Plato, it seems to me, constantly fails to distinguish between the
reasonableness of conduct, and the reasonableness of abstract reasoning,
that is, of the scientific intellect. To the moral philosopher,
scientific or theoretical interest and activity are one interest and
activity among others; and the reasonableness of activity is not
insured by pursuing an activity of reasonableness. It _may_ be quite
unreasonable, in the moral sense, to pursue abstract reasoning as a
vocation in life. When we say that in every man the reason should be
uppermost, we do not mean that every man should devote himself to
intellectual pursuits. Plato knows this, as, in a sense, he knows
everything; but he uses all arguments for his purpose, and among others
I think he allows it to be supposed that occupation with intellectual
matter is in a moral sense a predominance of the reason. I may instance
his attempt to prove that intellectual pleasures are the pleasantest,
more especially with reference to his aim in making the attempt, which
is, I suppose, to recommend intellectual occupation as pre-eminently
reasonable in the moral sense. To this I say No; if and in as far as the
inference is meant to rest upon an identification of scientific with
moral reasonableness, I think it a sheer confusion. It is like saying
that because a doctor has to do with the promotion of health, therefore
it is a healthy profession to be a doctor. But Plato’s argument shows
how strongly this idea appealed to him, because he even recommends
intellectual pleasures on the score of their sheer pleasantness, implying
not only that intellectual occupation is reasonableness in the moral
sense, but that intellectual occupation, even when chosen by way of
self-indulgence, is still reasonableness in the moral sense. Of course
the matter is complicated by a substantive connection, the degree of
which is matter of opinion, between the two things, like that between
being a physician and leading a healthy life. Intellectual exercise and
ambition have a definite influence on certain capacities concerned in the
reasonable will. But it cannot be made out, that a tendency to the more
intellectual occupations is in itself a tendency to moral reasonableness.
Moral reasonableness must be a general characteristic of moral action,
not guaranteed by the special content of any form of activity.
Next I have to discuss a principle which is advocated as an expression
of the morally reasonable, on the ground of having a sort of analogy
to several maxims or axioms of the intellectual world. It used to be
said that justice is like a square; or that the rightness of an action
consists in its conformity to certain eternal proportions impressed upon
the world by God. I take one more modern form of these principles as a
type of them all. Bentham said, “One is only to count for one,” and it is
a mere amplification of this when Mr. Sidgwick maintains, if I understand
him, that it is objectively reasonable not to prefer my own interest or
pleasure simply because it is my own, to that of some one else. This
principle seems to me a commendable expression of moral judgment, and I
do not think that it is needless or empty. There is a famous passage in
Middlemarch where the heroine, in a matter which acutely touches her own
feelings, thinks to herself, “Now how should I act if I could compel my
own pain to be silent, and merely consider what is best for the lives of
all the persons concerned in the situation?” That I suppose is a concrete
rendering of what this principle means.
But if we look closer, we see its weak side. It is negative, and
consequently abstract. You are not to heed your own feelings unless they
are such that you would heed them if they were some one’s else in the
same circumstances. This amounts to no more than saying, “We believe
there is always, under all circumstances, a right course.” It is strictly
parallel to the theoretical principles of Uniformity or Causation. “We
believe that there is an explanation for everything; that nothing changes
without some reason.” These are useful maxims if they make us look for
the explanation, and so the other is a useful maxim, if it makes us look
for the right course. But it really falls between two stools. It is
not capable, as intellectual theorems are, of accurate development and
application by measurement and analysis. Yet on the other hand it makes
no special appeal to any special content, or tendency of reasonableness
embodied in definite ends. It is neither theoretically fertile, nor is it
a description of a practical influence.
It is a well-known phenomenon that those who suggest maxims or moral
axioms of this kind as defining moral reasonableness are apt to be
reduced to assuming a particular impulse, told off to assist or obey
the reason. Such are Plato’s “Spirited” element in the soul, Kant’s
reverence, Mr. Sidgwick’s general desire to do what is reasonable. This
seems to me to be creating a rule which has no positive content, and
therefore has not the character of a human purpose, and then imagining an
impulse to obey it the nature of which is not accounted for in reference
to any plan of life, but must simply be propounded as an isolated fact.
It kept suggesting itself to us above that reasonableness could not be
thoroughly explained on the basis of a distinction between means and
end, because actual ends are not simple and uniform, but are obviously
qualified by the so-called means, or context of circumstance. We agreed,
however, that what is reasonable must be so in virtue of a positive
content, whether as means or perhaps as end, and that its negative or
prohibitive aspect must arise from the conflict of two such positive
contents.
We have in this section looked at two interpretations of moral
reasonableness apparently suggested by analogies with intellectual
reasonings or principles, and we could not deny that each of them had a
certain appearance of truth, but one seemed to confuse the content with
the form, the other to consist of a form without any content.
3. It suggests itself therefore that moral reasonableness must be a
characteristic which we ascribe to purposes of action. Then we get a
variety of positive content, without relying on the distinction between
means and end; while the abstract principles which we feel to be
reasonable fall into their right place as very general descriptions of a
purpose or scheme of life which can be called reasonable.
But the idea of a reasonable purpose requires explanation.
First, it is irreconcilable with abstract Hedonism. You cannot have any
relations within a single and uniform purpose, and reason always involves
relations.
Secondly, it is not the most intellectual purpose, the purpose that has
most to do with reasoning. I have tried to explain this above.
Thirdly, it _is_ such a life or purpose as possesses a self-consistent
relation of the parts to the whole. This is the general characteristic of
any reasonable totality _qua_ reasonable, and it is this which forms the
general characteristic of reasonable purpose _qua_ reasonable.
Then what is the meaning of the self-consistent relation of parts to the
whole in the case of a human scheme of life?
We cannot demand that our specific purposes should be related consciously
to the purpose of the universe; because the universe as a whole is the
object of theoretical knowledge only, and this does not furnish us with
the idea of a concrete purpose at all. It seems then that the whole, by
consistency with which human purpose is or is not reasonable, must be the
whole of existing human purpose, taken of course as moving in a certain
direction, owing to the modification continually introduced through the
progressive realisation of purposes. I do not see that more than this can
be said without entering upon the analysis of the actual structure of the
moral world, of society and of history. What is important seems to me
to be that we cannot construct the reasonable world of morality from a
theoretical view of men in general and of nature. We have to take it as
it is, and are then perhaps able to show that it is an organised movement
in the direction of self-consistency of purpose.
Is there not more than one kind or type of self-consistency possible, as
when self-indulgence is restricted simply within the bounds of health and
decency? This is the question whether consistency demands completeness,
i. e. whether mere omission destroys consistency. It has often been
discussed, and I suppose the general answer is that _assuming the unity
of the total moral movement_, any elements omitted in any portion of the
movement must ultimately have their revenge by producing disturbance.
Then if we ask what after all is the relation of the theoretical reason
to the reasonable will or moral reason, the only answer seems to be
that the moral reason, in the individual or in the race, is the body of
intellectual ideas which are in fact predominant as purposes in either,
having become predominant by the power they have shown of crushing out
or adjusting to themselves the active associations of all other ideas.
And the power is what might be described as logical power; that is to say
it depends on the range and depth which enables one idea to include in
itself as in a system a great variety of minor purposes.
The intellect as such is for morality in the first instance simply the
medium in which the moral world or content of the moral world exists;
and which therefore conveys to that content its own peculiar character
of system and totality. Then, further, in theoretical reflection on the
moral world, I imagine that we notice this predominance of ideas which
have organising power, and we frame to express this predominance such
predicates as important, right, good. And the whole of these judgments
we must call wisdom as opposed to knowledge. But I cannot myself see how
these or any judgments can be judgments of the moral reason. They seem
to me to be, as judgments, necessarily judgments of the theoretic reason
dealing with the facts of the moral world. But then there is the further
complication that these judgments themselves, forming the content of
intellectual ideas, may, if they have organising power, become actively
predominant, and then again they will form a portion of the actual moral
world as general ideas or clues, inciting to the active search for
concrete ideas which are concordant with them. In this case they are not
acting _as_ judgments, which are true and false, but only as dominant
contents. It is one thing to judge that there is a right in the moral
world, and another thing to be mastered by the right in one’s own mind.
If I am asked, what I mean by the predominance of dominant ideas, which
I allege to form the content of the reasonable will, I start from the
position that every idea would produce action if unchecked, simply by
suggestions which through associative reproductions call up the necessary
movement. Desire may, I believe, or may not intervene, as a state of
tension between a pain of want and a pleasure produced by an idea. All
that is essential, it appears to me, is this idea which can suggest an
action.
In the formed life of a civilised man the organising ideas have long
asserted their predominant power, and in every moment crush out countless
intruders each of which has in itself suggestions quite capable of
leading to action. In childhood or insanity the yielding to every
suggestion is a mark of what is called absence or loss of will; that
is, not the loss of a _general_ power to check minor suggestions, but of
perfectly _definite_ habitual purposes which check them as a matter of
course.
This view sounds no doubt like an iron Determinism, and I am not much
concerned to defend it from that imputation. After all, if we are
determined by the content of our own minds, why then I suppose we
determine ourselves. And trivial examples of indifferent alternatives
such as “I can blow out this candle or not as I please” seem to me very
poor representatives of the moral will, compared with the necessary
pressure of an over-mastering idea which drives the man up to the point
of saying, “This is what must be decisive with one like me, and I have no
alternative.” We feel, as we say, that “we shall have to do it.” Almost
all really serious action, it seems to me, is of this type. And if I have
read at all correctly this lesson of the new psychology which owes its
origin largely to Herbart, it is an instructive meeting of extremes, that
the most analytic of psychologies should more than ever represent the
individual as the incarnation of a progressive order in ideas.