who owns but the clothes he wears one day, is a millionaire the next,
and he attempts the impossible task of bisecting life, which has been
manifestly planned as a whole. He appears to succeed for a time, but
one day men are startled to hear that he has owned up that he had
chosen the wrong path, and has determined to quit it in suicide. A few
months after, the community is compelled to witness an almost
unparalleled degradation, that of a young man born in the purple, with
every advantage that birth, position, education or matrimonial
connections could give him, sentenced as a felon for the meanest
treachery, because he would halve life which was planned a whole, and
forgot the Fates, the dread Erynys, who administer the ethical law of
compensation.
But it is the same in lesser as in greater things. Without hesitation,
we may ascribe our minor sorrows to the one self-same source, the
attempt to dissever the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual
bright, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair. We
forget that purity of heart and the law of gravitation arise in the
same eternal spring, that the world is a whole, that moral and physical
are grounded in one source, and we pay the penalty. "The soul says
eat; the body would feast. The soul says the man and woman shall be
one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul
says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body
would have power over things to its own individual ends."
Now, this conduct never yet met with any success. You thrust your arm
into the stream to divide the water, but it re-unites behind your hand.
You attempt to live your life on one side only, to dissever that which
was made for unity, and calamity comes to crush you. Men and women
marry for flesh or gold, they put half their whole into the contract,
and their sacrilegious bargain smites them with a curse. It is the law
of compensation, the workings of that moral gravitation which causes
all things to fit into their own places, and is to us the clearest
indication of the workings of the Divine in all this tumultuous life.
Wonderful discernment of the ethical prophet! We cease to see God
omnipresent in all things, and our blindness ends in our destruction.
We see the sensual allurement, but not the sensual hurt; we see the
mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail; we think we see our way to
cut off that which we would have from that which we would not have.
"How secret art Thou who dwellest in the highest heavens in silence,
that bringest penal blindnesses on such as have unbridled desires,"
quotes Emerson from Augustine's confessions.
No "last judgment," then, but a first judgment, a judgment here and
now, swift, sudden, irreversible upon every man and woman who dare to
take their lives by halves, to forget the seamless unity wherewith the
universe is woven. This is the ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps
watch in the universe and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies
are the attendants on justice, and if the sun in the heavens should
transgress his path, they would punish him.
This is that awful yet sublime doctrine of retribution which is the
groundwork of the masterpieces of the ancient Greek tragedies, the
inspiration without which the world would never have known the
Agamemnon or the immortal trilogy of Sophocles. It is the doctrine
which made Plato describe punishment as going about with sin, "their
heads tied together," and Hegel define it as "the other half of sin,"
while Emerson shows that "crime and punishment grow out of one stem.
Punishment is a fruit which, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of
pleasure which concealed it." They are linked together inexorably, as
cause and effect, and no god can dispense in this law, because the law
itself is God.
Hence, there can be no such thing as "forgiveness of sin". An act once
done is irreparable. Its consequences must endure to all time. Our
most agonising repentance cannot undo the past, it can only avail to
safeguard the future. We cannot escape the law of compensation. There
is no magnified man in the skies, swayed by human passions, ready, at
the call and entreaty of prayer, to obstruct the operation of natural
laws. Theories of atonement by blood shedding, sacrifices for the
forgiveness of sins, arose in the days when man believed in such a
deity as that, but we know none such now, and wise are we if we
recognise--oh, how well it had been if in our youth we all could have
known--that the consequences of an act are absolutely inevitable, that
deeds once done, words once spoken, are traced ineffaceably on the
tablets of universal nature and must reverberate throughout the
universe to all time!
Severe teaching, you say. Yes, one pauses here when thoughts of hell
and devils never once made man pause. The truth is, no one really
believes the insensate teaching of the Churches on punishment. Even
their adherents have outgrown them. Nothing is clearer from history
than that fear of hell fire never yet made man moral. It could not
keep the Church of mediaevalism, its priests and its bishops, aye, and
its supreme pontiffs--numbers of them--even decent living men, to say
nothing of morality or virtue. It is worse than useless now;--an
insult to reason and an outrage on religion. But what _will_ hold a
man is the doctrine of compensation, of judgment pronounced _by
himself_ directly his iniquity is accomplished, of sentence
self-executed, unpardonable and irremissible, now and for ever.
And, added to this, the conviction that his crimes are committed, not
"against God," who can in no wise be personally influenced or injured
by man's misdeeds, being wholly destitute of human passions and
emotions, but against his fellow man, or against his sister woman.
One knows, alas! the beginning of the end to which the lost have come.
If only youth had been taught in the opening days of life, when
impressions are so vivid, that there is no such article as the creeds
of the Churches falsely proclaim--"the forgiveness of sin"--that one
only wrong act may, rather must, be the starting point which will one
day precipitate a catastrophe, how many would have been saved from the
nameless depths, of which we must be silent, how many spared the
anguish of an unavailing remorse!
Must this false teaching indeed go on for ever? Will it never dawn
upon our priests and ministers, our masters and mistresses in schools,
that God bears none of the burden of humanity; his heart never breaks
because a life is withering in despair? He takes no hurt from the
weltering sorrows by which so many are overwhelmed. It is man, it is
woman, who bears the agony; the crushing burden of wrong-doing falls on
them. Look no more then, we urge, to a phantom deity, to an idol-god
in the skies, a figment of a disordered imagination, but think on your
brother man before you dare to set mischief in motion. When you
apprehend the nearness of danger, think of the future, think of
consequences, think only of the irremissibleness of sin, which not all
the waters and baptisms, though it were of blood, through which the
Churches can pass you, will ever be able to efface.
How much knavery in actual progress in this wilderness of men in London
might one not hope to stop if this doctrine of compensation could be
brought home? How much company-promoting, fraud, mendacity,
adulteration of food, could we not render impossible, if ethical and
prophetical teaching took the place of the Church catechisms and the
creeds, if men could be persuaded that the success of their
ventures--quite legitimate in the eyes of the civil and criminal
law--can only be purchased by the tears and ruin of human beings? The
dogma of endless future punishment was apparently impotent to restrain
the ultra-orthodox directors of the Liberator Company, but I take it
that no man who had been schooled in Emerson, could have sat at that
board and thanked an Almighty God for the exceptional favours he had
been mercifully pleased to bestow on their conscious frauds. The
vindictiveness of a purposeless hell has, of course, failed
ignominiously as a deterrent from crime. We cannot conceive infinite
Intelligence inflicting an excruciating and endless punishment simply
for punishment's sake. We are superior to such methods ourselves; we
refuse to associate them with God. What we do believe in, what we are
sure of, is that a man's sin must find him out, that he must reap as he
sows, that the consequences of his misdeeds are eternal, that--
All on earth he has made his own
Floating in air or pent in stone,
Will rive the hills, the sea will swim,
And like his shadow follow him.
[1] In what follows I have freely borrowed from the great "Essay on
Compensation".
VI.
CONSCIENCE THE VOICE OF GOD AND THE VOICE OF MAN.
We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation
that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the
world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total
neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable
disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing
of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine
unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That,
likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the
solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its
problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp
truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is
partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better illustration of
this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by
conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral
life of man.
In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes,
in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself,
an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost
every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every
occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up
to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting--in all
the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned.
Those were naturally the days of the "Divine right of kings," when all
civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the
express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the
conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate
utterance of God. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to
rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the
custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his
thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical
sentiment of the hour.
Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course
inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as "a
worm" and an outcast, or avowing himself "a miserable sinner" and a
limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human
dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening
self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatural power
began to be seriously curtailed. "The Divine right of kings" went its
way with other archaisms into the limbo of oblivion, from which the
reigning monarch in Prussia would appear to be vainly endeavouring to
rescue it, while man began to realise that the causes of natural and
human phenomena were to be sought in nature and in man. As a
consequence of this, a new theory of conscience began to take shape,
which was ultimately described by one of the boldest of later English
philosophical writers, the late Professor Clifford, as "the voice of
man commanding us to live for the right".[1]
In these definitions of conscience, as "the voice of God" and "the
voice of man," we have an instance of propositions which in logic are
called _contraries_. Both, therefore, cannot be exclusively and
simultaneously true, but both may be simultaneously false. Thus, "all
men are white" and "no men are white" are contraries, but they are both
false. And this, I submit, is the judgment to be pronounced on these
two exclusive definitions of conscience. Neither is, exclusively
speaking, true, but there is a measure of truth common to both, and
that measure it will be the purpose of the following remarks to
determine.
But, before going any farther, we must get a clear idea of what we mean
by conscience. In a general way, of course, we all know what is meant
by the word: an appeal to conscience would be intelligible by every
one. We understand it to be a faculty which decides on a definite
course of action when alternatives of good and evil are before us. We
look upon it as an instinct, magnetic in its power, incessantly
prompting us towards the fulfilment of duty, and gravely reproaching us
on its dereliction. We recognise it as the sweetest and most
troublesome of visitants; sweetest when the peace unspeakable sinks
into our souls, most troublesome when we have been guilty of a great
betrayal. So delicate is that voice that nothing is easier than to
stifle it; so clear is it that no one by any possibility can mistake it.
Thus, in general terms, we may describe conscience. Coming now more
closely to a philosophical analysis of the conception, we shall find
therein much enlightenment for the purposes of our present
investigation. In the first place, the word is of comparatively late
origin. It does not occur in the Hebrew writers of the Old Testament.
Its earliest appearance is in the Book of Wisdom, the work of a
Hellenistic Jew extremely well acquainted with the trend of Greek
thought in the third century B.C. It does not occur in the Gospels,
except in the story of the sinful woman whom Christ refused to
condemn--a history which, though profoundly in accord with the
sympathetic genius of Jesus, is none the less an interpolation in the
eighth chapter of the Johannine Gospel, so much so that Tischendorff
excised it from his last edition of the text of the New Testament. St.
Paul certainly uses the word once in the Epistle to the Romans, and
though known in the latter days before the advent of Christianity, we
may assume that mainly through that religion the word was popularised
throughout the world.
But what is the faculty which corresponds to the word conscience? We
shall find etymology of great assistance in giving precision to our
thoughts. The word is, of course, a derivative from the Latin,
_conscientia_, knowledge with, or together. Now, _scientia_ is the
simple knowledge of things by the reason, while _conscientia_ is the
knowledge which the reason has of itself; it is the realisation of
one's selfhood--the realisation of the _ichkeit des ego_, as the very
expressive German phrase has it, "the selfhood of the I". In English
philosophical language we commonly denominate this self-realisation
consciousness, a word of precisely the same etymological origin as
conscience. If, in the next place, the reason is occupied, not with
the reflex action of self-contemplation, but with moral action or the
discernment of right from wrong, then it is called, and is, no longer
consciousness, but _conscience_. Putting it technically, consciousness
is a psychological expression, while conscience is ethical.
Nevertheless, it must be most carefully remembered that the two
functions are performed by one and the same reason--immaterial and
indivisible in us. Truly speaking, there is no real, but only a
conceptual, distinction between the reason of a Darwin elaborating his
famous law, realising his selfhood, and acknowledging his obligations
to the eminent man--only less so than himself--who had simultaneously
lighted on the great discovery of the age--the law of organic
evolution. As Paul says of those manifold endowments of the earliest
Christians, "A diversity of gifts and a diversity of graces, but in
them all worketh the self-same spirit," so say we of the reason at the
very heart of our being, the sole, self-sufficing explanation of the
multitudinous phenomena of our mental life. Hence we arrive at a
definition of conscience as "the practical dictate of the reason in us
prescribing obedience to the good and avoidance of the evil". Two
elements, therefore, are discernible in this definition: first,
reason, as such, pointing out what is good and evil; and, secondly,
reason, as conscience, ordaining that the good is to be done and the
evil left undone--a distinction to be carefully borne in mind when the
problem of conflicting consciences has to be faced; how it comes, for
instance, that morality appears to differ in different countries, and
even in the same individual at different periods of his life.
But of that nothing further need be said now, but we may immediately
pass on to see in what sense conscience, thus explained, is, in the
first place, to be accounted the voice of God.
Outside a philosophy avowedly atheist it seems difficult to understand
how there can be any doubt that the eternal distinction between right
and wrong betokens the presence in this world of men of a supreme power
and a supreme mind. "How comes it," let us ask with Emerson, "that the
universe is so constituted," that that which we instinctively recognise
as good makes for the individual and the general welfare, and that
which we must perforce reprobate as evil works uniformly disaster? We
recognise that things are unalterably so ordered that by no possibility
could lying, slander, malice and hatred be other than intrinsically
evil, and their opposites be other than essentially good. But how is
it that things are so ordered? Whence these uniformities of
approbation and disapprobation? Is there any answer conceivable but
that the power responsible for the world is a moral power? Whence is
existence itself but from the subsistent source of all being? Whence
is life but from one ever-lasting source? Whence is intelligence but
from the world's Soul, which is the soul of men? And towering above
being, above life and reason, is conscience, the supreme guide, the
light enlightening every man that cometh into this world.
Luce intellettual, piena d'amore,
Amor di vero ben pien di letizia,
Letizia die trascende ogni dolzore.
What is this "light intellectual," this "love of the true," so
unutterably blissful as to quiet all pain and sorrow, but the radiance
of the eternal falling athwart the shadows of this lower life? What is
this miraculous monitor--this "man within the breast," as the Stoics
called it--but the very articulate utterance of the supreme Reason
bidding man to live for the right? No great son of earth ever
interpreted it otherwise. From the days when Socrates scattered "the
sophist clan" in Athens, and forced men by the irresistible majesty of
his own moral elevation to believe in a morality which was more than a
string of rules sanctioned by convention; from the hour when he refused
to escape from prison because his conscience bade him submit to
die;--from the days of the sublime martyrdom of Socrates and Jesus, the
noble school of the Stoics, down to the philosophic Titans of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany, with the glorious sage
of Königsberg at their head, there has been but one answer to the
question, What is conscience? Conscience, they proclaimed, is the
voice of God. So surely as the maternal instinct in woman is the voice
of universal Nature, so surely is conscience the witness in us that we
are indeed "sons of God". If that teaching of the "Over-soul" be the
truth, then since the Divine is incarnate in every man, by what other
voice _can_ we be guided than by the Divine utterance commanding us to
live by a moral law? We are Divine by nature, by what other law of
life should we live?
Or, how are we to explain the appearance of so strange a visitant in a
universe which is dominated by the "struggle for existence"? The
intellectual difficulty of atheism is so insuperable that we hear of it
no more from men of science. I think Mr. Spencer's speculations have
given it the _coup de grace_. But difficult as is the question of the
origin of the cosmos, far more so is that of conscience. On what
principles are we to explain how a world, evolving itself mechanically,
cycle after cycle, has eventually produced an element so utterly at
variance with itself, an element which puts right before might,
self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity
in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development
of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a _volta face_ in
nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process
itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words
Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so
opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes--in other words, so
completely at variance are the law of conscience and the law of
evolution--that only by the triumph of the former over the latter is
progress possible in the world. Again, I ask, since conscience is not
the voice of Nature, of what is conscience the voice and witness if not
of one of whom it is written, "In the beginning was Reason; in the
beginning was Mind"?[3]
But there is another aspect of the question, and we must now pass on to
inquire how far conscience is also "the voice of man commanding us to
live for the right". Quite at the beginning of this ethical movement
we protested, as plainly as words would allow, our entire allegiance to
the teachings of physical science, and our readiness to abandon any
doctrine of ethical religion which is disproved by experimental
research. So convinced are we of the absolute unity of truth, because
with Plato we believe in the unity of its source in the Divine
intelligence, that to us it is inconceivable that there should be any
fundamental contradiction in the orders of the real and the ideal.
Things seen and unseen, the passing and the eternal, both ultimately
take their origin in the same source, the Infinite. No finite thing
can be the ultimate explanation of the universe, because it itself
requires explanation. Hence, whatever science has to tell us about
conscience will be enthusiastically acclaimed by us as true equally
with what we learn from the masters of the higher experience, the
philosophers who break unto us the bread of life.
Now what has experimental science to say about the conscience? It does
_not_ say that it is the voice of God--a fact by no means calculated to
disturb those who remember that physical investigation is not concerned
with such speculations. Half the mischief and misunderstandings which
occur over these border questions, which are, so to speak, under two
jurisdictions, arise from our forgetting in what capacity and by what
principles certain well-known scientific men have made pronouncements
on matters such as conscience, morality and religion. There are two
sides to them, the physical and the hyper-physical or metaphysical.
And here it may not be amiss to offer a suggestion that one should
mistrust that parrot cry so often heard from men who speak most
confidently about that which they know least, that metaphysic is
synonymous with unreality, or in plainer words, moonshine. A very
little reflection will be sufficient to satisfy us that without the aid
of conceptions higher than those of sense-experience--and that is all
the word metaphysic means--it would be absolutely impossible to
formulate a single scientific generalisation. What is the very concept
of law, or system, but a metaphysical idea? To cease to be
metaphysical would be to cease to be rational, to have no higher or
wider conceptions than those of a dog. Hence, like M. Jourdain, who
had been talking prose all his life without knowing it, some of our
most daring anti-metaphysicians have been philosophising by the very
method they had in their ignorance so contemptuously denounced.