It is for them the beginning and the end. Their certainty is an act of belief, which grows out of action and life. It is a curious mixture of insistence upon life and action, such as we find in Guyau and in Bergson, coupled with a religious Platonism. Brochard’s work is of this type. He wrote as early as 1874 on La Responsabilité morale, and in 1876 on L’Universalité des Notions morales. Three years later appeared his work L’Erreur. Ollé-Laprune and Blondel, who best represent this tendency, do not like Guyau’s ethics, which lacks the religious idealism which they consider should be bound up with morality. This was the thesis developed in the volume La Certitude morale, written by Ollé-Laprune in 1881. “By what right,” says Ollé-Laprune in his subsequent book Le Prix de la Vie (1895), “can Guyau speak of a high exalted life, of a moral ideal? It is impossible to speak so when you have only a purely naturalistic ethic; for merely to name these things is an implication that there is not only intensity in life, but also quality. You suppress duty because you can see in it only a falsely mystical view of life and of nature. What you fail to realise is that between duty and life there is a profound agreement. You reduce duty to life, and in life itself you consider only its quantity and intensity, and regard as illusion everything that is of a different order from the natural physical order in which you imprison yourself.”[[37]]
[37] Le Prix de la Vie, p. 139.
Such a criticism is not altogether fair to Guyau who, as we noted, proclaimed the superiority of the higher qualities of spiritual life. It does, however, attack his abandonment of the idea of Duty; and we must now turn to examine a thinker, who, by his contribution to ethics, endeavoured to satisfy the claims of life and of duty.
This was Rauh, whose Essai sur le Fondement métaphysique de la Morale appeared in 1890. It had been preceded by a study of the psychology of the feelings, and was later followed by L’Expérience morale (1903). In seeking a metaphysical foundation for morality, Rauh recalls Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals. He, indeed, agrees with Kant in the view that the essence of morality lies in the sentiment of obligation. Belief or faith in an ideal, by which it behoves us to act, imposes itself, says Rauh, upon the mind of man as essential. It is as positive a fact as the laws of the natural sciences. Man not only states facts and formulates general laws in a scientific manner, he also conceives and believes in ideals, which become bound up in his mind with the sentiment of obligation—that is, the general feeling of duty. But beyond a general agreement upon this point, Rauh does not follow Kant. He tends to look upon the ethical problem in the spirit which Guyau, Bergson and Blondel show in their general philosophic outlook. In life, action and immediacy alone can we find a solution. Nothing practical can be deduced from the abstract principle of obligation or duty in general. The moral consciousness of man is, in Rauh’s opinion, akin to the intuitional perceptions of Bergson’s philosophy. Morality, moreover, is creating itself perpetually by the reflection of sensitive minds on action and on life itself. “Morality, or rather moral action, is not merely the crown of metaphysical speculation, but itself the true metaphysic, which is learnt only in living, as it is naught but life itself.”[[38]] In concluding his thesis, Rauh reminds us that “the essential and most certain factor in the midst of the uncertainties of life and of duty lies in the constant consciousness of the moral ideal.” In it he sees a spiritual reality which, if we keep it ever before us, may inspire the most insignificant of our actions and render them into a harmony, a living harmony of character.
[38] Essai sur le Fondement métaphysique de la Morale, p. 255.
Rauh’s doctrines, we claim, have affinities to the doctrines of action and intuition. That does not imply, however, that the intelligence is to be minimised—far from this; but the intelligence triumphs here in realising that it is not all-sufficing or supreme. “The heart hath reasons which the reason cannot know.” While Fouillée had remarked that morality is metaphysics in action, Rauh points out that “metaphysics in action” is the foundation of our knowledge. We must, he insists, seek for certitude in an immediate and active adaptation to reality instead of deducing a rule or rules of action from abstract systems.
He separates himself from the sociologists[[39]] by pointing out that, however largely social environment may determine our moral ideals and rules of conduct, nevertheless the ethical decision is fundamentally an absolutely personal affair. The human conscience, in so far as active, must never passively accept the existing social morality. It finds itself sometimes in agreement, sometimes obliged to give a newer interpretation to old conventions, and at times is obliged to revolt against them. In no case can the idea of duty be equated simply and calmly with acquiescence in the collective general will. It must demand from social morality its credentials and hold itself free to criticise the current ethic of the community. More often than not society acts, Rauh thinks, as a break rather than a stimulus; and social interest is not a measure of the moral ideal, but rather a limitation of it.
[39] The relation of ethics and sociology is well discussed, not only by Durkheim (who, in his Division du Travail social, speaks of the development of democracy and increasing respect for human personality), but also by Lévy-Bruhl, who followed his thesis on L’Idée de Responsabilité, 1883, by the volume, La Morale el la Science des Moeurs.
Although the moral ideal is one which must be personally worked out, it is not a merely individualistic affair. Rauh does not abandon the guidance of reason, but he objects equally to the following of instinct or a transcendent teaching divorced from the reality of life. Our guide must be reflection upon instinct, and this is only possible by action and experience, the unique experience of living itself. Reason itself is experience; and it is our duty to face problems personally and sincerely, in a manner which the rational element in us renders “impersonal, universal and disinterested.”
Any code of morality which is not directly in contact with life is worthless, and all ethical ideas which are not those of our time are of little value. Only he is truly a man who lives the life of his time. The truly moral man is he who is alive to this spirit and who does not unreflectingly deduce his rules of conduct from ancient books or teachers of a past age. The art of living is the supreme art, and it is this which the great moralists have endeavoured to show humanity. Neither Socrates nor Jesus wrote down their ethical ideas: they lived them.