I have spoken more than once of Fitzjames's respect for Hobbes. For Hobbes's theory of sovereignty, and even its application by the ultramontane De Maistre, had always an attraction for him. Hobbes, with his logical thoroughness, seems to carry the foundations of policy down to the solid rock-bed of fact. Life is a battle; it is the conflict of independent atoms; with differing aims and interests. The strongest, in one way or other, will always rule. But the conflict may be decided peacefully. You may show your cards instead of playing out the game; and peace may be finally established though only by the recognition of a supreme authority. The one question is what is to be the supreme authority? With De Maistre it was the Church; with Fitzjames as with Hobbes it was the State. The welfare of the race can only be secured by order; order only by the recognition of a sovereign; and when that order, and the discipline which it implies, are established, force does not cease to exist: on the contrary, it is enormously increased in efficacy; but it works regularly and is distributed harmoniously and systematically instead of appearing in the chaotic clashing of countless discordant fragments. The argument, which is as clear as Euclid in the case of marriage, is valid universally. Society must be indissoluble; and to be indissoluble must recognise a single ultimate authority in all disputes. Peace and order mean subordination and discipline, and the only liberty possible is the liberty which presupposes such 'coercion.' The theory becomes harsh if by 'coercion' we mean simply 'physical force' or the fear of pain. A doctrine which made the hangman the ultimate source of all authority would certainly show brutality. But nothing could be farther from Fitzjames's intention than to sanction such a theory. His 'coercion' really includes an appeal to all the motives which make peace and order preferable to war and anarchy. But it is, I also think, a defect in the book that he does not clearly explain the phrase, and that it slips almost unconsciously into the harsher sense. He tells us, for example, that 'force is dependent upon persuasion and cannot move without it.'[148] Nobody can rule without persuading his fellows to place their force at his disposal; and therefore he infers 'persuasion is a kind of force.' It acts by showing people the consequences of their conduct. He calls controversy, again, an 'intellectual warfare,' which, he adds, is far more searching and effective than legal persecution. It roots out the weaker opinion. And so, when speaking of the part played by coercion in religious developments, he says that 'the sources of religion lie hid from us. All that we know is that now and again in the course of ages someone sets to music the tune which is haunting millions of ears. It is caught up here and there, and repeated till the chorus is thundered out by a body of singers able to drown all discords, and to force the unmusical mass to listen to them.'[149] The word 'force' in the last sentence shows the transition. Undoubtedly force in the sense of physical and military force has had a great influence in the formation both of religions and nations. We may say that such force is 'essential'; as a proof of the energy and often as a condition of the durability of the institutions. But the question remains whether it is a cause or an effect; and whether the ultimate roots of success do not lie in that 'kind of force' which is called 'persuasion'; and to which nobody can object. If coercion be taken to include enlightenment, persuasion, appeals to sympathy and sentiment, and to imagination, it implies an ultimate social groundwork very different from that generally suggested by the word. The utilitarian and individualist point of view tends necessarily to lay stress upon bare force acting by fear and physical pain. The utilitarian 'sanctions' of law must be the hangman and the gaoler. So long as society includes unsocial elements it must apply motives applicable to the most brutal. The hangman uses an argument which everyone can understand. In this sense, therefore, force must be the ultimate sanction, though it is equally true that to get the force you must appeal to motives very different from those wielded by the executioner. The application of this analogy of criminal law to questions of morality and religion affects the final conclusions of the book.
Fitzjames's whole position, if I have rightly interpreted him, depends essentially upon his moral convictions. The fault which he finds with Mill is precisely that Mill's theory would unmoralise the state. The state, that is, would be a mere association for mutual insurance against injury instead of an organ of the moral sense of the community. What, then, is morality? How are we to know what is right and wrong, and what are our motives for approving and disapproving the good and the bad? Fitzjames uses phrases, especially in his letters, where he is not arguing against an adversary, which appear to be inconsistent, if not with utilitarianism, at least with the morality of mere expediency. Lord Lytton, some time after this, wrote to him about his book, and he replies to the question, 'What is a good man?'—'a man so constituted that the pleasure of doing a noble thing and the pain of doing a base thing are to him the greatest of pleasures and pains.' He was fond, too, of quoting, with admiration, Kant's famous saying about the sublimity of the moral law and the starry heavens. The doctrine of the 'categorical imperative' would express his feelings more accurately than Bentham's formulæ. But his reasoning was different. He declares himself to be a utilitarian in the sense that, according to him, morality must be built upon experience. 'The rightness of an action,' he concludes, 'depends ultimately upon the conclusions at which men may arrive as to matters of fact.'[150] This, again, means that the criterion is the effect of conduct upon happiness. Here, however, we have the old difficulty that the estimate of happiness varies widely. Fitzjames accepts this view to some extent. Happiness has no one definite meaning, although he admits, in point of fact, there is sufficient resemblance between men to enable them to form such morality as actually exists.
But is such morality satisfactory? Can it, for example, give sufficient reasons for self-sacrifice—that is, neglect of my own happiness? Self-sacrifice, he replies, in a strict sense, is impossible; for it could only mean acting in opposition to our own motives of whatever kind—which is an absurdity.[151] But among real motives he admits benevolence, public spirit, and so forth, and fully agrees that they are constantly strong enough to overpower purely self-regarding motives. So far, it follows, the action of such motives may be legitimately assumed by utilitarians. He is, therefore, not an 'egoistic' utilitarian. He thinks, as he says in a letter referring to his book, that he is 'as humane and public-spirited as his neighbours.' A man must be a wretched being who does not care more for many things outside his household than for his own immediate pains and pleasures. Had he been called upon to risk health or life for any public object in India, and failed to respond, he would never have had a moment's peace afterwards. This was no more than the truth, and yet he would sometimes call himself 'selfish' in what I hold to be a non-natural sense. He frequently complains of the use of such words as 'selfishness' and 'altruism' at all. Selfishness, according to him, could merely mean that a man acts from his own motives, and altruism would mean that he acted from somebody else's motives. One phrase, therefore, would be superfluous, and the other absurd. He insists, however, that, as he puts it, 'self is each man's centre, from which he can no more displace himself than he can leap off his own shadow.'[152] Since estimates of happiness differ, the morality based upon them will also differ.[153] And from selfishness in this sense two things follow. First, I have to act upon my own individual conception of morality. If, then, I meet a person whose morality is different from mine, and who justifies what I hold to be vices, I must behave according to my own view. If I am his ruler, I must not treat him as a person making a possibly useful experiment in living, but as a vicious brute, to be restrained or suppressed by all available means. And secondly, since self is the centre, since a 'man works from himself outwards,' it is idle to propose a love of humanity as the guiding motive to morality. 'Humanity is only "I" writ large, and zeal for humanity generally means zeal for My Notions as to what men should be and how they should live.'[154]
This, therefore, leads to the ultimate question: What, in the utilitarian phrase, is the 'sanction' of morality? Here his answer is, on one side at least, emphatic and unequivocal. Mill and the positivists, according to him,[155] propose an utterly unsatisfactory motive for morality. The love of 'humanity' is the love of a mere shadowy abstraction. We can love our family and our neighbours; we cannot really care much about the distant relations whom we shall never see. Nay, he holds that a love of humanity is often a mask for a dislike of concrete human beings. He accuses Mill of having at once too high and too low an opinion of mankind.[156] Mill, he thinks, had too low an estimate of the actual average Englishman, and too high an estimate of the ideal man who would be perfectly good when all restraints were removed. He excused himself for contempt of his fellows by professing love for an abstraction. To set up the love of 'humanity,' in fact, as a governing principle is not only impracticable, but often mischievous. A man does more good, as a rule, by working for himself and his family, than by acting like a 'moral Don Quixote,[157] who is capable of making love for men in general the ground of all sorts of violence against men in particular.' Indeed, there are many men whom we ought not to love. It is hypocrisy to pretend to love the thoroughly vicious. 'I do not love such people, but hate them,' says Fitzjames; and I do not want to make them happy, because I could only do so by 'pampering their vices.'[158]
Here, therefore, he reaches the point at which his utilitarian and his Puritanical prepossessions coincide. All law, says the utilitarian, implies 'sanctions'—motives equally operative upon all members of society; and, as the last resort, so far as criminal law is concerned, the sanction of physical suffering. What is the corresponding element in the moral law? To this, says Fitzjames, no positivist can give a fair answer. He has no reply to anyone who says boldly, 'I am bad and selfish, and I mean to be bad and selfish.'[159] The positivists can only reply, 'Our tastes differ.' The great religions have answered differently. We all know the Christian answer, and 'even the Buddhists had, after a time, to set up a hell.' The reason is simple. You can never persuade the mass of men till you can threaten them. Religions which cannot threaten the selfish have no power at all; and till the positivists can threaten, they will remain a mere 'Ritualistic Social Science Association.' Briefly, the utilitarian asks, What is the sanction of morality? And the Puritan gives the answer, Hell. Here, then, apparently, we have the keystone of the arch. What is the good of government in general? To maintain the law? And what is the end of the law? To maintain morality. And why should we maintain morality? To escape hell. This, according to some of his critics, was Fitzjames's own conclusion. It represents, perhaps in a coarse form, an argument which Fitzjames was never tired of putting since the days when he worked out the theory of hell at school.
It would, however, be the grossest injustice to him if I left it to be supposed for a moment that he accepted this version of his doctrine. He repudiated it emphatically; and, in fact, he modifies the doctrine so much that the real question is, whether he does not deprive it of all force. No one was more sensible of the moral objections to the hell of popular belief. He thought that it represented the Creator as a cruel and arbitrary tyrant, whose vengeance was to be evaded by legal fictions. Still, the absolute necessity of some 'sanction' of a spiritual kind seemed clear to him. Without it, every religion would fall to pieces, as every system of government would be dissolved without 'coercion.' And this is the final conclusion of his book in chapters with which he was, as I find from his letters, not altogether satisfied. He explains in the preface to his second edition that the question was too wide for complete treatment in the limits. Briefly the doctrine seems to be this. The Utilitarian or Positivist can frame a kind of commonplace morality, which is good as far as it goes. It includes benevolence and sympathy; but hardly gets beyond ordering men to love their friends and hate their enemies. To raise morality to a higher strain, to justify what it generally called self-sacrifice, to make men capable of elevated action, they require something more. That something is the belief in God and a future world. 'I entirely agree,' he says, 'with the commonplaces about the importance of these doctrines.'[160] 'If they be mere dreams life is a much poorer and pettier thing, and mere physical comfort far more important than has hitherto been supposed. Morality, he says, depends on religion. If it be asked whether we ought to rise beyond the average utilitarian morality, he replies, 'Yes, if there is a God and a future state. No, if there is no God and no future state.'[161] And what is to be said of those doctrines, the ultimate foundation, if not of an average morality, yet of all morality above the current commonplaces? Here we have substantially the religious theory upon which I have already dwelt. He illustrates it here by quotations from Mill, who admits the 'thread of consciousness' to be an ultimate inexplicability, and by a passage from Carlyle, 'the greatest poet of the age,' setting forth the mystery of the 'Me.' He believes in a Being who, though not purely benevolent, has so arranged the universe, that virtue is the law prescribed to his creatures. The law is stern and inflexible, and excites a feeling less of love than of 'awful respect.' The facts of life are the same upon any theory; but atheism makes the case utterly hopeless. A belief in God is inextricably connected with a belief in morality, and if one decays the other will decay with it. Still it is idle to deny that the doctrines are insusceptible of proof. 'Faith says, I will, though I am not sure; Doubt says, I will not, because I am not sure; but they both agree in not being sure.'[162] He utterly repudiates all the attempts made by Newman and others to get out of the dilemma by some logical device for transmuting a mere estimate of probabilities into a conclusion of demonstrable certitude. We cannot get beyond probabilities. But we have to make a choice and to make it at our peril. We are on a pass, blinded by mist and whirling snow. If we stand still, 'we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? "Be strong and of a good courage." Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. Above all let us dream no dreams and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever we may land, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter the next scene with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks on our faces.'[163]
A conclusion of this kind could commend itself neither to the dogmatist who maintains the certainty of his theories, nor to the sceptic who regards them as both meaningless and useless. I have dwelt upon them so long because they seem to me to represent a substantially logical and coherent view which commended itself to a man of very powerful intellect, and which may be presumed to represent much that other people hold less distinctly. The creed of a strong man, expressed with absolute sincerity, is always as interesting as it is rare; and the presumption is that it contains truths which would require to be incorporated in a wider system. At any rate it represents the man; and I have therefore tried to expound it as clearly as I could. I may take it for granted in such references as I shall have to make in the following pages to my brother's judgment of the particular events in which he took part. Mill himself said, according to Professor Bain,[164] that Fitzjames 'did not know what he was arguing against, and was more likely to repel than to attract.' The last remark, as Professor Bain adds, was the truest. Mill died soon afterwards and made no reply, if he ever intended to reply. The book was sharply criticised from the positivist point of view by Mr. Harrison, and from Mill's point of view by Mr. John Morley in the 'Fortnightly Review' (June and August 1873). Fitzjames replied to them in a preface to a second edition in 1874. He complains of some misunderstandings; but on the whole it was a fair fight, which he did not regret and which left no ill-feeling.
III. DUNDEE ELECTION
The last letter of the series had hardly appeared in the 'Pall Mall Gazette,' when Fitzjames received an application to stand for Liverpool in the Liberal interest. He would be elected without expense to himself. He thought, as he observes, that he should find parliamentary life 'a nuisance'; but a seat in the House might of course further both his professional prospects and his schemes of codification. He consulted Coleridge, who informed him that, if Government remained in office, a codification Commission would be appointed. Coleridge was also of opinion that, in that event, Fitzjames's claims to a seat on the Commission would be irresistible. As, however, it was intended that the Commissioners should be selected from men outside Parliament and independent of political parties, Fitzjames would be disqualified by an election for Liverpool. Upon this he at once declined to stand. A place in a codification Commission would, he said, 'suit him better than anything else in the world.' Coleridge incidentally made the remark, which seems to be pretty obvious, that the authorship of the letters upon 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' would be a rather awkward burthen for a Liberal candidate to carry.
For some time Fitzjames might hope, though he hoped with trembling, that something would come of his various codifying projects. It was reported that Mr. Bruce (Lord Aberdare) would introduce the Homicide Bill during Russell Gurney's absence. Coleridge was able after many delays to introduce the Evidence Bill. But it was crowded out of sight by more exciting measures, and it was only upon its final withdrawal on the last day of the session (August 5, 1873) that he could say a few words about it.[165] The Bill was apparently ordered to be printed, but never became public. It went to the parliamentary limbo with many of its brethren.