I
If any lesson can be learned from history, which historians tell us is
not the case, it would seem to be that what we call "goodness" is on
the whole ineradicable. By goodness the race survives. Every one of
us, struggle as he may, is constrained in his degree to be less bad
than he might be. Many of us confess freely that we do not know why
this is so. We do not know whether there is a moral law. If there is a
moral law, we do not know whether its origin is transcendental and
arbitrary, biological and definitely ascertainable, or social and
fluctuating. Moreover we do not so much as know whether we are free
agents, choosing continually between good and evil, or automata,
feeling, to be sure, the stress of conflicting forces, but bound
mathematically to follow the line of their compromise. We are of
course comfortably able to ignore all these considerations in our
everyday trains of thought. Just as the schoolboy learns to say
parrotwise that the sun sits still and swings us round, though he sees
him every evening descend to rest in New Jersey like a tired commuter;
and just as the uncompromising idealist behaves exactly like the man
who believes in the knowable reality of the world; so the most
convinced determinist must act from morning to night as though he were
a free agent, and must judge his fellowmen as though they too were
choosers. Moreover almost all of us adopt instinctively some concrete
reason for the choices we assume we are making. These reasons being
inevitably partial and ludicrously incommensurate with the cosmic
results that we hang upon them, are constantly in process of giving
way under the strain. The so-called "religious" reasons land us in the
position of having to give an immoral basis for morality. Either they
involve the doctrine of a future life, and so vitiate the moral
impulse with egoism at its source, or, with a diminished confidence in
the sureness of reward, which is all to the good, they tend to
perpetuate affirmations that have lost their meaning, which is all to
the bad. It seems to have been on the whole a misfortune that religion
and morality, which historically and logically have neither more nor
less to do with each other than marriage and love, should have become
profoundly associated in Europe in the last two thousand years. The
most pressing duty of the moralist--and every man is a moralist--is to
dissolve the merger, and there are circumstances connected with its
origin which may lessen our estimate of the inconvenience involved in
the dissolution. The mythology, cult, doctrine, exegesis and ethics of
Christianity are considerably more Greek than Hebraic in origin, and
the Greeks in their prime had excellent ways of their own of dealing
with all these matters. They managed to be profoundly religious while
avoiding the two pits into which the Hebrews fell, first, the
confounding of myth with history, and, second, the erection of morals
on a supernatural, jural and egoistic basis. Let us then consider the
Greeks.