perspicuous, and effective as a writer, was Dr. PALEY, a man whose
position among the thinkers of the last century, though somewhat
dwarfed by the contemporary magnitude of Hume and Bentham, will ever
secure him an honourable place among the preachers of the Utilitarian
doctrine. As an author, he commanded a wider circle of intelligent
readers than any of his contemporaries who handled the same subjects;
he was a Churchman too, the only clergyman, so far as I know, among
the Utilitarian doctors; and the last of that school--Austin only
excepted[300.1]--who did not think it a disgrace but an honour to keep
on friendly terms with Christianity. The salient points of his moral
philosophy are four--Utility, the doctrine of Consequences, the Will
of God, and the Future life. Of the first, what remains to be said
will be said more opportunely when, in the next section, we shall have
to discuss Hume; the doctrine of Consequences a passing hint under
Bentham will dismiss; and for the other two points a few sentences may
suffice. “Virtue,” according to Paley, “is the doing good to
mankind in obedience to the will of God for the sake of everlasting
happiness.” {301} This definition characterizes the man, the book,
the age, the country, and the profession to which he belonged
admirably. It is a definition that, taken as a matter of fact, in all
likelihood expressed the feeling of nine hundred and ninety-nine out
of every thousand British Christians living in these islands in the
generation immediately preceding the French Revolution; still, it is a
definition which contains as many errors as it contains clauses. In
the first place, as to the doing good to mankind, it is a principle
which lies at the basis of the doctrine of Utility, and has its origin
doubtless not so much in modern anti-Christian systems as in the
prominence which Christianity gives to works of charity and
brotherly-kindness; than which practically of course there can be
nothing better, but as part of the definition of virtue in this place
it is faulty; for virtue of various kinds may be exercised where no
men exist to be the objects of our benevolence, as with Adam in
Paradise, and Robinson Crusoe in his desert island, and the poet
Campbell’s Last Man. Then as to the Will of God, that no doubt is a
power which overrules all; tides and tempests and thunderstorms must
obey that, and human life of course no less; but what constitutes the
Divine will, and how is it to be learned, in what way by the
Christian, and in what other way by the unbeliever? Properly speaking,
the will of God rather expresses the ultimate source of virtuous
conduct than furnishes a practical definition of its quality. Lastly,
as to the everlasting happiness, this is the greatest blunder of the
three. It may no doubt be very true under the relations in which it
was spoken, that “if in this life only we have hope in Christ we are
of all men {302} most miserable:” that was a sentence which applied
with the most vivid pointedness to St. Paul and to many others in
similar circumstances; but it is very far from furnishing a warrant
for the general proposition that the sure expectation of an
everlasting reward is a motive necessary for the existence of virtue
in this mortal life. For if this really were the case, either the
virtue of Socrates was no virtue at all, or a virtue far above the
standard of any Christian virtue according to Paley’s definition;
for Socrates died the death of a martyr with a very doubtful faith of
what might happen to him after death. But, in fact, the prospect of an
external reward is no part of any virtue, either Christian or
heathen,--rather in many cases would annihilate the very idea of
virtue. To give away ten pounds to-day with the sure expectation of
getting a thousand pounds for it to-morrow would be no act of
generosity. Aristotle says that a man is bound to be virtuous by the
distinctive law of his nature, whether he lives seventy years or seven
hundred years; and Christianity surely ought to say no less. It is
plain therefore that Dr. Paley was no great master of definitions.
Nevertheless he wrote a most useful practical book; such a book as
justly commended itself to the practical English mind; such a book as
might have been expected from the finished manhood of a young man of
whom when he went to college it had been said by his father, that
“he had by far the clearest head he had ever met with.” A clear
head unquestionably is a most useful quality in business and in daily
life, but a quality which of itself will not make a great philosopher,
or even a great man.
DAVID HUME, born at Edinburgh in the year {303} 1710, was older than
Dr. Paley by more than thirty years, though we have placed Paley
first, as with Locke and Hartley completing the band of decidedly
Christian Externalists. But in Hume we find the father of an
altogether new school, the real progenitor of that living sect of
philosophers whom the popular memory traces back no further than to
Bentham and James Mill. In him therefore we may reasonably expect to
find in one form or another all that came afterwards, some parts of
course less worked out and less consistent, but the whole more rich,
various, and complete; and, as in the case of Locke and Hartley, we
may probably have cause to rejoice that by a certain broad and
salutary inconsistency he saved himself from a narrow and pedantic
dogmatism. We shall not therefore err in calling him comparatively a
great man, but only comparatively; compared with the highest style of
men, great with first-rate position and constructive minds, he is not
great; he is only rich, various, and subtle. Nevertheless in respect
of those who followed him with kindred tendencies, his stature remains
unapproached. He is, as Emerson says of Plato, “a terrible destroyer
of originalities.” In the page of intellectual record he stands
unquestioned as the man who shook all the easy thinkers of an easy
century out of their easy seats with much observation; but there are
two ways of shaking people out of their seats--first in the manner of
an architect who pulls down a crazy old cabin in order that he may set
quarrymen, masons, plasterers, carpenters, painters, and other
artisans to work that they may erect a palatial structure in its
stead; secondly, in the manner of a strong Samson, who shakes the
pillars of some temple of Dagon, and buries himself {304} and all the
Philistines beneath its roof. That this is too much the manner of Hume
as a philosopher is obvious; only he does not actually die like
Samson, but gets himself paralysed for a moment, and then recovers
partially by virtue of that strong infection of common sense which, as
a Scotchman, he naturally had. We have called him a rich man; for
unquestionably his treatise on the Principles of Morals, perhaps on
the whole the best of his works, exhibits him as at once a subtle
thinker, a shrewd observer, and a graceful stylist, in a combination
as happy as it is rare. The man of the world is present here as well
as the philosopher; and perhaps the philosopher is not fully aware how
much the acceptance of his abstract speculations is due to his secular
shrewdness and his gentlemanly demeanour. But with all his wealth
there is a certain meagreness about Hume arising out of his ignorance
and entire misprision of the past. It is difficult for a man to write
well on morals with an entire disregard of Aristotle and Plato, and
with a fashionable Parisian contempt for the New Testament. No doubt
this was to a great extent the misfortune of the philosopher rather
than his fault; yet the fact remains, and cannot but weigh heavily
with all who would make a true estimate of the permanent value of his
contributions to ethical philosophy. In Hume’s time, as we have seen
above (p. 131), Aristotle had not yet recovered from the supposed
blows inflicted on him by Bacon--“his fame,” to use Hume’s own
language, “was utterly decayed;”[304.1] and as for Plato, St.
Paul, and St. John, our subtle Scotch David had no organ for them, and
could appreciate their excellence {305} as some kilted piper picked up
from Celtic games at Braemar might be expected to appreciate the
harmonies of Sebastian Bach. Greek certainly he had--the fruit of
private study in his riper years--more than usually falls to the lot
of Scottish philosophers; and what he had of that noble language he
knew how to use more effectively and with more grace and originality
than many English scholars with ten times his erudition; but in
reading his Principles of Morals I find no trace of any appreciation
of the work done by his great Hellenic predecessors; on the contrary,
I find the strange delusion possessing both him and Bentham that they
were commencing a new epoch, and doing for moral science what Newton
had done for physical, and what Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, not
to mention St. Paul and St John, had altogether failed to do. Hume’s
own view of his relation to the ancient moralists is distinctly stated
thus--“I found that the moral philosophy transmitted to us by
antiquity laboured under the same inconvenience that has been found in
their natural philosophy, of being entirely hypothetical and depending
more on invention than experience; every one consulted his fancy in
erecting schemes of virtue and happiness, without regarding human
nature, upon which every moral conclusion must depend.”[305.1] The
complacent conceit of this passage to a man who really knows the
ancient moralists, {306} is only less ludicrous than the benign
self-satisfaction which inspires the well-known overture to the
_Deontology_ of Bentham. And the conceit becomes the more ludicrous
when, in searching for this new principle which is to redeem ethics
from fancifulness and transport it into certainty, we find nothing but
the old Socratic formula:--
Reason + sentiment = virtue = happiness.
Nay more; he defines this sentiment to be “an internal sense or
feeling which nature has made universal in the whole species.”
_Risum teneatis, amici?_ Here we have the innate ideas of Plato, one
part of them certainly, which Mr. Locke was supposed to have blown
into smoke. And afterwards, in language even more distinctly Platonic,
in the section “Why Utility Pleases,” he says, “Had nature made
no original moral distinctions independently of education,
distinctions founded on the original constitution of the mind, the
words _honourable_ and _shameful_, _lovely_ and _odious_, _noble_ and
_despicable_, had never had place in any language; nor could
politicians, had they invented those terms, ever have been able to
render them intelligible, or make them convey any idea to the
audience.” We see therefore in these passages plainly, that Hume was
by no means a thorough and consistent Externalist; he protests stoutly
against Hobbes and all who declare that there is naturally no
difference between men and tigers till the policeman introduced it;
and he does not seem to have approached Professor Bain’s conception,
that Conscience is always and everywhere modelled on the statute-book.
He agrees entirely with Socrates in assigning to love and the {307}
social affections--the τὰ φιλικά--as strong a sway in human
society as to the selfish principle. Here his common sense and his
knowledge of the world saved him signally from the perverse ingenuity
of Hartley. It will be observed through all his works, indeed, that
though he was fond of puzzling himself as a thinker, he had
fundamentally far more faith in the common instincts and feelings of
the great masses of men than in the conclusions of the metaphysicians.
“Nature,” he says wisely, “will always assert her rights, and
prevail in the end over any abstract reasoning whatsoever;”[307.1]
while with regard to individual speculators he says, “It is easy for
a profound philosopher to commit a mistake in his subtle reasonings,
and one mistake is the necessary parent of another, while he pushes on
his consequences, and is not deterred from embracing any conclusion by
its unusual appearance or its contradiction to common sense.”[307.2]
And accordingly he makes no scruple of shelving the whole theory of
the Ethics of Selfishness by the single sentence that it “seems to
have proceeded entirely from that love of simplicity which has been
the source of much false reasoning in philosophy.”[307.3] What then
have we to lay hold of as distinctively Humian? Hitherto all is mere
Socrates. A well-disciplined reason and a well-educated natural
instinct of benevolence acting together for the public weal.--This is
Utility; this is Hume; this is Socrates also, and Aristotle; for these
great ancient thinkers had the εὐδαιμονία and the ὠφέλιμον in their
eye and on their tongue as {308} much as any modern Utilitarian. Where
then lies the differentiating element of this great progenitor of the
most modern school? The difference, we must reply, is partly
imaginary, arising out of the gross misconception of the character of
ancient philosophy, transparent in all the writings of the
Utilitarians; partly real, in so far as the ancients, while
acknowledging Utility as a principle, kept Reason in the foreground,
while the moderns push Utility into the van, and use Reason only as an
instrument to make that point alone prominent. The modern Utilitarian
accordingly looks more to the consequences of the action, the ancient
Rationalist to the quality of the actor; but how this should be looked
upon as a great discovery in morals, or as tending in any way to the
elevation of human character or the regeneration of society, seems
difficult to understand. It rather appears to me that the prominence
thus given to the results of action has a tendency to turn the eye of
men away from the great work of purifying the sources of action, the
foulness of which is the constant cause of foul results; prudential
considerations will be very apt to obtain undue preponderance; and
everywhere, as Lecky observes, “the philosophy of sensation will be
found to be accompanied with the morals of interest.”
The extreme meagreness of the Utilitarian doctrine as thus produced
from the propositions of its great progenitor, is something so
remarkable that one is naturally driven to look about for some cause
that may have given artificial importance to a matter in itself so
insignificant; and this cause, so far as I can discover, lies nowhere
so much as in the general reaction against Christianity which
distinguished the {309} age of which Voltaire in France was the great
spokesman, Hume in Scotland, and Bentham in England. Reaction is the
universal law of all mundane forces: and it was not to be expected
that Christianity should escape it. Christian ethics being based
purely, as we have seen, on a regard to the will of God, on purity of
motive, and lofty self-sacrifice, even had they been left to work in
all their natural integrity, would have demanded a doctrine of moral
consequences to neutralize the necessary one-sidedness of their
action. To have a good conscience was a most excellent thing, but to
have a clean shirt was also a virtue. The Divine sanction given by
Christian piety to Christian morals was naturally beneficial, but it
was also possible, or rather from human weakness almost certain, that
the science of human ethics might lose as much as it gained from
alliance with Christian theologians, who are only too apt to “bend
every branch of knowledge to their own purposes, without much regard
to the phenomena of nature, or to the unbiassed sentiments of the
mind.”[309.1] Add to this the tawdry mummeries of ritualism, the
insolence of haughty churchmen, the gross worldliness of fat
beneficiaries, the morbid sanctitude of pietistical devotees, the
unnatural austerities of monkish ascetics, and the grim severity of
damnatory dogmatists, and we shall easily understand how a revulsion
should have taken place, which would not be content till on the throne
of morals it had supplanted Christ by Socrates, and Socrates by
Epicurus. And this consideration opens up to us the second notable
achievement of the subtle Scot in the important field of morals. Not
content with {310} withdrawing virtue as much as possible from the
region of personal sentiment into the wider domain of social
wellbeing, he determined to strike at the root of the whole evil, as
it appeared to him, by not only attacking Christianity, but by
undermining that primary idea of CAUSALITY on which the idea of
religion and the very conception of a God reposes. This was a daring
business no doubt; but Hume was not the man to take things of that
nature overseriously; he would keep himself quite easy as to results;
he would not make himself miserable by any unnecessary enthusiasm even
for his own philosophy;[310.1] if he did not choke the Church-doctors,
he would at least give them something to chew; and at all events he
might effect a permanent divorce between human ethics and that
sectarian theology to which it had been so unpropitiously yoked.
The foundation of this monstrous doctrine of ATHEISM is laid by our
subtle Scotch Epicurus in the following way. In his chapter entitled
“Sceptical Doubts,” speaking of the origin of our ideas of _cause
and effect_, he says, “When we find that any particular objects are
constantly conjoined with each other, as the communication of motion
by one billiard-ball to another, this knowledge arises entirely from
_experience_, and is not a matter of _à priori_ reasoning.” Again:
“The effect in this and in every case is totally different from the
cause; the conjunction of every effect with its cause must appear
arbitrary; every effect is in fact a distinct event from its cause.
Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational
and modest has ever pretended {311} to assign the ultimate cause of
any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power
which produces any single effect in the universe. The ultimate springs
or principles productive of natural phenomena are totally shut up from
human curiosity and inquiry.” Then in the next section he goes on to
argue against the legitimacy of the common postulate of all scientific
thought, that “similar sensible qualities proceed from similar
secret powers.” “All that experience can do is to show us a number
of uniform effects resulting from certain objects, and to teach us
that those particular objects at that particular time were endowed
with such powers and forces.” After this, in the chapter entitled
“Sceptical Solution of Sceptical Doubts,” he lays it down that
since our belief that similar effects imply similar causes does not
depend on reasoning, the only, “principle on which it depends is
Custom or Habit.” In fact, “All inferences from experience are the
effect of CUSTOM, not of REASONING.” Cause means only “customary
conjunction.” Then, towards the conclusion of the same chapter, he
says, “There is a kind of pre-established harmony between the course
of nature and the succession of our ideas; and though the Powers and
Forces by which the former is governed be wholly unknown to us, yet
our thoughts and conceptions have still, we find, gone on in the same
train with the other works of nature. CUSTOM is that principle by
which this correspondence has been effected.” Cognate with these
chapters on Causation are some discussions that follow on the idea of
power or necessary connexion, in which he maintains that this idea is
not copied either from the observation of the operation of forces
{312} in the external world or in the world of volition within us;
that in all cases what we know is only “the frequent CONJUNCTION of
objects, not their connexion;” “all events seem entirely loose and
separate; and at bottom we have no idea of connexion or power at all,
and these words are absolutely without any meaning;” and,
philosophically expressed, “the sentiment or impression from which
we form the idea of power or necessary connexion,” is only “the
customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual
attendant.” And so “we may define a CAUSE to be one object
followed by another, and where all the objects similar to the first
are followed by objects similar to the second.” Lastly, to crown
this whole elaborate edifice of Scottish atheism, we have, in the
chapter on “Providence and a Future State,” the following
sentences:--“When we infer any particular cause from an effect, we
must proportion the one to the other, and can never be allowed to
ascribe to the cause any qualities but what are exactly sufficient to
produce the effect. Allowing, therefore, the gods to be the Authors of
the existence or order of the universe, it follows that they possess
that precise degree of power, intelligence, and benevolence which
appears in their workmanship; but nothing further can be proved. The
supposition of further attributes is mere hypothesis.” This argument
is levelled against the perfection of the Divine workmanship and
attributes. He then proceeds to annihilate, as he conceives, the
Socratic argument from design in the following fashion:--“If you saw
a half-finished building, surrounded with heaps of brick and stone and
mortar, and all the instruments of masonry, {313} you might justly
infer from this effect that it was a work of design and contrivance;
and in reference to works of human art this reasoning is good, because
_man is a being whom we know by experience_. But the case is not the
same with our reasonings from the works of Nature. The Deity is known
to us only by his productions, and is a single Being in the universe
not comprehended under any species or genus, from whose experienced
attributes or qualities we can by analogy infer any attribute or
quality in him. The method of reasoning which we legitimately use in
reference to the intentions and projects of men, can never have place
with regard to a Being so remote and incomprehensible, who bears much
less analogy to any other being in the universe than the sun does to a
wax taper, and who discovers himself only by some faint traces or
outlines, beyond which we have no authority to ascribe to him any
attribute or perfection.”
We have been at pains to transcribe these articulate sentences
verbatim, selected from a sweep of some hundred pages of the Essays,
because they really contain all that can be said in justification or
palliation of that sort of positive or negative atheism which has
recently been haunting the intellectual atmosphere of Europe, and
poisoning the sources of social morality. Let us now see what they
amount to.
In the first place, then, with regard to the general source of all our
knowledge of matters of fact, it is quite certain we gain such
knowledge only from experience; but this of course does not mean
merely external experience of external objects. Whatever exists, the
thinking I that is capable of taking cognisance {314} of objects, no
less than the objects cognised, are known only by experience, could
not be known otherwise. A thing must exist in order that it may be
known to exist. Nothing is known by mere abstract reasoning
independent of existence. If it be said that mathematics are so known,
the answer is, that mathematics imply the existence of a thinker, and
the existence of laws of thinking, and further, that the objects of
mathematical science are thoughts, not existences, mere hypothetical
conditions and arbitrary limitations of space and time. We are not
therefore entitled to start with a presumption that whatever is not
known by abstract reasoning falls under the category of mere accident
or custom; in the wide range of what we know by experience some things
may be accidental or customary, many things may be necessary; what
things are absolutely necessary the Supreme Cause alone may know; but
that customary conjunction is not a sufficient explanation of the
order of phenomena which we admire in the outer or inner world, human
reason may be quite strong enough without hesitation to assert. For,
let us inquire how the idea of CAUSE arises. According to Mr. Hume
it is nonsense; it is merely another word for custom; a constant
custom is a cause. Now, according to the general sense of mankind in
all ages, and the use of all languages,--a consent and a use to which
Mr. Hume himself, as we have seen, in another place attaches the
utmost importance,--while the inconstancy of a custom, by introducing
the idea of whim and caprice, excludes the notion of a cause, at least
of a cause which falls under the category of science, a constant
custom is the very thing which naturally suggests the question, What
{315} is the cause of this constancy? It is therefore something
different from the constancy; and whether discoverable or not, is not
to be confounded with the existence of that thing, or series of
things, of which it is required as the explanation. Take an example.
I see a certain person pass along the street before my window every
morning at a quarter before nine o’clock, and another person
following him regularly at ten minutes before nine. Here is a
customary conjunction. If it happened once, or even twice, I should
ask no questions, it might have been what men call accidental; but it
has happened every day for six months, and I ask the cause. Am I wrong
in doing so? Is there no cause? Or do I give a sufficient answer when
I say it is a customary conjunction, or an invariable sequence? The
invariability of the sequence, so far from offering any explanation of
the cause, is the very thing that suggests it. I insist on believing
that this invariability has a cause, and that it is neither an
accident nor a custom. Of course it may be possible that I shall not
be able to find out the cause; but that there is a cause I believe as
firmly as that two and two are four. Now why am I entitled to demand a
cause here, or in the case of any such conjunction? and what do I mean
by it? I mean something that has an inherent and necessary virtue to
produce effect; and I am entitled to make the demand, just because I
am a reasonable being, and because the exercise of reason has proved
to me directly that invariable sequences are not produced except by
the persistent application of some calculated force of which
energizing reason is the source. I know by experience that whenever
this presidency of reason is abolished, the {316} world in which I
move instantly becomes a chaos; and the living unity of that mind
which I exercise in thinking, and which brings its own unity into the
wide sphere of my thoughts, feelings, and actions, displays to me in
the most direct way that the unity of plan between the different
members of an invariable sequence can proceed only from that of which
plan and unity can be predicated, viz., REASON. I derive my notion
of cause therefore primarily from the most direct and certain of all
sources, from my own existence; and if Mr. Hume objects that I do not
know how my mind acts on my body, or how my limb does not follow my
will in the case of palsy in the motor nerves, this ignorance does not
in the least shake my conviction that a cause is something different
from a custom; a piston or a paddle may be deranged, but the steamboat
is moved by a cause nevertheless, and that cause is twofold,--the
steam, and the mind of James Watt. These conclusions with regard to
the works of man even Mr. Hume seems to regard as perfectly
justifiable; for, like all puzzle-headed paradox-mongers, he is forced
to forget his own distinctions, and to speak of a cause after all, as
something different from a custom. We are justified, therefore, in
finding in the energizing reason of man a cause, and the only
sufficient cause, for the reasonable works of man. But it is
different, you say, with the works of God. Different unquestionably in
some respects; as the ocean, for example, is different from a drop of
salt water, or the sun, as you say, from a wax taper, or a scuffle
between two Irishmen at a fair from a great battle betwixt Prussia and
France. Let it be so. There is an immense difference in magnitude
betwixt man and God, betwixt {317} the works of man and the works of
God. Still that will not make a gulf sufficiently large to prevent
mutual recognition. A drop of salt water, the chemist will tell you,
contains every element that makes the mighty ocean a salt ocean, and
not a fresh-water lake. The smallest spark from the largest
conflagration is an affair of the same oxygen gas; and petty
differences in the management of the smallest borough in Great Britain
are the result of the same play of vanities, jealousies, stupidities,
and spites that provoke the greatest wars on the battle-field of
Europe. We shall therefore not be deterred by the magnitude of the
Creator’s works from recognising the excellence of their cause; we
shall rather feel the more occasion to sing with the royal Hebrew
psalmist, “_How excellent in all the earth, Lord, our Lord, is Thy
name!_” No doubt there is another difference that separates human
work from Divine. The work of God is vital work, ours is mechanical,
mere puppetry, all the motive forces of which are borrowed from the
exhaustless batteries of the Divine electricity. But this is only
another reason for wondering with so much the more admiration, and
worshipping with so much the more fervour. How healthy-minded, how
noble, and how sublime, in reference to this matter, does that grand
old Hebrew singer appear, with the flaming wings of his devout Muse,
compared with this peeping Scotch metaphysician, keeping himself
jealously free from the contagion of all intellectual enthusiasm, and
discovering in this glorious universe only “some faint traces and
outlines” of a self-existent Reason, enough to lead a man into
puzzles but not to lift him into hymns! Truly a sorry spectacle! They
will not {318} worship God, forsooth, these philosophers, because they
do not know Him exactly as they know the machinery of their watches,
because they do not see Him with their carnal eyes, because they
cannot lay their fingers on Him. Well, let me ask them, Does any man
see any man? Can any man put his finger upon me, or you, upon that
which is properly called me and you? No; he sees only the man as
revealed in his flesh, as manifested in his works. His soul looks
through the windows of his eye; and his eye directs his hand where to
strike. We believe in the man; we do not see him. If his works are
full of order and beauty and purpose, we conclude that the man is
reasonable; if they are mere disorder, ugliness, and haphazard, we
conclude he is unreasonable. Not otherwise with our knowledge of God.
“No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see.” Creation is the
face of God; the sun is the eye of God. Everywhere I see Him in his
works radiant with reason, instinct with soul. I know Him as a child
knows his father, as the shepherd’s dog knows the shepherd, as a
common soldier knows the great projector of the campaign, though he
may never have seen him. I may not comprehend many of His movements
(it would be a strange thing if I did), I may not understand much of
that which most nearly concerns myself; but this necessary inadequacy
of my finite faculty shall not prevent my acknowledgment, my loyalty,
and my obedience. I know enough of God always to inspire wonder and to
annihilate criticism; and this is my highest human wisdom.
So much for the poor sceptical bewilderment of the celebrated David
Hume; into which den of dust {319} and cobwebs I certainly should not
have strayed in this discourse, had experience not taught me that to
deny God in the macrocosm necessarily leads to the denial of Mind in
the microcosm, and to deny mind in man is to disown morality, or at
least to stanch it in its principal well-head, and to poison the
purest of its fountains. In forming a judgment of his character,
however, we must not insist upon applying to him all the logical
consequences of his own arguments. That his philosophy is speculative
atheism is quite certain. By “emptying the idea of causation of its
efficiency,” to use Professor Ferrier’s language,[319.1] “that
is, of the element which constitutes its essence, he not only denied
God, but he struck a blow which paralysed man’s nature in its most
vital function;” he was not however consistently and thoroughly an
atheist; as a Scot he had too much sense to remain in his practical
moments entangled in the unsubstantial tissue of sophistry and cobwebs
which he had spun for himself in speculation, and his want of piety
was a defect of sentiment rather than a revolt of reason.[319.2] We
must remember also charitably, that he lived in a flat age, when it
was always impossible for a man to be truly great. A little moral
earnestness, of which the eighteenth century had nothing to give him,
would have saved him from a great part of the barren subtlety which
disfigures so many pages of his otherwise sagacious, pleasant, and
profitable works. When we observe that as the prophet of that age he
was in everything acute rather than strong, that in his literary
tastes {320} he preferred Sophocles to Shakespeare, Epicurus to Plato,
Lucian to the Apostle Paul, and Leo X. to Martin Luther, we shall not
be surprised to find his moral treatise tainted with the notion that
Christian virtue always means asceticism, and that religion is only a
more respectable name for superstition. Pity only that in the present
age some persons should be forward to use his arguments who have not
the excuse of his position.
We have now finished our notice of those who are entitled to be called
the founders of the Utilitarian school; those who follow, as the mere
inheritors of principles already largely discussed, need not detain us
long. Of these by far the most distinguished unquestionably is
Bentham; so distinguished indeed, as in popular estimate to be
accounted, the founder of the school. But there is need of a
distinction here. Those men found a school in the proper sense who
teach the principles which it acknowledges; but in another sense he
founds it who applies those principles to practice. In the first
sense, the founders of the ethical doctrine which we are considering
were Locke, Hartley, and Hume; in the other sense, Bentham. His glory
lies not so much in expounding as in applying principles; he is a
lawyer and a politician rather than a philosopher. Not however that he
did not give himself the airs of a philosopher; this he did with
observation, and was accepted by his disciples accordingly. Therein
lay the mistake. It is not every man, not even every great man, who
knows how to recognise the limits which nature has laid down to the
exercise of his faculty. Napoleon the Great, in the pride of imperial
command, overlooked the moral forces that {321} lay slumbering in the
heart of the people, and was punished by a three days’ cannonade at
Leipzig, the prelude to his final chastisement at Waterloo. Jeremy
Bentham, because he could tabulate Acts of Parliament with the
astuteness of a barrister, the purity of a philanthropist, and the
comprehensiveness of a statesman, conceited himself throned on a moral
eminence from which he might look down with contempt on Plato and
Socrates, and all the great moral teachers of the past. In the third
chapter of the first volume of _Deontology_, or _Doctrine of Duty_, we
read, “While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving
instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense
under pretence of teaching wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted
in words,--this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to
every man’s experience, and the assertion of other matters opposed
to every man’s experience. And exactly in the proportion in which
their notions on this subject differed from those of the mass of
mankind, exactly in that proportion were they below the level of
mankind.” Such an exhibition of ignorance, insolence, and
impertinence as this in a man of undoubted genius, were truly
inexplicable, did we not bear in mind that genius even of the very
highest kind is often accompanied by a very decided one-sidedness; and
more than that, there were in the circumstances of Bentham’s life
not a few things that tended to raise to a maximum the dogmatism with
which he was naturally endowed. He is by no means a solitary example
of a great man, the sublime of whose excellence has been turned into
the ridiculous for lack of a little Christian humility. {322} “Who
is that young man who discourses on all subjects with such a wealth of
resources?” said a distinguished guest at Worcester to Bishop
Stillingfleet one day after dinner. “That is my chaplain, sir,”
replied the Bishop; “Bentley is his name--Richard Bentley--a very
remarkable man, a man of gigantic learning, and who might be the
greatest man in Europe, had he only a little modesty.” Young Bentham
had the misfortune to be a spoiled child--and not without cause, for
he was by no means a common boy; his intellectual and moral endowments
were both rare; this was the good gift of God; but he was brought up
as a prodigy; this was the great blunder of his parents. Nor was the
blunder mended when at a remarkably early age he was sent to Oxford.
Public schools and colleges are often admirable institutions for
teaching young men to find their level, but it was not so with
Bentham; he had the misfortune to be born in a flat century, and fell
among flat people. Everything that he saw in the great seat of English
learning tended rather to pamper than to prune his conceit. He could
write Latin verses as well as the best of them; but he rightly judged
that at this time of day, in reference to the highest demands of a
rational culture, this sort of exercise is at best a very pretty kind
of trifling, and anything better did not grow there at that time. He
seems to have got a taste of Aristotle’s Logic--that was part of the
academical routine,--but he had logic enough in his own brain, and
could not be expected to reap much benefit from any barren
exercitations of a school-book. Logic is useful only as a flail, when
it gets corn to thresh from other quarters; of itself it is utterly
{323} unfruitful. Into the real gist and marrow of Aristotle and Plato
it does not appear he ever entered, nor amongst the tutors of his
college did any one offer a manuduction into these intellectual
penetralia; it was the age of elegant grammarians and low churchmen;
and when the Articles were duly subscribed and the Latin verses
properly turned off, there seemed nothing more in prospect for the
academical mind but port wine and chapel service, and, in pleasant
summer weather, a little languid activity on the bowling-green. But
this was not the sort of nutriment which could feed the fine spirit of
a young Bentham, whose food was mere intellectual truth, and his drink
pure human love. He had been born in a Tory family; he was bred in a
Tory college; he had been kidnapped (to his life-long horror) to sign
the Articles of a Tory Church; but from all this Toryism the best part
of his nature had received no nourishment. The consciousness grew, and
one day burst out with a flash upon him, that Toryism was selfishness:
that the British people, in common with himself, were lying languid
and downtrodden, and rotting beneath the selfish dominance of an
oligarchy, an oligarchy perhaps the most powerful that the history of
the world knew; for as he knew it, it certainly seemed fourfold,--an
oligarchy of pedants, an oligarchy of priests, an oligarchy of
lawyers, and an oligarchy of peers. Against all this the spirit of
young Bentham, as courageous as it was pure, rebelled. He would pull
it all down; though he stood alone in the world, like Plato’s just
man, he would pull it all down. And so he set himself valiantly to
protest against the oligarchy of pedants, founded on a blind reverence
{324} for the letter of dead books; against the oligarchy of priests,
founded on the real desire of power and the pretended admiration of an
ascetic morality; against the oligarchy of lawyers, who strangled the
rights of the present by the fictions of the past; against the
oligarchy of peers, which in the government of the State preferred the
interests of the favoured few to the happiness of the neglected many.
And the issue was that young Bentham returned from Oxford, not to
prosecute his legal studies at one of the Inns of Court, and advance
himself to a position of wealth and honour by practising the curious
art of giving a reasonable face to the most unreasonable of fictions,
but as an armed apostle of intellectual, moral, juridical, and
political democracy, and full of that sort of sacred fury which
inspired the French democrats when they looked forward to a speedy
millennium as the time “when the last king should be strangled with
the bowels of the last priest.”
The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my
opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary
one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was
the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit
itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young
men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of
view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which
permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the
nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and
could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no
limitation, any more than to those {325} of the Pope; he held himself
practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do
was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the
chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only
one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true
source of morality.”[325.1] After this we need inquire no further.
The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its
manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and
for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human
nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great
ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness
the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to
attain by ἡδονὴ or PLEASURE, another class by striving after
the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or the GOOD. This language, founded on the
healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity
sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being
“lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present
hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the
English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible,
and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language
is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature,
are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment,
but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other
always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the
other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main
organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in
common with a {326} pig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore
a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral
philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his
conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every
reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in
Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh
in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not
exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality
of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of
Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than
fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains,
therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to
palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral
science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality
that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had
always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical
solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was
naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which
did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as
it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,--that what was
most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was
least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that
Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now,
we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the
maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always
been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians have {327}
been roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen
have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics,
strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially
rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative
economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley
erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal
purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying
his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical,
and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It
is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe
and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of
professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain
let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even
worshipped as a saint--(he was a saint in his own peculiar way
unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or
academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in
a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize
pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in
Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.
With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is
little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were
expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the
doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away;
for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were
sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base
element out of which it sprang. One {328} of their foremost spokesmen
was JAMES MILL, the father of the present distinguished logician and
politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by
the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work
entitled _An Analysis of the Human Mind_. This treatise I have read
carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an
extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had
been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face
of which--near Montrose--he was born. From his life it would appear
that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the
great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable
attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that
the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our
Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato
thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the
purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found
nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out
into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and
the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we call
MIND, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a
merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can
be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out
of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in
this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing
in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to
think worth remembering.
{329}
Among living thinkers there is none who stands before the public more
prominently as the exponent of the Utilitarian ethics than JOHN
STUART MILL.[329.1] But whatever may be the merits of this
distinguished writer in the domain of logic, politics, and economics,
which seem most cognate to his genius, there can be little doubt in
the minds of thoughtful persons that his book on Utilitarianism has
done more to undermine than to sustain the doctrine which it professes
to expound. And the reason of this lies in a cause which is not less
condemnatory of the doctrine than it is complimentary to its champion.
Mr. Mill is too good a man to be the consistent advocate of a system
which, as compared with other systems, is fundamentally bad. He is too
earnest an apostle of the real moral progress of man to be a
thoroughgoing disciple of a school whose natural element is Epicurean
ease, sensual indulgence, and prudential calculation. His heart
revolted against the degrading tendency of a philosophy which gave a
primary importance only to what is low, and left the highest elements
of human nature to make a respectable show before men with a borrowed
and secondary vitality. But at the same time, he was a disciple of the
school, and the son of his father, and thus by education and a sort of
intellectual heritage, his head was committed to a doctrine for which
his heart was naturally a great deal too good. The consequence was a
sort of sophistry which, while we see through it, we cannot but
admire. Departing from the original idea of his school, that pleasure
is the only good, and that pleasures differ from one another only in
intensity, he interpolates into {330} the general idea of quantity of
happiness the discriminating element of quality; and thus is thrown
back virtually on those innate ideas which it is the characteristic
boast of his school to have discarded. For the essential difference in
the quality of high and low pleasures is not a matter to be proved by
any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual
and emotional nature of man, asserting its own innate superiority
precisely as light asserts itself over darkness, and order over
confusion. And thus, while he defends Utilitarianism successfully, so
far as results go, he succeeds only by throwing overboard all that is
most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is
most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents. In ancient times,
between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked
line of demarcation, which, whether in speculation or in practice, no
person could miss; now under Mr. Mill’s manipulation, this
distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is
sublimated into the love of virtue, and an ideal enthusiasm for the
greatest possible happiness of all sentient creatures is substituted
for the real and direct stimulus of pleasure which every man
understands; and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the
most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal
of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume
sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate
flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all
things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than
to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result;
for the whole platform of morality in {331} modern times has been so
elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to
win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not
fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th
chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the
individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be
imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and
shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain--keeping
Bentham’s language--how the original, individual, and personal love
of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere
external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of
innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who
are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its
credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving
to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the
demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the
strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements
that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that
he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the
logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to
maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has
changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to
observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a
formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of
all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and
trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after their {332}
own favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong
moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the
intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the
ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she
makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.
After J. S. Mill, the only other living champion of the Utilitarian
school who demands special notice here is Professor BAIN. This
subtle, various, and accomplished writer, while agreeing with Hume and
Mill in reverting to the old Socratic principle of original benevolent
instincts in man, and thus denying pure externalism in one important
part of the human soul, is nevertheless upon the whole a much more
thorough-going and consistent externalist than Mr. Mill; so thorough,
indeed, as not to have hesitated to assert, in the most unqualified
language, that conscience in the breast is a mere reflection of the
external model in the statute-book, instead of the statute-book being,
as the Idealists teach, a very fragmentary and inadequate projection
from the moral pattern in a normal conscience. This revival of Hobbism
in one of its extreme forms is not likely to meet with much acceptance
in a country where the popular conscience, from long centuries of
combined Christian and chivalrous culture, has attained a very high
degree of refined sensibility; and the numerous admirers of Mr. Mill,
who are grateful to that gentleman for the skill with which he has
disposed the ethics of Empiricism in the drapery of Idealism, will
scarcely be thankful to Mr. Bain for presenting their pet system in
the naked prose of its early cradle. The acute northern professor
would certainly have {333} been more consistent, though less amiable,
if he had asserted in its broadest form the Hobbesian doctrine of an
original war of all against all; and he would have found no greater
difficulty in evolving from the primeval tiger a Xavier or a Howard,
than others have found in elevating the primeval monkey into a Newton
or La Place.
We have now concluded our proposed survey of the Utilitarian philosophy,
and the result may be summarily stated thus:--Utilitarianism generally
is a method of thinking which, while professing to clear up dim ideas,
brings confusion and disorder into every region of human thought and
action; and specially--
1. Which, by deriving thought from mere sensation, by deducing the one
from the many, instead of the many from the one, and thus reducing
mind to a mere blank impressibility, confounds the essential
distinction between necessary and contingent truth, and renders all
science impossible.
2. Which, by confounding causation with sequence, pulls up philosophy
by the roots, disembowels theology of all substance, and freezes the
breath of all natural piety.
3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and
congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations
of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.
4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades
morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and
lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of
external consequences.
This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it
does not by any means follow {334} that Utilitarianism has proved
utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted.
It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that
it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social
morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an
amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has
done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man
certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear,
in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of
human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a
cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to
look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of
the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this
country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious
to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will
continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against
traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires
to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian
tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally
themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make
no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the
role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty
aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that
can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this
country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on the {335}
contrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs
and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it,
for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously
seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and
oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting
them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no
less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element
of NUMBER is made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort
of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by
taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the
many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also,
will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because
theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean
cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a
clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several
creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to
welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system
which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold
and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to
religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian
writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first
thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion
is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may
attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre
men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever
the more powerfully from the void which {336} its absence has
occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point,
the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses
of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion,
except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from
the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the
Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy
inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer
emptiness and despair.
[The End]