Women love too deeply to be able to judge justly.
II. What we Owe Others: Morality, Duty, Benevolence.
The much-maligned Epicurus is reported to have delivered the oracular utterance,—“The man who is not virtuous can never be happy;” and poets and moralists have exhausted their ingenuity in devising variants of the well-worn line,—“’Tis virtue only makes our bliss below.”
Who would have supposed that philosophers should have been found—aye, and they of high degree—who toss overboard these venerable maxims as antiquated rubbish? Yet such is the surprising case.
The mighty Kant, tearing away the cobwebs of the dogmatic philosophy, feared not to declare,—“There is not in the moral law the slightest ground for a necessary connection between Morality and Happiness;” and again,—“The goal of a perfect harmony of Desire and Duty cannot be obtained;” while in our own day the critical Alexander Bain calmly observes,—“Happiness and Virtue are independent aims and not identical. The treatment of Happiness should be dissevered from that of Ethics.”
Scarcely could the contrast of the new and the old schools of thought be more vividly displayed than in these
brief quotations. There are some, indeed, who have even gone farther, and maintained that the pursuit of happiness and that of virtue are not only independent, but even incompatible aims; because, writes Dr. Despine, a French psychologist of repute,—“Happiness is the satisfaction of desire, while virtue consists in doing good, not to satisfy the desire of doing it, but out of a sense of duty, and in opposition to desire.” This statement, however, overlooks the existence of a moral sense and the normal pleasure derived from its gratification.
Morality and the moral sense are not to be confounded. All men have a love for the beautiful, but nowise agree as to what is beautiful; and there is just as wide and just as impassable a gulf between the various conceptions of morals, although, in all, the moral sense is present.
Morality is nothing more than the conformity of the individual to the type of the society in which he lives. It is the recognition of the debt which he owes it for securing him the privileges of safety, liberty, and education, as I have explained in the last chapter. Not his own moral sense, but the society in which he is, lays down the terms on which that debt is to be paid; and while he feels on the one side entitled to these rights, he acknowledges, on the other, his liability for his social duties in exchange for them.