In the political world the growing strength of the empire sought likewise a religious sanction in its claim of a divine right, independent of the church. The claims of the civic life find also increasing recognition with the spiritual teachers.
The State had been regarded by Augustine as a consequence of the fall of man, but it now comes to claim and receive a moral value: first, with Thomas Aquinas, as the institution in which man perfects his earthly nature and prepares for his higher destiny in the realm of grace; then, with Dante, as no longer subordinate to the church, but coördinate with it.
Finally, the rise of the universities shows a most significant appearance of the modern spirit under the old sanctions. The range of secular studies was limited and the subject-matter to be studied was chiefly the doctrine of the Fathers. The teachers who drew thousands of eager young men about them were clerics. But the very fact that dialectics—the art of reasoning—was the focus of interest, shows the dawn of a spirit of inquiry. Such a book as Abelard's Sic et Non, which marshaled the opposing views of the Fathers in "deadly parallel," was a challenge to tradition and an assertion of reason. And it is not without significance that the same bold thinker was the first of the mediæval scholars to treat ethics again as a field by itself. The title "Know Thyself" suggests its method. The essence of the moral act is placed in the intent or resolve of the will; the criterion for judgment is agreement or disagreement with conscience.
§ 4. INDIVIDUALISM IN THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY AND DEMOCRACY
Rights.—It is not possible or necessary here to sketch the advance of political and civil liberty. Finding its agents sometimes in kings, sometimes in cities, sometimes in an aristocracy or a House of Commons, and sometimes in a popular uprising, it has also had as its defenders with the pen, Churchmen, Protestants, and freethinkers, lawyers, publicists, and philosophers. All that can be done here is to indicate briefly the moral significance of the movement. Some of its protagonists have been actuated by conscious moral purpose. They have fought with sword or pen not only in the conviction that their cause was just, but because they believed it just. At other times, a king has favored a city to weaken the power of the nobility, or the Commons have opposed the king because they objected to taxation. What makes the process significant morally is that, whatever the motives actuating those who have fought its battles with sword or pen, they have nearly always claimed to be fighting for "rights." They have professed the conviction that they are engaged in a just cause. They have thus made appeal to a moral standard, and in so far as they have sincerely sought to assert rights, they have been recognizing in some sense a social and rational standard; they have been building up a moral personality. Sometimes indeed the rights have been claimed as a matter of "possession" or of tradition. This is to place them on the basis of customary morality. But in such great crises as the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the French and American Revolutions of the eighteenth, some deeper basis has been sought. A Milton, a Locke, a Rousseau, a Jefferson, has but voiced the sentiments of a people in formulating an explicitly moral principle. Sometimes this has taken the form of an appeal to God-given rights. All men are equal before God; why should one man assume to command another because of birth? In this sense the Puritans stood for liberty and democracy as part of their creed of life. But often the appeal to a moral principle borrowed the conceptions of Greek philosophy and Roman law, and spoke of "natural rights" or a "law of nature."[88]
Natural Rights.—This conception, as we have noted, had its origin in Greece in the appeal from custom or convention to Nature. At first an appeal to the natural impulses and wants, it became with the Stoics an appeal to the rational order of the universe. Roman jurists found in the idea of such a law of nature the rational basis for the law of society. Cicero had maintained that every man had its principles innate within him. It is obvious that here was a principle with great possibilities. The Roman law itself was most often used in the interest of absolutism, but the idea of a natural law, and so of a natural right more fundamental than any human dictate, proved a powerful instrument in the struggle for personal rights and equality. "All men naturally were born free," wrote Milton. "To understand political power right," wrote Locke, "and derive it from its original, we must consider what state all men are naturally in, and that is a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature; without asking leave or depending on the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal." These doctrines found eloquent portrayal in Rousseau, and appear in the Declaration of Independence of 1776. Finally, the effort to find in nature some basis for independence and freedom is given a new turn by Herbert Spencer when he points to the instinct for liberty in animals as well as in human beings as the origin of the law of freedom.
By one of the paradoxes of history, the principle is now most often invoked in favor of "vested interests." "Natural" easily loses the force of an appeal to reason and to social good, and becomes merely an assertion of ancient usage, or precedent, or even a shelter for mere selfish interests. Natural rights in property may be invoked to thwart efforts to protect life and health. Individualism has been so successful in asserting rights that it is now apt to forget that there are no rights morally except such as express the will of a good member of society. But in recognizing possible excesses we need not forget the value of the idea of rights as a weapon in the struggle in which the moral personality has gradually won its way. The other side of the story has been the growth of responsibility. The gain in freedom has not meant an increase in disorder; it has been marked rather by gain in peace and security, by an increasing respect for law, and an increasing stability of government. The external control of force has been replaced by the moral control of duty.
§ 5. INDIVIDUALISM AS AFFECTED BY THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDUSTRY, COMMERCE, AND ART
The development of industry, commerce, and art affects the moral life in a variety of ways, of which three are of especial importance for our purpose.
(1) It gives new interests, and new opportunities for individual activity.