Love, the Law of Life

Romain Rolland has said that Fate is the term which man applies to all that he himself does not decide. Viewing the development of fatalism in the world, we find M. Rolland’s dictum to be correct.

When the oppression of the physical environment is extreme, man thinks of the power of fate in Nature; and when, unable to bear the oppression of his social environment, man loses sight of his own purpose, he feels the sorrow of social fate. The former is the fatalism found in primitive cultures, while the latter is one of the ways of viewing modern economic fate, 2. e¢., fatalism as transformed by the materialistic conception of history. More depressing than these two views is the psychic fatalism which holds that all of man’s psychic existence is predetermined by some superhuman power. Man is overrun by the wheels of fate, deprived of freedom, doomed to anguish only, coming finally to curse life itself. It is a metaphysical agony of imprecations against evil inheritance and of suffering from original sin. The anguish of the modern man penetrates from natural to social, from social to personal— deeper and deeper into the soul, his suffering continually more excruciating.

Consider first the fatalism arising from the oppression of Nature. Take the illustration of India. The early religion of ancient India, as revealed in the beautiful poems of the Rig Veda scriptures, was based upon a vivid view of life. The poets praised unfettered Nature, they sang of the lightning, and of the charm of the sky at dawn.. They hymned the beautiful echoes of the chariot wheels when the god Murat rode upon the clouds. Itis difficult to believe that the men of ancient India who composed such poetry were shuddering in fear at the oppression of a dreaded Nature.

But when they left the plateau of Iran and descended to the banks of the Ganges, they for the first time experienced the oppression of a mighty Nature which they, with the limited strength of men, were unable to conquer. In the dark jungles bordering the Ganges there awaited them those savage, well-nigh earthcolored Dravidians. Forthwith the fresh, free poetry ceased. Dwelling in the jungles and fearing the attacks of enemies, these folk from Iran would light their fires and recite the Upanishad scriptures. Before long, plagues devastated their villages, and they were stricken and reduced in numbers. Year by year their harvests failed. After the plagues came famines; then a succession of floods; then the apparition of a mysterious celestial visitor, a comet with a long tail. In all this they recognized a superhuman power, a power which constrained them and thwarted their courageous activities, binding them with the chains of mercilessness. They began to perceive that before these chains even a monarch leading a million men was powerless.

Thus in their daily life they experienced the repetition of blind, mechanical existence. The cycle of generations was pure sorrow. No longer was their history one of growth. Their lives became, generation after generation, a ceaseless repetition of futile efforts to conquer the oppression of Nature. In a day the culture they had founded was demolished by floods. In a moment of time their children whom they had carefully raised were torn from them by disease. To them, all their physical woes were but part of a natural fate. In the end they were unable to discover any great difference between themselves and the beasts. They found themselves facing starvation, for they were unable to eat roots of grass and bark of tree, which, were they beasts instead of men, they could have had in plenty. Compared to lions and oxen, they were not particularly superior animals. Observing their own fine skins burnt by the sun, wrinkled by long periods of illness, and changing to an earth color, they even began to envy the leopards their beautiful spotted skins, and were unable to restrain curses upon themselves for their futile existence. They thought how superior and how much more beautiful the beasts were. From these ideas began their primitive animal worship. It seemed to them that they were doomed to a life of mechanical transmigration by which those who had done evil in a former existence were born into this world as oxen, while those who did evil in this life would be reborn in _the next world as snakes.

When, on the banks of the Hoang-Ho in China, I met bands of starving folk, I thought upon social resistance to Nature. And when I saw the folk by the tens and hundreds of thousands, driven out by floods, in their boats roofed with sacks, making their way to Shanghai and Kyukiang, I marveled alike at the weakness of man and the strength of the forces of Nature. Then at the time of our great earthquake and fire, we in Japan collided with a like fatalism. Yet we were able, when snared by this simple fatalism, directly to continue our growth. For, individually through advance in knowledge and socially through perfection of organization, man has become able to extend the system of mutual aid and to fortify his social nature. He groups small families into tribes, tribes into races, races into unified nations, unified nations into international alliances. Thus against the oppression of Nature, which a single individual is powerless to oppose, man is able socially to make resistance. The prodigious aids of invention and discovery have enormously increased man’s power to subjugate Nature; and a scientific culture, quite lacking in primitive society, has come to birth.

Man has created a wholly new manner of living, quite removed from Nature. He has gotten away from the sod. He has built huge chimneys towering toward the sky, and stretched electric wires through the air like giant spiders’ webs. He has built railroads to the ends of the continents. Everything is done with the idea of convenience and public benefit, and directed toward the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Asa _ result, society practices division of labor to an extreme degree. Mechanized division of labor has necessitated the mechanization of daily life, of social organization, and of mind or spirit.

Folk enter the factories at the sound of the seven o’clock whistle, and from then until the evening whistle blows they must stand and tend machines. The wages that they earn must be used to buy food, and now no longer is there any surplus remaining. Everything must work like the hands of a clock. The aggregate of all the mechanized daily lives of individuals is comprehended in the modern factory.

Factories represent one side of the mechanization of the system of production, but politics as well has become mechanized. Because it promotes efficiency, _ bureaucratic government is esteemed, and work in government offices has become mechanical, bothersome, uninteresting, and inhuman. In the next place, armies are mechanized. Every soldier is required to move like a machine. The need for heroes is no longer recognized. All that is demanded of every soldier is that he turn into a tool for raising the efficiency of machine guns. Furthermore, passionate love, religion even, and learning as well, are all mechanized. Thus this complete mechanization of all things upon the basis of efficiency has resulted in forcing man to kneel down before the system which he has himself created and experience all his sufferings over again. This is the horrible fate of modern civilization and the reason why Karl Marx’s thoroughgoing materialistic conception of history has come to be literally accepted. But this does not imply that the soul of man is contented with this mechanical existence. His soul straightens itself up within. Ardently it makes the effort to break through its environment and demolish superficial formalism. Yet, though straightening up and becoming thus fired, an unfortunate inner principle lies athwart to hinder it. Thesoul bound by physical fate is fettered psychically as well. There are the fearful perils of syphilis and alcohol. Thus the soul held in check by all its evil inheritances and cast into the slough of fate, must, while yearning to rise, submit helplessly to suffering and tears—such is the poignant anguish of modern man. Ibsen’s Ghosts and Hauptmann’s tragedies were aimed at these conditions of social disease.

Thus has man been captured gradually by the trio of fates—natural, social, and psychic—proceeding from outer to inner; but M. Rolland’s words to the effect that the term fate is applied to all the parts of life which man does not himself determine, will to the end remain true. For when man’s soul can grow even a little—his inner power develop just a little more strength—and he is able to beat down external forces, his ideas of fate suddenly vanish. The conception of transmigration is demolished by social fatalism. Scientific forces furnish the power to control natural fate to a certain extent. Furthermore, psychic fate is stronger than external, social fatalism, and psychic determinism more fundamental than social determinism. Society itself is replaced by psychic canons. Thus, as the result of the inner evolution, there is soul-growth, and with it the position of fatalism is revolutionized. External fatalism is by degrees driven out by an inner fatalism. In other words, only the inner determinism remains; and the inmost determinism is none other than selfdeterminism—the final remainder.

When the individual abandons the will to advance toward the good, naught is left but external oppression. Though all the world be black, the soul which can still perceive a ray of light within, and has the courage to give a cup of water to some poor creature along its - pioneer path, can be said to have the strength by that much to overcome social fate. The soul which deeply trusts in itself never fears the darkness of life; and, moreover, the realm of fate is not necessarily sheer gloom. So long as the inner determination is deepening and the power remains with us to decide more or less our own course, that is, so long as we understand that our own destiny pertains to us alone, there is no need for us to be pessimistic. May it not be that we ought to fear ourselves more than we fear outer fate?

When cowardice or weakness drives an individual to the point of casting his life away, presumably he must accept the oppression of Nature as it comes, or materialistic determinism, or the determinism of evil inheritance as it is; but even though this threefold determinism be imposed, so long as he keeps open thedoors of self toward others and there is available to him any portion of that fourth realm of self-determination through invention, discovery, and creation, he wills to believe that the evil in the universe is by no means fundamental. Archimedes said that he could move the world if he had a lever. So long as the lever of self-determination is left to us at all, we believe that we can verily raise the weight of the world’s threefold fate.

Again would I repeat the words of M. Rolland: “If there be fate in the world, it occurs in matters outside the sphere of individual determination.”

When the soul develops within, and the self can determine its own fate, the course of the soul’s growth is removed from the domination of blind, inner fate, and becomes creation through love. The fate of the soul is in love’s hands. If love demands sacrifice, the soul is ready; if love is not daunted by the fiery furnace, neither may the soul shrink therefrom.

Love at times compels men to face sad ends, but the valor of love is able to dissolve their destinies. In love’s view, destiny is but that which affects the growth of the soul. Love sees through to the ultimate victory. Wherefore love has the courage to break through even the tragedy of fate. Love is the bravest of the brave.

It was love for the homeland that brought eight million souls to death on the battle fields of Europe; love for their countrymen that made men calmly: mount to the guillotine. Love for the helpless draws one near to the sufferers with infectious diseases. The bravest, the most adventurous, is love. Courageous love alone can break through destiny. Love determines the ego and the alter, or, rather, love determines my own destiny and that of the sufferer as well. The destiny embraced by love carries a double determination: for the ego, it is that of evolution; for the sufferer, it is a determination toward reévolution and redemption.

Even in the sad doom to destruction, love discovers the shining light of resurrection. Fate is, for love, but a game. It is like that played by children with the weaving of a cord on the fingers. Among the predetermined changes love still finds its clue. Even when, time and time again, the same combination is repeated, love discovers therein the resource of joy.

Death, illness, decrepitude—all are welcomed by love as beautiful arts. For love refines them fully, and has no fear of them. Love knows the means of redemption. Therefore, the soul awakened to love knows no disappointment. Through the flowering of love within the soul, the sad fate that overwhelms the individual can be deemed one of the elements in the drama of a greater love, rendering possible the expectation of the birth of the greater love, and this not by negation of the sorrow, but rather by virtue of it.

I see this love moving within me. Love decides my destiny. I am a part of love. Love determines my all. Love makes me to hunger. Love nails me to the cross. Love is the sum of my destiny. O joyous fate! O gladsome tidings! If there is a destiny for me, it is love that decides it. Iam bound to love: it is my glad fate. For love I suffer agony; for love, I make appeal.

But I, who am created to love, have so little of love; ~ yet I have laid upon me the compulsion to seek the object of my love. Love today sends me afar to the cold North, and tomorrow sets me down on burning eround. Love is my master. In truth, man has laid upon him the great compulsion to love—to find the way into men’s hearts by love. For love Iam created; love may use me as it will. I cannot flee from love; the bonds of love, indeed, are my joy. I am infatuated with holy love. Love draws me on to the scaffold; yet I cannot forsake love. The sorrow of love’s destiny is changed for me into a great evangel, a great art. Again I declare, love is my all-in-all; love is my joyous destiny!

The cosmos is love in the bud—one vast bud. ‘Thus would I believe, and thus my science-as-art teaches me. The great drama is still in progress; the future yet is long. And love gives meaning to the rising action.

Like passionate love the cosmos is fragrant—a mystic bud of life that is changed from love to love. It is felt only within. This is the message of evolution, that the world is still in bud.