Four Phases of Morals: Socrates, Aristotle, Christianity, Utilitarianism

by John Stuart Blackie

which, when analysed, turn out to be altogether different things baptized with the same name. If a rational self-interest convinces me that, when I see my neighbour fall into the sea, it is my duty to jump in after him at the risk of being drowned myself, it requires an open force put upon language to say that such an action is the result of any kind of deliberate self-regard; it seems more like the result of a social instinct, and so far from being the product of any sort of prudential calculation, it is more likely to be strangled in the first conception than brought to a brilliant birth by the consideration of self in any shape. It seems to me indeed quite unworthy of anything styling itself philosophy to deal in such manifest quibbles. I might in a similar way, for instance, classify all religions under a common name, according as they are inspired by

Gross reverence, Refined reverence, and Rational reverence;

but though the name is the same in all the three cases, the feeling may be very different, and the product altogether opposed; for the gross reverence of vulgar superstition may be founded on fear, while the rational reverence of enlightened piety may be based on philosophic wonder and on that perfect love which casteth out fear.

Much less ingenious than Hartley as a speculator, but more distinct, perspicuous, and effective as a writer, was Dr. Paley, a man whose position among the thinkers of the last century, though somewhat dwarfed by the contemporary magnitude of Hume and Bentham, will ever secure him an honourable place among the preachers of the Utilitarian doctrine. As an author, he commanded a wider circle of intelligent readers than any of his contemporaries who handled the same subjects; he was a Churchman too, the only clergyman, so far as I know, among the Utilitarian doctors; and the last of that school—Austin only excepted^[300.1]—who did not think it a disgrace but an honour to keep on friendly terms with Christianity. The salient points of his moral philosophy are four—Utility, the doctrine of Consequences, the Will of God, and the Future life. Of the first, what remains to be said will be said more opportunely when, in the next section, we shall have to discuss Hume; the doctrine of Consequences a passing hint under Bentham will dismiss; and for the other two points a few sentences may suffice. “Virtue,” according to Paley, “is the doing good to mankind in obedience to the will of God for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This definition characterizes the man, the book, the age, the country, and the profession to which he belonged admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all likelihood expressed the feeling of nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand British Christians living in these islands in the generation immediately preceding the French Revolution; still, it is a definition which contains as many errors as it contains clauses. In the first place, as to the doing good to mankind, it is a principle which lies at the basis of the doctrine of Utility, and has its origin doubtless not so much in modern anti-Christian systems as in the prominence which Christianity gives to works of charity and brotherly-kindness; than which practically of course there can be nothing better, but as part of the definition of virtue in this place it is faulty; for virtue of various kinds may be exercised where no men exist to be the objects of our benevolence, as with Adam in Paradise, and Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, and the poet Campbell’s Last Man. Then as to the Will of God, that no doubt is a power which overrules all; tides and tempests and thunderstorms must obey that, and human life of course no less; but what constitutes the Divine will, and how is it to be learned, in what way by the Christian, and in what other way by the unbeliever? Properly speaking, the will of God rather expresses the ultimate source of virtuous conduct than furnishes a practical definition of its quality. Lastly, as to the everlasting happiness, this is the greatest blunder of the three. It may no doubt be very true under the relations in which it was spoken, that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are of all men most miserable:” that was a sentence which applied with the most vivid pointedness to St. Paul and to many others in similar circumstances; but it is very far from furnishing a warrant for the general proposition that the sure expectation of an everlasting reward is a motive necessary for the existence of virtue in this mortal life. For if this really were the case, either the virtue of Socrates was no virtue at all, or a virtue far above the standard of any Christian virtue according to Paley’s definition; for Socrates died the death of a martyr with a very doubtful faith of what might happen to him after death. But, in fact, the prospect of an external reward is no part of any virtue, either Christian or heathen,—rather in many cases would annihilate the very idea of virtue. To give away ten pounds to-day with the sure expectation of getting a thousand pounds for it to-morrow would be no act of generosity. Aristotle says that a man is bound to be virtuous by the distinctive law of his nature, whether he lives seventy years or seven hundred years; and Christianity surely ought to say no less. It is plain therefore that Dr. Paley was no great master of definitions. Nevertheless he wrote a most useful practical book; such a book as justly commended itself to the practical English mind; such a book as might have been expected from the finished manhood of a young man of whom when he went to college it had been said by his father, that “he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with.” A clear head unquestionably is a most useful quality in business and in daily life, but a quality which of itself will not make a great philosopher, or even a great man.

David Hume, born at Edinburgh in the year 1710, was older than Dr. Paley by more than thirty years, though we have placed Paley first, as with Locke and Hartley completing the band of decidedly Christian Externalists. But in Hume we find the father of an altogether new school, the real progenitor of that living sect of philosophers whom the popular memory traces back no further than to Bentham and James Mill. In him therefore we may reasonably expect to find in one form or another all that came afterwards, some parts of course less worked out and less consistent, but the whole more rich, various, and complete; and, as in the case of Locke and Hartley, we may probably have cause to rejoice that by a certain broad and salutary inconsistency he saved himself from a narrow and pedantic dogmatism. We shall not therefore err in calling him comparatively a great man, but only comparatively; compared with the highest style of men, great with first-rate position and constructive minds, he is not great; he is only rich, various, and subtle. Nevertheless in respect of those who followed him with kindred tendencies, his stature remains unapproached. He is, as Emerson says of Plato, “a terrible destroyer of originalities.” In the page of intellectual record he stands unquestioned as the man who shook all the easy thinkers of an easy century out of their easy seats with much observation; but there are two ways of shaking people out of their seats—first in the manner of an architect who pulls down a crazy old cabin in order that he may set quarrymen, masons, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and other artisans to work that they may erect a palatial structure in its stead; secondly, in the manner of a strong Samson, who shakes the pillars of some temple of Dagon, and buries himself and all the Philistines beneath its roof. That this is too much the manner of Hume as a philosopher is obvious; only he does not actually die like Samson, but gets himself paralysed for a moment, and then recovers partially by virtue of that strong infection of common sense which, as a Scotchman, he naturally had. We have called him a rich man; for unquestionably his treatise on the Principles of Morals, perhaps on the whole the best of his works, exhibits him as at once a subtle thinker, a shrewd observer, and a graceful stylist, in a combination as happy as it is rare. The man of the world is present here as well as the philosopher; and perhaps the philosopher is not fully aware how much the acceptance of his abstract speculations is due to his secular shrewdness and his gentlemanly demeanour. But with all his wealth there is a certain meagreness about Hume arising out of his ignorance and entire misprision of the past. It is difficult for a man to write well on morals with an entire disregard of Aristotle and Plato, and with a fashionable Parisian contempt for the New Testament. No doubt this was to a great extent the misfortune of the philosopher rather than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen above ([p. 131]), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed blows inflicted on him by Bacon—“his fame,” to use Hume’s own language, “was utterly decayed;”^[304.1] and as for Plato, St. Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and could appreciate their excellence as some kilted piper picked up from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had—the fruit of private study in his riper years—more than usually falls to the lot of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary, I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated thus—“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”^[305.1] The complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the ancient moralists, is only less ludicrous than the benign self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the Deontology of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but the old Socratic formula:—

Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.

Nay more; he defines this sentiment to be “an internal sense or feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.” Risum teneatis, amici? Here we have the innate ideas of Plato, one part of them certainly, which Mr. Locke was supposed to have blown into smoke. And afterwards, in language even more distinctly Platonic, in the section “Why Utility Pleases,” he says, “Had nature made no original moral distinctions independently of education, distinctions founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words honourable and shameful, lovely and odious, noble and despicable, had never had place in any language; nor could politicians, had they invented those terms, ever have been able to render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the audience.” We see therefore in these passages plainly, that Hume was by no means a thorough and consistent Externalist; he protests stoutly against Hobbes and all who declare that there is naturally no difference between men and tigers till the policeman introduced it; and he does not seem to have approached Professor Bain’s conception, that Conscience is always and everywhere modelled on the statute-book. He agrees entirely with Socrates in assigning to love and the social affections—the τὰ φιλικά—as strong a sway in human society as to the selfish principle. Here his common sense and his knowledge of the world saved him signally from the perverse ingenuity of Hartley. It will be observed through all his works, indeed, that though he was fond of puzzling himself as a thinker, he had fundamentally far more faith in the common instincts and feelings of the great masses of men than in the conclusions of the metaphysicians. “Nature,” he says wisely, “will always assert her rights, and prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever;”^[307.1] while with regard to individual speculators he says, “It is easy for a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtle reasonings, and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion by its unusual appearance or its contradiction to common sense.”^[307.2] And accordingly he makes no scruple of shelving the whole theory of the Ethics of Selfishness by the single sentence that it “seems to have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy.”^[307.3] What then have we to lay hold of as distinctively Humian? Hitherto all is mere Socrates. A well-disciplined reason and a well-educated natural instinct of benevolence acting together for the public weal.—This is Utility; this is Hume; this is Socrates also, and Aristotle; for these great ancient thinkers had the εὐδαιμονία and the ὠφέλιμον in their eye and on their tongue as much as any modern Utilitarian. Where then lies the differentiating element of this great progenitor of the most modern school? The difference, we must reply, is partly imaginary, arising out of the gross misconception of the character of ancient philosophy, transparent in all the writings of the Utilitarians; partly real, in so far as the ancients, while acknowledging Utility as a principle, kept Reason in the foreground, while the moderns push Utility into the van, and use Reason only as an instrument to make that point alone prominent. The modern Utilitarian accordingly looks more to the consequences of the action, the ancient Rationalist to the quality of the actor; but how this should be looked upon as a great discovery in morals, or as tending in any way to the elevation of human character or the regeneration of society, seems difficult to understand. It rather appears to me that the prominence thus given to the results of action has a tendency to turn the eye of men away from the great work of purifying the sources of action, the foulness of which is the constant cause of foul results; prudential considerations will be very apt to obtain undue preponderance; and everywhere, as Lecky observes, “the philosophy of sensation will be found to be accompanied with the morals of interest.”

The extreme meagreness of the Utilitarian doctrine as thus produced from the propositions of its great progenitor, is something so remarkable that one is naturally driven to look about for some cause that may have given artificial importance to a matter in itself so insignificant; and this cause, so far as I can discover, lies nowhere so much as in the general reaction against Christianity which distinguished the age of which Voltaire in France was the great spokesman, Hume in Scotland, and Bentham in England. Reaction is the universal law of all mundane forces: and it was not to be expected that Christianity should escape it. Christian ethics being based purely, as we have seen, on a regard to the will of God, on purity of motive, and lofty self-sacrifice, even had they been left to work in all their natural integrity, would have demanded a doctrine of moral consequences to neutralize the necessary one-sidedness of their action. To have a good conscience was a most excellent thing, but to have a clean shirt was also a virtue. The Divine sanction given by Christian piety to Christian morals was naturally beneficial, but it was also possible, or rather from human weakness almost certain, that the science of human ethics might lose as much as it gained from alliance with Christian theologians, who are only too apt to “bend every branch of knowledge to their own purposes, without much regard to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiassed sentiments of the mind.”^[309.1] Add to this the tawdry mummeries of ritualism, the insolence of haughty churchmen, the gross worldliness of fat beneficiaries, the morbid sanctitude of pietistical devotees, the unnatural austerities of monkish ascetics, and the grim severity of damnatory dogmatists, and we shall easily understand how a revulsion should have taken place, which would not be content till on the throne of morals it had supplanted Christ by Socrates, and Socrates by Epicurus. And this consideration opens up to us the second notable achievement of the subtle Scot in the important field of morals. Not content with withdrawing virtue as much as possible from the region of personal sentiment into the wider domain of social wellbeing, he determined to strike at the root of the whole evil, as it appeared to him, by not only attacking Christianity, but by undermining that primary idea of Causality on which the idea of religion and the very conception of a God reposes. This was a daring business no doubt; but Hume was not the man to take things of that nature overseriously; he would keep himself quite easy as to results; he would not make himself miserable by any unnecessary enthusiasm even for his own philosophy;^[310.1] if he did not choke the Church-doctors, he would at least give them something to chew; and at all events he might effect a permanent divorce between human ethics and that sectarian theology to which it had been so unpropitiously yoked.

The foundation of this monstrous doctrine of Atheism is laid by our subtle Scotch Epicurus in the following way. In his chapter entitled “Sceptical Doubts,” speaking of the origin of our ideas of cause and effect, he says, “When we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other, as the communication of motion by one billiard-ball to another, this knowledge arises entirely from experience, and is not a matter of à priori reasoning.” Again: “The effect in this and in every case is totally different from the cause; the conjunction of every effect with its cause must appear arbitrary; every effect is in fact a distinct event from its cause. Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power which produces any single effect in the universe. The ultimate springs or principles productive of natural phenomena are totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry.” Then in the next section he goes on to argue against the legitimacy of the common postulate of all scientific thought, that “similar sensible qualities proceed from similar secret powers.” “All that experience can do is to show us a number of uniform effects resulting from certain objects, and to teach us that those particular objects at that particular time were endowed with such powers and forces.” After this, in the chapter entitled “Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,” he lays it down that since our belief that similar effects imply similar causes does not depend on reasoning, the only, “principle on which it depends is Custom or Habit.” In fact, “All inferences from experience are the effect of custom, not of reasoning.” Cause means only “customary conjunction.” Then, towards the conclusion of the same chapter, he says, “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the Powers and Forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same train with the other works of nature. Custom is that principle by which this correspondence has been effected.” Cognate with these chapters on Causation are some discussions that follow on the idea of power or necessary connexion, in which he maintains that this idea is not copied either from the observation of the operation of forces in the external world or in the world of volition within us; that in all cases what we know is only “the frequent conjunction of objects, not their connexion;” “all events seem entirely loose and separate; and at bottom we have no idea of connexion or power at all, and these words are absolutely without any meaning;” and, philosophically expressed, “the sentiment or impression from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion,” is only “the customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant.” And so “we may define a Cause to be one object followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first are followed by objects similar to the second.” Lastly, to crown this whole elaborate edifice of Scottish atheism, we have, in the chapter on “Providence and a Future State,” the following sentences:—“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to ascribe to the cause any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to produce the effect. Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the Authors of the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess that precise degree of power, intelligence, and benevolence which appears in their workmanship; but nothing further can be proved. The supposition of further attributes is mere hypothesis.” This argument is levelled against the perfection of the Divine workmanship and attributes. He then proceeds to annihilate, as he conceives, the Socratic argument from design in the following fashion:—“If you saw a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and mortar, and all the instruments of masonry, you might justly infer from this effect that it was a work of design and contrivance; and in reference to works of human art this reasoning is good, because man is a being whom we know by experience. But the case is not the same with our reasonings from the works of Nature. The Deity is known to us only by his productions, and is a single Being in the universe not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced attributes or qualities we can by analogy infer any attribute or quality in him. The method of reasoning which we legitimately use in reference to the intentions and projects of men, can never have place with regard to a Being so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun does to a wax taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any attribute or perfection.”

We have been at pains to transcribe these articulate sentences verbatim, selected from a sweep of some hundred pages of the Essays, because they really contain all that can be said in justification or palliation of that sort of positive or negative atheism which has recently been haunting the intellectual atmosphere of Europe, and poisoning the sources of social morality. Let us now see what they amount to.