Nonconformist brother; every philanthropic meeting you hear of as
addressed by clergymen of all denominations; every garden party given by
a bishop or a dean to a Dissenters' Conference; every advance you
gratefully note towards a wise and patient tolerance of theological
dissensions, the sinking of sectional differences in the interests of a
higher and purer life--ascribe it all to the beneficent influence of
Immanuel Kant. Before his day all these fraternisings would have been
impossible; the ancestors of these reconciled brethren were ready to
scourge and burn each other, until Kant came and shamed them out of their
narrowness and bigotry. Men talk no more of "mere morality," as though
it paled into positive insignificance by the side of the dogmatical
majesty of articles and creeds. Kant has taught them "a more excellent
way," and in so far as they have learnt that one lesson, they and we are
members of the one great Church--the Church of the ethically redeemed,
the Church of men to come--the idealism, the enthusiasm, of the ages to
be. Never let it be forgotten. We are not concerned to controvert or to
destroy. The message of Kant to the Churches is that in all essentials
we are at one with them, and the trend of thought is now setting visibly
towards the substitution of an ethical for a doctrinal basis of religion.
You are powerless to resist the times, we would urge. Whether the old
names and formulae survive or not, "the irresistible maturing of the
general mind" will make it impossible for men to acquiesce in any
religious belief not grounded on the conviction that the sole test of a
man's status is not what he believes, but what he does. This is Kant,
this is Christ, and this is the message of the ethical Church.
But to return to the teaching of the philosopher of ethics, I must remind
my readers again that I am unable to do more than sketch the outlines of
the great ethical system which he gave to the world. More than that will
not be needed for the moment. But before undertaking even a synoptical
account of the transcendental ethic, I think it advisable to remark that
Kant's title to philosophical immortality rests upon his constructive
work as an ethicist, and not on his critical work as a speculative
thinker. It is well known that the two philosophies of Kant are not
_primâ facie_ harmonious, that he finds himself compelled to deny as a
critic that of which he is most certain as a moralist. Thus the great
facts of theism, immortality and the autonomy or freedom of the will, he
professes himself unable to know save as revelations of the moral order.
His mind, or pure reason, can know nothing of them; it is his will or
practical reason which discerns them as plain deductions from the
overwhelming fact of the moral law. This fact has led some critics to
describe Kant as a sceptic. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We
might almost quote of him what Browning wrote of Voltaire:--
Crowned by prose and verse, and wielding
with wit's bauble learning's rod,
He at least believes in soul and is very sure of God.
No one more so; yet as a thinker he professed himself unable to
_demonstrate_ these high truths. In that sense Kant's famous _Critique
of the Pure Reason_ may be described as the forerunner of the systematic
agnosticism which is set forth in the _First Principles_ of Mr. Spencer.
But there is this immense difference, that Kant was convinced of the
reality of that which the mind of man could not demonstrate. The great
facts were existent indeed, but he was powerless to reach them with the
instruments at his command. In consequence, he laid it down as a
principle that man must ever act as though it were actually demonstrated
that we were free, our innermost being imperishable, and a supreme judge
and dispenser of justice to administer the moral laws which are the guide
of life. It would be out of place to state the arguments whereby Kant
justified his belief in a controlling mind in the universe and in the
spiritual nature of man, while avowing his inability to demonstrate those
truths. It must suffice to state here that the truths which lie at the
foundation of religion were a matter of profound conviction with the sage
of Königsberg, all the deeper perhaps because he would not claim to
subject them to an intellectual dissection or to be able to measure out
heaven and earth in the exiguous terms of human thought.
But as soon as he leaves the plane of the pure or speculative reason and
rises to the level of the practical reason or the will, then the full
truth bursts upon his astonished gaze, clearer than the meridian light.
He sees no more "half shade, half shine," but the truth pours itself
"upon the new sense it now trusts with all its plenitude of power". It
is the will, not the mind, which discloses the full revelation to
Immanuel Kant, and makes him the deeply-reverent, religious man he ever
was, the convinced theist, the believer in his power to control his acts
by the independence of his will, and in the possibility, or rather the
certainty, of his being one day morally perfect--not indeed within the
limits of the life which now is, but in a future life of unlimited
duration. That which to Wordsworth was an intimation was to Kant an
intuition after the vision of the glory of the moral law had flooded his
innermost soul.
And this we may, perhaps, briefly show before bringing the chapter to an
end.
The fundamental principle of the Kantian system is the primacy of the
will. The key to the mystery of man's being Kant finds, not in the
marvellous faculty of intelligence, but in that power of self-movement,
that capacity for self-originated energy which we call the will. Reason
is "regulative," he said, but not "creative" and "constitutive," like the
will. It is the latter faculty which makes us what we are, determines
our life, fixes our character, and decides our destiny. As you act, so
you are. This principle once conceded, the majestic system at once takes
shape. What is it that governs the world of phenomena outside us?
Physical laws, and supreme amongst these laws, that of equilibrium or
gravitation. What is it that governs the reason? The laws of thought,
those aboriginal rules, none of man's creation, but the essentially
necessary guides which he was bound to discover and to follow if he is to
think accurately, that is, if his thoughts are to be in conformity with
fact. And what is it which governs the will of man? "Do you tell me,"
the master would urge, "that the inert masses of the spheres have each
their own movements regulated for them, that nothing from a stone to a
star is shaped or moved without the intervention of eternal laws; that
the lispings of children no less than the meditations of a philosopher
must conform to law, and that the will of man, whereby he makes himself
to be what he is, shapes his character, influences his surroundings, and
fixes his destiny--do you venture to say that that is lawless in a world
where all is law? No," he proclaims in words which burn conviction into
his soul: "it, too, has its laws, the highest, holiest thing in all this
universe, the law of laws which confronts man wherever he goes, fills all
his sublimest thoughts, subdues his soul to the most reverent worship,
and is the holiest inspiration of his religion. It is the moral law, the
supreme concern of the will of man, a revelation to man alone of his own
unspeakable dignity, the norm or standard whereby he is to regulate his
life--this it is which is the law of his will. As gravitation rules the
stars, so the moral law, the sanction of the eternal distinction between
right and wrong, controls the will, not compulsorily, not arbitrarily, as
though it could by any possibility be otherwise, but freely. So
sovereign is its power, so authentic are its claims, that if it had might
as it has right, it would rule the world." It is, therefore, to use
Kant's own language, a _categorical imperative_, that is, an
unconditional command. "Thou canst, and therefore thou must." By the
very manhood you possess you are bound wholly to surrender yourself in
submission to what you know to be the right for the right's sake alone.
You must make it your own law, and obey it as inflexibly as the stars
keep their courses in the everlasting way.
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong,
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
We may see now how Kant bases his whole system upon the indestructible
fact of ethical law, the primeval intuition of the awakened spirit of man
into the eternal distinction between good and evil. Standing on that
foundation, he is able to descry the world of transcendental
realities--"the land which is very far off"--which the pure and critical
reason could never behold. But though the eyes of the mind were holden,
the intuition of the will enables him to gaze direct into the unseen and
discern freedom, soul, immortality and God as eternal facts. For whence
this sublime law of life unless we conceive mind, not blind chance, as
the arbiter of things? Whence this constraining power within me,
exerting itself to the uttermost to win my allegiance to the right,
unless I am free to obey or disobey? How is not the very conception of
morality entirely obliterated in the false philosophy that would fain
persuade man that because he is _in_ the world he must needs be _of_ it,
and because the tides rise and fall with the phases of the moon, that his
actions are fixed and controlled by influences utterly beyond his power?
We have no room for the "man-machine" in the beautiful school of Immanuel
Kant.
And, finally, the awful question of the future Kant solves in the light
of the same sublime principle. "That law," he urges, "which is the
essential law binding humanity must one day be fulfilled in every one of
us. There is a moral as well as a physical evolution which you try in
vain to confine to the limits of the life which now is. There is no
argument known to science justifying such an attempt." Kant believes in
the Eternities, because every man born of woman is destined to be at last
in absolute conformity with that law of everlasting righteousness which
is for us what the law of balance is to the infinite worlds. All life,
that which now is and whatever is to be in the hereafter, is simply a
never-ending progress towards an ideal whose dignity is infinite. Hence
the command of Jesus, "Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is also
perfect," would be endorsed by Kant as in strict harmony with the
philosophy which does not teach that the physical act of dissolution
called death fixes the moral state of man for ever, but that all life,
whatsoever it may be and wheresoever it may be lived, is but an approach
towards a goal of infinite value, the will of man absolutely conformed to
justice, or the moral law.
As Kepler described the philosopher and the scientist as "thinking again
the thoughts of God," even so does the Kantian ethic aspire to absolute
conformity of will with that Will which is supreme and eternal, the moral
order itself personified. This is immortality: this is everlasting life,
even as the Christian disciple and philosopher describes it: "This world
passeth away and the desire thereof, but he that doeth the Divine will
endureth for ever". The phenomenal world is a pageant, a scene. Only
"the good will" (Kant's constant expression) in absolute harmony with the
Supreme Will is real and eternal.
[1] _Philosophical Classics_, p. 85.
V.
THE ETHICAL DOCTRINE OF COMPENSATION.
I suppose there is no teaching more frequently insisted upon in the Old
and in the New Testament as the truth of a judgment, now, or in the
future, upon the misdeeds or sins of men. Let criticism prune and cut
as it will, while it exhibits the deplorably low standard of morality
once prevalent among the Hebrew peoples, and therefore prevalent among
their Gods, their Elohim, Adonai and Jahveh, one thing, at least, is
undeniable--that that which is recognised as immoral is reprobated and
forthwith visited with condign punishment. Doubtless, acts which to us
are wholly reprehensible are discussed without attaching any stigma to
them, and are even permitted, and sometimes suggested, by Jahveh
himself, as in the story of Judith and Holofernes. Such ethical
insensibility is wholly natural, viewing the state of development at
which the Hebrew people had arrived, and should cause no wonderment in
those who are familiar with the Deity of Christian Mediaevalism, and
the methods and practices he was supposed to favour. But what should
be carefully noted is, that nothing is adjudged immoral but is
forthwith sternly reprobated and condemned to a fitting retribution.
"The way of transgressors is hard" was a conviction with the race. In
the same way, the ethical note rings out in the New Testament, that
right and wrong are eternally dissevered, sheep ever separated from
goats; that virtue must be rewarded and vice be condemned and punished.
Now, this teaching of the judgment to come, the bare announcement of
which by Paul filled Felix, the Roman governor, with such dire
consternation, is the subject of which we propose to set forth the
philosophical and ethical explanation. In the Bible we have the
mythical setting much as we have the mythical version of the agony of
spirit undergone by Christ before he definitely committed himself to
his prophetical work. It is for us to-day to disentangle the
substantive truth from the maze of legend with which an imperfectly
developed age has surrounded it and discover the true _raison d'être_
of that doctrine which "the Bible Christian" confesses under the aspect
of the "Last Judgment".
Now, I take it that no educated man believes in the drama, or rather,
the panorama, of the "last judgment"; the vision of Jesus sitting in
the clouds, with every human being that ever was or shall be gathered
before his throne to hear definite sentence pronounced upon them. The
_mise-en-scène_ demands of course the presence of bodies, and I suppose
it is needless to point out the dogma of the resurrection of the body,
insisted upon by all the Christian Churches, is a blank impossibility.
We may acquire other bodies in that unknown state, should we stand in
need of such appurtenances--a fact which we may wholly disbelieve--but
of one thing we may rest assured, that these identical bodies in which
we die can by no possibility conceivable to us be brought back.
I once read a highly imaginative article in a religious magazine which
attempted to solve the unsolvable by suggesting that after men's bodies
had been buried in sufficient numbers, the whole soil of our planet
would consist of nothing but the substance of the bodies of the dead,
and that when that momentous epoch arrived, the Almighty would give the
order for the sounding of the final trump, and the whole solid globe
would be forthwith transmuted, or rather re-transmuted, into human
bodies--in what condition it was not stated--for the countless myriads
of "souls" ready to take possession of them. Probably, this pious
romance was woven in the days before cremation, and as the next century
will not be very old before we shall be compelled to resort to that
method of disposal of the dead, at all events in our larger cities, it
becomes increasingly difficult to comprehend how men of the future, to
say nothing of the past, are going to be provided with their own bodies
so as to put in an appearance at the great assize.
We may rightly wonder how men and women of the nineteenth century can
still believe in the Churches and Chapels which teach such deplorable
absurdities as the revelation of God, and how it happens that when
religion appears upon the scene of their daily life, their common sense
can so totally desert them. One need say nothing of the inadequacy of
the judgment pronounced, the summary classification of the myriads of
humanity as white sheep or black goats, or the character of the rewards
and punishments allotted. The one redeeming point in the narrative is
that whatever judgment is pronounced is decided, not on doctrinal
grounds, about which no two of Christ's followers can be got to agree,
but on ethical grounds, on character manifesting itself in public
spirit and care for the unfortunate--the bruised reeds and smoking
flax--of our communities. It would seem impossible to maintain after
this final scene that creeds and faiths have any decisive influence on
our status here or hereafter.
But though now seen to be no more than a variant upon the apocalyptic
tradition and literature which represented that Jesus was to return
speedily to earth and rule among his saints for a thousand years--a
delusion which apparently possessed even the trained intellect of Paul,
and subsequently led to the pseudo-Peter explaining that his
fellow-Christians must not be in too great a hurry, because "a thousand
years are as one day and one day as a thousand years in the sight of
the Lord"--it has done an incalculable amount of harm in the past. It
has shut men's eyes to the awful fact of retribution, administered here
and now, and prevented their realising any punishment other than the
savage, barbarous and wholly vindictive punishment of torturing
eternally by fire. It shuts men's minds to the operation of moral
laws, to the fact that judgment is executed instantaneously upon the
commission of wrong. It has, and it does, to the serious detriment of
moral development, lead man to put off until late in life, sometimes to
the very hour of death itself, restorative work which should have been
undertaken immediately on the recognition or conviction of misdeeds.
The notion that he is not to be called up for judgment until he is
rendered incapable by death of doing any further mischief, has been a
moral obstacle in the path of man, and therefore of the race, wholly
beyond the power of calculation. Foolish priests once thought that by
the invention of the dogma of hell they could terrorise men into
morality, and so they preached their Divinity, the magnified copy of a
fiend, who would have cheerfully created humanity out of nothing and
damned them everlastingly, had not he himself, in the shape of his son,
who is one in being with him, decided to appear upon earth and atone to
himself for the mischief, which presumably he could have very well
foreseen, perpetrated by man.
And what has been the effect of such teaching on humanity? It is
impossible to doubt that it has led to results deplorably,
indescribably wicked. Whence, for instance, arose the horrors of the
mediaeval inquisition, the insensate tortures inflicted upon men like
Huss and Bruno solely for theological errors, if not from belief in
this demon-deity whom the Church worshipped? If their practices were
but a shadow of the horrors he was supposed to be everlastingly
inflicting on mankind, who could raise a protest against them? Shall
man be juster than his God? This perverse Christian morality is
responsible for the worst cruelties which have tormented the human race
since the days of ecclesiastical domination. If the Deity is inhuman,
why should man be otherwise? Therefore, inhuman tortures will be
inflicted on prisoners. The rack and thumb-screw will be used to
extract secrets. Men will be immured alive within narrow walls and
allowed to perish by inches. The Austrian prisons in the northern
Italian provinces will be so constructed that the miserable victim can
neither sit nor lie down nor see the light of day. Floggings and
scourgings will be universal, _lettres de cachet_ an institution. Why
not? Where the god has no sense of justice, why should man? Hundreds
and hundreds of thousands of victims will perish at the stake and in
the flames in atrocious agony because they are wizards or witches or
have had dealings with imaginary devils. Why not? The god does worse
than all this. He keeps his victims alive for the sole purpose of
glutting his ire and satiating his insatiable vengeance. Nay, things
are so ordered that the very happiness of the elect is enhanced, not
only by the knowledge, but by the sight, of the appalling, unavailing
anguish of the lost, and we have seen such a philosopher as Aquinas
representing the Deity as conducting the "elect" in troops and droves
to the heavenly shores and giving them "a glimpse of hell" by way of
stimulating their enjoyment of the celestial beatitude. Why not? I
ask again. My only wonderment is how we ever got rid of it. Picture
the world under the universal dominion of this foul superstition. It
reigns on the thrones of kings, in the cabinets of statesmen, it is
preached in the pulpits, taught in the schools, it is the earliest
lesson that trembles on the lips of innocent children. The most
ingenious, subtly contrived, widespread and all-pervading influence is
especially created to propagate it everywhere in the shape of the
Christian Church--a Divine institution, possessed of the keys of life
and death, of heaven and hell--the sole representative of the Deity on
earth. How, we ask, in wondering gratitude, did the world ever escape
the tyranny of such superstition? This fact alone--this
deliverance--is enough to make one believe that there is a "Power, not
ourselves, which makes for righteousness," that the course of human
events is never wholly retrograde.
And, now, what is the truth about the "judgment to come"? What is the
ethical equivalent of "hell fire"? In the first place, we refuse to
believe in a "last judgment" because we know that judgment is not only
pronounced but executed instantaneously, automatically, I would say, on
the commission of wrong. There is no need to wait for the day of
judgment or even for the hour of death. If a man has done wrong he
sits condemned that self-same moment. _Illo nocens se damnat quo
peccat die_. There is no need of God, angel or devil, to announce the
fact or deliver judgment; the man has pronounced his own sentence,
executed judgment on himself. This is, in essence, the ethical
doctrine of compensation, that this universe is so woven, that the
nature of things is such that "things are what they are, that the
consequences of things will be what they will be," that we can no more
hope to avert them by crying out for help to man, saint or God, than we
can hope to hurl back the waves that dash upon the strand at flood
tide. Our view is that moral laws are as irresistible as physical, and
admit of no more dispensation than the everlasting order of Nature.
One of our main reasons for repudiating the conception of the
miraculous is that it involves a violation of eternal order and
therefore of eternal reason, and if freely admitted in the physical,
would doubtless be speedily introduced into the moral order, to the
destruction of civilised society. We believe that this universe is "so
magically woven" that it is absolutely impossible to escape the
consequences of our deeds, and if the Buddhist doctrine of Karma
represents that teaching, then we are among its most enthusiastic
adherents, because it is absolutely true to fact.
But let us look at the matter more closely.[1]
Have we ever sufficiently reflected how that "all things are double,
one against the other," in this mysteriously governed world, that
everything has its counterpart? the world appears to be split into
halves, which yet cleave to each other, as a man is haunted by his
shadow. "An inevitable dualism bisects Nature, so that each thing is
half, and suggests another thing to make it whole." Thus--spirit,
matter; man, woman; odd, even; subjective, objective; in, out; upper,
under; action, rest; yea, nay. "All things are double, one against the
other."
All the woes of existence arise from our deliberate resistance to the
law of oneness, to that integration which is so conspicuous in Nature.
We are incessantly seeking to take the one half and leave the other,
and straightway Nemesis overtakes us. We want to enjoy the pleasures
of sense without attending to the inexorable requirements of mind, and
such an appalling satiety sickens our souls, that we forget ourselves
in the commission of deeds unspeakably wicked; we possibly degrade
ourselves in the eyes of all men by falling even into the clutches of
the law, or we border on the verge of self-destruction in our
unspeakable _ennui_. We would have the half, while Nature planned the
whole, and we pay the last farthing. The results are naturally so
appalling that it is not to be wondered that men sought to express them
under the image of a fire which will not be quenched, a worm of remorse
which can never die--an immense despair for which there is no relief.