The State is the actually existing realised moral life. For it is the
unity of the universal essential Will with that of the individual, and
this is "Morality."--HEGEL.
A criminal is literally a person accused--accused, and in the modern
sense of the word convicted, of being harmful to Society. But is he
there in the dock, the patch-coated brawler or burglar, really harmful
to Society? is he more harmful than the mild old gentleman in the wig
who pronounces sentence upon him? That is the question. Certainly he has
infringed the law: and the law is in a sense the consolidated public
opinion of Society: but if no one were to break the law, public opinion
would ossify, and Society would die. As a matter of fact Society keeps
changing its opinion. How then are we to know when it is right and when
it is wrong? The Outcast of one age is the Hero of another. In
execration they nailed Roger Bacon's manuscripts out in the sun and
rain, to rot crucified upon planks--his bones lie in an unknown and
unhonoured grave--yet to-day he is regarded as a pioneer of human
thought. The hated Christian holding his ill-famed love-feasts in the
darkness of the catacombs has climbed up to the throne of S. Peter and
the world. The Jew moneylender whom Front-de-Boeuf could torture with
impunity is become a Rothschild--guest of princes and instigator of
commercial wars; and Shylock is now a highly respectable Railway
Bondholder. And the Accepted of one age is the Criminal of the next. All
the glories of Alexander do not condone in our eyes for his cruelty in
crucifying the brave defenders of Tyre by thousands along the sea-shore;
and if Solomon with his thousand wives and concubines were to appear in
London to-morrow, even our most frivolous circles would be shocked, and
Brigham Young by contrast seem a domestic model. The judge pronounces
sentence on the prisoner now, but Society in its turn and in the lapse
of years pronounces sentence on the judge. It holds in its hand a new
canon, a new code of morals, and consigns its former representative and
the law which he administered to a limbo of contempt.
It seems as if Society, as it progresses from point to point, forms
ideals--just as the individual does. At any moment each person,
consciously or unconsciously, has an ideal in his mind toward which he
is working (hence the importance of literature). Similarly Society has
an ideal in its mind. These ideals are tangents or vanishing points of
the direction in which Society is moving at the time. It does not reach
its ideal, but it goes in that direction--then, after a time, the
direction of its movement changes, and it has a new ideal.
When the ideal of Society is material gain or possession, as it is
largely to-day, the object of its special condemnation is the thief--not
the rich thief, for he is already in possession and therefore
respectable, but the poor thief. There is nothing to show that the poor
thief is really more immoral or unsocial than the respectable
money-grubber; but it is very clear that the money-grubber has been
floating with the great current of Society, while the poor man has been
swimming against it, and so has been worsted. Or when, as to-day,
Society rests on private property in land, its counter-ideal is the
poacher. If you go in the company of the county squire-archy and listen
to the after-dinner talk you will soon think the poacher a combination
of all human and diabolic vices; yet I have known a good many poachers,
and either have been very lucky in my specimens or singularly prejudiced
in their favour, for I have generally found them very good fellows--but
with just this one blemish that they invariably regard a landlord as an
emissary of the evil one! The poacher is as much in the right, probably,
as the landlord, but he is not right for the time. He is asserting a
right (and an instinct) belonging to a past time--when for hunting
purposes all land was held in common--or to a time in the future when
such or similar rights shall be restored. Cæsar says of the Suevi that
they tilled the ground in common and had no private lands, and there is
abundant evidence that all early human communities, before they entered
on the stage of modern civilisation, were communistic in character. Some
of the Pacific Islanders to-day are in the same condition. In those
times private property was theft. Obviously the man who attempted to
retain for himself land or goods, or who fenced off a portion of the
common ground and--like the modern landlord--would allow no one to till
it who did not pay him a tax--was a criminal of the deepest dye.
Nevertheless the criminals pushed their way to the front, and have
become the respectables of modern Society. And it is quite probable that
in like manner the criminals of to-day will push to the front and become
the respectables of a later age.
The ascetic and monastic ideal of early Christian and mediæval ages is
now regarded as foolish, if not wicked; and poverty, which in many times
and places has been held in honour as the only garb of honesty, is
condemned as criminal and indecent. Nomadism--if accompanied by
poverty--is criminal in modern Society. To-day the gipsy and the tramp
are hunted down. To have no settled habitation, or worse still, no place
to lay your head, are suspicious matters. We close even our outhouses
and barns against the son of man, and so to us the son of man comes not.
And yet--at one time and in one stage of human progress--the nomadic
state is the rule; and the settler is then the criminal. His crops are
fired and his cattle driven off. What right has he to lay a limit to the
hunting grounds, or to spoil the wild free life of the plains with his
dirty agriculture?
As to the marriage relation and its attendant moralities, the forms are
numerous and notorious enough. Public opinion seems to have varied
through all phases and ideals, and yet there is no indication of
finality. Modern investigations show that in primitive human societies
the affinities admitted or barred in marriage are most various--the
relation of brother and sister being even in cases allowed; in the
present day such a bond as the last-mentioned would be considered
inhuman and monstrous.[34] Polyandry prevails among one people or at one
time, polygyny prevails among another people or at another time. In
Central Africa to-day the chief offers you his wife as a mark of
hospitality, in India the native Prince keeps her hidden even from his
most intimate guest. Among the Japanese, public opinion holds young
women--even of good birth--singularly free in their intercourse with
men, _till they are married_; at Paris they are free after. In the Greek
and Roman antiquity marriage seems, with some brilliant exceptions, to
have been a prosaic affair--mostly a matter of convenience and
housekeeping--the woman an underling--little of the ideal attaching to
the relationship of man and wife. The romance of love went elsewhere.
The better class of free women or Hetairai were those who gave a
spiritual charm to the passion. They were an educated and recognised
body, and possibly in their best times exercised a healthy and
discriminating influence upon the male youth. The respectful treatment
of Theodota by Socrates and the advice which he gives her concerning her
lovers: to keep the insolent from her door, and to rejoice greatly when
the accepted succeed in anything honourable, indicates this. That their
influence was at times immense the mere name of Aspasia is sufficient to
show; and if Plato in the Symposium reports correctly the word of
Diotima, her teaching on the subject of human and divine love was
probably of the noblest and profoundest that has ever been given to the
world.
With the influx of the North-men over Europe came a new ideal of the
sexual relation, and the wife mounted more into equality with her
husband than before. The romance of love, however, still went mainly
outside marriage, and may, I believe, be traced in two chief forms--that
of Chivalry, as an ideal devotion to simple Womanhood; and that of
Minstrelsy, which took quite a different hue, individual and
sentimental--the lover and his mistress (she in most cases the wife of
another), the serenade, secret amour, etc.--both of which forms of
Chivalry and Minstrelsy contain in themselves something new and not
quite familiar to antiquity.
Finally in modern times the monogamic union has risen to
pre-eminence--the splendid ideal of an equal and life-long attachment
between man and wife, fruitful of children in this life, and hopeful of
continuance beyond--and has become the great theme of romantic
literature, and the climax of a thousand novels and poems. Yet it is
just here and to-day, when this ideal after centuries of struggle has
established itself, and among the nations that are in the van of
civilisation--that we find the doctrine of perfect liberty in the
marriage relationship being most successfully preached, and that the
communalisation of social life in the future seems likely to weaken the
family bond and to relax the obligation of the marriage tie.
If the Greek age, splendid as it was in itself and in its fruits of
human progress, did not hold marriage very high, it was partly because
the ideal passion of that period, and one which more than all else
inspired it, was that of comradeship, or male friendship carried over
into the region of love. The two figures of Harmodius and Aristogiton
stand at the entrance of Greek history as the type of this passion,
bearing its fruit (as Plato throughout maintains is its nature) in
united self-devotion to the country's good. The heroic Theban legion,
the "sacred band," into which no man might enter without his lover--and
which was said to have remained unvanquished till it was annihilated at
the battle of Chæronæa--proves to us how publicly this passion and its
place in society were recognised; while its universality and the depth
to which it had stirred the Greek mind are indicated by the fact that
whole treatises on love, in its spiritual aspect, exist, in which no
other form of the sentiment seems to be contemplated; and by the
magnificent panorama of Greek statuary, which was obviously to a large
extent inspired by it. In fact the most remarkable Society known to
history, and its greatest men, cannot be properly considered or
understood apart from this passion; yet the modern world scarcely
recognises it, or if it recognises, does so chiefly to condemn it.[35]
Other instances might be quoted to show how differently moral questions
are regarded in one age and another--as in the cases of Usury, Magic,
Suicide, Infanticide, etc. On the whole we pride ourselves (and justly I
believe) on the general advance in humanity; yet we know that to-day the
merest savages can only shudder at a civilisation whose public opinion
allows--as among us--the rich to wallow in their wealth, while the poor
are systematically starving; and it is certain that the vivisection of
animals--which on the whole is approved by our educated classes (though
not by the healthier sentiment of the uneducated)--would have been
stigmatised as one of the most abominable crimes by the ancient
Egyptians[36]--if, that is, they could have conceived such a practice
possible at all.
But not only do the moral judgments of mankind thus vary from age to age
and from race to race, but--what is equally remarkable--they vary to an
extraordinary degree from class to class of the same society. If the
landlord class regards the poacher as a criminal, the poacher, as
already hinted, looks upon the landlord as a selfish ruffian who has the
police on his side; if the respectable shareholder, politely and
respectably subsisting on dividends, dismisses navvies and the
frequenters of public-houses as disorderly persons, the navvy in return
despises the shareholder as a sneaking thief. And it is not easy to see,
after all, which is in the right. It is useless to dismiss these
discrepancies by supposing that one class in the nation possesses a
monopoly of morality and that the other classes simply rail at the
virtue they cannot attain to, for this is obviously not the case. It is
almost a commonplace, and certainly a fact that cannot be contested,
that every class--however sinful or outcast in the eyes of
others--contains within its ranks a large proportion of generous,
noble, self-sacrificing characters; so that the public opinion of one
such class, however different from that of others, cannot at least be
invalidated on the above ground. There are plenty of clergymen at this
moment who are models of pastors--true shepherds of the people--though a
large and increasing section of society persist in regarding priests as
a kind of wolves in sheep's clothing. It is not uncommon to meet with
professional thieves who are generous and open-handed to the last
degree, and ready to part with their last penny to help a comrade in
distress; with women living outside the bounds of conventional morality
who are strongly religious in sentiment, and who regard atheists as
_really_ wicked people; with aristocrats who have as stern material in
them as quarry-men; and even with bondholders and drawing-room loungers
who are as capable of bravery and self-sacrifice as many a pitman or
ironworker. Yet all these classes mentioned have their codes of
morality, differing in greater or lesser degree from each other; and
again the question forces itself upon us: Which of them all is the true
and abiding code?
It may be said, with regard to this variation of codes within the same
society, that, though various codes may exist at the same time, one only
is really valid, namely, that which has embodied itself in the law--that
the others have been rejected because they were unworthy. But, when we
come to look into this matter of law, we see that the plea can hardly be
maintained. Law represents from age to age the code of the dominant or
ruling class, slowly accumulated, no doubt, and slowly modified, but
always added to and always administered by the ruling class. To-day the
code of the dominant class may perhaps best be denoted by the word
Respectability--and if we ask why this code has to a great extent
overwhelmed the codes of the other classes and got the law on its side
(so far that in the main it characterises those classes who do not
conform to it as the criminal classes), the answer can only be: Because
it _is_ the code of the classes who are in power. Respectability is the
code of those who have the wealth and the command, and as these have
also the fluent pens and tongues, it is the standard of modern
literature and the press. It is not necessarily a better standard than
others, but it is the one that happens to be in the ascendant; it is the
code of the classes that chiefly represent modern society; it is the
code of the Bourgeoisie. It is different from the Feudal code of the
past, of the knightly classes, and of Chivalry; it is different from the
Democratic code of the future--of brotherhood and of equality; it is the
code of the Commercial age--and its distinctive watchword is property.
The respectability of to-day is the respectability of property. There is
nothing so respectable as being well-off. The Law confirms this:
everything is on the side of the rich; justice is too expensive a thing
for the poor man. Offences against the person hardly count for so much
as those against property. You may beat your wife within an inch of her
life and only get three months; but if you steal a rabbit, you may be
"sent" for years. So again, gambling by thousands on Change is
respectable enough, but pitch and toss for half-pence in the streets is
low, and must be dealt with by the police; while it is a mere
commonplace to say that the high-class swindler is "received" in society
from which a more honest but patch-coated brother would infallibly be
rejected. As Walt Whitman has it, "There is plenty of glamour about the
most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the
feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and
queens and courts, so well-dressed and handsome. But the people are
ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."
Thus we see that though there are, for instance in the England of
to-day, a variety of classes and a variety of corresponding codes of
public opinion and morality, one of these codes, namely that of the
ruling class whose watchword is property, is strongly in the ascendant.
And we may fairly suppose that in any nation from the time when it first
becomes divided into well-marked classes this is or has been the case.
In one age--the commercial age--the code of the commercial or
money-loving class is dominant; in another--the military--the code of
the warrior class is dominant; in another--the religious--the code of
the priestly class; and so on. And even before any question of division
into classes arises, while races are yet in a rudimentary and tribal
state, the utmost diversity of custom and public opinion marks the one
from the other.
What, then, are we to conclude from all these variations (and the far
greater number which I have not mentioned) of the respect or stigma
attaching to the _same_ actions, not only among different societies in
different ages or parts of the world, but even at any one time among
different classes of the same society? Must we conclude that there is no
such thing as a permanent moral code valid for all time; or must we
still suppose that there is such a thing--though society has hitherto
sought for it in vain?
I think it is obvious that there is no such thing as a permanent moral
code--at any rate as applying to _actions_. Probably the respect or
stigma attaching to particular classes of actions arose from the fact
that these classes of actions were--or were thought to be--beneficial or
injurious to the society of the time; but it is also clear that this
good or bad name once created clings to the action long after the action
has ceased in the course of social progress to be beneficial in the one
case, or injurious in the other; and indeed long after the thinkers of
the race have discovered the discrepancy. And so in a short time arises
a great confusion in the popular mind between what is really good or
evil for the race and what is reputed to be so--the bolder spirits who
try to separate the two having to atone for this confusion by their own
martyrdom. It is also pretty clear that the actions which are beneficial
or injurious to the race must by the nature of the case vary almost
indefinitely with the changing conditions of the life of the race--what
is beneficial in one age or under one set of conditions being injurious
in another age or under other circumstances--so that a permanent or
ever-valid code of moral action is not a thing to be expected, at any
rate by those who regard morality as a result of social experience, and
as a matter of fact is not a thing that we find existing. And, indeed,
of those who regard morals as intuitive, there are few who have thought
about the matter who would be inclined to say that any _act_ in itself
can be either right or wrong. Though there is a superficial judgment of
this kind, yet when the matter comes to be looked into, the more general
consent seems to be that the rightness or wrongness is in the _motive_.
To kill (it is said) is not wrong, but to do so with murderous intent
is; to take money out of another person's purse is in itself neither
moral nor immoral--all depends upon whether permission has been given,
or on what the relations between the two persons are; and so on.
Obviously there is no mere act which under given conditions may not be
justified, and equally obvious there is no mere act which under given
conditions may not become unjustifiable. To talk, therefore, about
virtues and vices as permanent and distinct classes of actions is
illusory: there is no such distinction, except so far as a superficial
and transient public opinion creates it. The theatre of morality is in
the passions, and there are (it is said) virtuous and vicious
passions--eternally distinct from each other.
Here, then, we have abandoned the search for a permanent moral code
among the actions; on the understanding that we are more likely to find
such a thing among the passions. And I think it would be generally
admitted that this is a move in the right direction. There are
difficulties however here, and the matter is not one which renders
itself up at once. Though, vaguely speaking, some passions seem nobler
and more dignified than others, we find it very difficult, in fact
impossible, to draw any strict line which shall separate one class, the
virtuous, from the other class, the vicious. On the whole we place
Prudence, Generosity, Chastity, Reverence, Courage among the
virtues--and their opposites, as Rashness, Miserliness, Incontinence,
Arrogance, Timidity, among the vices; yet we do not seem able to say
that Prudence is always better than Rashness, Chastity than
Incontinence, or Reverence than Arrogance. There are situations in which
the less honoured quality is the most in place; and if the extreme of
this is undesirable, the extreme of its opposite is undesirable too.
Courage, it is commonly said, must not be carried over into
foolhardiness; Chastity must not go so far as the monks of the early
Church took it; there is a limit to the indulgence of the instinct of
Reverence. In fact the less dignified passions are necessary sometimes
as a counterbalance and set-off to the more dignified, and a character
devoid of them would be very insipid; just as among the members of the
body, the less honoured have their place as well as the more honoured,
and could not well be discarded.
Hence a number of writers, abandoning the attempt to draw a fixed line
between virtuous and vicious passions, have boldly maintained that vices
have their place as well as virtues, and that the true salvation lies in
the golden mean. The [Greek: epieikeia] and [Greek: sôphrosunê] of the
Greeks seem to have pointed to the idea of a blend or harmonious
adjustment of all the powers as the perfection of character. Plutarch
says (_Essay on Moral Virtue_), "This, then, is the function of
practical reason following nature, to prevent our passions either going
too far or too short.... Thus setting bound to the emotional currents,
it creates in the unreasoning part of the soul moral habits which are
the mean between excess and deficiency."
The English word "gentleman" seems to have once conveyed a similar idea.
And Emerson, among others, maintains that each vice is only the "excess
or acridity of a virtue," and says "the first lesson of history is the
good of evil."
According to this view rightness or wrongness cannot be predicated of
the passions themselves, but should rather be applied to the use of
them, and to the way they are proportioned to each other and to
circumstances. As, farther back, we left the region of actions to look
for morality in the passions that lie behind action, so now we leave the
region of the passions to look for it in the power that lies behind the
passions and gives them their place. This is a farther move in the same
direction as before, and possibly will bring us to a more satisfactory
conclusion. There are still difficulties, however, the chief ones lying
in the want of definiteness which necessarily attaches to our dealings
with these remoter tracts of human nature; and in our own defective
knowledge of these tracts.
For these reasons, and as the subject is a complex and difficult one, I
would ask the reader to dwell for a few minutes longer on the
considerations which show that it is really as impossible to draw a
fixed line between moral and immoral passions as it is between moral and
immoral actions, and which therefore force us, if we are to find any
ground of morality at all, to look for it in some further region of our
nature.
Plato in his allegory of the soul, in the Phædrus, though he apparently
divides the passions which draw the human chariot into two classes, the
heavenward and the earthward--figured by the white horse and the black
horse respectively--does not recommend that the black horse should be
destroyed or dismissed, but only that he (as well as the white horse)
should be kept under due control by the charioteer. By which he seems to
intend that there is a power in man which stands above and behind the
passions, and under whose control alone the human being can safely
move. In fact, if the fiercer and so-called more earthly passions were
removed, half the driving force would be gone from the chariot of the
human soul. Hatred may be devilish at times--but, after all, the true
value of it depends on what you hate, on the use to which the passion is
put. Anger, though inhuman at one time, is magnificent at another.
Obstinacy may be out of place in a drawing-room, but it is the latest
virtue on a battle-field, when an important position has to be held
against the full brunt of the enemy. And Lust, though maniacal and
monstrous in its aberrations, cannot in the last resort be separated
from its divine companion, Love. To let the more amiable passions have
entire sway notoriously does not do: to turn your cheek, too literally,
to the smiter, is (_pace_ Tolstoi) only to encourage smiting; and when
society becomes so altruistic that everybody runs to fetch the
coal-scuttle, we feel sure that something has gone wrong. The
white-washed heroes of our biographies, with their many virtues and no
faults, do not please us. We have an impression that the man without
faults is, to say the least, a vague, uninteresting being--a picture
without light and shade--and the conventional semi-pious classification
of character into good and bad qualities (as if the good might be kept
and the bad thrown away) seems both inadequate and false.
What the student of human nature rather has to do is not to divide the
virtues (so-called) from the vices (so-called), not to separate the
black horse and the white horse, but to find out what is the relation of
the one to the other--to see the character as a whole, and the mutual
interdependence of its different parts--to find out what that power is
which constitutes it a unity, whose presence and control makes the man
and all his actions "right," and in whose absence (if it is really
possible for it to be entirely absent) the man and his actions must be
"wrong."
What we call vices, faults, defects, appear often as a kind of
limitation: cruelty, for instance, as a limitation of human sympathy,
prejudice as a blindness, a want of discernment; but it is just these
limitations--in one form or another--which are the necessary conditions
of the appearance of a human being in the world. If we are to act or
live at all we must act and live under limits. There must be channels
along which the stream is forced to run, else it will spread and lose
itself aimlessly in all directions--and turn no mill-wheels. One man is
disagreeable and unconciliatory--the directions in which his sympathy
goes out to others are few and limited--yet there are situations in life
(and everyone must know them) when a man who is _able and willing_ to
make himself disagreeable is invaluable: when a Carlyle is worth any
number of Balaams.
Sometimes again vices, etc., appear as a kind of raw material from which
the other qualities have to be formed, and without which, in a sense,
they could not exist. Sensuality, for instance, underlies all art and
the higher emotions. Timidity is the defect of the sensitive imaginative
temperament. Bluntness, stupid candor, and want of tact are
indispensable in the formation of certain types of Reformers. But what
would you have? Would you have a rabbit with the horns of a cow, or a
donkey with the disposition of a spaniel? The reformer has not to
extirpate his brusqueness and aggressiveness, but to see that he makes
good use of these qualities; and the man has not to abolish his
sensuality, but to humanise it.
And so on. Lecky, in his "History of Morals," shows how in society
certain defects necessarily accompany certain excellences of character.
"Had the Irish peasants been less chaste they would have been more
prosperous," in his blunt assertion, which he supports by the contention
that their early marriages (which render the said virtue possible) "are
the most conspicuous proofs of the national improvidence, and one of the
most fatal obstacles to industrial prosperity." Similarly he says that
the gambling table fosters a moral nerve and calmness "scarcely
exhibited in equal perfection in any other sphere"--a fact which Bret
Harte has finely illustrated in his character of Mr. John Oakhurst in
the "Outcasts of Poker Flat;" also that "the promotion of industrial
veracity is probably the single form in which the growth of manufactures
exercises a favorable influence upon morals;" while, on the other hand,
"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." Again he
points out that thriftiness and forethought--which, in an industrial
civilisation like ours, are looked upon as duties "of the very highest
order"--have at other times (when the teaching was "take no thought for
the morrow") been regarded as quite the reverse, and concludes with the
general remark that as society advances there is some loss for every
gain that is made, and with the special indictment against
"civilisation" that it is not favorable to the production of
"self-sacrifice, enthusiasm, reverence, or chastity."
The point of all which is that the so-called vices and defects--whether
we regard them as limitations or whether we regard them as raw materials
of character, whether we regard them in the individual solely or whether
we regard them in their relation to society--are necessary elements of
human life, elements without which the so-called virtues could not
exist; and that therefore it is quite impossible to separate vices and
virtues into distinct classes with the latent idea involved that one
class may be retained and the other in course of time got rid of.
Defects and bad qualities will not be treated so--they clamour for their
rights and will not be denied; they effect a lodgment in us, and we
have to put up with them. Like the grain of sand in the oyster, we are
forced to make pearls of them.
These are the precipices and chasms which give form to the mountain. Who
wants a mountain sprawling indifferently out on all sides, without angle
or break, like the oceanic tide-wave of which one cannot say whether it
is a hill or a plain? And if you want to grow a lily, chastely white and
filling the air with its fragrance, will you not bury the bulb of it
deep in the dirt to begin with?
Acknowledging, then, that it is impossible to hold permanently to any
line of distinction between good and bad passions, there remains no
course for us but to accept both, and to _make use_ of them--redeeming
them, both good and bad, from their narrowness and limitation by so
doing--to make use of them in the service of humanity. For as dirt is
only matter in the wrong place, so evil in man consists only in actions
or passions which are uncontrolled by the human within him, and
undedicated to its service. The evil consists not in the actions or
passions themselves, but in the fact that they are inhumanly used. The
most unblemished virtue erected into a barrier between one self and a
suffering brother or sister--the whitest marble image, howsoever lovely,
set up in the Holy Place of the temple of Man, where the spirit alone
should dwell--becomes blasphemy and a pollution.
Wherein exactly this human service consists is another question. It may
be, and, as the reader would gather, probably is, a matter which at the
last eludes definition. But though it may elude exact statement, that is
no reason why approximations should not be made to the statement of it;
nor is its ultimate elusiveness of intellectual definition any proof
that it may not become a real and vital force within the man, and
underlying inspiration of his actions. To take the two considerations in
order. In the first place, as we saw from the beginning, the experience
of society is continually leading it to classify actions into beneficial
and harmful, good and bad; and thus moral codes are formed which eat
their way from the outside into the individual man and become part of
him. These codes may be looked upon as approximations in each age to a
statement of human service; but, as we have seen, they are by the nature
of the case very imperfect; and since the very conditions of the problem
are continually changing, it seems obvious that a final and absolute
solution of it by this method is impossible. The second way in which man
works towards a solution is by the expansion and growth of his own
consciousness, and is ultimately by far the most important--though the
two methods have doubtless continually to be corrected by each other. In
fact, as man actually forms a part of society externally, so he comes to
know and _feel_ himself a part of society through his inner nature.
Gradually, and in the lapse of ages, through the development of his
sympathetic relation with his fellows, the individual man enters into a
wider and wider circle of life; the joys and sorrows, the experiences,
of his fellows become his own joys and sorrows, his own experiences; he
passes into a life which is larger than his own individual life; forces
flow in upon him which determine his actions, not for results which
return to him directly, but for results which can only return to him
indirectly and through others; at last the ground of humanity, as it
were, reveals itself within him, the region of human equality--and his
actions come to flow directly from the very same source which regulates
and inspires the whole movement of society. At this point the problem is
solved. The growth has taken place from within; it is not of the nature
of an external compulsion, but of an inward compunction. By actual
consciousness the man has taken on an ever-enlarging life, and at last
the life of humanity, which has no fixed form, no ever-valid code; but
is itself the true life, surpassing definition, yet inspiring all
actions and passions, all codes and forms, and determining at last their
place.
It is the gradual growth of this supreme life in each individual which
is the great and indeed the only hope of Society--it is that for which
Society exists: a life which so far from dwarfing individuality enhances
immensely its power, causing the individual to move with the weight of
the universe behind him--and exalting what were once his little
peculiarities and defects into the splendid manifestations of his
humanity.
To return then for a moment to the practical bearing of this on the
question before us, we see that so soon as we have abandoned all codes
of morals there remains nothing for us but to put _all_ our qualities
and defects to human use, and to redeem them by so doing. Our defects
are our entrances into life, and the gateway of all our dealings with
others. Think what it is to be plain and _homely_. The very word
suggests an endearment, and a liberty of access denied to the
faultlessly handsome. Our very evil passions, so called, are not things
to be ashamed of, but things to look straight in the face and to see
what they are good for--for a use can be found for them, that is
certain. The man should see that he is worthy of his passion, as the
mountain should rear its crest conformable to the height of the
precipice which bounds it. Is it women? let him see that he is a
magnanimous lover. Is it ambition? let him take care that it be a grand
one. Is it laziness? let it redeem him from the folly of unrest, to
become heaven-reflecting, like a lake among the hills. Is it
closefistedness? let it become the nurse of a true economy.
The more complicated, pronounced, or awkward the defect is the finer
will be the result when it has been thoroughly worked up. Love of
approbation is difficult to deal with. Through sloughs of duplicity, of
concealment, of vanity, it leads its victim. It sucks his sturdy
self-life, and leaves him flattened and bloodless. Yet once mastered,
once fairly torn out, cudgeled, and left bleeding on the road (for this
probably has to be done with every vice or virtue some time or other),
it will rise up and follow you, carrying a magic key round its neck,
meek and serviceable now, instead of dangerous and demoniac as before.
Deceit is difficult to deal with. In some sense it is the worst fault
that can be. It seems to disorganise and ultimately to destroy the
character. Yet I am bold to say that this defect has its uses. Severely
examined perhaps it will be found that no one can live a day free from
it. And beyond that--is not "a noble dissimulation" part and parcel of
the very greatest characters: like Socrates, "the white soul in a satyr
form"? When the divine has descended among men has it not always, like
Moses, worn a veil before its face? and what is Nature herself but one
long and organised system of deception?
Veracity has an opposite effect. It knits all the elements of a man's
character--rendering him solid rather than fluid; yet carried out too
literally and pragmatically it condenses and solidifies the character
overmuch, making the man woodeny and angular. And even of that essential
Truth (truth to the inward and ideal perfection) which more than
anything else perhaps _constitutes_ a man--it is to be remembered that
even here there must be a limitation. No man can in act or externally be
quite true to the ideal--though in spirit he may be. If he is to live in
this world and be mortal, it must be by virtue of some partiality, some
defect.
And so again--since there is an analogy between the Individual and
Society--may we not conclude that as the individual has ultimately to
recognise his so-called evil passions and find a place and a use for
them, society also has to recognise its so-called criminals and discern
their place and use? The artist does not omit shadows from his canvas;
and the wise statesman will not try to abolish the criminal from
society--lest haply he be found to have abolished the driving force from
his social machine.[37]
From what has now been said it is quite clear that in general we call a
man a criminal, not because he violates any eternal code of
morality--for there exists no such thing--but because he violates the
ruling code of his time, and this depends largely on the ideal of the
time. The Spartans appear to have permitted theft because they thought
that thieving habits in the community fostered military dexterity and
discouraged the accumulation of private wealth. They looked upon the
latter as a great evil. But to-day the accumulation of private wealth is
our great good and the thief is looked upon as the evil. When however we
find, as the historians of to-day teach us, that society is now probably
passing through a parenthetical stage of private property from a stage
of communism in the past to a stage of more highly developed communism
in the future, it becomes clear that the thief (and the poacher
before-mentioned) is that person who is protesting against the
too-exclusive domination of a passing ideal. Whatever should we do
without him? He is keeping open for us, as Hinton I think expresses it,
the path to a regenerate society, and is more useful to that end than
many a platform orator. He it is that makes Care to sit upon the Crupper
of Wealth, and so, in course of time, causes the burden and bother of
private property to become so intolerable that society gladly casts it
down on common ground. Vast as is the machinery of Law, and multifarious
the ways in which it seeks to crush the thief, it has signally failed,
and fails ever more and more. The thief will win. He will get what he
wants, but (as usual in human life!) in a way and in a form very
different from what he expected.
And when we regard the thief in himself, we cannot say that we find him
less human than other classes of society. The sentiment of large bodies
of thieves is highly communistic among themselves; and if they thus
represent a survival from an earlier age, they might also be looked upon
as the precursors of a better age in the future. They have their pals in
every town, with runs and refuges always open, and are lavish and
generous to a degree to their own kind. And if they look upon the rich
as their natural enemies and fair prey, a view which it might be
difficult to gainsay, many of them at any rate are animated by a good
deal of the Robin Hood spirit, and are really helpful to the poor.
I need not I think quote that famous passage from Lecky in which he
shows how the prostitute, through centuries of suffering and ill-fame,
has borne the curse and contempt of Society in order that her more
fortunate sister might rejoice in the achievement of a pure marriage.
The ideal of a monogamic union has been established in a sense directly
by the slur cast upon the free woman. If, however, as many people think,
a certain latitude in sexual relations is not only admissible but, in
the long run, and within bounds, desirable, it becomes clear that the
prostitute is that person who against heavy odds, and at the cost of a
real degradation to herself, has clung to a tradition which, in itself
good, might otherwise have perished in the face of our devotion to the
splendid ideal of the exclusive marriage. There has been a time in
history when the prostitute (if the word can properly be used in this
connection) has been glorified, consecrated to the temple-service and
honoured of men and gods (the hierodouloi of the Greeks, the kodeshoth
and kodeshim of the Bible, etc.) There has also been a time when she has
been scouted and reviled. In the future there will come a time when, as
free companion, really free from the curse of modern commercialism, and
sacred and respected once more, she will again be accepted by society
and take her place with the rest.
And so with other cases. On looking back into history we find that
almost every human impulse has at some age been held in esteem and
allowed full play; thus man came to recognise its beauty and value. But
then, lest it should come (as it surely would) to tyrannise over the
rest, it has been dethroned, and so in a later age the same quality is
scouted and banned. Last of all it has to find its perfect human use and
to take its place with the rest. Up to the age of Civilisation
(according to writers on primitive Society) the early tribes of mankind,
though limited each in their habits, were essentially democratical in
structure. In fact, nothing had occurred to make them otherwise. Each
member stood on a footing of equality with the rest; individual men had
not in their hands an arbitrary power over others; and the tribal life
and standard ruled supreme. And when, in the future and on a much higher
plane, the true Democracy comes, this equality which has so long been in
abeyance will be restored, not only among men but also, in a sense,
among all the passions and qualities of manhood: none will be allowed to
tyrannise over others, but all will have to be subject to the supreme
life of humanity. The chariot of Man instead of two horses will have a
thousand; but they will all be under control of the charioteer.
Meanwhile it may not be extravagant to suppose that all through the
Civilisation-period the so-called criminals are keeping open the
possibility of a return to this state of society. They are preserving,
in a rough and unattractive husk it may be, the precious seed of a life
which is to come in the future; and are as necessary and integral a part
of society in the long run as the most respected and most honoured of
its members at present.
The upshot then of it all is that "morals" as a permanent code of action
have to be discarded. There exists no such permanent code. One age, one
race, one class, one family, may have a code which the users of it
consider valid, but only they consider it valid, and then only for a
time. The Decalogue may have been a rough and useful ready-reckoner for
the Israelites; but to us it admits of so many exceptions and
interpretations that it is practically worthless. "Thou shalt not
steal." Exactly; but who is to decide, as we saw at the outset, in what
"stealing" consists? The question is too complicated to admit of an
answer. And when we _have_ caught our half-starved tramp "sneaking" a
loaf, and are ready to condemn him, lo! Lycurgus pats him on the back,
and the modern philosopher tells him that he is keeping open the path to
a regenerate society! If the tramp had also been a philosopher, he would
perhaps have done the same act not merely for his own benefit but for
that of society, he would have committed a crime in order to save
mankind.
There is nothing left but Humanity. Since there is no ever-valid code of
morals we must sadly confess that there is no means of proving ourselves
right and our neighbours wrong. In fact the very act of thinking
whether _we_ are right (which implies a sundering of ourselves, even in
thought, from others) itself introduces the element of wrongness; and if
we are ever to _be_ "right" at all, it must be at some moment when we
fail to notice it--when we have forgotten our apartness from others and
have entered into the great region of human equality. Equality--in that
region all human defects are redeemed; they all find their place. To
love your neighbour _as_ yourself is the whole law and the prophets; to
feel that you are "equal" with others, that their lives are as your
life, that your life is as theirs--even in what trifling degree we may
experience such things--is to enter into another life which includes
both sides; it is to pass beyond the sphere of moral distinctions, and
to trouble oneself no more with them. Between lovers there are no duties
and no rights; and in the life of humanity, there is only an instinctive
mutual service expressing itself in whatever way may be best at the
time. Nothing is forbidden, there is nothing which may not serve. The
law of Equality is perfectly flexible, is adaptable to all times and
places, finds a place for all the elements of character, justifies and
redeems them all without exception; and to live by it is perfect
freedom. Yet not a law: but rather as said, a new life, transcending the
individual life, working through it from within, lifting the self into
another sphere, beyond corruption, far over the world of Sorrow.
The effort to make a distinction between acting for self and acting for
one's neighbor is the basis of "morals." As long as a man feels an
ultimate antagonism between himself and society, as long as he tries to
hold his own life as a thing apart from that of others, so long must the
question arise whether he will act for self _or_ for those others. Hence
flow a long array of terms--distinctions of right and wrong, duty,
selfishness, self-renunciation, altruism, etc. But when he discovers
that there is no ultimate antagonism between himself and society; when
he finds that the gratification of every desire which he has or can have
may be rendered social, or beneficial to his fellows, by being used at
the right time and place, and on the other hand that every demand made
upon him by society will and must gratify some portion of his nature,
some desire of his heart--why, all the distinctions collapse again; they
do not hold water any more. A larger life descends upon him, which
includes both sides, and prompts actions in accordance with an unwritten
and unimagined law. Such actions will sometimes be accounted "selfish"
by the world; sometimes they will be accounted "unselfish"; but they are
neither, or--if you like--both; and he who does them concerns himself
not with the names that may be given to them. The law of Equality
includes all the moral codes, and is the standpoint which they cannot
reach, but which they all aim at.
Judged by this final standard then, it may doubtless fairly be
said--since we all fall short of it--that we are all criminals, and
deserve a good hiding; and even that some of us are greater criminals
than others. Only of this real criminality the actual moral and legal
codes afford but ineffectual tests. I may be a far worse or more
self-included ("idiotic" or brutal) man than you, but the mere fact that
I have violated the laws and been clapped into prison does not prove it.
There may be, probably is, a real and eternal difference represented by
the words Right and Wrong, but no statement that we can make will ever
quite avail to define it. One use, however, of all these laws and codes
in the past, imperfect though they were, may have been to gradually
excite the consciousness in the individual of his opposition to society,
and so prepare the way for a true reconcilement. As Paul says, "I had
not known sin, but by the law," and, if we had not been cudgeled and
bruised for centuries by this rough bludgeon of social convention, we
should not now be so sensitive as we are to the effect of our actions
upon our neighbours, nor so ready for a social life in the future which
shall be superior to law.
Of course, the ultimate reconcilement of the individual with society--of
the unit Man with the mass-Man--involves the subordination of the
desires, their subjection to the true self. And this is a most important
point. It is no easy lapse that is here suggested, from morality into a
mere jungle of human passion, but a toilsome and long ascent--involving
for a time at any rate a determined self-control--into ascendancy over
the passions; it involves the complete mastery, one by one, of them all,
and the recognition and allowance of them only because they are
mastered. And it is just this training and subjection of the
passions--as of winged horses which are to draw the human chariot--which
necessarily forms such a long and painful process of human evolution.
The old moral codes are a part of this process; but they go on the plan
of extinguishing some of the passions--seeing that it is sometimes
easier to shoot a restive horse than to ride him. We however do not want
to be lords of dead carrion, but of living powers; and every steed that
we can add to our chariot makes our progress through creation so much
the more splendid, providing Phoebus indeed hold the reins, and not the
incapable Phaeton.
And by becoming thus one with the social self, the individual, instead
of being crushed, is made far vaster, far grander than before. The
renunciation (if it must be so called) which he has to accept in
abandoning merely individual ends is immediately compensated by the far
more vivid life he now enters into. For every force of his nature can
now be utilised. Planting himself out by contrast he stands all the
firmer because he has a left foot as well as a right, and when he acts,
he acts not half-heartedly as one afraid, but, as it were, with the
whole weight of Humanity behind him. In abandoning his exclusive
individuality he becomes for the first time a real and living
individual; and in accepting as his own the life of others he becomes
aware of a life in himself that has no limit and no end. That the self
of any one man is capable of an infinite gradation from the most petty
and exclusive existence to the most magnificent and inclusive seems
almost a truism. The one extreme is disease and death, the other is life
everlasting. When the tongue for example--which is a member of the
body--regards itself as a purely separate existence for itself alone, it
makes a mistake, it suffers an illusion, and descends into its pettiest
life. What is the consequence? Thinking that it exists apart from the
other members, it selects food just such as shall gratify its most local
self, it endeavours just to titillate its own sense of taste; and living
and acting thus, ere long it ruins that very sense of taste, poisons the
system with improper food, and brings about disease and death. Yet, if
healthy, how does the tongue act? Why, it does not run counter to its
own sense of taste, or stultify itself. It does not talk about
sacrificing its own inclinations for the good of the body and the other
members; but it just acts as being one in interest with them and they
with it. For the tongue _is_ a muscle, and therefore what feeds it feeds
all the other muscles; and the membrane of the tongue _is_ a
prolongation of the membrane of the stomach, and that is how the tongue
knows what the stomach will like; and the tongue _is_ nerves and blood,
and so the tongue may act for nerves and blood all over the body, and so
on. Therefore the tongue may enter into a wider life than that
represented by the mere local sense of taste, and experiences more
pleasure often in the drinking of a glass of water which the whole body
wants, than in the daintiest sweetmeat which is for itself alone.
Exactly so man in a healthy state does not act for himself alone,
practically cannot do so. Nor does he talk cant about "serving his
neighbors," etc. But he simply acts for them as well as for himself,
because they are part and parcel of his life--bone of his bone and flesh
of his flesh; and in doing so he enters into a wider life, finds a more
perfect pleasure, and becomes more really a man than ever before. Every
man contains in himself the elements of all the rest of humanity. They
lie in the background; but they are there. In the front he has his own
special faculty developed--his individual façade, with its projects,
plans and purposes: but behind sleeps the Demos-life with far vaster
projects and purposes. Some time or other to every man must come the
consciousness of this vaster life.
The true Democracy, wherein this larger life will rule society from
within--obviating the need of an external government--and in which all
characters and qualities will be recognised and have their freedom,
waits (a hidden but necessary result of evolution) in the constitution
of human nature itself. In the pre-Civilisation period these vexed
questions of "morals" practically did not exist; simply because in that
period the individual was one with his tribe and moved (unconsciously)
by the larger life of his tribe. And in the post-Civilisation period,
when the true Democracy is realised, they will not exist, because then
the man will know himself a part of humanity at large, and will be
consciously moved by forces belonging to these vaster regions of his
being. The moral codes and questionings belong to Civilisation, they are
part of the forward effort, the struggle, the suffering, and the
temporary alienation from true life, which that term implies.[38]