History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)
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Title: History of European Morals From Augustus to Charlemagne (Vol. 1 of 2)
Author: William Edward Hartpole Lecky
Release date: March 25, 2012 [eBook #39273]
Most recently updated: June 17, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39273
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS FROM AUGUSTUS TO CHARLEMAGNE (VOL. 1 OF 2) ***
History of
European Morals
From Augustus to Charlemagne
By
William Edward Hartpole Lecky, M.A.
Ninth Edition
In Two Volumes
Vol. 1.
London
Longmans, Green, And Co.
1890
CONTENTS
Advertisement To The Third Edition.
Preface.
Chapter I. The Natural History Of Morals.
Chapter II. The Pagan Empire.
Chapter III. The Conversion Of Rome.
Footnotes
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE THIRD EDITION.
I have availed myself of the interval since the last edition, to subject
this book to a minute and careful revision, removing such inaccuracies as
I have been able myself to discover, as well as those which have been
brought under my notice by reviewers or correspondents. I must especially
acknowledge the great assistance I have derived in this task from my
German translator, Dr. H. Jolowicz—now, unhappily, no more—one of the most
conscientious and accurate scholars with whom I have ever been in
communication. In the controversial part of the first chapter, which has
given rise to a good deal of angry discussion, four or five lines which
stood in the former editions have been omitted, and three or four short
passages have been inserted, elucidating or supporting positions which had
been misunderstood or contested.
_January 1877._
PREFACE.
The questions with which an historian of Morals is chiefly concerned are
the changes that have taken place in the moral standard and in the moral
type. By the first, I understand the degrees in which, in different ages,
recognised virtues have been enjoined and practised. By the second, I
understand the relative importance that in different ages has been
attached to different virtues. Thus, for example, a Roman of the age of
Pliny, an Englishman of the age of Henry VIII., and an Englishman of our
own day, would all agree in regarding humanity as a virtue, and its
opposite as a vice; but their judgments of the acts which are compatible
with a humane disposition would be widely different. A humane man of the
first period might derive a keen enjoyment from those gladiatorial games,
which an Englishman, even in the days of the Tudors, would regard as
atrociously barbarous; and this last would, in his turn, acquiesce in many
sport which would now be emphatically condemned. And in addition to this
change of standard, there is a continual change in the order of precedence
which is given to virtues. Patriotism, chastity, charity, and humility are
examples of virtues, each of which has in some ages been brought forward
as of the most supreme and transcendent importance, and the very basis of
a virtuous character, and in other ages been thrown into the background,
and reckoned among the minor graces of a noble life. The heroic virtues,
the amiable virtues, and what are called more especially the religious
virtues, form distinct groups, to which, in different periods, different
degrees of prominence have been assigned; and the nature, causes, and
consequences of these changes in the moral type are among the most
important branches of history.
In estimating, however, the moral condition of an age, it is not
sufficient to examine the ideal of moralists. It is necessary also to
enquire how far that ideal has been realised among the people. The
corruption of a nation is often reflected in the indulgent and selfish
ethics of its teachers; but it sometimes produces a reaction, and impels
the moralist to an asceticism which is the extreme opposite of the
prevailing spirit of society. The means which moral teachers possess of
acting upon their fellows, vary greatly in their nature and efficacy, and
the age of the highest moral teaching is often not that of the highest
general level of practice. Sometimes we find a kind of aristocracy of
virtue, exhibiting the most refined excellence in their teaching and in
their actions, but exercising scarcely any appreciable influence upon the
mass of the community. Sometimes we find moralists of a much less heroic
order, whose influence has permeated every section of society. In
addition, therefore, to the type and standard of morals inculcated by the
teachers, an historian must investigate the realised morals of the people.
The three questions I have now briefly indicated are those which I have
especially regarded in examining the moral history of Europe between
Augustus and Charlemagne. As a preliminary to this enquiry, I have
discussed at some length the rival theories concerning the nature and
obligations of morals, and have also endeavoured to show what virtues are
especially appropriate to each successive stage of civilisation, in order
that we may afterwards ascertain to what extent the natural evolution has
been affected by special agencies. I have then followed the moral history
of the Pagan Empire, reviewing the Stoical, the Eclectic, and the Egyptian
philosophies, that in turn flourished, showing in what respects they were
the products or expressions of the general condition of society, tracing
their influence in many departments of legislation and literature, and
investigating the causes of the deep-seated corruption which baffled all
the efforts of emperors and philosophers. The triumph of the Christian
religion in Europe next demands our attention. In treating this subject, I
have endeavoured, for the most part, to exclude all considerations of a
purely theological or controversial character, all discussions concerning
the origin of the faith in Palestine, and concerning the first type of its
doctrine, and to regard the Church simply as a moral agent, exercising its
influence in Europe. Confining myself within these limits, I have examined
the manner in which the circumstances of the Pagan Empire impeded or
assisted its growth, the nature of the opposition it had to encounter, the
transformations it underwent under the influence of prosperity, of the
ascetic enthusiasm, and of the barbarian invasions, and the many ways in
which it determined the moral condition of society. The growing sense of
the sanctity of human life, the history of charity, the formation of the
legends of the hagiology, the effects of asceticism upon civic and
domestic virtues, the moral influence of monasteries, the ethics of the
intellect, the virtues and vices of the decaying Christian Empire and of
the barbarian kingdoms that replaced it, the gradual apotheosis of secular
rank, and the first stages of that military Christianity which attained
its climax at the Crusades, have been all discussed with more or less
detail; and I have concluded my work by reviewing the changes that have
taken place in the position of women, and in the moral questions connected
with the relations of the sexes.
In investigating these numerous subjects, it has occasionally, though
rarely, happened that my path has intersected that which I had pursued in
a former work, and in two or three instances I have not hesitated to
repeat facts to which I had there briefly referred. I have thought that
such a course was preferable to presenting the subject shorn of some
material incident, or to falling into what has always the appearance of an
unpleasing egotism, by appealing unnecessarily to my own writings.
Although the history of the period I have traced has never, so far as I am
aware, been written from exactly the point of view which I have adopted, I
have, of course, been for the most part moving over familiar ground, which
has been often and ably investigated; and any originality that may be
found in this work must lie, not so much in the facts which have been
exhumed, as in the manner in which they have been grouped, and in the
significance that has been ascribed to them. I have endeavoured to
acknowledge the more important works from which I have derived assistance;
and if I have not always done so, I trust the reader will ascribe it to
the great multitude of the special histories relating to the subjects I
have treated, to my unwillingness to overload my pages with too numerous
references, and perhaps, in some cases, to the difficulty that all who
have been much occupied with a single department of history must sometimes
have, in distinguishing the ideas which have sprung from their own
reflections, from those which have been derived from books.
There is one writer, however, whom I must especially mention, for his name
occurs continually in the following pages, and his memory has been more
frequently, and in these latter months more sadly, present to my mind than
any other. Brilliant and numerous as are the works of the late Dean
Milman, it was those only who had the great privilege of his friendship,
who could fully realise the amazing extent and variety of his knowledge;
the calm, luminous, and delicate judgment which he carried into so many
spheres; the inimitable grace and tact of his conversation, coruscating
with the happiest anecdotes, and the brightest and yet the gentlest
humour; and, what was perhaps more remarkable than any single faculty, the
admirable harmony and symmetry of his mind and character, so free from all
the disproportion, and eccentricity, and exaggeration that sometimes make
even genius assume the form of a splendid disease. They can never forget
those yet higher attributes, which rendered him so unspeakably reverend to
all who knew him well—his fervent love of truth, his wide tolerance, his
large, generous, and masculine judgments of men and things; his almost
instinctive perception of the good that is latent in each opposing party,
his disdain for the noisy triumphs and the fleeting popularity of mere
sectarian strife, the fond and touching affection with which he dwelt upon
the images of the past, combining, even in extreme old age, with the
keenest and most hopeful insight into the progressive movements of his
time, and with a rare power of winning the confidence and reading the
thoughts of the youngest about him. That such a writer should have devoted
himself to the department of history, which more than any other has been
distorted by ignorance, puerility, and dishonesty, I conceive to be one of
the happiest facts in English literature, and (though sometimes diverging
from his views) in many parts of the following work I have largely availed
myself of his researches.
I cannot conceal from myself that this book is likely to encounter much,
and probably angry, contradiction from different quarters and on different
grounds. It is strongly opposed to a school of moral philosophy which is
at present extremely influential in England; and, in addition to the many
faults that may be found in its execution, its very plan must make it
displeasing to many. Its subject necessarily includes questions on which
it is exceedingly difficult for an English writer to touch, and the
portion of history with which it is concerned has been obscured by no
common measure of misrepresentation and passion. I have endeavoured to
carry into it a judicial impartiality, and I trust that the attempt,
however imperfect, may not be wholly useless to my readers.
LONDON: _March 1869_.
CHAPTER I. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS.
A brief enquiry into the nature and foundations of morals appears an
obvious, and, indeed, almost an indispensable preliminary, to any
examination of the moral progress of Europe. Unfortunately, however, such
an enquiry is beset with serious difficulties, arising in part from the
extreme multiplicity of detail which systems of moral philosophy present,
and in part from a fundamental antagonism of principles, dividing them
into two opposing groups. The great controversy, springing from the rival
claims of intuition and utility to be regarded as the supreme regulator of
moral distinctions, may be dimly traced in the division between Plato and
Aristotle; it appeared more clearly in the division between the Stoics and
the Epicureans; but it has only acquired its full distinctness of
definition, and the importance of the questions depending on it has only
been fully appreciated, in modern times, under the influence of such
writers as Cudworth, Clarke, and Butler upon the one side, and Hobbes,
Helvétius, and Bentham on the other.
Independently of the broad intellectual difficulties which must be
encountered in treating this question, there is a difficulty of a personal
kind, which it may be advisable at once to meet. There is a disposition in
some moralists to resent, as an imputation against their own characters,
any charge of immoral consequences that may be brought against the
principles they advocate. Now it is a peculiarity of this controversy that
every moralist is compelled, by the very nature of the case, to bring such
charges against the opinions of his opponents. The business of a moral
philosophy is to account for and to justify our moral sentiments, or in
other words, to show how we come to have our notions of duty, and to
supply us with a reason for acting upon them. If it does this adequately,
it is impregnable, and therefore a moralist who repudiates one system is
called upon to show that, according to its principles, the notion of duty,
or the motives for performing it, could never have been generated. The
Utilitarian accuses his opponent of basing the entire system of morals on
a faculty that has no existence, of adopting a principle that would make
moral duty vary with the latitude and the epoch, of resolving all ethics
into an idle sentiment. The intuitive moralist, for reasons I shall
hereafter explain, believes that the Utilitarian theory is profoundly
immoral. But to suppose that either of these charges extends to the
character of the moralist is altogether to misconceive the position which
moral theories actually hold in life. Our moral sentiments do not flow
from, but long precede our ethical systems; and it is usually only after
our characters have been fully formed that we begin to reason about them.
It is both possible and very common for the reasoning to be very
defective, without any corresponding imperfection in the disposition of
the man.
The two rival theories of morals are known by many names, and are
subdivided into many groups. One of them is generally described as the
stoical, the intuitive, the independent or the sentimental; the other as
the epicurean, the inductive, the utilitarian, or the selfish. The
moralists of the former school, to state their opinions in the broadest
form, believe that we have a natural power of perceiving that some
qualities, such as benevolence, chastity, or veracity, are better than
others, and that we ought to cultivate them, and to repress their
opposites. In other words, they contend, that by the constitution of our
nature, the notion of right carries with it a feeling of obligation; that
to say a course of conduct is our duty, is in itself, and apart from all
consequences, an intelligible and sufficient reason for practising it; and
that we derive the first principles of our duties from intuition. The
moralist of the opposite school denies that we have any such natural
perception. He maintains that we have by nature absolutely no knowledge of
merit and demerit, of the comparative excellence of our feelings and
actions, and that we derive these notions solely from an observation of
the course of life which is conducive to human happiness. That which makes
actions good is, that they increase the happiness or diminish the pains of
mankind. That which constitutes their demerit is their opposite tendency.
To procure “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” is therefore
the highest aim of the moralist, the supreme type and expression of
virtue.
It is manifest, however, that this last school, if it proceeded no further
than I have stated, would have failed to accomplish the task which every
moralist must undertake. It is easy to understand that experience may show
that certain actions are conducive to the happiness of mankind, and that
these actions may in consequence be regarded as supremely excellent. The
question still remains, why we are bound to perform them. If men, who
believe that virtuous actions are those which experience shows to be
useful to society, believe also that they are under a natural obligation
to seek the happiness of others, rather than their own, when the two
interests conflict, they have certainly no claim to the title of inductive
moralists. They recognise a moral faculty, or natural sense of moral
obligation or duty as truly as Butler or as Cudworth. And, indeed, a
position very similar to this has been adopted by several intuitive
moralists. Thus Hutcheson, who is the very founder in modern times of the
doctrine of “a moral sense,” and who has defended the disinterested
character of virtue more powerfully than perhaps any other moralist,
resolved all virtue into benevolence, or the pursuit of the happiness of
others; but he maintained that the excellence and obligation of
benevolence are revealed to us by a “moral sense.” Hume, in like manner,
pronounced utility to be the criterion and essential element of all
virtue, and is so far undoubtedly a Utilitarian; but he asserted also that
our pursuit of virtue is unselfish, and that it springs from a natural
feeling of approbation or disapprobation distinct from reason, and
produced by a peculiar sense, or taste, which rises up within us at the
contemplation of virtue or of vice.(1) A similar doctrine has more
recently been advocated by Mackintosh. It is supposed by many that it is a
complete description of the Utilitarian system of morals, that it judges
all actions and dispositions by their consequences, pronouncing them moral
in proportion to their tendency to promote, immoral in proportion to their
tendency to diminish, the happiness of man. But such a summary is clearly
inadequate, for it deals only with one of the two questions which every
moralist must answer. A theory of morals must explain not only what
constitutes a duty, but also how we obtain the notion of there being such
a thing as duty. It must tell us not merely what is the course of conduct
we _ought_ to pursue, but also what is the meaning of this word “ought,”
and from what source we derive the idea it expresses.
Those who have undertaken to prove that all our morality is a product of
experience, have not shrunk from this task, and have boldly entered upon
the one path that was open to them. The notion of there being any such
feeling as an original sense of obligation distinct from the anticipation
of pleasure or pain, they treat as a mere illusion of the imagination. All
that is meant by saying we ought to do an action is, that if we do not do
it, we shall suffer. A desire to obtain happiness and to avoid pain is the
only possible motive to action. The reason, and the only reason, why we
should perform virtuous actions, or in other words, seek the good of
others, is that on the whole such a course will bring us the greatest
amount of happiness.
We have here then a general statement of the doctrine which bases morals
upon experience. If we ask what constitutes virtuous, and what vicious
actions, we are told that the first are those which increase the happiness
or diminish the pains of mankind; and the second are those which have the
opposite effect. If we ask what is the motive to virtue, we are told that
it is an enlightened self-interest. The words happiness, utility, and
interest include, however, many different kinds of enjoyment, and have
given rise to many different modifications of the theory.
Perhaps the lowest and most repulsive form of this theory is that which
was propounded by Mandeville, in his “Enquiry into the Origin of Moral
Virtue.”(2) According to this writer, virtue sprang in the first instance
from the cunning of rulers. These, in order to govern men, found it
necessary to persuade them that it was a noble thing to restrain, instead
of indulging their passions, and to devote themselves entirely to the good
of the community. The manner in which they attained this end was by acting
upon the feeling of vanity. They persuaded men that human nature was
something nobler than the nature of animals, and that devotion to the
community rendered a man pre-eminently great. By statues, and titles, and
honours; by continually extolling such men as Regulus or Decius; by
representing those who were addicted to useless enjoyments as a low and
despicable class, they at last so inflamed the vanity of men as to kindle
an intense emulation, and inspire the most heroic actions. And soon new
influences came into play. Men who began by restraining their passions, in
order to acquire the pleasure of the esteem of others, found that this
restraint saved them from many painful consequences that would have
naturally ensued from over-indulgence, and this discovery became a new
motive to virtue. Each member of the community moreover found that he
himself derived benefit from the self-sacrifice of others, and also that
when he was seeking his own interest, without regard to others, no persons
stood so much in his way as those who were similarly employed, and he had
thus a double reason for diffusing abroad the notion of the excellence of
self-sacrifice. The result of all this was that men agreed to stigmatise
under the term “vice” whatever was injurious, and to eulogise as “virtue”
whatever was beneficial to society.
The opinions of Mandeville attracted, when they were published, an
attention greatly beyond their intrinsic merit, but they are now sinking
rapidly into deserved oblivion. The author, in a poem called the “Fable of
the Bees,” and in comments attached to it, himself advocated a thesis
altogether inconsistent with that I have described, maintaining that
“private vices were public benefits,” and endeavouring, in a long series
of very feeble and sometimes very grotesque arguments, to prove that vice
was in the highest degree beneficial to mankind. A far greater writer had
however already framed a scheme of morals which, if somewhat less
repulsive, was in no degree less selfish than that of Mandeville; and the
opinions of Hobbes concerning the essence and origin of virtue, have, with
no very great variations, been adopted by what may be termed the narrower
school of Utilitarians.
According to these writers we are governed exclusively by our own
interest.(3) Pleasure, they assure us, is the only good,(4) and moral good
and moral evil mean nothing more than our voluntary conformity to a law
that will bring it to us.(5) To love good simply as good, is
impossible.(6) When we speak of the goodness of God, we mean only His
goodness to us.(7) Reverence is nothing more than our conviction, that one
who has power to do us both good and harm, will only do us good.(8) The
pleasures of piety arise from the belief that we are about to receive
pleasure, and the pains of piety from the belief that we are about to
suffer pain from the Deity.(9) Our very affections, according to some of
these writers, are all forms of self-love. Thus charity springs partly
from our desire to obtain the esteem of others, partly from the
expectation that the favours we have bestowed will be reciprocated, and
partly, too, from the gratification of the sense of power, by the proof
that we can satisfy not only our own desires but also the desires of
others.(10) Pity is an emotion arising from a vivid realisation of sorrow
that may befall ourselves, suggested by the sight of the sorrows of
others. We pity especially those who have not deserved calamity, because
we consider ourselves to belong to that category; and the spectacle of
suffering against which no forethought could provide, reminds us most
forcibly of what may happen to ourselves.(11) Friendship is the sense of
the need of the person befriended.(12)
From such a conception of human nature it is easy to divine what system of
morals must flow. No character, feeling, or action is naturally better
than others, and as long as men are in a savage condition, morality has no
existence. Fortunately, however, we are all dependent for many of our
pleasures upon others. Co-operation and organisation are essential to our
happiness, and these are impossible without some restraint being placed
upon our appetites. Laws are enacted to secure this restraint, and being
sustained by rewards and punishments, they make it the interest of the
individual to regard that of the community. According to Hobbes, the
disposition of man is so anarchical, and the importance of restraining it
so transcendent, that absolute government alone is good; the commands of
the sovereign are supreme, and must therefore constitute the law of
morals. The other moralists of the school, though repudiating this notion,
have given a very great and distinguished place to legislation in their
schemes of ethics; for all our conduct being determined by our interests,
virtue being simply the conformity of our own interests with those of the
community, and a judicious legislation being the chief way of securing
this conformity, the functions of the moralist and of the legislator are
almost identical.(13) But in addition to the rewards and punishments of
the penal code, those arising from public opinion—fame or infamy, the
friendship or hostility of those about us—are enlisted on the side of
virtue. The educating influence of laws, and the growing perception of the
identity of interests of the different members of the community, create a
public opinion favourable to all the qualities which are “the means of
peaceable, sociable, and comfortable living.”(14) Such are justice,
gratitude, modesty, equity, and mercy; and such, too, are purity and
chastity, which, considered in themselves alone, are in no degree more
excellent than the coarsest and most indiscriminate lust, but which can be
shown to be conducive to the happiness of society, and become in
consequence virtues.(15) This education of public opinion grows
continually stronger with civilisation, and gradually moulds the
characters of men, making them more and more disinterested, heroic, and
unselfish. A disinterested, unselfish, and heroic man, it is explained, is
one who is strictly engrossed in the pursuit of his own pleasure, but who
pursues it in such a manner as to include in its gratification the
happiness of others.(16)
It is a very old assertion, that a man who prudently sought his own
interest would live a life of perfect virtue. This opinion is adopted by
most of those Utilitarians who are least inclined to lay great stress upon
religious motives; and as they maintain that every man necessarily pursues
exclusively his own happiness, we return by another path to the old
Platonic doctrine, that all vice is ignorance. Virtue is a judicious, and
vice an injudicious, pursuit of pleasure. Virtue is a branch of prudence,
vice is nothing more than imprudence or miscalculation.(17) He who seeks
to improve the moral condition of mankind has two, and only two, ways of
accomplishing his end. The first is, to make it more and more the interest
of each to conform to that of the others; the second is, to dispel the
ignorance which prevents men from seeing their true interest.(18) If
chastity or truth, or any other of what we regard as virtues, could be
shown to produce on the whole more pain than they destroy, or to deprive
men of more pleasure than they afford, they would not be virtues, but
vices.(19) If it could be shown that it is not for our own interest to
practise any of what are admitted to be virtues, all obligation to
practise them would immediately cease.(20) The whole scheme of ethics may
be evolved from the four canons of Epicurus. The pleasure which produces
no pain is to be embraced. The pain which produces no pleasure is to be
avoided. The pleasure is to be avoided which prevents a greater pleasure,
or produces a greater pain. The pain is to be endured which averts a
greater pain, or secures a greater pleasure.(21)
So far I have barely alluded to any but terrestrial motives. These, in the
opinion of many of the most illustrious of the school, are sufficient, but
others—as we shall see, I think, with great reason—are of a different
opinion. Their obvious resource is in the rewards and punishments of
another world, and these they accordingly present as the motive to virtue.
Of all the modifications of the selfish theory, this alone can be said to
furnish interested motives for virtue which are invariably and
incontestably adequate. If men introduce the notion of infinite
punishments and infinite rewards distributed by an omniscient Judge, they
can undoubtedly supply stronger reasons for practising virtue than can
ever be found for practising vice. While admitting therefore in emphatic
terms, that any sacrifice of our pleasure, without the prospect of an
equivalent reward, is a simple act of madness, and unworthy of a rational
being,(22) these writers maintain that we may reasonably sacrifice the
enjoyments of this life, because we shall be rewarded by far greater
enjoyment in the next. To gain heaven and avoid hell should be the spring
of all our actions,(23) and virtue is simply prudence extending its
calculations beyond the grave.(24) This calculation is what we mean by the
“religious motive.”(25) The belief that the nobility and excellence of
virtue could incite us, was a mere delusion of the Pagans.(26)
Considered simply in the light of a prudential scheme, there are only two
possible objections that could be brought against this theory. It might be
said that the amount of virtue required for entering heaven was not
defined, and that therefore it would be possible to enjoy some vices on
earth with impunity. To this, however, it is answered that the very
indefiniteness of the requirement renders zealous piety a matter of
prudence, and also that there is probably a graduated scale of rewards and
punishments adapted to every variety of merit and demerit.(27) It might be
said too that present pleasures are at least certain, and that those of
another world are not equally so. It is answered that the rewards and
punishments offered in another world are so transcendently great, that
according to the rules of ordinary prudence, if there were only a
probability, or even a bare possibility, of their being real, a wise man
should regulate his course with a view to them.(28)
Among these writers, however, some have diverged to a certain degree from
the broad stream of utilitarianism, declaring that the foundation of the
moral law is not utility, but the will or arbitrary decree of God. This
opinion, which was propounded by the schoolman Ockham, and by several
other writers of his age,(29) has in modern times found many
adherents,(30) and been defended through a variety of motives. Some have
upheld it on the philosophical ground that a law can be nothing but the
sentence of a lawgiver; others from a desire to place morals in permanent
subordination to theology; others in order to answer objections to
Christianity derived from apparently immoral acts said to have been
sanctioned by the Divinity; and others because having adopted strong
Calvinistic sentiments, they were at once profoundly opposed to
utilitarian morals, and at the same time too firmly convinced of the total
depravity of human nature to admit the existence of any trustworthy moral
sense.(31)
In the majority of cases, however, these writers have proved substantially
utilitarians. When asked how we can know the will of God, they answer that
in as far as it is not included in express revelation, it must be
discovered by the rule of utility; for nature proves that the Deity is
supremely benevolent, and desires the welfare of men, and therefore any
conduct that leads to that end is in conformity with His will.(32) To the
question why the Divine will should be obeyed, there are but two answers.
The first, which is that of the intuitive moralist, is that we are under a
natural obligation of gratitude to our Creator. The second, which is that
of the selfish moralist, is that the Creator has infinite rewards and
punishments at His disposal. The latter answer appears usually to have
been adopted, and the most eminent member has summed up with great
succinctness the opinion of his school. “The good of mankind,” he says,
“is the subject, the will of God the rule, and everlasting happiness the
motive and end of all virtue.”(33)
We have seen that the distinctive characteristic of the inductive school
of moralists is an absolute denial of the existence of any natural or
innate moral sense or faculty enabling us to distinguish between the
higher and lower parts of our nature, revealing to us either the existence
of a law of duty or the conduct that it prescribes. We have seen that the
only postulate of these writers is that happiness being universally
desired is a desirable thing, that the only merit they recognise in
actions or feelings is their tendency to promote human happiness, and that
the only motive to a virtuous act they conceive possible is the real or
supposed happiness of the agent. The sanctions of morality thus constitute
its obligation, and apart from them the word “ought” is absolutely
unmeaning. Those sanctions, as we have considered them, are of different
kinds and degrees of magnitude. Paley, though elsewhere acknowledging the
others, regarded the religious one as so immeasurably the first, that he
represented it as the one motive of virtue.(34) Locke divided them into
Divine rewards and punishments, legal penalties and social penalties;(35)
Bentham into physical, political, moral or popular, and religious—the
first being the bodily evils that result from vice, the second the
enactments of legislators, the third the pleasures and pains arising from
social intercourse, the fourth the rewards and punishments of another
world.(36)
During the greater part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the
controversy in England between those who derived the moral code from
experience, and those who derived it from intuitions of the reason, or
from a special faculty, or from a moral sense, or from the power of
sympathy, turned mainly upon the existence of an unselfish element in our
nature. The reality of this existence having been maintained by
Shaftesbury, was established with an unprecedented, and I believe an
irresistible force, by Hutcheson, and the same question occupies a
considerable place in the writings of Butler, Hume, and Adam Smith. The
selfishness of the school of Hobbes, though in some degree mitigated, may
be traced in every page of the writings of Bentham; but some of his
disciples have in this respect deviated very widely from their master, and
in their hands the whole tone and complexion of utilitarianism have been
changed.(37) The two means by which this transformation has been effected
are the recognition of our unselfish or sympathetic feelings, and the
doctrine of the association of ideas.
That human nature is so constituted that we naturally take a pleasure in
the sight of the joy of others is one of those facts which to an ordinary
observer might well appear among the most patent that can be conceived. We
have seen, however, that it was emphatically denied by Hobbes, and during
the greater part of the last century it was fashionable among writers of
the school of Helvétius to endeavour to prove that all domestic or social
affections were dictated simply by a need of the person who was beloved.
The reality of the pleasures and pains of sympathy was admitted by
Bentham;(38) but in accordance with the whole spirit of his philosophy, he
threw them as much as possible into the background, and, as I have already
noticed, gave them no place in his summary of the sanctions of virtue. The
tendency, however, of the later members of the school has been to
recognise them fully,(39) though they differ as to the source from which
they spring. According to one section our benevolent affections are
derived from our selfish feelings by an association of ideas in a manner
which I shall presently describe. According to the other they are an
original part of the constitution of our nature. However they be
generated, their existence is admitted, their cultivation is a main object
of morals, and the pleasure derived from their exercise a leading motive
to virtue. The differences between the intuitive moralists and their
rivals on this point are of two kinds. Both acknowledge the existence in
human nature of both benevolent and malevolent feelings, and that we have
a natural power of distinguishing one from the other; but the first
maintain and the second deny that we have a natural power of perceiving
that one is better than the other. Both admit that we enjoy a pleasure in
acts of benevolence to others, but most writers of the first school
maintain that that pleasure follows unsought for, while writers of the
other school contend that the desire of obtaining it is the motive of the
action.
But by far the most ingenious and at the same time most influential system
of utilitarian morals is that which owes its distinctive feature to the
doctrine of association of Hartley. This doctrine, which among the modern
achievements of ethics occupies on the utilitarian side a position
corresponding in importance to the doctrine of innate moral faculties as
distinguished from innate moral ideas on the intuitive side, was not
absolutely unknown to the ancients, though they never perceived either the
extent to which it may be carried or the important consequences that might
be deduced from it. Some traces of it may be found in Aristotle,(40) and
some of the Epicureans applied it to friendship, maintaining that,
although we first of all love our friend on account of the pleasure he can
give us, we come soon to love him for his own sake, and apart from all
considerations of utility.(41) Among moderns Locke has the merit of having
devised the phrase, “association of ideas;”(42) but he applied it only to
some cases of apparently eccentric sympathies or antipathies. Hutcheson,
however, closely anticipated both the doctrine of Hartley and the
favourite illustration of the school; observing that we desire some things
as themselves pleasurable and others only as means to obtain pleasurable
things, and that these latter, which he terms “secondary desires,” may
become as powerful as the former. “Thus, as soon as we come to apprehend
the use of wealth or power to gratify any of our original desires we must
also desire them. Hence arises the universality of these desires of wealth
and power, since they are the means of gratifying all our desires.”(43)
The same principles were carried much farther by a clergyman named Gay in
a short dissertation which is now almost forgotten, but to which Hartley
ascribed the first suggestion of his theory,(44) and in which indeed the
most valuable part of it is clearly laid down. Differing altogether from
Hutcheson as to the existence of any innate moral sense or principle of
benevolence in man, Gay admitted that the arguments of Hutcheson to prove
that the adult man possesses a moral sense were irresistible, and he
attempted to reconcile this fact with the teaching of Locke by the
doctrine of “secondary desires.” He remarks that in our reasonings we do
not always fall back upon first principles or axioms, but sometimes start
from propositions which though not self-evident we know to be capable of
proof. In the same way in justifying our actions we do not always appeal
to the tendency to produce happiness which is their one ultimate
justification, but content ourselves by showing that they produce some of
the known “means to happiness.” These “means to happiness” being
continually appealed to as justifying motives come insensibly to be
regarded as ends, possessing an intrinsic value irrespective of their
tendency; and in this manner it is that we love and admire virtue even
when unconnected with our interests.(45)
The great work of Hartley expanding and elaborating these views was
published in 1747. It was encumbered by much physiological speculation
into which it is needless for us now to enter, about the manner in which
emotions act upon the nerves, and although accepted enthusiastically by
Priestley and Belsham, and in some degree by Tucker, I do not think that
its purely ethical speculations had much influence until they were adopted
by some leading utilitarians in the present century.(46) Whatever may be
thought of the truth, it is impossible to withhold some admiration from
the intellectual grandeur of a system which starting from a conception of
human nature as low and as base as that of Mandeville or Hobbes professes
without the introduction of a single new or nobler element, by a strange
process of philosophic alchemy, to evolve out of this original selfishness
the most heroic and most sensitive virtue. The manner in which this
achievement is effected is commonly illustrated by the passion of avarice.
Money in itself possesses absolutely nothing that is admirable or
pleasurable, but being the means of procuring us many of the objects of
our desire, it becomes associated in our minds with the idea of pleasure;
it is therefore itself loved; and it is possible for the love of money so
completely to eclipse or supersede the love of all those things which
money procures, that the miser will forego them all, rather than part with
a fraction of his gold.(47)
The same phenomenon may be traced, it is said, in a multitude of other
forms.(48) Thus we seek power, because it gives us the means of gratifying
many desires. It becomes associated with those desires, and is, at last,
itself passionately loved. Praise indicates the affection of the eulogist,
and marks us out for the affection of others. Valued at first as a means,
it is soon desired as an end, and to such a pitch can our enthusiasm rise,
that we may sacrifice all earthly things for posthumous praise which can
never reach our ear. And the force of association may extend even farther.
We love praise, because it procures us certain advantages. We then love it
more than these advantages. We proceed by the same process to transfer our
affections to those things which naturally or generally procure praise. We
at last love what is praiseworthy more than praise, and will endure
perpetual obloquy rather than abandon it.(49) To this process, it is said,
all our moral sentiments must be ascribed. Man has no natural benevolent
feelings. He is at first governed solely by his interest, but the infant
learns to associate its pleasures with the idea of its mother, the boy
with the idea of his family, the man with those of his class, his church,
his country, and at last of all mankind, and in each case an independent
affection is at length formed.(50) The sight of suffering in others
awakens in the child a painful recollection of his own sufferings, which
parents, by appealing to the infant imagination, still further strengthen,
and besides, “when several children are educated together, the pains, the
denials of pleasure, and the sorrows which affect one gradually extend in
some degree to all;” and thus the suffering of others becomes associated
with the idea of our own, and the feeling of compassion is engendered.(51)
Benevolence and justice are associated in our minds with the esteem of our
fellow-men, with reciprocity of favours, and with the hope of future
reward. They are loved at first for these, and finally for themselves,
while opposite trains of association produce opposite feelings towards
malevolence and injustice.(52) And thus virtue, considered as a whole,
becomes the supreme object of our affections. Of all our pleasures, more
are derived from those acts which are called virtuous, than from any other
source. The virtuous acts of others procure us countless advantages. Our
own virtue obtains for us the esteem of men and return of favours. All the
epithets of praise are appropriated to virtue, and all the epithets of
blame to vice. Religion teaches us to connect hopes of infinite joy with
the one, and fears of infinite suffering with the other. Virtue becomes
therefore peculiarly associated with the idea of pleasurable things. It is
soon loved, independently of and more than these; we feel a glow of
pleasure in practising it, and an intense pain in violating it.
Conscience, which is thus generated, becomes the ruling principle of our
lives,(53) and having learnt to sacrifice all earthly things rather than
disobey it, we rise, by an association of ideas, into the loftiest region
of heroism.(54)
The influence of this ingenious, though I think in some respect fanciful,
theory depends less upon the number than upon the ability of its
adherents. Though little known, I believe, beyond England, it has in
England exercised a great fascination over exceedingly dissimilar
minds,(55) and it does undoubtedly evade some of the objections to the
other forms of the inductive theory. Thus, when intuitive moralists
contend that our moral judgments, being instantaneous and effected under
the manifest impulse of an emotion of sympathy or repulsion, are as far as
possible removed from that cold calculation of interests to which the
utilitarian reduces them, it is answered, that the association of ideas is
sufficient to engender a feeling which is the proximate cause of our
decision.(56) Alone, of all the moralists of this school, the disciple of
Hartley recognises conscience as a real and important element of our
nature,(57) and maintains that it is possible to love virtue for itself as
a form of happiness without any thought of ulterior consequences.(58) The
immense value this theory ascribes to education, gives it an unusual
practical importance. When we are balancing between a crime and a virtue,
our wills, it is said, are necessarily determined by the greater pleasure.
If we find more pleasure in the vice than in the virtue, we inevitably
gravitate to evil. If we find more pleasure in the virtue than in the
vice, we are as irresistibly attracted towards good. But the strength of
such motives may be immeasurably enhanced by an early association of
ideas. If we have been accustomed from childhood to associate our ideas of
praise and pleasure with virtue, we shall readily yield to virtuous
motives; if with vice, to vicious ones. This readiness to yield to one or
other set of motives, constitutes disposition, which is thus, according to
these moralists, altogether an artificial thing, the product of education,
and effected by association of ideas.(59)
It will be observed, however, that this theory, refined and imposing as it
may appear, is still essentially a selfish one. Even when sacrificing all
earthly objects through love of virtue, the good man is simply seeking his
greatest enjoyment, indulging a kind of mental luxury which gives him more
pleasure than what he foregoes, just as the miser finds more pleasure in
accumulation than in any form of expenditure.(60) There has been, indeed,
one attempt to emancipate the theory from this condition, but it appears
to me altogether futile. It has been said that men in the first instance
indulge in baneful excesses, on account of the pleasure they afford, but
the habit being contracted, continue to practise them after they have
ceased to afford pleasure, and that a similar law may operate in the case
of the habit of virtue.(61) But the reason why men who have contracted a
habit continue to practise it after it has ceased to give them positive
enjoyment, is because to desist, creates a restlessness and uneasiness
which amounts to acute mental pain. To avoid that pain is the motive of
the action.
The reader who has perused the passages I have accumulated in the notes,
will be able to judge with what degree of justice utilitarian writers
denounce with indignation the imputation of selfishness, as a calumny
against their system. It is not, I think, a strained or unnatural use of
language to describe as selfish or interested, all actions which a man
performs, in order himself to avoid suffering or acquire the greatest
possible enjoyment. If this be so, the term selfish is strictly applicable
to all the branches of this system.(62) At the same time it must be
acknowledged that there is a broad difference between the refined hedonism
of the utilitarians we have last noticed, and the writings of Hobbes, of
Mandeville, or of Paley. It must be acknowledged, also, that not a few
intuitive or stoical moralists have spoken of the pleasure to be derived
from virtue in language little if at all different from these writers.(63)
The main object of the earlier members of the inductive school, was to
depress human nature to their standard, by resolving all the noblest
actions into coarse and selfish elements. The main object of some of the
more influential of the later members of this school, has been to
sublimate their conceptions of happiness and interest in such a manner, as
to include the highest displays of heroism. As we have seen, they fully
admit that conscience is a real thing, and should be the supreme guide of
our lives, though they contend that it springs originally from
selfishness, transformed under the influence of the association of ideas.
They acknowledge the reality of the sympathetic feelings, though they
usually trace them to the same source. They cannot, it is true,
consistently with their principles, recognise the possibility of conduct
which is in the strictest sense of the word unselfish, but they contend
that it is quite possible for a man to find his highest pleasure in
sacrificing himself for the good of others, that the association of virtue
and pleasure is only perfect when it leads habitually to spontaneous and
uncalculating action, and that no man is in a healthy moral condition who
does not find more pain in committing a crime than he could derive
pleasure from any of its consequences. The theory in its principle remains
unchanged, but in the hands of some of these writers the spirit has wholly
altered.
Having thus given a brief, but, I trust, clear and faithful account of the
different modifications of the inductive theory, I shall proceed to state
some of the principal objections that have been and may be brought against
it. I shall then endeavour to define and defend the opinions of those who
believe that our moral feelings are an essential part of our constitution,
developed by, but not derived from education, and I shall conclude this
chapter by an enquiry into the order of their evolution; so that having
obtained some notion of the natural history of morals, we may be able, in
the ensuing chapters, to judge, how far their normal progress has been
accelerated or retarded by religious or political agencies.
“Psychology,” it has been truly said, “is but developed
consciousness.”(64) When moralists assert, that what we call virtue
derives its reputation solely from its utility, and that the interest or
pleasure of the agent is the one motive to practise it, our first question
is naturally how far this theory agrees with the feelings and with the
language of mankind. But if tested by this criterion, there never was a
doctrine more emphatically condemned than utilitarianism. In all its
stages, and in all its assertions, it is in direct opposition to common
language and to common sentiments. In all nations and in all ages, the
ideas of interest and utility on the one hand and of virtue on the other,
have been regarded by the multitude as perfectly distinct, and all
languages recognise the distinction. The terms honour, justice, rectitude
or virtue, and their equivalents in every language, present to the mind
ideas essentially and broadly differing from the terms prudence, sagacity,
or interest. The two lines of conduct may coincide, but they are never
confused, and we have not the slightest difficulty in imagining them
antagonistic. When we say a man is governed by a high sense of honour, or
by strong moral feeling, we do not mean that he is prudently pursuing
either his own interests or the interests of society. The universal
sentiment of mankind represents self-sacrifice as an essential element of
a meritorious act, and means by self-sacrifice the deliberate adoption of
the least pleasurable course without the prospect of any pleasure in
return. A selfish act may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, and to
ascribe all good deeds to selfish motives, is not the distortion but the
negation of virtue. No Epicurean could avow before a popular audience that
the one end of his life was the pursuit of his own happiness without an
outburst of indignation and contempt.(65) No man could consciously make
this—which according to the selfish theory is the only rational and indeed
possible motive of action—the deliberate object of all his undertakings,
without his character becoming despicable and degraded. Whether we look
within ourselves or examine the conduct either of our enemies or of our
friends, or adjudicate upon the characters in history or in fiction, our
feelings on these matters are the same. In exact proportion as we believe
a desire for personal enjoyment to be the motive of a good act is the
merit of the agent diminished. If we believe the motive to be wholly
selfish the merit is altogether destroyed. If we believe it to be wholly
disinterested the merit is altogether unalloyed. Hence, the admiration
bestowed upon Prometheus, or suffering virtue constant beneath the blows
of Almighty malice, or on the atheist who with no prospect of future
reward suffered a fearful death, rather than abjure an opinion which could
be of no benefit to society, because he believed it to be the truth.
Selfish moralists deny the possibility of that which all ages, all
nations, all popular judgments pronounce to have been the characteristic
of every noble act that has ever been performed. Now, when a philosophy
which seeks by the light of consciousness to decipher the laws of our
moral being proves so diametrically opposed to the conclusions arrived at
by the great mass of mankind, who merely follow their consciousness
without endeavouring to frame systems of philosophy, that it makes most of
the distinctions of common ethical language absolutely unmeaning, this is,
to say the least, a strong presumption against its truth. If Molière’s
hero had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, this was
simply because he did not understand what prose was. In the present case
we are asked to believe that men have been under a total delusion about
the leading principles of their lives which they had distinguished by a
whole vocabulary of terms.
It is said that the case becomes different when the pleasure sought is not
a gross or material enjoyment, but the satisfaction of performed virtue. I
suspect that if men could persuade themselves that the one motive of a
virtuous man was the certainty that the act he accomplished would be
followed by a glow of satisfaction so intense as more than to compensate
for any sacrifice he might have made, the difference would not be as great
as is supposed. In fact, however—and the consciousness of this lies, I
conceive, at the root of the opinions of men upon the subject—the pleasure
of virtue is one which can only be obtained on the express condition of
its not being the object sought. Phenomena of this kind are familiar to us
all. Thus, for example, it has often been observed that prayer, by a law
of our nature and apart from all supernatural intervention, exercises a
reflex influence of a very beneficial character upon the minds of the
worshippers. The man who offers up his petitions with passionate
earnestness, with unfaltering faith, and with a vivid realisation of the
presence of an Unseen Being has risen to a condition of mind which is
itself eminently favourable both to his own happiness and to the expansion
of his moral qualities. But he who expects nothing more will never attain
this. To him who neither believes nor hopes that his petitions will
receive a response such a mental state is impossible. No Protestant before
an image of the Virgin, no Christian before a pagan idol, could possibly
attain it. If prayers were offered up solely with a view to this benefit,
they would be absolutely sterile and would speedily cease. Thus again,
certain political economists have contended that to give money in charity
is worse than useless, that it is positively noxious to society, but they
have added that the gratification of our benevolent affections is pleasing
to ourselves, and that the pleasure we derive from this source may be so
much greater than the evil resulting from our gift, that we may justly,
according to the “greatest happiness principle,” purchase this large
amount of gratification to ourselves by a slight injury to our neighbours.
The political economy involved in this very characteristic specimen of
utilitarian ethics I shall hereafter examine. At present it is sufficient
to observe that no one who consciously practised benevolence solely from
this motive could obtain the pleasure in question. We receive enjoyment
from the thought that we have done good. We never could receive that
enjoyment if we believed and realised that we were doing harm. The same
thing is pre-eminently true of the satisfaction of conscience. A feeling
of satisfaction follows the accomplishment of duty for itself, but if the
duty be performed solely through the expectation of a mental pleasure
conscience refuses to ratify the bargain.
There is no fact more conspicuous in human nature than the broad
distinction, both in kind and degree, drawn between the moral and the
other parts of our nature. But this on utilitarian principles is
altogether unaccountable. If the excellence of virtue consists solely in
its utility or tendency to promote the happiness of men, we should be
compelled to canonise a crowd of acts which are utterly remote from all
our ordinary notions of morality. The whole tendency of political economy
and philosophical history which reveal the physiology of societies, is to
show that the happiness and welfare of mankind are evolved much more from
our selfish than from what are termed our virtuous acts. The prosperity of
nations and the progress of civilisation are mainly due to the exertions
of men who while pursuing strictly their own interests, were unconsciously
promoting the interests of the community. The selfish instinct that leads
men to accumulate, confers ultimately more advantage upon the world than
the generous instinct that leads men to give. A great historian has
contended with some force that intellectual development is more important
to societies than moral development. Yet who ever seriously questioned the
reality of the distinction that separates these things? The reader will
probably exclaim that the key to that distinction is to be found in the
motive; but it is one of the paradoxes of the utilitarian school that the
motive of the agent has absolutely no influence on the morality of the
act. According to Bentham, there is but one motive possible, the pursuit
of our own enjoyment. The most virtuous, the most vicious, and the most
indifferent of actions, if measured by this test, would be exactly the
same, and an investigation of motives should therefore be altogether
excluded from our moral judgments.(66) Whatever test we adopt, the
difficulty of accounting for the unique and pre-eminent position mankind
have assigned to virtue will remain. If we judge by tendencies, a crowd of
objects and of acts to which no mortal ever dreamed of ascribing virtue,
contribute largely to the happiness of man. If we judge by motives, the
moralists we are reviewing have denied all generic difference between
prudential and virtuous motives. If we judge by intentions, it is certain
that however much truth or chastity may contribute to the happiness of
mankind, it is not with philanthropic intentions that those virtues are
cultivated.
It is often said that intuitive moralists in their reasonings are guilty
of continually abandoning their principles by themselves appealing to the
tendency of certain acts to promote human happiness as a justification,
and the charge is usually accompanied by a challenge to show any confessed
virtue that has not that tendency. To the first objection it may be
shortly answered that no intuitive moralist ever dreamed of doubting that
benevolence or charity, or in other words, the promotion of the happiness
of man, is a duty. He maintains that it not only is so, but that we arrive
at this fact by direct intuition, and not by the discovery that such a
course is conducive to our own interest. But while he cordially recognises
this branch of virtue, and while he has therefore a perfect right to
allege the beneficial effects of a virtue in its defence, he refuses to
admit that all virtue can be reduced to this single principle. With the
general sentiment of mankind he regards charity as a good thing only
because it is of use to the world. With the same general sentiment of
mankind he believes that chastity and truth have an independent value,
distinct from their influence upon happiness. To the question whether
every confessed virtue is conducive to human happiness, it is less easy to
reply, for it is usually extremely difficult to calculate the remote
tendencies of acts, and in cases where, in the common apprehension of
mankind, the morality is very clear, the consequences are often very
obscure. Notwithstanding the claim of great precision which utilitarian
writers so boastfully make, the standard by which they profess to measure
morals is itself absolutely incapable of definition or accurate
explanation. Happiness is one of the most indeterminate and undefinable
words in the language, and what are the conditions of “the greatest
possible happiness” no one can precisely say. No two nations, perhaps no
two individuals, would find them the same.(67) And even if every virtuous
act were incontestably useful, it by no means follows that its virtue is
derived from its utility.
It may be readily granted, that as a general rule those acts which we call
virtuous, are unquestionably productive of happiness, if not to the agent,
at least to mankind in general, but we have already seen that they have by
no means that monopoly or pre-eminence of utility which on utilitarian
principles, the unique position assigned to them would appear to imply. It
may be added, that if we were to proceed in detail to estimate acts by
their consequences, we should soon be led to very startling conclusions.
In the first place, it is obvious that if virtues are only good because
they promote, and vices only evil because they impair the happiness of
mankind, the degrees of excellence or criminality must be strictly
proportioned to the degrees of utility or the reverse.(68) Every action,
every disposition, every class, every condition of society must take its
place on the moral scale precisely in accordance with the degree in which
it promotes or diminishes human happiness. Now it is extremely
questionable, whether some of the most monstrous forms of sensuality which
it is scarcely possible to name, cause as much unhappiness as some
infirmities of temper, or procrastination or hastiness of judgment. It is
scarcely doubtful that a modest, diffident, and retiring nature,
distrustful of its own abilities, and shrinking with humility from
conflict, produces on the whole less benefit to the world than the
self-assertion of an audacious and arrogant nature, which is impelled to
every struggle, and developes every capacity. Gratitude has no doubt done
much to soften and sweeten the intercourse of life, but the corresponding
feeling of revenge was for centuries the one bulwark against social
anarchy, and is even now one of the chief restraints to crime.(69) On the
great theatre of public life, especially in periods of great convulsions
when passions are fiercely roused, it is neither the man of delicate
scrupulosity and sincere impartiality, nor yet the single-minded religious
enthusiast, incapable of dissimulation or procrastination, who confers
most benefit upon the world. It is much rather the astute statesman
earnest about his ends but unscrupulous about his means, equally free from
the trammels of conscience and from the blindness of zeal, who governs
because he partly yields to the passions and the prejudices of his time.
But however much some modern writers may idolize the heroes of success,
however much they may despise and ridicule those far nobler men, whose
wide tolerance and scrupulous honour rendered them unfit leaders in the
fray, it has scarcely yet been contended that the delicate
conscientiousness which in these cases impairs utility constitutes vice.
If utility is the sole measure of virtue, it is difficult to understand
how we could look with moral disapprobation on any class who prevent
greater evils than they cause. But with such a principle we might find
strange priestesses at the utilitarian shrine. “Aufer meretrices de rebus
humanis,” said St. Augustine, “turbaveris omnia libidinibus.”(70)
Let us suppose an enquirer who intended to regulate his life consistently
by the utilitarian principle; let us suppose him to have overcome the
first great difficulty of his school, arising from the apparent divergence
of his own interests from his duty, to have convinced himself that that
divergence does not exist, and to have accordingly made the pursuit of
duty his single object, it remains to consider what kind of course he
would pursue. He is informed that it is a pure illusion to suppose that
human actions have any other end or rule than happiness, that nothing is
intrinsically good or intrinsically bad apart from its consequences, that
no act which is useful can possibly be vicious, and that the utility of an
act constitutes and measures its value. One of his first observations will
be that in very many special cases acts such as murder, theft, or
falsehood, which the world calls criminal, and which in the majority of
instances would undoubtedly be hurtful, appear eminently productive of
good. Why then, he may ask, should they not in these cases be performed?
The answer he receives is that they would not really be useful, because we
must consider the remote as well as the immediate consequences of actions,
and although in particular instances a falsehood or even a murder might
appear beneficial, it is one of the most important interests of mankind
that the sanctity of life and property should be preserved, and that a
high standard of veracity should be maintained. But this answer is
obviously insufficient. It is necessary to show that the extent to which a
single act of what the world calls crime would weaken these great bulwarks
of society is such as to counterbalance the immediate good which it
produces. If it does not, the balance will be on the side of happiness,
the murder or theft or falsehood will be useful, and therefore, on
utilitarian principles, will be virtuous. Now even in the case of public
acts, the effect of the example of an obscure individual is usually small,
but if the act be accomplished in perfect secrecy, the evil effects
resulting from the example will be entirely absent. It has been said that
it would be dangerous to give men permission to perpetrate what men call
crimes in secret. This may be a very good reason why the utilitarian
should not proclaim such a principle, but it is no reason why he should
not act upon it. If a man be convinced that no act which is useful can
possibly be criminal, if it be in his power by perpetrating what is called
a crime to obtain an end of great immediate utility, and if he is able to
secure such absolute secrecy as to render it perfectly certain that his
act cannot become an example, and cannot in consequence exercise any
influence on the general standard of morals, it appears demonstrably
certain that on utilitarian principles he would be justified in performing
it. If what we call virtue be only virtuous _because_ it is useful, it can
only be virtuous _when_ it is useful. The question of the morality of a
large number of acts must therefore depend upon the probability of their
detection,(71) and a little adroit hypocrisy must often, not merely in
appearance but in reality, convert a vice into a virtue. The only way by
which it has been attempted with any plausibility to evade this conclusion
has been by asserting that the act would impair the disposition of the
agent, or in other words predispose him on other occasions to perform acts
which are generally hurtful to society. But in the first place a single
act has no such effect upon disposition as to counteract a great immediate
good, especially when, as we have supposed, that act is not a revolt
against what is believed to be right, but is performed under the full
belief that it is in accordance with the one rational rule of morals, and
in the next place, as far as the act would form a habit it would appear to
be the habit of in all cases regulating actions by a precise and minute
calculation of their utility, which is the very ideal of utilitarian
virtue.
If our enquirer happens to be a man of strong imagination and of solitary
habits, it is very probable that he will be accustomed to live much in a
world of imagination, a world peopled with beings that are to him as real
as those of flesh, with its joys and sorrows, its temptations and its
sins. In obedience to the common feelings of our nature he may have
struggled long and painfully against sins of the imagination, which he was
never seriously tempted to convert into sins of action. But his new
philosophy will be admirably fitted to console his mind. If remorse be
absent the indulgence of the most vicious imagination is a pleasure, and
if this indulgence does not lead to action it is a clear gain, and
therefore to be applauded. That a course may be continually pursued in
imagination without leading to corresponding actions he will speedily
discover, and indeed it has always been one of the chief objections
brought against fiction that the constant exercise of the sympathies in
favour of imaginary beings is found positively to indispose men to
practical benevolence.(72)
Proceeding farther in his course, our moralist will soon find reason to
qualify the doctrine of remote consequences, which plays so large a part
in the calculations of utilitarianism. It is said that it is criminal to
destroy human beings, even when the crime would appear productive of great
utility, for every instance of murder weakens the sanctity of life. But
experience shows that it is possible for men to be perfectly indifferent
to one particular section of human life, without this indifference
extending to others. Thus among the ancient Greeks, the murder or
exposition of the children of poor parents was continually practised with
the most absolute callousness, without exercising any appreciable
influence upon the respect for adult life. In the same manner what may be
termed religious unveracity, or the habit of propagating what are deemed
useful superstitions, with the consciousness of their being false, or at
least suppressing or misrepresenting the facts that might invalidate them,
does not in any degree imply industrial unveracity. Nothing is more common
than to find extreme dishonesty in speculation coexisting with scrupulous
veracity in business. If any vice might be expected to conform strictly to
the utilitarian theory, it would be cruelty; but cruelty to animals may
exist without leading to cruelty to men, and even where spectacles in
which animal suffering forms a leading element exercise an injurious
influence on character, it is more than doubtful whether the measure of
human unhappiness they may ultimately produce is at all equivalent to the
passionate enjoyment they immediately afford.
This last consideration, however, makes it necessary to notice a new, and
as it appears to me, almost grotesque development of the utilitarian
theory. The duty of humanity to animals, though for a long period too much
neglected, may, on the principles of the intuitive moralist, be easily
explained and justified. Our circumstances and characters produce in us
many and various affections towards all with whom we come in contact, and
our consciences pronounce these affections to be good or bad. We feel that
humanity or benevolence is a good affection, and also that it is due in
different degrees to different classes. Thus it is not only natural but
right that a man should care for his own family more than for the world at
large, and this obligation applies not only to parents who are responsible
for having brought their children into existence, and to children who owe
a debt of gratitude to their parents, but also to brothers who have no
such special tie. So too we feel it to be both unnatural and wrong to feel
no stronger interest in our fellow-countrymen than in other men. In the
same way we feel that there is a wide interval between the humanity it is
both natural and right to exhibit towards animals, and that which is due
to our own species. Strong philanthropy could hardly coexist with
cannibalism, and a man who had no hesitation in destroying human life for
the sake of obtaining the skins of the victims, or of freeing himself from
some trifling inconvenience, would scarcely be eulogised for his
benevolence. Yet a man may be regarded as very humane to animals who has
no scruple in sacrificing their lives for his food, his pleasures, or his
convenience.
Towards the close of the last century an energetic agitation in favour of
humanity to animals arose in England, and the utilitarian moralists, who
were then rising into influence, caught the spirit of their time and made
very creditable efforts to extend it.(73) It is manifest, however, that a
theory which recognised no other end in virtue than the promotion of human
happiness, could supply no adequate basis for the movement. Some of the
recent members of the school have accordingly enlarged their theory,
maintaining that acts are virtuous when they produce a net result of
happiness, and vicious when they produce a net result of suffering,
altogether irrespective of the question whether this enjoyment or
suffering is of men or animals. In other words, they place the duty of man
to animals on exactly the same basis as the duty of man to his fellow-men,
maintaining that no suffering can be rightly inflicted on brutes, which
does not produce a larger amount of happiness to man.(74)
The first reflection suggested by this theory is, that it appears
difficult to understand how, on the principles of the inductive school, it
could be arrived at. Benevolence, as we have seen, according to these
writers begins in interest. We first of all do good to men, because it is
for our advantage, though the force of the habit may at last act
irrespective of interest. But in the case of animals which cannot resent
barbarity, this foundation of self-interest does not for the most part(75)
exist. Probably, however, an association of ideas might help to solve the
difficulty, and the habit of benevolence generated originally from the
social relations of men might at last be extended to the animal world; but
that it should be so to the extent of placing the duty to animals on the
same basis as the duty to men, I do not anticipate, or (at the risk of
being accused of great inhumanity), I must add, desire. I cannot look
forward to a time when no one will wear any article of dress formed out of
the skin of an animal, or feed upon animal flesh, till he has ascertained
that the pleasure he derives from doing so, exceeds the pain inflicted
upon the animal, as well as the pleasure of which by abridging its life he
has deprived it.(76) And supposing that with such a calculation before
him, the utilitarian should continue to feed on the flesh of animals, his
principle might carry him to further conclusions, from which I confess I
should recoil. If, when Swift was writing his famous essay in favour of
employing for food the redundant babies of a half-starving population, he
had been informed that, according to the more advanced moralists, to eat a
child, and to eat a sheep, rest upon exactly the same ground; that in the
one case as in the other, the single question for the moralist is, whether
the repast on the whole produces more pleasure than pain, it must be owned
that the discovery would have greatly facilitated his task.
The considerations I have adduced will, I think, be sufficient to show
that the utilitarian principle if pushed to its full logical consequences
would be by no means as accordant with ordinary moral notions as is
sometimes alleged; that it would, on the contrary, lead to conclusions
utterly and outrageously repugnant to the moral feelings it is intended to
explain. I will conclude this part of my argument by very briefly
adverting to two great fields in which, as I believe, it would prove
especially revolutionary.
The first of these is the field of chastity. It will be necessary for me
in the course of the present work to dwell at greater length than I should
desire upon questions connected with this virtue. At present, I will
merely ask the reader to conceive a mind from which all notion of the
intrinsic excellence or nobility of purity was banished, and to suppose
such a mind comparing, by a utilitarian standard, a period in which
sensuality was almost unbridled, such as the age of Athenian glory or the
English restoration, with a period of austere virtue. The question which
of these societies was morally the best would thus resolve itself solely
into the question in which there was produced the greatest amount of
enjoyment and the smallest amount of suffering. The pleasures of domestic
life, the pleasures resulting from a freer social intercourse,(77) the
different degrees of suffering inflicted on those who violated the law of
chastity, the ulterior consequences of each mode of life upon well-being
and upon population, would be the chief elements of the comparison. Can
any one believe that the balance of enjoyment would be so unquestionably
and so largely on the side of the more austere society as to justify the
degree of superiority which is assigned to it?(78)
The second sphere is that of speculative truth. No class of men have more
highly valued an unflinching hostility to superstition than utilitarians.
Yet it is more than doubtful whether upon their principles it can be
justified. Many superstitions do undoubtedly answer to the Greek
conception of slavish “fear of the gods,” and have been productive of
unspeakable misery to mankind, but there are very many others of a
different tendency. Superstitions appeal to our hopes as well as to our
fears. They often meet and gratify the inmost longings of the heart. They
offer certainties when reason can only afford possibilities or
probabilities. They supply conceptions on which the imagination loves to
dwell. They sometimes even impart a new sanction to moral truths. Creating
wants which they alone can satisfy, and fears which they alone can quell,
they often become essential elements of happiness, and their consoling
efficacy is most felt in the languid or troubled hours when it is most
needed. We owe more to our illusions than to our knowledge. The
imagination, which is altogether constructive, probably contributes more
to our happiness than the reason, which in the sphere of speculation is
mainly critical and destructive. The rude charm which in the hour of
danger or distress the savage clasps so confidently to his breast, the
sacred picture which is believed to shed a hallowing and protecting
influence over the poor man’s cottage, can bestow a more real consolation
in the darkest hour of human suffering than can be afforded by the
grandest theories of philosophy. The first desire of the heart is to find
something on which to lean. Happiness is a condition of feeling, not a
condition of circumstances, and to common minds one of its first
essentials is the exclusion of painful and harassing doubt. A system of
belief may be false, superstitious, and reactionary, and may yet be
conducive to human happiness if it furnishes great multitudes of men with
what they believe to be a key to the universe, if it consoles them in
those seasons of agonizing bereavement when the consolations of
enlightened reason are but empty words, if it supports their feeble and
tottering minds in the gloomy hours of sickness and of approaching death.
A credulous and superstitious nature may be degraded, but in the many
cases where superstition does not assume a persecuting or appalling form
it is not unhappy, and degradation, apart from unhappiness, can have no
place in utilitarian ethics. No error can be more grave than to imagine
that when a critical spirit is abroad the pleasant beliefs will all
remain, and the painful ones alone will perish. To introduce into the mind
the consciousness of ignorance and the pangs of doubt is to inflict or
endure much suffering, which may even survive the period of transition.
“Why is it,” said Luther’s wife, looking sadly back upon the sensuous
creed which she had left, “that in our old faith we prayed so often and so
warmly, and that our prayers are now so few and so cold?”(79) It is
related of an old monk named Serapion, who had embraced the heresy of the
anthropomorphites, that he was convinced by a brother monk of the folly of
attributing to the Almighty a human form. He bowed his reason humbly to
the Catholic creed; but when he knelt down to pray, the image which his
imagination had conceived, and on which for so many years his affections
had been concentrated, had disappeared, and the old man burst into tears,
exclaiming, “You have deprived me of my God.”(80)
These are indeed facts which must be deeply painful to all who are
concerned with the history of opinion. The possibility of often adding to
the happiness of men by diffusing abroad, or at least sustaining pleasing
falsehoods, and the suffering that must commonly result from their
dissolution, can hardly reasonably be denied. There is one, and but one,
adequate reason that can always justify men in critically reviewing what
they have been taught. It is, the conviction that opinions should not be
regarded as mere mental luxuries, that truth should be deemed an end
distinct from and superior to utility, and that it is a moral duty to
pursue it, whether it leads to pleasure or whether it leads to pain. Among
the many wise sayings which antiquity ascribed to Pythagoras, few are more
remarkable than his division of virtue into two distinct branches—to be
truthful and to do good.(81)
Of the sanctions which, according to the utilitarians, constitute the sole
motives to virtue, there is one, as I have said, unexceptionably adequate.
Those who adopt the religious sanction, can always appeal to a balance of
interest in favour of virtue; but as the great majority of modern
utilitarians confidently sever their theory from all theological
considerations, I will dismiss this sanction with two or three remarks.
In the first place, it is obvious that those who regard the arbitrary will
of the Deity as the sole rule of morals, render it perfectly idle to
represent the Divine attributes as deserving of our admiration. To speak
of the goodness of God, either implies that there is such a quality as
goodness, to which the Divine acts conform, or it is an unmeaning
tautology. Why should we extol, or how can we admire, the perfect goodness
of a Being whose will and acts constitute the sole standard or definition
of perfection?(82) The theory which teaches that the arbitrary will of the
Deity is the one rule of morals, and the anticipation of future rewards
and punishments the one reason for conforming to it, consists of two
parts. The first annihilates the goodness of God; the second, the virtue
of man.
Another and equally obvious remark is, that while these theologians
represent the hope of future rewards, and the fear of future punishments,
as the only reason for doing right, one of our strongest reasons for
believing in the existence of these rewards and punishments, is our
deep-seated feeling of merit and demerit. That the present disposition of
affairs is in many respects unjust, that suffering often attends a course
which deserves reward, and happiness a course which deserves punishment,
leads men to infer a future state of retribution. Take away the
consciousness of desert, and the inference would no longer be made.
A third remark, which I believe to be equally true, but which may not be
acquiesced in with equal readiness, is that without the concurrence of a
moral faculty, it is wholly impossible to prove from nature that supreme
goodness of the Creator, which utilitarian theologians assume. We speak of
the benevolence shown in the joy of the insect glittering in the sunbeam,
in the protecting instincts so liberally bestowed among the animal world,
in the kindness of the parent to its young, in the happiness of little
children, in the beauty and the bounty of nature, but is there not another
side to the picture? The hideous disease, the countless forms of rapine
and of suffering, the entozoa that live within the bodies, and feed upon
the anguish of sentient beings, the ferocious instinct of the cat, that
prolongs with delight the agonies of its victim, all the multitudinous
forms of misery that are manifested among the innocent portion of
creation, are not these also the works of nature? We speak of the Divine
veracity. What is the whole history of the intellectual progress of the
world but one long struggle of the intellect of man to emancipate itself
from the deceptions of nature? Every object that meets the eye of the
savage awakens his curiosity only to lure him into some deadly error. The
sun that seems a diminutive light revolving around his world; the moon and
the stars that appear formed only to light his path; the strange fantastic
diseases that suggest irresistibly the notion of present dæmons; the
terrific phenomena of nature which appear the results, not of blind
forces, but of isolated spiritual agencies—all these things fatally,
inevitably, invincibly impel him into superstition. Through long centuries
the superstitions thus generated have deluged the world with blood.
Millions of prayers have been vainly breathed to what we now know were
inexorable laws of nature. Only after ages of toil did the mind of man
emancipate itself from those deadly errors to which by the deceptive
appearances of nature the long infancy of humanity is universally doomed.
And in the laws of wealth how different are the appearances from the
realities of things! Who can estimate the wars that have been kindled, the
bitterness and the wretchedness that have been caused, by errors relating
to the apparent antagonism of the interests of nations which were so
natural that for centuries they entangled the very strongest intellects,
and it was scarcely till our own day that a tardy science came to dispel
them?
What shall we say to these things? If induction alone were our guide, if
we possessed absolutely no knowledge of some things being in their own
nature good, and others in their own nature evil, how could we rise from
this spectacle of nature to the conception of an all-perfect Author? Even
if we could discover a predominance of benevolence in the creation, we
should still regard the mingled attributes of nature as a reflex of the
mingled attributes of its Contriver. Our knowledge of the Supreme
Excellence, our best evidence even of the existence of the Creator, is
derived not from the material universe but from our own moral nature.(83)
It is not of reason but of faith. In other words it springs from that
instinctive or moral nature which is as truly a part of our being as is
our reason, which teaches us what reason could never teach, the supreme
and transcendent excellence of moral good, which rising dissatisfied above
this world of sense, proves itself by the very intensity of its aspiration
to be adapted for another sphere, and which constitutes at once the
evidence of a Divine element within us, and the augury of the future that
is before us.(84)
These things belong rather to the sphere of feeling than of reasoning.
Those who are most deeply persuaded of their truth, will probably feel
that they are unable by argument to express adequately the intensity of
their conviction, but they may point to the recorded experience of the
best and greatest men in all ages, to the incapacity of terrestrial things
to satisfy our nature, to the manifest tendency, both in individuals and
nations, of a pure and heroic life to kindle, and of a selfish and corrupt
life to cloud, these aspirations, to the historical fact that no
philosophy and no scepticism have been able permanently to repress them.
The lines of our moral nature tend upwards. In it we have the common root
of religion and of ethics, for the same consciousness that tells us that,
even when it is in fact the weakest element of our constitution, it is by
right supreme, commanding and authoritative, teaches us also that it is
Divine. All the nobler religions that have governed mankind, have done so
by virtue of the affinity of their teaching with this nature, by speaking,
as common religious language correctly describes it, “to the heart,” by
appealing not to self-interest, but to that Divine element of
self-sacrifice which is latent in every soul.(85) The reality of this
moral nature is the one great question of natural theology, for it
involves that connection between our own and a higher nature, without
which the existence of a First Cause were a mere question of archæology,
and religion but an exercise of the imagination.
I return gladly to the secular sanctions of utilitarianism. The majority
of its disciples assure us that these are sufficient to establish their
theory, or in other words, that our duty coincides so strictly with our
interest when rightly understood, that a perfectly prudent would
necessarily become a perfectly virtuous man.(86) Bodily vice they tell us
ultimately brings bodily weakness and suffering. Extravagance is followed
by ruin; unbridled passions by the loss of domestic peace; disregard for
the interests of others by social or legal penalties; while on the other
hand, the most moral is also the most tranquil disposition; benevolence is
one of the truest of our pleasures, and virtue may become by habit, an
essential of enjoyment. As the shopkeeper who has made his fortune, still
sometimes continues at the counter, because the daily routine has become
necessary to his happiness, so the “moral hero” may continue to practise
that virtue which was at first the mere instrument of his pleasures, as
being in itself more precious than all besides.(87)
This theory of the perfect coincidence of virtue and interest rightly
understood, which has always been a commonplace of moralists, and has been
advocated by many who were far from wishing to resolve virtue into
prudence, contains no doubt a certain amount of truth, but only of the
most general kind. It does not apply to nations as wholes, for although
luxurious and effeminate vices do undoubtedly corrode and enervate
national character, the histories of ancient Rome and of not a few modern
monarchies abundantly prove that a career of consistent rapacity,
ambition, selfishness, and fraud may be eminently conducive to national
prosperity.(88) It does not apply to imperfectly organised societies,
where the restraints of public opinion are unfelt and where force is the
one measure of right. It does not apply except in a very partial degree
even to the most civilised of mankind. It is, indeed, easy to show that in
a polished community a certain low standard of virtue is essential to
prosperity, to paint the evils of unrestrained passions, and to prove that
it is better to obey than to violate the laws of society. But if turning
from the criminal or the drunkard we were to compare the man who simply
falls in with or slightly surpasses the average morals of those about him,
and indulges in a little vice which is neither injurious to his own health
nor to his reputation, with the man who earnestly and painfully adopts a
much higher standard than that of his time or of his class, we should be
driven to another conclusion. Honesty it is said is the best policy—a
fact, however, which depends very much upon the condition of the police
force—but heroic virtue must rest upon a different basis. If happiness in
any of its forms be the supreme object of life, moderation is the most
emphatic counsel of our being, but moderation is as opposed to heroism as
to vice. There is no form of intellectual or moral excellence which has
not a general tendency to produce happiness if cultivated in moderation.
There are very few which if cultivated to great perfection have not a
tendency directly the reverse. Thus a mind that is sufficiently enlarged
to range abroad amid the pleasures of intellect has no doubt secured a
fund of inexhaustible enjoyment; but he who inferred from this that the
highest intellectual eminence was the condition most favourable to
happiness would be lamentably deceived. The diseased nervous sensibility
that accompanies intense mental exertion, the weary, wasting sense of
ignorance and vanity, the disenchantment and disintegration that commonly
follow a profound research, have filled literature with mournful echoes of
the words of the royal sage, “In much wisdom is much grief, and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” The lives of men of genius have
been for the most part a conscious and deliberate realisation of the
ancient myth—the tree of knowledge and the tree of life stood side by
side, and they chose the tree of knowledge rather than the tree of life.
Nor is it otherwise in the realm of morals.(89) The virtue which is most
conducive to happiness is plainly that which can be realised without much
suffering, and sustained without much effort. Legal and physical penalties
apply only to the grosser and more extreme forms of vice. Social penalties
may strike the very highest forms of virtue.(90) That very sentiment of
unity with mankind which utilitarians assure us is one day to become so
strong as to overpower all unsocial feelings, would make it more and more
impossible for men consistently with their happiness to adopt any course,
whether very virtuous or very vicious, that would place them out of
harmony with the general sentiment of society. It may be said that the
tranquillity of a perfectly virtuous mind is the highest form of
happiness, and may be reasonably preferred not only to material
advantages, but also to the approbation of society; but no man can fully
attain, and few can even approximate, to such a condition. When vicious
passions and impulses are very strong, it is idle to tell the sufferer
that he would be more happy if his nature were radically different from
what it is. If happiness be his object, he must regulate his course with a
view to the actual condition of his being, and there can be little doubt
that his peace would be most promoted by a compromise with vice. The
selfish theory of morals applies only to the virtues of temperament, and
not to that much higher form of virtue which is sustained in defiance of
temperament.(91) We have no doubt a certain pleasure in cultivating our
good tendencies, but we have by no means the same pleasure in repressing
our bad ones. There are men whose whole lives are spent in willing one
thing, and desiring the opposite. In such cases as these virtue clearly
involves a sacrifice of happiness; for the suffering caused by resisting
natural tendencies is much greater than would ensue from their moderate
gratification.
The plain truth is that no proposition can be more palpably and
egregiously false than the assertion that as far as this world is
concerned, it is invariably conducive to the happiness of a man to pursue
the most virtuous career. Circumstances and disposition will make one man
find his highest happiness in the happiness, and another man in the
misery, of his kind; and if the second man acts according to his interest,
the utilitarian, however much he may deplore the result, has no right to
blame or condemn the agent. For that agent is following his greatest
happiness, and this, in the eyes of utilitarians, in one form or another,
is the highest, or to speak more accurately, the only motive by which
human nature can be actuated.
We may remark too that the disturbance or pain which does undoubtedly
usually accompany what is evil, bears no kind of proportion to the
enormity of the guilt. An irritability of temper, which is chiefly due to
a derangement of the nervous system, or a habit of procrastination or
indecision, will often cause more suffering than some of the worst vices
that can corrupt the heart.(92)
But it may be said this calculation of pains and pleasures is defective
through the omission of one element. Although a man who had a very strong
natural impulse towards some vice would appear more likely to promote the
tranquillity of his nature by a moderate and circumspect gratification of
that vice, than by endeavouring painfully to repress his natural
tendencies, yet he possesses a conscience which adjudicates upon his
conduct, and its sting or its approval constitutes a pain or pleasure so
intense, as more than to redress the balance. Now of course, no intuitive
moralist will deny, what for a long time his school may be almost said to
have been alone in asserting, the reality of conscience, or the pleasures
and pains it may afford. He simply denies, and he appeals to consciousness
in attestation of his position, that those pains and pleasures are so
powerful or so proportioned to our acts as to become an adequate basis for
virtue. Conscience, whether we regard it as an original faculty, or as a
product of the association of ideas, exercises two distinct functions. It
points out a difference between right and wrong, and when its commands are
violated, it inflicts a certain measure of suffering and disturbance. The
first function it exercises persistently through life. The second it only
exercises under certain special circumstances. It is scarcely conceivable
that a man in the possession of his faculties should pass a life of gross
depravity and crime without being conscious that he was doing wrong; but
it is extremely possible for him to do so without this consciousness
having any appreciable influence upon his tranquillity. The condition of
their consciences, as Mr. Carlyle observes, has less influence on the
happiness of men than the condition of their livers. Considered as a
source of pain, conscience bears a striking resemblance to the feeling of
disgust. Notwithstanding the assertion of Dr. Johnson, I venture to
maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging
the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting,
that if they could obtain flesh diet on no other condition, they would
relinquish it for ever. But to those who are inured to the trade, this
repugnance has simply ceased. It has no place in their emotions or
calculations. Nor can it be reasonably questioned that most men by an
assiduous attendance at the slaughter-house could acquire a similar
indifference. In like manner, the reproaches of conscience are doubtless a
very real and important form of suffering to a sensitive, scrupulous, and
virtuous girl who has committed some trivial act of levity or
disobedience; but to an old and hardened criminal they are a matter of the
most absolute indifference.
Now it is undoubtedly conceivable, that by an association of ideas men
might acquire a feeling that would cause that which would naturally be
painful to them to be pleasurable, and that which would naturally be
pleasurable to be painful.(93) But the question will immediately arise,
why should they respect this feeling? We have seen that, according to the
inductive theory, there is no such thing as natural duty. Men enter into
life solely desirous of seeking their own happiness. The whole edifice of
virtue arises from the observed fact, that owing to the constitution of
our nature, and the intimacy of our social relations, it is necessary for
our happiness to abstain from some courses that would be immediately
pleasurable and to pursue others that are immediately the reverse.
Self-interest is the one ultimate reason for virtue, however much the
moral chemistry of Hartley may disguise and transform it. Ought or ought
not, means nothing more than the prospect of acquiring or of losing
pleasure. The fact that one line of conduct promotes, and another impairs
the happiness of others is, according to these moralists, in the last
analysis, no reason whatever for pursuing the former or avoiding the
latter, unless such a course is that which brings us the greatest
happiness. The happiness may arise from the action of society upon
ourselves, or from our own naturally benevolent disposition, or, again,
from an association of ideas, which means the force of a habit we have
formed, but in any case our own happiness is the one possible or
conceivable motive of action. If this be a true picture of human nature,
the reasonable course for every man is to modify his disposition in such a
manner that he may attain the greatest possible amount of enjoyment. If he
has formed an association of ideas, or contracted a habit which inflicts
more pain than it prevents, or prevents more pleasure than it affords, his
reasonable course is to dissolve that association, to destroy that habit.
This is what he “ought” to do according to the only meaning that word can
possess in the utilitarian vocabulary. If he does not, he will justly
incur the charge of imprudence, which is the only charge utilitarianism
can consistently bring against vice.
That it would be for the happiness as it would certainly be in the power
of a man of a temperament such as I have lately described, to quench that
conscientious feeling, which by its painful reproaches prevents him from
pursuing the course that would be most conducive to his tranquillity, I
conceive to be self-evident. And, indeed, on the whole, it is more than
doubtful whether conscience, considered apart from the course of action it
prescribes, is not the cause of more pain than pleasure. Its reproaches
are more felt than its approval. The self-complacency of a virtuous man
reflecting with delight upon his own exceeding merit, is frequently spoken
of in the writings of moral philosophers,(94) but is rarely found in
actual life where the most tranquil is seldom the most perfect nature,
where the sensitiveness of conscience increases at least in proportion to
moral growth, and where in the best men a feeling of modesty and humility
is always present to check the exuberance of self-gratulation.
In every sound system of morals and religion the motives of virtue become
more powerful the more the mind is concentrated upon them. It is when they
are lost sight of, when they are obscured by passion, unrealised or
forgotten, that they cease to operate. But it is a peculiarity of the
utilitarian conception of virtue that it is wholly unable to resist the
solvent of analysis, and that the more the mind realises its origin and
its nature, the more its influence on character must decline. The
pleasures of the senses will always defy the force of analysis, for they
have a real foundation in our being. They have their basis in the eternal
nature of things. But the pleasure we derive from the practice of virtue
rests, according to this school, on a wholly different basis. It is the
result of casual and artificial association, of habit, of a confusion by
the imagination of means with ends, of a certain dignity with which
society invests qualities or actions that are useful to itself. Just in
proportion as this is felt, just in proportion as the mind separates the
idea of virtue from that of natural excellence and obligation, and
realises the purely artificial character of the connection, just in that
proportion will the coercive power of the moral motive be destroyed. The
utilitarian rule of judging actions and dispositions by their tendency to
promote or diminish happiness, or the maxim of Kant that man should always
act so that the rule of his conduct might be adopted as a law by all
rational beings, may be very useful as a guide in life; but in order that
they should acquire moral weight, it is necessary to presuppose the sense
of moral obligation, the consciousness that duty, when discovered, has a
legitimate claim to be the guiding principle of our lives. And it is this
element which, in the eye of reason, the mere artificial association of
ideas can never furnish.
If the patience of the reader has enabled him to accompany me through this
long train of tedious arguments, he will, I think, have concluded that the
utilitarian theory, though undoubtedly held by many men of the purest, and
by some men of almost heroic virtue, would if carried to its logical
conclusions prove subversive of morality, and especially, and in the very
highest degree, unfavourable to self-denial and to heroism. Even if it
explains these, it fails to justify them, and conscience being traced to a
mere confusion of the means of happiness with its end, would be wholly
unable to resist the solvent of criticism. That this theory of conscience
gives a true or adequate description of the phenomenon it seeks to
explain, no intuitive moralist will admit. It is a complete though common
mistake to suppose that the business of the moralist is merely to explain
the genesis of certain feelings we possess. At the root of all morals lies
an intellectual judgment which is clearly distinct from liking or
disliking, from pleasure or from pain. A man who has injured his position
by some foolish but perfectly innocent act, or who has inadvertently
violated some social rule, may experience an emotion of self-reproach or
of shame quite as acute as if he had committed a crime. But he is at the
same time clearly conscious that his conduct is not a fit subject for
moral reprobation, that the grounds on which it may be condemned are of a
different and of a lower kind. The sense of obligation and of legitimate
supremacy, which is the essential and characteristic feature of
conscience, and which distinguishes it from all the other parts of our
nature, is wholly unaccounted for by the association of ideas. To say that
a certain course of conduct is pleasing, and that a certain amount of pain
results from the weakening of feelings that impel men towards it, is
plainly different from what men mean when they say we ought to pursue it.
The virtue of Hartley is, in its last analysis, but a disease of the
imagination. It may be more advantageous to society than avarice; but it
is formed in the same manner, and has exactly the same degree of binding
force.(95)
These considerations will help to supply an answer to the common
utilitarian objection that to speak of duty as distinct from self-interest
is unmeaning, because it is absurd to say that we are under an obligation
to do any thing when no evil consequences would result to us from not
doing it. Rewards and punishments it may be answered are undoubtedly
necessary to enforce, but they are not necessary to constitute, duty. This
distinction, whether it be real or not, has at all events the advantage of
appearing self-evident to all who are not philosophers. Thus when a party
of colonists occupy a new territory they divide the unoccupied land among
themselves, and they murder, or employ for the gratification of their
lusts, the savage inhabitants. Both acts are done with perfect impunity,
but one is felt to be innocent and the other wrong. A lawful government
appropriates the land and protects the aboriginals, supporting its
enactments by penalties. In the one case the law both creates and enforces
a duty, in the other it only enforces it. The intuitive moralist simply
asserts that we have the power of perceiving that certain courses of
action are higher, nobler, and better than others, and that by the
constitution of our being, this fact, which is generically distinct from
the prospect of pleasure or the reverse, may and ought to be and
continually is a motive of action. It is no doubt possible for a man to
prefer the lower course, and in this case we say he is deserving of
punishment, and if he remains unpunished we say that it is unjust. But if
there were no power to reward or punish him, his acts would not be
indifferent. They would still be intelligibly described as essentially
base or noble, shameful though there were none to censure, admirable
though there were none to admire.
That men have the power of preferring other objects than happiness is a
proposition which must ultimately be left to the attestation of
consciousness. That the pursuit of virtue, however much happiness may
eventually follow in its train, is in the first instance an example of
this preference, must be established by that common voice of mankind which
has invariably regarded a virtuous motive as generically different from an
interested one. And indeed even when the conflict between strong passions
and a strong sense of duty does not exist it is impossible to measure the
degrees of virtue by the scale of enjoyment. The highest nature is rarely
the happiest. Petronius Arbiter was, very probably, a happier man than
Marcus Aurelius. For eighteen centuries the religious instinct of
Christendom has recognised its ideal in the form of a “Man of Sorrows.”
Considerations such as I have now urged lead the intuitive moralists to
reject the principles of the utilitarian. They acknowledge indeed that the
effect of actions upon the happiness of mankind forms a most important
element in determining their moral quality, but they maintain that without
natural moral perceptions we never should have known that it was our duty
to seek the happiness of mankind when it diverged from our own, and they
deny that virtue was either originally evolved from or is necessarily
proportioned to utility. They acknowledge that in the existing condition
of society there is at least a general coincidence between the paths of
virtue and of prosperity, but they contend that the obligation of virtue
is of such a nature that no conceivable convulsion of affairs could
destroy it, and that it would continue even if the government of the world
belonged to supreme malice instead of supreme benevolence. Virtue, they
believe, is something more than a calculation or a habit. It is impossible
to conceive its fundamental principles reversed. Notwithstanding the
strong tendency to confuse cognate feelings, the sense of duty and the
sense of utility remain perfectly distinct in the apprehension of mankind,
and we are quite capable of recognising each separate ingredient in the
same act. Our respect for a gallant but dangerous enemy, our contempt for
a useful traitor, our care in the last moments of life for the interests
of those who survive us, our clear distinction between intentional and
unintentional injuries, and between the consciousness of imprudence and
the consciousness of guilt, our conviction that the pursuit of interest
should always be checked by a sense of duty, and that selfish and moral
motives are so essentially opposed, that the presence of the former
necessarily weakens the latter, our indignation at those who when honour
or gratitude call them to sacrifice their interests pause to calculate
remote consequences, the feeling of remorse which differs from every other
emotion of our nature—in a word, the universal, unstudied sentiments of
mankind all concur in leading us to separate widely our virtuous
affections from our selfish ones. Just as pleasure and pain are ultimate
grounds of action, and no reason can be given why we should seek the
former and avoid the latter, except that it is the constitution of our
nature that we should do so, so we are conscious that the words right and
wrong express ultimate intelligible motives, that these motives are
generically different from the others, that they are of a higher order,
and that they carry with them a sense of obligation. Any scheme of morals
that omits these facts fails to give an accurate and adequate description
of the states of feeling which consciousness reveals. The consciences of
men in every age would have echoed the assertion of Cicero that to
sacrifice pleasure with a view of obtaining any form or modification of
pleasure in return, no more answers to our idea of virtue, than to lend
money at interest to our idea of charity. The conception of pure
disinterestedness is presupposed in our estimates of virtue. It is the
root of all the emotions with which we contemplate acts of heroism. We
feel that man is capable of pursuing what he believes to be right although
pain and disaster and mental suffering and an early death be the
consequence, and although no prospect of future reward lighten upon his
tomb. This is the highest prerogative of our being, the point of contact
between the human nature and the divine.
In addition to the direct arguments in its support, the utilitarian school
owes much of its influence to some very powerful moral and intellectual
predispositions in its favour—the first, which we shall hereafter examine,
consisting of the tendency manifested in certain conditions of society
towards the qualities it is most calculated to produce, and the second of
the almost irresistible attraction which unity and precision exercise on
many minds. It was this desire to simplify human nature, by reducing its
various faculties and complex operations to a single principle or process,
that gave its great popularity to the sensational school of the last
century. It led most metaphysicians of that school to deny the duality of
human nature. It led Bonnet and Condillac to propose an animated statue,
endowed with the five senses as channels of ideas, and with faculties
exclusively employed in transforming the products of sensation, as a
perfect representative of humanity. It led Helvétius to assert that the
original faculties of all men were precisely the same, all the difference
between what we call genius and what we call stupidity arising from
differences of circumstances, and all the difference between men and
animals arising mainly from the structure of the human hand. In morals,
theories of unification are peculiarly plausible, and I think peculiarly
dangerous, because, owing to the interaction of our moral sentiments, and
the many transformations that each can undergo, there are few affections
that might not under some conceivable circumstances become the parents of
every other. When Hobbes, in the name of the philosophy of self-interest,
contended that “Pity is but the imagination of future calamity to
ourselves, produced by the sense of another man’s calamity;”(96) when
Hutcheson, in the name of the philosophy of benevolence, argued that the
vice of intemperance is that it impels us to violence towards others, and
weakens our capacity for doing them good;(97) when other moralists
defending the excellence of our nature maintained that compassion is so
emphatically the highest of our pleasures that a desire of gratifying it
is the cause of our acts of barbarity;(98) each of these theories,
extravagant as it is, contains a germ of undoubted psychological truth. It
is true that a mind intensely apprehensive of future calamities would on
that account receive a shock at the sight of the calamities of others. It
is true that a very keen and absorbing sentiment of benevolence would be
in itself sufficient to divert men from any habit that impaired their
power of gratifying it. It is true that compassion involves a certain
amount of pleasure, and conceivable that that pleasure might be so
intensified that we might seek it by a crime. The error in these theories
is not that they exaggerate the possible efficacy of the motives, but that
they exaggerate their actual intensity in human nature and describe
falsely the process by which the results they seek to explain have been
arrived at. The function of observation in moral philosophy is not simply
to attest the moral sentiments we possess, leaving it to the reason to
determine deductively how they may have been formed; it is rather to
follow them through all the stages of their formation.
And here I may observe that the term inductive, like most others that are
employed in moral philosophy, may give rise to serious misconception. It
is properly applied to those moralists who, disbelieving the existence of
any moral sense or faculty revealing to us what is right and wrong,
maintain that the origin of those ideas is simply our experience of the
tendency of different lines of conduct to promote or impair true
happiness. It appears, however, to be sometimes imagined that inductive
moralists alone think that it is by induction or experience that we ought
to ascertain what is the origin of our moral ideas. But this I conceive to
be a complete mistake. The basis of morals is a distinct question from the
basis of theories of morals. Those who maintain the existence of a moral
faculty do not, as is sometimes said, assume this proposition as a first
principle of their arguments, but they arrive at it by a process of
induction quite as severe as any that can be employed by their
opponents.(99) They examine, analyse, and classify their existing moral
feelings, ascertain in what respects those feelings agree with or differ
from others, trace them through their various phases, and only assign them
to a special faculty when they think they have shown them to be incapable
of resolution, and generically different from all others.(100)
This separation is all that is meant by a moral faculty. We are apt to
regard the term as implying a distinct and well defined organ, bearing to
the mind the same kind of relation as a limb to the body. But of the
existence of such organs, and of the propriety of such material imagery,
we know nothing. Perceiving in ourselves a will, and a crowd of
intellectual and emotional phenomena that seem wholly different from the
properties of matter, we infer the existence of an immaterial substance
which wills, thinks, and feels, and can classify its own operations with
considerable precision. The term faculty is simply an expression of
classification. If we say that the moral faculty differs from the æsthetic
faculty, we can only mean that the mind forms certain judgments of moral
excellence, and also certain judgments of beauty, and that these two
mental processes are clearly distinct. To ask to what part of our nature
moral perceptions should be attributed, is only to ask to what train of
mental phenomena they bear the closest resemblance.
If this simple, but often neglected, consideration be borne in mind, the
apparent discordance of intuitive moralists will appear less profound than
might at first sight be supposed, for each section merely elucidates some
one characteristic of moral judgments. Thus Butler insists upon the sense
of obligation that is involved in them, contends that this separates them
from all other sentiments, and assigns them in consequence to a special
faculty of supreme authority called conscience. Adam Smith and many other
writers were especially struck by their sympathetic character. We are
naturally attracted by humanity, and repelled by cruelty, and this
instinctive, unreasoning sentiment constitutes, according to these
moralists, the difference between right and wrong. Cudworth, however, the
English precursor of Kant, had already anticipated, and later
metaphysicians have more fully exhibited, the inadequacy of such an
analysis. Justice, humanity, veracity, and kindred virtues not merely have
the power of attracting us, we have also an intellectual perception that
they are essentially and immutably good, that their nature does not depend
upon, and is not relative to, our constitutions; that it is impossible and
inconceivable they should ever be vices, and their opposites, virtues.
They are, therefore, it is said, intuitions of the reason. Clarke,
developing the same rational school, and following in the steps of those
moralists who regard our nature as a hierarchy of powers or faculties,
with different degrees of dignity, and an appropriate order of supremacy
and subordination, maintained that virtue consisted in harmony with the
nature of things. Wollaston endeavoured to reduce it to truth, and
Hutcheson to benevolence, which he maintained is recognised and approved
by what his respect for the philosophy of Locke induced him to call “a
moral sense,” but what Shaftesbury had regarded as a moral “taste.” The
pleasure attending the gratification of this taste, according to
Shaftesbury and Henry More, is the motive to virtue. The doctrine of a
moral sense or faculty was the basis of the ethics of Reid. Hume
maintained that the peculiar quality of virtue is its utility, but that
our affections are purely disinterested, and that we arrive at our
knowledge of what is virtuous by a moral sense implanted in our nature,
which leads us instinctively to approve of all acts that are beneficial to
others. Expanding a pregnant hint which had been thrown out by Butler, he
laid the foundation for a union of the schools of Clarke and Shaftesbury,
by urging that our moral decisions are not simple, but complex, containing
both a judgment of the reason, and an emotion of the heart. This fact has
been elucidated still further by later writers, who have observed that
these two elements apply in varying degrees to different kinds of virtue.
According to Lord Kames, our intellectual perception of right and wrong
applies most strictly to virtues like justice or veracity, which are of
what is called “perfect obligation,” or, in other words, are of such a
nature, that their violation is a distinct crime, while the emotion of
attraction or affection is shown most strongly towards virtues of
imperfect obligation, like benevolence or charity. Like Hutcheson and
Shaftesbury, Lord Kames notices the analogies between our moral and
æsthetical judgments.
These last analogies open out a region of thought widely different from
that we have been traversing. The close connection between the good and
the beautiful has been always felt, so much so, that both were in Greek
expressed by the same word, and in the philosophy of Plato, moral beauty
was regarded as the archetype of which all visible beauty is only the
shadow or the image. We all feel that there is a strict propriety in the
term moral beauty. We feel that there are different forms of beauty which
have a natural correspondence to different moral qualities, and much of
the charm of poetry and eloquence rests upon this harmony. We feel that we
have a direct, immediate, intuitive perception that some objects, such as
the sky above us, are beautiful, that this perception of beauty is totally
different, and could not possibly be derived, from a perception of their
utility, and that it bears a very striking resemblance to the
instantaneous and unreasoning admiration elicited by a generous or heroic
action. We perceive too, if we examine with care the operations of our own
mind, that an æsthetical judgment includes an intuition or intellectual
perception, and an emotion of attraction or admiration, very similar to
those which compose a moral judgment. The very idea of beauty again
implies that it should be admired, as the idea of happiness implies that
it should be desired, and the idea of duty that it should be performed.
There is also a striking correspondence between the degree and kind of
uniformity we can in each case discover. That there is a difference
between right and wrong, and between beauty and ugliness, are both
propositions which are universally felt. That right is better than wrong,
and beauty than ugliness, are equally unquestioned. When we go further,
and attempt to define the nature of these qualities, we are met indeed by
great diversities of detail, but by a far larger amount of substantial
unity. Poems like the Iliad or the Psalms, springing in the most
dissimilar quarters, have commanded the admiration of men, through all the
changes of some 3,000 years. The charm of music, the harmony of the female
countenance, the majesty of the starry sky, of the ocean or of the
mountain, the gentler beauties of the murmuring stream or of the twilight
shades, were felt, as they are felt now, when the imagination of the
infant world first embodied itself in written words. And in the same way
types of heroism, and of virtue, descending from the remotest ages,
command the admiration of mankind. We can sympathise with the emotions of
praise or blame revealed in the earliest historians, and the most ancient
moralists strike a responsive chord in every heart. The broad lines remain
unchanged. No one ever contended that justice was a vice or injustice a
virtue; or that a summer sunset was a repulsive object, or that the sores
upon a human body were beautiful. Always, too, the objects of æsthetical
admiration were divided into two great classes, the sublime and the
beautiful, which in ethics have their manifest counterparts in the heroic
and the amiable.
If, again, we examine the undoubted diversities that exist in judgments of
virtue and of beauty, we soon discover that in each case a large
proportion of them are to be ascribed to the different degrees of
civilisation. The moral standard changes within certain limits, and
according to a regular process with the evolutions of society. There are
virtues very highly estimated in a rude civilisation which sink into
comparative insignificance in an organised society, while conversely,
virtues that were deemed secondary in the first become primary in the
other. There are even virtues that it is impossible for any but highly
cultivated minds to recognise. Questions of virtue and vice, such as the
difference between humanity and barbarity, or between temperance and
intemperance, are sometimes merely questions of degree, and the standard
at one stage of civilisation may be much higher than at another. Just in
the same way a steady modification of tastes, while a recognition of the
broad features of beauty remains unchanged, accompanies advancing
civilisation. The preference of gaudy to subdued tints, of colour to form,
of a florid to a chaste style, of convulsive attitudes, gigantic figures,
and strong emotions, may be looked for with considerable confidence in an
uninstructed people. The refining influence of cultivation is in no sphere
more remarkable than in the canons of taste it produces, and there are few
better measures of the civilisation of a people than the conceptions of
beauty it forms, the type or ideal it endeavours to realise.
Many diversities, however, both of moral and æsthetical judgments, may be
traced to accidental causes. Some one who is greatly admired, or who
possesses great influence, is distinguished by some peculiarity of
appearance, or introduces some peculiarity of dress. He will soon find
countless imitators. Gradually the natural sense of beauty will become
vitiated; the eye and the taste will adjust themselves to a false and
artificial standard, and men will at last judge according to it with the
most absolute spontaneity. In the same way, if any accidental circumstance
has elevated an indifferent action to peculiar honour, if a religious
system enforces it as a virtue or brands it as a vice, the consciences of
men will after a time accommodate themselves to the sentence, and an
appeal to a wider than a local tribunal is necessary to correct the error.
Every nation, again, from its peculiar circumstances and position, tends
to some particular type, both of beauty and of virtue, and it naturally
extols its national type beyond all others. The virtues of a small poor
nation, living among barren mountains, surrounded by powerful enemies, and
maintaining its independence only by the most inflexible discipline,
watchfulness, and courage, will be in some degree different from those of
a rich people removed from all fear of invasion and placed in the centre
of commerce. The former will look with a very lenient eye on acts of
barbarity or treachery, which to the latter would appear unspeakably
horrible, and will value very highly certain virtues of discipline which
the other will comparatively neglect. So, too, the conceptions of beauty
formed by a nation of negroes will be different from those formed by a
nation of whites;(101) the splendour of a tropical sky or the savage
grandeur of a northern ocean, the aspect of great mountains or of wide
plains, will not only supply nations with present images of sublimity or
beauty, but will also contribute to form their standard and affect their
judgments. Local customs or observances become so interwoven with our
earliest recollections, that we at last regard them as essentially
venerable, and even in the most trivial matters it requires a certain
effort to dissolve the association. There was much wisdom as well as much
wit in the picture of the novelist who described the English footman’s
contempt for the uniforms of the French, “blue being altogether ridiculous
for regimentals, except in the blue guards and artillery;” and I suppose
there are few Englishmen into whose first confused impression of France
there does not enter a half-instinctive feeling of repugnance caused by
the ferocious appearance of a peasantry who are all dressed like
butchers.(102)
It has been said(103) that “the feelings of beauty, grandeur, and whatever
else is comprehended under the name of taste, do not lead to action, but
terminate in delightful contemplation, which constitutes the essential
distinction between them and the moral sentiments to which in some points
of view they may doubtless be likened.” This position I conceive to be
altogether untenable. Our æsthetical judgment is of the nature of a
preference. It leads us to prefer one class of objects to another, and
whenever other things are equal, becomes a ground for action. In choosing
the persons with whom we live, the neighbourhood we inhabit, the objects
that surround us, we prefer that which is beautiful to that which is the
reverse, and in every case in which a choice between beauty and deformity
is in question, and no counteracting motive intervenes, we choose the
former, and avoid the latter. There are no doubt innumerable events in
life in which this question does not arise, but there are also very many
in which we are not called upon to make a moral judgment. We say a man is
actuated by strong moral principle who chooses according to its dictates
in every case involving a moral judgment that comes naturally before him,
and who in obedience to its impulse pursues special courses of action.
Corresponding propositions may be maintained with perfect truth concerning
our sense of beauty. In proportion to its strength does it guide our
course in ordinary life, and determine our peculiar pursuits. We may
indeed sacrifice our sense of material beauty to considerations of utility
with much more alacrity than our sense of moral beauty; we may consent to
build a shapeless house sooner than to commit a dishonourable action, but
we cannot voluntarily choose that which is simply deformed, rather than
that which is beautiful, without a certain feeling of pain, and a pain of
this kind, according to the school of Hartley, is the precise definition
of conscience. Nor is it at all difficult to conceive men with a sense of
beauty so strong that they would die rather than outrage it.
Considering all these things, it is not surprising that many moralists
should have regarded moral excellence as simply the highest form of
beauty, and moral cultivation as the supreme refinement of taste. But
although this manner of regarding it is, as I think, far more plausible
than the theory which resolves virtue into utility, although the Greek
moralists and the school of Shaftesbury have abundantly proved that there
is an extremely close connection between these orders of ideas, there are
two considerations which appear to show the inadequacy of this theory. We
are clearly conscious of the propriety of applying the epithet “beautiful”
to virtues such as charity, reverence, or devotion, but we cannot apply it
with the same propriety to duties of perfect obligation, such as veracity
or integrity. The sense of beauty and the affection that follows it attach
themselves rather to modes of enthusiasm and feeling than to the course of
simple duty which constitutes a merely truthful and upright man.(104)
Besides this, as the Stoics and Butler have shown, the position of
conscience in our nature is wholly unique, and clearly separates morals
from a study of the beautiful. While each of our senses or appetites has a
restricted sphere of operation, it is the function of conscience to survey
the whole constitution of our being, and assign limits to the
gratification of all our various passions and desires. Differing not in
degree, but in kind from the other principles of our nature, we feel that
a course of conduct which is opposed to it may be intelligibly described
as unnatural, even when in accordance with our most natural appetites, for
to conscience is assigned the prerogative of both judging and restraining
them all. Its power may be insignificant, but its title is undisputed, and
“if it had might as it has right, it would govern the world.”(105) It is
this faculty, distinct from, and superior to, all appetites, passions, and
tastes, that makes virtue the supreme law of life, and adds an imperative
character to the feeling of attraction it inspires. It is this which was
described by Cicero as the God ruling within us; by the Stoics as the
sovereignty of reason; by St. Paul as the law of nature; by Butler as the
supremacy of conscience.
The distinction of different parts of our nature, as higher or lower,
which appears in the foregoing reasoning, and which occupies so important
a place in the intuitive system of morals, is one that can only be
defended by the way of illustrations. A writer can only select cases in
which such distinctions seem most apparent, and leave them to the feelings
of his reader. A few examples will, I hope, be sufficient to show that
even in our pleasures, we are not simply determined by the amount of
enjoyment, but that there is a difference of kind, which may be reasonably
described by the epithets, higher or lower.
If we suppose a being from another sphere, who derived his conceptions
from a purely rational process, without the intervention of the senses, to
descend to our world, and to enquire into the principles of human nature,
I imagine there are few points that would strike him as more anomalous, or
which he would be more absolutely unable to realise, than the different
estimates in which men hold the pleasures derived from the two senses of
tasting and hearing. Under the first is comprised the enjoyment resulting
from the action of certain kinds of food upon the palate. Under the second
the charm of music. Each of these forms of pleasure is natural, each can
be greatly heightened by cultivation, in each case the pleasure may be
vivid, but is very transient, and in neither case do evil consequences
necessarily ensue. Yet with so many undoubted points of resemblance, when
we turn to the actual world, we find the difference between these two
orders of pleasure of such a nature, that a comparison seems absolutely
ludicrous. In what then does this difference consist? Not, surely, in the
greater intensity of the enjoyment derived from music, for in many cases
this superiority does not exist.(106) We are all conscious that in our
comparison of these pleasures, there is an element distinct from any
consideration of their intensity, duration, or consequences. We naturally
attach a faint notion of shame to the one, while we as naturally glory in
the other. A very keen sense of the pleasures of the palate is looked upon
as in a certain degree discreditable. A man will hardly boast that he is
very fond of eating, but he has no hesitation in acknowledging that he is
very fond of music. The first taste lowers, and the second elevates him in
his own eyes, and in those of his neighbours.
Again, let a man of cheerful disposition, and of a cultivated but not very
fastidious taste, observe his own emotions and the countenances of those
around him during the representation of a clever tragedy and of a clever
farce, and it is probable that he will come to the conclusion that his
enjoyment in the latter case has been both more unmingled and more intense
than in the former. He has felt no lassitude, he has not endured the
amount of pain that necessarily accompanies the pleasure of pathos, he has
experienced a vivid, absorbing pleasure, and he has traced similar
emotions in the violent demonstrations of his neighbours. Yet he will
readily admit that the pleasure derived from the tragedy is of a higher
order than that derived from the farce. Sometimes he will find himself
hesitating which of the two he will choose. The love of mere enjoyment
leads him to the one. A sense of its _nobler_ character inclines him to
the other.
A similar distinction may be observed in other departments. Except in the
relation of the sexes, it is probable that a more intense pleasure is
usually obtained from the grotesque and the eccentric, than from the
perfections of beauty. The pleasure derived from beauty is not violent in
its nature, and it is in most cases peculiarly mixed with melancholy. The
feelings of a man who is deeply moved by a lovely landscape are rarely
those of extreme elation. A shade of melancholy steals over his mind. His
eyes fill with tears. A vague and unsatisfied longing fills his soul. Yet,
troubled and broken as is this form of enjoyment, few persons would
hesitate to pronounce it of a higher kind than any that can be derived
from the exhibitions of oddity.
If pleasures were the sole objects of our pursuit, and if their excellence
were measured only by the quantity of enjoyment they afford, nothing could
appear more obvious than that the man would be esteemed most wise who
attained his object at least cost. Yet the whole course of civilisation is
in a precisely opposite direction. A child derives the keenest and most
exquisite enjoyment from the simplest objects. A flower, a doll, a rude
game, the least artistic tale, is sufficient to enchant it. An uneducated
peasant is enraptured with the wildest story and the coarsest wit.
Increased cultivation almost always produces a fastidiousness which
renders necessary the increased elaboration of our pleasures. We attach a
certain discredit to a man who has retained those of childhood. The very
fact of our deriving pleasure from certain amusements creates a kind of
humiliation, for we feel that they are not in harmony with the nobility of
our nature.(107)
Our judgments of societies resemble in this respect our judgments of
individuals. Few persons, I think, who have compared the modes of popular
life in stagnant and undeveloped countries like Spain with those in the
great centres of industrial civilisation, will venture to pronounce with
any confidence that the quantum or average of actual realised enjoyment is
greater in the civilised than in the semi-civilised society. An
undeveloped nature is by no means necessarily an unhappy nature, and
although we possess no accurate gauge of happiness, we may, at least, be
certain that its degrees do not coincide with the degrees of prosperity.
The tastes and habits of men in a backward society accommodate themselves
to the narrow circle of a few pleasures, and probably find in these as
complete satisfaction as more civilised men in a wider range; and if there
is in the first condition somewhat more of the weariness of monotony,
there is in the second much more of the anxiety of discontent. The
superiority of a highly civilised man lies chiefly in the fact that he
belongs to a higher order of being, for he has approached more nearly to
the end of his existence, and has called into action a larger number of
his capacities. And this is in itself an end. Even if, as is not
improbable, the lower animals are happier than man,(108) and
semi-barbarians than civilised men, still it is better to be a man than a
brute, better to be born amid the fierce struggles of civilisation than in
some stranded nation apart from all the flow of enterprise and knowledge.
Even in that material civilisation which utilitarianism delights to
glorify, there is an element which the philosophy of mere enjoyment cannot
explain.
Again, if we ask the reason of the vast and indisputable superiority which
the general voice of mankind gives to mental pleasures, considered as
pleasures, over physical ones, we shall find, I think, no adequate or
satisfactory answer on the supposition that pleasures owe all their value
to the quantity of enjoyment they afford. The former, it is truly said,
are more varied and more prolonged than the latter but on the other hand,
they are attained with more effort, and they are diffused over a far
narrower circle. No one who compares the class of men who derive their
pleasure chiefly from field sports or other forms of physical enjoyment
with those who derive their pleasure from the highest intellectual
sources; no one who compares the period of boyhood when enjoyments are
chiefly animal with early manhood when they are chiefly intellectual, will
be able to discover in the different levels of happiness any justification
of the great interval the world places between these pleasures. No painter
or novelist, who wished to depict an ideal of perfect happiness, would
seek it in a profound student. Without entering into any doubtful
questions concerning the relations of the body to all mental states, it
may be maintained that bodily conditions have in general more influence
upon our enjoyment than mental ones. The happiness of the great majority
of men is far more affected by health and by temperament,(109) resulting
from physical conditions, which again physical enjoyments are often
calculated to produce, than by any mental or moral causes, and acute
physical sufferings paralyse all the energies of our nature to a greater
extent than any mental distress. It is probable that the American inventor
of the first anæsthetic has done more for the real happiness of mankind
than all the moral philosophers from Socrates to Mill. Moral causes may
teach men patience, and the endurance of felt suffering, or may even
alleviate its pangs, but there are temperaments due to physical causes
from which most sufferings glance almost unfelt. It is said that when an
ancient was asked “what use is philosophy?” he answered, “it teaches men
how to die,” and he verified his words by a noble death; but it has been
proved on a thousand battle-fields, it has been proved on a thousand
scaffolds, it is proved through all the wide regions of China and India,
that the dull and animal nature which feels little and realises faintly,
can meet death with a calm that philosophy can barely rival.(110) The
truth is, that the mental part of our nature is not regarded as superior
to the physical part, because it contributes most to our happiness. The
superiority is of a different kind, and may be intelligibly expressed by
the epithets higher and lower.
And, once more, there is a class of pleasures resulting from the
gratification of our moral feelings which we naturally place in the
foremost rank. To the great majority of mankind it will probably appear,
in spite of the doctrine of Paley, that no multiple of the pleasure of
eating pastry can be an equivalent to the pleasure derived from a generous
action. It is not that the latter is so inconceivably intense. It is that
it is of a higher order.
This distinction of kind has been neglected or denied by most utilitarian
writers;(111) and although an attempt has recently been made to introduce
it into the system, it appears manifestly incompatible with its principle.
If the reality of the distinction be admitted, it shows that our wills are
so far from tending necessarily to that which produces most enjoyment that
we have the power even in our pleasures of recognising a higher and a
wholly different quality, and of making that quality rather than enjoyment
the object of our choice. If it be possible for a man in choosing between
two pleasures deliberately to select as preferable, apart from all
consideration of consequences, that which he is conscious gives least
enjoyment because he recognises in it a greater worthiness, or elevation,
it is certain that his conduct is either wholly irrational, or that he is
acting on a principle of judgment for which ’the greatest happiness’
philosophy is unable to account. Consistently with that philosophy, the
terms higher and lower as applied to different parts of our nature, to
different regions of thought or feeling, can have no other meaning than
that of productive of more or less enjoyment. But if once we admit a
distinction of quality as well as a distinction of quantity in our
estimate of pleasure, all is changed. It then appears evident that the
different parts of our nature to which these pleasures refer, bear to each
other a relation of another kind, which may be clearly and justly
described by the terms higher and lower; and the assertion that our reason
reveals to us intuitively and directly this hierarchy of our being, is a
fundamental position of the greatest schools of intuitive moralists.
According to these writers, when we say that our moral and intellectual is
superior to our animal nature, that the benevolent affections are superior
to the selfish ones, that conscience has a legitimate supremacy over the
other parts of our being; this language is not arbitrary, or fantastic, or
capricious, because it is intelligible. When such a subordination is
announced, it corresponds with feelings we all possess, falls in with the
natural course of our judgments, with our habitual and unstudied language.
The arguments that have been directed against the theory of natural moral
perceptions are of two kinds, the first, which I have already noticed,
being designed to show that all our moral judgments may be resolved into
considerations of utility; the second resting upon the diversity of these
judgments in different nations and stages of civilisation, which, it is
said, is altogether inexplicable upon the supposition of a moral faculty.
As these variations form the great stumbling-block in the way of the
doctrine I am maintaining, and as they constitute a very important part of
the history of morals, I shall make no apology for noticing them in some
detail.
In the first place, there are many cases in which diversities of moral
judgment arise from causes that are not moral, but purely intellectual.
Thus, for example, when theologians pronounced loans at interest contrary
to the law of nature and plainly extortionate, this error obviously arose
from a false notion of the uses of money. They believed that it was a
sterile thing, and that he who has restored what he borrowed, has
cancelled all the benefit he received from the transaction. At the time
when the first Christian moralists treated the subject, special
circumstances had rendered the rate of interest extremely high, and
consequently extremely oppressive to the poor, and this fact, no doubt,
strengthened the prejudice; but the root of the condemnation of usury was
simply an error in political economy. When men came to understand that
money is a productive thing, and that the sum lent enables the borrower to
create sources of wealth that will continue when the loan has been
returned, they perceived that there was no natural injustice in exacting
payment for this advantage, and usury either ceased to be assailed, or was
assailed only upon the ground of positive commands.
Thus again the question of the criminality of abortion has been
considerably affected by physiological speculations as to the time when
the fœtus in the womb acquires the nature, and therefore the rights, of a
separate being. The general opinion among the ancients seems to have been
that it was but a part of the mother, and that she had the same right to
destroy it as to cauterise a tumour upon her body. Plato and Aristotle
both admitted the practice. The Roman law contained no enactment against
voluntary abortion till the time of Ulpian. The Stoics thought that the
infant received its soul when respiration began. The Justinian code fixed
its animation at forty days after conception. In modern legislations it is
treated as a distinct being from the moment of conception.(112) It is
obvious that the solution of such questions, though affecting our moral
judgments, must be sought entirely outside the range of moral feelings.
In the next place, there is a broad distinction to be drawn between duties
which rest immediately on the dictates of conscience, and those which are
based upon positive commands. The iniquity of theft, murder, falsehood, or
adultery rests upon grounds generically distinct from those on which men
pronounce it to be sinful to eat meat on Friday, or to work on Sunday, or
to abstain from religious assemblies. The reproaches conscience directs
against those who are guilty of these last acts are purely hypothetical,
conscience enjoining obedience to the Divine commands, but leaving it to
reason to determine what those commands may be. The distinction between
these two classes of duties becomes apparent on the slightest reflection,
and the variations in their relative prominence form one of the most
important branches of religious history.
Closely connected with the preceding are the diversities which result from
an ancient custom becoming at last, through its very antiquity, or through
the confusion of means with ends, an object of religious reverence. Among
the many safeguards of female purity in the Roman republic was an
enactment forbidding women even to taste wine, and this very intelligible
law being enforced with the earliest education, became at last, by habit
and traditionary reverence, so incorporated with the moral feelings of the
people, that its violation was spoken of as a monstrous crime. Aulus
Gellius has preserved a passage in which Cato observes, “that the husband
has an absolute authority over his wife; it is for him to condemn and
punish her, if she has been guilty of any shameful act, such as drinking
wine or committing adultery.”(113) As soon as the reverence for tradition
was diminished, and men ventured to judge old customs upon their own
merits, they were able, by steadily reflecting upon this belief, to reduce
it to its primitive elements, to separate the act from the ideas with
which it had been associated, and thus to perceive that it was not
necessarily opposed to any of those great moral laws or feelings which
their consciences revealed, and which were the basis of all their
reasonings on morals.
A confused association of ideas, which is easily exposed by a patient
analysis, lies at the root of more serious anomalies. Thus to those who
reflect deeply upon moral history, few things, I suppose, are more
humiliating than to contrast the admiration and profoundly reverential
attachment excited by a conqueror, who through the promptings of simple
vanity, through love of fame, or through greed of territory, has wantonly
caused the deaths, the sufferings, or the bereavements of thousands, with
the abhorrence produced by a single act of murder or robbery committed by
a poor and ignorant man, perhaps under the pressure of extreme want or
intolerable wrong. The attraction of genius and power, which the vulgar
usually measure by their material fruits, the advantages acquired by the
nation to which he belongs, the belief that battles are decided by
providential interference, and that military success is therefore a proof
of Divine favour, and the sanctity ascribed to the regal office, have all
no doubt conspired to veil the atrocity of the conqueror’s career; but
there is probably another and a deeper influence behind. That which
invests war, in spite of all the evils that attend it, with a certain
moral grandeur, is the heroic self-sacrifice it elicits. With perhaps the
single exception of the Church, it is the sphere in which mercenary
motives have least sway, in which performance is least weighed and
measured by strict obligation, in which a disinterested enthusiasm has
most scope. A battle-field is the scene of deeds of self-sacrifice so
transcendent, and at the same time so dramatic, that in spite of all its
horrors and crimes, it awakens the most passionate moral enthusiasm. But
this feeling produced by the thought of so many who have sacrificed their
life-blood for their flag or for their chief, needs some definite object
on which to rest. The multitude of nameless combatants do not strike the
imagination. They do not stand out, and are not realised, as distinct and
living figures conspicuous to the view. Hence it is that the chief, as the
most prominent, becomes the representative warrior; the martyr’s aureole
descends upon his brow, and thus by a confusion that seems the very irony
of fate, the enthusiasm evoked by the self-sacrifice of thousands sheds a
sacred glow around the very man whose prodigious egotism had rendered that
sacrifice necessary.
Another form of moral paradox is derived from the fact that positive
religions may override our moral perceptions in such a manner, that we may
consciously admit a moral contradiction. In this respect there is a strict
parallelism between our intellectual and our moral faculties. It is at
present the professed belief of at least three-fourths of the Christian
Church, and was for some centuries the firm belief of the entire Church,
that on a certain night the Founder of the Christian faith, being seated
at a supper table, held His own body in His own hand, broke that body,
distributed it to His disciples, who proceeded to eat it, the same body
remaining at the same moment seated intact at the table, and soon
afterwards proceeding to the garden of Gethsemane. The fact of such a
doctrine being believed, does not imply that the faculties of those who
hold it are of such a nature that they perceive no contradiction or
natural absurdity in these statements. The well-known argument derived
from the obscurity of the metaphysical notion of substance is intended
only in some slight degree to soften the difficulty. The contradiction is
clearly perceived, but it is accepted by faith as part of the teaching of
the Church.
What transubstantiation is in the order of reason the Augustinian doctrine
of the damnation of unbaptised infants, and the Calvinistic doctrine of
reprobation, are in the order of morals. Of these doctrines it is not too
much to say, that in the form in which they have often been stated, they
surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan
creed, and would, if they formed an essential part of Christianity, amply
justify the term “pernicious superstition,” which Tacitus applied to the
faith. That a little child who lives but a few moments after birth and
dies before it has been sprinkled with the sacred water is in such a sense
responsible for its ancestors having 6,000 years before eaten some
forbidden fruit that it may with perfect justice be resuscitated and cast
into an abyss of eternal fire in expiation of this ancestral crime, that
an all-righteous and all-merciful Creator in the full exercise of those
attributes deliberately calls into existence sentient beings whom He has
from eternity irrevocably destined to endless, unspeakable, unmitigated
torture, are propositions which are at once so extravagantly absurd and so
ineffably atrocious that their adoption might well lead men to doubt the
universality of moral perceptions. Such teaching is in fact simply
dæmonism, and dæmonism in its most extreme form. It attributes to the
Creator acts of injustice and of barbarity, which it would be absolutely
impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most
monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, acts
which are in fact considerably worse than any that theologians have
attributed to the devil. If there were men who while vividly realising the
nature of these acts naturally turned to them as the exhibitions of
perfect goodness, all systems of ethics founded upon innate moral
perceptions would be false. But happily this is not so. Those who embrace
these doctrines do so only because they believe that some inspired Church
or writer has taught them, and because they are still in that stage in
which men consider it more irreligious to question the infallibility of an
apostle than to disfigure by any conceivable imputation the character of
the Deity. They accordingly esteem it a matter of duty, and a commendable
exercise of humility, to stifle the moral feelings of their nature, and
they at last succeed in persuading themselves that their Divinity would be
extremely offended if they hesitated to ascribe to him the attributes of a
fiend. But their moral feelings, though not unimpaired by such
conceptions, are not on ordinary subjects generically different from those
of their neighbours. With an amiable inconsistency they can even find
something to revolt them in the lives of a Caligula or a Nero. Their
theological estimate of justice and mercy is isolated. Their doctrine is
accepted as a kind of moral miracle, and as is customary with a certain
school of theologians, when they enunciate a proposition which is palpably
self-contradictory they call it a mystery and an occasion for faith.
In this instance a distinct moral contradiction is consciously admitted.
In the case of persecution, a strictly moral and logical inference is
drawn from a very immoral proposition which is accepted as part of a
system of dogmatic theology. The two elements that should be considered in
punishing a criminal are the heinousness of his guilt and the injury he
inflicts. When the greatest guilt and the greatest injury are combined,
the greatest punishment naturally follows. No one would argue against the
existence of a moral faculty, on the ground that men put murderers to
death. When therefore theologians believed that a man was intensely guilty
who held certain opinions, and that he was causing the damnation of his
fellows if he propagated them, there was no moral difficulty in concluding
that the heretic should be put to death. Selfish considerations may have
directed persecution against heresy rather than against vice, but the
Catholic doctrines of the guilt of error, and of the infallibility of the
Church, were amply sufficient to justify it.
It appears then that a dogmatic system which is accepted on rational or
other grounds, and supported by prospects of rewards and punishments, may
teach a code of ethics differing from that of conscience; and that in this
case the voice of conscience may be either disregarded or stifled. It is
however also true, that it may be perverted. When, for example,
theologians during a long period have inculcated habits of credulity,
rather than habits of enquiry; when they have persuaded men that it is
better to cherish prejudice than to analyse it; better to stifle every
doubt of what they have been taught than honestly to investigate its
value, they will at last succeed in forming habits of mind that will
instinctively and habitually recoil from all impartiality and intellectual
honesty. If men continually violate a duty they may at last cease to feel
its obligation. But this, though it forms a great difficulty in ethical
enquiries, is no argument against the reality of moral perceptions, for it
is simply a law to which all our powers are subject. A bad intellectual
education will produce not only erroneous or imperfect information but
also a false ply or habit of judgment. A bad æsthetical education will
produce false canons of taste. Systematic abuse will pervert and vitiate
even some of our physical perceptions. In each case the experience of many
minds under many conditions must be appealed to, to determine the standard
of right and wrong, and long and difficult discipline is required to
restore the diseased organ to sanity. We may decide particular moral
questions by reasoning, but our reasoning is an appeal to certain moral
principles which are revealed to us by intuition.
The principal difficulty I imagine which most men have in admitting that
we possess certain natural moral perceptions arises from the supposition
that it implies the existence of some mysterious agent like the dæmon of
Socrates, which gives us specific and infallible information in particular
cases. But this I conceive to be a complete mistake. All that is
necessarily meant by the adherents of this school is comprised in two
propositions. The first is that our will is not governed exclusively by
the law of pleasure and pain, but also by the law of duty, which we feel
to be distinct from the former, and to carry with it the sense of
obligation. The second is that the basis of our conception of duty is an
intuitive perception that among the various feelings, tendencies, and
impulses that constitute our emotional being, there are some which are
essentially good, and ought to be encouraged, and some which are
essentially bad, and ought to be repressed. They contend that it is a
psychological fact that we are intuitively conscious that our benevolent
affections are superior to our malevolent ones, truth to falsehood,
justice to injustice, gratitude to ingratitude, chastity to sensuality,
and that in all ages and countries the path of virtue has been towards the
higher and not towards the lower feelings. It may be that the sense of
duty is so weak as to be scarcely perceptible, and then the lower part of
our nature will be supreme. It may happen that certain conditions of
society lead men to direct their anxiety for moral improvement altogether
in one or two channels, as was the case in ancient Greece, where civic and
intellectual virtues were very highly cultivated, and the virtue of
chastity was almost neglected. It may happen that different parts of our
higher nature in a measure conflict, as when a very strong sense of
justice checks our benevolent feelings. Dogmatic systems may enjoin men to
propitiate certain unseen beings by acts which are not in accordance with
the moral law. Special circumstances may influence, and the intermingling
of many different motives may obscure and complicate, the moral evolution;
but above all these one great truth appears. No one who desires to become
holier and better imagines that he does so by becoming more malevolent, or
more untruthful, or more unchaste. Every one who desires to attain
perfection in these departments of feeling is impelled towards
benevolence, towards veracity, towards chastity.(114)
Now it is manifest that according to this theory the moral unity to be
expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a
unity of tendency. Men come into the world with their benevolent
affections very inferior in power to their selfish ones, and the function
of morals is to invert this order. The extinction of all selfish feeling
is impossible for an individual, and if it were general, it would result
in the dissolution of society. The question of morals must always be a
question of proportion or of degree. At one time the benevolent affections
embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a
class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and
finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal
world. In each of these stages a standard is formed, different from that
of the preceding stage, but in each case the same tendency is recognised
as virtue.
We have in this fact a simple, and as it appears to me a conclusive,
answer to the overwhelming majority of the objections that are continually
and confidently urged against the intuitive school. That some savages kill
their old parents, that infanticide has been practised without compunction
by even civilised nations, that the best Romans saw nothing wrong in the
gladiatorial shows, that political or revengeful assassinations have been
for centuries admitted, that slavery has been sometimes honoured and
sometimes condemned, are unquestionable proofs that the same act may be
regarded in one age as innocent, and in another as criminal. Now it is
undoubtedly true that in many cases an historical examination will reveal
special circumstances, explaining or palliating the apparent anomaly. It
has been often shown that the gladiatorial shows were originally a form of
human sacrifice adopted through religious motives; that the rude nomadic
life of savages rendering impossible the preservation of aged and helpless
members of the tribe, the murder of parents was regarded as an act of
mercy both by the murderer and the victim; that before an effective
administration of justice was organised, private vengeance was the sole
preservative against crime,(115) and political assassination against
usurpation; that the insensibility of some savages to the criminality of
theft arises from the fact that they were accustomed to have all things in
common; that the Spartan law, legalising theft, arose partly from a desire
to foster military dexterity among the people, but chiefly from a desire
to discourage wealth; that slavery was introduced through motives of
mercy, to prevent conquerors from killing their prisoners.(116) All this
is true, but there is another and a more general answer. It is not to be
expected, and it is not maintained, that men in all ages should have
agreed about the application of their moral principles. All that is
contended for is that these principles are themselves the same. Some of
what appear to us monstrous acts of cruelty, were dictated by that very
feeling of humanity, the universal perception of the merit of which they
are cited to disprove,(117) and even when this is not the case, all that
can be inferred is, that the standard of humanity was very low. But still
humanity was recognised as a virtue, and cruelty as a vice.
At this point, I may observe how completely fallacious is the assertion
that a progressive morality is impossible upon the supposition of an
original moral faculty.(118) To such statements there are two very simple
answers. In the first place, although the intuitive moralist asserts that
certain qualities are necessarily virtuous, he fully admits that the
degree in which they are acted upon, or in other words, the standard of
duty, may become progressively higher. In the next place, although he
refuses to resolve all virtue into utility, he admits as fully as his
opponents, that benevolence, or the promotion of the happiness of man, is
a virtue, and that therefore discoveries which exhibit more clearly the
true interests of our kind, may throw new light upon the nature of our
duty.
The considerations I have urged with reference to humanity, apply with
equal force to the various relations of the sexes. When the passions of
men are altogether unrestrained, community of wives and all eccentric
forms of sensuality will be admitted. When men seek to improve their
nature in this respect, their object will be to abridge and confine the
empire of sensuality. But to this process of improvement there are obvious
limits. In the first place the continuance of the species is only possible
by a sensual act. In the next place the strength of this passion and the
weakness of humanity are so great, that the moralist must take into
account the fact that in all societies, and especially in those in which
free scope had long been given to the passions, a large amount of
indulgence will arise which is not due to a simple desire of propagating
the species. If then incest is prohibited, and community of wives replaced
by ordinary polygamy, a moral improvement will have been effected, and a
standard of virtue formed. But this standard soon becomes the
starting-point of new progress. If we examine the Jewish law, we find the
legislator prohibiting adultery, regulating the degrees of marriage, but
at the same time authorising polygamy, though with a caution against the
excessive multiplication of wives. In Greece monogamy, though not without
exceptions, had been enforced, but a concurrence of unfavourable
influences prevented any high standard being attained among the men, and
in their case almost every form of indulgence beyond the limits of
marriage was permitted. In Rome the standard was far higher. Monogamy was
firmly established. The ideal of female morality was placed as high as
among Christian nations. Among men, however, while unnatural love and
adultery were regarded as wrong, simple unchastity before marriage was
scarcely considered a fault. In Catholicism marriage is regarded in a
twofold light, as a means for the propagation of the species, and as a
concession to the weakness of humanity, and all other sensual enjoyment is
stringently prohibited.
In these cases there is a great difference between the degrees of
earnestness with which men exert themselves in the repression of their
passions, and in the amount of indulgence which is conceded to their lower
nature;(119) but there is no difference in the direction of the virtuous
impulse. While, too, in the case of adultery, and in the production of
children, questions of interest and utility do undoubtedly intervene, we
are conscious that the general progress turns upon a totally different
order of ideas. The feeling of all men and the language of all nations,
the sentiment which though often weakened is never wholly effaced, that
this appetite, even in its most legitimate gratification, is a thing to be
veiled and withdrawn from sight, all that is known under the names of
decency and indecency, concur in proving that we have an innate,
intuitive, instinctive perception that there is something degrading in the
sensual part of our nature, something to which a feeling of shame is
naturally attached, something that jars with our conception of perfect
purity, something we could not with any propriety ascribe to an all-holy
being. It may be questioned whether anyone was ever altogether destitute
of this perception, and nothing but the most inveterate passion for system
could induce men to resolve it into a mere calculation of interests. It is
this feeling or instinct which lies at the root of the whole movement I
have described, and it is this too that produced that sense of the
sanctity of perfect continence which the Catholic church has so warmly
encouraged, but which may be traced through the most distant ages, and the
most various creeds. We find it among the Nazarenes and Essenes of Judæa,
among the priests of Egypt and India, in the monasteries of Tartary, in
the histories of miraculous virgins that are so numerous in the
mythologies of Asia. Such, for example, was the Chinese legend that tells
how when there was but one man with one woman upon earth, the woman
refused to sacrifice her virginity even in order to people the globe, and
the gods honouring her purity granted that she should conceive beneath the
gaze of her lover’s eyes, and a virgin-mother became the parent of
humanity.(120) In the midst of the sensuality of ancient Greece, chastity
was the pre-eminent attribute of sanctity ascribed to Athene and Artemis.
“Chaste daughter of Zeus,” prayed the suppliants in Æschylus, “thou whose
calm eye is never troubled, look down upon us! Virgin, defend the
virgins.” The Parthenon, or virgin’s temple, was the noblest religious
edifice of Athens. Celibacy was an essential condition in a few of the
orders of priests, and in several orders of priestesses. Plato based his
moral system upon the distinction between the bodily or sensual, and the
spiritual or rational part of our nature, the first being the sign of our
degradation, and the second of our dignity. The whole school of Pythagoras
made chastity one of its leading virtues, and even laboured for the
creation of a monastic system. The conception of the celestial Aphrodite,
the uniter of souls, unsullied by the taint of matter, lingered side by
side with that of the earthly Aphrodite or patroness of lust, and if there
was a time when the sculptors sought to pander to the excesses of passion
there was another in which all their art was displayed in refining and
idealising it. Strabo mentions the existence in Thrace of societies of men
aspiring to perfection by celibacy and austere lives. Plutarch applauds
certain philosophers who vowed to abstain for a year from wine and women
in order “to honour God by their continence.”(121) In Rome the religious
reverence was concentrated more especially upon married life. The great
prominence accorded to the Penates was the religious sanction of
domesticity. So too, at first, was the worship so popular among the Roman
women of the Bona Dea—the ideal wife who according to the legend had, when
on earth, never looked in the face or known the name of any man but her
husband.(122) “For altar and hearth” was the rallying cry of the Roman
soldier. But above all this we find the traces of a higher ideal. We find
it in the intense sanctity attributed to the vestal virgins whose
continence was guarded by such fearful penalties, and supposed to be so
closely linked with the prosperity of the state, whose prayer was believed
to possess a miraculous power, and who were permitted to drive through the
streets of Rome at a time when that privilege was refused even to the
Empress.(123) We find it in the legend of Claudia, who, when the ship
bearing the image of the mother of the gods had been stranded in the
Tiber, attached her girdle to its prow, and vindicated her challenged
chastity by drawing with her virgin hand, the ponderous mass which strong
men had sought in vain to move. We find it in the prophetic gift so often
attributed to virgins,(124) in the law which sheltered them from the
degradation of an execution,(125) in the language of Statius, who
described marriage itself as a fault.(126) In Christianity one great
source of the attraction of the faith has been the ascription of virginity
to its female ideal. The Catholic monastic system has been so constructed
as to draw many thousands from the sphere of active duty; its irrevocable
vows have doubtless led to much suffering and not a little crime; its
opposition to the normal development of our mingled nature has often
resulted in grave aberrations of the imagination, and it has placed its
ban upon domestic affections and sympathies which have a very high moral
value; but in its central conception that the purely animal side of our
being is a low and a degraded side, it reflects, I believe, with perfect
fidelity the feelings of our nature.(127)
To these considerations some others of a different nature may be added. It
is not true that some ancient nations regarded polygamy as good in the
same sense as others regarded chastity. There is a great difference
between deeming a state permissible and proposing it as a condition of
sanctity. If Mohammedans people paradise with images of sensuality, it is
not because these form their ideal of holiness. It is because they regard
earth as the sphere of virtue, heaven as that of simple enjoyment. If some
pagan nations deified sensuality, this was simply because the deification
of the forces of nature, of which the prolific energy is one of the most
conspicuous, is among the earliest forms of religion, and long precedes
the identification of the Deity with a moral ideal.(128) If there have
been nations who attached a certain stigma to virginity, this has not been
because they esteemed sensuality intrinsically holier than chastity; but
because a scanty, warlike people whose position in the world depends
chiefly on the number of its warriors, will naturally make it its main
object to encourage population. This was especially the case with the
ancient Jews, who always regarded extreme populousness as indissolubly
connected with national prosperity, whose religion was essentially
patriotic, and among whom the possibility of becoming an ancestor of the
Messiah had imparted a peculiar dignity to childbirth. Yet even among the
Jews the Essenes regarded virginity as the ideal of sanctity.
The reader will now be in a position to perceive the utter futility of the
objections which from the time of Locke have been continually brought
against the theory of natural moral perceptions, upon the ground that some
actions which were admitted as lawful in one age, have been regarded as
immoral in another. All these become absolutely worthless when it is
perceived that in every age virtue has consisted in the cultivation of the
same feelings, though the standards of excellence attained have been
different. The terms higher and lower, nobler or less noble, purer or less
pure, represent moral facts with much greater fidelity than the terms
right or wrong, or virtue or vice. There is a certain sense in which moral
distinctions are absolute and immutable. There is another sense in which
they are altogether relative and transient. There are some acts which are
so manifestly and grossly opposed to our moral feelings, that they are
regarded as wrong in the very earliest stages of the cultivation of these
feelings. There are distinctions, such as that between truth and
falsehood, which from their nature assume at once a sharpness of
definition that separates them from mere virtues of degree, though even in
these cases there are wide variations in the amount of scrupulosity that
is in different periods required. But apart from positive commands, the
sole external rule enabling men to designate acts, not simply as better or
worse, but as positively right or wrong, is, I conceive, the standard of
society; not an arbitrary standard like that which Mandeville imagined,
but the level which society has attained in the cultivation of what our
moral faculty tells us is the higher or virtuous part of our nature. He
who falls below this is obstructing the tendency which is the essence of
virtue. He who merely attains this, may not be justified in his own
conscience, or in other words, by the standard of his own moral
development, but as far as any external rule is concerned, he has done his
duty. He who rises above this has entered into the region of things which
it is virtuous to do, but not vicious to neglect—a region known among
Catholic theologians by the name of “counsels of perfection.” No
discussions, I conceive, can be more idle than whether slavery, or the
slaughter of prisoners in war, or gladiatorial shows, or polygamy, are
essentially wrong. They may be wrong now—they were not so once—and when an
ancient countenanced by his example one or other of these, he was not
committing a crime. The unchangeable proposition for which we contend is
this—that benevolence is always a virtuous disposition—that the sensual
part of our nature is always the lower part.
At this point, however, a very difficult problem naturally arises.
Admitting that our moral nature is superior to our intellectual or
physical nature, admitting, too, that by the constitution of our being we
perceive ourselves to be under an obligation to develope our nature to its
perfection, establishing the supreme ascendency of moral motives, the
question still remains whether the disparity between the different parts
of our being is such that no material or intellectual advantage, however
great, may be rightly purchased by any sacrifice of our moral nature,
however small. This is the great question of casuistry, the question which
divines express by asking whether the end ever justifies the means; and on
this subject there exists among theologians a doctrine which is absolutely
unrealised, which no one ever dreams of applying to actual life, but of
which it may be truly said that though propounded with the best
intentions, it would, if acted upon, be utterly incompatible with the very
rudiments of civilisation. It is said that an undoubted sin, even the most
trivial, is a thing in its essence and in its consequences so unspeakably
dreadful, that no conceivable material or intellectual advantage can
counterbalance it; that rather than it should be committed, it would be
better that any amount of calamity which did not bring with it sin should
be endured, even that the whole human race should perish in agonies.(129)
If this be the case, it is manifest that the supreme object of humanity
should be sinlessness, and it is equally manifest that the means to this
end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of
wants is necessarily to multiply temptations, and therefore to increase
the number of sins. It may indeed elevate the moral standard, for a torpid
sinlessness is not a high moral condition; but if every sin be what these
theologians assert, if it be a thing deserving eternal agony, and so
inconceivably frightful that the ruin of a world is a less evil than its
commission, even moral advantages are utterly incommensurate with it. No
heightening of the moral tone, no depth or ecstasy of devotion, can for a
moment be placed in the balance. The consequences of this doctrine, if
applied to actual life, would be so extravagant, that their simple
statement is a refutation. A sovereign, when calculating the consequences
of a war, should reflect that a single sin occasioned by that war, a
single blasphemy of a wounded soldier, the robbery of a single hencoop,
the violation of the purity of a single woman, is a greater calamity than
the ruin of the entire commerce of his nation, the loss of her most
precious provinces, the destruction of all her power. He must believe that
the evil of the increase of unchastity, which invariably results from the
formation of an army, is an immeasurably greater calamity than any
material or political disasters that army can possibly avert. He must
believe that the most fearful plague or famine that desolates his land
should be regarded as a matter of rejoicing, if it has but the feeblest
and most transient influence in repressing vice. He must believe that if
the agglomeration of his people in great cities adds but one to the number
of their sins, no possible intellectual or material advantages can prevent
the construction of cities being a fearful calamity. According to this
principle, every elaboration of life, every amusement that brings
multitudes together, almost every art, every accession of wealth that
awakens or stimulates desires, is an evil, for all these become the
sources of some sins, and their advantages are for the most part purely
terrestrial. The entire structure of civilisation is founded upon the
belief that it is a good thing to cultivate intellectual and material
capacities, even at the cost of certain moral evils which we are often
able accurately to foresee.(130) The time may come when the man who lays
the foundation-stone of a manufacture will be able to predict with
assurance in what proportion the drunkenness and the unchastity of his
city will be increased by his enterprise. Yet he will still pursue that
enterprise, and mankind will pronounce it to be good.
The theological doctrine on the subject, considered in its full
stringency, though professed by many, is, as I have said, realised and
consistently acted on by no one; but the practical judgments of mankind
concerning the extent of the superiority of moral over all other interests
vary greatly, and this variation supplies one of the most serious
objections to intuitive moralists. The nearest practical approach to the
theological estimate of a sin may be found in the ranks of the ascetics.
Their whole system rests upon the belief that it is a thing so
transcendently dreadful as to bear no proportion or appreciable relation
to any earthly interests. Starting from this belief, the ascetic makes it
the exclusive object of his life to avoid sinning. He accordingly abstains
from all the active business of society, relinquishes all worldly aims and
ambitions, dulls by continued discipline his natural desires, and
endeavours to pass a life of complete absorption in religious exercises.
And in all this his conduct is reasonable and consistent. The natural
course of every man who adopts this estimate of the enormity of sin is at
every cost to avoid all external influences that can prove temptations,
and to attenuate as far as possible his own appetites and emotions. It is
in this respect that the exaggerations of theologians paralyse our moral
being. For the diminution of sins, however important, is but one part of
moral progress. Whenever it is forced into a disproportionate prominence,
we find tame, languid, and mutilated natures, destitute of all fire and
energy, and this tendency has been still further aggravated by the extreme
prominence usually given to the virtue of gentleness, which may indeed be
attained by men of strong natures and vehement emotions, but is evidently
more congenial to a somewhat feeble and passionless character.
Ascetic practices are manifestly and rapidly disappearing, and their
decline is a striking proof of the evanescence of the moral notions of
which they were the expression, but in many existing questions relating to
the same matter, we find perplexing diversity of judgment. We find it in
the contrast between the system of education usually adopted by the
Catholic priesthood, which has for its pre-eminent object to prevent sins,
and for its means a constant and minute supervision, and the English
system of public schools, which is certainly not the most fitted to guard
against the possibility of sin, or to foster any very delicate
scrupulosity of feeling; but is intended, and popularly supposed, to
secure the healthy expansion of every variety of capacity. We find it in
the widely different attitudes which good men in different periods have
adopted towards religious opinions they believe to be false; some, like
the reformers, refusing to participate in any superstitious service, or to
withhold on any occasion, or at any cost, their protest against what they
regarded as a lie; others, like most ancient, and some modern philosophers
and politicians, combining the most absolute personal incredulity with an
assiduous observance of superstitious rites, and strongly censuring those
who disturbed delusions which are useful or consolatory to the people;
while a third class silently, but without protest, withdraw themselves
from the observances, and desire that their opinions should have a free
expression in literature, but at the same time discourage all
proselytising efforts to force them rudely on unprepared minds. We find it
in the frequent conflicts between the political economist and the Catholic
priest on the subject of early marriages, the former opposing them on the
ground that it is an essential condition of material well-being that the
standard of comfort should not be depressed, the latter advocating them on
the ground that the postponement of marriages, through prudential motives,
by any large body of men, is the fertile mother of sin. We find it most
conspicuously in the marked diversities of tolerance manifested in
different communities towards amusements which may in themselves be
perfectly innocent, but which prove the sources or the occasions of vice.
The Scotch Puritans probably represent one extreme, the Parisian society
of the empire the other, while the position of average Englishmen is
perhaps equidistant between them. Yet this difference, great as it is, is
a difference not of principle, but of degree. No Puritan seriously desires
to suppress every clan-gathering, every highland game which may have
occasioned an isolated fit of drunkenness, though he may be unable to show
that it has prevented any sin that would otherwise have been committed. No
Frenchman will question that there is a certain amount of demoralisation
which should not be tolerated, however great the enjoyment that
accompanies it. Yet the one dwells almost exclusively upon the moral, the
other upon the attractive, nature of a spectacle. Between these there are
numerous gradations, which are shown in frequent disputes about the merits
and demerits of the racecourse, the ball, the theatre, and the concert.
Where then, it may be asked, is the line to be drawn? By what rule can the
point be determined at which an amusement becomes vitiated by the evil of
its consequences?
To these questions the intuitive moralist is obliged to answer, that such
a line cannot be drawn, that such a rule does not exist. The colours of
our moral nature are rarely separated by the sharp lines of our
vocabulary. They fade and blend into one another so imperceptibly, that it
is impossible to mark a precise point of transition. The end of man is the
full development of his being in that symmetry and proportion which nature
has assigned it, and such a development implies that the supreme, the
predominant motive of his life, should be moral. If in any society or
individual this ascendency does not exist, that society or that individual
is in a diseased and abnormal condition. But the superiority of the moral
part of our nature, though unquestionable, is indefinite not infinite, and
the prevailing standard is not at all times the same. The moralist can
only lay down general principles. Individual feeling or the general
sentiment of society must draw the application.
The vagueness that on such questions confessedly hangs over the intuitive
theory, has always been insisted upon by members of the opposite school,
who ’in the greatest happiness principle’ claim to possess a definite
formulary, enabling them to draw boldly the frontier line between the
lawful and the illicit, and to remove moral disputes from the domain of
feeling to that of demonstration. But this claim, which forms the great
attraction of the utilitarian school, is, if I mistake not, one of the
grossest of impostures. We compare with accuracy and confidence the value
of the most various material commodities, for we mean by this term,
exchangeable value, and we have a common measure of exchange. But we seek
in vain for such a measure enabling us to compare different kinds of
utility or happiness. Thus, to take a very familiar example, the question
may be proposed, whether excursion trains from a country district to a
seaport town produce more good than evil, whether a man governed by moral
principles should encourage or oppose them. They give innocent and healthy
enjoyment to many thousands, they enlarge in some degree the range of
their ideas, they can hardly be said to prevent any sin that would
otherwise have been committed, they give rise to many cases of
drunkenness, each of which, according to the theological doctrine we have
reviewed, should be deemed a more dreadful calamity than the earthquake of
Lisbon, or a visitation of the cholera, but which have not usually any
lasting terrestrial effects; they also often produce a measure, and
sometimes no small measure, of more serious vice, and it is probable that
hundreds of women may trace their first fall to the excursion train. We
have here a number of advantages and disadvantages, the first being
intellectual and physical, and the second moral. Nearly all moralists
would acknowledge that a few instances of immorality would not prevent the
excursion train being, on the whole, a good thing. All would acknowledge
that very numerous instances would more than counterbalance its
advantages. The intuitive moralist confesses that he is unable to draw a
precise line, showing where the moral evils outweigh the physical
benefits. In what possible respect the introduction of Benthamite
formularies improves the matter, I am unable to understand. No utilitarian
would reduce the question to one of simple majority, or would have the
cynicism to balance the ruin of one woman by the day’s enjoyment of
another. The impossibility of drawing, in such cases, a distinct line of
division, is no argument against the intuitive moralist, for that
impossibility is shared to the full extent by his rival.
There are, as we have seen, two kinds of interest with which utilitarian
moralists are concerned—the private interest which they believe to be the
ultimate motive, and the public interest which they believe to be the end,
of all virtue. With reference to the first, the intuitive moralist denies
that a selfish act can be a virtuous or meritorious one. If a man when
about to commit a theft, became suddenly conscious of the presence of a
policeman, and through fear of arrest and punishment were to abstain from
the act he would otherwise have committed, this abstinence would not
appear in the eyes of mankind to possess any moral value; and if he were
determined partly by conscientious motives, and partly by fear, the
presence of the latter element would, in proportion to its strength,
detract from his merit. But although selfish considerations are distinctly
opposed to virtuous ones, it would be a mistake to imagine they can never
ultimately have a purely moral influence. In the first place, a
well-ordered system of threats and punishments marks out the path of
virtue with a distinctness of definition it could scarcely have otherwise
attained. In the next place, it often happens that when the mind is swayed
by a conflict of motives, the expectation of reward or punishment will so
reinforce or support the virtuous motives, as to secure their victory;
and, as every triumph of these motives increases their strength and
weakens the opposing principles, a step will thus have been made towards
moral perfection, which will render more probable the future triumph of
unassisted virtue.
With reference to the interests of society, there are two distinct
assertions to be made. The first is, that although the pursuit of the
welfare of others is undoubtedly one form of virtue, it does not include
all virtue, or, in other words, that there are forms of virtue which, even
if beneficial to mankind, do not become virtuous on that account, but have
an intrinsic excellence which is not proportioned to or dependent on their
utility. The second is, that there may occasionally arise considerations
of extreme and overwhelming utility that may justify a sacrifice of these
virtues. This sacrifice may be made in various ways—as, when a man
undertakes an enterprise which is in itself perfectly innocent, but which
in addition to its great material advantages will, as he well knows,
produce a certain measure of crime; or when, abstaining from a protest, he
tacitly countenances beliefs which he considers untrue, because he regards
them as transcendently useful; or again, when, for the benefit of others,
and under circumstances of great urgency, he utters a direct falsehood,
as, for example, when by such means alone he can save the life of an
innocent man.(131) But the fact, that in these cases considerations of
extreme utility are suffered to override considerations of morality, is in
no degree inconsistent with the facts, that the latter differ in kind from
the former, that they are of a higher nature, and that they may supply
adequate and legitimate motives of action not only distinct from, but even
in opposition to utility. Gold and silver are different metals. Gold is
more valuable than silver; yet a very small quantity of gold may be
advantageously exchanged for a very large quantity of silver.
The last class of objections to the theory of natural moral perceptions
which it is necessary for me to notice, arises from a very mischievous
equivocation in the word natural.(132) The term natural man is sometimes
regarded as synonymous with man in his primitive or barbarous condition,
and sometimes as expressing all in a civilised man that is due to nature
as distinguished from artificial habits or acquirements. This equivocation
is especially dangerous, because it implies one of the most extravagant
excesses to which the sensational philosophy could be pushed—the notion
that the difference between a savage and a civilised man is simply a
difference of acquisition, and not at all a difference of development. In
accordance with this notion, those who deny original moral distinctions
have ransacked the accounts of travellers for examples of savages who
appeared destitute of moral sentiments, and have adduced them as
conclusive evidence of their position. Now it is, I think, abundantly
evident that these narratives are usually exceedingly untrustworthy.(133)
They have been in most cases collected by uncritical and unphilosophical
travellers, who knew little of the language and still less of the inner
life of the people they described, whose means of information were
acquired in simply traversing the country, who were more struck by moral
paradox, than by unostentatious virtue, who were proverbially addicted to
embellishing and exaggerating the singularities they witnessed, and who
very rarely investigated their origin. It should not be forgotten that the
French moralists of the last century, who insisted most strongly on this
species of evidence, were also the dupes of one of the most curious
delusions in the whole compass of literary history. Those unflinching
sceptics who claimed to be the true disciples of the apostle who believed
nothing that he had not touched, and whose relentless criticism played
with withering effect on all the holiest feelings of our nature, and on
all the tenets of traditional creeds, had discovered one happy land where
the ideal had ceased to be a dream. They could point to one people whose
pure and rational morality, purged from all the clouds of bigotry and
enthusiasm, shone with an almost dazzling splendour above the ignorance
and superstition of Europe. Voltaire forgot to gibe, and Helvétius kindled
into enthusiasm, when China and the Chinese rose before their minds, and
to this semi-barbarous nation they habitually attributed maxims of conduct
that neither Roman nor Christian virtue had ever realised.
But putting aside these considerations, and assuming the fidelity of the
pictures of savage life upon which these writers rely, they fail to prove
the point for whi
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