First and Last Things eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 194 pages of information about First and Last Things.

First and Last Things eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 194 pages of information about First and Last Things.

Moreover, hate must be in its nature a good thing.  We individuals exist as such, I believe, for the purpose in things, and our separations and antagonisms serve that purpose.  We play against each other like hammer and anvil.  But the synthesis of a collective will in humanity, which is I believe our human and terrestrial share in that purpose, is an idea that carries with it a conception of a secular alteration in the scope and method of both love and hate.  Both widen and change with man’s widening and developing apprehension of the purpose he serves.  The savage man loves in gusts a fellow creature or so about him, and fears and hates all other people.  Every expansion of his scope and ideas widens either circle.  The common man of our civilized world loves not only many of his friends and associates systematically and enduringly, but dimly he loves also his city and his country, his creed and his race; he loves it may be less intensely but over a far wider field and much more steadily.  But he hates also more widely if less passionately and vehemently than a savage, and since love makes rather harmony and peace and hate rather conflict and events, one may easily be led to suppose that hate is the ruling motive in human affairs.  Men band themselves together in leagues and loyalties, in cults and organizations and nationalities, and it is often hard to say whether the bond is one of love for the association or hatred of those to whom the association is antagonized.  The two things pass insensibly into one another.  London people have recently seen an edifying instance of the transition, in the Brown Dog statue riots.  A number of people drawn together by their common pity for animal suffering, by love indeed of the most disinterested sort, had so forgotten their initial spirit as to erect a monument with an inscription at once recklessly untruthful, spiteful in spirit and particularly vexatious to one great medical school of London.  They have provoked riots and placarded London with taunts and irritating misrepresentatin of the spirit of medical research, and they have infected a whole fresh generation of London students with a bitter partizan contempt for the humanitarian effort that has so lamentably misconducted itself.  Both sides vow they will never give in, and the anti-vivisectionists are busy manufacturing small china copies of the Brown Dog figure, inscription and all, for purposes of domestic irritation.  Here hate, the evil ugly brother of effort, has manifestly slain love the initiator and taken the affair in hand.  That is a little model of human conflicts.  So soon as we become militant and play against one another, comes this danger of strain and this possible reversal of motive.  The fight begins.  Into a pit of heat and hate fall right and wrong together.

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First and Last Things from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.