Book I - Right And Wrong As A Clue To The Meaning Of The Universe [by
Oxford don C. S. Lewis, the premier thinker of 20th century, given as
radio addresses on BBC during WWII before compiled into a book]
1. The Law Of Human Nature
Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe
we can learn something very important from listening to the kind of
things they say. They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone
did the same to you?"—"That's my seat, I was there first"—"Leave him
alone, he isn't doing you any harm"— "Why should you shove in
first?"—"Give me a bit of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"—"Come
on, you promised." People say things like that every day, educated
people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes
them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen
to please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour
which he expects the other man to know about. And the other man very
seldom replies: "To hell with your standard." Nearly always he tries to
make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the
standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. He pretends
there is some special reason in this particular case why the person who
took the seat first should not keep it, or that things were quite
different when he was given the bit of orange, or that something has
turned up which lets him off keeping his promise.
It looks, in
fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule
of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to
call it, about which they really agreed. And they have. If they had not,
they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not quarrel
in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show that
the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to
do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right
and Wrong are; just as there would be no sense in saying that a
footballer had committed a foul unless there was some agreement about
the rules of football.
Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong
used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the
"laws of nature" we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity,
or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of
Right and Wrong "the Law of Nature," they really meant the Law of Human
Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of
gravitation and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called
man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not
choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could
choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
We may put this in another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to
several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he
is free to disobey. As a body, he is subjected to gravitation and cannot
disobey it; if you leave him unsupported in mid-air, he has no more
choice about falling than a stone has. As an organism, he is subjected
to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an
animal can. That is, he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with
other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law
he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is
the one he can disobey if he chooses.
This law was called the Law
of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and
did not need to be taught it. They did not mean, of course, that you
might not find an odd individual here and there who did not know it,
just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a
tune. But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea
of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were
right. If they were not, then all the things we said about the war were
nonsense. What was the sense in saying the enemy were in the wrong
unless Right is a real thing which the Nazis at bottom knew as well as
we did and ought to have practised? If they had had no notion of what we
mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we
could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their
hair.
I know that some people say the idea of a Law of Nature or
decent behaviour known to all men is unsound, because different
civilisations and different ages have had quite different moralities.
But this is not true. There have been differences between their
moralities, but these have never amounted to anything like a total
difference. If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral
teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese,
Greeks and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like
they are to each other and to our own. Some of the evidence for this I
have put together in the appendix of another book called The Abolition
of Man; but for our present purpose I need only ask the reader to think
what a totally different morality would mean. Think of a country where
people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt
proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him.
You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made
five. Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish
to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or
everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself
first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to
whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed
that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
But the most
remarkable thing is this. Whenever you find a man who says he does not
believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back
on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try
breaking one to him he will be complaining "It's not fair" before you
can say Jack Robinson. A nation may say treaties do not matter, but
then, next minute, they spoil their case by saying that the particular
treaty they want to break was an unfair one. But if treaties do not
matter, and if there is no such thing as Right and Wrong— in other
words, if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a
fair treaty and an unfair one? Have they not let the cat out of the bag
and shown that, whatever they say, they really know the Law of Nature
just like anyone else?
It seems, then, we are forced to believe
in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them,
just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter
of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now
if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this.
None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any
exceptions among you, I apologise to them. They had much better read
some other work, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now,
turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:
I hope you
will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and
Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only
trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this
month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise
ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may
be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the
children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business
about the money—the one you have almost forgotten—came when you were
very hard up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have
never done—well, you never would have promised if you had known how
frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your
wife (or husband) or sister (or brother) if I knew how irritating they
could be, I would not wonder at it—and who the dickens am I, anyway? I
am just the same.
That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the
Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not
keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as
your arm. The question at the moment is not whether they are good
excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply,
whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not
believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make
excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in
decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so— that we
cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently
we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for
our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations.
It is only
our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we
put our good temper down to ourselves. These, then, are the two points I
wanted to make. First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this
curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot
really get rid of it. Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that
way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it. These two facts are the
foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we
live in.
2. Some Objections
If they are the foundation, I
had better stop to make that foundation firm before I go on. Some of the
letters I have had show that a good many people find it difficult to
understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of
Decent Behaviour is.
For example, some people wrote to me saying,
"Isn't what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn't
it been developed just like all our other instincts?" Now I do not deny
that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the
Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct—by
mother love, or sexual instinct, or the instinct for food. It means that
you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way. And, of
course, we sometimes do feel just that sort of desire to help another
person: and no doubt that desire is due to the herd instinct. But
feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought
to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help
from a man in danger.
You will probably feel two desires—one a
desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to
keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you
will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing
which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and
suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two
instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be
either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which
tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not
another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells
us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
Another way of seeing that the Moral Law is not simply one of our
instincts is this. If two instincts are in conflict, and there is
nothing in a creature's mind except those two instincts, obviously the
stronger of the two must win. But at those moments when we are most
conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side
with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much
more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law
tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try
to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is? I mean, we
often feel it our duty to stimulate the herd instinct, by waking up our
imaginations and arousing our pity and so on, so as to get up enough
steam for doing the right thing. But clearly we are not acting from
instinct when we set about making an instinct stronger than it is. The
thing that says to you, "Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,"
cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note
on the piano needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.
Here is a third way of seeing it. If the Moral Law was one of our
instincts, we ought to be able to point to some one impulse inside us
which was always what we call "good," always in agreement with the rule
of right behaviour. But you cannot. There is none of our impulses which
the Moral Law may not sometimes tell us to suppress, and none which it
may not sometimes tell us to encourage. It is a mistake to think that
some of our impulses— say mother love or patriotism—are good, and
others, like sex or the fighting instinct, are bad. All we mean is that
the occasions on which the fighting instinct or the sexual desire need
to be restrained are rather more frequent than those for restraining
mother love or patriotism. But there are situations in which it is the
duty of a married man to encourage his sexual impulse and of a soldier
to encourage the fighting instinct.
There are also occasions on
which a mother's love for her own children or a man's love for his own
country have to be suppressed or they will lead to unfairness towards
other people's children or countries. Strictly speaking, there are no
such things as good and bad impulses. Think once again of a piano. It
has not got two kinds of notes on it, the "right" notes and the "wrong"
ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The
Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is
something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right
conduct) by directing the instincts.
By the way, this point is
of great practical consequence. The most dangerous thing you can do is
to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing
you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will
not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might
think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave
out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking
evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity," and become in the end a
cruel and treacherous man.
Other people wrote to me saying,
"Isn't what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something
that is put into us by education?" I think there is a misunderstanding
here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted
that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that
thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so.
We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up
alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not
follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention,
something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made
different if they had liked?
I fully agree that we learn the Rule
of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books,
as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere
conventions which might have been different—we learn to keep to the left
of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to
the right—and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The
question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs.
There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics. The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imagine—and you can recognise the same law running through them all: whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent. The other reason is this.
When you think about these differences between
the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality
of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of
the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never
be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing
for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any
other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to
savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of
course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.
We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral
ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or
Pioneers—people who understood morality better than their neighbours
did. Very well then.
The
reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is
that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of
us thinks. If when each of us said "New York" each meant merely "The
town I am imagining in my own head," how could one of us have truer
ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood
at all. In the same way, if the Rule of Decent Behaviour meant simply
"whatever each nation happens to approve," there would be no sense in
saying that any one nation had ever been more correct in its approval
than any other; no sense in saying that the world could ever grow
morally better or morally worse.
I conclude then, that though the
differences between people's ideas of Decent Behaviour often make you
suspect that there is no real natural Law of Behaviour at all, yet the
things we are bound to think about these differences really prove just
the opposite. But one word before I end. I have met people who
exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between
differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For
example, one man said to me, "Three hundred years ago people in England
were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human
Nature or Right Conduct?" But surely the reason we do not execute
witches is that we do not believe there are such things.
If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did. There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
3. The Reality Of The Law
I now go back to what
I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things
about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a
sort of behaviour they ought to practise, what you might call fair play,
or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did
not in fact do so. Now some of you may wonder why I called this odd. It
may seem to you the most natural thing in the world. In particular, you
may have thought I was rather hard on the human race. After all, you may
say, what I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong or of Nature, only
means that people are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect
them to be? That would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was
to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving as
we expect others to behave. But that is not my job at all. I am not
concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth. And from
that point of view the very idea of something being imperfect, of its
not being what it ought to be, has certain consequences.
If you
take a thing like a stone or a tree, it is what it is and there seems no
sense in saying it ought to have been otherwise. Of course you may say a
stone is "the wrong shape" if you want to use it for a rockery, or that
a tree is a bad tree because it does not give you as much shade as you
expected. But all you mean is that the stone or tree does not happen to
be convenient for some purpose of your own. You are not, except as a
joke, blaming them for that. You really know, that, given the weather
and the soil, the tree could not have been any different. What we, from
our point of view, call a "bad" tree is obeying the laws of its nature
just as much as a "good" one.
Now have you noticed what follows?
It follows that what we usually call the laws of nature—the way weather
works on a tree for example—may not really be laws in the strict sense,
but only in a manner of speaking. When you say that falling stones
always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying
that the law only means "what stones always do"? You do not really think
that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under
orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall.
In other words, you cannot be sure that there is anything over and
above the facts themselves, any law about what ought to happen, as
distinct from what does happen.
The laws of nature, as applied to
stones or trees, may only mean "what Nature, in fact, does." But if you
turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a
different matter. That law certainly does not mean "what human beings,
in fact, do"; for as I said before, many of them do not obey this law at
all, and none of them obey it completely. The law of gravity tells you
what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you
what human beings ought to do and do not.
In other words, when
you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond
the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also
have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the
universe there need not be anything but the facts. Electrons and
molecules behave in a certain way, and certain results follow, and that
may be the whole story. (*) But men behave in a certain way and that is
not the whole story, for all the time you know that they ought to behave
differently. ----
[*] I do not think it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean that, as far as the argument has gone up to date, it may be.
----
Now this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it away. For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.
[*] I do not think it is the whole story, as you will see later. I mean that, as far as the argument has gone up to date, it may be.
----
Now this is really so peculiar that one is tempted to try to explain it away. For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean the same as when you say that a stone is the wrong shape; namely, that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.
I am not angry—except perhaps for
a moment before I come to my senses—with a man who trips me up by
accident; I am angry with a man who tries to trip me up even if he does
not succeed. Yet the first has hurt me and the second has not. Sometimes
the behaviour which I call bad is not inconvenient to me at all, but
the very opposite.
In war, each side may find a traitor on the other side very useful. But though they use him and pay him they regard him as human vermin. So you cannot say that what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that happens to be useful to us. And as for decent behaviour in ourselves, I suppose it is pretty obvious that it does not mean the behaviour that pays. It means things like being content with thirty shillings when you might have got three pounds, doing school work honestly when it would be easy to cheat, leaving a girl alone when you would like to make love to her, staying in dangerous places when you could go somewhere safer, keeping promises you would rather not keep, and telling the truth even when it makes you look a fool.
Some people say that though decent conduct does not mean
what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means
what pays the human race as a whole; and that consequently there is no
mystery about it. Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see
that you cannot have real safety or happiness except in a society where
every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to
behave decently.
Now, of course, it is perfectly true that safety
and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations
being honest and fair and kind to each other. It is one of the most
important truths in the world. But as an explanation of why we feel as
we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the point If we ask: "Why
ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is good for
society," we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for society
except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have to
say, "Because you ought to be unselfish"—which simply brings us back to
where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting
any further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it
would not be much good saying "in order to score goals," for trying to
score goals is the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you
would really only be saying that football was football—which is true,
but not worth saying.
In the same way, if a man asks what is the
point of behaving decently, it is no good replying, "in order to benefit
society," for trying to benefit society, in other words being unselfish
(for "society" after all only means "other people"), is one of the
things decent behaviour consists in; all you are really saying is that
decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You would have said just as much
if you had stopped at the statement, "Men ought to be unselfish."
And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be
fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish,
but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not
simply a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of
Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.
On the other hand, it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the
idea, and most of the things we say and think about men would be
reduced to nonsense if we did. And it is not simply a statement about
how we should like men to behave for our own convenience; for the
behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behaviour
we find inconvenient, and may even be the opposite.
Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or
whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing— a thing
that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet it is not a fact
in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behaviour is a
fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more
than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is
something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and
yet quite definitely real—a real law, which none of as made, but which
we find pressing on us.
4. What Lies Behind The Law
Let us
sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and trees and
things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not be
anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed
by certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in
a certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real—anything
above and beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of
Man, we saw that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, or of Right
and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human
behaviour. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something
else—a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to
obey.
I now want to consider what this tells us about the
universe we live in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been
wondering what this universe really is and how it came to be there. And,
very roughly, two views have been held. First, there is what is called
the materialist view.
People who take that view think that matter
and space just happen to exist, and always have existed, nobody knows
why; and that the matter, behaving in certain fixed ways, has just
happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce creatures like ourselves who
are able to think. By one chance in a thousand something hit our sun and
made it produce the planets; and by another thousandth chance the
chemicals necessary for life, and the right temperature, occurred on one
of these planets, and so some of the matter on this earth came alive;
and then, by a very long series of chances, the living creatures
developed into things like us. The other view is the religious view. (*)
According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than
it is like anything else we know.
----[*] See Note at the end of this chapter. ----
That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one
thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for
purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce
creatures like itself—I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds.
Please do not think that one of these views was held a long time ago
and that the other has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have
been thinking men both views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find
out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense.
Science works by experiments. It watches how things behave.
Every
scientific statement in the long run, however complicated it looks,
really means something like, "I pointed the telescope to such and such a
part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th and saw so-and-so," or, "I
put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to such-and-such a
temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying anything
against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more
scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that
this is the job of science— and a very useful and necessary job it is
too. But why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is
anything behind the things science observes—something of a different
kind—this is not a scientific question. If there is "Something Behind,"
then either it will have to remain altogether unknown to men or else
make itself known in some different way.
The statement that there
is any such thing, and the statement that there is no such thing, are
neither of them statements that science can make. And real scientists do
not usually make them. It is usually the journalists and popular
novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of half-baked science
from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is really a matter of
common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so that it knew
every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that the
questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?"
"Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?
Now the
position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and
only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could
learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely
observe men, we are men.
In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he? for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying them from outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this. We
want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for
no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it
is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed
facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts
can find it.
There is only one case in which we can know whether
there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we
find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling
power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of
the facts inside the universe— no more than the architect of a house
could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The
only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside
ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a
certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely
this ought to arouse our suspicions?
In the only case where you
can expect to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the
other cases, where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not.
Suppose someone asked me, when I see a man in a blue uniform going down
the street leaving little paper packets at each house, why I suppose
that they contain letters? I should reply, "Because whenever he leaves a
similar little packet for me I find it does contain a letter." And if
he then objected, "But you've never seen all these letters which you
think the other people are getting," I should say, "Of course not, and I
shouldn't expect to, because they're not addressed to me.
I'm
explaining the packets I'm not allowed to open by the ones I am allowed
to open." It is the same about this question. The only packet I am
allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that
particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that
I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a
certain way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get inside a
stone or a tree I should find exactly the same thing, just as I do not
think all the other people in the street get the same letters as I do.
I should expect, for instance, to find that the stone had to obey the
law of gravity—that whereas the sender of the letters merely tells me to
obey the law of my human nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws
of its stony nature. But I should expect to find that there was, so to
speak, a sender of letters in both cases, a Power behind the facts, a
Director, a Guide.
Do not think I am going faster than I really
am. I am not yet within a hundred miles of the God of Christian
theology. All I have got to is a Something which is directing the
universe, and which appears in me as a law urging me to do right and
making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when I do wrong.
I
think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like anything
else we know—because after all the only other thing we know is matter
and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But, of
course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person. In
the next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it.
But one word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap
talked about God for the last hundred years. That is not what I am
offering. You can cut all that out.
Note —In order to keep this
section short enough when it was given on the air, I mentioned only the
Materialist view and the Religious view. But to be complete I ought to
mention the In between view called Life-Force philosophy, or Creative
Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest expositions of it come in
the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound ones in those of
Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small variations by
which life on this planet "evolved" from the lowest forms to Man were
not due to chance but to the "striving" or "purposiveness" of a
Life-Force.
When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then "a mind bringing life into existence and leading it to perfection" is really a God, and their view is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense in saying that something without a mind "strives" or has "purposes"? This seems to me fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences.
When you are feeling fit and
the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole
universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to
think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries
and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do
something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with
no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that
troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force
is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will
not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the
Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has
yet seen?
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