CHAPTER VIII
THE ETHICAL CRITERION
“Things have life—God is life.”—Spinoza.
“I am come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.”—Rabbi Bar-elahin.
THE view of the meaning and purpose of cosmic development set forth in the preceding chapters must clearly have a bearing on the principles of human conduct. Men above a certain stage of culture do not live by blind instinct. They endeavour to harmonize their lives with some conception of the ratio essendi of the world in which they find themselves, and in so doing they are most truly men. The Stoic expressed this attempt in the simple formula, ‘Live according to Nature.’ But nature is not simple, and the endeavour to interpret nature has led to some very divergent ideals of human conduct.
Every one who has meditated on the subject at all has become aware that the world which we see and hear and feel, the world of sense-perception, is not all that we have to do with. Behind the visible and material world there lies the invisible, the X world, which we cannot weigh and analyze, but the existence and potency of which we are compelled to assume. It is the literal truth to say that no man can take a single step even in the most mundane and practical affairs of life without a belief, implicit or explicit, in the spiritual unity and reality underlying the fleeting panorama of sense-impressions. Nothing else can give him any assurance of the constancy, the orderly inter-relation, of the phenomena with which he has to deal, and with which he could not deal intelligently did not this constancy exist. Now when man begins to be aware that there is something more in the world than is immediately apparent to sense, his thinking on the subject may take several different lines, but it is probable that all of them may be referred to one or other of two main divisions, the Dualistic and the Monistic.[140] The Dualist will regard the world of sense-perception, whether originally produced and organized by the invisible or not, as now more or less independent of the latter, or even hostile to it, and he will generally interpret his own being as something properly belonging to the invisible world but for a time mysteriously and unhappily entangled, through the flesh, with the other. This is Platonic theology, carried by Paul into Christianity, and it eventuates, when driven to its conclusion by a rigorous and inhuman logic, in Asceticism. Instead of the Stoic, ‘Live according to Nature’ (a formula in complete harmony, it may be noted, with the Stoic Pantheism), we get, as the formula for ideal conduct, ‘Deny Nature, think the flesh a burden and a shame, fit yourself for the time when your real self will cast it off as a filthy garment.’
On the other hand the Monistic view represented in ancient Europe by the great Stoic school, and in modern times by names such as those of Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Walt Whitman, refuses to separate the visible and the invisible worlds. The former is the latter, made partially accessible to our minds. Man is a part of nature, bound up in all his being with the framework of the Universe. The flesh is not a bond on the spirit but an instrument of life, and what we acquire through it is just as valuable and as eternal as anything else. “Objects gross and the unseen soul are one,” says Whitman—the distinction between subject and object, the perceiver and the perceived, as Schopenhauer argues, is but a mode of cognition.
That the human mind can rest only in some kind of Monism, that Dualism must be regarded as a natural but a passing phase of thought, based on a hasty interpretation of certain aspects of man’s moral experience, would seem to follow from what has been urged previously from the a priori side of the question.[141] Indeed, it may be doubted whether there are any thinkers who seriously maintain the Dualistic view as a philosophic doctrine. Many, however, including the whole school of Catholic theology, with its ascetic ideal and its doctrine of eternal hell, turn practically Dualist in the sphere of ethics, while they would be horrified at a suspicion of anything but the purest Monism in their conception of the ultimate reality of being. The cause of this inconsistency is evident. We feel instinctively that no distinction in the world of our present experience goes deeper than the distinction between moral good and moral evil. We feel the danger of obliterating this distinction, and setting loose the greedy and violent passions of man to work their will unchecked by any sense of right and wrong. And undoubtedly the Monistic principle might, by a shallow interpretation of it, be held to obliterate the distinction. If God is One, it might be argued, and God is All, then evil is justified in the world equally with goodness, and the sense of duty is, what shall we say? an illusion, a superstition, a relic of fetishism. Hence the practical Dualism on the ethical and eschatological side which has found its way into Monistic thought. It is brought in to save morality. But inconsistencies like this do not last for ever; they can only persist where thought has become atrophied, and Dualism is now rapidly disappearing from the religious thought of Europe. What is to take its place? The problem before us is to discover a basis for ethics on the Monistic hypothesis without the slightest acceptance of the facile solutions offered by Dualism. If we succeed in that, and establish a real Monistic meaning for the terms right and wrong, we shall next have to deal with the sanction of the law of righteousness, and to show why it should be obeyed even, if necessary, at the cost of pain and death.
And first, let us unreservedly admit that on the Monistic view the distinction between right and wrong, moral good and moral evil, is not fundamental. Both must be regarded as moving towards comprehension in some unity as yet unimaginable by man. Without renouncing his faith, the Monist can never escape from that position, and he must be true to the light whatever the apparent consequences may be. A greater Power than he will look after the consequences: ταῦτα τῷ θεῷ μελήσει.
But, on the other hand, this distinction may be just as real and vital as any other in the world of experience. Nobody thinks that pleasure and pain are indifferent because they are both necessary forms of active life, or that beauty and ugliness are indifferent, or that success and failure are indifferent. How we strain for success in a game, for instance, although we are perfectly well aware that the game is the real object, not the triumph! Yet without the possibilities of triumph or defeat, there would be no game. The problem is really part of the primal mystery of the origin of cosmic life. If we assume at the beginning of things (so far as we can conceive a beginning) one infinite, homogeneous, absolutely undifferentiated Existence, and then conceive this Existence as impelled to act, and to become conscious of itself, it is plain that to do so it must differentiate itself. There must arise within it the relations of subject and object, simple and complex, better and worse, and all that is involved in change, variety, progression. And this applies as much to the moral life as to the life of the senses. It has often been pointed out that if there were no Wrong to strive with there would be no visible and active Right. Were there no hate, love would be incapable of the noblest part of its ministry. Were there no weakness, strength could never have been called on for the strain by which it is developed. And if good should ever overcome and absorb evil the stage thus attained will assuredly reveal some new contrast of pursuit and avoidance perhaps as strange to us now as moral distinctions would be to the lower animals.
The Monist will also urge that nature, as we behold it, is not a fixed and rounded entity, but is something in process of completion. We must therefore interpret nature not alone by its contents at any given moment, but by its drift and tendency. This is precisely the consideration which separates Pantheism as enlightened by science from the Pantheism of a primitive nature-worship. In it, the Greek and the Hebrew ideals are blended and reconciled.
But what, for ethical purposes, is this drift and tendency? What significance do I mean to attach to the terms moral good and moral evil? It is hardly necessary to say that I do not propose in a couple of chapters of one short book to elaborate an ethical system with all its groundwork, and with details ramifying into every branch of ethical action, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has essayed to do in his Data of Ethics. All I can do here, or in any section of this book, is to indicate a way of looking at things—at nature, at human life, at art—in which the meaning of the universe has seemed to become intelligible and satisfying to my own thought. Having found the way, every one must use it for himself or herself. I can, in the present work, go no further into detail than is necessary to make my meaning clear; to set whatever readers I may find at my point of view. If I can at all succeed in doing this, let them use their own eyes: they will find a wonderful landscape, vital, fresh and boundless, opening before them.
The conception of ethical law which I wish to put forward differs from what is commonly understood as evolutionary or scientific ethics at the present day. This system appears ultimately to rest on Jeremy Bentham as its founder, but Bentham’s later disciples have modified his doctrine at various points by a deeper appreciation of the difficulties of the position. They have approximated more closely to what I consider to be the truth, but they have never shaken off the entanglement of the original false position of the modern founder of the school. Bentham, who pursued “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” through the medium of the most depressing system of philosophy which the world has ever known, made Pleasure the ultimate criterion of moral action and declared for the summary striking out of the word ‘ought’ from the language of morals, as corresponding to an idea which, so far as it rested on any reality, was merely a relic of primitive superstition.[142] But J. S. Mill saw that the sentiment of duty and moral obligation was based on something deeper and more instinctive than a word misunderstood, and that it often survived in persons singularly free from superstition. He sought its origin in the psychology and physiology of man, and interpreted it, on the principle of association of ideas, as a survival of the deep impression made by punishments and rewards attached respectively to different classes of actions in each man’s early life.[143] The position was a more rational and scientific one than that of Bentham, but it still failed to account for the a priori character of the moral sense, the ready responsiveness with which early training evokes in man the sentiment of duty.
It seemed, as it were, to have been somehow prepared beforehand and to lie latent awaiting only the right touch to spring into action. Finally, Herbert Spencer, who may be said to have brought all this line of thinking to its climax, seized on the evolution doctrine as explaining this intuitive and innate quality of ethical feeling. It was prepared beforehand, far back in the ancestry of the race. Not the punishments and rewards applied to the modern individual in his own person, but those which affected his near and remote progenitors, had, in the course of countless generations, built up “moral perceptions” resulting from “inherited modifications caused by accumulated experiences.”[144] The moral sense, therefore, is now really innate because inherited, but was once acquired by the operation of pleasures and pains arising from man’s intercourse with nature and with his fellows. And the ultimate moral criterion in the present day remains simply the striking of a balance between pleasure and pain.[145]
It is clear that if the Lamarckian doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is a delusion, the bottom is at once knocked out of the Spencerian system of ethics. But apart from this, that system, on the historical side at least, is vitiated by the cardinal defect in Mr. Spencer’s mind—his failure to appreciate the true nature of the data with which he had to deal. The philosophic mind is not a mere logic-machine. It must include the faculty of vision, the vital perception of the objects of thought, as well as the faculty of observing and of generalizing about their action and reaction on each other, and from this point of view Mr. Spencer’s deficiency as a philosopher is enormous. A vital perception of the object in this case makes us at once aware that you cannot evolve a sense of Duty, “stern daughter of the voice of God,” out of pleasures and pains. Pleasures and pains per se will yield nothing to the end of the chapter but the sense or the recollection of pleasure and of pain. It is as impossible in psychology as it is in mechanics to juggle more power out of the end of a sequence of causes and effects than you put in at the beginning.
But what has a natural ethics to put in the place of pleasure as the goal of right action? The question is answered when we ask, What does Nature herself put? Nature is said to have no morals, yet a mother bird will imperil and often lose its life for the sake of its young. Is it seeking pleasure then? Certainly not—it is protecting and fostering life, the life of the race. And here, as we have insisted so often, is the master-impulse of nature. We are taking a false and contracted view when we assume that a living thing can have no other goal of action except pleasure. Far earlier than the appearance of man in the world is the appearance of the social instinct which prompts the individual to live, and if necessary to die, for the larger life of the race. What really begins in man is the power to think of himself, to choose, to analyze, the power to say, Why? To this question the science of ethics must provide an answer if it can—that, in fact, is its origin and function. But if it binds itself to provide an answer in terms of pleasure, it is entering the lists with naked Egotism at a fatal disadvantage. On that ground, it seems to me, Egotism must always win. But it is not the only ground. Nature knows a whole world of impulse and effort which has nothing to do with pleasure. Nature does not directly want pleasure at all, but is resolved, at the cost of pleasure and everything else, to have life. Now life is maintained at its highest point by harmony—a harmony of the faculties with each other and, as a whole, with the mighty life outside them. And, as Santayana admirably says, “harmony when made to rule in life gives reason a noble satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear.”[146] In this sense we may say that happiness is organically connected with right action.[147] But right action in itself is simply the action which best subserves the central purpose of nature. If that purpose is summed up in the one word Life, we must think of the moral sense, if we would not go astray and be bewildered, in terms of living and not in terms of enjoying. To take the greatest of exemplars, who can venture to affirm that Christ had more pleasure living as he did and uttering to the last syllable the message that was given him to deliver, than if he had prudently restrained himself and led the life of a decent and respectable artisan in his Syrian village? Indeed, even if we take very long views, who can affirm that, on the whole, he has by his life and death increased the sum of pleasure in the world? I doubt it very much. No one can deny that it is most questionable. To think of the matter in terms of pleasure seems to lead to nothing but perplexity and doubt. But there can be no doubt whatever that he lived to the full the life that it was in him to live, and that he immensely deepened and enriched the spiritual life of man. When we fix our minds on life as the goal and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified. But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that I think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline, or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. Whoever has done this will feel as if he had escaped from a jungle of contradiction and gloom, where man can only live at all by clearing some little space for his church and his homestead, and giving up the rest to the powers of darkness. Yet a step brings him to a point of view from which the physical, the animal and the human features of the world’s vast landscape seem to flow into a happy and organic union, where every part becomes luminous with meaning and charged with divine purpose.
Moral action then, I conceive, as a certain kind of life-promoting action. It is action which promotes life in the whole as opposed to the part, which sacrifices the lower, narrower, more immediate life for the fuller, nobler, more permanent life, whenever they are found to clash. It does not differ in kind from other wholesome vital action, but it differs in the heightening, the saliency, the intention conferred upon it by the circumstances under which it is taken. And if we ask how it was evolved in man, the answer is that it was there already in the instincts of the lower animals, which are never, as man often so sadly is, at odds with their true functions and duties. It is not morality which has been evolved in man, but the capacity for immorality, due to his personal self-consciousness.
The ultimate question, then, as regards the abstract morality of any act or class of acts must be, Does it make for life? Does it tend to help man towards the maximum development of all his faculties and capacities? These faculties and capacities are what the universe has now evolved at the highest level of which we have any knowledge. None of them is evil, except in so far as it may thwart and stunt the development of others. In the harmony of the whole range of man’s powers of sense and spirit lies the golden ideal which none of us may realize, but for which each of us may strive; or—for such is the supreme and fatal prerogative of man—which he may set himself to dishonour and deny.