The crude and dogmatic materialism that distinguished the science of the last century has nearly disappeared from the textbooks and the schools. To-day no living physicist of the front rank would venture to repeat the once-famous formula that “the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile.” In current speculations on the mind, its nature, and its functions, we see everywhere a certain caution and reserve where formerly there was a hardihood of materialistic assertion amounting almost to effrontery. It is no part of the present purpose to explain the causes of such a change. It is sufficient to welcome and applaud it. But we are entitled to believe that it began with the introduction of the Theosophical philosophy and the enormous impetus that was then given to psychical research. From that research proceeded a wealth of new fact that could neither be denied nor evaded, and that has compelled a revision of basic scientific theories and the choice of new methods of investigation.
But materialism lingers in the popular mind long after it has been discarded by the schools. If the scientist once favored a materialistic philosophy because it appeared to him to be consonant with the facts of life, that same philosophy, cheapened and vulgarized, is now favored by the laity because it is consonant with their propensities and with the prevailing laxity in ethical thought and conduct. Never before has there been so keen an interest in, so ready an acceptance of, any and everything that suggests our moral irresponsibility. Never before has there been so eager an acquiescence in any theory that represents us as acting in obedience to forces beyond our control, or as the victims of influences not of our creation and against which it would be hopeless to struggle. It would seem as though we were anxious to regard ourselves as automata in matters of tendency and character, and to abrogate our free will in favor of irresistible propulsions from environment, from heredity, or from physical defect.
There is no need to review the pseudo-scientific literature now appearing in such quantities and that has sedulously fostered a public belief that can hardly fail of its injurious effects upon public morals. Everywhere the doctrine of irresponsibility is being preached to ears that are ready enough to receive it as a welcome narcotic to conscience. Hereditists and eugenists vie with each other in noisy assertions that we are the slaves of our ancestors, mere sums of forces, and that for every virtue and for every vice we must seek a cause in our physical, mental, and moral heritage. No one is responsible for anything. Saints and sinners alike are the inevitable results of a predestination in which they had neither part nor lot. The burglar is criminal not because, in the exercise of his free will, he chose the bad instead of the good, but because he received from his grandparents certain tendencies that have enslaved him. Virtue is no longer admirable as the mark of victories on well-fought fields, since it is no more than the necessary result of inherited causes. And by the same process of reasoning we are invited to the future production of a sin-free humanity—not by the cultivation of unselfishness, nor by aspiration, nor by charity, but rather by a frank imitation of the methods of the stock-yard. One of the latest and most authoritative works upon heredity has the unparalleled audacity to tell its readers that the evolution of the race must henceforth cease unless we are prepared to breed humanity by the same processes of physical selection that are employed upon the cattle-ranch. This is not an inference from the work in question, nor a brutalized digest of its advice. The author says this very thing, and in the clearest language at his command. Most of the modern writers upon heredity draw their arguments from the cattle-pen. They are not ashamed to say that the same processes by which we may guarantee the production of a valuable bullock will be effective in the production of a valuable man, and that the valuable man can be produced in no other way. The Sermon on the Mount, obsolete and outworn, is replaced by a “science” which hands us in its place the latest manual on stock-breeding. It is easy, we are told, to provide a social mechanism—officered by political officials, we may assume—that shall prevent the criminal from being born and that shall ensure a race of saints and sages by the simple processes of pedigree. It is simply a matter of schedules, classification, and Bertillon measurements. That this same mechanism would have condemned half of the geniuses that the world has ever known matters not at all. The obvious fact that character is not transmitted is not allowed to interfere with a delightful gospel of irresponsibility. If the facts do not square with the theory—so much the worse for the facts. The eugenist soars loftily into an atmosphere unruffled by disturbing and evident truths. They are not for him. Moreover, he is writing for those who, by a mysterious decree of Providence, have been deprived of the power of thought. And so this endless stream of hysterical and fanciful “science” is poured out into the world, and its poison filters down through the Sunday supplements into the alleged minds of those who are eager enough to grasp at the straw of irresponsibility that will save them from the tide of retribution. An ethical irresponsibility has become the popular god of the moment, and right and wrong have been dethroned in favor of a scientific Calvinism. Part of this pernicious teaching is certainly due to an honest misconception, but one that descends with fatal ease to the selection, the distortion, and the suppression of facts, and to the devious ways of the special pleader who can admit no evidence and no fact against his cause. But a far larger part is the result of a scientific quackery, naked and unashamed, that finds a market for its wares in public ignorance, in public credulity, and in a public favor for any teaching that will narcotize conscience and offer a relief from the oppressive burden of individual accountability. Even the stage is not exempt from the new gospel of irresponsibility. How much is the popularity of Ibsen, for example, due to his unquestioned powers as poet and dramatist, and how much to his insistence upon heredity as the cause of human tendencies, of human virtues and vices? How much do Strindberg and half a dozen others owe to the same cause? Lesser men than they would receive similar measure of applause in return for the comfortable assurance that God is mocked, in spite of high authority to the contrary, and that for every idle word we shall not answer in the day of judgment.
The spasm will, of course, pass. We may even derive some satisfaction from the fact that conscience is uneasy enough to suggest the advantage of drugging it with the patent medicines of a scientific charlatanism. We may further remember that an advancing spirituality invariably calls forth a resistance that is more audible and more visible than its cause. And even the power of self-deception has its limits. No man remains wholly and forever unabashed when he lies to his own soul. Faith was once wittily defined as an ability to believe what we know to be untrue, but actually there is no such faith. There is nowhere an individual who can permanently persuade himself that he is without free will, or that he is irresponsible for his thoughts and his deeds. These are among the concepts of an instinctive and unshakeable conviction.
Theosophy is the only remedy for this ethical irresponsibility. Small wonder that the “man in the street” should fall victim to the plausibilities of a pseudo-science that offers him, through heredity, an immunity from wrongdoing just as theology once offered him the same immunity through a vicarious atonement. It is the same doctrine in other guise. He prides himself on his escape from religious dogmas even while he is already in the grip of other dogmas that are not the less dogmas nor the less hateful because they bear the label of an “uplift” science. But the “man in the street” is not beyond the reach of something better. There are few who will remain permanently indifferent to a philosophy that accepts every fact of physical heredity, that squares it with perfect justice, and that tempers the stern truth of human accountability with the dignity of a “life for evermore,” proceeding through countless incarnations to perfection. However dense the veils of ignorance and prejudice, yet they are but veils. They may hide, but they can never extinguish, the spiritual light that will not forever be dimmed nor thwarted. Not unknowingly did H. P. Blavatsky recommend the teaching of reincarnation, and therefore of ethical responsibility, as one of the master-keys that should open the doors to human liberation. If that key is neglected by those to whom it was given, there must lie upon their shoulders a Karmic load that even ages of suffering may not lift.