much is sure: Whoever has once tasted Criticism, is disgusted forever after with all dogmatic twaddle.
That is to say, once education and experience have aroused the critical spirit in a man, he straightway loses all belief in brummagem schemes for making the world a one-horse paradise overnight. The chief impression left on a healthy mind by a sound education, indeed, is an impression of what may be called the infinite complexity of the social reaction. An ignorant man believes in short cuts, ready answers, sovereign specifics. He believes, for example, that Peruna will cure Bright’s disease, that such terms as “good” and “bad” have definite and unchangeable meanings, that a simple act of the Legislature is sufficient to stamp out such things as prostitution, avarice, cleverness, drunkenness and the law of natural selection. The educated man is simply a man who knows better. The fact that he knows better is the one practicable test of his education. It may not be a sufficient and infallible test, but nevertheless it is the only test that actually works.
There is no need, I take it, of supporting this proposition with a host of examples, for a large number of them will immediately occur to every reflective man. All proposals for the reduction of enormously complex phenomena to simple equations come from the dreamers of the race, i. e., from those persons whose pressing sense of what ought to be is uncontaminated by any appreciable sense of what is. Viewed romantically, such persons are prophets. Their thinking is not grounded upon reason, but upon intuition—and it is always pleasant to argue that intuition is superior to reason. But viewed realistically, the thing they offer is not prophecy at all, but merely ignorance. It is the business of the persons who possess superior knowledge—that is to say, of those who are better educated—to combat this ignorance with criticism, and to pull off its successive husks, one by one, until finally the inner kernel of truth is revealed. Sometimes that kernel is microscopic, but it is very seldom, of course, that it has no existence at all, for even error is unimaginable save as it is an exaggerated and distorted statement of truth.
The operation of this process is seen most plainly, perhaps, in the field of medicine, for it is probable that men have done more thinking in that field, first and last, than in any other, not even excepting religion. Everyone of us is ill at times, and everyone of us wants to get well. The result of this universal yearning has always been an effort to dispose of ancient difficulties, to find short cuts, to reduce the complex and baffling to a beautiful simplicity. Such has been the origin of all the quack healing cults since the day of Hammurabi. For example, Christian Science. Mrs. Eddy was able to devise her puerile magic, and to believe in it after she had devised it, not because she was educated, for she wasn’t, but precisely because she was incredibly ignorant. Difficulties and objections that would have halted an educated person at the very start did not bother her in the slightest. She was ignorant of the most elementary facts of anatomy and physiology, and so she went blundering on. The result was a healing scheme of unparalleled simplicity—but also one of unparalleled imbecility.
But didn’t it convince many persons who were educated? It did not. It convinced only those who thought they were educated, who passed as educated. It convinced, in the first place, a crowd of women with no more genuine education, whatever their pretensions, than so many chorus girls or Slavonic immigrants. And it convinced, in the second place, a crowd of male boobies so powerful in intellect that they were willing to take the simple word of a vapid old woman, on an extremely recondite and technical question, against the sober and unanimous judgment of men who had devoted their whole lives to studying it. Many of these persons, male and female, were highly estimable. Most of them belonged to Sunday-schools. All of them, so far as I know to the contrary, paid their taxes, beat their children daily and sent money to the heathen. But in the whole lot there was not one who showed the slightest development of that critical faculty which is the chief fruit, sign and essence of true education. They were refined, peacable and honest—but they were infinitely credulous and ignorant.
The same phenomenon is frequently witnessed in the domain of morals. Speaking generally, the most ignorant man is always the most immovably moral man. That is to say, the most ignorant man is always the most sure that his right is the right, and that all other rights are bogus, and that no change in moral values will ever be possible in future, and that the world would be perfect if all dissenters were clapped into jail. Such is the fine, blatant, bumptious morality of vice crusaders, prohibitionists, Sunday snouters and all other such gladiators of Puritanism. The thought that their easy solution of all the problems of the world may be wrong—that civilization may be a vastly more complex affair than they assume it to be—this thought never crosses their minds. They are so sure that they are right that they are ecstatically eager to shed the blood of every man who raises any question about it.
Is it the duty of educated men, who should and do know better, to join in this preposterious bellowing? Or is it their duty to stand forever against it, to expose its weaknesses, one by one, to oppose it with all their might? I leave the answer to every man who esteems the true above the merely sonorous, to every man who feels any responsibility of gratitude for his opportunities to acquire knowledge, to every man who believes that deceit, cant, fustian, hypocrisy and stupidity are evil and shameful things, however virtuous their wrappings. [14 June 1913]
WAR IS GOOD
War is enormously destructive, not only to life and goods, but also to platitudes and platitutidinarians, the pediculidæ3 of civilization. Once the band begins to play and men are on the march there is no audience left for the Bryans and the Billy Sundays, the Carnegies and the Lydia Pinkhams. It is not good but bad fortune that keeps the United States out of the present mix-up. More than any other people we need the burden of resolute and manly effort, the cleansing shock of adversity. A foreign war—and, in particular, a foreign war in which we got the worst of it—would purge the national blood of the impurities which now pollute it. The Civil War had that effect, and for all its horrors, it was of profit to the race. It cut short an era of moralizing, posturing and tub-thumping and ushered in an era of action. It rid us of the abolitionist forever, and of the prohibitionist, the revivalist and the prude at least temporarily. It cleared the way for the unimpeded and unmoral enterprise of the 70’s and 80’s, during which decades the new nation found itself and came to genuine greatness.
The warlike qualities of daring and pugnacity are inherent in all healthy peoples and individuals, and a race must be far gone in decadence before they fall into ill repute. There is something deep down in the soul of every man worthy of the name which makes him crave power and consequence for himself and his own, that he and they may stand clearly above the common run of men. This craving is at the bottom of all that we know of human achievement and all that is loftiest and noblest in human aspiration. It moves the saint in his sheet of flame no less than the general on the battle field; it is as much responsible for the higher forms of sacrifice as for all forms of conquest. Human progress would be impossible without this inborn and irresistible impulse, this eternal will to power.
But civilization, as we all know, attempts a vain but none the less pertinacious war upon it. That security which is one of the chief fruits of civilization gives artificial advantages to the man who has it only faintly—to the poor-spirited, harbor-seeking sort of man—to the compromiser, the “right-thinker,” the joiner, the mob member, the hider behind skirts. And at the same time civilization tries to put an artificial restraint upon the man in whom the will to power is unusually strong, and who makes no effort of his own to throttle it—that is, upon the man of daring enterprise and intelligent self-seeking, the violator of precedents, the assertive and bellicose man, the “bad” citizen. In both directions the pressure is toward conformity, peaceableness, self-effacement. But in neither direction is it strong enough to achieve more than a mere appearance of prevailing. The yearning for self-functioning is still powerful in every healthy individual, and the measure of that self-functioning, in civilized societies, no less than in the sea ooze, is power.
War is a good thing because it is honest, because it admits the central fact of human nature. Its great merit is that it affords a natural, normal and undisguised outlet for that complex of passions and
