One more illustration and I have done. Whoever believes as I do in the indefeasible sanctity of honestly acquired moveable property, is logically bound to hold equally sacred the rights of bequest and inheritance. With whatever is exclusively your own, you may surely do anything you please except harm; nor need even harm be excepted if it be done to yourself alone. If, indeed, you go the length of playing ducks and drakes with gold pieces, or of lighting cigars with bank-notes, you are likely enough to be stopped and placed under restraint as a lunatic, but it is clear that this will be done solely because you are presumed not to understand what you are doing, and not from any question as to your right to do it if you do understand, for there are plenty of things far more objectionable in themselves, only not implying a want of sanity, which you will be left perfectly at liberty to do. If you choose, in imitation of Cleopatra, to spoil your fish-sauce by mixing powdered pearls with it, or, in imitation of a certain Peruvian viceroy, to shoe your carriage horses with silver, no one will dream of interfering with you; any more than of preventing courtesans and other fine ladies from befouling their nether limbs by sweeping the dusty road with flounces of Brussels lace; or of preventing members of the Cobden Club from gorging themselves annually, at a cost of five guineas per paunch, in honour of the prince of practical economists. But property, which, however great the good it is capable of doing, you are at liberty to employ solely for your own hurt, you are, of course, at liberty to destroy, thereby preventing it, at least, from doing any more harm. The lesser right of abuse is plainly comprehended in the larger. And of that which is so absolutely your own that you may, if you please, wantonly waste or destroy it, you may, of course, transfer the ownership, thereby conveying to another person all your rights in it, and rendering it as unjust to interfere with the new owner's disposal of the property, as it would previously have been to interfere with yours. Moreover, since the gift is a purely voluntary act, you may, if you please, without impairing its validity, arrange that it shall begin to take effect from some future date instead of immediately; so that, by naming some date subsequent to your own decease, you will be converting the gift into an equally valid bequest. This, I submit, is decisive as to the iniquity of any legal limitation of testamentary power. The right of bequest is comprehended within and rests upon the same basis as the right of possession, so that, unless it would be just to pass a law depriving all persons of any property possessed by them in excess of a given amount, it would not be just to deprive them by law of the power of bequeathing the surplus.
The rights of inheritance obviously coincide precisely with those of bequest. Just so much as the testator parts with the legatee obtains. When the bequest is unconditional, the new owner whom it creates steps into the precise position which the previous owner has vacated. Often, however, a legacy is qualified by conditions, and, among others, by this, that the property bequeathed shall be held in trust for certain purposes. Now, if these purposes be socially noxious, society need not hesitate to set aside the will that has provided for them. Quite justifiably, society might annul the testamentary endowment of a hospital for fleas and lice, such as Bishop Heber, in his Indian tour, found existing at Baroach and at Surat, because those particular insect pests could scarcely be retained within the walls of their infirmary. Perhaps, too, society might be justified in similarly preventing the endowment of a hospital for superannuated dogs and cats; whether it would or not depending mainly on the awkward question whether such inferior animals have any rights inconsistent with human interests. Be this as it may, however, where human interests alone are concerned, the rights of conditional heirship present no ethical difficulty. When it is for purposes socially innocuous and affecting human beings alone that property is left in trust, it cannot be equitably diverted from those purposes without the consent of all the individuals whom the testamentary arrangements were intended to affect. It matters not how whimsical or preposterous the object enjoined may be; not even though it be a periodical dinner, cooked after the manner of the ancients, like the nauseous one at which Peregrine Pickle assisted; or instruction in alchemy or in Hindoo astronomy, or in the art of walking on one's head. Not until there remain no persons at once entitled under the will, and also wishing to partake of the banquet or the instruction, can one or the other be equitably discontinued? As long as there are any such persons left, to stop, without their consent and without adequately compensating them, arrangements, rights in which have been vested in them by bequest, would be as palpable a violation of justice as to pick their pockets of sums equivalent to their several interests, real or supposed, in the arrangements.
If scrupulous adherence to the principle thus laid down would heavily shackle the activity and seriously impair the immediate usefulness of Mr. Forster and his coadjutors in the Endowed School Commission, I am exceedingly sorry, but not in the least shaken in my conviction that the principle ought to be rigidly adhered to. If parochial or other communities are too stupid or too selfish to consent that school endowments under their charge shall be applied to purposes of more extensive utility than the founders contemplated, every effort should be made to persuade or to shame them into consenting, but without their consent the thing should on no account be done. On this point Utilitarianism and Anti-utilitarianism would, I apprehend, give identical counsel, the former condemning as impolitic what the latter denounced as unjust. The cause of national education would be ill served by any course calculated to discourage its future endowment by private testators, and nothing would be more likely to have that effect than arbitrary interference with the endowments of former testators.
The courteous reader may now be temporarily released, with fitting acknowledgment of his exemplary patience. It would be cruel to detain him with a recapitulation, without which he may readily trace for himself, in what has gone before, the outlines of a consistent body of anti-utilitarian ethics. In these there is little new, little that has not been anticipated by many an old-fashioned saw and antiquated apothegm—such as, Fiat justitia ruat cælum, 'Be just before you are generous,' and, I would fain add, 'Honesty is the best policy'—save that to that Utilitarianism may fairly lay equal claim. My modest ambition throughout this essay has been to vindicate some of the most momentous of primeval truths from the slights to which philosophy—not modern, indeed, but modernised and refurbished—is continually subjecting them, and I will not deny that I have modest assurance enough to believe that I have at least partially succeeded. I think I have shown that there are such things as abstract right and wrong, resting not on fancied intuition, but on a solidly rational basis, and supporting in turn abstract justice, whose guidance, whoever accepts it, will find to be as sure and as adequate as any that unassisted reason is capable of supplying. Anti-utilitarian justice never tries to look half-a-dozen different ways at once, never points at the same time in opposite directions, never issues contradictory mandates, never halts between two opinions. Her votaries, like other mortals, may often be in doubt as to accomplished facts; but, provided these be clear, their course is in general equally clear; there seldom remains aught to embarrass them. If they sincerely desire to ascertain what is due from them, they can seldom err, except on the right side, and they will never dream of disputing that whatever is due from them it must be their duty to do, without respect of consequences. These they will leave to the supreme controller of events, if they believe in one, and will leave to take their chance, if they do not so believe, feeling all the more certain in the latter case that to control events cannot, at any rate, be within their power. They never stop to calculate how much good may perhaps ensue if evil be done. Simple arithmetic, apart from faith, satisfies them that to add wrong to wrong cannot possibly augment the sum total of right. The prime article of their creed is the absolute obligation of paying debts—a piece of unworldly wisdom more than ever now to Jews a stumbling-block, and to Greeks foolishness, but not the less to all, whether Jews or Gentiles, who will accept it, a light to show through the mazes of life, a path so plainly marked that the foolishest of wayfaring men cannot greatly err therein.
CHAPTER II.
HISTORY'S SCIENTIFIC PRETENSIONS.
Warwick. There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceased;
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, which in their seeds,
And weak beginnings, lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time;
And, by the necessary form of this,
King Richard might create a perfect guess,
That great Northumberland, then false to him,
Would, of that seed, grow to a greater falseness,
Which should not find a ground to root upon,
Unless on you.
King Henry. Are these things, then, necessities?
King Henry IV. Part II. Act. 3, Sc. I.
When equally competent thinkers appear to take directly opposite views of a matter of purely speculative interest, it will commonly be found that their differences arise from their using the same words in different senses, or from their being, by some other cause, prevented from thoroughly apprehending each other's meaning. An illustration is afforded by the controversy regarding the possibility of constructing a Science of History, which could scarcely have been so much prolonged if all who have taken part in it had begun by defining their terms, had agreed to and adhered to the same definitions, and had always kept steadily in view the points really in debate. If the word 'science' had been used only in the restricted, though rather inaccurate sense in which it is sometimes employed by some of the most distinguished of the disputants, there would have been less question as to its applicability to history. No one doubts that from an extensive historical survey may be drawn large general deductions on which reasonable expectations may be founded. No one denies that the experience of the past may teach lessons of political wisdom for the guidance of the future. If it were not so, history would be as uninstructive as fairy lore; its chief use would be to amuse the fancy; and little more practical advantage could result from investigating the causes of the failure of James II.'s designs on civil and religious liberty, than from an inquiry into the artifices by which Jack-the-Giant-killer contrived to escape the maw of the monsters against whom he had pitted himself. What is commonly understood, however, by a Science of History is something far beyond the idea entertained of it by such temperate reasoners as Mr. John Stuart Mill and Mr. Fitzjames Stephen. The science, for the reality of which M. Comte in France and Mr. Buckle in England have been the foremost champions, would bear the same relation to political events as Optics and Astronomy do to the phenomena of light and of the solar and sidereal systems. It would deal less with the conjectural and probable than with the predicable and positive. 'In the moral as in the physical world,' say its leading advocates, 'are invariable rule, inevitable sequence, undeviating regularity,' constituting 'one vast scheme of universal order.' 'The actions of men, and therefore of societies, are governed by fixed eternal laws,' which 'assign to every man his place in the necessary chain of being,' and 'allow him no choice as to what that place shall be.' One such law is that, 'in a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own lives:' another, that a certain number of persons must commit murder; a third, that when wages and prices are at certain points, a certain number of marriages must annually take place, 'the number being determined not by the temper and wishes of individuals, but by large general facts, over which individuals can exercise no authority.' These are general laws; but the special question as to who shall commit the crimes or the indiscretion enjoined by them, 'depends upon special laws, which, however, in their total action must obey the large social law to which they are all subordinate.' A Science of History would consist of a collection of 'social laws,' duly systematised and codified, by the application of which to given states of society the historical student might predict the future course of political events, with a confidence similar to that with which he could foretell the results of familiar chemical combinations, or the movement of the planets.[22]
This is the theory which a few years ago was so much discussed, and against which, notwithstanding the singular fascination it evidently possesses for some minds, the moral sense of a much larger number indignantly revolts, rightly apprehending that its establishment would be subversive of all morality. For, if the actions of men are governed by 'eternal and immutable laws,' men cannot be free agents; and where there is not free agency there cannot be moral responsibility. Nor are the apprehensions entertained on this score to be allayed by the answer, ingenious as it is, which has been given to them[23] by one of the ablest and most judicious apologists for the new creed. It is true that human actions can be said to be 'governed' only in the same metaphorical sense as that in which we speak of the laws of nature, which do not really govern anything, but merely describe the invariable order in which natural phenomena have been observed to occur. It is true that the discovery of invariable regularity in human affairs, supposing such a discovery to have been made, would not prove that there was any necessity for such regularity. It is conceivable that the orbs of heaven may be intelligent beings, possessing full power to change or to arrest their own course, and moving constantly in the same orbits merely because it pleases them to do so. Invariable regularity, therefore, would be perfectly consistent with free agency. All this is perfectly just, but it is also altogether beside the question. The offence given by the writers on whose behalf the apology is set up consists not so much in their asserting that there are, as in their insisting that there must be, uniformity and regularity in human affairs; or, as Mr. Buckle expresses it, that social phenomena 'are the results of large and general causes which, working on the aggregate of society, must produce certain consequences, without regard to the volition of the particular men of whom the society is composed.' Now, though free agency may co-exist with invariable regularity, it obviously cannot co-exist with necessary regularity, which, consequently, is incompatible likewise with moral responsibility. If men are compelled by the force of circumstances, or by any force, to move only in one direction, they cannot be responsible for not moving in a different direction. Nor is it more to the purpose to undertake a subtle analysis of the nature of causation, and to explain that it does not, properly speaking, involve compulsion, but simply means invariable antecedence. Let it be that a cannon-ball does not really knock down the wall against which it strikes, and that it would be more correct to say that the ball impinges and the wall falls; though, seeing that the wall would not have fallen unless the ball had impinged, the distinction is too nice for ordinary apprehension. As understood, at any rate, by the joint headmasters of the new school, causation does involve compulsion. 'Men's actions,' say they, 'are the product not of their volition, but of their antecedents,' and 'result from large and general causes which must produce certain consequences.' Neither, if this be so, is it of any avail to suggest that, possibly, the large and general causes in question may be of only temporary operation. 'It may be that the rules,' in accordance with which the sun has hitherto risen every morning since the creation of the world, 'will hold good only for a time.' It may be that the springs, whatever they are, by which the universe is kept in motion, may require to be periodically wound up like the works of a clock, and that, unless this be done, 'on some particular day out of many billions,' the sun may fail to rise, just as the clock, if suffered to run down, would stop on the eighth day. The conjecture would, of course, be not less applicable to social than to natural laws. It is conceivable that the large general causes assumed to regulate human actions might lose their efficacy at the end of a certain cycle, when mankind might either have to recommence a social revolution similar to the one just completed, or might have to begin an entirely different revolution under entirely different laws. Be it so. Still, if the causes, as long as they remained in operation, possessed a compulsory character—if, during the continuance of the supposed cycle, men were bound to act in a certain way in accordance with certain laws, and irrespectively of their own volition—what would it matter that those laws were not eternal and immutable? For the time being men would no more be free agents than the hands of a clock, while the clock was wound up. Both would be constrained to move in a prescribed direction, whether they would or no. Men in such circumstances might well be likened, as by Mr. Buckle they are likened, to links in a chain, but few would be prevented from joining in Mr. Goldwin Smith's eloquent protest against the comparison, by being told that the chain perhaps was not an endless one.