Of course such renunciations, to be rational, must not extend to the

whole material basis of life, since some physical particularity and

efficiency are requisite for bringing into being that very rationality

which is to turn enemies into friends. The need of a material basis for

spirit is what renders partial war with parts of the world the

inevitable background of charity and justice. The frontiers at which

this warfare is waged may, however, be pushed back indefinitely. Within

the sphere organised about a firm and generous life a Roman peace can be

established. It is not what is assimilated that saps a creative will,

but what remains outside that ultimately invades and disrupts it. In

exact proportion to its vigour, it wins over former enemies, civilises

the barbarian, and even tames the viper, when the eye is masterful and

sympathetic enough to dispel hatred and fear. The more rational an

institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others; for

these concessions, being just, propagate its essence. The ideal

commonwealth can extend to the limit at which such concessions cease to

be just and are thereby detrimental. Beyond or below that limit strife

must continue for physical ascendancy, so that the power and the will to

be reasonable may not be undermined. Reason is an operation in nature,

and has its root there. Saints cannot arise where there have been no

warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden

in the depths.

[Sidenote: To this extent there is rational society.]

Perhaps the art of politics, if it were practised scientifically, might

obviate open war, religious enmities, industrial competition, and human

slavery; but it would certainly not leave a free field for all animals

nor for all monstrosities in men. Even while admitting the claims of

monsters to be treated humanely, reason could not suffer them to absorb

those material resources which might be needed to maintain rational

society at its highest efficiency. We cannot, at this immense distance

from a rational social order, judge what concessions individual genius

would be called upon to make in a system of education and government in

which all attainable goods should be pursued scientifically. Concessions

would certainly be demanded, if not from well-trained wills, still from

inevitable instincts, reacting on inevitable accidents. There is tragedy

in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is

itself imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the most

consummate organism; they will flow in both from the outer world and

from the interstices, so to speak, of its own machinery; for a rational

life touches the irrational at its core as well as at its periphery. In

both directions it meets physical force and can subsist only by

exercising physical force in return. The range of rational ethics is

limited to the intermediate political zone, in which existences have

attained some degree of natural unanimity.

It should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between moral and

physical action are purely notional. Real existences do not lie wholly

on one or the other side of them. Every man, every material object, has

moral affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brute

personal kernel; this moral essence is enveloped in turn by untraceable

relations, radiating to infinity over the natural world. The stars enter

society by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and

the ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in their

substance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possess

manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his

poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the little

span of his foresight and love, each is merely a physical agency,

preparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of revolutions and

alien lives.

[Sidenote: A rational morality not attainable,]

A truly rational morality, or social regimen, has never existed in the

world and is hardly to be looked for. What guides men and nations in

their practice is always some partial interest or some partial

disillusion. A rational morality would imply perfect self-knowledge, so

that no congenial good should be needlessly missed—least of all

practical reason or justice itself; so that no good congenial to other

creatures would be needlessly taken from them. The total value which

everything had from the agent’s point of view would need to be

determined and felt efficaciously; and, among other things, the total

value which this point of view, with the conduct it justified, would

have for every foreign interest which it affected. Such knowledge, such

definition of purpose, and such perfection of sympathy are clearly

beyond man’s reach. All that can be hoped for is that the advance of

science and commerce, by fostering peace and a rational development of

character, may bring some part of mankind nearer to that goal; but the

goal lies, as every ultimate ideal should, at the limit of what is

possible, and must serve rather to measure achievements than to prophesy

them.

[Sidenote: but its principle clear.] In lieu of a rational morality,

however, we have rational ethics; and this mere idea of a rational

morality is something valuable. While we wait for the sentiments,

customs, and laws which should embody perfect humanity and perfect

justice, we may observe the germinal principle of these ideal things; we

may sketch the ground-plan of a true commonwealth. This sketch

constitutes rational ethics, as founded by Socrates, glorified by Plato,

and sobered and solidified by Aristotle. It sets forth the method of

judgment and estimation which a rational morality would apply

universally and express in practice. The method, being very simple, can

be discovered and largely illustrated in advance, while the complete

self-knowledge and sympathy are still wanting which might avail to

embody that method in the concrete and to discover unequivocally where

absolute duty and ultimate happiness may lie.

[Sidenote: It is the logic of an autonomous will.]

This method, the Socratic method, consists in accepting any estimation

which any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so as

to let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems is

what ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational being

ought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what he

genuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man’s rationality

and to discredit one’s own. With what face could any man or god say to

another: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; your

function is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering?

Such an attitude amounts to imposture and excludes society; it is the

attitude of a detestable tyrant, and any one who mistakes it for moral

authority has not yet felt the first heart-throb of philosophy.

[Sidenote: Socrates’ science.]

More even than natural philosophy, moral philosophy is something Greek:

it is the appanage of freemen. The Socratic method is the soul of

liberal conversation; it is compacted in equal measure of sincerity and

courtesy. Each man is autonomous and all are respected; and nothing is

brought forward except to be submitted to reason and accepted or

rejected by the self-questioning heart. Indeed, when Socrates appeared

in Athens mutual respect had passed into democracy and liberty into

license; but the stalwart virtue of Socrates saved him from being a

sophist, much as his method, when not honestly and sincerely used, might

seem to countenance that moral anarchy which the sophists had expressed

in their irresponsible doctrines. Their sophistry did not consist in the

private _seat_ which they assigned to judgment; for what judgment is

there that is not somebody’s judgment at some moment? The sophism

consisted in ignoring the living moment’s _intent_, and in suggesting

that no judgment could refer to anything ulterior, and therefore that no

judgment could be wrong: in other words that each man at each moment was

the theme and standard, as well as the seat, of his judgment.

Socrates escaped this folly by force of honesty, which is what saves

from folly in dialectic. He built his whole science precisely on that

intent which the sophists ignored; he insisted that people should

declare sincerely what they meant and what they wanted; and on that

living rock he founded the persuasive and ideal sciences of logic and

ethics, the necessity of which lies all in free insight and in actual

will. This will and insight they render deliberate, profound,

unshakable, and consistent. Socrates, by his genial midwifery, helped

men to discover the truth and excellence to which they were naturally

addressed. This circumstance rendered his doctrine at once moral and

scientific; scientific because dialectical, moral because expressive of

personal and living aspirations. His ethics was not like what has since

passed under that name—a spurious physics, accompanied by commandments

and threats. It was a pliant and liberal expression of ideals, inwardly

grounded and spontaneously pursued. It was an exercise in

self-knowledge.

[Sidenote: Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.]

Socrates’ liberality was that of a free man ready to maintain his will

and conscience, if need be, against the whole world. The sophists, on

the contrary, were sycophants in their scepticism, and having inwardly

abandoned the ideals of their race and nation—which Socrates defended

with his homely irony—they dealt out their miscellaneous knowledge, or

their talent in exposition, at the beck and for the convenience of

others. Their theory was that each man having a right to pursue his own

aims, skilful thinkers might, for money, furnish any fellow-mortal with

instruments fitted to his purpose. Socrates, on the contrary, conceived

that each man, to achieve his aims must first learn to distinguish them

clearly; he demanded that rationality, in the form of an examination and

clarification of purposes, should precede any selection of external

instruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless he

first had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised the

good? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangle

and attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of life

and the whole of virtue.

The autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic in

this: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he does

not recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of every

impulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of the

world, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He is

thoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while he

lives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, which

those who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of all

authority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgment

possible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his nature

attaches him to is not “really” a good, because it would not be a good,

perhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his own

heart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings and

actions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mystical

ethics, he gives out to the world. Socratic liberality, on the contrary,

is consistent with itself, as Spinozistic naturalism is also; for it

exercises that right of private judgment which it concedes to others,

and avowedly builds up the idea of the good on that natural inner

foundation on which everybody who has it at all must inevitably build

it. This functional good is accordingly always relative and good for

something; it is the ideal which a vital and energising soul carries

with it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates constantly taught,

with the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complement

needed to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind.

[Sidenote: Its vitality]

Rational ethics is an embodiment of volition, not a description of it.

It is the expression of living interest, preference, and categorical

choice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the

description of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping

far-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to

lend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even recognises, as

an emanation of its own force, that uncompromising truthfulness with

which science assigns all forms of moral life to their place in the

mechanical system of nature. But the rational moralist is not on that

account reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging no

interest except the interest in facts and in the laws of change. His own

spirit, small by the material forces which it may stand for and express,

is great by its prerogative of surveying and judging the universe;

surveying it, of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging it

only by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet, even so,

determining unequivocally a part of its constitution and excellence. The

rational moralist represents a force energising in the world,

discovering its affinities there and clinging to them to the exclusion

of their hateful opposites. He represents, over against the chance

facts, an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities, and

satisfactions of a specific being.

This dogmatic position of reason is not uncritically dogmatic; on the

contrary, it is the sophistical position that is uncritically neutral.

All criticism needs a dogmatic background, else it would lack objects

and criteria for criticism. The sophist himself, without confessing it,

enacts a special interest. He bubbles over with convictions about the

pathological and fatal origin of human beliefs, as if that could prevent

some of them from being more trustworthy and truer than others. He is

doubtless right in his psychology; his own ideas have their natural

causes and their chance of signifying something real. His scepticism

may represent a wider experience than do the fanaticisms it opposes. But

this sceptic also lives. Nature has sent her saps abundantly into him,

and he cannot but nod dogmatically on that philosophical tree on which

he is so pungent a berry. His imagination is unmistakably fascinated by

the pictures it happens to put together. His judgment falls unabashed,

and his discourse splashes on in its dialectical march, every

stepping-stone an unquestioned idea, every stride a categorical

assertion. Does he deny this? Then his very denial, in its promptness

and heat, audibly contradicts him and makes him ridiculous. Honest

criticism consists in being consciously dogmatic, and conscientiously

so, like Descartes when he said, “I am.” It is to sift and harmonise all

assertions so as to make them a faithful expression of actual experience

and inevitable thought.

[Sidenote: Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.]

Now will, no less than that reason which avails to render will

consistent and far-reaching, animates natural bodies and expresses their

functions. It has a radical bias, a foregone, determinate direction,

else it could not be a will nor a principle of preference. The knowledge

of what other people desire does not abolish a man’s own aims. Sympathy

and justice are simply an expansion of the soul’s interests, arising

when we consider other men’s lives so intently that something in us

imitates and re-enacts their experience, so that we move partly in

unison with their movement, recognise the reality and initial legitimacy

of their interests, and consequently regard their aims in our action, in

so far as our own status and purposes have become identical with theirs.

We are not less ourselves, nor less autonomous, for this assimilation,

since we assimilate only what is in itself intelligible and congruous

with our mind and obey only that authority which can impose itself on

our reason.

The case is parallel to that of knowledge. To know all men’s experience

and to comprehend their beliefs would constitute the most cogent and

settled of philosophies. Thought would then be reasonably adjusted to

all the facts of history, and judgment would grow more authoritative and

precise by virtue of that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all the

goods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued,

would leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; he

would still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would still

affect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubt

gain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglot

world; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feel

other creatures’ joys would grow by exercise and new overtones would be

added to his gamut. But the foundations of his nature would stand; and

his possible happiness, though some new and precious threads might be

woven into it, would not have a texture fundamentally different.

The radical impulses at work in any animal must continue to speak while

he lives, for they are his essence. A true morality does not have to be

adopted; the parts of it best practised are those which are never

preached. To be “converted” would be to pass from one self-betrayal to

another. It would be to found a new morality on a new artifice. The

morality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaks

autonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or

passion that fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which are

the only possible or fitting crown of a man’s life is predetermined by

his nature; he cannot choose a law-giver, nor accept one, for none who

spoke to the purpose could teach him anything but to know himself.

Rational life is an art, not a slavery; and terrible as may be the

errors and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the standard

and goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task imposed externally on a

man is imposed by force only, a force he has the right to defy so soon

as he can do so without creating some greater impediment to his natural

vocation.

[Sidenote: Reason expresses impulses.]

Rational ethics, then, resembles prerational precepts and half-systems

in being founded on impulse. It formulates a natural morality. It is a

settled method of achieving ends to which man is drawn by virtue of his

physical and rational constitution. By this circumstance rational ethics

is removed from the bad company of all artificial, verbal, and unjust

systems of morality, which in absolving themselves from relevance to

man’s endowment and experience merely show how completely irrelevant

they are to life. Once, no doubt, each of these arbitrary systems

expressed (like the observance of the Sabbath) some practical interest

or some not unnatural rite; but so narrow a basis of course has to be

disowned when the precepts so originating have been swollen into

universal tyrannical laws. A rational ethics reduces them at once to

their slender representative rôle; and it surrounds and buttresses them

on every side with all other natural ideals.

[Sidenote: but impulses reduced to harmony.]

Rational ethics thus differs from the prerational in being complete.

There is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore: the impulse to

reflect. Human instincts are ignorant, multitudinous, and contradictory.

To satisfy them as they come is often impossible, and often disastrous,

in that such satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of other instincts

inherently no less fecund and legitimate. When we apply reason to life

we immediately demand that life be consistent, complete, and

satisfactory when reflected upon and viewed as a whole. This view, as it

presents each moment in its relations, extends to all moments affected

by the action or maxim under discussion; it has no more ground for

stopping at the limits of what is called a single life than at the

limits of a single adventure. To stop at selfishness is not particularly

rational. The same principle that creates the ideal of a self creates

the ideal of a family or an institution.

[Sidenote: Self-love artificial.]

The conflict between selfishness and altruism is like that between any

two ideal passions that in some particular may chance to be opposed; but

such a conflict has no obstinate existence for reason. For reason the

person itself has no obstinate existence. The _character_ which a man

achieves at the best moment of his life is indeed something ideal and

significant; it justifies and consecrates all his coherent actions and

preferences. But _the man’s life_, the circle drawn by biographers

around the career of a particular body, from the womb to the

charnel-house, and around the mental flux that accompanies that career,

is no significant unity. All the substances and efficient processes that

figure within it come from elsewhere and continue beyond; while all the

rational objects and interests to which it refers have a trans-personal

status. Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion; and if a man

concentrates his view on private pleasures, these may qualify the

fleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic value, but they leave the

life itself shapeless and infinite, as if sparks should play over a

piece of burnt paper.

The limits assigned to the mass of sentience attributed to each man are

assigned conventionally; his prenatal feelings, his forgotten dreams,

and his unappropriated sensations belong to his body and for that reason

only are said to belong to him. Each impulse included within these

limits may be as directly compared with the represented impulses of

other people as with the represented impulses expected to arise later in

the same body. Reason lives among these represented values, all of which

have their cerebral seat and present efficacy over the passing thought;

and reason teaches this passing thought to believe in and to respect

them equally. Their right is not less clear, nor their influence less

natural, because they may range over the whole universe and may await

their realisation at the farthest boundaries of time. All that is

physically requisite to their operation is that they should be vividly

represented; while all that is requisite rationally, to justify them in

qualifying actual life by their influence, is that the present act

should have some tendency to bring the represented values about. In

other words, a rational mind would consider, in its judgment and action,

every interest which that judgment or action at all affected; and it

would conspire with each represented good in proportion, not to that

good’s intrinsic importance, but to the power which the present act

might have of helping to realise that good.

[Sidenote: The sanction of reason is happiness.]

If pleasure, because it is commonly a result of satisfied instinct, may

by a figure of speech be called the aim of impulse, happiness, by a like

figure, may be called the aim of reason. The direct aim of reason is

harmony; yet harmony, when made to rule in life, gives reason a noble

satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even

inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven

by craving, pleasure, and fear. The moralists who speak disparagingly of

happiness are less sublime than they think. In truth their philosophy is

too lightly ballasted, too much fed on prejudice and quibbles, for

happiness to fall within its range. Happiness implies resource and

security; it can be achieved only by discipline. Your intuitive moralist

rejects discipline, at least discipline of the conscience; and he is

punished by having no lien on wisdom. He trusts to the clash of blind

forces in collision, being one of them himself. He demands that virtue

should be partisan and unjust; and he dreams of crushing the adversary

in some physical cataclysm.

Such groping enthusiasm is often innocent and romantic; it captivates us

with its youthful spell. But it has no structure with which to resist

the shocks of fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turns

only too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-flake is soon a

smudge, and there is a deeper purity in the diamond. Happiness is hidden

from a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a

long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected

institutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of

happiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to

attain a beautiful naturalness. Discipline discredits the random

pleasures of illusion, hope, and triumph, and substitutes those which

are self-reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express an

equilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the result of endeavour

is partly unforeseen and unintentional, so long as the will is partly

blind, the Life of Reason is still swaddled in ignominy and the animal

barks in the midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist in

having recast natural energies in the furnace of experience. Nor is this

experience merely a repressive force. It enshrines the successful

expressions of spirit as well as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance;

it enables a man to know himself in knowing the world and to discover

his ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune’s coin.

[Sidenote: Moral science impeded by its chaotic data.]

With this brief account we may leave the subject of rational ethics. Its

development is impossible save in the concrete, when a legislator,

starting from extant interests, considers what practices serve to render

those interests vital and genuine, and what external alliances might

lend them support and a more glorious expression. The difficulty in

carrying rational policy very far comes partly from the refractory

materials at hand, and partly from the narrow range within which moral

science is usually confined. The materials are individual wills

naturally far from unanimous, lost for the most part in frivolous

pleasures, rivalries, and superstitions, and little inclined to listen

to a law-giver that, like a new Lycurgus, should speak to them of

unanimity, simplicity, discipline, and perfection. Devotion and

singlemindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard to

establish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all lay

activities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in the

conclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either to

accept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or to

mutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The condition,

therefore, of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set of

men with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may be

a firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing

the quicksands.

[Sidenote: and its unrecognised scope.]

When such a starting-point is given, moral values radiate from it to the

very ends of the universe; and a failure to appreciate the range over

which rational estimation spreads is a second obstacle to sound ethics.

Because of this failure the earnest soul is too often intent on escaping

to heaven, while the gross politician is suffered to declaim about the

national honour, and to promise this client an office, this district a

favour, and this class an iniquitous advantage. Politics is expected to

be sophistical; and in the soberest parliaments hardly an argument is

used or an ideal invoked which is not an insult to reason. Majorities

work by a system of bribes offered to the more barren interests of men

and to their more blatant prejudices. The higher direction of their

lives is relegated to religion, which, unhappily, is apt to suffer from

hereditary blindness to natural needs and to possible progress. The idea

that religion, as well as art, industry, nationality, and science,

should exist only for human life’s sake and in order that men may live

better in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhaps

opposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or of

small aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call

civilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered about

a variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the

universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the

empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and

philosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception,

the prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fills

the background of men’s minds. It represents feudal traditions rather

than the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, or

philanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice is

derived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; for

their theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turn

the echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of ruling

the world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule it

justly.

Modern rational ethics, however, or what approaches most nearly to such

a thing, has one advantage over the ancient and mediæval; it has

profited by Christian discipline and by the greater gentleness of modern

manners. It has recognised the rights of the dumb majority; it has

revolted against cruelty and preventable suffering and has bent itself

on diffusing well-being—the well-being that people want, and not the

so-called virtues which a supercilious aristocracy may find it

convenient to prescribe for them. It has based ethics on the foundation

on which actual morality rests; on nature, on the necessities of social

life, on the human instincts of sympathy and justice.

[Sidenote: Fallacy in democratic hedonism.]

It is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethics

which is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given a

bad technical expression to its generous principles and should have

substituted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere fact

that somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot give

direction to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation but

does not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustment

is thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which the

harmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A given

harmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changing

them together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering the

environment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached to

anything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define any

particular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in the

observer; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, for

instance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed in

dreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need not

limit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasures

among the million; he need not accept for a goal a child’s caprices

multiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comforts

doubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated by

the agent’s autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place they

fill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world,

not the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort of

physical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing a

particular nature; it is not a passive medium where heterogeneous values

can find their balance by virtue of their dead weight and number.

A moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what things

pleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational,

will not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his own

nature—on which alone honest ideals can rest—without attempting to

speak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentient

universe. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. A

living and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadens

its basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everything

that will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold a

particular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, the

arts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomy

without renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both of

its own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy.

[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty.]

Utilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialectical

ground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in a

concrete ideal. It is a noble thing to be sensitive to others’

hardships, and happy in their happiness; but it is noble because it

refines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a new

and congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamental

structure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made to

be child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would not

be social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, wholly

industrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and sexual instincts,

social life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly with

them, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. To

make this sympathy explicit and to find one’s happiness in exercising it

is to lay one’s foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range of

one’s being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moral

dissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bid

all living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run into

a cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure to

precede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance in

charity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within the

lines of his method; to trespass beyond them would be to recede.

This situation is repeated on a broader stage. A statesman entrusted

with power should regard nothing but his country’s interests; to regard

anything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment or

private hobbies to make him misapply the resources of his

fellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have an

enlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed be

expected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than his

countrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to his

eminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injury

or foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of a

people’s happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal.

Indestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race,

do not constitute its identity. Its essence is a certain spirit, and

only what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it.

[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular.]

If a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, may

ruin or transform, that is Allah’s business; mine is to clarify my own

intent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of my

experience and practical imagination, so that I may have a natural

ground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be a

rational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, or

that of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there contained

an overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational,

though the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in the

process. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conduct

terminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolation

they constituted all that morality had to consider, and as if respect

offered to them, somehow in proportion to their quantity, were the true

conscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will,

chastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. What

morality has to consider is the form of life, not its quantity. In a

world that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definite

centres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, nor

to redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding its

affinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, and

which it is in that measure enabled to understand.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B.]

CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective.]

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational

ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One

by his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his

preponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enough

how little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent

epitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of what

had been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting

its momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation was

already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty

quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had

begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of

justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul,

he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He

felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might

have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which

alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material

profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated

society began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions.

Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public

interest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper and

traditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots

were gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit

that rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered

to have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage

had shaken off all allegiance to art or reason.

[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities.]

The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent

attitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all

embodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the

effort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could

support no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the

soul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and more

persistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in

rationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation

which they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of

civilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse

whatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of

meaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of

building this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive

elements.

Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they

are, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from

which the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its

satirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may

precede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously

embraced in view of reason’s failure, they have a quite particular

value. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as the

intuitionist’s aversion does, from moral incoherence or religious

prejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the

contrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready

apprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality

of nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may

make it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the

philosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as

the beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he

and all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may

cry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity.

If you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he would

not be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, to

mere inattention and bluster. If you told him that every art and every

activity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realise

the ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarily

approves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, he

would not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. He

might admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency of

your conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and the

sadder man, that he had experience of their futility. “You Hellenisers,”

he might say, “are but children; you have not pondered the little

history you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtue

were stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justified

by a greater good arising out of them—then, indeed, a life according to

reason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of those

fond assumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria.

Virtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompous

garment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full of

spots and ridiculous patches. Men’s best laid plans become, in the

casual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterest

calamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say the

ways of God, but our own ways?”

[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them.]

Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever

positive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives

cannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not

collapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of

criticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not

pre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or

less explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least

imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an

intolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter

of fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never

eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of

the natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the

rest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that

natural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which it

reacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope—the appeal

to some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter

change in the conditions of life.

Post-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention if not in fact, a

criticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rational

morality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is

an effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some single

eventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that by

estranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment’s pleasure,

or mortifying the passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or

studying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gain

admission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought,

once conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted as a panacea.

It becomes in consequence (for such is the force of nature) the

foundation of elaborate institutions and elaborate philosophies, into

which the contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced.

When human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams that visit the

soul are the only evidence of her continued existence. Through them she

still envisages a good; and when the delirium passes and the normal

world gradually re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes her

regeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regeneration due, in

truth, to the restored nutrition and circulation within her. In this way

post-rational systems, though founded originally on despair, in a later

age that has forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the only

possible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to each sect, and

brought up under its influence, may exhaust criticism and sophistry to

show that all faith and effort would be vain unless their particular

nostrum was accepted; and so a curious party philosophy arises in which,

after discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary puts

forward some mythical echo of reason and nature as the one saving and

necessary truth. The positive substance of such a doctrine is

accordingly pre-rational and perhaps crudely superstitious; but it is

introduced and nominally supported by a formidable indictment of

physical and moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offered

to our worship acquires a spurious halo and an imputed majesty by being

raised on a pedestal of infinite despair.

[Sidenote: Epicurean refuge in pleasure.]

Socrates was still living when a school of post-rational morality arose

among the Sophists, which after passing quickly through various phases,

settled down into Epicureanism and has remained the source of a certain

consolation to mankind, which if somewhat cheap, is none the less

genuine. The pursuit of pleasure may seem simple selfishness, with a

tendency to debauchery; and in this case the pre-rational and

instinctive character of the maxim retained would be very obvious.

Pleasure, to be sure, is not the direct object of an unspoiled will; but

after some experience and discrimination, a man may actually guide

himself by a foretaste of the pleasures he has found in certain objects

and situations. The criticism required to distinguish what pays from

what does not pay may not often be carried very far; but it may

sometimes be carried to the length of suppressing every natural instinct

and natural hope, and of turning the philosopher, as it turned Hegesias

the Cyrenaic, into a eulogist of death.

The post-rational principle in the system then comes to the fore, and we

see clearly that to sit down and reflect upon human life, picking out

its pleasant moments and condemning all the rest, is to initiate a

course of moral retrenchment. It is to judge what is worth doing, not by

the innate ambition of the soul, but by experience of incidental

feelings, which to a mind without creative ideas may seem the only

objects worthy of pursuit. That life ought to be accompanied by pleasure

and exempt from pain is certain; for this means that what is agreeable

to the whole process of nature would have become agreeable also to the

various partial impulses involved—another way of describing organic

harmony and physical perfection. But such a desirable harmony cannot be

defined or obtained by picking out and isolating from the rest those

occasions and functions in which it may already have been reached. These

partial harmonies may be actual arrests or impediments in the whole

which is to be made harmonious; and even when they are innocent or

helpful they cannot serve to determine the form which the general

harmony might take on. They merely illustrate its principle. The

organism in which this principle of harmony might find pervasive

expression is still potential, and the ideal is something of which, in

its concrete form, no man has had experience. It involves a propitious

material environment, perfect health, perfect arts, perfect government,

a mind enlarged to the knowledge and enjoyment of all its external

conditions and internal functions. Such an ideal is lost sight of when a

man cultivates his garden-plot of private pleasures, leaving it to

chance and barbarian fury to govern the state and quicken the world’s

passions.

Even Aristippus, the first and most delightful of hedonists, who really

enjoyed the pleasures he advocated and was not afraid of the incidental

pains—even Aristippus betrayed the post-rational character of his

philosophy by abandoning politics, mocking science, making his peace

with all abuses that fostered his comfort, and venting his wit on all

ambitions that exceeded his hopes. A great temperament can carry off a

rough philosophy. Rebellion and license may distinguish honourable souls

in an age of polite corruption, and a grain of sincerity is better, in

moral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. The

violence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; and

a balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility.

Epicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise,

and passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping to

distinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might be

rational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, and

intellectual light. It cultivated unworldliness without superstition

and happiness without illusion. It was tender toward simple and honest

things, scornful and bitter only against pretence and usurpation. It

thus marked a first halting-place in the retreat of reason, a stage

where the soul had thrown off only the higher and more entangling part

of her burden and was willing to live, in somewhat reduced

circumstances, on the remainder. Such a philosophy expresses well the

genuine sentiment of persons, at once mild and emancipated, who find

themselves floating on the ebb-tide of some civilisation, and enjoying

its fruits, without any longer representing the forces that brought that

civilisation about.

[Sidenote: Stoic recourse to conformity.]

The same emancipation, without its mildness, appeared in the Cynics,

whose secret it was to throw off all allegiance and all dependence on

circumstance, and to live entirely on inner strength of mind, on pride

and inflexible humour. The renunciation was far more sweeping than that

of Epicurus, and indeed wellnigh complete; yet the Stoics, in

underpinning the Cynical self-sufficiency with a system of physics,

introduced into the life of the sect a contemplative element which very

much enlarged and ennobled its sympathies. Nature became a sacred

system, the laws of nature being eulogistically called rational laws,

and the necessity of things, because it might be foretold in auguries,

being called providence. There was some intellectual confusion in all

this; but contemplation, even if somewhat idolatrous, has a purifying

effect, and the sad and solemn review of the cosmos to which the Stoic

daily invited his soul, to make it ready to face its destiny, doubtless

liberated it from many an unworthy passion. The impressive spectacle of

things was used to remind the soul of her special and appropriate

function, which was to be rational. This rationality consisted partly in

insight, to perceive the necessary order of things, and partly in

conformity, to perceive that this order, whatever it might be, could

serve the soul to exercise itself upon, and to face with equanimity.

Despair, in this system, flooded a much larger area of human life;

everything, in fact, was surrendered except the will to endure whatever

might come. The concentration was much more marked, since only a formal

power of perception and defiance was retained and made the sphere of

moral life; this rational power, at least in theory, was the one peak

that remained visible above the deluge. But in practice much more was

retained. Some distinction was drawn, however unwarrantably, between

external calamities and human turpitude, so that absolute conformity and

acceptance might not be demanded by the latter; although the chief

occasion which a Stoic could find to practise fortitude and recognise

the omnipresence of law was in noting the universal corruption of the

state and divining its ruin. The obligation to conform to nature

(which, strictly speaking, could not be disregarded in any case) was

interpreted to signify that every one should perform the offices

conventionally attached to his station. In this way a perfunctory

citizenship and humanity were restored to the philosopher. But the

restored life was merely histrionic: the Stoic was a recluse parading

the market-place and a monk disguised in armour. His interest and faith

were centred altogether on his private spiritual condition. He

cultivated the society of those persons who, he thought, might teach him

some virtue. He attended to the affairs of state so as to exercise his

patience. He might even lead an army to battle, if he wished to test his

endurance and make sure that philosophy had rendered him indifferent to

the issue.

[Sidenote: Conformity the core of Islam.]

The strain and artifice of such a discipline, with merely formal goals

and no hope on earth or in heaven, could not long maintain itself; and

doubtless it existed, at a particular juncture, only in a few souls.

Resignation to the will of God, says Bishop Butler, is _the whole of

piety_; yet mere resignation would make a sorry religion and the

negation of all morality, unless the will of God was understood to be

quite different from his operation in nature. To turn Stoicism into a

workable religion we need to qualify it with some pre-rational maxims.

Islam, for instance, which boasts that in its essence it is nothing but

the primitive and natural religion of mankind, consists in abandoning

oneself to the will of God or, in other words, in accepting the

inevitable. This will of God is learned for the most part by observing

the course of nature and history, and remembering the fate meted out

habitually to various sorts of men. Were this all, Islam would be a pure

Stoicism, and Hebraic religion, in its ultimate phase, would be simply

the eloquence of physics. It would not, in that case, be a moral

inspiration at all, except as contemplation and the sense of one’s

nothingness might occasionally silence the passions and for a moment

bewilder the mind. On recovering from this impression, however, men

would find themselves enriched with no self-knowledge, armed with no

precepts, and stimulated by no ideal. They would be reduced to enacting

their incidental impulses, as the animals are, quite as if they had

never perceived that in doing so they were fulfilling a divine decree.

Enlightened Moslems, accordingly, have often been more Epicurean than

Stoical; and if they have felt themselves (not without some reason)

superior to Christians in delicacy, in _savoir vivre_, in kinship with

all natural powers, this sense of superiority has been quite

rationalistic and purely human. Their religion contributed to it only

because it was simpler, freer from superstition, nearer to a clean and

pleasant regimen in life. Resignation to the will of God being granted,

expression of the will of man might more freely begin.

[Sidenote: enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.]

What made Islam, however, a positive and contagious novelty was the

assumption that God’s will might be incidentally revealed to prophets

before the event, so that past experience was not the only source from

which its total operation might be gathered. In its opposition to

grosser idolatries Islam might appeal to experience and challenge those

who trusted in special deities to justify their worship in face of the

facts. The most decisive facts against idolaters, however, were not yet

patent, but were destined to burst upon mankind at the last day—and

most unpleasantly for the majority. Where Mohammed speaks in the name of

the universal natural power he is abundantly scornful toward that fond

paganism which consists in imagining distinct patrons for various

regions of nature or for sundry human activities. In turning to such

patrons the pagan regards something purely ideal or, as the Koran

shrewdly observes, worships his own passions. Allah, on the contrary, is

overwhelmingly external and as far as possible from being ideal. He is

indeed the giver of all good things, as of all evil, and while his

mercies are celebrated on every page of the Koran, these mercies consist

in the indulgence he is expected to show to his favourites, and the

exceeding reward reserved for them after their earthly trials. Allah’s

mercy does not exclude all those senseless and unredeemed cruelties of

which nature is daily guilty; nay, it shines all the more conspicuously

by contrast with his essential irresponsibility and wanton wrath, a part

of his express purpose being to keep hell full of men and demons.

The tendency toward enlightenment which Islam represents, and the limits

of that enlightenment, may be illustrated by the precept about unclean

animals. Allah, we are told, being merciful and gracious, made the world

for man’s use, with all the animals in it. We may therefore justly

slaughter and devour them, in so far as comports with health; but, of

course, we may not eat animals that have died a natural death, nor those

offered in sacrifice to false gods, nor swine; for to do so would be an

abomination.

[Sidenote: The latter alone lend it practical force.]

Unfortunately religious reformers triumph not so much by their rational

insight as by their halting, traditional maxims. Mohammed felt the unity

of God like a philosopher; but people listened to him because he

preached it like a sectary. God, as he often reminds us, did not make

the world for a plaything; he made it in order to establish distinctions

and separate by an immense interval the fate of those who conform to the

truth from the fate of those who ignore it. Human life is indeed beset

with enough imminent evils to justify this urgent tone in the Semitic

moralist and to lend his precepts a stern practical ring, absent from

merely Platonic idealisms. But this stringency, which is called

positivism when the conditions of welfare are understood, becomes

fanaticism when they are misrepresented. Had Mohammed spoken only of the

dynamic unity in things, the omnipresence of destiny, and the actual

conditions of success and failure in the world, he would not have been

called a prophet or have had more than a dozen intelligent followers,

scattered over as many centuries; but the weakness of his intellect, and

his ignorance of nature, made the success of his mission. It is easier

to kindle righteous indignation against abuses when, by abating them, we

further our personal interests; and Mohammed might have been less

zealous in denouncing false gods had his own God been altogether the

true one. But, in the heat of his militancy, he descends so far as to

speak of _God’s interests_ which the faithful embrace, and of fighting

in _God’s cause_. By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we are

allowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with which

in most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak to

be human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute,

we are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing our

support against independent enemies. So complete is the bankruptcy of

that Stoic morality which thinks to live on the worship of That which

Is.

[Sidenote: Moral ambiguity in pantheism.]

As extremes are said to meet, so we may say that a radical position is

often the point of departure for opposite systems. Pantheism, or

religion and morality abdicating in favour of physics, may, in practice,

be interpreted in contrary ways. To be in sympathy with the Whole may

seem to require us to outgrow and discard every part; yet, on the other

hand, there is no obvious reason why Being should love its essence in a

fashion that involves hating every possible form of Being. The

worshipper of Being accordingly assumes now one, now the other, of two

opposite attitudes, according as the society in which he lives is in a

prerational or a post-rational state of culture. Pantheism is

interpreted pre-rationally, as by the early Mohammedans, or by the

Hegelians, when people are not yet acquainted, or not yet disgusted,

with worldliness; the Absolute then seems to lend a mystical sanction to

whatever existences or tendencies happen to be afoot. Morality is

reduced to sanctioning reigning conventions, or reigning passions, on

the authority of the universe. Thus the Moslems, by way of serving

Allah, could extend their conquests and cultivate the arts and pleasures

congenial to a self-sufficing soul, at once indolent and fierce; while

the transcendentalists of our times, by way of accepting their part in

the divine business, have merely added a certain speculative loftiness

to the maxims of some sect or the chauvinism of some nation.

[Sidenote: Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.]

To accept everything, however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing,

unless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share.

However the Absolute may feel, a moral creature has to hate some forms

of being; and if the age has thrust these forms before a man’s eyes, and

imposed them upon him, not being suffered by his pantheism to blame the

Absolute he will (by an inconsistency) take to blaming himself. It will

be his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery in

having any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to him

the source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity of

things. Pantheism, under these circumstances, will issue in a

post-rational morality. It will practise asceticism and look for a

mystical deliverance from finite existence.

Under these circumstances myth is inevitably reintroduced. Without it,

no consolation could be found except in the prospect of death and,

awaiting that, in incidental natural satisfactions; whereby absorption

in the Absolute might come to look not only impossible but distinctly

undesirable. To make retreat out of human nature seem a possible

vocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented as

unnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come from

elsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finer

than this sublunary fog.

[Sidenote: A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.]

A curious foothold for such a myth was furnished by the Socratic

philosophy. Plato, wafted by his poetic vision too far, perhaps, from

the utilitarianism of his master, had eulogised concretions in discourse

at the expense of existences and had even played with cosmological

myths, meant to express the values of things, by speaking as if these

values had brought things into being. The dialectical terms thus

contrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers,

furnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rational

religion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mind

is itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positive

revelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world.

Out of the play of notions carried on in a prayerful dream wonderful

mysteries can be constructed, to be presently announced to the people

and made the core of sacramental injunctions. When the tide of vulgar

superstition is at the flood and every form of quackery is welcome, we

need not wonder that a theosophy having so respectable a

core—something, indeed, like a true logic misunderstood—should gain

many adherents. Out of the names of things and of virtues a mystic

ladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtues

themselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school would

not fail to arrange the steps in this progress—the end of which was

unattainable except, perhaps, in a momentary ecstasy—so that the

obvious duties of men would continue, for the nonce, to be imposed upon

them. The chief difference made in morals would be only this: that the

positive occasions and sanctions of good conduct would no longer be

mentioned with respect, but the imagination would be invited to dwell

instead on mystical issues.

[Sidenote: The Herbraic cry for redemption.]

Neo-Platonic morality, through a thousand learned and vulgar channels,

permeated Christianity and entirely transformed it. Original

Christianity was, though in another sense, a religion of redemption. The

Jews, without dreaming of original sin or of any inherent curse in being

finite, had found themselves often in the sorest material straits. They

hoped, like all primitive peoples, that relief might come by

propitiating the deity. They knew that the sins of the fathers were

visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. They

had accepted this idea of joint responsibility and vicarious atonement,

turning in their unphilosophical way this law of nature into a principle

of justice. Meantime the failure of all their cherished ambitions had

plunged them into a penitential mood. Though in fact pious and virtuous

to a fault, they still looked for repentance—their own or the

world’s—to save them. This redemption was to be accomplished in the

Hebrew spirit, through long-suffering and devotion to the Law, with the

Hebrew solidarity, by vicarious attribution of merits and demerits

within the household of the faith.

Such a way of conceiving redemption was far more dramatic, poignant, and

individual than the Neo-Platonic; hence it was far more popular and

better fitted to be a nucleus for religious devotion. However much,

therefore, Christianity may have insisted on renouncing the world, the

flesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background this perfectly

Jewish and pre-rational craving for a delectable promised land. The

journey might be long and through a desert, but milk and honey were to

flow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsion

from nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted last

judgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was only

temporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils.

Despair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though at

first it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction.

This was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom of

Christian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of one

very like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice,

it was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit

miraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged or

punished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. The

earthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as a

trial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, would

thereafter begin.

[Sidenote: The two factors meet in Christianity.]

Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalism

intercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness.

Its moral principle is reason—the only moral principle there is; its

motive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy.

Christianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principles

after a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by opening

up new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities and measures of success.

The Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping the

world of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values may

take place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience,

self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire a

religious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcely

have found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merely

incidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground that

human nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged and

transformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts and

become again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of God

men would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be truly

natural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere.

This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage from

the Jews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the pagan

and Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty in

restoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul of

the gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the language

of Messianic hopes, is really post-rational. It was not to marry and be

given in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysical

mysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in this

life, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and to

follow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. It

was not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of

their exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and

the change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh

excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary

austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human

desires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, falling

like the Father’s gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might take

the place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a

renunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his more spiritual

disciples, did not spring from disappointed illusion or lead to other

unregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. It

sprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to

the divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the

spirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetch

from contemplation.

[Sidenote: Consequent eclecticism.]

This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism,

gave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence in

later times. Those who were inwardly convinced—as most religious minds

were under the Roman Empire—that all earthly things were vanity, and

that they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not of

torment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world,

carry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purely

negative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a

discipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict nature

more boldly than one intended to take nature’s place. The hope of

unimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenzies

than it could have fallen into if its object had been merely to silence

the will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it

tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious

hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism,

extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like

Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It

looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be

crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These

were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped

at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his

natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and

much more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with

anæsthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

Another consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rational

with pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopes

of a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the two

factors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that included

both. Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised the

pre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first. To

the spiritually minded, whose religion was founded on actual insight and

disillusion, the joys of heaven could never be more than a symbol for

the intrinsic worth of sanctity. To the worldling those heavenly joys

were nothing but a continuation of the pleasures and excitements of this

life, serving to choke any reflections which, in spite of himself, might

occasionally visit him about the vanity of human wishes. So that

Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of

morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in disruptive

movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one

Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be

practising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the

busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God’s name, all

their hot and miscellaneous passions.

[Sidenote: The negation of naturalism never complete.]

This contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannot

be avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Every

post-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory. Its despair

cannot be universal nor its nihilism complete so long as it remains a

coherent method of action, with particular goals and a steady faith that

their attainment is possible. The renunciation of the will must stop at

the point where the will to be saved makes its appearance: and as this

desire may be no less troublesome and insistent than any other, as it

may even become a tormenting obsession, the mystic is far from the end

of his illusions when he sets about to dispel them. There is one

rational method to which, in post-rational systems, the world is still

thought to be docile, one rational endeavour which nature is sure to

crown with success. This is the method of deliverance from existence,

the effort after salvation. There is, let us say, a law of Karma, by

which merit and demerit accruing in one incarnation pass on to the next

and enable the soul to rise continuously through a series of stages.

Thus the world, though called illusory, is not wholly intractable. It

provides systematically for an exit out of its illusions. On this

rational ordinance of phenomena, which is left standing by an imperfect

nihilism, Buddhist morality is built. Rational endeavour remains

possible because experience is calculable and fruitful in this one

respect, that it dissolves in the presence of goodness and knowledge.

Similarly in Christian ethics, the way of the cross has definite

stations and a definite end. However negative this end may be thought to

be, the assurance that it may be attained is a remnant of natural hope

in the bosom of pessimism. A complete disillusion would have involved

the neglect of such an assurance, the denial that it was possible or at

least that it was to be realised under specific conditions. That

conversion and good works lead to something worth attaining is a new

sort of positivistic hope. A complete scepticism would involve a doubt,

not only concerning the existence of such a method of salvation, but

also (what is more significant) concerning the importance of applying it

if it were found. For to assert that salvation is not only possible but

urgently necessary, that every soul is now in an intolerable condition

and should search for an ultimate solution to all its troubles, a

restoration to a normal and somehow blessed state—what is this but to

assert that the nature of things has a permanent constitution, by

conformity with which man may secure his happiness? Moreover, we assert

in such a faith that this natural constitution of things is discoverable

in a sufficient measure to guide our action to a successful issue.

Belief in Karma, in prayer, in sacraments, in salvation is a remnant of

a natural belief in the possibility of living successfully. The remnant

may be small and “expressed in fancy.” Transmigration or an atonement

may be chimerical ideas. Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something,

the assumption that the world is steady and capable of rational

exploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magical

means, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practical

reason, an essential adherence to natural morality.

The pretension to have reached a point of view from which _all_ impulse

may be criticised is accordingly an untenable pretension. It is

abandoned in the very systems in which it was to be most thoroughly

applied. The instrument of criticism must itself be one impulse

surviving the wreck of all the others; the vision of salvation and of

the way thither must be one dream among the rest. A single suggestion of

experience is thus accepted while all others are denied; and although a

certain purification and revision of morality may hence ensue, there is

no real penetration to a deeper principle than spontaneous reason, no

revelation of a higher end than the best possible happiness. One

sporadic growth of human nature may be substituted for its whole

luxuriant vegetation; one negative or formal element of happiness may

be preferred to the full entelechy of life. We may see the Life of

Reason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly and

fantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Life

of Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, its

substance impulse and its end happiness.

[Sidenote: Spontaneous values rehabilitated.]

So much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rational

system to the matrix of human hopes. There remains a second point of

contact between these systems and rational morality: the reinstated

natural duties which all religions and philosophies, in order to subsist

among civilised peoples, are at once obliged to sanction and somehow to

deduce from their peculiar principles. The most plausible evidence which

a supernatural doctrine can give of its truth is the beauty and

rationality of its moral corollaries. It is instructive to observe that

a gospel’s congruity with natural reason and common humanity is regarded

as the decisive mark of its supernatural origin. Indeed, were

inspiration not the faithful echo of plain conscience and vulgar

experience there would be no means of distinguishing it from madness.

Whatever poetic idea a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition or

analogy he finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that he

should hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner that it may

sanction without disturbing the system of indispensable natural duties,

although these natural duties, by being attached artificially to

supernatural dogmas, may take on a different tone, justify themselves by

a different rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in some

minor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are not original

works: they are versions of natural morality translated into different

metaphysical languages, each of which adds its peculiar flavour, its own

genius and poetry, to the plain sense of the common original.

[Sidenote: A witness out of India.]

In the doctrine of Karma, for instance, experience of retribution is

ideally extended and made precise. Acts, daily experience teaches us,

form habits; habits constitute character, and each man’s character, as

Heraclitus said, is his guardian deity, the artisan of his fate. We need

but raise this particular observation to a solitary eminence, after the

manner of post-rational thinking; we need but imagine it to underlie and

explain all other empirical observations, so that character may come to

figure as an absolute cause, of which experience itself is an attendant

result. Such arbitrary emphasis laid on some term of experience is the

source of each metaphysical system in turn. In this case the surviving

dogma will have yielded an explanation of our environment no less than

of our state of heart by instituting a deeper spiritual law, a certain

balance of merit and demerit in the soul, accruing to it through a

series of previous incarnations. This fabulous starting-point was

gained by an imaginary extension of the law of moral continuity and

natural retribution; but when, accepting this starting-point, the

believer went on to inquire what he should do to be saved and to cancel

the heavy debts he inherited from his mythical past, he would merely

enumerate the natural duties of man, giving them, however, a new

sanction and conceiving them as if they emanated from his new-born

metaphysical theory. This theory, apart from a natural conscience and

traditional code, would have been perfectly barren. The notion that

every sin must be expiated does not carry with it any information about

what acts are sins.

This indispensable information must still be furnished by common

opinion. Those acts which bring suffering after them, those acts which

arouse the enmity of our fellows and, by a premonition of that enmity,

arouse our own shame—those are assumed and deputed to be sinful; and

the current code of morality being thus borrowed without begging leave,

the law of absolute retribution can be brought in to paint the picture

of moral responsibility in more glaring colours and to extend the vista

of rewards and punishments into a rhetorical infinite. Buddhistic

morality was natural morality intensified by this forced sense of minute

and boundless responsibility. It was coloured also by the negative,

pessimistic justification which this dogma gives to moral endeavour.

Every virtue was to be viewed as merely removing guilt and alleviating

suffering, knowledge itself being precious only as a means to that end.

The ultimate inspiration of right living was to be hope of perfect

peace—a hope generously bestowed by nature on every spirit which, being

linked to the flux of things, is conscious of change and susceptible of

weariness, but a hope which the irresponsible Oriental imagination had

disturbed with bad dreams. A pathetic feminine quality was thereby

imparted to moral feeling; we were to be good for pity’s sake, for the

sake of a great distant deliverance from profound sorrows.

[Sidenote: Dignity of post-rational morality.]

The pathetic idiosyncrasy of this religion has probably enabled it to

touch many a heart and to lift into speculation many a life otherwise

doomed to be quite instinctive animal. It has kept morality pure—free

from that admixture of worldly and partisan precepts with which less

pessimistic systems are encumbered. Restraint can be rationally imposed

on a given will only by virtue of evils which would be involved in its

satisfaction, by virtue, in other words, of some actual demand whose

disappointment would ensue upon inconsiderate action. To save, to cure,

to nourish are duties far less conditional than would be a supposed duty

to acquire or to create. There is no harm in merely not being, and

privation is an evil only when, after we exist, it deprives us of

something naturally requisite, the absence of which would defeat

interests already launched into the world. If there is something in a

purely remedial system of morality which seems one-sided and extreme, we

must call to mind the far less excusable one-sidedness of those

moralities of prejudice to which we are accustomed in the Occident—the

ethics of irrational acquisitiveness, irrational faith, and irrational

honour. Buddhistic morality, so reasonable and beautifully persuasive,

rising so willingly to the ideal of sanctity, merits in comparison the

profoundest respect. It is lifted as far above the crudities of

intuitionism as the whisperings of an angel are above a schoolboy’s

code.

A certain bias and deviation from strict reason seems, indeed,

inseparable from any moral reform, from any doctrine that is to be

practically and immediately influential. Socratic ethics was too perfect

an expression to be much of a force. Philosophers whose hearts are set

on justice and pure truth often hear reproaches addressed to them by the

fanatic, who contrasts the conspicuous change in this or that direction

accomplished by his preaching with the apparent impotence of reason and

thought. Reason’s resources are in fact so limited that it is usually

reduced to guerilla warfare: a general plan of campaign is useless when

only insignificant forces obey our commands. Moral progress is for that

reason often greatest when some nobler passion or more fortunate

prejudice takes the lead and subdues its meaner companions without

needing to rely on the consciousness of ultimate benefits hence accruing

to the whole life. So a pessimistic and merely remedial morality may

accomplish reforms which reason, with its broader and milder suasion,

might have failed in. If certain rare and precious virtues can thus be

inaugurated, under the influence of a zeal exaggerating its own

justification, there will be time later to insist on the complementary

truths and to tack in the other direction after having been carried

forward a certain distance by this oblique advance.

[Sidenote: Absurdities nevertheless involved.]

At the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and its

waste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamental

contradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual limits

of retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits and

injuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition which

religions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that they

must have their roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission of

salvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was obliged

to borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had preceded

it in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as a

scaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and spirituality.

But this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent with

what was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity the

post-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of the

human will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with the

pre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence. The

doctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral responsibility; but in

making responsibility dynamic and all-explaining, the theory

discountenanced in advance the charitable efforts of Buddhism—the

desire to instruct and save every fellow-creature. For if all my

fortunes depend upon my former conduct, I am the sole artificer of my

destiny. The love, the pity, the science, or the prayers of others can

have no real influence over my salvation. They cannot diminish by one

tittle my necessary sufferings, nor accelerate by one instant the period

which my own action appoints for my deliverance. Perhaps another’s

influence might, in the false world of time and space, change the order

or accidental vesture of my moral experiences; but their quantity and

value, being the exact counterpart of my free merits and demerits, could

not be affected at all by those extraneous doings.

Therefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains in

Buddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency;

and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can be

attributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind,

anything inconsistent with it is fundamentally repugnant to the whole

system. Yet on that repugnant and destructive dogma of Karma Buddhism

was condemned to base its instruction. This is the heavy price paid for

mythical consolations, that they invalidate the moral values they are

intended to emphasise. Nature has allowed the innocent to suffer for the

guilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die in some measure unpunished. To

correct this imperfection we feign a closed circle of personal

retributions, exactly proportionate to personal deserts. But thereby,

without perceiving it, we have invalidated all political and social

responsibility, and denied that any man can be benefited or injured by

any other. Our moral ambition has overleaped itself and carried us into

a non-natural world where morality is impotent and unmeaning.

[Sidenote: The soul of positivism in all ideals.]

Post-rational systems accordingly mark no real advance and offer no

genuine solution to spiritual enigmas. The saving force each of them

invokes is merely some remnant of that natural energy which animates the

human animal. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man

at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; it is as far as possible from being

the source of that normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunes

mend, he may gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the same

posthumous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them,

different races, or the same race at different periods, will manifest

the most opposite moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells and

heavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the

passionate from passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community,

in blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs or

celestial sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously for

life’s own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope for

a second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost its

savour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems too

intricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words; since

the supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so far as it

expresses man’s natural situation and points to the satisfaction of his

earthly interests. What keeps supernatural morality, in its better

forms, within the limits of sanity is the fact that it reinstates in

practice, under novel associations and for motives ostensibly different,

the very natural virtues and hopes which, when seen to be merely

natural, it had thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself,

if treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible; and what

makes it genuinely esteemed is the restored authority of those human

ideals which it expresses in a fable.

The extent of this moral restoration, the measure in which nature is

suffered to bloom in the sanctuary, determines the value of

post-rational moralities. They may preside over a good life, personal

or communal, when their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive;

when the supernatural machinery brings man back to nature through

mystical circumlocutions, and becomes itself a poetic echo of experience

and a dramatic impersonation of reason. The peculiar accent and emphasis

which it will not cease to impose on the obvious lessons of life need

not then repel the wisest intelligence. True sages and true

civilisations can accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominally

supernatural; for that supernaturalism may have become a mere form in

which imagination clothes a rational and humane wisdom.

[Sidenote: Moribund dreams and perennial realities.]

People who speak only one language have some difficulty in conceiving

that things should be expressed just as well in some other; a prejudice

which does not necessarily involve their mistaking words for things or

being practically misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So it

constantly happens that supernatural systems, when they have long

prevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural interests at

heart; because these persons lack that speculative freedom and dramatic

imagination which would allow them to conceive other moulds for morality

and happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has accustomed

them. Sceptical statesmen and academic scholars sometimes suffer from

this kind of numbness; it is intelligible that they should mistake the

forms of culture for its principle, especially when their genius is not

original and their chosen function is to defend and propagate the local

traditions in which their whole training has immersed them. Indeed, in

the political field, such concern for decaying myths may have a pathetic

justification; for however little the life of or dignity of man may he

jeopardised by changes in language, languages themselves are not

indifferent things. They may be closely bound up with the peculiar

history and spirit of nations, and their disappearance, however

necessary and on the whole propitious, may mark the end of some stirring

chapter in the world’s history. Those whose vocation is not philosophy

and whose country is not the world may be pardoned for wishing to retard

the migrations of spirit, and for looking forward with apprehension to a

future in which their private enthusiasms will not be understood.

The value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a double

conformity on its part with the Life of Reason. In the first place some

natural impulse must be retained, some partial ideal must still be

trusted and pursued by the prophet of redemption. In the second place

the intuition thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made the

starting-point for a restored natural morality. Otherwise the faith

appealed to would be worthless in its operation, as well as fanciful in

its basis, and it could never become a mould for thought or action in a

civilised society.

CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

The same despair or confusion which, when it overtakes human purposes,

seeks relief in arbitrary schemes of salvation, when it overtakes human

knowledge, may breed arbitrary substitutes for science. There are

post-rational systems of nature as well as of duty. Most of these are

myths hardly worth separating from the post-rational moralities they

adorn, and have been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter; but a few

aspire to be critical revisions of science, themselves scientific. It

may be well, in bringing this book to a close, to review these proposed

revisions. The validity of science is at stake, and with it the validity

of that whole Life of Reason which science crowns, and justifies to

reflection.

[Sidenote: Various modes of revising science.]

There are many degrees and kinds of this critical retractation. Science

may be accepted bodily, while its present results are modified by

suggesting speculatively what its ultimate results might be. This is

natural philosophy or legitimate metaphysics. Or science may be accepted

in part, and in part subjected to control by some other alleged vehicle

of knowledge. This is traditional or intuitive theology. Or science may

be retracted and withdrawn altogether, on the ground that it is but

methodological fiction, its facts appearances merely, and its principles

tendencies to feign. This is transcendentalism; whereupon a dilemma

presents itself. We may be invited to abstain from all hypostasis or

hearty belief in anything, and to dwell only on the consciousness of

imaginative activity in a vacuum—which is radical idealism. Or we may

be assured that, science being a dream, we may awake from it into

another cosmos, built upon principles quite alien to those illustrated

in nature or applicable in practice—which is idealism of the mythical

sort. Finally it may occur to us that the criticism of science is an

integral part of science itself, and that a transcendental method of

survey, which marshals all things in the order of their discovery, far

from invalidating knowledge can only serve to separate it from

incidental errors and to disclose the relative importance of truths.

Science would then be rehabilitated by criticism. The primary movement

of the intellect would not be condemned by that subsequent reflection

which it makes possible, and which collates its results. Science, purged

of all needless realism and seen in its relation to human life, would

continue to offer the only conception of reality which is pertinent or

possible to the practical mind.

We may now proceed to discuss these various attitudes in turn.

[Sidenote: Science its own best critic.]

A first and quite blameless way of criticising science is to point out

that science is incomplete. That it grows fast is indeed its commonest

boast; and no man of science is so pessimistic as to suppose that its

growth is over. To wish to supplement science and to regard its

conclusions as largely provisional is therefore more than legitimate. It

is actually to share the spirit of inquiry and to feel the impulse

toward investigation. When new truths come into view, old truths are

thereby reinterpreted and put in a new light; so that the acquisitions

of science not only admit of revision but loudly call for it, not

wishing for any other authority or vindication than that which they

might find in the context of universal truth.

To revise science in this spirit would be merely to extend it. No new

method, no transverse philosophy, would be requisite or fitted for the

task. Knowledge would be transformed by more similar knowledge, not by

some verbal manipulation. Yet while waiting for experience to grow and

accumulate its lessons, a man of genius, who had drunk deep of

experience himself, might imagine some ultimate synthesis. He might

venture to carry out the suggestions of science and anticipate the

conclusions it would reach when completed. The game is certainly

dangerous, especially if the prophecy is uttered with any air of

authority; yet with good luck and a fine instinct, such speculation may

actually open the way to discovery and may diffuse in advance that

virtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poetic

purposes. Verification in detail is needed, not so much for its own sake

as to check speculative errors; but when speculation is by chance well

directed and hits upon the substantial truth, it does all that a

completed science would do for mankind; since science, if ever

completed, would immediately have to be summed up again and reduced to

generalities. Under the circumstances of human life, ultimate truth must

forego detailed verification and must remain speculative. The curse of

modern philosophy is only that it has not drawn its inspiration from

science; as the misfortune of science is that it has not yet saturated

the mind of philosophers and recast the moral world. The Greek

physicists, puerile as was their notion of natural mechanism, had a more

integral view of things. They understood nature’s uses and man’s

conditions in an honest and noble way. If no single phenomenon had been

explained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet by

their frank and studious contemplation of nature they would have

liberated the human soul.

[Sidenote: Obstruction by alien traditions.]

Unfortunately the supplements to science which most philosophers supply

in our day are not conceived in a scientific spirit. Instead of

anticipating the physics of the future they cling to the physics of the

past. They do not stimulate us by a picture, however fanciful, of what

the analogies of nature and politics actually point to; they seek rather

to patch and dislocate current physics with some ancient myth, once the

best physics obtainable, from which they have not learned to extricate

their affections.

Sometimes these survivals are intended to modify scientific conceptions

but slightly, and merely to soften a little the outlines of a cosmic

picture to which religion and literature are not yet accustomed. There

is a school of political conservatives who, with no specific interest in

metaphysics, cannot or dare not break with traditional modes of

expression, with the customs of their nation, or with the clerical

classes. They accordingly append to current knowledge certain

sentimental postulates, alleging that what is established by tradition

and what appeals to the heart must somehow correspond to something which

is needful and true. But their conventional attachment to a religion

which in its original essence was perhaps mystical and revolutionary,

scarcely modifies, in their eyes, the sum of practical assurances or the

aim of human life. As language exercises some functions which science

can hardly assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so

theology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages,

might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies

in the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and

mysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be

suffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any

clear fact or natural duty. They might continue to decorate with a

mystical aureole the too prosaic kernel of known truth.

[Sidenote: Needless anxiety for moral interests.]

Mythology and ritual, with the sundry divinations of poets, might in

fact be kept suspended with advantage over human passion and ignorance,

to furnish them with decent expression. But once indulged, divination is

apt to grow arrogant and dogmatic. When its oracles have become

traditional they are almost inevitably mistaken for sober truths. Hence

the second kind of supplement offered to science, so that revelations

with which moral life has been intertwined may find a place beside or

beyond science. The effort is honest, but extraordinarily short-sighted.

Whatever value those revelations may have they draw from actual

experience or inevitable ideals. When the ground of that experience and

those ideals is disclosed by science, nothing of any value is lost; it

only remains to accustom ourselves to a new vocabulary and to shift

somewhat the associations of those values which life contains or

pursues. Revelations are necessarily mythical and subrational; they

express natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before the

advent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest and

explicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainable

welfare or understanding the situation. It is to be stubborn and

negligent under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag on

progress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatism

that fears they may be indispensable is entangled in a pathetic

delusion. It is conservatism in a ship-wreck. It has not the insight to

embrace the fertile principles of life, which are always ready to renew

life after no matter what natural catastrophe. The good laggards have no

courage to strip for the race. Rather than live otherwise, and live

better, they prefer to nurse the memories of youth and to die with a

retrospective smile upon their countenance.

[Sidenote: Science an imaginative and practical art.]

Far graver than the criticism which shows science to be incomplete is

that which shows it to be relative. The fact is undeniable, though the

inferences made from it are often rash and gratuitous. We have seen that

science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent,

common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as

much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage

in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action. Like life

itself, like any form of determinate existence, it is altogether

autonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must lean on its own

vitality; to sanction reason there is only reason, and to corroborate

sense there is nothing but sense. Inferential thought is a venture not

to be approved of, save by a thought no less venturesome and

inferential. This is once for all the fate of a living being—it is the

very essence of spirit—to be ever on the wing, borne by inner forces

toward goals of its own imagining, confined to a passing apprehension of

a represented world. Mind, which calls itself the organ of truth, is a

permanent possibility of error. The encouragement and corroboration

which science is alleged to receive from moment to moment may, for aught

it knows, be simply a more ingenious self-deception, a form of that

cumulative illusion by which madness can confirm itself, creating a

whole world, with an endless series of martyrs, to bear witness to its

sanity.

To insist on this situation may seem idle, since no positive doctrine

can gain thereby in plausibility, and no particular line of action in

reasonableness. Yet this transcendental exercise, this reversion to the

immediate, may be recommended by way of a cathartic, to free the mind

from ancient obstructions and make it hungrier and more agile in its

rational faith. Scepticism is harmless when it is honest and universal;

it clears the air and is a means of reorganising belief on its natural

foundations. Belief is an inevitable accompaniment of practice and

intent, both of which it will cling to all the more closely after a

thorough criticism. When all beliefs are challenged together, the just

and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and to re-establish

themselves alone. The doubt cast on science, when it is an ingenuous and

impartial doubt, will accordingly serve to show what sort of thing

science is, and to establish it on a sure foundation. Science will then

be seen to be tentative, genial, practical, and humane, full of ideality

and pathos, like every great human undertaking.

[Sidenote: Arrière-pensée in transcendentalism.]

Unfortunately a searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientious

reversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake. So

violent a disturbance of mental habits needs some great social upheaval

or some revolutionary ambition to bring it about. The transcendental

philosophy might never have been put forward at all, had its authors

valued it for what it can really accomplish. The effort would have

seemed too great and the result too nugatory. Their criticism of

knowledge was not freely undertaken, with the pure speculative motive of

understanding and purifying human science. They were driven on by the

malicious psychology of their predecessors, by the perplexities of a

sophistical scepticism, and by the imminent collapse of traditional

metaphysics. They were enticed at the same time by the hope of finding a

new basis for the religious myths associated with that metaphysics. In

consequence their transcendentalism was not a rehearsal of the Life of

Reason, a retrospect criticising and justifying the phases of human

progress. It was rather a post-rational system of theology, the

dangerous cure to a harmless disease, inducing a panic to introduce a

fable. The panic came from the assumption (a wholly gratuitous one) that

a spontaneous constructive intellect cannot be a trustworthy instrument,

that appearances cannot be the properties of reality, and that things

cannot be what science finds that they are. We were forbidden to believe

in anything we might discover or to trust in anything we could see. The

artificial vacuum thus produced in the mind ached to be filled with

something, and of course a flood of rhetorical commonplaces was at hand,

which might rush in to fill it.

[Sidenote: Its romantic sincerity.]

The most heroic transcendentalists were but men, and having imagined

that logic obliged them to abstain from every sort of hypostasis, they

could not long remain true to their logic. For a time, being of a

buoyant disposition, they might feel that nothing could be more

exhilarating than to swim in the void, altogether free from settled

conditions, altogether the ignorant creators of each moment’s vision.

Such a career evidently affords all sorts of possibilities, except

perhaps the possibility of being a career. But when a man has strained

every nerve to maintain an absolute fluidity and a painful fidelity to

the immediate, he can hardly be blamed if he lapses at last into some

flattering myth, and if having satisfied himself that all science is

fiction he proclaims some fairy-tale to be the truth. The episodes of

experience, not being due to any conceivable machinery beneath, might

come of mere willing, or at the waving of a dialectical wand. Yet apart

from this ulterior inconsistency and backsliding into credulity,

transcendentalism would hear nothing of causes or grounds. All phenomena

existed for it on one flat level. We were released from all dogma and

reinstated in the primordial assurance that we were all there was, but

without understanding what we were, and without any means of controlling

our destiny, though cheered by the magnificent feeling that that destiny

was great.

[Sidenote: Its constructive importance.]

It is intelligible that a pure transcendentalism of this sort should not

be either stable or popular. It may be admired for its analytic depth

and its persistency in tracing all supposed existences back to the

experience that vouches for them. Yet a spirit that finds its only

exercise in gloating on the consciousness that it is a spirit, one that

has so little skill in expression that it feels all its embodiments to

be betrayals and all its symbols to be misrepresentations, is a spirit

evidently impotent and confused. It is self-inhibited, and cannot fulfil

its essential vocation by reaching an embodiment at once definitive and

ideal, philosophical and true. We may excuse a school that has done one

original task so thoroughly as transcendentalism has thing could be

said of it, would be simply an integral term in the discourse that

described it. And this discourse, this sad residuum of reality, would

remain an absolute datum without a ground, without a subject-matter,

without a past, and without a future.

[Sidenote: Its futility.]

It suffices, therefore, to take the supposed negative implication in

transcendentalism a little seriously to see that it leaves nothing

standing but negation and imbecility; so that we may safely conclude

that such a negative implication is gratuitous, and also that in taking

the transcendental method for an instrument of reconstruction its

professors were radically false to it. They took the starting-point of

experience, on which they had fallen back, for its ultimate deliverance,

and in reverting to protoplasm they thought they were rising to God. The

transcendental method is merely retrospective; its use is to recover

more systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. It

invalidates nothing in science; much less does it carry with it any

rival doctrine of its own. Every philosophy, even materialism, may find

a transcendental justification, if experience as it develops will yield

no other terms. What has reason to tremble at a demand for its

credentials is surely not natural science; it is rather those mystical

theologies or romantic philosophies of history which aspire to take its

place. Such lucubrations, even if reputed certain, can scarcely be

really credited or regarded in practice; while scientific tenets are

necessarily respected, even when they are declared to be fictions. This

nemesis is inevitable; for the mind must be inhabited, and the ideas

with which science peoples it are simply its involuntary perceptions

somewhat more clearly arranged.

[Sidenote: Ideal science is self-justified.]

That the relativity of science—its being an emanation of human life—is

nothing against its truth appears best, perhaps, in the case of

dialectic. Dialectic is valid by virtue of an intended meaning and felt

congruity in its terms; but these terms, which intent fixes, are

external and independent in their ideal nature, and the congruity

between them is not created by being felt but, whether incidentally felt

or not, is inherent in their essence. Mathematical thinking is the

closest and most intimate of mental operations, nothing external being

called in to aid; yet mathematical truth is as remote as possible from

being personal or psychic. It is absolutely self-justified and is

necessary before it is discovered to be so. Here, then, is a conspicuous

region of truth, disclosed to the human intellect by its own internal

exercise, which is nevertheless altogether independent, being eternal

and indefeasible, while the thought that utters it is ephemeral.

[Sidenote: Physical science is presupposed in scepticism.]

The validity of material science, not being warranted by pure insight,

cannot be so quickly made out; nevertheless it cannot be denied

systematically, and the misunderstood transcendentalism which belittles

physics contradicts its own basis. For how are we supposed to know that

what call facts are mere appearances and what we call objects mere

creations of thought? We know this by physics. It is physiology, a part

of physics, that assures us that our senses and brains are conditions of

our experience. Were it not for what we know of the outer world and of

our place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning to

subjectivity. The flux of things would then go on in their own medium,

not in our minds; and no suspicion of illusion or of qualification by

mind would attach to any event in nature. So it is in a dream; and it is

our knowledge of physics, our reliance on the world’s material

coherence, that marks our awakening, and that constitutes our discovery

that we exist as minds and are subject to dreaming. It is quite true

that the flux, as it exists in men, is largely psychic; but only because

the events it contains are effects of material causes and the images in

it are flying shadows cast by solid external things. This is the meaning

of psychic existence, and its differentia. Mind is an expression,

weighted with emotion, of mechanical relations among bodies. Suppose the

bodies all removed: at once the images formerly contrasted with those

bodies would resume their inherent characteristics and mutual relation;

they would become existences in their own category, large, moving,

coloured, distributed to right and left; that is, save for their values,

they would become material things.

[Sidenote: It recurs in all understanding of perception.]

Physics is accordingly a science which, though hypothetical and only

verifiable by experiment, is involved in history and psychology and

therefore in any criticism of knowledge. The contradiction would be

curious if a man should declare that his ideas were worthless, being due

to his organs of sense, and that therefore these organs (since he had an

idea of them) did not exist. Yet on this brave argument idealism chiefly

rests. It asserts that bodies are mere ideas, because it is through our

bodies that we perceive them. When physics has discovered the conditions

under which knowledge of physics has arisen, physics is supposed to be

spirited away; whereas, of course, it has only closed its circle and

justified its sovereignty. Were all science retracted and reduced to

symbolic calculation nothing would remain for this calculation to

symbolise. The whole force of calling a theory merely a vehicle or

method of thought, leading us to something different from itself, lies

in having a literal knowledge of this other thing. But such literal

knowledge is the first stage of science, which the other stages merely

extend. So that when, under special circumstances, we really appeal to

algebraic methods of expression and think in symbols, we do so in the

hope of transcribing our terms, when the reckoning is over, into the

language of familiar facts. Were these facts not forthcoming, the

symbolic machinery would itself become the genuine reality—since it is

really given—and we should have to rest in it, as in the ultimate

truth. This is what happens in mythology, when the natural phenomena

expressed by it are forgotten. But natural phenomena themselves are

symbols of nothing, because they are primary data. They are the

constitutive elements of the reality they disclose.

[Sidenote: Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.]

The validity of science in general is accordingly established merely by

establishing the truth of its particular propositions, in dialectic on

the authority of intent and in physics on that of experiment. It is

impossible to base science on a deeper foundation or to override it by a

higher knowledge. What is called metaphysics, if not an anticipation of

natural science, is a confusion of it with dialectic or a mixture of it

with myths. If we have the faculty of being utterly sincere and of

disintegrating the conventions of language and religion, we must confess

that knowledge is only a claim we put forth, a part of that unfathomable

compulsion by force of which we live and hold our painted world together

for a moment. If we have any insight into mind, or any eye for human

history, we must confess at the same time that the oracular substitutes

for knowledge to which, in our perplexities, we might be tempted to

fly, are pathetic popular fables, having no other sanctity than that

which they borrow from the natural impulses they play upon. To live by

science requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly.

[Sidenote: It suffices for the Life of Reason.]

If science thus contains the sum total of our rational convictions and

gives us the only picture of reality on which we should care to dwell,

we have but to consult the sciences in detail to ascertain, as far as

that is possible, what sort of a universe we live in. The result is as

yet far from satisfactory. The sciences have not joined hands and made

their results coherent, showing nature to be, as it doubtless is, all of

one piece. The moral sciences especially are a mass of confusion.

Negative, I think, must be the attitude of reason, in the present state

of science, upon any hypothesis far outrunning the recorded history and

the visible habitat of the human race. Yet exactly the same habits and

principles that have secured our present knowledge are still active

within us, and promise further discoveries. It is more desirable to

clarify our knowledge within these bounds than to extend it beyond them.

For while the reward of action is contemplation or, in more modern

phrase, experience and consciousness, there is nothing stable or

interesting to contemplate except objects relevant to action—the

natural world and the mind’s ideals.

Both the conditions and the standards of action lie well within the

territory which science, after a fashion, already dominates. But there

remain unexplored jungles and monster-breeding lairs within our nominal

jurisdiction which it is the immediate task of science to clear. The

darkest spots are in man himself, in his fitful, irrational disposition.

Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order would

establish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of keen

senses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, that

mankind have fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. It

has been for want of good character, good example, and good government.

There is a pathetic capacity in men to live nobly, if only they would

give one another the chance. The ideal of political perfection, vague

and remote as it yet seems, is certainly approachable, for it is as

definite and constant as human nature. The knowledge of all relevant

truth would be involved in that ideal, and no intellectual

dissatisfaction would be felt with a system of ideas that should express

and illumine a perfect life.