_THE NECESSITY OF THE FACTS, OF WHICH THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE
REFLECTION, IF IDEAL INTERESTS ARE TO BE SUPREME_
I. THE QUESTION
With this positive and negative definition of the social
consciousness in our minds, a third question immediately suggests
itself to one who wishes to go to the bottom of our theme. Why must
the facts, of which the social consciousness is the reflection, be as
they are if ideal interests are to be supreme? What has a theodicy to
say as to these facts? Why, that is, from the point of view of the
ideal--of religion and theology--why are we constituted so alike? so
that we must influence one another? so that the results of our actions
necessarily go over into the lives of others? so that the innocent
suffer with the guilty and the guilty profit with the righteous? so
that we must recognize everywhere the claim of others? so that we must
respect their personality? and so that we must love them?
II. OTHERWISE NO MORAL WORLD AT ALL
The answer to all these world-old questions may perhaps be contained
in the single statement, that otherwise we should have no moral world
at all. There would be no thinkable moral universe, but rather as many
worlds as there are individuals, having no more to do with one another
than the chemical reactions going on in a set of test-tubes.
1. _The Prerequisites of a Moral World._ For our human thinking,
assuredly, there are certain prerequisites, that the world may be at
all a sphere for moral training and action. What are these
prerequisites for a moral world? There must be, in the first place, a
_sphere of universal law_, to count on, within which all actions take
place. In a lawless world, action could hardly take on any
significance--least of all ethical significance. That freedom itself
should mean anything in outward expression, there must be the
possibility of intelligent use of means toward the ends chosen.
There must be, in the second place, some _real ethical freedom_, some
power of moral initiative. We need not quarrel about the terms used;
but, as Paulsen intimates, no serious ethical writer ever doubted that
men have at least some power to shape their own characters.[16]
Without that assumption, we have a whole world of ideas and
ideals--many of them the realest facts in the world to us--that have
no legitimate excuse for being, that are simple insanities of the most
inexplicable sort. The very meaning of the personality, indeed, which
the social consciousness must demand for men, is some real existence
for self, that is, some real self-consciousness and moral initiative.
And freedom is not enough; there must be also _some power of
accomplishment_. To ascribe mere volition to man seems, it has been
justly said, sophistical. Results are needed to reveal the character
of our acts, even to ourselves--to make that character real. Lotze's
charge that the world is imperfect because it might have been so made
that only good designs could be carried out, or so that the results of
evil volitions would be at once corrected,[17] is itself similarly
sophistical. Such a world, in which the outward results of action
never appear, would be but a play-world after all--only a nursery of
babes not yet capable of character. It could be no fit world for moral
training.
And still more, not less, must this law of the necessary results of
actions hold in our relations to other persons. There can be, least of
all, a moral universe where we are not _members one of another_.
Character, in any form we can conceive it, could not then exist. Our
best, as well as our worst, possibilities are involved in these
necessary mutual relations. Moral character has meaning only in
personal relations. The results, therefore, which follow upon action,
if the character of our deed is to have reality for us, must be
chiefly personal. The realm of character has fearful possibilities.
This _is_ no play-world. We can cause and be caused suffering, and our
sin necessarily carries the suffering, if not the sin, of others with
it.
2. _The Ideal World Requires, thus, the Facts of the Social
Consciousness._--All this could be changed in any vital way only by
shutting up every soul absolutely to itself, and with that result life
has simply ceased.
For we cannot really conceive a person as having any reason for being
without such relations. He would be constantly baffled at every point,
for he is made for persons and personal relations. Love, too, the
highest source of both character and happiness, requires everywhere
personal relations. Religion itself, as a sharing of the life of God,
would be impossible without some relation to others; for God, at
least, could not be separated from the life of all. That is, persons,
love, religion, in such a world, have gone.
This, then, simply means that the ideal world ceases to be, with the
denial of the facts that the social consciousness reflects. We must be
full persons, social beings in the entire meaning demanded by the
social consciousness--hard as the consequences involved often are--if
ideal interests are to be supreme. Indeed, the very moral judgment,
that incessantly prompts the problem of evil for every one of us, is
required, for its own existence, to assume the validity of the
relations about which it questions. For it complains, for the most
part, of those facts that follow inevitably from the necessary mutual
influence of men; but the chief sources of the joy it requires, that
it may justify the world, lie in these same mutual relations. It
assumes, thus, in its claims on the world, the validity and worth of
the very relations of which it complains in its criticism of the
world. Or, slightly to vary the statement, the major premise, even of
pessimism, is that a really justifiable world must have worth in the
joy it yields in personal life, impossible out of the personal
relations of a real moral universe. And there can be no moral universe
without the facts reflected in the social consciousness. The ideal
world requires, then, the facts of the social consciousness.
[16] _System of Ethics_, pp. 467 ff.
[17] _Philosophy of Religion_, p. 125.