Lum held that evolutional ethics, or Anarchist ethics, in fact, must
take account of both the altruistic and egoistic impulses; that while
determining causes will ever lie in the mysterious realm of the
unconscious life, consciousness may discern the trend of development
and throw in its quota of influence for or against. That in its
endeavor to comprehend the trend of development, it should take fair
account of ancient truths, however enveloped in superstitious husks;
should aim to extract the virtue even in the much mistaken altruistic
doctrines of vicarious atonement and personal abasement; and while
emphasizing the negation of human rulership as destructive of the
possibilities of true growth, at the same time to acknowledge the vain
conceit of self as anything more than a temporary grouping of instinct
developed in beast, in plant, in man; to acknowledge the individual
creature as a sort of mirrored reflection of the cosmos, constantly
shifting, now scintillant, now vague and evanescent, now gone forever as
Death breaks the mirror.
The notion of immortality which grows from such a conception of self is
purged of the old vain conceit. It has been most beautifully voiced in
George Eliot's "Choir Invisible," Mr. Lum's favorite poem; and in the
lines is expressed the last great limitless shadow which engulfs even
this immortality, the blind, tremendous darkness which lies at the end
of all, the sense of the invincibility of which must have lain upon our
teacher's soul when after the last searching, inexplicable, farewell
look into a friend's eyes he went out into the April night and took his
last walk in the roar of the great city--he who should soon be so
silent!
Most of his comrades were surprised. They said: "I never thought Dyer D.
Lum would go alone." But I who know how often and how wearily he said
"What's the use," am sure that that mocking question lay at his heart,
and paralyzed the _will_ to do.
Like Olive Schreiner's stars in the African Farm, the soul about to
depart sees the earth so coldly--all the ages are as one night--and
like them he watches little helpless creatures of the earth come out and
crawl awhile upon its skin, then go back beneath it, and it does not
matter--nothing matters.
Francisco Ferrer
In all unsuccessful social upheavals there are two terrors: the
Red--that is, the people, the mob; the White--that is, the reprisal.
When a year ago to-day the lightning of the White Terror shot out of
that netherest blackness of Social Depth, the Spanish Torture House, and
laid in the ditch of Montjuich a human being who but a moment before had
been the personification of manhood, in the flower of life, in the
strength and pride of a balanced intellect, full of the purpose of a
great and growing undertaking,--that of the Modern Schools,--humanity at
large received a blow in the face which it could not understand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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