The Philosophy of Bernard Shaw

ONE of the most oddly significant commentaries upon the Anglo-Saxon indifference to the great ideas of the century whenever they are concretized into the form of actable drama, is furnished by the amazing unanimity, on the part of dramatic critics in both England and America, in denying the actual existence of such an entity as the Shavian philosophy. So irreparably is the average theatrical newsman, by courtesy dubbed Dramatic Critic, divorced from the real life of philosophy, ethics, politics, and sociology; so hopelessly is his critical perception warped by the romantic conventions, senescent models, and classic traditions of the stage; so entirely does he breathe the air of boxoffice receipts, shine in the reflected halo of “ stars,” or dwell in the unreal atmosphere of stage human nature, that when the new truths of a new philosophy present themselves to his judgment, his power to recognize them as valuable or even as truths, is irretrievably lost. And if perchance the dramatist, accepting as a mere rhetorical question Horace’s “Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid vetat ? ” possesses the genius and the hardihood to embody his profoundly serious views of life in brilliantly witty and epigrammatic expression, let him beware of the penalty of being regarded as a frivolous and light-headed near-philosopher!

Stranger still, one might even venture to say almost remarkable, is the attitude of the leading English and American dramatic critics, who are men of the world in the large sense, thoroughly cosmopolitan in spirit. Mr. Walkley is quite willing to admit that Bernard Shaw has let in a fresh current of ideas upon the English drama; and yet, in that airy manner of his with which he brushes aside, but does not dispose of, real problems, he nonchalantly dubs these ideas the loose ends of rather questionable German philosophy. There seems little reason to doubt that Mr. Archer was quite sincere in his expressed belief that Bernard Shaw’s philosophy may be picked up at any second-hand bookstall. Mr. Huneker is by no means unique in the opinion that Shaw’s dramatic characters are mere mouth pieces for the ideas of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ibsen.

It might be imagined that the verdict of Continental Europe, where so many of the most modern conceptions, most vitally fecund ideas, originate and flourish, would carry with it some weight of authority. America inaugurated Shaw’s world-renown by recognizing in him a brilliant and witty personage who succeeded in entertaining the public through the adventitious medium of the stage. It was not until Shaw’s plays swept from one end of Europe to the other that Shaw came to be recognized abroad as a man of ideas rather than a mere theatre-poet; indeed, as a genius of penetrative insight and philosophic depth. Forced by the example of America and Europe to recognize in Shaw a dramatist of Continental calibre and range, England at last accorded to Shaw, the dramatist, the acknowledgment so long and so discreditably overdue. Nevertheless, the English dramatic critics still continued to refer Shaw’s philosophy to Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Strindberg, “ knowing nothing about them,” as Mr. Shaw once remarked to me, “ except that their opinions, like mine, are not those of The Times or The Spectator.”

It is at least worthy of notice that Shaw does not claim to be a great novelist, or a great dramatist, or a great critic; for, as Mr. Chesterton says, he is very dogmatic, but very humble. Indeed, Mr. Shaw once wrote me that he does not claim to be great: either he is or he is not great, and that is an end of the matter. But it is highly significant that Shaw does specifically claim to be a philosopher. Shaw’s philosophical ideas have been regarded by English and American critics either as of undoubted European derivation, or else as fantastic paradoxes totally unrelated to the existing body of thought. “ I urge them to remember,” Shaw remonstrates. “ that this body of thought is the slowest of growths and the rarest of blossomings, and that if there is such a thing on the philosophic plane as a matter of course, it is that no individual can make more than a minute contribution to it.” An earnest effort to discover Shaw’s original “ minute contribution ” to the existing body of thought is, it seems to me, a much more worthy undertaking than glib accusations of plagiarism; and the introduction of chronological evidence and personal testimony may tend to prove that Shaw is essentially an independent thinker, with a clearly coördinated system of philosophy. Let us critically endeavor, then, in the language of political economy, to award Shaw his merited “ rent of ability.”

My studies of the life and work of Bernard Shaw have led me to the unwavering conclusion that every phase in his career is the logical outcome of his socialism. His philosophy is the consistent integration of his empirical criticisms of modern society and its present organization, founded on authority and based upon capitalism. In essence, Shaw’s drama is socially deterministic; his characters are what they are, become what they become, far less on account of heredity or ancestral influence than on account of the social structure of the environment through which their fate is moulded. Economist as well as moralist, Shaw attributes paramount importance to the economic and political conditions of the régime in which his characters live and move and have their being. His drama has its true origin in the conflict between the wills of his characters and the social determinism perpetually at work to destroy their freedom. The germ idea of his philosophy is rooted in the effort to supplant modern social organization by socialism, through the intermediary of the free operation of the will of humanity.

Shaw’s fundamental postulate is that morality is transitory, evolutional — a concomitant fluxion of civilization. “ What people call vice is eternal,” he once wrote; “ what they call virtue is mere fashion.” This is only an extravagant, epigrammatic mode of stating that morality is not simply “ purement géographique,” as an eminent Frenchman once observed, but a creature of occasion, conditioned by circumstance and environment. Historically considered, progress connotes repudiation of custom and abrogation of authority; the step from the premise that morality is a variable function of civilization to the conclusion that salvation lies alone in revolt, is inevitable. Huxley says in a passage truly Shavian, “ History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.”

To the student of modern art and thought, there is nothing especially paradoxical, or even novel, in the notion that morality flows. “ The ideal is dead; long live the ideal! ” is the epitome of all human progress. In the nineteenth century men ceased to be always on the side of the angels and the devil began to get his due. The day of the advocatus diaboli of the saintly anarch, has dawned. The whole anarchistic spirit of our time is summed up in the words of a character in one of Ibsen’s plays: “The old beauty is no longer beautiful; the new truth is no longer true.” Every age has its dominant, accepted ideas and forms, petrifactions, crystallizations; but, as Georg Brandes has said, “ Besides these it owns another whole class of quite different ideas, which have not yet taken shape, but are in the air, and are apprehended by the greatest men of the age as the results which must now be arrived at.” The ideas of the evolutionary trend of human ideals, of the triumphant hypocrisy of current morality, of the necessity for repudiating the code of the multitude, were in the air; they were slowly being arrived at by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Stirnir in philosophy; by Lassalle, Marx, and Morris in economics and sociology; by Ibsen, Mark Twain, Shelley, Ruskin, and Carlyle in literature and art. Bernard Shaw epitomizes the movement in a phrase: “ Duty is what one should never do; ” and embodies his faith in a perfect epigram: “ The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.” The literature of the age resounds with the “ rattle of twentieth-century tumbrils.”

The destruction of the principle of alien authority involves the necessity for the creation of the individual standard. Nietzsche has defined freedom as the will to be responsible for one’s self. And Max Stirnir, scorning the claims of the species, avers that “ to be a man is not to realize the ideal of Man, but to present one’s self, the individual. It is not how I realize the generally human that needs to be my task, but how I satisfy myself. I am my species, am without law, without model, and the like. It is possible that I can make very little out of myself; but this little is everything, and is better than what I allow to be made out of me by the might of others, by the training of custom, religion, the laws, the State, etc.” Whilst differing fundamentally from Nietzsche merely in the advocacy of socialism, and from Stirnir in profound concern for the progressive evolution of the species, Shaw is in agreement with them both in desiring the autonomy of the individual. Like many a great master from Molière to Whitman, from Rabelais to Rousseau, Shaw raises the world-old cry, “ Back to Nature.”

The repudiation of the idea of duty, and of the principle of alien authority, throws the source of action upon the individual; and to Shaw, naturam sequere means to heed the voice of instinct in the conduct of life. Shaw turns from the guidance of “ conscience,” so-called, to the dictates of natural impulse; and is unwavering in urging to the fullest extent the Protestant’s claim of right of private judgment in all matters of conscience. And in doing so, he realizes full well that whilst “ heterodoxy in art is at worst rated as eccentricity or folly, heterodoxy in morals is at once rated as scoundrelism, and, what is worse, propagandist scoundrelism, which must, we are told, if successful, undermine society and bring us back to barbarism after a period of decadence like that which brought imperial Rome to its downfall.”

I do not believe that I am exaggerating in saying that Shaw’s life-work, ethically considered, has consisted in an attack upon the conception that passions are necessarily base and unclean; his art works are glorifications of the man of conviction who can find a motive, and not an excuse, for his passions; whose conduct flows from his own ideas of right and wrong; and who obeys the law of his own nature in defiance of appearance, of criticism, of alien authority — in a word, of any external trammel whatsoever. “ The ingrained habit of thinking of the propensities of which we are ashamed as ‘our passions,’ ” Shaw has pointed out, “ and of our shame of them and of the propensities to noble conduct as a negative and inhibitory deportment called our conscience, leads us to conclude that to accept the guidance of our passions is to plunge recklessly into the insupportable tedium of what is called a ‘ life of pleasure.’ Reactionists against the almost equally insupportable slavery of what is allied a ‘ life of duty ’ are nevertheless willing to venture on these terms.” But, according to Shaw, the would-be wicked ones find, when they come to the point, that “ the indispensable qualification for a wicked life is not freedom, but wickedness.”

The difficulty of personal conduct guided by instinct, with its oftentimes appalling consequences, is fully recognized by Shaw; and yet it must be clearly grasped that he does not see anarchy as the outcome of repudiation of duty. Instead of accepting the nude anarchistic formula of Maurice Barrés, for example, — Fais ce que tu reux, — Shaw may be understood to enjoin: “ Form your moral conscience, and act as it directs you.” This morality is no new thing under the sun; for Maurice Maeterlinck has declared that our morality of to-day has nothing to add to this injunction, found in the Arabian Nights: “ Learn to know thyself! And do thou not act till then. And do thou then only act in accordance with all thy desires, but having great care always that thou do not injure thy neighbor.” Even when we do form our moral conscience and act as it directs us, the difficulties are still immense, as both Shaw and Nietzsche have pointed out; and the “ experiment ” — for it can only be regarded as a tentative proposal — requires great strength of purpose and great force of will. “ For too long a time man regarded his natural bents with an ‘ evil eye,’ ” writes Nietzsche, “so that in the end they became related to ‘ bad conscience.’ A reverse experiment is in itself possible — but who is strong enough for it ? ”

Maurice Maeterlinck is committed to the view that great ideas belong to the species, not to the individual; and even justice appears to him as an instinct whose tendency is the defense and conservation of humanity. Shaw likewise sees in truth and justice, not abstract principles external to man, but human passions, which have, in their time, conflicted with higher passions as well as with lower ones. Temperament, guided by passion and operating instinctively, is Shaw’s picture of the free, natural man to whose state a return is, in his eyes, desirable. Mr. Shaw once went so far as deliberately to assure me that the universal application of the Shavian philosophy does actually take place. America’s greatest living man of letters, after a long life of the most varied experience, recently expressed his conviction that every human action found its primary and invariable source in the egoistic instinct for self-satisfaction predominant in every human being. Pursuant to this view, he epitomized the philosophy of a great life — his own — in the admonition: “ Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward towards a summit where you will find your chiefest pleasure in conduct which, while contenting you, will be sure to confer benefits upon your neighbor and the community.”

It seems to be true that, in reality, the great majority of people do not do what they please, but, aside from scruples of conscience, find it vastly more satisfactory and more convenient to conform to prevailing standards of right and wrong. Indeed, the real limitations to the application of the Shavian philosophy are given by Shaw himself in the assertion that “ the men in the street have no use for principles, for they can neither understand nor apply them; and that what they can understand and apply are arbitrary rules of conduct, often frightfully destructive, but at least definite rules enabling the common stupid man to know where he stands, and what he may do and not do without getting into trouble.” That is, most people can and actually do fulfill their desires only within the limits prescribed by the prevailing code of morality. The average man is neither a philosopher nor a moralist; and so he is unable to get through the world without being told what to do and what not to do at every turn. “ As the race evolves,” Shaw pertinently remarks, “ many a convention which recommends itself by its obvious utility to every one, passes into an automatic habit, like breathing; and meanwhile the improvement in our nerves and judgment enlarges the list of emergencies which individuals may be trusted to deal with on the spur of the moment without reference to regulations; but there will for many centuries to come be a huge demand for a ready-made code of conduct for general use, which will be used more or less as a matter of overwhelming convenience by all members of communities.”

The final effect of the Shavian philosophy is to substitute conscience for conformity. Readiness to over-ride tradition, to act unconventionally, to violate the current code of morality, requires moral courage of the very highest order. The sense of responsibility is infinitely deepened. One of John Tanner’s epigrams is, “ Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.” Shavianism is the philosophy for the reformer who is driven by the “passion of a great faith.” The prime restriction of Shavianism is that it is, in Nietzsche’s illuminating phrase, “ the privilege of the fewest.” Its fundamental limitation inheres in the step of exchanging the golden rule of personal conduct for the iron law of personal responsibility. Shaw celebrates the heroism of the man who believes in himself and dares do the thing he wills,— a heroism requiring great force of character, great moral strength. Emancipation comes only when man fulfills his duty to himself; but one’s duty to one’s self, as Shaw has reminded us, is no duty at all, since a debt is cancelled when the debtor and creditor are the same person. Its payment, in Shaw’s phrase, is simply a “fulfillment of the individual will, upon which all duty is a restriction.” Giving free rein to one’s natural instincts means nothing more or less than the fulfillment of the individual will. This is the goal toward which Shaw’s philosophy is directed. In his plays he has sought to reveal to us instinctive temperaments whose motives are deep down in the will itself.

Shaw appears to many people, especially to women, as a cynic, because he nonchalantly proceeds in the firm belief that, whereas people imagine that their actions and feelings are dictated by moral systems, by religious systems, by codes of honor and conventions of conduct which lie outside the real human will, as a matter of fact these conventions do not supply them with their motives but merely serve as very plausible ex post facto excuses for their conduct. Some people see only repulsive greed in the injunction, “Take care to get what you like, or you wall have to like what you get; ” whilst many are revolted by Ann Whitefield’s motto, “ The only really simple thing to do is to go straight for what you want and grab it.” And the charge that Shaw depicts only frauds, impostors, poseurs, cads, bounders, hypocrites, and humbugs, is quite fully disposed of by Shaw’s expressed conviction that it is conceit, and not hypocrisy, that makes a man think he is guided by reasoned principles when he is really obeying his instincts.

Let us make quite clear to ourselves, before proceeding further, that there is no substantial basis whatsoever for the charge that Shaw is a mouthpiece for the ideas of Stirnir, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Ibsen. “ If all this talk about my indebtedness to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche continues,” Mr. Shaw laughingly remarked to me one day, “ I really will have to read their works in order to discover just what we have in common.” I have never heard Mr. Shaw speak Stirnir’s name. I do not recall any mention of Stirnir in all of Shaw’s works, and I have no reason to believe that Shaw is indebted to him in the slightest degree. Whilst Shaw accepts the metaphysics, or, as he prefers to call it, the “ metaphysiology ” of Schopenhauer, he utterly repudiates his profoundly pessimistic conclusion that life is not worth living.

“ I cannot accept for a moment,” Mr. Shaw once averred to me, “ Schopenhauer’s fundamental doctrine that the will which urges us to live in spite of the fact that life is not worth living, is a malign torturer, the desirable end of all things being the Nirvana of the stilling of the will, and the consequent setting of life’s sun ‘ into the blind cave of eternal night.’ ”

It is quite true that, like Stirnir, Shaw is an intellectual anarch; but he has no real sympathy for Stirnir’s Eigentum, for the reason that, though Shaw is an individualist, he is likewise a constitutional collectivist. He sees no real conflict — and here stands out his fundamental disagreement with Stirnir — between individualism and socialism. Shaw has always deliberately affirmed that the alleged opposition between socialism and individualism is false and question-begging; and he once went so far as to propound the following striking definition: “Socialism is merely individualism rationalized, organized, clothed, and in its right mind.” Like Nietzsche, Shaw is firmly convinced that our old morality is a piece of comedy; and he is at one with Ibsen in the assertion that neither our moral conceptions nor our artistic forms have an eternity before them. Yet, as a matter of chronologic fact, Shaw had written novels saturated with “ Ibsenism ” before he had ever read a line, or even heard, of Ibsen. And I have it from Shaw himself that the charge that his Quintessence of Ibsenism derived its philosophy from Jenseits von Gut und Böse for the first time directed his attention to Friedrich Nietzsche. Dr. Georg Brandes makes the curious mistake of attributing to the influence of Ibsen the social discontent of Bernard Shaw, who had been a vigorous socialist propagandist for five years before he became acquainted with Ibsen’s works. Signor Mario Borsa finds a rationalist pur et simple in Shaw — in Shaw, who regards the reign of reason as vieux jeu, and declares again and again that man will always remain enslaved so long as he listens to the voice of reason! Indeed, nothing so utterly separates Shaw from Schopenhauer as Shaw’s refusal to fall into Schopenhauer’s cardinal rationalist error which consisted in making happiness the test of life. Shaw regards happiness and beauty as mere by-products; and his celebration of instinct explains his real opposition to Romance as the great heresy which must be swept off from modern art and life.

The keynote of Shaw’s philosophy — the “Shavian Philosophy,” as he denominates it — is pursuit of life for its own sake. Life is realized only as activity thatsatisfies the will: that is, as self-assertion. Every extension or intensification of activity is an increase of life. Quantity and quality of activity measure the value of existence. Bernard Shaw sees in life, not tire fulfillment of moral law, or the verification of the deductions of reason, but the satisfaction of a passion in us of which we can give no account.

The liberation of the natural instincts of man, as we have seen, amounts precisely to fulfillment of the individual will. Shaw accordingly proceeds to posit a great purpose informing the universe —a genuinely mystical concept paralleling the Christian’s idea of God, Schopenhauer’s concept of the Wille zu leben, or Nietzsche’s concept of the Wille zur Macht. This force, which Shaw calls the LifeForce, he identifies with the human will. “ The Life-Force must not be imagined as standing apart from ordinary things,” says Mr. Holbrook Jackson in his acute study of Shaw. “ It is neither an outside and independent deity nor a metaphysical toy. On the contrary, the Life-Force has for Shaw no other existence than that of living things. Just as there is no such thing as poverty, but only poor people; just as there is no such thing as happiness, but only happy beings; or no such thing as beauty, but only beautiful things; so, for Shaw, there is no such final and complete thing as the World-Will, but only a world willing itself towards ampler certainty of its end.”

Bernard Shaw is not a materialist or natural selectionist, but an idealistic optimist in direct line of descent, astounding as may be the contrast from Schopenhauer, Lamarck, and Samuel Butler. Contrary to the popular estimate of him as a case of intellect almost pure, Shaw is a man of tremendous passions, of humanitarian and truly philanthropic origin. Scorning to subscribe to the Biblical teaching that man is vicious by nature, Shaw has argued upon the scientific assumption that progress can do nothing but make the most of us all as we are. The passion for the expression of individuality,for the deification of the sovereign will, — of the new man who, in the possession of a “ long infrangible will,” has his own standard of valuation, — this has animated him throughout his career.

Before he came to Wagner, Shaw had discovered the impossibilities of anarchism: his clearer vision soon enabled him to see that “ the individual Siegfried has come often enough, only to find himself confronted with the alternative of government or destruction at the hands of his fellows who are not Siegfrieds.” In fine, Shaw came to realize, in his own phrase, that it is “ necessary to breed a race of men in whom the life-giving impulses predominate before the New Protestantism becomes politically practicable.” The matured form of Shaw’s ideal is the ethical man, convinced of the bankruptcy of education and progress, inspired with the faith of the World-Will, and resolved, not to adopt a new philosophy, but to develop and perfect the human species. To the Socialist in his magnificent optimism, nothing is necessary for the realization of Utopia but that Man should will it. “ Man will never be that which he can and should be,” wrote Richard Wagner, “ until by a conscious following of that inner, natural necessity, he makes his life a mirror of nature, and frees himself from his thraldom to outer artificial counterfeits. Then will he first become a living man, who now is a mere wheel in the mechanism of this or that Religion, Nationality, or State.”

Thecardinal point in the New Theology enunciated by Bernard Shaw is the identification of “ God ” with the Life-Force.

“ There are two mutually contradictory ideas which cut across each other in regard to the relative powers of God and Man,” observed Mr. Shaw to me one day. We were then, as we walked along the lanes of sleepy Hertfordshire, concluding a long discussion of Shaw’s theologic and philosophic views. “ According to the popular conception, God always creates beings inferior to Himself: the creator must be greater than the creature. I find myself utterly unable to accept this horrible old idea, involving as it does the belief that all the cruelty in the world is the work of an omnipotent God, who if He liked could have left cruelty out of creation. If God could have created anything better, do you suppose He would have been content to create such miserable failures as you and me?

“ As a matter of fact,” Mr. Shaw continued, “ we know that in all art, literature, politics, sociology, — in every phase of genuine life and vitality, — man’s highest aspiration is to create something higher than Himself. So God, or, as I prefer to concretize it impersonally, the Life-Force, has been struggling for countless ages to become fully conscious of Himself — to express Himself in forms higher and ever higher up in the scale of evolution. God does not take pride in making a grub-worm because it is lower than Himself. On the contrary, the grub is a mere symbol of his desire for selfexpression.”

To Bernard Shaw, the universe is God in the act of making Himself. At the back of the universe, in Shaw’s conception, there is a great purpose, a great will. This force behind the universe is bodiless and impotent, without executive power of its own; after innumerable tentatives — experiments and mistakes — this force has succeeded in changing inert matter into the amœba, the amœba into some more complex organism, this again into something still more complex, and finally there has been evolved a man with hands and a brain to accomplish the work of the will. Man is not the ultimate aim of this Life-Force, but only a stage in the scale of evolution. The Life-Force will go still further and produce something more complicated than Man, that is, the Superman, then the Angel, the Archangel, and last of all an omnipotent and omniscient God.

This conception, which M. Auguste Hamon finds of somewhat theosophic aspect, sets off Shaw distinctly from other thinkers with whom he has many points of contact. In reality, Shaw is a confirmed Neo-Lamarckian in the view that “ where there’s a will, there’s a way.” As Mr. Shaw once expressed it to me, Schopenhauer’s treatise on the World as Will is the complement to Lamarck’s natural history; for will is the driving force of Lamarckian evolution. Shaw accepts Samuel Butler’s anti-Darwinian views to the extent of regarding selection as, in Butler’s own words, “a purely automatic conception of the universe as of something that will work if a penny be dropped into the box.”

Bernard Shaw’s religion is the expression of his faith in life and the will. He regards man as divine because actually he is the last effort of the will to realize itself as God. And yet Shaw has assured me that he does not believe in personal immortality. At bottom, he agrees with Weissman that death is only a means of economizing life. The vital spark, the life principle within us, goes on, Shaw believes, in spite of personal annihilation. “ This is the true joy in life,” he has written, “ the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

Socialism is the alpha and omega of Shaw’s life. He believes in will, engineered by reason and inspired by faith, because he sees in it the only real instrument for the achievement of socialism. Like all pioneers in search of an El Dorado, he has found something quite different from the original object in mind. Indeed, in his search for freedom of will, he has really succeeded in discovering three checks and limitations to its operation; and to-day he has abandoned the paradox of free will. For he has discovered, as first limitation, the iron law of personal responsibility to be the alternative to the golden rule of personal conduct. Second, the desirability of the sacrifice of the individual will to the realization of the general good of society through the progressive evolution of the race. And third, the personal, temperamental restriction which forbids him to accept anything as true, to take any action, to allow any free play to his will which would seriously and permanently militate against the progressive advance of collectivism.

In the manuscript of an unfinished work, which Mr. Shaw recently loaned to me, I discovered a notable passage which throws a flood of light upon Shaw’s philosophy as an index to his entire life and career. Perhaps it may distill the quintessence of the Shavian philosophy.

“ The man who is looking after himself is useless for revolutionary purposes. The man who believes he is only a fly on the wheel of Natural Selection, of Evolution, or Progress, or Predestination, or ‘ some power, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,’ is not only useless, but obstructive. But the man who believes that there is a purpose in the universe, and identifies his own purpose with it, and makes the achievement of that purpose an act, not of self-sacrifice for himself, but of self-realization: that is the effective man and the happy man, whether he calls the purpose the will of God, or Socialism, or the religion of humanity. He is the man who will combine with you in a fellowship, which he may call the fellowship of the Holy Ghost and you may call Democracy; or the Parliament of Man, or the Federation of the World, but which is a real working, and if need be fighting, fellowship for all that. He is the man who knows that nothing intelligent will be done until somebody does it, and who will place the doing of it before all his other interests.

“ In short, we must make a religion of Socialism. We must fall back on our will to Socialism, and resort to our reason only to find out the ways and means And this we can do only if we conceive the will as a creative energy, as Lamarck did. and totally renounce and abjure Darwinism, Marxism, and all fatalistic, penny-in-theslot theories of evolution whatever.”