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Page 40
We cannot, then, get the ideal itself from nature,
and as we follow here the first and natural speculation, we will
leave out (for the present) the idea of getting it from God.
We must have our own vision. But the attempts of most moderns
to express it are highly vague.
Some fall back simply on the clock: they talk as if mere
passage through time brought some superiority; so that even a man
of the first mental calibre carelessly uses the phrase that human
morality is never up to date. How can anything be up to date?--
a date has no character. How can one say that Christmas
celebrations are not suitable to the twenty-fifth of a month?
What the writer meant, of course, was that the majority is behind
his favourite minority--or in front of it. Other vague modern
people take refuge in material metaphors; in fact, this is the chief
mark of vague modern people. Not daring to define their doctrine
of what is good, they use physical figures of speech without stint
or shame, and, what is worst of all, seem to think these cheap
analogies are exquisitely spiritual and superior to the old morality.
Thus they think it intellectual to talk about things being "high."
It is at least the reverse of intellectual; it is a mere phrase
from a steeple or a weathercock. "Tommy was a good boy" is a pure
philosophical statement, worthy of Plato or Aquinas. "Tommy lived
the higher life" is a gross metaphor from a ten-foot rule.
This, incidentally, is almost the whole weakness of Nietzsche,
whom some are representing as a bold and strong thinker.
No one will deny that he was a poetical and suggestive thinker;
but he was quite the reverse of strong. He was not at all bold.
He never put his own meaning before himself in bald abstract words:
as did Aristotle and Calvin, and even Karl Marx, the hard,
fearless men of thought. Nietzsche always escaped a question
by a physical metaphor, like a cheery minor poet. He said,
"beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say,
"more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
Had he faced his thought without metaphors, he would have seen that it
was nonsense. So, when he describes his hero, he does not dare to say,
"the purer man," or "the happier man," or "the sadder man," for all
these are ideas; and ideas are alarming. He says "the upper man,"
or "over man," a physical metaphor from acrobats or alpine climbers.
Nietzsche is truly a very timid thinker. He does not really know
in the least what sort of man he wants evolution to produce.
And if he does not know, certainly the ordinary evolutionists,
who talk about things being "higher," do not know either.
Then again, some people fall back on sheer submission
and sitting still. Nature is going to do something some day;
nobody knows what, and nobody knows when. We have no reason for acting,
and no reason for not acting. If anything happens it is right:
if anything is prevented it was wrong. Again, some people try
to anticipate nature by doing something, by doing anything.
Because we may possibly grow wings they cut off their legs.
Yet nature may be trying to make them centipedes for all they know.
Lastly, there is a fourth class of people who take whatever
it is that they happen to want, and say that that is the ultimate
aim of evolution. And these are the only sensible people.
This is the only really healthy way with the word evolution,
to work for what you want, and to call THAT evolution. The only
intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among men,
is that we have a definite vision, and that we wish to make
the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so,
the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the
mere method and preparation for something that we have to create.
This is not a world, but rather the material for a world.
God has given us not so much the colours of a picture as the colours
of a palette. But he has also given us a subject, a model,
a fixed vision. We must be clear about what we want to paint.
This adds a further principle to our previous list of principles.
We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it.
We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary)
in order to have something to change it to.
We need not debate about the mere words evolution or progress:
personally I prefer to call it reform. For reform implies form.
It implies that we are trying to shape the world in a particular image;
to make it something that we see already in our minds. Evolution is
a metaphor from mere automatic unrolling. Progress is a metaphor from
merely walking along a road--very likely the wrong road. But reform
is a metaphor for reasonable and determined men: it means that we
see a certain thing out of shape and we mean to put it into shape.
And we know what shape.
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