Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Realism 27
tific materialism is utterly incapable of accounting for them. If our conscious
desires make no difference in the world, if all our actions can be
accounted for by strict physical laws that have no need for conscious will,
then why should will exist at all? The second reason is that will need not be
capricious, as the materialists assumed. It might represent the working out
of a universal principle, the equivalent of what, before the rationalists, was
called Divine Providence. Shaw encapsulated this viewpoint in the first
chapter of The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The essential message there is
that reason need not be and has not been abandoned; it has merely been
put into the service of the will. The rationalists substituted universal principles
for the whims of a vindictive deity and insisted on the scrupulous
regard for fact. Shaw merely insisted that the universal principles were
teleological and manifested in human will. The universe is orderly, human
reason is capable of understanding it, and will can change it. Will is not
caprice but the working out of universal principles. All will is Divine Will.
If that were all there were to it, there would be no end to human
progress. Unfortunately, divine purpose has an enemy that blinds reason
and perverts will. The enemy is not original sin or human wickedness; it is
not a conspiracy of evil tyrants or malicious devils. It is something unexpected.
Shaw called it idealism.
Ideals and Idealists
If there is confusion about Shaw’s repudiation of reason in the first chapter
of the Quintessence, it is nothing compared to that produced by his attack
on idealism in the next. But anyone who wishes to obtain the secret of the
Shavian philosophy must, like the fabled suitors compelled to solve an
impossible riddle for the hand of a beautiful princess, unravel the mystery
at the heart of The Quintessence: the conundrum of the 700 Philistines,
299 idealists, and one realist. 1
The question seems simple: What, in this parable, is a realist? The
simple answer, “One who sees things as they are, not as he wishes them,”
is not satisfactory. Few think of themselves as deluded by wishful thinking.
Shaw is not helpful. The realist is not defined except as something different
from a Philistine or an idealist—and something both above and beyond
them. Shaw asks us to “imagine a community of a thousand persons,
organized for the perpetuation of the species on the basis of the British
family as we know it at present. Seven hundred of them, we will
suppose, find the British family arrangement quite good enough for