"Be ye," say the laws of Menou to the Hindoos, "as the wood of the sandal tree, that perfumes the hatchet which wounds it." If we interrogate Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, Kant; in whatever other respect they may disagree, they think upon this fundamental point with the Gospel and the Laws of Menou.
It is in the confusion of Duty and of Right, and in the inversion of their natural and their true order, that the error resides of those who maintain the Theory of an Independent Morality. Duty is the moral law of men's actions; law intimate, personal. Right, on the other hand, is derived from the application of the moral law to the relations of men. I will not deny myself the great yet melancholy pleasure of citing upon this subject a few words of a person whose mind and life were united to mine, and who, in a modest essay, threw over this important subject a flood of light as vivid as it is pure: "The word Right, brings with it the idea of a relation to something. As every Right is an application of a moral law to the different relations of Society, there exists not a Right of which Society is not the occasion. A Right is only the moral power of an individual over the Liberty of another: a power attributed to him by virtue of the moral law which regulates the relations of men with one another. Duty is the sole basis of Right. Did there exist no duties there would exist no rights. There is no claim of a right which does not affirm a Duty to be its source. Duty applied as a rule to govern the relations of man to man constitutes justice; justice cannot exist without Duty; a thing is neither just, nor unjust, as far as regards the being who has not had the duty prescribed to him of distinguishing between them. Ideas of Right are as essential to men as ideas of duty; for if the idea of Duty is the social bond;—the means of peace and of Union amongst mankind;—the idea of Right constitutes the arms, offensive and defensive, which society gives to men, for reciprocal use. Every man has a consciousness of his own rights, which aids him to keep others in the line of their duty; but rights only so far aid him to do this, as the duty upon which they are founded is known and respected; for with regard to that man who ignores his duty, the man who has a right has absolutely nothing. Right is a moral power producing its effects without the help of physical force; if he who has both right and power must employ the power to enforce his right, it is no longer his right which triumphs, it is his power; his right remains to him to justify the employment of force; but it is not his right which has made his cause triumph. Thus it is that the idea of Duty is the basis of society, and is at the same time the basis of the idea of right, an idea which in its turn contributes also to the stability of society. To found society upon the sole idea of duty, is to deprive society of one of its most powerful means of defence and of development; to strip the tree of the buds which serve to give it at once strength and amplitude. To found society upon the idea of Right without the idea of duty, is to cut away the very roots of the tree." [Footnote 16]
[Footnote 16: "Essai sur les idées de droit et de devoir considérées comme fondement de la société." It is inserted in the work entitled, "Conseils de Morale, ou Essais sur l'homme, les mœurs, les caractères, le monde, les femmes, l'education, etc. Par Madame Guizot, née de Meulan," (2 vols. 8vo, 1828) vol. ii., pp. 147-271.]
This is not all. Besides the mistake which they commit in considering Duty as a mere consequence of Right, derived from the independence and dignity of man as man, the advocates of the theory of an independent morality forget an entire class of moral elements occupying an important position in our nature; I mean, the instinctive sentiments intimately allied to the Moral Law, sentiments to which the notion of a Right, founded upon the independence and dignity of man's personality, is completely strange. Is it on account of the independence and dignity of man's personality that fathers and mothers regard it as their duty to love their children, to take charge of them, to work for and devote themselves to them? Is it by virtue of this principle, and of the right which flows from it, that children are bound to honour their father and their mother? Man's soul, man's existence, is full of moral relations and moral acts, in which the idea of Right has no part; no part, I mean, in the sense which these theorists of an independent morality attach to it: their system is no more an explanation of Sympathy than of Duty.
I am touching upon the source of their error. If they make the principle of human morality consist in a Right emanating from man's Liberty and man's intelligence, it is that they see in man only a free and intelligent being. Strange ignorance, and mutilation of man's nature. At the same time that he is a free and intelligent being, man is a being dependent and subject: he is dependent, in the material order, upon a power superior to his own; and subject, in the moral order, to a law which he did not make, which he cannot change, which he is forced to admit even whilst he is free not to obey it; a law from which he cannot withdraw himself without troubling his soul and endangering his future. Morality in a sense is in effect independent; it is essentially independent of man; man, the free agent man, is its subject. Morality is truly the law of Liberty of Action.
Liberty is not an isolated fact, which exhausts itself by working its own completion, and which, once accomplished, remains without further consequences. To Liberty is attached Responsibility. When the human being, giving effect to his free will, resolves and acts, he feels that he is responsible for his resolution and his act. The Laws of Society declare this to him in express terms, for they punish him if they judge his act to be criminal; not merely because they find his act to be hurtful, but because they find it to be morally culpable: for, were its author pronounced to be mad, or his mind or volition recognised as unsound, the laws of society would acquit him. And if a culprit escape legal punishment, he does not escape from the internal punishment of remorse. Without speaking of penal laws, remorse is at once the proof and the sanction of moral responsibility. Possible it is that all remorse may be lulled to sleep in the mind of the hardened offender; but there are a thousand instances to prove that it may be always reawakened. Neither in good nor in evil is man's nature entirely effaced. Repentance sometimes hides itself in recesses so profound, that to penetrate thither is impossible, except for the soul which feels repentance even when seeking to escape from it.