CHAPTER IX
THE ETHICAL SANCTION
“Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth,
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth.”
Tennyson.
Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified; in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life for the individual at the present moment. It means most life for the Whole, so far as the individual acts upon the Whole. And he acts on it in two ways—first (one which is often overlooked) by living his own life which is equally a part of that Whole whether he lives on a desert island or in the heart of a city; and secondly by the influence he radiates on other lives with which his own is socially related.
This, it is clear, is quite the same thing as to say that the right life for any man is that in which for him there is most of life—the richest and the fullest life—if he were to go on living indefinitely. For whatever depresses or exalts life in the Whole must ultimately depress or exalt it in the individual also; the two interests are clearly identical in the long run. This ‘long run’ or universal point of view, which makes identical the interests of the Whole and the interests of the individual, gives to a natural ethics the criterion for all human action. It gives the contents, though not the cogency—with this we have to deal in the present chapter—of the word ‘ought.’
By the mere fact of his social relations with other men each individual is continually being trained to take this view, to harmonize together his egoistic and his altruistic instincts; and is continually amassing a store of social experiences out of which a universal moral code is gradually shaping itself. “Life,” it has been well said, “has saved up much wisdom.” Ethical wisdom, in this regard, will clearly involve such kind of action, of organization, as will afford to each individual the fullest opportunities for vital development in mind and body.
The life in which there is most of life! By holding fast to this clue we shall, I think, see our way through many of the obscurities in which, partly by the search for an extra-natural basis of morality, partly by the reactionary attempt to base morality simply on the striking of a balance between pleasures and pains, the philosophy of right and wrong has been involved. We get a natural basis for establishing a scale in human action, a distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ without which a philosophic ethics is clearly impossible. I do not, of course, mean to say that it is possible to apply a mechanical rule and measure to moral action in the manner of Catholic casuistry, according to which it is a venial sin to steal 19s. 6d. but a mortal sin to steal £1.[148] Still, the existence of a natural scale is evident at once when we consider the fact that man is constantly being placed in positions in which his action may either thwart and depress life, or simply maintain it, or markedly enrich and extend it. The ethical quality of his action appears to arise from the fact that it is possible for him, under the impulse of immediate personal gratification, to do things which if commonly done by men would destroy the beauty and order of human life. The interests of the whole and of the individual may be identical, as we have said, in the long run, but at the moment they are often in violent conflict. Allowing for the fact that it is never possible in nature to draw a sharp dividing line between different classes of being, and to say absolutely that things are thus on one side of it and thus on the other, we may repeat that this opposition between the long-run or universal and the momentary or personal interest is a characteristic of human life as opposed to that of the lower animals. It arises from the strong sense of individuality, of selfhood, which emerges in man and of which the animals know little or nothing. In itself it is a new and noble power of life, but it has its fatal and mischievous aspect. Without it we should know neither good nor evil. Personality is at once man’s pride and his fall.
With this sense of selfhood there have grown up in humanity the faculties of Conscience and of Will. Conscience I interpret as the sense of what is due to the Whole, to the nobler and more permanent self. Inasmuch as man is only gradually discovering what it really is that the Whole demands of us, it follows that the utterances of conscience may be misdirected, and that they need to be corrected and purified by intelligence and experience. We see here an example of that principle of the combination of evolution and involution which alone seems to make intelligible the development of life. Never, by organizing into a social system a multitude of individual appetencies, can one produce a moral sense, a conscience. But neither is conscience concerned to give the true laws of that organization. It adds its peculiar numen, its sanctity, to every effort to
Set up a mark of everlasting light
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,
and though the mark itself may, indeed must, shift and be transformed with the ripening insight of man, yet, as between it and the temptations of sense, conscience must always be obeyed. Now as nature is organically one, we should expect to find this truth not dependent merely on an intuitive perception but written in the experiences of life. And is not this exactly what we do find? The ethical ideals of Judaism, of Hinduism, and of Roman Catholicism, with their extreme reliance on external observance and ritual, are lower, no doubt, than those of Christianity as conceived, say, by St. Paul. Yet let a Jew or a Hindu turn Christian, or a Catholic turn Protestant or Freethinker, for the mere sake of material advantages or an easier way of living, and a general moral deterioration seems at once to set in.[149] Whenever a man allows his sense of personal ease and gratification to overpower his sense of what is due to his fellow man, to his own higher self, to his God, he weakens his will and his capacity for living the nobler life. Ultimately he destroys the capacity altogether, and with it vanishes even that for which he sinned, the capacity for pleasure itself. The poison of self-indulgence will slacken and corrupt every fibre of his moral and physical being. To grasp at pleasure indiscriminately, recklessly, greedily is a way that makes not for life but death. On the other hand, the capacity for renunciation and self-control, the following of the law of love, the passion for justice and equality, not only grow strong by exercise but, far from injuring the other capacities which it may, on occasion, be right to suppress for their sake, they rather intensify these. As self-indulgence corrupts and fatigues the whole man, even on the self-indulgent side, so duty and righteousness vitalize and brace the whole man, both on their own side and the other. For Nature is one—sweet and mighty are the powers which conspire to create the harmony she loves in the spirits faithful to her world-wide revelation.
Now since the moral faculties bear this common stamp upon them, that they are those which oppose to the temptations of personal gratification the sense of duty to something outside ourselves, and since, when these two clash, the claim of the moral law is always to be obeyed, it is inevitable that men will sometimes take the denial of personal gratification for an end per se and attach to it a notion of peculiar holiness and purity. And this error will be intensified by the ancient and inveterate habit of regarding the Supreme Being as a malignant Power, to be propitiated by suffering. Thus we get the false sanction with its Ascetic ideal which has appeared so often in history. It is the other extreme to licence, and rests equally on disregard for the rational ideal of Sophrosyne or Temperance which lies between them. Yet it may truly be said that asceticism has its due place in the world. The ascetic life cannot indeed be the ideal life for any one who holds that plenitude of life is the true ideal. But it may be the best life for this or that individual. A nature maimed or scathed from birth, or by unhappy fortune, may best be able to realize itself in complete withdrawal from the interests of ordinary social life. Such withdrawal may also be necessary for the pioneer or leader of a cause, for a great reformer, for a teacher absorbed in his mission.
Philosophy, in fact, has its saints and ascetics as well as any religion that rests on extra-natural sanctions. But in each case the ascetic ideal rests on quite a different basis.
Looking broadly at the part which religious Orders have played in the religious and intellectual history of Europe, it may well be doubted whether even the most gracious and human figure in the history of asceticism, Francis of Assisi, would not have better served his time and land by the natural development, in secular life and activity, of the beautiful if sometimes wildly ebullient character portrayed in the records of his youth, than by cutting away half his life in order to force the other half into a distorted rarity. In recognizing the beauty and sweetness of his nature let us not be misled into attributing it in any degree to the influence of that fatal miasma from a faith more ancient than any religion which has a name and place on earth to-day, the dim terror of the unseen which has embodied itself for ages in expiatory sacrifices and rites of blood and pain.
Had Francis not been a saint he would certainly have been one of his country’s greatest poets.[150] Different minds will probably estimate differently the loss and gain. As a poet he produced the ‘Canticle of the Sun’; as an ascetic, the Franciscan Order. Now it is fair to point out that this, like other Orders of his church, must not be judged by what it is like in times when it is surrounded by watchful and by no means adorant eyes. A Catholic religious Order in a Catholic country naturally lives and moves in an atmosphere of veneration. To preserve this atmosphere pure from the sceptical thought which, from the monastic point of view, would vitiate it so dangerously, is naturally a prime object of every religious community; hence the bigotries, superstitions, and tyrannies of which these communities have so often been the sources or agents, from the days of Hypatia to the days of Dreyfus. Such communities, developing themselves under such circumstances, cannot attract many men of intellect and character to join them. They rapidly deteriorate, and European literature from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Erasmus shows us the repute in which they come to be held by the uncloistered intellect. A false ideal may stimulate, but it poisons. St. Francis, dreaming that he serves God by making himself blind to God’s world through a course of pitiless austerities,[151] produces an Order whose licence in one generation after his death has become a scandal to Christendom.[152]
Let us turn now to the theory of asceticism as conceived by the humane and rational spirit of Stoic philosophy. Epictetus—to my mind the greatest ethical thinker of antiquity—has a valuable and carefully reasoned chapter on the subject in his Dissertations. In reading this after, let us say, The Little Flowers of St. Francis, one seems to pass from the drugged atmosphere of a mediæval church to the free air and sunlight of the world. The ascetic, or Cynic as he was called in Stoic phraseology, is painted for us as a man who adventures himself to the extreme limit of abnegation, not from any mystic sentiment of the holiness of pain and poverty, but simply to help himself and others to realize the soul’s independence of external things. It was a cardinal doctrine of Stoicism (as it was of the Christianity of Christ) that the things which a man wrought and thought, the things under the control of his will, were the only things that really mattered. What happened to a man from outside was, indeed, of great importance in regard to how he dealt with it; in itself it was of none; it was like a ball in a game which you have to do your best to catch, knowing well that you do so not for the sake of the ball but of the game. Such was the Stoic view of life, and the Cynic represented not the perfected Stoic, not an ideal towards which all should tend—for the ideal was that of citizenship and well-ordered social life—but simply the method of verification which consists in taking an extreme case and showing that one’s theory will fit in with it. And so Diogenes lived in a barrel instead of a house, and asked nothing of Alexander except to stand out of his light. It is not more pleasing to God, not better in any way, that a man should live in a barrel rather than in a house, that he should be single rather than married, poor rather than rich; yet in the chances and changes of this mortal life all these things may happen to a man, will he, nill he, and the point is to show that he may still be confident and cheerful, knowing that his true self is untouched by these calamities. And while St. Francis and the more devoted of his followers so tortured and wrecked the body which St. Paul had called the temple of the Holy Spirit that many of them perished or had to linger out their lives in the infirmary,[153] with the Cynic the cultivation of the body and its faculties was a part of his discipline.
“For,” says Epictetus,[154] “if he shall appear consumptive, meagre and pale, his witness hath not the same emphasis. Not only by showing forth the things of the spirit must he convince foolish men that it is possible, without the things that are admired of them, to be good and wise, but also in his body must he show that plain and simple and open-air living are not mischievous even to the body: ‘Behold, even of this I am a witness, I and my body.’ So Diogenes was wont to do, for he went about radiant with health, and with his very body he turned many to good. But a Cynic that men pity seems to be a beggar—all men turn away from him, all stumble at him. For he must not appear squalid; so that neither in this respect shall he scare men away; but his very austerity should be cleanly and pleasing.”
How sane and wholesome, how wisely adapted to the fundamental facts of life, is the Stoic ideal as compared with the monastic! In it we see that there is a place in a natural ethics for a rational asceticism. Of such there will always be need—we must admit, whatever we may think of the ‘spirituality’ of self-destruction, that there are, and are always likely to be, many more men and women who deteriorate in soul and body through petty acts of self-indulgence than who do so by an excess of austerity. And this makes it all the more necessary that the matter should be conceived rightly, reasonably, from the side of a reverence for life and its manifestations, not from that of disdain and repulsion; that we should take hold of it (to quote Epictetus again) by the handle by which it can be carried, not that by which theory and experience alike have shown that it never can. When Tennyson wrote “Move upward, working out the beast,” he was not so well inspired as in some of his other appreciations of modern science. The religious ascetic aims at working out the beast—not so Nature, who does not progress by substituting one form of living for another, but by growing from a central core and continually harmonizing the old radical elements of being with the new assimilations. One can, perhaps, work out the beast—what cannot the will achieve? But the beast surely avenges himself, and often in terrible fashion.
When, however, we have recognized the false sanction and the false ideal associated with it, we have still the more difficult problem of establishing the true. If Righteousness—to use that term for all kinds of action ethically right—is to be followed in the interests of life, how can it ever be required that much suffering, and even death itself may have to be faced for its sake? Man is a part of a Whole—in the effective realization of that conception all ethics is summed up—but he is also an individual. Why should the individual give way to the Whole if their interests seem to clash? In other words, though we have the contents, the static significance of the word ‘ought,’ we have still to find its dynamic significance, its cogency.
Every beast does what it ‘ought’ without any question, and this constantly involves acts of co-operation or self-sacrifice for the interests of the race. In man, ethical action has a greater value for life, simply because, unlike the beast, he is able to question its grounds and to forgo it if he chooses. He observes, as we have said, that the ‘long run’ or universal point of view is often in conflict with the individual point of view. “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” is the extreme expression of the individual point of view. It has been called a ‘pig-philosophy,’ and if the expression is just, it is not because the pig will die to-morrow, for it will probably live as long as anything else, but because no matter how long it lives it is, qua pig, incapable of any other form of life.
But a man is capable of other forms of life, and to realize these he must keep the pig-life in check, not despising or disowning it, but restraining it, lest it should throw him out of harmony. Unchecked, it will do that in the long run; but what if he is to have no long run? Where the lower life can yield an hour of delight, why deny it for the sake of a higher life, if in the next hour both must end together?
I confess that I see no escape from the implied conclusion if the premiss is true. But if the view of life outlined in these pages be true, then this premiss is palpably false. Neither the higher nor the lower life can ever have any end, though no doubt they may pass into forms outside the category of Time, in which the terms beginning and end have no longer any meaning. Life is not dependent on its visible and tangible forms. The question here involved is one on which the drift of certain modern speculations in physics obliges us to dwell for a little.
The question of the present inhabitability of Mars or other planets has been much debated of late, pro and con. Opinions differ on this point; but there is a very general agreement among physicists that the state of the moon, cold, dead, and barren as a burnt-out cinder, must, by the equalization of energy, be sooner or later the necessary fate of every planet and of every sun in the universe. Science has thus apparently come to justify by its solemn verdict that cry of the Latin poet, more charged with the pathos of eternal death than perhaps any other human utterance:—
“Soles occidere et redire possunt:
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,
Nox est perpetua una dormienda.”[155]
The conditions under which life is possible will then no longer exist. One nothingness awaits the saint, the sage, the ox, the oak tree, and the fungus. “Life,” says Le Dantec, “has not always existed on the earth”; we are to regard it as merely “a surface accident in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe.”[156]
This remark, which is one that a thermometer might be expected to make if it could talk, is in Le Dantec’s mouth probably no more than a little rhetorical fling at orthodoxy, for it is really answered by his whole book. His main thesis is “the absence of all essential difference and all absolute discontinuity between living and not-living matter.” “A surface accident” can hardly be a reasonable description of a development thus prepared for in the essential nature of the substance of the world. But other physicists have lately cut deeper, and will not allow the suns of Catullus, even when cold, to set and rise again for ever. According to the very interesting and apparently well-supported speculations of Gustave Le Bon,[157] all matter is at present engaged in that process of disintegration of which radium offers the most conspicuous example. The energy which produces life and response of all kinds is explained as simply the result of this long, disintegrating process, and may be compared to the action of a released spring, seeking its state of quiescence and immobility.[158] When the process is complete, matter will be resolved into the primordial Something from which it somehow originated. And where will the saint and the sage, or anything that we can recognize as life, be then?
The answer to all this rises to the mind at once when we abandon the point of view of the thermometer and place ourselves at that of rational Man. This Matter, on whose states life is supposed to be dependent, is, after all, known to us only through the fact that we are living to observe it. If it disappeared, no doubt we should cease to see it, and if it were transformed we should see it otherwise, but to make the life which sees dependent on our seeing anything exactly as it appears now on this globe is surely the wildest of assumptions. We observe that life makes use of certain conditions of matter—a certain range of temperature, the presence of certain minerals and gases—in order to express itself. We regard these conditions as the product of a Power which desires life and has produced them to obtain it. But there may be many other conditions too. All we can tell is that beyond certain physical limits our senses cannot perceive life or get responses from it. M. Le Dantec would, no doubt, treat as an illusion the belief that man can communicate with and be responded to by a Power, a Life, transcending that of which the senses inform us. I am, with the multitude of men, profoundly convinced that we can. But leaving this entirely aside, is it not evident that, even as there are invisible rays in the spectrum which are now and then discovered by some unexpected chemical or electrical action, so there may be modes of living of which none of our present senses can give us the faintest conception? Whoever may deny this possibility, and on whatever grounds, it certainly cannot be denied on any grounds that physics or biology are aware of. And to those who believe that life is the central thing, and that matter exists only for it, the possibility is a certainty, for life must have been when as yet matter was not—life set it going. To convey the idea that everything that exists, however it may be transformed, is part of a divine Whole which cannot die because it is essential Life, we say that it is ‘immortal,’ and conceive ourselves as existing after death in a spiritual form just as the body exists after the bodily death in other bodily forms. Whether time and space, or even personality, will exist for us after death we dare not say; we are totally unable to imagine the conditions of such an existence. But we can perfectly grasp the broad fact that whatever we do and are, whatever we think, whatever transacts itself even in the unconscious sphere of our existence, must have eternal endurance and significance because it is knit with the eternal Whole.
“To the foot,” says Epictetus, “I shall say that it is according to Nature that it be clean; but if you take it as a foot, and not as a solitary thing, it shall beseem it to go into the mud, and to tread on thorns, and perchance to be cut off, for the sake of the whole; otherwise it is no longer a foot.
“And some such thing we should suppose about ourselves also. What art thou? A man. Look at thyself as a solitary creature, and it is according to Nature for thee to live to old age, to grow rich, and to keep good health. But if thou look upon thyself as a man, and as a part of a certain whole, for the sake of that whole it may become thee now to have sickness, now to sail the seas, and run into peril, now to suffer need, and perchance to die before thy time.
“Why, then, dost thou bear it hard? Knowest thou not that, as the foot, alone, is not a foot, so thou, alone, art not a man.”[159]
The broad fact on which a system of natural ethics must be based, if it is to have any ethical quality at all, is that the individual life finds its goal in the cosmic life, not in pleasure, or any other term by which we may choose to express a sensation of personal enjoyment. The distinction between the bonum honestum and the bonum delectabile is really a valid one—it is no invention of moralists “suckled in a creed outworn,” but is revealed by a study of life and its manifestations to have been deeply rooted in nature from a period far anterior to the advent of man upon the earth. In man, the bonum honestum takes the form mainly of what Epictetus calls the sense of “natural fellowship” among men, and what Christ expressed in the word which gave to the ideas of Stoicism the penetrating power they had lacked, the great and divine word, Love. But we must never forget that even this word will not take us to our end and sum up a system of ethical thought unless we rightly conceive the ultimate object to which it is directed. This is not the visible community of men, nor even that of all nature, now existing or to exist in the future. It is the ideal, eternal community, of which every man remains equally an organic part, whether he has any means of physical communication with his fellows or not. It is that without which the visible community, with all its laws and inter-relations, would never have come into being. It is the “city of God,” builded without hands, the Universal Polity whose “troubled image,” as Plato says, we discern in the polity we know.
When Socrates, after his sentence, lay in prison awaiting the summons to die, his friends gathered round him entreating him to make his escape, and explaining to him the safe and easy means they had provided for that end. Freely and cheerfully as was his wont, delighting in the play of dialectical fence, he debated the matter with them. Then he laid dialectics aside, and spoke to them from the heights of vision. Rightly or wrongly, he declared, the laws of his mother-city, to which he owed all he had and all he was, had bidden him die. Whatever happened now, there could be no escape in the end. Some day he must face death, and stand before the Laws of the Underworld. What answer should he make to Them when they demanded how he had dealt in life by their brethren in the world above?
This grand impersonation of the eternal Laws in their kinship with the laws of the visible world illumines a whole region of thought, extending far beyond the limits of the particular moral question which evoked it. It strikes the note of all high thinking on man’s duty to man. The laws, written or unwritten, that govern societies of men can claim no reverence from the individual who does not feel that they are the shadows or copies of laws belonging to the sphere of the eternal.
It is one thing to admit that the social relations of mankind give the start to ethical feeling, provide it with a wide and varied field of action, and with a criterion as to what is right and what is not. It is quite another to argue that this ethical feeling is merely a product of these relations, and has, apart from them, no meaning or purpose. This is another case of the principle which I have described before[160] in speaking of Evolution and Involution. Without both of these I cannot see how any movement from one state of being to another is to be accounted for. People, or even animals, living in communities find that mutual aid is useful to them, and they practise it. The utilitarian school think, when they have demonstrated this, that the whole ethical question is solved. But in reality they have not even approached it. Mutual aid is useful? Well, then, it is useful. How are we going to get any further? How are we going to account for love, duty, fidelity, self-sacrifice? Because certain things appear in the world under certain conditions we have, many of us, got into a slipshod way of saying that they are the product of these conditions, but a strict examination of the terms will frequently show that they are nothing of the kind. There is no valid reason why social life and mutual aid should not go on for ever without producing anything higher than the sense of mutual advantage. The nobler passions do indeed come into life when the proper stage of social evolution has been reached, but their source is not within the bounds of the visible order, nor do I see how they can ever justify themselves with reference to it alone. Neither, on the other hand, can they be realized without it. The divine air which we breathe on the mountain height is not made by the mountain, but we must climb the mountain to breathe it. Every step we take upwards in the visible order is, as it were, the discovery of something in that invisible order which is its spiritual counterpart and gives it its spiritual significance.
I have said that ethics is for life; but to the individual it must sometimes appear to be rather for death than for life, unless he knows that there is a life beyond the visible life. In this faith only—in whatever varied forms the intellect of man has embodied and expressed it—are martyrdoms possible. And martyrdoms have been so often the great turning-points and inspirations of human history that an ethics which cannot justify them would seem to be an ethics at odds with nature. Consider from our point of view the significance of the two martyrdoms of history which have most deeply impressed and influenced the minds of men.
Socrates had no gospel, no new truth to proclaim. He dissociated himself from the ‘rationalistic’ theories of his time, not indeed because he was particularly attached to ancient ideas in religion, but because theorizing on these subjects had no interest for him.[161] On his trial he expressly disclaimed heretical views on religion. It is clear that these were only charged against him because the real offence was no crime in Athenian or any other law. The real offence was that Socrates was a relentless critic, within reach of whose tongue no patriotic rhetorician could feel himself confident and comfortable. It was a time of rhetorical patriotism in Athens. From the bitter humiliation of the Peloponnesian War had arisen an impulse towards national regeneration, a genuine and worthy impulse in itself, but one which unfortunately took shape not in a manly facing of facts, a courageous march forward to the future, but rather in a panic-stricken retreat to old conservative formulas and bigotries, to the abandonment of which by cultivated Athenians was ascribed all the evil that had fallen on the city. Socrates, however, delighted in taking popular convictions and reducing them by a series of ingenious interrogations to their verifiable residuum of truth, if there happened to be any. They commonly emerged from the ordeal in a dilapidated condition. At a time when the whole city was high strung with patriotic fervour while inwardly very uncertain about its principles of action, the presence of a thinker like Socrates, with his pitiless arraignment of every gaudy fallacy before the bar of Reason, was a continual scandal and offence, and was easily interpreted as a public danger. Had he consented to keep silent, and affected to fall in with the general trend of public sentiment, he would, as he well knew, have been safe. But he refused all compliance and compromise, and declared with absolute truth that Athens would do better to reward him for stinging it into a perception of realities than to punish him for the wholesome pain of the process. So he went with clear-sighted deliberation to his death, and that death, so wonderfully recorded for us by the greatest prose writer of all time, has ennobled all criticism, all sceptical thought, thenceforward. None can think lightly of what Socrates thought it worth his while to die for.
Turn to the death of Christ, and into how different an atmosphere we seem to pass! No philosopher has here recorded for us the death of a philosopher. Myth and legend have clustered round the great event—the Jewish conception of an expiatory sacrifice—the truer and profounder myth of a slain and re-arisen God—and these have wrapped the Crucifixion in such a cloud of mystical light and colour that the outlines of the historical fact are lost to view. When this cloud is pierced, however, an intelligible human transaction remains. In Christ the luminous purity of Greek reason was so blended with the religious fervour of the Eastern mind that he may justly be called the ideal man, the Son of Man and of God, the incarnation of the divine thought. Unlike Socrates, he was distinctly a heretic in his place and time. He appeared among a people deeply religious but one in whom religion had taken the form of an immense fabric of ceremonial and observance, guarded and administered by a special caste who conceived themselves as the appointed vehicle of the will of God for the untaught multitude. To this multitude Christ went direct. He led them straight to the ancient founts of light and life, disregarding the narrow channels hewn by Pharisaic formalism. He bade them open their eyes and see for themselves; he taught them that the truth was for all men; beside the conceptions of the authorized religion he set new conceptions which made the old seem barren or ludicrous. The people heard him gladly, and the great fabric of Pharisaism was manifestly tottering. The fury of a monopolist caste was aroused. There is no more merciless anger than the anger of the religious monopolist who sees his monopoly threatened, and to this anger Christ fell a victim. As Socrates died for the right to disbelieve, so Christ died for the right to believe, and whatever the churches have made of him he has inspired every revolt against priestcraft and authority ever since. No creed is worth living for which is not worth dying for. Christ’s death and spiritual resurrection[162] set the seal on this truth and gave the world the most signal instance in history of triumph arising out of defeat and death.
Volumes of argument and analysis could not confute an ethical system so effectually and so severely as the bare fact that it looked paltry or incongruous beside such lives and deaths as these.
The conclusions we have reached in this discussion of the basis of a natural ethics may now be summed up. We have interpreted the object of phenomenal Being as Life.
The ethical quality of life lies in its conscious and active harmony with the Whole.
The motive for ethical action lies in the fact that we are a part of that Whole. The sense of this relation is as deep a part of man’s nature as the sense of his selfhood, or deeper.
To live for Others, then, is no more the true epitome of a natural ethics than is, to live for Self. The true epitome is, Live for the Whole—the Whole which includes both others and yourself, which is greater than all humanity, yet is capable of being faithfully served in the silence of one human breast.
We have now before us, therefore, a clear conception of the criterion and the sanction of ethical action. The criterion is applied when we ask of anything done by man, “Does it further life in the Whole?” The sanction is found in the fact that each of us is an organic part of that Whole. The richest and fullest life is evidently to be won by the most complete development of all our faculties which is allowed us by our opportunities. Ethics, therefore, exists for life, not life for ethics. This simple proposition arises inevitably from the scientific conception of the world. The greatest of fallacies is to conceive life as existing for any other object whatsoever, or to define its aim as something more or less remote from our present existence. Our ‘eternal life’ is not something to come—we are living it here and now. This is not a pilgrimage or a place of preparation; it leads us to no heaven, no hell, no distant judgment seat. We are before that judgment seat every hour; the heaven and the hell which it dispenses are the daily experiences through which we move; and the saints and prophets of this faith are those who have felt most deeply and revealed most profoundly the great realities of existence, hidden from us not so much by the darkness of the grave as by the impalpable veils of use and wont. The grave has mystery indeed but no terror of gloom for those who realize that the universe is but an eddy on the stream of life. By that eddy we see the stream, we feel its power and movement; and we know that the substance of which it is made is the stuff of life itself.