The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

MODERN IDEAS OF CONDUCT

is most intense, and the thought of defeat, frustration, or death exquisitely intolerable. We fight for self-expression, for our own survival, for our reproduction, with extreme effort. But ripening knowledge and the progress of adolescence temper this fierce selfconcentration.

It seems possible that man is being evolved past this phase of extreme selfishness and self-concentration. The tendency of all moral teaching and of all progress in conduct throughout the development of civilization has been to replace selfishness by fellowship, to treat secretiveness, cunning and secret motives, greed, injustice, self-assertion, disregard of the feelings and good of others with increasing reprehension. Modern biology simply takes these generally recognized virtues of trustworthiness, frankness, fairness, willing helpfulness, charity, devotion to the commonweal and recognizes them as not only normal duties but as reasonable and natural ways of establishing and retaining mental serenity.

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vasion, Indolence, and Fear

Before we conclude this very general review of modern ideas about conduct, we must direct attention to a group of phenomena which have this in common, that they concern a recoil from activity, a certain paralysis of will. In the Catholic system, based on a very huge amount of searching experience, there is, among the list of the seven deadly sins, accidie or sloth. It is the inability to live, as St. John put it, * abundantly.”

In the contemporary civilized community there is a very large number of people who display this weak disinclination for life, who live by habit, who react feebly to stimulation, who seem to be inattentive, spiritless and joyless. They are what are often called “devitalized”? individuals. They may have lost physical health, or that state of mental health, that confidence in things and themselves being “‘ all right,” which is called “‘ faith.” Effort never seems to be worth while to them. They accept second-rate things, are content to do things in a second-rate fashion, and to be secondrate people. Rodents and other creatures, when their population numbers have passed a periodic minimum and selection is not pressing them too hard, may display parallel types of listlessness, but most living species are too close to death to carry many such slack individuals. If most creatures do not

want to live very strenuously, nature sees to it that they do not live at all. Natural selection does not generally tolerate the second-rate. But compared with all other animals, mankind is hardly subjected at all now to even the shadow of selective killing. There is a kind of low-grade security for nearly everyone. People are indeed enslaved, sweated, fed on broken crusts, but they drag on, and they can procreate. Humanity is certainly accumulating a substratum of these dull unkilled.

But it is not to be too readily assumed that all people who submit to lead dreary, unventilated, uneventful lives are inferior and unnecessary people in their essential quality. If individuals inheriting the best genes in the world are born into grey conditions and ill-nourished and discouraged, they may never get stimulation early enough, or of the right quality, to develop their faculties fully. They may be caught early and cowed by pain before their courage develops ; they may be trained to humiliations and submission. All conscious living is a balance of impulse and inhibition, and the balance may easily acquire a permanent tilt towards inhibition. Life can scorch and sting those who challenge it rashly, but from the modern point of view, it is better to be scorched and stung and searched to the core of one’s being than to stand aside and watch the world go by.

These people whose hearts fail them may, and do, find consolation and compensation in a multitude of selfprotective mental complexes. ‘They represent their slackness as commonsense, as quiet modesty, as a mysterious subtle refinement that keeps them aloof from the brawling strain of vigorous vulgar life. They thank the gods they are not “ pushers,” not “‘ highbrows,”’ not the mad, restless followers of every novelty. They like to do things in their own quiet, unobtrusive way. They cannot but be amused at the exertions and the socalled knowledge of those they do not understand. There is much quiet laughter of a really malicious sort among the victims of accidie. They have a sociability of their own and are capable of immense passive obstructions in a progressive world. They line the streets for any passing show, and rather hate it as it passes. Then home to the den that is never lit by strenuous effort or any sense of the purpose that may lie before mankind.

There can be little doubt that in the new clearness that is coming to mankind, it will be realized that submissiveness to limited

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