criticising, it can be indicated in a moment. The most ordinary
induction has satisfied men that, in the long run, the Hebrew singer is
right when he says, "The way of transgressors is hard". Wrong-doing
and calamity are inseparably connected. Those laws, through which the
voice of the Supreme is ever heard, are so intertwined in their action,
that the infraction of one leads to the infliction of retributive
punishment by the other. We break a moral law, the physical law will
take up its cause, and we suffer. We have come, I say, to see the
universal validity of this rule, the absolute irresistibility of the
laws under which we live. Hence, a shallow judgment has been hastily
framed that you may always judge of the morality of an act by the
consequences it produces. If the results are good, then the action is
good; if evil, then the action is adjudged bad. This is, in substance,
the Benthamite or utilitarian ethic, Bentham roundly maintaining that
crime is nothing but a miscalculation, an error in arithmetic. It is
the failure of a man to count the cost, to weigh the results of what he
is about to do. That being the case, the scientist being persuaded
that utility and pleasure make an action good, and uselessness and pain
make it bad, he was able to conclude at a stroke that one action
differs only from another in the results it produces, and that since
science was admirably equipped to take stock of results through its
statistical bureau, she, and not the hideous old shrews, theology and
philosophy, was the rightful protectress of morality.
But we, who believe with Immanuel Kant, that the "_All's well that ends
well theory_" has no place in morality, refuse to recognise that the
character of an action is determined solely by the results it produces.
We believe that some actions are intrinsically good, and others
intrinsically bad, totally irrespective of the good or evil they may
effect. We believe with the Stoics and with Jesus that evil may be
consummated in the heart without any evil results appearing at all. We
believe that thoughts of envy, hatred, malice, are in themselves bad,
irrespective of results, that such a thing as slander is _ipso facto_
stamped as irredeemably bad long before any of its evil consequences
may be manifest. We look not so much to consequence, but to the
intention of the doer, and the intrinsic nature of the action
performed. Pleasure and pain considerations are the last things we
take into account when we weigh an action in the scales of justice.
The theory is therefore hopelessly inadequate to our needs; it breaks
in our hands when we attempt to use it, and, consequently, we refuse
our assent to the proposition that because science can _occasionally_
predict results she is therefore entitled to patronise ethics.
The truth is, that ethics need no such patronage. Neither the
theologian nor the scientist is essential to their well-being. Ethics
are beholden to neither of the two claimants who dispute the honour of
their parentage and protection. They rest on that alone on which
everything in this miraculous universe, science itself included,
ultimately rests, the _reason_ which is at the heart of things. The
moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between right and
wrong, a distinction valid before the very whisperings of science, aye,
and of the voice of men were heard upon this earth, is, to the stately
and impressive system of Emerson and Kant, the first-born of the
eternal Reason itself, the very apprehensible nature of the Most High,
which, the more men grow in the moral life, the more they recognise for
his inner-most character and nature. Things are what they are, and
actions are what they are, not because of the ephemeral judgments of a
tribe or nation of men, but because they cannot be otherwise than they
are, good or bad in themselves, judged solely by reference to that
everlasting law of righteousness, the aboriginal enactment of the
Eternal.
Men point to the growth and development of the moral sentiment in man,
they show how he has grown from savagery to civilisation, and think
therein that they have explained everything. They are like the
photographer I spoke of above. They have found out the history of
ethics, and they think there is nothing more to know. Far from it.
Identically the same might be said of music and logic. Man once beat a
tom-tom, and now he writes operas and oratorios. He once rambled, now
he reasons. Will any sane man delude himself into believing that music
and logic are nothing more in themselves but the history of the
successive stages through which they have naturally and inevitably
passed? Neither then is ethic and the moral law. It is not man's
creation, it is not his handiwork. It is no mere provincialism of this
dwindling sphere of ours, but a fact and a law supreme, holding sway
beyond the uttermost star, valid in infinity and eternity, at this
hour, the sovereign law of life for whatsoever or whomsoever lives and
knows, the adamantine foundation upon which all law, civilisation,
religion and progress are built.
"This is," says Burke in his magnificent language, "that great
immutable pre-existent law, prior to our devices, and prior to all our
sensations, antecedent to our very existence, by which we are knit and
connected in the eternal frame of the universe, out of which we cannot
stir." And not only Burke, but centuries before him, the great Roman
orator, in language equally sublime, professed his enthusiastic belief
in that same law, which "no nation can overthrow or annul; neither a
senate nor a whole people can relieve us from its injunctions. It is
the same in Athens and in Rome, the same yesterday, to-day, and for
ever."
III.
ETHICS AND THEISM.
In the present chapter we propose to discuss the gravest of all the
grave problems which gather round the central conception of ethic as
the basis of religion. There are, it may be said, two great schools
which hold respectively the doctrines which may be not unfitly
described as the significance and the insignificance, or rather,
non-significance of ethics. The latter school, which is that of
Bentham, Mill and Spencer, is content to take ethic as a set of
formulae of utility which man has, in the course of his varied
experience, discovered to be serviceable guides of life. There is no
binding force in them; the idea of a conscience "trembling like a
guilty thing surprised" because it has broken one of these laws, the
hot flush of shame which seems to redden the very soul at the sense of
guilt, the agony of remorse so powerful as sometimes to send the
criminal self-confessed and self-condemned to his doom, is all said to
be part of an obsolete form of speculation. There is merely "a
_feeling_ of obligation," such as an animal may experience which is
harnessed to a waggon or a load, but any real obligation,
authoritatively binding on the conscience of man, is repudiated in
terms.
Now this teaching I venture to describe as the insignificant ethic, the
ethic which connotes nothing beyond the "feeling of obligation," and
refuses to recognise in morality anything but a series of hints
casually picked up, as to how mankind should behave in order to score
in the game of life.
The significant ethic, on the other hand, discerns in the law of
morality the pathway into the transcendental world, the realm of reason
beyond the boundaries of the sense. It sees in morality the basis of
religion; it discovers the fact of man's freedom to conform or not to
conform to the eternal law; it unveils the reality of life beyond this
earth-stage of existence, and last and chiefest of all, it discerns, in
the words of Immanuel Kant, "a natural idea of pure theism" in the
unmistakable reality of the moral law, from the very obvious fact that
laws do not make themselves, but are enactments of reason or
intelligence.
We propose, therefore, to address ourselves to the fundamental
question--the question of questions--the being of a subsistent
intelligence and a supreme moral will, responsible for man and all
things, whom we in our own tongue name God, though it were more
reverent to think and speak of the awful truth with Emerson, as the
"Nameless Thought, the Super-personal Heart". We are to treat of
theism, the philosophical, _not the theological_, term to designate the
truth that the universe owes its existence to infinite Power and
infinite Mind, and that morality is a fact because that Power is moral
also. To quote Whittier's well-known lines, which express the
essential truth of theism in words of exceeding simplicity combined
with philosophic depth:--
By all that He requires of me
I know what He Himself must be;
or, to quote the more vigorous, but equally common-sense statement of
the facts by Carlyle: "It was flatly inconceivable to him (Frederick
the Great) that moral emotion could have been put into him by an entity
which had none of its own". And finally, we propose to speak of
theism, thus defined, in its relations to ethics or moral science, the
discipline which treats of human conduct and its conformity with a
recognised law of life, the systematising of those principles of life
which man has learned by reason and experience during the course of his
sojourn in this sphere of existence.
Let us begin by some attempt at a definition of our terms. Ethics, I
take it, we are agreed to consider as the science concerned with
conduct; that is, with the actions of man in so far as they conform or
do not conform with a standard of right, whatever that standard may be.
Ethical, moral, morally good, right, we take to be synonymous terms.
The word metaphysical _male olet_, no doubt. It is unpalatable, and is
suggestive of, if not synonymous with, the unreal. However, I do not
think we need be concerned now with the repute or disrepute of
metaphysic generally, since we all are agreed that theism, or that
reality for which theism stands, is in the super-sensible,
super-experiential world, and therefore if theism is an implication of
ethics at all, it is, of course, a metaphysical one. As to theism
itself, things are not quite so clear, for the term covers, or may be
made to cover, a number of philosophic systems which are not in harmony
with one another. Thus the theism of the Hebrew Scriptures would
possibly be atheism to Hegel, while the great idealist's position might
be pantheism or worse to a High Church curate. To us theism means that
at the ground of being, at the heart of existence, there is a
self-subsistent reality which we call by the highest name we know,
_viz._, reason or mind. "Before the chaos that preceded the birth of
the heavens and the earth one only being existed, immense, silent,
immovable, yet incessantly active; that being is the mother of the
universe. I know not how this being is named, but I designate it by
the word 'reason'." [1] Absolute, unconditioned intelligence is the
_Theos_ we acknowledge. This is the formulary of our philosophical
creed, and as Luther fastened his forty theses to the doors of the
Würtemburg Cathedral, I affix my two humble propositions to the postern
of the ethical church, namely, first, that "In the beginning was Mind,"
and next, that the moral law is the highest expression of that Mind.
And, moreover, that as the mind in man is so ordered as to naturally
proceed from the more known to the less known, from the ascertained
fact of the moral law, we ascend to the source of the moral law, which,
like all things, takes its rise in the _apeiron_, the Boundless of
Anaximander, the Infinite of Mr. Spencer. Theism, then, as thus
explained, one discerns as an implication of the indisputable fact of
morality, of the sovereignty of ethic, of the indestructible supremacy
of conscience.
And here one may be allowed to quote a singularly luminous passage from
the _Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophic Morale en 18ème Siècle_ of
Victor Cousin, p. 318. "Kant remarks at this point," he says, "that we
have no right to derive our moral ideas from the idea of God, because
it is precisely from the moral ideas themselves that we are led to
recognise a Supreme Being, the personification of absolute
righteousness. Consequently, no-one may look upon the laws of morality
as arbitrary enactments of the will of God. Virtue is not obligatory
from the sole reason that it is a Divine ordinance; on the contrary, we
only know it to be a law of God because it already commands our inward
assent." This is essential Kantism, the gospel of the _Critique of the
Practical Reason_, and the _Religion within the Boundaries of mere
Reason_. Not ethics, then, from theism, but theism from ethics. Not
morality from God, but God is known from and through morality.
Now, here we may be justified in remarking, by way of a preliminary
indication of the truth, rather than of an argument, that the
preponderant weight of modern philosophical authority is emphatically
in favour of some such interpretation of ethic as Cousin sketches from
Kant. Whatever the cry of "back to Kant" may actually mean, an
idealist ethic is in the air of the schools of this country and
America. I am not oblivious of such names as Spencer and Stephen, nor
of Höffding or Gizycki abroad, but I think it undeniable that what we
mean by the metaphysical implications of ethic commands the assent, not
merely of the prophets of the church ethical, such as Emerson, Carlyle
and Ruskin, but also of the rising men amongst us who are carrying on
the philosophical traditions of the country. But passing by the
argument from authority, let us approach the question from the
standpoint of reason.
We may appeal, in the first place, to the truth implied in the very
expression the _Moral Law_. But it must be explained that by the term
moral law we do not mean a code of five, ten, or fifty commandments,
but simply the expression of the ethical "ought," the announcement of
the supreme fact of moral obligation in general, that is, the duty of
unconditionally obeying the right when the right is known to us. It is
no more the duty of the moral law to set about codifying laws than it
is of the conscience to practise casuistry. Conscience is not a
theoretical instructor, but a practical commander. The intelligence,
the reason in man it is to which is allotted the function of
formulating laws and of deciding what is and what is not in conformity
with right. Once that is decided, according to its light, by the
reason, then conscience steps in and authoritatively commands that the
right is to be unconditionally obeyed. And this, of course, solves
that venerable objection that conscience can be no guide because moral
codes have changed and are changing, and are not alike in various ages
and countries. Conscience has nothing to do with the excesses of
Torquemada, or libidinous rites of Astarte. Reason was at fault, not
conscience, and that supreme judge, misguided by the reason, appeared
to give a false judgment, whereas, true to itself for ever, it simply
pronounced in each and every instance, that the right must be obeyed.
Like the needle in the compass, it undeviatingly points to the polar
star of duty.
Let us proceed with our analysis of the conception of the moral law.
There are various schools of ethics, but they are all united in
maintaining _some_ obligatory force in morality, that whatever may be
the precise meaning of the solemn word right, the right is binding on
the allegiance of our will. Hence Emerson, of the rational school, is
philosophically accurate when he deduces purity of heart, or
uprightness of intention, and the law of gravitation from the same
source. They are both laws, one valid in the spheres, the other valid
among men, the one only difference being that whereas the spheres
compulsorily obey the law of their existence, man by the noble
obeisance of his will--an obeisance which, as Kant points out, raises
him to an immeasurable dignity--voluntarily submits himself to his law,
and thereby fulfils the purpose of his life.
Moreover, we must reflect, as the law of gravitation, which as physical
beings we obey, is none of our making, but merely our discovery, so is
the moral law, the eternal distinction between right and wrong, no
creation of man's. He is born into a world not his own, and he finds
himself surrounded by an order which is not within the sphere of his
control. The law, for instance, of numbers, the law of thought, the
facts of the universe, organic and inorganic, the bases on which he has
erected what is compendiously called civilisation--are all provided
otherwise than by his efforts. He is born into an order of reason
which, by obedience to the law and light of reason within him, he has
developed into the stately fabric of organised, social, political,
intellectual, in a word, civilised life. But, I would repeat, the
basic facts of this life are none of our creation; they are our
_discovery_, and no more the _invention_ of man than America is the
invention of Columbus. Hence, with the master-poet of Hellas, we must
acknowledge those--
_agrapta kasphalê theôn_
_nomima_
_ou gar ti nun ge kachthes, all aei pote_
_zê tauta, koudeis oiden ex otou phanê--_
the unwritten irresistible laws, ever-living, whose origin no one can
tell.
It would be of no avail, I submit, to point out to Sophocles, as
Spencer pointed out to Kant, that a knowledge of the early condition of
man would have made short work of these sublimities, that the cosmical
man was before the ethical man, in whom we discover very little
evidence of these majestic laws of such universal and undeniable
validity. The reply would be that the growth of them is only evidence
of what was potentially present from the first, that just as the
beating of brass was no obstacle to the ultimate evolution of the opera
or the oratorio, or the first vague feelings of wonderment with which
primitive man surveyed himself and his surroundings to the creation of
the world of science and philosophy, so the undoubted fact that man was
unmoral at the start is no obstacle to the belief that the moral law
was as existent then as now. Nay, just as the cosmic process itself
from the first contained the promise and potency of an organic form
ultimately to be called man and to become "the crowning glory of the
universe," so also, we hold, it contained the potentialities of that
whereby man was enabled to crown the splendid edifice of creation by
the imperishable deeds he has done, and that just as it would be futile
to ask one to point out traces of man amongst "the dragons of the
prime," or some Bathybiotic slime, so it would be equally irrelevant to
demand indications of moral life in the tertiary man. But, as in the
savage of to-day, as in the infant, it is there; and the fact that it
ultimately appears shows that it was there. So surely as the laws of
music, mathematics and thought, are of the Sophoclean category of
eternal facts, man's discoveries not his creations, so also are the
moral laws, and, therefore, when Mr. Spencer points out the aborigines
who are destitute, to all appearances, of what we understand by the
term morality and traces its growth through almost everlasting
generations of men, he is but describing the history of ethic, the
development of morality, just as one might write the history of music,
or of the rifle, from the days of the blunderbuss to the Mauser or
Lee-Metford; but what ethic, what morality, is _in se_, he leaves
untouched. The form differs from the content, _history_ differs from
the _reality_ of which it is the history, and morality is more than the
story of its vicissitudes, of its gradual, painful development from the
pre-historic times to our own.
What, then, is morality _in se_ apart from its history? It is, as
asserted, that universal law, obligatory on all rational beings in
virtue of their rationality, binding them to live for the right. The
_instinct_ of humanity is with us, that instinct which commands a man
to live for the right, and instinct does not err. Just as we
instinctively recognise a righteous retribution in the downfall of the
wrong-doer and feel outraged when he prospers, even temporarily, in his
wickedness, so we equally apprehend by an immediate intuition that what
is recognised as the good ought to be obeyed, and loyally obeyed, by a
man. _Fais ce que tu dois: Advienne que pourra_, is the expression of
this faith that is in humanity, and I cannot conceive how any ethical
philosopher can venture to contest its truth, no matter what his test
of morality may speculatively be.
And, now, we may point out what we conceive to be the significance, the
implication of the facts just set forth. If we are to think about the
matter at all, if we are not to adopt a Positivist attitude and
absolutely bar metaphysic as a sterile and unprofitable investigation,
it seems to me that the moral law, like all law, points unmistakably to
reason as its source; and since, as already pointed out, man does not
create the moral order in which he lives any more than he creates the
mathematical or chemical laws which he uses, but simply discovers them
by observation, the moral law must be the expression of a mind other
than man's. When we say "other than man's," we do not mean
specifically, but individually, for we hold the specific oneness of all
mind in all intelligent creatures from first to last. We mean, the
moral law is an expression of the "Mind which is the Whole," the Mind
which is the Infinite, so that, just as Mr. Spencer refers everything
ultimately--and in this he is "not far from the kingdom of God"--to an
"Infinite and Everlasting Power," we refer everything, the moral law
above all, which to us is the highest expression of the Divine known to
this earth, to an Infinite and Everlasting Mind, the Soul of the World,
the Soul of all souls, the inexhaustible Intelligence upon whose
treasury I am drawing now as I think and write, upon whose stores all
creatures are drawing in every intelligent action of their lives.
Law we define as an ordination of reason. From first to last it is so.
From the laws which we daily obey to the everlasting laws holding the
spheres together--can we account of them as other than the expression
of reason? So do we account of the moral law, with this essential
difference, that while the rules of man, the laws of man, may be
arbitrary, the moral law is no arbitrary enactment, but essential
righteousness; it is the Supreme Mind and Will in actual
manifestation--the moral law _is_ God. I mean thereby that it could
not be otherwise. It is beyond the power of omnipotence to dispense
with it. Right recognised as right could never be other than right, it
could never become wrong, any more than two and three could become
interchangeable ideas. One may say now that this definite act is
right, and a century later that it is wrong; but for all that, for all
the imperfection, the limitation, of our intelligence, as much in the
moral as in the mental spheres, one thing is certain, that the right
does exist and is eternally dissevered from the wrong, and that this
"quite infinite distinction" is the instant revelation of Supreme Mind.