But it may be said this calculation of pains and pleasures is defective

through the omission of one element. Although a man who had a very strong

natural impulse towards some vice would appear more likely to promote the

tranquillity of his nature by a moderate and circumspect gratification of

that vice, than by endeavouring painfully to repress his natural

tendencies, yet he possesses a conscience which adjudicates upon his

conduct, and its sting or its approval constitutes a pain or pleasure so

intense, as more than to redress the balance. Now of course, no intuitive

moralist will deny, what for a long time his school may be almost said to

have been alone in asserting, the reality of conscience, or the pleasures

and pains it may afford. He simply denies, and he appeals to consciousness

in attestation of his position, that those pains and pleasures are so

powerful or so proportioned to our acts as to become an adequate basis for

virtue. Conscience, whether we regard it as an original faculty, or as a

product of the association of ideas, exercises two distinct functions. It

points out a difference between right and wrong, and when its commands are

violated, it inflicts a certain measure of suffering and disturbance. The

first function it exercises persistently through life. The second it only

exercises under certain special circumstances. It is scarcely conceivable

that a man in the possession of his faculties should pass a life of gross

depravity and crime without being conscious that he was doing wrong; but

it is extremely possible for him to do so without this consciousness

having any appreciable influence upon his tranquillity. The condition of

their consciences, as Mr. Carlyle observes, has less influence on the

happiness of men than the condition of their livers. Considered as a

source of pain, conscience bears a striking resemblance to the feeling of

disgust. Notwithstanding the assertion of Dr. Johnson, I venture to

maintain that there are multitudes to whom the necessity of discharging

the duties of a butcher would be so inexpressibly painful and revolting,

that if they could obtain flesh diet on no other condition, they would

relinquish it for ever. But to those who are inured to the trade, this

repugnance has simply ceased. It has no place in their emotions or

calculations. Nor can it be reasonably questioned that most men by an

assiduous attendance at the slaughter-house could acquire a similar

indifference. In like manner, the reproaches of conscience are doubtless a

very real and important form of suffering to a sensitive, scrupulous, and

virtuous girl who has committed some trivial act of levity or

disobedience; but to an old and hardened criminal they are a matter of the

most absolute indifference.

Now it is undoubtedly conceivable, that by an association of ideas men

might acquire a feeling that would cause that which would naturally be

painful to them to be pleasurable, and that which would naturally be

pleasurable to be painful.(93) But the question will immediately arise,

why should they respect this feeling? We have seen that, according to the

inductive theory, there is no such thing as natural duty. Men enter into

life solely desirous of seeking their own happiness. The whole edifice of

virtue arises from the observed fact, that owing to the constitution of

our nature, and the intimacy of our social relations, it is necessary for

our happiness to abstain from some courses that would be immediately

pleasurable and to pursue others that are immediately the reverse.

Self-interest is the one ultimate reason for virtue, however much the

moral chemistry of Hartley may disguise and transform it. Ought or ought

not, means nothing more than the prospect of acquiring or of losing

pleasure. The fact that one line of conduct promotes, and another impairs

the happiness of others is, according to these moralists, in the last

analysis, no reason whatever for pursuing the former or avoiding the

latter, unless such a course is that which brings us the greatest

happiness. The happiness may arise from the action of society upon

ourselves, or from our own naturally benevolent disposition, or, again,

from an association of ideas, which means the force of a habit we have

formed, but in any case our own happiness is the one possible or

conceivable motive of action. If this be a true picture of human nature,

the reasonable course for every man is to modify his disposition in such a

manner that he may attain the greatest possible amount of enjoyment. If he

has formed an association of ideas, or contracted a habit which inflicts

more pain than it prevents, or prevents more pleasure than it affords, his

reasonable course is to dissolve that association, to destroy that habit.

This is what he “ought” to do according to the only meaning that word can

possess in the utilitarian vocabulary. If he does not, he will justly

incur the charge of imprudence, which is the only charge utilitarianism

can consistently bring against vice.

That it would be for the happiness as it would certainly be in the power

of a man of a temperament such as I have lately described, to quench that

conscientious feeling, which by its painful reproaches prevents him from

pursuing the course that would be most conducive to his tranquillity, I

conceive to be self-evident. And, indeed, on the whole, it is more than

doubtful whether conscience, considered apart from the course of action it

prescribes, is not the cause of more pain than pleasure. Its reproaches

are more felt than its approval. The self-complacency of a virtuous man

reflecting with delight upon his own exceeding merit, is frequently spoken

of in the writings of moral philosophers,(94) but is rarely found in

actual life where the most tranquil is seldom the most perfect nature,

where the sensitiveness of conscience increases at least in proportion to

moral growth, and where in the best men a feeling of modesty and humility

is always present to check the exuberance of self-gratulation.

In every sound system of morals and religion the motives of virtue become

more powerful the more the mind is concentrated upon them. It is when they

are lost sight of, when they are obscured by passion, unrealised or

forgotten, that they cease to operate. But it is a peculiarity of the

utilitarian conception of virtue that it is wholly unable to resist the

solvent of analysis, and that the more the mind realises its origin and

its nature, the more its influence on character must decline. The

pleasures of the senses will always defy the force of analysis, for they

have a real foundation in our being. They have their basis in the eternal

nature of things. But the pleasure we derive from the practice of virtue

rests, according to this school, on a wholly different basis. It is the

result of casual and artificial association, of habit, of a confusion by

the imagination of means with ends, of a certain dignity with which

society invests qualities or actions that are useful to itself. Just in

proportion as this is felt, just in proportion as the mind separates the

idea of virtue from that of natural excellence and obligation, and

realises the purely artificial character of the connection, just in that

proportion will the coercive power of the moral motive be destroyed. The

utilitarian rule of judging actions and dispositions by their tendency to

promote or diminish happiness, or the maxim of Kant that man should always

act so that the rule of his conduct might be adopted as a law by all

rational beings, may be very useful as a guide in life; but in order that

they should acquire moral weight, it is necessary to presuppose the sense

of moral obligation, the consciousness that duty, when discovered, has a

legitimate claim to be the guiding principle of our lives. And it is this

element which, in the eye of reason, the mere artificial association of

ideas can never furnish.

If the patience of the reader has enabled him to accompany me through this

long train of tedious arguments, he will, I think, have concluded that the

utilitarian theory, though undoubtedly held by many men of the purest, and

by some men of almost heroic virtue, would if carried to its logical

conclusions prove subversive of morality, and especially, and in the very

highest degree, unfavourable to self-denial and to heroism. Even if it

explains these, it fails to justify them, and conscience being traced to a

mere confusion of the means of happiness with its end, would be wholly

unable to resist the solvent of criticism. That this theory of conscience

gives a true or adequate description of the phenomenon it seeks to

explain, no intuitive moralist will admit. It is a complete though common

mistake to suppose that the business of the moralist is merely to explain

the genesis of certain feelings we possess. At the root of all morals lies

an intellectual judgment which is clearly distinct from liking or

disliking, from pleasure or from pain. A man who has injured his position

by some foolish but perfectly innocent act, or who has inadvertently

violated some social rule, may experience an emotion of self-reproach or

of shame quite as acute as if he had committed a crime. But he is at the

same time clearly conscious that his conduct is not a fit subject for

moral reprobation, that the grounds on which it may be condemned are of a

different and of a lower kind. The sense of obligation and of legitimate

supremacy, which is the essential and characteristic feature of

conscience, and which distinguishes it from all the other parts of our

nature, is wholly unaccounted for by the association of ideas. To say that

a certain course of conduct is pleasing, and that a certain amount of pain

results from the weakening of feelings that impel men towards it, is

plainly different from what men mean when they say we ought to pursue it.

The virtue of Hartley is, in its last analysis, but a disease of the

imagination. It may be more advantageous to society than avarice; but it

is formed in the same manner, and has exactly the same degree of binding

force.(95)

These considerations will help to supply an answer to the common

utilitarian objection that to speak of duty as distinct from self-interest

is unmeaning, because it is absurd to say that we are under an obligation

to do any thing when no evil consequences would result to us from not

doing it. Rewards and punishments it may be answered are undoubtedly

necessary to enforce, but they are not necessary to constitute, duty. This

distinction, whether it be real or not, has at all events the advantage of

appearing self-evident to all who are not philosophers. Thus when a party

of colonists occupy a new territory they divide the unoccupied land among

themselves, and they murder, or employ for the gratification of their

lusts, the savage inhabitants. Both acts are done with perfect impunity,

but one is felt to be innocent and the other wrong. A lawful government

appropriates the land and protects the aboriginals, supporting its

enactments by penalties. In the one case the law both creates and enforces

a duty, in the other it only enforces it. The intuitive moralist simply

asserts that we have the power of perceiving that certain courses of

action are higher, nobler, and better than others, and that by the

constitution of our being, this fact, which is generically distinct from

the prospect of pleasure or the reverse, may and ought to be and

continually is a motive of action. It is no doubt possible for a man to

prefer the lower course, and in this case we say he is deserving of

punishment, and if he remains unpunished we say that it is unjust. But if

there were no power to reward or punish him, his acts would not be

indifferent. They would still be intelligibly described as essentially

base or noble, shameful though there were none to censure, admirable

though there were none to admire.

That men have the power of preferring other objects than happiness is a

proposition which must ultimately be left to the attestation of

consciousness. That the pursuit of virtue, however much happiness may

eventually follow in its train, is in the first instance an example of

this preference, must be established by that common voice of mankind which

has invariably regarded a virtuous motive as generically different from an

interested one. And indeed even when the conflict between strong passions

and a strong sense of duty does not exist it is impossible to measure the

degrees of virtue by the scale of enjoyment. The highest nature is rarely

the happiest. Petronius Arbiter was, very probably, a happier man than

Marcus Aurelius. For eighteen centuries the religious instinct of

Christendom has recognised its ideal in the form of a “Man of Sorrows.”

Considerations such as I have now urged lead the intuitive moralists to

reject the principles of the utilitarian. They acknowledge indeed that the

effect of actions upon the happiness of mankind forms a most important

element in determining their moral quality, but they maintain that without

natural moral perceptions we never should have known that it was our duty

to seek the happiness of mankind when it diverged from our own, and they

deny that virtue was either originally evolved from or is necessarily

proportioned to utility. They acknowledge that in the existing condition

of society there is at least a general coincidence between the paths of

virtue and of prosperity, but they contend that the obligation of virtue

is of such a nature that no conceivable convulsion of affairs could

destroy it, and that it would continue even if the government of the world

belonged to supreme malice instead of supreme benevolence. Virtue, they

believe, is something more than a calculation or a habit. It is impossible

to conceive its fundamental principles reversed. Notwithstanding the

strong tendency to confuse cognate feelings, the sense of duty and the

sense of utility remain perfectly distinct in the apprehension of mankind,

and we are quite capable of recognising each separate ingredient in the

same act. Our respect for a gallant but dangerous enemy, our contempt for

a useful traitor, our care in the last moments of life for the interests

of those who survive us, our clear distinction between intentional and

unintentional injuries, and between the consciousness of imprudence and

the consciousness of guilt, our conviction that the pursuit of interest

should always be checked by a sense of duty, and that selfish and moral

motives are so essentially opposed, that the presence of the former

necessarily weakens the latter, our indignation at those who when honour

or gratitude call them to sacrifice their interests pause to calculate

remote consequences, the feeling of remorse which differs from every other

emotion of our nature—in a word, the universal, unstudied sentiments of

mankind all concur in leading us to separate widely our virtuous

affections from our selfish ones. Just as pleasure and pain are ultimate

grounds of action, and no reason can be given why we should seek the

former and avoid the latter, except that it is the constitution of our

nature that we should do so, so we are conscious that the words right and

wrong express ultimate intelligible motives, that these motives are

generically different from the others, that they are of a higher order,

and that they carry with them a sense of obligation. Any scheme of morals

that omits these facts fails to give an accurate and adequate description

of the states of feeling which consciousness reveals. The consciences of

men in every age would have echoed the assertion of Cicero that to

sacrifice pleasure with a view of obtaining any form or modification of

pleasure in return, no more answers to our idea of virtue, than to lend

money at interest to our idea of charity. The conception of pure

disinterestedness is presupposed in our estimates of virtue. It is the

root of all the emotions with which we contemplate acts of heroism. We

feel that man is capable of pursuing what he believes to be right although

pain and disaster and mental suffering and an early death be the

consequence, and although no prospect of future reward lighten upon his

tomb. This is the highest prerogative of our being, the point of contact

between the human nature and the divine.

In addition to the direct arguments in its support, the utilitarian school

owes much of its influence to some very powerful moral and intellectual

predispositions in its favour—the first, which we shall hereafter examine,

consisting of the tendency manifested in certain conditions of society

towards the qualities it is most calculated to produce, and the second of

the almost irresistible attraction which unity and precision exercise on

many minds. It was this desire to simplify human nature, by reducing its

various faculties and complex operations to a single principle or process,

that gave its great popularity to the sensational school of the last

century. It led most metaphysicians of that school to deny the duality of

human nature. It led Bonnet and Condillac to propose an animated statue,

endowed with the five senses as channels of ideas, and with faculties

exclusively employed in transforming the products of sensation, as a

perfect representative of humanity. It led Helvétius to assert that the

original faculties of all men were precisely the same, all the difference

between what we call genius and what we call stupidity arising from

differences of circumstances, and all the difference between men and

animals arising mainly from the structure of the human hand. In morals,

theories of unification are peculiarly plausible, and I think peculiarly

dangerous, because, owing to the interaction of our moral sentiments, and

the many transformations that each can undergo, there are few affections

that might not under some conceivable circumstances become the parents of

every other. When Hobbes, in the name of the philosophy of self-interest,

contended that “Pity is but the imagination of future calamity to

ourselves, produced by the sense of another man’s calamity;”(96) when

Hutcheson, in the name of the philosophy of benevolence, argued that the

vice of intemperance is that it impels us to violence towards others, and

weakens our capacity for doing them good;(97) when other moralists

defending the excellence of our nature maintained that compassion is so

emphatically the highest of our pleasures that a desire of gratifying it

is the cause of our acts of barbarity;(98) each of these theories,

extravagant as it is, contains a germ of undoubted psychological truth. It

is true that a mind intensely apprehensive of future calamities would on

that account receive a shock at the sight of the calamities of others. It

is true that a very keen and absorbing sentiment of benevolence would be

in itself sufficient to divert men from any habit that impaired their

power of gratifying it. It is true that compassion involves a certain

amount of pleasure, and conceivable that that pleasure might be so

intensified that we might seek it by a crime. The error in these theories

is not that they exaggerate the possible efficacy of the motives, but that

they exaggerate their actual intensity in human nature and describe

falsely the process by which the results they seek to explain have been

arrived at. The function of observation in moral philosophy is not simply

to attest the moral sentiments we possess, leaving it to the reason to

determine deductively how they may have been formed; it is rather to

follow them through all the stages of their formation.

And here I may observe that the term inductive, like most others that are

employed in moral philosophy, may give rise to serious misconception. It

is properly applied to those moralists who, disbelieving the existence of

any moral sense or faculty revealing to us what is right and wrong,

maintain that the origin of those ideas is simply our experience of the

tendency of different lines of conduct to promote or impair true

happiness. It appears, however, to be sometimes imagined that inductive

moralists alone think that it is by induction or experience that we ought

to ascertain what is the origin of our moral ideas. But this I conceive to

be a complete mistake. The basis of morals is a distinct question from the

basis of theories of morals. Those who maintain the existence of a moral

faculty do not, as is sometimes said, assume this proposition as a first

principle of their arguments, but they arrive at it by a process of

induction quite as severe as any that can be employed by their

opponents.(99) They examine, analyse, and classify their existing moral

feelings, ascertain in what respects those feelings agree with or differ

from others, trace them through their various phases, and only assign them

to a special faculty when they think they have shown them to be incapable

of resolution, and generically different from all others.(100)

This separation is all that is meant by a moral faculty. We are apt to

regard the term as implying a distinct and well defined organ, bearing to

the mind the same kind of relation as a limb to the body. But of the

existence of such organs, and of the propriety of such material imagery,

we know nothing. Perceiving in ourselves a will, and a crowd of

intellectual and emotional phenomena that seem wholly different from the

properties of matter, we infer the existence of an immaterial substance

which wills, thinks, and feels, and can classify its own operations with

considerable precision. The term faculty is simply an expression of

classification. If we say that the moral faculty differs from the æsthetic

faculty, we can only mean that the mind forms certain judgments of moral

excellence, and also certain judgments of beauty, and that these two

mental processes are clearly distinct. To ask to what part of our nature

moral perceptions should be attributed, is only to ask to what train of

mental phenomena they bear the closest resemblance.

If this simple, but often neglected, consideration be borne in mind, the

apparent discordance of intuitive moralists will appear less profound than

might at first sight be supposed, for each section merely elucidates some

one characteristic of moral judgments. Thus Butler insists upon the sense

of obligation that is involved in them, contends that this separates them

from all other sentiments, and assigns them in consequence to a special

faculty of supreme authority called conscience. Adam Smith and many other

writers were especially struck by their sympathetic character. We are

naturally attracted by humanity, and repelled by cruelty, and this

instinctive, unreasoning sentiment constitutes, according to these

moralists, the difference between right and wrong. Cudworth, however, the

English precursor of Kant, had already anticipated, and later

metaphysicians have more fully exhibited, the inadequacy of such an

analysis. Justice, humanity, veracity, and kindred virtues not merely have

the power of attracting us, we have also an intellectual perception that

they are essentially and immutably good, that their nature does not depend

upon, and is not relative to, our constitutions; that it is impossible and

inconceivable they should ever be vices, and their opposites, virtues.

They are, therefore, it is said, intuitions of the reason. Clarke,

developing the same rational school, and following in the steps of those

moralists who regard our nature as a hierarchy of powers or faculties,

with different degrees of dignity, and an appropriate order of supremacy

and subordination, maintained that virtue consisted in harmony with the

nature of things. Wollaston endeavoured to reduce it to truth, and

Hutcheson to benevolence, which he maintained is recognised and approved

by what his respect for the philosophy of Locke induced him to call “a

moral sense,” but what Shaftesbury had regarded as a moral “taste.” The

pleasure attending the gratification of this taste, according to

Shaftesbury and Henry More, is the motive to virtue. The doctrine of a

moral sense or faculty was the basis of the ethics of Reid. Hume

maintained that the peculiar quality of virtue is its utility, but that

our affections are purely disinterested, and that we arrive at our

knowledge of what is virtuous by a moral sense implanted in our nature,

which leads us instinctively to approve of all acts that are beneficial to

others. Expanding a pregnant hint which had been thrown out by Butler, he

laid the foundation for a union of the schools of Clarke and Shaftesbury,

by urging that our moral decisions are not simple, but complex, containing

both a judgment of the reason, and an emotion of the heart. This fact has

been elucidated still further by later writers, who have observed that

these two elements apply in varying degrees to different kinds of virtue.

According to Lord Kames, our intellectual perception of right and wrong

applies most strictly to virtues like justice or veracity, which are of

what is called “perfect obligation,” or, in other words, are of such a

nature, that their violation is a distinct crime, while the emotion of

attraction or affection is shown most strongly towards virtues of

imperfect obligation, like benevolence or charity. Like Hutcheson and

Shaftesbury, Lord Kames notices the analogies between our moral and

æsthetical judgments.

These last analogies open out a region of thought widely different from

that we have been traversing. The close connection between the good and

the beautiful has been always felt, so much so, that both were in Greek

expressed by the same word, and in the philosophy of Plato, moral beauty

was regarded as the archetype of which all visible beauty is only the

shadow or the image. We all feel that there is a strict propriety in the

term moral beauty. We feel that there are different forms of beauty which

have a natural correspondence to different moral qualities, and much of

the charm of poetry and eloquence rests upon this harmony. We feel that we

have a direct, immediate, intuitive perception that some objects, such as

the sky above us, are beautiful, that this perception of beauty is totally

different, and could not possibly be derived, from a perception of their

utility, and that it bears a very striking resemblance to the

instantaneous and unreasoning admiration elicited by a generous or heroic

action. We perceive too, if we examine with care the operations of our own

mind, that an æsthetical judgment includes an intuition or intellectual

perception, and an emotion of attraction or admiration, very similar to

those which compose a moral judgment. The very idea of beauty again

implies that it should be admired, as the idea of happiness implies that

it should be desired, and the idea of duty that it should be performed.

There is also a striking correspondence between the degree and kind of

uniformity we can in each case discover. That there is a difference

between right and wrong, and between beauty and ugliness, are both

propositions which are universally felt. That right is better than wrong,

and beauty than ugliness, are equally unquestioned. When we go further,

and attempt to define the nature of these qualities, we are met indeed by

great diversities of detail, but by a far larger amount of substantial

unity. Poems like the Iliad or the Psalms, springing in the most

dissimilar quarters, have commanded the admiration of men, through all the

changes of some 3,000 years. The charm of music, the harmony of the female

countenance, the majesty of the starry sky, of the ocean or of the

mountain, the gentler beauties of the murmuring stream or of the twilight

shades, were felt, as they are felt now, when the imagination of the

infant world first embodied itself in written words. And in the same way

types of heroism, and of virtue, descending from the remotest ages,

command the admiration of mankind. We can sympathise with the emotions of

praise or blame revealed in the earliest historians, and the most ancient

moralists strike a responsive chord in every heart. The broad lines remain

unchanged. No one ever contended that justice was a vice or injustice a

virtue; or that a summer sunset was a repulsive object, or that the sores

upon a human body were beautiful. Always, too, the objects of æsthetical

admiration were divided into two great classes, the sublime and the

beautiful, which in ethics have their manifest counterparts in the heroic

and the amiable.

If, again, we examine the undoubted diversities that exist in judgments of

virtue and of beauty, we soon discover that in each case a large

proportion of them are to be ascribed to the different degrees of

civilisation. The moral standard changes within certain limits, and

according to a regular process with the evolutions of society. There are

virtues very highly estimated in a rude civilisation which sink into

comparative insignificance in an organised society, while conversely,

virtues that were deemed secondary in the first become primary in the

other. There are even virtues that it is impossible for any but highly

cultivated minds to recognise. Questions of virtue and vice, such as the

difference between humanity and barbarity, or between temperance and

intemperance, are sometimes merely questions of degree, and the standard

at one stage of civilisation may be much higher than at another. Just in

the same way a steady modification of tastes, while a recognition of the

broad features of beauty remains unchanged, accompanies advancing

civilisation. The preference of gaudy to subdued tints, of colour to form,

of a florid to a chaste style, of convulsive attitudes, gigantic figures,

and strong emotions, may be looked for with considerable confidence in an

uninstructed people. The refining influence of cultivation is in no sphere

more remarkable than in the canons of taste it produces, and there are few

better measures of the civilisation of a people than the conceptions of

beauty it forms, the type or ideal it endeavours to realise.

Many diversities, however, both of moral and æsthetical judgments, may be

traced to accidental causes. Some one who is greatly admired, or who

possesses great influence, is distinguished by some peculiarity of

appearance, or introduces some peculiarity of dress. He will soon find

countless imitators. Gradually the natural sense of beauty will become

vitiated; the eye and the taste will adjust themselves to a false and

artificial standard, and men will at last judge according to it with the

most absolute spontaneity. In the same way, if any accidental circumstance

has elevated an indifferent action to peculiar honour, if a religious

system enforces it as a virtue or brands it as a vice, the consciences of

men will after a time accommodate themselves to the sentence, and an

appeal to a wider than a local tribunal is necessary to correct the error.

Every nation, again, from its peculiar circumstances and position, tends

to some particular type, both of beauty and of virtue, and it naturally

extols its national type beyond all others. The virtues of a small poor

nation, living among barren mountains, surrounded by powerful enemies, and

maintaining its independence only by the most inflexible discipline,

watchfulness, and courage, will be in some degree different from those of

a rich people removed from all fear of invasion and placed in the centre

of commerce. The former will look with a very lenient eye on acts of

barbarity or treachery, which to the latter would appear unspeakably

horrible, and will value very highly certain virtues of discipline which

the other will comparatively neglect. So, too, the conceptions of beauty

formed by a nation of negroes will be different from those formed by a

nation of whites;(101) the splendour of a tropical sky or the savage

grandeur of a northern ocean, the aspect of great mountains or of wide

plains, will not only supply nations with present images of sublimity or

beauty, but will also contribute to form their standard and affect their

judgments. Local customs or observances become so interwoven with our

earliest recollections, that we at last regard them as essentially

venerable, and even in the most trivial matters it requires a certain

effort to dissolve the association. There was much wisdom as well as much

wit in the picture of the novelist who described the English footman’s

contempt for the uniforms of the French, “blue being altogether ridiculous

for regimentals, except in the blue guards and artillery;” and I suppose

there are few Englishmen into whose first confused impression of France

there does not enter a half-instinctive feeling of repugnance caused by

the ferocious appearance of a peasantry who are all dressed like

butchers.(102)

It has been said(103) that “the feelings of beauty, grandeur, and whatever

else is comprehended under the name of taste, do not lead to action, but

terminate in delightful contemplation, which constitutes the essential

distinction between them and the moral sentiments to which in some points

of view they may doubtless be likened.” This position I conceive to be

altogether untenable. Our æsthetical judgment is of the nature of a

preference. It leads us to prefer one class of objects to another, and

whenever other things are equal, becomes a ground for action. In choosing

the persons with whom we live, the neighbourhood we inhabit, the objects

that surround us, we prefer that which is beautiful to that which is the

reverse, and in every case in which a choice between beauty and deformity

is in question, and no counteracting motive intervenes, we choose the

former, and avoid the latter. There are no doubt innumerable events in

life in which this question does not arise, but there are also very many

in which we are not called upon to make a moral judgment. We say a man is

actuated by strong moral principle who chooses according to its dictates

in every case involving a moral judgment that comes naturally before him,

and who in obedience to its impulse pursues special courses of action.

Corresponding propositions may be maintained with perfect truth concerning

our sense of beauty. In proportion to its strength does it guide our

course in ordinary life, and determine our peculiar pursuits. We may

indeed sacrifice our sense of material beauty to considerations of utility

with much more alacrity than our sense of moral beauty; we may consent to

build a shapeless house sooner than to commit a dishonourable action, but

we cannot voluntarily choose that which is simply deformed, rather than

that which is beautiful, without a certain feeling of pain, and a pain of

this kind, according to the school of Hartley, is the precise definition

of conscience. Nor is it at all difficult to conceive men with a sense of

beauty so strong that they would die rather than outrage it.

Considering all these things, it is not surprising that many moralists

should have regarded moral excellence as simply the highest form of

beauty, and moral cultivation as the supreme refinement of taste. But

although this manner of regarding it is, as I think, far more plausible

than the theory which resolves virtue into utility, although the Greek

moralists and the school of Shaftesbury have abundantly proved that there

is an extremely close connection between these orders of ideas, there are

two considerations which appear to show the inadequacy of this theory. We

are clearly conscious of the propriety of applying the epithet “beautiful”

to virtues such as charity, reverence, or devotion, but we cannot apply it

with the same propriety to duties of perfect obligation, such as veracity

or integrity. The sense of beauty and the affection that follows it attach

themselves rather to modes of enthusiasm and feeling than to the course of

simple duty which constitutes a merely truthful and upright man.(104)

Besides this, as the Stoics and Butler have shown, the position of

conscience in our nature is wholly unique, and clearly separates morals

from a study of the beautiful. While each of our senses or appetites has a

restricted sphere of operation, it is the function of conscience to survey

the whole constitution of our being, and assign limits to the

gratification of all our various passions and desires. Differing not in

degree, but in kind from the other principles of our nature, we feel that

a course of conduct which is opposed to it may be intelligibly described

as unnatural, even when in accordance with our most natural appetites, for

to conscience is assigned the prerogative of both judging and restraining

them all. Its power may be insignificant, but its title is undisputed, and

“if it had might as it has right, it would govern the world.”(105) It is

this faculty, distinct from, and superior to, all appetites, passions, and

tastes, that makes virtue the supreme law of life, and adds an imperative

character to the feeling of attraction it inspires. It is this which was

described by Cicero as the God ruling within us; by the Stoics as the

sovereignty of reason; by St. Paul as the law of nature; by Butler as the

supremacy of conscience.

The distinction of different parts of our nature, as higher or lower,

which appears in the foregoing reasoning, and which occupies so important

a place in the intuitive system of morals, is one that can only be

defended by the way of illustrations. A writer can only select cases in

which such distinctions seem most apparent, and leave them to the feelings

of his reader. A few examples will, I hope, be sufficient to show that

even in our pleasures, we are not simply determined by the amount of

enjoyment, but that there is a difference of kind, which may be reasonably

described by the epithets, higher or lower.

If we suppose a being from another sphere, who derived his conceptions

from a purely rational process, without the intervention of the senses, to

descend to our world, and to enquire into the principles of human nature,

I imagine there are few points that would strike him as more anomalous, or

which he would be more absolutely unable to realise, than the different

estimates in which men hold the pleasures derived from the two senses of

tasting and hearing. Under the first is comprised the enjoyment resulting

from the action of certain kinds of food upon the palate. Under the second

the charm of music. Each of these forms of pleasure is natural, each can

be greatly heightened by cultivation, in each case the pleasure may be

vivid, but is very transient, and in neither case do evil consequences

necessarily ensue. Yet with so many undoubted points of resemblance, when

we turn to the actual world, we find the difference between these two

orders of pleasure of such a nature, that a comparison seems absolutely

ludicrous. In what then does this difference consist? Not, surely, in the

greater intensity of the enjoyment derived from music, for in many cases

this superiority does not exist.(106) We are all conscious that in our

comparison of these pleasures, there is an element distinct from any

consideration of their intensity, duration, or consequences. We naturally

attach a faint notion of shame to the one, while we as naturally glory in

the other. A very keen sense of the pleasures of the palate is looked upon

as in a certain degree discreditable. A man will hardly boast that he is

very fond of eating, but he has no hesitation in acknowledging that he is

very fond of music. The first taste lowers, and the second elevates him in

his own eyes, and in those of his neighbours.

Again, let a man of cheerful disposition, and of a cultivated but not very

fastidious taste, observe his own emotions and the countenances of those

around him during the representation of a clever tragedy and of a clever

farce, and it is probable that he will come to the conclusion that his

enjoyment in the latter case has been both more unmingled and more intense

than in the former. He has felt no lassitude, he has not endured the

amount of pain that necessarily accompanies the pleasure of pathos, he has

experienced a vivid, absorbing pleasure, and he has traced similar

emotions in the violent demonstrations of his neighbours. Yet he will

readily admit that the pleasure derived from the tragedy is of a higher

order than that derived from the farce. Sometimes he will find himself

hesitating which of the two he will choose. The love of mere enjoyment

leads him to the one. A sense of its _nobler_ character inclines him to

the other.

A similar distinction may be observed in other departments. Except in the

relation of the sexes, it is probable that a more intense pleasure is

usually obtained from the grotesque and the eccentric, than from the

perfections of beauty. The pleasure derived from beauty is not violent in

its nature, and it is in most cases peculiarly mixed with melancholy. The

feelings of a man who is deeply moved by a lovely landscape are rarely

those of extreme elation. A shade of melancholy steals over his mind. His

eyes fill with tears. A vague and unsatisfied longing fills his soul. Yet,

troubled and broken as is this form of enjoyment, few persons would

hesitate to pronounce it of a higher kind than any that can be derived

from the exhibitions of oddity.

If pleasures were the sole objects of our pursuit, and if their excellence

were measured only by the quantity of enjoyment they afford, nothing could

appear more obvious than that the man would be esteemed most wise who

attained his object at least cost. Yet the whole course of civilisation is

in a precisely opposite direction. A child derives the keenest and most

exquisite enjoyment from the simplest objects. A flower, a doll, a rude

game, the least artistic tale, is sufficient to enchant it. An uneducated

peasant is enraptured with the wildest story and the coarsest wit.

Increased cultivation almost always produces a fastidiousness which

renders necessary the increased elaboration of our pleasures. We attach a

certain discredit to a man who has retained those of childhood. The very

fact of our deriving pleasure from certain amusements creates a kind of

humiliation, for we feel that they are not in harmony with the nobility of

our nature.(107)

Our judgments of societies resemble in this respect our judgments of

individuals. Few persons, I think, who have compared the modes of popular

life in stagnant and undeveloped countries like Spain with those in the

great centres of industrial civilisation, will venture to pronounce with

any confidence that the quantum or average of actual realised enjoyment is

greater in the civilised than in the semi-civilised society. An

undeveloped nature is by no means necessarily an unhappy nature, and

although we possess no accurate gauge of happiness, we may, at least, be

certain that its degrees do not coincide with the degrees of prosperity.

The tastes and habits of men in a backward society accommodate themselves

to the narrow circle of a few pleasures, and probably find in these as

complete satisfaction as more civilised men in a wider range; and if there

is in the first condition somewhat more of the weariness of monotony,

there is in the second much more of the anxiety of discontent. The

superiority of a highly civilised man lies chiefly in the fact that he

belongs to a higher order of being, for he has approached more nearly to

the end of his existence, and has called into action a larger number of

his capacities. And this is in itself an end. Even if, as is not

improbable, the lower animals are happier than man,(108) and

semi-barbarians than civilised men, still it is better to be a man than a

brute, better to be born amid the fierce struggles of civilisation than in

some stranded nation apart from all the flow of enterprise and knowledge.

Even in that material civilisation which utilitarianism delights to

glorify, there is an element which the philosophy of mere enjoyment cannot

explain.

Again, if we ask the reason of the vast and indisputable superiority which

the general voice of mankind gives to mental pleasures, considered as

pleasures, over physical ones, we shall find, I think, no adequate or

satisfactory answer on the supposition that pleasures owe all their value

to the quantity of enjoyment they afford. The former, it is truly said,

are more varied and more prolonged than the latter but on the other hand,

they are attained with more effort, and they are diffused over a far

narrower circle. No one who compares the class of men who derive their

pleasure chiefly from field sports or other forms of physical enjoyment

with those who derive their pleasure from the highest intellectual

sources; no one who compares the period of boyhood when enjoyments are

chiefly animal with early manhood when they are chiefly intellectual, will

be able to discover in the different levels of happiness any justification

of the great interval the world places between these pleasures. No painter

or novelist, who wished to depict an ideal of perfect happiness, would

seek it in a profound student. Without entering into any doubtful

questions concerning the relations of the body to all mental states, it

may be maintained that bodily conditions have in general more influence

upon our enjoyment than mental ones. The happiness of the great majority

of men is far more affected by health and by temperament,(109) resulting

from physical conditions, which again physical enjoyments are often

calculated to produce, than by any mental or moral causes, and acute

physical sufferings paralyse all the energies of our nature to a greater

extent than any mental distress. It is probable that the American inventor

of the first anæsthetic has done more for the real happiness of mankind

than all the moral philosophers from Socrates to Mill. Moral causes may

teach men patience, and the endurance of felt suffering, or may even

alleviate its pangs, but there are temperaments due to physical causes

from which most sufferings glance almost unfelt. It is said that when an

ancient was asked “what use is philosophy?” he answered, “it teaches men

how to die,” and he verified his words by a noble death; but it has been

proved on a thousand battle-fields, it has been proved on a thousand

scaffolds, it is proved through all the wide regions of China and India,

that the dull and animal nature which feels little and realises faintly,

can meet death with a calm that philosophy can barely rival.(110) The

truth is, that the mental part of our nature is not regarded as superior

to the physical part, because it contributes most to our happiness. The

superiority is of a different kind, and may be intelligibly expressed by

the epithets higher and lower.

And, once more, there is a class of pleasures resulting from the

gratification of our moral feelings which we naturally place in the

foremost rank. To the great majority of mankind it will probably appear,

in spite of the doctrine of Paley, that no multiple of the pleasure of

eating pastry can be an equivalent to the pleasure derived from a generous

action. It is not that the latter is so inconceivably intense. It is that

it is of a higher order.

This distinction of kind has been neglected or denied by most utilitarian

writers;(111) and although an attempt has recently been made to introduce

it into the system, it appears manifestly incompatible with its principle.

If the reality of the distinction be admitted, it shows that our wills are

so far from tending necessarily to that which produces most enjoyment that

we have the power even in our pleasures of recognising a higher and a

wholly different quality, and of making that quality rather than enjoyment

the object of our choice. If it be possible for a man in choosing between

two pleasures deliberately to select as preferable, apart from all

consideration of consequences, that which he is conscious gives least

enjoyment because he recognises in it a greater worthiness, or elevation,

it is certain that his conduct is either wholly irrational, or that he is

acting on a principle of judgment for which ’the greatest happiness’

philosophy is unable to account. Consistently with that philosophy, the

terms higher and lower as applied to different parts of our nature, to

different regions of thought or feeling, can have no other meaning than

that of productive of more or less enjoyment. But if once we admit a

distinction of quality as well as a distinction of quantity in our

estimate of pleasure, all is changed. It then appears evident that the

different parts of our nature to which these pleasures refer, bear to each

other a relation of another kind, which may be clearly and justly

described by the terms higher and lower; and the assertion that our reason

reveals to us intuitively and directly this hierarchy of our being, is a

fundamental position of the greatest schools of intuitive moralists.

According to these writers, when we say that our moral and intellectual is

superior to our animal nature, that the benevolent affections are superior

to the selfish ones, that conscience has a legitimate supremacy over the

other parts of our being; this language is not arbitrary, or fantastic, or

capricious, because it is intelligible. When such a subordination is

announced, it corresponds with feelings we all possess, falls in with the

natural course of our judgments, with our habitual and unstudied language.

The arguments that have been directed against the theory of natural moral

perceptions are of two kinds, the first, which I have already noticed,

being designed to show that all our moral judgments may be resolved into

considerations of utility; the second resting upon the diversity of these

judgments in different nations and stages of civilisation, which, it is

said, is altogether inexplicable upon the supposition of a moral faculty.

As these variations form the great stumbling-block in the way of the

doctrine I am maintaining, and as they constitute a very important part of

the history of morals, I shall make no apology for noticing them in some

detail.

In the first place, there are many cases in which diversities of moral

judgment arise from causes that are not moral, but purely intellectual.

Thus, for example, when theologians pronounced loans at interest contrary

to the law of nature and plainly extortionate, this error obviously arose

from a false notion of the uses of money. They believed that it was a

sterile thing, and that he who has restored what he borrowed, has

cancelled all the benefit he received from the transaction. At the time

when the first Christian moralists treated the subject, special

circumstances had rendered the rate of interest extremely high, and

consequently extremely oppressive to the poor, and this fact, no doubt,

strengthened the prejudice; but the root of the condemnation of usury was

simply an error in political economy. When men came to understand that

money is a productive thing, and that the sum lent enables the borrower to

create sources of wealth that will continue when the loan has been

returned, they perceived that there was no natural injustice in exacting

payment for this advantage, and usury either ceased to be assailed, or was

assailed only upon the ground of positive commands.

Thus again the question of the criminality of abortion has been

considerably affected by physiological speculations as to the time when

the fœtus in the womb acquires the nature, and therefore the rights, of a

separate being. The general opinion among the ancients seems to have been

that it was but a part of the mother, and that she had the same right to

destroy it as to cauterise a tumour upon her body. Plato and Aristotle

both admitted the practice. The Roman law contained no enactment against

voluntary abortion till the time of Ulpian. The Stoics thought that the

infant received its soul when respiration began. The Justinian code fixed

its animation at forty days after conception. In modern legislations it is

treated as a distinct being from the moment of conception.(112) It is

obvious that the solution of such questions, though affecting our moral

judgments, must be sought entirely outside the range of moral feelings.

In the next place, there is a broad distinction to be drawn between duties

which rest immediately on the dictates of conscience, and those which are

based upon positive commands. The iniquity of theft, murder, falsehood, or

adultery rests upon grounds generically distinct from those on which men

pronounce it to be sinful to eat meat on Friday, or to work on Sunday, or

to abstain from religious assemblies. The reproaches conscience directs

against those who are guilty of these last acts are purely hypothetical,

conscience enjoining obedience to the Divine commands, but leaving it to

reason to determine what those commands may be. The distinction between

these two classes of duties becomes apparent on the slightest reflection,

and the variations in their relative prominence form one of the most

important branches of religious history.

Closely connected with the preceding are the diversities which result from

an ancient custom becoming at last, through its very antiquity, or through

the confusion of means with ends, an object of religious reverence. Among

the many safeguards of female purity in the Roman republic was an

enactment forbidding women even to taste wine, and this very intelligible

law being enforced with the earliest education, became at last, by habit

and traditionary reverence, so incorporated with the moral feelings of the

people, that its violation was spoken of as a monstrous crime. Aulus

Gellius has preserved a passage in which Cato observes, “that the husband

has an absolute authority over his wife; it is for him to condemn and

punish her, if she has been guilty of any shameful act, such as drinking

wine or committing adultery.”(113) As soon as the reverence for tradition

was diminished, and men ventured to judge old customs upon their own

merits, they were able, by steadily reflecting upon this belief, to reduce

it to its primitive elements, to separate the act from the ideas with

which it had been associated, and thus to perceive that it was not

necessarily opposed to any of those great moral laws or feelings which

their consciences revealed, and which were the basis of all their

reasonings on morals.

A confused association of ideas, which is easily exposed by a patient

analysis, lies at the root of more serious anomalies. Thus to those who

reflect deeply upon moral history, few things, I suppose, are more

humiliating than to contrast the admiration and profoundly reverential

attachment excited by a conqueror, who through the promptings of simple

vanity, through love of fame, or through greed of territory, has wantonly

caused the deaths, the sufferings, or the bereavements of thousands, with

the abhorrence produced by a single act of murder or robbery committed by

a poor and ignorant man, perhaps under the pressure of extreme want or

intolerable wrong. The attraction of genius and power, which the vulgar

usually measure by their material fruits, the advantages acquired by the

nation to which he belongs, the belief that battles are decided by

providential interference, and that military success is therefore a proof

of Divine favour, and the sanctity ascribed to the regal office, have all

no doubt conspired to veil the atrocity of the conqueror’s career; but

there is probably another and a deeper influence behind. That which

invests war, in spite of all the evils that attend it, with a certain

moral grandeur, is the heroic self-sacrifice it elicits. With perhaps the

single exception of the Church, it is the sphere in which mercenary

motives have least sway, in which performance is least weighed and

measured by strict obligation, in which a disinterested enthusiasm has

most scope. A battle-field is the scene of deeds of self-sacrifice so

transcendent, and at the same time so dramatic, that in spite of all its

horrors and crimes, it awakens the most passionate moral enthusiasm. But

this feeling produced by the thought of so many who have sacrificed their

life-blood for their flag or for their chief, needs some definite object

on which to rest. The multitude of nameless combatants do not strike the

imagination. They do not stand out, and are not realised, as distinct and

living figures conspicuous to the view. Hence it is that the chief, as the

most prominent, becomes the representative warrior; the martyr’s aureole

descends upon his brow, and thus by a confusion that seems the very irony

of fate, the enthusiasm evoked by the self-sacrifice of thousands sheds a

sacred glow around the very man whose prodigious egotism had rendered that

sacrifice necessary.

Another form of moral paradox is derived from the fact that positive

religions may override our moral perceptions in such a manner, that we may

consciously admit a moral contradiction. In this respect there is a strict

parallelism between our intellectual and our moral faculties. It is at

present the professed belief of at least three-fourths of the Christian

Church, and was for some centuries the firm belief of the entire Church,

that on a certain night the Founder of the Christian faith, being seated

at a supper table, held His own body in His own hand, broke that body,

distributed it to His disciples, who proceeded to eat it, the same body

remaining at the same moment seated intact at the table, and soon

afterwards proceeding to the garden of Gethsemane. The fact of such a

doctrine being believed, does not imply that the faculties of those who

hold it are of such a nature that they perceive no contradiction or

natural absurdity in these statements. The well-known argument derived

from the obscurity of the metaphysical notion of substance is intended

only in some slight degree to soften the difficulty. The contradiction is

clearly perceived, but it is accepted by faith as part of the teaching of

the Church.

What transubstantiation is in the order of reason the Augustinian doctrine

of the damnation of unbaptised infants, and the Calvinistic doctrine of

reprobation, are in the order of morals. Of these doctrines it is not too

much to say, that in the form in which they have often been stated, they

surpass in atrocity any tenets that have ever been admitted into any pagan

creed, and would, if they formed an essential part of Christianity, amply

justify the term “pernicious superstition,” which Tacitus applied to the

faith. That a little child who lives but a few moments after birth and

dies before it has been sprinkled with the sacred water is in such a sense

responsible for its ancestors having 6,000 years before eaten some

forbidden fruit that it may with perfect justice be resuscitated and cast

into an abyss of eternal fire in expiation of this ancestral crime, that

an all-righteous and all-merciful Creator in the full exercise of those

attributes deliberately calls into existence sentient beings whom He has

from eternity irrevocably destined to endless, unspeakable, unmitigated

torture, are propositions which are at once so extravagantly absurd and so

ineffably atrocious that their adoption might well lead men to doubt the

universality of moral perceptions. Such teaching is in fact simply

dæmonism, and dæmonism in its most extreme form. It attributes to the

Creator acts of injustice and of barbarity, which it would be absolutely

impossible for the imagination to surpass, acts before which the most

monstrous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignificance, acts

which are in fact considerably worse than any that theologians have

attributed to the devil. If there were men who while vividly realising the

nature of these acts naturally turned to them as the exhibitions of

perfect goodness, all systems of ethics founded upon innate moral

perceptions would be false. But happily this is not so. Those who embrace

these doctrines do so only because they believe that some inspired Church

or writer has taught them, and because they are still in that stage in

which men consider it more irreligious to question the infallibility of an

apostle than to disfigure by any conceivable imputation the character of

the Deity. They accordingly esteem it a matter of duty, and a commendable

exercise of humility, to stifle the moral feelings of their nature, and

they at last succeed in persuading themselves that their Divinity would be

extremely offended if they hesitated to ascribe to him the attributes of a

fiend. But their moral feelings, though not unimpaired by such

conceptions, are not on ordinary subjects generically different from those

of their neighbours. With an amiable inconsistency they can even find

something to revolt them in the lives of a Caligula or a Nero. Their

theological estimate of justice and mercy is isolated. Their doctrine is

accepted as a kind of moral miracle, and as is customary with a certain

school of theologians, when they enunciate a proposition which is palpably

self-contradictory they call it a mystery and an occasion for faith.

In this instance a distinct moral contradiction is consciously admitted.

In the case of persecution, a strictly moral and logical inference is

drawn from a very immoral proposition which is accepted as part of a

system of dogmatic theology. The two elements that should be considered in

punishing a criminal are the heinousness of his guilt and the injury he

inflicts. When the greatest guilt and the greatest injury are combined,

the greatest punishment naturally follows. No one would argue against the

existence of a moral faculty, on the ground that men put murderers to

death. When therefore theologians believed that a man was intensely guilty

who held certain opinions, and that he was causing the damnation of his

fellows if he propagated them, there was no moral difficulty in concluding

that the heretic should be put to death. Selfish considerations may have

directed persecution against heresy rather than against vice, but the

Catholic doctrines of the guilt of error, and of the infallibility of the

Church, were amply sufficient to justify it.

It appears then that a dogmatic system which is accepted on rational or

other grounds, and supported by prospects of rewards and punishments, may

teach a code of ethics differing from that of conscience; and that in this

case the voice of conscience may be either disregarded or stifled. It is

however also true, that it may be perverted. When, for example,

theologians during a long period have inculcated habits of credulity,

rather than habits of enquiry; when they have persuaded men that it is

better to cherish prejudice than to analyse it; better to stifle every

doubt of what they have been taught than honestly to investigate its

value, they will at last succeed in forming habits of mind that will

instinctively and habitually recoil from all impartiality and intellectual

honesty. If men continually violate a duty they may at last cease to feel

its obligation. But this, though it forms a great difficulty in ethical

enquiries, is no argument against the reality of moral perceptions, for it

is simply a law to which all our powers are subject. A bad intellectual

education will produce not only erroneous or imperfect information but

also a false ply or habit of judgment. A bad æsthetical education will

produce false canons of taste. Systematic abuse will pervert and vitiate

even some of our physical perceptions. In each case the experience of many

minds under many conditions must be appealed to, to determine the standard

of right and wrong, and long and difficult discipline is required to

restore the diseased organ to sanity. We may decide particular moral

questions by reasoning, but our reasoning is an appeal to certain moral

principles which are revealed to us by intuition.

The principal difficulty I imagine which most men have in admitting that

we possess certain natural moral perceptions arises from the supposition

that it implies the existence of some mysterious agent like the dæmon of

Socrates, which gives us specific and infallible information in particular

cases. But this I conceive to be a complete mistake. All that is

necessarily meant by the adherents of this school is comprised in two

propositions. The first is that our will is not governed exclusively by

the law of pleasure and pain, but also by the law of duty, which we feel

to be distinct from the former, and to carry with it the sense of

obligation. The second is that the basis of our conception of duty is an

intuitive perception that among the various feelings, tendencies, and

impulses that constitute our emotional being, there are some which are

essentially good, and ought to be encouraged, and some which are

essentially bad, and ought to be repressed. They contend that it is a

psychological fact that we are intuitively conscious that our benevolent

affections are superior to our malevolent ones, truth to falsehood,

justice to injustice, gratitude to ingratitude, chastity to sensuality,

and that in all ages and countries the path of virtue has been towards the

higher and not towards the lower feelings. It may be that the sense of

duty is so weak as to be scarcely perceptible, and then the lower part of

our nature will be supreme. It may happen that certain conditions of

society lead men to direct their anxiety for moral improvement altogether

in one or two channels, as was the case in ancient Greece, where civic and

intellectual virtues were very highly cultivated, and the virtue of

chastity was almost neglected. It may happen that different parts of our

higher nature in a measure conflict, as when a very strong sense of

justice checks our benevolent feelings. Dogmatic systems may enjoin men to

propitiate certain unseen beings by acts which are not in accordance with

the moral law. Special circumstances may influence, and the intermingling

of many different motives may obscure and complicate, the moral evolution;

but above all these one great truth appears. No one who desires to become

holier and better imagines that he does so by becoming more malevolent, or

more untruthful, or more unchaste. Every one who desires to attain

perfection in these departments of feeling is impelled towards

benevolence, towards veracity, towards chastity.(114)

Now it is manifest that according to this theory the moral unity to be

expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a

unity of tendency. Men come into the world with their benevolent

affections very inferior in power to their selfish ones, and the function

of morals is to invert this order. The extinction of all selfish feeling

is impossible for an individual, and if it were general, it would result

in the dissolution of society. The question of morals must always be a

question of proportion or of degree. At one time the benevolent affections

embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a

class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and

finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal

world. In each of these stages a standard is formed, different from that

of the preceding stage, but in each case the same tendency is recognised

as virtue.

We have in this fact a simple, and as it appears to me a conclusive,

answer to the overwhelming majority of the objections that are continually

and confidently urged against the intuitive school. That some savages kill

their old parents, that infanticide has been practised without compunction

by even civilised nations, that the best Romans saw nothing wrong in the

gladiatorial shows, that political or revengeful assassinations have been

for centuries admitted, that slavery has been sometimes honoured and

sometimes condemned, are unquestionable proofs that the same act may be

regarded in one age as innocent, and in another as criminal. Now it is

undoubtedly true that in many cases an historical examination will reveal

special circumstances, explaining or palliating the apparent anomaly. It

has been often shown that the gladiatorial shows were originally a form of

human sacrifice adopted through religious motives; that the rude nomadic

life of savages rendering impossible the preservation of aged and helpless

members of the tribe, the murder of parents was regarded as an act of

mercy both by the murderer and the victim; that before an effective

administration of justice was organised, private vengeance was the sole

preservative against crime,(115) and political assassination against

usurpation; that the insensibility of some savages to the criminality of

theft arises from the fact that they were accustomed to have all things in

common; that the Spartan law, legalising theft, arose partly from a desire

to foster military dexterity among the people, but chiefly from a desire

to discourage wealth; that slavery was introduced through motives of

mercy, to prevent conquerors from killing their prisoners.(116) All this

is true, but there is another and a more general answer. It is not to be

expected, and it is not maintained, that men in all ages should have

agreed about the application of their moral principles. All that is

contended for is that these principles are themselves the same. Some of

what appear to us monstrous acts of cruelty, were dictated by that very

feeling of humanity, the universal perception of the merit of which they

are cited to disprove,(117) and even when this is not the case, all that

can be inferred is, that the standard of humanity was very low. But still

humanity was recognised as a virtue, and cruelty as a vice.

At this point, I may observe how completely fallacious is the assertion

that a progressive morality is impossible upon the supposition of an

original moral faculty.(118) To such statements there are two very simple

answers. In the first place, although the intuitive moralist asserts that

certain qualities are necessarily virtuous, he fully admits that the

degree in which they are acted upon, or in other words, the standard of

duty, may become progressively higher. In the next place, although he

refuses to resolve all virtue into utility, he admits as fully as his

opponents, that benevolence, or the promotion of the happiness of man, is

a virtue, and that therefore discoveries which exhibit more clearly the

true interests of our kind, may throw new light upon the nature of our

duty.

The considerations I have urged with reference to humanity, apply with

equal force to the various relations of the sexes. When the passions of

men are altogether unrestrained, community of wives and all eccentric

forms of sensuality will be admitted. When men seek to improve their

nature in this respect, their object will be to abridge and confine the

empire of sensuality. But to this process of improvement there are obvious

limits. In the first place the continuance of the species is only possible

by a sensual act. In the next place the strength of this passion and the

weakness of humanity are so great, that the moralist must take into

account the fact that in all societies, and especially in those in which

free scope had long been given to the passions, a large amount of

indulgence will arise which is not due to a simple desire of propagating

the species. If then incest is prohibited, and community of wives replaced

by ordinary polygamy, a moral improvement will have been effected, and a

standard of virtue formed. But this standard soon becomes the

starting-point of new progress. If we examine the Jewish law, we find the

legislator prohibiting adultery, regulating the degrees of marriage, but

at the same time authorising polygamy, though with a caution against the

excessive multiplication of wives. In Greece monogamy, though not without

exceptions, had been enforced, but a concurrence of unfavourable

influences prevented any high standard being attained among the men, and

in their case almost every form of indulgence beyond the limits of

marriage was permitted. In Rome the standard was far higher. Monogamy was

firmly established. The ideal of female morality was placed as high as

among Christian nations. Among men, however, while unnatural love and

adultery were regarded as wrong, simple unchastity before marriage was

scarcely considered a fault. In Catholicism marriage is regarded in a

twofold light, as a means for the propagation of the species, and as a

concession to the weakness of humanity, and all other sensual enjoyment is

stringently prohibited.

In these cases there is a great difference between the degrees of

earnestness with which men exert themselves in the repression of their

passions, and in the amount of indulgence which is conceded to their lower

nature;(119) but there is no difference in the direction of the virtuous

impulse. While, too, in the case of adultery, and in the production of

children, questions of interest and utility do undoubtedly intervene, we

are conscious that the general progress turns upon a totally different

order of ideas. The feeling of all men and the language of all nations,

the sentiment which though often weakened is never wholly effaced, that

this appetite, even in its most legitimate gratification, is a thing to be

veiled and withdrawn from sight, all that is known under the names of

decency and indecency, concur in proving that we have an innate,

intuitive, instinctive perception that there is something degrading in the

sensual part of our nature, something to which a feeling of shame is

naturally attached, something that jars with our conception of perfect

purity, something we could not with any propriety ascribe to an all-holy

being. It may be questioned whether anyone was ever altogether destitute

of this perception, and nothing but the most inveterate passion for system

could induce men to resolve it into a mere calculation of interests. It is

this feeling or instinct which lies at the root of the whole movement I

have described, and it is this too that produced that sense of the

sanctity of perfect continence which the Catholic church has so warmly

encouraged, but which may be traced through the most distant ages, and the

most various creeds. We find it among the Nazarenes and Essenes of Judæa,

among the priests of Egypt and India, in the monasteries of Tartary, in

the histories of miraculous virgins that are so numerous in the

mythologies of Asia. Such, for example, was the Chinese legend that tells

how when there was but one man with one woman upon earth, the woman

refused to sacrifice her virginity even in order to people the globe, and

the gods honouring her purity granted that she should conceive beneath the

gaze of her lover’s eyes, and a virgin-mother became the parent of

humanity.(120) In the midst of the sensuality of ancient Greece, chastity

was the pre-eminent attribute of sanctity ascribed to Athene and Artemis.

“Chaste daughter of Zeus,” prayed the suppliants in Æschylus, “thou whose

calm eye is never troubled, look down upon us! Virgin, defend the

virgins.” The Parthenon, or virgin’s temple, was the noblest religious

edifice of Athens. Celibacy was an essential condition in a few of the

orders of priests, and in several orders of priestesses. Plato based his

moral system upon the distinction between the bodily or sensual, and the

spiritual or rational part of our nature, the first being the sign of our

degradation, and the second of our dignity. The whole school of Pythagoras

made chastity one of its leading virtues, and even laboured for the

creation of a monastic system. The conception of the celestial Aphrodite,

the uniter of souls, unsullied by the taint of matter, lingered side by

side with that of the earthly Aphrodite or patroness of lust, and if there

was a time when the sculptors sought to pander to the excesses of passion

there was another in which all their art was displayed in refining and

idealising it. Strabo mentions the existence in Thrace of societies of men

aspiring to perfection by celibacy and austere lives. Plutarch applauds

certain philosophers who vowed to abstain for a year from wine and women

in order “to honour God by their continence.”(121) In Rome the religious

reverence was concentrated more especially upon married life. The great

prominence accorded to the Penates was the religious sanction of

domesticity. So too, at first, was the worship so popular among the Roman

women of the Bona Dea—the ideal wife who according to the legend had, when

on earth, never looked in the face or known the name of any man but her

husband.(122) “For altar and hearth” was the rallying cry of the Roman

soldier. But above all this we find the traces of a higher ideal. We find

it in the intense sanctity attributed to the vestal virgins whose

continence was guarded by such fearful penalties, and supposed to be so

closely linked with the prosperity of the state, whose prayer was believed

to possess a miraculous power, and who were permitted to drive through the

streets of Rome at a time when that privilege was refused even to the

Empress.(123) We find it in the legend of Claudia, who, when the ship

bearing the image of the mother of the gods had been stranded in the

Tiber, attached her girdle to its prow, and vindicated her challenged

chastity by drawing with her virgin hand, the ponderous mass which strong

men had sought in vain to move. We find it in the prophetic gift so often

attributed to virgins,(124) in the law which sheltered them from the

degradation of an execution,(125) in the language of Statius, who

described marriage itself as a fault.(126) In Christianity one great

source of the attraction of the faith has been the ascription of virginity

to its female ideal. The Catholic monastic system has been so constructed

as to draw many thousands from the sphere of active duty; its irrevocable

vows have doubtless led to much suffering and not a little crime; its

opposition to the normal development of our mingled nature has often

resulted in grave aberrations of the imagination, and it has placed its

ban upon domestic affections and sympathies which have a very high moral

value; but in its central conception that the purely animal side of our

being is a low and a degraded side, it reflects, I believe, with perfect

fidelity the feelings of our nature.(127)

To these considerations some others of a different nature may be added. It

is not true that some ancient nations regarded polygamy as good in the

same sense as others regarded chastity. There is a great difference

between deeming a state permissible and proposing it as a condition of

sanctity. If Mohammedans people paradise with images of sensuality, it is

not because these form their ideal of holiness. It is because they regard

earth as the sphere of virtue, heaven as that of simple enjoyment. If some

pagan nations deified sensuality, this was simply because the deification

of the forces of nature, of which the prolific energy is one of the most

conspicuous, is among the earliest forms of religion, and long precedes

the identification of the Deity with a moral ideal.(128) If there have

been nations who attached a certain stigma to virginity, this has not been

because they esteemed sensuality intrinsically holier than chastity; but

because a scanty, warlike people whose position in the world depends

chiefly on the number of its warriors, will naturally make it its main

object to encourage population. This was especially the case with the

ancient Jews, who always regarded extreme populousness as indissolubly

connected with national prosperity, whose religion was essentially

patriotic, and among whom the possibility of becoming an ancestor of the

Messiah had imparted a peculiar dignity to childbirth. Yet even among the

Jews the Essenes regarded virginity as the ideal of sanctity.

The reader will now be in a position to perceive the utter futility of the

objections which from the time of Locke have been continually brought

against the theory of natural moral perceptions, upon the ground that some

actions which were admitted as lawful in one age, have been regarded as

immoral in another. All these become absolutely worthless when it is

perceived that in every age virtue has consisted in the cultivation of the

same feelings, though the standards of excellence attained have been

different. The terms higher and lower, nobler or less noble, purer or less

pure, represent moral facts with much greater fidelity than the terms

right or wrong, or virtue or vice. There is a certain sense in which moral

distinctions are absolute and immutable. There is another sense in which

they are altogether relative and transient. There are some acts which are

so manifestly and grossly opposed to our moral feelings, that they are

regarded as wrong in the very earliest stages of the cultivation of these

feelings. There are distinctions, such as that between truth and

falsehood, which from their nature assume at once a sharpness of

definition that separates them from mere virtues of degree, though even in

these cases there are wide variations in the amount of scrupulosity that

is in different periods required. But apart from positive commands, the

sole external rule enabling men to designate acts, not simply as better or

worse, but as positively right or wrong, is, I conceive, the standard of

society; not an arbitrary standard like that which Mandeville imagined,

but the level which society has attained in the cultivation of what our

moral faculty tells us is the higher or virtuous part of our nature. He

who falls below this is obstructing the tendency which is the essence of

virtue. He who merely attains this, may not be justified in his own

conscience, or in other words, by the standard of his own moral

development, but as far as any external rule is concerned, he has done his

duty. He who rises above this has entered into the region of things which

it is virtuous to do, but not vicious to neglect—a region known among

Catholic theologians by the name of “counsels of perfection.” No

discussions, I conceive, can be more idle than whether slavery, or the

slaughter of prisoners in war, or gladiatorial shows, or polygamy, are

essentially wrong. They may be wrong now—they were not so once—and when an

ancient countenanced by his example one or other of these, he was not

committing a crime. The unchangeable proposition for which we contend is

this—that benevolence is always a virtuous disposition—that the sensual

part of our nature is always the lower part.

At this point, however, a very difficult problem naturally arises.

Admitting that our moral nature is superior to our intellectual or

physical nature, admitting, too, that by the constitution of our being we

perceive ourselves to be under an obligation to develope our nature to its

perfection, establishing the supreme ascendency of moral motives, the

question still remains whether the disparity between the different parts

of our being is such that no material or intellectual advantage, however

great, may be rightly purchased by any sacrifice of our moral nature,

however small. This is the great question of casuistry, the question which

divines express by asking whether the end ever justifies the means; and on

this subject there exists among theologians a doctrine which is absolutely

unrealised, which no one ever dreams of applying to actual life, but of

which it may be truly said that though propounded with the best

intentions, it would, if acted upon, be utterly incompatible with the very

rudiments of civilisation. It is said that an undoubted sin, even the most

trivial, is a thing in its essence and in its consequences so unspeakably

dreadful, that no conceivable material or intellectual advantage can

counterbalance it; that rather than it should be committed, it would be

better that any amount of calamity which did not bring with it sin should

be endured, even that the whole human race should perish in agonies.(129)

If this be the case, it is manifest that the supreme object of humanity

should be sinlessness, and it is equally manifest that the means to this

end is the absolute suppression of the desires. To expand the circle of

wants is necessarily to multiply temptations, and therefore to increase

the number of sins. It may indeed elevate the moral standard, for a torpid

sinlessness is not a high moral condition; but if every sin be what these

theologians assert, if it be a thing deserving eternal agony, and so

inconceivably frightful that the ruin of a world is a less evil than its

commission, even moral advantages are utterly incommensurate with it. No

heightening of the moral tone, no depth or ecstasy of devotion, can for a

moment be placed in the balance. The consequences of this doctrine, if

applied to actual life, would be so extravagant, that their simple

statement is a refutation. A sovereign, when calculating the consequences

of a war, should reflect that a single sin occasioned by that war, a

single blasphemy of a wounded soldier, the robbery of a single hencoop,

the violation of the purity of a single woman, is a greater calamity than

the ruin of the entire commerce of his nation, the loss of her most

precious provinces, the destruction of all her power. He must believe that

the evil of the increase of unchastity, which invariably results from the

formation of an army, is an immeasurably greater calamity than any

material or political disasters that army can possibly avert. He must

believe that the most fearful plague or famine that desolates his land

should be regarded as a matter of rejoicing, if it has but the feeblest

and most transient influence in repressing vice. He must believe that if

the agglomeration of his people in great cities adds but one to the number

of their sins, no possible intellectual or material advantages can prevent

the construction of cities being a fearful calamity. According to this

principle, every elaboration of life, every amusement that brings

multitudes together, almost every art, every accession of wealth that

awakens or stimulates desires, is an evil, for all these become the

sources of some sins, and their advantages are for the most part purely

terrestrial. The entire structure of civilisation is founded upon the

belief that it is a good thing to cultivate intellectual and material

capacities, even at the cost of certain moral evils which we are often

able accurately to foresee.(130) The time may come when the man who lays

the foundation-stone of a manufacture will be able to predict with

assurance in what proportion the drunkenness and the unchastity of his

city will be increased by his enterprise. Yet he will still pursue that

enterprise, and mankind will pronounce it to be good.

The theological doctrine on the subject, considered in its full

stringency, though professed by many, is, as I have said, realised and

consistently acted on by no one; but the practical judgments of mankind

concerning the extent of the superiority of moral over all other interests

vary greatly, and this variation supplies one of the most serious

objections to intuitive moralists. The nearest practical approach to the

theological estimate of a sin may be found in the ranks of the ascetics.

Their whole system rests upon the belief that it is a thing so

transcendently dreadful as to bear no proportion or appreciable relation

to any earthly interests. Starting from this belief, the ascetic makes it

the exclusive object of his life to avoid sinning. He accordingly abstains

from all the active business of society, relinquishes all worldly aims and

ambitions, dulls by continued discipline his natural desires, and

endeavours to pass a life of complete absorption in religious exercises.

And in all this his conduct is reasonable and consistent. The natural

course of every man who adopts this estimate of the enormity of sin is at

every cost to avoid all external influences that can prove temptations,

and to attenuate as far as possible his own appetites and emotions. It is

in this respect that the exaggerations of theologians paralyse our moral

being. For the diminution of sins, however important, is but one part of

moral progress. Whenever it is forced into a disproportionate prominence,

we find tame, languid, and mutilated natures, destitute of all fire and

energy, and this tendency has been still further aggravated by the extreme

prominence usually given to the virtue of gentleness, which may indeed be

attained by men of strong natures and vehement emotions, but is evidently

more congenial to a somewhat feeble and passionless character.