Read Ebook: The New Optimism by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 354 lines and 22944 words, and 8 pages

"The first great act of creation was accomplished, and on that vast day when, Mercury left definitely behind, the budding of worlds was finished, the sun and the planets around it might have been seen like a golden bee surrounded by its golden children, shining in the night of space.

"The earth was a much brighter place then, for it was simply a globe of incandescent vapour, and yet that glowing vapour held everything. Man and woman, and love and war, beauty and sorrow. Art, poetry, music, hunger, and cruelty.

"That mixture of the abstract and the concrete sounds like rant, but it is not. It is a bald statement of facts. Every thought that man has ever thought, every dream that man has ever dreamed was lying unborn yet in the essence of that globe of incandescent vapour. Every form that ever sketched itself on earth was there, too--from the daisy to the hippopotamus. But as yet there was nothing definite, nothing but the dance of the atoms and the atoms themselves.

"Excuse me for a moment, but what do you mean by the first symptoms of thought?"

"Long, long before the first germ of life began to form, matter in its own mind had worked out the problem of the mountains and the seas; matter had kneaded the moon in its 'dull' hands and flung it up into the sky to be a lamp and a tide-maker; matter had worked out the whole problem of lighting and watering and warming the earth, so that when life appeared in its first humble and rudimentary form, it found a house built for it, water laid on for it, and all the lighting arrangements perfect.

"Yes, to me, sometimes, all that work done by matter on its own account is even more wonderful than all the work done by Life, for even had life never appeared on the world, the labours of 'dull matter' and 'brute force' would still have created the house of the earth."

"It was created for Life to live in?"

"I do not think so. I think the creation of the world was the result of the first vague struggle of the spirit of matter toward higher things. The senseless ferocity of blazing gas had calmed down, and the mind of matter, if I may use the term, had reached the dignity of expressing itself in form; and you will mark that the advance toward higher things was on the road from ferocity to kindliness; that the triumph of matter was not so much in the creation of the forms of hills and plains and mountains and seas from whirling oceans of molten material, as in the creation of those conditions of mildness necessary for the existence of life.

"Yes, before life ever appeared, matter had developed abstract qualities, the benign had separated itself from the malignant, and, under the influence of the benign, Life first peeped out.

"We date everything from that first budding of matter into what we call life. Yet in reality it was the last stage of a long journey, the last act of a long series of actions and reactions, the last triumph of benignity over ferocity in the first stage of the evolution of the world."

"What do you mean by Benignity?"

"I use the word Benignity for all that makes for development of the simple into the complex, and the word Malignity for all that retards it. I will use the words Good and Evil if you like them better, and say that Good in those days was anything that helped forward the evolution of matter, Evil anything that retarded it. The sunray falling on the first jelly-fish was good, the storm that injured it was evil; and Good was good just because it enabled matter to build one storey higher, and Evil was evil just because it tried to pull that storey down.

"Now you have followed me from the very beginning of the world to the first beginnings of life. Have I impressed you logically with one simple fact, that the journey of atoms from a mass of blazing gas to a world where life was just beginning to bud was along one path, and one path only, the path of development?"

"Of course it was."

"And of the other fact are you equally assured?--that the journey from a whirling lava storm to a solid world of comparatively quiet seas and hills and plains and mountains was a glorious journey and a benign?"

"Yes."

"Then we will start with matter on the new journey on which it set forth a million million years ago, using for its carriage the first jelly-fish."

"It had laboured dimly to form the hills, the plains, and the seas, but that part of it which had laboured to form the seas, now that they were formed, found something more to do, found itself developing in a new and strange direction--that of life.

"The energy of matter that had already constructed the solar system and had evolved the rocks and the sea found itself at last held up, cribbed, cabined and confined, with nothing to do.

"Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy, which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.--And, in parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and find its field in a world as yet unknown.

"However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry, nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed their home.

"To me more wonderful than the creation of life is the creation of those external conditions that made life possible. They collectively formed the mould in which life was cast.

"Now, in my sketch of the creation of the sun and planets I have just hinted what the brain can scarcely guess--the scenes of fiery storm and horror that preceded the welding of the world into a solid whole and the birth of the conditions that made life possible. But these are less halting to thought than the scenes of ferocity that filled the earth when life awoke, raging and tempestuous, and form began to devour form as though the world energy were eating its way through all forms to reach the form of man. And that is, in fact, the truth. Man has been reached by teeth just as the hills have been reached by fire. And not only man. The dove that was once a pterodactyl, the dog that was once a wolf, the cat that was once a tiger, and a thousand other things once terrible, thoughtless and ferocious, all these have come along the very path that the hills and the seas came along in their making--the path from negation and through ferocity to the benign.

"Now, can you not see why the fact that I was once a swimming reptile,--just as you were--devouring other reptiles, is a fact that I would not barter for all fancies? for by its light and by what astronomy and geology and the other sciences tell me I can see that the world, taken as a whole, has a glorious and definite meaning.

"And the gist of the meaning is this: that side by side with the evolution of world forms, from the liquid lava wave to the solid rock, from the rock to the saurian, and from the saurian to man, has gone the evolution of world character and the development of a world spirit; and that the beauty of kindliness and benignity and good receives its deep, deep significance from the fact that all the labour of the world since the first cooling of its fires has been directed along the path leading to these three gods. Nothing is more clear than that, and nothing can be more definitely proved. There is no use at all in fixing your eyes on the Jurassic period and saying, 'What monsters are here!' or on a London slum and saying, 'How terrible life is! It can have no meaning!' There is no use in fixing your eyes on a thousand years of history and saying, 'I see no development. Men were as good then as they are now.' You must take a billion years in your purview, to see the amazing and glorious thing as it is, and then what you will see will be strangely like the growth and unfolding of a flower--or the flowering of a bramble."

"I believe in dreams, but I have no faith except in hard facts. Those hard facts tell me that the sun, toward which everything grows to-day, is the same sun toward which the seas and the hills and the rocks grew before life exhibited itself first, and toward which life has grown since its birth; and that sun is the sun of Amelioration, Benignity, Good, and Gentleness. Let us call it by the great good word that embraces all these things: Good. Well, then, the world, since the beginning, has grown toward Good."

"Do you deny the soul?"

"I do not. I know nothing about it. I am quite content to live in a world that is slowly and steadily developing in benignity, and to assist that development in my small way by trying to develop the benignity in myself.

"I do not trouble about my soul one iota, but I am deeply concerned to keep on that upward path along which earth is ascending."

"Ah, but how can one do that?"

"But you are neither ferocious nor cruel?"

"Perhaps not actively, but just as I carry in my material brain the eye of the extinct monster I once was, so do I carry in my mind the remnants of the passions of the reptile that once was me, the lust of the reptile and the hatred. I do not tear other human beings with my teeth, but I have torn them by deeds and words. I have been cruel--who has not? lustful--who has not? inspired by hatred--who has not? I have regretted these things--who has not?--and forgotten them--who has not?"

"But since I have taken a broad view of the world, since I have seen that all these things are part and parcel of the malignity from which earth is freeing herself in her journey toward the Benign, I have come to hate those things as a man on the road to some brilliant festival might hate the obstacles on his path."

"But since you have no surety that you possess an individual soul, you have no surety of ever reaching the festival."

"I cannot help that. My immediate aim is to keep up with the procession. I leave the rest to chance."

"All that," said she, "seems true. No one can deny that the world has developed; no one can deny that the world has developed along the path that leads to gentleness and good. The world is like a big head, isn't it? With all its brains on the outside."

"Just. It began to think like a jelly-fish; then it went on to the consciousness of the first reptile; then it went on till it thought like an animal, and finished by thinking like a man. The world, as you say, is a big head, with its brains on the outside. But during the last hundred years an astounding development has taken place in the world of ethics. Philosophically speaking now, there is no such thing as an individual brain; every brain in the western world is only a cell in the universal brain. And the universal brain is developing on lines of its own, and in precisely the same way as the individual brain developed.

"A hundred--or shall we say eighty?--years ago, the brain of the world consisted of a number of isolated thought centres. A thought took six months to reach Australia from England, and two days to reach London from Manchester. Then came railways, the printing-press, and the electric telegraph; and in a hundred years the universal brain has developed from almost nothing into a highly complex organism.

"This new power of man to think universally has not been recognized by philosophers for what it is. It is practically the fusion of all brains into one great brain and the creation of a new organism. Formerly there were men in the world--now there is Man. Roughly speaking, every brain in the western world is joining, now, with every other brain, and the universal brain thinks as a whole. You remember, I defined the Benign as that which assists the elevation of the simple to the complex, and if, as I fully believe, all evolution is the child of the Benign, ought we not to look at this evolution of the universal brain with a critical eye, to discover whether it is following in the same path as the world followed in its development from seas of fire to hills and plains; and as the individual brain followed in its evolution from the brain of the saurian to the brain of the civilised man?

"What do we find?

"We find that the development of the universal brain has followed in exactly the same path that all matter has followed from the very beginning of things. The development has been extraordinarily rapid and the stride toward Good has been mathematically in keeping with the development. And it is absolutely truthful to say that since joining this great confederation of thought the individual brain of man has advanced on the road of ethical progress more in the last hundred years than in all the years between the birth of Christ and the eighteenth century.

"To see what has really happened, let us look far back over the civilisations of the world. Egypt was great, and vanished; Athens brought art and philosophy and culture to their highest pitch, and died; Rome arose, and fell thundering in ruins into the night of the Middle Ages. For all these civilisations were in reality segregated communities, and even in the communities themselves thought was not universal. And if you watch civilisation rising from the mist of the Middle Ages, you will see that it rose not by the power of the word or of precept, but of the printing-press, the telegraph, and the train--that is to say, by the universalisation of thought.

"A hundred years ago men were still half bogged in the Middle Ages. Men, compared to what men are now, were stupid, brutal, and merciless. Brains there were, and clever brains, but the universal brain was not born. The individual brain has reached its limit of development as an individual brain and was preparing for its great development as a part of the universal brain.

"What happened was this. From the printing-press, from the steam-engine, and from the electric telegraph station all sorts of threads began to spin, joining mind to mind. The minds of Birmingham became linked up with the minds of London, those of London with Paris. The remotest country village to-day thinks with the greatest town. A giant of thought has suddenly arisen in the place of a thousand pigmies; he has developed in the short space of eighty or a hundred years, and his development has been on the line leading to Beneficence. And this giant is a new creation, as important as the creation of earth from fire, and of life from earth.

"There have been, in fact, three creations. The creation of the material earth; the creation of life, which reached its ultimate form in men; and the creation of Man from the scattered tribes of men. Man the giant , and who feels in the London part of his brain a pain that exists in the Congo or Putumayo part of his brain. Man, who, though a giant, is still in his infancy and who, when he has reached his teens, will be a much more perfect being than he is now.

"Ah, but will he?"

"Look back at the earth struggling up from chaos, and always and always advancing toward the good; set back now, perhaps, for a million years by the ferocity of life fighting for its foothold in the age of the saurians and the monsters, breaking past that fearful period till those terrible forms are utterly destroyed and there is moulded from them the kindlier animals, and, from them, animals more kindly still; and until among them are seen the first vague forms of men.

"Then look at these forms of men, how steadily they have advanced in perfection and toward the good. Steadily, I say, though at times the advance has been set back for perhaps a thousand years--till the highest development of individual man was reached. That is to say, the highest development that men could reach toward the good as individual entities.

"Then what happened? From purely material causes all these individual entities have become, or are becoming, fused into one great universal entity. The struggle of the world spirit to higher things found itself held up by the individual brain, just as before the birth of organic life it found itself held up by the limits of the inorganic world. It burst that boundary, and now it has burst the narrow limit imposed by the individual mind and has found a new outlet for its energies in the mind universal.

"And that mind, though recently formed, is developing hugely in the direction of the good. It may receive set-backs, but even in the hundred years since its birth, look at the beneficence displayed in its working, and look at the effect of that beneficence on the lives of the individual men it has taken into its great keeping.

"Since Man has arisen to take charge of the world, Justice and Mercy have marked his dealings with men. All things have improved, and ferocity and injustice have found themselves under the sway of a cruel tyrant who is turning them into the wilderness to keep company with the tigers and the remnants of a world that was once all ferocity and cruelty.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet