IV
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the seed-time of our modern ideas, as it has so often seemed to be, the English people, having in art at length brought their language to a fine degree of clarity and precision, and having just passed through a highly stimulating period of dominant Puritanism in life, became much interested in philosophy, psychology, and ethics. Their interest was, indeed, often superficial and amateurish, though they were soon to produce some of the most notable figures in the whole history of thought. The third Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the earliest of the group, himself illustrated this unsystematic method of thinking. He was an amateur, an aristocratic amateur, careless of consistency, and not by any means concerned to erect a philosophic system. Not that he was a worse thinker on that account. The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities. Shaftesbury was, moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was; but, unlike Kant, he was not a childish hypochondriac in seclusion, but a man in the world, heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life. By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a characteristic book of “Exercises,” as he proposed to call what his modern editor calls the “Philosophical Regimen,” in which he consciously seeks to discipline himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he is the disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftesbury was also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, in part absorbed, indeed, from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but never before made clearly recognisable as a moral theory and an ethical temper, susceptible of being labelled by the philosophic historian, as it since has been under the name, passable no doubt as any other, of “Æsthetic Intuitionism.”
Greek morality, it has been well said, is not a conflict of light and darkness, of good and evil, the clear choice between the broad road that leads to destruction and the narrow path of salvation: it is “an artistic balance of light and shade.” Gizycki, remarking that Shaftesbury has more affinity to the Greeks than perhaps any other modern moralist, says that “the key lay not only in his head, but in his heart, for like can only be recognised by like.”[[96]] We have to remember at the same time that Shaftesbury was really something of a classical scholar, even from childhood. Born in 1671, the grandson of the foremost English statesman of his time, the first Earl, Anthony Cooper, he had the advantage of the wise oversight of his grandfather, who placed with him as a companion in childhood a lady who knew both Greek and Latin so well that she could converse fluently in both languages. So it was that by the age of eleven he was familiar with the two classic tongues and literatures. That doubtless was also a key to his intimate feeling for the classic spirit, though it would not have sufficed without a native affinity. He became the pupil of Locke, and at fifteen he went to Italy, to spend a considerable time there. He knew France also, and the French tongue, so well that he was often taken for a native. He lived for some time in Holland, and there formed a friendship with Bayle, which began before the latter was aware of his friend’s rank and lasted till Bayle’s death. In Holland he may have been slightly influenced by Grotius.[[97]] Shaftesbury was not of robust constitution; he suffered from asthma, and his health was further affected by his zeal in public affairs as well as his enthusiasm in study, for his morality was not that of a recluse, but of a man who played an active part in life, not only in social benevolence, like his descendant the enlightened philanthropic Earl of the nineteenth century, but in the establishment of civil freedom and toleration. Locke wrote of his pupil (who was not, however, in agreement with his tutor’s philosophic standpoint,[[98]] though he always treated him with consideration) that “the sword was too sharp for the scabbard.”
“He seems,” wrote of Shaftesbury his unfriendly contemporary Mandeville, “to require and expect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in grapes and China oranges, of which, if any of them are sour, we boldly pronounce that they are not come to that perfection their nature is capable of.” In a certain sense this was correct. Shaftesbury, it has been said, was the father of that new ethics which recognises that Nature is not a mere impulse of self-preservation, as Hobbes thought, but also a racial impulse, having regard to others; there are social inclinations in the individual, he realised, that go beyond individual ends. (Referring to the famous dictum of Hobbes, Homo homini lupus, he observes: “To say in disparagement of Man ‘that he is to Man a wolf’ appears somewhat absurd when one considers that wolves are to wolves very kind and loving creatures.”) Therewith “goodness” was seen, virtually for the first time in the modern period, to be as “natural” as the sweetness of ripe fruit.
There was another reason, a fundamental physiological and psychological reason, why “goodness” of actions and the “sweetness” of fruits are equally natural, a reason that would, no doubt, have been found strange both by Mandeville and Shaftesbury. Morality, Shaftesbury describes as “the taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent,” and the “sense of beauty” is ultimately the same as the “moral sense.” “My first endeavour,” wrote Shaftesbury, “must be to distinguish the true taste of fruits, refine my palate, and establish a just relish in the kind.” He thought, evidently, that he was merely using a metaphor. But he was speaking essentially in the direct, straightforward way of natural and primitive Man. At the foundation, “sweetness” and “goodness” are the same thing. That can still be detected in the very structure of language, not only of primitive languages, but those of the most civilised peoples. That morality is, in the strict sense, a matter of taste, of æsthetics, of what the Greeks called αἴσθησις, is conclusively shown by the fact that in the most widely separated tongues—possibly wherever the matter has been carefully investigated—moral goodness is, at the outset, expressed in terms of taste. What is good is what is sweet, and sometimes, also, salt.[[99]] Primitive peoples have highly developed the sensory side of their mental life, and their vocabularies bear witness to the intimate connection of sensations of taste and touch with emotional tone. There is, indeed, no occasion to go beyond our own European traditions to see that the expression of moral qualities is based on fundamental sensory qualities of taste. In Latin suavis is sweet, but even in Latin it became a moral quality, and its English derivatives have been entirely deflected from physical to moral qualities, while bitter is at once a physical quality and a poignantly moral quality. In Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic salt is not only a physical taste but the name for lustre and grace and beauty.[[100]] It seems well in passing to point out that the deeper we penetrate the more fundamentally we find the æsthetic conception of morals grounded in Nature. But not every one cares to penetrate any deeper and there is no need to insist.
Shaftesbury held that human actions should have a beauty of symmetry and proportion and harmony, which appeal to us, not because they accord with any rule or maxim (although they may conceivably be susceptible of measurement), but because they satisfy our instinctive feelings, evoking an approval which is strictly an æsthetic judgment of moral action. This instinctive judgment was not, as Shaftesbury understood it, a guide to action. He held, rightly enough, that the impulse to action is fundamental and primary, that fine action is the outcome of finely tempered natures. It is a feeling for the just time and measure of human passion, and maxims are useless to him whose nature is ill-balanced. “Virtue is no other than the love of order and beauty in society.” Æsthetic appreciation of the act, and even an ecstatic pleasure in it, are part of our æsthetic delight in Nature generally, which includes Man. Nature, it is clear, plays a large part in this conception of the moral life. To lack balance on any plane of moral conduct is to be unnatural; “Nature is not mocked,” said Shaftesbury. She is a miracle, for miracles are not things that are performed, but things that are perceived, and to fail here is to fail in perception of the divinity of Nature, to do violence to her, and to court moral destruction. A return to Nature is not a return to ignorance or savagery, but to the first instinctive feeling for the beauty of well-proportioned affections. “The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth,” he asserts, and he recurs again and again to “the beauty of honesty.” “Dulce et decorum est was his sole reason,” he says of the classical pagan, adding: “And this is still a good reason.” In learning how to act, he thought, we are “learning to become artists.” It seems natural to him to refer to the magistrate as an artist; “the magistrate, if he be an artist,” he incidentally says. We must not make morality depend on authority. The true artist, in any art, will never act below his character. “Let who will make it for you as you fancy,” the artist declares; “I know it to be wrong. Whatever I have made hitherto has been true work. And neither for your sake or anybody’s else shall I put my hand to any other.” “This is virtue!” exclaims Shaftesbury. “This disposition transferred to the whole of life perfects a character. For there is a workmanship and a truth in actions.”
Shaftesbury, it may be repeated, was an amateur, not only in philosophy, but even in the arts. He regarded literature as one of the schoolmasters for fine living, yet he has not been generally regarded as a fine artist in writing, though, directly or indirectly, he helped to inspire not only Pope, but Thomson and Cowper and Wordsworth. He was inevitably interested in painting, but his tastes were merely those of the ordinary connoisseur of his time. This gives a certain superficiality to his general æsthetic vision, though it was far from true, as the theologians supposed, that he was lacking in seriousness. His chief immediate followers, like Hutcheson, came out of Calvinistic Puritanism. He was himself an austere Stoic who adapted himself to the tone of the well-bred world he lived in. But if an amateur, he was an amateur of genius. He threw a vast and fruitful conception—caught from the “Poetics” of Aristotle, “the Great Master of Arts,” and developed with fine insight—into our modern world. Most of the great European thinkers of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in some measure inspired, influenced, or anticipated by Shaftesbury. Even Kant, though he was unsympathetic and niggardly of appreciation, helped to develop the conception Shaftesbury first formulated. To-day we see it on every hand. It is slowly and subtly moulding the whole of our modern morality.
“The greatest Greek of modern times”—so he appears to those who study his work to-day. It is through Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury alone that Greek morals, in their finest essence, have been a vivifying influence in our modern world. Georg von Gizycki, who has perhaps most clearly apprehended Shaftesbury’s place in morals, indicates that place with precision and justice when he states that “he furnished the elements of a moral philosophy which fits into the frame of a truly scientific conception of the world.”[[101]] That was a service to the modern world so great and so daring that it could scarcely meet with approval from his fellow countrymen. The more keenly philosophical Scotch, indeed, recognised him, first of all Hume, and he was accepted and embodied as a kind of founder by the so-called Scottish School, though so toned down and adulterated and adapted to popular tastes and needs, that in the end he was thereby discredited. But the English never even adulterated him; they clung to the antiquated and eschatological Paley, bringing forth edition after edition of his works whereon to discipline their youthful minds. That led naturally on to the English Utilitarians in morality, who would disdain to look at anything that could be called Greek. Sir Leslie Stephen, who was the vigorous and capable interpreter to the general public of Utilitarianism, could see nothing good whatever in Shaftesbury; he viewed him with contemptuous pity and could only murmur: “Poor Shaftesbury!”
Meanwhile Shaftesbury’s fame had from the first been pursuing a very different course in France and Germany, for it is the people outside a man’s own country who anticipate the verdict of posterity. Leibnitz, whose vast genius was on some sides akin (Shaftesbury has, indeed, been termed “the Leibnitz of morals”), admired the English thinker, and the universal Voltaire recognised him. Montesquieu placed him on a four-square summit with Plato and Montaigne and Malebranche. The enthusiastic Diderot, seeing in Shaftesbury the exponent of the naturalistic ethics of his own temperament, translated a large part of his chief book in 1745. Herder, who inspired so many of the chief thinkers of the nineteenth century and even of to-day, was himself largely inspired by Shaftesbury, whom he once called “the virtuoso of humanity,” regarding his writings as, even in form, well-nigh worthy of Greek antiquity, and long proposed to make a comparative study of the ethical conceptions of Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, but unfortunately never carried out that happy idea. Rousseau, not only by contact of ideas, but the spontaneous effort of his own nature towards autonomous harmony, was in touch with Shaftesbury, and so helped to bring his ideals into the general stream of modern life. Shaftesbury, directly or indirectly, inspired the early influential French Socialists and Communists. On the other hand he has equally inspired the moralists of individualism. Even the Spanish-American Rodó, one of the most delicately aristocratic of modern moralists in recent time, puts forth conceptions, which, consciously or unconsciously, are precisely those of Shaftesbury. Rodó believes that all moral evil is a dissonance in the æsthetic of conduct and that the moral task in character is that of the sculptor in marble: “Virtue is a kind of art, a divine art.” Even Croce, who began by making a deep division between art and life, holds that there can be no great critic of art who is not also a great critic of life, for æsthetic criticism is really itself a criticism of life, and his whole philosophy may be regarded as representing a stage of transition between the old traditional view of the world and that conception towards which in the modern world our gaze is turned.[[102]]
As Shaftesbury had stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative artistic impulse in life and critical æsthetic appreciation. In the sphere of morals we must often be content to wait until our activity is completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness.[[103]] On the background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. The artist’s work in life is full of struggle and toil; it is only the spectator of morals who can assume the calm æsthetic attitude. Shaftesbury, indeed, evidently recognised this, but it was not enough to say, as he said, that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature. One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture.
Yet we must not allow these considerations to lead us away from the great fact that Shaftesbury clearly realised—what modern psychology emphasises—that desires can only be countered by desires, that reason cannot affect appetite. “That which is of original and pure nature,” he declared, “nothing besides contrary habit and custom (a second nature) is able to displace. There is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy it.” Where he went beyond some modern psychologists is in his Hellenic perception that in this sphere of instinct we are amid the play of art to which æsthetic criteria alone can be applied.
It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is, ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For all art is, primarily, not a contemplation, but a doing, a creative action, and morality is so preëminently.
Shaftesbury, with his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded as the founders of æsthetics; it was Hutcheson, though he happened to be the least genuinely æsthetic in temperament of the three, who wrote the first modern treatise on æsthetics. Together, also, they may be said to have been the revivalists of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenic spirit, or rather of the classic spirit, for it often came through Roman channels. Shaftesbury was, as Eucken has well said, the Greek spirit among English thinkers. He represented an inevitable reaction against Puritanism, a reaction which is still going on—indeed, here and there only just beginning. As Puritanism had achieved so notable a victory in England, it was natural that in England the first great champion of Hellenism should appear. It is to Oliver Cromwell and Praise-God Barebones that we owe Shaftesbury.
After Shaftesbury it is Arbuckle who first deserves attention, though he wrote so little that he never attained the prominence he deserved.[[104]] He was a Dublin physician of Scottish ancestry, the friend of Swift, by whom he was highly esteemed, and he was a cripple from boyhood. He was a man of genuine artistic temperament, though the art he was attracted to was not, as with Shaftesbury, the sculptor’s or the painter’s, but the poet’s. It was not so much intuition on which he insisted, but imagination as formative of a character; moral approval seemed to him thoroughly æsthetic, part of an imaginative act which framed the ideal of a beautiful personality, externalising itself in action. When Robert Bridges, the poet of our own time, suggests (in his “Necessity of Poetry”) that “morals is that part of Poetry which deals with conduct,” he is speaking in the spirit of Arbuckle. An earlier and greater poet was still nearer to Arbuckle. “A man to be greatly good,” said Shelley in his “Defence of Poetry,” “must imagine intensely and comprehensively.... The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.” If, indeed, with Adam Smith and Schopenhauer, we choose to base morals on sympathy we really are thereby making the poet’s imagination the great moral instrument. Morals was for Arbuckle a disinterested æsthetic harmony, and he had caught much of the genuine Greek spirit.
Hutcheson was in this respect less successful. Though he had occupied himself with æsthetics he had little true æsthetic feeling; and though he accomplished much for the revival of Greek studies his own sympathies were really with the Roman Stoics, with Cicero, with Marcus Aurelius, and in this way he was led towards Christianity, to which Shaftesbury was really alien. He democratised if not vulgarised, and diluted if not debased, Shaftesbury’s loftier conception. In his too widely sympathetic and receptive mind the Shaftesburian ideal was not only Romanised, not only Christianised; it was plunged into a miscellaneously eclectic mass that often became inconsistent and incoherent. In the long run, in spite of his great immediate success, he injured in these ways the cause he advocated. He overemphasised the passively æsthetic side of morals; he dwelt on the term “moral sense,” by Shaftesbury only occasionally used, as it had long previously been by Aristotle (and then only in the sense of “natural temper” by analogy with the physical senses), and this term was long a stumbling-block in the eyes of innocent philosophic critics, too easily befooled by words, who failed to see that, as Libby has pointed out, the underlying idea simply is, as held by Shaftesbury, that æsthetic notions of proportion and symmetry depend upon the native structure of the mind and only so constitute a “moral sense.”[[105]] What Hutcheson, as distinct from Shaftesbury, meant by a “moral sense”—really a conative instinct—is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he was inclined to consider the conjugal and parental affections as a “sense” because natural. He desired to shut out reason, and cognitive elements, and that again brought him to the conception of morality as instinctive. Hutcheson’s conception of “sense” was defective as being too liable to be regarded as passive rather than as conative, though conation was implied. The fact that the “moral sense” was really instinct, and had nothing whatever to do with “innate ideas,” as many have ignorantly supposed, was clearly seen by Hutcheson’s opponents. The chief objection brought forward by the Reverend John Balguy in 1728, in the first part of his “Foundation of Moral Goodness,” was precisely that Hutcheson based morality on instinct and so had allowed “some degree of morality to animals.”[[106]] It was Hutcheson’s fine and impressive personality, his high character, his eloquence, his influential position, which enabled him to keep alive the conception of morals he preached, and even to give it an effective force, throughout the European world, it might not otherwise easily have exerted. Philosophy was to Hutcheson the art of living—as it was to the old Greek philosophers—rather than a question of metaphysics, and he was careless of consistency in thinking, an open-minded eclectic who insisted that life itself is the great matter. That, no doubt, was the reason why he had so immense an influence. It was mainly through Hutcheson that the more aristocratic spirit of Shaftesbury was poured into the circulatory channels of the world’s life. Hume and Adam Smith and Reid were either the pupils of Hutcheson or directly influenced by him. He was a great personality rather than a great thinker, and it was as such that he exerted so much force in philosophy.[[107]]
With Schiller, whose attitude was not, however, based directly on Shaftesbury, the æsthetic conception of morals, which in its definitely conscious form had up till then been especially English, may be said to have entered the main stream of culture. Schiller regarded the identity of Duty and Inclination as the ideal goal of human development, and looked on the Genius of Beauty as the chief guide of life. Wilhelm von Humboldt, one of the greatest spirits of that age, was moved by the same ideas, throughout his life, much as in many respects he changed, and even shortly before his death wrote in deprecation of the notion that conformity to duty is the final aim of morality. Goethe, who was the intimate friend of both Schiller and Humboldt, largely shared the same attitude, and through him it has had a subtle and boundless influence. Kant, who, it has been said, mistook Duty for a Prussian drill-sergeant, still ruled the academic moral world. But a new vivifying and moulding force had entered the larger moral world, and to-day we may detect its presence on every side.