It may seem to some that Plotinus reduces to absurdity the conception of morality as æsthetics, and it may well be that the Greeks of the great period were wiser when they left the nature of morals less explicit. Yet Plotinus had in him the root of the matter. He had risen to the conception that the moral life of the soul is a dance; “Consider the performers in a choral dance: they sing together, though each one has his own particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the others are silent; and each brings to the chorus something of his own; it is not enough that all lift their voices together; each must sing, choicely, his own part in the music set for him. So it is with the Soul.”[[93]] The Hellenic extension of the æsthetic emotion, as Benn pointed out, involved no weakening of the moral fibre. That is so, we see, and even emphatically so, when it becomes definitely explicit as in Plotinus, and revolutionarily hostile to all those ideals of the moral life which most people have been accustomed to consider modern.
As usually among the Greeks, it is only implicitly, also, that we detect this attitude among the Romans, the pupils of the Greeks. For the most part, the Romans, whose impulses of art were very limited, whose practical mind craved precision and definition, proved rebellious to the idea that living is an art; yet it may well be that they still retained that idea at the core of their morality. It is interesting to note that St. Augustine, who stood on the threshold between the old Roman and new Christian worlds was able to write: “The art of living well and rightly is the definition that the ancients give of ‘virtue.’” For the Latins believed that ars was derived from the Greek word for virtue, ἀρετή.[[94]] Yet there really remained a difference between the Greek and the Roman views of morals. The Greek view, it is universally admitted, was æsthetic, in the most definite sense; the Roman was not, and when Cicero wishes to translate a Greek reference to a “beautiful” action it becomes an “honourable” action. The Greek was concerned with what he himself felt about his actions; the Roman was concerned with what they would look like to other people, and the credit, or discredit, that would be reflected back on himself.
The Hebrews never even dreamed of such an art. Their attitude is sufficiently embodied in the story of Moses and that visit to Sinai which resulted in the production of the table of Ten Commandments which we may still see inscribed in old churches. For even our modern feeling about morals is largely Jewish, in some measure Roman, and scarcely Greek at all. We still accept, in theory at all events, the Mosaic conception of morality as a code of rigid and inflexible rules, arbitrarily ordained, and to be blindly obeyed.
The conception of morality as an art, which Christendom once disdained, seems now again to be finding favour in men’s eyes. The path has been made smooth for it by great thinkers of various complexion, who, differing in many fundamental points, all alike assert the relativity of truth and the inaptitude of rigid maxims to serve as guiding forces in life. They also assert, for a large part, implicitly or explicitly, the authority of art.
The nineteenth century was usually inspired by the maxims of Kant, and lifted its hat reverently when it heard Kant declaiming his famous sayings concerning the supremacy of an inflexible moral law. Kant had, indeed, felt the stream of influence which flowed from Shaftesbury, and he sought to mix up æsthetics with his system. But he had nothing of the genuine artist’s spirit. The art of morals was to him a set of maxims, cold, rigid, precise. A sympathetic biographer has said of him that the maxims were the man. They are sometimes fine maxims. But as guides, as motives to practical action in the world? The maxims of the valetudinarian professor at Königsberg scarcely seem that to us to-day. Still less can we harmonise maxims with art. Nor do we any longer suppose that we are impertinent in referring to the philosopher’s personality. In the investigation of the solar spectrum personality may count for little; in the investigation of moral laws it counts for much. For personality is the very stuff of morals. The moral maxims of an elderly professor in a provincial university town have their interest. But so have those of a Casanova. And the moral maxims of a Goethe may possibly have more interest than either. There is the rigid categorical imperative of Kant; and there is also that other dictum, less rigid but more reminiscent of Greece, which some well-inspired person has put into the mouth of Walt Whitman: “Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect person, that is finally right.”
III
Fundamentally considered, there are two roads by which we may travel towards the moral ends of life: the road of Tradition, which is ultimately that of Instinct, pursued by the many, and the road of what seems to be Reason—sought out by the few. And in the end these two roads are but the same road, for reason also is an instinct. It is true that the ingenuity of analytic investigators like Henry Sidgwick has succeeded in enumerating various “methods of ethics.” But, roughly speaking, there can only be these two main roads of life, and only one has proved supremely important. It has been by following the path of tradition moulded by instinct that man reached the threshold of civilisation: whatever may have been the benefits he derived from the guidance of reason he never consciously allowed reason to control his moral life. Tables of commandments have ever been “given by God”; they represented, that is to say, obscure impulses of the organism striving to respond to practical needs. No one dreamed of commending them by declaring that they were reasonable.
It is clear how Instinct and Tradition, thus working together, act vitally and beneficently in moulding the moral life of primitive peoples. The “divine command” was always a command conditioned by the special circumstance under which the tribe lived. That is so even when the moral law is to our civilised eyes “unnatural.” The infanticide of Polynesian islanders, where the means of subsistence and the possibilities of expansion were limited, was obviously a necessary measure, beneficent and humane in its effects. The killing of the aged among the migrant Eskimos was equally a necessary and kindly measure, recognised as such by the victims themselves, when it was essential that every member of the community should be able to help himself. Primitive rules of moral action, greatly as they differ among themselves, are all more or less advantageous and helpful on the road of primitive life. It is true that they allow very little, if any, scope for divergent individual moral action, but that, too, was advantageous.
But that, also, is the rock on which an instinctive traditional morality must strike as civilisation is approached. The tribe has no longer the same unity. Social differentiation has tended to make the family a unit, and psychic differentiation to make even the separate individuals units. The community of interests of the whole tribe has been broken up, and therewith traditional morality has lost alike its value and its power.
The development of abstract intelligence, which coincides with civilisation, works in the same direction. Reason is, indeed, on one side an integrating force, for it shows that the assumption of traditional morality—the identity of the individual’s interests with the interests of the community—is soundly based. But it is also a disintegrating force. For if it reveals a general unity in the ends of living, it devises infinitely various and perplexingly distracting excuses for living. Before the active invasion of reason living had been an art, or at all events a discipline, highly conventionalised and even ritualistic, but the motive forces of living lay in life itself and had all the binding sanction of instincts; the penalty of every failure in living, it was felt, would be swiftly and automatically experienced. To apply reason here was to introduce a powerful solvent into morals. Objectively it made morality clearer but subjectively it destroyed the existing motives for morality; it deprived man, to use the fashionable phraseology of the present day, of a vital illusion.