_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a
question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself
consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
them is decided by {23} our will. Are our moral preferences true or
false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure
intellect decide? If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral
reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men
(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté
and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
better than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more be
refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we
stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The
sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.
Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of
questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of
mind between one man and another. _Do you like me or not?_--for
example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on
whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like
me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part
in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes {24} your liking
come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have
objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the
absolutists say, _ad extorquendum assensum meum_, ten to one your
liking never comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere
sanguine insistence of some man that they _must_ love him! he will not
consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain
kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so
it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions,
boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play
the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other
things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them
in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and
creates its own verification.
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is
because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the
other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result
is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its
existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in
one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a
commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on
this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing
is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave
enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter
can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a
movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him
up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at once
with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faith
in a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic
which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall. Yet
such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
regulate our lives!