Anarchist Morality by Peter Kropotkin

Notes For “Anarchist Morality”

This study of the origin and function of what we call “morality” was written for pamphlet publication as a result of an amusing situation. An anarchist who ran a store in England found that his comrades in the movement regarded it as perfectly right to take his goods without paying for them. “To each according to his need” seemed to them to justify letting those who were best able foot the bills. Kropotkin was appealed to, with the result that he not only condemned such doctrine, but was moved to write the comrades this sermon. Its conception of morality is based on the ideas set forth in “Mutual Aid” and later developed in his “Ethics.” Here they are given special application to “right and wrong” in the business of social living. The job is done with fine feeling and with acute shafts at the shams of current morality. Kropotkin sees the source of all so-called moral ideas in primitive superstitions. The real moral sense which guides our social behavior is instinctive, based on the sympathy and unity inherent in group life. Mutual aid is the condition of successful social living. The moral base is therefore the good old golden rule “Do to others as you would have others do to you in the same circumstances,” —which disposed of the ethics of the shopkeeper’s anarchist customers. This natural moral sense was perverted, Kropotkin says, by the superstitions surrounding law, religion and authority, deliberately cultivated by conquerors, exploiters and priests for their own benefit. Morality has therefore become the instrument of ruling classes to protect their privileges. He defends the morality of killing for the benefit of mankind —as in the assassination of tyrants– but never for self. Love and hate he regards as greater social forces for controlling wrong-doing than punishment, which he rejects as useless and evil. Account-book morality —doing right only to receive a benefit— he scores roundly, urging instead the satisfactions and joy of “sowing life around you” by giving yourself to the uttermost to your fellow-men. Not of course to do them good, in the spirit of philanthropy, but to be one with them, equal and sharing.

ANARCHIST MORALITY by P. Kropotkin

The history of human thought recalls the swinging

of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a

long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.

Then thought frees herself from the chains with which

those interested —rulers, lawyers, clerics— have carefully

enwound her.

She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe

criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the

emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social

prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts

research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new

discoveries, creates new sciences.

But the inveterate enemies of thought —the

government, the lawgiver, and the priest— soon recover

from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their

scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of

laws to adapt them to the new needs. Then, profiting by

the servility of thought and of character, which they

themselves have so effectually cultivated; profiting, too,

by the momentary disorganization of society, taking

advantage of the laziness of some, the greed of others, the

best hopes of many, they softly creep back to their work

by first of all taking possession of childhood through

education.

A child’s spirit is weak. It is so easy to coerce it by

fear. This they do. They make the child timid, and then

they talk to him of the torments of hell. They conjure up

before him the sufferings of the condemned, the

vengeance of an implacable god. The next minute they

will be chattering of the horrors of revolution, and using

some excess of the revolutionists to make the child “a

friend of order.” The priest accustoms the child to the

idea of law, to make it obey better what he calls the

“divine law,” and the lawyer prates of divine law, that the

civil law may be the better obeyed.

And by that habit of submission, with which we are

only too familiar, the thought of the next generation

retains this religious twist, which is at once servile and

authoritative, for authority and servility walk ever hand in

hand.

During these slumbrous interludes, morals are rarely discussed. Religious practices and judicial hypocrisy take

their place. People do not criticize, they let themselves be

drawn by habit, or indifference.They do not put

themselves out for or against the established morality.

They do their best to make their actions appear to accord

with their professions.

All that was good, great, generous or independent

in man, little by little becomes moss-grown; rusts like a

disused knife. A lie becomes a virtue, a platitude a duty.

To enrich oneself, to seize one’s opportunities, to exhaust

one’s intelligence, zeal and energy, no matter how,

become the watchwords of the comfortable classes, as

well as of the crowd of poor folk whose ideal is to appear

bourgeois. Then the degradation of the ruler and of the

judge, of the clergy and of the more or less comfortable

classes becomes so revolting that the pendulum begins to

swing the other way.

Little by little, youth frees itself. It flings overboard

its prejudices, and it begins to criticize. Thought

reawakens, at first among the few; but insensibly the

awakening reaches the majority. The impulse is given, the

revolution follows.

And each time the question of morality comes up again.

“Why should I follow the principles of this hypocritical

morality?” asks the brain, released from religious terrors.

Why should any morality be obligatory?”

Then people try to account for the moral sentiment

that they meet at every turn without having explained it

to themselves. And they will never explain it so long as

they believe it a privilege of human nature, so long as

they do not descend to animals, plants and rocks to

understand it. They seek the answer, however, in the

science of the hour.

And, if we may venture to say so, the more the basis

of conventional morality, or rather of the hypocrisy that

fills its place is sapped, the more the moral plane of

society is raised. It is above all at such times precisely

when folks are criticizing and denying it, that moral

sentiment makes the most progress. It is then that it grows,

that it is raised and refined.

Years ago the youth of Russia were passionately

agitated by this very question. “I will be immoral!” a

young nihilist came and said to his friend, thus

translating into action the thoughts that gave him no rest.

“I will be immoral, and why should I not? Because the

Bible wills it? But the Bible is only a collection of

Babylonian and Hebrew traditions, traditions collected

and put together like the Homeric poems, or as is being

done still with Basque poems and Mongolian legends.

Must I then go back to the state of mind of the half-civilized peoples of the East?

“Must I be moral because Kant tells me of a

categoric imperative, of a mysterious command which

comes to me from the depths of my own being and bids

me be moral? But why should this ‘categoric imperative’

exercise a greater authority over my actions than that

other imperative, which at times may command me to get

drunk. A word, nothing but a word, like the words

‘Providence,’ or ‘Destiny,’ invented to conceal our

ignorance.

“Or perhaps I am to be moral to oblige Bentham,

who wants me to believe that I shall be happier if I drown

to save a passerby who has fallen into the river than if I

watched him drown?

“Or perhaps because such has been my education?

Because my mother taught me morality? Shall I then go

and kneel down in a church, honor the Queen, bow before

the judge I know for a scoundrel, simply because our

mothers, our good ignorant mothers, have taught us such

a pack of nonsense ?

“I am prejudiced, —like everyone else. I will try to rid

myself of prejudice! Even though immorality be distasteful, I will yet force myself to be immoral, as when I was a

boy I forced myself to give up fearing the dark, the church-yard, ghosts and dead people —all of which I had been

taught to fear.

“It will be immoral to snap a weapon abused by

religion; I will do it, were it only to protect against the

hypocrisy imposed on us in the name of a word to which

the name morality has been given!”

Such was the way in which the youth of Russia

reasoned when they broke with old-world prejudices,

and unfurled this banner of nihilist or rather of anarchist

philosophy: to bend the knee to no authority whatsoever,

however respected; to accept no principle so long as it is

unestablished by reason.

Need we add, that after pitching into the waste-paper basket the teachings of their fathers, and burning all

systems of morality, the nihilist youth developed in their

midst a nucleus of moral customs, infinitely superior to

anything that their fathers had practiced under the

control of the “Gospel,” of the “Conscience,” of the

“Categoric Imperative,” or of the “Recognized

Advantage” of the utilitarian. But before answering the

question, “Why am I to be moral ?” let us see if the

question is well put; let us analyze the motives of human

action.

II

When our ancestors wished to account for what led

men to act in one way or another, they did so in a very

simple fashion. Down to the present day, certain catholic

images may be seen that represent this explanation. A man

is going on his way, and without being in the least aware

of it, carries a devil on his left shoulder and an angel on

his right. The devil prompts him to do evil, the angel tries

to keep him back. And if the angel gets the best of it and

the man remains virtuous, three other angels catch him up

and carry him to heaven. In this way everything is explained

wondrously well.

Old Russian nurses full of such lore will tell you never

to put a child to bed without unbuttoning the collar of its

shirt. A warm spot at the bottom of the neck should be left

bare, where the guardian angel may nestle. Otherwise the

devil will worry the child even in its sleep.

These artless conceptions are passing away. But

though the old words disappear, the essential idea

remains the same.

Well brought up folks no longer believe in the devil, but

as their ideas are no more rational than those of our

nurses, they do but disguise devil and angel under a

pedantic wordiness honored with the name of philosophy.

They do not say “devil” nowadays, but “the flesh,” or “the

passions.” The”angel” is replaced by the words

“conscience” or “soul,” by “reflection of the thought of a

divine creator” or “the Great Architect,” as the Free-Masons say. But man’s action is still represented as the

result of a struggle between two hostile elements. And a

man is always considered virtuous just in the degree to

which one of these two elements —the soul or

conscience— is victorious over the other —the flesh or

passions.

It is easy to understand the astonishment of our

great-grandfathers when the English philosophers, and

later the Encyclopedists, began to affirm in opposition to

these primitive ideas that the devil and the angel had

nothing to do with human action, but that all acts of man,

good or bad, useful or baneful, arise from a single motive:

the lust for pleasure.

The whole religious confraternity, and, above all,

the numerous sects of the pharisees shouted “immorality.”

They covered the thinkers with insult, they

excommunicated them. And when later on in the course

of the century the same ideas were again taken up by

Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Tchernischevsky, and a host of

others, and when these thinkers began to affirm and prove

that egoism, or the lust for pleasure, is the true motive of

all our actions, the maledictions redoubled. The books

were banned by a conspiracy of silence; the authors were

treated as dunces.

And yet what can be more true than the assertion

they made?

Here is a man who snatches its last mouthful of

bread from a child. Every one agrees in saying that he is a

horrible egoist, that he is guided solely by self-love.

But now here is another man, whom every one

agrees to recognize as virtuous. He shares his last bit of

bread with the hungry, and strips off his coat to clothe the

naked. And the moralists, sticking to their religious

jargon, hasten to say that this man carries the love of his

neighbor to the point of self-abnegation, that he obeys a

wholly different passion from that of the egoist. And yet

with a little reflection we soon discover that however

great the difference between the two actions in their result

for humanity, the motive has still been the same. It is the

quest of pleasure.

If the man who gives away his last shirt found no

pleasure in doing so, he would not do it. If he found

pleasure in taking bread from a child, he would do that

but this is distasteful to him. He finds pleasure in giving,

and so he gives. If it were not inconvenient to cause

confusion by employing in a new sense words that have a

recognized meaning, it might be said that in both cases

the men acted under the impulse of their egoism. Some

have actually said this, to give prominence to the thought

and precision to the idea by presenting it in a form that

strikes the imagination, and at the same time to destroy

the myth which asserts that these two acts have two

different motives. They have the same motive, the quest of

pleasure, or the avoidance of pain, which comes to the

same thing.

Take for example the worst of scoundrels: a Thiers,

who massacres thirty-five thousand Parisians, or an

assassin who butchers a whole family in order that he may

wallow in debauchery. They do it because for the moment

the desire of glory or of money gains in their minds the

upper hand of every other desire. Even pity and

compassion are extinguished for the moment by this other

desire, this other thirst. They act almost automatically to

satisfy a craving of their nature. Or again, putting aside

the stronger passions, take the petty man who deceives his

friends, who lies at every step to get out of somebody the

price of a pot of beer, or from sheer love of brag, or from

cunning. Take the employer who cheats his workmen to

buy jewels for his wife or his mistress. Take any petty

scoundrel you like. He again only obeys an impulse. He

seeks the satisfaction of a craving, or he seeks to escape

what would give him trouble.

We are almost ashamed to compare such petty

scoundrels with one who sacrifices his whole existence to

free the oppressed, and like a Russian nihilist mounts the

scaffold. So vastly different for humanity are the results of

these two lives; so much do we feel ourselves drawn

towards the one and repelled by the other.

And yet were you to talk to such a martyr, to the

woman who is about to be hanged, even just as she nears

the gallows, she would tell you that she would not

exchange either her life or her death for the life of the

petty scoundrel who lives on the money stolen from his

work-people. In her life, in the struggle against monstrous

might, she finds her highest joys. Everything else outside

the struggle, all the little joys of the bourgeois and his

little troubles seem to her so contemptible, so tiresome, so

pitiable! “You do not live, you vegetate,” she would

reply; “I have lived.”

We are speaking of course of the deliberate,

conscious acts of men, reserving for the present what we

have to say about that immense series of unconscious, all

but mechanical acts, which occupy so large a portion of

our life. In his deliberate, conscious acts man always seeks

what will give him pleasure.

One man gets drunk, and every day lowers himself

to the condition of a brute because he seeks in liquor the

nervous excitement that he cannot obtain from his own

nervous system. Another does not get drunk; he takes no

liquor, even though he finds it pleasant, because he wants

to keep the freshness of his thoughts and the plentitude of

his powers, that he may be able to taste other pleasures

which he prefers to drink. But how does he act if not like

the judge of good living who, after glancing at the menu

of an elaborate dinner rejects one dish that he likes very

well to eat his fill of another that he likes better.

When a woman deprives herself of her last piece of

bread to give it to the first comer, when she takes off her

own scanty rags to cover another woman who is cold,

while she herself shivers on the deck of a vessel, she does

so because she would suffer infinitely more in seeing a

hungry man, or a woman starved with cold, than in

shivering or feeling hungry herself. She escapes a pain of

which only those who have felt it know the intensity.

When the Australian, quoted by Guyau, wasted

away beneath the idea that he has not yet revenged his

kinsman’s death; when he grows thin and pale, a prey to

the consciousness of his cowardice, and does not return to

life till he has done the deed of vengeance, he performs

this action, a heroic one sometimes, to free himself of a

feeling which possesses him, to regain that inward peace

which is the highest of pleasures.

When a troupe of monkeys has seen one of its

members fall in consequence of a hunter’s shot, and

comes to besiege his tent and claim the body despite the

threatening gun; when at length the Elder of the band

goes right in, first threatens the hunter, then implores him,

and finally by his lamentations induces him to give up the

corpse, which the groaning troupe carry off into the

forest, these monkeys obey a feeling of compassion

stronger than all considerations of personal security. This

feeling in them exceeds all others. Life itself loses its

attraction for them while they are not sure whether they

can restore life to their comrade or not. This feeling

becomes so oppressive that the poor brutes do everything

to get rid of it.

When the ants rush by thousands into the flames of

the burning anthill, which that evil beast, man, has set on

fire, and perish by hundreds to rescue their larvae, they

again obey a craving to save their offspring. They risk

everything for the sake of bringing away the larvae that

they have brought up with more care than many women

bestow on their children.

To seek pleasure, to avoid pain, is the general line

of action (some would say law) of the organic world.

Without this quest of the agreeable, life itself

would be impossible. Organisms would disintegrate, life

cease.

Thus whatever a man’s actions and line of conduct

may be, he does what he does in obedience to a craving of

his nature. The most repulsive actions, no less than

actions which are indifferent or most attractive, are all

equally dictated by a need of the individual who

performs them. Let him act as he may, the individual acts

as he does because he finds a pleasure in it, or avoids, or

thinks he avoids, a pain.

Here we have a well-established fact. Here we have

the essence of what has been called the egoistic theory.

Very well, are we any better off for having reached

this general conclusion?

Yes, certainly we are. We have conquered a truth

and destroyed a prejudice which lies at the root of all

prejudices. All materialist philosophy in its relation to

man is implied in this conclusion. But does it follow that

all the actions of the individual are indifferent, as some

have hastened to conclude? This is what we have now to

see.

III

We have seen that men’s actions (their deliberate

and conscious actions, for we will speak afterwards of

unconscious habits) all have the same origin. Those that

are called virtuous and those that are designated as

vicious, great devotions and petty knaveries, acts that

attract and acts that repel, all spring from a common

source. All are performed in answer to some need of the

individual’s nature. all have for their end the quest of

pleasure, the desire to avoid pain.

We have seen this in the last section, which is but a

very succinct summary of a mass of facts that might be

brought forward in support of this view.

It is easy to understand how this explanation makes those

still imbued with religious principles cry out. It leaves no

room for the supernatural. It throws over the idea of an

immortal soul. If man only acts in obedience to the needs

of his nature, if he is, so to say, but a “conscious

automaton,” what becomes of the immortal soul? What of

immortality, that last refuge of those who have known too

few pleasures and too many sufferings, and who dream of

finding some compensation in another world?

It is easy to understand how people who have

grown up in prejudice and with but little confidence in

science, which has so often deceived them, people who

are led by feeling rather than thought, reject an

explanation which takes from them their last hope.

IV

Mosaic, Buddhist, Christian and Mussulman theologians

have had recourse to divine inspiration to distinguish

between good and evil. They have seen that man, be he

savage or civilized, ignorant or learned, perverse or

kindly and honest, always knows if he is acting well or ill,

especially always knows if he is acting ill. And as they

have found no explanation of this general fact, they have

put it down to divine inspiration. Metaphysical

philosophers, on their side, have told us of conscience, of

a mystic “imperative,” and, after all, have changed nothing

but the phrases.

But neither have known how to estimate the very

simple and very striking fact that animals living in

societies are also able to distinguish between good and

evil, just as man does. Moreover, their conceptions of

good and evil are of the same nature as those of man.

Among the best developed representatives of each

separate class, —fish, insects, birds, mammals,— they are

even identical.

Forel, that inimitable observer of ants, has shown by

a mass of observations and facts that when an ant who has

her crop well filled with honey meets other ants with

empty stomachs, the latter immediately ask her for food.

And amongst these little insects it is the duty of the

satisfied ant to disgorge the honey that her hungry friends

may also be satisfied. Ask the ants if it would be right to

refuse food to other ants of the same anthill when one has

had oneUs share. They will answer, by actions impossible

to mistake, that it would be extremely wrong. So selfish

an ant would be more harshly treated than enemies of

another species. If such a thing happens during a battle

between two different species, the ants would stop

fighting to fall upon their selfish comrade. This fact has

been proved by experiments which exclude all doubt.

Or again, ask the sparrows living in your garden if

it is right not to give notice to all the little society when

some crumbs are thrown out, so that all may come and

share in the meal. Ask them if that hedge sparrow has

done right in stealing from his neighbor’s nest those

straws he had picked up, straws which the thief was too

lazy to go and collect himself. The sparrows will answer

that he is very wrong, by flying at the robber and pecking

him.

Or ask the marmots if it is right for one to refuse

access to his underground storehouse to other marmots of

the same colony. they will answer that it is very wrong, by

quarrelling in all sorts of ways with the miser.

Finally, ask primitive man if it is right to take food

in the tent of a member of the tribe during his absence. He

will answer that, if the man could get his food for himself,

it was very wrong. On the other hand, if he was weary or

in want, he ought to take food where he finds it; but in

such a case, he will do well to leave his cap or his knife, or

even a bit of knotted string, so that the absent hunter may

know on his return that a friend has been there, not a

robber. Such a precaution will save him the anxiety

caused by the possible presence of a marauder near his

tent.

Thousands of similar facts might be quoted, whole

books might be written, to show how identical are the

conceptions of good and evil amongst men and the other

animals.

The ant, the bird, the marmot, the savage have read neither

Kant nor the fathers of the Church nor even Moses. And

yet all have the same idea of good and evil. And if you reflect for a moment on what lies at the bottom of this idea,

you will see directly that what is considered good among

ants, marmots, and Christian or atheist moralists is that

which is useful for the preservation of the race; and that

which is considered evil is that which is hurtful for race

preservation. Not for the individual, as Bentham and Mill

put it, but fair and good for the whole race.

The idea of good and evil has thus nothing to do

with religion or a mystic conscience. It is a natural need of

animal races. And when founders of religions,

philosophers, and moralists tell us of divine or

metaphysical entities, they are only recasting what each

ant, each sparrow practices in its little society.

Is this useful to society? Then it is good. Is this

hurtful? Then it is bad.

This idea may be extremely restricted among

inferior animals, it may be enlarged among the more

advanced animals; but its essence always remains the

same.

Among ants it does not extend beyond the anthill.

All sociable customs, all rules of good behavior are

applicable only to the individuals in that one anthill, not

to any others. One anthill will not consider another as

belonging to the same family, unless under some

exceptional circumstances, such as a common distress

falling upon both. In the same way the sparrows in the

Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, though they will mutually

aid one another in a striking manner, will fight to the

death with another sparrow from the Monge Square who

may dare to venture into the Luxembourg. And the

savage will look upon a savage of another tribe as a person

to whom the usages of his own tribe do not apply. It is

even allowable to sell to him, and to sell is always to rob

the buyer more or less; buyer or seller, one or other is

always “sold.” A Tchoutche would think it a crime to sell

to the members of his tribe: to them he gives without any

reckoning. And civilized man, when at last he

understands the relations between himself Ind the

simplest Papuan, close relations, though imperceptible at

the first glance, will extend his principles of solidarity to

the whole human race, and even to the animals. The idea

enlarges, but its foundation remains the same.

On the other hand, the conception of good or evil

varies according to the degree of intelligence or of

knowledge acquired. There is nothing unchangeable

about it.

Primitive man may have thought it very right —that is,

useful to the race— to eat his aged parents when they

became a charge upon the community— a very heavy

charge in the main. He may have also thought it useful to

the community to kill his new-born children, and only

keep two or three in each family, so that the mother could

suckle them until they were three years old and lavish

more of her tenderness upon them.

In our days ideas have changed, but the means of

subsistence are no longer what they were in the Stone Age.

Civilized man is not in the position of the savage family

who have to choose between two evils: either to eat the

aged parents or else all to get insufficient nourishment

and soon find themselves unable to feed both the aged

parents and the young children. We must transport

ourselves into those ages, which we can scarcely call up

in our mind, before we can understand that in the

circumstances then existing, half-savage man may have

reasoned rightly enough.

Ways of thinking may change. The estimate of what

is useful or hurtful to the race changes, but the

foundation remains the same. And if we wished to sum

up the whole philosophy of the animal kingdom in a

single phrase, we should see that ants, birds, marmots,

and men are agreed on one point.

The morality which emerges from the observation

of the whole animal kingdom may be summed up in the

words: “Do to others what you would have them do to

you in the same circumstances.

And it adds: “Take note that this is merely a piece

of advice; but this advice is the fruit of the long experience

of animals in society. And among the great mass of social

animals, man included, it has become habitual to act on

this principle. Indeed without this no society could exist,

no race could have vanquished the natural obstacles

against which it must struggle.”

Is it really this very simple principle which

emerges from the observation of social animals and

human societies? Is it applicable? And how does this

principle pass into a habit and continually develop? This

is what we are now going to see.

V

The idea of good and evil exists within humanity

itself. Man, whatever degree of intellectual development

he may have attained, however his ideas may be obscured

by prejudices and personal interest in general, considers

as good that which is useful to the society wherein he

lives, and as evil that which is hurtful to it.

But whence comes this conception, often so vague

that it can scarcely be distinguished from a feeling? There

are millions and millions of human beings who have

never reflected about the human race. They know for the

most part only the clan or family, rarely the nation, still

more rarely mankind. How can it be that they should

consider what is useful for the human race as good, or

even attain a feeling of solidarity with their clan, in spite

of all their narrow, selfish interests?

This fact has greatly occupied thinkers at all times,

and it continues to occupy them still. We are going in our

turn to give our view of the matter. But let us remark in

passing that though the explanations of the fact may vary,

the fact itself remains none the less incontestable. And

should our explanation not be the true one, or should it

be incomplete, the fact with its consequences to humanity

will still remain. We may not be able fully to explain the

origin of the planets revolving round the sun, but the

planets revolve none the less, and one of them carries us

with it in space.

We have already spoken of the religious

explanation. If man distinguishes between good and evil,

say theologians, it is God who has inspired him with this

idea. Useful or hurtful is not for him to inquire; he must

merely obey the fiat of his creator. We will not stop at this

explanation, fruit of the ignorance and terrors of the

savage. We pass on.

Others have tried to explain the fact by law. It must

have been law that developed in man the sense of just and

unjust, right and wrong. Our readers may judge of this

explanation for themselves. They know that law has

merely utilized the social feelings of man, to slip in,

among the moral precepts he accepts, various mandates

useful to an exploiting minority, to which his nature

refuses obedience. Law has perverted the feeling of

justice instead of developing it. Again let us pass on.

Neither let us pause at the explanation of the

Utilitarians. They will have it that man acts morally from

self-interest, and they forget his feelings of solidarity with

the whole race, which exist, whatever be their origin.

There is some truth in the Utilitarian explanation. But it is

not the whole truth. Therefore, let us go further.

It is again to the thinkers of the eighteenth century

that we are indebted for having guessed, in part at all

events, the origin of the moral sentiment.

In a fine work, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, left

to slumber in silence by religious prejudice, and indeed

but little known even among anti-religious thinkers,

Adam Smith has laid his finger on the true origin of the

moral sentiment. He does not seek it in mystic religious

feelings; he finds it simply in the feeling of sympathy.

You see a man beat a child. You know that the

beaten child suffers. Your imagination causes you

yourself to suffer the pain inflicted upon the child; or

perhaps its tears, its little suffering face tell you. And if

you are not a coward, you rush at the brute who is

beating it and rescue it from him.

This example by itself explains almost all the moral

sentiments. The more powerful your imagination, the

better you can picture to yourself what any being feels

when it is made to suffer, and the more intense and

delicate will your moral sense be. The more you are

drawn to put yourself in the place of the other person, the

more you feel the pain inflicted upon him, the insult

offered him, the injustice of which he is a victim, the more

will you be urged to act so that you may prevent the pain,

insult, or injustice. And the more you are accustomed by

circumstances, by those surrounding you, or by the

intensity of your own thought and your own imagination,

to act as your thought and imagination urge, the more will

the moral sentiment grow in you, the more will it become

habitual.

This is what Adam Smith develops with a wealth of

examples. He was young when he wrote this book which is

far superior to the work of his old age upon political econ-omy. Free from religious prejudice, he sought the

explanation of morality in a physical fact of human nature,

and this is why official and non-official theological

prejudice has put the treatise on the Black List for a

century.

Adam Smith’s only mistake was not to have

understood that this same feeling of sympathy in its

habitual stage exists among animals as well as among

men.

The feeling of solidarity is the leading

characteristic of all animals living in society. The eagle

devours the sparrow, the wolf devours the marmot. But

the eagles and the wolves respectively aid each other in

hunting, the sparrow and the marmot unite among

themselves against the beasts and birds of prey so

effectually that only the very clumsy ones are caught. In

all animal societies solidarity is a natural law of far greater

importance than that struggle for existence, the virtue of

which is sung by the ruling classes in every strain that may

best serve to stultify us.

When we study the animal world and try to explain

to ourselves that struggle for existence maintained by

each living being against adverse circumstances and

against its enemies, we realize that the more the principles

of solidarity and equality are developed in an animal

society and have become habitual to it, the more chance

has it of surviving and coming triumphantly out of the

struggle against hardships and foes. The more thoroughly

each member of the society feels his solidarity with each

other member of the society, the more completely are

developed in all of them those two qualities which are the

main factors of all progress: courage on the one hand, md

on the other, free individual initiative. And on the

contrary, the more any animal society or little group of

animals loses this feeling of solidarity —which may chance

as the result of exceptional scarcity or else of exceptional

plenty— the more do the two other factors of progress

courage and individual initiative, diminish. In the end

they disappear, and the society falls into decay and sinks

before its foes. Without mutual confidence no struggle is

possible; there is no courage, no initiative, no solidarity—

and no victory! Defeat is certain.

We can prove with a wealth of examples how in the

animal and human worlds the law of mutual aid is the

law of progress, and how mutual aid with the courage

and individual initiative which follow from it secures

victory to the species most capable of practicing it.

Now let us imagine this feeling of solidarity acting during the millions of ages which have succeeded one another

since the first beginnings of animal life appeared upon the

globe. Let us imagine how this feeling little by little

became a habit, and was transmitted by heredity from the

simplest microscopic organism to its descendants —

insects, birds, reptiles, mammals, man— and we shall

comprehend the origin of the moral sentiment, which is a

necessity to the animal like food or the organ for

digesting it.

Without going further back and speaking of

complex animals springing from colonies of extremely

simple little beings, here is the origin of the moral

sentiment. We have been obliged to be extremely brief in

order to compress this great question within the limits of

a few pages, but enough has already been said to show

that there is nothing mysterious or sentimental about it.

Without this solidarity of the individual with the species,

the animal kingdom would never have developed or

reached its present perfection. The most advanced being

upon the earth would still be one of those tiny specks

swimming in the water and scarcely perceptible under a

microscope. Would even this exist? For are not the

earliest aggregations of cellules themselves an instance of

association in the struggle?

VI

Thus by an unprejudiced observation of the animal

kingdom, we reach the conclusion that wherever society

exists at all, this principle may be found: Treat others as

you would like them to treat you under similar

circumstances.

And when we study closely the evolution of the

animal world, we discover that the aforesaid principle,

translated by the one word Solidarity, has played an

infinitely larger part in the development of the animal

kingdom than all the adaptations that have resulted from

a struggle between individuals to acquire personal

advantages.

It is evident that in human societies a still greater

degree of solidarity is to be met with. Even the societies of

monkeys highest in the animal scale offer a striking

example of practical solidarity, and man has taken a step

further in the same direction. This and this alone has

enabled him to preserve his puny race amid the obstacles

cast by nature in his way, and to develop his intelligence.

A careful observation of those primitive societies

still remaining at the level of the Stone Age shows to what

a great extent the members of the same community

practice solidarity among themselves.

This is the reason why practical solidarity never

ceases; not even during the worst periods of history. Even

when temporary circumstances of domination, servitude,

exploitation cause the principle to be disowned, it still

lives deep in the thoughts of the many, ready to bring

about a strong recoil against evil institutions, a

revolution. If it were otherwise society would perish.

For the vast majority of animals and men this feeling remains, and must remain an acquired habit, a principle

always present to the mind even when it is continually

ignored in action.

It is the whole evolution of the animal kingdom

speaking in us. And this evolution has lasted long, very

long. It counts by hundreds of millions of years.

Even if we wished to get rid of it we could not. It

would be easier for a man to accustom himself to walk on

fours than to get rid of the moral sentiment. It is anterior

in— animal evolution to the upright posture of man.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the

sense of smell or of touch.

As for law and religion, which also have preached

this principle, they have simply filched it to cloak their

own wares, their injunctions for the benefit of the

conqueror, the exploiter, the priest. Without this principle

of solidarity, the justice of which is so generally

recognized, how could they have laid hold on men’s

minds?

Each of them covered themselves with it as with a garment;

like authority which made good its position by posing as the

protector of the weak against the strong.

By flinging overboard law, religion and authority, mankind

can regain possession of the moral principle which

has been taken from them. Regain that they may criticize

it, and purge it from the adulterations wherewith priest,

judge and ruler have poisoned it and are poisoning it yet.

Besides this principle of treating others as one

wishes to be treated oneself, what is it but the very same

principle as equality, the fundamental principle of

anarchism? And how can any one manage to believe

himself an anarchist unless he practices it?

We do not wish to be ruled. And by this very fact,

do we not declare that we ourselves wish to rule nobody?

We do not wish to be deceived, we wish always to be told

nothing but the truth. And by this very fact, do we not declare that we ourselves do not wish to deceive anybody,

that we promise to always tell the truth, nothing but the

truth, the whole truth? We do not wish to have the fruits

of our labor stolen from us. And by that very fact, do we

not declare that we respect the fruits of others’ labor?

By what right indeed can we demand that we

should be treated in one fashion, reserving it to ourselves

to treat others in a fashion entirely different? Our sense of

equality revolts at such an idea.

Equality in mutual relations with the solidarity

arising from it, this is the most powerful weapon of the

animal world in the struggle for existence. And equality

is equity.

By proclaiming ourselves anarchists, we proclaim beforehand that we disavow any way of treating others in which

we should not like them to treat us; that we will no longer

tolerate the inequality that has allowed some among us to

use their strength, their cunning or their ability after a

fashion in which it would annoy us to have such qualities

used against ourselves. Equality in all things, the

synonym of equity, this is anarchism in very deed. It is not

only against the abstract trinity of law, religion, and

authority that we declare war. By becoming anarchists we

declare war against all this wave of deceit, cunning,

exploitation, depravity, vice —in a word, inequality—

which they have poured into all our hearts. We declare

war against their way of acting, against their way of

thinking. The governed, the deceived, the exploited, the

prostitute, wound above all else our sense of equality. It

is in the name of equality that we are determined to have

no more prostituted, exploited, deceived and governed

men and women.

Perhaps it may be said —it has been said sometimes

“But if you think that you must always treat others as you

would be treated yourself, what right have you to use

force under any circumstances whatever? What right have

you to level a cannon at any barbarous or civilized

invaders of your country? What right have you to

dispossess the exploiter? What right to kill not only a

tyrant but a mere viper?”

What right? What do you mean by that singular

word, borrowed from the law? Do you wish to know if I

shall feel conscious of having acted well in doing this ? If

those I esteem will think I have done well? Is this what you

ask? If so the answer is simple.

Yes, certainly! Because we ourselves should ask to

be killed like venomous beasts if we went to invade

Burmese or Zulus who have done us no harm. We should

say to our son or our friend: “Kill me, if I ever take part in

the invasion!”

Yes, certainly! Because we ourselves should ask to

be dispossessed, if giving the lie to our principles, we

seized upon an inheritance, did it fall from on high, to use

it for the exploitation of others.

Yes, certainly! Because any man with a heart asks beforehand that he may be slain if ever he becomes

venomous; that a dagger may be plunged into his heart if

ever he should take the place of a dethroned tyrant.

Ninety-nine men out of a hundred who have a wife

and children would try to commit suicide for fear they

should do harm to those they love, if they felt themselves

going mad. Whenever a good-hearted man feels himself

becoming dangerous to those he loves, he wishes to die

before he is so.

Perovskaya and her comrades killed the Russian

Czar. And all mankind, despite the repugnance to the

spilling of blood, despite the sympathy for one who had

allowed the serfs to be liberated, recognized their right to

do as they did. Why? Not because the act was generally

recognized as useful; two out of three still doubt if it were

so. But because it was felt that not for all the gold in the

world would Perovskaya and her comrades have

consented to become tyrants themselves. Even those who

know nothing of the drama are certain that it was no

youthful bravado, no palace conspiracy, no attempt to

gain power. It was hatred of tyranny, even to the scorn of

self, even to the death.

“These men and women,” it was said, “had

conquered the right to kill”; as it was said of Louise

Michel, “She had the right to rob.” Or again, “They have

the right to steal,” in speaking of those terrorists who

lived on dry bread, and stole a million or two of the

Kishineff treasure.

Mankind has never refused the right to use force on

those who have conquered that right, be it exercised upon

the barricades or in the shadow of a cross-way. But if such

an act is to produce a deep impression upon men’s

minds, the right must be conquered. Without this, such an

act whether useful or not will remain merely a brutal fact,

of no importance in the progress of ideas. People will see

in it nothing but a displacement of force, simply the

substitution of one exploiter for another.

VII

We have hitherto been speaking of the conscious,

deliberate actions of man, those performed intentionally.

But side by side with our conscious life we have an

unconscious life which is very much wider. Yet we have

only to notice how we dress in the morning, trying to

fasten a button that we know we lost last night, or

stretching out our hand to take something that we

ourselves have moved away, to obtain an idea of this

unconscious life and realize the enormous part it plays in

our existence.

It makes up three-fourths of our relations with

others. Our ways of speaking, smiling, frowning, getting

heated or keeping cool in a discussion, are unintentional,

the result of habits, inherited from our human or pre-human ancestors (only notice the likeness in expression

between an angry man and an angry beast), or else

consciously or unconsciously acquired.

Our manner of acting towards others thus tends to

become habitual. To treat others as he would wish to be

treated himself becomes with man and all sociable

animals, simply a habit. So much so that a person does

not generally even ask himself how he must act under

such and such circumstances. It is only when the

circumstances are exceptional, in some complex case or

under the impulse of strong passion that he hesitates, and

a struggle takes place between the various portions of his

brain —for the brain is a very complex organ, the various

portions of which act to a certain degree independently.

When this happens, the man substitutes himself in

imagination for the person opposed to him; he asks

himself if he would like to be treated in such a way, and

the better he has identified himself with the person whose

dignity or interests he has been on the point of injuring,

the more moral will his decision be. Or maybe a friend

steps in and says to him: “Fancy yourself in his place;

should you have suffered from being treated by him as he

has been treated by you? And this is enough.

Thus we only appeal to the principle of equality in

moments of hesitation, and in ninety-nine cases out of a

hundred act morally from habit.

It must have been obvious that in all we have hitherto

said, we have not attempted to enjoin anything,we have

only set forth the manner in which things happen in the

animal world and amongst mankind.

Formerly the church threatened men with hell to

moralize them, and she succeeded in demoralizing them

instead. The judge threatens with imprisonment, flogging,

the gallows, in the name of those social principles he has

filched from society; and he demoralizes them. And yet

the very idea that the judge may disappear from the earth

at the same time as the priest causes authoritarians of

every shade to cry out about peril to society.

But we are not afraid to forego judges and their

sentences. We forego sanctions of all kinds, even

obligations to morality. We are not afraid to say: “Do what

you will; act as you will”; because we are persuaded that

the great majority of mankind, in proportion to their

degree of enlightenment and the completeness with which

they free themselves from existing fetters will behave and

act always in a direction useful to society just as we are

persuaded beforehand that a child will one day walk on

its two feet and not on all fours simply because it is born

of parents belonging to the genus Homo.

All we can do is to give advice. And again while

giving it we add: “This advice will be valueless if your

own experience and observation do not lead you to

recognize that it is worth following.”

When we see a youth stooping and so contracting his

chest and lungs we advise him to straighten himself, hold

up his head and open his chest. We advise him to fill his

lungs and take long breaths, because this will be his best

safeguard against consumption. But at the same time we

teach him physiology that he may understand the

functions of his lungs, and himself choose the posture he

knows to be the best.

And this is all we can do in the case of morals. And

this is all we can do in the case of morals. We have only a

right to give advice, to which we add: “Follow it if it

seems good to you.”

But while leaving to each the right to act as he

thinks best; while utterly denying the right of society to

punish one in any way for any anti-social act he may have

committed, we do not forego our own capacity to love

what seems to us good and to hate what seems to us bad.

Love and hate; for only those who know how to hate

know how to love. We keep this capacity; and as this

alone serves to maintain and develop the moral

sentiments in every animal society, so much the more will

it be enough for the human race.

We only ask one thing, to eliminate all that

impedes the free development of these two feelings in the

present society, all that perverts our judgment: —the

State, the church, exploitation; judges, priests,

governments, exploiters.

Today when we see a Jack the Ripper murder one

after another some of the poorest and most miserable of

women, our first feeling is one of hatred.

If we had met him the day when he murdered that

woman who asked him to pay her for her slum lodging,

we should have put a bullet through his head, without

reflecting that the bullet might have been better bestowed

in the brain of the owner of that wretched den.

But when we recall to mind all the infamies which

have brought him to this; when we think of the darkness

in which he prowls haunted by images drawn from

indecent books or thoughts suggested by stupid books,

our feeling is divided. And if some day we hear that Jack

is in the hands of some judge who has slain in cold blood

a far greater number of men, women and children than all

the Jacks together; if we see him in the hands of one of

those deliberate maniacs then all our hatred of Jack the

Ripper will vanish. It will be transformed into hatred of a

cowardly and hypocritical society and its recognized

representatives. All the infamies of a Ripper disappear

before that long series of infamies committed in the name

of law. It is these we hate.

At the present day our feelings are continually thus

divided. We feel that all of us are more or less,

voluntarily or involuntarily, abettors of this society. We

do not dare to hate. Do we even dare to love? In a society

based on exploitation and servitude human nature is

degraded.

But as servitude disappears we shall regain our

rights. We shall feel within ourselves strength to hate and

to love, even in such complicated cases as that we have

just cited.

In our daily life we do already give free scope to

our feelings of sympathy or antipathy; we are doing so

every moment. We all love moral strength we all despise

moral weakness and cowardice. Every moment our

words, looks, smiles express our joy in seeing actions

useful to the human race, those which we think good.

Every moment our looks and words show the repugnance

we feel towards cowardice, deceit, intrigue, want of

moral courage. We betray our disgust, even when under

the influence of a worldly education we try to hide our

contempt beneath those lying appearances which will

vanish as equal relations are established among us.

This alone is enough to keep the conception of

good and ill at a certain level and to communicate it one

to another.

It will be still more efficient when there is no longer

judge or priest in society, when moral principles have

lost their obligatory character and are considered merely

as relations between equals.

Moreover, in proportion to the establishment of

these relations, a loftier moral conception will arise in

society. It is this conception which we are about to

analyze.

VIII

Thus far our analysis has only set forth the simple

principles of equality. We have revolted and invited

others to revolt against those who assume the right to treat

their fellows otherwise than they would be treated

themselves; against those who, not themselves wishing to

be deceived, exploited, prostituted or ill-used, yet behave

thus to others. Lying, and brutality are repulsive, we have

said, not because they are disapproved by codes of

morality, but because such conduct revolts the sense of

equality in everyone to whom equality is not an empty

word. And above all does it revolt him who is a true

anarchist in his way of thinking and acting.

If nothing but this simple, natural, obvious

principle were generally applied in life, a very lofty

morality would be the result; a morality comprising all

that moralists have taught.

The principle of equality sums up the teachings of

moralists. But it also contains something more. This

something more is respect for the individual. By

proclaiming our morality of equality, or anarchism, we

refuse to assume a right which moralists have always

taken upon themselves to claim, that of mutilating the

individual in the name of some ideal. We do not

recognize this right at all, for ourselves or anyone else.

We recognize the full and complete liberty of the

individual; we desire for him plentitude of existence, the

free development of all his faculties. We wish to impose

nothing upon him; thus returning to the principle which

Fourier placed in opposition to religious morality when

he said:

“Leave men absolutely free. Do not mutilate them

as religions have done enough and to spare. Do not fear

even their passions. In a free society these are not

dangerous.”

Provided that you yourself do not abdicate your

freedom, provided that you yourself do not allow others

to enslave you; and provided that to the violent and anti-social passions of this or that person you oppose your

equally vigorous social passions, you have nothing to

fear from liberty.

We renounce the idea of mutilating the individual

in the name of any ideal whatsoever. All we reserve to

ourselves is the frank expression of our sympathies and

antipathies towards what seems to us good or bad. A man

deceives his friends. It is his bent, his character to do so.

Very well, it is our character, our bent to despise liars.

And as this is our character, let us be frank. Do not let us

rush and press him to our bosom or cordially shake

hands with him, as is sometimes done today. Let us

vigorously oppose our active passion to his.

This is all we have the right to do, this is all the

duty we have to perform to keep up the principle of

equality in society. It is the principle of equality in

practice.

But what of the murderer, the man who debauches children? The murderer who kills from sheer thirst for blood

is excessively rare. He is a madman to be cured or

avoided. As for the debauchee, let us first of all look to it

that society does not pervert our children’s feelings, then

we shall have little to fear from rakes.

All this it must be understood is not completely

applicable until the great sources of moral depravity—

capitalism, religion, justice, government—shall have

ceased to exist. But the greater part of it may be put in

practice from this day forth. It is in practice already.

And yet if societies knew only this principle of

equality; if each man practiced merely the equity of a

trader, taking care all day long not to give others anything

more than he was receiving from them, society would die

of it. The very principle of equality itself would

disappear from our relations. For, if it is to be maintained,

something grander, more lovely, more vigorous than

mere equity must perpetually find a place in life.

And this greater than justice is here.

Until now humanity has never been without large

natures overflowing with tenderness, with intelligence,

with goodwill, and using their feeling, their intellect, their

active force in the service of the human race without

asking anything in return.

This fertility of mind, of feeling or of goodwill

takes all possible forms. It is in the passionate seeker after

truth, who renounces all other pleasures to throw his

energy into the search for what he believes true and right

contrary to the affirmations of the ignoramuses around

him. It is in the inventor who lives from day to day

forgetting even his food, scarcely touching the bread with

which perhaps some woman devoted to him feeds him

like a child, while he follows out the intention he thinks

destined to change the face of the world. It is in the ardent

revolutionist to whom the joys of art, of science, even of

family life, seem bitter, so long as they cannot be shared

by all, and who works despite misery and persecution for

the regeneration of the world. It is in the youth who,

hearing of the atrocities of invasion, and taking literally

the heroic legends of patriotism, inscribes himself in a

volunteer corps and marches bravely through snow and

hunger until he falls beneath the bullets. It was in the

Paris street arab, with his quick intelligence and bright

choice of aversions and sympathies, who ran to the

ramparts with his little brother, stood steady amid the rain

of shells, and died murmuring: “Long live the Commune!”

It is in the man who is revolted at the sight of a wrong

without waiting to ask what will be its result to himself,

and when all backs are bent stands up to unmask the

iniquity and brand the exploiter, the petty despot of a

factory or great tyrant of an empire. Finally it is in all

those numberless acts of devotion less striking and

therefore unknown and almost always misprized, which

may be continually observed, especially among women,

if we will take the trouble to open our eyes and notice

what lies at the very foundation of human life, and

enables it to enfold itself one way or another in spite of

the exploitation and oppression it undergoes.

Such men and women as these, some in obscurity,

some within a larger arena, creates the progress of

mankind. And mankind is aware of it. This is why it

encompasses such lives with reverence, with myths. It

adorns them, makes them the subject of its stories, songs,

romances. It adores in them the courage, goodness, love

and devotion which are lacking in most of us. It transmits

their memory to the young. It recalls even those who have

acted only in the narrow circle of home and friends, and

reveres their memory in family tradition.

Such men and women as these make true morality,

the only morality worthy the name. All the rest is merely

equality in relations. Without their courage, their

devotion, humanity would remain besotted in the mire of

petty calculations. It is such men and women as these who

prepare the morality of the future, that which will come

when our children have ceased to reckon, and have

grown up to the idea that the best use for all energy,

courage and love is to expend it where the need of such a

force is most strongly felt.

Such courage, such devotion has existed in every

age. It is to be met with among sociable animals. It is to be

found among men, even during the most degraded

epochs.

And religions have always sought to appropriate

it, to turn it into current coin for their own benefit. In fact

if religions are still alive, it is because—ignorance apart—

they have always appealed to this very devotion and

courage. And it is to this that revolutionists appeal.

The moral sentiment of duty which each man has

felt in his life, and which it has been attempted to explain

by every sort of mysticism, the unconsciously anarchist

Guyau says, “is nothing but a superabundance of life,

which demands to be exercised, to give itself; at the same

time, it is the consciousness of a power.”

All accumulated force creates a pressure upon the

obstacles placed before it. Power to act is duty to act. And

moral “obligation” of which so much has been said or

written is reduced to the conception: the condition of the

maintenance of life is its expansion.

“The plant cannot prevent itself from flowering.

Sometimes to flower means to die. Never mind, the sap

mounts the same,” concludes the young anarchist

philosopher.

It is the same with the human being when he is full

of force and energy. Force accumulates in him. He

expands his life. He gives without calculation, otherwise

he could not live. If he must die like the flower when it

blooms, never mind. The sap rises, if sap there be.

Be strong. Overflow with emotional and

intellectual energy, and you will spread your intelligence,

your love, your energy of action broadcast among others!

This is what all moral teaching comes to.

IX

That which mankind admires in a truly moral man

is his energy, the exuberance of life which urges him to

give his intelligence, his feeling, his action, asking nothing

in return.

The strong thinker, the man overflowing with

intellectual life, naturally seeks to diffuse his ideas. There

is no pleasure in thinking unless the thought is

communicated to others. It is only the mentally poverty-stricken man, who after he has painfully hunted up some

idea, carefully hides it that later on he may label it with his

own name. The man of powerful intellect runs over with

ideas; he scatters them by the handful. He is wretched if

he cannot share them with others, cannot scatter them to

the four winds, for in this is his life.

The same with regard to feeling. “We are not

enough for ourselves: we have more tears than our own

sufferings claim, more capacity for joy than our own

existence can justify,” says Guyau, thus summing up the

whole question of morality in a few admirable lines,

caught from nature. The solitary being is wretched,

restless, because he cannot share his thoughts and feelings

with others. When we feel some great pleasure, we wish to

let others know that we exist, we feel, we love, we live, we

struggle, we fight.

At the same time, we feel the need to exercise our

will, our active energy. To act, to work has become a need

for the vast majority of mankind. So much so that when

absurd conditions divorce a man or woman from useful

work, they invent something to do, some futile and

senseless obligations whereby to open out a field for their

active energy. They invent a theory, a religion, a “social

duty”— to persuade themselves that they are doing

something useful. When they dance, it is for a charity.

When they ruin themselves with expensive dresses, it is to

keep up the position of the aristocracy. When they do

nothing, it is on principle.

“We need to help our fellows, to lend a hand to the

coach laboriously dragged along by humanity; in any

case, we buzz round it,” says Guyau. This need of lending

a hand is so great that it is found among all sociable

animals, however low in the scale. What is all the

enormous amount of activity spent uselessly in politics

every day but an expression of the need to lend a hand to

the coach of humanity, or at least to buzz around it .

Of course this “fecundity of will,” this thirst for

action, when accompanied by poverty of feeling and an

intellect incapable of creation, will produce nothing but a

Napoleon I or a Bismarck, wiseacres who try to force the

world to progress backwards. While on the other hand,

mental fertility destitute of well developed sensibility

will bring forth such barren fruits as literary and scientific

pedants who only hinder the advance of knowledge.

Finally, sensibility unguided by large intelligence will

produce such persons as the woman ready to sacrifice

everything for some brute of a man, upon whom she

pours forth all her love.

If life to be really fruitful, it must be so at once in

intelligence, in feeling and in will. This fertility in every

direction is life; the only thing worthy the name. For one

moment of this life, those who have obtained a glimpse of

it give years of vegetative existence. Without this

overflowing life, a man is old before his time, an impotent

being, a plant that withers before it has ever flowered.

“Let us leave to latter-day corruption this life that

is no life,” cries youth, the true youth full of sap that longs

to live and scatter life around. Every time a society falls

into decay, a thrust from such youth as this shatters

ancient economic, and political and moral forms to make

room for the up-springing of a new life. What matter if

one or another fall in the struggle! Still the sap rises. For

youth to live is to blossom whatever the consequences! It

does not regret them.

But without speaking of the heroic periods of

mankind, taking every-day existence, is it life to live in

disagreement with one’s ideal ?

Now-a-days it is often said that men scoff at the

ideal. And it is easy to understand why. The word has so

often been used to cheat the simple-hearted that a

reaction is inevitable and healthy. We too should like to

replace the word “ideal,” so often blotted and stained, by

a new word more in conformity with new ideas.

But whatever the word, the fact remains; every human

being has his ideal. Bismarck had his—however strange—;

a government of blood and iron. Even every philistine has

his ideal, however low.

But besides these, there is the human being who has conceived a loftier ideal. The life of a beast cannot satisfy him.

Servility, lying, bad faith, intrigue, inequality in human

relations fill him with loathing. How can he in his turn

become servile, be a liar, and intriguer, lord it over

others? He catches a glimpse of how lovely life might be

if better relations existed among men; he feels in himself

the power to succeed in establishing these better relations

with those he may meet on his way. He conceives what is

called an ideal.

Whence comes this ideal? How is it fashioned by heredity

on one side and the impressions of life on the other? We

know not. At most we could tell the story of it more or

less truly in our own biographies. But it is an actual fact —

variable, progressive, open to outside influences but

always living. It is a largely unconscious feeling of what

would give the greatest amount of vitality, of the joy of

life.

Life is vigorous, fertile. rich in sensation only on

condition of answering to this feeling of the ideal. Act

against this feeling, and you feel your life bent back on

itself. It is no longer at one, it loses its vigor. Be untrue

often to your ideal and you will end by paralyzing your

will, your active energy. Soon you will no longer regain

the vigor, the spontaneity of decision you formerly knew.

You are a broken man.

Nothing mysterious in all this, once you look upon

a human being as a compound of nervous and cerebral

centers acting independently. Waver between the various

feelings striving within you, and you will soon end by

breaking the harmony of the organism; you will be a sick

person without will. The intensity of your life will

decrease. In vain will you seek for compromises. Never

more will you be the complete, strong, vigorous being

you were when your acts were in accordance with the

ideal conceptions of your brain.

There are epochs in which the moral conception

changes entirely. A man perceives that what he had

considered moral is the deepest immorality. In some

instances it is a custom, a venerated tradition, that is

fundamentally immoral. In others we find a moral system

framed in the interests of a single class. We cast them

overboard and raise the cry “Down with morality!” It

becomes a duty to act “immorally.”

Let us welcome such epochs for they are epochs of

criticism. They are an infallible sign that thought is

working in society. A higher morality has begun to be

wrought out.

What this morality will be we have sought to

formulate, taking as our basis the study of man and

animal.

We have seen the kind of morality which is even

now shaping itself in the ideas of the masses and of the

thinkers. This morality will issue no commands. It will

refuse once and for all to model individuals according to

an abstract idea, as it will refuse to mutilate them by

religion, law or government. It will leave to the

individual man full and perfect liberty. It will be but a

simple record of facts, a science. And this science will say

to man: “If you are not conscious of strength within you, if

your energies are only just sufficient to maintain a

colorless, monotonous life, without strong impressions,

without deep joys, but also without deep sorrows, well

then, keep to the simple principles of a just equality. In

relations of equality you will find probably the maximum

of happiness possible to your feeble energies.

“But if you feel within you the strength of youth, if

you wish to live, if you wish to enjoy a perfect, full and

overflowing life —that is, know the highest pleasure which

a living being can desire— be strong, be great, be vigorous

in all you do.

“Sow life around you. Take heed that if you

deceive, lie, intrigue, cheat, you thereby demean yourself.

belittle yourself, confess your own weakness beforehand,

play the part of the slave of the harem who feels himself

the inferior of his master. Do this if it so pleases you, but

know that humanity will regard you as petty,

contemptible and feeble, and treat you as such. Having no

evidence of your strength, it will act towards you as one

worthy of pity— and pity only. Do not blame humanity if

of your own accord you thus paralyze your energies. Be

strong on the other hand, and once you have seen

unrighteousness and recognized it as such —inequity in

life, a lie in science, or suffering inflicted by another— rise

in revolt against the iniquity, the lie or the injustice.

“Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the

struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived;

and a few hours of such life are worth years spent

vegetating.

“Struggle so that all may live this rich, overflowing

life. And be sure that in this struggle you will find a joy

greater than anything else can give.”

This is all that the science of morality can tell you.

Yours is the choice.