Gozzi, made Pantaleone a philistine, who used good sense against the follies of fashion. No women were present at these comedies at Venice at this time.1 Scherillo 2 quotes Perucci, that at the end of the seventeenth century the folk theater was obscene in word and act beyond the ancient comedies. If that is true, it is only a detail of the degeneracy of Italy from the middle of the sixteenth century. 669. Summary and review. It is evident that amusement and relaxation are needs of men. The fondness for exhibitions and theatrical representations can be traced through history. The suggestion is direct and forcible. It can be made to play upon harmful tastes as well as upon good ones. There is nothing to guide it or decide its form and direction except the mores, the consenting opinion of the masses as to what is beneficial or harmful. The leading classes try to mold this opinion. The history shows that the mores can make anything right, and protect any violation of the sex taboo or of ordinary propriety. There is no subject in regard to which the mores need more careful criticism than in regard to amusements. The standard and the usage degenerate together unless there is control by an active and well-trained taste and sense. The popular taste and sense are products of inherited mores. It is this reflex action of habitual acts and experiences which makes the subject difficult. All the primary facts and the secondary or remoter reflections are intertwined as in an organic growth, and all go together. The facts exert constant education, and every positive effort to interfere with the course of things by primitive education must be content to exert slight effects for a long time. Wealth and luxury exert their evil effects through amusement. Poverty cuts down these products of wealth and brings societies back to simplicity and virtue. Men renounce when they cannot get. The periods of economic and social decay have cut off the development of forms of amusement, arrested vice, and forced new beginnings. 670. Amusements need the control of educated judgment and will. The history shows that amusements are a pitfall in which 1 Masi, Teatro Ital., 89, 232, 264. 2 La Commedia del Arte, 50. good mores may be lost and evil ones produced. They require conventional control and good judgment to guide them. This requirement cannot be set aside. Amusements always present a necessity for moral education and moral will. This fact has impressed itself on men in all ages, and all religions have produced Puritan and ascetic sects who sought welfare, not in satisfying but in counteracting the desire for amusement and pleasure. Their efforts have proved that there is no solution in that direction. There must be an educated judgment at work all the time, and it must form correct judgments to be made real by a cultivated will, or the whole societal interest may be lost without the evil tendency being perceived. 671. Amusements do not satisfy the current notions of progress. It is clear from the history that amusements have gone through waves upward and downward, but that the amplitude of the waves is very small. It is true that the shows of the late Roman empire were very base, and that the great drama has gone very high by comparison, but the oscillation between the two entirely destroys anything like a steady advance in dramatic composition or dramatic art. This is a very instructive fact. It entirely negatives the current notion of progress as a sort of function of time which is to be expected to realize itself in a steady improvement and advance to better and better. The useful arts do show an advance. The fine arts do not. They return to the starting point, or near it, again and again. The dramatic art is partly literary and partly practical handicraft. Theater buildings improve; the machinery, lights, scenery, and manipulation improve. The literary products are like other artistic products: they have periods of glory and periods of decay. It is the literary products which are nearest to the mores. They lack all progress, or advance only temporarily from worse to better literary forms. CHAPTER XVIII ASCETICISM The exaggeration of opposite policies. - Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency. - Luck and welfare; self-discipline to influence the superior powers. · Asceticism in Japan. Development of the arts; luxury; sensuality. The ascetic philosophy. — Asceticism is an aberration. The definitions depend on the limits. - Asceticism in India and Greece; Orphic doctrines. Ascetic features in the philosophic sects. Hebrew asceticism. - Nazarites, Rechabites, Essenes.-Roman asceticism. - Christian asceticism. Three traditions united in Christianity. — Asceticism in the early church. Asceticism in Islam. — Virginity. - Mediæval asceticism. Asceticism in Christian mores. Renunciation of property; beggary. Ascetic standards. — The Mendicant Friars. - The Franciscans. - Whether poverty is a good. — Clerical celibacy. — How Christian asceticism ended. 672. The exaggeration of opposite policies. It is not to be expected that all the men in a society will react in the same way against the same experiences and observations. If they draw unanimously the same conclusions from the same facts, that is such an unusual occurrence that their unanimity gives great weight to their opinion. In almost all cases they are thrown into parties by their different inferences from the same experiences and observations. There is nothing about which they differ more than about amusement, pleasure, and happiness, and as to the degree in which pleasure is worth pursuing. Those who feel deceived by pleasure and duped by the pursuit of happiness revolt from it and denounce it. Inasmuch as others not yet disillusioned still pursue pleasure as the most obviously desirable good, there are two great parties who divide on fundamental notions of life policy. Two such parties, face to face, tend to exaggerate their distinctive doctrines and practices. Each party goes to extremes and excess. We have seen in the last chapter (secs. 624 ff.) that at the beginning of the Christian era moral restraints were thrown aside and that all living men seemed to plunge into vice, luxury, and pleasure, so far as their means would allow. There were, however, a number of sects and religions in the Greco-Roman world that held extremely pessimistic views as to the worth of human life and of those things which men care for most. They renounced the ordinary standards of welfare and happiness, and sought welfare and happiness in merely denying the popular standards. The old world philosophies no longer commanded faith, and they seemed to be rejected with active hatred, not with mere indifferent unbelief. The poor and those who were forced to live by self-denial joined these sects of philosophy or religion. The age which saw extremes of luxury and vicious excess was also the age which saw great phenomena of ascetic philosophy and practice. Each school or tendency developed its own mores to treat the problems of life in its own way. An ascetic policy never is a primary product of the "ways" in which unreflecting men meet the facts of life. It is reflective and derived. It is a secondary stage of faith built on experience and reflection. It is, therefore, dogmatic. It must be sustained by faith in the fundamental pessimistic conviction. It never can be verified by experience. It purposely runs counter to all the sanctions which are possible in experience. If any one declares evil good and pain pleasure, he cannot find proof of it in any experiment. The mores produced out of asceticism are therefore peculiar and in many ways instructive. 673. Failure of the mores and revolt against expediency. We have seen that the mores are the results of the efforts of men to find out how to live under the conditions of human life so as to satisfy interests and secure welfare. The efforts have been only very imperfectly successful. The task, in fact, never can be finished, for the conditions change and the problem contains different elements from time to time. Moreover, dogmas interfere. They dictate "duty" and "right" by authority and as virtue, quite independently of any verification by experience and expediency. All the primitive taboos express the convictions of men that there are things which must not be done, or must not be done beyond some limited degree, if the men would live well. Such convictions came either from experience or from dogma. The former class of cases were those things which were connected with food and the sex relation. The latter class of cases were those things which were connected with the doctrine of ghosts. There are also a great many primitive customs for coercing or conciliating superior powers, either men or spirits, which consist in renunciation, self-torture, obscenity, bloodshedding, filthiness, and the performance of repugnant acts or even suicide. These customs all imply that the superior powers are indifferent, or angry and malevolent, or justly displeased, and that the pain of men pleases, or appeases and conciliates, or coerces them, or wins their attention. Thus we meet with a fundamental philosophy of life in which it is not the satisfaction of needs, appetites, and desires, but the opposite theory which is thought to lead to welfare. Renounce what you want; do what you do not want to do; pursue what is repugnant; in short, invert the relations of pleasure and pain, and act by your will against their sanctions, so as to seek pain and flee pleasure. A doctrine of due measure and limit upon the rational satisfaction of needs and desires is turned into an absolute rule of well-being. Within narrower limits the same philosophy inculcates acts of labor, pain, and renunciation, which produce no results in the satisfaction of wants but are regarded as beneficial or meritorious in themselves, as a kind of gymnastic in self-control and selfdenial. It is not to be denied that such a gymnastic has value in education, especially in the midst of luxury and self-indulgence, if it is controlled by common sense and limited within reason. Nearly all men, however, are sure to meet with as much necessity for self-control and self-denial as is necessary to their training, without arbitrarily subjecting themselves to artificial discipline of that kind. 674. Luck and welfare. Self-discipline to influence the superior powers. The notion of welfare through acts which upon their face are against welfare is directly referable to experience of the impossibility of establishing sure relations between positive efforts and satisfactions. The lowest civilization is full of sacrifices, renunciation, self-discipline, etc. It is the effect of the aleatory |