Ascetic practices are manifestly and rapidly disappearing, and their

decline is a striking proof of the evanescence of the moral notions of

which they were the expression, but in many existing questions relating to

the same matter, we find perplexing diversity of judgment. We find it in

the contrast between the system of education usually adopted by the

Catholic priesthood, which has for its pre-eminent object to prevent sins,

and for its means a constant and minute supervision, and the English

system of public schools, which is certainly not the most fitted to guard

against the possibility of sin, or to foster any very delicate

scrupulosity of feeling; but is intended, and popularly supposed, to

secure the healthy expansion of every variety of capacity. We find it in

the widely different attitudes which good men in different periods have

adopted towards religious opinions they believe to be false; some, like

the reformers, refusing to participate in any superstitious service, or to

withhold on any occasion, or at any cost, their protest against what they

regarded as a lie; others, like most ancient, and some modern philosophers

and politicians, combining the most absolute personal incredulity with an

assiduous observance of superstitious rites, and strongly censuring those

who disturbed delusions which are useful or consolatory to the people;

while a third class silently, but without protest, withdraw themselves

from the observances, and desire that their opinions should have a free

expression in literature, but at the same time discourage all

proselytising efforts to force them rudely on unprepared minds. We find it

in the frequent conflicts between the political economist and the Catholic

priest on the subject of early marriages, the former opposing them on the

ground that it is an essential condition of material well-being that the

standard of comfort should not be depressed, the latter advocating them on

the ground that the postponement of marriages, through prudential motives,

by any large body of men, is the fertile mother of sin. We find it most

conspicuously in the marked diversities of tolerance manifested in

different communities towards amusements which may in themselves be

perfectly innocent, but which prove the sources or the occasions of vice.

The Scotch Puritans probably represent one extreme, the Parisian society

of the empire the other, while the position of average Englishmen is

perhaps equidistant between them. Yet this difference, great as it is, is

a difference not of principle, but of degree. No Puritan seriously desires

to suppress every clan-gathering, every highland game which may have

occasioned an isolated fit of drunkenness, though he may be unable to show

that it has prevented any sin that would otherwise have been committed. No

Frenchman will question that there is a certain amount of demoralisation

which should not be tolerated, however great the enjoyment that

accompanies it. Yet the one dwells almost exclusively upon the moral, the

other upon the attractive, nature of a spectacle. Between these there are

numerous gradations, which are shown in frequent disputes about the merits

and demerits of the racecourse, the ball, the theatre, and the concert.

Where then, it may be asked, is the line to be drawn? By what rule can the

point be determined at which an amusement becomes vitiated by the evil of

its consequences?

To these questions the intuitive moralist is obliged to answer, that such

a line cannot be drawn, that such a rule does not exist. The colours of

our moral nature are rarely separated by the sharp lines of our

vocabulary. They fade and blend into one another so imperceptibly, that it

is impossible to mark a precise point of transition. The end of man is the

full development of his being in that symmetry and proportion which nature

has assigned it, and such a development implies that the supreme, the

predominant motive of his life, should be moral. If in any society or

individual this ascendency does not exist, that society or that individual

is in a diseased and abnormal condition. But the superiority of the moral

part of our nature, though unquestionable, is indefinite not infinite, and

the prevailing standard is not at all times the same. The moralist can

only lay down general principles. Individual feeling or the general

sentiment of society must draw the application.

The vagueness that on such questions confessedly hangs over the intuitive

theory, has always been insisted upon by members of the opposite school,

who ’in the greatest happiness principle’ claim to possess a definite

formulary, enabling them to draw boldly the frontier line between the

lawful and the illicit, and to remove moral disputes from the domain of

feeling to that of demonstration. But this claim, which forms the great

attraction of the utilitarian school, is, if I mistake not, one of the

grossest of impostures. We compare with accuracy and confidence the value

of the most various material commodities, for we mean by this term,

exchangeable value, and we have a common measure of exchange. But we seek

in vain for such a measure enabling us to compare different kinds of

utility or happiness. Thus, to take a very familiar example, the question

may be proposed, whether excursion trains from a country district to a

seaport town produce more good than evil, whether a man governed by moral

principles should encourage or oppose them. They give innocent and healthy

enjoyment to many thousands, they enlarge in some degree the range of

their ideas, they can hardly be said to prevent any sin that would

otherwise have been committed, they give rise to many cases of

drunkenness, each of which, according to the theological doctrine we have

reviewed, should be deemed a more dreadful calamity than the earthquake of

Lisbon, or a visitation of the cholera, but which have not usually any

lasting terrestrial effects; they also often produce a measure, and

sometimes no small measure, of more serious vice, and it is probable that

hundreds of women may trace their first fall to the excursion train. We

have here a number of advantages and disadvantages, the first being

intellectual and physical, and the second moral. Nearly all moralists

would acknowledge that a few instances of immorality would not prevent the

excursion train being, on the whole, a good thing. All would acknowledge

that very numerous instances would more than counterbalance its

advantages. The intuitive moralist confesses that he is unable to draw a

precise line, showing where the moral evils outweigh the physical

benefits. In what possible respect the introduction of Benthamite

formularies improves the matter, I am unable to understand. No utilitarian

would reduce the question to one of simple majority, or would have the

cynicism to balance the ruin of one woman by the day’s enjoyment of

another. The impossibility of drawing, in such cases, a distinct line of

division, is no argument against the intuitive moralist, for that

impossibility is shared to the full extent by his rival.

There are, as we have seen, two kinds of interest with which utilitarian

moralists are concerned—the private interest which they believe to be the

ultimate motive, and the public interest which they believe to be the end,

of all virtue. With reference to the first, the intuitive moralist denies

that a selfish act can be a virtuous or meritorious one. If a man when

about to commit a theft, became suddenly conscious of the presence of a

policeman, and through fear of arrest and punishment were to abstain from

the act he would otherwise have committed, this abstinence would not

appear in the eyes of mankind to possess any moral value; and if he were

determined partly by conscientious motives, and partly by fear, the

presence of the latter element would, in proportion to its strength,

detract from his merit. But although selfish considerations are distinctly

opposed to virtuous ones, it would be a mistake to imagine they can never

ultimately have a purely moral influence. In the first place, a

well-ordered system of threats and punishments marks out the path of

virtue with a distinctness of definition it could scarcely have otherwise

attained. In the next place, it often happens that when the mind is swayed

by a conflict of motives, the expectation of reward or punishment will so

reinforce or support the virtuous motives, as to secure their victory;

and, as every triumph of these motives increases their strength and

weakens the opposing principles, a step will thus have been made towards

moral perfection, which will render more probable the future triumph of

unassisted virtue.

With reference to the interests of society, there are two distinct

assertions to be made. The first is, that although the pursuit of the

welfare of others is undoubtedly one form of virtue, it does not include

all virtue, or, in other words, that there are forms of virtue which, even

if beneficial to mankind, do not become virtuous on that account, but have

an intrinsic excellence which is not proportioned to or dependent on their

utility. The second is, that there may occasionally arise considerations

of extreme and overwhelming utility that may justify a sacrifice of these

virtues. This sacrifice may be made in various ways—as, when a man

undertakes an enterprise which is in itself perfectly innocent, but which

in addition to its great material advantages will, as he well knows,

produce a certain measure of crime; or when, abstaining from a protest, he

tacitly countenances beliefs which he considers untrue, because he regards

them as transcendently useful; or again, when, for the benefit of others,

and under circumstances of great urgency, he utters a direct falsehood,

as, for example, when by such means alone he can save the life of an

innocent man.(131) But the fact, that in these cases considerations of

extreme utility are suffered to override considerations of morality, is in

no degree inconsistent with the facts, that the latter differ in kind from

the former, that they are of a higher nature, and that they may supply

adequate and legitimate motives of action not only distinct from, but even

in opposition to utility. Gold and silver are different metals. Gold is

more valuable than silver; yet a very small quantity of gold may be

advantageously exchanged for a very large quantity of silver.

The last class of objections to the theory of natural moral perceptions

which it is necessary for me to notice, arises from a very mischievous

equivocation in the word natural.(132) The term natural man is sometimes

regarded as synonymous with man in his primitive or barbarous condition,

and sometimes as expressing all in a civilised man that is due to nature

as distinguished from artificial habits or acquirements. This equivocation

is especially dangerous, because it implies one of the most extravagant

excesses to which the sensational philosophy could be pushed—the notion

that the difference between a savage and a civilised man is simply a

difference of acquisition, and not at all a difference of development. In

accordance with this notion, those who deny original moral distinctions

have ransacked the accounts of travellers for examples of savages who

appeared destitute of moral sentiments, and have adduced them as

conclusive evidence of their position. Now it is, I think, abundantly

evident that these narratives are usually exceedingly untrustworthy.(133)

They have been in most cases collected by uncritical and unphilosophical

travellers, who knew little of the language and still less of the inner

life of the people they described, whose means of information were

acquired in simply traversing the country, who were more struck by moral

paradox, than by unostentatious virtue, who were proverbially addicted to

embellishing and exaggerating the singularities they witnessed, and who

very rarely investigated their origin. It should not be forgotten that the

French moralists of the last century, who insisted most strongly on this

species of evidence, were also the dupes of one of the most curious

delusions in the whole compass of literary history. Those unflinching

sceptics who claimed to be the true disciples of the apostle who believed

nothing that he had not touched, and whose relentless criticism played

with withering effect on all the holiest feelings of our nature, and on

all the tenets of traditional creeds, had discovered one happy land where

the ideal had ceased to be a dream. They could point to one people whose

pure and rational morality, purged from all the clouds of bigotry and

enthusiasm, shone with an almost dazzling splendour above the ignorance

and superstition of Europe. Voltaire forgot to gibe, and Helvétius kindled

into enthusiasm, when China and the Chinese rose before their minds, and

to this semi-barbarous nation they habitually attributed maxims of conduct

that neither Roman nor Christian virtue had ever realised.

But putting aside these considerations, and assuming the fidelity of the

pictures of savage life upon which these writers rely, they fail to prove

the point for which they are adduced. The moralists I am defending, assert

that we possess a natural power of distinguishing between the higher and

lower parts of our nature. But the eye of the mind, like the eye of the

body, may be closed. Moral and rational facilities may be alike dormant,

and they will certainly be so if men are wholly immersed in the

gratification of their senses. Man is like a plant, which requires a

favourable soil for the full expansion of its natural or innate

powers.(134) Yet those powers both rational and moral are there, and when

quickened into action, each will discharge its appointed functions. If it

could be proved that there are savages who are absolutely destitute of the

progressive energy which distinguishes reason from instinct and of the

moral aspiration which constitutes virtue, this would not prove that

rational or moral faculties form no part of their nature. If it could be

shown that there is a stage of barbarism in which man knows, feels and

does nothing that might not be known, felt and done by an ape, this would

not be sufficient to reduce him to the level of the brute. There would

still be this broad distinction between them—the one possesses a capacity

for development which the other does not possess. Under favourable

circumstances the savage will become a reasoning, progressive, and moral

man: under no circumstances can a similar transformation be effected in

the ape. It may be as difficult to detect the oakleaf in the acorn as in

the stone; yet the acorn may be converted into an oak: the stone will

always continue to be a stone.(135)

The foregoing pages will, I trust, have exhibited with sufficient

clearness the nature of the two great divisions of moral philosophy—the

school which proceeds from the primitive truth that all men desire

happiness, and endeavours out of this fact to evolve all ethical

doctrines, and the school which traces our moral systems to an intuitive

perception that certain parts of our nature are higher or better than

others. It is obvious that this difference concerning the origin of our

moral conceptions forms part of the very much wider metaphysical question,

whether our ideas are derived exclusively from sensation or whether they

spring in part from the mind itself. The latter theory in antiquity was

chiefly represented by the Platonic doctrine of pre-existence, which

rested on the conviction that the mind has the power of drawing from its

own depths certain conceptions or ideas which cannot be explained by any

post-natal experience, and must therefore, it was said, have been acquired

in a previous existence. In the seventeenth century it took the form of a

doctrine of innate ideas. But though this theory in the form in which it

was professed by Lord Herbert of Cherbury and assailed by Locke has almost

disappeared, the doctrine that we possess certain faculties which by their

own expansion, and not by the reception of notions from without, are not

only capable of, but must necessarily attain, certain ideas, as the bud

must necessarily expand into its own specific flower, still occupies a

distinguished place in the world of speculation, and its probability has

been greatly strengthened by recent observations of the range and potency

of instinct in animals. From some passages in his Essay, it appears that

Locke himself had a confused perception of this distinction,(136) which

was by no means unknown to previous writers; and after the publication of

the philosophy of Locke it was clearly exhibited by Shaftesbury and

Leibnitz, and incidentally noticed by Berkeley long before Kant

established his distinction between the form and the matter of our

knowledge, between ideas which are received _a priori_ and ideas which are

received _a posteriori_. The existence or non-existence of this source of

ideas forms the basis of the opposition between the inductive philosophy

of England and the French philosophy of the eighteenth century on the one

hand, and the German and Scotch philosophies, as well as the French

eclecticism of the nineteenth century upon the other. The tendency of the

first school is to restrict as far as possible the active powers of the

human mind, and to aggrandise as far as possible the empire of external

circumstances. The other school dwells especially on the instinctive side

of our nature, and maintains the existence of certain intuitions of the

reason, certain categories or original conceptions, which are presupposed

in all our reasonings and cannot be resolved into sensations. The boast of

the first school is that its searching analysis leaves no mental

phenomenon unresolved, and its attraction is the extreme simplicity it can

attain. The second school multiplies faculties or original principles,

concentrates its attention mainly upon the nature of our understanding,

and asserts very strongly the initiative force both of our will and of our

intellect.

We find this connection between a philosophy based upon the senses, and a

morality founded upon utility from the earliest times. Aristotle was

distinguished among the ancients for the emphasis with which he dwelt upon

the utility of virtue, and it was from the writings of Aristotle that the

schoolmen derived the famous formulary which has become the motto of the

school of Locke. Locke himself devoted especial research to the refutation

of the doctrine of a natural moral sense, which he endeavoured to

overthrow by a catalogue of immoral practices that exist among savages,

and the hesitation he occasionally exhibited in his moral doctrine

corresponds not unfaithfully to the obscurity thrown over his metaphysics

by the admission of reflection as a source of ideas. If his opponent

Leibnitz made pleasure the object of moral action, it was only that

refined pleasure which is produced by the contemplation of the happiness

of others. When, however, Condillac and his followers, removing reflection

from the position Locke had assigned it, reduced the philosophy of

sensation to its simplest expression, and when the Scotch and German

writers elaborated the principles of the opposite school, the moral

tendencies of both were indisputably manifested. Everywhere the philosophy

of sensation was accompanied by the morals of interest, and the ideal

philosophy, by an assertion of the existence of a moral faculty, and every

influence that has affected the prevailing theory concerning the origin of

our ideas, has exercised a corresponding influence upon the theories of

ethics.

The great movement of modern thought, of which Bacon was at once the

highest representative and one of the chief agents, has been truly said to

exhibit a striking resemblance, and at the same time a striking contrast,

to the movement of ancient thought, which was effected chiefly by the

genius of Socrates. In the name of utility, Socrates diverted the

intellect of antiquity from the fantastic cosmogonies with which it had

long been occupied, to the study of the moral nature of man. In the name

of the same utility Bacon laboured to divert the modern intellect from the

idle metaphysical speculations of the schoolmen to natural science, to

which newly discovered instruments of research, his own sounder method,

and a cluster of splendid intellects, soon gave an unprecedented impulse.

To the indirect influence of this movement, perhaps, even more than to the

direct teaching of Gassendi and Locke, may be ascribed the great

ascendency of sensational philosophy among modern nations, and it is also

connected with some of the most important differences between ancient and

modern history. Among the ancients the human mind was chiefly directed to

philosophical speculations, in which the law seems to be perpetual

oscillation, while among the moderns it has rather tended towards physical

science, and towards inventions, in which the law is perpetual progress.

National power, and in most cases even national independence, implied

among the ancients the constant energy of high intellectual or moral

qualities. When the heroism or the genius of the people had relaxed, when

an enervating philosophy or the lassitude that often accompanies

civilisation arrived, the whole edifice speedily tottered, the sceptre was

transferred to another state, and the same history was elsewhere

reproduced. A great nation bequeathed indeed to its successors works of

transcendent beauty in art and literature, philosophies that could avail

only when the mind had risen to their level, examples that might stimulate

the heroism of an aspiring people, warnings that might sometimes arrest it

on the path to ruin. But all these acted only through the mind. In modern

times, on the other hand, if we put aside religious influences, the

principal causes of the superiority of civilised men are to be found in

inventions which when once discovered can never pass away, and the effects

of which are in consequence in a great measure removed from the

fluctuations of moral life. The causes which most disturbed or accelerated

the normal progress of society in antiquity were the appearance of great

men, in modern times they have been the appearance of great inventions.

Printing has secured the intellectual achievements of the past, and

furnished a sure guarantee of future progress. Gunpowder and military

machinery have rendered the triumph of barbarians impossible. Steam has

united nations in the closest bonds. Innumerable mechanical contrivances

have given a decisive preponderance to that industrial element which has

coloured all the developments of our civilisation. The leading

characteristics of modern societies are in consequence marked out much

more by the triumphs of inventive skill than by the sustained energy of

moral causes.

Now it will appear evident, I think, to those who reflect carefully upon

their own minds, and upon the course of history, that these three things,

the study of physical science, inventive skill, and industrial enterprise,

are connected in such a manner, that when in any nation there is a

long-sustained tendency towards one, the others will naturally follow.

This connection is partly that of cause and effect, for success in either

of these branches facilitates success in the others, a knowledge of

natural laws being the basis of many of the most important inventions, and

being itself acquired by the aid of instruments of research, while

industry is manifestly indebted to both. But besides this connection,

there is a connection of congruity. The same cast or habit of thought

developes itself in these three forms. They all represent the natural

tendencies of what is commonly called the practical as opposed to the

theoretical mind, of the inductive or experimental as opposed to the

deductive or ideal, of the cautious and the plodding as opposed to the

imaginative and the ambitious, of the mind that tends naturally to matter

as opposed to that which dwells naturally on ideas. Among the ancients,

the distaste for physical science, which the belief in the capricious

divine government of all natural phenomena, and the distaste for

industrial enterprise which slavery produced, conspired to favour the

philosophical tendency, while among the moderns physical science and the

habits of industrial life continually react upon one another.

There can be no question that the intellectual tendencies of modern times

are far superior to those of antiquity, both in respect to the material

prosperity they effect, and to the uninterrupted progress they secure.

Upon the other hand, it is, I think, equally unquestionable that this

superiority is purchased by the sacrifice of something of dignity and

elevation of character. It is when the cultivation of mental and moral

qualities is deemed the primary object, when the mind and its interests

are most removed from the things of sense, that great characters are most

frequent, and the standard of heroism is most high. In this, as in other

cases, the law of congruity is supreme. The mind that is concentrated most

on the properties of matter, is predisposed to derive all ideas from the

senses, while that which dwells naturally upon its own operations inclines

to an ideal philosophy, and the prevailing system of morals depends

largely upon the distinction.

In the next place, we may observe that the practical consequences, so far

as ethics are concerned,(137) of the opposition between the two great

schools of morals, are less than might be inferred from the intellectual

chasm that separates them. Moralists grow up in the atmosphere of society,

and experience all the common feelings of other men. Whatever theory of

the genesis of morals they may form, they commonly recognise as right the

broad moral principles of the world, and they endeavour—though I have

attempted to show not always successfully—to prove that these principles

may be accounted for and justified by their system. The great practical

difference between the schools lies, not in the difference of the virtues

they inculcate, but in the different degrees of prominence they assign to

each, in the different casts of mind they represent and promote. As Adam

Smith observed, a system like that of the Stoics, which makes self-control

the ideal of excellence, is especially favourable to the heroic qualities,

a system like that of Hutcheson, which resolves virtue into benevolence,

to the amiable qualities, and utilitarian systems to the industrial

virtues. A society in which any one of these three forms of moral

excellence is especially prominent, has a natural tendency towards the

corresponding theory of ethics; but, on the other hand, this theory, when

formed, reacts upon and strengthens the moral tendency that elicited it.

The Epicureans and the Stoics can each claim a great historical fact in

their favour. When every other Greek school modified or abandoned the

teaching of its founder, the disciples of Epicurus at Athens preserved

their hereditary faith unsullied and unchanged.(138) On the other hand, in

the Roman empire, almost every great character, almost every effort in the

cause of liberty, emanated from the ranks of Stoicism, while Epicureanism

was continually identified with corruption and with tyranny. The intuitive

school, not having a clear and simple external standard, has often proved

somewhat liable to assimilate with superstition and mysticism, to become

fantastic, unreasoning, and unpractical, while the prominence accorded to

interest, and the constant intervention of calculation in utilitarian

systems, have a tendency to depress the ideal, and give a sordid and

unheroic ply to the character. The first, dwelling on the moral

initiative, elevates the tone and standard of life. The second, revealing

the influence of surrounding circumstances upon character, leads to the

most important practical reforms.(139) Each school has thus proved in some

sense at once the corrective and the complement of the other. Each when

pushed to its extreme results, produces evils which lead to the

reappearance of its rival.

Having now considered at some length the nature and tendencies of the

theories according to which men test and classify their moral feelings, we

may pass to an examination of the process according to which these

feelings are developed, or, in other words, of the causes that lead

societies to elevate their moral standard and determine their preference

of some particular kinds of virtue. The observations I have to offer on

this subject will be of a somewhat miscellaneous character, but they will

all, I trust, tend to show the nature of the changes that constitute moral

history, and to furnish us with some general principles which may be

applied in detail in the succeeding chapters.

It is sufficiently evident, that, in proportion to the high organisation

of society, the amiable and the social virtues will be cultivated at the

expense of the heroic and the ascetic. A courageous endurance of suffering

is probably the first form of human virtue, the one conspicuous instance

in savage life of a course of conduct opposed to natural impulses, and

pursued through a belief that it is higher or nobler than the opposite. In

a disturbed, disorganised, and warlike society, acts of great courage and

great endurance are very frequent, and determine to a very large extent

the course of events; but in proportion to the organisation of communities

the occasions for their display, and their influence when displayed, are

alike restricted. Besides this the tastes and habits of civilisation, the

innumerable inventions designed to promote comfort and diminish pain, set

the current of society in a direction altogether different from heroism,

and somewhat emasculate, though they refine and soften, the character.

Asceticism again—including under this term, not merely the monastic

system, but also all efforts to withdraw from the world in order to

cultivate a high degree of sanctity—belongs naturally to a society which

is somewhat rude, and in which isolation is frequent and easy. When men

become united in very close bonds of co-operation, when industrial

enterprise becomes very ardent, and the prevailing impulse is strongly

towards material wealth and luxurious enjoyments, virtue is regarded

chiefly or solely in the light of the interests of society, and this

tendency is still further strengthened by the educational influence of

legislation, which imprints moral distinctions very deeply on the mind,

but at the same time accustoms men to measure them solely by an external

and utilitarian standard.(140) The first table of the law gives way to the

second. Good is not loved for itself, but as the means to an end. All that

virtue which is required to form upright and benevolent men is in the

highest degree useful to society, but the qualities which constitute a

saintly or spiritual character as distinguished from one that is simply

moral and amiable, have not the same direct, uniform and manifest tendency

to the promotion of happiness, and they are accordingly little

valued.(141) In savage life the animal nature being supreme, these higher

qualities are unknown. In a very elaborate material civilisation the

prevailing atmosphere is not favourable either to their production or

their appreciation. Their place has usually been in an intermediate stage.

On the other hand, there are certain virtues that are the natural product

of a cultivated society. Independently of all local and special

circumstances, the transition of men from a barbarous or semi-civilised to

a highly organised state necessarily brings with it the destruction or

abridgment of the legitimate sphere of revenge, by transferring the office

of punishment from the wronged person to a passionless tribunal appointed

by society;(142) a growing substitution of pacific for warlike

occupations, the introduction of refined and intellectual tastes which

gradually displace amusements that derive their zest from their barbarity,

the rapid multiplication of ties of connection between all classes and

nations, and also the strengthening of the imagination by intellectual

culture. This last faculty, considered as the power of realisation, forms

the chief tie between our moral and intellectual natures. In order to pity

suffering we must realise it, and the intensity of our compassion is

usually proportioned to the vividness of our realisation.(143) The most

frightful catastrophe in South America, an earthquake, a shipwreck, or a

battle, will elicit less compassion than the death of a single individual

who has been brought prominently before our eyes. To this cause must be

chiefly ascribed the extraordinary measure of compassion usually bestowed

upon a conspicuous condemned criminal, the affection and enthusiasm that

centre upon sovereigns, and many of the glaring inconsistencies of our

historical judgments. The recollection of some isolated act of magnanimity

displayed by Alexander or Cæsar moves us more than the thought of the

30,000 Thebans whom the Macedonian sold as slaves, of the 2,000 prisoners

he crucified at Tyre, of the 1,100,000 men on whose corpses the Roman rose

to fame. Wrapt in the pale winding-sheet of general terms the greatest

tragedies of history evoke no vivid images in our minds, and it is only by

a great effort of genius that an historian can galvanise them into life.

The irritation displayed by the captive of St. Helena in his bickerings

with his gaoler affects most men more than the thought of the nameless

thousands whom his insatiable egotism had hurried to the grave. Such is

the frailty of our nature that we are more moved by the tears of some

captive princess, by some trifling biographical incident that has floated

down the stream of history, than by the sorrows of all the countless

multitudes who perished beneath the sword of a Tamerlane, a Bajazet, or a

Zenghis Khan.

If our benevolent feelings are thus the slaves of our imaginations, if an

act of realisation is a necessary antecedent and condition of compassion,

it is obvious that any influence that augments the range and power of this

realising faculty is favourable to the amiable virtues, and it is equally

evident that education has in the highest degree this effect. To an

uneducated man all classes, nations, modes of thought and existence

foreign to his own are unrealised, while every increase of knowledge

brings with it an increase of insight, and therefore of sympathy. But the

addition to his knowledge is the smallest part of this change. The

realising faculty is itself intensified. Every book he reads, every

intellectual exercise in which he engages, accustoms him to rise above the

objects immediately present to his senses, to extend his realisations into

new spheres, and reproduce in his imagination the thoughts, feelings, and

characters of others, with a vividness inconceivable to the savage. Hence,

in a great degree, the tact with which a refined mind learns to

discriminate and adapt itself to the most delicate shades of feeling, and

hence too the sensitive humanity with which, in proportion to their

civilisation, men realise and recoil from cruelty.

We have here, however, an important distinction to draw. Under the name of

cruelty are comprised two kinds of vice, altogether different in their

causes and in most of their consequences. There is the cruelty which

springs from callousness and brutality, and there is the cruelty of

vindictiveness. The first belongs chiefly to hard, dull, and somewhat

lethargic characters, it appears most frequently in strong and conquering

nations and in temperate climates, and it is due in a very great degree to

defective realisation. The second is rather a feminine attribute, it is

usually displayed in oppressed and suffering communities, in passionate

natures, and in hot climates. Great vindictiveness is often united with

great tenderness, and great callousness with great magnanimity, but a

vindictive nature is rarely magnanimous, and a brutal nature is still more

rarely tender. The ancient Romans exhibited a remarkable combination of

great callousness and great magnanimity, while by a curious contrast the

modern Italian character verges manifestly towards the opposite

combination. Both forms of cruelty are, if I mistake not, diminished with

advancing civilisation, but by different causes and in different degrees.

Callous cruelty disappears before the sensitiveness of a cultivated

imagination. Vindictive cruelty is diminished by the substitution of a

penal system for private revenge.

The same intellectual culture that facilitates the realisation of

suffering, and therefore produces compassion, facilitates also the

realisation of character and opinions, and therefore produces charity. The

great majority of uncharitable judgments in the world may be traced to a

deficiency of imagination. The chief cause of sectarian animosity, is the

incapacity of most men to conceive hostile systems in the light in which

they appear to their adherents, and to enter into the enthusiasm they

inspire. The acquisition of this power of intellectual sympathy is a

common accompaniment of a large and cultivated mind, and wherever it

exists, it assuages the rancour of controversy. The severity of our

judgment of criminals is also often excessive, because the imagination

finds it more easy to realise an action than a state of mind. Any one can

conceive a fit of drunkenness or a deed of violence, but few persons who

are by nature very sober or very calm can conceive the natural disposition

that predisposes to it. A good man brought up among all the associations

of virtue reads of some horrible crime, his imagination exhausts itself in

depicting its circumstances, and he then estimates the guilt of the

criminal, by asking himself, “How guilty should _I_ be, were I to

perpetrate such an act?” To realise with any adequacy the force of a

passion we have never experienced, to conceive a type of character

radically different from our own, above all, to form any just appreciation

of the lawlessness and obtuseness of moral temperament, inevitably

generated by a vicious education, requires a power of imagination which is

among the rarest of human endowments. Even in judging our own conduct,

this feebleness of imagination is sometimes shown, and an old man

recalling the foolish actions, but having lost the power of realising the

feelings, of his youth, may be very unjust to his own past. That which

makes it so difficult for a man of strong vicious passions to unbosom

himself to a naturally virtuous man, is not so much the virtue as the

ignorance of the latter. It is the conviction that he cannot possibly

understand the force of a passion he has never felt. That which alone

renders tolerable to the mind the thought of judgment by an all-pure

Being, is the union of the attribute of omniscience with that of purity,

for perfect knowledge implies a perfect power of realisation. The further

our analysis extends, and the more our realising faculties are cultivated,

the more sensible we become of the influence of circumstances both upon

character and upon opinions, and of the exaggerations of our first

estimates of moral inequalities. Strong antipathies are thus gradually

softened down. Men gain much in charity, but they lose something in zeal.

We may push, I think, this vein of thought one step farther. Our

imagination, which governs our affections, has in its earlier and feebler

stages little power of grasping ideas, except in a personified and

concrete form, and the power of rising to abstractions is one of the best

measures of intellectual progress. The beginning of writing is the

hieroglyphic or symbolical picture; the beginning of worship is fetishism

or idolatry; the beginning of eloquence is pictorial, sensuous, and

metaphorical; the beginning of philosophy is the myth. The imagination in

its first stages concentrates itself on individuals; gradually by an

effort of abstraction it rises to an institution or well-defined

organisation; it is only at a very advanced stage that it can grasp a

moral and intellectual principle. Loyalty, patriotism, and attachment to a

cosmopolitan cause are therefore three forms of moral enthusiasm

respectively appropriate to three successive stages of mental progress,

and they have, I think, a certain analogy to idolatrous worship, church

feeling, and moral culture, which are the central ideas of three stages of

religious history.

The reader will readily understand that generalisations of this kind can

pretend to nothing more than an approximate truth. Our knowledge of the

laws of moral progress is like that of the laws of climate. We lay down

general rules about the temperature to be expected as we approach or

recede from the equator, and experience shows that they are substantially

correct; but yet an elevated plain, or a chain of mountains, or the

neighbourhood of the sea, will often in some degree derange our

calculations. So, too, in the history of moral changes, innumerable

special agencies, such as religious or political institutions,

geographical conditions, traditions, antipathies, and affinities, exercise

a certain retarding, accelerating, or deflecting influence, and somewhat

modify the normal progress. The proposition for which I am contending is

simply that there is such a thing as a natural history of morals, a

defined and regular order, in which our moral feelings are unfolded; or,

in other words, that there are certain groups of virtues which spring

spontaneously out of the circumstances and mental conditions of an

uncivilised people, and that there are others which are the normal and

appropriate products of civilisation. The virtues of uncivilised men are

recognised as virtues by civilised men, but they are neither exhibited in

the same perfection, nor given the same position in the scale of duties.

Of these moral changes none are more obvious than the gradual decadence of

heroism both active and passive, the increase of compassion and of

charity, and the transition from the enthusiasm of loyalty to those of

patriotism and liberty.

Another form of virtue which usually increases with civilisation is

veracity, a term which must be regarded as including something more than

the simple avoidance of direct falsehood. In the ordinary intercourse of

life it is readily understood that a man is offending against truth, not

only when he utters a deliberate falsehood, but also when in his statement

of a case he suppresses or endeavours to conceal essential facts, or makes

positive assertions without having conscientiously verified their grounds.

The earliest form in which the duty of veracity is enforced is probably

the observance of vows, which occupy a position of much prominence in

youthful religions. With the subsequent progress of civilisation, we find

the successive inculcation of three forms of veracity, which may be termed

respectively industrial, political, and philosophical. By the first I

understand that accuracy of statement or fidelity to engagements which is

commonly meant when we speak of a truthful man. Though in some cases

sustained by the strong sense of honour which accompanies a military

spirit, this form of veracity is usually the special virtue of an

industrial nation, for although industrial enterprise affords great

temptations to deception, mutual confidence, and therefore strict

truthfulness, are in these occupations so transcendently important that

they acquire in the minds of men a value they had never before possessed.

Veracity becomes the first virtue in the moral type, and no character is

regarded with any kind of approbation in which it is wanting. It is made

more than any other the test distinguishing a good from a bad man. We

accordingly find that even where the impositions of trade are very

numerous, the supreme excellence of veracity is cordially admitted in

theory, and it is one of the first virtues that every man aspiring to

moral excellence endeavours to cultivate. This constitutes probably the

chief moral superiority of nations pervaded by a strong industrial spirit

over nations like the Italians, the Spaniards, or the Irish, among whom

that spirit is wanting. The usual characteristic of the latter nations is

a certain laxity or instability of character, a proneness to exaggeration,

a want of truthfulness in little things, an infidelity to engagements from

which an Englishman, educated in the habits of industrial life, readily

infers a complete absence of moral principle. But a larger philosophy and

a deeper experience dispel his error. He finds that where the industrial

spirit has not penetrated, truthfulness rarely occupies in the popular

mind the same prominent position in the catalogue of virtues. It is not

reckoned among the fundamentals of morality, and it is possible and even

common to find in those nations—what would be scarcely possible in an

industrial society—men who are habitually dishonest and untruthful in

small things, and whose lives are nevertheless influenced by a deep

religious feeling, and adorned by the consistent practice of some of the

most difficult and most painful virtues. Trust in Providence, content and

resignation in extreme poverty and suffering, the most genuine amiability

and the most sincere readiness to assist their brethren, an adherence to

their religious opinions which no persecutions and no bribes can shake, a

capacity for heroic, transcendent, and prolonged self-sacrifice, may be

found in some nations in men who are habitual liars and habitual cheats.

The promotion of industrial veracity is probably the single form in which

the growth of manufactures exercises a favourable influence upon morals.

It is possible, however, for this virtue to exist in great perfection

without any corresponding growth of political veracity, or in other words,

of that spirit of impartiality which in matters of controversy desires

that all opinions, arguments, and facts should be fully and fairly stated.

This habit of what is commonly termed “fair play” is especially the

characteristic of free communities, and it is pre-eminently fostered by

political life. The practice of debate creates a sense of the injustice of

suppressing one side of a case, which gradually extends through all forms

of intellectual life, and becomes an essential element in the national

character. But beyond all this there is a still higher form of

intellectual virtue. By enlarged intellectual culture, especially by

philosophic studies, men come at last to pursue truth for its own sake, to

esteem it a duty to emancipate themselves from party spirit, prejudices,

and passion, and through love of truth to cultivate a judicial spirit in

controversy. They aspire to the intellect not of a sectarian but of a

philosopher, to the intellect not of a partisan but of a statesman.

Of these three forms of a truthful spirit the two last may be said to

belong exclusively to a highly civilised society. The last especially can

hardly be attained by any but a cultivated mind, and is one of the latest

flowers of virtue that bloom in the human heart. The growth, however, both

of political and philosophical veracity has been unnaturally retarded by

the opposition of theologians, who made it during many centuries a main

object of their policy to suppress all writings that were opposed to their

views, and who, when this power had escaped their grasp, proceeded to

discourage in every way impartiality of mind and judgment, and to

associate it with the notion of sin.

To the observations I have already made concerning the moral effects of

industrial life, I shall at present add but two. The first is that an

industrial spirit creates two wholly different types of character—a

thrifty character and a speculating character. Both types grow out of a

strong sense of the value and a strong desire for the attainment of

material comforts, but they are profoundly different both in their virtues

and their vices. The chief characteristic of the one type is caution, that

of the other enterprise. Thriftiness is one of the best regulators of

life. It produces order, sobriety, moderation, self-restraint, patient

industry, and all that cast of virtues which is designated by the term

respectability; but it has also a tendency to form contracted and

ungenerous natures, incapable of enthusiasm or lively sympathy. The

speculating character, on the other hand, is restless, fiery, and

uncertain, very liable to fall into great and conspicuous vices, impatient

of routine, but by no means unfavourable to strong feelings, to great

generosity or resolution. Which of these two forms the industrial spirit

assumes depends upon local circumstances. Thriftiness flourishes chiefly

among men placed outside the great stream of commerce, and in positions

where wealth is only to be acquired by slow and steady industry, while the

speculating character is most common in the great centres of enterprise

and of wealth.

In the next place, it may be remarked that industrial habits bring

forethought into a new position in the moral type. In early stages of

theological belief, men regarding every incident that happens to them as

the result of a special divine decree, sometimes esteem it a test of faith

and a form of duty to take no precautions for the future, but to leave

questions of food and clothing to Providential interposition. On the other

hand, in an industrial civilisation, prudent forethought is regarded not

simply as lawful, but as a duty, and a duty of the very highest order. A

good man of the industrial type deems it a duty not to marry till he has

ensured the maintenance of a possible family; if he possesses children, he

regulates his expenses not simply by the relation of his income to his

immediate wants, but with a constant view to the education of his sons, to

the portioning of his daughters, to the future necessities and careers of

each member of his family. Constant forethought is the guiding principle

of his whole life. No single circumstance is regarded as a better test of

the civilisation of a people than the extent to which it is diffused among

them. The old doctrine virtually disappears, and is interpreted to mean

nothing more than that we should accept with resignation what no efforts

and no forethought could avert.

This change is but one of several influences which, as civilisation

advances, diminish the spirit of reverence among mankind. Reverence is one

of those feelings which, in utilitarian systems, would occupy at best a

very ambiguous position; for it is extremely questionable whether the

great evils that have grown out of it in the form of religious

superstition and political servitude have not made it a source of more

unhappiness than happiness. Yet, however doubtful may be its position if

estimated by its bearing on happiness and on progress, there are few

persons who are not conscious that no character can attain a supreme

degree of excellence in which a reverential spirit is wanting. Of all the

forms of moral goodness it is that to which the epithet beautiful may be

most emphatically applied. Yet the habits of advancing civilisation are,

if I mistake not, on the whole inimical to its growth. For reverence grows

out of a sense of constant dependence. It is fostered by that condition of

religions thought in which men believe that each incident that befalls

them is directly and specially ordained, and when every event is therefore

fraught with a moral import. It is fostered by that condition of

scientific knowledge in which every portentous natural phenomenon is

supposed to be the result of a direct divine interposition, and awakens in

consequence emotions of humility and awe. It is fostered in that stage of

political life when loyalty or reverence for the sovereign is the

dominating passion, when an aristocracy, branching forth from the throne,

spreads habits of deference and subordination through every village, when

a revolutionary, a democratic, and a sceptical spirit are alike unknown.

Every great change, either of belief or of circumstances, brings with it a

change of emotions. The self-assertion of liberty, the levelling of

democracy, the dissecting-knife of criticism, the economical revolutions

that reduce the relations of classes to simple contracts, the

agglomeration of population, and the facilities of locomotion that sever

so many ancient ties, are all incompatible with the type of virtue which

existed before the power of tradition was broken, and when the chastity of

faith was yet unstained. Benevolence, uprightness, enterprise,

intellectual honesty, a love of freedom, and a hatred of superstition are

growing around us, but we look in vain for that most beautiful character

of the past, so distrustful of self, and so trustful of others, so simple,

so modest, and so devout, which even when, Ixion-like, it bestowed its

affections upon a cloud, made its very illusions the source of some of the

purest virtues of our nature. In a few minds, the contemplation of the

sublime order of nature produces a reverential feeling, but to the great

majority of mankind it is an incontestable though mournful fact, that the

discovery of controlling and unchanging law deprives phenomena of their

moral significance, and nearly all the social and political spheres in

which reverence was fostered have passed away. Its most beautiful displays

are not in nations like the Americans or the modern French, who have

thrown themselves most fully into the tendencies of the age, but rather in

secluded regions like Styria or the Tyrol. Its artistic expression is

found in no work of modern genius, but in the mediæval cathedral, which,

mellowed but not impaired by time, still gazes on us in its deathless

beauty through the centuries of the past. A superstitious age, like every

other phase of human history, has its distinctive virtues, which must

necessarily decline before a new stage of progress can be attained.

The virtues and vices growing out of the relation between the sexes are

difficult to treat in general terms, both on account of the obvious

delicacy of the subject, and also because their natural history is

extremely obscured by special causes. In the moral evolutions we have as

yet examined, the normal influences are most powerful, and the importance

of deranging and modifying circumstances is altogether subsidiary. The

expansion of the amiable virtues, the decline of heroism and loyalty, and

the growth of industrial habits spring out of changes which necessarily

take place under almost all forms of civilisation,(144) and the broad

features of the movement are therefore in almost all nations substantially

the same. But in the history of sensuality, special causes, such as

slavery, religious doctrines, or laws affecting marriage, have been the

most powerful agents. The immense changes effected in this field by the

Christian religion I shall hereafter examine. In the present chapter I

shall content myself with two or three very general remarks relating to

the nature of the vice, and to the effect of different stages of

civilisation upon its progress.

There are, I conceive, few greater fallacies than are involved in the

method so popular among modern writers of judging the immorality of a

nation by its statistics of illegitimate births. Independently of the

obvious defect of this method in excluding simple prostitution from our

comparison, it altogether neglects the fact that a large number of

illegitimate births arise from causes totally different from the great

violence of the passions. Such, for example, is the notion prevailing in

many country districts of England, that the marriage ceremony has a

retrospective virtue, cancelling previous immorality; and such too is the

custom so general among some classes on the Continent of forming permanent

connections without the sanction either of a legal or a religious

ceremony. However deeply such facts may be reprehended and deplored, it

would be obviously absurd to infer from them that the nations in which

they are most prominent are most conspicuous for the uncontrolled violence

of their sensual passions. In Sweden, which long ranked among the lowest

in the moral scale, if measured by the number of illegitimate births, the

chief cause appears to have been the difficulties with which legislators

surrounded marriage.(145) Even in displays of actual and violent passion,

there are distinctions to be drawn which statistics are wholly unable to

reach. The coarse, cynical, and ostentatious sensuality which forms the

most repulsive feature of the French character, the dreamy, languid, and

æsthetical sensuality of the Spaniard or the Italian, the furtive and

retiring sensuality of some northern nations, though all forms of the same

vice, are widely different feelings, and exercise widely different effects

upon the prevailing disposition.

In addition to the very important influence upon public morals which

climate, I think, undoubtedly exercises in stimulating or allaying the

passions, it has a powerful indirect action upon the position, character,

and tastes of women, by determining the prevalence of indoor or

out-of-door life, and also the classes among whom the gift of beauty is

diffused. In northern countries the prevailing cast of beauty depends

rather on colour than on form. It consists chiefly of a freshness and

delicacy of complexion which severe labour and constant exposure

necessarily destroy, and which is therefore rarely found in the highest

perfection among the very poor. But the southern type is essentially

democratic. The fierce rays of the sun only mellow and mature its charms.

Its most perfect examples may be found in the hovel as in the palace, and

the effects of this diffusion of beauty may be traced both in the manners

and the morals of the people.

It is probable that the observance of this form of virtue is naturally

most strict in a rude and semi-civilised but not barbarous people, and

that a very refined civilisation is not often favourable to its growth.

Sensuality is the vice of young men and of old nations. A languid

epicureanism is the normal condition of nations which have attained a high

intellectual or social civilisation, but which, through political causes,

have no adequate sphere for the exertion of their energies. The temptation

arising from the great wealth of some, and from the feverish longing for

luxury and exciting pleasures in others, which exists in all large towns,

has been peculiarly fatal to female virtue, and the whole tendency of the

public amusements of civilisation is in the same direction. The rude

combats which form the chief enjoyments of barbarians produce cruelty. The

dramatic and artistic tastes and the social habits of refined men produce

sensuality. Education raises many poor women to a stage of refinement that

makes them suitable companions for men of a higher rank, and not suitable

for those of their own. Industrial pursuits have, indeed, a favourable

influence in promoting habits of self-restraint, and especially in

checking the licence of military life; but on the other hand, they greatly

increase temptation by encouraging postponement of marriage, and in

communities, even more than in individuals, moral inequalities are much

more due to differences of temptation than to differences of

self-restraint. In large bodies of men a considerable increase of

temptation always brings with it an increase, though not necessarily a

proportionate increase, of vice. Among the checks on excessive

multiplication, the historical influence of voluntary continence has been,

it must be feared, very small. Physical and moral evils have alone been

decisive, and as these form the two opposite weights, we unhappily very

frequently find that the diminution of the one has been followed by the

increase of the other. The nearly universal custom of early marriages

among the Irish peasantry has alone rendered possible that high standard

of female chastity, that intense and jealous sensitiveness respecting

female honour, for which, among many failings and some vices, the Irish

poor have long been pre-eminent in Europe; but these very marriages are

the most conspicuous proofs of the national improvidence, and one of the

most fatal obstacles to industrial prosperity. Had the Irish peasants been

less chaste, they would have been more prosperous. Had that fearful

famine, which in the present century desolated the land, fallen upon a

people who thought more of accumulating subsistence than of avoiding sin,

multitudes might now be living who perished by literal starvation on the

dreary hills of Limerick or Skibbereen.

The example of Ireland furnishes us, however, with a remarkable instance

of the manner in which the influence of a moral feeling may act beyond the

circumstances that gave it birth. There is no fact in Irish history more

singular than the complete, and, I believe, unparalleled absence among the

Irish priesthood of those moral scandals which in every continental

country occasionally prove the danger of vows of celibacy. The unsuspected

purity of the Irish priests in this respect is the more remarkable,

because, the government of the country being Protestant, there is no

special inquisitorial legislation to ensure it, because of the almost

unbounded influence of the clergy over their parishioners, and also

because if any just cause of suspicion existed, in the fierce sectarianism

of Irish public opinion, it would assuredly be magnified. Considerations

of climate are quite inadequate to explain this fact; but the chief cause

is, I think, sufficiently obvious. The habit of marrying at the first

development of the passions has produced among the Irish peasantry, from

whom the priests for the most part spring, an extremely strong feeling of

the iniquity of irregular sexual indulgence, which retains its power even

over those who are bound to perpetual celibacy.

It will appear evident from the foregoing considerations that, while the

essential nature of virtue and vice is unaltered, there is a perpetual,

and in some branches an orderly and necessary change, as society advances,

both in the proportionate value attached to different virtues in theory,

and in the perfection in which they are realised in practice. It will

appear too that, while there may be in societies such a thing as moral

improvement, there is rarely or never, on a large scale, such a thing as

unmixed improvement. We may gain more than we lose, but we always lose

something. There are virtues which are continually dying away with

advancing civilisation, and even the lowest stage possesses its

distinctive excellence. There is no spectacle more piteous or more

horrible to a good man than that of an oppressed nationality writhing in

anguish beneath a tyrant’s yoke; but there is no condition in which

passionate, unquestioning self-sacrifice and heroic courage, and the true

sentiment of fraternity are more grandly elicited, and it is probable that

the triumph of liberty will in these forms not only lessen the moral

performances, but even weaken the moral capacities of mankind. War is, no

doubt, a fearful evil, but it is the seed-plot of magnanimous virtues,

which in a pacific age must wither and decay. Even the gambling-table

fosters among its more skilful votaries a kind of moral nerve, a capacity

for bearing losses with calmness, and controlling the force of the

desires, which is scarcely exhibited in equal perfection in any other

sphere.

There is still so great a diversity of civilisation in existing nations

that traversing tracts of space is almost like traversing tracts of time,

for it brings us in contact with living representatives of nearly every

phase of past civilisation. But these differences are rapidly disappearing

before the unparalleled diffusion and simplification of knowledge, the

still more amazing progress in means of locomotion, and the political and

military causes that are manifestly converting Europe into a federation of

vast centralised and democratic States. Even to those who believe that the

leading changes are on the whole beneficial, there is much that is

melancholy in this revolution. Those small States which will soon have

disappeared from the map of Europe, besides their vast superiority to most

great empires in financial prosperity, in the material well-being of the

inhabitants, and in many cases in political liberty, pacific tastes, and

intellectual progress, form one of the chief refuges of that spirit of

content, repose, and retrospective reverence which is pre-eminently

wanting in modern civilisation, and their security is in every age one of

the least equivocal measures of international morality. The monastic

system, however pernicious when enlarged to excess, has undoubtedly

contributed to the happiness of the world, by supplying an asylum

especially suited to a certain type of character; and that vindictive and

short-sighted revolution which is extirpating it from Europe is destroying

one of the best correctives of the excessive industrialism of our age. It

is for the advantage of a nation that it should attain the most advanced

existing type of progress, but it is extremely questionable whether it is

for the advantage of the community at large that all nations should attain

the same type, even when it is the most advanced. The influence of very

various circumstances is absolutely necessary to perfect moral

development. Hence, one of the great political advantages of class

representation, which brings within the range of politics a far greater

variety both of capacities and moral qualities than can be exhibited when

one class has an exclusive or overwhelmingly preponderating influence, and

also of heterogeneous empires, in which different degrees of civilisation

produce different kinds of excellence which react upon and complete one

another. In the rude work of India and Australia a type of character is

formed which England could ill afford to lose.

The remarks I have now made will be sufficient, I hope, to throw some

light upon those great questions concerning the relations of intellectual

and moral progress which have of late years attracted so large an amount

of attention. It has been contended that the historian of human progress

should concentrate his attention exclusively on the intellectual elements;

for there is no such thing as moral history, morals being essentially

stationary, and the rudest barbarians being in this respect as far

advanced as ourselves. In opposition to this view, I have maintained that

while what may be termed the primal elements of morals are unaltered,

there is a perpetual change in the standard which is exacted, and also in

the relative value attached to particular virtues, and that these changes

constitute one of the most important branches of general history. It has

been contended by other writers that, although such changes do take place,

and although they play an extremely great part in the world, they must be

looked upon as the result of intellectual causes, changes in knowledge

producing changes in morals. In this view, as we have seen, there is some

truth, but it can only, I think, be accepted with great qualification. It

is one of the plainest of facts that neither the individuals nor the ages

most distinguished for intellectual achievements have been most

distinguished for moral excellence, and that a high intellectual and

material civilisation has often coexisted with much depravity. In some

respects the conditions of intellectual growth are not favourable to moral

growth. The agglomeration of men in great cities—which are always the

centres of progress and enlightenment—is one of the most important causes

of material and intellectual advance: but great towns are the peculiar

seed-plots of vice, and it is extremely questionable whether they produce

any special and equivalent efflorescence of virtue, for even the social

virtues are probably more cultivated in small populations, where men live

in more intimate relations. Many of the most splendid outbursts of moral

enthusiasm may be traced to an overwhelming force of conviction rarely

found in very cultivated minds, which are keenly sensible to possibilities

of error, conflicting arguments, and qualifying circumstances.

Civilisation has on the whole been more successful in repressing crime

than in repressing vice. It is very favourable to the gentler, charitable,

and social virtues, and, where slavery does not exist, to the industrial

virtues, and it is the especial nurse of the intellectual virtues; but it

is in general not equally favourable to the production of self-sacrifice,

enthusiasm, reverence, or chastity.

The moral changes, however, which are effected by civilisation may

ultimately be ascribed chiefly to intellectual causes, for these lie at

the root of the whole structure of civilised life. Sometimes, as we have

seen, intellectual causes act directly, but more frequently they have only

an indirect influence, producing habits of life which in their turn

produce new conceptions of duty. The morals of men are more governed by

their pursuits than by their opinions. A type of virtue is first formed by

circumstances, and men afterwards make it the model upon which their

theories are framed. Thus geographical or other circumstances, that make

one nation military and another industrial, will produce in each a

realised type of excellence, and corresponding conceptions about the

relative importance of different virtues widely different from those which

are produced in the other, and this may be the case although the amount of

knowledge in the two communities is substantially equal.

Having discussed these questions as fully as the nature of my subject

requires, I will conclude this chapter by noticing a few very prevalent

errors in the moral judgments of history, and will also endeavour to

elucidate some important consequences that may be deduced from the nature

of moral types.

It is probable that the moral standard of most men is much lower in

political judgments than in private matters in which their own interests

are concerned. There is nothing more common than for men who in private

life are models of the most scrupulous integrity to justify or excuse the

most flagrant acts of political dishonesty and violence; and we should be

altogether mistaken if we argued rigidly from such approvals to the

general moral sentiments of those who utter them. Not unfrequently too, by

a curious moral paradox, political crimes are closely connected with

national virtues. A people who are submissive, gentle, and loyal, fall by

reason of these very qualities under a despotic government; but this

uncontrolled power has never failed to exercise a most pernicious

influence on rulers, and their numerous acts of rapacity and aggression

being attributed in history to the nation they represent, the national

character is wholly misinterpreted.(146) There are also particular kinds

both of virtue and of vice which appear prominently before the world,

while others of at least equal influence almost escape the notice of

history. Thus, for example, the sectarian animosities, the horrible

persecutions, the blind hatred of progress, the ungenerous support of

every galling disqualification and restraint, the intense class

selfishness, the obstinately protracted defence of intellectual and

political superstition, the childish but whimsically ferocious quarrels

about minute dogmatic distinctions, or dresses, or candlesticks, which

constitute together the main features of ecclesiastical history, might

naturally, though very unjustly, lead men to place the ecclesiastical type

in almost the lowest rank, both intellectually and morally. These are, in

fact, the displays of ecclesiastical influence which stand in bold relief

in the pages of history. The civilising and moralising influence of the

clergyman in his parish, the simple, unostentatious, unselfish zeal with

which he educates the ignorant, guides the erring, comforts the sorrowing,

braves the horrors of pestilence, and sheds a hallowing influence over the

dying hour, the countless ways in which, in his little sphere, he allays

evil passions, and softens manners, and elevates and purifies those around

him—all these things, though very evident to the detailed observer, do not

stand out in the same vivid prominence in historical records, and are

continually forgotten by historians. It is always hazardous to argue from

the character of a corporation to the character of the members who compose

it, but in no other case is this method of judgment so fallacious as in

the history of ecclesiastics, for there is no other class whose

distinctive excellences are less apparent, and whose mental and moral

defects are more glaringly conspicuous in corporate action. In different

nations, again, the motives of virtue are widely different, and serious

misconceptions arise from the application to one nation of the measure of

another. Thus the chief national virtues of the French people result from

an intense power of sympathy, which is also the foundation of some of

their most beautiful intellectual qualities, of their social habits, and

of their unrivalled influence in Europe. No other nation has so habitual

and vivid a sympathy with great struggles for freedom beyond its border.

No other literature exhibits so expansive and œcumenical a genius, or

expounds so skilfully, or appreciates so generously, foreign ideas. In

hardly any other land would a disinterested war for the support of a

suffering nationality find so large an amount of support. The national

crimes of France are many and grievous, but much will be forgiven her

because she loved much. The Anglo-Saxon nations, on the other hand, though

sometimes roused to strong but transient enthusiasm, are habitually

singularly narrow, unappreciative, and unsympathetic. The great source of

their national virtue is the sense of duty, the power of pursuing a course

which they believe to be right, independently of all considerations of

sympathy or favour, of enthusiasm or success. Other nations have far

surpassed them in many qualities that are beautiful, and in some qualities

that are great. It is the merit of the Anglo-Saxon race that beyond all

others it has produced men of the stamp of a Washington or a Hampden; men

careless, indeed, for glory, but very careful of honour; who made the

supreme majesty of moral rectitude the guiding principle of their lives,

who proved in the most trying circumstances that no allurements of

ambition, and no storms of passion, could cause them to deviate one hair’s

breadth from the course they believed to be their duty. This was also a

Roman characteristic—especially that of Marcus Aurelius. The unweary,

unostentatious, and inglorious crusade of England against slavery may

probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages

comprised in the history of nations.

Although it cannot be said that any virtue is the negation of another, it

is undoubtedly true that virtues are naturally grouped according to

principles of affinity or congruity, which are essential to the unity of

the type. The heroical, the amiable, the industrial, the intellectual

virtues form in this manner distinct groups; and in some cases the

development of one group is incompatible, not indeed with the existence,

but with the prominence of others. Content cannot be the leading virtue in

a society animated by an intense industrial spirit, nor submission nor

tolerance of injuries in a society formed upon a military type, nor

intellectual virtues in a society where a believing spirit is made the

essential of goodness, yet each of these conditions is the special sphere

of some particular class of virtues. The distinctive beauty of a moral

type depends not so much on the elements of which it is composed, as on

the proportions in which those elements are combined. The characters of

Socrates, of Cato, of Bayard, of Fénelon, and of St. Francis are all

beautiful, but they differ generically, and not simply in degrees of

excellence. To endeavour to impart to Cato the distinctive charm of St.

Francis, or to St. Francis that of Cato, would be as absurd as to

endeavour to unite in a single statue the beauties of the Apollo and the

Laocoon, or in a single landscape the beauties of the twilight and of the

meridian sun. Take away pride from the ancient Stoic or the modern

Englishman, and you would have destroyed the basis of many of his noblest

virtues, but humility was the very principle and root of the moral

qualities of the monk. There is no quality virtuous in a woman that is not

also virtuous in a man, yet that disposition or hierarchy of virtues which

constitutes a perfect woman would be wholly unsuited for a perfect man.

The moral is in this respect like the physical type. The beauty of man is

not the beauty of woman, nor the beauty of the child as the beauty of the

adult, nor the beauty of an Italian as the beauty of an Englishwoman. All

types of character are not good, as all types of countenance are not

beautiful; but there are many distinct casts of goodness, as there are

many distinct casts of beauty.

This most important truth may be stated in a somewhat different form.

Whenever a man is eminently deficient in any virtue, it, of course,

follows that his character is imperfect, but it does not necessarily

follow that he is not in other respects moral and virtuous. There is,

however, usually some one virtue, which I may term rudimentary, which is

brought forward so prominently before the world, as the first condition of

moral excellence, that it may be safely inferred that a man who has

absolutely neglected it is entirely indifferent to moral culture.

Rudimentary virtues vary in different ages, nations, and classes. Thus, in

the great republics of antiquity patriotism was rudimentary, for it was so

assiduously cultivated, that it appeared at once the most obvious and the

most essential of duties. Among ourselves much private virtue may co-exist

with complete indifference to national interests. In the monastic period,

and in a somewhat different form in the age of chivalry, a spirit of

reverential obedience was rudimentary, and the basis of all moral

progress; but we may now frequently find a good man without it, his moral

energies having been cultivated in other directions. Common truthfulness

and honesty, as I have already said, are rudimentary virtues in industrial

societies, but not in others. Chastity, in England at least, is a

rudimentary female virtue, but scarcely a rudimentary virtue among men,

and it has not been in all ages, and is not now in all countries,

rudimentary among women. There is no more important task devolving upon a

moral historian, than to discover in each period the rudimentary virtue,

for it regulates in a great degree the position assigned to all others.

From the considerations I have urged, it will appear that there is

considerable danger in proposing too absolutely a single character,

however admirable, as the model to which all men must necessarily conform.

A character may be perfect in its own kind, but no character can possibly

embrace all types of perfection; for, as we have seen, the perfection of a

type depends not only upon the virtues that constitute it, but also upon

the order and prominence assigned to them. All that can be expected in an

ideal is, that it should be perfect of its own kind, and should exhibit

the type most needed in its age, and most widely useful to mankind. The

Christian type is the glorification of the amiable, as the Stoic type was

that of the heroic qualities, and this is one of the reasons why

Christianity is so much more fitted than Stoicism to preside over

civilisation, for the more society is organised and civilised, the greater

is the scope for the amiable, and the less for the heroic qualities.

The history of that moral intolerance which endeavours to reduce all

characters to a single type has never, I think, been examined as it

deserves, and I shall frequently have occasion to advert to it in the

following pages. No one can have failed to observe how common it is for

men to make their own tastes or excellences the measure of all goodness,

pronouncing all that is broadly different from them to be imperfect or

low, or of a secondary value. And this, which is usually attributed to

vanity, is probably in most cases much more due to feebleness of

imagination, to the difficulty most men have in conceiving in their minds

an order of character fundamentally different from their own. A good man

can usually sympathise much more with a very imperfect character of his

own type than with a far more perfect one of a different type. To this

cause, quite as much as to historical causes or occasional divergences of

interest, may be traced the extreme difficulty of effecting cordial

international friendships, especially in those cases when a difference of

race coincides with the difference of nationality. Each nation has a

distinct type of excellence, each esteems the virtues in which it excels,

and in which its neighbours are often most deficient, incomparably the

greatest. Each regards with especial antipathy the vices from which it is

most free, and to which its neighbours maybe most addicted. Hence arises a

mingled feeling of contempt and dislike, from which the more enlightened

minds are, indeed, soon emancipated, but which constitutes the popular

sentiment.

The type of character of every individual depends partly upon innate

temperament and partly upon external circumstances. A warlike, a refined,

an industrial society each evokes and requires its specific qualities, and

produces its appropriate type. If a man of a different type arise—if, for

example, a man formed by nature to exhibit to the highest perfection the

virtues of gentleness or meekness, be born in the midst of a fierce

military society—he will find no suitable scope for action, he will jar

with his age, and his type will be regarded with disfavour. And the effect

of this opposition is not simply that he will not be appreciated as he

deserves, he will also never succeed in developing his own distinctive

virtues as they would have been developed under other circumstances.

Everything will be against him—the force of education, the habits of

society, the opinions of mankind, even his own sense of duty. All the

highest models of excellence about him being formed on a different type,

his very efforts to improve his being will dull the qualities in which

nature intended him to excel. If, on the other hand, a man with naturally

heroic qualities be born in a society which pre-eminently values heroism,

he will not only be more appreciated, he will also, under the concurrence

of favourable circumstances, carry his heroism to a far higher point than

would otherwise have been possible. Hence changing circumstances produce

changing types, and hence, too, the possibility of moral history and the

necessity of uniting it with general history. Religions, considered as

moral teachers, are realised and effective only when their moral teaching

is in conformity with the tendency of their age. If any part of it is not

so, that part will be either openly abandoned, or refined away, or tacitly

neglected. Among the ancients, the co-existence of the Epicurean and

Stoical schools, which offered to the world two entirely different

archetypes of virtue, secured in a very remarkable manner the recognition

of different kinds of excellence; for although each of these schools often

attained a pre-eminence, neither ever succeeded in wholly destroying or

discrediting the other.

Of the two elements that compose the moral condition of mankind, our

generalised knowledge is almost restricted to one. We know much of the

ways in which political, social, or intellectual causes act upon

character, but scarcely anything of the laws that govern innate

disposition, of the reasons and extent of the natural moral diversities of

individuals or races. I think, however, that most persons who reflect upon

the subject will conclude that the progress of medicine, revealing the

physical causes of different moral predispositions, is likely to place a

very large measure of knowledge on this point within our reach. Of all the

great branches of human knowledge, medicine is that in which the

accomplished results are most obviously imperfect and provisional, in

which the field of unrealised possibilities is most extensive, and from

which, if the human mind were directed to it, as it has been during the

past century to locomotive and other industrial inventions, the most

splendid results might be expected. Our almost absolute ignorance of the

causes of some of the most fatal diseases, and the empirical nature of

nearly all our best medical treatment, have been often recognised. The

medicine of inhalation is still in its infancy, and yet it is by

inhalation that Nature produces most of her diseases, and effects most of

her cures. The medical power of electricity, which of all known agencies

bears most resemblance to life, is almost unexplored. The discovery of

anæsthetics has in our own day opened out a field of inestimable

importance, and the proved possibility, under certain physical conditions,

of governing by external suggestions the whole current of the feelings and

emotions, may possibly contribute yet further to the alleviation of

suffering, and perhaps to that euthanasia which Bacon proposed to

physicians as an end of their art. But in the eyes both of the

philanthropist and of the philosopher, the greatest of all results to be

expected in this, or perhaps any other field, are, I conceive, to be

looked for in the study of the relations between our physical and our

moral natures. He who raises moral pathology to a science, expanding,

systematising, and applying many fragmentary observations that have been

already made, will probably take a place among the master intellects of

mankind. The fastings and bleedings of the mediæval monk, the medicines

for allaying or stimulating the sensual passions, the treatment of nervous

diseases, the moral influences of insanity and of castration, the

researches of phrenology, the moral changes that accompany the successive

stages of physical developments, the instances of diseases which have

altered, sometimes permanently, the whole complexion of the character, and

have acted through the character upon all the intellectual judgments,(147)

are examples of the kind of facts with which such a science would deal.

Mind and body are so closely connected that even those who most earnestly

protest against materialism readily admit that each acts continually upon

the other. The sudden emotion that quickens the pulse, and blanches or

flushes the cheek, and the effect of fear in predisposing to an epidemic,

are familiar instances of the action of the mind upon the body, and the

more powerful and permanent influence of the body upon the disposition is

attested by countless observations. It is probable that this action

extends to all parts of our moral constitution, that every passion or

characteristic tendency has a physical predisposing cause, and that if we

were acquainted with these, we might treat by medicine the many varieties

of moral disease as systematically as we now treat physical disease. In

addition to its incalculable practical importance, such knowledge would

have a great philosophical value, throwing a new light upon the filiation

of our moral qualities, enabling us to treat exhaustively the moral

influence of climate, and withdrawing the great question of the influence

of race from the impressions of isolated observers to place it on the firm

basis of experiment. It would thus form the complement to the labours of

the historian.

Such discoveries are, however, perhaps far from attainment, and their

discussion does not fall within the compass of this work. My present

object is simply to trace the action of external circumstances upon

morals, to examine what have been the moral types proposed as ideal in

different ages, in what degree they have been realised in practice, and by

what causes they have been modified, impaired, or destroyed.