This was the idealism which Kant taught and Fichte promoted. Of the other idealism there are no doubt abundant traces in the language of Kant: and they were greedily fastened on by Schopenhauer. To him the doctrine, that the world is my idea, is adequately represented when it is translated into the phrase that the world is a phantasmagoria of my brain; and escape from the subjective idealism thus initiated is found by him only through a supposed revelation of immediate being communicated in the experience of will. But according to the more consistently interpreted Kant, the problem of philosophy consists in laying bare the supreme law or conditions of consciousness on which depend the validity of our knowledge, our estimates of conduct, and our aesthetic standards. And these roots of reality are for Kant in the mind-or, should we rather say-in mind-in "Consciousness in General." In the _Criticism of Pure Reason_ the general drift of his examination is to show that the great things or final realities which are popularly supposed to stand in self-subsistent being, as ultimate and all-comprehensive objects set up for knowledge, are not "things" as popularly supposed, but imperative and inevitable ideas. They are not objects to be known-(these are always finite): but rather the unification, the basis, or condition, and the completion of all knowledge. To know them-in the ordinary petty sense of knowledge-is as absurd and impossible as it would be, in the Platonic scheme of reality, to know the idea of good which is "on the further side of knowledge and being." G.o.d and the Soul-and the same would be true of the World (though modern speculators sometimes talk as if they had it at least within their grasp)-are not mere _objects_ of knowledge. It would be truer to say they are that by which we know, and they are what in us knows: they make knowledge possible, and actual. Kant has sometimes spoken of them as the objects of a faith of reason. What he means is that reason only issues in knowledge because of and through this inevitable law of reason bidding us go on for ever in our search, because there can be nothing isolated and nowhere any _ne plus ultra_ in science, which is infinite and yet only justified as it postulates or commands unity.
Kant"s central idea is that truth, beauty, goodness, are not dependent on some qualities of the object, but on the universal nature or law of consciousness. Beauty is not an attribute of things in their abstractness: but of things as ideas of a subject, and depends on the proportion and symmetry in the play of human faculty. Goodness is not conformity to an outward law, but is obligatory on us through that higher nature which is our truer being. Truth is not conformity of ideas with supposed trans-subjective things, but coherence and stability in the system of ideas. The really infinite world is not out there, but in here-in consciousness in general, which is the denial of all limitation, of all finality, of all isolation. G.o.d is the essential and inherent unity and unifier of spirit and nature-the surety that the world in all its differentiations is one. The Soul is not an essential ent.i.ty, but the infinite fruitfulness and freshness of mental life, which forbids us stopping at anything short of complete continuity and unity. The Kingdom of G.o.d-the Soul-the moral law-is within us: within us, as supreme, supra-personal and infinite intelligences, even amid all our littleness and finitude. Even happiness which we stretch our arms after is not really beyond us, but is the essential self which indeed we can only reach in detail. It is so both in knowledge and in action. Each knowledge and enjoyment in reality is limited and partial, but it is made stable, and it gets a touch of infinitude, by the larger idea which it helps to realise.
Only indeed in that ant.i.thesis between the finite and the infinite does the real live. Every piece of knowledge is real, only because it a.s.sumes _pro tempore_ certain premisses which are given: every actual beauty is set in some defect of aesthetic completeness: every actually good deed has to get its foil in surrounding badness. The real is always partial and incomplete. But it has the basis or condition of its reality in an idea-in a transcendental unity of consciousness, which is so to say a law, or a system and an order, which imposes upon it the condition of conformity and coherence; but a conformity which is essential and implicit in it.
Fichte has called his system a _Wissenschaftslehre_-a theory of knowledge.
Modern German used the word _Wissenschaft_, as modern English uses the word Science, to denote the certified knowledge of piecemeal fact, the partial unification of elements still kept asunder. But by _Wissen_, as opposed to _Erkennen_, is meant the I know, am aware and sure, am in contact with reality, as opposed to the derivative and conditional reference of something to something else which explains it. The former is a wider term: it denotes all consciousness of objective truth, the certainty which claims to be necessary and universal, which pledges its whole self for its a.s.sertion. Fichte thus unifies and accentuates the common element in the Kantian criticisms. In the first of these Kant had begun by explaining the nature and limitation of empirical science. It was essentially conditioned by the given sensation-dependent i.e. on an unexplained and preliminary element. This is what makes it science in the strict or narrow sense of the term: its being set, as it were, in the unknown, the felt, the sense-datum. The side of reality is thus the side of limitation and of presupposition. But what makes it truth and knowledge in general, on the other hand,-as distinct from _a_ truth (i.e. partial truth) and a knowledge,-is the ideal element-the mathematical, the logical, the rational law,-or in one word, the universal and formal character. So too every real action is on one hand the product of an impulse, a dark, merely given, immediate tendency to be, and without that would be nothing: but on the other hand it is only an intelligent and moral action in so far as it has its const.i.tution from an intelligence, a formal system, which determine its place and function.
It is on the latter or ideal element that Kant makes the emphasis increasingly turn. Not truths, duties, beauties, but truth, duty, beauty, form his theme. The formal element-the logical or epistemological condition of knowledge and morality and of beauty-is what he (and still more Fichte) considers the prime question of fundamental philosophy. His philosophy is an attempt to get at the organism of our fundamental belief-the construction, from the very base, of our conception of reality, of our primary certainty. In technical language, he describes our essential nature as a Subject-object. It is the unity of an I am which is also I know that I am: an I will which is also I am conscious of my will(49). Here there is a radical disunion and a supersession of that disunion. Action and contemplation are continually outrunning each other.
The I will rests upon one I know, and works up to another: the I know reflects upon an I will, and includes it as an element in its idea.
Kant had brought into use the term Deduction, and Fichte follows him. The term leads to some confusion: for in English, by its modern ant.i.thesis to induction, it suggests _a priori_ methods in all their iniquity. It means a kind of jugglery which brings an endless series out of one small term.
Kant has explained that he uses it in the lawyer"s sense in which a claim is justified by being traced step by step back to some acknowledged and accepted right(50). It is a regressive method which shows us that if the original datum is to be accepted it carries along with it the legitimation of the consequence. This method Fichte applies to psychology. Begin, he says like Condillac, with the barest nucleus of soul-life; the mere sentiency, or feeling: the contact, as it were, with being, at a single point. But such a mere point is unthinkable. You find, as Mr. Spencer says, that "Thought" (or Consciousness) "cannot be framed out of one term only." "Every sensation to be known as one must be perceived." Such is the nature of the Ego-a subject which insists on each part being qualified by the whole and so transformed. As Mr. Spencer, again, puts it, the mind not merely tends to revive, to a.s.sociate, to a.s.similate, to represent its own presentations, but it carries on this process infinitely and in ever higher multiples. Ideas as it were are growing in complexity by re-presenting: i.e. by embracing and enveloping elements which cannot be found existing in separation. In the mind there is no mere presentation, no bare sensation. Such a unit is a fiction or hypothesis we employ, like the atom, for purposes of explanation. The pure sensation therefore-which you admit because you must have something to begin with, not a mere nothing, but something so simple that it seems to stand out clear and indisputable-this pure sensation, when you think of it, forces you to go a good deal further. Even to be itself, it must be more than itself. It is like the pure or mere being of the logicians. Admit the simple sensation-and you have admitted everything which is required to make sensation a possible reality. But you do not-in the sense of vulgar logic-deduce what follows out of the beginning. From that, taken by itself, you will get only itself: mere being will give you only nothing, to the end of the chapter. But, as the phrase is, sensation is an element in a consciousness: it is, when you think of it, always more than you called it: there is a curious "continuity" about the phenomena, which makes real isolation impossible.
Of course this "deduction" is not history: it is logic. It says, if you posit sensation, then in doing so, you posit a good deal more. You have imagination, reason, and many more, all involved in your original a.s.sumption. And there is a further point to be noted. You cannot really stop even at reason, at intelligence and will, if you take these in the full sense. You must realise that these only exist as part and parcel of a reasonable world. An individual intelligence presupposes a society of intelligences. The successive steps in this argument are presented by Fichte in the chief works of his earlier period (1794-98). The works of that period form a kind of trilogy of philosophy, by which the faint outlines of the absolute selfhood is shown acquiring definite consistency in the moral organisation of society. First comes the "Foundation for the collective philosophy." It shows how our conception of reality and our psychical organisation are inevitably presupposed in the barest function of intelligence, in the abstractest forms of logical law. Begin where you like, with the most abstract and formal point of consciousness, you are forced, as you dwell upon it (you identifying yourself with the thought you realise), to go step by step on till you accept as a self-consistent and self-explanatory unity all that your cognitive and volitional nature claims to own as its birthright. Only in such an intelligent will is perception and sensation possible. Next came the "Foundation of Natural Law, on the principles of the general theory." Here the process of deduction is carried a step further. If man is to realise himself as an intelligence with an inherent bent to action, then he must be conceived as a person among persons, as possessed of rights, as incapable of acting without at the same moment claiming for his acts recognition, generality, and logical consecution. The reference, which in the conception of a practical intelligence was implicit,-the reference to fellow-agents, to a world in which law rules-is thus, by the explicit recognition of these references, made a fact patent and positive-_gesetzt_,-expressly inst.i.tuted in the way that the nature and condition of things postulates.
But this is not all: we step from the formal and absolute into the material and relative. If man is to be a real intelligence, he must be an intelligence served by organs. "The rational being cannot realise its efficient individuality, unless it ascribes to itself a material body": a body, moreover, in which Fichte believes he can show that the details of structure and organs are equally with the general corporeity predetermined by reason(51). In the same way it is shown that the social and political organisation is required for the realisation-the making positive and yet coherent-of the rights of all individuals. You deduce society by showing it is required to make a genuine individual man. Thirdly came the "System of Ethics." Here it is further argued that, at least in a certain respect(52), in spite of my absolute reason and my absolute freedom, I can only be fully real as a part of Nature: that my reason is realised in a creature of appet.i.te and impulse. From first to last this deduction is one process which may be said to have for its object to determine "the conditions of self-hood or egoity." It is the deduction of the concrete and empirical moral agent-the actual ego of actual life-from the abstract, unconditioned ego, which in order to be actual must condescend to be at once determining and determined.
In all of this Fichte makes-especially formally-a decided advance upon Kant. In Ethics Kant in particular, (-especially for readers who never got beyond the beginning of his moral treatise and were overpowered by the categorical imperative of duty) had found the moral initiative or dynamic apparently in the other world. The voice of duty seemed to speak from a region outside and beyond the individual conscience. In a sense it must do so: but it comes from a consciousness which is, and yet is more than, the individual. It is indeed true that appearances here are deceptive: and that the idea of autonomy, the self-legislation of reason, is trying to become the central conception of Kant"s Ethics. Still it is Fichte"s merit to have seen this clearly, to have held it in view unfalteringly, and to have carried it out in undeviating system or deduction. Man, intelligent, social, ethical, is a being all of one piece and to be explained entirely immanently, or from himself. Law and ethics are no accident either to sense or to intelligence-nothing imposed by mere external or supernal authority(53). Society is not a brand-new order of things supervening upon and superseding a state of nature, where the individual was entirely self-supporting. Morals, law, society, are all necessary steps (necessary i.e. in logic, and hence in the long run also inevitable in course of time) to complete the full evolution or realisation of a human being. The same conditions as make man intelligent make him social and moral. He does not proceed so far as to become intelligent and practical, under terms of natural and logical development, then to fall into the hands of a foreign influence, an accident _ab extra_, which causes him to become social and moral. Rather he is intelligent, because he is a social agent.
Hence, in Fichte, the absence of the ascetic element so often stamping its character on ethics, and representing the moral life as the enemy of the natural, or as mainly a struggle to subdue the sensibility and the flesh.
With Kant,-as becomes his position of mere inquirer-the sensibility has the place of a predominant and permanent foreground. Reason, to his way of talking, is always something of an intruder, a stranger from a far-off world, to be feared even when obeyed: sublime, rather than beautiful. From the land of sense which we habitually occupy, the land of reason is a country we can only behold from afar: or if we can be said to have a standpoint in it, that is only a figurative way of saying that though it is really over the border, we can act-it would sometimes seem by a sort of make-believe-as if we were already there. But these moments of high enthusiasm are rare; and Kant commends sobriety and warns against high-minded _Schwarmerei_, or over-strained Mysticism. For us it is reserved to struggle with a recalcitrant selfhood, a grovelling sensibility: it were only fantastic extravagance, fit for "fair souls" who unfortunately often lapse into "fair sinners," should we fancy ourselves already anch.o.r.ed in the haven of untempted rest and peace.
When we come to Fichte, we find another spirit breathing. We have pa.s.sed from the age of Frederick the Great to the age of the French Revolution; and the breeze that burst in the War of Liberation is already beginning to freshen the air. Boldly he p.r.o.nounces the primacy of that faith of reason whereby not merely the just but all shall live. Your will shall show you what you really are. You are essentially a rational will, or a will-reason. Your sensuous nature, of impulse and appet.i.te, far from being the given and found obstacle to the realisation of reason,-which Kant strictly interpreted might sometimes seem to imply-(and in this point Schopenhauer carries out the implications of Kant)-is really the condition or mode of being which reason a.s.sumes, or rises up to, in order to be a practical or moral being. Far from the body and the sensible needs being a stumbling-block to hamper the free fullness of rationality and morality, the truth rather is that it is only by body and sense, by flesh and blood, that the full moral and rational life can be realised(54). Or, to put it otherwise, if human reason (intelligence and will) is to be more than a mere and empty inner possibility, if man is to be a real and concrete cognitive and volitional being, he must be a member of an ethical and actual society, which lives by bread, and which marries and has children.
(iii.) Psychology in Ethics.
In this way, for Fichte, and through Fichte still more decidedly for Hegel, both psychology and ethics breathe an opener and ampler air than they often enjoy. Psychology ceases to be a mere description of psychic events, and becomes the history of the self-organising process of human reason. Ethics loses its cloistered, negative, unnatural aspect, and becomes a name for some further conditions of the same development, essentially postulated to complete or supplement its shortcomings.
Psychology-taken in this high philosophical acceptation-thus leads on to Ethics; and Ethics is parted by no impa.s.sable line from Psychology. That, at least, is what must happen if they are still to retain a place in philosophy: for, as Kant says(55), "under the government of reason our cognitions cannot form a rhapsody, but must const.i.tute a system, in which alone can they support and further its essential aims." As parts of such a system, they carry out their special work in subordination to, and in the realisation of, a single Idea-and therefore in essential interconnexion.
From that interconnecting band we may however in detail-enquiry dispense ourselves; and then we have the empirical or inductive sciences of psychology and ethics. But even with these, the necessity of the situation is such that it is only a question of degree how far we lose sight of the philosophical horizon, and entrench ourselves in special enquiry.
Something of the philosophic largeness must always guide us; even when, to further the interests of the whole, it is necessary for the special enquirer to bury himself entirely in his part. So long as each part is sincerely and thoroughly pursued, and no part is neglected, there is an indwelling reason in the parts which will in the long run tend to const.i.tute the total.
A philosophical psychology will show us how the sane intelligence and the rational will are, at least approximately, built up out of elements, and through stages and processes, which modify and complement, as they may also arrest and perplex, each other. The unity, coherence, and completeness of the intelligent self is not, as vulgar irreflectiveness supposes and somewhat angrily maintains, a full-grown thing or agent, of whose actions and modes of behaviour the psychologist has to narrate the history,-a history which is too apt to degenerate into the anecdotal and the merely interesting. This unity of self has to be "deduced," as Fichte would say: it has to be shown as the necessary result which certain elements in a certain order will lead to(56). A normal mind, self-possessed, developed and articulated, yet thoroughly one, a real microcosm, or true and full monad, which under the mode of its individuality still represents the universe: that is, what psychology has to show as the product of factors and processes. And it is clearly something great and good, something valuable, and already possessing, by implication we may say, an ethical character.
In philosophy, at least, it is difficult, or rather impossible to draw a hard and fast line which shall demarcate ethical from non-ethical characters,-to separate them from other intellectual and reasonable motives. Kant, as we know, attempted to do so: but with the result that he was forced to add a doubt whether a purely moral act could ever be said to exist(57); or rather to express the certainty that if it did it was for ever inaccessible to observation. All such designations of the several "factors" or "moments" in reality, as has been hinted, are only _a potiori_. But they are misused when it is supposed that they connote abrupt and total discontinuity. And Kant, after all, only repeated in his own terminology an old and inveterate habit of thought:-the habit which in Stoicism seemed to see sage and foolish utterly separated, and which in the straiter sects of Christendom fenced off saint absolutely from sinner.
It is a habit to which Hegel, and even his immediate predecessors, are radically opposed. With Herder, he might say, "Ethics is only a higher physics of the mind(58)." This-the truth in Spinozism-no doubt demands some emphasis on the word "higher": and it requires us to read ethics (or something like it) into physics; but it is a step on the right road,-the step which Utilitarianism and Evolutionism had (however awkwardly) got their foot upon, and which "transcendent" ethics seems unduly afraid of committing itself to. Let us say, if we like, that the mind is more than mere nature, and that it is no proper object of a merely natural science.
But let us remember that a merely natural science is only a fragment of science: let us add that the _merely_ natural is an abstraction which in part denaturalises and mutilates the larger nature-a nature which includes the natural mind, and cannot altogether exclude the ethical.
What have been called "formal duties(59)" seem to fall under this range-the province of a philosophical psychology which unveils the conditions of personality. Under that heading may be put self-control, consistency, resolution, energy, forethought, prudence, and the like. The due proportion of faculty, the correspondence of head and heart, the vivacity and quickness of sympathy, the ease and simplicity of mental tone, the due vigour of memory and the grace of imagination, sweetness of temper, and the like, are parts of the same group(60). They are lovely, and of good report: they are praise and virtue. If it be urged that they are only natural gifts and graces, that objection cuts two ways. The objector may of course be reminded that religion tones down the self-complacency of morality. Yet, first, even apart from that, it may be said that of virtues, which stand independent of natural conditions-of external supply of means (as Aristotle would say)-nothing can be known and nothing need be said. And secondly, none of these qualities are mere gifts;-all require exercise, habituation, energising, to get and keep them. How much and how little in each case is nature"s and how much ours is a problem which has some personal interest-due perhaps to a rather selfish and envious curiosity. But on the broad field of experience and history we may perhaps accept the-apparently one-sided-proverb that "Each man is the architect of his own fortune." Be this as it may, it will not do to deny the ethical character of these "formal duties" on the ground e.g. that self-control, prudence, and even sweetness of temper may be used for evil ends,-that one may smile and smile, and yet be a villain.
That-let us reply,-on one hand, is a fault (if fault it be) incidental to all virtues in detail (for every single quality has its defect): nay it may be a limitation attaching to the whole ethical sphere: and, secondly, its inevitable limitation does not render the virtue in any case one whit less genuine so far as it goes. And yet of such virtues it may be said, as Hume(61) would say (who calls them "natural," as opposed to the more artificial merits of justice and its kin), that they please in themselves, or in the mere contemplation, and without any regard to their social effects. But they please as entering into our idea of complete human nature, of mind and spirit as will and intellect.
The moralists of last century sometimes divided the field of ethics by a.s.signing to man three grades or kinds of duty: duties to himself, duties to society, and duties to G.o.d. For the distinction there is a good deal to be said: there are also faults to be found with it. It may be said, amongst other things, that to speak of duties to self is a metaphorical way of talking, and that G.o.d lies out of the range of human duty altogether, except in so far as religious service forms a part of social obligation. It may be urged that man is essentially a social being, and that it is only in his relations to other such beings that his morality can find a sphere. The sphere of morality, according to Dr. Bain, embraces whatever "society has seen fit to enforce with all the rigour of positive inflictions. Positive good deeds and self-sacrifice ... transcend the region of morality proper and occupy a sphere of their own(62)." And there is little doubt that this restriction is in accordance with a main current of usage. It may even be said that there are tendencies towards a narrower usage still, which would restrict the term to questions affecting the relations of the s.e.xes. But, without going so far, we may accept the standpoint which finds in the phrase "popular or social" sanction, as equivalent to the moral sanction, a description of the average level of common opinion on the topic. The morality of an age or country thus denotes, first, the average requirement in act and behaviour imposed by general consent on the members of a community, and secondly, the average performance of the members in response to these requirements. Generally speaking the two will be pretty much the same. If the society is in a state of equilibrium, there will be a palpable agreement between what all severally expect and what all severally perform. On the other hand, as no society is ever in complete equilibrium, this harmony will never be perfect and may often be widely departed from. In what is called a single community, if it reach a considerable bulk, there are (in other words) often a number of minor societies, more or less thwarting and modifying each other; and different observers, who belong in the main to one or other of these subordinate groups, may elicit from the facts before them a somewhat different social code, and a different grade of social observance. Still, with whatever diversity of detail, the important feature of such social ethics is that the stress is laid on the performance of certain acts, in accordance with the organisation of society. So long as the required compliance is given, public opinion is satisfied, and morality has got its due.
But in two directions this conception of morality needs to be supplementing. There is, on one hand, what is called duty to G.o.d. The phrase is not altogether appropriate: for it follows too closely the a.n.a.logy of social requirement, and treats Deity as an additional and social authority,-a lord paramount over merely human sovereigns. But though there may be some use in the a.n.a.logy, to press the conception is seriously to narrow the divine character and the scope of religion. As in similar cases, we cannot change one term without altering its correlative.
And therefore to describe our relation to G.o.d under the name of duty is to narrow and falsify that relation. The word is no longer applicable in this connexion without a strain, and where it exists it indicates the survival of a conception of theocracy: of G.o.d regarded as a glorification of the magistrate, as king of kings and lord of lords. It is the social world-and indeed we may say the outside of the social world-that is the sphere of duties. Duty is still with these reductions a great august name: but in literal strictness it only rules over the medial sphere of life, the sphere which lies between the individual as such and his universal humanity(63). Beyond duty, lies the sphere of conscience and of religion.
And that is not the mere insistence by the individual to have a voice and a vote in determining the social order. It is the sense that the social order, however omnipotent it may seem, is limited and finite, and that man has in him a kindred with the Eternal.
It is not very satisfactory, either, as Aristotle and others have pointed out, to speak of man"s duties to himself. The phrase is a.n.a.logical, like the other. But it has the merit, like that of duty to G.o.d, of reminding us that the ordinary lat.i.tude occupied by morality is not all that comes under the larger scope of ethics. The "ethics of individual life" is a subject which Mr. Spencer has touched upon: and by this t.i.tle, he means that, besides his general relationship to others, a human being has to mind his own health, food, and amus.e.m.e.nt, and has duties as husband and parent. But, after all, these are not matters of peculiarly individual interest. They rather refer to points which society at certain epochs leaves to the common sense of the agent,-apparently on an a.s.sumption that he is the person chiefly interested. And these points-as the Greeks taught long ago-are of fundamental importance: they are the very bases of life.
Yet the comparative neglect in which so-called civilised societies(64) hold the precepts of wisdom in relation to bodily health and vigour, in regard to marriage and progeny, serve to ill.u.s.trate the doctrine of the ancient Stoics that p??ta ?p??????, or the modern idealist utterance that the World is my idea. More and more as civilisation succeeds in its disruption of man from nature, it shows him governed not by bare facts and isolated experiences, but by the systematic idea under which all things are subsumed. He loses the navete of the natural man, which takes each fact as it came, all alike good: he becomes sentimental, and artificial, sees things under a conventional point of view, and would rather die than not be in the fashion. And this tendency is apparently irresistible. Yet the mistake lies in the one-sidedness of sentiment and convention. Not the domination of the idea is evil; but the domination of a partial and fragmentary idea: and this is what const.i.tutes the evil of artificiality.
And the correction must lie not in a return to nature, but in the reconstruction of a wider and more comprehensive idea: an idea which shall be the unity and system of all nature; not a fantastic idealism, but an attempt to do justice to the more realist as well as the idealist sides of life.
There is however another side of individualist ethics which needs even more especial enforcement. It is the formation of
"The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength and skill:"
the healthy mind in a healthy body. Ethics is only too apt to suppose that will and intelligence are a.s.sumptions which need no special justification.
But the truth is that they vary from individual to individual in degree and structure. It is the business of ethical psychology to give to these vague attributions the definiteness of a normal standard: to show what proportions are required to justify the proper t.i.tle of reason and will-to show what reason and will really are if they do what they are encouraged or expected to do. It talks of the diseases of will and personality: it must also set forth their educational ideal. The first problem of Ethics, it may be said, is the question of the will and its freedom. But to say this is of course not to say that, unless freedom of will be understood in some special sense, ethics becomes impossible. If the moral law is the _ratio cognoscendi_ of freedom, then must our conception of morality and of freedom hang together. And it will clearly be indispensable to begin by some attempt to discover in what sense man may be in the most general way described as a moral agent-as an intelligent will, or (more briefly, yet synonymously) as a will. "The soil of law and morality," says Hegel(65), "is the intelligent life: and its more precise place and starting-point the will, which is free, in the sense that freedom is its substance and characteristic, and the system of law the realm of freedom realised, the world of intelligence produced out of itself as a second nature." Such a freedom is a freedom made and acquired, the work of the mind"s self-realisation, not to be taken as a given fact of consciousness which must be believed(66). To have a will-in other words, to have freedom, is the consummation-and let us add, only the formal or ideal consummation-of a process by which man raises himself out of his absorption in sensation and impulse, establishes within himself a mental realm, an organism of ideas, a self-consciousness, and a self.
The vulgar apprehension of these things seems to a.s.sume that we have by nature, or are born with, a general faculty or set of general faculties, which we subsequently fill up and embody by the aid of experience. We possess-they seem to imply-so many "forms" and "categories" latent in our minds ready to hold and contain the raw materials supplied from without.
According to this view we have all a will and an intelligence: the difference only is 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 organisation of a graded experience, of series of ideas, working themselves up again and again in representative and re-representative degree, till they const.i.tute a mental or inner world of their own. The will is thus the t.i.tle 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 a.s.sume characters quite unsurmised in their earliest aspects, and yet only the consolidation or self-realisation of implications. 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 independence;-which produces an inner life more and more self-centered and also more and more equal to the universe which it has embodied. And will and intelligence are an important stage in that process.
Herbart (as was briefly hinted at in the first essay) has a.n.a.lysed ethical appreciation (which may or may not be accompanied by approbation) into five distinct standard ideas. These are the ideas of inward liberty, of perfection, of right, benevolence, and equity. Like Hume, he regards the moral judgment as in its purity a kind of aesthetic p.r.o.nouncement on the agreement or proportion of certain activities in relations to each other.
Two of these standard ideas,-that of inward liberty and of perfection-seem to belong to the sphere at present under review. They emerge as conditions determining the normal development of human nature to an intelligent and matured personality. By inward freedom Herbart means the harmony between the will and the intellect: what Aristotle has named "practical truth or reality," and what he describes in his conception of wisdom or moral intelligence,-the power of discerning the right path and of pursuing it with will and temper: the unity, clear but indissoluble, of will and discernment. By the idea of perfection Herbart means the sense of proportion and of propriety which is awakened by comparing a progress in development or an increase in strength with its earlier stages of promise and imperfection. The pleasure such perception affords works in two ways: it is a satisfaction in achievement past, and a stimulus to achievement yet to come.
Such ideas of inward liberty and of growth in ability or in performance govern (at least in part) our judgment of the individual, and have an ethical significance. Indeed, if the cardinal feature of the ethical sentiment be the inwardness and independence of its approbation and obligation, these ideas lie at the root of all true morality. Inward harmony and inward progress, lucidity of conscience and the resolution which knows no finality of effort, are the very essence of moral life.
Yet, if ethics is to include in the first instance social relationships and external utilities and sanctions, these conditions of true life must rather be described as pre-ethical. The truth seems to be that here we get to a range of ethics which is far wider than what is ordinarily called practice and conduct. At this stage logic, aesthetic, and ethic, are yet one: the true, the good, and the beautiful are still held in their fundamental unity. An ethics of wide principle precedes its narrower social application; and whereas in ordinary usage the social provinciality is allowed to prevail, here the higher ethics emerge clear and imperial above the limitations of local and temporal duty.
And though it is easy to step into exaggeration, it is still well to emphasise this larger conception of ethics. The moral principle of the "maximising of life," as it has been called(67), may be open to misconception (-so, unfortunately are all moral principles when stated in the effrontery of isolation): but it has its truth in the conviction that all moral evil is marked by a tendency to lower or lessen the total vitality. So too Friedrich Nietzsche"s maxim, _Sei vornehm_(68), ensue distinction, and above all things be not common or vulgar (_gemein_), will easily lend itself to distortion. But it is good advice for all that, even though it may be difficult to define in a general formula wherein distinction consists, to mark the boundary between self-respect and vanity or obstinacy, or to say wherein lies the beauty and dignity of human nature. Kant has laid it down as the principle of duty to ask ourselves if in our act we are prepared to universalise the maxim implied by our conduct. And that this-which essentially bids us look at an act in the whole of its relations and context-is a safeguard against some forms of moral evil, is certain. But there is an opposite-or rather an apparently opposite-principle which bids us be individual, be true to our own selves, and never allow ourselves to be dismayed from our own unique responsibility. Perhaps the two principles are not so far apart as they seem. In any case true individuality is the last word and the first word in ethics; though, it may be added, there is a good deal to be said between the two termini.
(iv.) An Excursus on Greek Ethics.
It is in these regions that Greek ethics loves to linger; on the duty of the individual to himself, to be perfectly lucid and true, and to rise to ever higher heights of achievement. _Ceteris paribus_, there is felt to be something meritorious in superiority, something good:-even were it that you are master, and another is slave. Thus navely speaks Aristotle(69).
To a modern, set amid so many conflicting ideals, perhaps, the immense possibilities of yet further growth might suggest themselves with overpowering force. To him the idea of perfection takes the form of an idea of perfectibility: and sometimes it smites down his conceit in what he has actually done, and impresses a sense of humility in comparison with what yet remains unaccomplished. An ancient Greek apparently was little haunted by these vistas of possibilities of progress through worlds beyond worlds. A comparatively simple environment, a fixed and definite mental horizon, had its plain and definite standards, or at least seemed to have such. There were fewer cases of the man, unattached or faintly attached to any definite profession-moving about in worlds half realised-who has grown so common in a more developed civilisation. The ideals of the Greek were clearly descried: each man had his definite function or work to perform: and to do it better than the average, or than he himself habitually had done, that was perfection, excellence, virtue. For virtue to the Greek is essentially ability and respectability: promise of excellent performance: capacity to do better than others. Virtue is praiseworthy or meritorious character and quality: it is achievement at a higher rate, as set against one"s past and against others" average.
The Greek moralists sometimes distinguish and sometimes combine moral virtue and wisdom, ??et? and f????s??: capacity to perform, and wisdom to guide that capacity. To the ordinary Greek perhaps the emphasis fell on the former, on the attainment of all recognised good quality which became a man, all that was beautiful and honourable, all that was appropriate, glorious, and fame-giving; and that not for any special reference to its utilitarian qualities. Useful, of course, such qualities were: but that was not in question at the time. In the more liberal commonwealths of ancient Greece there was little or no anxious care to control the education of its citizens, so as to get direct service, overt contribution to the public good. A suspicious Spartan legislation might claim to do that. But in the free air of Athens all that was required was loyalty, good-will-e????a-to the common weal; it might be even a sentiment of human kindliness, of fraternity of spirit and purpose. Everything beyond and upon that basis was left to free development. Let each carry out to the full the development of his powers in the line which national estimation points out. He is-nature and history alike emphasise that fact beyond the reach of doubt, for all except the outlaw and the casual stranger-a member of a community, and as such has a governing instinct and ideal which animates him. But he is also a self-centered individual, with special endowments of nature, in his own person and in the material objects which are his. A purely individualist or selfish use of them is not-to the normal Greek-even dreamed of. He is too deeply rooted in the substance of his community for that: or it is on the ground and in the atmosphere of an a.s.sured community that his individuality is to be made to flourish. Nature has secured that his individuality shall rest securely in the presupposition of his citizenship. It seems, therefore, as if he were left free and independent in his personal search for perfection, for distinction. His place is fixed for him: _Spartam nactus es; hanc orna_: his duty is his virtue. That duty, as Plato expresses it, is to do his own deeds-and not meddle with others. Nature and history have arranged that others, in other posts, shall do theirs: that all severally shall energise their function. The very word "duty" seems out of place; if, at least, duty suggests external obligation, an order imposed and a debt to be discharged. If there be a task-master and a creditor, it is the inflexible order of nature and history:-or, to be more accurate, of nature, the indwelling and permanent reality of things. But the obligation to follow nature is scarcely felt as a yoke of constraint. A man"s virtue is to perform his work and to perform it well: to do what he is specially capable of doing, and therefore specially charged to do.
Nowhere has this character of Greek ethics received more cla.s.sical expression than in the Republic of Plato. In the prelude to his subject-which is the nature of Right and Morality-Plato has touched briefly on certain popular and inadequate views. There is the view that Right has its province in performance of certain single and external acts-in business honesty and commercial straightforwardness. There is the view that it is rendering to each what is due to him; that it consists in the proper reciprocity of services, in the balance of social give and take. There is the critical or hyper-critical view which, from seeing so much that is called justice to be in harmony with the interest of the predominant social order, bluntly identifies mere force or strength as the ground of right. And there are views which regard it as due to social conventions and artifices, to the influence of education, to political arrangements and the operation of irrational prejudices. To all these views Plato objects: not because they are false-for they are all in part, often in large part, true-but because they are inadequate and do not go to the root of the matter. The foundations of right lie, he says, not in external act, but in the inner man: not in convention, but in nature: not in relation to others, but in the const.i.tution of the soul itself. That ethical idea-the idea of right-which seems most obviously to have its centre outside the individual, to live and grow only in the relations between individuals, Plato selects in order to show the independent royalty of the single human soul. The world, as Hume afterwards, called justice artificial: Plato will prove it natural. In a way he joins company with those who bid us drive out the spectre of duty, of obligation coming upon the soul from social authority, from traditional idea, from religious sanctions. He preaches-or he is about to preach-the autonomy of the will.
The four cardinal virtues of Plato"s list are the qualities which go to make a healthy, normal, natural human soul, fit for all activity, equipped with all arms for the battle of life. They tell us what such a soul is, not what it does. They are the qualities which unless a soul has, and has them each perfect, yet all co-operant, its mere outward and single acts have no virtue or merit, but are only lucky accidents at the best. On the other hand, if a man has these const.i.tutive qualities, he will act in the social world, and act well. Plato has said scornful things of mere outward and verbal truthfulness, and has set at the very lowest pitch of degradation the "lie in the soul." His "temperance" or "self-restraint,"
if it be far from breathing any suggestion of self-suppression or self-a.s.sertion, is still farther from any suspicion of asceticism, or war against the flesh. It is the n.o.ble harmony of the ruling and the ruled, which makes the latter a partner of the sovereign, and takes from the dictates of the ruler any touch of coercion. It is literally sanity of soul, integrity and purity of spirit; it is what has been sometimes called the beautiful soul-the indiscerptible unity of reason and impulse. Plato"s bravery, again, is fort.i.tude and consistency of soul, the full-blooded heart which is fixed in reason, the zeal which is according to knowledge, unflinching loyalty to the idea, the spirit which burns in the martyrs to truth and humanity: yet withal with gentleness and courtesy and n.o.ble urbanity in its immediate train. And his truthfulness is that inner lucidity which cannot be self-deceived, the spirit which is a safeguard against fanaticism and hypocrisy, the sunlike warmth of intelligence without which the heart is a darkness full of unclean things.
The full development and crowning grace of such a manly nature Aristotle has tried to present in the character of the Great-souled man-him whom Plato has called the true king by divine right, or the autocrat by the patent of nature. Like all such attempts to delineate a type in the terms necessarily single and successive of abstract a.n.a.lysis, it tends occasionally to run into caricature, and to give partial aspects an absurd prominency. Only the greatest of artists could cope with such a task, though that artist may be found perhaps cla.s.sed among the historians. Yet it is possible to form some conception of the ideal which Aristotle would set before us. The Great-souled man _is_ great, and he dare not deny the witness of his spirit. He is one who does not quail before the anger and seek the applause of popular opinion: he holds his head as his own, and as high as his undimmed self-consciousness shows it is worth. There has been said to him by the reason within him the word that Virgil erewhile addressed to Dante:
"Libero, dritto, e sano e il tuo arbitrio E fallo fora non fare a suo cenno; Per ch" io te sopra te corono e mitrio."
He is his own Emperor and his own Pope. He is the perfected man, in whom is no darkness, whose soul is utter clearness, and complete harmony. Calm in self-possessed majesty, he stands, if need be, _contra mundum_: but rather, with the world beneath his feet. The chatter of personality has no interest for him. Bent upon the best, lesser compet.i.tions for distinction have no attraction for him. To the vulgar he will seem cold, self-confined: in his apartness and distinction they will see the signs of a "prig." His look will be that of one who pities men-rather than loves them: and should he speak ill of a foe, it is rather out of pride of heart and unbroken spirit than because these things touch him. Such an one, in many ways, was the Florentine poet himself.
If the Greek world in general thus conceived ??et? as the full bloom of manly excellence (we all know how slightly-witness the remarks in the Periclean oration-Greeks, in their public and official utterances, rated womanliness), the philosophers had a further point to emphasise. That was what they variously called knowledge, prudence, reason, insight, intelligence, wisdom, truth. From Socrates to Aristotle, from Aristotle to the Stoics and Epicureans, and from the Stoics to the Neo-Platonists, this is the common theme: the supremacy of knowledge, its central and essential relation to virtue. They may differ-perhaps not so widely as current prejudice would suppose-as to how this knowledge is to be defined, what kind of knowledge it is, how acquired and maintained, and so on. But in essentials they are at one. None of them, of course, mean that in order to right conduct nothing more is needed than to learn and remember what is right, the precepts and commandments of ordinary morality. Memory is not knowledge, especially when it is out of mind. Even an ancient philosopher was not wholly devoid of common sense. They held-what they supposed was a fact of observation and reflection-that all action was prompted by feelings of the values of things, by a desire of something good or pleasing to self, and aimed at self-satisfaction and self-realisation, but that there was great mistake in what thus afforded satisfaction. People chose to act wrongly or erroneously, because they were, first, mistaken about themselves and what they wanted, and, secondly, mistaken in the means which would give them satisfaction. But this second point was secondary. The main thing was to know yourself, what you really were; in Plato"s words, to "see the soul as it is, and know whether it have one form only or many, or what its nature is; to look upon it with the eye of reason in its original purity." Self-deception, confusion, that worst ignorance which is unaware of itself, false estimation-these are the radical evils of the natural man. To these critics the testimony of consciousness was worthless, unless corroborated. To cure this mental confusion, this blindness of will and judgment, is the task set for philosophy: to give inward light, to teach true self-measurement. In one pa.s.sage, much misunderstood, Plato has called this philosophic art the due measurement of pleasures and pains. It should scarcely have been possible to mistake the meaning. But, with the catchwords of Utilitarianism ringing in their ears, the commentators ran straight contrary to the true teaching of the _Protagoras_, consentient as it is with that of the _Phaedo_ and the _Philebus_. To measure, one must have a standard: and if Plato has one lesson always for us, it is that a sure standard the mult.i.tude have not, but only confusion. The so-called pleasures and pains of the world"s experiences are so ent.i.tled for different reasons, for contrary aims, and with no unity or harmony of judgment. They are-not a fact to be accepted, but-a problem for investigation: their reality is in question, their genuineness, solidity and purity: and till you have settled that, you cannot measure, for you may be measuring vacuity under the idea that there is substance. You have still to get at the unit-i.e. the reality of pleasure. It was not Plato"s view that pleasure was a separate and independent ent.i.ty: that it was exactly as it was felt. Each pleasure is dependent for its pleasurable quality on the consciousness it belongs to, and has only a relative truth and reality. Bentham has written about computing the value of a "lot" of pleasures and pains. But Plato had his mind on an earlier and more fundamental problem, what is the truth and reality of pleasure; and his fullest but not his only essay towards determining the value or estimating the meaning of pleasure in the scale of being is that given in the _Philebus_.
This then is the knowledge which Greek philosophy meant: not mere intellect-though, of course, there is always a danger of theoretical inquiry degenerating into abstract and formal dogma. But of the meaning there can be no serious doubt. It is a knowledge, says Plato, to which the method of mathematical science-the most perfect he can find acknowledged-is only an _ouverture_, or perhaps, only the preliminary tuning of the strings. It is a knowledge not eternally hypothetical-a system of sequences which have no sure foundation. It is a knowledge which rests upon the conviction and belief of the "idea of good": a kind of knowledge which does not come by direct teaching, which is not mere theory, but implies a lively conviction, a personal apprehension, a crisis which is a kind of "conversion," or "inspiration." It is as it were the prize of a great contest, in which the sword that conquers is the sword of dialectic: a sword whereof the property is, like that of Ithuriel"s spear, to lay bare all deceptions and illusions of life. Or, to vary the metaphor: the son of man is like the prince in the fairy tale who goes forth to win the true queen; but there are many false pretenders decked out to deceive his unwary eyes and foolish heart. Yet in himself there is a power of discernment: there is something kindred with the truth:-the witness of the Spirit-and all that education and discipline can do is to remove obstacles, especially the obstacles within the self which perturb the sight and mislead the judgment. Were not the soul originally possessed of and dominated by the idea of good, it could never discern it elsewhere.