From what has been said, it is necessarily inferred that right and wrong are not contingent on the knowledge of the moral agent. Unfitness, misuse, abuse, is none the less wrong because the result of ignorance. If the result of inevitable ignorance, it does not indeed imply an unfitness or derangement of the agent's own moral powers. Yet it is none the less out of harmony with the fitness of things. It deprives an object of its due use. It perverts to pernicious results what is salutary in its purpose. It lessens for the agent his aggregate of good and of happiness, and increases for him his aggregate of evil and of misery. In this sense—far more significant than that of arbitrary infliction—the maxim of jurisprudence, Ignorantia legis neminem excusat ("Ignorance of the law excuses no one"), is a fundamental principle of human nature.
We are now prepared to consider the relation of moral distinctions to theology. In the first place, if the ground which I have maintained be tenable, ethical science rests on a basis of its own, wholly independent of theology. Right and wrong, as moral distinctions, in no wise depend on the Divine will and law; nay, not even on the Divine existence. The atheist cannot escape or disown them. They are inseparable from existence. For whatever exists, no matter how it came into being, must needs have its due place, affinities, adaptations, uses; and an intelligent dweller among the things that are cannot but know something of their fitnesses and harmonies, and, so far as he acts upon them, cannot but feel the obligation to recognize their fitnesses, and thus to create or restore their harmonies. Even to the atheist, vice is a violation of fitnesses which he knows or may know. It is opposed to his conscientious judgment. He has with regard to it an inevitable sense of wrong. I can therefore conceive of an atheist's being—though I should have little hope that he would be—a rigidly virtuous man, and that on principle.
But while atheism does not obliterate moral distinctions, or cancel moral obligation, these distinctions are a refutation of atheism; and from the very fitness of things, which we have seen to be the ground of right, we draw demonstrative evidence of the being, unity, and moral perfectness of the Creator: so that the fundamental truths of theology rest on the same basis with the fundamental principles of ethics. Let me ask you to pursue this argument with me.
Every object, as I have said, must, by virtue of its existence, have its fit place and use; but, in a world that was the dice-work of chance, there would be myriads of probabilities to one against any specific object's attaining to its fit place and use. This must be the work of will alone. If chance can create, it cannot combine, co-ordinate, organize. If it can throw letters on the ground by the handful, it cannot arrange them into the Iliad or the Paradise Lost. If it can stain the sky or the earth with gorgeous tints, it cannot group them into a Madonna or a landscape. Its universe would be peopled by straylings, full of disjointed halves of pairs,—of objects thrown together in such chaotic heaps that seldom could any one object find its counterpart or subserve its end.
The opposite is the case in the actual world. The first discoveries which the first human being made were of the fitnesses of the objects around him to himself and to one another. With every added year his microcosm enlarged, so that, before he left the world, he had within his cognizance a range of fitnesses and uses sufficient to guide his own activity, and to enable him to predict its results, together with numerous other results not contingent on his own agency. Beyond this microcosm, indeed, lay a vast universe impenetrable to his search, in which he could trace no relations, no filaments of order; in which all seemed to him a medley of chaotic confusion, mutually intruding systems, clashing and jarring forces. On this realm of the unknown man has ever since been making perpetual aggressions; and every step of his progress has been the discovery of fitnesses, relations, reciprocal uses, among the most remote, diverse, and at first sight mutually hostile objects, classes, and systems. Natural history, physics, and chemistry, are the science of mutual fitnesses and uses among terrestrial objects. Astronomy is the science of harmonies among all the worlds,—of fitnesses in their relations and courses to the condition of things in our own planet, approximately to other bodies in the solar system, and, by ascertained analogies, to those distant orbs of which we know only that they stand and move ever in their order. Geology is the science of mutual fitnesses in former epochs and conditions of our own planet, and of prospective fitnesses in them to the needs and uses of the present epoch; so that by harmonies which run through unnumbered æons we are the heirs, and sustain our industries by the usufruct, of the ages, the great moments of whose history we are just beginning to read. Mathematical science reveals geometrical and numerical fitnesses, proportions, and harmonies, which are traced alike in the courses of the stars and in the collocation of the foliage on the tree, and which promise one day to give us the equation of the curve of the sea-shell, of the contour of the geranium-leaf, of the crest of the wave. There is still around us the realm of the unknown; yet not only are daily aggressions made upon it, but science has advanced so far as to render it certain that there is no department or object in the universe, which is not comprehended in this system of mutual fitnesses, harmonies, and uses.
Now consider the relation of organized being to this system. What is an organ? It is the capacity of perceiving, choosing, and utilizing a fitness. The rootlets of the tree by the river-side perceive the adjacent water, elongate themselves toward it, in a drought make convulsive and successful efforts to reach it; while the corolla of the heliotrope perceives the calorific rays, and turns toward their source in the heavens. The organs of the plant select from the elements around it such substances as are fitted to feed its growth, and appropriate them to its use, even though they be found in infinitesimal proportions, in masses of alien substance. In all this there is a semi-self-consciousness, corresponding, not indeed to the action of mind, but to that of the spontaneous life-processes in intelligent beings.
The animal carries us a step higher. His instincts are an unerring knowledge of fitnesses and uses within his sphere. He seeks what is fitted, shuns what is unfitted to his sustenance and growth, is never deceived when left to his own sagacity, and fails only when brought into anomalous relations with the superior knowledge of man. He lives, merely because he is conscious of the fitnesses of nature, and yields up his life to a stronger beast, in accordance with those same fitnesses—beneficent still—by which all realms of nature are kept fully stocked, yet never overstocked, with healthy and rejoicing life.
The fitness which thus pervades and unifies the entire creation, man as an animal perceives, as a living soul recognizes and comprehends; and to his consciousness it is an imperative law, obeyed always with self-approval, disobeyed only with self-condemnation. Of disobedience he alone is capable, yet he but partially. In order to live, he must obey in the vast majority of instances; still more must he obey, if he would have society, physical comfort, transient enjoyment of however low a type; and the most depraved wretch that walks the earth purchases his continued being by a thousand acts of unintended yet inevitable obedience to one of voluntary guilt. Man's law—the law which, in violating or scorning it, he cannot ignore or evade—is the very same fitness which runs through all inorganic nature, and which the semi-conscious tree, shrub, or flower, the imperfectly self-conscious bird, fish, or beast uniformly obeys.