CHAPTER IX

THE DUALISM IN MAN

I

ONE great aspect of the mystery of our life lies in its dualism. It is neither the one thing nor the other. Man's being is neither wholly animal nor wholly spiritual; it is a combination and often a confusion of both. It is this dualism that vexes our existence, that makes it so inscrutable, that puts before us the most vital of all our practical problems that of personal character.

At first this dualism is accentuated by the religious ideal. There is the harmony of the unmoral life and there is the harmony of the life that has fought its great battle and won, whose task is to secure and ennoble the conquest that has been made. There is besides the dualism of the human nature breaking into a sense of the life of the flesh and the life of the spirit. It is this dualism that is often deepened by the vision of the Christian ideal. The impossibility of the existence of interior moral order, of meeting the demands of the ideal often seems absolute, and creates in many persons something like despair of goodness. The great prophet of Israel sees the moral ideal and his primary response to it is in these words: "Woe

is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts." 1 The most eager and the frankest of the disciples of Jesus said, "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man." The presence of the moral or religious ideal not only deepens the sense of worthlessness, but also accentuates the apparently ineradicable contradiction in the human soul. Swift with his keen eye upon this contradiction and what it leads to, and with grim tragic humor, writes: "But a broomstick, perhaps you will say, is an emblem of a tree standing on its head; and pray what is man but a topsy-turvey creature, his animal faculties perpetually mounted on his rational, his head where his heels should be, grovelling on the earth." 2 The same writer remarks elsewhere that "we have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another." The religious ideal seeks to undo the inversion of which Swift speaks, and to create the love that conquers hate; its presence and endeavor bring into view, at first, hardly anything more than the immensity of the problem. Begin to clean the interior of the great ship, pour the hot water through the entire hold, and the

1 Is. 6:5. 244 A Meditation upon a Broomstick." 3 "Thoughts on Various Subjects.".

number of unsuspected rats that will run to the deck will make you aware, for the first time, what sort of creatures have been mixed with your

cargo.

As we face this ultimate dualism, watch its aggravation under the presence of the religious ideal, and note its persistence, we see clearly the origin of two great errors that prevail concerning the meaning of man's nature; we can see, too, the plausibility of the reasoning advanced in support of these one-sided and erroneous beliefs.

There is the naturalistic error. The animal knows no schism in his being, he is a pure selfseeker, limited by parental instinct and limited in a measure by social instinct, but in all and through all a pure self-seeker, undisturbed by any sense of wrong, or sin, in the evolution of his egoism. Many have endeavored to construe human life in this way. They say man is an animal, like other animals; he was born here, he breathes the air of this planet, lives upon the food supplied by it, finds a mate as the birds do, expresses his being in other organisms, like his own, as do the animals, grows old, wears out, dies, turns to dust, and as he began here so he ends here. The mind that he has is given him simply for economic, domestic, social and political utility; it has no transcendent meaning. What character man has comes from the struggle, the suc

cessful struggle for existence; he comes to know when it is wise to tell the truth and when it is best to lie. Love is simply an incident of the physical organism which swells in youth and maintains itself through the years and fades out with old age. Many human beings have tried to think out human life in this way and multitudes in all lands and among all races are trying to live human life on the animal hypothesis. The religious ideal is here an alien, a troubler of our animal peace; it is to be expelled as an alien and as evil.

This simplification of our total humanity to the level of the consistent self-seeker is met by four great protests. There is the protest from the sense of beauty; the beauty of nature is rich, endless, and normal man is sensitive to it. There is the beauty of the world of art, created by man's genius. What possible relation has the sense of beauty to the mere animal struggle for existence? From a purely economic point of view the money spent upon art is sheer, clear waste; if beauty be not the consolation of man's spirit, if it be not a means of exaltation, if it be not a ministry of dignity, sweetness and grace to the human soul, then it is waste; it does not further the mere fight on the economic field.

There is the protest of truth. Man is a being capable of pure, theoretic interest. What is science but intellect consecrated to the discovery of

the fact, the whole fact and nothing but the fact, whether the fact be against or for humanity. What is philosophy but the endeavor to discover the meaning of our human existence, whether that meaning be what we should like or the reverse of what we should like. Here, then, is a theory, an interest, pure, unstained, having nothing to do with the struggle for existence. The superior thinker is evident by his freedom from bias; his passion is for truth, burning, and wearing forms of splendor as in Plato; profound, unobtrusive, all pervading, inexhaustible as in Aristotle. Bias does not mean a sense of the dignity of our human world; prejudice does not signify the vision of the worth of humanity. Bias is party spirit, prejudice is a form of perversity; the real stain upon the thinker is the wish to see things other than they are, to play the advocate by concealing the momentous and by elevating to the chief place the incidental and the trivial.

Here, too, is the love that the naturalist caricatures in the fortunate young people who are about to found a home. This is surely one of the most moving, one of the most beautiful things in the world. There is nothing that a wise man delights in more than in the marriage of fit persons. And there is the love that comes with children; infinite tenderness comes and an altruism as pure as the stars. There is the love that supports man