Science of Power B. Kidd

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THE SCIENCE OF POWER


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BY THE SAME AUTHORSOCIAL EVOLUTION, 1894.

Translated German, 1895; Swedish, 1895; French, 1896;Russian, 1897; Italian, 1898; Chinese, 1899; Czech,1900; Danish. 1900; Arabic, 1913.

PRINCIPLES OF WESTERN CIVILISATION, 1902.Translated Spanish, 1903.


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THESCIENCE OF POWER

nv

BENJAMIN KIDDtr .

EIGHTH EDITION

METHUEN & CO. LTD.36 ESSEX STREET W.C.LONDON


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Firtt Published .


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CONTENTSPART I

THE FAILURE OF WESTERN KNOWLEDGECHAP. fAGK

I. THE GATHERING OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION 3II. THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF THZ GREAT PAGAN

RETROGRESSION . . . .41III. THE CULMINATING PHASE OF THE PAGAN ETHIC

IN THE WEST . . . . .68PART IITHE BASIS OF INTEGRATING POWER

IV. POWER IN CIVILIZATION RESTS ON COLLECTIVEEMOTION, NOT ON REASON . . . 101

V. THE EMOTION OF THE IDEAL is THE SUPREMEPRINCIPLE OF EFFICIENCY IN THE COL-LECTIVE STRUGGLE OF THE WORLD . 121

VI. THE STUPENDOUS POSITION IN THE WEST . 152PART III

THE NEW PSYCHIC CENTRE OF POWERVII. THE FIRST LAWS OF THE SCIENCE OF POWER . 18 1

VIII. WOMAN is THE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF POWERIN THE SOCIAL INTEGRATION . . 192

IX. THE MIND OF WOMAN . . . .223X. SOCIAL HEREDITY . . . . .258

A CHART OF HUMAN PROGRESS . . . -299INDEX . . . . . . .303

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THE SCIENCE OF POWER


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PART ITHE FAILURE OF WESTERNKNOWLEDGE


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CHAPTER ITHE GATHERING OF THE WORLD

REVOLUTION

AT some future time the nature of the dramawhich is at present unfolding itself in historymust make a powerful appeal to the humanimagination.

Under our eyes, with the confuseddetails of the transition spread before us from dayto day in the events of the leading countries of theearth, we see the curtain rising upon an entirelynew order of the world.

It is one of the curious features 'of our day thatthe nature of the change is as yet scarcely appre-hended. The shadow of it rests upon all the eventsof the time. The meaning of it encircles the world.The instinct of it moves in the minds of distantpeoples and of strange races. But there is yetscarcely any conception of its nature. We areundoubtedly living in the West in the opening stagesof a revolution the like of which has never beenexperienced in history. We are witnessing theemergence of causes and the marshalling


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4 THE SCIENCE OF POWERleaguing of forces utterly unknown to textbooks.They will make history for a thousand years tocome. But for the understanding of the greattransition going on around us the very elementsof thought do not at present exist.

It has been a feature of the time which haswitnessed the greatest war in the history of thehuman race to talk as if the existing conditionsof the West were the result of peculiar causesintroduced by a single nation or affecting a singleperiod of time. We must put aside such concep-tions. The present conditions in the West are theresult of causes which are universal, which havecome slowly to a head in history, which extend farbeyond military aspects, and into the meaningof which the development of the entire world willin the future be drawn.

It is a fact, the significance of which has beenalmost overlooked in the past, that Western civiliza-tion has been in a special and peculiar sense foundedupon force. All the reasoned knowledge of theWest is the science of force in one or other of itsphases. Our civilization has been brought to thebirth in time as the result of a process of force,which is unparalleled in the development of therace, and the conditions of which can almostcertainly never be reproduced in history. For


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 5countless ages before history has view of him, thefighting male of the West has streamed acrossEurope in successive waves of advance and con-quest, vanquishing, exterminating, overwhelming,overmastering, taking possession. The fittest, whohave survived in these successive layers of conquest,have been the fittest in virtue of the right of force,and in virtue of a process of military selectionprobably the longest, the sternest, the most cul-minating which the race has ever undergone.

It is this fighting pagan of the world who hasmade the history of the West. The civilizationwhich he has produced is the strangest flower in thefields of time. He has introduced into it at everypoint the spirit of the unmeasured ages of conquestout of which it has come. Into all the institutionswhich he has created he has carried the spirit ofwar, and the belief in force as the ultimate principleof the world.

But at the same time he has inherited a religionwhich is the utter negation of force, and which inevery phase of his development has remained theoutstanding challenge to his conception of theomnipotence of force. He has struggled withthis extraordinary inheritance for centuries inhistory. Deep in the inmost recesses of his naturehe has continually persuaded himself against belief


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6 THE SCIENCE OF POWERin it. He has set his science and his philosophiesto reason it away. He has gone forth on his businessto the conquest of the world fortifying himselfagainst it and with his spirit resolutely tuned to thedoctrine of force. In his national wars he has madethe right of conquest the ultimate right of thefittest. In the social struggle he has trained himselfto see, in the steel claws of devouring tyranniesclosing on the worsted, the natural law of efficiency.

It is only our lifelong familiarity with the out-standing features of our civilization, which hasdimmed our vision to its altogether surprisingfeatures. As the spirit of the belief, which is theflat denial of the conception of the omnipotenceof force, has gradually overmastered the world-builder of the West, the results baffle all adequatedescription. The pagan has captured the worldby force. He holds it by force. But the system ofideas in which he is enmeshed flings into sight anunparalleled significance. While his philosophieshave argued with it, while his sciences have brandedit as foolishness, it has slowly enfranchised theworld around him. It is bringing into the rivalriesof life on terms of equality with him every class andsubstratum of his societies, every race of men onthe planet.The problems which are evolving themselves out.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTIONof the deep are illimitable. The blinding visionof which the West has caught sight has been thatthere is but one class, and but one colour, and butone soul in humanity. It is a vision under whichthe soul of the pagan world-builder flames inrebellion. But it has come to haunt the n oo Is ofindustrial Demos as he hums his rag-time musicin the midst of the mills of force which he haserected. The spirit of it moves in the dreams ofstrange peoples at the ends of the earth. And onthe mind of Demos and of the distant peoplesthe effect is the same. It has brought a hauntingsense of some meaning, infinite but unexplained,through which our civilization moves towards afulfilment in which the past may pass for ever, andin which new standards of efficiency, that menhave not dreamt of, may possibly arise in theworld.The male of Western civilization has become by

force of circumstances the supreme fighting animalof creation. History and natural selection havemade of him what he is. For at least four thousandyears, and possibly for a period ten times as long,his forbears have represented the highest expressionof force in the world. Every instinct of the fight,every quality of the rule of force exists in himthrough an ancestral inheritance measured by the


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8 THE SCIENCE OF POWERmeaning of hundreds of generations of successfulfighting.The consequences are felt to-day throughout

every fibre of our civilization. As race after raceof the peoples of the earth, as class after class, andlayer after layer of their societies have been graduallybrought into the struggle under the emancipatinginfluence described, there has resulted a conflictof forces never before known. The problems there-of have become in every field of activity in theWest the centres of movements molten with humanpassion. There has never been anything like thedaily sequence of events which is spread before usin the record of civilization during the past half-century. It is a record of a war continuous andintense under every phase of human activity.In the programmes of parties, in the relations ofnations, in business, in labour politics, in art, inliterature, in the whole realm of economic activ-ity, it is war in progress under every conceivableaspect.But this cannot be the meaning of the West.Through it all there runs a sense of new eras,

of new values, of emerging types, of widen-ing horizons, of more spacious ideals of humanbrotherhood seen through the social emotion.But it is a world of revolution, of sinking temples,


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 9of falling idols, of rending veils, of darkening skiesunder which the gods of force huddle towards vastArmageddons muttering, We know not fear,while the past moves from under them.

If we could unly see the age which preceded theuniversal war of nations which began in 1914 as thehistorian of the future will see it, it would presenta surprising spectacle, for we should see this war ofthe nations to be no more than an incident in auniversal movement, involving every leading formof thought and activity in the West, gradually risingto a climax throughout the world.There is a striking feature which we may perceiveto be characteristic of the half-century whichpreceded the war which began in 1914. At thecentre of every movement of opinion in the Westthe same fact is to be noticed. There is visible agradual falling back upon first principles, a retreatall along the line to those conditions of elementalforce under which the civilization of the West firstcame into being.The Darwinian thesis, presented to the Western

mind in the middle of the nineteenth century, had aremarkable effect on civilization. It presented tothe masters of force in the West a conception of theworld which they rendered exclusively in terms offorce and struggle. It was not science which


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 11reading between the lines beholds in progress achange far exceeding in significance any politicalrevolution which has ever taken place in the world.The iron of conviction has passed from the mindof authority. The doctrine of force has taken itsplace. The ears of the present generation havebeen glued to the ground, strained to catch the dis-tant meaning of vast, formless, approaching causes,speaking a language absolutely unknown to thosewho occupied the seats of knowledge in the past.The full effect of the change long in progress in

civilization has come into view almost suddenly.The significance of it was from the first perceivedby the Churches, those historic centres for centuriesof the idealisms of the West. It soon reached toevery centre of opinion. For a prolonged periodpreviously the Western nations, even in their darkesthours of struggle, had ever placed before themselvesand regarded with unfaltering gaze an inward vision.They had conceived our civilization as graduallyripening, through the perfection of principles in-herent in it, towards an age of universal peace andbalanced harmony among all the nations of the earth.The first startling effect in the West of th>*

recrudescence of the pagan doctrine of the omni-potence of force was upon this ideal. For fifteencenturies, since the full adoption of Christianity


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12 THE SCIENCE OF POWERby the continent of Europe, the scandal and paradoxof the world, says the Honourable George Peel, wasthat European history was a tale of blood andslaughter. 1 But always hitherto this record hadbeen shamed into irrelevancy by the permanenceand supremacy of the vision in the background.Within the short space of some fifty years all this

has been changed. Those living have watchedcivilization becoming openly and of set purposea universal place of arms. Within the half-century,by a process of development marking the intensityof the causes at work, they have seen standingarmies, on a scale previouslyquite unknown,becominga normal feature of the life of modern communities.The sun has followed its daily course from Eastto West over the nations of the world standingto arms and preparing for war. The full significanceof the change, moreover, has lain in the fact thatnow it was preparation for war without any highervision whatever of peace perduring in the back-ground.

For the changes in the direction of thought havebeen far-reaching and rapid. The state of warbecame spoken of again among men not as a shameand a rebuke to civilization but as a state of nature.During the first period of the twentieth century

1 The Future of England, p. 169.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 18in the reviews, books, newspapers, parliaments,congresses, and even in the schools of the principalcountries, war has been the principal subject ofinterest. The discussion of war by experts andpublicists the methods by which war is to be carriedon, the enemies against whom it may have to bedirected, and the objects and policies for which itmay have to be waged has gone on continually.As the result of tendencies which in a short space

have enveloped the world, settled modes of thoughtregarding war, which in countries like Great Britainand the United States had been the slow growth ofcenturies of previous development, have becomeprofoundly modified and altered. Men have cometo listen silently, as they would not have listenedhalf a century previously, when they have been toldby leaders of opinion that the ultimate principlesof civilization do not justify the prophecies sincethe beginning of our era as to an eventual age ofpeace and goodwill; that war is the natural con-dition of man, that it is not an evil but a necessityand even a good, and that the modern resources ofscience are not tending to abolish war but only torender it more terrible and destructive by raisingto the n^ power the possibilities of savagery.The alteration taking place in the nature of the

pleas urged in favour of peace have become even


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14 THE SCIENCE OF POWERmore striking and significant. Fifty years agothe most prominent feature in the case for inter-national peace was that it was made to rest onthe high ground of an immutable moral doctrine.War was held to be a crime, a crime against theprinciple of civilization, a direct challenge to thefundamental conception of Christianity. It washeld, therefore, that the higher nations must evolvebeyond war, just as the higher individual hasbeen raised beyond crime, through the growth ofan internal moral standard producing a feeling ofabsolute abhorrence.But almost under the eyes of the current genera-

tion this view became replaced by another con-ception. The high inflexible conviction urgedagainst war in the past, that the spirit of war wasa crime, that peace was a moral end to be soughtfor its own sake and irrespective of any cost orsacrifice whatever, ceased to be urged. Peace cameto be advocated because it was said to be the con-dition which paid best in civilization ; war wasargued to be economically unsound because itwas said to be a great illusion to believe that anational policy founded on war could be a profitablepolicy for any people in the long run.

In no phase of the time has the rapid loweringof the standards of opinion in the West been more


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 15directly in evidence than in this modification oithe principle upon which the demand for peace wasbased. The degeneracy and futility of the argu-ment which had come to rest the cause of peace onno higher ground than this was deeply and in-stinctively felt by every mind which understoodthe nature of the forces on which Western civiliza-tion rests. Even in the standards of those whohad begun to base the policy of nations upon theomnipotence of force, the demand at least waseverywhere for the capacity for sacrifice.The state of international relations in the West

for many years before the outbreak of the warwhich opened in 1914 will be one to cause marvelto students in history in times to come. We havepassed so rapidly through such moving events in ourtime that the existing world has never seen in focusthe period through which we are living. It hasnever fully realized that the great movements inthe West in recent times are but phases of a largerdevelopment which in a generation or two has cometo envelop the whole of civilization.The gradual lowering of the standards of opinionand conduct has extended to all centres of Westernthought and action. But it was at the beginningmost clearly visible in international relations. Oneof the most influential of British Liberal journals,


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16 THE SCIENCE OF POWERwriting some years before the war, described in avivid article the altogether extraordinary conditionswhich for a considerable period had come to prevailin European diplomacy. It seemed, the journalurged, as if civilization in Europe in the highestenvironment of culture had returned to conditionsof primitive savagery. The crudity of the purposes,the danger of the aims, the thinly veiled barbarismsof the methods which were coming to prevailamongst diplomatists, were forcibly described.Speaking of the conditions surrounding the

diplomatists who were guiding modern affairsat the points of contact of the principal nationsof the West, the journal with great seriousnesscontinued: We see them pulling wires, stealingmarches on each other, laying long and craftyplans which almost invariably miscarry, and missingobvious events which throw all their designs intoconfusion. And on one side or the other there isa perpetual exploiting of the inherent loyalty andpatriotism of their countries in quarrels which aremere combativeness for no purpose. In inter-national relations, in short, the minds of the menof leading and culture who were guiding the affairsof the West seemed to the journal in question tohave returned so near to a state of primitivebarbarism that the journal gravely wondered why


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 17the immense majority in the nations did not assertthemselves and sweep it all away. 1Whatever these symptoms might imply in their

more immediate relations there could be even thenno mistaking their import in the deeper aspects ofhistory. The West was getting down to the firstprinciples of force. The powers which had com-mand of force were, with a sure instinct, preparingfor a stage in which strength would be measuredagain in the West in those conditions of primitiveforce which the West understood. But the timeswere evidently pregnant with a wider meaningthan this. It was a period more elemental stillin which some new, vast, and fundamental con-ditions were assembling in the world, presently toemerge into full view in another era of civilization.When we turn from these external symptomsto the social conditions existing within the frontiers

of the nations before the outbreak of the war of1914, the spectacle becomes more arresting. Theworld-wide reach of the revolution which has beenin progress becomes more clearly visible.For centuries it had been a commonplace ofpolitical thought in the West that the world thatis, represents the world that always will be. Themasters of force from the beginning took the Dar-

1 Westminster Gazette, 31 October 1911.


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18 THE SCIENCE OF POWERwinian conception as giving lasting support to theview that the social struggle supplied the stern, inevit-able condition out of which social efficiency emerged.They took it as confirming that theory of the world,which was already presented in economic science,according to which the natural and unchangeablecondition of society was one of extreme polarity.At one end there was the accumulation of propertyand influence in the hands of the few representingthe leaders and the capables, and at the otherend there was the vast majority of the populationruled down by the iron necessities of the competitivestruggle to the lowest wage at which they wouldwork efficiently and reproduce themselves.

In little more than the lifetime of a generationwe have seen the foundations of this world of know-ledge transformed. The emancipating influenceat work in civilization has gradually brought tothe multitudes the political enfranchisement in-herent from the beginning in the conception ofhuman equality and human brotherhood. In everyleading country the working millions constitutingthe greater part of the population were to be seenbecoming consolidated and organized by the actualmechanism of the process in which they were caught,with the gift of political power in their hands,with the dawning light of an intelligence in their


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 19eyes never before seen in history, crowding at lastat the head of every avenue of authority and stretch-ing out waiting and impatient hands towards all thelevers of power in the State. And in the day-dreamsof this multitude the sombre, insistent, infinitelywidening instinct of the social emotion has alreadybegun to close with the vast problems of the future.

Writers and historians will attempt in days tocome to limn the bold outlines of the world dramain which we behold Demos in the West with theinheritance behind him of thousands of generationsof successful fighting awaking in history in thissituation. It is a position with every element ofhuman passion, every element of tragedy, everyelement of revolution in it, and all represented on ascale without precedent or comparison in the past.Throughout the West it may be observed that for

generations the idea of the world presented by text-books of economic science has been based on acentral conception. However deftly the realismsof the human struggle have been glossed over,however faithfully the artists of its apologies mayhave softened the grim silhouettes of that struggleinto a background of the public weal, of one thingthere can be no doubt. The fundamental idea ofthe economic science of the West has always beenthe conception of society as a state of war.


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20 THE SCIENCE OF POWERAnd in this state of war the central figure has

been none other than that of Demos himself asthe victim of it. The leaders of the proletariat asthey gradually took in the details of the positionhave not been slow to interpret it to the masses intheir own version. Every textbook of economics inthe West, itwas said, presented the same picture of thetoil-stained millions. In the struggle of the world theoverlords of the capitalist age of force took all theywere able to hold as the wages of capacity. And themillions of the wage-earners were scaled down to theminimum condition of existence upon which the greatbeast of the proletariat would consent to reproduceits useful kind. That has been the rendering.But the masses of the West have been themselves,

and in their own right, and no less than the over-lords of capital, the inheritors of the spirit of the agesof fight and conquest out of which the West hascome. Gradually as they have drunk in with theirnew-born political consciousness the position thusexplained to them, a new spirit passed over theWest of the like of which and of the significanceof which the world has had no previous experience.Firmly and consciously the hand of the workingmultitude has stiffened on the levers of supremepower which they have come to grasp under theforms of Democracy in the West.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 21The leading features of a position which moves

towards greater events than any recorded in thepast of the world may be rapidly summed up.There was no long parleying with the situation.The leaders of the proletariat went straight to thecentre of it. History will record of them thatwithout hesitation they simply accepted the worldwhich the economists and the interpreters ofDarwin had thus rendered to them in terms of force.But they accepted it with one reservation, thesignificance of which has begun to overshadow allthe events of Western civilization. It became theavowed intention and determination of the leadersof the proletariat so to use the weapons which thepolitical power of labour had placed in their handsthat the result of the social war should be entirelychanged. It should no longer be against theirclass ; it should be in favour of it. There canbe no mistaking the wider bearing of such a resolu-tion. Under its inspiration the movement of theproletariat in all the leading countries of the Westhas gradually taken on a meaning in keepingwith the character of the general world movementin which all the institutions of civilization havebecome involved in our time. It has begun topresent all the same symptoms of a developmentslowly concentrating on first principles, namely,


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22 THE SCIENCE OF POWERon those actualities of force which are deeplyinherent in it.As we turn to watch the character of the inter-

national situation contemporaneously developing,we have to observe how the cause of the workingclasses of civilization gradually becomes involvedas part of the universal movement in progress inthe West.

Historians of the future will note that it tookroughly the whole span of the nineteenth centuryfor the masters of force in Europe, while re-maining carefully hidden behind the screen of ourcurrent civilization, to evolve the principles of forcescientifically applied in international war. The funda-mental condition of the science of force as appliedamong nations was that which, first systemati-cally developed by Prussia, has changed theface of the modern world, namely, universal con-scription or the compulsory levying of the wholeavailable male population of a nation for purposesof war.The second and equally fundamental condition

of force scientifically applied has been the gradualformulation, also behind the screen of a civilizationfounded on the ethics of the Christian religion, ofthe original code of pagan ethics which placed theinterests of the State resting on force above all


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 28principles of universal Right and Justice. Thegreat aim and object of scientific war as set forthin textbooks, now notorious, of the military nationsof Western Europe, was to be successful. Everymeans to that end was, in the last resort, held tobe justifiable. All questions of right, of feeling, ofjustice, of the sanctity of agreements or treaties,or even of humanity, became, in the last issue,nothing more than questions of expediency or thereverse in aiming at success.Our time has witnessed the fighting leaders of

races with unmeasured ages of conquest behind themturning in the middle of current civilization withthe silent joy of the essential pagan to the stupendoustask of organizing all the accumulated resources ofthe world to the making of war on these principles.The first outward result of a gradual return tothe standards of savagery in European diplomacyhas just been described. The next world-shakingchapter in the international position was about toopen. But the conditions in which we have towitness the labour movement in the social war be-coming involved in all countries in the same cycleof events have an extraordinary interest.

It has been said that the first principle upon whichthe supreme overlords of force had, 'with far-seeingvision, based all their plans for the organization of


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24 THE SCIENCE OF POWERinternational war was universal military conscrip-tion. It has to be remarked that the first objectat which the leaders of labour with the same supremeinstinct of the fight upon them aimed in the West,indicated an insight equally clear. The first demandof labour was for nothing less than the compulsoryorganization of its own class throughout all thenations. Those who do not understand the magni-tude of the position towards which the proletariatof the West has attempted to move in ourtimes, and who do not therefore perceive thevitality to labour not only of organization but ofcompulsory organization, often miss the peculiarbut fundamental feature of the struggle which hasbeen opened. A study of the democratic State asit has been in history no longer supplies us withany clue to the future. It is the state of warbetween nations which henceforward furnishesthe only parallel for enlightenment on the prin-ciples which control the existing class war in theWest.

In many parts of the Western world the observersees labour still under the old conditions of itsstruggle with capital, using the weapon of the localstrike, throwing down its tools and engaging infeats of endurance to obtain by collective bargainingbetter terms than could be obtained by individuals.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 25But in reality this era of the straggle has been leftbehind in the main movement where the strugglewith capital has now begun to converge uponessentials and fundamentals.The principal leaders of the proletariat in the

West have hitherto shown an extremely far-reachinggrasp of the conditions and the limitations in ourcivilization of a struggle resting ultimately onforce and conducted on a world-wide scale. By allthe principles of effective war labour was bound tomake a most determined effort to obtain exactlythat same first object which the masters of militaryforce in international war had attained by universalconscription. Its leaders proceeded, therefore, tosecure throughout the world the first tremendousprinciple of solidarity for which labour stands.They formulated the programme known as the closed shop.

This is, in effect, nothing more or less than thedemand that no workman shall ultimately earnhis livelihood without first being a member of atrade union. It is the history of the war to securethis fundamental object of labour which constitutesthe real history of the labour movement duringrecent times. At one end of the scale we see thefirst phase of the struggle still represented in theUnited States, where the effort of labour to enforce


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26 THE SCIENCE OF POWERthis hitherto illegal demand for the closed shop hasbeen accompanied for years by riots, outrages, andbloodshed, which have deeply disturbed the publicmind of a continent. At the other end of the scalethe struggle is represented in Great Britain by theexample of the cotton trade, where in the mosthighly organized industry in the world the principleof the closed shop is to be seen emerging at last asa successfully established objective of labour. Theworld has, indeed, actually witnessed in recenttimes the operatives of this industry, havingsuccessfully insisted in the full daylight of legalitythat capital shall employ no workers who are notmembers of their union, proceeding completely tohold up the premier manufacturing industry ofcivilization for such a period as the exigencies oftheir warfare demanded.The interval between these two stages in securing

this, the cardinal position of the labour movementin the West, has represented a large part of theinternal history of the leading nations of the worldfor a generation. The struggle has been in progressthroughout Europe and America. It has furnishedthe principal events for a considerable period in thepolitics of countries like Australia and New Zea-land. And it has everywhere presented the samefeatures of a universal struggle in which a movement


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 27representing world-wide and fundamental interests incivilization is tending to fall back upon the prime andelemental conditions of force underlying it.As the conditions of force governing the struggle

have rapidly developed it has become visible howvital, how far-reaching, and how true to type hasbeen the military instinct of labour. The principlesof the democratic State from this stage forwardbegin to be pressed one by one into the background.One of the most effective and hardly won of theinstruments of Democracy in recent times for theprotection of right against force was the secretballot in the election of political representatives.At an early stage in its own struggle we see the openballot in the election of its representatives becominga characteristic demand in the labour movement.In other leading features the transition of themovement towards principles of ulterior force ofthe kind which were being worked out elsewhere inmilitary textbooks was rapid.The press of the leading countries of the West for

several years preceding the outbreak of the greatworld war of the nations in 1914 presents in thisrespect a most remarkable spectacle. Its leadingorgans are to be seen registering the opinion that anew era of civilization was arising under the pre-vailing conditions. Hitherto one of the most


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28 THE SCIENCE OF POWERpronounced of all aspects of legality in the Westhad been the accepted sanctity of agreements.But in the course of the labour struggle it began tobe a subject exciting profound feeling that in theagreements made by organized labour on the oneside, and organized capital on the other, this principlewas often no longer observed. The Times, surveyingin England the labour movement for a number ofyears,1 laid great stress on this remarkable feature,maintaining that in a long series of crises legalcontracts deliberately entered into by labour hadbeen

continuously violated as if they had meant

nothing at all.In these violations of agreements, moreover,

remarkable features were pointed out. They wereall ultimately condoned. The enormous votingpower of labour in the State rendered any otheraction impossible. A still more striking feature,showing the retreat on the ultimate principles offorce which was taking place, was the nature of thedefence coming to be urged for these breachesof contract by labour. The proletariat, in a stateof war, it was said, had often no option but toaccept for the time being the terms of capital.But, as it began to be characteristically put on be-half of labour, a defeated nation may have to sue

1 Times, 26 January 1912 and 27 March 1912.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 29for peace, and if the conquerors exact hard termsa defeated nation will, at the first favourable oppor-tunity, repudiate such terms and so with the men. lHere it will be seen we are face to face with the

standards of international war, where all conditionsof legality have come to rest on force. We are,indeed, in the presence of that last argumentalready being advocated under many forms in theofficial military textbooks of the central Statesof Europe in which expediency had become the solecriterion of conduct directed to the end of successin war at any cost whatever.

There need be no desire to attribute to theresponsible leaders or to the body of the rank andfile of the labour movement in the West a consciousintent or consent to these lowering of standards.Enormous forces of quite a contrary direction were,indeed, behind the labour programme. What weare watching is rather the labour movement asa whole becoming enveloped in the irresistibletendencies of the universal movement in civilizationwhich was now everywhere falling back rapidly onthe actualities of force inherent in it. As syndical-

1 Cf. When a class issue of any importance is raised. Mightmakes Right always and everywhere, quoted from a Syndical-ist handbook written by Charles Watkins, and indorsed by TomMann. Vide The Nineteenth Century, Sept. 1911, The LabourRevolt and its Meaning, by J. Ellis Barker.


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30 THE SCIENCE OF POWERism developed in the next stage it brought intoclear view the ultimate features of this position.

In syndicalism the controlling factors in the greatclass war of civilization were defined with firm graspin the programme set out in 1912 in the leadingorgan of the movement in England. The demandfor the nationalization of industry so prominentlydisplayed in all the earlier pronouncements ofsocialism was, in that programme, shifted definitelyinto the background. Syndicalism, it was asserted,had ceased to put its trust in the State. Labourwas fighting for its own cause. For syndicalists,it was said, had come to foresee a condition in thefuture in which the power of the State would beinferior to the power of organized capital, and inwhich the power of the State under the control ofthe

capitalistwould be turned against the workersin an industry that had become nationalized. The

universal strike, therefore, to be thoroughly effectivein the future must be directed, it was asserted,not simply at curtailing profits. It must aim tobecome a menace to the community itself through thestoppage of supplies.We have to observe, in short, the labour move-ment in the West hi this phase becoming at lastconsciously instinct with the principles of universalwar resting ultimately on each side on the armed


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 81forces of civilization. This instinct expressed itselfquite clearly in syndicalism in two forms. In oneform it urged the programme of a determined propa-ganda, addressed to labour by the more moderateleaders, urging the workers to obtain command ofmilitary force by acquiring as rapidly as possible poli-tical control in all the parliaments of the world whichvote supplies for the armed forces of nations. In theother form the programme became, in the hands ofthe more extreme leaders, a propaganda addresseddirect to the soldiers of the nations as the ultimateunits of a civilization in which armies could be turnedagainst labour in the last arbitrament of war.

In both these positions the leaders of the extremewing of labour had come in sight of the situationwhich was already actually being discussed by theleaders of militarism in the military textbooks ofGermany. For in these textbooks the masters offorce had foreseen and had anticipated the daywhen, under universal conscription, the soldier him-self having become the ultimate unit of civilizationwould be subject to all the tendencies which makehim the child of his time. l The disturbing effectof such a propaganda as syndicalism contemplatedhad indeed haunted the dreams of the masters of

1 The German War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege), J. H.Morgan's translation.


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32 THE SCIENCE OF POWERforce. It would, they foresaw, interfere with theefficiency of the instrument of irresistible forcewhich they were forging in civilization. But theirpolicy, in this last resort, had been thought out.It was already outlined in the textbooks of war.It was to smash the whole fabric of that spirituallife in the soldier himself, equally with that of theenemy, for they had counted upon the necessity inboth cases, which ran counter to the policy whichdemanded success as the supreme object of war.1Thus had the essentially pagan mind of the West

reached to the elementals of the atavistic creed ofomnipotent force biological necessity it had becomein the military textbooks of Germany into which ithad rendered the thesis which Darwin had given toit fifty years previously. Slowly but with increasingmomentum the curtain was beginning to rise uponthe greatest world-drama of force in the history ofhumanity.

It is necessary to turn now to watch other as-pects of this movement in civilization into which alllocal phases, national and social, have rapidly been

1 For the teaching as to smashing the spiritual life of theenemy compare The German War Book (Kriegsbrauch im Land-kriege), translated by J. H. Morgan, M.A. For the teaching asto smashing the spiritual life of the soldier when it ran counter tothe necessities of war compare passage quoted from Austrianmilitary textbook, for which and reference see p. 71 of thisvolume.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 83drawn. The causes which have driven labour toorganization within recent times have been irre-sistible. But causes operating with a similarintensity have at the same time been drivingcapital into a position in which all the landmarksof the past are one by one disappearing from view.The enfranchising tendencies in the life of theWest have gradually set in motion tidal movementsin civilization in which the social emotion is sub-merging all the fixed points of the past. But thereis no indication whatever on the thought or activityof the time that the power-holding interests incivilization have any clear grasp of the situationin which they are involved. We see them rathereverywhere falling back instinctively upon positionscalculated to give them command in an environmentof force if the struggle should resolve itself into onefor mastery under more primitive conditions.

In the old individualistic age of the past capital-ism had come to rest in large part on the convenientmaxims of a science of political economy whichidentified the operations of capital with the per-manent public weal. But the spokesmen of capitalhave on the whole shown no consciousness that thefoundations of this world have moved bodily in ourtime. As the demand of the proletariat in themodern class war has threatened to become nothing

3


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34 THE SCIENCE OF POWERless than the demand for the replacement of capital-ism by collectivism supported by the enormousvoting power of organized labour, capital has had toface round to meet problems which bring into thefront rank of the conflict the most fundamentalissues connected with our civilization.As the spirit of the world fight has gradually

enveloped the whole range of the complex activitiesof the West, the position of capital in relation to thesocial emotion has assumed features of great in-terest. One of the most striking developments ofthe age has been the colossal concentration ofwealth. Relentlessly driven from two sides to-wards concentration, from without by labour andfrom within by the nature of modern enterprise,capital has become aggregated into immenseorganizations worked on the basis of joint-stockcompanies. It has been a peculiar and inherentfeature of these aggregations that they have tendedthrough causes which they have been quite unableto control to bring capital profoundly and on a world-wide scale into conflict with the social emotion.As the leaders of labour with the gathering

instinct of the fight strong upon them have sensedthe omens of the time in the West, the antagonismto capital has grown rapidly. In almost every partof the civilized world it has deepened in intensity


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 85in the first period of the twentieth century. Thecase, moreover, which we see being put forward onbehalf of the proletariat a case which is based onthe voting power of labour and which orientatesitself in the last resort to the armed forces of civiliza-tion has become more uncompromising. It hascome to take the form of a determined frontalattack on the whole cause of capitalism.

It amounts, as we see it put forward now, to thearraignment by labour before public opinion of theentire system of modern capitalism on the groundthat it is inherently and fundamentally anti-socialand therefore impossible. The attack has closelyfollowed the lines I foreshadowed in 1908 in theHerbert Spencer Lecture to the University of Oxford. 1Everywhere in the struggle we see capital in theWest essaying to defend itself on the old lines.The modern tendency to gigantic concentration andcontrol by the few is taken to be a developmentquite inevitable and in the public good. The circleof shareholders of its joint-stock companies will,it is maintained, become ever wider and wider.Its Companies and its Trusts will tend, therefore,to become at length identified with the generalpublic itself. Its Corporations will tend more andmore to become governing industrial republics rest-

1 Individualism and Afier.


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36 THE SCIENCE OF POWERing on their own representation within the bodypolitic a kind of industrial democracy graduallysupplementing and superseding political democracy.But on the other side we see labour closing for

battle with a vision which it has fixed far beyondthis horizon. It sweeps away almost withoutparley the case put against it. The financial re-publics of joint-stock enterprise, it asserts, haveno counterpart in political democracy. Theymanage public utilities on a scale so great that theiraffairs are comparable only to the affairs of a first-class state or a federation of states. But theyoutrage the fundamental principles of democracy,labour asserts, in that they have no relation toany social or moral principle outside the earningof dividends ; while they violate the cardinalnecessity of democracy in that voting power isaccording to the amount of shares held, and thatcontrol is in the hands of the few who work in thedark, the vastest returns being obtained by the arti-ficial raising and depressing of the Stock Exchangevalue of their securities. Labour does not stay toargue with the overlords of capital the case for thewages of capacity in this direction. The giganticgrowth of speculation in Stock Exchange values andthe vast system of finance which accompanies ithave come to be described as parasitic on modern


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 37industry, representing no function that can beexpressed in terms of social utility. So the pro-paganda becomes an appeal for the votes of theproletariat to sweep the whole system away. Andthe argument, as we have seen, has come in the lastresort to envisage without hesitation the ultimateconditions of force and to be consciously addressedto armed men as themselves the ultimate units ofcivilization.

All these profound movements in the West inwhich we see the foundations of society beingchallenged proceed with the same spirit movingthrough them. We appear to be everywherewitnessing a retreat upon the first principles of war.The Westminster Gazette, speaking at the centre ofBritish politics, recently recorded a change inpolitical conditions in Great Britain which a genera-tion ago would have been unthinkable. Thejournal noted a peculiar fact of our time to consistin the substitution of a condition of uncompromisingwar resting on violence for a condition of freediscussion in all the principal institutions on whichpopular government rests. The inevitable result,the journal went on to say, is that in parliamentarygovernment the proceedings are becoming battlesrather than deliberations, and that the whole pro-cedure has to be organized on the basis of war . . .


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38 THE SCIENCE OF POWERit is now the practice of all minorities to say thatthey will concede nothing to the majority and tothreaten to carry on every controversy by violentand extra-constitutional means. l

This is the spirit, the effect of which meets us atevery turn in the times in which we are living. Weseem to see the male of the West under every formof the activities of civilization enveloped in a kindof monstrous aura of the fight which has becomeessentially and profoundly atavistic. Speaking ofthe current life of the West in the year beforethe outbreak of the great world war, Mr. HaroldBegbie asserted : Look where you will, it is thespirit of I Myself which is paramount. Life existsfor Me : all the dim aeons behind have toiled toproduce Me : This brief moment in the eternalduration of time is only an opportunity for Mypleasure and My ease : I care not a jot for the agesahead and the sons of men who shall inhabit theearth when I am dust beneath their feet. Give MeMy Rights. Stand clear of My way. I want andI will have/'

2

The questions which leap into view at this pointcannot be avoided. What is the meaning of thistremendous process of life which under all these

1 Westminster Gazette, 30 July 1913.1 The Weakest Link. p. 43.


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THE WORLD REVOLUTION 89aspects in the West is undoubtedly rising to aclimax in history ? No observer in his senses candoubt the infinite significance in the world of theprocess of enfranchisement, new in the history ofthe race, which, moving slowly through long periodsin the past, has brought our civilization to its presentposition. But what is the import of the apparentrebirth in the West of the pagan mind drunkenwith the spirit of force and of that recrudescence ofthe forms of force in all the institutions of theWest which in a space of fifty years has followedthe interpretation of the Darwinian thesis of theworld in terms of efficiency resting on force ? It isa development which cannot contain the meaningof the West. It is a development which is indeedentirely overshadowed by the significance of anotherand counter phenomenon the ever-rising tide ofthe social emotion in our civilization. For throughall the stress of conflict in the West there swellsthe deep diapason of the social passion callingfor service, for subordination, for sacrifice, forrenunciation on a scale unprecedented. The pro-paganda which it inspires is, moreover, addressedno longer to nameless mobs, but through everyavenue of emotion in art and literature to theminds of voting millions who are themselves thearmed millions and the ultimate units of civiliza-


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40 THE SCIENCE OF POWERtion. It is an age of elementals. In the midst ofthe rising to the surface again in civilization, on ascale approaching the universal, of aspects ofsavagery belonging to epochs of the past, we arewatching the assembling in the world of the govern-ing forces of new eras of history.Have the interpreters of Darwinism in the past

missed the great secret of the humanity of theworld ? It is becoming evident that all the truththere is in Darwin's great conception may be summedup in a single word integration. For long we havewasted our breath in talk about the survival of thefittest and in discussions as to which the fittestmay be. But the fittest in life is simply the mostadvanced integration. Darwinism dealt with theindividual and with the individual mostly beforethe advent of mind. The law of the integrationof the individual has been the law of the supremacyand the omnipotence of brute force. But other andhigher integrations are now on foot in the worldwhich rest on mind and spirit. It is the laws andthe meanings of these integrations which are carryingthe world into new horizons. And in the upbuildingof the civilization founded on this wider knowledgeit is the stones which the builders of the past haverejected which are about to become the masterstones of the edifice.


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CHAPTER IITHE PSYCHIC CENTRE OF THE GREAT

PAGAN RETROGRESSION

WHEN in the autumn of the year 1914 thenations of the world entered almostwithout warning on the greatest war ofall time, in which more than half the human racebecame engaged, and in which forces numberingconsiderably more than thirty millions of menmet each other armed in the field, the worldstood aghast. The magnitude of the conflagrationseemed to emphasize in a special manner somegigantic failure of the West in bringing to fruitionin history those high expectations of universalpeace and goodwill which its leading minds had forcenturies held up to humanity. The war was,indeed, an event of far greater significance thanany military development that had ever happenedin the world. It marked the fact that the climaxhad been reached in that extraordinary set of con-ditions described in the last chapter, in whichunder every phase of its civilization we beheld


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42 THE SCIENCE OF POWERthe West getting down to the first principles offorce.Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, even

in the midst of the fiercest, most prolonged andmost savage wars, the West had remained con-sistently steadfast to its conception of civilizationas ripening towards a golden age of world peace.The ideal of permanent goodwill among nationsand of international arbitration as an ultimatesubstitute for war had continued to deepen itshold on men's minds during the whole of the period.The Congress of Vienna in 1814-5, at the close ofthe Napoleonic wars of conquest, although it led toreaction and was a congress of princes rather thanof peoples, was held under the influence of visionsof a coming age of permanent peace in the world.In 1834 Mazzini and the

Young Europe

associa-

tion were dreaming of universal fraternity. In1841 the poet Tennyson, in England, was singingin fervent anticipation of the day when the battleflags of the nations were to be furled in the parlia-ment of man. Through the whole of this decadeup to the Saxon revolution in 1848-9 the struggle inprogress in most of the central States of Europewas for constitutionalism, and the dreams of theirpeoples were of lasting peace amongst States andnationalities. A little later many of the foremost


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 48minds oi civilization were allowing themselves tothink with the rulers of Great Britain under thelead of the Prince Consort, that the opening of theGreat International Exhibition of 1851 in Londonmarked the practical inauguration of such an eraof universal peace.A change radical and sudden took place soonafter 1850 in the spirit of the West. It was achange which did not arise from any causes merelysocial or political. It was due to forces which wereprofoundly jpsychic. It is necessary to under-stand these forces, for it is in the psychic develop-ment which preceded the world war of 1914, thatwe have to witness the almost incredible spectacleof the entire organized system of that knowledgeof the West, which is essentially the science offorce, passing gradually to monstrous forms ofextravagance and failure, and at length to irre-trievable bankruptcy in Western civilization.By far the most important event in the history

of the modern West is that of the publication in1859 of Darwin's Origin of Species. There is noprecedent in the history of the human mind tocompare with the saturnalia of the Westernintellect which followed the publication of thisbook. Speaking of the event in his Presiden-tial Address to the Royal Society in London in


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44 THE SCIENCE OF POWER1905, Sir William Huggins said of the instantaneousrevolution it produced : The accumulated tensionburst upon the mind of the whole intelligent worldwith a suddenness and an overwhelming force forwhich the strongest material metaphors are poor andinadequate. . . . In a way to which history furnishesno parallel the opinions of mankind may be saidto have changed in a day. The change, more-over, produced by the Darwinian hypothesiswas not simply one of detail. The revolutionseemed to involve the reversal of a positionfundamental in Western thought which, to useSir William Huggins' simile, like a keystonebrought down with it an arch of connectedbeliefs that for centuries had formed part ofthe permanent life inheritance of the civilizationof the West.Darwin's presentation of the evolution of theworld as the product of natural selection in never-ceasing war as a product, that is to say, of a strugglehi which the individual efficient in the fight for hisown interests was always the winning type touchedthe profoundest depths of the psychology of theWest. The idea seemed to present the wholeorder of progress in the world as the result of apurely mechanical and materialistic process restingon force. In so doing it was a conception which


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 45reached the springs of that heredity born of theunmeasured ages of conquest out of which theWestern mind has come. Within half a centurythe Origin of Species had become the bible of thedoctrine of the omnipotence of force.The hold which the theories of the Origin of

Speciesobtained on the popular mind in the Westis one of the most remarkable incidents in the

history of human thought. The first effect of thispresentation of the existing world as the resultof selection through struggle and merciless warwas immediate. Everywhere throughout civiliza-tion an almost inconceivable influence was givento the doctrine of force as the basis of legalauthority.

This effect had two deeply marked phases.In countries like England and the United Statesthe striking resemblance which the doctrine ofthe survival of the fittest in the war for exist-ence bore to those doctrines of political economywhich had come to prevail in business and com-merce was immediately recognized. Almost everyargument of the Origin of Species appeared torepresent a generalized conception of the effec-tiveness of the war of competition. The condi-tions of the social war which Maurice, Ruskin,and a crowd of writers had condemned, but


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46 THE SCIENCE OF POWERwhich Bentham, the Mills, and the influential schoolof English utilitarians had long been attemptingto realize in the political State, seemed to havebecome justified at a stroke. The central thesisof Darwin appeared as nothing less than a cul-minating scientific condemnation of all the labourprogrammes of the West conceived in a spirit ofsocialism. The prevailing social system, born as ithad been in struggle, and resting as it did in thelast resort on war and on the toil of an excludedwage-earning proletariat, appeared to have becomeclothed with a new and final kind of authority.Darwinism seemed to the rulers of civilization tohave lifted the veil from life and to have disclosedto the gaze of the time the self-centred struggle ofthe individual ruthlessly pursuing his own interests,and pursuing them as in the competition of businessto the exclusion of all other conceptions, and tohave revealed this individual as the basal fact ofthe world in evolution.

This was the first phase of the effect of Darwin'sconception on civilization. But although Darwinismwas a product of the English-speaking peoples itwas neither in England nor in the United Statesthat it passed rapidly into the second phase of itsinfluence. In this phase on the continent of Europethe extraordinary position was soon reached in


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 47which Darwin's theories came to be openly set out inpolitical and military textbooks as the full justifica-tion for war and highly organized schemes of nationalpolicy in which the doctrine of Force became thedoctrine of Right, and in which force in a mannerwhich had not been known for centuries was openlymade the basis of all legal authority.As the prestige of Darwinism increased and as the

new ideas became entrenched in the handbooks ofpopular science and in systems of revolutionarycriticism, it was almost as if the desert and the junglehad begun to voice themselves in human thought.The world beheld the champions of force gradu-ally becoming again in their own right the Super-men of systems of popular philosophy. In solemntreatises of social science it saw them emerging as

efficients. In political science lectures they be-gan to appear as we who have the Right becausewe have the Power of systems of national policy.The doctrine of the supremacy and the omnipotenceof force became the doctrine of absolute Rightexpounded as the law of biological necessity inbooks of state-craft and war-craft, of expandingmilitary empires. And through it all the worldsaw the right of conquest becoming justifiedand glorified by warlike and military organizationsas civilization had never dared to glorify and justify


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48 THE SCIENCE OF POWERit before. Soon after the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury andonward the history of theWest takes on a newspirit. From this date forward George Peel's terriblesaying that history and homicide are indistinguish-able terms l becomes a truth pregnant with a mean-ing which it never possessed before in civilization.To understand clearly the character of this sur-

prising development of which modern Germanybecame the life centre in civilization it is necessaryto glance briefly at Darwin's central thesis. Thetruth of Darwin's conception may be compressedwithin clear boundaries. It is of great importanceto grasp the characteristic outlines thereof. Darwingave to the world the true science of the evolutionof the animal in the past epochs of the world. Dar-winism is essentially the science of the integrationof the individual efficient in his own interests. IfA was able to kill B before B killed A, then A sur-vived. And the race became a race of As, inheritingA's qualities. 2 This was Bagehot's brief and vividsummary of the Darwinian doctrine. Darwinism is,in short, the science of the causes which have madethose who are efficient in the struggle for their owninterests supreme and omnipotent in the world.Now this doctrine has nothing to do with the

1 The Future of England, p. 142.1 Physics and Politics, p. 188


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 49science of civilization. It is the doctrine of theefficiency of the animal. It has absolutely nothingto do with the causes making for collective efficiencyin the social and moral world founded on mind whichis evolving in civilization. Darwinism representsindeed the very antithesis of the principles of thatsocial integration which is taking place in civiliza-tion. The dividing line, moreover, is absolutelyfundamental. For the first principle of evolutionin the world of the efficient animal of Darwinismis the supremacy and omnipotence therein of in-dividuals or groups of individuals efficient in theirown interests. The first principle, on the contrary,in the evolution of the social world of civilization liesin the subordination of individuals. The ascendinghistory of the human race is indeed nothing elsethan the progressive history of the sacrifice of theindividual efficient for himself to the meaning ofthat collective efficiency which is being organizedin civilization gradually merging in the universal.The progress of humanity has, therefore, over and

above every other feature this meaning. It is theepic of the vast, tragic, ennobling, immortalizing,all-conquering ethic of Renunciation. The story ofcreation up to and including human savagery issimply the story of the supremacy in the world ofphysical force organized in the life of the efficient


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50 THE SCIENCE OF POWERindividual or the efficient group or the efficientState. But the story of evolution above savageryis nothing else than the story of the gradual riseto supremacy in the world of those psychic forcesorganized in civilization which are subduing indi-viduals or aggregations of individuals efficient in then-own interests to those universal principles which aremaking for the limitless efficiency of civilization.

It happens through all this that there has neverbeen since civilization began any reconciliationbetween the morality of the individual efficientfor himself and the morality of evolving civiliza-tion. There never will be any such reconciliationto the end of time. The two things are inherentlyincompatible. The meaning which underlies allforms of progress in advanced civilization is that itrepresents the great spiritual integration of mindwhich has raised the conception of Right to theplane of the Universal by projecting the sense ofhuman responsibility outside all theories of limitedinterests whatsoever which rest merely on force.It has made Right independent of and superiorto all interests of the individual, the group or theState resting on the successful application of Force,on whatever claim or mission they may be based,on whatever scale they may be represented, bywhatever force they may be backed.


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 51The contrary doctrine that Right rests on the

successful a plication of Force in the individual wasbroken when the day of the highwayman passedin civilization. The organized form of the samedoctrines in the State that no Right is above theState, and that the State has no standard but thatof power and expediency l resting on omnipotentforce, has been the standing challenge to libertyand progress in every phase of the tremendousstruggles which make the history of civilization.Now if we take up any of the superficialphilosophies or false systems of social scienceof which the world is full, we have the clue atonce to their unsoundness. It may be distin-guished immediately that they have all one un-mistakable mark on them. They representendeavours to construct the science of evolvinghumanity without the subordination of the in-dividual to the universal, and therefore without theiron ethic of Renunciation. They are all hopelessattempts foredoomed to failure, to set out the merescience of the animal efficient in his own interestsas the science of civilization.A name may be given to all these sham cults of

civilization. They are all essentially pagan. Thepagan was originally a villager, the worshipper of1 Bernhardi, Germany and ike Next War, chap. v.


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52 THE SCIENCE OF POWERlocal and therefore of false gods. He was the anti-thesis of the universal. The modern definition ofpaganism may be put clearly and briefly thus :

The pagan man is the man whose standard ofRight does not extend beyond his owninterests.

The pagan state is the state whose standardof Right does not extend beyond its owninterests.

The pagan man and the pagan state may confuseus at the present day by the profession of exemplaryprinciples or of exemplary standards of culturefrom motives of expediency or opportunism in themidst of the world by which they are surrounded.But if they have as part of them no standard otRight raised to the plane of the Universal and pro-jected outside their interests, they are essentiallypagan. And systems of religion, systems of ethicsand philosophies are all in whole or in part pagan orthe reverse in this sense, as well as men and states.Now in the light of these facts it is a matter

of peculiar interest to attempt to follow the vasteffort in the life of the modern West to clothe theideas of the great pagan retrogression resting onDarwinism in the language of science and philo-sophy, and then to embody them in gigantic schemesof world politics. They all conform to one type.


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 53They all represent historic efforts in one form oranother to present what is essentially Darwin'sscience of the individual animal as the scienceof civilization. The task is in the nature of thingsimpossible, for it represents a fundamental con-fusion of individual efficiency in the animal withsocial efficiency in civilization, of the non-moralwith the moral, of the pagan ethics of primitiveman with the advanced ethics of civilization, of thestandards of the jungle with those of evolvinghumanity. The elemental extravagances involvedreveal themselves, therefore, at every step, asalmost the whole of civilization is gradually broughtunder the influence of these attempts.

It was Prussia first, and then the whole ofGermany, which became the seat of this develop-ment. The centre of Darwinism in Germany wasin the writings of Haeckel. But Darwin's theoriesand Haeckel's ideas were absorbed and utilized bya most powerful group of authors and men of actionwho, from various standpoints, perceived howclosely the Darwinian doctrines of efficiency re-sembled the doctrines of efficiency resting onforce, in which they had for long endeavoured toembody their own conceptions of the national policyof modern Germany. It was from this intellec-tual ferment that there gradually spread throughout


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54 THE SCIENCE OF POWERcivilization a surprising movement the like of whichthe human mind will probably never see again.

In watching modern Germany advancing towardsthe Armageddon, a psychic centre of particularinterest and significance is in Nietzsche's writingsand in Haeckel's effort to define the ethic ofDarwinism and to compare it with that previouslyprevailing in Western civilization. Haeckel'spopularization of Darwin began early, but itsbearing may be best studied in its clearestform in his Riddle of the Universe. In this effortit may be observed that all the ideas revolveround a single fundamental conception. Accordingto Haeckel the supreme mistake of the Christianethic consists in this. It conceives that thereexists in the ordinary man a kind of dualism, somefundamental principle of opposition, that is to say,between himself and society, between the good ofhimself and the good of the world, between theindividual and universal.

According to Haeckel all this is undiluted non-sense. There is no place whatever, he tells us, foranything of the kind in the Darwinian ethic. Man,in Haeckel's interpretation of Darwinism, is simplya social vertebrate. His social duties and hisduties to himself are, therefore, one and the same,and grow from the same root in the past. The


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 55whole matter, in short, is that altruism or thegood of others is only enlightened egoism forthe good of oneself. And this fundamental lawof society, concludes Haeckel, is so simple andso inevitable that one cannot understand how it canbe contradicted in theory or in practice as is doneto-day and has been done for thousands of years. *

This is Haeckel's system of monistic ethics.What it represents in reality is the standard ofprimitive man. There is naturally and as a matterof course no place in it for that stupendous conflictbetween limited interests resting on force and theinterests of the Universal which forms the maintheme of human history.Thus the categorical imperative of the moral

law which demands by an overwhelming instinctthe sacrifice of self, and which Kant, therefore,summarizes in the maxim, Act at all times insuchwise that the act may hold good as auniversal law, becomes to Haeckel Kant'scurious idol. 1 Similarly, the command of theFounder of Christianity, Love your enemies,bless them that curse you, do good to them thathate you, and pray for them that despitefullyuse you and persecute you, is pronounced byHaeckel to be as useless in practice as it is un-

1 The Riddle of the Universe, chap. xix.


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56 THE SCIENCE OF POWERnatural/' 1 And as for the doctrine that if anyman will take away thy coat let him have thy cloakalso/' what in the light of Darwinism, asks Haeckelin effect, could be made of such a doctrine in themidst of the conditions of the modern world ?

Haeckel's writings gave to the pagan doctrineof force an extraordinary prestige in the minds ofthe millions who read the popular editions of hisworks in Germany, in English-speaking lands, andin other countries. But Haeckel's attempt toapply Darwinism to civilization was . from thebeginning made in that spirit of compromise whichcould not long endure. It was made in that spiritwhich distinguished Herbert Spencer's similaiattempt in England, a spirit which has beendescribed as essentially demoralizing in that it

attempted to combine the Christian standard ofmanners with a materialistic standard of values.In this it was like the later attempt of the GermanGeneral Staff in the Kriegsbrauch im Landkriegeso admirably summarized by Professor Morganin his translation. It consisted in laying downunimpeachable rules (representing the ethic ofcivilization) and then destroying them by excep-tions (representing the ethic of savagery). 3 It was

1 The Piddle of the Universe, chap. xix.a Ford Madox Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument: an An-

alysis of Prussian Culture, Pt. II. chap. n. ii. * Op. cit. p. I .


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 57Nietzsche who flung to the winds all such futileattempts at compromise and who first proclaimedaloud to the world the inner meaning of popularDarwinism, the true ethic of the great pagan revivalof the modern West.The permanent significance of Nietzsche inWestern

literaturesprings

from a tremendous fact. It is inNietzsche's writings that the Western mind firstbeholds laid bare with unspeakable fidelity thatovermastering animal soul of the West which repre-sents the individual efficient in the struggle forhis own interests, of which Darwin gave us thescience. The West was born of force. Its con-ditions through millenniums of time have been theproduct of force. All the characteristic scienceof the West is the organized knowledge of force.Yet the world-shaping tragedy of our times is thatthe modern West does not stand for the supremacyof force. It represents, on the contrary, thatspiritual integration of mind which is makingRight superior to force. The modern West repre-sents the doom of the doctrine of force in history.But it is Nietzsche of all the world who has voicedfor us the animal soul of the past as it recognizesthis terrible issue and as it rages against the meaningof the new world which it feels to be destined tooverwhelm it. There is no event in humanity to


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58 THE SCIENCE OF POWERcompare with the drama of the meeting of thesetwo epochs of human evolution in the life of themodern West.There is not one of us in the dark, efficient, and

terrible West who does not feel deep in him thestir of this soul of the past as he watches Nietzsche'stragic spirit go forth in modern literature castingdust to heaven as he curses the advancing armiesof progress. There is no foolish and futile effortin Nietzsche as there is in Haeckel to identify hisdoctrines with the ethic of Christianity, I impeachthe greatest blasphemy in time the religion whichhas enchained and softened us. These areNietzsche's words. And again : What have weto do with the herd morality which expresses itselfin modern democracy ? ... It is good for cows,women, and Englishmen. He turns, therefore, tovoice his soul in the doctrine of the supermanthe animal efficient in the struggle for his owninterests : A new table I set over you, oh mybrethren. Become hard ; l For the best thingsbelong to us, the best food, the purest sky, thefairest women, the strongest thoughts. And ifmen do not give us these things, we take them. *Thus do we see the ethic of popular Darwinismpassing towards its embodiment in the politics of

1 The Twilight of the Idols. Zarathustra.


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 59the modern State. Thus do we watch it develop-ing into those maxims which applied to the nationalpolicy of modern Germany, come in due time tocarry it to the world developments which began inthe opening days of August 1914.

Nietzsche's teachings represented the interpreta-tion of the popular Darwinism delivered with thefury and intensity of genius. They fell on unusuallyfertile ground in the conditions of modern Germany.Towards the middle of the nineteenth century thestruggle for constitutionalism was brought to a closein that country with the collapse of the Saxonrevolution. The policy of Prussia had become thepolicy of the sword, and the maxim that thedestinies of the German people are in the handsthat hold the sword emerges into open light asan established principle in the aims of that State.The incomparable machine of the Prussian army wasused to enforce and to justify the doctrine of force.

Bismarck, in the development of the State policyof his country, gradually brought into full view incivilization the working of Nietzsche's conceptionthat the State founded on successful force is a lawof Right to itself. The idea, inherent in the Dar-winian conception of progress, that the main businessof the efficient State is to wage war, came to beformulated at the same time with increasing clear-


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60 THE SCIENCE OF POWERness and persistence. We have now agreed/'concludes Treitschke in one of his most importantlectures, that war is just and moral, and that theideal of eternal peace is both unjust and immoraland impossible. lThe tendency to exalt, at the expense of society,

the absolute claim of the State thus founded on war,went hand in hand with this development. It wasput in the most striking manner in a statementquoted from Treitschke : I have never in my lifegiven one thought to my duties to society ; I havenever in my life, by so much as one single thought,neglected to consider my duty to the PrussianState. 2 The intellect of Germany under thelead of those at the head followed suit and setitself almost as a body to justify and embody inthe State, first in Prussia and then in Germany, theDarwinian conception of force. The Seminars ofthe German universities, says Professor Morgan, were the arsenals that forged the intellectualweapons of the Prussian hegemony. They allhave this in common that they are merciless tothe claims of the small States whose existenceseemed to present an obstacle to Prussian aims. a

1 Treitschke : his Life and Works, Essay on International Law.1 F. M. Hueffer, When Blood is their Argument, Pt. I. chap. iv.8 The German War Book, translated by J. H. Morgan. Trans-

lator's Introduction, chap, iv.


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 01We have to observe in modern Germany, saysa recent writer, a grim development, how pro-fessor after professor, whether merely truculent likeTreitschke or sedate and comparatively mild-spokenlike professors of the school of Ranke and Delbrtick,have always come nearer and nearer to the doctrineof force until finally the blinding light of the argu-ment that the first object of the State is the wagingof war bursts upon the professorial brain. l

It was Darwinism pure and simple, embodied inthe State. If A was able to kill B before B killedA, then A survived. And it would become thedestiny of the race to become a race of As inherit-ing A's qualities. 2 This in actual effect became inlarge measure the national policy and the nationalidealism of a great people for two generations in ourtime. And the theory of Right which accompanied itwas simply that those who held the power of the Statewere not bound by any code of morality save thatdictated by the interests of the State thus restingon successful war.

In all these developments the influence of Nietzscheon his tune was profound. It exceeded in its ownway even the influence of Treitschke's lecturesand of Wagner's music. Nationalism, militarism,

1 F. M. Hueffer, op. cit., Pt. I. chap. 11. iv.* Walter Bagehot, op. cit.


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62 THE SCIENCE OF POWERmaterialism became the three dominant notes inthe life of modern Germany. After the death ofBismarck Nietzsche almost took Bismarck's place.Gradually, as these developments were in progress,the voices and tendencies which up to the middleof the nineteenth century had led to the greatdemocratic movement in the West, and in particularin Germany, became subdued and muted. Rapidlyfrom 1860 onward the spirit of the Darwinianethic gathered towards ascendancy in the nationalpolitics of Europe. Germany fought Denmark,Germany fought Austria, Germany fought France.After 1880 the impulse took on a wider and moreintense world-phase. The Western nations, drivenby the new spirit and in conditions of rivalry inwhich they could not help themselves, entered onthe scramble for the world outside of Europe,engaging in what has been called the most rapidand vast career of acquisition that the world hadwitnessed since the days of Islam. l Within thetwo closing decades of the nineteenth century andthe opening decade of the twentieth century theleading nations of the West in this period of con-quest and annexation added to their dominions areasfifty times as large as that of the United Kingdom.The spirit underlying these world movements was

1 George Peel, The F^tture of England, p. 126.


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 68everywhere the same. The development accom-panying it was marked by the international phaseso accurately described in the quotation given in theprevious chapter from the Westminster Gazette inwhich that journal saw the diplomacy of the leadingEuropean nations openly reverting to the principlesof savagery. The doctrine that Right was ulti-mately based solely on military strength, and thatmilitary power was the supreme test of fitness andefficiency amongst civilized nations, was simul-taneously being rapidly developed in textbooks ofpolitical and military science in Germany : thatthe Right of a State turns not on internationalmorality, but simply and solely on power andexpediency ; l that treaties and national engage-ments ceased to be binding and became scraps ofpaper

when they could no longer be supported

by the sword, were all the culminating steps bywhich the doctrine that irresistible force was thesole test of fitness brought the world to the brinkof the cataclysm which plunged nine hundred millionsof the human race into war in 1914.The pagan doctrine of force as the supreme testof efficiency in the world which had come out thusnaked and unabashed in modern Germany andwhich was moving towards its organized expression

1 Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War, chap. v.


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64 THE SCIENCE OF POWERin national policy had its springs deep down in thetendencies of the intellectual life of every leadingWestern nation.There has been nothing in the history of the

human mind in the past, there will probably benothing in the history of the human mind in thefuture, to compare with the phases of the intellectualmovement which in other countries of the Westcontemporaneously accompanied the phases of thepolitical movement in which the doctrine of theefficient Darwinian animal became embodied inthe world policy of modern Germany.Almost every reading mind of the West which

attempted, under the influence of the Darwinianhypothesis, to apply the doctrine of evolution tohuman society became affected in the same way.Darwin's science of the animal efficient in his owninterest was conceived to be the science of civiliza-tion itself. In every case the conception gave riseto some monstrous form of extravagance. In themilitary state in Germany where Darwinism fromthe beginning took a political direction its cul-minating phase was found to be in its applicationto Weltpolitik. Nietzsche gave Germany the doc-trine of Darwin's efficient animal in the voice ofhis superman. Bernhardi and the military text-books in due time gave Germany the doctrine of the


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 65superman translated into the national policy of thesuperstate aiming at world power. Through allthe many phases of the movement there ran thesame dominating note of intensive self-assertion,the same fundamental conception of the supremacyof force. Life exists for Me. All the dim aeonsbehind have toiled to produce Me. I am theFittest. Give Me My Rights. Stand clear of Myway. I want and I will have. 1

All this was in Germany. But in the ultra-democratic State as represented in England, France,and the United States the development of Darwin'*ideas took on different but even more surprisingforms. In the article on Sociology in the currentedition of the Encyclopedia Britannica I havedealt with some of these phases. As early as 1860,the year after the publication of Darwin's Origin ofSpecies, Herbert Spencer published in England hisfamous article on the Social Organism. The articlecontained the central idea around which Spencerafterwards constructed his system of SyntheticPhilosophy, the principal books of which have beentranslated into every leading language of the West.

Nothing has ever existed in the world or will everexist therein like the social organism which Spencerconceived in this essay. For the characteristic

1 Harold Begbic, op. cit.5


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66 THE SCIENCE OF POWERfeature of the social organism of human society,as Spencer described it, was that it is an organismin which the interests of the individuals com-prising it can never be subordinated to anysupposed interest of the whole. Extraordinary asthe fact may seem, this conception is actually putforward by Spencer in all seriousness. It is theleading idea in his system of Synthetic Philosophy.Yet the mind staggers and boggles at the conception.For how could there be such a thing as a socialorganism while the interests of the individual in itwere supreme over every good of the whole organism Even the arrogance of Nietzsche's superman did notreach that of Spencer's individual as thus conceived.

In ages to come, as men watch the phenomenonof the passing at this time to gigantic catastrophein history of the whole system of the knowledgeof the West which is founded on force, interestwill centre in the extraordinary intellectual positionthus being developed in England by Spencer sideby side with the political development taking placein Germany.At the time when Spencer wrote the German

people were being rapidly enveloped in those theoriesof the absolute State aiming at world power andresting on militarism which had been placed onthe anvil by Frederick the Great of Prussia long


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GREAT PAGAN RETROGRESSION 67before Nietzsche voiced the spirit of these theories,and Haeckel clothed them in the terms of Dar-winian science. But Spencer was an Ultra-democrat.He hated militarism. He lived in England. Hetherefore applied the Darwinian doctrine of theefficient animal in his own way.

Yet the result was essentially identical in both

Science of Power B. Kidd

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