Whither? by Anonymous

MUCH of what I have been saying was written before this war began. In the great hush that has fallen upon the nations, is it not well for us to stop and ask anew whither our progress has been tending? What words have those who have been taught to live and breathe and think in terms of matter, wherewith to voice this awful stirring of the soul? People cry out that the Dark Ages will come again through this fearful slaughter, this waste of resources intellectual and material. Have not the Dark Ages been with us for decades? For mankind, more and more stripped of the deeper faith, the larger hope, more and more cut off from the finer part of his own nature, what darker ages can there be than these shadowed by the dreary positivism, undiscussed and undefined, but merely assumed, of our day? Many a thinker must see, in this present awful crisis, not an isolated phenomenon, not a mere political event for which a train of political causes had been laid, but also one of the natural results of our ways of thinking, of our kind of progress. The growth of material over spiritual conceptions in the last fifty years is appalling; to such an end the Gospel of the Perfect Brute legitimately leads. We may believe ourselves through this struggle untouched, apart, and watch with wonder and surprise, but the same forces are at work with us, and potent. This terrible, crashing exposure is something to make us, who are not in the thick of the battle, stop and think.

We are shuddering at a German nation Nietzscheized, brutalized, as we conceive, through a brutal ideal; but are the Germans so far removed? Have they not simply adopted, a little more vigorously, a little more frankly than we, a doctrine which is becoming the moving force in all countries, replacing Christianity? Are they not simply the most progressive of all nations? Since the theory of evolution was demonstrated, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which should be taught as the mere working of a physical law, has come to be taught as ethics, and an odd confusion of thought has come about. How insidiously the idea of the biological necessity is coming to be considered the whole necessity of man, we are only now faintly realizing; the need of spiritual struggle, of spur to that instinct which may save man from much that had seemed biological necessity, is becoming more and more dim. It is one thing to recognize warfare in the physical world, the strife that attended the evolution of man; it is another thing to exalt this to a code of conduct and deliberately teach it. A conscious lowering of nature to the first primitive impulse, a deliberate going backward, is a very different matter from following these impulses in the slow process of growth. If a higher thought comes along your line of vision, woe betide you if you choose the lower! Doubtless dragons and prehistoric monsters would have behaved differently if they had got better ideas into their heads; we shall not be acquitted by posterity if, after a finer ideal has been suggested, we go back to writhing and biting in the slime.