The Book of Life Part 1

The Book of Life.

by Upton Sinclair.

INTRODUCTORY

The writer of this book has been in this world some forty-two years.

That may not seem long to some, but it is long enough to have made many painful mistakes, and to have learned much from them. Looking about him, he sees others making these same mistakes, suffering for lack of that same knowledge which he has so painfully acquired. This being the case, it seems a friendly act to offer his knowledge, minus the blunders and the pain.

There come to the writer literally thousands of letters every year, asking him questions, some of them of the strangest. A man is dying of cancer, and do I think it can be cured by a fast? A man is unable to make his wife happy, and can I tell him what is the matter with women? A man has invested his savings in mining stock, and can I tell him what to do about it? A man works in a sweatshop, and has only a little time for self-improvement, and will I tell him what books he ought to read? Many such questions every day make one aware of a vast ma.s.s of people, earnest, hungry for happiness, and groping as if in a fog. The things they most need to know they are not taught in the schools, nor in the newspapers they read, nor in the church they attend. Of these agencies, the first is not entirely competent, the second is not entirely honest, and the third is not entirely up to date. Nor is there anywhere a book in which the effort has been made to give to everyday human beings the everyday information they need for the successful living of their lives.

For the present book the following claims may be made. First, it is a modern book; its writer watches hour by hour the new achievements of the human mind, he reaches out for information about them, he seeks to adjust his own thoughts to them and to test them in his own living.

Second, it is, or tries hard to be, a wise book; its writer is not among those too-ardent young radicals who leap to the conclusion that because many old things are stupid and tiresome, therefore everything that is old is to be spurned with contempt, and everything that proclaims itself new is to be taken at its own valuation. Third, it is an honest book; its writer will not pretend to know what he only guesses, and where it is necessary to guess, he will say so frankly. Finally, it is a kind book; it is not written for its author's glory, nor for his enrichment, but to tell you things that may be useful to you in the brief span of your life. It will attempt to tell you how to live, how to find health and happiness and success, how to work and how to play, how to eat and how to sleep, how to love and to marry and to care for your children, how to deal with your fellow men in business and politics and social life, how to act and how to think, what religion to believe, what art to enjoy, what books to read. A large order, as the boys phrase it!

There are several ways for such a book to begin. It might begin with the child, because we all begin that way; it might begin with love, because that precedes the child; it might begin with the care of the body, explaining that sound physical health is the basis of all right living, and even of right thinking; it might begin as most philosophies do, by defining life, discussing its origin and fundamental nature.

The trouble with this last plan is that there are a lot of people who have their ideas on life made up in tabloid form; they have creeds and catechisms which they know by heart, and if you suggest to them anything different, they give you a startled look and get out of your way. And then there is another, and in our modern world a still larger cla.s.s, who say, "Oh, shucks! I don't go in for religion and that kind of thing."

You offer them something that looks like a sermon, and they turn to the baseball page.

Who will read this Book of Life? There will be, among others, the great American tired business man. He wrestles with problems and cares all day, and when he sits down to read in the evening, he says: "Make it short and snappy." There is the wife of the tired business man, the American perfect lady. She does most of the reading for the family; but she has never got down to anything fundamental in her life, and mostly she likes to read about exciting love affairs, which she distinguishes from the unexciting kind she knows by the word "romance." Then there is the still more tired American workingman, who has been "speeded up" all day under the bonus system or the piece-work system, and is apt to fall asleep in his chair before he finishes supper. Then there is the workingman's wife, who has slaved all day in the kitchen, and has a chance for a few minutes' intimacy with her husband before he falls asleep. She would like to have somebody tell her what to do for croup, but she is not sure that she has time to discuss the question whether life is worth living.

Yet, I wonder; is there a single one among all these tired people, or even among the cynical people, who has not had some moment of awe when the thought came stabbing into his mind like a knife: "What a strange thing this life is! What am I anyhow? Where do I come from, and what is going to become of me? What do I mean, what am I here for?" I have sat chatting with three hoboes by a railroad track, cooking themselves a mulligan in an old can, and heard one of them say: "By G.o.d, it's a queer thing, ain't it, mate?" I have sat on the deck of a ship, looking out over the midnight ocean and talking with a sailor, and heard him use almost the identical words. It is not only in the cla.s.s-room and the schools that the minds of men are grappling with the fundamental problems; in fact, it was not from the schools that the new religions and the great moral impulses of humanity took their origin. It was from lonely shepherds sitting on the hillsides, and from fishermen casting their nets, and from carpenters and tailors and shoemakers at their benches.

Stop and think a bit, and you will realize it does make a difference what you believe about life, how it comes to be, where it is going, and what is your place in it. Is there a heaven with a G.o.d, who watches you day and night, and knows every thought you think, and will some day take you to eternal bliss if you obey his laws? If you really believe that, you will try to find out about his laws, and you will be comparatively little concerned about the success or failure of your business. Perhaps, on the other hand, you have knocked about in the world and lost your "faith"; you have been cheated and exploited, and have set out to "get yours," as the phrase is; to "feather your own nest." But some gust of pa.s.sion seizes you, and you waste your substance, you wreck your life; then you wonder, "Who set that trap and baited it? Am I a creature of blind instincts, jealousies and greeds and hates beyond my own control entirely? Am I a poor, feeble insect, blown about in a storm and smashed? Or do I make the storm, and can I in any part control it?"

No matter how busy you may be, no matter how tired you may be, it will pay you to get such things straight: to know a little of what the wise men of the past have thought about them, and more especially what science with its new tools of knowledge may have discovered.

The writer of this book spent nine years of his life in colleges and universities; also he was brought up in a church. So he knows the orthodox teachings, he can say that he has given to the recognized wise men of the world every opportunity to tell him what they know. Then, being dissatisfied, he went to the unrecognized teachers, the enthusiasts and the "cranks" of a hundred schools. Finally, he thought for himself; he was even willing to try experiments upon himself. As a result, he has not found what he claims is ultimate or final truth; but he has what he might describe as a rough working draft, a practical outline, good for everyday purposes. He is going to have confidence enough in you, the reader, to give you the hardest part first; that is, to begin with the great fundamental questions. What is life, and how does it come to be? What does it mean, and what have we to do with it?

Are we its masters or its slaves? What does it owe us, and what do we owe to it? Why is it so hard, and do we have to stand its hardness? And can we really know about all these matters, or will we be only guessing?

Can we trust ourselves to think about them, or shall we be safer if we believe what we are told? Shall we be punished if we think wrong, and how shall we be punished? Shall we be rewarded if we think right, and will the pay be worth the trouble?

Such questions as these I am going to try to answer in the simplest language possible. I would avoid long words altogether, if I could; but some of these long words mean certain definite things, and there are no other words to serve the purpose. You do not refuse to engage in the automobile business because the carburetor and the differential are words of four syllables. Neither should you refuse to get yourself straight with the universe because it is too much trouble to go to the dictionary and learn that the word "phenomenon" means something else than a little boy who can play the piano or do long division in his head.

PART ONE

THE BOOK OF THE MIND

CHAPTER I

THE NATURE OF LIFE

(Attempts to show what we know about life; to set the bounds of real truth as distinguished from phrases and self-deception.)

If I could, I would begin this book by telling you what Life is. But unfortunately I do not know what Life is. The only consolation I can find is in the fact that n.o.body else knows either.

We ask the churches, and they tell us that male and female created He them, and put them in the Garden of Eden, and they would have been happy had not Satan tempted them. But then you ask, who made Satan, and the explanation grows vague. You ask, if G.o.d made Satan, and knew what Satan was going to do, is it not the same as if G.o.d did it himself? So this explanation of the origin of evil gets you no further than the Hindoo picture of the world resting on the back of a tortoise, and the tortoise on the head of a snake--and nothing said as to what the snake rests on.

Let us go to the scientist. I know a certain physiologist, perhaps the greatest in the world, and his eager face rises before me, and I hear his quick, impetuous voice declaring that he knows what Life is; he has told it in several big volumes, and all I have to do is to read them.

Life is a tropism, caused by the presence of certain combinations of chemicals; my friend knows this, because he has produced the thing in his test-tubes. He is an exponent of a way of thought called Monism, which finds the ultimate source of being in forms of energy manifesting themselves as matter; he shows how all living things arise from that and sink back into it.

But question this scientist more closely. What is this "matter" that you are so sure of? How do you know it? Obviously, through sensations. You never know matter itself, you only know its effects upon you, and you a.s.sume that the matter must be there to cause the sensation. In other words, "matter," which seems so real, turns out to be merely "a permanent possibility of sensation." And suppose there were to be sensations, caused, for example, by a sportive demon who liked to make fun of eminent physiologists--then there might be the appearance of matter and nothing else; in other words, there might be mind, and various states of mind. So we discover that the materialist, in the philosophic sense, is making just as large an act of faith, is p.r.o.nouncing just as bold a dogma as any priest of any religion.

This is an old-time topic of disputation. Before Mother Eddy there was Bishop Berkeley, and before Berkeley, there was Plato, and they and the materialists disputed until their hearers cried in despair, "What is Mind? No matter! What is Matter? Never mind!" But a century or two ago in a town of Prussia there lived a little, dried-up professor of philosophy, who sat himself down in his room and fixed his eyes on a church steeple outside the window, and for years on end devoted himself to examining the tools of thought with which the human mind is provided, and deciding just what work and how much of it they are fitted to do. So came the proof that our minds are incapable of reaching to or dealing with any ultimate reality whatever, but can comprehend only phenomena--that is to say, appearances--and their relations one with another. The Koenigsberg professor proved this once for all time, setting forth four propositions about ultimate reality, and proving them by exact and irrefutable logic, and then proving by equally exact and irrefutable logic their precise opposites and contraries. Anybody who has read and comprehended the four "antinomies" of Immanuel Kant[A]

knows that metaphysics is as dead a subject as astrology, and that all the complicated theories which the philosophers from Herac.l.i.tus to Arthur Balfour have spun like spiders out of their inner consciousness, have no more relation to reality than the intricacies of the game of chess.

[A] See Paulsen: "Life of Kant."

The writer is sorry to make this statement, because he spent a lot of time reading these philosophers and acquainting himself with their subtle theories. He learned a whole language of long words, and even the special meanings which each philosopher or school of philosophers give to them. When he had got through, he had learned, so far as metaphysics is concerned, absolutely nothing, and had merely the job of clearing out of his mind great ma.s.ses of verbal cobwebs. It was not even good intellectual training; the metaphysical method of thought is a _trap_.

The person who thinks in absolutes and ultimates is led to believe that he has come to conclusions about reality, when as a matter of fact he has merely proved what he wants to believe; if he had wanted to believe the opposite, he could have proven that exactly as well--as his opponents will at once demonstrate.

If you multiply two feet by two feet, the result represents a plain surface, or figure of two dimensions. If you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet, you have a solid, or figure of three dimensions--such as the world in which we live and move. But now, suppose you multiply two feet by two feet by two feet by two feet, what does that represent?

For ages the minds of mathematicians and philosophers have been tempted by this fascinating problem of the "fourth dimension." They have worked out by a.n.a.logy what such a world would be like. If you went into this "fourth dimension," you could turn yourself inside out, and come back to our present world in that condition, and no one of your three-dimension friends would be able to imagine how you had managed it, or to put you back again the way you belonged. And in this, it seems to me, we have the perfect a.n.a.logy of metaphysical thinking. It is the "fourth dimension" of the mind, and plays as much havoc with sound thinking as a physical "fourth dimension" would play with--say, the prison system. A man who takes up an absolute--G.o.d, immortality, the origin of being, a first cause, free will, absolute right or wrong, infinite time or s.p.a.ce, final truth, original substance, the "thing in itself"--that man disappears into a fourth dimension, and turns himself inside out or upside down or hindside foremost, and comes back and exhibits himself in triumph; then, when he is ready, he effects another disappearance, and another change, and is back on earth an ordinary human being.

The world is full of schools of thought, theologians and metaphysicians and professors of academic philosophy, transcendentalists and theosophists and Christian Scientists, who perform such mental monkey-shines continuously before our eyes. They prove what they please, and the fact that no two of them prove the same thing makes clear to us in the end that none of them has proved anything. The Christian Scientist a.s.serts that there is no such thing as matter, but that pain is merely a delusion of mortal mind; he continues serene in this faith until he runs into an automobile and sustains a compound fracture of the femur--whereupon he does exactly what any of the rest of us do, goes to a competent surgeon and has the bone set. On the other hand, some devoted young Socialists of my acquaintance have read Haeckel and Dietzgen, and adopted the dogma that matter is the first cause, and that all things have grown out of it and return to it; they have seen that the brain decays after death, they declare that the soul is a function of the brain--and because of such theories they deliberately reject the most powerful modes of appeal whereby men can be swayed to faith in human solidarity.

The best books I know for the sweeping out of metaphysical cobwebs are "The Philosophy of Common Sense" and "The Creed of a Layman," by Frederic Harrison, leader of the English Positivists, a school of thought established by Auguste Comte. But even as I recommend these books, I recall the dissatisfaction with which I left them; for it appears that the Positivists have their dogmas like all the rest. Mr.

Harrison is not content to say that mankind has not the mental tools for dealing with ultimate realities; he must needs prove that mankind never will and never can have these tools, I look back upon the long process of evolution and ask myself, What would an oyster think about Positivism? What would be the opinion of, let us say, a young turnip on the subject of Mr. Frederic Harrison's thesis? It may well be that the difference between a turnip and Mr. Harrison is not so great as will be the difference between Mr. Harrison and that super-race which some day takes possession of the earth and of all the universe. It does not seem to me good science or good sense to dogmatize about what this race will know, or what will be its tools of thought. What does seem to me good science and good sense is to take the tools which we now possess and use them to their utmost capacity.

What is it that we know about life? We know a seemingly endless stream of sensations which manifest themselves in certain ways, and seem to inhere in what we call things and beings. We observe incessant change in all these phenomena, and we examine these changes and discover their ways. The ways seem to be invariable; so completely so that for practical purposes we a.s.sume them to be invariable, and base all our calculations and actions upon this a.s.sumption. Manifestly, we could not live otherwise, and the spread of scientific knowledge is the further tracing out of such "laws"--that is to say, the ways of behaving of existence--and the extending of our belief in their invariability to wider and wider fields.

Once upon a time we were told that "the wind bloweth where it listeth."

But now we are quite certain that there are causes for the blowing of the wind, and when our researches have been carried far enough, we shall be able to account for and to predict every smallest breath of air. Once we were told that dreams came from a supernatural world; but now we are beginning to a.n.a.lyze dreams, and to explain what they come from and what they mean. Perhaps we still find human nature a bewildering and unaccountable thing; but some day we shall know enough of man's body and his mind, his past and his present, to be able to explain human nature and to produce it at will, precisely as today we produce certain reactions in our test-tubes, and do it so invariably that the most cautious financier will invest tens of millions of dollars in a process, and never once reflect that he is putting too much trust in the permanence of nature.

In many departments of thought great specialists are now working, experimenting and observing by the methods of science. If in the course of this book we speak of "certainty," we mean, of course, not the "absolute" certainty of any metaphysical dogma, but the practical certainty of everyday common sense; the certainty we feel that eating food will satisfy our hunger, and that tomorrow, as today, two and two will continue to make four.

CHAPTER II

THE NATURE OF FAITH

(Attempts to show what we can prove by our reason, and what we know intuitively; what is implied in the process of thinking, and without which no thought could be.)

The primary fact that we know about life is growth. Herbert Spencer has defined this growth, or evolution, in a string of long words which may be summed up to mean: the process whereby a number of things which are simple and like one another become different parts of one thing which is complex. If we observe this process in ourselves, and the symptoms of it in others, we discover that when it is proceeding successfully, it is accompanied by a sensation of satisfaction which we call happiness or pleasure; also that when it is thwarted or repressed, it is accompanied by a different sensation which we call pain. Subtle metaphysicians, both inside the churches and out, have set themselves to the task of proving that there must be some other object of life than the continuance of these sensations of pleasure which accompany successful growth. They have proven to their own satisfaction that morality will collapse and human progress come to an end unless we can find some other motive, something more permanent and more stimulating, something "higher," as they phrase it. All I can say is that I gave reverent attention to the arguments of these moralists and theologians, and that for many years I believed their doctrines; but I believe them no longer.

I interpret the purpose of life to be the continuous unfoldment of its powers, its growth into higher forms--that is to say, forms more complex and subtly contrived, capable of more intense and enduring kinds of that satisfaction which is nature's warrant of life. If you wish to take up this statement and argue about it, please wait until you have read the chapter "Nature and Man," and noted my distinction between instinctive life and rational life. For men, the word "growth" does not mean _any_ growth, _all_ growth, blind and indiscriminate growth. It does not mean growth for the tubercle bacillus, nor growth for the anopheles mosquito, nor growth for the house-fly, the spider and the louse. Neither do we mean that the purpose of man's own life is _any_ pleasure, _all_ pleasure, blind and indiscriminate pleasure; the pleasure of alcohol, the pleasure of cannibalism, the pleasure of the modern form of cannibalism which we call "making money." We have survived in the struggle for existence by the cooperative and social use of our powers of judgment; and our judgment is that which selects among forms of growth, which gives preference to wheat and corn over weeds, and to self-control and honesty over treachery and greed.

So when we say that the purpose of life is happiness, we do not mean to turn mankind loose at a hog-trough; we mean that our duty as thinkers is to watch life, to test it, to pick and choose among the many forms it offers, and to say: This kind of growth is more permanent and full of promise, it is more fertile, more deeply satisfactory; therefore, we choose this, and sanction the kind of pleasure which it brings. Other kinds we decide are temporary and delusive; therefore we put in jail anyone who sells alcoholic drink, and we refuse to invite to our home people who are lewd, and some day we shall not permit our children to attend moving picture shows in which the modern form of cannibalism is glorified.