No, for the sake of your own salvation, I say, they shall _live_, and
this is truth. It is extremely bold of me to say so, but I assert that
man's world is a moral world, not because we blindly agree to believe
it, but because it is so in truth which would be dangerous for us to
ignore. And this moral nature of man cannot be divided into convenient
compartments for its preservation. You cannot secure it for your home
consumption with protective tariff walls, while in foreign parts making
it enormously accommodating in its free trade of license.
Has not this truth already come home to you now, when this cruel war has
driven its claws into the vitals of Europe? when her hoard of wealth is
bursting into smoke and her humanity is shattered into bits on her
battlefields? You ask in amazement what has she done to deserve this?
The answer is, that the West has been systematically petrifying her
moral nature in order to lay a solid foundation for her gigantic
abstractions of efficiency. She has all along been starving the life of
the personal man into that of the professional.
In your mediæval age in Europe, the simple and the natural man, with all
his violent passions and desires, was engaged in trying to find out a
reconciliation in the conflict between the flesh and the spirit. All
through the turbulent career of her vigorous youth the temporal and the
spiritual forces both acted strongly upon her nature, and were moulding
it into completeness of moral personality. Europe owes all her greatness
in humanity to that period of discipline,--the discipline of the man in
his human integrity.
Then came the age of intellect, of science. We all know that intellect
is impersonal. Our life, and our heart, are one with us, but our mind
can be detached from the personal man and then only can it freely move
in its world of thoughts. Our intellect is an ascetic who wears no
clothes, takes no food, knows no sleep, has no wishes, feels no love or
hatred or pity for human limitations, who only reasons, unmoved, through
the vicissitudes of life. It burrows to the roots of things, because it
has no personal concern with the thing itself. The grammarian walks
straight through all poetry and goes to the root of words without
obstruction, because he is not seeking reality, but law. When he finds
the law, he is able to teach people how to master words. This is a
power,--the power which fulfils some special usefulness, some particular
need of man.
Reality is the harmony which gives to the component parts of a thing the
equilibrium of the whole. You break it, and have in your hands the
nomadic atoms fighting against one another, therefore unmeaning. Those
who covet power try to get mastery of these aboriginal fighting
elements, and through some narrow channels force them into some violent
service for some particular needs of man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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