It is, I think, a peculiarity of modern times that the chief moral influences are much more various and complex than in the past. There is no such absolute empire as that which was exercised over character by the State in some periods of Pagan antiquity and by the Church during the Middle Ages. Our civilisation is more than anything else an industrial civilisation, and industrial habits are probably the strongest in forming the moral type to which public opinion aspires.
Slavery, which threw a deep discredit on industry and on the qualities it fosters, has pa.s.sed away. The feudal system, which placed industry in an inferior position, has been abolished, and the strong modern tendency to diminish both the privileges and the exclusiveness of rank and to increase the importance of wealth is in the same direction. An industrial society has its special vices and failings, but it naturally brings into the boldest relief the moral qualities which industry is most fitted to foster and on which it most largely depends, and it also gives the whole tone of moral thinking a utilitarian character. It is not Christianity but Industrialism that has brought into the world that strong sense of the moral value of thrift, steady industry, punctuality in observing engagements, constant forethought with a view to providing for the contingencies of the future, which is now so characteristic of the moral type of the most civilised nations.
Many other influences, however, have contributed to intensify, qualify, or impair the industrial type. Protestantism has disengaged primitive Christian ethics from a crowd of superst.i.tious and artificial duties which had overlaid them, and a similar process has been going on in Catholic countries under the influence of the rationalising and sceptical spirit. The influence of dogmatic theology on Morals has declined. Out of the vast and complex religious systems of the past, an eclectic spirit is bringing into special and ever-increasing prominence those Christian virtues which are most manifestly in accordance with natural religion and most clearly conducive to the well-being of men upon the earth. Philanthropy or charity, which forms the centre of the system, has also been immensely intensified by increased knowledge and realisation of the wants and sorrows of others; by the sensitiveness to pain, by the softening of manners and the more humane and refined tastes and habits which a highly elaborated intellectual civilisation naturally produces. The sense of duty plays a great part in modern philanthropy, and lower motives of ostentation or custom mingle largely with the genuine kindliness of feeling that inspires it; but on the whole it is probable that men in our day, in doing good to others, look much more exclusively than in the past to the benefit of the recipient and much less to some reward for their acts in a future world. As long, too, as this benefit is attained, they will gladly diminish as much as possible the self-sacrifice it entails. An eminently characteristic feature of modern philanthropy is its close connection with amus.e.m.e.nts. There was a time when a great philanthropic work would be naturally supported by an issue of indulgences promising specific advantages in another world to all who took part in it. In our own generation b.a.l.l.s, bazaars, theatrical or other amus.e.m.e.nts given for the benefit of the charity, occupy an almost corresponding place.
At the same time increasing knowledge, and especially the kind of knowledge which science gives, has in other ways largely affected our judgments of right and wrong. The mental discipline, the habits of sound and accurate reasoning, the distrust of mere authority and of untested a.s.sertions and traditions that science tends to produce, all stimulate the intellectual virtues, and science has done much to rectify the chart of life, pointing out more clearly the true conditions of human well-being and disclosing much baselessness and many errors in the teaching of the past. It cannot, however, be said that the civic or the military influences have declined. If the State does not hold altogether the same place as in Pagan antiquity, it is at least certain that in a democratic age public interests are enormously prominent in the lives of men, and there is a growing and dangerous tendency to aggrandise the influence of the State over the individual, while modern militarism is drawing the flower of Continental Europe into its circle and making military education one of the most powerful influences in the formation of characters and ideals.
I do not believe that the world will ever greatly differ about the essential elements of right and wrong. These things lie deep in human nature and in the fundamental conditions of human life. The changes that are taking place, and which seem likely to strengthen in the future, lie chiefly in the importance attached to different qualities.
What seems to be useless self-sacrifice and unnecessary suffering is as much as possible avoided. The strain of sentiment which valued suffering in itself as an expiatory thing, as a mode of following the Man of Sorrows, as a thing to be for its own sake embraced and dwelt upon, and prolonged, bears a very great part in some of the most beautiful Christian lives, and especially in those which were formed under the influence of the Catholic Church. An old legend tells how Christ once appeared as a Man of Sorrows to a Catholic Saint, and asked him what boon he would most desire. "Lord," was the reply, "that I might suffer most." This strain runs deeply through the whole ascetic literature and the whole monastic system of Catholicism, and outside Catholicism it has been sometimes shown by a reluctance to accept the aid of anaesthetics, which partially or wholly removed suffering supposed to have been sent by Providence. The history of the use of chloroform furnishes striking ill.u.s.trations of this. Many of my readers may remember the French monks who devoted themselves to cultivating one of the most pestilential spots in the Roman Campagna, which was a.s.sociated with an ecclesiastical legend, and who quite unnecessarily insisted on remaining there during the season when such a residence meant little less than a slow suicide.
They had, as they were accustomed to say, their purgatory upon earth, and they remained till their const.i.tutions were hopelessly shattered and they were sent to die in their own land. Touching examples might be found in modern times of men who, in the last extremes of disease or suffering, scrupled, through religious motives, about availing themselves of the simplest alleviations,[21] and something of the same feeling is shown in the desire to prolong to the last possible moment hopeless and agonising disease. All this is manifestly and rapidly disappearing. To endure with patience and resignation inevitable suffering; to encounter courageously dangers and suffering for some worthy and useful end, ranks, indeed, as high as it ever did in the ethics of the century, but suffering for its own sake is no longer valued, and it is deemed one of the first objects of a wise life to restrict and diminish it.
No one, I think, has seen more clearly or described more vividly than Goethe the direction in which in modern times the current of morals is flowing. His philosophy is a terrestrial philosophy, and the old theologians would have said that it allowed the second Table of the Law altogether to supersede or eclipse the first. It was said of him with much truth that "repugnance to the supernatural was an inherent part of his mind." To turn away from useless and barren speculations; to persistently withdraw our thoughts from the unknowable, the inevitable, and the irreparable; to concentrate them on the immediate present and on the nearest duty; to waste no moral energy on excessive introspection or self-abas.e.m.e.nt or self-reproach, but to make the cultivation and the wise use of all our powers the supreme ideal and end of our lives; to oppose labour and study to affliction and regret; to keep at a distance gloomy thoughts and exaggerated anxieties; "to see the individual in connection and co-operation with the whole," and to look upon effort and action as the main elements both of duty and happiness, was the lesson which he continually taught. "The mind endowed with active powers, and keeping with a practical object to the task that lies nearest, is the worthiest there is on earth." "Character consists in a man steadily pursuing the things of which he feels himself capable." "Try to do your duty and you will know what you are worth." "Piety is not an end but a means; a means of attaining the highest culture by the purest tranquillity of soul." "We are not born to solve the problems of the world, but to find out where the problem begins and then to keep within the limits of what we can grasp."
To cultivate sincere love of truth and clear and definite conceptions, and divest ourselves as much as possible from prejudices, fanaticisms, superst.i.tions, and exaggeration; to take wide, sound, tolerant, many-sided views of life, stands in his eyes in the forefront of ethics.
"Let it be your earnest endeavour to use words coinciding as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, experience, imagine, and reason;" "remove by plain and honest purpose false, irrelevant and futile ideas." "The truest liberality is appreciation." "Love of truth shows itself in this, that a man knows how to find and value the good in everything."[22]
In the eyes of this school of thought one of the great vices of the old theological type of ethics was that it was unduly negative. It thought much more of the avoidance of sin than of the performance of duty. The more we advance in knowledge the more we shall come to judge men in the spirit of the parable of the talents; that is by the net result of their lives, by their essential unselfishness, by the degree in which they employ and the objects to which they direct their capacities and opportunities. The staple of moral life becomes much less a matter of small scruples, of minute self-examination, of extreme stress laid upon flaws of character and conduct that have little or no bearing upon active life. A life of idleness will be regarded with much less tolerance than at present. Men will grow less introspective and more objective, and useful action will become more and more the guiding principle of morals.
In theory this will probably be readily admitted, but every good observer will find that it involves a considerable change in the point of view. A life of habitual languor and idleness, with no faculties really cultivated, and with no result that makes a man missed when he has pa.s.sed away, may be spent without any act which the world calls vicious, and is quite compatible with much charm of temper and demeanour and with a complete freedom from violent and aggressive selfishness.
Such a life, in the eyes of many moralists, would rank much higher than a life of constant, honourable self-sacrificing labour for the good of others which was at the same time flawed by some positive vice. Yet the life which seems to be comparatively blameless has in truth wholly missed, while the other life, in spite of all its defects, has largely attained what should be the main object of a human life, the full development and useful employment of whatever powers we possess. There are men, indeed, in whom an over-sensitive conscience is even a paralysing thing, which by suggesting constant petty and ingenious scruples holds them back from useful action. It is a moral infirmity corresponding to that exaggerated intellectual fastidiousness which so often makes an intellectual life almost wholly barren, or to that excessive tendency to look on all sides of a question and to realise the dangers and drawbacks of any course which not unfrequently in moments of difficulty paralyses the actions of public men. Sometimes, under the strange and subtle bias of the will, this excessive conscientiousness will be unconsciously fostered in inert and sluggish natures which are const.i.tutionally disinclined to effort. The main lines of duty in the great relations of life are sufficiently obvious, and the casuistry which multiplies cases of conscience and invents unreal and fact.i.tious duties is apt to be rather an impediment than a furtherance to a n.o.ble life.
It is probable that as the world goes on morals will move more and more in the direction I have described. There will be at the same time a steadily increasing tendency to judge moral qualities and courses of conduct mainly by the degree in which they promote or diminish human happiness. Enthusiasm and self-sacrifice for some object which has no real bearing on the welfare of man will become rarer and will be less respected, and the condemnation that is pa.s.sed on acts that are recognised as wrong will be much more proportioned than at present to the injury they inflict. Some things, such as excessive luxury of expenditure and the improvidence of bringing into the world children for whom no provision has been made, which can now scarcely be said to enter into the teaching of moralists, or at least of churches, may one day be looked upon as graver offences than some that are in the penal code.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] St. Francis de Sales.
[12] St. Philip Neri.
[13] St. Teresa.
[14] "c.u.m dictus Johannes Hus fidem orthodoxam pertinaciter impugnans, se ab omni con ductu et privilegio reddiderit alienum, nec aliqua sibi fides aut promissio de jure naturali divino vel humano, fuerit in praejudicium Catholicae fidei observanda." Declaration of the Council of Constance. See Creighton"s _History of the Papacy_, ii. 32.
[15] I have collected some ill.u.s.trations of this in my _History of European Morals_, ii. 235-242.
[16] See, e.g. his funeral oration on Marie Therese d"Autriche.
[17] See the enthusiastic eulogy of the persecution of the Huguenots in his funeral oration on Michel le Tellier. It concludes: "epanchons nos coeurs sur la piete de Louis; poussons jusqu"au ciel nos acclamations, et disons a ce nouveau Constantin, a ce nouveau Theodose, a ce nouveau Marcien, a ce nouveau Charlemagne ce que les six cent trente Peres dirent autrefois dans le Concile de Chalcedoine: "Vous avez affermi la foi; vous avez extermine les heretiques; c"est le digne ouvrage de votre regne; c"en est le propre caractere. Par vous l"heresie n"est plus, Dieu seul a pu faire cette merveille. Roi du ciel, conservez le roi de la terre; c"est le voeu, des eglises; c"est le voeu des eveques.""
[18] See Migne, _Encyclopedie Theologique_, "Dict. de Cas de Conscience," art. _Avortement_.
[19] See on this subject my _History of Rationalism_, ii. 250-270, and my _Democracy and Liberty_, ii., ch. viii.
[20] 21 James I. c. 20; 19 Geo. II. c. 21. The penalties, however, were fines, the pillory, or short periods of imprisonment. The obligation of reading the statute in churches was abolished in 1823, but the custom had before fallen into desuetude. In 1772 a vicar was (as an act of private vengeance) prosecuted and fined for having neglected to read it.
(_Annual Register_, 1772, p. 115.)
[21] The following beautiful pa.s.sage from a funeral sermon by Newman is an example: "One should have thought that a life so innocent, so active, so holy, I might say so faultless from first to last, might have been spared the visitation of any long and severe penance to bring it to an end; but in order doubtless to show us how vile and miserable the best of us are in ourselves ... and moreover to give us a pattern how to bear suffering ourselves, and to increase the merits and to hasten and brighten the crown of this faithful servant of his Lord, it pleased Almighty G.o.d to send upon him a disorder which during the last six years fought with him, mastered him, and at length has destroyed him, so far, that is, as death now has power to destroy.... It is for those who came near him year after year to store up the many words and deeds of resignation, love and humility which that long penance elicited. These meritorious acts are written in the Book of Life, and they have followed him whither he is gone. They multiplied and grew in strength and perfection as his trial proceeded; and they were never so striking as at its close. When a friend visited him in the last week, he found he had scrupled at allowing his temples to be moistened with some refreshing waters, and had with difficulty been brought to give his consent; he said he feared it was too great a luxury. When the same friend offered him some liquid to allay his distressing thirst his answer was the same."--Sermon at the funeral of the Right Rev. Henry Weedall, pp. 19, 20.
[22] See the excellent little book of Mr. Bailey Saunders, called _The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe_.
CHAPTER VI
The tendency to regard morals rather in their positive than their negative aspects, and to estimate men by the good they do in the world, is a healthy element in modern life. A strong sense of the obligation of a full, active, and useful life is the best safeguard both of individual and national morals at a time when the dissolution or enfeeblement of theological beliefs is disturbing the foundations on which most current moral teaching has been based. In the field of morals action holds a much larger place than reasoning--a larger place even in elucidating our difficulties and illuminating the path on which we should go. It is by the active pursuit of an immediate duty that the vista of future duties becomes most clear, and those who are most immersed in active duties are usually little troubled with the perplexities of life, or with minute and paralysing scruples. A public opinion which discourages idleness and places high the standard of public duty is especially valuable in an age when the tendency to value wealth, and to measure dignity by wealth, has greatly increased, and when wealth in some of its most important forms has become wholly dissociated from special duties. The duties of the landlord who is surrounded by a poor and in some measure dependent tenantry, the duties of the head of a great factory or shop who has a large number of workmen or dependents in his employment, are sufficiently obvious, though even in these spheres the tie of duty has been greatly relaxed by the growing spirit of independence, which makes each cla.s.s increasingly jealous of the interference of others, and by the growing tendency of legislation to regulate all relations of business and contracts by definite law instead of leaving them, as in the past, to voluntary action. But there are large cla.s.ses of fortunes which are wholly, or almost wholly, dissociated from special and definite duties. The vast and ever-increasing mult.i.tude whose incomes are derived from national, or provincial, or munic.i.p.al debts, or who are shareholders or debenture-holders in great commercial and industrial undertakings, have little or no practical control over, or interest in, those from whom their fortunes are derived. The multiplication of such fortunes is one of the great characteristics of our time, and it brings with it grave dangers. Such fortunes give unrivalled opportunities of luxurious idleness, and as in themselves they bring little or no social influence or position, those who possess them are peculiarly tempted to seek such a position by an ostentation of wealth and luxury which has a profoundly vulgarising and demoralising influence upon Society. The tendency of idleness to lead to immorality has long been a commonplace of moralists. Perhaps our own age has seen more clearly than those that preceded it that complete and habitual idleness _is_ immorality, and that when the circ.u.mstances of his life do not a.s.sign to a man a definite sphere of work it is his first duty to find it for himself. It has been happily said that in the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria young men in England who were really busy affected idleness, and at the close of the reign young men who are really idle pretend to be busy. In my own opinion, a disproportionate amount of English energy takes political forms, and there is a dangerous exaggeration in the prevailing tendency to combat all social and moral abuses by Acts of Parliament. But there are mult.i.tudes of other and less obtrusive spheres of work adapted to all grades of intellect and to many types of character, in which men who possess the inestimable boon of leisure can find abundant and useful fields for the exercise of their powers.
The rectification of moral judgments is one of the most important elements of civilisation; it is upon this that the possibility of moral progress on a large scale chiefly depends. Few things pervert men more than the habit of regarding as enviable persons or qualities injurious to Society. The most obvious example is the pa.s.sionate admiration bestowed on a brilliant conqueror, which is often quite irrespective of the justice of his wars and of the motives that actuated him. This false moral feeling has acquired such a strength that overwhelming military power almost certainly leads to a career of ambition. Perverted public opinion is the main cause. Glory, not interest, is the lure, or at least the latter would be powerless if it were not accompanied by the former--if the execration of mankind naturally followed unscrupulous aggression.
Another and scarcely less flagrant instance of the worship of false ideals is to be found in the fierce compet.i.tion of luxury and ostentation which characterises the more wealthy cities of Europe and America. It is no exaggeration to say that in a single festival in London or New York sums are often expended in the idlest and most ephemeral ostentation which might have revived industry, or extinguished pauperism, or alleviated suffering over a vast area. The question of expenditure on luxuries is no doubt a question of degree which cannot be reduced to strict rule, and there are many who will try to justify the most ostentatious expenditure on the ground of the employment it gives and of other incidental advantages it is supposed to produce. But nothing in political economy is more certain than that the vast and ever-increasing expenditure on the luxury of ostentation in modern societies, by withdrawing great ma.s.ses of capital from productive labour, is a grave economical evil, and there is probably no other form of expenditure which, in proportion to its amount, gives so little real pleasure and confers so little real good. Its evil in setting up material and base standards of excellence, in stimulating the worst pa.s.sions that grow out of an immoderate love of wealth, in ruining many who are tempted into a compet.i.tion which they are unable to support, can hardly be overrated. It is felt in every rank in raising the standard of conventional expenses, excluding from much social intercourse many who are admirably fitted to adorn it, and introducing into all society a lower and more material tone. Nor are these its only consequences.
Wealth which is expended in multiplying and elaborating real comforts, or even in pleasures which produce enjoyment at all proportionate to their cost, will never excite serious indignation. It is the colossal waste of the means of human happiness in the most selfish and most vulgar forms of social advertis.e.m.e.nt and compet.i.tion that gives a force and almost a justification to anarchical pa.s.sions which menace the whole future of our civilisation. It is such things that stimulate cla.s.s hatreds and deepen cla.s.s divisions, and if the law of opinion does not interfere to check them they will one day bring down upon the society that encourages them a signal and well-merited retribution.
A more recognised, though probably not really more pernicious example of false ideals, is to be found in the glorification of the _demi-monde_, which is so conspicuous in some societies and literatures. In a healthy state of opinion, the public, ostentatious appearance of such persons, without any concealment of their character, in the great concourse of fashion and among the notabilities of the State, would appear an intolerable scandal, and it becomes much worse when they give the tone to fashion and become the centres and the models of large and by no means undistinguished sections of Society. The evils springing from this public glorification of the cla.s.s are immeasurably greater than the evils arising from its existence. The standard of popular morals is debased. Temptation in its most seductive form is forced upon inflammable natures, and the most pernicious of all lessons is taught to poor, honest, hard-working women. It is indeed wonderful that in societies where this evil prevails so much virtue should still exist among graceful, attractive women of the shopkeeping and servant cla.s.s when they continually see before them members of their own cla.s.s, by preferring vice to virtue, rising at once to wealth, luxury and idleness, and even held up as objects of admiration or imitation.
In judging wisely the characters of men, one of the first things to be done is to understand their ideals. Try to find out what kind of men or of life; what qualities, what positions seem to them the most desirable.
Men do not always fully recognise their own ideals, for education and the conventionalities of Society oblige them to a.s.sert a preference for that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or qualities or circ.u.mstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous, magnetic power over them--whether they really value supremely rank or position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent tendencies of his imagination, his essential n.o.bility or meanness, are thus disclosed more effectually than by any other means. A man with high ideals, who admires wisely and n.o.bly, is never wholly base though he may fall into great vices. A man who worships the baser elements is in truth an idolater though he may have never bowed before an image of stone.
The human mind has much more power of distinguishing between right and wrong, and between true and false, than of estimating with accuracy the comparative gravity of opposite evils. It is nearly always right in judging between right and wrong. It is generally wrong in estimating degrees of guilt, and the root of its error lies in the extreme difficulty of putting ourselves into the place of those whose characters or circ.u.mstances are radically different from our own. This want of imagination acts widely on our judgment of what is good as well as of what is bad. Few men have enough imagination to realise types of excellence altogether differing from their own. It is this, much more than vanity, that leads them to esteem the types of excellence to which they themselves approximate as the best, and tastes and habits that are altogether incongruous with their own as futile and contemptible. It is, perhaps, most difficult of all to realise the difference of character and especially of moral sensibility produced by a profound difference of circ.u.mstances. This difficulty largely falsifies our judgments of the past, and it is the reason why a powerful imagination enabling us to realise very various characters and very remote circ.u.mstances is one of the first necessities of a great historian. Historians rarely make sufficient allowance for the degree in which the judgments and dispositions even of the best men are coloured by the moral tone of the time, society and profession in which they lived. Yet it is probable that on the whole we estimate more justly the characters of the past than of the present. No one would judge the actions of Charlemagne or of his contemporaries by the strict rules of nineteenth-century ethics. We feel that though they committed undoubted crimes, these crimes are at least indefinitely less heinous than they would have been under the wholly different circ.u.mstances and moral atmosphere of our own day. Yet we seldom apply this method of reasoning to the different strata of the same society. Men who have been themselves brought up amid all the comforts and all the moralising and restraining influences of a refined society, will often judge the crimes of the wretched pariahs of civilisation as if their acts were in no degree palliated by their position. They say to themselves "How guilty should I have been if I had done this thing," and their verdict is quite just according to this statement of the case. They realise the nature of the act. They utterly fail to realise the character and circ.u.mstances of the actor.
And yet it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the difference between the position of such a critic and that of the children of drunken, ignorant and profligate parents, born to abject poverty in the slums of our great cities. From their earliest childhood drunkenness, blasphemy, dishonesty, prost.i.tution, indecency of every form are their most familiar experiences. All the social influences, such as they are, are influences of vice. As they grow up Life seems to them to present little more than the alternative of hard, ill-paid, and at the same time precarious labour, probably ending in the poor-house, or crime with its larger and swifter gains, and its intervals of coa.r.s.e pleasure probably, though not certainly, followed by the prison or an early death. They see indeed, like figures in a dream, or like beings of another world, the wealthy and the luxurious spending their wealth and their time in many kinds of enjoyment, but to the very poor pleasure scarcely comes except in the form of the gin palace or perhaps the low music hall. And in many cases they have come into this reeking atmosphere of temptation and vice with natures debased and enfeebled by a long succession of vicious hereditary influences, with weak wills, with no faculties of mind or character that can respond to any healthy ambition; with powerful inborn predispositions to evil. The very mould of their features, the very shape of their skulls, marks them out as destined members of the criminal cla.s.s. Even here, no doubt, there is a difference between right and wrong; there is scope for the action of free will; there are just causes of praise and blame, and Society rightly protects itself by severe penalties against the crimes that are most natural; but what human judge can duly measure the scale of moral guilt? or what comparison can there be between the crimes that are engendered by such circ.u.mstances and those which spring up in the homes of refined and well-regulated comfort?
Nor indeed even in this latter case is a really accurate judgment possible. Men are born into the world with both wills and pa.s.sions of varying strength, though in mature life the strength or weakness of each is largely due to their own conduct. With different characters the same temptation, operating under the same external circ.u.mstances, has enormously different strength, and very few men can fully realise the strength of a pa.s.sion which they have never themselves experienced. To repeat an ill.u.s.tration I have already used, how difficult is it for a const.i.tutionally sober man to form in his own mind an adequate conception of the force of the temptation of drink to a dipsomaniac, or for a pa.s.sionless man to conceive rightly the temptations of a profoundly sensual nature! I have spoken in a former chapter of the force with which bodily conditions act upon happiness. Their influence on morals is not less terrible. There are diseases well known to physicians which make the most placid temper habitually irritable; give a morbid turn to the healthiest disposition; fill the purest mind with unholy thoughts. There are others which destroy the force of the strongest will and take from character all balance and self-control.[23] It often happens that we have long been blaming a man for manifest faults of character till at last suicide, or the disclosure of some grave bodily or mental disease which has long been working unperceived, explains his faults and turns our blame into pity. In madness the whole moral character is sometimes reversed, and tendencies which have been in sane life dormant or repressed become suddenly supreme. In such cases we all acknowledge that there is no moral responsibility, but madness, with its illusions and irresistible impulses, and idiocy with its complete suspension of the will and of the judgment, are neither of them, as lawyers would pretend, clearly defined states, marked out by sharp and well-cut boundaries, wholly distinct from sanity. There are incipient stages; there are gradual approximations; there are twilight states between sanity and insanity which are clearly recognised not only by experts but by all sagacious men of the world. There are many who are not sufficiently mad to be shut up, or to be deprived of the management of their properties, or to be exempted from punishment if they have committed a crime, but who, in the common expressive phrase, "are not all there"--whose eccentricities, illusions and caprices are on the verge of madness, whose judgments are hopelessly disordered; whose wills, though not completely atrophied, are manifestly diseased. In questions of property, in questions of crime, in questions of family arrangements, such persons cause the gravest perplexity, nor will any wise man judge them by the same moral standard as well-balanced and well-developed natures.
The inference to be drawn from such facts is certainly not that there is no such thing as free will and personal responsibility, nor yet that we have no power of judging the acts of others and distinguishing among our fellowmen between the good and the bad. The true lesson is the extreme fallibility of our moral judgments whenever we attempt to measure degrees of guilt. Sometimes men are even unjust to their own past from their incapacity in age of realising the force of the temptations they had experienced in youth. On the other hand, increased knowledge of the world tends to make us more sensible of the vast differences between the moral circ.u.mstances of men, and therefore less confident and more indulgent in our judgments of others. There are men whose cards in life are so bad, whose temptations to vice, either from circ.u.mstances or inborn character, seem so overwhelming, that, though we may punish, and in a certain sense blame, we can scarcely look on them as more responsible than some noxious wild beast. Among the terrible facts of life none is indeed more terrible than this. Every believer in the wise government of the world must have sometimes realised with a crushing or at least a staggering force the appalling injustices of life as shown in the enormous differences in the distribution of unmerited happiness and misery. But the disparity of moral circ.u.mstances is not less. It has shaken the faith of many. It has even led some to dream of a possible Heaven for the vicious where those who are born into the world with a physical const.i.tution rendering them fierce or cruel, or sensual, or cowardly, may be freed from the nature which was the cause of their vice and their suffering upon earth; where due allowance may be made for the differences of circ.u.mstances which have plunged one man deeper and ever deeper into crime, and enabled another, who was not really better or worse, to pa.s.s through life with no serious blemish, and to rise higher and higher in the moral scale.
Imperfect, however, as is our power of judging others, it is a power we are all obliged to exercise. It is impossible to exclude the considerations of moral guilt and of palliating or aggravating circ.u.mstances from the penal code, and from the administration of justice, though it cannot be too clearly maintained that the criminal code is not coextensive with the moral code, and that many things which are profoundly immoral lie beyond its scope. On the whole it should be as much as possible confined to acts by which men directly injure others. In the case of adult men, private vices, vices by which no one is directly affected, except by his own free will, and in which the elements of force or fraud are not present, should not be brought within its range. This ideal, it is true, cannot be fully attained. The legislator must take into account the strong pressure of public opinion.
It is sometimes true that a penal law may arrest, restrict, or prevent the revival of some private vice without producing any countervailing evil. But the presumption is against all laws which punish the voluntary acts of adult men when those acts injure no one except themselves. The social censure, or the judgment of opinion, rightly extends much further, though it is often based on very imperfect knowledge or realisation. It is probable that, on the whole, opinion judges too severely the crimes of pa.s.sion and of drink, as well as those which spring from the pressure of great poverty and are accompanied by great ignorance. The causes of domestic anarchy are usually of such an intimate nature and involve so many unknown or imperfectly realised elements of aggravation or palliation that in most cases the less men attempt to judge them the better. On the other hand, public opinion is usually far too lenient in judging crimes of ambition, cupidity, envy, malevolence, and callous selfishness; the crimes of ill-gotten and ill-used wealth, especially in the many cases in which those crimes are unpunished by law.
It is a mere commonplace of morals that in the path of evil it is the first step that costs the most. The shame, the repugnance, and the remorse which attend the first crime speedily fade, and on every repet.i.tion the habit of evil grows stronger. A process of the same kind pa.s.ses over our judgments. Few things are more curious than to observe how the eye accommodates itself to a new fashion of dress, however unbecoming; how speedily men, or at least women, will adopt a new and artificial standard and instinctively and unconsciously admire or blame according to this standard and not according to any genuine sense of beauty or the reverse. Few persons, however pure may be their natural taste, can live long amid vulgar and vulgarising surroundings without losing something of the delicacy of their taste and learning to accept--if not with pleasure, at least with acquiescence--things from which under other circ.u.mstances they would have recoiled. In the same way, both individuals and societies accommodate themselves but too readily to lower moral levels, and a constant vigilance is needed to detect the forms or directions in which individual and national character insensibly deteriorate.
FOOTNOTE:
[23] See Ribot, _Les Maladies de la Volonte_, pp. 92, 116-119.
CHAPTER VII
It is impossible for a physician to prescribe a rational regimen for a patient unless he has formed some clear conception of the nature of his const.i.tution and of the morbid influences to which it is inclined; and in judging the wisdom of various proposals for the management of character we are at once met by the initial controversy about the goodness or the depravity of human nature. It is a subject on which extreme exaggerations have prevailed. The school of Rousseau, which dominated on the Continent in the last half of the eighteenth century, represented mankind as a being who comes into existence essentially good, and it attributed all the moral evils of the world, not to any innate tendencies to vice, but to superst.i.tion, vicious inst.i.tutions, misleading education, a badly organised society. It is an obvious criticism that if human nature had been as good as such writers imagined, these corrupt and corrupting influences could never have grown up, or at least could never have obtained a controlling influence, and this philosophy became greatly discredited when the French Revolution, which it did so much to produce, ended in the unspeakable horrors of the Reign of Terror and in the gigantic carnage of the Napoleonic wars. On the other hand, there are large schools of theologians who represent man as utterly and fundamentally depraved, "born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by himself of doing good;" totally wrecked and ruined as a moral being by the catastrophe in Eden. There are also moral philosophers--usually very unconnected with theology--who deny or explain away all unselfish elements in human nature, represent man as simply governed by self-interest, and maintain that the whole art of education and government consists of a judicious arrangement of selfish motives, making the interests of the individual coincident with those of his neighbours. It is not too much to say that Society never could have subsisted if this view of human nature had been a just one. The world would have been like a cage-full of wild beasts, and mankind would have soon perished in constant internecine war.
It is indeed one of the plainest facts of human nature that such a view of mankind is an untrue one. Jealousy, envy, animosities and selfishness no doubt play a great part in life and disguise themselves under many specious forms, and the cynical moralist was not wholly wrong when he declared that "Virtue would not go so far if Vanity did not keep her company," and that not only our crimes but even many of what are deemed our best acts may be traced to selfish motives. But he must have had a strangely unfortunate experience of the world who does not recognise the enormous exaggeration of the pictures of human nature that are conveyed in some of the maxims of La Rochefoucauld and Schopenhauer. They tell us that friendship is a mere exchange of interests in which each man only seeks to gain something from the other; that most women are only pure because they are untempted and regret that the temptation does not come; that if we acknowledge some faults it is in order to persuade ourselves that we have no greater ones, or in order, by our confession, to regain the good opinion of our neighbours; that if we praise another it is merely that we may ourselves in turn be praised; that the tears we shed over a deathbed, if they are not hypocritical tears intended only to impress our neighbours, are only due to our conviction that we have ourselves lost a source of pleasure or of gain; that envy so predominates in the world that it is only men of inferior intellect or women of inferior beauty who are sincerely liked by those about them; that all virtue is an egotistic calculation, conscious or unconscious.
Such views are at least as far removed from truth as the roseate pictures of Rousseau and St. Pierre. No one can look with an unjaundiced eye upon the world without perceiving the enormous amount of disinterested, self-sacrificing benevolence that pervades it; the countless lives that are spent not only harmlessly and inoffensively but also in the constant discharge of duties; in constant and often painful labour for the good of others. The better section of the Utilitarian school has fully recognised the truth that human nature is so const.i.tuted that a great proportion of its enjoyment depends on sympathy; or, in other words, on the power we possess of entering into and sharing the happiness of others. The spectacle of suffering naturally elicits compa.s.sion. Kindness naturally produces grat.i.tude. The sympathies of men naturally move on the side of the good rather than of the bad. This is true not only of the things that immediately concern us, but also in the perfectly disinterested judgments we form of the events of history or of the characters in fiction and poetry. Great exhibitions of heroism and self-sacrifice touch a genuine chord of enthusiasm. The affections of the domestic circle are the rule and not the exception; patriotism can elicit great outbursts of purely unselfish generosity and induce mult.i.tudes to risk or sacrifice their lives for causes which are quite other than their own selfish interests. Human nature indeed has its moral as well as its physical needs, and naturally and instinctively seeks some object of interest and enthusiasm outside itself.
If we look again into the vice and sin that undoubtedly disfigure the world we shall find much reason to believe that what is exceptional in human nature is not the evil tendency but the restraining conscience, and that it is chiefly the weakness of the distinctively human quality that is the origin of the evil. It is impossible indeed, with the knowledge we now possess, to deny to animals some measure both of reason and of the moral sense. In addition to the higher instincts of parental affection and devotion which are so clearly developed we find among some animals undoubted signs of remorse, grat.i.tude, affection, self-sacrifice. Even the point of honour which attaches shame to some things and pride to others may be clearly distinguished. No one who has watched the more intelligent dog can question this, and many will maintain that in some animals, though both good and bad qualities are less widely developed than in man, the proportion of the good to the evil is more favourable in the animal than in the man. At the same time in the animal world desire is usually followed without any other restraint than fear, while in man it is largely though no doubt very imperfectly limited by moral self-control. Most crimes spring not from anything wrong in the original and primal desire but from the imperfection of this higher, distinct or superadded element in our nature. The crimes of dishonesty and envy, when duly a.n.a.lysed, have at their basis simply a desire for the desirable--a natural and inevitable feeling. What is absent is the restraint which makes men refrain from taking or trying to take desirable things that belong to another.