It seemed, as it were, to have been somehow prepared beforehand and to lie latent awaiting only the right touch to spring into action. Finally, Herbert Spencer, who may be said to have brought all this line of thinking to its climax, seized on the evolution doctrine as explaining this intuitive and innate quality of ethical feeling. It was prepared beforehand, far back in the ancestry of the race. Not the punishments and rewards applied to the modern individual in his own person, but those which affected his near and remote progenitors, had, in the course of countless generations, built up “moral perceptions” resulting from “inherited modifications caused by accumulated experiences.”[144] The moral sense, therefore, is now really innate because inherited, but was once acquired by the operation of pleasures and pains arising from man’s intercourse with nature and with his fellows. And the ultimate moral criterion in the present day remains simply the striking of a balance between pleasure and pain.[145]
It is clear that if the Lamarckian doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is a delusion, the bottom is at once knocked out of the Spencerian system of ethics. But apart from this, that system, on the historical side at least, is vitiated by the cardinal defect in Mr. Spencer’s mind—his failure to appreciate the true nature of the data with which he had to deal. The philosophic mind is not a mere logic-machine. It must include the faculty of vision, the vital perception of the objects of thought, as well as the faculty of observing and of generalizing about their action and reaction on each other, and from this point of view Mr. Spencer’s deficiency as a philosopher is enormous. A vital perception of the object in this case makes us at once aware that you cannot evolve a sense of Duty, “stern daughter of the voice of God,” out of pleasures and pains. Pleasures and pains per se will yield nothing to the end of the chapter but the sense or the recollection of pleasure and of pain. It is as impossible in psychology as it is in mechanics to juggle more power out of the end of a sequence of causes and effects than you put in at the beginning.
But what has a natural ethics to put in the place of pleasure as the goal of right action? The question is answered when we ask, What does Nature herself put? Nature is said to have no morals, yet a mother bird will imperil and often lose its life for the sake of its young. Is it seeking pleasure then? Certainly not—it is protecting and fostering life, the life of the race. And here, as we have insisted so often, is the master-impulse of nature. We are taking a false and contracted view when we assume that a living thing can have no other goal of action except pleasure. Far earlier than the appearance of man in the world is the appearance of the social instinct which prompts the individual to live, and if necessary to die, for the larger life of the race. What really begins in man is the power to think of himself, to choose, to analyze, the power to say, Why? To this question the science of ethics must provide an answer if it can—that, in fact, is its origin and function. But if it binds itself to provide an answer in terms of pleasure, it is entering the lists with naked Egotism at a fatal disadvantage. On that ground, it seems to me, Egotism must always win. But it is not the only ground. Nature knows a whole world of impulse and effort which has nothing to do with pleasure. Nature does not directly want pleasure at all, but is resolved, at the cost of pleasure and everything else, to have life. Now life is maintained at its highest point by harmony—a harmony of the faculties with each other and, as a whole, with the mighty life outside them. And, as Santayana admirably says, “harmony when made to rule in life gives reason a noble satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear.”[146] In this sense we may say that happiness is organically connected with right action.[147] But right action in itself is simply the action which best subserves the central purpose of nature. If that purpose is summed up in the one word Life, we must think of the moral sense, if we would not go astray and be bewildered, in terms of living and not in terms of enjoying. To take the greatest of exemplars, who can venture to affirm that Christ had more pleasure living as he did and uttering to the last syllable the message that was given him to deliver, than if he had prudently restrained himself and led the life of a decent and respectable artisan in his Syrian village? Indeed, even if we take very long views, who can affirm that, on the whole, he has by his life and death increased the sum of pleasure in the world? I doubt it very much. No one can deny that it is most questionable. To think of the matter in terms of pleasure seems to lead to nothing but perplexity and doubt. But there can be no doubt whatever that he lived to the full the life that it was in him to live, and that he immensely deepened and enriched the spiritual life of man. When we fix our minds on life as the goal and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified. But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that I think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline, or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. Whoever has done this will feel as if he had escaped from a jungle of contradiction and gloom, where man can only live at all by clearing some little space for his church and his homestead, and giving up the rest to the powers of darkness. Yet a step brings him to a point of view from which the physical, the animal and the human features of the world’s vast landscape seem to flow into a happy and organic union, where every part becomes luminous with meaning and charged with divine purpose.
Moral action then, I conceive, as a certain kind of life-promoting action. It is action which promotes life in the whole as opposed to the part, which sacrifices the lower, narrower, more immediate life for the fuller, nobler, more permanent life, whenever they are found to clash. It does not differ in kind from other wholesome vital action, but it differs in the heightening, the saliency, the intention conferred upon it by the circumstances under which it is taken. And if we ask how it was evolved in man, the answer is that it was there already in the instincts of the lower animals, which are never, as man often so sadly is, at odds with their true functions and duties. It is not morality which has been evolved in man, but the capacity for immorality, due to his personal self-consciousness.
The ultimate question, then, as regards the abstract morality of any act or class of acts must be, Does it make for life? Does it tend to help man towards the maximum development of all his faculties and capacities? These faculties and capacities are what the universe has now evolved at the highest level of which we have any knowledge. None of them is evil, except in so far as it may thwart and stunt the development of others. In the harmony of the whole range of man’s powers of sense and spirit lies the golden ideal which none of us may realize, but for which each of us may strive; or—for such is the supreme and fatal prerogative of man—which he may set himself to dishonour and deny.
CHAPTER IX
THE ETHICAL SANCTION