True, Kant contradicts himself, for after having sternly excluded from his doctrine all utility as the end of Morality, all trace of feeling from moral action, he smuggles blissful happiness in by a back door; the result of submission to the moral law and its dutiful fulfilment, he declares, will be bliss. Bliss, however you interpret it, is a pleasurable emotion. Whether you act morally with the declared intention of attaining the pleasurable emotion of bliss, or whether this pleasurable emotion comes of its own accord as an undesired reward when you have acted morally merely from a feeling of duty, without a thought for such a result, without a wish to attain it, it makes no difference to the fact that moral action actually meets with a reward. Kant does not openly promise this, but with a wink he whispers in your ear that there is a prospect of it.
Nor does it alter the further fact that Kant, having contemptuously expelled Eudæmonism from his system, reinstates it with full honours. Once it has been conceded that moral conduct makes man blissful, in other words gives him a reward, the categorical imperative also has a sanction, albeit a very insufficient one. He who fulfils the moral law attains bliss; that is a spur whether you admit it or not. But he who does not fulfil it loses this advantage, otherwise, however, nothing happens to him. The sanction, therefore, is onesided. A reward is offered for the fulfilment of the moral law, but there is no punishment for its non-fulfilment. For it is no penalty if bliss is withheld from him who has no conception of it and no desire for it. No matter, then, if the moral law be eternal and immutable as the stars above us, if it be categorical, if it be fulfilled, not owing to a conception of its effect, not from liking for this effect, but from an inner necessity, it ceases to be a living force for mankind or to have any practical significance; for the single thread which unites it with human feelings—the whispered, vague promise of bliss—is too thin. Feeling which has no knowledge of this misty bliss, and therefore no yearning for it, is uninfluenced by the categorical moral law. Reason is not necessarily convinced that it is right and valid. The moral law abides like the stars with which it is arbitrarily compared, itself a star in airless space, pursuing its course regardless of humanity, having no relation to it or connexion with it; regard for or disregard of the moral law makes no perceptible difference, and it ceases to have any but a kind of astronomical interest for mankind, a purely theoretical interest for purposes of scientific observation and calculation, and is in no way applicable to the feelings, thoughts and actions of men.
Theological Morality adopts a widely different point of view. Its logic compels it to provide the most effective sanctions. God is the lawgiver of Morality. He prescribes with dictatorial omniscience what is good, what is bad, what should be practised and what avoided. Obedience earns a glorious reward, revolt entails the most terrible punishment. Reward and punishment are eternal, or may in certain circumstances be so, and this, by the way, is cruelty which ill accords with the universal goodness ascribed to God. For human understanding will never be persuaded, will never be able to grasp, that a sinner, however grave and numerous his sins committed during the brief period of the fleeting life of man, can ever deserve an eternity of the most fearful punishment. The lack of proportion between the deed and the penalty is so monstrous that it is felt to be the gravest injustice, against which both Reason and feeling revolt. Imagination can conceive hell fire that lasts a certain time and has an aim, like life with its praiseworthy and wicked deeds, but it boggles at the idea of a hell from which there is no escape and the agonies of which are endless.
The Old Testament conceives the sanctions of the moral law enunciated by God in a thoroughly realistic manner. Fulfil the commandment "that thy days may be long in the land." If you disobey, the curse of the Lord will be on you and you will be pursued by His anger unto the fourth generation. Christianity considered it dubious to make this life the scene of reward and punishment. It is imprudent to let divine justice rule here below, so to say, in public, before an audience and representatives of the Press who attentively follow the proceedings, watch all its details, and can judge whether the verdict is put into execution. Prudence demands that the trial should take place in the next world, where it is protected from annoying curiosity. Mocking onlookers cannot then observe that it is only in the dramas of noble-minded poets that in the last act vice is inevitably punished and virtue rewarded, while in real life only too often merit starves, suffers humiliation and poverty and altogether leads a miserable existence, while sin flourishes in an objectionable manner and to the very end revels in all the good things of this earth. However, the religious moralists painted such a vivid and arresting picture of what awaits the sinners in the next world, that if men had not been obdurate in their disbelief they must have shudderingly realized it, as if it actually happened in this world. Words from the pulpit admonishing men to obey God's law under penalty of most terrible punishment were greatly emphasized by the paintings and sculpture over the altars and the church doors, where all the tortures of hell were depicted by great artists who put all their imagination and all their genius into the work.
As innumerable people have testified, these representations were taken so literally, not only by the simple-minded masses but also by the more highly educated, that they were haunted by them, waking and sleeping, and imagined that in their own flesh they felt the torture of flames, of boiling pitch, of the prick of the pitchfork as the devil turned them on the grid, of the teeth with which the spirits of hell tore their flesh from their bones. The fear of hell poisoned many a life up till quite recently, especially in Scotland, and kept people in a constant state of agitation and anguish which occasionally rose to mad despair. It is remarkable that only punishment was so impressively held up to man's view, but not reward. Pictures of paradise are much less rich and varied than those of hell, and its joys are peculiarly modest. The inventive powers of painters, sculptors, and poets did not rise above a beautifully illuminated hall where the blessed are ranged around God's throne and with folded hands sing hymns of praise to Him, while angels play an accompaniment on trumpets and fiddles. A prayer meeting, a choir and a concert of music, that is all that Christian eschatology holds out as an eternal reward to virtue. It redounds to its credit that it assumes a sufficiently modest taste among the good to make them long for these joys and find infinite happiness in them.
Islam does not count on such moderation. The joys of paradise that it promises are so crudely sensual that they may well arouse lust in coarse natures, and can counterbalance the fear of hell fire. The ideas of the reward of merit in the hereafter held by the northern nations, Germans and Scandinavians, are just as low and coarse. For the Mohamedans paradise is a harem; for the worshippers of Odin it is a pot-house where there are free drinks and a jolly brawl to end up with. Heroes who fall in battle—they knew no virtues but a warlike spirit and contempt of death—enter Valhalla, where they partake of the everlasting orgies of the gods, drink unlimited quantities of mead and beer, and fight for them to their heart's content without taking any harm. The North American Indians hope, after leading a model life, to be gathered to the Great Spirit, and in the happy hunting grounds of heaven evermore to kill abundant game. Only Buddhism comforts the virtuous man with finer and more spiritual hopes. From out his world of weariness and pessimism it opens up the prospect of Nirvana to him, that is, of the end of all feeling, which after all can only be painful, and of all thought, which after all is only melancholy and despair, and of the volatilization of the personality, the only real release; while it condemns the sinner to the worst punishment, continued existence in ever new incarnations.
These are indeed extraordinarily vigorous sanctions, which, though they fail to have any effect on the unbeliever, make a very deep impression on the believer, and are well fitted to determine his actions. But they imply a debasement of the motives for leading a moral life, which are no longer the outcome of insight and a convinced desire for good, but the result of fear and avidity, a speculation for profit, a prudent flight from danger. The practice of morality becomes a safe investment for the father of a family who hopes to find his savings augmented by interest in the hereafter, and the avoidance of vice becomes a schoolboy's fear of punishment. Nevertheless, the view is widely held by superficial, practical men that these imaginary and deceptive sanctions of Morality cannot be dispensed with, that only the fear of hell can keep the masses from giving themselves up to every form of vice and crime, that only the promise of paradise is capable of inducing them to act unselfishly and make sacrifices, and that all bonds of discipline would be loosened if they ceased to believe in a last judgment and an hereafter with its rewards and punishments.
This whole system of sanctions in a future life is a transcendental projection (according with primitive, childlike thought) of immanent practices and forms in the positive administration of justice which are transferred to a class of actions that successfully evade it. Traditional and customary Law, as well as written Law, puts its whole emphasis on sanctions; it partakes itself of the nature of a sanction. Without sanctions it has no meaning. It is not kindly counsel, nor fatherly admonition, nor wise advice, it is a stern command, it is coercion, and this arouses only scorn if it is not armed with the means to make itself a reality to which the unwilling must also submit, because they cannot help themselves. There is no law, there can be no law, which is not supplemented by arrangements that make it binding for everyone.
In the British House of Commons it has been customary for many hundred years to designate members as the representatives of their particular constituency. Only if a member commits a grave offence against the rules of the House does he run the risk of the Speaker's calling him by name, but this case has not arisen within the memory of man. A disrespectful Irish member of Parliament, urged by perverse curiosity, asked the Speaker one day: "What would happen if you called me by my name?" The Speaker thought for a short time and then answered with impressive gravity: "I have no idea, but it must be something terrible." Such a mysterious threat of an unknown catastrophe may suffice for a picked assembly whose members would no doubt maintain order and observe all the rules of parliamentary decency, even if they were not held in check by the fear of some dark danger. It would not be sufficient by a long way to guarantee the rule of Law in a society which includes individuals of the most varied disposition, mind development, education and strength of impulse.
Positive Law, as I have shown, presents a very simplified excerpt of Morality for the use of coarser natures. It is a summary of the minimum of self-denial, consideration for one's fellow men, and the feeling of joint responsibility, the observance of which the community must pitilessly demand from all its members if it is to continue to exist and not fall back within a very short time into the state of Hobbes's war of all against all. The necessity of self-preservation makes it a duty for the community to provide for the case that one of its members refuses to accept the minimum of discipline and to recognize the claims of another personality. The community prevents this revolt, which would frustrate its aim and endanger its existence, by employing physical force to break all resistance to the Law which it must, for the common weal, impose on all its members. That is an extraneous compulsion that certainly has something brutal and unworthy of man about it and may well arouse discomfort in more highly developed minds. It would undoubtedly be more dignified and better if there were no need for the handcuffs of the police, for prison cells and executioners, if man's own insight and the admonition of his conscience were enough to constrain everyone to respect the Law, that is, to practise a minimum of Morality.