THE ART OF MORALS
I
NO man has ever counted the books that have been written about morals.
No subject seems so fascinating to the human mind. It may well be,
indeed, that nothing imports us so much as to know how to live. Yet it
can scarcely be that on any subject are the books that have been written
more unprofitable, one might even say unnecessary.
For when we look at the matter objectively it is, after all, fairly
simple. If we turn our attention to any collective community, at any
time and place, in its moral aspect, we may regard it as an army on the
march along a road of life more or less encompassed by danger. That,
indeed, is scarcely a metaphor; that is what life, viewed in its moral
aspect, may really be considered. When thus considered, we see that it
consists of an extremely small advance guard in front, formed of persons
with a limited freedom of moral action and able to act as patrols in
various directions, of a larger body in the rear, in ancient military
language called the blackguard and not without its uses, and in the main
of a great compact majority with which we must always be chiefly
concerned since they really are the army; they are the community. What
we call “morals” is simply blind obedience to words of command—whether
or not issued by leaders the army believes it has itself chosen—of which
the significance is hidden, and beyond this the duty of keeping in step
with the others, or of trying to keep in step, or of pretending to do
so.[89] It is an automatic, almost unconscious process and only becomes
acutely conscious when the individual is hopelessly out of step; then he
may be relegated to the rear blackguard. But that happens seldom. So
there is little need to be concerned about it. Even if it happened very
often, nothing overwhelming would have taken place; it would merely be
that what we called the blackguard had now become the main army, though
with a different discipline. We are, indeed, simply concerned with a
discipline or routine which in this field is properly described as
_custom_, and the word _morals_ essentially means _custom_. That is what
morals must always be for the mass, and, indeed, to some extent for all,
a discipline, and, as we have already seen, a discipline cannot properly
be regarded as a science or an art. The innumerable books on morals,
since they have usually confused and befogged this simple and central
fact, cannot fail to be rather unprofitable. That, it would seem, is
what the writers thought—at all events about those the others had
written—or else they would not have considered it necessary for
themselves to add to the number. It was not only an unprofitable task,
it was also—except in so far as an objectively scientific attitude has
been assumed—aimless. For, although the morals of a community at one
time and place is never the same as that of another or even the same
community at another time and place, it is a complex web of conditions
that produces the difference, and it must have been evident that to
attempt to affect it was idle.[90] There is no occasion for any one who
is told that he has written a “moral” book to be unduly elated, or when
he is told that his book is “immoral” to be unduly cast down. The
significance of these adjectives is strictly limited. Neither the one
book nor the other can have more than the faintest effect on the march
of the great compact majority of the social army.
Yet, while all this is so, there is still some interest in the question
of morals. For, after all, there is the small body of individuals ahead,
alertly eager to find the road, with a sensitive flair for all the
possibilities the future may hold. When the compact majority, blind and
automatic and unconscious, follows after, to tramp along the road these
pioneers have discovered, it may seem but a dull road. But before they
reached it that road was interesting, even passionately interesting.
The reason is that, for those who, in any age, are thus situated, life
is not merely a discipline. It is, or it may become, really an art.
II
THAT living is or may be an art, and the moralist the critic of that
art, is a very ancient belief. It was especially widespread among the
Greeks. To the Greeks, indeed, this belief was so ingrained and
instinctive that it became an implicitly assumed attitude rather than a
definitely expressed faith. It was natural to them to speak of a
virtuous person as we should speak of a beautiful person. The “good” was
the “beautiful”; the sphere of ethics for the Greeks was not
distinguished from the sphere of æsthetics. In Sophocles, above all
poets, we gather the idea of a natural agreement between duty and
inclination which is at once both beauty and moral order. But it is the
beautiful that seems to be most fundamental in τὸ καλὸν, which was the
noble, the honourable, but fundamentally the beautiful. “Beauty is the
first of all things,” said Isocrates, the famous orator; “nothing that
is devoid of beauty is prized.... The admiration for virtue comes to
this, that of all manifestation of life, virtue is the most beautiful.”
The supremely beautiful was, for the finer sort of Greeks, instinctively
if not always consciously, the supremely divine, and the Argive Hera, it
has been said, “has more divinity in her countenance than any Madonna of
them all.” That is how it came to pass that we have no word in our
speech to apply to the Greek conception; æsthetics for us is apart from
all the serious business of life, and the attempt to introduce it there
seems merely comic. But the Greeks spoke of life itself as a craft or a
fine art. Protagoras, who appears to-day as a pioneer of modern science,
was yet mainly concerned to regard living as an art, or as the sum of
many crafts, and the Platonic Socrates, his opponent, still always
assumed that the moralist’s position is that of a critic of a craft. So
influential a moralist as Aristotle remarks in a matter-of-fact way, in
his “Poetics,” that if we wish to ascertain whether an act is, or is
not, morally right we must consider not merely the intrinsic quality of
the act, but the person who does it, the person to whom it is done, the
time, the means, the motive. Such an attitude towards life puts out of
court any appeal to rigid moral laws; it meant that an act must befit
its particular relationships at a particular moment, and that its moral
value could, therefore, only be judged by the standard of the
spectator’s instinctive feeling for proportion and harmony. That is the
attitude we adopt towards a work of art.
It may well appear strange to those who cherish the modern idea of
“æstheticism” that the most complete statement of the Greek attitude has
come down to us in the writings of a philosopher, an Alexandrian Greek
who lived and taught in Rome in the third century of our Christian Era,
when the Greek world had vanished, a religious mystic, moreover, whose
life and teaching were penetrated by an austere ascetic severity which
some would count mediæval rather than Greek.[91] It is in Plotinus, a
thinker whose inspiring influence still lives to-day, that we probably
find the Greek attitude, in its loftiest aspect, best mirrored, and it
was probably through channels that came from Plotinus—though their
source was usually unrecognised—that the Greek moral spirit has chiefly
reached modern times. Many great thinkers and moralists of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it has been claimed, were
ultimately indebted to Plotinus, who represented the only genuinely
creative effort of the Greek spirit in the third century.[92]
Plotinus seems to have had little interest in art, as commonly
understood, and he was an impatient, rapid, and disorderly writer, not
even troubling to spell correctly. All his art was in the spiritual
sphere. It is impossible to separate æsthetics, as he understood it,
from ethics and religion. In the beautiful discourse on Beauty, which
forms one of the chapters of his first “Ennead,” it is mainly with
spiritual beauty that he is concerned. But he insists that it _is_
beauty, beauty of the same quality as that of the physical world, which
inheres in goodness, “nor may those tell of the splendour of Virtue who
have never known the face of Justice and of Wisdom beautiful beyond the
beauty of Evening and of Dawn.” It is a beauty, he further
states,—though here he seems to be passing out of the purely æsthetic
sphere,—that arouses emotions of love. “This is the spirit that Beauty
must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love,
and a trembling that is also delight. For the unseen all this may be
felt as for the seen, and this souls feel for it, every soul in some
degree, but those the more deeply who are the more truly apt to this
higher love—just as all take delight in the beauty of the body, but all
are not strung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are
known as Lovers.” Goodness and Truth were on the same plane for Plotinus
as Beauty. It may even be said that Beauty was the most fundamental of
all, to be identified ultimately as the Absolute, as Reality itself. So
it was natural that in the sphere of morals he should speak
indifferently either of “extirpating evil and implanting goodness” or of
“introducing order and beauty to replace goodness”—in either case “we
talk of real things.” “Virtue is a natural concordance among the
phenomena of the soul, vice a discord.” But Plotinus definitely rejects
the notion that beauty is only symmetry, and so he avoids the narrow
conception of some more modern æsthetic moralists, notably Hutcheson.
How, then, he asks, could the sun be beautiful, or gold, or light, or
night, or the stars? “Beauty is something more than symmetry, and
symmetry owes its beauty to a remoter principle”—its affinity, in the
opinion of Plotinus, with the “Ideal Form,” immediately recognised and
confirmed by the soul.
It may seem to some that Plotinus reduces to absurdity the conception of
morality as æsthetics, and it may well be that the Greeks of the great
period were wiser when they left the nature of morals less explicit. Yet
Plotinus had in him the root of the matter. He had risen to the
conception that the moral life of the soul is a dance; “Consider the
performers in a choral dance: they sing together, though each one has
his own particular part, and sometimes one voice is heard while the
others are silent; and each brings to the chorus something of his own;
it is not enough that all lift their voices together; each must sing,
choicely, his own part in the music set for him. So it is with the
Soul.”[93] The Hellenic extension of the æsthetic emotion, as Benn
pointed out, involved no weakening of the moral fibre. That is so, we
see, and even emphatically so, when it becomes definitely explicit as in
Plotinus, and revolutionarily hostile to all those ideals of the moral
life which most people have been accustomed to consider modern.
As usually among the Greeks, it is only implicitly, also, that we detect
this attitude among the Romans, the pupils of the Greeks. For the most
part, the Romans, whose impulses of art were very limited, whose
practical mind craved precision and definition, proved rebellious to the
idea that living is an art; yet it may well be that they still retained
that idea at the core of their morality. It is interesting to note that
St. Augustine, who stood on the threshold between the old Roman and new
Christian worlds was able to write: “The art of living well and rightly
is the definition that the ancients give of ‘virtue.’” For the Latins
believed that _ars_ was derived from the Greek word for virtue,
ἀρετή.[94] Yet there really remained a difference between the Greek and
the Roman views of morals. The Greek view, it is universally admitted,
was æsthetic, in the most definite sense; the Roman was not, and when
Cicero wishes to translate a Greek reference to a “beautiful” action it
becomes an “honourable” action. The Greek was concerned with what he
himself felt about his actions; the Roman was concerned with what they
would look like to other people, and the credit, or discredit, that
would be reflected back on himself.
The Hebrews never even dreamed of such an art. Their attitude is
sufficiently embodied in the story of Moses and that visit to Sinai
which resulted in the production of the table of Ten Commandments which
we may still see inscribed in old churches. For even our modern feeling
about morals is largely Jewish, in some measure Roman, and scarcely
Greek at all. We still accept, in theory at all events, the Mosaic
conception of morality as a code of rigid and inflexible rules,
arbitrarily ordained, and to be blindly obeyed.
The conception of morality as an art, which Christendom once disdained,
seems now again to be finding favour in men’s eyes. The path has been
made smooth for it by great thinkers of various complexion, who,
differing in many fundamental points, all alike assert the relativity of
truth and the inaptitude of rigid maxims to serve as guiding forces in
life. They also assert, for a large part, implicitly or explicitly, the
authority of art.
The nineteenth century was usually inspired by the maxims of Kant, and
lifted its hat reverently when it heard Kant declaiming his famous
sayings concerning the supremacy of an inflexible moral law. Kant had,
indeed, felt the stream of influence which flowed from Shaftesbury, and
he sought to mix up æsthetics with his system. But he had nothing of the
genuine artist’s spirit. The art of morals was to him a set of maxims,
cold, rigid, precise. A sympathetic biographer has said of him that the
maxims were the man. They are sometimes fine maxims. But as guides, as
motives to practical action in the world? The maxims of the
valetudinarian professor at Königsberg scarcely seem that to us to-day.
Still less can we harmonise maxims with art. Nor do we any longer
suppose that we are impertinent in referring to the philosopher’s
personality. In the investigation of the solar spectrum personality may
count for little; in the investigation of moral laws it counts for much.
For personality is the very stuff of morals. The moral maxims of an
elderly professor in a provincial university town have their interest.
But so have those of a Casanova. And the moral maxims of a Goethe may
possibly have more interest than either. There is the rigid categorical
imperative of Kant; and there is also that other dictum, less rigid but
more reminiscent of Greece, which some well-inspired person has put into
the mouth of Walt Whitman: “Whatever tastes sweet to the most perfect
person, that is finally right.”
III
FUNDAMENTALLY considered, there are two roads by which we may travel
towards the moral ends of life: the road of Tradition, which is
ultimately that of Instinct, pursued by the many, and the road of what
seems to be Reason—sought out by the few. And in the end these two roads
are but the same road, for reason also is an instinct. It is true that
the ingenuity of analytic investigators like Henry Sidgwick has
succeeded in enumerating various “methods of ethics.” But, roughly
speaking, there can only be these two main roads of life, and only one
has proved supremely important. It has been by following the path of
tradition moulded by instinct that man reached the threshold of
civilisation: whatever may have been the benefits he derived from the
guidance of reason he never consciously allowed reason to control his
moral life. Tables of commandments have ever been “given by God”; they
represented, that is to say, obscure impulses of the organism striving
to respond to practical needs. No one dreamed of commending them by
declaring that they were reasonable.
It is clear how Instinct and Tradition, thus working together, act
vitally and beneficently in moulding the moral life of primitive
peoples. The “divine command” was always a command conditioned by the
special circumstance under which the tribe lived. That is so even when
the moral law is to our civilised eyes “unnatural.” The infanticide of
Polynesian islanders, where the means of subsistence and the
possibilities of expansion were limited, was obviously a necessary
measure, beneficent and humane in its effects. The killing of the aged
among the migrant Eskimos was equally a necessary and kindly measure,
recognised as such by the victims themselves, when it was essential that
every member of the community should be able to help himself. Primitive
rules of moral action, greatly as they differ among themselves, are all
more or less advantageous and helpful on the road of primitive life. It
is true that they allow very little, if any, scope for divergent
individual moral action, but that, too, was advantageous.
But that, also, is the rock on which an instinctive traditional morality
must strike as civilisation is approached. The tribe has no longer the
same unity. Social differentiation has tended to make the family a unit,
and psychic differentiation to make even the separate individuals units.
The community of interests of the whole tribe has been broken up, and
therewith traditional morality has lost alike its value and its power.
The development of abstract intelligence, which coincides with
civilisation, works in the same direction. Reason is, indeed, on one
side an integrating force, for it shows that the assumption of
traditional morality—the identity of the individual’s interests with the
interests of the community—is soundly based. But it is also a
disintegrating force. For if it reveals a general unity in the ends of
living, it devises infinitely various and perplexingly distracting
excuses for living. Before the active invasion of reason living had been
an art, or at all events a discipline, highly conventionalised and even
ritualistic, but the motive forces of living lay in life itself and had
all the binding sanction of instincts; the penalty of every failure in
living, it was felt, would be swiftly and automatically experienced. To
apply reason here was to introduce a powerful solvent into morals.
Objectively it made morality clearer but subjectively it destroyed the
existing motives for morality; it deprived man, to use the fashionable
phraseology of the present day, of a vital illusion.
Thus we have morality in the fundamental sense, the actual practices of
the main army of the population, while in front a variegated procession
of prancing philosophers gaily flaunt their moral theories before the
world. Kant, whose personal moral problems were concerned with eating
sweetmeats,[95] and other philosophers of varyingly inferior calibre,
were regarded as the lawgivers of morality, though they carried little
enough weight with the world at large.
Thus it comes about that abstract moral speculations, culminating in
rigid maxims, are necessarily sterile and vain. They move in the sphere
of reason, and that is the sphere of comprehension, but not of vital
action. In this way there arises a moral dualism in civilised man.
Objectively he has become like the gods and able to distinguish the ends
of life; he has eaten of the fruit of the tree and has knowledge of good
and evil. Subjectively he is still not far removed from the savage,
oftenest stirred to action by a confused web of emotional motives, among
which the interwoven strands of civilised reason are as likely to
produce discord or paralysis as to furnish efficient guides, a state of
mind first, and perhaps best, set forth in its extreme form by
Shakespeare in Hamlet. On the one hand he cannot return to the primitive
state in which all the motives for living flowed harmoniously in the
same channel; he cannot divest himself of his illuminating reason; he
cannot recede from his hardly acquired personal individuality. On the
other hand he can never expect, he can never even reasonably hope, that
reason will ever hold in leash the emotions. It is clear that along
neither path separately can the civilised man pursue his way in
harmonious balance with himself. We begin to realise that what we need
is not a code of beautifully cut-and-dried maxims—whether emanating from
sacred mountains or from philosophers’ studies—but a happy combination
of two different ways of living. We need, that is, a traditional and
instinctive way of living, based on real motor instincts, which will
blend with reason and the manifold needs of personality, instead of
being destroyed by their solvent actions, as rigid rules inevitably are.
Our only valid rule is a creative impulse that is one with the
illuminative power of intelligence.
IV
AT the beginning of the eighteenth century, the seed-time of our modern
ideas, as it has so often seemed to be, the English people, having in
art at length brought their language to a fine degree of clarity and
precision, and having just passed through a highly stimulating period of
dominant Puritanism in life, became much interested in philosophy,
psychology, and ethics. Their interest was, indeed, often superficial
and amateurish, though they were soon to produce some of the most
notable figures in the whole history of thought. The third Earl of
Shaftesbury, one of the earliest of the group, himself illustrated this
unsystematic method of thinking. He was an amateur, an aristocratic
amateur, careless of consistency, and not by any means concerned to
erect a philosophic system. Not that he was a worse thinker on that
account. The world’s greatest thinkers have often been amateurs; for
high thinking is the outcome of fine and independent living, and for
that a professorial chair offers no special opportunities. Shaftesbury
was, moreover, a man of fragile physical constitution, as Kant was; but,
unlike Kant, he was not a childish hypochondriac in seclusion, but a man
in the world, heroically seeking to live a complete and harmonious life.
By temperament he was a Stoic, and he wrote a characteristic book of
“Exercises,” as he proposed to call what his modern editor calls the
“Philosophical Regimen,” in which he consciously seeks to discipline
himself in fine thinking and right living, plainly acknowledging that he
is the disciple of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But Shaftesbury was
also a man of genius, and as such it was his good fortune to throw
afresh into the stream of thought a fruitful conception, in part
absorbed, indeed, from Greece, and long implicit in men’s minds, but
never before made clearly recognisable as a moral theory and an ethical
temper, susceptible of being labelled by the philosophic historian, as
it since has been under the name, passable no doubt as any other, of
“Æsthetic Intuitionism.”
Greek morality, it has been well said, is not a conflict of light and
darkness, of good and evil, the clear choice between the broad road that
leads to destruction and the narrow path of salvation: it is “an
artistic balance of light and shade.” Gizycki, remarking that
Shaftesbury has more affinity to the Greeks than perhaps any other
modern moralist, says that “the key lay not only in his head, but in his
heart, for like can only be recognised by like.”[96] We have to remember
at the same time that Shaftesbury was really something of a classical
scholar, even from childhood. Born in 1671, the grandson of the foremost
English statesman of his time, the first Earl, Anthony Cooper, he had
the advantage of the wise oversight of his grandfather, who placed with
him as a companion in childhood a lady who knew both Greek and Latin so
well that she could converse fluently in both languages. So it was that
by the age of eleven he was familiar with the two classic tongues and
literatures. That doubtless was also a key to his intimate feeling for
the classic spirit, though it would not have sufficed without a native
affinity. He became the pupil of Locke, and at fifteen he went to Italy,
to spend a considerable time there. He knew France also, and the French
tongue, so well that he was often taken for a native. He lived for some
time in Holland, and there formed a friendship with Bayle, which began
before the latter was aware of his friend’s rank and lasted till Bayle’s
death. In Holland he may have been slightly influenced by Grotius.[97]
Shaftesbury was not of robust constitution; he suffered from asthma, and
his health was further affected by his zeal in public affairs as well as
his enthusiasm in study, for his morality was not that of a recluse, but
of a man who played an active part in life, not only in social
benevolence, like his descendant the enlightened philanthropic Earl of
the nineteenth century, but in the establishment of civil freedom and
toleration. Locke wrote of his pupil (who was not, however, in agreement
with his tutor’s philosophic standpoint,[98] though he always treated
him with consideration) that “the sword was too sharp for the scabbard.”
“He seems,” wrote of Shaftesbury his unfriendly contemporary Mandeville,
“to require and expect goodness in his species as we do a sweet taste in
grapes and China oranges, of which, if any of them are sour, we boldly
pronounce that they are not come to that perfection their nature is
capable of.” In a certain sense this was correct. Shaftesbury, it has
been said, was the father of that new ethics which recognises that
Nature is not a mere impulse of self-preservation, as Hobbes thought,
but also a racial impulse, having regard to others; there are social
inclinations in the individual, he realised, that go beyond individual
ends. (Referring to the famous dictum of Hobbes, _Homo homini lupus_, he
observes: “To say in disparagement of Man ‘that he is to Man a wolf’
appears somewhat absurd when one considers that wolves are to wolves
very kind and loving creatures.”) Therewith “goodness” was seen,
virtually for the first time in the modern period, to be as “natural” as
the sweetness of ripe fruit.
There was another reason, a fundamental physiological and psychological
reason, why “goodness” of actions and the “sweetness” of fruits are
equally natural, a reason that would, no doubt, have been found strange
both by Mandeville and Shaftesbury. Morality, Shaftesbury describes as
“the taste of beauty and the relish of what is decent,” and the “sense
of beauty” is ultimately the same as the “moral sense.” “My first
endeavour,” wrote Shaftesbury, “must be to distinguish the true taste of
fruits, refine my palate, and establish a just relish in the kind.” He
thought, evidently, that he was merely using a metaphor. But he was
speaking essentially in the direct, straightforward way of natural and
primitive Man. At the foundation, “sweetness” and “goodness” are the
same thing. That can still be detected in the very structure of
language, not only of primitive languages, but those of the most
civilised peoples. That morality is, in the strict sense, a matter of
taste, of æsthetics, of what the Greeks called αἴσθησις, is conclusively
shown by the fact that in the most widely separated tongues—possibly
wherever the matter has been carefully investigated—moral goodness is,
at the outset, expressed in terms of _taste_. What is _good_ is what is
_sweet_, and sometimes, also, _salt_.[99] Primitive peoples have highly
developed the sensory side of their mental life, and their vocabularies
bear witness to the intimate connection of sensations of taste and touch
with emotional tone. There is, indeed, no occasion to go beyond our own
European traditions to see that the expression of moral qualities is
based on fundamental sensory qualities of taste. In Latin _suavis_ is
_sweet_, but even in Latin it became a moral quality, and its English
derivatives have been entirely deflected from physical to moral
qualities, while _bitter_ is at once a physical quality and a poignantly
moral quality. In Sanskrit and Persian and Arabic _salt_ is not only a
physical taste but the name for lustre and grace and beauty.[100] It
seems well in passing to point out that the deeper we penetrate the more
fundamentally we find the æsthetic conception of morals grounded in
Nature. But not every one cares to penetrate any deeper and there is no
need to insist.
Shaftesbury held that human actions should have a beauty of symmetry and
proportion and harmony, which appeal to us, not because they accord with
any rule or maxim (although they may conceivably be susceptible of
measurement), but because they satisfy our instinctive feelings, evoking
an approval which is strictly an æsthetic judgment of moral action. This
instinctive judgment was not, as Shaftesbury understood it, a guide to
action. He held, rightly enough, that the impulse to action is
fundamental and primary, that fine action is the outcome of finely
tempered natures. It is a feeling for the just time and measure of human
passion, and maxims are useless to him whose nature is ill-balanced.
“Virtue is no other than the love of order and beauty in society.”
Æsthetic appreciation of the act, and even an ecstatic pleasure in it,
are part of our æsthetic delight in Nature generally, which includes
Man. Nature, it is clear, plays a large part in this conception of the
moral life. To lack balance on any plane of moral conduct is to be
unnatural; “Nature is not mocked,” said Shaftesbury. She is a miracle,
for miracles are not things that are performed, but things that are
perceived, and to fail here is to fail in perception of the divinity of
Nature, to do violence to her, and to court moral destruction. A return
to Nature is not a return to ignorance or savagery, but to the first
instinctive feeling for the beauty of well-proportioned affections. “The
most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth,” he
asserts, and he recurs again and again to “the beauty of honesty.”
“_Dulce et decorum est_ was his sole reason,” he says of the classical
pagan, adding: “And this is still a good reason.” In learning how to
act, he thought, we are “learning to become artists.” It seems natural
to him to refer to the magistrate as an artist; “the magistrate, if he
be an artist,” he incidentally says. We must not make morality depend on
authority. The true artist, in any art, will never act below his
character. “Let who will make it for you as you fancy,” the artist
declares; “I know it to be wrong. Whatever I have made hitherto has been
true work. And neither for your sake or anybody’s else shall I put my
hand to any other.” “This is virtue!” exclaims Shaftesbury. “This
disposition transferred to the whole of life perfects a character. For
there is a workmanship and a truth in actions.”
Shaftesbury, it may be repeated, was an amateur, not only in philosophy,
but even in the arts. He regarded literature as one of the schoolmasters
for fine living, yet he has not been generally regarded as a fine artist
in writing, though, directly or indirectly, he helped to inspire not
only Pope, but Thomson and Cowper and Wordsworth. He was inevitably
interested in painting, but his tastes were merely those of the ordinary
connoisseur of his time. This gives a certain superficiality to his
general æsthetic vision, though it was far from true, as the theologians
supposed, that he was lacking in seriousness. His chief immediate
followers, like Hutcheson, came out of Calvinistic Puritanism. He was
himself an austere Stoic who adapted himself to the tone of the
well-bred world he lived in. But if an amateur, he was an amateur of
genius. He threw a vast and fruitful conception—caught from the
“Poetics” of Aristotle, “the Great Master of Arts,” and developed with
fine insight—into our modern world. Most of the great European thinkers
of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were in some measure
inspired, influenced, or anticipated by Shaftesbury. Even Kant, though
he was unsympathetic and niggardly of appreciation, helped to develop
the conception Shaftesbury first formulated. To-day we see it on every
hand. It is slowly and subtly moulding the whole of our modern morality.
“The greatest Greek of modern times”—so he appears to those who study
his work to-day. It is through Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury alone that
Greek morals, in their finest essence, have been a vivifying influence
in our modern world. Georg von Gizycki, who has perhaps most clearly
apprehended Shaftesbury’s place in morals, indicates that place with
precision and justice when he states that “he furnished the _elements_
of a moral philosophy which fits into the frame of a truly scientific
conception of the world.”[101] That was a service to the modern world so
great and so daring that it could scarcely meet with approval from his
fellow countrymen. The more keenly philosophical Scotch, indeed,
recognised him, first of all Hume, and he was accepted and embodied as a
kind of founder by the so-called Scottish School, though so toned down
and adulterated and adapted to popular tastes and needs, that in the end
he was thereby discredited. But the English never even adulterated him;
they clung to the antiquated and eschatological Paley, bringing forth
edition after edition of his works whereon to discipline their youthful
minds. That led naturally on to the English Utilitarians in morality,
who would disdain to look at anything that could be called Greek. Sir
Leslie Stephen, who was the vigorous and capable interpreter to the
general public of Utilitarianism, could see nothing good whatever in
Shaftesbury; he viewed him with contemptuous pity and could only murmur:
“Poor Shaftesbury!”
Meanwhile Shaftesbury’s fame had from the first been pursuing a very
different course in France and Germany, for it is the people outside a
man’s own country who anticipate the verdict of posterity. Leibnitz,
whose vast genius was on some sides akin (Shaftesbury has, indeed, been
termed “the Leibnitz of morals”), admired the English thinker, and the
universal Voltaire recognised him. Montesquieu placed him on a
four-square summit with Plato and Montaigne and Malebranche. The
enthusiastic Diderot, seeing in Shaftesbury the exponent of the
naturalistic ethics of his own temperament, translated a large part of
his chief book in 1745. Herder, who inspired so many of the chief
thinkers of the nineteenth century and even of to-day, was himself
largely inspired by Shaftesbury, whom he once called “the virtuoso of
humanity,” regarding his writings as, even in form, well-nigh worthy of
Greek antiquity, and long proposed to make a comparative study of the
ethical conceptions of Spinoza, Leibnitz, and Shaftesbury, but
unfortunately never carried out that happy idea. Rousseau, not only by
contact of ideas, but the spontaneous effort of his own nature towards
autonomous harmony, was in touch with Shaftesbury, and so helped to
bring his ideals into the general stream of modern life. Shaftesbury,
directly or indirectly, inspired the early influential French Socialists
and Communists. On the other hand he has equally inspired the moralists
of individualism. Even the Spanish-American Rodó, one of the most
delicately aristocratic of modern moralists in recent time, puts forth
conceptions, which, consciously or unconsciously, are precisely those of
Shaftesbury. Rodó believes that all moral evil is a dissonance in the
æsthetic of conduct and that the moral task in character is that of the
sculptor in marble: “Virtue is a kind of art, a divine art.” Even Croce,
who began by making a deep division between art and life, holds that
there can be no great critic of art who is not also a great critic of
life, for æsthetic criticism is really itself a criticism of life, and
his whole philosophy may be regarded as representing a stage of
transition between the old traditional view of the world and that
conception towards which in the modern world our gaze is turned.[102]
As Shaftesbury had stated the matter, however, it was left on the whole
vague and large. He made no very clear distinction between the creative
artistic impulse in life and critical æsthetic appreciation. In the
sphere of morals we must often be content to wait until our activity is
completed to appreciate its beauty or its ugliness.[103] On the
background of general æsthetic judgment we have to concentrate on the
forces of creative artistic activity, whose work it is painfully to
mould the clay of moral action, and forge its iron, long before the
æsthetic criterion can be applied to the final product. The artist’s
work in life is full of struggle and toil; it is only the spectator of
morals who can assume the calm æsthetic attitude. Shaftesbury, indeed,
evidently recognised this, but it was not enough to say, as he said,
that we may prepare ourselves for moral action by study in literature.
One may be willing to regard living as an art, and yet be of opinion
that it is as unsatisfactory to learn the art of living in literature as
to learn, let us say, the art of music in architecture.
Yet we must not allow these considerations to lead us away from the
great fact that Shaftesbury clearly realised—what modern psychology
emphasises—that desires can only be countered by desires, that reason
cannot affect appetite. “That which is of original and pure nature,” he
declared, “nothing besides contrary habit and custom (a second nature)
is able to displace. There is no speculative opinion, persuasion, or
belief, which is capable immediately or directly to exclude or destroy
it.” Where he went beyond some modern psychologists is in his Hellenic
perception that in this sphere of instinct we are amid the play of art
to which æsthetic criteria alone can be applied.
It was necessary to concentrate and apply these large general ideas. To
some extent this was done by Shaftesbury’s immediate successors and
followers, such as Hutcheson and Arbuckle, who taught that man is,
ethically, an artist whose work is his own life. They concentrated
attention on the really creative aspects of the artist in life, æsthetic
appreciation of the finished product being regarded as secondary. For
all art is, primarily, not a contemplation, but a doing, a creative
action, and morality is so preëminently.
Shaftesbury, with his followers Arbuckle and Hutcheson, may be regarded
as the founders of æsthetics; it was Hutcheson, though he happened to be
the least genuinely æsthetic in temperament of the three, who wrote the
first modern treatise on æsthetics. Together, also, they may be said to
have been the revivalists of Hellenism, that is to say, of the Hellenic
spirit, or rather of the classic spirit, for it often came through Roman
channels. Shaftesbury was, as Eucken has well said, the Greek spirit
among English thinkers. He represented an inevitable reaction against
Puritanism, a reaction which is still going on—indeed, here and there
only just beginning. As Puritanism had achieved so notable a victory in
England, it was natural that in England the first great champion of
Hellenism should appear. It is to Oliver Cromwell and Praise-God
Barebones that we owe Shaftesbury.
After Shaftesbury it is Arbuckle who first deserves attention, though he
wrote so little that he never attained the prominence he deserved.[104]
He was a Dublin physician of Scottish ancestry, the friend of Swift, by
whom he was highly esteemed, and he was a cripple from boyhood. He was a
man of genuine artistic temperament, though the art he was attracted to
was not, as with Shaftesbury, the sculptor’s or the painter’s, but the
poet’s. It was not so much intuition on which he insisted, but
imagination as formative of a character; moral approval seemed to him
thoroughly æsthetic, part of an imaginative act which framed the ideal
of a beautiful personality, externalising itself in action. When Robert
Bridges, the poet of our own time, suggests (in his “Necessity of
Poetry”) that “morals is that part of Poetry which deals with conduct,”
he is speaking in the spirit of Arbuckle. An earlier and greater poet
was still nearer to Arbuckle. “A man to be greatly good,” said Shelley
in his “Defence of Poetry,” “must imagine intensely and
comprehensively.... The great instrument of moral good is the
imagination.” If, indeed, with Adam Smith and Schopenhauer, we choose to
base morals on sympathy we really are thereby making the poet’s
imagination the great moral instrument. Morals was for Arbuckle a
disinterested æsthetic harmony, and he had caught much of the genuine
Greek spirit.
Hutcheson was in this respect less successful. Though he had occupied
himself with æsthetics he had little true æsthetic feeling; and though
he accomplished much for the revival of Greek studies his own sympathies
were really with the Roman Stoics, with Cicero, with Marcus Aurelius,
and in this way he was led towards Christianity, to which Shaftesbury
was really alien. He democratised if not vulgarised, and diluted if not
debased, Shaftesbury’s loftier conception. In his too widely sympathetic
and receptive mind the Shaftesburian ideal was not only Romanised, not
only Christianised; it was plunged into a miscellaneously eclectic mass
that often became inconsistent and incoherent. In the long run, in spite
of his great immediate success, he injured in these ways the cause he
advocated. He overemphasised the passively æsthetic side of morals; he
dwelt on the term “moral sense,” by Shaftesbury only occasionally used,
as it had long previously been by Aristotle (and then only in the sense
of “natural temper” by analogy with the physical senses), and this term
was long a stumbling-block in the eyes of innocent philosophic critics,
too easily befooled by words, who failed to see that, as Libby has
pointed out, the underlying idea simply is, as held by Shaftesbury, that
æsthetic notions of proportion and symmetry depend upon the native
structure of the mind and only so constitute a “moral sense.”[105] What
Hutcheson, as distinct from Shaftesbury, meant by a “moral sense”—really
a conative instinct—is sufficiently indicated by the fact that he was
inclined to consider the conjugal and parental affections as a “sense”
because natural. He desired to shut out reason, and cognitive elements,
and that again brought him to the conception of morality as instinctive.
Hutcheson’s conception of “sense” was defective as being too liable to
be regarded as passive rather than as conative, though conation was
implied. The fact that the “moral sense” was really instinct, and had
nothing whatever to do with “innate ideas,” as many have ignorantly
supposed, was clearly seen by Hutcheson’s opponents. The chief objection
brought forward by the Reverend John Balguy in 1728, in the first part
of his “Foundation of Moral Goodness,” was precisely that Hutcheson
based morality on instinct and so had allowed “some degree of morality
to animals.”[106] It was Hutcheson’s fine and impressive personality,
his high character, his eloquence, his influential position, which
enabled him to keep alive the conception of morals he preached, and even
to give it an effective force, throughout the European world, it might
not otherwise easily have exerted. Philosophy was to Hutcheson the art
of living—as it was to the old Greek philosophers—rather than a question
of metaphysics, and he was careless of consistency in thinking, an
open-minded eclectic who insisted that life itself is the great matter.
That, no doubt, was the reason why he had so immense an influence. It
was mainly through Hutcheson that the more aristocratic spirit of
Shaftesbury was poured into the circulatory channels of the world’s
life. Hume and Adam Smith and Reid were either the pupils of Hutcheson
or directly influenced by him. He was a great personality rather than a
great thinker, and it was as such that he exerted so much force in
philosophy.[107]
With Schiller, whose attitude was not, however, based directly on
Shaftesbury, the æsthetic conception of morals, which in its definitely
conscious form had up till then been especially English, may be said to
have entered the main stream of culture. Schiller regarded the identity
of Duty and Inclination as the ideal goal of human development, and
looked on the Genius of Beauty as the chief guide of life. Wilhelm von
Humboldt, one of the greatest spirits of that age, was moved by the same
ideas, throughout his life, much as in many respects he changed, and
even shortly before his death wrote in deprecation of the notion that
conformity to duty is the final aim of morality. Goethe, who was the
intimate friend of both Schiller and Humboldt, largely shared the same
attitude, and through him it has had a subtle and boundless influence.
Kant, who, it has been said, mistook Duty for a Prussian drill-sergeant,
still ruled the academic moral world. But a new vivifying and moulding
force had entered the larger moral world, and to-day we may detect its
presence on every side.
V
It has often been brought against the conception of morality as an art
that it lacks seriousness. It seems to many people to involve an easy,
self-indulgent, dilettante way of looking at life. Certainly it is not
the way of the Old Testament. Except in imaginative literature—it was,
indeed, an enormous and fateful exception—the Hebrews were no “æsthetic
intuitionists.” They hated art, for the rest, and in face of the
problems of living they were not in the habit of considering the lilies
how they grow. It was not the beauty of holiness, but the stern rod of a
jealous Jehovah, which they craved for their encouragement along the
path of Duty. And it is the Hebrew mode of feeling which has been, more
or less violently and imperfectly, grafted into our Christianity.[108]
It is a complete mistake, however, to suppose that those for whom life
is an art have entered on an easy path, with nothing but enjoyment and
self-indulgence before them. The reverse is nearer to the truth. It is
probably the hedonist who had better choose rules if he only cares to
make life pleasant.[109] For the artist life is always a discipline, and
no discipline can be without pain. That is so even of dancing, which of
all the arts is most associated in the popular mind with pleasure. To
learn to dance is the most austere of disciplines, and even for those
who have attained to the summit of its art often remains a discipline
not to be exercised without heroism. The dancer seems a thing of joy,
but we are told that this famous dancer’s slippers are filled with blood
when the dance is over, and that one falls down pulseless and deathlike
on leaving the stage, and the other must spend the day in darkness and
silence. “It is no small advantage,” said Nietzsche, “to have a hundred
Damoclean swords suspended above one’s head; that is how one learns to
dance, that is how one attains ‘freedom of movement.’”[110]
For as pain is entwined in an essential element in the perfect
achievement of that which seems naturally the most pleasurable of the
arts, so it is with the whole art of living, of which dancing is the
supreme symbol. There is no separating Pain and Pleasure without making
the first meaningless for all vital ends and the second turn to ashes.
To exalt pleasure is to exalt pain; and we cannot understand the meaning
of pain unless we understand the place of pleasure in the art of life.
In England, James Hinton sought to make that clear, equally against
those who failed to see that pain is as necessary morally as it
undoubtedly is biologically, and against those who would puritanically
refuse to accept the morality of pleasure.[111] It is no doubt important
to resist pain, but it is also important that it should be there to
resist. Even when we look at the matter no longer subjectively but
objectively, we must accept pain in any sound æsthetic or metaphysical
picture of the world.[112]
We must not be surprised, therefore, that this way of looking at life as
an art has spontaneously commended itself to men of the gravest and
deepest character, in all other respects widely unlike. Shaftesbury was
temperamentally a Stoic whose fragile constitution involved a perpetual
endeavour to mould life to the form of his ideal. And if we go back to
Marcus Aurelius we find an austere and heroic man whose whole life, as
we trace it in his “Meditations,” was a splendid struggle, a man
who—even, it seems, unconsciously—had adopted the æsthetic criterion of
moral goodness and the artistic conception of moral action. Dancing and
wrestling express to his eyes the activity of the man who is striving to
live, and the goodness of moral actions instinctively appears to him as
the beauty of natural objects; it is to Marcus Aurelius that we owe that
immortal utterance of æsthetic intuitionism: “As though the emerald
should say: ‘Whatever happens I must be emerald.’” There could be no man
more unlike the Roman Emperor, or in any more remote field of action,
than the French saint and philanthropist Vincent de Paul. At once a
genuine Christian mystic and a very wise and marvellously effective man
of action, Vincent de Paul adopts precisely the same simile of the moral
attitude that had long before been put forth by Plotinus and in the next
century was again to be taken up by Shaftesbury: “My daughters,” he
wrote to the Sisters of Charity, “we are each like a block of stone
which is to be transferred into a statue. What must the sculptor do to
carry out his design? First of all he must take the hammer and chip off
all that he does not need. For this purpose he strikes the stone so
violently that if you were watching him you would say he intended to
break it to pieces. Then, when he has got rid of the rougher parts, he
takes a smaller hammer, and afterwards a chisel, to begin the face with
all the features. When that has taken form, he uses other and finer
tools to bring it to that perfection he has intended for his statue.” If
we desire to find a spiritual artist as unlike as possible to Vincent de
Paul we may take Nietzsche. Alien as any man could ever be to a cheap or
superficial vision of the moral life, and far too intellectually keen to
confuse moral problems with purely æsthetic problems, Nietzsche, when
faced by the problem of living, sets himself—almost as instinctively as
Marcus Aurelius or Vincent de Paul—at the standpoint of art. “Alles
Leben ist Streit um Geschmack und Schmecken.” It is a crucial passage in
“Zarathustra”: “All life is a dispute about taste and tasting! Taste:
that is weight and at the same time scales and weigher; and woe to all
living things that would live without dispute about weight and scales
and weigher!” For this gospel of taste is no easy gospel. A man must
make himself a work of art, Nietzsche again and again declares, moulded
into beauty by suffering, for such art is the highest morality, the
morality of the Creator.
There is a certain indefiniteness about the conception of morality as an
artistic impulse, to be judged by an æsthetic criterion, which is
profoundly repugnant to at least two classes of minds fully entitled to
make their antipathy felt. In the first place, it makes no appeal to the
abstract reasoner, indifferent to the manifoldly concrete problems of
living. For the man whose brain is hypertrophied and his practical life
shrivelled to an insignificant routine—the man of whom Kant is the
supreme type—it is always a temptation to rationalise morality. Such a
pure intellectualist, overlooking the fact that human beings are not
mathematical figures, may even desire to transform ethics into a species
of geometry. That we may see in Spinoza, a nobler and more inspiring
figure, no doubt, but of the same temperament as Kant. The impulses and
desires of ordinary men and women are manifold, inconstant, often
conflicting, and sometimes overwhelming. “Morality is a fact of
sensibility,” remarks Jules de Gaultier; “it has no need to have
recourse to reason for its affirmations.” But to men of the
intellectualist type this consideration is almost negligible; all the
passions and affections of humanity seem to them meek as sheep which
they may shepherd, and pen within the flimsiest hurdles. William Blake,
who could cut down to that central core of the world where all things
are fused together, knew better when he said that the only golden rule
of life is “the great and golden rule of art.” James Hinton was for ever
expatiating on the close resemblance between the methods of art, as
shown especially in painting, and the methods of moral action. Thoreau,
who also belonged to this tribe, declared, in the same spirit as Blake,
that there is no golden rule in morals, for rules are only current
silver; “it is golden not to have any rule at all.”
There is another quite different type of person who shares this
antipathy to the indefiniteness of æsthetic morality: the ambitious
moral reformer. The man of this class is usually by no means devoid of
strong passions; but for the most part he possesses no great
intellectual calibre and so is unable to estimate the force and
complexity of human impulses. The moral reformer, eager to introduce the
millennium here and now by the aid of the newest mechanical devices, is
righteously indignant with anything so vague as an æsthetic morality. He
must have definite rules and regulations, clear-cut laws and by-laws,
with an arbitrary list of penalties attached, to be duly inflicted in
this world or the next. The popular conception of Moses, descending from
the sacred mount with a brand-new table of commandments, which he
declares have been delivered to him by God, though he is ready to smash
them to pieces on the slightest provocation, furnishes a delightful
image of the typical moral reformer of every age. It is, however, only
in savage and barbarous stages of society, or among the uncultivated
classes of civilisation, that the men of this type can find their
faithful followers.
Yet there is more to be said. That very indefiniteness of the criterion
of moral action, falsely supposed to be a disadvantage, is really the
prime condition for effective moral action. The academic philosophers of
ethics, had they possessed virility enough to enter the field of real
life, would have realised—as we cannot expect the moral reformers
blinded by the smoke of their own fanaticism to realise—that the slavery
to rigid formulas which they preached was the death of all high moral
responsibility. Life must always be a great adventure, with risks on
every hand; a clear-sighted eye, a many-sided sympathy, a fine daring,
an endless patience, are for ever necessary to all good living. With
such qualities alone may the artist in life reach success; without them
even the most devoted slave to formulas can only meet disaster. No
reasonable moral being may draw breath in the world without an open-eyed
freedom of choice, and if the moral world is to be governed by laws,
better to people it with automatic machines than with living men and
women.
In our human world the precision of mechanism is for ever impossible.
The indefiniteness of morality is a part of its necessary imperfection.
There is not only room in morality for the high aspiration, the
courageous decision, the tonic thrill of the muscles of the soul, but we
have to admit also sacrifice and pain. The lesser good, our own or that
of others, is merged in a larger good, and that cannot be without some
rending of the heart. So all moral action, however in the end it may be
justified by its harmony and balance, is in the making cruel and in a
sense even immoral. Therein lies the final justification of the æsthetic
conception of morality. It opens a wider perspective and reveals loftier
standpoints; it shows how the seeming loss is part of an ultimate gain,
so restoring that harmony and beauty which the unintelligent partisans
of a hard and barren duty so often destroy for ever. “Art,” as Paulhan
declares, “is often more moral than morality itself.” Or, as Jules de
Gaultier holds, “Art is in a certain sense the only morality which life
admits.” In so far as we can infuse it with the spirit and method of
art, we have transformed morality into something beyond morality; it has
become the complete embodiment of the Dance of Life.
Footnote 89:
What we call crime is, at the beginning, usually an effort to get, or
to pretend to get, into step, but, being a violent or miscalculated
effort, it is liable to fail, and the criminal falls to the rear of
the social army. “I believe that most murders are really committed by
Mrs. Grundy,” a woman writes to me, and, with the due qualification,
the saying is worthy of meditation. That is why justice is impotent to
prevent or even to punish murder, for Mrs. Grundy is within all of us,
being a part of the social discipline, and cannot be hanged.
Footnote 90:
Herbert Spencer, writing to a correspondent, once well expressed the
harmlessness—if we choose so to regard it—of moral teaching: “After
nearly two thousand years’ preaching of the religion of amity, the
religion of enmity remains predominant, and Europe is peopled by two
hundred million pagans, masquerading as Christians, who revile those
who wish them to act on the principles they profess.”
Footnote 91:
But later asceticism was strictly the outcome of a Greek tendency, to
be traced in Plato, developed through Antisthenes, through Zeno,
through Epictetus, who all desired to liberate the soul from the bonds
of matter. The Neo-Platonists carried this tendency further, for in
their time, the prevailing anarchy and confusion rendered the world
and society less than ever a fitting haven for the soul. It was not
Christianity that made the world ascetic (and there were elements of
hedonism in the teaching of Jesus), but the world that made
Christianity ascetic, and it was easy for a Christian to become a
Neo-Platonist, for they were both being moulded by the same forces.
Footnote 92:
Maurice Croiset devotes a few luminous critical pages to Plotinus in
the Croisets’ _Histoire de la Littérature Grecque_, vol. V, pp.
820-31. As an extended account of Plotinus, from a more
enthusiastically sympathetic standpoint, there are Dr. Inge’s
well-known Gifford Lectures, _The Philosophy of Plotinus_ (1918); I
may also mention a careful scholastic study, _L’Esthétique de Plotin_
(1913), by Cochez, of Louvain, who regards Plotinus as the climax of
the objective æsthetics of antiquity and the beginning of the road to
modern subjective æsthetics.
Footnote 93:
_Ennead_, bk. III, chap. VI. I have mostly followed the translation of
Stephen McKenna.
Footnote 94:
St. Augustine, _De Civitate Dei_, bk. IV, chap. XXI.
Footnote 95:
Kant was habitually cold and calm. But he was very fond of dried
fruits and used to have them specially imported for him by his friend
Motherby. “At one time he was eagerly expecting a vessel with French
fruits which he had ordered, and he had already invited some friends
to a dinner at which they were to be served. The vessel was, however,
delayed a number of days by a storm. When it arrived, Kant was
informed that the provisions had become short on account of the delay,
and that the crew had eaten his fruit. Kant was so angry that he
declared they ought rather to have starved than to have touched it.
Surprised at this irritation, Motherby said, ‘Professor, you cannot be
in earnest.’ Kant answered, ‘I am really in earnest,’ and went away.
Afterwards he was sorry.” (Quoted by Stuckenberg, _The Life of Kant_,
p. 138.) But still it was quite in accordance with Kantian morality
that the sailors should have starved.
Footnote 96:
Georg von Gizycki, _Die Ethik David Hume’s_, p. 11.
Footnote 97:
F. C. Sharp, _Mind_ (1912), p. 388.
Footnote 98:
Shaftesbury held that Locke swept away too much and failed to allow
for inborn instincts (or “senses,” as he sometimes called them)
developing naturally. We now see that he was right.
Footnote 99:
There is no need to refer to the value of salt, and therefore the
appreciation of the flavour of salt, to primitive people. Still
to-day, in Spain, _sal_ (salt) is popularly used for a more or less
intellectual and moral quality which is highly admired.
Footnote 100:
Dr. C. S. Myers has touched on this point in _Reports of the Cambridge
Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits_, vol. II, part II, chap.
IV; also “The Taste-Names of Primitive Peoples,” _British Journal of
Psychology_, June, 1904.
Footnote 101:
Dr. Georg von Gizycki, _Die Philosophie Shaftesbury’s_ (1876); and the
same author’s _Die Ethik David Hume’s_ (1878).
Footnote 102:
It should be added that Croce is himself moving in this direction, and
in, for instance, _Il Carattere di Totalità della Espressione
Artistica_ (1917), he recognises the universality of art.
Footnote 103:
Stanley Hall remarks in criticising Kant’s moral æsthetics: “The
beauty of virtue is only seen in contemplating it and the act of doing
it has no beauty to the doer at the moment.” (G. Stanley Hall, “Why
Kant is Passing,” _American Journal of Psychology_, July, 1912.)
Footnote 104:
See article on Arbuckle by W. R. Scott in _Mind_, April, 1899.
Footnote 105:
See a helpful paper by M. F. Libby, “Influence of the Idea of Æsthetic
Proportion on the Ethics of Shaftesbury,” _American Journal of
Psychology_, May-October, 1901.
Footnote 106:
We find fallacious criticism of the “moral sense” down to almost
recent times, in, for instance, McDougall’s _Social Psychology_, even
though McDougall, by his insistence on the instinctive basis of
morality, was himself carrying on the tradition of Shaftesbury and
Hutcheson. But McDougall also dragged in “some prescribed code of
conduct,” though he neglected to mention who is to “prescribe” it.
Footnote 107:
See W. R. Scott, _Francis Hutcheson: His Life, Teaching and Position
in the History of Philosophy_. (1900.)
Footnote 108:
It is noteworthy, however, that the æsthetic view of morals has had
advocates, not only among the more latitudinarian Protestants, but in
Catholicism. A few years ago the Reverend Dr. Kolbe published a book
on _The Art of Life_, designed to show that just as the sculptor works
with hammer and chisel to shape a block of marble into a form of
beauty, so Man, by the power of grace, the illumination of faith, and
the instrument of prayer, works to transform his soul. But this simile
of the sculptor, which has appealed so strongly alike to Christian and
anti-Christian moralists, proceeds, whether or not they knew it, from
Plotinus, who, in his famous chapter on Beauty, bids us note the
sculptor. “He cuts away here, he smooths there, he makes this line
lighter, this other purer, until a living face has grown upon his
work. So do you also cut away all that is excessive, straighten all
that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, make all one
glow of beauty, and never cease chiselling your statue until the
godlike splendour shines on you from it, and the perfect goodness
stands, surely, in the stainless shrine.”
Footnote 109:
“They who pitched the goal of their aspiration so high knew that the
paths leading up to it were rough and steep and long,” remarks A. W.
Benn (_The Greek Philosophers_, 1914, p. 57); “they said ‘the
beautiful is hard’—hard to judge, hard to win, hard to keep.”
Footnote 110:
_Der Wille zur Macht_, p. 358.
Footnote 111:
Mrs. Havelock Ellis, _James Hinton_, 1918.
Footnote 112:
This has been well seen by Jules de Gaultier: “The joys and the
sorrows which fill life are, the one and the other,” he says (_La
Dépendance de la Morale et l’Indépendance des Mœurs_, p. 340),
“elements of spectacular interest, and without the mixture of both
that interest would be abolished. To make of the representative worth
of phenomena their justification in view of a spectacular end alone,
avoids the objection by which the moral thesis is faced, the fact of
pain. Pain becomes, on the contrary, the correlative of pleasure, an
indispensable means for its realization. Such a thesis is in agreement
with the nature of things, instead of being wounded by their
existence.”