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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 45
the terrible responsibility thrown on him by this inexorable fact. All
his stock excuses vanish before it—“The woman tempted me,” “The
serpent tempted me,” “I was not myself at the time,” “I meant well,”
“My passion got the better of my reason,” “It was my duty to do it,”
“The Bible says that we should do it,” “Everybody does it,” and so on.
Nothing is left but the frank avowal: “I did it because I am built that
way.” Every man hates to say that. (“A Degenerate’s View of
Nordau” 359–60)
Every man, that is, except the realist. Because he is ready both to satisfy
and to take responsibility for his will, the realist has no need to disguise it
in the robes of external authority; he feels no need to claim that reason,
Scripture, or any other divine oracle entails the conclusion he seeks; he
confesses honestly that he believes because he wants to and that frank
avowal is his liberation from self-deceit. The courage to face unpleasant
facts goes hand in hand with the courage to accept that the desire to change
them has no authority but one’s unadorned will. The strength of mind that
can say “I believe it because I will to” is sister to the courage unflinchingly
to face facts that say “It is not so.” Bereft of subterfuge, the realist has no
option but to change the facts. The realist is always a reformer, if not a
revolutionist.
The Universal and Individual Will
Shaw’s realist is not a simple egoist, although in a strict and limited sense
of the word, an egoist can be a realist, provided he is unashamed of his own
selfishness and does not seek to justify it with rationalist-materialist ideals—or
any other sort. But for Shaw such a person was “literally an idiot”
(Quintessence [1913] 275). Etymologically an “idiot” is a “private person,”
which made it a perfect epithet from Shaw’s perspective for persons who
fail to see that “we are members one of another.” 4 The realist Shaw describes
has a larger soul, one that grows as the will is fed. For such a soul,
egoism leads logically and spiritually beyond itself. Ibsen’s Emperor and
Galilean is for Shaw primarily a tragedy of a mighty soul who fails to see
that his own powerful will is part of something larger. That drama receives
far more attention than any other play discussed in the Quintessence.
It was something for Julian to have seen that the power which he
found stronger than his individual will was itself will; but inasmuch
as he conceived it, not as the whole of which his will was but a part,
but as a rival will, he was not the man to found the third empire. He