Anarchist Morality

by Peter Kropotkin



		Note 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



I                                 

						

	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 dis-

cussed. 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 distaste-

ful, 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 ant-hill, 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 re-

flect 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 dur-

ing 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 re-

mains, 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 de-

clare 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 before-

hand 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 be-

forehand 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 chil-

dren? 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 con-

ceived 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.



