for the view that to obtain happiness we must avoid aiming at it
directly. If we do not aim at the pleasure in its own subjective
character, we aim at the thing that immediately brings the pleasure;
which is, for all practical purposes, to aim at the pleasure.
The prescription to look away from the final end, Happiness, in order to
secure that end, may be tested on the example of one of our intermediate
pursuits, as Health. It is not a good thing to be always dwelling on the
state of our health: by doing so, we get into a morbid condition of
self-consciousness, which is in itself pernicious. It does not follow
that we are to live at random, without ever giving a thought to our
health. There is a plain middle course. Guided by our own experience,
and by the experience of those that have gone before us, we arrange our
plan of life so as to preserve health; and our actions consist in
adhering to that plan in the detail. So long as our scheme answers
expectation, we think of nothing but of putting it in force, as occasion
arises; we do not dwell upon our states of good health at all. It is
some interruption that makes us self-conscious; and then it is that we
have to exercise ourselves about a remedial course. This, when found, is
likewise objectively pursued; our only subjectiveness lies in being
aware of gradual recovery; and we are glad to get back to the state of
paying no attention to the workings of our viscera. We do not,
therefore, remit our pursuit; only, it is enough to observe the routine
of outward actions, whose sole motive is to keep us in health.
The pursuit of the still wider end, Happiness, has much in common with
the narrower pursuit. When we have discovered what things promote, and
what things impede our happiness, we transfer our attention to these, as
the most direct mode of compassing the end. If we are satisfied that
working for other people brings us happiness, we work accordingly; this
is no side aim, it is as direct as any aim can be. It may involve
immediate sacrifice, but that does not alter the case; we can get no
considerable happiness from any source without temporary sacrifice.
[HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE DISTINCT AIMS.]
If it be said that the best mode of attaining happiness is to put
ourselves entirely out of account, and to work for others exclusively,
this, as already noted, is a self-contradiction. It is to tell people
not to think of their own happiness, and yet to know that they are
securing that in the most effectual way. It is also very questionable,
indeed absolutely erroneous, in fact. The most apparent way to secure
happiness is to ply all the known means of happiness, just as far as,
and no farther than, they are discovered to produce the effect. We must
keep a check upon the methods that we employ, and abandon those that do
not answer. So long as we find happiness in serving others, so long we
continue in that course. And it is a melancholy fact that Pope's bold
assertion--"Virtue alone is happiness below,"--cannot be upheld against
the stern realities of life. Life needs to be made up of two aims--the
one, Happiness, the other Virtue, each on its own account. There is a
certain mutual connection of the two, but all attempts at making out
their identity are failures.
It is of very great importance to teach men the bearings of virtue on
happiness, so far as these are known. There will, however, always remain
a portion of duty that detracts from happiness, and must be done as
duty, nevertheless. Men are entitled to pursue happiness as directly as
ever they please; only, they must couple with the pursuit their round of
duties to others; in which they may or may not reap a share of the
coveted good for self.
* * * * *
Let us, next, consider some of the difficulties and mistakes attaching
to the WILL. Here there are the questions of world-renown, questions
known even in Pandemonium--Free-will, Responsibility, Moral Ability, and
Inability. It is now suspected, on good grounds, that, on these
questions, we have somehow got into a wrong groove--that we are lost in
a maze of our own constructing.
[A STRONG WILL THE GIFT OF NATURE.]
I. We shall first notice a misconception akin to some of the foregoing
mistakes respecting the feelings. In addressing men with a view to spur
their activity, there is usually a too low estimate of what is implied
in great and energetic efforts of will. Here, exactly as in the cheerful
temperament, we find a certain constitutional endowment, a certain
natural force of character, having its physical supports of brain,
muscle, and other tissue; and neither persuasion, nor even education,
can go very far to alter that character. If there be anything at all in
the observations of phrenology, it is the connection of energetic
determination with size of brain. Lay your hand first on the head of an
energetic man, and then on the head of a feeble man, and you will find
a difference that is not to be explained away. Now it passes all the
powers of persuasion and education combined to make up for a great
cranial inequality. Something always comes of assiduous discipline; but
to set up a King Alfred, or a Luther, as a model to be imitated by an
ordinary man, on the points of energy, perseverance, endurance, courage,
is to pass the bounds of the human constitution. Persistent energy of a
high order, like the temperament for happiness, costs a great deal to
the human system. A large share of the total forces of the constitution
go to support it; and the diversion of power often leaves great defects
in other parts of the character, as for example, a low order of the
sensibilities, and a narrow range of sympathies. The men of
extraordinary vigour and activity--our Roman emperors and conquering
heroes--are often brutal and coarse. Nature does not supply power
profusely on all sides; and delicate sympathies, of themselves, use up
a very large fraction of the forces of the organisation. Even
intellectually estimated, the power of sympathising with many various
minds and conditions would occupy as much room in the brain as a
language, or an accomplishment. A man both energetic and sympathetic--a
Pericles, a King Alfred, an Oliver Cromwell--is one of nature's giants,
several men in one.
There is no more notable phase of our active nature than Courage. Great
energy generally implies great courage, and courage--at least in
nine-tenths of its amount--comes by nature. To exhort any one to be
courageous is waste of words. We may animate, for the time, a naturally
timid person, by explaining away the signs of danger, and by assuming a
confident attitude ourselves; but the absolute force of courage is what
neither we nor the man himself can add to. A long and careful education
might effect a slight increase in this, as in other aspects of energy of
character: we can hardly say how much, because it is a matter that is
scarcely ever subjected to the trial; the very conditions of the
experiment have not been thought of.
The moral qualities expressed by Prudence, Forethought, Circumspection,
are talked of with a like insufficient estimate of what they cost. Great
are the rewards of prudence, but great also is the expenditure of the
prudent man. To retain an abiding sense of all the possible evils, risks
and contingencies of an ordinary man's position--professional, family,
and personal--is to go about under a constant burden; the difference
between a thorough-going and an easy-going circumspection is a large
additional demand upon the forces of the brain. The being on the alert
to duck the head at every bullet is a charge to the vital powers; so
much so, that there comes a point when it is better to run risks than to
pile up costly precautions and bear worrying anxieties.
Lastly, the attribute of our active nature called Belief, Confidence,
Conviction, is subject to the same line of remark. This great
quality--the opposite of distrust and timidity, the ally of courage, the
adjunct of a buoyant temperament--is not fed upon airy nothings. It is,
indeed, a true mental quality, an offshoot of our mental nature; yet,
although not material, it is based upon certain forces of the physical
constitution; it grows when these grow, and is nourished when they are
nourished. People possessed of great confidence have it as a gift all
through life, like a broad chest or a good digestion. Preaching and
education have their fractional efficacy, and deserve to be plied,
provided the operator is aware of nature's impassable barriers, and does
not suppose that he is working by charm. It is said of Hannibal that he
dissolved obstructions in the Alps by vinegar; in the moral world,
barriers are not to be removed either by acetic acid or by honey.
* * * * *
[PREJUDICES DUE TO PERSONAL DIGNITY.]
II. The question of Free-will might be a text for discoursing on some of
the most inveterate erroneous tendencies of the mind.
For one thing, it gives occasion to remark on the influence exerted over
our opinions by the feeling of Personal Dignity. Of sources of bias,
prejudices, "Idola," "fallacies _a priori_" this may be allowed
precedence. For example, the maxim has been enunciated by some
philosophers, that, of two differing opinions, preference is to be given
(not to what is true, but) to what ennobles and dignifies human nature.
One of the objections seriously entertained against Darwin's theory is
that it humbles our ancestral pride. So, to ascribe to our mental powers
a material foundation is held to be degrading to our nobler part. Again,
a philosopher of our own day--Sir W. Hamilton--has placed on the
title-page of his principal work this piece of rhetoric: "On earth,
there is nothing great but man; in man, there is nothing great but
mind". Now one would suppose that there are on earth many things besides
man deserving the appellation of "great"; and that the mechanism of the
body is, in any view, quite as remarkable a piece of work as the
mechanism of the mind. There was one step more that Hamilton, as an
Aristotelian, should have made: "In mind, there is nothing great but
intellect". Doubtless, we ought not to dissect an epigram; but epigrams
brought into a perverting contact with science are not harmless. Such
gross pandering to human vanity must be held as disfiguring a work on
philosophy.
The sentiment of dignity has much to answer for in the doctrine of
Free-will. In Aristotle, the question had not assumed its modern
perplexity; but the vicious element of factitious personal importance
had already peeped out, it being one of the few points wherein the bias
of the feelings operated decidedly in his well-balanced mind. In
maintaining the doctrine that vice is voluntary, he argues, that if
virtue is voluntary, vice (its opposite) must also be voluntary; now to
assert virtue not to be voluntary would be to cast an _indignity_ upon
it. This is the earliest association of the feeling of personal dignity
with the exercise of the human will.
[FALSE PRIDE IN CONNECTION WITH FREE-WILL.]
The Stoics are commonly said to have started the free-will difficulty.
This needs an explanation. A leading tenet of theirs was the distinction
between things in our power and things not in our power; and they
greatly overstrained the limits of what is in our power. Looking at the
sentiment about death, where the _idea_ is everything, and at many of
our desires and aversions, also purely sentimental, that is, made and
unmade by our education (as, for example, pride of birth), they
considered that pains in general, even physical pains and grief for
the loss of friends, could be got over by a mental discipline, by
intellectually holding them not to be pains. They extolled and magnified
the power of the will that could command such a transcendent discipline,
and infused an emotion of _pride_ into the consciousness of this
greatness of will. In subsequent ages, poets, moralists, and theologians
followed up the theme; and the appeal to the pride of will may be said
to be a standing engine of moral suasion. This originating of a point of
honour or dignity in connection with our Will has been the main lure in
bringing us into the jungle of Free-will and Necessity.
It is in the Alexandrian school that we find the next move in the
question. In Philo Judaeus, the good man is spoken of as free, the
wicked man as a slave. Except as the medium of a compliment to virtue,
the word "freedom" is not very apposite, seeing that, to the highest
goodness, there attaches submission or restraint, rather than liberty.
The early Christian Fathers (notably Augustine) advanced the question to
the Theological stage, by connecting it with the great doctrines of
Original Sin and Predestination; in which stage it shared all the
speculative difficulties attaching to these doctrines. The Theological
world, however, has always been divided between Free-will and Necessity;
and probably the weightiest names are to be found among the
Necessitarians. No man ever brought greater acumen into theological
controversy than did Jonathan Edwards; and he took the side of
Necessity.
Latterly, however, since the question has become one of pure
metaphysics, Free-will has been the favourite dogma, as being most
consonant to the dignity of man, which appears to be its chief
recommendation, and its only argument. The weight of reasoning is, I
believe, in favour of necessity; but the word carries with it a seeming
affront, and hardly any amount of argument will reconcile men to
indignity.
* * * * *
III. Another weakness of the human mind receives illustration from the
free-will controversy, and deserves to be noticed, as helping to account
for the prolonged existence of the dispute: I mean the disposition to
regard any departure from the accustomed rendering of a fact as denying
the fact itself. The rose under another name is not merely less sweet,
it is not a rose at all. Some of the greatest questions have suffered by
this weakness.
[ANALYSIS DOES NOT DESTROY THE FACT.]
The physical theory of matter that resolves it into _points of force_
will seem to many as doing away with matter no less effectually than the
Berkeleyan Idealism. A universe of inane mathematical points, attracting
and repelling each other, must appear to the ordinary mind a sorry
substitute for the firm-set earth, and the majestically-fretted vault
of heaven, with its planets, stars, and galaxies. It takes a special
education to reconcile any one to this theory. Even if it were
everything that a scientific hypothesis should be, the previously
established modes of speech would be a permanent obstruction to its
being received as the popular doctrine.
But the best illustrations occur in the Ethical and Metaphysical
departments. For example, some ethical theorists endeavour to show that
Conscience is not a primitive and distinct power of the mind, like the
sense of colour, or the feeling of resistance, but a growth and a
compound, being made up of various primitive impulses, together with a
process of education. Again and again has this view been represented as
denying conscience altogether. Exactly parallel has been the handling of
the sentiment of Benevolence. Some have attempted to resolve it into
simpler elements of the mind, and have been attacked as denying the
existence of the sentiment. Hobbes, in particular, has been subjected to
this treatment. Because he held pity to be a form of self-love, his
opponents charged him with declaring that there is no such thing as pity
or sympathy in the human constitution.
A more notable example is the doctrine of the alliance of Mind with
Matter. It is impossible that any mode of viewing this alliance can
erase the distinction between the two modes of existence--the material
and the mental; between extended inert bodies, on the one hand, and
pleasures and pains, thoughts and volitions, on the other. Yet, after
the world has been made familiar with the Cartesian doctrine of two
distinct substances--the one for the inherence of material facts, and
the other for mental facts--any thinker maintaining the separate mental
substance to be unproved, and unnecessary, is denounced as trying to
blot out our mental existence, and to resolve us into watches,
steam-engines, or speaking and calculating machines. The upholder of the
single substance has to spend himself in protestations that he is not
denying the existence of the fact, or the phenomena called mind, but is
merely challenging an arbitrary and unfounded hypothesis for
representing that fact.
[PERCEPTION OF A MATERIAL WORLD.]
The still greater controversy--distinct from the foregoing, although
often confounded with it--relating to the Perception of a Material
World, is the crowning instance of the weakness we are considering.
Berkeley has been unceasingly stigmatised as holding that there is no
material world, merely because he exposed a self-contradiction in the
mode of viewing it, common to the vulgar and to philosophers, and
suggested a mode of escaping the contradiction by an altered rendering
of the facts. The case is very peculiar. The received and
self-contradictory view is exceedingly simple and intelligible in its
statement; it is well adapted, not merely for all the commoner purposes
of life, but even for most scientific purposes. The supposition of an
independent material world, and an independent mental world, created
apart, and coming into mutual contact--the one the objects perceived,
and the other the mind perceiving--expresses (or over-expresses) the
division of the sciences into sciences of matter and sciences of mind;
and the highest laws of the material world at least are in no respect
falsified by it. On the other hand, any attempt to state the facts of
the outer world on Berkeley's plan, or on any plan that avoids the
self-contradiction, is most cumbrous and unmanageable. A smaller, but
exactly parallel instance of the situation is familiar to us. The daily
circuit of the sun around the earth, supposed to be fixed, so exactly
answers all the common uses that, in spite of its being false, we adhere
to it in the language of every-day life. It is a convenient
misrepresentation, and deceives nobody. And such will, in all
likelihood, be the usage regarding the external world, after the
contradiction is admitted, and rectified by a metaphysical circumlocution.
Speculators are still only trying their hand at an unobjectionable
circumlocution; but we may almost be sure that nothing will ever
supersede, for practical uses, the notion of the distinct worlds of Mind
and Matter. If, after the Copernican demonstration of the true position
of the sun, we still find it requisite to keep up the fiction of his
daily course; much more, after the final accomplishment of the
Berkeleyan revolution (to my mind inevitable), shall we retain the
fiction of an independent external world: only, we shall then know how
to fall back upon some mode of stating the case, without incurring the
contradiction.
* * * * *
IV. To return to the Will. The fact that we have to save, and to
represent in adequate language, is this:--A voluntary action is a
sequence distinct and _sui generis;_ a human being avoiding the cold,
searching for food, and clinging to other beings, is not to be
confounded with a pure material sequence, as the fall of rain, or the
explosion of gunpowder. The phenomena, in both kinds, are phenomena of
sequence, and of _regular_ or _uniform_ sequence; but the things that
make up the sequence are widely different: in the one, a feeling of the
mind, or a concurrence of feelings, is followed by a conscious muscular
exertion; in the other, both steps are made up of purely material
circumstances. It is the difference between a mental or psychological,
and a material or physical sequence--in short, the difference between
mind and matter; the greatest contrast within the whole compass of
nature, within the universe of being. Now language must be found to give
ample explicitness to this diametrical antithesis; still, I am satisfied
that rarely in the usages of human speech has a more unfortunate choice
been made than to employ, in the present instance, the antithetic
couple--Freedom and Necessity. It misses the real point, and introduces
meanings alien to the case. It converts the glory of the human character
into a reproach (although its leading motive throughout has been to pay
us a compliment). The _constancy_ of man's emotional nature (but for
which our life would be a chaos, an impossibility) has to be explained
away, for no other reason than that, at one time, a blundering epithet
was applied to designate the mental sequences. Great is the difference
between Mind and Matter; but the terms Freedom and Necessity represent
the point of agreement as the point of difference; and this being made
familiar, through iteration, as the mode of expressing the contrast, the
rectification is supposed to unsettle everything, and to obliterate the
wide distinction of the two natures.
* * * * *
[SEIZING A QUESTION BY THE WRONG END.]
V. What is called Moral Ability and Inability is another artificial
perplexity in regard to the will, and might also be the text for a
sermon on prevailing errors. More especially, it exemplifies what may be
termed _seizing a question by the wrong end_.
The votary, we shall say, of alcoholic liquor is found fault with, and
makes the excuse, he cannot help it--he cannot resist the temptation. So
far, the language may pass. But what shall we say to the not uncommon
reply,--You could help it if you would. Surely there is some
mystification here; it is not one of those plain statements that we
desire in practical affairs. Whether we are dealing with matter or with
mind, we ought to point out some clear and practicable method of
attaining an end in view. To get a good crop, we till and enrich the
soil; to make a youth knowing in mathematics, we send him to a good
master, and stimulate his attention by combined reward and punishment.
There are also intelligible courses of reforming the vicious: withdraw
them from temptation till their habits are remodelled; entice them to
other courses, by presenting objects of superior attraction; or, at
lowest, keep the fact of punishment before their eyes. By these methods
many are kept from vices, and not a few reclaimed after having fallen.
But to say, "You can be virtuous if you will," is either unmeaning, or
it disguises a real meaning. If it have any force at all--and it would
not be used unless, some efficacy had been found attaching to it,--the
force must be in the indirect circumstances or accompaniments. What,
then, is the meaning that is so unhappily expressed? In the first place,
it is a vehicle for conveying the strong wish and determination of the
speaker; it is a clumsy substitute for--"I do wish you would amend your
conduct"; an expression containing a real efficacy, greater or less
according to the estimate formed of the speaker by the person spoken to.
In the next place, it presents to the mind of the delinquent the _ideal_
of improvement, which might also be done in unexceptionable phrase; as
one might say--"Reflect upon your own state, and compare yourself with
the correct and virtuous liver". Then, there is a touch of the stoical
dignity and pride of will. Lastly, there may be a hint or suggestion to
the mind of good and evil consequences, which is the most powerful
motive of all. In giving rise to these various considerations, even the
objectionable expression may have a genuine efficacy; but that does not
justify the form itself, which by no interpretation can be construed
into sense or intelligibility.
[MEANING OF MORAL INABILITY.]