T

ras

LECTURES AND ESSAYS

NATURAL THEOLOGY AND ETHICS

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW y,

YORK

tf

Lectures and Essays

on

Natural Theology and Ethics

BY

WILLIAM WALLACE

LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE

AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY

IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

EDITED, WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

BY

EDWARD CAIRO

MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD

WITH A PORTRAIT

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1898

Ojcforfc

PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

BY HORACE HART, M.A.
PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

CONTENTS

PACK

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION vii-xl

1. GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL THEOLOGY AND
THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY.

INTRODUCTORY NOTE 3

i. THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY .... 4

ii. THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY .... 24

in. THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST .... 42

iv. RELIGION AND MORALITY THE DEFINITION OF RE
LIGION .......... 52

v. THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION ... 60
vi. MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' • • 73
vn. NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM — THE SCIENTIFIC
AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW— THE
MAIN CONDITIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF REASON . 93
vin. SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF ETHICS . 113

ix. MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE— MATERIALISTIC AND

IDEALISTIC VIEWS OF IT 130

x. MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION— THE MATERIAL BASIS

OF THE MORAL LIFE 147

yi CONTENTS

PAGK

xi. ON SOME RELATIONS OF MOKALS, SCIENCE, AND RE- ^

LIGION ..-•••

xii THE ESSENTIAL NATURE or RELIGION AND ITS RELA
TION TO MOKALITY-THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY

II. ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

i. OUR NATURAL RIGHTS

ii. PERSON AND PERSONALITY

•JQI

in. RESPONSIBILITY .

iv. DUTY 3H

v. HEDONISM

vi. UTILITARIANISM 374

*vii. THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM .

- viii. THE RELATIONS OF FICHTE AND HEGEL TO SOCIALISM 427
- ix. THE LEGAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SANCTIONS OF

MORALITY 44«

III. CRITICAL ESSAYS.

i. LOTZE 4^1

ii. NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY . . . 511

in. NIETZSCHE'S 'Tnus SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA ' . . . 530

iv. STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC, BY JOHN

M. E. MCTAGGART .... 542

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

I HAVE undertaken to write a short account of
the life and work of the late Professor Wallace as
an introduction to this volume of selections from
his manuscripts. The existence of a College Tutor
and University Professor is so quiet and uneventful,
and Wallace confined himself so closely to his
academic duties, that an elaborate biography of
him would be out of place. At the same time, his
influence over his pupils was so great, and his work
both as a writer and lecturer was so unique in kind,
that it has seemed desirable to put on record the
main events of his life, and to attempt, so far as
is possible, to estimate the main features of his
character and the general purport of his philo
sophical teaching.

William Wallace was born on May 11, 1843,
at Cupar, the county town of Fifeshire. His
father, James Wallace, began life as a mason, and
got on so well as to become a successful master-
builder. He and his wife, Jean Kellock, were a
quiet, industrious pair, who mixed little with their

viii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

neighbours, and devoted themselves mainly to the
bringing up of their family, of whom there were five,
four sons and one daughter. William was the eldest
of the family, and the third son was Edwin Wallace,
afterwards Fellow of Worcester College and author
of an edition of Aristotle's De Anima, a man of
fine intelligence and generous character, who died
of consumption at a comparatively early age. The
parents were simple and truthful people, the mother
especially being a woman of considerable energy and
originality, and their example had no little influence
in developing in their son that quiet independence
and uncompromising devotion to ideal aims, which
were leading notes of his character. His ability and
steadfastness of purpose showed themselves very
early. Both at the Madras Academy, Cupar, and
subsequently at the University of St. Andrews,
he easily took the first place in all the studies to
which he gave his mind. His main interest at first
was in Classics, in which he had the advantage
of the teaching of Professor Sellar and Professor
(afterwards Principal) Shairp, but in the last years
of his course he came under the influence of Professor
Ferrier, to whose lectures he traced his first intel
lectual awakening and his initiation in philosophical
study. He did not take to golf as an amusement
like most St. Andrews students, nor indeed did he
ever care much for athletics in any form; but he
early developed a taste for natural beauty, which
he indulged in long country walks. At St. Andrews
he was specially impressed by his first view of the

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION ix

sea, and used to spend much time in watching the
waves breaking on the rocks or rolling up the long
slope of the sands.

For such a studious youth in Scotland, the Church
seemed the natural profession ; and his parents
sent him to the University with that object. But
after spending four years in the Arts course at
St. Andrews, and especially after his philosophical
studies had awakened him to independent thinking,
Wallace came to feel himself not specially fitted for
that profession, and somewhat doubtful whether he
could comply with its requirements. On this subject
an interesting anecdote is told by a member of his
family. It had been arranged, in conformity with
the wish of his mother, that he should go to the
Divinity Hall in Edinburgh after having completed
his curriculum at St. Andrews. But at last, when
the day came that he should start, he said to her,
' Do you really wish me to go? If you say the word,
I will go.' His mother, seeing that his heart was
not in it, turned away in silence ; she was much
disappointed, but was too wise to press him further
in such a matter.

Having thus changed his plans, he was recom
mended by his professors in 1864 to try for an
Exhibition in Balliol College, which he succeeded
in getting. At Oxford he showed the same easy
mastery of the work he had to do, taking a First
Class in Moderations 1866, and a First in Literae
Humaniores in the following year, gaining also the
Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, and, not long after,

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

a Craven Scholarship. I remember making his
acquaintance when he first came into residence in
Oxford, and the impression of youthful staidness
and self-command which he made upon me.
Balliol, owing to his retiring disposition, his com
parative maturity of mind, and his disinclination
to athletics, he was not well known to many of the
undergraduates, and a certain bluntness of manner,
partly the result of shyness, gained him the nick
name of ' The Dorian.' But he was greatly respected
and admired, and his genuine kindness of heart and
rectitude of purpose made itself felt by all who
came into near relation with him. Jowett and
Green both had a high estimate of his character
and powers, and he was strongly influenced by both
in his mental development. From Green he received
a further stimulus towards the study of philosophy,
and especially of the philosophy of Germany ; and
long afterwards he spoke of what he owed ' to that
example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of
earnest and intrepid thinking on the deep things
of eternity.' On the other hand, the intellectual
influence of Jowett was more in the direction of
Classical scholarship and of literary style, and of
general balance of mind. In the preface to the last
edition of Wallace's Prolegomena to the Hegelian
Logic, which was written under the influence of
Jowett's recent death, he says a few words about
his ' old Oxford Tutor and friend,' touched no doubt
with the idealization of memory and regret, but
characterizing the nature of Jowett's influence as

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xi

truly as anything that has been written of him.
'The late Master of Balliol/ he says, 'was more
than a mere scholar, a mere philosopher. He
seemed so idealist, yet so practical ; so realist, and
yet so full of large ideals ; so delicately kind,
and yet so severely reasonable. You felt that he
saw life more steadily, and saw it more whole than
others ; as one reality in which religion and philo
sophy, art and business, the sciences and theology,
were severally but elements and aspects. To the
amateurs of novelty, to the slaves of specialization,
to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness
might, with the impatience natural to limited minds,
have seemed indifference. So must appear those
who on higher planes hear all parts of the harmony
of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love,
maintain an intellectual Sophrosyne. On his pupils,
this secret power of an other-world serenity laid
an irresistible spell, and bore in upon them the
conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there
was the fuller truth of life, and the all-embracing
duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest require
ments of their place.'

In 1867, just after taking his Degree, Wallace
became a Fellow of Merton College, and was shortly
after appointed to a Tutorship, the duties of which
he continued to discharge till his death, in addi
tion to those of Whyte's Professorship of Moral
Philosophy, to which he was elected 1882, as the
successor of T. H. Green. In 1872 he had married
Miss Janet Barclay, daughter of the Sheriff Clerk of

xi; BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

Fife, who, with a daughter and two sons, survives

him. -,

The main after-events of his life were connected
with the publication of his books. In 1874 he
published his translation of the Logic of Hegel (from
the Encyclopaedie), with Prolegomena, in which he
dealt with the main preliminary difficulties of the
study of Hegel. His Epicurean Philosophy appeared
in 1880 (in the S.P.C.K. Series of Ancient Phi
losophies). It contains a delicately appreciative
account of a philosophy to which we should hardly
have expected Wallace to feel any special attraction.
It traces the origin of the school, and dwells with
much sympathy upon the beautiful harmony and ideal
simplicity of the society of friends which Epicurus
created. In this work Wallace first showed that
desire to realize in all their details the circumstances
of the life of the thinkers in whom he was interested,
which was a marked characteristic of his writing. It
was not that he exaggerated the importance of such
secondary elements in biography ; he even apologizes
for paying so much regard to them ; but he took
very great pleasure in collecting even the least
important facts about the philosophers or poets
whom he was studying, and in visiting the scenes
associated with their lives. Generally he directed
his summer tours to such places, and in different
years sought to familiarize himself with the environ
ment of Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
finally, of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Thus, while
writing his book on Kant, published in 1882, for

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xiii

Blackwood's Philosophical Series, he paid a visit to
Konigsberg. The result is shown in the very inter
esting and humorous biography in which he pictures
to us in a very lifelike way the surroundings of the
great critical philosopher arid his faithful servant
Lampe. The part of the book relating to the
philosophy of Kant is an excellent resume, but
suffers from the fact that he had to cut it down
so much in order to reduce it to the required size.
His next book, the Life of Schopenhauer, pub
lished in 1890, was written in a similar way. It
is perhaps the best of his smaller books, and con
tains a very vivid account of that curmudgeon of
genius — if we may be allowed the expression — in
which the defects of his character and philosophy
are indicated, but at the same time full credit is
given to him for that deeper idealistic impulse that
runs through his works, and the wonderful gleams
of poetic or philosophic insight which he exhibits
from time to time. In this volume Wallace displays
a very rare biographical gift. I do not know any
biography which makes us to see more clearly that
the character and thought of its subject are different
aspects of the same thing. We are made to realize
how Schopenhauer's violent recoil against materialism
and empiricism, and the impatient and intolerant
idealism which was his mental characteristic, almost
inevitably resulted in his negative Pantheistic
theory of the world ; and how, at the same time,
he was enabled by a logical tour de force to give
to that negative view something of the value of

xiv

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

a positive, and to maintain that the ultimate unity
has a sporadic manifestation in art and life, which
it is the open secret of genius to detect. Thus we
are enabled to understand the strange alternations
of depth and shallowness, of penetrative insight
and savage prejudice, of egoistic passion and self-
abnegation, which showed themselves in his life
and found expression in his philosophy— a philo
sophy whose influence upon some readers has been
so great, partly because it was such an immediate
reflex of the character of the author. Take one

passage :—

' One may say,' says Wallace, ' that there are two
Schopenhauers in the field. Even the meanest of
God's creatures, says the poet,

"Boasts two soul sides, one to face the world with,
One to show a woman when he loves her."

Schopenhauer's beloved was no mortal maiden,
but an angel vision— or was it a reality ? — of truth.
There is the Schopenhauer of the outward biography,
an irritable, petulant, paradoxical creature, plagued
by a most unconquerable vanity ; whose acts accuse
him of being selfish, harsh-mannered, and sordid,
with a history full of trivial incidents and vulgar
quarrels ; self-engrossed, dead to the sweet ties of
domesticity, and deaf to the call of public and
national interests ; sinking as the years passed by
into a solitary cave, whence, like the giant in
Bunyan's Allegory, he raged impotently at the
heterodox wayfarer. Unfortunately in some of his
books, especially in the later, this unpleasant self

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xv

is rampant. But these same books, at their best,
give the picture of another soul, which, freed from
the bond of temporal quarrels and the world's
litigiousness, draws closer to the great heart of life,
and tries to see clearly what man's existence and
hopes and destiny really are ; which recognizes the
peaceful creations of art as the most adequate
representations the sense-world can give of the true
inward being of all things ; and which holds the
best life to be that of one who has pierced through
the illusions dividing one conscious individuality
from another, into that heart of divine rest where
we are each members one of another, essentially
united in the great ocean of Being, in which and by
which we alone live V The chapter that follows
this gives not so much an analysis of Schopenhauer's
work, as rather a sympathetic rendering of its inner
spirit ; and the whole biography is a great illustration
of the principle that the most powerful criticism of
an author lies in a thorough appreciation of the
best that is in him.

In 1892 Wallace brought out the second edition
of his translation of Hegel's Logic, carefully revised,
and enriched with many notes ; and in the following
year he republished his Prolegomena, so much
modified and enlarged as really to constitute a new
work. Finally, in 1894, he published a translation of
the last part of Hegel's Encyclopaedic, The Philo
sophy of Mind, with five Essays, in which he reviews
the subjects of the volume, dealing especially with

1 Life of Schopenhauer, ch. iv.

XVI

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

the question of the method of psychology, and its
relation to ethics and theology.

In 1892 he was appointed Gifford Lecturer in the
University of Glasgow, and in the two following
years delivered two courses of lectures there on the
history of Natural Theology, and on the relation of
Morality and Religion. What of these lectures has
been preserved is printed in this volume. Wallace
had contemplated a complete rewriting of these
courses, and also the preparation of a volume on the
ethical ideas in the poets of the nineteenth century.
But the execution of these and other projects was
postponed till he should be released from the lectures
of the Merton Tutorship. In 1898 he would have
earned a pension for thirty years' service in that
College, and have had much more leisure for literary
work. But in February, 1897, in riding down a hill
about eight miles from Oxford, he appears to have
lost control over his bicycle, and was dashed against
the parapet of a bridge at the bottom. He survived
until the following morning, but never recovered
consciousness.

Wallace's life was purely the life of a teacher ; he
never took any prominent part even in University
politics, though he frequently served on the Board
of Faculties and other committees for University
administration, and, both in these and in the meet
ings of his College, his words had great influence.
He formed his opinions with much independence,
and his forceful, and often pointed and luminous
expression of them, was such as to lend them full

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xvii

weight and effect. He had not a little practical
insight, and much of what one might call mental
detachment and impartiality, and even those who
could not agree with him often felt that his words
cast a fresh light upon the subject. ' He was a quick
tempered man,' writes a member of his College, who
had good opportunities of judging, 'but never bore
malice, was always inclined to think matters over,
and, if necessary, to express a change of opinion.
He had the strong and vigorous sense which enabled
hirn to strike at the root of practical questions.'
And the Warden of Mertori speaks of ' the incisive
brevity, weight, and pertinency of his remarks at
College meetings,' and says that, in discussions on
discipline or examinations, his ' desire to be just was
evident, and he was not afraid to stand alone in his
judgement.'

While, however, Wallace did not decline such
University business as fell to his share, his main
interest lay in his work as a College Tutor, as Lecturer
on Philosophy, and as a writer on philosophical sub
jects. As a College Tutor, he gained the respect of
many generations of Merton men ; and after he
became a University Professor his influence was
greatly extended. He was not indeed naturally
fitted to be a teacher of Passmen, and in later years
he did not take any share in that work. But as
a teacher of philosophy to men reading for the
Honour School of Literae Humaniores, he has had
few rivals in the history of the University. ' Of
this, indeed,' as Principal Fairbairn has said, ' only

b

xviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

those who passed through his hands are qualified to
speak, and the most qualified have spoken in terms
of unstinted praise. It might be hard to some,
though to none so hard as to himself, to break
through his habitual and constitutional reserve ; but
he was so true a man, so good a scholar, so high and
pure a thinker, and so conscientious a teacher, that
association with him could not but be to the capable
an education in itself.' To exercise his full educative
power, he required to be known, and he could hardly
be well known except to those who had some depth of
character and real interest in philosophy ; but upon
those whom he influenced at all, he had an almost
transforming power. His sincerity and simplicity of
manner, his absorbing interest in the real purport of
philosophy, and disregard of what was merely formal
and technical, his dislike of sham and pretence, and
his sympathy and power of entering into the diffi
culties of a student, even his intolerance of idleness
and the severity of the demands he made upon his
pupils, awakened in them an admiration and enthu
siasm seldom felt for any teacher.

I have before me many letters from former pupils

who are well qualified to estimate the value of the'

instructions they received, in which he is spoken of

m language that might seem extravagant, if it were

> obviously sincere. One old pupil writes :

should think that no one who was taught by him

ouW fal into carelessness or insincerity of thought

without feeling rebuked. It was teaching that could

t pass away, because it gave one new powers and

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xix

a higher life.' Another says : ' When I was in
Oxford, I was simply saturated with his sayings, and
was always quoting him and writing about him to
my friends. I remember writing that he was a
Carlyle, but a Carlyle with eyes fixed on thought
rather than on practice.' Another says : ' All his
pupils must feel that he was their intellectual father
— a sternish father at times. He provoked us to
thought, and his words stuck in one's memory like
burrs. I was warmly attached to him, and felt this
more strongly every time I saw him.' A Fellow of
Merton, who was quite recently a pupil under
Wallace's tuition, writes : ' It is extremely difficult
for so young a man as myself to attempt adequately
to appreciate the greatness of our late Professor ;
but an intercourse of two years, and the intimacy
into which that intercourse brought me, inspired in
me — and here I am speaking for all his pupils, not
for myself alone — an admiration, I might say a
reverence, which was never felt toward any other
teacher. From the first we could not but feel the
utter earnestness of the man, the intense seriousness
with which he approached the great subjects of
which he was trying to give us some faint con
ception. His method was severely Socratic ; for the
first year of work with him he struck us sometimes
as stern and hard, as demanding too much ; but we
soon came to see that if he asked much from us in
the way of devotedness, enthusiasm, labour, and
self-denial, he asked much more from himself. To
have known him as I did for two years in almost

b 2

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

daily contact, was a high and generous inspiration.
He had more of the prophet about him than any
man I have known, and he was regarded by those of
his pupils who could at all appreciate him, with
a whole-hearted devotion such as few others ever
inspired. His memory is the most precious posses
sion of my University life.'

Wallace's lectures were in many ways unlike the
usual University type; they had an individual
flavour which it is not easy to characterize. They
were not systematic expositions of the subject, as
already formed and settled in the speaker's mind,
but rather like attempts to realize its significance
afresh, by approaching it now from one point of
view and now from another. He seldom read from
a manuscript, and when he did so, the constraint of
reading seemed to deprive him of the freedom neces
sary to effective speaking. His custom was rather
before lecturing to fill his mind with his subject,
making many notes, and often writing out even
many pages of extracts from the authors criticized.
Generally, however, especially in later years, he made
no attempt to write out even a sketch of what he had
to say, but trusted for the expression to the impulse
of the moment and of the audience. Speaking thus
ex tempore, he never seemed to have any difficulty
in finding words for his ideas, and his sentences
flowed on without hesitation ; though he was some
what dependent for his effectiveness upon the mood
and temper of the moment, and, we may add, upon
the state of his health. But by this method he

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxi

seemed to gain unusual power of putting himself en
rapport with his audience, and of communicating to
them, by a kind of infection, his own vivid percep
tion of his subject, as it rose before his mind in the
moment of delivery. His hearers seemed to be
receiving thought in the making, and not as the cut-
and-dried product of the study. The play of his
mind upon the questions discussed, the strange
touches of humour with which his discourse was
lighted up, the subtle beauty and conclusiveness of
expression which he often attained, and, through it
all, the gravity and earnestness of his manner, pro
duced an impression which was unique of its kind.
He did not aim at giving to those whom he addressed
the kind of things which might be useful in the
Schools, but rather at showing them how to think
and feel. His thought seemed never the working of
an abstract intellect, but rather an attempt to deepen
life by making it self-conscious and communicating
it to others. ' He is never other than stimulating and
suggestive, and, in a sense, he was always preaching,'
said an appreciative listener ; and it is not impos
sible that the fact that he had looked forward to
the Church as his profession, as well as the strongly
ethical cast of his own mind, tended to give
a practical turn to his teaching. He might indeed
be fairly said to be a preacher of ideal truth, and
his lectures seemed to be to him an opportunity
in which he could free himself from the circum
praecordia frigus, which made it so difficult for
a man constitutionally reserved, and further trained

xxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

to reticence by academic habits, to utter himself

freely on the highest subjects.

> To those who live in London,' writes Professor
Muirhead, 'his figure has not been unfamiliar for
some years past, when he has come to lecture at
Toynbee Hall, or the London Ethical Society— the
tall and somewhat gaunt outline, the earnest and
thought-worn expression, the perfect mastery of
material and language, which enabled him to speak
for generally over an hour, without note or reference,
yet without a slip ; the graphic and humorous
illustrations must have stamped themselves on the
memory of many. His habit was to choose for his
subject some individual thinker (Rousseau, Epicurus,
Nietzsche, Wordsworth, were the titles of some of
his lectures) ; or if he chose some more abstract topic,
such as " Duty," he was careful to attach what he
said to some concrete instance ; the lecture last
referred to taking the unexpected turn of a vivid
characterization of Frederick the Great as a type of
devotion to duties of one's station. Ideas were to
him living forces, and unless he could show them in
actual operation in concrete instances, he had little
hope of making their scope and meaning clear V

In the published works of Wallace, what first
strikes the reader is their literary quality, which is
unusual in philosophical writing. His style, with
more continuity of thought, has much of the subtlety
and refinement which characterize the writings of
Jowett. One cannot read many pages without

1 Fortnightly Revieiv, May, 1897.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxiii

coming upon one of those ' Olympian sentences,' as
one of his pupils called them, those eVea Tn-e/ooei/ra,
winged at once with thought and imagination, which
seem once for all to fix and define for us some aspect
of things. And on a closer view, one finds that this
power of speech is not a mere literary gift, but due
to the fact that he thinks (Platonically) not with
his intellect only, but with his whole soul, using his
imagination and his sympathies to aid him in identi
fying himself with the object, and explaining it from
within outwards. It is due also to what, for want
of a better word, we must call the intuitive character
of his mind, which led him rather to see the whole
in every part, and therefore to attempt to realize it
as something with independent life, than to trace
out its connexions and relations with the other parts.
For, though his main work was devoted to the ex
position of Hegel, the great modern systematizer
of Idealism, and though he had, as we shall see,
a subtle appreciation of the dialectical method of
Hegel's thought, it cannot be said that his own
tendency was to system, or to the close tracing of
the filiation of thought upon thought. His effort
was rather to realize by subtle criticism and sympa
thetic insight the different aspects of the matter
with which he was dealing ; and then to gather up
the general result in some luminous imaginative
expression. His way was to ruminate upon a sub
ject till ' the fire burned,' and clearness of vision led
to vivid and characteristic utterance. Or we might
say that reflexion was to him rather a means to an

xxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

end, a way of securing more perfect vision, and that
he hardly cared to analyze or methodize it for itself.
He once spoke to me of the ' wretchedly episodic
character of his mind/ which seemed to be a strange
complaint from one who was always looking at his
subject, whatever it might be, in the light of the
unity of the whole. But what he meant is, I think,
illustrated by many places in his writings, in which
he seems to suggest point after point, to view the
subject in aspect after aspect, and then to call upon
the reader to make the synthesis for himself, with
the aid of some striking metaphor, or else, as Pro
fessor Muirhead indicates, of a sketch of the life and
character of some individual, in whom the idea he is
discussing was embodied. It is in harmony with this
that he quite as often seeks to illustrate his thoughts
from the poets as from the philosophers. He was
a constant and unwearied reader of all the great
ancient and modern classics, and he often made
a special study of any new appearance in literature.
And both in literature and philosophy what he
sought was not thought or system for itself, but
rather as the concentrated expression of life, the
quintessence of human experience. The Hegelian
philosophy had its strong hold upon his mind mainly
because he seemed to find in Hegel one who united
idealism with a more than positivist insistence upon
the emptiness of abstract ideas, and whose thinking
was a continual effort after the comprehension of the
actual in its concreteness and complexity.

It is an indication of the same longing to get

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxv

close to reality that so much of Wallace's interest
was by preference drawn to writers whose ten
dencies were just the reverse of his own. He
seemed to feel that philosophy was only to be
trusted if it could verify itself in the most unfavour
able of instances. He was fearful lest his idealism
should become empty, if he did not continually bring
it into contact with the crudest empiricism ; that
his optimism might get shallow if he did not con
tinually drag it up de profundis from the deepest
divisions and contradictions of thought and life.
I have already spoken of the great pains he took
to realize to himself, not only the intellectual atmo
sphere in which the philosophers and poets about
whom he wrote were living, but also all the details
of their outward life.

Wallace's criticism is almost always appreciative,
and we might say, at times appreciative to a fault.
He was, indeed, not without some of the logical
pugnacity attributed to his countrymen, and which
made a friend of mine say that when a Scotsman
agrees with you on ninety-nine points, and differs
on one, he always chooses that one point to speak
about. He could occasionally fulminate with much
vigour against views and tendencies of which he
disapproved. But on the whole he disliked and
avoided the atmosphere of controversy, and generally
when he thought an author worthy of study, he
took infinite pains to enter into his point of view,
and even to suggest reasons to justify what seemed
paradoxical and extravagant. This may be noticed

xxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

in his treatment of not only Kant and Hegel, but
of Epicurus, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and
others. Certainly the fault, if it is a fault, is more
than compensated by the subtle insight which is
the natural reward of this kind of criticism, and
which enables him to see the affirmation that
working behind the negations of the authors he is
examining, and to find out all the grains of gold
which are hidden in their dross.

Wallace's most important work, of course, lay
in his exposition of the Hegelian system. In the
Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic, even in its first form,
he did much to remove the preliminary difficulties
that embarrass the student; and in the enlarged
edition, he discussed very fully all the main aspects
of the Hegelian philosophy, giving also a sketch
of the whole movement of the Logic, and showing
its relation to the other parts of the system. The
main defect of the Prolegomena is one which I have
already indicated, viz. that while the topic of each
chapter is treated in a very suggestive and pene
trative way, the links of connexion between the
different chapters are not always fully indicated ;
and in consequence the whole has the aspect of
being a series of essays, rather than of a connected
treatise. This, however, is more in appearance than
reality, and to any one who carefully studies the
volume as a whole, it will become evident that there
are few real difficulties in the subject, which have
not been thoroughly dealt with. The points upon
which Wallace dwells most fully are, first of all,

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxvii

Hegel's view of the relation of the point of view
of philosophy to that of the ordinary consciousness
on the one hand, and that of the sciences on the
other. In connexion with this, he takes up and
discusses very fully the various misunderstandings
of what is meant by Idealism, such as the supposi
tion that it is the reduction of the objective world
to an appearance in the consciousness of the subject,
or that it involves the reference of the phenomenal
world to a transcendental world of ideas. Such
misconceptions he tries to meet by an historical
survey of the transition through Kant and Fichte
to Schelling and Hegel ; and again by showing that
the fundamental truth upon which Idealism exists,
is the relativity of all distinctions. In particular,
he seeks to prove that it does not set the object and
the subject against each other, or deny the reality
of the former any more than of the other, but that
it insists primarily on that ultimate unity of all
things which Plato adumbrated in the Idea of
Good.

' The central or cardinal point of view of Idealism J
is/ he declares, ' its refusal to be kept standing at
a fixed disruption between subject and object,
between spirit and nature. Its idea is the identity
or unity (not without the difference) of both. In
its purely logical or epistemological aspect, one can
easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of
repeating, there is no object without a subject, and
no subject without an object. The difficulty arises

1 Proleg., p. 193.

xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

in remembering these excellent truisms when one
of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other
seems to be independent, and to come before us with
a title to recognition apparently all its own. . . . The
basis of all consciousness and mental activity is an
original division, a " judgement " or dijudicatiori of
self from self. But once the dijudication made for
such ends, it is a mistake to forget its initiation,
and lose sight entirely of the fact that the observing
mind is also the active, and that the object-self is
not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in
a higher unity is identifiable therewith. . . . What
Hegel, after Schelling, teaches, on the other side, is
that the process of sense impression and the manipu
lations to which it is subjected by intellect pre
suppose, for their existence and their objective
truth, a Eeason which is the unity of subject and
object, an original identity uniting knowledge to
being.'

If, therefore, we attempt to separate spirit from
nature, we end in depriving of all meaning the
element which we try to treat as an independent
substance. As Schelling puts it ' :— < Opposing and
separating the world of intelligence from the world
of nature, men have learned to see nature outside
God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing
nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated
: to the unholy which they name mechanical, while
by the same act they have made the ideal world

> scene of a lawless liberty. At the same time

1 Proleg., p. 165 ; Schelling, iv. 306.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxix

as they defined nature as a merely passive entity,
they supposed they had gained the right of defining
God, whom they elevated above nature, as pure
activity, utter " actuosity," as if one of these concepts
did not stand and fall with the other.' On the other
hand, we must not conceive the unity so asserted as
a transcendent Being, in which the difference of things
is simply lost, but simply as the unity of experience
fully thought out. ' This transcendental, absolutist,
a priori philosophy, which stands so strange and
menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth
century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called
it, an essay to comprehend and see the true nearness
and dimensions of the much-quoted experience.
All knowledge exists in (not on) the unity of
experience. All the several experiences rest in the
totality of one experience, — ultimate, all embracing,
absolute, unconditioned, universal and yet indivi
dual, necessary and yet free, — eternal, yet filling all
the works of time — ideal, and yet the mother of all
reality, — unextended, and yet spread through the
space of the universe. Call it, if you like, the
experience of the race, but remember that that
apparently more realistic and scientific process
connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood)
than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute
experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the
basis and the builder of all conditions ; the Absolute,
which is the home and parent of all relations.
Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is
much more than yours and mine. He who builds

xxx BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

on his experience, builds on and in the Absolute, in
the system, a system which is not merely his. In
his every utterance he claims to speak as the
mouthpiece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned; his
words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance ;
they are candidates (not necessarily or always success
ful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth ;
they are dogmatic assertions, and, even in their
humblest tones, none the less infected with the
fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise it
would be a shame and an insult to let them
cross the lips V

Again, if this be so, we can understand that the
task of philosophy is not merely to sum up the results
of the sciences, or to show the harmony of their first
principles, but it is to transform our ordinary view
of the world as a collection of independent things,
or even of things acting arid reacting on each other,
by thoroughly working out the idea of their unity.
In opposition at once to the mystic view that would
lose all things in God, and the empirical view that
would rest in their apparent independence as
phenomena conditioned by time and space, a true
philosophy must be guided by the idea of system—
a system which does justice to all the divisions of
reality, yet attempts to show the organic or super-
organic unity of the whole. Philosophy cannot stop
short of this; and if it be said that such system
unattainable, the answer is, that the thins is
' ^ us all, and has to be done -. • If not as men

., p. I69.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxi

of science, yet as men, as human beings, we have
to put things together, and form some total estimate
of the drift of development, of the unity of nature.
To get a notion, not merely of the general methods
and principles of the sciences, but of their results
and teachings, and to get this, not as a mere lot
of fragments but with a systematic unity, is indis
pensable in some degree for all rational life. The
life not founded on science is not the life of man.
But he will not find what he wants in the text
books of the specialist, who is obliged to treat his
subject, as Plato says, "under the pressure of
necessity," and who dare riot look on it in its
quality, " to draw the soul towards truth, and to
form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what
we now mainly keep down" (Plato, Rep. 527). If
the philosopher in this province does his work badly,
he may plead the novelty of his task, to which he
comes as a pioneer, or even as an architect. He
finds little that he can directly utilize. The
materials have been gathered and prepared for very
special aims ; and the great aim of science — that
human life may be made a higher, an ampler and
happier thing — has hardly been kept in view at all,
except in its more materialistic aspects. To the
philosopher the supreme interest of the physical
sciences is that man also belongs to the physical
universe, or that Mind and Matter are (to use
Mr. Spencer's language) " at once antithetic and
inseparable." He wants to find the place of Man,—
but of Man as Mind — in Nature.'

xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

This view leads to a new conception of logical
method, in which the old difficulty of Plato, whether
inference proceeds from the known to the known,
or from the known to the unknown, receives its
solution. We cannot base knowledge on principles
which we know independently of the results based
on them, or on so-called 'facts' which remain to the
end what they were for us at the beginning. For
any such principle or fact, as thus isolated, must
be imperfectly conceived, and can be rightly con
ceived only when we discern in it the relations and
connexions which at first we overlook ; nor can we
stop short in the process of regress and recon
struction, of corrective interpretation and reinter-
pretation, till we find the whole in, or behind, our
first starting-point. 'Begin where you like, the
reason of things, if you allow it to work, carries you
round till you see identity where you saw only
difference, or effects where you only looked for
causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with
the belief that the process is from the known to the
unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you
called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit
that your facts are partly fictions, which waited for
the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality.
You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single
and simple process, which out of facts builds up
generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go
on that the only induction which operates, except
in cases which have been artificially simplified by
supposing half the task done before you apply your

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

experimental methods, is an induction of which the
major part is deductive, and where your conclusion
will be recurrently made your premiss. Your in
duction only works on the basis of an hypothesis,
and must be itself linked in the " concatenation of
truths," a concatenation which is itself a criticism
and a correction V

From this it follows that the mechanical method
of construing the whole as the aggregate of the
parts, and also, what may be called the chemical
method, in which the unity of the parts appears
as a new partial existence with qualities that have
no apparent essential connexion with those of the
elements out of which they come, must be regarded
as abstract methods, which, though they work well
within a certain region, yet rest on a limited and
hypothetical construction of things. And they
must both ultimately yield to the ' method of
development which is the method that is applicable
to the full concrete reality, not like the others to
parts abstracted from and insulated in reality V
a method which ' has to blend induction with reduc
tion, and to start from both ends in the series of
causation at once,' and which goes upon the supposi
tion that the determinations of each part can be
truly known only when we regard it as resting upon
arid returning to the unity of the whole. This
method ' recognizes in the object it examines a
certain independence or originality, yet also the
pressure of an immanent law, which does not wait

1 Proleg., p. 188. 2 Id., p. 214.

C

xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

for the outsider to put it together, but constructs
itself as it were after a plan of its own1.' It sees
in it the 'same subjective principle, both analytic
and synthetic, as we own in thought.' The object
is for it, 'neither a mere thing to be explained and
construed ab extra, nor a mystery of sudden trans
formation to be passively accepted ; but a growth
to be sympathetically watched and understood—
understood, because it follows the same order as the
movement of our own thought in the process of
knowledge. Similia similibus cognoscuntur!

As an actual specimen of this method of treating
an object, and working towards the comprehension
of it by following its own dialectic, we may refer to
the eighteenth chapter of the Prolegomena, where
Wallace attempts to deal with the idea of Per
sonality, and to show how the different views of
it may be regarded as steps in self-explication ; or
to the remarks in the next chapter on Genesis in
mental life. The concluding chapters of the Pro
legomena give an account of Hegel's application
of this method to Logic itself, showing especially in
what sense the whole system is developed out of
the idea of Being with which it began, and in
which sense the beginning really presupposes the
system.

In the Essays prefixed to Hegel's Philosophy
of Mind, Wallace's last published work, there is
an attempt in the same spirit to discuss the value
of the different methods in their application to

1 Proleg., p. 221.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxv

psychology, arid to maintain the ultimate superiority
of the method of development. The following
passage may be sufficient to indicate the general
point of view. ' The vulgar apprehension of these
things seems to assume that we have by nature or
are born with a general faculty or set of faculties,
which we subsequently fill up and embody by the
aid of experience. We possess — they seem to
imply— so many "forms" or "categories" latent in
our minds ready to hold and combine the new
materials supplied from without. According to
this view, we have all a will and an intelligence ;
the difference is only that some put more into them,
and some put less. But such a separation of the
general form from its contents is a piece of pure
mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that
the human being is of such a character that will
and intelligence are in the ordinary course inevitably
produced. But the forms which grow up are the
more and more definite and systematic organization
of a graded experience, of series of ideas, working
themselves up again and again in representative
and re-representative degree, till they constitute
a mental or inner world of their own. The will is
thus the title appropriate to the final stage of
a process, by which sensation and impulse have
polished and perfected themselves, by union and
opposition, by differentiation and accompanying
redintegration, till they assume characters quite
unsurmised in their earliest aspects, and yet only
the consolidation or self-realization of implications.

c 2

xxxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

Thus the mental faculties are essentially acquired
powers, acquired not from without, but by action
which generates the faculties it seems to imply.
The process of mind is a process which creates
individual centres, raises them to completer inde
pendence ;— which produces an inner life more and
more self-centred, and also more and more equal
to the universe which it has embodied. And will
and intelligence are an important stage of that
process.' In what follows, Wallace gives a very
suggestive commentary on the way in which Hegel
follows out this idea, not only in psychology, but
also in ethics and the philosophy of religion.

As may be partly seen from the account just given,
Wallace was at once one of the most faithful of the
followers of Hegel, and at the same time the most
free from any clinging to mere verbal fidelity.
He does not deal much in Hegelian formulae, even
when he is explaining Hegel ; rather he is very
impatient of such literalness, and never rests in the
Hegelian thought till he has reproduced it in a new
form, or in many new forms. His allegiance means
that he seemed to himself to find in Hegel just what
he wanted for the development of his own tendencies
of mind. On the other hand, just for that reason,
I think his expositions of Hegelianism extremely
faithful, and little influenced by any preconceptions.
They seem to me to be explanations from within
outwards, and less embarrassed by subordinate
technicalities than almost any other treatment of
the subject I have met with, If there is a bias

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxvii

in them at all, it is, as I have already indicated,
that he emphasizes more the aspect of Hegel in
which he agreed with Schelling, and therefore lays
more stress upon the presence of the whole in each
part, than upon the negative dialectical movement
from one stage to another. But this is rather
a question of comparative emphasis than of any
essential difference of view.

In his general attitude to philosophy, Wallace
combined a strong, almost unswerving confidence
in the general idealistic point of view, with an
extreme distrust of his own power of stating it
adequately. This arose partly from a consciousness
of the complexity of things which made him con
tinually ready to look at them in new aspects, and
to reconsider views of them which he had neglected,
or to which he felt he had not done sufficient justice.
It arose also partly from his high literary ideal,
which made him keenly alive to any defect of
exactness or refinement of expression. As I have
said, he took endless pains in gaining an intimate
knowledge of any subject or author whom he was
studying, even down to the most external and insigni
ficant details of biography ; and when preparing any
work for publication he wrote and rewrote what he
had to say, till he was even in danger of losing the
spontaneity of his original draft. I hardly think
I have known any one who was so much oppressed
with the vision of perfection, or rather with the
combined and almost irreconcilable ideals of literary
and philosophical excellence. This is partly the

xxxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

reason why he did not produce more, though it was
also due to the fact that his circumstances, and
the various claims upon him, rendered it necessary
for him to combine the work of a Tutorship with
that of his Chair, and also to undertake other work
which left him comparatively little time for writing.
It is harder to speak of Wallace's personal cha
racter, and of what he was to those who knew him
intimately. The somewhat abrupt speech and
manner, which might repel strangers, and made the
process of becoming intimate with him slow and
difficult, did not conceal from those who came nearer
to him the deep sincerity and reality of the man,
and the tenderness and strength of his affections.
And those who knew his private life know what
sacrifices of any kind he was capable of making for
those in whom he was interested. He was one who
hid his good deeds almost as if they were crimes.
Generally his innate reserve made it difficult for him
to show what he was, out of his own household, and
a comparatively narrow circle of friends. During
the work of the Term, he often seemed rather
oppressed than satisfied with what he could do.
But he had correspondingly keen enjoyment in the
times when the pressure was relaxed, especially in
the numerous tours which he made with his family
to places interesting from literary or philosophical
associations. He was a ' lover of the meadows, and
the woods, and mountains,' who had the deepest
enjoyment in natural beauty, and who would go
miles to see the first spring flowers and bring

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxix

them back to his family. He loved the simple
and the natural, and he was intensely averse to
any kind of show or display. But one could not
be long in his company without feeling the in
fluence of his strong rectitude of nature, and of
his latent and never directly expressed enthusiasm
for that ideal view of life which he regarded as
the truth.

In regard to the contents of the following volume,
only a few words need be said. Wallace was not
in the habit of writing out his lectures, and hence
some of his best work in later years exists only in
the form of notes, which are too disconnected and
unfinished for publication. But there remains a
considerable amount of writing, mainly on ethical or
theological subjects, from which I have selected the
parts that seemed most likely to interest the public.
With the exception of two reviews, none of the papers
included had been prepared for publication by the
author, and consequently some of them are lacking
in completeness and consecutiveness of treatment,
and others want that finish of literary expression
which his writings generally show. At the same time,
I think there is some gain on the other side, especially
for those who desire to search into the actual working
of a philosopher's mind. There is in them often
a certain spontaneity and freshness, a directness and
force, which more than compensate for any defect of
form. The Gifford Lectures, in spite of their frag
mentary condition, contain a fairly adequate expres
sion of his view of the relation of philosophy to

xl BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

theology, and of religion to morality. And some of
the papers, especially the Essays on Moral Philosophy,
have a tentative and heuristic character, as of a
mind testing different ways of thought and seeking
an outlet in one direction after another, which will
be specially attractive to those who like to see
thought, not ready made, but in the process of
development. On the whole, they do not seem to
me to fall below the usual high standard of the
author's philosophical writings, and they show more
completely than any of them his mind upon the
highest questions of Religion and Morality.

I have to offer my best thanks to Mr. Bernard
Bosanquet, to Professor Jones of the University of
Glasgow, and to Mr. J. A. Smith of Balliol College,
for assistance in selecting, from Wallace's manu
scripts the papers that were most suitable for
publication.

EDWARD CAIRD.

BALLIOL COLLEGE,
Oct. 10, 1898.

LECTURES

ON

NATURAL RELIGION AND THE
RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY

[BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY
OF GLASGOW IN 1894 AND 1895]

INTRODUCTORY NOTE
TO THE GIFFORD LECTURES

PROFESSOR WALLACE delivered two courses of Gifford
Lectures in the University of Glasgow. In the first
course, delivered in 1894, he discussed the subject of
Natural Theology historically, giving a sketch of the
views of Greek philosophers, and showing their influence
on the development of Christian doctrine. The first three
of the following lectures belong to this course ; the other
lectures of this course exist only in the form of news
paper reports, which are too imperfect and fragmentary to
be reprinted. The first two, dealing with the scope of
Natural Theology and the Greek Origins of Theology, do
not correspond with the newspaper reports, and seem to
have been written after the course was delivered, when
Mr. Wallace was thinking of preparing his lectures for
publication. The third, on the Natural Theology of Christ,
was actually delivered.

The second course, delivered in 1895, dealt with the
subject of the relations of Morality and Religion. Of
this course, nine lectures have been preserved. The first
five lectures were occupied with a review of the various

B 2

4 INTRODUCTORY NOTE

influences, ethical, literary, and scientific, which are affect
ing the religious thought of the present time, and changing
the old dogmatic conceptions with which religion was
formerly associated. Of this part of the course only two
lectures are preserved (the fourth and fifth of the lectures
following). The MS. breaks off abruptly at the end of
the second of these two lectures, at the point where
Mr. Wallace entered upon an examination of the influence
of modern scientific conceptions upon the religious idea.
The rest of the lectures of this course, from the sixth to
the twelfth lecture, are preserved. They begin with an
account and criticism of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of
Belief, and then proceed to discuss the general subject
of the relations of morality and religion. These lectures,
though they have not been in any way revised or corrected
since they were first written, seem to me to contain some
of the most original and suggestive pages which Professor
Wallace has produced.

LECTURES

ON

iNATURAL RELIGION AND THE
RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY

THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY

AT the present time, Natural Theology is apt to seem
a belated stranger, if not even an impertinent intruder, in
the circle of the sciences. The very term, the combination of
noun and adjective, suggests an ill-assorted pair,, or perhaps
a contradiction in the conception. Theology, firmly estab
lished on its rock of Scripture, looks down almost con
temptuously on the feeble efforts of unassisted reason to
feel after God, if haply it may find Him. An impassable
gulf is declared to separate the range of nature, which is the
field of science, from the higher sphere of religion and of
divine things. In the latter, it is urged, mere human reason
is incompetent, or, where it is not altogether incompetent,
it is altogether subordinate. For theology the necessary
stimulus and starting-point must come from above, and has
in fact come in the shape of a supernatural revelation. The
mere natural man by merely natural means can know
nothing of God, and, if he is to know anything of Him,
must be directly or indirectly enlightened about God by God
Himself.

6 CIFFORD LECTURES [i

Questions like these may be said no doubt to go to the
root of the matter. But it will perhaps also be admitted that,
before proceeding to these extremities, there are problems
of some importance connected with the scope of the terms
employed. To mark the problems which are under examina
tion, the contrasts of natural and supernatural have to be
dealt with. The history of theological conceptions has to be
traced.

And, in the first place, we must try to rise out of and
beyond the conception of Natural Theology which is most
familiar to the English mind, the conception which was
adopted by Paley and the Bridgewater treatises of the present
century. Natural Theology is thus restricted to the study of
the evidences of design in nature, to an examination of the
mutual adaptations in the physical universe which seemed
to indicate as their origin an intelligence ordering all things
for a purpose, that purpose being on the \vhole understood
to be the welfare of man. So many and so striking are,
from this point of view, the appearances of wise arrange
ment, moulding everything into materials for the use of
humanity, that it is impossible to suppose them to be the
result of chance, to be the undesigned consilience of indepen
dent agents.

This kind of Natural Theology, though with Paley (1802)
and Chalmers it lasts on into the nineteenth century, is
really a survival of a mode of thought more appropriate to
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Francis Bacon
(1605) Natural Theology, with an alternative title of Divine
Philosophy, is described as that 'knowledge or rudiment of
knowledge concerning God which may be obtained by con
templation of His creatures.' < It suffices,' he adds, ' to confute
atheism, but not to inform religion/ Even at that date the
subject was a popular one : on this topic, remarks the author
of the Advancement of Learning < I am so far from noting any
deficiency as I rather note an excess.' Bacon, in fact, seems

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 7

thoroughly aware of the limited scope and negative character
of the remarks and observations included under the title of
Natural Theology, as indeed might have been expected from
one who has complained elsewhere of the unhappy results of
mixing up theology with science.

The authority of Sir Isaac Newton contributed, in England
at least, to subordinate science to certain presuppositions from
theology. In the Scholion Generate which concludes the third
book of his Principla (1687) Newton almost steps out of his
way to affirm, as against Cartesianism, his acceptance of the
creationist theory. Hypotheses like that of Descartes may
profess to explain the stability and symmetry of the planetary
world by a purely naturalistic or mechanical evolution of an
aggregate of material particles according to the laws of
movement. Newton, on the contrary, distinctly states his
conviction that ' All these regular movements do not have
their source in mechanical causes ' ; and in the (posthumously
published) letters to Bentley plainly says, c the diurnal rota
tions of the planets could not be derived from gravity, but
required a divine arm to impress them.' This argument is
indeed of little value : for it only means that the man of
science is unable to construct a scheme of evolution without
lacunae from the assumed primordial state of matter down to
the ordered system of the present epoch. Yet if we translate
the figuratively materialistic language of Newton into more
abstract terms, we may say that, however far back we retrace
the origin of the present scheme of things, we cannot really
escape the hypothesis of a system which even in its molecules
was instinct with the presence of law and order.

The whole tenor of Natural Theology betrays its connexion
with an age of practical and utilitarian science, which, how
ever, had not cast off its religious faiths, and was solicitous
to keep the two sides of its life in some sort of correlation.
Works like that of John Ray, The Wisdom of Got I manifested
in the 1 forks of Creation (1691) popularized, and we may even

8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i

say vulgarized, the idea o£ making 'the book of nature
a commentary on the book of revelation/ The example
apparently ' caught on' and satisfied a need of the times.
The Boyle lectures, instituted for what is sometimes called
the proof of fundamental Christian doctrine against all out
siders, of other religion or of none, offered a vehicle for such
reflections. The new natural knowledge, which had hitherto
struggled onward on its own resources, winning favour by
its intrinsic attractions, received a status of respectability in
the social hierarchy. Even as the older Church had given
an ex post facto consecration to movements and organizations
that had first started beyond its pale, so Protestantism allied
to itself the rising spirit of research, and sought to make the
sciences pay tribute to the religious and theological interests of
the age and country.

Among the early Boyle lectures were those of W. Derham,
in 1711-12, published under the title of Physico-theology. This
is the name which in the more careful use of words is specially
appropriated to the branch of Natural Theology now under
discussion, the argument from the contrivance and adaptation
supposed to be detected in nature to the existence of a designer
and contriver of more than human wisdom and power. In 1 7 1 4
Derham followed with an Astro-theology, specially illustrating
the way in which the heavens declare the glory of God.
These essays found imitators in England, and still more in
Germany, to which at that epoch England stood more in the
position of an ensample than she can be at present said to do.
It may be that by such observations the pious Christian mind
was enabled to strike up a relation between religion and the
other aspects of life and reality. Derham's two works were
translated into German by the notable scholar and compiler
John Albert Fabricius in 1728 and 1730, who also contributed
to the literature of the subject by a Hydro-tlieology in 1730.
and the outlines of a Pyro-theokgy in 1732. The philosopher
Christian Wolff dealt with the whole subject in his Tkeologia

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 9

Naturalis (1736), of which the first volume treated especially
of the a posteriori evidences, whilst the second gave the a priori
or metaphysical argument. One writer (F. C. Lesser) added
three special departments for pious reflection : viz. on stones,
insects and shell-fish, endeavouring (in the words of one of his
own titles) to show how, under the authority of Scripture and
reason, fby attentive study of otherwise neglected natural
facts one may rise to a lively perception and admiration of
the omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, and justice of the great
God/ Other writers in the half-century preceding Kant's
first Kritik dealt with the religious lessons which may be
derived from the phenomena of snow, plants, birds, thunder,
locusts, fishes, bees, earthquakes. These treatises, long since
consigned to oblivion, were not without their particular
occasions and appropriateness : e. g. they preserve the memory
of the great snowfalls of 1726 and 1729, the plague of
locusts in central Europe between 1747 and 1749^ and the
earthquake at Lisbon in 1755.

Of this mode of bridging over the interval between science
and religion Paley's Natural Theology in 1802 is a belated
survival, a character still more attachable to the Bridgewater
treatises published more than thirty years later. But as it-
reappeared, it had lost in naturalness what it professed to
gain in logical plausibility ; for with the larger apparatus of
scientific method the line of evidence grows artificial, and
rather reflects the acumen of the demonstrator than the skill
apparent in the works of nature. Meanwhile the conceptions
of matter and of nature had been passing beyond the phases
at which the argument for final causes took them. The
relationship of a creator to the creatures as that of an
architect or manager to his works was no longer deemed
adequate, nor did it seem the highest praise which could fall
to him that he had made the best of somewhat recalcitrant
materials. The great mechanician is only a mode, and an
insufficient mode, of conceiving God's supremacy; and even

I0 GIFFORD LECTURES [i

if it be specially suitable to the genius of a utilitarian age, it
cannot rank as more than an analogy under which we form
a partial conception of the divine mode of action. The
problems of the cosmos presuppose for their solution a greater
power of adapting matter than human agency as yet pos
sesses : so that, if God works after our methods, He must
exhibit our powers in a transcendent degree:— such is all that
the argument carries.

Religion had little to gain by these demonstrations : at
least any religion which had real vitality and was not a form
of words parasitically seeking to gain support from alien
growths. There is, indeed, a natural piety which sees God
hi everything, and translates every word of nature into
u whisper of God. When the devoted Jesuits, who in the
early part of the seventeenth century carried the Gospel to
c New France/ write back to their French superiors, ' To live
in New France is in sooth to live in the bosom of God and
to breathe only the air of His divine guidance ' ; when they
say, ' How good it feels in the sacred horrors of these forests,
and how much of heaven's light is found in the dense dark
ness of this barbarian land/ we recognize the presence of that
faith which removes mountains, where the vision of dominant
conviction transfigures wilds and Indians into a rift through
which shine the glory and love of the Eternal. It is the
same when we find Jonathan Edwards describing his feelings,
when sometime between his seventeenth and twentieth years
his mind had first been visited with some insight into the
deeper realities of life, and he had retired to what he calls
a solitary place in his father's pasture. ' As I was walking
there and looking upon the sky and clouds, there came into
my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace
of God that I know not how to express. . . . The appearance
of everything was altered : there seemed to be a calm sweet
cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything.
God's excellency, His wisdom, His purity and love seemed to

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY u

appear in everything- : in the sun, moon, and stars : in the
clouds and blue sky : in the grass, flowers, and trees : in the
water and all nature : which used greatly to fix my mind.'
Even the more terrible phenomena of nature participated in
this new spirit. ' Scarcely anything among all the works of
nature was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. . . I felt
God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm/
Even in such immature sentimentalism we can see that it is
only the sun-possessed eye that can behold the sun itself. It
is the pure in heart that see God : and Pectusfacit tkeologum.
The dominant principle, idea, love, passion determines the
interpretation of facts. So while Charles Kingsley finds it
a nobler thought to hold that ' Deity created primal forms
capable of self -development into all forms needful pro tempo re
and pro loco' than to follow the old view of a creation once
and for ever established in its species, Mill is more inclined
to see in the evolutionist hypothesis the supplanting of the
old creator by what Darwin called fmy deity, natural
selection/

To minds susceptible mainly to practical and material
considerations this form of Natural Theology, the physico-
theological argument from design, has seemed a sounder basis
than the ontological method which appeared to juggle with
ideas. In Mill's judgement it satisfied the requirements of
inductive inference so far at least as to suggest a considerable
probability in favour of an intelligent and powerful being as
the guide of the cosmic movements, but to be less cogent now
that it had been, if, as the Darwinian hypothesis suggested,
the same facts could also be explained as the cumulative
effect of accidental variations, and of the mutual actions
and reactions of all existences. Yet on a closer inspection
perhaps it may be said that the real effect of design argu
ments is only seen when they are pushed back to their ultimate
presupposition in the radical unity and interdependence of all
things that are. Things are not external to each other and

I2 GIFFORD LECTURES d

independent: they are not merely brought into affinity and
correlation by an outside impulse and guidance; but are
essentially and primordially in organic interconnexion, sym
pathetic, interconscious, in a many-sided reciprocal attraction.
Its weakness is the tendency to regard humanity as the
centre or pivot on which the whole effort of creation con
verges : whereas the human interest is only a relative and
partial centre, not to be elevated into absolute authority to
the exclusion and depreciation of others.

Besides this use of the term Natural Theology, restricting
it to the physico-theological argument from design, there is
a wider use of it to mean what is also called rational or
philosophical theology. Here we come in touch with what
has been called Natural or Rational Religion, and with the
naturalistic and rationalistic movements which mark the
course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not
unfrequently said, and with some surface plausibility, that
Lord Herbert of Cherbury (De Ferilate, 1624) gave in
modern times the impulse to this free-thinking movement.
The thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation had been
occasionally touched by the larger spirit of religious faith.
Thus Erasmus in his Encheiridion could say ' Christum vero esse
puta non vocem inanem, sed nihil aliud quam charitatem, sim-
plicitatem, patientiam, puritatem, breviter quidquid ille docuit/
To him it seemed that inspiration was not limited to the
Jews : the ethical scriptures of Cicero, Seneca, and above all
Plato, formed a catena of truths not unworthy to be linked
along with the theism of the Old and New Testament. It
is this 'natural religion' which is an inspiring principle to
writers so different as Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, and Mon
taigne. It finds voice in the syncretism of Mutianus Rufus :
( Quum Jovem nomino, Christum intelligo et verum Deum/
Sebastian Frank (1495-1543) identifies the lumen naturale
with the ' word ' or invisible Christ : he sees in the historical
fact of Adam and Christ only a symbol of the eternal relation

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 13

of man and God: 'Omnis homo/ he says, 'unus homo: vita
una et eadem omnibus/ The older Realism revives, and sets
the eternal Spirit against the changing history of the letter.

But the oldest example of the phase of Natural Theology
belonging to this pre-Reformation period is the Tkeologia
Naturalu of Raymond de Sabunde, published in 1438. It is
probably best known by Montaigne's Apology. Montaigne
knew little more of the author than that he was said to be
a Spaniard, and he is described on the title-page as doctor in
arts and medicine, and professor in theology. Montaigne,
who tells us he made a translation of the work (published
apparently in 1.569), speaks mysteriously of the original as
' basty d'un espaignol, baragouine en terminaisons latines/
which seems an exaggeration of the character of the text as
we have it. The obnoxious matter is contained in the pro
logue, which has been omitted in all subsequent editions, as
condemned before 1500 by the Index1. The prologue in
a few pages states the scope of the book. There are two
books given by God to man. That originally given was the
book of nature, or of the Universitas creaturarum. But by
reason of his blindness man was unable to read it; and
another had therefore to be given, the book of Holy Scripture.
Unfortunately the key which Scripture affords is itself
a dubious and puzzling gift. Its obscurity requires in the
interpreter a special training, that of the scholar and priest :
its authenticity needs to be corroborated by research and
argument. Philology, grammar, logic, and rhetoric are
indispensable, if we are to make a proper use of the super
natural key to the meaning of the world and life.

The case with the book of nature is very different. It is
a connatural part of the regular order of life, and can be
studied by the unassisted intelligence sine magistro. There

1 The full title of the book is Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum,
specialiter de homine et de natura ejus in quantum homo, et de his quae sunt ei
necessaria ad cogncscendum seipsum et omne debitum ad quod homo tenetur et obliga-
tur tarn deo quam proximo.

I4 CIFFORD LECTURES [i

is no possibility o£ misunderstanding- it, and no risk from
forgeries. It is an infallible science which any one can
acquire fin a month and without labour, and it requires no
effort of memory/ This is the 'light of all the sciences/
without which they are but vanities. It contains that rule
of nature by which a man learns all his duty. And now in
the end of the world it is necessary to every Christian that
he may be established in the Catholic faith. It argues,, in
fallibly, ' from those things which are most certain to every
man by experience,, or from the nature of all the creatures
and of man himself, from those things which man most
surely knows of himself by experience, and especially by
inward experience ; and therefore it is a knowledge which
does not require any witness but man himself.' But before
dealing with man it considers the various orders of created
things. For 'the universe of things and beings is set as it
were a natural ladder having firm and immovable steps by
which a man may ascend into himself/ To grasp these
stages in their unity is to learn the meaning of the book of
the universe, in which the several creatures and their groups
form the letters and syllables. Man learns to see his own
purpose, his own dignity and duty, by seeing himself as the
convergent unity of lower orders of being, the culmination of
a process from mere existence to life, from life to sentiency,
and from sentiency to intelligence and will in a free person
ality. But man himself points upwards to an absolute unity
and realization of all being, a being who is the principle of
love, the root of all good, and of an all-inspiring delight.

The interest of such a book is to be sought in its historical
surroundings and antecedents. Towards the past it gives an
echo of that liberal and mystical theology which stretches
across the Middle Ages, with here and there a half -heretical
thinker taking up the philosophical standpoint of the
Alexandrines and of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists. It
belongs to a movement which, so to speak, goes on behind

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 15

the Lutheran reformation, drawing its impetus from a more
literary, scientific, and rationalist current of ideas ; its basis
is not the reference from a corrupt tradition to an incorrupt
book of authoritative doctrine, but from all written texts
whatever to the everlasting and unfailing gospel of nature
and reason. It rises, however it may or may not admit this
to itself, above the ecclesiastical traditionalism which had
been the best-preserved part of the Church's inheritance from
Augustine, above the dependence on literal revelation, and
while adopting the basis of inner experience, it thinks
more of the systematized experience of natural life than of
the bare inwardness of mystical theology. If mediaeval
theology was determined to understand what it believed, this
postulate implied in the last resort the conviction of the
reasonableness of the faith, i.e. of its correspondence with
the entire system of reality as it had been otherwise ascer
tained. This conviction is at the bottom of de Sabunde's
book. It is partly distorted by a certain boastfulness, marking
the intoxication of a discoverer who has learned that a truth
hitherto accepted on authority is intrinsically credible, and
concordant with fact. But, along with this, there goes
a tendency to see in religion an ally of ethics, and to find its
essence rather in the scope it assigns to our duty than in the
knowledge it gives of God as an abstractly independent
being.

Perhaps the earliest occurrence of the title Natural Theology
in Western thought belongs, however, to the system of
Stoicism. St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, vi. 5-12) states, on the
authority of Varro, who probably but epitomizes the reflection
of Stoic teachers, that there are three species of theology, the
poetic or mythological, the civil or political, and the physical
or natural. The first is the scheme of divine acts and beings
which is suitable to the theatre, the world of literature and
art, and its hierophants are the poets. The second is the
mode under which a political community acknowledges its

l6 GIFFORD LECTURES LI

dependence upon higher powers, and is under the charge of
sacerdotal officials. But the third is the way in which the
thinker and the man of science sees the great power of things.
His eye is not restricted to the narrow scope of the city, nor
is it content with the reflection of reality in myth and legend
of demi-gods and gods. He looks at the whole of things, at
the great system of nature, above the range of art and of
popular religion ; he finds the truest approach to divinity in
a philosophy that seeks the deeper reality, the universal truth,
which underlies the visions of poets and the conventional or
historical distinctions which national peculiarities have in
troduced into divinity. To Varro, and to the philosophers for
whom he speaks, the two other species of theology were at
bottom erroneous, and were only suitable for such as by nature
and temperament, or by circumstances and authority, were
incapable of attaining the true vision of the essence of things.
Yet at the same time it is apparent that he can speak of
philosophy as a theology only in so far as he allows the two
other interpretations, the political and the artistic, to give
colour and form to the somewhat vague and unsubstantial
phases of the world-order. It is this confusion between
philosophy and practical needs which marks the Stoical
system, and which is the inevitable consequent of its pro
fessing to give the world a guide through life and its duties.
The old antagonism between the philosopher and theologian
is smoothed down into that between an esoteric and an
exoteric doctrine, or between the inner truth and the accom
modation of it to vulgar necessities, and popular incapacity
for the higher teaching.

We may thus learn that, under all its phases in history,
natural theology is the attempt at a synthesis of two factors
in human life, which at their first appearance and always
present to each other a certain incompatibility, or it may be
hostility. It is the application of science to religion, the
interpretation of faith and worship by the intellectual

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 17

principle, and in accordance with the results of ascertained
knowledge. It may err by being premature and hasty : it
may err by an inadequate perception of the fact to be
explained. The science which is dominant at a particular
age may be one-sided and imperfect as judged by a later and
more enlarged standpoint ; and the result of its verdict on
religious facts cannot in such a case be unprejudiced. It may
turn itself too exclusively to one aspect of reality, too much
to the world of physical fact and too little to the realm of
psychical life ; and it may on that account fail to give a
due place to certain aspects of religious phenomena which
are alien to its prepossessions. But in some degree the
rationalization of belief, the naturalization of religion, is
an inevitable problem. There are differences in the extent
to which reason carries this determination, but it is only a
question of degree. Even the primaeval ' theologian/ whom
the philosopher seeks to dispossess,, is a philosopher too in his
infinitesimal degree. He may be dubbed irrational, but that
only means that his reasoning stops short at an earlier stage
than we think proper. His development in the line of
intelligence has suffered arrest.

Yet nothing is more certain than that a widespread
jealousy meets the attempt to rationalize the faith. Not
merely natural theology, but theology altogether has seemed
to be an intruder5 on the religious field. The creation of
dogma is an injury to the spirit of faith : under pretence of
strengthening the living organism, it turns it into a lifeless
petrifaction. Nor is this merely a shrinking from intellectual
effort, which springs partly from an ignoble preference for the
animal luxury of dull feeling and stolid enjoyment, partly
from the effects of reaction against the illusions and dis
appointments that have befallen others. The same tendency
is fostered by the preference for action, the sense that
theological speculation is an unnecessary, and perhaps a
shameful luxury, when so much of the world is lying in sin

c

l8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i

and misery. There is also the delicacy of feeling which
shrinks from theological dogma as a kind of profanation, or
as at best but < sound and smoke clouding over the glow of
heaven.' The deeper moments of religious experience, where
the soul is alone with God, shrink from the cold clear light
of analysis and reflection. The heart claims for its object
of devotion a unique and incomparable quality, which would
be destroyed when such object was classified and reduced to
the level of its kindred.

Yet when we come to think of it, we can see that this
protest of life against being reduced to mere logic is
exaggerated. What it really implies is a feeling that reason
is not omnipotent, a feeling that all our knowledge rests on.
and arises by contrast with, an unknown ; that consciousness
must be in perpetual antithesis, but also in perpetual correla
tion with an unconscious. We may, no doubt, amuse ourselves
with the fancy of absolute beginnings and absolute ends.
But in sober fact it has to be admitted that all our knowledge
rests upon ignorance, that it always has a presupposition,
which it as continually displaces. We may speak of an ap^i]
awTToOeros, but we shall be misled if we take this for one
single truth out of which others can be deduced by proper
analysis, and upon which others can be built. The true
method of science is neither a mere analysis (as the one
phrase suggests), nor a mere synthesis (as is implied by the
second). Analysis and synthesis are continually alternating
and complementary : in other words, analysis is only valuable
as a step to synthesis, and synthesis involves a preliminary
distinction of elements.

If it be said that it is the object of philosophy to construe
religion, that does not mean, as sometimes seems to be supposed,
that it has to construct it. To construe a thing is to set it in
its relation to other things, to give it its place in a system,
to deprive it of its mere individuality, and to understand its
place and value. As has been said, some such appreciation

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 19

or estimate is always made : but it may be made stealthily,
blindly, and without due sense of proportions. The whole
claim made by philosophy is that such evaluation of the
factors of life shall be made consciously and with due care,
and not at haphazard. It may be maintained, indeed, that,
as a matter of fact, the most prominent and widespread forms
of religion have grown up in a soil thoroughly saturated by
philosophic influences. This is certainly true of Christianity
and Buddhism. But, apart from this, we must distinguish
between philosophy as a life, and philosophy as logic. In
reference to life, philosophy is only instrumental and sub
ordinate. It is the extension and deepening of intelligence;
the translation, it may be said, of the is into the is known ;
the organization of the fragments of life — so at first they
appear — into the complete structure which they really pre
suppose. Philosophy in this case means the development of
intelligence into a united view of all the factors of reality
and life in their mutual relationships ; the correlation of all
departments of human activity with each other, in the light
of their being but severally parts and members in working
out the ideal of humanity. Philosophy is thus the surveillance
of the whole over the members, or rather the spirit of the
whole, awakening in each of these members, and making
them aware of their mutual dependence. It is the idea of
perfection realizing itself in each imperfect medium, seeking
to reduce the divergent factors of civilization to accord in
the idea of life, full and perfect. To perform such a task
a certain aloofness is required. But that is what always
happens in any department. To philosophize is to stand
apart from the bustle of life : yet the philosopher is after all
a man, and his philosophy is only a part of his life, for him
perhaps the most important, yet in the great system of
human collective life reduced to a factor and a share.

When philosophy arises, it comes because of felt contradic
tions. It is stimulated by the presence of difficulties and

C 2

20

GIFFORD LECTURES [i

incongruities, not to say inconsistencies, in the religious scheme.
It is all very well to say with Vincent of Lerinum (Common.
II. 3) that ' quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, credi-
tum est, hoc est vere proprieque catholicum/ But to discover
what possesses the marks of ' universitas, antiquitas, consensio '
is a task that soon appears to be hopeless, unless we call in the
aid of reasoning and reflection. A mere statistical enumeration
and summation is in such a problem impracticable. The marks,
literally taken, are inapplicable : the universal and eternal is
not found in the range of sense-phenomena. To find it, we
must gradually educe from the facts some idea in which
they find their unity, and which again in its turn serves as
a standard of criticism. Not that such an idea is found once
and for all. It is itself but an ideal capable of indefinite
approximation, the organized product of a vast number of less
adequate steps towards it.

It is not therefore in a wilful aggression on a peaceful field
that we are to seek the origin of rationalizing in religion.
Such effort at rationalizing in religion is only the reaction
from the effects of hesitancy and dispute. The variety of
contemporary belief, the changes in the successive phases
of faith and doctrine, are sufficient to account for the attempt
to give a reasonable character to a faith. But this is not the
whole of the problem. There are other departments of human
life, and these in course of time develop with unequal speed
and to disproportionate extents. Contradictions thus emerge
between church and state, between art and religion, and
between science and theology, in the restricted senses in which
these terms are ordinarily used. It is partly in consequence
of such divergences that Natural Theology has found itself
in competition with theology in its narrower sphere.

It is, and should be, the business of philosophy to release
the human problem from this departmental division— so far
at least as each of these elements of life tends to isolate
itself in one-sided supremacy. The antitheses between art

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 21

and morality and religion, not to mention many others, have
their relative justification ; but they do harm when treated
as independent forces. For a large and philosophic view,
morality is a part and step in the great process of man's
self-development, a part which, if on one side it is in un
broken continuity with the fulfilment of the elements of
psychical life to a free and full personality or true self, is on
the other hand building a framework of social relationships,
without which religion would hardly deserve that august
name, and would certainly not rank as the great humanizing
energy it is supposed to be. Such a philosophical view, again,
will free religion from the taint of an evil ' other- worldliness/
which often befalls it, and give it its right place in the scenes
of daily life and the sympathies of common intercourse,
lieleased from its isolation and specious sacro-sanctity, religion
will appear as the crown and consecration of an actuality
which often in its details seems trivial and frivolous. Art,
again, as it releases the tension of desire, and reveals the
repose and self-completeness of existence, will keep religion
from falling away from the temporal scene, and protest
against the absoluteness of scientific analysis. And science,
in the narrower sense, will recognize its limitations, and above
all the hypothetical character of its constructions, which are
after all approximations to the infinitely complex structure
of the real, made practicable only through the self-restraint
of an abstraction.

Such a Natural Theology grows up inevitably as man
emerges from the cave of tradition and custom, and realizes
that in him, as an intelligent and rational being, there is
something superior to the mere individuality which sets him
as only one among the many things of the world, and that
he is (in the phrase of Protagoras), in some sense, the measure
of all things. Nay, more, it may be asserted that man has
never been wholly without this faculty of raising himself
so as in some measure to survey and control his environment,

22

GIFFORD LECTURES []

instead of being wholly immersed in it, and forming a mere
part to be moulded and altered by agencies outside and above
him, of which he has no control. The degrees in which
this power has been exercised may range within an immense
space ; but the germ of such detachment, of such individuali-
zation, which lifts the individual above a mere passive par
ticipation in the whole to which he belongs, seems to be
indispensable to characterize humanity.

The note of naturalness in theology, therefore, lies in its
superiority to restrictions due to special historic conditions.
The antithesis of natural is not to revealed : but to one type
of revealed, exalted as the alone revealed, to the exclusion
of all others. When it uses the term natural, it does not,
except in the restricted sense of physico-theology, mean to
exclude from its survey the field of history and of human life.
It rejects, indeed, the notion of special revelation, if that be
understood to imply the communication of full-made truths
by a miraculous importation of them into the human faculties.
But, on the other hand, it does not, by calling itself natural
or rational, imply that it turns its back upon history and
experience. It may be that at certain epochs, in a fit of
disgust at vulgar credulity and in hatred of superstition, it
imagined that unassisted reason could of itself construct a
creed. But in so far as it did so, it was labouring under
an illusion. There is no absolutely unassisted reason. Reason,
on the contrary, only lives by a perpetual antithesis to sense :
it only emerges from the soil of reality and life, from the fact
of experience: it is experience made more and more har
monious, complete and self-explanatory. Its only conflict
with revelation arises because revelation is said to introduce
into the sphere of human knowledge and experience a fact
absolutely unique and incommensurable. Unique and incom
mensurable, in a way, every reality is : but not in the sense
that it forms no part in the compass of reality, giving to and
taking from its environment. Natural theology, the theology

i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 23

of reason,, claims the prerogative of man to examine all things,
and is but an attempt in a special range of questions to carry
out that purpose fully, without bar or check from any specially
privileged province.

Christian theology is a different thing. That is no inquiry
into truth, no free scientific pursuit, no mere theory. It is
the redaction into a system of the non-historic and essential
constitution of the Church: the reflex of its life-spirit, its
needs and relationships, in a shape determined no doubt by
individual instrumentality, but by instruments pervaded by a
common faith, a historical experience, a sense of eternal
community, — eternal with an eternity such as no nation can
boast, because the church, each and every visible church,
believes itself, through and above its earthly manifestation,
to be a city divinely founded and maintained.

II

THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY

NATURAL Theology as already described in last lecture has
been almost identified with what in the present century would
be usually called the philosophy of religion. Either term may
be taken to denote a reflective study of the facts or phenomena
of religion, when that study is methodically or systematically
pursued. Such reflection can hardly be turned upon religion,
until religious facts or phenomena have grown into the rank
of obviously objective material for observation. There must
be a tolerably well-defined group of performances,, rites, cere
monials, sacrifices, prayers, &c., upon which the vision can be
turned. Till that epoch has offered such material, religious
life, in feeling and act, may have been intense and vigorous,
and may have undergone various transformations ; but so long
as these phenomena have not been set in special relief, and
brought into a certain anomalous position in life, they will be
passed over with the indifference which awaits all that is
familiar and awakes no sense of curiosity. It needs the
stimulus of a trouble and a want to prompt laggard curiosity.
Religion must have come to be in some measure detached
from the observed : it must no longer form an organic part of
his life and being. With the process of social differentiation
the several aspects of life come to be more or less strangers to
many of those who share in the social unity. Religion will
thus have become the special care of a certain order, and
present more and more a mystery to those outside the sacred

THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 25

circle. Diversity of interests, and even of religious interests,
is a condition for the study of religious phenomena. Here as
elsewhere, it is when the first fervour of life and zeal is past
that reflection begins. Theology, therefore, as an attempt
to note and correlate the phenomena of the religious life,
will have a certain antipathy to the first age of devotion.
Religion at such an epoch has become, instead of a common
all-embracing influence penetrating life, one interest among
many; a memory and a hope, rather than a present faith.
And such interest may come either from those professionally
interested in it, or from the outsider and the critic. To the
former the main work of theology is the codification of faith
in a creed. To the latter it may either be a subject of
disinterested study, or an interest which he would fain rescue
from the hands of the mere specialist, and base upon a wider
foundation than the mere authority of a text. In the latter
case we have what is called natural theology. The natural
theologian aims at widening the basis of faith by an appeal
to a wider range of corroborative fact, but he seldom studies
religious phenomena in a spirit of philosophic impartiality.
He has a special view of what constitutes the essentials of
religion as opposed to its accidents : a view which in the main
represents the average standpoint of his time and not a result
of critical inquiry. The natural theologian of this type has
a practical interest : he is anxious to purify religion from
what he regards as the extravagances of superstition and to
rest it upon a surer evidence than that of a supposed super
natural authority. To such an one the nucleus of true religion
lies in its ethical context, or rather in its supposed guarantee
of three ethical needs : a God, to make the world of nature
co-operative to the success of duty; Freedom, to raise man
above the necessitation of purely physical influences; and
Immortality, to make man's capacities a match for duty's
infinite requirements. ' What Christ did,' said Leibniz in the
preface to the Theodicee, ' was to translate natural religion

26 GIFFORD LECTURES [11

into a law, and to give it the authority of a public dogma/
Natural religion so understood is the warranty by metaphysical
fact to the absolute claim of duty. Morality is possible,
because nature is not omnipotent over man by its impulses,
nor victorious over him by the dissolution of his body, and
because God who holds the keys of nature is the warder
of morality. The emancipation of man from the tyranny of
nature is the essence of morals, and the purpose of religion is
to furnish a creed in which that liberation is guaranteed
by a metaphysical or supernatural theory of life and the
world.

The philosophy of religion cannot have the directly
practical aims of this so-called natural theology : its stand
point is purely that of the critical observer who seeks to
understand. But the term theology has a further dis
advantage as applied to denote the science of religion. In
a strict etymological use, the term may seem either defective
or redundant. It is defective, because it sets in peculiar
relief and isolates from its context one important term of the
religious life. It separates the object or outward projection
of religious faith from the faith and life to which it stands
in essential relation. It leaves God, so to speak, bare and
abstract, withdrawn from the witness of the spirit, and left
cold and dead on the analytical board. So left, the object
of theology loses its life and significance, and the theological
demonstrator is therefore obliged to begin his work of
exposition by a task not known in the same way to the
other branches of science : he has to establish the reality
of his object, which has become only a name, and to prove,
as it is called, the existence of God.

Yet, on the other hand, the name theology may seem
redundant as a title for the phenomena of religion. It is
possible that the object of religious life, the objective focus
of faith, may scarcely rise to the definiteness, individuality,
and stability which would fairly entitle it to the name of

n] THE CREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 27

God. Life may be controlled by the unseen, and what is
sometimes called the supernatural : faith and hope may turn
from the world to something hardly unified and permanent
enough to be called a divinity. And so, without clear idea
of God, there may be that presence of the other world in this,
that dependence on something supernal or infernal, which
seems the central power of religion. It is evident, therefore,
that if theology is to be regarded as equivalent to the theory
of religion in general, it must not be confined to one precise
shape in which objectivity and quasi-sensible form is given
to the powers and influences on which human life is assumed
to depend.

Theology, as we know it, is a product of Greek civilization.
It is a trite confession to admit the debt we owe to Greece.
But perhaps it may be thought that it is not in the religious
sphere that that influence most obviously prevails. And no
doubt it is true that the germinal principle of the religious
life established amongst us comes from the Hebrews, and
especially from a movement arising in the later Judaism.
Yet, for all that, it was through Greek words and Greek
literature that the oracles of the new faith, the letters of its
first evangelists, were proclaimed and written ; it was through
the systems of ethics, and the schemes of virtues and vices,
worked out by Greek moralists, that it had to define its
relations to social life : and it was through the attempts of
Greek thinkers to determine the conditions of truth, and the
value of the various factors in reality, that the Christian
community had to justify its conception of life, and correlate
its view of the first and last things with the conventions of
civilization. Even before Christianity emerged upon the
scene, Greek influences had come to pervade Western Asia.
Not, of course, that the peasantry of Palestine, or the com
monalty of Syria were familiar with Hellenic ideas, and
instructed in Greek philosophy. That, if ever possible, could
only have been accomplished in many ages. But, at the

28

GIFFORD LECTURES [n

centres of light and leading- through the East, it was Greek
thought and Greek culture that gave the tone to literature and
religion. Even in the stronghold of Judaism the influence of
Hellenism was felt at every corner, and it determined, by
its opposition, the movements that rose up to repel it. Greek
was the vehicle of intercommunication between races of alien
manners and speech. And thus even on the religious field
' captured Greece took captive her barbarian conqueror.'
Even when St. Paul carried Christianity to Corinth and
the West, he carried it as one who had been born at Tarsus
and had gained some familiarity with that Greek culture,
which influenced even the teachers of the Law, as it had
influenced the later writers of the Apocrypha literature.

Greece, in fact, furnished the mould for the science of
religion, just as she supplied the grammatical categories in
which the study of language has been carried on. Practical
needs led ingenious instructors of Greek to formulate a scheme
for describing and defining the facts of language : to create
a system of rules for guiding the speaker and writer in
acquiring the phrase held to be alone correct in the multi
plicity of practice. Thus grew up a grammar, meant
originally for Greek, which came to serve a like purpose
for other tongues. So long as the new languages were of
a kindred structure with Greek, all might go well : but
when in course of time the forms and rubrics so obtained
had to be applied to languages of quite other structure, like
the Semitic, or the languages of Africa and the New World,
the old scheme was found to fail. Gradually this incongruity
led to the perception of the need for a new method of the
study of languages: a method which should not force the
more primitive stages into forms and moulds suitable only
for an advanced stage of linguistic development. The
analysis of language had to be carried further and with
a wider reference in order to fulfil its purpose. It had to
find a new alphabet and syntax of more comprehensive scope.

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 29

So in some measure it has been with the philosophy of
religion. It is futile no doubt to ask how that philosophy
would have fared if speculation on religious phenomena had
by some freak of fate begun elsewhere and not in Greece.
And if it be an ignoble indolence which proclaims that what
ever is is right, it is a still more mischievous conceit which
grumbles that whatever is is wrong. Yet it may not be with
out its uses to reflect that theology would hardly have taken
the shape it has done had it grown up under other influences.
There is an unparalleled clearness and visual objectivity about
the Greek gods ; an individual independence, and a systematic
unity in their differences, which sets them in a unique position
in the world's pantheon. They need only be compared with
the strange impersonality of Chinese religion, whether we
regard the supreme imperial heaven or the ill-defined but
pervasive multitude of lesser spirits ; with the mystic haze
through which the Vedic gods emerge under the magic
efficacy of ritual and sacrifice; or with the abstract imps
of momentary act and quality, which were so often all that
stood for deities at Rome — to let us see how different is
the atmosphere in which the Greek gods live and move. In
other races the religious process had stopped short at an
emotional or devotional stage. But with the Greeks the
divine power stands out in individualized shapes with clear
ness of outline and definite personality, probably unparalleled
in religious development. The conditions of cultus or worship,
the prayer, sacrifice and ritual, fa-H into the background, and
allow the object of worship and of sacrifice to emerge in
brilliant and conspicuous form, standing out independent of
the religious process in which they had their birth. Theology
thus becomes a mythology, or, a history and a description
of certain divine persons, a collection of legends and sacred
tales about gods, who, separated from the religious interest
and motive in which they had their source, move about and
act with interests of their own, denizens, almost, of the real

30 GIFFORD LECTURES [n

world. The first 0eoAo'yoi are narrators who tell the history
of beings, no doubt related to man, but somehow raised to an
independent and collateral existence.

At least the religion of Greece upon its higher levels dealt
mostly in this region. It is a strange feature of Greek life
that a poem so secular as the work of Homer should be said
to give us the theology of the Greeks. We must always
remember that the poet— and this is true even of Yedic
hymns — gives a picture from a special point of view and
from a special level of culture. The works of Greek literature
and art reveal Greek life to us, in the first instance, as it
appeared on the heights to those emancipated from the baser
influences of ignorance and superstition. It is true there are
traces everywhere of the lower strata, the basis of common
life. They come out in isolated moments, and show the
abyss which always rolled under the sunlit tablelands of art.
The criticisms of Epicurus and Lucretius on the religion of
the masses, though possibly affected by fanaticism, may serve
to counterbalance the more aesthetically refined but perhaps
irreligiously trivial ideas of popular art. And thus, though
the Greek philosophers are not out of touch with the vulgar
needs of religion, they chiefly deal with it as it appears on the
literary level. The Aei(ri6at/zoz;ia which comes to the front in
Nicias and Xenophon, the foul rites which flourish in the
obscurity of antique custom or of modern licence, the freaks
of witchcraft and magic, are only seen at faint instants.
Greek religion, like everything Greek, was, until comparatively
modern times when closer research and the influence of wider
anthropological study had taught a different lesson, regarded
under an idealized and poetical halo, which separated it from
grosser reality.

When philosophy came upon the scene, it found the
phenomena of religion arranged under two heads. On one
hand, they had been to some extent regulated, licensed, and
reduced to a fixed type for the community. They had

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 31

adapted themselves to the ruling influence o£ the social
organization, stamped with an appointed ritual and an order
of worship and service. In Greece, as well as in Rome,
religion was an integral part of the social system, indis
tinguishable in practice from other performances needful to
the stability of the political edifice. Religion, in this point
of view, had hardly separated itself from the general
political problem : the gods were part of the state, of the
system of custom and law. But there was also a poetical
theology, in which the gods had come to form a group of
realities, with a history of their own, independent and col
lateral. Towards this mythology philosophy, following even
the more reflective poetry, began at an early period to take
up a critical attitude. Xenophanes had boldly accused men
of having formed the conceptions of these gods too much in
their own image, and of having attributed to the heavenly
ones all that was disgraceful among men. Philosophy thus
ignored the origin of these tales in the conditions of more
primitive life, and treated them simply as regards their effects
on the morals of the contemporary community. From that
point of view Plato laid down two canons or ' types ' to control
the eccentricities of popular mythology : the first, that evil-
doing must never be attributed to a divine agent ; the second,
that a divine being should be represented as always true and
unchangeable in his revelations of himself to man.

In Plato there is no discussion of the problem of religion as
a whole, in its psychological premisses and its metaphysical
presuppositions. There is indeed no one term in Greek which
can cover the whole field. Piety (ewe/3eia) is at one time
counted as one of the more important characteristics of the
good man : but in the scheme of the Republic e. g. it finds
no distinct recognition. The service of religious observance
is relegated to the special care of priestly rules, and forms
no part of general humanity. But of the political value of
religion Plato is deeply convinced, especially, as it seems,

32 GIFFORD LECTURES [H

in his later years. The gods of the commonwealth are for
him the sign and bond of its social unity, of its vigour as
a living and thriving organism. The essence of their being
and nature, therefore, lies not so much in what they abstractly
are, as in their significance for the ethical life. So far as
Plato can be said to define God at all, it is as the form of
Good, something higher than being and than knowledge,
something neither to be treated as a mere objective nor as
a mere subjective, but as transcending that opposition. If,
therefore, we ask, as polemics has often asked, whether Plato
inclines to pantheism, or to a personal God, it is impossible
to give a simple answer. Unquestionably he is not all
things, either as aggregate or unity; for he is distinctly
declared to be above the contrasts of good and evil in this
world. Here, in this world, there must be always evil :
always, that is, truth can only be reality as presupposing
error, and goodness cannot free itself from the presence and
opposition of vice. For man there is left the effort to become
like unto God, in whom is no evil at all. There thus seems
to be two extreme or absolute poles, one all goodness, another
all evil, between which actual existence is a struggle : and
these poles seem to be real. To the modern relativist this
supposition of Plato seems a mistake. He recognizes the
opposition of good and evil, but he does not believe that that
means the struggle of two self-subsistent forces, which come
into external collision. He believes no more in an absolute
good and absolute evil, than in an absolute cold and hot.
Only that can be good, in the real sense of that word, which
is not wholly good : i. e. which has in it further possibilities
of goodness. A thing is evil which has fallen short of its
goodness, yet is not bereft of its goodness altogether.

But if we say that God is good, it must be in another
sense of the word. Thus the < form of good ' is a directing
principle which draws mankind ever higher and higher on
the path toward perfection. It is, we may almost say, the

nj THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY

33

form which Godhead presents to us, the shape in which His
presence and power appear; and yet it would be rash to
identify it with Him. The essence of religion, it may be
added, is in what it is for us. The gods or God are made
no better by worship which men offer them. But man by
such service wins his reward in an ennobled character. He
attaches his existence to the eternal tendency upward and
onward. Beyond all struggle, his attainment. Only if we
call this perfection of attainment goodness, we do not mean
that it is good merely, free from all taint of evil. At the
moment when evil ceases to trouble, then the word good
loses its old meaning. So much agnosticism at least seems
necessary to retain. Existence involves antithesis.

On another point Plato touches upon religion, and that is
the relation of God as maker and creator of the world. Here
too he tends to remove the creation from the direct contact
with the creator. The thesis in which he is interested is the
rationality of existence, i. e. its unity of meaning and
purpose. Here again the essential point is not the act
of God as creator, but the wisdom of order in nature which
permits man to work towards ends. There is intelligence in
things, an intelligence which however can only show itself
operative on a black gulf of unintelligence. Only, here too,
we must not follow Plato or his modern analogues, if he puts
a blind matter here, and a wise arranger there supervening.
We must not break up the two parts of the antithesis from
their inseparable solidarity. Matter is only for an intelligence
which manipulates : and an intelligence is a mere word
unless in relation to a matter which it penetrates. Or, as
intellect presupposes sense, and sense implies intellect, so
mind implies matter, and matter is only so by antithesis
to mind.

In Aristotle we can distinguish two levels of theology.
There is, first of all, the general assumption of teleology in
a united universe. There is nothing in vain, nothing random.

D

34 GIFFORD LECTURES \ii

There are no inexplicable episodes in the world due to violent
and chance interposition. God does not interfere from with
out. But, on the other hand, there is nothing* chaotic. The
world is all an ordered and co-operant unity. God is in a way
to be identified with nature : a self-centred, self-moving
system of things. There is an art in things : but it is
unlike human art, because it is immanent in the things
themselves, and not directing from without. God is not
banished from His universe. In all nature there is a source
of growth and movement, which in the last resort can only
be explained by an attraction — a strong love by which
Aristotle in metaphorical language represents all things as
drawn towards the prime aim of desire and principle of
thought. In the very heart of all existence there is a craving
for perfect existence, for the fulness of being. Man, like
other things, has his place in this order, and a high place :
but the higher the seat, the harder the duty, the closer the
obligation. The son in the family is less left to the licence
of his own devices than the bondman.

Thus in the Aristotelian realm of nature there lives and
moves a principle which is quasi-intelligent and quasi-
volitional. It acts, if not with a purpose, yet never in vain.
All things natural have in them something divine. Nature
is alive, in eager and incessant motion, struggling onwards
towards greater perfection, wrestling with an obstacle which
is always present to it. Even without explicit consciousness
it is straining uniformly and regularly after the best. The
world of nature has thus an indwelling divinity, but
a divinity concordant and unanimous with being, and not
anarchic, unexpected, or irregular. This view is in sharply-
conceived opposition to the atoms of Democritus. Meno agitat
molem. Movement is not mere locomotion, but is the path
of self-realization, of the increase of being.

But at other times when Aristotle is engaged with the
transition from metaphysics to physics there is a tendency

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 35

to a kind of materialism. On the outskirts of the material
or visible universe is the home of the divine. Far away at
the limit of the world of time and place and movement, there
is a world of unmoved unvarying being-, source of eternal
energy, where there is no void, but fulness of reality :
another world which, not by the force of mechanical impact
but by the strength of love-yearning, draws to its fruition
of perfect life all that in the sensible world is but in the
promise and potency of being. Materialistically understood,
at some far-distant verge of things the supreme reality, God,
comes into quasi-sensible contact with the great circle of the
cosmos, and causes to be initiated in it a movement which
thence descends through sphere after sphere, till it reaches
even this sublunary world and vivifies the things of earth.
In the heavens divinity is near : in the stellar and planetary
spheres it is powerfully present, but on earth it is marred by
disturbing influences. How much in this conception, which
has been familiarized by Dante, should be assigned to the
twilight of imagination, and how much is to be translated
into rational terms, is a point on which there might be long
discussion. Discount the metaphor : and to define God as
extramundane may mean that He is the key to the multi
plicity of existence, the enveloping unity which gives cohe
rence and meaning to all its parts. Regard the figurative
language as the essence of the matter : and it means that, far
away beyond the range of experience, there is another range
of existence of finer texture : an order of superior beings,
yet somehow things of like kind after all.

The source of these difficulties and contradictions in the
theology of Aristotle is, partly at least, to be sought in
his failure to get at the root of religion, and in his accepting
up to a certain point, and admitting to a certain authority,
the results of the process of religion, the theogonic process.
He is anxious apparently to show that popular theology and
the worship of celestial bodies has a philosophic value. To do

D 2,

36 GIFFORD LECTURES [n

that, he takes them as objects given, and for which an
appropriate interpretation has to be sought. Hut lie is
premature in the identification of deity with the unity and
rationality of existence. The epistemologist, who examines
the history of our ordinary physical knowledge, shows how
the things we seem to see as many independent objects, each
out in a world of their own, unaffected by our being so or
otherwise, are really dependent for their separate existences
on a system of relations without which they would not be
what they are. It is not otherwise with the gods. The
aspects of deity are the result of a historical development :
they are /br men, not indeed nothing in themselves, but only
symbolic of something more : they live in a covenant between
God and man. And the conception of God is more akin to
ethical problems than to the inquiries of physics. To under
stand the gods or God, we must get to sec the place and
scope of religion as a whole.

Now it may be said that such an inquiry hardly falls
within the scope of ancient philosophy. The idea of 0mrty
which holds so governing a position in the Greek systems—
the conception of true reality as opposed to appearance and
accident, and the conception of philosophy as knowledge of
supreme quality- do not fit into the view of things which
commends itself to the religious mind. Hut above all,
ancient philosophy was unaccustomed to the psychological
and epistemologieal standpoint. It had not learned to* ask
for the origin in mental development of the realities which in
various grades composed the fabric of the world. It did not,
to use the Kantian phrase, think of < deducing ' the deity, or
in a commoner phrase, of < proving ' God's 'existence. To
'deduce' God is to exhibit the grounds on which a certain
conception claims to hold a place in reality, by showing that
without it reality will no longer be what it professes to be.
To 'prove' God is similarly to show that there are tendencies
and purposes in things, which point beyond themselves, and

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 37

require a synthesis in absolute unity and power. It seems
strange at first sight to talk of proving the reality of your
object. But the reason may partially at least be made
evident. When Socrates, according to Aristotle, insisted on
the duty of definition as the guarantee of real knowledge,
it is obvious that he did not apply his method to all things
indiscriminately. What he defines are ethical and political
terms. He takes these vague words, and by an application
of real concrete instances, he reinstates them into their full
being and truth : shows them to be constituent elements of
the world of human life and fact. So we 'deduce' or
'prove' the existence of what has become doubtful, what
has lost its place in the universe of things, and rolls about,
disinherited and expropriated, a nullity and a question. To
deduce it, is to show the inadequacy of the otherwise accepted
reality, if it be deprived of the element or principle in
question : to show that, in what we accept, there are other
things involved, other considerations potent, which we neglect,
but which inusl be there, otherwise what we suppose we have
would fade away into nothingness and collapse for want
of due coherency. And this deduction is necessary, because
in practical life first or ultimate principles tend to be
forgotten, while the mind is engrossed with the particulars
which imply them.

The whole tendency of Greek philosophy was to conceive of
God as the great principle of the natural order, as the supreme
reality, as the object of all objects. He is the order, or He is
the source and author of the order, of the physical universe.
He is the supreme condition, on which for the philosopher
depends the intelligibility of nature, the final source of all its
movement, the goal of all its becoming. But for the individual
who has to live and not merely to speculate, God must be
something more and different. Science, great as it is, is not
supreme: it is only an instrument of life, a part of the
machinery of intelligent existence.

mo

GIFFORD LECTURES [n

It was Kant who gave these questions their prominence in
dern philosophy. He dealt with science, with morality ; in a
less degree, with art and religion. Gradually as he proceeded
his problem was extended : it began with 'What can I know?'
or ' What are the conditions which make knowledge possible,
and which therefore draw certain limits to its range?' Scientific
reality and truth, the truth and reality which are implied in
our ordinary way of knowing things, may not be co-extensive
with the whole field of reality : it may indeed involve some
thing over and beyond itself, on the existence of which it
tacitly counts. Now the conditions which Kant signalized
as necessary to knowledge were that a sensation should be
given, and that such sensation should be placed in an order of
time and place, and referred to objectivity by means of certain
concepts which he called categories. That the reality should
be given, not made, — a sensation, not a thought, is not a new
principle: but when it comes to saying what is meant by
( given,' and what precisely is the feature of ( sensation/ the
answer of Kant does not carry us far. Phrases like ' affect
the sensibility ' are after all only phrases. Kant distinguishes
between the ' receptivity ' and the ' spontaneity ' : and while
he identifies the former with the senses, gives the latter
characteristic to the intelligence. But, in the first place,
it is clear that to separate the receptive from the spontaneous
in this matter-of-fact way is impossible. There is no recep
tivity without spontaneity, and a pure spontaneity does not
exist: both imply action, and that in reality is always
re-action. And, secondly, to identify sense with receptivity
is only possible on the assumption that we have already
defined and perhaps enlarged the scope of sensibility itself.
Defined it : in such measure as we have accentuated the
aspect of ' affection ' by something ' given/ Enlarged it :
in so far as there is no longer any restriction to the special
senses, or organs of sensibility.

But what Kant laid even more stress upon is that all

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 39

science, and therefore all we know as reality in the stricter
sense, lies within certain totalities. These are time, space,
and experience. None of these are given us as totals : yet on
the relations of elements within them as such totalities all
reality rests. That is real which has temporal and spatial
relations ; that is real which is an integral part of experience :
but experience, time, and space, are only ideal totals. There
is only one time, one space, one experience ; but such a unity
is not a fact : it is an ideal always approximated to, and
governing every increase in knowledge, but never realized.
Reality thus is always fragmentary, a part in relation to
other parts, an item in a system : it always presupposes
something beyond itself, and is only determinable by rela
tions in a totality ; which, however, recedes perpetually, and
never comes within the range of knowledge strictly so
called.

Science is thus hemmed in by certain limits, or rests upon
our respecting certain conditions. It can only succeed by not
attempting too much: by attaching itself to a given point,
and by connecting this with something else, defining it in
one direction. If it attempts to grasp a totality, it must
inevitably fail. And yet its whole success is gained by the
conviction that each thing is in and of a totality, and has
infinite relations, which can be explored so as to determine it.
Thus it can only reach the totality by a succession of partial
efforts, each correcting and completing the other. Kant
hardly would say with Spinoza that God, the absolute unity
of being, is the presupposition of all knowledge : for his
favourite way of stating his view is that the original unity of
self -consciousness is the source from which all determination
flows. But when he comes to consider more clearly what this
consciousness is, he seems to admit that it is not an individual
mind (if such a thing there be), but consciousness in general.
And what is consciousness in general ? A consciousness not
limited to a localized person, not equivalent to a single soul,

GIFFORD LECTURES

but something in which all single psychical function lives:
a synthesis embracing the several minds.

What Kant seeks to bring out is really that God cannot be
Carded as an olject of knowledge, or at least not merely as
that He cannot be reduced to one object in the multitude
of things Yet to treat Him as such an object seems inevitable
to human nature. Everywhere, after a step gained in advance
it tends to throw itself upon some centralized conception, as i
that contained the key of the future, and formed a stand
point on which one could rest. Again and again it is obliged
to cast away its idols, or at least to allow fresh objects of
worship to set themselves up at its side. But still the old
fallacy afflicts it : it translates the part into an image of
the totality, and reduces the godhead to the limits of one

of its parts.

What Kant is driving at is that there are different grades
in the hierarchy of reality, that the order of physical
things or of nature is, as it is ordinarily described,— i. e. as
a mechanical system of cause and effect— rests upon presup
positions which it is itself incompetent to explain. Science in
that sense, as a knowledge of causes and effects, cannot include
God : for He can only come under it as a ' first cause ' or
a ' final end ' — two conceptions which equally contradict the
very implication of the term cause. You may style God a
causa mi ; but such a term really means that He is more than
a mere cause : or it means that in the full concept of ' cause '
there is an originality involved which can never belong to
a single thing, but always implies a synthesis, or, as it is
called, a 'sum of conditions/ co-operating with the single
prominent antecedent.

Kant thus, on the one hand, declares that God cannot be
described by the categories, because these all presuppose
a variety of things in correlation; and yet that a quasi-
application of the categories to Him is inevitable, because
He is active under these restrictions. But over and above

n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 41

his negative results, he has insisted that God, with the
cognate positions of freedom and immortality, is required by
what he calls the moral law. Perhaps, for the present, we
may generalize Kant's teaching to the effect that, if God is
not an object of science in the narrow sense of that conception,
it is because He is above it and gives the very presupposition
of it. Even so Plato has described his 'idea' of Good, as
standing to all reality in the same relation as the sun does to
visible objects. As the sunlight is, in different aspects, the
cause of growth, and again, of the visibility of sensible things,
so the ' idea of good ' is the force which makes reality active
and operant, and enables the knower to understand it. Nor
is this agnosticism. Agnosticism holds that, behind all
single objects we know, there may be a total object which
we do not know. But, according to the present account, God
is not something behind or beyond other objects. Each of
them is, indeed, less than Him ; but all in their various degree
express them and involve Him. In none of them can we say
finally, ' Here He is ' : yet we may not say either, ' Beyond
all of them He is to be sought and possibly found/ He is
personal : yet, but at the same time, supra-personal : moral,
but at the same time more than moral.

The Greek philosophers, more perhaps even than Hebrew
prophets, emphasize the unity of God. The prophets, by the
intensification of their conception of Jahve, gradually made
him the God of all the earth : but in so doing they unawares
altered the conception, and repelled deity, as it were, into
greater depths of distance. The Greek philosophers saw in
him the unity of nature, the source of life and motion, but
Himself something above nature, and removed from the
sphere of change. They were not interested in the religious
acts and feelings in which He was efficient : they sought in
the conception of Him rather a counterpart to their doctrine
of the unity of all being.

Ill

THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST

THE value of Christianity in the historical development
of natural theology does not in the first place lie in any
addition it makes to the conception of God, but rather in the
experiential demonstration it may give of the factual reality
or truth of that idea. In that sense it claims to be the
revelation of God, whereby, instead of being an objective
aim of worship, or an idea underlying all intelligence, He is
realized and present as the light and life and love in all that
lives and is. It thus verifies or evidences the conclusions
of reflection and criticism ; but in so doing sets them in a new
light. The transcendent God and heaven are seen as present
and within us, as in the world and in the soul, though they
knew it not, and had sought the missing principle even on
the further side of being. Christianity may thus be styled
emphatically natural religion, in so far as it professes to
realize the implications latent in all historical forms of faith,
but freed from the restrictions to which they were therein
subject. It claims to satisfy the realism of spontaneous
devotion and the idealism of the philosophical consciousness :
to be all that religion ever meant to be, and to bring forth
certainty unto truth.

It is difficult, however, if not impossible, to select any
special article of religious faith which is, in its general aspect,
a doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Its uniqueness lies rather
in what some would call the personality of the founder. So

THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 43

far as one may venture to specialize the expression of that
uniqueness, we may say it consisted in his absolute and
plenipotentiary freedom, and in his utter realization of the
immanence of God in this present life. In this conviction
of the power of endless life and the presence of reconciling
love, theology lost its former aloofness and abstraction. It
might be paradoxically put that Christianity is atheism :
meaning thereby that God, for it, ceases to be a mere object,
controlling life and reality and becomes identical with the
reality of reality, the life of life. Prayer, for it, becomes
not a request for blessings from a separate being, but a com
munion in which the soul essentially realizes its unity in
all things with God. Sacrifice there can henceforth be none ;
for man in turning upward from nature is not rejecting the
source of his being, but fundamentally working with God.
Yet, on the other hand, there is an initial and absolute
sacrifice : it is the ' baptism into death/ the ( taking up the
cross,' the 'imitatio C/iristi' becoming, as St. Paul puts it,
a slave of Jesus. But this, again, is only another aspect of,
and is dependent on, the sonship of God : the consciousness
of the grace of the Father, of universal mercy and love, or,
briefly, the eternal life. Thus of this death, it is true, mors
ianua vitae, and it had been so described by Plato. What
Christ affirms more distinctly than Plato, is that man has
not in this to struggle alone, but has on his side the power
and the goodness which is the life of all things, or, in the
familiar words, a Father in heaven.

Christianity thus sets in the forefront the omnipotence
of God and the liberty of man. But that omnipotence is
directed against all other authorities and constraints, against
everything in nature that might be supposed to control
human destinies. The Greeks and Romans made much of the
worship of Fortune, and, indeed, the whole conception of
popular religion is saturated with it, with ideas of chance,
luck and destiny. Ethics has always tended to teach that

44 GIFFORD LECTURES [nr

man is the architect of his own fortune, and that happiness
rests with our own activity. Religion, as expressed in
Christianity,, not merely connects all fortune and event with
God, but insists that man has God upon his side, and by
faith can rise superior to his enemies in fate and circum
stance. On the other side, the liberty of man essentially
consists in his sonship to God, in the realization by feeling
and thought and act, that his real life is not in the temporal
and transitory; it consists in a predominant sense that in
and over all partial act and feeling, and deeper than all
separate objects of desire, there is an absolute unity and rest.
Thus the theology, strictly so called, of Christianity is com
bined with what was in early days called an < economy': in
other words the doctrine of God is essentially a doctrine
of the relation of man to God, and of God to man, and
indeed of the actual (even if not the abstractly essential)
interdependence of the two.

The < economy' of Christianity, however, takes a step
further, and that of vast historical importance. The realiza
tion of this sonship, thus visibly and tangibly, is, in the first
instance at least, the work of one man, who brought life
and immortality to light, and who might thus be described
as the mediator between God and man. It is through his
vision that those first drawn around him see. He, therefore
^cupies an unique position: he is the bearer of tidings from
only dimly apprehended land, and it is faith in him that
pves the message its reality. On the other hand, there
struggling through this belief at second hand a faith in
the unseen ^eality itself through the witness of the spirit,
t witness is only an elder brother who has been the
to pass beyond the veil, the leader and vanguard of
-y bro hers. But on this point there gradually emerges
a profound difference in the religious world. For the majority,
comes to mean belief in a message authenticated, not
s own merits, but by the special authority of the

mes-

m] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 45

senger, that authority in the end being- due to his essential
participation in another world and of a more than human
nature, i. e. more, in the sense of non-human and divine. This
view, in some degree and with many variations present from
the first, becomes the orthodox creed of the Church in the
fourth century. The other view, which again was always
represented and in not fewer variations, even while assigning
an unparalleled position to the founder, does not regard him
as a supernatural being, in any sense in which that term
implies a break of a new force into the realm of natural
powers. The supernatural, as a further province occasionally
trenching on the ordinary world of experience, it cannot
accept, believing the supernatural to be but the natural, seen
by faith as the garment of divine goodness.

The conceptions involved in the new idea of the relations
of God and man necessarily took time to clear themselves of
accidental accretions and stand out in all their significance.
And that the more, in proportion to their novelty, and the
distance at which they stood from the dominant habits of
contemporary thought. The seed, however good, gathered, as
it grew up and flowered and fruited, the consequences of its
soil and circumstances. No doubt the impression which was
forced upon those who saw and companied with the living
ensample and realization of the life of man in God, and
which spread with enthusiasm from disciple to disciple, and
from place to place, caused a profound change in the aims
and hopes which regulate conduct. But the so-called ' new
man/ though a new structure, built upon a new plan and
with ' new hopes aggrandizing the rags and tatters/ is after
all not divided by any abrupt breach of continuity from his
old past. Centred in the one thing new and needful, he
may no doubt for the moment exclusively note the gulf that
parts him off from his former self. But the novelty lies only
in the controlling or animating faith and idea : and when
that fails to hold its sovereignty over his will, when it sinks

46 GIFFORD LECTURES [m

into the calm and cool of reflection,, and becomes one among
many impulses of the man, the old propensities and acquired
habits resume their independence, and reassert themselves in
such force that they convert the new life they but now owned
as supreme into a vehicle and a minister of their glory.

New ideas — which always and necessarily underlie and
vivify a new scheme of life and conduct — cannot be received
with pure passivity. Often, it is true, something very like
passivity marks those who accept them. A wave of enthu
siasm, an epidemic of imitation, sweeps like a natural and irre
sistible force over all who come in its way. Hearts burn, new
powers awake, gifts almost miraculous display the presence
of sympathetic and generous excitement, in the gathering
where soul knits itself with soul, and each has the strength
of ten, or even of ten thousand, because the boundaries of
individuality are broken down, and the spirit works mightily
in each and all to comfort and convince with irresistible
inspiration of the universal in man. So it was in the early
days of Christianity, as in other like times : an unloosing of
curbed in energies, of hopes and fears, of ideals and passions,
of antipathies and regrets, all stimulated by the new idea,
on which in their turn they again reacted. A period of
fermentation, irregularities, impossibilities, signs of a new
and vigorous life, but signs also of old and vigorous passions
working together; a harvest of wheat and tares mingled,
needing time and patience to disentangle them, and defying
the best efforts of those who, like the apostle Paul, tried
occasionally to regulate the course of growth and check the
not which ever and anon tended to cause social, political, and
domestic anarchy. Even from the first, though not with the
stmct classification a later and more reflective age was able
to import into it, there were great differences dividing into
sections and strata the Christian religiosity, and the relation
ian's spirit to things divine. The truth of the unity and
% of man as man, of the incalculable individuality

in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 47

which makes each as it were equally valuable in the sight
o£ God, is no doubt a never to be forgotten principle. But
equally memorable is the diversity and inequality of human
gift. And it shows itself everywhere, not least in the act of
faith. To some faith is an act of personal trust, a dependence
on another's word and an abandonment of the personal claim
or right to see and appreciate for one's self. In itself this
confidence in humanity, in the common feeling and bond of
life, is an indispensable principle of conduct. Without the
sense of solidarity, of community, of fellowship, the fortune
of man in this world would be but low and brute-like.
Members, one of another, and of the Church invisible, the
individuals of this community share in each other's advance
or backsliding. But that each should lean on the other, it
is necessary that each should also stand by and for himself.
Or, if there be one to lean on, that rock must be not temporal
but eternal, not man but God : or, in another way of putting
it, the stay is to be found finally not in the Church visible,
but in the Church eternal which is in the heavens.

Such faith as rests upon the immediate incident of personal
influence and sympathy is an implicit faith. Dae in the
main to custom and circumstance, content to go with the
majority, organized or unorganized, it simplifies the burden
of life by allowing others to bear it. It finds its typical
expression in the words of Augustine, that, were it not for
the authority of the ecclesiastical organization, the Christian
faith would be for him incredible and absurd. Yet these
words, exaggerated as they seem, probably contain a glimpse
of truth which it is easier to let slip than to formulate in
proper proportion. They mean that the religious idea is
essentially not an individualist perception, not a single fact
which stands separate and palpable, but an organic and
organizing principle, which binds man to man, and of which
the Church is the embodiment and evidence. ' How can
a man love God/ it is said, ' if he love not his brother also ? '

48 GIFFORD LECTURES [m

How, it may be added, can one see and realize God, unless he
see and realize the community and solidarity of man ? On
the coherence and coincidence of these two aspects all religion
depends : it is this which, when it is alive, makes it always
propagandist ; for you feel that it cannot be really true for
you unless it is true for others also. The Church, says the
allegorist, is the bride appointed and preparing for Christ.
She is, in other words, the visible and material organization
in which a great truth is maturing : and the wedlock of the
fact with the idea is again the full realization of the Unity,
when God shall be all in all.

In the kingdom of God are many mansions: and while
some are content, as it were, to live on tradition and authority,
to believe on trust, to repose on the common strength, it is
necessary that there should also be from time to time a few,
a select number, who resolve, or rather are compelled by
a necessity naturally laid upon them, to see for themselves.
Theirs also is faith: but it is the faith of insight and of
knowledge, the faith which is Gnosis. Hard things have
been said of Gnosis, and harder things of Gnosticism" but it
cannot be too clearly seen that Gnosis is the very life of the
Church, the blood of religion. It is the faith which is not
merely hearsay and dependence, but which really envisages
the unseen for itself. It does not believe on a person : it
believes in and into Him : it becomes, by an act at once
voluntary and impelled from without (as all human action
s really entitled to that name), participant with Him
and through Him of a force of life and conduct

Gnosis undoubtedly has its dangers, but so also has Praxis-
and after all the dangers of the one lie very much in the
same ine as those of the other. And that is the line of
dividualism and separatism. The truth lies in the subordi
nation of all action and all knowledge to the common good,
to the ideal ends of the community which has realized its
™ty m God, love, life. But as God and man are allowed to

in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 49

fall apart, God there and man here : as speculation devotes
its energies to the former, and moral conduct is mainly con
cerned with the latter, the speculation tends to become
frivolous and abstruse, the moralism to become cold and
superficial. If the latter tend to isolate good deeds, by which
name it complacently denotes almsgiving, &c., the former
becomes a love of transcendent inquiry into powers and
beings which live and move in us, as we live and move in
them, but of which, taken abstractly, we can say nothing
wisely.

From age to age the genuine Gnosis has been the life-blood
of religion in the world : we may almost say it is the arduous
guest by which from time to time a new Prometheus brings
fire from heaven to relight the smouldering and all but extinct
altars of faith : or rather it is the channel whereby the winds
and waters of the spiritual life refresh the decaying garden of
God. Such Gnosis, which is firstborn and genuine faith,
was that of Paul, of Augustine, of Luther, and of many
thousands, named and unnameable, who have, in that daring
of soul which is the good providence of the world, sought not
an implicit but an explicit faith. That they, any or all of
them, should have seen the full reality is impossible : yet
amid the errors which must arise in the attempt to express
incomprehensible eternal things, they have, — even when, as
always happened, their own vision faltered and their message
was but half followed or mainly ignored by contemporaries
and successors, — still served to keep alive a light of that higher
world which otherwise fades from human sight. They
retrace by what is called experience, i.e. by the energetic
but necessitated reliving of our former life with full con
sciousness, that perennial way of religion which has become
a tradition and a name.

The great deed that seems to emerge as the life of Christ
is the bringing into one of God and man : the discovery that
the supernatural is in the natural, the spiritual in the

E

GIFFORD LECTURES [m

physical : the eternal life as the truth and basis of this : God
manifest in the flesh : removal of the partition wall between
God and man : the immanence of the divine, not as a new
and imported element in human life, a special bit of man
peculiarly holy, but as the truth and life in life. And the
practical corollary is twofold: first, it is absolute peace in
believing, the assurance of reunion, the good conscience
which is 'free from the bondage of the < weak and beggarly
elements1/ the pure heart which rejoices in the Lord : the
removal of fear and doubt: the 'strength which is as the
strength of ten/ The veil is rent away which in the days
of ignorance hid God and made him an unknown God : clad
him in thick darkness and terrors of the mount, saw him
invisible in excess of light, heard him whispering indistinctly
in the separate events of natural and human history-
a factor incalculable, mysterious, awful. Thus the heart is
made strong and cheerful : it has no hanging remorse, no
repentance in the sense of doubts and remorse ; for the true
repentance is a conversion of the whole soul to newness of
life, the appropriation of a new will. But there is another
side : the absolute freedom of the Christian man is absolute
allegiance to God : his independence rests in utter dependence.
His freedom is from the tyranny of partial claims, individual
desires and objects, from the half nesses and weaknesses of our
nature : and it is won by identification with the universal.
It is, in short, here that there comes in what is called
humility. To define it exactly is difficult, if not impossible :
for, like all goodness, it has the defect of its quality, and to be
precious it must never part company with its correlative,
independence. Humility is the sense of solidarity and com
munity: the controlling and regulating power of the con
sciousness that we are not our own, that we are God's and
our neighbour's 2. Humility is the attitude of an individual
who recognizes his individuality, his partiality, his dependence,
1 Gal. iv. 9. 2 And for our neighbour see the parable.

in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 51

his immanence in the whole, and his conformity with all the
parts, and yet of an individual who knows himself his own,
and not another's, a free man of God, a son and heir. To be
genuine, it must go hand in hand with the good conscience
and the faith unfeigned.

Finally, the most practical corollary is Love, 'Ayehnj.
There are, said the Jew, two great commandments on which
hinge all the law and prophets. The first bids love God with
all strength and soul and intellect; the second, love the
neighbour as self. If we separate them and minutely try
to balance the several claims, it will lead to unpleasant and
profitless casuistry. But they are not separate, and they
cannot be balanced against each other. God, self, and
neighbour, — they form an indissoluble trinity. Yet if the
central dogma of Christianity be the community of God and
man, the kingdom of the heavens, it is easily mistaken and
misconceived. It is not to be confused with mysticism.
Mysticism is the potent sense of the unseen, the vision of the
higher truth which sweeps the lower away. In it the soul
swoons away into the unseen : it passes by a bold act of
anticipation beyond the divisions of earth, and rests in utter
identification with the great source of life. The end of religion
is thus a certain deification : the finite and temporal sinks
absorbed in the great sea of being. God here tends to become
all in all: the individual and personal is utterly swamped,
and the great peace of the universe reigns unchecked.

Such mysticism can only be a mood — a mood that needs
its corrective and antithesis. It is the reaction from battle
and struggle — the lapse into the great bosom of nature, into
the identity of existence. To it the other world comes to be
a world to which we can only come by leaving this behind.
The mind that lingers on it may be more logically or more
aesthetically inspired : but in either case he will be apt
to lose religion in Theology, whether it be a mystical or
a scholastic theology.

IV

RELIGION AND MORALITY.-THE DEFINITION OF
RELIGION

IN this second course of lectures it is my intention to deal
with the question of the inner relations of morality and
religion. There is what may be called a departmental view
of human life which sets religion here and science there,
which separates art from morality and morality from religion.
It is a view which is useful in its place, but we should not
allow it to influence us too far. I shall not deny that there
is an ethics which, to all appearance, is independent of
religion; but I think it may be safely said that at the
present day a mere ethics and a mere religion are equally
impracticable and undesirable. Neither without the other
can fulfil what it promises. I do not mean that religion is
always necessary as a schoolmaster to enforce morality, but
I mean that, if we look to the origin and foundation of
morality, in other words, if we ask what is the function and
the place of morality in life and the universe, whether it is an
accident or the essence of things, whether it is something
that may or may not be, or something that must be, if any
thing be : if we ask such questions, we are driven to recognize
that religion is the complement and the implication of the
moral life. At any rate it will be my object in the following
lectures to try to show that it is so : or at least to point
out some directions in which ethics seems to imply or
postulate ideas, which lie at the very root of those religions

RELIGION AND MORALITY 53

which have played the most important part in the history of
the world.

The phrase ' Religion of Morality ' has to the ears of the
purist a sound ominous of a confusion of kinds, a mixture
of heterogeneous natures. Religion, it is thought, is one
thing, and morality another and altogether different. From
the one side the scorn falls on what is caljed mere morality,
from the other there is equal suspicion of mere religion. The
fanatic will keep sedulously apart the human and the divine,
the service of this world's humanity and the devotion to
the other world of eternal life. The confusion, it may be
urged, is like that of one who speaks of architecture as
' frozen music/ who breaks down the barrier lines between
epic and drama, who mixes poetry and prose, or blends
sculpture with painting.

Yet, it may be replied, is it not precisely the characteristic
glory of the highest art that, even in its definite department,
it speaks a language which awakes life and emotion in fields
seemingly far disparate? Like the outpouring of the
prophetic spirit on the first Christian Whitsuntide, it is
understood in many alien tongues. The great poet, the great
composer, the great painter, are endowed with an inspiration
wider than the so-called legitimate scope of their art. They
do not indeed mingle or confuse kinds, do not bring in poetry
to help where painting fails, or try to turn prose into poetry by
any accidental efflorescence. But in the real artistic life, the
life in the soul and spirit, which is all form and harmony and
grace, each art, divided in mediocre artists from its sisterhood,
again draws in the strength of its undivided source, the com
prehensive spirit of art itself. In its spirit and truth every
separate art ceases to be so separate ; it speaks with an -utter
ance which knows no limitation of departments, which spurns,
because it overcomes, the barriers fixed by grammar and
abstraction. The consummate artist concentrates in his
special gift the whole range of art-power ; the highest art

54 GIFFORD LECTURES [iv

special to an age is in a way the epitome and quintessence of
all other arts as well.

Adam, says the old legend, gave names to all cattle and to
the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field : < whatso
ever the man called every living creature that was the name
thereof/ But ere Adam called them they were there, called
into being by forces greater than a man-imposed name, knit
together by the development of a history, a genesis, which
his glance could not in an instant surmise. Their true
name, may we say, only their maker could know ; and that
name, if it were true to their reality, would be perhaps
a myriad-syllabled vocable. The stranger, confronted with
the problem, gave them names : he is seldom at a loss for
that, this nomenclator man : but in the long lapse of years
since Eden he has gradually gained a glimpse of the vast
discrepance between what he, simply, naively, fancifully or
practically named them, and the true names which they bore,
or will one day bear, in the muster-roll of God. All science,
says one, is but a ' language well made/ a language which
shall not miss true affinities and underlying connexions ;
which shall trace, say, in evolutional fashion, the inner
genealogy of Nature.

It is the stranger and the outsider who gives the name, the
outward observer. The bosom friend, the member of an
organic unity, hardly needs a name. Our name, for each of
us, is for others to use, for others' convenience. A tribe does
not give itself a name; at least in the primitive course of
things its name is given perhaps mostly by its enemies, by
aliens. And it is oftenest a sort of nickname, the freak of
what we call chance, which settles on some conspicuous
feature that appeals to the imagination.

Not otherwise is it with names like religion, or morals.
When we have recourse in such cases to etymology, we should
be on our guard against a misconception of its evidence. The
history of the elements of the word will not tell us what

iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 55

religion was to those who had it and lived in it : but it may
throw some light on what observers saw as they looked upon
it. It will tell us something of its outward phases and effects,
of the conduct and ceremony to which it gave rise. We
cannot tell what the Roman religion really and inwardly was ;
but whether we follow one etymology or another (re-ligere,
after Cicero, or re-ligare after Lactantius), the prominent
feature brought before the mind is (as in Lact. iv. 28, ' vinculo
pietatis obstricti Dei et religati ') a strictness and conscien
tiousness, a scrupulosity and care in behaviour, a diligent
observance of ceremony and form of worship (' religiosi = qui
omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinent diligenter retractant/
De Nat. Deor. ii. 28), a watchful anxiety in presence of some
superior influence (' superioris cujusdam naturae . . . curam
ceremoniamque affert/ De Inv. ii. 53).

It is this idea of strict obligatory control over human
action which is prominent in the word as it meets us in its
older French and English uses, prior to the seventeenth cen
tury. If Luther e. g. speaks of the ' old religion/ it is of its
objective ceremonial or ritual side that he is thinking. And
so Calvin (Instit. 66) says: ' j'estime que ce mot est oppose a la
trop grande licence et excessive que la plupart de monde s'est
permise. . . . Religion done comporte autant comme une
retraite et discretion mure et bien fondee/ It is the same
disciplinary consciousness of being ever in the great task
master's eye that made Frenchmen speak of the Huguenots as
messieurs de la religion. And if we open the pages of Chaucer
or his contemporaries, we find perhaps a more restricted con
ception of religion. Religion to him is special consecration of
place and conduct to direct special divine service. A place of
religion is e. g. a monastery : a man of religion is one in holy
orders.

Religion thus holds a separate and definite sphere in life,
confined as it seems to selected spots, and peculiar modes of
action. It surrenders as it were its claim to rule whatever we

56 GIFFORD LECTURES [iv

do, and to be wherever we are, if only we give it and secure
it a special realm.

But whatever be the range of its sway, the obligatory
nature, the awe-inspiring and legal character attaches to it.
Religion is, in fact, divine law. Under that name it appears
in mediaeval language as Lex nostra, Lex Judaica. The
conception, of course, is, in part, that of the older Judaic, but
in a deeper sense it is a common, almost universal, attitude to
God. Religion is the sense of a covenant obligation, a bind
ing tie. It need not surprise us, therefore, that in Parsifal
and the Nibelungen Lied the word for religion and its sanctity
is fi (the modern EJie, now used only of marriage) : e. g. in
Knstenlicker fi, or den touf, und Kristen fi. And so in
Shakespeare the commonest sense involves this emphasis on
conscientious obligation, strict fidelity, loyal obedience ; e. g.
f Keep your promise with no less religion ' (As Yon Like It,
iv. T. 201); 'When the devout religion of mine eye'' (Rom.
i. 2. 97) ; ' How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear
religious love stolen from mine eye ' (Son. 31).

The decisive novelty of the Lutheran reform was in the
direction of a subversion of this apparent predominance of
objective religion. For the outward ordinance, the minute
and accurate performance of measured duties, it substituted
the inward feeling, the subjective attitude of faith. The word
for true religion in the Lutheran language is Glaube : and
the essence of Glaube isfu/ilen. ' Du musst bei dir selbst im
Gewissen f iihlen Christum selbst, und unbeweglich empfmden
dass es Gottes Wort sei/

Yet it would be a mistake to speak of the movement as
a change of the emphasis merely from the objective to the
subjective side. To some extent the Catholic mysticism of
the later mediaeval times had done that before. The other
and perhaps more important step was that the Lutheran
reform sought to put an end to the restriction of religion to
a specially religious sphere, a higher and peculiar range of

iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 57

sanctity. Not that Catholicism had failed to recognize the
presence of the divine law in all secular life. Marriage it had
declared a sacrament ; in other words, it had set the human
ethical relationship as part of the direct ordinance of God, as
a service of the kingdom of heaven ; not as a convenient
arrangement for social well-being, but as a method of salvation,
and only to be engaged in as a way and means to the attain
ment of eternal life. If the older Catholicism failed, it was
because its social or political organization created and enforced
grades of goodness,, which were not in accordance with its
own essential doctrines.

Lutheranism could not long remain true to its own funda
mental intuition. In the stress of conflict between reformation
and counter-reformation, reality and belief had to give way to
formulae or creeds. The term 'faith' or ' belief ' as a volitional
act, an effort of the whole man, a lively personal apprehension,
was, by the force of objectivity and of words, turned into
a set of beliefs, a creed. The only apparent result was, it
might seem, that a new narrowness was substituted for the
old. Once it had been a special region of act, ceremony,
observance : now it was a special form and phrase of defini
tion of doctrine. Religion, in Protestantism, thus gains a
dominantly intellectual, a sort of literary, character. According
to Calovius (p. 282) it ' comprehends all things which are
comprehended in theology, whether they are things to be
done, or things to be believed/ But to speak of a ' thing
to be believed ' is already to use language in which the great
vision of Luther runs a risk of being lost. Theology and
religion are in danger of coinciding — to the injury of both.
Nor need we lay much stress on the fact that the two sides of
religion (theoretical and practical) are set side by side, uncon
nected. It is only a further gliding on the same slope when
it is declared that faith proper (fiducia) is preceded by bare
knowledge (notitia) of the facts.

Religion had been transferred to the field of science : it had

5g GIFFORD LECTURES [iv

been, that is, appropriated by the rising tide of the modern
world and of scientific civilization, of literature and popular
opinion. It comes forward, or rather is brought forward, into
discussion, by those who looked at it from the outside, and
tried to correlate it with the other aspects of life. It sought
to legitimate itself in the court of science, and became the
so-called science of theology, or, on the other hand, it was
decried and scorned by those who judged it by the canons of
physical science. With the Reformation rationalism, the
unchecked lust of reasoning and explaining, had been let
loose, and alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy it ruled.

Yet, that the real sphere of religion was elsewhere, was
never utterly forgotten. It hardly needed Schleiermacher to
repeat that the essence of religious life is the sense of utter
and all-round dependency. When Kant had described the
essence of religion as the recognition of all our duties as
commands of God, he had said the same thing in balder
language, in language less mystically attractive than the
vaguer and suggestive words of Schleiermacher, and open
to obvious misinterpretation by those who would press the
meaning of terms like ' command/ or like ' recognition/
where the old error of intellectualism might seem to lurk.

And, if we take a contemporary of Schleiermacher, let us
hear Schelling, who reiterates the essentiality of duty, but of
a duty inspired by something higher than subjection, a some
thing which he calls at once heroism, faith, fidelity to yourself
and to God1.

'By religiosity, the inner power and spirit of religion,
I understand/ says Schelling1, 'not an instinct groping
towards the divine, and not mere emotional devoutness : for
God, if He be God, must be the very heart of life of all
thinking and all action, and not a mere object of devout
passion or of belief. That is no real knowledge of God,
where He is merely object : either God is not known at all,

1 Schelling, Werke, Erste Abtheilung, Band vi, p. 558-9.

iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 59

or He is at once subject and object of knowledge. He must
be at once our very self, our heart of hearts, and yet compre
hending all hearts far beyond us. Religion is higher than
dim outstretching hope and feeling for God. The first
meaning of the much misused word is conscientiousness; it
expresses the law that knowledge and action are at one so
supremely, that action must inevitably follow knowledge.
He is not conscientious who in a given case must first set
before himself the command of duty, in order to decide
himself to act rightly through respect for its mandate.
Religion means that action is bound, obliged, that there is
no choice between opposites, but supreme decidedness for the
right, without option/

Conscientiousness, it is true, does not always appear as
enthusiasm, or heroism ; it may consist in strict fulfilment
of duty, and, as in the case of Cato, show a certain hardness
and harshness in its features. But such strictness and scrupu
losity is, like the strictness of life in the physical world, the
germ from which will yet issue true grace and real divinity.
When the divine principle at its root has sprung into life
through its strictness of sentiment, then virtue presents itself
as enthusiasm, as ( heroism, i. e. action which does not spring
from the finite nature of man, but is the free and beautiful
courage of a man to act as God instructs him, and not to fall
short in action from what he has seen to be true' ; or if we call
such religion faith, the word is not to be taken to mean assent
to a proposition which is partly doubtful, and where assent
therefore is regarded as meritorious, but ' in its original sense
of a trust and confidence in the divine which excludes or
abolishes all choice. . . . This faith and this fidelity to your
selves and the divine/ adds Schelling in his lecture, ( I wish
you to take with you into life as the sole true fruit of
philosophy/

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION

ONE of the most important facts or problems in the life of
the present day is that which is best described as the ethical
movement in religion. That movement, as it obviously presents
itself, has two very distinct phases. It is a movement inside
the Churches (both the Christian Churches and also Churches
that are not exactly Christian) ; and it is a movement outside
the Churches,, though not always or necessarily hostile to them.
It shows itself e.g. in the rise of what are called Ethical
Societies in America, in France, and in this country — societies
which are, indeed, not very important, if judged by outward
bulk. A few human beings linked in action for fhe purpose
of bettering the general standard of ethical feeling, may seem
rather a subject for jest. But they are one indication of
a widely prevailing want of satisfaction with the results both
of religious and of scientific teaching : and the initiation of an
effort after something better, which the historian of the future
will not count unworthy of regard.

The present state of opinion upon ethics and religion may
remind the student of history of what happened at Athens
more than 2,000 years ago. Then also the old landmarks of
local religion and patriotism seemed to disappear. A little
town, by a series of achievements and struggles about which
the world has not yet grown tired of hearing, found itself
suddenly planted on a new scale of existence, with new duties
and outlooks, calling for new preparations. It entered upon

THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 61

a larger life, the life of a cosmopolitan centre — cosmopolitan,
at least, so long- as the world was a Mediterranean world.
There was a call for more virtue. But what, it may be asked,
was virtue ? It is a question which in the modern world has
had to be asked : for words, like other things, grow stale and
unprofitable, mere shadows of themselves. Again and again
in the course of history virtue has been taken in a purely
neutral sense ; or rather we should say, it has been taken in
a quite negative sense. It has come to mean, neither doing
something, nor the ability to do something, but the not doing
something, the power of abstinence. Instead of the idea of
force or manly energy, it has been used to express the nega
tion of force, or at best the power of self-control ; nay, it has
sunk lower still. So too with propriety : in its first power the
word meant being all that one should be, realizing one's own,
self-realization, being true to one's own self and working out
one's own law. Even in Adam Smith the word still meant
the sense of proportion in things. But it too sank till it
expressed no more than negative merit, till it stood in a line
with mediocrity and meant or suggested something strait-
laced, cold, and formal.

Now virtue of the real stamp is positive ability, the power
to act, to act well and vigorously. And when we say ability
to act, let us add, that ability, if it be real, is itself action.
It is the initiative of act, inchoate action, tendency passing
forward into energy. It is not mere not doing something
which is to be condemned; it is doing, or readiness to do,
something which is required by law, by ideal, by social
demand, by the needs of life.

As new circumstances involve new work, the call of virtue
assumes a new phase. In a stagnant or decaying civilization,
such, for instance, as we meet in the later days of Greco-
Roman fame, when life and progress had died out, to all
appearance virtue came to be endurance, self-denial, restraint :
it acquired a passive tincture. At such times the world gets

62

GIFFORD LECTURES [v

to move in a quasi-mechanical routine, and the great require
ment is to step accurately in the line, and show no sign of
originality or independence. But at other seasons virtue must
be positive. It can no longer be a cold morality, a formal
compliance ; it must be warm, active, and onward-going. It
is fully all that it is, only when it is so active. Yet, perhaps
we do well to remember that resistance also is action ; that
much effort may sometimes be demanded merely to produce
equilibrium : that energy is not always best exhibited by
{ agitation/ and that there may be a strenuous inertia,
a service of those ' who only stand and wait/

To meet the demand in Athens arose a class of teachers who
professed to communicate the requisite ability, who taught
the virtue which fitted for the discharge of social and public
functions. It was urged against them by some observers that
in these departments teaching, specific training, culture was
unnecessary. Everybody, it was said, can speak Greek, and
he learns it naturally by the practice of life. Yet it was
found that speaking Greek required in certain cases more than
mother-wit and family example could supply. So, too, what
ever differences may be between men, they may be all said to
be pretty equally endowed as regards a moral sense, shame of
wrong-doing, and sense of justice. Yet here too the new
complexities of social existence created cases where the old
average hardly met the needs of the situation. It is no doubt
true in a way that he who can rule his own soul can rule
a kingdom, yet perhaps a few considerations as to the aims,
methods, and machinery of political life may not be amiss.

The same questions arise for the modern world, and we
may say, if we like, that in both cases they are due to the
advent of what is called Democracy. What is Democracy ?
To the observation of Plato, as of many observers since,
Democracy has seemed another name for Anarchy. Its very
name sounds amiss : it is mass-force, the violent power of the
great multitude, of the whole people. It is Kratos-torce

v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 63

(remember Kpdros KOU Bta in the Prometheus). Monarchy and
oligarchy are rule and direction of one or few, but democracy,
it is said, suggests only absence of all direction, all principle,
all originative rule — anarchy.

But Plato, if he is occasionally unjust, and gives scope
to sarcasm, is equally aware that democracy may be some
thing better than anarchy. There is a democracy which is
according to law, a democracy in which there is no absence
of apxy, but where every citizen from the highest to the
lowest, from the least to the most capable, is in his measure
and degree an arche, archon, though, as we may add from
Aristotle, none is ap^av who is not also ap^ofjitvos, i. e. who
is not in his own person at once sovereign and subject, at
once lawgiver and law-bound, king and commoner. This
then is the true or ideal democracy, the organization of the
total power of a group of human beings, in which none is
merely a mean or instrument of service, but each also enjoys
the end of his own and others' action ; in which there is
fraternity, but not necessarily equality or even vulgar liberty ;
or where the equality lies in common duty of service, and the
liberty in the removal of all mere passivity.

On its negative side, then, democracy is the power and
force of the whole body, as against the decided dominance
of one or of several classes in the body politic. As so
negative, it has an appearance of no direction, of anarchy.
But the positive side must not be ignored. And that, in one
word, is autonomy, self-direction, self-organization. It is not
the negation of direction or government, but its completion
and universalization. To realize that positive side is the
work of education : and, it is in the recognition of that
problem that the promoters of an ethical movement have
their place and function in the present as in the past. They
are the witness of a feeling that something is amiss; that
the order of the world is passing through a change, and that
a new effort is needed to set it right, to prevent stagnation

<54 GIFFORD LECTURES [v

and corruption. It is not quite so clear that they have dis
covered the root of the evil, or that they are on the likely way
to a solution of the question.

More than this. If we are guided by the analogy of the
old world, we may well doubt whether the issue is at all
simple and near. Even where only material interests are
concerned, it is often long ere the great masses can be got
to discern the nature of the needs they labour under. It
requires the guidance of genius to show the place of the evil.
It is not for everyone to say where the shoe pinches. The
sense of the masses is a vague feeling of malaise, a vague
disgust, spite, indignation, against something wrong : but to
discern what the wrong precisely is or in what it exactly
consists, that is just what the masses are unable to compass,
and what their leaders, good or false, try or pretend to make
possible for them. So it is alike in material and spiritual
evil. The remedy comes only by diagnosis, by the ascer
tainment of the definite nature, the characteristic feature, of
the ailment.

So in the ancient Greek world, it was not a simple matter
to say what was the evil eating at the root of life. It was
easy of course to note symptoms : for a little natural inter
pretation in a predisposed mind can turn any fact into a
symptom, and a spontaneous imagination may easily add to
their number. But the diagnosis of the disease of Greece
which Plato offered, and the ideal of the good and happy life
which he faintly indicated, were too alien to the ordinary
mind of his countrymen to find immediate response. Yet
the Greek philosophers by direct and indirect energies laboured
a soil of which other people reaped the fruits. It is by no
means fanciful to say that the organization of the mediaeval
Church was the realization of Plato's ideal, though a realiza
tion of it which was deeply pervaded by a spirit of alien
tone. The early Christian writers themselves in their saner
moods spoke of Greek philosophy as the preparation of

v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 65

Gospel, though sometimes in their blind zeal they styled it
devilish.

To us looking at the facts in the light of history, it is
hardly possible to say otherwise than that though it was well
done, it was far from being thoroughly well done, or so done
that it can be considered satisfactorily done for ever. But
we need cherish no illusions as to what we can learn from
the past. The cry is again and again raised. Back to —
it may only be to Kant : it may be to Greece, it may be
to mediaeval Christendom, it may be to primitive Christianity,
or, as with Rousseau, it may be back to Nature. But in what
sense back ? What has been done, even the gods themselves
(says the adage) cannot make undone. All that historical
reversions can do is to suggest that in the onward move
ment something precious had been left behind, which it
were well to recover before going further. But the Nature,
the Greece, the Christianity we go back to is not in the past ;
it is, seen through the arch of experience, the gleam of that
untrodden world to which we move. To seek them in the past
is to seek the living among the dead. The gates of one
Paradise are closed, the Paradise of infancy, of simple hours,
of naive faith. The gates of Paradise are eternally open.

The ethical movement, as it has been called, is the result
of various influences, and is an attempt to satisfy various
needs. It grows out of felt wants, and gropes about to find
a remedy. It is no solution, but a step towards a solution.
Its most obvious source perhaps is found in what some people
would rashly call the decline and fall of religious belief. But
what is thus called by the comprehensive title of religious
belief is only one part of the existing religious spirit and
institution, and perhaps not its most central or religious part.
What has fallen or is falling is not that central spirit of
religion which we found described as conscientiousness, de
votion, reverence, loyalty, fidelity, enthusiasm, and heroism.

66 GIFFORD LECTURES [v

What has fallen is not that trust in the world order, that
faithfulness unto death, that joy in well-doing, that cheer
fulness of good conscience, which made obedience no burden,
and service a delight. These things, it may be said, are now
seldom seen : but so, it may be answered, was it always,
may be added perhaps that they are oftener to be seen for
those who have the eye to detect them than our cheap cynicism

admits.

What has changed lies in another part of the religious
system. What has fallen, or rather what has become un
certain and suspect, is the historical and metaphysical dogmas,
the cosmic theory, which have been knit up with religion.
In the history of the Christian Church— in a way which
I endeavoured in my last year's course of lectures to trace-
there grew up slowly and naturally a creed, a body or group
of articles, partly historical, partly philosophical, in which
an effort was made to express the fundamental Christian
conception of what man was, is, and would be; what God
is, how the world is related to God and to man; in other
words, to furnish a scheme of beliefs about life and death,
duty and reward, which should answer all demands that
legitimate curiosity on man's part could make. By those
who formulated this body of doctrine, these articles of faith,
it was believed that their labours and decisions only codified
and defined what originally, in some exceptionally favoured
epoch of history and in some peculiarly holy land, had been
given forth with an authority more than human, and from
a source veritably divine. In some way — though precisely
how it happened, an unanalytical age barely presumed to
inquire— God had communicated directly with men and given
them a message, in which the true purpose of existence was
revealed, and the means indicated by which the full fruition
of existence for man might be realized. That message was,
as it were, a bequest consigned to a trust, left in charge of
a community who, walking by the light of the revelation,

v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 67

maintained it intact in their treasury-archives as a funda
mental document, a title deed to the inheritance. That
document is of course the sacred Scripture. But while
maintaining- the deed intact and seeing- to the training of
a select body, the so-called clergy,, which should be able to
read and interpret it, the main function which the Church
claimed as her abiding work was to celebrate, i. e. to repeat
and realize, in symbolic ceremony, the perpetual meaning of
the said message. A system of rites, a series of sacramental
observances, carried out in all departments of life the purport
of the fundamental conception of life and duty. The aim of
the Church was to make each individual feel and perceive
for himself that here and now the meaning of the everlasting
Gospel was enacted and realized. A symbolic ceremony was
by active participation of the celebrant the sign of an inward
process. Day by day, year by year, in appointed cycle, the
Church re-enacted the deed once done, the life once lived and
the death once died, not in vain repetition or impious travesty
of the accomplished fact, but in order to enforce by sensible
image the eternal and universal virtue of the truth, of the
law of life, the way to life which is true life, or, as the phrase
is, life eternal. If it be said that this is but opus operatum
operari, it might be replied : Even so, always, what God may
be said to do once for all, man, the child of time, can only
equal by eternal repetition.

But with the Reformation, which was also and most
obviously a Revolt, a new view of the Church's duty emerged.
It was supposed, not without reason, that the Church under
took to do by her own authority what had been done once
and for all in a remote past. Not content to occupy till
He came who should restore all things, the Church, it was
said, had usurped the absent ruler's place, and claimed to rule
by right of her own, as if her dominion were irresponsible
and not merely vicarious. She was accordingly thrust aside
as illegitimately intervening between the soul and its God.

68 GIFFORD LECTURES [v

The whole ritual was pronounced to be a work of idolatry.
And it was reasserted that not the ceremonial was the
essential, but the inward spiritual change which the cere
monial typified. And if, indeed, the Church had so stepped in
between, if she had assumed a mediatorial function between
man and God, so far the change made was to be justified.
If, on the other hand, the Church had only acted in its
organic capacity as a whole, to guide and help the faint
efforts of its weaker members, the change was less excusable.
If the Church had meant to teach that not the temporary
event but its real significance was the essence of true religion,
if her symbolism was merely the means of making the dogma
approach the apprehension of ignorant minds, then who shall
say the Church was wholly wrong ?

Such in barest outline is the quarrel between Catholicism
and Protestantism. It is time perhaps to realize that, like
all violent changes, the Reformation only helped progress
by accentuating the fundamental issues involved in religious
life, as a life in the world. It did not answer the questions
it raised, and it imported a new bitterness into all attempts
to answer them. At any rate, what happened was that the
documentary evidence of Scripture came to be looked upon
as all important. The historical record took the place of the
Church. The title deed became more important than the
estate. Nominally at least, the individual was encouraged
to regard the document as a private promissory note, which
he could use by the light of his own soul, or by a light
privately vouchsafed, without regard to the community. It
was not long indeed before the right of private interpretation
was claimed. Protestantism gradually and perhaps inevitably
came to assert that the whole truth, the whole message
of God to man, was contained in the ' Testament/ There
each, even the cottager at her own door, could read clear
her title to a mansion in the skies. But the fact, which
remained unchanged by any formal declaration of indepen-

v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 69

dence, was that the interpretation,, which fifteen centuries
had helped to consolidate, remained in its main features
dominant over those who renounced allegiance to the Pope
at Rome. The quarrel had in the first instance touched
only on the machinery. Like all quarrels, indeed, it induced
a spirit of suspicion which surmised evil everywhere. But,
in the deeper regions of belief, the old scheme still remained
in essentials unaltered as the theory of true life.

And, practically, in all the gamut of Protestantism down
to Congregationalism, and if there be ranges beyond it, the
individual never came merely and simply in contact with
the revelation. He might see with ' old lights ' or with ' new
lights/ but always he saw the truth revealed in Scripture
through some common light, a light burning in a community,
however narrow might be the limits he assigned it. When
he sought toleration, it was often because he wanted to
tyrannize in a body after his own mind. With an excusable
inconsistency Protestantism accepted in the main, though
with slight reservation and corrections, the doctrinal system
which the efforts of theologians in council had wrought out
of the data of the original documents.

Now in the course of last year's lectures I attempted to
show that it is a delusion to suppose that these doctrinal
systems are merely the pure colourless statement in logical
form of God-given truth. In all cases they are a synthesis,
a compound product, due to a reflection on the data of
Christianity, which was guided in the main by ideas derived
from Greek philosophy. They are a mixture of good metal
and other less worthy elements. And when I thus express
it, I do not mean that the dividing line between these
elements lies at the boards of the Bible. The line of dis
tinction is harder to draw than that. The tares lie mixed
with the wheat even within the sacred precincts; and the
separation of false from true is not to be made by simply
returning to a given tradition of the past, but in working

?0 GIFFORD LECTURES [v

and waiting for what is called the < end of the world/ the
revelation of the sons of God. These theological structures
were the result of attempts to rationalize the faith and the
articles of belief it embraces, and out of them to form a
system of doctrine. But such a system could not be final ;
the doctrine must grow, i. e. it must be altered and enlarged.

Since the Reformation dogmatic theology in the older
sense could make no advances. And why? It was then
asserted that the real theology lay in the limited words and
scope of the Scriptures, and that the creative process of
religion had been restricted to the space of a few years. Hence
the naive process by which the early Church built up theology,
seeking to give to religion and science, to faith and art,
a unity of scheme and idea, was henceforth condemned as
unscriptural and illegitimate. All that could be done was
to set the same old material in a slightly different light :
but to add to it was impossible. You see the results in the
endless series of German Dogmatics. A narrower view of
the "position was to reject all theology or interpretation and
cling to the Scriptures alone. Hold to them, and you will
be safe.

But this standpoint is untenable, (i) The private inter
pretation of the individual no less than that of the Church
involves the application of ideas of human and social origin.
Private theology is liable to all the additional recklessness of in
dividual judgement. For individual judgement is — what ? The
judgement of one biassed by an opinion due to surroundings,
to instruction, habit, and all the various mixture of ignorance
and knowledge. Always it is the product of class influences ;
its roots lie outside its apparent source, it is the work of
many causes, necessitated on all hands; and yet it comes
forward with the claim of freedom and independence. Wir
freie Geister, says Nietzsche. But who gave us Geisf- and
Fretieit? (2) The title-deeds themselves are subjected to
criticism. This applies to Catholic as well as Protestant

v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 71

theology, so far as it is founded upon Scripture. Yet
Catholicism has still the living- and actual faith and practice
of an abiding body to fall back upon. It has never com
pletely pinned its faith to history and a limited tradition.
It has built on the universal tradition of all ages,, i. e. really
on the essential humanity or rationality of its doctrines.

What was the crowning merit of Catholicism ? The very
thing which many a modern, accustomed to identify it with
the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, or perhaps with
a caricature even of these, would probably deny to it. That
is, that in a rough and imperfect way the Church regarded
itself as a central and guiding principle of life, to which
indeed all other things were but ancillary ; but, just for that
reason, conceived it as a duty to give to each of them a place
and a function within itself. Hence science, art, social life,
political union, grew up as integral parts of its structure.
The unity, perhaps, was somewhat roughly compacted : and
it only held out against criticism so long as progress was slow
or imperceptible. But still, as Dante shows us, the synthesis
of life was there. Already, however, in the Cinquecento the
Renaissance indicates that disease has set in for the organism ;
that disease which consists in the too unequal growth of the
several members. And soon the Reformation comes to make
a deep rent in the one body of spiritual life. It breaks up the
unity of art, science, morality, and religion. And it does so,
though with characteristic variations in either case, both for
the Reformed Church and for the Church of the Council
of Trent.

But, on the other hand, science in the mean time has
been setting itself up side by side with religion, taking
religion in the narrow sense. That is, a view of the world^s
meaning and drift has been slowly growing up, parallel with
and partly antagonistic to the strictly religious view. The
latter has no doubt the advantage of being a more closely
wrought, complete coat of mail. But it is antiquated. The

72 GIFFORD LECTURES

new view is growing, fragmentary, progressive, and therefore
incomplete. It is forming from different sources, by slow
processes of natural growth, here a little and there a little,
though it still remains the property of a few and are by them
known only in parts. It is chaotic, assertive, and self-con
tradictory ].

1 At this point the manuscript abruptly stops. In the three following
lectures Professor Wallace examined the influence of modern science and
literature in changing our ideas of religion. The manuscript begins again
in the sixth lecture with an examination of Mr. Balfour's Foundations
of Belief, and is continuous to the end of the course.

VI

ME. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF '

THE title of Mr. Balfour's book promises to lay bare the
'Foundations of Belief/ and ' to delineate, and if possible
to recommend'' a particular way of looking at the world-
problems ' — a way which may be briefly styled the theological,
perhaps even the Christian. The theme of the book is less
purely theoretic, and more polemical than its title suggests.
It is in the main an examination and an indictment of a
modern creed, to which the critic has given the name of
Naturalism, and which is, by definition, the negation of all
theology. The book falls into four parts. In the first
part there is an exposition of some ' consequences/ which in
Mr. Balfour's judgement follow from the naturalistic creed,
certain changes, which its uncompromising acceptance would
involve, in our estimate of the principles we call ethical,
aesthetical, and logical or intellectual : in other words, this
part seeks to show that the naturalistic standpoint, if
thoroughly adopted, would in the long run dry up and
cause to wither away every belief in the paramountcy of
righteousness and beauty and reason1.

Naturalism, it is therefore concluded, is practically insuffi
cient. The second part, under the title of Some Reasons for

1 The book, perhaps by an oversight, describes this part as ' Some
Consequences of Belief ' ; it really treats of ' Presumable Consequences
of the Naturalistic Creed.'

?4 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi

Belief, carries us to a point of outlook from which we can, at
a proper distance, survey the philosophers, the men of sound
common sense, and the professional theologians, at their work
of providing- a rationale for a, or their, or Uie creed. First of
all— and that from respect to their ' formidable following '-
come the Naturalistic Empiricists. By that name is meant
those who, in the first place, attempt to provide a theory
which may show on what the certainty and stability of the
sciences rest, a task in which they have failed (' such/ remarks
Mr. Balfour, ' is after all the common lot of philosophies ') ;
and who, in the second place, disguising- or ignoring their
failure, have, under cover of the successes of the sciences
which they profess to explain, contrived to foist upon the
blatant part of the world a theory of life and of all reality,
which is no necessary concomitant or part of genuine science,
and which at once fails to satisfy the conscience, and violates
the coherence of reason. In a second rank, as befits their scanty
numbers, and their foreign origin (for their utterances, made
English out of German, are such no ' ordinary Englishman
will consent to assimilate '), come the Idealists. ' Very remote,
indeed, from ordinary modes of expression/ the doctrines of
these ' Idealists/ or, as they are often doubly dubbed in the
text, ' Transcendental Idealists/ are for the general reader's
sake veiled in a chapter in smaller type, wrhich he is recom
mended to omit. For the present it need only be said that
under this head are weighed and found wanting certain views,
more or less attachable to Kant and T. H. Green; the net result
of the criticism being that these views have their natural
outcome in Solipsism, the theory that ' in the infinite variety
of the universe there is room for but one knowing subject,
and that for each one of us severally this subject is "him
self.1"' Such a conclusion, so obviously inconsistent with
science, morality, and common sense, seems indeed to justify
the place given to < transcendental idealism ' on Mr. Balfour's
'index expurgatorim. Behind these Metaphysicians who are

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' 75

poets of the abstract and supersensible, but to be sure, poets
with a difference (for it cannot often be said that the product
of their labours is a ' thing1 of beauty '), come as third line of
array, the troop of Rationalists. These, otherwise known as
champions of common sense or enlightenment, are not, as such,
philosophers: they, indeed, ignore, if they do not despise,
metaphysics. They judge as men of the world, and test
every belief by one touchstone : they ask, of every article
of any creed, does it ' square with the view of the universe
based exclusively upon the prevalent mode of interpreting
sense-perception''? Rationalism, in short, is the method
which, in an age where the physical sciences have a pre
ponderating eclat, inevitably leads to Naturalism. It is
1 Naturalism in embryo/ And its right to the name
Rationalism is based on its carrying out at least that
principal function of reason, which is to smooth away con
tradiction, to remove inconsistencies. Lastly, as a fourth
group, with its own attitude to the problem of belief, comes
the band labelled ' Rationalist Orthodoxy/ Here muster
the Natural Theologians, who make theology c a mere annex
or appendix to science, a mere footnote to history ' ; or who,
in other words, profess, by an extension of physical methods
and the evidence of historical fact, to read God's word in the
rocks, in the struggles of animated life, and in the course of
civilization. The doom of Natural Theology is written : it
has appealed to natural science, but it is not by the method of
science that it can c break out of the naturalistic prison-house/
The third part propounds ' Some Causes of Belief/ It
supposes us to take the position of an observer from another
planet ' who, in a spirit of detached curiosity/ surveys beliefs
from the outside, so as to find out the place they occupy in
the natural history of the earth and its inhabitants. The
task of this observer is, it may be suggested, by no means
easy, not to say impossible : but let that pass. With
a penetrative power such as archangel cannot match, he sees

?6 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi

where it exists (in certain vital forms) the correspondence of
neural change and psychic event: he sees the beliefs of external
things with their order in time and place forming in the indi
vidual mind. But he soon discovers that other influences than
those of the physiological structure of the individual man are
at work in forming the individual's creed. Man's beliefs are
not all on one level : they rise in a kind of hierarchy. And to
explain such of them as are connected with the higher scientific,
social and spiritual life of the race, there is needed something
more than physiological structure : an appropriate environment
is required. In that environment one group of causes influ
encing these higher beliefs is specially selected for notice.
This group is named briefly Authority. To fix its place and
function, according to Mr. Balfour's estimate of it, we need
only note that it is styled the ' rival and opponent ' of reason.
It ' stands for that group of non-rational causes, moral, social,
and educational, which produces its results by psychic processes
other than reasoning/ To Authority we owe the order and
stability of the moral world : by it the efforts of reason to
rationalize are ' coerced to a fore-ordained issue ' : throughout
the whole course of history its part in producing belief is
immense, inevitable, and, on the whole, beneficent: it is
through it that are generated ' psychological climates/
i.e. general and irresistible habits of belief of which reason
is but the dupe or the captive. Even ' rationalism ' itself
rules those whom it rules, not by its reasonableness, but as
a mood and a fashion of the set, the age, or the place.
Political ' loyalty ' is one of the most valuable products of
authority. The believer, it is true, will often attempt by
reason to justify his faith ; and in the causes which, as
a matter of fact, have generated it, he will profess to discover
reasons which legitimate it. But in so doing, he is the victim
of an illusion which he would be the first to condemn in others.
' It is from Authority that Reason itself draws its most im
portant premises/ ' It is Authority rather than Reason to

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF3 77

which in the main we owe not religion only, but ethics and
polities'; and not these only, but the essential elements of
the premises of science, and the foundations and the super
structure of social life. And, on the other side, we are
reminded, that ' reasoning- is a force most apt to divide and
disintegrate/

The fourth part offers ' Suggestions towards a Provisional
Philosophy/ i. e. towards the ' unification of all belief into an
ordered whole, compacted into one coherent structure under
the stress of reason/ Of these various and heterogeneous
beliefs, certain, viz. those about the world of phenomena, the
so-called material world, possess a peculiar prominence ; for
they seem inevitable and universal to a degree to which no
others can lay claim. But from the view of reflective reason
this pre-eminence is ' irrelevant/ The omnipresence of the
material world in our habitual moods is the product of an
irrational coercion ; it is forced upon us by the elementary
necessities of life, bred from infancy into our very flesh and
bone. The universality and necessity of our beliefs in the
reality of the material world cannot, therefore, confer on these
beliefs superiority of rank or dignity. The needs which a
scheme of belief must reasonably satisfy are not merely those
which we ' share with our brute progenitors/ It is on this
gradation of beliefs that the whole question hinges. The
postulate underlying all beliefs about e phenomena/ as well
as about things other than what are ordinarily called phe
nomena, is a ' harmony between our inner selves and the
universe of which we form a part'; a correspondence not
partial, but complete, between our essential selves and the
eternal reality of things. It is the assumption that the
human consciousness in its fundamental character, its essential
requirements, strikes a note which is answered in complex
harmony by the deepest heart in the ordered frame of the
universe.

At this point Mr. Balfour interpolates some remarks on the

78 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi

relation between beliefs and formulas especially in theology.
There, as he puts it, < the explanation and the thing explained
are mutually dependent/ The abandonment of a theory
which formulates a religious experience often carries with it,
to popular apprehension, the negation of the fact on which
it is based. It is as if gravitation would cease to act, should
the gravitation theory be shaken. But there is another point
which gives a special character to the theological formula.
That formula is not merely a statement of theoretical agree
ment : it is the index and the support of the unity of an
associated organization. Hence an alteration in the creed
tends to draw with it a revolution in the corporate life.
And even while the formula remains to outward appearance
the same, its inner meaning is almost certainly undergoing
a continuous and hardly perceptible change. The words of it
no longer are answered in those who repeat it by the
thoughts which they once awakened. And in any case the
thoughts themselves are, at the best, but inadequate repre
sentations and expressions of the one all-embracing reality,
be that reality in the last resort what it may. ' What kind
of a universe/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would that be which we
could understand ? ' It may be exaggeration to say that the
very absurdity and impossibility of a dogma are the best
witness to its truth ; but at any rate an excess of simplicity
in a theory is always a good ground for preliminary
suspicion.

These distinctions — the distinction between the two functions
of formulas as expositions of doctrine and as a basis for common
action, and again the distinction between the formal precision
of formulas as modes of expression, and the material reality
of the belief they shadow forth — may serve to moderate our
demands upon formulas and our criticism on their imperfec
tions. They suggest how difficult it is to determine that
element in doctrine or dogma or belief which may be truly
styled immutable, which amid all variations of formula and

vi] MR. BALFOUR' S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF* 79

explanation may be regarded as the ark of truth, the veritas
vere catJiolica enshrined and hidden in formulas. What these
' immutable doctrines'' are, Mr. Balfour does not take upon
himself to say. But that there are such propositions, charged
no doubt in course of time and progress of knowledge with
richer and richer content, c propositions about the real world
capable of ministering unchanged for indefinite periods to the
uses of Mankind/ inalienable KriJ/xara es ad, — is what he is
concerned to asseverate.

The fourth chapter of this part is of the nature of an
argumentnm ad Jiommem. It is addressed to those who, while
ready enough to admit or insist upon the radical inadequacy
of all theological formulae, are under the fixed impression
that scientific statements bring us face to face with supreme
reality and touch the very foundation of things. By a few
pertinent questions, e. g. as to what is a l thing/ and by some
deeper probing of Mr. Spencer's admissions as to ' ultimate
scientific ideas/ Mr. Balfour urges the inference that, if we
cannot clearly make out even what is a 'thing/ it is not
wonderful that we should come short in our knowledge of
God ; and that, if the basis of physical uniformity is admitted
to be a puzzle, some obscurity is not a wholly intolerable
offence in theories about the basis of moral law.

Science cannot solve all riddles. It cannot, as represented
by its theoretical exponents, even justify its own premises.
But it has its place. It is not, indeed, as Naturalism sup
poses, the possessor and standard of all truth and reality, but
it is a province and an important one, co-operating with
others in the revelation of the one reality. These provinces,
physical science, ethics, aesthetics and theology, are (each in
its measure and kind) ( the expression of a reality beyond our
reach, the half-seen vision of transcendent truth'; and the
problem of philosophy is (with all its powers, be they what
they may) 'to harmonize the detached hints and isolated
fragments in which alone Reality comes into relation to us/

8o G1FFORD LECTURES [vi

We have, however, not done with ' Naturalism/ It has to
sustain another and a closer assault. The early chapters
showed how utterly insufficient was its explanation of morality
and beauty to justify the place these hitherto have held in
the scheme of life. But, at the present stage, the point is.
that 'Naturalism' is inconsistent with the very implication
or presupposition of knowledge itself. If Naturalism is to be
our ultimate creed, science or knowledge is a mere accident in
the course of evolution,, a chance product in the development
of matter,, with no claim, or at least no right, to be judged as
true or false. No doubt, if the ordinary assumptions of
Evolutionism are correct, ' knowledge/ since it actually exists,
(only how can it be entitled to the implications of the term
knowledge?) must have been advantageous to its possessors,
a useful weapon in the war of world-evolution. But the rank
of a critic of life or a theorist of ultimate truth it must sur
render : for these, by its naturalistic genesis, it possesses no
competence.

Only on one hypothesis can we emerge from these abysses.
And that hypothesis is that, above and embracing us and the
world, there is Being, Reality, through whom it is intelligible
and we are intelligent. And if it be said that we cannot form
any conception of how this one reality, this transcendently
true, stands to us and the world— how it, so to say, interferes
in things— the retort is easy. No more can we tell how soul
acts on matter or matter on soul. Every self is in its turn
a creator in the world, endowed with a creative faculty which,
from the purely naturalistic point of view, is inexplicable.
Nor merely from the naturalistic point of view. Mr. Balfour
equally on his own part acquiesces in fthe existence of an
unsolved difficulty/ The problem how man can be an agent,
in tautological phrase, a free agent, is a real difficulty in
psychology : but it is certainly not less intractable there than
it is in theology.

Science then cannot maintain its claim to be true, to be

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF3 81

knowledge of reality, without postulating the idea of some
thing not less real, which is the harmony of mind and the
world; or, if we may borrow the language of another
philosophy, the identity (or unity) of subject and object.
It does not of course follow that this quasi-scientific Deity
is the God of religion. Yet compatible or connected the
idea in both departments must be, if the problem of philo
sophy is to be solved, if science and religion are to be co
ordinated.

The incompatibility between the two departments is sup
posed to show itself most acutely in regard to the question
of Miracles. These are understood to be at variance with
the scientific principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Here
Mr. Balfour, retracing the ground of his former book, urges
that the uniformity of Nature is a fine-sounding but some
what nebulous phrase, and that laws are not more than
abstractions formed for scientific purposes. He urges, what
is more obvious, that the modern definition of a miracle, if
definition that may be called which practically negatives the
existence of the definiendum, is entirely foreign to the epoch
of organic religious life, and implies a division between the
natural and something else, perhaps spiritual, which is no
less strange to the religious consciousness. Nor is it possible
to lay down canons generally acceptable as to what con
stitutes a wonder : for these can only be based on a prior
determination of the whole meaning and scope of things, and
that ex J/ypothesi is not in existence.

If again a miracle be said to imply the ( special action of
God/ a special providence, or, in general, a ' preferential
exercise of divine power,' it may be noted that such ' pre
ferential action ' seems an almost invariable presupposition
of religion, and not a mode confined to special times or places.
If so, at what point can we draw the limit to the range of its
operation ? And, on the other side, with what right dare we
represent the universal God as entering into more intimate

G

82

GIFFORD LECTURES [vi

relation with one part of creation than another? We seem
shut up in an antinomy between God as alike near to all, and
as specially close to each. Nor is this a matter for religion
alone. Ethics also seems to lose grip, if God is regarded as
indifferent, or, still worse, as malevolent. An immoral or
an indifferent God must in the long run render ethics
impossible.

It would seem then that, if we assume that God is, ethics
and religion require us to believe or postulate that he enters
into special relations with individuals and nations ; and
evolution, as sometimes interpreted, suggests that the frame
of things is an ' economy/ a work carrying out step by step
a purpose, a striving towards something yet to be.

In short, whereas, according to a naturalistic creed, scientific,
ethical, and aesthetic beliefs are simply the products of
phenomenal causes or sources, non-rational, non-ethical, non-
aesthetic ; the truth rather is that we can only restore the
balance between cause and effect, can only get a real reason
for the alleged result, by postulating behind these non-rational
and non-moral forces a rational and moral God. Nor is the
beautiful in a position different from that of truth and morals.
Beauty may be no ' objective ' fact, as the phrase has it : still,
here too, we may and must believe that ' in the thrill of some
deep emotion we have for an instant caught a far-off reflection
of divine beauty/ Religion too ceases, on the same postulate,
to be a mere psychological phenomenon of the naturalistically
conceived individual. ' Mankind have almost always claimed
for their beliefs about God that they were due to God ' : or,
the cause of religion must be something adequate to the given
effect. And, if that be so, the distinction between the sphere
of the natural and the sphere of the supernatural must be
broken down. The effort, by which the human soul rises and
grows in wisdom, goodness, and truth, is unintelligible without
a counter-process, the process by which God continually
communicates himself to man. ' Unassisted reason is a fiction/

vi] MR. BALFOUR' S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF J 83

All progress is the product of two factors, a divine influence
and a human effort. In other words, ' Inspiration ' (if the
divine co-operation with humanity is to be so called) ' is
limited to no age, to no country, to no people/ ' Let us not/
says Mr. Balfour, ' give colour to the opinion that God's
assistance to mankind has been narrowed down to the sources,
however unique, from which we immediately and consciously
draw our own spiritual nourishment/

Can we then judge between the conflicting — for conflicting
in many, though not all or perhaps even most, ways they are
— can we judge between the conflicting claims of various
religions to authority over the lives and consciences of men ?
Or, putting the practical and immediate question which comes
first to the occidental, by what criteria shall we determine the
claim of Christianity to take precedence of a general Theism,
which speaks of God only as the one supreme Reality or
Transcendent Truth ? The criterion, says Mr. Balfour, is
found in the degree in which a religion ' ministers to our
ethical needs.' What are these ethical needs ? ' They are the
aspirations and ideals which inspire conduct ; they include,
above all, harmony between the interests of the individual
and those of the community/ And that harmony, urges
Mr. Balfour, can be perfectly secured only by the complete
correspondence between virtue and felicity in a future life.
Above all, the fundamental ethical need is to keep entire the
dignity of human nature, of man's essential self, as against
the mere immensity of the material universe. In these latter
times ' we search out God with eyes grown old in studying
Nature, with minds fatigued by centuries of metaphysics, and
imaginations glutted with material infinities/ Whether this
be so, whether the causes of the practical atheism of the world
are not to be rather sought in its petty cares and the deceit-
fulness of riches, we need not discuss. At any rate, even if
speculation by itself may discover that moral excellence is for
ever incommensurable with material bigness (Mr. Balfour says

6 3

84 GIFl'ORD LECTURES [vi

' grandeur/ but th« word is out of place ; < grandeur ' is always
moral), ordinary mankind can only get an ' imaginative grasp'
of this truth by a history and a doctrine such as that of the
' Incarnation.' Physical science, again, as she more and more
reveals the immensity of the physical universe, makes us
realize more and more the dependence of mind on physical
organization and environment. And if speculative philosophy
here too shows the account given by materialism to be at
bottom inconsistent and meaningless, it needs a visible demon
stration, an intuition of tin; faith-inspired imagination, such
as the same doctrine of Christianity presents, to transform
that speculative glimpse for the mass of mankind into a life-
controlling and life-exalting dynamic. And, last but perhaps
not least, if the problem of suffering calls for all the power
of philosophy to explain its function in the great whole,
Christianity, in its picture of a suffering God, ' ministers to
one of our deepest ethical needs/

And, now, passing from the analysis of Mr. Balfour's
contribution to philosophy, let us try to ascertain its value.
Is it new, and is it true? And first, let us welcome his
discovery of the function of philosophy. That function is to
put together c under the stress of reason/ ' into one coherent
structure/ the contributions which art and morality, science
and religion, severally bring to the expression of the One
Reality. It is to systematize and harmonize the various
provinces and different aspects under which the Ik'ing of
Iking is known, felt, perceived, and surmised by us. In the
long run, a double, divided truth, a truth in theology which
is indifferent to a truth in science, is intolerable to humanity.
The monistic, if that means the unificatory, instinct is irresis
tible. To some, no doubt, the transcendent truth, the supreme
reality, the infinite Personality, may have a more pleasing
sound than has that pedantic term, the Absolute. If so, let
them remember that the obnoxious term means neither more
nor less than the others, so long as the others are kept at the

vi ] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 85

height of their meaning*, and not used as a vehicle under
which casual associations may be insinuated.

Philosophy offers the great Eireni&on : a method of peace
and reconciliation. If it is to be monistic, its monism must
be one which leaves abundant room for difference, for dualism,
for further even than dual opposition. Unity requires at
least two, probably more, members of truth. It cannot
sacrifice religion to science, or science to religion : nor, in its
completeness, can it neglect even the rights of art. It is
true that many will probably join Mr. Balfour in his view
that it is forced and arbitrary to treat the ' artistic fancies of
an insignificant fraction of the human race during a very brief
period of its history' as important elements in building up
humanity and the spiritual world. They may, like him,
think ' most schemes of metaphysical aesthetics very absurd,'
and hold that there is ' no natural punishment attached to
bad taste/ Yet something may be said on the other hand
for those who hold that the beliefs of the cultivated races as
regards the place of art in life are only the more developed
manifestations of a faith, efficient and living, as early as any
traces of human life can be found : that the aesthetic theories
of metaphysicians are after all only the systematized efforts
to trace out and analyse that charm, which lights up the dull
levels of life, and of which most of us, if human, have at
times felt the power; and that bad taste carries with it
inevitably a lowering of tone, a confusion of judgement,
a perversion of aim, than which there can be no punishment
more exemplary. But, whatever may be our estimate of the
function of art in life — and art, remember, is all that gives
life its grace, its dignity, its form, and not a thing to be
locked up and sometimes looked at in museums and galleries —
it is at any rate true that, to the English public, the con
trasting views of life are those derived from religion, which
in some dim way includes moral doctrine, and from physical
science. That there are other sciences which deal with the

86

GIFFORD LECTURES [vi

inner life, i. e. the completer reality ; that political effort and
ideal is the obverse and test of morality; and that national
righteousness is that without which individual righteousness
is a puny and diseased thing— these are points which a few
realize, and which many painfully surmise. For the most,
however, the antithesis is set, simply and solely, between
religion (or theology) and science. And because it is so set,
without due regard to the environment or context, it is set
falsely and foolishly. There have indeed been times when
the conduct of the so-called theologian, in adjusting religion
to scientific advances, has reminded one of Miss Matilda
Jenkyns and her friend in protecting the colour of the new
drawing-room carpet. The sun in its course blazed through
and down on a strip of the Brussels, and the ladies spread
newspapers to shelter it from the withering ray. But as the
sun gradually moved on and on, the newspapers had to be
again and again taken up and placed on a fresh patch of
light. It is certainly not so that Mr. Balfour understands
the reconciliation. Each has its place. Science, such is his
plea, ' can only do what it claims to do,' i. e. c reveal reality in
its special way, if it presupposes a theory of existence, very
like that which in its ultimate premises constitutes the base
of theology. But reconciliation thus acquired, through
identity in fundamental principle, is far from interfering with
a wholesome growth of either separately. As someone has
said of its relations to theology, ' non adjutrix nisi libera,
non libera nisi adjutrix philosophia/ ' In its labour/ says
M. Sabatier, 'the human race builds an eternal cathedral
of which the two main columns (colonnes maUresses) are
science and the holy life (la vie sainte). They spring slowly
from the soil, and rise parallel in the air. Amongst the
workmen who labour at this divine work, some are dis
couraged and fear the two columns may never meet and form
the vaulted arch they dream of. Others, impatient, inflect
the severe rectitude of the lines of the construction, but the

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF1 87

false and apocryphal work they thus make, is self-ruined and
self-demolished, because it violates the rigour of the mysterious
plan of the invisible architect. The religious worker is
humble : he guards himself against the impatience which
makes us faithless, and the discouragement which makes us
cowardly. He lives by faith, not by sight : he raises the two
pillars of his inner life in obedience to the prescribed rules,
knowing that his duty is not to make them arbitrarily con
verge and join before the time, but to build them stone
by stone, higher, straighter, more solid. Science is only
positively served by those who with all strictness apply
the laws of scientific research. Similarly, we advance in
the moral life by an undeviating obedience to the ideal law
of conscience1.'

Mr. Balfour therefore has risen to that idea of philosophy
to which Schelling and Hegel, following out the sugges
tions of Kant, have given its characteristic modern form,
but which has really been the underlying aim of all the
higher modern, as it was in a great measure, of ancient
speculation. We can hardly indeed apply to Mr. Balfour
what the aged German poet, Fr. Riickert, has dared to
forebode (1864) —

'Was Kant hat angebahnet,
Was Schelling vorgeahnet,
Was Hegel ausgeschliffen
Zu glanzenden Begriffen,
Bis es ward ausgepfift'en,
Es wird aus der Veraltung
Gewinnen Neugestaltung
In hOherer Entfaltung.'

That prophecy still awaits its fulfilment, when it shall come :
yet before it comes, it is necessary that the doctrine shall
sink as a simple rudimentary form into the common stock of
culture. As such, its appearance in a work like Mr. Balfour's
is a welcome symptom, that the general standpoint of

1 A. Sabatier : Esquisse d'une philosophic de la religion.

88 CIFFORD LECTURES [vi

philosophy is finding1 its way to the heart of the nation,
despite the uncouth tongue in which its oracles are written.
But, before this very general idea can be the principle or the
foundation of beliefs, it must explicate itself into something
less indefinite and scanty. It is not enough to say that four,
or it may be more, provinces must combine, that their several
glimpses of reality must be reconciled. A good deal remains
to be done before the terms of union are to be defined. Are
the provinces or faculties co-ordinate? Are they mutually
corrective and complementary ? What are their several
tasks ? To answer these questions is to indicate the founda
tion of belief: and in common phraseology it is to write
a philosophy. A provisional philosophy will not answer the
purpose. Provisional, of course, every philosophy is, in
a sense : each exists only until there come a better to super
sede it. But it must not build, on that account, a mere
shell, perfunctorily : it must do its work with all its heart,
and soul, and strength, as if it built its house for eternity.

Of all this positive work, to which contributions have been
made by many, here and elsewhere, after Kant had mainly
concerned himself with the critical and negative task,
Mr. Balfour does next to none. He simply does for the
English public what Kant had already done, but, according
to him, had not by his interpreters and commentators suc
ceeded in teaching to the average insular mind. Whether
there are not more who have ceased to bow the knee to the
Baalim of Naturalism than Mr. Balfour suspects, is a question
we need not discuss. Yet to have impressed upon the public
that philosophy is the way to a complete theology— not, we
need hardly say, to religion— is a service which the religious
bigot, if such there be, may rate less than lightly, but which
most other people can only welcome. Our thanks would
have been less mixed, if Mr. Balfour had not, to generalize his
own confession, < found it easier to satisfy himself of the
insufficiency . . . than of the absolute sufficiency, or any of

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF1 89

the schemes by which it has been sought to complete or
modify Naturalism/ That is the weakness of a man who
possesses considerable faculty of dialectic and enjoys the zest
of debate, and whose instinct is to look for weak points,
pulling a complex theory to pieces by piece-meal attack. It
is no doubt the accredited method of parliamentary warfare,,
but even there its results are hardly so pleasing or useful as
to lead us to desire its extension to the more serious problem
of philosophy.

When Mr. Balfour again urges that ethics, aesthetic and
science, are only retainable in their truth, beauty and
righteousness, on the hypothesis that behind the phenomenal
process of sensation and movement there is an encompassing
( reality/ if that is to be the word for the presence and power
of the Idea, we can only say that we are glad to see that the
fundamental dogma of Platonism still serves to the rest-and-
shelter-seeking soul as the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land. Plato too had to fight with the champions of what
Mr. Balfour has called ' Naturalism.' To them the whole
fabric of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideas was a matter
of physical history : thought was a fact of brain-movement,
and beauty a growth of associations, generated out of what
was utterly without aesthetic quality. The naturalistic-
theory of life was as complete, if not as detailed, in Athens in
400 B. c. as it is to-day. And against that theory Plato lays
down his axiom that ' it is by the beautiful that things
beautiful become beautiful/ and that knowledge would not
have been at all, had not things and perceiver been at one in
the ' transcendent truth/ facKfiva TOV oyros, which is, in our
modern phrase, at once real and ideal, and so above either
alone. In other words, you cannot completely explain the
higher form by the lower elements ; a true synthetic unity
is not a mere product or sum of its elements : it is unique ;
and they are, at best, its condition, or in an older phraseology,
its material, but not its final or formal, cause. To use words

90 G1FFORD LECTURES [vi

like sum or product, is simply to ignore a principle of organiza
tion, a law of crystallization, which rules and manipulates its
constituents. You trace, scientifically, the gradual evolution
of form from form : but, behind the facts and results, is the
agent and the life, the idea in its efficiency, the substance
of Spinoza, the Absolute of Mr. Bradley, the Reality of
Mr. Balfour, infinite, ever-new, ever-creative ; never a mere
putter together of the old, but with the old materials, by
a cosmic and divine phantasy, creating the new. Its
syntheses are more than syntheses : they are at each stage
a new birth : a fresh revelation of the infinite spirit of life,
the life of life, the cause of causes. Yes, here too, we miss
a deeper view. The religious mind, as well as the scientific
and the aesthetic and the moral mind, each are jealous of
their own : the reality behind science stands awful and grim
in presence of the ideal of art, the God of religion : and this
introduction to theology does little to bring them together.
When Mr. Balfour points out that, behind all the variety
of formula, and all the imperfection of dogma, there are
'immutable doctrines,' nourished on which men have lived
and died in hope, faith, and love, the philosophy which I have
learned from is agreed. But it would hardly be satisfied
with the mere confession— of an unknown God. That is
a hopeless search for God and reality, which is seeking him
in an ever receding reality behind and beyond phenomena.
Phenomena too are of God, nay, in their place and function,
they are the visible and sensible body of God. Sensible
matter too is part of the immutable doctrines. It is not, as
Mr. Balfour seemed to say, a mere 'irrelevancy that the
material body, the material world, stands with a pre-eminent
reality/ Far from it. Tta whole spiritual, the aesthetic,
moral, religious life, needs the body ; and with a bodiless,
a disembodied spirit, it ceases to have meaning, reality, and
power. You have heard what Mr. Balfour has to say of the
power of Christian dogma of Incarnation to fulfil our moral

vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF* 91

needs. To my mind the central value of the doctrine of the
Incarnation is to teach that all men, as they live and are,
are sons of God ; sons, some of them prodigal, and some
conceitedly goody : but all, if they would but know it, and
knowing, realize it, sons of God ; with the Godhead in spirit
within them, suffering, enjoying with them, their bodies
temples of the holy one who inhabiteth Eternity. The eternal
reality is in it all : God is in it all : not, as Mr. Balfour
seems to think, alone by himself, enjoying an unchanging
beauty of which we can only catch glimpses, but with us and
in us, suffering in us and with us, the captain of our salva
tion, the firstfruits of many brothers. We, — if I, a mere
disciple, may speak for the great masters of those who know, —
take the Incarnation as no mere temporary fact, but as the
eternal truth of human life and history. We can rise to the
poet's words : ' Lady, I fain would tell how evermore thy soul
I know not from thy body, nor thee from myself, neither our
love from God.'

Not less is Philosophy in general agreed, that the true test
of the truth of a religion is its capacity to satisfy our ethical
or moral needs. It would, perhaps, hardly be content with
a mere phrase, which is left open for interpretation by each
private sentiment. Still less, perhaps, would it, like Mr. Kidd
and Mr. Balfour, regard the consilience of individual and
social interest as the only nameable moral need, or treat
a future life, a vague word, as clenching the need. It would
probably take a different view about the place of punishment,
and it would certainly note that moral conceptions of the
future life were the fruit of moral life. But it would in
the main agree to accept Mr. Balfour's thesis. Only I think
it would put it in a less restricted phrase. It would hold
that we are primarily and essential beings who have to act,
to be agents. We are, as it were, endowed with a problem,
enriched with a task — the task to live. It is only by slow
degrees that we gather all that it means, that we see what

92 GIFFORD LECTURES

we really and truly will. All experience, all science, all
association, all suffering- and joy, show it more and more fully.
But always it stands behind and before, above and within,
a light to our feet. Plato called it the idea of good; the
Gospel of St. John calls it < the light which lighteth every
man that cometh into the world/

VII

NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM. — THE SCIENTIFIC

AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW.

THE MAIN CONDITION OF THE EVOLUTION OF
REASON

Ax interesting range of questions is opened out by what
is said in Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief as to the nature
and function of theological formulas, as to the respective
place of Eeason and Authority in forming beliefs, and
indeed as to the general scope of the two cognate habits of
mind or attitudes of thought which have been styled
Naturalism and Rationalism.

Perhaps there are few things more noteworthy, and yet
few things more neglected, in the study of the history of
human thought, than the tendency to accentuate the points
of partial difference and to ignore, as if taken for granted,
the deep and broad bases of fundamental agreement. Each

great philosopher— an* Aristotle, say, succeeding a Plato

builds in his turn upon the uncontested and accepted body
of doctrine and belief which is common to him with his
predecessors. For that very reason he says little about it.
"W hat he lays stress upon and, to the careless reader, seems
alone to think essential, are certain favourite ideas of his own,
certain peculiarities of definition and detail, which are his
peculiar work, and which pass into history as the essentials
of Aristotelianism. So things seem from the outside. To

94 G1FFORD LECTURES [vn

a profounder study Aristotle is himself a Platonist, sharing
the deepest convictions of Plato, but, like a true and perfect
man who is never a mere imitator, carrying the germ out
into the fulness and integrity of an individual system, without
which discipleship is a sham and a snare. It is not so merely
in philosophy. It is a general law that what counts at first
sight is difference. When we measure our income and our
resources, it is not wholly what we are and have that gives
the habitual tone to our mind. What we see as ourselves in
our mental vision, what we think others will estimate us at,
is the differential amount between our estate, our endowments,
and theirs. The nearer the fundamental equation of what
we are and have with what others are and have, the more
keenly do we set store by our petty prerogative, in that
imagination of compared dignity which haunts us like a
demon. It is not always his poverty that makes the poor
man's hardship : it is as often the sense that he is poorer than
others : poorer, above all, than others he would otherwise have
matched.

We may apply these principles to the judgements which
we have heard passed on Naturalism and Rationalism. An
'-ism' is by its inmost being always in opposition. It marks
a protest against a feature which is believed to be erroneous
and injurious. As it thus emerges, it is no complete theory
of the subject with which it is chiefly concerned. On the
contrary it subsists only because it has tacitly taken over into
itself, and accepted without question, the great bulk of the
general creed or system against which it raised a partial
objection. Utilitarianism e. g. protesting against what it
considered an irrational, ascetic, or sentimental vice in the
dominant formulation of ethical doctrine, still, in the first
instance, accepted the general lines of moral order and pro
gress. Socialism, again, as it first appeared, was no com
prehensive theory of the ideals and methods of collective life,
but chiefly a criticism of the chief evils of a disintegrating

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 95

individualism and a suggestion of remedies. But it is easy to
see that things cannot so remain.

In the first place, a struggle inevitably arises between the
old and the new. From some points of view the new is
obviously at disadvantage. It is the theory of a partial
point of view, and as it steps beyond its original limits, it
is almost sure to fall into inconsistencies, and make mistakes
in extending its principles. On the other hand, it is generally
backed by an enthusiasm and eagerness, which is only inten
sified by anything that suggests the superiority of strength
that lies at the command of its opponent, the established
authority. It is inclined to credit itself with all or most
of the truth, and leave only force to its opponent. The older
and larger body of doctrine, again, is apt to attach too much
importance to formal and logical inconsistencies, and to forget
that there may be much in the new formularies which those
who hold them read, so to speak, between the lines, but do
not think it needful to express. But in the struggle it is
almost certain that each party will exaggerate its differences.
Forgetting altogether the many points where it might well
admit fhe that is not against us is on our side/ each con
centrates its view on those apparently cardinal issues, in
which it can raise its battle-cry, ( he that is not with us is
against us.'

Now the Rationalism, which we heard described as an
embryo Naturalism, is under that historic title mainly a
product of the eighteenth century. In its origin it was the
continuation of that protest against the men and works of
darkness, which Ulrich von Hutten waged by the side of
Luther, the war against superstition, idolatry, obscurantism.
But as a great authority reminds us, it is hard to pluck up
the tares without' destroying some good wheat. You cannot,
i. e. the race of man cannot, draw a hard and fast line where
the true worship of God gives place to superstitious idol-
worship. It is not merely that good and evil grow so closely

96 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn

side by side : that were a minor difficulty : but in most of
human life it is hard to say where good does not grow out of
evil, and evil out of good. It is only the sword of God,
which pierces to the dividing asunder the bone and the
marrow, that can discern the secrets of life. A too ardent
assault upon superstition may itself become a superstition,
and a baleful one, for its champions.

But for that fault it was not the Rationalist who was
mainly or solely responsible. The least concession was
refused to his claim for more light. He was commanded
to bow reverently to the ever-revealing Church, or to the
revealed Scripture. In the presence of these oracles reason
must be dumb. There is a vulgar proverb to the effect that,
if you ask for a silk gown, you may get a sleeve. As the
Rationalist was given little, he naturally came to demand
more. When it came to the time of Voltaire, the cry ficmsez
I'Lifdme, which originally only meant a demand to clear the
temple of thieves and money changers, came to be the ominous
threat of a clean sweep of all that Christianity held and holds
most precious. Nor that alone. There were heard mutter-
ings : Ni Dieu ni maitre : down with all absolute irrational
authority, be it in realms secular or in realms sacred. And
all this, just because the cry for light was gagged, because
the stream of reason was stopped by a great dam piled ever
higher, until the stream, gathering into itself the myriad
impulses of human nature, high and low, became a wild flood
that for a while swept all institutions into ruin.

So it is with Naturalism. It in its origin was the protest,
not against the supernatural in itself, but against a super
natural conceived as arbitrary, incoherent and chaotic : it was
the protest against the idle profanity which thinks it has
explained an event, when it has said, with pious gesture, that
it is the work of God,— as if aught were not the work of
God. Naturalism is not the antithesis of theology, as
Mr. Balfour has assumed, though a vindictive theology has

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 97

often pushed it into such an attitude : nor is it the assumption
that the beggarly elements of sense-perception are enough to
frame for us the picture of the world, though a foolish
Spiritualism has often driven it into the arms of Materialism.
Naturalism and Rationalism must not be judged solely by
what they are at the worst, in the hands of sciolists and
polemics ; they must be judged altogether, in their worst
and their best, in the principles which at first gave them
direction not less than in the course which through the
intermixture of effects they have occasionally taken. It is
an easy-going Rationalism, unworthy of the name, which
thinks its only function is to knock off corners, and smooth
inequalities. ' What/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would be a world
which we should understand : ' or, as I suppose, which we had
thoroughly understood ? A world, clearly, without interest ;
the den of listlessness and dumb despair : or rather the ice-
age of humanity, when to be and not to be would for once be
absolutely alike. But, on the other hand, what were a world
which we did not understand, had not in any measure under
stood ? A world full of fears rather than hopes : a perpetual
uncertainty, a grisly mystery, which made darkness cover the
earth, and gross darkness its peoples. The world which
reason claims is one where she may go for ever on and never
die : a world where nothing can be called utterly unknowable,
though much may remain for ever unknown : a world where,
as humanity accumulates more and more its intellectual and
spiritual capital, we shall move about more and more freely,
i. e. more and more wisely, as becomes those who are called to
inherit the kingdom. The world which the genuine Naturalist
desires is not different. It is a world of law : but in the ideal
sense law in Nature is even as law in the social sphere. To
the beginner in sociological study, laws are an aggregate of
commands of a general character, set by somebody who can
command to others, who will by some means and to some
extent be constrained to obey. To the idealist— you will find

98 GIFFORD LECTURES [vir

him in antiquity amongst the great Stoics of the middle
period (as may be read in Cicero) — to the idealist, law is one
system,, one economy carried out in different grades, all
mutually interdependent,, whereby the right working of each
member of the community may be attained, whereby each
may not only do his duty as past ordinances have appointed,
but may find an outlook and a stimulus to conceive and
execute ever fresh, ever higher codes of duty.

So it is also with the world of scientific law. The older
scientists looked upon laws as so many ascertained uniformities
of sequences, regularities in the succession of cause and effect,
which, as they grew more numerous, admitted of codification,
and some degree of system. The net result of them was
a hint to man in his practical endeavours, that certain things
can be done, certain others cannot be done. The reign of law
was thus a disguised reign of force : it seemed to consist of
a network of checks spread over the whole structure of the
universe, as so many barriers within which God, it might
perhaps be said, had tied his own hands, as well as limited the
possibilities of man. On the other hand, the idealist view —
which has always lurked at the heart of religious faith, though
often strangely marred by foreign concretions — looked at the
future rather than the past, at what was to be, rather than
what was. Put religiously, it subordinated the creational
(taking that term in its narrower sense) idea of God to the
providential. It looked at Nature as, not merely what was
and is, but also as what will be. It regarded the universe
(as Goethe has pictured it in that series of aphorisms which
he drew up under the stimulus of Frau von Stein's charm)
as at once Natura natnrans and Natura Natural a, as an
organic community, an ideal, or as St. Paul might call it,
a spiritual body, working by myriad ways to an end which
only gradually reveals itself, and using methods or modes of
operation, which in parts we can discern, and when discerned
we call laws. The reign of law has here become, if not the

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 99

reign of grace, at least the kingdom of the spirit. All its
special laws are but fragments,, from time to time abstracted
and isolated, which enter into the one unity of organization.
Nor dare we set limits to the possibilities of that organization.
If we exclude the old conception of miracle, we exclude equally
the conception of inflexible rules to which God must bow.
And if we could rise to the height of beatific vision, which
is difficult, not to say impossible, we might, turning round
Browning's words, say, ' All's law, but alPs love/

This is a long way from Mr. Balfour's Naturalism. But it
has an equal right, nay, a far better right, to the name. It
is the Naturalism that full-grown science seems more and
more brought to adumbrate. Mr. Balfour, ' for reasons with
which it is not necessary/ he says, ' to trouble the reader/ has
selected the name Naturalism for what might equally have
been styled Agnosticism, Positivism, or Empiricism. When
reasons are concealed, it is improper perhaps to surmise them.
And yet it hardly seems going beyond a legitimate inference
to suggest that the name was chosen as a way to deal a more
crushing blow. To assault Naturalism and Rationalism is to
strike Nature and Reason : it is to support Supernaturalism,
and the Materialism of authority. It looks a little like
seeking to wound an opponent by an insult to his beloved.

But, as old Socrates pulls himself up, and admits that when
he saw his love Philosophy lightly dealt with, he spoke some
what vehemently ; so here we may admit that after all
Mr. Balfour does not mean it : it is only an incident in the
polemical debate.

To the superficial glance, the history of philosophy seems
to be a mere succession of opinions, contradicting or con
troverting opinions that have gone before, and to be in turn
contradicted by opinions yet to come. On a deeper view this
contradiction is a phenomenon like the supersession of the
flower by the fruit. For the plant's life under all apparent
incoherence is one process, continuous, incessant, in which

H 2

ioo GIFFORD LECTURES [vii

one plant soul creates for itself a body which is ever chang
ing1, yet which in some sense ever remains identical with
itself. So. reasoning1 by analogy, the annals of philosophic
failure need not unduly depress us. It is, says Mr. Balfour,
the common lot of philosophies to fail. Even so to the
rash judgement is every human life — and the greater its
scope and task, the more decidedly — a failure. It comes
with promise of peace and good will, and when it is over,
it seems to have left a sword that pierces ever deeper
and deeper into the heart of humanity. It bourgeons out
with the fairest flowers of art and letters ; and yet, as the
times roll on, these flowers seem to corrupt, till the air is
too heavy and poisonous for men to breathe it and live. It
founds a great and glorious empire in which social energies
should find all room for their ameliorating play, conquering
and to conquer; and the political grandeur is there only as it
were to intensify and accelerate the ravages of the cancerous
growths under the sleek and prosperous surface. It spreads the
light of science ; and the chief use of the new weapons science
prepares is to rend asunder the fabric of social well-beino-

& *

And yet it would be rashness, on the strength of these
appearances, to pronounce a verdict on human life, on the
efforts of science, art, religion, and law, which would echo
the merely pessimistic cry as if failure were all. 'Thou
fool/ says the strong-hearted apostle, ' that which thou thy
self sowest is not quickened except it die, and that which
thou sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall be, but
a bare grain ; and God giveth it a body even as it pleased
Him, and to each seed a body of its own/ Take this
phenomenon of life by death and death to life, as it shows
in our own inner and individual life. The resolution which
(we often can hardly tell how) emerges into the light of
rational volition, must, before it issues in outward act, plunge,
first, into the warring mass of other impulses, which, awhile
silent, as if they had yielded up the ground, only its existence

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 101

stimulated into activity ; and then, as it reappears, altered
and complicated from the struggle, it must again plunge
into the seething mass of outside efforts, the surge and swell
of the adjacent world, to re-issue with the body which the
providence of nature and history has been pleased, we co
operating, to give it. To us, the spectators of our own selves
and of outward event, this drama, this Divina Commedia of
human life, presents itself so. We have hardly formed our
resolve, when we regret it : the voices of our other selves,
of that manifold pack of half-formed personalities within us,
none of which we dare honestly disown, are raised in protest
against the usurping monarchy of our overt resolve. The
democracy, or shall we call it the ochlocracy, of passion and
appetite has to be heard and reckoned with ; and a struggle
arises, of which the issue is a modification and enlargement,
for better or for worse, of the original purpose. It is the
same with the outward act. It never is exactly what we
meant it, and as we meant it. We are disappointed and
discouraged by the event : and often it seems as if, the
higher and purer our aim had been, the greater had been
the discomfiture in our achievement. What do these things
teach us ? First, perhaps, that we must not judge what
manner of men we are by the thoughts and resolves that
come to the surface in our hours of clearest vision : that we are
not the simple and straightforward units we fancy ourselves
to be, but rather an undulating and varying unity of impulses
and powers, growing slowly by effort and discipline into the
unity of the perfect man. And secondly, that we, however
original, personal, individual, or monadic we may be, are
still units circling in, penetrated by, and fulfilled with, a
larger social life, a common, it may be, national spirit, which
is at once outside us and within us, at once containing us
and contained by us, on which we depend, and through which
we gain such independence as can ever be ours.

It is a mistake, therefore, and a fateful one, to isolate the

IO2

GIFFORD LECTURES [vn

phenomena of life from their context. Fa? sits in uno, says
a vulgar adage, fa fats in omnibus. One error entails another,
one lie involves a second, to try to cover it. So undoubtedly
it in part is : and so it would for ever be, if life and humanity
were what some people call logical, if pedantic consistency
were the rule. But the world is not in that sense of the
term logical or reasonable : though in a larger sense, and
with a more generous scope, it may still be called logical and
reasonable. To be reasonable is, in the full sense of the
term, to be human : it is to cling to and follow after unity,
but not always to ensure mere consistency. The function
of reason is to seek totality, to be comprehensive. It is more
than abstract intelligence ; it is the faculty of ideals,, the faculty
that dreams of and tries, — of course never quite successfully,
and let us add, never without some success, — to give com
pleteness, system, rounded perfection to our lives. It soars
beyond science, because it springs from an impulse larger
than that which brings science to birth. It has been said
to be the purpose of science to find a theory of nature. That
is a scope which can only be claimed by science, if we
give to science a very wide meaning. Science, as such,
in its actual performance, has a humbler scope, a more
practical and more practicable aim. And this aim is,—
within certain ranges approximately and roughly marked off,
under certain conventions, and with certain hypotheses which
work, i. e. admit of experimental treatment and confirma
tion—to constitute a system of coherent relations, of un variable
sequences and unconditional causality. For science, properly
speaking, there is no Nature : Nature is to science a poetic,
artistic, or metaphysical word. A science deals with a group
of phenomena, roughly demarcated by common sense, and
seeks to organize it into a system of coherent relations;
which, it may be added — in case some one may dream that
you can have relations by themselves— include things related.
Such, at least, is the scope of all the positive sciences.

vii J NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 103

The scope of ideal science or philosophy is quite other. In
common talk, indeed , it is often implied that the science
of the ideal is only a generalization or an extension of the
positive sciences into a region where they grow large, but
at the same time vague and fantastic. But in truth,
philosophy is no mere sum or generalization of the positive
sciences. It is a view, or attempt at a view of Nature, i. e. the
whole sum of facts, lived, experienced, and believed in their
unity : it is the fulfilment of the task which, according to
Bacon, is appointed to man, to be the minister et interpret*
Naturae. That is more than the special sciences do or
profess to do : it is the work of a science, which is ideal
no less than positive; a science which includes art, religion,
and morality as its handmaids, but handmaids who are maids
of honour and not mere helps in the kitchen of humanity.

Thus reason is the principle of unity : but of a unity which
works through, and in, diversity. The dispute between
reason and authority as to priority and posteriority is one
which may be paralleled with another more notorious con
troversy. Did the hen come first or the egg ? To answer it,
let us ask how reason arose, and what it works : let us ask
what authority means, and not content ourselves with vague
nominal oppositions. Just because reason is so often opposed
to authority, they must have something in common, were
it only some common subject to dispute. And, indeed, a
quarrel unites as surely, and the cynic may say, more closely
and permanently, than a friendship. Indifference, presumably,
is not union. A certain propinquity of interests, a community
of purpose, is needed for a vigorous opposition. Nay, may
we not further say, that in many a case we quarrel more
fiercely with others, just because they say out aloud something
which we would fain keep silent in ourselves; and that the
rage against the enemy outside is only the evidence of an
inward struggle in our own breast, which we have failed to
quench ?

104 GIFFORD LECTURES [vir

Now what is the fundamental feature of all reason, of all
ideal forms ? Surely this, that they rise from us, seem to be
our offspring, nay, perhaps, our product, and yet, without
any warning, turn round and lord it over us. Take con
science : it is, says Butler, a principle of reflection, it is our
act of judgement : and yet it claims (and we cannot help in
a sneaking way admitting the claim) to be the voice of God.
Take fashion : it is a whim to which we seem to give
currency by our own act, and yet it plays the inflexible
despot. We calmly speak as if we made the laws, and talk
of ourselves as law-givers and law-makers ; and yet the law
rules in its own right. We love, and it seems the expression
of our freest personality; and lo, we have forged a chain
which, whether agreeable or not, binds us for perhaps a life.
We act purposely; and it seemed free for us to do or to
abstain : yet the deed is an irrevocable master ; the gods
themselves, says the Greek proverb, cannot undo what is
done. Even the light word, to which we unthinkingly give
voice, may one day chastise us with scorpions.

How can these things be? Are we really so little lords
of ourselves as they seem to show ? Can we only assert our
freedom in order to throw ourselves into a more effective
bondage ? Whence came this reason ? Reason, we have
lately heard from Mr. Kidd, is individualistic in the uttermost,
the weapon of disintegration. When we say, < Come, let us
reason together/ it appears that we mean (not, as the men
of old time thought, ' Let us try to agree, and remove the
stumbling-blocks that cause jars between us;' but, in
the modern language), < Let us dispute and divide/ Now it
is simply impossible to allow any one thus to play the fool
with language. No doubt, if the thing had been done long
enough ago, the rose might still smell as sweet had it had
another name. But as things are, names have been pre
occupied, and to play false with them is neither more nor
less than stealing. And stealing a good name, as Falstaff

vi i ] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 105

tells us, is a more serious crime than stealing the trash
that is in our purse. It is a kind of treason to humanity :
Nomina numina.

Is reason then a private property of the individual ? Is
conscience,, is soul, is love ? In one thing- Mr. Balfour is quite
right : the higher spiritual life with its beliefs is not
explicable from the physiological or biological individual.
In that biological framework and function, as every one is
perhaps aware, we are of close kindred with the animal world,
and, comparatively speaking, of very close kindred with
certain members of it. We know that every human being,
as an embryo in his mother's womb, runs in a few months
through, we may almost say, the whole scale of animal life.
An ancient Greek sage, of supposed mystic tendencies and
oracular utterance, told in some verses the story of his life,
as he passed, still one soul, through various animal forms.
in sea, in air, and on land ; and people thought him moon
struck. It is now received as the soberest scientific truth
that each of us — and in the lapse of no long time, as
measured by the horologe of our daylight world — has run
through a career more romantic and strange than old
Empedocles or Agrigentum probably ever dreamed of. We
are — and the less we forget it the better, the higher we
may learn to become — we are, in the substantial framework
and function of our being, animals, comrades of the dog, the
hare, the ape, and the tiger. They seem sometimes far apart
from us, brutes at the worst, poor relations at the best. Now
that — I do not say, wisely or unwisely — we have concluded
that we are made but a little lower than the Elohim, and no
longer see angels as an aristocracy of creation above us, but
fancy ourselves as its foremost rank, we are apt to forget
that the difference between us and the nearest mammals sinks
to at least apparent insignificance in comparison with the
gulf between them and the amoeba, an apparently amorphous,
structureless mass, or rather molecule.

io6

GIFFORD LECTURES [vn

The evolution of reason, of authority, of morals, of art
and religion, Mat is the problem. I spoke the other day of
the birth of a soul. 1 may come later to speak of the birth
of conscience. What is it that we can expect to find in this
mode of enquiry, in this path of evolution? There was
a time when the word for the new birth was creation. But
the word was a little too abstruse for many who employed it,
and it led to strange fancies of a superhuman man moulding-
creatures out of nothing. With all this confusion of vulgar
imagination, the philosophical conception of creation had
nothing to do. Something of the same confusion has
infected the modern term Evolution. Evolution has been
taken to mean a process of continuous change by which,
if you only give it time enough, an A will some day turn
into a B, an oak become a beech. So once on a time the
chemists— but at that time they were called alchemists— had
the fancy that, by some method of manipulation yet to be
discovered, iron or one of the baser metals would be trans
muted into gold. The alchemist saw transmutations of
a kind going on everywhere in nature, and with a judgement
perverted by the lust of wealth, he came to look upon all the
mineral kingdom as a range of steps which, if we could
only get the secret of transmutation, would bring us nearer
and nearer to its final head and supreme development, the
royal Gold.

A similar frenzy seized some biologists at hearing the idea
of transformation of living beings. The whole kingdom of
animals presented itself to their minds as one continuous
development from some primary organism which, allowing
sufficient variation in circumstances and sufficient length of
time, might become, to put it briefly, anything in the possible
range of animality. Now that this is possible or impossible,
I am not concerned to say. The very word impossible',
indeed, is not one in favour with sensible men, and is one
that science will rarely use. Perhaps, like Napoleon, the

vii] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 107

sciences may call it ' a blockhead of a word/ Science, i. e.
human knowledge of facts and laws of fact, can ascertain to
a certain extent that something has or has not been done.
But to pronounce that it cannot be done, is what it will
only do with the qualification : ' so far as we at present
know/

This holds in the region of biology as it holds elsewhere.
Transformation of animal form and function within certain
limits has long been a fact of common experience. It is
hard or, as things stand, impracticable, to lay down definitely
where these limits lie : they are often very elastic ; how
elastic, wre dare not forecast : but all experience tends in the
direction that there are limits, and even impassable limits. It
is easy, but it is frivolous, to say that we can place no limits
to the power of adaptation which we actually observe. Such
a style of argument is after the fashion of the man who,
finding his horse did not perish under a gradual reduction of
his corn, proceeded with a so-called logical mind — it is the
logic of the fixed idea, and common amongst the insane — to
maintain him on no corn at all. We cannot place the limits,
perhaps, but the limits may be there. All observed varia
tion in present nature, or in the historical process which
palaeontology partly reveals, takes place within limits : and
if the limits in the data afforded for long past ages by
palaeontology seem wider than those exemplified in the
present day, perhaps we may be permitted to suggest that
the evidence of the geological strata is a matter which has
not yet received its final interpretation, and should not be put
too much in the first brunt of battle. Evolution, in short,
is at present a working hypothesis. If any one asks what
that means, it need only be said that, by the assumption that
all living things may be conceived as forming links in a con
tinuous chain of life, — instead of being taken, as the casual
observer might suppose them, to be merely diverse and
apparently unconnected, — we get a point of view for biological

io8

GIFFORD LECTURES [vn

study which both suggests wise and far-reaching questions,
and makes it more easy to find answers. More than this
the Darwinian theory need never become : but this is quite
sufficient for scientific work ; though perhaps not enough to
gratify an ignorant and aimless curiosity,, which would get
behind the beginnings of things,, and, so to speak, see tln'in
as they were before they were made.

The fact, then, which biology would seem to start from,
is the probability that man was once, when no one knows,
a creature in all appearance and in all structure very like an
ape, a creature closely allied to certain species of our existing
quadrumana, but yet somehow sui generis : a unique ape, an
ape which really was not an ape as we know apes, but which
had in him the promise and potency of humanity; just as the
human embryo of to-day, though in its earliest stages it
reminds the observer of certain animals, has in it, whether
the anatomist can detect it or not, a je ne sais quoi which
determines it to be man, and nothing but man. The starting-
point is, you observe, not entirely a fact : but it may fairly
be called, from the biological standpoint, a plausible and
workable hypothesis. There was then a time within the
present century, when each of us, man or woman, so far as
all the experimental tests could tell us, was the very nega
tion of all we as adults claim to be : a time when for us
speech and thought, reason and morality, all the distinctive
peculiarities of human shape and structure, were not. As in
the old story of the creation of the terrestrial globe, so there
was a time when we wTere ' without form and void ' : an
amorphous,, inorganized mass. And yet shape and organiza
tion were there, though our organs and even our instruments
failed to detect them.

It is in that sense and with these limitations that I speak
of the evolution of reason or of morality. I can attach no
meaning to the statement that reason or morality was made
out of something utterly other than itself. Non-reason does

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 109

never beget reason, nor does non-moral beget moral. We may
possibly lay down the conditions, the circumstances, the occa
sions, which facilitated the event, its sine qua non. But the
secret of the first birth, the secret of life's emergence at
conception, the mystery of origins, is well kept. Still, now
as of old, each birth is a creation. We have learned — thanks
to Darwin, and, as I am more especially bound to add, to
others before Darwin — that creation is a process law-governed,
a work of reasonable not arbitrary deity; that the whole organic
kingdom is a systematic unity, the unveiling in time and place
of one grand plan. We can guess with much probability the
scheme of architecture, but we have not forced the hand of
the architect, and stolen the secret of his work. We are, to
him, in a position not unlike that of the grammarian and the
critics to a great original genius in poetry or painting; we
can catch, or deem we catch, some of his tricks or his mode of
composition. But Raphael and Dante are always on another
plane than their imitators, and He that sits in heaven may
perhaps smile at those who so boldly identify the way they
construe his plan with that plan itself j or who fail even to
surmise — and this is the important thing — that He is an
architect who draws no plan and directs no workers, but is
himself the life that inspires the worker and the source that
supplies the work.

It is the evolution of the human mind we study, with
reason as its governing function, with morality, art, and
religion as its characteristic products. And that means,
when, and under what conditions, can mind be seen emerging?
In what atmosphere did it draw its breath, from what
parentage did it spring? The psychologist who analyzes
mental phenomena assumes mind as a given fact ; or rather
for him the soul is a geographical term, used to denote the
range within which certain phenomena which he describes are
to be found, and sometimes equated with the sum or aggregate
of their phenomena. The comparative psychologist will show

IIO G1FFORD LECTURES [vii

us by a process of guess-work and more or less plausible

analogical interpretation of stories of animal life, of move
ments executed by animals — how in the animal world with
varying degrees there are indications of the presence of several
of the faculties found in man. And these comparisons are
very interesting, if always a little liable to the defect of
alternative interpretation. But we must go a little further
than either of these, and ask : When or under what conditions;
do we first observe the human,, the rational soul ?

The answer briefly is — and the same answer will apply to
morality, art, and religion — that reason is a social product :
it appears and lives in human association. Just as cohesion,
or electricity, or any other material property only exhibits
itself in a correlation of elements, which are at once antithetic
and interdependent: so the human soul is a phenomenon which
appears and lives in the sociality of human beings. There is
doubtless a sentiency which is part of animal nature in general :
but even it, we may note, only exists in a great community of
physical life. The specially human soul is a social fact, the
resultant and index, of a social effort. Society, the reciprocity
of man with man, is the atmosphere in which it breathes, the
soil in which it grows. Man, the individual physiological
being, exhibits in association with his fellows the products we
call rational, moral, aesthetic, and religious. And it is only
man, not all animals, that does so : a statement which need
not be pressed to exclude all approaches to reason in the so-
called lower animals. Hence we conclude that in him there
is a something which in the appropriate environment will so
develop. The soul is his potentially, let us say : and yet it
would never be actual— any more than hydrogen and oxygen,
of their separate initiative, form water, without some con
straining agent— unless another soul were to be made at the
same stroke.

To some it may sound a paradox to say that reason is not
of the individual, as such, but only of the socialized or

vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM in

civilized individual. It is not so long ago that indignation
was lavished on the anthropologist, who dared to hint that
primaeval man in his birth-time had been speechless. And
yet the obnoxious fact reveals itself afresh in every human
infant. The doctrine that reason is the concomitant of
sociality is a common one to philosophy. Hear Hobbes :
' Reason' (which he defines in his rough way as conceiving
a sum-total from the addition of parcels, as in short ' reckon
ing') ' is not, like sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten
by experience only ' (by experience Hobbes means ( the tear
and wear of life '), e as prudence is, but attained by industry/
Hear Fichte : ' Man would not be rational or human, were he
purely isolated and unsocial/

Let us not, however, misunderstand. Juxtaposition, associa
tion, in and by itself, could yield nothing. But where there
is a something — which however we do not know in itself, and
can only discern in its effects — this association leads to a new
development : it is the meeting of energies which causes birth.
The human being, to put it in materialistic figures, is charged
with force, energy, faculty: but energy requires solicitation
from without, to bring it into exercise and actuality. The
human individual, as such, is to all appearance simply an
animal : primus inter pares, perhaps, yet still only amongst
his peers. But under that appearance there are in him
possibilities of unique energies. There are tendencies and
potencies craving to meet each other, and to link hand in
hand, heart in heart. All the various ranges of Nature live,
if we speak the religious language, under some special dis
pensation of God : in scientific phrase, they have each their
own law of development. The specific law of human existence
is sociality. It is that which makes us human beings. The
absolutely solitary, said Aristotle, is either a brute beast or
a god. This is a truth of which all exceptions prove the rule.
St. Simeon Stylites is as much dependent on a social environ
ment for such life as he leads, as the most sociable and business-

112

GIFFORD LECTURES

like citizen of Antioch. Even the Cyclops of the Odyssey,
who is said to live reckless of all neighbours, finds that they
will not stand his midnight howls.

But if sociality be the root, the medium, the atmosphere of
all that is distinctly human, there is one peculiarity about it
which cannot be passed by. To the rest of the natural world
their peculiar law, the guiding principle of their being, seems
(I will not at present go beyond ' seems ') to be given to be
their own inalienable property ; a natural endowment, a fixed
law, which they have without effort, and which they cannot
or will not transgress. Man, doubtless, like the rest of Nature,
has his so-called inherent properties, his instincts and qualities.
But all that he can call specially his own is an effort, an
acquisition. As I put it before, he inherits a task, he is
endowed with a problem : his riches are all to be earned.

This sociality is not a quality but a tendency, craving for
fulfilment, tasking the energies. Man has been defined in
many ways. Let us for the present say that he is par
excellence the being who works, labours : that he is so in
tendency, in progress. Man the worker — 'that which he
hath done but earnest of the thing which he shall do/ 'Tis
true that barbarian man, and still more savage man, is idle :
and that their survivals in modern days — whether at one end
or other of the social scale — still carry out the old animal
ideal. But with these exceptions which only prove the rule —
for savage man can only idle while his women and other slaves
toil, and later barbarians nourish their idleness largely by
some sort of force and fraud— the rule for man is not to
merely accept the given, but to mould and fashion it for
himself. In him nothing merely is : it is to be : it has
taken on it a new law, the law of becoming, as the law
which governs him and the things he deals with. With
his emergence on the scene, the world has, as it were, got
a new relative centre : all things have become, or rather are
more and more becoming, anthropocentric.

VIII

SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS

THE point at which we had arrived in the last lecture was
a consideration of that sum or group of conditions under
which the characteristic features of humanity make their
appearance. In a broad general way we gave it the name
of sociality : meaning thereby to indicate the fact that reason
and morality, art and industry, science and philosophy and
religion, only present themselves in associated bodies of
human beings. It is perhaps in one way trivial, yet is it in
another way important to add, that association is not here
treated as a cause or a reason. If we say that morality or
religion or language is a social product, we must not deceive
ourselves. Mere association can do of itself nothing.
Association is,, so to say, the outward visible sign of an
invisible inward grace : and the first thing to realize clearly
is, that you cannot have the one without the other. The
mere fact of there being two or three or more people together
would not make anything grow or become, which had not its
root in some way in the single individuals. So, too, the con
clusion of a syllogism dare not, in one way of looking at the
matter, add anything new to the premises : whatever goes
beyond the premises is of evil, and erroneous. And yet, this
material identity does not prevent the conclusion being a real
addition to our sum of knowledge. You put, as the phrase
is, two and two together : and the result — well, it is not quite

I

II4 GIF FORD LECTURES [vm

two and two, but two and two put together. No doubt, if
you insist on overlooking- the ' put together/ or treating it as
if it were nothing— what anybody can do, and so a neglige-
able quantity— you may say we are exactly where we were.
Yet, when we are ourselves, and not playing the verbal
quibbler, we know that to put two and two together is to
create something new, something irreducible to, and incom
parable with its factors or elements. All the data of Hamlet
were already somewhere, before Shakespeare touched them :
and yet, except as implicit in the predeterminate laws of
life natural and social, or if you prefer it, in the determinate
will of God, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Hamlet of the modern
world, was not. Or, again, the musical notes are, in a way,
all there j and yet each musical genius that comes upon the
scene is a creator of new constellations of harmony.

So here, the mother, already enriched with reason and love,
bending over her infant, does not by her glance, her smile,
her touch, give it a soul, a spirit, a reason : and yet in that
glance, that smile, that touch, soul, spirit, reason, are as
surely born as the physiological life of the same child is
born, and so far as we know is only born, in the congress
of male and female. As in that case the elements of the
living being, the constituents which build up structure, are
older, far older than the two parents, who to popular appre
hension are the authors of the being of their progeny ; so in
the spiritual world, the child and its mother severally bring
to their union of soul a store of powers and faculties prepared
by, it may be, centuries of inherited tradition. Yet it is in
the main true, that it is the mother's and father's look and
touch, charged with the fruits of life, of life both theirs
and that of myriad others which have gone to make up theirs,
which kindles into flame the dull materials of humanity, and
begins that second birth, that spiritual parentship which, at
least not less than the first, should be the peculiar glory
of human father and motherhood. And, to prevent mis-

vni] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 115

conception, the gift of soul and spirit, if gift it be, is not
on one side only. If the parent, in a way, makes the child,,
it is not less true that the child makes the parent. He
kindles new lights, and pierces out new depths, in the parent
soul ; builds his world anew, with other features and fabric
than of old : brings him nearer heaven or nearer hell ; but
at any rate, if the parent ever really sees his child eye to eye
and approaches him touch to touch — and unfortunately we
dare not assume that this always happens, so many parents
and children have never seen each other's soul-face — he is not
as he was before.

We are here concerned with facts, and with the funda
mental condition of our human reality. "With facts. It
might have been that each of us should have been sent into
the world, a fixed and complete quantity of energy charged
with a certain role; a germ, containing a certain bundle
of possibilities, and capable of developing all that was pre
figured without help or hindrance from other things. It
might have been that each of us should have existed as an
independent individual, burdened indeed internally with
a certain drag or limitation or inertia of resistance, — so that
the infinity, implicit in each of us, never became at any
moment wrholly actual, wholly equal to the absolute and
perfect Being, — but yet not hampered by anything without ;
and thus the outward happening, though it was to all appear
ance perpetually about to interfere with what we did, would
yet never really come into contact with us, but would be
kept off, as by some plate-glass surface, or by some imper
meable yet transparent adamant encircling our sphere of
being. So, it appears, thought the great Leibnitz. Each
real being — he called it a Unit or Monad — he thought to be,
as it were, a god, a potential never quite perfect god, but
filled with an instinct towards greater and ever greater com
pleteness : a being, always fragmentary, in that there were
numberless other beings outside it, utterly independent of

I]6 G1FFORD LECTURES [vm

it, yet all somehow, more or less faintly, within its ken,
ideally present to it ; it and all the rest again having- the
full, real, true God above and over all as a sovereign, the real
bond which was represented in this ideal harmony. It is,
you say, an inconsistent conception. But the inconsistency
is partly, I may suggest, in the fact that it is the phraseology
of a compromise. Its voice is the voice of eighteenth-
century Deism, which was the final deposit of a century
of Lutheran orthodoxy : but its hands are the hands of
something very much liker Spinozism than his contemporaries
fancied.

At any rate, without committing ourselves to any denial
that in a higher interpretation the idealism of Leibnitz may
hold its ground, for the present we must insist on the reality
of the fact of inter-action. The individual, so far as
phenomenal facts go, is what he is, through and in his
surroundings. But to call them surroundings or environment
is to mislead. The surroundings of the individual are, how
ever paradoxical the phrase may sound, not merely around,
but in him. They are part and parcel of him : he is part
and parcel of them. The old idealists, such as the later
Stoics, were fond of insisting that things are what we make
them, or take them to be. Everything, say Epictetus and
Marcus Aurelius, is v-noXri^ris ; imagination, fashion, opinion,
rules the world. But if this is true, there is necessity for
reaffirming a corresponding and counter- truth : ' Things are
what they make us become.' Neither side, taken by itself,
has a monopoly of productiveness or creativeness. Things
are not, as an idealist like Fichte might be supposed to say,
mere stuff for us to cut and carve for our own sakes, and as
we please. They are — and this is what Fichte, who was not
a mere idealist, did say — the stuff by our manipulation of
which we become better or worse. In other words, they
subdue us to them, just as much as we subdue them to us.
And if that be so, it would seem to follow that what we call

vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 117

our acting upon them, is, in equal degree, their acting
upon us. Action and re-action are always equal : because,
as a philosopher might say, they are the same thing, seen
from two ends.

External things are the tests of our reality. The so-called
Eerkeleian idealist was supposed to hold that, in the case
of sensible things, their esse was their perclpl : to say that
they existed, was only another phrase for saying that we
perceived them. And some scoffers jeered at the lunatic
philosopher who reduced all reality to a spectral phantasma
goria in his, i.e. the philosopher's, mind; or, as the cruder
critic said, in his brain. But these species of philosophical
propositions are only fully understood, when they are seen
to be reversible. It is equally true that the percipient gets
his being from the perceived. Not to know them, it is said
of some great ones, argues yourself unknown. Do not be too
rash, therefore — I may perhaps say to the very young meta
physician, — do not be in a hurry to throw overboard the
sensible world. It is true that a metaphysician of fame has
declared that you cannot hope to be a genuine philosopher.
if you have not had at some time a serious doubt as to the
so-called reality of the material world. There is something
in this, I admit: but it reminds me of the encouragement
given to a beginner at the game, when he is told that he will
never turn out a crack golfer, unless he first breaks a club
or two : or of the general warrant sometimes thrown out to
the young that, if later years are to bring forth a crop of
good and valiant deeds, it is necessary to begin with sowing
some wild oats. In these cases I suspect there is a little
of the confusion which in the logic books is said to take post
hoc as if it were propter Jioc. In other words : it may be
a grand and generous soul will, just because of his nobler
mettle, commit faults and break hearts, ere he, so to speak, gain
the full mastery of his machine, and learns to elicit the high
music that is in him ; and a player of the grand style may

u8 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm

break an instrument or two, before he learns that even golf-
sticks are to be handled delicately and with respect, as
becomes what are no mere rigid things but organs of the
spirit. But it would be a perilous thing for the clown to
draw encouragement from the necessary mishaps of genius,
and suppose that he can only trundle his wheelbarrow with
its load, if he imitates the prancings and caprioles of some
high-bred steed. So it is with the way to philosophy.
Every one must take his own path, his own royal road.
There is no regulation pattern, no scheme of philosophical
salvation, which each must undeviatingly follow. It is not
necessary, in order to be a philosopher, to doubt the reality
of the external world ; but it is necessary to abandon two
beliefs before, philosophically, you can be saved. The first
is that the external world is the reality, and that our mind,
our ego, is a mere echo, a reflection, or epiphenomenon of it.
The second is that we are the reality — we, the scheme of
ideas — and that the external world is a mere dream, the
passing phenomenon of our minds. The former error is
Materialism, and some people call it Realism : the latter is
Spiritualism, and some people call it Idealism. Salvation,
philosophic or otherwise, can come only to one who has
disowned both errors, and who has learnt that the truth lies
in the utter qualification of one half-truth by the other. The
way to philosophy can only pass through a point where we
see that neither subject or object alone primarily is : where
we learn that things are, because we by reason understand
how things are what they are, and, not less, because the sense
passively receives the impress of their action. Inner and
outer must utterly coincide to give reality.

These epistemological considerations are not alien to our
present problem. For they tend to show that the bond of
reality, as Leibnitz hinted, is in something which compre
hends us and things : that reality is not m things of any
grade whatever, but that things are in reality: or that reality

vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 119

resides in the manifold system o£ relations, the complex, which
binds them together. None of the rings which form the chain
of reality is itself strong- enough to hang the others thereon ;
yet, on the other hand, each of the rings is charged by
implication with the whole. Each is, has being in itself,
but when we look carefully, it is in itself only through the
being of others. Each, as you view it from the standpoint of
the other, is only a phenomenon : and yet each must be real,
or it could not even be a phenomenon. Everywhere subjective
initiative is inseparable from passivity, as of an object, to
something else.

This reciprocal interdependence of aspects holds good, as
perhaps few can care to deny, in the relationship between man
and things. And to us, looking at the problem from our
present standpoint, here might seem to be the commencement.
We go forward to meet the world, to learn from it, to struggle
with it; if possible (and it is not fully possible) to overcome
it. But it is we who go forward : we, the collective, the race
of man. Even when an individual David goes forth to meet
Goliath, he is a champion of an associated host, the bearer of
an ancestral and national interest, the worshipper of his
country's god, the wielder of the weapon which centuries of
customary skill have fashioned, strong in the sympathies
of his compatriots, and strengthened by burning hatred
against the uncircumcised Philistine. The individual in the
search for science is no less sustained, fortified, inspired, by
a long past, by many ages of struggling humanity. The
scholar, even the most rudimentary, does what he does only in
the strength of what his forefathers and their comrades have
done and suffered. By all means let him be proud of his
intelligence, his wit, his genius, his science, his freedom of
mind. But let him remember that if he is free born, some
one has had to pay for him the price of his emancipation.
When Kenan at twenty-five years old entered on his brilliant
course of philological and historical achievement, he started

I20 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm

from a great capital of tradition, which he entered upon partly
by labour but largely by inheritance. He received, in the
dispensation of Nature, all that acquired power of patient
work, of sympathetic insight, of natural piety and human
tenderness, which his Breton peasant forefathers had laboured
for ; he entered upon all the august memories, the organized
strength, the systematized logic and learning, the grand
theistic conception of the Catholic Church: he gathered the
fruits of a scientific struggle, prolonged through centuries
of experimental research, of theoretical construction, and of
attempts to find a law in human life and human history.
Wirfreie Geister, we emancipated intelligences, is the favourite
cry of a modern German thinker, as he thinks of himself and
a band of advanced thinkers. It is a cry that calls for
humility at least as much as pride. One has read of armies
in retreat before some terrible destroyer, brought face to face
suddenly with a deep and precipitous ravine, and compelled by
the mere pressure of horror from behind to march on and on,
till the gap was filled with prostrate human forms, and the
survivors reached the other bank safely by the involuntary
self-sacrifice of their front ranks. Something like this is
always happening in the annals of each life. That each of
us can individually seek to develop our individual minds,
prosecute our separate studies, reach intellectual, artistic, or
social eminence, is possible only because we are raised on the
joined hands of many unknown to fame, who have formed by
stern resolve and hard clench a solid roof over that abyss of
mere animality into which we should otherwise fall. Science,
art, and religion, all that makes life glorious, all that con
stitutes the special glory of individuals, grows out of the root
of sociality. They rest and grow, says Hegel, in the State.
But what, according to Hegel, is the State ? Not something,
assuredly, which lives in London, and has its holy of holies in
the offices of the Treasury : not something which lives for the
time being in the Cabinet, and in the upper and influential

vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 121

circle of the bureaucracy. The State, as Hegel conceives it,
is the completed organization, the self-contained social form,
in which human life can develop its ideal activities : it is an
organization in which the family forms the perennial, and so
to speak the natural basis, the ever fresh, ever creative spring
of moral, intelligent, and artistic life : in which the inter
dependence of industrial effort, commerce, social and com
mercial demand and supply, constitutes the ever-widening
stream : while the more purely political organization itself
blends all these divergent interests and natural ties into one
single and comprehensive nationality or people, wherein the
members can both play their own part well, and contribute
their quota in orderly way to the total work of humanity.

Before the individual could deal successfully, reasonably,
well with the natural world around him, he had to deal with
his own kind, and, combined in action with them, to gain the
weapons and the machinery for carrying out his ends. Before
he could cultivate science and art, he had to live, and to live
he must live in a community. It is no doubt a temptation to
separate one part of this from another, to suppose that outward
activity created inward faculty, or that inward faculty
gradually evolved outward instruments. But the whole point
we here have to insist upon is, not the separateness of these
two, but their necessary interdependence. Man was not an
intelligent creature, who gradually devised newer and abler
tools ; nor was he an unintelligent creature, who became
intelligent by the reflex action of the machinery he had
devised. The old question at issue between Anaxagoras and
Aristotle, ' Is man the cleverest animal because he has
hands ? or has he hands because he is the cleverest of animals ?'
can never be answered as it stands. The turo developments
go tm'pari pasw, parallel to each other, each always cause and
always effect of the other. As Spinoza puts it, there is no
body without a soul, no soul except it be the idea, the life and
consciousness, of a body. The aptitudes of action belonging

122

GIFFORD LECTURES [vm

to the body are exactly equivalent to the intelligence and
rationality of its soul. Soul is not something given a body
to direct ; body not something handed over to a soul's direc
tion. The union of reasonable soul and animal body is
a deeper thing than either spiritualism or materialism.
Reality has, according to Spinoza,, a double aspect : seen this
way, it is soul ; seen that way, it is body : this way, you
attribute to it modes of thought ; that way, you attribute
to it modes of extension. It is true, you may say, that this
is to exceed the facts; for you only see in yourselves, and
infer in those like you, that there are two aspects. But,
answers Spinoza, you cannot have this doubleness of being
even in these cases, you cannot carry your reasoning a step,
unless you admit that, beyond and behind these two aspects
in you, there is an identity, i. e. a self -reaffirming coincidence
of these two aspects.

That intelligence and reason, conscience and language,
emerge only through social, collective, or combined action is
the point. Sociality is not mere juxtaposition, mere aggrega
tion ; if it be ever describable as a quality or property of the
human animal, it is only so in the sense that in man there is, in
a degree and way unknown to the other animals, an impulse
which drives him to combined action. There are, of course,
what are called animal societies, of which certain species of
bees or ants form the typical instances ; though there are
others perhaps which in some respects come closer to their
human analogues. Between the almost stereotyped caste
scheme of the former, and the looser and more flexible
gregariousness of the latter, man steers a sort of mean. It
is not that we can say he is, in any line of distinction,
absolutely and utterly unique. To establish such an impass
able gulf of division between himself and the whole animal
world, has no doubt been a dominant interest in human
curiosity on these matters. But it is hardly describable as
a noble, still less as a disinterested curiosity. It savours of

vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 123

meanness to think our titles to grandeur will be securer, if we
can exclude the claims of the animal creation. Nobler, I think,
is the attitude of St. Francis, when he speaks of his ' brothers'
throughout creation, and, with the Hebrew psalmist, calls all
things from sun and moon to young men and maidens, old
men and children, to praise the name of the Lord. One thing
I know, that neither science nor philosophy are interested in
the question of excluding dogs from heaven, on the ground,
apparently, that the spaces of paradise would become incon
veniently crowded. Perhaps the day may come when the
gospel can be preached for what some people complacently
call the ' beasts that perish/ So long as the device is ( Let
right prevail/ we may be confident no legitimate right will
come short.

But we are concerned with man : and with man sociality is
an effort. The physiological individual, the pure animal, if
we have a right to such an abstraction, tends to slip away
into isolation. At the best, he eats and drinks side by side
with his fellows ; but, unless provender is plentiful and space is
wide, he tends to quarrel with his neighbours, with those who
wander beside him. Even the attraction of sex is a fickle
and feeble bond. I do not know whether Professor Drummond
is right in saying that through the animal world ' the apathy
and estrangement between husband and wife is radical and
universal/ Too general utterances in these matters are
undesirable, and the cynic may point out, with too much
apparent justice, that this apathy and estrangement are not
confined to what is ordinarily called the animal world. But
at any rate it seems tolerably true that, in most cases, the
connexion not merely between animal husband and wife, but
generally between animals, is fairly described as indifference
tempered by occasional caresses and quarrels : while, in the
cases where a closer and more lasting union prevails, as in
the social animals, it has a stereotyped and mechanical
character, as if the several creatures were automata moved by

I24 C1FFORD LECTURES [vm

some necessitation behind tliem. The human association is
co-operation, society in work, or action. At first perhaps
it is an association of labourers cemented by their common
subserviency to some end ; afterwards the association of
labourers who interest and attract each other, not merely
through their final end but also in themselves; not merely
for the temporary or lasting pleasure their deeds confer, but
also for their own sakes, as independent centres of action,
who can be for us all that they may be, only when they are
never mere instruments but always also sources of original
activity.

This is,, in a nutshell, the evolution of ethics. It begins
when co-operative action first appears upon the scene, and
it marks the fact (first) that the single self has made a step
forward, has broken the mechanism of nature, and assumed
a direction, set forth an end ; and (second) that it did so in
a strength not entirely its own, through a will not completely
self-centred ; that it depended on help, on co-operation, and thus
submitted itself to a bond. At first, indeed, it lays the stress,
so far as it can, exclusively on one side. It treats the con
tribution of others as a mere subserviency to its own initiative.
It is selfish, and makes its own utility the centre of all
judgement. It forms relations of inequality, of which the
type is that of master and slave. The human being is, at
this stage, only one among the instruments of production and
conquest, distinguished from the rest only by his flexibility,
his plasticity to the master's hand. Even this, however, is
an advance on a more primitive condition. For the merit of
the relation is that it has introduced order and stability, which
is the first and indispensable condition of all progress. The
worse preliminary stage was an age of chaotic, inconsistent,
erratic conjunctions, when each to other was as a comet
coming occasionally and at barely predictable intervals over
the other's path. Such would be the ideal state of savagery,
a state, it need hardly be said, which has left no traces and

vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 125

which, indeed, in its utterness, is inconceivable. For by
savage we mean simply a degree of civilization far removed
from our own, in which all the more characteristic products
of advanced civilization are conspicuous by their absence.

The evolution of ethics, i. e. the process whereby these faint
traces of ethicality have been actualized more and more, is
the process in which the two elements in all ethics have
acquired increased light, and by which their solidarity has
become more and more real. These elements or factors, to
repeat, are the principle of direction of will-movement on the
one hand, and that of co-operation and co-ordination on the
other. The essence of all ethics is shut up in the word
' Autonomy ' -, but shut up, perhaps, so as hardly to be per
ceptible. Its first part is the idea of originality of action,
of initiation, of movement to end : its second part is the
idea of law, solidarity, community. Emphasize the first, and
ethics seems to be purely idealist, a chase for unattainable
perfections, for self-satisfaction, it may be, even, for pleasure.
But, as our most thoughtful novelist says: 'The cry of the
young for pleasure is actually — I have studied their language
— a cry for burdens/ It may be that a theoretical hedonist
may say of Lais, ' I have and hold her, not she me ' : yet if
Lais does not hold him, it can only be because some petty
care, some mean tie, binds him with a more constraining
force, and makes him lose even the best of Lais. At any
rate, it is true that the cry for pleasures is the cry for life, for
struggle, for tasks : 'and, inevitably, as life rolls on, it turns
round into another and an opposite ethics, the ethics of
realism, and of passivity. Thus ethics becomes compliance
with a code, obedience to a rule, the thraldom of law and
custom ; it becomes the negative sense of duty, and then, as
the same novelist adds, ' the old ones cry for having too many
burdens on their shoulders/ In this second stage ethics
leaves half its meaning behind : it grows negative, and
ascetic, the bondage of Sinai, a schoolmaster to be listened

I26 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm

to, a school to be submitted to. The very word ( school ' is
a standing commemoration of this change. In its Greek
original, <rxoA.r? is release from the distraction of petty tasks,
from the bondage of custom, the fragmentariness of practice,
and the ascent into a freedom where we see things whole and
true, where we are our own full selves, enjoying the full
sense of accomplished and yet progressive being. Thus
school meant the leisure of free development and full self-
realization, the sense and enjoyment of life unimpaired, one
and complete, reserved for those who, having passed through
the trials of experience, the ups and downs of a much-divided
world, might now on the Delectable Mountains behold the
turrets of the celestial city rising out of its earthly prepara
tion stage ; reserved also for those who have yet the world
before them, and can rest awhile, under the Interpreters
care and in the House Beautiful, beholding all the winder
of the world that might be. So are the glories of school
fallen.

Of these two elements, let us look at each in succession.
The first is effort, direction, onward movement, the discharge
of energy in pursuit of end ; an end which, however, only
comes clearly into view as it is realized. Its full name is
work, labour. The human animal, indeed, is not the only
worker. Some of the animal world have their work more
completely organized, as the phrase is, than man's has yet
been. It goes on almost with mechanical regularity. And
ancient aphorisms, as well as modern socialisms, sometimes
seem as if they deemed that man would be more perfect, if he
more nearly approached the painful regularity of the ant.
A world from which imprudence, folly, intoxication, heroism,
wantonness were utterly banished seems a promising ideal :
the ideal of life, not exactly as an eternal petrifaction, but as
one uniformly self-repeating round of tasks, discharged with
punctual regularity, in a prison-house from which there should
be no escape, no release. To organize life, or, more correctly

vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 127

perhaps, to mechanize all its movements ; to reach a stationary
state where all would do well, or at least none could do ill ; to
remove all volition and substitute an unfailing- determinism ;
such might be the vision that the sight of the ant should
produce, not merely on the sluggard. But, alas ! man is not
the industrious bee, the ever- virtuous and much-to-be-imitated
ant. These things are perfect in their way, precisely because
of their inferior nature. The anthropoid, as our scientific
friends prefer to call primitive man, had from the point of
view of the rest of Nature what is vulgarly called a * bee in
his bonnet ' ; or, to take another phrase, he was at the begin
ning an fugly duckling/ He was an outcast amongst the
innumerable races of the animal world. If I may use for the
moment the language of a foul-speaking book, lately done
into English, he was from the very first a case of ' degenera
tion.' He broke, this diseased, strange creature, through the
calm stupidity of the animal world. He ate at an immemorial
date from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ; and he
fell, or, in modern slang, degenerated. Even so is the wheat,
which is our staff of life, a degeneration from some unknown
and probably little worth, but correct grass, which suffered
little from blights, and grew admirably even amongst thorns
and in stony places.

Let us not insist on both having our cake and eating it.
It may be that the ant is happier, better, more virtuous than
man. I know no way of determining it. Or rather it may
be, as I surmise, that these words used of ants are meaning
less. At any rate, let us pluck up heart of grace and not
merely confess, but with all humility boast : Errare kumamim
est. Let us feel quite clear on this point, that to abolish error
in this world is to make truth impossible. There may be —
and we hope it at the consummation of all things — a time
when the wheat and the tares will be eternally separated.
But, for this present temporal scene, let us maintain the
solidarity of opposites. You must pay for your white, if you

I28 CIFFORD LECTURES [vm

will have it, at the cost of black ; if not, you will get, if you
get anything, a dull monotonous grey. The virtues can only
grow on a soil which as necessarily will bear vices. The word
purity has no meaning save as against evil desires repressed,
against incipient impurity. Let the virtuous woman reflect
that her coronal only shines so bright because of what other
wise had grown into her fallen sister. There is none good,
it was said, but God; ' why callest thou me good?' And
I reply, with respectful decision, one may well call thee good,
in so far as thou tightest the fight of faith, not as if thou
hadst already attained, or wert already perfect. And we dare
not say, ' God is good/ because so to call him seems to bring
him down to the level of such an one as mortals are, and to
offer a cheap commendation of him whose ways are not as our
ways, nor his thoughts as our thoughts.

Man is not the industrious bee, or the ever-virtuous ant.
He is not that kind of pattern. Rather is he, equally at the
root of him, idle. His industry is an effort : his work is only
partly a pleasure : he constantly relapses from the strain.
Oftentimes, indeed, he looks round among the animal world
and would fain shake off in fancy the awful yoke that lifts
not night or day, the call of work to be done, all quid facien
dum. In a grand passage of the Metaphysics Aristotle has
remarked that in the economy of the universe, as of a human
household, it is not the highest in rank on whom life sits
easiest. The slave, as he is called, has his hours of rest, his
rude amusements : the laugh in the kitchen sounds often
louder and looser than in the drawing-room. The weight of
responsibility is removed : whereas in the ruling members,
noblesse oblige presses with perpetual weight. The roving
Bushman, with little to bless himself with in material wealth,
sings all day and far into the night for very lightness of
heart: while the latest products of civilization— with some
exceptions, thank heaven !— go to their daily tasks with tense
and apathetic faces, as if they were prisoners.

vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 129

There are, in short, two spirits in man, and both seem
equally natural, equally essential in making him what he is.
He looks before and after, says the poet. The animals are
engrossed., it seems, with the present. But be this as it may,
man, visited by the glimpse of possibilities which arise for
him through social activity, has thus opened up for him
a vision of the recurring contradiction of what he is to be
with what he has been. He is an animal, and sometimes
would be glad to be nothing more. But there has been
realized within him, by social action and co-operation, the
sense of something better. He has risen above himself, yet
without leaving himself. He has gained a human soul,
a social spirit, that puts him into sympathy with a portion
of his fellow creatures, and has in it an expansion to which
no limits can be set. But it is a spirit which is only to be
maintained in struggle against his old animal self. It is the
spirit of a wider nature, born out of other elements besides
those of his own origination. Thus, though it grows out of
him, it has its source in a wider, a larger world. It is reason
in him, and not entirely his ; except in so far as his continual
effort is to be not only himself but more than himself. It is
conscience, the eternal witness to the ' ought ' against the
' is ' : and yet a witness also that the ' ought to be,' in
a higher sense always 'is/

IX

MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE. — MATERIALISTIC AND
IDEALISTIC VIEWS OF IT

THE relation in which Man stands to Nature makes it to
him at once antithetical and inseparable. Nature, if we look
at it in a large way, is that which, whether we will or no,
goes on according to a law of its own, working out of itself
all the potentialities it contains. In simple dignity, unhast-
ing, unlingering, sometimes as it were with simplicity of
a child, and sometimes with the inflexibility of a formed
manhood, it marches on, governed no doubt, as we are gradu
ally brought to surmise, by laws, but not troubled by any
of that consciousness of possible opposition between the law
and the fact, which is so frequent and so bitter an element in
our human experience. We may have by science convinced
ourselves that its course is hemmed in at every point by
uniform laws, but nature itself is to the mere obvious percep
tion free, determined by no alien force, itself supplying the
very means by which it is made better. And as against such
nature uniform, complete, all-encompassing, man seems the
child of caprice, irregularity, and self-contradiction ; his
business, we should, if we spoke hastily, say was to thwart
and pervert, to defy and constrain the great power of things :
only that if he for a little slacken his efforts, and cease from
troubling, the other elemental forces resume their sway, and
in a few years or centuries leave no obvious traces of his
works. He builds his bridges, he forms his conventional

MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 131

barriers and settlements over and across nature's surface : but
they are founded on the moving sand of his conceits, and are
in no long time swept away to the bourne from which there is
no return. Impotent and vain, brooding over ideals which
the natural conditions forbid him ever to realize, man seems
to the mere realist (who in this matter takes a pessimist
tone), to be an inexplicable and absurd freak of nature —
a child born of nature in some foul hour of mysterious incest,
doomed from his birth to struggle, but to struggle for ever in
vain, against his mother and her ordinances, vexing her soul
with his vanity, his insanity, his despairs, by his ideals moral
and immoral; but doomed also, at some distant date per
chance, to fade away into nothingness, and leave the weary
world at peace from the perverse iniquity of her Caliban, her
youngest and most froward child. To the mere idealist
perhaps, on the other hand, the antagonism takes a more
optimistic issue. He sees in man a being who already was,
in some higher sphere before nature came to be, and who still
will be after all the works of nature are shrivelled into nebula.
Or rather, perhaps, the idealist sees in him a being who in
his inmost essence has no past and no hereafter. His life, as
we, speaking the language of one short-lived race, call life, is
but the misconceived or half-understood representation of
something deeper, higher than it appears to be. The true
life, the ' life that knows no ending,' and perhaps knows no
beginning, is the invisible but real pre-supposition of the
struggle to be which we call life. Charged for a while with
the task of guiding some little portion of material nature, the
soul, as the old idealism named this imperishable germ of
being, has a watch to keep, a service to render ; it is, by some
dark law of universal order, submitted for a time and times to
a probation ; to, it may be, an exile in an alien world, with
an ever-present yearning for its true country, which is the
heavenly, and an occasional reminiscence of its spotless
beauty : and at length, after the campaign is over, the soldier

K 2

I32 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

spirit, according to its constancy or its cowardice, is given
back to the real, i.e. the invisible world, with due meed of
joy, of penal but purifying- torments, or of unending- pain.

Such are the schemes of conceiving the relation of Man to
Nature which have had an historical fame. The first, that
of the materialistic and pessimistic observer, sees in man
a revolter against nature, an unintelligible accident, the
sudden emergence oE an unearthly, unnatural ideal, as of some
portentous star in a grey moonlight sky. It foresees, with
no shadow of a doubt, that the rebellion of man is foredoomed
to inevitable failure : that the meteoric light which he flashed
must and will be extinguished, and leave behind only a dead
meteoric stone more in the cosmos. And yet, while his scien
tific senses force him so to judge, there is something else
in him which, with at least not less authority, obliges him to
declare that, notwithstanding the inevitable collapse which
sooner or later will come, he for one will fight, and ever fight,
whatever the issue. He hears the loud yelp of the Fenris
wolf coming ever nearer, more heart-crushing ; he sees the
powers of ancient darkness, the giants, gathering round
stonily imminent as the light grows dim, and on the face of
Loki the smile of assured triumph settling grislier and
grimmer ; the jaws of the world-serpent open for their prey ;
he feels the eternal frost creeping to the vitals of the earth,
he declares that he cherishes no hope of an ultimate reversal of
the doom impending : and yet, undaunted as a bridegroom to
meet his bride, he goes forth, mightier in his mood than the
elements which seek to engulf him, and bury him and his
revolt out of sight. It is unintelligible and absurd, you say :
but it is magnificent. But is it so unintelligible after all?
Is it not rather the reason of life suppressing the reason of
logic, and of what the short-sighted call science ? ' All men
are mortal,' says the logic-book, ' and Peter is a man ; there
fore Peter is mortal/ So far so good : but every man, every
woman, eternally supersedes that conclusion as a half-truth

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 133

for him and herself, and says by act, which is more rational
than the formal syllogism, — Nou onmis moriar • whereby they,
by deeds done in love, survive.

The second scheme may on the whole be styled the Platonic,
or, in special form, the idealist and spiritualist. In the develop
ment of the Christian church, and partly even in the very
origins of Christianity, it has entered into the body of Christian
doctrine in a measure which has made it practically impossible
to separate the two elements. Perhaps most people hardly
realize, or even are aware, how thoroughly their conception
of life and immortality, of the here and the hereafter, which
they regard as essentially Christian, are in their origin and
form Platonic : though, be it added, of a Platonism which
has undergone much vulgarization in the process of incorpora
tion, and even before it. But the fact is, the modern reader
of the sacred books can only with great difficulty, much self-
restraint, much purgation of mind, get into even tolerably
direct contact with them. In some works of religious art,
when symbolism took other forms than it does now, the
artist gave to his saintly figures a nimlus or aureola round
their head. What is that nimbus? It is the ' cloud of
witness,' the work of witnessing spirits, who, as the genera
tions rolled past, have brought out in quasi-sensible shape
the significance of the bare fact or of the barely visible
personage, and stamped it, in always altering and increasing
complexity, on the face of the saint; even as, in a different
way, a painter by his finer symbolism may depict in a face
a depth of character which no casual observer had been able to
see. Even such a nimbus gathers round the plain words of an
ancient text. Such a text also lives and grows fuller of com
plex life. It gathers up and bears around it a charmed halo,
of! which in the end it seems almost sacrilege to try to strip
it. And to pause a moment in an inviting side-issue, let me
ask and try to answer the question : Is it well to strip it off ?
Yes, I reply, for certain purposes well : but not in all respects

GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

well To illustrate by an analogous case, 'Let us/ says a
French writer \ < see in woman nothing to trouble us, nothing
mysterious : let us strip her of all this romance : (de'pomllon*-
la de tout ce lyriwe) which we throw, as it were long veils,
upon our troubles : let her for us be truly nature (qu'elle wit
pour nous vmiment nature).' We know what to say to this
proposal of M. Barres ; or if any one will not say it, he can
hear it from Wordsworth. It is well for certain purposes
that we should, as he puts it, know the very pulse of the
woman's machine: should, i.e. know that like all humanity
she is animal, weak, capricious, fearful : should remember
that, as Schopenhauer was fond of putting it, < under, or,
if you prefer it, over the lady, there is always the woman.'
But it is, on the other hand, emphatically not well that, as
the same Schopenhauer was inclined to do, the man should so
far strip himself of humanity as to wrench with brutal hand
from her all that developed and ordered grace and spirit of
womanliness which, through the age-long operation of asso
ciation in the family bond with all its varying types, in social
organization, in natural union, have made her, though not
less ' truly nature,' still also and thereby,

'A spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light.'

And now for the application of the analogy. It is well
that the scholar and the critic should try to penetrate beneath
the accumulation of rags and patchwork which, they say, have
gathered about the ipgissima verba of a sacred book. The
present generation fancies, and in some respects no doubt
rightly fancies, that it has at length learned the right art
of interpreting the texts ; that by scholarship and history
it enters more sympathetically into their innermost central
meaning. On the whole I agree : I do not like to quarrel
with the Zeitgeist. Yet, at the risk of being more than
usually frivolous, I must just suggest a doubt as to our

1 M. Barres, Un Homme Lihre, p. 44.

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 135

all-sufficiency. We all sometimes in a vacant hour turn to
old numbers of Punch. If we go back thirty years, we
come in its pages upon bonnets, dresses, shawls, which, in
proportion to our degrees of youth, we pronounce hideous,
tasteless, unnatural, or at best quaint, such a contrast do
they present to the naturalness of the present style. Yet
some of us can remember a time when, for reasons I stay
not to inquire into, these same pieces of garb seemed to earn
quite other epithets. So in other more scientific fields perhaps
— I will not go further towards prophecy — it may happen
that a later time surveying the labours of the nineteenth
century may pronounce our most impartial criticism preten
tious and absurd ; or, without going so far, may venture to
say that our critics were under the influence of their time,
and saw its ideas and beliefs reflected in the works, which
they professed with due impartiality to do no more than
expound.

But, however this may be, one thing needs remembering;
and that is that all the books on which humanity has fed,
humanity has in its turn made to develop new growths.
And the same is true of its songs and its pictures. Have
you realized that those books we turn to, not often perhaps if
compared with our vulgar readings, but again and again when
we would, as it were, bathe ourselves (se retremper) in the fresh
bracing pools of some mill stream : that these books have
much written, so to say, in sympathetic ink between the lines ;
exchanging the metaphor, that the letters in them quiver and
glow in the throb of historical emotion? A recent Hebrew
scholar e. g. gives us a book on the origin of the Psalms, and
their religious significance. In some respects it probably
matters little, and for the sake of truth and accuracy it may
be even a great gain, to ascertain that these lyrics are not the
effusions of that somewhat excessively amorous and cruel
adventurer king, David ben-Isai, but the outpourings of a
later, more cultured, and more devout, and even a more

I36 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

patriotic age. But the main thing after all for humanity
at large, even for the scholar in his ex-scholar moments, is
the mental, moral, religious sustainment or inspiration these
hymns afford to universal human life in its struggle onwards
and upwards. It is the temptation of the scholar, especially
of the critical scholar, to isolate the text from its comment.
For purely historical purposes that is entirely right, and we
are not likely to have too much of it. But all the same, none
of us can afford to be pure or mere historians. The danger
therefore is that we go back to the ' beggarly elements/ under
the impression that we are thus getting nearer the real truth.
It is vain to talk of reading these books without note or
comment. The comment also has in course of time become
part of the text. Every reader is trained in a traditional inter
pretation which, with what ability he may have, he helps to
develop and hand on. There is no private right of inter
pretation, if that means privilege : private right is based on
common law.

And now to return. The Platonist idealism, which has
largely entered into the formation of the Christian idea, and
has again issued from it to form quasi-independent schemes
of idealism and spiritualism, has generally been disposed to
regard nature as an enemy, but also as an illusory enemy,
already in essence vanquished. Whereas, on the materialistic
theory, the sudden rise of the intellectual and moral warrior,
who defied the hosts of nature, is utterly surprising and un
explained ; here, on the idealist hypothesis, the spirit is
distinctly declared to have descended from above and from
outside. ' Intelligence/ repeats Aristotle, following an older
theory, ' comes in from the door' (Ovpadtv). The soul has
come from heaven, i.e. from the supernal abodes of the
highest mind, to enter into and dwell with man. Itself
a divine germ, it has assumed the human form ; or, in
metaphor, it has entered a tabernacle of earth. In that
post, however, it has its task before it. It, a pure intelli-

jx] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 137

gence, must co-operate with creatures of lower breed : as
Plato in his figurative language puts it, the soul is a
charioteer who can only drive through life with the help
of two unequally yoked horses, one gallant and violent, the
other sluggish and cowardly : or, as he varies his metaphor,
the man we seem at first sight alone to see, has, lurking
under that fair exterior, a being half -lion, half -serpent, and
another many-headed creature, more complex and grotesque
than poet's fancy has feigned. Thus, at least, in moods
which the dominant current of the later Platonism loved to
retrace — though I think they are after all a by-path, and not
the royal highway which the great Athenian himself chiefly
loved — thus did Plato present man in antagonism with what
some will now call his nature. In Plato's speech, nature is
the eternal order of righteousness, the law that works through
reason into good. A later age, indeed, came to speak of body,
or, as it is otherwise called, 'the flesh/ under the name of
nature. This, however, is not Plato's phraseology : nor is it the
phraseology of St. Paul. St. Paul's Greek and his philosophy
may not be always unexceptionable, but in his letter to the
converts at Rome, he is perfectly unmistakeable in the dis
tinction between nature (which is the great common law for
all mankind, of which Judaic law is only as it were an
appendix or special edition, issued for the use of a stiff-necked
race) and those evil lusts which are ayain&t nature ; even as by
the law of the flesh he means the principle of an imperfect
life, which narrows its aim, and perverts its proportions to
partial, one-sided, fragmentary issues. It was a degradation
of language, in which Christian theologians have perhaps
helped, to speak of nature as the adversary of spirit.

Of the two views that wrestle in Plato's mind, the one sees
Nature as the starting-point of Spirit, as a germ which by
physical discipline and the moralizing stimulus of society (as
expressed e.g. in art and letters) may become more adequate
as a vehicle of the highest life. This tone of thought is

T38 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

shown in the contempt he pours on those who spoke as if
virtue was against the grain, was an unnatural thing. On
the contrary, he says, virtue is the very path of nature. And
to the last his theme is that the righteous are by nature happy,
and the happy must be righteous. Still, in his later writings,
a change has come over his spirit. He sees the world lying
largely in wickedness. Natural influences seem banded against
the life of the highest soul : and an ethics of asceticism ever
and anon crosses the older creed of free self -development.
The good recedes into the innermost soul and the utter
most sphere of reality. Man's true life is elsewhere, and

not here.

Of these two views let me add only one word more before
I pass on. I have sympathies with both. The realistic or
materialistic interpretation of nature and man may be imper
fect and may be inconsistent : yet it has at least, I think, the
merit of seeking to found itself on facts, not on illusions. Its
facts may be narrowly apprehended, crudely interpreted : yet
there is such a thing as a sturdy independence, which refuses
to borrow a crust or a coal which it deems not honourably
earned, and will rather fight the world starving than beg or
steal ideal hopes and transcendental beliefs. Of the idealistic
hypothesis, on the other hand, I will on]y say that it may be
true : in some essential points, perhaps, it must be true. But,
as it is ordinarily stated, it soars too daringly into the realm
of the unknown ; it draws too large cheques on the bank of
our ' ethical needs ' ; and above all, it introduces too vast and
arbitrary a gulf in the order of development of reality. If
animal life, though a new thing not reducible to its ante
cedents, yet comes in the order of nature as their due sequel ;
in like manner we must postulate that the spiritual life, the
life of righteousness, beauty, and goodness, shall be a con
tinuation of the same natural, which is thus in its essence also
a supernatural, order.

The soul, mind, or spirit, then, with all its objective, or

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 139

more than barely objective, creations in morals, science, art,
religion,, is born, generated, produced in the social medium,
through the effort long prolonged, intermittently pursued,
and often misdirected, an effort of social co-operation. There
is, of course, in man, as in all animals ' that nourish a blind
life within the brain/ an animal sensibility, an animal pru
dence, which we call instinct. There is in them, just as with
due degrees of variation in all living things, a sensitive soul :
it may be, if we follow the hypothesis of Fechner, that such
a soul is to be found even in stars, as in planets ; for they also
in their way exhibit what we call vital phenomena, the
appearances or exercises of living. And this soul, if we
for the present restrict our consideration to the animal world,
comes into existence under conditions of which biology can
give an approximately correct account. What is more, this
* vital principle/ the principle of animal life, is not, as the
so-called ' vitalists } are alleged to hold., a locally separate
being or presiding genius who sets in motion, guides, and
controls the whole stream and circulation of the vital phe
nomena. That old idea — so far as it was ever distinctly held
by any thinker, and not merely an attempt to express in
abstract generality the supposed kernel of popular opinion
on the subject — was no doubt an analogue of other old-
fashioned ideas, not even now extinct in the sphere of
government and politics. In the pre-scientific mind, in the
imaginative popular way of looking at fact, in the Vorstellung,
as Hegel would say, rather than the Begriff, the initiative of
social effort was believed to lie with a governing power, and
to proceed thence to all the periphery of the body politic. So
in the world-government, God, to Leibnitz for example, was
the sovereign being, or the architectonic mind. And in
the microcosm, in the human mind itself, the will and the
intellect, the superior or aristocratic faculties, were understood
to rule the inner world, and to give the starting-point for
action and reflection.

I40 GUTORD LECTURES [ix

In the modern time, which we sometimes call the scientific,
,nd sometimes (with the qualification 1 before indicated) the
democratic time, we neither think so, nor, whatever our
politics be, can we think so. In this one point the modern
advanced liberal touches the conservative, and makes one of
those recurriuo- conjunctions of extremes which puzzle the
adherent of the old party lines of distinction. The new idea,
indeed, is difficult to express, for its very nature is to be a
vague strong feeling and therefore inexpressible : once you try
to define it, either side will protest that was not their meaning.
It is, if I may again quote M. Karros'. ' the feeling that the
masses alone make us touch the foundation of humanity: the
people have revealed to us the human substance, the sap
of the world: or 'In coming near the simple, I have seen
how under each of my acts there co-operates with conscious
activity an activity which is unconscious, an activity like that
which is seen in the animals and the plants: I have simply
added to it reflection.' Or again : ' Yes, this force which
agitates in our veins, this absolute " me " which tends to
sourdre in the deplorable "me" that I am, this perpetual
restlessness, which is the condition of our perpetual coming to
be, they know it as we do, those humble companions, the goat
and the ass, which .Berenice takes out to walk on the common.
In each is a superior being who would fain realize itself.'
Or again : ' It is instinct much more than analysis which
makes the future. Jt is instinct alone which dominates the
unexplored parts of my being, it alone which enables me to
substitute for the "me" I appear the "me" towards which
I march with eyes bandaged.' In one word, it is the idea of
the social solidarity as controlling and enabling individual
performance, of the whole psychic organism as a higher thing
than a mere system or hierarchy of powers, of the world itself
as immanent in God and God immanent in the world, which
rules our psychology, sociology and theology.
1 Lt Jardhi dt JbYmiur, pp. 175-183.

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 141

I shall not for one moment seek to ignore the fact that the
new phraseology has its dangers like the old. We fight for
a conception, we get it : and yet we are not happy. Even the
successful suitor who has just got his mistress's yea- word, is
said to have a momentary shiver of self-searching. None of
these things,, taken by themselves, can satisfy the soul's
infinite thirst for truth, beauty, good. Yet may one more
than another be, for the individual and the age, the appointed
means whereby he may not merely discern the relations of
things, but — which is the iniitm neccssarium — may, to the
measure of his ability, set his life on everlasting foundations.

But those who have accepted the conclusions of biology,
are less consenting when they are asked to follow the march
onward into sociology. They admit that science is within her
rights, when she declares that life, animal and vegetable, is
a phenomenon equally open to study with the phenomena of
light and heat ; equally inexplicable, if we insist on going back
to an ' original' or ' ultimate' force ; equally intelligible, if we
have regard to the laws and conditions of its existence and
development. They admit that the power of the organism
cannot be assigned, either in perpetuity or in trust, to any
archaeus or single agent located in itself. They are content
to define life as the consensus of vital function, without feel
ing much put about by the remark of that scare-crow, the
formal logician, who tells them that their definition involves
tautology. As if, forsooth, every definition that is worth its
salt did not. overtly or covertly, contain a circuhi* in (lefi-
niendo, or, in other words, return into itself.

But when they come to the intellectual Psyche, what the
Aristotelians and their successors down to Kant's time called
the superior faculties, i.e. the intellect, reason, will, conscience,
aesthetic sense, they cry out against Materialism, Natu
ralism, Empiricism and so on. They cry out : ' These things
are from above: they have a higher origin than the merely
sensitive and appetitive quasi-animal faculties.' And they do

I42 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

well to cry out : these things are from above : these things
have a hi-her origin. Their mistake is to introduce the divine
stage-manager through a trap-door, or to lower him m a swing;
to add suddenly and at one stroke of magic, something which
the original structure of the play we call the universe, a play
into which he has certainly put himself, would not naturally
evolve by itself. One of the most significant utterances of
Him who loved to call himself Man (for that I need perhaps
hardly remind you is the plain English for the Semitic idiom
'Son of Man') is, 'My Father goes on working, up to this
moment, and I work too/ Creation is incessant and per
petual : the world is ever in the making : we do not know
what we are, because we know not yet what we shall be.
God, said the old legend, rested on the seventh day : but the
newer legend says with one voice, that God rests never,
neither slumbers nor sleeps ; and with another voice that His
Sabbath remaineth for ever and ever. For if it be true even
of the human artist, that into his work he puts something of
himself, and that that something— like the trees the ' laird '
planted or bade his son plant— will go on growing when he
lies sleeping; it is more emphatically true of the Divine
Artist or Artificer: for, with him, fine art and common
craftsmanship are indistinguishably one. The world is not
merely his work : it is, as Plato dared to say long ago in
bold metaphor, his own only offspring, his only-begotten,
the gradually realizing and realized image of himself, the
apparency (or, as it has been rendered, the glory, 5 of a) of the
Father.

What we have said, then, was that the emergence of these
superior faculties in history — by which I mean, not human
record but the process of becoming, or, as it is called, of
evolution — is conditioned by the social effort of man ; of
man, i. e. originally to all appearance very like other animals,
but containing germs and tendencies unobserved, because
unsolicited, which would one day set him perspicuously dis-

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 143

tinct from those who yet are of his kind, the kindred of an
older lineage than stops at the days when Adam delved and
Eve span. Those things, powers and faculties, we have
called them, grow in him as a social being : a being, i. e. who
is born male and female, and so never quite without some
relations to pairing, to parentship, and blood-kindred; who,
even apart from sexual ties, is forced, if he will live, to join
hand in hand, to lend a hand and an eye, to work for a
common aim j who cannot be altogether alone at any moment
of life, and who, though common phrases seem to assert the
contrary, knows the pang of death through his ineradicable
sociality.

' Unassisted reason/ we heard the other day, ' is a fiction ' ;
that means that reason is the very breath of sociality. It is
not the work of the individual. What he ( is pleased to call
his mind ' is the evidence of something in him greater than
his narrower self. All that he is as a spiritual creature, he
is in the give and take of society. His own, as Shakespeare
has told us in Troilus and Cressida, is not his own till it
comes back to him from the life, eye, hand, of another J.
Our intellectual world, our morality, art and religion, are
built up,— built up to some extent in each of us individually,
— but always by an act which is collective and social. So
far this, perhaps, will be accepted. But I must press it
farther home. True, some will say, that the evidence forces
us to the conclusion that these objective and universal
creations just mentioned are the result of a national or tribal
co-operation. But surely you must admit on the other hand
that the human mind, and its superior faculties of will,
intellect, conscience, sense of beauty, religious sense, are
innate and original, the very substance and essence of man.
Well, without taking refuge in some obvious lurking places
suggested by the concluding terms, I will directly reply
with some hope of future counter-admission, that I cannot

1 Trail, and Cress, iii. 3. 96-123.

GIFFORD LECTURES [ix

144.

admit this proposition. I know nothing of faculties and
I doubt if vou know much more, i.e. of faculties apart from
and utterly previous to their exercise. You would not probably
be in the way of saying that a man runs because he has
a faculty of running, any more than you would repeat the
old joke," that opium causes sleep because it has a 'dormitive'
faculty. The appeal to faculties is very much like a justifica
tion of one 'I think so ' by another 'because I think so/
Faculties are, firstly, only an inference, though I should like
to add a necessary inference, from the fact of their exercise.
If I did it, you say, I must have been able to do it, I must
have had a faculty for doing it. If you did it ! but are you
quite sure that you did it, you and you alone? Or, is your
phrase an elliptical one? Are you not, so to speak, sitting
in the chair of Nebuchadnezzar? That king (in a pretty
legend which the somewhat apocryphal book of Daniel has
preserved) was walking on the royal palace of Babylon,
and as lie looked on his city for which he had done so much,
he could not refrain from saying were it but to himself:
' Is not this great Babylon which I have built by the might
of my power? ' And, straightway, a voice fell from heaven :
the kingdom departed from him, he was driven out from
men and made his dwelling with the beasts of the field.
The punishment, you observe, is no arbitrary imposition:
it is only the acted, outwardized thought. For all that
glory of civilization, these fanes, academies, storehouses and
all they symbolize, were the combined work of uncounted
workers in many generations ; and he was but the foremost
minister of his kingdom, and, if you prefer it, the servus
ftervornm Dei. And as he said, so it was : he had dreamed
himself all alone, and alone he was, — as one of the beasts of
the field.

True, where there is exercise, there must be faculty. If
it is done, it could (as least then) be done. But this some
what trite or, as some call it, insignificant proposition hardly

ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 145

warrants the assertion that each of us have the faculties
in question. You can, of course, carry on the war longer,
if you like ; you can say, we must have had the faculty to
have the faculty — we the individuals — to become we the
social. But here I cease to pursue; if you adopt Scythian
tactics and retire into the wastes, I can do nothing: and
at present I am not prepared to follow the plan suggested
to Darius, and attack the sepulchres of your fathers. Let
me rather say, that, for all purposes of common intelligence,
real faculty is only where there is actuality: and that is only
in the reciprocal action and reaction of at least two agents,
or, if you prefer it, an agent and a patient, who are for ever
changing places.

But there is another thing to be said about the faculties,
which we thus severally tend to appropriate. When we have
them all before us, it gets a difficult matter to adjust their
mutual relationships. How far is conscience e.g. different
from will, or will different from intellect? How do they
severally stand to us, to our self or ego ? The phrenologist,
or, as we now know him, the brain physiologist, will perhaps
reply: fOh! but we have localized the faculties in the brain/
I understand they have localized, to a not very great extent,
and with some dispute, something in the brain : but I doubt
whether it is the faculties. I doubt whether you can, if
words are to be used plainly, speak of localizing faculties.
Perhaps, first, you will have to settle whether mind itself
is localized in the brain. That, some may answer, is a ' fore
gone conclusion": to which, if I may give full meaning to
the words, I assent. < If not there, then, where is it? it
must be somewhere/ Well, these are questions I cannot
answer, or you insist on asking. Similarly, I cannot tell you
where God is : not that I do not draw a difference between
God and mind. God, it may be said, is everywhere: and
my mind,— well, is not everywhere. One thing I will say :
as I do not know whether God is to be said to be within

L

146 GIFFORD LECTURES

or without the world, so I cannot tell whether the mind
or soul is within or without the body. To fix your faith
on such words, is to play at metaphors with the Devil in
a game where he is almost sure to win. You do not, I pre
sume, identify your heart, when you give it away, with the
central machinery of the blood-pump, nor is a broken heart
necessarily a rupture in the cardiac muscles. But you reply,
mind is a function of the brain, is it not? Happy, or shall
I say, unhappy man, to whom that ill-savoured word ' func
tion ' gives repose. But, if I must use it, I will say : Yes,
mind is a function of brain, acting in conjunction with the
whole graduated universe of things.

At any rate, when we come to conscience, will, aesthetic
sense, we may cease to talk of brain localization. Of course,
these, like all mental exercise, involve action of brain cells :
they go, so to say, through certain tracts, and adopt certain
paths fitted for them. So some spiritual action uses the
hand, some the teeth, some the lungs. But it seems to me
as quaint to call this localization as it would be to say, digestion
resides in the stomach. These phrases, doubtless, have some
meaning, but it seems confusedly involved. No : it is in
the sphere of their action that we get the difference of
will and intellect, conscience and reason, intellect and aesthetic
sense. You gain nothing, and perhaps lose much, by hyposta-
tising a faculty of will, beside intellect. You will and
understand, you reason and have conscience: but if you
do, it is in the co-ordinated and combined work of society,
not by special drawers in your particular mind. Your reason
and conscience, your intelligent will, and your sense of God,
come to you in the course of an associate life, towards which
you co-operate: if they are in you, they are there as social
energies, for human service, and thereby for higher and wider
aims.

MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION. — THE MATERIAL BASIS
OF THE MORAL LIFE

THE question ' What is Civilization ? s can, like many others,,
be answered in two or three very different ways. We may,
for instance, looking round on the more striking- but familiar
features of our own national life and contrasting them with
others more remote or opposite in character, select certain of
these as marking out the boundaries of the word's denotation.
We know, of course,, — it is, indeed a commonplace and an
axiom, — that we are a civilized people. And on these premises
it is concluded that civilization means railways, lighting of
streets by night, a certain legalized and moralized form of
marriage, the institution of property, churches, and so on, in
a list which may be as long, and consist of such items, as the
knowledge or aim of the observer suggests. Any group or
community of men which is without these features, or has
others opposite to them, is accordingly styled uncivilized.
We no longer for instance, at least in an offensively frank
way, buy our women to wife. That practice therefore stamps
a people as uncivilized. We no longer openly eat our fellow-
humans, though it is still a legitimate test of skill to be able
to prey upon our neighbours, and as an elegant phrase puts it,
suck their brains. The cannibal, therefore, is uncivilized.
We dress, or rather in ceremonious manner, we doubly dress,
when we dine : and the absence of clothes at the festive board
is a mark of uncivilizedness.

i48 GIFFORD LECTURES [x

So speaking, we take what we conceive as the essence of
our civilization to be an absolute standard, to be the civiliza
tion of civilization; and every feature of it, except such as
those which we may, for some reason, think trivial or casual,
is re-arded as an item in making np the total idea. A little
extension or experience, a little travel through history, helps
to dispel this illusion, or at least to modify it. Gradually, as
we escape from our ingrown prepossessions, and can look out
from a disinterested observer's standpoint, we come to speak
of a Greek, of an Egyptian, of a Chinese civilization, and the
rest. Of each of these foreign, and it may be vanished civili
zations, we can, through the help of books and other monu
ments, construct a picture, approximately correct : not, of
course, quite so complete or so well-compacted as we can
form of our own state; more confined to externals, and pene
trating less to what is within, but still in essence a picture of
the same style as that which we delineate of our home
product. Each such delineation is what we term a < descrip
tion ' : and description, though the logicians seem very unwill
ing to admit and register this plain fact, is, always of an
individual instance, always a constructed percept, never
a concept or general idea. And, so long as we keep to this
field of individuals, and do not dig deeper down to their basis,
that is, to the universal or general (which again, as the
logician knows, is always the sphere of definition as opposed
to description), there is really no good reason for drawing the
line anywhere, and saying that here civilization stops. Once
you cease to regard your own peculiar property, your private
and particular civilization, as the one and sole type of real
civilization, you are set moving on an inclined plane ; and, as
historians of civilization, you will have to speak of a Hottentot
or an Eskimo civilization. But having gone so far, can you
stop even there, and if so, why? Just as religion means,
first, and vulgarly, your religion : the dominant or predomi
nant religion of your nation and time : then, secondly, a set of

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 149

phenomena, found in different and perhaps in all races, occu
pying- a similar or analogous place in their national life to
what ours does for us : so with civilization. Our own civili
zation we know in a way, however imperfectly,, both from
without and within, subjectively and objectively : the civili
zation of others mainly from without, objectively. But
neither of these methods of knowledge is finally satisfactory.

The historical outlook inevitably leads to comparisons : and
comparisons lead to criticism, to selection, to judgements of
good or bad, and to the formation of a scale or order of merit.
Our ' boasted civilization ' is weighed in the balance against
others, known or imagined : and sometimes, and at some
points, it is pronounced wanting. With an imperfect con
sciousness of what and why, there grows up in the mind thus
reflecting a sense of a direction or purpose, of a main end or
principle in the complex structure of civilization, by which its
parts and members can be judged as well or ill developed, as
degenerations or steps of progress, as survivals that have lost
meaning, or as rudiments which apparently have not yet
wholly found it. It may, as just hinted, be sometimes diffi
cult to say in clear words what this central idea is : for, at
first, it is only a felt and experienced influence, it acts
instinctively, and, if you like, blindly as a clairvoyante, before
it comes to seize itself in the light of clear self -apprehension.
We come thus to a third stage in our way to the meaning of
civilization, in which we seek to get at the unity, which
underlies and holds together the various phenomena of our
own civilization, and which also is the organizing tie in all.
And, as a first step in that direction, we must look for what
Goethe used to call the Uqihanomen, the typical and, as it
were, aboriginal phenomenon : the single example which
projects the completest image of the fact in all its essential
elements : the body, as it were, which lets the soul most
translucently show through it.

In one way, the way, we may call it, of Nominalism, it is

I50 G1FFORD LECTURES [x

easy enough to see that civilization is citizenship. The fact
that it points to, or means, is a < city/ And when we say
a city, we mean, if we but think of it, any gathering or
association of human beings which, within limits larger or
smaller and with more or less permanence, has a kind of
independent completeness; which in a visible way shows
a co-ordination and subordination of individual actions to
wards some common end that belongs to all, and can be
enjoyed by each. A city, in this sense, is equally to be seen
in the group of tents which shelters an Australian tribe, in
the commonwealth of ancient Greece, in the kingdom of
Israel, in the Chinese empire, in the United States. The
name, however, belongs originally, properly, and grammati
cally, to only one period of these historical formations. The
city, as such, appears for the first time in Greece; and later,
by imitation, in Rome, in the Hellenized east, in mediaeval
Europe : and thence, by an extension backwards and forwards,
the name gets applied to all organized communities of men.
But why, one may ask, first in Greece? Because— so at
least we can partially answer the question — in Greece, and
especially at one period of Greek history, the inner thought or
idea took perceptible shape, visible form. A city, according
to Aristotle, the ancient theorist who has tried to tell us what
the Greeks meant by what they named a TroAis, is of such
a size that you can easily survey it in a single view, of such
population that every citizen may know in a rough way every
other, and where all may be able to meet in such a place that
one speaker's voice can reach them all. This, you observe, is
unity to sight as well as unity to thought : it is idea wedding
fact in a very palpable, tangible way. But, we may, I think,
go beyond these Aristotelian notes of what makes the city
a perceived or seen unity. In various other directions, it had
no less visible and sensible symbols of spiritual oneness. It
had one central fortress, perhaps, where in extremity it might
concentrate its militant life; it had one temple, or it might

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 151

be, a conjunct group of such ; it had one market-place, where
the citizens saw their industrial and commercial unity realized,
and where, as the hours went round, the business of chaffering
about the merchandise of each gave place to the business of
the common good; it had one, or an ordered series of great
common festivals, half-religious, half-social (if we use our
analytic terms to describe them), into which the whole com
munity threw itself with zest and zeal ; it had, perhaps, one
common, and perhaps open-air, exhibition of art and litera
ture, which was a gathering-place of the community in which
it specially felt itself one ; it had its meeting-place for the
fathers of the city, its public hearth with the ever-burning
hearth-fire of the land, and its public table where those
worthy of general honour found a home; it had its own
comparatively comprehensive yet simple code of laws ; and its
one great burial-place, where the living could linger and
dream with their departed.

Contrast all this with, say, Glasgow. There may be
physical obstructions other than size which here make a
synoptic view of the whole city impossible : but, even apart
from fog and smoke, it is plain that Aristotle's conditions
would not be realizable, even in a single one of its parlia
mentary divisions. But it is when we come to the signs and
symbols of mental and moral unity that the contrast of the
modern city stands most obvious. There are some attempts,
costly and even grandiose, to give expression to municipal
unity, — and what a fragment of unity that is, after all ! — but
the most ardent admirer of Glasgow will scarcely assert that
they are adequate, whether one looks solely to the place they
take in the mere field of observation, or considers rather how
far they possess that vigour, that dynamic activity, that hold
on the lives and sentiments of men, which was exercised by
the monuments of Greece, and by many imitators of Greece in
later times. But, while one says this, one should add that
other things are to be taken into account. The modern city

I52 GIFFORD LECTURES [x

has an immense scheme of adjustments and arrangements,
a mechanism which works to keep it together, which is very
efficient, and yet not very conspicuous to the outward eye. It
is a rational or intellectual rather than a visible or audible
machinery. This rational machinery makes little show and
has but slender bulk. It does by a touch, a pen-stroke, what
in more sensuous ages required a vast display of force. What
in the sensible sphere rings loud and shows clear, that, when
translated into intellectual methods, grows a thin but efficient
breath. And yet, while we admit all this, the want is not
thereby made up. Still, as Coleridge says, the heart doth
need a language. Man does not live by forms or words : he
needs also the actual bread of deeds. The word by itself, the
bare general, unimpassioned, mechanical, reasoning method,
will never be enough without the bread of visible ceremony.
No doubt, if we may take an illustration, the civil marriage
by the formless formality of registration is the main thing ;
and it might be the sole thing, if we were only reasoning
machines. But as yet we are not citizens of Laputa, we are
still human, i. e. weak and reasonable. There is, as Plato
says, a child in each human being, a child that walks by sight
and touch, not by faith ; there is, not merely in women but
also in men, not merely in plain men but even in business
men and rationalists, a child-like being which craves for its
due, the meed of sensibility, the intuitive symbol. And what
is true of marriage, is true in a different way of all the organs
and systems in social life. Concept without percept, says
Kant, is empty. The truth has not merely to be said, and
posted up in formula, it must be done and made visible hour
by hour, day by day. The very word for the Greek city will
help to illustrate. We translate it, awkwardly enough, by
the phrase ( city-state/ That is as if we were to say of a
human being (and it is what perhaps we dare say of the
fewest), that he or she was body-soul : the body the trans
parent and perfect temple of the spirit : a dress, as it were, so

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 153

absolutely well-fitting, as to reveal while it veiled. And as it
is only a perfectly shaped person who can afford to wear
a perfectly fitting dress, so only a perfect state, which is the
spirit, can be embodied in a clear-formed city.

Civilization, then, was embodied, or seemed or be embodied,
at one period or rather instant of history, in a city. But
before it reached that point of development, before the spirit
had visibly come to dwell in mortal body, it had run through
a whole series of less adequate forms : and again, after it
reached that form, it has had to recommence the same
problem but with larger data, less easily manageable con
ditions. Greece, as it were, created one visible form of union,
as an earlier world had created the family : and again and
again its example has been imitated, no doubt with much
divergence and defect, as e. g. by the Italian communes of the
middle ages, and similar institutions. But, partly through
the ever-increasing size of cities themselves, partly through
the further need for enabling several cities to form a lasting
and stable union, the social evolution of the modern world
has been towards an organization of a machinery which should
render immensely larger associations possible. The main
interest of this movement in its recent phases has, however, lain
in the discovery of the mechanical conditions of organization,
i. e. the means by which space and time can be practically
obliterated, and rational or intelligible methods of combination
made to operate, where the old sensible methods had become
impossible. This kind of progress is one that is ever going
on, even within the range of our organic senses. Thus the
mere primitive senses themselves, — touch, with its specifications
and developments in taste and smell, — have been in the higher
animals supplemented and in part superseded by eye and ear ;
each, in its own peculiar way, a vastly more rational sense
than that which it supplanted, bringing us by the mechanism
of light and sound waves into contact with regions to which
the primal touch seemed utterly inadequate to reach. And

I54 G1FFORD LECTURES [x

yet the rational beauties of a sight and sound world fail
ultimately to satisfy us. They are only surrogates at the
best. In the stress of strong emotion, in the keen instants of
life and of death, we seek to go back to the weak and beggarly
rudiments, the animal elements of mere touch. Even touch,
it may be said, does not bring spirit close to spirit. Yet the
hand grasp, if real, and not a mere play of callisthenics, is our
nearest approach in the sense world to the soul to soul of the
spirit. But in the human world, the chain of means and
methods between us as the agent or source, and us as the
recipient or end of action, is mainly a system of external
material things. The age of machinery is upon us, as, in one
way, it always has been ; but the chain of means by which we
come in touch with ourselves grows longer, the network of
mechanism grows denser and less penetrable. The vast range
of instruments, set in order and system, rises in pseudo-
independence, a self-subsistent thing, a real world, almost
like a second and more soulless nature, standing imperious
between our needs and their satisfaction. The prophetically
speculative chemist enthusiastically tells us that ere long we
shall cease to go to the animal or vegetable kingdom for our
foods, and that he will feed us by new methods from his
laboratory. Animals and plants will be allowed or encouraged
by destructive agencies to disappear, and man alone, by
a series of mechanical creatures of his own devising, will
gradually convert the realm of nature into his pabulum
and his dress.

These things may be only in their extravagance a dream,
and, as many may think, a hideous dream. But that they ex
press a direction, and a prominent direction, in modern civiliza
tion is undoubted. Poets, said old Homer, are strong in fiction,
and the modern scientific inventor occasionally runs them
hard in his promises. We have fallen on what Hesiod might
have called an iron age : in which the machinery of means
makes us almost lose sight of ends. Civilization has come to

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 155

stand for the means of civilization. But, after all, the life is
more than the food, whether that life and that food be bodily
or spiritual : and what we shall put on, is not as important
as what, within our clothes, we are. Like Martha, we are
careful and troubled about many thing's ; but many things
are not needed. The necessaries of life, as Jesus taught her,
are but few, perhaps but one ; but beyond the necessaries,
which are but means, come the real goods and true ends, the
things which, if chosen, are a good part that can never be
taken away.

' The world/ says Wordsworth, as said the apostles before
him, 'is too much with us/ What is this world, against
which the religious man and the poet raise their voice ? It is
the skeleton, the carcase, the dry bones of life : it is the
machinery of living, left apart from the ultimate ends which
it subserves. The fool in the parable built larger barns and
increased his stores. He had multiplied machinery and
thought he had perfected organization. But organization
in its truth is machinery plus a soul, a heart, a life. These
alone are spiritual stores such as thieves cannot steal. ' To
love the world ' in this technical sense is to be devoted to the
things which are the means of true and good life, as if they
were ends in themselves. Property, wealth, health, honour,
and all institutions are goods ; but they are good for certain
ends more ultimate, or, if you like it, more fundamental. If
you seek them for themselves, and not for the service, the
action, they render possible, you become an idolater, a world-
worshipper. You are, in New Testament phrase, godless (or
without God) in the world. Without God, in one sense, no
one can be. But each man can, if he will, ignore him without
whom he cannot be. The old monastic ethics of the mediaeval
church said, in its bald and drastic way, that the flesh was
foul and devilish. Wherein lay the foulness and the possession
by the devil, thus attributed to the flesh and the world ? The
flesh that is so stigmatized is the body of one who has

I56 GIFFORD LECTURES [x

forgotten that the body is what it is by a great co-operation ;
that it has been wrought by kindred, parents, and society;
that it is not its own, but bought by a great price, the burdens
carried by fatherhood and motherhood, by the whole society
in which it has been reared. Every body is a product of the
social capital, an investment of social energy and care. It has
a debt upon it from which it can never be emancipated. 'That
body which is stigmatized as the flesh, is a body of one who holds
it as his absolute own, an estate without debt or mortgage, to
dispose of as his separate soul may direct. Always, though
not solely a means, it has been made merely an end.

Not different is it with the world. The world, the material?
or mechanism of civilization, is also a social product. The
world is the realm of outward things, into which man has put
his activity, and through which he has sought his satisfaction.
It came into existence, and can only be maintained in existence,
by constant effort and exercise, and by conjunct effort and
exercise. Every item is the fruit of consideration and service
from countless sources. Our comfort, our very existence, in
even the smallest matters depends upon the co-operation of
a complex of causes and energies, which no mathematician
could estimate. In our superficial moods, when we skim the
newspaper, we are sometimes ready to cry out at the iniquity,
the malice, the selfishness of men. But we may rest assured
that in the main it is far otherwise. The psalmist who said :
' All men are liars/ was guilty in his haste of a double exag
geration. All men certainly are not. But not even any man
is wholly a liar : he has his exceptions, and, if we knew him
better, we should find they were many. It is even doubtful
whether we can safely say of any one : He lies. Politeness
after all is nearer, as usual, to the truth, when it forbids such
language. For to lie, when we come to think of it, implies,
to make it complete, a diabolic malice which it is hard to
attribute to any one bearing the human form. Our coarse,
hasty judgement lumps all the qualities of a human being

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 157

under one head which he casually presents to us. He is
a thief, an adulterer, a liar, a murderer, and therefore bad
irretrievably and utterly bad. Can any good thing come out
of that ruffianly and barbarous land of Nazareth ? And it is
true that one fault by the logic of fact tends to entail another.
Yet it is also true that utter badness is, so far as we follow the
indications of experience, impossible. Even the vilest helps
in many, almost infinite ways, to keep together the political
frame. He is a thief, we say : but there is honour, and
a fortiori honesty even among thieves. Vice is possible, only
because its opposite, common, unrecognized virtue is so super
latively dominant. The weakest, — equally, we may say, with
the strongest, when either contribution is alike necessary, —
help to create the materials of civilization ; the directing head
must be supported by the labouring hand ; and unless the
labouring hand gives free co-operation, born of a partly free
initiative, all the wisdom of social architects will be ineffective.
The leader, the director, can only lead and direct by the self-
leading and self-direction of those he yet is well said to lead
and direct. ' What/ asks one, ' moves the bell-wether ? '
Who leads the leader ? Who sets the fashion ? Who forms
public opinion ? And the answer is, that in all these questions,
by the very way of asking, the answer is made impossible.
There is no independent starting-point of motion : no merely
passive units waiting to be led. The waiting units are silently
but surely giving their own direction : and he is the wise
leader in politics, or elsewhere, who, as it were, can hear
the grass growing, can by anticipation catch the first faint
breath of the coming storm. The dumb cattle need the
herdsman, yet the herdsman, to be worth much, must have
some insight of sympathy with the dumb herd he seems
to guide.

But here, as in the case of the corporeal organism, so when
he looks upon the part of social product, the world next to
himself, the individual may easily forget the social origin and

I58 GIFFORD LECTURES [x

therefore the social debt. He may look upon the means of
civilization as his own to be done with as he pleases. Or, for
getting the end for which they exist, he may treat them as ends
in themselves. The world is at first the name for the mass,
ultimately the whole mass, of material things, considered as
means or machinery by which we may be, each of us, all that
we would be; i.e. means of self-realization. But when we
say self-realization, let us guard against a mistake. There is
a self which realizes and a self which is realized. They are,
and they are not, the same. The one is the germ, the
beginning; the other the end, the full-grown organism;
between them lies a world, an economy of means and ends,
a passage from all emptiness to all fulness. Yet in the
emptiness there was more than seemed present. For in that
germ, in that human thing, there dwelt all the fulness of
godhead, and the end was ivhat it was, because omnipotence
lay in the cradle at the beginning.

We are perhaps now in a position to answer the question
what is civilization? We may (i) identify it with certain
objects, a collection or aggregate of things, a stock of objective
goods or materials, a machinery of useful and pleasant things,
of which we can draw up a list more or less complete. Wre
sometimes call it material civilization, and include in it
clothes, railways, Sec., and in so styling it, we may perhaps
tend to despise it. Thus we are sometimes said to civilize
a country, when we get its inhabitants into clothes and
facilitate their means of communication. (2) In a natural
revulsion from all this we may declare that civilization is an
inner subjective thing, a state of mind and character. There
has been created a common medium, a social atmosphere, in
which the strangeness, uncouthness, roughness of individua
lities ceases to trouble. This is formal, just as the other was
material civilization. Irregularities have been polished off, or,
at least, a world of common social forms has been created —
society in the narrower sense — a world of culture, of education,

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 159

regarded as the means for making us all citizens in this
world, ' the world ' as it is called. In this connexion we may
almost say that civilitas, which means something more com
prehensive, has been well rendered as urbanity, civility,
politeness. It is an admirable and a necessary quality, at the
very root of much that is good. But it is obviously an inward
which is very much of an outward. At the best, it is only
a manner, a hypocrisy, which well imitates the deeper sense
of solidarity. The real unity of society may have gone while
the appearance of it still remains ; there is a sort of equality,
but there is no fraternity. (3) Civilization in the fuller sense
is the union, or, to say it better, the identity, i. e. the being-in-
oneness, of outer and inner, of subjective and objective. But
when we say, union or identity, we must note that this is not
juxtaposition or addition. It is not enough merely to add to
the abundance of material civilization a sufficient extension of
literary culture, of manners, of common sociality. The two
elements must become in a deeper way one. The material
must embody the formal; the intellectual life grow out of the
corporeal. Poetry, art, literature, must begin from home,
not take their inspiration from an alien world. And material
civilization must become the visibility of the spirit. Instead
then of the verbal admission of civility that we are all in
a way fellow- workers and have in some sort a common right,
what is wanted is the practical carrying out of that idea in
every detail of reality. A community is civilized in which
the solidarity of human effort is the first and foremost
principle, in which citizenship is realized as the governing
idea of all life. But realized and real it must be, and not
merely acknowledged as a mental principle or in words and
forms. A community is not civilized in which the subordina
tion of all the materials of civilization to the commonweal
does not receive palpable expression. That is the point for
which the Socialists fight, however much they may sometimes
lose sight of it in side issues. It is an aim not, indeed,

i6o

G1FFORD LECTURES [x

probably to be reached by what in their sense is called the
( Socialization ' of the means of production.

If, however, it be important to note that civilization is at
its height morality ; that, in other words, the matter and the
form of civilization both receive their justification and sancti-
fication from the life of the spirit which they further and
realize; it is not less important, on the other hand, to note
that for morality the material conditions are all-essential, and,
indeed, are more than mere conditions : or, to put it otherwise,
they are riot purely ' material ' conditions, as that word is usually
understood, but themselves products and parts of the spiritual
life. It is true that the ordinary observer of modern times
has been apt to draw distinction between the moral life and
the economic or industrio-commercial life very much to the
glorification of the former. Yet, as against this, it must be
said that industry and trade are intrinsically parts of the moral
life, and that, in so far as they fail to be so, they at the very
same moment cease to fulfil their own proper function.
Economics is itself a part of moral science; it is a study of
certain abstracted parts of moral life with a view to deter
mining1 their intrinsic relations and laws, ultimately with an
eye to the welfare of the body social. So, again, the modern
reader draws a distinction between the various elements of the
Judaic law : one part of it is moral, another ceremonial l ;
one is made up of precepts of universal significance, and the
other of rules of temporary authority, now supposed to be in
the main abrogated. But all this is a mistake, and a mistake
which is fraught with misleading consequences. Ethics is not

1 According to Wellhsusen, Exod. xxxiv. 14 seq. is the original decalogue
of Jahve worship in old Israel. (Thou shalt worship no strange god : thou
shalt makethee no molten gods: the feast of unleavened bread shalt thou
keep : all that openeth the womb is mine : thou shalt observe the feast
of weeks, and the feast of ingathering : thou shalt not offer the blood of
my sacrifice with leavened bread : neither shall the sacrifice of the feast
of the passover be left unto the morning : the first of the firstfruits of thy
ground thou shall bring to the house of Jahve thy God : thou shalt not
seethe a kid in its mother's milk.)

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 161

solely concerned with general precepts ; the point of its
remarks lies in their application. Dolus latet in generalilus.
Nor again are the special and detailed precepts of a purely
ceremonial nature : they are commanded, it is not our business
here to ask how far rightly or wrongly, as conditions and
indeed parts of universal and individual welfare for Israel ;
they are therefore entirely ethical. But equally, of course,
Dolus latet in particularibus. Each particular rule tends to be
set up as an independent aim, as a thing worthy and precious
in itself, apart from its relations and functions.

The prophets of old Israel — and prophets, I hope I need
remind no one, are not predictors of events to come, but
those who speak to men what they believe to be the truth or
message of God — probably, indeed certainly, made no utterly
new discovery when they declared that Jahve cared less for
sacrifice and burnt-offerings than for righteousness and truth
and mercy. Always the human heart has felt that ; though
always it has to be reminded of it, so apt is it to rest content
with what is behind, instead of pressing on to those things
which are before. And what the earlier prophets said, the
last of them, Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to corroborate. The
firstfruits of prophecy, in the movement which began with
Ezra and culminated in the age of the Maccabees, had been
an intensification of legal particularism. The nominal bond
of Judaism covered both those who called themselves the
righteous, and those who were called the ( sinners/ In its
nobler phases — and no reader of the psalms and the later
literature can doubt of the existence of such noble phases —
these antithetic names had their ground in the resolute
courage which realizes the ideal of God's kingdom, as con
trasted with the weakness which cares for no such thing.
But, in certain conspicuous and dominant instances, as we
learn from the New Testament, it was far otherwise. The
' righteous ' was the Pharisee, the punctual observer of detailed
rules, and the regular attendant on temple service, while the

M

162

GIFFORD LECTURES [x

< sinner > was any one without this circle ; what, in these parts,
we might call 'belonging to no denomination/ 'a joined
member of no religious body/ In the face of these facts
there is much in the language of the Prophet of Nazareth
which, to the careless hearer, might sound contemptuous of
special observance and detailed ordinance. What he really
warred against was the superstition which thought to sup
plement moral defects by care in special observances ; the
idolatry which held particular ceremonies as absolute as
the ethical needs of man. But the language had its effect,
as had that of the prophets, when read casually and out of its
context. It was supposed by a section of those who called
themselves his followers, that ethics and religion henceforth
were to deal with the higher spiritual life, and that the
common round of duties was comparatively unimportant.
The error was taken up by an unintelligent Spiritualism, and
ethics, like religion, was treated as almost too good for
human nature's daily food.

It is against misconceptions like this that the older Hebrew
Scriptures, which Christianity presupposes and out of which
it grows, are of permanent value. It may be true, as says
John C. Calhoun, that ' they didn't know everything down
in Judea ' ; but they knew some things which it would have
been well if the later ages had not lost sight of. They knew
that, even if religion is not a matter of meats and drinks,
meat and drink are no trifles which religion may ignore.
They knew that religion is intimately wrapped up with the
tillage of the field, the pasture of the flocks, the rules and
modes of wedlock, the custom of the market, with sanitary
rules, with the treatment of disease. They may have been
mistaken in some of their views, but they were certainly
right in their main thesis ; and the whole bent of modern
progress is towards doing what they did in a complete!* way.
To them religion and ethics left no sphere of life untouched.
Every theological doctrine had for its converse a practical

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 163

command, or rather everything they believed about God was
ipso facto a law of life. No otiose theology this ; on the con
trary, one submitting itself to experiential verification, and
glorying therein. It is no mere assertion that ' God is
good ' : it is ' Taste and see that God is good/ Jahve
is the God of his people : all their interests are his,
and he deputes none of them, and thinks none of them
unimportant.

The modern world thinks too gingerly of God. * Thou
thoughtest that I was even such an one as thyself ; ' one,
that is, who does not care to dirty his hands with manual
labour, who dwells only in the high places of wisdom and
policy, who leaves to lower arts and vulgar attention the lesser
matters of the animal life. What is perhaps worse, some
have thought that they could tell what God is by the way of
scientific generalization. But God does not so reveal him
self. He comes and comes alone to him who does well, i. e.
faithfully and heartily, the work which in the ordinances
of nature lies next to him to do. If he come at all, he
comes altogether, in the lowest as in the highest, sooner
perhaps to the day-labourer than to the speculative thinker,
because the latter perchance thinks he can find out God by
patience and resolution, while the former in honest effort,
seeking no great things, is perhaps readier to hear the voice :
' Friend, come up higher.' The modern world can only gain
religion, and have such vision of God as man can have, when
it realizes to the intensest that the wise and foolish equally
enjoy his sunlight, that to him nothing is common or
unclean. The old churches at least saw this ; and if they did
amiss in trying literally to reproduce a code, that may have
suited the later Israel, for the use of Geneva or of Scotland,
yet their principle was right, absolutely right, the principle
that religion is no separate element, no function of a separate
organ, but a power governing all life and consecrating
democracy into theocracy.

M 2

i64 GIFFORD LECTURES [x

It is nearly half a century since a German scientist of
a school which we for brevity's sake call Materialistic,
scandalized many good people by the remark that Der Mensch
ist, ivas er isst; an untranslatable pun. < Man is what he
eats/ Nowadays we have grown accustomed to the scandal.
It is perhaps unnecessary at this date to note that ' eat' must
here be taken to imply ' digestion/ to include drinking and
breathing, and perhaps other less definable modes of recep
tivity. Even with these qualifications many people will
shrink from admitting it in its absolute plainness : they
will insist that there is something in the original structure,
and that there is more in any of us that can be, straight off,
equalled to any aggregate or mixture of carbon, nitrogen,
phosphorus, and the rest. With these good people I will
not attempt to argue. I will not even go into the problem
whether, when the ' heart' of I' ami Fritz was captured by
a dish of apple fritters, there was not something of human
nature in it ; nor will I appeal to any housewife's experience
of the ratio between dinner and a husband's mind and temper.
I will rather say, Friends, are you not, to put it mildly,
a little wanting in apprehension ? The man who thought it
worth while to say : ( Man is what he eats,' must have
suffered much from a generation who said that it mattered
nothing, and that he, his morality, his intelligence, his
religion were things of a source far transcending what he fed
on. He spoke in some weariness, and uttered the other half
of the truth. No man, no, nor angel from heaven, if he
speaks human speech, can put a concrete truth, a truth, i.e. of
life-reality, into a simple proposition.

But what I touched upon this old phrase for, was not to
rake up the special controversy it awaked. It is to recall the
truth that morals, intellect, art, and religion, are all, pro
foundly and in their very inwards, affected by the economic
condition of a people. Given a certain arrangement of the
means of production, and you can only have a certain kind

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 165

of morals, art,, and religion. You may encourage schools of
art, apply the persuasions of punishment and training to
make people moral, and build churches till they fill every
corner of your streets, but it will not answer. The founda
tions of things lie in the commonwealth, and these
foundations are its economic arrangements. You fancy, no
doubt, that fine art has nothing to do with vulgar craftsman
ship or honest labour, but it is far otherwise. You think
religion will cure the wretched homes of horrid poverty and
insolent wealth : but it will not ; for religion will not and
cannot live where there are such abominations. You fancy
morality sits high and safe on the eternal rocks of reason :
but, probably, if you got nearer, you would find that the
venerable queen of life has long since been petrified in these
altitudes.

The foundations, perhaps even the ground-plan of the
moral, religious, artistic life, are laid and fixed in the form,
which at any given epoch is dominant, of providing and
distributing the means of subsistence. What was the
beginning of it all ? Of course, we cannot tell : we know
nothing of primitive man ; most likely we shall in the literal
sense never know primitive man. But we can go so far as
the most primitive races that are upon the earth at present.
Yet, if we speak of races, let no stress be laid upon that
word, and the differences it may involve. The vanities of
breed count for little here in comparison with the greater
uniformities of art, morality, and religion, which are found
wherever in the surface of the globe there is approximately
the same form of production of the means of subsistence.

The lowest rank is taken by tribes, found in widely
different localities, mainly supporting life by means of
hunting and fishing. Such tribes as the native Australians,
some Brazilian groups, the Eskimos, the Andamans, the
Bushmen in South Africa, and the Terra del Fuegians. The
terms hunter and fisher have first to be realized, before their

166 G1FFORD LECTURES [x

force appears. To the modern citizen, hunting and fishing
are to some extent a by-play, a sport : in which the object, in
the majority of cases, is placed at a hopeless disadvantage.
We shall understand it better when, with Lady Nairne's
song, we remember that the herring which some call < vulgar
faring' are to fisher wives symbolic of < lives of men/ But,
even in the fishers' case, the primitive people have a sterner
war to wage : a war, in almost sober truth, between com
batants not equally matched, when man had yet to mould his
weapons, and learn the secret of mastery: when, as tell the
Indian hunters' legends, he began to steal from the various
creatures their distinctive weapons, and made himself the sole
proprietor of all nature's wiliness. It was a struggle too in
which for long the victory was, to say the least, uncertain ;
in which there were many disappointments, long periods of
trying hunger, other times of rude gorging; a wandering
life running round the cycle of the year, as game drew it
here and there ; with domestic life, fitful and but forced,
with all the illnesses and weaknesses which fasting and
feasting alternately followed can produce ; leisure for art of
a kind ; a passionate love of excitement in moments of full
meat; a dark, mysterious godhead, dimly connected with
woods and streams, with storm and cloud, with unknown
perils, with the beasts. Marriage and property, as we know
them, were not, save in their rudiments. Yet laws or
customs, rigid and numerous, complicated and terrible, grow
up. Nor is hunting all. Almost everywhere in these hunter
days, the woman has a province of her own. It may be,
as in Brazil, that she begins a rude cultivation of the soil ;
and while her mankind prowl in woods for a while and then
sleep or loll till hunger next appeals, she by feebler, but more
unremitting energy, gathers a stock of vegetables and fruits.
So long as life is so harassed, half the virtues we respect, half
the attributes we attribute to deity, half the developments
of art, cannot arise.

x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 167

It would be out of place here to try to follow out the steps
by which the pastoral stage emerged ; how the agricultural
followed : and how, industry always increasing, complexity
supervened. But if the survey could be made, it would show,
first, that art, religion and morality, and, we need hardly
add, science, grow up and take form in society, and that the
essence or ground-plan of society lies in its economical
arrangements. The lawgivers of old Israel saw clearly that
in them is the root of the matter for morals and religion.
The modern spiritualist laughs at the ancient believer, whose
god gave him corn and wine, and sat him down under his own
vine and fig-tree. But we may spiritualize our God over
much. God is not merely the guardian or the rewarder of
the narrowly moral law. The real moral law of God is the
law of all life : and such a God is a living God, the strength
of all who believe in him, the shelter in the storm and the
heat. God, we may be sure, is not indifferent to morals
and still less is he immoral : but perhaps he may be less
like a moralist or a judge, a lawgiver or a king, than we are
sometimes taught to conceive. Perhaps, as many count
morality, he may be more than moral.

XI

ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS, SCIENCE, AND
RELIGION

IT is not easy to describe the plain fact of morality ; for
if it be a fact, it is not as others with which we are more
familiar. It is not subject to what are ordinarily called
the scientific tests. It cannot be measured or weighed. You
can no more detect its presence by experiment strictly so
called than you can that of mind or will. You cannot prove
that an act of pure virtue was ever done. God is not the
only object, if object one may for the moment call Him,
that neither microscope nor telescope can discover. Scientific
instruments and methods, in the technical sense of their
terms, are as little able to detect the presence of intelligence,
of purpose, of goodness, of beauty. Psychology, as a strict
science in the older sense, must confine itself to the physio
logical laboratory.

Kant himself has not ventured to assert, that in the world
accessible to the scientific, i. e. the sense-bound intellect, there
is such a thing as freedom, as morality, as God. All he
can say is, in the first place, that if morality be unreal,
or rather if it be not the central reality, the keynote of
all thought and life, then you have not merely lost the spring
from out your year, but you have ruined the fabric of reality.
At least something like this is implied in the course of his
argument. It is true that the world known by science seems
to remain as an assured and independent result, whether

ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 169

there be a moral reality or no. Given a set of sensations,
and certain formal tricks of arrangement in them; given
an intelligence which gives to these sensations some unity
and consistency j and the phenomena, the casual appearances
which, as the phrase is, impress themselves upon us, seem to
form groups and systems of sufficient stability and solidity
to deserve the name of empirical reality. And ' empirical
reality' is all Kant claims for so-called things or objects.
But a philosopher can hardly rest content with a phrase
like ' empirical reality/ Even to say, in words more
intelligible to the plain man, that the sense-world of science
is a real world, because we feel it inevitably, and because
we can calculate and predict its phenomena with a high
degree of security, is to say what is true, but what does
not go far enough. What is this feeling, this impression
we speak of as a self-evident datum, and of which we say
that it is inevitable ? Let us answer : this feeling is always
the reverse side of activity ; we are ' impressed,' because we
are active, and go forth to meet the world. Were we not
active, we could not be thus passive or receptive. The
physiologist knows that efferent and afferent nerve-conduction
are ultimately inseparable : the stimulus received from with
out is only possible because of coincident stimulus from
within. The eye must strike the sun, in order that the sun
may dazzle the eye. So in the mental world, perception
were not, if volition were not. Only a being that wills
(I use the word in its widest sense) can perceive, as on the
other hand only a being that perceives can will. So it is
with the synthetic intelligence, with the scientific mind that
builds up the data of sensation into groups, types, classes,
uniformities, relations of cause and effect, and so on. To
say that all this is so, because of the original synthetic unity,
or of fthe transcendental unity of self -consciousness,' is no
doubt true also, but it does not go to the root of the matter.
Self-consciousness, what and why is it? Self -consciousness

I70 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

does not— I fear I must apologize to the philosophically
trained hearer for making this remark— does not in logic
mean the state of mind when a shy person imagines that
it is not what he or she does, but that it is he or she who
does it, which is the fact of supreme interest to all observers.
Self-consciousness to the philosopher means the emergence
of intelligence, from its mere awareness of outward fact in
a sort of mirror-like reproduction thereof, to an apprehension
of itself as co-agent, i.e. as in action and reaction with
an outward world, and yet at the same time, as, in some
mysterious way, supreme in surveying the play of its own
actions and reactions; itself the scene, the play, and an
observer, who, in some strange league with author and
manager, is more than mere observer. Understanding, said
Kant, makes the world, makes nature. Whereat the wiseacres
who love to criticize where it is hard to understand, spoke
certain witty-sounding words about Solipsism, or the strange
fancy of some mad philosopher that his mind made all
things ; and also certain words intended to be witty, which
rested on the assumption that when Kant said ' nature' or
' world/ he meant the whole lump of earth, and other lumps
of other earths, called suns and planets, with all the countless
fragments into which we are accustomed to divide the large
earthly lump, e.g. into coals, carts, &c. But intelligence,
as we have, I hope, already seen, is not a thing which can be
the sole property of any one being, or be supposed to be
included in one single brain : it is, as old Thomas Hobbes
said, the same in every man, a common atmosphere or spirit
in which they live and act, and which finds its visible
embodiment and guarantee in what for shortness we call
the ' City ' or State. The understanding which makes nature
and the world is in no risk of falling into Solipsism : that
is the one thing it cannot do : sooner than do that, it must
perish. It cannot be self-confined, in the narrow sense;
its self is the universe, potential, if not actual.

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 171

But it is hardly less important to realize that the so-called
world or nature is not a mere aggregate of things. Nature
is an elliptical phrase for the order,, the indwelling order,
the self-unfolding order, the progressive uniformity, of what
you loosely call ' the natural world ' without much thinking
what you mean. Each separate thing is, no doubt, also
and rightly, called nature : but it is so, because in each there
is the presence and power which animates the whole : a com
plex of relations which we can never hope to completely
unveil, and which would, if we could but know it, bind
it in some way with every other item in the universe of
things. And so it is with what we call the World, with,
however, this difference. When we speak of the totality
of things as nature^ we think mainly of that totality as a self-
directing, self-systematizing being, rolling on the cycle of its
changes, our vicissitudes even included, by laws of its own.
But when we talk of the world, we are in the first instance
more impressed by the practical aspect of reality. Wre see
in it, not so much a mere theoretical problem to be unravelled,
as a field of action in which order has been established, and
will yet more and more be established, in subservience to
human needs; needs of all kinds and all grades, some of
them what we call material, some what we call spiritual.
Even the world, as we saw the other day, tends to slip from
us into independence: yet always we feel it is the field of
action, a unity to which we (we and not I, or if I, then the
absolute (I3 of Fichte, which is equal to the collective
infinity of ' we^s) have given as it were the bond : we, as
humanity, as what we are and are not, but will be, when we
are all that we may be. To the view of the sum of things as
nature, which is the theoretical view, the outlook of the con
templative spirit, man seems but a little thing: a part in
a great system, not merely bowed down before the physical
immensity of the spectacle, but even more abased before the
transcendent Power which seems to mould its destinies and

I?2 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

therefore Us. The other view of it as the world— the
Kosmos, mundus — is taken from a different standpoint, that
of action rather than theory. It sees in the system of
things an order and an economy, of which man-humanity is
the central point, on which all things hinge. It implies that
in him lies the key to the mystery : a key, however, which
has yet many doors to open : or rather — for metaphor must
break down here — a key which has magic history and fairy
powers, which is not yet what it shall be. It is humanity,
social humanity, forming itself by slow steps : slow, though
sometimes, when we are immersed in some petty advance,
we think with pardonable, yet foolish pride that we have
made immense strides : forming itself by industry and com
merce, by art and science, by philosophy and religion, to
decipher the mystery in which it was born, and thus better
and better understand itself. For this is perhaps the main
thing. Man, to use an old phrase, is the microcosm, the
little world. He becomes more and more himself in pro
portion as, by work and thought, by art and science, he
more and more makes the larger world his own.

O

And this brings us round to the purport of an inevitable
digression. The ' Nature' which the philosophic theorist,
the metaphysician poet, sees as the background of unity in
which lie all the several materials, of which the several
sciences make their most by observation and experiment and
calculus : that nature, as Kant points out, is not itself a fact
of science, of sense, or of intellect, as he defines them. It is
the reflex of a mental unity, of a mysterious unifying power
we sometimes call imagination or the faculty of ideal construc
tion, and at other times call the ' original unity of appercep
tion/ ' Nature ' in this sense goes for its roots deeper than
perception or apperception (which means the organizing or
assimilating of perceptions into a concrete percept). It goes
back to the practical side, the active part, the will, the effort
to do and live, the effort to be more and more of what we are

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 173

as yet less, that nisus of self-conservation which can only
succeed in being that by being more than that, by being
a nisus or effort to become more than it was, to be all that it
had not been. Intelligence reads off one world of uniform
law, because will demands one world for life to be realized in :
reason theoretic gives a unity to nature, because reason prac
tical, starting from a ' me ' or ' ego ' which is weak, incoherent,
unrealized, is ever seeking to elevate it to be a ' me ' or
( ego ' which is one, comprehensive, and complete. If you
speak of nature as a unity governed by unfaltering law, it is
because human reason in its action, industrial, moral, artistic,
postulates the subservience of all events to one common end.
And that end, what is it ?

An old answer, most of us here are familiar with, tells us
that 'man's chief end/ at least, 'is to glorify God, and to
enjoy him for ever/ It may be, — I do not know, — that those
who framed these words thought, as think some of those who
read them to-day, that the two parts of the answer represent
two stages, one here, another hereafter ; and that they
regarded the latter as a reward attached by grace to the
earlier. Yet perhaps too they may have entertained an idea
of a more intimate connexion between the two aspects, both
in time and in essence. To us at the present day, the words,
if we try to get their meaning and do not merely repeat them,
sound unfamiliar, echoes of a time when other fashions ruled
the social and intellectual world. To glorify God, ad maiorcm
Dei ffloriam, are phrases which the sciolist, sometimes in
places where one would expect better things, finds an easy
subject of scorn ; and I am not concerned to deny that there
have been curious misapplications of them. But are our own
phrases so impeccable ? If, in a bald literal way, it be impos
sible to glorify the Supreme, as it is impracticable to gild
refined gold, is it any more possible to organize God, him,
the supreme organizer and organization? But neither the
Presbyterian divines nor Renan altogether wasted words. If

I?4 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

it be a truth that God created man in his own image, it is
no less a truth that every man recreates God in his image.
It is the Word, the only-begotten Son, who for ever reveals,
or, as I should translate it, describes and interprets the
Father. But to do that, man, so to speak, must be fully
himself: he must become not a separate sphere in creation,
but the organizing principle of all. He must more and more
realize the infinite possibilities that are in him, by realizing
more and more the unity of creation. Herein lies for him
a difficulty and a danger. He fancies in his impotence that
the less others can be, the more he makes them cease, the
more will he himself be. His grand impulse, his glory
perhaps— and he sometimes thinks it for God's glory also—
is to kill. He crushes down his fellows. He ruthlessly
sweeps away the lower races which check the free swing of
his interests. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the
air fall a victim often to the mere lust of killing ; and the
choicest trees and shrubs have been irrecoverably cut down
by the maddened colonist and trader who knows no god but
Plutus. The terrestrial fauna and flora are fast losing their
variety. The earth's surface has been ravaged and rent into
unrecognizableness. He has captured and tamed some of the
beasts. His own species he has sought to enslave, i.e. to
destroy their separate personality, and make them mere tools
of his hand. And, almost universally, he has sought to make
his vassal or bondwoman out of the woman of his own kind ;
her, who, just because she is nearer to him and in all senses
dearer to him than aught else, has always been the most
unenslavable of all things and the most untameable of all his
captives. And yet he wonders that he is without peace,
security, and happiness : he wonders that his heart is
empty. But if there is one truth more certain than another,
it is that for every thing destroyed in its own nature and
independence, there is a corresponding lack created in the
destroyer. We can only be what we are meant to be, in

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 175

proportion as we can establish such a relation between us and
other things that they may realize their full being. It is not
merely human persons that are ends in themselves : though
their essential worth it may be especially our interest to
maintain. But in a way all things are such ends. And they
are so for us because, unless they attain their full develop
ment, we fall short of ours. The enslaving man is a man
enslaved, in a worse sense, by his slave. There is nothing
single nor solitary, said the Stoic, in the city of God we call
the world. No doubt, we may shut our eyes to the essential
sociality of man : we may act as if it were not. But in that
case we pay the penalty, not in a punishment deferred, and
to be paid by some mysterious machinery, as the Christian
theologian, misconceiving Plato's metaphors, has sometimes
seemed to suppose ; but in a lowered vitality, an empty heart,
the sting of not, it may be, remorse, but of realized failure.
It is the eternal law of righteousness, that the soul which
falls short of the law of universal respect, and treats one of
the least of things as if it too were not God's creature, that
soul is struck with a withering of which the natural issue
is death.

For our own sakes, for our own interest, we must be tender,
respectful of all things. I know there are some to whom all
this will sound absurd, quixotic, fantastic, if not worse. To
such I would say, like Cromwell : ' I beseech you, brethren,
think it possible that ye may be mistaken/ It is possible.
I dare say, that a single soul may find salvation for itself :
but it may be doubted if such a salvation is greatly worth the
trouble. A great Christian has left on record the word that
he would almost be accursed himself rather than see his kins
folk left to perdition. As Plato has it, a single traveller may
perhaps find shelter from the dust-storm that ever blows
across the way by retiring into the shelter of some wall : but
the only true hope of betterment is to save himself by forming
a company, and ultimately it must be a large company, of his

I?6 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

kindred. They are poor creatures who press into the warm
hall, whilst any of their near and dear ones are still shivering

in the cold.

But more than that is here at stake. Freedom, says the
old Scotch poet, is a noble thing-. But they are of the fewest
who know what freedom really is. Its essence is, in each,
respect for the individuality of others. We sometimes hear it
said that the age of reverence is past, gone with the age of
chivalry. But if these good things have gone, it may be
that they were not wholly good ; and that in these ' good
customs' God did not fulfil himself so fully as to justify
their eternal endurance. What ended the age of chivalry was
that it was not chivalrous enough. It is easy to be chivalrous,
if only the lady be but young and fair, if only your enemy be
nobly born and nobly bred, and when love and honour follow
on service rendered. But when chivalry passed beyond these
charmed bounds, its lance lay useless, and its knight errantry
grew cold. So, it may be, there was something false in the
ring of an old-time reverence. It was, perhaps, too one-sided,
too partial in its scope. Juvenal somewhere speaks of the
' reverence due to boyhood/ What he says in one special
sense has a wider meaning. There is room for Vice Versa
between fathers and sons, between husband and wife, between
many other relationships. Our reverences all round have
perhaps been but measured on one little patch of life, and
left all the rest desert. We wish, no doubt, to have others
in agreement with us, but agreement is worth little unless it
is genuine and spontaneous. Ibsen, in one of his plays, has
depicted a husband and wife who, after years of juxtaposi
tion are still strangers, so that the relation between them is
one of fear and distrust, tempered by something that might
grow to love. An occasion arises when an old tie tends to re
assert itself over the wife. The husband's natural impulse
is to assert and make good on the other side the legal, i.e. the
force-sanctioned, bond which marriage law gives him. But

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 177

a more reasonable impulse prevails ; and, by effacing- his own
brute authority,, he restores his wife to her self-command,,
and the temptation is at an end. I do not inquire how far
such conduct might be in each case possible or advisable.
But I think I may say that half the embroglios of this
world arise from the substitution of mechanical for moral
suasion. And by, moral suasion is meant, not counselling, or
advising1, or recommending, or persuading, in so far as these
imply a foregone conclusion; but an effort on our part to
exclude the influence of all other than purely rational, i.e.
common or social motives, to efface all the brute force of
personality, and to trust only to that higher personality which
may well be called impersonal. The triumph of morality is
attained when, with all the earnestness of conviction, we can
resist the impulse to tyrannize over a wife, or a husband, or
a child, or any one whose legal relations to us puts them, as
it is facetiously called, at our mercy. If sons and daughters
revolt, if a whole sex is shaken by incipient mutiny, it is time,
not perhaps to tear up the institutions which are concerned,
but certainly to consider, and consider with practical effect,
whether there be not something rotten in the state of Den
mark, to account for such fretfulness and protest. And these
remarks do not, I hardly need add, cut only one way. So
long as mere force is in any way directly influential in human
life, so long- we are not civilized or moral. In an imperfect
world force is necessary, but only to protect rights : and
rights are, in their own nature and function, the modes of
realizing freedom.

Now the very conception of nature and a natural world,
with which the philosophy of science makes us acquainted,
has its justification in this prime moral need. As a world,
the material objects fronting- us, whether persons or things —
for materiality is a common attribute of them all — are a means
for our self-realization. By it and them we become what we
are, and the larger and more organically one they become, the

N

I7g GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

better developed are we. They are necessary to our fulfilment :
in and through them we are made perfect. But not merely
do they constitute our environment, as a kind of spring-board
by which we may rise to higher things; they are also a
natural world, a world of nature. As such, they one and all,
each through all, and all through each, follow a law of their
own. That is the great lesson which philosophy, as it follows
the lead of the natural sciences, continually impresses upon us.
Each part of nature, if you like to put it religiously, is alike
near and dear to God : alike, i. e. in so far as its nature is
in its measure his care, as peculiarly as if there were none to
compete with it. This was the truth which Spinoza expressed
when he identified God and nature, and refused to concede to
man a place utterly outside the natural range. It may be
that the phraseology of Spinoza was hardly adequate. But at
least, it taught to those who would listen, that the lordship of
man over nature is essentially a ministry and a stewardship.

If Kant, therefore, insists that Freedom is the essential of
humanity, it is clear that this freedom cannot overthrow the
necessity, such as it is, of nature. Rather freedom has
meaning only in correlation to such necessity. It lies — and
Spinoza saw this as well as Kant — in acting, and not in mere
being. Nobody is free. All action is freedom. The world
which is and has been, and which must be because it has been,
cannot be the only world, or cannot be the full world, real
with the highest reality. The ordered cycle of changes and
uniformities must be the expression of an intelligent will,
and I, the agent, must participate in the direction ; I must be
not merely a part of things, controlled and necessitated by
other things, but also and essentially one with the whole, an
individual, so far independent and co-operative, in a greater
and complete individuality. And lastly, Kant assumes, as
has been even now implied, that, if morality is to be the
centre of reality, there must be God. So far Kant sees
clearly : but when he comes to ask more definitely what it is

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 179

that God does, his vision seems to grow unsteady. Christianity,
in Kant's day, had brought the world to a Deism, which had
ousted God from the present life of reality, and relegated him
to a Far beyond and Hereafter. From that Far away he
still came, supervising, rectifying, and punishing. And so
Kant was understood to speak of him as if it were his task
to adjust the failing proportion between virtue and happiness,
to compensate the good for their sufferings, and to make evil
in the end unprofitable. Yet, if Kant said so, we may be sure
that was not the true meaning at which he aimed. Even God,
we may assert, cannot undo what has been done. God does
not, as Plato supposed in his myth, let go the helm of the
world for a time, and again and again return to save the
vessel. He is not the synthesis or adjustment of nature and
moral order : rather in him they are one. We may not see
the convergency-point : but action and theory presuppose its
necessity. Kant, we may maintain even against appearances,
did not commit what Schelling calls the ' abomination ' of
' seeking to deduce God from the requirements of morality.'
And if we may even less care to adopt Schilling's phrase, ' It
is a duty to be convinced that all immorality is in its essence
and root unintelligent and irrational/ we may at least agree
with him in holding that ' to the wrong-doer, it is just the
diminished reality which gets expression by him that is his
punishment/

But what is morality ? To this question Kant himself has
returned an answer which is historic. For Kant the fact of
morality is, as all the world knows, the sense of duty.
Kant's King Frederick II may be cited in support of this
view. Thus in 1760 (in the midst of the Seven Years' War)
he writes to D'Argens : ' You must know it is not necessary
that I should live, but very necessary I should do my duty.
We are in this world to work. To do good ... is a duty
which every man ought to fulfil according to his means/
Or again, ' Both my body and my mind must bend to their

N 2

T8o G1FFORD LECTURES [xi

duty/ Or, in a letter to the Electress of Saxony ( 1 766), ' Do
to others only what you wish they should do to you : this
principle includes all virtue and the duties of man towards
the society in which he is placed/ Duty, no doubt, often
coincides with inclination ; obligation is often dissolved, as it
were, in pleasure. But if we wish to see it as it truly is, we
must, in Kant's view, look at it when it stands alone : we must
see it, as Plato hinted long1 before Kant, as it behaves when
unsupported by liking1, opposed by desire. When so seen in
its purity, it comes upon man with a downright command,
' a categorical imperative/ The latter phrase is Kant's :
but because the phrase is his, no one need suppose the fact
which it names was any discovery or novelty of his. The
categorical imperative is as old as humanity, as old as reason,
as old as love, as old as the faith in God, as old as the first
efforts of art to eternalize the passing show. It is a command
without a reason : because it is the supreme command of
reason itself ; but for the present, we need not meddle with
that, and simply note the fact alleged by Kant that its
authority is unconditional.

All this, be it said, was not new. But, as German biography
in the end of last century can show, it had a deep and stimu
lating effect on the conscience. It disengaged a great fact
out of a mass of irrelevant details : and even if it a little
exaggerated it in so disengaging it, that is a fault which may
well be borne with. Even Goethe, who did not himself see
the moral life chiefly as duty, felt so far inspired as to make
it a theme of some stories. It needed some genius thus to
set duty in its high seat, to realize what Kant calls the
'grandeur and sublimity of its name.' Grammatically, all
that Kant did was only to set the singular for the plural, and
that you may say is a small thing. Perhaps, and yet, if
I may borrow an example to make the difference clear, what
ever tone men may adopt when they speak about women, it is
generally a higher note they feel themselves obliged to strike

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 181

when they think upon woman. Duties, in the plural — and
they go endlessly into the plural, into the detail of life —
seem sometimes trivial, tiresome marks of bondage and
hampering conditions to free development. So even thought
a French moralist, Malebranche, rather more than a century
before Kant : les devoirs to him savoured of the lesson to be
learned, the exercise to be done, in consequence of command
issued yesterday, and to avoid a punishment expectable other
wise to-morrow. And so Malebranche, turning half-con-
temptuously from mere duties, bade the seeker for true and
noble morality keep his eye ever bright with the love of order.
And there have been many ready to outdo Malebranche in
depreciating the yoke of duty. It is, they say, the mere
weight of tradition, the mere incidence of authority. To them,
the phrase about doing duty in that place and station to which
God has appointed us, has an air of feudal hierarchism, of
unchangeable caste, of a system which hangs blindly to the
past, and forgets the whole onward tendency to the future.
It seems to bar all progress, all reform. It may do for common
folk, ' for country folk who live beneath the shadow of the
steeple, the parson and the parson's wife, and mostly married
people.' But something better is needed for young men and
maidens, for all who would (if not leave the world better than
they found it, which they may think either a vain task or
a work of supererogation) yet raise themselves higher in the
scale of being. Why should they be bound by what was
done ages before them, by the remnants of custom and
observance handed down from an ignorant and half-barbarous
time ? Duties : why, the word is a bugbear to check progress ;
it is a catchword of the friends of order, of the party of
stagnation and perhaps of reaction. Or, again, they cry :
Duty is one of the ' fads } of Christianity : and Kant him
self in his ethical system was only putting in philosophical
formulae the memories of his youth, when under pious parents
he learnt the decalogue and the later commandments.

i82 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

So Schopenhauer has said and many have re-echoed since.
I will take the liberty of saying that it is a poor argument
a-ainst any part of a philosophic creed, to say that it has been
smuggled into it from Christian sources. We may all have
our own views about the personality of him who gave his
popular and prophetic name (Christ or Messiah) to the
Christian life : but there can be little dispute about the fact
that the ideas, the principles at the root of Christianity, are in
no sense peculiar to it, in no sense its special property. I say
with Schelling, the Schelling of his later time, Christianity is
as old as the world : its ideas, its hopes, its faith, its love, are
those on which the nobler sons and daughters of humanity
have in all ages and in all lands nourished in some measure
their inner life, gone forth to meet the world and death. It
also, like Kant, proclaimed no new truth, no truth which had
never been there before; but, as its adherents believed, in their
Master they saw one who gave to words and ideas the power
of a life, one who helped them to see the invisible world as
they had never seen it before, and with a strength of faithful
vision which shot past even the gates of death into the land
of eternal life. But the ideas of Christianity, its legitimate
ideas, are consonant with all reason, and kindred with all true
thought which has tried to fathom the mystery of life. And
it would be a poor system of ethics which, forsooth, because it
was proud to be called human or humane, should consider
itself either entitled or obliged to shut itself out from the
New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, on the ground
that these were 'revealed/ If ethics is not to annex any of
the doctrines which in different ages and countries are believed
to have been revealed, ethics will have a rather narrow survey.
But it has annexed them, and will do so more and more.

And undoubtedly this conception of ethics, as, on the one
hand, a system of laws, and as, on the other, a duty to fulfil
or obey them, is one which stands out conspicuously in what
Hebrew philology has taught us to regard as the great products

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 183

of the so-called prophetic reform. A people of shepherds,
cradled in the desert, and there taught by some providential
method to realize the unity of their life in a God, who goes forth
with them to battle, rejoices with them in their joys and
has compassion on their sorrows, is through some course of
events led to occupy a territory half-agricultural, and to
exchange its nomadic habits for the ways and manners of
the townsman and the cultivator. As years roll on, its old
organization shows itself unequal to cope with the altered
circumstances. Internal dissensions, external violence, wreck
its prosperity and partially destroy it. A fresh effort of
concentration is needed : a reform, which is at the same time
a going back upon the old spirit of unity and obedience to
the one living and guiding principle of collective action.
Then arose a series of men, — we know them as the prophets
of Israel, — who, strong in the sense of their solidarity with the
one spirit which guided Israel in the distant and legendary
past, and will, as they believe, guide him in the years to
come, declare themselves the messengers of Jahve. Rebuking-,
consoling, reminding, encouraging, they emphasize one central
truth that the whole people, and man by man, is the servant
of Jahve, charged with a work to be done, laden with a burden
never to be thrown off, but always sustained by the sympathy,
the help, if need be, the merciful punishment of the Lord
of Hosts. At first, the work which they conceive as thus
imposed is a particularist work for Israel's interest, and Jahve
is the God of Israel : but as prophet succeeds prophet, the
servant of Jahve, i. e. Israel, collectively and individually,
becomes, so to speak, an apostle for the human race, and
Jahve himself is seen to be the God of the whole earth, whom
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain. Aud God
himself comes to be, as it were, embodied, though never quite
lost, in the conception of a Law, of a great order which he
reveals as determining the aim and methods of life, for the
nation and the individual. All life is part of a great duty,

i84

GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

to reveal the glory, the wisdom and mercy of Jalive, and to
work out the spirit of righteousness. Yet is the Lawgiver the
friend, the lover of his people: if they have been as the un
faithful wife, he is as the loving husband, who judges righteous
judgement, i. e. forgives, because he knows what humanity is.
The dominant note, therefore, is a harmony of two elements :
it is the sense of utter and everlasting dependence, the fear of
Jahve : but it is, in its highest moments, joy in the Lord : if
he is with us, who can be against us ? and though we faint
and fail, God is our strength and our everlasting own.

It is a mere injustice to Judaism to say that it had not
a spring of life and strength within it, a well of ethical water
springing up to everlasting life. What the last prophet came
to fulfil, that the earlier law and the prophets had taught.
This we may be sure of, that Judaism would not have lasted
through the fearful ordeal of Mediaevalism, had it not been
something nobler than a mere system of rules, codified into
endless multiplicity of detail. Do not let us abuse the Law
because of the lawyers (some of whom must be bad); or
charge the righteous with the petty conceits of Pharisaism.
The Law only came to be a grinding burden, an unfulfi liable
task, when he that was Lord of the Law seemed to men to
withdraw into himself, to show himself no more to Israel,
and to leave as his witness and testimony a cast-iron code, or
a code which, if flexible, was flexible only that it might catch
more than it could ever do by its rigidity. The Law became
an evil to be cast forth, an idol to be burned, at such time as
it came to shut out God, the living God, from his people, and
left the Moloch of legalism in its place. But not so had the
prophets or the author of Deuteronomy understood the relation
of Law to God : not so the preponderating voice of the
Hebrew psalmists. Yet it is true that, in the struggle which
the Jewish race had to wage on its own soil for six centuries
till Titus scattered it to the winds, stress came to be laid on
the elements of exclusiveness ; that the fear of the Lord

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 185

tended to suppress hope and joy in believing ; and that the
Law degenerated to all appearance into a burden of precept
and deduction from precept, too grievous to be borne.

Yet if the central idea of Semitic religion took its place in
European culture, it was not without a profound alteration in
its structure and its relations to the other elements of national
life. A Semitic scholar has tried to make out that the great
contribution to religious thought by the Semitic race was the
idea of monotheism. It is perhaps a little difficult to say
what the monotheistic idea veritably is. But, in any case, it
may be asserted without unnecessary paradox that the strength
of the Semitic contribution to humanity does not lie, strictly
speaking, in ideas. The people of ' ideas/ of thoughts, in the
ordinary sense, are the Indo-European races. The Semite —
and by Semite I mean in the main Hebrew and Arab — is
a man of vision, a seer, one who envisages truth in its indi
vidual concreteness. His genius is lyrical and historical, not
dramatic or philosophical. What he sees, he utters ; what he
feels, he can reveal ; but it is a monologue, and no reflection.
And, secondly, he is a man of action, rather than thought ;
his beliefs are not articles of a creed, but postulates of action.
For him God speaks to man directly, face to face ; speaks in
the spirit of the moment, and for the thing to be done. His
great function is the imperative, the word of action ; not, ' so
am I to be rightly thought of/ but c so must it be done/
Creation itself is a mandate, not a making : its word is fat.

Even the later appearance of Semitic religion is like the
earlier. Mohammed, too, is a man of simple sensuous vision ;
he sees his Lord as a beardless youth with locks of curly hair,
and on his feet golden sandals. God comes nigh. He de
scends till he is only two bows' length from the prophet
and nearer : Mohammed sees Paradise, with its dark-eyed
maidens and the green-robed faithful at their side. But
observe it is all fresh and vigorous, with the hues of young
belief, and not a mere lingering image in some after-time.

l88 GIFFORD LECTURES [XT

consequences for morals. It took the life out of it, and left it
a law, a form, a < cold morality.' If life, therefore, was to be
given, it had to be galvanized into the moral order from
without. That might be done by a supra-mundane God, who
by fiat corrects the defective correspondence between the sense
of duty and the sense of life. Perhaps, on the other hand,
like young Fichte, you may assert in words that we need no
god other than the moral order. But if you use such words,
you will probably be obliged to own, as Fichte afterwards did,
that a moral order so understood is very different from what
the phrase ordinarily means ; that it is not an order but an
ordering life ; that it is not moral but something to which
morality, strictly so called, is a means.

Christendom, as I showed more at length last year, drank
deeply, through St. Paul, and later through the Roman
legalism, of the Judaic spirit. Duty, the sense of ever-
pressing law, grew to be misconstrued as a regard for already
promulgated laws, a service to ordinances, a machinery of
order. But duty is more than order or obedience; and that
is what it was Kant's especial business to teach ; not to
emphasize— though that also is good — that man lives under
a categorical imperative. The ethical doctrine of Kant is
chiefly concerned with an argument to show that the moral
law is freedom ; that iU order is also progress : and that
the categorical imperative is only fully phrased by autonomy.
The moral law, if it be a command, is not a command from
without; if it comes from above and with authority, that
authority is not (in the ordinary sense) supernatural, and
that 'above' is to be taken not of locality, but of grade
of function. Every ethical precept must be judged by one
test : is it a co-operant part of the great ethical ideal of
growing perfection for the individual and for the collectivity ?
Can it, in the fullest light, and with all clearness, be said to
be an integral part of that good will, that will to good, which
is the essential prerogative of man, however much in moments

xi ] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 189

he fails short of it, or in ignorance works against it ? This
will to good, which has no limits or dividing lines, which is
not will for the good of self, or of society, or of humanity,
but for all good and good in all, is another name for reason,
and another name for love. It is the spirit in man which is
his higher nature, ever enacting rules of good, ever setting
up new methods of reaching the ideal ; but always conscious
that they are, though good, not the good, and therefore,
though to be obeyed, not to be blindly obeyed. They are
to be obeyed, one might say, not as we would obey God, but
as we might bow before one of his angels. Progress through
order, and order for the sake of progress : yet, always —
though it is a dangerous truth, as some may think — the
order is progressive, duty is moving. Even so it is with
religion. Man, it has been said, never is, but always to be,
blest. So says one, ' the true God of Israel is not the god
who comes naturally (i. e. as result of previous process) to
the Israelitic consciousness : he must be apprehended by an
express act of the intelligence. All the patriarchs look forward
to a salvation to come : and God himself is only to be under
stood as a God who becomes and lives, who for us is not what
he will yet be.' So duty is not adherence to a fixed post : the
soldier of duty has no doubt an obligation : but he will dis
charge it ill, if he think it is all predetermined and within
the bond.

When in presence of Lear, her sisters and the court, her
father asked Cordelia his question, her reply was :

( I love your majesty
According to my bond, nor more nor less.'

And aain

' You have begot me, bred me, loved me : I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.'

Cordelia defended herself against the charge of untenderncss
by the claim to be at least true : and excused apparent coldness

i88

eon

GIFFORD LECTURES [xi

sequences for morals. It took the life out of it, and left it
a law, a form, a ' cold morality.' If life, therefore, was to be
given, it had to be galvanized into the moral order from
without. That might be done by a supra-mundane God, who
by fat corrects the defective correspondence between the sense
of duty and the sense of life. Perhaps, on the other hand,
like young Fichte, you may assert in words that we need no
god other than the moral order. But if you use such words,
you will probably be obliged to own, as Fichte afterwards did,
that a moral order so understood is very different from what
the phrase ordinarily means ; that it is not an order but an
ordering life; that it is not moral but something to which
morality, strictly so called, is a means.

Christendom, as I showed more at length last year, drank
deeply, through St. Paul, and later through the Roman
legalism, of the Judaic spirit. Duty, the sense of ever-
pressing law, grew to be misconstrued as a regard for already
promulgated laws, a service to ordinances, a machinery of
order. But duty is more than order or obedience; and that
is what it was Kant's especial business to teach ; not to
emphasize — though that also is good — that man lives under
a categorical imperative. The ethical doctrine of Kant is
chiefly concerned with an argument to show that the moral
law is freedom ; that if.it order is also progress : and that
the categorical imperative is only fully phrased by autonomy.
The moral law, if it be a command, is not a command from
without; if it comes from above and with authority, that
authority is not (in the ordinary sense) supernatural, and
that < above ' is to be taken not of locality, but of grade
of function. Every ethical precept must be judged by one
test : is it a co-operant part of the great ethical ideal of
growing perfection for the individual and for the collectivity?
Can it, in the fullest light, and with all clearness, be said to
be an integral part of that good will, that will to good, which
is the essential prerogative of man, however much in moments

xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 189

he fails short of it, or in ignorance works against it ? This
will to good, which has no limits or dividing lines, which is
not will for the good of self, or of society, or of humanity,
but for all good and good in all, is another name for reason,
and another name for love. It is the spirit in man which is
his higher nature, ever enacting rules of good, ever setting
up new methods of reaching the ideal ; but always conscious
that they are, though good, not the good, and therefore,
though to be obeyed, not to be blindly obeyed. They are
to be obeyed, one might say, not as we would obey God, but
as we might bow before one of his angels. Progress through
order, and order for the sake of progress : yet, always —
though it is a dangerous truth, as some may think — the
order is progressive, duty is moving. Even so it is with
religion. Man, it has been said, never is, but always to be,
blest. So says one, ' the true God of Israel is not the god
who comes naturally (i.e. as result of previous process) to
the Israelitic consciousness : he must be apprehended by an
express act of the intelligence. All the patriarchs look forward
to a salvation to come : and God himself is only to be under
stood as a God who becomes and lives, who for us is not what
he will yet be.' So duty is not adherence to a fixed post : the
soldier of duty has no doubt an obligation : but he will dis
charge it ill, if he think it is all predetermined and within
the bond.

When in presence of Lear, her sisters and the court, her
father asked Cordelia his question, her reply was :

' I love your majesty
According to my bond, nor more nor less.'

And again :

' You have begot me, bred me, loved me : I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.'

Cordelia defended herself against the charge of untenderness
by the claim to be at least true : and excused apparent coldness

I90 GIFFORD LECTURES

by the defence, <I cannot heave my heart into my mouth/
Her situation was, indeed, excusable; she was tempted.^ A
foolish father, hypocritical sisters, and a gaping crowd, might
well have been too much for her; and like a second Vashti,
she refused at the monarch's beck fto show the princes and
the people her beauty/ But natheless, even though her
tempter took the guise of an angel of light, the love of
truth, she fell, a not wholly innocent victim. For duty is
not perfectly rendered, when it is rendered as duty and no
more: it can never be merely debt paid, but always must
have added grace : it must not be paid, but as if freely given.
It is sad when the hypocrisy of over-statement drives one into
matter-of-factness: for matter-of-factness just wants a gracious
touch to light it up into truth. Cordelia, for a moment, but
a moment of great issues, was prim and proper ; and considera
tions, quite irrelevantly personal, closed the issues from the
heart to the lips. An evil spirit, the evil spirit of sisterhood,
subjugated nature and daughterhood, and the jealousy her
words let loose went on to work out all its tempestuous
mischief.

XII

THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION AND ITS
RELATION TO MORALITY. — THE BELIEF IN
IMMORTALITY

WE have seen more than once that it is hard to lay down
a line to distinguish religion from morality. In a phrase
quoted from Schelling, we found the religious spirit described
as conscientiousness, only however in order that such con
scientiousness itself might be identified with heroism and
enthusiasm. But in each of the terms themselves there is
a corresponding antinomy. In religion, e.g. at whatever
stage we regard it, there is a strange antithesis between
the power attributed to the god or gods, and the implication
that the faithful worshipper has all this divine power as it
were at his command. Even in the lower forms of savage
religion the worshipper believes that, if only the right
methods are employed, the powers that rule in the various
parts of the natural sphere are at his disposal. The believer,
however, ascribing superhuman powers to his god, still, by an
apparently contradictory attitude, hopes confidently to find
these powers subservient to himself. There is thus, on the
one hand, fear, subjection, dependence: but there is equally
on the other, hope, confidence, and appropriation. There is
an underlying sense of essential kindred between man and
God, but between the two parties there is at the same time
a division or apparent hostility : a hostility which, however,
may be said to be implicitly overcome, because it can be over-

I92 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn

come by means and methods at man's disposal. The face of
God may be often veiled and apparently averted, but, though
the friendship may be concealed, it is there, and by applying
the right means can be re-awakened. God and man are, as
it were, old friends, as Pindar said, from the same stock; but
(shall we say, in the process of civilization ?) they have drifted
apart; a variance has arisen, and requires to be removed by
communication, according to a certain set of observances.
These friendly observances, however, God himself has, it is
understood, revealed at some auspicious moment. He may be
jealous, he may be mischievous, he may be uncertain ; so it
has seemed at times to many of his worshippers; but under
lying it all there is a certainty in the worshipper that, if he
follows the appointed methods of approaching his God, he can
by them secure for his interest the great powers of the world.
Thus understood, religion means a sense, on man's side, of
a Power superior, indefinitely superior to himself, controlling
him and things with absolute authority : yet graciously per
mitting him, by an appointed or revealed series of observances,
to exercise control in his turn. Man, in his weakness, has
ultimately on his side God in his strength : if, that is,
a certain barrier between them be first removed, a mode of
doing which has in some way been disclosed to man by the
deity. Thus in the very forefront of religion stands the postu
lated fact of revelation. Man, away from God and having
lost sight of him, is as constantly persuaded that he is opening
a way back to himself, as it were, giving signals and beckon
ing- from the darkness in which he dwells.

c"5

It is usual in these days to regard everything under the
conditions of the struggle for existence, and as a weapon for
use therein. Of material weapons man has invented or
appropriated many. He has wrested from the creatures their
own claws, tusks, bones, and used them to subdue others ; he
has chipped and shaped stones, and finally hammered and
fused metals into his tools. But all these implements are

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 193

slight in importance if compared with the metaphysical ally,
the supernatural aid, which he has secured in his contest.
All the ranges of nature, animate and inanimate, may resist
as they like his efforts to subdue them : but man has a
weapon in his possession stronger than anything they can
possibly bring against him. By an instinct earlier than
any history can trace, he sets the power in and behind
phenomena on his side. He is naturally a tJieogonic being :
he has at the very root of all his action an instinct, the
instinct of reason, which grows and becomes more deter
minate, that he is, as it were, backed by great powers to the
extent of which he can and will fix no limits. He projects
his own self to be into the nature he seeks to conquer. Like
an assailant who should succeed in throwing his standard into
the strong central keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his
way thereto with assured victory in his eyes of hope, so man,
with the vision of the soul, prognosticates his final triumph.
He sees, often faltering, the writing on the wall, which
announces for those who can read it the foe's defeat. Thus
behaves, thus exults, that reason in him, stronger and faster
than reasoning, which already reaching beyond his mere
physical individuality, knows ( no limits to its sway; its flag,
the sceptre all who meet obey/ It, the god-discovering, god-
begetting instinct, is, as it were, the long-neglected foundling
of some great hero by a lowly mother, who goes forth,
a Theseus, in search of home and adventures, working his
way slowly into recognition, the hidden father ever and anon
vouchsafing tokens of encouraging manifestations, till in the
fullness of all times the hour of unification and final
restitution shall come.

Such a power reveals itself especially, as it were palpably,
in particular incidents and events of his history. It takes
shape here and there, in the course of experience. It is, if
you like so to put it, the sense of the infinite ; but that only
means the feeling, and occasionally the vivid realization, that
^ o

i94

GIFFORD LECTURES [xii

behind the definite and the accomplished there is ever more
and more yet to be attained. For at first the conception
of the object of each feeling is very inadequate. Its infinity
only appears in an endless emergence of new and ever new
gods. We speak of the concluding result of such a theogonic
movement of the human spirit as polytheism. But polytheism
is only the summing up by reflection of a process which
comes upon God here, there, and anywhere, and which, now
that it has found so many instances of godhead, stops, and
gathering them together forms them into a system. Thus
the mere assemblage, the mere pantheon, of a polytheism is
not the primal religious fact, but a subsequent product of
theological study, seeking to arrange, codify, and co-ordinate
the forms of divinity, which have successively arisen in the
course of natural development. Each of its successive, or even
simultaneous, deities was a god, or, indeed, was God ; each
a specimen, as seen under the perspective of a special time
and place, of the great power of things : and it was only
when classification supervening found a multitude of such
beings awaiting its decision, and all claiming to be genuinely
accredited, that the question arose as to their mutual relation.
Each, as it first appeared in the form of deity, was God :
each even afterwards, when the religious worshipper took it
seriously as a divine power, was still God: but when the
deifying instinct had ceased, and there were only its results to
compile and compare, the products left for the artist and the
historian in the course of the theogonic process had to be
adjusted to each other. Theological ingenuity, taking each
of these products as an independent and individually real
entity, and asking how the multiplicity can be grouped,
creates a mythological pantheon or system of gods. If, on
the contrary, we remember that each god was only a frag
mentary step in the evolution of God, we shall refuse to
recognize any of them in separateness as fully God ; though
each was for the time and place a symbol of true divinity.

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 195

We shall treat the variety, not as exclusive individuals to be
grouped in a collective body, but as fragments or faces or as
pects of one supreme reality, one Godhead successively surmised
by man, and successively self-revealed in the course of history.
A real polytheism, if it were possible, would violate the
very postulate of religion. If the gods are many, they cease
to be God, the object of worship and power, and become
mere objects suitable for treatment in art and literature. So
it was in Greece, in India, in Germany, and indeed almost
everywhere : so it might have been in Israel. Always a
polytheism is rather an artistic than a religious phenomenon,
a category of theological reflection, not a directly religious
birth. In the truly religious field the God is one and com
plete, at each time one and all. It may be that the
worshipper, who now paid his reverence to Aphrodite, at
another time to Demeter, could hardly tell what was the
relation of the powers he successively adored. But, on
the other hand, these were not problems that troubled him :
they are problems that concern the theologian. To the
faithful heart, seeking help and hearing, each at the moment
is God, each omnipotent ; with, no doubt, the qualification
added as reflection steps in — in his sphere. But, at each
moment in the stress and strain of real life, the many
practically converge into one. Here, as in so many other
instances, religion and theology separate. But theology
belongs to literature or to art : it deals not with the living
gods in their life and activity, but with their names and
historical place ; with the statical aspect of- the pantheon, not
with its dynamic life ; and its difficulties of mutual arrange
ment little perplex the real and earnest worshipper. These
matters are of externals, and do not touch the central meaning
of religion. They arise after you have left the shrine and
the presence of God. In brief, the multiplicity of gods is
but the reflex cast upon Olympus by an ill-organized com
munity, which has put its parts together by mechanical

o 2

I96 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn

imposition: it is the field for sacerdotal learning rather
than an interest of genuine faith. And when it seriously
exist, it is a sign that religions development has been
arrested for purposes other than religious: that political or
artistic interests have carried the day. To religion, therefore,
the glorious Greek literature and art gave no helping hand.
Just as in mediaeval Europe Greek science was spun out
into multiplicity of detail, but lost touch with the root of
science in reality; so Greek mythology was a gorgeous
parasite that left its parent to grow blanched and unnatural

under its shade.

The main difference in religions is due to the advance
of man in other fields, to the growth of man's knowledge of
the world, to the general result of his civilization : in other
words, it is determined by the advance of his knowledge
of nature and by the growth of his own sociality. By the
former, it is corrected and co-ordinated on its objective side :
by the latter, on its subjective. If it be asked which of
these is most important, perhaps, from the religious stand
point, we shall not err in emphasizing the subjective. The
theory of objective godhead is essential : but its revelation in
and to man is the natural prius. It was e. g. in the former
direction that unity was given by philosophic reflection to the
theology of Greece, in the latter direction that unity was
given by prophetic effort to the religion of Israel. To the
man of scientific reflection, God was the central being, the
supreme cause and source of movement in the physical or
objective world : he was the reality of all reality, the object
in all objectivity. To the religious man, who did not analyze
his religion, God was the central source and rule of action,
the standard to live after, and the life to live by, of the
moral community. Thus the poetic remoulding of Greek
mythology was in the first instance mainly a matter of
theology : it did not directly touch the heart, and had little
or no effect on the popular religion. Of that religion,

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 197

at least of its inner life of faith, prayer, praise, we indeed
know but little : literature and art can tell us comparatively
little about it. It is the picturesque, the artistic, and finally
the historical and philosophical sides of the products of
religious o-enius that we see : of the devotional side we

O O

can gather but little directly from the works of the sculptor
and the poet. But we are hardly, therefore, entitled to
suppose it non-existent. To the cultured classic writers, to
whom we owe the main part of our knowledge of Greek
civilization, religion was evidently a matter which lay in
the main outside their range of interests. And from several
indications we are almost entitled to assume that, even
as art was defective and almost prohibited in the more
religious phases of Semitic civilization, so religion, strictly
so called, was a defective and undeveloped element in Greece.
Non omnia possumus omnes. Religion in Greece always tended
to become identified with a sort of theology and theosophy.
It was a kind of Oeoopia. Even the monastic Christianity of
the Greeks tended to be what the occidental worker calls idle
contemplation, that looked away and away into the easy calm
of nature and the peace of God ; a leisure of vision in which
the distraction of life and business were left behind, in
which even the strain of duty ceased, and the soul was at
peace with the universe, untempted, unattracted, unoccupied.
The Greek Church has still a Christianity of its own, and
under Christian names it reproduces much of the spirit that
created the drama and the theoretic life.

If religion be what we have described, it would seem in its
first essence to have little or nothing to do with the community
and with morality. It is so to speak on a deeper level, a more
fundamental stratum than morality. Morality seems to be
but a means to better and higher life, while religion claims to
be or contain the fundamental postulate in the struggle for
life itself, the postulate or belief that the inmost and supreme
forces of the world are on man's side. Only in the earliest

T98 GIFFORD LECTURES [XH

historical forms of religion this postulate is underlying and
implicit, hardly daring to own its presumption, and does not
with full self-confidence come to the front. It is rather a hope,
mixed with fears : a wish that has yet to be actualized and
fulfilled by strange and unintelligible methods. There is no
security in it : no faith that can cast out fear. It is a groping
upwards of feeble hands ; and though it never utterly fails— that
were the death of deaths— it recurrently droops and hesitates.
Man is not at inward ease, not at unity with himself, he has
not risen to possess his own soul ; and hence he finds no unity,
no stability, no rest in the powers which he postulates in the
world around him. Just because he is not fully and reasonably
man, but presents from time to time different and disconnected
parts of man, so is the God he finds ready in nature to support
him a self -divided, many-formed, unrestful being. Whether,
therefore, we assert with the German theologian Kaftan, that
the object sought in all religions is life and not perfect life,
that religion is based on the merely natural desire for good,
and not on any ethical obligation to realize an ideal ; or main
tain with others, that it is only through religion that mail can
uphold his inner independence against the obstacles which
nature throws in his way ; we must still say that life and
good are words that have no proper meaning for a being who
is entirely without ethical quality. To talk of ethical ideals,
unless these terms are carefully defined, is beside the question.
A desire for good is not a mere desire for pleasant feeling,
but a desire for self-satisfaction, for a better, truer, more
real self; and thus in every way it implies an ideal. Life
is not a purely physical or animal state, but the self-centred
realization of an intelligent soul.

Morality, then, far from being a mere means to more perfect
life — which implies that life would still be life apart from it
— is essentially a part, or rather, as we have already ventured
to conclude, the centre and life of life in all human existence.
Or, in other words, it was through the social bond and social

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 199

effort that man became a true and living soul. That made
him in the human sense one life, one being, and differentiated
him from the mere animal. For his unity as man lies not in
the physiological organism, but in the enveloping idea of
common sociality. It is precisely his quality, his privilege, to
have ideals, because in him always, to make him man, there
is the contrast between what he is and will be, between matter
and spirit ; there is the faculty of error, which is the faculty
of truth. He is always in division and tension between what
he is and what he would or ought to be. He is not a life
self-complete, to which a further grace of perfection may be
from time to time added as an ornament, but which can go
on in its normal course as mere life. To live is, for man, to
form ideals and to fall short of them : they may be very
lowly ones, not what popularly would be called ideals at all ;
but at any rate, from the day that the social sting entered
into him and made him a competitor, from the day that social
sympathy inspired him and made him a co-operator, there
has always been a contrast, however slight, between his Is and
his Ought to be, between the given and the postulated. What
may have been the case in that pre-social life which, according
to Hobbes, was, if it ever was anything, ' nasty and brutish Y
we need not greatly care ; at any rate, for human life in
general, we may say that always it is governed and constituted
by reason, which bids a man not to be what he is, but to
be such as the dictates of a larger and a society-postulating
consciousness requires.

Morality is not something without which man would still
be man, and his life still be life ; not a counsel of perfection,
but an unconditional universal imperative. No doubt, by
careless abstraction, we may speak of such a soulless life as
man's life, and imagine man as still man with all social
relations and all their hopes and fears and demands obliterated.
But these are plays of that old fallacy, called by logicians
1 Leviathan, Part I, ch. xiii.

200

GIFFORD LECTURES [xn

Acervus, which supposes that, because you can diminish
a quality till it becomes next to nothing, you can therefore
leave it out altogether. If we reject such false abstraction,
we may go back and assert that in the very beginnings of
religion there was morality. Non-moral, i. e. non-social and
non-civilized man, we know not. Morality, sociality, civility
is his prop num. His morality, indeed, may be quaint and
untasteful as judged by later specimens more familiar to us ;
yet that is a judgement which the lowest savage, as we
complacently call the savages of another type than ours, can
easily retort. But the rudest savage has a life only because
he lives in others, for others, by others ; because his life is
determined and formed by rules, customs, observances, pain
fully numerous and apparently onerous. It is from this
superinduced backbone of his, this political framework and
spirit, which is his only because he is son, father, tribesman
and what not, that he derives the moral support that enables
him to claim the strength of nature, or of nature's inner self
on his side. The claim for life, the Anspruc/i auf Leben, of
which Kaftan speaks, is a cheque which he feels entitled to
draw, because nature has already singled him out for a special
prerogative, charged him, as it were, to be her interpreter or
steward. His citizenship, his appropriation of the materials
of the natural order for purposes of his life, seems to justify
his presumption that he has unlimited right to claim the
backing of the universe, or of Him who ultimately is the
reality of the Universe, when in any special instance he seems
baffled by obstacles in his path.

Indeed, were it not for the sociality in which he lives it
would be hard to see how man, in his individual weakness,
could claim the supports of the force or will that lies behind
the visible oppositions of things. It is in the conjunct action
of himself and his group that he feels himself able to hold up
his feeble self in the face of things. He belongs to a royal
race, a people chosen by the powers. It is in proportion as

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 201

by social union he makes life more of a certainty and less of
a weary struggle, that he rises to conceive himself as no mere
accident or epiphenomenon in things, but as their leading
purpose and chief interest. If he thinks that he is only
a little lower than the Elo/tim, it is because he has formed
a metaphysical reality which is his, and yet something greater
than his mere natural individuality can hold. If he feels
himself a match for the powers of the physical world,, it is by
the strength of his community concentrated in consciousness ;
and if he dares to believe that the influences of the world are
anywhere on his side, it is again because he is one of a group
which has entered into specially close relationship with a
certain physical region, has become, as it were, co-heir with the
powers that rule therein, and formed a sort of covenant of
alliance offensive and defensive with them, or with the main
Baal and lord of the land. The original gods are local gods,
of power and influence narrowly defined by the sphere of the
social power to which they are attached, but in that sphere
they are supreme. Outside their ordered circle there are other
natural powers, vague, treacherous, not yet as it were reduced
to the social order of human companionship, but even they
too are not wholly unreconcilable enemies. When we speak,
therefore, of nature-religions and ethical religions by way
of contrast, we use terms rather loosely, and a potion. The
German anthropologist speaks of nature-peoples. But there
are no nature-peoples, Natnr-J'dlkcr^ but only peoples which
to outside judgement leave much to be desired in the character
of their civilization ; so much as hardly to deserve the name
civilized at all : yet are they still in some degree civilized,
never mere children of unadulterated and non-rational nature,
and their very abominations are the proof of their humanity.
So in the other case. A nature-religion is only an ethical
religion of a rather less organized ethicality than is presup
posed in other religions. There is no non-ethical man, though
the ethics of certain times may be very unlike those most

202 GIFFORD LECTURES [XH

familiar to us. But, as we have already seen, ethics, religion,
art and science are dependent for their development on the
degree in which the community has solved the problem of
sustaining life by the production and distribution of material
goods, so here it may be noted that in the early stages of
civilization the incident obligations of ethics are perpetually
dodged by the ever-pressing pangs of hunger.

And just as man believes that the life and emotion of the
Power in nature beats somehow in deep sympathy with his
own, and that a force greater than his own is on his side,
whatever obstacles may temporarily deflect his course, so he
believes that the visible life he and others lead here is not
altogether extinguished by death. If it be an indestructible
tendency of social man, i.e. of man as man, to claim the
support of the general principle at the heart of things, and
to have by appointed modes metaphysical aid always at
his beck, it is no less his tendency to assume his existence
prolonged into a world beyond death. Even to the savage,
and most of all perhaps to the savage, the idea of the ter
mination of all his existence by death seems absurd and
unintelligible. But in this case, as in the others, it is in
the strength of the social tie that he is able to prolong the
vision of life in a perspective to which only the incompetence
of his imagination sets a limit. The tombs of his fathers,
these are his holy of holies : there is set up in visible
shape the enduring memorial of his conviction, that death
cannot break the invisible continuity of his real life.

In a passage of great power at the close of Fifine at
the Fair, Browning has given a sort of survey of human
civilization. Beginning with a vision of a great crowd in
the Square of St. Mark's at Venice, he proceeds to use it as
an emblem of that strange masquerade of change in per
manence and permanence in change, which the movements
of art, science, morality and religion present. At length he
sums up all the work of human culture, in all its branches

xil] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 203

and all its variety, in one single picture, reduced as it were
to its lowest denominator, its grayest and most unadorned
shape. And that epitome of all man's monumental labours
is one of those dolmen- tombs, the long, low, narrow avenue
ending in the funereal chamber with its great bread lid
and its foreignly curious stones, supporting as at Maezhow
a great memorial mound. That is the net result, the epitome
of civilization — a tomb ! For in that grim structure, so
toilsomely reared as if for ever, man has boldly claimed to
be heir of the ages, he has extended his hopes into the
illimitable future, and with superb self-confidence declared
that he does not all die. Such a tomb is a temple, the
witness to a faith in life eternal ; for even the gods in older
legend had their sepulchre : was it not in Crete that men
showed the grave of Zeus ? But the tombs of the saints still
work wonders ; and the graves of the fathers are the pledge
to the sons of the times that are yet to be, as well as the
record of immemorial beginnings.

Let us not however misunderstand the evolution-formula.
There have perhaps been some who have regarded the pro
tective defences, by which some persecuted race has survived
and escaped its assailants, as a happy trick by which it
suddenly endowed itself with new properties. So some seem
to think, man, like to be worsted in the struggle for life,
said to himself : Let there be gods, beings of my kindred,
but far more potent, on my side : Let there be a life hereafter,
so that I may not be haunted by the weakening thought
that all is vanity. If man so said to himself, it was, we may
be assured, by no idle Jiat, but because in him spoke some
thing other, and yet not wholly other, than himself. Scientific
writers sometimes remind us that the whole beauty of sight
and sound in the world is a sensuous illusion : really, they
tell us, there is no colour, save in the eye, no music but
in the ear. It is kind of them to stop where they do ; for
why there should be even weight, or force, or direction, if

204 GIFFORD LECTURES [XII

the human senses are gone, some of us may be excused
for doubting. Certainly if *ifs' and 'ans' are to be used
so boldly as good ware, we may expect crashes. It is a poor
jest to argue that, if something which is were not, something
else would be something still more else. It is not for us
to pick and choose the bits of reality we are to accept as
genuine. It hangs all together: and if you give up any
of it, its most sensuous or materialist part, vou cannot be
sure of retaining even the spirit. And. equally, if you give
up the more spiritual. \ on endanger the more material. No
doubt the reasoning and rational being, generally younir,
imagines he could pick and choose, so as to leave out certain
disagreeables. Hut experience (and experience is only matured
reason) shows that good cannot be got without evil: or
rather that those distinctions, though practically useful, are.
as Spinoza saw. not easily attributable to the supreme sub
stance, the 7>rw, which is another word for .Ww/vt.

It is not man's single intellect that makes the gods, any
more than it is man's single intelligence that in Kant's
phrase makes nature. The intelligence in either case is more
than the physical individuality can contain, and the ' making '
is in this case • prosu pposing ' : which means realizing that
there is something efficient in nature, which does not appear on
the surface. It is the discovery that the process of civilization,
which in its appearance and obvious tendency is a turning
away from nature, a departure by human inventions from
the rectitude of primaeval arrangements, is not so uniform
as it looks. It seems as if man were encroaching on the
divine, and stealing its prerogatives : as if he were preparing
tor himself the fate of Prometheus, to expiate his rebellion
agamst the universal law. Hut Prometheus has within him
secret that keeps him confident even under the tortures
inflicted by an angry Zeus. He knows that Zeus, who thus
vrammes over earth and heaven, the blindly natural god,
: to aMgn for ever: he knows that a saviour will come,

xii] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 205

that in the struggle of man with the first nature — a struggle
which, like all such, is not without the evils and violence
of wild war — there is preparing a new heaven and a new
earth, wherein dwells righteousness. He knows that he has
on his side a better and a greater Zeus, a God who far from
being jealous or hostile to man, will yet reign through man,
and raise the son of man, in the consummation of all things,
to sit upon the throne of his kingdom.

There are two weapons, if wre again turn to the evolutionist
formula, which man has used against the waste and wear
of time and chance. In the strength of a living and active
sociality, man has defied the brute powers of nature ; and he
has appealed with faith to their inner spirit and purpose : or
rather he has taken the permanence of sociality as the pledge
and foretaste of an extension of his being, to which time and
space can set no limits. He has claimed God for his ever
lasting ally, and been content with nothing less than immor
tality. But if we say l immortality ' we must guard against
any special limitation of its meaning, any special theories as
to what and when and where man is immortal. Our ideas on
that subject — and I suspect, as I hinted the other day,
on many kindred topics — are largely dependent on popular
and exoteric interpretations of Platonism : and, even if Plato's
ideas on this topic were much clearer or more undisputed
than they are, and personal immortality were a less ambiguous
phrase than it can honestly be said to be, we need not here
bring them into account. As I use the term, I take it, in its
very widest sense, to mean that our inner true being is not
a visible and a sensible thing, that it is that in us which
is unextinguished by death. { Seiitimus experimurque? says
Spinoza, ' HOS aetenios es*e ' : a personal experience tells us we
are above and beyond time. That is all. And if you say,
it is not much ; if you speak confidently of life and
immortality elsewhere brought to light, if you refer to the
speculation of St. Paul which we hear so often by the opened

206 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn

grave ; I will only say that, though as a human being I would
fain like others be able to say more, and be glad, like the
children in the carol, to bring tidings strange yet true from
the land of the leal, I can see in both of these only the
reaffirmation of one doctrine, that man lives and fights
the world in the faith of a persistence, whose possibility he
can by science neither affirm nor deny, neither prove nor dis
prove, but which in some shape and some grade seems as
essential an element of humanity, whether externally formu
lated or not, as the belief in God. Both are still of faith
as of old ; if they were otherwise than of faith, they would
not move men as they have done. If they seem less obviously
prominent in the world than they once were, may it not be
that they have sunk as perpetual stimuli even into the hearts
of those who, when they consciously reflect, seem half-
inclined to reject them from their creed ? For as not every
one who says, ' Lord, Lord ! ' shall be admitted to the
kingdom, so, says one, ' loving hearts have thought they saw
in atheism a form, to their mind the most respectful, of modest
and profound piety ; ' and many, who in words have rejected
immortality, have done so because of their ideal faith that
' flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God/ These
things, like others, are justified by their fruits. That is
a poor faith in immortality, which would seek in it another
chance to make up for neglected opportunities here, or to
replenish in after-time the now-kept-empty vessel of love : as
it is a poor faith in God, which is content with the belief
that, however slackly things go now, he will one day come
to be our judge.

But, as of the belief in gods, so of that in immortality, it is
true that, in a loose use of words, we may say that it is at
first without ethical significance. What does ' ethical ' mean
in this connexion? Probably to most people of an unre-
generate mind, it means that which is or ought to be visited
with rewards or punishment ; and to the most unregenerate

xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 207

mind, especially the latter. Ethical, to this type of moralist
— and he has long been a common one — always connotes, in
the first instance, approval or disapproval, and, in the second,
a wish to see an example made and a whipping inflicted.
Such moralists take a fine personal interest in the moral law,
but perhaps scarcely an ethical interest. There is undoubtedly
a time in the history of civilization when punishment occupies
a foremost place amongst its machinery. There was a time
when, wild in woods, the noble savage — and especially the
noble savage's children — ran, little troubled with the fear
of discipline, and with no obvious penalty from political
sanctions. There was, no doubt, a sort of tit for tat : but
it had something of a sportive character about it: as when
the Australian savage, having injured a man, has to stand
as a goal for the missiles of his adversary or adversary's
relative. But as things went further, and civilization
advanced too fast for the natural pace of some who had to
follow, it was found necessary to apply sharper goads to the
slow and refractory so as to quicken their pace. And so it
continued, till punishment almost came to be looked upon as
the end for which civilization had been wrought, and jails
and scaffolds as its obvious symbols. At present we begin
to have some doubts as to the right to punish. Just as we
now recognize, if we but think, that physical sicknesses are
very largely due to our own misconduct, and therefore, in a
schoolmastering world, fit objects for penal treatment ; so we
recognize, on the other hand, that crimes have some of the
nature of disease, and are in many cases their own punish
ment. And we have on the whole admitted, not that
criminals are faultless, but that casting stones at them is
not the best way of putting matters right, and has an
unpleasant tendency to generate fresh offences. At any rate,
punishment has ceased to be quite the noble function it was
half a century ago.

Now, when people spoke of the ethical transformation of

2o8 GIFFORD LECTURES [XH

the religious idea and that o£ immortality, they were thinking
of the spirit of a time when, in the course of social and
political development, the important uses of punishment had
first dawned upon men. In Homer, e. g. where penal codes
are still defective, there is on the whole little use of the after
life for penalty, except in the case apparently of some
extremely profane persons. In Pindar, again, the after-life
is partly conceived as a field for further development of things
set going here. But in Plato the penal machinery of the
other world is in full operation, and for the punishment craze,
i. e. the extravagant enthronement of it, he is considerably to
blame. Curious results, indeed, come about by the change of
view : and Zeus might have to punish in his modern capacity
what he (according to earlier creeds) might also be said to
have inspired. But that, perhaps, is an inconsistency not
confined to the Hellenic world.

And what Plato did in a mild way, the extravagances of
vulgar, and especially vulgarly theological, imagination carried
to terrible lengths in Christendom. Both perhaps got the
framework of their ideas from Egypt, where, as the Greeks
thought, the immortality of the soul was discovered. And
certainly, if not discovered, it was there applied as a great
disciplinary agent in accordance with the exemplarily bureau
cratic spirit of the Egyptian regime. The world of the dead
was a great law-court sitting in permanence, and making an
exhaustive scrutiny of the deeds done in the body.

The important point for us is not to rest satisfied with the
restriction of ethical conceptions to a stage when they are
dominated by the rule of laws. Of laws, I say, not of Law :
for while laws are commands with penal sanctions attached,
Law is the voice of God, or the sweet reasonableness of
harmonious and self-completing life. The law, said one,—
meaning the code of laws, — was a schoolmaster to bring us to
the heirship of the promises. There is a period of discipline,
but it is subordinate, and a means of self -development ; its

xii] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 209

justification is to anticipate the end, and so give direction to
effort, that would otherwise hurt itself and others, and waste
precious time. But it has its limits in its end : it must never
extirpate, though it may accelerate and facilitate, self -education
and freedom. And of God, therefore, we need not think too
much as an authority to coerce an erring world. True morality
is not a thing of rules and observances. Far, indeed, should
any man be from speaking scornfully of forms, traditions, and
the bonds of social authority. Without them we should be
poor and miserable creatures ; through them is all progress.
But they are not everything. When Michael Angelo's great
vision of the last judgement was set open to view, a certain
high official at the Papal court complained that its nudities
were indecencies, worthy of places unnameable rather than of
the buildings in charge of the Vicar of Christ. Michael
Angek/s first notice of the criticism, says the legend, was to
give his critic a place amongst the evil shameless ones. But
he had at length to reckon with the Pope, who echoed the
complaint. ' That,' replied the artist, ' is a fault easy to set
right : there are harder things to amend than that.' And the
order was forthwith given to Daniele da Volterra, to be known
hereafter in art history as II Braghettone, the breeches-maker,
to veil the offending members. Now breeches-making in this
sense is a comparatively easy matter ; and a great many people
are of opinion that it is the most important of all matters.
And its necessity to some extent is undoubted. Only the
tailors must not be too proud. It is a nobler task to mould
fine limbs, strong, graceful and active; and for that end
tailoring, otherwise commendable, sometimes stands in the
way. It is excellent again to clean the outside of the cup
and the platter : but there is still the business of the inside.

And so, let us not forget — we all do forget — that the art of
morality is not, how not to do it. Its function is not merely
to keep us from falling, nor is it to help us to become proper.
It is to teach us to love God with all our hearts and strength

p

2io G1FFORD LECTURES

and mind, and our neighbours as ourselves. The old Stoics
used to say, ' Follow Nature ' : and Bishop Butler has
remarked that this is but a loose way of talking-. The
Stoic perhaps might have retorted that it was a lax way of
talking to say, ' Obey conscience.' For all formulas in nut
shell fashion are lax.

The Stoic and Butler also said, ' Follow God/ In each case
you must realize that, whichever you do, you take your life in
your hands ; you enter on a grand enterprise, a search for the
holy Grail, which will bring you to strange lands and perilous
seas. For you cannot say, interpreting, ' Thus far and no
further, merely according to the bond and the duty/ In fol
lowing God, you follow by what has been, what is ruled and
accomplished, but you follow after what is not yet. ' It may
be that the gulfs will wasli us down''; it may be that the
gods of the past will rain upon us brimstone and horrible
tempest. But he that is with us is more than all that are
against us. Whoever keeps his ear ever open to duty, always
forward, never attained, is not far from the kingdom. The
gods may be against him, the demi-gods may depart, but he,
as said Plotinus, ' if alone, is with the Alone.'

ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

P 2

OUR NATURAL RIGHTS

THE phrase ( natural rights ' is, we are sometimes told,
a survival from the obsolete language of a controversy long
since forgotten. The very words that make up the phrase
are ambiguous. Each has in turn been the confusing battle-
cry in a combat where the fighters knew not what they
fought for. And yet, if we look into it, the question
underlying the phrase is not of a merely antiquarian
interest. It touches on problems which never cease to
excite curiosity — which each age has to face and to seek to
solve for itself.

The history of the idea we need not here attempt to draw
out in full. Perhaps germs of the claim to natural justice
have never been altogether absent from the world, even in
primitive conditions of society, but it may fairly be said that
such demands hardly rise into the clear light of reflection
till the last days of the ancient world, and the time when
modern Europe slowly emerged from the disintegrating
structure of the Roman Empire. The idea of natural rights
inherent in man as man seems to indicate its source in
a period when the atoms that had been solidly built up into
ancient society began, as dissolution of that society set in,
to feel themselves entrusted with their own fortunes, masters
of their scanty savings from the ruin of the old world. That
old regime of Greek and Roman times at least had taught
the few who were favoured by social status to be free and

2i4 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

equal : and had inspired thinkers to suggest that, apart from
the ordinances of statecraft, such liberty and equality were
the birthright of each member of the human race. The
history of the early centuries of modern Europe, the so-called
Dark and Middle Ages, is the record of an attempt, prolonged
through centuries, to create a tolerable order of human life
out of the dislocated and scattered elements which were left by
the changes during the first centuries of that period. The
old order did not entirely lapse into nothingness ; it survived,
however, not as a visible empire, but as an idea of order and
unity, an idea animating the efforts of many individuals,
governing the actions of more, and rising in a few to the
height of a bright and passionate devotion. This idea of
human unity, which was the legacy of the decaying system of
antiquity, was brought into contact with another idea, the idea
of voluntary attachment, of fidelity to comrades, of loyalty
to a self-imposed leadership, the idea of community based not,
as the old world had been, on local ties, or on family neces
sities, but on free and independent combination to attain
some common end. The typical associations of the mediaeval
world, the orders of chivalry, the monastic brotherhoods, the
industrial guilds, found their unifying principle in partici
pation in a work for some general good, in giving them
selves up to the realization of some object freely chosen,
but, when once accepted, claiming the sacrifice of the whole
breadth and depth of life. The Church itself both directly
and indirectly fostered this sense of individual independence.
Over against the visible local kingdom and its claims upon
the subject, Religion set up the idea of a higher and uni
versal kingdom, which was above and beyond the secular
authority. If it often sank into only another and a subtler
tyranny, still in theory the Church was to the members of
the petty principalities of Europe ruled by their local despots
one of the safeguards of personal liberty. It cannot be too
clearly stated that in the darker periods of mediaeval history

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 215

there were learned and wise priests who upheld the reign
of impersonal law, of justice and mercy, amid the struggles
and brutal violence of selfish chiefs.

Thus the very methods, through which order emerged as
a self-won product from the chaos of the transition period
between the old world and the new, made it only too likely
that a sentiment of individual autonomy, of free and inde
pendent contribution to the result, should remain as a settled
conviction in the mind. The services rendered in this process
by the idea of citizenship, as a natural law in which lived
transfigured the political results of the old world, were hardly
remembered. It is not therefore to be wondered at, if, as
soon as political speculation began to awake, as soon as
attention was turned on the nature of sovereignty, the view
gained expression that kingdoms and commonwealths were
the work of the voluntary efforts of individuals. Such
speculation, first started into keen activity when the con
troversy between Pope and Emperor reached a climax, was
invested with new and more general interest by the wars
of religion in the sixteenth century. We there find Jesuit
and Protestant alike (with different motives) proclaiming the
theory of the divine right of the peoples to choose their own
form of government. A fresh stage of the controversy was
due to the fifty years' struggle between the Stuart kings and
the leaders of Parliamentary government. The advocate of the
Puritan revolution, John Milton, lays it down that ' all men
were naturally born free, . . . born to command, and not to
obey': that the 'authority and power of self-defence and
self-preservation ' is a ' natural birthright/ whereas the
' power of kings and magistrates ' is ' only derivative, trans
ferred and committed to them in trust from the people/ So
too John Locke, the advocate of the ' glorious revolution ' of
1688, taught that men, being by nature 'free equal and
independent/ surrendered their ' natural power' and freely
consented to abide by the decisions of the majority so long as

2,6 ESSAYS IN MORAL I'lIlLOSOI'llY [r

they were thus the better enabled ' to preserve themselves,
their liberty and property/

When we come to the middle of the eighteenth century,
we find Blackstone, in his Comment-ane* on Mm Lawn of
Knylawl (1765), expounding the lessons of Loeke as a funda
mental doctrine. ' The principal aim of society/ he explains,
< is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute
rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of
nature/ These 'absolute rights of man,' summed up in the
general name of the 'natural liberty of mankind/ which
means fa power of acting as one thinks fit without any
restraint unless by the law of nature/ have in most other
countries been restricted or altogether destroyed, but in
England they are coeval with our form of government. Thus
though founded upon nature and reason, or even on the will
of God, they have in this country, according to Blackstone,
the peculiar advantage of being defined by different laws in
a number of private immunities. They include three principal
or primary articles, the right of personal security, the right of
personal liberty, and the right of personal property. These
broad terms, however, are whittled away by definition.
Personal liberty, e. g. is explained to consist in the absence
of slavery, and the freedom from arbitrary or illegal arrest.

Ten years afterwards the question of natural rights was
transferred from the region of academical discussion to the
arena of public meetings. The ideas of the revolutionary
party in Europe were carried to America by Thomas Paine,
the author of Hound Common Kunxn (1776) and The Crmv. As
early as 1773 a meeting at Mendon in Massachusetts had
adopted resolutions ( that all men have an equal right to life,
liberty and property/ and ' that a right to liberty and
property (which are natural means of self-preservation) is
absolutely inalienable arid can never lawfully be given up
by ourselves or taken from us by others/ The 'principle
of self-preservation/ which holds the central place in this

OUR NATURAL Rid I ITS

217

document, is pronounced necessary alike to the well-being
of individuals and to the order of the universe. In the
American declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, the
same views are reproduced: * \Ye hold these (ruths to he
self-evident., that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed hy their Creator with certain unalienahle rights, Unit
amon^1 these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:
that- to secure these rights governments are instituted amon^'
men, deriving their just powers from (he consent of the
governed, and that whenever any form of •'•overnnieiit he-
comes destructive of these; ends, it is the ri^-ht of the people to
alter and to abolish it, and to institute a. new ^ovenimeut,
laying its foundation on such principles and or^ani/in^ its
powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their safety and happiness.'

The attitude of Burke on the suhject of natural rights
is worth noting. In his Thoinjhtx on (lie (\ut,ti' of tin1
Present Discontents (1770) he maintains in a, most outspoken
manner the origin of all government in the popular will.
'The King/ he says, 'is the representative of the people: so are
the Lords : so uro the Judges. They are all trustees for the
people, as well as the Commons : because no power is •j-ivcn
for the solo sake of the holder: and although government
certainly is an institution of Divine Authority, yet its forms
and the persons who administer it, all originate from the
people/ But. on the whole he declines to enter upon ultimate
questions of principle. His consideration, he says, in his
Speech on, Conciliation wil/i Ann'rlca (i77,r)), is 'limited to
the policy of the question.' k I do not examine whet. her the
^•ivin^- away a 'man's money he a power cxcepted and reserved
out of the general trust of ^'overnment : and how far all
mankind, in all forms of Polity, are entitled to an exercise
of that rio-ht hy the Charter of Nature.' 'The question
witli mo/ he adds, ' is not whether you have a ri^-ht to render
your people miserable : hut whether it is not your interest

2i8 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I
do but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to
do/ He contrasts titles and compacts with what ' the reason
of the thing ' requires.

In his Reflexions on the Revolution in France he con
trasts the historical and legal character of the English
Revolution with the abstract theories of the French. ' No
experience/ he says, 'has taught us that in any other course
or method than that of an hereditary crown, our liberties can
be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary
right' When our liberties are thus considered ' in the light of
an inheritance, ... our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It
carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree
and illustrating ancestors. ... We procure reverence to our
civil institutions ... on account of their age and on account
of those from whom they are descended/ The French declined
to follow this path and give to their recovered freedom
a correspondent dignity— by recalling the privileges that had
been discontinued. ' They have "the rights of men/' Against
these there can be no prescription : against these no agreement
is binding, these admit no temperament and no compromise/
For Burke these rights are a piece of ' political metaphysics/
dangerous only because they afford a ground of quarrel with
all government, on ' a question of competency and a question
of title/ Not that he denies what he calls the ' real rights of
men/ ' Civil Society is an institution of beneficence : and law
itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right
to justice : they have a right to the fruits of their industry, and
to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have
a right to the acquisitions of their parents : to the nourish
ment and improvement of their offspring : to instruction in life
and consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately
do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for
himself ; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which
society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 219

his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights,
but not to equal things/

But man, in the convention by which society is formed,,
' has divested himself of the first fundamental right of un-
covenanted man, that is, to judge for himself and to assert
his own cause.' ( That he may secure some liberty, he makes
a surrender in trust of the whole of it/ ' Government,'
however, ' is not made in virtue of natural rights/ It ' is
a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants/
And if ( men have a right, that these wants should be provided
for by this wisdom/ then, — as amongst these wants is ' the
want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their
passions/ — it follows that ' the restraints on men, as well as
their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights/ And
'the moment you abate any thing from the full rights of
men each to govern himself/ 'from that moment the whole
organization of government becomes a consideration of con
venience/ Thus the science of constructing a commonwealth
is not to be taught a priori. It presupposes a long experience.
' Political reason is a computing principle. It calculates
morally and not mathematically/ Whereas the pretended
rights of men are ' all extremes/ ' morally and politically
false in proportion as they are metaphysically true,' the rights
of men in government are their advantages : — consisting
often in balances and compromises. { By the theorists of the
revolution the right of the people is almost always sophistically
confounded with their power/ But ' till power and right are
the same, the whole body of the people has no right incon
sistent with virtue/ ' Men have no right to what is not
reasonable and to what is not for their benefit/

Burke notes the influence which the legal profession
exercised on the course of the American as of the French
Revolution. ' I have been told/ he says, (Conciliation with
America) fby an eminent bookseller that in no branch of
his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many

220 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

books as those on the law exported to the plantations. . . .
I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's
Commentaries in America as in England/

The language of the American declaration of independence
is vague and rhetorical ; it reduces the language of popular
philosophy to the form of doubtful maxims. It proclaims in its
fantastic simplicity not merely the right, but the duty of insur
rection against an unfaithful government, and suggests in the
f unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness * a justification of
any acts of a human being whatsoever. What may not a man
dare to do in such a quest? Similar assertions of 'inherent
rights/ ' unalienable and indefeasible/ occur in the special
declarations of principles or bills of rights drawn up by the
single states. But side by side with these appeals to abstract
rights, to general principles, borrowed from the dominant
philosophy, there is, as we noticed in Blackstone's remarks,
an appeal to historic precedents. The Congress of New York
in 1765 claims 'all the inherent rights and liberties of the
king's natural-born subjects within the kingdom of Great
Britain/ They are entitled to ' the undoubted rights of
Englishmen, and appeal to the principle and spirit of the
British Constitution/ The people of Connecticut takes its
stand on the liberties, rights, and privileges which it has
received from its forefathers. And the declaration of rights
drawn up by the Congress of Philadelphia in October, 1775,
bases the American claims on the old rights which were
brought from the mother country, on the English Constitu
tion and inherited privileges founded on the acknowledged
acts and practices of the British Empire. The two grounds
of argument are directed to different classes. The reference
to historic facts is intended for the diplomatic world, for those
accustomed to the language of statesmanship, who count
a single precedent worth a hundred principles. The appeal
to natural justice- to ' imprescriptible ' rights-is for the
popular heart, for the crowd which rolls like a sweet morsel

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 221

under its tongue the large sounding phrases of vague and
flexible ideals.

The success of the Americans in their insurrection had
been largely due to the help of the French fleets and armies.
Among the French officers, the most distinguished was the
noble and brave, but vain and imprudent,, Marquis de La
Fayette. When the news of the uprising in America reached
France, La Fayette, then nineteen, and a captain of dragoons,
enthusiastically resolved to espouse the cause of liberty, and
braving all opposition of friends and the dangers of arrest by
his own Government, hurried across the seas to take part in
the struggle for independence. After the war had ended in
success, La Fayette returned to France, and in 1787, at the
still juvenile age of thirty, was elected as one of the Notables
whom the king had summoned to advise him on the measures
to be taken for the redress of grievances throughout the
country. In the Constituent Assembly which succeeded, we
find La Fayette on July n, 3789, presenting the proposal
for a declaration of rights modelled on that which Jefferson
had framed for the Americans.

The sound of ( rights' was far from unfamiliar to the
French ear, but hitherto it had been associated with a very
different set of ideas. The rights that most promptly
occurred to a French lawyer were the feudal rights, governing
the tenure of property and regulating the lives of almost all
dwellers in the country. It was not that these rights were
peculiar to France : they were found, and sometimes in a
stricter form, in almost every country. But in France the
peculiarity in the position of the privileged classes, the nobles
and the clergy, was that for more than half a century before
the Revolution they had ceased to occupy any direct place in
the political administration of the country. When the long
struggle between the monarchy and the feudal lords was
ended, and in 1 756 the last of the feudal brigands was taken
and beheaded, the king Louis XV was left in a position where

222

ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

lie could fairly say, as he did ten years later say, ' It is to me
alone that the legislative power belongs, independently and
without participation. The whole of public order emanates
from me.' When that result had been reached by the efforts
of Richelieu and Louis XIV, the justification of the feudal
system had ceased. The great nobles had practically
abandoned their place in the country in order to dance
attendance at court, and the smaller nobility who still resided
on their lands were often poor and had no real participation
in the management of local affairs. The same was true of
the clergy: neither they nor the nobility performed any
public service, or had a sense of public and national duty.
An administrative centralization had been established long
before the Revolution ; France was governed by central
bureaux; the king felt the sovereignty as his heritage and
managed the public revenues by his own ' intendants ' in each
province.

But though the territorial lords had been deprived of their
supremacy, many of them had still many ' fine rights ' (de
beaux droits) attached to them. Though he neither dis
charged a useful function as local magistrate and adminis
trator, or as representative at the seat of central authority,
the seigneur had a number of privileges which were felt as all
the more burdensome by his peasant neighbours just because
they were no longer in any legal political dependence upon
him. His seigneurial jurisdiction — one of the prime con
sequents of feudal superiority (for la justice suit le fitf\ was
still left to him, and he had those rights d'aulaine, cTepaves,
Sec., which followed from the feudal sovereignty of the land
holder, besides the so-called lanalHes (the obligation of the
tenant to use the superior's mill, &c.) and the corvees (or
obligation to perform so many days' work for the superior).
Besides these the noble class enjoyed in many cases either
a total or partial exemption from taxation, and public places
were often in their hands : they had the exclusive right of

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 223

sport, and the game-laws were a constant offence to the
cultivators. The nobility and clergy, in short, had sunk into
the position of privileged classes, who no longer justified their
position by exceptional services. They were the inheritors of
imposts and dues felt as oppressive by those who saw no
reason for them, and as insulting by those who had come
to feel themselves comparative freemen. Feudalism, as
De Tocqueville remarks, ceasing to be a political institution,
still remained the greatest of all the civil institutions of
France. ' The seigneur had ceased to govern : but his
presence in the parish and his privileges effectually prevented
any good government from being established in the parish in
place of his own.' To such a position had sunk those knights
who, says a Spanish chronicle in the tenth century, kept their
horses in the hall where they slept with their wives, to be
ready at any moment to repress disorder in the land.

From the earlier part of the century onwards a pervasive
influence had been making itself supreme in France. The
practice of social intercourse among all who belonged to the
privileged classes, or could for temporary reasons be reckoned
amongst them, became the main problem of life : encroaching
on and gradually suppressing the intimacies of conjugal life
and of parental affection. A uniform code of manners, la
lienseance, imposed upon the select multitude a characteristic
form which was so finely balanced, so soon impressed, and so
universally spread that it seemed hardly to be felt as a gene,
and became to a large class a sort of second nature. It
taught the art of sympathy, the form of friendship ; it gave
the skill of concealing pain and weakness, of checking
unseasonable individuality, of putting on a smiling and serene
face in trouble, and of not offending others by the assertion
of personal prejudices. The great vice to such a period lay
in being une espece, an original. But even this wide empire
of the salon had its limits. The distinction between the gentil-
liomme and the roturier remained uneffaced and apparently

224 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

uneffaceable. The nobility and the < third estate ' grew more
and more hostile to each other: and France offered the
spectacle of a country broken up by class distinctions, into
groups almost caste-like in their nature.

' But beyond all these divisions there lay a common meeting-
ground in literature. And the literature of that period is
a literature which is dominated by philosophy, by speculation,
by the search for and the worship of abstract and absolute
ideas. Political theory which had been fostered in the
seventeenth century in England found during the middle part
of the eighteenth century its home in France. In a social
state, founded on inequalities and permeated by conventions,
inquiry dealt by preference with the theory of natural justice
and the nature of political power. The list of writers who
lay the foundations of social and political science is headed by
the name of Montesquieu. The Spirit of Lairs (1748) did
not do all that its admirers have sometimes said : it did not
discover and restore to humanity its long lost titles. But it
did, on the basis of the vague definition of law as a ' necessary
relation derived from the nature of things/ paitly show that
laws are in the last resort facts beyond the arbitrary inter
ference of governments, dependent on circumstances of nature
and history, and governed by scientific principles no less
inflexible than those of the physical universe. Before such
a theory, arbitrary powers and incoherent privileges must
necessarily hide themselves. Other theorists, dazzled, as even
Montesquieu himself at times is, by the splendours of Greek
and Roman history, and misled by the legendary glories of
early Sparta, preached doctrines more tempting to the dis
satisfied and unsuccessful. The Abbe Morelly in his Code de
la Nature (1755) laid down three fundamental laws : the non-
existence of private property : the character of public
functionary attached to every citizen : and the duty of every
citizen to contribute to the public welfare. The fountain
of Socialism flows in his postulate that ' every citizen is

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 225

to be supported, maintained, and employed at the public
expense.'

One of the most instructive of these writers, especially as
dealing with the question of natural rights, is Mercier de la
Riviere, in his book De I'ordre nalurel et essentid des societes
politiqiies (1767). The first of all rights according to him
is that of individual liberty, or ' personal property ' : from
which as a necessary consequence flows first that of property
in movables (mobiliere) and secondly in land (fonciere), the
latter to be justified by noting .the necessity of continued
possession for making proper use of the soil. These three
fundamental species of property are linked together and
justified by the maxim : that duties are the justification of
rights, and rights give the means of exercising duties : ' Point
de droits sans devoirs, point de devoirs sans droits/ But if the
right of property thus understood is a necessary consequence
of human duty, it is no less evident that it further involves
liberty and security : and that all institutions which are
indispensable to maintain these three ends are parts of the
' essential order ' of political societies. So far Mercier follows
the common track of the liberal theorists of his day. But in
what succeeds he makes a new departure, and follows a line,
afterwards adopted by Fichte, in opposition to the maxims
of Montesquieu as to the separation of the ' three powers ' of
government. His view is briefly stated in the words: 'la
puissance executrice est toujours et ne'cessairement puissance
legislative ;' and his reason is that the distinction if made can
not be maintained : either will inevitably usurp the functions
of the other. But the real justification of this view is to be
found in his distrust of the sway of personal opinions and
arbitrary pretensions among the various claimants of supreme
power. The ideal institution of government is, he maintains,
to be sought in the direction which will leave least room to
the rivalry of individual interests, to the varying chances cf
a majority. The best government is therefore a hereditary

226 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

monarchy- a despotism, but one founded not on ignorance,
but on a knowledge of the true laws of the social order It
is in short the ideal of paternal government, of a 'legal
despotism/ of the authority of one man who is supreme
and sole but who has no other interests than those of the
community, and whose knowledge is adequate to his

function.

What Mercier de la Riviere thus lays down is the view o
the great economists of the century. Political liberty, as
the active participation in legislation by each member of the
community, is what they hardly consider worth striving for.
These writers are the panegyrists of the State. The main
security for Liberty which they thought necessary was
a wide-spread system of popular education. According to
Quesnay, ' public, general, and continual instruction in the
principles of essential justice and natural order' are the means
to render despotism impossible. And he has nothing but con
tempt for representative assemblies and all the machinery of
popular checks to the preponderance of the central power.

What the economists desired was a social and administrative
reform : the removal of abuses, the destruction of unnecessary
restrictions to free intercourse and commerce; they wanted
to simplify government and give administration uniformity.
Turgot, Vincent de Gournay, and Fran?ois Quesnay are the
chief names amongst these writers who, as the advocates of
the emancipation of agriculture, industry, and trade were
originally known as ' ^conomistes/ but since the time of Dupont
de Nemours have been commonly styled ' Physiocrates/ The
title ' Physiocrat ' gives expression to one of the two principles
which Gournay is said by Turgot to have discovered : that
the industrial and commercial life of nations is governed by
laws as unbending as those of physical nature. The other
principle is the practical application of these laws to explain
by their habitual violation the misery of the poor and the
straits of the government in France. For in France there

OUR NATURAL RIGHTS

227

prevailed a complex system of regulations interfering at every
stage with the freedom of trade,, a system on which province
was set against province, town against town, on which free
initiative was impossible, and invention had to contend
against established prescriptions. The programme of Gournay
was Laissez faire, laissez passer. It was the protest against
the exaggerations by which the royal intendants in the
provinces fixed the length to which a piece of cloth should be
woven, the pattern to be selected, the number of threads of
which it was to be composed. Such was the founder of the
doctrine that Turgot (1727-81) sought to make his country
men understand. Quesnay (1694-1774), the physician of
Louis XV, is the author of the Maximes Generates du gouverne-
ment economlque (Tun royaume ac/ricole (1768). He believed
that agriculture had been depressed by an undue pursuit of
the manufacture of articles of luxury, and directed his
attention towards methods for increasing the production of
grain and wine, in which he believed lay the national wealth
and strength. What he demanded was the liberation of the
farmer from those burdens which pressed so heavily — abolition
of forced labour, reduction of the taille, and complete libera
tion of the trade in corn both within and without the
kingdom. Thus Quesnay claimed for agriculture and original
production, what Gournay asked in the interest of manu
factures — the removal of useless and harmful restrictions.
After all they only repeated and repeated almost in vain the
advice that Boisguillebert, that ' insense pour Famour du public '
(1697, Le detail de la France), and Marshal Vauban (1707,
Projet cTune dime royale) had given long before. Vauban
pointed out that le menu peuple was the part of the nation
which bears all charges, which has suffered and does suffer
most, and which yet by its labours and its taxes enriches both
the king and the kingdom. To remedy that state of affairs
Vauban suggested the abolition of all existing taxes and
replacing them by an income tax of a tenth on all.

a

228 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

These aims-the emancipation of labour and trade from
fatal bondage, and the economical constitution of the finance
system- the economists hoped to get from the hand of a strong
monarch who had learned the true laws which govern the
production and distribution of wealth. Once the state had
thoroughly learnt its duty, it was to be altogether unrestrained
by checks! The form of liberty matters little : the substance of
good government is all important. And there is no doubt
that in this view the economists practically coincided in their
results with what the Revolution actually brought about.
The levelling process which they commended, the erasing of
old barriers Tnd divisions, was carried out, and the despotism
of an enlightened representative of the scientific order was
apparently realized. The great achievement of the revolu
tion was certainly not the attainment of political freedom as
it is commonly understood : its real result is what was finally
consolidated in the Civil Code, in an equal system of private
law, a regular and open administration, a removal of
hampering inequalities which prevented the development
of agriculture and industry. Political and social life is
a thing of slower growth, which needs intelligent co-opera
tion and careful interest on the part of individuals. It
implies an effort of reorganization.

The declaration of the rights of man which Lafayette
proposed was, after some discussion and several alterations,
promulgated on November 3, 1789, as a preface to the Con
stitution (of 1791), under the title of a Declaration of the
Rights of the Nan and the Citizen. The assembly begins
by setting forth the sentiments that animated the young
and generous men whom the philosophy of the age had made
enthusiasts for freedom. ( The representatives of the French
people, constituted as a National Assembly, considering that
ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man
are the sole causes of the public misfortunes and of the cor
ruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 229

declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man,
in order that the declaration, being- constantly present to all
the members of the social body, may continually recall to
them their rights and their duties. ... In consequence the
national assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and
under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights
of the man and the citizen. Art. i. Men are born and
remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be
based only on common utility. 2. The end of every political
association is the conservation of the natural and impre
scriptible rights of man, These rights are liberty, security,
property, and resistance to oppression. 4. Liberty consists in
being able to do everything that does not harm others : thus
the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits
besides those which assure to other members of society the
enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be
determined by the law. 1 1 . The free communication of
thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of
man : every citizen may therefore speak, write, print freely,
on condition of answering for any abuse of that liberty, in
cases determined by the law. 17. Property being an inviolable
and sacred right, none may be deprived of it, unless public
necessity, legally certified, evidently so demands, always under
the condition of a just and pre-payable indemnity/ In the
sequel to this declaration the assembly makes some promises
of no slight range, which seem to be consequent upon it. It
guarantees the establishment of secours publics — a system of
public reliefs : and propos.es to create a public education,
common to all the citizens, gratuitous, so far as regards those
parts of instruction which are indispensable for all men. It
engages in short to help all who cannot help themselves, and
holds out a scheme of free elementary schools.

The constitution of 1793 substantially agrees with these
provisions, perhaps seeking after greater accuracy. Article I
is : The end of society is the common happiness. Government

23o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

is instituted to guarantee to man the enjoyment of his natural
and imprescriptible rights. 2. These rights are equality,
liberty, security, property. 3. All men are equal by nature
and before the law. 6. Liberty ... has for its principle nature,
for rule justice, for safeguard the law : its moral limit is in
the maxim : Do not do to another what you do not wish
should be done to you. 8. Security consists in the protection
accorded by society to each of its members for the con
servation of his person, of his rights, and of his properties.
1 6. The right of property is that which belongs to every
citizen of enjoying, and of disposing at his will of, his goods,
his income, the fruit of his labour and of his industry. 21.
Public reliefs are a sacred debt. Society owes subsistence
to unfortunate citizens, whether in procuring them work or in
assuring the means of subsistence to those who are incapable
of working. 22. Instruction is the need of all. Society
ought to favour with all its power the progress of the public
reason, and put instruction within the reach of all the citizens.
33. Resistance to oppression is the consequence of the other
rights of man.

The Constitution of 1795 (August 22), drawn up after the
fall of Robespierre, departs somewhat both in form and matter
from the two earlier statements. Among the list of rights,
it preserves silence on the right of insurrection, either as
primary or derivative right : and it observes the same dis
cretion as to the claims of the unfortunate poor. With regard
to equality it lays down (Art. 4) that it ' admits of no
distinction of birth, no hereditary transmission of powers ' :
a phrase which for vagueness probably gains the prize amid
the whole collection. The main novelty, however, of this
paper is its title : it is a Declaration of the Rights and Duties
of the Man and the Citizen. Under the head of the Duties of
man we find, Art. 2. All the duties of man and citizen follow
from these two principles, graven by nature on all hearts :
Do not do to others what you would not wish any one

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 231

to do to you : Do constantly to others the good you would
like to receive from them. 4. None is a good citizen who
is not a good son,, a good father, good brother, good
friend, good husband. 5. No one is a good man who is
not sincerely and religiously observant of the laws. 8. On
the maintenance of property depends the cultivation of the
field, all production, every means of work, and the whole social
order.

Whatever may be the faults of these documents, it is clear
that they do not sin by their revolutionary character. Their
tendency is eminently sober and conservative. No thorough
equality, no licentious liberty is promised or praised : but
moderation in all things, and a mild sort of fraternity, in
volving no very severe services to humanity. The liberty
sought is absence of illegal and arbitrary interference by
individuals : the equality is only an equality in rights or
before the law. Property is expressly and evidently placed as
the keystone of the social fabric, and the control of his goods
entrusted to the proprietor is ample. We know indeed that
on this last point there were debates : and at one time
Robespierre thought it well to argue against Condorcet and
the Girondists, who held that ' man is master of disposing at
his will of his goods, his capital, his income, and his industry/
and to insist that the right of property was borne comme lex
autres. But this acknowledgement of the right of the com
munity was not seriously proclaimed, especially after Babeuf
had in his newspaper insisted that each citizen should have
secured to him la snffi&ance, mais rien qiie la suffisance, and
had added that, as the soil of a state ought to secure the
existence of all its members, the population should, if need
be, suffer diminution to the requisite extent. And the con
demnation to death of Babeuf and Darthe was the answer of
the majority of the revolutionary authorities to the demand
of Sylvain Marechal, another of this band, for egalite dufait,
real equality, and la Communaule des biens. The revolutionary

232 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

movement was in its accredited utterances far from being-
socialistic, or antagonistic to the rights of private property.
Indeed, the charge most readily brought against it would be
that it appealed to the baser prejudices of the bourgeoisie,
and was too much a mere middle-class movement, which
ended in elevating the third estate to a level with the two
older privileged classes.

It has often been remarked in similar cases that the general

phraseology of a document must receive its interpretation

from the special circumstance to which it applies. People

talk large and wide : but they have definite facts in view.

Partly from incapacity to formulate in definite and precise

terms, partly from the weakness of rhetoricians, men are in

the habit of clothing- their meaning in preposterously ample

vestments. At the time this difference between the sign

and the thing signified is not so striking for those whose

situation helps them to interpret the langnage, but as distance

of place and time intervenes the gap between word and

meaning grows more conspicuous. The accent, the tone,

the sentiment, which qualified the sense and pointed the

hearer to the fact, are now absent : and one has to wonder,

and wonder in vain what the orator had precisely in view.

Now in the case of these declarations it is evident that they

are drawn up by journalists, half trained in philosophic

thought, and hurried by the appetites of their clientele ;

anxious to formulate in a few brief propositions and catching

phrases of apparent simplicity the cardinal principles on

which society ought to be reformed, which were also in their

opinion the principles always underlying social life, though

now and for a long time past ignored and despised. It is

undoubtedly true that the course of the revolution is marked

both in the very beginning and during the reign of the

Terror by wild excesses, lawless orgies of passion-driven and

base-hearted individuals and multitudes ; that a system

of terroristic administration prevailed during considerable

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 233

periods ; and that low selfishness and degraded hatreds sought
their gratification under the guise of a demand for legal
fairness and punishment of accumulated misdeeds. But in
its general and legitimate current and tendency, to which
these documents are an attempt to give a logical expression,
the revolution was only a levelling up of the tiers etat to the
condition of the two others, and a removal of the disabilities
which checked the free growth of arts and industry. The
revolution of 1789 in fact was the victory of the tiers etat.
When the abbe Sieyes at the beginning of the struggle
asked his famous question, ' What is the third estate ? ' the
only reply he gave was ' Nothing ' : it had by the revolution,
as he predicted, become ' Everything/ It had swallowed up
the privileged classes. It had succeeded in quashing the
old feudal entanglements, which still were potent enough to
make life for the peasant and the townsman full of real or
supposed indignities. No doubt in course of that process
the poorest class had gained incidental relief. Dependence,
like that described by Voltaire as prevailing in the vicinity
of his own country seat, was no longer possible. The serfs
or dependent bondsmen (mainmortables) of the great monas
teries had been emancipated. But what was chiefly attained
was a common law, without privileged exceptions (auciui
privilege ni exception an droit eonimun de tons les Frangais],
and a removal of the old guild restrictions (il ny a pins ni
jurandes ni corporations de professions, arts et metiers}. There
were to be no more lettres de cachet, or arbitrary arrests of sup
posed dangerous characters. And as to that fraternity which
is so often coupled with liberty and equality, perhaps the
only mention of the thing is when it is spoken of as an
object to be secured by the institution of fetes nationals.
For the spirit of fraternity we must go elsewhere : go for
example to the Scotch poet, Burns, who welcomed the New
Year of 1795 with the spirit-stirring ode which concludes
with the lines

234 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

'Then let us pray that come it may

(As come it will for a' that),
That sense arid worth o'er a' the earth

Shall bear the gree an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,

It's comin' yet for a' that,
The man to man the world o'er

Shall brothers be for a' that.'

But in Burns the cry is not in the first instance for either
liberty or equality ; but for something very different, inde
pendence. ' The man o' independent mind/ ' the honest man,
tho' e'er so poor, is king o' men for a' that/

The declarations state the rights of the man and the citizen.
The second epithet qualifies and limits the first. They say
nothing of the woman and the child. The very document
which lays down the principles of liberty and equality, pro
ceeded to exclude from their operation a large portion of the
population of France, or at least to draw a far-reaching-
division between two classes of citizens. Section II of the
constitution of 1791 marks off from the rest what it calls
the active (as opposed to the passive) citizen. An active
citizen must be a man and a French man, not less than twenty-
five years of age, paying rates equivalent to three days' work,
not engaged in menial service, not under accusation of crime,
nor under decree of bankruptcy. By the constitution of 1793
the age of active citizenship was reduced to twenty- one years,
and no other debarring conditions were allowed, except con
demnation to peines infamanles ou afflictive* : but the consti
tution of 1795 again refuses citizenship to the bankrupt
debtor and to the menial servant.

These facts are enough to show that the large professions
of the creed must be cautiously interpreted. The same point
is involved in some of the arguments by which Bentham, in
his chapter on 'Anarchical Fallacies/ has criticized the
declarations of 1791. Is the relation of husband and wife,
of master and apprentice, of hired servant, consistent with
the assertion of such rights of equality? Are not the

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 235

principles of equality and liberty in their literal statement
sufficient grounds for destroying all social order whatever?
The so-called right of resistance to oppression says in effect :
' Submit not to any decree or other act of power, of the
justice of which you are not yourself perfectly convinced : '
and the practical result of the formula is ' to excite insur
rection at all times against every government whatsoever/
Bentham starts from the principle that ' natural rights is
simple nonsense : natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical
nonsense — nonsense upon stilts/ fA reason for wishing
that a certain right were established is not that right/
' Bight, the substantive right, is the child of law : from real
laws come real rights, but from imaginary laws, from laws
of nature, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters/
Bentham further attacks the contract theory of government
on which the doctrine of the superiority of natural rights
to law is based. The theory, he says', ' is a pure fiction, or in
other words, a falsehood/ 'All governments that we have
any account of have been gradually established by habit,
after having been formed by force/ And, as he adds, ' What
signifies it how governments are formed? Is it the less
proper that the happiness of society should be the one end
kept in view by the members of government in all their
measures?' The protest of Bentham is mainly directed
against the vague and impractical nature of the resolutions,
and the danger which such indefinite formulations carry for
the uneducated who are unable to supply the necessary cor
rectives. Once assert that ' the laws have no right to forbid
certain actions/ or 'that whatever is not forbidden by law
cannot be hindered/ and you destroy all habits of obedience
to government, and ' annihilate for the time being and for
ever all powers of command ; all power the exercise of which
consists in the issuing and enforcing obedience to particular
and occasional commands : domestic power, power of the
police, judicial power, military power, power of superior

236 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

officers, in the line of civil administration over their subor
dinates/ There is one thing1 and one thing- only superior to
the laws,, superior i. e. to this or that particular law ; but
that is not a natural right, it is the law of the constitution,
the fundamental principles, which particular laws are so many
attempts to express in detail. Of the conformity of these laws
with this general spirit of union no single man is the judge,
although each is entitled to his opinion : he is free to think
as he pleases, and we may add that he has a right to express
his opinion.

The declarations themselves are shallow and uncertain,
whenever they are pressed to disclose a consistent meaning.
They fail either to present in clear conception, or to define
in a satisfactory mode, the comparative claims of natural
rights and the common happiness. They make no attempt
to define that law before which all are equal, which determines
the limits of liberty of speech and of the right of property,
as of liberty in general. They hint, but dare not say, that
liberty is only realized by law, and that all law is in its
very essence coercion. For in short they are trammelled by
the situation. It was, on the one hand, necessary to throw
a decent covering over the accomplished insurrection, over the
revolt made against constituted authority : and this is done
by affirming a right of resistance to oppression and by a
protest against hereditary privileges. But it was, on the
other hand, no less incumbent on the framers of these docu
ments to make order possible for the future : and to this end
they insist upon the limits of the natural rights and on the
majesty of Law. Thus double-faced is the catalogue. As
for the reference to public relief of the poor, and a general
system of education, they were for the time ' sacred duties/
i. e. pious wishes.

These rights of man, like much else in the Revolution, drew
some of their inspiration from Rousseau. But Rousseau was
a deeper philosopher and a less narrow mind than the leaders

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 237

in the political strife, and had a wide human scope which was
foreign to their whole attitude. The social problem had
exercised him deeply in its various aspects. In the year
1732, he tells us, as he was making* his way on foot through
France, he had allowed himself to be drawn from the road
by the interests of the landscape, and had wandered so long in
his entrancement that he entirely lost his way. Weary and
faint, he at length gained a peasant's hut, at which he made
bold, after the manner of his native mountains, to ask for
refreshments, for which he was willing to pay. The peasant
gave him — and it was all that he had, according to his own
account — a dish of skim-milk and a piece of coarse bread. As
the young man greedily swallowed his repast, his entertainer,
concluding from his appearance that he was a bona jide
traveller, proceeded to open a trap-door by which he descended
to a cellar, soon to reappear with a good white loaf, an
appetizing ham, and a bottle of wine. But when, after this
more generous meal, his guest offered payment, the peasant's
suspicions revived that his visitor was a spy of the tax-
collector ; for as it appeared, unless every sign of a prosperous
homestead were obliterated and abject poverty stamped on
whatever met the eye, ruin from exactions was inevitable.
Rousseau left the spot, he says, with the germ of that
inexhaustible hatred he ever afterwards felt against institu
tions which enabled the oppressor to wrench from the toilers
those gains which nature had in her bounty destined for
them.

Some people tell us that in every man there are two natures,
two selves : but it is seldom that the two beings within a man
are so at variance as in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The very
name is a symbol of antagonism. On the one side, the
commonplace and ordinary John James, doubly common, by
its two common names : on the other, the distinctive character
of Rousseau. A union of aristocrat and democrat : of man
and woman : of child and sage : of sinner and saint. His life

238 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

up nearly to his fortieth year was passed in a silence and
secrecy, which we should be unable to get over, were it not
for his own revelations in his later years. Left without
a mother at his birth, his earliest years were spent in unequal
companionship with a father, not much more settled in man
hood than himself ; and the two would sit for hours entranced
over the fortunes of some hero of romance, or the scarcely less
fantastic story of some of the great men of classic biography.
At the age of ten he was deprived of this snatch of home life.
His father, involved in the consequences of a brawl, sought
relief in flight from Geneva, and abandoned his son, who was
taken under the protection of an uncle, and brought up for
a few years in a way that failed to supply the discipline he
had hitherto lacked. The youth grew up with no real world of
duty and drudgery to limit his straggling impulses, but rather
in a fantastic world filled with the ideals of sensuous and
sentimental gratifications ; ready always, like a Don Quixote,
to deck out the real with visions of fair and pure femineity
and grace, but also inclined, more like Sancho Panza, to sink
these high ideals in the realities of vulgar or worse than vulgar
prose. His first contact with the requirements of steady work
was a failure. He seemed incapable of becoming a clerk, and
he found his apprenticeship at the engraver's intolerable :
and so in his sixteenth year he absconded from Geneva and
began that life of wanderings and vicissitudes which lasted
for more than twenty years. He became to appearance an
adventurer and a vagabond : a stranger to his country, and
a recreant to the religion of his native town : a hanger-on now
on one patron or patroness, now on another : obliged to descend
to the position of a menial and a lackey, in order to earn
a livelihood : gaming strange experiences of woman in a love
that was an inextricable labyrinth of passion and calculation,
of delicacy and coarseness : sinking into depths of pruriency
and meanness, and vulgarity that one is hardly obliged to
believe literally even on his own showing. And yet in that

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 239

strange nature — with its keen and erratic sensibility and its
defiance and distrust o£ convention and decorum — in that
incessant contradiction between ideal independence and real
subjection to the implied or expressed wishes of some noble
protector, there was something- pure and noble, which was
dimmed but not extinguished by the vulgarity and rudeness
which clung to many o£ his outward acts. It has been said
by an ancient thinker that the true physician should be one
who has himself run through an experience of the ills that
flesh is heir to, who has learnt by suffering what maladies
really are. Perhaps it may be sometimes so in moral malady
and weakness also. If we believe, as we may, that he who
sins does not wholly sin, but still preserves a principle of moral
health which, though driven back into the central citadels, still
does not altogether yield the fortress, then we may think that
Rousseau had emerged from the night of spiritual sickness
and uncertainty with a tenderer perception of the inroads of
evil, a more clairvoyant sympathy with the temptations
of weakness and doubt, than he could have had if he had
himself been whole and sound. The inconsistency in Rousseau's
behaviour is not so inexplicable as it seems. To the majority
of the world the intercourse of life takes place by forms and
symbols, by external ordinances, which are as it were the organs
and feelers connecting soul with soul. In Rousseau's case
these intermediate helps which divide while they connect were
dispensed with. He lived in direct and immediate rapport
with his environment. As on summer afternoons he rambled
alone with his dog through the woods of Montmorency his
spirit was wrapt up into sympathy with the nature around him ;
he abandoned himself to a stupor of ecstasy and could only
utter the words 6 Grand Eire ! 6 Grand &tre I For such a spirit
passing in immediate spirituality from itself to the life and
heart in all around, it must have been hard to keep pace with
those who only moved and felt by means of the material
organs, the garb and fashion in which they had moulded

240 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

themselves. And such disengagement from human ordinances,
from form and symbol, is impossible without loss. If it is the
spirit alone which can truly inspire communion, and convert
mechanism into life, it is no less true that without a definite
mechanism, without external signs and objective manifesta
tions of the inner will there is no real communication, but
only an intention of it, an unreality which is blown about by
every wind of fancy and feeling. It is impossible really to
live the solitary life in which the society of the hermit is
created for him by the vigorous intuitions of imagination.
So when Rousseau tells us that he began to live on April 9,
1756 (the day he settled at the Hermitage), because he left
behind him the intrigues and frivolities of Paris ; when he
speaks of himself as surrounding himself in these solitudes
with an ideal society worthy of their beauty, we must
remember that though he holds the peasants of Montmorency
to be more useful members of society than the well-fed idlers
of erudite Paris, still the society of his Therese, of his well-
beloved dog, and his old cat, have their corresponding defects
and mar the perfect development and freedom of his spirit.
Disdaining the graces of civilization because of its hollowness,
he iinds relief in a vulgar liaison which has its own deceptions :
and when he asserts the independence of the sage, he some
times falls into the rudeness of the egoist. When he made the
great discovery which so many Stoic souls have made before
and since, that the source of men's misery and wickedness lies
in their false opinions, he forgot that it is impossible even for
the solitary to avoid and leave behind him the dangers of
mistaken estimates of the goods of life. He was engaged in
an impossible struggle, and in a world where forms must exist,
his every act solicited that inevitable contradiction which
keeps asunder the ideal and the real. It is hardly to be
wondered at if his overstrung brain, assailed by real persecu
tions and pestered by designing friends, at length gave way
to the strong and often baseless delusions that embittered his

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 241

later years. We must take him for what he is, and not refuse
to accept the prophecy and the poetry, because the poetic
harmonies gave but a shrill sound and his visions of the
perfect had but a shabby translation in his actual life. ' An
indolent soul scared at every care, an ardent, bilious, and too
susceptible temperament ' (it is so he analyzes himself) are bad
endowments for an honest and honourable life : but they
could not destroy the sympathy which went forth for all
beings, which grasped humanity in its folds, and entered even
into the unconscious life of the nature around.

The first lesson which Rousseau had to teach his generation
was, like almost all his writings, a paradox to his age. All
truth at its first announcement must be a paradox : a shock to
existing opinion : ' to scholars a stumbling-block and to the
world foolishness/ The current belief of the literary circles
of his time — its belief ever since the time when Bacon and
Descartes had pleaded for freedom of thought, for more light,
for the increase of knowledge — was that in widening our
acquaintance with the laws of nature lay the panacea for the
evils of the world. Multiply science and art, and you
accelerate the millennium. To that opinion Rousseau in his
first work threw down his gage, and he continued to the end
to maintain the thesis then set up. That thesis is not that
science and philosophy are pernicious, that civilization in the
sense of increasing culture is a mistake, but that they are
not all in all, that they are instruments and not ends ; that
life is more than art or science. Mere knowledge is but a
poor thing. What Burns puts in his simple words :

' It 's no in books, it 's no in lear,

To make us truly blest,
If happiness has not her seat
And centre in the breast ; '

or what is implied in Bishop Butler's words, 'the science
of improving the temper and making the heart better '-
is the theme of Rousseau's first essay. This was what

ft

242 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

Kant meant when he said that Rousseau first taught him
that the supreme work and glory of arts and sciences lay
in the service of humanity, not in the mere scholar's 3oy in
discovery and creation.

The second step taken by Rousseau is in form a discourse
' on the origin of inequality amongst men/ That inequality
it deduces as the inevitable consequence of the development of
the human faculties, due to the freedom by which man com
mands nature and seeks to rise to greater and greater perfec
tion. But when the moral authority conferred by law is out
of all proportion to the physical inequalities, it is contrary to
natural right. Such contrast to natural right is seen ' when
a child commands a gray-beard, when an imbecile conducts
a wise man, and when a handful of people is ready to burst
with superfluities, while the starved multitude is in want of
necessities.' The original man, the uncivilized child of nature,
is indolent and easy, he lives in himself, ' il ne veut que vivre
et rester oisif/ But the civilized man is never at rest, he
seeks for power and reputation, he works himself to death in
order to gain the means of living; because it is from the
opinion of others and in their judgement alone that he gets
the feeling of his own existence. The civilized man thus lives
only in appearances, he sees himself through the opinion of
others, and hence an universal dissimulation, ' de Fhonneur sans
vertu, de la raison sans sagesse, et du plaisir sans bonheur/
This is the true theme of the essay. It is the demonstration
that man in society has lost the mastery of himself, that he
has handed himself over to an authority which deprives him
of all real initiative, all spontaneous action, all sincerity.

The same theme appears in the £mile and in the Nouvelle
Helo'ise. The Nouvelle Helo'ise is a dissertation, presented
under the form of a romance, upon love, marriage, and family
life. Few subjects connected with these interesting questions,
whether sentimental, moral, practical, educational, economical,
are not to some degree touched upon or even examined at con-

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 243

siderable length. The HhnMe is a treatise on education. It is
an education not for a special end : ' vivre est le metier que je
lui veux apprendre ' ; and its hope is to produce a man who
in one and the same course shall be prepared to transcend that
contradiction in life as it is, which makes nature drag- a man
one way, and men drag- him another; that contradiction
between the moral and the physical which afflicts humanity.
Civilized man is born, lives, and dies in slavery : his first ideas
are those of empire and servitude. The method of Rousseau,
which he holds is the method of nature, is to treat the child
for many years as a purely physical being*, to let him feel in
good time the heavy yoke of necessity, la necessile des ckoses,
but to give no place in his dictionary to the words ' obey and
command/ and still more those of duty and obligation. The
child is not a reasonable being, and ought not to be treated as
such : but just for that reason he must not be made to feel
himself the puppet of human will. His rights as an indivi
dual in the natural world ought to be respected : he also must
learn Thabitude de s'asservir sans peine a la necessite des
choses.' It is absurd to speak to children of their duties
before you speak of their rights : the first sense of justice is
not from what we owe, but from what is due to us.

The fundamental idea is the slavery in which society holds
as. Eut it would be unjust to Rousseau to suppose that he
wishes us to return to the state of the unspoiled savage who is
sufficient for himself and lives a real totality, not a mere frag
ment of the social body. Rather the aim of education is to
secure for man his independence as a member of society. The
ancient philosophers sometimes discussed the problem if the
best man was also the best citizen : and they answered it
by saying that the two ideals would coincide only in the
perfect commonwealth. Rousseau, as it were, answers from
the other side. When man is so educated as nature pre
scribes, he will, when the age of reason comes, be able to
take his place in the true commonwealth. But the moral

E 2

244 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

and political life must not be permitted to thwart and pervert

the natural.

If Rousseau has given in his view of education a new con
ception of the rights of the child not to be a plaything of men,
but to be subject only to the laws of nature, until he becomes
of an age to understand reason ; he has in the same treatise, in
the book entitled Sophie ou la Femme, based the education of
women upon the indications of nature.

The treatise on the social contract is an attempt to give
new force to the old doctrine of the sovereignty of the people.
But who are the people who are thus declared sovereign?
Not the multitude, or any portion of the multitude, which has
been separated and distinguished from the governing body.
The people which is sovereign is the organized people, actually
assembled in its completeness ; if it is sovereign at other times,
what it has is a passive sovereignty, a background of authority,
vast, indivisible, inalienable, which rounds off and underlies
the several exercises of authority in the existing government.
The people is sovereign, but the sovereign does not govern ;
he does not exercise executive functions, he does not put his
own hands to work : like the immortal gods, the mortal god
called the state only works by his delegates.

The people is sovereign : what it wills is the law, the prin
ciples which guide the exercise of the magistrates. But how
is this will to be ascertained ? The people is a multitude, it
consists of individuals, one of whom may wish this, and
another wish that. Can we find out what they will by
counting votes, and conclude that what all have willed is the
will we are seeking for ? No, replies Rousseau, the general
will is not the will of all. Each is guided, naturally or
directly guided, by his own interest : and only if we suppose
the more and less to cancel each other, would we get the
general will. The people, if left to itself, always wishes or
wills the good ; but of itself it does not always see it. The
judgement which guides the general will is not always

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 245

enlightened. AY hat the general will requires, then, is not
identical with the decisions of a majority or even of a unani
mous vote : for if the voters are blind, their decision does not
truly represent their will. The people thus is represented as
a blind but good-natured giant, who needs to be enlightened
as to what he really wants : to be taught the ' conditions of
civil association ' which we call laws.

To teach it that, to let the people see what it really wishes,
is the function of the legislator. Thus, strange anomaly, the
people must get some one to teach it what is its real will.
Such a teacher must be a superior intelligence, sympathetic
with human passion, and yet himself passionless : indepen
dent of our happiness, and yet ready to charge himself with
its care : in one word, a God. The legislator is not a magis
trate, nor is he sovereign. Having no authority, he yet has
before him the enterprise of transforming human nature.
Unable to employ either force or reasoning, he must have
recourse to an authority, the intervention of heaven, which
can constrain without violence and persuade without convinc
ing. The fundamental laws of a nation, its action of supreme
power, come as it were from something in man which is
higher than man : they reveal themselves to him as the
central tendency and drift of his being. The general will,
in short, transcends the individual and can never be confused
with the tyranny of democracy.

A somewhat curious instance of the effect of the ideas of
Rousseau and the Revolution upon a mind of ordinary
qualities, though in extraordinary mass and mixture, is seen
in a youthful composition of Buonaparte. The following are
extracted from an unfinished essay he wrote in December, 1790
(he was then twenty-one), in competition for a prize offered
by the Academy of Lyons for an answer to the question
' Quelles verites et quels sentiments importe-t-il le plus d^in-
culquer aux hommes pour leur bonheur? } (Buonaparte, it may
be noted, was then at Ajaccio full of plans for the emancipation

246 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

of Corsica.) He begins by defining man's happiness as Ma
jouissance de la vie la plus conforme a son organisation/
That organization is partly physical and partly moral. With
regard to ' notre organisation animate/ it has as its indispen
sable wants food, sleep, and sexual pleasure (manger, dormir,
engendrer1). It is only emphasizing the last point when he
remarks that < Sans femme il n'est ni sante ni bonheur/ But
man is more than animal : < notre organisation intellectuelle
a des appetits non moins imperieux : sentir et raisonner/
And man must learn < que sa vraie gloire est de vivre en
homme/ And happiness lies especially in the feelings (not
in the reason), le sentiment is the bond (lien) of life, of
society : it is by it that we enjoy ourselves, nature, our country,
and the human beings who surround us. Such enjoyment
does not require great wealth as its means. In fact the rich
live to their hurt under < Fempire de Fimagination dereglee/
Still all men have a claim to be listened to for so much as is
necessary to enable them to carry out the life required by their
organization. Hence not merely a wife, but a certain amount
of terrestrial property is a sine qua non. ' 1/homme en naissant
porte avec lui les droits sur la portion des fruits de la terre
necessaires a son existence : ' and it follows that the legislator
(the organ of society) must resolve the political problem ' de
maniere que le moindre ait quelque chose/

One may compare with this what George Sand (Histoire de
ma Vie, i. 50) says of her grandmother Madame Dupui de
Francueil. Among other papers the latter left behind an
essay ' Du Bonheur/ which began « Tous les hommes ont
un droit egal au plaisir/ The word plaisir, according to
George Sand, means fun bonheur material, jouissance de la
vie, bien-etre, repartition des biens.'

The demand for the maintenance of natural rights was
almost a new feature of political life in the eighteenth

1 Cf. Xenoph. Hiero, 7. 3 crmotj KOI TTOTOIS «ai vnvois tta.1 a<f>podiffiois iravra.
opo'iais TJSfaOai t'cu/ce TO. £a)a.

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 247

century. In the Petition of Rights exhibited by Lords and
Commons to Charles I, in 1628, the claim is made to
a * freedom inherited by the laws and statutes of the realm ' •
the rights and liberties prayed for are those according to the
laws and franchise of the land, ' the laws established in
the realm, either by the customs of the realm or by acts of
parliament.'' And in the Bill of Rights of 1689 ' the rights
and liberties asserted and claimed are the true ancient and
indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom/
and the acts complained of are distinctly stigmatized as illegal
usurpations of power. Everything asked for is a corollary of
the same liberties, rights, and grants, which in Magna Carta
secured the supremacy of the law of the land and justice over
arbitrary power of the king or the king's officials. The
tendency prevalent throughout is what may be called
Legitimism, the doctrine of historic rights, of hereditary
privilege. The claim of the present is founded on a posses
sion of the past; it is the consequence of a precedent.
Liberty and right rest upon a charter, a special historical
fact. The rights and liberties have the same justification in
a, line of long descent, as the nobility and the monarchy have
put forward for themselves against the parvenu and the
radical. Unable or unwilling to raise the difficult questions
of right and wrong, the advocates of national freedom and
of justice contented themselves with the appeal to a distinct
past — a past which was never present, a supposed and believed
primeval use and wont. It is the same appeal to the custom
of our forefathers which leads Antigone in the Greek play to
appeal against the commands of the king to the unwritten
and sure statutes of heaven whose origin is in immemorial
antiquity. What the race holds dear it credits with birth in
the beginnings of the ages l.

1 Heine, Englische Fragmente, xiii : ' Die fruheren Bestrebungen, die wir
in der Geschichte der Lombardischen und Toskanischen Eepubliken, . . .
verdienen nicht die Ehre eine Volkserhebung genannt zu werden : es war
kein Streben nach Freiheit, sondern nach Freiheiten, kein Kampf fur

248 £55,4 yS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

The eighteenth century was not satisfied with the results
of this doctrine of historic rights and of iegitimism . It
despised the weakness which, rather than confront the real
issue of right and wrong, took refuge in an alleged creation
of the right by primitive custom and statute. It would have
no more of those liberties (franchises) which are the creations
of charters and royal grants. It came to the conclusion that
rights were something which monarchs and governments
could not bestow, that liberty was ( above their sceptred
sway ' ; that rights and liberties had a basis in the nature of
things, independent of rulers who might acknowledge and
declare, but could never make them. The mission of govern
ment, one of the philosophers of the time had said, is not
to make laws, but to promulgate those laws which are
necessary and natural, which are relations inherent in the
nature of things. To ascertain these rights therefore is
according to the philosophers the province of reason : and
what is from one point of view called natural right may from
another be called rational rights.

A right, it is said, is always the creature of law. But law
is itself an ambiguous term, or rather there are laws and laws ;
and it is and has been a problem to say what are the differ
ences and what the analogies which subsist between moral
and positive law, between law political and law physical,

Rechte, sondern fur Gerechtsame : Korporationen strittenum Privilegien.
. . . Erst zur Zeit der Reformation wurde der Kampf von allgemeiner und
geistiger Art, und die Freiheit wurde verlangt, nicht als ein hergebra elites,
sondern als ein urspriingliches, nicht als ein erworbenes, sondern als
ein angebornes Recht. Da wurden nicht znehr alte Pergamente, sondern
Principien vorgebracht.' See also Goethe, Faust, p. 72, ed. 1858, Mephisto-
philes to the student : —

'Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte

Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort :

Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte

Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort.

Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage,

Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist !

Vom Rechte das mit uns geboren 1st,

Von dem 1st, leider ! nie die Frage.'

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 249

laws of nature and laws of society : or generally between
what is called the law of man and the law of God. And the
usage of language can here be no certain guide. It is easy of
course to begin by propounding the view that every law is
a command, issued by a well-marked superior to those in
habit of submission within a political community knowing no
master outside,, and a command moreover which says not
merely ' Do this thing/ but ' Do this sort of thing/ For the
rough and ready practice of jurists such a definition may be
sufficient : and it is then natural to add that laws of nature
and moral laws are comparatively improper generalizations in
the usage of the term. But it has to be pointed out that for
the most part laws, even political and civil, are not so much
commands to do a sort of thing, as statements that, if some
thing is done or left undone, certain painful consequences are
intended to fall upon the doer or the negligent person. Each
so-called law has its place in a system of law, and has its
meaning governed and determined by that system : it is
subject to the canon of consistency. The laws of a country
are thus the successive and continuous explication of the con
ditions of social welfare, inherent in the general characteristics
of human nature and in the special situation and qualities of
the special community. A semblance of consistency at least
is therefore indispensable, if they are to be laws. But if this
be so, the laws of a country are only in a very secondary sense
the commands of an assignable authority. The popular con
sciousness has always seen in the laws something above the
control of individual will, of dictation or caprice. Actual
law, it is true, has not unfrequently seemed due to the
individual will : but this was and is possible because of
the ignorance in which the community lives as to its
true will, because, at the time when the law was enacted,
the discrepancy between the decision of one and the demand
of the universal was not apparent.

The dispute which, as it was formulated during the Middle

25o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

Ages, raged round the origin of law from will or from reason
was, Is is usual with such disputes, partly a question of names.
When Grotius held that natural right is so immutable that it
cannot be changed even by God ; or when Gabriel Biel pro
claimed with the true scholastic piling up of impossibility to
a climax : ' If, which is impossible, there were no God, who is
divine reason, or if that divine reason were in error, still if any
one were to act against the right reason of angels or men, or
any other there may be, he would do wrong : and if no right
reason at all existed, still if any one were to act against what
right reason would dictate if there were any, he would do
wrong,' they certainly seem to run counter to the view
attributed to Occam that law originates solely from the
divine will, and binds only in virtue of his command. Yet it-
is only the old question of Christian philosophy puzzling over
the distinction of faculties of intellect and will. The eternal
and necessary conditions "of existence and of welfare rule us
whether we will or no : and a mere perception of their
existence elevates them into the position of laws. But in the
case of human welfare there are peculiarities. Human life is
governed by the conception of ends, by ideals. Its charac
teristic feature consists in the formation of common aims, of
ideals in which a community or society are interested. The
human being is essentially a social animal : a creature which
enters into confederacy with others, which forms groups or
unities. Or rather, to speak more truly, the human being is
from the beginning, so far as we can see, differentiated from
all animals by a something in him, which makes him not
merely a creature of momentary impulse but a unity of self
through diverse times : which makes him at one with others
so far at least that, in order to realize his own existence, he
must conceive and set it forward as bound up with others in
a unity— a unity of greater or less compass, according to the
circumstances and the time. There thus is ever present within
him, but in greater or less degrees of force and range, the sense

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 251

of community, of a common basis or unity, a common life in
which he and others share. This sense is what in some
respects we call the work of reason, in others of sympathy.
In other words, what forms the unity is partly an unconscious
principle, natural fellow feeling- founded on sensuous and
visible ties : partly it is a reflective and reasoning- principle,
which carries him from more obvious and more sensibly
palpable ties to the more universal, generic, and intellectually
realizable.

Now this community only exists by means of the minds
of those who constitute it. These partial unities which are
formed, no doubt make use of natural facts and rest upon
physical boundaries : but, strictly speaking, there are no
boundaries in nature. One part passes on into another and
the world is a single totality. A river, a sea, or a mountain
only becomes a boundary in virtue of the action of those who
live beside them. Energy and enterprise can practically
annihilate the barriers which nature interposes : whether a
particular natural feature shall be a barrier or a link of con
nexion, depends on the human beings who have to deal with
it. Thus the principles of union in the actual community
rest upon the will and intellect of those who make it up. It
is not a natural fact ; but is made what it is by the conception
and loyalty of its members.

This is the place at which arise the two opposite concep
tions of -a political unity as, on one view, a work of human wills,
of deliberate and intentional compact, of action originating in
individuals; and as, on the other view, a natural structure,
a necessity of human nature, a fundamental fact which must
be accepted but cannot be explained. The theorists of the
eighteenth century, as has been already pointed out, were led
to regard as most prominent the part of individual enterprise
in forming- the social body : it seemed, in short, as if they
regarded the state as depending for its existence on the good
will, the caprice even of the individuals, who with a view to

252 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

further their private ends entered into a compact of con
federacy. Now as against this view it was perfectly fair for
writers like Paley to urge that all government, having begun
either from the power of a parent over his family, or of
a commander over his fellow-warriors, had from these natural
beginnings been maintained by the three motives of
prejudice, reason, and self-interest on the part of the
governed. But it was wrong in them not to recognize more
explicitly than they did that the authority alike of the
patriarch and of the leader in war rested upon reason and
sympathy from its very commencement, was at least dimly
felt to be the vehicle for attaining a common utility, and
presupposed the indistinct conception of a unity and system
of things. Even from the first we may make bold to say the
human unity, however constituted, was not founded on mere
naked force, but owed a certain homage to will and reason.
The despot who wilfully applies the resources of a family or
a community solely and singly for his individual good is
a rare phenomenon : he generally is himself persuaded and
manages to some extent to persuade others that he is sub
serving permanent and general interests. For, as Paley
remarks, the physical strength almost in all cases resides in
the governed, not in the government.

It would seem to follow then that the authority of a govern
ment rests upon the idea of a common good, upon a general
will, which it is supposed to interpret and promulgate and
enforce upon recalcitrant members. For indeed the very
existence of government implies first, ignorant, and secondly,
malignant members : i. e. people who do not know the
general good which embraces their own, and people who
prefer their own interests instead of the universal. As
against the first class, government can avail itself of the
instrument of education, of instruction in the rights and
duties of human life : and for those who believe that a know
ledge of the right is a certain method of realizing it, the

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 253

second object would in this way also gradually be attained by
removing the main cause of their recalcitrancy to authority.
Such obviously are the two chief functions of government :
and if the duty of punishment is the more directly incum
bent, the duty of educating, i. e. of giving them all necessary
and desirable means to enable them to perform their civic
functions, is even more fundamental.

The ideal perfection of a state then would apparently involve
its own suppression. But practically such a result does not
come within the bounds of possibilities. For the conception
of the duties of the commonwealth is not a fixed and settled
quantum : it grows from age to age : and hence the necessity
of education and of restriction is always incumbent. For as
the existence of the state lies in the active conscience of its
members, every new apergu of its duty and function arises
in a single mind, and has to work its way by the growing
association of several, until it becomes the dominant belief of
the majority. Thus the practicable ideal of a state is that
its constitution shall be in accordance with the wishes and
intelligence of the largest possible numbers, shall rest upon
the widest possible basis of popular agreement. But this
necessity of the nearest possible approximation to unanimity,
as a practical condition of a working polity, must never put
out of sight another side of this question ; and that is, that the
material points in which the popular majority agree, shall be
the true and abiding interest of the whole community and so
of each member. A mob and a multitude in agreement is no
guarantee of the right of truth of its conclusions. ' Private
judgement and public deliberation/ said William Godwin,
' are not the standard of right and wrong : they are only the
means of discovering them.' ' The functions of society extend
not to the making, but only to the interpreting of laws : it
cannot decree, it can only declare that which the nature of
things has already decreed/ In other words, while it is the
aim of the prudent politician to take measures such that

254 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

the vast majority of a country shall be on the side of truth
and justice, and so to secure what is called political liberty,
or the participation of each in the making- of the law, it is
equally the duty of the wise statesman to take means for
making the majority realize the true issues and complete
bearing's of the measures which may be set before them. He
must, in short, get them to see that they are on the side of
reason and nature, that their resolutions are not creating
a right, but recognizing the conclusion forced on them by
the events of history and the circumstances of nature. The
human mind must be disabused of the delusion that it makes
laws, must discover that there are conditions governing the
common life of human beings whether they will or not, and
that it will never be well with it till these are recognized.

Does what has thus been said leave room for the distinction
between absolute and relative rights, as they are severally
called by Blackstone, between natural and adventitious rights,
as they are called by Paley ? It is evident, and hardly need
be said, that the term natural need not be taken to imply
a state of nature previous to that of civilization. The natural
is neither equivalent to the savage, nor to the paradisaic
stage of the world's life. Savagery and civilization are alike
within the realm of nature, and alike show departures from
the natural. It is no doubt the case that longing eyes are
sometimes cast from the confines of advanced civilization
towards the apparently unfettered ranges of savage life. But
experience soon shows that the bonds of convention are not
solely to be found in the higher levels of society ; that the
rule of custom and usage rules with iron rigidity the primitive
barbarian. It has often indeed been supposed that innocence
and natural grace have taken up their abode in the country
with the peasant, in the borders of civilized lands, in the
primitive barbarism of the tropical islands. But the truth
in this only is that the savage and the civilized man have got
different vices and virtues. Nature can govern life in all

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 255

levels of civilization, and unnatural life is enforced to no grade
or landscape.

Natural rights then are consequences of the fundamental
laws of social existence,, of those laws which make life-in-
communion possible in all countries and all times. Now
though it is true that we can to a certain extent choose our
company, the extent to which we can do so is limited. We can
to some measure change the incidence of social pressure : but
get rid of it altogether we cannot. In certain states of society
it is reduced we may say to a minimum. But it is the
very condition of human life that we cannot get rid of it
altogether. We may therefore dismiss the hypothesis of
a meeting of individuals previously isolated and independent
with the view of constituting an association. Individuals
thus absolutely individualized would never have come together
at all. Sometimes indeed speculative theorists, in order to
put in an emphatic light the necessity of a recognition by
each of something higher than these petty selves, have put
forward the picture of the brutishly chaotic state of affairs
which would be inevitable, if each were in his acts to behave
as if he were alone in the universe, if each in short were
resolutely to pretend to be what he knew he is not. But the
picture of such a social state is only the reductio ad absurdum
of pure egoism, a demonstration that pure egoism vigorously
carried out is self-destructive. And pure egoism can only be
carried out, if it is ever carried out, because so many other
principles of salvation for society are in operation, that its
effects for evil are swallowed up in the general tide of good.

The question therefore is — society being the condition of
human life — will we adapt ourselves to its indispensable terms
or not ? Now it is evident that those terms will vary to some
extent from place to place and from age to age. The conditions
oh which society is possible for a group of hunters will be
very different from those incumbent on a society partly
agricultural and partly manufacturing : the conditions for

256 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

a country village will be different from those of the closely
packed inhabitants of a large town : those of a set of peasant-
farmers will be other than those for a body of ecclesiastics.
And yet it is scarcely less evident that amid all these
diversities there will be certain analogies, certain principles
common to all forms of association. Not of course that we
can find these general principles as so many separate conditions
on which the peculiar and local principles supervene. The
world is not made in that way. Rather it is that we, coming
later and reflecting comparingly on what we see, can detect in
the characteristic constitution of each certain features which
can be stated approximately in general terms. These general
features of life, never presented abstractly by themselves, but
always realized in a special type, are what give rise to what
have been called the absolute or natural rights of man.

There is another sense in which we may speak of natural
rights. By what is natural, we mean the opposite of
artificial and affected or forced. A thing is natural when
it flows from one principle in all its details, when it is not in
one part out of accordance with itself in another, but exhibits
a solidarity and unity of all its members and functions. The
natural is marked by unsought harmony, by consilience, as if
each element by some magic power in itself sprang up to
meet and join hands with every other. In the course of
history a society like a clock gets out of order. The one
spirit which ought to pervade it, the one law which ought to
govern it, is replaced by a number of petty principles. Under
a superficial bond of unity, for example, under a strong cen
tralized financial administration, there may yet be no real
unity of life throughout the kingdom. Such, for example,
was the condition of France before the Revolution. Such
more or less tends to be every great social union. There
arises a state of affairs which may be illustrated by comparison
with the conditions of the physical body in disease and in
dissolution. In disease what happens is a disruption of the

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 257

social continuity : some of the organs and tissues acquire
a partial independence,, and work by other principles than the
general consensus of the bodily organs.

After dissolution a similar process is repeated with intensi
fication. New organisms arise and take the place of the
former vital structure. Something similar to this occurs in
a state of society. Parts of it get ossified : one part has gone
on, while others have got left behind : some have developed
abnormally and, as privileged bodies, attracted more than
their fair share of the supplies of vitalizing matter. In such
a state of affairs the cry for natural rights is a demand for
justice, equity, equality, for the removal of narrow restric
tions, for the destruction of complexities that have ceased
to be useful or intelligible, and for greater simplicity and
uniformity in the administration of business, especially in
application to law and business.

Thus in these ways we may agree both with the school
which speaks highly of natural rights, and with the school
which disparages them as misleading and unmeaning verbiage.
Where they are dangerous is when they are supposed to be
something which the individual carries about with him from
his birth onwards, something so peculiarly his own that he
can at pleasure retain them or surrender them to others. To
this theory no mercy can or should be shown. All that is
a man's own is what he can do : what belongs to the physical
individual is mere power or force. Even the word ' can ' is
ambiguous : it sometimes means what one ' may ' do — and in
that case is not applicable to the mere individual, considered
out of relation with others. But a man's rights are not mere
powers ; they are powers sanctioned or recognized by some
thing transcending the mere individual. They are claims
which he has on the behaviour of others, grounds for inter
ference, justifications for action in certain contingencies.
Such grounds for claiming from another some specified
behaviour presuppose a common standpoint, a public ground

s

258 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

on which persons meet; or, in other words, rights belong
only to persons, and a person is an individual who
subordinates himself to some comprehensive or uniting-
principle, something- which puts them in relation to each
other. The rig-lit implies a controlling- authority on which
these persons can fall back, something (at least logically) ante
cedent to and inclusive of the individual, which makes him
more than an individual, by giving him the entry to a sphere
in which other individuals also enter. The mere individual
has no rights as such ; he has rights only as a person, i. e. as
member of a society, as embodying in himself, at least partially,
the larger aggregate of which he is a unit. The person has
rights, because though an individual he is also implicitly the
species: in him we find exemplified and realized the law of the
class to which he belongs. A person in short is an individual
who has what we may call a public character, a social function
to perform. He is raised above himself by his conscious
adoption of the class to which he belongs, by his sense of
being constituted and governed by the general system or idea
which is exemplified in him. A person is an individual
realizing the universal. He is not merely one amongst many,
not merely a single being in the multitude whom we note as
we pass over them in review, not merely a being with pecu
liarities or idiosyncrasies of his own, out of which we can by
an effort of abstraction disentangle the general properties. As
a person he is conceived of as having respects and relations
to the whole of which he is a part, and to the individuals who
are his fellow-members. Thus the person is the individual which
has lost its unrelatedness, which is a member of a group —
a conscious and co-operating unit of a society.

There are legal and moral persons just as there are legal
and moral rights. The term moral is ambiguous. At times
it merely denotes the opposite of the physical : as when we
distinguish a man's physique from his morale, or physical
from moral sciences : a sense in which the words mean pretty

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS

259

much the same as the antithesis between material and im
material. The moral in this general sense is what cannot
be brought to book in definite objective fact, what eludes the
test of experience and observation. Something of that wider
meaning always attaches to the term moral : the moral is
intangible j it cannot be weighed, counted, and measured. As
such it is especially opposed to the legal, as the outer and
obvious shell is opposed to the inner kernel, as the potential
to the actual ; as the great ' may be ' to the definite and ascer
tained ' is/ But the antithesis must not be pressed too far, or
treated as absolute. They are two partial aspects of a single
fact, that fact being the fact of human society : of which
they respectively present the statical and the dynamical
element, the element of order and the element of progress.
The legal is the moral cooled and stationary : the moral
shows us the same element still fluid and energetic, shapeless
and indefinite, but alive. The total fact is the social life of
the world, where the principle of progress is in a healthy state
always in union with the principle of order, the dynamical
always keeping up the statical. Law is but the deposit, the
fixed result, of the operation of that instinct, which while
still heaving shapelessly is called morality. In the actual
world they are never wholly separate : one without the other
is dangerous to the community.

The merely moral is the purely internal : the merely legal
the purely external. And just as it is true that ' summum
jus summa injuria/ so it is occasionally found that nothing is
so immoral as the conscience which refuses to be enlightened
by objective order. Law, moreover, in constituting obligations
and rights, does not constrain the holder of the right to make
use of it. Morality, on the contrary, issues in the inexorable
imperative of duty. Rights permit : duty constrains and
obliges. Or, perhaps, while rights control another, duty
controls one's self. And carrying this a little further we
may see that rights are strictly speaking concerned, not with

S 2

26o ESSAYS' IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

the inner relations of a man to himself, but with his relations
to others. A man's rights refer to his external aspects, to
those points on which he comes into contact with others, to
his objective manifestations. So long as he remains purely
inward, rights have no application to him. Thus if we say
a man has a right to his opinions, we must mean, if we speak
correctly, to refer to the expression or utterance of his opinions,
so long as they remain merely opinions, and do not affect
the existence of others injuriously. So again the right to
freedom of conscience would have no meaning, unless it
included the outward expression— to what extent of course
is a problem— of the beliefs and ideas which conscience
cherishes. And as conscience is primarily negative in
function, it at least will cover the right of not taking part
in any performance to which conscience objects.

It is for the same reason that the person means in the
first instance the physical body; for that is obviously for
external purposes the primary objectification of the self. In
the body the will and intelligence is present or presumed
to be present for the outsider : and any injury done to the
body is an injury distinctively done to the person. No doubt
we can speak of the moral person ; and the person as moral
is independent of the body, is purely inward and spiritual.
And such a power of abstraction has sometimes been claimed
by those who maintained that the beauty of the soul remained
untarnished by whatever was done in the body — who supposed
in short that the sanctified spirit could lead a life of its own
in lordly indifference to the claims of the grosser nature.
Such is the tendency of some forms of mysticism. But
a humbler philosophy, which follows the track of experience
and confines itself to the fortunes of the embodied spirit, holds
that in the main the soul is sympathetic with, suffers and
acts in and along with the body. It refuses to admit, except
for moments of difficult and dangerous abstraction, the separa
tion of the inward and the outward of human nature ; and

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 261

while it maintains and allows the distinction of inward and
outward, it denies their separate and independent existence as
a fact coming within the purview of science.

Rights then are conditioned by law, and law only exists
where there are external relations forming a system, consti
tuting a social group. Rights mark out the place which
belongs to each in that system, and are only valid where such
a system, economy, or constitution prevails. Outside it and
apart from it, an individual has no claim to be called a person,
and to be charged or invested with rights. Belonging to
different societies, more or less co-ordinated with each other,
an individual sustains several persons and thus possesses a
variety of different rights. The basis of his rights then
lies in the system to which he belongs ; and to belong to
a system is to perform the functions which are required of
him in that system, not merely to be a passive and idle
member of it,fruge$ consumere natns. A right is thus, as it is
said, correlative with a duty. My rights, or the sphere of
my rightful existence, are the consequence of my performance
of certain external acts, of my making my existence felt by my
prescribed conduct.

At this point comes in the right of coercion. So long as
my entry into a society is an entirely voluntary act, so long
the right of coercion in that society can only exist in a very
moderate degree. I enter it upon a definite understanding,
and can only be responsible to the extent of the bargain.
Even here the society naturally expect me to make good
any loss which my conduct may have caused it to sustain.
The way in which it accomplishes that result is as follows.
Strictly speaking all men form in the last resort one vast
society. But for practical purposes that comes to mean that
all civilized men form one society. The extent of that
confederacy has varied from time to time. In the ancient
world it was an oasis on the shores of the Mediterranean :
indeed it was so much as this, only in the concluding days

262 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i

of the Reman Republic. In modern times it comprehends
a large minority of the world. Slowly through the ages pro
gress is made towards realizing actually the implicit community
pointed to by the Stoic saying : homo sum, nihil humani alie-
num : changing the moral into a legal community, and creating
a real/a* gentium, a true international law, not in the sense of
a public law governing various nations as nations, but in
the sense a common law dealing in a uniform way with the
acts of individuals in society. So-called international law, as
a collection of diplomatic usages, conventions and courtesy-
rules of intercourse especially in war, is of course no law at
all, but a set of inferences from the common practice of belli
gerent states, supplemented by an indefinite number of pious
wishes.

In reality the summit of real unity is reached in the
independent political state, which so far acknowledges its
solidarity with other civilized states as to assist them by
the extradition of criminals against the common law. The
state then, for all practical purposes, may be taken for the
supreme society : and up to it all subordinated societies
ultimately refer ; or it finally takes cognizance of all inferior
societies, as if they were its delegates and instruments. The
state then is the ultimate creator, guardian and guarantee
of all right in this world. It exists by the combined action
of its members, and exists more or less clearly in the con
sciousness of each. It is important that this consciousness
of the whole in each should receive an objective manifestation
in a special body, told off for the purpose — a universal
estate, separated as far as possible from individual interests
and entrusted with the guardianship of the common weal.
This estate is what we call the government, the executive
and judicial body, the permanent administration. It is
charged with the duty of seeing that the conditions of public
order and progress laid down, or to be laid down, in the laws
are complied with. In order to carry out that mandate

i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 263

it has the right to punish. That right to punish does not
belong to the government in virtue o£ any compact, by which
the members of the state bound themselves on entering it
to submit themselves to chastisement, if they violated the
term of their engagement. As we have seen already, the
state as society is the condition of human life ; and although
at first a community may feel itself as merely a little
usurpation amidst the general chaos, and so allow its
defaulters to escape if they can beyond its limits, it gradually
comes to see that the earth is one, and that it is bound to
pursue the criminal from land to land through the world.
The state, in short, must realize that it is the mortal
God, and that in this world it should be ubiquitous and
omnipotent.

Its duty as a government is then to see that the laws
or conditions of social (i. e. human) order and progress shall
be obeyed and realized in the conduct of individuals ; in
other words, that the rights of each, both his general rights
and those special rights he possesses as member of special
associations guaranteed by the general order of the state,
shall be respected and maintained. To this end punishments
are available. What is a punishment? A punishment in
the first instance is an act of restitution, if possible: a re
investment of the injured party into rights of which he was
deprived, and a denudation of the violator from the rights
which he had misappropriated. But this is only sufficient
in certain cases : those cases, viz. where examination shows
that a right has been interfered with ; where loss has been
sustained, but where no malice or intentional hurt can be
shown to exist, where there was good faith on one side as
on the other. There all that government has to do is to see
that the goods removed are replaced by an equivalent, as
nearly as may be to the loss sustained. But in such cases
it is not enough to show that no malice was intended; it

O

may also be required that no criminal neglect of ordinary

264 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

precaution be proved. It is an assumption based on the
very nature of society that certain obvious and fundamental
relations shall be continually present to the mind and govern
the conduct.

But punishment proper only steps in where the injury is
designed,, or where the carelessness is of the degree styled
culpable, i.e. is such as to show a dereliction from the
ground of the first principles of social life. If it be asked,
does the law then take cognizance of the motive and of the
character, the answer must be both yes and no. Of the
motives affecting the agent law has no regard, except so far
as they modify the action; but in so far as they give the
action a new character and constitute it what it is, law must
take regard of the motive. If the action is conformable to
law, is overtly in accordance with social terms,, the state
by its authorities is satisfied : if it is not in conformity, the
state may have a very considerable interest in the reasons
of that non-conformity. For though law deals only with
actions (which are all outward) it cannot lose sight of the
fact that an action is made such by a purpose, an act of will,
and that an act of will is due to the adoption by the whole
acting man of some desire or appetite which arises within
him. It has therefore to consider the demerit of that
appetite as a principle of action and overt consequence.
Accordingly the punishment will be heavier or lighter not
in proportion to the character of the individual, but in pro
portion to the more dangerous character of the dispositions
which evidence their existence in his actions. If drunkenness,
for example, is the immediate motive of the action, then
the action will be more severely punished by those who hold
that the temptation to indulgence in liquor is supremely
pernicious to the interests of the community.

II

PERSON AND PERSONALITY

A PERSON is commonly defined as the ' subject of rights ' :
it is sometimes added, fand of duties/ The two ideas of
' rights ' and ' persons ' are thus closely connected and perhaps
interdependent.

Persons are distinguished as * natural ' or fictitious : as
' physical ' or c moral ' : as simple or compound. In other
words, they are either (i) individual human beings, or
(2) corporate groups invested with powers of individual
action, such as the state, a municipality, &c.

Some confusion may arise by applying the word ' moral '
to corporate personalities, as when Rousseau (and others) call
the state a personne morale : artificial associations, corporations,
colleges, &c., coming under this head, and denoting aggregates
which are formed of units already existing in the shape of
individual human beings. But these human beings, as mem
bers of the corporation, seem in part to surrender their original
personality. They are called ' moral ' in distinction from the
individual persons, human beings who seem to derive their
personality from nature.

But, strictly speaking, we may hold that all true personality
is moral. Pufendorf seems right in holding that personality
is always ' moral/ always, i. e. due to a relation of thought,
and to be carefully distinguished from mere natural indi
viduality. A person is, according to him, an ens morale ; it is
originally (he speaks the language of the contemporary logic)

266 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

a modus (not a substantia), though it is constantly in danger
of being (' ad normam entium physicaram ') treated as itself
a substantia, i. e. hypostatized in an individual reality. Per
sonality, in short, is a quality of the human being that expresses
his moral nature. And the moral nature of man lies in his
being subordinate to a general law, or being a member of
a community, in which he forms an integral part and performs
a function. Or, personality, like morality, only belongs to
man in so far as, though a physical individual, he is implicitly
universal.

The community to which man belongs is in its idea
absolutely universal : i. e. if expressed in terms of space and
time, it is a community of all times and places ; eternal
and omnipresent. In fact, it is only of limited range, or
of restricted universality: a community consisting of a special
group of human beings in a special country and age. The
physical individual, as member of this absolutely ideal king
dom (of humanity and of God), is a moral person : as a member
of a particular and definite kingdom, he is or has a legal
person. In practice, the moral personality is not always
widely separated from the legal. The moral is just a step
or two ahead in extent : we do not rise at once from the
special to the absolute universal, but rather in certain direc
tions seek to diminish the narrowness of the actual scope of
life and advance a little way towards that infinite which we
can never attain in actual accomplishment.

In the other or common sense of the phrase e moral person,'
however, nothing of this sort is implied. It only means
a ' person ' made up by the aggregation and organization of
individuals into a unity, which acts and suffers in common,
and has recognized organs for the expression and enforcing of
its will. And, strictly speaking, it would seem that such an
aggregate only receives the title of a person, in the legal
sense, when it is itself treated as a unit by a larger unity
in which it inheres. Thus the corporation in a political

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 267

community is invested with its personality by charter or
similar authorization from the supreme sovereign. On the
other hand, an independent state is only a person, in so far as
the consciousness of the state at any moment is governed by
the idea of its ultimate end or function, of its place in the
system of humanity: it is a person in so far as it has what
we may call an eternal and infinite consciousness, or as it
recognizes above it the authority of conscience and of God.
And in practice it is a person in so far as it regards other
states and other states regard it, not merely as so much
power, but as power controlled by moral ends, regulated by
reason, freely setting before it good aims — i. e. aims con
formable and contributory to the general good.

It may be of some use to note historically the usages of
the word ' person.' ' Persona ' in Latin means a ' mask ' — an
'assumed or fictitious countenance' in contradistinction to the
natural face ('fades sua/ Sen. Ep. 24. 13). Secondly, it
means the part or character played by an actor : his assumed
part : and thus by degrees the individual himself considered
as having a certain outward presentment. Thus even a thing
may be said to have a e persona/ when it is conceived of as
presenting a certain aspect or front, an appearance as distinct
from its reality. In this sense ' personatus ' means e assumed/
'counterfeit/ 'unreal.' The general meaning of the word,
however, does not include this suggestion of deception : it
merely connotes the particular aspect and character in which
a man appears to the world : and from this it is easy to see
that a human being may sustain several persons, or play more
than one part in the complex organization of any existing
society.

In law the contrast is put between person and thing,
between 'persona' and 'res.' A persona is thus a human
being, but considered as invested with a certain function and
social character; not a mere abstract human being, but one
having a special place in the body politic, one who counts as

268 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [11

something in the world. Hence in a state of society which
legitimates slavery, the slave is in legal language said to have
I\Q persona or public character. His social existence is, so far
as the law goes, entirely absorbed in that of his proprietor :
6 bovkos -rrapa roty i>o>ois airpoa-uiros e<m, rovre'ort, oi»5e SoKet
£171; oi&e airflvaL1. His presence or absence makes no difference
in the social sum : he counts only as a chattel. It is tolerably
evident that such personality is a quality inhering in the
individual through his place in a system : or that to transform
the merely living human being into a legal person there is
required recognition on the part of the state.

In mediaeval Latin the word persona is found in several
shades of meaning. To lose one's persona is to become a
slave. But more commonly it denotes a dignity or faculty,
and secondarily the person charged with such dignity, func
tion, or right and obligation. Thus we hear of a ' persona et
potestas emendi et vendendi ' : and Boniface speaks of ' Laicus
quidem magnae personae ad nos veniens/ It is especially
used, however, of the holder of a clerical dignity : hence the
modern English parson, which in Chaucer is still ' persoun/
A persona is in John of Salisbury a beneficed clerk (as opposed
to a curate). Personatns is the dignity of a persona. A piece
of Old French of the twelfth century speaks of a meeting
where ' erent del pais li barun assemble, deien, arcediachre,
persones (= cures) et abe V A 'personnat' is a sort of
benefice in a cathedral church. It is evident, in short, that
the dignity and office par excellence of the mediaeval period
has usurped to itself the title persona : the c parson ' is the
clerical functionary, the most distinct representative of a
public character.

As we come down we find the word ' person ' extended like

other dignities to a larger and larger sphere. Even in

Madame de Sevigne it has still a certain distinction attached

to it: speaking of a lady, she says felle lit, elle travaille,

1 Theodor. Herm. vii. 6. 2 See Littre and Du Cange.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 269

enfin c'est une personne' : she is in short ( somebody1.' But
at last it seems in a phrase like ' etre content de sa personne"
— to be satisfied with one's self, one had got to the bottom.
Even here perhaps a careful observer might allege that there
was a distinction between the judging self and the apparent.,
presented self, which appears to others. In English a person
is about the least one can say of one : when one speaks of
a ' young person ' one has come close to a state where the
human being has ceased to be even a woman and become
a mere link in the chain of society.

There is another use still however. A law treatise on the
Liberty of the Subject speaks of laws relating ' to the body
or person/ and of ' the security of the person or body/ And
it is from the same reason that we speak of a woman^s person,
meaning thereby her physical appearance. ' My face is my
fortune, sir, she said : ' it may be that in the case of a woman
there is an especial ground of regarding her physique as
specially constituting the character or part she has to play in
the world.

The theological application of the term c person ' need not
detain us. It is now well known that the so-called Athanasian
creed, in which the doctrine of the three persons of the Trinity
is so conspicuously presented, is a document compounded about
the time of Charlemagne in the Latin language, and only
assigned to the authorship of Athanasius in order to give it
venerable authority. The Greek term corresponding to per
sona is TTp6(T(*)iTov : but the Greek word on which turned the

1 Cf. Keller, Leute von Seldwyler, i. 31 : 'Sie machteganzlich den Eindruck
von etwas Einzigena und Personlichem : es war, kurz gesagt, eine
Person.' Schiller, 10. 308 : ' Die Abstraction unterseheidet in dem
Menschen etwss das bltibt und etwas das sich unaufhorlich verandert :
das bleibende nennt sie seine Person, das wecbselnde seinen Zustand.'
See Zietelmann, Begriff und Wesen der juristischen Person (Leipzig, 1873'.
Cf. Luther, Wider Hans Worst : ' Die Person wird euch nichts helfen,
wenn euch das Recht verdampt.' Goethe, 43. 5 : ' Der Schauspieler muss
seine Personlichkeit verlaugneii ;' 25. 364 : 'Der Meni-ch wirkt alles was
er vermag auf den Menschen durch seine Personlichkeit.'

27o £55,4 YS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

disputes of the Arian controversy in the fourth century was
vTToa-Taa-is. An hypostasis is represented in Latin by sub-
stantia, and the question of hypostasis is closely allied to the
question of essence or nature. In the ' condemning clauses '
of the original form of the Nicene creed rebuke is addressed
to those who teach that the Son is ere'pas ^Troorao-eco? T) ov<rias.
Gregory of Nyssa is the Eastern advocate of the Trinity in
Unity : according to him, Scripture is found (f)v\aTTovcra
TavTorr]Ta OcoTrjros (v iSior^n viroo-racrf^v, and he seeks to
reconcile to the mind the antithesis between the f) rrjs ^weco?
tvonis and fj Kara ras vTroortWi? 8ia/c/H<ns. The same lan
guage appears in Augustine1, who declares that the same
whole is a Trinity ' propter proprietatem personarum/ and
one God ' propter inseparabilem divinitatem ' ; but he differs
from the Greek Fathers in holding that in each Person the
Godhead is fully realized, not, as they maintained, merely the
particular aspect of universal deity.

If we next ask what attempts philosophers have made to
examine the ultimate principles involved in a term which
jurisprudence is content to handle without too minute analysis,
we may first turn to Locke. Dealing in Book II, chap.
xxvii. of the Essay on Human Understanding with the
question of personal identity, he is careful to maintain that
it cannot be based on, or consist in some mysterious
identical substance, a solid substratum of hard matter at
the centre and kernel of life. It lies and can only lie in
an active consciousness, a ' thinking thing/ which attributes
actions to itself. Personal identity lies in consciousness ;
it is the sameness of a rational being and consists in
the act of intelligence, in the consciousness which, while
distinguishing itself from itself, still refers the passing,
variable mood to the permanent self ; shows the variations of
consciousness as phenomena of one consciousness, and realizes
the one consciousness (out of time) in the succession of con-
1 De Civ. Dei, xi. 24.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 271

scious states in time. A person, says Locke, is a ' thinking-
intelligent being that has reason and reflection, and can con
sider itself as itself (the same thinking- being) in different
times and places/ A little further on he tells us that
' Person is a forensic term, appropriating actions and their
merit, and so belongs only to intelligent beings, capable of
a law and happiness and misery/ He means that, when we
punish, we presuppose that we are dealing with a person, and
by that we mean an agent whose acts are recognized as part
and portion of himself, as proceeding from himself and all
connected together in one sequence or consistence, forming
parts of a single unity. But he also means that in merely
intelligent beings, without feeling of pain or pleasure, this
idea of a self, a responsible self, would never arise. In us,,
however, the ' concern for happiness } is ' an unavoidable
concomitant of consciousness.'

The last point may be compared with some remarks of
Lotze. It is impossible, he says1, to define the meaning
of 'mine"7 by a logical combination of concepts. It is a
primary experience, by which the difference of the mine and
not-mine is first felt and realized. This form of experience
consists in the feeling of interest, of pleasure or pain. What
pains or gladdens we is absolutely distinct from what I repre
sent either as indifferent, as painful, or as pleasant, without
feeling the supposed weal or woe. And so in his Psycho
logy (§ 51) he maintains that a mere act of knowledge cannot
be the motive of this distinction (between me and not me).
'Mine' comes before f I' or 'me' : and we must distinguish.,
he adds, between feeling our self as a self, and knowing our
own being : between the sense of self and self-knowledge. The
latter is the subsequent interpretation of what came earlier as
an experience of feeling. Thus the consciousness expressed in
( I ' does not belong- to a merely intelligent being. We must
accordingly distinguish between the spiritual nature common

1 Beligionsphil. § 33.

272 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY In

to all, the general essence of soul or universal appearing in
all individuals : and the nature of the ego by which each soul
distinguishes itself from all others1. Each is not a mere
specimen of a class, a mere particular case : he is also and
more essentially a being-for-himself, a self-centred being,
referring all that he is to himself. This is the secret of life,
which is inapprehensive to logic : of personality, which refuses
to be dissolved in the universality of philosophy.

As yet we have only seen that personality was based on
reason and intelligence, on the power of self -disruption and
of self-reunion, but, further, on a reason which is not mere
intellect but is an intelligent life, feeling and realizing its
concepts, and realizing them indeed before it can properly be
said to know them. It was natural for Butler, commenting
upon Locke, to raise a question as to what Locke meant by
the ' substance' he perhorresces, and how it differs from
' being ' : and to declare that, though consciousness may
ascertain for us our personal identity, it can hardly be main
tained to constitute it. The discussion touches on a radical
problem of philosophy — what existence applied to spiritual
being or to ' ideal reality ' can properly be held to mean —
which hardly came forward for clear examination till Kant
and Fichte.

Mansel2 can hardly be said to throw much light on
the question. Distinguishing between the ' accidents of
consciousness and its essential constituents ' he points out
that, though ' the matter of consciousness is continually
changing, the form abides permanent and immutable/ No
great gain perhaps follows from applying to the question this
Kantian distinction of form and matter. It however empha
sizes itself in a phrase like this : ' I exist as a person
only as I am conscious of myself, and I am conscious of
myself only as I exist/ Our being is a conscious being :
a phrase which is too bald not to stand much in need of

1 Cf. Lotze, Medic. Psychol. pp. 493 seqq. 2 Metaphysics, p. 359.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 273

exposition. Mansel adds that there are two conditions indis
pensable to personal existence, time and free agency : there
must be a succession in time (of modifications in a persisting
subject), and also a power of attention or volition. The
last seems to mean that a person must not be a mere drift
of events upon a stage, but must also possess a power
of surveying and so far controlling the stream, a power
of comparison, unification, and initiative. We come back
very much in this to the phrase of Leibniz : ' Persona est
cuius aliqua voluntas est, seu cuius datur cogitatio, affectus,
voluptas, dolor/ Clearly in other words a person is not
a thing.

It is only very incidentally that Kant has given any
exposition of the idea of a person 1. We call a rational being
a person, he says, because his nature points him out as
something \vhich can never be a mere means, but must
always be treated as at the same time an end in itself. As
persons, rational beings are possessed of a certain worth or
dignity, in that they obey no law but a self-imposed one.
A person thus has the special prerogative of guiding his
course by principles derived at once from his own point of
view and from that of every other, as a legislative being.
Our person is distinguished from our state (Zustand): our
personal value from the pleasant or painful condition in
which we are. And thus finally our personality reposes upon
the power we have of regarding ourselves from an ideal or
intelligible point of view, as purely free, originative being's.
And so Kant comes to a conclusion like that of Ahrens,
that human personality lies in the union of the contingent
and finite element of individual life with the absolute
and divine reason : and implies a power of the mind to
detach itself from the given fact by an act of utter spon
taneity. A person is one who has been able consciously to
grasp and make his own all the varied qualities of mind and
1 P. i. no.

274 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

soul which belong to him as an individual. This power of
reducing to unity and stamping as his own every mental
element and faculty is what belongs to every person as such :
and it constitutes the common generic aspect of human
personality. Hence, says J. H. Fichte, 'the normal man is
one who has raised his individuality in all its parts to
personality, who has brought all mere instincts, &c., to the
full property of intelligence1.' Yet in all men this person
ality is imperfect. There always remains an insoluble residue
in the background, from the depth of which continually rises
the unexpected and the undesirable.

The movement towards personality is thus a realization
and concentration of the characteristics of the individual.
These, scattered and isolated, are appropriated and unified by
the act of the genius or inner self : they are no longer mere
fragments of being, but fused into an instrument and symbol
of the self. But in this act each sets himself in antagonism
to others : he becomes a person by asserting and determining
himself against others: he marks off his own sphere of
personality; and in constituting himself a person shuts
himself off from others, who yet are recognized as independent
of him in that very act of renunciation. Thus the person is
essentially an individual, one among many. But the forma
tion of personality is a process which goes on in each by
reflection on others, whom he at once acknowledges and
excludes : the creation of this reduplicated individuality thus
implies a movement pari passu towards community, or the
recognition of another self — another yet the same — in others.
The subject thus measures the value of his personality by the
reflection of it he imagines he can trace in the judgement of
others. The individual or free subject thus attains to per
sonality only in company and competition with others ; and
from this social relation flow both his rights and his duties, as
he alternately seems to exclude others and to include them

1 AnthropoL 251.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 275

with him in the same community. Those rights which follow
from the mere fundamental conditions of community, before
any definite and special free relations have been formed, are
the original and inalienable rights of men, the rights in which
all men, as members of any community whatever, are equal to
each other. It is in these everlasting rights that personality
as such consists : the abstract right of free self-development
and self-determination — the equal right to exist and live his
nature out.

But as J. H. Fichte has hinted, anl as Lotze has enforced
at some length, the finite being finds himself on all hands con
fronted by forces with which he did not invest himself, and by
laws which he has to accept, as well as by wills different from
his own : nay, even in the recesses of his own being he seems
to meet with a dark strange substance which is in him, but is
not he ; and to which as a vehicle his whole personal develop
ment is attached. We have grown up as it were by piecemeal,
and are never wholly ourselves ; we identify ourselves with the
particular point of view at which we stand in a particular stage
of our development. The complete sanity of self-control, of
self-mastery, and absolute possession and appropriation of all
our souls is what we never fully attain. ' It is only to a
limited degree,' concludes Lotze l, ' that we can say that it
is we who act : for the most part action is carried on in us
by the several groups of ideas or feelings to which our
mental machinery at each instant has given predominance.
Still less are we in time quite all our own. Much vanishes
from memory : most of all does it gradually lose hold of the
individual moods of feeling. Many grooves of ideas, in which
when young we were at home, come before us in later years
as foreign phenomena : we can hardly find our way back to
feelings in which we once indulged with enthusiasm ; the
power they once wielded over us has left scarcely a trace
behind. In the walks into which later life brings us we

1 Microc. iii. 574.
T 2

276 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ir

come to regard as unintelligible aberrations those aspirations
which we once held to be inalienable members of our inmost
self : we cannot understand how we could ever have felt such
impulses. In truth, therefore, we have little ground for
speaking of the personality of finite beings : personality is an
ideal, which like all ideals is proper only to the Infinite in its
unconditioned nature, but to us is, like every other good
thing, only vouchsafed under conditions and therefore im
perfectly/ Thus, he sums up, ' a full personality is possible
for the Infinite alone : the peculiarities of the finite are only
hindrances to its development/

It is necessary, however, to examine briefly this attribution
of personality to the Infinite or Absolute. The point on
which Lotze seems to lay special weight is the imperfect
character of such personality as is exemplified by human
nature. The same thing may be said also of morality, and
even perhaps of religion. Each of these has a something
in it which presses onwards to a perfection, the attainment
of which would be its own annihilation. The religious man
aims at a growing and increasing divinity or likeness to
God: if this likeness reach its ideal limit in identity with
the divine nature, then it is no longer strictly entitled to
be called religion. It has passed beyond itself into the
reality which it aimed at, and in the continual but unending
approximation to which its very life and existence consists.
But the state thus imagined is one which it is impossible
to realize in clear thought. The truth rather seems to be
that religion, like everything else in humanity, only exists
in what we may call a radical antithesis, a synthesis of two
aspects, neither of which can be severed from the other. It
is, on the one hand, a sense of the dependence on the divine,
of the infinite littleness of human nature, and on the other
a sense that God is with man and that even now, in this
world, God and man are reconciled in one.

And so it is also with morality. The law of duty is a

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 277

standard which, as it is approached, ceases to bear the old
aspect of obligation, and passes into the guise of autonomy.
A perfect morality would be a state of soul in which the
struggle between conscience and appetite has been com
pletely transcended in a willing union, where the appetites
become the ready messengers, or organs instinct with good
doing their master's will as their own. Morality, as Kant
says, arises because man regards himself as a citizen of
a higher world, a spiritual kingdom; regards himself as
a legislative and spontaneously legislative member of that
kingdom, embodying a law universal in his every single
resolve and action. But man, though obliged by something
within him to put himself in that position, to assume that
high place and rank, finds himself as matter of fact a citizen
of the sense world, the world of nature, a mere link or rather
an aggregate of mere pieces in a physical system, which
governs his movements. He is moral only by an effective
act to make himself; to realize his vocation, and affirm the
initiative and independence of physical law which he claims.
He finds himself a fragment; he believes himself to be a
whole. His life is a struggle between his realization of this
faith and his acceptance of the position of fragmentary fact.
Neither aspect can be ignored, and so long as that is so,
man cannot be perfectly moral, just because he is a sensible
creature. Morality thus is founded upon an idea — the idea
of a spiritual nature, the faith in an ' intelligible world ' — an
idea which can never in this world be realized. Perfect
morality and perfect religion carry us beyond themselves to
an absolute in which we may suppose them to be satisfied :
satisfied, however, by being carried out to that consummation
which destroys what is their very essence.

It is the same with personality. The ideal of personality
is the complete penetration of all that comes within the
compass of the person : it is the animation of all the parts of
the human mind and body, and all that subserves these, with

278 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

one mind and spirit: the thorough appropriation of every
particle that is mine with the full reality of me, so that
I may be complete and at home in every part. But such
an appropriation rests upon a distinction of mine and thine
which is fundamental and immediate: it involves an indi-
vidualitv, feeling and asserting its own distinct existence
amongst other individualities. The personality therefore is
only a position assumed to mark out and define individual
existence. If it could be what it would fain be, it would
be universal, all-embracing : for at no point can I stop and
say : Thus far do I go, and what is beyond is to me indifferent.
Any limit which is to be drawn must be imposed by the
existence of other personalities equally self-assertive in the
region to part of which I am obliged in this way to confine
my claim. Just as religion only exists because man is always
differenced from God, and morality because the appetites
are not absorbed and annulled by the reasonable will, so
personality only exists because we are not pure spirits and
mere ideal beings, but have a visible and sensible basis to
our existence, in passions, limbs, and material conditions.
We are persons because we have an excluding individuality,
4 ein lestimmtes materiales Icli ' ; though that personality is
only inherent in the definite materiality by virtue of an
implicit universality of appropriative and unifying thought,
It is only because they act in a sense world that rational
beings come into connexion with each other, and, while
excluding one another, yet somehow keep up their unity with
that which they have excluded. Hence personality can only
belong to a member of a world, to one who is not everything,
but stands in contact and relation with others outside him
self. Such a position cannot belong to the Absolute or
Infinite. We cannot indeed say that the absolute is im
personal, but we may at least say he is something more than
a person.

Personality then is an idea which, as we know it, is realized

: PERSON AXD PERSONALITY 279

in the case of a person, or of persons. As in other cases,
we must distinguish between the singular form of the
universal idea, and the singular or plural of its several mani
festations. Thus truth is an idea; its real aspect is seen
in particular truths, none of which are ever adequate to the
absolute idea. Nor can we deduce from the idea of truth
any particular truth whatever, or find in any higher concep
tion a criterion or standard by which all subordinate truths
may be recognized. We can only say that all truths must
be consistent with each other: that a truth which is incon
sistent with another truth shows itself or the other to be
no truth; that wherever there is a want of clearness and
distinctness — or of coherency with the whole system — there
there is error or falsehood. "When we refer our perceptions
to experience, we do not merely mean that one perception
is coherent with perceptions of the past, we mean that
they both form members of that united world in which all
experience is embraced.

Similarly we distinguish duty from duties : and we dare
not try to deduce the latter from the former. We can only
sav here again that duty is (not indeed an abstract, merely
identical unitv, but) a system of unity in which perfect
harmony prevails ; or that, in the language of Kant, the only
criterion of moral law lies in its absolute compatibility in
every part — its adaptation to hold good in action under
everv circumstance. * Les devoirs/ as Malebranche said lt are
infinitely various — they are only the external fact, the ' devoirs
exterieurs ' : but true virtue is only one — the ' amour de 1'oidre/
'H ne faut pas confondre les devoirs avec la vertn/ What
Malebranche called * la vertu/ Kant called ' die Pflicht.' It is
this inner spirit which is his ; great, sublime name ' : an inward
or ideal, which can never be proved by experiment to have an
outward existence, or ever to be a fact. The duties are given
us bv the conditions of human life in society, and we cannot

1 Trmti de Jfcrafe, c. 2.

28o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

deduce them from any idea of duty, any more than we can
deduce a given animal from the general idea or law of life.

So too, according1 to Plato, we rise from the diversity and
accidentality of outer conduct, of justice as the world knows it,
viz. as this or that Suecuoi;, to the conception of inner SIKCUOCTWTJ,
the justice in the soul, the systematic disposition of faculty in
the system of human nature. The just act as such may flow
from various characters : it may be the product of prudence, of
calculation, of caprice, of impulse, of hatred or of love. But
it has only one true and genuine cause, the proper balance
and co-operation of the several principles which constitute
human nature : the proper subordination of the impulses which
crave for enjoyment, for pleasure, under the conception of the
true reality and good of life, and their supplementation by
a due development of that spirit of independence and activity,
which in its excess delights in war and struggle, and of the
intellectual energy which by itself might be lost in mere con
templation of speculative conceits. The man in whom such a
balance of forces was established, would be in himself a prin
ciple of justice. And being such a principle, he would, if he
could exist, have no need of external arrangements and systems
of polity : he would be a law to himself. Unfortunately such
a unified being is only an ideal, a standard man, with whom
we compare the man developing each of these interests to
a more than due extent. And in the city which Plato con
structs we have a machinery by which the ideal, not realizable
perhaps in the individual, may be attained by the influence
which in the fabric of the state each part exerts on the other.

So personality is only known as a person among persons,
as a visible and sensible one among others, maintaining his
ground amongst others, keeping up a unity and consistency
of his being in all its details. But each of these details, and
they are infinite in number and minute complexity, is part of
other connexions ; each enters into a variety of relationships,
and has so to speak interests and laws of its own. The person

nj PERSON AND PERSONALITY 281

therefore is a fictitious unity, an artificial product, so long as
he has not completely identified himself with all his parts, and
them with himself. But such complete identification is for
a finite being impossible. Each part of him carries him out
beyond his actual self into another world, a world in which he
is not supreme, and where other persons hold sway. Hence
the person soon begins to compare the implicit or potential
universality that he felt himself striving to be, with his own
partial attainment of it, and with the like attainments and
claims of others. The result is a mixture of oppositions. On
one hand he seeks to carry the claims of personality farther
and farther, to extend his being in range, even if he cannot
master its ground in intensity of penetration. Such is the
instinct of power. On the other hand, he seeks to get the most
out of his actual possession, to identify himself completely
with what he does appropriate, and to gratify the instinct of
pleasure. Or again he may seek more and more to realize for
himself that his personality is something transcending all that
is visible and sensible, that he is other than the things he sees,
feels, and conquers ; and this in its excess is the instinct of
the mystic and the quietist. For him the external world is
annihilated : his personality is wholly inward and invisible :
and his only actions are done in his soul. Instead of using
the invisible self as a stepping-stone or point of view, he
essays to dwell in this upper world. The conflicts which arise
in the visible world deter him from venturing into it. He
surrenders the corporeal embodiment of self, and withdraws
himself into his purely spiritual being. He concerns himself
solely with the internal unity, and resigns to alien control
that outer world where supremacy is always imperfect and
can only be kept up by constant effort and is constantly liable
to interferences which no skill or prudence can wholly provide
against.

Real human personality must be something different from
this. It uses the world as not abusing it : or, in every tie

282 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

which it forms with external things, it remembers that the
conjunction is a temporal one. Or, feeling itself in essence
eternal, it does not on that account make light of its
existence in time, from moment to moment and in local
and limited spheres. Human personality is essentially a unity
of oppositions. And we may even go so far as to say that its
special appearance is in the visible and outward sphere. As
a person, we are primarily what we are to our neighbours :
we occupy a certain place and discharge a certain function in
the visible world. Hence a man's personality is not his mere
intellect, but his whole being : it is more than his books, more
than any definite work he may have accomplished. A great
personality is a sum of influences, each of which may so far
be exercised apart, but which produce their chief effect in
virtue of some individual bond which holds them altogether
and makes us feel more than we can consciously explain on
analysis. Thus the personality is not the body merely, but
the body and matter as informed, controlled, organized by
mind and soul.

But the essence of personality is undoubtedly shown in the
distinction of I and Thou. To be a person is thus not merely
to be an individual, but an individual which recognizes an
other individual as possessed of the same essential character
istics. The person, while marking off self from others and
claiming a certain sphere as his own, does at the same time
admit the existence and rights of the other. Each has as it
were a double order of organs. His grosser organs are exposed
to the influence of the external world, whether he will or not.
He cannot choose but hear, when mighty noises convulse his
ear. But so long as a certain point is not passed, he is
independent, and can only hear by an inward sympathy or
participation. He hears only when he imitates by an inner
and more delicate organ the tones which are echoed in his
outer organs. He must help if the effect is produced. This
is the right of personality : and it is violated when another

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 283

individual by physical violence forcibly induces a change in
the organism of the first to which he does not respond.

When so looked at, personality or personal identity (on
which, as Locke says, ' is founded all the right and justice of
reward and punishment') is made an ideal of complete uni
fication and self-control of all the parts and aspects of a
man's nature. We begin with what may be termed ' psycho
logical personality ' : the ' I ' which ' is not a conception,
but a mere consciousness that accompanies all conceptions.'
Thus the fl think' is a conception (or judgement) which
is the vehicle of all concepts whatever l. Or, as it is put in
the Proleg. § 46, note,, ' the "I" is no conception, but only
a designation of the object of the inner sense, so far as we do
not apprehend it under any specific character : it is nothing but
a "sense of existing" (Gefuhl eines Daseyns) without the least
conception, and only represents to us something to which
all thinking stands in relation.' Kant's point, it must be
observed, is that the ' I ' is not a thing or object among other
things : we cannot put it before us as an object : if we could
do so, the ' I ' would cease to be an ' I,' and become a Not-I.
Or, as he otherwise puts it, the ' I ' is not something of which
we have a c standing and abiding impression,' a steady clear
image. It is always a subject, always active, and never
to be conceived as a passive object, or permanent substance.
Thus Kant maintains against metaphysical (rational) psycho
logy that the Ego is a bare apperception, which underlies and
makes possible all our forms of conception : but we can never
so far objectify it, and put it in the order of objects, as to
treat it as a substance, the simple persistent something which
underlies all mental change. Thus he calls it a mere ' feeling
of existing,' as distinguished from the intellectual ideas of
relations. 'Subject' can never become 'object,' or it ceases
to be ' subject.' There is a profound and indelible distinction
between the idea of a thing (which is a formula expressing

1 Kritik der R. F., Dialektik, bk. ii. ch. i, Paralog. 3.

284 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [11

the relations between tlie parts constituting it, and between
it and other things which are connected with it) and the
existence of that thing, its real being, life and actuality.
As Kant remarked, in dealing with the scholastic arguments
for the divine being, existence is not an attribute of a thing,
not a mere part and portion of the idea : but something
unique and gui generis. The reality, as distinct from the
idea, is something active, something which appropriates and
holds the idea, and feels resistance or contradiction of the
idea as a disturbance of its own being; something which
exerts an effort and sustains opposition. Existence then in
its last resort is not something which can be touched and
measured, but something which is felt, felt above all in the
immediate self-experience of mental life. Existence therefore
is properly spoken of only where there is susceptibility to
influence, capacity of action and reaction.

Hence, as was already hinted, no being can be called
a person who is not capable of feeling and action, as well as
a mere idea of the intellect, a mere object of apprehensive
judgement. Personal action is distinguished from the
operation of necessary laws, or from the authority of mere
ideas, which are true, but do not exist. Mere ideas, mere
concepts, have no power in themselves : they are made alive
and real only in a living consciousness. The idea has to be
incarnated in flesh and blood. Hence the influence and place
of great men in history, the force of a real personality. The
theorem may be there : the facts may arrange themselves in
the very act of expressing a law : but unless the living heart
and voice take up the burden of the idea it is ineffectual.
The mere words even may be present; but they are only
<j)(Dvd€VTa a-vveTolo-iv. They require, as Plato says, the father
of the word to cherish and defend the children of his thought,
and strengthen their ghostlike forms with his own life and
blood. The soul or central self is more than the mere intel
lectual concept : than a type, plan, or idea on paper or in

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 285

mere words : it is the actual concentration of all the system
of relations in one source of power, making the words breathe
and the thoughts burn. It is only as a state of the soul that,
the concept enters as a force into the real world and changes
the material. That the idea may live, it must be embodied in
a person or an institution: and an institution is after all
only a moral person — a complex person.

Kant then seeks to show that the Ego cannot be treated on
the same level as the mental or physical phenomena which it
observes : it cannot be well or adequately described by such
terms as ' substance/ ' thinking thing/ and the like. It is
the perpetual concomitant of all mental acts, but not the
single object of any : if it be made an object, it is of a
peculiar sort — a subject-object. We may to some extent
consider it in abstraction from its special phases or attach
ments, but we ought not to speak of it as existing apart from
them. We cannot take the fH' out of ourselves and put it
1 there ' before us. It is true the consciousness ' I think ' is
a simple and unanalyzable consciousness ; whenever we go into
further detail, we leave the simplicity of the condition of con
sciousness and descend into the detail of actual consciousness
of this or that object. But a simple consciousness does not
entitle us to speak of the simple nature of the subject of
consciousness : consciousness cannot get behind itself and
consider its own cause or principle. The Ego is only the
'form of apperception attached to every experience': an
epithet noting the subject condition on which all knowledge
depends. All the categories on which knowledge depends are
only special and detailed forms of this ultimate power and
principle of synthesis. Being itself the ultimate condition of
all knowledge, we cannot get behind it to see its conditions.
It is an irreducible and ultimate sentiment of reality, a feeling
of being.

So much for psychological personality, the condition of
moral action, or the prius of morality. It consists in the

286 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

presence of a central unity of apperception, a feeling that we
exist in our several modifications, that the various feelings,
desires, emotions are ours, belong to us, have a common
ground and a mutual interdependence, thus constituting a
system with necessary relations. Personality, moral person
ality, has a double aspect : it is the relation and inter-connexion
of elements claiming some measure of independence. Within
us personality presupposes a nature which is one and yet
many : which has from the beginning a potency of unification
of instincts and principles, and which can occasionally at least
raise that potency to an actual symmetry and solidarity. It
presupposes various apyai, which ultimately fall under the
guidance or control of one apx7? : an(i m tnat relation, implicit
or actual, of the central monad to the others in our being,
personality as an inner quality consists. But there is also
an outer personality : a personality for the eyes of others and
in an external community. In this aspect personality depends
upon a system of society, in which each has his place
appointed, and therefore occupies a special restricted position.
But still in fulfilling that place his inner and moral per
sonality must remain intact. He is no doubt a mere unit :
but a unit which can embrace and reproduce in himself the
whole society of which he forms a part.

It is for this reason that Kant calls personality ' eine
Achtung erweckende Idee.' Moral personality is nothing
but the freedom of a rational being under moral laws (whereas
psychological personality is merely the power of being con
scious of one's self in the various states of one's identical
existence) : from which it follows that a person is subjected
to no other laws than those which it imposes on itself (either
alone, or at least at the same time with others). ' A Person/
in short, ' is that subject (agent) whose actions are capable of
imputation : whilst " a thing " is capable of no imputation V
In virtue of being an end in himself man possesses a dignity

1 Eechtslehre, EM. p. 24.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 287

(Wurcle) 1. Personality 2, as ' freedom and independence from
the mechanism of the whole of nature/ elevates him as
a moral being- above his sensible nature, which attaches him
to the order of things. Personality belongs to a being
endowed with inward freedom — with the power of absolute
initiative.

Thus, as Hegel remarks, 'to be a person is the grandest
thing a man can be : and yet the bare abstraction — a person
— is somewhat contemptible in the very expression/ It is
different from the subject or psychical person, the mere possi
bility of personality which is found wherever we find a living
human being. As an individual, I am a being denned in
various ways, of such and such an age, so tall, in this or that
space, with such and such a temper, character, and modes of
thought. But all the while as a person I can set aside all
this particular aspect of myself and recognize it as something
separable from me : can look at myself as a pure personality,
in which all speciality and limitation of my nature is can-
eelled and lost to view. So viewing myself I see myself as
absolutely unconstrained and unlimited, as infinite, universal,
and free. Thus if I can be said to see myself here as an
object, it is an object absolutely simple, general, and self-
identical. It is not till an individual and a nation have
reached the point at which they can dismiss as irrelevant to
themselves any special phase of being to which they are
accustomed, that they can be said to attain personality. Thus
in personality we have the contrast between the limited
actuality and the unlimited possibility, between the pheno
menal aspect and the essential being, between the particular
definiteness and the latent universal. Personality is the
power of realizing and keeping in view the universal, free,
and unlimited being, amid the particular and definite or
isolated forms which threaten to overwhelm it. It is as
tending to sink the particular in a mere general relation-

1 Tugendl. § 38. 2 Kr. d. Pr. Ver. p. 214.

288 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

ship that the term person seems occasionally a term of
reproach.

Thus a person is, on the one hand, an individual or indi
vidualized being1, one among many — in ordinary cases, a single
living human body — which, on the other hand, has the
capacity of regarding itself as a universal, not bound by
limits of actual achievement, but as infinite and free. This
is the so-called mystery, grandeur, or contradiction of per
sonality. In the little physical individuality which is alive

in the single subject or living soul which is a mere point
excluding all others and excluded by them — there is a potential
universality, a claim to absolutely unconstrained existence,, to
complete independence of action, utter spontaneity. Un
checked this may degenerate into disease; the individual
may see himself in his petty individuality as all-embracing
and deserving universal empire.

But on two sides this danger is guarded against. In the
individual consciousness there is the sense of the moral law,
which gives moral personality : i.e. the individual sees himself
subject to a law which categorically regulates his actions and
appoints his sphere. And around him he, as a living indi
viduality, is confronted by others, who implicitly claim the
same universality as he does : and with whom therefore, if he
is to live, some modus viveudi must be established, on the
ground that each of them is equally a person, and that what
ever be their implicit universality, in the bounds of their
external manifestation, their personal existence, they must
mutually recognize each other.

Thus personality has a double aspect: neither part of
which can be absent, though the one is mainly emphasized
ts moral, the other as legal personality. The legal personality
s always found in a thing, a material body, or something
which can represent or stand for a material thing. Even the
human body comes under this head. It is more closely
connected with the person than other things: but of it too

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 289

it can be said that the person can divest himself of parts of
it and yet retain a visible personality. But also of things
external to the body it may be said that I cannot be alto
gether without them : I must have something mine in the
external world, or my personality will cease to exist. Thus
my organic body is the first and most rudimentary realization
of my personality, but of it, as of other things, I must take
possession by an act of will, forming and appropriating my
body as an organ of myself. My body and my property are
means of objectifying, realizing and maintaining my freedom,
my universality, my independence. In them I am present,
and by them I carry out that absolute claim to all things, to
self-mastery and complete sovereignty, which is inherent in
personality. The human will goes forth with the conviction
that things are lordless, appliable by the first comer, waiting
for a meaning and soul to be given them.

The legal personality is under the rule of right or law. Its
principle lies in the restraint imposed upon the freedom of
each by the recognition of the (in principle) equal freedom
of all. The rule of right is, ( Be a person and respect
the personality of others V As the will of a person towards
things, as the instinct of realizing personality in a material
world, the range of personality is unbounded. The mere
thing is impersonal, and has no rights. Hence man,
individual man, has towards things an unlimited right of
appropriation2: he treats the purely natural world as pos
sessed of no substantial existence, as a mere vehicle for his
manifestation. But the position is altogether altered by
the existence of other persons : and now there arise two
conditions of existence. On the one hand, each recognizes
the existence and right of the other: or perhaps it is now
first of all that we can properly speak of rights, meaning
that each recognizes a certain sphere of action as belonging
to the other, and gets a certain sphere recognized as his own.
1 Hegel, Rechtsphil. § 36. 2 Ib. § 44.

U

290 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

But on the other hand, each may persist in the original
instinct and ignore the other: we have then the rule of
might, where they take who have the power, and they keep
who can. When this rule of might is regarded as an outrage
on the natural law of right or mutual recognition, it is
describable as the dominion of wrong and transgression.

The moral personality is not under an external, but an in
ternal law : it is a member of a spiritual and invisible, not of
a visible and material kingdom. The moral law commands :
the law of right only forbids and restrains. The sphere of
law is the range of what is permitted, or of what is forbidden :
it does not say, Do this or that, but rather, Do not do this or
that. The sphere of moral law is the sphere of obligation
and duty. The latter commands categorically : the former
only permits. Thus while legal personality concerns in the
first place my relation to other beings, moral personality deals
with my relation to myself, or with the relation of my sensible
to my spiritual nature. Legal personality therefore depends
upon the institution of a common law, of a sovereign judge,
of a commonwealth organized and united. Moral personality
is independent of all outward law: and if all beings were
perfectly moral, i.e. subject to the inward law, there would
be no need of a law of rights. But man is very far from
being so constituted : he can only make himself moral (which
he is not through nature) by means of the labour and
discipline of education. The law of right is part of such
education. It attains its object indirectly.

Logically it may be said that law comes before rights, and
that rights are the creations of law : they exist only because
they receive the public sanction. But historically the process
often seems to present the opposite aspect. Law is only the
gradual accumulation of a number of jura, or rights, indepen
dently asserted and determined by special acts. Law at first
only exists in petto, in the consciousness of the people, and is
elicited by its chosen interpreters. The judge in Homer has

IT] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 291

for his function 81*17^ Wvvrara eiTtelv, to pronounce the right
most straightly : he is a (k/cao-Tro'Aos avrip : he has no law to fall
back upon as a written and systematized body of laws. Law
at first only exists as a fundamental and underlying principle
of right and equity in the biKaios avrip. It is created as
a system in accidental or occasional decisions, which affirm
the special right in an individual case. Gradually such
isolated jur a, or asserted and accepted rights, grow in number,
come more and more into relation with each other, and
require consolidation and harmonizing. For as they grow up
singly, and, though resting on a common consciousness, have
to be got at by a special fact and through the judgement of
a single human being, they may possibly conflict with each
other. Again, considering the strength of the tendency to
imitation, there is a chance of precedents gaining ground in
cases which are hardly in pari materia. Still in some ways
it may be that, while law thus remains in the common con
sciousness, it is less likely to get stereotyped than when it is
reduced to a written code. But on the other hand, the legal
administration passes from the people to the judgement of
a special class or person, who in German is said to shape the
verdict or doom. When that happens, formality, pedantry
and ossification are apt to set in.

Still we may say that law makes its first appearance in the
shape of so many rights or decisions actually given. These
rights present themselves as belonging to the individual, and
it is in battle for such rights that revolutions take place.
And while law seems to come from above and be imposed on
the unwilling, rights spring from beneath and only require
to be affirmed and accepted. Jus is right : jus civile is the
right attaching to the citizen (of Rome). The struggle for
legal right takes the form of an effort on the part of individuals
and classes to claim something, which they believe to belong
to them and to be unjustly withheld. Thus legal rights
arise as the claims of personality, of individual human beings,

u 2,

292 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

as the claim o£ the individual to a recognition from others.
It is only gradually that the idea of rights sink into the idea
of a common law.

Eights then are the claims of individuals upon others, and
they are only affirmed as rights by the recognition and
acceptance of them on the part of these others. It is
moreover as against others, against individuals, that the
individual has rights : not as against the state or organized
community as such. They are the boundaries between
individuals, denoting the range of power and influence which
the community has recognized as belonging to its several
members. Such rights therefore need not be equal : they are
simply the powers belonging to the individual, which are
licensed, accepted, or recognized by the state. The principle
of right is reciprocity : what you would not wish done to
yourself, you are not to do to another. This is the respect of
personality, the negative condition of virtue. Right assigns
to each his place and prevents one from encroaching upon
another. Its real origin is a moral one, the claim of personality
to be master of its own development, to be subject to no law
but that which it imposes upon itself. But to attain that
end, it must recognize in others the same claims as it makes
itself, and so restrict its own plenitude. No one can claim
a privilege strictly so called, that is, a right which departs
from the general equity and balance of the system.

Thus the right of personality is the right never to be
treated as a thing. No person, however, can claim that right
unless he himself admits and practises it. ' Persons/ says
Pichte 1, 'treat each other mutually as persons, only so far as
each acts only on the higher sense of the other, and therefore
leaves it to his free will to accept the action, leaving his lower
organs wholly unassailed and unchecked/

In practice this view is confronted by the difficulty of
determining whether the conditions of personality have been
1 Nalurrecht, p. 87.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 293

complied with. But here it is probably best to err on the
side of presuming- personality to exist, and therefore requiring
to be respected. As we have seen, personality in its full
phase is an unrealized ideal. It is therefore difficult to
discover any inferior limit where it may be presumed absent.
At what time,, for example, is personality to be 'recognized as
present in children ? It is true that the law fixes with some
show of agreement a time when the infant acquires the full
rank of person, when he emerges from minority and is invested
with the charge of himself. But the period of majority is
fixed in view of certain domestic and social interests, and
cannot be regarded as an answer to the scientific question.
Nor can we altogether accept the poetic dictum that

'The baby, new to earth and sky,
What time his tender palm is prest
Against the circle of the breast,
Has never thought that this is I :
But as he grows, he gathers much,
And learns the use of I and me '/

as meaning more than that the feeling of ' defined isolation '
is not yet clearly conceived and set before him. Personality
may exist in very real germ long before the use of the per
sonal pronouns has been mastered. And even the baby has
something more than the thing, as also in another measure
has the animal : they each appear in some degree to be con
scious of an inherent principle, a right to their own unim
peded development.

This right of personality then is never to be treated as
a mere means, but always as having its end and principle in
itself. Thus the body in which the personality is primarily
objectified must always be treated as the cause of its own
movements, and still more the mind. A person e.g. is not
treated as a person, if external action upon him is so vehement
and violent that it moves and affects him without his own
consent. Any loud speaking, e. g. which bursts through the
1 In Memoriam, 45.

294 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

barriers of his organs, is thus disrespectful and obtrusive.
Any rough handling or fondling, which in the least forces his
organs to comply with those of another, is an outrage on
personality, which is not penal, only because it is commonly
vulgar. Where personality is presumed to be fully developed, we
must always ask the other to co-operate with us, to respond,
to do himself what we wish or teach him to do. Only partial
imbecility can justify any intrusion. But on the other hand,
if non-intrusion be a right, affability and readiness to meet
another is equally a duty.

Still the person must be allowed, so to speak, to choose his
own company, ideas, movements, &c. All that he can be
fairly expected to do is not to shut himself up to the sugges
tions of others, and not without special reason to close the
organs of sense to the communication of others. The very
essence of personality is equality, liberty, and fraternity.
Liberty is a peculiarly negative word : it means that the in
dividual as a person is not to be made to do anything against
his own will : it means freedom from assault, intrusion, and
outrage : but it does not always mean liberty to do everything
which he might like to do. It is guarded by equality and fra
ternity. But equality in this phrase does not mean equality
of powers, natural or acquired : such an equality is partly
impossible, partly undesirable to secure. It is sometimes said
that the equality meant is equality in rights or equality before
the law : i. e. that in all affairs of public interest there shall
be no privileged treatment of individuals or classes : it
means, in short, a claim to equity and impartiality. But it
also is a postulate that beneath social differences and natural
distinctions there is a common meeting-ground, an average
standard to be presumed, a dignity of man and of woman, as
such, which puts them on a level. And this equality therefore
is bound up with fraternity : the equality is that of brothers
and sisters, of children of the same father; members of
a community. Liberty is checked by equality, and the excess

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 295

of equality prevented by liberty : and both are humanized
by fraternity — by the identity of a common humanity.

How far the conditions of personality are satisfied in an
individual is not easy to say. It requires possession of mental
and bodily health. But what, it may be asked, is health?
The answer is supplied by Plato. The body, like the soul,
is an organism : a system of parts mutually adapted, each
possessing- a certain independence and proper function : which
however in a healthy state never actually rises to utter
severance from the general. The whole adjustment in its
details in the body is governed by the laws of mechanism : at
no point can we say that a special principle of life, a vital
principle, steps in and directs the interaction. The principle
is one with its parts, it is in each part and in the whole : it
is the supposed explanation of the fact that there is this
solidarity, this unity which transcends and interpenetrates the
separation of parts, tissues, and organs : it is the principle of
equality and fraternity in the body: and also the principle
of liberty. No part can encroach on another, no part can be
held less essential, no part be treated as separable from the
others, without in each case inducing a perturbation of the
general fabric. Each has its own province, its own right or
duty : but none can permanently act in independence of the
others ; and all must practically experience that the general
law of life, of self-maintenance of the total organism, is a
principle overriding particular rights.

It is equally so in the soul, in the psychical range, only
that here something further seems to supervene on the mere
organism. The vital principle is always engrossed in its part,
and can never be regarded as an independent agent. The
unity of the body is a unity of co-operation, the result of
factors which work in obedience to a common law. But that
common law is out of sight. In the soul, on the contrary,
the very essence of the whole movement is that it rises in
some degree into the light of consciousness. And the peculi-

296 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

arity of consciousness is that it is a whole conception or form
which gradually fills itself in detail with the fullness of its
partial shapes. The unity, however implicit and potential,
underlies and realizes itself in each step towards particular
manifestation. The unity is primary : and it is only because
duration as a whole of time lies as an undeveloped basis that
we come to make distinctions of the duration of special states.
We count these, not by the summation of their separate
periods, but by the means of a common basis of consciousness
which, while parting itself out, does not lose hold of the whole.

This unity of consciousness reacts, if we may say so, upon
the body. The body has other than the merely organic
movements, which follow according to impenetrable laws of
instinctive nature. The purely animal movements are
governed by an idea; and the body itself is by mind
transformed (i) into a sense, (2) into an instrument. It
is in this double capacity that the body is strictly ours,
the organ of our mind, of our intelligence and our will.
The word 'organ,' indeed, covers both meanings. As such
the body is organized or articulated by the mind : i. e. its
parts are differentiated in use and function, made to some
extent independent of each other and under the direct control
of each other, and capable at the same time of co-operation in
executing a complex movement.

Now bodily health consists in this completeness of organiza
tion and articulation of the body as an organ or instrument of
the soul, no less than in the mere regular movement of the
purely organic life. The difference however between the
normal soul and the normal body is considerable. Of the
proper proportion of parts and distribution of functions in the
normal body, it is easy to get a tolerable definite conception.
But as Lotze remarks 1, we have no type of the definitive
shape which ought normally and necessarily to be taken by the
several psychical powers. In order to estimate how far a soul
1 Medic. Psych, p. 580.

n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 297

is or is not in a healthy state, we have recourse to two methods.
On the one hand,, we gradually form some ideal picture of the
state which the soul in its collective capacity ought to reach.
On the other, we consider how far the various means at our
control for that purpose may enable the soul, not alone,
but when aided by the average amount of favourable condi
tions presented by life, to attain this normal end. That is,
we first have a rough idea of what mental sanity ought to be,
and then we ask how far the given facts in ordinary conditions
are likely to realize it.

Now as regards the first, we see that mental health and
wealth do not depend on a mere accumulation of single
facts, but on solid ideas of what life is and ought to be,
and what the world around us really means : it does not lie
in confinement to a fragmentary life, limited in its range of
view, and moving for ever in the same monotonous routine,
but in a large and free scope of experience : nor does it
lie in the degree of variety and intensity to which we
can bring our sensations and aspirations, but in acquiring
the proper estimate of values, in calming the turmoil of
temper and gaining at once ' sweetness and light,' that
gentle reasonableness which, though not less free to receive
impressions than in the beginnings of life, is at the same
time matured by experience to a wiser judgement of their
comparative worth. The true ideal of a fully developed per
sonality does not consist merely in a keen intellectual acumen,
nor in an intense but inactive susceptibility to the moods of
happy feeling, nor in a perpetual unresting activity ; it
involves a balance of all these elements. But few, if any,
reach this ; and if this be perfect health, ' wir sind,' as Lotze
says, ' fast alle krank/

Yet we are not in the habit of applying this rigid standard.
We are indeed ready to admit that we are far from having
made the best of our possibilities. We see, as we look back
on ourselves and others, that many faculties which had the

298 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n

germ of almost endless expansion and usefulness, have turned
out mere single accomplishments, petty facilities of pro
duction in one department, whilst others have taken lines of
growth of which we thoroughly disapprove. Hours of self-
examination come, when we are ill at ease in reviewing the
result to which time has brought abilities that promised so
fair. And yet in spite of this self-condemnation, we still do
not hesitate to pronounce ourselves spiritually sound. To
explain this contradiction, we must take note of the second
point of view, our judgement on the possibility of reaching
the ideal by the help of normal and average conditions.

We admit that our course of mental growth has taken
false directions : but we do not believe that the psychical
formations are equally irrevocable with the corporeal. We
separate the permanent reality from what we suppose the mere
appearance. We fancy ourselves, even after all these mental
misgrowths, to be still fundamentally unaltered in our general
capacities as when we began our career. And when the
failures of development have been cast away, as the withered
leaves are stripped from the trunk of the tree, we expect that
the indestructible root of life and character within us will
throw out fresh shoots, perhaps more vigorous and better
than those which went before. So long as the derangement
has not penetrated to the very root and centre of our life, we
conceive it possible that alongside the actual depravity and
failure there still survives a better spiritual principle, an unex-
tinguishable source of fresh spiritual health. It is only when
we find that movements originating within us, or obstacles
which we can trace to some bodily infirmity, hinder us either
for a time or for ever from giving birth to new and fresh
life from the old source of life, that we recognize the com
mencement of spiritual disease. And it follows from this
way of thinking that we are indulgent in our judgements :
we do not regard as intolerable departures, either eccentricities
of feeling and sentiment, or disagreeable specimens of intel-

ii] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 299

lectualism cultivated in one line solely, or excess of un
reasoning passions. It is only when, on actually experi
menting, we find that there is no longer the capacity of
applying the general potentiality of mind to even simple
objects, that we admit the existence of mental derangement.

But this hypothesis, which would so much simplify the
problems of mental diagnosis, cannot be accepted. We cannot
always distinguish the permanent health of the faculties from
the perversity of their actual applications. There are no
ready-made faculties of permanent quality and power, which
can be manipulated without alteration of their structure and
nature. As Plato said, the food of the mind cannot be
conveyed in vehicles alien to itself, but only in the mind
itself which is modified according to its content l. The
soul cannot be conceived of as exerting side by side a variety
of utterances, good or bad, according as outward circum
stances suggest, while the root and stem remain sound and
unaltered : every application of the general faculties of mind
is at the same time a modification of the instrument we use.
Nor can it be denied that the employment of the faculties, as
it varies, leads to changes in our powers of judging things ;
the eye is perverted when the heart is turned on base material.
There is danger in the tendency to treat these prejudices,
peculiarities and whims of character, as mere superficial in
equalities not affecting the sound heart and judgement at the
bottom. The outside angularities, irregularities, and so-called
originalities of mind which are thus engendered, are symptoms
of a state verging towards mental insanity. Still there is
some excuse for the distinction between the faculties them
selves and their applications. In derangement proper there
is a thorough-going unrest, a want of proportion between
the inner faculties. But in the product resulting from
cramped and perverted development, the mental forces have
got some sort of equilibrium. The weak, ill-grown mind of
1 Piotag. 314 B.

3oo ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

one tied down to a narrow round of life may be compared to
a chronic disease, when a species of mutual accommodation
has made the defects suit each other, and produce an existence
which in ordinary conditions goes on without much friction.
The sick man's mind is not violently or conspicuously ill,
exhibits no great lesions. But it is all on a false scale. His
want of sanity has grown into a bearable system, but still
it is removed from true health of soul.

Mental derangement then, as ordinarily understood, does
not merely mean the state in which, from whatever causes,
the estimates of things and the sense of their importance are
perverted, or in which the views formed about circumstances,
in themselves distant and indifferent, show a want of intel
lectual balance, an inequality of judgement : it means that,
whether from these conditions or others, the ordinary facts of
everyday life, open to what may be called ocular demonstra
tion, are falsely apprehended or are misinterpreted.

But when the law treats a person as a responsible agent, this
is the ultimate limit which it lays down. A responsible agent
must not be suffering from mental derangement : he must be
in possession of sound senses and sound mind ; and by this
the minimum meant is that he is capable of ordinary percep
tion of single facts and has ordinary capacity of interpreting
or inferring from these facts. Without this a being is said to
be utterly irresponsible. He is not strictly speaking a person,
is not possessed of the common foundation of rationality.
Yet it may be doubted whether it is possible to lay down
definitely the conditions required to prove responsibility.
Jurisprudence certainly has not done so. In the nature of
the case it is obvious that no absolute rules can fix how much
power of judgement and perception is sufficient to constitute
rationality and responsibility ; and in any given case it can
hardly be possible to prove that these conditions have not at
all been satisfied. Thus we are forced, like Aristotle, to be
content with general and vague considerations.

Ill

RESPONSIBILITY

THERE are two points of view from which responsibility
like personality may be regarded. We may deal with it,
looking at the individual or at the community. In either
aspect we get a part of what is meant by responsibility.

The word is partly synonymous with terms like account
ability, irnputability, and is closely connected with punish
ment. ' The term responsibility/ says Bain, ' is 'a figurative
expression. Seeing that in every country where forms of
justice have been established, a criminal is allowed to answer
the charge made against him before he is punished, this
circumstance has been taken up and used to designate punish
ment. We shall find it conduce to clearness to put aside
the figure and employ the literal term. Instead therefore
of responsibility, I will substitute punishability/ To the
same effect J. S. Mill trenchantly says : ' Responsibility
means punishment/

On this, however, two remarks suggest themselves. The
first is that, when punishment is made the practical index
or proof of responsibility, ' the real question,' as Mill himself
says, 'is one of justice — the legitimacy of retribution or
punishment 3 : not punishment merely, but the conditions in
the individual which make it right to punish him. And
secondly, though responsibility is a condition of punishment,
it is not limited to acts which deserve punishment. It is
a feature of the world, which might perhaps be explained,

302 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m

that the good that is done is accepted much more passively
than the evil :

1 Men's evil manners live in brass : their virtues
We write in water l ; '

and

' The evil that men do, lives after them :
The good is oft interred with their bones2.'

People are responsible for the good they do no less than
for the evil : but no one is curious about the authors of our
blessings. The public treats all its servants as bound to the
full discharge of all the benefits their faculty affords, and only
attends to their special performance when it falls short of the
normal average.

The terms 'accountability' and ' responsibility ' undoubt
edly seem to refer to a ' scrutiny ' or examination, to which
the deeds of a person are liable in consequence of his
occupying a public function. Such is the vTtevOvvos apyj]
which has to give an account of his administration — who,
unlike the povvapyLa 3 or autocracy, is subject to law. The
idea is one of dependence — subjection to a higher will. A
evOvva or account has to be rendered : the person so rendering
an account being evidently treated as a deputy or servant
charged with a function, and not as a wholly independent
(irresponsible) or self-centred agent. But while the term
virevdvvos is in Greek specially applied to public functionaries
and a public scrutiny, the term amos and amao-0cu has
a wider range. The term alnavOai means, to bring a charge
against, to accuse ; but it has also the more general meaning,
to allege as the cause : and similarly while air La generally
means an accusation or change of crime, a crimen, it is some
times used by Plato for a cause or source (atria ayaOov). Thus
in Pindar, Nem. vii. n, a pehtypov air Lav poaio-i fj.ovcrav means
' a pleasing subject (motif) for the flow of song ' : and curios,

1 K. Hen. VIII, Act iv, sc. 2. 2 Jul. Caesar, Act iii, sc. 2.

3 Her. iii. 80.

in] RESPONSIBILITY 303

though usually ' the culprit ' or < accused/ is also the author
or originator1: so Plato, Rep. 379, T&v ^Iv aya6£v ovbeva
aXXov aiTLarlov. In Greek therefore, while vneuQwos denotes
especially the liability to a public account and examination,
the idea in afoios is that of authorship or causality, of source
or origination.

In Latin again the term reus is usually applied to the
accused person, culprit, both before and after trial ; but it
is also used to mean ' one under obligation to get or supply,
e. g. reus clods, or voli reus, i. e. bound by a vow ' : the reus,
in short, is the party who has made a covenant : and a res is
a ground of action, a reason, or plea. A causa similarly is
an interest or reason for acting : like res, it seems originally
a forensic term which has come into wider use. Res means
the object of a right : a reus is a human being who is the
object (not subject) of a right.

Responsibility, it thus appears, has something to do with
causality. The term ' imputation ' means the same as attribu
tion : imputare often means ' to make a merit of/ ( to take
credit for/ or 'to give credit for/ Thus Tacitus, Germ. 21 :
'gaudent muneribus, sed nee data imputant, nee acceptis
obligantur ' — i. e. they take no credit for giving, and count
it no obligation to receive. So ascribere is literally to place
a thing to a person's credit, to count it among his debts :
i.e. to treat it as part of his property and dependent upon
his will.

The notion of desert (merit), good or ill-desert, falls in the
same group. ' The idea of ill-desert,' says Butler, ' does not
merely mean that it is for the good of society that the agent
should suffer : it follows (as a perception) on finding that an
action is unsuitable, or out of proportion to the capacities of
the agent/ In other words, an action has good desert, not
because of the rewards which law or custom may attach to it,
but intrinsically by its natural and inherent adaptation to the

1 Thuc. iii. 22 -qyovvTO 5e oi'ircp «at TTJS Treipas ainoi rfaav.

304 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m

constitution and circumstances of human nature. In Latin
hcne Mi-rcri is to earn a place on the credit side (<h republica^
on the books of the commonwealth) : to pay a debt or perform
a duty is mcrcrl : whilst the epithets bate or male connote that
the obligation has been more than or less than equally dis
charged. Thus the idea of ill-desert is to have fallen short
in duty, to have failed in extinguishing- the debt. Mcritnm
means debt or due ; or, otherwise, the same thing is on one
hand a debt, on the other a credit : hence the word has both
the meaning of ' benefit ' and ' fault/ So the debts belong
ing to a person may mean his rights of action against others,
i. e. what is to his credit in their books, no less than what
it is his duty to pay.

Through the whole phraseology there shows the close
parallelism between the moral and the economical use of
the terms, between the moral and the legal. Nor need
this cause surprise. The moral, though it form the basis
of both legal and economical, is later in coming to distinct
expression. The juridical moreover includes the economical.
And all of the terms imply a system of things, an
established order: they connect with ideas of order and
authority. Responsibility implies an ordered world, in which
all things (act) have their place and are related to one
another, have mutual connexions. The fixing of responsi
bility is like the search for causes: a responsible agent is
a cause in the moral world. And just as each cause is
also an effect, so each responsible being is also, from certain
aspects, only a link in the change of causality. He is not
amoj, but only avrairios. Just as we may say that the
cause of an event is the sum of the whole antecedents or
conditions, and yet can select as the cause one circumstance,
which directly produces the effect that up to the moment of its
appearance had not seemed to begin, so the responsible agent
is the last or decisive moment in leading desire into action.
In ordinary life we are under the belief that a healthy

ni] RESPONSIBILITY 305

mental organization is responsible for the direction of the will.
No question is here raised as to free will as a metaphysical
problem. It may be maintained by the metaphysician that
the will is always governed by the law of sequence of effect
upon cause. The question now before us regards a difference
between individual wills. Are there any wills which are under
the sway of a malformed mind so completely that responsibility
is to be denied them ? It is generally admitted that there is
a class of human beings thus incapacitated. To say precisely
who are insane is not an easy task for medical or juridical
psychology. Such definitions as that 'it is a chronic disease
of the brain inducing chronic disordered mental symptoms 3
are little more than verbal, with the addition that ' mental
aberration ' is a predominant symptom of brain disease. But
how much of this 'physiological' disease is necessary to
constitute the irresponsibility of the insane, is a question
to which probably no general answer is possible. We must
content ourselves with saying that there are mental states
(dependent apparently most directly on nervous conditions)
which, in certain cases and under certain respects, deprive
a man of those faculties on which mental responsibility is
based.

Such conditions required for a rational direction of will are
(j) a correct apprehension of the external world, and of the
precise point in it towards which action is directed ; (2) suffi
cient collectedness to see the present aim of action in its
general bearings on our life and circumstances; and (3) a
healthy sense of reality, which makes this estimate of con
sequences no mere dreamy conception but a vital active
apprehension. Where we are under a delusion as to outward
facts, and especially of the physical laws governing the matter
we propose to manipulate ; where we are infatuated by a
present passion to such an extent as to lose all sense of
proportion and to be unable to keep our permanent well-
being in view, and where we see the world and ourselves,

x

3o6 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m

but see them like phantoms in a world which we have no
connexion with — there responsibility in the fullest measure
is absent. But there are shades of difference in this general
sphere. Sometimes, as in the case of a passionate outburst,
or of acts done under unreasoning" panic, or under the effect
of stimulants, the responsibility for the single act is in
abeyance; but it is replaced by a general responsibility for
the habitual character which facilitated their perturbations.
Many of our actions originate in a very fragmentary self-
consciousness. But, merely on that account, we should not
lose responsibility : imputation ceases only when there are
causes working not merely in the moment of action, but per
sistently — causes, not susceptible of our modification, which
make the average amplitude of clear and realized perception
and conception impossible.

For law fixes, or at least assumes, an average standard of
sanity, an average duty of self-possession and attention. It
calculates on every man in a way doing his duty. This is the
basis of responsibility as of obligation. Nor, when we say
that the individual is responsible to society, do we mean only
legal responsibility. Legal responsibility as a rule looks only
to the past : for the aim of law is to maintain or preserve the
established and attained order of things. For law is mainly
the instrument and guarantee of order and security : it is little
concerned with progress, and has its interest in the conserva
tion of the past. Law does not anticipate and lay down lines
for future development, but rather fortifies what has been
achieved against the risks of innovation. But moral responsi
bility looks upon the order of things not merely as fixed but
as progressive; it treats man as a member of a progressive
system, and as having duties other than the mere maintenance
of the past.

It is thus assumed that every man has a sort of public
interest— a conception of a good common to him with a social
body : that he regards his action as entering into and forming

in] RESPONSIBILITY 307

part of a system or realm of conduct, and as not remaining
isolated and ineffectual amid a foreign mass of other actions.
In consequence of such a postulate, a man is bound to know
the law — so far as the law is an expression, made public, of
those conditions and relations under which his acts must
adapt themselves to the general body of action. There are
cases where ignorance of the law does excuse ; but in general
it is assumed that a man, as a £<3o/' TroAmKoV, recognizes him
self as a perfect self only in his relations with his community,
and is aware of the recognized and published conditions of his
partnership. Similarly, a man is presumed cognizant of the
general notions of morality current in his place and time. In
all of these points it is taken for granted that the individual
lives consciously the common life, participates in the common
ideas, and knows what is definitely and generally expected of
him. These common obligations or expectations he is bound
to fulfil, answer to, and satisfy.

He is also expected to have a tolerable idea of a common
system of things into which his action enters : a capacity of
knowing the nature and consequences of acts, the general
rules and probabilities of sequence in events. It is from
this point of view that a man is held responsible for the
consequences of his acts, and that these consequences enter
into our estimate of his moral character. But the con
sequences which are thus taken into account are the normal,
natural, and necessary consequences — the outward utterance
of the inward intention. But a man is not responsible merely
for the consequences of his acts which he intended : he is
responsible no less for those which with ordinary foresight he
could have known to follow inevitably from them. This ex
tension of responsibility will be variously measured in different
cases. But undoubtedly there is a culpable negligence,
and a minimum of attention to facts and conditions is
presumed from every citizen.

Similarly a man is presumed to be capable of some amount

X '2,

308 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m

of self-control. He is credited with the power of attending
to general principles of conduct and to distant motives, and
of comparing them calmly with immediate incitements. A
man must be able to control himself, just as he must know
the nature of his own acts. He must not lose sight of general
duties and considerations in the moment and under the
pressure of the momentary sentiment. His power of self-
control may be limited in two ways. He may be subjected
to compulsion by means of threats, or perhaps of bribes. But
compulsion of this sort does not remove responsibility : it
forms no excuse for crime, though it may be admissible as
a ground for mitigating the punishment. The only compulsion
in question is that which destroys freedom and responsibility.
Such compulsion is physical constraint, which properly speaking
leaves the doer no longer an agent, but only an instrument in
the hands of brute force. But in ordinary practice, com
pulsion is allowed to embrace motives which are exceeding
terrible and powerful — such as, in the words of Aristotle,
no man could withstand, or which exceed the measure of
human nature. There is a gradation, not fixed on any
principles, bat introduced on particular occasions, between
such constraints from external suasion as average self-mastery
is considered equal to resist, and those which tax to the
uttermost the most heroic virtue. Here, as in the question of
knowledge of act and circumstances, jurisprudence follows on
each occasion a vague tact, or popular sense of discrimination
— a common cuo-07/o-is rather than any definite rule or logical
principle.

But as there is a violence, an encroachment on the will
from without, which may culminate in actual violence, or
physical constraint by the force of others, so there is an
internal violence, which may culminate in a state of pure
passivity to the solicitations of any whim or fancy, without
power or wish to resist it. Such a state of insanity— of
idiocy, when the judgement is absent and reason or knowledge

m] RESPONSIBILITY 309

is impaired, or of mania or melancholy, when passion bl inds
the will and prevents the employment of reason is recog
nized as destroying responsibility no less than external
violence, or fraud or deception. The case is not so simple
with the lesser degrees, in which impulses cognate with
insanity are prevalent. Here it is obvious that, just as we do
not regard any threat as proof of practical compulsion because
it was successful, so we cannot hold every insane impulse to
be irresistible, merely because it is not resisted. And just as
with compulsion, persuasion, instigation, &c., we hold that
a man for practical purposes is not so free and responsible as
without them, but yet that he might resist them if he would;
so, in regard to the stimulation of appetites and instincts which
tend to carry towards unlawful action, we do not consider the
difficulty of overcoming them a reason for holding it not
possible to overcome them.

Rather the current view is loath to regard any one as not
in some measure a free agent. Practical law insists no doubt
that one must draw a line somewhere ; it cuts the Gordian
knot which it cannot untie. Law has to do with averages,
and makes rough assumptions, subject always to a certain
amount of modification and correction in applying them to any
case. But for all except those who are proved to belong to
another category, the law assumes their sanity and responsi
bility. And in so doing it does them honour : it credits them
with the possession of the common attributes of social
humanity. It assumes, that is, that they are not ' dumb
driven cattle/ but can always — it rests with them — become
'heroes in the strife.' It treats them as men — free and
responsible, self- controlled, self -legislative, persons — who are
their own masters, who have reduced their own impulses to
unity and subjection, and who have raised themselves to the
common or universal standard of their age and country. It
does not degrade them to the position of automata or
machines moved by forces of which they have no mastery,

3io ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in

which they are barely conscious, and even if conscious, are
powerless to alter.

But if the popular sentiment shrinks from degrading any
human being to the level of irresponsibility, it is otherwise
with the scientific inquirers of modern times. On the one
side, emphasis is laid on the preponderant influence exercised
by heredity. Each at his birth receives by descent from his
nearer or more remote parents a physiological endowment
with a corresponding temperament, proclivities, instincts,
which so far predetermine his conduct for him, and render his
responsibility for his actions a rapidly vanishing quantity.
On the other hand, it is alleged that the statistics of crime
prove, by their comparative uniformity through periods of
years, that criminality depends more upon the constitution
of the social environment in manners, morals, ideals, than
on that of the individual personality : who is thus freed
from a responsibility which is transferred to the shoulders
of the community.

According to a recent development of these theories, con
nected with the names of Cesare Lombroso l and Enrico Ferri
in Italy, and of Prof. Benedict of Vienna, and which are
fanatically adopted by some Russian writers, the criminal is
a distinct and hitherto unrecognized species of human being,
marked off by definite peculiarities both from the sane and
from the insane. According to Benedict, human beings fall
into four groups, which comprise, besides the mentally sane
and insane, the two classes of the degenerate and those who
are congenitally deficient in psychical calibre (neiir-asthenics).
There are thus found amongst us, partly from inherited
qualities and partly through the acquired effects of certain
modes of life, a large class of individuals who are beneath the
normal definition of human beings, whether that definition
be purely physiological, or moral, or aesthetic, or intellectual.
To beings so constituted the ordinary stimuli appeal with
1 L' Uomo delinquents.

in] RESPONSIBILITY 3n

little or no force. If their physiological force is under par,
they become skulkers from work, fond of vagabondage and
indolence. If their debility is moral and aesthetic, they are
unsusceptible to the voice of sympathy and beauty, of art and
nature, of duty and social ties. Intellectual feebleness is
shown in the inability to follow the links of a continued
argument beyond the first and simplest steps 1.

According to these writers crime is due to four main causes
or conditions. These are social circumstances, pathological
states of the agent, degeneration, and atavism. The first of
these may be afterwards considered. The others may now be
examined. No one is prepared to deny the influence of
heredity. It is an undoubted fact that peculiarities of parents
are reproduced in their children : that not merely are their
general characters physical and moral often repeated, but that
even apparently incidental and temporary conditions of the
progenitor are exhibited in effects on the progeny. Every
one can quote examples of famous parents with famous
children : of personal peculiarities which mark families
through several generations, of the frequent occurrence of
physical resemblances. And, in the next place, there is
a general agreement upon the interdependence of physical and
psychical characters. No one seriously believes nowadays,
if they ever did, that in the phenomenal world, the only
world of which there is science, the spiritual is not inseparably
conjoined with the corporeal. It is further admitted that
nowhere do we find the normal man or woman — the abstract
generic type without any specific modifications. If we define
man as the rational animal, we do not mean that he is never
unreasonable : and if we call him a social animal, we are
aware of a rooted instinct of independence and isolation
in him.

If heredity is a fact, so likewise is variation. If on the one
hand the progeny resemble the parents, on the other they tend
1 Of. Rev. des Deux Mondes, April, 1887 ; Unsere Zeit, Feb. 1888.

3i2 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m

to vary from them. Natural and artificial selection, the action
of circumstances and the operations of human purpose, tend to
alter the hereditary nature into new forms. And these forms
in certain cases tend again to reproduce themselves,, and again
to be subjected to the modifying agency of man and nature.
In some cases the acquired characters remain a permanent part
of the stock ; in others they last only for a few generations,
and then revert to the original stock ; in others they do not
descend by inheritance at all, but each individual has to
acquire them afresh.

These facts would seem enough to show that, though
heredity is a fact, it is premature to speak of a law or laws
of heredity. M. Ribot in his work on L' he redite psychology que
admits that it is indeed impossible to determine ' scientific
laws ' of heredity, but proceeds to lay down four ' empirical
laws/ as a convenient classification founded on experience.
These are as follows : ( i ) tendency of parents to bequeath
psychical characteristics; (2) preponderance tendency towards
inheritance from one parent; (3) tendency to resort to remote
ancestral type, atavism; (4) heredity exhibited at corre
sponding periods of life.

It is hardly necessary to say that such vague tendencies
can scarcely be called laws. There are laws in the same
inexact sense in which we speak of the ' laws of association of
ideas/ For a law in a proper sense, more is needed than
a mere discovery that one fact is sometimes, or generally, or
often, connected with another. We want to know the precise
conditions in the one which are influential upon the other —
the numerical evaluation of the amounts, ratios, &c.

Heredity has been admitted as a fact. Strictly speaking it
might be urged that it is only a theory or interpretation of
a fact. This fact is the occurrence in progeny of qualities and
characteristics similar to or identical with those exhibited by
their parents or ancestors, near or more remote. To say that
these qualities are inherited is to use metaphorical language

in] RESPONSIBILITY 3!3

borrowed from the sphere of law. But in the case of in
heritance strictly so called,, what is inherited is an existing
right, which has a continuous existence and can be passed on
from one person to another. In the case of heredity strictly so
called,, there is no such persisting- right, property or thing. It
is easy to say that the characteristics inherited are, while non-
apparent, in a state of latency, dormancy, or abeyance. But
these terms are only covers of ignorance, and convey no real
or positive meaning. A latent or dormant object is existent,
but inactive, concealed and asleep. But to say that the
characters in question are in any true sense existent, is to talk
the language of figure.

It is much the same here as in the case of memory and
recollection. The ordinary language of heredity is parallel to
the crude conception of ideas or images stored up in the mind
or brain and recalled from their latency into active conscious
ness. A little reflection shows that we can only in a meta
phorical way talk of the furniture of the mind, and regard
the mind as possessed of store-rooms and presence chambers.
And if we adopt the language of some scientific specula
tors, and speak of hereditary qualities as organic memory,
this transference is more interesting than really edifying.
We may, if wre please, indulge in a supposition that the
elements of our original constitution are a limited number of
elements, which, like the coloured pieces of glass in a kaleido
scope, present a succession of different forms as they revolve,
but occasionally in consequence of their small number recur at
intervals in the same form, or if they once assume a peculiarly
stable grouping, may for some time recur in almost identical
shape. At any rate, if the number of original elements in each
stock is limited, clearly the number of permutations is also
limited, and it may even be that one combination will, while
certain influences predominate, recur very frequently.

IY

DUTY

THERE are two judgements which according to our
changing moods we are inclined to make about our species.
At one time we are especially struck by the diversities which
part man from man and race from race. At another we are
apt to feel the influence of that touch of nature which makes
the whole world kin. Perhaps the abstract philosopher is too
ready to assume the permanent identity of human nature
everywhere, and the mere historian and naturalist too likely
to take every variety as a unique specimen. If this be
generally the case, it is also specially applicable to man as
a moral being.

First of all, it is clear that, in every period of history and
every sphere of life, man has a life to lead under circumstances
and conditions which are the same to all. Rich and poor,
learned and unlearned, have alike to traverse the path from
birth to the grave, alike to learn the terms of life, alike to
struggle with enemies and with circumstances, alike to win
friends and love, alike to learn some measure of wisdom and
character. Up to certain limits nature allows no exceptions to
her law : omnes eodem cogimur. It can hardly be said too
emphatically that in the deeper realities and the fundamental
problems of life, savage and civilized, king and peasant, have
nothing to envy each other. But on the other hand, if the
fundamental notes and harmonies of the tune are the same,
there is immense variation possible in the minor details,

DUTY 3I5

details too so numerous that in their succession and multi
plicity we often lose sight of the main movement, and
imagine we hear an unique performance. There are the
general differences of rich and poor, strong and weak, wise
and foolish, which entail corresponding intervals between
lives, as they show more rapid movement, more elaborate
detail, and more precise systematization, or the reverse. Even
length of years may seem to involve such additional wealth,
though in most cases it hardly affects the substantial value
of the life. Specific differences again of different posts and
offices in life, entail a variety in the qualities required to make
them exhibit in their special range a reflection of all that life
ought to be.

But there are other differences between human being-s.

&

Hitherto they have been considered as single beings, in
essentials the same, though differing in natural endowments,
and in the accumulated powers which these natural endow
ments have permitted them to acquire. But human beings
are not known to exist in this unqualified individuality.
Historically and really every human being is a member of
a group. That group may be a nation, a tribe, a family ;
it may also be an association with which the ties of kinship
have very little or nothing to do. But always — anomalies
like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island do not make an
exception — men and women are members of such a group.
And what is implied in being a member of such a group ?
Very much ; and that mainly because such membership is not
a mere matter of arbitrary choice, and is not a mere juxta
position of individuals, each of which remains as independent
and self-centred as before. What brings people together into
such groups is not their will, but their need ; ' their poverty,
and not their will consents.' The cause which combines
people in a society is not a matter of their choice; it is
an idea which confronts them more or less consciously as
essential to their welfare, as expressing their need and

3i6 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

demanding their service. People realize, not always equally
clearly, that there is a work waiting- to be done, a work
which they have to do, and which can only be done by con
joined effort. The world without them, the national world,
for example, of field and wood and river, is not cut up into
parts distinctly separated from one another : rather each
part is dovetailed into another, and all form a unity. There
is no absolute boundary line anywhere, if we inspect closely
and minutely : to a microscopic glance there are connecting-
links and transition lines to be detected everywhere : but
it is otherwise to a rough practical survey. For practical
purposes there are many demarcations apparent between parts
of nature — some of them no doubt arbitrary and artificial,
others however decidedly more natural and scientific. As an
instance take national boundaries. An absolute dividing line
might be said perhaps to exist in an impassable range of
mountains, in an innavigable water, in a trackless desert, or
a malarious swamp. But there are no such mountains, waters,
deserts, or swamps. Yet for practical purposes there are
many changes of geological formation which interpose
sufficient barriers. And a thousand other circumstances, some
physical, others dependent on history and tradition, combine
to magnify the obstructions of these geographical circum
stances, and to form national and political groups, in their
totality quite distinct from their neighbours. So it is in
other divisions. Each trading and industrial group tends at
its extreme to pass over into some other : every rank or order
in society fades away into others adjacent : every association
of believers in any creed tends to lose itself at its margin in
a class, who are hardly distinguishable from those who hold
the opposite creed. But for practical purposes the distinctions
hold good : the world is an aggregate of parties and societies,
in which individuals have their place and subsistence. In the
long run the whole inhabitants of the world form a unity of
will and purpose, just as the earth is one whole and its

iv] DUTY 3I?

differences sink into unimportance when we note how they all
pass at their limiting- verge into each other.

Such a vision of unity in the world — in the world visible
and material, and in the world human and moral — was
not, and could hardly be, clear in the early days of history.
More limited horizons, both material and spiritual, spanned
the survey of early humanity. Yet whatever was its range,
the collective world gave to the view of the single members
within it a power and a system which they could not otherwise
lay claim to. Built up into the compact unity, they shared in
the power, the interests, the joys, the sorrows of all the rest.
Their little souls — with tiny range and scanty powers, it may
be — were expanded and elevated by the partnership of others
in the group of higher genius and character : and these last
gained a fulcrum for their energies in the sense of solidarity,
the willing hearts and hands around them. So there grew up,
and always in some measure grows up, a common, a social,
a collective life; a spirit only realized by the energies of
individuals, and yet living on above and beyond them,
taken singly. It is in the light of that common life that we
look at and judge our own special lives. In the background
of our consciousness, dominating it though never coming
much into view, stands a collective life, a common enter
prise, a general achievement, in which our contribution
and effort takes its place and does its part. On such
a support and such an embracing unity we all singly fall
back, and in the light of it we form our plans, and carry
them out.

Such grouping also gives an ideal extension to our life.
Before we came into the world and after we leave it, that
world has no direct bearing upon us. But by means of those
who associate with us, and writh whose lives our own is bound
up, we find ourselves living in idea both in the past and the
future. The members of the family e. g. thus get a con
ception of life and work, which invests them with the burdens

318 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

and the pleasures of a vast brotherhood — a kindred which
ramifies out in many directions, both towards the generations
that have passed away and those which are to follow. And to
this ideal extension of the scope given to the individual
there are barely any limits assignable — except the limits
which practically arise because, as successive circles of
influence carry us further from the self, the vision grows
fainter and at length sinks exhausted. Still far beyond the
range of actual touch, historical sympathy sets the individual
amid a kindred of great names. Even in the barbarian tribe
the individual has set in his soul, embalmed in sweet
memories of old achievement, the heroes of his race, whose
acts he almost feels to be re-enacted in himself again. In
their strength his strength is as the strength of ten, because
his heart is the great heart of his race. And even in our
associations of to-day, half the secret of our life is hidden in
the social groups, to which we belong and from which we
draw our influences.

It is because and in so far as we live thus not for ourselves
but in the common life, the general work, of some portion of
the world, that we are moral beings. To be moral is to be
raised out of our selfish isolation. Purely and wholly isolated
indeed we cannot be. We are parts of the world and have
a share in the common activity, whether we will or not.
But it makes a great deal of difference how we enter upon
our inheritance and take our part in the community of toil
and pleasure. And it makes a great deal of difference what
community our lot and circumstances have cast us into. In
the ideal, as we have seen, each community, each gronp, dove
tails into another, and by degrees a federation of communities
would bind the inhabitants of the world into one great con
sentient realm of humanity. The real aspect is very different
from this : there is no such hierarchy or gradation, or harmony
of the different associations. They grow up at haphazard,
here and there, without plan, and without adaptation to each

iv] DUTY 3Ig

other : they necessarily fight against each other, as each sticks
persistently to its own aim, and ignores or thwarts the others.

Yet in each community there is some good ; each of them
is relatively and comparatively a moral influence. Even the
band of robbers and thieves nourishes within it some virtues.
Seen from the outside indeed, all seems dark and terrible.
But we must never judge by the outside alone. It would be
difficult to find any community in which all the influences
were hopelessly and utterly bad. And as Bret Harte is fond
of illustrating in his stories, not merely is there honour among
thieves, but there is love and self-sacrifice amongst the
degraded. As we penetrate into the heart of a society, we
find it different from its mere superficial character.

We have then no actual community which is all-embracing
either in place and time. Even our oldest societies, even our
national existence, or our ecclesiastical institutions, carry us
after all but a little way back into the history of the past.
We trace our national history back for a thousand years, but
long before we reach even the Conquest it has lost all close
connexion and touch with us. And so it is in the divergence
of associations throughout the world. Nowhere is there more
than a side of humanity represented. Nationality rises up
against nationality. And it hardly seems possible to hope
that it will ever be otherwise : nor if it were possible, does it
seem desirable. At times it seems as if national differences
were fading away : but probably the change, when it occurs,
is only a passing phase, a transient step on the way to
the formation of new groups. So long as the natural
diversities of soil, climate, and production exist, so long
probably there will be partitions of grouping amongst the
inhabitants ; and so long as human nature varies in indi
viduals, so long they will league themselves together in a
variety of disparate groups. But in and through each aspect
and branch of life there shines the faint light of an idea greater
than itself : each nation in its own conception has ennobled,

320 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

perfected, and rounded off the circle of its life : and through
its limited actuality it has given expression to an idea much
grander (because really infinite and eternal in its aspiration)
than its framework would let us suppose.

We turn to some of the great historical societies of the
world to illustrate how their moral idea is rooted in their
principle of community and takes a special form according to cir
cumstances. Let us begin with the people of Israel. There are
two things about that people which at once strike the stranger :
its Lawr and its God. In history there have been codes and
laws, ancient and modern : nowhere perhaps has a nation been
so wedded to its law, and that law so grand, as among the
Hebrews. The very life of the later Judaism is based upon
its law : a law not in the modern sense only, but a complete
guide of life, moral as well as political. And that law the
law of God — the God of the nation. Then, as never else
where, a community felt itself the especial favourite, and
therefore the more than ordinarily obliged subject of the
Lord of universal life. And that Lord was finally regarded
as commanding c to do justly and to love mercy'; 'to let
judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream ' • ' to set right the oppressor, judge the fatherless,
plead for the widow/ The good Jew therefore had his
undoubted temptations to national pride, because he was of the
chosen people, and to attachment of excessive importance to
the letter of the law ; and by these temptations he fell. But
in his idea he was greater than in his performance. He and
his nation was the ' servant of Jehovah/ the servant i. e. of
him whose revelation lay in the law of mercy, righteousness,
and truth. That is the truth which Judaism reached at its
point of highest development, and which it has handed down
for all like-minded in after ages. We have sneaking proverbs
amongst us, to the effect that Honesty is the best policy, and
that God helps those who help themselves. How much
grander the confidence of the Jew when he says, ' Thou hast

iv] DUTY

321

loved righteousness and hated wickedness : therefore God, thy
God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy
fellows/ For all humanity the Jew has expressed the faith
that the path of the just, the wise, the merciful, is the path
that shineth more and more unto the perfect day : that it is
the path traced by the stars in their courses, the law of the
world. Some say the moral law is only a human concern,
perhaps even a human and temporary convention. The Jews
had seen it in another light. There were days in their history
when they had thought their God concerned mainly with
incense and with offerings. They learned otherwise, as one of
their later teachers says : Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the
God of Israel, I spake not unto your fathers concerning burnt
offerings and sacrifices : but this thing I commandeth them,
saying, Hearken unto my voice, and I will be your God. . . .
Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord,
the temple of the Lord are these : but if ye throughly amend
your ways and your doings; if ye throughly execute judge
ment between a man and his neighbour, if ye oppress not the
stranger, the fatherless and the widow, . . . then will I cause
you to dwell in this place1.

Let us next turn to the Greeks. Here the circumstances
are altogether different. In Palestine, an isolated people,
hardly holding its own between the great powers of the
Euphrates and the Nile, a little enclave in the desert of Syria,
clings firmly to its national unity and its national God, and
sees itself a royal nation, with a sacred law : and when it
sinks from its height, still clings to its legal obedience, still
maintains its isolated place. In Greece, a people open to
influences from all hands, and spreading in all directions into
the adjacent lands : a catholic and versatile race, but a race
which had broken up into scattered communities, and which
had advanced beyond the patriarchal into the industrial and
civic age. Here the characteristic form of society is based on

1 Jer. vii. 4-6, 22.

322 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

the existence of an aristocratic order, a class of organizers and
rulers, removed from the necessity of daily toil in all its
severity, and yet not far enough removed to be made idle
and luxurious. They are just so far above want as to be
released from its terrors, and their minds are still free and
vigorous., open to all the curiosity of the child, eager to under
stand and ready to enjoy. In the age of Greek history which
gave rise to this ideal the Athenian could boast : <£<AoKa-
\ovfji€v p.€T €VT€\€ias. To us at the present day art is a costly
thing. "We pay our best painters paltry sums : and when
they are gone, we lavish thousands on the picture-dealers,
professional and amateur, who have speculated on their works.
The great artist of Greek antiquity found his customer in the
community : but it was a customer who worked wTith him,
and with whom he was in sympathy.

What governed the member of such an aristocratic class in
his conduct ? The idea of his class, no doubt, its opinions,
and judgements. But who were that aristocracy ? Not, as
in modern times, a select few, far beyond the common level,
nor a crowd of rich, possessed of something far exceeding
the common means. They were a great body of citizens, of
various grades, but not separated by the great gulfs of modern
society, members of some town, small as judged by modern
standards. Theirs was a select opinion, unquestionably, but
not so select as to be strikingly narrow. It was freed from
a depressing utilitarianism, one which is careful about imme
diate and vulgar utilities : and could give itself up to those
higher and wider utilities, which are not of the moment, but
for ever. Hence the standard was the beautiful. The
' beautiful ' means to the Greek a great deal more than it
does to us : more of an ideal and less of a mere sensuous
quality. Of all the powers which can act upon a people to
inspire morality perhaps the yoke of this is the lightest. And
yet even here the standard is not purely subjective. The idea
of beauty grows up in the consciousness of the community

iv] DUTY

323

and under the stimulus of an environment. But it is as it
were in a region above the law, not something required, but
something freely given for the sake of the thing's own grace.
And so, in the days of Athenian greatness, the spirit which
animated men to do great deeds was not sense of gratitude to
the state, so much as a desire to keep up the consciousness of
high and noble achievement. The word was virtue rather
than duty. People did not realize that to do all they could
do was after all only what was required : they aimed at dis
tinguishing themselves by adding some new glory to their
common mother, by raising higher the name of the common
wealth. They fancied themselves glorified in and through
their country, which did not stand as a sovereign over them,
but as the expression of their best activity and to be carried
further by fresh energy. Their loyalty is tvvoia : not devotion,
but good will : and their ideal of a community is one where
all are free and equal, and where to rule and to be ruled are
always alternating.

Turn to another epoch of the world, the Middle Ages,
when out of a general disturbance of relations order is slowly
establishing itself in the world. Countries that had gained
some measure of industrial and intellectual civilization, but
had failed to organize themselves otherwise than for purposes
of taxation, are overrun, and, as the phrase is, conquered by
tribes of semi-barbarians headed by some chief. The chief,
wjio merely owes his authority to his warlike supremacy and
his control over those who have banded under him so as to
win power and substance, is gradually turned into a monarch,
and his chieftains or captains into so many rulers of provinces.
It takes a long time before the mere warrior learns that he
has other duties than those of plundering strangers and
enriching himself. What violence has gained can only be
maintained by further violence. Hence the old feudal barons
and their men in the tenth and eleventh century are brutal
and barbarous : they live in a world full of strife, treachery,

y 2

324 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

cruelty, and they flourish by their fitness in these arts. But
it was only an uncomfortable sort of survival after all : the
conqueror was miserable in his conquest. And alongside of
him there was an order protesting against murder, against
bloodshed — at first even against soldiering in every shape.
But the church, gradually departing from this strictness,
which Augustine had maintained, had come to express a
toleration of war, if war was just. Partly through Chris
tian teaching, partly through the common protest for mercy
and gentleness, which cannot long be altogether absent
where human hearts beat, a change had come over the view
of the soldier's work. Chivalry appeared as the fair flower
and spirit of feudalism. The latter had been hereditary:
knighthood could only be acquired by steps of probation and
showing one's self worthy of the post. How it first grew up
one cannot tell. ' Elle naquit d'elle-meme/ says one author.
Or like the Romance order of architecture, ' elle est nee
partout a la fois, et a etc en meme temps I'effet naturel des
memes aspirations et des memes besoms. ' It was founded on
the German usage of pledged allegiance to a leader, but it sub
stituted allegiance to a moral ideal. And it appears as a full-
grown institution in the Chanson de lioland (1066-1095?),
i.e. it is always more of an ideal than an institution properly
so called. It was the sacrament, baptism, consecration of the
warrior. He was still a soldier, but his 'sauvagerie' had
become ' prouesse ' (' nul chevalier sans prouesse '), and he
had added < courtoisie/ The knight of the crusading epoch
was no doubt bound, first of all, to fulfil the divine law
('essamplir la loi Dieu'): he was presumed to be loyal to
the Christian faith and to the Church: and in his special duty
of courage, he was expected to let the unbelieving Saracen
feel the weight of his arm.

One of the greatest defects noticeable in certain philo
sophers' books on Morals is that they confound the duties
(devoirs) with the virtues, or that they give names of virtues

iv] DUTY 325

to simple duties : so that though, properly speaking, there is
only one virtue, the love of order, they produce an infinity of
them. This puts confusion everywhere, and so embarrasses
the science of ethics that it is hard enough to see clearly
what one ought to do to be a good man (homme de bien).

It is evident that virtue ought to render its possessor
virtuous : and yet a man may discharge his duties, may do
with ease acts of humility, of generosity, of liberality, without
having any of the virtues. The disposition to discharge this
or that duty is not properly speaking virtue without the love
of order. When a person discharges his duties, he is virtuous
in men's eyes. But a man is not always such as he appears :
and he who never fails in the outward duties of friendship,
except when the order, which alone is our inviolable law,
prevents him, though he may sometimes appear a faithless
friend, is truer and more faithful, or at least more virtuous
and more amiable, than those excited friends who sacrifice to
their friend's passions their relatives, their life, and their
everlasting salvation.

Virtue then ought not to be confounded with duties, on
account of the conformity of names. That deceives men.
Some of them imagine they follow virtue, though they only
follow the natural inclination (penchant) they have to perform
certain duties : and as it is by no means reason which guides
them, they are actually vicious to excess, when they suppose
themselves heroes in virtue.

Malebranche, when he thus writes in his Trait e de Morale
(1684), is instructive both by his approach to Kant in doctrine
and his divergence in terminology. Though he is barely consis
tent in his use of terms, and sometimes himself interchanges
the duties and the virtues, his main contention is that duty
is the mere act — what falls in the eyes of men — the visible
conformity to requirement, which may be done for any
motive, and is mostly done in response to our inclinations,
our humours, our imagination. It is only when these

326 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

outward acts are done through the promptings of the ' love of
order/ of that e immutable order/ the 'inviolable law of all
intelligences and of God himself/ a willing subjection to the
universal system of reasonable truth. (For to be animated
by the love of order is to be guided by reason.) But as it
needs a e very grievous sort of labour ' to be guided by reason,
men renounce its direction, and abandon themselves to the
easier direction of imagination, to vague and confused ideas,
rather than make the effort to get clear and distinct ones.

Examples of duty and of dutiful conduct may be found in
every sphere of life. But for some purposes one may see
what duty involves, what the sense of duty can prompt and
how it may mislead, if one takes a case conspicuously set
forth before all men. A convenient hypothesis reigns among
many of us who are not kings that they are given or have
been given to take duty lightly : that their life is one of
pleasure and pleasure only. A common ignorance and a
commoner envy lead us to look at the high and mighty ones
of the earth with unfair eyes. We try them by a sterner
standard than common men. Our feeble imagination enters
but slightly into their difficulties and dangers. We expect
them to be made of harder stuff than ordinary, and we allow
nothing for extraordinary temptations. In modern times
when so many direct rivals of kings exist in the shape of the
vast army of the uncrowned king's of journalism, monarchy
fares but badly in the balance of public opinion. This self-
complacency by which we thank our stars that we are not
even as these princes is a little Pharisaical. Let us see how
once on a time a king found his inspiring principle in the sense
of duty.

If we were to call Frederick the Great, king of Prussia,
a hero, some people might object against his right to the
name. To hear them, the term is only applicable to an
ideal, a blameless king. Not so was the word used : not so
ought it to be used. A hero is far from being a perfect man.

iv] DUTY 327

He is a man who in some one or more aspects of conduct
rises above the average level, and resists fears or temptations
which ordinarily are victorious. A single gallant act may
justify the name, even though other weakness come to cast
a shade over the glory. So we may speak of Frederick as
a hero, and not the least of them, if also not rising to the
utmost heights of heroism. He had fallen, we may say, on
an unpicturesque age, a humdrum and commonplace time.
Yet for that reason he may the better serve as a model for
common imitation. He represents upon the throne the general
tendency of the eighteenth century : the mixture of science
with utility, the reduction of science to human enlightenment
for bettering and beautifying life. It is the spirit of Lord
Bacon's philosophy : that knowledge and art should justify
themselves by ameliorating the estate of man. With Frederick
that philosophy ascended the throne.

In 1739, the year before he became king, he had finished
his Anti-Macchiavel (which appeared in 1740 anonymously).
It professes to be a criticism of the Prince of Macchiavelli.
The great Italian who wrote it spoke the language of an age
when treachery was universal and tyranny and falsehood
had corrupted all. But he spoke it with the view that, in the
aim of reuniting Italy into one state, and casting forth the
strangers who preyed upon it, no terms should be used and no
quarter should be given. It was the desperate device of
a patriot who, when his country's interest seems to demand
it, calls out that no compact, no right, no duty, shall stand
in the way of realizing his aspirations for independence. The
cry is a mistaken one, but one can at least sympathize with
the end, and pity those whose desperation seems to justify
to them such means. But Macchiavellism came to mean
something else. It came to mean that a government, in order
to preserve itself against internal and external enemies, need
be held back by no claims of right or principles of duty. In
the holy duty of asserting legitimate authority of sovereigns

328 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

the subjects were to be treated by the reason of state, i. e.
cajoled, deceived, and if need be imprisoned. Macchiavellism
was another name for political Jesuitry.

Frederick had grown up under two influences, which com
bined to mould him into a man unlike the average sovereign
of his time. On the one hand he had been a scholar of the
philosophy and literature of his age : he had learned to admire
Wolff, and was devoted to Voltaire. From the former he
learned the principles of liberal and reasonable morals and
politics : from the latter a wide humanitarian culture.
Wolff taught him to reason the principles of conduct :
Voltaire taught him to rise superior to the narrownesses of
superstitious religion. He gathered, in short, the ideas of the
reforming and liberal thinkers of his time, both in their
constructive moderation and in their critical flippancy. And
for a while it seemed as if he were going to lose himself in
the life of a dilettante and amateur in literature. But he
had grown up under another rule which, though he spurned
it at the time, left profound traces. His father was
intellectually of little breadth of view, liable to fall into
pedantry and bigotry ; but under these excesses there were
concealed the sterling qualities of punctuality, dutifulness,
willing service to the country he ruled. And one is glad to
know that Frederick Wilhelm before he died was known by
his son to be a true-hearted father to his people, doing his
duty to the full measure of his knowledge, even if that know
ledge itself was small.

Frederick, so influenced, was not likely to accept the
ordinary Macchiavellism. He was indeed no believer in the
virtue of either kings or common men. ' Le gros de notre
espece est sot et mediant. Tout homme a une bete feroce en
soi/ The human species when it is left to itself is brutal,
ferocious, and barbarous. And what men in general are,
sovereign princes exhibit in a more conspicuous way. Between
man and man, in short, there are no hereditary distinctions.

iv] DUTY 329

' Everything/ he says,, ' would be lost in a state, i£ birth were
to carry the day over merit.' ' Le prince doit etre sans cesse
attentif a ne distinguer que le merite personnel, et a ne
temoigner que du mepris pour 1'opulence sans moeurs et sans
vertus/ ' Birth is only a chimera, if it is not sustained by
merit/ ' Les hommes, ce me semble, sont tous d'une race
egalement ancienne.' He protests therefore against the view
common amongst his contemporaries, that a ' king's subjects
are only meant to be the ministers and instruments of his
ill-regulated passions/

A prince, on the contrary, should realize that ' ce rang dont
ils sont si jaloux (leur elevation] n'est que 1'ouvrage des
peuples/ Hence the sovereign is strictly the representative
of the state : he and his peoples form only a single body.
Far from being the absolute master of the peoples under his
dominion, he is only ' le premier domestique/ A sovereign
prince 'est le premier serviteur et le premier magistrat de
Fetat '• — ' obliged to act with probity, with wisdom, and with
entire disinterestedness, as if at each moment he ought to
give account of his administration/ Thus the true glory
of the rulers consists ' a remplir les devoirs de leurs charges, et
a repondre en tout a Pintention de ceux qui les ont revetu
de leur pouvoir, et de qui ils tiennent la grandeur supreme V

The general maxim of government is this : ' La base de ces
systemes (de lois, politique, &c.) doit toujours etre relative au
plus grand bien de la societe/ The sovereign thus becomes
a far-seeing and kindly householder. He must direct his
conduct by a prudent estimate of the common need. ' Tout
souverain attache au bien public est oblige de se pourvoir de
magasins abondamment pourvus, pour suppleer a la mauvaise
recolte et pour prevenir la famine/ He will have specially to
realize to himself the needs and difficulties of the poor. ' Le
souverain doit se souvenir de Fetat du pauvre peuple,' *se
mettre a la place d'un paysan et d'un manufacturier, et se

1 Consider, s. le corps polit. de I'Euvope.

33o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

dire alors, si j'etais ne dans la classe dont les bras font le
capital, que desirerais-je du souverain ? '

In his own view he was ' born for the arts/ and it was, as
he once puts it, chance which decreed that a philosopher
should sway the sceptre. From the battlefield he yearns for
the time when he can reason with his friends ' sur le vide
et sur la nullite de toutes les choses de cette vie/ But in the
true spirit of the Stoic, he corrects himself: 'II faut prendre
Fesprit de son etat/ For, as the Stoics had long ago recog
nized, it was not every day, if it was anywhere short of the
ideal world, that the sage could perform a Karop0a>/ma,
a thoroughly right and successful action, a deed of perfect
virtue. More essential was it that he should know how to
deal with ra KaOijKovra, i. e. with the requirements of his post
and situation, as they severally came upon him in life and
demanded his energy. And Frederick feels that he is born
a prince, and is only anxious to realize all the requirements
of the post. Thus though he confesses to the Electress of
Saxony that, if the choice had been his, he would have pre
ferred the quietude of private rank, the remark is only one of
those imaginations of the great may-be. His real conviction
is that 'Fliomme n'est pas fait pour etre oisif : il faut qu'il
s'occupe a quelque chose, et qu'il ait toujours pour but le bien
de la societe/ A good citizen is a man who makes it his
inviolable law to be as useful as is in his power to the society
of which he is a member : and as a type of the citizen who
does his duty in the narrow circumstances of an artisan, the
king depicts his shoemaker Heinhart.

On what principles does the king found this morality ? Not
on what is ordinarily called religion. * L/amour de nous-
memes, Thumanite, la nature enfin, nous retient et nous
retiendra plus que la religion/ Of religion his view is that
it consists of two parts, a superstitious and fabulous element,
and, on the other hand, a moral creed necessary for the
maintenance of society. Of the former he is contemptuous,

iv] DUTY

331

he sees in it little better than falsehood and deceit ; but he
is hardly prepared to admit that all orders of society can
dispense with the necessity of such an admixture. It is
otherwise with himself and the selecter souls who have got
enlightenment. For, according to Frederick, the interests of
morality can be benefited only by the spread of sound
knowledge. ' Le meme esprit qui donne le gout des sciences
porte ceux qui Font a remplir exactemeiit le devoir/

The first principle of all action, he says after the Stoics, is
self-interest. But it is the special province of education to
give a true and enlightened view of self-interest. Always ' la
plus grande et essentielle partie de ^education est celle des
mo3urs/ But whereas to the great mass this teaching is by
precept or catechism, by example, and above all by the inter
mingling sanctions of religion, in the enlightened mind the
teaching must be a fuller revelation of the intimate ties
which bind things together. How individual and general
interest combine Frederick does not clearly explain. They
act reciprocally : ' La societe doit faire notre bien, et nous
devons travailler reciproquement a son avantage/ In his
letters against the political indifference of the Epicurean he
lays it down that to the country which has done for him
everything he owes a thorough and absolute gratitude. Sains
piM'ica is his supremo, lex. Whatever his country needs he will
cheerfully yield : if its interest bid him renounce a treaty with
another nation, then that renunciation will be made. His
principle of duty he professes is much the same as that of the
gospels. ' Ne faites aux autres/ he says in 1776 in a letter to
the Electress of Saxony, ' que ce que vous voulez qu'ils vous
f assent: ce principe renferme toute la vertu et les devoirs de
rhomme envers la societe ou il est place/ It is in short the
principle of reciprocity, and, as it stands, it is in need of
some support from the idea of the. unity through which the
reciprocity is made possible.

For him then self-interest is identified with labour for the

332 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

benefit of the community. ' I have a people that I love/ he
says. ' I must bear the burden which lies upon me. I must
remain at my post/ We see that Frederick envisages
his ideal under the form of attachment to the State, as
the highest earthly realization of his conception. He has
a religion ; it is a pure theism : not very dogmatic or firm,
any more than are his views on the immortality of the soul,
or on the freedom of the will. On all of these points, which
in earlier years he had been so ready to discuss, his attitude is
rather that of an aspirant hope and craving for the ideal's
realization than that of a firm belief. He falls back therefore
on reasoning to justify his faith in virtue : but after all that
faith itself is its own best justification. The utility of virtue
is such a noble utility as does not admit of a single and ocular
demonstration : and only appeals to those who, as it is said,
'aiment la vertu pour Pamour d'elle-meme/ Hence in his
epistle to Keith (1751) he represents himself and his friend
as one of those who cherish a disinterested love of virtue :

<Le bion du genre humain, la vertu, nous anime ;
L'amour du devoir seul nous a fait fuir le crime :
Oui, finissons sans trouble et mourons sans regrets,
En laissant 1'univers comble de nos bienfaits.'

This sense of duty is his constant consolation. It is the gift,
he says, of philosophy which, as he put it (1760), was the
staff on which he stayed himself, his support in adversities.
In calmer times he aimed at combining the inclination to
be happy with the claims of duty. He would be at once
Stoic and Epicurean. ' Pour moi,' he writes to his sister
(Oct. 7, 1747), 'je suis heureusement desabuse de cette passion
(ambition); j'ai cuve le filtre qu'elle m/avoit donne, et je ne
songe qu^a ecouler d'une fa^-on tranquille les jours que le ciel
me depart, de profiter du plaisir sans en abuser, de faire tout
le bien que je puis, et d'abandonner Fen-cur, Fastuce, et la
vanite a ceux qui en veulent etre les dupes/ But in the
darker days of the Seven Years' War he falls back on the faith

iv] DUTY 333

in duty. Thus he writes to Voltaire (July, 1759), l J'aime
& etre heureux autant que qui que ce soit. . . . Quoique je
desire tous ces biens, je ne veux cependant pas les acheter par
les bassesses et les infamies. La philosophic nous apprend
a faire notre devoir, a servir fidelement notre patrie, a lui
sacrifier tout notre etre/ As he had said on his accession,
' «Fai cru que depuis la perte de mon pere je me devais entiere-
ment a la patrie/ so he writes to d'Argens (1760), 'vous
devriez savoir qu'il n'est pas necessaire que je vive, mais bien
que je fasse mon devoir/ And again (1768), ' il faut que mon
corps et mon esprit se plient a leur devoir. Faire le bien —
c'est un devoir que tout homme doit remplir selon ses moyens/
So (in 1759), ' je vais mon chemin : je ne fais rieii centre la
voix interieure de ma conscience/ It is not necessary that
I live : but quite necessary that I do my duty.

Thus in January,, 1757, he left instructions that, if he was
captured by the enemy, not the least account was to be taken
of his person, or any attention be paid to what he might
write under imprisonment. So in the liaisons de ma Conduite
Militaire, ' I have held it my duty to render account to the
state and posterity of my position and the grounds which
determined me. . . . When the question is about love to
country, I challenge the whole world for rival, and to these
sentiments I will stand fast to the last breath of my life/
Our life, said his testament (written 1/69), is a long passage
from birth to death : during this span of life it is man's chief
end to work for the weal of the community he belongs to.

The cardinal or ' essential trait of the moral consciousness is
the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling
or feelings/ says Mr. Spencer *, such subordination being of
course conscious, i.e. being what is called self-restraint. But
if it be a conscious relinquishment of personal for general good,
such moral self-control presents features which may be pro
duced by several external motives, by fear, (a) of a visible ruler;

1 Data of Ethics, 113.

334 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

(b) of the general opinion of society ; (c) of an invisible or
supernatural ruler. All of these sanctions of duty, the
political, social, and religious,, as they are usually called,
bring about results which are apparently identical with
those of the properly moral self-control, of the self-control
fully and strictly so called. According to Spencer, they are
at first co-extensive with and indistinguishable from moral
self-control: i.e. it is impossible for us to penetrate into the
inside of an action, and say definitely what principle prompted
it. Further, he adds, the socio-political and religious or
sacerdotal controls are preparatory to the moral, which evolves
under their shadow or protection, and only finally emerges,
after a course of social evolution, as an independent principle.
These non-moral controls of action, again, are essentially
coercive, i.e. they have joined with them the thought of
external coercion, and are based upon or refer to certain
extrinsic, incidental, or factitious consequences, generally evil
consequences. The dictates of moral self-restraint, on the con
trary, have a ' perceived rectitude/ or an ' essential propriety ' ;
they refer to the intrinsic effects of the acts in question.

Thus in the conception of duty or obligation the sense of
restraint or control has a double source. The one is a certain
coerciveness or compulsory quality, due to the extrinsic effects
of the socio-political and the sacerdoto-religious sanctions.
This element is obviously, thinks Mr. Spencer, of only
temporary value — a feeling due to transitory circumstances,
which will fade away, when these other restraints have done
their schoolmaster work, when the Law has prepared the
ground for the Gospel. The other element in self-control is
the superior authoritativeness of the representative or more
complex feelings, of the 'ideal' feelings, as compared with
the simple sensations and appetites. Those feelings which
are representative or ideal, which are concerned with indirect
rather than immediate effects, and with effects general rather
than with effects special, have on the whole, by their own

iv] DUTY 335

character, and still more by the influence of tradition, educa
tion and experience,, a preponderant authority over mere present
impulses or sensations referring" to immediate gratification.
But here too,, as moralization increases,, the sense of authority
diminishes : whereas originally we feel in our immediate pro-
pensions constrained, as VTT^KOOL or subjects of the ruling
(apX^v) reason or general feeling- ; as we grow more morally
self-restrained, the sense of restraint disappears in a o-^^coyta
or ofj.6voia between the two orders of feeling, so that they fall
naturally and normally into one harmonious tone or utterance.
In that ideal state of consummated morality, the essential
trait of the moral consciousness will itself disappear : there
will be no conscious control or subordination of feeling to
feeling— or, in commoner language, of passion to reason — but
the very possibility of discord will have been removed. Thus,
as we may conclude, the end or consummation of morality is
to be absorbed, to render itself unnecessary: at its moment
of perfection the antithesis in which it lived will disappear
and be merged in a complete unity.

The first point which calls for examination in this sketch
of moral progress is the commencement. The moral idea
appears (according to Spencer's account) at first in a sort of dis
guise, so mixed up with the company of the socio-political and
religioso-sacerdotal controls, that it is indistinguishable from,
and co-extensive with, them. Gradually it emerges from this
subjection into the place of an independent principle, only
however in the close to disappear and fade away in the efful
gence of the blessed life of the ideal or absolute social state :
a state 'so constituted that man's spontaneous activities are
congruous with the conditions imposed by the social environ
ment ' (p. 275), and that the remote pleasures have been made
in all their force immediate. Now that moral self-control has
in all ages been mixed up with external controls, is a fact
so palpable that perhaps none will dispute it. But when
we ask the relation between these various controls, and the

336 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

explanation of their authority, some divergence of opinion
may appear probable. Or, in more general language still, we
may ask, what is authority and how does it stand related to
coercion? The answer to these questions is that authority in
its proper and original sense does not imply compulsion and
constraint, but rather a priority of origination and superiority
of idea. Authority originally belongs to those whose voice
was foremost, whose thought was rapidest, whose energy
was most effective. The socio-political sanction is in its
origin the influence of the pioneer, the leader, the earlier and
abler. So only without factitious aids could it have esta
blished itself. In other words, it rested originally on identity,
on solidarity of view and interest between the ruler and the
ruled. 'Apx?? ig essentially authority of the pioneer or com-
mencer. But no less unquestionably and inevitably this
rightful sovereignty, this natural and normal apiaTOKparia,
takes on less pleasing characters : and it does so by the opera
tion of the family principle. The leader hands down to his
sons the superiority which he owed to nature and reason, as
a gift passing by inheritance. Then the mischief begins, when
the natural basis of authority is gradually replaced by mere
imposition and force of inertia. When authority rests upon
tradition — upon what was, but is not, or even when a judge
ment is accepted a second time merely because its author had
found acceptance before — then it rapidly passes into the false
position of an extrinsic director, an arbitrary and coercive
influence. That all authority degenerates into such a com
pulsory force, may with a certain propriety be admitted : but
no less it should be maintained that before it could become
degenerate, and as a necessary backbone even to support its
occasional and frequent acts of degenerate character, it must
possess a general acceptability of leadership, a strength
derived from its being the interpreter and spokesman of
a public sentiment. Before the king could impose a violent
restraint in arbitrary ways, he must have acquired the intelli-

iv] DUTY 337

gent confidence of the majority; and before the priestly
power could wield the superstitious instincts of a people in
crafty ways, it must have gained what authority it has by
the work of the natural instincts of the people themselves.
When Othello is charged by Brabantio with stealing his

daughter's affections by drugs, and charms, and conjurations

for how else could

'A maiden never bold,

Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself —

how could such a maid ' fall in love with what she feared to
look on'? — the accused succeeded in convincing his judges
that the only witchcraft he had used had owed all its efficacy
to the fact that that seeming-quiet maiden had subdued her
heart and consecrated her soul and fortunes to her lord the
Moor. So it is with the control of the visible ruler, the
invisible ruler, and the general social pressure : they are not
originally superimposed upon an unwilling people, but are the
objectification of tendencies and ideas inherent in that people.
It is the natural result of the way in which the mind regards
phenomena and interprets the sequence of cause and effect,,
in other words,, of the ruling ideas that it imports into its con
ception of natural processes — that a religious authority arises
in this world to represent the dicta of the invisible world.
The king and ruler is made such ultimately by the willing
suffrage of those who obey him, and ceremonies often keep up
a memory of the original process long after it has ceased to be
a reality.

Such is not Mr. Spencer's view of the philosophy of history
or of the law of sociological development. That process he
reads apparently as consisting in the preliminary existence
of a military to be followed by the dominance of an industrial
age. This view, which seems to repose largely on the super
ficial aspect of the change from mediaeval to modern Europe,,
can hardly stand a close inspection. It is a strange delusion,
i- z

338 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

fostered in part by the different form in which modern war
presents itself, and partly due to hasty inferences from the
exceptional circumstance of Great Britain. Industrialism and
military life are not separated in this gross fashion, any more
than egoistic and altruistic impulses. Far from being sepa
rated, they are constantly united in their development. The
industrial type of each is reflected in its military type, and
the latter reacts upon the former. The organization of
industry reappears in the organization for war, and the fact
that one is industrially engaged is no reason why one
should not also perform military functions. In a primitive
community all have certain industrial functions, even the
women and children : and similarly all are obliged to perform
their part in war. As civilization advances, some are excluded
from direct participation in industry, and the same applies to
the service of war. In the modern world both industry and
war are practised on more scientific principles : i. e. they are
more socialized, carried on by great companies, systematically
organized and not liable to the casual arid intermittent phases
they severally used to display.

It is possible no doubt to imagine that the modern world
should surrender its local patriotisms, its national prepossessions.
Instead of the inhabitants of a certain coast or valley seeking
to get the best market for their peculiar produce and trying
every means to oust their rivals from the supply of that
produce throughout the world, we may fancy to ourselves
a general federation of states, which should organize the trade
of the world in such a way that every district would have its
speciality of produce, and would receive in return for its con
tribution a proper and proportionate share in the other articles
making up the total production of the world. Thus inter
nationally the principle that each shall produce by labour
according to his faculties and shall receive for consumption
according to his wants, would be established, say, at first for
Europe. But such a consummation, not to mention that it

iv] DUTY 339

would only make the situation worse for externals, is some
thing- toward which we see no tendency ; to which, indeed,
the fierce recrudescence of nationalism within the last half-
century runs entirely counter. When every country of
Europe is wag-ing- an internecine industrial war through the
savage continents and the islands of the Pacific, it is a curious
thing to commend the age for the growing superiority of the
industrial over the military spirit. The modern form of
industry and trade gives a wider range to the weapons of war.
What we see, and are likely to see in the future, is a keener
phase of the struggle for existence between nations. No
doubt by the constitution of modern states, which has afforded
a certain sphere of comparative security, a rapid extension of
industry has been made possible : and the few states, or the
one which was able to take advantage of the situation thus
produced, have had a fine time of it for a little while. But
as the numbers of competitors have increased, the profit has
rapidly waned. Each nation is forced to discover rude and
unknown markets, where it may for a while extract an ex
travagant rate of profit. Its whole aim is to make immediate
gain, and in doing that it cares not one whit what may come
next after it has left the scene. The European commercial
world is doing on a grand scale what the Arab ivory and slave-
trader does in a more forcible way in Africa. He looks only
to immediate returns, and in an attempt to secure them he
wastes recklessly the materials of wealth. Every European
country is tending more to depend for the substantial
necessaries of life on the barbarous parts of the globe : and
retains its supremacy only by a certain control of the
mechanical arts and practical technology. But these are
easily transferable in this age of mechanism, and when
that transformation is accomplished, the countries of modern
Europe will find themselves face to face with a difficulty
which they have not previously encountered.

To return then to the views of Mr. Spencer with regard to

z 2

340 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv

the evanescence of duty, an idea which is due to the coercion
of political and religious authorities, and which tends to disap
pear with the advance of civilization, we may say that, as
he himself admits, it is not of the essence of morality, which
means free self-restraint or self-control. The mere coercion
of external order does not generate a moral act, but only an
act which in its outward aspects can hardly be distinguished
from it. The laws, as Aristotle said long ago, speak about
everything : they bid us do all the acts which are the character
istic performances of the good man in each department of life.
The visible, the invisible, and the indefinite (or mob) ruler
extend their voice and decree over all that a human being can
do. And the majority of the world, as we found Malebranche
saying, are apt to confine their view to these requirements.
Nor, if we look facts fairly in the face, have we any reason
to suppose that this coercion is becoming less and that the
individual is gradually accommodating himself to the environ
ment. It is true that in some places phenomena point in that
direction : but they are hardly such as make one long for the
ideal of society when the sense of legal and social compulsion
has ceased. Mr. Bryce has described what he calls the
1 fatalism of the multitude * : meaning thereby ' the loss of
resisting power, the diminished sense of personal responsibility
and of the duty to battle for one's opinions, which disposes
a minority and an individual to submit without the need of
a command, to spontaneously renounce its own view, and to
fall in with the view which the majority has expressed1/
That, however, is not what Mr. Spencer means. For beyond
this mere mechanical moulding of the individual as an un
resisting unit or member in the social mechanism, he directs
his view toward an ideal society, where each has become his
own government and supplies his own ruler. In such a case
obviously coercion is needless; each naturally and normally
does what is right and finds pleasure in it. But hardly any-

1 American Commonwealth, iii. 127.

iv] DUTY 34I

where are there obvious tendencies to realize this complete
independence of the righteous individual. Rather everywhere
the yoke of social and political and religious coercion seems to
continue, though it may occasionally change its aspect. Till
the possibility of crime has been eradicated from human
nature, we may spare our attention to the details of this
evolutionist utopia.

There is somewhat more to be said on the second point in
his doctrine of the evanescence of the sense of duty or
obligation, namely, his view as to authority of conscience,
the moral imperative of duty. Authority and obligation, as
Butler long ago maintained, naturally belong to the prin
ciple of reflection or conscience *. Judgement, direction,
superintendency is a constituent part of the idea of con
science 2. As a principle of reflection, it is manifestly superior
to a mere propension. So, according to Spencer, the repre
sentative, complex, and general feelings possess a superior
authoritativeness, as compared with simple sensations and
appetites. How they get this is not very clearly explained,
but he seems partly to claim acceptance for it as a self-
evident truth. Partly also he would accept Darwin's view,
that the sense of duty is caused by the felt contrast between
a higher social instinct or acquired character and a mere
natural and original instinct. But this is again to revert
to the explanation of authoritativeness from coercion or ex
ternal pressure. And in that direction there seems to be no
hint of any explanation of the word 'higher/ if that be
taken as something different from mightier : or of the idea
of authority as distinct from coercion — which after all means
only an application of strength or power. And, as Butler
remarks, there is an essential difference between mere power
or strength and authority : between superiority de jure and
de facto.

Now Spencer does appear to acknowledge an inherent or
1 Preface. 2 Ser. ii.

342 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

intrinsic superiority as an element in moral self-control^
which fact self-control he regards as the basis and essential
trait of morality. But he has a strangely hesitating way of
approaching the fact. ' The feelings have authorities/ he says,
( proportionate to the degree in which they are removed by
their complexity and ideality from simple sensations and
appetites/

HEDONISM

THE hedonist school lays down that the end of all action is
to attain pleasure, and, indeed, to get the maximum of pleasure
or of enjoyment. We profess, no doubt, it is said, to seek now
for this, and now for that object : for health, wealth, power,
knowledge, of ourselves and of others; but in reality the
secret aim, at the root of all this variety of professed goods, is
pleasure. For surely, it is urged, it is obvious that whatever
we do, we do because we believe it will afford us satisfaction :
and satisfaction is only another name for pleasure. Or, to
follow the language of James Mill : Desire is only another
name for ( idea of a pleasurable sensation/ It is this idea of
pleasure and nothing else which originally and really sets the
will in motion. By degrees, it must be owned, we get into
the habit of speaking as if we desired not pleasure, but the
things which bring the pleasure. But this is only a figure of
speech, which has grown upon us by association, but need not
deceive us.

Now in this there seems to be a nest of confusions. One of
them, which is comparatively simple and not equally obvious
in all languages, is the identification of will and pleasure. Td
est notreplaisir : the Latin placet and bene placltum are similar
instances. With it may be compared the use of the Greek
e8o£e and boy^a rrjs TroAecos to express not an intellectual
opinion, but an imperative resolution. The lesson to be drawn
from all such language is, that in real life the psychological

344 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

abstractions of quasi-independent faculties are not treated with
much respect. We may for our own purposes distinguish
between the intellectual, the emotional, and the volitional ;
but none of these exists really without some tincture of the
other. The human intellect is not a dry light, but suffused
with a strain of passion. The will has no real existence,
except as containing an intellectual conception. We have
allowed ourselves to be over-influenced by the ideal separa
tion of different faculties. Above all, the intellectual classes
—and they naturally are chiefly engaged with the present
problems— are apt to forget that books are not life and
reality, but only the reservoirs in which the materials of life
have been stored up, dried food, so to speak, or goods in tins.
They confound a vast and always increasing stock of words
and formulae with an actually realized enjoyment and posses
sion of ideas. A great deal of our scientific stores is, like the
works of art in our museum and galleries, in the shadowy
state of the ghosts in Hades which need to drink living blood
before they can communicate their message. The average in
tellectual, i. e. bookish, life breeds in those who come under it
a habit of treating words as we do the coinage ; never realizing
that in every coin are represented and embodied the labours
and the means of enjoyment of real human beings, that
ro'fuo-^a is only T/rraAAay/xa TTJS \peias. But the central con
fusion in the whole statement is the hypostatizing of pleasure.

• And that in two stages : first it is treated as xwpicrroV n, as
a something independent, existing per se : this is the fallacy
of the transcendental ist, who invests the forms of our thought

I and sensibility with an existence as things. Secondly, it is
treated as a series of sensible objects — TO. TroAAa ^5ea :
pleasures are spoken of as so many kinds or individuals :
this is the fallacy of the vulgar, who tend to identify
a quality or characteristic with the particular things
which ordinarily or habitually manifest that characteristic.
The victims of the first fallacy treat of Pleasure, with

v] HEDONISM

345

a capital P ; and if they do not, as they are very liable to do,
take the further step of personifying- their pleasure, they at any
rate fail to realize the essential relativity of the notion. By
that relativity is meant that pleasure is simply the sense of
a correspondence between the agent and his surroundings, or
the sense that a movement initiated by the organism has not
gone off at random, but has, as it were, returned and con
verged in the organism as its end. Pleasure is not another
thing beside life, but it is the sense of life, and in par
ticular, of life as a process of outgoing or differentiation,
immediately transforming itself into the obverse process of
in-going or redintegration. In health and vigour these two
processes are almost synchronous, and certainly inseparable :
the activity which is put forth is not spent on some ulterior
end, but immediately reverts into self, is at once apperceived
and realized in the self. At other times there is a long in
terval possibly between the forth-putting and the ingathering.
The distinction between the two cases is rendered by
Aristotle as that between tvtpyeia and yevco-is. The latter is
activity of which the end or fruition is outside itself : it is
work done under direction, and having its issue or result in the
future. It is not being, but a coming to be : it is aAAov eVexa.
Such is the life of business in its do-xoAia, plagued as it is
with the hope of an end or consummation yet to be reached.
It is the TrpaKTiKos /3tos, if 7r/)a£is is taken in its narrower
sense as negotium, the antithesis of o^oA??, as the action of
one who has set his aim, his goal, in the future. But in the
wider sense of 77pafi9, in which it is equivalent to tvtpyeia, the
activity is self-realization, fruition as well as action, not
merely Trpafts in the limited acceptation, but also 0ea>/na. It
was indeed a tendency of the Greeks, fostered by their political
and social condition, to find such tvepytia more especially in
cr^oA?/, and to identify it with Staycoy?}, that activity which is
so little of an effort that it is little beyond the tranquil easy
consciousness of life passing on, like the ceaseless rippling,

346 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

glittering, and whispering of a brook over its pebbly bed, or
like the tofaepov ye'Aa^a of the waves breaking gently on
a sunny shore. But whether we take Mpycia after the calmer
mood of the Greek, or the more energetic of the modern, it is
essentially not action which is, so to speak, commanded by
a power outside it, and directed to a foreign end, but action
self-initiated and self-enjoyed. If we may believe the writer
of the seventh book of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Platonic
school attempted to get from yeWis to htpyeia. by describing
the latter under the title of a yeWo-is <foe/A7ro8i(rros : an activity
which was free and self-contained, released from subjection,
and attaining its natural end. They added, however, that
the yeWts in question must be aitrfqn? : i. e. the activity
must be a felt activity, must be consciously apprehended as
free or self-realizing energy. This is a point to which
Aristotle himself returns in the tenth book. There we get
a sort of supplement and correction to the view of ev8*u/xoz>fo
given in the first book. Happiness had been there defined as
tvtpytLa ^vxys, and it might be said that if the activity is
psychic, it must be self-conscious activity. But this is
hardly correct for the standpoint of Aristotle whose whole
tendency (in accordance with what we may call the pre
vailingly objective character of Greek philosophy) is not to
regard happiness as consciousness, but rather as a function
of the self, a form of the mental life, a realization rather
than a possession, but without any special emphasis on the
purely subjective side. This subjective element, however,
comes out, though still very imperfectly, in the statement
that pleasure has special connexion with alo-Orjcris and TO
alo-dav6p.€i>ov} that it is tv rtj evepyeiq, but rather as a super
vening consummation (t-niyiyvo^tvov n reAos) than as a faculty
which can consummate : i. e. rather as a natural resultant
which action puts on to crown itself, than as a special power
which itself yields that consummation. It is the unbought
and unbuyable grace of life : the electric spark, as it were,

v] HEDONISM 347

which flashes out at the point where the outgoing- line of
action returns upon itself and is just completing- its redin
tegration with self : it is the consciousness that the object,
which is presented by natural causes, or which we have
ourselves produced by an act of will, is in harmony and co
operation with the subjective conditions and forces of life,
which reveal themselves in our voluntary agency.

It follows from this examination that pleasure is no sub
stantial or independent entity, no object per se : but, as the
Stoics called it, an eTriyewTjjjia, a sort of surplusage, like the
striking of the clock, which may keep equally good time
whether it strikes or not. Of course this does not mean that
pleasure is not a real or important element of consciousness.
As Aristotle long ago remarked, pleasure is the sign or
symptom of self-realization : the witness that an action is
not done for external motives, but that it is the exhibition of
a efis, i. e. of a faculty which has been made part of the
original self, has been in short acquired or made our own
second nature, if it was not our first. Pleasure, or as we may
now call it, satisfaction, means that we have attained our end :
it is not itself the end. The idea of pleasure, which Mill
speaks of — let alone the doubtful use of the word idea — means
the idea of ourselves pleased, i. e. of ourselves attaining the
object of our effort, the idea of ourselves satisfied, of ourselves
self-realized. Such an idea is not an invariable presence in
consciousness. In cases where the self-realization has its out
going and its incoming moment in immediate juxtaposition,
where indeed the one is at every instant becoming the other,
where action is pleasure, there is no previous idea of pleasure,
no anticipation of it in faint consciousness to compensate
us for the reality which is as yet absent. The statement,
indeed, that the idea of pleasure stimulates to action, is on
a par with its converse doctrine that it is present uneasiness
of desire which determines to voluntary action.

Deeper than pleasure and pain are the stimuli themselves,

348 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

the impulses, appetites, or natural propensities of human
nature. These are the various aspects in which the great
fact or process of life is partially and in detail represented.
That great fact or process may be described as a process of
metabole, with its two sides of anabole or katabole : or in
plainer language, life is the continuous ridge or acme of a
double process, which consists, on the one hand, in the assimi
lation of material or in the acquisition of matter to realize
its formative powers, and, on the other, in the rejection
and disintegration of the formed material as soon as the
process of formation is completed. Life, in short — and this
seems the essential thing to remember — is the process, and
not the product. It is not, as has sometimes been said, the
correspondence of inward changes to outward changes, or the
correspondence of a moving equilibrium within to another
without. It is the inferior half of a truth to say that life is
adaptation to the environment : rather where life is, the
environment is adapted and assimilated, employed in the
service and for the realization of formative energy, or, in
other words, to body forth that molecular movement up and
down in which life as a physical fact or process consists.

But life, more and more conspicuously in proportion to
the visible complexity of the organism which it inhabits, is
parted up into a number of partial processes of self-realiza
tion. These initial movements, which we call impulses and
appetites, are the primary details, the several exemplifications
of the great movement of life. With regard to the large
number of them, impulse and actualization go hand in hand,
with little gap or interval. The impulses which find vent in
exercise of most of the organs, such as those of sense, are
to some extent of this character. It is different with the
appetites strictly so called : and it is in problems connected
with them that ethics is strictly concerned. There the forth-
putting of energy has to be undertaken for a remote end.
\\ork, labour, in short becomes necessary to procure the

v] HEDONISM 349

means of satisfaction, to complete the circuit. And so we
are again confronted with the distinction between work and
play : the latter being activity which is immediately felt
and found to be at harmony with the self, and thus directly
pleasant, whereas the former does not immediately carry its
own fruition with it, and is therefore either neutral, or, if
contrasted with some possible direct pleasure, may become
decidedly painful.

As so regarded, the impulses fall into two classes; one,
in which the pleasure is normally immediate, the other, in
which the pleasure is only to be found at a greater or less
distance. On the one hand are the impulses craving imme
diate exercise, on the other the appetites of hunger and
thirst, which demand not so much exercise as satisfaction or
repletion. The former are tendencies to expend or explode
what has been acquired; they are processes of katabolism.
accompanied with liberation of energy. The latter are
tendencies to acquire and assimilate, to concentrate and
unify ; they are processes of anabolism, gathering up energy
and embodying it in structure. The two must go on simul
taneously, and the ideal of human life at this stage would
seem to be reached if the expenditure of energy from
muscle and nerve could be so arranged, that the individual
was able to appropriate the amount of material goods re
quisite for the maintenance of his own being and well-
being. It would be a legitimate development of this idea
if we were further to suppose that a social group might
be constituted, of such a magnitude and such elements,
that the parts of the total product, needed for the main
tenance of the whole group, should so be distributed amongst
the members as to make the work of each at once socially
useful and individually pleasant to the agent. Such was
the ideal of society formed by Fourier. But it is tolerably
evident that, although by wise arrangements something
might be secured much better than our existing society,

35o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

the realization of the conversion of all work into play
can only be treated as an ideal- the greatest possible approxi
mation to which, however, remains the duty of the social
reformer. No organization will ever make labour cease
to be trouble: but probably a great deal more might be
done by organization to make it a labour in which delight
is taken. It is no great curse to be obliged to gain one's
bread by the sweat of the flesh, or the toil of the brain :
but it is a curse when the sweat and the toil do not bring
the bread, or even when they bring it, not as a direct fruit
or remote result of the toil, but as a supervening some
thing, attached to it by a social mechanism of which the
recipient understands little, and for which he entertains little
faith. And to reverse this state of affairs is a problem which
cannot be solved by any reduction of hours of labour, but
which will require a training in the mechanism of the social
organism such as few have yet dreamt of.

But to return. Before pleasure emerged, impulses and
appetites had sought their way to actualization. They had
found it by natural channels, by the outlet of energy, i.e.
in those ways which opposed least resistance to its expendi
ture. Similarly the appetites had learned the matter required
for stilling their demands, learned it. no doubt, by a course of
irregular experiments. In the next stage, however, we see the
clearer emergence of the idea of pleasure as an element in
the business. Man thus passes from the stage of instinct to
the dominion of intelligence. He came into the world with
tendencies and impulses for which he is not responsible, with
a complicated living organism, which is ultimately a system
of opi^aL appearing one by one, and appearing first of all by
the action which they spontaneously initiate. That action
reveals to him his own nature, at least in its elements, in
partial or fragmentary aspects, as they occasionally occur.
And so he has offered to him at least a pathway of escape
from the immediate and utter subjection of action to impulse.

v] HEDONISM 351

So long1 as impulse, fortuitously appearing, spontaneously
works its way to realization, one is no more in control of it
than the savage is of the flood and the hurricane. But once
consciousness represents to reflection the whole range of
the spontaneous movement from the first dim uneasiness of
impulse to the final stage of satisfaction, and does this for
impulse after impulse and satisfaction after satisfaction, two
or three consequences are entailed. In the first place, the
idea of a satisfaction of impulse and appetite takes its place
as an initiative of movement. It is a misinterpretation of
this when James Mill defines desire as an ' idea of a pleasurable
sensation/ The misinterpretation consists in treating a ' plea
surable sensation ' as an independent object. Of a pleasurable
sensation as such, there can be and is no idea. What there is
and can be an idea of, is a definite kind of action, an indi
vidual phenomenon, which will give, as it is believed on
experience to have given, satisfaction. It is the idea of
a definite pleasure, meaning by that the idea of a definite
event, occurrence, or thing which was found pleasant. It is
not then an abstract pleasure, not even an abstractly pleasurable
sensation — i.e. a sensation which is pleasant and nothing
more — but an objective and definable fact, which has been
found to be a realization, a furthering and perfecting of some
one side of what we know as our self. The idea of a
pleasure means the idea of a pleased self, and that again
means no general or indefinite ego, but the real ego or per
sonality of a particular moment, generalized perhaps, but still
perfectly determinate and precise. Desire then is and is not
of pleasure. It is the desire of pleasure, if pleasure be under
stood to mean not a general something which is pleasure and
nothing else, but a specific object which by its correlation
with some aspect of the total organic being has acquired the
attribute ' pleasant.'

One more remark on the phrase ' idea of a pleasure ' as equiva
lent to a desire. This conception goes along with that manner

352 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

of psychology which was first made familiar by Hume, and
has since been reproduced by Mr. Spencer. That is the dis
tinction of mental facts or phenomena into two orders, a fainter
and a more vivid, not separated by any hard and fast line, but
still sufficiently apart to warrant us in regarding the distinction
as important. It is partly like the old Aristotelian distinction
between Mi-apis and evepyeia : partly like that between mole
cular and molar movements : between latent process and per
ceptible change. At a certain stage movement fails to be
detected by the unaided senses ; at a further stage it escapes
the notice of our most accurate instruments of research, while
it is still pursuable by our inference and logic to further
depths. So, according to the psychologist, our mental states
or exhibitions of mental (psychical) action have a variety of
grades, from their first grosser reality as actual impressions,
vivid sentiencies, to their finer and more imperceptible reality
as ideas, the distant echoes or images of these stronger exci
tations; and finally to the stage of apparent quiescence or
latency, the stage of what may be called by the somewhat
contradictory name ' unconscious idea/ or idea latent in con
sciousness. Such ideas, of satisfactions emerging by some
accident from their latency, find themselves occasionally re
inforced by the circumstances of the moment, when these all
point decidedly in one direction : and they are developed to
a still greater extent, when through innate want of energy
or absence of other external stimuli, the whole soul is allowed
to dwell and fasten on that single image. Such overmastering
impulses, due not to the idea of a pleasure, but to the idea of
an action with which satisfaction is imagined to be intimately
involved, are the natural experience of the untrained and
undisciplined young, of the barbarian in all societies, and
attain their worst exhibitions perhaps in the ill- disciplined
and ill-proportioned minds of those who by a sudden revolu
tion have gained imperial position. Of the first Napoleon, says
M. Taine : ' Chez lui,, aucune idee ne demeure speculative et

v] HEDONISM 353

pure : aucune n'est une simple copie du reel, ou un simple
tableau du possible : chacune est une secousse interne qui
spontanement et tout de suite tend a se transformer en acte.'
And Taine explains this absence of self-control, not merely by
the fact that the emperor was tout imagination, but by his early
upbringing in an island, where the administration of justice is
a farce, and where the public opinion bestows a frank admira
tion on well-laid ambuscades and successful acts of treachery.

But it is by this same faculty of guiding- his course by ideas
of pleasures that the voluptuary is generated. The voluptuary
seems to be a victim of reason and imagination. The animal
is comparatively safe because of his defective range of in
telligence. But the human being, at a very early stage of
civilization, or rather in very low levels of barbarism, soon
learns to misuse the motive power of ideas, and begins to seek
for pleasure over and above what comes in the normal and
average performance of function. Idleness and want of varied
interest are the great parents of intemperance, and the savage
is fully qualified in both respects. He knows nothing of the
discipline of labour, and nothing of the other ideal discipline
which gives a man ideal interests, public aims, social plans to
pursue. And what is true of the savage, is repeated in some
measure by the gangs of vagrants and tramps in modern
times.

A more dangerous development, however, judged by its
ultimate effects, is seen in the voluptuary proper. He is
generally, like the tramp and the beggar, a product of a highly
civilized society ; i. e. a society in which the construction of a
well- jointed and secure form of social institutions and the estab
lishment of a solid and safe property system have been carried
to their height without any corresponding growth of the sense of
moral solidarity, of public duty, of general human fraternity.
For such an one the regulative influence of normal work -has
been removed, and has not been replaced by any zeal for ideal
ends or common good. He becomes not a seeker for pleasur-

A a

354 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

able sensations in general, but a very close approach to that
creation of abstraction. Not pleasure in general, but the greatest
possible variety and multiplicity of pleasures is his aim. In the
pursuit of art, he is the dilettante who sips only the honey
that can be got from the selected flowers. In science, his
range is measured by what he finds interesting, what gratifies
his taste, or personal whim. But above all his motto is to
extract pleasure from as many sources as he may, to turn
everything if possible into a cause of pleasure, and, if that be
impossible, to surround himself as far as he can with a well-
arrayed system of materials, out of each of which as they
revolve around him he may get its quota of enjoyment.

That such an art of pleasure is altogether illegitimate it
would be wrong to say. Under the common name of volup
tuary hasty thought is apt to confound two persons altogether
different. Or we may say that there is a true and a false
Epicureanism. The false Epicureanism makes the acquisi
tion of versatility of pleasure-taste and the accumulation of
a stock of pleasure-means an aim in itself, or for the ultimate
enjoyment of the agent. But within proper limitations,
Epicureanism may present itself as the effort to make the
setting and framework of human life free from unnecessary
jar and fret, so as to leave the energies unimpaired for higher
and better work. We are told by Mr. Spencer that ' pleasure-
giving acts are life-sustaining acts/ and ' every pleasure
increases vitality,' and ' raises the tide of life.' Both of these
propositions, as Mr. Spencer well knows and subsequently
admits, are misleading, because we are not yet in that social
millennium, where actions are at once and simultaneously
completely right and completely pleasant. In the world as it
is, a great deal of readjustment is required before mankind
can trust the guidance of their emotions, or of their sensations l.
And this adjustment is not merely, as the author seems to
suppose, between mankind and the social state ; it is equally

1 Data of Ethics, p. 99.

v] HEDONISM 355

an adjustment needed in the organism of the individual man.
Except on the idea that the organism is a perfectly normal
one, exactly adjusted in every detail, the pleasure which
results from an action is no sure indication of the life-
sustaining or vitality-increasing qualities of the said pleasure.
We may almost go so far as to say that there is a pleasure
which is a sure symptom of imminent death : the satisfaction
which is felt when the morbid structure is so thoroughly
pervaded by disease that the sense of struggle and dispropor
tion vanishes in an ease which is the forerunner of collapse,
But in general we may say that, in an organism which is
liable to partial disruption of continuity of function, and
where each part in turn usurps the prerogative of the whole,
there may be a great variety of pleasures which, far from
attesting the health of the whole, only attest the private
convenience of one organ, and which, though they raise the
tide of life in a one-sided way, really do so at the cost of other
parts, and thus depress the general vitality. Such usurpations
of language which applies only to the ideal and normal man —
in whom every part performs its function in due subjection
to the common function, without any tendency to separation
or isolation of life — are utterly inappropriate and perilous
when applied as a guide to the more or less abnormal
creatures which the great mass of humanity are. Let us
keep ideals and normals in their place as standards of
perfection, and remember that each actual individual has
always a problem of his own which cannot be settled by
generalities.

We are on safer ground if we adhere to the negative pro
position that every pain is evidence of incongruity between
the part and the whole organism, and between the whole
organism and its circumstances of life. We may even say
that pleasure is evidence of a congruity somewhere, but
for practical purposes that proposition is of little value. It is
a poor consolation for one dying of some organic disease to

A a 2

356 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

know that at a certain point there will be such harmony
established between the diseased centre and its immediate
surrounding's that he will feel a great ease and calm. Nor,
again, when we are told that, if the actions are life-sustaining,
the pleasures which they bring with them will be life-sus
taining too,, do we learn anything of very much value as
a guide of life. If you are a normally constituted human
being in a normally constituted and thoroughly adapted society,
you may be pretty sure that your pleasures are all on the
side of normal and ideal existence : but only an irrational
optimism will treat that hypothetical idea or principle as
a presumption to be taken for granted in actual life.

And yet on the other side it is to be remembered that the
influence of pain and pleasure is not a simple or plain matter.
Here again facts force us to abandon the general lumping
of pleasures under one abstract category. To the popular
apprehension at any rate it would seem evident that some
pleasures enervate and others stimulate : that some pains
benumb and others fire with zeal. Mr. Spencer on one
occasion seeks to prove his point by pointing to the effect
of what he calls 'good spirits'* on work and play. It is
but a loose style of argument which can put ( good spirits '
as an equivalent for pleasure, or ' low spirits ' for pain. A
deal of mischief is done by this fancy for levelling away
all distinctions, so as to be able to point out pleasure here,
pleasure there, pleasure everywhere, and then get a simple,
uniform principle. In short, if a general law of duty is
complained of as giving but a poor light in difficulties of
moral detail, a general law of pleasure can hardly escape
a blame for the same fault.

So to return to our Epicurean with the good heart, in
bonam partem. He is one who has learnt that a great deal
of vice is due to the pains of misery : who has observed that
every irritation and vexation which befalls a human being
tends to remain in his inner consciousness ready to burst

v] HEDONISM 357

forth on the first available object, however innocent. There
are hundreds of troubles which are not of importance enough,
or are too much part of a portentous system, to be got rid
of by a bold act which takes up arms against them and
by opposing ends them. Pains that at once awake activity
to overcome them are not unmingled evils. The others,
which we dare not or cannot treat with these vigorous
reprisals, are the bane of life. The sufferer feels as if he
had a general grievance against the world and humanity,
sometimes even against God : and unable probably to charge
the offence on a specific cause, he discharges his irritation
on those who are nearest and ought to be dearest to him.
Some such evils come through the organization of society;
and the individual, feeling himself for the most part powerless
to remedy the mischief by direct action, is content with, as the
children say, passing it on, and probably with some interest
added to the principal burden. But other such irritations
come from causes less amenable to social agency : to the
effects of an overheated and ill-ventilated room, of an ill-
cooked and ill-compounded meal, of malarious locality, of
tasteless and aggravating furniture, of ill-pitched voices,
of misfitted articles of apparel, of discordant colours, and
so on. The Epicureanism which for itself and others seeks
to abolish the causes of these pains, is a noble Epicureanism.
No one need suppose that, when these are removed, the world
will be a paradise of lotus-eaters, where it is always afternoon.
When these curable evils are removed, there will be plenty
of real evils still, and as the eye is no longer pestered by the
mists which always accompany a fretful atmosphere, it will
see work to be done in directions hitherto unsurmised.
Before the brotherhoods who aspired to live a religious life
could settle down to their task, it behoved them to clear away
the thorns and briars, which less wise ascetics might have
kept in hand to torture themselves withal.

It follows then that though ethics must be concerned with

358 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

pleasures and pains,, the problem for it is, first, to determine
what are the right or true pleasures and pains, and secondly,
to consider the means by which these may also be the actual
pleasures and pains of the individual. Every activity, be
it bad or good, may have its pleasures : and according to
the general verdict of hedonist writers, the only distinction
between them is one of quantity, however variously in
detailed methods that quantity may be estimated. Now,
of an individual it might be true to say that in a deliberate
choice between two or more courses of action his choice is
due to a belief that the results, taken altogether, of the
action — i. e. the action taken in its full and entire range — will
give him more pleasure, or be more in accordance with and
afford more satisfaction to his whole nature, than those likely
to follow another course. But is this equivalent to the
doctrine of a pleasure-tariff or pleasure list ? Can a general
list of pleasures be drawn up, not confined to the estimates
of an individual subject, but dominating the tastes of a large
multitude ?

That such a list can to some extent be made out would
seem to be generally allowed: and if so, what implications
seem to be contained in it ? To answer this question we may
compare an analogous economic question. In the course of
trade we find that prices are not fixed by the will of isolated
individuals but by the chaffering and higgling of the market,
i.e. by a process of offer (hypothesis) corrected by other
offers, by tentative steps, which aim at arriving at the general
or common estimate put upon articles brought to the mart.
The ayopd, mart or guildhall, is the place of public and
common resort : it is the scene of the respublica, the ground
on which the KOIVUVLO. is actualized. The price is fixed by
a social act— an act not carried out artificially at one step,
but, after the manner of natural processes, by a series of
adjustments and readjustments. In some stages of society,
it is true, the price is settled by a direct act of the organs

v] HEDONISM 359

appointed by the sovereign people. But any difference in
method need not conceal the fundamental fact that the price
and the value of commodities is settled by the whole social
group, and settled by it not arbitrarily, but after comparison
of the place of the given article in the systematic aggregate
of social want. Price is fixed not by one man's demand and
by one man's supply, but by the total demand and total
supply in the social group to which they belong. It varies
therefore with the fluctuations in the total social system.

Somewhat similar is the tariff of pleasures. Each indivi
dual has no doubt a standard of his own in these matters.
Just as he has a stronger demand for certain commodities,
so he has a bias towards certain pleasures. But his enjoyment
of the latter, like his appropriation of the former, is not
a matter in which he alone is concerned. If we set aside
for the moment abnormal cases, we may say that all pleasures
have a social element, and that they cease to be real pleasures
except in so far as they are correlated to the consciousness of
other men. The pleasures of ambition, power, love, sensuality,
are complete only when they are responded to by the feelings
of others. The pleasure of each therefore depends upon the
social consciousness : i. e. upon the conception of life and work
held by the common group to which an individual belongs.
For that reason the quantity of pleasure in acts is measured
in any group by the amount in which the activity, to which
they are attached, is felt or believed to contribute towards the
production of the common well-being or general comfort. But
if we say common well-being, we mean well-being as deter
mined not by a formal or official creed, but by the intrinsic and
natural belief in the group and its members. We mean the
actual conception of happiness which pervades the group : the
governing ideal of TO ev £r\v : the more or less systematized
aggregate of actions and feelings which constitutes the contents
of the idea of life for that group. The happiness which is thus
put as a governing conception is again not a general or abstract

360 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

conception. It may be vague in parts— not sufficiently detailed
—but it is the strictly individualized and determinate conception
held by a particular group, epoch, and people. The concep
tion of EvScu/iozua implies, when fully wrought out, a hierarchy
of activities and enjoyments, a systematic conception of life.

It is built up, no doubt it may be said, of single pleasures,
and these pleasures of the individual. So, it may be said, the
total scientific conception of the facts of the world, alike in
its more popular and its more elaborate phase, rests upon
what are called single experiences, individual observations ; on
what we may call in the last resort mere passing sensations
of the individual. But, as Kant may probably be considered
once for all to have demonstrated, human consciousness is not
such a mere disjunct sequence in the single mind, nor such
a mere otiose co-existence of conceptions in several minds one
beside the other. It is true that Kant has mainly insisted on
the fact that ours is a systematizing consciousness : that just
as our alimentary system analyzes and builds up the mere
aggregate of elements contained in a piece of food into
a living organic fabric, so our intellectual and cognitive
system, in its two digestive apparatus, called respectively
sense and understanding, constructs the material of experience
into that formed and systematized experience, which in its
most formed and systematized degree we call knowledge or
science. But we may carry Kant's argument a step further.
Our consciousness is not merely a systematic organ in itself :
but it is an integral part in the constitution of the general or
common consciousness of humanity, in each of its various grades
of association, up to the very highest and most universal.

What is thus laid down implies that experience is a process
of continual self-correction : first (if we may distinguish and
treat separately what goes on pan passu), in the individual
consciousness, secondly, in the collective or co-operant conscious
ness, self-correction and self -adjustment. And that, because
every patch and item of experience, every so-called single

v] HEDONISM 361

observation, and mere sensation is for the human being
a self-extending-, self-asserting, and thus a self-universaling
fact. Every single perception is a possible infinity : not a
mere perception, but an apperception of itself, a self-appre
hension; and that means, that it always carries us a little
way, and sometimes a great way, beyond itself. The rudi
mentary idea, just because it arises in a self-consciousness,
has in it a little of the prophetic and anticipatory : it travels
a little way into the unknown, it is not merely its bare single
self, but is symbolic of a wider behind or beyond it. This
anticipatory tendency, to round off the part into a postulated
totality, to carry on the present moment into the future and
thence back to the past, is the rudimentary or essential nature
of human reason. It is the tendency to interpret the given,
i. e. to see it not merely as it stands, but in its meaning, in its
bearings, in its context and implications, in its generality.
To interpret nature and thus to anticipate her next word
is the fundamental function of man — the ground-function
through which both truth and falsehood alike become possible.
Error arises when the process of interpretation and anticipation
is abruptly or arbitrarily fore-closed at one step, or is carried
too far at one step without due caution. Truth, on the con
trary, can only be secured through a continual revision and
correction of the idea or interpretation in the light of fuller
data, which, put face to face with the already made accu
mulation in idea and interpretation, have to unite in furnish
ing out a fuller and more authentic symbolism.

Let us apply this to pleasures. There also we begin with
single experiences of individual souls, mere transient, isolated,
and momentary emergencies of pleasant feeling, i. e. occasional
perceptions that some act of our own, some circumstance about
us, is in harmony and response to the needs- of our organi
zation as a whole. But what is revealed to us of our
organization as a whole in consciousness is not much at first.
Yet we can certainly say that the mere felt feeling is never

362 rss.-n's AV MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

left wholly uncorrelated with a little range of possille feeling
around it : it makes us, as a pleasure, feel ourselves as pleased

it awakes the vacant idea of self and gives it a real content.

But the satisfaction which is awaked by an incipient idea of
self, or rather which awakes such an incipient idea, is an
interpretation : it has symbolized more than it actually is.
"What we call experience, meaning the succession of circum
stances that affect our lives and feeling's, conies to test such
interpretations, and to be itself tested : for each such expe
rience is itself to us interpreted, and will only be interpreted
well, when it is taken in connexion with the whole available con
text in our mind. Gradually there grows up a conception of
happiness which is strong enough to impose itself as a regula
tive on each aspirant to the title of pleasure.

But that strength especially comes to it because it is not
a mere isolated or individual idea, but is backed up by the
power of a social consciousness, which has fostered it and
brought it to maturity. And had the individual been reared
and had his consciousness developed under a simple single and
equal social influence, the domination of the social standard
over his individual feeling would have been supreme, and
monstrous in its autocracy. An illustration of what the
dominancy of the social conception of happiness is, is seen in
the manners, and — as in this natural stage the distinction
of manners and morals is at a minimum — in the morals of
savage races. There, we may say, the whole group is a toler
ably uniform and homogeneous mass, well isolated from sur
rounding and disturbing, i. e. variety-introducing influences.
Hence the influence of rojuos is despotic, and even in the private
consciousness there is apparently no sign of any rebellion or
assertion of the rights of the individual. And something
analogous is seen even at the present time in narrow self-con
tained groups, little islets of opinion which manage to maintain
their isolation in the general movement of currents to and fro.
The possibility of individual freedom, i. e. of the divergence

v] HEDONISM 363

between manners and morals, comes with the contending claims
of several groups, to all of which the individual belongs, though
without falling precisely under any : or it comes with the
appearance of divergences of sub-groups inside of the general
uniformity. Such sub-groups are probably never wholly
absent in any group, constituted of individuals so variable as
men, and in circumstances so different as the world affords.
But in some countries, e. g. in great expansive plains and small
secluded valleys, the uniformity often becomes oppressive.

Along with this variety of groups, within the radius of the
same general circle to which the individual belongs, there is
given room for variety in the social standards from which
the individual gets his rule. He is still overpowered by
social influences, but in the multiplicity of contending
masters there is an opening for freedom. That such freedom
should be complete it is necessary (i) that every aspect of
human nature should find strength and support in some social
institution, and none be left to languish in the merely indivi
dual consciousness : (2) that these various institutions should be
so co-ordinated and subordinated in an organized system that
none can claim more than its due share of the individual life, or
attempt to cancel the claims of other aspects. To secure this
latter condition is the business of the State, which seeks to
organize social institutions in such a way that it may be an
exact reproduction of the whole tendencies of the whole man
in their normal hierarchy and system. In such a State man is
free, really free, i. e. not liberated from the social yoke alto
gether, but liberated from its one-sided, fractional, and partial
tyrannies, which are what make the social yoke intolerable.
A false emancipation, on the contrary, is the withdrawal from
the yoke of society altogether, or the pretence of withdrawal,
which arbitrarily selects an agreeable environment, and leaves
the rest to look after itself.

Such is the perfect idea of human society, as it is secured
in what has been called the free and less appropriately the

364 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

democratic state. Man is essentially social : his whole develop
ment is accomplished through social influences. But these
influences,, if they took the form of the simple and uniform
pressure of a homogeneous environment on the individual,
would generate a heavy and retarding social tyranny. Even
when they part into a variety of influences, working through
their several institutions and associations on the individual,
they tend, when left to themselves, to affect him unequally
and irregularly. What happens is as follows. A variety of
different ideals presents itself to the acceptance of the indi
vidual. But they present themselves piecemeal and as it
were by accident : not co-ordinated with each other on any
plan, not referred to any higher principle. Life has become
a chaos, amid which the individual, with what resources he
may, is obliged to select some portion in which to work
out his own function, leaving the rest to their confusions.
In such a condition of affairs the political unity may exist
in name ; but in reality it is only one amongst a number
of contending principles of association, side by side with the
religious, the economic and the educational principles. The
true or reasonable State must be more than this. It must be
supreme visible organization of all principles of organization
whatever. With the invisible kingdom of art, science, religion,
it cannot, even if it would, deal : in the region of temporalities,
i.e. of materialized and tangible existence, the State is supreme
—not as a supervening domination, but as an indwelling
organization. With art, science, religion, as such, as spiritual
principles of human energy, the State has nothing directly to
do : but wherever they appear as organizations, wherever they
rise into materialized actions, there the State is present, not
as something alien and antagonistic, but as the whole organiza
tion controlling the eccentricity of the parts.

Such a State is an ideal, but it is the supreme ideal of the
visible development of humanity. Yet every State, so far
as it deserves that name, has the ideal aim. Each State is

v] HEDONISM 365

in its measure the idea, or it is nothing : in so far as it
seeks to afford to each of its members a common stock of
goods, out of which they can individually derive the strength
necessary for each, and yet seeks to present to each what he
specially wants, not indiscriminately in a great aggregate of
omnigenous goods, but in special organizations and institutions
accommodated as far as is possible to all the existing varieties
of human temperament and endowments. The State is thus
in the best sense a socialistic agency, a system in which each
finds his interest satisfied, in which each gains the appropriate
scope for his outward development. But it should be added,
while we are on this point, that the socialisting organization
has been created and must be maintained by the persistent
exercise of human function. The stock from which each takes
what he needs for his private use, he must at the same
moment replenish, and replenish with interest as well as
principal. It is a wide-spread and constantly recurring
fallacy that the State (TO KOLVOV) has an independent and
self-subsistent stock of resources upon which individuals can
draw at will. The fallacy was a natural one when the State
was not — when, as Plato says, it consisted of two antagonistic
states, the rich and the poor, one of which supposed that it
was solely entitled to draw on the civic bank, while the other
had the less pleasing duty of keeping it supplied. But such
an abnormal condition of affairs, when a community can
for ages live by plundering their neighbours and foreign
communities, or in which one class of the community makes
the honey which the other will consume, cannot be made the
basis of political theory, as distinct from the art of politics.
In the ideal or theoretical State the common stock only exists
in so far as the associated individuals produce year by year
and age by age more than they spend. The produce of
successful brigandage, whether in open war or in commercial
rivalry, cannot be permanently reckoned upon as sufficient to
compensate the absence of industrial habits of hand and head.

366 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

Pleasure then is socially determined, just because the self
is socially realized, i. e. realized by the help of a more or less
complex social organization. Pleasures and pains, so far as
ethics is concerned with them, are social pleasures and pains,
not the mere natural organic accompaniments of psychical
activity or susceptibility. These, of course, we have to begin
with : they are the elements, the raw material, out of which
the life-product, the finished works of the art of life, are to be
made. The successive experiences of pleasures are part of the
general experience of life : and as in all experience they partly
help to build it up, partly receive correction from it. No
single experience is infallible : it has to be confronted with
the total idea as its critic, though it serves in turn to suggest
a criticism of that idea. What experience thus helps to
establish is a bulwark of sound judgement, of laws and
general principles, which protect against any casual, desultory,
and irregular inroads of experience. So in the case of pleasure,
the total and collective experience (i. e. of the individual, as
transcending his several moments, and as included in or
enlarged by his social medium) corrects the mistaken judge
ments or interpretations of early sensation. For, as has already
been said, we live not as a whole at any instant, but by
partial aspects and occasional flashes of sensation, here a little,
and there a little. And each pleasure is the defined and indi
vidualized pleasure of a moment — of one aspect or phase of
life. It reveals to us our own nature, but in a partial or frag
mentary revelation : and it is only through a process of
constructive comparison that we come to learn what we in
a fuller and fullest sense are. Above all, the evidence of the
social pleasures is given towards the doctrine of the social
solidarity of human beings.

Thus the general conception of human happiness will
determine the character of the particular pleasures. They
no doubt have served to constitute that conception, but in
constituting it they have themselves been altered and shaped

v] HEDONISM 367

in adaptation to the total system. And the conception of
happiness is, as Aristotle pointed out, a conception of activity
and of activities : of life in short, as actualization, rather than
of the pleasant consciousness which attends the actualization.
As such it is objective, rather than subjective : rather some
thing done than something felt, or, perhaps, something not
merely felt but also done, realized, objectified. The dominant
idea is thus not satisfaction, but self-realization involving
satisfaction, and involving always a greater and greater
degree of self-realization. The end is happiness : happiness
is self-realization, but the self which is realized is not the
mere self living a solitary life, but a self which, with varying
grades of attraction, draws first family, then city, and lastly
the whole human kind into the circle of its self-interest.

Pleasure thus is useful as an index to the line of life ; yet
taken singly it is not an infallible index, but one which calls
for correction, first by an united and growing experience of
the whole individual life, secondly by the coincidence and
opposition of other pleasure-experiencers. To this point Plato
directs himself in the Philebus. The crude positivist starts
with the assumption that every sensation is true and real.
A further process of reflection serves to show that to which
these epithets are applicable is not the sensation as such, but
the interpretation or implication which is given to it. But
sensations when thus understood, as they must be in the case
of human sensation, are not more true and real than they
may be untrue and unreal. Their truth and reality comes to
them from their implication and relations, i.e. from their
connexion with a context. It is only by an ellipse of language
that we speak of a single object as real : it is real only as
part of a world in which it acts and suffers. So with
pleasures. A pleasure is a species of interpretation — an
instantaneous interpretation generally — of something as a
constituent part and parcel of our life and activity : a per
ception or rather a feeling of agreement or harmony, of

368 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

adaptation of environment to self, and of expansion of self
without loss in the environment. Such perceptions like all
others may err, and may err persistently, as in the case of the
stick seen to bend at its point of immersion in the water,
or the square tower which at a sufficient distance puts on
a round shape. The positive Positivist of course refuses to
call this an error of perception : it is, he says, an error of
judgement : as if there were any perceptions which did not
include an act of judgement and rapid or latent inference,
i.e. extension beyond the mere seen to the suspected. And,
similarly, he will have it that every pleasure is an ultimate
and irreducible real element, an ultimate brick of the set of
bricks out of which life is made. There are no such ultimate
bricks or atomic (i. e. irreducible and indivisible) pleasures :
pleasures like other perceptions are what they seem, i.e. what
they are thought to be ; and what has been called real from
one point of view, is from another made unreal, i.e. is trans
muted into another fact. Thus arises in the last resort the
final or penultimate conception of life, which has been formed,
not out of an addition of pleasures, but out of a testing and
mutual correction of pleasures in the medium of experience ;
where reason, acting on the broad field of time and space,
through its synthetic powers builds up a world, a living
world, not by putting piece to piece, but by that subtler and
higher mode of composition — which we may call metabolism
and metaphorically illustrate by fire — where the very mole
cules and invisible organisms of each constituent are so
amalgamated that the result is, as it were, the secretion, the
distillation, the organic product of inorganic elements. Such
a process of life is the form, idea, or standard by which all
future experience of pleasures is dominated : just as the
increasing bulk of scientific knowledge and the clearer con
ception of fundamental laws and principle of physical existence
come to dominate experience, and serve as a criterion by
which alleged experiences of an abnormal character can be

v] HEDONISM 369

tried. It is true that neither in the one case nor in the other
can absolute finality be attained. Not in science, because
here the unexplored regions are still vast : new lights may
throw into the shade much that is now approved, and the
whole system of the physical universe is a moving- and
advancing equilibrium, of which the sciences have only traced
the contemporary form. Still we hold it probable that no new
discovery will utterly destroy and annul the old, though it
may cause its proud proportions to dwindle and to lose all
independent place in the new palace of truth. Nor in
conduct : it is perhaps too early to say that all the possi
bilities of human nature have been exhausted and realized,
and new ranges of human life may be made acceptable by
pleasures hitherto unexperienced, so that the very centre of
gravity of human existence will be displaced. Yet here too,
probably, the lesson of the past is rather in favour of the view
that, though there may be considerable alteration in the
general arrangement, the main constituents of human life will
retain a place not very different from what they now possess.
Thus the moral and social control the physical : happiness,
as a general idea of well-led life, of activities perfectly
realized, lays down the law to pleasure in its individual
appearances. The systematized totality, which is not a mere
sum of pleasures, but the organic unity in which pleasures
tend to become completely harmonious, is the standard and
the measure as against the individual and the occasional. Life
organized is the judge as against the several unorganized detail-
performances of life. Happiness is the summum lonum as against
the single or several pleasures. But the judge is after all only
the 8ucuoz> t^v\ov, the law which, partly visible only in the
several cases, becomes clear and strong in their organized and
systematic grouping. It is not an alien authority, except in
so far as the part claims an independence and sets itself out
over against the totality and system to which it ought to
belong; in which case the law appears as coercion, constraint,

Bb

37o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

and compels obedience. And, further, happiness is a law only
when and because it has acquired objective and permanent
shape, because it is an habitual mode of life, a solidified form
of action, an institution. Happiness must no doubt have its
seat and centre in the breast : but it will not be happiness if
it have not also a permanent visible objectivity. Only as
such is it secure and real, protected against the dangers which
attend isolated and individual pleasures, against individual
recklessness and fluctuations. Thus the demand for happi
ness, if it is not to degenerate into a mere clutching at
a maximum of pleasures, and so eventually to contradict
and destroy itself, must be regulated by the organization of
human life, by its objective manifestation in institutions and
modes of life.

Such a conception of life in its entirety, in its full deve
lopment, in its objective manifestation, in its organized
systematization, is what the Greek philosophers understood
by Nature. <£>v(ns, says Aristotle, is the sum of existence
regarded as containing its own rule and origin : it is the con
stitution of the universe and of each thing in it, when that
thing has attained the full completeness of its being: it is
the normal and thoroughly adapted existence, that existence,
as Plato says, which is not mere ovo-ia, or reality bare of
organization, but the higher reality of the good which rises
far beyond its phenomenal existence in power and glory.
For Nature, to Aristotle and Plato, is not merely the
sum of existence, but the organization and the organizing
principle of existence, definable on the one hand as God and
the good, doing nothing without purpose; on the other as
the multitudinous realm of life and actuality in which all
things work together.

When the early philosophers spoke of tyvo-is, they regarded
it, whatever might be their private diversities of interpreta
tion, as a synthetic and organizing matter, principle, law —
a universal which transcended all the several particulars,

v] HEDONISM 37 j

though not itself another particular outside of them, but
rather the centrality and unity of all principles and particular
phases. It is the cardinal doctrine of Greek thought, as it
is the inspiring principle of Greek practice that,, over and
above the superficial differences and divisions which the con-
ditionary forms of time and space force upon our appre
hension, there is a unity out of which these differences can be
explained, and by the gradual and fragmentary action of
which they arise. Philosophy in fact consists in the effort
to realize this unity — to transcend these differences of detail,
which to the impatient and non-persevering glance seem to
be all. A partial philosophy, an imperfect culture, puts its
own sense upon the cry, ' Back to nature/ It says, with
Thrasymachus its mouthpiece, that the institutions of mankind
are only the despotic devices of the few to avail themselves of
the services of the many, or that moral rules are but arbitrary
lines of demarcation breaking up and keeping asunder what
nature has meant to be united. It infers that such institu
tions and such rules will be discarded by the 'advanced
thinker'' and the ' intelligent members of society/ If it is
mildly sentimental in its love of unity and harmony, it may
stop short at a half -mystical, half-sensuous absorption in the
charm of undifferentiated and Adamic life, discarding the
grosser forms of convention and bathing itself in an idyllic-
complacency of natural sympathy. If it is more turbulently
concupiscent, it seeks fiercer pleasures and more tyrannic-
usurpations of the means of enjoyment.

It may, indeed, be said that the exhortation to follow
nature is for a moralist but a loose way of talk. The charge
is one which may be equally brought against any of the
general or abstract forms in which an ethical principle is
couched. None of them in epitome are without similar dangers
of misuse. And the abuse made by the Sophists of this phrase
is only parallel to that which has been made by other
moralists of other phrases. There is no one phrase, no one

B b a

372 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v

idea, which is adequate to convey the content of morality, or
ethics would have been settled long ago. As Plato remarked,
the idea of good is at least composed of three distinct ideas :
and Herbart has treated it as only completely constituted by
the synthesis of five.

But Plato and Aristotle with their Stoic followers, when
they clung to the faith that good conduct consists in the
life conformable to nature, explained what they meant by
declaring that man's nature especially lay in KOIV&VLCL and
Ao'yos. According to Plato, human life is essentially com
munity, because its economic needs cannot otherwise be
satisfied. Without community none is secure of existence :
only in a common organization can the individual life be
guaranteed. Such a complete organization is the Kara (frvo-Lv
OLKLa-Oflcra TTO'AIS. But, as Plato goes on, he perceives that his
principle changes its aspect, and what he began with as 0vo-ts
reappears later as the idea TOV ayaOov. The difference in
point of view is significant : it marks the stage at which
Greek philosophy tends to emancipate itself from the con
ditions of its time, and enters upon a line of thought where it
comes into touch with the higher Christianity. That is, Plato
was dissatisfied with the limitations of the conception Nature.
Nature, he half feels, is blind, is neither this nor that, is all
things at all times, is too much sunk in the immediate and
fragmentary, and emerges too little as the ideal or spiritual
principle; for this, though it appears in the visible and
temporal organization, is yet never quite exhausted by the
actual, but looks before and after, and is not merely the
movement in time and space, but the eternal identity in which
that movement is only a stage or phase. One can hardly say
that in Plato this identity is a self-consciousness ; rather it is
the permanent law or 'outline of movement which the several
phenomena of the world partially reproduce, and which the
philosopher after long preparatory study may learn to detect.
It is the eternal ordinance and co-adaptation of things, which

v] HEDONISM

373

exists for those, says Plato, who can so train their vision that
it no longer sees phenomena merely but penetrates to the
truth of things, the ultimate and objective synthesis of the
universe, the final laws, which determine man's problems in
life and death. To us it would perhaps be otherwise con
ceived. Some would hold it to be but a subjective synthesis,
the mere effort made by the individual to put together for
his aims and according to his preconceptions the elements of
his experience. Others would rather note that the eternal
ordinance must be conceived after the analogy of an eternal
ordainer : as a self -consciousness which sees its own travail
and is satisfied in the work, and which yet is also a -npovoia
that transcends the actual and is the indwelling spirit of
a continuous and intelligent self-adjustment.

VI

UTILITARIANISM

ONE great shortcoming of Utilitarianism was that, as
K. Marx says1, ' it took the modern shopkeeper, especially the
English shopkeeper, as the normal man/ But ' he that would
criticize all human acts, movements, relations, &c., by the
principle of Utility, must first deal with human nature in
general, and then with human nature as modified in each
historical epoch/ Bentham belonged to an unhistorical or
rational age, it is said. Perhaps it would be truer to say that
he represents a relative or comparative truth : the truth that no
social institution, law, or ceremony can claim to be received or
obeyed except in so far as it contributes to produce social wel
fare. He is perpetually at hand therefore with his question
Cui BOKO ? On his principles no rule can subsist in authority
without being justified by its effects : all rules must be in
harmony and co-operation with each and form a system.
Hence his proposals for the reform of the law and its
codification.

Secondly, Bentham taught that, when we say society or
community, we mean only the individuals forming it, the
community being otherwise a figment. Here also there was
a truth ; but error, at the same time, had inserted the thin end
of the wedge. The truth is, that the community has no
universal or transcendent existence apart from its particulars
(ra vor]Ta iv rots alaOrjTols). The error which insinuates itself
is, that the community owes its existence to the conscious
1 Capital, p. 622, Eng. tr.

UTILITARIANISM 375

choice or option of these individuals : that they have made it
of their own free will, and that at that will they can unmake
it, and resume, if they can indeed ever be said to have surren
dered, their independence. This, the common error of the
century which culminated in the Revolution, is the error of
Bentham, who inveighed against the rights of man. Hence
the happiness of the community is only the sum of individual
happinesses. And Bentham only avoids seeing the possible
opposition between individual happinesses, and hence the im
possibility of treating their relations in the state as expressed
by a sum of addition, because he holds a .naive faith in
the unforced accordance between public interest and rightly
understood private interest. It is only in curious and excep
tional cases, cases which wise precautions of legislature would
render almost incapable of occurrence, that there will be any
serious conflict between the claims of virtue or duty and the
impulses craving self-satisfaction.

But further, when Bentham is asked to explain the mean
ing of Utility, or to what kind of human being certain acts
or relations are useful, his answer is, To a being which can feel
pleasure and pain. That is what man has been reduced to.
The question which settles whether any thing is or is not
a subject of ethics, is not, Has it reason ? but Can it suffer ?
Can it feel pain and pleasure ? Thus all the reality of life,
all its positive aims and occupations, sink out of sight and
leave only the mere creature who can be managed through his
two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. But here Bentham
is kept in company by more than one English writer, e. g. by
Mr. Spencer. Pleasure is a ' necessary form of moral intuition/
Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is
1 an inexpugnable element ' of the ' ultimate moral aim/ Only
that the later author is so far more careful, and means only
that, had man not been a being subject to pleasurable and
painful feelings, morality would have had no meaning. Thus
instead of saying like Bentham that pleasure is all, we find

376 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

him treating- it as a ' necessary form ' or ' inexpugnable
element' of: morality: a proposition which no school of
moralists is concerned to deny, though there is great diversity
of opinion as to the place where it conies in.

We may perhaps better understand the position of Bentham
if we compare him with Hobbes. Hobbes, too, begins with an
assumed primitive normal man : but his eye is not so exclu
sively bent on pleasure as that of Bentham's man. The
great aim of the Hobbesian crude-man is power, predominancy,
self-assertion. He is not content to suffer pleasure or pain :
but would fain see the fruit of his soul's three great passions,
desire of safety, of gain, and of glory. He is essentially
a competitive, quarrelsome, active, and domineering being.
Of course Hobbes got his man, as Bentham did, from the
society round him : he stereotyped in an absolute and uni
versal form the restless revolutionary man of the English
revolution, as Bentham did the placid bourgeois type of the
nation of shopkeepers, little anxious for glory, and watching
only for comfortable ease. Neither type is fundamental man :
and yet as on Bentham's man was built the conception of
life which still lingers disconsolate in our Liberalism, so
on Hobbes' man was built the theory of sovereignty and
authority which has been used at different dates to support
the practice of absolute monarchy.

Hobbes saw man in the stage of criticism, of transition
from one system of life to another, in the agonies and
struggle of a new birth. The feudal system of personal rule
had been gradually centralized : instead of many feudal lord
ships with separate subordinate jurisdictions there had been
substituting itself, by a process which culminated in the Tudor
monarchy, a concentration of all jurisdiction and power in one.
But that one power had retained, as far as might be, the same
characteristics which belonged to its divided and local prede
cessors. It was essentially a personal monarchy : and the
personal monarchy, though with many signs of coming

vi] UTILITARIANISM 377

disruption which the Queen was shrewd enough to note, cul
minated in Elizabeth. With her two successors the prudent
via media ceased almost everywhere to commend itself. The
democracy, which had uplifted its kings to supreme authority
over their nobles, became fully conscious of its sovereignty,
and proceeded in a wild outburst of zeal to realize its ideas of
right and impose them as a sacred duty on the recalcitrant
world around. Each not merely did and thought what was
right in his own eyes, but was bent on making others do like
wise. But the prevailing element was the recrudescence of
the religious spirit. During the whole of the Middle Ages
the individual sense or spirit of religion had been dead, or
had only burst out here and there in isolated and therefore
heretical fits of personal devotion. The English nation, like
the rest of modern Europe, had been converted to Christianity
in the gross — in battalions and counties — according to the
influence of the political power. Even when in Henry VIIFs
time it became Protestant, political initiative had a great deal
too much to do with the change. But in the latter part of
the sixteenth century the reformation movement assumed
a more personal subjective character. For the first time since
the early days of Christianity religion becomes a real, living,
and governing interest in men. But under the guise of
religious, or even of Biblical enthusiasm, which made human
ordinances ultimately rest for their sanction on divine models
(these divine models being differently perceived by Puritan and
Prelatist), there was another principle alive — the principle of
private judgement, of individualism, of anarchism. It is dis
guised, because one party appeals to the written word, the
plain witness of honest interpretation, the other to the tradi
tional form, the sanctions of long authority. But both alike,
the sacerdotal ritualist and the biblically minded Puritan,
were departing from the via media of English tradition, and
to each other they seemed respectively to be lapsing into
superstition, or to be wandering into religious anarchy.

378 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

It is such an individualistic man, in the stress of contest,
casting1 off allegiance to the old institutions, which yet, even
without his will, control his action, that we meet with in the
one-eyed and one-sided picture of human nature given by
Hobbes. He is far from the primitive or normal man. He
is rather a full-grown product of civilization — an old civiliza
tion — who, not alone, but simultaneously with multitudes,
throws off these integuments, and with full-grown faculties
proceeds in a competitive spirit to construct a social habita
tion de novo. Above all, he is a being in whom self-con
sciousness, self-assertion is abnormally developed : a being
who has realized his independence and is bent on carrying
it to the uttermost. S.uch a man is far removed from the
primitive being, whose life is largely under the bondage of
environment, tradition, family, and social order. He has an
individuality, exaggerated and conscious, which to the more
primitive types is .unknown.

In some respects the man of the Benthamite age is the
very reverse. Jf in the sixteenth century the effect of
renaissance and reformation, of inventions and discoveries,
had been to stimulate individuality, to produce a burst of
originative and creative genius, the effect of the scientific
and philosophical movement from 1680 to 1780 was to
generate a common average of convention, culture, and
judgement, a well-informed, comfortable, and well-mannered
society. The eighteenth century having laid up, as it
thought, much capital for many years, was engaged in an
effort to arrange the world, evenly, systematically, and agree
ably for its future habitation. It was of opinion, indeed,
that kings and priests had too much in their hands, and that
they managed the affairs of the world neither wisely nor
honestly. But the spread of enlightenment, it thought,
would naturally put an end to these pretensions of the secular
and the spiritual guides. Only let plenty of light in upon the
dark chambers of the law, the civil administration, and the

vi] UTILITARIANISM 379

churches, and the melancholy spectres which haunted them
would flee away, as in Diirer's picture, and leave the world
to enjoy itself. What was the mistake that these worthy
reformers laboured under ? It was what we may call a very
inadequate conception of the structure of society. They sup
posed that society consisted of a number of separate bits : and
as some of these were inconveniently placed, and crowded
others a little too much, they expected to make themselves
easy by casting away the obnoxious and unnecessary appurte
nances. This theory was a mistake. As the phrase goes, the
social structure is a living organism, not a mechanism : which
means that if some of its parts are removed, the others are
seriously affected, and the whole organism may possibly perish.
They tended to conceive the social organism after the fashion
of animals which are acephalous, without thereby ceasing to
live : or after the fashion of others, in which, if one member
is cut off, the force of the total organism soon succeeds in
throwing out a new member to take its place. In this last
point, indeed, they were partly right : but it is necessary to
add that such powers only appear in the very elementary forms
of social union, and that the theory has not much application
to the highly developed states of modern Europe, where after
the head has once been cut off, it shows a persistent reluctance
to bud out again. And there was another fault in their
premises. Those theorists, who thought men would be happy
if only governments ceased to trouble and priests to confound,
had not realized that, invisible or dimly visible to them,
there was a large multitude who looked upon themselves,
much as they looked upon their stumbling-blocks.

The Benthamite therefore imagined that, if the incon
veniences of certain effete institutions were got rid of, man
would be left in possession of certain eternal dwelling-
houses, where his soul need only consider how for many years
it might best eat, drink, and be otherwise merry. He had
not realized that the social house in which he fancied himself

380 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

secure for ever, as in a structure of nature, was the work of
human minds and hands, that for mankind to live actively and
energetically is the business of businesses, without which no
pleasure permanently can be secured, and that this business
must often be carried on, whether pleasure comes very directly
in the work or not. A century of peace — for the colonial
conflicts with France and other transient brushes in con
nexion with German affairs never seriously disturbed the
insular tranquillity — had led England to believe that the
comfortable abodes, which each man of the dominant middle
and upper class had carved for himself in the social system,
were founded upon natural rock, and not on something which
could only be held up by the same strenuous effort which
had been originally necessary to found it.

In short, both Hobbes and Bentham had been strictly
bound down in their conclusions by the immediate data of
their age. Their desire to be practically and at once effective
made them forget to institute a further comparison, and base
their conclusions on a wider experience. They have given us
philosophies which are in many respects identical, with this
important difference, that Hobbes heads a line which leads to
collective and despotic socialism, while Bentham gave fresh
impetus to a movement which can hardly stop short of anarchic
individualism. Hobbes' main idea is security, organization,
power: Bentham's is comfort, convenience, pleasure..

As against theories like those of Hobbes and Bentham,
the evolutionist and historical view of the ethical problem
endeavours (i) to get over the confusion of the specimen of
one historical period with the normal or natural man, and (2)
to lay a deeper foundation for its investigations than they had
laid, (i) As specially historical, it brings to our recollection
that man and society are in a process of development, which
to a large degree takes the shape of continuously growing
complication, an increasing multiplicity of elements; and
that, as organization grows and extends, there is a strong

vi] UTILITARIANISM 381

tendency for a large part of it to go out of sight, and
leave in public view only certain portions, which portions
thus, to careless observers, seem all that needs be noticed.
As we compare civilization with civilization, we find certain
general regularities or uniformities of succession and con
nexion in each. Within certain limits, we may say that
there is in Greece an age of feudalism and of chivalry; an
age which reminds us of the revival of letters ; and an age to
which we come so near that we should almost call it modern.
We see that at analogous stages of development certain
doctrines or ways of looking at life and conduct get pre
dominant. Thus we are led to the idea of a law governing
not merely the connexion of one stage of development as
a wrhole with its successor, but also determining the various
aspects of a state of society which are at a given moment
in correlation with each other. We learn to analyze
a given social group or organism into the various organisms
which exist within it, and that in considerable independence
of each other. We are forced to recognize differences of
shading, often very deep, between institutions and virtues,
which at a superficial examination looked of one homogeneous
piece. Further, we find frequently that social structures in
course of time tend to amalgamate into one forms which were
originally separate : that e. g. when a number of institutions
and ideas compete for existence, the victorious result is not
without considerable admixture of elements and only gains its
survival by conscious or unconscious adaptation or compromise.
Thus, as we go back in history, the number of forms of social
organism does not perhaps so much diminish, as their com
plexity gives place to simpler structures. But we shall be
disappointed if we suppose that among the primitive forms
we can find the special form, historical or prehistoric, which
may be regarded as the parent or ancestor of our modern
systems of life, and our modern types of character. The
biological attempts at reconstructing the genesis of man have

382 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

led to the conclusion that we cannot trace the descent or
filiation in any one historic line to definite ancestors. None
of the quadrumana exactly fit the requirements for the
ancestor of homo sapiens. The fish cannot be treated as the
parent-form of the reptile. So, in sociology,, the form and
institutions of savage life,, either as observable to-day, or as
inferrible from the records and monuments of the past, cannot
be taken as a historic starting-point for explaining our develop
ment. There is no such continuity as thus implied. For, if
this were accepted, then a social group, especially endowed in
nature and circumstances, would have to be conceived as
ultimately passing over into another organization which also
has started from its peculiar faculty and conditions. We
cannot suppose Greek civilization e.g. descended from the
character and conditions of a non-Greek type : nor need we
imagine how, for example, Japanese nature and conditions will
show themselves under the guise of occidental modes and
institutions. In such matters the lesson of the historical and
evolutionist method is that uniformity and identity of develop
ment is a fiction ; that each nation has a law and career of
its own, similar in what we may call essentials, but unlike
also in conspicuous features, to the law and career of other
national types ; and that any national group, which puts
on in a freak of admiring imitation the modes and institutions
of another of widely different endowment and resources, is
surely and rapidly preparing its own dissolution.

But though our materials are and must for ever remain
inadequate for constructing a genealogical tree of human
society, they can serve, if cautiously used, to throw light on
the mystery of our own development. We can learn from
them what may be termed the laws of the structural growth
of society, and of the formation of human faculty and
character. Not indeed, as has been already explained, that
we can directly transfer the law of one period, the causality
of one group and age, to determine the law of another. The

vi] UTILITARIANISM 383

more we regard the problem of causation, the more we are
led to see that the vulgar idea of a knowledge of causes
enabling us to predict must be carefully guarded and denned.
Popular usage no doubt justifies us in asserting that, once
we have ascertained a true sequence of cause and effect, we
can transfer our knowledge to any point in the universe
we may wish to explain. More reflective habits suggest
the practical difficulties in the way of such transference.
A cause, instead of being one conspicuous mark or symptom,
as it is to the uncultivated, becomes to the scientific or
logical mind, a whole group of constituent conditions; and
in like manner the effect, in place of being an obvious
incident or change, is analyzed into a complex and fully
defined group of modifications in some substance or thing.
When this change of view has been made in the estimate
of cause and effect, it is an easy step to the perception that
two strictly identical cases can hardly or can only rarely
occur, and that every inference therefore is more or less
a mere analogy, to be carefully verified, like any other
hypothesis, when it is made to a new and very different case.
Thus we can learn in some measure the laws of social
evolution : i. e. some general features, as illustrated in par
ticular instances of social change and social interdependence.
We may get better to understand the growth of society out of
its elements, its general aspects of differentiation and integra
tion; in other words, we may discover the way in which it
buds forth into a variety of outward organs, and then receiving-
and internalizing these in the individual consciousness, binds
them together into a comparatively homogeneous principle,
destined however in its turn to repeat the same process.
We may even within limits endeavour to get a general view
of the historical process over a considerable period, and so
far as we can trace a fundamental identity of structure and
ideas we may carry our philosophy of history. But such a
philosophy has its obvious limits. There are great natural

384 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

divisions in human history, as there are in natural history.
' Existing history may draw these lines of division somewhat
prematurely, and may fix the boundaries at very ill-chosen
epochs. The capture of Rome and of Constantinople,
the Reformation and the Revolution, may not mark real
dividing lines, any more than Salamis and the Catalaunian
fields. But as our present knowledge goes — and probably
for a long time to come — we must submit to accept the
existence of ethnic and historic groups, which stand out
in tolerably clear separation from each other, and of which
it is at present impossible to detect any connecting or
transition points of importance. It may not be exactly true
for us still to say that European history began with the
siege of Troy, and goes down from that date in one con
tinuous stream : for (i) research carries us by gradual steps
beyond the Trojan hosts to kindred predecessors, and (2) new
streams of influence have since then profoundly modified
the current of development, But still it remains true that
for practical purposes there are streams of history and social
life so virtually independent of our European career, that
no philosophy of history can at present or for a long time
hope to show that one continuous movement has been going
on, with fresh tributaries, each bringing its quota, to supply
the material of the main stream.

But (2) the study of history as a process of evolution for
human faculty, guided, we may almost say, by the pre
suppositions1 that 'all the natural capacities of a creature
are destined some time or other to develop themselves com
pletely and appropriately/ and 'that in man all those
capacities which are directed to the use of his reason only
develop themselves completely in the species, not in the
individual '—gives a new view of the present intellectual and
moral structure of man. The infinite complexity and diversity
of human faculty presents itself from the point of view of

Cf. Kant, Idcen zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte.

vi] UTILITARIANISM 385

this theory as acquired and transmitted not by natural
generation, but by spiritual parentage, by the means of that
social and intellectual and moral capital which is stored up
by successive generations, but which, if it is not to become
a purely dead thing, has to be revivified, or kept vivified by
the vital energy of actual men. Such capital is simply the
utterance or forth-putting of human energy and formative
skill in material things — appropriating and stamping them
with man's mark : it is the extension of human personality,
its realization in an outward or natural world, consisting
of human bodies, animals, and other material objects. In
such action man expands, differentiates, and realizes himself
into a material organism, in literary, religious, artistic,
economic and other forms. But man also concentrates,
reflects, or redintegrates these material and separate elements
he has 'acquired/ or in which he has lost himself and put
part of his own life and force. The economic stock e. g. he
redintegrates, partly by consuming or enjoying it (frui),
partly by using (uti), i. e. energizing it. But always the
passive expression, the lifeless acquisition, must be enlivened
by the breath of life from the vital agent. The very spoken
word, which otherwise disappears, has to be taken up, repro
duced internally, and understood by the hearer. The written
words are always only fyoovavra o-vveTola-iv. The arts need
the same spirit which nurtured them originally to keep them
away. And the outward ordinances, rites, creeds, holy places,
sacred personages of religion need to be assimilated, and made
an inner life and feeling by the worshipper, if they are to be
more than stocks and stones and vain repetitions.

Thus we come to throw a new light on the problems of
psychology. Since the time of Locke it has become a settled
maxim that the true method of philosophical study is the
psychological. For the study of logic, aesthetics, ethics,
and whatever else nray be held philosophy, it was said that
the only safe and sure method was to examine our own

c c

386 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

ideas, arid see what was their original or primary stock :
and that thus only we might learn what could be built
upon them, how far they could be made to go, and what
certainty we could have about their objective application.
But by psychology we must be careful first of all to
explain that we mean something more than the ultimate
analysis of the mental structure. Up to a certain part or
point, the study of psychology for man is similar or analo
gous to what it is for the animals. Man, like them, is
a being endowed with senses, with faculties of memory,
imagination, and something of the nature of intelligence : he
has various appetites or attractions towards objects, is sensi
tive to pleasure and pain, subject to impulse and passion.
These faculties are directly connected with his special endow
ment of a nervous system, with its central organs in the
brain. We are not entitled to say that even in these points
he is identically constituted with them : he has what Aristotle
called an ato-^ri/o) V/^XT/, but his sensitive soul, we may be
sure, is characteristically his own, though its structure evinces
a certain parallelism to that of the nearest animals, just as is
the case with his general physical structure. It is further
obvious that in this department of psychology, the psychology
of the sensible nature in the widest sense, great help is to
be had from physiology or that branch of it which is called
psychophysics. Indeed it would hardly be going too far to
say with Comte — as Aristotle himself had hinted in anticipa
tion of the spirit of the Baconian philosophy — that unless
we can reach the physical or physiological realities, i.e. the
molecular movements which underlie and constitute the so-
called elementary faculties, we shall get very little better than
a verbal treatment, 5iaA.e/cn/cws- /cat KCV&S. In this branch
then of psychology we are mainly referred to general bio
logical problems, which here, as elsewhere, are ultimately
soluble only by those molecular theories which apply to
muscular and nervous movements.

vi] UTILITARIANISM 387

The psychology which Locke's Essay inaugurated is on
a different level. It is more characteristically human. Not,
of course, that we need maintain that any brand-new faculties
emerge into view when we come to deal with human nature.
The difference of grade is not definable in any such simple
way as the intervention or addition of new faculties. It is
much more subtle and complex. We may be able plausibly
e.g. to show how one after another of the higher human
endowments has its close parallel in some animal nature : and
yet the total impression and effect may be altogether different.
And in this characteristically human field — the field, as
Aristotle calls it, of the VOTJTLK^ or AoyiKr) •tyvyj] — ^ne ne^P °^
physiology fails us. We are now concerned with phenomena
which cannot plausibly be connected with any peculiarities of
nervous structure, any characters proper to the physical
organism. And yet here as there introspection, which was
the method mainly employed by Locke, leads to no valuable
results — issues in little better than verbal distinctions and
what Bacon calls alstracta. In the literal sense introspection
is vain. And this does not simply mean that we cannot
observe ourselves, because (i) we cannot both be the agent
and patient ; and (2) we alter the fact in resolving to observe
it. For perhaps it might be said that we can note it the very
instant after, and that instantaneous memory is as good as
observation. There is of course a large amount of truth in
the remark that we cannot easily observe ourselves : but it is
a truth which is equally illustrated by the difficulty of taking
our own pulse, or observing the phenomena of one's own
physical system, and arises from what may be styled the
explosive force of ideas, i.e. the involuntary transmission of
vivid sensitive ideas into the motor system. The objection
goes deeper. The ' I ' who observes a psychical fact is the same
' I ' that observes a physical fact. As observer it is distinct
from what is observed in one case as well as in the other. It
only observes well in so far as it is at once disinterested and

C C 2

388 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

interested : disinterested, because the object is not connected
by any material interest; interested, because the object has
become the centre of interest. That is, the object of observa
tion is the resting-point round which observation circles : the
object is not carried round at the pleasure of the observer.
Hence the object, even if it originates in the current of our
own mental life and interest, must be observed in virtue of an
act of detachment or abstraction, which sets it apart from us
in the ideal field of observation. But as Aristotle long ago
remarked, Otutpelv p.a\\ov TOVS TreAas 6wa/xe0a ?} eavrovs.
In other words, such self-survey, if it is to come to any
good, must be a social survey, i.e. a sympathetic appre
hension through our own feelings of other's acts, and of
their feelings through our acts. It is in the mutual play
of thought and fancy that light reveals the recesses of the
mind: in what Plato sometimes calls SiaAe/m*?? and some
times vE/xos, meaning by the former the more reflective
unravelling of the common web of humanity, by the latter
the more spontaneous and intimate sympathy which must
underlie the intellectual discussion, if it is really to penetrate
the barriers of self-conceit which keep man apart from man,
and is to make the two dialectician fellow-devotees of the
truth, counting nothing too dear or interesting if so be they
may get at the inner vision of reality.

If then by psychology we mean an attempt such as Locke
made to get at the source and history of our ideas, we shall
not learn much by groping in what we choose to call ourselves,
and still less by consulting the physiologist as to the nature
of our muscular, assimilative, vascular, or nervous system.
These things have their place, but we have passed beyond it
when we come to consider the characteristically human
aspects, the ideas into which the bare natural endowment
has blossomed forth. Physiology e. g. will have a good deal
to say on the elements of language, on sounds, letters,
syllables : but physiology has no say in the problem of words

vi] UTILITARIANISM 389

as such, of language. The problem of language only begins
to trouble when other questions than those of the physical
basis of speech emerge for consideration.

And now, as we have said that psychology in its first grade
will get her real illumination from physiology or psycho-
physics, we might say that in this higher grade psychology
must seek the help of sociology. But in saying so, we could
not fail to note the immense difference of our position in the
two cases. Nerve-physiology has not gone very far : but it
has a certain amount of consistency, and a certain idea of its
method of research. Sociology, on the other hand, is rather
a word which denotes a great group of problems waiting for
solution than any compact and systematic body of doctrine.
Works with the title of Sociology are not unheard of, but
they are essays to find the handle of a science, than real
exhibitions of its systematic content. What then are the
problems which sociology is an attempt to grapple with?
Briefly they spring from the growing perception in the
present century that all characteristically human phenomena —
such as religion, art, science, property, language — are social
and not individual functions, i. e. that they issue through
and are the permanent form of the action of individuals, but
of individuals co-operating with each other, forming necessary
and natural groups, spontaneously as well as reflectively
realizing their personality in that of others.

But the peculiar function of sociology in this matter of our
ideas may be best illustrated from Plato, who was the first,
and for long the only one, distinctly to understand its principle.
It is impossible to get a clear idea of what the characteristic
forces of human nature are by looking within the breast, by
introspection : a mere faculty for that matter can hardly be
said to be an object of observation at all. Even if we turn
to observe the actions of the individual, we are not much
further advanced. By what means shall we discover the lines
of demarcation between his actions, and how be led to refer

390 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

these actions to principles or parts supposed to animate him ?
Evidently our search is completely at sea. We see what
human nature is by considering it in its actions (which, as we
saw, are only the objectivation of inner motive and character),
and considering not the actions of this or that individual, but
the actions collectively of the mass of individuals. Such
action, recurrent and universal, was, we saw, the real essence
of an institution. And in the different social institutions,
i. e. the habitual and organized modes of action, we have the
revelation of the inner faculty or nature of man, or the
realization in visible or perceptible shapes of that imper
ceptible organization which is the germ of all development,
the protoplasm which is differentiated and integrated into
organs and system. Thus, according to Plato, we see what
reason is by looking at the facts of guidance, government,
initiative, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the common
or political life. In the governmental organ the common
function of intelligence, present in some degree in every
human being, has concentrated itself : just as the clothes-
forming faculty realizes itself first distinctly and obviously in
the rise of a tailor class. The institutional form, the social
class, is only the outward realization of one aspect, one
•comparatively independent member of the human organism,
when it is, so to speak, written large, magnified, and made
uniform, stereotyped. By such objectivation in an organism
or institution of its own, the aspect of human nature first
realizes its internal unity as also a substantial force. The
inward faculty, be it of discernment or of passion, instead of
being backed up now and then by some other force, in
cidentally operative with it, receives back into itself the
consciousness of its essential unity with the same faculty in
a thousand others.

'In examining the way by which opinion is formed,' says
Mr. Bryce J, ' we cannot fail to note how small a part of the

1 Bryce, iii. p. 6.

vi] UTILITARIANISM 391

view which the average man entertains when he goes to vote
is really of his own making. - His original impression was
faint and perhaps shapeless : its present definiteness and
strength are mainly due to what he has heard and read.
He has been told what to think, and why to think it.
Arguments have been supplied to him from without , and
controversy has imbedded them in his mind. Although he
supposes his view to be his own, he holds it rather because
his acquaintances, his newspapers, his party leaders hold it
and his acquaintances do the like. Each man believes and
repeats certain phrases, because he thinks that everybody else
on his own side believes them, and of what each believes only
a small part is his own original impression, the far larger
part being the result of the commingling and mutual action
and reaction of the impressions of a multitude of individuals,
in which the element of pure personal emotion, based on
individual conviction, is but small/

In this fashion what was originally a mere passing stage in
the entire conduct of a human being gradually gains a quasi-
independent position. Each nation acquires a psychology of
its own : and that psychology locates or sets inwardly in each
individual mind a division and hierarchy of faculties, which
being at first in each only a mere sketch or potentiality, has
come by sympathetic action and reaction to appear in a visible
organization, and finally, when consciously reproduced in the
individual, to take rank as a substantive agent in his system
of mind. The individual has his possibility or germ, an
invisible organization, but not yet differentiated into distinct
faculty: as he works with others, plays with them, fights
along with them, the points in each which are similar to
those in others get, as it were, attracted together, associated,
and through this associated body or organ which they produce,
they are reflected into consciousness, become internalized, and
constitute that second or reflective nature and constitution
which is found in every social being after he has been

392 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

subjected to social influences. Society cannot, it seems
probable, put into the individual anything which was
absolutely without germ or foundation in him before : cannot
give him in the literal sense a new faculty. But in an
intelligible sense of the words, society does and can give new
faculties : that is, society can strengthen what was weak, can
lend force from the super-endowed to the sparsely-endowed,
can and does create a common capital or stock of language,
literature, science, art, method, whereby, as Bacon said, the
disparity between natural talents is largely diminished. This
is in fact what society means : and a one-sided insistence on
this duty or function of society is what is generally under
stood by Socialism. But society, be it remembered, is only
a short name to express the sum of the co-operation and
mutual modification of influences issuing from individuals,
who amid all diversities in detail are similarly constituted in
the main.

The psychology of an individual then is the resultant stage
of a process, wherein the native or natural basis of faculty,
issuing out and entering into combination with like tendencies
or germs in others, is reflected back into the individual con
sciousness with the distinct and definite quasi-independence
which it has received in the associated life of the community.
At each period of history, therefore, in each organization, or
institution, new faculties are created in individuals. That is,
possibilities in them, called forth in new measure, or in new
combination, by each variety of circumstances, acquire through
reflection and sympathy certain typical and comparatively
permanent forms of association, which become so many new
species. If it be asked what are the initial or native possi
bilities out of which all this variety is generated, the only
answer is that as yet we cannot completely tell. Human
life is self-realization, and its law self-realization through
society. Till the end of that process is reached, it would be
rash to offer a complete list of the initial faculties, the

vi] UTILITARIANISM 393

rudimentary basis. Indeed,, it would not only be rash, it
would be impracticable. We only see these faculties when
they have ceased to be natural, spontaneous and rudimentary :
when they have become reflective, formed, and magnified
into specific organs. To use the latter aspect to describe
the former would only lead to misconceptions.

On this point the ancient philosophers were probably more
cautious than some of the modern. They recognize that the
human faculties, moral and intellectual, are so many efeis,
or habits, acquired and formed powers, stereotyped abilities,
which result from a (/>WIKI) Swa/xis. Of what that natural
potentiality or germ is in special cases, they do not give any
systematic explanation. Of one point they are sure, that the
absolute presupposition of all moral and intellectual faculty,
the o.px.r\, is reason or vovs : that originative and systema
tizing faculty which, when it has become differentiated and
organized by objective utterance into a reflective shape, is
called Ao'yo?. On this ultimate basis, a differentiation takes
place by the division of two groups of organs — what in
modern language we call the sensory and motor nerves,
what in Greek psychology are known as ato-^o-is and opefis-.
As to (uo-0Tjo-i9, they follow the popular distinction into five
organs : as to opefts-, they are less clear, till at any rate the
Stoics lay down the fundamental op/x?? as the impulse TQ kavrov
rripdv. The moderns, on the other hand, have till quite
recently contented themselves with classification. But classifi
cation is, in its commoner form, only the preliminary of science,
and a preliminary which advancing science has to correct and
sometimes to discard. The real science of psychology has the
further business of explaining the diversity of faculties by
showing how it has arisen. In that task it will probably
derive some help, as we have seen, from those experimental
researches which touch upon nerve physiology. But in dis
tinctively human psychology it will gain much more light
from the study of phenomena which are sociological, which

394 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

consist, that is, in the action of human beings on each other
in a social body.

In attempting1 to trace the process of mental evolution,
then, care is required to prevent exclusive notice being1 given
to one side or factor in the process. We must get a clear
view of social process, social action, social organism. Man
forms himself, i. e. his mind, his speech, his manners, his
law, his wealth, by his own action ; but that action is a social
action. Nor again is society an agent supervening upon
man, giving him by its organs what he had not before.
Society and its organs and institutions are simply human
beings in action, uttering their possibilities, but uttering
them under the law of intelligence, sentience, or sympathy,
which prevents the individual from being a mere individual,
and forces him to act, at first with the bare sense or feeling,
then with the clearer feeling, then with the more conscious
intelligence of intuition, and lastly with the comprehension
of the general principle, as consciously objectified rule or law
(Ao'yos). But it is man the individual, who is the vehicle of
all that social sympathy and solidarity : and while the influ
ence of the circumjacent multitude is continually reducing
this to a common rule, a hard and fast law, there is
a tendency in the individual to step further, to start on
a fresh course.

This view of the relation of man's ideal nature to his real
social environment — that environment being itself created
under the influence of physical conditions by those who live
under it — leads us to say a word on differentiation and
integration as factors or rather as stages of development.
Differentiation and integration correspond respectively to
what in the Hegelian system are called the stages of reality
and ideality. Just as a seed may be said to integrate into
a simple sum or expression what in the real plant has been
differentiated into a multitude of organs and structures, so
we may call the seed the vehicle, which contains idealiter

vi] UTILITARIANISM 395

all that the plant was realiter. But this description applies
in a higher sense to social and human evolution. There, as
we found, the germ of social life, which is present in all the
members of a group just because of their common humanity,
appears in the realization as an external structure, falling
into parts and organs, liable to assume a certain independence
of each other. In the consciousness of the members, at least
of some of them, that organization is reflected, but reflected
not in parts, but in its totality, or whole function : and thus
is invested with a unity it did not to the outward sense so
obviously possess. On all its members indeed the institution
exercises a silent influence, moulding their thought and
temper in definite ways, creating as it were new faculties,
giving powers of apprehension and resolution not originally
found by the individual in himself. It is so with language,
religion, morality, economic fact. They deposit in the indi
vidual mind habitual or customary modes of conception,
forms of feeling, laws of thought, conditions of action, which,
though not consciously perceived in their general or ideal
form, still mould and constitute the whole scheme of life
and conduct.

But in almost every society a further circumstance and
source of action has to be taken into account. The even level
of the society and the uniform and unanimous course of
development is interfered with by two influences. First, by
contact with foreign societies. Plato and Aristotle sometimes
talk of isolating their ideal community from all external
influences. And this might possibly be a commendable plan,
if we could accept the practicability of their hypothesis that
an ideal state, perfectly planned and equipped, could be set on
foot at once with all that is essential to it. But the evidence
of history teaches too clearly that, although there are periods
to which the epithet of degeneration and declension can be
applied in a relative way, they do not subvert the general law
of human history that acquired or permanent faculties are

396 £55.4 YS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi

evolved out of the yet slumbering potentialities of nature to
meet the requirements of a perpetually changing environment.
Thus the ideal becomes a problem, not a fact : the summary,
in a provisional way, of the future convergence and com
pletion of tendencies, of needs and of powers, which are yet
in their infancy: a preliminary anticipation of the path and
the landscape to some distance beyond the range which is
actually visible or has been actually surveyed.

It is then in the contact between group and group that we
find the first cause which breaks up the general level and
monotony of life, and initiates what we call progress. The
dweller on the borderland, less immersed in his social system
as a natural ordinance, sees it more and more as a whole, and
in contrast with surrounding ideas. One need only point to
the rapid movement of ideas which characterizes colonial life,
or to the anti-conservative tendencies of commerce. But also
in the group itself there emerge differences. With all the
sameness of humanity, which leads to identical institutions
and manners, as it leads to a common language, there is also
a radical individuality in each member of a group, which gives
rise in each to a different combination of what we may call
the fundamental impulses and powers of human nature. Thus
each ultimately may be said to understand and appreciate the
social institutions in a way of his own. Thirty millions e. g.
are described as speaking the same language. But unless that
group form literally as well as figuratively a single family,
living together in identical circumstances— a condition which
the numbers render impossible and which could only be carried
out with a small tribal union — there will be all shades or
degrees of difference embraced under that surface agreement.
Possibly each individual, and in a clearer degree each family
has an individualized language of its own. Every profession
has its own technical phraseology. Things hardly change
with us so rapidly as they are alleged to do in certain hunting
tribes, where a new generation grows up with a language of

vi] UTILITARIANISM 397

its own. But unquestionably in any larger group, where
pronounced habits of life and thought mark off some im
portant section, dialects are formed which insensibly come
to effect the main tongue. Where a large portion of society
engages habitually in pursuits and is conversant with insti
tutions which belong to the vicious and semi-vicious range,
such as the criminal classes, the demi-monde, and the betting
and sporting world, we find a large development of slang or
argot, and its incursion into literature.

So it is in every social organ and institution. The normal
or average level is a conventional estimate which, as Hume
remarks, we use for the purposes of social intercourse. When
I speak to you, I assume that we use the same language and
speak vocables which bear only one sense, else mutual under
standing would be impossible. But experience obliges us
to admit that our hypothesis is never perfectly realized,
and that in many cases the fact very widely departs
from the hypothesis. Psychically, no less than physically,
each man hears a different language : because to hear it he
must reproduce it by his own psychical organs, which are
developed in each individual under influences more or less
different. Nor is a perfect understanding to be secured by
the discovery of what is termed a philosophical language.
It is possible no doubt to mend matters. But the root
of the evil lies in other causes than the mere words we use.
And a nearer approach to a remedy lies for each in the effort
to realize and recognize his limitations as well as those of
others, and to accustom himself as early and persistently as
possible to shun the habit of resting content with words as
ultimates.

But it is in the existence of these differences and these
mutual disabilities that the hope of progress for finite beings
lies. If all merely and entirely agreed in everything, this
would not go far to prove that their consensus was right and
truth, unless we start with the assumption that their voice was

398 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

the voice of God. The agreement which proves truth and
right is not such a mere abstract agreement and nothing more :
it is an agreement which admits of differences and even
antitheses, but in which these differences tend to find, if they
do not actually find, reconciliation. The vox populi, which
is the vox Dei, is not the cry of the mob where ten thousand
shout as one. It is the voice which, out of difference and
disputes, tends more and more to display itself as the one in
the many, the ultimate identity which issues out of difference,
and which has embraced all that was worth keeping out
of these antithetic sides.

Thus progress is achieved through the formation of new
and divergent institutions. In the larger group a smaller is
inserted and this grows as did the other. A new factor
germinates in an individual mind, i. e. through some variation
which arises fortuitously or spontaneously (so far as our know
ledge goes) in the general endowment of some group of the
human species. But such an original, though unique, is not
altogether alone. The same ideas which have forced them
selves upon him will force themselves by degrees on a smaller
or larger number who in the particular point feel and see
like him. Feeling and acting with considerable uniformity,
they mark themselves out as an association, and create for
themselves an institution. But the process does not stop
here. If, as it may happen, the ideas and aspirations are
local, personal, and of temporary interest, the institution
will gradually disappear. But in proportion as they are
universal, essential, and permanent, they pass into even wider
and wider circles, until finally they become an institution of
the whole group, and mould the character of every member
in certain forms of thought, feeling, and action.

VII

THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM

SOCIALISM is one of the 'Isms/ It indicates a tendency
and a propaganda in some direction,, rather than an accom
plished fact or a definite doctrine. Our humanity has been
compared to the 'weary Titan/ As he tosses on his uneasy
bed or struggles along his toilsome way, one ache or pressure
or stumbling-block seems abnormally hard to bear. And as
this particular Titan has many heads and many hands, there
may be simultaneously more than one misery to shrink from,
more than one trial to encounter. But in each age there are
some wants that are felt in many breasts at once, and
a common cry rises more or less clearly from a multitude
of throats. The age feels its wants, but it does not always
clearly understand what they are, and still less has it clear or
distinct ideas of how they are to be relieved.

Socialism is the evidence of such a felt defect— the
symptom of an unquestioned evil. But it is far on that
account from being a definite conception either of the evil,
and of its causes, or of the mode by which these evils may
be eradicated. More than that : two further considerations
serve to complicate the question. First, it is no easy problem
to probe the mysterious paths of social operation, and only too
easy or probable that the inquirer, unless endowed with grave
judgement and practised skill, may rashly lay hands on
agencies that are not to blame. Second, in the concatenation
of human life, it is barely ever possible to keep the many
strands asunder, which as left to themselves cross and recross

4oo ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vir

each other's path and actually unite for considerable lengths
into a single thread. We label these strands by various
names : religious,, political, artistic, economic,, legal,, industrial,
scientific, and whatever others there may be. But, as it
has been said, the subtilty of nature is too much for the
subtilty of our dialectical distinctions. The real world does
not conform to our academic precision.

So it is always with ' Isms/ They are a battle-cry, a watch
word, a catchword : but they are not the names of any
definite idea. Their force even depends on a certain necessary
vagueness, and their ill-defined forms stand out provocative
of curiosity and interest as they loom through the mist.
They are none the less real or vital on that account. But
they are the more dangerous to meddle with, alike for their
admiring followers and for their critics and foes. They are
never phantoms and fancies, however blurred their outlines
may be in the darkness. And they are seldom as fair or as
foul as they are dreamed to be. Each of them in its turn
gathers under its name hopes and aspirations, hates and
horrors, from the other quarters of the souls of those who
adopt this battle-cry. The best ideals and the foulest
desires may and do come to shelter themselves under the
cover of the dominant idol of man's devotion.

It has not been long since the word Socialism with its
companion Communism was first heard, just about half a
century. In a way the thing, i. e. the feeling or craving
which the word implies, is much older. And whence comes
that feeling or craving? From the beginnings of recorded
time man has been a social being, has lived in and formed
what has been called society. He has been linked to his
fellow-humanity by sympathy, by language, by reasoning, by
common endowments, by natural dependences and artificial
ties, by war and by peace, by arts and industries, by religion
and by science. This social solidarity remains, as it was,
a natural fact, which cannot be altered, though it may be in

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 401

part ignored. But on a grand scale the history of our race,
and in miniature the history of each individual, shows another
process going on. The child who began as almost a part
of the parental group, and in childlike unity with his brothers
and sisters, gradually passes out into independent life, and in
many cases becomes a stranger to those who were once near
and dear to him. In the greater world the cares of daily life
and the self-preserving effort which has been painted as
a ' struggle for existence/ make each individual more or less
become a self-centred and self-seeking unit, who in his
habitual mood is apt to forget his common humanity. Each
finds his own narrow groove, and inhabits his own peculiar
den, whence he comes forth only as duties and pleasures
require his temporary exit. Or, if we modify this too strict
picture to commoner fact, the individual is by the effect of
circumstance, of momentary passions, of partial interests,
bound up with a few others in some local, petty, particular
league, serving only immediate, limited, accidental ends.
It is still self-seeking which governs him : but it is the self-
seeking of a clique, a party, a section.

Against such a fractional existence, such a surrender of the
human birthright which in early life seemed so indefeasibly
ours, there keeps rising up, from time to time, a protest in
every heart that has not altogether lost its humanity. We
may sink the man under the office, the title, the shop, the
costume, the civic and social badge, but though he is silent
and even the eyes bear no sign, it would be rash to infer that
nothing has been left but a form of clothes and of ceremonial.
And even if there be those whose soul is dead within them, it
remains true that there are others in all ages of history and
of human life who revolt against the worship of temporary
idols and local divinities, and bid man again remember that
Allah alone, the living, the self-subsisting1, is one God, that he
has made of one blood all upon the earth, and that ' a man's
a man for a' that/ The sense of human brotherhood revives

Dd

402 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

in them : they feel the cords of sympathy drawing hard
through all the entanglements of selfishness.

But here a divergence makes its appearance between these
aspiring souls who seek to rise above divisions and partisan
littleness. Some of them, content in a kind of hopelessness
or careless because the object of conflict seems so unimportant,
would leave the real divisions alone and seek refuge in the
life of the spirit, the inward peace, the ideal calm. They
see or seem to see through the contentions, the separations,
the hollow relationships of the visible life into the ever
lasting repose, the beatitude of that indwelling of the spirit
with itself, which is at the same time its intimacy with the
world of all human souls and with God. And when we say
spirit, we mean no more or less than that human, central
unity of being which is the deep source of all noble, simple,
honest life, and of all the warmth of real human love and
heart. Such is the Mysticism, such the Quietism, in which
men of purer natures and more limpid founts of life have
dwelt in the company of others like themselves, and, seeing
events sub specie aeternitatis, have recreated, were it only in
a gorgeous vision of faith, that heaven which is the true
home of the soul.

But such men were ever a select few, and the ages grow
less and less favourable to their ecstasy. The eye of faith no
longer penetrates the distance so boldly to find its home in
God. Man has become more and more convinced that the
divine must dwell among us, that it must be realized on
earth as in heaven, and realized not in the heart merely,
but in tangible and visible forms. Or, to put it more
definitely, the enthusiast, whose glance passes through the
dividing shams to the underlying unity, is not content to
build that long-lost heritage of humanity in the spirit only ;
he will not tamely submit to the actual fragmentariness of
life, content, if so be he can still enjoy the comforting sense
of its ideal wholeness. He protests against the breaking-up

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM

403

into fractions of human unity and demands its restitution.
He criticizes the casual, unsystematic, inharmonious character
of the minor groupings which actually prevail ; he shows how
they are not duly dovetailed into each other, and that they do
not tend to converge and form any collective universe of life :
he condemns the inequalities which by slow accumulations
have shut many men out of the common sunlight of humanity,
and forced them either to cower despairingly under falling
hovels, or to entrench themselves defiantly in palatial prisons.
He demands that the social basis of human life and action
shall be realized, not as a mere general supervision and police
of occasional interference, not as a system of laws which,
when definite acts against the common weal have been traced
to their author, shall restore the balance and the status quo
ante, but realized as a reasonable organization, which watches
so carefully, so closely, so wisely, that every part of the social
machine shall never fail to keep in mind its social duty, that
no part shall be other than an individualized organ or
missionary of the whole, that no stagnation, no block, no
purely special or local movement shall arise to mar the
uniformity of action. Natural laws, he will admit, tend after
all to compensate all divergences, to bring all selfishness to
become in the end the servant of the common good : a law
other than the conscious motive of their actions and business
constrains individuals and parties to further the general
organism. But the process, he complains, is slow and costly :
and meanwhile many a sigh, many a death, many a torture
has to be endured, which a reasonable method of organization
might have prevented. The world must band itself together
to enforce on each by the instrumentality of all that he is
nothing, and has nothing, except his moment's life and work :
that all else, which through the gift of nature, through the
process of history, is gathered and kept around him, is
a common stock, which, as the poet says,

' Nulli manciple datur, omnibus usu.'
D d 2,

404 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

Such ideas, like all ideas, are not first heard from those
who are deepest in the social slough, who are in the greatest
measure disinherited of the common goods of social life. It
is from observers, not utterly merged in the social whirl, nor
yet quite untouched by its revolutions, that come the first
words demanding a renovation of the order of human life.
Such voices, indeed, had been heard, ( rari nautes in gurgite
vasto/ here and there from age to age. But it is only
in the present century that the catena of the witnesses of
socialism becomes continuous. First comes Henri, Comte de
Saint Simon, a survival of the old chivalry, but in a new
medium of finance, a knight errant of the industrial age.
His life — and it is that which fits him to interpret his
generation — runs on from the time of Louis XV through the
Revolution to the Empire and the Restoration of the Bourbons.
The Revolution had hurled the old system from its founda
tions and broken it to fragments : but it had founded
nothing, and left nothing permanent, except a code. But
a code is but scanty furnishing for an empty house l. And
Saint Simon, already past his prime in the days of the
Empire, a broken-down but indomitable hearted man, gave
utterance to a dream, which drew around his declining years
some of the finest youth of intellectual promise in France.
And that dream? That the industrial chiefs, the great
bankers, financiers, capitalists, who really ruled the world
from their quiet bank -parlours, should assume the real duties
of their function, should become true captains of industry,
leaders of men's movements, because concerned with that
aspect of life, the economical, which is the basis of all else.
And beside and behind these magnates, whose practical skill
and mastery in the art of manipulating men pointed them out

1 The important question, according to St. Simon, is not about remodel
ling the powers and forms of government, but the law which constitue Us
proprietes et qui en regie fexercise. The natural means of reaching liberty is
reconstituer la propriete. St. Simon emphasizes bonheur instead of justice et
raison.

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISE 405

as fit to take the place of an effete feudalism, stood the men
of science and art, the disciples of Newton and Raphael,
throwing1 rays of sweetness and light into the harder and
darker money-souls, intermediaries as it were between the
practical agent and the celestial source of wisdom and
kindness. The disciples who drank up these suggestions,
and who remembered their master's dying words, that
' Nothing great is ever done without passion/ rushed with
the headstrong and fantastic eagerness of converted youth to
carry out their mission. Youthful extravagance, and the
friction between warring ambitions, soon burnt out their
flame, and many of the inspired apostles of the Saint
Simonian Church cooled down into sober citizens and practical
utilitarians. But, even though the propaganda failed in
immediate reformation, it left everlasting seeds, and began
a permanent ferment. It created the dream of an organiza
tion of social life on a single, and that a real basis, not
a fiction legitimated only by its antiquity. It maintained
for natural capacity the rights of free development, and of
just retribution for service done. And besides justice, it
preached fraternity as its new Christianity — a Christianity
of this world, which holds true religion to consist in all
work aiming at ameliorating the condition of human kind.

These were the ideal aims of this Aristocratic Socialism,
which creates a new feudalism, an industrial feudalism of
light and leading, binding the capitalist to be the bene
factor and the guide of his workman. It was a dream, but
a dream of that glorious age of French Romance when
Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand saw like high visions
of the possibilities for human nature, if only it lived freely
and openly by its self-appointed ideals.

The next step in the march of Socialism is on a humbler
level. A little younger than Saint Simon, but of far other
origin : a petty shopkeeper's son, himself a shopman and
commercial traveller, Charles Fourier was especially impressed

4o6 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

by the unnecessary frictions, the senseless competition,, the
commercial struggle for life, which went on around him, and
which were due, he thought, entirely to the present absurd
arrangements which broke men and women up into separate
families, and forced each person throughout life, not merely to
retain the partners of their original choice, but to follow one
trade and one only from year to year — thus sinking deeper
into an isolation from all other human beings, finding life
more and more monotonous in his narrow routine, and fretting
his soul in a base endeavour to overreach his neighbours. The
ideal of Fourier is Harmony, in which competition is trans
formed into emulation, friction into co-operation, and work
becomes veritably play. This magic change follows attention
to the fundamental laws of human nature — the law of
passional attraction. The ordinary life proceeds on the
assumption that man is a monotone — a being of a single and
consistent wish. In truth, says Fourier, he is a twelve-
stringed instrument in his normal fullness, and admits of all
possible variations in the strength of the various impulses,
the combinations or groupings of these impulses, and the
dominant moods which regulate their play. Hence to let
these aspects of a many-sided human nature have free course
and realization, a new social order must appear, in which vice
will disappear because only due to natural bent which man's
misplacement has turned into a curse. To that end the mono
gamous family must go, and in its place must arise a social
unity of larger numbers, some 2,000 souls, old and young,
who shall form a phalanx of the new social army. In
each such group where likings, varying from hour to hour,
determine each man's work and his companions, and where
ingenious arrangements take its sting from the primitive
curse of labour, a combined organization, freely built up by
natural impulse, aims at the production of some species of
product : and as the whole world will one day be covered
with similar phalanxes, each engaged with zest and skill on

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 407

a special product, the adjustment of one canton's product to
another will flow from spontaneous harmony of passions, and
hardly need any interference from the titular omniarch, who
sits ruling1 the nations from Constantinople. When the loss
due to war, friction, and irregular production is thus removed,
the wealth of the world will fabulously mount. But let us
do Fourier the justice to say that, if he had these gallant
visions of future weal and wealth, he was consistent enough,
at least in his earliest work, to dream that, as a glorious
aurora rose triumphant in the northern sky, the harmonious
world would find nature's fauna equally ready in the service
of peace' and increase.

A fantastic dreamer, doubtless. But the fantastic element
may in part be easily discounted, and was so by his early
followers. What remains? A first systematic attempt to
show the mechanism of the appetites and propensipns of
human nature, and to claim for man's senses their right
to a beautiful, fit, and harmonious environment, instead of
the present hideousness which stares upon us from a dress,
manners, and habitation which have no living relation to the
beings they enclose. A protest against the selfishness of life,
and a plan, capable no doubt of much amendment, for making
freedom of social intercourse and expression of public spirit
a possibility. And thirdly, a plan for giving to talent, to
capital, and to labour, a proportionate share in the social
product: a plan which puts labour decidedly first, capital
second, and leaves talent largely to that self -approbation
which must always be its main reward.

Out of these two prophets of socialism comes all that is
pictorial in its literature, distinct in its conception of the
future society, attractive to the needs of the human heart,
and inspiring to the souls who here and there aspired to an
ampler life, a less selfish companionship. But as yet the
mission had only touched these higher souls, in France, in
England, in America, and in Germany, who felt dissatisfied

408 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

with the chaos and coldness of life, and with the wayward
ignorance and hopelessness of the masses. The next step
required therefore was to popularize the ideas, to give them
a more artistic grouping, and to bring them into closer
contact with the ordinary needs and conceptions of common
men. That was done by the social Romance of Cabet. Here
a communistic state was portrayed in its supposed actual
working in some as yet undiscovered land beyond the
Atlantic. It is a nation entirely composed of working men
and women, but where the working-day never extends beyond
seven hours, where each worker feels that he or she is a public
functionary, no less than if he or she is invested, as may any
day happen, with the official titles and duties of authority.
It is a land in which all that comfort and care, all that
co-operation can accomplish, has been attained. Woman, the
ouvriere — and there are no ladies who are not oumieres — is
acknowledged in every family to be the social queen : and
family life runs on sweet and pleasant throughout, as it does
in our present world only in its halcyon days. Strict but
gracious decorum prevails in every province of life, maintained
by an imperious order, which, like a predestined fate, fears no
obstruction and is strong with the strength of the universal
will. A wise directory sees that everything is done as reason
and justice demand, and as secures the common good. Every
step in life from beginning to end is taken under the direction
and by the measures of the public authority. The child is, if
possible, ushered into the world in a hospital : and early
education, uniform for all, and the same for both sexes at
first, is traced out by comprehensive orders of council. The
choice of professions is conducted under official supervision,
and, if need be, determined by examination. Every branch
of industry is fixed as regards its extent and conduct by
regulation from above, and the whole social capital is the
property of the community, which must directly command its
administration. The dress, the food, the hours of meals, are

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 469

all the subject of regulation lists, which are the fruit of the
best consideration which science and experience can give to
these problems. Courtship is by no means conducted in
a corner,, and celibacy is the subject of severe reproach. Art
and letters are under a moral and political censorship, which
forbids e. g. the exhibition of the nude, and allows only an
official press, suppressing the firebrands of journalism.
Government is conducted in the fullest light of public
criticism, and no excuse of need of diplomatic secrecy or
reasons of state tolerated for an instant. And as for religion,
why, though heaven and hell are convenient beliefs for the
wretched who look onward to compensation for themselves
and their oppressors, they are meaningless in this Icarian
community, where religion is replaced by an ethical system,
fsans ceremonie ni pratique qui sente la superstition.' At
last comes the end of life, and the deceased Icarian, after
finally serving his country by being submitted to dis
section and having the report, nameless, entered in the public
register, is dissolved by cremation into his elements.

Such was the work which its author, a Frenchman, who
had lived some years in England, and read Sir Thomas More,
put forward to give the imagination of the masses. And,
ever since, the pictures of that romance — in spite, be it
added, of the poor little homesteads which were all that came
visibly out of the attempts to realize the Icarian community
in Illinois and Iowa — these pictures, modified here and there,
even illuminated more brightly in parts by later hands,
have served as the basis of the portraitures of the Socialist
millennium. But if Cabet and his imitators furnish the
doctrine of the latter-day things, his apocalypse of the New
Jerusalem, we must go elsewhere for the Gospels and the
Epistles of Socialism : and pass from the prophets to the
evangelists and teachers.

In the latter half of the reign of Louis Philippe, the social
restlessness which had brought him to the crown had

4ro ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii

continued to penetrate deeper and deeper, as his own bourgeois
selfishness and stolidity, the prudish pedantry of his ministers,
and the general stagnation of political life, made the heart
sicker and sicker with hopes deferred. The rose water
landscapes of Cabet might please inexperienced milliners
or poetical enthusiasts. The real workman in his times of
misery, the thinker considering the false and selfish ends
of social ambition, and the agitator, anxious to see his ideas
of liberty and justice victorious over the old powers of
legitimate monarchy, took a sterner view of the needs of the
time — of the Condition-of- Europe question. In England,
France, and Germany the irritation is at a height. Theo
logians, poets, essayists, politicians, all in various tones
discuss the evil, and examine or propose remedies. In
England perhaps there is least talking, just because there
is most acting. In the early years of the post-Napoleonic
period Robert Owen had come forward with proposals for
moulding men into happy and productive citizens by a more
real, practical, and all-embracing education, physical, moral,
and intellectual, and by a co-operative system of labour com
munities. But Owen's work was in the main a personal,
practical work, done at New Lanark j done, it may be added,
before his theory had been definitely dogmatized. His
theoretical contribution is in quality and real content incon
siderable : and that for two reasons. The first is his own
organizing personality, which was everything and every
where : bent, as his phrase was, on forming men's character
for them by the circumstances and influences he could bring
to bear on them, treating them in short as passively plastic to
his wise master-hand. The other reason was his conflict with
the instincts and prepossessions nearest to the heart of
England: his mechanical system, his calm declaration of
favour of a purely reasonable religion, and his proposals
towards loosening the traditional securities of the family or
domestic relationship. Yet, as has been pointed out more

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 411

than once, while other nations have developed socialistic
theory, England during the second quarter of the present
century entered by the Factory Laws on that long series of
socialist measures, by which the free will or caprice of indi
vidual owners to do what they liked with their own, even if
that own were but the labour-power which they had to sell,
was subjected to regulation, inspection, and positive require
ment of beneficial service, in the interest, so far as that
interest was understood, of all those immediately concerned,
and, in consequence, of the community at large.

Elsewhere the fires, which corn-law abolition and factory
inspection had calmed at least for a time in England, burned
vigorously enough, if largely in secret. In the manufacturing
towns of Western and Northern Switzerland, in the plains of
the lower Rhine, and sporadically in other parts, the working
classes were being drawn into associations when they learned
their strength and began to realize their wants. Many
motives worked together in founding these clubs and secret
societies. The most prominent and at first probably the
most efficient was the spirit of republican freedom, which had
been fostered and nattered in the Great War of Liberation,
but which, in the twenty years after Waterloo, had been, by
exasperation from within and unwise repression from above,
gradually turned into a bitter hatred of the Prussian
monarchy, and an ardent desire to see the three-and-thirty
princedoms of Germany absorbed in one great free Father
land. Next to this motive was an ideal tendency, to foster
a higher public spirit in the federations of the labouring class,
to raise their standard of education, and give them a taste
for nobler pleasures, social interests of permanent value. And
lastly and more potently there was a communistic motive :
a desire to level all ranks down to one standard, to eliminate
all special authorities and orders from society, and to band
the labourers together into the one all-embracing class, which
is really no class but the generality.

4i2 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii

The centre of this system of fiery agitation was for a long
time Paris. As early as 1836 a Communist League had been
founded there by Germans. Four years later it emigrated to
London, where it has since remained, connected with the
associations of similar aims throughout Europe and America.
In 1846 the League offered a place in its councils to one
who according to common report had at length succeeded
in founding socialism on strictly ' scientific ' views of the
development of the social state. Karl Marx, the most
notable and original advocate of these germs of economico-
social theory, was then in his twenty-eighth year. In 1847
he and his friend Engels issued the Manifesto of the Com
munist Party— an appeal to the ' proletarians ' of all nations
to combine to overthrow the capitalist party by the attain
ment of political power. But the cry was heard in a desert :
and the sanguine anticipations which Marx and other leaders
entertained of a favouring juncture in German policy were
signally disappointed. The London Exhibition of 1 862 gave
an occasion to a renewal of the attempt to federate the
revolutionary elements among European workmen : and in
1864 the International Working Men's Association was
founded with a somewhat similar aim. But this associa
tion was a conglomerate of many elements — some, like the
followers of Mazzini, being quite opposed to Socialism. But
the Socialistic element carried the day, and Marx remained
practically supreme in the Association till about 1872, when
the growing strength of the Anarchist elements at the Hague
Congress led to its lapse and the transference of these
elements to America. Since that date the strength of the
Socialist party has lain in Germany. When Karl Marx died in
1883, the socialist parties of Germany who in 1871 had polled
only about i in 40, and in 1877 nearly i in 10 votes, suc
ceeded, notwithstanding the Socialist Law of 1878, in slightly
increasing their votes even beyond that proportion.

But, leaving these statistics which are more pretentious

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 413

than edifying, and throw almost no light on the real numbers
o£ believers in Socialism, and still less as to what their belief
involves, let us return and try to understand the scientific
basis on which Marx based Socialism. His chief work, Das
Kapital, of which the first volume was originally published
in 1867, is the sacred book of Socialism. The work is
incomplete: but, as it stands, it forms the text to which
almost socialistic literature of later times is but the com
mentary. In form the work is no treatise on Socialism : it
is a criticism of the current political economy and of the
capitalist mode of production.

To understand the position of Marx we must remember
that he began life in an intellectual atmosphere thoroughly
pervaded by the spirit of German philosophy. Fichte had
shown his view of public rights by such utterances as that
the State is bound to see that every one is able to live by his
labour, and that the blameless poor has an absolute com
pulsory right to support by the State : that mines and forests
are properly state property ; and that ' the first aim of
hunting is the protection of agriculture and by no means the
possession of game/ Fichte had even planned an economic
state, where everything was organized for the general good,
and not by the individual profit. Hegel in his Philosophy of
Law had been equally decided. The trader is virtually a public
functionary and servant, and the community ought to see
that he fulfils his part. Free-trade requires a general super
vision to mitigate and shorten the periods of violent con
vulsion which arise in the course of natural adjustments of
supply and demand. Society has taken the place of the
parents and is bound to fulfil their duties to its members,
especially the poor, and that not merely by relieving their
distress, but by taking steps to save them from the vices
which their position, with its sense of wrong, naturally
generates. When society is left to its own unregulated
activity, the growing interdependence of men upon each

414 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii

other leads to the generation, and the more and more rapid
generation, of a small class of immensely rich, and a numerous
class, depressed in its resources below the normal level of sub
sistence, lost consequently to all sense of law and honesty
and honour — a rabble, or, as it was afterwards called, a Pro
letariat. In this way it appears that with all its excessive
wealth, economic society is not rich enough to suppress such
a proletariat. The immediate remedy which Hegel sees is
in the revival of the mediaeval guilds and corporations in
a form appropriate to modern circumstances. The corporation
or guild gives its members a wider family home, a common
stock of repute, character, capital, on which he is saved from
the oscillations of individual competition, and is trained in
a school of at least comparative devotion to a common cause.
Isolation of the individual worker leads to a race for riches :
and the advantage of belonging to a chartered guild in the
light of publicity is to check the tendency to individual
prodigality on one hand, or individual lagging behind in the
work of industry and commerce on the other. The corpora
tion, limiting what is called the natural right to dispose of his
skill as he pleases, really elevates him to be a conscious
contributor to a common end. And above the corporation
is the State, which keeps the highest common good alive in
the several minor or particular associations, where particu
larities are only too likely to harden and ossify.

It can hardly be wondered at that words like these were
as wormwood to the German liberals, as similar doctrines
were and are to the extremer free-traders among ourselves.
But Karl Marx was not likely to suppose that such functions
could be entrusted to the Prussian Government. The real,
i. e. the ideal, state, of which Hegel had thus spoken, he saw
in quite another direction, and he approached the considera
tion of it from quite another level. All the socialists from
Saint Simon and Fourier downwards had poured out con
tempt on the moralist, the philosopher, and the metaphysician.

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 415

To them these were the word-mongers of idealism — dealers in
some distillation or other from that spiritualist theory which
finds its best-known shape in religion. All alike attempted
to rule the world by unrealities, by figments. Duties, says
Fourier, are only the caprices of philosophers : they are
human and variable : but the passions are the voice of nature
and God, and the end of all desire, the fullness of happiness,
is that ' graduated opulence which puts one above want/ and,
through and in it, the satisfaction of all one's passions.
Marx does not deal with the basis of life in this popular and
grossly materialist way. And yet his materialism is in its
own way equally decided.

The true basis on which all the phenomena of human
life, and therefore of history, find their explanation is the
economic. Economic needs and the mode of satisfying them
are the ultimate factors which in slightly concealed or com
pletely disguised aspects meet us under the names of politics,
morals, and religion. The phenomena may seem to hover
about celestial regions, to centre on ideas, and to consist in
questions of just or unjust policy. But these are illusions,
which have been fostered by certain malformations in the
economic structure, and which will disappear when once
economic phenomena have, returned to their normal limpidity,
and permit every one to see clearly that man's activity to
supply his needs of life is the only permanent fact behind
all the phantasmagoria of metaphysics and theology. The
relations of labour and its reward are therefore at the basis
of all history — are the only reality in all history. Behind
the history of creeds, dogmas, and philosophies, behind the
struggles of constitutional and religious history, behind wars
and diplomacy, behind the organization of family and state,
behind democracy and oligarchy, behind the developments
of art and science, there is the great record of the gradual
stages in that process whereby labour became divorced from
enjoyment, the means of life from the labourer, and the free

416 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

man in direct appropriation of nature is replaced by a society
in which the vast majority are disinherited of the right of
direct approach to the means of subsistence,, and those who
are their reputed possessors are only holders of a bond
endorsed by the society of the period.

There was once a time, perhaps, in primitive ages and
backward civilizations, when the members of a little com
munity were all comparatively on a level, and each had his
traditional place assigned him in the commonwealth, directly
serving it and serving himself, but not dependent on indi
viduals, and so in a modicum of comfort enjoying the sense
of independent work. But at the beginning of our European
history in the classical period a change had been nearly con
summated, which ended in breaking up mankind into two
groups, the slave-holding proprietors on one hand, and their
slaves on the other. The few independent members of society
hardly count when that form of society reached its climax.
This is succeeded in due course by the mediaeval society, with
its contrasts between feudal lords and their serfs, and the
master with his assistants in the trade guilds. The workman
in that period has not acquired his general or abstract
character of labourer : and the master is not a mere employer
for wages. The relation between the two parties is a personal
and human one : the serf does a definite and particular labour
in kind, and receives a definite and particular protection : the
subordinates in the guild-relation are bound to their master
by ties almost domestic. The social character of labour
is not veiled in its exchangeability for a money price,
and the social relation of the producers not disposed of by
a commercial transaction. But these relations are inflexible
and narrow, and tend to sink into a mere dependence on
particular individuals, where the only gain is that one
has a definite master, a definite attachment, and is not
a ' miserable 3 cut off even from the privilege of being ruled.
Where Karl Marx really enters fully and with zeal into

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 417

the history of economic movement, however, is when he traces
the stages which have led to the capitalist production of
modern times. The rise of the commercial and mercantile
class, the progress of industrial undertakings on a large
scale, the character given to manufacture by the introduction
of machinery, are all described with force and abundant
illustration. We hurry on to the denouement. ' Self -wrought
private property, resting so to speak on the coalescence
of the isolated and independent individual labourer with
the conditions or means of his labour, is displaced by the
private property of the capitalist, which rests on the exploita
tion of the labour of others, yet labour which in form is
free. ... As soon as this transformation-process has dis
integrated the old society deeply and widely enough, i. e. as
soon as the labourer is thoroughly divorced from the means
of existence, then the further step in socializing labour, and
in transforming the earth and other means of production
into instruments worked by the organized effort of the com
munity — in short, the next step in expropriating the private
proprietors is taken. What is now to disinherit is no longer
the labourer working on his own stock of goods, but the
capitalist who gets the work out of many labourers. This
expropriation is carried out through the law inherent in the
very nature of capitalist production, through the concentra
tion of capitals. Every one capitalist is the death of many.
Hand in hand with this concentration or the expropriation
of many capitalists by a few, the co-operative form of the
labour process grows more and more extensive. Then the
monopolizing of capital grows a fetter on the mode of pro
duction, which has sprung up with it and under it. At
last the centralization of the means of production and the
associative mode of labour reach a point where they become
incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integu
ment is burst up. The hour of capitalist private property
has struck. The expropriators are expropriated/

E e

4i8 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

The main work of Marx may thus be said to fall into two
parts, a theoretical and a practical. The general purport of
the theory is a refutation of the claims of the current economics
to be considered a science of the general group of phenomena
with which it deals. In this, he on the whole may be said to
join sides with the critics who point out that political economy
has not risen to the scientific height of surveying its facts
from a universal or comprehensive point of view, but has
remained immersed in local and temporary aspects of the
phenomena in question, treating the present order of things
as an absolute or eternal truth, instead of one stage in a
process, the whole laws of which form the only adequate
object of economic science. In the practical tendency of his
argument, however, Marx stands on a somewhat different
ground. The pure and abstract historian, if such a creature
there be, is content with pointing out sequences, and is
cautious in presuming he can detect causes, still more un
willing to profess to foresee tendencies and immanent laws.
The human being, who has not so learned to mutilate his
mind, is forced to look at things otherwise. To him the
past is big with the future. However uncertain may be his
footing, he must use it to jump, or at least to step, into the
problems that wait for him. They cannot be put off till
uncertainty be annihilated. And so, as we saw, Marx, doing
his best to gather the drift or normal tendency of social-
economic movement, proclaims it as the only light we can
have to guide our path and fix in some way the goal. He
doubtless erred, as all prophets have inclined to err, in
supposing that the end was close at hand, that the process
of socializing capital was all but complete. But a little
error in calculation does not seriously interfere with the
truth of the general principle. And that principle is that
the present line of movement is tending in what may briefly
be called a socialist direction. To us, imitating him, the true
attitude towards this movement is neither to ban nor to

vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 419

bless it. If we hesitate, as we should, to term it a natural
law, a necessity of social evolution, we cannot deny that it
is one, a prominent, perhaps the dominant tendency of our
modern civilization. Those who fight against it are by the
inner dialectic of antagonism compelled to use its own weapons,
and undertake its work. They fight in fact not against it,
but against the men who advocate it. Just as the heathen
sages and kings sought to stay Christian progress by evincing
the inner Christianity of the Pagan theology, just as the
conservative defeats the radicals by showing that, on occa
sion and in his heart of hearts, he is more reforming than
they, so Prince Bismarck outbids the socialist by a series
of laws enforcing the very duties which the workmen's unions
have been aiming at. The good landlord and the bad, almost
equally, though by different modes of motion, support the
socialist argument. Every syndicate formed to regulate the
price of a commodity, in a particular interest, shows the
imminence of socialization. The more our individual and our
collective welfare hangs upon vast congeries of machinery,
partially dependent of each other, and beyond individual super
vision and control — except for selfish and, it may be, sinister
ends — the more a collective, i.e. a centralized administration,
is necessary. Since the first railroads were carried across
private property for the common good by coercive law, barely
half a century has elapsed, and not so much since the factory
acts really exercised any considerable influence : yet how
much has already been done in the same direction. And if
we look nearer home, it is plain that university legislation and
university practice have alike tended towards consolidation,
subordination to common ends, the socialization of intellectual
capital, and the recognition by the individual labourer of his
social or communitarian function.

Are we then to conclude that by a quiet and easy transition,
society, as it now is, will be so internally transformed by the
many molecular changes going on slowly and imperceptibly

E e 2

420 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

within it, that one fine morning the world will awake and find
itself socialist in name, as it has long been tending to become
in fact ? Or, will the change from the old order to the new
be a violent one, the pang of a revolution, abruptly and sharply
rending the continuity of life ? No man will wisely attempt
the task of prophet, save in decorous generalities. Of old
time one said, the kingdom of heaven cometh even as a thief
in the night ; and yet again, Heed not them who say Lo here
or Lo there, for the kingdom of heaven is within you. So
perhaps will it be with this generation. It must be that
stumbling-blocks bar the way, and there will be some rough
jolting, perhaps even some deadlier accidents in the movement.
But, on the other hand, the end is not yet. Prophetic socialism
lifts up its eyes to the hills ; but it hardly realizes how far off
they are ; how, indeed, to the thinker they are already ascer
tained to be the hills of heaven, though more cynical observers
might be inclined to call them the fabled mountains of the
moon. Philosophy does not much sympathize with the popular
conceptions or misconceptions of what is meant by progress.
To the vulgar rhetorician the word, uttered too often in
Pharisaic self-commendation, suggests the image of a long
straight road, which, as.it goes on, becomes wider and fuller,
and filled with a wiser, a merrier, a richer assemblage — a
continuous accumulation of good things, with perhaps just
a few movements of malaise, an occasional time of trial, but
not more than enough to season and enhance the general sense
of getting on. And another view, held by those who fancy
they give accuracy to their conceptions by a mixture of
exact science, regards progress as taking place along some
complicated curve, where, like the traveller through the
Saint Gothard following his way gradually through a succes
sion of circles which land him at each outlet on higher and
higher planes, we seem alternately to recede from and approach
the end in view. Perhaps a sober philosophy, not too con
temptuous of the past, nor too sanguine of the future, will

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 421

hesitate to assess the difference of culture-level : and will be
inclined to say that it is sufficient faith in God and nature to
think that all is for good, without venturing to transcend our
data and say it is all either for the better or the best, much less
that all is for the worst. To that frame of mind it will be
suitable to suppose that each age has its own problem : and that
as its day is, so will its strength be. If the problem is more
complex,, we may fairly hold that the powers of solving the
problem are multiplied in proportion, but we shall not therefore
conclude that the result is of a higher value. We may shrink
from assuming that anything beyond a transference of energy
can take place, and hesitate to commit ourselves to theories
— and they are those of our current philosophy — that the
world goes on accumulating virtue, able at once to eat its
cake and store it up.

And what is the bearing of these generalities on human
progress on the present question ? This : that socialism is no
solution of the human problem, but that in its general outline
it is rather an indication of its nature, and an attempt to
formulate how it has arisen, and in what it consists. That
problem is the perennial problem of human association : a
problem which at intervals becomes more aggravating and
threatening, and therefore calls forth by natural and normal
response new efforts to comprehend the difficulty and to find
the way out of it. In such an accentuated phase now stands
the problem of freeing man's life from its recurrent tendency
to become as Hobbes said, ' solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short/ It is easier in such a case either to minimize or to
magnify the evil : but there is safety in saying that socialism,
whatever its aberrations, has the credit of keeping people alive
to the fact that the social compact is always making and
never made, and that it has now become like an ill-fitting
dress, which is displacing the assimilative system of society,
causing irregular excitation of the heart, and clogging the
organs of breathing.

422 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn

Not merely does it indicate that there is a problem : it
diagnoses fairly well the central seat of the disease, or,
perhaps we should say perturbation. The old Saint-Simonian
society talked about the rehabilitation of the flesh. The word,
it is urged, has a dangerous sound. ' Why, that 's certain ; '
we reply with Hotspur : ' 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to
sleep, to drink ! but out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this
flower, safety.' Socialism is part of the general protest
which has been raised in the realistic interest against a
fantastic and unsubstantial idealism, or spiritualism, or intel-
lectualism. When mediaeval Christendom said in its early
artists, teste Browning,

'To bring the invisible full into play,
Let the visible go to the dogs, what matters?'

it spoke a very aspiring and, let us retort, a very dangerous
dogma. The modern socialist might and perhaps does demand
the whole charter of man : but he naturally begins by re-
demanding what was last taken from him. That the physical
life of the body is the basis of everything else, bright with the
promise of all life, in art, morals, science and religion, is the one
conviction that emerges more and more definitely and palpably
in all modern ethics. The soul, indeed, is highest : but we cannot
now believe that the soul may be saved without the body, or
that physical health and vigour are other than absolutely indis
pensable to enable the higher life, the real life, to become all
that it was meant to be. And this ' rehabilitation of the
flesh/ if properly understood, is not contradictory of the pre
cept which bids us deny the flesh. If for one moment I may
borrow a Hegelian formula, I should say that our proper
attitude in this matter is a negation of a negation. If the
denial of the flesh means discipline and culture, means self-
control, means the consecration of natural powers to ideal
ends, then is such denial praiseworthy. But a mere rejection,
ignoring, soaring above the flesh, is vain and false. And the
rehabilitation of the flesh means only that the passionate nature,

vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 423

at first silenced as an intruder into the life of the spirit, must
cease that silence and learn a new language.

The movement is part of that tendency of the modern
world to put the state and secular functions supreme. In the
Middle Ages the Church stood foremost. Mediaeval life
seemed to centre in the Church, as the mediaeval town
clustered round the towers and buttresses of its cathedrals.
But it needs not much acquaintance with mediaeval life to say
that the semblance must not here, more than elsewhere, be
taken for the reality. As you examine more carefully, you
see that the sacred place is the home of art and science, and
that in the carvings on its walls you can trace the evidence o£
the same jovial and not over sanctimonious mirth which laughs
out in the farces and fabliaux of the period. Round the
consecrated altar-slab, the nave and aisles of the church,
were ground in which plays and marketing were neither
vulgar nor unclean : and I need not tell a Cambridge audience
that as late as the reign of Elizabeth a play of Plautus was
performed in King's College Chapel. There came afterwards
a period of differentiation. It was a result, fostered by the
Reformation, and still more by the counter-Reformation, to
make broad and stern the distinction between the secular and
the sacred : and out of this there issued in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century the real struggle between the sacerdotal
and religious element on the one hand, and the secular and
scientific on the other. By the close of the seventeenth
century the Church and religion seemed on the whole vic
torious. But the eighteenth century reversed the process, and
by the close of it the triumph of this world and the secular
commonwealth seemed secure. Further experience has shown
the delusion of those who thought so. The secularistic move
ment of the present century has had to go deeper and to
embrace a wider range. To go deeper : instead of the mere
light, intellectual enlightenment, which the eighteenth century
held to be the highest gift, it has had to seek for a more

424 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii

adequate basis of knowledge, to penetrate beneath the surface
of civilization into the workman's lodging-, the factory, and
the peasant's hut — to realize the existence of what has been
called a fourth class behind the tiers etat which emancipated
itself a century ago. But at the same time the enlightenment
of the nineteenth century, as it has found a profounder basis
of fact and knowledge, so it has taken up into itself an ideal
spirit, an influence of poetry, art, and religion, which formerly
seemed to it absurd and intelligible. The same society which
bade put on the flesh the new robe of honour, also declared that
all its energies were to be enlisted in the service of humanity.

Thus socialism has done well, if it has succeeded in producing
any conviction in the general mind that political party, religious
service, and scientific study, all derive their permanent value
from the direct service they render in eliminating the eliminable
causes of human wretchedness. If it can break in pieces any
of our political, religious, or educational fetiches, and bring
the priest, the politician and the schoolmaster and bookman to
realize that the question of questions ultimately is, Whom have
thy labours made better, what hungry and thirsty and stranger
and sick hast thou endowed and helped with thy sympathy
and aid, socialism will not have been fruitless of good.

Socialism, as was pointed out, is an acute phase of the
general social question. It contains in itself, and raised to
the highest pitch, the two opposite tendencies which govern
the whole process of history. These tendencies appear in
socialism in an aggravated, an almost inconceivable antago
nism. They are individualism, the proclamation of freedom
and equality : and communism, the principle of fraternity or
of something to which fraternity is only an approach. On
one hand, the demand for absolute independence, for suppres
sion of all authoritative interference from without, for the
right to free development from without. On the other,
the cry for organization, for socialization, for intensifying
the solidarity of all social action and life.

viz] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 425

It is sometimes said, and there is a superficial truth in the
saying, that there are two sets of socialists, the collectivists
and the anarchists. But it is nearer the fact to say that
there are two warring- tendencies inherent in socialism —
which, to repeat it again, is only conscious and intensified
society — two tendencies, of which one is more prominent in
certain minds, or at certain times, and in certain circum
stances, or more specially adapted to the conditions of certain
classes.

A word on ' Anarchism/ It is an ugly word, and, if
associated with bombshells or dynamite, it becomes uglier still.
But listen to two of the anarchists who were put to death at
Chicago in 1886. ' Anarchism/ says one, fdoes not mean
bloodshed : does not mean robbery, arson, &c. Anarchism
means the reorganization of society upon scientific principles.
Anarchism is a free society without kings or classes, a society
of sovereigns in which the liberty and economic equality of all
would furnish an unshakable equilibrium as a foundation and
condition of social order/ ' Anarchy/ says another, fis the
natural law, instead of the man-made statute. Laws, natural
laws, just laws, are not made, they are discovered. Every
human ill is produced by the denial of man^s natural rights/ It
is clear that such anarchism as this is a deduction, an applica
tion of a very respectable doctrine, the doctrine to which
John Milton and John Locke have lent their names. It is also
fair to remember that anarchism, as it arose in minds like
those of the Russian Bakunin, is the normal reaction from
despotism and autocracy, the sovereignty of a despotic church
or state. And lastly, when men like Mr. William Morris
take an analogous position and cover it with the name of
Communism, while expressing their doubts of the permanent
value of the socialistically-organized state, it is clea.r that the
doctrine is only an exaggeration of a truth. Anarchism, then,
is an unfortunate name, a distorted expression of the view
that, the more human action proceeds from internal motives

426 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

and the less it is vitiated by f all the paraphernalia of official
authority, which is after all a burden/ the better will be the
results for human welfare and individual development. If
thus conceived as an ideal of the state where each is a law to
himself, because his basal principle is a faith of solidarity with
others, and where free play is given to faculty in all its
individuality of growth, because it draws its force from a
common soil, anarchy is transformed into an angel of light.
And if it adopt the name of Communism, it is a communism
which all true theories of the State have maintained, when
they conceived it not as a hindrance but as a help to develop
ment, as the common foster-mother, out of whom proceed
all useful and precious functions, differentiating into endless
forms of individual and class performance, but never losing
allegiance to the central idea of a common life in which they
live, from which they issue, and to enrich and diversify which
they contribute. If Mr. Morris thinks that our modern states
are too large to give a real home, and that lesser social unities
or ' communes ' should gather together under the shelter of
the State as the mighty mother of ' communes/ that is
a form of home wile to which no objection can be taken,
provided you can be sure that the members of your petty
groups are worthy citizens, who can keep their local patriotism
in subordination to, or rather in essential harmony with their
general partnership in the community 1.

1 This lecture seems to have been the introduction to a fuller discussion
of the subject, of which there remains only a few notes, and the section
which follows dealing with the views of Fichte and Hegel.

VIII

RELATIONS OF FTCHTE AND HEGEL TO SOCIALISM

IT is urged by writers like Schaffle that Hegelianism is the
true parent of Socialism. Hegel, they say, as the anti-refor
mation said of Erasmus — Hegel laid the egg, if the Socialists
hatched it. Yet it used to be maintained by writers of the
extreme Liberalist School in Germany that Hegel's work
on the Philosophy of Law, published in 1821, was, a philosophy
in the interests of Prussian absolutism. The facts of such
opposing accusations seem to indicate that that philosophy
was, as it claimed to be, superior to the disturbing influences
of partisanship or political bias. From the days of Socrates
and Plato downwards no eminent philosopher has escaped
this assault from partisans, who, finding their theories were
not entirely accepted and .defended by him, concluded he had
gone over to the side of the enemy. The vulgar — and the
common politician is always vulgar — parts all mankind by an
' Either, Or/ — ' Either he is with us, or he is against us/ His
little mind cannot see that a larger intelligence may embrace
what he cannot — jnay put his shibboleth and its antagonist
cry alongside of each other, and show they only need a little
mutual explanation in order to attain the common aim they
pursue by opposing means. Against the impatient cry c He
that is not with us is against us/ Hegel set the calmer ' He
that is not against us is on our side/

Fichte, as we have seen, had attempted a sort of a priori
construction of the State. In his usual method of step by

428 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

step deduction lie had shown that human beings, if they are
to live together in the same sphere or range, must inevitably
arrange their community of life on general and all-embracing
principles. A common and uniformly accepted organization
must grow up. For Fichte is not looking at what happens
with human beings as they are. As they are, they are, most
of them, figuratively half -asleep : they let life drift on, and
get into new situations and relations almost at haphazard.
One person, and one group of persons organizes life a little
here, and another organizes it a little there. But, even in
what is called one State, two conterminous often live largely
in unconcern of each other. In such a community, visibly
and outwardly one, there are a million centres of organization,
sometimes indifferent to each other, sometimes crossing and
thwarting each other, but never going on in any direction
more than a little way. So the world has grown up by
patches here and there: each province, it may be each
parish, with a way and system of its own, and in none
very thoroughly carried out. And individuals do likewise :
their minds are like cupboards, each drawer of which has
been filled from a separate source : they keep their thoughts
in isolated compartments.

Fichte, on the contrary, was the Son of the Revolution,
full of its Titanic spirit of radical reconstruction. He sets
before his mind the process of a state-formation in which
every individual would be wide-awake, would be fully alive
to his own interests, would take no step without seriously
considering all its bearings, and Avould stop nowhere short
of the ultimate conclusion. He is the prince of doctrinaires,
the undaunted and somewhat impatient champion of freedom
and of reason. In his constructions we assist at the work
of a people of dialecticians who, when they have said A,
know that they must say B, and will not shrink from the
resolute development of every element till they have come
to their Z. This is what is meant by the State of Reason,

vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 429

the Reasonable State. In a sense every state which people live
under is a reasonable state : it has its meaning, its justifica
tion, its historic value and truth. But reasonable in Fichte's
sense it is not. To be literally reasonable in that sense,
it must be a transparent system of deductions, one stage
emerging from another, one condition implicating another,
in the reasoning vision of a single intelligence. Fichte's
idealism will be content with nothing short of constructing
the state by a logical process from its first wide outlines to
its closely compacted organization.

We need only note a few points in which Fichte's
rationalizing spirit brings him somewhat on the lines of the
Socialists. Not that Fichte was of the general metal of
which Socialists are made. But the poor weaver's son of
Rammenau in Lusatia had seen the bitterness of the peasant's
lot : he had observed the social disorder of his age : and his
heart rose against those who seemed to claim that man was
made to obey the laws, whereas laws are only sanctified by
their constituting a well-doing community. He had not before
him, like the Socialists of 1840 and onwards, the degrada
tion of the industrial population of large towns : but the
German peasantry were sufficient instance to give point
and meaning to his general principles. And he resolves at
one bound as it were to put himself in the heart of the
situation. He, Fichte, becomes the multitudinous nation :
he in his own reflection relives their gathering into social
and national unity : he brings under the focus of his powerful
mind all the movements that were really transacted in a
million brains, and which for that reason were loosely and
incoherently transacted : he, strongly grasping his discordant
elements together, constructs the organized State, so that
it is a perfect mechanism, with not a joint loose or cranky,
and with a thorough system of telegraphy and communica
tion making- it all advance and move as one man. It is

c5

a splendid machine — a little too perfect perhaps in theory —

43o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

but that will do no great harm in a philosophical specula
tion, which has a long1 way before it till it works down into
practice.

In such a state there will be no privileged classes — none
entitled to an exemption from the common burden. There
will of course be distinctions, and each individual will have
his special work : but none will be excused work altogether.
The State cannot in its issue deny the ends which were fore
most in the less compacted aggregate of human lives out of
which it arose. And so each must claim his original right
to the means of subsistence : in other words, society is con
demned, if it has become so organized that any part of the
population is against his will prevented from earning his
living. This is the assertion of the droit au travail. For
had the development of the social order been carried out with
clairvoyant eye, men would have protested against the first
step which locked up the means of subsistence in private
hands, inaccessible to the common administration. Property
and its rights, he remarks, are not strictly speaking in the
land and its natural powers : these remain common ground :
what is property, is the definite use of these materials, the
right to transform them or their products into means of
human subsistence and enjoyment. Accordingly wherever
the proper utilization of natural products does not require
their being put for a period into private hands, there it is
desirable to retain the control and working directly in the
administration of the whole community. Private property in
land and natural agents is only valid under these limitations,
and only justified by the argument that it is the method of
getting the utmost product from nature, and so providing the
largest amount for general consumption. But the proprietor's
rights do not extend to leaving a natural product unused at
his will and pleasure, nor do they include the liberty of de
stroying the peasant's crops in the pursuit of his lordly sport.

Fichte has thus realized that the anarchy of industry and

vin ] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 431

commerce could not possibly be willed, if one intelligent con
sciousness had continuously guided the evolution of society.
The antagonism between the landed or agricultural interest,
the manufacturing or craftsman interest, and the commercial
or shopkeeper and merchant interest, seemed to him a scandal
and an absurdity. Each class, as it appeared to him, and
each individual of that class or profession, pursued his
business, on that tacit understanding or latent compact —
which Plato called justice — that the other was in his turn
performing his part of a great national work, realizing
a common national stock or capital, out of which the wants
of all its members were to be supplied. Each would have
refused to enter upon a specialized work, to tie himself to
a limited range of labour, had he seen reason to suppose that
he would thereby be putting himself at a permanent dis
advantage. Hence, concludes Fichte, the organization of the
trades and professions must be the business of the State :
the State must see what is the balance of farmer, artisan and
merchant, needed to maintain the whole social fabric in
a wholesome condition : and it mu'st so arrange the details
that none shall be damnified by having undertaken (on State
authority) a labour which does not bring in immediate and
material reward. Fichte lived in an age which was eagerly
uprooting the old restrictions on industry imposed by the
gilds and corporations originating in the Middle Ages. He
saw that the rage for rejecting all organization was overreach
ing itself : and foreseeing the rapid approach of a day when
the corporationless artisans would feel the need of associa
tion to help them to attain a worthy life, he declared that the
gilds which were abolished nevertheless are bound to exist.

A few passages may illustrate Fichte's view. He supposes
a complete free- trade throughout Europe, and this he says
is the result ] : ' In the trading public there arises an endless
war of all against all, a war between buyers and sellers : and

1 Fichte's Werke, vol. iii. p. 457.

432 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

this war grows more violent, unjust, and dangerous in its
consequences, in proportion as the world grows more populous,
as the commercial state grows larger by additional acquisi
tions, as production and arts rise higher, and as the com
modities in circulation thus become more numerous, and the
general demand increases and multiplies. What in simple
conditions of national life passed off without great injustice
and oppression, is transformed after the intensification of
demand into the most crying wrong and a source of great
misery. The buyer seeks to squeeze out commodities from
the seller : and so he calls for free-trade, i. e. liberty for the
seller to glut his markets, to find no sale, and from necessity
to sell his commodities far below their value. In like
manner he calls for strong competition of manufacturers and
merchants, in order that — from the difficulties thrown in the
way of a sale, because ready money is indispensable — they
may be compelled to give him the commodities at any price
which he in his magnanimity may offer. Should he succeed,
the labourer is impoverished, and industrious families sink in
want and misery, or emigrate from an unjust nation. Against
this oppression the seller defends himself, or assails the stock
and supply of goods by the most diverse means, by buying
them up, by artificial dearth, &c. He thus places the buyers
in peril of being suddenly cut off from their habitual wants,
or of paying unusually dear for them, and having to pinch
in some other quarter. Or he reduces the excellence of
his goods, after he has been forced to reduce their price.
The buyer accordingly does not get what he expected to
get : he is cheated : and for the most 'part there arises with
bad, careless work, a further sheer loss in public energy and
time and in the products which are so badly manufactured.
In short, no man has the slightest guarantee that if he
continue to work he will continue to subsist : for men are
resolved to be completely free, mutually to bring each other
to ruin/

vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 433

' The first and original property, the ground of all property,
is an exclusive right to a specific free activity. This free
activity may either be named and defined by the object to
which it refers, or by its form and manner only ; of the first
kind is property or possession in a thing, e. g. property in the
soil, of which however Fichte remarks: "the earth is the
Lord's, man has only the power of cultivating and using it
for good ends/'' Of the second kind of property is the right
to practise a certain craft, and to prevent all other men from
the exercise of the same art. But in both cases the basis
of all right of property is to be placed in the right to
exclude others from a certain free activity reserved for us
alone, by no means in an exclusive possession of objects V It
is clear, therefore, that not merely the agriculturist, but every
inhabitant in the State must have an exclusive property of
his own, because otherwise he cannot be bound to recognize
the agriculturist's right of property, cannot be legitimately
prevented from ousting the latter from his field, and robbing
him of its fruits. And what would be the exclusive property
of the non-agriculturist, the manufacturer, the merchant, in
return for which he would have surrendered to the agri
culturist the exclusive right of property to the soil ? His
art and trade-skill he owes to nature and himself, not to the
State. In respect of these he is not bound to the State,
as the agriculturist to his piece of land. Thrown naked on
any shore he can say, c Omnia mea mecum porto/ What
then can the State still give him? Evidently only the
guarantee that he shall constantly find work or sale for his
commodities, and that for them he shall receive the share
that falls to him of the goods of the land. It is through
this security that the State attaches him to itself. But this
guarantee the State cannot discharge unless it closes the
number of those who pursue the same branch of industry,
and undertakes to care for the necessary subsistence of all.

1 P. 444.
rf

434 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

It is by this closing- that the branch of work becomes property
of the class which pursues it : it is by this provision for
subsistence that it becomes a property from which they
can live : and it is only in return for this their property
that they can resign their claims to the property of the
agricultural class.

' National wealth/ says Fichte, ' has many meanings. To
me the inner essential prosperity consists in being able to
procure the most specially human enjoyments with the least
labour of a severe and persistent kind. And this must be the
prosperity of a nation — not of a few individuals, whose highest
prosperity is often the most striking symptom and true ground
of the supreme ill-condition of the nation V ' It is not a mere
pious wish for humanity, but it is the indispensable require
ment of its right and of its destiny that it should live so
freely, so easily, so commandingly over nature, so genuinely
humanly on the earth, as nature at all permits. Man has to
work : but not like a beast of burden that sinks to sleep under
its load, and after the minimum refreshment of its exhausted
forces is again stirred up to carry the same load. Man ought
to labour, without anxious fright, with pleasure and joy, and
have time left to raise his mind and eye to heaven, for whose
gaze he was formed. He ought not precisely to eat with his
beast of burden : his food should be distinguished from its
fodder, his dwelling from its stall, just as in his corporeal
structure he is different from it. This is his right, just because
he is a man V

e Here we have reached 3 the source of the greatest part of
the still subsisting abuses. In modern Europe there were for
a long period no States. At present we are in face of attempts
to form some. Further, the task of the State has been hitherto
conceived in a partial and half-hearted way, as if it were
an institute to maintain by law the citizen in that estate of
possession in which he is found. The deeper lying duty^f
1 P. 423- 2 P. 422. 3 P. 453-

VIH] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 435

the State to invest each with the possession that is his due,,
has been left out of sight/ ' Conceive a definite sum of
possible activity in a certain sphere of action as the one
magnitude. The comfort of life which ensues from this
activity is the value of this magnitude. Conceive a definite
number of individuals as the second magnitude. Divide the
value of the first magnitude in equal parts among the indi
viduals, and you find what each should receive under the
given conditions. . . . The part which each gets is his own by
right : he should get it if it is not already promised him. In
the State of reason he gets it : in the division which was
made by chance and force before the awakening and the rule
of reason, each of course did not get it, because some appro
priated more than fell to their share. Thus for the actual
State which by art approximates to reason the wish must
be to help each to his own, in the sense of the word just
explained1.' ' The source of all evil in our make-shift States
is solely and singly anarchy, and the impossibility of creating
order2/

The method of Hegel has a decidedly more conservative
look, but it is not less scathing in its criticisms or less
progressive in its results. Fichte resembles an advocate
who, by a bold effort of sustained construction, displays
step by step the hidden process of some crime, showing how
motive arose out of action and consequences trammelled the
will until the final issue burst out as it stands before us : and
who at the close of his demonstration exclaims, So must it
have been. Hegel is rather like the judicious cross-examiner
who, by experienced suggestion of topics and by manipulation
of data, forces the criminal to tell his own story, to reveal the
hidden movements, hopes and fears, weaknesses and troubles
of his inner life and intimate circumstances, to be the crowning
witness against himself, and the real expounder of those by
ways and windings of motive which the wiliest outward
1 P. 402. 2 P. 302.

Ff 2

436 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

interpreter is never quite sure of not missing- or mistaking-.
Observers indeed will be inclined to suggest that the perform
ance is a cleverly laid trick, and that the advocate has suborned
his patient to make out his own case as he has prepared it.
They may allege, in other words, that Hegel has the historical
puppets secretly under his control : that he can make the
history say what he wants. In reply, it may be said, that no
defender of this method will readily pledge himself to main
tain that the cross-examiner may not occasionally be unjust,
and may not now and then, by putting things together, cause
the professedly independent witness of his victim to bear out
the colour of his own presuppositions : but no one who has
carefully studied the method will believe that even a master
of thought like Hegel could produce marionettes which looked
so surprisingly alive and intelligent, or will allow an occasional
arbitrary interference to thwart the general conclusion of a
trustworthy and decisive self -revelation.

The Hegelian method professes to show in the real history,
prepared, as the experimenters say, by discarding unessentials
and trivialities, the very law of growth and construction of
our moral, religious, economic, and political world. The
world in its history, i. e. in the revelation of its own real
time-movement, sits in judgement upon itself, and betrays
its own secret. But if it displays how far in each effort or
stage it has departed from the normal path, it also shows how
in each age and epoch there was a larger principle, a fuller
heart at work, and that, though the actual performance was
one-sided, it was always accompanied by a compensating and
alternative principle which so far mended the mischief the
other had caused. Beneath the superficial order of move
ment — the alternate dominance of one-sided motives, and
the appearance of a mere see-saw of principles, a chaos in
which brilliant performance is suddenly swallowed up in
blank collapse — there is disclosed a real, and much slower,
because much more complex and encumbered, process of

vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 437

social life. This underlying process is the movement of the
infinite behind the finite : the march of God in history as
opposed to the march of man. Yet they are not two move
ments, the phenomenal distinct from the noumenal: the
former seen in fragments, in seeming- regression, in involved
curves, and general disorder : the latter a uniform, systematic-
series — a total and harmonious idea. The appearance is one
with the reality for those who can see it from that com
manding position in which its inequalities and discontinuity
are reduced to their proper place — where, in short, they cease
to disturb the total view.

The PlnlosopJiy of Law and Outlines of the State follow this
method. They show us first* of all that the State has a
development from simpler stages, and that in all its stages
it is the product of two elements, two principles, law — the
principle of an objective order, and conscience — the principle
of a subjective freedom. In the State we have the meeting,
the synthesis, of the legal and the moral : the union of all out
ward form of order or organization with the inward spirit of
self-realization. The republican idea had tended to reduce the
State to a purely secular and outward institute for the main
tenance of rights, for the security of property, and for fencing
round a sphere in which human life might develop individually
at its own will and pleasure. On this view the State was but
the protecting shell, the restricting framework, of peculiarly
human life to be carried on" by individual agents within for
their several interests. Opposed to this was a conception
which ignored the value of such mere organization, and
which laid down that the good will is everything, that
the conviction and persuasion of being in the right is what
defines the moral nature of an action. Here the aspect of self-
determination becomes supreme. Thus there had grown up
an antithesis between order, which is the fruit of law, and
liberty or self -initiation which is guaranteed by conscience.

The State is the full and final reconciliation of order and

438 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

liberty, o£ law and conscience, of manners and morals, but it
only appears in its character of reconciler if we look at the
two phrases or aspects which constitute it, and each of which
has some claim to be identified with the State. The one of
these phases is the family, the true ' State of nature ' or
natural State, if we consider it, not in any peculiar form it
has taken or may now take, but in its general features and
type in all ages. With this natural aggregation human beings
have both liberty and order; but so mixed up and packed
together, that neither of these ends is duly secured, till by later
expansions (in the developed State) the family, freed from
duties and burdens with which it could not well cope, is better
able to perform its appropriate functions.

The other phase of the State is what Hegel calls Society
— Citizen Society — c bourgeois ' or ' tradesmen ' society — the
society of industry and commerce. This ' bourgeois ' society
is the ' make-shift state ' of Fichte (Nolhstaaf). It is a system
generated in the first instance by the dependence of each
for his welfare and subsistence on the welfare and subsisten'
of all. The narrow range of family life soon proves its-la
inadequate to the growing multitude of wants and neef3
which emerge in the course of experience. Human nature
soon develops its capacities of multiplying, subdividing,
and varying its wants as well as the means for satisfying
them. Division and co-operation of the labours needed to pro
duce the means of subsistence and enjoyment know no limit
to their extension. This partition of the sum-total of labours
required to bring forth the materials of subsistence goes on
according to natural accidents, following the lines laid down
by the natural endowment of individuals, the advantages
of situation, and all the variety of fortuitous circumstance.
It is, in short, a process of natural selection which settles
what varieties of industry and commerce flourish, and what
persons devote themselves to each. The only general laws
that can be laid down are the general tendency of the

vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 439

systematic groups which deal with the modes of procuring
the common subsistence to fall into three main bodies.
These are (i) the class which is engaged in appropriating
for human use the more immediate products of nature;
(2) the class which transmutes these natural products into
more and more artificial forms (including the labour of
artisan and manufacturer), and which finally secures the
entrance of its several products into the general field of con
sumption (including the work of commerce) ; (3) the class
to which are entrusted the more general interests of the whole
society. Such estates and orders of society are the final form
which its somewhat imperfect unity can present.

In such a society each has a chance afforded him of
securing a certain capital of his own. But not more than
a chance : circumstances may be too hard on him. Still
the accidental and unequal development by which individuals
variously take their place in such and such an estate, such
and such a profession or trade, is on the whole a natural and
'mforced process; and it gives rise in course of time, as it
.^peats itself again and again, to certain fixities, uniformities,
or regularities of social arrangement. Laws to protect such
personal property as has grown up in this natural and
unequal way are only the expression in verbal formulae of
that precipitate, in the mind, of customs — which are the-'
subjective reflex of habitual occurrence. Laws, therefore, are I
only the consecration of the existent order : they follow the 1
lines laid down by the natural, which is far from being thej,
pre-eminently or strictly just, method of human socialization.
But when law is enforced in public courts and by public officials,
it means that the community as a whole is resolved to stand
by and keep up the status quo, to protect the infringement of
those individual appropriations which have grown up by ways
and means of which it has no direct cognizance, but to which
it gives a right, by its general resolution to hold those in
possession as presumably the rightful proprietors.

440 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

But society has other duties than merely to protect rights
by punishing- those who infringe them. It must further
seek to prevent the occurrence of such infringements by
maintaining a system of police, which shall maintain indi
viduals in a continuous security, and by anticipating and
thwarting crime shall guarantee the welfare of individuals
as well as uphold the majesty of the law. And this
anticipatory action of the police is soon found to have
a wide range.

As the wants of the day are indefinitely multiplied and
intertwined, says Hegel l, there emerge points of view
which are equally the interest of all, and where one man's
business is also a common concern. Every one relies on there
being no obstacles to make it impossible to procure and
exchange the means for satisfying these wants : and every
one is concerned in shortening, as far as may be, the
investigations and transactions called for to that end. Hence
also various methods and arrangements come to be employed
in the common interest ; and these general concerns and
arrangements for the common good call for the inspection and
supervision of the public authority. Again (§ 236) the several
interests of the producer and the consumer may come into
collision with each other. It is true that on the whole the
proper equilibrium will be spontaneously established. Still
the adjustment requires regulation, and that regulation must
be supplied by an intelligent power which stands above both
sides. Whence then the right to regulate such details, as e. g.
the assizes or fixing the price of the commonest articles of con
sumption? It arises from the fact that the public show of
goods for sale, when these are of quite general and everyday
use, is not so much put before the individual as such, as before
him in his general capacity, i. e. before the public. If the
public then has a right not to be cheated, the inspection
of the quality of commodities may, as an affair of common

1 §235-

VHI] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 441

concern, be undertaken and cared for by a public authority.
But a general supervision and direction is above all things
entailed by the dependence of great branches of industry
on the state of foreign nations, and on remote combinations,,
of which the persons specially assigned and attached to
these departments are unable to get a complete and compre
hensive view.

Free trade and free industry is one extreme in economic
life. The opposite extreme is seen when a public organiza
tion both supplies the needs of all and fixes their work.
Thus in the case of the ancient work on the pyramids and
other monstrous works of Egypt and Asia, they were pro
duced for public ends, but without the private option or
private interest of the individual labourers having any
influence on the direction of his labour. It is this private
interest to which free trade appeals against regulation from
above. But the fact is that, just because such private
interest is blindly engrossed on selfish ends, it requires a public
supervision, if it is to be made conformable to the universal
good, and if it is desired to mitigate the dangerous con
vulsions and to cut short the duration of the interval, wherein
the collisions would have to adjust themselves by the methods
of mechanical necessity. There exists (§ 237) indeed for the
individual a possibility of taking his part in the common
stock, and that possibility is guaranteed by public authority.
But it is not only that this guarantee must remain imperfect.
It is further, on the side of the individual himself, liable to
all sorts of accidents, and the more so the more it presumes
him possessed of the pre-conditions of skill, health, capital,
&c. Originally (§ 238) the family was the basis of unity,
out of which the individual sprung, and in which he grew.
The family had the duty of seeing to this private aspect
of the individual : to see that he had the means and the
skill so as to acquire a stock of his own out of the social
stock, and that he was cared for and supported in case of his

442 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm

being rendered incapable. But economic society has torn the
single human being out of the family unity : has made
the members of the family strangers to each other, and
treated them as independent persons. Instead of inorganic
nature without and the paternal soil, in which the individual
found his subsistence, society has substituted its own soil ;
and the stability of the whole family thus undermined is
made dependent on society and subject to the chapter of
accidents. The individual has thus become a son (not of his
natural parents, but of) society : society has claims on him,
and he has rights against it. Society thus (§ 239) becomes
the universal family : and in this capacity it has the duty
and the right, as against the wilful and casual behaviour
of the parents, to supervise and influence the children's
education. It does so, so far as education has bearings on
the capacity of becoming a member of society, especially if
that education is to be finished by others than the parents
themselves. Further, so far as a common mechanism can be
provided for that purpose, it has to take the necessary steps.
In like manner (§ 240), where the extravagance of a person
renders his own and his family's subsistence insecure, society
has the duty and the right to assume the guardianship, and
to carry out in their stead the purposes of society and their
own. Such a state (§ 241) of dependence, indeed, may not
be due to personal wilfulness. Accidental circumstances,
depending on nature or on outward conditions of life, may
bring individuals down to poverty. And what poverty does is
to leave them all the wants of society, while it deprives them
more or less of all its advantages, such as the facility of
acquiring technical skill and education, even of the protection
of law, sanitary precautions, and even the consolations of
religion. For society has withdrawn from them the natural
means of acquiring wealth (by its recognition of private rights
of property), and it destroys the clan or tribe — that form which
the expanded family assumes. Thus for the poor, the general

vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 443

authority takes on itself the duty of the family, not only in
reference to relieving- their immediate distress, but also with
a view to reforming their disposition to laziness, their
malignity, and the other vices which spring from such
a situation and the sense of the wrong done them.

But poverty (§ 242) and all forms of distress to which the
individual in his natural sphere of action is exposed, has an
inner or subjective aspect as well : and it thus requires
a subjective or personal assistance to deal with its special
circumstances of every case, as well as to satisfy the claims
of the heart and love. This is the point where, whatever
general scheme of action be adopted, personal and individual
morality will find enough to do. But this ^ assistance is liable
to fortuitous influences, both for its own awakening, and^n
its effects : and society accordingly does all it can towards
eliciting the permanent features of the distress and the
general principles governing, so as to reduce it to a regular
system, and to dispense in some degree with individual
assistance.

The fortuitousness of alms-giving, of charitable institutions
(and of the burning of lamps at the images of saints, &c.),
is supplemented by public poor-houses, hospitals (public
lighting of the streets, &c.). Private benevolence has still
enough left to do, and it is a mistake to claim this relief
of distress as solely belonging to the moods of individuals,
and the casual character of their temper and knowledge, and
to feel injured and annoyed by obligatory general regulations
and orders. The state of the public is, on the contrary,
to be regarded as more perfect, the less is left for the
individual's own personal and particular fancy, in comparison
with what is reduced to a general organization.

Where society (§ 243) is left to its own unchecked action,
its course is marked by a progressive advance in population
and industry. As the interdependence of men upon each
other through their wants (demands) becomes more and more

444 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vin

general and comprehensive, and as the modes of preparing
and supplying the means of gratifying these wants become
also more general, so does the accumulation of wealth
increase, just because from this multiplied generality there
is drawn the greater profit. But this accumulation of wealth
on one side is met on the other by the narrow and highly
special character of the special labours, and by the dependence
and distress of the classes which are bound down to these
labours : a dependence which entails an incapacity to feel
and enjoy wider liberties, and in especial the intellectual
advantages of society.

A large body of men (§ 244) is thus depressed beneath the
standard of subsistence, which naturally fixes itself as neces-
sajy for the members of any given society. It loses the sense
that it is right, and honest, and honourable to support itself
by its own activity and labour. The result is the production of
a rabble (Pobel = proletariate), which in its turn involves an
increased facility of concentrating a disproportionate amount
of wealth in a few hands.

Supposing (§ 245) the burden of maintaining in a decent
state of subsistence this mass which gravitates towards
pauperism is imposed upon the wealthier class, or supposing
direct means for this purpose are found in other public
property (rich hospitals, charitable foundations, monasteries),
the result would be to guarantee the subsistence of the
needy, without their being obliged to labour for it. Such
a result would run counter to the principle of society and
to the sense of personal independence and honour. If, on
the other hand, the subsistence of the needy is made to
depend on labour (by supplying work to do), then the stock
of products would be increased. But the evil lies in surplus
production, and in the absence of the proportionate number
of consumers, who were themselves productive. In both
ways then the evil is only magnified. In this way it
becomes obvious that with all its excess of wealth, economic

vin j FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 445

society is not rich enough, i. e. does not possess in the
capital that is peculiar to it enough to keep clear of the
excess of poverty and the generation of the proletariate.

These phenomena may be studied on a grand scale in the
example of England, as well as the consequences that flow
from the poor-rate, boundless charitable foundations, and no
less unlimited private beneficence, and above all from the
abolition of the corporations. In that country it has been
found (especially in Scotland) that the directest means against
pauperism, as well as — and especially — against throwing off
all shame and honour, the subjective basis of society, and
against the laziness and profligacy, &c., from which the
proletariate issues, is to leave the poor to their fate, and to
refer them to public begging.

In this way, it is shown, colonization becomes necessary,
and commerce with lands at a more backward stage of
civilization.

But when (§ 249), instead of realizing the permanent and
general elements of society as a mere external order and
machinery for the protection of masses of personal aims
and interests, the several branches of the social body try
to make these permanent elements, implicit in their class
interests, the object of their will and activity, society assumes
a moral character in itself, and presents itself in corporations.
It is in the industrial order, and especially among the artisan
class, that the corporation flourishes. Such a corporation
takes the place of a second family — a position which general
society, in its greater remoteness from individuals and their
special distress, could only perform in a vague and general way.

In the corporation (§ 253) the family gets a solid basis,
a guarantee of subsistence which is conditioned by capacity, a
solid basis of capital. But it not merely has such a guarantee :
the fact is invested with open recognition, so that the member
of a corporation does not require to exhibit any further external
certificates to prove that he is something, to evidence his

446 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vni

qualifications, his competence and ability to make his way in
the world. In this way too it is recognized that he belongs
to a group, which is in its turn a member of general society,
and that he is interested in, and takes trouble for, the more
unselfish aim of this group. Thus in his order or estate he
has his honour.

The institution of corporations, securing to the individual
his craft and skill as capital or source of revenue, corresponds
to the introduction of agriculture and private property (in
land, &c.) at another stage. If complaints are made about
the luxury and prodigality of the industrial classes, and the
consequent production of a proletariate or rabble, we must
not forget, over and above the other causes (e. g. the tendency
of labour to become more and more mechanical), the moral
reason which has just been given. Without becoming a
member of an authorized (chartered) corporation — and it is
only as authorized that the association is a corporation — the
individual has no class honour; by his isolation he is reduced
to the selfish side of industry, and his subsistence and enjoy
ment want stability. In such a case he will seek to get himself
acknowledged, by external exhibitions of his proficiency in his
trade — exhibitions which are lawless because, as his class or
order has no existence (for no association has existence and
place in society, except such as are legally constituted and
acknowledged), there is no possibility of living according to
his class-requirements. Thus he is without any more general
mode of life appropriate to him. In the corporation the aid
which poverty receives loses its fortuitous character and its
unjustly humiliating aspect: wealth again, in its duty towards
the fraternity, loses the arrogance which it stimulates in its
possessor, and the envy it excites in others : and honest worth
receives its rightful acknowledgement and honour.

The corporation (§ 254) involves a certain limitation of
what is called the natural right to exercise one's skill, and
thus to make what profit can be made. But this limitation

vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 447

amounts only to rendering that right reasonable: i.e. it is
freed from its self-conceit and fortuitousness, risks to itself as
well as for others : it is acknowledged, guaranteed, and thus
elevated to conscious activity for a common end.

After the family (§ 255) the corporation constitutes the
second of the moral roots of the state — a root founded in civil
economic society. The family, or first root, holds in undiffe-
rentiated unity the two principles of subjective personal life,
and objective life for the community. These same two principles
appear in economic society as the principle of particularization
of wants and enjoyment on the one hand, and the principle of
abstract legal generality on the other. The corporation, or
second root of the state, brings them together in an inward
way, and in this combination the welfare of individuals is
realized and in a legal institution.

Thus sanctity of marriage, and honour in the corporation,
are the two points at which the disorganization of society
makes itself felt.

But the corporation (§ 256) is restricted and finite. And
thus it, no less than that separation of aspects and their
comparative identity which is found in the external order of
social regulations, finds its full truth in a purpose which is
and is known to be universal, and in the absolute actuality of
that purpose. Thus the sphere of civic society passes over
into the State.

In the State the inequalities of economic society are corrected.
In days of peace, when all the departments of social life go
on side by side as if independent, people lose sight of the fact
that they and all they possess repose on the State. But in
war what Hegel calls the ( ideality ' of all private interests is
made manifest, and devotion to the State is presented as
universal duty and the very basis of all life.

IX

THE LEGAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SANCTIONS
OF MORALITY

ETHICAL writing in England, as befits the supposed character
of the nation, has had a predominantly practical aim. The
more eminent of the authors who have touched upon or who
have treated the subject have had their eyes mainly turned to
the interests of moral training and social discipline. So it
was with the great thinker of the Elizabethan age, when he
noted with censure the too exclusively speculative and abstract
inquiries of the Greek philosophers, and indicated the new
needs and purposes of the modern spirit, which from his pro
phetic soul already received the expression of its under-current
tendencies. The moral philosopher of the future, said Francis
Bacon, instead of wasting his time and talent in a minute
delineation of a — superhumanly grand — ideal or Exemplar of
Good, ought rather to lay down the methods and means by
which this ideal might be realized, by tracing the roots and
fibres of good in the physical order, and showing how natural
conditions might be manipulated by superinducing habits and
so ' framing and subduing the will of man to become true and
conformable ' to the pre-established pattern.

In Bacon's footsteps his successors have largely continued
to travel. Hobbes is hampered by no suspicions. of the quick
sands which beset the voyager who would carefully thread the
channels of investigation into moral principles. A few simple
calculations from maxims that lay claim to an axiomatic self-

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 449

evidency, a few deductions from the great natural law of
equality and proportion,, which reason, being the same in all
men, enunciates and commands,, are enough, in his opinion,
to construct the outlines of a sufficient moral philosophy, to
establish, in other words, a science of ' the means of peaceable,
social, and comfortable living/ To discover the law of nature
and of reason — that moral law, whereof he is as careful as any
of his opponents to affirm the eternal and immutable obliga
tion — is a problem which does not require profound meditation,
but may be solved with comparative ease. What is to him
the problem of problems is to find how this ideal authority,
which only obliges in the inner man, may become a power in
the actual world, a ruler over the deeds and lives of men. And
to get this real power, to secure the practical force of uniformity
and order, which is of the very essence of law, no price seems
to him too high, no sacrifice too costly.

Even Locke, with all his love of moderation, does not
hesitate to state his conviction that, if people were only honest
and plain with themselves, morals might with the greatest
ease be reduced to the certainty of a mathematical science.
But it is in Bentham that this aversion to speculative theory
in ethics reaches its maximum. He tosses aside, with con
tempt, and perhaps a mutter of impatience, the subtleties of
discussion on the origin of moral distinctions, or on the bases
of moral obligation. To him such questions so prolonged into
unending dialectics seem to betray a stupid and perverse habit
of mind, a mind overgrown by prejudices. Any open mind,
he asserts, can see at a glance that nothing can claim moral
approval except what tends to the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, and when you have seen that, you have
grasped the one principle necessary. Such a principle is
rather more vague than it at first seems, and is not quite free
from the double edge of confusion that lies in wait for the
believer in platitudes. But Bentham, strong in possessing
at least an apparent standard for adjusting measures of

Gg

450 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

action, turns his entire energies on the problem of moral
education, and, in particular, on the methods of discipline.
The principles of social paedagogics, the rationale of rewards
and punishments, the modes of adapting1 his stimuli of pleasure
and pain, our two sovereign taskmasters, to the almost endless
variety in human natures — these are the points towards which
Bentham devotes his powers of analysis, and on which he is
anxious to effect a thorough reformation.

The facts as alleged are as follows. First, you have each
human being, by an instinctive impulse we may call a law,
doing what gives him pleasure and refusing to do whatever
causes him pain. Then you have the great fact that there is
a moral law, in the sense that each man is expected in case of
conflict of pleasures to surrender his particular share, if by so
doing the greater pleasure of the majority or entire body is
gained or secured. A state of things may perhaps be imagined
in which this conflict would be reduced to a minimum. In
such a state so clear would be the mutual sympathy, so
complete the identity and harmony of airn, so inextricably
interwoven the aims and desires of all members, that each
would see that his own best interest was secured by serving
the community, and that in serving others he was serving
himself. But the solidarity and the intelligence involved in
such a supposed state, though possibly not so entirely absent
as the satirist would insinuate, is not to be assumed without
many drawbacks and shortcomings. Passion and prejudice
distort or blind the judgement, inferior and partial ties between
individuals clash with others equally partial, and with the
general aims of the collective community ; abnormal tempera
ments and unusual experiences disturb the harmony of taste
and purpose. In the shortness of life it is found impossible
to get the long time needed for the generation of that sound
knowledge and steadfast conviction, which is the only sure
means of maintaining the social harmony and realizing the
social end. We must, therefore, fall back upon a lower

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 451

range : we must fight pleasure-seeking by pleasure-seeking,
or pain by pain. We cannot wait till the right thing be
done in the right way and in the right spirit. It has to
be done: that from the outside social point of view is the
one thing needful ; and if it only can be got done,, we shall
not be very curious to ask how.

Such pleasures and such pains, having for their effect
(and possibly for their object) to minim zie the conflict so
prone to arise in ill-regulated souls between their immediate
impulses, appetites, and instincts which they would fain
gratify, and the commandments of social welfare, the felicific
order of the moral law, are what have been called the sanctions
of morality. The term most properly refers only to punish
ments, or threats of punishments, to the law-breaker : but it
is perhaps no unwarrantable stretch of application to make
it cover also rewards for the law-keeper. Sanctions, then,
refer to a law : and it must be understood that morality is
thus paralleled fo} what it is so often contrasted with, a law.
The phrase, 'the Moral Law/ is indeed a commonplace. It
is perhaps not so much of a commonplace that the name in its
origin denoted a portion of the positive code of the Jews,
distinguished from other enactments bearing less directly
on everyday social welfare : whereas the use of the word,
especially since the days of Kant, has carried it into regions
where law positive is altogether unmeaning. But, again, if
morality be taken as a sort of law, the sanctions which help
to enforce it bear reference solely to actual performances. The
morality that is secured by sanctions is the morality of outward
behaviour : it is what has sometimes been called legality. And
to those who speak thus of the sanctions of morality, morality
means partly the acts required by the public law or law of the
land, but partly, and perhaps even more especially (in virtue
of contrast with law positive), it means the acts or forbearances
called for, or in various ways enforced, by the customs and
fashions of society in its various groups, as well as by the law

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452 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

of God or the law sacred, ceremonial and religious. Should
morality mean something- more than this, or something different
from this, something that lies within the heart and will, between
the man and himself, between the soul and God, then, it may
be asserted, with such a sphere the sanctions cannot directly
intermeddle.

Bentham, with his fondness for classifications, has drawn
up a brief list of the chief sources whence pains and pleasure
may flow to corroborate the general tendency, which we may
assume to exist in the human being, to subordinate his
wishes to the dominant condition of subserving the common
welfare. They fall into two great groups, according as the
rewards and penalties are directly or indirectly introduced
into the facts by the agency of rational beings, or are
spontaneous operations of the natural forces, enforcing the
ethical requirements, and tending to show that the moral
order is in harmony with the general physical laws. The
latter of these is the so-called physical sanction. There
are obviously cases in which an act, called forth by an
immediate stimulus of pleasure, is followed by a greater
balance of pain and loss : and there may even be acts in
which the performances required by law and custom are
directly pleasant. In such cases an ordinarily intelligent
person will by mere prudence be led to conduct in accordance
with moral laws. For practical purposes, perhaps, we should
limit the applications of the physical sanction to those results
or effects which are obvious and undisputed, even, we may
say, visible and tangible ; to cases where the causality is
unmistakeable, or traceable with a kind of arithmetical
accuracy. And such experience is perhaps most accessible
in the case of many of the virtues and vices which directly
regard our own persons, our full selves, corporeal as well as
spiritual. And beyond this personal morality with its
discipline of the appetites, where prudence manifests itself
as temperance and self-control, it is undesirable, at least in

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY

453

the first instance, to extend the range of the physical
sanction. It is by such considerations of retributory pain
following1 on excess, that the sobriety and moderation which
society requires are commended to the reason, which, if at
first it seems only the ministering' servant of the several
appetites, soon becomes, like a wise servant,, the master
who rules them, were it only by playing off one against
another.

It is possible indeed to go beyond this narrow limit, and
to lay down that the moral law coincides with the law of
nature, and that morality and physical well-being tend in the
long-run always to go together. But if we thus assert that
the very stars in their courses fight against evil and make
for righteousness, that all things work together for good for
those who follow the right in scorn of consequence, we are,
in the first place, running the risk of destroying the practical
efficiency of the sanction, by boldly assuming it to extend
to a region where the warrant of verification is hardly
possible. And that is not all. Even if the doctrine of the
identity of goodness and happiness be true, its truth is
reached only by giving to the words an interpretation other
than what they usually bear. In that high sphere where
moral goodness is its own reward and happiness ultimately
implies virtue, it does so because happiness and virtue have
alike been raised above their ordinary meaning into something
which it has not entered into the ordinary heart of man to
conceive. The natural order of which we spoke must be
transformed into a nature which would better be styled
supernatural. The nature which the moralist assumes as
his sanction, that supernatural nature which is the final
moral order of the world, is a law which he could only read
in the apparent chaos of the sense-world, because he had
more or less clearly seen it with the inward and intellectual
eye in the world of his own spirit. If moral philosophy
may, as Bacon said, save itself much futile inquiry by

454 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

carefully gathering- up the hints afforded by the unity in
difference, by the attractions and proportions, the gradation
and centralizing organization of the material universe, it
must begin by spiritualizing nature, before it can extract
from nature the law of the spiritual world. It is, on the
other hand, just because the physical sanction goes but a little
way, that its work has to be taken up and continued by
sanctions derived from spirit and intelligence.

For man is not merely a part of nature, a sentient
organism affected by the material structures of the universe ;
he is also a social being, a member of what has been called
the social organism. The term serves to emphasize the
dependence of individual on individual through the totality
of the group to which he by nature or choice belongs. It
recognizes the essential teleological relationship of each to
all and of all to each : but it falls short of giving expression
to the fact that this relationship in ever-increasing measure
works through ideas and not by mere mechanical impacts or
material pressure. It forgets that here the unity, which had
erewhile been immersed in matter and only manifested in
systematic and harmonious movements, has now assumed
independence and a being of its own : that it has an existence
not merely in, but also above its envelope : that it rises, in
short, above itself so as to survey itself, and even to
reorganize itself in further forms. It is at once immanent
and transcendent : the organizing principle embodied in the
mass, and the spirit detaching itself from its absorption, yet
not from its connexion, rising into ever more controlling and
commanding phases of activity, creating a social organization,
a special order of superintendent agency, a literature and
art, a religion and a philosophy.

But for the present we need only consider the agency
of this social structure as it surveys itself and guides its
organization in the light of its double disciplinary function :
first, as an organized total, and, secondly, in its looser and

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 455

more particular groups, as yet but imperfectly cohering with
the spirit of the total body. These give the so-called legal
or political sanction, embodied in the laws of the country,
and the social or popular sanction, lying in the censures
of class opinion, of general opinion, scandal, reputation, fame ;
in some cases, not going beyond a mental judgement telling
through sympathy in the minds of those who feel it, but
in other cases accompanied, in the lesser groups where it
prevails, with more or less of material loss and pain in those
who are subjected to it. In early times and small unde
veloped societies there was no hard and fast line of distinc
tion between these, any more than between law and custom.
Yet even there, there are fundamental conditions of social
life felt to be essential and common, and others on which
opinion still fluctuates and varies from person to person and
from group to group, which refer more to the sentimental
and ideal side of life. There are things and acts which by
a palpable and visible effect injure the community, at least
its members, and there are others which indicate divergencies
of taste and aim, differences of judgement, annoyances which
can be felt, though it is not so easy to define their precise
causes or modes of operation.

To discuss the legal and the social sanction is to ask
what is the influence of laws and of social observances upon
morals. Or, we may even say, it is to ask a more com
prehensive question : what are the actions and reactions on
each other of law and custom on one hand, and of morality
on the other? Probably a little reflection will show that,
although it is for some purposes convenient to oppose law
and custom to morality, and even to set law against custom,
these distinctions should never make us lose sight of the
interdependence of the outward and the inward, of the
general and the particular, in one comprehensive idea. In
plainer words, it has to be remembered that in the average
community the conduct required by the laws and by social

456 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [Jx

opinion is what in a way is done or supposed to be done by
the predominant majority of the population, and that the
conduct to which legal penalty or social stigma is attached
is the sort of behaviour only likely to be exhibited by
a comparatively insignificant minority. What the society
believes itself to do, what each recognizes in the case of every
other to be right (however he may in practice except himself
from the obligation), is what it requires by law and custom.
The law states what is done by the vast mass of the com
munity, and not merely what ought to be done : or it
presents what is done by the majority as what ought to be
done by the small minority.

Law and custom thus represent the result of a process
by which, out of the fluctuating mass of what is actually
done, there emerges a solid nucleus which serves as a rule
or standard, when conscious reflection upon conduct seizes
upon the common element, the dense central mean of conduct,
around which the divergencies tone off on either side. Just
as, in the individual human being, the experience of life
enables him to fix on a more or less definite pivot of belief
and thought within him, on which his various opinions and
tendencies turn and which he regards as a permanent higher
self, so the intelligence of a community gradually detects,
and at length fixes in independent outlines the broad middle
way on which its movement tends more and more to
accumulate itself. In apprehending this, the community,
like the individual, has as it were come to itself, has reached
the unity and essential principle of its existence, the universal
of its particularity.

But with the separation of the common and universal
nucleus from its variations and outrunners, there arises an
antagonism and a danger. An antagonism : the average
presents itself as a normal : what i* as what ought to be :
what all in a rough sort of way do as what each definitely
and precisely has to do. Compulsion and constraint and

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 457

coercion are in the air : the individual sees the law as an
external force, an alien control. The law confronts him
embodied in a judge, an officer,, a government; personality
is set against personality, will against will : organic inter
dependence is replaced by a more mechanical relationship:
the sense of free agency, of autonomy, is replaced by require
ment ab extra. The state and the community may in their
essence and theory be an organic unity : as they appear in
the practice of government, they sink into a machinery, which
involves a good deal of friction.

So far as the laws proper are concerned, we have to note
a difference in their operation. The older codes of laws
content themselves in the main by noting the injuries to the
members of the community or to its peace and security in
general, which they deem desirable to punish by various
inflictions and sufferings. What these are, will of course
depend on the social and political system which has become
established. But the punishment is in each case directed
against an actual violation or outrage on the social order as
it exists. In course of time legislation embraces a secondary
order of crimes, which are crimes only as it were constructively
and ex liypotkesi. Penalties are imposed upon acts which
lead, or which are for good reasons believed to lead, to results
which will be injurious to the common welfare. Here we
have the prophylactic action of the state. Trusting to the
lessons of experience and the inferences of science, it attempts
to catch an evil before it has assumed actuality, while it is
yet in embryo and possibility. In these cases to omit
a precaution, which experience has shown to be a valuable
safeguard against the emergence of notable calamities,
renders the culpable negligence liable to a penalty. Here
the State no doubt uses the knowledge gained of the physical
sanctions waiting on certain forms of imprudence : but its
action is not so much in the interest of the agent, as of
the other members of the community, who may probably

458 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

suffer through his neglect. Here,, where unassisted nature
may be supposed to let the children suffer for the fathers,
or the neighbour for the neighbour's sin, the State en
deavours to bring home the remote result to the original
offender by replacing the ultimate result by an immediate
penalty.

Thus, as a rule,, while the earlier laws do not require a
performance, but only punish the commission an act they
forbid, the later punish the omission of a prophylactic act
they require. In this department of law it is evident that
we come close to the kind of observances required by society
in its non-political and private aspect. It insists upon
uniformity : it lays down a particular way of action or
behaviour and insists upon conformity. Thus grow up
manners and customs, rites and observances, usages and
fashions, ritual and ceremonial. While the laws are directed
at special performance or non-performance, the social sanction
is jealous of any departure from its one course, it craves
an unvarying obedience and will hardly permit even
a divergence in thought and opinion. This is the vopos
Seo"7ro'r?7s : the custom which pries into and seeks to direct
the heart, which persecutes every non-conformant, which
would impress on all the stamp of a single model.

But it may be well to point out the source of the tyranny.
In its origin custom is wholesome : it is to a large extent
the unforced product of common insight and common need
in common circumstances. As such, it is no tyrant, but the
spontaneous sympathetic action of individuals. Yet as a
matter of fact this coincidence is often unreal and super
ficial. The natural differences of originality and creative or
perceptive power, the tendency to imitate in one part of
a population which supplements the claim of leadership in
the other part, the habit of accepting what is asserted and
of imagining that one believes what one has not force enough
to discuss — all these proclivities make custom and fashion

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 459

dictatorial and arbitrary, make them represent the verdict
of a dominant clique rather than the result of a common
effort and a consensus of original opinion. In its ideal the
vox populi may be the vox del : but in its actual appearance
it is often the accidentally predominant opinion of a minority
which has put on the semblance of a majority. In such
a case, we speak of the tyranny of public opinion, and
of the obedience of a multitude to a fancied authority which
only a little courage is needed to reject.

The common law is a realm of liberty compared with the
iron bond which these social requirements cast around the
members of a society. But in either case it has to be
remembered that these sanctions operate as moral or quasi-
moral agents ; not as external forces, but as inward con
straints. Neither the law nor the custom has its force from
its mere mechanical weight. Its strength resides in the inner
confession of the sufferer from its penalties that he deserves
his doom. As mere brute force, they are on a level with the
forces of nature : they may smite the defaulter down, but
when they do so, they rather stimulate and corroborate his
will than subdue it. They are felt to be mere accidents from
the force of an alien world, a world for which he has no
respect, which lies utterly outside him, and outside the world
in which he lives. It is otherwise when they are felt as the
objectified utterance of his own substance, of his permanent
and underlying self, of the world and the life with which
his momentary self and life are bound up. To the criminal,
in whom the sense of his own partnership in the system to
which these laws give expression is utterly absent or dead,
the law and its penalty have the same deterrent force as the
terror of man's vengeance has on the bloodthirsty or mis
chievous animal. But wherever the sense of social solidarity
still exercises its force, wherever the culprit realizes his own
fundamental unity with the authority which made the laws,
there the sanction of law and social observance exerts its

460 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

potent psychological force. It is the esprit fie corps, the
social conscience (and conscience is essentially social, essen
tially the voice of a common reason), which makes the
mere loss, suffering-, and injury a punishment. The sanction
after all does not operate from without : but by its identifica
tion with what is within. It becomes a punishment only
when, or in so far as, it is recognized by the sufferer as the
necessary sequel of his own act, its inevitable consequence
in a world so constituted, and that world as the framework
and substantial reality on which his own life is founded.
Punishment as an ethical force only emerges when this
sense of social solidarity is awake and active : and it was
this condition to which Becearia gave such absurd expression
when he based the right of the community to punish its
members on their actual or implied agreement to accept the
penalty of their deeds.

There is, however, a question that falls to be considered
here. How far are the acts and observances demanded by
these sanctions moral in their essential quality ? How far
do law and custom encourage or forbid in accord with the
requirements of the moral sense ? Of the law it may be
said that what it insists upon is rather the sine qua nou
of morality than morality itself. And of a great deal of
social ethics it may be said that they are prophylactic
of morality, but not themselves moral. They are the sign
and symptom indicating with greater or less accuracy an
essential and underlying frame of mind and direction of the
will. This, moreover, is not the whole. The social form and
legal enactment remains unchanged even when it is no
longer in harmony with the inner state of affairs. It comes
to possess an authority of its own, independent of what it
represents : it asserts itself as a separate structure, with
a life and interests of its own. Such an organ of the
common life, thus invested with a separate vitality and with
a standing of its own, is a morbid growth : —

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 461

'Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte

Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort :
Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte

Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort :
Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage.'

But this is a disease and a discord not confined to laws.
Art and science, literature and religion, also, in the objective
institutions and quasi-materialized shapes which they assume,
and must assume if they are to be powers in the real world,
tend to become stereotyped in a traditional form and to be
transmitted from age to age, as if they had a value of
their own, and were not essentially valuable as factors only
and elements in the total life and action of humanity.
The inward spirit of morality, in itself inclined to antinomi-
anism and autonomy, inclined, in other words, to claim an
abstract and one-sided right of self-determination, is the
natural and legitimate enemy of mere conformity, uniformity,
and obedience to traditional restraints ; but they both are
elements in the social life, where moral order unites witli
moral liberty, and the conservative impulse is in conjunction
with the progressive. The moral life, the idea of the social
organism, is only maintained in vigorous antagonism, where
resolute adhesion to all that is worthy in the past is matched
with resolute endeavour to reach the fruition of a worthier
ideal.

It is in the consideration of this antagonism at the root
of social life that we find the ground of the tragic character
of the ethical process. The human being who is to reach
true happiness, who is, in other words, to attain the full
fruition of his being, to compass high ends and rejoice in his
performance, must, as Plato says, have a suitable and pro
portionate community ; he must, as Aristotle says, have
a complete life and fortunate environment. But such duly
graduated and harmonious development between man and
man, between group and group — not to mention between man
and nature — is far from universal, or even very common.

462 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

Every part, like every man, has the defects of its qualities :
it is the nature of finite things that they can only win some
thing by ignoring or letting slip something else. No one
party has a monopoly of social virtue. In the tangled skein
of human affairs, to draw out one strand clean and clear
requires you to cut or maltreat others. The one view, more
over, in its extremer form inevitably calls forth an opponent
with equal one-sidedness but in an opposite direction: yet
the two antagonists only come by their antagonism because
in their imperfection they yet have a latent sense of their
totality and turn angrily against the side which reminds
them most keenly of what they have missed. The persecutor
when he tortures a dissident belief is angriest because in his
heart of hearts he feels that he is fighting against an enemy
that is of his own house and has an echo in his own breast ;
and the sufferer partly undergoes vicarious punishment for
this inner foe. Just as, in a very different sphere, one, who
has already felt the power of love but unwillingly, struggles
hard against its chain, and in blind passion vexes the loved
one as the source and object of his or her own weakness ; so
the violence of party strife is often an involuntary and uncon
scious recognition of the, at least partial, Tightness of the
other side. Thus when Saul is loudest in breathing slaughter
against those of the Christian way, he is already in the mood
that may at any moment break out into conversion to the
faith he denounces.

So it is also that the essential sanction or rather impulse
given by law and custom is that they embody our own will
and mind : the will which, though permanent, we had
forgotten. They are the image of our true selves, of sides
and depths in our nature which the pressure and distraction
of life had obliterated. They speak, as Plato says, with
the voice of aged parents and once-esteemed friends whom
we would rather not meet, but whose monitions, whether
we will or not, haunt us with the power of an insuperable

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 463

necessity. They are the face of his country as it presents
itself to the deserter and exile.

If it be the failure of the sanction-aspect of political and
social laws that they are looked at solely as external forces,,
and not as deriving their efficacy from their kindred with the
forces within the soul, this is still more apparent in the
ordinary way of looking at the religious sanctions of which it
is now time to speak. In one sense of the term — where
however it would be better to speak of the ecclesiastical
sanction— it only denotes a peculiar variety of the social
sanction in general. The church, e. g. as forming a special
organization in the State and in society, may exert an
influence by separate ecclesiastical penalties on its members,
and even create within its bounds a moral standard of its
own; or a theocracy, a sacerdotal order, claiming to govern
as the vicegerents of a divine inspiration, may produce a type
of conduct and character unlike that of the ordinary commu
nity. In a community where the power of the civil state
is ill-established and its functions of social regulation ill-
performed, the ecclesiastical organization — especially when it
wields the influence of a more than national union, as it did
in the case of the mediaeval church — may assume the post of
a judge and regulator, and thus do the work which the secular
government is unequal to perform. It is true that, in so far
as the religious creed adopts to the secular life an opposition
of ideal and aim, such enforcement of morality through the
consecrated order may err on the side of asceticism. But
these are tendencies not necessarily connected with religious
sanctions.

In any case, indeed, the sanctions of religion form part
of the established social and political order : sometimes as
one of the many social influences, sometimes in close alliance
with the secular arm of the state. But ordinarily the
sanction of religion means either the occasional direct inter
ference of God in human affairs, punishing acts and omissions

464 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

that escape the meshes of human justice, whether legal or
social, or the inevitable final penalty and reward attached
to these and other acts in the future world. The former is
the belief in a divine power, outside nature, yet supreme
over it, which punishes great criminals whom human justice
fails to overtake, and secret evil-doers of whose acts the
ordinary sanctions have no cognizance. The latter is the
belief that all conduct, besides its obvious effects, and its
obvious accompaniments in reward and punishment in this
world, has future effects and infinite issues : or, in vulgar
language, that the good done in this world is rewarded here
after, and the evil done in this world is hereafter punished.
The beliefs, we have said : for here also it is not the outward
force of an angry deity, but the faith of the religious mind
that creates or contains the sanction. It is the belief in the
validity of a sanction which for moral purposes constitutes
its force.

It is here that we are often introduced to the ' super
natural/ But this term, with its antithesis the ' natural/
are words to which we should not much pin our faith. What
nature is in all the actuality of its detail, is what none of us
know. Nature is simply a way we look at the world, a law,
condition or conception, under which our mind compels us
to look at all facts or supposed facts : it is the statement that
whatever exists, exists in complete interdependence ; that
there is nothing irregular, nothing chaotic, nothing absolutely
isolated and unconnected in the natural world. Of this
we are absolutely sure: or rather it is the fundamental
condition of all certainty and knowledge. But it is a very
different thing to assert that the particular uniformities
of event which we have ascertained, the particular sequences
which have actually been observed, are all the uniformities
which exist, and that they exhaust the possibilities of
sequence which may be observed. On this sure foundation
rests the fabric of our life and knowledge ; and therefore if

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 465

we speak of the ' supernatural ' we cannot mean another
province of our lives and knowledge, which lies in a sort
of local juxtaposition, and occasionally, as it were, forms
a sort of enclave in the territories of the natural. We can
only mean that the forms and terms, under which we
ordinarily grasp the unity of nature, are not the only forms
in which that unity may reveal itself : we can only mean, in
particular, that the forms of time and place are forms beyond
which our thought is sometimes compelled to range. If
nature be restricted, as it legitimately enough may, to denote
a time and space world, a world in which there is always
externality, where the unity of the idea is only as it were
interpreted into it from some further source ; then by the
supernatural, we mean the inward and abiding unity which
refuses to disappear from the multiplicity, and yet which
cannot find adequate expression in the multiplicity : the
natura naturans, as opposed to the natura naturata.

If we ask then how far the religious belief that whatever
men's sanctions may do or fail to do, and whatever the
ordinary course of nature may do, there is still a Providence
that controls the operations of nature so as to realize his
moral will, and punishes where man and nature fail, — if we
ask how far this belief is agreeable with the ' uniformity
of nature/ it will be necessary to note the meaning we
assign to our statements. And, first, the words may be
taken in an obviously pictorial sense. They may mean that
occasionally God does directly and personally interfere with
the phenomena of the world, that he appears as an agent
upon the scene, and takes a place among second causes,
instead of remaining as the great first cause, i. e. not, strictly
speaking, as a cause at all, but as the life and thought and
spirit of all causes. At momentous issues in individual,
national, or universal human life, at peculiar places where the
world-drama has for the time concentrated its interest for
the observer, God, as it were, rends asunder the veil which

Hh

466 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

is ordinarily supposed to cover him, and an almighty right
hand is stretched out to make itself felt in human affairs.
Such a view is one into which the observer readily falls, who
sees events from his limited standpoint and with his limited
and particular interests. He views things, as the philosopher
would say, from the ground of his senses and his imagina
tion, not from the standpoint of reason. Absorbed in his
own, or his nations aims, he see things from a false point
of view, and can only explain the marvellous in his survey
by the hypothesis of extraordinary forces. If he is right
in his general assumption that no event happens without
God, he is wrong by the partial way in which he confines the
divine action to a special interference in his affairs. Such
a belief may be and often is pictorially effective; and for
those to whom pictorial effect is as it were the last word
of thought, there is probably some good in even this partial
realization of the dependence of all that we are and do on the
great source of life.

Yet perhaps the truer meaning of the phrase is that the
ways of the world are not all explained and classified in our
philosophy or science, and are not all in subordination to
the detailed structure of causes and effects we have actually
ascertained ; that the uniformities we know are only parts,
and the order of nature extends far beyond those details of
that order of which we are actually aware. It is, however,
to the believer in the moral order of the world more than
this. It is a far-reaching faith that whatever is, is right.
Such a faith does not imply that an adequate and sufficient
good has been attained and that we should rest and be
thankful. It is rather the full acceptance of the system
of nature and of science, as involving that there is reason in
the world, and that it is only a partial or defective view that
can speak of absolute unreason. This does not mean that
every stage in the process of individual or of cosmic life is in
its isolation admirable : it means only that what appears dark

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 467

or dismal in the details becomes bright and cheering in the
totality. It is the confident anticipation of the ultimate
identity of spirit and nature : a monistic faith in the unity of
man's permanent purposes with the cosmic order and move
ment : a doctrine which is perhaps Spinozist in its emphasis
on the essential identity of the ordo rerum and the orclo
idearum, though hardly Spinozist in its tendency to regard
the latter as the superior phase of the former.

With regard, again, to the belief in future rewards and
punishments, here also we have a statement in the pictorial
language of imagination, whereby the timeless truth of
necessary law is translated into the successive events of
a history. What cannot be conveniently discharged at the
time, is to be wiped, off at some coming day, with a massive
weight of penalty and reward which should not fail to
impress the observant mind. God, as it were, stands aside,
and leaves the human agent free-play for a season : only to
step in with awful rigour when the day of reckoning comes
round in the end of all things. But what these pictures
tear asunder into scenes is the truth that, beyond the utmost
consequences of acts as they reveal themselves to us, there
are further and further consequences ; that, though for us
it is forbidden to trace bej'ond a slight range the effects of
acts upon ourselves and our neighbours and the world at
large, such effects do not stop where their influence becomes
inaccessible to palpable tests. It is a statement that the
temporal is only a part of the Eternal, and that, when
the thread of life and conduct disappears to the sensuous
vision, it has only entered on a new phase, with issues
infinite and indestructible.

And if we ask what are the effects of such beliefs on
morality, we must reply that the religious sanction operates
in one way, when it forms an integral part of the social
system, intricately allied with general ideals, observances, and
requirements, and when it has a real hold on the life and

H h 2,

468 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

thought of the individual soul— in short, when it is in
harmony with the whole other aims and beliefs, the environ
ment and organization. And it operates in another way, when
it exercises an influence alien to the general tone and temper,
when it owes its place to a traditional reverence, and the
power of a narrow organization with its impermm in imperio.
There is a living religion, and there is a mere skeleton of
organization. The religious organism, the objective form in
which it is embodied, may like other organizations become
self-engrossed, detached from the general life, and drawing
into itself, like a morbid structure, the materials which ought
to go to maintain the general well-being.

But what is a religion ? It has apparently several elements
and grows up from several sources. But as we consider
them, it behoves us first of all and above all to remember
that it grows and lives in the heart and soul of man, and
that it exists there in intimate and perpetual interaction
with all other human agencies. It varies with the con
ditions of the individual and of the community. We must
think of it as in touch with the other factors and agencies
in human life, receiving and transmitting, as well as
exerting influences. To treat it as if it existed and acted
by itself is to make an abstraction, which for certain
purposes may be just or necessary, but which is none the less
likely to be misleading and dangerous. To say that it does
this or that, is to attribute to one prominent quality of
an agent the effect which the whole agent produces. In the
first place, it is the religious man, the religious community
which is the real agent. And, secondly, in that agent
religion never acts alone. Its operation is conditioned, is
stimulated and checked by other interests, other pursuits, and
ideals. It is in equal correlation too with the manners and
customs, the organization or, it may be, the disorganization
of the community.

Man, it is sometimes said, is par excellence the religious

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 469

animal. So too man has been defined or specified as
a cooking-, or as a visible, animal. But this far from
implying that man always cooks or laughs : and it need
not be inconsistent with the statement that certain savages
are unacquainted with the use of fire, and have never been
known to relax in a smile. Nor is it inconsistent with the
further fact that the style of cookery varies from country
to country, and that the taste for the ridiculous is no less
uncertain. By the assertion that man has these qualities
we mean that the experience of history can only be explained
on the assumption of certain uniform tendencies or form-
principles of human intelligence, which lead, when sub
mitted to appropriate stimuli, to certain tolerably uniform
developments. A religion then will be the response of
certain tendencies in the human organization to certain con
ditions in the world around. But there may be all sorts
of irregularities and what seem anomalies in the general
development. The conditions which promote one line of
development may be unfavourable to another. It is equally
true that a human being- is an artistic, or that he is a com
mercial being : but the mode in which his artistic or com
mercial activity may issue admits of all shades and degrees.
The circumstances which call out one of these activities may
dwarf another. Though art e. g. may be justly called the
natural and normal result of certain tendencies in mankind, it
is quite true that there are many races and many individuals
who would be baldly pronounced inartistic. But the term,
like so many of the kind, expresses only a comparative
defect, not an absolute want. It means that the art is bad,
and does not come up to its ideal. So also there are
individuals and races in whom the religious instinct appears
dormant, if not dead : others in which science and philosophy
are practically non-existent: others in which commerce is
nearly unknown. And yet as we survey the history of
our race we have a conviction that what man has done, man

47o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

may do : and we credit him always with potentialities which
are only occasionally realized. This is perhaps a conviction
that expresses rather the postulate of a complete and all-
round development, than a belief which can be actually
substantiated by experience. It is the ideal of the perfect
man, of a perfect humanity, in which the several excellencies
of individuals form a social nucleus, a spiritual substance,
in which each partly acquires a faculty he would never have
acquired by himself, and yet each gives to the total a some
thing none could render but himself. It is the normal social
man who is essentially religious and artistic, not always in
his obvious individuality any single man we meet in the
street, though even in his case we hold the faith that some
where within him, however hard to get at and however deeply
buried, there is an element which, under the proper stimulus
of education, will respond to the call from the art and
religion without. Sometimes, indeed, it seems so difficult to
find the fulcrum on which to rest our motor, that we incline
to deny the susceptibility altogether, and are ready to believe
that there are human beings bereft by nature of a moral,
a religious, or an artistic sense, just as there are some born
blind and others deaf. And yet, perhaps, the homonymy of
the term ' sense ' here misleads us, and makes us forget that,
while the senses strictly so-called presuppose a very definite
physical organ, the other so-called senses rest upon a much
broader basis, and can arise in a great variety of methods,
by very various solicitations; and that they represent to
a large extent the individualized form of a faculty which
is essentially social, and lives in the conjunct organization
of the community, largely independent of accidental and
particular variations in the single members of such a body.

The essence of religion seems to lie in the sense that this
life and this world, this visible and temporal scene, is only
a part, or only an appearance, of a greater life, a grander
world, which is out of sense and is eternal : a sense that the

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 471

motors of this changing scene are in a world beyond and
behind them ; that the meaning of existence is not contained
in the facts and phenomena patent to observation, but
postulate for their explanation agencies and forces unacces-
sible to the mere eyes and ears. But under this common
tendency there may be distinguished more than one shade of
motive. There is an aesthetic demand for a completeness
and symmetry such as the isolated fragments of existence do
not always supply : there is a need of explanation, which
primitive ignorance and inexperience call for at a very early
stage, but which advancing knowledge pushes further and
further off : there is a moral need, which would seek some
reconciliation of the unfinished and discordant struggles seen
in actual life. Yet this sense of dependence of the seen upon
the unseen has in all cases been accompanied by the sense
that man, who is, on one hand, a part of the visible and
temporary, and so subordinate, is, on the other hand, a part
of the invisible and the eternal : so that in him there is
a meeting place, as at a point, of the finite and the infinite.
While, therefore, he feels his kindred with the things
that perish and pass away, he feels also his kindred
with the abiding and the invariable, with the gods who
live for ever.

Thus if, on the one hand, religion is the feeling of all-
entwining dependence, the utterness of subjection of the part
to the total, of the imperfect finite to the complete and limit
less, it implies no less, on the other hand, the anthropopathic
conviction that the universe is not without a being or beings
who throb with sympathy or antipathy to man, who, at any
rate, are not indifferent to him, and who, if occasionally they
may be his enemies, can by various methods be made friendly
and kind. How far in a given case either of these aspects may
be prominent will, as already noted, depend upon the grade
of development of the other functions of human energy.
A rich, full, active life, unchecked in its activity and

472 £55,4 yS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

achieving the self-satisfaction of its aims, will feel, no doubt,
the grandeur and majesty of the great powers who envelop
human existence, but it will not anxiously crave their help or
fear their enmity : it will see in their nature and existence
a reflex of its own avrapKeia ', it will worship, but with the
calm, self-satisfied jubilation of those who glory in their
kindred with the immortals, and cheerfully own the vast
superiority of those who after all are indissolubly linked with
the national life. If, on the contrary, the bond of national
life has no outward symbol, if individuals have to find, as
best they can, a refuge from the storm of life and a fortress
against its perturbations, then the powers of the other world
will rise supreme and dominant over the present : they will
grow turbid with awful grandeur, and demand the offering
of complete surrender. Such are the gods of nations rejoicing
in their strength and supremacy — projections into the infinite
of the national vigour in its finite forms of achievement :
and such, on the other hand, are the gods of the needy and
down-pressed individuals, seeking in some strange new
divinity from lands remote the help that the national gods
do not give. Till finally, out of the latter, there emerge
religions which tend to supplant the local divinities as well
as the gods created to supply a special need, or to be the
partial solution of a difficulty — religions which in varying
measure are an expression of the need and satisfaction of
man as man, in his fullest individuality and in his widest
humanity.

Still, not at all times, nor in all circumstances will the
religious instinct awake ; or if we must say that it is always
there, it takes sometimes forms which prevent us recognizing
it for religion. It is not for nought that it is sometimes
said that to many people wealth is a god, or art, or beauty.
All things, said an ancient philosopher, are full of gods. By
their actions, at least, such people seem to credit the objects
of their devotion with a permanence, a fundamentally,

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 473

a central and all-supporting nature. The eye of the devotee,
like that of the poet, sees things in their ideal completeness,
in a brilliancy and power they never have to ordinary
mortals. It gathers round the finite object the wealth of its
infinite forebodings, and under the veil of the visible it
worships an invisible glory. But for religion in its more
specific phase, some greater detachment is necessary: we
must rise above practice to contemplation, from engrossment
in business to calm abstraction from ourselves and our
pursuits. If the world is too much with us, we cannot hope
to see God : distracted by its various pursuits, our eye only
fixes upon one temporal object after another, and has neither
the concentration nor the power to rise to the totality, or to
penetrate to the unity and inner meaning.

We may perhaps note three ways in which this power of the
One and All touches. First, there is the sense of loneliness
in nature, the feeling of the primitive stranger in a natural
environment which in ways many and mysterious comes as
a disturbing, or favouring, a controlling influence into his
life : a feeling which in the intoxicating attractions of our
artificial surroundings is reduced to a minimum, but which
may be aroused in one who for longer or shorter time feels
himself an outcast and solitary in a great multitude, or who
suddenly finds himself in the vast loneliness of nature-
possessed by that peculiar sense of the haunting mystery
of the outer wilds, so well depicted by the modern French
romancer, as speaking to the sailor on dim and distant seas
of the misty north, or to the sojourner amid the environing
forests of some island in southern seas. But as is the
individual, in his feelings and training, so is the articulation
of the voice that speaks to him from the circumambient world.
Whereas a Wordsworth sees behind the light of setting suns
a motion and a spirit that impels all things, the primitive
savage finds a deity in more prosaic and proximate objects ;
yet always perhaps, not so much in them, as behind them, be

474 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

they but stock or stone. It seems somehow as if by many
an incident our eyes and hearts, otherwise given away to petty
and partial objects and aims, had the veil suddenly taken
away from them ; as if for a moment they were enabled to see
the "outlying- provinces of life, and to feel the vaster issues
of that roar of worlds, which in daily routine we contrive to
forget, and which for many purposes we must, if not
absolutely forget, at least hear only as a distant and subdued
accompaniment to the melody of life.

But if the variety of human fortunes and experiences is
felt to be only a department in the great all-embracing
universe, if acts and their issues are believed to depend on
the unaccountable influences of external forces, or to be
a consequence and a detail of the one great cosmic unity ;
if a dimly seen but intensely felt destiny or overruling
influence of fate carries along with it in its train and sweep
the lives and works of men, there is also a closer and
a kindlier tie which binds the generations each to each, which
gives the individual a permanent abiding-place and a sub
stantial immortality. This is the solidarity of human life
as first realized in the family and its extensions. But, here
too, the full awareness of the bond only comes when the
visible unity of the family passes away at death. It is the
family deserted of its head which learns to look on that unity
as subsisting on and on, yet subsisting in a certain ghostly
wise, hardly real, only embalmed in memory ; existing in the
subjective devotion of those who abide, but supposed to exist
quasi-objectively in the ghostly realm of the dead. If the
former source of religion consists in the presupposition of
a unity in all the incidents of life in the endless range of
universal space, the latter welds together present, past, and
future in one continuous line of being, and beholds a per
sistent life running throughout. The infinitesimally short
lapse of the momentary and present sojourn of man is felt to
be rooted in the past and to have its meaning in onlook to

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 475

the future. It is here that we find what in some ways may
be regarded as an equivalent to the modern hypothesis of the
continuity of the germ-plasm.

Yet the dead, who have become thus the object of worship,
are also changed. If they have lost some of the attributes
of humanity, and are thus in worse estate than before their
decease, they are also freed from certain of its limitations.
They are superior to the ordinary restrictions of time and
space: they gain an ampler, less defined, more universal
being. Still belonging to our general kindred, they have
a wider and less determinate range of operation, a subtler
power of penetration. Through them the code of family
ethics acquires a consistency and authority such as it had not,
while they lived : their personality, with all its peculiarities
and interfering accidents, disappears, and leaves only the
vague, but more emphatic spirit of their general function.
Gradually, even, they lose the limits of humanity altogether,
and become great spirits of influence : they breathe an
ampler ether, a diviner air. They become one with the great
forces of nature, with the lordly spirits of the natural world.
The father of men becomes also the ruler and principle of the
nature.

The fusion is accomplished under the influence of the
rise of civilized communities. In such a community man
gradually arrives at a new sense of his position in nature
and of his relation to his fellows. He ceases to be so
directly dependent on the mere grace and bounty of nature :
directly, i. e. at the mercy of the accidents of a single
place and time. Between the individual and the gratification
of his wants is now interposed the whole instrumental
machinery of the social union. The concentration and
unification of the dependence has in the religious sphere
a tendency to substitute monotheism for polytheism, or at
least to raise certain deities to a prominence and a per
manence unknown before. But the political society is not

476 ESSAYS 77V MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix

merely an economic organism : it also comes to discharge, and
on an ampler scale, the functions of the family and its head.
The unity of social life, which under the sway of family
ideas was mainly felt as a ghostly influence, inhabiting the
realm of the departed, is now realized as a present and active
force, distinguishable even from the actual persons in whom
it is visibly embodied, Occasionally, indeed, the living
monarch, the actual state, may be actually treated as divine,
as representing for the time being the eternal majesty of the
social force. And in this social force, be it noted, we have
a sort of synthesis of man and nature. The culture of the
state represents, as Bacon would say, the wedlock of mens
with natura : of the human mind with the physical world.
Yet even the organized state leads the mind beyond itself :
it too is dependent — dependent, so to speak, at its circum
ference only — but along that circumference the dependence is
now seen to be more complete and all-embracing than ever.
Yet something further has been gained in the process. The
union of man and nature which has been actually accom
plished in the arts and sciences of civilization, suggests a far-
reaching unity in the principles underlying the two sides.
God now becomes in a higher degree than before the ultimate
purport and therefore the very basis of the social union, of
its moral code as well as its material conquests. He has
given man the arts of life, has promulgated the law of
conduct. That is, here again, the actual sees its warrant and
sanction in an exalted ideal, a reasoned-out perfection which
is more everlasting and determinate than itself : but that
exalted perfection is more than ever in harmony with the
actual. Heaven, at this stage, recalls for us the prototype—
the moralized and organized world of this earth.

But is heaven only the glorified image, the abiding source
and sanction, of the actual moral world, the world of social
institutions, the social politico-economical organism ? No :
religion is more than the sanction of morality ; and when

ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 477

it is dragged down to this position it is ill both for
religion and for morality. The ethical world is but a step,
though an all-important step, on the path that leads to
God. The social organism, the state, is after all essentially
a human and secular mechanism : perhaps, as Hobbes says,
the mortal God, but not wholly adequate to the invisible
and infinite type. Religion loses its freshness and power
when it is treated as no broader and deeper than a moral
sanction : and morality is deprived of its human freedom
and self-developing growth when it is abruptly described
as a command from a celestial sovereign possessing unlimited
power and wisdom, or even (after the example of Kant)
as the law of a realm of intelligent agents, whereof God
is the lord. It would be a strange thing, said Aristotle,
to consider God as a moral agent. There is a something
higher than the life of conduct and practice ; and that higher
is the life which is essentially self-realization, and not merely
a process to something higher than itself. The moral sphere,
as we may otherwise put it, has about it a certain unrest ;
it is an effort to obey an alien law, to work out a problem
imposed, to attain an end outside itself. And the problem is
by the nature of it insoluble, in the terms in which it is
stated. For the very aim of moral action could only be
reached by making moral action henceforth impossible. If
the world were what it ought to be, what need of further
endeavour to make it better. Good itself can only be, on the
assumption that evil is there to be overcome : such is the
doctrine of many a Theodicee.

It has been remarked that more than one philosophy has
endeavoured to base its moral doctrine on its metaphysical
theory, which in the last resort is an article of faith. Thus
to one who holds that the end of the cosmic process is the
evolution of intellect till it completely subdues will, the
ethical rule will take the form of asceticism and quietism.
The duty of the microcosm, man, is represented as the normal

478 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY

tendency of the macrocosm or universe. So the Stoic taught
that the wise man would but cheerfully fall in with a destiny
which, even should he refuse, would infallibly carry him
with it. It is implied in all this that the moral and social
order and progress is from one point of view a part in
the great cosmic evolution. In the phases and fortunes
of human society there is a great law operative which over
rules all individual perturbations and renders impossible all
that seems arbitrary or artificial.

CRITICAL ESSAYS

HERMANN LOTZE

NEARLY four years have elapsed since Hermann Lotze died l.
His removal from the scene left a sense of real loss, both
personal and public, in a large body of friendly readers who
hoped that he had yet in store for them a fuller revelation of
that subtle spirit of wisdom which had often helped them in
the doubts and confusions of modern controversy. It could
not be said indeed that one of the great lights of the philosophic
sky had gone out; yet at least a bright star had set and left
the eye without one of its familiar means of orientation.
There was more than the common ground for the trite words
uttered over the closing grave that the world was a poorer
place since he had gone, and that if he had lived longer, he
might have taught us something more. And therefore it
hardly needs the appearance of an English translation of his
two last volumes, done by a group of Oxford scholars, to
suggest a motive for trying to give in English some outline
of Lotze's place in the history of philosophy, of his method
and his ruling ideas.

For some years back an ill-defined mixture of fascination
and repulsion has kept curiosity alive in the neighbourhood
of that all but inaccessible peak of adamant, the Hegelian
philosophy. Latterly it has been suggested that the sure
way to reach its summit, or possibly to attain a more
commanding altitude, is to wend along the ' critical'' path
which Kant made. But that path seems to lead else
where : and the wanderers who have gone out by it, are
1 Written in 1885.

I i

482 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

still struggling through endless hills of difficulty, no nearer
the mountain top. It can do little harm to suggest a
study of Lotze as an alternative approach to Hegel. The
age in which Lotze first shaped the ideas which characterize
him was an age saturated in the conceptions of aim and
method of the great German idealists,, and yet keenly sensitive
to the flaws and failures of their systems. Even if this
suggestion turn out abortive, and the access to Hegelianism
remain doubly barred, the study of Lotze will not have
been fruitless. Apart from his dogmatic burthen of ideas
and metaphysic, the example of his method — his patient
unravelling of tangled arguments, his delicate refusal to
precipitate a conclusion till every appeal has been heard —
will remain a classic standard for the philosophical critic.
Lotze has besides a special claim on our attention. A student
of medicine before he turned to the study of philosophy, he
had familiarized his mind with the methodological principles
of physical science, and carried into the discussion of meta
physical questions a lively conscience of the requirements of
analysis and explanation^ which is rare among professional
philosophers. Thus if, on the one hand, he may afford a line
of regress to idealism, on the other he is not without points
of attachment, progressively, to those realistic researches of
modern German experimental psychology, which M. Ribot
and Mr. Sully have chronicled for their countrymen.

Captious censors may pronounce Lotze to be only ' common
sense ' in philosophy. Even so, the faculty is not so common
that it need be disparaged. Others may allege that he lacks
the direct decision of a great teacher, that he guards himself
in every dictum by reservations and conditions, and that,
though dogmatic in abstract principles, he hesitates and gives
forth an uncertain sound when he comes to settle an individual
problem or make a concrete application. The latter charge
cannot be rebutted. But, it may be added, it is not the
highest virtue of a philosopher to solve the Gordian knot by

0 HERMANN LOTZE 483

a blow of the sword. That is the way of 'practical' men.
And < practical ' in that sense Lotze was not. One can under
stand the worry it must have cost him Saturday after Saturday
to sit on the board for testing candidates for the higher educa
tional posts; and undoubtedly it could only have been the
effect of the diminution in the numbers at his lectures during
the period he was 'out of the Schools' (1875-9) that he
returned to the distasteful task. In his voluminous works
there is scarcely a page which touches upon the topics
currently agitated in the social, political and religious worlds.
He does not, it is true, write wholly for the school, but he is
academic in tone and theme, and the world for which he
thinks is the world of cultivated reflection and scholarly taste.
A solitary chapter of his Logic discusses the methods for
getting a true vote, when it is needful to pronounce between
a number of measures or of men. Yet in a time which
swarms with doctrinaires ready for action, it is absurd to give
a grudging welcome to the voice of one who neither bans
unreservedly nor blesses altogether, but with calm yet sympa
thetic judgment weighs good and evil, careful to shun the
fallacies of words and the pronounced bias of a transient
majority. No doubt to the practical man such a position
looks like scepticism. Such a sceptic, too, unsatisfied with
the certainty and solidity of much that the specialist looks
upon as proved and discovered, Lotze appeared from the
first, in his work on the principles of medicine. But when
philosophy shall cease to be so sceptical, shall leave the post
of criticism to become finally dogmatic, philosophy will be on
the eve of euthanasia, with the sciences now made perfect
waiting to carry their elder sister to her tomb. It is just
because Lotze throughout his teaching never sunk criticism
in mere exposition, but worked up to results by the recurrent
correction of successive guesses at truth — in a way that
simulates the movement of a living Logos leading him
whithersoever it would — that he did knightly service, not

I i 2,

484 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

only as a writer o£ some repute and popularity, but perhaps
even more as a stimulating lecturer for nearly forty years in
German universities.

For philosophy in the hands of a professoriate has too often
proved unfaithful to her trust. Commissioned by her original
charter to keep clean and open the highways of intellectual
communication, to light a perpetual lamp in the dark labyrinth
of human purposes, and to show through her perspective glass
the reality which is hardly visible under the phenomenal
aspects of the world, philosophy has sunk once and again into
a mere lackey of academic routine and a colporteur of the lore
of old tradition. After such a lapse from her high estate,
some observer is sure to ask the warrant for her claims, and
her title to the rank conceded her by the arrangements of
civilization. Her professors meanwhile either smile like the
Roman augur at their own hypocrisy, or complacently take
stock of an assured position. They reflect that logic is now
more than ever une langue lien faite really to be installed into
the memories of pupils ; that ethical questions are all practically
settled, except for irreconcilables who still rage around free
will, and for revolutionaries who watch for the upheavings of
the social storm ; and that metaphysics has been finally sent
by a sane mental science to rest on the shelf with other
historical curiosities, in that vast gallery of the anthropological
museum which holds samples of human aberration. In the
hardness of human hearts, it is almost inevitable that dis
tribution should thus usurp the place of production ; teaching
the place of research. The professor of philosophy has been
turned into a spoke of the educational wheel, and is no longer,
as Plato dreamed, a spectator of all time and all being. The
grand instrument of reform, the chief agent in helping men
out of the slough of despond, has often sunk into a chief
warder of the prison-house of the human mind.

In the history of academic philosophy, that phase of
conservative inertia, which has gained the typical name of

^ HERMANN LOTZE ^

scholasticism, breaks out again and again. In different a^es
it names its altars after different gods, but they are all
honoured only as avatars of the same undying One the
demon of classification. These great names, like Aristotle or
Locke, are often much worthier than the mediocrities into
which the originals have been fashioned by the hands of
faithful but ignorant devotees. Yet the deadly besetting sin
of scholasticism is its comfortable persuasion that the school
was not made for the world, but the world for the school.
This delusion, that learned institutions were an end in them
selves, was notably prevalent in the school which had long
time buried in its borders the treasures of ancient ideas. Its
dogmatic slumber was broken in the seventeenth century to
some extent by that reveillee which was sounded nearly
simultaneously in England and France. The very pillars of
traditional belief were shaken by the summons of Descartes
to^submit every dogma to the test of lucid and complete
thinkableness ; and for the wantonness of controversy Bacon
substituted the effort of research to establish definite rela
tions between definite elements, with a view to free and
strengthen the hands working for human welfare. By this
first revolution logic, which had hitherto been used as the
handmaid of arbitrary reasoning, received a foundation which
one day might serve to support a theory of knowledge and of
the method of science.

A second reformation — tardily consequent on the first

undertook for metaphysics what the other did for logic. It
is associated with the name of Kant. The new metaphysics
sprung from a perception that the older system had started
from an unknown God and worked down to familiar man;
and it proposed to show that the true synthesis of phenomena
could only be reached by a system which began with the
analysis of our own endowment of conscious power, and traced
out the indications thereon afforded until they offered, if they
so should offer, a scheme to explain the secret structure of the

486 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

macrocosm. At first, as managed by Kant himself,, the new
metaphysics was fearful of its own shadow. It would fain
discourage any helief in the higher ideas as more than neces
sary fictions for ordering and rounding off both knowledge
and life. Yet it owned that life would be a bestial chaos,
and the theory of organic existence and the sense of beauty
an inexplicable deception, unless the symmetry which mind
reflected upon the world was a real animating law in the
phenomena themselves. As younger heads caught the con
tagion of the new way of ideas, men plucked from their own
consciousness a key to unlock all the doors of the universe.
A race of Titans began. Fichte, magnifying the hero for
whom circumstances are only materials for aiding his own
development, treated the whole of nature as but a background,
delineated as it were gradually into the shape of a world, in
order that self -consciousness, in antithesis to a given range of
objects, might realize its potentialities in their full form and
body. Schelling, a less fiery spirit, vindicated for nature
a parallel rank to man, and saw by intellectual intuition their
common source in a non-human and non- natural Absolute,
— an ultimate assumed sameness from which proceeded two
co-ordinate provinces of operation. Hegel, partially learning
from both, put mind above nature, and yet made the eternal
systematization of thought — the 'idea' — the basis and the
result of both. To him the universe was a trinity in perpetual
unity. The world of consciousness, while to the cursory
observer it seemed a mere incident occasionally varying the
even course of physical machinery, was pronounced on closer
inspection to be the essential aim and meaning of the opera
tions of nature — the f idea ' or form of law with all its sub-
clauses — which, not being adequately expressed in the physical
processes, or even in conscious life (for which, however, it was
presupposed), came into manifestation, dimly and sensuously in
art and religion, clearly in philosophy : — of which it was thus
the mission to reveal God out of nature, and man.

d HERMANN LOTZE 8

In this new metaphysics the note of distinction lay in the
profession to gather from the human reason the organizing
principle of the heavens and the earth. The old metaphysics
had inherited its dogmas from various sources, Hellenic' and
Hebrew. What it accepted it did its best to reduce to logical
shape and order, and thence to deduce lower phenomena. The
new scheme proposed to supply the premises leading up to the
original dogmas, to rationalize theology, and to found religion
on philosophy. It dared to prove, for those who could follow
its flights, that existence must affirm the reality of those ideas
which were postulated by an adequate unfolding of thought as
necessary for the maintenance of the spirit. Yet for those
who pondered these promises, it seemed as if the reduction of
a dogmatic to a speculative theology led necessarily to a third
revolution. It would then appear that metaphysics is not
a mere piece of logic and reasoning, but the work of the
concrete human soul, which feels no less than thinks, and is
dominated by ethical and aesthetical ideals not less than by
logical rules and forms. It is an ethical reformation which
would thus be the necessary climax of the movement which
modified logic and metaphysics.

It was at the very culmination and crisis in this fever of
ideas that Lotze first played a part on the philosophic scene.
Of his outward life, apparently, there is not much to tell. An
inward balance of powers and tendencies, and probably unre
corded influences of youthful training, issued in one of those
symmetrical lives which leave behind but little waste for the
chronicler to garner up. Born on May a i , 1 8 1 7, at Bautzen in
the Ober-Lausitz (Upper Lusatia), in the kingdom of Saxony,
the son of an army-doctor, who soon after migrated with his
corps to Zittau (nearer Bohemia), and who died when his boy was
only twelve, Rudolph Hermann Lofcze (he dropped the Rudolph
ere long) received his schooling at the latter town, after 1838
m its High School or Gymnasium. At the age of seventeen
he went up to the University of Leipsic, where four years

488 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

later (1838) he graduated both in medicine and philosophy
(Anglice, Arts). After a little retreat for preparation,, and
a brief stay in the probationary stage of Privat-clocent, Lotze
was in 1 842 elevated at Leipsic to the post of professor-extra-
ordinariiis, and in 1844 was called to Gottingen to fill the
philosophy chair left vacant since Herbart's death. At
Gottingen he remained for thirty-seven years ; and when he
left it in 1881 to take a chair of philosophy at Berlin, it was
only — after a few weeks' lectures — to die on the first of July
of that year. Thus, at the age of sixty-four, was closed
a blameless, strenuous, and fair-proportioned life, spent in
a round of study, writing, teaching, with snatches of rural
leisure in vacation, environed with domestic sympathies, and
separated by habits and interests from the social restlessness
of the time.

The surest waymarks to trace the course of a scholar and
thinker are his literary performances : in Lotze's case they
are numerous. His first offering to the muses was a little
volume of poems in 1840. After this act of grace, each of
the three years following saw a solid work appear under his
name: Metaphysics in 1841 : General Pathology and Thera
peutics as mechanical sciences in 1842: and Logic in 1843.
The sterling merits of his medical work indirectly helped him
to his Leipsic professorship : and his translation to Gottingen
was chiefly promoted by Prof. Rudolph Wagner, to whom he
was commended by a similarity of scientific method and
attitude in the conflict between faith and science, and for
whose Dictionary of Physiology he wrote articles that caused
no small stir in the spiritualist dovecots on the subjects : Life,
Soul, Instinct. As early as 1841 he began his contributions
to periodical literature by articles in Fichte's Zeitschrift fur
Philosophic : from 1844 he contributed papers to the Gottinger
Studien (notably two on the principles of aesthetics), to the
Gelchrte Anzeigen (reviews of books), and other journals1.

1 Amongst them, a year before his death, appeared in the Contemporary

^ HERMANN LOTZE 489

A second period of literary activity began in 1851 with the
General Physiology of Bodily Life, followed in 1852 by
Medical Psychology or Physiology of the Soul, and in 1856 by
the first volume of the Microcosms: Ideas on the History of
Nature and Man, the two remaining volumes of which appeared
m 1858 and 1864 respectively. Connected with this the
crowning achievement of his life, in which he has summed up
in a comparatively popular form everything of general interest
that he has discussed elsewhere, and added not a few fresh
ingredients, was a reply to some strictures of the younger
Fichte. This pamphlet (professedly the first of a series of
'Polemics') in 1857 supplies a want of the biographer in
dealing with one who seldom or never cares to season with
personal talk the dullness of mere abstract discussions. In
the same year he issued a Latin version of the Antigone of
Sophocles- -no doubt an intellectual holiday excursion, during
the strain of composing the Microcosms, into that Greek world
and that < unique self-enjoyment of existence which ' as he
elsewhere says, < everywhere presents its cheering face there/
In 1868 he contributed to the series of histories of the sciences,
issued under the direction of the Munich Academy, a History
of Aesthetics in Germany : a book which occupies among his
writings a position of its own, consisting of a series of
thoughtful essays on various aesthetic theories as connected
with the general doctrines of their propounders, on the aspects
of the aesthetic faculty, and on modern conceptions of Art.
His third and last period of literary work was intended to
recapitulate the main results of his more purely academic
teaching, under what may in his case be called the somewhat
conventional name of a ' System of Philosophy/ Of this
total only two parts appeared : Logic in 1874, and Metaphysic
in 1879. The remaining portion, which should have treated
of Ethics and Aesthetics — subjects so cardinal in the theory

Renew (Jan. 1880) the first instalment of a sketch of ' Philosophy in the
last forty years.'

490

CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

of one who was always repeating- that the beginning of
metaphysics is in ethics — was never written. Of all these
writings only the two last have been translated into English :
the metaphysics also into French. The Microcosmus, of which
an English translation l has for some time been promised, was
long ago translated into Russian. There is a French version
(in the Bibliotheque de Philosophic Contemporaine) of the first
book of the Medical Psychology.

Rarely does a philosophic teacher write, and in such
comparative youth, on the fundamental topics of metaphysics
and biology, and certainly it is one of the salient features in
Lotze's career that at an age, where many men are still
lighting for a creed to live by, his standpoint was already
taken and his views on a wide range of questions already
formed. Nothing can well offer a greater contrast than his
mental history to the frequent change of course which marks
the voyage of Kant in search of a centre of knowledge, or
the slow and secret struggle which keeps many a thinker
silent till he has passed middle life, and then leaves him
barely time enough to give perspicuous form to the truths he
deems himself to have discovered. Temperament and environ
ment had combined to give to Lotze an early, almost pre
mature stability of judgement. The process by which opinions
crystallize into a theory had glided on precipitately and yet
quietly to a conclusion. There are those who pay for truth
by toilsome wanderings on fruitless quests. He came, by the
influence of circumstances, into an easy possession of doctrines
which, if not absolutely centralizing, are at least amongst the
inner range of verities. By the time he was twenty-sis Lotze
had formulated his views on the weightier matters of philo
sophy, and on the limits of the principles of science : and by
his fortieth year he had published the outlines of his peculiar
idealism and discussed the whole compass of subjects on which
he allowed himself to dilate.

1 Now published.

i] HERMANN LOTZE 491

To a person acquainted only with the practice of English
universities, the range of subjects embraced by a German
professor of philosophy must seem enormous and unmanage
able. Logic, psychology, metaphysics, practical philosophy,
aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of nature, history
of philosophy, — such was Lotze's list of subjects, alternating at
intervals during his whole career at Gottingen. For most
men such a burden would be unbearable : even for him who
can endure it heavy costs must be paid out of personal health
and opportunity for special development. One is sometimes
led to sigh for that division of labour which prevails so
generally elsewhere. And undoubtedly there are obvious
limits to the extent to which mastery of details can be carried
in each of the branches. Yet unless the Positivist contention
is to be admitted, and a corresponding branch of physics or
physiology to take the place erewhile occupied by the sub
divisions of philosophy (and Lotze in his own youth had
maintained the thesis that ' Aesthetics should be treated as
a physical science '), the separation of teaching between
branches like logic, metaphysics, ethics, cannot be regarded
as an unmitigated gain. No doubt matters will be made
easier for the teacher who has received a definite subject-
matter, to be dealt with historically and by classifications and
analysis, as other sciences are. He will no longer have to
complain of being expected to make bricks without straw.
But, says the Greek adage : the things that are beautiful are
difficult. In the nature of things, an idea will never be
made so tangible as a stone : the ultimate laws of existence
must always be perceived by fewer eyes than can recognize the
special uniformities. And on two grounds one may plead for
some compensation to set against the dispersive tendencies of
specialization. In the first place, the doctrines included under
philosophy possess a community of purpose, which makes it
impossible to sever logic from metaphysics, or either from
ethics,— impossible at least, so long as any of them trench on

492 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

first principles, or fail to be content with a mere rechauffee o£
ancient and vulgar observations. In one branch indeed you
may largely observe silence about the other, but only because
you have prejudged it and assumed your conclusions. And
secondly, when philosophy has come to be broken up into
a group of special and detailed inquiries, which differ from
other branches of knowledge only because they are less likely
to soil the fingers and perhaps to vulgarize the taste of their
disciples, it will cease to subserve its main end; which is to
keep clear and wholesome the heterogeneous mass of general
culture, and to further the universal and liberal interests of
man and the commonwealth.

If the traditions of his chair seemed to impose upon Lotze
the survey of every province in philosophy, it may be added
that the speciality of his own training brought its limitations
in the interpretation of that task. Certain aspects of the
problems displaced or concealed others. The contact of
physics and metaphysics, of body and soul, of nature and
history, of mind and matter, of psychology and logic, of the
real and the ideal, of God and the world — is under many
names perhaps his one favourite theme. Another scarcely
less frequently recurring tendency is to distinguish adjacent
problems, to strip the mask from impossible questions, to
expose pretended solutions, to define the limitations of popular
maxims and the fallacies in current maxims. But in what
ever line, the fruit of his early systematization appeared in
the compact and finished formulation of the summaries of
doctrine given in his lectures. These dictata, delivered not
from manuscript notes but from the memorial stores of
a formed judgement to which the way the conclusion was got
seemed as essential as the result itself, present in careful
miniature a sketch of Lotze's philosophy, which often serves
as a key to the larger picture, too luxuriantly labyrinthine,
given in his later works. Since his death (1882-4), ^nev
have been published from the note-books of his students,

i] HERMANN LOTZE 493

in eight thin octavos, of less than 100 pages each, dealing
with the eight courses, which formed the staple of his teaching.
These lectures given at Gottingen, generally in two courses
of four lectures each weekly, both in the summer and winter
sessions — delivered, it might be at the hours of 10 a.m. and
4 p.m. respectively — to audiences varying from less than ten
in the less popular (e. g. aesthetic) to more than a hundred in
the more popular classes (e. g. psychology), probably produced
on the student youth of Germany a deeper effect than his
published writings. Enthusiasm is hardly the word for the
feeling of his pupils : but there was a quiet strong attraction
in his earnest manner, and the sense that you were listening
to one who did not teach like the mere commentator, but
spoke with the authority of philosophy itself. His oral
teaching had one decided advantage over his written. The
reader of the Microcosmus and subsequent works often faints
bedazzled by the uniform brilliancy of the exposition where
no salient abruptness breaks the general polish, and few
epigrammatic touches happily print themselves in the
memory. Sometimes he loses his reckoning like one who
sails along some sinuous channel, where each promontory
threatens to close the way and each zigzag of the course
discloses a new scene, like, yet strangely unlike the last ;
and so, growing reckless as to progress, gradually, as he
looks on the rhythmic dance of dallying argument, is soothed
into somnolent repose. The lingering tendencies of an equit
able and reflective mind are combined in Lotze with a too
favourable leaning to a quasi-poetical imagery and a falsely
rhetorical re-arrangement of words in his sentences. The
lesson he had learnt, to look for the deceit lurking both in
generals and in particulars, made him interrogate every catch
word, and every proffer of narrative in place of explanation —
of the changeling Mythos put where Logos should have been.
These tendencies, which have free play in his later writings,
were checked in lecture by the need of being emphatic and

494

CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

definite. His earlier writings, though they betray the halting
and guarded march of one who knows how narrow is the way
of truth,, and how many partial truths must be qualified and
supplemented if one wants to be honest, are still marked by
a greater directness of style. The earlier logic and meta
physics — in many ways the most obscure and difficult to
understand of his books — are written throughout with a
certain youthful verve and almost impetuous onwardness.
And in his pamphlet and reply to Fichte's censures there
is much of the same straightforward vigour.

An author has occasionally been heard to lament that some
homonym among contemporaries confused his account books
with fame. Lotze has apparently been the victim of an
opposite mistake. Like an ancient hero, he has been doubled
in order to find a subject proper for the different parts he
plays. Two histories of German literature (those of Kurz and
Gottschall) seem to distinguish between a Lotze the poet and
Lotze the philosopher. The poet, whom Kurz finds obscure
though full of promise, is by Gottschall styled mystical. The
poems appeared on the eve of his engagement to his future
wife : and doubtless came along with that pure warm blush of
imagination which the spring-time of sweet emotions awakes
in every nature. But in Lotze the poetry had a deeper source
in a perennial power of mind which in the language of an old
fantasy never allows the discord and dullness of the present
to deaden the sense for the harmony and beauty of the cosmic
spheres. It might mislead to call Lotze a Mystic : but only
because he was much more than that or any similar nickname
would imply. Mysticism, it has been said, plays a part in
every genuine philosophy. But there is mysticism and
mysticism. Sometimes it is taken to mean that at every
moment the finite must be dipped into the infinite and thence
return saturated with fresh life : that the smallest trifle has to
wait for a special intervention of the absolute. One world is
in turn immersed in another and released from its influence.

i] HERMANN LOTZE 495

Lotze, on the contrary, holds that the phenomenal world is
also the real : that the infinite is everywhere present in the
finite and gives to the finite all its force. But he nevertheless
separates the work-day view of mechanical science from the
blissful Sabbath of the spiritual theory. Scientific method
must once for all discount the infinite and absolute and
prosecute the inquiry into phenomena, mental as well as
material, on the hypothesis that definite elements when
brought into definite relations with each other exhibit the
finite result with invariable regularity. But though it is
for scientific calculations needful to ignore the infinite, the
principle cannot be allowed more than an instrumental value.
The material is only intelligible as the manifestation of an
immaterial : mechanism must presuppose a living mind, and
the universal reign of law proceed from the personality of
God.

With ideas like these, we are not surprised to learn from
himself that it was a lively inclination towards poetry and art
which first made him philosophize. He came to the study
with a head trained in scientific conceptions, and a heart full
of the eternal romance of that light which never was on sea
and land. His teacher at Leipsic was Christian Weisse.
Weisse, originally an admirer of Hegelian method, had
gradually diverged from the main current of the system, and,
whilst still retaining the form, had sought to find other
material, more consonant with established beliefs, which
might be systematized by its means. Like the younger
Fichte, Weisse tried to put on a better footing those ideas
of God, free-will and immortality, which the theory of Hegel
had left as exoteric names, not admitting of precise interpre
tation in the terms of the system. It was with this type of
thought, in which the great circle of ideas connected with the
names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had come to form
' more a characteristic kind of culture than a rigid system of
doctrine,' that Lotze was brought into contact in ' that fair

496 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

time of earlier youth/ In its very vagueness he found the
liberty he wished : yet amid the varying matter of private
interpretations he gained, he says, a ' nucleus of convictions '
which he never surrendered.

The year 1841,, in which Lotze's Metaphysics appeared,
marks a crisis in German philosophy. Hegel had died ten
years before : Herbart that very year : and Schelling had
just gone to Berlin to begin his latest phase. Trendelen-
burg's Logical Researches, published the year before, marked
a change in the philosophic tone of the age. But the most
characteristic feature of the time was the rise of natural
science on the one hand, and the great schism in the Hegelian
school on the other. A few Hegelians were still to be found
who clung, with a fair degree of orthodoxy, to the doctrine
of the master in its integrity. But they were far outstripped
in popularity and influence by the pseudo- Hegelians like
Weisse, and by the so-called Young- Hegelian group, which
includes the names of Arnold Ruge, Bruno Bauer, Strauss,
and Feuerbach. The bond of sympathy between men so
dissimilar was their common antipathy to the conventional,
the non-natural, and the super-natural, their endeavour to
reduce imposing historical authority to its matter-of-fact
basis, to eliminate the theological from the field of human
history, and to ' paint man, man, man whatever the issue.'
Accepting the criticism which history passes upon acts, they
used it, not, as Hegel did, to show that the rational is the
real, but to tear up the roots of old beliefs and institutions in
order to show the sordid materials and base nutriment from
which their strength had come. They rejected the idealism
which judges a thing's truth and reality by its function and
meaning, and adopted the realism which lays main stress on
the origin, the means, and machinery.

With these Realists Lotze had little relation. Nor had
he very much closer connexion with the realism of Herbart.
It is indeed common with those who love to classify philo-

i] HERMANN LOTZE 497

sophers by schools, after the manner of the ancient gram
marians, to call Lotze a Herbartian. There would be at
least as much justification for naming- him a Hegelian. He
has himself protested against the Herbartian title : and de
clared that his realism, such as it is, was not the realism of
Herbart, but the realism of the physicist. The very word
has been so bandied about as an antithesis that it may
almost mean anything. In Herbart it refers to the prin
ciple that the difficulties in the apparent data of experience
postulate for their explanation a true and non-contradictory
reality, which under certain relations presents the aspects,
the contradictions in which perplex our logical require
ments. This reality however is not one : the true reality
consists of an indefinite plurality of real beings, each
simple, and completely independent of all the others. Still
they are ' together/ and they can (not must) stand in
relation to one another. In such a case, when the juxta
position occurs, there may to the eye of a spectator be
presented an apparent fusion of their elements, by means
of an analysis which substitutes for the two invariable
'reals' two equivalent expressions admitting of comparison.
Yet the real beings remain at last as they were at first : any
disturbance that may have been threatened is at once annulled
by their self-conserving power, 'like the trees in a wood,
which stand out from each other as they approach the eye
and at a distance gather into one mass, whilst they them
selves undergo no change/ In psychology Herbart made
two important points. The first is his doctrine that the soul,
one of these simple and indestructible ' reals/ when brought
'together' with the others, conserves itself under the form
of an idea, or object of consciousness ; that once the soul
has thus acted and produced sensations or ideas, it ceases
to be more than a passive scene, on which through the
action and reaction of the various < ideas ' upon each other
by mechanical laws, and without need of postulating a number

Kk

498 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

of other and higher faculties, there is gradually produced the
varied structure of mental life, such as feelings of pain and
pleasure, general ideas, volitions, judgments, &c. The second
point carries out this view into the conception of the application
of mathematics to psychology : of treating the processes of
association according to the principles of mechanical science.

In none of the peculiar doctrines of Herbart has Lotze
been his follower. Where he agrees with Herbart is in
insisting on analytical investigation instead of constructive
imagination, and on the absurdity of beginning with the
deduction of everything from one supreme principle ; in the
important function he attributes to the method of substituting
for indivisible totals the analytic expressions derived for them
by ( accidental views ' ; and in the secondary place he assigns
to relations instead of inner states of the active elements
themselves. But his antagonism is hardly less marked. He
refuses, for example, to treat the soul as a mere background for
the evolutions of the atom -like ' ideas/ in which they thwart
or promote each other, fuse into a homogeneous mass, or are
partially disrupted by some new attraction, and where con
cepts and judgements are mere casual products, collateral
results of the fore-play of ideas. According to Herbart
attention is merely the strength of an idea driving others
before it. According to Lotze thought is activity : the soul
directs, watches, and above all criticizes the processes which
go on mechanically between ideas : it does voluntarily, with
comparison and attention, what the psychical machinery did
as it were by chance. Thought in short is an original act
of interference with the mechanism of association : the laws
which express the general principles guiding that critical
interference are the laws of thought, whilst the special forms
of thought, such as concept and judgement, are the modes
under which the mind forces the results of sense-association
to comply with the general conditions of reality, the meta
physical categories.

i] HERMANN LOTZE 499

I£ Lotze thus differs from Herbart in denying that thought
is a mere occasional result of senses and association, and
maintaining the essential spontaneity of the 'relating' in
tellect, he no less differs from his view that ideas and
sensations are the sole primary elements, giving rise to feelings
and volitions in their dynamical effects. For Lotze, the soul
is not a simple real : there are nowhere indeed any such
simple reals : and the soul, above all others, has something
of the infinite in its nature, which needs, indeed, the stimulus
of other presences to unfold, but which is notwithstanding
the source of its own internal state. Still less can Lotze
be satisfied with the doctrine of independent realities in
a mere ' together ' — in a vacuity of juxtaposition. We have
already seen the antithesis in psychology — where metaphysical
differences naturally appear in the most pronounced form :
and we have only to substitute for the soul the universe.
Here too there is one directing principle, critically guiding
the whole of event according to a plan, supplying in each
apparent centre of being those states of activity, which, by
his common purpose, have the power of carrying along with
them corresponding states in other centres of activity.

The points at which Hegelianism most repelled Lotze need
scarcely be noted. Over and above the common defects of
idealism — that it is too much concerned with ends to pay the
proper attention to means, and that it begins at the wrong
point — a special objection to Hegelianism is its claim to have
discovered a movement of thought which is the native move
ment of the reality : its deification of method, and neglect
of realities. 'It is/ he says, 'a, philosophy of philosophy,
which ceases to occupy itself with the problems and deals
only with itself/ He has stated in the beginning of his
early Metaphysics his own idea of what philosophy has to do,
and of its relation to life. When it first addresses itself
to the mind, it enters no vacant ground. The mind as a
whole is already there, with truth possessed and exercised,

K k 3

500 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

though without scientific knowledge of it. An instinctive
sense or law within, existing in the shape of opinion, but
not formulated in definite rules, serves as a repellent and
protective power to negative whatever is out of harmony
with it. Though we do not know what or where is the
unknown which we seek, we are still able to reject the sug
gestion that it is this or is here. As each inappropriate
suggestion is set aside, the outlines of opinion acquire
a fuller definiteness. And so it may almost seem as if the
clearness grew by a motor in the ideas themselves, without
our interference. But this allusion arises only because of
the vagueness of that inward truth, which only comes
forward into action when stimulated by the felt disproportion
between it and each overt judgment.

The truth in the mind — which carries us beyond the given
to something not given, standing as its necessary comple
ment — is an activity of the whole mind. And the mind
in so doing is exerting its supreme category — the 'ought
to be.' Thus philosophy comes up in consequence of the
tendency in the mind to seek for the fragmentary comple
ment needed to clear off the contradictions found in each
several phenomenon : and its business is to give a distinct
and, as far as may be, a detailed account of this instinctive
activity, this real though indefinable opinion, and to make
its laws no longer a means only but also an object of know
ledge. Nor is it only in this desultory way that we are
carried by an indwelling feeling for truth beyond the given
fact to the totality of which it forms part. There comes also
to every mind a time of longing and ethical emotion, Lotze
reminds us, when it is visited by a vision, carried away by
an enthusiasm, the burden of which is infinitely good and
precious — a true reality which is unlimited and unchangeable.
In the inward glow of youthful imagination a consciousness
grows that beyond the ordinary course of thought there lies
another and more real world — no single phenomenon, not

*1 HERMANN LOTZE 5OI

liable to the limited and transitory conditions of finite things
-describable by no words except by the uncertain sounds,
< one, infinite and eternal/ But it is to be added that only

' In a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither.'

Oftener in duller moods, when this splendid vision fades into
common day, we feel the want of some means to give the
shadowy outlines permanence, to combine the results of our
several questionings of sense and outward things with this
feeling of a presence of something which gives the true
meaning and purpose to all existence. To give to this con
ception of true being (and the weight of truth lies in its
ethical significance) that persistence and definiteness which
as a mere dream of faith and suggestion of passing moods
it lacks — to make it a substantive part of our common
thought— is the aim of philosophy. Ordinary civilization
has done something to establish a comparatively fixed notion
of what is real and what only an illusion. To carry this
work a stage further is the aim of philosophy. Her aim
is primarily formal, she does not propose to create ideas,
which must be gained by the training of art and experience :
but to bring greater unity and system into the vague assump
tions which underlie all thinking and action. The aim of
the school is therefore to elevate the transient convictions
of individuals into a common estate of science. It is reserved
for faith and conduct — acting through laws and manners — to
make the truth thus ascertained a real and permanent pos
session of the whole being.

Traced in such words the problem of philosophy has a more
human interest than Lotze seemed to find in contemporary
systems. If, on the one hand, they cherished aims and
employed methods which his scientific studies showed him
to be impossible and wrong, on the other hand, they failed

502

CRITICAL ESSAYS

to supply him with that support for ethical and aesthetical
cravings which had led him to philosophy. He has no
liking for the apotheosis of knowledge for its own sake — for
the cold intellectualism he found rampant. The resistless
movement of self-development in the ' idea/ the evolution
which has no further purpose than fullest evolution, were
to him meaningless and repulsive — specimens of a curiosity
which revelled in its logical dexterity and mastery of method.
A mere plan which was carried out inexorably without any
regard to the worth of the principle it subserved, he held
to be an offer of a stone when one asked for bread. That
everything is one vast process without beginning or end,
each stage only a preliminary to the next, with no permanent
result except the exhibition of certain uniformities of suc
cession and coexistence, sounded to him a vain mockery of
human cravings. There must be something somewhere, which
has intrinsic value, and that something can only be conscious
self-enjoying being. Existence is no mere machinery for
working out a logical operation, or illustrating relations of
fact. There must be something that can justify the bother
and pother of existence — some meaning and purpose, over
and above the mere regularity, system, and development.
Something must develop as well as be developed, enjoy the
order as well as move in submission to it.

The basis of his conviction is embodied in the statement
that the root of metaphysic lies in ethics. But he has
nowhere given expression to all that is implied in this
assertion. It is probably so deeply imbedded in all his
thought, both by early influences and by the special form
it received through his first philosophic teacher, that it lay
beyond the range of introspective criticism. His first
writings did not specially discuss the theme. An essay on
the idea of Beauty (1845) touches upon this faith in the
ideal. But during the first part of his professorial career
he did not deal with specially ethical problems. The lectures

i] HERMANN LOTZE 503

on ' Practical Philosophy ' were first given in 1857, an<l those
on the < Philosophy 0£ Religion ' in 1858. On ethics the
only parts of his published writings that we can refer to
are a few chapters in the Microcosmus, and a paper which
appeared after his death under the title of ' Principles of
Ethics/ but which really traverses only the ground of the
old battles between experience and the a priori. One may
doubt whether the unwritten last volume of the 'System'
would have carried us much further.

His point of view has some light thrown upon it by the
following words addressed in 1857 to J. H. Fichte (who
was his senior by twenty years) : ' With your illustrious
father, most honoured friend, I am associated not merely
by the to me pleasant accident of a common Lusatian
nationality, but by a fundamental theory of things, to which
I bring the same inflexible energy as he showed in its
defence : the conviction, to wit, that it is only in what,
for want of a sufficiently comprehensive name, I will for
the nonce call the import of the ' idea of the good/ that
the adequate motive is to be sought for the whole burthen
of existence and event, or, as I have elsewhere described it,
that the world of values is also at the same time the key
to the world of forms ... I could not agree with your father
in the detail of his opinions, neither in his initial subjective
idealism, nor in the restriction by which he exclusively laid
stress on action, as the form in which what ought to be
is to find its existence, and made it the sole aim and
destination of the world to supply the conditions needful
for realizing action. For me the quiet bliss of beauty,
the sanctity of that disposition which neither does nor
desires, the intrinsic self-consistency of truth with the place
of its harmonies, were counted elements too essential in the
constitution of that postulated ideal world to let me do
otherwise than look upon the restlessness of action as merely
the means for reaching that higher aim/

504 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

There is in these words the force of a persuasion which
he always reverts to : the belief that movement and progress
is not a good for its own sake, but that in the words of
Aristotle, schole is the end of all ascholia — self-enjoyment is
the truth of work. It is the protest and reaction against
an attitude which in the eighteenth century took the shape
of a deification of moral and intellectual progress in society,
and which, in the logical philosophy of the nineteenth, became
a worship of evolution and development. His scepticism
anent the cry of progress had started early. One of his
theses in 1840, when he ' habilitated,' was 'that there was
no progress in human conduct: that the difference between
civilization and its obstacles was a constant quantity/ It
seemed to him that in all these matters men mistook the
means for the end ; and that the loud self -approbation of
material civilization over its advances was a delusion. As
every quality has its defects, so every new instrument and
institution calls for a fresh effort to guard against a new
series of dangers. People do not realize that nothing can
be got for nothing: — a delusion which in various forms,
more or less gross, misleads more than half the energy of
the world. The deifying of machinery and movement forgets
that no machine creates force, but only transfers it to a place
where it may be used without being dissipated beforehand.

His general quarrel is with what for want of a better name
may be called formalism — the belief that there is a saving
virtue in forms, methods, movements, by themselves. It
is this which leads him to criticize the Kantian moral
principle on the ground that mere conformity to law for
the sake of law, as such, can never be a true motive for
the behaviour of a being, who is something more than a
mere intelligence, pleased with uniformities for their own
sake. It similarly leads him to object to the tendency in
Hegelianism, as he understands it, to lay the main emphasis
on its method — on the formal symmetry of a movement of

i] HERMANN LOTZE 5o5

thought which proceeds more geometrico, and revels in the
achievements of mere dialectic. 'It is not a mere blind
fate' he says in the last pages of his MetapJiysic (1841)
' which has appointed a tedious triadic development as the
law of this world : but,, because the good is the true substance
of the world, and is what it is only by this process (from
end proposed by means of instrument to end realized), all
being is moulded in the form of the good/ His metaphysical
system is thus named by himself a ' teleological idealism/
The good must be : — such is the initial presupposition, and
on that is based the necessity for the machinery of existence
and of thought. The so-called categories of metaphysics
are conceptions of the nature of being which are rendered
necessary, if we accept the conviction that the true cause of
events, the very substance of all that is, is a moral meaning
or plan. And this assumption — unprovable by logic — is
a conviction forced upon the mind as not a mere intelli
gence, but an intelligence suffused with emotion and inspired
by conceptions of what ought to be.

When Lotze gives expression to these ideas, there is no
doubt that he believes himself to be carrying out the idea
of Plato. From the intellectualism of his own time, Lotze
turned not merely to Leibnitz but further still to the
philosophy of Greece. There form and law had not yet
celebrated their exaltation to supreme power. Duty for
duty's sake was subordinated to the dominant influence of
the beautiful and the good. It is in accordance with this
origin that Lotze puts in the front of his practical philosophy
that idea of a chief good which Kant had deposed from its
primacy. When the ancient Greek was asked what this
good was, he was perplexed between two answers. The
one answer was Pleasure, the other was Intelligence. Some
times he tried to combine both, more frequently he felt struck
by their incompatibility. Lotze does not join in the common
hunt which zealots urge against the value of pleasure.

5o6 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

Though foolish courtiers have profaned her palace, this is
no justification for joining the rout of ascetics who clamour
for her head. And so Lotze finds himself in disagreement
with Kant, who allowed no fellowship between pleasure
and duty, or between the beautiful and the pleasant : for
there is no good which is not pleasure, nothing beautiful
which fails to please. He turns away from a theory which
finds nothing more in beauty than a formal symmetry, or
in virtue than the recognition of universal law.

The question, it may be remarked, is not whether Lotze
was correct in so interpreting either Kant or Hegel. That is
a question which concerns the study of these philosophers :
though it may be said that Lotze came to the task of
interpretation with a mind too definitely formed to allow
him to do more than observe the salient contrasts or resem
blances with his own line of thought. The point for present
consideration is the light these antipathies throw on his own
point of view. What they evidence is his realism : the
realism which cannot suppose an act without an agent, an
idea without a thinker, a form without a form-giver. He
has no sympathy with the language which uses words like
humanity, as if there were a common spirit over and above
the forces active and co-operative in the individual men.
To him humanity is no mere generic character, still less
a mere multitude of individuals only co-existing in our
thought. ' It consists/ he says *, ' in that real and living
community which comprises in one totality of reciprocal
being the temporally separate and disrupted numbers of
spirits ; a totality in which each, as if they were all
numbered, has his peculiar place pre-arranged and reserved/
The personal must never be swallowed up in the impersonal.
' If we had to believe/ he says 2, ' that all personal life was
employed only as a transition-point for the development of
an impersonal absolute, we should either give up the efforts

1 Micr. iii. 51. r* P. 41.

i] HERMANN LOTZE 507

to do good, since we discover no obligation to co-operate
towards the support of a process which is equally unin
teresting to itself and to us, or, if we should still hold fast
the treasure of love, duty, and sacrifice, which we find
within us, we should at the same time admit that a human
heart in all its finitude and transiency is a far nobler, richer,
and more sublime being than that absolute with all its
necessary development/

To conclude this part of the statement. It is true that
Lotze has not given us an ethical philosophy on which
his other views can rest. But he has given significant
utterance to the conviction that no metaphysical system
which does not satisfy the wants of our moral nature will
ever be a permanent creed. And he has put forward with
distinctness two points of importance in ethical theory. One
is the supremacy of conscience in morals. ' All theoretical
knowledge we have conceived to begin from simple truths
innate in the nature of the mind, and to apply which the
mind is awakened by the force of observation : no knowledge
of the actual sprung up without the experiences which supplied
those principles with the matter for their estimation. Con
versely experience alone could never generate the highest
principles, by which it is fain to be estimated. Practical
philosophy offers a complete analogy. A moral judgement
upon our actions can only proceed from the consciousness
of unconditionally obligatory ideals, to realize which is
binding upon us under all circumstances that urge us to
action: but similarly these ideas will realize what they
command only in the definite shapes rendered possible by
the real circumstances to be learned by experience . . . These
ultimate principles we shall seek where we sought the cor
responding principles of our knowledge: in our own mind,
in that immediate sense of certainty with which our con
science, when interrogated in reference to the simplest forms
of our possible actions, utters its irrevocable judgement of

5o8 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i

approval or disapproval. For this beginning we can allow
no other : no pretended interpretation of the plan of the
world, from which, as if it were possible for us, the obligatory
commandments of our behaviour might be deduced ; still less
that silly and offensive custom which at present plumes
itself with so great aplomb on descending into the enter
taining incidents of natural history, and — out of a tendency,
which is imagined to have been discovered in the animal
world, to ascending development — construing the summit,
which logically ought to form the behaviour of humanity.
If we could not find in our own conscience the irrevocable
criterion of our moral judgement, we should certainly not get
it from the beasts : for what observation of them might teach
us — that the series of development we suppose we find in
them goes upwards to the perfect and not downwards to the
bad — we could know, only if it were beforehand completely
clear to us, which we should regard as the better and the
worse end of this scale.'

Such is the expression given to a cardinal truth generally
neglected by those moralists who devote their study to
the ways and means by which these ideals are gradually
realized in the scientific consciousness and in actual
life. The other point to which reference has already been
made is the rehabilitation of pleasure from the attacks of
ascetic formalists. ' Somewhere the mere bringing about
of outward events must open into an internal activity of
pleasure. Pleasure is the seal set upon perfect life, and
we crave for pleasure not in mere selfishness, but because
we feel that the world without it would be an incomplete
world — an absurdity even, if the good for which genera
tions laboured were lost to them and only the blessing of
generations to come. Pleasure must be no longer identified
with an egoism which sees everything only as a means to
its petty enjoyment: but considered as 'the light in which
every objective excellence and beauty of the actual, first

i] HERMANN LOTZE 5o9

becomes truly luminous/ No doubt Lotze was aware of
the difficulties that arise for ethics and aesthetics in trying
to reconcile the subjective and apparently variable ground
work of pleasures with the objective universality commonly
predicated of the good and the beautiful. He has touched
in the following passage from the General Physiology^ on
the opposition between scientific law and the poetical truth
of morals : —

' It is the problem of an ethical philosophy to show how
the fabric of the world, though directed to the production
of goods, may not seek this end at any cost, but only while
maintaining the original sacredness of certain relationships —
or rather to show how from the true conception of the highest
good itself there immediately flow certain indispensable forms
of existence and development, which in all formations re
appear as limits to the range of configuration, and which,
without being aimed specially at a result of pleasure, possess
an immediate necessity as evidence for the principle of the
whole . . . Much is still wanting before this problem can be
solved and the full cogency of a scientific truth acquired
for those ideal interpretations of life, under the influence
of which we all unconsciously prosecute our work. Whether
we should complain of this, we know not. Even now we
have not lost the sense of those dim ideas, and the greater
definiteness of theoretically moulded form — the only addition
we can expect from science — would scarcely compensate us
for the sacrifice of the intuitive vividness of its aesthetic
impression. It is not needful that everything should become
science. Much is completely clear and open which yet shrinks
from definition/

So far all that has been done is to attempt a sketch of
Lotze^s place in the history of modern philosophy and the
general attitude of his speculations. On the whole he executes
a retreat from the advanced idealist philosophy of the absolute

1 P. 163.

5io CRITICAL ESSAYS

and to a more generally human ground. But the retreat
is not equivalent to a surrender. All that was precious in
idealism may still be kept, but kept partly as a faith and
a conviction, partly as a series of inferences gradually reached
by confronting these ideals with the data of everyday
experience, finding in the former a guide through the com
plications of the latter, getting from the latter real bits
of knowledge to piece out the vague suggestions of the
former. On the other hand, the truth of science claims
her own, and Lotze admits it with no grudging measure.
Truth of science must be made independent of truth of
poetry. Yet the truth of poetry, when lifted out of the
changeful moods in which it usually lives into the stable
shape of a philosophic doctrine, is the higher. So that
after all what Lotze has done is to carry idealism home
to those humbler latitudes where dwell the ordinary men
and women, who feel uncomfortable on the cold heights
of speculation and find the absolute ' uncanny.' And thus,
as was suggested in the beginning, Lotze may perhaps to
some be as it were a porch whence they may enter into
the Hegelian courts, not so dreary perhaps as they have
been represented.

II

NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY

IT is no easier in Nietzsche's case than in the case of any
other ' philosopher ' to sum up in a single principle or tendency
the general drift or spirit of his writings. When we ask
for such a summary,, we really ask to see him as he could
not see himself. Self-consciousness is no doubt understood
to be a foremost quality of thoughtful minds. But what
such self-consciousness brings to light is not the total
impression of the intellectual and moral self: but rather
a series of particular pictures, a set of self-manifestations
in a special circle of circumstances. It is by reflections from
other things that the mind, that most pure spirit of sense,
sees itself. What is thus revealed by those thoughts or
writings which are the self -manifestation of any thinker,
is a product of the mind and its circumstances conjoined,
and that not in one finished and rounded work, but in
a succession of partial efforts at self-expression. Each man's
life, as long as its visible utterances last, is a continued
but varying attempt to utter his full purpose or achieve
his full task. But of that purpose and of that task he
has no final and perfect intuition or vision. His essential
work, after all, is to be, without knowing it. The work
of the historian is, on the contrary, to know what he can
scarcely hope to be. And this is true in relation to the

512 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

thinker's efforts and achievements not less than in relation
to those of other men.

He too, no less (it may be, even more) than others, has
certain partial revelations of what manner of man he is
and of what kind of work he is ultimately doing. But
the completer objectivity which history requires must take
all such autobiographical dicta as mere elements in the
problem it seeks to solve — elements of priceless value, occa
sionally, but still only factors in the delineation of its object.
What a man seemed to himself to be and to do, is perhaps
a predominant element in determining what he was and did,
but it is not final or complete. History hears his evidence,
and, it may be, regards it as supremely important : but its
task requires an analysis and a synthesis on a wider scale.

These remarks are suggested by Nietzsche's own attempts
to describe or name his problems or define his task. These
problems are, we may expect, more than one, and their names
are not always the same. Nietzsche, indeed, is a man of
problems. Where the ordinary person sees only a fact to
be accepted, Nietzsche stumbles on a host of difficulties,
puzzles, questions. Everything, as it were, sets him thinking
on the What and the Why, the Whence and the Whereunto.
And at the same time every discovery and every idea forces
into prominence the question of what ultimately is to be
done — of what he is by his nature bound to effect or to
help in effecting.

Nietzsche was originally and professionally a philologist —
whose interests lay in tracing the growth of ideas in
literature, and in scrutinizing the documentary evidence
for early history. His first literary performances which
saw the light were essays on the poems of Theognis, and
on the sources of Diogenes Laertius (1867). But philology
was in his case only a remedy to check that ' mania for
universal knowledge' which he felt as a danger of develop
ment, and to stave off the full emancipation of ' disposition

n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 513

to refer the individual problem to its deepest and remotest
grounds/ And he was not long in finding out that he could
no longer stay in any such half-way house, and that scholar
ship in its ordinary limitations could not finally satisfy his
cravings for truth. ' Philology ' he finds 'lacking in great
ideas ; 3 and in the absence of a grand enthusiasm ' the
workers in it have grown like workers in a factory : the
interest of the whole is lost to their sight.' ' Our philologists
ought/ he adds, 'to give up higgling about single passages,
and take to heart the large methods of philosophy.' For
even philology has its final reason of existence in its
ministering to human life. 'The dynamic of all research
lies in those unknown far-off regions where the results of
research are seen to harmonize with those of life/ 'The
fruitfulness of philology lies in the points where its studies
touch upon humanity at large/ And so there had inevitably
to come a time when he would say : 'I have journeyed forth
from the house of scholars : too long had my soul sat hungry
at their table/ He refused -because his nature refused-
to spend life in ' settling the business of the enclitic/

The love for individual fullness o£ life which will be content
with nothing short of all reality for its province is not
however to be identified entirely with a dislike to restraint
and discipline. If he loves < freedom and the air above fresh
earth/ it is because of a certain hardness and love of solitude
which turns away from everything vulgar and shuns the
crowd. Call it pride— the < pathos of distance '—or by
worse names, you must recognize in Nietzsche a coldness
and indifference to the commonplace ideals of snugness
what is known as happiness. As a student at Bonn (1864)
he soon felt himself out of tone with the drinking and
smoking habits of the clubs : he grew indignant at the
Bier-nalerialimu* and Bier-gemiithUMeit which they foster:
and found that such company lowers the moral tone and
destroys all clearness and singleness of aim. An occasional

Ll

514 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

ascetic fit makes him try to harden himself, for example,
by shortening- his hours of sleep. If other mortals say to
him, like carbon to diamond, Why so hard, brother, he
replies, Why so soft.

There are, as he says, in a letter to his sister, written
at this time, a lot of half-and-half standpoints. But there
is notwithstanding- a clear bifurcation of paths of life, such
as was shown to Herakles : the path to truth and the
path to happiness. ' If you would aim at peace of soul
and happiness, then believe : if you will be a disciple of
truth, then inquire/ And the truth is to be accepted even if it
prove ugly and deterrent. Nay, Nietzsche flaunts, as it were,
a sort of preference for the sterner and more repellent truth,
a certain readiness to esteem more highly the belief that costs
most in the loss of ease and vulgar comforts. His critical
intelligence in philosophy has ' an earnestness which is never
content except in presence of the naked truth, and a fearless
ness to meet hard and wicked conclusions, perhaps an affection
towards them.' v|A fatal facility to believe in uncomfortable
truths and to distrust everything that is associated with ease
and indolence ! It seems at times as if life were really to
him only a means of knowledge, and knowledge itself the
end : and f with this principle in the heart/ he says, ' we
can live not only bravely, but even cheerfully,' — and, as
the doubt emerges : ' It may be that in following out this
passion of knowledge, humanity will perish *,' — still ' even
this thought has no power over us/ These are bold wTords :
perhaps also not a little paradoxical.

Two influences had contributed to modify the effect of
a purely philological training, one of them was a considerable
susceptibility to the aesthetic and artistic side of life, especially
a love of music, and some actual achievement both in writing
songs and setting them to music. So far as mastery in that
direction is concerned, however, he soon came to the conclusion

1 v. 295.

n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 515

that he had no supreme distinction to hope for. But it
was otherwise as regards the general tone and mental
attitude which music and perhaps art in general can give.
' Art/ he says in one place l, ' has taught the world to
look with interest and pleasure on life in every shape/
' Art is the supreme task/ he puts it elsewhere, ' and the
properly metaphysical activity of this life/ But when he
says art, we must remember that the art properly so called,
as shown in what are technically called ' works of art/ is
only an appendix of that larger sense to which he extends the
term. Without its help — and fits great, over- great task is
to embellish life ' by concealing or interpreting away every
thing that is ugly — pessimism would reign unchecked 2. Its
network is spread over all existence : called sometimes religion,
sometimes art, sometimes science. The homines reliffiosi may
in fact be reckoned among the artists, and considered as
their highest order. All in their several degrees, art,
religion, and science, are illusions spread over things —
devices by which human creatures may keep themselves in
life : for ' all life/ it is declared 3, ' rests on semblance, art,
illusion, optic, necessity of perspective and of errors.'

In this there is partly an echo of Schopenhauer, with
whose ideas he first made acquaintance in his first term
at Leipsic (1865). ' I am far from believing/ he writes later,
< that I have correctly understood Schopenhauer : it is only
myself that I have learnt to understand a little better through
Schopenhauer's means, that is why I owe him most gratitude/
Not in short the specific doctrines or arguments which
Schopenhauer uses, but the value of him and his philosophy
for life, is the cardinal point on which Nietzsche's interest
turns. Two things there were in Schopenhauer which"
attracted him, as they did others. The first was the feeling
that here at least philosophy was no matter of names and
disputation only, but a serious attempt to get at the meaning

1 ii. 206. 2 i- '09- ' *• 9'

516 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

and drift of reality, and to examine into the worth of life.
It seemed as if here the 'one thing needful ' were the aim,
to the exclusion of all side issues and all logomachy. The
second was the show of independence of all established
and endowed dog-ma and institution which Schopenhauer
exhibited. Philosophy was not only an attempted codification
of what was thought and believed, but a criticism of ordinarily
accepted values.

And a third — and that, the central idea of Schopenhauer —
wras the reduction of intelligence to a secondary and derivate
rank, combined within the enthronement of Will as the
supreme reality. It is perhaps impossible to give to Will
in Schopenhauer's pages a clearly consistent meaning : but
so much at least is negatively certain, that he meant, in
some way, to assert the phenomenal, superficial, and partial
character of the reason or thought which philosophers
generally put in the front rank or at the very foundation
of reality. Intelligence is an exception and a par ergon,
not the essential being of things. It is at the best a means
to an end, the evidence of an imperfection in the organism,
a machinery to supply the want of deeper and essential unity.
A Spinoza-like treatment of intellect, as only a special phase
in a wider animateness or cogitatio which does not want or
deserve the epithet f conscious,' is characteristic of this mood
of thought. Human thought — and all animal consciousness
which is more or less analogous to it — is a mark of provin
ciality. The fully free citizen of the universe regards it as
a mark of imperfection, a pis-all er.

' The mind counts for us/ says Nietzsche, c only as a symptom
of a relative imperfection of the organism, as a stage of
experimenting, feeling about, and missing its aim V The
great business of life is for us, as for nature, in general
transacted in silence : it is done, and needs not the intermediary
of speech and thinking. ' Consciousness,' he further notes,

1 viii. 230.

ii] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 517

'does not properly belong to the individual existence of man
but only to that part in him which is of the nature of com
munity and gregariousness/ It is a social product— and if
it be assumed, as Nietzsche does assume that sociality is but
an accident of man, due to a weakness which will not let
him stand alone— then it too is a result of his infirmities,
a part of the great sin of < herding' and seeking shelter, with
its inevitable contaminations, behind others in a mass. < The
nature of the animal consciousness, therefore, involves that
the world of which we and these gregarious animals are
conscious is only a superficial world, a world of signs, a
generalized world1.' It is hardly going farther when we
are told that < everything good is instinct': that the
' so-called motive is only a surface-phenomenon of con
sciousness/ The doom of intellectualism and rationalism
could not be pronounced more clearly.

Partly, at least, this is in accord with a wider movement
in which physical science has had its part. There is a con
viction abroad that we have been imposed upon by names.
We have confused the expression and the interpretation, which
varies from time to time, with the reality which underlies it
and is the same always. Reason, intelligence, logic, is but
a receiver and transmitter of a prime reality which is given.
We are passive recipients : the only word that properly
describes our — individual and conscious — attitude to beino*

O

is ' pregnancy 2 ' : we turn over again and again a material
which we did not create. The home of our true being
and of our best wisdom is our body — our spirit and mind
is but an interloper, a bleared or at best a one-eyed reduction
of that which is all eye and all ear, the universal life.
A great deal of our morality and religion is but a mis
interpretation of physical or physiological reality. We take
a nervous or stomachic uneasiness and describe it in terms
of morals and religion, as, e. g., guilt or sin. Call it

1 v. 203. 2 v. 362.

518 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

realism,, or materialism, this revolt of naturalism is a protest
against some sort of spiritualism which seemed inclined
to deny or ignore the matter-of-fact of life, and to sub
stitute the comment and the translation for the original
text.

Man, however, as we have seen, lives by these illusions —
or, in milder phrase — by these interpretations. The lowest,
and apparently the least satisfactory of them is science. The
type of the ' scientific ' or purely theoretic man according
to Nietzsche is Socrates. For Socrates, myth and mystery
are standpoints to be left behind : the spirit of science or
rationalism will brook nothing short of absolute clearness
and intelligibility. Logic — in the vulgar sense — as cut-
and-dry reasoning, must rule life and reality : dialectic
must prescribe laws to the world. But Socrates— so
Nietzsche treats, as a parable, the story of the Phaedo—
begins to doubt at the close of life whether he has adequately
fulfilled the command to make music. Hitherto he had
supposed he was carrying out the oracle when he sought,
in and out of season, for the reasons and the definitions of
things, for was not philosophy 'the greatest music'? But
in the house of prison Socrates begins to see — so Nietzsche
methodizes the tale — that perhaps science with its clear-cut
distinctions is not all-in-all. Perhaps there is a deeper and
truer than science— something nearer the fountain-head of
life. Is it art? and above all, music, that art which,
according to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, reveals the whole
force of being, the undivided will of reality? Behind
science, and even beyond the arts of painting or sculpture,
there is the spirit of music, and its child, the tragic drama.
That drama— such is the theme of his earliest work— is
the revelation, so far as the forms of Apollo the god of
light allow, in words and act, of the Dionysiac mystery of
being:— the scene which bodies itself out in the eye of the
chorus (through whom the poet speaks) to express the

ii] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 519

otherwise unutterable burthen of passion and emotion which
surges indefinitely in the musical tones.

What science is unequal to perform, art and religion may
in some measure hope to accomplish. The enthusiasm for
Richard Wagner which Nietzsche displayed in his first
writings, is connected with these hopes. In Wagner he
imagined he had found one who was more of the true
artist, and less of the mere rationalist, than other musicians :
the promise, if not the performance, of an f art which knows
no longer the opposition of educated and uneducated, and
speaks no more the language of a caste/ In Wagner he
hears ' the language of an art which speaks not to nations,
but to man : which is no longer narrowly rational, but human
—though it waits for a humanity of the future to give its
appropriate audience. ' Wagner,' says Nietzsche, fis a true
poet : he thinks in myths, as the people always have
thought.' And what is a myth? It is the complete
concrete individuality or fact, of which a theory is only
an abstract and mutilated copy. 'The myth is not based
on a thought, as the children of an artificial education
suppose: but is itself a kind of thinking, which imparts
a conception of the world : but imparts it in a sequence
of events, acts, and sufferings.' 'A myth is a single exem
plar of a universal truth which has infinite significance/
In Wagner, in short, Nietzsche fancied he saw the fulfilment
of what Schelling demanded1, a new mythology in which
the ideal (i. e. the truly real) world would no longer be, as
it is with the philosopher, subject to limitations and tainted
by the weakness of subjectivity. It is the merit of Wagner
to have seen, he thinks, that art is no accident on the shores
of life, but in intimate connexion with all political, social,
and moral activity.

Religion again is a kind of art — perhaps the supreme
form of art. It, too, is a bulwark against pessimism : an

1 iii. 628.

520 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

instrument which the will to live uses in its struggle against
the hostile forces of the universe — the forces deadly to man.
As such it has its value, its justification. To ask if faith
is true,, is to ask amiss : and to seek to prove the reality
and truth of religious belief by pointing to the fervours and
vigours of enthusiasm which it inspires, is to be illogical
and absurd1. The sole question in the first instance is,
does it sustain life? does it give strength in the struggle
for existence? If it does that, it has justified itself as
religion, and it were a preposterous demand to ask it to
conform to the canons of science - \ for * between religion
and genuine science there subsists neither relationship, nor
friendship, nor even hostility : they live on different stars/
Yet, apparently, they cannot be quite so unconnected: for
in man they inhere, by man they live : just as, conversely,
it is true that according as man lives in one or other of
these stars, he rises to different heights of his potentiality
of being, and religion and art must give place to a fuller
manifestation. ' We must have loved religion and art, as
one loves mother and nurse : otherwise one cannot grow
wise. But we must look beyond them and outgrow them.
If we stay within their confines, we understand them not V
They are only steps on the upward ladder of humanity, not
its goal.

The present age looks with pride upon itself as the historical
age par excellence. It is so, however, chiefly because it is
without strength or originality of its own4. The historic
sense is in its origin a sequel of that mixture of orders and
races, of creeds and ideals, into which the democratic progress
of modern Europe has turned the modern man. Itself
possessed of no intrinsic and characteristic quality, modern
Europe is open to receive the stamp of all the ages, and finds
in itself a chord which is sensitive to all varieties of opinion.

1 viii. 286. 2 ii. n9. s jj 2o6

4 Jens. § 224.

n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 521

It is liberal and not exclusive in its appreciations. It has
plenty of taste for all fashions and phases, and probably
cannot be expected to cling- to anything so narrow as good
taste. It has no home, no narrow altar of its own, but in
cosmopolitan laxity seeks anywhere and everywhere for
excellence, for an object of worship.

Man himself may be said to be par excellence the historical
animal. He is not solely the present and the moment. ' He
has to hold himself up against the great and ever greater
burden of the past : it weighs him down, or turns him aside,
it impedes his walk as an invisible and gloomy load which
he may deny, but only in appearance/ The irrevocable and
indestructible past, the It ica.^ is the human doom. ' Even
the child learns to understand the meaning of that It was,
the watchword with which battle, suffering, and vexation
draw close to man, to remind him what his existence at
bottom is— a never- to-be-completed imperfect/ We walk
through life with the consciousness that we are epigoni \ —
' Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist : ' that things have
been said and done which have left us no longer our own
masters, and bind us to the authority of the past. ' There
is much talk of free personality, and in louder tones than
were ever before heard : ' — but it is the outcry of want and
longing. ' Nowhere do we see a personality, still less a free
personality — there is nothing but beings concealed under the
identical mantle of a generalized humanity/

In such a condition of affairs the study of history is
a fresh danger. We take to it, as the invalid takes to
what is most consonant with his own debility. It does
not strengthen, but paralyzes or lulls to indolent acquiescence.
The useful reading of history belongs only to those who have
thrown out their roots and branches widely and strongly
in the present. ' It is only from the highest force of the
present that you should interpret the past: it is only in
the strongest exertion of your noblest qualities that you

522 CRITICAL ESSAYS [11

will surmise what in the past is great, and worth knowing
and admiring/ The greatest men in all ages have been
those who have dared to ignore the past: the great epochs
of history have been those which acted as if the world
was new for them. To act, to achieve something, it is
necessary to be able to forget the past, and to shut your
self up within a limited horizon. It is necessary to wrap
yourself in the unhistorical — to throw around you its
enveloping atmosphere in which alone is life generated.
Annihilate that atmosphere, which gives at least a temporary
unity and finality to life, and life itself must vanish. ' For
he who cannot stablish himself on the threshold of the
present in forgetfulness of all that is past, will never know
what happiness is : and worse still, he will never do anything
which makes others happy/

Hence the maxim : Forget once and for all the superstition
that you are of the epigoni — one of the later generations.
Draw around you the fence of a great and comprehensive
hope, of effort embraced in hope. Form within you an
image to which the future shall correspond — and work
immersed in present actuality. There are, of course, other
difficulties, which threaten to break up this isolative effort.
Against them you must call in what Nietzsche calls the
' supra-historical ' powers. These are Art and Religion.
In them the existence has acquired the character of some
thing eternally and uniformly significant : they carry you
beyond and above the fluctuations of time and change.
These are the antidotes against the disease of history.

( The thing which has most profoundly engaged me/ says
Nietzsche, fis the problem of decadence.3 It is the pheno
menon of the present, as Nietzsche sees it. The present is
an age of deterioration, of degeneration, of descending life.
( The symptoms of decadence,' he declares, ' are an anarchy of
the atoms and a disgregation of wills.' The sense of social
solidarity and of personal unity have been lost. The con-

ii] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 523
fidence of instinctive life, the strength of undivided will
have gwen way to a distrust of self, a leaning upon
suggestions and authorities, and of authorities largely incom
patible or contradictory. 'We all have values, formulae
words, morals, of opposite descent in our body/ We are
ruins, in short, crumbling to pieces, but held together by
extraneous supports and foreign ligatures. Like invalids
or neurasthenics, we can only continue to exist on an'
artificial regimen : our worn-out systems are attracted by
what is injurious to them, and have no longer the vigour
or resolution which finds nutriment in things hard and
dangerous. We can no longer trust our instincts : we can
no longer be generous to our passions. And yet < to be
forced to fight against the instincts is the very formula
of decadence > ; and 'to attack the passions at the root
is to assail the roots of life/

What Nietzsche thus describes as decadence, is not unlike
the state of soul and society which Plato was pleased to call
democratic. It seemed to him the proper name for a state
of affairs which has lost centrality of aim and leading in
social and individual life. There have been many who
used the term (democracy) as an ideal of a different kind,
just as there have been a few who made an ideal of
anarchy. To these idealists anarchy meant a condition in

which all external and obvious restraint has been removed

a sort of self-abolition and idealization of governmental in
terference, when outward and visible thought is unnecessary
because each unit carries out under his individual stimuli
all that external means of repression could conceivably
secure. So, in the ideal sense, democracy, in contrast
to all terms which recognize the limitation of the highest
manifestations of political life to a special and numbered
order, denotes a state of associated action, in which there
is no amorphous mass, set in motion by forces alien to it,
but the whole body freely and completely organized, is

524 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

the master of its own movements. Bat such democracy
is not what Plato meant, and such anarchy is not that
condemned by Nietzsche. The state of anarchy is one
in which the principle of order and unity is reduced to
a minimum : and democracy,, in Plato's sense, is a sweltering
muddle of constitutional forms, in which none has emerged
to rule and domination, to a domination, that is. which is based
ideally not on force, but on harmony of aim and purpose.

But Nietzsche himself has said elsewhere that ' corruption is
only a term of abuse for the autumn time of a nation/ This,
too, is only a metaphor : but it may serve to indicate some
doubts as to Nietzsche's thorough-going- disjunction of periods
of ascending and descending life. It is in that respect to be
compared with another corresponding distinction between
organic and critical periods in history : ages which build
up larger unities, and ages which analyze the given into
its elements. Loosely taken, perhaps, such distinctions, like
the analogous contrasts between the heart and the head,
do no great harm. At certain epochs life seems to proceed
spontaneously, unconsciously, constructively, as if moved
altogether by an inward spring : at other epochs doubts and
uncertainties call for reflection, examination, discussion :
the forward step seems suspended: there is little apparent
action, and much thinking and talking. But it will surely
be found, when one looks below the surface, that the so-called
organic period owes the secret of the advance to hints and
discoveries made in the tentative and abortive efforts of
hesitation; and that just as there is not — except when
seen from an outlook too distant to permit of close scrutiny
— an absence of criticism from an organizing period, so
the apparently fruitless movements of criticism really repre
sent those starting-points, which are more than the half
of the subsequent progress.

Terms like decadence and deterioration or degeneration
savour of a prejudice which is scarcely scientific. They

ill NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 525

are, as Bentham has phrased it, dyslogistic, and have a
tone of quasi-disapproval about them. They imply a tacit
assumption of the merit of unehangeableness and stability
of kind : an assumption which perhaps might be tenable of
kinds existing in total independence of their surroundings.
They imply, perhaps, in addition, a belief in the fallacy of the
golden age — of that idealization which raises the past into
a contrast against the mixed reality of the present. To
use them is to show a forgetfulness of the various factors
in the situation. It is to assume that instincts have been
given as ready-made states, instead of being what they
apparently always are, a product of a long series of efforts,
gradually succeeding in reaching some unification which,
for the time at least, has a certain sufficiency. In a
changing world it is unwise to be too trustful of mere
instincts. As we look upon the present in its disruptions
and chaotic effort, we are apt to forget how rare and how
short-lived were those moments of balanced and harmonious
activity when the race and people was one and single-minded.
We forget, too, how no unification thus attained is perfect :
that, such as it is, it has only been achieved by what may
be called an arbitrary simplification of the problem : and
that at the very moment when success is assured, it becomes
apparent that a heavy price has been paid in exclusiveness
and partiality. Nietzsche knows— none better — that all
Rec//fe or rights are in their origin Vorrechie or privileges
and distinctions — that liberties always imply a corresponding
check upon the action of others. Ascend the stream of
history as far as you can, you do not thereby emerge
from the range of mixed races. All such 'pure races' as
are alleged to exist are apparently only artificial and
temporary restrictions, due to special conditions, but power
less to check the general movement of differentiation and
integration. Far from being the aboriginal state of society,
purity of race is rather a device of dominant classes to thwart

526 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

the tendency of evolution in the interests of a special aggre
gation of social elements. And when it is claimed that the order
of progress shall rest at some stage in a fixed institution, it is
a sign that there are movements which would lead beyond,
and which it is deemed desirable to check. But unity is not
a datum : it is a goal, or rather a law guiding development.

One should not accordingly lay too much stress on the
alleged phenomenon of decadence, as if it stood alone, and
were not a part of a complete process. It is, on the
contrary, only an aspect of the total phenomenon of evolution.
The breaking up of old forms — the disruption of institutions
—is only a step in a complete movement, and changes its
look according to the environment in which we see it. It
is also a necessary step without which progress is impossible.
In the tentative efforts which are the concomitants and causes
of advance, all kinds of impossible combinations are made,
and these must perish. 13 ut it is only by such sacrifices
that progress is attained. The decadent is an experimenter
who fails. And he may fail in various ways, either by
precipitancy or by sluggishness: he may fall behind the
line of march, or he may rush on to overwhelming dangers.
The decadent must have ideas, but they are not adequately
co-ordinated with the facts around him. He is unwisely
clinging to old rules and beliefs, or he is rashly running
on unexplored territory with half-formed plans.

It is not altogether wrong to say that we are all decadents.
But in the same way it may be maintained that all walking
is a continual falling. It is so : but it is also a continued
rectification of the process or falling. To act is always
a little tainted by folly and rashness. It cannot wait till
everything is certain : if it were to do so, it would hardly
be action. The straight course is only the resultant of
innumerable divergences on this side and that. The ultra-
conservative who clings blindly to a passing and falsified
ideal carries movement to one extreme: the ultra-radical

n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 527

who wishes to unsettle everything drives it in another. Both
in relation to the middle course are decadents and de
generates. But both are necessary adjuncts to the car of
, progress. Both are experiments which prove an impasse :
safety does not lie in that direction. But in the darkness
and blindness through which all discovery and advance is
made, no decadent can be considered superfluous. The
obstinate survival of old beliefs helps to strengthen and
clarify the new rivals to their place, and prevents the
steadying influence of the past from passing away without
leaving a trace behind. The extravagances of new com
binations disclose the variety of circumstance with which
the problem is beset, and the conditions which have to be
satisfied.

The problem of decadence, therefore, seems to lie in a failure
to recognize its place in the law of existence which we call
development. Man — and it is with him that we are con
cerned—is in no wise finished. The other creatures represent
so many formed types, each adapted to its peculiar circum
stances and its province of nature. But man is yet to be
made : he is still in the making. As yet he is only
a beginner : his true day has not yet come : and before it
dawns there must be passage from day to day, between
which intervenes the "fall of night. ' Man/ says Nietzsche,
— ' not only the reason of centuries, but also their frenzy breaks
out in him.' We are a bundle of contradictions, just because
we are a growing and self-forming creature. Nay, every
great step in advance must be bought at terrible cost.
' Almost everywhere it is madness which paves the way
for the new thought that breaks through the barrier of
revered usage and superstition/ The vast detachment which
unlooses the tie of immemorial habit is only possible with
a general unsettling which gives its victim a repute of being
beside himself.

' To every progress on a large scale a partial weakening

528 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n

must be antecedent ' : the strongest natures keep the type
permanent : the weaker help towards its further development.
Thus in all evolutionary progress, while there must be, on
the one hand, an 'augmentation of the stable force by faith
and sense of solidarity/ there must be, on the other, in the
' occurrence of degenerating natures ] the possibility of
attaining to higher goals/ Such is the law of history —
through night to light.

The man of the future — the man that is yet to be —
a humanity which shall be to the present as sunlight and
moonlight, and as wine unto water, is the goal of development.
To bring him forth is — shall we say — the aim of the process
of the world — at any rate the aim of all genuine reform.
But as things have hitherto gone, the process is singularly
unequal and inadequate. Nowhere is there such a failure
as man. The higher and the less definite the goal, the
greater the risk of complications and collisions in the effort
to reach it. History is strewn with wrecks — with possibilities
unrealized, experiments that seemed to shut up the way of
advance. It seems at times — as Nietzsche himself often
appears to think— as if the only fairly successful man were
the primitive ' blond beast/ the beast of prey, without
a conscience and a faith, save the unhesitating faith in
his instincts. But such a primeval man is probably not
less of an illusion than many other ideals inhabiting the
golden age. Between him and the primeval man of anthro
pology there is indeed an abyss, a Fall — from the Eden
garden of dreams into the earth of gross reality. It is
not wrong perhaps to say that to bridge over that interval
between the perfect man and the perfect animal — from which
he sprung, no means were great enough. Kather at the
beginning we should place him whom Nietzsche and others
call the decadent. He has fallen — but it is a fall upstairs.
The abnormal outburst of reason is simultaneous with

n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 529

a disorganization of instincts, or rather — as the term dis
organization is question-begging — the elasticity and liberty
in his instincts was the curse without which development
would have been impossible. And at every step in his
future progress the same laxity and differentiation had to
be repeated. The attainment of truth is only possible in
proportion as you increase the liability to the influence of
error.

The common method of training proceeds upon another
view. It forgets that ' without the errors which are at
work in every pleasure and pain of the soul, a humanity
would never have arisen V ' The individual is treated by his
educators as if, though he was something new, he ought
to be a repetition2/ Whereas, it remains true that 'the
terrible energies — what is called the Wicked — are the
Cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity3. History
speaks almost only of those bad men who have subsequently
been visited with approval4. The object of common educa
tion is therefore to dam up individuality and originality
under the bounds of the traditional rule.

There is indeed a degeneration (Entartung) which Nietzsche
cannot abide : which to him is bad and worst. It is the
degeneration which may always be surmised when the gift-
making principle is lacking in the egoistic soul which cries
' Everything for me/ But that is not degeneration which
throws itself away in order to gain itself in others ; which
goes through history, a body in growth and combat, and
a spirit which is the herald of its victories r°, their comrade
and their echo 6.

1 iii. 199. 2 ii. 217. " ii. 231.

4 v. 29. 5 vi. in.

6 This was intended to be the first chapter of a detailed criticism of
Nietzsche, which was not completed. Partially to supply what is want
ing, I have added the following review from the International Journal of
Ethics, which was the latest thing written by Professor Wallace.

M m

Ill

THUS SPAKE ZAKATHUSTRA l

THESE things are an allegory: and the man who ( spake'
them is no kinsman of the Persian Zoroaster. Friedrich
Nietzsche, the new wearer of that prophet's mantle, picked it
up as he walked one day in January, 1883, along the wooded
hills around Rapallo and looked on the fairest scenery of the
eastern Kiviera. He was then in his thirty-ninth year, and
had for about seven years been a wanderer in search of health
on the uplands of the Engadin and on the shores of the
Mediterranean. In 1872 he had begun a career of meteoric
brilliancy as a writer and a thinker on man, his aims, ideals,
and illusions, and drew upon himself the attention, if not
always the approval, of those who, throughout the world, fight
under the banners of ' advanced thought/ This career came
to an abrupt end in 1889 by a mental and bodily collapse,
which has left the daring spirit a complete and apparently
hopeless wreck.

The book, called Thus Spake Zarathnstra, consists of a series
of chapters, composed in a figurative and fantastic prose, which
caricatures rather than imitates the style of an Oriental sacred
book, and is laden with a varied store of epigrammatic re
flections on life and criticisms of morals and religion. It is
divided into four parts. The first three, written during the
years 1883-84, were published in 1886. The fourth part,

1 Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book for All and Non&, By Friedrich Nietzsche.
Translated by A. Tille. London : Henry & Co., 1896, pp. xxiii, 488.

THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 531

a sort of interlude — or satiric drama following on the trilogy
of passion — was printed for circulation among Nietzsche's
friends in 1885 (having been written that same year at
Men tone), but did not become public till 1892. To under
stand properly the utterances of Zarathustra-Nietzsche some
knowledge of the life and letters of the author during these
years would be almost indispensable, and this biographical
material would have to be supplemented by a history of the
movements in the world of thought and letters for the last
twenty-five years. Some light as regards the personal
element in the work may be derived from Lou Andreas-
Salome's Fr. Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Wien, 1894), but
for complete and authentic information more may be expected
from the second volume, yet unpublished, of Nietzsche's life
by his sister.

When the scene opens, Zarathustra is supposed to have
spent from his thirtieth to his fortieth year in the quest of
truth, making his home in a mountain cavern, with an eagle
and a serpent as his familiars. He has at length resolved to
go down from his hermitage and offer men the gifts won in
his aerial meditations. These gifts are summed up in a new
gospel, the gospel of a new humanity, which, instead of sacri
ficing the individual to the mass, and the earthly Here to
a heavenly Hereafter, shall be realized on earth in a more
than human race, which it is the present duty to prepare and
make possible, a race for which society shall not be an obstacle,
but, as it were, a fostering garden where they may grow in
grace and strength, and for which deity shall be the inspiring
faith in perfectibility, not a fixed power impending as a menace
and a check upon the path of progress. The multitude, how
ever, shows no taste for such revelations of spiritual truth, and
prefers the marvels of charlatans. Zarathustra, accordingly,
who does not wish ' implicit believers/ but fellow-workers
who will ' write new values on new tables ' — i. e. will destroy
the old misconception of good and bad and create other ideals

M m 2

53G CRITICAL ESSAYS [in

of perfection — turns away from the masses and resolves to sing
his song e to single and to dual recluses.' These chants form
some eighty chapters, more or less concordant in theme, but
far from continuous or systematic : the outpouring of varying
moods of gloom and gladness, hope and disgust ; often wild
and fiery in tone, with many traces of the struggle with self
and with old associations, but often also gracious with quaint
charms, and touches of tenderness.

European civilization, as Nietzsche sees it, is the victim of
ideals which mislead it in two directions. On one side it is
dominated by a low-toned Utilitarianism, whose watch-words
are mass-happiness, comfort, conservation of general and in
dividual welfare. To these ends learning and morality, en
lightenment and virtue, are made alike subservient. To-day
is the day of the masses and the vulgar. The 'Philister'
is supreme, and gives the keynote both to the science of the
scholar and to the ethics of the just and good. On another
side, civilization is attracted — and distracted — by ascetic and
pessimistic ideals, which, according to Nietzsche, have found
their typical expression in Christianity. These disparage
natural impulses ; instead of manly action they preach self-
sacrifice, compassion, and, in general, an altruism which leaves
no room for healthy self-regard. As against the greatest-
happiness idea, Nietzsche insists on the view that self-conser
vation must not be identified with stagnation, and that the
welfare of humanity has yet to be discovered and rightly
conceived. Man, far from having surmised or learned his
true meaning and drift, is still in the making : he is, as he
stands, only ' the rope between the animal and the super
human/ 'What is great in man is that he is a bridge and
. not a goal/ His being has yet to be made by effort, suffering,
and sacrifice. So far Nietzsche may seem to be an ally of
ascetic morality. But he sharply disclaims the connexion.
Asceticism has in his eyes treated the body as something
extraneous, which hampers, and only hampers, the spiritual

in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 533"

life ; its overstrained spirituality has dehumanized man, and
set up a conception of truth and goodness which is hostile to
the requirements of human nature. ' Everywhere/ he cries,
' sounds the voice of the preachers of death/

'Dead are all gods : it is now our will that the superhuman
live/ are the words which conclude the first part ; and when
Zarathustra, after months and years of renewed retirement,
again, in Part II, utters his message, it begins with the same
refrain : ' The old God is dead/ or, for those who have not
yet gone so far, Deus est delendus. ' There was a time/ as
he puts it, ' when, as men looked out on far-away seas, they
said God/ but the surmise thus uttered was, according to
Nietzsche, one which paralyzed man's effort, set up an insur
mountable barrier to his progress, and subjected his life to an
influence of incalculable instability. Such a deity is — or rather
is part of — the inscrutable power whom primitive man (if
Epicurus and Nietzsche tell us true) saw haunting human life
from lonely places and holds of darkness. And, perhaps, if
man is to rise above his lower self, such a God must disappear.
We may even say that, if this be atheism, such an atheism
has many adherents among the followers of the true God.
The godhead which is to be, Nietzsche sees as the ideal end,
consummating a process whereby the man of to-day, if he
fulfils his true mediating position, will build up in many
children of glory the kingdom of the superhuman — the as yet
undiscovered, but still-to-be-pursued, ' land of his children and
his children's children in remotest seas/ But if the gods of
primitive tradition are to go and leave man free space to
create many exemplars of the godhead which is to be, other
fetters on human development must go too. Foremost among
these drags is, in Nietzsche's eyes, the dogma of the eternity
and immutability of moral rules and of particular moral ideals.
All detached ethical precepts, all single and limited ethical
ideas, all detailed moral standards, have in them elements
arbitrary, provincial, temporary. The law which shall not

534 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in

pass away is not written with earthly pens or graven on
earthly tables. Nichts ist wahr : Alles isf, erlauU. There is
nothing- in even the most sacred observances and institutions
of human life which has not,, when tested by history, a ten
tative and provisional character. Even the best of manners
and customs, if allowed to remain for ever, i. e. beyond its
implied conditions, would corrupt a world, the distinctive
mark of which is to be ever on the march. Hear Nietzsche :

' Oh ! my brothers ! where lies the greatest danger for all
men's future ? Is it not from the good and just ?

' Eor they are those who say and feel in their heart, We
know already what is good and just ; we have it, too. Woe
to those who still seek for it ! ...

' Oh ! my brothers ! there was once one who saw into the
heart of the good and just ; and he said, They are Pharisees.
But men understood him not.

' The good and just themselves might not understand him :
their mind was fast in the stocks of their good conscience.
Unfathomably shrewd is the stupidity of the good. . . .

' But the second who discovered their land — land, heart, and
world of the good and just — he it was that asked, Whom do
they hate most ?

' It is the maker of new things they hate most : him who
breaks tables and old values, the breaker. Him they call
peace-breaker (criminal).

' The good, verily, they cannot make anything new : they
are always the beginning of the end. They crucify him who
writes new values on new tables : they sacrifice the future ;
they crucify all men's future. . . .

' Break, break in pieces the good and the just.

' Ye flee from me ? Ye are scared ! Ye tremble at this
word !

{ Oh ! my brothers ! when I bade you break in pieces the
good and the tables of the good, then first did I put man
aboard to sail his high sea.

in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 535

' Then only comes there upon him the great terror, the great
looking about, the great illness, the great qualm, the great
sea-sickness.

'False shores and false securities the good taught you: in
good men's lies had ye birth and bield. Sly and awry have
the good made everything to its very heart.

' But he who discovered the land Man, discovered also the
land Man's future. So shall ye become my seafarers, valiant,
patient.

' Walk upright betimes. Oh ! my brothers ! learn to walk
upright. The sea is in storm, and many will fain hold them
selves upright on you.

' The sea is in storm. Everything is in the sea. Up ! up !
ye old seamen's hearts. Fatherland, say ye ? Our helm is set
thitherwards where is our children's land. Thither, stormier
than the sea, storms our great longing/ . . .

Should any one, stimulated by the call of this patriotism of
the future to serve and to create a nobler posterity, be unwilling,
like a prudent person, to throw away the old tables until he
receives assurance of what is to take their place — should he
ask, What is the way ? and what are the signs which betoken
the approach to truer goals ? he will not find, I fear, much
comfort from the new prophet. He does not reveal a Way ;
he seeks fellow-travellers who are fellow-seekers. He knows
that he is only a forerunner ; and not very infallible even at
that. If he be ' a bridge unto the future/ he is also — and that
is his cross — ' a cripple at the bridge.' He knows that the
work of self-teaching and self -discipline unto self-growth is
a task not to be accomplished at a single stroke ; knows, too,
that every good quality, every nobility, has its defect and its
temptation. ' Whoso wisheth to learn to fly one day must
first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance.'
There is no one infallible road either, because there is no
single goal : ' noble ones of many kinds are needful, if there
is to be nobility.' ' That is my way ' is his answer to those

536 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in

who question him as to the way. ' The way — there is none
such.' ' By many ways and modes I have come unto my
truth : ... a trying- and questioning of ways was all my going/
Clearly, there are many dangers attending such experimenta
tion in life. It cannot be tried ' on a worthless thing ' ; the
cost of the experiment must be borne by the living experi
menter. This has to be borne by every one who, like
Nietzsche, has felt : ' I am of to-day and the past ; but
something is within me that is of to-morrow and the day
after/ Whoso goes on this path is not without his work. If
he has broken the tablets of duties, he has still upon him the
unwritten law of duty to the Man that is to be. Past and
present forms of family may be in his view but provisional
inductions ; but the ideal of marriage still remains ' the will
in pairs to create the one which is more than those who created
it. Mutual reverence name I marriage — reverence before
those who will such a will/

It was said by Francis Bacon of his Atlantidean sage that
his look was of one who pitied men. And so may it be said
of Nietzsche. Yet is his a mixed feeling : there is in it pity
that men ' bear so many strange things on their shoulders/
and make their ' life so hard to bear'; there is contempt that
they sit so complacently resigned under their burden, and
regret the irrevocable, and leave their existence a meaningless
fragment ; but there is also active energy urging to transform
the future by a creative will. But of vulgar compassion
Nietzsche is impatient. ' What in the world/ he asks, ( has
done more harm than the follies of the compassionate?'
Setting more importance on relief of momentary pain and of
temporary ailments than on the sure but protracted process
of rebuilding health and strength, weakly and sentimental
pity leads astray, and neglects the one thing needful, the
development of the higher man. ( Compassion makes dull and
heavy air for all free souls/ Its function in life is entirely
secondary ; and to allow it to claim more is high treason

m] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 537

against the majesty of future humanity. So the master-
builder, who labours for the higher world he surmises and longs
for, must often be hard, sparing neither his neighbour nor
himself in the rigour of his devotion. ' Myself I sacrifice unto
my love, and my neighbour as myself ; thus runs the speech
of all creators/ Nietzsche's protest against the idolization of
emotional pity and sympathy, which the sensitive and senti
mental have sometimes spoken of as the essential teaching of
Christianity,, and which Schopenhauer dignified with the title
of ethical principle, is not unneeded. And if we remember
the extravagances of altruism, we shall better understand his
emphatic counterblasts. ' There is a wholesome and healthy
selfishness which springs from mighty soul — from mighty
soul to which belongs the high body, the beautiful, victorious,
refreshing body, around which everything is a mirror; the
flexible, persuading body, whose image and epitome is the self-
joyous soul/ Such selfishness is not a light thing, any more
than true compassion is identical with the gush of sympathetic
emotion. ' By all means/ says Nietzsche, c love your neigh
bour as yourselves, but let me first see you such as love
yourselves/ But ' to learn how to love one's self is the finest
and cunningest of arts/

To hear Nietzsche, one might sometimes think as if all that
was needed for the seeker after higher life was to burst the
bonds around him by an effort of vigorous will. ' Willing
delivers.' But what if will itself be a prisoner ? Gods and
moral imperatives may be discarded ; but the past stands
irrevocable, menacing and marring the present, and man can,
it seems, only gnash his teeth impotently, and seek in vain
anger and vainer punishments to get relief for his vexation.
Will beats wildly against its prison-bars and kicks against the
pricks ; and how is it to unlearn the spirit of revenge ? ' Who
taught it reconciliation with time, and something higher than
all reconciliation ? ' How is it to unlearn the pessimism which
arises as it sees in all the past, in every ' It was/ a ' fragment,

538 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in

an enigma, a dismal accident ' ? Only, replies Nietzsche,
' when a creative will saith unto the " It was," Thus would
I have it be/ But for Nietzsche, at least, the ( It was ' has
a further significance and a deeper horror than to the com
monalty. Following out an idea which has again and again
in different forms risen up to awe the inquiring spirit, he sees
in all existence an eternal recurrence. The burden of the
irrevocable past grows heavier as age is added to age. ' A
demon/ so he puts it, * in an hour of utmost solitude thus
whispers : This life, as thou now livest and hast lived, thou
must live once more and countless times more ; and there will
be in it nothing new, but each pain and pleasure and each
thought and sigh and all the ineffably little and big of thy
life must return to thee, and all in the same order and sequence/
And what retort does the tempted will make ? Does it curse
the demon who so spoke, or fall crushed to the ground in
despair? or may there come a moment when it rises to the
height of the awful decision and, in full amity with life,
affirms its resolve to have this moment once more and count
less times over again. From the depth of Nietzsche's pessi
mism — from the horror in which he shrinks at the ghastly
idea of the ' ring of existence/ the ' eternal recurrence ' —
there emerges the final utterance of the world-affirming, life-
ascending will. The free spirit — the pioneer on the way to
the superhuman — is one who has so accepted the fact of life
that ' he will have it again, as it was and is, for ever and ever,
insatiably calling da caj)o} not merely to himself, but to the
whole piece and play, and not only to the play, but at bottom
to him to whom this play is just what is needed, and who
makes it needful, because he always needs himself again, and
makes himself needful. How ? And — would not — this — be —
circulus vitiosus Deus ' ? The problem of life, it seems, has
brought us round — by a ' vicious circle/ perhaps — to God.
Life, on the assumption of the demonic idea, can only be
lived — a paralyzing pessimism can only be escaped — if the

m] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA

539

individual, born, as it appears, to struggle with an alien and
irremovable sum of antecedents, as a mere incident and single
fragment in the stream of time, boldly accepts and asserts his
identity, in the root of his being, with the supreme freedom
and unchartered spirit of life in all its range and sweep. We
are now, it may be said, in the full tide of unverifiable meta-
physic ; or we have passed from morality — even Nietzsche's
morality — into religion. The final and fundamental step is
a mystic salto mortale — an act of faith — by which the
individual seems to reach what more pensive thinkers call
the ( beatific vision ' and ( intellectual love of God/

It is principally in the second and third parts that these
vaguely adumbrated ideas find a place : and they are not
touched in Nietzsche's other works except in passages such as
Aph. 341, from 'the Gay Science' (publ. 1882), and in the
' Other side of the good and bad ' (Aph. 57). They are the
evidence of the last stages of a Titanic struggle — of the struggle
which man seems inevitably compelled to make to give himself
a secure standing-ground in the battle of life. In Nietzsche's
case they seem especially full of terrible pathos. If all life, as
he holds, has been hitherto built and taught to rise by illusions ;
if man in his science, his art, and his morality has only clutched
at semblances helping him to keep and foster life j if these
creations of his mind are only something spread over existence
to cheat or stave off an ineradicable pessimism ; — it is hard to
find anything solid elsewhere. Then the circle of inference is
indeed vicious • and man only steps into the vacant place of
God, or simulates the post of conductor in the chariot of life
and nature, because otherwise he must perish. But, on the
other hand, it may be urged, only by such declaration, of what
the old thinker otherwise expressed by saying that all our
movement, life, and being was in God, can art, science, and
morality be made anything more than illusions and artificial
perspectives. The creator of art, science, and morality, if they
are to be real and solid elements in a real world, and not

540 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in

mere devices and tricks to escape ruin — a mimicry which
deceives enemies in the struggle for existence — must be a real
superhuman or a real Deity. And by an inverted path
Nietzsche would have arrived at the old Greek dogma of
man's essential divinity.

But these conclusions were not formulated by Nietzsche ;
he, at least, has not, like R. Wagner, recited a palinode ; and
we cannot say that any decided trace exists of the recoil, which
the acceptance of a theo -centric, instead of an anthropo-centric,
position for man seems to involve, had clearly presented itself
to his mind. His hour apparently had come ; his sun set
when the great noon promised a fruitful evening, and his
message hardly goes beyond that awakening of the sleepers,
that stimulus to a new step in development, which thorough
scepticism, honest and unresting, may give. The fourth part
of the book is not properly a continuation of the rest. It is
rather a grimly farcical indictment of those specimens of the
higher culture and advanced thought, who fancied themselves,
and at one time were fancied by Nietzsche himself, to be his
comrades and fellow- workers in the emancipation of the human
spirit. They are all, on closer inspection, somewhat cranky
and ill-favoured instances of the type higher-man — suitable
for doing odds and ends of rough work in the wilderness, but
hardly genial and hale and gracious enough to enter into the
land of promise. Towards the close of the book they are all
— the several types of the radical, emancipated, agnostic, and
free-thinker — gathered in Zarathustra's cave, where the utmost
they arise to is (in allusion to a mediaeval caricature of religion)
the worship of the Ass. Whereby, perhaps, is signified that
although they have surmounted the gloomier depths of
religious dogmatism, and surmised the presence of an ineffable
simplicity in things, they have reached but a somewhat jejune
and negative conception of the higher truth. But of the
interpretation of these scenes, which are- evidently not with
out the spice of direct personal reference, it would be out of

in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 541

place to say more than to hint that they occasionally sound
a jarring- note and offend against the canons of good taste.

In the main, this notice has contented itself with giving
a brief exposition of the contents of this volume, without
going into criticism or discussion. Some of Nietzsche's
opinions are of such obvious extravagance, judged by common
standards, that examination of them may be thought un
necessary. But of most, a much longer discussion would be
required than could find a place here. Perhaps enough has
been said on various points to excite a desire to hear more.
Some, indeed, may think that these are poisonous opinions
and best left in silence and neglect. But to this it may be
rejoined that the growth of such opinion is itself a symptom
that certain corners in the fields of ethics and religion have
been left to an abandonment which favours the upspringing of
strange plants, with both weeds and good grain among them.
Nietzsche is at least always honest, pure, and thorough. One
of his faults is a natural perversity, if one may so style it,
which positively refuses easy and nattering solutions of
problems, and would always seek its rest on the hardest and
barest of rocks, with inveterate suspicion of any suggestion
that happiness and truth can lie down together. Another is
a fatal facility to follow the track of epigram, and to wander
in the pleasant but devious mazes of verbal conceits. It has
been impossible in a bare abstract like this to give much of
an idea of his style. Its variety and sparkle naturally tend
to disappear in the monotony of a summary statement of his
positions.

Of the translation it is difficult to speak favourably; but it
may be admitted that to translate Nietzsche well would be
a task of no small skill.

IV

STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC l

HITHERTO, with slight exceptions, the studies in Hegelian
philosophy published in this country have been chiefly in the
line of exposition. Criticism has in the main been incidental,
and found in works dealing- with Hegel's' views on special
questions whose discussion engaged the chief attention.
Mr. McTaggart's book marks a distinct advance. It is
a thoughtful and acute attempt, conducted with marked
good taste and ability, to determine what Hegel actually
tried to effect and how far he succeeded, to clear away
misconceptions as to his method and its relation to ordinary
experience, to point out problems which Hegel suggests to
reflection but cannot be said himself either to see or to give
a solution to, to indicate some directions in which his system
seems to need supplement or correction, and to examine the
value of his philosophy in general, as well as of certain appli
cations he made of it to the several departments of sociological
history. Even for those who are unable to accept all its con
clusions it is a stimulating and enlightening book, full of
quiet reflectiveness and penetrating remark, and high-toned in
its conception of the problem of philosophy.

The seven chapters conjoined under the title of Studies in
the Hegelian Dialectic, if they do not exactly form an organic
unity, offer at least a fairly continuous discussion of certain

1 Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. By John M. E. McTaggart, M.A., Fellow
of Trinity College, Cambridge. 8vo. Cambridge, 1896. Pp. xvi, 259.
(Mind, no. 20, 2nd series, 1896.)

STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 543

difficulties and corollaries which sooner or later present them
selves to the student of Hegelianism. They fall, it may be
said, into three or four tolerably distinct groups. In the first
of these groups will go the three chapters (i-iii) entitled
' The general nature/ ' Different interpretations/ and ' The
validity/ — ' of the dialectic/ Too much should not of course
be expected under these somewhat comprehensive headings.
The three chapters are written with, on the whole, a definite
reference to views taken of HegePs work by critics of the two
generations since his death (e. g. by Trend elenburg, Herr v.
Hartmann, and Prof. A. Seth), and offer a line of arguments
narrowed (even if it be also pointed) by the occasionally
accidental and personal qualities of the objections against
which they are directed. Such objections to a large extent
are but symptomatic of the course of development in the
individual soul which makes them, and to deal with them in
a satisfactory way would require (as, obviously, one cannot
hope to traverse the endless multitude of single censures)
either to assure ourselves that they may safely be taken as
typical of the dubieties raised by Hegelianism in the average
human mind, or to seek to discover the fundamental views as
to the problem of philosophy, as to the relations or no-relations
of thought and reality, to discover (to put it roughly) the
idola of the den and the theatre, which underlie and give
growth to the incessant efflorescence of cavils. Instead of
this all but impossible method of dealing with objectors,
Mr. McTaggart takes the praiseworthy course of testing
general demurrers by a patient confrontation of them with
the evidence of the original texts, by distinguishing what is
valid in their remarks from what is exaggerated for the sake
of a thesis. Probably there are other and more penetrating
criticisms of the Hegelian principle and method which it would
have been desirable for him to tackle. Those of Trendelenburg
were written too much in the shade of that reaction which
made asceticism in speculation a positive, and perhaps the sole

544 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

intellectual, virtue, and looked back on the speculative epoch
as a time of philosophic paganism : Von Hartmann's essay
on the ' dialectical method ' is but a hasty spoil of the times
when he was scouring- the domains erewhile held by the three
kings of thought who reigned before him, and trying to carve
out for himself a new realm; and as for Prof. Seth, perhaps
one may venture the hope that he will yet employ his eminent
conciliatory talent to bridge over the gulf between the deep-
rooted instincts of ' personal ' life and the ' meditation of
death ' which seems to take their place when life is viewed
* under a certain species of eternity/ instead of intensifying
the inevitable conflict between them by an appeal ad
populum.

Chapters iv and v — which have been already published,
' nearly in their present form ' in Mind * — form a second group
of different aspect. Chapter iv, entitled ' The development of
the Method/ taking the phenomena as presented first in Hegel's
Logic, and then in the whole cycle of his philosophy,
endeavours to show that in the progress of the Hegelian
system the method undergoes a continuous alteration — like an
instrument which acquires new capabilities by being used ;
that in its beginning the element of negation and contradic
tion takes a more prominent position than it holds later, so
that a period of struggle gives place finally to an easy evolu
tion • that, in a way, the conclusion thus serves to show the
incorrectness or ' subjectivity ' of the process by which it was
reached, or, in other words, that ' the dialectic does not give
a fully adequate account of its own nature/ This, it must
be owned, sounds at first hearing a very awkward doctrine for
the ' dialectic/ even though Mr. McTaggart is careful to
circumscribe its consequences. He further points out that
Hegel might, if he had chosen, have adopted for the relations
of Nature and Mind to pure Logic a scheme of movement,
analogous to that adopted in the transitions of Being and not-
1 N. S. i, 2, 8, 10.

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 545

being, rather than that suggested by the relation of subjective
and objective in the 'idea/ To the thesis o£ this chapter,
that Hegel had not himself realized or seen what was implied
in the gradual but decisive change from the inadequacy of
the earlier categories to the increasing truth of the later,
Mr. McTaggart attaches much importance : ( it is only/ he
remarks, ' by the aid of some such theory ' (of a subjective
element in the dialectic) ' that we can regard the Hegelian
system as valid at all/

Chapter v, c The relation of the dialectic to time/ will be
to many the most difficult passage in the book. The author
is always acute and subtle in argumentation, and the discus
sion of the place of time in the system of ultimate reality is
not a less fertile field of ambiguity now than it was in the
days of Augustine. That the development in the dialectical
system, both pure and applied, is not a development in time
(i. e. the story of a growth) may be taken as settled : Hegel
distinctly negatives the suggestion of so treating it ; and
indeed the confusion between a record of events and an exposi
tion of meaning seems too gross to be deemed possible. But,
it is argued, this technical treatment of it does not really
abolish the difficulty. If philosophy is the comprehension of
what is, if it aims at ' discovering the ultimate nature of all
reality,' and does so by showing ' reality* ordinarily so-called
to be an inadequate stage or partial truth of what in its fullest
' realization ' is an ' idea/ it seems not unnatural to say with
Mr. McTaggart that the purpose of philosophy is to ' establish
the rationality of the universe/ and that all idealism (and
Hegel's system is confessedly and professedly a complete or
' absolute ' idealism) declares the world or universe to be
( fundamentally rational and righteous throughout/ Does
not the veriest tyro know that Hegel asserted that whatever
is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real ? And if
so, is not the actual fact, present anywhere, justified ; and is
not the ' must be ' and ' ought to be ' of the ' rationalist '

N n

546 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

invested with a title to existence ? Yet ' if all reality is rational
and righteous/ how are we to explain the notorious facts of
unreason and wrong everywhere protruding ? We are, it is
obvious, confronted by the ' problem of the origin of evil/
According to Mr. McTaggart the solution of the problem lies
in accepting both the opposed propositions — that the universe
is eternally rational, and that imperfection does exist — and
hoping that in some as yet unknown and unsurmiseable way
a reconciliation may be found in a higher synthesis. Perhaps
this is to throw too hard a task on the divine might of Higher
Synthesis, and it may more profitably be asked whether the
universe which is eternally rational and righteous is directly
identifiable with the universe in which imperfection prevails.
Or it may even more profitably be considered what is to be
understood by ' eternally reasonable and righteous/ and how
far these epithets are clear and unequivocal.

The two concluding chapters (vi. and vii.) treat of ' The
final result of the dialectic ' and ' The application of the
dialectic/ The ( final result ' or the terminus of the dialectic
is made by Hegel to be Philosophy, and one hardly sees how
he could do otherwise in an encyclopaedia, where philosophy
is alpha and omega. But philosophy, urges Mr. McTaggart,
must be considered to be ' merely a state of knowledge/
Deduct the ' merely/ and the equation seems no great error :
but what is the force of the ' merely ' ? It is the separation
of knowledge, first, from the thing known, from the f this '
which we know, and then we have before us the thing-in-itself
named knowledge, but to which neither gods nor men can
attach any meaning or allow any reality ; and, second, its
separation from volition and from pleasure and pain — that
pure, disinterested knowledge, which human beings at least
neither desire nor care for. Philosophy — so understood as
a state of knowledge — cannot (it is further inferred) be
regarded as the ' culminating point of reality/ or as the
* supreme activity of spirit ' ; it cannot even form a part in

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 547

that supreme activity, for it is for ever vitiated by its anti
thesis to volition, and by its dependence upon an ' immediate '
and a ' given ' which is alien to it. Philosophy is not ' capable
of acting- as a synthesis between art and religion.^ It, like
them, is ' endeavouring ' (says the author) ' to find a harmony
between the individual spirit and the rest of the universe.'
But all three alike fall short of their aim. A new synthesis
is required : ( some state of conscious spirit/ ' as direct as art, as
certain and universal as philosophy/ in its faith, vision, and
assurance that all things (ourselves included) are in harmony.
Of the essay on the application of the dialectic the drift is
briefly to show that the dialectic itself is worth much more
than its applications. ' The really valid part of Hegel's
system is his Logic, and not his applications of it.' And if
we farther ask what the value is of what is thus pronounced
valid, an answer comes that ' the value of philosophy lies more
in the domains of religion than in those of science or practice,'
and that that value consists in the ' general determination of
the nature of true reality' and in the certainty Logic gives
that ' all reality is rational and righteous.' The application -
of the method to portions of the concrete historical field in
religion, law, or art is invalidated, according to Mr. McTaggart,
by three considerations : first, that we have there no fixed
beginning or end as in the Logic, no bare rudiment or ' com
plete realization ' of the ' absolute idea ' where we can set our
foot down ; second, that all real life and history is more than
logic, that the dialectic process is continually disturbed by
external causes ; and third, that a philosopher cannot possibly
have the extensive and thorough knowledge of particulars,
which the ' rationalization of reality '—particularly if under
stood to be the 'reconciliation of it with our aspirations '-
must demand as a pre-requisite. In consequence of the
last deficiency it is suggested that a more promising field
in which to apply logic will be found by taking abstract
(moral) qualities and considering them as thesis, antithesis,

N n 2

548 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

or synthesis of other qualities (or mixed modes) of the same
abstract stamp.

It is a commonplace that every age has its own difficulties
and prejudices ; and that each individual also has his own.
The thoughts and interests of a period, a class, a single person,
are set in a particular direction, and reflect or construct the
world in a special way. An age which in the gross may be
called idealistic is replaced by a period where realistic currents
prevail. Faith fastens at different dates on widely diverse
foci, or calls them at least by widely disparate names. New
catchwords are abroad, new aims pursued, new gods worshipped.
We ask the philosopher of other days questions which imply
a standpoint he would find it difficult to assume. We want
to see him from the outside, all round, as a single object, to
be, as it may seem desirable, appropriated or rejected, according
to its adaptability or inadaptability to our needs. What to
him was at least an effort to reconstruct the world in the light
of the Absolute, his readers will for practical purposes treat as
only a petty contribution to a task (that of rationalizing the
mass of things) which each reader must de novo undertake for
himself. But so to take stock of themselves— to put them
selves in a nutshell — to adjust themselves for consumption by
the public jaws — is what the great thinkers have not done,
and could not do without self-derogation and self-destruction.
Hegel, in the introductory chapters of the Encyclopadie, made
an attempt : but it was not more successful than Wordsworth's
exposition of the theory of the relations of Nature to Art and
to Man which governed his poetry. He had not studied his
own method from without : it was not — for him— detachable
from his subject-matter, just as, conversely, the subject-
matter was not detachable from it. Such a subject-matter,
detached and made a body of dogma, would be but dry bones,
suitable for a museum : such a method, reduced to an
abstract trick of manipulation, would be but an instrument
of logomachy.

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 549

Hegel has spoken more than once of the movement of
thought in his argument as that of the matter or fact itself
(der Sache selljxt). He did not mean that the abstractly
objective did or could move : that a selfless world could exert
the life of change. The fact, itxdf of which he speaks is the
real world, which is a unity of subjective and objective : it
is a thought-permeated objectivity, and a subjectivity which
has made itself at home in external body, and is no longer
a floating will-o'-the-wisp of opinion. When HegeFs Logic
begins its dogmatic march and enters on the sicheren Gang
der Wissenschaft, the processes of nature and history — and
especially that of mental history (and Mind is always and par
excellence the Historical process — das llistorische) have been
already traversed. It is a fundamental hypothesis of his
system that philosophy as self-contained knowledge is a circle
— that it returns into itself — and that the beginning has its
full force only for him who has gone already through what
is called its end. The mind which logicizcs^is a mind which,
if it at its one end grows out of the organized concretion of
space and materiality known as homo sapiens^ attempts at_jts
ojtherjto_raisc itself up to, and seck_a_highcr firmament in, that
^spiritual i structure_of jthc Idea, \vhich__is, tho infnno-i]>1o m^l
inapprehensible God, as he may bc__said to exist (if such
being can be called existence) before the realm of nature
and the realm of history (which is freedom and humanity)
hiixLoum^ed. If this be kept in mind — and it is implied
in Mr. McTaggart's phrase that the process of Hegelian
logic is a reconstruction rather than construction — it seems
to cut away the ground from some loose talk about 'pure
thought/ about the passage from Logic to Nature, and about
the relation of philosophy to religion and art. A parallel
case may set this in a clearer light. Just as Kant is some
times estimated on the basis of an arbitrary restriction of
his teaching to the more palpable features of the Criticism
of Pure Reason, so Hegel has suffered by the subordination

550 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

of his philosophies of Nature and Mind to the Logic. Nor
is it sufficient to say that the Logic presupposes experience :
that it is based upon the general nature or ' common character
istics of all experience ' — an experience which contains within
it the ' nature of pure thought ' to be elicited or ascertained
by dialectic. ' Experience ' is but a vague, much- worn word ;
and, like its neighbour ' reality/ it( is employed perhaps a
little too much as a conjuror's cry. The specific experience
which philosophy always, according to Hegel, presupposes
is an experience which has in it the characters of morality,
art, and religion : and the still more specific experience which
Hegelianism presupposes is the concentrated ideal life in the
Geisterreich or World of Soul, Mind and Spirit, which is the
abiding fruit gained from the historic movement of art and
religion, and above all of philosophy. The bare shell of
experience is and gives nothing : we must know what it
is an experience of: for experience is not a reality, a self-
subsistent, nor on the other hand is it so much ' pure thought '
combined with so much 'data of sense' or ' matter of intuition/
Data of sense which are ' indispensable and yet negative/
which are fnot positive causes, but conditions,' shrivel up
into something very hard to talk about — at least if they
are to be talked about with profit.

Mr. McTaggart has entitled these interesting and sugges
tive chapters essays in the Hegelian dialectic. He has spoken
freely of categories. He has used as descriptive of the three
steps of the logical movement the names thesis, antithesis,
and synthesis* He may plead great example for so doing,
and may urge the convenience of distinct terms. But
something may be said on the other side. The three last
names arethe literary property oj Fichte, and oust a multitude
of very untranslateable Hegelian terms, such as setzen and
aufhelen, an nncl fur sich, which, with their various shades
and — as some may even think — ambiguities, constitute (may
one say ?) the charm and the stimulus of Hegelianism. The

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 551

others, I think, give a mechanical regularity and discrete
ness to the process which, as Mr. McTaggart well points
out, is or would be continuous and organic. Synthesis, in
particular, is misleading. No doubt in some modern uses
it denotes a finer, ideal composition — an inner and intimate
union of hearts and bodies ; but it may be doubted whether
the word can fairly bear this meaning, and it is unadvisable
so to treat it, in the face of Hegel's relegation of it to a lower
level than that of a ' speculative ' unity. ' Category/ again,
is a name Hegel occasionally introduces : but it is only
to facilitate the way of the historical student — (in a similar
way to Kant's so calling the Stammbegriffe of intellect),
and tends to mix up matters of diverse origin and purport.
An elastic term like this has its disadvantages.

The case is somewhat different with Dialectic. In HegeFs
primary use it designates a real, though frequently unnoted,
phenomenon in life and knowledge, whereby the thing or
concept, which temporarily or ordinarily seemed stable,
definite and simple, turns out to be unstable, multiform
and contradictory. Common practical life rests upon the
assumption of temporarily ultimate points, absolute principles,
and the like. It may, if probed, own them to be relative
and abstract, but it deals with them as if they were absolute
and total. And it is natural and good for it so to act, so
long as it is immersed in the necessities of practical life
which insensibly and gradually call up the complementary
re-action. It is otherwise when it philosophizes and rests
in reflection on the single step. Then the context and the
complementary is lost sight of ; and a series of independent
atoms of thought seem to be left as severally real. Theory
in its first stage tends to give independent fixity to elements
which life keeps flexible and organic. It is the business
of a higher philosophy to find a more adequate expression
of concrete experience than the ordinary efforts of reflection,
divorced from life and action, are able to supply.

552 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

4 The business of dialectic, therefore, in its most legitimate
sense, is to be the bridge which continually throws itself out
to span the abyss between the land of so-called common
sense, or first impression of ordinary reflection, and the land
of reason or philosophy. It serves to demonstrate that the
irrefragable data and solid ground of the theorizing practician
are not really so solid and impregnable as they seem. In
practice no doubt the impermanence and the interdependence
of things is again and again flashed upon even common
observation. But in the world of theory which is for ever
being built up by man, this truth of observation is forgotten,
treated as an extrinsic and accidental phenomenon of things,
instead of being recognized as what Plato has called a irdOos
adavarov re KOL ayi'ipav. ' To be a philosopher,' says Nietzsche
in his drastic way, ' is to be a mummy/ That at least is the
common danger of the hasty theorizer. His ideal world leaves
out the pathos and the action of life, and converts it into
a statuesque collection or a mechanical conjunction of what
are called ideas. This is where Hegel pressed his dialectic
into service — to show that these ideas, even when hardened
into the stability of things, have intrinsic and intestine life
and motion. It is directed against the half-and-half measures
of popular philosophy — of the philosophy which seeks a com
fortable pillow of sound principle to sleep again, and which
perhorresces nothing so much as seeing a 'bacchantic
intoxication'' convulsing the old stolidly respectable ideas.
The human mind in its unregenerate nature craves for a TTOV
o-rcS, some solidly apprehended reality, some impregnable rock
of experience, whence it may possibly seek to move other
things, or where it may itself rest in tranquillity. Such
a rest Hegel does not give : — or if he gives it, he gives it
in the ' absolute idea/ where there is room in ' identity '
and l unity ' for all transitions and correlations and develop
ments through negation and contradiction; or he gives it
in that absolute philosophy which includes all that is true

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 553

in art and religion, and, in including-, transcends and
transmutes. But the absolute idea and the philosophy are
both unlike the rest of sleep : and if they are to be called
reality, then reality is that immeasurably far-off divine event
to which all things in their fmitude move, as from it in their
fmitude they proceed.

The function of the dialectic is therefore mainly intro- +
ductory. It is none the less eternally necessary. Here and
there, in every tongue and tone, some reflective spirit cries
that he has found the solid bit of fact, reality, experience,
out of which he will ( — if you allow him time enough, and
operations sufficiently multiple of memory, construction,
generalization, abstraction,, and so on—) build you up the
real round world you know. Only let him sit on his patch
of the solid earth of present reality and primitive appre
hension—even though his datum, or ' given/ be a very little
one—, and he will be at ease. Hegel's whole energy is
engaged in a contest against this belief in a datum. Make
it as small as you like— call it pure being : and his argument
tends to show that you have got nothing, You say you
do not want a pathological process of knowledge ; a know
ledge which grows through disturbances and tempests and
morbid states : you would like « pure health/ a normal and
natural development. Hegel replies, you are crying for
the moon : pregnancy and birth have their morbid features :
all life is tainted with sickness : nay, all life is lived only
through the victory over perturbing elements; and if the
conquest be too thorough, and the struggle collapse through
want of antithesis, the life itself is at an end. You would
like positive, out-and-out positive, truth. But truth only
lives by the side of error : it has its value and validity
only in the error which it serves to refute, i. e. to explain :
remove the error it lives upon, and the truth hangs flaccid
and sere. In ordinary everyday experience this dialectic,
as we have seen, goes on quietly enough. But it assumes

554 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

more terrible proportions on the field of history, when ideas
have, by causes not here to be discussed, grown into great
concrete powers, and summed up in a single term the result
of long processes. Then the phenomena are called disease.
But there is no absolutely normal health — except in a visionary
standard which only youthful impatience can expect to see
realized in his own sturdy growth.

But Hegel has not used the term ' dialectic ' as the
supremely descriptive name of his method, or made it, as
Mr. McTaggart does, serve to cover the whole process of
introducing order and connexion into the mass of terms
and forms of thought which are built into the fabric of
reality. Dialectic proper perhaps belongs most to the field
of what Hegel at one time called Objective Logic. Objective
Logic deals with a number of ' categories ' or ' kinds of
nameable things ' which are taken as, in a way, part of the
1 external ' universe of fact, bits of reality. There are other
categories — more commonly taken as ( forms of thought ' —
which fall within the scope of what Hegel once called
Subjective Logic. These, such as final cause, and the formulae
of judgement and conception, are treated as ideal vestments
on reality : ways the human mind has of putting together
or disjoining facts which are in the last resort independent
of this dressing. HegeFs purpose may be said to be to
break down the absoluteness and ultimateness of this dis
tinction. It was not a new step, but only a systematic
prosecution of a view which had come out decidedly in
Kant, been deepened and extended by Fichte and Schelling,
but had never been absent when philosophy went vigorously
to work in its effort to unify the theory of life. That
view had been that the so-called objective is essentially
a subjective-objective : that not merely in the modal or
properly logical terms, but also in such as put forward
a claim to metaphysical, and even materialistic value, there
is the pulse and life of subjectivity. With being, you

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 555

suppose yourself to be on the ground of reality : you fancy
that on given qualities you can build as on primitive rock.
Causes are valid,, you say, even if final causes are foibles :
there is power in number, even if organism be an ill-
compounded mode of synthesis. But the Hegelian logic
claims to show that if you are safe on being, it is only
because it is one plank on the deck of the ship of thought,
and that the single solid plank involves and postulates the
concrete complexity of the whole structure. If you are
in earnest with being, or trust the data of intuition
(apprehension), you are committed to the absolute idea,
i. e. to the concrete system of correlativity, transition, and
development, which is the god of the abstract logical world :
and in the long run you are committed to something larger
still, tojan organic natural realm, and to the omnipresence
of intelligent and volitional life. It was this conviction
which in partial and therefore paradoxical shapes led to
the Berkeleian theory of vision, to the analysis of the more
abstruse ideas by Locke into simpler co-adjusted elements,
and to Hume^s much maligned interpretation of causality
in things as connexion between thoughts. It is the same
principle which in Descartes appears in the personal form,
cogito, ergo sum, and in his finding the safeguard of each
single perception in their coherence with that supreme
harmony of all true or ' perfect ' reality which he called
God. What merit Hegel has is perhaps only the persistent
exploitation of this idea throughout the whole range of terms
in which blank and bare reality emerges into name, inter
relation, and value. The real world in its essential fabric
is a work of ideas : while the admittedly ideal terms are only
the development to a further stage of what has come to be
commonly taken as real and constitutive of reality.

But dialectic is after all only the negative side of his
philosophy: and Hegel does not rest content with the
demonstration of the power of negation, even in the highest.

556 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

His own name for his method would be Speculative : and
as Speculation he designates the positive and unificatory
operation of intelligence which holds contradictions in unity
and identity. But the ' unity ' and ' identity ' of contra
dictions does not,, however crassness or perversity may assert,
mean that it is all the same whether we say yes or no. It
means rather that the meanest of God's creatures boasts at
least two soul-sides, one to show to the world and the enemy,
another to show to the self and the friend. It means that
in the view of science or fuller knowledge, the simplicity
which is the assumption of practical life is an illusion. The
plain man and the practical judge expect a plain answer, yes
or no, to a plain question. But the investigator and the
criminologist have learned that plain questions and plain
answers are only possible for those of hurried and blunted
senses ; guilty and not-guilty are terms of a limited province
and are conditioned in their application by a social convention.
The plain answers are neither quite unreal nor quite untrue,
be it added : but they are not expressive of the whole truth
or the whole reality. The problem which is strictly called
speculative is to find a more adequate expression, to formulate
the question in terms which will allow a more equitable
answer. But it must not be supposed that the speculative
simply undoes the effect of the dialectical act : or if we say
that it reconciles, reconciliation does not consist ini^lpssing
over or ignoring the opposition. We may declare tSat the
disruption is overcome, or cancelled, or suppressed, or tran
scended: but we shall misinterpret these terms if we think
that thereby that which once was has been made as if it
were not. The fnew life which rises upon the ruins of
the old ' is a phrase which, as is the way of metaphors,
makes us forget that the new life owes its structural grace
and wealth to the fragments and jarring elements which
it reconstructed. Mr. McTaggart remarks that fif we find
contradictions in our notion of a thing, we must give up

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 557

its reality/ This seems an unnecessarily hard saying-. No
doubt contradiction is a symptom of incompleteness and
therefore of comparative unreality of defective 'truth/ It
is a sign that you are not on the absolutely solid ground.
But the ground may be fairly real ground for all that.
A pure unreality would hardly be worth the trouble of
contradiction. It is only the ' concrete notion/ says the
author, which is ' found in the world of reality/ and he
tells us that according to Hegel ' thought can only exist
in its complete and concrete form'' as absolute idea. Surely
there is exaggeration and misconception present or suggested
here. The world of reality in which the concrete idea is
found existent is not the world known as real to ordinary
mortals : for them its light is not visible on sea or land :
it is a world which for him who has eyes only for the actual
((/as Wirkliche) is a veiled world. The full and concrete
notion — the ' absolute idea ' — surely only exists (if the word
is even there appropriate) in the totality of nature and of
mind, in the universe natural and spiritual. But the absolute
truth (' truth ' and not ' reality* is the Hegelian term of
supreme sweep) does not annihilate partial truths, and seat
itself in their place. Apart from their partial reality or
truth, it itself were the emptiest reality and the poorest
truth, just because the most pretentious. The Absolute
must not merely have room for, but must contain all the
Relatives : the concrete must contain all the abstracts : the
harmonious unity, all the contradictories.

Mr. McTaggart remarks that in the Logic we have fixed
points at the two termini : Being at the commencement and
Absolute idea at the close. He speaks, it often seems, as
if there were two points as realistically defined and located
as the two ends of a road. But this may be misleading if
we forget that the road leads across the infinite and eternal.
The start with being is equivalent, he thinks, to the postulate
that ' experience really exists/ or that ' something is ' : the

558 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

dialectic l assumes the validity of the idea of being.' What
precisely is meant by ' validity/ I hardly feel sure : but in
any case I do not think the philosophy which characteristically
asserts that ' Being and Nothing is the same thing ' can have
a very high estimate of the idea of being and its validity.
It would be truer to say that the dialectic demonstrates the
invalidity of the idea of being ( — that impregnable stronghold
of those who fear the eddying tides of thought) until it has
been supplemented by factors which are decidedly idealistic,
subjective, thought-born. And ' Is,' which is no more than
a bare ' Is/ being in its blank purity, far from serving as
a solid standpoint, is a tight-rope from which you are
incessantly rolling off into nought. It is the beginning
of the dialectic, not because it is warranted by the common
nature of experience — (the common nature of experience,
if it can warrant anything, can warrant a great deal more
than the bare pin-point of being), but because as mere or
pure being it is the pole of truth in closest contact with
nonentity, and at an inappreciable distance from it.

But if pure Being is the minimum of reality, what shall
be said of the Absolute Idea? One may have the highest
respect for the serried array of the dialectic, and feel unable
to detect a serious flaw in the links of its chain ; one may be
amazed at the incompetence which allows some of its critics
first to mistranslate and then to misconceive its argument ;
and yet one may not be clear that here is the absolutely
fire-proof structure of thought, embracing all details, and
complete for all time to come. Even a disciple may regard
his master as human, and be content if he finds in him
a light to lighten the past and to convert its chaotic voices
into harmony or at least coherent speech, though he fails
to prophesy unambiguously of the after-times. As Hegel
approaches the terminus — the absolute idea (in Logic) and
philosophy (in Mind) — he grows terse and enigmatic. And
why ? One may say with Mr. McTaggart that the ' Idea '

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 559

is 'the idea of the human mind, acting theoretically or
(and ?) practically.' But this is but a piece of verbal informa
tion, till we know the human mind— know it, as Plato says,
not in its crushed and degraded or 'degenerate' form on
these shores of time, but in its pristine or perfect (eternal)
nature as revealed in philosophy. And when that knowledge
comes, shall we be anxious to retain the epithet ' human ' as
distinct from 'superhuman' and 'divine'? The < absolute
idea' can have little said of it, because it represents
a postulated maximum— just as the other terminus (being)
represented a minimum— of truth. Once we get beyond
'Object' in the Logical order and enter on 'Idea' we
cross the Rubicon which separates the philosophic movement,
as it was directed by Kant and his successors, from all the
past. Up to that point Hegel had been reproducing what
may, not irreverently, be called ancient history. In the

rest of the Logic he is engaged on the modern field

a much more complex and concrete field. The relation
between life and intelligence, between intellect and will,
the problems of Schelling and Schopenhauer, the questions
of evolution theory, emerge and come to the front. But
even if 'organism' and 'vitality' were clear and assured
conceptions (and they are far from being so, they are rather
battle-grounds of the advanced sciences), it is difficult to
surmise how we are to go beyond them, and where we shall
find ourselves if we do. We may say with Mr. McTaggart
that 'the universe is a super-organic unity.' But just as
'organic' gets most of its meaning by its antithesis to
' mechanical,' so super-organic is only a plus ultra sort
of word, tending to indicate that 'organism' is not the
mountain summit, but only a subordinate height of truth.
'Absolute idea' therefore can only be regarded as a name
for the problem of philosophy, not as a solution : it
emphasizes the need of a synthesis. The very title itself
(with its epithet absolute) suggests this : and Hegel's (like

560 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

Kant's) use of 'knowledge' as a genus embracing the
two species of theoretical and practical reason hints the
same approach to ' undiscovered territory/ When the idea
is absolute, it ceases to be only idea.

I cannot agree with Mr. McTaggart therefore when he
speaks of the highest category as 'without contradictions/
A nursery rhyme tells of the tumultuous and interesting
scenes of life and death that were transacted in relation
to the House that Jack built. This House so built is in
its way a supreme category : but I think it would be a rather
lame affair if all the contradiction and negation of which
it was the centre were removed. The pith of the story
would be gone. So when we are reminded that in the
advance of thought and knowledge ' the presence of negation
is a mere accident, though an inseparable one, and that its
importance continuously decreases/ one may in a way admit
that the later chapters have less of it, and yet seek the causes
in other quarters. These causes are partly that this part
of the Logic had been treated in the c Phenomenology of
Mind ' and comes up again in the discussion of organic and
mental phenomena : partly that the battles on this field were
largely yet to fight, and that not even a Hegel can anticipate
the debates of the future in their detail.

It is Mr. McTaggart's conviction that ' reality is not in its
truest nature a process, but a stable and timeless state/ I
pass over the antithesis of a process and a timeless state, and
its implications : they are perhaps scarcely in accordance with
the statements of chapter v. I must note that Hegel speaks
not of reality — which to him is a very subordinate category —
but of the Absolute, when he describes it (if and when he does
describe it) as a process. But I think it is impossible to
accept the description given by Mr. McTaggart as true to
Hegelianism. The absolute — the Hegelian God (if we for
a moment adopt language of accommodation which will not
improbably mislead) — is at least Life, at least Ego : and if

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 561

these are not process, self-surrendering, self-renewing process,
it is difficult to see where we are to look for examples of
process. To speak of Him or It as the ' supreme being ' or
'ultimate reality/ as the ' reality which underlies all finite
things' is to use expressions, capable perhaps of profitable
interpretation, but which certainly lead, by their obvious
suggestions, towards the cave of Spinozan substance, rather
than to Hegelian Subjectivity — which is Personality, or
rather Tri-personality. And there is in Mr. McTaggart's
language if not in his thought, a recurrent proclivity in this
direction. It shows itself in the pre-supposition of an irre
ducible minimum of being as datum, an undeduced and given
This; a reality which lies behind and which 'the inadequacy
of our finite thought ' never permits us to express completely;
a reality ' supplied by sense ' — sense without which ' we can
perceive nothing of the nature of thought/ It shows itself in
the dictum that it is the office of thought to mediate, and only
to mediate : to ' relate ' alien elements, given and apprehended
somethings. TV7 hen it is added that ' thought actually exists,
or it could not mediate/ we are face to face with the old
mythology of 'efficient' causes, powers which mediate like
persons, and are entangled in the inextricable confusion
between thought, the thinker, and his thoughts. As against
such conceptions there is here only space to say that a thought,
which does not do more than mediate, must presuppose and
postulate another (if it be another) thought which calls for
mediation and submits to it : a thought which, to use
language we have already demurred to, is synthesis, anti
thesis, and thesis — which

' Creates, creator and receiver both.'

Thought mediates : but to do so, it has to be more than
a mediator, and must have in it the natures of the two
extremes which it reconciles, otherwise its would-be mediation
is waste and nullity, or accident. The only ground for holding

0 o

562 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

otherwise would seem to lie in a confusion of terms. Say
that an unrelated being is as good as nothing, and you are
immediately supposed to have been refuted, if it is pointed out
that by your own admissions the being must be before it is
related. The refuter does not take ' unrelated ' in all its
bitter truth, its absoluteness and utterness : he still leaves it in
its comparative sense, indicating the absence of those relations
without which the being may still exist and perform its
function.

There is however another feature in Mr. McTaggart's con
ception of the dialectic process which has to be noted in this
connexion. We have seen already how he supposes negation
to be banished from the bosom of ultimate reality and contra
diction to be removed from supreme truth. He prefers, it is
evident, the faith and the historical event of religion to the
triplicity of syllogism into which philosophy dissolves the tale.
If it be the declaration of religion, as he says, that ' all things
are dependent on a reality' in which our ideals find their
embodiment, if religion, as Hegel suggests, keeps in the view
of suffering humanity the prospect of a glittering rest which
lights up the scene of present toil, philosophy certainly
endeavours to ' secularize,' i. e. to reduce to an immanent law
of life what revelation presents as an event and a drama. Bub
does philosophy supervene as a new stage, utterly differing
from what has gone before ? Is it, as we have heard it called,
a state of knowledge only ? To say so of HegeFs conception
of philosophy is — one need not put it more, and one dare not
put it less, bluntly — seriously to misconceive Hegelianism.
When Hegel says * that ' religion is the general title of the
supreme sphere ' of intelligence, he only expresses his prevail
ing tendency to accentuate that religious tone and aspect of the
higher mind which he accused even Kant, and still more his
predecessors, of unduly neglecting in their systems. Philo-

1 Ency. § 554.

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 563

sophy no doubt is knowledge ; but even distinguished critics
have failed to show that it is only knowledge. It is the
knowledge of religion: the credo as intelligo. Philosophy .
(to Hegel) is that stage of truth— the highest, if evanes
cent, vision of reality — which is called religion — turned, or
attempted to be turned, into the grip of a pervading prin
ciple of immanent life and conscious action, not set in
antagonism and relief to the present actuality, but read
more and more into it, and in its turn steadied and inter
preted by it.

I do not think the dialectic intended to teach us that
' matter must be reduced to spirit/ unless that means that in
vulgar matter (so to call it) there are promises and potencies
which call for revelation or manifestation. It is not the case,
I submit, that, in Hegel's view, ' explanation by a higher
category relieves us from the necessity of finding a consistent
explanation by a lower one/ Hegel had read his Anaxagoras
and his Leibniz to better advantage than that, and knew that
the supreme NoCy never works without the instrumentality of
machinery, and that final causes never supersede, but only
complete, the laws of mechanical causation. The higher
categories are not thus ungrateful. If theirs is the glorious
prerogative of crowning the edifice, it is a prerogative which
only the patient and laborious co-operation of many minor
craftsmen made possible. No doubt we all feel sympathy
with the critic who complains that the three volumes of
Hegel's Logic, with their recurrent demonstration of the
inadequacy of concepts whose practical reality and use we
all accept, are a weary pull up barren steeps. But it is —
according to Hegel — only on the partial truth of these
materials of which dialectic proves the partial inefficiency that
the higher and distant stages of the pyramid of knowledge
can be reached. And each later category has to keep — trans
muted and adjusted — the earlier, not leaving them behind.

o o 3

564 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv

It is therefore questionable policy to declare that ' philosophy
can tell us a priori that nature and spirit do exist.' When it
so speaks, philosophy perhaps reveals no more profound secret
than M. Jourdain heard when he learnt he had been talking1
prose all his life. Phrases, like ( a priori' and l deduction/
are out of place in this phase of method, and serve only as
stumbling-blocks. If philosophy can predict nature and
spirit, it is because nature and spirit have produced or grown
into philosophy.

Lastly, a word on some phrases by which the purpose of
philosophy is here described. It 'aims at discovering the
ultimate nature of all reality': and its final conclusion, we
are informed, is, at least for Hegel, that ' all reality consists of
spirits which are individuals ' or of self-conscious beings exist
ing only in their connexion with one another — a connexion
which is closer than an organism. Such is the ontology ; and
it has beside it a theology which declares God to be ' the reality
which underlies all finite beings.' It would have been desirable
perhaps to give more definite justification from Hegel for the
assertion that he had arrived at the former conclusion, and to
supply some indication as to the relation between the reality
which underlies appearance and finitude, and the reality which
consists of individual self-conscious beings. But when it is
stated that, according to Hegel, philosophy is the ' culminating
point of reality/ we fall into an almost grotesque bundle
of equations, to correlate which will require an interpreta
tion of God, philosophy, and reality involving a portentous
effort of reconstructive thought. ' Reality ' at least will not
help us much in these latitudes, when it has become as empty
a term as thing or being. But I do not linger long on these
ontological dogmas : for — as Kant long ago remarked in
his ' Dreams } — it is not easy to say how much you
commit yourself to when you cross the boundary into Spirit-
land.

iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 565

Philosophy, however, has its less metaphysical side. It
' establishes the rationality of the universe ' : and Hegel
himself is said to show that < the universe is fully rational/
' altogether rational and righteous/ A German poet, Novalis,
I think, is reported to have said that though philosophy can
bake us no bread, she can give us God, freedom, and immortality.
Not on one side only, but on both, this aphorism smacks
of the enthusiasm and pseudo-idealism of the Romantic
epoch. Directly philosophy can do the second as little as the
first : in her place in the organism of intellect she can help
much both towards better bread, and a worthier life in the
light of these three ideas. But let us not be in a hurry to
suppose that a discovery of the harmony of the universe, its
rationality and righteousness, will reconcile it with our
aspirations or with our ethical needs, at least unless we
first make our aspirations and our ethical needs both
rational and righteous. Our aspirations are no doubt legiti
mate in their way, and our ethical needs are possibly even
1 daughters of the voice of God ' • and so are in another way
the harmonies of art and the consolations of religion. But the
righteousness of the true and rational world — of the kingdom
which is, in a practical sense, to come, if it be also the kingdom
which is within us— exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes
and Pharisees. And we are all- perhaps in our lower moments
to be found in the camp of the Scribes and Pharisees. We are
proud of our justice and our benevolence. Eut Fiat justitia, 'mat
caelum is but a relatively- worthy flaunt cast at weak-kneed
pity. The righteousness and rationality of the intelligible
world may not entirely square with our notions borrowed
from our earthly jurisprudence and our practical aims. If
philosophy therefore seeks to rationalize the world, it does so
in continuation of those efforts which in all ages have been
made in the direction of realizing the unity and coherence of
all being, in carrying ever further the process of discovering

566 CRITICAL ESSAYS

and constituting the truth of things, the harmony of mind
and nature, the synthesis of all the aspects and appear
ances of experience. Of ultimate and absolute reality
it will say positively and dogmatically but little, though
it may hint much of what we have to do in temporal
and relative service to further the coming of the kingdom of
truth.

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