by Bart Schultz
February ,
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
polities, security to labour, education, freedom from gross superstitions, improved
health and longer life, the destruction of privilege in society and of caprice in family life, better guarantees for the peace of the world, and enforced regard for
life and property when war unfortunately breaks out. It is possible to conceive
the administration of the most advanced states so equitable and efficient that
no-one will even desire seriously to disturb it. On the other hand, it seems rea-
sonable to assume that religion will gradually pass into a recognition of ethical
precepts and a graceful habit of morality; that the mind will occupy itself less and
less with works of genius, and more and more with trivial results and ephemeral
discussions; that husband and wife, parents and children, will come to mean less
to one another; that romantic feeling will die out in consequence; that the old
will increase on the young; that two great incentives to effort, the desire to use
power for noble ends, and the desire to be highly esteemed, will come to promise
less to capable men as the field of human energy is crowded; and generally that
the world will be left without deep convictions or enthusiasm, without the re-
generating influence of the ardour for political reform and the fervour of pious
faith which have quickened men for centuries past as nothing else has quickened
them, with a passion purifying the soul. It would clearly be unreasonable to mur-
mur at changes that express the realisation by the world of its highest thought,
whether the issue be good or bad. The etiolated religion which it seems likely we
shall subside upon; the complicated but on the whole satisfactory State mech-
anism, that will prescribe education, limit industry, and direct enjoyment, will
become, when they are once arrived at, natural and satisfactory. The decline of
the higher classes as an influence in society, the organisation of the inferior race
throughout the Tropical Zone, are the natural result of principles that we cannot
disown if we would. It would be impossible for a conservatively-minded monarch
to reconstruct the nobility of the eighteenth century in the twentieth; and even
now no practical statesman could dream of arresting Chinese power or Hindoo
or negro expansion by wholesale massacres. The world is becoming too fibre-
less, too weak, too good to contemplate or to carry out great changes which imply
lamentable suffering. It trusts more and more to experience, less and less to insight and will.
An admirer of Nietzsche and Ibsen, Pearson frets endlessly about the
fate of a society of weak men, a society that “has no purpose beyond
supplying the day’s needs, and amusing the day’s vacuity.” What has such
a society “to do with the terrible burden of personality?” But there “seems
no reason why men of this kind should not perpetuate the race, increasing
and multiplying till every rod of earth maintains its man, and the savour
of vacant lives will go up to God from every home.”
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The precise nature of the human predicament, according to Pearson,
has everything to do with race:
Even during historical times, so-called, the world has mostly been peopled by
races, either like the negro very little raised above the level of brutes, or at best, like the lower-caste Hindoo and the Chinaman, of such secondary intelligence as
to have added nothing permanent to our stock of ideas. At this moment, though
the civilised and progressive races have till quite recently been increasing upon the inferior types, and though the lowest forms of all are being exterminated, there
seems, as we have seen, good warrant for assuming that the advantage has al-
ready passed to the lower forms of humanity, and indeed it appears to be a well-
ascertained law that the races which care little for comfort and decency are bound
to tide over bad times better than their superiors, and that the classes which reach
the highest standard are proportionally short-lived. Nay, so profusely is life given
in excess of what we can account the efficient use made of it, so many purposeless
generations seem to pass away before humanity is in travail of a prophet or a
thinker, that some inquirers have actually defined the method of creation as a law
of waste.
Pearson is willing to console the reader with invocations of the Norse
“twilight of the gods” as the possible future, when, although there may be
a “temporary eclipse of the higher powers,” even the losing struggle is a
kind of vindication. This Nietzschean thought continues:
We are so accustomed to the fierce rapture of struggle and victory, to that rough
training of necessity by which the weak are destroyed, to revolutions of the political order, transferences of power and wealth, and discoveries in science, that we can
hardly conceive a quiet old age of humanity, in which it may care only for sunshine
and food and quiet, and expect nothing great from the toil of hand or thought. . . . It is now more than probable that our science, our civilisation, our great and real
advance in the practice of government are only bringing us nearer to the day when
the lower races will predominate in the world, when the higher races will lose
their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor
from the future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still remain
to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand
erect before the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest,
may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress.
Pearson’s passionate racism makes Sidgwick’s concern with coloniza-
tion and manual labor look singularly suspicious, as though his doubts
about progress and faith in federation and the “Concert of Europe”
might have reflected an all-too-conservative faith in a saving remnant
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
of civilization holding out against the peril of the “lower races.” After
all, his views on the difficulty of determining what made for scientific
and cultural change and development certainly left a very wide field for
alternative explanations, such as Pearson’s. And it is all too clear what
Pearson has in mind, given his account of the attitudes that he deems overly
complacent:
No one, of course, assumes that the Aryan race – to use a convenient term – can
stamp out or starve out all their rivals on the face of the earth. It is self-evident that the Chinese, the Japanese, the Hindoos, if we may apply this general term to
the various natives of India, and the African negro, are too numerous and sturdy
should suffer decrease or oppression. What is assumed is that the first three of
these races will remain stationary within their present limits, while the negro will
contribute an industrial population to the states which England and Germany
will build up along the Congo or the Zambesi. The white man in these parts of
the world is to be the planter, the mine-owner, the manufacturer, the merchant,
and the leading employee under all these, contributing energy and capital to the
new countries, while the negro is to be the field-hand, the common miner, and
the factory operative. Here and there, in exceptional districts, the white man will
predominate in numbers, but everywhere he will govern and direct in virtue of a
higher intelligence and more resolute will.
Pearson is insistent that the “character of a race determines its vitality
more than climate,” and he strikes a pessimistic note, arguing that the day
will come when the globe is “girdled with a continuous zone of the black
and yellow races, no longer too weak for aggression or under tutelage,
but independent, or practically so. . . . The citizens of these countries will then be taken up into the social relations of the white races, will throng the
English turf, or the salons of Paris, and will be admitted to intermarriage.
It is idle to say, that if all this should come to pass our pride of place will not
be humiliated.” As Pearson elaborates on this vision, those who had been
struggling “for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined
to belong to the Aryan races and to the Christian faith” will wake up to
find themselves “elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by
peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound
always to minister to our needs.” Against the “solitary consolation” that
the changes were “inevitable,” he confesses that “in some of us the feeling
of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have passed
away before that day arrives.”
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And Pearson’s worries about an evolution toward socialism that amounts
to a triumph of base security and mediocrity – the contented herd – are
connected with his interpretation of the global drift. The “lower races”
are multiplying more rapidly than the higher, and the greater humanity
of war favors them. This forecloses certain outlets for domestic unrest:
More and more as we approach the stationary state – as there are no countries to
receive immigrants; as war is more and more dreaded for its chances, or recoiled
from for its barbarity; as commerce and invention are restricted because there
are no new regions to open up – will the old outlets for discontent or unsatisfied
ambition be closed. What are now the governing classes will have to arrange
reasonable compromises, by which the condition of the poor is made endurable.
It may be that there will be less enthusiasm in those days, because there will be
less hope; but it may be assumed that there will be less misery, more resignation,
and it may even be more content.
There is of course a great deal of romanticism in Pearson’s lament for
greatness, which on many points sounds very like Myers’s views on the
decline of genius, or at least on the declining appreciation of it (a point
Freud would later adopt wholesale). But in this case, as Harvie rightly
observes, the “persistent re-statement of the inferiority of the coloured
races did much to stimulate ‘yellow peril’ agitation and ‘white Australia’
policies. As a convinced and hard-working radical, his assessment of the
tendencies making for collectivism was shrewd and not unsympathetic;
but the book was penetrated by searing, pessimistic judgements about the
consequences for human personality of such development.” Could this
really be the book that Sidgwick deemed “the most impressive book of a
prophetic nature which has appeared in England for many years”?
Lest there be any underestimating just what was behind Harvie’s still
much-too-delicately-put charge, consider how in Pearson’s very Intro-
duction he defensively explains:
The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes, and
which Englishmen at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the instinct
of self-preservation, quickened by experience. We know that coloured and white
labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us
with a single year’s surplus of population; and we know that if national existence
is sacrificed to the working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it is not the
Englishman in Australia alone, but the whole civilised world, that will be the
losers. Transform the Northern half of our continent into a Natal with thirteen
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February ,
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Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe
out of fourteen belonging to an inferior race, and the Southern half will speedily
approximate to the condition of a Cape Colony, where the whites are indeed a
masterful minority, but still only as one in four. We are guarding the last part of
the world, in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for the higher
civilisation. We are denying the yellow race nothing but what it will find in the
home of its birth, or in countries like the Indian Archipelago, where the white
man can never live except as an exotic.
If, however, the white race is precluded by natural laws from colonising on
a large scale anywhere except in the Temperate Zone, it seems certain that the
condition of old countries will be powerfully modified. The eager and impetuous
element that has hitherto found an outlet in new communities, will be pent up in
the overpeopled countries of Europe.
The book had actually opened with a half-lament that the contemporary
statesman confines his attention too much to the immediate future, even
though his forecasts of this are often more misguided than his longer-term
visions – thus, “the transportation of an inferior race, like the negroes of
the United States, to a country where they would be harmless, is too vast,
and of too uncertain benefit, to be readily attempted.”
Pearson makes little mention of Bryce or Sidgwick; he smugly cites
the former on how the United States has increasingly limited the influx
of Chinese immigrants, and the latter on the obscurity of the notion of
patriotism, the duties of which would bear on the morality of “voluntary
expatriation,” a subject obviously close to his heart after his move to
Australia.
But in his contribution to Charles Henry Pearson: Memorials by Himself,
His Wif
e, and His Friends, Sidgwick makes it perfectly evident not only
that he knew Pearson very well and thought highly of him, but also that the
general drift of Pearson’s thinking was evident even back in his somewhat
more optimistic Cambridge period.
It may be noticed that I have said little that is definite of Pearson’s opinions, po-
litical, sociological, or theological. The fact is that, though I had much interesting talk with him on these subjects, the impression derived therefrom has become, in
the main, blended with or obliterated by the impression derived, more than twenty
years later, from his remarkable book on ‘National Life and Character’; so that I
could not now hope to reproduce it with any accuracy. I can only say generally
that many of the startling conclusions of that book were certainly held by him at
the earlier date, though his tendency to pessimistic forecast seemed to me to have
grown stronger in the interval. One point I seem to remember clearly: he used to
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talk forebodingly of the probable results of the removal of the barriers that now
separate European and Chinese civilisations; but I do not think he then conceived
the danger as at all political, but as solely economical. Centuries of keen struggle
for existence, he argued, had made the Chinaman a more economical machine for
most kinds of work than the European. Thrifty, industrious, and tolerant of pri-
vations, he would successfully underbid the European in industrial competition;
so that, if the then Liberal ideal of open competition were maintained, the human
world would gradually become mainly yellow, with a black band round the tropics,
and perhaps an aristocratic film of white on the surface!
Thus, when Sidgwick was doing his best to keep his “catch,” Pearson,
in Cambridge, teaching history in the new curriculum, he was not under
any misconceptions about his views. Indeed, he thought that Pearson was
a most impressive intellect and a warmly sympathetic friend, though he
did observe that he “was certainly one of the small class of persons whose
practical adhesion to their convictions is only made more resolute by
