of the good and wise individual, but that of the moral sense of our
civilisation. We can very seldom give an adequate reason for those
points on which we have the strongest moral convictions. For example, in
argument I suppose we should most of us find it very difficult to
produce a case for monogamy as against polygamy anything like so strong
as the feeling which we have in favour of the one against the other.
That feeling is implanted in us by the experience of our civilisation, a
civilisation which has, in fact, emerged from one into the other, and
these very strong instinctive feelings, which are common to great masses
of people and for which usually any one individual in all that mass can
only give a most inadequate reason, are something to which an enormous
volume of human experience has contributed. Generation after generation
has come to feel that certain relations of the sexes are, as a matter of
fact, the only ones that can be maintained with real wholesomeness, and
this belief becomes so strong in the community that it is received with
the air we breathe all through the formative years of our life, and the
result is an intense conviction for which, as I say, we can hardly give
any argument--an intense conviction that one sort of thing is right and
the other wrong; and what most of us mean by our conscience is just this
body of feeling concerning right and wrong which has been implanted in
us as the result of the accumulated experience of civilisation. From
the point of view of the individual it is usually more an emotion than a
reasoned judgment; and it is much more of the nature of prejudice than
of an argumentative conclusion. When people talk about conscientious
objections to obeying the law, it is always quite impossible to
distinguish between their prejudice and their conscience; there is no
standard by which to determine. But the fact that it is unreasoned in
the individual does not mean that it is irrational, or without reason in
itself. What has been built up by the steady pressure of whole
centuries of experience has enormous weight of pure reason behind it,
even though the individual cannot himself give the reason, and even
though there may be no individual alive who can give it; it has come out
of the logic of experience; it has been built up in the strictly
scientific way by a whole series of facts. There is an enormous
inductive background, an enormous scientific basis for the moral
convictions of the better, more self-controlled members of any civilised
society. The moral verdict of society, and the conscience of the
individual, which is his own echo, for the most part, of that moral
verdict, is a thing of quite enormous authority.
But, it will be urged, the authorities clash. The verdict of European
civilisation is for monogamy; the verdict of certain other civilisations
is quite as emphatically against it. Does this mean that the whole
distinction of right and wrong is a mere matter of convention? No, it
does not. But even if it did, the thing would not be as bad as people
often imagine, because convention is not something artificial in the
sense of contrary to nature or fictitious; a convention is simply the
expression of human nature working on a large scale. Man is a being
whose nature it is to set up conventions, and a convention is a product
of human nature, a property and mark of human nature, just as much
gravitation is a property and mark of mechanical nature; and it only
becomes contrary to nature and a nuisance when it has survived the
purpose for which it originally grew up. But none the less there is
something more than any convention or social growth about the
distinction of right and wrong; the distinction in itself is absolute
and fundamental. It is the distinction between recognising oneself as
member of a community and not so recognising oneself. Morality is
always recognition of a claim on the part of other persons, the
recognition that their point of view and their interests have to be
taken into account in the determination of my conduct. As man is by
nature social, as by nature he is designed to live in communities, the
distinction of right and wrong, that is the recognition of the claim of
the community and of the members in it, is absolute and final.
But what is the content of the two terms right and wrong, what actual
action shall be called right and what wrong on any given occasion, may
vary easily according to circumstances, according to the degree of
social development and the like. There is conduct which is right at one
stage of society and wrong at another, precisely because at one stage it
tends to the health of society, while at another it will be bad for the
health of society; just as there are ways in which it is good from time
to time to train children in which it would not be well to train
grown-up people; and there is conduct which is appropriate to earlier
stages of society, because beneficial to society, which becomes
inappropriate and harmful at any other stage. What is right and what is
wrong may depend very largely upon circumstances, stage of development,
spiritual receptiveness, and a host of other things; but the distinction
between right and wrong itself remains unaffected by all these, and
absolutely fundamental and invariable.
Now, how is it that in society progress is actually made in morals? The
appeal to authority can always be made in two ways. It can be made in
the most obvious form in the interest of mere stagnation, by saying,
"What was good enough for our fathers is good enough for us," a thing
nobody ever does say; or by saying, "What is good enough for us is good
enough for our children," a thing which numbers of people say. While
the first form may be some safeguard against wild experiments--and wild
experiments in morals are more dangerous than wild experiments anywhere
else in life, for a reason I will mention in a moment--yet the tendency
of this appeal is to pure stagnation. But the right appeal is to ask,
not what the great men of the past actually did, but what were the
principles upon which they acted. What we want to be doing with the
prophets of the last generation is not saying again, like parrots, just
what they said, but finding out the principles and spirit of their life
and applying that same spirit to circumstances which are changed just
because those prophets lived and wrought. They would not have been
prophets, they would not have been great men, if they had not changed in
some degree the world they lived in. Then just because they have
changed the world their action may no longer be appropriate; it is not
the action which they themselves would now take if they were still alive
and retained their power of development. What we do then is to appeal,
not to their conduct but to the principle of their conduct. So when
Wilberforce started the campaign against slavery what he did was to
appeal from the conduct of the Church to the principle of that conduct
which it professed and admitted. In other spheres it admitted the
sanctity of human personality; but it had never applied this principle
to the particular problem of slavery.
In this way the appeal to authority is both just, safe, and progressive.
It is only a fool who will throw away all that the experience of the
ages has built up. But the wisest man of all is surely he who,
rejoicing in that great inheritance, can still appeal not to its outward
form, but to its indwelling, living spirit, and carry forward the work
which the past has done. The ages in the past that we value are not
those in which people were mainly concerned to praise their
predecessors, but those in which men were agreed to press forward to
whatever new life God has in store. So it must be here: if we would be
true to the great men of the past, to the authority of those who have
built up our moral life, it will not be by standing still, but by moving
on in the direction to which they point.
The appeal to authority, then, will not be an appeal to practice, but
always an appeal to principle; and so we shall be saved from that danger
of moral experiment, a danger that is so immensely great because the
individual who has made the experiment has thereby very often spoilt
himself. One cannot experiment in the moral life with the detachment
that we use in science. I may try mixing a couple of fluids together to
see what happens, and I can regard the result quite accurately; but I
cannot try the experiment of stealing, or of murder, in order to see
what the real moral value of the thing is, because in the process of
doing the act I shall vitiate my own soul; here the material in which we
experiment is itself the instrument by which we have to judge; and the
man who has once done an evil thing himself, very seldom has the same
clearness of vision concerning its good and evil as the man who has kept
true to some lofty purpose. The mere experiment, the mere trying what
it feels like to be a murderer--not that anyone would take so extreme an
instance as that--is always a method condemned in advance to futility,
because in the process of making the experiment we destroy our power of
judging the result. We want therefore to rely upon some authority;
being unable to experiment for ourselves, we must follow the general
rule that I have stated; the authority to which we appeal must be an
authority of principle and not of practice.
But what of the authority of our Lord Himself? To us who have accepted
it, or who are trying to accept it, it is final; yet still, surely, in
the spirit rather than in the letter. Why did He teach by a series of
amazing paradoxes if it was not to prevent us setting up a code of rules
as His legislation, if it was not to force us back upon the spirit of
His teaching, behind the detailed regulations in which that spirit was
embodied? Even here it is still true that the appeal is to the authority
of His Spirit and not to that of detailed action or individual precept.
And beyond all this, it is certain that He Himself wins His authority by
first submitting Himself to the moral judgment of His people. He
rejects, in the second and third of the Messianic temptations after His
baptism, the method of coercion. He rejects this, and stands before men
submitting Himself to their moral judgment, to their conscience, to
their capacity to understand pure goodness and love, as that capacity
has grown through the civilisation which God Himself had guided as the
preparation for His final revelation in His Son. So He submits Himself
first of all to our moral judgment; and thus our conscience, coming down
to us, as it does, out of the Divinely-guided history of the past, is
the supreme authority; if we choose Him to be the Guide of our life it
is because our conscience has first pronounced Him to be the highest and
the holiest, which we must needs love when we see it.
*APPENDIX III*
*ON JUSTICE AND EDUCATION*
As long as there are great numbers of citizens whose faculties are
undeveloped it is impossible for society to be justly ordered. The
democracies of the world have been curiously blind to this truth, as
they have to the parallel truth that education is essential to true
liberty.
As long as there is a vast difference between a man's actual worth to
society and his potential worth, there will be two just claims
concerning him, and no possibility of adjudicating between them. To
treat a man who is in fact useless as though he were useful, is to
injure the community by encouraging a parasite; to treat him as useless,
when only lack of opportunity has prevented his becoming useful, is to
injure him. A vast amount of the existing social order is an attempt to
compromise between these two injuries, by inflicting a little of both.
The only real solution is to be found in a complete educational system
which will raise the actual worth of every man to the level of his
potential work precisely by enabling him to realise his potentialities.
But education which is to have this effect, without producing mere
selfishness and aggressiveness and thereby defeating its own object,
must be a moralising force; and that means, if the argument of Appendix
II is sound, that its processes must be largely sub-conscious. In fact,
one root of the great sin of Germany is to be found in the effort to
control life through the highly developed conscious intellect. The
specialised training of administrators and the attempt to guide human
action by scientific method is doomed to failure. If it were possible
to collect all the relevant facts, it might be right merely to form an
inductive conclusion and act upon it. But in regard of any human
problem it is never possible to collect all the facts; they are at once
too numerous and too subtly differentiated. Consequently the English
method, though grotesquely deficient just where the German is strong, is
yet morally preferable and politically more successful. It takes a boy
and throws him into a society of boys which largely governs itself;
appalling risks are taken and disasters are not unknown; boy standards
are allowed to prevail, with the result that form-work is regarded as a
tiresome though inevitable adjunct rather than the chief business of
school life. Perhaps it is as well to mention here that the exaltation
of games over work, however disastrous in its exaggeration, is yet
morally sound; for the boy feels that in his games he plays for his
house and school, while his work is done for himself. Wise seniors will
tell him from the pulpit that he should work hard at school so as to fit
himself for the service of the community in later years; and this is
true enough; but the boy will be a terrible prig if he is continually
conscious of its truth.
The same principle determines our University ideal. The primary test
for a degree is "residence"--that is, an adequate share in a general
life. Colleges may require attendance at lectures, but the University
does not. It demands that a candidate for a degree should have some
knowledge--not very much, it is true--but it never asks where or how he
got it; it only asks if he has "kept his terms."
At the end of the process there are some failures, of course; but those
who represent the system's success, and they are the great majority,
though they may not have any large amount of knowledge, have acquired
the instinct to act wisely in almost any emergency with which they may
be confronted. Very often they could not give any theoretical ground
for acting as they do, for their wisdom is largely sub-conscious or
instinctive; but the action is right all the same.
In England we are at the present time witnessing the collision of two
educational types, of which I have outlined the older and more
traditional. But this collision is itself of such exceeding interest
that, at the risk of some repetition, I would venture to sketch out the
two opposing types and attempt to indicate the mode of their
interaction.
The aim of education may be defined as the attempt to train men and
women to understand the world they live in, so that they may be able to
assist or resist the tendencies of their time in the light of ideals and
standards resting on the widest possible foundation of knowledge and
experience.
Now, our educational history for the last hundred years has been the
result of the interaction between two predominant educational types,
which I may call, simply for the purposes of description, the
traditional and the modern. The traditional type comes down to us (with
modifications, no doubt) by a continuous history from the Middle Ages,
and its chief representatives in England at the present time are those
large private institutions which are called public schools, and the two
older universities. The first great mark of this type of education is
that in practice--whatever its theory may have been--in practice it is
corporate. It has believed in educating people rather through influence
than through instruction, and it has believed in educating them in
direct relation to their social context and setting. Now that, in a
country of aristocratic organisation, inevitably involved an exclusive
and aristocratic type of education. If you have got a society
stratified in layers one above the other, and you are then going to
educate people in direct relation to their social context, your
educational system is bound to be similarly stratified. That is
inevitable, and consequently, through the social conditions of the time,
the education which is most strongly corporate in tone and spirit has
also tended to be aristocratic. As I have said, this method deals with
people rather through influence than through instruction. Of course, it
does not ignore instruction, but it is true that not very long ago I
heard a very distinguished lady asked whether a certain school was what
we call a public school; "Oh, yes," she replied, "it is a real public
school. I mean they don't learn anything there." The instruments which
for the most part this education has used have been the great
literatures of all ages, and particularly the literatures of Greece and
Rome, and their civilisations. These literatures and civilisations have
a great advantage over all others as instruments of education, because,
while they are in many ways closely akin to our own, which are descended
from them, they are complete and can be studied in their entirety. The
aim of this type of education has been to bring the student's mind into
closest possible contact with the greatest minds of the human race in
all ages, with the minds that have done or attempted most (in history),
with the minds that have thought most accurately and deeply (in science
and philosophy), with the minds that have felt most tenderly and truly
(in poetry). It may, or may not, succeed in that aim. It may attempt
it in the case of individual students who are particularly ill-suited
for it; but that is its aim, and no one is going to say that it is an
ignoble aim. In doing this, it has supplied to those who have been most
able to profit by it standards of judgment, standards of criticism.
This enables a man to stand apart from the tendencies of the moment and
to pronounce judgment on them in the light of what has been best in
human experience. Those are the strongest points, as I consider, of the
old traditional type. But it has certain faults, one of which I have
already mentioned, which is a fault in our day if it was not a fault in
the day in which this type of education became predominant. I mean that
it is liable to be exclusive, to shut up people within the limits of
their own class so that they are unable to acquire any living
acquaintance with the great movements going on in the world around them.
The other system has not these particular evils; this more modern type
of education, so far as you can draw lines across history at all, may be
said to begin with Rousseau; it is predominantly individual rather than
corporate, intellectual rather than spiritual, democratic rather than
aristocratic; it supplies people with knowledge of facts rather than
with standards of judgment. It is individual rather than corporate, for
it began to take possession of the world when the forces of progress
were almost all of them strongly individualistic; at that time the
demand of democracy was for the abolition of privileges, the breaking
down of class restrictions and the insistence that the individual must
be able to live his own life; with all of which we entirely agree,
though we think it needs a good deal of supplementing; and,
consequently, its tendency has been to suggest to people that the aim of
education is that they may get on in the world. The instrument which it
has used has been for the most part instruction, and its appeal has
been, not as in the traditional system to sympathy and imagination, but
to intelligence and memory. This, it seems to me, is precisely because
it believes in the career open to talent, and so far cuts across all
social divisions.
Its ideal is the educational ladder. Now there would be no objection to
the educational ladder if people went down it as well as up, if, that is
to say, men of small ability and character always sank in the social
scale and men of great ability and character always rose. But so long as
you have social classes maintained in their position, not by ability and
character alone, but by the mere accident of possession, so long it will
be true that to lift a man by education from one social stratum to
another is to expose him to a terrible temptation--the temptation to
despise his own people. And when once a man's native sympathies have
been rooted up, it is hard for any more to grow. There is real danger
that the more modern type of education may serve to produce a race of
self-seekers. But this modern type has great advantages. It is alive
and in touch with the world at the moment; and the people who receive
education of this kind will probably be very vitally aware of most of
the living interests of their own time. But it fails to supply
standards of judgment.
Now, of course, no existing institution belongs purely and entirely to
either of these types; but we can all think easily of institutions in
which one or the other is the predominant characteristic. And one of
our troubles is that most parents like the faults and dislike the
virtues of both types. They like the aristocratic and exclusive tone of
the traditional type; and they like the pushfulness and
"get-on-in-the-world" tone of the modern type.
The great problem before the educational world in the next period is to
draw the two types and tendencies in education closer together, to leave
the whole strength of both unimpaired, but to unite them. It is not
easy to do. It is a very big problem, easily stated, but very hard to
solve in practice. I would suggest that one of the flaws of the modern
tendency is that it leaves people very strongly aware of what is going
on at the moment, but not always equally aware of what has been thought
by the greatest men in the history of the world. This is very liable to
lead people to suppose that whatever is modern is on that account good.
Now that is exactly as foolish as to suppose that whatever is ancient is
therefore good. The fact its antiquity or modernity has nothing to do
with its value at the present moment. Of course, it is true that any
institution which has lasted through many centuries is likely to be of
use again, though we may always have just reached the point at which it
begins to be an incubus. Of course, it is true that an idea which
arises out of the stress of life at the moment is very likely to be very
well adapted to the realities of that moment in which it arises, but,
also, it may be well adapted to assist a downward course. What we want
is that the people shall know the facts and also have the power to judge
them--to be able, as I said, to assist or resist the tendencies of their
time, in the light of the best ideals and standards. There is a very
strong inclination among many of us (I am personally very much aware of
it in myself) to think that the new thing must be good; and yet one
remembers the words of Clough:--
"'Old things need not be therefore true,'
Oh, brother men! nor yet the new."
Again, the old type which trains people through their social setting is
very largely co-operative in its methods. It merges the individual in
his school, or his college, so that he comes quite genuinely to care
more keenly for the welfare of his house and school and college than for
his own progress. Nobody who has had any intercourse at all with the
life of public schools or universities can doubt that. The modern
method, on the whole, I suppose, trusts mainly rather to competition.
It aims at assisting people to put out their best energy by pitting them
against one another. I want to raise a very serious question to which I
am not prepared to give an answer. I want all people interested in
education to consider it. Is it worth while to get the greatest effort
out of a person at the cost of teaching him that he is to make efforts
in his own interest? I am very doubtful.
I heard a little while ago a distinguished schoolmaster describe the
visit of the father of one of the boys in his house; the boy was being
very idle, and this distinguished man said, "I wish you would speak to
him as seriously as ever you can"; the father said, "I will." He saw
the boy and when he came back he said, "I spoke to him very seriously,
in fact I spoke to him quite religiously. I said 'You must be getting
along, you know, or other people will be pushing past you.'" The
religion would appeal to be of a "Darwinian" type.