According to our different methods of viewing society, we express this newer ideal which is after all so old as to have been engendered in the tribe itself. He who makes the study of society a mere corollary of biology, speaks of the "theory of the unspe-( 21)-cialized," that the simple cell develops much more rapidly when new tissue is needed than the more highly developed one;he who views society from the economic standpoint and finds hope only in a changed industrial order, talks of the "man at the bottom of society,"of the proletarian who shall eventually come into his own; he who believes that a wiser and a saner education will cure our social ill, speaks ever and again of "the wisdom of the little child" and of the necessity to reveal and explore his capacity; while he who keeps close to the historic deductions upon which the study of society is chiefly founded, uses the old religious phrase, "the counsel of imperfection," and bids us concern ourselves with "the least of these."The French have a phrase l'imperieuse bonté by which they designate those impulses towards compassionate conduct which will not be denied, because they are as imperative in their demand for expression as is the impulse to make music or to soften life by poesy and decoration.
According to this definition, St. Francis was a genius in exactly the same sense as was Dante or Raphael, and he revealed quite as they did, possibilities and reaches of the human soul hitherto unsuspected. This genius for goodness has in the past largely expressed itself through indi-( 22)-viduals and groups, but it may be that we are approaching a period which shall give it collective expression, and shall unite into one all those private and parochial efforts. It would be no more strange than was that marvelous coming together of the artists and the people in the thirteenth century which resulted in the building of the Gothic cathedrals. We may be waiting for a religious enthusiasm, for a divine fire to fuse together the partial and feeble efforts at "doing good" into a transfigured whole which shall take on international proportions as naturally as the cathedrals towered into unheard-of heights. The Gothic cathedrals were glorious beyond the dreams of artists, notwithstanding that they were built by unknown men, or rather by so many men that it was a matter of indifference to record their names. Could we compare the present humanitarian efforts to the building of a spiritual cathedral, it would seem that the gargoyles had been made first, that the ground is now strewn with efforts to "do good" which have developed a diabolical capacity for doing harm. But even these may fall into place. The old cathedral-builders fearlessly portrayed all of life, its inveterate tendency to deride as well as to bless; its trickery as well as its beauty. Their art was catholic enough to portray all, and the ( 23) cathedral was huge enough to mellow all they portrayed into a flowing and inspired whole.
At the present moment it requires the philosopher to unify these spiritual efforts of the common man into the internationalism of good will, as in the past it was natural that the philosophers, the men who looked at life as a whole, should have been the first to sigh for negative peace which they declared would be "eternal."Speculative writers, such as Kant, Bentham, and Buckle, long ago pointed out that the subsidence of war was inevitable as society progressed. They contended that every stage of human progress is marked by a further curtailment of brute force, a limitation of the area in which it is permitted. At the bottom is the small savage community in a perpetual state of warfare; at the top an orderly society stimulated and controlled by recognized ideals of social justice. In proportion as the savage society comes under the dominion of a common moral consciousness, it moves up, and in proportion as the civilized society reverts to the use of brute force, it goes down.
Reversion to that brute struggle may at any moment cost the destruction of the painfully acquired bonds of equity, the ties of mutual principle, which are wrought with such effort and loosed with such ease. But these earlier ( 24) philosophers could not possibly have foreseen the tremendous growth of industry and commerce with their inevitable cosmopolitanism which has so recently taken place, nor without knowledge of this could they possibly have prognosticated the leap forward and the aggressive character which the concern for human welfare has latterly evinced. The speculative writers among our contemporaries are naturally the only ones who formulate this new development, or rather bid us heed its presence among us. An American philosopher [3] has lately reminded us of the need to "discover in the social realm the moral equivalent for war_ something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war has done, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual natures as war has proved itself to be incompatible."It may be true that we are even now discovering these moral substitutes, although we find it so difficult to formulate them. Perhaps our very hope that these substitutes may be discovered has become the custodian of a secret change that is going on all about us. We care less each day for the heroism connected with warfare and destruction, and constantly admire more that which pertains to labor and the nourishing of human life. The new ( 25) heroism manifests itself at the present moment in a universal determination to abolish poverty and disease, a manifestation so widespread that it may justly be called international.
