The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is
that they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs. I said
some time back that real ethical relations existed in a purely human
world. They would exist even in what we called a moral solitude if the
thinker had various {211} ideals which took hold of him in turn. His
self of one day would make demands on his self of another; and some of
the demands might be urgent and tyrannical, while others were gentle
and easily put aside. We call the tyrannical demands _imperatives_.
If we ignore these we do not hear the last of it. The good which we
have wounded returns to plague us with interminable crops of
consequential damages, compunctions, and regrets. Obligation can thus
exist inside a single thinker's consciousness; and perfect peace can
abide with him only so far as he lives according to some sort of a
casuistic scale which keeps his more imperative goods on top. It is
the nature of these goods to be cruel to their rivals. Nothing shall
avail when weighed in the balance against them. They call out all the
mercilessness in our disposition, and do not easily forgive us if we
are so soft-hearted as to shrink from sacrifice in their behalf.
The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the
difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When in the
easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. The
capacity for the strenuous mood probably lies slumbering in every man,
but it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up. It
needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the
higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom. Strong relief is a
necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
brought down and all the valleys are {212} exalted is no congenial
place for its habitation. This is why in a solitary thinker this mood
might slumber on forever without waking. His various ideals, known to
him to be mere preferences of his own, are too nearly of the same
denominational value: he can play fast or loose with them at will.
This too is why, in a merely human world without a God, the appeal to
our moral energy falls short of its maximal stimulating power. Life,
to be sure, is even in such a world a genuinely ethical symphony; but
it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
infinite scale of values fails to open up. Many of us, indeed,--like
Sir James Stephen in those eloquent 'Essays by a Barrister,'--would
openly laugh at the very idea of the strenuous mood being awakened in
us by those claims of remote posterity which constitute the last appeal
of the religion of humanity. We do not love these men of the future
keenly enough; and we love them perhaps the less the more we hear of
their evolutionized perfection, their high average longevity and
education, their freedom from war and crime, their relative immunity
from pain and zymotic disease, and all their other negative
superiorities. This is all too finite, we say; we see too well the
vacuum beyond. It lacks the note of infinitude and mystery, and may
all be dealt with in the don't-care mood. No need of agonizing
ourselves or making others agonize for these good creatures just at
present.
When, however, we believe that a God is there, and that he is one of
the claimants, the infinite perspective opens out. The scale of the
symphony is incalculably prolonged. The more imperative ideals now
begin to speak with an altogether new objectivity and significance, and
to utter the penetrating, shattering, {213} tragically challenging note
of appeal. They ring out like the call of Victor Hugo's alpine eagle,
"qui parle au précipice et que le gouffre entend," and the strenuous
mood awakens at the sound. It saith among the trumpets, ha, ha! it
smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the
shouting. Its blood is up; and cruelty to the lesser claims, so far
from being a deterrent element, does but add to the stern joy with
which it leaps to answer to the greater. All through history, in the
periodical conflicts of puritanism with the don't-care temper, we see
the antagonism of the strenuous and genial moods, and the contrast
between the ethics of infinite and mysterious obligation from on high,
and those of prudence and the satisfaction of merely finite need.
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural
human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or
traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one
simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
existence its keenest possibilities of zest. Our attitude towards
concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe there
are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we joyously
face tragedy for an infinite demander's sake. Every sort of energy and
endurance, of courage and capacity for handling life's evils, is set
free in those who have religious faith. For this reason the strenuous
type of character will on the battle-field of human history always
outwear the easy-going type, and religion will drive irreligion to the
wall.
It would seem, too,--and this is my final conclusion,--that the stable
and systematic moral universe {214} for which the ethical philosopher
asks is fully possible only in a world where there is a divine thinker
with all-enveloping demands. If such a thinker existed, his way of
subordinating the demands to one another would be the finally valid
casuistic scale; his claims would be the most appealing; his ideal
universe would be the most inclusive realizable whole. If he now
exist, then actualized in his thought already must be that ethical
philosophy which we seek as the pattern which our own must evermore
approach.[3] In the interests of our own ideal of systematically
unified moral truth, therefore, we, as would-be philosophers, must
postulate a divine thinker, and pray for the victory of the religious
cause. Meanwhile, exactly what the thought of the infinite thinker may
be is hidden from us even were we sure of his existence; so that our
postulation of him after all serves only to let loose in us the
strenuous mood. But this is what it does in all men, even those who
have no interest in philosophy. The ethical philosopher, therefore,
whenever he ventures to say which course of action is the best, is on
no essentially different level from the common man. "See, I have set
before thee this day life and good, and death and evil; therefore,
choose life that thou and thy seed may live,"--when this challenge
comes to us, it is simply our total character and personal genius that
are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called philosophy, our choice and
use of that also are but revelations of our personal aptitude or
incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing practical ordeal no
professor's lectures and no array of books {215} can save us. The
solving word, for the learned and the unlearned man alike, lies in the
last resort in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of their
interior characters, and nowhere else. It is not in heaven, neither is
it beyond the sea; but the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth
and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.
[1] An Address to the Yale Philosophical Club, published in the
International Journal of Ethics, April, 1891.
[2] The Principles of Psychology, New York, H. Holt & Co, 1890.
[3] All this is set forth with great freshness and force in the work of
my colleague, Professor Josiah Royce: "The Religious Aspect of
Philosophy." Boston, 1885.
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