In the last part of his treatise Guyau deals with the difficult problem of “sanction,” so ultimately connected with ethics, and, it must be added, with religion. The Providence who rewards and punishes us, according to the orthodox religious creed of Christendom, is merely a personified “sanction” or distributive justice, operating in a terrestrial and celestial court of assize. Guyau condemns this as an utterly immoral conception. Religious sanctions, as he has not much difficulty in showing, are more cruel than those which a man could imagine himself inflicting upon his mortal enemy. The “Heavenly Father” ought at least to be as good as earthly ones, who do not cruelly punish their children. Guyau touches upon an important point here, which will be further emphasised—namely, the necessity for making our idea of God, if we have one at all, harmonious with our own ethical conceptions. The old ideas of the divinity are profoundly immoral and are based on physical force. This is natural because those views which have survived in modern times are those of primitive and savage people to whom the most holy was the most powerful and physically majestic. But, says Guyau, now that we see that “all physical force represents moral weakness,” the idea of God the All-terrible, with his hell-fire ready for the sinful soul, must be condemned as immoral blasphemy itself. “God,” he remarks, “in damning any soul might be said to damn himself.”
Virtue is really its own reward. No one should be or do good in order to gain an entry into paradise or to escape the torments of hell. That is to build morality on an immoral principle and on a belief, not in goodness as valuable in and for itself, but on a basis of material self-interest alone, “the best policy.” It is true, Guyau admits, that virtue involves happiness, but it is not in this sense. A conflict between “pleasure” and virtue is usually one of higher versus lower ideals. Virtue is not a precedent to sense-happiness, and in this sense is not at all equivalent or bound up with happiness, but, as the facts of life reveal, very often opposed to it.
Guyau opposes the ordinary view of punishment in society and shows that it is both immoral and socially harmful in its application. It adds evil to evil, and legal murder is really more absurd than the illegal murder. Punishment, capital or other, is no “compensation” exacted for the crime committed, and it never can be such. Attempts to treat and cure the guilty one would, Guyau suggests, be far more rational, humane and really beneficial to society itself, which at present creates by its punishments, especially those inflicted for first offences, a “criminal class.” One should convert the criminal before punishing him, and then, Guvau asks, if he is converted, why punish him?
The appeal to justice denoted in the words “To everyone according to his works” is frequently heard in the defence of punishment. This is an excellent maxim in Guyau’s opinion, but he is careful to point out that it is purely one of social economics. It is a plea for a just distribution of the products of labour, but does not apply at all to the problem of punishment. In a manner which recalls the remarks of Renan, Guyau sees in evil-doing a lack of culture, or rather of that sociability, which comes of social culture, from consciousness of a membership of society and a solidarity with one’s fellows. In vice and in virtue alike the human will appears aspiring to better things according to its lights. As virtue is its own reward, so is evil; and the moralist must say to the wicked: “Verily they have their reward” (Comme si ce n’était pas assez pour eux d’être méchants).
Guyau comments upon the gradual modifications of punishment from a social point of view. There was the day when the chastisement was infinitely worse than the crime itself. Then came the morality of reciprocity, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” an ethic which represented a high ideal for primitive man to reach, and one to which, Guyau thinks, we have yet to reach to-day in some spheres of life. Yet a further moral development will show how foolish, in a civilised society, are wrath and hatred of the criminal and the cry for vengeance. Society must aim at ensuring protection for itself with the minimum of individual suffering. Punishment must be regarded as an example for the future rather than as revenge or compensation. In the individual himself Guyau observes how powerful can be the inner sanction of remorse, the suffering caused by the unrealised ideal. This is perhaps the only real moral punishment, and it is one which society cannot itself directly enforce. Only by increasing “sociability” and social sensitiveness can this sanction be indirectly developed.
Herein lies the highest ethical ideal, far more concrete and living, in Guyau’s opinion, than the rigorism of a Kant or the “scholastic”[[35]] temper of a Renouvier. Charity or love for all men, whatever their value morally, intellectually or physically, must, he claims, “be the final end pursued even by public opinion.”In co-operation and sociability, he finds the vital moral ideal; in love and brotherhood, he finds the real sanction which should operate.”Love supposes mutuality of love,” he says; and there is one idea superior to that of justice, that is the idea of brotherhood, and he remarks with a humane tenderness “the guilty have probably more need for love than anyone else.” “I have,” he cries, “two hands—the one for gripping the hand of those with whom I march along in life, the other to lift up the fallen. Indeed, to these I should be able to stretch out both hands together.”[[36]]
[35] This is Guyau’s word to describe Renouvier, whom he regards as far too much under the influence of Kant.
[36] Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction, p. 223.
While Fouillée and, more especially, Guyau were thus outlining an ethic marked by a strong humanitarianism, a more definitely religious ethic was being proclaimed by that current of philosophy of belief and of action which has profoundly associated itself in its later developments with “Modernism” in the Roman Church. The tendency to stress action and the practical reason is noticeable in the work of Brochard, Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, also in Rauh. They agree with Renouvier in advocating the primacy of the practical reason, but their own reasons for this are different from his, or at least in them the reasons are more clearly enunciated. Plainly these reasons lie in the difficulties of intellectualism and the quest of truth. They propose the quest of the good in the hope of finding in that sphere some objectivity, some absolute, in fact, which they cannot find out by intellectual searching. They correspond in a somewhat parallel fashion to the philosophy of intuition with its rejection of intellectualism as offering a final solution. These thinkers desire by action, by doing the will, to attain to a knowledge of the doctrine. The first word in their gospel is—
“Im Anfang war die That.”