But in his present state of unspeakable barbarism, man is unable to distinguish his own spontaneous integrity from his mechanical lusts and aspirations. Hence there must still be laws and governments. But laws and governments henceforth, we see it clearly and we must never forget it, relate only to the material world: to property, the possession of property and the means of life, and to the material-mechanical nature of man.
In the past, no doubt, there were great ideals to fulfil: ideals of brotherhood, oneness, and equality. Great sections of humanity tended to cohere into particular brotherhoods, expressing their oneness and their equality and their united purpose in a manner peculiar to themselves. For no matter how single an ideal may be, even such a mathematical ideal as equality and oneness, it will find the most diverse and even opposite expressions. So that brotherhood and oneness in Germany never meant the same as brotherhood and oneness in France. Yet each was brotherhood, and each was oneness. Souls, as they work out the same ideal, work it out differently: always differently, until they reach the point where the spontaneous integrity of being finally breaks. And then, when pure mechanization or materialism sets in, the soul is automatically pivoted, and the most diverse of creatures fall into a common mechanical unison.
This we see in America. It is not a homogeneous, spontaneous coherence so much as a disintegrated amorphousness which lends itself to perfect mechanical unison.
Men have reached the point where, in further fulfilling their ideals, they break down the living integrity of their being and fall into sheer mechanical materialism. They become automatic units, determined entirely by mechanical law.
This is horribly true of modern democracy — socialism, conservatism, bolshevism, liberalism, republicanism, communism: all alike. The one principle that governs all the isms is the same: the principle of the idealized unit, the possessor of property. Man has his highest fulfilment as a possessor of property: so they all say, really. One half says that the uneducated, being the majority, should possess the property; the other half says that the educated, being the enlightened, should possess the property. There is no more to it. No need to write books about it.
This is the last of the ideals. This is the last phase of the ideal of equality, brotherhood, and oneness. All ideals work down to the sheer materialism which is their intrinsic reality, at last.
It doesn’t matter, now, who has the property. They have all lost their being over it. Even property, that most substantial of realities, evaporates once man loses his integral nature. It is curious that it is so, but it is undeniable. So that property is now fast evaporating.
Wherein lies the hope? For with it evaporates the last ideal. Sometime, somewhere, man will wake up and realize that property is only there to be used, not to be possessed. He will realize that possession is a kind of illness of the spirit, and a hopeless burden upon the spontaneous self. The little pronouns “my” and “our” will lose all their mystic spell.
The question of property will never be settled till people cease to care for property. Then it will settle itself. A man only needs so much as will help him to his own fulfilment. Surely the individual who wants a motor-car merely for the sake of having it and riding in it is as hopeless an automaton as the motor-car itself.
When men are no longer obsessed with the desire to possess property, or with the parallel desire to prevent another man’s possessing it, then, and only then shall we be glad to turn it over to the State. Our way of State-ownership is merely a farcical exchange of words, not of ways. We only intend our States to be Unlimited Liability Companies instead of Limited Liability Companies.
The Prime Minister of the future will be no more than a sort of steward, the Minister for Commerce will be the great housekeeper, the Minister for Transport the head-coachman: all just chief servants, no more: servants.
When men become their own decent selves again, then we can so easily arrange the material world. The arrangement will come, as it must come, spontaneously, not by previous ordering. Until such time, what is the good of talking about it? All discussion and idealizing of the possession of property, whether individual or group or State possession, amounts now to no more than a fatal betrayal of the spontaneous self. All settlement of the property question must arise spontaneously out of the new impulse in man, to free himself from the extraneous load of possession, and walk naked and light. Every attempt at preordaining a new material world only adds another last straw to the load that already has broken so many backs. If we are to keep our backs unbroken, we must deposit all property on the ground, and learn to walk without it. We must stand aside. And when many men stand aside, they stand in a new world; a new world of man has come to pass. This is the Democracy, the new order.
THE PROPER STUDY
If no man lives for ever, neither does any precept. And if even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea, so also does the weariest wisdom. And there it is lost. Also incorporated.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
It was Alexander Pope who absolutely struck the note of our particular epoch: not Shakespeare or Luther or Milton. A man of first magnitude never fits his age perfectly.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man — with a capital M.
This stream of wisdom is very weary now: weary to death. It started such a gay little trickle, and is such a spent muddy ebb by now. It will take a big sea to swallow all its alluvia.
“Know then thyself.” All right! I’ll do my best. Honestly I’ll do my best, sincerely to know myself. Since it is the great commandment to consciousness of our long era, let us be men, and try to obey it. Jesus gave the emotional commandment, “Love thy neighbour.” But the Greeks set the even more absolute motto, in its way, a more deeply religious motto: “Know thyself.”
Very well! Being man, and the son of man, I find it only honourable to obey. To do my best. To do my best to know myself. And particularly that part, or those parts of myself that have not yet been admitted into consciousness. Man is nothing, less than a tick stuck in a sheep’s back, unless he adventures. Either into the unknown of the world, of his environment. Or into the unknown of himself.
Allons! the road is before us. Know thyself! Which means, really, know thine own unknown self. It’s no good knowing something you know already. The thing is to discover the tracts as yet unknown. And as the only unknown now lies deep in the passional soul, allons! the road is before us. We write a novel or two, we are called erotic or depraved or idiotic or boring. What does it matter, we go the road just the same. If you see the point of the great old commandment, Know thyself, then you see the point of all art.
But knowing oneself, like knowing anything else, is not a process that can continue to infinity, in the same direction. The fact that I myself am only myself makes me very specifically finite. True, I may argue that my Self is a mystery that impinges on the infinite. Admitted. But the moment my Self impinges on the infinite, it ceases to be just myself.
The same is true of all knowing. You start to find out the chemical composition of a drop of water, and before you know where you are, your river of knowledge is winding very unsatisfactorily into a very vague sea, called the ether. You start to study electricity, you track the wretch down till you get some mysterious and misbehaving atom of energy or unit of force that goes pop under your nose and leaves you with the dead body of a mere word.
You sail down your stream of knowledge, and you find yourself absolutely at sea. Which may be safety for the weary river, but is a sad look-out for you, who are a land animal.
Now all science starts gaily from the inland source of I Don’t Know. Gaily it says: “I don’t know, but I’m going to know.” It’s like a little river bubbling up cheerfully in the determination to dissolve the whole world in its waves. And science, like the little river, winds wonderingly out again into the final I Don’t Know of the ocean.
; All this is platitudinous as regards science. Science has learned an uncanny lot, by the way.
Apply the same to the Know Thyself motto. We have learned something by the way. But as far as I’m concerned, I see land receding, and the great ocean of the last I Don’t Know enveloping me.
But the human consciousness is never allowed finally to say: “I Don’t Know.” It has got to know, even if it must metamorphose to do so.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan.
Now as soon as you come across a Thou Shalt Not commandment, you may be absolutely sure that sometime or other, you’ll have to break this commandment. You needn’t make a practice of breaking it. But the day will come when you’ll have to break it. When you’ll have to take the name of the Lord Your God in vain, and have other gods, and worship idols, and steal, and kill, and commit adultery, and all the rest. A day will come. Because, as Oscar Wilde says, what’s a temptation for, except to be succumbed to!
There comes a time to every man when he has to break one or other of the Thou Shalt Not commandments. And then is the time to Know Yourself just a bit different from what you thought you were.
So that in the end, this Know Thyself commandment brings me up against the Presume-Not-God-to-Scan fence. Trespassers will be prosecuted. Know then thyself, presume not God to scan.
It’s a dilemma. Because this business of knowing myself has led me slap up against the forbidden enclosure where, presumably, this God mystery is kept in corral. It isn’t my fault. I followed the road. And it leads over the edge of a precipice on which stands up a signboard: Danger! Don’t go over the edge!
But I’ve got to go over the edge. The way lies that way.
Flop! Over we go, and into the endless sea. There drown.
No! Out of the drowning something else gurgles awake. And that’s the best of the human consciousness. When you fall into the final sea of I Don’t Know, then, if you can but gasp Teach Me, you turn into a fish, and twiddle your fins and twist your tail and grope in amazement, in a new element.
That’s why they called Jesus: The Fish. Pisces. Because he fell, like the weariest river, into the great Ocean that is outside the shore, and there took on a new way of knowledge.
The Proper Study is Man, sure enough. But the proper study of man, like the proper study of anything else, will in the end leave you no option. You’ll have to presume to study God. Even the most hard-boiled scientist, if he is a brave and honest man, is landed in this unscientific dilemma. Or rather, he is all at sea in it.
The river of human consciousness, like ancient Ocean, goes in a circle. It starts gaily, bubblingly, fiercely from an inland pool, where it surges up in obvious mystery and Godliness, the human consciousness. And here is the God of the Beginning, call him Jehovah or Ra or Ammon or Jupiter or what you like. One bubbles up in Greece, one in India, one in Jerusalem. From their various God-sources the streams of human consciousness rush variously down. Then begin to meander and to doubt. Then fall slow. Then start to silt up. Then pass into the great Ocean, which is the God of the End.
In the great ocean of the End, most men are lost. But Jesus turned into a fish, he had the other consciousness of the Ocean which is the divine End of us all. And then like a salmon he beat his way up stream again, to speak from the source.
And this is the greater history of man, as distinguished from the lesser history, in which figure Mr. Lloyd George and Monsieur Poincare.
We are in the deep, muddy estuary of our era, and terrified of the emptiness of the sea beyond. Or we are at the end of the great road, that Jesus and Francis and Whitman walked. We are on the brink of a precipice, and terrified at the great void below.
No help for it. We are men, and for men there is no retreat. Over we go.
Over we must and shall go, so we may as well do it voluntarily, keeping our soul alive; and as we drown in our terrestrial nature, transmogrify into fishes. Pisces. That which knows the Oceanic Godliness of the End.
The proper study of mankind is man. Agreed entirely! But in the long run, it becomes again as it was before, man in his relation to the deity. The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to the deity.
And yet not as it was before. Not the specific deity of the inland source. The vast deity of the End. Oceanus whom you can only know by becoming a Fish. Let us become Fishes, and try.
They talk about the sixth sense. They talk as if it were an extension of the other senses. A mere dimensional sense. It’s nothing of the sort. There is a sixth sense right enough. Jesus had it. The sense of the God that is the End and the Beginning. And the proper study of mankind is man in his relation to this Oceanic God.
We have come to the end, for the time being, of the study of man in his relation to man. Or man in his relation to himself. Or man in his relation to woman. There is nothing more of importance to be said, by us or for us, on this subject. Indeed, we have no more to say.
Of course, there is the literature of perversity. And there is the literature of little playboys and playgirls, not only of the western world. But the literature of perversity is a brief weed. And the playboy playgirl stuff, like the movies, though a very monstrous weed, won’t live long.
As the weariest river winds by no means safely to sea, all the muddy little individuals begin to chirrup: “Let’s play! Let’s play at something! We’re so god-like when we play.”
But it won’t do, my dears. The sea will swallow you up, and all your play and perversions and personalities.
You can’t get any more literature out of man in his relation to man. Which, of course, should be writ large, to mean man in his relation to woman, to other men, and to the whole environment of men: or woman in her relation to man, or other women, or the whole environment of women. You can’t get any more literature out of that. Because any new book must needs be a new stride. And the next stride lands you over the sandbar in the open ocean, where the first and greatest relation of every man and woman is to the Ocean itself, the great God of the End, who is the All-Father of all sources, as the sea is father of inland lakes and springs of water.
But get a glimpse of this new relation of men and women to the great God of the End, who is the Father, not the Son, of all our beginnings: and you get a glimpse of the new literature. Think of the true novel of St. Paul, for example. Not the sentimental looking- backward Christian novel, but the novel looking out to sea, to the great Source, and End, of all beginnings. Not the St. Paul with his human feelings repudiated, to give play to the new divine feelings. Not the St. Paul violent in reaction against worldliness and sensuality, and therefore a dogmatist with his sheaf of Shalt-Nots ready. But a St. Paul two thousand years older, having his own epoch behind him, and having again the great knowledge of the deity, the deity which Jesus knew, the vast Ocean God which is at the end of all our consciousness.
Because, after all, if chemistry winds wearily to sea in the ether, or some such universal, don’t we also, not as chemists but as conscious men, also wind wearily to sea in a divine ether, which means nothing to us but space and words and emptiness? We wind wearily to sea in words and emptiness.
But man is a mutable animal. Turn into the Fish, the Pisces of man’s final consciousness, and you’ll start to swim again in the great life which is so frighteningly godly that you realize your previous presumption.
And then you realize the new relation of man. Men like fishes lifted on a great wave of the God of the End, swimming together, and apart, in a new medium. A new relation, in a new whole.
ON BEING RELIGIOUS
The problem is not, and never was, whether God exists or doesn’t exist. Man is so made, that the word God has a special effect on him, even if only to afford a safety-valve for his feelings when he must swear or burst. And there ends the vexation of questioning the existence of God. Whatever the queer little word means, it means something we can none of us ever quite get away from, or at; something connected with our deepest explosions.
It isn’t really quite a word
. It’s an ejaculation and a glyph. It never had a definition. “Give a definition of the word God,” says somebody, and everybody smiles, with just a trifle of malice. There’s going to be a bit of sport.
Of course, nobody can define it. And a word nobody can define isn’t a word at all. It’s just a noise and a shape, like pop! or Ra or Om.
When a man says: There is a God, or There is no God, or I don’t know whether there’s a God or not, he is merely using the little word like a toy pistol, to announce that he has taken an attitude. When he says: There is no God, he just means to say: Nobody knows any better about life than myself, so nobody need try to chirp it over me. Which is the democratic attitude. When he says: There is a God, he is either sentimental or sincere. If he is sincere, it means he refers himself back to some indefinable pulse of life in him, which gives him his direction and his substance. If he is sentimental, it means he is subtly winking to his audience to imply: Let’s make an arrangement favourable to ourselves. That’s the conservative attitude. Thirdly and lastly, when a man says: I don’t know whether there’s a God or not, he is merely making the crafty announcement: I hold myself free to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, whichever I feel like at the time — And that’s the so-called artistic or pagan attitude.
In the end, one becomes bored by the man who believes that nobody, ultimately, can tell him anything. One becomes very bored by the men who wink a God into existence for their own convenience. And the man who holds himself free to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds doesn’t hold interest any more. All these three classes of men bore us even to the death of boredom.
Remains the man who sincerely says: I believe in God. He may still be an interesting fellow.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1064