'Without prejudice, what would be the effect upon modern civilisation
if the Divine Ideal should vanish from modern thought?
'It would be presumptuous to attempt a description, rather because it
is so hard to picture ourselves and our outlook deprived of what we
have held during thousands of generations, our very _raison d'etre_,
than because we cannot calculate at least a part of what would have to
happen. Without pretending to undertake that exercise, it may not be
too bold to conclude definitely, what has been suggested
argumentatively throughout: namely, that moral goodness, as we trace it
in the past, as we enjoy it in the present, as we reckon upon it in the
future, would be found undesirable and therefore impracticable. A new
"morality" would doubtless take its place and set up a new ideal of
goodness; but the former would no more represent the elements we so far
call moral than the latter would embody the conceptions we now call
good: the more logically the inevitable system were followed up, the
more progressively would moral inversion be realised.
'It does not seem credible that the new morality could escape being
egoistic and hedonistic, and these principles alone would dictate
complete reversal of all our present notions as to what is noble, what
is useful, what is good. An egoist hedonism that should not be selfish
and sensual is a fond {231} superstition; it would have to be both and
frankly. All the prophylactic expedients whereby a reciprocal egoism
must safeguard its sensuous rights would certainly be there; and they
represent in spirit and in practice whatever we have learned to
consider execrable. We do not require Professor Haeckel[1] to inform
us, with the triumphal rhetoric that accompanies a grand new discovery,
of the prudential homicide which is to confer a supreme blessing upon
humanity, for it has raged throughout antiquity, and still stalks
abroad in daylight wherever the kingdom of men is not also the kingdom
of Christ. Ten minutes' thought is sufficient to convince any rational
man or woman what must inevitably follow in a world of animal
rationalism, where no souls are immortal, where the human will is the
supreme will and there is eternal peace in the grave. It could
scarcely transpire otherwise than that "euthanasia" should replace care
of the chronic sick and indigent aged; that infanticide should be in a
large category of circumstances encouraged, and in some compelled; that
suicide should offer a rational escape from all serious ills, leaving a
door ever hospitably ajar to receive the body bankrupt in its capacity
for sensual enjoyment, the only enjoyment henceforth worthy of the
name. These are the "virtues" under the new morality; there are other
things of which it were not well to speak. Imagination turns its back.
In a world that has never been without its gods, among human creatures
who have never existed without a conscience, deeds have been done and
horrors have been practised through centuries, through ages, that make
annals read like ogre-tales and books of travels like the works of
morbid novelists; and the worst always goes unrecorded. What then
ought we to anticipate for a world yielding obedience to nothing
loftier {232} than the human intellect, seeking no prize obtainable
outside the individual life time, logically incapable of any
gratification outside the individual body, convinced of nothing save
eternal oblivion in the ever-nearing and inevitable grave, and reposed
on the calm assurance that "goodness" and "badness," "virtue" and
"vice" (whatever these terms may then correspond to) are recompensed,
indifferently, by nothing better and nothing worse than physical animal
death?'--JASPER B. HUNT, B.D., _Good without God: Is it Possible_? p.
51.
[1] See _The Wonders of Life_, chap. v., popular translation, and other
works.
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