ON COMPROMISE
_'It makes all the difference in the world whether we put
Truth in the first place or in the second place.'_
WHATLEY
ON COMPROMISE
BY
JOHN MORLEY
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1908
_This Edition first printed 1886_
NOTE.
The writer has availed himself of the opportunity of a new edition to
add three or four additional illustrations in the footnotes. The
criticisms on the first edition call for no remark, excepting this,
perhaps, that the present little volume has no pretensions to be
anything more than an Essay. To judge such it performance as if it
professed to be an exhaustive Treatise in casuistry, is to subject it to
tests which it was never designed to bear. Merely to open questions, to
indicate points, to suggest cases, to sketch outlines,--as an Essay does
all these things,--may often be a process not without its own modest
usefulness and interest.
_May 4, 1877._
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
Design of this Essay
The question stated
Suggested by some existing tendencies in England
Comparison with other countries
Test of this comparison
The absent quality specifically defined
History and decay of some recent aspirations
Illustrations
Characteristics of one present mood
Analysis of its causes
(1) Influence of French examples
(2) Influence of the Historic Method
(3) Influence of the Newspaper Press
(4) Increase of material prosperity
(5) Transformation of the spiritual basis of thought
(6) Influence of a State Church
CHAPTER II. OF THE POSSIBLE UTILITY OF ERROR
Questions of a dual doctrine lies at the outset of our inquiry
This doctrine formulated
Marks the triumph of _status quo_
Psychological vindication of such a doctrine
Answered by assertion of the dogmatic character of popular belief
And the pernicious social influence of its priests
The root idea of the defenders of a dual doctrine
Thesis of the present chapter, against that idea
Examination of some of the pleas for error
I. That a false opinion may be clothed with good associations
II. That all minds are not open to reason
III. That a false opinion, considered in relation to the general
mental attitude, may be less hurtful than its premature
demolition
IV. That mere negative truth is not a guide
V. That error has been a stepping-stone to truth
We cannot tell how much truth has been missed
Inevitableness is not utility
CHAPTER III. INTELLECTUAL RESPONSIBILITY AND THE POLITICAL SPIRIT.
The modern _disciplina arcani_
Hume's immoral advice
Evil intellectual effects of immoral compromise
Depravation that follows its grosser forms
The three provinces of compromise
Radical importance of their separation
Effects of their confusion in practical politics
Economy or management in the Formation of opinion
Its lawfulness turns on the claims of majority and minority over one
another
Thesis of the present chapter
Its importance, owing to the supremacy of the political spirit in
England
Effects of the predominance of this spirit
Contrasted with epochs of intellectual responsibility
A modern movement against the political spirit
An objection considered
Importance to character of rationalised conviction, and of ideals
The absence of them attenuates conduct
Illustrations in modern politics
Modern latitudinarianism
Illustration in two supreme issues
Pascal's remarks upon a state of Doubt
Dr. Newman on the same
Three ways of dealing with the issues
Another illustration of intellectual improbity
The Savoyard Vicar
Mischievousness of substituting spiritual self-indulgence for reason
CHAPTER IV. RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY.
Compromise in Expression
Touches religion rather than politics
Hume on non-resistance
Reason why rights of free speech do not exactly coincide with rights of
free thought
Digression into the matter of free speech
Dissent no longer railing and vituperative
Tendency of modern free thought to assimilate some elements from the
old faith
A wide breach still remains
Heresy, however, no longer traced to depravity
Tolerance not necessarily acquiescence in scepticism
Object of the foregoing digression
The rarity of plain-speaking a reason why it is painful
Conformity in the relationship between child and parent
Between husband and wife
In the education of children
The case of an unbelieving priest
The case of one who fears to lose his influence
Conformity not harmless nor unimportant
CHAPTER V. THE REALISATION OF OPINION.
The application of opinion to conduct
Tempering considerations
Not to be pressed too far
Our action in realising our opinions depends on our social theory
Legitimate and illegitimate compromise in view of that
The distinction equally sound on the evolutional theory
Condition of progressive change
A plea for compromise examined
A second plea
The allegation of provisional usefulness examined
Illustrated in religious institutions
In political institutions
Burke's commendation of political compromise
The saying that small reforms may be the worst enemies of great ones
In what sense true
Illustration in the Elementary Education Act
Wisdom of social patience
The considerations which apply to political practice do not apply to
our own lives
Nor to the publication of social opinions
The amount of conscience in a community
Evil of attenuating this element
Historic illustration
New side of the discussion
Is earnestness of conviction fatal to concession of liberty to others?
Two propositions at the base of an affirmative answer
Earnestness of conviction consistent with sense of liability to error
Belief in one's own infallibility does not necessarily lead to
intolerance
The contrary notion due to juristic analogies in social discussion
Connection between the doctrine of liberty and social evolution
The timid compromisers superfluous apprehension
Material limits to the effect of moral speculation
Illustration from the history of Slavery
Illustration from French history
Practical influence of a faith in the self-protecting quality of a
society
Conclusion
NOTE TO PAGE 242.
The Doctrine of Liberty
ON COMPROMISE.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
The design of the following essay is to consider, in a short and direct
way, some of the limits that are set by sound reason to the practice of
the various arts of accommodation, economy, management, conformity, or
compromise. The right of thinking freely and acting independently, of
using our minds without excessive awe of authority, and shaping our
lives without unquestioning obedience to custom, is now a finally
accepted principle in some sense or other with every school of thought
that has the smallest chance of commanding the future. Under what
circumstances does the exercise and vindication of the right, thus
conceded in theory, become a positive duty in practice? If the majority
are bound to tolerate dissent from the ruling opinions and beliefs,
under what conditions and within what limitations is the dissentient
imperatively bound to avail himself of this toleration? How far, and in
what way, ought respect either for immediate practical convenience, or
for current prejudices, to weigh against respect for truth? For how much
is it well that the individual should allow the feelings and convictions
of the many to count, when he comes to shape, to express, and to act
upon his own feelings and convictions? Are we only to be permitted to
defend general principles, on condition that we draw no practical
inferences from them? Is every other idea to yield precedence and empire
to existing circumstances, and is the immediate and universal
workableness of a policy to be the main test of its intrinsic fitness?
To attempt to answer all these questions fully would be nothing less
than to attempt a compendium of life and duty in all their details, a
Summa of cases of conscience, a guide to doubters at every point of the
compass. The aim of the present writer is a comparatively modest one;
namely, to seek one or two of the most general principles which ought
to regulate the practice of compliance, and to suggest some of the
bearings which they may have in their application to certain
difficulties in modern matters of conduct.
It is pretty plain that an inquiry of this kind needs to be fixed by
reference to a given set of social circumstances tolerably well
understood. There are some common rules as to the expediency of
compromise and conformity, but their application is a matter of endless
variety and the widest elasticity. The interesting and useful thing is
to find the relation of these too vague rules to actual conditions; to
transform them into practical guides and real interpreters of what is
right and best in thought and conduct, in a special and definite kind of
emergency. According to the current assumptions of the writer and the
preacher, the one commanding law is that men should cling to truth and
right, if the very heavens fall. In principle this is universally
accepted. To the partisans of authority and tradition it is as much a
commonplace as to the partisans of the most absolute and unflinching
rationalism. Yet in practice all schools alike are forced to admit the
necessity of a measure of accommodation in the very interests of truth
itself. Fanatic is a name of such ill repute, exactly because one who
deserves to be called by it injures good causes by refusing timely and
harmless concession; by irritating prejudices that a wiser way of urging
his own opinion might have turned aside; by making no allowances,
respecting no motives, and recognising none of those qualifying
principles, which are nothing less than necessary to make his own
principle true and fitting in a given society. The interesting question
in connection with compromise obviously turns upon the placing of the
boundary that divides wise suspense in forming opinions, wise reserve in
expressing them, and wise tardiness in trying to realise them, from
unavowed disingenuousness and self-illusion, from voluntary
dissimulation, and from indolence and pusillanimity. These are the three
departments or provinces of compromise. Our subject is a question of
boundaries.[1] And this question, being mainly one of time and
circumstance, may be most satisfactorily discussed in relation to the
time and the circumstances which we know best, or at least whose
deficiencies and requirements are most pressingly visible to us.
Though England counts her full share of fearless truth-seekers in most
departments of inquiry, yet there is on the whole no weakening, but a
rather marked confirmation, of what has become an inveterate national
characteristic, and has long been recognised as such; a profound
distrust, namely, of all general principles; a profound dislike both of
much reference to them, and of any disposition to invest them with
practical authority; and a silent but most pertinacious measurement of
philosophic truths by political tests. 'It is not at all easy, humanly
speaking,' says one who has tried the experiment, 'to wind an Englishman
up to the level of dogma.' The difficulty has extended further than the
dogma of theology. The supposed antagonism between expediency and
principle has been pressed further and further away from the little
piece of true meaning that it ever could be rightly allowed to have,
until it has now come to signify the paramount wisdom of counting the
narrow, immediate, and personal expediency for everything, and the
whole, general, ultimate, and completed expediency for nothing.
Principle is only another name for a proposition stating the terms of
one of these larger expediencies. When principle is held in contempt, or
banished to the far dreamland of the philosopher and the student, with
an affectation of reverence that in a materialist generation is in truth
the most overweening kind of contempt, this only means that men are
thinking much of the interests of to-day, and little of the more ample
interests of the many days to come. It means that the conditions of the
time are unfriendly to the penetration and the breadth of vision which
disclose to us the whole range of consequences that follow on certain
kinds of action or opinion, and unfriendly to the intrepidity and
disinterestedness which make us willing to sacrifice our own present
ease or near convenience, in the hope of securing higher advantages for
others or for ourselves in the future.
Let us take politics, for example. What is the state of the case with
us, if we look at national life in its broadest aspect? A German has his
dream of a great fatherland which shall not only be one and
consolidated, but shall in due season win freedom for itself, and be as
a sacred hearth whence others may borrow the warmth of freedom and order
for themselves. A Spaniard has his vision either of militant loyalty to
God and the saints and the exiled line of his kings, or else of devotion
to the newly won liberty and to the raising up of his fallen nation. An
American, in the midst of the political corruption which for the moment
obscures the great democratic experiment, yet has his imagination
kindled by the size and resources of his land, and his enthusiasm fired
by the high destinies which he believes to await its people in the
centuries to come. A Frenchman, republican or royalist, with all his
frenzies and 'fool-fury' of red or white, still has his hope and dream
and aspiration, with which to enlarge his life and lift him on an ample
pinion out from the circle of a poor egoism. What stirs the hope and
moves the aspiration of our Englishman? Surely nothing either in the
heavens above or on the earth beneath. The English are as a people
little susceptible in the region of the imagination. But they have done
good work in the world, acquired a splendid historic tradition of stout
combat for good causes, founded a mighty and beneficent empire; and
they have done all this notwithstanding their deficiencies of
imagination. Their lands have been the home of great and forlorn causes,
though they could not always follow the transcendental flights of their
foreign allies and champions. If Englishmen were not strong in
imagination, they were what is better and surer, strong in their hold of
the great emancipating principles. What great political cause, her own
or another's, is England befriending to-day? To say that no great cause
is left, is to tell us that we have reached the final stage of human
progress, and turned over the last leaf in the volume of human
improvements. The day when this is said and believed marks the end of a
nation's life. Is it possible that, after all, our old protestant
spirit, with its rationality, its austerity, its steady political
energy, has been struck with something of the mortal fatigue that seizes
catholic societies after their fits of revolution?
We need not forget either the atrocities or the imbecilities which mark
the course of modern politics on the Continent. I am as keenly alive as
any one to the levity of France, and the [Greek: hubris] of Germany. It
may be true that the ordinary Frenchman is in some respects the victim
of as poor an egoism as that of the ordinary Englishman; and that the
American has no advantage over us in certain kinds of magnanimous
sentiment. What is important is the mind and attitude, not of the
ordinary man, but of those who should be extraordinary. The decisive
sign of the elevation of a nation's life is to be sought among those who
lead or ought to lead. The test of the health of a people is to be found
in the utterances of those who are its spokesmen, and in the action of
those whom it accepts or chooses to be its chiefs. We have to look to
the magnitude of the issues and the height of the interests which engage
its foremost spirits. What are the best men in a country striving for?
And is the struggle pursued intrepidly and with a sense of its size and
amplitude, or with creeping foot and blinking eye? The answer to these
questions is the answer to the other question, whether the best men in
the country are small or great. It is a commonplace that the manner of
doing things is often as important as the things done. And it has been
pointed out more than once that England's most creditable national
action constantly shows itself so poor and mean in expression that the
rest of Europe can discern nothing in it but craft and sinister
interest. Our public opinion is often rich in wisdom, but we lack the
courage of our wisdom. We execute noble achievements, and then are best
pleased to find shabby reasons for them.
There is a certain quality attaching alike to thought and expression and
action, for which we may borrow the name of grandeur. It has been
noticed, for instance, that Bacon strikes and impresses us, not merely
by the substantial merit of what he achieved, but still more by a
certain greatness of scheme and conception. This quality is not a mere
idle decoration. It is not a theatrical artifice of mask or buskin, to
impose upon us unreal impressions of height and dignity. The added
greatness is real. Height of aim and nobility of expression are true
forces. They grow to be an obligation upon us. A lofty sense of personal
worth is one of the surest elements of greatness. That the lion should
love to masquerade in the ass's skin is not modesty and reserve, but
imbecility and degradation. And that England should wrap herself in the
robe of small causes and mean reasons is the more deplorable, because
there is no nation in the world the substantial elements of whose power
are so majestic and imperial as our own. Our language is the most widely
spoken of all tongues, its literature is second to none in variety and
power. Our people, whether English or American, have long ago superseded
the barbarous device of dictator and Caesar by the manly arts of
self-government. We understand that peace and industry are the two most
indispensable conditions of modern civilisation, and we draw the lines
of our policy in accordance with such a conviction. We have had imposed
upon us by the unlucky prowess of our ancestors the task of ruling a
vast number of millions of alien dependents. We undertake it with a
disinterestedness, and execute it with a skill of administration, to
which history supplies no parallel, and which, even if time should show
that the conditions of the problem were insoluble, will still remain
for ever admirable. All these are elements of true pre-eminence. They
are calculated to inspire us with the loftiest consciousness of national
life. They ought to clothe our voice with authority, to nerve our action
by generous resolution, and to fill our counsels with weightiness and
power.
Within the last forty years England has lost one by one each of those
enthusiasms which may have been illusions,--some of them undoubtedly
were so,--but which at least testified to the existence among us, in a
very considerable degree, of a vivid belief in the possibility of
certain broad general theories being true and right, as well as in the
obligation of making them lights to practical conduct and desire. People
a generation ago had eager sympathy with Hungary, with Italy, with
Poland, because they were deeply impressed by the doctrine of
nationalities. They had again a generous and energetic hatred of such an
institution as the negro slavery of America, because justice and
humanity and religion were too real and potent forces within their
breasts to allow them to listen to those political considerations by
which American statesmen used to justify temporising and compromise.
They had strong feelings about Parliamentary Reform, because they were
penetrated by the principle that the possession of political power by
the bulk of a society is the only effective security against sinister
government; or else by the principle that participation in public
activity, even in the modest form of an exercise of the elective
franchise, is an elevating and instructing agency; or perhaps by the
principle that justice demands that those who are compelled to obey laws
and pay national taxes should have a voice in making the one and
imposing the other.
It may be said that the very fate of these aspirations has had a
blighting effect on public enthusiasm and the capacity of feeling it.
Not only have most of them now been fulfilled, and so passed from
aspiration to actuality, but the results of their fulfilment have been
so disappointing as to make us wonder whether it is really worth while
to pray, when to have our prayers granted carries the world so very
slight a way forward. The Austrian is no longer in Italy; the Pope has
ceased to be master in Rome; the patriots of Hungary are now in
possession of their rights, and have become friends of their old
oppressors; the negro slave has been transformed into an American
citizen. At home, again, the gods have listened to our vows. Parliament
has been reformed, and the long-desired mechanical security provided for
the voter's freedom. We no longer aspire after all these things, you may
say, because our hopes have been realised and our dreams have come true.
It is possible that the comparatively prosaic results before our eyes at
the end of all have thrown a chill over our political imagination. What
seemed so glorious when it was far off, seems perhaps a little poor now
that it is near; and this has damped the wing of political fancy. The
old aspirations have vanished, and no new ones have arisen in their
place. Be the cause what it may, I should express the change in this
way, that the existing order of facts, whatever it may be, now takes a
hardly disputed precedence with us over ideas, and that the coarsest
political standard is undoubtingly and finally applied over the whole
realm of human thought.
The line taken up by the press and the governing classes of England
during the American Civil War may serve to illustrate the kind of mood
which we conceive to be gaining firmer hold than ever of the national
mind. Those who sympathised with the Southern States listened only to
political arguments, and very narrow and inefficient political
arguments, as it happened, when they ought to have seen that here was an
issue which involved not only political ideas, but moral and religious
ideas as well. That is to say, the ordinary political tests were not
enough to reveal the entire significance of the crisis, nor were the
political standards proper for measuring the whole of the expediencies
hanging in the balance. The conflict could not be adequately gauged by
such questions as whether the Slave States had or had not a
constitutional right to establish an independent government; whether the
Free States were animated by philanthropy or by love of empire; whether
it was to the political advantage of England that the American Union
should be divided and consequently weakened. Such questions were not
necessarily improper in themselves, and we can imagine circumstances in
which they might be not only proper but decisive. But, the
circumstances being what they were, the narrower expediencies of
ordinary politics were outweighed by one of those supreme and
indefeasible expediencies which are classified as moral. These are, in
other words, the higher, wider, more binding, and transcendent part of
the master art of social wellbeing.
Here was only one illustration of the growing tendency to substitute the
narrowest political point of view for all the other ways of regarding
the course of human affairs, and to raise the limitations which
practical exigencies may happen to set to the application of general
principles, into the very place of the principles themselves. Nor is the
process of deteriorating conviction confined to the greater or noisier
transactions of nations. It is impossible that it should be so. That
process is due to causes which affect the mental temper an a whole, and
pour round us an atmosphere that enervates our judgment from end to end,
not more in politics than in morality, and not more in morality than in
philosophy, in art, and in religion. Perhaps this tendency never showed
itself more offensively than when the most important newspaper in the
country criticised our great naturalist's scientific speculations as to
the descent of man, from the point of view of property, intelligence,
and a stake in the country, and severely censured him for revealing his
particular zoological conclusions to the general public, at a moment
when the sky of Paris was red with the incendiary flames of the Commune.
It would be hard to reduce the transformation of all truth into a
subordinate department of daily politics, to a more gross and unseemly
absurdity.
The consequences of such a transformation, of putting immediate social
convenience in the first place, and respect for truth in the second, are
seen, as we have said, in a distinct and unmistakable lowering of the
level of national life; a slack and lethargic quality about public
opinion; a growing predominance of material, temporary, and selfish
aims, over those which are generous, far-reaching, and spiritual; a
deadly weakening of intellectual conclusiveness, and clear-shining moral
illumination, and, lastly, of a certain stoutness of self-respect for
which England was once especially famous. A plain categorical
proposition is becoming less and less credible to average minds. Or at
least the slovenly willingness to hold two directly contradictory
propositions at one and the same time is becoming more and more common.
In religion, morals, and politics, the suppression of your true opinion,
if not the positive profession of what you hold to be a false opinion,
is hardly ever counted a vice, and not seldom even goes for virtue and
solid wisdom. One is conjured to respect the beliefs of others, but
forbidden to claim the same respect for one's own.
This dread of the categorical proposition might be creditable, if it
sprang from attachment to a very high standard of evidence, or from a
deep sense of the relative and provisional quality of truth. There might
even be a plausible defence set up for it, if it sprang from that
formulated distrust of the energetic rational judgment in comparison
with the emotional, affective, contemplative parts of man, which
underlies the various forms of religious mysticism. If you look closely
into our present mood, it is seen to be the product mainly and above all
of a shrinking deference to the _status quo_, not merely as having a
claim not to be lightly dealt with, which every serious man concedes,
but as being the last word and final test of truth and justice. Physical
science is allowed to be the sphere of accurate reasoning and distinct
conclusions, but in morals and politics, instead of admitting that these
subjects have equally a logic of their own, we silently suspect all
first principles, and practically deny the strict inferences from
demonstrated premisses. Faith in the soundness of given general theories
of right and wrong melts away before the first momentary triumph of
wrong, or the first passing discouragement in enforcing right.
Our robust political sense, which has discovered so many of the secrets
of good government, which has given us freedom with order, and popular
administration without corruption, and unalterable respect for law along
with indelible respect for individual right, this, which has so long
been our strong point, is fast becoming our weakness and undoing. For
the extension of the ways of thinking which are proper in politics, to
other than political matter, means at the same time the depravation of
the political sense itself. Not only is social expediency effacing the
many other points of view that men ought to take of the various facts of
life and thought: the idea of social expediency itself is becoming a
dwarfed and pinched idea. Ours is the country where love of constant
improvement ought to be greater than anywhere else, because fear of
revolution is less. Yet the art of politics is growing to be as meanly
conceived as all the rest At elections the national candidate has not
often a chance against the local candidate, nor the man of a principle
against the man of a class. In parliament we are admonished on high
authority that 'the policy of a party is not the carrying out of the
opinion of any section of it, but the general consensus of the whole,'
which seems to be a hierophantic manner of saying that the policy of a
party is one thing, and the principle which makes it a party is another
thing, and that men who care very strongly about anything are to
surrender that and the hope of it, for the sake of succeeding in
something about which they care very little or not at all. This is our
modern way of giving politicians heart for their voyage, of inspiring
them with resoluteness and self-respect, with confidence in the worth of
their cause and enthusiasm for its success. Thoroughness is a mistake,
and nailing your flag to the mast a bit of delusive heroics. Think
wholly of to-day, and not at all of to-morrow. Beware of the high and
hold fast to the safe. Dismiss conviction, and study general consensus.
No zeal, no faith, no intellectual trenchancy, but as much low-minded
geniality and trivial complaisance as you please.
Of course, all these characteristics of our own society mark tendencies
that are common enough in all societies. They often spring from an
indolence and enervation that besets a certain number of people, however
invigorating the general mental climate may be. What we are now saying
is that the general mental climate itself has, outside of the domain of
physical science, ceased to be invigorating; that, on the contrary, it
fosters the more inglorious predispositions of men, and encourages a
native willingness, already so strong, to acquiesce in a lazy
accommodation with error, an ignoble economy of truth, and a vicious
compromise of the permanent gains of adhering to a sound general
principle, for the sake of the temporary gains of departing from it.
Without attempting an elaborate analysis of the causes that have brought
about this debilitation of mental tone, we may shortly remind ourselves
of one or two facts in the political history, in the intellectual
history, and in the religious history of this generation, which perhaps
help us to understand a phenomenon that we have all so keen an interest
both in understanding and in modifying.
To begin with what lies nearest to the surface. The most obvious agency
at work in the present exaggeration of the political standard as the
universal test of truth, is to be found in some contemporary incidents.
The influence of France upon England since the revolution of 1848 has
tended wholly to the discredit of abstract theory and general reasoning
among us, in all that relates to politics, morals, and religion. In
1848, not in 1789, questions affecting the fundamental structure and
organic condition of the social union came for the first time into
formidable prominence. For the first time those questions and the
answers to them were stated in articulate formulas and distinct
theories. They were not merely written in books; they so fascinated the
imagination and inflamed the hopes of the time, that thousands of men
were willing actually to go down into the streets and to shed their
blood for the realisation of their generous dream of a renovated
society. The same sight has been seen since, and even when we do not see
it, we are perfectly aware that the same temper is smouldering. Those
were premature attempts to convert a crude aspiration into a political
reality, and to found a new social order on a number of umcompromising
deductions from abstract principles of the common weal. They have had
the natural effect of deepening the English dislike of a general theory,
even when such a theory did no more than profess to announce a remote
object of desire, and not the present goal of immediate effort.
It is not only the Socialists who are responsible for the low esteem
into which a spirit of political generalisation has fallen in other
countries, in consequence of French experience. Mr. Mill has described
in a well-known passage the characteristic vice of the leaders of all
French parties, and not of the democratic party more than any other.
'The commonplaces of politics in France,' he says, 'are large and
sweeping practical maxims, from which, as ultimate premisses, men reason
downwards to particular applications, and this they call being logical
and consistent. For instance, they are perpetually arguing that such and
such a measure ought to be adopted, because it is a consequence of the
principle on which the form of government is founded; of the principle
of legitimacy, or the principle of the sovereignty of the people. To
which it may be answered that if these be really practical principles,
they must rest on speculative grounds; the sovereignty of the people
(for example) must be a right foundation for government, because a
government thus constituted tends to produce certain beneficial effects.
Inasmuch, however, as no government produces all possible beneficial
effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences; and
since these cannot be combated by means drawn from the very causes which
produce them, it would often be a much stronger recommendation of some
practical arrangement that it does not follow from what is called the
general principle of the government, than that it does,'[2]
The English feeling for compromise is on its better side the result of a
shrewd and practical, though informal, recognition of a truth which the
writer has here expressed in terms of Method. The disregard which the
political action of France has repeatedly betrayed of a principle really
so important has hitherto strengthened our own regard for it, until it
has not only made us look on its importance as exclusive and final, but
has extended our respect for the right kind of compromise to wrong and
injurious kinds.
A minor event, which now looks much less important than it did not many
years ago, but which still had real influence in deteriorating moral
judgment, was the career of a late sovereign of France. Some apparent
advantages followed for a season from a rule which had its origin in a
violent and perfidious usurpation, and which was upheld by all the arts
of moral corruption, political enervation, and military repression. The
advantages lasted long enough to create in this country a steady and
powerful opinion that Napoleon the Third's early crime was redeemed by
the seeming prosperity which followed. The shocking prematureness of
this shallow condonation is now too glaringly visible for any one to
deny it. Not often in history has the great truth that 'morality is the
nature of things' received corroboration so prompt and timely. We need
not commit ourselves to the optimistic or sentimental hypothesis that
wickedness always fares ill in the world, or on the other hand that
whoso hearkens diligently to the divine voice, and observes all the
commandments to do them, shall be blessed in his basket and his store
and all the work of his hand. The claims of morality to our allegiance,
so far as its precepts are solidly established, rest on the same
positive base as our faith in the truth of physical laws. Moral
principles, when they are true, are at bottom only registered
generalisations from experience. They record certain uniformities of
antecedence and consequence in the region of human conduct Want of faith
in the persistency of these uniformities is only a little less fatuous
in the moral order than a corresponding want of faith would instantly
disclose itself to be in the purely physical order. In both orders alike
there is only too much of this kind of fatuousness, this readiness to
believe that for once in our favour the stream shall flow up hill, that
we may live in miasmatic air unpoisoned, that a government may depress
the energy, the self-reliance, the public spirit of its citizens, and
yet be able to count on these qualities whenever the government itself
may have broken down, and left the country to make the best of such
resources as are left after so severe and prolonged a drain. This is the
sense in which morality is the nature of things. The system of the
Second Empire was in the same sense an immoral system. Unless all the
lessons of human experience were futile, and all the principles of
political morality mere articles of pedantry, such a system must
inevitably bring disaster, as we might have seen that it was sowing the
seeds of disaster. Yet because the catastrophe lingered, opinion in
England began to admit the possibility of evil being for this once good,
and to treat any reference to the moral and political principles which
condemned the imperial system, and all systems like it, beyond hope or
appeal, as simply the pretext of a mutinous or Utopian impatience.
This, however, is only one of the more superficial influences which have
helped and fallen in with the working of profounder causes of weakened
aspiration and impoverished moral energy, and of the substitution of
latitudinarian acquiescence and faltering conviction for the
whole-hearted assurance of better times. Of these deeper causes, the
most important in the intellectual development of the prevailing forms
of thought and sentiment is the growth of the Historic Method. Let us
consider very shortly how the abuse of this method, and an unauthorised
extension and interpretation of its conclusions, are likely to have had
something to do with the enervation of opinion.
The Historic Method may be described as the comparison of the forms of
an idea, or a usage, or a belief, at any given time, with the earlier
forms from which they were evolved, or the later forms into which they
were developed, and the establishment, from such a comparison, of an
ascending and descending order among the facts. It consists in the
explanation of existing parts in the frame of society by connecting them
with corresponding parts in some earlier frame; in the identification of
present forms in the past, and past forms in the present. Its main
process is the detection of corresponding customs, opinions, laws,
beliefs, among different communities, and a grouping of them into
general classes with reference to some one common feature. It is a
certain way of seeking answers to various questions of origin, resting
on the same general doctrine of evolution, applied to moral and social
forms, as that which is being applied with so much ingenuity to the
series of organic matter. The historic conception is a reference of
every state of society to a particular stage in the evolution of its
general conditions. Ideas of law, of virtue, of religion, of the
physical universe, of history, of the social union itself, all march in
a harmonious and inter-dependent order.
Curiosity with reference to origins is for various reasons the most
marked element among modern scientific tendencies. It covers the whole
field, moral, intellectual, and physical, from the smile or the frown on
a man's face, up to the most complex of the ideas in his mind; from the
expression of his emotions, to their root and relations with one another
in his inmost organisation. As an ingenious writer, too soon lost to our
political literature, has put it:--'If we wanted to describe one of the
most marked results, perhaps the most marked result, of late thought, we
should say that by it everything is made _an antiquity_. When in former
times our ancestors thought of an antiquarian, they described him as
occupied with coins and medals and Druids' stones. But now there are
other relics; indeed all matter is become such. Man himself has to the
eye of science become an antiquity. She tries to read, is beginning to
read, knows she ought to read, in the frame of each man the result of a
whole history of all his life, and what he is and what makes him so.'[3]
Character is considered less with reference to its absolute qualities
than as an interesting scene strewn with scattered rudiments, survivals,
inherited predispositions. Opinions are counted rather as phenomena to
be explained than as matters of truth and falsehood. Of usages, we are
beginning first of all to think where they came from, and secondarily
whether they are the most fitting and convenient that men could be got
to accept. In the last century men asked of a belief or a story, Is it
true? We now ask, How did men come to take it for true? In short the
relations among social phenomena which now engage most attention, are
relations of original source, rather than those of actual consistency in
theory and actual fitness in practice. The devotees of the current
method are more concerned with the pedigree and genealogical connections
of a custom or an idea than with its own proper goodness or badness, its
strength or its weakness.
Though there is no necessary or truly logical association between
systematic use of this method rightly limited, and a slack and slipshod
preference of vague general forms over definite ideas, yet every one can
see its tendency, if uncorrected, to make men shrink from importing
anything like absolute quality into their propositions. We can see also,
what is still worse, its tendency to place individual robustness and
initiative in the light of superfluities, with which a world that goes
by evolution can very well dispense. Men easily come to consider
clearness and positiveness in their opinions, staunchness in holding and
defending them, and fervour in carrying them into action, as equivocal
virtues of very doubtful perfection, in a state of things where every
abuse has after all had a defensible origin; where every error has, we
must confess, once been true relatively to other parts of belief in
those who held the error; and where all parts of life are so bound up
with one another, that it is of no avail to attack one evil, unless you
attack many more at the same time. This is a caricature of the real
teaching of the Historic Method, of which we shall have to speak
presently; but it is one of those caricatures which the natural sloth in
such matters, and the indigenous intellectual haziness of the majority
of men, make them very willing to take for the true philosophy of
things.
Then there is the newspaper press, that huge engine for keeping
discussion on a low level, and making the political test final. To take
off the taxes on knowledge was to place a heavy tax on broad and
independent opinion. The multiplication of journals 'delivering brawling
judgments unashamed on all things all day long,' has done much to deaden
the small stock of individuality in public verdicts. It has done much to
make vulgar ways of looking at things and vulgar ways of speaking of
them stronger and stronger, by formulating and repeating and
stereotyping them incessantly from morning until afternoon, and from
year's end to year's end. For a newspaper must live, and to live it must
please, and its conductors suppose, perhaps not altogether rightly, that
it can only please by being very cheerful towards prejudices, very
chilly to general theories, loftily disdainful to the men of a
principle. Their one cry to an advocate of improvement is some sagacious
silliness about recognising the limits of the practicable in politics,
and seeing the necessity of adapting theories to facts. As if the fact
of taking a broader and wiser view than the common crowd disqualifies a
man from knowing what the view of the common crowd happens to be, and
from estimating it at the proper value for practical purposes. Why are
the men who despair of improvement to be the only persons endowed with
the gift of discerning the practicable? It is, however, only too easy to
understand how a journal, existing for a day, should limit its view to
the possibilities of the day, and how, being most closely affected by
the particular, it should coldly turn its back upon all that is general.
And it is easy, too, to understand the reaction of this intellectual
timorousness upon the minds of ordinary readers, who have too little
natural force and too little cultivation to be able to resist the
narrowing and deadly effect of the daily iteration of short-sighted
commonplaces.
Far the most penetrating of all the influences that are impairing the
moral and intellectual nerve of our generation, remain still to be
mentioned. The first of these is the immense increase of material
prosperity, and the second is the immense decline in sincerity of
spiritual interest. The evil wrought by the one fills up the measure of
the evil wrought by the other. We have been, in spite of momentary
declensions, on a flood tide of high profits and a roaring trade, and
there is nothing like a roaring trade for engendering latitudinarians.
The effect of many possessions, especially if they be newly acquired, in
slackening moral vigour, is a proverb. Our new wealth is hardly leavened
by any tradition of public duty such as lingers among the English
nobles, nor as yet by any common custom of devotion to public causes,
such as seems to live and grow in the United States. Under such
conditions, with new wealth come luxury and love of ease and that fatal
readiness to believe that God has placed us in the best of possible
worlds, which so lowers men's aims and unstrings their firmness of
purpose. Pleasure saps high interests, and the weakening of high
interests leaves more undisputed room for pleasure. Management and
compromise appear among the permitted arts, because they tend to
comfort, and comfort is the end of ends, comprehending all ends. Not
truth is the standard, but the politic and the reputable. Are we to
suppose that it is firm persuasion of the greater scripturalness of
episcopacy that turns the second generation of dissenting manufacturers
in our busy Lancashire into churchmen? Certainly such conversions do no
violence to the conscience of the proselyte, for he is intellectually
indifferent, a spiritual neuter.
That brings us to the root of the matter, the serious side of a
revolution that in this social consequence is so unspeakably ignoble.
This root of the matter is the slow transformation now at work of the
whole spiritual basis of thought. Every age is in some sort an age of
transition, but our own is characteristically and cardinally an epoch of
transition in the very foundations of belief and conduct. The old hopes
have grown pale, the old fears dim; strong sanctions are become weak,
and once vivid faiths very numb. Religion, whatever destinies may be in
store for it, is at least for the present hardly any longer an organic
power. It is not that supreme, penetrating, controlling, decisive part
of a man's life, which it has been, and will be again. The work of
destruction is all the more perturbing to timorous spirits, and more
harassing even to doughtier spirits, for being done impalpably,
indirectly, almost silently and as if by unseen hands. Those who dwell
in the tower of ancient faiths look about them in constant
apprehension, misgiving, and wonder, with the hurried uneasy mien of
people living amid earthquakes. The air seems to their alarms to be full
of missiles, and all is doubt, hesitation, and shivering expectancy.
Hence a decisive reluctance to commit one's self. Conscience has lost
its strong and on-pressing energy, and the sense of personal
responsibility lacks sharpness of edge. The native hue of spiritual
resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of distracted, wavering,
confused thought. The souls of men have become void. Into the void have
entered in triumph the seven devils of Secularity.
And all this hesitancy, this tampering with conviction for fear of its
consequences, this want of faithful dealing in the highest matters, is
being intensified, aggravated, driven inwards like a fatal disorder
toward the vital parts, by the existence of a State Church. While
thought stirs and knowledge extends, she remains fast moored by ancient
formularies. While the spirit of man expands in search after new light,
and feels energetically for new truth, the spirit of the Church is
eternally entombed within the four corners of acts of parliament. Her
ministers vow almost before they have crossed the threshold of manhood
that they will search no more. They virtually swear that they will to
the end of their days believe what they believe then, before they have
had time either to think or to know the thoughts of others. They take
oath, in other words, to lead mutilated lives. If they cannot keep this
solemn promise, they have at least every inducement that ordinary human
motives can supply, to conceal their breach of it. The same system which
begins by making mental indolence a virtue and intellectual narrowness a
part of sanctity, ends by putting a premium on something too like
hypocrisy. Consider the seriousness of fastening up in these bonds some
thousands of the most instructed and intelligent classes in the country,
the very men who would otherwise be best fitted from position and
opportunities for aiding a little in the long, difficult, and plainly
inevitable work of transforming opinion. Consider the waste of
intelligence, and what is assuredly not less grave, the positive
dead-weight and thick obstruction, by which an official hierarchy so
organised must paralyse mental independence in a community.
We know the kind of man whom this system delights to honour. He was
described for us five and thirty years ago by a master hand. 'Mistiness
is the mother of wisdom. A man who can set down half a dozen general
propositions which escape from destroying one another only by being
diluted into truisms; who can hold the balance between opposites so
skilfully as to do without fulcrum or beam; who never enunciates a truth
without guarding himself against being supposed to exclude the
contradictory,--who holds that scripture is the only authority, yet that
the Church is to be deferred to, that faith only justifies, yet that it
does not justify without works, that grace does not depend upon the
sacraments, yet is not given without them, that bishops are a divine
ordinance, yet that those who have them not are in the same religious
condition as those who have,--this is your safe man and the hope of the
Church; this is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but
sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through
the channel of no meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and
No.'[4] The writer then thought that such a type could not endure, and
that the Church must become more real. On the contrary, her reality is
more phantom-like now than it was then. She is the sovereign pattern and
exemplar of management, of the triumph of the political method in
spiritual things, and of the subordination of ideas to the _status quo_.
It is true that all other organised priesthoods are also bodies which
move within formularies even more inelastic than those of the
Establishment. But then they have not the same immense social power, nor
the same temptations to make all sacrifices to preserve it. They affect
the intellectual temper of large numbers of people, but the people whom
they affect are not so strongly identified with the greater organs of
the national life. The State Church is bound up in the minds of the most
powerful classes with a given ordering of social arrangements, and the
consequence of this is that the teachers of the Church have reflected
back upon thorn a sense of responsibility for these arrangements, which
obscures their spirituality, clogs their intellectual energy and mental
openness, and turns them into a political army of obstruction to new
ideas. They feel themselves to a certain extent discharged from the
necessity of recognising the tremendous conflict in the region of belief
that goes on around them, just as if they were purely civil
administrators, concerned only with the maintenance of the present
order. None of this is true of the private Churches. Their teachers and
members regard belief as something wholly independent of the civil
ordering of things. However little enlightened in some respects, however
hostile to certain of the ideas by which it is sought to replace their
own, they are at least representatives of the momentous principle of our
individual responsibility for the truth of our opinions. They may bring
their judgments to conclusions that are less in accord with modern
tendencies than those of one or two schools that still see their way to
subscribing Anglican articles and administering Anglican rites. At any
rate, they admit that the use of his judgment is a duty incumbent on the
individual, and a duty to be discharged without reference to any
external considerations whatever, political or otherwise. This is an
elevating, an exhilarating principle, however deficiencies of culture
may have narrowed the sphere of its operations. It is because a State
Church is by its very conception hostile to such a principle, that we
are justified in counting it apart from the private Churches with all
their faults, and placing it among the agencies that weaken the vigour
of a national conscience and check the free play and access of
intellectual light.
Here we may leave the conditions that have made an inquiry as to some of
the limits of compromise, which must always be an interesting and
important subject, one of especial interest and importance to ourselves
at present. Is any renovation of the sacredness of principle a possible
remedy for some of these elements of national deterioration? They will
not disappear until the world has grown into possession of a new
doctrine. When that comes, all other good things will follow. What we
have to remember is that the new doctrine itself will never come, except
to spirits predisposed to their own liberation. Our day of small
calculations and petty utilities must first pass away; our vision of the
true expediencies must reach further and deeper; our resolution to
search for the highest verities, to give up all and follow them, must
first become the supreme part of ourselves.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: See below, ch. iii.]
[Footnote 2: _System of Logic_, bk. vi. ch. xi.]
[Footnote 3: Bagehot.]
[Footnote 4: Dr. J.H. Newman's _Essays Critical and Historical_, vol. i.
p. 301.]