II

The goal of ethics, on the other hand, is to discover the most

organised system of ends, of goods, which a rational life can realise.

This goal of ethics can never be fully achieved, for so long as man

acts and reflects he may pursue and conceive novel ends. But though

the most elaborate system of ethics is in origin an expression of

personal preferences, it is not therefore arbitrary and unjustifiable

by reason. My values have their roots in my nature. I can exhibit

them, demonstrate that they are mutually consistent and do not defeat

the interests which underlie them. Furthermore I can declare that if

any one honestly questioned his heart he might find that my values

represented it. It is not to psychology, then, that one must turn for

knowledge of human goods. For psychology, although it may analyse the

efficient causes of desire, cannot estimate the value of its objects,

of the ideal form of a rational life. If psychologists talk of a normal

organism, they mean one whose desires are adjusted to its environment,

the one most likely to survive. If they speak of superior organisms

and civilisation, they mean increased ability for adjustment to a more

complex environment. Thus though psychologists speak of normal and

civilised they are unable either to define or to evaluate them.

Knowledge of human goods is furnished by philosophers, when they

are frank and speak for themselves; by the founders of religions,

the saints, and the mystics; by the poets, and chiefly, as Socrates

knew, by knowledge of oneself. Self-knowledge, though it may first

look back upon the behaviour studied by psychology, moves in the

opposite direction toward the objects sought. These it endeavours to

comprehend, to purge of contradictions, to regard intently _sub specie

mortalitatis_. From the vantage point of death one becomes a spectator

of human life. Thought acquires the prestige of impersonality, without

the sacrifice of its warm interest in life. The point of view of death

differs from seeing things _sub specie æternitatis_ both in essence

and in purpose. It does not abolish time or elevate mind to the

contemplation of a necessary order, which is the function of seeing

things _sub specie æternitatis_, although consideration of death (as in

the Phædo) may do this. It enables one to regard life in its totality

and, without projecting it against the background of nature, to

estimate each partial aim in the perspective of all others, and thus to

distinguish the objects one truly desires.

The effort to detach oneself from the present and to incorporate it

with the past and future in a satisfactory whole, which psychology

does not attempt, is what makes action ethical. In the unique self the

past exists in memory, which is one’s personal tradition. Thus memory,

besides being the mother of the muses, is the mother of ethics and

of rational action. It enables us to confront our present condition,

its projects, hopes, and fears, with the past, and by comparison

to evaluate the present action. It enables us to utilise the whole

of our experience in the active organisation of our life and thus

to attain a continuity of being. Consequently a succession of full

moments does not, as Pater thought, constitute a full life. For each

of those separate selves which a past moment represented and which

the subsequent one renounced lives in memory to advance its claim to

existence against the present; and only similar circumstances are

needed, a chance odour, or gesture, or phrase, to revive it, and make

one feel the desolation of its loss. These intermittances of the heart,

as Proust calls them, are dependent on the infinite passive occasions

of sensation, and since they never represented an ideal actively

striven for, no analysis is able to penetrate to an underlying unity.

On the other hand the consequence of dispossessing oneself of the past

in order to live in the moment is a reduction of the personality to

indecision and apathy. Besides, the past preserved in memory and the

future that we anticipate enrich the present and give it its fulness

of being, as a musical phrase has more significance in a symphony than

when played in isolation.

As one interrogates the present, with its What shall I do? What shall

I be? it expands to absorb the relevant testimony that relates it to

the past and to the future. Ordinarily the present includes a fairly

definite content, some concrete situation and prospect, often trivial,

as a dinner to be ordered. Choice when it is not automatic can easily

review the relevant factors; one’s favourite dishes, the season of

the year; possible illness on the morrow. At other times the relevant

relations are endless, particularly when an irrevocable choice forces

us to discriminate among all the elements of our being: love, honour,

country, and religion each claiming our allegiance. The infinite

variety of situations that may arise and the impossibility of relating

them to a definite past and a definite future are responsible for the

differences of ethical systems. A philosopher’s conception of the

typical situation will define his problems and dictate the general

terms of his solution. Buddha saw sorrow and suffering as the main

portion of human existence. His endeavour, therefore, was to emancipate

mankind from them. Aristotle started with man’s desire for happiness.

Therefore he analysed the actions of men, the pursuit of wealth, of

honour, and of knowledge to see which conformed most with the essential

nature of man. Amiel’s situation was intensely personal, but he stated

his problem in universal terms. Amiel recognised from his youth the

necessity of an organising purpose and a continuous effort. His culture

and sympathies, however, extended to all human actions; to limit his

life to one of the manifold beings he felt contained within himself

seemed a violation of the ideal.

Now what is the context, the appropriate situation and problem, from

which ethics should start? Is it some general aspect of life common

to all people, like sorrow or suffering, or the generic nature of

man, or the attempt to discover an organising purpose? Or is it our

immediate context, the world to which our traditions, conduct, desires,

and ambitions have engaged us? It is this world that confronts us

daily. Our actions in it are the theme of the novel, the drama, and

the epic, which are an almost inexhaustible field for ethical study.

Each work is a representation of an action, and in proportion as the

writer concentrates his imagination on the situation before him, on his

_donnée_, and reveals its possibilities, the action will illustrate

some ideal. Literature always retains the concrete immediacy of life,

the movement of an action never being from a situation to a principle.

But all the comprehensiveness of a principle, the innumerable

unsuspected relations which it opens when once intuition has leapt the

gap between a formula and the fact it covers is implied by an action

at its close. The characters are still flesh and blood, but as they

finally define themselves their situation includes all their relevant

past and all that is significant in their future, so that they become

transparent, and the whole moral world which they represent shines

clearly through them. Hence it is possible that a profound ethics and a

great work of art may introduce us to the same moral world, so that the

orientation of our being, emotional and intellectual, after reading the

_Ethics_ of Spinoza and _The Wings of the Dove_ say, will be identical.

If ethics is to be persuasive and reasonable it must be founded on the

most complete experience possible. The context from which it arises,

as in life and literature, should be rich and concrete. The defect of

most ethical systems is that they quit life too abruptly. Instead

of studying the complex conditions which underlie any achieved good,

as psychology is contented to do, philosophers ignore them, except

in their generality, and so attain a factitious unity. Consequently

rationalistic philosophers invert the proper procedure of thought.

They start from the typical, the general, and the rational, whereas

these are the ultimate fruits of reflection. When an ethics, however,

repudiates the purpose of rationalism as well as its method, it severs

itself from all connection with the good. If it speaks of goods and

ideals, it speaks of them only provisionally and instrumentally. Its

excessive preoccupation with the conditions marks the return of ethics

to that immersion in the present from which it initially arose.

Humanism differs from other ethical systems by its data and by its

method. Its data are each individual in his context; his inherited

values, his body, his capabilities, and the relations formed by them.

It is the task of each individual to preserve himself in the world,

and to establish a continuity of being. The essence of humanism is the

refusal to allow any sudden break of development, any shift of basis

that arbitrarily repudiates one’s past, such as breaking one’s word.

Its method is to survey life in the light of death. By this means one’s

personal situation can be enlarged by history, and by the contemplation

of the ideals which men pursue. The more vivid the conception of

an ideal society and a rational life within it, so long as it does

not weaken one’s personal reality, the more likely is life to yield

happiness.

Psychology and ethics deal with the same subject matter, human

behaviour, but they regard it from opposite points of view. Psychology

regards it externally as a physical phenomenon having already taken

place in time. Like any other science psychology tries to correlate

its diverse data and to reduce them to the simplest elements possible.

But since psychology requires that the organisms which it studies

should be essentially the same and that the environment to which they

react should be stable and limited, it cannot deal with the behaviour

dominated by mind. For mind is unique and its possible objects are

infinite. Its language is that of meaning, purpose, end. The effort of

a moral individual is to know what he wants, to know his mind. Hence

ethics regards human behaviour internally and as directed towards the

future. The goal of ethics is the satisfactory synthesis of the unique

perspectives of different minds. It approximates this synthesis by

studying the dialectic of desire, the logical implications of each

purpose in relation to all other objects. In this way ethics will

describe ideally how an individual may harmonise with himself and with

society, which psychology can never do, and thus point the way to

happiness.

_The Well of Discipline_