BY V. A. THIAGARAJAN, M.A.

When Shelley preached the ideal of equality through love, the men of his day called him a revolutionary for preaching equality, just as the Marxians now call him a dreamer because he hoped to gain equality through love. Although the conflict now is over methods and not over aims, the difference is not less fundamental. Marxian socialism draws its philosophy of life from the Hobbsian waste of self-interest, augmented by the Darwinian idea of struggle for existence. It is not ashamed of violence. "Force," said Marx, "shall be the midwife that shall assist at the birth of every old society that is pregnant with the spirit of the new." Marxian socialism makes mind a category of matter. It comes into conflict with Shelley's idealism at two points–as to whether the mind is more important than matter, and as to whether the goal of equality should be reached by the shorter process of class struggle, than the slower process of love and brotherhood.

In his reply to Sully Proudhomme, Karl Marx says: "Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstraction of the social relations of production. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal landlord, the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist." (The Poverty of Philosophy, P. 92.) Marx goes on to say that the philosopher errs by looking things upside down. The reply to Marx is given to us by Bosanquet: "Undoubtedly man lives the life of his planet, his climate, and his locality, and is the utterance so to speak of the conditions under which his race and nation have evolved. The only difficulty arises if, by some arbitrary line between man and his environment, the conditions which are the very material of his life come to be treated as alien influences upon it, with the result of representing him as the slave of his surroundings, rather than their concentrated idea and articulate expression. Plato differs from Marx in regarding form as the inherent organising life of matter and the better life as the crown and possibilities, of material conditions that are inherent in them." (Philosophical Theories of the State, P. 31.) Neither the hand-mill, nor the steam-mill came to be by themselves. The social framework itself is an aspect of the mind. To the idealist, matter itself is an aspect of the mind. Sir Henry Jones tells us: "The materialist is wrong in denying the spiritual character of the world from which mind springs. His error is to attribute mental results to the operation of matter, and at the same time to conceive matter as dead and inert, and therefore incapable of such results." (Principles of Citizenship, P. 81).

The idealist who hopes to attain his millennium by living in harmony with his natural environment excludes by his very hypothesis all idea of conflict with his human environment. The good that he seeks ceases to be good if it is obtained by unethical means. It then becomes another aspect of self-interest, and the tyranny of the majority can be as bad as the tyranny of the minority. Apart from where it leads us, it is bad philosophy. The idealist never regards the goal as all important, and the means as secondary or as an unwilling price to be paid for it. To do so will be to place the object of life outside life. The Marxist who desires to gain by violence a classless brotherhood of man is committing the fundamental error of the politician who wanted to make the world safe for democracy by a war to end war. Democracy now lies buried in the conflict between Fascism and Bolshevism, and the world has swung violently from the unreasoning individualism of Laissez Faire to the unreasoning collectivism of today. Further, the appeal to force can be raised by any party. "Fascism," says Gorgolini, "is not ashamed of violence." "Force," says Marx, "shall be the midwife of the new social order." Force, used by whomsoever, is a negation of freedom. It does not liberate either character or intelligence. Even if equality were to be introduced by force, which is doubtful, it is certain that men cannot keep it, because they will not have been educated to the worth of what they have. From the biological point of view again, Kropotkin tells us that mutual aid is as much a factor in evolution as conflict. The sickness of an acquisitive society, says Tawney, can be cured, not by introducing an extra dose of the dangerous drug of violence, but by an emphasis on those elements of human nature that would heal the strife and make for continued co-operation. "Wisdom and charity," says Shelley, addressing the Irish people, "are the only means which I will countenance for the redress of your grievances, and the grievances of the world." Following the same trail of thought Laski tells us: "No investment is ever lost that maintains good will, and in the transference to a new system the more good will we have the greater is the augury of its success." (A Grammar of Politics, P. 210)

To say that good will is necessary for social reconstruction is one thing. To say that a select band of men, animated by good will, should go and settle in some remote place on the banks of Sesquahama, or of Styx, is quite another. Suave qui puet is a confession of defeat. It is an escape from the struggle. It reminds us of those old pictures of heaven where the elect recline on beds in happy islands and see the wicked tormented. Such a heaven is revolting from its very narrowness. It is as anti-social as the individualism of the exploiter. It only proves how narrow individualism, of whatever kind, tends to destroy itself by self-limitation. After all, what we call our individuality is the product of our age and environment. Society is a structure of intelligences. Deprive the individual of what society has given him and there is little that he can carry away with him. It has also been pointed out that Utopias of all kinds fall into the fallacy of static categories. They are limited by the vision of the present. Plato’s ideal republic might have appeared good enough for Plato, but look quite narrow and stifling for us. "True Utopia," says Burke, "is neither in Plato, nor Moore, nor in Harrington’s Oceana. It is before me–it is at my feet–and the rude swain treads daily on it with his clouted shoon." (Speech on conciliation with America. Works, Vol. 1, p. 489) The soil of Arcadia is of common clay. Our heaven and our hell alike lie within ourselves. Samuel Butler was never tired of saying that in life’s battle victory is not to the strong, nor is the race to the swift, but to that organism which is good all-round, and lives in complete and in active harmony with its environment. Let the consciousness of common good be in the mind, and society, like every other biological organism, will necessarily evolve the limbs to discharge its proper function.

Shelley is here thinking of the real will, which is the deeper will of the individual and which binds not only the individuals of a community together, but also binds the future to the past. The unification that he seeks is at once spatial and temporal. By such unification mankind will learn to reasonably interpret its past and intelligently anticipate its future.

The social millennium of Shelley is to dawn neither as the result of a revolution nor as the result of a flight, but as the result of a re-valuation of life. Like the blossoming of a tree after the winter months are over, like the coming of dawn after night, the higher life is to dawn as the organic possibility of all that has preceded it. But it is obvious there can be no sweetness without strength. If the tree did not resist the winter’s cold, it will not blossom in the spring. In social organisation the individual may be as weak and insignificant as a leaf torn by the wind, but in the consciousness of a collective purpose he might be as strong as an oak that has withstood a thousand storms. "Working men of the world! Unite!"–The appeal to solidarity is an appeal to seek the consciousness of potential strength in numbers.

This is Shelley’s appeal to the workmen to seek in the real will of the group the strength of each. Such strength should be organised for peace by methods of peace, "Peace implies reconciliation; and where there has been a material dispute reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession, on the one part or on the other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in affirming that the proposal ought to originate from the stronger. Great and acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by an unwillingness to exert itself." (Burke: Speech on conciliation.) The strong power, like the strong tree that has withstood wind and rain, knows also, like the tree assimilating wind and rain for its own life, how to live in harmony with its total environment. In social forces such harmony is the harmony of love. And in the strength of love there is no room for strife.

The mystery of life is that it is at once a call to sacrifice and to fulfillment. What is sacrificed is hatred; what is gained is the fellowship of the strong. Addressing the Irish people Shelley says: "Whatever wrongs you may have suffered, benevolence and a spirit of forgiveness should mark your conduct towards those who have persecuted you." And this advice holds good in politics as well as in economics. Wherever the calculating faculty is dropped and a deed of benevolence performed, there we have a trophy raised, as it were, to mark our victory over narrow self-interest. It is the conquest of love. "Give love time, and apply it to the fleeting needs of passing circumstance, and it will shed its grossness, and its flickering inconsistency will become a steady loyalty. As little as the cave man could forecast the features of the present world, can the present world forecast what is to be when the sway of love has attained its fullness." (Sir Henry Jones, Principles of Citizenship, p, 75.) Looking back at the era of industrial progress Shelley realises that the inventions of civilisation, whether they be that of the mechanist who abridges labour, or of the political economist who combines labour, have been of value only in so far as they corresponded to the first principles of love and tended to common advantage, while every exercise of the calculating faculty has led the State to drift between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of despotism.

In his Essay on Christianity Shelley writes: "Among true and real friends, all is common: and were ignorance and envy and superstition banished from the world, all mankind would be friends. The only perfect and genuine republic is that which comprehends every living being. Those distinctions which have been artificially set up of nations, societies, families and religions, are only general names, expressing the abhorrence and contempt with which men blindly consider their fellow-men. I love my country, I love the city in which I was born, my parents, my wife, and the children of my care; and to this city, this woman, this nation, it is incumbent in me to do all the benefit in my power. To what do these distinctions point but to an evident denial of the duty, which humanity imposes on you, of doing every possible good to every individual, under whatever denomination he may be comprehended, to whom you have the power of doing it? You ought to love all mankind. You ought, not to love the individuals of your domestic circle less, but to love those who exist beyond it more. Once make the feelings of confidence and of affection universal, and the distinctions of property and of power will vanish, nor are they to be abolished without substituting something equivalent in mischief to them until mankind shall acknowledge an entire community of rights. As the shades of night are dispersed by the faintest glimmerings of dawn, so shall the minutest progress of the benevolent feelings disperse, in some degree, the gloom of tyranny and curb the ministers of mutual suspicion and abhorrence. Your physical wants are few, while those of your mind and heart cannot be numbered or described from their multitude and complication. To secure the gratification of this former, you have made yourselves the bond-slaves of each other."

According to Shelley the attainment of equality through Love is not only an emotional process but also an intellectual conquest, for it has meant the renunciation of the pursuit of an atomic self-interest. Looking at the problem from the intellectual point of view he says elsewhere: "In proportion as mankind becomes wise,–yes, in exact proportion to that wisdom should be the extinction of the unequal system under which they now subsist." Shelley does not want to force equality. He wants men to choose it. His socialism is the socialism that gives, not the socialism that demands. It has therefore necessarily to start with the individual; and each man in this respect has the freedom to be his own legislator. It may be slow to work, it may be imperfect, but it secures liberty of the will and makes for permanency.

Economic equality must go hand in hand with political liberty. Then alone can we have, as Wells points out, the free play of the intellect, and in such free play find ‘the subjective triumph of our existence.’ (A Modern Utopia, quoted in Rohit Mehta’s Theosophical Socialism.) The human personality and the significance of the will are not suppressed. External equality merely gives the direction to life to seek its own internal uniqueness. Equality merely means the organisation of life on rational lines. Shelley’s ideal remains the old Revolutionary ideal of political liberty and economic equality attained through the development of a sense of brotherhood. Both aspects of it are grounded in the human will. As the will seeks community of sentiment with its environment, it makes for harmony. As it seeks its own uniqueness, it makes for inner growth. Just as democracy makes for true leadership, so also equality will make for leadership in every aspect of thought.

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