CHAPTER V
SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS
AND RELIGION
[§ 1.] If Reality is a harmonious system, it must somehow make provision for the gratification of our ethical, religious, and æsthetic interests. [§ 2.] But we cannot assume that ethical and religious postulates are necessarily true in the forms in which our practical interests lead us to make them. [§ 3.] Thus, while morality would become impossible unless on the whole there is coincidence between virtue and happiness, and unless social progress is a genuine fact, “perfect virtue,” “perfect happiness,” “infinite progress” are logically self-contradictory concepts. [§ 4.] But this does not impair the practical usefulness of our ethical ideals. [§ 5.] In religion we conceive of the ideal of perfection as already existing in individual form. Hence ultimately no part of the temporal order can be an adequate object of religious devotion. [§ 6.] This leads to the Problem of Evil. “God” cannot be a finite being within the Absolute, because, if so, God must contain evil and imperfection as part of His nature, and is thus not the already existing realisation of the ideal. [§ 7.] This difficulty disappears when we identify “God” with the Absolute, because in the Absolute evil can be seen to be mere illusory appearance. It may, however, be true that religious feeling, to be practically efficient, may need to imagine its object in an ultimately incorrect anthropomorphic form. [§ 8.] The existence, within the Absolute, of finite “divine” personalities, can neither be affirmed nor denied on grounds of general Metaphysics. [§ 9.] Proofs of the “being of God.” The principle of the “ontological” and “cosmological” proofs can be defended against the criticism of Hume and Kant only if we identify God with the Absolute. The “physicotheological proof” could only establish the reality of finite superhuman intelligences, and its force depends purely upon empirical considerations of evidence.
§ 1. The metaphysician is perhaps at times too ready to treat experience as though it were constituted solely by intellectual interests; as though our one concern in dealing with its deliverances, as they come to us, were to construct out of them a system of knowledge satisfactory to our demand for coherent thinking. This is, of course, a one-sided, and therefore, from the standpoint of Metaphysics itself, an imperfect expression of the nature of our attitude as intelligences towards the world of our experience. Our moral, religious, and artistic, no less than our logical, ideals represent typical forms of our general interest as intelligent beings in bringing harmony and order into the apparently discordant material of experience. Hence no study of metaphysical principles, however elementary, would be complete without some discussion of the light thrown by these various ideals upon the ultimate structure of the system of Reality in which we and our manifold interests form a part. If it is the fundamental principle of a sound philosophy that all existence forms a harmonious unity, then, if we can discover what are the essential and permanent features in the demands made by art, morality, and religion upon the world, we may be sure that these demands are somehow met and made good in the scheme of things.
For a world which met our ethical, religious, and aesthetic demands upon life with a mere negative would inevitably contain aspects of violent and irreconcilable discord, and would thus be no true world or systematic unity at all. In what follows I propose to discuss the double question, What appears to be the “irreducible minimum” of the demands which morality and religion make of the world, and how far the general conception of existence defended in our earlier chapters provides for their liquidation. The consideration of our aesthetic ideals and their metaphysical significance I propose to decline, on the ground both of its inferior practical interest for mankind at large, and of the very special and thorough training in the psychological analysis of æsthetic feeling which is, in my own judgment at least, essential for the satisfactory treatment of the question.
§ 2. In dealing with the subject thus marked out, it will be necessary to begin with a word, partly of caution, partly of recapitulation of previous results, as to the attitude towards the practical ideals of morality and religion imposed upon the metaphysician by the special character of his interests as a metaphysician. It will thus be apparent why I have spoken in the last paragraph of an “irreducible minimum” of ethical and religious postulation. There is a marked tendency among recent writers on philosophical topics, encouraged more specially by Professor James and his followers, to urge that any and every ideal which we think valuable for the purposes of morality and religion has no less claim to be accepted in Metaphysics as of value for our conception of Reality than the fundamental principles of logical thought themselves. Logical thinking, it is contended, is after all only one of the functions of our nature, by the side of others such as moral endeavour towards the harmonising of practice with an ideal of the right or the good, aesthetic creation of the beautiful, and religious co-operation with a “power not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is more specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect than those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the “creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or the artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more than “postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? Must we not, in fact, say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art, “Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of the others”?
The doctrine I have attempted to summarise thus briefly, I believe to be partly irrelevant in Metaphysics, partly mistaken, and therefore, so far as mistaken, mischievous. I pass lightly over the curious mental reservation suggested by the claim to believe as you list “at your own risk.” As George Eliot has reminded us in Adam Bede, it is a fundamental fact of our position as members of a social order, that nothing in the world can be done exclusively at the risk of the doer. Your beliefs, so far as they receive expression at all, like all the rest of your conduct, inevitably affect the lives of others as well as your own, and hence it is useless to urge in extenuation of a false and mischievous belief to which expression has been given—and a belief which gets no kind of expression is no genuine belief at all—that it was entertained at your “personal risk.” That no man liveth to himself is just as true of the metaphysician as of any other man, and he has no more claim than another to disregard the truth in practice.
To pass to a more important point. It is no doubt true that the attainment of satisfaction for our intellectual need for a coherent way of thinking about existence is only one of a number of human interests. And thus we may readily grant that morality, religion, and art have a right to existence no less than Logic. Further, the question whether any one of the four has a better right to existence than the others seems to be really unmeaning. There seems to be no sense in asking whether any typical and essential human aspiration has a superior claim to recognition and fulfilment rather than another. But it does not seem to follow that for all purposes our divergent interests and attitudes are of equal value, and that therefore they may not legitimately be used as bases for mutual criticism. In particular, it does not seem to follow that because Logic and morality, say, have an equal right to exist, there must be an equal amount of truth in the principles of Logic and the postulates of Ethics. Truth, after all, is perhaps not the “one thing needful” for human life, and it is not self-evident even that truth is the supreme interest of morality and religion.
On the face of things, indeed, it seems not to be so. Primâ facie, it looks as if the logician’s ideal of truth and the moralist’s ideal of goodness were, in part at any rate, divergent. For it is by no means clear that the widest possible diffusion of true thinking and the general attainment of the highest standard of moral goodness must necessarily go together. It may even be conducive to the moral goodness of a community that many members of it should not think on certain topics at all, or even should think erroneously about them.[[211]] And the ideals of goodness and beauty, we may remind ourselves, seem to be similarly divergent. It is by no means self-evident, and might even be said to be, so far as history enables us to judge, probably untrue, that the society in which the appreciation of beauty is most highly developed is also the society with the highest standard of goodness.
Now, if truth and goodness are not simply identical, we cannot conclude that the ultimate truth of a belief is proportionate to its moral usefulness in promoting practical goodness. And therefore the metaphysician, who takes ultimate truth as his standard of worth, would appear to be quite within his right in refusing to admit moral usefulness as sufficient justification for a belief, just as the moralist, from the point of view of his special standard of worth, may rightly decline to take the aesthetic harmoniousness of a life as sufficient evidence of its moral excellence. Until you have shown, what the view I am here opposing appears tacitly to assume, that truth, moral goodness, and beauty are one thing, you cannot rationally refuse the metaphysician’s claim to criticise, and if necessary to condemn as not finally true, the “postulates” of which Ethics is entitled to assent, not that they are “true,” but that they are practically useful.