than to the scientist the progressive rationalisation of matter by the work of scientific intelligence is the natural vocation of the human mind.
This must seem a hard saying when we consider that science and discovery, like a second eating of the forbidden fruit of knowledge, have proved a curse rather than a blessing to humanity. But the disease of modern civilisation lies neither in science nor in machinery, but in the false philosophy with which they have been associated. At the very moment that man was at last acquiring control over his material environment, he was abandoning the ideal of spiritual order and leaving the new economic forces to develop uncontrolled without any higher social direction. Economic activity was no longer regarded as a function of society as a whole, but as an independent world in which the only laws were the purely economic ones of supply and demand, and of the relations between population and capital.
Money and commodities were not considered in relation to social life, but became hyposta¬
tised into abstract principles on which social life was dependent.
But though these ideas accompanied the rise of the machine order, they are in reality profoundly inconsistent with that order and with the scientific genius, and to-day they are 102
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W O R D E R
either dead or in the process of dissolution. It is now generally recognised—even by those who attach no importance to spiritual values—that the machine order involves social direction and that it is absurd to build up an elaborate artificial mechanism of production and to leave society itself at the mercy of private acquisitiveness. This was first clearly realised by the Socialists, and to-day Communism claims to be the only social theory that is consistent with the new scientific order. But Communism is itself a result of the same pseudo-scientific rationalism which produced the doctrine of Ricardo, and it gained consistency only by carrying the false principles of the older theory to their extreme conclusion.
The old economists had excluded human values from economic life, but they had not attempted to deny them entirely. Outside business hours ” the economic man ” was free to behave as a human being. But to the Communist no such dualism is possible. The economic life absorbs the whole man and the whole society. The political, intellectual and spiritual aspects of life are all subordinated to the economic end, which alone is absolute and consequently is the only ethical criterion.
Thus man becomes the servant and not the master of the machine, since society exists for 103
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
economic production and man exists for society.
But the history of Communism is itself sufficient to disprove this materialistic conception of history. For Communism was not the spontaneous product of impersonal economic forces. It had its origin in the mind of that atrabilious arch-individualist, Karl Marx, and the forces that inspired him were neither of the economic nor the material order. It was the instinct of spiritual self-assertion, the revolutionary ideal of abstract justice, and perhaps more than all the ineradicable Jewish faith in an apocalyptic deliverance that drove him from his own country and the interests of his bourgeois career to a life of exile and privation.
Thus Communism, like every other living power in the world of men, owes its existence to spiritual forces. If it were possible to eliminate these, as the Communist theory demands, and to reduce human life to a purely economic activity, mankind would sink back into barbarism and animality. For the creative element in human culture is spiritual, and it triumphs only by mortifying and conquering the natural conservatism of man’s animal instincts. This is true above all of science, for the path of the scientist leads him further from the animal than the rest of men. He lives not in the concrete 104
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W O R D E R
reality of sensible experience, like the animal or the savage, but in a rarefied atmosphere of mathematical abstraction in which the ordinary man cannot breathe. If the materialist interpretation of history were true, the scientific intellectualisation of nature could no more have arisen than could the metaphysical intuition of reality, and without science there could be no machine order. The true Marxian Communism is not that of a machine order which is the work of the creative scientific spirit, but rather that of the Eskimo, which is the direct product of economic necessity. For the machine is a proof not of the subordination of mind to matter, but of the subordination of matter to mind. So far from necessitating the substitution of material for spiritual order, it is itself a vindication of spiritual order, since it frees man from his age-long animal condition of dependence on nature and material circumstance.
But if the scientific order is to realise this ideal, it must be related to spiritual ends and must form part of a wider spiritual order.
Material organisation alone is incapable of saving civilisation. Left to itself it may easily become a destructive force which is hostile alike to spiritual values and to human freedom.
True civilisation is essentially a spiritual order, and its criterion is not material wealth, but 105