level a cannon at any barbarous or civilized
invaders of your country? What right have you to
dispossess the exploiter? What right to kill not only a
tyrant but a mere viper?"
What right? What do you mean by that singular
word, borrowed from the law? Do you wish to know if I
shall feel conscious of having acted well in doing this ? If
those I esteem will think I have done well? Is this what you
ask? If so the answer is simple.
Yes, certainly! Because we ourselves should ask to
be killed like venomous beasts if we went to invade
Burmese or Zulus who have done us no harm. We should
say to our son or our friend: "Kill me, if I ever take part in
the invasion!"
Yes, certainly! Because we ourselves should ask to
be dispossessed, if giving the lie to our principles, we
seized upon an inheritance, did it fall from on high, to use
it for the exploitation of others.
Yes, certainly! Because any man with a heart asks be-
forehand that he may be slain if ever he becomes
venomous; that a dagger may be plunged into his heart if
ever he should take the place of a dethroned tyrant.
Ninety-nine men out of a hundred who have a wife
and children would try to commit suicide for fear they
should do harm to those they love, if they felt themselves
going mad. Whenever a good-hearted man feels himself
becoming dangerous to those he loves, he wishes to die
before he is so.
Perovskaya and her comrades killed the Russian
Czar. And all mankind, despite the repugnance to the
spilling of blood, despite the sympathy for one who had
allowed the serfs to be liberated, recognized their right to
do as they did. Why? Not because the act was generally
recognized as useful; two out of three still doubt if it were
so. But because it was felt that not for all the gold in the
world would Perovskaya and her comrades have
consented to become tyrants themselves. Even those who
know nothing of the drama are certain that it was no
youthful bravado, no palace conspiracy, no attempt to
gain power. It was hatred of tyranny, even to the scorn of
self, even to the death.
"These men and women," it was said, "had
conquered the right to kill"; as it was said of Louise
Michel, "She had the right to rob." Or again, "They have
the right to steal," in speaking of those terrorists who
lived on dry bread, and stole a million or two of the
Kishineff treasure.
Mankind has never refused the right to use force on
those who have conquered that right, be it exercised upon
the barricades or in the shadow of a cross-way. But if such
an act is to produce a deep impression upon men's
minds, the right must be conquered. Without this, such an
act whether useful or not will remain merely a brutal fact,
of no importance in the progress of ideas. People will see
in it nothing but a displacement of force, simply the
substitution of one exploiter for another.
VII
We have hitherto been speaking of the conscious,
deliberate actions of man, those performed intentionally.
But side by side with our conscious life we have an
unconscious life which is very much wider. Yet we have
only to notice how we dress in the morning, trying to
fasten a button that we know we lost last night, or
stretching out our hand to take something that we
ourselves have moved away, to obtain an idea of this
unconscious life and realize the enormous part it plays in
our existence.
It makes up three-fourths of our relations with
others. Our ways of speaking, smiling, frowning, getting
heated or keeping cool in a discussion, are unintentional,
the result of habits, inherited from our human or pre-
human ancestors (only notice the likeness in expression
between an angry man and an angry beast), or else
consciously or unconsciously acquired.
Our manner of acting towards others thus tends to
become habitual. To treat others as he would wish to be
treated himself becomes with man and all sociable
animals, simply a habit. So much so that a person does
not generally even ask himself how he must act under
such and such circumstances. It is only when the
circumstances are exceptional, in some complex case or
under the impulse of strong passion that he hesitates, and
a struggle takes place between the various portions of his
brain --for the brain is a very complex organ, the various
portions of which act to a certain degree independently.
When this happens, the man substitutes himself in
imagination for the person opposed to him; he asks
himself if he would like to be treated in such a way, and
the better he has identified himself with the person whose
dignity or interests he has been on the point of injuring,
the more moral will his decision be. Or maybe a friend
steps in and says to him: "Fancy yourself in his place;
should you have suffered from being treated by him as he
has been treated by you? And this is enough.
Thus we only appeal to the principle of equality in
moments of hesitation, and in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred act morally from habit.
It must have been obvious that in all we have hitherto
said, we have not attempted to enjoin anything,we have
only set forth the manner in which things happen in the
animal world and amongst mankind.
Formerly the church threatened men with hell to
moralize them, and she succeeded in demoralizing them
instead. The judge threatens with imprisonment, flogging,
the gallows, in the name of those social principles he has
filched from society; and he demoralizes them. And yet
the very idea that the judge may disappear from the earth
at the same time as the priest causes authoritarians of
every shade to cry out about peril to society.
But we are not afraid to forego judges and their
sentences. We forego sanctions of all kinds, even
obligations to morality. We are not afraid to say: "Do what
you will; act as you will"; because we are persuaded that
the great majority of mankind, in proportion to their
degree of enlightenment and the completeness with which
they free themselves from existing fetters will behave and
act always in a direction useful to society just as we are
persuaded beforehand that a child will one day walk on
its two feet and not on all fours simply because it is born
of parents belonging to the genus Homo.
All we can do is to give advice. And again while
giving it we add: "This advice will be valueless if your
own experience and observation do not lead you to
recognize that it is worth following."
When we see a youth stooping and so contracting his
chest and lungs we advise him to straighten himself, hold
up his head and open his chest. We advise him to fill his
lungs and take long breaths, because this will be his best
safeguard against consumption. But at the same time we
teach him physiology that he may understand the
functions of his lungs, and himself choose the posture he
knows to be the best.
And this is all we can do in the case of morals. And
this is all we can do in the case of morals. We have only a
right to give advice, to which we add: "Follow it if it
seems good to you."
But while leaving to each the right to act as he
thinks best; while utterly denying the right of society to
punish one in any way for any anti-social act he may have
committed, we do not forego our own capacity to love
what seems to us good and to hate what seems to us bad.
Love and hate; for only those who know how to hate
know how to love. We keep this capacity; and as this
alone serves to maintain and develop the moral
sentiments in every animal society, so much the more will
it be enough for the human race.
We only ask one thing, to eliminate all that
impedes the free development of these two feelings in the
present society, all that perverts our judgment: --the
State, the church, exploitation; judges, priests,
governments, exploiters.
Today when we see a Jack the Ripper murder one
after another some of the poorest and most miserable of
women, our first feeling is one of hatred.
If we had met him the day when he murdered that
woman who asked him to pay her for her slum lodging,
we should have put a bullet through his head, without
reflecting that the bullet might have been better bestowed
in the brain of the owner of that wretched den.
But when we recall to mind all the infamies which
have brought him to this; when we think of the darkness
in which he prowls haunted by images drawn from
indecent books or thoughts suggested by stupid books,
our feeling is divided. And if some day we hear that Jack
is in the hands of some judge who has slain in cold blood
a far greater number of men, women and children than all
the Jacks together; if we see him in the hands of one of
those deliberate maniacs then all our hatred of Jack the
Ripper will vanish. It will be transformed into hatred of a
cowardly and hypocritical society and its recognized
representatives. All the infamies of a Ripper disappear
before that long series of infamies committed in the name
of law. It is these we hate.
At the present day our feelings are continually thus
divided. We feel that all of us are more or less,
voluntarily or involuntarily, abettors of this society. We
do not dare to hate. Do we even dare to love? In a society
based on exploitation and servitude human nature is
degraded.
But as servitude disappears we shall regain our
rights. We shall feel within ourselves strength to hate and
to love, even in such complicated cases as that we have
just cited.
In our daily life we do already give free scope to
our feelings of sympathy or antipathy; we are doing so
every moment. We all love moral strength we all despise
moral weakness and cowardice. Every moment our
words, looks, smiles express our joy in seeing actions
useful to the human race, those which we think good.
Every moment our looks and words show the repugnance
we feel towards cowardice, deceit, intrigue, want of
moral courage. We betray our disgust, even when under
the influence of a worldly education we try to hide our
contempt beneath those lying appearances which will
vanish as equal relations are established among us.
This alone is enough to keep the conception of
good and ill at a certain level and to communicate it one
to another.
It will be still more efficient when there is no longer
judge or priest in society, when moral principles have
lost their obligatory character and are considered merely
as relations between equals.
Moreover, in proportion to the establishment of
these relations, a loftier moral conception will arise in
society. It is this conception which we are about to
analyze.
VIII
Thus far our analysis has only set forth the simple
principles of equality. We have revolted and invited
others to revolt against those who assume the right to treat
their fellows otherwise than they would be treated
themselves; against those who, not themselves wishing to
be deceived, exploited, prostituted or ill-used, yet behave
thus to others. Lying, and brutality are repulsive, we have
said, not because they are disapproved by codes of
morality, but because such conduct revolts the sense of
equality in everyone to whom equality is not an empty
word. And above all does it revolt him who is a true
anarchist in his way of thinking and acting.
If nothing but this simple, natural, obvious
principle were generally applied in life, a very lofty
morality would be the result; a morality comprising all
that moralists have taught.
The principle of equality sums up the teachings of
moralists. But it also contains something more. This
something more is respect for the individual. By
proclaiming our morality of equality, or anarchism, we
refuse to assume a right which moralists have always
taken upon themselves to claim, that of mutilating the
individual in the name of some ideal. We do not
recognize this right at all, for ourselves or anyone else.
We recognize the full and complete liberty of the
individual; we desire for him plentitude of existence, the
free development of all his faculties. We wish to impose
nothing upon him; thus returning to the principle which
Fourier placed in opposition to religious morality when
he said:
"Leave men absolutely free. Do not mutilate them
as religions have done enough and to spare. Do not fear
even their passions. In a free society these are not
dangerous."
Provided that you yourself do not abdicate your
freedom, provided that you yourself do not allow others
to enslave you; and provided that to the violent and anti-
social passions of this or that person you oppose your
equally vigorous social passions, you have nothing to
fear from liberty.
We renounce the idea of mutilating the individual
in the name of any ideal whatsoever. All we reserve to
ourselves is the frank expression of our sympathies and
antipathies towards what seems to us good or bad. A man
deceives his friends. It is his bent, his character to do so.
Very well, it is our character, our bent to despise liars.
And as this is our character, let us be frank. Do not let us
rush and press him to our bosom or cordially shake
hands with him, as is sometimes done today. Let us
vigorously oppose our active passion to his.
This is all we have the right to do, this is all the
duty we have to perform to keep up the principle of
equality in society. It is the principle of equality in
practice.
But what of the murderer, the man who debauches chil-
dren? The murderer who kills from sheer thirst for blood
is excessively rare. He is a madman to be cured or
avoided. As for the debauchee, let us first of all look to it
that society does not pervert our children's feelings, then
we shall have little to fear from rakes.
All this it must be understood is not completely
applicable until the great sources of moral depravity--
capitalism, religion, justice, government--shall have
ceased to exist. But the greater part of it may be put in
practice from this day forth. It is in practice already.
And yet if societies knew only this principle of
equality; if each man practiced merely the equity of a
trader, taking care all day long not to give others anything
more than he was receiving from them, society would die
of it. The very principle of equality itself would
disappear from our relations. For, if it is to be maintained,
something grander, more lovely, more vigorous than
mere equity must perpetually find a place in life.
And this greater than justice is here.
Until now humanity has never been without large
natures overflowing with tenderness, with intelligence,
with goodwill, and using their feeling, their intellect, their
active force in the service of the human race without
asking anything in return.
This fertility of mind, of feeling or of goodwill
takes all possible forms. It is in the passionate seeker after
truth, who renounces all other pleasures to throw his
energy into the search for what he believes true and right
contrary to the affirmations of the ignoramuses around
him. It is in the inventor who lives from day to day
forgetting even his food, scarcely touching the bread with
which perhaps some woman devoted to him feeds him
like a child, while he follows out the intention he thinks
destined to change the face of the world. It is in the ardent
revolutionist to whom the joys of art, of science, even of
family life, seem bitter, so long as they cannot be shared
by all, and who works despite misery and persecution for
the regeneration of the world. It is in the youth who,
hearing of the atrocities of invasion, and taking literally
the heroic legends of patriotism, inscribes himself in a
volunteer corps and marches bravely through snow and
hunger until he falls beneath the bullets. It was in the
Paris street arab, with his quick intelligence and bright
choice of aversions and sympathies, who ran to the
ramparts with his little brother, stood steady amid the rain
of shells, and died murmuring: "Long live the Commune!"
It is in the man who is revolted at the sight of a wrong
without waiting to ask what will be its result to himself,
and when all backs are bent stands up to unmask the
iniquity and brand the exploiter, the petty despot of a
factory or great tyrant of an empire. Finally it is in all
those numberless acts of devotion less striking and
therefore unknown and almost always misprized, which
may be continually observed, especially among women,
if we will take the trouble to open our eyes and notice
what lies at the very foundation of human life, and
enables it to enfold itself one way or another in spite of
the exploitation and oppression it undergoes.
Such men and women as these, some in obscurity,
some within a larger arena, creates the progress of
mankind. And mankind is aware of it. This is why it
encompasses such lives with reverence, with myths. It
adorns them, makes them the subject of its stories, songs,
romances. It adores in them the courage, goodness, love
and devotion which are lacking in most of us. It transmits
their memory to the young. It recalls even those who have
acted only in the narrow circle of home and friends, and
reveres their memory in family tradition.
Such men and women as these make true morality,
the only morality worthy the name. All the rest is merely
equality in relations. Without their courage, their
devotion, humanity would remain besotted in the mire of
petty calculations. It is such men and women as these who
prepare the morality of the future, that which will come
when our children have ceased to reckon, and have
grown up to the idea that the best use for all energy,
courage and love is to expend it where the need of such a
force is most strongly felt.
Such courage, such devotion has existed in every
age. It is to be met with among sociable animals. It is to be
found among men, even during the most degraded
epochs.
And religions have always sought to appropriate
it, to turn it into current coin for their own benefit. In fact
if religions are still alive, it is because--ignorance apart--
they have always appealed to this very devotion and
courage. And it is to this that revolutionists appeal.
The moral sentiment of duty which each man has
felt in his life, and which it has been attempted to explain
by every sort of mysticism, the unconsciously anarchist
Guyau says, "is nothing but a superabundance of life,
which demands to be exercised, to give itself; at the same
time, it is the consciousness of a power."
All accumulated force creates a pressure upon the
obstacles placed before it. Power to act is duty to act. And
moral "obligation" of which so much has been said or
written is reduced to the conception: the condition of the
maintenance of life is its expansion.
"The plant cannot prevent itself from flowering.
Sometimes to flower means to die. Never mind, the sap
mounts the same," concludes the young anarchist
philosopher.
It is the same with the human being when he is full
of force and energy. Force accumulates in him. He
expands his life. He gives without calculation, otherwise
he could not live. If he must die like the flower when it
blooms, never mind. The sap rises, if sap there be.
Be strong. Overflow with emotional and
intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence,
your love, your energy of action broadcast among others!
This is what all moral teaching comes to.
IX
That which mankind admires in a truly moral man
is his energy, the exuberance of life which urges him to
give his intelligence, his feeling, his action, asking nothing
in return.
The strong thinker, the man overflowing with
intellectual life, naturally seeks to diffuse his ideas. There
is no pleasure in thinking unless the thought is
communicated to others. It is only the mentally poverty-
stricken man, who after he has painfully hunted up some
idea, carefully hides it that later on he may label it with his
own name. The man of powerful intellect runs over with
ideas; he scatters them by the handful. He is wretched if
he cannot share them with others, cannot scatter them to
the four winds, for in this is his life.
The same with regard to feeling. "We are not
enough for ourselves: we have more tears than our own
sufferings claim, more capacity for joy than our own
existence can justify," says Guyau, thus summing up the
whole question of morality in a few admirable lines,
caught from nature. The solitary being is wretched,
restless, because he cannot share his thoughts and feelings
with others. When we feel some great pleasure, we wish to
let others know that we exist, we feel, we love, we live, we
struggle, we fight.
At the same time, we feel the need to exercise our
will, our active energy. To act, to work has become a need
for the vast majority of mankind. So much so that when
absurd conditions divorce a man or woman from useful
work, they invent something to do, some futile and
senseless obligations whereby to open out a field for their
active energy. They invent a theory, a religion, a "social
duty"-- to persuade themselves that they are doing
something useful. When they dance, it is for a charity.
When they ruin themselves with expensive dresses, it is to
keep up the position of the aristocracy. When they do
nothing, it is on principle.
"We need to help our fellows, to lend a hand to the
coach laboriously dragged along by humanity; in any
case, we buzz round it," says Guyau. This need of lending
a hand is so great that it is found among all sociable
animals, however low in the scale. What is all the
enormous amount of activity spent uselessly in politics
every day but an expression of the need to lend a hand to
the coach of humanity, or at least to buzz around it .
Of course this "fecundity of will," this thirst for
action, when accompanied by poverty of feeling and an
intellect incapable of creation, will produce nothing but a
Napoleon I or a Bismarck, wiseacres who try to force the
world to progress backwards. While on the other hand,
mental fertility destitute of well developed sensibility
will bring forth such barren fruits as literary and scientific
pedants who only hinder the advance of knowledge.
Finally, sensibility unguided by large intelligence will
produce such persons as the woman ready to sacrifice
everything for some brute of a man, upon whom she
pours forth all her love.
If life to be really fruitful, it must be so at once in
intelligence, in feeling and in will. This fertility in every
direction is life; the only thing worthy the name. For one
moment of this life, those who have obtained a glimpse of
it give years of vegetative existence. Without this
overflowing life, a man is old before his time, an impotent
being, a plant that withers before it has ever flowered.
"Let us leave to latter-day corruption this life that
is no life," cries youth, the true youth full of sap that longs
to live and scatter life around. Every time a society falls
into decay, a thrust from such youth as this shatters
ancient economic, and political and moral forms to make
room for the up-springing of a new life. What matter if
one or another fall in the struggle! Still the sap rises. For
youth to live is to blossom whatever the consequences! It
does not regret them.
But without speaking of the heroic periods of
mankind, taking every-day existence, is it life to live in
disagreement with one's ideal ?
Now-a-days it is often said that men scoff at the
ideal. And it is easy to understand why. The word has so
often been used to cheat the simple-hearted that a
reaction is inevitable and healthy. We too should like to
replace the word "ideal," so often blotted and stained, by
a new word more in conformity with new ideas.
But whatever the word, the fact remains; every human
being has his ideal. Bismarck had his--however strange--;
a government of blood and iron. Even every philistine has
his ideal, however low.
But besides these, there is the human being who has con-
ceived a loftier ideal. The life of a beast cannot satisfy him.
Servility, lying, bad faith, intrigue, inequality in human
relations fill him with loathing. How can he in his turn
become servile, be a liar, and intriguer, lord it over
others? He catches a glimpse of how lovely life might be
if better relations existed among men; he feels in himself
the power to succeed in establishing these better relations
with those he may meet on his way. He conceives what is
called an ideal.
Whence comes this ideal? How is it fashioned by heredity
on one side and the impressions of life on the other? We
know not. At most we could tell the story of it more or
less truly in our own biographies. But it is an actual fact --
variable, progressive, open to outside influences but
always living. It is a largely unconscious feeling of what
would give the greatest amount of vitality, of the joy of
life.
Life is vigorous, fertile. rich in sensation only on
condition of answering to this feeling of the ideal. Act
against this feeling, and you feel your life bent back on
itself. It is no longer at one, it loses its vigor. Be untrue
often to your ideal and you will end by paralyzing your
will, your active energy. Soon you will no longer regain
the vigor, the spontaneity of decision you formerly knew.
You are a broken man.
Nothing mysterious in all this, once you look upon
a human being as a compound of nervous and cerebral
centers acting independently. Waver between the various
feelings striving within you, and you will soon end by
breaking the harmony of the organism; you will be a sick
person without will. The intensity of your life will
decrease. In vain will you seek for compromises. Never
more will you be the complete, strong, vigorous being
you were when your acts were in accordance with the
ideal conceptions of your brain.
There are epochs in which the moral conception
changes entirely. A man perceives that what he had
considered moral is the deepest immorality. In some
instances it is a custom, a venerated tradition, that is
fundamentally immoral. In others we find a moral system
framed in the interests of a single class. We cast them
overboard and raise the cry "Down with morality!" It
becomes a duty to act "immorally."
Let us welcome such epochs for they are epochs of
criticism. They are an infallible sign that thought is
working in society. A higher morality has begun to be
wrought out.
What this morality will be we have sought to
formulate, taking as our basis the study of man and
animal.
We have seen the kind of morality which is even
now shaping itself in the ideas of the masses and of the
thinkers. This morality will issue no commands. It will
refuse once and for all to model individuals according to
an abstract idea, as it will refuse to mutilate them by
religion, law or government. It will leave to the
individual man full and perfect liberty. It will be but a
simple record of facts, a science. And this science will say
to man: "If you are not conscious of strength within you, if
your energies are only just sufficient to maintain a
colorless, monotonous life, without strong impressions,
without deep joys, but also without deep sorrows, well
then, keep to the simple principles of a just equality. In
relations of equality you will find probably the maximum
of happiness possible to your feeble energies.
"But if you feel within you the strength of youth, if
you wish to live, if you wish to enjoy a perfect, full and
overflowing life --that is, know the highest pleasure which
a living being can desire-- be strong, be great, be vigorous
in all you do.
"Sow life around you. Take heed that if you
deceive, lie, intrigue, cheat, you thereby demean yourself.
belittle yourself, confess your own weakness beforehand,
play the part of the slave of the harem who feels himself
the inferior of his master. Do this if it so pleases you, but
know that humanity will regard you as petty,
contemptible and feeble, and treat you as such. Having no
evidence of your strength, it will act towards you as one
worthy of pity-- and pity only. Do not blame humanity if
of your own accord you thus paralyze your energies. Be
strong on the other hand, and once you have seen
unrighteousness and recognized it as such --inequity in
life, a lie in science, or suffering inflicted by another-- rise
in revolt against the iniquity, the lie or the injustice.
"Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the
struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived;
and a few hours of such life are worth years spent
vegetating.
"Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing
life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy
greater than anything else can give."
This is all that the science of morality can tell you.
Yours is the choice.
