Immorality is really unsociability, and Guyau thinks this a better key-note than to regard it as disobedience. If it is so to be spoken of, it is disobedience to the social elements in one’s own self—a mischievous duplication of personality, egoistic in character and profoundly antisocial. The sociological elements which characterise all Guyau’s work are here very marked. In the notion of sociability we find an equivalent of the older and more artificial conception of Duty—a conception which lacks concreteness and offers in itself so little guidance because it is abstract and empty. The criterion of sociability, Guyau claims, is much more concrete and useful. He asks us to observe its spirituality, for the more gross and materialistic pleasures fall short of the criterion by the very fact that they cannot be shared. Guyau’s thought is here at its best. The higher pleasures, which are not those of bodily enjoyment and satisfaction, but those of the spirit, which thinks, feels, wills and loves, are precisely those which come nearest to fulfilling the ideal of sociability, for they tend less to divide men than to unite them and to urge them to a closer co-operation for their spiritual advancement. Guyau writes here with sarcasm regarding the lonely imbecile in the carriage drawn by four horses. For his own part it is enough to have—
“. . . a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.”
He knows who really has chosen the better part. One cannot rejoice much and rejoice alone. Companionship and love are supremely valuable “goods,” and the pleasure of others he recognises as a very real part of his own. The egoist’s pleasure is, on the other hand, very largely an illusion. He loses, says Guyau, far more by his isolated enjoyment than he would gain by sharing.
Life itself is the greatest of all goods, as it is the condition of all others, but life’s value fades if we are not loved. It is love, comradeship and the fellowship of kindred souls which give to the humblest life a significance and a feeling of value. This, Guyau points out with some tenderness, is the tragedy of suicides. These occurrences are a social no less than an individual tragedy. The tragic element lies in the fact that they were persons who were unable to give their devotion to some object, and the loss of personalities in this way is a real loss to society, but it is mainly society itself which is to blame for them.
We need not fear, says Guyau, that such a gospel will promote unduly the operation of mere animality or instinctive action, for in the growth of the scientific spirit he sees the development of the great enemy of all instinct. It is the dissolving force par excellence, the revolutionary spirit which incessantly wages warfare within society against authority, and in the individual it operates through reason against the instinctive impulses. Every instinct tends to lapse in so far as it is reflected upon by consciousness.
The old notion of duty or obligation must, in Guyau’s opinion, be abandoned. The sole commandment which a scientific and positive ethic, such as he endeavours to indicate, can recognise, is expressible only in the words, “Develop your life in all directions, be an individual as rich as possible in energy, intensive and extensive”—in other words, “Be the most social and sociable being you can.” It is this which replaces the “categorical imperative.”
He aptly points out the failure of modern society to offer scope for devotion, which is really a superabundance of life, and its proneness to crush out opportunities which offer a challenge to the human spirit. There is a claim of life itself to adventure; there is a pleasure in risk and in conflict; and this pleasure in risk and adventure has been largely overlooked in its relation to the moral life. Such risk and adventure are not merely a pure negation of self or of personal life, but rather, he considers, that life raised to its highest power, reaching the sublime. By virtue of such devotion our lives are enriched. He draws a touching picture of the sacrifice upon which our modern social life and civilisation are based, and draws an analogy between the blood of dead horses used by the ploughman in fertilising his field, and the blood of the martyrs of humanity, qui ont fécondé l’avenir. Often they may have been mistaken; later generations may wonder if their cause was worth fighting for; yet, although nothing truly is sadder than to die in vain, that devotion was valuable in and for itself.
With the demand of life for risk in action is bound up the impetus to undertake risk in thought. From this springs the moral need for faith, for belief and acceptance of some hypotheses. The very divergence or diversity of the world-religions is not discouraging but rather the reverse. It is a sign of healthy moral life. Uniformity would be highly detrimental; it would cease to express life, for with conformity of belief would come spiritual decline and stagnation. Guyau anticipates here his doctrine of a religion of free thought, a “non-religion” of the future, which we shall discuss in our next chapter, when we examine his book on that subject. In the diversity of religious views Guyau sees a moral good, for these religions are themselves an expression of life in its richness, and the conservation and expansion of this rich variety of life are precisely the moral ideal itself.
We must endeavour to realise how rich and varied the nature of human life really is. Revolutionaries, Guyau points out, are always making the mistake of regarding life and truth as too simple. Life and truth are so complex that evolution is the key-note to what is desirable in the individual intellect and in society, not a revolution which must inevitably express the extreme of one side or the other. The search for truth is slow and needs faith and patience, but the careful seekers of it are making the future of mankind. But truth will be discovered only in relation to action and life and in proportion to the labour put into its realisation. The search for truth must never be divorced from the active life, Guyau insists, and, indeed, he approaches the view that the action will produce the knowledge, “He that doeth the will shall know of the doctrine.” Moreover he rightly sees in action the wholesome cure for pessimism and that cynicism which all too frequently arises from an equal appreciation of opposing views. “Even in doubt,” he exclaims, “we can love; even in the intellectual night, which prevents our seeing any ultimate goal, we can stretch out a hand to him who weeps at our feet.”[[34]] In other words, we must do the duty that lies nearest, in the hope and faith that by that action itself light will come.
[34] Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, p. 178.