THE ETHICAL TASK UNDER CHRISTIANITY.
1. Helped by the Completion of the Ethical View 219-220
2. Quickened by Assurance of Success 220-222
3. The Religious Interest Brought to Reinforce the Moral 222-224
4. The Enlightening and Enforcing Power of the Holy Spirit 224-225
5. Through Spiritual Regeneration 225-227
THEORETICAL ETHICS.
CHAPTER I.
DEFINITION AND DIVISIONS.
==Ethics Defined.==
=1.= Ethics is the science of rectitude and duty. It treats of the
right and its obligations. Its subject is morality. Its sphere is
the sphere of virtuous conduct. It covers a double range of inquiry,
as the subject-matter lies within or without the human constitution.
On the one side it investigates and sets forth the facts and laws of
man's moral constitution; on the other, the nature and grounds of the
distinction of right and wrong. In the light of the whole investigation
into these fundamental verities, it determines the principles and
rules of duty in the various relations of life. It thus discovers
and elucidates the underlying pre-suppositions and principles upon
which the phenomena of moral discernment and obligation rest, and on
which man rises into the possibility and reality of character, as
his supreme distinction among the orders of existence on earth. The
inquiry throughout is conducted according to the scientific method of
careful observation and analysis of the unquestionable facts concerned,
and an orderly presentation of their necessary logical implications
and conclusions. Hence the product of the investigation, as the
systematized view of the facts, with their underlying principles, may
justly be called, as it usually is called, moral science.
The term Ethics, which we thus use to designate this branch of study,
with its systematized truth, is not employed with etymological
strictness. For it comes from the Greek ἦθος [Greek: êthos], moral
character, which, according to Aristotle is derived from ἔθος [Greek:
ethos] custom, under the notion that moral virtue is a product of
repeated acts of voluntary preference.[1] Taken strictly this would
build rectitude or the ethically right on the mere habits or usages
of a people. But this conception of the basis of virtue must not be
included and carried into the scientific use of the word, or be at all
allowed to prejudice the final decision of this great question of the
foundation of right, in the end, in the light of all the facts in the
case.[2]
The Latin equivalent for ἦθος [Greek: êthos] was _mos_, with similar
suggestion as to the nature of rectitude, and human duty was treated
under the head of De Moribus. Cicero says: "_Quia pertinet ad mores,
quod ἦθος [Greek: êthos] illi vocant, nos eam partem philosophiæ De
Moribus appellare solemus; sed decet augentem linguam Latinam nominare
Moralem._"[3] This suggestion of Cicero has given the common English
designation Morals or Moral Philosophy. Recent usage, however, speaks
of the study rather as moral science, in harmony with the prevailing
preference for the term science in all investigations conducted under
the inductive method. It is, nevertheless, as will appear, largely
a metaphysical and philosophical investigation, and, if classed as
science, must be counted as pre-eminently a philosophical science.
==Historical Glance.==
=2.= The beginning of the movement to give a systematic view of ethical
truth may be traced to Socrates. The pre-Socratic philosophy failed to
produce anything that can be called a system in this connection. The
difficulty in the way was not only the want of a scientific spirit at
that period, but especially the inadequate and false light in which
human beings were viewed. Outside of the Hebrew people there was
little or no recognition of the freedom of man, as man. Such freedom
was denied both in thought and in life. Everywhere, in India, China,
and Egypt, as well as in Greece and Rome, the immense mass of the
population were in a condition of abject slavery, regarded as chattels,
not amenable to the responsibilities of moral life. Only the free
citizens were viewed as capable of virtue. Slavery was a part of the
very conception of the State. The essential characteristics and rights
of humanity were not thought of as belonging to all men. But moral
life, as will appear, can exist only in the sphere of liberty. Even the
most advanced philosophers of the ancient world extended the conception
of moral manhood only to the free citizen, the status of the rest not
bringing them within the possibility of even civic virtue. And even
the so-called free citizen existed almost absolutely for the State.
His sacred selfhood disappeared under ownership by the Government, by
which he was held and used as a machine for military service. Even
long after Socrates opened the way, within this limited range, toward
some connected view of ethical life, these disabling causes continued
to distort and impede all efforts to systematize the principles which
underlie and determine it. Plato, Aristotle, and the philosophers
generally, continued to know nothing of a morality for all human
beings.[4]
It is to be remembered, too, that this tardy appearance of effort in
scientific ethics is part of the wider fact, that in that period of
human history even the most advanced tribes and nations had not risen
to science at all. All knowledge was in the non-scientific form, or
only fragmentarily and inchoately adjusted. The moral consciousness and
personal virtues, however, of course existed, as part of the normal
constitution and practical activities of human life. The various
peoples had collections of moral precepts and rules for right living,
often bright with gems of ethical truth and beauty, usually in close
connection with religious beliefs and convictions; but these were not
based and unified on any underlying principles bringing them logically
into compact and consistent system. Just as the facts and practices of
religion existed, in even rich luxuriance, anterior to the appearance
of speculative theologies, and the phenomena of nature for long
centuries preceded the formation of the natural sciences, so the moral
constitution of the race and practical morality existed long in advance
of the explanations and systemization that create the science of ethics.
The history of the science does not come within the purpose of this
work. The greatness of the speculative and practical questions involved
in the subject, clearly and impressively apparent when once brought
forward, could not fail to awaken and hold the most earnest interest
of the human mind. They concerned the powers and possibilities of man
in the crowning endowments of his nature, and in the highest ascent
of their evident intention and adaptation. They touched the great
problems of personal and social welfare in the most vital relations
and decisive interests. So the old sages became moralists and their
great themes were the themes of virtue and duty. Not very deeply,
however, did they, for centuries, succeed in penetrating the rational
principles of the moral life and the authority of the moral judgments.
Yet clear gems of thought and deep suggestion mark the pathway of
their thinking. In passing on, and over from pagan into Christian
development, the treatment was mostly in connection with religious
truths, and as involved in theological doctrine. In the light of the
Christian Scriptures the whole subject came under a new illumination.
The various duties, however, in the different relations of life,
were permitted to rest, without much theorizing, on the warrant of
supernatural revelation and divine precept. Down through the early
Christian period, and the centuries of mediæval scholasticism, and on
through the Renaissance and the Reformation and the subsequent dogmatic
period of Protestant theology, ethics continued to be treated simply as
a division of theology, based almost wholly on the Sacred Scriptures,
with but little inclusion of any effort to determine its natural basis
and significance. But with the age of modern philosophy and science a
new interest and direction came to ethical inquiry. Explanation began
to be sought for the unique authority of the ethical judgments, and
concerning the place of the moral power in the essential constitution
of the human soul. Special emphasis was given to the fact that, even
apart from the precepts of revelation, man is bound to rectitude by
an imperative within him, which is not of his choice, but claims the
right to dominate his choices. And since the seventeenth century
the ethical constitution of humanity, together with the nature and
grounds of right, has been made, apart from theology, the distinct
and separate theme of scientific and philosophical investigation and
discussion. It has been among the leading subjects of rational inquiry
and constructive effort. Especially in Great Britain and in our own
country has the inquiry been conducted on this basis, and directed to
the exhibition of the natural foundation and character of the ethical
distinctions and judgments, and to a systemization of the ethical
realities and laws thus determinable. The work thus done has created an
immense literature, and established a body of securely authenticated
scientific results.
=3.= Ethics, in its comprehensive sense, is naturally divided into two
leading parts--Theoretical Ethics, and Practical or Applied Ethics.
==Theoretical Ethics.==
(1) Theoretical Ethics deals with the essential realities and
principles which form the fundamental basis and source of obligation
and moral law, in the constitution of man and of the world. It is a
speculative study, seeking a rational account of the foundations of
morality and behests of duty. It secures a theory from and of the
facts. It has, however, a double range of investigation, as it seeks to
determine the truth with respect to the two great essential factors in
the aggregate inquiry.
In the one range it examines and ascertains the facts and laws of man's
moral nature. It investigates the constitution of the moral agent, in
whose conscious experience, in the presence of the concrete world, the
moral phenomena arise. In this part, the inquiry is psychological, and
its results are scientific.
In the other range it investigates the nature and ground of right, or
the morally good. In this the search is not for what is discoverable
within the moral agent, or the phenomena of the moral perceptions and
emotions, but for that which is without him and to which his moral
life is, at least apparently, required to be adjusted. Here the work
is metaphysical, passing on from what is phenomenal within man, and
looking for the super-phenomenal realities implied. The process and
results here are philosophical.
It thus appears that the one range of investigation moves subjectively,
the other objectively. The first discovers what man is--at least so far
as his constitution embraces those powers, perceptions, judgments and
feelings in which he becomes and recognizes himself a moral being; the
second seeks to know what rectitude is, or what is that to which the
moral perceptions and discriminations refer and bind. When the truth on
both these sides is discovered and brought together, the whole view,
with the particulars logically correlated, will present the aggregate
theory of duty, or the rationale of obligation.
==Practical Ethics.==
(2) Practical Ethics sets forth the proper application of these
fundamental principles of right and duty, as developed and justified in
theoretical ethics, to the varied relations of men, personally, in the
Family, in Society, and in the State. It passes on from the philosophy
of moral obligations to a settlement of particular duties in the
different spheres of human life and activity.
The connection between theoretical and practical ethics is very
close and vital. Theory and practice always affect each other. They
cannot be held wholly apart. They act and react on each other, in
ceaseless influences. It is so in every department of thought and life.
Theoretical error in physical science, in art, in trade, in political
economy, can hardly fail to appear in faulty or misdirected practice.
Every failure to grasp first principles correctly and firmly is sure
to mean failure also to grasp and maintain the true order and beauty
of right living. False views as to the reality and grounds of moral
obligation weaken, vitiate and corrupt life. They become, often, the
fountain of far-flowing streams of evil and blight. At best they lack
power for the true and right life. A correct theory of ethical truth
is, therefore, demanded by all the high interests in the moral life of
man and the order of the world.
It is apparent, however, that it is only the theoretical part that
constitutes the science of ethics. It alone settles the systematic
view of it, revealing its underlying pre-suppositions and principles,
exhibiting its reasons and determining its laws. Practical ethics, as
simply pointing out how these bear upon men's temper and conduct in
actual life, is apart from the scientific investigation. Though this
has usually constituted a large portion of formal treatises on the
subject, we, for the reason thus given, omit it from this discussion.
=4.= A few of the relations of ethical science are properly called to
mind here. Its place will thus be more clearly seen. It sustains very
close relations to three other great branches of study.
==Relation to Psychology.==
(1) To psychology. It is organically related to this. In that part of
its work which determines the reality and nature of moral obligation
from the constitution and action of the human mind, moral science joins
with psychology in the investigation of man's mental capacities and
powers. Ever since the days of Aristotle ethics has been seen to have
real psychological basis and pre-suppositions.[5] Yet, as a result of
the later general subsuming of ethics under religious and theological
precepts, this basis received but little distinct investigation till
the time of Shaftesbury who, though failing to give adequate or
correct account of it, brought it prominently forward. Mental science
is essentially conditional for moral science. The behests of duty are
provided for and sanctioned in human nature. The moral discriminations
and convictions emerge as psychical phenomena. "To understand what man
ought to do, it is necessary to know what he is." In the very structure
and adjustment of his powers, it becomes apparent that he has been made
for duty and organized under obligations.
But while psychology and ethics both study the powers and functions of
the soul, they do so with different aims. The one has no aim beyond
a knowledge of the phenomena and laws of the mind as mind. The other
studies it with a view to the light which this knowledge sheds on
the problems of virtue and duty. There are, indeed, some questions
in ethics that transcend the province of psychology, and belong to
the further realm of metaphysics--as, for instance, the validity and
ground of the distinction between right and wrong--yet, so far as it is
the science of conscience or of man's moral nature, it is thoroughly
psychological. And well would it have been for moral science if,
instead of speculatively and arbitrarily theorizing on the subject, it
had more critically, fully, and exactly searched out the real facts
in actual psychology and moved forward always toward the conclusions
necessitated by these fundamental and abiding realities.
==Relation to Natural Theology.==
(2) To Natural Theology. As Natural Theology seeks to determine the
existence, character and will of God as Creator and Moral Governor
of the world, and the consequent relations and responsibilities of
men, it covers, to some extent, the same ground as a system of ethics
constructed simply upon the basis of reason and the data found in
man's nature and place. Both, if properly drawn out, bring to view the
reality of "a power that makes for righteousness"[6] in the natural
constitution of the world, and exhibit the laws of obligation that
bind men under the action of conscience. Both treat of the fact and
authentications of human duty. A science of ethics, as well as a
theology, may be constructed, apart from supernatural revelation,
from the data of reason and nature alone. The possibility of this is
implied in Rom. 2:14, 15. This would be a system of natural ethics.
There is still, however, a large difference--though theology and ethics
be kept apart from the teachings of special revelation. For Natural
Theology keeps more prominently and controllingly in view the being and
character of God, and aims more distinctly to produce the religious
sentiments, while authenticating the reality and action of the moral
law. Ethics, on the other hand, puts the facts of human nature and
life into the front and includes the religious element only as a
consequential, though necessary, inclusion.
==Relation to Christian Theology.==
(3) To Christian Theology, or revealed religion. As this is the fullest
disclosure of the duty of man, in all his relations, to God, to his
fellow-men, and to his own end, it is not surprising that for so many
centuries, the treatment of morals was made simply a part of general
theology, and merely distinguished as Moral Theology. In the modern
separation of ethics from theology and treatment of it as a science, it
is not meant to deny the close affinity between the two investigations
or the rich illumination that duty receives from supernatural
revelation, but only to trace out more distinctly and fully, in
independent and scientific form, the deep and immovable foundations of
the principles of duty in the very constitution of man and the world.
This exhibition of the natural basis of ethical law and obligation
becomes an independent and generic enforcement of the principles of
righteousness. It gives a philosophic vindication of one of the first
assumptions of Christianity--the supremacy of the law of rectitude for
human life. And Christianity is vindicated and exalted when it comes
recognizing and confirming all the principles and duties discoverable
in our moral nature, and adding a supernatural disclosure of the way in
which righteousness may be established in our lives, and men may attain
their right character and destiny.
Christianity, while much more than this, appears as a divine
re-publication of the ethical truth which from the first has been
incorporated in the organization of humanity. In it the light of
conscience is supplemented and made clear. The ethics of human reason
and those of revelation thus cover, to a great extent, the same ground.
When correctly read they are never in conflict, but in harmony. Both
show man to be under moral law--and under broken law, that is, under
sin. But the light of the Scriptures is broader and fuller. For in
addition to their confirmation of a natural ethic for man, they
disclose a scheme of redemption, with otherwise undiscoverable moral
relations and obligations, introducing new and vital elements into the
science of ethics. The inclusion of these elements and truths turns
pagan or natural ethics into Christian.
Whatever interpretation may be given by different Christians to
the redemption thus disclosed, the ethical teaching of the Sacred
Scriptures, by universal consent, surpasses, in clearness, elevation
and completeness, every other ethical view or system in the world. The
loftiest philosophical thought has reached no higher summit--and has
climbed to its best only in the light which Christianity has supplied.
No system of morals is now worthy of the name that fails to avail
itself of its ethical teaching. Only when this is properly included,
illuminating natural ethics with its supernatural light, can we have
the whole view of human duty. He who refuses the Christian grade and
completeness of moral view goes back from the full daylight into the
obscure dawn before the morning. Nevertheless the natural basis of
ethical laws needs to be clearly apprehended and distinctly borne in
mind. In these days when the foundations of all truths are put to
scrutinizing tests, it is of fundamental importance that, through the
verifying processes of careful science, we shall recognize the ethical
verities and responsibilities, affirmed by revelation, as primarily and
immutably a part of the very nature of man and the constitution of the
world.
CHAPTER II.
THE FACT OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS.
==Moral Distinctions.==
The primary fact underlying the science of ethics is the great
phenomenon of moral distinctions in the world. Scarcely anything
in human life has been more conspicuous and indubitable than the
existence of ideas of right and wrong and their application to human
conduct. This has characterized mankind everywhere and in all ages.
Its prevalence is as broad as humanity. A phenomenon so universal and
permanent must necessarily be regarded as in some way organic in the
human constitution. It calls for examination and justifies scientific
inquiry into its cause and implications.
The certainty and largeness of the phenomenon become deeply impressive
when it is traced out and fairly considered.
==Revealed in Personal Consciousness.==
=1.= The distinction between right and wrong appears in every man's
personal consciousness. Each one is directly and fully aware of it in
his own case. He approves and condemns on this basis, and in doing so
finds himself in harmony with a principle marking the sentiments of
others around him. He passes quick, spontaneous judgments on his own
conduct and on that of his fellow-men. The distinction, to greater
or less degree, shapes itself into a sense of obligation and a law of
duty. Nothing can wipe it out from his knowledge and feelings.
==Incorporated in Social Organism.==
=2.= It is found incorporated into the social organism. What each man
is conscious of doing in his own inner life, society, in its solidarity
or constitutional unity, is found doing and enforcing. Organic humanity
reveals the presence of the ethical conception and sure lines of its
action everywhere. However diverse may be its judgments, there is
such a thing as a public conscience that holds up conduct to favor
or reprobation, not simply as beneficial or injurious but as being
intrinsically right or wrong.
The social constitution is in fact framed together under the human
capacity and necessity of perceiving and fulfilling the duties that
arise in the inter-relations of associated life. For, the very laws and
administrations on which the social order and welfare are dependent,
and through which they are in a measure secured, are the embodiment
of the ethical ideas and judgments of the people. No adjustment of
relations is possible except upon this foundation. The obliteration of
these ideas would mean social anarchy. "Society," says Prof. Borden P.
Bowne, "in its organized form, is a moral institution with moral ends.
However selfish individuals may be, they cannot live together without a
social order which rests on moral ideas."[7]
==Witnessed in History.==
=3.= The great volume of history is witness to the universal
phenomenon. Its records testify to the presence and action of the
moral distinctions everywhere and in all the ages of the world. Whether
these records present the customs and habits of early tribes, the rise
and fall of nations, the reigns of princes and emperors, the exploits
of generals and conquerors, the march and overthrow of armies, the
relentless cruelty of tyrants or the noble service of patriots and
benefactors, the establishment of just institutions or the miseries of
the people where the oppressor's millstones grind on, all the pages
are replete with evidence that men, around all the globe and through
all the centuries, have been wont either to accuse or excuse the
conduct and motives of one another according to some standard of moral
judgment or sentiments of right and wrong. It is true that from some
pages of history the moral sense seems darkened out of sight. They
bring before us thousands of men, often the most conspicuous in the
ever-changing drama of public life, from whose thinking the notions
of right and wrong seem to have been wanting or obliterated, acting
only from selfishness, avarice, or ambition, monsters of injustice,
heartlessness, cruelty and blood. Many of its chapters are but the
sickening stories of tribal and national feuds and wars, of crime,
plunder and devastation, of hate, scheming and treachery, of thirst
for power, fame and treasure, of moving armies and fields of carnage
and fire-swept lands, seeming to report that the moral sense had
no place or force whatever in the men who were the actors in those
scenes. But these chapters of lurid crime and wrong, like the records
of crime to-day, do not represent all the thought of the humanity
of such times. They tell of the men and deeds that most completely
defied the moral ideas that belonged to their own nature, and whose
remorseless wrong-doing evoked the deep, indignant reprobation of the
thousands and millions of innocent and injured sufferers. And when
the pen of history, with eye on the relations of cause and effect
and the unfolding issues of such flagrant violation of right and
justice, has traced the steps of a divine Nemesis, a stern Avenger,
following the guilty, age after age, the record proves to be, all the
more emphatically, a ceaseless testimony to the great fact of moral
distinctions as a world-wide and ceaseless phenomenon of human life.
==Shown in All Religions.==
=4.= The religions of the world all show the same fact. While these
present a Godward side and express the perpetual human need of union
and fellowship with the infinite divine Source of all Good, they at
the same time testify to a distinctively moral constitution and action
of human life. The sense of obligation, duty and guilt appears in the
warp and woof of religion everywhere. While with a singular breach
with reason religious rites and practices here and there have shown
a wide departure from correct moral principles, yet the religious
consciousness of the race has been almost a synonym for the action
of the moral sense. In all lands and all ages this consciousness has
carried with it, in greater or less clearness and force, a conviction
that the Power above men not themselves is a Power that makes for
righteousness, establishing and enforcing principles of duty among
men. And the various religions of mankind, especially those of
monotheistic teaching and more distinct development, present clear and
emphatic codes of moral principles and requirement. Some of them are
resolvable largely into philosophies of life, with ethical directions
for the regulation of conduct. In the Egyptian Book of the Dead, which
belongs to the age of the pyramid builders, from 2000 to 3000 B. C., we
find set forth a morality marked by surprising breadth and purity.[8]
In all the wide-spread religions of Asia, some of them emerging out
of the darkness of prehistoric times, the Akkadian and Babylonian,
Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Tâoism, Shintoism,
and Mohammedanism, with their countless millions of followers,
everywhere the constitution of man and social life is recognized as
laid in laws of moral obligation and order, and religious life, in
greater or less degree, is called to aspire to that which is judged to
be right and good. Ancient Druidism was strongly marked by its emphatic
moral tone. No Christian needs to be reminded with what sublime
distinctness Christianity, with its redemption economy, declares the
eternal distinction between moral good and evil, and calls men to peace
and blessedness through faith and righteousness.
Religion, it is to be remembered, is in the broadest sense a fact of
humanity. The distinguished anthropologist Quatrefages is sustained
by the fullest evidence when he asserts that man is essentially a
religious being. It appears in every tribe on earth. Moral conceptions
and sentiments, however faint and faultily applied, are a part of this
omnipresent religious mind of the race.
==Pervades Literature.==
=5.= Such moral conceptions pervade the general literature of the
world. Wherever a people has progressed in culture sufficiently to
create and preserve a literature, it is found to be many-tongued
witness to a recognized difference between right and wrong. In its
pages these discriminations appear as a never-ceasing characteristic
of human thought. They come to us out of the remotest past and from
regions untaught by the decalogue of Sinai. They illuminate, as
already implied, the sacred books of India, China, Egypt, Persia and
Babylonia, as well as the classic writings of ancient Greece and
Rome and the Saga writing of Northern Europe. They not only form the
body of the moral disquisitions of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cato,
Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many others, but color and shape
the drama and lyric poetry in which the thought and sentiment of the
race have been embalmed. To see illustrations of this we need only
read the tragedies of Sophocles, for instance Œdipus Tyrannus, lines
863-871, or Antigone, lines 449-460, or listen to the verse of Horace,
Book III, Ode 3, tracing the supremacy and triumph of a consciousness
of right over all other authority and power. With the advance of
humanity as the centuries have passed away literature is more and
more the representation of human sentiment and life under the action
and reaction of these ethical discriminations in the ever-changing
conditions of the world. Philosophy and science and fiction and
poetry and politics and jurisprudence are occupied in dealing with
the principles and questions thus raised, and our modern libraries
are largely the accumulated treasures of the thinking world on the
significance and application of these principles.
==Anthropological Confirmation.==
=6.= The ethnic and anthropological information of the present day
reports no people or tribe, even the rudest, altogether without moral
ideas and some measure of application of them to conduct. Enthusiastic
scientists, travelers and missionaries, traversing the earth, have
thoroughly established this point. Often, indeed, has the universality
here asserted been disputed. Reports were brought of tribes discovered
altogether destitute of the ethical sense. But closer inspection of
the tribal and personal life has corrected the first impression,
and evidences of the disputed fact have become indubitable. A low
and confused manifestation had been mistaken as none whatever. In
degraded and besotted conditions of human life, it is altogether
reasonable to believe that the particular discrimination in question
would appear only in the crude and uncertain forms in keeping with
the undeveloped grade of all the functions of thought and sentiment.
The sunken humanity has carried down and buried its proper and normal
manifestations almost out of sight. As soon as uplift comes to a
tribe, the powers of moral discernment and knowledge, whose action
was scarcely discoverable before, emerge in unmistakable certainty and
force. And no phenomenon that science is seeking to investigate to-day
can be more justly regarded as universally human than the fact under
consideration.
==Not Affected by Explanations.==
=7.= It needs to be distinctly fixed in mind that this great fact
is not at all affected by any offered theory of its cause and
significance. It stands independent of any particular explanation
of it, and indeed of all solutions. If, for instance, the origin of
these moral judgments should be traced back and accounted for, as is
done by Herbert Spencer, as the result of accumulated experiences of
utility, gradually organized and inherited as spontaneous approval
and disapproval, the theory still recognizes the fact of ethical
judgments while endeavoring to account for them. Or, when the older
utilitarianism seeks to explain them as resolvable into the pleasure
or satisfaction men feel toward certain forms of conduct or principles
of behavior that are found to be useful and promotive of happiness,
the fact still remains that judgments of right and wrong are actually
established and dominate the thought and life of men. The very attempt
to identify the virtues of life with its utilities, while making the
virtues only its utilities, concedes that the obligation to them is
part of the recognized reality of human life. Or, further, should a
bolder and more radical view allege that these notions of right and
wrong are mere matters of taste and prejudice, a fictitious product of
adventitious circumstances and education, without verity or validity
at bottom, the offered explanation would be simply a denial, but no
disproof of the fact concerned. For it would amount to a claim that
in the absolute sense one thing is essentially as good as another,
and would thus disregard the real affirmation as it stands in the
moral judgment of mankind. Such a claim, it has been well said, no
theorist of the present day would pretend to maintain outside of his
closet.[9] Not in any race or people has the ethical sense allowed that
essentially and at bottom all acts are equally right. This is the very
point of the great phenomenon presented. Whatever may be the final
explanation of it, somehow or other the reason, sentiment and practical
sense of mankind insist on a real difference, and look upon all denial
of the distinction as a manifest and intolerable absurdity.
The universal recognition of this distinction, revealed in every
man's consciousness, involved in the organic relations of society,
testified to everywhere in the pages of history, embodied essentially
in the religious nature and sentiments of mankind, woven into general
literature, found to-day unmistakably in the thinking, laws and customs
of all races and tribes, and acknowledged in the philosophical view
of humanity wherever man is studied, irreducible as a fact by any
account of its genesis or explanation of its significance, presents the
occasion and primary materials of ethical science. The great phenomenon
calls for investigation. We want to know the reasons for it and the
import of it.
CHAPTER III.
FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS--THE EXISTENCE OF CONSCIENCE.
==The Moral Faculty.==
The great fact of moral distinctions, found to be universal in human
thought and life, must be traced back to the particular power of
the mind which discerns and feels these distinctions. Back of the
phenomenon must be recognized the psychical capacity and action out of
which the discriminations arise. The moral faculty answers to and in
part accounts for the moral fact. In modern general literature it is
usually called the conscience. Ethical science properly accepts the
designation. It is sometimes called the moral consciousness, or the
moral sense. It expresses a power of the personal _ego_ or self to
make the moral discrimination and discern the obligation to rectitude.
Without such power, as an adequate capacity for the ideas, it is
plain that the ethical judgments could not arise. The very idea of
obligation, the ethical "ought," would be wanting. The whole realm of
what this science considers would be a blank. In the moral faculty or
conscience itself, as the immediate source of the ethical distinctions
and laws of duty, we are furnished with additional material for this
study.
No particular stress is here laid on the term "faculty," as a
designation of the moral power. There is, indeed, no validity in the
claim of some recent psychologists that the term must be abandoned
on the ground that psychology discovers only mental acts, without a
psychic subject with distinct faculties back of the acts. Yet the term
faculty has often been used and understood in a way inconsistent with
the essential and conscious unity of the personal _ego_ or self, making
the soul seem a bundle of independent and separately acting parts of a
psychical organism. The perfect oneness of the personal self must be
maintained, and the term faculty, when used for any form of psychical
ability, must be understood simply as expressing the soul's capacity
or power to do any specific form of work, or to act in any particular
and distinctively definable way, as, for instance, to know, to feel, to
will, to remember, to compare. In this sense the use of the term stands
fully justified in psychological usage and propriety. But the reason
for abating from the claim of strict exactness in the term in this
connection is that the conscience, in its full conception and action,
as will hereafter appear, while exhibiting a specific and simple power
as its central reality, will be found to include also subordinately
the conjoint action of several other forms of psychical power. It
stands for a complex of capacities and powers. This will appear when we
reach its analysis. But the question of the absolute simplicity of the
faculty does not affect the substance of our inquiry into its existence
nor the propriety of employing the term for the power in its totality.
For, as naming the central and decisive reality in the conscience, it
is justly spoken of as a special faculty. Even when it is viewed as
standing for a complex of powers converging, in their functions, to
the discernment of moral distinctions and the reality of duty, it has
sufficient individuality to be rightly and scientifically designated
in this way. The question to be considered, and upon which the logical
conclusions of the science will depend, is not its absolute simplicity,
but the fact of such a power as a normal part in the soul's essential
constitution of powers. If the power be found integral and normal in
the soul's actual capacities, we have all that is essential for the
foundation of ethics.
The existence of the conscience as a specific and natural faculty of
discernment of right and duty may seem to the student or reader to need
no formal proof, as something substantially everywhere acknowledged.
But as various theories undertake to question its existence, in the
sense thus explained, and resolve the affirmations of right and duty
into pseudo-products developed in a roundabout way, or by some illusive
transformation of ideas or sentiments given by the other faculties of
the soul, ideas or sentiments which in fact are really unethical, it
becomes necessary to vindicate the asserted existence of this moral
faculty.
==Moral Distinctions Prove Conscience.==
=1.= The primary and fundamental evidence is the great fact, already
set forth, of the moral distinctions which arise out of its action
and fill personal consciousness and the life of the world with their
attesting presence. The known object implies a power by which it
is known. Without the faculty, in the sense of a power to know, the
knowledge here in question could not exist. Its existence is proof
of the reality and action of the faculty perceptive of it. The only
alternative to this would be a total denial of the ethical distinction,
even as a genuine phenomenon, and an assertion that the supposed
knowledge of it is, and always has been, illusory and unreal. And
this would be equivalent to a claim that men may and should abandon
the ethical distinction and believe that there is absolutely no moral
difference between justice and injustice, between kindness and hatred,
between truth and lying, between friendship and treachery, between
charity and murder. And this again would mean that we are to repudiate,
as without validity, the whole notion which the ages, especially the
most intelligent and best ages, have cherished, that man is capable
of character, as good or bad, excellent or blameworthy. But this
whole alternative becomes impossible, by reason of the necessary
and invincible contrary judgment by which the moral distinctions
are affirmed as actual and valid for human life. The faculty of
moral discernment proves its existence by making the contrary of its
discernment an impossible conception.
==The Moral Perceptions Peculiar.==
=2.= Its existence is further proved by the unique and peculiar
character of its data or perceptions. These are unlike any other, _sui
generis_. They are original and cannot be deduced from other data. The
ethical percept is something that can be understood only in terms
of itself. It cannot be described or expressed in the terms of the
percepts or knowledge given by the other faculties of the soul, either
general or special, either separately or in combination. Hence we must,
according to all sound psychological procedure, postulate a special
faculty, as distinctive and normal as is the percept, for this original
and irresolvable ethical idea.
A little explanation will help to show this. Let us make search for
the ethical idea or perception among the well-known data of the other
faculties. Manifestly it is not given by the "sense-perception," for
it presents none of the physical properties which this makes known.
Clearly, too, it is not created by the "consciousness," which presents
simply the states or acts of the mind, with the personal self as
their subject, but which does not itself originate the states or acts
it reveals--any more than does the light of the morning create the
objects of the landscape which it discloses. Further, it is evidently
not given by the power of "representation," for this merely reproduces
and re-knows what was before known through the "sense-perception"
and revealed in "consciousness," revived in the form of memory or
rearranged and recombined in the forms of the constructive imagination.
It supplies no original data. It, further still, cannot be the product
of the "logical" faculty, as the power or function of discursive
reasoning, because this originates no new material, but only reconnects
and judges of relations in the material already known, simply dealing
with ideas furnished to it. Nor can the ethical percept, as an
intuition to the obligation to rectitude, be at all identified with
the _a priori_ ideas of time and space, or the categories of substance
and attribute, identity and difference, means and end, or the law of
causation. And yet it stands out in an originality as positive and
distinct as do any of the unquestionable data or percepts of the soul's
acknowledged specific faculties.
Just as little can the ethical idea, as the discrimination of right and
wrong, be referred to the "sensibility," as the pleasure or dislike
with which we regard what is found useful and conducive to enjoyment
or the reverse. For, though a certain pleasure is connected with the
ethically right, this specific feeling follows, and is dependent on
no other perception than of the right. It is a satisfaction which
the ethically good thus awakens. But the knowledge which experience
gives of what is useful and conducive to enjoyment is generically
different from the moral idea and its sense of obligation. Utility and
the ethical discrimination are not the same conception. They belong
to two diverse realms of thought and knowledge. Whatever relations
may be traced between them, they cannot be identified or held as
convertible percepts. The autonomous imperative of the ethical idea
often positively prohibits the very things men judge to be profitable
and pleasurable. It is a remarkable fact that the testimonies from
literature and life to the phenomenon of moral distinctions everywhere
maintain the difference between the idea of right and that of the
pleasurable or profitable. What is right is one thing; what is
agreeable is another thing. The two conceptions are not identical, but
are often placed in immediate and irreducible antithesis. Those who do
right, choosing it and heroically loyal to it despite the appeals of
ambition, the temptations of avarice, the enticements of ease, and the
favor or the wrath of the wicked, are approved and honored. To such the
gates of the divine favor and recompense are pictured as ever standing
open.
There is another consideration in this connection which shows beyond
question that this ethical faculty, whose action is everywhere
traceable, is not to be confounded with mere intellectuality or
the action of simply the general intellectual powers. It exhibits
itself in a distinct line of working and results, like a particular
current in the common sea, and often in open contrast. It is a
peculiar and significant fact, often observed by historians, that
as the civilizations of antiquity, of Assyria, Egypt, Phenicia,
Greece and Rome, advanced in intellect they declined in morals.
Intellectualism may be at its height while the moral side of life
may suffer a submergence beneath the floods of luxury and refined
social vices. Buckle confesses that intellect and morals are not
only distinguishable, but separable.[10] Herbert Spencer says: "The
belief in the moralizing effects of intellectual culture, flatly
contradicted by facts, is absurd _a priori_."[11] Lord Wolseley makes
a statement not flattering to the boasted advantage claimed for simple
intellectualism: "The virtue of the Zulu women was superior to that
of any civilized people I know of."[12] The function of the conscience
in human nature and life stands clearly distinguishable from the
common data and powers of mere intellectualism. The world will not
be ethically saved by intellect alone. The conscience must dominate
mere intellectual results and forces. And the high distinctive place
and peculiar character of the conscience-perception is seen when it
is thus observed that the perception is not of something that is,
but of what ought to be, in the sphere of conduct and character. Its
object is apprehended as lying in the ideal realm of obligation. The
reality perceived is transcendent, as what should be in life, in order
that life may accord with a super-sensible reality in the realm of
righteousness. It as truly reaches beyond sense as do the intuitions
of time and space or the law of causation; and, as truly as they, it
calls for the recognition of a special and original psychical faculty
or provision, among the powers of the soul, for its perception. The
conscience,
"Deep-seated in our mystic frame,"
discerns a law of righteous obligation, which is not the dictate of
mere desire or pleasure or self-advantage, but a law established
at once over us and in us not dependent on our will or choice but
demanding conformity of will and choice to itself.
==Feelings from Conscience Perceptions.==
=3.= The existence of the conscience as an integral power of the
human constitution is evidenced also by the special feelings which
attend its perceptions. They are distinctively peculiar. This is
illustrated in the sense of obligation arising from the idea of right
and the perception of duty. It is even more clearly illustrated in the
satisfaction which attends and follows duty done, and the remorse which
follows wrong or crime committed.
The sense of obligation, _i. e._ the emotion awakened by the perception
of obligation, is unique among the emotions of the sensibility. In the
presence of recognized right or wrong men feel bound to correspondent
action as they feel bound under no other perceptions. The conscience,
indeed, uses no compulsion, but it presents the right or wrong and
correspondent obligation. Freedom is not annulled, but appealed to.
The feeling, as the sensibility excited, is the feeling of ought or
ought not, added to the perception of it. Nothing like this appears
in connection with any of the other perceptions. We may perceive
truth, but if the truth is not the particular truth of obligation
itself, there is only the pleasure, gratification or admiration in
its discovery and attainment. We may perceive beauty, but if the
beauty be apart from that of ethical excellence, the feeling is simply
æsthetic and different from the obligatory feeling: "I ought." We may
perceive utility or understand what is simply profitable, but the
feeling awakened is but desire. All these and like simply intellectual
perceptions awaken no sense of obligation to cherish any special
sentiments or perform any special acts. But as soon as men, in pure
and normal state of their rational and emotional nature, perceive
the right as over against the wrong, the sensibility which always in
greater or less degree responds to every act of knowledge, presents a
form of feeling, in the ethical "ought," generically different from
the feelings that arise out of all other kinds of knowledge. This
feeling is itself a part and parcel of the aggregate or complex of the
conscience. But its presence marks the conscience as a special power
normally constituent of human nature.
The other moral emotions named, viz.: satisfaction in duty done
and remorse or compunction for wrong, bring us to the same conclusion.
These feelings are _sui generis_. They are distinctively characteristic,
and are never called forth but in connection with the moral intuitions.
These peculiar satisfactions or compunctions never appear upon
perception of a truth of mathematics or a fact in chemistry or a gem of
art. Such knowledge evokes no sense of duty and is followed by no
feeling of remorse or rush of compunction, flooding the soul with
self-condemnation. A sense of loss, in failing to gain a possible
advantage, is incapable of being confounded with the feeling of having
done wrong. Some of the highest elevations of ethical satisfaction are
felt when men have maintained their fidelity to the right in face of
the most enormous losses and of the most desolating sufferings. The
deepest remorse the human soul ever knows may spring up in view of ways
and acts which have given men all the things they have coveted and
judged to be the most useful and enjoyable. There must surely be a
special power whose peculiar discernments call the sensibilities into
such unique and peculiar forms of feeling.
==Conflict of Moral Judgements.==
=4.= This conclusion is not weakened, as has sometimes been supposed,
by the diversity and seeming conflict of moral judgments among men.
This diversity seems, in the view of many persons, inconsistent with
the supposition of a conscience, in the sense given. The fact of such
diversity is freely conceded. The progress of history shows many
changes in moral judgments. An advance is clearly traceable, in which
once accepted rules of conduct have been superseded by different
requirements. Things approved in one land and tribe are condemned in
another. Pascal has said that conscience is one thing north of the
Pyrenees and another south. In every community what some look upon as
right others declare wrong. Infanticide, which under our civilization
is punished as murder, on the banks of the Ganges has been esteemed a
high religious duty. Polygamy, which our government is trying to wipe
out as an immorality and foul blot, is held by the Mormons as a sacred
right. Slavery is still regarded by some as right though condemned by
the convictions of the nation as morally indefensible. Most startling
diversities and contrasts are continually appearing. Hence it has often
been said that our moral judgments rest, in fact, on no original and
permanent principles discerned by a distinct and universal faculty of
the soul, but are a purely adventitious and accidental product, shaped
in ideas that come of circumstances, education or the shifting spirit
of the age.[13] The law of morality is reduced to the dictates of
expediency or to sentiment and caprice born of our changeful desires.
This virtually denies both the validity of the ethical behests and the
reality of an ethical faculty provided for perception of rectitude and
duty. But the difficulty from this diversity and apparent contradiction
loses its force when carefully considered. It disappears when we recall
the following indubitable facts:
==Ethical Sense Persists.==
First, that in the midst of this variety and conflict in the moral
judgments, the ethical sense still persists in maintaining its
function. If convicted of acting inconsistently, it still acts. Though
it is found judging differently, it still judges, asserting its place
and office, and imposing its decisions as obligatory in conduct. Under
the view alleged in the objection, the sense of obligation ought to
disappear, its supposed authority having been explained away. The
person finds that in very truth the moral behest, though in him is not
of him, is not of his will or choice, but arises out of the necessary
action of a power that he cannot displace by refusal to obey it. The
faculty or power does not consent, so to speak, to omit or withdraw its
ethical distinction and assertion of duty. It does not abdicate, when
men allege the illegitimacy of its authority.
==Agreement in Judgments.==
Secondly, that while there is diversity as to many points, there is
none in its judgments as to the great body of virtues and vices of
human life. As to all the leading qualities of character and conduct
there is full and universal agreement. With respect to all the cardinal
virtues, such as justice, kindness, veracity, love, courage, fidelity,
generosity, the moral judgments approve them as the magnet owns its
pole, in all the multi-form relations and offices of life. On the other
hand, injustice, falsehood, enmity, treachery, cruelty, adultery,
theft, murder and similar dispositions and acts in their thousand forms
of unmistakable manifestation, are universally condemned. There is no
question anywhere around our globe that one who deliberately kills his
mother or mangles his father, or tortures the innocent or defrauds his
friend, is a wrong-doer, of abhorrent guilt. Over almost the entire
broad field of moral obligation there is a consentient, clear and
consistent judgment by the moral sense of man in all ages and places.
It is only along dividing lines, wider or narrower as they may be,
that, by reason of the fainter presence of the moral element or the
complexity of the relations concerned, the moral judgments exhibit this
diversity or act with less assured and certain accuracy. The perplexity
and difference find place only in limited degree and on remoter points,
where the distinctions are so subtle as to require the nicest balancing
of all the complex relations and elements which develop the ethical
obligations.
If, indeed, the conscience reported entirely different codes
throughout, from bottom to top and from center to circumference, or
codes with contradictions as to the cardinal virtues and vices, then
we might well question the existence and action of a real, original
and normal faculty as actually perceiving a real moral distinction and
principle of duty. But if such diversities are found only in limited
degree, on marginal ground and in complex situations, we are simply in
the presence of a fact of great similarity of the conscience with all
the rest of the finite and fallible faculties of the human mind. Upon
a hundred points of practical morals the intelligent conscience would
be likely to agree quite as well as the judgments of men in any other
sphere of practical knowledge and life.
==Agreement in Principles.==
Thirdly, that even with respect to the cases in which there is the most
startling diversity, there is often an underlying agreement, overlooked
by superficial thought. Take, for instance, the Hindu mother's act of
infanticide. Underneath her act and guiding it, is one or the other,
or possibly both, of these principles: 1. Whatever sacrifice God calls
for ought to be made; or, 2. Whatever is best for the child ought to
be done. Falsely taught to believe that God calls for the sacrifice of
her child, or that this surrender of it to him is the best thing for
it, the mother makes the offering. Essentially as to the principles
from which she acts her conscience and the Christian conscience are at
one. But she has been misled as to the will of God. Her understanding
is without correct information as to matters of fact, and she applies
mistakenly the principles of duty which are in her moral nature.
Take, again, the crimes of religious intolerance and persecution. The
religious zealot believes that every man is to be, without weakness or
shadow or turning, faithful to the truth. So also does the dissenter
from the creed which the persecutor defends. They agree as to the
underlying principle of action. Each feels bound by the same ethical
law of "fidelity to the truth," but the persecutor is in grievous error
in understanding that this fidelity binds him to coerce the mind of his
dissenting brother.
==Difference of Perceptions.==
Fourthly, the difference must be clearly kept in view between the
essential ethical perception, viz.: the distinction of right and
wrong with the involved obligation, and the application of that
perception--between the primary and secondary moral judgment. The
primary is the intuition of the law of right, the secondary affirms
the quality of right or wrong with respect to particular actions. In
the one case the moral sense perceives that justice, love, veracity,
kindness, etc., are right, and injustice, hatred, falsehood and
cruelty are wrong; in the other the judgment is concerned with the
further question whether this, that, or the other act comes under one
or the other of these categories. The fundamental ethical distinction
and obligation, with approval of justice, truth, etc., are generic,
and altogether irrespective of any particular actions or instances.
The secondary judgments apply the distinction to particular modes of
conduct or forms of temper and feeling. The latter are only in part
moral judgments, _i. e._ only so far as the particular feeling or deed
exhibits to the conscience the presence of the ethical quality. It is
an unquestionable fact that in many of the activities of life there
are open alternatives of choice where the question of moral quality is
not raised at all. As, for instance, between taking one path or another
to a certain point, or in writing a letter with a pen or typewriter,
the choice is morally indifferent. The decision involves no ethical
judgment. But in most contemplated action there are relations that
raise the question of right or wrong--in some cases only by remote
implication, in others in clear and burning emphasis. There are degrees
in this respect, all the way from the faintest glimmering of ethical
quality to the boldest and most transparent certainty. We are by no
means entitled to doubt the existence of conscience, because in all
these unequal conditions, with imperfect knowledge of the relations
of particular actions and feelings, it fails to apply its unchanging
affirmations of generic duty, with equal or unmistaken certainty and
exactness, to all the varied motives, feelings and deeds of men. It is
clear how differing moral judgments may occur, without any impeachment
whatever of either the ethical reality or the existence of the faculty
for its discernment.
==Infallibility Not Involved.==
Fifthly, we must add that the reality of this faculty, as an essential
endowment of the human soul, by no means involves infallibility in its
action. No one of the human faculties is, in all its range and the
application of its data, absolutely infallible, incapable of error or
of being misled. The sense-perceptions, the memory, the logical power,
the power of applying the notions of time and space, are all liable to
error. Yet these are all original, constitutional and normal faculties
of man, divinely-given guides for his self-direction and suited to the
ends for which they exist. The reality of a faculty is not disproved by
its fallibility. Finiteness, limitation and consequent incompetence to
exclude mistake or only partial discernment, are no reason for denying
the existence of any faculty within the range of its given action and
real discriminations. The very errors that appear in its action are at
once evidence of its existence and proof of limitations which harmonize
it with the aggregate human psychology. The objection against the
conscience from its fallibility, which is but another name for this
diversity in its applicatory judgments, if applied to all the psychical
faculties, would discredit the reality of the aggregate complex of the
psychical powers and overthrow the basis of all our knowledge, even of
that which is employed to effect such overthrow. No diversity occurs
in the primary judgment of distinction between moral good and evil. As
already explained, it is easy to see how differences, varied and great,
should appear in the application of the distinction to the complicated,
obscure and ever-changing aspects and relations of human conduct.
==Proofs Independent of Origin.==
=5.= These proofs of conscience as a distinct endowment of the
human mind are independent of the whole question of the mode of its
origin. For they consist of facts, as clear, peculiar, indisputable
and irreducible as are the facts that guarantee any particular
science whatever. They are capable of verification under perpetual
tests, as they have been verified in the consentient experience of
mankind in all its normally developed conditions. And the logic
of the facts is altogether irrespective of any theory of the mode
of the origin of conscience. It is needful that this point should
be clearly fixed in mind, especially in view of the wide favor at
present shown to the hypothesis of an evolutionary genesis of man.
Except in the materialistic and atheistic form of the hypothesis the
theory distinctly presents evolution not as the cause, but only as
the mode of the creation of man with all his now given endowments.
It is, of course, incumbent on the supporters of the hypothesis, in
any form whatever, in order to vindicate its scientific claims, to
show its competency to account for the existence and action of the
moral faculty with its ethical discernment and law. An hypothesis
that fails to solve any of the involved phenomena discredits itself,
not the facts. So far as the materialistic, non-teleological form of
evolutionism is concerned, which proposes matter and force as the full
cause and account of man, it is condemned by its own utter inadequacy
to explain the genesis of conscience with its moral law, as well as
of the other great psychical realities in the nature and life of
man. It is helpless before the task. Its only resource is to seek to
resolve both the ethical fact and the ethical faculty into illusion.
With respect to theistic evolutionism, which stands simply as an
hypothesis of the mode of creation by God, the existence of the moral
faculty may still be admitted, as having its all-sufficient cause in
the divine creative power as the source of all things. If, instead of
an immediate creation of man, the idea of his gradual creation from
the inferior animal orders be maintained as the actual method of the
divine work, then the law of evolution must be regarded as having been
adjusted and used for the production of man with the faculty of moral
discernment. The teleological principle, everywhere illuminating the
structure of organisms and the constitution of life, must, from the
first, have guided the development for this enthronement of right in
the human personality. Asserting its method of a progressive genesis of
conscience, this kind of evolutionism confesses its existence. Whether
or not its account is satisfactory is another question, to be decided
according to the evidence furnished. It is more than doubtful if it has
yet succeeded in making clear the possibility of its origin under the
hypothesis. Some serious difficulties have still to be overcome.[14] If
it ever does succeed it must be, not by denial of the conscience, but
by showing the evolutionary movement in some way or other competent to
its creation.
This lengthened presentation of the evidence of the existence of the
conscience as an essential endowment and part of human nature, may
seem to the reader to have been unnecessary or beyond the importance
of the question involved. But, as will appear hereafter, the firm
establishment of this point is vitally needful, in order to exclude
various forms of erroneous teaching and secure a firm and immovable
foundation for a just ethical system.
CHAPTER IV.
THE FACULTY OF MORAL DISTINCTIONS--THE NATURE OF CONSCIENCE.
==Right View Necessary.==
In close connection with the indubitable fact of conscience, as an
essential faculty of the human soul, follows a more careful inquiry
into the nature of this faculty. It is necessary to ascertain
precisely, if possible, what it is as a peculiar psychical power, as
revealed and defined in and by its own action.
=1.= The importance of determining, at this place, the exact nature of
the conscience is apparent from two considerations.
==Scientific Accuracy.==
(1) Scientific accuracy in the whole ethical view is possible only
through a true and thoroughly accurate understanding of the power that
gives rise to the whole phenomenon of obligation. The final theoretical
view is dependent on finding the truth at this point. Mistake or
inexactness here must inevitably introduce, or at least allow,
confusion or error in all the dependent questions of the science. A
false conception of the conscience will at once mislead. Even an only
partial or obscure view of it will fail to afford sufficient light
for the subsequent steps of the investigation. A conception of it,
with true and false elements combined, must necessarily introduce
perplexity or contradiction and weaken or distort the conclusion.
Such differing views have in fact introduced the utmost confusion into
the problems of this science. The conscience has sometimes been spoken
of as an "instinct," which identifies it with the non-intelligent,
blind action in the bee which builds cells after geometrical
principles, or in birds or fishes which migrate with the changing
seasons. Often it has been represented as but a special "feeling" or
"sentiment" that arises inexplicably, if not fortuitously, prior to
perception of any ethical quality, itself the basis of judgments of
duty.[15] Again it has been made to stand simply for accumulated or
established approbative judgments from experiences of pleasure or
advantage, transformed and fixed as rules of conduct.[16] Sometimes it
has been regarded as an immediate, almost supernatural "voice of God"
within men, with its inexplicable direct imperative of duty. It is
plain that these and other differing notions of conscience must always
affect, as they always have affected, the whole theory of ethics.
==Condition of Authority.==
(2) A right view of its nature is necessary to a correct conception of
its authority. This makes the question more than simply speculative
or important for correct ethical theory. It involves the interests of
practical morality. The right of the conscience to rule us is sustained
or denied according as one or another conception of its nature is
entertained.
It is natural that we should feel prompted to examine the nature of a
part of our constitution that is constantly obtruding its distinctions
and asserting a ruling authority over us. As it has its place within us
irrespective of our will and presents laws of duty to the will, we want
to see on what ground its asserted authority can be justified. But not
all views of its nature afford equal explanation of this peculiarity
in its action. For instance, if the conscience be nothing but a
blind, irrational "instinct," or a "feeling" without any perception
of reality to give rise or right to the feeling, or if it be but a
standard judgment of prudence or utility from experiences of what has
been helpful or hurtful, perhaps slowly accumulated and hereditarily
transmitted, a clear and rational ground of ethical authority cannot
be made out. Such a power may indicate what is useful, but can, if
this be all, impose on us no obligation. It may tell us what is
pleasurable or desirable, but cannot speak to us concerning the other
question: What is right? It cannot hold us guilty because we may choose
to forego personal advantage or enjoyment. If, however, examination
can show that the conscience is a faculty of actual perception,
discerning a fundamental distinction between right and wrong and an
immutable obligation to apply it in the constituted relations of
life, its rightful authority is at once vindicated. It is seen to be
an authoritative guide in its sphere of perception, as are the other
cognitive powers, each in its own sphere of real knowledge. When it
becomes clear that the moral faculty, in the presence of the existing
conditions and relations of life, perceives what ought to be done, and
what men are obligated to do, and what they cannot disregard without
demerit, ill-desert or guilt, then the right of conscience to direct
conduct is justified.
At any rate, whether the examination may confirm or discredit this
claim of rightful rulership, the inquiry into the nature of the
conscience is essential to a correct settlement of the great question
of its authority and the grounds of it.
==Question of Psychology.==
=2.= The primary and proper source of information to settle the
question of the nature of this faculty is to be found, not in
speculative theorizing or arbitrary assumptions, but in the actual
working of the human mind. It is a psychological question, and must be
settled, as all psychological questions must, by the facts as they are
discovered in experience and consciousness. The method of inductive
inquiry is here the true and essential one. The full phenomena of
action must be carefully examined, analyzed and traced to their
psychical genesis. Such examination can leave but little doubt in the
conclusion. In the facts of consciousness, as found in connection with
the operations of our minds in the sphere of moral self-determination
and action, the entire movement can be observed, marked and recorded.
==Place of Conscience.==
=3.= In a preliminary way, it must be noted and remembered that the
power and action of conscience can have place only in connection with
the total complex of man's psychical powers. It is not an isolated,
independent faculty in the midst of the different powers of the
soul. This truth will require fuller consideration in another place,
but it is necessary to note it here so far as to show the essential
psychological conditions of conscience.
The very possibility of such a faculty or power is conditioned in
all the human faculties of intelligence, sensibility and choice, in
which man becomes a moral agent. While the soul or self is a unit,
its powers act under a law of inter-dependence, exhibiting a striking
and beautiful order of conditioning and being conditioned, from the
primary and fundamental forms of activity to those that are highest
and crown all the rest. At the very base and beginning of its action
are sense-perception and consciousness--these furnishing knowledge
of the outer and inner worlds, of the realities and relations in the
system of things in the midst of which man finds himself. Dependent
upon the percepts by the senses and the states of consciousness thus
furnished comes the further capacity of "representative knowledge" in
the forms of memory and the imagination. Only as the original acts of
perception and consciousness have supplied their data, is the memory
or the imagination possible. But the representative power and action
are then necessary to the action of the higher powers. Without memory
the logical power, the discursive function in comparison, judgment
and conclusion, in analysis, synthesis and systemization, would have
no materials and could do no work. The mind could not do this advance
work except upon the basis of work of a different kind done before.
And then, too, the reason, as the power of intuitive or _a priori_
truths, would be without a knowledge of the phenomenal world, in the
midst of which, or on occasion of the experiences of which, these
_a priori_ truths appear and are seen to be necessary. The various
kinds of knowing exercised by the undivided and indivisible self are
plainly arranged in an ascending order, till at their summit they are
crowned with the intuitional power which we may term, as we here do,
the reason--the power of discerning necessary universal truths. But it
is equally clear that of the powers below the reason--sense-perception
and consciousness furnishing facts objective and subjective, memory
restoring them before the mental eye, and the logical power rushing
to necessary conclusions--none, either singly or together, can stand
for the conscience. Sense and consciousness can give us only what is,
not what ethically ought to be. The memory can but renew to mental
view what was before known. The sense of logical necessity is clearly
different from the perception of moral rightness and obligation.
But the action of these antecedent powers or faculties supplies the
conditions for the existence and action of the conscience--gives
knowledge of the personal self and the relations of life, in the midst
of which moral right and wrong and obligation and duty are developed
and are seen to arise. Upon this knowledge, in which man knows himself
and his relations to the world of which he forms a part, the soul
rises to an outlook in the clear atmosphere of which the reality of
ethical distinctions, duty and responsibility become visible. And
to the crowning power of the reason, as rational insight, must be
assigned the central function of this ethical perception of right and
obligation--somewhat as to it belong, in another field of view, also
the intuitions into the realities of time and space and the categories
of substance, attribute, and causality.
This position of the conscience as, in its fundamental action, a form
of rational intuition, among the summit forms of the mind's powers,
makes evident its relation of dependence on the entire complex of
psychical faculties which furnish the conditions for its discernments
and imperative. But there is something more. As we shall yet see, its
total function, in guiding the moral life, includes the action of many
of the common functions of both intellect and sensibility.
=4.= The specific psychology of the conscience itself, under close and
complete analysis, will disclose the following clearly distinguishable
elements in its action. They reveal the nature of the conscience-power
in its total complex reality. These elements are not separable in fact,
but are distinguishable in the analytic thinking that examines them.
==Ethical Distinctions.==
(1) The primary element is a simple irreducible perception of the
distinction between right and wrong. This is the first and fundamental
ethical idea. In it we have the initial point in the moral action
of the mind. "The universal ethical fact is the recognition of a
distinction between right and wrong in conduct."[17] This distinction
appears among the necessary ideas of the human mind. It is a phenomenon
in the psychology of the race. It is developed, in the presence of
the facts and relations of life, as something provided for in the
normal and necessary action of the rational self-conscious _ego_. It
must be viewed as an "intuition" of the reason. It can not otherwise
be accounted for. In its nature it is not a feeling, though it gives
rise to feeling. It is not a volition, for it comes irrespective of
choice and asserts its own rights before the will. It is not a mere
experience, though it arises on occasion of experience. The idea stands
for something beyond experience--experience being limited to the
profitable, the enjoyable or the painful. We experience the useful and
the agreeable, but the right, the ethical idea, must be perceived or
rationally seen, as a super-sensible reality in the ideal realm of the
demands of duty. It is not a perception of relations themselves, but
of a distinction as to something due in human relations and life.
If we describe this primary and fundamental distinction, as it appears
in the action of the conscience, it will be found marked by the
following characteristics. First, the distinction is perceived--a datum
of the cognitive intellect. As discerned by the knowing faculty, its
object, viz.: the distinction, exists. For knowing always involves that
the thing known is. The distinction between right and wrong is real
in the sphere of moral relations. Second, it is universal, marking
the human mind's action everywhere and in all ages. Third, it cannot
be obliterated. Through all questions about it and objections to its
validity, it remains undestroyed and seemingly indestructible. It
disappears only with the wreck of rationality itself. Fourth, it is
unique and simple, an original perception, incapable of being resolved
into more elementary ideas or deduced from them. Fifth, it is the first
of its kind of discernments, _i. e._ of ethical perceptions.
==Obligation Perceived.==
(2) Along with, though dependent on, the perception of the moral
distinction between right and wrong, there is also a perception of
obligation with respect to right and wrong--to do or not to do. This
is an essential part of the aggregate conscience-discernment. The
perception of the right is thus the discovery also of law for conduct.
The soul, it must be specially noted, perceives this obligation as
truly as it does the ethical distinction itself. The term "obligation"
may express also a feeling, but the _ego_, or personal self, perceives
the obligation before it feels it. For in all cases rational emotion or
feeling can arise in the mind only as the mind discerns something to
awaken it.
==Belongs to the Agent.==
It is to be particularly observed, further, that the obligation, thus
perceived and then felt, is perceived and felt as due by the moral
agent with respect to right and wrong. The ethical quality of rightness
belongs to the act or principle of action. The motive, the intention,
the conduct of men, is in itself morally right or wrong, good or evil.
But the obligation appears as what is owed by the moral agent to what
is right. The relation between right and obligation corresponds to
that between right and duty. Right is in the conduct; duty is for
the responsible person. The terms express two sides in the ethical
reality, the first the objective side, the second the subjective. The
two imply and call for each other. The right in the contemplated action
means obligation or duty in the person. To the right there is always a
corresponding duty; for duty in fact expresses what is due to the right
forever by all persons.[18]
This perception of obligation, with its attendant feeling of it, is
the central reality of the conscience. It is the very core of it. For
in this the moral faculty carries and asserts its "imperative" for the
regulation of conduct. On the basis of the idea of right, it affirms
duty, and brings mankind under the reality and behests of moral law.
The distinction of right and wrong, if conceived of as unattended with
this further discernment of obligation, would manifestly fall short of
establishing the principle of duty or fixing in the soul a conscious
bond to righteousness. But in this further discernment is revealed the
nexus that binds together perceived right and man's responsibility to
it. Hence, this is the cardinal thing in the conscience, for which the
ethical idea prepares, and upon which the moral life rests. It is the
point at which humanity is organized under a moral constitution and the
behests of moral law. It is the sublime endowment in which man's nature
is capacitated for its position, as standing face to face with the
sublimer reality of the divine government over the world.
It is to be distinctly observed, however, that the "imperative"
disclosed in this perceived obligation, does not mean compulsion. The
idea of "obligation" can have no place where there can be no choice as
to accepting it. The whole sphere of morals, as we have already seen
and shall need often to be reminded, exists, and can exist only in
connection with personality or intelligent free agency. Its realm is
that of freedom. Law in ethics is something in clear contrast with law
in the processes of physical nature. The perception of it is not the
perception of what must be or will be, or shall be, but what ought to
be. Its appeal is to our freedom, and the duty is ideated before it is
performed.
Further, it is well to observe here again how distinctly peculiar
is this percept of obligation among the data of our cognitive
faculties. The sense-perception notifies us of what is. So does the
consciousness. Memory renews to consciousness a knowledge of what
was. The logical processes reveal abstract relations. That two and
two make four, or that a straight line is the shortest between two
points, or that oxygen and hydrogen united in certain proportions form
water, are truths distinctly known when the mind is directed to these
subjects; but the perception of these truths is without the unique
idea of obligation or the duty of cherishing any particular feeling
or of conforming to a standard of righteousness. Only through the
discernments of right and wrong by the conscience, is there given this
peculiar intuition of the reality of obligation.
==Moral Quality Identified.==
(3) A third thing to be marked in this psychological analysis of the
action of conscience, and revealing its nature, is the affirmation of
right or wrong to particular acts or principles of conduct. In this
the function of conscience passes from its fundamental idea into the
form of an applicatory judgment. The ideas of right and obligation
are applied to the actual affairs and activities of life. The quality
of right or wrong is connected with particular actions, feelings or
purposes, and these are affirmed to be right or wrong according as
they have or have not such moral quality. This application is both a
perception and a judgment--a perception in that it sees the ethical
quality in the deed or motive, and a judgment in that it affirms the
connection. These judgments take the forms of approval or disapproval,
as the conduct is discerned to be morally good or bad. It is plain
that such judgments of application would be impossible were there not
in the mind the fundamental ethical distinctions already explained.
Manifestly these judgments of application belong to the general judging
power of the mind. All knowing may be said to be judging, or at least
tends to take the form of judgment. They are specific here, only with
respect to the material they take account of. They are the acts of the
judging faculty in the sphere of applying the ethical distinctions and
obligations. As a basis for the judgments, not only must the ethical
distinction exist in the mind, but the action or conduct to be judged
must be seen or understood in all its essential relations and motives.
As duties are developed by relations, the moral character of the
contemplated conduct or deed cannot be determined apart from a correct
knowledge of those relations. The judging capacity will err without the
light of true and full information concerning the place and purposes
of the action. And its insights and affirmations will vary in their
approximation to entire correctness according to the degree in which
all the elements entering into the particular conduct are understood
and considered.
==Merit and Demerit Perceived.==
(4) The action of the conscience includes also perception of merit
and demerit in connection with conduct. The meaning of these terms
needs to be carefully defined and limited. They express something more
than the simple approval or disapproval already noted in connection
with the discernment of the rightness or wrongness of an action. The
terms stand for a step of discernment and judgment beyond these, and
denote the ethical reality of good-desert or ill-desert for the moral
agent who conforms to rightness, or offends against its claims. He who
conforms deserves well; he that offends deserves ill. They, therefore,
mark distinctly and definitely the point in the psychology of the
conscience where the faculty discerns that those who do right ought to
receive favor and those who do wrong ought to experience disfavor. They
express a principle of just consequences. The principle is, that for
right conduct good is due, for wrong done evil is due. The wrong-doer
is guilty, _i. e._ justly subject to punitive action. His deed deserves
it for him. On the other hand doing right is worthy of reward, or of
the good that befits the good done. The conscience discerns and affirms
this reality of good and evil-desert.
Here is reached the psychological source of the great fact of
responsibility in the world. It emerges into consciousness and into
actual force in human life from this point in the disclosures and
affirmations of the moral sense. Hence arises the unspeakably varied
but ever persistent human necessity under which men are compelled
to regard themselves and others as justly amenable to the law of
moral consequences. Its application is seen in every sphere of life,
personal, domestic, social, and national. A moral administration is
seen in the world only as the administration is found to be conformed
to and carrying out the principle of distributing good according to
moral desert. Any failure in the adjustment of recompense or given good
under this idea is felt to be a lapse from justice and proper order. It
stands as something abnormal and monstrous. So firmly does the decision
of conscience establish this principle of happy consequences as due to
right conduct and punitive effects to wrong-doing, so strongly does it
fix the conviction that the divine administration must on the whole
adjust award and happiness on this basis, that thoughtful philosophers
have ever been wont to find here one of the most assuring guarantees of
a future life in which the fragmentary justice of this world will be
filled out in fully given recompense.
It must be noted, as is apparent, that this merit or demerit does not
belong to men's acts, but to themselves as the moral agents. To action
and conduct pertain the moral qualities of rightness and wrongness, but
what is done is itself altogether impersonal and not responsible for
its own occurrence. The doer of the deed deserves whatever good or evil
is due in connection with it.
The practical application of this principle of moral desert is found
to be almost infinitely varied, both with respect to the import of
the principle and the measure of merit and demerit. With respect
to its _import_, good desert may mean simply that he who chooses
the morally right is entitled to his own self-approbation and the
approval of others and the moral excellence which he thus prefers.
Or it may signify various degrees and kinds of more positive reward
which the divine constitution and moral administration of the
world may be adjusted to give in the way of happiness and the best
external conditions of existence. On the other hand, the demerit of
the wrong-doer may mean anything he deserves, from the simple loss of
the moral good which he does not choose, to the extremest penalties,
objective and subjective, which a righteous divine government may have
to employ for the repression of wickedness. In its import, both merit
and demerit may refer to endlessly varied experiences and forms of
good and evil. With respect to the _measure_ of merit and demerit and
the adjustment of due recompense, a similar wide range of difference
must be recognized when we come to the application of the principle
to human acts and conduct. Conformity to right and offense against it
are exhibited in myriad degrees under conditions as varied as are the
positions and relations and inner state of all the individuals of the
race. The very nature of different persons is in unequal adjustment
to virtue and vice. Environment, too, brings stronger temptations to
some than to others. Hereditary forces and early training strengthen
or weaken the moral perceptions and forces. Thousands of differences
perplex the attempt to equate the measure of moral desert to men. It
can be determined only in full and perfect view of all the conditions
within and the relations surrounding the moral agent; and the
apportionment of the due award, it would seem, can be perfectly made
only by a being of infinite knowledge and justice.
The measurement of merit and demerit is, however, but another form
of judgments of application, in which the moral sense can act in only
approximate determinations. Here variation and uncertainty find place.
But there can be none as to the fact of good desert and guilt where
right and wrong are done.
==Emotions Awakened.==
(5) Emotions or feelings, awakened by the perceptions of right
and wrong, obligation, merit and demerit, complete the action of
conscience. These feelings are peculiar and original, unlike the
feelings springing from any other perceptions and incapable of being
resolved into or deduced from others. Psychologically, it is to be
remembered, feeling is in no case a part of perception or cognition,
but an additional psychical action of a different kind. "A purely
cognitive intelligence might have perfect knowledge of things and
their relations to itself; it might know that things, or courses of
action, would destroy its own existence; it might even know that its
own existence was about to be destroyed; but this knowledge alone
would imply no feeling. Such intellect would be like a mirror; it
would accurately reflect all that passed before it; but it would be as
indifferent as the mirror."[19] But knowing is followed by feeling, a
different kind of action of the soul. This is not its action in the
form of intellect, but in the form of sensibility. It is action of
another order--not itself a cognition, but arising out of cognition.
This is the place and relation of these moral feelings. They are
awakened in the soul by and through the ethical perceptions. They are
determined by these, and form the final element in the total action of
the conscience.
These moral feelings, while they form one class, as having their origin
in the ethical discriminations, exhibit distinguishing differences.
These differences develop in a twofold way, presenting special forms of
feeling. They must be noted as they differ by these two conditions of
their development.
==Correspondent to Right or Wrong.==
First, according as the moral quality, the perception of which awakens
them, is good or evil. The soul cannot discern the great distinctions
between right and wrong without correspondent emotional awakening. The
sensibility is moved by the perception, and takes the form of a feeling
of approval for the morally good, and a feeling of reprobation for
the wrong. Our language furnishes no single term to designate either
of these feelings, but this phraseology is sufficiently descriptive
to point them out. The feeling toward the right may be denoted as
moral love; that toward wrong as moral aversion. When the quality
of rightness or wrongness is exhibited in specially intense degree
in particular conduct, the feelings may take the form of ethical
admiration or of abhorrence.
==Before and After Action.==
Secondly, as arising before or after the moral action. If the feeling
is awakened in view of action proposed to be done, it may be described,
in the absence of a more specific designation, as a sense of obligation
to do or not to do the deed--this feeling of obligation being based on
a perception of the obligation. From the intellectual discernment the
emotional sensibility springs as a sentiment which forms part of the
impelling force of conscience. When the feeling arises with respect
to an act already done, it takes the nature of ethical satisfaction,
a peculiar pleasure in which are blended a sense of self-approbation
and of joy, if the deed be right; of self-reproach and remorse, if
wrong. Remorse--"a gnawing sense of guilt," whether the feeling be
the slightest disquiet of emotion or of agonizing and unsolaceable
compunction--appears to be the aptest term to express this state of
mind.
==Differences of Degree.==
Besides the differences thus arising, there are differences in the
degree or intensity of these moral feelings. Innumerable causes may
affect the differences in this respect. Personal temperament, acquired
character, or external conditions may make the feeling greater or less.
The mental organization of some persons is more emotional. Education
may have given a peculiar development. Temporary circumstances may
heighten the excitation. But other things being equal the degree of
positiveness in the moral emotions is generally dependent on two
things: (_a_) the clearness with which the moral distinction and
the consequent obligation is discerned, and (_b_) the pureness and
tenderness of the person's moral nature. If the ethical idea and
obligation are unclearly seen or hardly seen at all, the impression in
the feelings must be comparatively slight. But if seen under strong
light and with their supreme import, the intuition impresses with
greater force. So, too, the state of the whole moral nature is a
reason of higher or lower moral sensibility. The more unblighted is the
condition of personal life, the more is it responsive to the ethical
discernment. Habitual refusal of duty, easy and indifferent familiarity
with wrong-doing, or any continued enslavement of the higher nature to
the lower, necessarily blunts the delicateness of the sensibilities and
lowers the strength of the moral feelings. The process of injury may
go on until a condition of callousness is reached which fulfils the
striking description: "Seared as with a hot iron."
==Motive Power.==
It is through these feelings that the conscience becomes a motive power
for moral life. The perception of duty alone, as purely intellectual,
would be, as said, "like a mirror accurately reflecting the ethical
reality passing before it, but as indifferent as the mirror." But upon
the perception the emotional nature springs into action. Knowledge, if
at all, always goes into effect mediately through the sensibilities
in which the soul is stirred by affections and desires. These may be
toward moral good as truly as toward sensuous good. We may love the
true and the beautiful and the right. We may love the right as right.
According to our choices we make the ethically good our own and mould
our life into its excellence and blessedness, or the contrary. These
feelings are motive powers, bringing occasions for choices.
It is proper to take note, however, that it is only the feelings in
view of the right or wrong of an act yet to be done, that are directly
moral motives. For it is only through these that we are face to face
with the question of choosing or refusing the right in the proposed
conduct. The feelings that arise, as satisfaction or remorse after
wrong acts, have no existence till the conduct is in retrospect,
and can have no motive force for it. And when memory brings these
experiences as motives for subsequent conduct, they stand mainly, if
not wholly, as considerations for enjoyment. They are not feelings of
pure obligation to rightness, but remembrances of pleasure or pain
influential as prompting or dissuading on the lower ground of comfort.
There is a generic and indelible difference between the feeling of
duty, under the pure behests of right, and the natural desire to gain
the enjoyment or avoid the misery which we have learned to anticipate
from experiences in conduct. In the one case it presents love of the
right as right; in the other a love of the more agreeable consequences
of right. Unquestionably, indeed, a desire of the better consequences
is a proper motive for choices. In these consequences virtue is proving
its adaptation to bring its own reward. But the merit of virtue is not
in seeking the reward, but in seeking virtue itself. The mercenary
spirit is not the love of righteousness, nor as high as it.
=5.= This analysis makes clear the following characteristics of the
conscience.
==Conscience is Intellectual.==
First, it is primarily and fundamentally intellectual. It is a power
of rational perception. It perceives, in direct or intuitive way, the
primary ethical distinction between right and wrong, perceives the
quality of rightness or wrongness in particular acts or conduct,
perceives the obligation of the moral agent with respect to right and
wrong, as also the merit or demerit of the moral agent. But along with
and blended in inseparable concurrence, moves the function of the
sensibility, in feelings of approval and obligation, satisfaction or
remorse. Both the intellectual and emotional action of the soul are,
therefore, included in what is named the conscience--the perceptive
action, here as everywhere else, being primary and conditional for the
emotional. If there were no ethical distinction perceived, none would
be felt. The conscience, taken in its totality, thus includes both
sides of the human psychology, the intellect and the sensibility, and
it addresses its behests of duty to the will in its own peculiar way of
moral law for conduct.
The strife between intuitional theories and sentimental theories of
conscience is, therefore, composed by the concurrence of both knowing
and feeling in the action of this power. But the intellectual part
is necessarily logically prior to the emotional, and conditional for
it. To make a feeling of obligation the basal fact in the psychology
of conscience would be an inversion of the whole order of dependence
revealed in consciousness. And, surely, the feelings here developed
are rational, not physiological sensations. They cannot, for a moment,
be identified with the physical sensations which condition the
sense-perceptions. Their true place is among the rational emotions.
==Sole Percept Moral Quality.==
Secondly, the sole object of perception by the conscience is moral
quality--the quality of rightness or wrongness, together with the
correspondent obligation. It is something supersensible and ideal; not
actions themselves as known by sense, but their quality as morally good
or evil as discovered by the ethical reason. The thing discerned by the
conscience is generically different from the things discerned by the
sense-perception or consciousness. Through our senses we know the whole
world of objective existences, events and their relations; through
consciousness the states, acts and experiences of the subjective
personal self are given. But the conscience does not furnish us with
a knowledge of any of the substances, events or relations which
constitute the world about us or the world within us, but solely of the
moral quality of conduct and sentiment, as duty is developed in these
relations. It takes notice of the ethical character of the actions and
motives of intelligent and responsible beings.
==Conscience Acts of Necessity.==
Thirdly, the action of the conscience is marked by necessity. And by
this we are to understand something more than the simple uniformity in
which all the psychical activity, except that of the choices of the
will, is held under "fixed laws of thought and feeling." The necessity
here affirmed is that unique necessity which distinguishes and marks
intuitive or _a priori_ cognition, as of time, space, and causality.
"Necessity" is justly conceded to be one of the criteria of these and
other intuitional "first truths." It is not at the option of the human
mind whether it will think the world under the relations of time and
space, or events as occurring under the principle of causation. These
are "forms of knowledge," knowledge of super-sensible realities, that
come not at our choice but by an unavoidable insight. The primary and
fundamental ethical distinction belongs to such rational intuition,
and is marked by the peculiar necessity of intuitional action. As
on occasion of knowing material bodies with three dimensions, or of
changes in consciousness or in the outer world, with the fact of
co-existence or succession and duration, the phenomenal sphere is
necessarily transcended and time and space are necessarily discerned,
so when we understand the manifold relations in which our lives are to
be lived, in which we may use our personal powers, either in harmony
with or in violation of our given adaptations, and with either great
injury or rich good to others, in the same necessary way the conscience
must discern the distinction of right and wrong and the reality of duty.
The great implication in this necessity, as we shall hereafter see in
examining the nature of virtue, is that the principle of righteousness
or the law of duty is something that belongs to the objective order
of the world as constituted by God, a divine reality permanent and
immutable, not produced but perceived by the conscience. It is not
made by man but finds him--finds him through the intelligence by which
he is informed of the realities to which he must adjust his life.
Moral law stands for a reality that rays itself into view in the human
reason whether men will or not. The intuitions of it do not come at
the call, or desire, or even at the consent of man. The law revealed
stands independent of the individual's personality or choices and
asserts itself over him. While this is true of the law revealed, the
perception of the law becomes a necessity with the moral agent that is
normally endowed and developed. Man does not furnish the moral law to
himself. He is not the giver of it, but the recipient. The conscience,
therefore, is an open window of our being, through which the objective
law of righteousness to which the Creator has adjusted our nature and
the constitution of the universe may be discerned by us, a sphere
of reality enfolding us, with which our freedom is to harmonize our
conduct. Francis Newman has admirably marked the position of this
conscience-power in our constitution:
"This energy of life within is ours, yet it is not we.
It is in us, belongs to us, yet we cannot control it,
It acts without our bidding, and when we do not think of it,
Nor will it cease its acting at our command, or otherwise obey
us,
But while it recalls from evil, and reproaches us for evil,
And is not silenced by our effort, surely it is not _we_;
Yet it pervades mankind, as one life pervades the trees."[20]
The reason of these intuitions of the conscience is that back of it
and around it and above it is a realm of moral obligations which must,
without contingency, be made known to us, that we may order our lives
aright.
==Erroneous Theory.==
=6.= It is proper at this place to express dissent from some forms of
theory which are at variance with the truth thus brought to light.
Almost all of them are the outcome of the philosophical phenomenalism
of which Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is the best illustration. It
discredits the competency of our cognitive faculties to reach knowledge
of things as they really are. We can know, it is said, only phenomena,
while the noumena or things in themselves are incognizable; and
doubt is raised whether there is a reality corresponding to what our
faculties report. It is suggested that the data of these faculties,
especially in the forms of intuition and universal judgments, may
be mere "forms of thought," forms of knowing but not of real being,
created within as well as by the mind itself, and projected thence in
connection with apprehended phenomena. They may be mental fictions
in whole or in part, in which the ideal must not be held as standing
for actual being. Thus while time and space are necessary "forms of
thought" under which all bodies and events must be known, yet time
and space, it is alleged, may be but subjective forms given to the
phenomena by and in the cognitive action. We are obliged, indeed,
it is conceded, in practical life to follow the guidance of our
necessary forms of thought. But the knowledge is merely regulative
for present activity; and being a product created and shaped largely
by the particular organization of our minds, this merely relative and
regulative perception of truth may be different in other minds or be
hereafter so changed as to present changed phenomena, superseding
the judgments now given by other judgments under other views. When
the adherents of the Positive Philosophy proceed to define matter
as merely "a permanent possibility of sensations,"[21] faith in the
reliability of our knowledge of the realities about us, as true for
those realities, is thoroughly undermined. This tendency toward an
invalidating of our knowledge as real for objective truth, has been
fostered by recent physiological psychology which, under materialistic
implications, magnifies the effect of the physical organization and
condition upon the mental products. In these ways extreme idealism and
positive materialism join hands in effort to reduce to uncertainty
or illusion what our cognitive faculties perceive of reality and
truth in both the material and moral systems about us. But ethical
science, in harmony with the soundest and best sustained philosophy of
the Christian centuries, rejects these agnostic suggestions, as not
only unproved but untenable. They form a theory of our intellectual
faculties which cuts away the foundations of all knowledge, even
of that which is most clear, fixed, necessary and unchangeable
in the intelligence of the race. The theory becomes intellectual
suicide, as it nullifies the real validity of all the fundamental
perceptions of both sense and reason, on which its own conclusion
rests. Its suggestions discredit themselves by confessing that their
own foundation is but a part of the illusory, phantasmal action of
faculties which, instead of perceiving what is, present but forms which
they produce. While it is conceded that, even on this agnostic basis,
the conscience would still possess "regulative" authority--as it still
asserts its imperative "ought" for life--yet rational ethics, like
self-respecting philosophy, must not vacate for our cognitive faculties
the great function of knowing while attempting to exercise it, nor
fail to maintain that they have been organized for real knowledge,
within the sphere and measure opened to them, of the genuine realities
with which we have to do, in both the material and moral worlds. The
conscience, therefore, must be held, not as formative of its peculiar
phenomena, but perceptive of the ethical realities of right and
obligation.
==Consistent with Theistic Evolution.==
=7.= It is proper also to point out here that this view of the
nature of the conscience is not necessarily affected by the question
of its evolutionary origin. Should the theory of man's derivative
origin, under some form of theistic and teleological evolution, ever
pass from its position as an hypothesis into that of scientific
truth, this would not require us essentially to alter our account
of the nature of this faculty. For the nature of the faculty has
not been found in considerations of the mode of its origin, but
from analysis of the elemental facts in its action. The adherents
of the evolution hypothesis have, indeed, found one of their most
formidable difficulties in attempting a satisfactory explanation of a
possible origination of this faculty in the assumed forces and laws
of evolutionary action. Keeping in view the fact that the very center
of the conscience-function appears in regulation and often in denial
of inherited feelings and habits, the difficulty of attributing its
creation to hereditary action is clearly seen and deeply felt. It
has been well pointed out that "the injunctions of conscience do not
run with the stream of our hereditary tendencies, but rather against
them."[22] That a law of the work and victory of hereditary forces
should issue in organizing an endowment for control and repression of
hereditary tendencies, seems to involve too much of a contradiction
to be accepted. That the survival of the strongest in the battle of
individual existence, the reign of "tooth and talon," should gradually
create a faculty for asserting the obligation and law of love and
kindness to the weak, fails to come properly under our conception of
the working of cause and effect.[23] Even in the theistic form of
the theory, in which evolution offers itself as presenting not the
cause but only the mode of creation, it is hard to conceive of the
adaptation of such a process for the production of such a result--a
result standing apart from the means by a total difference in both
their nature and direction. It is as if the flow of the stream should
create the principle of repression of flowing. The actual attempts of
evolutionist writers to construct an ethical view which shall explain
the phenomena of conscience and justify its authority, has added
further evidence of the difficulty on this point. No such attempts
have thus far been satisfactory. But the nature of the conscience, as
has already been shown, is properly settled, not by the mode of its
origin, but by an examination of its actual psychology and intrinsic
powers. If this makes it clear, as it unquestionably does, that it is
primarily intellectual and percipient in its function, then any failure
of evolution or any other theory to explain its origin must much
rather discredit the theory than disprove the nature of the endowment
which stands as a fact. But an origin of the conscience by evolution,
should it ever be proved, would introduce no trouble at this point in
the science of ethics. For the faculty is competent for its office in
virtue of what it is, and not by the mode through which the divine
creative power worked in its formation. The necessity in the case would
be met should the evolutionary mode be shown to be capable of evolving
an intellectual endowment high enough in perceptive power to discern
the ethical distinctions and bind their obligations on men.
CHAPTER V.
THE SUPREMACY OF CONSCIENCE.
By the supremacy of conscience is meant its right to exercise moral
control. It expresses its proper authority. This authority is not
to be thought of as original or independent, but as resting on and
revealing the absolute authority of God, who has constituted the moral
relations of the world and has set the conscience, with its discerning
and regulative function, in the human soul. The question involved is
not the right of one merely subjective faculty to impose obligation on
another faculty or on all the human capacities and powers--one part
of the personal self playing the role of sovereign over the other
parts. This would be a shallow and misleading notion of this authority.
The whole conception of the conscience is theistic, and implies, as
it also testifies to, an absolute law of righteousness over all the
world, established by Him who is creator and sovereign of all. It is
in the discernment of this principle of rightness, with its demand
for obedience to it, that the conscience comes into its position of
authority and its authority becomes _de jure_ supreme.
=1.= But the proof that such authority rightly belongs to it needs to
be more fully exhibited. It is explained and made unquestionable in the
following facts:
==Its Sphere of Judgments.==
(1) It is involved in the very sphere of its discernments. This sphere
is the sphere of right and duty, which, by very conception, subordinate
everything else. Its primary perception is of "the right," as having
claim on every rational free agent--and then of obligation which
immediately presses its moral requirement into the presence of our
capacity for conformity to it. There is, indeed, a degree of authority
belonging to each and all the psychical faculties, in the functions
they fulfil for the direction and welfare of life. But the peculiarity
of the conscience is that the realm of its functions and direction
is higher than that of the other powers, the realm in which manhood
reaches its supreme purpose and worth. Moral goodness, excellence
of character, is the summit of the ascent to which human nature is
adapted. In this our nature reaches the "supreme" and all-inclusive
"good," compared with which all things else are of inferior claim
and merit. The authority of the conscience, as a faculty, is thus
identified with the supremacy which belongs to the idea of the morally
right, of obligation, duty, the irrepealable "ought" for the conduct of
life.
==Shown by Nature of Action.==
(2) This is more distinctly apparent when we recall the nature of its
action. Psychologically, the conscience does not stand as a thing of
our own personal will, or as in any way making the obligation which it
presents. When we examine it, as it appears in our consciousness, its
movement is in the form of a necessary perception of an obligation
that is upon us irrespective of our will, a law of duty not of our
own framing, but imposing itself on us and demanding the homage of
our will. It possesses its authority, therefore, in the fact that it
is the discernment of something higher than our will or ourselves, a
principle transcending our personality and appearing as supreme law for
our life and conduct. And the law connotes a lawgiver and a judge. The
conscience thus puts us in the presence of One who has sovereign and
absolute right to rule in us and over us. It thus becomes authoritative
by its being the power or faculty through which is made known to us the
principle or law of righteousness which God has established for the
moral order of the world.[24]
==The Contrary is Absurd.==
(3) These facts, at once psychologically and metaphysically well
certified, would themselves be sufficient to explain and vindicate the
peculiar right of supremacy almost universally conceded to belong to
the moral sense. But the proof, thus given, is confirmed by the fact
that the contrary conclusion involves a manifest absurdity.
In the first place, it is incredible to suppose that man, as an
intelligent, rational, free agent, capable of character, should have no
provision in his mental make-up, no faculty of knowledge, furnishing a
principle of guidance for meeting the responsibilities of life. For,
such an absence of endowment for this purpose, would necessarily mean,
either that responsibility is an illusion, a conclusion belied by the
hard fact that the organization of human life inexorably treats and
exacts it as real, or that man's nature is constructed in a falsehood,
being bound to a high task for which it contains no endowment.
Somewhere, therefore, among the human faculties, must appear a power
or complex of powers whose disclosures or impulses shall furnish
a rightful principle of control. To say that there is no rightful
principle--that the morally good has no more right than the morally
bad--would be not only absurd to reason, but fly in the face of the
spontaneous and ineradicable sense of mankind, which makes the moral
distinction.
Further: While the authority for self-control, to meet the ethical task
and responsibilities of life, must thus be found somewhere in man's
constitution, careful consideration makes it also clear that the right
of supremacy cannot be attributed to any other capacity, function or
impulse of our nature. The well-known _argumentum ad absurdum_ is fully
applicable here.
Besides the conscience itself, the only other motive-forces for conduct
are the physiological appetites, the desires for enjoyment, and the
benevolent affections. The right of supreme control cannot be supposed
to belong to the physical appetites and passions. The supremacy of
these would be subversive of character and deadly to personal and
social welfare. This is not simply the judgment of reason, but a fact
attested by the most melancholy experiences in which blight and woe
have fallen on men. Nor can the right of ruling authority belong to
the desire of enjoyment. When this dominates it becomes the reign of
selfishness, which, according to the consent of mankind, is utterly
inconsistent with the development of noble character, or the discharge
of those inter-human duties on which both individual and social
well-being depends. It forms the soul of anarchy, in which the family,
society, and the state would be dissolved. The true excellence and
happiness of man would be impossible. The rulership of this class of
motive forces is thus inconsistent with the highest and best ends to
which his nature has been correlated.
Nor can the supremacy belong to the benevolent affections. These,
summed up in the word love, are indeed very high and must be regarded
as among the worthiest and best elements of character and principles
of action. "God is love," and so near does love come to being the
very essence of virtue, that it is declared to be "the fulfilling
of the law." But the "love" that God is said to be is not alone in
His character, nor does it rule without regard to holiness, justice,
purity, or righteousness. It cannot be conceived as subordinating these
to a desire to make creatures happy. On the other hand we are obliged
to think of love as able to confer its favors only in accordance with
the principle of righteousness. Even in its supreme exhibition, in the
salvation of men, in giving its gifts, it could only act through a
way that declared the divine righteousness while granting forgiveness
to those that repent and forsake wrong. In human life, the love that
in its own degree and order helps to the fulfillment of the law is
not alone, or unregulated, or superior to the principle of duty, of
truth, purity and holiness. It cannot get above these, but is itself
right only when it holds its ends, of making its objects happy, in
subordination to what is morally good. We must remind ourselves exactly
what the supremacy of the benevolent affections would mean. Unless
guided in the action through which they reach their object, they
would subject everything to their own ends and take no account of the
character of the ways and means, as right or wrong. As unregulated love
they would lack an essential element for the office of moral control.
If it be true, as it unquestionably is, that some things are wrong,
no matter how lovingly they may be done, the benevolent affections
cannot be the supreme guide for even the loving activities of life.
Blind affection may run, as it does in thousands of relations and
instances, into the widest departures from good character and into
gross vices. However high the benevolent feeling may be as a motive,
all its purposes and the activities through which these purposes are
accomplished need the guidance of the law of righteousness, if they
are to be maintained in harmony with essential virtue, holy character
and human welfare. Their function must therefore be held subordinate
to the authority of conscience as the capacity through which the
law of rectitude, with its obligation, is presented and kept before
the mental view. This conclusion does not remove love from its high
position, at the very summit of things that are right and good and
essential for character. It allows it to stand, as it does all other
springs of action, in its full rights and value among human motives and
virtues in determining duty in conduct. But it is the conscience, and
not love itself, that judges and decides the obligation to it and the
high rank that ought to be given it as an element of character. Thus
the regulative function, even for benevolence, belongs to the ethical
sense, through perception of what sentiments and acts are right in
conduct. And so the peculiar business of the conscience is to watch all
the forces of our nature and keep each in its place.
The view which gives the right of moral control to the conscience is
thus vindicated by the plain fact that there is no other faculty or
spring of action in the human constitution adapted to this function, so
unquestionably requisite for the order and welfare of life.
==Difficulties.==
=2.= An apparent difficulty, however, arises in connection with this
conclusion. It calls for a brief consideration, lest it should be
thought to form a refutation of the correctness of our view: