The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
When your ordinary doctor of {186} divinity has proved to his own
satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The
familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this
question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I will
therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,--that
the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will
unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all
our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely
psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of
drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in
incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
discords and harmonies as these.
Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses
between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the
coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing
_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say. {188} 'Experience'
of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_? If a man has
shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an
impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how
hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as
the fruit of such a bargain? To what, once more, but subtile
brain-born feelings of discord can be due all these recent protests
against the entire race-tradition of retributive justice?--I refer to
Tolstoi with his ideas of non-resistance, to Mr. Bellamy with his
substitution of oblivion for repentance (in his novel of Dr.
Heidenhain's Process), to M. Guyau with his radical condemnation of the
punitive ideal. All these subtileties of the moral sensibility go as
much beyond what can be ciphered out from the 'laws of association' as
the delicacies of sentiment possible between a pair of young lovers go
beyond such precepts of the 'etiquette to be observed during
engagement' as are printed in manuals of social form.
No! Purely inward forces are certainly at work here. All the higher,
more penetrating ideals are {189} revolutionary. They present
themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in
that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the
environment and the lessons it has so far taught as must learn to bend.
This is all I can say of the psychological question now. In the last
chapter of a recent work[2] I have sought to prove in a general way the
existence, in our thought, of relations which do not merely repeat the
couplings of experience. Our ideals have certainly many sources. They
are not all explicable as signifying corporeal pleasures to be gained,
and pains to be escaped. And for having so constantly perceived this
psychological fact, we must applaud the intuitionist school. Whether
or not such applause must be extended to that school's other
characteristics will appear as we take up the following questions.
The next one in order is the metaphysical question, of what we mean by
the words 'obligation,' 'good,' and 'ill.'