CHAPTER X

MYSELF AND MY NEIGHBOR

(Compares the new morality with the old, and discusses the relative importance of our various duties.)

So now we may say that we know what are the great and important things in life. Slowly and patiently, with infinite distress and waste and failure, but yet inevitably, the life of man is being made over and multiplied to infinity, by the power of the thinking mind, impelled by the joy and thrill of the creative action, and guided by the sense of responsibility, the instinct to serve, which we call conscience. To develop these higher faculties is the task we have before us, and the supreme act to which we dedicate ourselves.

So now we are in position to define the word moral. Assuming that our argument be accepted, that action is moral which tends to foster the best and highest forms of life we know, and to aid them in developing their highest powers; that is immoral which tends to destroy the best life we know, or to hinder its rapid development.

Let us now proceed to apply these tests to the practices of man; first as an individual, and then as a social being. What are my duties to myself, and what are my duties to the world about me?

You will note that these questions differ somewhat from those of the old morality. Jesus told us, first, that we should love the Lord our God, and, second, that we should love our neighbor as ourself. Some would say that modern thought has dismissed God from consideration; but I would prefer to say that modern thought has decided that the place where we encounter God most immediately is in our own miraculously expanding consciousness. Our duty toward God is our duty to make of ourselves the most perfect product of the Divine Incarnation that we can become. Our duty to our neighbor is to help him to do the same.

Of course, as we come to apply these formulas, we find that they overlap and mingle inextricably; the two duties are really one duty looked at from different points of view. We

decide that we owe it to ourselves to develop our best powers of thinking, and we discover that in so doing we make ourselves better fitted to live as citizens, better equipped to help our fellow men. We go out into our city to serve others by making the city clean and decent, and we find that we have helped to save ourselves from a pestilence.

The most commonly accepted, or at any rate the most commonly preached, of all formulas is the "golden rule," "Do ⚫ unto others as you would have them do unto you." This formula is good so far as it goes, but you note that it leaves undetermined the all-important question, what ought we to want others to do unto us. If I am an untrained child, what I would have others do unto me is to give me plenty of candy; therefore, under the golden rule, my highest duty becomes to distribute free candy to the world. The "golden rule" is obviously consistent with all forms of self-indulgence, and with all forms of stagnation; it might result in a civilization more static than China.

Or let us take the formula which the German philosopher Kant worked out as the final product of his thinking: "Act so that you would be willing for your action to become a general rule of conduct." Here again is the same problem. There are many possible general rules of conduct. Some would prefer one, some others; and there is no possible way of escape from the fact that before men can agree what to do, they must decide what they wish to make of their lives.

To the formula of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," the answer is obvious enough: "Suppose my neighbor is not worthy of as much love as myself?" To be sure, it is a perilous thing for me to have to decide this question; nevertheless, it may be a fact that I am a great inventor, and that my neighbor is a sexual pervert. There is, of course, a sense in which I may love him, even so; I may love the deeper possibilities of his nature, which religious ecstasy can appeal to and arouse. But in spite of all ecstasies and all efforts, it may be that his disease-physical, mental and moral-has progressed to such a point that it is necessary to confine him, or to castrate him, or even to asphyxiate him painlessly. To say that I must love such a man as myself is, to say the least, to be vague. We can see how the indiscriminate preaching of such a formula would open the flood-gates of sentimentality and fraud.

Modern thinking says: Thou shalt love the highest possibilities of life, and thou shalt labor diligently to foster them; moreover, because life is always growing, and new possibilities are forever dawning in the human spirit, thou shalt keep an open mind and an inquiring temper, and be ready at any time to begin life afresh.

Such is the formula. It is not simple; and when we come to apply it, we find that it constantly grows more complex. When we attempt to decide our duty to ourselves, we find that we have in us a number of different beings, each with separate and sometimes conflicting duties and needs. We have in us the physical man and the economic man, and these clamor for their rights, and must have at least a part of their rights, before we can go on to be the intellectual man, the moral man, or the artistic man. So our life becomes a series of compromises and adjustments between a thousand conflicting desires and duties; between the different beings which we might be, but can be only to a certain extent, and at certain times. We shall see, as we come to investigate one field after another of human activity, that we never have an absolute certainty, never an absolute right, never an absolute duty; never can we shut our eyes, and go blindly ahead upon one course of action, to the exclusion of every other consideration! On the contrary, we sit in the seat of self-determination as a highly trained and skillful engineer. We keep our eyes upon a dozen different gauges; we press a lever here and touch a regulator there; we decide that now is a time for speed, and now for caution; and knowing all the time that the safety, not merely of ourselves, but of many passengers, depends upon the decisions of each moment.

CHAPTER XI

THE MIND AND THE BODY

(Discusses the interaction between physical and mental things, and the possibility of freedom in a world of fixed causes.)

It is our plan, so far as possible, to discuss the problems of the mind in one section of this book, and the problems of the body in another; but just as we found that we could not separate our duties to ourself from our duties to our neighbors, so we find that the mind and the body are inextricably interwoven, and that whenever we probe deeply into one, we discover the other. The interaction of the mind and the body is a fascinating problem into which we must look for a moment, not because we expect to solve it, but because it illuminates the whole subject.

The human body is a machine. It takes in carbon and oxygen, and burns them, and gives out carbon dioxide and other waste products, and develops energy in proportion to the amount of carbon it consumes. This machine has its elaborate apparatus of action and reaction, its sensory organs where outside stimuli are received, its nerves like telegraph wires to carry these impressions, its brain cells to store them and to transform them into reactions. We know to some extent how these brain cells work. We know what portions of the brain are devoted to this or that activity. We know that if we stick a pin into a certain spot we shall paralyze the left forefinger. We know that by injecting a certain drug, or by breathing a certain gas, we can cause this or that sensation or reaction, such as laughing or weeping or mania. We know what poisons are generated in the system by anger, and what chemical changes takes place in a muscle that is tired. All this is part of a vast new science which is called biochemistry, or the chemistry of life.

Our bodies, therefore, are part of the material universe, and subject to the laws or ways of being of this universe. The first of these laws that we know is the law of causation. Every change in the universe has its cause, and that in turn

had another cause; this chain is never broken, no matter how far we go, and the same causes universally produce the same effects. If you see a ball move on a billiard table, you know that the ball did not move itself; you know that something struck the ball or tilted the table. You discover that the motion of the ball moves the air around it, and the waves of that motion are spread through the room. They strike the walls, and the motion is carried on through the walls, and if we had instruments sensitive enough, we could feel the motion of that billiard ball at the other side of the world, and a few million years from now at the most remote of the stars. This is what is called the law of the conservation of energy, and when we discover something like radium which seems to violate that law by giving out unlimited quantities of energy, we investigate and discover a new form of energy locked up in the atom. In the disintegration of the atom we have a source of power which, when we have learned to use it, will multiply perhaps millions of times the powers we are now able to use on this earth. But energy, no matter how many times it is transformed, and in what strange ways it reappears, always remains, and is never destroyed, and never created out of nothing.

My friend the great physiologist once took me into his laboratory and showed me a little aquarium in which some minute creatures were wiggling about-young sea-urchins, if I remember. The physiologist took a bottle containing some chemical, and dropped a single drop into the water, and instantly all these little black creatures, which had been darting aimlessly in every direction through the water, turned and swam all in one direction, toward the light. They swam until they touched the walls of the aquarium, and there they stuck, trying their best to swim farther. "And now," said my friend, "that is what we call a 'tropism,' and all life is a tropism. What you see in that aquarium means that some day we shall know just what combination of chemicals causes a human being to move this way or that, to do this thing or that. When biochemistry has progressed sufficiently, we shall be able to make human qualities, perhaps in the sperm, perhaps in the embryo, perhaps day by day by means of diet or injection."

Said I: "Some day, when bio-chemistry has progressed far enough, you will know what combination of chemicals causes a man to vote the Democratic or Republican ticket."