CHRISTIANITY AND MORALS.
Christianity based on morals—Origin of morality—Traced
in Judaism—Originates in evolution—Instance of
murder—Freedom of will—Will suspended in certain states of
brain—Hypnotism—Mechanical theory—Pre-established harmony—Human
and animal conscience—Analysis of will—Explained by
polarity—Practical conclusion.
The great advantage which Christianity possesses over most other
religions is that it is based to a much greater extent on the solid
foundation of an elevated morality. The creeds of ancient Egypt, of
Buddhism, and of Confucianism contain many excellent moral precepts;
and the injunctions to ‘do unto others as you would be done by,’ and
to ‘love your neighbour as yourself,’ are to be found long before the
Sermon on the Mount. But these religions in the main followed other lines
of development, and branched off either into metaphysical conceptions
or into formal rites and ceremonies. With the exception of Judaism, of
which Christianity is the lineal descendant, no religion has ever to the
same extent become to the great mass of its adherents a rule of conduct
and an incentive, strengthened by divine sanction, to lead pure and
upright lives. This is the sense in which Christianity has always been
understood by the vast majority of Christians, and its corruptions have
come much more from above than from below; from theologians, priests,
and politicians, than from the instincts of the millions; and this it
is which enables it to retain such a wonderful vitality even in modern
times, when faith in dogmas and miracles has been so greatly weakened.
In order to appreciate the solidity of this basis it is necessary to
understand the origin of morals, and to see that the fundamental precepts
of moral law are not mere chance inventions of a few exceptional minds,
or the teachings of doubtful revelations, but are the necessary growth
and products of human nature, in the course of the evolution of society
from rude beginnings to a high civilisation. This gives them a certainty
and sanction which could be derived from no other source, and makes them
what in fact they have become—almost primary instincts of the natural and
normal mind in civilised communities. I proceed, therefore, to endeavour
to trace shortly the process by which moral laws have originated and
grown up to their present certainty and cogency in the course of
evolution.
As I have already said, the element of morality is one of the latest to
be developed in religious conceptions. The first impressions of savage
races reflect the feelings of vague superstitious terror with which
they regard unknown phenomena and powers. They are afraid of ghosts and
afraid of thunder, long before they rise to a belief in a future state
of rewards and punishments, or to the notion of an almighty Being acting
by natural laws. In a higher state of development they personify natural
powers in gods, who have no more idea of morality than if they were so
many parallels of latitude or degrees of longitude; and they invent
tribal gods, who are simply great chiefs, bound by no laws, but granting
favours when appeased and inflicting injuries when angry. By slow
degrees, as civilisation advances, moral ideas are evolved, and the more
enlightened minds begin to attribute moral attributes to their deities.
Earnest men, prophets, and reformers take up these ideas and preach them
to the world, and, if circumstances are favourable and the soil prepared,
they take root and become popular convictions, surviving in the struggle
for life, and becoming stronger from generation to generation.
This evolution of moral ideas is most clearly traced in the religious
history of the Jews. In their earlier conceptions Jehovah is represented
with all the traits of a jealous and capricious Oriental sultan. The one
virtue in his eyes is implicit obedience; the one unpardonable crime,
anything that looks like disrespect. David is the man after God’s own
heart, though he commits crimes of the foulest description, and treats
as nullities the moral commandments against adultery and murder. But
when he takes a census of his people Jehovah is offended, and, with
a total disregard of justice, visits his anger, not on the offender,
but on the innocent people whom he decimates by a pestilence. In like
manner, Abraham is favoured because he is ready to obey the inhuman
command to sacrifice his son; while Saul loses Jehovah’s favour because
he hesitates to massacre his captives in cold blood. The first ideas
of a higher moral sense appear with the prophets in the troubled times
of the later kings—when poor little Palestine was being ground between
the upper millstone of Assyria and the nether one of Egypt. Sufferings
and persecutions, anxieties and tribulations, wrought a ferment in the
Jewish mind from which new ideas were generated. Sacrifices had been duly
offered, and yet the enemies of Jehovah waxed and his chosen people
waned. It must be that He was offended with them because He required
something better than the blood of bulls—justice and mercy. So taught
the popular preachers of the day—men like Isaiah and Amos—and by degrees
their words found acceptance. It was not, however, until the Captivity
that these ideas of morality were wrought into the Jewish nation so as
to become, so to speak, flesh of their flesh and blood of their blood,
as they have remained ever since. Whether it was contact with the more
advanced moral ideas of religions like those of Buddha and Zoroaster, or,
more probably, their sufferings from the cruelty and injustice of their
conquerors, the Captivity certainly made them a new nation, attached
ardently to morality and monotheism—thus effecting in a few years, and
by purely human agencies, what, according to received beliefs, centuries
of miraculous dispensation had failed to accomplish. How speedily and
how effectually the work was done appears from that most interesting
narrative of the domestic life of a middle-class Jew of Nineveh, the
Book of Tobit. The simple piety and homely household virtues are almost
identically the same as those of many a Jewish family living to-day in
London or Frankfort. From that time forward Jewish morality maintains
a high level, and in the age immediately preceding Christianity it had
attained great purity and spirituality in the school of the early doctors
of the Talmud, and of the Jewish colony of Alexandria. The Sermon on
the Mount, beautiful as it is, is but an admirable _résumé_ of maxims
which are to be found in the works of Philo and other Jewish teachers,
and which were current in the synagogues of the day. Hillel, who was
president of the Sanhedrin when Christ was born, when asked what was the
law, replied, ‘Do not unto another what thou wouldst not have another
do unto thee. This is the whole Law, the rest is mere commentary.’ And
again, ‘Do not judge thy neighbour until thou hast stood in his place.’
The Talmud anticipates in a wonderful degree not only the moral precepts
of the Gospel, but to a great extent its phraseology and technical
terms. ‘Redemption,’ ‘grace,’ ‘faith,’ ‘salvation,’ ‘Son of man,’ ‘Son
of God,’ ‘kingdom of heaven,’ were all, as Deutsch shows, not invented
by Christianity, but were household words of contemporary Judaism. In
one respect only Christianity shows a higher evolution of morality than
Judaism—viz. its universality. Pure Judaism hardly rises above the idea
of ‘neighbour,’ or those who were of the same race or common faith; while
Christianity, as enlarged by St. Paul, embraces all mankind, and may
truly say: ‘Humani nihil a me alienum puto.’
The idea that morality and religion are products of a slowly developing
evolution is denounced by many as degrading and materialistic. In many
the instinct of the ‘good’ is so strong that it seems to them sacrilege
to attempt to explain it. They insist that it is either a universal
instinct implanted from the first in all mankind, or else that it has
been so implanted by a divine revelation. They forget that, to use the
vigorous phraseology of Carlyle, ‘It matters not whether you call a thing
pan-theism or pot-theism; what really concerns us is to know whether it
is _true_.’ Now it admits of no question that, whether we like it or not,
the evolutionist theory of morality is the true one. Take an extreme
instance, that of murder. We feel an instinctive horror at the idea,
and even a brutal ruffian like Bill Sikes becomes an accursed thing to
himself and his companions when he has transgressed the commandment ‘Thou
shalt do no murder.’ But is it so everywhere, and was it so always? By
no means; the Fiji islander kills and eats a stranger or enemy without
scruple; the Red Indian and the Dyak are not accounted men until they
have murdered some one and brought home his scalp or his head as a
trophy. Even at a late period among ourselves murder was considered to be
rather as a civil injury, to be met by compensation, than as a crime; and
a regular tariff was established of the amount to be paid according as
the victim was a slave or a freeman.
The origin and progress of the idea that murder is a crime can almost
be traced step by step. The wife of a rude savage does something which
offends him; a violent perception of anger flashes from the visual organ
to the perceptive area of the brain, and a reflex action flashes from it
along the motor nerve to the muscles of the arm. He strikes and kills
her, almost as unconsciously and instinctively as he walks or breathes.
But other perceptions follow on the act. He finds next day that he has
no one to cook his food; the image of her dying face photographed on his
brain is an unpleasant one; and thus by degrees a series of secondary
perceptions get attached to the primary one of striking when he feels
angry. If he gets another wife who again provokes him, the primary
perception calls up the secondary ones, and the nerve-centres of his
brain, instead of being solicited only in one direction, are acted on
in opposite ways by conflicting impressions. He hesitates, and, as
the primary impulse of passion is probably the more evanescent, the
restraining impulses prevail, and every time they prevail they acquire
more strength. Gradually they extend to a conviction that it is both
inconvenient and disagreeable to kill any one with whom he is closely
related either by family or tribal ties, and that, in a word, murder
does not pay, and is wrong, unless practised on an enemy. This idea
accumulates by heredity, and evidently those tribes or races in whom it
is strongest will have an advantage in the struggle for life and be most
likely to survive.
From this point the idea may be traced historically, deepening and
widening from generation to generation as civilisation advances, until
in the higher races it assumes the form of an instinctive abhorrence of
murder in the abstract, as we find it at the present day.
It is a mistake to suppose that the foundations of morality are in any
way weakened by thus tracing them up to their first origins. On the
contrary, if we consider the matter rightly, they are placed on a much
more solid and unassailable basis. If we say that moral laws depend on
a universal instinct implanted in all mankind, faith in them is shaken
whenever we read in history, or hear from the report of travellers, of
whole nations, constituting from first to last the immense majority
of the human race, who had none of those ideas which we now consider
fundamental. If, again, we base them on divine precepts miraculously
conveyed, every discovery of science and development of thought which
weakens faith in miracles impairs the basis of morals. And on this
theory, hopeless contradictions arise within the sphere of those very
moral laws which we seek to establish; as in reconciling the justice and
mercy of the Creator in revealing this inspired code only to limited
portions of the human race, and under conditions which leave large scope
for legitimate doubt, and which, in point of fact, failed to ensure
recognition for its moral precepts among His own chosen people for a long
period after its promulgation.
But on the scientific theory of the evolution of morality by natural laws
it stands on an impregnable footing. No one can deny that, as a matter
of fact, such instincts do prevail, and have become part of the nature
of all the best men and best races, and that each successive generation
tends to fix them more firmly. Mathematical laws are not the less certain
because they can be traced back to counting on the fingers, and moral
laws will continue to have a certainty and cogency, scarcely inferior to
the axioms of mathematics, although we can trace them back to origins as
rude as the attempts of the Australian savage to extend his perceptions
of number beyond ‘one, two, and a great many.’
The real difficulty is not in tracing the origin of these instincts
of morality, but in that fundamental difficulty which underlies all
theories of reconciling the consciousness of free-will with the material
attributes with which it is indissolubly associated. Without freedom
of will there can be no conscience, no right or wrong in acting in
accordance or otherwise with the instincts of moral law, however those
instincts may have been derived. Now it is certain that the will, like
life, memory, consciousness, and other mental functions, is, so far as
human knowledge extends, indissolubly connected with matter and natural
laws, in the form of certain motions of the cells which form the grey
substance of the nerves and of the nervous ganglia of which the cortex
of the brain is the most considerable. This is conclusively proved by
experiment. We know that, by removing certain portions of the brain of a
dog or of a pigeon, we can destroy the power of motion while preserving
the will, and by removing certain other portions we can destroy the will
while preserving the powers of motion. Take away a certain portion of the
brain of a pigeon, and although it retains the power of taking food, it
has so totally lost the will to exercise this power that it will starve
in the midst of abundance, though it can be kept alive by placing the
food in its mouth. In like manner, in the human brain there are certain
portions which, if destroyed by injury or disease, will paralyse the
power of giving effect to the will by muscular movements, while the
destruction of other portions will paralyse the will which originates
such movements. Numerous cases are recorded in medical treatises in
which the will is completely paralysed for the performance of certain
functions, and in such cases the anatomist can lay his finger on the spot
where the brain is affected, and when the brain is dissected after the
death of the patient, it will be found that his prediction is verified,
and that this region of the brain really was diseased. In sleep also,
and in abnormal states of the brain such as somnambulism, and mesmerism
or hypnotism, the action of the will is suspended. Hypnotism affords the
most remarkable instances, for here the will seems to be transferred from
the Ego or individuality of the patient to that of the operator, and the
currents of nervous energy which induce motion in A are set going by
impulses in the mind of A, not caused by his own will, but by that of B,
conveyed by words, gestures, or other subtle indications. A ludicrous
instance of this is recorded by Dr. Braid, in which an old lady, who had
a true puritanical abhorrence of dancing as sinful, being hypnotised,
began capering about the room when a waltz tune was struck up, on being
told to do so by the operators.
There are some other curious effects produced by hypnotism, in the way of
inducing a sort of double consciousness and memory, which makes people in
this condition totally forget things which they remember when awake, and
remember things which were totally forgotten in the waking state.
These and a variety of other instances point to the conclusion that
man is only a conscious machine. In other words, that the original
impress, to use Dr. Temple’s words, was so perfect that it provided a
pre-established harmony not only for the innumerable phenomena of the
material universe as unfolded by evolution, but for the still more
innumerable phenomena of life in all its manifestations and all its
complex relations to outward environment. I say of _life_, for we clearly
cannot confine the theory to human life. A dog, who with the two courses
before him of doing wrong and chasing a rabbit, or doing right and
remaining at his master’s heel, chooses one of them, is in exactly the
same position as Hercules between the rival attractions of virtue and
pleasure. If Hercules acted as a machine, yielding to the pre-established
preponderance of the stronger attraction, so did the dog; but if Hercules
exerted free-will and felt the approval or blame of conscience, so did
the retriever. There is no fundamental distinction, but merely a question
of degree, between human conscience and the shame which a dog feels when
it knows that it has done wrong, and the pleasure which it manifests
when conscious that it has behaved properly.
Shall we thus conclude, as Leibnitz and other great philosophers have
done, in favour of the mechanical theory? But if we do, how are we to
account for the instinctive ineradicable feeling, which comes home to
every one with a conviction even stronger than the evidence of the
senses, that we really have a choice between opposite courses, and can
decide on our own actions—a conviction which is obviously the foundation
of all conscience and of all morality?
Let us try to analyse more closely what Will really means, and under what
conditions it is manifested. The circuit which connects any one single
perception with action, through sensory nerve, sensory centre, motor
centre, motor nerve and muscle, is as purely mechanical as that of an
electric circuit. Reflex motions such as breathing, and even more complex
motions which by repetition have become reflex or instinctive, are also
mechanical and involve no exercise of will. But when perceptions become
complex, and one primary evokes a number of secondary perceptions—in
other words, when the cells of the corresponding portions of grey matter
in the cortex of the brain are set vibrating by a variety of complex
and conflicting molecular motions, the feeling of free-will inevitably
arises. We feel the conviction that there is a something which we call
soul, mind, or in the last analysis, ‘I myself I,’ which sits, as Von
Moltke might do, in a cabinet receiving conflicting telegraphic messages
from different generals, and deciding then and there what order to flash
out in reply.
What can we say to this? That it is like space and time, one of the
categories of thought, or primary moulds in which thought is cast. We do
not know what space and time really are in their essence, or why they are
the necessary conditions of thought, any more than we do in the case of
will. They may be illusions, but we accept them, and of necessity accept
them, as facts. For all practical purposes it is the same to us, as if
we understood their essence and knew them to be realities. A man can no
more doubt that he is an individual being, with a will which, in a great
many cases, enables him to decide which of a variety of impulses shall
prevail, than he can hesitate, if he is furnishing a room, to regulate
his purchase of carpeting and paper by space of three dimensions, without
regard to possible speculations as to quaternions.
Perhaps the principle of polarity may assist us in understanding that
both theories may be true; or rather that matter and spirit, necessity
and free-will, may be opposite poles of one fundamental truth which is
beyond our comprehension. We cannot shake off this principle of polarity,
and arrive at any knowledge, or even conception, of the absolute truth
in regard to the atoms, energies, and natural laws, which make up the
universe of matter and of all the ordinary and material functions of
life; why should we expect to do so in the higher manifestations of the
same life, which have been arrived at in the later stages of one unbroken
course of evolution from monad to man?
This, at any rate, is the theory which best satisfies my own mind and
enables me to reduce my own individual chaos into some sort of a cosmos.
I draw from it the following conclusions:—
For all practical purposes assume that ‘right is right,’ and that the
moral instincts, however they have been formed, are imperative laws.
Assume also that
Man is man and master of his fate,
and that we have, to a great extent, the power of deciding what to do and
what not to do. But in doing so, keep the mind open to all conclusions
of science, and admit freely that these assumptions are indissolubly
connected with natural laws and with material organs, and that man
is to a very great extent dependent on his environment and his place
in evolution, both for his moral code and for the force of will and
conscience which enable him to conform to it. Learn therefore the lesson
of a large toleration and of charity in thought and deed, towards those
who, from inherited constitution or unfortunate conditions of education
and outward circumstances, fall under the sway of the principle of evil,
and lead bad, useless, and unlovely lives. Had you and I, reader, been in
their place, should we have done better?