“Man’s morality, on the one hand, has never been preserved from
error by an outlook into the beyond of heaven and hell, and, on
the other hand, there have never been missing those impulses
that originate in the depths of human nature working in the
line of moral ideas.”
These impulses are, according to Professor Jodl, the purely moral
sanction of conscience. And conscience is represented as, and in another
place called, “the natural sanction of morality.”
This view of regarding conscience as the natural sanction of morality
does not appear to us as a happy expression, and it seems to us that
Professor Jodl did not intend it as it might be understood. For Professor
Jodl speaks in another passage of “the natural impulses of morality as
having their sanction in _experience_.”
If that be so, conscience would not be the ultimate authority, but
conscience would have to be regulated and corrected by a rationalised
experience.
If “the natural impulses of morality have their sanction in experience,”
the ultimate authority would be the facts represented in experience; and
the facts of experience, in their totality, are nothing more or less than
the whole universe with its natural laws and conceived in its cosmical
order. The universe, the All, nature, or whatever you call it, is indeed
an omnipotent reality which man cannot resist, and in which he can live
only by adapting himself to its laws. If this ultimate authority of the
natural laws be called by the religious term “God,” we shall see at once
that the old dogmatic religions express a very deep truth in mythological
language. The ultimate sanction of morality is not our conscience, but
that omnipotent power which resides in the objective world of realities,
in the cosmical order of the universe.
We might as well say that everybody shall regard his watch as the
ultimate standard of time as to make his conscience the criterion of
morality. May everybody use his watch wisely and regulate it well. And so
may everybody revise his conscience and investigate diligently whether
it agrees with the laws of that all-power of which we are a small part
and through which alone we exist.
Professor Jodl praises very highly the French institution of a so-called
purely moral instruction in the public schools. Father H. Gruber,
however, points out some serious shortcomings in this system of moral
education, resulting from a lack of principle. (See _Stimmen aus
Maria-Laach_, Freiburg i. B., 1892, No. 4.)
It is apparent that moral commands cannot be based upon purely subjective
notions or ideals, they must be based upon some objective authority which
is a power that enforces obedience. Such a power exists. It is the world
in which we live. It is that All-being of which we are a part. And that
feature of nature which enforces that conduct which we call moral is
named God in the terminology of religious language.
A consideration like this points out the way to a reconciliation between
science and religion. There is a truth in the old religions, and this
truth need only be purified from the errors that cluster about it, hiding
its grandeur, beauty, and importance. Let the church and its authorities
recognise science and the principle of free investigation; let them
be ready to accept the scientific methods of research; let them be
willing to accept truth as it can be proved by arguments and verified by
experience as well as by experiments; and we need no longer worry about
dogmatism and the narrowness of their sectarian doctrines. All these
accidental features of religion will, then, pass away, and we shall have
a religion which the scientist and the philosopher can embrace.
This is what we call the Religion of Science; and the Religion of Science
is bound to be the religion of the future. The Religion of Science will
not abolish the religions of the past, but it will develop them, broaden
them, perfect them, into the cosmical religion of humanitarianism.
To teach an ethics that either has no sanction, or whose sanction is
built upon the diverging opinions of individuals, will not do. Ethics
must be based upon the sanction of some objective authority, and the
recognition of an objective authority, of a power which enforces a
certain kind of conduct, being religion, we say that no ethics can be
without a religious basis.
The problem at present is not how to teach irreligious ethics—all such
attempts are failures at the start; but to change the mythology of
the old religions into a clear, scientific conception of the natural
conditions which demand of man that he should observe those rules which
we are wont to call moral.