Though the close relationship that subsists between morals and happiness
is universally acknowledged, I do not belong to the school which
believes that pleasure and pain, either actual or anticipated, are the
only motives by which the human will can be governed; that virtue
resolves itself ultimately into well-considered interest and finds its
ultimate reason in the happiness of those who practise it; that 'all our
virtues,' as La Rochefoucauld has said, 'end in self-love as the rivers
in the sea.' Such a proverb as 'Honesty is the best policy' represents
no doubt a great truth, though it has been well said that no man is
really honest who is only honest through this motive, and though it is
very evident that it is by no means an universal truth but depends
largely upon changing and precarious conditions of laws, police, public
opinion, and individual circumstances. But in the higher realms of
morals the coincidence of happiness and virtue is far more doubtful. It
is certainly not true that the highest nature is necessarily or even
naturally the happiest. Paganism has produced no more perfect type than
the profoundly pathetic figure of Marcus Aurelius, while Christianity
finds its ideal in one who was known as the 'Man of Sorrows.' The
conscience of Mankind has ever recognised self-sacrifice as the supreme
element of virtue, and self-sacrifice is never real when it is only the
exchange of a less happiness for a greater one. No moral chemistry can
transmute the worship of Sorrow, which Goethe described as the essence
of Christianity, into the worship of happiness, and probably with most
men health and temperament play a far larger part in the real happiness
of their lives than any of the higher virtues. The satisfaction of
accomplished duty which some moralists place among the chief pleasures
of life is a real thing in so far as it saves men from internal
reproaches, but it is probable that it is among the worst men that pangs
of conscience are least dreaded, and it is certainly not among the best
men that they are least felt. Conscience, indeed, when it is very
sensitive and very lofty, is far more an element of suffering than the
reverse. It aims at an ideal higher than we can attain. It takes the
lowest view of our own achievements. It suffers keenly from the many
shortcomings of which it is acutely sensible. Far from indulging in the
pleasurable retrospect of a well-spent life, it urges men to constant,
painful, and often unsuccessful effort. A nature that is strung to the
saintly or the heroic level will find itself placed in a jarring world,
will provoke much friction and opposition, and will be pained by many
things in which a lower nature would placidly acquiesce. The highest
form of intellectual virtue is that love of truth for its own sake which
breaks up prejudices, tempers enthusiasm by the full admission of
opposing arguments and qualifying circumstances, and places in the
sphere of possibility or probability many things which we would gladly
accept as certainties. Candour and impartiality are in a large degree
virtues of temperament; but no one who has any real knowledge of human
nature can doubt how much more pleasurable it is to most men to live
under the empire of invincible prejudice, deliberately shutting out
every consideration that could shake or qualify cherished beliefs.
'God,' says Emerson, 'offers to every mind its choice between truth and
repose. Take which you please. You can never have both.' One of the
strongest arguments of natural religion rests upon the fact that virtue
so often fails to bring its reward; upon the belief that is so deeply
implanted in human nature that this is essentially unjust and must in
some future state be remedied.
For such reasons as these I believe it to be impossible to identify
virtue with happiness, and the views of the opposite school seem to me
chiefly to rest upon an unnatural and deceptive use of words. Even when
the connection between virtue and pleasure is most close, it is true, as
the old Stoics said, that though virtue gives pleasure, this is not the
reason why a good man will practise it; that pleasure is the companion
and not the guide of his life; that he does not love virtue because it
gives pleasure, but it gives pleasure because he loves it.[8] A true
account of human nature will recognise that it has the power of aiming
at something which is different from happiness and something which may
be intelligibly described as higher, and that on the predominance of
this loftier aim the nobility of life essentially depends. It is not
even true that the end of man should be to find peace at the last. It
should be to do his duty and tell the truth.
But while this great truth of the existence of a higher aim than
happiness should be always maintained, the relations between morals and
happiness are close and intimate and well worthy of investigation. As
far as the lower or more commonplace virtues are concerned there can be
no mistake. It is very evident that a healthy, long and prosperous life
is more likely to be attained by industry, moderation and purity than by
the opposite courses. It is very evident that drunkenness and sensuality
ruin health and shorten life; that idleness, gambling and disorderly
habits ruin prosperity; that ill-temper, selfishness and envy kill
friendship and provoke animosities and dislike; that in every
well-regulated society there is at least a general coincidence between
the path of duty and the path of prosperity; dishonesty, violence and
disregard for the rights of others naturally and usually bringing their
punishment either from law or from public opinion or from both. Bishop
Butler has argued that the general tendency of virtue to lead to
happiness and the general tendency of vice to lead to unhappiness prove
that even in its present state there is a moral government of the world,
and whatever controversy may be raised about the inference there can at
least be no doubt about the substantial truth of the facts. Happiness,
as I have already said, is best attained when it is not the direct or at
least the main object that is aimed at. A wasted and inactive life not
only palls in itself but deprives men of the very real and definite
pleasure that naturally arises from the healthful activity of all our
powers, while a life of egotism excludes the pleasures of sympathy which
play so large a part in human happiness. One of the lessons which
experience most clearly teaches is that work, duty and the discipline of
character are essential elements of lasting happiness. The pleasures of
vice are often real, but they are commonly transient and they leave
legacies of suffering, weakness, or care behind them. The nobler
pleasures for the most part grow and strengthen with advancing years.
The passions of youth, when duly regulated, gradually transform
themselves into habits, interests and steady affections, and it is in
the long forecasts of life that the superiority of virtue as an element
of happiness becomes most apparent.
It has been truly said that such words as 'pastime' and 'diversion'
applied to our pleasures are among the most melancholy in the language,
for they are the confession of human nature that it cannot find
happiness in itself, but must seek for something that will fill up time,
will cover the void which it feels, and divert men's thoughts from the
conditions and prospects of their own lives. How much of the pleasure of
Society, and indeed of all amusements, depends on their power of making
us forget ourselves! The substratum of life is sad, and few men who
reflect on the dangers and uncertainties that surround it can find it
even tolerable without much extraneous aid. The first and most vital of
these aids is to be found in the creation of strong interests. It is one
of the laws of our being that by seeking interests rather than by
seeking pleasures we can best encounter the gloom of life. But those
only have the highest efficiency which are of an unselfish nature. By
throwing their whole nature into the interests of others men most
effectually escape the melancholy of introspection; the horizon of life
is enlarged; the development of the moral and sympathetic feelings
chases egotistic cares, and by the same paradox that we have seen in
other parts of human nature men best attain their own happiness by
absorbing themselves in the pursuit of the happiness of others.
The aims and perspective of a well-regulated life have never, I think,
been better described than in one of the letters of Burke to the Duke of
Richmond. 'It is wise indeed, considering the many positive vexations
and the innumerable bitter disappointments of pleasure in the world, to
have as many resources of satisfaction as possible within one's power.
Whenever we concentre the mind on one sole object, that object and life
itself must go together. But though it is right to have reserves of
employment, still some one object must be kept principal; greatly and
eminently so; and the other masses and figures must preserve their due
subordination, to make out the grand composition of an important
life.'[9] It is equally true that among these objects the disinterested
and the unselfish should hold a predominant place. With some this side
of their activity is restricted to the narrow circle of home or to the
isolated duties and charities of their own neighbourhood. With others it
takes the form of large public interests, of a keen participation in
social, philanthropic, political or religious enterprises. Character
plays a larger part than intellect in the happiness of life, and the
cultivation of the unselfish part of our nature is not only one of the
first lessons of morals but also of wisdom.
Like most other things its difficulties lie at the beginning, and it is
by steady practice that it passes into a second and instinctive nature.
The power of man to change organically his character is a very limited
one, but on the whole the improvement of character is probably more
within his reach than intellectual development. Time and Opportunity are
wanting to most men for any considerable intellectual study, and even
were it otherwise every man will find large tracts of knowledge and
thought wholly external to his tastes, aptitudes and comprehension. But
every one can in some measure learn the lesson of self-sacrifice,
practise what is right, correct or at least mitigate his dominant
faults. What fine examples of self-sacrifice, quiet courage, resignation
in misfortune, patient performance of painful duty, magnanimity and
forgiveness under injury may be often found among those who are
intellectually the most commonplace!
The insidious growth of selfishness is a disease against which men
should be most on their guard; but it is a grave though a common error
to suppose that the unselfish instincts may be gratified without
restraint. There is here, however, one important distinction to be
noted. The many and great evils that have sprung from lavish and
ill-considered charities do not always or perhaps generally spring from
any excess or extravagance of the charitable feeling. They are much more
commonly due to its defect. The rich man who never cares to inquire into
the details of the cases that are brought before him or to give any
serious thought to the ulterior consequences of his acts, but who is
ready to give money at any solicitation and who considers that by so
doing he has discharged his duty, is far more likely to do harm in this
way than the man who devotes himself to patient, plodding, house to
house work among the poor. The many men and the probably still larger
number of women who give up great portions of their lives to such work
soon learn to trace with considerable accuracy the consequences of their
charities and to discriminate between the worthy and the unworthy. That
such persons often become exclusive and one-sided, and acquire a kind of
professional bent which induces them to subordinate all national
considerations to their own subject and lose sight of the true
proportion of things, is undoubtedly true, but it will probably not be
found with the best workers that such a life tends to unduly intensify
emotion. As Bishop Butler has said with profound truth, active habits
are strengthened and passive impressions weakened by repetition, and a
life spent in active charitable work is quite compatible with much
sobriety and even coldness of judgment in estimating each case as it
arises. It is not the surgeon who is continually employed in operations
for the cure of his patients who is most moved at the sight of
suffering.
This is, I believe, on the whole true, but it is also true that there
are grave diseases which attach themselves peculiarly to the unselfish
side of our nature, and they are peculiarly dangerous because men,
feeling that the unselfish is the virtuous and nobler side of their
being, are apt to suffer these tendencies to operate without supervision
or control. Yet it is hardly possible to exaggerate the calamities that
have sprung from misjudged unselfish actions. The whole history of
religious persecution abundantly illustrates it, for there can be
little question that a large proportion of the persecutors were
sincerely seeking what they believed to be the highest good of mankind.
And if this dark page of human history is now almost closed, there are
still many other ways in which a similar evil is displayed. Crotchets,
sentimentalities and fanaticisms cluster especially around the unselfish
side of our nature, and they work evil in many curious and subtle ways.
Few things have done more harm in the world than disproportioned
compassion. It is a law of our being that we are only deeply moved by
sufferings we distinctly realise, and the degrees in which different
kinds of suffering appeal to the imagination bear no proportion to their
real magnitude. The most benevolent man will read of an earthquake in
Japan or a plague in South America with a callousness he would never
display towards some untimely death or some painful accident in his
immediate neighbourhood, and in general the suffering of a prominent and
isolated individual strikes us much more forcibly than that of an
undistinguished multitude. Few deaths are so prominent, and therefore
few produce such widespread compassion, as those of conspicuous
criminals. It is no exaggeration to say that the death of an
'interesting' murderer will often arouse much stronger feelings than
were ever excited by the death of his victim; or by the deaths of brave
soldiers who perished by disease or by the sword in some obscure
expedition in a remote country. This mode of judgment acts promptly upon
conduct. The humanitarian spirit which mitigates the penal code and
makes the reclamation of the criminal a main object is a perfectly
right thing as long as it does not so far diminish the deterrent power
of punishment as to increase crime, and as long as it does not place the
criminal in a better position of comfort than the blameless poor, but
when these conditions are not fulfilled it is much more an evil than a
good. The remote, indirect and unrealised consequences of our acts are
often far more important than those which are manifest and direct, and
it continually happens that in extirpating some concentrated and
obtrusive evil, men increase or engender a diffused malady which
operates over a far wider area. How few, for example, who share the
prevailing tendency to deal with every evil that appears in Society by
coercive legislation adequately realise the danger of weakening the
robust, self-reliant, resourceful habits on which the happiness of
Society so largely depends, and at the same time, by multiplying the
functions and therefore increasing the expenses of government, throwing
new and crushing burdens on struggling industry! How often have
philanthropists, through a genuine interest for some suffering class or
people, advocated measures which by kindling, prolonging, or enlarging a
great war would infallibly create calamities far greater than those
which they would redress! How often might great outbursts of savage
crime or grave and lasting disorders in the State, or international
conflicts that have cost thousands of lives, have been averted by a
prompt and unflinching severity from which an ill-judged humanity
recoiled! If in the February of 1848 Louis Philippe had permitted
Marshal Bugeaud to fire on the Revolutionary mob at a time when there
was no real and widespread desire for revolution in France, how many
bloody pages of French and European history might have been spared!
Measures guaranteeing men, and still more women, from excessive labour,
and surrounding them with costly sanitary precautions, may easily, if
they are injudiciously framed, so handicap a sex or a people in the
competition of industry as to drive them out of great fields of
industry, restrict their means of livelihood, lower their standard of
wages and comfort, and thus seriously diminish the happiness of their
lives. Injudicious suppressions of amusements that are not wholly good,
but which afford keen enjoyment to great masses, seldom fail to give an
impulse to other pleasures more secret and probably more vicious.
Injudicious charities, or an extravagant and too indulgent poor law
administration, inevitably discourage industry and thrift, and usually
increase the poverty they were intended to cure. The parent who shrinks
from inflicting any suffering on his child, or withholding from him any
pleasure that he desires, is not laying the foundation of a happy life,
and the benevolence which counteracts or obscures the law of nature that
extravagance, improvidence and vice lead naturally to ruin, is no real
kindness either to the upright man who has resisted temptation or to the
weak man whose virtue is trembling doubtfully in the balance. Nor is it
in the long run for the benefit of the world that superior ability or
superior energy or industry should be handicapped in the race of life,
forbidden to encounter exceptional risks for the sake of exceptional
rewards, reduced by regulations to measures of work and gain intended
for the benefit of inferior characters or powers.
The fatal vice of ill-considered benevolence is that it looks only to
proximate and immediate results without considering either alternatives
or distant and indirect consequences. A large and highly respectable
form of benevolence is that connected with the animal world, and in
England it is carried in some respects to a point which is unknown on
the Continent. But what a strange form of compassion is that which long
made it impossible to establish a Pasteur Institute in England, obliging
patients threatened with one of the most horrible diseases that can
afflict mankind to go--as they are always ready to do--to Paris, in
order to undergo a treatment which what is called the humane sentiment
of Englishmen forbid them to receive at home! What a strange form of
benevolence is that which in a country where field sports are the
habitual amusement of the higher ranks of Society denounces as criminal
even the most carefully limited and supervised experiments on living
animals, and would thus close the best hope of finding remedies for some
of the worst forms of human suffering, the one sure method of testing
supposed remedies which may be fatal or which may be of incalculable
benefit to mankind! Foreign critics, indeed, often go much further and
believe that in other forms connected with this subject public opinion
in England is strangely capricious and inconsistent. They compare with
astonishment the sentences that are sometimes passed for the
ill-treatment of a woman and for the ill-treatment of a cat; they ask
whether the real sufferings caused by many things that are in England
punished by law or reprobated by opinion are greater than those caused
by sports which are constantly practised without reproach; and they are
apt to find much that is exaggerated or even fantastic in the great
popularity and elaboration of some animal charities.[10] At the same
time in our own country the more recognised field sports greatly trouble
many benevolent natures. I will here only say that while the positive
benefits they produce are great and manifest, those who condemn them
constantly forget what would be the fate of the animals that are
slaughtered if such sports did not exist, and how little the balance of
suffering is increased or altered by the destruction of beings which
themselves live by destroying. As a poet says--
The fish exult whene'er the seagull dies,
The salmon's death preserves a thousand flies.
On most of these questions the effect on human character is a more
important consideration than the effect on animal happiness. The best
thing that legislation can do for wild animals is to extend as far as
possible to harmless classes a close time, securing them immunity while
they are producing and supporting their young. This is the truest
kindness, and on quite other grounds it is peculiarly needed, as the
improvement of firearms and the increase of population have completely
altered, as far as man is concerned, the old balance between production
and destruction, and threaten, if unchecked, to lead to an almost
complete extirpation of great classes of the animal world. It is
melancholy to observe how often sensitive women who object to field
sports and who denounce all experiments on living animals will be found
supporting with perfect callousness fashions that are leading to the
wholesale destruction of some of the most beautiful species of birds,
and are in some cases dependent upon acts of very aggravated cruelty.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Seneca, _De Vita Beata_.
[9] Burke's _Correspondence_, i. 376, 377.
[10] As I am writing these pages I find the following paragraph in a
newspaper which may illustrate my meaning:--'DOGS' NURSING. A case was
heard at the Brompton County Court on Friday in which some suggestive
evidence was given of the medical treatment of dogs. The proprietor of a
dogs' infirmary at Tattersall's Corner sued Mr. Harding Cox for the
board and lodging of seven dogs, and the _régime_ was explained. They
are fed on essence of meat, washed down with port wine, and have as a
digestive eggs beaten up in milk and arrowroot. Medicated baths and
tonics are also supplied, and occasionally the animals are treated to a
day in the country. This course of hygiene necessitated an expenditure
of ten shillings a week. The defendant pleaded that the charges were
excessive, but the judge awarded the plaintiff £25. How many hospital
patients receive such treatment?'--_Daily Express_, February 16, 1897.