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

by John Stuart Blackie

3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.

4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of external consequences.

This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it does not by any means follow that Utilitarianism has proved utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted. It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear, in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on the contrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it, for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element of Number is made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also, will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void which its absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair.

[The End]

FOOTNOTES.

[1.1] See the splendid eulogy of the philosopher in J. S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty.”

[1.2] See the famous sentence in the Deontology (vol. i.), which a man to believe must have seen,—so gross is the amount of ignorance, conceit, and dogmatism that it parades without a mask.

[26.1] The reader will not suppose that we have penned the above sentences about the position and character of the Sophists without having seriously weighed the evidence on the subject, and especially without having taken into account the very able chapter on Socrates and the Sophists in Grote’s History of Greece. On the contrary, we have read that chapter carefully over several times, and have on each occasion returned from the perusal with the confirmed conviction that the learned author wrote it as a special pleader rather than as an impartial historian, and that the light in which he presents this important subject is essentially false, and distorts, or rather inverts, the real position of the principal figures in the picture. The main features in Grote’s account of the matter are that the Sophists are a much calumniated class of men; that Socrates was the head of that class, rather than their antagonist; and that not the real facts of the case, but the imagination of the transcendental Plato, and the caricatures of Aristophanes, carelessly accepted as true history, have been the sources of modern ideas on the subject. In all this we think Mr. Grote is decidedly wrong, running counter at once to the inherent probabilities of the case, and to the unhesitating and concurrent testimony of all antiquity. The hollowness of the case of Mr. Grote has been shown in detail by Mr. Cope in the Cambridge Philological Journal and by myself in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; so that we may content ourselves here by simply stating what appears to be the rationale of the process by which the distinguished author of the History of Greece was led into the maintenance of such an untenable position. Now the influences which acted on the learned historian’s mind in this matter seem reducible to three—(1.) Mr. Grote is characteristically a polemical historian; from beginning to end of his book he has in his eye, and is writing against, a class of writers who had made it a business, in writing the history of Greece, to write against the Athenian democracy, and through that, against democracy in general. With such a literary mission, Mr. Grote, however triumphant in the main, was constantly exposed to the strong temptation of vindicating characters that had been previously abused, and abusing those whose respectability had hitherto stood unquestioned; (2.) In the course of his sweeping progress of knocking down old ideals and setting up new ones, no figures were more likely to call his chivalrous faculty of vindication into play than the Sophists; for they were, as we have seen, the natural guides of the lusty young democracy, and as such the special favourites of a historian whose business it was to justify and glorify the Athenians in all the characteristic phases of their social and political life. And to a certain extent no doubt the distinguished historian was right in maintaining that the antagonists of Socrates were not so black as they had been painted by many, but represented a considerable element of civic worth and respectability. But he was certainly not justified in wiping out that antagonism altogether from the record,—an antagonism which was just as marked in Athens as that more famous one in Jerusalem four centuries later, between the Scribes and Pharisees and the first preachers of the Gospel. The manner in which Mr. Grote endeavours to confound Socrates with the herd of Sophists, from the mere external resemblance of the weapons which they used, is unworthy of a great historian. It was enough that such a confusion should have blinded the eyes of the Athenian vulgar, and their great jest-maker Aristophanes, without being made at this time of day to serve as a serious vindication of the great mass of Sophistical teachers; but (3.) Mr. Grote was led to elevate the Sophists, and so, comparatively, to degrade their great antagonist, not only from his position as the champion of Athenian democracy, but from his sympathy with the philosophical principles of the Sophists, as opposed to those of Socrates and Plato. These principles are those of the Sensational as opposed to what is commonly called the Ideal or Intellectual philosophy, the philosophy which gathers its conclusions exclusively from what is external, while looking with suspicion on any categorical intuitions, God-given instincts, or God-seeking aspirations that may assert themselves from within. With this temper Mr. Grote is naturally led to take the part of those ancient Greek teachers who held similar principles; and these are to be found not on the side of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but on the side of Protagoras and the Sophists. How strongly his speculative tendencies gravitate in this direction the learned historian has amply shown in his book on Plato, a work in which the reader will more readily find an eager and acute advocacy of the adversaries of Plato than an intelligent and loving estimate of the great idealist himself. In expounding Plato Mr. Grote put himself pretty much in the same position that Voltaire would have done had he undertaken to write a commentary on the Gospel of John. It is not enough, in order to see a thing, that a man have sharp eyes; he must have a soul behind the eye, to teach him both what is to be seen, and what it signifies when it is seen.

[32.1] See the singular dialogue with Theodote, afterwards mistress of Alcibiades, in the Memorabilia.

[42.1] Professor Grote says—“Law is the public reason of a society, participated in more or less by the mass of individuals, enforcible upon all who will not participate in it.”—On Utilitarianism.