"Are God and nature, then, at strife,
That nature lends such evil dreams?"
But they have not weakly refused to believe in God because they could not comprehend his works. They saw the evil; but the deepest instincts of the soul—the longing for immortal life, the craving for the unattainable, the thirst for a knowledge never given, the sense of the emptiness of what seems most real; the mother-ideas of human reason—those of being, of cause, of the absolute, the infinite, the eternal, the sense of the all-beautiful, the all-perfect—made them fall
"Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,"
and stretch hands of faith, and trust the larger hope.
We do not propose to offer any arguments to prove that God is, or to show that his existence is reconcilable with the evil in the world, since Mill has not attempted to establish the contradictory of this; but we wish merely to state that his apprehension of the difficulties which surround this question is not keener than that of thousands of others who have seen no connection between apprehending these difficulties and doubting the doctrines to which they are attached. Whilst admitting that science can never prove that there is no God, Mill evidently intended his Autobiography to be an argument against the usefulness of belief in God for moral and social purposes; "which," he tells us, "of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation very generally take refuge in an optimistic deism—a worship of the order of nature and the supposed course of Providence—at least as full of contradictions and perverting to the moral sentiments as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it is as fully realized."[256] Confessing the inability of the scientists to prove that there is no God, he thinks that they should devote their efforts to the attempt to show that belief in God is not beneficial either to the individual or to society. We shall, therefore, turn to the question of morality, which is enrooted in metaphysics, out of which it grows, and to which it is indebted both for its meaning and its strength.
Can the atheistic philosophy give to morality a solid basis? To deny the existence of an infinitely perfect Being is to affirm that there is no absolute goodness, no moral law, eternal, immutable, and necessary, no act that in itself is either good or bad, no certain and fixed standard of right and wrong.
Hence atheistic philosophy can give to morality no other foundation than that of pleasure or utility:
"Atque ipsa utilitas justi prope mater et aequi,
Nec natura potest justo secernere iniquum."
And, in fact, this has been the doctrine, we may say, of all those who have denied the existence of God.
Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Helvetius, Volney, and the whole Voltairean tribe in France, have all substantially taken this view of the question of morality; and Mill's opinion on the subject did not, except in form, differ from theirs. His father was the friend of Bentham, an advocate of the utilitarian theory of morality, which he applied to civil and criminal law; and young Mill became an enthusiastic disciple of the Benthamic philosophy.