All a man can be, at the very best, is himself. At the very worst he can be something a great deal less than himself, a money-grubber, a millionaire, a State, like Louis Quatorze, a self-conscious ascetic, a spiritual prig, a grass-chewing Nebuchadnezzar.
So where does equality come in? Men are palpably unequal in every sense except the mathematical sense. Every man counts one: and this is the root of all equality: here, in a pure intellectual abstraction.
The moment you come to compare them, men are unequal, and their inequalities are infinite. But supposing you don’t compare them. Supposing, when you meet a man, you have the pure decency not to compare him either with yourself or with anything else. Supposing you can meet a man with this same singleness of heart. What then? Is the man your equal, your inferior, your superior? He can’t be, if there is no comparison. If there is no comparison, he is the incomparable. He is the incomparable. He is single. He is himself. When I am single-hearted, I don’t compare myself with my neighbour. He is immediate to me, I to him. He is not my equal, because this presumes comparison. He is incomparably himself, I am incomparably myself. We behold each other in our pristine and simple being. And this is the first, the finest, the perfect way of human intercourse.
And on this great first-truth of the pristine incomparable nature of every individual soul is founded, mistakenly, the theory of equality. Every man, when he is incontestably himself, is single, incomparable, beyond compare. But to deduce from this that all men are equal is a sheer false deduction: a simple non sequitur. Let every man be himself, purely himself. And then, in the evil hour when you do start to compare, you will see the endless inequality between men.
In the perfect human intercourse, a relation establishes itself happily and spontaneously. No two men meet one another direct without a spontaneous equilibrium taking place. Doubtless there is inequality between the two. But there is no sense of inequality. The give-and-take is perfect; without knowing, each is adjusted to the other. It is as the stars fall into their place, great and small. The small are as perfect as the great, because each is itself and in its own place. But the great are none the less the great, the small the small. And the joy of each is that it is so.
The moment I begin to pay direct mental attention to my neighbour, however; the moment I begin to scrutinize him and attempt to set myself over against him, the element of comparison enters. Immediately I am aware of the inequalities between us. But even so, it is inequalities and not inequality. There is never either any equality or any inequality between me and my neighbour. Each of us is himself, and as such is single, alone in the universe, and not to be compared. Only in our parts are we comparable. And our parts are vastly unequal.
Which finishes equality for ever, as an ideal. Finishes also fraternity. For fraternity implies a consanguinity which is almost the same as equality. Men are not equal, neither are they brothers. They are themselves. Each one is himself, and each one is essentially, star- rily responsible for himself. Any assumption by one person of responsibility for another person is an interference, and a destructive tyranny. No person is responsible for the being of any other person. Each one is starrily single, starrily self-responsible, not to be blurred or confused.
Here then is the new ideal for society: not that all men are equal, but that each man is himself: “one is one and all alone and ever more shall be so.” Particularly this is the ideal for a new system of education. Every man shall be himself, shall have every opportunity to come to his own intrinsic fullness of being. There are unfortunately many individuals to whom these words mean nothing: mere verbiage. We must have a proper contempt and defiance of these individuals, though their name be legion.
How are we to obtain that a man shall come to his own fullness of being; that a child shall grow up true to his own essential self? It is no use just letting the child do as it likes. Because the human being, more than any other living thing, is susceptible to falsification. We alone have mental consciousness, speech, and thought. And this mental consciousness is our greatest peril.
A child in the bath sees the soap, and wants it, and won’t be happy till he gets it. When he gets it he rubs it into his eyes and sucks it, and is in a far more unhappy state. Why? To see the soap and to want it is a natural act on the part of any young animal, a sign of that wonderful naive curiosity which is so beautiful in young life. But the “he won’t be happy till he gets it” quality is, alas, purely human. A young animal, if diverted, would forget the piece of soap at once. It is only an accident in his horizon. Or, given the piece of soap, he would sniff it, perhaps turn it over, and then merely abandon it. Beautiful to us is the pure nonchalance of a young animal which forgets the piece of soap the moment it has sniffed it and found it no good. Only the intelligent human baby proceeds to fill its mouth, stomach, and eyes with acute pain, on account of the piece of soap. Why? Because the poor little wretch got an idea, an incipient idea into its little head. The rabbit never gets an idea into its head, so it can sniff the soap and turn away. But a human baby, poor, tormented little creature, can’t help getting an idea into his young head. And then he can’t help acting on his idea: no matter what the consequences. And this bit of soap shows us what a bitter responsibility our mental consciousness is to us, and how it leads astray even the infant in his bath. Poor innocent: we like to imagine him a spontaneous, unsophisticated little creature. But what do we mean by sophistication? We mean that a being is at the mercy of some idea which it has got into its head, and which has no true relation to its actual desire or need. Witness the piece of soap. The baby saw the piece of soap, and got an idea into its head that the soap was immeasurably desirable. Acting on this simple idea, it nearly killed itself, and filled an hour or so of its young life with horrid misery.
It is only when we grow up that we learn not to be run away with by ideas which we get in our heads and which don’t correspond to any true natural desire or need. At least, education and growing-up is supposed to be a process of learning to escape the automatism of ideas, to live direct from the spontaneous, vital centre of oneself.
Anyhow, it is criminal to expect children to “express themselves” and to bring themselves up. They will eat the soap and pour the treacle on their hair and put their fingers in the candle-flame, in the acts of physical self-expression, and in the wildness of spiritual self-expression they will just go to pieces. All because, really, they have enough mental intelligence to obliterate their instinctive intelligence and to send them to destruction. A little animal that can crawl will manage to live, if abandoned. Abandon a child of five years and it won’t merely die, it will almost certainly maim and kill itself. This mental consciousness we are born with is the most double-edged blessing of all, and grown-ups must spend years and years guarding their children from the disastrous effects of this blessing.
Now let us go back to the maxim that every human being must come to the fullness of himself. It is part of our sentimental and trashy creed today that a little child is most purely himself, and that growing up perverts him away from himself. We assume he starts as a spontaneous little soul, limpid, purely self-expressive, and grows up to be a sad, sophisticated machine. Which is all very well, and might easily be so, if the mind of the little innocent didn’t start to work so soon, and to interfere with all his little spontaneity. Nothing is so subject to small, but fatal automatization as a child: some little thing it sets its mind on, and the game is up. And a child is always setting its little mind on something, usually something which doesn’t at all correspond with the true and restless desire of its living soul. And then, which will win, the little mind or the little soul? We all know, to our sorrow. When a child sets its little mind on the soap, its little soul, not to speak of its little eyes and stomach, is thrown to the winds. And yet the desire for the soap is only the misdirection of the eternally yearning, desirous soul of an infant.
Here we are, then. Instead of waiting for the wisdom out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, let us see that we k
eep the soap- tablet out of the same mouths. We’ve got to educate our children, and it’s no light responsibility. We’ve got to try to educate them to that point where at last there will be a perfect correspondence between the spontaneous, yearning, impulsive-desirous soul and the automatic mind which runs on little wheels of ideas. And this is the hardest job we could possibly set ourselves. For man just doesn’t know how to interpret his own soul-promptings, and therefore he sets up a complicated arrangement of ideas and ideals and works himself automatically till he works himself into the grave or the lunatic-asylum.
We’ve got to educate our children. Which means, we’ve got to decide for them: day after day, year after year, we’ve got to go on deciding for our children. It’s not the slightest use asking little Jimmy “What would you like, dear?” because little Jimmy doesn’t know. And if he thinks he knows, it’s only because, as a rule, he’s got some fatal little idea into his head, like the soap-tablet. Yet listen to the egregious British parent solemnly soliciting his young son: “What would you like to be, dear? A doctor or a clergyman?” — “An engine-driver,” replies Jimmy, and the comedy of babes-and- sucklings continues.
We’ve got to decide for our children: for years and years we have to make their decisions. And we’ve got to take the responsibility on to ourselves, as a community. It’s no good feeding our young with a sticky ideal education till they are fourteen years old, then pitching them out, pap-fed, into the whirling industrial machine and the warren of back streets. It’s no good expecting parents to do anything. Parents don’t know how to decide; they go to little Jimmy as if he were the godhead. And even if they did know how to decide, they can do nothing in face of the factory and the trades union and the back streets.
We, the educators, have got to decide for the children: decide the steps of their young fates, seriously and reverently. It is a sacred business, and unless we can act from our deep, believing souls, we’d best not act at all, but leave it to Northcliffe and trades unions.
We must choose, with this end in view. We want quality of life, not quantity. We don’t want swarms and swarms of people in back streets. We want distinct individuals, and these are incompatible with swarms and masses. A small, choice population, not a horde of hopeless units.
And every man to be himself, to come to his own fullness of being. Not every man a little wonder of cleverness or high ideals. Every man himself, according to his true nature. And those who are comparatively non-mental can form a vigorous, passionate proletariat of indomitable individuals: and those who will work as clerks to be free and energetic, not humiliated as they are now, but fierce with their own freedom of beings: and the man will be always more than his job; the job will be a minor business.
We must have an ideal. So let our ideal be living, spontaneous individuality in every man and woman. Which living, spontaneous individuality, being the hardest thing of all to come at, will need most careful rearing. Educators will take a grave responsibility upon themselves. They will be the priests of life, deep in the wisdom of life. They will be the life-priests of the new era. And the leaders, the inspectors, will be men deeply initiated into the mysteries of life, adepts in the dark mystery of living, fearing nothing but life itself, and subject to nothing but their own reverence for the incalculable life-gesture.
IV
It is obvious that a system of education such as the one we so briefly sketched out in our second chapter will inevitably produce distinct classes of society. The basis is the great class of workers. From this class will rise also the masters of industry, and, probably, the leading soldiers. Second comes the clerkly caste, which will include elementary teachers and minor professionals, and which will produce the local government bodies. Thirdly we have the class of the higher professions, legal, medical, scholastic: and this class will produce the chief legislators. Finally, there is the small class of the supreme judges: not merely legal judges, but judges of the destiny of the nation.
These classes will not arise accidentally, through the accident of money, as today. They will not derive through heredity, as the great oriental castes. There will be no automatism. A man will not be chosen to a class, or a caste, because he is exceptionally fitted for a particular job. If a child shows an astonishing aptitude, let us say, for designing clocks, and at the same time has a profound natural life-understanding, then he will pass on to the caste of professional masters, or even to that of supreme judges, and his skill in clocks will only be one of his accomplishments, his private craft. The whole business of educators will be to estimate, not the particular faculty of the child for some particular job: not at all; nor even a specific intellectual capacity; the whole business will be to estimate the profound life-quality, the very nature of the child, that which makes him ultimately what he is, his soul-strength and his soul-wisdom, which cause him to be a natural master of life. Technical capacity is all the time subsidiary. The highest quality is living understand- mg — not intellectual understanding. Intellectual understanding belongs to the technical activities. But vital understanding belongs to the masters of life. And all the professionals in our new world are not mere technical experts: they are life-directors. They combine with their soul-power some great technical skill. But the first quality will be the soul-quality, the quality of being, and the power for the directing of life itself.
Hence we shall see that the system is primarily religious, and only secondarily practical. Our supreme judges and our master professors will be primarily priests. Let us not take fright at the word. The true religious faculty is the most powerful and the highest faculty in man, once he exercises it. And by the religious faculty we mean the inward worship of the creative life-mystery: the implicit knowledge that life is unfathomable and unsearchable in its motives, not to be described, having no ascribable goal save the bringing-forth of an ever-changing, ever-unfolding creation: that new creative being and impulse surges up all the time in the deep fountains of the soul, from some great source which the world has known as God; that the business of man is to become so spontaneous that he shall utter at last direct the act and the state which arises in him from his deep being: and finally, that the mind with all its great powers is only the servant of the inscrutable, unfathomable soul. The idea or the ideal is only instrumental in the unfolding of the soul of man, a tool, not a goal. Always simply a tool.
We should have the courage to refrain from dogma. Dogma is the translation of the religious impulse into an intellectual term. An intellectual term is a finite, fixed, mechanical thing. We must be content for ever to live from the undescribed and indescribable impulse. Our god is the Unnamed, the Veiled, and any attempt to give names, or to remove veils, is just a mental impertinence which ends in nothing but futility and impertinencies.
So, the new system will be established upon the living religious faculty in men. In some men this faculty has a more direct expression in consciousness than in other men. Some men are aware of the deep troublings of the creative sources of their own souls, they are aware, they find speech or utterance in act, they come forth in consciousness. In other men the troublings are dumb, they will never come forth in expression, unless they find a mediator, a minister, an interpreter.
And this is how the great castes naturally arrange themselves. Those whose souls are alive and strong but whose voices are unmodulated, and whose thoughts unformed and slow, these constitute the great base of all peoples at all times: and it will always be so. For the creative soul is for ever charged with the potency of still unborn specch, still unknown thoughts. It is the everlasting source which surges everlastingly with the massive, subterranean fires of creation, new creative being: and whose fires find issue in pure jets and bubblings of unthinkable newness only here and there, in a few, or comparatively few, individuals.
It must always be so. We cannot imagine the deep fires of the earth rushing out everywhere, in a myriad myriad jets. The great volcanoes stand isolate. And at the same time the life-issues concentrate in certain indi
viduals. Why it is so, we don’t know. But why should we know? We are, after all, only individuals, we are not the eternal life-mystery itself.
And therefore there will always be the vast, living masses of mankind, incoherent and almost expressionless by themselves, carried to perfect expression in the great individuals of their race and time. As the leaves of a tree accumulate towards blossom, so will the great bulk of mankind at all time accumulate towards its leaders. We don’t want to turn every leaf of an apple tree into a flower. And so why should we want to turn every individual human being into a unit of complete expression? Why should it be our goal to turn every coal-miner into a Shelley or a Parnell? We can’t do either. Coal-miners are consummated in a Parnell, and Parnells are consummated in a Shelley. That is how life takes its way: rising as a volcano rises to an apex, not in a countless multiplicity of small issues.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1050