III.

The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the

_casuistic_ question. Here we are, in a world where the existence of a

divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of

the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number

of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about

which no general consensus obtains. It is hardly necessary to present

a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known. The wars

of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of

different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social

prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,

temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,--all form a maze of

apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to

lead one out. Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,

adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if he

were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists

that over all these individual opinions there is a _system of truth_

which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.

We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and

must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.

In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is

a truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gained

the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,

or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the

shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. There is,

however, no visible thinker invested with authority. Shall we then

simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones? No; for if we

are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even

the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are

fairly to be judged. But how then can we as philosophers ever find a

test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the

other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with

us, on which we simply pin our faith?

The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we

revolve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopher

obliges him to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must be

incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can

he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and

prepossessions are implied?

One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been

taken by the more serious {200} ethical schools. If the heap of things

demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,

if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the

casuistic problem would be solved. If it were found that all goods

_quâ_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence

involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,

and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be _the_ good

upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and

universal good that the philosopher seeks. Even his own private ideals

would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place

among the rest.

Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of

the ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be

recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for

the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add

to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or

flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to

promote the survival of the human species on this planet,--are so many

tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the

essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.

No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,

given general satisfaction. Some are obviously not universally present

in all cases,--_e. g._, the character of harming no one, or that of

following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many

acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,

and serve not as examples of a universal law. Other {201} characters,

such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.

Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their

consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:

a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use

the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves. The

best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be

the capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down

fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses

that never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a

universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most

universal principle,--that _the essence of good is simply to satisfy

demand_. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There is

really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be

accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is

ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single

law. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those

of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart from

the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be so

used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically

accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.

A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,

will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely

theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever

come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the

best _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;

for all demands as {202} such are _primâ facie_ respectable, and the

best simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand was

gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a

physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we

inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of

_n_-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible

with one another here below, which would then go on in

conjunction,--such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our

holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet

doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping

our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no

question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be

the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create

universes _à priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that

is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.

But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and

the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually

possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;

and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual which

can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is

hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the

possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined

good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of

some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep his

nerves in condition?--he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for

Amelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart.

Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit of

unsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc. So that

the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination

in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of

the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a

tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has

to deal.

Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by

the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely

ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally

highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to

haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one

applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our

environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The

philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of

objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, and

rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive

preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of

the truth. The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the

place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in

History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.' Now, with

no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that

any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such

a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts

to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each

struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings? The

very best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrously

and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fighting

free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged

and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human

being, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,

think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of

Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions

of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must

think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on

which to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to

arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a

reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the

content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods

with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the

light of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no

longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal

power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order

which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to

survive,--and the notion really turns one pale. All one's slumbering

revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist

wielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than an

order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the

most enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopher

is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the

parties to the fray.

What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on

scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?

{205}

But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is

open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of

one particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by that

fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy

(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)

be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_? That

act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,

in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the

casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which

_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible

number of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat there

must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the

more inclusive side,--of the side which even in the hour of triumph

will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished

party's interests lay. The course of history is nothing but the story

of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and

more inclusive order. _Invent some manner_ of realizing your own

ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,--that and that only

is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself

into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of

social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and

polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial

torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually

aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the

worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of

them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}

savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made

for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for

himself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the

laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction

to the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases of

conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.

The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his

casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs

of the community on top.

And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing

final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as

our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,

so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order

which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without

producing others louder still. "Rules are made for man, not man for

rules,"--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena

to Ethics. And although a man always risks much when he breaks away

from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than

they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times

open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake

his life and character upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pent

in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it

weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always

rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by

which they may get free. See the abuses which the {207} institution of

private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted

among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is

to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed and

unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the

marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the

unwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _régime_ of

so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the

counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which

could flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humble

and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until

now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. See

everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem

how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the

free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and

civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;

the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the

weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed

against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what

sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in

this world. These experiments are to be judged, not _à priori_, but by

actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry

or how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions can

possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or what

can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where

every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already

provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,

and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can only

follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least

resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive

arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the

kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.