The Book of Life. Upton Sinclair
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their minds" about the matter. Reason would be the judge, and the new revelation would be the prisoner at the bar. Humanity might say, this is a real inspiration, we will submit ourselves to it and follow it, and allow no one from now on to question it. But inevitably there would be some who would say, "Tommyrot!" There would be others who would say, "This new revelation isn't working, it is repressing progress, it is stifling the mind." These people would stand up for their conviction, they would become martyrs, and all the world would have to discuss them. And who would decide between them and the great mass of men? Reason, the judge, would decide.
It is perfectly true that human reason is fallible. Infallibility is an absolute, a concept of the mind, and not a reality. Life has not given us infallibility, any more than it has given us omniscience, or omnipotence, or any other of those attributes which we call divine. Life has given us powers, more or less weak, more or less strong, but all capable of improvement and development. Reason is the tool whereby mankind has won supremacy over the rest of the animal kingdom, and is gradually taking control of the forces of nature. It is the best tool we have, and because it is the best, we are driven irresistibly to use it. And how strange that some of us can find no better use for it than to destroy its own self! Visit one of the Jesuit fathers and hear him seek to persuade you that reason is powerless against faith and must abdicate to faith. You answer, "Yes, father, you have persuaded me. I admit the fallibility of my mortal powers; and I begin by applying my doubts of them to the arguments by which you have just convinced me. I was convinced, but of course I cannot be sure of a conviction, attained by fallible reason. Therefore I am just where I was before—except that I am no longer in position to be certain of anything."
You answer in good faith, and take up your hat and depart, closing the door of the good father's study behind you. But stop a moment, why do you close the door? You close the door because your reason tells you that otherwise the cold air outside will blow in and make the good father uncomfortable. You put your hat on, because your reason has not yet been applied to the problem of the cause of baldness. You step out onto the street, and when you hear a sudden noise, you step back onto the curbstone, because your reason tells you that an automobile is coming, and that on the sidewalk you are safe from it. So you go on, using your reason in a million acts of your life whereby your life is preserved and developed. And if anybody suggested that the fallibility of your reason should cause you to delay in front of an automobile, you would apply your reason to the problem of that person and decide that he was insane. And I say that just as there is insanity in everyday judgments and relationships, so there is insanity in philosophy, metaphysics and religion; the seed and source of all this kind of insanity being the notion that it is the duty of anybody to believe anything which cannot completely justify itself as reasonable.
Nowadays, as ideas are spreading, the champions of dogma are hard put to it, and you will find their minds a muddle of two points of view. The Jewish rabbi will strive desperately to think of some hygienic objection to the presence of meat and butter on the same plate; the Catholic priest will tell you that fish is a very wholesome article of food, and that anyhow we all eat too much; the Methodist and the Baptist and the Presbyterian will tell you that if men did not rest one day in seven their health would break down. Thus they justify faith by reason, and reconcile the conflict between science and theology. Accepting this method, I experiment and learn that it improves my digestion and adds to my working power if I play tennis on Sunday. I follow this indisputably rational form of conduct—and find myself in conflict with the "faith" of the ancient State of Delaware, which obliges me to serve a term in its state's prison for having innocently and unwittingly desecrated its day of holiness!
If you read Professor Bury's little book, "A History of Freedom of Thought," you will discover that there has been a long conflict over the right of men to use their minds—and the victory is not yet. The term "free thinker," which ought to be the highest badge a man could wear, is still almost everywhere throughout America a term of vague terror. In the State of California today there is a Criminal Syndicalism Act, which provides a maximum of fourteen years in jail for any person who shall write or publish or speak any words expressive of the idea that the United States government should be overthrown in the same way that it was established—that is, by force; only a few months ago the writer of this book was on the witness stand for two days, and had the painful, almost incredible experience of being battered and knocked about by an inquisitive district attorney, who cross-examined him as to every detail of his beliefs, and read garbled extracts from his published writings, in the effort to make it appear that he held some belief which might possibly prejudice the jury against him. The defendant in this case, a returned soldier who had spent three years as a volunteer in the trenches, and had been twice wounded and once gassed, was accused, not merely of approving the Soviet form of government, but also of having printed uncomplimentary references to priests and religious institutions.
Nowadays it is the propertied class which has taken possession of the powers of government, and which presumes to censor the thinking of mankind in its own interest. But whether it be priestcraft or whether it be capitalism which seeks to bind the human mind, it comes to the same thing, and the effort must be met by the assertion that, in spite of errors and blunders, and the serious harm these may do, there is no way for men to advance save by using the best powers of thinking they possess, and proclaiming their conclusions to others. Speaking theologically for the moment, God has given us our reasoning powers, and also the impulse to use them, and it is inconceivable that He should seek to restrict their use, or should give to anyone the power to forbid their use. It is His truth which we seek, and His which we proclaim. In so doing we perform our highest act of faith, and we refuse to be troubled by the idea that for this service He will reward us by an eternity of sulphur and brimstone.
Throughout the remainder of this book it will be assumed that the reader accepts this point of view, or, at any rate, that he is willing for purposes of experiment to give it a trial and see where it leads him. We shall proceed to consider the problems of human life in the light of reason, to determine how they come to be, and how they can be solved.
CHAPTER IV
THE ORIGIN OF MORALITY
(Compares the ways of nature with human morality, and tries to show how the latter came to be.)
Seventy years ago Charles Darwin published his book, "The Origin of Species," in which he defied the theological dogma of his time by the shocking idea that life had evolved by many stages of progress from the diatom to man. This of course did not conform to the story of the Garden of Eden, and so "Darwinism" was fought as an invention of the devil, and in the interior of America there are numerous sectarian colleges where the dread term "evolution" is spoken in awed whispers. Only the other day I read in my newspaper the triumphant proclamation of some clergyman that "Darwinism" had been overthrown. This reverend gentleman had got mixed up because some biologists were disputing some detail of the method by which the evolution of species had been brought about. Do species change by the gradual elimination of the unfit, or do they change by sudden leaps, the "mutation" theory of de Vries? Are acquired powers transmitted to posterity, or is the germ plasm unaffected by its environment? Concerning such questions the scientists debate. But the fact that life has evolved in an ordered series from the lower forms to the higher, and that each individual reproduces in embryo and in infancy the history of this long process—these facts are now the basis of all modern thinking, and as generally accepted as the rotation of the earth.
You may study this process of evolution from the outside, in the multitude of forms which it has assumed and in their reactions one to another; or you may study it from the inside in your own soul, the emotions which accompany it, the impulse or craving which impels it, the élan vital, as it is called by the French philosopher Bergson. The Christians call it love, and Nietzsche, who hated Christianity, called it "the will to power," and persuaded himself that it was the opposite of love.
You will find in the essays of Professor Huxley, one entitled "Evolution and Ethics," in which he sets forth the complete unmorality of nature, and declares that there is no way by which what mankind knows as morality can have originated in the