The purely hedonistic views of the Utilitarians he considers untrue. Doubtless, he admits, there is a degree of truth in the doctrine that consciousness tends to pursue the line of greatest pleasure or least resistance, but then we must remember how slight a part this consciousness actually plays. Instincts and an intensive subconscious “will-to-live” are constantly operating. A purely scientific ethic, if it is to present a complete scheme, must allow for this by admitting that the purely hedonistic search after pleasure is not in itself a cause of action, but is an effect of a more fundamental or dominating factor. This factor is precisely the effort of Life to maintain itself, to intensify itself and expand. The chief motive power lies in the “intensity of Life.” “The end which actually determines all conscious action is also the cause which produces every unconscious action; it is Life itself, Life at once the most intense and the most varied in its forms. From the first thrill of the embryo in its mother’s womb to the last convulsion of the old man, every movement of the being has had as cause Life in its evolution; this universal cause of actions is, from another point of view, its constant effect and end.”[[33]]
[33] Esquisse d’une Morale, p. 87.
A true ethic proceeding upon the recognition of these principles is scientific, and constitutes a science having as its object all the means by which Life, material and spiritual, may be conserved and expanded. Rising in the evolutionary development we find the variety and scope of action increased. The highest beings find rest not in sleep merely, but in variety and change of action. The moral ideal lies in activity, in all the variety of its manifestations. For Guyau, as for Bergson, the worst vice is idleness, inertia, lack of élan vital, decay of personal initiative, and a consequent degeneration to merely automatic existence.
Hedonism is quite untenable as a principle; pleasure is merely a consequence, and its being set in the van of ethics is due to a false psychology and false science. Granting that pleasure attends the satisfaction of a desire, pain its repression, recognising that a feeling of pleasure accompanies many actions which expand life, we must live, as Guyau reminds us, before we enjoy. The activity of life surges within us, and we do not act with a view to pleasure or with pleasure as a motive, but life, just because it is life, seeks to expand. Man in acting has created his pleasures and his organs. The pleasure and the organ alike proceed from function—that is, life itself. The pleasure of an action and even the consciousness of it are attributes, not ends. The action arises naturally from the inherent intensity of life.
The hedonists, too, says Guyau, have been negligent of the widest pleasures, and have frequently confined their attention to those of eating and drinking and sexual intercourse, purely sensitive, and have neglected those of living, willing and thinking, which are more fundamental as being identical with the consciousness of life. But Guyau asserts that, as the greatest intensity of life involves necessarily its widest expansion, we must give special attention to thought and will and feeling, which bring us into touch universally with our fellows and promote the widest life. This expansiveness of life has great ethical importance. With the change in the nature of reproduction, involving the sexual union of two beings, “a new moral phase began in the world.” It involved an expansion not merely physical, but mental—a union, however crude, of soul.
It is in the extension of this feature of human life that Guyau sees the ethical ideal. The most perfect organism is the most sociable, for the ideal of the individual life is the common or social life. Morality is for him almost synonymous with sociability, disinterestedness, love and brotherhood, and in it we find, he says, “the flower of human life.”
All our action should be referred to this moral ideal of sociability. Guyau sees in the phrase “social service” a conception which should not be confined to those who are endeavouring in some religious or philanthropic manner to alleviate the suffering caused by evil in human society, but a conception to which the acts, all acts, of all members of society should be related. Like Renouvier, he gives to work an important ethical value. “To work is to produce—that is, to be useful to oneself and to others.” In work he sees the economic and moral reconciliation of egoism and altruism. It is a good and it is praiseworthy. Those who neglect and despise it are parasites, and their existence in society is a negation of the moral ideal of sociability and social service. In so far as the work of certain persons leads to the accumulation of excessive capital in individual hands, it is likely to annul itself sooner or later in luxury and idleness. Such an immoral state of affairs, it is the concern of society, by its laws of inheritance and possession, to prevent.
Having made clear his principle of morality, Guyau then has to face the question of its relation to the notion of duty or obligation. Duty in itself is an idea which he rejects as vague, and he disapproves of the external and artificial element present in the Kantian “rigorism.” For Guyau the very power of action contained in life itself creates an impersonal duty. While Emerson could write:
“Duty says, ‘I must,’
The youth replies, ‘I can,’”
the view of Guyau is directly the converse; for him “I can” gives the “I must”; it is the power which precedes and creates the obligation. Life cannot maintain itself unless it grows and expands. The soul that liveth to itself, that liveth solely by habit and automatism, is already dead. Morality is the unity of the personality expanding by action and by sympathy. It is at this point that Guyau’s thought approaches closely to the philosophie des idées-forces of his step-father, by his doctrine of thought and action.