Is Life Worth Living?
by W. H. Mallock · English · Gutenberg #17201 · 520,489 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Is Life Worth Living?
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Is Life Worth Living?
Author: W. H. Mallock
Release date: December 2, 2005 [eBook #17201]
Most recently updated: December 13, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17201
Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? ***
Produced by David Garcia, Stacy Brown Thellend and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?
BY
WILLIAM HURRELL MALLOCK
AUTHOR OF 'THE NEW REPUBLIC' ETC.
* * * * *
'Man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.'
'How dieth the wise man? As the fool.... That which befalleth the
sons of men befalleth the beasts, even one thing befalleth them; as
the one dieth so dieth the other, yea they have all one breath; so
that man hath no preeminence above a beast; for all is vanity.'
'[Greek: talaipôros egô anthrôpos, tis me rudetai ek tou sômatos
tou thanatou toutou];'
* * * * *
NEW YORK
G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS
182 Fifth Avenue
1879
I INSCRIBE THIS BOOK
TO
JOHN RUSKIN
_TO JOHN RUSKIN._
My dear Mr. Ruskin,--You have given me very great pleasure
by allowing me to inscribe this book to you, and for two reasons;
for I have two kinds of acknowledgment that I wish to make to
you--first, that of an intellectual debtor to a public teacher;
secondly, that of a private friend to the kindest of private
friends. The tribute I have to offer you is, it is true, a small
one; and it is possibly more blessed for me to give than it is for
you to receive it. In so far, at least, as I represent any
influence of yours, you may very possibly not think me a
satisfactory representative. But there is one fact--and I will lay
all the stress I can on it--which makes me less diffident than I
might be, in offering this book either to you or to the world
generally.
The import of the book is independent of the book itself, and of
the author of it; nor do the arguments it contains stand or fall
with my success in stating them; and these last at least I may
associate with your name. They are not mine. I have not discovered
or invented them. They are so obvious that any one who chooses may
see them; and I have been only moved to meddle with them, because,
from being so obvious, it seems that no one will so much as deign
to look at them, or at any rate to put them together with any care
or completeness. They might be before everybody's eyes; but instead
they are under everybody's feet. My occupation has been merely to
kneel in the mud, and to pick up the truths that are being trampled
into it, by a headstrong and uneducated generation.
With what success I have done this, it is not for me to judge. But
though I cannot be confident of the value of what I have done, I am
confident enough of the value of what I have tried to do. From a
literary point of view many faults may be found with me. There may
be faults yet deeper, to which possibly I shall have to plead
guilty. I may--I cannot tell--have unduly emphasized some points,
and not put enough emphasis on others. I may be convicted--nothing
is more likely--of many verbal inconsistencies. But let the
arguments I have done my best to embody be taken as a whole, and
they have a vitality that does not depend upon me; nor can they be
proved false, because my ignorance or weakness may here or there
have associated them with, or illustrated them by, a falsehood. I
am not myself conscious of any such falsehoods in my book; but if
such are pointed out to me, I shall do my best to correct them. If
what I have done prove not worth correction, others coming after me
will be preferred before me, and are sure before long to address
themselves successfully to the same task in which I perhaps have
failed. What indeed can we each of us look for but a large measure
of failure, especially when we are moving not with the tide but
against it--when the things we wrestle with are principalities and
powers, and spiritual stupidity in high places--and when we are
ourselves partly weakened by the very influences against which we
are struggling?
But this is not all. There is in the way another difficulty.
Writing as the well-wishers of truth and goodness, we find, as the
world now stands, that our chief foes are they of our own
household. The insolence, the ignorance, and the stupidity of the
age has embodied itself, and found its mouthpiece, in men who are
personally the negations of all that they represent theoretically.
We have men who in private are full of the most gracious modesty,
representing in their philosophies the most ludicrous arrogance; we
have men who practise every virtue themselves, proclaiming the
principles of every vice to others; we have men who have mastered
many kinds of knowledge, acting on the world only as embodiments of
the completest and most pernicious ignorance. I have had occasion
to deal continually with certain of these by name. With the
exception of one--who has died prematurely, whilst this book was in
the press--those I have named oftenest are still living. Many of
them probably are known to you personally, though none of them are
so known to me; and you will appreciate the sort of difficulty I
have felt, better than I can express it. I can only hope that as
the falsehood of their arguments cannot blind any of us to their
personal merits, so no intellectual demerits in my case will be
prejudicial to the truth of my arguments.
To me the strange thing is that such arguments should have to be
used all; and perhaps a thing stranger still that it should fall to
me to use them--to me, an outsider in philosophy, in literature,
and in theology. But the justification of my speaking is that there
is any opening for me to speak; and others must be blamed, not I,
if
the lyre so long divine
Degenerates into hands like mine.
At any rate, however all this may be, what I here inscribe to you,
my friend and teacher, I am confident is not unworthy of you. It is
not what I have done; it is what I have tried to do. As such I beg
you to accept it, and to believe me still, though now so seldom
near you,
Your admiring and affectionate friend,
W.H. MALLOCK.
P.S.--Much of the substance of the following book you have seen
already, in two Essays of mine that were published in the
'Contemporary Review,' and in five Essays that were published in
the 'Nineteenth Century.' It had at one time been my intention, by
the kindness of the respective Editors, to have reprinted these
Essays in their original form. But there was so much to add, to
omit, to rearrange, and to join together, that I have found it
necessary to rewrite nearly the whole; and thus you will find the
present volume virtually new.
Torquay, _May, 1879_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
THE NEW IMPORT OF THE QUESTION.
PAGE
The question may seem vague and useless; but if we consider its
real meaning we shall see that it is not so 1
In the present day it has acquired a new importance 2
Its exact meaning. It does not question the fact of human happiness 3
But the nature of happiness, and the permanence of its basis 4
For what we call the higher happiness is essentially a complex
thing 5
We cannot be sure that all its elements are permanent 7
Without certain of its elements it has been declared by the wisest
men to be valueless 8
And it is precisely the elements in question that modern thought
is eliminating 11
It is contended that they have often been eliminated before; and
that yet the worth of life has not suffered 13
But this contention is entirely false. They were never before
eliminated as modern thought is eliminating them now 17
The present age can find no genuine parallels in the past 19
Its position is made peculiar by three facts 19
Firstly, by the existence of Christianity 19
Secondly, the insignificance to which science has reduced the
earth 23
Thirdly, the intense self-consciousness that has been developed
in the modern world 25
It is often said that a parallel to our present case is to be found
in Buddhism 27
But this is absolutely false. Buddhist positivism is the exact
reverse of Western positivism 29
In short, the life-problem of our day is distinctly a new and an as
yet unanswered one 31
CHAPTER II.
MORALITY AND THE PRIZE OF LIFE.
The worth the positive school claim for life, is essentially a moral
worth 33
As its most celebrated exponents explicitly tell us 34
This means that life contains some special prize, to which morality
is the only road 34
And the value of life depends on the value of this prize 35
J.S. Mill, G. Eliot, and Professor Huxley admit that this is a
correct way of stating the case 36
But all this language as it stands at present is too vague to be of
any use to us 38
The prize in question is to be won in this life, if anywhere; and
must therefore be more or less describable 39
What then is it? 40
Unless it is describable it cannot be a moral end at all 41
As a consideration of the _raison d'être_ of all moral systems will
show us 42
The value of the prize must be verifiable by positive methods 43
And be verifiably greater, beyond all comparison, than that of
all other prizes 44
Has such a prize any real existence? This is our question 44
It has never yet been answered properly 45
And though two sets of answers have been given it, neither of
them are satisfactory 45
I shall deal with these two questions in order 47
CHAPTER III.
SOCIOLOGY AS THE FOUNDATION OF MORALITY.
The positive theory is that the health of the social organism is
the real foundation of morals 49
But social health is nothing but the personal health of all the
members of the society 51
It is not happiness itself, but the negative conditions that make
happiness for all 51
Still less is social health any _high_ kind of happiness 54
It can only be maintained to be so, by supposing 55
Either, that all kinds of happiness are equally _high_ that do not
interfere with others 55
Or, that it is only a _high_ kind of happiness that can be shared
by all 56
Both of which suppositions are false 57
The conditions of social health are a moral end only when we
each feel a personal delight in maintaining them 58
In this case they will supply us with a _small portion_ of the
moral aid needed 59
But this case is not a possible one 60
There is indeed the natural impulse of sympathy that might tend
to make it so 61
But this is counterbalanced by the corresponding impulse of
selfishness 63
And this impulse of sympathy itself is of very limited power 63
Except under very rare conditions 63
The conditions of general happiness are far too vague to do more
than very slightly excite it 64
Or give it power enough to neutralise any personal temptation 66
At all events they would excite no enthusiasm 67
For this purpose there must be some prize before us, of recognised
positive value, more or less definite 67
And before all things, to be enjoyed by us individually 67
Unless this prize be of great value to begin with, its value will
not become great because great numbers obtain it 71
Nor until we know what it is, do we gain anything by the hope
that men may more completely make it their own in the future 72
The modern positive school requires a great general enthusiasm
for the general good 73
They therefore presuppose an extreme value for the individual
good 74
Our first enquiry must be therefore what the higher individual
good is 76
CHAPTER IV.
GOODNESS AS ITS OWN REWARD.
What has been said in the last chapter is really admitted by the
positive school themselves 77
As we can learn explicitly from George Eliot 78
In _Daniel Deronda_ 78
That the fundamental moral question is, '_In what way shall the
individual make life pleasant?_' 79
And the right way, for the positivists, as for the Christians, is
an inward way 80
The moral end is a certain inward state of the heart, and the
positivists say it is a sufficient attraction in itself, without
any aid from religion 81
And they support this view by numerous examples 82
But all such examples are useless 83
Because though we may get rid of religion in its pure form 83
There is much that we have not got rid of, embodied still in the
moral end 84
To test the intrinsic value of the end, we must sublimate this
religion out of it 86
For this purpose we will consider, first, the three general
characteristics of the moral end, viz. 88
Its inwardness 88
Its importance 89
And its absolute character 91
Now all these three characteristics can be explained by religion 93
And cannot be explained without it 96
The positive moral end must therefore be completely divested of
them 100
The next question is, will it be equally attractive then? 100
CHAPTER V.
LOVE AS A TEST OF GOODNESS.
The positivists represent love as a thing whose value is
self-dependent 101
And which gives to life a positive and incalculable worth 103
But this is supposed to be true of one form of love only 104
And the very opposite is supposed to hold good of all other forms 105
The right form depends on the conformity of each of the lovers
to a certain inward standard 105
As we can see exemplified in the case of Othello and Desdemona,
etc. 107
The kind and not the degree of the love is what gives love its
special value 108
And the selection of this kind can be neither made nor justified
on positive principles 109
As the following quotations from Théophile Gautier will show us 110
Which are supposed by many to embody the true view of love 110
According to this view, purity is simply a disease both in man
and woman, or at any rate no merit 116
If love is to be a moral end, this view must be absolutely
condemned 117
But positivism cannot condemn it, or support the opposite view 117
As we shall see by recurring to Professor Huxley's argument 118
Which will show us that all moral language as applied to love is
either distinctly religious or else altogether ludicrous 122
For it is clearly only on moral grounds that we can give that
blame to vice, which is the measure of the praise we give to
virtue 123
The misery of the former depends on religious anticipations 124
And so does also the blessedness of the latter 125
As we can see in numerous literary expressions of it 126
Positivism, by destroying these anticipations, changes the whole
character of the love in question 128
And prevents love from supplying us with any moral standard 131
The loss sustained by love will indicate the general loss
sustained by life 131
CHAPTER VI.
LIFE AS ITS OWN REWARD.
We must now examine what will be the practical result on life
in general of the loss just indicated 132
To do this, we will take life as reflected in the mirror of the
great dramatic art of the world 134
And this will show us how the moral judgment is the chief faculty
to which all that is great or intense in this art appeals 136
We shall see this, for instance, in _Macbeth_ 137
In _Hamlet_ 137
In _Antigone_ 137
In _Measure for Measure_, and in _Faust_ 138
And also in degraded art just as well as in sublime art 139
In profligate and cynical art, such as Congreve's 140
And in concupiscent art 141
Such as _Mademoiselle de Maupin_ 141
Or such works as that of Meursius, or the worst scenes in
Petronius 142
The supernatural moral judgment is the chief thing everywhere 143
Take away this judgment, and art loses all its strange interest 144
And so will it be with life 145
The moral landscape will be ruined 145
Even the mere sensuous joy of living in health will grow duller 146
Nor will culture be of the least avail without the supernatural
moral element 148
Nor will the devotion to truth for its own sake, which is the last
refuge of the positivists when in despair 149
For this last has no meaning whatever, except as a form of
concrete theism 152
The reverence for Nature is but another form of the devotion to
truth, and its only possible meaning is equally theistic 157
Thus all the higher resources of positivism fail together 161
And the highest positive value of life would be something less
than its present value 161
CHAPTER VII.
THE SUPERSTITION OF POSITIVISM.
From what we have just seen, the visionary character of the
positivist conception of progress becomes evident 163
Its object is far more plainly an illusion than the Christian
heaven 164
_All_ the objections urged against the latter apply with far more
force to the former 165
As a matter of fact, there is no possible object sufficient to
start the enthusiasm required by the positivists 167
To make the required enthusiasm possible human nature would
have to be completely changed 168
Two existing qualities, for instance, would have to be magnified
to an impossible extent--imagination 169
And unselfishness 170
If we state the positive system in terms of common life, its
visionary character becomes evident 172
The examples which have suggested its possibility are quite
misleading 173
The positive system is really far more based on superstition than
any religion 175
Its appearance can only be accounted for by the characters and
circumstances of its originators 175
And a consideration of these will help us more than anything to
estimate it rightly 178
And will let us see that its only practical tendency is to deaden
all our present interests, not to create any new ones 179
CHAPTER VIII.
THE PRACTICAL PROSPECT.
It is not contended that the prospect just described will, as a
fact, ever be realised 183
But only that it will be realised _if_ certain other prospects are
realised 185
Which prospects may or may not be visionary 186
But the progress towards which is already begun 187
And also the other results, that have been described already 187
Positive principles have already produced a moral deterioration,
even in places where we should least imagine it 187
As we shall see if we pierce beneath the surface 189
In the curious condition of men who have lost faith, but have
retained the love of virtue 189
The struggle was hard, when they had all the helps of religion 190
It is harder now 190
Conscience still survives, but it has lost its restraining power 191
Temptation almost inevitably dethrones it 192
And its full prestige can never be recovered 193
It can do nothing but deplore; it cannot remedy 194
In such cases the mind's decadence has begun; and its symptoms
are 194
Self-reproach 195
Life-weariness 195
And indifference 195
The class of men to whom this applies is increasing, and they are
the true representatives of the work of positive thought 196
It is hard to realise this ominous fact 197
But by looking steadily and dispassionately at the characteristics
of the present epoch we may learn to do so 198
We shall see that the opinions now forming will have a weight
and power that no opinions ever had before 199
And their tendency, as yet latent, towards pessimism is therefore
most momentous 200
If it is to be cured, it must be faced 200
It takes the form of a suppressed longing for the religious faith
that is lost 200
And this longing is wide-spread, though only expressed indirectly 201
It is felt even by men of science 202
But the longing seems fruitless 203
This dejection is in fact shared by the believers 203
And is even authoritatively recognised by Catholicism 204
The great question for the world now, and the one on which its
whole future depends, is, will the lost faith ever be recovered? 205
The answer to this will probably have to be decisive, one way or
the other 206
CHAPTER IX.
THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC NEGATION.
What gives the denials of positivism their general weight, is the
impression that they represent reason 208
They are supported by three kinds of arguments: physical, moral,
and historical 209
The two first bear upon all religion; the latter only on special
revelations 210
Natural religion is the belief in God, immortality, and the
possibility of miracles generally 210
Physical science prefers to destroy natural religion by its
connection of mind with matter 210
1st. Making conscious life a function of the brain. 2nd. Evolving
the living organisms from lifeless matter. 3rd. Making this
material evolution automatic 210
Thus all external proofs of God are destroyed 212
And also of the soul's immortality 213
External proof is declared to be the test of reality 213
And therefore all religion is set down as a dream 215
But we believe that proof _is_ the test of reality, not because
it is proved to be so, but because of the authority of those who
tell us so 215
But it will be found that these men do not understand their own
principle 216
And, that in what they consider their most important conclusions
they emphatically disregard it 217
One or other, therefore, of their opinions is worthless--their
denial of religion or their affirmation of morality 219
But we shall see this more clearly in considering the question of
consciousness and will 220
We shall see that, as far as science can inform us, man is nothing
but an automaton 220
But the positive school are afraid to admit this 221
And not daring to meet the question, they make a desperate effort
to confuse it 222
Two problems are involved in the matter: 1st. How is brain
action connected with consciousness 223
2nd. Is the consciousness that is connected with it something
separable from, and independent of it 223
The first of these problems has no bearing at all on any moral
or religious question. It is insoluble. It leaves us not in
doubt but in ignorance 224
The doubt, and the religious question is connected solely with
the second problem 228
To which there are two alternative solutions 228
And modern science is so confused that it will accept neither 228
As Dr. Tyndall's treatment of the subject very forcibly shows us 230
And Dr. Tyndall in this way is a perfect representative of the
whole modern positive school 231
Let us compare the molecules of the brain to the six moving
billiard-balls 231
The question is, are these movements due to the stroke of one
cue or of two 233
The positive school profess to answer this question both ways 234
But this profession is nonsense 236
What they really mean is, 1st. That the connection of consciousness
with matter is a mystery; as to _that_ they _can_ give no
answer. 2nd. That as to whether consciousness is wholly a
material thing or no, they _will_ give no answer 237
But why are they in this state of suspense? 238
Though their system does not in the least require the hypothesis
of an immaterial element in consciousness 239
They see that the moral value of life does 239
The same reasons that will warrant their saying it _may_ exist,
will constrain them to say it _must_ 240
Physical science, with its proofs, can say nothing in the matter,
either as to will, immortality, or God 242
But, on the other hand, it will force us, if we believe in will, to
admit the reality of miracles 243
So far as science goes, morality and religion are both on the same
footing 243
CHAPTER X.
MORALITY AND NATURAL THEISM.
Supposing science not to be inconsistent with theism, may not
theism be inconsistent with morality? 247
It seems to be so; but it is no more so than is morality with
itself. Two difficulties common to both:--1st. The existence of
evil; 2nd. Man's free will and God's free will 248
James Mill's statement of the case represents the popular
anti-religious arguments 249
But his way of putting the case is full of distortion and
exaggeration 250
Though certain of the difficulties he pointed out were real 251
And those we cannot explain away; but if we are to believe in
our moral being at all, we must one and all accept 252
We can escape from them by none of the rationalistic substitutes
for religion 252
A similar difficulty is the freedom of the will 257
This belief is an intellectual impossibility 258
But at the same time a moral necessity 260
It is typical of all the difficulties attendant on an assent
to our own moral nature 260
The vaguer difficulties that appeal to the _moral imagination_ we
must meet in the same way 261
CHAPTER XI.
THE HUMAN RACE AND REVELATION.
Should the intellect of the world return to theism, will it ever
again acknowledge a special revelation? 264
We can see that this is an urgent question 265
By many general considerations 265
Especially the career of Protestantism 267
Which is visibly evaporating into a mere natural theism 268
And, as such, is losing all restraining power in the world 271
Where then shall we look for a revelation? Not in any of the
Eastern creeds 275
The claims of the Roman Church are the only ones worth considering 276
Her position is absolutely distinct from that of Protestantism,
and she is not involved in its fall 277
In theory she is all that the enlightened world could require 279
The only question is, is she so in practice? This brings us to
difficulties 282
1st. The partial success of her revelation; and her supposed
condemnation of the virtues of unbelievers. But her partial
success is simply the old mystery of evil 282
And through her infinite charity, she does nothing to increase
that difficulty 283
The value of orthodoxy is analogous to the value of true physical
science 285
All should try to learn the truth who can; but we do not condemn
others who cannot 286
Even amongst Catholics generally no recondite theological knowledge
is required 287
The facts of the Catholic _religion_ are simple. Theology is the
complex scientific explanation of them 288
Catholicism is misunderstood because the outside world confuses
with its religion--1st. The complex explanations of it 289
2nd. Matters of discipline, and practical rules 290
3rd. The pious opinions, or the scientific errors of private
persons, or particular epochs 291
None of which really are any integral part of the Church 293
Neither are the peculiar exaggerations of moral feeling that have
been prevalent at different times 293
The Church theoretically is a living, growing, self-adapting
organism 295
She is, in fact, the growing, moral sense of mankind organised
and developed under a supernatural tutelage 295
CHAPTER XII.
UNIVERSAL HISTORY AND THE CLAIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH.
We must now consider the Church in relation to history and external
historical criticism 297
1st. The history of Christianity; 2nd. The history of other
religions 298
Criticism has robbed the Bible of nearly all the supposed internal
evidences of its supernatural character 298
It has traced the chief Christian dogmas to non-Christian sources 300
It has shown that the histories of other religions are strangely
analogous to the history of Christianity 300
And to Protestantism these discoveries are fatal 302
But they are not fatal to Catholicism, whose attitude to history
is made utterly different by the doctrine of the perpetual
infallibility of the Church 305
The Catholic Church teaches us to believe the Bible for her sake,
not her for the Bible's 305
And even though her dogmas may have existed in some form
elsewhere, they become new _revelations_ to us, by her
supernatural selection of them 306
The Church is a living organism, for ever selecting and
assimilating fresh nutriment 307
Even from amongst the wisdom of her bitterest enemies 309
All false revelations, in so far as they have professed to be
infallible, are, from the Catholic standpoint, abortive
Catholicisms 311
Catholicism has succeeded in the same attempt in which they
have failed 313
CHAPTER XIII.
BELIEF AND WILL.
The aim of this book 315
Has been to clear the great question as to man's nature, and the
proper way of regarding him, from the confusion at present
surrounding it 317
And to show that the answer will finally rest, not on outer
evidence, but on himself, and on his own _will_, if he have
a will 319
NOTE.
In this book the words '_positive_,' '_positivist_,' and '_positivism_'
are of constant occurrence as applied to modern thought and thinkers. To
avoid any chance of confusion or misconception, it will be well to say
that these words as used by me have no special reference to the system
of Comte or his disciples, but are applied to the common views and
position of the whole scientific school, one of the most eminent members
of which--I mean Professor Huxley--has been the most trenchant and
contemptuous critic that 'positivism' in its narrower sense has met
with. Over 'positivism' in this sense Professor Huxley and Mr. Frederic
Harrison have had some public battles. Positivism in the sense in which
it is used by me, applies to the principles as to which the above
writers explicitly agree, not to those as to which they differ.
W.H.M.
Is Life Worth Living?
CHAPTER I.
THE NEW IMPORT OF THE QUESTION.
_A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of
which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to
era._--Froude's _History of England_, ch. i.
What I am about to deal with in this book is a question which may well
strike many, at first sight, as a question that has no serious meaning,
or none at any rate for the sane and healthy mind. I am about to attempt
inquiring, not sentimentally, but with all calmness and sobriety, into
the true value of this human life of ours, as tried by those tests of
reality which the modern world is accepting, and to ask dispassionately
if it be really worth the living. The inquiry certainly has often been
made before; but it has never been made properly; it has never been made
in the true scientific spirit. It has always been vitiated either by
diffidence or by personal feeling; and the positive school, though they
rejoice to question everything else, have, at least in this country,
left the worth of life alone. They may now and then, perhaps, have
affected to examine it; but their examination has been merely formal,
like that of a customs-house officer, who passes a portmanteau, which he
has only opened. They have been as tender with it as Don Quixote was
with his mended helmet, when he would not put his card-paper vizor to
the test of the steel sword. I propose to supply this deficiency in
their investigations. I propose to apply exact thought to the only great
subject to which it has not been applied already.
To numbers, as I have just said, this will of course seem useless. They
will think that the question never really was an open one; or that, if
it ever were so, the common sense of mankind has long ago finally
settled it. To ask it again, they will think idle, or worse than idle.
It will express to them, if it expresses anything, no perplexity of the
intellect, but merely some vague disease of the feelings. They will say
that it is but the old ejaculation of satiety or despair, as old as
human nature itself; it is a kind of maundering common to all moral
dyspepsia; they have often heard it before, and they wish they may never
hear it again.
But let them be a little less impatient. Let them look at the question
closer, and more calmly; and it will not be long before its import
begins to change for them. They will see that though it may have often
been asked idly, it is yet capable of a meaning that is very far from
idle; and that however old they may think it, yet as asked by our
generation it is really completely new--that it bears a meaning which is
indeed not far from any one of them, but which is practical and
pressing--I might almost say portentous--and which is something
literally unexampled in the past history of mankind.
I am aware that this position is not only not at first sight obvious,
but that, even when better understood, it will probably be called false.
My first care, therefore, will be to explain it at length, and clearly.
For this purpose we must consider two points in order; first, what is
the exact doubt we intend to express by our question; and next, why in
our day this doubt should have such a special and fresh significance.
Let us then make it quite plain, at starting, that when we ask 'Is life
worth living?' we are not asking whether its balance of pains is
necessarily and always in excess of its balance of pleasures. We are not
asking whether any one has been, or whether any one is happy. To the
unjaundiced eye nothing is more clear than that happiness of various
kinds has been, and is, continually attained by men. And ingenious
pessimists do but waste their labour when they try to convince a happy
man that he really must be miserable. What I am going to discuss is not
the superfluous truism that life has been found worth living by many;
but the profoundly different proposition that it ought to be found worth
living by all. For this is what life is pronounced to be, when those
claims are made for it that at present universally are made; when, as a
general truth, it is said to be worth living; or when any of those
august epithets are applied to it that are at present applied so
constantly. At present, as we all know, it is called sacred, solemn,
earnest, significant, and so forth. To withhold such epithets is
considered a kind of blasphemy. And the meaning of all such language is
this: it means that life has some deep inherent worth of its own, beyond
what it can acquire or lose by the caprice of circumstance--a worth,
which though it may be most fully revealed to a man, through certain
forms of success, is yet not destroyed or made a minus quantity by
failure. Certain forms of love, for instance, are held in a special way
to reveal this worth to us; but the worth that a successful love is thus
supposed to reveal is a worth that a hopeless love is supposed not to
destroy. The worth is a part of life's essence, not a mere chance
accident, as health or riches are; and we are supposed to lose it by no
acts but our own.
Now it is evident that such a worth as this, is, in one sense, no mere
fancy. Numbers actually have found it; and numbers actually still
continue to find it. The question is not whether the worth exists, but
on what is the worth based. How far is the treasure incorruptible; and
how far will our increasing knowledge act as moth and rust to it? There
are some things whose value is completely established by the mere fact
that men do value them. They appeal to single tastes, they defy further
analysis, and they thus form, as it were, the _bases_ of all pleasures
and happiness. But these are few in number; they are hardly ever met
with in a perfectly pure state; and their effect, when they are so met,
is either momentary, or far from vivid. As a rule they are found in
combinations of great complexity, fused into an infinity of new
substances by the action of beliefs and associations; and these two
agents are often of more importance in the result than are the things
they act upon. Take for instance a boy at Eton or Oxford, who affects a
taste in wine. Give him a bottle of gooseberry champagne; tell him it is
of the finest brand, and that it cost two hundred shillings a dozen. He
will sniff, and wink at it in ecstasy; he will sip it slowly with an air
of knowing reverence; and his enjoyment of it probably will be far
keener, than it would be, were the wine really all he fancies it, and he
had lived years enough to have come to discern its qualities. Here the
part played by belief and associations is of course evident. The boy's
enjoyment is real, and it rests to a certain extent on a foundation of
solid fact; the taste of the gooseberry champagne is an actual pleasure
to his palate. Anything nauseous, black dose for instance, could never
raise him to the state of delight in question. But this simple pleasure
of sense is but a small part of the pleasure he actually experiences.
That pleasure, as a whole, is a highly complex thing, and rests mainly
on a basis that, by a little knowledge, could be annihilated in a
moment. Tell the boy what the champagne really is, he has been praising;
and the state of his mind and face will undergo a curious
transformation. Our sense of the worth of life is similar in its
complexity to the boy's sense of the worth of his wine. Beliefs and
associations play exactly the same part in it. The beliefs in this last
case may of course be truer. The question that I have to ask is, are
they? In some individual cases certainly, they have not been. Miss
Harriet Martineau, for instance, judging life from her own experience of
it, was quite persuaded that it was a most solemn and satisfactory
thing, and she has told the world as much, in no hesitating manner. But
a part at least of the solemn satisfaction she felt in it was due to a
grotesque over-estimate of her own social and intellectual importance.
Here, then, was a worth in life, real enough to the person who found it,
but which a little knowledge of the world would have at once taken away
from her. Does the general reverence with which life is at present
regarded rest in any degree upon any similar misconception? And if so,
to what extent does it? Will it fall to pieces before the breath of a
larger knowledge? or has it that firm foundation in fact that will
enable it to survive in spite of all enlightenment, and perhaps even to
increase in consequence of it?
Such is the outline of the question I propose to deal with. I will now
show why it is so pressing, and why, in the present crisis of thought,
it is so needful that it should be dealt with. The first impression it
produces, as I have said, is that it is superfluous. Our belief in life
seems to rest on too wide an experience for us to entertain any genuine
doubt of the truth of it. But this first impression does not go for
much. It is a mere superficial thing, and will wear off immediately. We
have but to remember that a belief that was supposed to rest on an
equally wide basis--the belief in God, and in a supernatural order--has
in these days, not been questioned only, but has been to a great degree,
successfully annihilated. The only philosophy that belongs to the
present age, the only philosophy that is a really new agent in progress,
has declared this belief to be a dissolving dream of the past. And this
belief, as we shall see presently, is, amongst civilized men at least,
far older than the belief in life; it has been far more widely spread,
and experience has been held to confirm it with an equal certainty. If
this then is inevitably disintegrated by the action of a widening
knowledge, it cannot be taken for granted that the belief in life will
not fare likewise. It may do so; but until we have examined it more
closely we cannot be certain that it will. Common consent and
experience, until they are analysed, are fallacious tests for the
seekers after positive truth. The emotions may forbid us to ask our
question; but in modern philosophy the emotions play no part as organs
of discovery. They are facts in themselves, and as such are of course of
value; but they point to no facts beyond themselves. That men loved God
and felt his presence close to them proves nothing, to the positive
thinker, as to God's existence. Nor will the mere emotion of reverence
towards life necessarily go any farther towards proving that it deserves
reverence. It is distinctly asserted by the modern school that the right
state in which to approach everything is a state of enlightened
scepticism. We are to consider everything doubtful, until it is proved
certain, or unless, from its very nature, it is not possible to doubt
it.
Nor is this all; for, apart from these modern canons, the question of
life's worth has, as a matter of fact, been always recognised as in a
certain sense an open one. The greatest intellects of the world, in all
ages, have been at times inclined to doubt it. And these times have not
seemed to them times of blindness; but on the contrary, of specially
clear insight. Scales, as it were, have fallen from their eyes for a
moment or two, and the beauty and worth of existence has appeared to
them as but a deceiving show. An entire book of the Hebrew Scriptures is
devoted to a deliberate exposition of this philosophy. In '_the most
high and palmy state_' of Athens it was expressed fitfully also as the
deepest wisdom of her most triumphant dramatist.[1] And in Shakspeare it
appears so constantly, that it must evidently have had for him some
directly personal meaning.
This view, however, even by most of those who have held it, has been
felt to be really only a half-view in the guise of a whole one. To
Shakspeare, for instance, it was full of a profound terror. It crushed,
and appalled, and touched him; and there was not only implied in it that
for us life does mean little, but that by some possibility it might have
meant much. Or else, if the pessimism has been more complete than this,
it has probably been adopted as a kind of solemn affectation, or has
else been lamented as a form of diseased melancholy. It is a view that
healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain. Its advocates
have been met with neglect, contempt, or castigation, not with
arguments. They have been pitied as insane, avoided as cynical, or
passed over as frivolous. And yet, but for one reason, to that whole
European world whose progress we are now inheriting, this view would
have seemed not only not untenable, but even obvious. The emptiness of
the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest
pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has
been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with
saints and sages. The conception that anything in this life could of
itself be of any great moment to us, was considered as much a puerility
unworthy of a man of the world, as a disloyalty to God. Experience of
life, and meditation on life, seemed to teach nothing but the same
lesson, seemed to preach a sermon _de contemptu mundi_. The view the
eager monk began with, the sated monarch ended with. But matters did not
end here. There was something more to come, by which this view was
altogether transmuted, and which made the wilderness and the waste place
at once blossom as the rose. Judged of by itself, this life would indeed
be vanity; but it was not to be judged of by itself. All its ways seemed
to break short aimlessly into precipices, or to be lost hopelessly in
deserts. They led to no visible end. True; but they led to ends that
were invisible--to spiritual and eternal destinies, to triumphs beyond
all hope, and portentous failures beyond all fear. This all men might
see, if they would only choose to see. The most trivial of our daily
actions became thus invested with an immeasurable meaning. Life was thus
evidently not vanity, not an idiot's tale, not unprofitable; those who
affected to think it was, were naturally disregarded as either insane or
insincere: and we may thus admit that hitherto, for the progressive
nations of the world, the worth of life has been capable of
demonstration, and safe beyond the reach of any rational questioning.
But now, under the influence of positive thought, all this is changing.
Life, as we have all of us inherited it, is coloured with the intense
colours of Christianity; let us ourselves be personally Christians or
not, we are instinct with feelings with regard to it that were
applicable to it in its Christian state: and these feelings it is that
we are still resolved to retain. As the most popular English exponent of
the new school says: '_All positive methods of treating man, of a
comprehensive kind, adopt to the full all that has ever been said about
the dignity of man's moral and spiritual life._' But here comes the
difficulty. This adoption we speak of must be justified upon quite new
reasons. Indeed it is practically the boast of its advocates that it
must be. An extreme value, as we see, they are resolved to give to
life; they will not tolerate those who deny its existence. But they are
obliged to find it in the very place where hitherto it has been thought
to be conspicuous by its absence. It is to be found in no better or
wider future, where injustice shall be turned to justice, trouble into
rest, and blindness into clear sight; for no such future awaits us. It
is to be found in life itself, in this earthly life, this life between
the cradle and the grave; and though imagination and sympathy may
enlarge and extend this for the individual, yet the limits of its
extension are very soon arrived at. It is limited by the time the human
race can exist, by the space in the universe that the human race
occupies, and the capacities of enjoyment that the human race possesses.
Here, then, is a distinct and intelligible task that the positive
thinkers have set themselves. They have taken everything away from life
that to wise men hitherto has seemed to redeem it from vanity. They have
to prove to us that they have not left it vain. They have to prove those
things to be solid that have hitherto been thought hollow; those things
to be serious that have hitherto been thought contemptible. They must
prove to us that we shall be contented with what has never yet contented
us, and that the widest minds will thrive within limits that have
hitherto been thought too narrow for the narrowest.
Now, of course, so far as we can tell without examining the matter,
they may be able to accomplish this revolution. There is nothing on the
face of it that is impossible. It may be that our eyes are only blinded
to the beauty of the earth by having gazed so long and so vainly into an
empty heaven, and that when we have learnt to use them a little more to
the purpose, we shall see close at hand in this life what we had been
looking for, all this while, in another. But still, even if this
revolution be possible, the fact remains that it is a revolution, and it
cannot be accomplished without some effort. Our positive thinkers have a
case to be proved. They must not beg the very point that is most open to
contradiction, and which, when once duly apprehended, will be most sure
to provoke it. If this life be not incapable of satisfying us, let them
show us conclusively that it is not. But they can hardly expect that,
without any such showing at all, the world will deliberately repel as a
blasphemy what it has hitherto accepted as a commonplace.
This objection is itself so obvious that it has not escaped notice. But
the very fact of its obviousness has tended to hide the true force of
it, and coming so readily to the surface, it has been set down as
superficial. It is, however, very constantly recognised, and is being
met on all sides with a very elaborate answer. It is this answer that I
shall now proceed to consider. It is a very important one, and it
deserves our most close attention, as it contains the chief present
argument for the positive faith in life. I shall show how this argument
is vitiated by a fundamental fallacy.
It is admitted that to a hasty glance there may certainly seem some
danger of our faith in life's value collapsing, together with our belief
in God. It is admitted that this is not in the least irrational. But it
is contended that a scientific study of the past will show us that these
fears are groundless, and will reassure us as to the future. We are
referred to a new branch of knowledge, the philosophy of history, and we
are assured that by this all our doubts will be set at rest. This
philosophy of history resembles, on an extended scale, the practical
wisdom learnt by the man of the world. As long as a man is inexperienced
and new to life, each calamity as it comes to him seems something unique
and overwhelming, but as he lives on, suffers more of them, and yet
finds that he is not overwhelmed, he learns to reduce them to their
right dimensions, and is able, with sufficient self-possession, to let
each of them teach some useful lesson to him.
Thus we, it is said, if we were not better instructed, might naturally
take the present decline of faith to be an unprecedented calamity that
was ushering in an eve of darkness and utter ruin. But the philosophy
of history puts the whole matter in a different light. It teaches us
that the condition of the world in our day, though not normal, is yet by
no means peculiar. It points to numerous parallels in former ages, and
treats the rise and fall of creeds as regular phenomena in human
history, whose causes and recurrence we can distinctly trace. Other
nations and races have had creeds, and have lost them; they have
thought, as some of us think, that the loss would ruin them: and yet
they have not been ruined. Creeds, it is contended, were imaginative,
provisional, and mistaken expressions of the underlying and
indestructible sense of the nobility of human life. They were artistic,
not scientific. A statue of Apollo, for instance, or a picture of the
Madonna, were really representations of what men aimed at producing on
earth, not of what actually had any existence in heaven. And if we look
back at the greatest civilisations of antiquity, we shall find, it is
said, that what gave them vigour and intensity were purely human
interests: and though religion may certainly have had some reflex action
on life, this action was either merely political or was else injurious.
It is thus that intense Greek life is presented to us, the influence of
which is still felt in the world. Its main stimulus we are told was
frankly human. It would have lost none of its keenness if its theology
had been taken from it. And there, it is said, we see the positive
worth of life; we see already realised what we are now growing to
realise once more. Christianity, with its supernatural aims and objects,
is spoken of as an '_episode of disease and delirium_;' it is a
confusing dream, from which we are at last awaking; and the feelings of
the modern school are expressed in the following sentence of a
distinguished modern writer:[2] '_Just as the traveller_,' he says,
'_who has been worn to the bone by years of weary striving among men of
another skin, suddenly gazes with doubting eyes upon the white face of a
brother, so if we travel backwards in thought over the darker ages of
the history of Europe we at length reach back with such bounding heart
to men who had like hopes with ourselves, and shake hands across that
vast with ... our own spiritual ancestors._'
Nor are the Greeks the only nation whose history is supposed to be thus
so reassuring to us. The early Jews are pointed to, in the same way, as
having felt pre-eminently the dignity of this life, and having yet been
absolutely without any belief in another. But the example, which for us
is perhaps the most forcible of all, is to be found in the history of
Rome, during her years of widest activity. We are told to look at such
men as Cicero or as Cæsar--above all to such men as Cæsar--and to
remember what a reality life was to them. Cæsar certainly had little
religion enough; and what he may have had, played no part in making his
life earnest. He took the world as he found it, as all healthy men have
taken it; and, as it is said, all healthy men will still continue to
take it. Nor was such a life as Cæsar's peculiar to himself. It
represents that purely human life that flourished generally in such
vigour amongst the Romans. And the consideration of it is said to be all
the more instructive, because it flourished in the face of just the same
conditions that we think so disheartening now. There was in those times,
as there is in ours, a wide disintegration of the old faiths; and to
many, then as now, this fact seemed at once sad and terrifying. As we
read Juvenal, Petronius, Lucian, or Apuleius, we are astounded at the
likeness of those times to these. Even in minute details, they
correspond with a marvellous exactness. And hence there seems a strange
force in the statement that history repeats itself, and that the wisdom
learnt from the past can be applied to the present and the future.
But all this, though it is doubtless true, is in reality only half the
truth; and as used in the arguments of the day, it amounts practically
to a profound falsehood. History in a certain sense, of course, does
repeat itself; and the thing that has been is in a certain sense the
thing that shall be. But there is a deeper and a wider sense in which,
this is not so. Let us take the life of an individual man, for instance.
A man of fifty will retain very likely many of the tastes and tricks
that were his, when a boy of ten: and people who have known him long
will often exclaim that he is just the same as he always was. But in
spite of this, they will know that he is very different. His hopes will
have dwindled down; the glow, the colour, and the bright haze will have
gone from them; things that once amused him will amuse him no more:
things he once thought important, he will consider weary trifles; and if
he thinks anything serious at all, they will not be things he thought
serious when a boy. The same thing is true of the year, and its changing
seasons. The history of a single year may be, in one sense, said to
repeat itself every day. There is the same recurrence of light and
darkness, of sunrise and of sunset: and a man who had lived only for a
month or two, might fancy that this recurrence was complete. But let him
live a little longer, and he will come to see that this is not so.
Slowly through the summer he will begin to discern a change; until at
last he can contrast the days and nights of winter with the days and
nights of summer, and see how flowers that once opened fresh every
morning, now never open or close at all. Then he will see that the two
seasons, though in many points so like each other, are yet, in a far
deeper way, different.
And so it is with the world's history. Isolate certain phenomena, and
they do, without doubt, repeat themselves; but it is only when isolated
that they can be said to do so. In many points the European thought and
civilisation of to-day may seem to be a repetition of what has been
before; we may fancy that we recognise our brothers in the past, and
that we can, as the writer above quoted says, shake hands with them
across the intervening years. But this is really only a deceiving fancy,
when applied to such deep and universal questions as those we have now
to deal with--to religion, to positive thought, and to the worth of
life. The positivists and the unbelievers of the modern world, are not
the same as those of the ancient world. Even when their language is
identical, there is an immeasurable gulf between them. In our denials
and assertions there are certain new factors, which at once make all
such comparisons worthless. The importance of these will by-and-by
appear more clearly, but I shall give a brief account of them now.
The first of these factors is the existence of Christianity, and that
vast and undoubted change in the world of which it has been at once the
cause and the index. It has done a work, and that work still remains:
and we all feel the effects of it, whether we will or no. Described in
the most general way, that work has been this. The supernatural, in the
ancient world, was something vague and indefinite: and the classical
theologies at any rate, though they were to some extent formal
embodiments of it, could embody really but a very small part. Zeus and
the Olympian hierarchies were dimly perceived to be encircled by some
vaster mystery; which to the popular mind was altogether formless, and
which even such men as Plato could only describe inadequately. The
supernatural was like a dim and diffused light, brighter in some places,
and darker in others, but focalised and concentrated nowhere.
Christianity has focalised it, united into one the scattered points of
brightness, and collected other rays that were before altogether
imperceptible. That vague '_idea of the good_,' of which Plato said most
men dimly augured the existence, but could not express their augury, has
been given a definite shape to by Christianity in the form of its Deity.
That Deity, from an external point of view, may be said to have acquired
His sovereignty as did the Roman Cæsar. He absorbed into His own person
the offices of all the gods that were before him, as the Roman Cæsar
absorbed all the offices of the state; and in His case also, as has been
said of the Roman Cæsar, the whole was immeasurably greater than the
mere sum of the parts. Scientifically and philosophically He became the
first cause of the world; He became the father of the human soul, and
its judge; and what is more, its rest and its delight, and its desire.
Under the light of this conception, man appeared an ampler being. His
thoughts were for ever being gazed on by the great controller of all
things; he was made in the likeness of the Lord of lords; he was of kin
to the power before which all the visible world trembled; and every
detail in the life of a human soul became vaster, beyond all comparison,
than the depths of space and time. But not only did the sense of man's
dignity thus develop, and become definite. The accompanying sense of his
degradation became intenser and more definite also. The gloom of a sense
of sin is to be found in Æschylus, but this gloom was vague and
formless. Christianity gave to it both depth and form; only the despair
that might have been produced in this way was now softened by hope.
Christianity has, in fact, declared clearly a supernatural of which men
before were more or less ignorantly conscious. The declaration may or
may not have been a complete one, but at any rate it is the completest
that the world has yet known. And the practical result is this: when we,
in these days, deny the supernatural, we are denying it in a way in
which it was never denied before. Our denial is beyond all comparison
more complete. The supernatural, for the ancient world, was like a
perfume scenting life, out of a hundred different vessels, of which only
two or three were visible to the same men or nations. They therefore
might get rid of these, and yet the larger part of the scent would still
remain to them. But for us, it is as though all the perfume had been
collected into a single vessel; and if we get rid of this, we shall get
rid of the scent altogether. Our air will be altogether odourless.
The materialism of Lucretius is a good instance of this. In many ways
his denials bear a strong resemblance to ours. But the resemblance
ceases a little below the surface. He denied the theology of his time as
strongly as our positive thinkers deny the theology of ours. But the
theology he denied was incomplete and puerile. He was not denying any
'All-embracer and All-sustainer,' for he knew of none such. And his
denial of the gods he did deny left him room for the affirmation of
others, whose existence, if considered accurately, was equally
inconsistent with his own scientific premisses. Again, in his denial of
any immortality for man, what he denied is not the future that we are
denying. The only future he knew of was one a belief in which had no
influence on us, except for sadness. It was a protraction only of what
is worst in life; it was in no way a completion of what is best in it.
But with us the case is altogether different. Formerly the supernatural
could not be denied completely, because it was not known completely. Not
to affirm is a very different thing from to deny. And many beliefs which
the positivists of the modern world are denying, the positivists of the
ancient world more or less consciously lived by.
Next, there is this point to remember. Whilst during the Christian
centuries, the devotion to a supernatural and extramundane aim has been
engendering, as a recent writer has observed with indignation, a
degrading '_pessimism as to the essential dignity of man_,'[3] the world
which we have been to a certain extent disregarding has been changing
its character for us. In a number of ways, whilst we have not been
perceiving it, its objective grandeur has been dwindling; and the
imagination, when again called to the feat, cannot reinvest it with its
old gorgeous colouring. Once the world, with the human race, who were
the masters of it, was a thing of vast magnitude--the centre of the
whole creation. The mind had no larger conceptions that were vivid
enough to dwarf it. But now all this has changed. In the words of a
well-known modern English historian, _'The floor of heaven, inlaid with
stars, has sunk back into an infinite abyss of immeasurable space; and
the firm earth itself, unfixed from its foundations, is seen to be but
a small atom in the awful easiness of the universe.'_[4] The whole
position, indeed, is reversed. The skies once seemed to pay the earth
homage, and to serve it with light and shelter. Now they do nothing, so
far as the imagination is concerned, but spurn and dwarf it. And when we
come to the details of the earth's surface itself, the case is just the
same. It, in its extent, has grown little and paltry to us. The wonder
and the mystery has gone from it. A Cockney excursionist goes round it
in a holiday trip; there are no
_Golden cities, ten months journey deep,
In far Tartarian wilds_;[5]
nor do the confines of civilisation, melt as they once did, into any
unknown and unexplored wonderlands. And thus a large mass of sentiment
that was once powerful in the world is now rapidly dwindling, and, so
far as we can see, there is nothing that can ever exactly replace it.
Patriotism, for instance, can never again be the religion it was to
Athens, or the pride it was to Rome. Men are not awed and moved as once
they were by local and material splendours. The pride of life, it is
true, is still eagerly coveted; but by those at least who are most
familiar with it, it is courted and sought for with a certain contempt
and cynicism. It is treated like a courtesan, rather than like a
goddess. Whilst as to the higher enthusiasm that was once excited by
external things, the world in its present state could no more work
itself up to this than a girl, after three seasons, could again go for
dissipation to her dolls. She might look back to the time of dolls with
regret. She might see that the interest they excited in her was,
perhaps, far more pleasing than any she had found in love. But the dolls
would never rival her lovers, none the less. And with man, and his aims
and objects, the case is just the same. And we must remember that to
realise keenly the potency of a past ideal, is no indication that
practically it will ever again be powerful.
Briefly, then, the positive school of to-day we see thus far to be in
this position. It has to make demands upon human life that were never
made before; and human life is, in many ways, less able than it ever was
to answer to them.
But this is not all. There is a third matter yet left to consider--a
third factor in the case, peculiar to the present crisis. That is the
intense self-consciousness that is now developed in the world, and which
is something altogether new to it. During the last few generations man
has been curiously changing. Much of his old spontaneity of action has
gone from him. He has become a creature looking before and after; and
his native hue of resolution has been sickled over by thought. We admit
nothing now without question; we have learnt to take to pieces all
motives to actions. We not only know more than we have done before, but
we are perpetually chewing the cud of our knowledge. Thus positive
thought reduces all religions to ideals created by man; and as such, not
only admits that they have had vast influence, but teaches us also that
we in the future must construct new ideals for ourselves. Only there
will be this difference. We shall now know that they are ideals, we
shall no longer mistake them for objective facts. But our positive
thinkers forget this. They forget that the ideals that were once active
in the world were active amongst people who thought that they were more
than ideals, and who very certainly did mistake them for facts; and they
forget how different their position will be, as soon as their true
nature is recognised. There is no example, so far as I know, to be found
in all history, of men having been stimulated or affected in any
important way--none, at any rate, of their having been restrained or
curbed--by a mere ideal that was known to have no reality to correspond
to it. A child is frightened when its nurse tells it that a black man
will come down the chimney and take it away. The black man, it is true,
is only an ideal; and yet the child is affected. But it would cease to
be affected the instant it knew this.
As we go on with our enquiry these considerations will become plainer to
us. But enough has even now been said to show how distinct the present
position is from any that have gone before it, and how little the
experience of the past is really fitted to reassure us. Greek and Roman
thought was positive, in our sense of the word, only in a very small
degree. The thought of the other ancient empires was not positive at
all. The oldest civilisation of which any record is left to us--the
civilisation of Egypt--was based on a theism which, of all other
theisms, most nearly approaches ours. And the doctrine of a future life
was first learnt by the Jews from their masters during the Captivity. We
search utterly in vain through history for any parallel to our own
negations.
I have spoken hitherto of those peoples only whose history more or less
directly has affected ours. But there is a vast portion of the human
race with which, roughly speaking, our progress has had no connection;
and the religions of these races, which are now for the first time
beginning to be accurately studied, are constantly being appealed to in
support of the positive doctrines. Thus it is urged by Mr. Leslie
Stephen that _'the briefest outline of the religious history of mankind
shows that creeds which can count more adherents than Christianity, and
have flourished through a longer period, have omitted all that makes the
Christian doctrine of a future state 'valuable in the eyes of the
supporters_;' and Dr. Tyndall points with the same delighted confidence
to the gospel of Buddhism, as one of '_pure human ethics, divorced not
only from Brahma and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the existence
of God_.'[6] Many other such appeals are made to what are somewhat
vaguely called '_the multitudinous creeds of the East_;' but it is to
Buddhism, in its various forms, that they would all seem to apply. Let
us now consider the real result of them. Our positivists have appealed
to Buddhism, and to Buddhism they shall certainly go. It is one of the
vastest and most significant of all human facts. But its significance is
somewhat different from what it is popularly supposed to be.
That the Buddhist religion has had a wide hold on the world is true.
Indeed, forty per cent. of the whole human race at this moment profess
it. Except the Judaic, it is the oldest of existing creeds; and beyond
all comparison it numbers most adherents. And it is quite true also that
it does not, in its pure state, base its teaching on the belief in any
personal God, or offer as an end of action any happiness in any
immortal life. But it does not for this reason bear any real resemblance
to our modern Western positivism, nor give it any reason to be sanguine.
On the contrary, it is most absolutely opposed to it; and its success is
due to doctrines which Western positivism most emphatically repudiates.
In the first place, so far from being based on exact thought, Buddhism
takes for its very foundation four great mysteries, that are explicitly
beyond the reach either of proof or reason; and of these the foremost
and most intelligible is the transmigration and renewal of the existence
of the individual. It is by this mystical doctrine, and by this alone,
that Buddhism gains a hold on the common heart of man. This is the great
fulcrum of its lever. Then further--and this is more important
still--whereas the doctrine of Western positivism is that human life is
good, or may be made good; and that in the possibility of the enjoyment
of it consists the great stimulus to action; the doctrine of Buddhism is
that human life is evil, and that man's right aim is not to gratify, but
to extinguish, his desire for it. Love, for instance, as I have said
before, is by most Western positivists held to be a high blessing.
Buddhism tells us we should avoid it '_as though it were a pit of
burning coals_.' The most influential positive writer in England[7] has
said: '_I desire no future that will break the ties of the past_.'
Buddhism says that we should desire no present that will create any ties
for the future. The beginning of the Buddhist teaching is the intense
misery of life; the reward of Buddhist holiness is to, at last, live no
longer. If we die in our sins, we shall be obliged to live again on the
earth; and it will not be, perhaps, till after many lives that the
necessity for fresh births will be exhausted. But when we have attained
perfection, the evil spell is broken; and '_then the wise man_,' it is
said, '_is extinguished as this lamp_.' The highest life was one of
seclusion and asceticism. The founder of Buddhism was met, during his
first preaching, with the objection that his system, if carried out
fully, would be the ruin and the extermination of humanity. And he did
not deny the charge; but said that what his questioners called ruin, was
in reality the highest good.
It is then hard to conceive an appeal more singularly infelicitous than
that which our modern positivists make to Buddhism. It is the appeal of
optimists to inveterate pessimists, and of exact thinkers to inveterate
mystics. If the consideration of it tells us anything of importance, it
tells us this--that by far the largest mass of mankind that has ever
been united by a single creed has explicitly denied every chief point
that our Western teachers assert. So far then from helping to close the
question we are to deal with--the question as to the positive worth of
life, the testimony of Buddhism, if it be of any weight at all, can only
go to convince us that the question is at once new and open--new,
because it has never yet been asked so fully; and open, because in so
far as it has been asked, nearly half mankind has repudiated the answer
that we are so desirous of giving it. Mr. Leslie Stephen calls Buddhism
'a stupendous fact,' and I quite agree with him that it is so; but taken
in connection with the present philosophy of Europe, it is hardly a fact
to strengthen our confidence in the essential dignity of man, or the
worth of man's life.
In short, the more we consider the matter, and the more various the
points from which we do so, the more plain will it become to us that the
problem the present age is confronted by is an altogether unanswered
one; and that the closest seeming parallels to be found amongst other
times and races, have far less really of parallelism in them than of
contrast. The path of thought, as it were, has taken a sudden turn round
a mountain; and our bewildered eyes are staring on an undreamed-of
prospect. The leaders of progress thus far have greeted the sight with
acclamation, and have confidently declared that we are looking on the
promised land. But to the more thoughtful, and to the less impulsive, it
is plain that a mist hangs over it, and that we have no right to be
sure whether it is the promised land or no. They see grave reasons for
making a closer scrutiny, and for asking if, when the mist lifts, what
we see will be not splendour, but desolation.
Such, in brief outline, is the question we are to deal with. We will now
go on to approach it in a more detailed way.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Vide Sophocles, _OEdipus Coloneus_.
[2] Professor Clifford, whose study of history leads him to regard
Catholicism as nothing more than an 'episode' in the history of Western
progress.
[3] Mr. Frederic Harrison.
[4] Mr. Froude, _History of England_, chap. i.
[5] Wordsworth.
[6] Quoted by Dr. Tyndall from Professor Blackie.
[7] George Eliot.
CHAPTER II.
THE PRIZE OF LIFE.
'_The kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hid in a field._'
Having thus seen broadly what is meant by that claim for life that we
are about to analyse, we must now examine it more minutely, as made by
the positive school themselves.
This will at once make evident one important point. The worth in
question is closely bound up with what we call _morality_. In this
respect our deniers of the supernatural claim to be on as firm a footing
as the believers in it. They will not admit that the earnestness of life
is lessened for them; or that they have opened any door either to levity
or to licentiousness. It is true indeed that it is allowed occasionally
that the loss of a faith in God, and of the life in a future, may, under
certain circumstances, be a real loss to us. Others again contend that
this loss is a gain. Such views as these, however, are not much to the
purpose. For those even, according to whom life has lost most in this
way, do not consider the loss a very important, still less a fatal one.
The _good_ is still to be an aim for us, and our devotion to it will be
more valuable because it will be quite disinterested. Thus Dr. Tyndall
informs us that though he has now rejected the religion of his earlier
years, yet granting him proper health of body, there is '_no spiritual
experience_,' such as he then knew, '_no resolve of duty, no word of
mercy, no act of self-renouncement, no solemnity of thought, no joy in
the life and aspects of nature, that would not still be_' his. The same
is the implicit teaching of all George Eliot's novels; whilst Professor
Huxley tells us that come what may to our '_intellectual beliefs and
even education_,' '_the beauty of holiness and the ugliness of sin_'
will remain for those that have eyes to see them, '_no mere metaphors,
but real and intense feelings_.' These are but a few examples, but the
view of life they illustrate is so well known that these few will
suffice. The point on which the modern positivist school is most
vehement, is that it does not destroy, but that on the contrary it
intensifies, the distinction between right and wrong.
And now let us consider what, according to all positive theories, this
supremacy of morality means. It means that there is a certain course of
active life, and a certain course only, by which life can be made by
everyone a beautiful and a noble thing: and life is called earnest,
because such a prize is within our reach, and solemn because there is a
risk that we may fail to reach it. Were this not so, right and wrong
could have no general and objective meaning. They would be purely
personal matters--mere misleading names, in fact, for the private likes
and the dislikes of each of us; and to talk of right, and good, and
morality, as things that we ought all to conform to, and to live by,
would be simply to talk nonsense. What the very existence of a moral
system implies is, that whatever may be our personal inclinations
naturally, there is some common pattern to which they should be all
adjusted; the reason being that we shall so all become partakers in some
common happiness, which is greater beyond comparison than every other
kind.
Here we are presented with two obvious tasks: the first, to enquire what
this happiness is, what are the qualities and attractions generally
ascribed to it; the second, to analyse it, as it is thus held up to us,
and to see if its professed ingredients are sufficient to make up the
result.
To proceed then, all moral systems must, as we have just seen, postulate
some end of action, an end to which morality is the only road. Further,
this end is the one thing in life that is really worth attaining; and
since we have to do with no life other than this one, it must be found
amongst the days and years of which this short life is the aggregate. On
the adequacy of this universal end depends the whole question of the
positive worth of life, and the essential dignity of man.
That this is at least one way of stating the case has been often
acknowledged by the positive moralists themselves. The following
passage, for instance, is from the autobiography of J.S. Mill. '_From
the winter of 1821_,' he writes, '_when I first read Bentham.... I had
what might truly be called an object in life, to be a reformer of the
world.... I endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could by the
way; but as a serious and permanent personal satisfaction to rest upon,
my whole reliance was placed on this.... But the time came when I
awakened from this as from a dream.... It occurred to me to put the
question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life
realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you
were looking forward to, could be completely effected in this very
instant, would this be a very great joy and happiness to you?" And an
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered "No!" At this my
heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was
constructed fell down.... The end had ceased to charm, and how could
there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing
left to live for.... The lines in Coleridge's "Dejection" exactly
describe my case_:--
"_O grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A dreary, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet nor relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.
* * * * *
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And life without an object cannot live._"'
And the foregoing confession is made more significant by the author's
subsequent comment on it. '_Though my dejection,' he says, 'honestly
looked at, could not be called other than egotistical, produced by the
ruin, as I thought, of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of
mankind was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated from my own.
I felt that the flaw in my life must be a flaw in life itself; and that
the question was whether, if the reformers of society and government
could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were
free, and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life being no
longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.
And I felt that unless I could see some better hope than this for human
happiness in general, my dejection must continue.'_ It is true that in
Mill's case the dejection did not continue; and that in certain ways at
which it is not yet time to touch, he succeeded, to his own
satisfaction, in finding the end he was thus asking for. I only quote
him to show how necessary he considered such an end to be. He
acknowledged the fact, not only theoretically, or with his lips, but by
months of misery, by intermittent thoughts of suicide, and by years of
recurring melancholy. Some ultimate end of action, some kind of
satisfying happiness--this, and this alone, he felt, could give any
meaning to work, or make possible any kind of virtue. And a yet later
authority has told us precisely the same thing. He has told us that the
one great question that education is of value for answering, is this
very question that was so earnestly asked by Mill. '_The ultimate end of
education_,' says Professor Huxley, '_is to promote morality and
refinement, by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by leading
them to see that the highest, as it is the only content, is to be
attained not by grovelling in the rank and steaming valleys of sense,
but by continually striving towards those high peaks, where, resting in
eternal calm, reason discerns the undefined but bright ideal of the
highest good--"a cloud by day, a pillar of fire by night_."' And these
words are an excellent specimen of the general moral exhortations of the
new school.
Now all this is very well as far as it goes; and were there not one
thing lacking, it would be just the answer that we are at present so
anxious to elicit. But the one thing lacking, is enough to make it
valueless. It may mean a great deal; but there is no possibility of
saying exactly what it means. Before we can begin to strive towards the
'highest good,' we must know something of what this 'highest good' is.
We must make this 'higher ideal' stand and unfold itself. If it cannot
be made to do this, if it vanishes into mist as we near it, and takes a
different shape to each of us as we recede from it; still more, if only
some can see it, and to others it is quite invisible--then we must
simply set it down as an illusion, and waste no more time in pursuit of
it. But that it is not an illusion is the great positivist claim for it.
Heaven and the love of God, we are told, were illusions. This 'highest
good' we are offered, stands out in clear contradistinction to these. It
is an actual attainable thing, a thing for flesh and blood creatures; it
is to be won and enjoyed by them in their common daily life. It is, as
its prophets distinctly and unanimously tell us, some form of happiness
that results in this life to us, from certain conduct; it is a thing
essentially for the present; and '_it is obviously_,' says Professor
Huxley, '_in no way affected by abbreviation or prolongation of our
conscious life_.'
This being the case, it is clearly not unreasonable to demand some
explicit account of it; or if no sound account of it be extant, to
enquire diligently what sort of account of it is possible. And let it be
remembered that to make this demand is in no way to violate the great
rule of Aristotle, and to demand a greater accuracy than the nature of
the subject will admit of. The 'highest good,' it is quite possible, may
be a vague thing; not capable, like a figure in Euclid, of being defined
exactly. But many vague things can be described exactly enough for all
practical purposes. They can be described so that we at once know what
is meant, and so that we can at once find and recognise them. Feelings,
characters, and personal appearance are things of this sort; so too is
the taste of food, the style of furniture, or the general tone and
tenour of our life, under various circumstances. And the 'good' we are
now considering can surely be not less describable than these. When
therefore our exact thinkers speak to us about the highest happiness, we
want to know what meaning they attach to the words. Has Professor
Huxley, for instance, ever enjoyed it himself, or does he ever hope to
do so? If so, when, where, and how? What must be done to get it, and
what must be left undone? And when it is got, what will it be like? Is
it something brief, rapturous, and intermittent, as the language often
used about it might seem to suggest to one? Is it known only in brief
moments of Neoplatonic ecstasy, to which all the acts of life should be
stepping stones? It certainly cannot be that. Our exact thinkers are
essentially no mystics, and the highest happiness must be something far
more solid than transcendental ecstasies. Surely, therefore, if it
exists at all we must be able somewhere to lay our hands upon it. It is
a pillar of fire by night; surely then it will be visible. It is to be
lifted up, and is to draw all men unto it. It is nothing if not this:
and we shall see more clearly if we consider the matter further.
This chief good, or this highest happiness, being the end of moral
action, one point about it is at once evident. Its value is of course
recognised by those who practise morality, or who enunciate moral
systems. Virtuous men are virtuous because the end gained by virtue is
an end that they desire to gain. But this is not enough; it is not
enough that to men who are already seeking the good the good should
appear in all its full attractiveness. It must be capable of being made
attractive for those who do not know it, and who have never sought it,
but who have, on the contrary, always turned away from everything that
is supposed to lead to it. It must be able, in other words, not only to
satisfy the virtuous of the wisdom of their virtue, it must be able to
convince the vicious of the folly of their vice. Vice is only bad in the
eye of the positive moralist because of the precious _something_ that we
are at the present moment losing by it. He can only convince us of our
error by giving us some picture of our loss. And he must be able to do
this, if his system is worth anything; and in promulgating his system he
professes that he can do it. The physician's work is to heal the sick;
his skill must not end in explaining his own health. It is clear that if
a morality is incapable of being preached, it is useless to say that it
is worthy of being practised. The statement will be meaningless, except
to those for whom it is superfluous. It is therefore essential to the
moral end that in some way or other it be generally presentable, so that
its excellence shall appeal to some common sense in man. And again, be
it observed, that we are demanding no mathematical accuracy. We demand
only that the presentation shall be accurate enough to let us recognise
its corresponding fact in life.
Now what is a code of morals, and why has the world any need of one? A
code of morals is a number of restraining orders; it rigorously bids us
walk in certain paths. But why? What is the use of bidding us? Because
there are a number of other paths that we are naturally inclined to walk
in. The right path is right because it leads to the highest kind of
happiness; the wrong paths are wrong because they lead to lower kinds of
happiness. But when men choose vice instead of virtue, what is
happening? They are considering the lower or the lesser happiness better
than the greater or the higher. It is this mistake that is the essence
and cause of immorality; it is this mistake that mankind is ever
inclined to make, and it is only because of this inclination that any
moral system is of any general value.
Were we all naturally inclined to morality, the analysis of it, it is
true, might have great speculative interest; but a moral system would
not be needed as it is for a great practical purpose. The law, as we all
know, has arisen because of transgressions, and the moralist has to
meddle with human nature mainly because it is inconstant and corrupted.
It is a wild horse that has not so much to be broken, once for all, as
to be driven and reined in perpetually. And the art of the moralist is,
by opening the mind's eye to the true end of life, to make us sharply
conscious of what we lose by losing it. And the men to whom we shall
chiefly want to present this end are not men, let us remember, who
desire to see it, or who will seek for it of their own accord, but men
who are turned away from it, and on whose sight it must be thrust. It is
not the righteous but the sinners that have to be called to repentance.
And not this only: not only must the end in question be thus
presentable, but when presented it must be able to stand the inveterate
criticism of those who fear being allured by it, who are content as they
are, and have no wish to be made discontented. These men will submit it
to every test by which they may hope to prove that its attractions are
delusive. They will test it with reason, as we test a metal by an acid.
They will ask what it is based upon, and of what it is compounded. They
will submit it to an analysis as merciless as that by which their
advisers have dissolved theism.
Here then is a fact that all positive morality presupposes. It
presupposes that life by its very nature contains the possibility in it
of some one kind of happiness, which is open to all men, and which is
better than all others. It is sufficiently presentable even to those who
have not experienced it; and its excellence is not vaguely apparent
only, but can be exactly proved from obvious and acknowledged facts.
Further, this happiness must be removed from its alternatives by some
very great interval. The proudest, the serenest, the most successful
life of vice, must be miserable when compared with the most painful life
of virtue, and miserable in a very high degree; for morality is
momentous exactly in proportion to the interval between the things to be
gained and escaped by it. And unless this interval be a very profound
one, the language at present current as to the importance of virtue, the
dignity of life, and the earnestness of the moral struggle, will be
altogether overstrained and ludicrous.
Now is such a happiness a reality or is it a myth? That is the great
question. Can human life, cut off utterly from every hope beyond
itself--can human life supply it? If it cannot, then evidently there
can be no morality without religion. But perhaps it can. Perhaps life
has greater capacities than we have hitherto given it credit for.
Perhaps this happiness may be really close at hand for each of us, and
we have only overlooked it hitherto because it was too directly before
our eyes. At all events, wherever it is let it be pointed out to us. It
is useless, as we have seen, if not generally presentable. To those who
most need it, it is useless until presented. Indeed, until it is
presented we are but acting on the maxim of its advocates by refusing to
believe in its existence. '_No simplicity of mind_,' says Professor
Clifford, '_no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of
questioning all that we believe_.'
The question, then, that we want answered has by this time, I think,
been stated with sufficient clearness, and its importance and its
legitimacy been placed beyond a doubt. I shall now go on to explain in
detail how completely unsatisfactory are the answers that are at present
given it; how it is evaded by some and begged by others; and how those
that are most plausible are really made worthless, by a subtle but
profound defect.
These answers divide themselves into two classes, which, though
invariably confused by those that give them, are in reality quite
distinct and separable. Professor Huxley, one of the most vigorous of
our positive thinkers, shall help us to understand these. He is going to
tell us, let us remember, about the '_highest good_'--the happiness, in
other words, that we have just been discussing--the secret of our life's
worth, and the test of all our conduct. This happiness he divides into
two kinds.[8] He says that there are two things that we may mean when we
speak about it. We may mean the happiness of a society of men, or we may
mean the happiness of the members of that society. And when we speak of
morality, we may mean two things also; and these two things must be kept
distinct. We may mean what Professor Huxley calls '_social morality_,'
and of this the test and object is the happiness of societies; or we may
mean what he calls '_personal morality_,' and of this the test and
object is the happiness of individuals. And the answers which our
positive moralists make to us divide themselves into two classes,
according to the sort of happiness they refer to.
It is before all things important that this division be understood, and
be kept quite clear in our minds, if we would see honestly what our
positive modern systems amount to. For what makes them at present so
very hard to deal with, is the fact that their exponents are perpetually
perplexing themselves between these two classes of answers, first
giving one, and then the other, and imagining that, by a kind of
confusion of substance, they can both afford solutions of the same
questions. Thus they continually speak of life as though its crowning
achievement were some kind of personal happiness; and then being asked
to explain the nature and basis of this, they at once shift their
ground, and talk to us of the laws and conditions of social happiness.
Professor Huxley will again supply us with a very excellent example. He
starts with the thesis that _both_ sorts of morality are strong enough
to hold their own, without supernatural aid; and when we look to see on
what ground he holds they are, we find it to consist in the following
explanation that _one_ is. '_Given_,' he says, '_a society of human
beings under certain circumstances, and the question whether a
particular action on the part of one of its members will tend to
increase the general happiness or not, is a question of natural
knowledge, and as such is a perfectly legitimate subject of scientific
inquiry.... If it can be shown by observation or experiment, that theft,
murder, and adultery do not tend to diminish the happiness of society,
then, in the absence of any but natural knowledge, they are not social
immoralities._'
Now, in the above passage we have at least one thing. We have a short
epitome of one of those classes of answers that our positive moralists
are offering us. It is with this class that I shall deal in the
following chapter; and point out as briefly as may be its complete
irrelevance. After that, I shall go on to the other.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Vide _Nineteenth Century_, No. 3, pp. 536, 537.
CHAPTER III.
SOCIOLOGY AS THE FOUNDATION OF MORALITY.
Society, says Professor Clifford, is the highest of all organisms;[9]
and its organic nature, he tells us, is one of those great facts which
our own generation has been the first to state rationally. It is our
understanding of this that enables us to supply morals with a positive
basis. It is, he proceeds, because society is organic, '_that actions
which, as individual, are insignificant, are massed together into ...
important movements. Co-operation or_ band-work _is the life of it_.'
And '_it is the practice of band-work_,' he adds, that, unknown till
lately though its nature was to us, has so moulded man as '_to create in
him two specially human faculties, the conscience and the intellect_;'
of which the former, we are told, gives us the desire for the good, and
the latter instructs us how to attain this desire by action. So too
Professor Huxley, once more to recur to him, says that that state of man
would be '_a true_ civitas Dei, _in which each man's moral faculty shall
be such as leads him to control all those desires which run counter to
the good of mankind_.' And J.S. Mill, whose doubts as to the value of
life we have already dwelt upon, professed to have at last satisfied
himself by a precisely similar answer. He had never '_wavered in the
conviction_,' he tells us, even all through his perplexity, that, if
life had any value at all, '_happiness_' was its one '_end_,' and the
'_test of its rule of conduct_;' but he now thought that this end was to
be attained by not making it the direct end, but '_by fixing the mind on
some object other than one's own happiness; on the happiness of
others--on the improvement of mankind_.' The same thing is being told us
on all sides, and in countless ways. The common name for this theory is
Utilitarianism; and its great boast, and its special professed strength,
is that it gives morals a positive basis in the acknowledged science of
sociology. Whether sociology can really supply such a basis is what we
now have to enquire. There are many practical rules for which it no
doubt can do so; but will these rules correspond with what we mean by
morals?
Now the province of the sociologist, within certain limits, is clear
enough. His study is to the social body what the study of the physician
is to the individual body. It is the study of human action as
productive, or non-productive, of some certain general good. But here
comes the point at issue--What is this general good, and what is
included by it? The positive school contend that it is general
happiness; and there, they say, is the answer to the great
question--What is the test of conduct, and the true end of life? But
though, as we shall see in another moment, there is some plausibility in
this, there is really nothing in it of the special answer we want. Our
question is, What is the true happiness? And what is the answer thus
far?--That the true happiness is general happiness; that it is the
happiness of men in societies; that it is happiness equally distributed.
But this avails us nothing. The coveted _happiness_ is still a locked
casket. We know nothing as yet of its contents. A happy society neither
does nor can mean anything but a number of happy individuals, so
organised that their individual happiness is secured to them. But what
do the individuals want? Before we can try to secure it for them, we
must know that. Granted that we know what will make the individuals
happy, then we shall know what will make society happy. And then social
morality will be, as Professor Huxley says, a perfectly legitimate
subject of scientific enquiry--then, but not till then. But this is what
the positive school are perpetually losing sight of; and the reason of
the confusion is not far to seek.
Within certain limits, it is quite true, the general good is a
sufficiently obvious matter, and beyond the reach of any rational
dispute. There are, therefore, certain rules with regard to conduct
that we can arrive at and justify by strictly scientific methods. We can
demonstrate that there are certain actions which we must never tolerate,
and which we must join together, as best we may, to suppress. Actions,
for instance, that would tend to generate pestilence, or to destroy our
good faith in our fellows, or to render our lives and property insecure,
are actions the badness of which can be scientifically verified.
But the _general good_ by which these actions are tested is something
quite distinct from happiness, though it undoubtedly has a close
connection with it. It is no kind of happiness, high or low, in
particular; it is simply those negative conditions required equally by
every kind. If we are to be happy in any way, no matter what, we must of
course have our lives, and, next to our lives, our health and our
possessions secured to us. But to secure us these does not secure us
happiness. It simply leaves us free to secure it, if we can, for
ourselves. Once let us have some common agreement as to what this
happiness is, we may then be able to formulate other rules for attaining
it. But in the absence of any such agreement, the only possible aim of
social morality, the only possible meaning of the _general good_, is not
any kind or any kinds of happiness, but the security of those conditions
without which all happiness would be impossible.
Suppose the human race were a set of canaries in a cage, and that we
were in grave doubt as to what seed to give them--hemp-seed, rape-seed,
or canary-seed, or all three mixed in certain proportions. That would
exactly represent the state of our case thus far. There is the question
that we want the positive school to answer. It is surely evident that,
in this perplexity, it is beside the point to tell us that the birds
must not peck each other's eyes out, and that they must all have access
to the trough that we are ignorant how to fill.
The fault then, so continually committed by the positive school, is
this. They confuse the negative conditions of happiness with the
positive materials of it. Professor Huxley, in a passage I have already
quoted, is caught, so to speak, in the very act of committing it.
'_Theft, murder, and adultery_,' all these three, it will be remembered,
he classes together, and seems to think that they stand upon the same
footing. But from what has just been pointed out, it is plain that they
do not do so. We condemn theft and murder for one reason. We condemn
adultery for quite another. We condemn the former because they are
incompatible with any form of happiness. We condemn the latter because
it is the supposed destruction of one particular form; or the
substitution, rather, of a form supposed to be less complete, for
another form supposed to be more complete. If the '_highest good_,' if
the best kind of happiness, be the end we are in search of, the truths
of sociology will help us but a very short way towards it. By the
practice of '_band-work_' alone we shall never learn to construct a
'_true_ Civitas Dei.' Band-work with the same perfection may be
practised for opposite ends. Send an army in a just war or an unjust
one, in either case it will need the same discipline. There must be
order amongst thieves, as well as amongst honest men. There can be an
orderly brothel as well as an orderly nunnery, and all order rests on
co-operation. We presume co-operation. We require an end for which to
co-operate.
I have already compared the science of sociology to that of medicine;
and the comparison will again be a very instructive one. The aim of both
sciences is to produce health; and the relation of health to happiness
is in both cases the same. It is an important condition of the full
enjoyment of anything: but it will by no means of itself give or guide
us to the best thing. A man may be in excellent health, and yet, if he
be prudent, be leading a degrading life. So, too, may a society. The
Cities of the Plain may, for all we know to the contrary, have been in
excellent social health; indeed, there is every reason to believe they
were. They were, apparently, to a high degree strong and prosperous;
and the sort of happiness that their citizens set most store by was only
too generally attainable. There were not ten men to be found in them by
whom the _highest good_ had not been realised.
There are, however, two suppositions, on which the general good, or the
health of the social organism, can be given a more definite meaning, and
made in some sense an adequate test of conduct. And one or other of
these suppositions is apparently always lurking in the positivist mind.
But though, when unexpressed, and only barely assented to, they may seem
to be true, their entire falsehood will appear the moment they are
distinctly stated.
One of these suppositions is, that for human happiness health is alone
requisite--health in the social organism including sufficient wealth and
freedom; and that man's life, whenever it is not interfered with, will
be moral, dignified, and delightful naturally, no matter how he lives
it. But this supposition, from a moralist, is of course nonsense. For,
were it true, as we have just seen, Sodom might have been as moral as
the tents of Abraham; and in a perfect state there would be a fitting
place for both. The social organism indeed, in its highest state of
perfection, would manifest the richest variety in the development of
such various parts. It might consist of a number of motley communes[10]
of monogamists and of free-lovers, of ascetics and sybarites, of saints
and [Greek: paiderastai]--each of them being stones in this true
_Civitas Dei_, this holy city of God. Of course it may be contended that
this state of things would be desirable; that, however, is quite a
different question. But whatever else it was, it would certainly not be
moral, in any sense in which the word has yet been used.
The second supposition I spoke of, though less openly absurd than this
one, is really quite as false. It consists of a vague idea that, for
some reason or other, happiness can never be distributed in an equal
measure to all, unless it be not only equal in degree but also the same
in kind; and that the one kind that can be thus distributed is a kind
that is in harmony with our conceptions of moral excellence. Now this is
indeed so far true, that there are doubtless certain kinds of happiness
which, if enjoyed at all, can be enjoyed by the few alone; and that the
conditions under which alone the few can enjoy them disturb the
conditions of all happiness for the many. The general good, therefore,
gives us at once a test by which such kinds of happiness can be
condemned. But to eliminate these will by no means leave us a residue of
virtue; for these so far from being co-extensive with moral evil, do in
reality lie only on the borders of it; and the condemnation attached to
them is a legal rather than a moral one. It is based, that is, not so
much on the kind of happiness itself as on the circumstances under which
we are at present obliged to seek it. Thus the practice of seduction may
be said to be condemned sufficiently by the misery brought by it to its
victims, and its victims' families. But suppose the victims are willing,
and the families complacent, this ground of condemnation goes; though in
the eye of the moralist, matters in this last will be far worse than in
the former. It is therefore quite a mistake to say that the kind of
happiness which it is the end of life to realise is defined or narrowed
down appreciably by the fact that it is a general end. Vice can be
enjoyed in common, just as well as virtue; nor if wisely regulated will
it exhaust the tastes that it appeals to. Regulated with equal skill,
and with equal far-sightedness, it will take its place side by side with
virtue; nor will sociology or social morality give us any reason for
preferring the one to the other.
We may observe accordingly, that if happiness of some certain kind be
the moral test, what Professor Huxley calls '_social morality_'--the
rule that is, for producing the negative conditions of happiness, it is
not in itself morality at all. It may indeed become so, when the
consciousness that we are conforming to it becomes one of the factors of
our own personal happiness. It then suffers a kind of apotheosis. It is
taken up into ourselves, and becomes part and parcel of our own personal
morality. But it then becomes quite a different matter, as we shall see
very shortly; and even then it supplies us with but a very small part of
the answer.
Thus far what has been made plain is this. General, or social happiness,
unless explained farther, is simply for moral purposes an unmeaning
phrase. It evades the whole question we are asking; for happiness is no
more differentiated by saying that it is general, than food is by saying
that everyone at a table is eating it; or than a language is by saying
that every one in a room is talking it. The social happiness of all of
us means nothing but the personal happiness of each of us; and if social
happiness have any single meaning--in other words, if it be a test of
morals--it must postulate a personal happiness of some hitherto
unexplained kind. Else sociology will be subsidiary to nothing but
individual license; general law will be but the protection of individual
lawlessness; and the completest social morality but the condition of
the completest personal un-morality. The social organism we may compare
to a yew-tree. Science will explain to us how it has grown up from the
ground, and how all its twigs must have fitting room to expand in. It
will not show us how to clip the yew-tree into a peacock. Morality, it
is true, must rest ultimately on the proved facts of sociology; and this
is not only true but evident. But it rests upon them as a statue rests
upon its pedestal, and the same pedestal will support an Athenè or a
Priapus.
The matter, however, is not yet altogether disposed of. The type of
personal happiness that social morality postulates, as a whole, we have
still to seek for. But a part of it, as I just pointed out, will, beyond
doubt, be a _willing_ obedience by each to the rules that make it in its
entirety within the reach of all. About this obedience, however, there
is a certain thing to remember: it must be willing, not enforced. The
laws will of course do all they can to enforce it; but not only can they
never do this completely, but even if they could, they would not produce
morality. Conduct which, if willing, we should call highly moral, we
shall, if enforced only, call nothing more than legal. We do not call a
wild bear tame because it is so well caged that there is no fear of its
attacking us; nor do we call a man good because, though his desires are
evil, we have made him afraid to gratify them. Further, it is not
enough that the obedience in question be willing in the sense that it
does not give us pain. If it is to be a moral quality, it must also give
us positive pleasure. Indeed, it must not so much be obedience to the
law as an impassioned co-operation with it.
Now this, if producible, even though no further moral aim was connected
with it, would undoubtedly be of itself a moral element. Suppose two
pigs, for instance, had only a single wallowing-place, and each would
like naturally to wallow in it for ever. If each pig in turn were to
rejoice to make room for his brother, and were consciously to regulate
his delight in becoming filthy himself by an equal delight in seeing his
brother becoming filthy also, we should doubtless here be in the
presence of a certain moral element. And though this, in a human
society, might not carry us so far as we require to be carried, it
would, without doubt, if producible, carry us a certain way. The
question is, Is this moral element, this impassioned and unselfish
co-operation with the social law, producible, in the absence of any
farther end to which the social law is to be subordinate? The positive
school apparently think it is; and this opinion has a seeming foundation
in fact. We will therefore carefully examine what this foundation is,
and see how far it is really able to support the weight that is laid
upon it.
That fact, in itself a quite undoubted one, is the possession by man of
a certain special and important feeling, which, viewed from its passive
side, we call sympathy, and from its active side, benevolence. It exists
in various degrees in different people, but to some degree or other it
probably exists in all. Most people, for instance, if they hear an
amusing story, at once itch to tell it to an appreciative friend; for
they find that the amusement, if shared, is doubled. Two epicures
together, for the same reason, will enjoy a dinner better than if they
each dined singly. In such cases the enjoyment of another plays the part
of a reflector, which throws one's own enjoyment back on one. Nor is
this all. It is not only true that we often desire others to be pleased
with us; we often desire others to be pleased instead of us. For
instance, if there be but one easy chair in a room, one man will often
give it up to another, and prefer himself to stand, or perhaps sit on
the table. To contemplate discomfort is often more annoying than to
suffer it.
This is the fact in human nature on which the positive school rely for
their practical motive power. It is this sympathy and benevolence that
is the secret of the social union; and it is by these that the rules of
social morality are to be absorbed and attracted into ourselves, and
made the directors of all our other impulses.
The feelings, however, that are thus relied on will be found, on
consideration, to be altogether inadequate. They are undoubted facts, it
is true, and are ours by the very constitution of our nature; but they
do not possess the importance that is assigned to them, and their limits
are soon reached. They are unequal in their distribution; they are
partial and capricious in their action; and they are disturbed and
counterbalanced by the opposite impulse of selfishness, which is just as
much a part of our nature, and which is just as generally distributed.
It must be a very one-sided view of the case that will lead us to deny
this; and by such eclectic methods of observation we can support any
theory we please. Thus there are many stories of unselfish heroism
displayed by rough men on occasions such as shipwrecks, and displayed
quite spontaneously. And did we confine our attention to this single set
of examples, we might naturally conclude that we had here the real
nature of man bursting forth in all its intense entirety--a constant but
suppressed force, which we shall learn by-and-by to utilise generally.
But if we extend our observations a little farther, we shall find
another set of examples, in which selfishness is just as predominant as
unselfishness was in the first set. The sailor, for instance, who might
struggle to save a woman on a sinking ship, will trample her to death to
escape from a burning theatre. And if we will but honestly estimate the
composite nature of man, we shall find that the sailor, in this latter
case, embodies a tendency far commoner, and far more to be counted on,
than he does in the former. No fair student of life or history will, I
think, be able to deny this. The lives of the world's greatest men, be
they Goethes or Napoleons, will be the first to show us that it is so.
Whilst the world's best men, who have been most successful in conquering
their selfish nature, will be the first to bear witness to the
persistent strength of it.
But even giving these unpromising facts the least weight possible, the
case will practically be not much mended. The unselfish impulses, let
them be diffused never so widely, will be found, as a general rule, to
be very limited in power; and to be intense only for short periods, and
under exceptional circumstances. They are intense only--in the absence
of any further motive--when the thing to be won for another becomes
invested for the moment with an abnormal value, and the thing to be lost
by oneself becomes abnormally depreciated; when all intermediate
possibilities are suddenly swept away from us, and the only surviving
alternatives are shame and heroism. But this never happens, except in
the case of great catastrophes, of such, for instance, as a shipwreck;
and thus the only conditions under which an impassioned unselfishness
can be counted on, are amongst the first conditions that we trust to
progress to eliminate. The common state of life, then, when the feelings
are in this normal state of tension, is all that in this connection we
can really be concerned in dealing with. And there, unselfishness,
though as sure a fact as selfishness, is, spontaneously and apart from a
further motive, essentially unequal to the work it is asked to do. Thus,
though as I observed just now, a man may often prefer to sit on a table
and give up the arm-chair to a friend, there are other times when he
will be very loth to do so. He will do so when the pleasure of looking
at comfort is greater than the pleasure of feeling it. And in certain
states of mind and body this is very often the case. But let him be
sleepy and really in need of rest, the selfish impulse will at once
eclipse the unselfish, and, unless under the action of some alien
motive, he will keep the arm-chair for himself. So, too, in the case of
the two epicures, if there be sufficient of the best dainties for both,
each will feel that it is so much the better. But whenever the dainties
in question cannot be divided, it will be the tendency of each to take
them furtively for himself.
And when we come to the conditions of happiness the matter will be just
the same. If without incommoding ourselves we can, as Professor Huxley
says, repress '_all those desires which run counter to the good of
mankind_,' we shall no doubt all willingly do so; only in that case
little more need be said. The '_Civitas Dei_' we are promised may be
left to take care of itself, and it will doubtless very soon begin '_to
rise like an exhalation_.' But if this self-repression be a matter of
great difficulty, and one requiring a constant struggle on our part, it
will be needful for us to intensely realise, when we abstain from any
action, that the happiness it would take from others will be far greater
than the happiness it would give to ourselves. Suppose, for instance, a
man were in love with his friend's wife, and had engaged on a certain
night to take her to the theatre. He would instantly give the engagement
up could he know that the people in the gallery would be burnt to death
if he did not. He would certainly not give it up because by the sight of
his proceedings the moral tone of the stalls might be infinitesimally
lowered; still less would he do so because another wife's husband might
be made infinitely jealous. Whenever we give up any source of personal
happiness for the sake of the happiness of the community at large, the
two kinds of happiness have to be weighed together in a balance. But the
latter, except in very few cases, is at a great disadvantage: only a
part of it, so to speak, can be got into the scale. What adds to my
sense of pleasure in the proportion of a million pounds may be only
taxing society in the proportion of half a farthing a head.
Unselfishness with regard to society is thus essentially a different
thing from unselfishness with regard to an individual. In the latter
case the things to be weighed together are commensurate: not so is the
former. In the latter case, as we have seen, an impassioned
self-devotion may be at times produced by the sudden presentation to a
man of two extreme alternatives; but in the former case such
alternatives are not presentable. I may know that a certain line of
conduct will on the one hand give me great pleasure, and that on the
other hand, if it were practised by everyone, it would produce much
general mischief; but I shall know that my practising it, will, as a
fact, be hardly felt at all by the community, or at all events only in a
very small degree. And therefore my choice is not that of the sailor's
in the shipwreck. It does not lie between saving my life at the expense
of a woman's, or saving a woman's life at the expense of mine. It lies
rather, as it were, between letting her lose her ear-ring and breaking
my own arm.
It will appear, therefore, that the general conditions of an entirely
undefined happiness form an ideal utterly unfitted to counterbalance
individual temptation or, to give even willingness, let alone ardour, to
the self-denials that are required of us. In the first place the
conditions are so vague that even in the extremest cases the individual
will find it difficult to realise that he is appreciably disturbing
them. And in the second place, until he knows that the happiness in
question is something of extreme value he will be unable to feel much
ardour in helping to make it possible. If we knew that the social
organism in its state of completest health had no higher pleasure than
sleep and eating, the cause of its completest health would hardly excite
enthusiasm. And even if we did not rebel against any sacrifices for so
poor a result as this, we should at the best be resigned rather than
blest in making them. The nearest approach to a moral end that the
science of sociology will of itself supply to us is an end that, in all
probability, men will not follow at all, or that will produce in them,
if they do, no happier state than a passionless and passive
acquiescence. If we want anything more than this we must deal with
happiness itself, not with the negative conditions of it. We must
discern the highest good that is within the reach of each of us, and
this may perhaps supply us with a motive for endeavouring to secure the
same blessing for all. But the matter depends entirely on what this
highest good is--on the end to which, given the social health, the
social health will be directed.
The real answer to this question can be given, as I have said before, in
terms of the individual only. Social happiness is a mere set of ciphers
till the unit of personal happiness is placed before it. A man's
happiness may of course depend on other beings, but still it is none the
less contained in himself. If our greatest delight were to see each
other dance the _can-can_, then it might be morality for us all to
dance. None the less would this be a happy world, not because we were
all dancing, but because we each enjoyed the sight of such a spectacle.
Many young officers take intense pride in their regiments, and the
character of such regiments may in a certain sense be called a corporate
thing. But it depends entirely on the personal character of their
members, and all that the phrase really indicates is that a set of men
take pleasure in similar things. Thus it is the boast of one young
officer that the members of his regiment all spend too much, of another
that they all drink too much, of another that they are distinguished for
their high rank, and of another that they are distinguished for the
lowness of their sensuality. What differentiates one regiment from
another is first and before all things some personal source of happiness
common to all its members.
And as it is with the character of a regiment, so too is it with the
character of life in general. When we say that Humanity may become a
glorious thing as a whole, we must mean that each man may attain some
positive glory as an individual. What shall I get? and I? and I? and I?
What do you offer me? and me? and me? This is the first question that
the common sense of mankind asks. '_You must promise something to each
of us_,' it says, '_or very certainly you will be able to promise
nothing to all of us_.' There is no real escape in saying that we must
all work for one another, and that our happiness is to be found in that.
The question merely confronts us with two other facets of itself. What
sort of happiness shall I secure for others? and what sort of happiness
will others secure for me? What will it be like? Will it be worth
having? In the positivist Utopia, we are told, each man's happiness is
bound up in the happiness of all the rest, and is thus infinitely
intensified. All mankind are made a mighty whole, by the fusing power of
benevolence. Benevolence, however, means simply the wishing that our
neighbours were happy, the helping to make them so, and lastly the being
glad that they are so. But happiness must plainly be something besides
benevolence; else, if I know that a man's highest happiness is in
knowing that others are happy, all I shall try to procure for others is
the knowledge that I am happy; and thus the Utopian happiness would be
expressed completely in the somewhat homely formula, '_I am so glad that
you are glad that I am glad_.' But this is, of course, not enough. All
this gladness must be about something besides itself. Our good wishes
for our neighbours must have some farther content than that they shall
wish us well in return. What I wish them and what they wish me must be
something that both they and I, each of us, take delight in for
ourselves. It will certainly be no delight to men to procure for others
what they will take no delight in themselves, if procured by others for
them. '_For a joyful life, that is to say a pleasant life_,' as Sir
Thomas More pithily puts it, '_is either evil; and if so, then thou
shouldest not only help no man thereto, but rather as much as in thee
lieth withdraw all men from it as noisome and hurtful; or else if thou
not only mayest, but also of duty art bound to procure it for others,
why not chiefly for thyself, to whom thou art bound to show as much
favour and gentleness as to others?_' The fundamental question is, then,
what life should a man try to procure for himself? How shall he make it
most joyful? and how joyful will it be when he has done his utmost for
it? It is in terms of the individual, and of the individual only, that
the value of life can at first be intelligibly stated. If the coin be
not itself genuine, we shall never be able to make it so by merely
shuffling it about from hand to hand, nor even by indefinitely
multiplying it. A million sham bank notes will not make us any richer
than a single one. Granting that the riches are really genuine, then the
knowledge of their diffusion may magnify for each of us our own pleasure
in possessing them. But it will only do this if the share that is
possessed by each be itself something very great to begin with. Certain
intense kinds of happiness may perhaps be raised to ecstasy by the
thought that another shares them. But if the feeling in question be
nothing more than cheerfulness, a man will not be made ecstatic by the
knowledge that any number of other people are cheerful as well as he.
When the happiness of two or more people rises to a certain temperature,
then it is true a certain fusion may take place, and there may perhaps
be a certain joint result, arising from the sum of the parts. But below
this melting point no fusion or union takes place at all, nor will any
number of lesser happinesses melt and be massed together into one great
one. Two great wits may increase each other's brilliancy, but two
half-wits will not make a single whole one. A bad picture will not
become good by being magnified, nor will a merely readable novel become
more than readable by the publication of a million copies of it. Suppose
it were a matter of life and death to ten men to walk to York from
London in a day. Were this feat a possible one, they might no doubt each
do their best to help the others to accomplish it. But if it were beyond
the power of each singly, they would not accomplish it as a body, by the
whole ten leaving Charing Cross together, and each of them walking one
tenth of the way. The distance they could all walk would be no greater
than the distance they could each walk. In the same way the value of
human life, as a whole, depends on the capacities of the individual
human being, as an enjoying animal. If these capacities be great, we
shall be eager in our desire to gratify them--certainly for ourselves,
and perhaps also for others; and this second desire may perhaps be great
enough to modify and to guide the first. But unless these capacities
_be_ great, and the means of gratifying them definite, our impulses on
our own behalf will become weak and sluggish, whilst those on behalf of
others will become less able to control them.
It will be apparent farther from this, that just as happiness, unless
some distinct positive quality, gains nothing as an end of action,
either in value or distinctness, by a mere diffusion in the present--by
an extension, as it were, laterally--so will it gain nothing further by
giving it another dimension, and by prospectively increasing it in the
future. We must know what it is first, before we know whether it is
capable of increase. Apart from this knowledge, the conception of
progress and the hope of some brighter destiny can add nothing to that
required _something_, which, so far as sociology can define it for us,
we have seen to be so utterly inadequate. Social conditions, it is true,
we may expect will go on improving; we may hope that the social
machinery will come gradually to run more smoothly. But unless we know
something positive to the contrary, the outcome of all this progress may
be nothing but a more undisturbed ennui or a more soulless sensuality.
The rose-leaves may be laid more smoothly, and yet the man that lies on
them may be wearier or more degraded.
_To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death._
This, for all that sociology can inform us to the contrary, may be the
lesson really taught us by the positive philosophy of progress.
But what the positivists themselves learn from it, is something very
different. The following verses are George Eliot's:
_Oh may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence. So
To live is heaven....
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing us beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity
For which we struggled, groaned, and agonised
With widening retrospect, that bred despair....
That better self shall live till human time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb
Unread for ever. This is life to come,
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, and be to other souls
That cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardour, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense;
So shall I join that choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world._
Here is the positive religion of benevolence and progress, as preached
to the modern world in the name of exact thought, presented to us in an
impassioned epitome. Here is hope, ardour, sympathy, and resolution,
enough and to spare. The first question is,--How are these kindled, and
what are they all about? They must, as we have seen, be about something
that the science of sociology will not discover for us. Nor can they
last, if, like an empty stomach, they prey only upon themselves. They
must have some solid content, and the great thing needful is to discern
this. It is quite true that to suffer, or even to die, will often seem
_dulce et decorum_ to a man; but it will only seem so when the end he
dies or suffers for is, in his estimation, a worthy one. A Christian
might be gladly crucified if by so doing he could turn men from vice to
virtue; but a connoisseur in wine would not be crucified that his best
friend might prefer dry champagne to sweet. All the agony and the
struggles, then, that the positivist saint suffers with such enthusiasm,
depend alike for their value and their possibility on the object that is
supposed to cause them. And in the verses just quoted this object is
indeed named several times; but it is named only incidentally and in
vague terms, as if its nature and its value were self-evident, and could
be left to take care of themselves; and the great thing to be dwelt upon
were the means and not the end: whereas the former are really only the
creatures of the latter, and can have no more honour than the latter is
able to bestow upon them.
Now the only positive ends named in these verses are '_the better
self_,' '_sweet purity_,' and '_smiles that have no cruelty_.' The
conditions of these are _beauteous order_,' and the result of them is
the '_gladness of the world_.' The rest of the language used adds
nothing to our positive knowledge, but merely makes us feel the want of
it. The purest heaven, we are told, that the men of any generation can
look forward to, will be the increased gladness that their right conduct
will secure for a coming generation: and that gladness, when it comes,
will be, as it were, the seraphic song of the blessed and holy dead.
Thus every present, for the positivist, is the future life of the past;
earth is heaven perpetually realising itself; it is, as it were, an
eternal choir-practice, in which the performers, though a little out of
tune at present, are becoming momently more and more perfect. If this be
so, there is a heaven of some sort about us at this moment. There is a
musical gladness every day in our ears, our actual delight in which it
might have been a heaven to our great-grandfathers to have anticipated
in the last century.
Now it is plain that this alleged music is not everywhere. Where, then,
is it? And will it, when we have found it, be found to merit all the
praise that is bestowed upon it? Sociology, as we have seen, may show us
how to secure to each performer his voice or his instrument; but it will
not show us how to make either the voice or the instrument a good one;
nor will it decide whether the orchestra shall perform Beethoven or
Offenbach, or whether the chorus shall sing a penitential psalm or a
drinking song. When we have discovered what the world's highest gladness
can consist of, we will again come to the question of how far such
gladness can be a general end of action.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Vide _Nineteenth Century_, October, 1877.
[10] '_As Mr. Spencer points out, society does not resemble those
organisms which are so highly centralised that the unity of the whole is
the important thing, and every part must die if separated from the rest;
but rather those that will bear separation and reunion; because,
although there is a certain union and organisation of the parts in
regard to one another, yet the far more important fact is the life of
the parts separately. The true health of society depends upon the
communes, the villages and townships, infinitely more than on the form
and pageantry of an imperial government. If in them there is band-work,
union for a common effort, converse in the working out of a common
thought, there the Republic is._'--Professor Clifford, _Nineteenth
Century_, October, 1877.
CHAPTER IV.
GOODNESS AS ITS OWN REWARD.
'_Who chooses me must give, and hazard all he hath._' Inscription on
the Leaden Casket. _Merchant of Venice._
What I have been urging in the last chapter is really nothing more than
the positivists admit themselves. It will be found, if we study their
utterances as a whole, that they by no means believe practically in
their own professions, or consider that the end of action can be either
defined and verified by sociology, or made attractive by sympathy. On
the contrary, they confess plainly how inadequate these are by
themselves, by continually supplementing them with additions from quite
another quarter. But their fault is that this confession is, apparently,
only half conscious with them; and they are for ever reproducing
arguments as sufficient which they have already in other moments
implicitly condemned as meaningless. My aim has been, therefore, to put
these arguments out of court altogether, and safely shut the doors on
them. Hitherto they have played just the part of an idle populace, often
turned out of doors, but as often breaking in again, and confusing with
their noisy cheers a judgment that has not yet been given. Let us have
done, then, with the conditions of happiness till we know what happiness
is. Let us have done with enthusiasm till we know if there is anything
to be enthusiastic about.
I have quoted George Eliot's cheers already, as expressing what this
enthusiasm is. I will now quote her again, as showing how fully she
recognises that its value depends upon its object, and that its only
possible object must be of a definite, and in the first place, of a
personal nature. In her novel of _Daniel Deronda_, the large part of the
interest hangs on which way the heroine's character will develop itself;
and this interest, in the opinion of the authoress, is of a very intense
kind. Why should it be? she asks explicitly. And she gives her answer in
the following very remarkable and very instructive passage:
'_Could there be a slenderer, more insignificant thread,_' she says,
'_in human history, than this consciousness of a girl, busy with her
small inferences of the way in which she could make her life pleasant?
in a time too, when ideas were with fresh vigour making armies of
themselves, and the universal kinship was declaring itself fiercely:
when women on the other side of the world would not mourn for the
husbands and sons who died bravely in a common cause; and men, stinted
of bread, on one side of the world, heard of that willing loss and were
patient; a time when the soul of man was waking the pulses which had for
centuries been beating in him unheard, until their full sense made a new
life of terror or of joy._
'_What in the midst of that mighty drama are girls and their blind
visions? They are the Yea or Nay of that good for which men are enduring
and fighting. In these delicate vessels is borne onward through the ages
the treasure of human affections._'
Now here we come to solid ground at last. Here is an emphatic and frank
admission of all that I was urging in the last chapter; and the required
end of action and test of conduct is brought to a focus and localized.
It is not described, it is true; but a narrow circle is drawn round it,
and our future search for it becomes a matter of comparative ease. We
are in a position now to decide whether it exists, or does not exist. It
consists primarily and before all things in the choice by the individual
of one out of many modes of happiness--the election of a certain
'_way_,' in George Eliot's words, '_in which he will make his life
pleasant_.' There are many sets of pleasure open to him; but there is
one set, it is said, more excellent, beyond comparison, than the others;
and to choose these, and these alone, is what will give us part in the
holy value of life. The choice and the refusal of them is the Yea and
the Nay of all that makes life worth living; and is the source, to the
positivists, of the solemnity, the terrors, and sweetness of the whole
ethical vocabulary. '_What then are the alternative pleasures that life
offers_ me? _In how many ways am_ I _capable of feeling_ my _existence a
blessing? and in what way shall_ I _feel the blessing of it most
keenly_?' This is the great life-question; it may be asked indifferently
by any individual; and in the positivist answer to it, which will be the
same for all, and of universal application, must lie the foundation of
the positive moral system.
And that system, as I have said before, professes to be essentially a
_moral_ one, in the old religious sense of the word. It retains the old
ethical vocabulary; and lays the same intense stress on the old ethical
distinctions. Nor is this a mere profession only. We shall see that the
system logically requires it. One of its chief virtues--indeed the only
virtue in it we have defined hitherto--is, as has been seen, an habitual
self-denial. But a denial of what? Of something, plainly, that if denied
to ourselves, can be conveyed as a negative or positive good to others.
But the good things that are thus transferable cannot plainly be the
'_highest good_,' or morality would consist largely of a surrender of
its own end. This end must evidently be something inward and
inalienable, just as the religious end was. It is a certain inward state
of the heart, and of the heart's affections. For this inward state to
be fully produced, and maintained generally, a certain sufficiency of
material well-being may be requisite; but without this inward state such
sufficiency will be morally valueless. Day by day we must of course have
our daily bread. But the positivists must maintain, just as the
Christians did, that man does not live by bread alone; and that his life
does not consist in the abundance of the things that he possesses. And
thus when they are brought face to face with the matter, we find them
all, with one consent, condemning as false the same allurements that
were condemned by Christianity; and pointing, as it did, to some other
treasure that will not wax old--some water, the man who drinks of which
will never thirst more.
Now what is this treasure--this inward state of the heart? What is its
analysis, and why is it so precious? As yet we are quite in the dark as
to this. No positive moralist has as yet shown us, in any satisfactory
way, either of these things. This statement, I know, will be
contradicted by many; and, until it is explained further, it is only
natural that it should be. It will be said that a positive human
happiness of just the kind needed has been put before the world again
and again; and not only put before it, but earnestly followed and
reverently enjoyed by many. Have not truth, benevolence, purity, and,
above all, pure affection, been, to many, positive ends of action for
their own sakes, without any thought, as Dr. Tyndall says, '_of any
reward or punishment looming in the future_'? Is not virtue followed in
the noblest way, when its followers, if asked what reward they look for,
can say to it, as Thomas Aquinas said to Christ, '_Nil nisi te,
Domine_'? And has not it so been followed? and is not the positivist
position, to a large extent at any rate, proved?
Is it not true, as has been said by a recent writer, that[11] '_lives
nourished, and invigorated by_ [a purely human] _ideal have been, and
still may be, seen amongst us, and the appearance of but a single
example proves the adequacy of the belief_?'
I reply that the fact is entirely true, and the inference entirely
false. And this brings me at once to a point I have before alluded
to--to the most subtle source of the entire positivist error--the source
secret and unsuspected, of so much rash confidence.
The positive school can, and do, as we have seen, point to certain
things in life which have every appearance, at first sight, of adequate
moral ends. Their adequacy seems to be verified by every right feeling,
and also by practical experiment. But there is one great fact that is
forgotten. The positive school, when they deal with life, profess to
exhibit its resources to us wholly free from the false aids of
religion. They profess (if I may coin a word) to have _de-religionized_
it before they deal with it. But about this matter they betray a most
strange ignorance. They think the task is far simpler than it is. They
seem to look on religion as existing nowhere except in its pure form, in
the form of distinct devotional feeling, or in the conscious assents of
faith; and, these once got rid of, they fancy that life is
de-religionized. But the process thus far is really only begun; indeed,
as far as immediate results go, it is hardly even begun; for it is
really but a very small proportion of religion that exists pure. The
greater part of it has entered into combination with the acts and
feelings of life, thus forming as it were, a kind of amalgam with them,
giving them new properties, a new colour, a new consistence. To
_de-religionize_ life, then, it is not enough to condemn creeds and to
abolish prayers. We must further sublimate the beliefs and feelings,
which prayers and creeds hold pure, out of the lay life around us. Under
this process, even if imperfectly performed, it will soon become clear
that religion in greater or less proportions is lurking everywhere. We
shall see it yielded up even by things in which we should least look for
it--by wit, by humour, by secular ambition, by most forms of vice, and
by our daily light amusements. Much more shall we see it yielded up by
heroism, by purity, by affection, and by love of truth--by all those
things that the positivists most specially praise.
The positivists think, it would seem, that they had but to kill God, and
that his inheritance shall be ours. They strike out accordingly the
theistic beliefs in question, and then turn instantly to life: they sort
its resources, count its treasures, and then say, '_Aim at this, and
this, and this. See how beautiful is holiness; see how rapturous is
pleasure. Surely these are worth seeking for their own sakes, without
any "reward or punishment looming in the future."_' They find, in fact,
the interests and the sentiments of the world's present life--all the
glow and all the gloom of it--lying before them like the colours on a
painter's palette, and think they have nothing to do but set to work and
use them. But let them wait a moment; they are in far too great a hurry.
The palette and its colours are not nearly ready for them.
One of the colours of life--religion, that is--a colour which, by their
own admission, has been hitherto an important one, they have swept clean
away. They have swept it clean away, and let them remember why they have
done so. It may be a pleasing colour, or it may not: that is a matter of
taste. But the reason why it is to be got rid of is that it is not a
fast colour. It is found to fade instantly in the spreading sunlight of
knowledge. It is rapidly getting dim and dull and dead. When once it is
gone, we shall never be able to restore it, and our future pictures of
life must be tinted without its aid. They therefore profess loudly that
they will employ it no longer.
But there is this point, this all-important point, that quite escapes
them. They sweep the colour, in its pure state, clean off the palette;
and then profess to show us by experiment that they can get on perfectly
well without it. But they never seem to suspect that it may be mixed up
with the colours they retain, and be the secret of their depth and
lustre. Let them see whether religion be not lurking there, as a subtle
colouring principle in all their pigments, even a grain of it producing
effects that else were quite impossible. Let them only begin this
analysis, and it will very soon be clear to them that to cleanse life of
religion is not so simple a process as they seem to fancy it. Its actual
dogmas may be readily put away from us; not so the effect which these
dogmas have worked during the course of centuries. In disguised forms
they are around us everywhere; they confront us in every human interest,
in every human pleasure. They have beaten themselves into life; they
have eaten their way into it. Like a secret sap they have flavoured
every fruit in the garden. They are like a powerful drug, a stimulant,
that has been injected into our whole system.
If then we could appraise the vigour and value of life independent of
religion, we can draw no direct conclusions from observing it in its
present state. Before such observations can teach us anything, there is
a great deal that will have to be made allowance for: and the positive
school, when they reason from life as it is, are building therefore on
an utterly unsound foundation. It is emphatically untrue to say that a
single example in the present day, or for matter of that any number of
examples, either goes or can go any way towards proving the adequacy of
any non-religious formula. For all such formulæ have first to be further
analysed before we know how far they are really non-religious; and
secondly the religious element that will be certainly found existing in
them will have, hypothetically, to be removed.
It would be well if the positive school would spend in this spiritual
analysis but a little of that skill they have attained to in their
analysis of matter. In their experiments, for instance, on spontaneous
generation, what untold pains have been taken! With what laborious
thought, with what emulous ingenuity, have they struggled to completely
sterilise the fluids in which they are to seek for the new production of
life! How jealously do they guard against leaving there any already
existing germs! How easily do they tell us their experiments may be
vitiated by the smallest oversight!
Surely spiritual matters are worthy of an equally careful treatment.
For what we have here to study is not the production of the lowest forms
of animal life, but the highest forms of human happiness. These were
once thought to be always due to religion. The modern doctrine is that
they are producible without such aid. Let us treat, then, the beauty of
holiness, the love of truth, '_the treasure of human affection_,' and so
forth, as Dr. Tyndall has treated the infusions in which life is said to
originate. Let us boil them down, so to speak, and destroy every germ of
religion in them, and then see how far they will generate the same
ecstatic happiness. And let us treat in this way vice no less than
virtue. Having once done this, we may honestly claim whatever yet
remains to us. Then, we shall see what materials of happiness we can, as
positive thinkers, call our own. Then, a positive moral system, if any
such be possible, will begin to have a real value for us--then, but not
till then.
Such an analysis as this must be naturally a work of time; and much of
it must be performed by each one of us for ourselves. But a sample of
the operation can be given here, which will show plainly enough its
nature, and the ultimate results of it. I shall begin, for this purpose,
with reconsidering the moral end generally, and the three primary
characteristics that are ascribed, by all parties, to it, as
essentials. I shall point out, generally also, how much of religion is
embodied in all these; and shall then proceed to one or two concrete
examples, taken from the pleasures and passions that animate the life
around us.
These three characteristics of the moral end are its inwardness, its
importance, and, within certain limits, its absolute character.
I begin with its inwardness. I have spoken of this several times
already, but the matter is so important that it will well bear
repetition. By calling the moral end inward, I mean that it resides
primarily not in action, but in motives to action; in the will, not in
the deed; not in what we actually do, but in what we actually endeavour
to do; in the love we give, rather than in the love that we receive.
What defiles a man is that which comes out of his heart--evil thoughts,
murders, adulteries. The thoughts may never find utterance in a word,
the murders and adulteries may never be fulfilled in act; and yet, if a
man be restrained, not by his own will, but only by outer circumstances,
his immorality will be the same. The primary things we are '_responsible
for_,' observes a recent positive writer,[12] are '_frames of mind into
which we knowingly and willingly work ourselves_': and when these are
once wrong, he adds, '_they are wrong for ever: no accidental failure
of their good or evil fruits can possibly alter that_.' And as with what
is wrong or vicious, so with what is right or virtuous; this in a like
manner proceeds out of the mind or heart. '_The gladness of true
heroism_,' says Dr. Tyndall, '_visits the heart of him who is really
competent to say, "I court truth."_' It is not, be it observed, the
objective attainment of truth that creates the gladness. It is the
subjective desire, the subjective resolution. The moral end, for the
positivist just as much as for the believer, is a certain inward state
of the heart, or mind--a state which will of necessity, if possible,
express itself in action, but whose value is not to be measured by the
success of that expression. The battle-ground of good and evil is within
us; and the great human event is the issue of the struggle between them.
And this leads us on to the second point. The language used on all hands
respecting this struggle, implies that its issue is of an importance
great out of all proportion to our own consciousness of the results of
it, nay, even that it is independent of our consciousness. It is implied
that though a man may be quite ignorant of the state of his own heart,
and though no one else can so much as guess at it, what that state is is
of great and peculiar moment. If this were not so, and the importance of
our inner state had reference only to our own feelings about it,
self-deception would be as good as virtue. To believe we were upright,
pure, and benevolent would be as good as to be so. We might have all the
pleasures of morality with none of its inconveniences; for it is easy,
if I may borrow a phrase of Mr. Tennyson's, to become _so false that we
take ourselves for true_; and thus, tested by any pain or joy that we
ourselves were conscious of, the results of the completest falsehood
would be the same as those of the completest virtue.
But let a man be never so perfect an instance of a result like this, no
positivist moralist would contend that he was virtuous, or that he could
be said, at his death, to have found the true treasure of life. On the
contrary his career would be regarded as, in the profoundest sense, a
tragedy. It is for this reason that such a value is set at present upon
feminine purity, and that we are accustomed to call the woman ruined
that has lost it. The outer harm done may not be great, and may lead to
no ill consequences. The harm is all within: the tragedy is in the soul
itself. But--and this is more important still--even here the harm may
not be recognised: the act in question may lead to no remorse; and yet
despite this, the case will be made no better. On the contrary it will
be made a great deal worse. Any father or husband would recognise this,
who was not professedly careless about all moral matters altogether. It
would not, for instance, console a positivist for his daughter's
seduction to know that the matter was hushed up, and that it gave the
lady herself no concern whatever. It is implied in the language of all
who profess to regard morality, that whether the guilty person be
conscious or no of any remorse or sorrow, the same harm has been done by
what we call guilt.
There is, however (and this brings us to the third point), a very large
part of the world that, as a fact, no matter what it professes, really
sets upon morality no true value whatever. If it has ever realised at
all what morality is, it has done so only partially; it has been more
impressed with its drawbacks than with its attractions, and it becomes
practically happier and more contented, the more it forgets the very
idea of virtue. But it is implied, as we have seen, in the usual
language of all of us that, let the vicious be as happy as possible,
they have no right to such a happiness, and that if they choose to take
it, it will in some way or other be the worse for them. This language
evidently implies farther that there is some standard by which happiness
is to be measured, quite apart from its completeness, and from our
individual desire for it. That standard is something absolute, beyond
and above the taste of any single man or of any body of men. It is a
standard to which the human race can be authoritatively ordered to
conform, or be despised, derided, and hated, if it refuse to do so. It
is implied that those who find their happiness in virtue have a right to
order and to force, if possible, all others to do the same. Unless we
believed this there would be no such thing as moral earnestness in the
propagation of any system. There could, indeed, be no such thing as
propagandism at all. If a man (to use an example of Mill's) preferred to
be a contented pig rather than a discontented Socrates, we should have
no positive reason for thinking him wrong; even did we think so we
should have no motive for telling him so; even if we told him, we should
have no means of convincing him.
Those, then, who regard morality as the rule of action, and the one key
that can unlock for each of us the true treasure of life, who talk of
things being noble and sacred and heroic, who call our responsibilities
and our privileges[13] awful, and who urge on a listless world the
earnestness and the solemnity of existence--all those, I say, who use
such language as this, imply of the moral end three necessary things:
first, that its essence is inward, in the heart of man; secondly, that
its value is incalculable, and its attainment the only true happiness
for us; thirdly, that its standard is something absolute, and not in
the competence of any man or of all men to alter or abolish. That this
is true may be very easily seen. Deny any one of these propositions; say
that the moral end consists in something outward and alienable, not in
something inward and inalienable; that its importance is small, and
second to many other things; that its standard is not absolute, but
varies according to individual taste; and morality becomes at once
impossible to preach, and not worth preaching.
Now for all these characteristics of the end of life, the theism that
modern thought is rejecting could offer a strictly logical basis. And
first, as to its importance. Here it may be said, certainly, that theism
cuts the knot, and does not untie it. But at all events it gets rid of
it; and in the following way. The theist confesses freely that the
importance of the moral end is a thing that the facts of life, as we now
know them, will never properly explain to us. It can at present be
divined and augured only; its value is one of promise rather than of
performance; and the possession itself is a thing that passes
understanding. It belongs to a region of mystery into which neither
logic nor experiment will ever suffice to carry us; and whose secrets
are beyond the reach of any intellectual aeronaut. But it is a part of
the theistic creed that such a region is; and that the things that pass
understanding are the most important things of life. Nothing would be
gained, however, by postulating merely a mystery--an unknowable. This
must be so far known by the theist, that he knows its connection with
himself. He must know, too, that if this connection is to have any
effect on him, it must be not merely temporary, but permanent and
indissoluble. Such a connection he finds in his two distinctive
doctrines--the existence of a personal God, which _gives_ him the
connection; and his own personal immortality, which _perpetuates_ it.
Thus the theist, upon his own theory, has an eye ever upon him. He is in
constant relationship with a conscious omnipotent Being, in whose
likeness he is in some sort formed, and to which he is in some sort kin.
To none of his actions is this Being indifferent; and with this Being
his relations for good or evil will never cease. Thus, though he may not
realise their true nature now, though he may not realise how infinitely
good the good is, or how infinitely evil the evil, there is a day in
store for him when his eyes will be opened, and what he now sees only
through a glass darkly, he will see face to face.
The objectivity of the moral end--or rather the objective standard of
the subjective end--is explained in the same way. The standard is God's
will, not man's immediate happiness. And yet to this will, as soon as,
by natural or supernatural means, we discern it, the Godlike part of
our nature at once responds: it at once acknowledges it as eternal and
divine, although we can give no logical reasons for such acknowledgment.
By the light, too, of these same beliefs, the inwardness of the moral
end assumes an explicable meaning. Man's primary duty is towards God;
his secondary duty is towards his brother men; and it is only from the
filial relation that the fraternal springs. The moral end, then, is so
precious in the eyes of the theist, because the inward state that it
consists of is agreeable to what God wills--a God who reads the heart,
and who cannot be deceived. And the theist's peace or gladness in his
highest moral actions springs not so much from the consciousness of what
he does or is, as of the reasons why he does or is it--reasons that
reach far away beyond the earth and its destinies, and connect him with
some timeless and holy mystery.
Thus theism, whether it be true or no, can give a logical and a full
account of the supposed nature of the moral end, and of its supposed
importance. Let us turn now to positivism, and consider what is its
position. The positivist, we must remember, conceives of the moral end
in the same way, and sets upon it the same value. Let us see how far his
own premisses will give him any support in this. These premisses, so far
as they differ from those of theism, consist of two great denials:
there is no personal God, and there is no personal immortality. We will
glance rapidly at the direct results of these.
In the first place, they confine all the life with which we can have the
least moral connection to the surface of this earth, and to the limited
time for which life and consciousness can exist upon it. They isolate
the moral law, as I shall show more clearly hereafter, from any law or
force in the universe that may be wider and more permanent. When the
individual dies, he can only be said to live by metaphor, in the results
of his outward actions. When the race dies, in no thinkable way can we
say that it will live at all. Everything will then be as though it never
had been. Whatever humanity may have done before its end arrives,
however high it may have raised itself, however low it may have sunk
itself,
_The event
Will trammel up the consequence, and catch
With its success surcease_.
All the vice of the world, and all its virtue, all its pleasures and all
its pains, will have effected nothing. They will all have faded like an
unsubstantial pageant, and not left a wrack behind.
Here, then, the importance of morality at once changes both its
dimensions and its kind. It is confined within narrow limitations of
space and time. It is no longer a thing we can talk vaguely about, or
to which any sounding but indefinite phrases will be applicable. We can
no longer say either to the individual or the race,
_Choose well, and your choice is
Brief, but yet endless._[14]
We can only say that it is brief, and that bye and bye what it was will
be no matter to anyone.
Still within these limits it may be said, certainly, that it is a great
thing for us that we should be happy; and if it be true that the moral
end brings the greatest happiness, then it is man's greatest achievement
to attain to the moral end. But when we say that the greatest happiness
resides in the moral end, we must be careful to see what it is we mean.
We may mean that as a matter of fact men generally give a full assent to
this, and act accordingly, which is the most obvious falsehood that
could be uttered on any subject; or we may mean--indeed, if we mean
anything we must mean--that they would give a full assent, and act
accordingly, could their present state of mind undergo a complete
change, and their eyes be opened, which at present are fast closed. But
according to the positivist theory, this hypothesis is in most cases an
impossibility. The moral end, as we have seen, is an inward state of the
heart; and the heart, on the showing of the positivists, is for each
man an absolute solitude. No one can gain admission to it but by his
assistance; and to the larger part no one can ever gain admission at
all.
_Thus in the seas of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal myriads live alone._
So says Mr. Matthew Arnold; and the gentle Keble utters the same
sentiment, remarking, with a delicate pathos, how seldom those even who
have known us best and longest
_Know half the reason why we smile or sigh._
Thus in the recesses of his own soul each man is, for the positivist, as
much alone as if he were the only conscious thing in the universe; and
his whole inner life, when he dies, will, to use some words of George
Eliot's that I have already quoted,
_Be gathered like a scroll within the tomb,
Unread for ever._
No one shall enquire into his inward thoughts, much less shall anyone
judge him for them. To no one except himself can he in any way have to
answer for them.
Such is the condition of the individual according to the positivist
theory. It is evident, therefore, that one of the first results of
positivism is to destroy even the rudiments of any machinery by which
one man could govern, with authority, the inward kingdom of another;
and the moral imperative is reduced to an empty vaunt. For what can be
an emptier flourish than for one set of men, and these a confessed
minority, to proclaim imperious laws to others, which they can never get
the others to obey, and which are essentially meaningless to the only
people to whom they are not superfluous? Suppose that, on positive
grounds, I find pleasure in humility, and my friend finds pleasure in
pride, and so far as we can form a judgment the happiness of us both is
equal; what possible grounds can I have for calling my state better than
his? Were I a theist, I should have the best of grounds, for I should
believe that hereafter my friend's present contentment would be
dissipated, and would give place to despair. But as a positivist, if his
contentment do but last his lifetime, what can I say except this, that
he has chosen what, for him, was his better part for ever, and no God or
man will ever take it away from him? To say then that his immoral state
was worse than my moral state would be a phrase incapable of any
practical meaning. It might mean that, could my friend be made to think
as I do, he would be happier than he is at present; but we have here an
impossible hypothesis, and an unverifiable conclusion. It is true enough
that I might present to my friend some image of my own inward state, and
of all the happiness it gave me; but if, having compared his happiness
and mine as well as he could, he still liked his own best, exhortation
would have no power, and reproach no meaning.
Here, then, are three results--simple, immediate, and necessary--of
positivism, on the moral end. Of the three characteristics at present
supposed essential to it, positivism eliminates two and materially
modifies the third.
In the first place, the importance of the moral end is altogether
changed in character. It has nothing in it whatever of the infinite, and
a scientific forecast can already see the end of it.
In the second place, it is nothing absolute, and not being absolute is
incapable of being enforced.
In the third place, its value, such as it is, is measured only by the
_conscious_ happiness that its possession gives us, or the conscious
pains that its loss gives us.
Still it may be contended with plausibility that the moral end, when
once seen, is sufficient to attract us by its own inalienable charm, and
can hold its own independently of any further theories as to its nature
and its universality. It remains now to come to practical life, and see
if this really be so; to see if the pleasures in life that are supposed
the highest will not lose their attractiveness when robbed of the three
characteristics of which the positive theory robs them.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Vide _Pessimism_, by James Sully.
[12] Professor Clifford; 'Ethics of Belief,' _Contemporary Review_, Jan.
1877.
[13] '_An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should
help to create a world in which posterity will live!_'--Professor
Clifford.
[14] Goethe, translated by Carlyle.
CHAPTER V.
LOVE AS A TEST OF GOODNESS.
[Greek: Erôta de, ton tyrannon andrôn,
Ton tas Aphroditas
Philtatôn thalamôn
Klêdouchon, ou sebizomen,
Perthonta.]--_Euripides._
I will again re-state, in other words than my own, the theory we are now
going to test by the actual facts of life. '_The assertion_,' says
Professor Huxley, '_that morality is in any way dependent on certain
philosophical problems, produces the same effect on my mind as if one
should say that a man's vision depends on his theory of sight, or that
he has no business to be sure that ginger is hot in his mouth, unless he
has formed definite views as to the nature of ginger_.' Or, to put the
matter in slightly different language, the sorts of happiness, we are
told, that are secured to us by moral conduct are facts, so far as
regards our own consciousness of them, as simple, as constant and as
universal, as is the perception of the outer world secured to us by our
eyesight, or as the sensation formed on the palate by the application of
ginger to it.
Love, for instance, according to this view, is as simple a delight for
men in its highest forms as it is for animals in its lowest. What George
Eliot calls '_the treasure of human affection_' depends as little for
its value on any beliefs outside itself as does the treasure of animal
appetite; and just as no want of religious faith can deprive the animals
of the last, so no want of religious faith can deprive mankind of the
first. It will remain a stable possession to us, amid the wreck of
creeds, giving life a solemn and intense value of its own. It will never
fail us as a sure test of conduct. Whatever guides us to this treasure
we shall know is moral; whatever tends to withdraw us from it we shall
know is immoral.
Such is the positivist theory as to all the higher pleasures of life, of
which affection confessedly is one of the chief, and also the most
obviously human. Let us proceed now from generalities to special
concrete facts, and see how far this theory is borne out by them. And we
can find none better than those which are now before us--the special
concrete facts of affection, and of sexual affection in particular.
The affection of man for woman--or, as it will be best to call it,
love--has been ever since time was, one of the chief elements in the
life of man. But it was not till Christianity had very fully developed
itself that it assumed the peculiar importance that is now claimed for
it. For the ancient world it was a passion sure to come to most men, and
that would bring joy or sorrow to them as the case might be. The
worldly wisdom of some convinced them that it gave more joy than sorrow;
so they took and used it as long as it chanced to please them. The
worldly wisdom of others convinced them that it gave more sorrow than
joy, so they did all they could, like Lucretius, to school themselves
into a contempt for it. But for the modern world it is on quite a
different footing, and its value does not depend on such a chance
balance of pains and pleasures. The latter are not of the same nature as
the former, and so cannot be outweighed by them. In the judgment of the
modern world,
'_Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all_.
To love, in fact, though not exactly said to be incumbent upon all men,
is yet endowed with something that is almost of the nature of a duty. If
a man cannot love, it is looked on as a sort of moral misfortune, if not
as a moral fault in him. And when a man can love, and does love
successfully, then it is held that his whole nature has burst out into
blossom. The imaginative literature of the modern world centres chiefly
about this human crisis; and its importance in literature is but a
reflection of its importance in life. It is, as it were, the sun of the
world of sentiment--the source of its lights and colours, and also of
its shadows. It is the crown of man's existence; it gives life its
highest quality; and, if we can believe what those who have known it
tell us, earth under its influence seems to be melting into, and to be
almost joined with, heaven.
All this language, however, about love, no matter how true in a certain
sense it may be, is emphatically true about it in a certain sense only,
and is by no means to be taken without reserve. It is emphatically not
true about love in general, but only about love as modified in a certain
special way. The form of the affection, so to speak, is more important
than the substance of it. It will need but little consideration to show
us that this is so. Love is a thing that can take countless forms; and
were not the form, for the modern world, the thing of the first
importance, the praise bestowed upon all forms of it would be equal, or
graduated only with reference to intensity. But the very reverse of this
is the case really. In our estimate of an affection, its intensity,
though doubtless of great importance, is yet of an importance that is
clearly secondary. Else things that the modern world regards as the most
abominable might be on a level with the things it regards as most pure
and holy; the lovers of Athens might even put to shame with their
passion the calm sacramental constancy of many a Christian pair; and the
whole fabric of modern morals would be undermined. For, according to
the modern conception of morals, love can not only give life its highest
quality, but its lowest also. If it can raise man to the angels, it can
also sink him below the beasts; and as to its intensity, it is a force
which will carry him in the one direction just as well as the other.
Kind and not degree is the first thing needful. It is the former, and
not the latter, that essentially separates David and Jonathan from
Harmodius and Aristogeiton, St. Elizabeth from Cleopatra, the beloved
disciple from Antinous. How shall we love? is the great question for us.
It comes long before, How much shall we love?
Let us imagine a bride and bridegroom of the type that would now be most
highly reverenced, and try to understand something of what their
affection is. It is, of course, impossible here to treat such a subject
adequately; for, as Mr. Carlyle says, '_except musically, and in the
language of poetry, it can hardly be so much as spoken about_.' But
enough for the present purpose can perhaps be said. In the first place,
then, the affection in question will be seen to rest mainly upon two
things--firstly, on the consciousness of their own respective characters
on the part of each; and, secondly, on the idea formed by each of the
character of the other. Each must have a faith, for instance, in his or
her own purity, and each must have a like faith, also in the purity of
the other. Thus, to begin with the first requisites, a man can only
love a woman in the highest sense when he does so with a perfectly clear
conscience. There must be no obstacle between them which shocks his
sense of right, or which, if known by the woman, would shock hers. Were
the affection indulged in, in spite of such an obstacle, its fine
quality would be injured, no matter how great its intensity; and,
instead of a moral blessing, it would become a moral curse. An exquisite
expression of the necessity of this personal sense of rightness may be
read into the well-known lines,
_I could not love thee, dear, so well,
Loved I not honour more._
Nor shall we look on _honour_ here as having reference only to external
acts and conditions. It has reference equally, if not more, to the
inward state of the heart. The man must be conscious not only that he is
loving the right woman, but that he is loving her in the right way. '_If
I loved not purity more than you_,' he would say to her, '_I were not
worthy of you_.'
And further, just as he requires to possess this taintless conscience
himself, so does he require to be assured that the like is possessed by
her. Unless he knows that she loves purity more than him, there is no
meaning in his aspiration that he may be found worthy of her. The gift
of her affection that is of such value to him, is not of value because
it is affection simply, but because it is affection of a high kind; and
its elevation is of more consequence to him than its intensity, or even
than its continuance. He would sooner that at the expense of its
intensity it remained pure, than that at the expense of its purity it
remained intense. Othello was certainly not a husband of the highest
type, and yet we see something of this even in his case. His sufferings
at his wife's supposed inconstancy have doubtless in them a large
selfish element. Much of them is caused by the mere passion of jealousy.
But the deepest sting of all does not lie here. It lies rather in the
thought of what his wife has done to herself, than of what she has done
to him. This is what overcomes him.
_The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets,
Is hushed within the hollow mine of earth,
And will not hear it_.
He could have borne anything but a soul's tragedy like this:
_Alas! to make me
A fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet I could bear that too, well--very well:
But there, where I have garnered up my heart,
Where I must either live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!_
Whenever he was with her, Desdemona might still be devoted to him. She
might only give to Cassio what she could not give to her husband. But to
Othello this would be no comfort. The fountain would be polluted '_from
which his current runs_'; and though its waters might still flow for
him, he would not care to touch them. If this feeling is manifest in
such a love as Othello's, much more is it manifest in love of a higher
type. It is expressed thus, for instance, by the heroine of Mrs.
Craven's '_Récit d'une Soeur_.' '_I can indeed say_,' she says, '_that
we never loved each other so much as when we saw how we both loved
God:_' and again, '_My husband would not have loved me as he did, if he
had not loved God a great deal more._' This language is of course
distinctly religious; but it embodies a meaning that is appreciated by
the positive school as well. In positivist language it might be
expressed thus: '_My husband would not have loved me as he did, if he
would not, sooner than love me in any other way, have ceased to love me
altogether._' It is clear that this sentiment is proper, nay essential,
to positivist affection, just as well as to Christian. Any pure and
exalted love would at once change its character, if, without any
further change, it merely believed it were free to change it. Its
strongest element is the consciousness, not that it is of such a
character only, but that this character is the right one. The ideal
bride and bridegroom, the ideal man and wife, would not value purity as
they are supposed to do, did they not believe that it was not only
different from impurity, but essentially and incalculably better than
it. For the positivist, just as much as the Christian, this sense of
rightness in love is interfused with the affection proper, and does as
it were give wings to it. It far more than makes good for the lovers any
loss of intensity that may be created by the chastening down of passion:
and figuratively at least, it may be said to make them conscious that
'_underneath them are the everlasting arms_.'
Here then in love, as the positive school at present offer it to us, are
all these three characteristics to which that school, as we have seen,
must renounce all right. It is characterised as conforming to some
special and absolute standard, of which no positive account can be
given; the conformity is inward, and so cannot be enforced; and for all
that positive knowledge can show us, its importance may be a dream.
We shall realise this better if we consider a love from which these
three characteristics have, as far as possible, been abstracted--a love
which professes frankly to rest upon its own attractions, and which
repudiates all such epithets as worse or better. This will at once show
us not only of what various developments the passion of love is capable,
but also how false it is to imagine that the highest kind need naturally
be the most attractive.
I have quoted Othello, and Mrs. Craven's heroine as types of love when
religionized. We will go to the modern Parisian school for the type of
love when de-religionized--a school which, starting from the same
premisses as do the positive moralists, yet come to a practical teaching
that is singularly different. And let us remember that just as the ideal
we have been considering already, is the ideal most ardently looked to
by one part of the world, so is the ideal we are going to consider now,
looked to with an equal ardour by another part of the world. The writer
in particular from whom I am about to quote has been one of the most
popular of all modern romancers; and has been hailed by men of the most
fastidious culture as a preacher to these latter generations of a bolder
and more worthy gospel. '_This_,'[15] says one of the best known of our
living poets, of the work that I select to quote from--
_This is the golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty._
Of this '_holy writ_' the chief theme is love. Let us go on to see how
love is there presented to us.
'_You know_,' says Théophile Gautier's best-known hero, in a letter to a
friend, '_you know the eagerness with which I have sought for physical
beauty, the importance I attach to outward form, and how the world I am
in love with is the world that the eyes can see: or to put the matter in
more conventional language, I am so corrupt and blasé that my faith in
moral beauty is gone, and my power of striving after it also. I have
lost the faculty to discern between good and evil, and this loss has
well nigh brought me back to the ignorance of the child or savage. To
tell the plain truth, nothing seems to me to be worthy either of praise
or blame, and I am but little perturbed by even the most abnormal
actions. My conscience is deaf and dumb. Adultery seems to me the most
commonplace thing possible. I see nothing shocking in a young girl
selling herself.'... 'I find that the earth is all as fair as heaven,
and virtue for me is nothing but the perfection of form.' 'Many a time
and long_,' he continues farther on, '_have I paused in some cathedral,
under the shadow of the marble foliage, when the lights were quivering
in through the stained windows, when the organ unbidden made a low
murmuring of itself, and the wind was breathing amongst the pipes; and I
have plunged my gaze far into the pale blue depths of the almond-shaped
eyes of the Madonna. I have followed with a tender reverence the curves
of that wasted figure of hers, and the arch of her eyebrows, just
visible and no more than that. I have admired her smooth and lustrous
brow, her temples with their transparent chastity, and her cheeks shaded
with a sober virginal colour, more tender than the colour of a
peach-flower. I have counted one by one the fair and golden lashes that
threw their tremulous shade upon it. I have traced out with care in the
subdued tone that surrounds her, the evanescent lines of her throat, so
fragile and inclined so modestly. I have even lifted with an adventuring
hand the folds of her tunic, and have seen unveiled that bosom, maiden
and full of milk, that has never been pressed by any except divine lips.
I have traced out the rare clear veins of it, even to their faintest
branchings. I have laid my finger on it, to draw the white drops forth,
of the draught of heaven. I have so much as touched with my lips the
very bud of the_ rosa mystica.
'_Well, and I confess it honestly, all this immaterial beauty, this
thing so winged and so aerial that one knows well enough it is soon
going to fly away from one, has never moved me to any great degree. I
love the Venus Anadyomene better, better a thousand times. These
old-world eyes, slightly raised at the corners! these lips so pure and
so firmly chiselled, so amorous, and so fit for kissing! this low,
broad brow! these tresses with the curves in them of the sea water, and
bound behind her head in a knot, negligently! these firm and shining
shoulders! this back, with its thousand alluring contours! all these
fair and rounded outlines, this air of superhuman vigour in a body so
divinely feminine--all this enraptures and enchants me in a way of which
you can have no idea--you the Christian and the philosopher._
'_Mary, despite the humble air affected by her, is a deal too haughty
for me. It is as much as her foot does, swathed in its white coverings,
if it just touches the earth, now purpling where the old serpent
writhes. Her eyes are the loveliest eyes in the world; but they are
always turned heavenwards, or else they are cast down. They never look
you straight in the face. They have never served as the mirror of a
human form.... Venus comes, from the sea to take possession of the
world, as a goddess who loves men should--quite naked and quite alone.
Earth is more to her liking than is Olympus, and amongst her lovers she
has more men than gods. She drapes herself in no faint veils of mystery.
She stands straight upright, her dolphin behind her, and her foot upon
her opal-coloured shell. The sun strikes full upon her smooth limbs, and
her white hand holds in air the waves of her fair locks, which old
father Ocean has sprinkled with his most perfect pearls. One can see
her. She hides nothing; for modesty was only made for those who have no
beauty. It is an invention of the modern world; the child of the
Christian contempt for form and matter._
'_Oh ancient world! all that you held in reverence is held in scorn by
us. Thine idols are overthrown in the dust; fleshless anchorites clad in
rags and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, and their
shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched themselves on
the pedestals of thy fair desirable gods. The Christ has enveloped the
whole world in his winding-sheet.... Oh purity, plant of bitterness,
born on a blood-soaked soil, and whose degenerate and sickly blossom
expands with difficulty in the dank shade of cloisters, under a chill
baptismal rain; rose without scent, and spiked all round with thorns,
thou hast taken the place for us of the glad and gracious roses, bathed
with nard and wine, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!_
'_The ancient world knew thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never
enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume. In that vigorous and
healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully.
Purity, mysticism, melancholy--three words unknown to thee, three new
maladies brought into our life by the Christ!... For me, I look on
woman in the old world manner, like a fair slave, made only for our
pleasures. Christianity, in my eyes, has done nothing to rehabilitate
her.... To say the truth, I cannot conceive for what reason there should
be this desire in woman to be looked on as on a level with men.... I
have made some love-verses in my time, or at least something that
aspired to pass for such ... and there is not a vestige in them of the
modern feeling of love.... There is nothing there, as in all the
love-poetry since the Christian era, of a soul which, because it loves,
begs another soul to love it back again; nothing there of a blue and
shining lake, which begs a stream to pour itself into its bosom, that
both together they may mirror the stars of heaven; nothing there of a
pair of ring-doves, opening their wings together, that they may both
together fly to the same nest._'[16]
Such is the account the hero gives of the nature of his love for woman.
Nor does he give this account regretfully, or think that it shows him to
be in any diseased condition. It shows rather a return, on his part, to
a health that others have lost. As he looks round upon the modern world
and the purity that George Eliot says in her verses she would die for,
'_Woman_,' he exclaims mournfully, '_is become the symbol of moral and
physical beauty. The real fall of man was on the birthday of the babe
of Bethlehem_.'[17] It will be instructive to notice further that these
views are carried out by him to their full legitimate consequences, even
though this, to some degree, is against his will. '_Sometimes_,' he
says, '_I try to persuade myself that such passions are abominable, and
I say as much to myself in as severe a way as I can. But the words come
only from my lips. They are arguments that I make. They are not
arguments that I feel. The thing in question really seems quite natural
to me, and anyone else in my place would, it seems to me, do as I
do._'[18]
Nor is this conception of love peculiar to the hero only. The heroine's
conception is its exact counterpart, and exactly fits it. The heroine as
completely as the hero has freed herself from any discernment between
good and evil. She recoils from abnormal impurity no more than from
normal, and the climax of the book is her full indulgence in both.
Now here we have a specimen of love raised to intensity, but divested as
far as possible of the religious element. I say divested as far as
possible, because even here, as I shall prove hereafter, the process is
not complete, and something of religion is still left fermenting. But it
is quite complete enough for our present purpose. It will remind us in
the sharpest and clearest way that love is no force which is naturally
constant in its development, or which if left to itself can be in any
way a moral director to us. It will show us that many of its
developments are what the moralist calls abominable, and that the very
worst of these may perhaps be the most attractive, and be deliberately
presented to us as such by men of the most elaborate culture. We shall
thus see that love as a test of conduct, as an aim of life, or as an
object of any heroic devotion, is not love in general, but love of a
special kind, and that to fulfil this function it must not only be
selected from the rest, but also removed from them, and set above them
at a quite incalculable distance. And the kind thus chosen, let me
repeat again (for this, though less obvious, is more important still),
is not chosen because it is naturally intense, but it becomes intense
because it is the chosen one.
Here then lies the weak point in the position of the positive moralists,
when they hold up such love to us as so supreme a treasure in life. They
observe, and quite correctly, that it is looked upon as a treasure; but
the source of its preciousness is something that their system expressly
takes from it. That choice amongst the loves, so solemn and so imperious
and yet so tender, which descends like a tongue of flame upon the love
it delights to honour; which fixes on a despised and a weak affection,
taking it like Elisha from his furrows, or like David from his
pastures, setting it above all its fellows, and making it at once a
queen and prophetess--this is a choice that positivism has no power to
make; or which, if it makes, it makes only a caprice, or a listless
preference. It does not, indeed, confound pure love with impure, but it
sets them on an equal footing; and those who contend that the former
under these conditions is intrinsically more attractive to men than the
latter, betray a most naïve ignorance of what human nature is.
Supposing, for argument's sake, that to themselves it may be so, this
fact is not of the slightest use to them. It is merely the possession on
their part of a certain personal taste, which those who do not share it
may regard as disease or weakness, and which they themselves can neither
defend nor inculcate. It is true they may call their opponents hard
names if they choose; but their op
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/17201