[3] Evolution and Ethics, pp. 31, 45, 83.
IV.
IDEALISM
The bitterness of Pessimism, or rather of the pessimistic interpretation of evolution sketched in our last chapter, lies in the discovery that what we value most, what we, in our best moments, prize most highly, what we hold dearest to us, is a matter of indifference to the cosmos. That there should be any power greater than that of Right, that all goodness should in the end for ever be confounded, is incredible in the same way that the greatest losses in life are incredible in the first moment of shock in spite of the undeniable facts that show them to be real. But whereas those losses are but personal, and possibly our regrets selfish, this loss is more than personal, and the regret not merely selfish. It is not merely that we personally have held a mistaken opinion, or that any self-sacrifice—miserably small and unworthy in the retrospect—that we have made has been made for a losing cause. It is that apart from our personal share in the matter, which rated at its true value is as naught, the thing is wrong; it ought not to be. Of that we are just as certain as that our past life has not been what it ought to have been, what it might have been. The past is past beyond recall, but for the future hitherto there has been hope and faith, faith that what ought to be may be, even for us, hope that it will be so. But now, in place of hope and faith, we have the scientific certainty that the future of humanity is devoted to the triumph of the thing that ought not to be. The only consolation left to us is the inextinguishable, the unconquerable conviction that right is right even though it should not prevail. To this conviction we must hold, though the heavens should fall. To it we must hold, though it bring, as bring it must, according to Mr. Huxley, sorrow and pain and the renunciation of our own happiness.
These are hard sayings. But there is a yet harder to be added to them. Even though it should involve the renunciation of our intellectual superiority to other people, we must hold to our conviction. If we are in earnest about our moral convictions, we shall reject any suggestion that they are not after all really true, even if that suggestion seems to afford the only way of escaping from the conclusion that faith in religion has the same basis in reason as faith in science.
In proclaiming our conviction that right is right, we affirm and intend to affirm that it is so not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of fact. In the same way, an established scientific truth is not one of those matters about which reasonable persons, who are competent to judge, may reasonably hold different opinions: it is not a matter of opinion, but a matter of fact. Indeed, both kinds of truth, moral truths and scientific truths, are quite independent of individual and personal opinion. There are people in whose opinion the earth is flat; but the earth is not flat, nor can their opinion alter the fact. There was a time when all the laws of nature were unknown to man or misconceived by him; but they operated as usual, quite unaffected by his ideas. So there are people who consider successful roguery ideal, and who would make a fortune by promoting fraudulent companies, if they could; but honesty remains a duty, in spite of their ideas. Right is right, even though there be brutes in human form; and right was right, even when the ape and tiger ruled in man, and even though they were fine fellows, in their own opinion. Cruelty and selfishness never were right at any time, and never will be. The laws of morality, like the laws of science, are objectively true: they do not vary with the opinions men entertain about them; the earth, for instance, did not move or cease to move round the sun according as men imagined Galileo to be right or wrong, nor has right ceased to be right even when the world has been most depraved.
A moral judgment, then, like a scientific judgment, is objective, not subjective; it is not the expression of a mere opinion, but the statement of a fact which has an existence independent of man. If now we ask what sort of an existence it has, it is clear that what is and what ought to be have not in all cases the same kind of existence: the thing which is may sometimes also be the thing that ought to be, but often it is not. Now, when the latter is the case, when a thing is felt to be a crying evil, a foul injustice that calls for remedy, in what sense does the justice exist on which we call to drive out the injustice? The thing which ought not to be exists, and is in possession. The thing which ought to be delays its coming. Shall we say, then, that, while that is so, it exists indeed, but exists as an ideal, as something which we know ought to be and are resolved shall be? That it must present itself to some mind or other as an object of desire, and as a possibility capable of fulfilment, is certain. That it does so present itself to man is what we mean when we attribute to him the power of moral judgment and moral action. But when we speak of man's moral judgments as being objectively true, we imply that they exist not merely in his mind, but also elsewhere. But ideals can only exist in a mind; judgments can be pronounced only by a judge. When, therefore, we affirm that in objectivity and validity our moral judgments are on a par with our scientific judgments, and that our knowledge of what ought to be is as real and true as our knowledge of what is, that the existence of ethical nature, with its demands upon our reason, is a fact as indisputable as the existence of cosmic nature, we are implicitly affirming also the existence of a mind, other than human, from whose moral judgments the laws of morality derive their validity; and as those laws are eternal and immutable, as right is right always and from eternity to eternity, so must be the mind in which they are and from which they proceed.
To say that the ideal is real sounds paradoxical. It seems like saying that to have the idea of a shilling is the same thing as possessing a shilling. That is a patent absurdity, but no one will maintain that it is an absurdity to say that we ought to try to be better than we are. On the contrary, everyone will admit that it is a truth, and a truth of the highest importance, of greater value and greater significance for our highest interests than, say, the law of gravitation, or any statement as to the ways in which matter and motion are redistributed. When the desire to amend our life is strong upon us, when we are most conscious of the heavy difference between actual amendment and amendment in idea alone, then we are most certain of the reality of the moral ideal as a fact, both of immediate consciousness at the moment and of permanent significance for us and for all men. To say that our moral convictions correspond to no real facts is simply to deny to them any validity at all. To say that the facts to which they correspond are real, but are purely subjective, being but moods, and often passing moods, of the individual, is merely to say that our moral convictions are illusions and right-doing only fancy. Nor do we mend matters if we add that all men are more or less subject to these moods, that right and wrong are purely human institutions; for if their value in the individual is naught, their existence in the multitude does but add to ciphers ciphers. On the other hand, if the moral ideal is no figment of man's imagination, if its existence does not come and go with his fitful moral struggles, then its permanent abode, the centre from which it manifests itself, must be in some permanent intelligence at the centre of things.
The Pessimistic interpretation of evolution suggests another way of reaching the same conclusion. That form of Pessimism represents cosmic nature as indifferent, if not hostile, to ethical nature; the former by its law of the struggle for existence favours the survival of the strongest and the most selfish; the latter with its moral laws strives to suspend the struggle for existence, and to defeat the selfishness which the former seeks to perpetuate and extend. Human evolution is in its essence the struggle of man as a moral being against nature as non-moral or anti-moral; and the curve traced by human evolution is the resultant of the opposition of the two forces—the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, nature. During the first part of its course the line of human evolution rises, but during the latter part it is doomed to fall; and the curve will be completed when man, having traversed every stage of moral degradation, is merged once more in the brute matter to which originally he owed his being. Against this victory of cosmic nature man, as a moral being, protests and fights. He protests that it is wrong—wrong, not because it brings him more pain than pleasure, for right-doing also may have that result, but wrong without regard to his feelings, so that any impartial spectator who witnessed the struggle would condemn and regret the issue. If this is not so, if the condemnation is the expression merely of human prejudice, then there is nothing in the defeat of ethical nature or in the victory of its enemy, cosmic nature, really to regret; the difference between right and wrong is not an absolute or real distinction, corresponding to real facts, and the victory of cosmic nature, even if it runs counter to man's prejudices, is not thereby shown to be really wrong, though man naturally is under the illusion that it is.