Part 60 (1/2)
It is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethics which is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given a bad technical expression to its generous principles and should have subst.i.tuted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere fact that somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot give direction to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation but does not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustment is thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which the harmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A given harmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changing them together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering the environment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached to anything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define any particular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in the observer; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, for instance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed in dreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need not limit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasures among the million; he need not accept for a goal a child's caprices multiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comforts doubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated by the agent's autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place they fill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world, not the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort of physical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing a particular nature; it is not a pa.s.sive medium where heterogeneous values can find their balance by virtue of their dead weight and number.
A moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what things pleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational, will not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his own nature--on which alone honest ideals can rest--without attempting to speak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentient universe. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. A living and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadens its basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everything that will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold a particular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, the arts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomy without renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both of its own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy.
[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty.]
Utilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialectical ground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in a concrete ideal. It is a n.o.ble thing to be sensitive to others'
hards.h.i.+ps, and happy in their happiness; but it is n.o.ble because it refines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a new and congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamental structure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made to be child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would not be social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, wholly industrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and s.e.xual instincts, social life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly with them, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. To make this sympathy explicit and to find one's happiness in exercising it is to lay one's foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range of one's being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moral dissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bid all living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run into a cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure to precede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance in charity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within the lines of his method; to trespa.s.s beyond them would be to recede.
This situation is repeated on a broader stage. A statesman entrusted with power should regard nothing but his country's interests; to regard anything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment or private hobbies to make him misapply the resources of his fellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have an enlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed be expected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than his countrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to his eminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injury or foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of a people's happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal.
Indestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race, do not const.i.tute its ident.i.ty. Its essence is a certain spirit, and only what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it.
[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular.]
If a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, may ruin or transform, that is Allah's business; mine is to clarify my own intent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of my experience and practical imagination, so that I may have a natural ground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be a rational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, or that of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there contained an overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational, though the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in the process. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conduct terminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolation they const.i.tuted all that morality had to consider, and as if respect offered to them, somehow in proportion to their quant.i.ty, were the true conscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will, chastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. What morality has to consider is the form of life, not its quant.i.ty. In a world that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definite centres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, nor to redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding its affinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, and which it is in that measure enabled to understand.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B.]
CHAPTER X
POST-RATIONAL MORALITY
[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective.]
When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One by his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his preponderating interest in history and a.n.a.lysis, showed clearly enough how little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent epitaph on their country. They were publis.h.i.+ng the principles of what had been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting its momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation was already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul, he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated society began to drive him to artificial excitements and superst.i.tions.
Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public interest was still represented, the few whose n.o.bler temper and traditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots were gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit that rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered to have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage had shaken off all allegiance to art or reason.
[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities.]
The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent att.i.tudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all embodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the effort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could support no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the soul with some subst.i.tute for happiness. Life is older and more persistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in rationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation which they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of civilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse whatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of meaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of building this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive elements.
Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they are, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from which the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its satirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may precede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously embraced in view of reason's failure, they have a quite particular value. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as the intuitionist's aversion does, from moral incoherence or religious prejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the contrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready apprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality of nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may make it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the philosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as the beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he and all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may cry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity.
If you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he would not be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, to mere inattention and bl.u.s.ter. If you told him that every art and every activity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realise the ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarily approves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, he would not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. He might admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency of your conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and the sadder man, that he had experience of their futility. ”You h.e.l.lenisers,”
he might say, ”are but children; you have not pondered the little history you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtue were stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justified by a greater good arising out of them--then, indeed, a life according to reason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of those fond a.s.sumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria.
Virtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompous garment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full of spots and ridiculous patches. Men's best laid plans become, in the casual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterest calamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say the ways of G.o.d, but our own ways?”
[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them.]
Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever positive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives cannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not collapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of criticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not pre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or less explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an intolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter of fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of the natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the rest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that natural ideal because, compared with the commoner pa.s.sions on which it reacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope--the appeal to some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter change in the conditions of life.
Post-rational morality thus const.i.tutes, in intention if not in fact, a criticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rational morality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is an effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some single eventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that by estranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment's pleasure, or mortifying the pa.s.sions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or studying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gain admission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought, once conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted as a panacea.
It becomes in consequence (for such is the force of nature) the foundation of elaborate inst.i.tutions and elaborate philosophies, into which the contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced.
When human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams that visit the soul are the only evidence of her continued existence. Through them she still envisages a good; and when the delirium pa.s.ses and the normal world gradually re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes her regeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regeneration due, in truth, to the restored nutrition and circulation within her. In this way post-rational systems, though founded originally on despair, in a later age that has forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the only possible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to each sect, and brought up under its influence, may exhaust criticism and sophistry to show that all faith and effort would be vain unless their particular nostrum was accepted; and so a curious party philosophy arises in which, after discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary puts forward some mythical echo of reason and nature as the one saving and necessary truth. The positive substance of such a doctrine is accordingly pre-rational and perhaps crudely superst.i.tious; but it is introduced and nominally supported by a formidable indictment of physical and moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offered to our wors.h.i.+p acquires a spurious halo and an imputed majesty by being raised on a pedestal of infinite despair.
[Sidenote: Epicurean refuge in pleasure.]