The tendency to regard morals rather in their positive than their
negative aspects, and to estimate men by the good they do in the world,
is a healthy element in modern life. A strong sense of the obligation of
a full, active, and useful life is the best safeguard both of individual
and national morals at a time when the dissolution or enfeeblement of
theological beliefs is disturbing the foundations on which most current
moral teaching has been based. In the field of morals action holds a
much larger place than reasoning--a larger place even in elucidating our
difficulties and illuminating the path on which we should go. It is by
the active pursuit of an immediate duty that the vista of future duties
becomes most clear, and those who are most immersed in active duties are
usually little troubled with the perplexities of life, or with minute
and paralysing scruples. A public opinion which discourages idleness and
places high the standard of public duty is especially valuable in an age
when the tendency to value wealth, and to measure dignity by wealth, has
greatly increased, and when wealth in some of its most important forms
has become wholly dissociated from special duties. The duties of the
landlord who is surrounded by a poor and in some measure dependent
tenantry, the duties of the head of a great factory or shop who has a
large number of workmen or dependents in his employment, are
sufficiently obvious, though even in these spheres the tie of duty has
been greatly relaxed by the growing spirit of independence, which makes
each class increasingly jealous of the interference of others, and by
the growing tendency of legislation to regulate all relations of
business and contracts by definite law instead of leaving them, as in
the past, to voluntary action. But there are large classes of fortunes
which are wholly, or almost wholly, dissociated from special and
definite duties. The vast and ever-increasing multitude whose incomes
are derived from national, or provincial, or municipal debts, or who are
shareholders or debenture-holders in great commercial and industrial
undertakings, have little or no practical control over, or interest in,
those from whom their fortunes are derived. The multiplication of such
fortunes is one of the great characteristics of our time, and it brings
with it grave dangers. Such fortunes give unrivalled opportunities of
luxurious idleness, and as in themselves they bring little or no social
influence or position, those who possess them are peculiarly tempted to
seek such a position by an ostentation of wealth and luxury which has a
profoundly vulgarising and demoralising influence upon Society. The
tendency of idleness to lead to immorality has long been a commonplace
of moralists. Perhaps our own age has seen more clearly than those that
preceded it that complete and habitual idleness _is_ immorality, and
that when the circumstances of his life do not assign to a man a
definite sphere of work it is his first duty to find it for himself. It
has been happily said that in the beginning of the reign of Queen
Victoria young men in England who were really busy affected idleness,
and at the close of the reign young men who are really idle pretend to
be busy. In my own opinion, a disproportionate amount of English energy
takes political forms, and there is a dangerous exaggeration in the
prevailing tendency to combat all social and moral abuses by Acts of
Parliament. But there are multitudes of other and less obtrusive spheres
of work adapted to all grades of intellect and to many types of
character, in which men who possess the inestimable boon of leisure can
find abundant and useful fields for the exercise of their powers.
The rectification of moral judgments is one of the most important
elements of civilisation; it is upon this that the possibility of moral
progress on a large scale chiefly depends. Few things pervert men more
than the habit of regarding as enviable persons or qualities injurious
to Society. The most obvious example is the passionate admiration
bestowed on a brilliant conqueror, which is often quite irrespective of
the justice of his wars and of the motives that actuated him. This false
moral feeling has acquired such a strength that overwhelming military
power almost certainly leads to a career of ambition. Perverted public
opinion is the main cause. Glory, not interest, is the lure, or at least
the latter would be powerless if it were not accompanied by the
former--if the execration of mankind naturally followed unscrupulous
aggression.
Another and scarcely less flagrant instance of the worship of false
ideals is to be found in the fierce competition of luxury and
ostentation which characterises the more wealthy cities of Europe and
America. It is no exaggeration to say that in a single festival in
London or New York sums are often expended in the idlest and most
ephemeral ostentation which might have revived industry, or extinguished
pauperism, or alleviated suffering over a vast area. The question of
expenditure on luxuries is no doubt a question of degree which cannot be
reduced to strict rule, and there are many who will try to justify the
most ostentatious expenditure on the ground of the employment it gives
and of other incidental advantages it is supposed to produce. But
nothing in political economy is more certain than that the vast and
ever-increasing expenditure on the luxury of ostentation in modern
societies, by withdrawing great masses of capital from productive
labour, is a grave economical evil, and there is probably no other form
of expenditure which, in proportion to its amount, gives so little real
pleasure and confers so little real good. Its evil in setting up
material and base standards of excellence, in stimulating the worst
passions that grow out of an immoderate love of wealth, in ruining many
who are tempted into a competition which they are unable to support, can
hardly be overrated. It is felt in every rank in raising the standard of
conventional expenses, excluding from much social intercourse many who
are admirably fitted to adorn it, and introducing into all society a
lower and more material tone. Nor are these its only consequences.
Wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts,
or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to
their cost, will never excite serious indignation. It is the colossal
waste of the means of human happiness in the most selfish and most
vulgar forms of social advertisement and competition that gives a force
and almost a justification to anarchical passions which menace the
whole future of our civilisation. It is such things that stimulate class
hatreds and deepen class divisions, and if the law of opinion does not
interfere to check them they will one day bring down upon the society
that encourages them a signal and well-merited retribution.
A more recognised, though probably not really more pernicious example of
false ideals, is to be found in the glorification of the _demi-monde_,
which is so conspicuous in some societies and literatures. In a healthy
state of opinion, the public, ostentatious appearance of such persons,
without any concealment of their character, in the great concourse of
fashion and among the notabilities of the State, would appear an
intolerable scandal, and it becomes much worse when they give the tone
to fashion and become the centres and the models of large and by no
means undistinguished sections of Society. The evils springing from this
public glorification of the class are immeasurably greater than the
evils arising from its existence. The standard of popular morals is
debased. Temptation in its most seductive form is forced upon
inflammable natures, and the most pernicious of all lessons is taught to
poor, honest, hard-working women. It is indeed wonderful that in
societies where this evil prevails so much virtue should still exist
among graceful, attractive women of the shopkeeping and servant class
when they continually see before them members of their own class, by
preferring vice to virtue, rising at once to wealth, luxury and
idleness, and even held up as objects of admiration or imitation.
In judging wisely the characters of men, one of the first things to be
done is to understand their ideals. Try to find out what kind of men or
of life; what qualities, what positions seem to them the most desirable.
Men do not always fully recognise their own ideals, for education and
the conventionalities of Society oblige them to assert a preference for
that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful
examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or
qualities or circumstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous,
magnetic power over them--whether they really value supremely rank or
position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of
character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key
to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent
tendencies of his imagination, his essential nobility or meanness, are
thus disclosed more effectually than by any other means. A man with high
ideals, who admires wisely and nobly, is never wholly base though he may
fall into great vices. A man who worships the baser elements is in truth
an idolater though he may have never bowed before an image of stone.
The human mind has much more power of distinguishing between right and
wrong, and between true and false, than of estimating with accuracy the
comparative gravity of opposite evils. It is nearly always right in
judging between right and wrong. It is generally wrong in estimating
degrees of guilt, and the root of its error lies in the extreme
difficulty of putting ourselves into the place of those whose characters
or circumstances are radically different from our own. This want of
imagination acts widely on our judgment of what is good as well as of
what is bad. Few men have enough imagination to realise types of
excellence altogether differing from their own. It is this, much more
than vanity, that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which
they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are
altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible. It is,
perhaps, most difficult of all to realise the difference of character
and especially of moral sensibility produced by a profound difference of
circumstances. This difficulty largely falsifies our judgments of the
past, and it is the reason why a powerful imagination enabling us to
realise very various characters and very remote circumstances is one of
the first necessities of a great historian. Historians rarely make
sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments and
dispositions even of the best men are coloured by the moral tone of the
time, society and profession in which they lived. Yet it is probable
that on the whole we estimate more justly the characters of the past
than of the present. No one would judge the actions of Charlemagne or of
his contemporaries by the strict rules of nineteenth-century ethics. We
feel that though they committed undoubted crimes, these crimes are at
least indefinitely less heinous than they would have been under the
wholly different circumstances and moral atmosphere of our own day. Yet
we seldom apply this method of reasoning to the different strata of the
same society. Men who have been themselves brought up amid all the
comforts and all the moralising and restraining influences of a refined
society, will often judge the crimes of the wretched pariahs of
civilisation as if their acts were in no degree palliated by their
position. They say to themselves 'How guilty should I have been if I
had done this thing,' and their verdict is quite just according to this
statement of the case. They realise the nature of the act. They utterly
fail to realise the character and circumstances of the actor.
And yet it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difference between the
position of such a critic and that of the children of drunken, ignorant
and profligate parents, born to abject poverty in the slums of our great
cities. From their earliest childhood drunkenness, blasphemy,
dishonesty, prostitution, indecency of every form are their most
familiar experiences. All the social influences, such as they are, are
influences of vice. As they grow up Life seems to them to present little
more than the alternative of hard, ill-paid, and at the same time
precarious labour, probably ending in the poor-house, or crime with its
larger and swifter gains, and its intervals of coarse pleasure probably,
though not certainly, followed by the prison or an early death. They see
indeed, like figures in a dream, or like beings of another world, the
wealthy and the luxurious spending their wealth and their time in many
kinds of enjoyment, but to the very poor pleasure scarcely comes except
in the form of the gin palace or perhaps the low music hall. And in many
cases they have come into this reeking atmosphere of temptation and vice
with natures debased and enfeebled by a long succession of vicious
hereditary influences, with weak wills, with no faculties of mind or
character that can respond to any healthy ambition; with powerful inborn
predispositions to evil. The very mould of their features, the very
shape of their skulls, marks them out as destined members of the
criminal class. Even here, no doubt, there is a difference between right
and wrong; there is scope for the action of free will; there are just
causes of praise and blame, and Society rightly protects itself by
severe penalties against the crimes that are most natural; but what
human judge can duly measure the scale of moral guilt? or what
comparison can there be between the crimes that are engendered by such
circumstances and those which spring up in the homes of refined and
well-regulated comfort?
Nor indeed even in this latter case is a really accurate judgment
possible. Men are born into the world with both wills and passions of
varying strength, though in mature life the strength or weakness of each
is largely due to their own conduct. With different characters the same
temptation, operating under the same external circumstances, has
enormously different strength, and very few men can fully realise the
strength of a passion which they have never themselves experienced. To
repeat an illustration I have already used, how difficult is it for a
constitutionally sober man to form in his own mind an adequate
conception of the force of the temptation of drink to a dipsomaniac, or
for a passionless man to conceive rightly the temptations of a
profoundly sensual nature! I have spoken in a former chapter of the
force with which bodily conditions act upon happiness. Their influence
on morals is not less terrible. There are diseases well known to
physicians which make the most placid temper habitually irritable;
give a morbid turn to the healthiest disposition; fill the purest
mind with unholy thoughts. There are others which destroy the force
of the strongest will and take from character all balance and
self-control.[23] It often happens that we have long been blaming a man
for manifest faults of character till at last suicide, or the disclosure
of some grave bodily or mental disease which has long been working
unperceived, explains his faults and turns our blame into pity. In
madness the whole moral character is sometimes reversed, and tendencies
which have been in sane life dormant or repressed become suddenly
supreme. In such cases we all acknowledge that there is no moral
responsibility, but madness, with its illusions and irresistible
impulses, and idiocy with its complete suspension of the will and of the
judgment, are neither of them, as lawyers would pretend, clearly defined
states, marked out by sharp and well-cut boundaries, wholly distinct
from sanity. There are incipient stages; there are gradual
approximations; there are twilight states between sanity and insanity
which are clearly recognised not only by experts but by all sagacious
men of the world. There are many who are not sufficiently mad to be shut
up, or to be deprived of the management of their properties, or to be
exempted from punishment if they have committed a crime, but who, in the
common expressive phrase, 'are not all there'--whose eccentricities,
illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are
hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are
manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in
questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest
perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard
as well-balanced and well-developed natures.
The inference to be drawn from such facts is certainly not that there is
no such thing as free will and personal responsibility, nor yet that we
have no power of judging the acts of others and distinguishing among our
fellowmen between the good and the bad. The true lesson is the extreme
fallibility of our moral judgments whenever we attempt to measure
degrees of guilt. Sometimes men are even unjust to their own past from
their incapacity in age of realising the force of the temptations they
had experienced in youth. On the other hand, increased knowledge of the
world tends to make us more sensible of the vast differences between the
moral circumstances of men, and therefore less confident and more
indulgent in our judgments of others. There are men whose cards in life
are so bad, whose temptations to vice, either from circumstances or
inborn character, seem so overwhelming, that, though we may punish, and
in a certain sense blame, we can scarcely look on them as more
responsible than some noxious wild beast. Among the terrible facts of
life none is indeed more terrible than this. Every believer in the wise
government of the world must have sometimes realised with a crushing or
at least a staggering force the appalling injustices of life as shown in
the enormous differences in the distribution of unmerited happiness and
misery. But the disparity of moral circumstances is not less. It has
shaken the faith of many. It has even led some to dream of a possible
Heaven for the vicious where those who are born into the world with a
physical constitution rendering them fierce or cruel, or sensual, or
cowardly, may be freed from the nature which was the cause of their
vice and their suffering upon earth; where due allowance may be made for
the differences of circumstances which have plunged one man deeper and
ever deeper into crime, and enabled another, who was not really better
or worse, to pass through life with no serious blemish, and to rise
higher and higher in the moral scale.
Imperfect, however, as is our power of judging others, it is a power we
are all obliged to exercise. It is impossible to exclude the
considerations of moral guilt and of palliating or aggravating
circumstances from the penal code, and from the administration of
justice, though it cannot be too clearly maintained that the criminal
code is not coextensive with the moral code, and that many things which
are profoundly immoral lie beyond its scope. On the whole it should be
as much as possible confined to acts by which men directly injure
others. In the case of adult men, private vices, vices by which no one
is directly affected, except by his own free will, and in which the
elements of force or fraud are not present, should not be brought within
its range. This ideal, it is true, cannot be fully attained. The
legislator must take into account the strong pressure of public opinion.
It is sometimes true that a penal law may arrest, restrict, or prevent
the revival of some private vice without producing any countervailing
evil. But the presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary
acts of adult men when those acts injure no one except themselves. The
social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much
further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or
realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too
severely the crimes of passion and of drink, as well as those which
spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great
ignorance. The causes of domestic anarchy are usually of such an
intimate nature and involve so many unknown or imperfectly realised
elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men
attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is
usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy,
malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and
ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes are
unpunished by law.
It is a mere commonplace of morals that in the path of evil it is the
first step that costs the most. The shame, the repugnance, and the
remorse which attend the first crime speedily fade, and on every
repetition the habit of evil grows stronger. A process of the same kind
passes over our judgments. Few things are more curious than to observe
how the eye accommodates itself to a new fashion of dress, however
unbecoming; how speedily men, or at least women, will adopt a new and
artificial standard and instinctively and unconsciously admire or blame
according to this standard and not according to any genuine sense of
beauty or the reverse. Few persons, however pure may be their natural
taste, can live long amid vulgar and vulgarising surroundings without
losing something of the delicacy of their taste and learning to
accept--if not with pleasure, at least with acquiescence--things from
which under other circumstances they would have recoiled. In the same
way, both individuals and societies accommodate themselves but too
readily to lower moral levels, and a constant vigilance is needed to
detect the forms or directions in which individual and national
character insensibly deteriorate.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Volonté_, pp. 92, 116-119.