To summarize: according to Kant man as an object is unfit to warrant the claim of unconditional obligation on the part of others toward himself. An abstract principle must be sought. This principle is universality, and necessity based on universality. Respect for this purely abstract notion is that which alone imparts a moral quality to so-called moral acts. We start, according to Kant, with the declaration that man is an end per se. But we reject him as an object, and take refuge in a formal principle. We then assume that every human being is conscious of the working within himself of this formal principle and acknowledges his subjection to it, whether he is able to analyze it out or not. And thus indirectly we derive out of emptiness a ray of glory which we allow to fall upon each and every man.
The question now is, since this approach to the ethical problem manifestly fails, must we not begin at the opposite end, and take the attribution of worth to men, however unworthy they may actually be, as our starting-point?
CHAPTER III
PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON WORTH, AND ON THE REASONS WHY THE METHOD EMPLOYED BY ETHICS MUST BE THE OPPOSITE OF THAT EMPLOYED BY THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES
The moral equality of men is a corollary of the attribution of worth to all men. Did we not ascribe worth to them, there is no reason why we should not make servile use of them. But there are admittedly formidable difficulties in the way of attributing worth to human nature.
The first and most obvious of these is the existence of repulsive traits in human beings, such as sly cunning, deceit, falsehood, grossness, cruelty: homo homini lupus! Secondly, there is the prevalent error of employing ethical terms, like good and bad, to denote the merely attractive and repellent traits.[23] Attractive traits, such as gentleness, sweetness, kindness, a sympathetic disposition, are, in those fortunate enough to possess them, pleasing accidents of nature. We delight in them, but have no reason to ascribe the superlative quality of worth to those who possess them. If the evil that men do revolts us, the so-called good in them does not give us the right to surround their heads with the nimbus of worth. Thirdly, and perhaps even more deterrent than the ever-present spectacle of evil and the inadequacy of so-called goodness, is the commonplaceness, the cheapness of men.
It must be admitted that, with rare exceptions, our estimates of others are apt to be low rather than lofty. Can we ascribe worth to those whom we hold cheap? The reason of our habitual under-estimation of fellowmen I think is that we regard them from the standpoint of the use to which we can put them, and do not see them from the inside, as it were, in the light of the marvelous energies of which human nature is the scene. The grossest matter, the most ordinary physical happenings, reveal to the instructed eye of the scientist the play of forces which it taxes the most powerful intellects in some measure to apprehend and describe. Yet these miracles escape the dull senses of those of us who deal with the forces of nature from the point of view of their immediate use. We turn on the electric light, but have little more than a crude surmise of the things that the word electricity meant to Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, or Hertz. And as we turn on the electric light, so we turn on our fellowmen, as it were, to use them. The thought of the poet—“What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculty!” occurs to us only at scattered moments. And yet things transpire in the inner life of human beings far more marvelous than the chemical processes or the flux of electric waves, did we but attend to them. There is in particular one kind of energy to which the quality of worth may well attach itself. It is unlike the physical forces; it is not a transformed mode of mechanical energy. It is sui generis, underivative, unique; it is synonymous with highest freedom; it is power raised to the Nth degree. It is ethical energy. To release it in oneself is to achieve unbounded expansion. Morality, as commonly understood, is a system of rules, chiefly repressive. Ethical energy, on the contrary, is determined by the very opposite tendency; a tendency, it is true, never more than tentatively effectuated under finite conditions. And because the energy is unique, it points toward a unique, irreducible, hence substantive entity in man, from which it springs. This entity is itself incognizable, yet the effect it produces requires that it be postulated. The category of substance, which is almost disappearing from science, is to be reinstalled in ethics. Ethics cannot dispense with it. This, as a prelude, may suffice to indicate the path along which we shall proceed.
The Reason Why the Method of Ethics Must Be the Opposite of the Method Employed by the Physical Sciences
Physical science begins from the bottom and builds upwards. It analyzes phenomena into their elements, and thereupon seeks to combine these elements into structures that shall correspond to experience. In this business it never comes to a finish. Its analysis of the elements is provisional. Every element is hypothetical. Indeed it is plain in the nature of the case that no element can be ultimate. An element is a unit, and every empirical unit necessarily conceals in its bosom a plexus of which it is the unification. The very idea of unit requires for its complement a manifold of some kind. In hypothetical units, or ideal constructs that have for their purpose to lead to the discovery and arrangement of real phenomena, science abounds. Atoms, electrons, energy conceived as a substance by Ostwald, Spencer’s physiological units, are examples.