PART II

THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY

IX

THE PRECISE NATURE OF THE ISSUE

The disillusionment that creeps over twentieth-century man concerns, not the ability of the universe to supply what he desires, but his own capacity for really desiring anything greatly significant. Are our springs of action, then, all necessarily narrow, selfish, or sensual, and do we merely delude ourselves when we fancy that our souls have wings?

It is conceivable that we have wings, but that the surrounding atmosphere is not of sufficient density to sustain us in flight. In this case an old form of pessimism would be justifiable. We should be able to respect ourselves, but we should complain against the nature that brought us forth and now envelops us. The situation would have all the elements of the deepest tragedy--two irreconcilables meeting, and producing unrelievable woe thereby.

The general trend of our day is not towards pessimism of this kind. Modern man assumes, on the whole, that the world is large enough for our nature, and that his job is to get out of it what’s there. No slackening of enterprise confronts us, little world-weariness; rather unprecedented eagerness to explore, master, and appropriate. Nature does not scare and oppress us as she used to do, and she is immensely more responsive to our desires since the sciences taught us how to predict. Accordingly, not disappointed bitterness, not renunciation nor resignation, but exploitation is the characteristic attitude. “The world is my oyster.”

What directly affects our idealism, then, is not any general lack of exuberance in nature, but the conviction that there is a special lack at one point. What we want is there, it is believed, but our wants, our springs of action, are scant. It is assumed that we cannot want the common welfare as much as we want profits; that we cannot desire world-fellowship as much as we desire the perquisites of our present war-making system of economy; that sex-appetite never can be made to play a harmonious part in a symphony of life; and that aspiration for communion with the divine is a refined and self-deceived form of the very forces that religion fancies that it is bringing under control.

Our question concerns the truth of this view. Is it borne out by the facts? If it is not borne out by the facts, then another question will confront us. To conclude that we are capable of high motives is not to affirm that we live up to our capacities. He who is most ardently respectful towards human nature will not deny that we live below them. How, then, does this come about?

An old answer is that we are fundamentally at variance with ourselves. On one side of our nature, it was said, we are divine or at least have a spark of divinity, but on another side we are of the earth, earthy. Others affirm that to be conscious is to desire, and that desire, in and of itself, is a state of division and inherently painful, and that relief can be had only through the extinction of consciousness. Upon this supposed disunity with self another sort of pessimism has been built. However high some of our motivation may be, and whatever the rest of the universe is like, it is said, we are doomed to defeat through self-frustration.

Even if we found deep grounds for self-respect, therefore, the spirit of disillusionment with reference to ourselves might not be wholly exorcized. In the present Part evidence will be given that neither the generalizations of science nor the run of everyday experience can justify the mood that has overflowed us. But this will have the effect of plunging us into an even more difficult problem--that of understanding the contrarieties within our nature. This will be the theme of Part III , and in