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

MODERN IDEAS OF CONDUCT

bad. But the scalpel, the microscope, the study of the less familiar aspects of life and the searchlight of an intensive criticism have all combined to undermine our confidence in the simplicity and absolute integrity of individuals. We begin to apprehend the transitory, provisional, and fluctuating factors and aspects of a human self.

In those unsuspicious pre-scientific days John Everyman could really think of himself as boxed-up in himself, as absolutely separate from all the rest of things, able to keep his thoughts and motives to himself, free to do just what he liked with himself. He could make his own plans for his own ends. He could lie and cheat other people, but it did not occur to him that he could ever lie to himself.

But now objective science is bringing it home to Mr. Everyman that he is a product of organic evolution and that this conscious individuality of his is a synthesis of processes, which is directed rather to the survival of a collection of genes than to its own distinct and separate affairs. He has been boxed-up in himself for a particular end, and that boxing-up is not the primary verity he thought it was. And psycho-analysis shows him that, all unawares, his ego has been perpetually imposing interpretations upon the intimations of fact that come to him, exalting this in the persona or thrusting that down out of recognition into the anima. It dawns upon him nowadays that this working idea of conduct as a boxed-off separate game against the universe may be illusion. He is not entitled to all that privacy. It was a narrow and cunning idea of existence. He belongs, he now apprehends, to something greater than himself, something that modern science is gradually enabling him to realize. He is a part. Fe is not a cut-off unity. He is neither a beginning nor an end.

As this realization soaks into people’s minds, it changes their attitude to conduct very profoundly. They develop what is called “the scientific attitude of mind at the scientific style of behaviour. The first, most marked characteristic of this modern attitude is the unprecedented value it gives to candour. We are all experiments together, says biology ; we are all serving in the education and growth of life, and all the plotting and planning and hiding things from each other for small private and personal advantages that constituted the bulk of human reactions in the past is seen suddenly for the waste and folly it is. The psychoanalyst has revealed to us the advantages

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of candour with ourselves, the advance of science in the last two centuries has opened before us the splendour of candour between man and man. A commandment, omitted strangely enough from the Ten delivered at Sinai, has become the dominant one for the new world: ‘Tell the Truth. Hide nothing.”

As that has been realized as a primary duty the pattern of persona in fashion in our world has undergone enormous changes. We have no quantitative science of conduct, no systems of measuring changes in the moral atmosphere, but it will express something of what we are seeking to convey if we assert that the changes in the spirit and nature of conduct that have occurred in our modern communities during the past hundred years far exceed any of the changes in mechanical realities or any of the extensions of knowledge that have gone on during the same period. A hundred years ago conduct went on under a burthen of definite injunctions and definite prohibitions, under a burthen of repressions and concealments, that have become almost inconceivable to-day. To go back to the novels and plays before the new era began is to realize something but not all of that change. All life in these representations seems to be going on in blinkers, to be “ make-believe ” enforced in the most terrible and cruel fashion. Everyone pretended to be pious, patriotic, and genteel, and many succeeded in being so. The Unconscious was indeed a cesspool in those days, and the general decorum was relieved by outbreaks of dirty and nasty libidinousness. These lacked even the dignity of defiance. They were flushed and furtive in manner ; they were made for the sake of their foulness rather than their freedom, like the stories of medieval monks. There was plenty of shamefaced vice, but then so many things were vicious. The sexual suppressions of the genteel found release in a perpetual discussion and reprobation of “‘ the nude.” All mankind seemed hiding from itself. Souls and bodies were hidden even from their owners. Slowly throughout the past hundred years the long lost human form has been unveiled from the ankles upward and from the chin downward. The long lost human soul has dared an even greater unveiling. Could our great-grandparents be brought alive again to-day, the miracle would probably be wasted upon them. They would die of shock.

To them our atmosphere would seem to be one of blinding candour, of reckless revelation. If they did not instantly die they

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