so far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The
argument is that "if this were not the case, we could not reason with
a man as to what is right." "We do in fact hold that when one man
approves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is
mistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man
likes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of
them is mistaken." In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,
however absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about
them! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave
and the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this
singular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and
physical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or
incorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is
good as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but
deals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.
But to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false
collocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;
it is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are
not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we
feel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may
assert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we
may be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different
preferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.
Russell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great
advance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded
as hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or
beans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called
"unnatural"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts
that intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par
excellence_, abominations.
I am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view
where he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and
refutes it on the ground that "it is commonly admitted that there are
bad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean
desires for what is bad." Most people undoubtedly call desires bad
when they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call
objects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This
human weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician
to appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said
that Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called
it _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is
inclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he
candidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about
good and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he
triumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree
with his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,
supposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to
recognise was independent of their constitution.
In a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are
desires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper
psychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of
consciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations
that make one thing good for another. At the same time the words
desire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,
for those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral
units are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional
interests that things are "really" good or bad; interests which may
not be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt
any desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial
interest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable
value; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests
of men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less
to the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions
may indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they
thwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains
them. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of
particular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison
at once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for
the other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating
than coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a
strange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to
insist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference
to any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent
intoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this
way Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead
bad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders
reasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,
and false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point
of reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point
of reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing
but physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force
than to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not
in philosophy.
That good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and
adventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,
whenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,
to show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but
appeal "to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree."
He repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,
having pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as
intense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it
your good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is
expected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_
(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man
who gives the required answer does so not because the answer is
self-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of
man. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless
pleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome
intermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the
voluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their
origin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they
marked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and
causes many a soul, far more profound than that of the young
Protarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease
altogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines
all conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for
political or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our
humanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be
pursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The
impossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure
pleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to
their being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.
The author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of
egoism, and most of all in his "Free Man's Religion." Egoism, he
thinks, is untenable because "if I am right in thinking that my good
is the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits
that my good, not his, is the only good." "Most people ... would admit
that it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only
one person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,
but is simply good." "It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to
secure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is
hard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.
And if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that
cannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general
question who _A_ and _B_ may be." To the question, as the logician
states it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly
irrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in
nature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally
good, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the
locus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be
indifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises
in me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In
practice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in
the private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an
alien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life
of an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in
some way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so
representing the alien good would hang our conviction that it was
truly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The
voice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is
to enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a
remote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for
such sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,
in a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all
wills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled
magically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must
be actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to
be an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it
would suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their
eyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of
nature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the
selfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for
the peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can
generate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them
intrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)
generate or recognise the goods we prize.
In the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so
that to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,
abstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified
at all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the
qualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever
they went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing
from sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine
different goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and
actual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell
makes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and
those akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that
the things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized
by others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these
chosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie
rather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,
in many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;
yet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely
just. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic
from exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would
merely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly
establishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious
tyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices
which would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,
the pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had
allowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of
self-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.
Moore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become
in the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of
egoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot
help thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it
became prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than
would a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no
matter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that
goods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to
specific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned
arrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to
have but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher
duty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were
incompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,
without insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically
contemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of
others. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible
unselfishness is chivalry--a recognition of the inward right and
justification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has
long been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes
of war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of
men with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.
Policy, hypnotisation, and even surgery may be practised without
exorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,
it is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that
course is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural
origin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and
ethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it
says by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the
philosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction
that what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to
existence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn
absolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or
precious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its
own to achieve.
The consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting
than its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might
still be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or
mover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;
his good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long
help his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a
mythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is
natural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been
projected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should
attract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world
is aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more
serious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be
expressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before
anything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable
property, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything
exists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to
this moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason; and,
indeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a
good that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good
notwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being
obeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good
is not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are
those who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising
their sinful natural propensities, keep asserting that certain things
are in themselves good and others bad, and declaring to be detestable
any other saint who dogmatises differently. In this system the
Calvinistic God has lost his creative and punitive functions, but
continues to decree groundlessly what is good and what evil, and to
love the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.
Meanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the
elect are sure to find it here.
What shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal
religion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old
force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in
losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,
this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in
retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;
for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit--in this
case a most pure and heroic spirit--which it strives so hard to
dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an
unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the
discernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,
because in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true
philosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial
systems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their
adherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,
and they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but
simply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true
insight they were based on is too often buried under them. The
hypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the
forthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things
the limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted
by logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and
when it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.
Mr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed
the moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to
some things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that
combinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and
that these valuable things are far more specific than abstract
pleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity
if this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,
whose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a
tangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!
V
SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
It is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and
there is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains
that any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably,
if it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In practice, however,
the ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by argument, it is readily
overcome by nature. It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the
anarchist's own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative
endeavour. In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible,
human nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only
what is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain
itself in the moral world. Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism
of art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution,
cannot avail to establish a great reputation. They may dazzle for a
moment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an
important subject-matter and a sane humanity.
If this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain
artists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.
How would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows
the judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who
evidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only
in the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,
Matthew Arnold said, was "a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating
his wings in a luminous void in vain." In consequence he declared that
Shelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an
unsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,
and as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want
of the sense of humour, which could only be called _bête_. These
strictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They
unmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all
revolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only
through tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien
reality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other
half, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a
common inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so
much as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of
revolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that
they wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the
midst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly
a strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,
and an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the
leaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if
one is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to
any private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may
exist and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle
of criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of
pervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other
hand--who can honestly doubt it?--the rebels and individualists are
the men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in
particular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and
Shelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in
humour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a
matter of æsthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of
capital importance in the development of human genius that the great
revolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that
began with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found
angels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which
began at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have
been one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we
reconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to
call the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,
and shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation
or political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox
principle that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are
essential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out
of our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not
perhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in
Shelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the
truth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really
has a great subject-matter--what ought to be; and that he has a real
humanity--though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal
principle, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can
flourish in the world.