A Writer's Notebook (27 page)

The success of religious systems is proof of the absorbing egoism of men and of their lack of mental balance.

No egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul.

Wisdom can hardly be termed a virtue, for it is made up of intellectual qualities which one man has and another not. If wisdom is necessary to right action, this can only be possible to the minority of mankind.

Intuitionism rests on the principle of an absolute in morals, and its insecurity appears in the fact that the intuitions which
tell men how to act differ from country to country, from age to age, and from man to man. Intuition will tell a man to commit a murder in one age and in another will cause him to revolt from the idea. The judgments which seem to come from no discernible source can very simply be shown to arise from the teaching of childhood and the practice of neighbours. The explanation of intuition is the same as that of advertisement: tell a man ten thousand times that Pears Soap is good for the complexion and eventually he will have an intuitive certainty of the fact.

It is curious to find a father of the church, St. Chrysostom, hinting at the relativeness of morality in the words: “Do not ask how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good, now when the need for them has passed: ask how they were good when the period required them.”

The hedonist must remember that self-consciousness is incompatible with happiness. Happiness will escape him if he fixes his mind on his own pursuit of pleasure.

Desire is pleasurable in its early stages, but, becoming intense, is painful. Then the result of desire is the same as that of pain, and we seek to get rid of the desire rather than to obtain the object desired. Sometimes love is so violent that the desire becomes no longer a pleasure but a pain, and then men will kill the woman they love so as to rid themselves of the desire.

Hunger is a desire which is on the boundary line between pain and pleasure. It shows better than any other state that pain and pleasure arise from the degree of desire. When hunger is moderate the sensation is agreeable, and the idea of
food gives pleasure; but when it is excessive there is only pain, and then one's thoughts are engaged not with the satisfactoriness of eating a good dinner, but merely with the getting rid of an unpleasant feeling.

No more stupid apology for pain has ever been devised than that it elevates. It is an explanation due to the necessity of justifying pain from the Christian point of view. Pain is nothing more than the signal given by the nerves that the organism is in circumstances hurtful to it; it would be as reasonable to assert that a danger signal elevates a train. But one would have thought that the ordinary observation of life was enough to show that in the great majority of cases, pain, far from refining, has an effect which is merely brutalising. An example in point is the case of hospital in-patients: physical pain makes them self-absorbed, selfish, querulous, impatient, unjust and greedy; I could name a score of petty vices that it generates, but not one virtue. Poverty also is pain. I have known well men who suffered from that grinding agony of poverty which befalls persons who have to live among those richer than themselves; it makes them grasping and mean, dishonest and untruthful. It teaches them all sorts of detestable tricks. With moderate means they would have been honourable men, but ground down by poverty they have lost all sense of decency.

For the average man a sufficient rule of life is to follow his instincts controlled by the moral standard of the society in which he lives.

He raged, a twopenny halfpenny Prometheus, as unquiet thoughts gnawed at his heart, while he strove to pierce the mystery of life.