recognize a material world by mechanical law--and indeed our knowledge
of matter itself is only a knowledge of its laws--so in like manner,
and _pari passu_, we recognize a moral world by its distinctive law. We
live, therefore, not in one world, but in two:
"Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him."
The point is of surpassing importance! Upon it turns the whole issue.
"Can mechanism--or, as it is vaguely called, materialism--be or be
not accepted, with its attendant theories, as the truth; that is,
_our_ whole truth, all we have to live by and to die by?" Infinitely
important issue! having much to do at this very moment with the
happiness and real good of millions amongst our fellow-creatures and
fellow-countrymen. It is for this reason we must not spare pains to
demonstrate our moral law, for this reason also we will give some
passing sentences to show how worthless in argument is the sophism most
commonly circulated against it. Men speak of a "law of motives," with
complete assurance, and without seeming to be aware of the twofold
fallacy underlying it. Writers on the subject furnish statistics of
suicide, murder, and the like; and then ask how the freedom of moral
cause can be compatible with so visible a law? But what sort of a law
is this? Clearly not a law upon which the results are conditioned,
as sunrise on the earth's rotation; but a mere generalization, like
the laws of average before mentioned. Such a law does not govern the
acts, but the acts the law, or, in plain words, they _are_ the law.
It is an epitomized result, inferring no more consequence to our free
moral causation, than a life assurance infers to the contingency of
our individual life or death. The sophism would be readily detected if
it were not for that unfortunate word "motive." People forget that a
motive is not a power that compels us, but an object which we choose
to seek. "Will," we are seriously told, "must be determined by the
strongest motive." Now if, in thus speaking, the strongest motive
_objectively_ be meant, that is the motive essentially and in its own
nature the strongest, then indeed we may exclaim, "Would that this
were true!" For are not right, justice, goodness, absolutely and in
themselves the strongest? Yet men in general fail to pursue them;
they are chosen by those of whom the world is not worthy. But if, on
the other hand, the phrase "strongest motive" is to be understood
_subjectively_, and means that which on each occasion is _felt_ to be
the strongest; what form of sounding words has ever yielded a more
barren sense, a simpler truism? "Will must be determined by the choice
of will." It means this, and nothing more.
We may sum the whole matter of motive in a single sentence. Motives do
not make the man, but the man his motives. To conceive it otherwise
would be to imagine each man a mere bundle of instincts, such instincts
as we calculate with certainty in the brute animals we wish to allure,
to subdue, or to destroy.
"Be not like dumb driven cattle,"
says the Psalm of Life, and old Herbert exhorts--
"Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action."
The beast feels an incitement, and rushes direct upon the pitfall. It
is the prerogative of a true man to subsume (as logicians speak) each
line of impulse into the circle of his own soul; to deliberate in the
secret chambers of a being impenetrable even to his own understanding,
and to put in force the result which becomes as it were the free
manifestation of himself. When therefore you examine the actions of a
fellow-creature, and discern his motives, you praise or blame what? not
the motives, but the man.
Permit me to close this discussion by an example of the manner in which
we make and unmake our own motives.
No one present is so young, or so careless, as never to have felt the
pains of self-reproach. Some light or shade of life projects before us
the outline of ourself. By virtue of the law described, we view and
review it, as if it were the picture of another being. In contrast
with it, we place our own ideal, all that our boyhood fondly fancied
our manhood would become; the semblances of those we have loved and
lost; of the father, who taught us to prize truth and virtue above
earthly wealth and distinction; of the mother, at whose knee we knelt
in prayer, and whose upraised eye imaged the serenity of that heaven
to which she implored us to aspire. These beloved forms, robed in the
unfading freshness of a love stronger than death, stir our heart of
hearts, with accents unmistakable. They remind us of what we resolved
and trusted one day to be found, in thought, in feeling, and in life.
But, close to the glowing portrait of our purposed self stands the
dwindled figure of what we actually are; and, oh, the shame, the
anguish of that stern, disappointing comparison!
Among the lower creatures (we ask in passing) what is there to resemble
this self-reforming principle? In the domesticated animal, both beast
and bird, we see wounded affection, grief under a master's anger, and
desire to win back his love. In the gregarious tribes we find respect
for a common bond of what we almost may call utility; but has any sense
of wrong as wrong, or sin as sin, ever been found educable? Man shows
the mighty strength of this principle within him, even when he shows it
in its most repulsive shapes. The remorseful wretch who throws himself
beneath the wheel of Juggernaut, is a different _kind_ of being from
the horse or dog. And considering the self-interest, self-flattery, and
self-indulgence arrayed against it, may we not say that the root of
such passionate remorse has something sound in it, else it would long
ago have been trodden out from the life and heart of mankind?
For now, as always, our honest anguish and shame sow the appointed seed
of our noblest attainments. Those steps by which we climb our steep
ascent are hewn in the travail of our souls. David found it so, when
he heard the voice of Nathan saying, "Thou art the man!" and wrote
words which have come down near three thousand years;--"The sacrifices
of God are a broken spirit." "Of all acts," asks Mr. Carlyle, "is not,
for a man, _repentance_ the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were
that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the
heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility, and fact; is
dead; it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history,
as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest
emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below."
Truest emblem indeed! In it, we see, as in a glass, how living in two
worlds we cannot but have a sympathy with each; insomuch that every man
feels himself to be two selves, not one; a spiritual and a psychical
man. "There is," says Sir Thomas Browne, "another man within me,
that's angry with me, rebukes, commands, and dastards me." A _double_
consciousness which grows upon many a soul, until its truer choice and
better motives are attained:
"The life which is, and that which is to come,
Suspended hang in such nice equipoise
A breath disturbs the balance; and that scale
In which we throw our hearts preponderates."
This lecture started from the question, what is a phenomenon, and
how do we know of its existence? Seeing that our knowledge rests
primarily on the evidence of our own mind, we drew the inference that
Comte committed a fatal error when he banished the science of mind, as
mind, from his cycle. Reviewing his various devices, and some devices
of his successors, for eliminating psychology, and reducing the study
of mind to a study of bodily functions, we approached the stronghold
of Positivism,--law. And, after discussing the theories maintained
respecting it, we boldly threw down our challenge to this effect: law
phenomenal or mechanical admitted, we assert, the existence of another
kind of law. We say that the freedom of human choice between evil and
good is utterly unlike the freedom of a stone which falls by mechanical
law, and cannot choose but fall. The inference from phenomenal law
is the existence of a phenomenal world. The inference from another
existent law is that there is another existent world. Man, we affirm,
lives in both; has sympathies with both; and, by virtue of his double
nature, is a true citizen of both. The ultimate principle of man's
higher nature is to us inscrutable; for, even as the eye sees not
itself, so neither does the spirit of a man discern that which makes
it spirit. But, though we cannot know the soul, we can know much and
many things about it; things most important--nay, all-important for us
to know, since they distinguish the spirit that burns within us from
matter, from mechanism, and from mere animality. Hence we do not, with
the Positivist, ignore the unknowable. Contrariwise, confessing our
ignorance, where we are ignorant, we strive to observe and gather all
we can.
One thing that can be thus known is the principle of moral causation;
and this we have inductively investigated. We began by observing a
process in our own minds, a process or law of self-objectivity. I am
sorry to use such an uncouth word; but it saves a long description,
and you will all remember the fact. That process carries, on the very
face of it, adaptation to the purposes of moral choice, free from the
material necessity which governs a falling stone, and disengaged from
the control of such impulses as the incitement of ruling instincts. We
next verify this law by observing its operation; _first_, in single
acts of the Will accompanied, as you will recollect, by distinct
consciousness of choice and responsibility. It was in respect of
this conscious certainty that Dr. Johnson said, "We _know_ we are
free, and there ends the matter." We verified, a _second_ time, the
self-objectivising law, by its working and effects upon our motives,
which it makes and unmakes; eliminating some, adopting others, so as to
modify and alter our whole real character. Any one who is happy enough
to recall the slow advances of successful self-education, or a less
ordinary process by which old things passed away and all things became
new, may recollect with pleasure how this law served as an instrument
of change; how it placed himself before his own inward eye, even
daily, in freshly instructive lights, awakening new self-questionings,
emotions, aversions, desires, hopes, and stimulating to new exertions;
how it opposed itself to the mastery of any single dominant passion,
under which we say a man acts mechanically, because he has already
surrendered himself a slave to its sway; how it became a check upon all
day-dreaming or drifting with the tide, when again we are said to act
mechanically because we yield to circumstances as they flow, and live
a blind life, like creatures that cannot escape the chain of Instinct.
For, observe: let any instinct, even the noblest, be ever so nobly
developed, if we act from its impulse only, and not from a reflective
choice of the prompting which it gives, we are living below the image
of our true nature, because we are not striving to become a law unto
ourselves.
You may verify our moral law in numberless ways among the common
walks of life; and it really is a task of no great difficulty, if
you take with you the truth that the whole issue is summed in one
word--Responsibility. A falling stone cannot choose but fall; were
a man subject to material law, he could have no choice whatever.
Neither would it make any real difference, if the Will were impelled
by overpowering motive, and did not make its motive to itself. The
slate which slides from a roof, and kills a child, we do not accuse
of murder; we do not attach moral accountability to the hungry tiger.
It is because man is not impelled like stones or tigers, that we hold
him responsible. And we praise or blame in the highest degree his most
deliberate acts. The wrong he does with malice aforethought is a crime
in the strongest sense; the good he works with considerate purpose we
esteem his highest well-doing. In our time the wills of individual men
have changed the destinies of nations; and any one who reads books,
reviews, or newspapers sees a vigorous use of that word responsibility.
No one doubts that these powerful wills are the true causes of effects
felt throughout all Europe, effects which will remain when those who
caused them are in the grave; nay, even when generations--perchance
dynasties--shall have passed away.
In lower life, we honour the truly causative man who conquers a habit
of intemperance or any evil passion: it is greater to overcome one's
self than to conquer many cities. We deem every one accountable for
what he allows, or disallows, in relation to his God, his fellows, or
himself. In a word, we consider each man so far the true cause of his
own conduct, as to load him with responsibility.
Yes, responsibility! Do not shrink from the thought; it is wholesome
for all. Do but practise self-control enough to look yourself with
honest purpose in the face when you are about to act, you will never
suppose that you act mechanically, and you will seldom act amiss. If
you wish to benefit your countrymen, inculcate the grand lesson of
responsibility; for what well-informed person doubts that one main root
of our present social and religious ailments lies in compromise with
known immoralities, indolent acquiesence in hollow words, and lifeless
outside shows, where ought to be heard and seen the rigid truths of
accountability, duty, consistency?--all impossible without a practical
law of self-scrutiny and self-control. Yet further: Responsibility is
also an undeniable witness to a world of life beyond death. Just as
even Herbert Spencer himself has remarked, that the idea of relativity
involves the correlative idea of an absolute; even so, in thought,
responsibility involves its correlative belief, a recompence! But, in
morality, the evidence is stringent beyond expression. For, the idea of
responsibility is fixed in the nature of things; unchangeable, eternal.
And it contains in itself the loftier idea of personality. Leading us
to look for a world of righteous recompence, it leads also to belief in
a personal Being, before whom we are responsible, and who will award to
each of us our recompence. David travelled the same road to the same
conclusion, when he looked round upon men, who lacked mercy because
they lacked justice, and said, "Unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy:
for thou renderest to every man according to his work."
Did I not feel that my strain upon your attention must now cease, I
should have liked to show at length how the law by which we discover
moral causation, may be verified everywhere in the whole province
of mind. It is difficult, for instance, to look at the perplexing
questions raised about language, without perceiving that there
runs through its purely human formation the articulate results of
an element resembling internal dialogue; in other words, a law of
self-objectivising representation. In art, again, the perpetual efforts
of ages is to present our human manifoldness of thought, feeling, and
idea, before our one individual self. Hence the art formula of multeity
in unity. And what is the true bond of society as distinguished from
gregariousness? Is it not the Gospel's golden rule? But how can our
neighbour be viewed as a second self, unless self has been already
objectivised before our moral intuitions? We might follow the same
thread throughout the conditions of all philosophy.
The one thing we have to remember in every research concerning man
is that education, whether of self or others, implies an educable
principle; a germ, of which education and attainment are the bud, the
blossom, and the fruit. Therefore, if we want to know Humanity, we must
look to the educated human being. The philosopher, the artist, the
thinker of every sort, must have risen into clearness ere he can become
a typical man. Is it not, therefore, a mistake to appeal for theories
of human nature to the statistics (always statistics!) of ignorance and
savagery? When modelling our physical form, Buonarotti did not seek his
type in hospitals for maimed or distorted limbs, and exclaim, Behold,
such is man! Curious too, and contradictory, the way in which appeals
to barbarism have worked. In the 18th century we used always to hear of
that golden age,
"When free in woods the noble savage ran,
And man, the brother, lived the friend of man."
In the 19th, savage life is cannibalism, superstition, cruelty,
terrible, revolting, loathsome; perchance, time must yet pass before we
learn justice to our fellows of any age! Meanwhile, we may feel sure
that our human ideal is not to be found in the frost-bitten rickety
infant species; nor yet in its dwarfed and stunted adult; the cretin
and the imbecile will not give its lineaments; and it may be hard to
say which is least like a true man, the undeveloped or the perverted
creature. For example, what superiority in moral height has the
_savant_, whose self-satisfied science ignores or denies a God, over
the poor pigmy barbarian, unskilled in the use of fire, and living upon
berries and insects, who props himself against a tree with earthward
face, and prays, saying, "_Yere_, if indeed thou art, why dost thou
suffer us to be killed? Thou hast raised us up. Why dost thou cast us
down?"[16] Better perhaps the rude stammering of our race's childhood
than its half-speechless, half-paralyzed old age!
And here the argument of this lecture ends. Of causation in general,
and the grand subject of design, it has not been my hint to speak.
These vast topics have fallen into higher hands than mine. My aim was
limited to finding the _differentia_ of man--the moral characteristic
which places him in contrast with physico-mechanical laws.
It occurs to me, however, that you may employ ten minutes not
unpleasantly, upon what we can hardly help calling the romance
of Positivism. The story, taken from first to last--part comic,
part tragic--is as wild and weird as one of the Frenchman Doré's
pictures,--a story too strange to be thought true, if it did not
happen to have been true! It has also its stinging lessons, and they
follow naturally; evolved, as it were, from the motley and mystifying
commencement.
Comte's life has been written by friend and foe. For fulness of detail
the right book is by his disciple and executor, Dr. Robinet, who has
just figured among those who rule in the Commune of Paris. Robinet
is very interesting, for he thoroughly believes in his master, and
accepts the whole Comtist religion, calendar and all, which Littré and
others reject. No reproach this to Comte's biographer, for that same
worship is celebrated in our cooler atmosphere of England. The _Pall
Mall Gazette_ has, by its notices, made the celebrations widely known.
There is an account of the grandest yearly solemnity which will suffice
many, and excite the curiosity of more, in its number for January
7th, 1868. It is not hard to see that the worshippers differ from
the recusants by a strong feeling that they cannot live upon axioms
sounding like negatives. They want sentiment, emotion, excitement to
sustain them. Let us observe how Comte caught the first glimpse of this
requirement.
His life was sombre--a boy delicate and fractious, disliked by his
masters, turned out of the Polytechnique, repudiated by his great
socialist teacher St. Simon. His family relations not happy, his
marriage least of all. We cannot wonder at vagaries, for he had a
real fit of rampant insanity, and after release from an asylum had
nearly drowned himself in the Seine. His wife found him intolerable,
and left her home. Mr. Mill speaks of her respect for him;--it was
oddly testified after his death, for she pleads in law that he was a
madman, an atheist, and immoral; repudiates his will, and seizes the
consecrated relics of his dwelling. Littré supported her against those
who, like Robinet, thought her little less than blasphemous. If she had
appeared in an English law court, we should have known more truth than
we do.
Let us now look at such facts as we have from the more favourable
side. The man lived a lonely life, as became a sort of conceptual
alchemist, sustained by a belief that he was turning men's leaden
thoughts into his own pure gold. One brilliant projection of his has
made him the idol of Positivists. I confess it puzzles me, among
many others, to imagine how a qualified critic can treat such a
philosophic solvent either as true or as original. It supposes the
history of all human thinking to pass necessarily through three stages,
theology, metaphysics, positive truth; and that the world makes
progress accordingly. We will hope that the thing called theology, a
benighted belief in the government and intervention of supreme will,
is not altogether extinct in this age of progress; if it be so, Mr.
Froude encourages us to look for a revival. Among lesser matters, the
hypothesis of metaphysical cookery is an idea one fails to realise.
Was it a banquet with joints cut Laputa-like, after some fashion of
concepts, or syllogistic figures? Was it a "feast of reason and a flow
of soul," or, more probably, an abstraction pure and simple, as if a
man could
"Cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast"?
Comte's comicalities strike most people all the more because he writes
on, always utterly insensible to his own comedy. If any one wishes for
a serious critique in small compass, I may mention Stirling's appendix
to his translation of Schwegler's Handbook; Whewell in his Philosophy
of Discovery, and elsewhere.
Comte was most confiding in his own theory. Littré is not so confident,
for he has another theory of his own. But, putting aside the question
of its verification, we may remark that in the rough idea Comte showed
himself before his age. Positive thinkers have busied themselves with
physical evolution; for example, the development of a brain from an
oyster or an eozoon; but Comte was intent upon mental evolution.[172]
Man need not much care about the congeners of a body sprung from
earth; but soul is another thing. We trust our own spirit, as carrying
some image and superscription of God; we feel and conceive it to be
different in kind from sensitive life; we love to think of it in its
finality as a spark flowing out from Divine Light; a breath breathed
into body from above. In the reverse of this belief there is doubtless
an element unfavourable to happiness; it makes some men cynics, some
pessimists, some simply victims. Comte's infinite self-satisfaction
probably saved him from self-torture. But we judge that he felt his
condition deeply, from the rapture with which he hailed a new and
brilliant discovery!
Yes, it was the most wonderful of all his discoveries; he one day found
an unsuspected law of life within himself; he discovered that he had a
heart.
To many, this is the black spot on Comte's memory; they cannot receive
his love, nay, his frantic adoration, of the lonely wife of a convict,
absent in the gallies, as a piece of pure Platonism. Had Madame Comte's
allegations been sifted fully, we might have known all. As it is, I
for my own part like to think him innocent; he was mad from disease,
and perhaps from conceit; a conceit, says Mr. Mill, too colossal to be
believed without reading him up; but I trust he was not immoral. His
letters are against it, the lady's face is against it, and above all,
there is against it the lasting effect upon himself. After a year's
happiness to Comte, she died and left him, as he thoroughly supposed,
an enlightened and a religious man.