Lecky On Morals.
[Footnote 155]
[Footnote 155: History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne. By William Edward Hartpoole Lecky, M.A. London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1869. 2 vols. 8vo.]
Mr. Lecky divides his work into five chapters. The first chapter is preliminary, and discusses "the nature and foundations of morals," its obligation and motives; the second treats of the morals of the pagan empire; the third gives the author's view of the causes of the conversion of Rome and the triumph of Christianity in the empire; the fourth the progress and deterioration of European morals from Constantine to Charlemagne; and the fifth the changes effected from time to time in the position of women. The author does not confine himself strictly within the period named, but, in order to make his account intelligible, gives us the history of what preceded and what has followed it; so that his book gives one, from his point of view, the philosophy and the entire history of European morals from the earliest times down to the present.
The subject of this work is one of great importance in the general history of the race, and of deep interest to all who are not incapable of serious and sustained thought. Mr. Lecky is a man of some ability, of considerable first or second hand learning, and has evidently devoted both time and study to his subject. His style is clear, animated, vigorous, and dignified; but his work lacks condensation and true perspective. He dwells too long on points comparatively unimportant, and repeats the same things over and over again, and brings proofs after proofs to establish what is mere commonplace to the scholar, till he becomes not a little tedious. He seems to write under the impression that the public he is addressing knows nothing of his subject, and is slow of understanding. He evidently supposes that he is writing something very important, and quite new to the whole reading world. Yet we have found nothing new in his work, either in substance or in presentation, nothing—not even an error or a sophism—that had not been said, and as well said, a hundred times before him; we cannot discover a single new fact, or a single new view of a fact, that can throw any additional light on European morals in any period of European history. Yet we may say Mr. Lecky, though not an original or a profound thinker, is above the average of English Protestant writers, and compiles with passable taste, skill, and judgment.
We know little of the author, except as the author of the book before us, and of a previous work, on Rationalism in Europe, and we have no vehement desire to know anything more of him. He belongs, with some shades of difference, to a class represented, in England, by Buckle, J. Stuart Mill, Frank Newman, and James Martineau; and of which the Westminster Review is the organ; in France, by M. Vacherot, Jules Simon, and Ernest Renan; and, in this country, by Professor Draper, of this city, and a host of inferior writers. They are not Christians, and yet would not like to be called anti-Christians; they are judges, not advocates, and, seated on the high judicial bench, they pronounce, as they flatter themselves, an impartial and final judgment on all moral, religious, and philosophical codes, and assign to each its part of good, and its part of evil. They aim to hold an even balance between the church and the sects, between Christian morals and pagan morals, and between the several pagan religions and the Christian religion, all of which they look upon as dead and gone, except with the ignorant, the stupid, and the superstitious. Of this class Mr. Lecky is a distinguished member, though less brilliant as a writer than Renan, and less pleasing as well as less scientific than our own Draper.
The writers of this class do not profess to break with Christian civilization, or to reject religion or morals, but strive to assert a morality without God, and a Christianity without Christ. They deny in words neither God nor Christ, but they find no use for either. They deny neither the possibility nor the fact of the supernatural, but find no need of it and no place for it. They concede providence, but resolve it into a fixed natural law, and are what we would call naturalists, if naturalism had not received so many diverse meanings. In their own estimation, they are not philosophers, moralists, or divines, but really gods, who know, of themselves, good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error, and whose prerogative it is to judge all men and ages, all moralities, philosophies, and religions, by the infallible standard which each one of them is, or has in himself. They are the fulfilment of the promise of Satan to our mother Eve, "Ye shall be as gods."
Mr. Lecky, in his preliminary chapter, on the nature and foundation of morals, refutes even ably and conclusively the utilitarian school of morals, and defends what he calls the "intuitive" school. He contends that it is impossible to found morals on the conception of the useful, or on fears of punishment and hopes of reward; and argues well, after Henry More, Cudworth, Clark, and Butler, that all morality involves the idea of obligation, and is based on the intuition of right or duty; or, in other words, on the principle of human nature called conscience. But this, after all, is no solution of the problem raised. There is, certainly, a great difference between doing a thing because it is useful, and doing it because it is right; but there is a still greater difference between the intuitive perception of right and the obligation to do it. The perception or intuition of an act as obligatory, or as duty, but is not that which makes it duty or obligatory. The obligation is objective, the perception is subjective. The perception or intuition apprehends the obligation, but is not it, and does not impose it. The intuitive moralists are better than the utilitarians, in the respect that they assert a right and a wrong independent of the fact that it is useful, or injurious, to the actor. But they are equally far from asserting the real foundation of morals; because, though they assert intuition or immediate perception of duty, they do not assert or set forth the ground of duty or obligation. Duty is debt, is an obligation; but whence the debt? whence the obligation? We do not ask why the duty obliges, for the assertion of an act as duty is its assertion as obligatory; but why does the right oblige? or, in other words, why am I bound to do right? or any one thing rather than another?
Mr. Lecky labors hard to find the ground of the obligation in some principle or law of human nature, which he calls conscience. But conscience is the recognition of the obligation, and the mind's own judgment of what is or is not obligatory; it is not the obligation nor its creator. This mistake proceeds from his attempt to found morals on human nature as supreme law-giver, and is common to all moralists who seek to erect a system of morals independent of theology. Dr. Ward, in his work on Nature and Grace, commits the same mistake in his effort to find a solid foundation in nature of duty, without rising to the Creator. All these moralists really hold, as true, the falsehood told by Satan to our first parents, "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil;" that is, in order to know good or evil ye shall not need to look beyond your own nature, nor to recognize yourselves as subject to, or dependent on, any authority above or distinct from it. It is the one fundamental error that meets us in all Gentile philosophy, and all modern philosophy and science, speculative, ethical, or political, that holds itself independent of God. The schoolmen understood by morals, when the term means duty, or anything more than manners and customs, what is called Moral Theology, or the practical application of speculative and dogmatic theology to the offices of life, individual, domestic, and social or political. Natural morality meant that portion of man's whole duty which is prescribed by the natural law and promulgated by reason, as distinguished from revelation. They based all morals on the great principle of theology, and therefore they called theology the queen of the sciences. We have made no advance on them.
In morals, three things—first, the obligation; second, the regula or rule; third, the end—are essential, and must be carefully distinguished. Why am I bound to do one thing rather than another? that is, why am I bound at all? What am I bound to do, or to avoid? For what end? These three questions are fundamental and exhaustive. The intuitionists hold that all morals involve the idea or conception of duty; but they omit to present the reason or ground of duty or obligation, and therefore erect their moral fabric without any foundation, and make it a mere castle in the air. They confound conscience with obligation, and the rule or law with the reason or motive for observing it. Suppose we find in human nature the rule or law; we cannot find in it either the obligation or the motive, for the simple reason that human nature is not independent, is not sufficient for itself, does not belong to itself, and has in itself neither its origin nor its end, neither its first nor its final cause. The rule—regula—is the law, and the law prescribes what is to be done and what is to be avoided; but it does not create the obligation nor furnish the motive of obedience. Mr. Lecky himself maintains that it does not, and is very severe upon those who make an arbitrary law the ground of moral distinctions, or the reason of duty. The law does not make the right or the wrong. The act is not right because commanded, nor wrong because prohibited; but it is commanded because it is right, and prohibited because it is wrong. Whence then the obligation? or, what is it that transforms the right into duty? This is the question that the independent or non-theological moralists, no matter of what school, do not and cannot answer.
There is no answer, unless we give up the godship of man, give Satan the lie, and understand that man is a dependent existence; for an independent being cannot be bound or placed under the obligation of duty, either by his own act or by the act of another. If man is dependent, he is created, and, if created, he belongs to his Creator; for the maker has a sovereign right to that which he makes. It is his act, and nothing is or can be more one's own, than one's own act. Man, then, does not own himself; he owes himself, all he is, and all he has, to his Creator. As it has pleased his Creator to make him a free moral agent, capable of acting from choice, and with reference to a moral end, he is bound to give himself, by his own free will, to God to whom he belongs; for his free will, his free choice, belongs to God, is his due; and the principle of justice requires us to give to every one his due, or what is his own.
Here, then, in man's relation to God as his creator, is the ground of his duty or obligation. It grows out of the divine creative act. Deny the being of God, deny the creative act, deny man is the creature of God, and you deny all obligation, all duty, and therefore, according to Mr. Lecky's own doctrine, all morals.
The irrational cannot morally bind the rational. All men are equal, and no man, no body of men has, or can have, a natural right to bind or govern another. Only the Creator obliges, as the owner of the creature; and if I owe myself, all I am and all I have, to God, I owe nothing to another in his own right, and only God has any right over me, or to me. Here is at once the basis of obligation and of liberty, and the condemnation of all tyranny and despotism. From this, it clearly follows that every system of morals that rests on nature, the state, or any thing created, as its foundation, is not and of itself cannot be obligatory upon any one, and that without God as our creator, and whose we are, there is and can be no moral obligation or duty whatever. Pantheism, which denies the creative act, and atheism, which denies God, both alike deny morals by denying its basis or foundation. Either is fatal to morals, for obligation is only the correlative of the right to command. Having found the ground of obligation, and shown why we are morally bound, the next thing to be considered is the rule by which is determined what we are bound to do, and what we are bound to avoid. Mr. Lecky makes this rule conscience, which, though he labors to prove that it is uniform and infallible in all ages and nations, and all men, he yet concedes varies in its determinations as to what is or is not duty according to the circumstances of the age or nation, the ideal or standard adopted, public opinion, etc. That is, conscience assures us that we ought always to do right, but leaves us to find out, the best way we can, what is or is not right. Conscience, then, cannot be itself the rule; it is a witness within us of our obligation to obey God, and the judgment which we pass on our acts, usually, in practice, on our acts after they are done, is at best only our judgment of what the rule or law is, not the rule or law itself. The rule or regula is not conscience, but the light of conscience, that by which it determines what is or is not duty; it is the law which, according to St. Thomas, is "quaedam est regula et mensura actuum, secundum quam inducitur ad agendum, vel ab agendo retrahitur;" [Footnote 156] or, in the sense we here use the term, the rule, or measure of duty prescribing what is to be done, and what avoided.
[Footnote 156: Summa primae secundae, quest. xc. art. I. incorp.]
It is, as St. Thomas also says, an ordinatio rationis, and as an ordination of reason, it can be only the rule or measure of what is obligatory to be done or to be avoided. It defines and declares what is or is not duty, it does not and cannot make the duty, or create the obligation. The author and his school overlook the fact that reason is perceptive, not legislative. They confound the obligation with the rule that measures and determines it, and assume that it is the reason that creates the duty. They are psychologists, not philosophers, and see nothing behind or above human reason, man's highest and distinguishing faculty. Certainly without reason man could not either perform, or be bound to perform, a single moral act; and yet it is not the reason that binds him; and if he is bound to follow reason, as he undoubtedly is, it is only because reason tells him what is obligatory, and enables him to do it.
Since only God can bind morally, only God can impose the law which measures, defines, or discloses what independent of the law is obligatory. The rule of duty, of right and wrong, is therefore the law of God. The law of God is promulgated in part through natural reason, and in part through supernatural revelation. The former is called the natural law, lex naturalis; the latter, the revealed law, or the supernatural law. But both are integral parts of one and the same law, and each has its reason in one and the same order of things, emanates from one and the same authority, for one and the same ultimate end. There are, no doubt, in the supernatural law, positive injunctions, and prohibitions, which are not contained in the natural law, though not repugnant thereto; but these have their reason and motive in the end, which in all cases determines the law. All human laws, ecclesiastical or civil, derive all their vigor as laws from the law of God, and all the positive injunctions and prohibitions of either are, in their nature, disciplinary, or means to the end, in which is the reason or motive of the law. Hence there is, and can be, nothing arbitrary in duty. Nothing is or can be imposed, under either the natural law or the supernatural law, in either church or state, in religion or morals, that does not immediately or mediately grow out of our relation to God as our creator, and as our last end or final cause. As a Christian I am bound to obey the supreme Pastor of the church, not as a man commanding in his own name, or by his own authority, but as the vicar of Christ, who has commissioned him to teach, discipline, and govern me. As a citizen I am bound to obey all the laws of my country not repugnant to the law or the rights of God, but only because the state has, in secular matters, authority from God to govern. In either case the obedience is due only to God, and he only is obeyed. It is his authority and his alone that binds me, and neither church nor state can bind me beyond or except by reason of its authority derived from him.
The law is the rule, and is prescribed by the end, in which is the reason or motive of duty. The law is not the reason or motive of duty, nor is it the ground of the obligation. It is simply the rule, and tells us what God commands, not whence his right to command, nor wherefore he commands. His right to command rests on the fact that he is the Creator. But why does he command such and such things, or prescribe such and such duties? We do not answer, because such is his will; though that would be true as we understand it. For such answer would be understood by this untheological age, which forgets that the divine will is the will of infinite reason, to imply that duties are arbitrary, rest on mere will, and that there is no reason why God should prescribe one thing as duty rather than another. What the law of God declares to be duty is duty because it is necessary to accomplish the purpose of our existence, or the end for which we are created. Everything that even God can enjoin as duty has its reason or motive in that purpose or end. The end, then, prescribes, or is the reason of, the law.
The end for which God creates us is himself, who is our final cause no less than our first cause. God acts always as infinite reason, and cannot therefore create without creating for some end; and as he is self-sufficing and the adequate object of his own activity, there is and can be no end but himself. All things are not only created by him but for him. This is equally a truth of philosophy and of revelation, and even those theologians who talk of natural beatitude, are obliged to make it consist in the possession of God, at least, as the author of nature. Hence, St. Paul, the greatest philosopher that ever wrote, as well as an inspired apostle, says, Rom. xi. 36, "Of him, and by him, and in him are all things;" or, "in him and for him they subsist," as Archbishop Kenrick explains in a note to the passage. The motive or reason of the law is in the end, or in God as final cause. The motive or reason for keeping or fulfilling the law is, then, that we may gain the end for which we are made, or, union with God as our final cause. This is all clear, plain, and undeniable, and hence we conclude that morals, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be asserted unless we assert God as our creator and as our last end.
Mr. Lecky and his school do not, then, attain to the true philosophy of morals, for they recognize no final cause, either of man or his act; and yet there is no moral act that is not done freely propter finem, for the sake of the end. We do not say that all acts not so done are vicious or sinful, nor do we pretend that no acts are moral that are not done with a distinct and deliberate reference to God as our last end. The man who relieves suffering because he cannot endure the pain of seeing it, performs a good deed, though an act of very imperfect virtue. We act also from habit, and when the habit has been formed by acts done for the sake of the end, or by infused grace, the acts done from the habit of the soul without an explicit reference to the end are moral, virtuous, in the true sense of either term; nor do we exclude those Gentiles who, not having the law, do the things of the law, of whom St. Paul speaks, Rom. ii. 14-16.
Mr. Lecky overlooks the end, and presents no reason or motive for performing our duty, distinguishable from the duty itself. He adopts the philosophy of the Porch, except that he thinks it did not make enough of the emotional side of our nature, that is, was not sufficiently sentimental. The Stoics held that we must do right for the sake of right alone, or because it is right. They rejected all consideration of personal advantage, of general utility, the honor of the gods, future life, heaven or hell, or the happiness of mankind. They admitted the obligation to serve the commonwealth and to do good to all men, but because it was right. The good of the state or of the race was duty, but not the reason or motive of the duty. The professedly disinterested morality on which our author, after them, so earnestly insists, closely analyzed, will be found to be as selfish as that of the Garden, or that of Paley and Bentham. The Epicurean makes pleasure, that is, the gratification of the senses, the motive of virtue; the Stoic makes the motive the gratification of his intellectual nature, or rather his pride, which is as much a man's self as what the apostle calls concupiscence, or the flesh. Intellectual selfishness, in which the Stoics abounded, is even more repugnant to the virtue of the actor than the sensual selfishness of the votary of pleasure. We care not what fine words the Stoic had on his lips, no system of pagan morals was further removed from real disinterested virtue than that of the Porch.
Mr. Lecky denounces the morality of the church as selfish, and says the selfish system triumphed with Bossuet over Fénélon; but happily for us he is not competent to speak of the morals enjoined by the church. He does not understand the question which was at issue, and entirely misapprehends the matter for which Fénélon was censured by the Holy See. The doctrine of Fénélon, as he himself explained and defended it, was never condemned, nor was that of Bossuet, which, on several points, was very unsound, ever approved. Several passages of Fénélon's Maxims of the Saints were censured as favoring quietism, already condemned in the condemnation of Molinos and his adherents—a doctrine which Fénélon never held, and which he sought in his Maxims to avoid without running into the contrary extreme, but, the Holy See judged, unsuccessfully. His thought was orthodox, but the language he used could be understood in a quietistic sense; and it was his language, not his doctrine, that was condemned.
The error favored by Fénélon's language, though against his intention, was that it is possible in this life to rise and remain habitually in such a state of charity, or pure love of God for his own sake, of such perfect union with him, that in it the soul no longer hopes or fears, ceases to make acts of virtue, and becomes indifferent to its own salvation or damnation, whether it gains heaven or loses it. The church did not condemn the love of God for his own sake, nor acts of perfect charity, for so much is possible and required of all Christians. The church requires us to make acts of love, as well as of faith and hope, and the act of love is: "O my God! I love thee above all things, with my whole heart and soul, because thou art infinitely amiable and deserving of all love; I love also my neighbor as myself for the love of thee; I forgive all who have injured me, and ask pardon of all whom I have injured." Here is no taint of selfishness, but an act of pure love. Yet though we can and ought to make distinct acts of perfect charity, it is a grave error to suppose that the soul can in this life sustain herself, habitually, in a state of pure love, that she ever attains to a state on earth in which acts of virtue cease to be necessary, in which she ceases from pure love to be actively virtuous, and becomes indifferent to her own fate, to her own salvation or damnation, to heaven or hell—an error akin to that of the Hopkinsians, that in order to be saved one must be willing to be damned. As long as we live, acts of virtue, of faith, hope, and charity, are necessary; and to be indifferent to heaven or hell, is to be indifferent whether we please God or offend him, whether we are united to him or alienated from him.
It is a great mistake to represent the doctrine the church opposed to quietism or to Fénélon as the selfish theory of morals. To act from simple fear of suffering or simple hope of happiness, or to labor solely to escape the one and secure the other, is, of course, selfish, and is not approved by the church, who brands such fear as servile, and such hope as mercenary, because in neither is the motive drawn from the end, which is God, as our supreme good. What the church bids us fear is alienation from God, and the happiness she bids us seek is happiness in God, because God is the end for which we are made. Thus, to the question, "Why did God make you?" the catechism answers, "That I might know him, love him, and serve him in this world, and be happy with him for ever in the next." With him, not without him. The fear the church approves is the fear of hell, not because it is a place of suffering, and the fear of God she inculcates is not the fear of him because he can send us to hell, but because hell is alienation from God, is offensive to him: and therefore the fear is really fear of offending God, and being separated from him. The hope of happiness she approves is the hope of heaven, not simply because heaven is happiness, but because it is union with God, or the possession of God as our last end, which is our supreme good.
Here neither the fear of hell nor the hope of heaven is selfish; for in each the motive is drawn from the end, from God who is our supreme good. It therefore implies charity or the love of God. And herein is its moral value. It may not be perfectly disinterested, or perfect charity, which is the love of God for his own sake, or because he is the supreme good in himself; but to love him as our supreme good, and to seek our good in him and him only, is still to love him, and to draw from him the motive of our acts. The church enjoins this reference to God in which, while she recognizes faith and hope as virtues in this life, she enjoins charity, without which the actor is nothing.
If Mr. Lecky had known the principle of Catholic morals, and understood the motives to virtue which the church urges, he would never have accused her of approving the selfish theory, which proposes in no sense God, but always and everywhere self, as the end. He will allow us no motive to virtue but the right; that is, in his theory, duty has no reason or motive but itself. No doubt his conception of right includes benevolence, the love of mankind, and steady, persevering efforts to serve our country and the human race; but he can assign no reason or motive why one should do so without falling either into the selfishness or the utilitarianism which he professes to reject. The sentimental theory which he seems to adopt cannot help him, for none of our sentiments are disinterested; all the sentiments pertain to self, and seek always their own gratification. This is as true of those called the higher, nobler sentiments as of the lower and baser, and, in point of fact, sentimentalists, philanthropists, and humanitarians are usually the most selfish, cruel, heartless, and least moral people in society. Men who act from sentimental instead of rational motives are never trustworthy, and are, in general, to be avoided.
Mr. Lecky maintains that right is to be done solely because it is right, without any considerations of its particular or general utility, or regard to consequences. But he shrinks from this, and appeals to utility when hard pressed, and argues that considerations of advantage to society or to mankind, or a peculiar combination of circumstances, may sometimes justify us in deviating from the right—that is, in doing wrong. He contends that it may be our duty to sacrifice the higher principles of our nature to the lower, and appears shocked at Dr. Newman's assertion that "the church holds that it were better for sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions of its inhabitants to die of starvation in extreme agony, so far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one venial sin, tell one wilful untruth, though it harmed no one, or steal one poor farthing, without excuse." This is too rigid for Mr. Lecky. He places duty in always acting from the higher principles of our nature; but thinks there may be cases when it is our duty to sacrifice them to the lower! He supposes, then, that there is something more obligatory than right, or that renders right obligatory when obligatory it is.
But this doctrine of doing right for the sake of the right is utterly untenable. Right is not an abstraction, for there are no abstractions in nature, and abstractions are simple nullities. It must be either being or relation. If taken as a relation, it can be no motive, no end, because relation is real only in the related. If being, then it is God, who only is being. Your friends, the Stoics, placed it above the divinity, and taught us in Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius that it binds under one and the same law both God and man. But an abstraction which is formed by the mind operating on the concrete can bind no one, for it is in itself simply nothing. The weaker cannot bind the stronger, the inferior the superior, or that which is not that which is. But there is no being stronger than God or above him; for he is, in every respect, supreme. Nothing can bind him, and right must either be identified with him or held to grow out of the relations of his creatures to himself. In the first case, right is God, or God is right; and the obligation to do right is only the obligation to do what God commands. Right, as being, cannot exist distinct from God, and can bind men only in the sense in which God himself binds them. Their sovereign, in such case, is God, who, by his creative act, is their lord and proprietor. But right and God are not identical, and, consequently, right is not being, but a relation. What binds is not the right or the relation, but he who, by his creative act, founds the relation. Rejecting, then, right as an abstraction, we must understand by the right what under this relation it is the duty of the creature to do. Right and duty are then the same. Ask what is man's duty; the answer is, what is right. Ask what is right, and the answer is, whatever is duty.
But right does not make itself right, nor duty itself duty. Here is the defect of all purely rationalistic morals, and of every system of morals that is not based, we say not on revelation, but on theology, or the creative act of God. Right and duty are identical, we grant; but neither can create its own obligation, or be its own reason or motive. To say of an act, it is duty because it is right, or it is right because it is duty, is to reason, as the logicians say, in a vicious circle, or to answer idem per idem, which is not allowable by any logic we are acquainted with. We must, then, if we assert morals at all, come back to theology, and find the ground of obligation or duty—which is simply the right or authority of God to command us—in our relation to God, as our creator or first cause, and the reason or motive in our relation to him as our last end or final cause.
No doubt the reason why the rationalistic moralists in modern times are reluctant to admit this is, because they very erroneously suppose that it means that the basis of morals is to be found only in supernatural revelation, and is not ascertainable or provable by reason. But this is a mistake, growing out of another mistake; namely, that the creative act is a truth of revelation only, and not a truth of science or philosophy. The creative act is a fact of science, the basis, rather, of all science, as of all life in creatures, and must be recognized and held before revelation can be logically asserted. That God is, and is our creator, our first cause, and our final cause, are truths that do not depend on revelation to be known; and the theological basis of morals which we assert, in opposition to the rationalistic moralists, is within the province of reason or philosophy. But the rationalists, in seeking to escape revelation, lose God, and are forced to assert a morality that is independent of him, and does not suppose or need him in order to be obligatory. They are obliged, therefore, to seek a basis of morals in nature, which in its own right has no legislative authority; for nature is the creature of God, and is nothing without him.
The intuition of right, obligation, duty, which, according to our author, is the fundamental principle of morals, is only, he himself maintains, the immediate apprehension of a principle or law of human nature, or of our higher nature, from which we are to act, instead of acting from our lower nature; but our higher nature is still nature, and no more legislative than our lower nature. Nature being always equal to nature, nothing is more certain than that nature cannot bind nature or place it under obligation.
Besides, when the author places the obligation in nature, whether the higher or the lower, he confounds moral law with physical law, and mistakes law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as first cause for law in the sense in which it proceeds from God as final cause. The physical laws, the natural laws of the physiologists, are in nature, constitutive of it, indistinguishable from it, and are what God creates: the moral law is independent of nature, over it, and declares the end for which nature exists, and from which, if moral nature, it must act. It is supernatural in the sense that God is supernatural, and natural only in the sense that it is promulgated through natural reason independently of supernatural revelation. Natural reason asserts the moral law, but asserts it as a law for nature, not a law in nature. By confounding it with physical laws, and placing it in nature as the law of natural activity, the author denies all moral distinction between it and the law by which the liver secretes bile, or the blood circulates. He holds, therefore, with Waldo Emerson that gravitation and purity of heart are identical, and, with our old transcendentalist friends, that the rule of duty is expressed in the maxims, Obey thyself; Act out thyself; Follow thy instincts. No doubt they meant, as our author means, the higher instincts, the nobler self, the higher nature. But the law recognized and asserted is no more the moral law than is the physical law by which the rain falls, the winds blow, the sun shines, the flowers bloom, or the earth revolves on its axis. Physical laws there are, no doubt, in human nature; but the theologians tell us that an act done from them is not an actus humanus, but an actus hominis, which has no moral character, and, whatever its tendency, is neither virtuous nor vicious.
Mr. Lecky, as nearly all modern philosophers, denies God as final cause, if not as first cause. The moral law has its reason and motive in him as our final cause, and this is the difference between it and physical law. The pagan Greeks denied both first cause and final cause, for they knew nothing of creation; but being a finely organized race and living in a country of great natural beauty, they confounded the moral with the beautiful, as some moderns confound art with religion. The author so far agrees with them, at least, as to place duty in the beauty and nobility of the act, or in acts proceeding from the beauty and nobility of our nature—what he calls our higher nature. We do not quarrel with Plato when he defines beauty to be the splendor of the divinity, and therefore that all good, noble, and virtuous acts are beautiful, and that whoever performs them has a beautiful soul. But there is a wide difference between the beautiful and the moral, though the Greeks expressed both by the same term; and art, whose mission it is to realize the beautiful, has of itself no moral character; it lends itself as readily to vice as to virtue, and the most artistic ages are very far from being the most moral or religious ages. The mistake is in overlooking the fact that every virtuous or moral act must be done propter finem, and that the law, the reason, the motive of duty depends on the end for which man was made and exists.
But the author and his school have not learned that all things proceed from God by way of creation, and return to him without absorption in him as their last end. Morals are all in the order of this return, and are therefore teleological. Not knowing this, and rejecting this movement of return, they are forced to seek the basis of morals in man's nature in the order of its procession from God, where it is not. The intuition they assert would be something, indeed, if it were the intuition of a principle or law not included in man's nature, but on which his nature depends, and to which it is bound, by the right of God founded in his creative act, to subordinate its acts. But by the intuition of right, which they assert, they do not mean anything really objective and independent of our nature, which the mind really apprehends. On their system they can mean by it only a mental conception, that is, an abstraction. We indeed find men who, as theologians, understand and defend the true and real basis of morals, but who, as philosophers, seeking to defend what they call natural morality, only reproduce substantially the errors of the Gentiles. This is no less true of the intuitive school, than of the selfish, the sentimental, or the utilitarian. Cudworth founds his moral system in the innate idea of right, in which he is followed by Dr. Price; Samuel Clarke gives, as the basis of morals, the idea of the fitness of things; Wollaston finds it in conformity to truth; Butler, in the idea or sense of duty; Jouffroy, in the idea of order; Fourier, in passional harmony—only another name for Jouffroy's order. But these all, since they exclude all intuition of the end or final cause, build on a mental conception, or a psychological abstraction, taken as real. The right, the fitness, the duty, the order they assert are only abstractions, and they see it not.
It is the hardest thing in the world to convince philosophers that the real is real, and the unreal is unreal, and therefore nothing. Abstractions are firmed by the mind, and are nothing out of the concrete from which they are generalized. A system of philosophy, speculative or moral, built on abstractions or abstract conceptions of the true, the right, the just, or duty, has no real foundation, and no more solidity than "the baseless fabric of a vision." Yet we cannot make the philosophers see it, and every day we hear people, whose language they have corrupted, talk of "abstract principles," "abstract right," "abstract justice," "abstract duty," "abstract philosophy," "abstract science;" all of which are "airy nothings," to which not even the poet can give "a local habitation and a name." The philosophers who authorize such expressions are very severe on sensists and utilitarians; yet they really hold that all non-sensible principles and causes, and all ideas not derived from the senses, are abstractions, and that the sciences which treat of them are abstract sciences. Know they not that this is precisely what the sensists themselves do? If the whole non-sensible order is an abstraction, only the sensible is real, or exists a parte rei, and there is no intelligible reality distinct from the sensible world. All heathen philosophy ends in one and the same error, which can be corrected only by understanding that the non-sensible is not an abstraction, but real being, that is God, or the real relation between God and his acts or creatures. But to do this requires our philosophers to cast out from their minds the old leaven of heathenism which they have retained, to recognize the creative act of God, and to find in theology the basis of both science and morals.
Mr. Lecky proves himself, in the work before us, as in his previous work, an unmitigated rationalist, and rationalism is only heathenism revived. He himself proves it. He then can be expected to write the history of European morals only from a heathen point of view, and his judgments of both heathen and Christian morals will be, in spite of himself, only those of a respectable pagan philosopher and in the latter period of pagan empire, and attached to the moral philosophy of the Porch. He is rather tolerant than otherwise of Christianity, in some respects even approves it, lauds it for some doctrines and influences which it pleases him to ascribe to it, and to which it has no claim; but judges it from a stand-point far above that of the fathers, and from a purely pagan point of view, as we may take occasion hereafter to show, principally from his account of the conversion of Rome, and the triumph of the Christian religion in the Roman empire.
But we have taken up so much space in discussing the nature and foundation of morals, to which the author devotes his preliminary chapter, that we have no room for any further discussion at present. What we have said, however, will suffice, we think, to prove that rationalism is as faulty in morals as in religion, to vindicate the church from the charge of teaching a selfish morality, and to prove that the only solid basis of morals is in theology.