Essayist.

Southern Cross, Volume 5, Issue 33, 20 November 1897, Page 6

Essayist.

IS CIVILISATION CONDUCIVE TO THE HAPPINESS OF THE RACE. (Concluded from last week.) (From the Otago University Review.) The savage undoubtedly does escape some of the drawbacks of social progress. He is fitted to his environment; and much of the misery of the civilised lies in the unsuitability to environment. Education and intelligence, in combination with poverty, mean powers without scope to exercise them ; tastes without means to gratify them; toil for which there is not the physical capacity, or which is at any rate burdensome and monotonous. Whatever the hard ships of savage life, they are less felt than similar ones among the civilised. Physical robustness and obtuseness of nerve are a safe-guard against suffering. Savages suffer little from illness, for only the hardy survive, and their first sickness is often their last. Civilisation, by preserving the physically unfit, has lowered the strength and vitality of the race; and this, with the unhealthy conditions of modern industry, causes hosts of diseases unknown to savages ; while lack of strength and increased sensitiveness render trifling ailments and injuries more painful than severe ones are to savages. It is no doubt true that a higher degree of strength arid physical development may be met with among the healthy and well to do of civilised communities than one could find in uncivilised, but this does not contradict what has just been said, and the most healthy of those possessing high nervous organisation, and accustomed to the comforts of civilised life, are, in virtue of their superior sensitiveness, more exposed to suffering than the savage. Civilisation undoubtedly increases our capacity for pain, and even the more fortunately circumstanced among us are likely to suffer more one way or another in the course of their lives, than if they had been denizens of the wilds of Africa. But we cannot estimate happiness aright by merely taking into account immunity from pain. Were we to do this, an oyster would be happier than a man —and we might say a stone than either; but perhaps this would be beyond a rediictio ad absurdum, as some slight glimmering of sentience is essential to the conception of any kind of happiness or pleasure. We must take the good along with the bad. According to the law of compensation pervading nature, increased capacity for suffering is inseparable from the higher development that bestows increased capacities for enjoyment. And we must not quarrel with this if we can hope that capabilities for happiness increase in the same ratio as those for suffering, and that the former are not necessarily frustrated by the conditions of civilisation. Surely we must own that the state of the highest being is the best, though superior organisation may entail suffering of which an inferior being is incapable. If we do not own this, we must be prepared to maintain, as I have heard some do, that animals are happier than men. If happiness is to be' estimated negatively, undoubtedly they are, and the positive delights of the higher animals must be very keen. Who can watch the lark soaring upwards and pouring forth its song until lost in the blue, and doubt that it is thrilled with the joy of life in itself ? —a joy which, owing to defective physical organisation or adverse surroundings, is unknown to many of us, or is lost in early youth. Animals have all the simpler pleasures of the senses; they partake to some extent in the social ones; they have the excitements of pursuit and contest; the delight of the free exercise of their faculties almost all that primitive man can have. Their lives are more pleasing and innocent, and escape the troubles that man procures for himself. Yet probably no one, even if he had j ust expressed envy of the existence of animals, would wel-

come the appearance of a Circe to accord his wish. Of course to realise such a possibility is to realise seifestimation, and this is an unwelcome thought, however dark one’s lot may be. But there is also surely an instinctive shrinking from any descent or loss of faculties which have been once acquired. And this consideration gives the key to the problem whether civilisation and increase of knowledge are blessings. Progress is the great law of life. What has once been acquired cannot be given up. One may hear people sigh as they watch the mirth of children, and say that they have never been so happy as when children. Yet, however, one may enjoy the spirits and careless innocence of childhood, he would not seriously wish to give up his richer emotional and intellectual life ; his painfully won knowledge and experience, and limit himself within the narrow mental horizon of the child. This may not be a fair answer to the question whether child or man enjoys life the most. To look at a state from without gives no criterion of what our feelings would be within it. Our pleasures would seem as unsatisfying to children as theirs to us, and the very development of our minds has incapacitated us from forming an adequate estimate of the feelings of childhood. Here, again, we are brought to the impossibility of forming an accurate estimate of relative happiness. Happiness cannot be weighed or calculated : we cannot compare the intensity of different kinds and say which is the most valuable. But though we cannot compare pleasures, we can see that the more highly developed the creature, the greater is the range and variety of the pleasures of which it is capable. And herein lies the superiority of the truly civilised to the uncivilised. Increase of knowledge may be increase of sorrow. The intellectual and moral advance that frees men from the terrors of superstition, and that may help to raise them above selfish troubles, also entails melancholy at the sight of the degradation and suffering of humanity, and the widened sympathies that are a source of so much refined pleasure are equally a source of pain. Increased nervous development means increased susceptibility to physical pain, and as sensitiveness to pain seems to increase in a higher ratio than that to physical pleasures, it is doubtful if all the gratifications of the senses, and all alleviations of disease and suffering procurable by our modern civilisation ensure a balance of good. It is on the immaterial rather than the material side of our natures that we profit most by civilisation ; and, here, allowing the utmost for all disadvantages, there is only a balance of benefits. Mental culture opens the way to an indefinite number of enjoyments, and in a measure renders its possessor independent of the simpler and more obvious gifts of fortune. How many and various are what may be called the impersonal enjoyments of life ! —those that spring neither from the satisfaction of actual needs, nor of selfish ambition or passions. Theie is the delight given by an insight into the beauty of nature—a delight almost unknown to rude minds, the refined and satisfying pleasures of art and literature, and all the varied intellectual interests of a mind alive in every direction. Ennui is, of course, common enough among the large class of the mentally vacuous, but culture and mental activity cannot fail to render life more interesting. And it is the interests of life rather than its mere pleasures that make its happiness. Many of the best things of life are cheap, and easily attainable by all who seek them. One may be un prosperous and condemned to surroundings ; and a mode of life in many ways uncongenial, and yet be happy by making the most of what one’s lot yields, and escaping from its tramping limits to the wide world opened by books and thought. A day may be passed in depressing sur-

foundings ; yet be cbeered by many influences that the unobservant would not perceive : the sight of the blue sky ; of budding leaves ; of a bird flitting joyously by; of the golden gleam of sunset; and it may be enriched by communion with the highest and most beautiful of human utterances, and by all the wider human sympathies. Some think that our modern civilisation has taken a wrong direction, that our complex industrial system and mechanical triumphs have alienated man from nature and increased the poverty and ugliness of the world. —- “ ’Tis the day of the chattel, Web to weave and corn to grind ; Things are in the saddle. And ride mankind.” It may be that the world is little better for the steam engine and electric telegraph, and other inventions that have so transformed the aspect of life during the last century or two. But it surely is better and richer for the poetry of Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Burns, Wordsworth, and the many more who have endowed it with beauty and high thought; for the researches into nature of Hewton, Darwin, and other illustrious workers who have toiled to make us understand the forces around us ; for the deep, far-reaching generations of philosophers who have taught us to understand our place in nature, and thereby better to understand ourselves. Whatever can be said in denial of the benefits of civilisation, it is, roughly speaking, synonymous with the rise of man as a moral and intellectual being. And if the spiritual part of us is nobler than the animal, it must be well that civilisation should ever spread and advance, even if it were proved to be unfavourable to the average sura of sentient pleasures. If happiness means merely sentient pleasure and freedom from uneasiness, then perhaps one would have a better chance of obtaining it by being born in the South Sea Islands than among the middle classes of Europe. But if it has anything to do with the perfection of man’s nature, then one would choose the latter lot; and there can be but one answer to the question whether civilisation has profited mankind.