“Far, far, how far? from o’er the gates of Birth,
The faint horizons, all the bounds of earth.”
Tennyson.
Ethical philosophy centres on two main points—the ethical criterion and the ethical sanction. We have to ask ourselves, What kind of life ought I to live, and secondly, Why ought I to live it? The first of these questions we have answered simply thus: Life is self-justified; in merely living we fulfil the whole purpose of nature; and as life is a thing admitting of degrees it follows that that life is best in which there is most of life. But this does not mean apparent life for the individual at the present moment. It means most life for the Whole, so far as the individual acts upon the Whole. And he acts on it in two ways—first (one which is often overlooked) by living his own life which is equally a part of that Whole whether he lives on a desert island or in the heart of a city; and secondly by the influence he radiates on other lives with which his own is socially related.
This, it is clear, is quite the same thing as to say that the right life for any man is that in which for him there is most of life—the richest and the fullest life—if he were to go on living indefinitely. For whatever depresses or exalts life in the Whole must ultimately depress or exalt it in the individual also; the two interests are clearly identical in the long run. This ‘long run’ or universal point of view, which makes identical the interests of the Whole and the interests of the individual, gives to a natural ethics the criterion for all human action. It gives the contents, though not the cogency—with this we have to deal in the present chapter—of the word ‘ought.’
By the mere fact of his social relations with other men each individual is continually being trained to take this view, to harmonize together his egoistic and his altruistic instincts; and is continually amassing a store of social experiences out of which a universal moral code is gradually shaping itself. “Life,” it has been well said, “has saved up much wisdom.” Ethical wisdom, in this regard, will clearly involve such kind of action, of organization, as will afford to each individual the fullest opportunities for vital development in mind and body.
The life in which there is most of life! By holding fast to this clue we shall, I think, see our way through many of the obscurities in which, partly by the search for an extra-natural basis of morality, partly by the reactionary attempt to base morality simply on the striking of a balance between pleasures and pains, the philosophy of right and wrong has been involved. We get a natural basis for establishing a scale in human action, a distinction between ‘higher’ and ‘lower,’ without which a philosophic ethics is clearly impossible. I do not, of course, mean to say that it is possible to apply a mechanical rule and measure to moral action in the manner of Catholic casuistry, according to which it is a venial sin to steal 19s. 6d. but a mortal sin to steal £1.[148] Still, the existence of a natural scale is evident at once when we consider the fact that man is constantly being placed in positions in which his action may either thwart and depress life, or simply maintain it, or markedly enrich and extend it. The ethical quality of his action appears to arise from the fact that it is possible for him, under the impulse of immediate personal gratification, to do things which if commonly done by men would destroy the beauty and order of human life. The interests of the whole and of the individual may be identical, as we have said, in the long run, but at the moment they are often in violent conflict. Allowing for the fact that it is never possible in nature to draw a sharp dividing line between different classes of being, and to say absolutely that things are thus on one side of it and thus on the other, we may repeat that this opposition between the long-run or universal and the momentary or personal interest is a characteristic of human life as opposed to that of the lower animals. It arises from the strong sense of individuality, of selfhood, which emerges in man and of which the animals know little or nothing. In itself it is a new and noble power of life, but it has its fatal and mischievous aspect. Without it we should know neither good nor evil. Personality is at once man’s pride and his fall.
With this sense of selfhood there have grown up in humanity the faculties of Conscience and of Will. Conscience I interpret as the sense of what is due to the Whole, to the nobler and more permanent self. Inasmuch as man is only gradually discovering what it really is that the Whole demands of us, it follows that the utterances of conscience may be misdirected, and that they need to be corrected and purified by intelligence and experience. We see here an example of that principle of the combination of evolution and involution which alone seems to make intelligible the development of life. Never, by organizing into a social system a multitude of individual appetencies, can one produce a moral sense, a conscience. But neither is conscience concerned to give the true laws of that organization. It adds its peculiar numen, its sanctity, to every effort to
Set up a mark of everlasting light