1
10
37
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/0b61f71bcb4d998616e1c7e6df95b69d.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=JcwvO1THRhbKHhRpRIq6%7Ehil0tAe6BQm3wYE5sxT1WhxXXZfI0h8im--fTUYsBflEKJRk-zKM0Mw%7E%7EeOGbXnMXBoaecRk%7EJ2zAbMqfQJeirovFkOTTDhUJYe7FuNBOJSR3FaAfnhNkvLynK57TKo-loVygYa2TvwcvuBdatOJ8SbXcLIJ7E95%7E0bWMUWkIf4kPmehxA-JD2lzkmXSQAw5K-emq7K2FD-KSH-lR-oIj1K2FQkD%7EFa4956K3reBXyPcmKbdlHuocmvYIhWz3H-hjkf3S8EUI9aas4kzR1bmX0T2efMEOOVrkDUA2Vs-ISUS26aU0PbuAimptm288a73A__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
d653c41e87d229c76ba9009d48351a71
PDF Text
Text
N -2-1'3
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCI «TY
Atheism
AND
A Reply
SUICIDE.
to
ALFRED TENNYSON, Poet Laureate.
BY
G-. W. FOOTE.
------- ♦-------
Mr. Tennyson has written some fine poetry in his old age,
and he has also written a good deal of trash. Most of the
latter has appeared in the hospitable columns of the Nine
teenth Century. Mr. James Knowles, the editor of that
magazine, is an excellent man of business and knows what
takes with the British public. He is fully aware that Mr.
Tennyson is the popular poet of the day, and with com
mendable sagacity, he not only accepts the poet-laureate’s
verses whenever he can get them, but always prints them in
the largest type. Mr. Tennyson opened the first number
of his magazine with a weak sonnet, in which men like Pro
fessor Clifford were alluded to as seekers of hope “ in sunless
gulfs of doubt.” That little germ has developed into the
longer poem on “Despair” that appears in the current
number of the Nineteenth Century.
The critics have lauded this poem. Nothing else could be
expected of them. Mr. Tennyson is the popular poet, the
household poet, the Christian poet, and scarcely a critic dares
give him aught but unstinted praise. The ordinary gentle
men of the press write to order; they describe Mr. Tenny
son’s poetry as they describe Mr. Irving’s acting; they are
fettered by great, and especially by fashionable reputations ;
and when the publi? has settled who are its favorites they
never resist its verdict but simply flow with the stream. In
the course of time there grows up a sanctified cant of
criticism. If you are rash enough to doubt the favorite’s
greatness, you are looked upon as a common-place person
incapable of appreciating genius. If you object to the
popular poet’s intellectual ideas, you are rebuked for not
seeing that he is divinely inspired. Yet it is surely indis
putable that ideas are large or small, true or false, whether
they are expressed in verse or in prose. When poets con
descend to argue they must be held amenable to the laws of
reason. The right divine of kings to govern wrong is an
exploded idea, and the right divine of poets to reason wrong
should share the same fate.
�2
Mr. Tennyson’s poem is not too intelligible, and with a
proper appreciation of this he has told the gist of the story
in a kind of “ argument.”
“ A man and his wife having lost faith in a God, and hope of a
life to come, and being utterly miserable in this, resolved to end
themselves by drowning. The woman is drowned, but the man
is rescued by a minister of the sect he had abandoned.”
Now Mr. Tennyson has not worked fairly on these lines.
The question “ Does Atheism, as such, incline men to self
destruction ?” is not touched. The Atheist husband of
“ Despair” loses more than belief in God and hope of a life
to come. His wife suffers from a malady only curable, if at
all, by the surgeon’s knife. His eldest son has forged his
name and ruined him, while it is hinted that another son has
sunk to a still worse depth of vice. And he describes him
self as “ a life without sun, without health, without hope,
without any delight.” All this is very inartistic. An
Atheist under such a burden of trouble might commit suicide
just as a Christian might. Dr. Newman well says that by
a judicious selection of facts you may prove anything, and
Mr. Tennyson has judiciously selected his facts. He could
not kill his hero with Atheism, and so he brings in bad
health, a diseased wife, cruel and criminal children, and a
ruined home. Any one of these might prompt to suicide,
without the introduction of Atheism at all.
Mr. Tennyson’s lack of art in this poem goes still farther.
He makes the husband and wife drown themselves theatri
cally. They walk out into the breakers near a lighthouse.
This is mere melodrama. Why did they not take poison
and die in each other’s arms ? The only answer is that Mr.
Tennyson wanted to use that lighthouse, and as he could not
bring the lighthouse to them he took them to the lighthouse.
He wished to make the husband think to himself as he
looked at its rolling eyes—
“Does it matter how many they saved? We are all of us
wreck’d at last.”
This is an old trick of Mr. Tennyson’s. He is always
making his wonderful and vivid perceptions of external
nature compensate for his lack of spiritual insight and
power.
The melodrama of “ Despair ” is continued to the end.
The wife is successfully drowned as she was not required
any further in the poem, but the husband is rescued by (of
all men in the world!) the minister of the chapel he had
�3
forsaken. He loaths and despises this preacher, yet he tells
him all his domestic secrets and reveals to him all his
motives. Nay more, he wastes a great of denunciation on
his rescuer, and vehemently protests his intention to do for
himself despite his watcher’s “lynx-eyes.” Why all this
pother? Earnest suicides are usually reserved and very
rarely make a noise. Why not hold his tongue and quietly
seize the first opportunity ? But Mr. Tennyson’s heroes are
generally infirm of purpose. He can make his characters
talk, but he cannot make them act.
Another defect of Mr. Tennyson’s heroes is their abnormal
self-consciousness. The hero of “ Maud ” rants about him
self until we begin to hope that the Crimea will really
settle him. The hero of “ Locksley Hall” is a selfish cad
who poses through every line of faultless eloquence, until at
last we suspect that “ cousin Amy ” has not met the worst
fate which could befall her. And the hero of “ Despair ”
is little better. After powerfully describing the walk with
his wife to the breaker’s edge of foam, he says that they
kissed and bade each other eternal farewell. There he
should have stopped. But he must go on with—
“ Never a cry so desolate, not since the world began!
Never a kiss so sad, no, not since the coming of man ! ”
This little speculation could not be verified or disproved. It
is one which selfish people usually entertain. They nearly
always think their own sorrows the greatest the world ever
saw. Fortunately, although it may be news to Mr. Tenny
son, all Atheists are not of that kind. Some of them, at
least, are capable of the heroic joys of life, and of con
suming their personal sorrows in the fire of enthusiasm for
lofty and unselfish aims.
Mr. Tennyson should remember the sad end of Brutus in
“Julius Caesar.” Perhaps he does, for some of his language
seems borrowed from it. Brutus has lost what he most
values. His country’s liberties, for which he has fought
and sacrificed all, are lost, and his noble wife has killed her
self in a frenzy of grief. He kills himself too rather than
witness the dishonor of Rome and minister to the usurper’s
pride. But he does not pule and whine. He also bids his
dearest left adieu—
“ For ever, and for ever, farewell, Cassius !
If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
If not, why then, this parting was well made.”
And Cassius replies in the same magnanimous vein. There
�4
is a large and noble spirit which can face even suicide with
dignity and without repining.
So infected with selfishness is Mr. Tennyson’s Atheist
that he doubts the utility of virtue—
“ Does it matter so much whether crown’d for a virtue, or
hang’d for a crime ? ”
Yes, it does matter; or why does he cry out against his
son’s wickedness ? If the young man’s crime “ killed his
mother almost,” other people’s crime injures mankind, and
that is its condemnation. The real Atheist has his moral
creed founded on fact instead of fancy, and therefore, when
things go wrong with him, he does not rail against virtue.
He knows it to be good in the long run to the human family
whatever may be his own fate.
The hero of “Despair” had evidently been a Calvinist.
He reminds the minister of his having “ bawled the dark
side of his faith, and a God of eternal rage.” And he
exclaims—
“What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us
so well ?
Infinite wickedness rather that made everlasting Hell,
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom’d us, and does what he will
with his own;
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan !
Hell? if the souls of men were immortal, as men have been
told,
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn
for his gold,
And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you
say,
His Love would have power over Hell till it utterly vanish’d
away.”
Now Calvinism is certainly not the creed any man could
regret to find untrue. And to our mind a man who could
live for years in the belief that the evils of this life are
ordained by God, and will be followed by an ordained hell
in the next life, is not likely to destroy himself when he finds
that the universe has no jailer and that all the evils of this
life end with it.
The man and his wife turn from the “ dark fatalist
creed ” to the growing dawn
“ When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the
ghosts of the Past,
And the cramping creeds that had madden’d the peoples would
vanish at last.”
�5
But when the dawn comes, they find that they have “ past
from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day.”
They are without a real God, for what deity remains is only
a cloud of smoke instead of a pillar of fire. Darwinism
they find to be very cold comfort, and they wail over them
selves as “poor orphans of nothing,” which is a comical
phrase, and one which we defy Mr. Tennyson or anybody
else to explain. If the Poet Laureate thinks that Darwinian
Atheists go about bemoaning themselves as poor orphans, he
is very much mistaken. He had better study them a little
before writing about them again. They are quite content
to remain without a celestial father. Earthly parents are
enough for them, earthly brothers and sisters, earthly wives,
and earthly friends. And most of them deem the grasp of
a father’s hand, and the loving smile on a mother’s face,
worth more than all the heavenly parentage they are satisfied
to lack.
Mr. Tennyson’s husband and wife, being utterly forlorn,
resolve to drown themselves, and the husband gives their
justication:—
“ Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of
pain
If every man die for ever, if all his griefs are in vain,
And the homeless planet at length will be wheel’d thro’ the
silence of space,
Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race,
When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother
worm will have fled
From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth
that is dead ? ”
Now all this will no doubt happen. Many millions of years
hence this world will be used-up like the moon; and there
fore, according to Mr. Tennyson’s argument, we should
commit suicide rather than put up with the toothache. It
will be all the same in the end. True ; but it is a long
while to the end. And people who act on Mr. Tennyson’s
principle must either forget this, or they must resemble the
man who refused to eat his dinner unless he had the
guarantee of a good dinner for ever and ever, with a dessert
by way of Amen.
Elsewhere they express pity for others as well as for them
selves—
“ Pity for all that aches in the grasp of an idiot power,
And pity for our own selves on an earth that bore not a flower;
Pity for all that suffers on land or in air, or the deep,
And pity for our own selves till we long’d for eternal sleep.”
�6
Mr. Tennyson may well make his Atheist husband say “ for
we leaned to the darker side.” This is an earth without a
flower! In every sense it is untrue. There are flowers of
beauty in the natural world, and flowers of greater beauty
in the human garden, despite the weeds. This suicidal pair
are fond of what Mr. Tennyson has himself called “the
falsehood of extremes.”
Sincere pessimists do not advocate suicide. Schopenhauer
himself condemns it as a superlative act of egoism. If here
and there a pessimist destroys himself, how can that make
things better for the masses who are governed by instinct
and not by metaphysics ? Mr. Tennyson does not see that
the most confirmed pessimist may, like George Eliot, believe
in Meliorism ; that is, not in perfection, but in improvement.
Nature, we may be sure, will never produce a race of beings
with a general taste for suicide; and it is therefore the duty
of those who deplore the ineradicable evils of life, to stay
with their brethren and to do their share towards improving
the common lot. If they cannot really make life happier,
they may at least make it less miserable, which is very much
the same thing.
Has Mr. Tennyson been reading that grand and powerful
poem of Mr. James Thomson’s, and is “ Despair ” the result?
If so, it is a poor outcome of such a majestic influence.
Mr. Tennyson has misread that great poem. Its author has
his joyous as well as his sombre moods, and he has himself
indicated that it does not cover the whole truth. Pessimists,
too, are not so stupid as to think that the extinction of a
few philosophers will affect the general life, or that a
universal principle of metaphysics can determine an isolated
case. They know also that philosophy will never resist
Nature or turn her set course. They see that she is enor
mously fecund, and is able to spawn forth life enough to
outlast all opposition, with enough instinct of self-preserva
tion to defy all the hostility of sages. And it is a note
worthy fact that the chief pessimists of our century have
not courted death themselves except in verse. Schopen
hauer lived to seventy-two ; Hartmann is one of the happiest
men in Germany; Leopardi died of disease ; and the author
of “The City of Dreadful Night’’has not yet committed
suicide and probably never will. It is one thing to believe
that, considered universally, life is a mistake, and quite
another thing to cut one’s own throat. The utmost that
even Schopenhauer suggested in the way of carrying out his
principles, was that when the human race had become far
�7
more intellectual and moral, and far less volitional and
egoistic, it would cease to propagate itself and so reaeh.
Nirvana. Whoever expects that to happen has a very farreaching faith. If the sky falls we shall of course catch
larks, but when will it fall ?
Atheists, however, are not necessarily pessimists, and in
fact few of them are so. Most of them believe that a large
portion of the world’s evil is removable, being merely the
result of ignorance and superstition. Mr. Tennyson might
have seen from Shelley’s writings that an Athest may
cherish the noblest hopes of progress. Perhaps he would
reply that Shelley was not an Atheist, but few will agree
with him who have read the original editions of that glorious
poet and the very emphatic statements of his friend Trelawny.
Does Atheism prompt men to suicide ? That is the
question. Mr. Tennyson appears to think that if it does
not it should. We cannot, however, argue against a mere
dictum. The question is one of fact, and the best way to
answer it is to appeal to statistics. Atheists do not seem
prone to suicide. So far as we know no prominent Atheist
has taken his own life during the whole of this century.
But let us go farther. There has recently been published
an erudite work * on “ Suicide, Ancient and Modern,” by
A. Legoyt, of Paris. He has given official tables of the
reasons assigned for suicides in most of the countries of
Europe; and although religious mania is among these
causes, Atheism is not. This dreadful incitement to self
destruction has not yet found its way into the officia
statistics even of Germany or of France, where Atheist
abound I
Suicides have largely increased during the last twenty
years. In England, for instance, while from 1865 to 1876
the population increased 14-6 per cent., suicides increased
27T per cent. In France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, Swit
zerland and Belgium the increase is still more alarming.
But during the same period lunacy has wonderfully in
creased ; and the truth is that both are caused by the everincreasing velocity and complexity of modern life, which
makes greater demands on our cerebral power than we are
able to answer. By-and-bye this will rectify itself through
* Ze /Swicicfe, Ancien et Moderne. Etude Historique, Philosophique
Morale et Statistique. Par A. Lïgott. Paris : A. Drouin.
�8
natural selection, but for the present our brains are not
strong enough for their sudden access of work. Hence the
increase of nervous derangement, lunacy, and suicide.
But it may be urged that religion keeps down the number
of suicides which would be still more plentiful without it.
That, however, is a mere matter of opinion, which can
hardly be verified or disproved. Religion does not restrain
those who do commit suicide, and that fact outweighs all
the fine talk about its virtue in other cases.
Some Christian apologists have made much capital out of
George Jacob Holyoake’s meditation on suicide in Gloucester
jail, when he was imprisoned for “ blasphemy,” or in other
words, for having opinions of his own on the subject of
religion. Mr. Holyoake’s mental torture was great. His wife
was in want, and his favorite daughter died while he was in
prison. Fearing that his reason might forsake him, and
being resolved that the Christian bigotry which had made
him suffer should never reduce him to an object of its derision,
he prepared the means of ending his life if the worst should
happen. “ See,” say these charitable Christians, “ what a
feeble support Atheism is in the hour of need! Nothing
but belief in Christ can enable us to bear the troubles of life.”
But our answer is that Mr. Holyoake did not commit suicide
after all; while, on the other hand, if we may judge by our
own notes during the past six months, one parson cuts his
throat, or hangs, or drowns, or poisons himself, on an
average every month.
Recurring finally to Mr. Tennyson, we say that his poem
is a failure. He does not understand Atheism, and he fails
to appreciate either its meaning or its hope. We trust that
he will afflict us with no more poetical abortions like this,
but give us only the proper fruit of his genius, and leave
the task of holding up Atheists as a frightful example to
the small fry of the pulpit and the religious press.
November 14iA, 1881.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
London : Fbeethought Publishing Company, 28, Stonecutter Street,
Farringdon Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Foote, George W., 1843-1886
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1881
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Freethought Publishing Company
Subject
The topic of the resource
Atheism
Suicide
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N223
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Alfred Tennyson
Atheism
NSS
Suicide
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/767bb194ee58c7945706846c94e88985.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=NvdlrTtzZmvcxikIyn3DdLWRZy9tr6zMP6zNNmU60%7EEu7JNjVlC-46%7EoKjbr2HiPqnBHIinVdShj%7EJJ-IADvHg8-HRnQ95SiZw8Jvmr4r96Dd2cI%7ET-Tq1vfzLocYPsuJQH7dwk6hpKAkIT%7EgzRJkvJ-wl7S2Uta5aWHYo9eYKOJB1k55roBUKKmyc4P6auTzhkWZvM0ZrHZRqu6URxhzvDJ7VagJR9313O%7EeX3uQ5wj08OQGTk9OLwBsHn%7EsJpXz1yeoSym818V%7EqVCne1sF-n5mXEu8PTcE8wtUsbHxW2ByjH6eG8oiGbpd15gWr47Y4quec1M4Wrfx6w2cpzAZQ__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
903d71228d278d575b0ec785ce62a1e2
PDF Text
Text
����������������������������������������
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The psycho-physiology of the moral imperative: A chapter in the psycho-physiology of ethics
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 528-559 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. "Reprinted from the American Journal of Psychology, Vol, viii, No. 4" - see title page.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Leuba, James Henry
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[s.n.]
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The psycho-physiology of the moral imperative: A chapter in the psycho-physiology of ethics), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G999
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Ethics
Psychology
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/b887f8e969a9066a9b1b5189c6264b31.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=KvqFr0-C3Cmnubx2pvYTsE9eOB7wkwZUXJiEzsZwXBAdnA9O3wsNex7-1pTiMrPeu-5WmSmq6KvhyVuVAP8xl-gUUlEosYVEj8nJLjqyk3LplY6YKK%7E8AVX7SpLrnYmcS8FezXcHxDGJgz1oTsxaAgEtwOXI8dSke15YYC-UaE-PCAdsiehMgbODMR-462CHAQXFaz1G2gVzwxNxqR-hX1HwtiZyrm%7Ev9ReALOlYq8o69uVJ%7EkSgh0bks1zfRZ7w4hnF%7EGL-%7ESElwNLJaB6N5ULaE44NnmuNVTIuhJ9ZAy6VicdLcdY6nURjQIrLBQFNuXEP7EsCJ28e97HznDYXrA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
14058cbcda4e66009054f6a8e1c3e996
PDF Text
Text
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
OUTLINE
AN
EVOLUTIONARY
ETHICS
BY
C.
COHEN.
Vice-President National Secular Society.
PUBLISHED
BY
R. FORDER,
28,
STONECUTTER STREET.
LONDON, E.C.
1896.
�PREFACE.
The object of the present essay is disclosed in the title;
it is that of presenting, in as few words as possible, an
outline of a System of Ethics based upon the doctrine of
Evolution.
Accordingly, I have avoided entering into a
discussion of the value of any of the special virtues—to do
so would require a volume, not a pamphlet—being content
with putting forward what I conceive to be the essential
principles of a Science of Ethics, leaving it for those who
are interested, to pursue the subject further. There is,
therefore, no attempt at completeness in this essay ; it is
meant as an outline, and an introduction, nothing more.
Nor is there in any sense, a claim of originality on behalf
of the ideas suggested ; that, again, has not been my object.
I doubt whether there is a single original idea throughout
the whole. I have simply aimed at putting in a small
compass, and in plain language, conclusions that are at pre
sent locked up in bulky and expensive volumes, which
the average individual has neither time nor opportunity
to consult or study 'systematically.
Students of Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s Works, Mr. Leslie Stephen’s “ Science
of Ethics,” and Mr. Henry Sidgwick’s “ Methods of Ethics,”
will recognise readily how much I am indebted to these
writers.
‘
Where direct quotations occur, I have named the
sources from which they are drawn ; to have particularized
my indebtedness further would have meant more notes
than text. My one object has been to place the subject
in a brief, clear, and convincing light; if I have succeeded
in doing that, I am quite content.
�B2J347
I.—Introductory.
In endeavouring to carry out the oracular utterance :
*' Man know thyself,” there is no branch of study at once
so interesting and so important, as that which relates to
■conduct. At bottom, all our social, religious, and political
■questions find their supreme justification or condemna
tion in their influence upon human behaviour. A question
that had no reference to conduct, one that could not
possibly influence it for better or worse, might interest
the mere spinner of words, but to the earnest thinker
■or sober reformer, it would be valueless. It is true that
the seeker after knowledge has not always an ethical end
as the conscious object of his studies ; he—to use a com
mon phrase—“ seeks knowledge for its own sake ; ” but
it is clear, on reflection, that the only reason why increased
knowledge should be regarded as of value, is, that it will
enable us to better adjust our actions to the varying
circumstances of life. The fears often expressed, lest
some new theory of knowledge should weaken the force
■of accepted moral precepts, is, again, a tacit admission of
“ the sovereignty of ethics; ” and, when genuine, may
be regarded with a certain amount of favour. Even un
willingness to depart from old forms and customs, when
not pushed too far is good ; a querulous dissatisfaction,
with existing conditions being quite as foolish as a slavish
adherence to obsolete customs.
But customs and ideas, be they ever so firmly rooted,
reach, eventually, a stage when they are either summarily
dismissed, or are called upon to show decisive proof of
their title to our respect and obedience. This fate, which
sooner or later overtakes all institutions has in our own
day beset ethics; and at the great bar of human reason,
our ethical codes and teachers are called upon to show
reason why we should still follow their lead. In the
region of morals, as elsewhere, old lights are fading and
new ones are beginning to dawn ; and, perhaps, the
fading of the old lights would be matter for unalloyed
gratification, were it not that while many have lost faith in
the old teaching, they have not yet advanced sufficiently to
have a sincere trust in the new.
Much of this want of confidence in such guides as
�4
modern science has furnished us with, is doubtless due to
the inability of many to accustom their minds to funda
mentally different conceptions from those in which they
were nurtured; but much also is due to the unnecessary
obscurity of writers upon ethical subjects. May I venture
to say—and I say it with all becoming humility—that a
number of needless difficulties have been allowed to encum
ber the subject of morals. Writers have approached the
subject with such an amount of religious and transcen
dental prejudice; have dwelt so strongly upon the
sacredness, the sublimity and the difficulty of the subject,
that their method has served to create difficulties that
have no right to exist. Plainly, if we are going to make
any real headway, we must sweep away all this rhetorical
and metaphysical fog, and deal with human conduct in.
the same careful and unimpassioned manner that we deal
with the subject matter of any of the sciences.
That this subject has its special difficulties, none will
deny—the complexity of the factors renders this inevit
able—but these difficulties need not be increased by the
discussion of a number of casuistical questions that have
scarce an existence in real life ; nor need they blind us to
the fact that a science of human conduct is both necessary
and possible. Human actions are among the facts of
existence ; their causes and results—when they can be
ascertained—are constant, and they must, therefore, be
collected, arranged, and studied, in precisely the same
way that the geologist or chemist deals with the facts
that come within the scope of his respective department
of knowledge.
But before ethics could assume anything like a thoroughly
scientific form, it was essential that many other branches
of knowledge—particularly physiology and psychology—
should be fairly well developed ; and the shortcomings of
earlier systems may be partly attributed to the incom
pleteness of the necessary data. A scientific system of
ethics can only be constructed upon data furnished by a,
number of other sciences ; and this necessary knowledge
has only been forthcoming within very recent times.
But where facts were wanting, fancy filled the gap, and
theories of morals were propounded which satisfied
without enlightening, and darkened that which they pre
tended to explain.
�5
The great weakness of all theological and meta
physical systems of morals, is, that they take man as
he is, without reference to his past history or evol
ution, and proceed to frame rules for his future
guidance. The result is just 5frhat might be expected.
It is precisely what would happen to a man who set him
self to write a description of the British constitution,
without any reference to the history of its gradual
•development : certain features would be misunderstood,
others under or over rated, while many would be left out
of sight altogether. The only way to understand what is,
is to find out how it became so; and this rule is as true
of moral ideas as it is of social institutions and national
customs.
It is in this direction, in emphasising the
importance of the element of time in our speculations
concerning the universe, that Evolution has left its clearest
impress upon modern thought.
Until very recently,
writers—with rare exceptions—were agreed in taking the
order of the universe as fixed from the beginning. Crea
tion being thus taken for granted, there remained merely
a constitution to discover ; and all enquiries as to how
this constitution reached its present condition were looked
upon as beside the mark, or were met by the dogma. “ and
God said, let there be —” Gradually, however, first in one
department, then in another, there grew up the idea of
development, and instead of the present condition of things
being regarded as having come into existence fully formed
the conception of its gradual formation, through vast
periods of time began to gain ground. As philosophers
regarded the physical universe, so they regarded man’s
moral nature. No matter how widely moralists differed,
they were in substantial agreement thus far—they all
viewed the moral nature of man as being constant, as
having been always as it is ; and from this hypotheti
cally constant human nature, proceeded to elaborate their
ethical theories—with much satisfaction to themselves, if
not with benefit to others. As a matter of fact, however,
human nature is as variable as the conditions amid which
it exists—or even more so—while our moral instincts,
appetites, and aversions, which were taken as primary
endowments of the race, in the light of more correct
knowledge, are seen to be the results of slowly acquired
experiences stretching over thousands of generations. As
�6
I have said, it is in this direction that the influence of
Evolutionary thought is mo9t apparent. What others
took for granted, we now find it necessary to explain —
the problem from being—“ given certain instincts what isour reason for calling them moral ? ” has expanded intoHow have the moral feelings come into existence, what
is their nature, and how far should their authority
extend ? ”
It is these questions that I purpose attempting to>
answer in the following pages.
II.—The Meaning of Morality.
The business of the following essay, be it repeated, is a
study of conduct from a purely scientific standpoint;
that is, to establish a rational foundation for moral actions,
and a reasonable motive for their performance, apart from
all religious or supernatural considerations. To the
student of ethics there are two sources from which may
be drawn those facts upon which moral rules or laws are
based. The first is the study of all those mental states to
which praise or blame may be attached. The subjective
view of ethics has hitherto claimed by far the larger share
of attention, at times utterly excluding any other aspect of
the subject; and whatever good might have resulted from
a close examination of mental states, has been frustrated
owing to its neglect of an equally important division of
ethics, namely, the study of conduct from the objective and.
historic side. It is this aspect of the scientific treatment
of ethics that is brought into prominence by the doctrineof evolution. Its main features are comparative and histor
ical ; it embraces a study of customs as affected by race and
age, and even the actions of all animals whose conduct
exhibits any marked degree of conscious forethought. The
importance of this branch of study can hardly be exagger
ated : introspection unchecked by objective verification is.
responsible for most of the errors that abound in philoso
phical writings; while the historical and objective
method has thrown as much light upon mental and moral
problems in fifty years, as had been shed by the intro
spective method in as many generations. Following Mr.
Herbert Spencer, we may define the subject matter of
ethics as “the conscious adjustment of acts to ends;”’
and the object of ethics the statement of such rules as
�7
will lead to the realisation of the welfare of those for
whose benefit such rules are devised.
The main questions that ethical systems are called upon
to answer are :—What is morality ? Why are some
actions classed as moral and others as immoral ? How
did our moral instincts and feelings come into existence ?
and, What are the conditions of their preservation and
improvement ?
In the discussion of all questions such as these,
much time is saved, and much confusion avoided, by
setting out with a clear idea of the meanings of the
cardinal terms in use. All things that we seek to avoid
or possess, whether they be actual objects or states of con
sciousness, fall under one of two heads : they are either
good or bad. Health, riches, friendship, are classed as
good ; disease, poverty, enmity, are classed as bad. We
speak of a good horse, a good knife, a good house, or the
reverse. Upon what ground is this division drawn ? In
virtue of what common quality possessed by these differ
ent objects is the above classification made ? Clearly it
is not because of any intrinsic quality possessed by them.
Considered by themselves they would be neither good
nor bad A knife viewed without regard to the purpose
of cutting, or as an object exhibiting skilled workmanship,
would be subject to neither praise nor censure. An
action that neither helped nor hindered self or fellows,
would awaken no feelings of approbation or disappro
bation. It is only in relation to some end that we have
in view that an object becomes either good or bad, or an
action moral or immoral. Further, an object that may be
classed as good in relation to one end, would be classed
as bad in relation to another. A horse that would be
valuable for deciding a wager as to speed, would be of
little use for the purpose of ploughing a field.
As
Professor Clifford pointed out, the fundamental trait that
determines goodness is efficiency—the capability of an
object or an action for reaching a desired end. A thing
must be good for something or for someone ; a knife for
cutting, a horse for carrying or drawing, a house for
shelter; fresh air, pure water, good food, because they
promote a healthy physique ; and each will be classed as
possessing a greater degree of goodness as it reaches the
desired end in a more effectual manner. A good action,
�8
may, therefore, be defined as one which attains the end
desired with the least expenditure of time and energy.
A further distinction needs to be pointed out between the
terms good and moral ; for in the light of the above
definition, the two terms are by no means always synony
mous, although they may be so in special cases. A man
who so adjusted his actions as to commit a burglary in
the most expeditious manner, might be rightly spoken of
as a good burglar, but no one, I opine, would speak of
him as a moral one. Nevertheless, an action becomes
moral for the same reason that an action becomes good,
that is, in view of a certain result to be attained, although
in this case certain ulterior considerations are involved.
Now, in examining all those actions classed as moral,
I find them to be either socially or individually bene
ficial, while those actions classed as immoral are injurious
either to the individual or to society ; while actions which
neither injure nor help are classed as indifferent.
Even
in the case of those actions that are performed instinc
tively, the justification for their existence or practice is
always to be found in reasons arising from their social or
individual utility. Analyse carefully the highest and
most complex moral action, and it will be found in its
ultimate origin to be an act of self or social preservation.
Press home the enquiry why the feeling of moral obliga
tion should be encouraged, and the answer will be the
same. This fundamental significance of the terms used,
is frequently veiled under such phrases as Duty, Perfec
tion, Virtue, etc. Thus Immanuel Kant declares that
“ No act is good unless done from a sense of duty.” But
why should we act from a sense of duty ? What reason
is there for following its dictates ?
Clearly a sense of
duty is only to be encouraged or its dictates obeyed
because it leads to some desired result; there must be
some reason why a sense of duty is to be acted upon,
rather than ignored, and in the very nature of the case
that reason can only be found in the direction indicated.
Nor can we on reflection and in the light of modern
science, think of moral actions as having any other origin
or justification than their tendency to promote the well
being of society. Given a race of animals with a
particular set of surroundings, and the problem before it
will be “ How to maintain a constant harmony between
�9
the species and its medium ; how the former shall adjust
its movements in such a manner as to ward off all
aggressive forces, both conscious and unconscious, to
rear its young and preserve that modifiability of actions
requisite to meet the needs of a changing environment ;
without which death rapidly ensues.” This is the problem
of life stated in its plainest terms; a problem which
presses upon savage and civilised alike, and one with
which we are all constantly engaged. It may be said that
we are all engaged in playing the same game—the game
of life —and ethics may be spoken of as the rules of the
game that we are always learning but never thoroughly
master. The one condition of existence for all life, from
lowest to highest, is that certain definite lines of conduct
—determined by the surrounding conditions—shall be
pursued ; and just as any invention, be it steam engine,
printing press, or machine gun, is the result of a long
series of adjustments and readjustments reaching over
many generations, so our present ability to maintain our
lives in the face of a host of disturbing forces, is the
result of a long series of adjustments and re-adjustments,
conscious and unconscious, dating back to the dawn of
life upon the globe. Self-preservation is the fundamental
cause of the beginnings of morality, and only as the
sphere of self becomes extended so as to embrace others
does conduct assume a more altruistic character. At
beginning these adjustments by means of which life is
preserved are brought about unconsciously, natural selec
tion weeding out all whose conduct is of an undesirable
or life-diminishing character; but with the growth of
intelligence and the conscious recognition of the nature of
those forces by which life is moulded, these unconscious
adaptations are superseded—or rather have superadded to
them—conscious ones. It is this conscious recognition of
the nature of these forces by which life is maintained,
and of the reason for pursuing certain courses of conduct,
that is the distinguishing feature of human society.
Human morality seeks to effect consciously what has
hitherto been brought about slowly and unconsciously.
It aims at this, but at more than this; for a system of
ethics not only seeks to preserve life, but to intensify it,
to increase its length and add to its beauties. It declares
not only what is, or what may be, but what ought to be.
�10
Moral principles or laws, therefore, consist in the main in
furnishing a reason for those courses of conduct which
experience has demonstrated to be beneficial, and the
acquisition of which have been accentuated by the struggle
for existence.
In this case, however, progress is effected much more
rapidly than where the evolution is unconscious, while
the ability to discern more clearly the remote effects of
our actions renders that progress more certain and perma
nent. We maintain ourselves, we rear our young, and lay
up the means of future happiness in virtue of the
presence of a particular set of instincts or the formulation
of a number of rules which experience has demonstrated
to be beneficial.
It is a detailed account of these actions
and the reason for their existence that constitutes our
moral code. Long before moral principles are formulated
society conforms to them. Custom exists before law;
indeed, a large part of law is only custom recognised and
stereotyped; the law, so to speak, does but give the
reason for the custom, and by the very exigences of exis
tence such customs as are elevated into laws must be
those that have helped to preserve the race, otherwise
there would be a speedy end to both law and law-makers.
As, therefore, in the course of evolution only the societies
can continue to exist whose actions serve, on the whole, to
bring them into harmony with their environment, and as
it will be these actions the value of which will afterwards
come to be recognised and their performances enforced
by law, there is brought about an identification of moral
rules with life preserving actions from the outset, and
this identification tends to become still closer as society
advances. The impulses that urge men to action cannot
be, in the main, anti-social or society would cease to exist.
In the last resort, as will be made clear later, a man will do
that which yields him the most satisfaction, and unless
there is some sort of identity between what is pleasant
and what is beneficial, animate existence would soon
cease to be. Morality can, then, from the scientific stand
point, have no other meaning except that of a general
term for all those preservative instincts and actions by
means of which an individual establishes definite and har
monious relations between himself and fellows, and wards
off all those aggressive forces that threaten his existence.
�11
We have now, I think, reached a clear conception of
what is meant by a “ Moral Action.” A moral action is.
one that adds to the “ fitness” of society; makes life fuller
and longer; adds to the fulness of life by nobility of
action, and to its duration by length of years. An.
immoral action is one that detracts from the “ fitness ” of
society, and renders it less capable of responding to the
demands of its environment. The only rational meaning:
that can be attached to the phrase “a good man,” is that
of one whose actions comply with the above conditions ;
and his conduct will become more or less immoral as it
approaches to or falls away from this ideal.
III.—The Moral Standard.
Although I have but little doubt that the majority of
people would on reflection yield a general assent to the
considerations set forth above, yet, it may be complained,
that they are too vague. To say that moral actions are such
as promote life, it may further be said, is hardly to tell us
what such actions are, or to provide us with a rational
rule of action, since our verdict as to whether an action is
moral or immoral must clearly depend upon our view as
to what the end of life is. The man who holds that all
pleasure is sinful, and that mortification of the flesh is the
only way to gain eternal happiness, will necessarily pass
a very different judgment upon actions from the one
who holds that all happiness that is not purchased at the
expense of another’s misery is legitimate and desirable.
The justice of the above complaint must be admitted ; it
remains, therefore, to push our enquiries a step further.
Ethical Methods, in common with other systems, pass
through three main stages—Authoritative, critical, and
constructive. The first is a period when moral precepts
are accepted on the bare authority of Priest or Chieftain.
In this stage all commands have an equal value, little or
no discrimination is exercised, and all acts of disobedience
meet with the most severe punishment.
*
The second
period represents a season of upheaval occasioned either
by the growing intelligence of men perceiving the faults or
shortcomings of the current teaching, or a healthy revolt
against the exercise of unfettered authority. And then,
*As in the Bible where picking up sticks upon the Sabbath merits
the same punishment as murder.
�12
finally, there ensues a constructive stage, when an attempt
is made to place conduct upon a rational foundation.
It is not very easy to point out the line of demarcation
between the different stages, nor is it unusual to find
them existing side by side, but they are stages that can be
■observed by a careful student with a tolerable amount of
■ease. And in this latter stage the difficulty is, not so
much the formulation of moral precepts, as furnishing
the reason for them. The great question here is, not so
much “ How shall I be moral,’’ as—“ Why should I be
moral,” it is this question we have now to answer.
All Ethical systems are compelled to take some
standard as ultimately determining the rightness or
wrongness of conduct, and we may roughly divide all
these systems into three groups—two of which regard the
moral sense as innate, and the third as derivative. These
three groups are, (1) Theological systems which take the
will of deity as supplying the necessary standard, (2)
Intuitional which holds the doctrine of an innate moral
sense that is in its origin independent of experience, and
professes to judge actions independent of results, (3)
*
Utilitarian, which estimates conduct by observing the
results of actions upon self and fellows, and holds that
■our present stock of moral sentiments have been acquired
by experience both individual and racial.
Concerning the first of these schools—the theological—
its weakness must be apparent to all who have given any
serious attention to the subject. For, setting on one side
the difficulty of ascertaining what the will of deity is, and
the further difficulty that from the religious world there
■comes in answer to moral problems replies as numerous
as the believers themselves, it is plain that the expressed
will of deity cannot alter the morality of an action to the
slightest extent. It does not follow that spoiling the
Egyptians is a moral transaction because God com
manded it, nor are we justified in burning witches or
stoning heretics because their death sentence is contained
in the bible. It would be but a poor excuse after commit
* We have used the term “Intuitional” to denote the method which
recognises rightness as a quality belonging to actions independently of their
conduciveness to any ulterior end. The term implies that the presence of
the quality is ascertained by simply looking at the actions themselves
-without considering their consequences.—Sidgwick, “ Methods of Ethics”
bk. I. c. viii, sec. i.
�13
ting a crime to plead that God commanded it. The
reply to all such excuses would be, “ crime is crime no
matter who commanded it ; wrong actions must be
reprobated, the wrong doer corrected, or society would
fall to pieces,” and such a decision would have the sup
port of all rational men and women. A belief that my
actions are ordered by God can only guarantee my honesty
as a believer in deity in carrying them out, but can in no
way warrant their morality.
Further, those who claim that the will of God as ex
pressed in a revelation or discovered by a study of nature,
furnishes a ground of distinction between right and
wrong, overlook the fact that all such positions are self
contradictory, inasmuch as they assume a tacit recognition
at the outset of the very thing they set out to discover—
they all imply the existence of a standard of right and
wrong to which God’s acts conform. To speak of biblical
precepts as good implies that they harmonize with our
ideas of what goodness is ; to say that God is good and
that his actions are righteous, implies, in the same manner,
a conformity between his actions and some recognised
standard. Either that, or it is a meaningless use of terms
to speak of God’s actions as good, and at the same time
claim that it is his actions alone which determine what
goodness is. In short, all such terms as good and bad,
moral and immoral, take for granted the existence of some
standard of goodness discoverable by human reason, and
from which such terms derive their authority. This much
appears to me clear:—either actions classed respectively as
moral and immoral have certain definite effects upon our
lives or they have not. If they have, then their effects remain
the same with or without religious considerations; and
granting the possession of an ordinary amount of common
sense, it will always be possible to build up a code of
morals from the observed consequences of actions. If
actions have no definite effects upon our lives, then those
who believe that our only reason for calling an action
moral or immoral lies in the will of God, given in revela
tion or expressed in the human consciousness, are com
mitted to the startling proposition that theft, murder and
adultery would never have been recognised as immoral
had these commands not have been in existence. This
last alternative is rather too ridiculous to merit serious
�14
disproof. In brief, neither the theologian nor, as we shall
see later, the intuitionist can avoid assuming at the outset
■of their investigations all that he seeks to reach as a con
clusion. The very phrases both are compelled to use have
no validity unless there exist principles of morality derived
from experience—and this thay are constantly seeking to
disprove.
Nor do the advocates of a dim religious sense mani
fest in the human mind, fare any better than those who
hold the cruder form of the same doctrine. The strength
•of their position is apparent only ; due to the vagueness
of language rather than the logical force of their ideas.
Dr. Martineau—who may be taken as one of the best
representatives of the religious world upon this subject—
declares that if there be no supernatural authority for
morals, “ nothing remains but to declare the sense of
responsibility a mere delusion, the fiduciary aspect of
life must disappear; there is no trust committed to us,
no eye to watch, no account to render ; we have but to
settle terms with our neighbours and all will be well.
Purity within, faithfulness when alone, harmony and
depth in the secret affections, are guarded by no caution
ary presence, and aided by no sacred sympathy ; it may
be happy for us if we keep them, but if we mar them it
is our own affair, and there is none to reproach us and
put us to shame.”* To all of which one may say that
that conduct can hardly be called moral which needs the
constant supervision of an eternal “cautionary presence”
to ensure its rectitude
To refrain from wrong-doing
because of the presence of an “ all-seeing eye,” whether
its possessor be a supernatural power or a mundane
policeman can hardly entitle one to be called
virtuous ; and society would be in a poor way indeed did
right conduct rest upon no firmer foundation than this.
A man so restrained may not be such a direct danger to
society as he would otherwise be, but he is far from being
a desirable type of character. Surely purity, faithfulness
to wife, children and friends, honesty in our dealings,
truthfulness in our speech, and confidence in our fellows,
are not such poor, forlorn things as to be without some
inherent personal recommendation ?
Indeed, Dr.
* “ A Study of Religions,” II. p. 40.
�15
Martineau himself is a splendid disproof of his own
position, for if there is one thing certain about a man of
his type, it is that the absence of religious beliefs would
influence his conduct but little for the worse, while it might
even give more breadth to his sympathies and character.
True morality finds its incentives in the effects of actions
upon self and fellows, and not in fears inspired by either
god or devil. As Mr. Spencer has said, “ The truly moral
deterrent from murder is not constituted by a represen
tation of hanging as a consequence, or by a representation
of tortures in hell as a consequence, or by a representation
of the horror or hatred excited in fellow men, but by a
representation of the necessary natural results — the
infliction of death agony upon the victim, the destruc
tion of all his possibilities of happiness, the entailed
suffering to his belongings.
Neither the thought of
imprisonment, nor of divine anger, nor of social disgrace,
is that which constitutes the check on theft, but the
thought of injury to the person robbed, joined with a
vague consciousness of the general evils caused by a
disregard of proprietory rights .... Throughout, then,
the moral motive differs from the motives it is associated
with in this ; that instead of being constituted by repre
sentations of incidental, collateral, non-necessary conse
quences of acts, it is constituted by representations of
consequences which the acts naturally produce.”* Of all
moral sanctions the religious sanction is the most delusive
and unsatisfactory. Changing as human nature changes,
reflecting here benevolence and there cruelty, sanctioning
all crimes at the same time that it countenances much
that is virtuous, it is an authority that people have
appealed to in all ages to justify every action that human
nature is capable of committing. Surely a sanction which
justifies at the same time the religion of the Thug and
the benevolence of the humanitarian must be an eminently
fallacious one ? And yet we are warned that the removal
of the religious sanction will weaken, if it does not destroy,
morality! I do not believe it.
Conduct can gain no
permanent help from a false belief, and no permanent
strength from a lie ; and had the energies of our religious
teachers been devoted to impressing upon the people
“ Data of Ethics,” sec. 45.
�16
under their control the natural sanction of morality they
might have been kept moral without a sham of a priest
hood, or the perpetuation of superstitious beliefs that are
a stain upon our civilisation. But we have been taught
for so long that religion alone could furnish a reason for
right living, that now that time has set its heavy hand upon
religious creeds and death is claiming them for its own,
many honestly fear that there will be a corresponding
moral deterioration. Yet of this much we may be certain,
so long as men continue to live together morality
can never die ; so long as suffering exists or injustice
is done, there will not be wanting ;those who will
burn to release the one and redress the other.
Nay, rather will the value of life and of conduct
during life be enhanced by stripping it of all false fears
and groundless fancies. Whatever else is proven false
this life remains certain ; if it is shown that we share the
mortality of the brute we need not share its life, and we
may at least make as much of the earth we are now in
possession of as the heaven we may never enter. As
George Eliot says, “ If everything else is doubtful, this
suffering that I can help is certain ; if the glory of the
cross is an illusion, the sorrow is only the truer.
While
the strength is in my arm I will stretch it out to the
fainting ; while the light visits my eyes they shall seek
the forsaken.”*
The intuitional theory of morals while displaying
fewer errors than the scheme of the theological
school, yet presents a fundamental and insurmountable
difficulty. With the general question as to the nature
and authority of conscience, we shall deal more fully
when we come to treat of the “ Moral Sense.” The
question at issue between the intuitionist and the upholder
of the doctrine of evolution is, not the present existence
in man of a sense of right or wrong, but whether that
sense is an original endowment of the species or has been
derived from experience. According to this school ight
*
and wrong are known as such in virtue of a divinely
implanted sense or faculty = soul or conscience; we
recognise the virtue of an action as we recognise the
presence of a colour, because we possess a special sense
* “ Eomola.”
�17
fitted for the task ; and it is impossible to furnish any
other reason why it should be so. Right and wrong are
immediately perceived by the mind as such, and there is
an end of the matter. .A plain and obvious comment
upon this position is that the intuitions of men are
neither uniform nor infallible in their judgments.
Instead of finding, as the intuitional theory of morals
would lead us to expect, that moral judgments are every
where the same, we find them differing with race, age,
and even individuals. The only thing common to the
moral sense is that of passing judgment, or making a
selection of certain actions, and this much is altogether
inadequate for the purpose of the intuitionist. The
moral sense of one man leads him to murder his enemy ;
that of another to feed him ; in one age the moral sense
decrees that polygamy, death for heresy, witch burning,
and trial by combat are legitimate proceedings, and in
another age brands them as immoral. Obviously, if our
intuitions are to be regarded as trustworthy guides, there
is no reason why we should adopt one set of intuitions
more than another. All must be equally valuable or the
theory breaks down at the outset. If, however, we pro
nounce in favour of the intuitions of the cultured European
and against that of the savage, it must be because of a com
parison of the consequences of the different intuitions
upon human welfare ; and in this case the authority of
the moral sense as an arbitrary law-giver disappears.
If
the moral sense be ultimate, then our duty is to follow
its dictates. Any questioning of what the moral sense
decides to be right involves an appeal to some larger fact,
or to some objective guide. To arbitrarily select one
intuition out of many and label that and that only as good
is simply to set up another god in place of the one
dethroned. All moral growth implies the fallibility of
our intuitions, since such growth can only proceed by
correcting and educating our primary ethical impulses.
There is one point, however, which seems to have escaped
the notice of intuitionists, and that is, that the existence of
their own writings is a direct disproof of the truth of
their position. For if all men possessed such a faculty as it
is claimed they possess, its existence should be sufficiently
obvious as to command the assent of all; there could
exist no such questioning of the fact as to necessitate the
�18
existence of the proof offered. No man ever yet needed
to write a volume to prove that the sun gave light, or
that men experience feelings of pleasure and pain, and an
intuition that is co.extensive with humanity, which is not
reducible to experience, and which is the very ground
work of our moral judgments should be so obvious as to
be independent of all proof. The mere fact of it being
called into question is sufficient disproof of its existence.
But, as already said, the diversities of moral judgments
are fatal to the hypothesis. Press the intuitionist with the
question why he should prefer the intuition of one man
to that of another, and he is compelled to forsake his
original position and justify his selection upon the grounds
of the beneficial effects of one and the injurious effects
of the other; thus constituting experience as the final
court of appeal. The conclusion is, then, that neither the
theologian nor the intuitionist can avoid taking into con
sideration the effects of action in the formation of moral
judgments ; both of them when pressed are compelled to
fall back upon something outside their system to support
it; neither can justify himself without making an appeal
to that experience, which according to his hypothesis
is unnecessary and untrustworthy.
Turning now to the last of the three schools named—the
utilitarian—let us see if we can derive from it a satisfactory
standard of right and wrong. Practically the question has
already been answered in our examination of “the meaning
of morality,” where it was determined that moral actions
were such as led to an increase of life in length of days
and nobility of action ; but as this may be thought too
vague it becomes necessary to frame some more detailed
expression.
The essence of Utilitarianism may be stated in a sen
tence it asserts that “ actions are right in proportion as
they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to
produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is in
tended pleasure and the absence of pain ; by unhappiness
pain and the privation of pleasure. ” Act so as to ensure
*
the happiness of all around you, may be said to be the
one great precept of Utilitarianism. According to this
doctrine all things become of value only in so far as they
minister to the production of happiness, while the end of
*J. S. Mil), “ Utilitarianism ” p. 9.
�19
action is always the production of an agreeable or pleas
urable state of consciousness. The correctness of this
position admits of ample demonstration. Indeed, the
fact that happiness is the end contemplated by all is so
plain as to scarcely need proof, were it not that the means
to this end have by long association come to stand in con
sciousness as ends in themselves.
Yet a very little
analysis will show that each of the prudential or benevo
lent virtues must find their ultimate justification in their
tendency to increase happiness. As Mill says: “The
clearest proof that the table is here is that I see it ; and
the clearest proof that happiness is the end of action is
that all men desire it.” Upon every hand we are brought
face to face with the truth of this statement. It matters
little whether we take the honest man or the thief ; the
drunkard in his cups or the reformer in his study,
the one object that they have in common will be
found to be the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain. The difference between men does not consist in
the fact that the motives urging them to action are gener
ically different, they are not; the difference consists
rather in the kind of happiness sought after or the means
adopted to obtain it. As will presently be made clear,
feeling induces action at all timesand under all conditions.
The immediate cause of conduct is the desire to bring
into existence a pleasant state of consciousness or to subdue
a painful one—although there is plainly much diversity
in the pleasures sought after. The biological reason for
this pursuit of pleasure will be seen later ; but that the
tendency of actions to produce happiness is our sole reason
for classing them as good will be seen by imagining the
contrary to be the case. Suppose, to quote Mr. Spencer,
“ that gashes and bruises caused agreeable sensations, and
brought in their train increased power of doing work and
receiving enjoyment; should we regard assault in the
same manner as at present; or, suppose that self-mutila
tion, say by cutting off a hand, was both intrinsically
pleasant and furthered performance of the processes by
which personal welfare and the welfare of dependents is
achieved ; should we hold as now that deliberate injury
done to one’s own body is to be reprobated ; or again,
suppose that picking a man’s pocket excited in him joyful
emotions by brightening his prospects; would that theft
�20
be counted among crimes, as in existing law books and
moral codes ? In these extreme cases, no one can deny
that what we call the badness of actions is ascribed to
them solely for the reason that they entail pain, immediate
or remote, and would not be so ascribed did they entail
pleasure.”*
The difference between a selfish and an unselfish action
is not that in the latter case the feeling itself is absent—
this is never the case—the difference is that in a selfish
action a man’s happiness is in things confined to himself,
while in an unselfish action his happiness embraces the
happiness of others likewise. Does a man give away his
last shilling to one poorer than himself ; it is because he
escapes the greater pain of witnessing distress and not
relieving it. Does the martyr go to the stake in vindica
tion of his belief ?
It is because to hide those beliefs, to
profess a belief which he did not enjtertain, to play the
hypocrite and escape persecution by an act of smug con
formity, would be far more unbearable than any torment
that intolerence could inflict.
Whatever man does he acts so as to avoid a pain and
gain a pleasure ; and the function of the ethical teacher is
to train men to perform only those actions which eventu
ally produce the greatest and most healthful pleasures.
And let it not be imagined for a moment that in thus
reducing the distinction, between good and bad, to the
simpler elements of pleasure and pain, that we have
thereby destroyed all distinction between them. Far
from it. The perfume of the rose and the evil smell of
asafcetida remain as distinct as ever, even though we
reduce both to the vibrations of particles; and we shall
not cease to care for one and dislike the other on that
account. And so long as a distinction is felt between a
pleasurable and a painful sensation, so long will the
difference between good and bad remain clear and distinct;
it is a distinction that cannot disappear so long as life
exists.
A complete moral code is but a complete statement of
actions that are of benefit to self and society in terms of
pleasure and pain ; and, therefore, until we can cease to
distinguish between the two sets of feelings we can never
* “Data or Ethics,” sec. 2.
�21
cease to know the grounds of morality and to find a
sound basis for its sanctions.
Every individual then acts so as to avoid a pain or
cultivate a pleasure. A state of happiness to be realised
at some time and at some place, is an inexpugnable ele
ment in all estimates of conduct; is the end to which all
men are striving, no matter how they may differ in their
methods of achieving it. Unfortunately, such considera
tions, as have been pointed out. are disguised under such
phrases as “ Perfection,” “ Blessedness,” &c. And yet, to
quote Mr. Spencer once again, “ If it (Blessedness) is a
state of consciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three
states—painful, indifferent, or pleasurable,” and as no
one, I presume, will say that it is either of the first two,
we are driven to the conclusion, that after all, “ Blessed
ness ” is but another name for happiness.
Or take as an illustration of the same principle, a plea that
is sometimes put forward on behalf of self-denial, which,
it is urged, contravenes the principle of utility. It is
claimed that that conduct is highest which involves self
sacrifice. But, clearly, self-sacrifice, as self-sacrifice, has
little or nothing to commend it. The man who denied
himself all comfort, who continually “mortified the
flesh,” without benefiting any one by so doing, would be
regarded by all sane thinking people as little better than
a lunatic. The only possible justification f or self-sacrifice
is that the happiness of self in some future condition of
existence, or the happiness of society in the present, will
be rendered greater thereby. Even the fanatical religionist
indulging in acts of self-torture, is doing so in the full
belief that his conduct will bring him greater happiness
hereafter. So that once more we are brought back to the
same position, viz., that no individual can avoid taking
happiness in some form as the motive for and sanction of
his conduct.
Here, then, upon the widest possible review of human
conduct, we are warranted in asserting that the ultimate
criterion of the morality of an action is its tendency to
produce pleasurable states of consciousness. To speak of
an action as good or bad apart from the effect it produces
upon human life, is as absurd as to speak of colour apart
from the sense of sight. An action becomes good because
of its relation to a human consciousness, and apart from
�22
this relation its goodness disappears. As Spinoza says—
“We do not desire a thing because it is good, we call it
good because we desire it.”
This, then, is our test of the morality of an action—
will it result in a balance of painful feelings ? Then it
is bad. Will it produce a surplus of pleasurable ones ?
Then it is good,
But although, in ultimate analysis, to desire a thingand call it good, or the performance of an action
and call it moral, is merely another way of saying the
same thing, it by no means follows that all desires are to
be gratified merely because they exist. Nothing is plainer
than that the gratification of many desires would lead to
anything but beneficial results. Our desires need at all
times to be watched, controlled and educated. It is in
this direction that reason plays its part in the determin
ation of conduct.
Its function is, by the perception and
calculation of the consequences of actions, to so train the
feelings as to lead us eventually to gratify only such,
desires as will ultimately lead to individual and social
happiness.
And not only is it clear on analysis that the avoidance
of a painful state of consciousness or the pursuit of an
agreeable one, is the underlying motive for all our actions,
but it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise. An
ethical relation between ourselves and an object can never
be established by simple perception ; nor is perception
ever the immediate cause of action.
The immediate
cause of action is, as I have already said, feeling ; that is,
we associate pleasurable or painful feelings with an
object perceived, and shape our conduct in accordance
with past experience.
*
No abstract conception of life
and its duties could ever give rise to action, were
not such conduct closely associated with pleasant or
* May we not justly affirm, as we clearly perceive, that the intellectual
life does not supply the motive or impulse to action ; that the understand
ing or reason is not the cause of our outward actions, but that the desiresare? Our most effective energies spring from our most urgent needs. . .
The desire is the fundamental expression of the individual’s character. . ►.
In fact the power of the understanding is reflective and inhibitory,
being exhibited rather in the hindrance of passion-prompted action, and in
the guidance of our impulses, than in the instigation of conduct; its office
in the individual, as in the race is, as Comte systematically and emphati
cally pointed out, not to impart the habitual impulsion but deliberative.
—Maudesley, “ Physiology of Mind,” p. 357.
�23
painful feelings—as escaping censure, personal approba
tion or disapprobation, direct personal reward or punish
ment, or the admiration of our neighbours. We may
put the case briefly as follows : Every action consciously
performed aims at calling into existence a particular state
of consciousness. States of consciousness, so far as they
are the subjects of ethical judgments, are of two kinds—
agreeable and disagreeable, or pleasant and painful. The
former we desire to maintain, the latter to destroy. By
experience pleasurable feelings have become associated
with a particular object or the performance of a particular
action, and the possession of the object or the performance
of the action is the means by which such agreeable sensa
tions are revived It is upon this principle only that the
past can serve as a guide in the present; although the
past can never induce action, the future alone can do
this. Our conduct is necessarily based upon the belief
that the future will resemble the past, and that actions
which resulted in happiness in the past will have the
same effect in the future. If, then, the motive resulting
in action is the wish to revive and return some state of
consciousness, and if all states of consciousness are either
painful or pleasurable, and if it is further admitted that
pleasurable states are sought after and painful ones
avoided, then it becomes clear that the ideal state is one
in which pleasurable states only are experienced ; or, as
it is briefly described, a state of happiness.
And now having reached the conclusion that the pro
duction of a pleasurable feeling is the end of all our
actions, the question remaining to be answered is, “ why
should happiness be the end of action, what is it that
constitutes happiness, and what justification for the
pursuit of happiness is there to be found in a study of
the laws of life ? ”
Here we may be met with the remark that happiness is
an extremely variable factor, that it varies at different
times and with different individuals ; the happiness of the
drunkard or the debauchee is quite as real as the happi. ness of the philosopher, and therefore upon what grounds
do we class one as bad and the other as good ? The
drunkard may say, “ my conduct yields me pleasure,
while to imitate yours would prove extremely irksome
and painful, and therefore I prefer to keep on my present
�24
course in spite of all that may be said concerning other
sources of happiness, the beauty of which I am unable to
appreciate.” In what way, then, the evolutionist may be
asked, can we prove the drunkard to be in the wrong ?
This objection, although a fairly common one, yet repre
sents an entire misunderstanding of the utilitarian position.
Certainly pleasures of a special kind accompany such
actions as those named, for, as I have shown, conduct
must always be produced by feeling, and feeling always
aims at the one end ; but it is not by taking into con
sideration the immediate effects of actions only and
ignoring the remote ones that any sound conclusions
can be reached, this can only be done by combining both,
and when it is shown, and it will not be disputed, that
the immediate pleasures of the drunkard carry with them
as final results a long train of miseries in the shape of
ruined homes, shattered constitutions, and general social
evils, we have shown that these actions are not such as
produce ultimate happiness, and therefore have no valid
claim to the title of good.
But waiving the discussion of such objections as these,
the problem facing us is, “granting that the end of action
is as stated, in what way can we identify what is with
what ought to be ; or how can it be shown that actions
which rightly viewed yield happiness and actions that
preserve life are. either identical or tend to become so ? ”
This question, it is clear, can only be thoroughly answered
by determining the physiological and psychological con
ditions of happiness.
The incentives to action, it has been shown, is the desire
to call into existence, or to drive out of being a particular
state of consciousness. All changes in consciousness are
brought about either by sensations directly experienced,
or by the remembrance of sensations previously ex
perienced. We receive sensations by means of what are
called faculties—including under that term both organ
and function. Of a certain number of possible sensations
some are pleasant, others are unpleasant; the former we
seek, the latter we shun; and the desire to revise the
agreeable states of feeling is the immediate motive for all
our actions. A pleasurable feeling, then, results from the
*
* To say that we seek the revival of a disagreeable feeling would be a
contradiction in terms.
�25
exercise of our energies in a particular direction ; the ques
tion is, in what direction ? It is in answering this question
that Mr. Spencer has made one of his most important con
tributions to ethical science, and thereby placed the utilitar
ian theory of morals upon a thoroughly scientific footing.
Clearly, the indiscriminate exercise of our faculties, or
the promiscuous gratification of our desires, will not lead
to ultimate happiness. Apart from the existence in our
selves of desires which being either of a morbid character,
or survivals from times when the conditions of life were
different, and the gratification of which would therefore be
looked upon as anything but desirable ; even the exercise
of what may be termed legitimate desires needs to be care
fully watched and regulated. Indeed a large part of
wrong doing results, not from the existence of a faculty,
but from its misdirection; an intemperate gratification
of desires that, rightly directed, would yield but good.
No one, for example, would condemn the desire of people
to “ make a name,” a perfectly legitimate and even laud
able aspiration ; yet, owing to the method adopted, there
are few desires that lead to greater wrong doing.
Again, over indulgence in any pursuit, as in over eating,
over studying, or over indulgence in physical exercise, is
likely to lead to extremely injurious results. And equally
significant are the pains—cravings—that result from too
little exercise in any of these directions. If, therefore,
conduct that approaches either extreme leads to painful
results, the implication is that a pleasurable state of
consciousness is the accompaniment of actions that lie
midway between the two. But actions that leave behind
naught but a diffused feeling of pleasure, imply that the
body has received just that amount of exercise necessary
to maintain it in a state of well being, and are, therefore,
healthful actions; or in other words, pleasure—using that
term in the sense given to it above—will result from the
exercise of each organ of the body up to that point
necessary to maintain the entire organism in a healthy
condition. Concerning the quantity of exercise required
no hard and fast rule can be laid down, it will differ with
each individual, and even with the same individual at
different times, the amount of exercise necessary to keep
one man in a state of health would kill another, and vice
versa.
�26
Thus, from a biological standpoint we may define
happiness as a state of consciousness resulting from the
exercise of every organ of the body and faculty of the mind,
up to that point requisite to secure the well being of the
entire organism; and from the psychological side, the
gratification of all such desires as lead to this result. Now
if this be admitted as true, it follows that pleasure
producing actions and pain-producing actions are, in the
long run the equivalents of life preserving and life
destroying actions respectively ; that as Spencer says,
“ Every pleasure raises the tide of life ; and every pain
lowers the tide of life,’’ or as Professor Bain has it—“ States
of pleasure are connected with an increase, and states of
pain with an abatement of some, or all, of the vital
functions ; ” * and therefore to say .that the tendency of an
action to produce happiness is the ultimate test of its
morality, is simply saying in effect that that conduct is
moral which leads to a lengthening and broadening of
life.
And not only is this the conclusion reached by an
examination of animal life as it now is, but it is a con
clusion logically deducible from the hypothesis of
evolution and the laws of life in general. The connection
between pain and death, and happiness and life, is too
deeply grounded in general language and thought not to
have some foundation in fact. The general accuracy of
this connection is witnessed by all physiologists and
medical men, the latter of whom readily recognise how
importantian element is cheerfulness in a patient’s recovery,
while the former demonstrates that pain lowers and
pleasure raises the general level of life.
And upon no other condition could life have developed
upon the earth. As has been pointed out, actioii springs
directly from feeling and seeks to obtain pleasure either
immediately or remotely ; therefore, unless the pleasures
pursued are such as will preserve life the result is
extinction.
Imagine for example that life-destroying
actions produced pleasurable sensations—that is a state of
consciousness that animals sought to bring into existence
and retain—that bodily wounds, impure foods, and
exhausting pursuits generally, yielded nothing but
pleasure, and would, therefore, be performed eagerly,
* “ Senses and the Intellect,” p. 283.
�27
it is obvious that such a state of things would cause a
rapid disappearance of life altogether. Illustrations of
this may be readily found in individual instances, for
example, opium eaters or excessive drinkers, but it is
clear that such habits could not maintain themselves for
long upon a general scale. Something of the same thing
may even be seen in the case of lower races, that, coming
in contact with European culture and finding pleasure in
the performance of actions suitable to their past life but
unsuitable to their present one, have become extinct.
Thus, as Mr. Spencer puts it. “ At the very outset, life is
maintained by persistence in acts which conduce to it,
and desistence from acts which impede it; and whenever
sentiency makes its appearance as an accompaniment, its
forms must be such that in the one case the produced,
feeling is of a kind that will be sought—pleasure, and in
the other case is of a kind that will be shunned—pain.” *
And again, “ Those races of beings only can have survived
in which, on the average, agreeable or desired feelings
went along with activities conducive to the maintenance
of life, while disagreeable and habitually-avoided feelings
went along with activities directly or indirectly destruc
tive of life; and there must have been, other things being
equal, the most numerous and long-continued survivals
among races in which these adjustments of feelings to
actions were the best, tending ever to bring about perfect
adjustment.” f The answer, therefore, to the question,
“Why should we pursue happiness ? ” is, that we cannot
do otherwise and live. Pursuit of happiness, properly
understood, means conformity to those conditions that
render a continued and healthful life possible. The final
and ultimate reason for performing any action is that a
special desire exists urging me to do so, and the reason
for the existence of that desire must be sought for in
deeper ground than consciousness—which is relatively a
late product in biologic evolution. It is to be found in
those laws of life to which all living beings must conform,
and to which natural selection, by weeding out all of a
contrary disposition, secures an intrinsic or organic com
pliance. Morality is evidenced in action before it is
explained in thought ; its justification, the causes of its
* “ Data of Ethics.”, sec. 33.
+ “ Principles of Psychology,” Vol. i. sec. 128.
�28
growth, and the nature of its authority, are to be found
in the natural conditions of existence, and depends no
more upon the presence of a mysterious self-realising ego
than upon a conception of God furnished by current or
future theologies. It is a false and ruinous antithesis
that places virtue and happiness as two things distinct
from each other.
Virtue has no meaning other than
can be expressed in terms of pleasure ; as Spinoza said,
“ Happiness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself.”
The utilitarian formula that actions are right which
promote pleasure, and wrong which promote pain receives,
therefore, the fullest possible justification from an ex
amination of the laws of life. Highet authority than that
can no system have.
The various steps of the above argument may now be
recapitulated.
(1) Conduct is always immediately dependent upon
feeling.
(2) The immediate object will be to invite agreeable,
and obviate or modify disagreeable states of consciousness.
(3) Therefore, unless there is a general agreement
between conduct that preserves life and conduct that
produces agreeable feelings, the race must die out; while
life will increase in length and breadth as that general
agreement becomes explicit and complete.
(4) But in the course of evolution the inevitable result
is the weeding out of all such organisms as pursue life
destroying acts with pleasure, and there is thus produced
a gradual identification between the performance of life
preserving actions and the production of agreeable states
■of consciousness
It is in supplying us with these generalisations that the
•doctrine of evolution has placed morality upon a perfectly
secure and impregnable foundation, and ethics upon the
same level as other departments of scientific knowledge.
It makes morality incumbent upon the individual and
society alike by showing its identity with those processes
that make life worth living. That at present many find
pleasure in the performance of actions that lower the tide
of life, does not militate against the truth of the doctrine
.stated above. We are in a transitional state, partly
military and partly industrial, we have clinging to us
many traces of the savagery, from which we are just
�29
emerging, and there is necessarily a conflict between
many of our inherited instincts and present ideals. But
there can be little doubt that this conflict between what is
and what should be will decrease as the course of
evolution proceeds ; until becoming weaker by disuse,
the lower and undesirable instincts shall have finally
disappeared. Meanwhile a scientific ethic should do
precisely what a law of astronomy or of biology does—
describe what takes place and explain how it takes place.
Astronomical and biological laws give nothing new, they
merely formulate in comprehensible terms what takes
place in their separate departments. The function of a
science of ethics is, similarly, to describe accurately the
actions of men and why and how such actions take place ;
to trace the causes of morality, to formulate the con
ditions and nature of perfect conduct, and leave such
rules to be put into operation as rapidly as wisdom may
devise or circumstances permit.
IV.—The Nature and Authority of Conscience.
It may be asked, “ If the foregoing account of the
nature of morality is admitted to be correct, what becomes
of the authority of conscience ? Is it merely a name, or is
it, as the ordinary man believes, a divinely implanted
faculty enabling one to distinguish finally and decisively
between a right and a wrong action ? ‘ Ordinary experi
ence,’ it may further be said, ‘ shows that men do not
determine the rightness or wrongness of actions by any
mathematical calculation as to the pains or pleasures
resulting from them, but rather by a direct appeal to
conscience, and when conscience declares in favor of or
against a particular course of conduct there is no more to
be said upon the matter.
“ Upon this hypothesis man does right for pretty much
the same reason that a dog ‘ delights to bark and bite,’
because ‘ ’tis his nature to.’
Now, there is in the presentation of the case a certain
amount of truth, but it is entangled with a much larger
amount of error. For example, no one denies the exis
tence in man of a moral sense now ; all our language pre
supposes its existence. Neither is it denied that men are
swayed by the dictates of what is called ‘ Conscience.’
As Mill says:—‘The ultimate sanction of all morality is a
�30
subjective feeling in our minds.” A man will act as his
conscience directs, and provided that he has fulfilled
certain preliminary conditions, we hold that he is right in
doing so. The phrase—‘A conscientious man ’ has quite
as definite a meaning to the Utilitarian as to the Intuit
ionist. It is in the carrying out of these preliminary
conditions—i.e. instructing, checking, and improving our
conscience, comparing its deliverance with the deliverance
of that of others—upon which the dispute mainly turns.
The question really at issue is not the existence of a
moral sense, but whether this moral sense is always trust
worthy in its decisions ; whether it does not need to be
constantly checked and corrected ; and whether instead
of beiug a single indecomposable faculty it may not be
resolved into simpler parts, as a chemical compound is
shown to be made up of a number of simpler elements ?
This is substantially the whole of the matter in dispute
between the evolutionist and the intuitionist. The latter
regards the moral sense as innate and virtually indepen
dent of experience ; the former asserts that it has been
built up from much simpler feelings acquired during the
development of the race, and that examination proves
that, just as a single nerve centre is composed of clusters
of ganglia, which are again composed of fibres and cells,
so the apparently simple moral sense is really a highly
complex process, due to the gradual accumulation of the
experiences of simpler sensations acquired during ages of
past evolution. It would, indeed, be quite possible to
take successively all the vices and virtues upon which our
present moral sense passes a rapid and decisive verdict,
and show how gradually each feeling of approval and
disapproval has been built up. There is, for example,
no action upon which the moral sense of the cultured
European passes such a ready condemnation as the taking
of life. And yet it is quite certain that this special feeling
of aversion is a- comparitively late product in human
evolution. With many of the lower races the wrongness
of taking human life is confined almost entirely to the
family—and not always there; but within the tribe
personal vengeance is permitted, and even when that is
disallowed by public opinion the murder of the member
of another tribe only serves to exalt the murderer in the
eyes of his fellows. In the dark ages a man’s life was
�31
valued in an inverse ratio to his social importance, and
the church drew up a scale of punishments in accordance
with that estimate, murder of an ecclesiastic being
punished by torture and death, that of a serf by a fine of
a few pence. Even in modern civilised Europe, hundreds
or thousands of lives may be shed to satisfy political
passion or national vanity ; and only in the higher types
of the race is there a lively and constant repugnance to
the taking of life, whether if friend or foe. Indeed, the
fact that moral sense is acquired and not innate appears
on reflection, to be so plain as to cause some little surprise
that the opposite opinion should ever have been seriously
entertained for any length of time.
But apart from the historical aspect of the subject,
what we are more directly concerned with here is the
nature of those conditions which have resulted in the
growth of conscience. It would take too long to discuss
fully the nature of consciousness—even if it were not a
matter of psychology rather than of ethics—but we may
put the matter briefly in the following manner :—
Reflex action is of two kinds ; the first, irritability, is
due to the simple excitation of a piece of living matter,
and is shared by all living tissue wherever it may be
found. In virtue of this quality the organism responds
to certain stimuli and shrinks from others; and it is
plain that unless the stimuli to which the organism
responds are such as are beneficial the result will be death.
The second class of reflex actions is that in which actions
have become instinctive by frequent repetition. It is a
matter of common observation that any action frequently
performed tends to become organic, or instinctive : that
is, a purposive action is preceded by certain molecular
rearrangements in the fibres and cells, and centres of the
brain ; a repetition of the action means a repetition of the
disturbance; and by the frequent recurrence of such
rearrangements there is set up a line of least resistance
along which the nervous energy flows, with the final
result of a modification of nerve tissue, and the existence
of a structure which in response to a certain stimulus acts
automatically in a particular manner. “ The order of
events/’ says Maudesley, is presumably in this wise :
by virtue of its fundamental adaptive property as
organic matter, nerve-element responds to environing
�32
relations by definite action ; this action, when repeated
determines structure ; and thus by degrees new structure,
or—what it really is—a new organ is formed, which
embodies in its substance and displays in its function
the countless generalisations, so to speak, or ingredients
of experience, which it has gained from past and contri
butes to present stimulation,” * Now the mental side of
this physical acquirement expresses itself in the principle
known as the association of ideas. When in the course
of experience a certain set of ideas is constantly occurring
in the same order, the revival of any one of the term
will bring about a revival of the remainder of the series.
As illustrative of this we may note how when any par
ticular object is presented to the mind, as for example an
orange, the mind calls up the associated sensations of
taste and smell, neither of which is immediately presented
to it; and there may even be present the idea of certain
injurious or beneficial effects following the easing of the
fruit. Here it is evident the secondary sensations are
revived because they have always accompanied the primary
one, and it is clear that the mind has gone over a chain of
causes and effects, although we may not be conscious—
indeed we seldom are—of all the steps intervening
between the first and last term of the series. But to any
one who pays attention to the working of the mind it is
obvious that this power of rapid summing-up has been
acquired very gradually, and that what the mind now
does rapidly and decisively, it once did slowly and
hesitatingly; just as the firm steps of the man are pre
ceded by the faltering steps of the child, or the rapid
adding up of columns of figures by the trained accountant
becomes a long and wearisome process in the hands of
the amateur.
Now the verdict passed upon action by the moral sense
is merely another illustration of the same general principle.
Just as we have learned to associate a certain number of
qualities with an object the moment it is perceived, so we
have acquired by experience, individual or social,
the habit of associating a balance of pleasures or pains
with a particular action or course of conduct, even when
an entirely opposite conclusion is immediately presented
to the mind. Apart from certain actions which give rise
♦“Physiology
of
Mikd,” p. 397.
�33
to painful or pleasurable feelings as long as their effects
endure, experience has shown that certain actions while
directly painful are ultimately pleasurable, while others
immediately pleasurable are ultimately painful. This
experience has been repeated so frequently that the desire
attaching to the end has become transferred to the means :
as in the case of a man who begins by loving money because
of its purchasing power, and ends by loving it for itself,
the means to an end becomes thus all in all. Thus, the
means and the end become jammed together, so to speak,
in thought, and the mind having in view the after results
of an action, passes an instantaneous judgment upon it.
A trained biologist will draw from a very few facts a
conclusion which is by no means apparent to the untrained
mind ; long experience has familiarised him with the
process, and the conclusion suggests itself immediately to
the mind ; and one might as well postulate an innate
biological sense to account for the one process as postulate
an innate moral sense to account for the other.
The existence of a moral sense in man is simply an
illustration of the physiological law that functions slowly
acquired and painfully performed become registered in a
modified nerve structure, and are handed on from
generation to generation to be performed automatically or
to take their place as moral instincts.
Two things have prevented people seeing this clearly,
first, the problem has been treated as being purely psycho
logical, and, secondly, moral qualities have been viewed
as innate instead of acquired, and the question of develop
ment consequently ignored. Both of these causes have
helped to confuse rather than to clear. Underlying all
mental phenomena there is and must be a corresponding
physical structure; and it is only by carrying our
enquiries further and studying this physical structure
that we may hope to understand those mental qualities,
feelings, or emotions to which it gives rise, and, secondly,
it is not by contemplating the moral instincts of man as
they are to-day that we can hope to understand them.
This can be done only by reducing them to their simpler
elements and carefully studying the causes and conditions
of their origin and development. And when we analyse
the contents of our moral judgments, we find precisely
what the hypothesis of evolution would lead us to expect,
�34
namely, the majority of such actions as it sanctions are
found in the light of sober reason to be conducive to
individual and social welfare, while such as it condemns
are of a directly opposite character.
The decisions of the moral judgment are thus neither
more nor less than verdicts upon conduct expressed by
the summed-up experience of the race; and although such
judgments carry with them undoubted authority in virtue
of their origin, they, nevertheless need to be constantly
watched over and corrected when necessary. For, granting
that a certain presumption exists in favour of a verdict
passed by “ conscience,”—since it argues the possession of
a mental habit acquired by experience, and which would
never have been acquired had not such conduct as led to
its formation been once useful,—such verdicts cannot be
admitted to be final; for nothing is of commoner occur
rence than to find that habits and customs that are useful
at one stage of human development are dangerous at
others.
All that the existence of a moral instinct can prove
beyond doubt is that it was once useful, whether it is
useful now or not is a matter to be decided by ordinary
experience and common sense. A function owes its
value to its relation to a particular environment, and
therefore can only retain its worth so long as the condi
tions of life remain unchanged ; any alteration in the
condition of existence must involve a corresponding
change in the value of a function or in that cluster of
moral tendencies classed under the general name of
“ conscience.” While, therefore, conscience may urge us
to take action in a particular direction, it cannot give us
any guarantee that we are acting rightly. All that we can
be certain of is the existence of a feeling prompting a
particular action, and with that our certainty ends. To
discover whether the dictates of conscience are morally
justifiable we need to appeal to a higher court. The voice
of conscience is, as experience daily shows, neither uni
form nor infallible in its decrees ; its decisions vary not
only with time, place, and individual, but even with the
same individual at different times and under different con
ditions. In brief “acting up to one’s conscience,” to
use a common phrase, is indicative of honesty only,
not of correctness, it can mean merely that we
�35
are acting in accordance with certain feelings of
approbation or disapprobation that have been called
into existence during the evolution of the race and by
the early moral training of the individual. Nothing
is plainer than that the conscience needs correction
and admits of improvement; the fact of moral growth
implies as much, and this alone should be sufficient to
prove that conscience is an acquired and not an original
activity.
That conscience represents the stored up and consoli
dated experiences of preceding generations, subject of
course to the early training of the individual, there can
be little doubt. Given living tissue capable of responding
to certain stimuli and shrinking from others, and we
have the raw material of morality; for the only tissue
that can continue to exist will be such as responds to
stimuli favourable to its existence and shrinks from such
as are unfavourable. The reverse of this it is impossible
to conceive. Once the conditions under which life
persists becomes fairly understood, and the above con
clusion becomes almost a necessity of thought. There is
thus secured from the outset a general harmony between
actions instinctively performed and life-preserving ones;
and natural selection by preserving the lives of those
animals whose actions serve to establish the closest
harmony between themselves and their environment
serves to accentuate the formation of such habits as
render the performance of life-preserving actions certain
and instinctive. This feeling of moral approbation is, as
I have already said, not the only example of the principle
here emphasised, viz. : that separate and successive
acquisitions become so blended together as to form an
apparently single faculty. It is exemplified alike in the
skilled mathematician and the trained mechanic, and is,
indeed, co-extensive with the world of sentient life.
From monad to man progress has meant the acquisition
of such habits—physical, mental, and moral, Our moral
equally with our intellectual faculties have been built up
gradually during the course of human development. We
each start life with a certain mental and moral capital
that comes to us as a heritage from the past. Functions
that took generations to acquire are found as parts of our
structure, and their exercise has become an organic
�36
necessity.
Frequent repetition has converted certain
actions into habits ; physiologically these habits imply the
existence of a modified nerve structure demanding their
performance ; while mentally and morally such structures
and functions express themselves in the much debated
and misunderstood, moral sense.
V.—Society and the Individual.
In the foregoing pages morality has been dealt with
almost exclusively from the standpoint of the individual;
I have purposely omitted certain factors that aid moral
development in order that fundamental ethical principles
might not be obscured. I have shown the groundwork
of morality to lie in the very constitution of organic
matter; and that rules of ethics are merely generalized
statements of those courses of conduct which serve to
establish a harmony between organism and environment,
or, in other words, to maintain life.
Yet it must be evident to the student that one very im
portant factor—the social factor—must be considered if
our system is to btf complete. The influence of society in
developing morality must, it is plain, be considerable ;
for although the reason for right conduct, and the motives
that lead to it, must ultimately be found in the nature of
the individual, yet, if we seek for a full explanation of
the individual’s character, we must be referred back again
to the structure of that society of which he is a part. For
at bottom, the only reason why each individual should
possess a certain number of moral qualities of a particular
character, is that he belongs to a society that has developed
along special lines. The individual, as he is to-day, is a
product of the race, and would no more be what he is
apart from social organization, than society could be what
it is apart from the individuals that compose it. Each
quality or action is good or bad in virtue of its adaptation
or non-adaptation to an environment ; and to speak of
goodness or badness apart from such relations is to use
words that are void of all meaning. From whence do
such words as “honest,” “justice,” “duty,” Ac., derive
their significance if not from the relations existing between
the individual and his fellows ? Place a man upon a
desert island, and what becomes of ariy of these qualities ?
All moral conduct requires a medium ; in this case society
�37
is the medium in which morality lives and breathes ; and
it could no more continue without it than a bird could fly
without the atmosphere. The proof of this is seen in the
fact that any disturbance in the social structure involves a
corresponding change in the relationships of men and
women. All periods of change, religious or social, have
influenced for better or worse existing ethical institutions
and ideas, and few will doubt that should any great econ
omic change occur to-day there would ensue a speedy
re-arrangement of moral ideals.
*
It is therefore in the structure and development of the
social organism that we must seek for an explanation of
existing moral principles ; by this method only can we
understand how it is possible to obtain from a race of
beings, each of which is primarily moral by the instinct
of self-preservation, a social morality.
The general
manner in which this result has been attained has been
already indicated, but it remains to trace out the process
in greater detail.
In his profoundly suggestive book, “ Physics and
Politics,’’ Bagshot has pointed out that the great problem
early society had to face was, “ how to bend men to the
social yoke,” to domesticate him in short. Man untrained
and savage needed to have his energies checked, his im
pulses educated, and the whole of his nature practically
transformed before he could become either social or ethical.
A number of forces, natural, religious, social and political,
have contributed to bring about the desired result; and
although they overlap one another, still it is easy to deter
mine their position and approximate value.
Not to reckon with the possession of certain fundamental
life-preserving instincts, which are an inevitable product
■of the struggle for existence, and which must be the
common property of all sentient being, the struggle
against natural forces must early have driven men into
the adoption of additional life-preserving courses of con
duct. The conduct that furthered a fuller life may not
have been consciously adopted, but from the fact that all
who did not adopt it would disappear, its performance
would be rendered tolerably certain. Further, even were
not social organisation a heritage from man’s animal
* The fact of a movement of change proceeding from an ethical impulse
in no way affects this statement.
�38
ancestors, the struggle against nature would soon havedriven man into co-operation with his fellows. The
advantages of combination are too great not to give those
who are more amenable to the restraints of social life a
tremendous advantage over such as are not. The cohesion
and discipline of a tribe would be of far-greater importance
in the primitive than in the modern state. Natural selec
tion would, therefore, work along the lines of favouring
the preservation of the more social type of character. In
a tribe where some of its members showed but little in
clination to work with their fellows or submit to the
discipline laid down, such individuals would be weeded
out by a dual process. They would fall easy victims to
the tribal enemies, and the type would be discouraged by
public opinion. They would thus leave few or no des
cendants to perpetuate their qualities ; and by this dual
process of elimination the type would tend to die out,
and there would be gradually formed in its place one that
to some extent regarded individual and general welfare
as being inextricably blended. But this living together
necessarily implies the existence and cultivation of certain
sentiments and virtues that are not purely self-regarding.
If people are to live together and work together, there
must of necessity be some sense of duty, justice, confi
dence and kindness, let it be in ever so rudimentary a.
form; but these virtues must be present, or society disin
tegrates. Without confidence there could be no combina
tion, and without justice combination would be useless.
But the great thing in the first stage is to get the indi
vidual to obey the voice of the tribe and submit to its
judgments; and so long as a quality brings this end about
it is of service. It is in this direction that the fear of
natural forces, represented by early religions, and fear of
the chief as the representative of the gods on earth, have
played their part in domesticating man. The chief and
the priest both dictated and enforced certain lines of
conduct; where the conduct enjoined gave the tribe an
advantage over its competitors, it flourished ; where the
conduct enforced was of an opposite character, it was
either altered or the race went under in the struggle. So
that here again there would be brought about an identifi
cation of habitual and life-preserving conduct. The
discipline thus enforced was stern, the after results were
�39
disastrous, but it was useful then ; and, as Bagehot says,
“ Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early
food had not been the late poison.”
Mr. Francis Galton has shown that a want of self*
reliance has been of great benefit to many species of
animals, inasmuch as it led to their presenting a united front
to an enemy that could not have been successfully resisted
by any other means; and undoubtedly, as he proceeds to
argue, a too great tendency to break away from custom
and initiate movements on one’s own responsibility, would
at the outset destroy whatever social life existed. Of
course these coercive forces by means of which man is
first domesticated, are not altogether consciously directed
or invented ; it cannot be said that any man invented a
custom, although it may be said humanity invented them.
Custom among savage races will grow out of the most
trifling circumstances or coincidences. Many customs
rise up and die out, and eventually out of a multitude
that are tried only a few survive; pretty much as out of
a number of seeds that may be scattered only those strike
root that find themselves amid favourable conditions.
The first step, then, in the growth of the state and
morality, is for each individual to recognise that living
with others implies that all his impulses shall not be
gratified promiscuously ; that it is wrong to go against the
expressed opinion of the tribe, or, better still, that his
interests are in some mysterious manner vitally connected
with the interests of the whole. This is secured, primarily, by the operation of natural selection, later by
conscious innovation ; the sphere of self unconsciously
extends until it takes in the whole of which the individual
is but a part. But apart even from those influences which
serve to foster moral feelings, the existence of family life
gives us a very definite point from which to commence
our investigations. It has been made pretty clear by
numerous investigators that the genesis of the state is to be
found in the family. From that it passes by natural
growth through the patriarchal and tribal stages to the
nation ; and therefore one must seek in the structure of the
family for the beginnings of much that is afterwards
expressed in the tribe.
*" Human Faculty,” pp. 70-79.
�40
The young human being has a longer period of infancy
and helplessness than any other animal. For several years
its existence, and consequently the existence of the species,
is dependent upon the unselfish feelings of others.
*
The family is, therefore, a much more powerful influence
in the moulding of the human character, than it is with
other animals, and it is consequently in the family that we
must look for the first clear outline of the social virtues.
Most of the virtues that are not purely self-regarding will,
I imagine, be found to have had their origin in this source.
Here must first have found clear expression the virtues of
forbearance, kindness, and a certain rough sense of justice.
The sense of justice is however very slight, being little
more than the arbitrary dictates of the head of the family,
a condition of things that lingers even when the family
has blossomed into the tribe. Still the main point to be
noted is that it is in the family that the individual is first
brought into constant relationship with creatures similar
to himself ; these others constitute a part, a very important
part of his environment, and he is necessarily compelled to
adjust his actions accordingly. It has been shown above
that “ Goodness ” consists essentially in a relation—the
maintenance of a balance between an organism and its
environment. Whether that environment be organic or
inorganic the principle remains the same, although in the
former case the influence of the environment is clearer and
more direct. As, however, in the family the surroundings
of each unit is partly made up of similar units, and,
further, as the medium of each is tolerably uniform,
adjustment will involve here (1) development along pretty
similar lines, and (2) adjustment in such a manner, that
the welfare of all the units becomes in some measure bound
up with and identical with that of each. Each one is
affected in somewhat similar manner by the same
influence, and the presence of pain in any member of the
family gives rise to similar representative feelings in self.
In this circumstance we find the beginning of sympathy
which plays such a large part in evolved conduct, and
which consists essentially in the process sketched above.
The next expansion of self occurs when the family
* I adopt the conventional terms here, but the precise meaning to be
attached to the words “Selfish” and “ Unselfish,” will be considered
later.
�41
developes into the tribe or state. Here the relations of
man become more varied, the interests wider; and the
constant clashing of interests renders necessary the
framing of laws for the general guidance. What had
already taken place in the family now takes place in the
state, a re-adjustment must be effected in order to establish
a more satisfactory relation between the individual and
the new environment. In particular, the ideas of justice
and duty must undergo a great expansion and elevation.
But even here the demands of right conduct are strictly
limited to the tribe; duties and obligations have no
reference to outsiders. Very plainly is this shown in the
Bible, “ Thou shalt not steal ” did not mean the Israelites
were not to “ spoil the Egyptians,” nor “ Thou shalt not
bear false witness ” mean that they were to be truthful to
their enemies; nor did the command “ Thou shalt not
commit murder” prevent the Jews putting to death the
people whose lands they had invaded. Virtue here was
purely local. It was not until a much later stage of human
development, when the tribe had grown into the state,
and the expansion of the state had given rise to a com
munity of nations with a oneness of interest running
through all, that the idea of virtue as binding alike upon
all was finally reached ; although we have still lingering
much of the tribal element in that narrow patriotism
which finds expression in the maxim, “ My country, right
or wrong.”
In the history of Rome we can trace these various stages
with tolerable clearness. One can watch Rome developing
from the patriarchal stage to the tribal, thence to the
nation, and finally to the world-wide Empire with its far
reaching consequences. At each of these stages we can
discern a corresponding development in moral ideals.
Confined at first to the tribe, morality grew until it
absorbed the nation ; and finally its universal dominion
involved as a necessity rules of ethics that should press
with equal force upon all, and which expressed itself
generally in the doctrine of human brotherhood. As
Lecky says, “ The doctrine of the universal brotherhood
of mankind was the manifest expression of those social
and political changes which reduced the whole civilised
globe to one great empire, threw open to the most distant
tribes the right of Roman citizenship, and subverted all
�42
those class distinctions around which moral theories had
been formed.” *
It is by such natural and gradual steps as those outlined
above that morality has developed. Its rise is upon
precisely the same level as that of the arts and sciences.
Given living tissue and the struggle for existence, and a
moral code of some sort is the inevitable result. Just as
inventions grew out of individual needs, so morality grew
out of social necessities. One feature in the process of
development is clear, and that is that the expansion of
moral theories, and their purification, has at each step
been dependent upon an expansion of the organic
environment. As this grew wider and more intricate
there was necessitated a re-adjustment of moral ideas.
Feelings that at first applied only to the family were
afterwards extended to the tribe, then to the nation, and
lastly, as a recognition of a oneness of interest indepen
dent of nationality began to dawn upon the human
reason, to the whole of humanity.
I have endeavoured to make this process of develop
ment as plain as possible by keeping clear of many con
siderations which, while bearing upon the subject, were not
altogether essential to its proper consideration. Yet, it is
obvious, that if the above outline be admitted as sub
stantially correct, the relation of the individual and society
is put in a new light; it is no longer the attributes of a
number of independent objects that we have to deal with,
but the qualities of an organism; and hence will result
very important modifications in the use of terms and in
the structure of our moral ideals.
In the first place the arbitrary division hitherto drawn
between self-regarding and social acts can no longer be
maintained, or at least not without serious modification.
The distinction usually drawn between self-regarding and
social conduct, although valuable enough for working
purposes, cannot be an ultimate distinction. It can mean
no more at bottom than the division of mind into emotion,
volition, and thought. Man’s moral, mental, and physical
nature forms a unity, and all divisions that may be made
are divisions erected to suit our conveniences and not such
as exist in nature. As the individual is an integral portion
Hist. European Morals. Ed. 1892. I. 340.
�43
of society, is indeed a product of social activity, his actions
have necessarily a double aspect, his fitness as an individual
determines his value in the social structure, and con
versely the perfection of the structure has a vital bearing
upon his own value ; and therefore although we may fix
our minds upon one portion of his conduct to the exclusion
of the other, such a state of things no more exists in
reality than the Euclidean line without breadth, or a point
without magnitude.
But it does not follow that because the distinction
usually drawn between the two classes of actions is
inaccurate that there is, therefore, no such thing as
gratifying individual preference at the cost of injury to
others. That is by no means the case. The important
thing is having a correct understanding of the sense- in
which the terms are used.
It has, I think, been made clear that however it may be
disguised the main end of the action is always the pursuit
of pleasure or the avoidance of pain; and therefore,
unless we choose to confuse ourselves with what Bentham
called “ question begging epithets,” it is plain that a man
can only desire the well-being of others in so far as their
happiness becomes in some manner bound up with his
own.
This result is brought about by two methods :
directly, by the growth of the sympathetic feelings which
makes the sight of suffering painful, and indirectly
through the desire of the good opinion and friendship of
those with whom we are living. Sympathy, although not
so important as many have imagined it to be, is yet an
extremely potent factor in moral evolution. Indeed, sym
pathy, which may be defined as the process of presenting
to the mind the pleasures and pains endured by others,
and making them our own, so to speak, is involved in the
very nature of knowledge and in the structure of society.
Social life is impossible, bearing in mind our fundamental
maxim, unless animals find some amount of pleasure in
the mere fact of being together. Were it otherwise there
would be disunion. This simpler form of sympathy
quickly gives rise to other forms of a much more complex
character. Beside the general circumstance that creatures
living amid the same general set of conditions come to
have nearly identical feelings aroused by similar stimuli,
it is obvious that a large part of the value of gregarious
�44
ness will depend upon the ability of certain individuals
to arouse by their actions feelings of a desired kind in
others. A member of a herd of animals scenting a special
danger, excites by its actions sympathetic feelings on the
part of the other members, thus enabling them to prepare
for defence in a similar manner. Otherwise the warning
that is given on the approach of danger would be of little
or no value. Thus, the development of a society involves
a capacity of entering into the pleasures and pains of
others ; and this power is further heightened by those
social sanctions which prescribe and enforce certain lines
of conduct—sanctions which are much more powerful in
primitive societies than in modern ones, owing to the
smaller individuality of its members.
The distinction, therefore, between a selfish and an
unselfish act is not that in the latter case egoistic feelings
have no place; this would be impossible ; it is simply
that in the evolution of society a transfusion of the
egoistic feelings occurs owing to which their distinctive
features are lost, pretty much as the special properties of
a number of elements are lost when merged into a
chemical compound. In the conflict of mutual self
regarding interests a number of re-adjustments and
compromises occur, until the result assumes a different
character from that presented by the individual elements.
The discussion about egoism and altruism has, as a result
of ignoring these considerations, been largely a barren one.
It is impossible to live for others unless one lives for self,
it is equally impossible to live wisely for self and ignore
duties to others. Therefore, as Maudesley says, “It is
not by eradication but by a wise direction of egoistic
passions, not by annihilation but by utilisation of them, that
progress in social culture takes place ; and one can only
wonder at the absurdly unpractical way in which
theologians have declaimed against them, contemning and
condemning them, as though it were a man’s first duty to
root them clean out of his nature, and as though it were
their earnest aim to have a chastity of impotence, a
morality of emasculation.” *
A second and no less important consideration is one that
has been already pointed out generally, namely, that a
* “Body and Will” p. 167.
�45
science of ethics can only reach safe generalisations by
taking into consideration the social structure of which the
individual is a part. To separate man from society and then
hope to understand his moral nature, is like attempting
to determine the function of a leg or an arm without
reference to the body. Such qualities as duty and justice
are, as I have said, purely social, and therefore the reason
for their existence cannot be found in the nature of the
individual considered apart from his fellows, any more
than the movements of the earth could be understood
apart from the influence of the rest of our planetary sys
tem. Indeed, a great many of the objections commonly
urged against a scientfic system of ethics will be found to
be based upon this short-sighted view of the matter ; and
thus as Mr. Stephens has pointed out, must lead to error
and confusion.
That man is a social animal is a statement frequently
made and easily illustrated, although few of those who use
the phrase have apparently considered all that is involved
in the dictum. Yet in that sentence lies the key to the
whole problem. As G. A. Lewes says, “ The distinguishing
feature of human psychology is that to the three great
factors, organism, external medium and heredity, it adds a
fourth, namely, relation to a social medium, with its product
the general mind.”* It is this “ fourth factor ” which gives
rise to a purely human morality and psychology, and so
speak, lifts the individual out of himself and merges him
in a larger whole.f From the first moment of his birth
man is dependent upon the activities of others for ninetenths of those things that render life endurable, and the
feelings engendered in the course of evolution bear an
obvious relation to this dependence. The love of offspring,
regard for the feelings of others, readiness to act in
unison with others, all form part of those conditions that
make the perpetuation of the specieS possible ; and conse
quently without such instincts and sentiments the
individual as he now exists would be an impossibility.
And in such cases where these sentiments were absent—the
+ To live for self is as scientifically and ethically absurd as to live for
others. The true ethic consists in giving to self-regarding and other re
garding claims their due weight, while at the same time demonstrating
their interdependence.
* “ Study
of
Psychology.”
�46
love of offspring for example—these individuals would
leave few behind to perpetuate their qualities, and the type
would thus tend to disappear. On the other hand, the
kindly disposed person, the sympathetic, or such as come
up to the tribal ideal of excellence, would be held up for
imitation and respect; and thus by a dual process of
weeding out anti-social specimens, and by cultivating
social ones, the development of a higher type would
proceed. Indeed, we can scarcely conceive the cause of
evolution to have been otherwise. Natural selection
works by favouring the possessors of such qualities as
establish a more perfect balance between organism and
environment, and in developing customs and instincts
the course of social evolution has been to bring out and
cultivate such as were favourable to the welfare of social
structure and repress those of a contrary character. Each
of the social virtues may have its rise traced in this
manner, by showing how it has contributed to individual
and social development.
*
The tendency of natural
selection in preserving those communities in which the
members are most at one in feeling and action is to bring
about not merely an ideal, but an actual identification of
individual and social welfare, and this in such a manner
that each one finds the fullest expression of his own wel
fare in the combined happiness of all around him.
This truth, that man might properly be regarded as a
cell in the “ social tissue,” was recognised in a vague and
rather fanciful manner long ago ; t but it is owing to the
unparalleled scientific activity of the last half century that
this conception of man has been placed upon a solid
foundation, and a scientific view of human life and conduct
made possible. We now see that the phrase “social
organism ” or “ social tissue” is something more than a
mere figure of speech, that it expresses a fundamental fact
and one that must be constantly borne in mind in the
consideration of social problems. What, indeed, is society
or the social medium but a part of the individual ? One’s
whole being, intellectual and moral, is composed of
* A very interesting inquiry might here be opened concerning the
influence upon the general character of leading or much admired
individuals.
+ Plato, Republic, book v. 462.
�47
innumerable relations between it and others. My nature
has been and is being so continually moulded by this social
medium that my pleasures and pains have become indis
solubly connected with the pleasures and pains of others
to such an extent that I could no more be happy in
a society where misery was general than 1 could travel in
comfort or indulge in the pleasures of art, science, or
literature, apart from the activities of those around me.
The mere fact of being brought up in a society so
identifies all our ideas and customs with that society as to
defy their separation from it. This is well illustrated in
the case of young men and women who are brought up
within the pale of a particular church. They become part
of its organisation, they identify themselves with it, and its
losses and gains become their own. If all this is witnessed
in a single generation, how much more powerful must the
co-operate feeling become when society has been constantly
developing along the same lines for countless generations
with its sanctions enforced by organic necessity ? The
process must obviously result in the direction above
indicated, that of bringing about a union of individual
desires and actions with social well-being; while the
growing intelligence of man, by perceiving the reason and
value of this mutual dependence of the unit and society,
must be constantly taking steps to strengthen the union
and increase its efficiency.
Here, then, w have reached a conclusion, or at least to
e
*
go further would involve a lengthy discussion of matters
into which we have no desire to enter. But if the fore
going reasoning be sound, we have reached a point from
which the reader will be enabled to lay down a clear and
satisfactory theory of morals such as will place the
subject upon the same level as any of the arts and
sciences.
The principles involved in the preceding pages may be
briefly summarised as follows :—
(1) Maintenance of life depends upon the establish
ment and continuance of a definite set of actions between
the organism and its environment.
(2) In the ceaseless struggle for existence this is
secured by the preservation of all those animals whose
�48
habits and capabilities best equips them to meet the
demands of their environment, natural selection thus
the
*
accentuating
value of all variations in this direction.
(3) As all conduct has as its immediate object the pur
suit of pleasurable, and the avoidance of painful feelings,
and as life is only possible on the condition that pleasur
able and beneficial actions shall roughly correspond,
there is set up a general and growing agreement between
pleasure-producing and life-preserving conduct.
(4) As experience widens and intelligence develops,
those actions that make for a higher life become more
certain and easy of attainment; while the pleasures
formerly attached to the end of action become transferred
to the means, these becoming an end in themselves.
(5) The conditions of life bearing upon all with a
certain amount of uniformity, and therefore demanding
a like uniformity of action, leads to a gradual modification
of nerve structure and the creation of corresponding
general sentiments, which, handed on and increased from
generation to generation, express themselves in our exist
ing moral sense.
(6) The moral sense, therefore, while possessing a
certain authority in virtue of its origin, needs to be con, tinually tested and corrected in accordance with the
requirements of the age.
(7) All progress involves the specialisation and integra
tion of the various parts of the organism, individual and
social. By the operation of this principle there is
brought about an identification of individual and general
interests ; inasmuch as each one finds his own happiness
constantly dependent upon the happiness of others, and
that a full expression of his own nature is only to be
realised in social activity.
Frcm all of which we, may conclude that:—
“ The rule of life drawn from the practice and opinions
of mankind corrects and improves itself continually, till
at last it determines entirely for virtue and excludes all
kinds and degrees of vice.
*
For, if it be correct to say
Hartley, “Observations on Man,” II. p. 214.
�49
that the moral formula is the expression of right relations
between man and the world, then it follows that the pres
sure urging man to the performance of right actions—i.e.,
actions serving to broaden and perpetuate life—must on
the whole be more permanent than those impelling him
to the performance of wrong ones. This, it will be
observed, is merely making the broad and indisputable
statement that evolution tends to maintain life.
The course of evolution is therefore upon the side of
morality. By the operation of the struggle for existence
we can see how “ the wicked are cut off from the earth ; ”
and the more righteous live on and perpetuate the species.
Right conduct is one of the conditions of existence, and
is as much the outcome of natural and discoverable laws
as any of the sciences to which we owe so much. What
has prevented it assuming a like positive character has
been the extreme complexity of the factors joined to the
want of a proper method. Here, again, we are deeply
indebted to the doctrine of evolution for having thrown
a flood of light upon the subject, and making tolerably
clear what was before exceedingly obscure. Under its
guidance we see the beginnings of morality low down in
the animal world in the mere instinct of self-preservation,
and its highest expression in the sympathetic and kindred
feelings of men living in society. And between these
two extremes there are no gaps ; it is an unbroken
sequence right through. As I have said, the process has
practically assumed the shape of an expansion of self,
from the individual to the family, from the family to the
state, and from the state to the whole of humanity.
Morality thus rises at length above the caprice of the
individual or the laws of nations, and stands a law
giver in its own right and in virtue of its own inherent
majesty. That which was a matter of blind instinct
at the outset, and later of arbitrary authority, becomes
in the end a matter of conscious perception pressing upon
all alike with the authority of natural law.
The outlook, then, to the rationalist is a perfectly
hopeful one. From the vantage ground afforded him by
modern science he can see that a constant purification of
conduct is part of the natural order of things, and
although in a universe of change one can hardly picture
�50
a time when there will cease to be a conflict between
good and bad motives, yet the whole course of evolution
warrants us in looking forward with confidence to a time
when the development of the permanently moral qualities,
or of such powers as serve to keep men moral, will be
sufficient to hold the immoral and anti-social tendencies
in stern and complete subjection ; for however much the
forms of morality may change with time and place, that
in virtue of which right conduct gains its name, must
ever remain the same.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
An outline of evolutionary ethics
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Cohen, Chapman [1868-1954]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 50 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Written when Cohen was Vice-President of the National Secular Society. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
R. Forder
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1896
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N162
Subject
The topic of the resource
Evolution
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (An outline of evolutionary ethics), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Ethics
Evolution
NSS
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/ca9dc2235e36314834838a1e9bd6bc9a.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=LXvTdCOJMnhtF74eUPD-sSRUfaKLTNcC%7EwEFeCqiEeRKqtzG103dNH6ImonuoxSdcRfEbsYsBson7YSwq29wZzxtYQDafgs%7Ej10WoxreaPatl7HSvaCTMRqzb6Lqb1BaiGFfwP6ZBfvUSmmDy01XBr5UsBzJkWDJl5eaufhXVUpTkuZCU3VaY7ZTGN-LdKIpQLTPpHeGSa53RC9697MQmUWstHBWfIh26R0Iztskic9hUbkVVkDQvZxFkqKWxHmBXTlEW2W05gFxQFC-LBraTRDcoOw300ewjlDtPnhmukFH%7ET6SKyS2DvF1gCgsuxoQLU6V4Pt7v0J5kGzzj335vA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
520587af2e2c99329ee569ce67947d57
PDF Text
Text
����������������������������
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The ethics of social reform: A paper read at a meeting of The Fellowship of the New Life, London
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Adams, Maurice
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 26 p. ; 19 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Publisher's advertisements on front and back endpaper.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
W. Reeves
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1887
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G898
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The ethics of social reform: A paper read at a meeting of The Fellowship of the New Life, London), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Ethics
Social Reform
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/99d50e88c5396e5c62161a0a161e6c8d.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=uSdsoUCY4nXoT3WzDfo%7ElRkS9eJAZwHXCfVawvpBxNWBt-DHjgvssRI4ejN98oR-lUTnY2qzYsr6Re7%7EoQ7piMoBqDOSxrPNvTVhnwq2Eop7zRQ7wHsomcz4YOTFTj30tYh0olLca9NYaLa67Arz%7EedB%7EM%7EIvj1mkgUs01gkR9Oepfwfk0QqCwObi2SLFKw3xRmBYdfU5Z6lLIq5EU01W8ihwMNf3zCvovi3jRIb0l2k%7EAaeb4phjZ2fLqzv5ZZNsR1qGOFZjg9RA-QeXPjRETGy5ITtXm%7EsTXJOhLNCNgnZKwwnx9nuhKsXWA--RNscO2rO979jzoZeAow3Lc4WnA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
b9e1b01feb9938e1c0e4591e2ec84049
PDF Text
Text
THOUGHTS
ON
THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL.
BY
PROFESSOR F. W. NEWMAN.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Threepence.
�My Dear Scott,
I do not know whether you will take interest
in this paper, which, in preparing to change my abode,
I have routed out of a drawer. You will observe that
it is dated 1841. At that time I had gone far from
“ the creed of the Reformers,” but had not quite cut the
last cords that bound me to the idea of Supernaturalism.—
Yours ever,
F. W. N.
June 9 th 1872.
�THOUGHTS ON THE EXISTENCE OF EVIL.
T is impossible to extend inquiry and contemplation
ever so little beyond the bounds of ordinary thought,
without discerning how crude and untenable is the
popular conception of divine Omnipotence. The child
who is informed that God is Almighty, asks in great
simplicity, why then does God let any body be unhappy?
We may unhesitatingly deduce, that there is a real
contrariety between the divine perfections, as conceived
of by the child, and the existence of any evil. With
the same logical force, though with more rudeness, some
have alleged that the deity ought to have made man
other than he is. Nor has the highest intellect and
deepest piety ever essayed even to modify and relieve
the difficulty, except by suggestions drawn from the
topics of Optimism. It is said, “ Perhaps the allwise
God sees that it is best so to be: he sees ends to be
obtained, which, could not be obtained so well in any
other way; and which are valuable enough to deserve
being bought at such a price.” In different forms, this
is substantially the meaning of all that the humble
and pious can adduce. Whether learned or unlearned,
philosophic or simple, the topic to which they refer
us, is, “ Perhaps the Allwise God saw that there was
no better way."
A sentiment, even conjectural, which comes to us
recommended by such authority, cannot be deemed rash
and profane. If it is impious, what else is more pious?
Is it not the zealous effort of piety to shelter and
I
�4
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
defend its own existence 1 It is, and whether it be a
just sentiment or not, at any rate it is devotional and
humble. And yet, let us examine what it virtually
means. The evil which God has either ordained or
permitted is partly moral and partly physical; yet this, it
is suggested, was probably seen by him to be the best
means of attaining some eminently good end. Now it
cannot be intended to imply that he thinks slightly of
moral evil; an idea subversive of reverence for his holy
character, and degrading him into one who will employ
wicked means to compass his purposes. It must re
main, that the argument intends to say, that inscrut
able limitations exist in the divine power, which could
never have been suspected until the broad facts pro
claimed it; so that the deity had to submit necessarily,
at least for a time, to a state of things contrary to his
mind, as an essential prerequisite towards the attaining
of a glorious end beyond.
A recent essayist, whose work has attracted more
than usual notice, the Rev. Henry Woodward, has
forced prominently forward the fact, that nearly all
our reasonings concerning the Wisdom of God imply
some limitation of his power. To a being, Omnipotent
in the gross and popular sense, wisdom must be wholly
useless, and in fact becomes in him an unintelligible
quality. As policy is superfluous, to a conqueror who
can apply overwhelming force, so is wisdom superseded
by omnipotence. We admire the adaptation of lungs
to air, and of air to the lungs, on the supposition that
a difficult problem has been proposed,—how to free
the blood from noxious particles 1 But if we are asked,
“ why might not the divine fiat have done it as well?”
one reply alone is to be had,—that there are other
objects to be gained by adhering to the general laws of
matter, which objects could not have been so well
gained by a direct exertion of divine power. If other
wise, there would be no intelligible wisdom in employ
ing a circuitous, rather than a direct method of effecting
�Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
5
the end. The like may he observed in every other
case. Hence, wisdom and power are in one sense
antagonistic qualities ; the more you enlarge the sphere
of the latter, the more you diminish that of the former;
and every time we ascribe wisdom to the divine agent,
we virtually imply some unknown limitation to his
power, and deny the existence of almightiness in its
vulgar sense.
To ignorant persons, who have imbibed with their
devotional feelings the popular idea of omnipotence, it
is apt to appear a profane thing to assert, that it is not
within the power of the Almighty to recall the past; or,
to construct a square which shall have the properties of a
circle. But all thoughtful and philosophical minds
have long been aware, that that which is self-contra
dictory does not lie within the sphere of power;
and that it is no degradation to the Almighty that
he cannot make the same thing both to be and not
to be.
It being then certain, that limitations to the opera
tions of his power may exist, and do exist, which the
thoughtful of our race can discern, but of which the
ignorant and unthinking are not aware; we may
presume that other limitations possibly exist, which
no human mind would guess at a priori, and which may,
as yet,be concealed from all. And it has appeared,
that an analysis of every argument which ascribes
wisdom to the deity, manifests that there is a secret
conviction in all religious minds of the reality of that
which has been just called a presumption. Applying
such principles to the creation of intelligent and free
beings like man, we presently fall upon the conception,
that to be able to love God, man needed to be able
to hate him ; if free to go right, man is free also to go
wrong. At present it is enough to assert, that it is at
least a plausible opinion that the two sorts of ability
are inseparable. It is not only unproved that to create
a being capable of holiness without being liable to sin,
�6
thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
is within, the sphere of divine power; hut the prima
facie aspect of the case is the reverse, tending to con
vince us that the very idea is as self-contradictory as
that of a square circle. For when we try to analyse
the notion of freedom, or indeed of holiness, we find it
essentially implies a power of sin. For who would call
a man honest, who had no natural power to he dis
honest? or meek, who was physically unable to be
angry? or humble, who could not help his humility?
and so of all other moral excellences. Every one
of them implies a tfpoaipttsis or free choice; and they
not only could not be praised, but could not even exist;
for it would not be a soul if there were no freedom.
A liability to go wrong is then essentially inseparable
from a capacity to go right, as much as convexity from
concavity. They are little more than the same thing
viewed from opposite sides. We do not praise a stone
image of Xenocrates for temperance; for it cannot be
gluttonous ; and we do not blame a hog for gluttony or
a fox for theft, for they are incapable of the virtues of
temperance and of honesty.
Now if this does not wholly satisfy any one, let it be
at least allowed that the opinion is not wholly imaginary
or absurd, but that it has a measure of probability.
That probability appears at once to be turned into prac
tical certainty by the powerful testimony of matter of
fact on the same side. We do find, to an amazing
and appalling extent, moral disorder spread over the
whole world as known to us; and the greatest difficulty
is met in accounting for such a phenomenon within the
realm of so beneficent and wise a ruler as we believe to
superintend the earth. The fact forces on all pious
contemplators the conviction, that, in some sense or
other, he could not help it, consistently with the attain
ing of some paramount ends. If it is a physical
difficulty which he could not overcome, that no doubt
tends to degrade our conception of divine power; but
if it is a metaphysical difficulty, not at all. On the
contrary, our own minds are in fault for having invented
�Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
7
an absurdity, and then proposed it as a problem for
his power to effect. The latter is at once both the
alternative to which the case itself points us, and that
which preserves the honour of the divine attributes.
It does then appear to have as much proof as have any
of the received propositions of natural theology, that to
create a being capable of having a holy will, essentially
implies the endowing him with a power to sin; and that
even almighty power cannot separate the two, since the
idea is self-contradictory. •
If this is conceded, the first great question press
ing on us is; “ whether the evils resulting from
the creation of man, as a being capable of holiness,
are so enormous, as to outweigh all the conceivable
advantages.” We cannot set aside this, by imagining
some metaphysical necessity to have forced the deity to
the creation of mankind; without falling into a system of
mere fatalism. It would make out, that he is not our
voluntary creator, but is himself a kind of tool or machine
in the hands of destiny; and by breaking the moral con
nection between the creator and his creatures, would
appear to subvert all intelligent piety. Nor indeed can
the intellect approve such a conception, any more than
does our devotional feeling; for what can be a more
unmeaning phrase, than that God should create us by
necessity, and without his own choice? Forced then
to regard the act as chosen deliberately and voluntarily
on his part, we cannot help urgently desiring some
ground to believe, that the contingent evils thence
resulting are slight in comparison with the good. To
suppose either that he knew they would outweigh the
good, or that his foresight was defective, and that he
did not know how great they would prove, would
grievously impair our conception either of the goodness
or of the wisdom of God.
It is useless to deny that the doctrine of eternal
misery, whether as popularly understood, or as philoso
phically explained, spreads an impenetrable cloud over
the whole divine character. It matters not whether w&
�8
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
conceive of God as exerting a direct act of judgment, to
torture in everlasting flames the vast majority of the
human race; or whether the wicked are to endure
countless and never-ending agonies from accusing con
science and evil passions. The two doctrines possess
in common the fact of everlasting misery and everlast
ing sin, in appalling and ever increasing intensity; and
this, to a vast majority of the children of Adam. Even
if the last point were omitted, yet if there be millions
on whom this horrible lot would fall, the human heart
seems incapable of conceiving how this awful evil can
ever be a desirable purchase money for some greater good;
but we are forced back on the inevitable persuasion, that
it had been better that man had never been created.
Nay, could we realize what eternal sin and eternal agony
mean, perhaps we should conclude that such suffering
and such moral evil to a single individual would be too
great a price to pay for the everlasting blessedness and
perfection of all the rest of our race. No generous
mind,—or rather, no heart not harder than flint,—could
desire to purchase for itself a heaven at the price of a
hell to its brother; but would wish a thousand times
over that not one of the family had ever come into ex
istence. Such is the unconstrained utterance of ordin
ary human feeling; and if we are not to ascribe the
like to the supreme creator, if we are to suppose his
strength of mind such, that he does not flinch from
bringing about the welfare of the few, by results so
appalling to the many; devotion is crushed into super
stition, and adoration ceases to be intelligent. No
effort can be made to dispel the darkness resting on the
character of the most high, if the doctrine of eternal
punishment, in the philosophical and exact sense of the
term eternal, is true.
It is, however, certain, that one who is contemplat
ing the facts of the world with the eye of a natural
theologian, will not encumber himself with this doc
trine. It is, if sanctioned by Christianity, a load to be
supported by the credit of “ revelation; ” a new diffi-
�Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
9
culty introduced, of which we know nothing from a
contemplation of nature : and in this case it must be
allowed, that so far from bringing us “ good news,” and
clearing up the difficulties which distressed faith and
perplexed intellect, Christ has brought us the worst
news we could possibly have had, worse than the
wildest misanthrope could have imagined, and has in
tensely aggravated all pre-existing perplexities.
In
short, whatever is the amount of evidence testifying to
the truth of the Christian revelation, it might seem an
obvious axiom that it is the duty of every good man, as
it must be the impulse of every humane man, earnestly
to hope that Christianity may turn out to be a fiction,
rather than that this doctrine should be true : and this
circumstance loads it with so enormous an improbability,
as would suffice to overturn all intelligent faith in the
doctrine, were it even far better supported by Scriptural
evidence than it is.
Supposing then that this doctrine is set aside, let us
recur to the question, whether evil (physical and moral)
may not ultimately prove a sort of evanescent quantity,
in comparison to the good. The first step towards this
will assuredly be taken, if it is believed that the evil ix
temporary, the good eternal. Now, to this, the general
spirit of the Christian Scriptures strongly testifies ; nor
are there wanting special texts bearing on this result.
All sin is regarded as of the nature of corruption; and
is counted as “ of this agewhile all righteousness
and goodness is regarded as both coming down from God,
and as partaking of his nature, which is incorruption
and eternity. To the same conclusion both conscience
and philosophy point. From the very necessity of the
case, inexperience appears to draw after it errors ; we
make allowance for the indiscretions of youth: we
should think it inhuman to wish a man to be punished
to his dying day for his early offences. Moreover, the
punishment which they draw after them has a very per
ceptible tendency to correct and improve the man. It
would be unwise to desire that sin should not. tend to
�io
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
bring after it misery; for it would be to lose a whole
some instructor: but as we must wish the punishment
to be only in due measure, and to cease after it has an
nihilated that of which it was the chastisement, so we
have the testimony of experience, that this is ordinarily
the case. Man being himself finite, his sin is not in
finite in its’ effects on others, nor on himself; and if
not always remediable, yet it tends to self-exhaustion.
All virtue and goodness, being self-consistent, strengthen
continually with growth : but vices in every shape are
opposed to one another, and though occasionally they
may strengthen each other, the contrary happens far
oftener. Indeed, in different men, vices are in the long
run obviously and surely opposed, and wear each other
out in many ways. Now the fact is (however it be ex
plained) that man comes into this world with intellect
and conscience wholly unformed, and he has to be built
up into a moral and spiritual being. It would be more
reasonable to expect a person to be able to swim before
entering the water, than to expect a human being to
learn to go right, without ever going wrong. But if in
manhood we look back with a smile and without pain
at the sorrows of childhood, so also do we look back
without shame or remorse at the peevishness, greediness,
impatience, or other follies incident to that age ; nay,
nor does any sound minded man feel humbled at the
faults of youth,when they are merely the necessary
defects of that age, and not his own personal and
peculiar transgressions—I mean, such defects as the
being too sanguine and ardent, hasty and imprudent,
too ready to form friendships and to trust strangers,
too vehement in love and in expectation, somewhat too
confident of one’s own opinion. Just in proportion as
any of these were a voluntary transgression, they will
call for and produce humiliation, but no further. But
again, whatever may have been our past sufferings, yet
when at last we obtain honourable and permanent
repose, the remembrance of them is rather pleasant;
and if they have brought us spiritual improvement, we
�Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
11
may well count them a real good. No amount then of
mere outward suffering, not connected with our own
sin, during this short life, need cause the slightest dif
ficulty in our present argument. All evil is ultimately
annihilated, in comparison with the good. As concerns
the moral evil in which each of us may have been in
volved, no one can repine and justly regret, if the fire
which burns in the soul from this cause is fierce and
gnawing. If remorse do its work, and the man learn
to go softly all his days in the bitterness of his soul;
he will only the better learn that sin stingeth as a
serpent and biteth as an adder. In fact, as regards the
mass of mankind, perhaps no wise man would desire
to have the tormenting power of remorse lessened.
Nevertheless, as in the case of slight transgressions,—
an unkind word—a proud thought—a selfish neglect of
another—there is a soothing of the conscience, when
contrition has wrought its results,—confession and resti
tution ; so of greater offences there may be a genial
repentance, quite unlike mere remorse, and where there
is, some ultimate lesson may be taught both to the
offender himself and to others : and though it is not to
be imagined that it is better to him to have gone wrong,
than to have been both wise enough and good enough
to go right, yet his sin may in the end be a mere pro
cess of rising higher; just as the false notes on a violin
are but a state of transition towards better play. Hence
even the worst cases of guilt become reconcilable with
the divine wisdom in ordaining the present scene of
things : for in short, though all are transgressors, yet at
the worst one portion is led on towards moral perfection
and consequent happiness; and another portion, if it
does not attain this, yet at some period ceases to exist.
No difficulty arises, except on the belief that the sin
and misery of the latter is unsubdued and everlasting.
Exclude this conception ;—believe that goodness alone
is eternal; and it remains clearly intelligible, how
the divine wisdom may have ordained, on the one hand,
that man should gain a stable independent holy will,
�t
2
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
so as to be capable of friendship with his infinite crea
tor ; but that, on the other hand, this essentially de
manded that he should be left free to sin, and conse
quently moral evil has abounded and abounds, but only
for a time. Sin and its effects, remorse and misery, are
to be abolished, and the fruit of holiness shall flourish to
everlasting life.
But it will be inquired, is not this, after all, to main
tain, that the holy God uses base and unholy means to
work out his designs ? Does it not confound our sense
of moral distinctions, and make evil to be good when
it tends to a good end, if the view above given is
correct ? This objection exerts a force that is hard to
account for upon many minds ; for it does not seem to
have any intrinsic weight. It might seem to have
been borrowed from the barbaric reasoning of King
Agamemnon in Homer, or from a bye-gone Predestinarian school, whose doctrine annihilated all human
agency, arid imputed to the deity the acts of all men.
Certainly such a doctrine makes it impossible to defend
the moral character of our creator. If vice and cruelty
are bad, and he is as truly responsible for their exis
tence, as though he were the immediate agent, there is
an end of reasoning. The tyrant may justify himself,
by saying, that when he oppresses, he is only the tool
by which God scourges men. But the first principle of
all intelligent worship recognizes in ourselves a power
to resist the will of God, which constitutes sin against
him. It is in extravagant inconsistency with this first
principle, to imagine that because God gives us the
power to sin, therefore God ordains the sin and is
responsible for it. If with reverence we may use the
phrase, we may say that he is responsible for the general
result of investing us with such a power. Consistently
with goodness and wisdom, he must have foreseen that
in the long-run this arrangement was beneficent; and
consistently with justice, he must have provided that
no individual should suffer disproportionately, beyond
his deserts, from such an arrangement. But this may
�'Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
i2
co-exist with a steady upholding of the belief in his
fixed hatred of moral evil. A wise father will give his
son an allowance of pocket money, in order that he may
learn to spend judiciously : and even when he sees him
about to employ it foolishly, he will not check him,
deeming it better that he should learn by experience,
than by dictation. Without alleging that the cases are
perfectly parallel, this suffices to put into a clear light
the fact, that to make a beneficial disposal of affairs, well
knowing that the parties so invested with power will
partially abuse it, is quite consistent with the purest
disapproval of such abuse. All that is needed to justify
him who so ordains, is, a clear belief that in no other
way will so good a total result be gained.
In this light we must look on the men who are gene
rally regarded as the scourges of mankind. Who can
read without shuddering the atrocities of a Timour or
an Attila ? Indeed, in the latter, it appears less fright
ful from his very savageness.
We judge of him as
a wild beast, rather than as a man. But Timour was a
legislator and a would-be reformer. Alexander the
Great was eminent for political intellect. Our question,
however, is not, What are we to think of the men ?
but, How are we to vindicate the divine providence
which permits their action? It does not seem to be
difficult, after the above. Indeed, an Attila may be
classed with earthquakes or volcanoes; fearful visitations
not caused by moral evil; and no one who holds that
these physical evils are consistent with divine goodness
(partly as the results of good laws impressed on nature,
partly, as directly remedial) will find much difficulty in
believing the same of Attila. But we may go further.
Not only is it certain that we should injure man’s
nature, if we could wholly extinguish ambition; cer
tain, that the flame which in Alexander or Napoleon
burned to intense and baneful fury, is in its milder forms
quite essential to man’s welfare: but it is credible,
that, if we did but know the alternative possibilities
(which we never can know), we might find that the
�14
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil.
permanent good effected (blindly) by Alexander, by
Julins Caesar, by Napoleon, far more than out-balances
their evil. We may even venture to believe, that,
until mankind is otherwise more perfect, it is beneficial
on the whole that men of unbridled ambition do exist,
and will exist. This is God’s great influence for fusing
into one the separated tribes of the human race by con
quest ; the method by which the superior energies and
talents of one nation are ultimately diffused over
another : and although it produces countless miseries
on the way, inasmuch as the conquerors are not aiming
at good or concerned to use virtuous methods (and this is
their sin), yet an extensive survey of human history
will convince any well-judging mind, that our race
would never have attained its present elevation or its
present prospects of improvement, if ambition had
always been thwarted before it could overflow in
conquest.
It is striking to contemplate the analogy offered us
in the whole field of nature, as to the slow progress of
whatever is to be ultimately great. In the botanical
world it has been long proverbial, that vast growths are
slow; and the discoveries of geology magnificently
illustrate the saying. But there is another aspect from
which the same facts may be viewed. In one sense,
the material universe may be called always the same.
Having the same repulsions and attractions and the same
material masses, only the same phenomena (it might
seem) must for ever recur, did not organic life break in
to disturb the monotony. The influx of vegetable
forms introduces wonderful variety; yet each vegetable
in itself is, within near limits, ever like itself; nor
does any improvement in the individual, nor much in
the species, take place. Moral growth is the last and
most complicated of organic growths. If ferns took
many thousand years to perfect themselves, it is but
little to allow a hundred thousand years to man.
�-L /6Cz JUllUU.'UUJ J. {.UlLjyiCLVLb U/KL ± Ct^C/d //tCty (7CJ /UlU Utb UALWT&58(H(/
a letter enclosing the price in postage stamps to Mr THOMAS
SCOTT, Mount Pleasant, Ramsgate.
Eternal Punishment. An Examination of the Doctrines held by the Clergy of the Church of
England. By “Presbyter Anglicanus.” Price 6d.
Letter and Spirit. By a Clergyman .of the Church of England. Price6d.
Science and Theology. By R. D. Hanson, Esq., Chief Justice of South Australia. Price 4d.
Questions to which the Orthodox are Earnestly requestegto give Answers.
Thoughts on Religion and the Bible. By a Layman and M.A. of Trin. Coll., Dublin. Price 6d
The Opinions of Professor David F. Strauss. Price 6d.
A Few Self-Contradictions of the Bible. Price Is., free by post.
Against Hero-Making in Religion. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Ritualism in the Church of England. By “ Presbyter Anglicanus.” Price 6d.
The Religious Weakness of Protestantism. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 7d., post free
The Difficulties and Discouragements which attend the Study of the Scriptures. By
the Right Rev. Francis Hare, D.D., formerly Lord Bishop of Chichester. Price 6d.
The Chronological Weakness of Prophetic Interpretation. By a Benbficed Clergy
man of the Church of England. Price Is. Id., post free.
The “ Church and its Reform.” A Reprint. Price Is.
“The Church of England Catechism Examined.” By Bentham. A Reprint. Price Is.
Original Sin. Price 6d.
Redemption, Imputation, Substitution, Forgiveness of Sins, Ind Grace. Price 6d.
Basis of a New Reformation. Price 9d.
Miracles and Prophecies. Price 6d.
The Church : the Pillar and Ground of the Truth. Price 6d.
Modern Orthodoxy and Modern Liberalism. Price fid.
The Gospel of the Kingdom. By a Beneficed Clergyman. Price 6d.
“James and Paul.” A Tract by Emer. Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d
La w and the Creeds. Price fid.
Genesis Critically Analysed, and continuously arranged; with Introductory Remarks. By
Ed. Vansittart Neale, M.A. and M.R.I. Price Is.
A Confutation of the Diabolarchy. By Rev. John Oxlee. Price 6d.
The Bigot and the Sceptic. By Emer. Professor F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Church Cursing and Atheism. By the Rev. Thomas P. Kirkman, M.A., F.R.S., &c., Rector
of Croft, Warrington. Price Is.
Practical Remarks on “The Lord’s Prayer.” By a Layman. With Annotations by a
Dignitary of the Church of England. Price 6d
The Analogy of Nature and Religion—Good and Evil. By a Clergyman of the Church
of England. Price 6d.
Commentators and Hierophants; or, The Honesty of Christian Commentators. In Two
Parts. Price fid. each Part.
Free Discussion of Religious Topics. By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of Norwich
Part I., price Is. Part II., price Is. 6d.
The Evangelist and the Divine. By a Beneficed Clergyman. Price Is.
The Thirty-Nine Articles and the Creeds,—Their Sense and their Non-sense. By a
Country Parson. Parts I., II., III. Price 6d each part.
A Reply to the Question, “What have we got to Rely on, if we cannot Rely on the
Bible? ” By Professor F. W. Newman.
The Dean of Canerbury on Science and Revelation. A Letter by M.P. Price 6d.
Another Reply to the Question, “ What have we got to Rely on, if we cannot rely on
the Bible?” By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of Norwich
Price 6d.
The Utilization of the Church Establishment. By the Author of “The Pilgrim and the
Shrine,” “The Meaning of the Age,” <fcc. &c. Price fid.
The True Temptation of Jesus. By Professor F. W. Newman. With Portrait. Price 6d.
On Public Worship. Price 3d.
Modern Protestantism. By the Author of “The Philosophy of Necessity.’ Price 6d.
A Replt to the Question, “Apart from Supernatural Revelation. What is the Pros
pect of Man’s Living after Death ? By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of
Norwich. Price 6d.
Tree and Serpent Worship. Price 6d.
A Review of a Pamphlet, entitled, “ The Present Dangers of the Church of England.
By W. G. Clark, M.A., Vice-Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Price 6d.
The Twelve Apostles. Price 6d.
The Bible for Man, not Man for the Bible. By a Country Vicar. Price 6d.
Is Death the end of all things for Man ? By a Parent and a Teacher. Price 6d.
On the Infidelity of Orthodoxy. By the Rev. Thomas Kirkman, M.A., F.R.S. In Three
Parts. Price 6d. each Part.
“The Finding of the Book.” By John Robertson, Coupar-Angus. Price 2s.
On Moral Evil. By Rev. Charles Voysey, Price 6d.
The Claims of Christianity to the Character of a Divine Revelation, considered
By W. Jevons. Price 6d.
The Unity of the Faith among all Nations. By a Padre of the Established Church
Price 6d.
Sacred History as a Branch of Elementary Education. Part I. Its Influence on the
Intellect. Price Sixpence. Part II. Its Influence on the Development of the
Conscience. Price Sixpence.
�On Religion. By a Former Elder in a Scotch Church. Price Sixpence.
The Nature and Origin of Evil. A Letter to a Friend, by Samuel Hinds, D.D., late
Lord Bishop of Norwich. Price Sixpence.
A. I. Conversations. Recorded by a Woman, for Women. Three Parts, 6d each.
The Passion for Intellectual Freedom. By Edward Maitland. Price Sixpence.
Reason versus Authority. By W. O. Carr Brook. Price 3d.
An appeal to the Preachers of all the Creeds. By Gamaliel Brown. Price 3d.
The Voysey Case. By Moncure D. Conway. Price 6d.
“Realities.” By P. A. Taylor, M.P.
On the Causes of Atheism. By F. W. Newman. With Portrait. Price 6d.
The Bible; Is it “The Word of God?” By T. L. Strange, late Judge of the High Court
of Madras. Price 6d.
A Woman’s Letter. Price 3d.
An Episode in the History of Religious Liberty. By Rev. Charles Voysey. With
Portrait. Price 6d.
Thirty-nine Questions on the Thirty-nine Articles. By Rev. J. Page Hopps. With
Portrait. Price 3d.
Intellectual Liberty. By John Robertson. Price 6d.
Tub Spiritual Serfdom of the Laity. By M. D. Conway. With Portrait. Price 6d.
Theology of the Past and the Future. By M. Kalisch, Pli.D. Reprinted from Part I. of
his Commentary on Leviticus. With Portrait. Price Is.
The Doctrine of Immortality in its Bearing on Education. By Presbyter Anglicanus.
Price 6d.
The Divergence of Calvinism from Pauline Doctrines. By Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 3d.
The Judgment of the Committee of Council in the Case of Mr. Voysey. Some remarks
by J. D. La Touche, Vicar of Stokesay, Salop. Price 3d.
A Challenge to the Meme «s of the Christian Evidence Society. By Thomas Scott.
On the Formation of Religious Opinions. By the late Rev. Jas. Cranbrook. Price 3d.
The Tendencies of Modern Religious Thought. By thelateRev. Jas. Cranbrook. Price 3d.
The Collapse of ihs Faith. Edited by Rev. W. G. Carroll, A.M., Dublin. Price 6d.
A Reply to the Question—“Shall I seek Ordination in the Church of England?”
By Samuel Hinds, D.D., late Lord Bishop of Norwich. Price 6‘d.
A Lecture on Rationalism. By Rev. Charles Voysey. Price 6d.
A Lecture on the Bible. By Rev. Charles Voysey. Price 6d.
Pleas for Free Inquiry. Parts I. and II. By “ M. A.,” Trin. Col., Cam. 6d. each.
On the Hindrances to Progress in Theology. By the late Rev. Jas. Cranbrook. Price 3d.
Jewish Literature and Modern Education : or the Use and Misuse of the Bible in
the School-room. By Edward Maitland. Price Is. 6d.
The Speaker’s Commentary Reviewed, by T. L. Strange, late a Judge of the High Court
of Madras. Price 2s. 6d.
On CHURcn 'Pedigrees. By Rev. T. P. Kirkman, M.A., F.R.S. Portrait. Two Parts. 6d. each.
The Tactics and Defeat of the Christian Evidence Society. By Thomas Scott.
Price 6d.
Notes on Bishop Magee’s Pleadings for Christ. By a Barrister. Price 6d.
How to Complete the Reformation. By Edward Maitland. With Portrait. Price 6d.
Does Morality depend on Longevity ? By Ed. Vansittart Neale. Price 6d.
A Dialogue by way of Catechism,—Religious, Moral, and Philosophical. By a
Physician. Parts I. and II. Price 6d. each.
Sunday Lyrics by Gamaliel Brown.
Christianity and Education in India. A Lecture delivered at St George’s Hall, London,
November 12, 1871. By A. Jyram Row, of Mysore. Price Sixpence.
On the Relations of Theism to Pantheism, and on the Galla Religion. By Professor
F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
An Examination of some Recent Writings about Immortality. By W. E. B. Price 6d.
The Impeachment of Christianity. By F. E. Abbot. With Letters from Miss F. P. Cobbe
• and Prof. Newman, giving their reasons for not calling themselves Christians. Price 3d.
On Faith. By A. D. Graham and F. H, Price 3d.
Scepticism and Social Justice. By Thomas Horlock Bastard. Price 3d.
A Critical Catechism. Criticised by a Doctor of Divinity, and defended by Thomas
Lumisden Si range. Price Sixpence.
Rational Theology. By F. R. Statham. Price 3d.
The English Life of Jesus. New Edition. By Thomas Scott. Price 4s. Postage 4d. extra.
The Living God. By Rev. E. M. Geldart. Price 3d.
Spiritual Pantheism. By F. H. I. Price 6d.
The Book of Common Prayer Examined in the Light of the Present Age. By Wm.
Jevons. Price 6d.
The Prayer Book Adapted to the Age. By William Jevons. Price 3d.
The Mythos of the Ark. By J. W. Lake. Price 6d.
The New Doxology. By Gamaliel Brown. Price 3d.
Truths for the Times. By Francis E. Abbot. Price 3d.
Clerical Integrity. By T. L. Strange. Price 3d.
Thoughts on the Existence of Evil. By Professor F. W. Newman. Price 3d.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Thoughts on the existence of evil
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Newman, Francis William [1805-1897.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 14, [2] p. ; 18 cm
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 4. Lecture written in 1841. [From author's note on title page verso]. Publisher's series list on unnumbered pages at the end.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1872]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G4855
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Evil
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br />This work (Thoughts on the existence of evil), identified by Humanist Library and Archives, is free of known copyright restrictions.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Evil
Morris Tracts
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/fe3c948c036a20d84731950a31e99043.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=qBgR%7EBZcfEnC4I0%7EbFu690ZcMcYDbwzVjMqqYtOPyfxObE9iyfVKlGvIRD2HTlSDCYvo2RkUCHZUNof7OktYYNa9w%7ELuD5cqRmzpyxCvIeVxwVBlzH33sejRLHgmUBgxxURfUZGt3r9pT0gPAV-3hZdnV%7Eq-P5H4meDWvXlDERyFHWNzPtoHhudVq9JwfnS0Waifa1Jyflk33G4T7I42jliRgdmwv8vUrM54H2ZIqsxav3RLF83rRtpoo0LXGkd3%7EZugGIE1V2pi93ksKMj7XHePrf96Fzqo1-Hxz8aTIQnf5iBer0-ax7z%7E2TKChPz%7EK8ZU%7E5tRZ-1TQ6qXMt13AA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
aca8d898975b944d452c6a53311f4f21
PDF Text
Text
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, 8.E.
Price Fourpence.
�I I
�EUTHANASIA.
“ T HAVE already related to you with what care they
J. look after their sick, so that nothing is left
undone wfflich may contribute either to their health or
ease. And as for those who are afflicted with incurable
disorders, they use all possible means of cherishing
them, and of making their lives as comfortable as pos
sible ; they visit them often, and take great pains to
make their time pass easily. But if any have tortur
ing, lingering pain, without hope of recovery or ease,
the priests and magistrates repair to them and exhort
them, since they are unable to proceed with the busi
ness of life, are become a burden to themselves and all
about them, and have in reality outlived themselves,
they should no longer cherish a rooted disease, but
choose to die since they cannot but live in great misery;
being persuaded, if they thus deliver themselves from
torture, or allow others to do it, they shall be happy
after death. Since they forfeit none of the pleasures,
but only the troubles of life by this, they think they
not only act reasonably, but consistently with religion;
for they follow the advice of their priests, the expound
ers of God’s will. Those who are wrought upon by
these persuasions, either starve themselves or take
laudanum. But no one is compelled to end his life
thus ; and if they cannot be persuaded to it, the former
care and attendance on it is continued. And though
they esteem a voluntary death, when chosen on such
authority, to be very honourable, on the contrary, if
�4
Euthanasia.
any one commit suicide without the concurrence of the
priest and senate, they honour not the body with a
decent funeral, but throw it into a ditch.”*
Tn pleading for the morality of euthanasia, it seems
not unwise to show that so thoroughly religious a man
as Sir Thomas More deemed that practice so consonant
with a sound morality as to make it one of the customs
of his ideal state, and to place it under the sanction of
the priesthood. As a devout Roman Catholic, the
great Chancellor would naturally imagine that any
beneficial innovation would be sure to obtain the sup
port of the priesthood; and although we may differ
from him on this head, since our daily experience
teaches us that the priest may be counted upon as the
steady opponent of all reform, it is yet not uninstructive to note that the deep religious feeling which dis
tinguished this truly good man, did not shrink from
the idea of euthanasia as from a breach of morality, nor
did he apparently dream that any opposition would (or
could) be offered to it on religious grounds. The last
sentence of the extract is specially important; in dis
cussing the morality of euthanasia, we are not discus
sing the moral lawfulness or unlawfulness of suicide in
general; we may.protest against suicide, and yet uphold
euthanasia, and we may even protest against the one
and uphold the other, on exactly the same principle, as
we shall see further on. As the greater includes the
less, those who consider that a man has a right to
choose whether he will live or not, and who therefore
regard all suicide as lawful, will, of course, approve of
euthanasia; but it is by no means necessary to hold
this doctrine because we contend for the other. On the
general question of the morality of suicide, this paper
expresses no opinion whatever. This is not the point,
and we do not deal with it here. This essay is simply
* Memoirs. A translation of the Utopia, &c., of Sir Thomas
More, Lord High Chancellor of England. By A. Cayley the
Younger, pp. 102, 103. (Edition of 1808.)
�Euthanasia.
5
and solely directed to prove that there are circum
stances under which a human being has a moral right
to hasten the inevitable approach of death. The subject
is one which is surrounded by a thick fog of popular
prejudice, and the arguments in its favour are generally
dismissed unheard. I would therefore crave the reader s
generous patience, while laying before him the reasons
which dispose many religious and social reformers to
regard it as of importance that euthanasia should be
legalised.
In the fourth edition of an essay on Euthanasia, by
P. D. Williams, jun.,—an essay which powerfully sums
up what is to be said for and against the practice in
question, and which treats the whole subject exhaust
ively—we find the proposition, for which we contend,
laid down in the following explicit terms :
“ That in all cases of hopeless and painful illness, it
should be the recognised duty of the medical attendant,
whenever so desired by the patient, to administer
chloroform, or such other anaesthetic as may by-and-by
supersede chloroform, so as to destroy consciousness at
once, and to put the sufferer to a quick and painless
death ; all needful precautions being adopted to prevent
any abuse of such duty; and means being taken to
establish, beyond the possibility of doubt or question,
that the remedy was applied at the express wish of the
patient.”
It is very important, at the outset, to lay down
clearly the limitations of the proposed medical reform.
It is sometimes thoughtlessly stated that the supporters
of euthanasia propose to put to death all persons suf
fering from incurable disorders ; no assertion can be
more inaccurate or more calculated to mislead. We
propose only, that where an incurable disorder is accom
panied with extreme pain—pain, which nothing can
alleviate except death—pain, which only grows worse
as the inevitable doom approaches—pain, which drives
almost to madness, and which must end in the intensi
�6
Euthanasia.
fied torture of the death agony—that pain should be at
once soothed by the administration of an anesthetic,
which should not only produce unconsciousness, but
should be sufficiently powerful to end a life, in which
the renewal of consciousness can only be simultaneous
with the renewal of pain. So long as life has some
sweetness left in it, so long the offered mercy is not
needed; euthanasia is a relief from unendurable agony,
not an enforced extinguisher of a still desired existence.
Besides, no one proposes to make it obligatory on any
body ; it is only urged that where the patient asks for
the mercy of a speedy death, instead of a protracted one,
his prayer may be granted without any danger of the pen
alties of murder or manslaughter being inflicted on the
doctors and nurses in attendance.
I will lay before
the reader a case which is within my own knowledge,—
and which can probably be supplemented by the sad
experience of almost every individual,—in v’hich the
legality of euthanasia would have been a boon equally
to the sufferer and to her family. A widow lady was
suffering from cancer in the breast, and as the case was
too far advanced for the ordinary remedy of the knife,
and as the leading London surgeons refused to risk an
operation which might hasten, but could not retard,
death, she resolved, for the sake of her orphan children,
to allow a medical practitioner to perform a terrible
operation, whereby he hoped to prolong her life for
some years. Its details are too painful to enter into
unnecessarily; it will suffice to say that it was per
formed by means of quick-lime, and that the use of
chloroform was impossible. When the operation, which
extended over days, was but half over, the sufferer’s
strength gave way, and the doctor was compelled to
acknowledge that even a prolongation of life was im
possible, and that to complete the operation could only
hasten death. So the patient had to linger on in almost
unimaginable torture, knowing that the pain could only
end in death, seeing her relatives worn out by watching,
�Euthanasia.
7
•and agonised at the sight of her sufferings, and yet
compelled to live on from hour to hour, till at last the
anguish culminated in death. Is it possible for any
one to believe that it would have been wrong to have
hastened the inevitable end, and thus to have shortened
the agony of the sufferer herself, and to have also spared
Sier nurses months of subsequent ill-health. It is in
»uch cases as this that euthanasia would be useful. It
s, however, probable that all will agree that the benefit
conferred by the legalisation of euthanasia would, in
nany instances, be very great; but many feel that the
objections to it, on moral grounds, are so weighty, that
10 physical benefit could countervail the moral wrong.
These objections, so far as I can gather them, are as
bllows:—
Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and
nust only be taken back by the giver of life.
*
Euthanasia is an interference with the course of
•lature, and is therefore an act of rebellion against God.
Pain is a spiritual remedial agent inflicted by God,
.-jid should therefore be patiently endured.
Life is the gift of God, and is therefore sacred, and
.nust only be taken back by the Giver of life. This
objection is one of those high-sounding phrases which
mpose on the careless and thoughtless hearer, by catchng up a form of words which is generally accepted as
m unquestionable axiom, and by hanging thereupon
in unfair corollary. The ordinary man or woman, on
tearing this assertion, would probably answer—“ Life
tacred ? Yes, of course ; on the sacredness of life
lepends the safety of society ; anything which tampers
vith this principle must be both wrong and dangerous.”
Ind yet, such is the inconsistency of the thoughtless,
hat, five minutes afterwards, the same person will glow
.vith passionate admiration at some noble deed, in
* We of course here have no concern with theological questions
nuching the existence or non-existence of Deity, and express no
pinion about them.
�8
Euthanasia.
which the sacredness of life has been cast to the winds
at the call of honour or of humanity, or will utter words
of indignant contempt at the baseness which counted
life more sacred than duty or principle. That life is
sacred is an undeniable proposition; every natural gift
is sacred, i.e. is valuable, and is not to be lightly
destroyed ; life, as summing up all natural gifts, and
as containing within itself all possibilities of usefulness
and happiness, is the most sacred physical possession
which we own. But it is not the most sacred thing on
earth. Martyrs slain for the sake of principles which
they could not truthfully deny ; patriots who have
died for their country; heroes who have sacrificed
themselves for others’ good ;—the very flower and glory
of humanity rise up in a vast crowd to protest that
conscience, honour, love, self-devotion, are more precious
to the race than is the life of the individual. Life is
sacred, but it may be laid down in a noble cause ; life
is sacred, but it must bend before the holier sacredness
of principle ; life which, though sacred, can be de
stroyed, is as nothing before the indestructible ideals
which claim from every noble soul the sacrifice of per
sonal happiness, of personal greatness, yea, of personal
*
life
It will be conceded, then, on all hands, that the
proposition that life is sacred must be accepted with
many limitations : the proposition, in fact, amounts
only to this, that life must not be voluntarily laid
down without grave and sufficient cause. What we
have to consider, is, whether there are present, in any
proposed euthanasia, such conditions as overbear con
siderations for the acknowledged sanctity of life. W e
* The word “ life ” is here used in the sense of “ personal exist
ence in this world.” It is, of course, not intended to be asserted
that life is really destructible, but only that personal existence, or
identity, may be destroyed. And further, no opinion is given on
the possibility of life otherwhere than on this globe; nothing is
spoken of except life on earth, under the conditions of human
existence.
�Euthanasia.
9
contend that in the cases in which it is proposed that
death should be hastened, these conditions do exist.
"We will not touch here on the question of the
endurance of pain as a duty, for we will examine that
further on. But is it a matter of no importance, that
a sufferer should condemn his attendants to a prolonged
drain on their health and strength, in order to cling to
a life which is useless to others, and a burden to him
self ? The nurse who tends, perhaps for weeks, a bed
of agony, for which there is no cure but death whose
senses are strained by intense watchfulness whose
nerves are racked by witnessing torture which she is
powerless to alleviate—is, by her self-devotion, sowing
in her own constitution the seeds of ill-health that is
to say, she is deliberately shortening her own life. We
have seen that we have a right to shorten life in obedi
ence to a call of duty, and it will at once be said that
the nurse is obeying such a call. But has the nurse a
right to sacrifice her own life—and an injury to health
is a sacrifice of life—for an obviously unequivalent
advantage? We are apt to forget, because the injury
is partially veiled to us, that we touch the sacredness
of life whenever we touch health : every case of over
work, of over-strain, of over-exertion, is, so to speak, a
modified case of euthanasia. To poison the spring of
life is as real a tampering with the sacredness of life
as it is to check its course. The nurse is really com
mitting a slow euthanasia. Either the patient or the
nurse must commit an heroic suicide for the sake of
the other—which shall it be ? Shall the life be sacri
ficed, which is torture to its possessor, useless to
society, and whose bounds are already clearly marked ?
or shall a strong and healthy life, with all its future
possibilities, be undermined and sacrificed in addition
to that which is already doomed 1 But, granting that
the sublime generosity of the nurse stays not to balance
the gain with the loss, but counts herself as nothing in
the face of a human need, then surely it is time to urge
�IO
Euthanasia.
that to permit this self-sacrifice is an error, and that to
accept it is a crime. If it be granted that the throwing
away of life for a manifestly unequivalent gain is wrong,
then we ought not to blind ourselves to the fact, that
to sacrifice a healthy life in order to lengthen by a few
short weeks a doomed life, is a grave moral error, how
ever much it may be redeemed in the individual by the
glory of a noble self-devotion. Allowing to the full the
honour due to the heroism of the nurse, what are we
to say to the patient who accepts the sacrifice 1 What
are we to think of the morality of a human being, who,
in order to preserve the miserable remnant of life left
to him, allows another to shorten life 1 If we honour
the man who sacrifices himself to defend his family, or
risks his own life to save theirs, we must surely blame
him who, on the contrary, sacrifices those he ought to
value most, in order to prolong his own now useless
existence. The measure of our admiration for the one,
must be the measure of our pity for the weakness and
selfishness of the other. If it be true that the man who
dies for his dear ones on the battlefield is a hero, he
who voluntarily dies for them on his bed of sickness is
a hero no less brave. But it is urged that life is the
gift of God, and must only he taken hack hy the Giver
of life. I suppose that in any sense in which it can be
supposed true that life is the gift of God, it can only be
taken back by the giver—that is to say, that just as
life is produced in accordance with certain laws, so it
can only be destroyed in accordance with certain other
laws. Life is not the direct gift of a superior power :
it is the gift of man to man and animal to animal, pro
duced by the voluntary agent, and not by God, under
physical conditions, on the fulfilment of which alone
the production of life depends. The physical condi
tions must be observed if we desire to produce life, and
so must they be if we desire to destroy life. In both
cases man is the voluntary agent, in both law is the
means of his action. If life-giving is God’s doing, then
�Euthanasia.
11
life-destroying is his doing too. But this is not what
is intended by the proposers of this aphorism. If they
will pardon me for translating their somewhat vague
proposition into more precise language, they say that
they find themselves in possession of a certain thing
called life, which must have come from somewhereand
as in popular language the unknown is always the
divine, it must have come from God : therefore this life
must only be taken from them by a cause that also
proceeds from somewhere—i.e., from an unknown cause
—i.e., from the divine will. Chloroform comes from a
visible agent, from the doctor or nurse, or at least from
a bottle, wich can be taken up or left alone at our own
h
*
choice. If we swallow this, the cause of death is known,
and is evidently not divine ; but if we go into a house
where scarlet fever is raging, although we are in that
case voluntarily running the chance of taking poison
quite as truly as if we swallow a dose of chloroform,
yet if we die from the infection, we can imagine the
illness to be sent from God. Wherever we think the
element of chance comes in, there we are able to imagine
that God rules directly. We quite overlook the fact
that there is no such thing as chance. There is only
our ignorance of law, not a break in natural order. If
our constitution be susceptible of the particular poison
to which we expose it, we take the disease. If we
knew the laws of infection as accurately as we know
the laws affecting chloroform, we should be able to fore
see with like certainty the inevitable consequence ; and
our ignorance does not make the action of either set of
laws less unchangeable or more divine. But in the
“ happy-go-lucky ” style of thought peculiar to ignor
ance, the Christian disregards the fact that infection is
ruled by definite laws, and believes that health and
sickness are the direct expressions of the will of his
God, and not the invariable consequents of obscure but
probably discoverable antecedents ; so he boldly goes
into the back slums of London to nurse a family
�12
Euthanasia.
stricken down with fever, and knowingly and deliber
ately runs “ the chance ” of infection—i.e., knowingly
and deliberately runs the chance of taking poison, or
rather of having poison poured into his frame. This
he does, trusting that the nobility of his motive will
make the act right in God’s sight. Is it more noble
to relieve the sufferings of strangers, than to relieve the
sufferings of his family ? or is it more heroic to die of
voluntarily-contracted fever, than of voluntarily-taken
chloroform 1
, The argument that life must only be taken back by the
life-giver, would, if thoroughly carried out, entirely pre
vent all dangerous operations. In the treatment of
some diseases there are operations that will either kill
or cure: the disease must certainly be fatal if left alone;
while the proposed operation may save life, it may
equally destroy it, and thus may take life some time be
fore the giver of life wanted to take it back. Evidently,
then, such operations should not be performed, since
there is risked so grave an interference with the desires
of the life-giver.
Again, doctors act very wrongly
when they allow certain soothing medicines to be taken
when all hope is gone, which they refuse so long as a
chance of recovery remains : what right have they to
compel the life-giver to follow out his apparent inten
tions ? In some cases of painful disease, it is now
usual to produce partial or total unconsciousness by the
injection of morphia, or by the use of some other
anaesthetic. Thus, I have known a patient subjected
to this kind of treatment, when dying from a tumour
in the sesophagus; he was consequently, for some
weeks before his death, kept in a state of almost com
plete unconsciousness, for if he were allowed to become
conscious, his agony was so unendurable as to drive
him wild. He was thus, although breathing, practi
cally dead for weeks before his death. We cannot but
wonder, in view of such a case as his, what it is that
people mean when they talk of “ life.” Life includes,
�Euthanasia.
13
surely, not only the involuntary animal functions, such
as the movements of heart and lungs; but conscious
ness, thought, feeling, emotion. Of the various con
stituents of human life, surely those are not the most
“ sacred ” which we share with the brute, however
necessary these may be as the basis on which the rest
are built. It is thought, then, that we may rightfully
destroy all that constitutes the beauty and nobility of
human life, we may kill thought, slay consciousness,
deaden emotion, stop feeling, we may do all this, and
leave lying on the bed before us a breathing figure,
from which we have taken all the nobler possibilities
of life; but we may not touch the purely animal exist
ence ; we may rightly check the action of the nerves
and the brain, but we must not dare to outrage the
Deity by checking the action of the heart and the
lungs.
We ask, then, for the legalisation of euthanasia,
because it is in accordance with the highest morality
yet known, that which teaches the duty of self-sacrifice
for the greater good of others, because it is sanctioned
in principle by every service performed at personal
danger and injury, and because it is already partially
practised by modern improvements in medical science.
Euthanasia is an interference with the course of
nature, and is therefore an act of rebellion against
God. In considering this objection, we are placed in
difficulty by not being told what sense our opponents
attach to the word “ nature; ” and we are obliged once
more to ask pardon for forcing these vague and highflown arguments into a humiliating precision of mean
ing. Nature, in the widest sense of the word, includes
all natural laws; and in this sense it is of course
impossible to interfere with nature at all. We live,
and move, and have our being in nature ; and we can
no more get outside it, than we can get outside every
thing. With this nature we cannot interfere : we can
study its laws, and learn how to balance one law
�14
Euthanasia.
against another, so as to modify results; but this can
only be done by and through nature itself. The
“ interference with the course of nature ” which is in
tended in the above objection does not of course mean
this, impossible proceeding ; and it can then only mean
an interference with things which would proceed in
one course without human agency meddling with them,
but which are susceptible of being turned into another
course by human agency. If interference with nature’s
course be a rebellion against God, we are rebelling against
God every day of our lives. Every achievement of civili
sation is an interference with nature. Every artificial
comfort we enjoy is an improvement on nature.
“Everybody professes to approve and admire many
great triumphs of art over nature: the junction by
bridges of shores which nature had made separate, the
draining of nature’s marshes, the excavation of her
wells, the dragging to light of what she has buried at
immense depths in the earth, the turning away of her
thunderbolts by lightning-rods, of her inundations by
embankments, of her ocean by breakwaters. But to
commend these and similar feats, is to acknowledge
that the ways of nature are to be conquered, not
obeyed; that her powers are often towards man in
the position of enemies, from whom he must wrest, by
force and ingenuity, what little he can for his own use,
and deserves to be applauded when that little is rather
more than might be expected from his physical weak
ness in comparison to those gigantic powers. All
praise, of civilisation, or art, or contrivance, is so much
dispraise of nature; an admission of imperfection,
which it is man’s business, and merit, to be always
endeavouring to correct or mitigate.”* It is difficult
to understand how anyone, contemplating the course of
nature, can regard it as the expression of a divine will,
which man has no right to improve upon. Natural
law is essentially unreasoning and unmoral: gigantic
* “Essay on Nature,” by John Stuart Mill.
�Euthanasia.
*5
forces clash, around us on every side, unintelligent, and
unvarying in their action. With equal impassiveness
these blind forces produce vast benefits and work vast
catastrophes. The benefits are ours, if we are able to
grasp them; but nature troubles itself not whether we
take them or leave them alone. The catastrophes may
rightly be averted, if we can avert them; but nature
stays not its grinding wheel for our moans. Even
allowing that a Supreme Intelligence gave these forces
their being, it is manifest that he never intended man
to be their plaything, or to do them homage; for man
is dowered with reason to calculate, and with genius to
foresee; and into man’s hands is given the realm of
nature (in this world) to cultivate, td govern, to im
prove. So long as men believed that a god wielded
the thunderbolt, so long would a lightning-conductor
be an outrage on Jove; so long as a god guided each
force of nature, so long would it be impiety to resist,
or to endeavour to regulate, the divine volitions. Only
as experience gradually proved that no evil consequences
followed upon each amendment of nature, were natural
forces withdrawn, one by one, from the sphere of the
unknown and the divine. Now, even pain, that used
to be God’s scourge, is soothed by chloroform, and
death alone is left for nature to inflict, with what
lingering agony it may. But why should death, any
more than other ills, be left entirely to the clumsy,
unassisted processes of nature ?-—why, after struggling
against nature all our lives, should we let it reign
unopposed in death ? There are some natural evils
that we cannot avert. Pain and death are of these;
but we can dull pain by dulling feeling, and we can ease
death by shortening its pangs. Nature kills by slow
and protracted torture; we can defy it by choosing a
rapid and painless end. It is only the remains of the
old superstition that makes men think that to take life
is the special prerogative of the gods. With marvel
lous inconsistency, however, the opponents of euthan
�i6
Euthanasia.
asia do not scruple to “interfere with the course of
nature ” on the one hand, while they forbid us to inter
fere on the other. It is right to prolong pain by art,
although it is wrong to shorten it. When a person is
smitten down with some fearful and incurable disease,
they do not leave him to nature; on the contrary, they
check and thwart nature in every possible way; they
cherish the life that nature has blasted; they nourish
the strength that nature is undermining; they delay
each process of decay which nature sows in the dis
ordered frame; they contest every inch of ground with
nature to preserve life; and then, when life means
torture, and we ask permission to step in and quench
it, they cry out that we are interfering with nature.
If they would leave nature to itself, the disease would
generally kill with tolerable rapidity; but they will not
do this. They will only admit the force of their own
argument when it tells on the side of what they choose
to consider right. “Against nature ” is the cry with
which many a modern improvement has been howled
at; and it will continue to be raised, until it is gener
ally acknowledged that happiness, and not nature, is
the true guide to morality, and until man recognises
that nature is to be harnessed to his car of triumph,
and to bend its mighty forces to fulfil the human will.
Pam is a spiritual remedial agent, inflicted hy God,
and should therefore he patiently endured. Does any
one, except a self-torturing ascetic, endure any pain
which he can get rid of? This might be deemed a
sufficient answer to this objection, for common sense
always bids us avoid all possible pain, and daily expe
rience tells us that people invariably evade pain, when
ever such evasion is possible. The objection ought to
run : “ pain is a spiritual remedial agent, inflicted by
God, which is to be got rid of as soon as possible, but
ought to be patiently endured when unavoidable.”
Pain as pain has no recommendations, spiritual or
otherwise, nor is there the smallest merit in a voluntary
�Euthanasia.
J7
and needless submission to pain. As to its remedial
and educational advantages, it as often as not sours the
temper and hardens the heart; if a person endures
great physical or mental pain with unruffled patience,
and comes out of it with uninjured tenderness and
sweetness, we may rest assured that wre have come
across a rare and beautiful nature of exceptional strength.
As a general rule, pain, especially if it > be mental,
hardens and roughens the character. The use of anaes
thetics is utterly indefensible, if physical pain is to be
regarded as a special tool whereby God cultivates the
human soul. If God is directly acting on the sufferer s
body, and is educating his soul by racking his nerves,
by what right does the doctor step between with his
impious anaesthetic, and by reducing the patient to un
consciousness, deprive God of his pupil, and man of
his lesson ? If pain be a sacred ark, over which hovers
the divine glory, surely it must be a sinful act to touch
the holy thing. We may be inflicting incalculable
spiritual damage by frustrating the divine plan of edu
cation, which was corporeal agony as a spiritual agent.
Therefore, if this argument be good for anything at all,
we must from henceforth eschew all anaesthetics, we
must take no steps to alleviate human agony, we must
not venture to interfere with this beneficent agent, but
must leave nature to torture us as it will. But we
utterly deny that the unnecessary endurance of pain is
even a merit, much less a duty; on the contrary, we
believe that it is our duty to war against pain as much
as possible, to alleviate it wherever we cannot stop it
entirely ; and, where continuous and frightful agony
can only end in death, then to give to the sufferer the
relief he craves for, in the sleep which is mercy. “ It
is a mercy God has taken him,” is an expression often
heard when the racked frame at last lies quiet, and the
writhed features settle slowly into the peaceful smile of
the dead. That mercy we plead that man should be
allowed to give to man, when human skill and human
�18
Euthanasia.
tenderness have done their best, and when they have
left, within their reach, no greater boon than a speedy
and painless death.
We are not aware that any objection, which may not
be classed under one or other of these three heads, has
been levelled against the proposition that euthanasia
should be legalised. It has, indeed, been suggested
that to put into a doctor’s hands this “ power of life
and death,” would be to offer a dangerous temptation
to those who have any special object to gain by putting
a troublesome person quietly out of the way. But this
objection overlooks the fact that the patient himself must
ask for the draught, that stringent precautions can be taken
to render euthanasia impossible except at the patient’s
earnestly, or even repeatedly, expressed wish, that any
doctor or attendant, neglecting to take these precautions,
w’ould then, as now, be liable to all the penalties for
murder or for manslaughter; and that an ordinary
doctor would no more be ready to face these penalties
then, than he is now, although he undoubtedly has
now the power of putting the patient to death with
but little chance of discovery. Euthanasia would not
render murder less dangerous than it is at present, since
no one asks that a nurse may be empowered to give a
patient a dose which would ensure death, or that she
might be allowed to shield herself from punishment on
the plea that the patient desired it. If our opponents
would take the trouble to find out what we do ask,
before they condemn our propositions, it would greatly
simplify public discussion, not alone in this case, but
in many proposed reforms.
It may be well, also, to point out the wide line of
demarcation, which separated euthanasia from what is
ordinarily called suicide. Euthanasia, like suicide, is
a voluntarily chosen death, but there is a radical dif
ference between the motives which prompt the similar
act. Those who commit suicide thereby render them
�Euthanasia.
*9
selves useless to society for the future j they deprive
society of their services, and selfishly evade the duties
which ought to fall to their share ; therefore, the social
feelings rightly condemn suicide as a crime against
society. I do not say, that under no stress of circum
stances is suicide justifiable ; that is not the question ;
but I wish to point out that it is justly regarded as a
social offence. But the very motive which restrains
from suicide, prompts to euthanasia. The sufferer who
knows that he is lost to society, that he can never
again serve his fellow-men ; who knows, also, that he
is depriving society of the services of those who use
lessly exhaust themselves for him, and is further injur
ing it by undermining the health of its healthy mem
bers, feels urged by the very social instincts which
would prevent him from committing suicide while in
health, to yield a last service to society by relieving it
from a useless burden. Hence it is that Sir Ihomas
More, in the quotation with which we began this essay,
makes the social authorities of his ideal state urge
euthanasia as the duty of ,a faithful citizen, while they
yet, consistently reprobate ordinary suicide, as a Ibsemajeste, a crime against the State. The life of the
individual is, in a sense, the property of society. The
infant is nurtured, the child is educated, the man is
protected by others; and, in return for the life thus
given, developed, preserved, society has a right to
demand from its members a loyal, self-forgetting devo
tion to the common weal. To serve humanity, to raise
the race from which we spring, to dedicate every talent,
every power, every energy, to the improvement of, and
to the increase of happiness in, society, this is the duty
of each individual man and woman. And, when we
have given all we can, when strength is sinking, and life
is failing, when pain racks our bodies, and the worse
agony of seeing our dear ones suffer in our anguish,
tortures our enfeebled minds, when the only service
�20
Euthanasia.
we can render man is to relieve him of a useless and
injurious burden, then we ask that we may be per
mitted to die voluntarily and painlessly, and so to
crown a noble life with the laurel-wreath of a selfsacrificing death.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Euthanasia
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Besant, Annie Wood
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 20 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Author not named on pamphlet but known to be Annie Besant. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. Also published with the added subtitle: 'A pamphlet advocating the legalization of the administration of poison by a medical attendant to persons suffering from incurable and painful diseases'.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Thomas Scott
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1875]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G5502
Subject
The topic of the resource
Euthenasia
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Euthanasia), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Annie Besant
Conway Tracts
Death
Ethics
Euthanasia
Health
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/66bf10875e4f0159211dc19291783594.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=vdX5udFG-crtFcsxdthJpVJzuIMBLB2%7EDpojlopW4AIrOFEKz7mYNhsveBeBiaheuW8tqLSA-LftGlAI37-DMJ1oK-0kPdHsnzBSGDWDyRy5TmUGizMShaGGYZxJ8Iqj8jL2WhKxzPzGfee8bBBdnp4bPzmcKfAGBq-0Q7X0PtDl6XwHAxm7UnuImf4xFLX%7EFl7901OwDZ6H1AQcRrcsqAfBEChhs%7EfNjdoAQIijthI6AAxhSfZQ006XgMmTyPYLnREQarS2Mrg5mKFOKBFVjk5lxULt4BrZUSy01j2AOQ8NIwTU6cpZHtqE3Q%7E2YuXd1OO9rHK0LMDVSJ5kH9l4Rg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
c99cf20663e8c08db6b06e773f698eea
PDF Text
Text
Vicarious Suffering.
OUR
SANCTIONS
FOR
CRUELTY.
BY
SALADIN.
(Reprinted from the “Agnostic Journal.")
May 31st, 1902.
LONDON:
W. STEWART & CO., 4b FARRINGDON ST,
E.C.
�Every Thursday.
Price Twopence.
Journal
AND ECLECTIC REVIEW.
EDITED
BY
SALADIN.
V Under name and pen-name, some of the most
scholarly and able writers of the age contribute regularly
to The Agnostic Journal ; and, although the Editorial
policy is opposed to the popular and dominant faith,
the columns of the journal are ever open to articles in
defence of Christianity from clergymen or lay Christians
of recognized ability, while considerable space is devoted
to the investigation of Theosophy, Spiritualism,
Mysticism, etc.
The Agnostic Journal can be had free by post on
the following terms :—Quarterly, 2s. 8|d.; half-yearly,
5s. 5d. ; yearly, 10s. iod. Orders should be given to
local newsagents ; but where this is impracticable they
should be sent direct to the Publishing Office.
London : W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farringdon Street, E.C.
�VICARIOUS SUFFERING.
“ Man’s inhumanity to man ” is the blight and canker
and bane of human life. In recent decades human
ingenuity has been, in part, directed to such benignant
inventions as the steam-engine and the electric telegraph
and telephone. But, anterior to those decades, for
century upon century, man’s mechanical ingenuity was
principally directed to the production of instruments of
torture, to contrivances which applied to those mystic
harp-strings, the human nerves, could evoke every note in
the gamut of agony.
In the Ages of Faith, in the ages in which the Church
which claimed, and still claims, to be of Christ was
supreme, we had no telescope, no gas-light, no railway, no
printing-press ; but we had the rack, the wheel, the boots,
the thumb-screw, the witch’s bridle, the Iron Virgin, and
other torture-engines too numerous and devilish to be
catalogued here. In our museums you can still behold
preserved specimens of these mechanical horrors. The
sight of them makes me shudder : then, what effect must
their hellish spectacle of rust and horror have upon you,
O Orthodoxist, when you remember that it was almost
exclusively in the service of the Church that that rack tore
human joints out of their sockets, that the boots there
�4
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
held the leg of a human being till blood from the ruptured
veins and marrow from the shattered bone splashed in
the face of him who, with swinging hammer, drove home
the merciless wedges ? Here is heresy, some incom
prehensibly subtle doctrinal distinction contemned : then,
tighten the wedges, apply the hammer ; as weighed against
the crime of heresy how trifling are blood and marrow
and anguish and agony !
Were grimly fanatical believers culpably inconsistent
with their creed in thus mangling their fellow human
beings ? Did not the Lord, at the very outset of his
career with man, shew that he preferred the red blood of
the veins to the red flush of the rose ? Did he not prefer
the fat of Abel’s veal to the fragrance of Cain’s violets ?
Cain : Poor Abel ! he was but a shepherd boy,
Who offered up the firstlings of his flocks
In order to appease Jehovah’s wrath,
Who revelled in the pangs and dying groans
Of the poor beasts who never did him wrong.
My heart revolted at the cruel sport. ’Twas I
Refused to torture gentle innocents,
But, taking fruit, I offered it to Him,
Altho’ ’twas mock’ry, seeing all was His.
Spirit : Fruit would not do. The Lord has ordered blood.
Cain : My brother, as a shepherd, offered lambs,
And I, as husbandman, did offer fruit.
Methought the offering of one’s toil is best acceptable.
Spirit : Blood, dying pangs, the torture of the innocent,
Alone appeases the Almighty’s wrath.
Cain : Ay ! to the shame of all created things,
Thou speakest true—He loveth blood I *
Did not the entire wheel of the Christians’ faith turn upon
the pivot of blood and suffering ? Was not the man-god
in whom they believed nailed, hand and foot, to the bitter
cross ? Painters, poets, theologians and historians, have
testified to the pain and ignomy of crucifixion. It was not
* Lady Florence Dixie, in “ Abel Avenged,” in Part II. of
“ The Songs of a Child.”
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
5
mere execution, as we now understand the word; it was
studied torture. In being nailed, or lashed, to the cross, no
vital organ of the victim was affected. Crucifixion was, with
hellish ingenuity, designed to elicit and stimulate all the
suffering of which the nerves of the culprit were capable,
even to the last spasm and writhe of anguish and agony.
A strong culprit has been known to hang on the cross
for several days, before exposure to the sun, hunger, slow
haemorrhage and fiery thirst brought death in merciful
relief.
And this is the revolting and horrible torture to which
the Church deliberately and dogmatically subjected her
man-deity. Lest the horror upon which her very existence
rested should be overlooked or forgotten, crucifixes with
a tortured and nude human figure nailed thereto were
exhibited everywhere, in wood, in stone, on canvas.
And, as if this were not enough of the cruel and the
horrible, the twelve “ Stations of the Cross,” each more
shudderingly revolting than the other, were invented and
forced, in all their repellant gruesomness, upon the wild
and sanguinary imagination of an unlettered public.
Blood! Blood ! Blood everywhere ! “ Without the
shedding of blood there is no remission.” “ Except
ye eat my flesh and drink my blood, there is no life in
you.”
This horrible dithyramb with the refrain of “ Blood ”
only too truculently commended itself to the fierce races
in the fields of Christian mission. Blood, not brain.
Brain was crude, credulous and inchoate, and applied its
raw rapacity to blood and the merciless shedding
thereof. Zealots, bigots, their god had been tortured, and
.they, not incoherently, took to inventing instruments “ for
His name’s sake.” Habituation to the idea of crucifixion—
“ and, being in agony, He prayed more earnestly, and
the sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling
�6
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
down to the ground”—hardened all the more gentle
and tender humanitarian instincts, as daily contemplation
of cruel and morbid topics inevitably will. And, here, in
London, only a few years ago, we had, on exhibition, a
collection of torture-engines by which, through dark and
bloody ages, on the scaffold and in the dungeon, the Gospel
had been protected in its purity against the taint of
heresy.
Perdition to the church that required such engines to pro
tect her against heresy ! Now, on every side, she is assailed
by heresy—nay, by blank unbelief; and this contumacious
journal is, every week, hurled in her teeth in defiant
scorn. Yet who will say that, in spite of this, the world
is not better than it was at the time when this serial would
have been in the flames and its editor on the rack ?
Blood! Blood ! “ There is a fountain filled with
blood.” Well, disinfect the abhorrent nuisance and fill
it up with rubble: scatter over it a layer of rich and
generous mould ; there let the wholesome green grass wave
round the rathe roses of Reason and the white lilies of
Peace. Can it be wondered at that this habituation to the
conception of the sanguinary and horrible has rendered
Christianity the bloodiest agency that has ever cursed the
earth with its presence ? I fearlessly appeal to history in
corroboration of my averment. “ I come not to bring
peace, but a sword,” is a dictum put into the mouth of
the clumsily-invented myth from whom the faith of the
vulgar takes its name. Yes, and, by Heaven, the sword
came, and came to stay; and with it came ignorance and
superstition and bigotry, and cruelty and rancour and hate.
“ The Lamb of the Great Sacrifice” was hoisted on the back
of The Ass of the Great Credulity, and the Dark Ages was
the result, and the darkness of the Dark Ages flings its
penumbra upon the vaunted illumination of to-day to a
degree that he who looks upon Society conventionally
little suspects.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
7
Not only did the “glad tidings of great joy”—O
mordant irony !—tend to the reckless and merciless waste
of life; but, by a far hotter and more real hell than any
previous faith had known, it lent new terrors to death.
Never, before Christianity was devised, was it dis
covered that there was any sting in death worth speaking
of. Ask the death-bed memories of certain sincere
Christians of the type of John Bunyan and William
Cowper, in their raving terror, how Christianity takes
away the sting from death; and, if I, like them, were a
Christian, I feel certain that my death-bed would be as
shudderingly terrible as was theirs. There are, I know,
many Christians who feel quite sure that they will “ fall
asleep in Jesus,” and who console themselves by repeating
maudlin, nauseous, and meaningless Gospel tags. They
know that the vast majority of human kind go to perdition,
but they have the despicable self-conceit to believe
that they have been selected from that overwhelming
majority, that they are members of that select few, that
mere handful, the elect, that they have “ found Jesus,’’
that they have been “ washed in the blood of the Lamb,”
and much else of canting commonplace. And, in their
selfish meanness, they feel idiotically happy—although,
practically, the whole of the rest of the world is to be lost.
And only by this intensely selfish and self-conceited
imbecility does Christianity 11 take away the sting from
death.” Plato knew how to die, ignorant of this
sting-extracting process; and so did Socrates, so did
Cato, so did Epaminondas, so did Codes, so did Caesar,
so did Julian.
He who mercilessly drowned a multitude of swine,
after, in his superstitious ignorance, he deemed he had
put devils into them, cannot be cited as a zoophilist.
Buddha and Mahomet alike insisted upon kindness to the
“lower” animals; but where did Jesus utter one word
that can be quoted enjoining upon us kindly treatment
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
of our poor non-human fellow-mortals ? We find attri
buted to him a number of fatuous utterances like,
“ I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven ”; “I and
my father are one ” ; and “ The father is greater than I.”
But he never once said : “ Be merciful to the ass ”; “ Be
kind to the dog ”; or “ Liberate the slave.” And,
consistently enough, till this hour, the countries professing
the faith that bears his name are by far the cruellest and
zoomistic in the world.
Even while I write, in Spain, the most Christian
country in Europe, a bull-fight on a more than ordinarily
*
colossal scale is being arranged, and which will involve
reeking slaughters and horrors in which the Mahometan
could never participate, and which the Buddhist would
rather die than sanction. By far the best organized and
numerically strongest section of the Church that bears
Christ’s name formulates thus, in brutal candour, in
“ The Catholic Dictionary,” published under the
imprimatur of Cardinal Vaughan: “ The brutes are
made for man, who has the same right over them that he
has over plants and stones. He may, according to the
express permission of God, given to Noe, kill them for his
food, and this without strict necessity; it must also be
lawful to put them to death or to inflict pain on them for
any good or reasonable end, such as the promotion
of man’s knowledge, health, etc., or even for the purposes
of recreation.”
There are, however, humanitarians among the Papists,
as among the Protestants, men and women nobler than,
and unconsciously in revolt against, their creed. For
instance, the Christian pietist, Frances Power Cobbe,
denounces Vivisection as “ to the last degree un-Christian ”;
and then, by a tour de force of the glaring inconsistency
to which Christian apologists are driven, she admits:
* See p. 13.
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
9
“ This abominable sentiment, and all the cruelty to man
and brute of which it has been the promoter, remains
after twenty centuries of Christianity almost unnoticed
by the churches of Christ. No moralist—so far as my
small knowledge extends, whether Catholic or Protestant
—no father, no schoolman, no casuist of later times, no
Protestant preachers, have denounced Cruelty and the
Pleasure in Pain with anything approaching to the nature
of its moral delinquency.”
Again : “ If we really accepted the precept of Love to
all and under all conditions as the supreme Divine Law,
should we not regard the sin of positively torturing and
taking pleasure in the sight of torture as the very last and
worst of offences ? Should not the early Christian
teachers, when they mapped out the Seven Deadly Sins,
have placed Cruelty the very first on the list ? What
were they doing, and what has the Church of Rome been
doing ever since, to tell us that Sloth, Covetousness, Lust,
Anger, Envy, Pride, and even Gluttony are mortal sins,
and say not one word about Cruelty to man or beast ?
Again : 11 Even our own English minds (through whole
regions of which the old Roman theology and morals still
unconsciously dribble) rarely take in the idea that the
supreme Vice is Cruelty, that while all other vices degrade
man to the level of the beast, Cruelty sinks him to that
of the fiend. When we speak of Vice commonly, we
think of sexual vice or intemperance. We do not think
of that Vice of which—so it seems to me—we must, if
guilty, repent through all the cycles of our immortality.”*
Yes, Miss Cobbe, and to this Vice of all the vices that
“ most holy religion ” of yours is not appreciably opposed,
in either theory or practice !
That truculent Romish dictum I have quoted gives
full warranty, not only to hunting our fellow-mortals to
Contemporary Review, May, 1902.
�IO
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
death for “ sport,” but gives sanction to the hideous
horrors exposed in a brochure * which I have glanced
at and closed with a shudder. Jesus was crucified to
secure our spiritual, and now, consistently enough with
that immoral and revolting proposition, dogs and cats and
rabbits and guinea-pigs are being vivisected to secure our
physical well-being. In the name of Mercy, who and
what are we that both god and dog should suffer and die
for us ? I who, till recently, was endowed with far above
the normal strength and agility, and could leap a five-bar
gate, was wont to feel more proud of the feat than that
of writing an “ At Random ” ; but I have now, through a
nerve-malady, to move cautiously, and not over steadily,
along by the aid of a staff. Yet, even were the torture
of the mouse, exhibited in figure 447, to disclose the
neurotic secret that would again make me a swift-footed
Achilles, I should, unscathed, set the “ wee bit creepin’,
timorous beastie ” free. What right have I to make his
impotency my potency, to make his woe my weal ?
In Figure 503^, these Christian vivisectionists have
actually stuck up a rabbit with a nail through each foot
and in an attitude grimly suggestive of their man-god
upon the cross. The brutal burlesque is theirs, not
mine. But in the figures on page 158, the cat, my
favourite among all the animals, is exposed in three
attitudes of vivisectional agony. I finish this at “ the
wee short hour ayont the twal,” and go to bed to pass a
sleepless night. Visions of my lost friend, the “ Prodigal
’Catalogue of apparatus and appliances for experiments with
animals, issued by F. and M. Lautenschlager, Berlin. Translated
into English by Paul Griinfeld, who was nominated at the request
of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, by the librarian of the British
Museum. The illustrations, which have been reproduced by
photographic zinco-etching, are fac-similes of the originals, and have
been placed beside the letterpress as they appear in the original
catalogue. Second Edition.—Twentieth Thousand. Printed for
The National Anti-Vivisection Society, 92, Victoria Street, London.
j
�VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
II
Son,” will pass before me, between my closed but
sleepless eyes and heaven’s dome filled with the awful
stars. His remains lie affectionately interred in the small
plot of garden behind my home in London, and a giant
Scots thistle from Galloway keeps vigil over his grave.
My ever tenderly remembered “ Prodigal Son,”
who was young and happy, and to whom life was
dear, yet died like a philosopher. I feel convinced that
he knew he was dying; but he died like a hero. He
knew he was dying; but he knew nothing about the sting
having been taken from death by the reputed sacrifice
of an old-time carpenter; he did not know that death had
ever had any special sting. As I nursed him, he only
looked up with a deep and tender mournfulness into my
tearful eyes. I have among “ my puir earth-born
companions and fellow mortals,” had pet pigs, pet
bullocks, pet horses, pet rats, pet sheep, pet. crows and
pet owls. I never had the self-conceit to feel myself so
superior to any of them that I presumed to regard them
as subordinates; I regarded them as friends, and (I wish
I could say the same of the human animal) not one
of them ever betrayed me.
I read inexpressible volumes of pathos in the counten
ance of my expiring feline friend. His teeth, which he had
often used upon me playfully, were visible between his
parted lips, as he panted for laborious breath. And, as
he cast upon me his last look, there was an eloquence
therein which can never be expressed in any weak words of
mine. It meant: “ Dearest friend, Saladin, my poor green
eyes, of which you were the delight, are closing. I am in
pain. It is growing dark. My one regret is, I shall see
you no more.”
I am aware that what I here express is only the
emotionalism of an intense zoophilist who sometimes feels
inclined to doubt that “ the lower animals ” are the lower
animals at all, it being difficult to get lower than the
�12
VICARIOUS
SUFFERING.
average J. Smith, and impossible to get lower than the
lowest J. Smith.
If, in the awful arcanum of inexorable Fate, I cannot
have my soul saved without a tortured Christ, or my body
cured without a vivisected Cat, let soul and body perish.
I am not without egoistic self-esteem; but I have
also moral self-respect, and this latter revolts at my
accepting of weal at the cost of another’s woe. Barbaric
conception of pristine savages ! If my soul cannot be
saved without another’s blood and agony—Let it be lost.
Doom, I face thee and whatever thou mayest have in
reserve for me j and I decline to escape my weird through
the anguish of a Christ on the Cross, or, through its
natural, sequence, the agony of a Cat on the “ Operation
Board.” God, whom I cannot formulate in thought, but
whom I meet in ecstatic vision, Thou wilt not permit r
me to be lost because I decline to accept of a cruel
coward’s method of being saved.
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
*
The hold the ring has on Spain is enormous. There
are four weekly journals in Madrid devoted solely to the
interests and literature of the bull-ring. There are dozensof books written on the subject, and on every day of a
fight Madrid is simply painted green with copies of the
“Programa de Espectaculos,” a four-page sheet sold fora,
penny by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hawkers.
This gives pictures of the bulls to be slaughtered on theday in question, their pedigrees and owners and short
histories of the animals, together with the names of all
the performers in the day’s spectacle. About an hour
before the time for the show to begin the picadores,
dressed in their clumsy but picturesque costume, set out
from their hotel in the Puerta del Sol for the Plaza de
Toros, about a mile away.
These gentry are mounted on fine horses, not the sorry
hacks they use in the-ring, and are followed by immense
crowds of admiring men, women, and children, who con
sider it an honour to be near the heroes.
At this time of the year the spectacle begins at about
four, earlier or later, according to the number of animals
to be killed. The scene for a couple of hours before this
time beggars description. A sense of furious struggle,
wild desire, fierce eagerness hangs over the city—comes
pouring down with the rays of the hot sun, rises with the
dust from the suffocating streets, gets into the blood of
every Madrileno, and compels him or her—for women go
to bull-fights in their thousands—to make a mad rush for
the place of slaughter.
Even if he cannot afford to enter the show—and it is
an old saying that a Spaniard will sell his shirt to go
Daily Express, May 21st, 1902.
�14
A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
to a bull-fight—to be near the ring is something. Per
haps he may hear a wounded bull bellow with rage or
a dying horse scream in his agony, and he is certain
to see the chief actors come or go.
Private carriages, with well-dressed men and daintilyclad women, electric trams succeeding each other with
amazing rapidity, each laden to the full with sweltering
humanity (or inhumanity), horse and mule trams that
use no rails, but clatter madly over the cobbles, extra
omnibuses, and open cars drawn by five, six, or eight
red-tasselled mules, all dash at full gallop for the Plaza
de Toros to turn out their loads and tear back for
more.
As the time grows short they come only part of the
way back and turn at the half-way mark to hurry on
belated stragglers. It is not gay, it is feverish, exciting,
bewildering. Men’s faces are set and keen. There is
no badinage or merriment, even if it were possible,
while thundering over the ill-paved streets. The one
idea is to get to the fight quickly. Anger is swift to the
surface, drivers are urged and sworn at, and woe be to the
wretched horse or mule that stumbles. He is greeted
with a shower of curses from roof and window of the
vehicle and flogged unmercifully by his driver.
If anyone is of opinion that bull-fighting does not
brutalize these people, let him watch the crowd that goes
to the Plaza de Toros any Sunday in Madrid. He need
not go inside the amphitheatre—he will see enough out
side to change his mind.
We are having fights nearly every day just at present.
I went to Thursday’s contest, and saw six bulls and
fifteen horses slaughtered. I was disgusted and bored,
and came away simply worn out, not with excitement,
but with a sinking stomach and fluttering heart. My
first feeling was that of anger at the men in the ring
for brutally sacrificing the poor horse, who, with his
bandaged eye on to the side towards the bull, was made
to receive broadside the cruel horns of the maddened
and worried brute. The result was sickening. The
horse was ripped open, and amidst screams of pain he
was forced to stand again with his entrails dragging on
the sand of the arena. Every step he took he trod on
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
15
his entrails, but was not allowed to lie down and die until
he could no longer bear the burden of the picador, who
urged him forward as long as possible with spurs while his
servant slashed the dying brute over the head with a
*
stick
I do not intend to describe the fight; you would
probably not publish the revolting details if I did. I
merely give one instance which was multiplied over a
dozen time with variations more loathing and gory as the
insistent crowd’s lust for blood grew with what it fed upon.
Finally, the bull, his fore part a crimson flood, spirit
exhausted, an easy victim for the cowards who were
torturing him, was put out of his misery by the matador.
For three hours this went on until the six bulls had been
dragged out dead by mules.
Bull-fighting is a cruel, soul-debasing sight. Men,
women, and children must become brutalised made
callous to suffering and pain. It must and does stamp
the character of the people who love it, and degrade
them. Many Spaniards will tell you that they do not
care for it, and never go. They wish to have the “ sport ”
stopped, but they are few compared to the millions here
who would cause civil war rather than their favourite
pastime should be abolished. In some parts of the United
States the law does not permit a butcher to sit on a jury
trying a prisoner for capital crime, because he is sup
posed to be accustomed to the sight of blood. If such a
law were in force here it would be hard to obtain a jury
in Madrid, where nearly everyone is a butcher, by proxy
s>t least
After witnessing a. bull-fight it is easy to understand
Spanish cruelty in Cuba and elsewhere, and to realise that
it was in this Spain that the Inquisition originated- You
may see to-day in Madrid the square, Plaza Mayor, where
thousands of persons were tortured and burned to death
to the great delight of the spectators crowding the bal
conies about the four sides of the square. It has changed
but little in appearance, except that the instruments of
torture have been removed a little further away to the Plaza
de Toros.
,, c u •
There are many laws in Spain regulating bull-fighting,
mostly in favour of the institution. As an example of its
�A CHRISTIAN HOLIDAY.
legality, I may merely point out that should all the horses
available be killed at a corrida the law allows the managers
of the rings to go into the public streets and commandeer
the first horses at hand, paying for them, of course. There
are more than two hundred and fifty bull-rings in Spain,
About five hundred fights are held every year, in which
one thousand five hundred bulls and six thousand horses
are killed. These are average figures. It is impossible
to get any reliable figures of the expense of this national
institution, but it must be very large. Matadors of first
rank make sometimes from ^£10,000 to_^'i£)ooo a year,
and everybody finds money for the bull-fight, though
schools suffer in this country, where about fifty per cent,
of the people are illiterate.
London: W. Stewart & Co., 41, Farrin^don Street, E.C.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Ross, William Stewart [1844-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes A Christian holiday, article reprinted from the Daily Express, 21 May 1902. Reprinted from the Agnostic Journal, 31 May 1902. Includes bibliographical references. Annotations in ink and pencil. "by Saladin" [title page]. Saladin is the pseudonym of William Stewart Ross. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
W. Stewart & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1902]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N600
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Vicarious suffering : our sanctions for cruelty), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Bullfighting
Cruelty
NSS
Suffering
Torture
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/2e2f6f2d360f9b69fea6db67ee15e085.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=j0v%7EOqf-2U-YtDGwGKXGm9C-yDHaNlJ6UMIcLzL%7ENs0IR6tL9e3LnNBNJPZPkbr41Lb2FFBGkAsBIoPz4ojUKOM1BLmFQL9OxYYBlHq0gexpow3tGGr5qR9h5jdHKCFPb5BXB3c76Z5KL8JvEXNHIuDoPsKblV0I96B36BysuoH1bB%7EfRvMO5N8TLSmSzK4K4QBCtWYVpJeTgvFAXLRgSH45yKiVt95sxtjaAd%7Etfi9I5bXp42ptrieBetOyY56azceS1xkUrOqDAcDZNkUnueDNee1qzZYkOgmc5HCj5fs6D-J6PGfT2INNfQrko5vahlGlVAZGj%7EQX9DpXxpdyyg__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
8450359937ee5db15d9d5edd9355fea2
PDF Text
Text
ENTERING SOCIETY:
A DISCOURSE
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
DELIVERED AT
SUNDAY, 29th July, 1877.
frige twopence.
�LONDON :
PRINTED BY WATERLOW & SONS LIMITED
LONDON WALL.
I
�ENTERING SOCIETY.
Every physical law runs through the universe; ex
plains equally the rolling world and rolling pebble ;
harmonises flowers and constellations. In the moral
and social world there is a like self-similarity. A
certain unity may be discovered in the culture of a
child, a nation, or the human race. »
Constant is the unity of interests, feelings, thoughts,
making what we term society. There is an endless
variety in human nature, but its distinction from all
lower nature is that its varieties can be utilized to
form a society. In animal swarms and herds same
ness is their strength; feather flocks with-its feathei.
There is a strange tribe of American Indians who
have a tradition that mankind is descended from the
animal world. There was, they say, a mountainous
monster who devoured all manner of animals. He
swallowed them alive, and once, when he had taken
this various meal, a certain Little Wolf that had
�4
been swallowed, found the animals inside the monster
quarrelling with each other; and he persuaded them
that instead of quarrelling they should one and all
unite, and contribute their several powers of horn,
tooth, or other faculty to get out of the monster and
slay him. The animals co-operated; liberated them
selves ; slew the monster; and, in doing that, they
were changed to men, and the human race began.
It is a much more moral and scientific genesis of man
than that in the Bible. Intelligent co-operation of
different species imply humanity; and there are
facts enough to show that, on the other hand, pro
longed strife disintegrates society, and men may be
transformed back to animals.
All human beings are born members of society.
Some pietists and fanatics have tried to escape this
necessity, because society is what they call worldly ;
but, though they hide in nunneries, monasteries,
caves and deserts, they do not get out of society any
more than they get out of the world. If society were
to cease its work of coining, baking, weaving, trading,
then the hermit would get out of it in the one way
possible—death.
There is nothing more grotesque, were we not so
familiar with it, than where the abject language of her
mits who fled society,—and sometimes escaped from
it by the door of death,—and their anathemas on the
�5
world are repeated by Christians enjoying society and
ambitious of its rewards. Possibly they feel bound
for form’s sake to carry the skeleton of asceticism
round the banquet, but, as in the Egyptian custom,
the performance only seems to stimulate the more the
avidity with which the so-called pious utilise and enjoy
the kingdom of this world. The Church of England
merits the credit of having to a large extent abolished
the fiction of a world of sinners and an un-world (so to
say) of saints; and it might become a fairly good
church if it were to lay aside its pretence that the
world is morally an invalid in need of its holy medi
caments. The temptation is great where the deceived
patient is rich, for priests as well as for the doctors
who proffer bread-pills. (The “ Priest in Absolution
really believes in the deadly situation of human nature,
and goes on with the old practice of drugging, blister
ing and bleeding.)
The unpardonable sin of nearly every theology ■
the sin by which it must perish—is the separation it
has effected between two parts of man’s nature, the
antagonism instituted between his social and spiritual
activities, in whose harmony man’s well-being can
alone be found. That only a few eccentric priests
believe and act on that principle does not mitigate the
evil fact that all are taught it, and that the young and
simple have their consciences bruised and their lives
�6
misdirected by it. A result of this figment lias been
that the strongest moral agencies, which a true religion
would have cultivated, have been left to trail or climb
as they could; no sect being willing to acknowledge
that any good force belonged to human nature. Still,
without any aid from the churches, and mostly against
their opposition, Society has been partially able to
cultivate the motives, feelings, aims which constitute
the actual religion,—the guiding, moulding, animating
religion,-—of each civilised community, so far as it is
really guided, leaving the churches to become more
and more museums of antiquarian dogmatic remains.
What is the Social Religion ? Its motive is the
sentiment of honour, the sin it specially hates is
meanness : these two—love of the honourable, hatred
of the dishonourable—branch out from the individual
heart into endless adaptations. Out of the social
sentiment of honour emerge patriotism, justice, forti
tude, supporting states; and that loyalty in personal
relations, generating sympathy and friendliness, which,
when men make the most of them, will cement the
w'orld better than gunpowder. No state can ever be
perfectly civilised until it is held together by simple
force of friendliness.
There is a print often seen in shop-windows which
has been sent by thousands through the world. It is
inscribed—“Simplyto thy cross I cling,” and repre
�7
sents a young woman with the waves of a sea dashing
around her, clasping for safety a cross which rises
from the mid-ocean. It is a perfect mirror of Chris
tian idolatry: it is translatable into many systems of
superstition, where above the billows Faith clings now
to a lingam, next to a wheel, or it may be, to the
symbol of a serpent. But from what engulphing
waves will a stone cross, or any of the like idols, save
those who cling to them? From billows of sorrow,
loss of their friends, or from disease, pain, and death ?
By no means. It is truly written in the Bible that
one fate happens to all alike, whatever be their
prayers and sacrifices; and it almost broke the hearts
of the old prophets and psalmists that the pious got
no advantage at all over others in these things; in
fact, nature’s strict impartiality between the prayerful
and the prayerless was a main reason why priests fell
to abusing nature and building up a cloudy realm, in
which, being its sole creators, they could like other
romancers have things turn out as they liked—all the
“ pious ” happy, all the rest damned. In that world
where cause and effect are of no importance all
the stone crosses are in order. They are effective
enough to save clinging Faith from imaginary billows,
from storms that are not raging, floods non-existent,
' waves of delusive sin against a demonic majesty, and
fabulous furies of a phantasmal hell.
�But for all of these the real religion that grows
around us day by day -will substitute the definite
recognition of actual moral dangers, and the study of
■rational methods by which they may be escaped,
and the health of man and society be preserved.
Even now the finest hearts and minds in this
world are impressing upon us the real hells
beside which those of the sects appear petty and
ridiculous. While the “ lake of fire,” to an increasing
number, reads like something seen by Baron Mun
chausen on his travels, it is no dream that bright and
sweet children are growing up to people asylums and
prisons, to break hearts and desolate homes, and to
pass into degradations which sometimes make death .
seem a tardy joy. If a man has ever had the sorrow
of seeing one youth beginning with promise, throwing
away his life in debauchery and selfishness, much
more if he have seen the anguish of a home when all
its fairest promises are broken, he will hardly require
more to show him the absurdity of priest-made horrors
in the presence of these that are real.
I think it not too soon to maintain that somewhat
more gravity—even solemnity, if you please—should
be associated with what is called “entering society.”
That phrase usually denotes participation in festal
society—a realm of gaiety, beauty, mutual felicitation,
where persons are seen in picturesque tableau.
�9
There are some silly moralists who look upon all that
as vanity j all the beauty of raiment, each effort to
look the best, to be happy and make others happy, as
ministering to ostentation and selfishness, and as
injurious to modesty, humility, and simplicity.
Nothing of the kind. It will never harm the modesty
of youth to enjoy life’s springtide, as nature invites
with her blossom and melody. All that purity
requires is that their mirth and dance keep always in
the light, and that there be no blind ways such as
priests in absolution” provide, and other spiders
that weave their webs along the flower-fringed paths of
early life. There are hard, odious men (not many
.women I hope), who would turn this world into a coal
depot, or a grocer’s shop; but the social health is too
vigorous for them ; and it is a satisfaction to know
that there is a demand for roses as well as cabbages.
They who wear the roses, or other decoration, are
they vain? On the contrary they are conscious of
their need of the rose or the gem to supply that
wherein they fall short. Nor are they selfish; they
do not array themselves for self-admiration; they long
to contribute their part to the general happiness, to
make the social circle beautiful, tasteful, and worthy
of the enormous cost and toil by which it is sup
ported.
The only danger is that the young will believe some
�IO
evil whisper that their circle of social enjoyment is
quite apart from their round of religious interests and
moral duties. They may not indeed adopt the vulgar
cant that these are opposed to each other—one holy,
the other wicked. But even where that notion is not
found, some regard society as a worldly thing, a region
of persons not of principles. The merchant who regards
religion as a thing for Sunday and not Monday; who
conceives the commandments proper between lids of
the Bible, out of place between lids of the ledger ; the
preacher who on Sunday rehearses creeds declaring the
human race under a doom, and everybody moving
amid satanic snares, and then passes the rest of his
week as smilingly as if there were no danger;—these,
and others like them, are generally so unconscious of
the duplicity of their lives that we may see plainly
that the actual every-day world and the so-called
religious world are to those they represent as different
as two planets. But it is impossible that this tradition
can be suffered to go on much longer. That religious
world which has no relation to society, but only to an
anthropomorphic deity and another world, has already
received the verdict of human intelligence that it is
no real religion at all, but a morbid excrescence on
the body of Humanity. The verdict has been passed,
and the sentence can not long be delayed; for it is
impossible that the real interests of man can be
�preserved if his energies, his means, above all his
moral enthusiasm, are diverted from a society in need
to a deity not in need ; from actually existent men and
women to possibly existent angels; from the momen
tous day that is to that which is not.
The fundamental law of society is one with the
fundamental law of religion. It is a higher law than
the Hebrew golden rule (though not inharmonious
with it), for it teaches us that our self-love must not
equal our love of others. In every case the social
instinct requires our personal interest to be held
subordinate to the general good; and there is no other*
foundation of either morality or religion than just that:
self-denial, self-restraint, even self-sacrifice, for things
larger than self, are varied growths from the one germ
of our moral nature—the social self rising above the
personal self.
Unless the endless combinations of society be at
tended and supervised by the moral principle just
stated, increase of wealth and power is but increase
of things anti-social, selfish, unprogressive. An irre
ligious society is self-disintegrating; but how is society
to be kept in pure elevation when religion is off at
tending to mansions in heaven; and when the majority
of young people are taught such notions of religion
that they are only too glad to get rid of it during the
rational days of the week ? They are perfectly right;
�12
the introduction of cant and sanctimoniousness into
the drawing-room, or theatre, or club, or business,
would be like the new beetle amid grain ; for that is
vast selfishness disguised as religion. But there is such
a religion as charity and kindness, as self-control and
love and service to others ; the spirit that desires to
learn and be set right; the courtesy, the sympathy,
which alone can make the true gentleman or gentle
woman j and if this kind of religion does not beat as
pulse of the social heart to transfuse the social body
and all its members, the life of these will be coarse,
their end corruption.
Let us for example consider one of the great social
growths of modern times—the club system. To what
is called polite society the club is almost as important
a development as the railway system to trade. It re
sults from the application of the principle of co-opera
tion to secure personal intercourse under favourable
conditions, and all manner of comfort and culture
with utmost economy of means. That is the most
powerful principle in the world—combination and
though society is itself a product of it, it has hardly
imagined its farther results. But what are the social
effects of club life at present? It appears to me that
great as are their advantages they are fostering some
very serious evils, and it is to be feared, even vices.
Every respectable young man has the opportunity of
�13
entering one or another of the innumerable clubs, and
if he obtains a little means the club almost doubles
them. The average home cannot rival the average
club for comfort, luxury, or various society. The wife
may make herself a slave, but if great wealth be not
given her she cannot make her home compete with
the ample attractions of the club. And how little the
cost 1 A young man, for little more than half of
what it would cost him to marry and found a home of
moderate comfort, may live luxuriously, passing his free
hours in the finest library, with all the current litera
ture of the world, amid decorated rooms for use
or amusement, dining magnificently with clever com
pany ; and all by combining his small means with the
small means of other young men. All very good, and
rightly helpful to many a youth. But for that youth
duties are waiting, tasks presently clamour to be done
by him j and if he remains in his palace after ne has
heard their voice, it becomes to him tne Castle of In
dolence, and probably also the home of sensuality. It
is no narrow or ascetic judgment to say that large
numbers of young men of high tastes and talents are
sinking into lives of selfishness, dilettantism, and
worthlessness through the enticing luxuries of club
life. Nor is the evil much, if at all, diminished when
we consider how many homes after they are foimed
are robbed of their rights by this overpowering growth
of modern society.
�14
How are such evils to be met ? Is there any case
for a crusade against clubs ? If there were it would
be a quixotic crusade. But clubs are not an evil; they
supply great and necessary advantages. All we need
is that there shall be a social religion attending and
guarding these vast social formations. Our need is
that moral culture shall turn from star-gazing and face
moral facts, and a religion rise up to teach every man
from the cradle to the grave that his duty is not
to a dead Christ but to a living humanity, not to a
Virgin Mary but to womanhood around him, not to a
« Holy Ghost” but to a principle of honour,—aye, an
honour which, when it has a religious sanction, will not
be unarmed, but remand every idler in club or else
where to his task, will place every self-indulgent circle
under ban of intolerable shame, and get from each
his or her high duty, with every pure pleasure in its
train.
When there is a religion appealing to the highest
motives in every human heart, that leads each youth
of either sex who enters society to consider that every
advantage corresponds with a duty, then all develop
ments of power and wealth in any direction must be
diffused through every part of society as benefit. We
hear a great deal of social science ; there is one very
old piece of social science confirmed by ages of experi
ence_ that we are members one of another. Hand
�cannot be so well off if foot is lame ; all are weak if
one is weak. Great nations have learned at terrible
cost that when one class or interest advances very far
it is sure to be brought to a stop till other classes gain
their share. The white people in America found lately
that their own freedom could not last another year
unless the black people enjoyed the same. Europe is
learning a severe lesson of the same kind about some
long neglected Eastern tribes. But the law holds with
equal truth of any community, or any social circle in
it. If, for example, co-operation has exemplified its
power in the club, the club cannot monopolise it with
out danger; it must become the economy of homes
also ; both sexes must share it; working men and
working women must share it. And if there is any
society where wise principles are not thus diffused
those who belong to it will be themselves fragmentary
and inharmonious.
Every man or woman entering society should carry
a whole heart into it. Not one instinct or faculty
should be reserved, or left to take the veil. Each and
all, let them enter into life, love it, enjoy it, and not
fail to do their duty by it. The price is not fairly
paid unless you endeavour to diffuse what there is
acquired. You enter the hive to create the sweet as
well as to enjoy it. And in the human hive the
creation means the progressive purification, and per-
�i6
fection of it. In society you have found new thoughts
—higher truth—liberal views ; they all belong to the
hive. And in a high sense your debt to all is secured :
you can have no benefit genuinely unless by giving it.
If God himself were to offer you a private favour and
advantage of which nobody else could reap the least
good, far better decline it. That which is sweet to you
That which is pure and true to
is sweet to others.
you, would be so to others if they felt it as you do.
Then give others your very best. So shall you stimulate
them to diffuse their best; and all shall become
apostles of the sunshine.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Entering society : a discourse delivered at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, Sunday 29th July 1877
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 16 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. Printed by Waterlow & Sons, London Wall.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1877]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3336
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
Society
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Entering society : a discourse delivered at South Place Chapel, Finsbury, Sunday 29th July 1877), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Moncure Conway
Morris Tracts
Religion and Civil Society
Social Ethics
Social Justice
Society
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/d12c7b52e743976e8024e85a736ce062.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=JKk0ukiqqyaV1TabuSURHe66dUC8lVCPuUR8WHDuVnF4qdJi8ZooIIWW3IrgPL9G8QJEvnl7s%7EvK2M0%7ES92WBchTpOYpltK85saHY5EDI2nBXKeIXjO5xDsIGdjoxVHmdesMtxL0z8QmBzJPNq%7El9U7buc0n8GFMp5my3VlknRKOp%7EoUQYC9BmEjMlHiRgs3RBoPKWQOjoBzWkqJ4ogX9AC4PwLZTFsGbRGKDElUsyPiVyOWoKhWCHTj1L2qBV04O%7EeII-p%7EMXF9qGaEwF%7EhoF2zjzLGCfMArNXLbnzlzOv%7EA3CCpcpFIfNgJSs6Cc7XbgrK2sywbIx-8nDVGwTdhw__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
b370e2b7bfef54971f88a8e5fa7052fd
PDF Text
Text
St&ies of feature Society.
NATURAL ETHICS
IN THEORY AND PRACTICE. J
X
Kk • -’M' J...';? l
BMMpEpyP? ■'.<--
.
»
■
Qxkraets from TSfjree J&eetures given for tfje jK
Ethics of Nature Society,
'■'■<
BY
C. W. SALEEBY, M.D., F.R.S.E.
., WATTS & Co.,
17, Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, London.
1912.
>
PRICE 2d.
�the ethics of nature
SOCIETY is an Association for the
Harmonious Development of Life
through the practice of Ethics based
on the Laws of Nature, and for the
Propagation of the truth that the
history of Life in
its
evolution
provides a complete justification for
asserting that there is such a thing
as the Ethics of Nature.
Morality
therefore has natural sanction and
natural criteria.
�B.3II )
NATIONAL SECULAR SOCIETY
ETHICS OF NATURE SOCIETY.
Natural Ethics
IN THEORY AND
PRACTICE.
Extracts from Three Lectures given for the
ETHICS OF NATURE SOCIETY
BY
C. W. SALEEBY, M.D., F.R.S.E.
WATTS & Co.)
ty, Johnson’s Court, Fleet Street, London
1912.
��THE
ORIGIN
OF
MORALITY.
[Reprinted from the Ethics of Nature Review.]
Before turning to- his subject for the evening, Dr. Saleeby
spoke of the three delusions which are prevalent as to the
origin of Morality—delusions which arise in part from a mis
understanding of the word Morality.
Of these three, the first and oldest is that Morality finds its
basis either in some kind of authoritative power or definite
law from on High (the Mosaic laws, the Koran, etc.), or in
persons representative of someone to whom that power was
given (the “divine right of Kings,” the clergy, etc.). Accord
ing to this delusion, Morality has no natural criterion, and
cannot be judged by its effects, but by an authorised code of
conduct only.
The second delusion is that Morality has
arisen without any definite cause or purpose, through Cus
tom; and the third and most important, which is
the common assertion of ecclesiasticism, is that there
is no natural, spontaneous, inherent Morality in Man.
Even John Stuart Mill, in his “Utilitarianism,” lays
it down that morals are not born in a man,
but
are acquired characteristics imposed on the individual by his
surroundings, and having no root in his own nature—that
man’s is a purely selfish nature, acting by means of external
pressure. It may be taken as an indication of the progress
of the last five and twenty years, that this delusion is so
rapidly dying out.
In turning to the true conception of the Origin of Morality,
Dr. Saleeby gave a definition of the term which coincides en
tirely (as did indeed his lecture from first to last) with the
views of the Ethics of Nature Society, not only in senti
ment, but in actual expression.
“Morality is that which
makes for more life as against less, and for higher life as
against lower.” The definition grows clearest- when we under
stand what Nature means by “higher” life.
Having definitely defined Morality in terms of life, we must
turn for its history to the History of Life, which is purely
�4
evolutionary.
Past historians, past the history of churches,
past human dogmas, we come down to the beginnings of Life
as it must somehow have arisen on our planet. Already in
the vegetable world, the; marvellous structures devisied by
Nature for the nurture of the young plant, point to- Morality,
according to our definition, since they make for life. Pass
ing to the animal world, as Herbert Spencer once said, in
discussing the subject, even when the first single cell divided
itself into two, there was the rude foreshadowing of Moral
action—here was a being not wholly selfish.
Morality has thus its origin of origins in that great necessity
of Life to reproduce itself—a necessity which arose in the
presence and irrevocability of Death. The arrangements
made in Nature for reproduction are connected from the' first
with Morality, and the sacrifices involved in the process- in
crease steadily as the scale of life ascends.
Through the animal world, past the invertebrates-, past the
lower forms of vertebrates (fish-, amphibia-, birds) to the- mam
malia, from the duckmole and the kangaroo up to- the remark
able monkey tribes, a-nd thence to Human-kind, the scale of
progress may be said to be uninterrupted. In due sequence
with the general trend, the amount of care, labour, and life
devoted by the parents (and especially by the mother) to
the young, grows ever greater.
More and more stress is
laid on Morality, because there is more and more, need for it.
From the historical level, we come to the level of positive
interpretations, being confronted at the first with the query
whether this Mora-lit-y, which is an ever increasing thing in
the history of Evolution, has arisen through a particular in
clination of nature in that- direction; and we conclude that
this is undoubtedly not the case, since the na-t-ural law isi uni
versally the Darwinian law of the survival of the- fittest—of
those best suited to their particular time, environment, and
circumstances.
Yet, though we see that Nature is strictly impartial, a-nd
will indifferently choose teeth and claws with murderous in
tent, or the most delicate o-f reproductive organs imposing
absolute self-abnegation and personal risk, it is always in
so far as one or other makes for Life and Higher Life.
Nature’s bias is vital, and Morality has consequently den
�5
veloped in Nature because of its superior survival value. Not
withstanding that Morality was handicapped from the first,
it has won through by that value alone.
In order to appreciate what Morality has done for man, let
us consider by what means a man survives in the world; not
indeed by means of a defensive armour, nor by any offensive
weapons, nor by reason of his strength or of his fleetness, but
because of his Intellect, that great instrument of adaptabilityAnd this instrument comes to him through Morality, since
an intelligent being can only develop, under maternal care,
and will develop only as Morality continues to increase.
Morality is no invention of men, or of priests, or of amiable
enthusiasts; it is the maker of man, and is as necessary to
all further development as it has been necessary from the
first to natural Evolution.
Having existed from all time,
being far older than mankind, and older in consequence than
all churches and dogmas and creeds-—Morality will doubtless
survive1 them all.
�G
NATURE
AND
ETHICS.
The subject is too large to be dealt with at all completely,
and I propose expressing only my own attitude as a student
of Nature, from the standpoint of the biologist. The subject,
taken more narrowly, lies between Ethics and Biology, the
Science of Life.
The biologist finds more particularly in the history of life, in
its evolution, complete justification for asserting that there is
such a thing asi an Ethics of Nature; that Morality has
natural sanction and natural criteria.
For Moral Education we generally have recourse to the
method of former generations ; we refer thei questioning child,
not to any ultimate sanction, but to1 an all-seeing and all
judging power; and in order to make our own commands
complied with, we offer the old alternative of punishment and
reward.
So long as the right people are ruling, and so long
as there isi sufficient faith in the authoritative source which
they plead, the problem is simple enough.
But at such a
time as this, when doubt is expressed not only as to what
is right and what wrong, but even as to the actual existence
of Right and Wrong at all, the matter of Moral Education
and the moral basis is entirely changed, and become extremely
complicated.
We no longer believe in the Fall of Man; we are beginning
to understand the Ascent of Man. The fact isi, we are clearly
living in a moral interregnum; the original and older sano
tions of morality have broken down; those who still profess
them will be found to be acting in accordance with what we
call “right," simply through their own nature, or custom
and public opinion, and not by a real belief in the sanction
which they assert.
We all know that there is a distinction between Right and
Wrong; there are certain sentiments or instincts which do
tell us, in crucial instances, how we should act, irrespective
of rewards, irrespective of any sanction, irrespective
of any thing outside ourselves.
But this is not sufficient
for all needs; we ask what moral anchorage there can be—•
not only what is right, but why it is right.
�7
It is to meet this demand, to which Herbert Spencer gave
expression in his “Data of Ethics,” that some come forward
to-day with what may be termed. “Ethics of Life”-—with what
Ellen Key calls the Religion of Life.
Her books are well
worth reading; for hers is no mystic confession or creed, she
simply lays down certain ideas, certain plans, for personal
and universal conduct; which she refers to> as the Religion
of Life. She believes, as the Ethics of Nature Society does,
that in Life and its laws are detailed information and direc
tion as to what is right and wrong.
Professor Bergson’s Philosophy of Life strengthens this
theory immeasurably.
He has, from his standpoint asi a
student of Biology, a clear feeling that in the very facts of Life
are to be found certain data on which to build a moral code.
It is extremely difficult to refer to facts of Nature without
seeming to give implication of design, purpose, or intent.
Looking at the facts of the living world (in both low and high
forms of life), there is distinctly a “thrust” or impetus (as
Bergson has it, an “elan vital”} which seeks to achieve more
life. This seems to me a perfectly just statement. Whether
Life is to be considered as an almost conscious Entity, striving
to realise its o-wn partly idealised purposes, as our individual
lives do, we can hardly say.
But it certainly does appear
so. Life is, above all, says Prof. Bergson, “ a tendency to act
cn inert matter”—reminding one of certain biologists who
have argued that life looks as if it were seeking to turn as
much lifeless matter as possible into living matter.
This
argument of Bergson reminds one also- of two passages in
Shelley,s “Adonais”:
“Through wood. and. stream and field and hill and ocean
A quickening life from the Earth’s heart has bursit.”
. . . “the one Spirit’s plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear.”
It is as though Life were something behind Matter, striving
to express itself; it isi as if that plan which Tennyson sums
up aS “More Life and fuller” were the purpose of living
Nature.
Above all, this may be seen in contemplating the
history of Life.
First of all we see no life at all, then we
find traces of very simple life; and finally life as we know it
to-day; through all the process there seems an almost irresist
�8
ible desire of Life to multiply, to magnify, to intensify itself.
This is shown not only in the life of the individual, but in
those ulterior purposes for which more and more the individ
ual appears' to be designed, and to which more, and more he is
devoted.
We are- all acquainted with the great paradox of Weismann
ism, that the individual exists only for the race, to be the
host of the immortal germ-plasm, so- that all bodies are simply
designed for the making of more life in the future, for parent
hood, for the enhancement of life, and, above all, for its in
tensive culture—the making of forms- less numerous, but with
greater intensity of what may be called the living flame.
This view, which is more and more justified, is the biological
statement of the functions of the individual a® designed (if
1 may use the word) throughout all the process' of evolution
less for its own life’s sake than for the making of more- life,
widespread.
Of that age-long process we; are the1 product.
What, then, of that aspect of living Nature which has
been regarded as nearly murderous, not only a-s non-moral,
but actually as anti-moral?
John Stuart Mill spoke of living Nature- as a- “slaughter
house”; Tennyson pictured Nature “red in tooth and claw”
We are all a-ware of the destruction of life, full-grown or
immature, in the processes of Nature; many forms of life are
designed to- do murder, are ruthless1 instruments for death.
Can the proposition of Nature’s desire for Life and Morality
be compatible with the enormous- amount of futile death we
see on all hands, and with the construction of creatures de
signed to give death ? Certainly it can !
In the first place, when we point to the destruction and
worse than wast-e- amongst the immature (animals, fish, seeds,
etc.), we forget that- those who are destroyed serve for the
food and life of other—largely of higher—formsThe waste
is only apparent.
We should first- have looked to the causes
of death before we- called it so.
If a fish produces- one- mil
lion eggs yearly, and perhaps only two reach maturity to
replace their parents, it- does not follow that there has- been
meaningless, fut-ile murders of the others; for they have- gone
to serve Nature in another way, by giving food to other
species.
�9
Nature sets out to make more life and fuller; not to de
stroy. Animals that hunt and kill for their food possess teeth
and claws which, though instruments of murder on the one
hand, on closer inspection prove' to be instruments1 for life,
since by them life is sustained. This comment may to some
extent remove the existing doubt whether Nature affords a
sanction for moral conduct.
Moral conduct is that which makes for more life; and since
Life is to be measured in terms of quality as well as in terms
of quantity, we must make the further proviso' that Nature
works for intenser (we may safely say for higher) forms;
that is, for more life confined in a. narrower space. The ten
dency to subsist for that belief, to evolve, from that, and to
move upon that, forms the basis of the. Ethics of Nature
Society.
Moral conduct on these' lines will be either that
which makes for more life as against less, or that which makes
for higher life as against lower1.
Lack of time prevents, me from attempting, this evening,
to meet, or even to name, all the, difficulties which the subject
brings up; they will be dealt, with at, future lectures; but, I
do want to repeat that if any of you think this is; a thing
to look into, you should read Bergson’s “Creative Evolution,”
and Ellen Key’s “Love- and Marriage” (the book has an un
fortunate title, but the moral and social conduct, which she
derives from that theory which it is difficult to avoid calling
the Purpose of Life,, isi extremely valuable). These books' I
recommend to be read in association with M. Deshumbert’s
“The Ethics of Nature,” which is entirely devoted to the
statement of our present thesis.
The, new theory of Morality, and of the nature of Morality,
is based more and more on Biology, relying greatly upon the
facts of our natural instincts, especially the parental instinct,
and their function. Thus Dr- Mercier, of the Charing Cross
Hospital, in his new book, “Conduct and its Disorders,” has
come to look at conduct from, the, point of view of Biology,
and to controvert the old, wildly delusive doctrine that in
man the instincts' have disappeared, and that in place of
instincts he has intelligence.
Intelligence is not a motor,
it is a pilot, and if we really had lost our instincts we should
sit like Job motionlessly contemplating life, instead of which
�10
we move and do1. The springs of our conduct are those, very
instincts which a few years ago, we were said not to possess.
On all this subject, Dr. McDougall is the master and pioneer,
in his “Social Psychology.”
We possess just such instincts as animals in their essential
nature, and they underlie all our emotions. Thus the emotion
of wonder is the subjective side of what we call the instinct
of curiosity. The parental instinct is correlative in us, with
“tender emotion.” The more you examine the parental in
stinct, whether it be exhibited in actual, or foster, or non
parents, tire more you see that it is the source of all the actions
which, consciously or unconsciously, you and I call moral, or
good, or right. You find it in the mother who lives, and if
need be dies, for her child; you find it in the old maid with
her cats; you find it in the doctor with his patient.
Psy
chologists have argued that parental instinct is what I may
call anticipatory gratitude; it is nothing of the kind.
It
is an instinctive feeling for life which is young' or is in need,
and which we can help; and it is by no means confined to
our own species (where reward in some form might be antici
pated), but is shown in other species, not self-conscious, which
cannot anticipate future repayment.
There is good, reason
to suppose that if you fuse this instinct, with, others; in o-ur
nature; you will produce those qualities which we call moral.
The ultimate justification for believing that these acts are
moral, is that somehow or other they serve (or will, or can
serve) the general life; we recognise in them, at least, an ele
ment of life-saving. It may be only serving an idea, it may
be serving only one particular class.
My particular cause
for existence is to serve Eugenics, on the theory that we can
do most for the general life by devoting our energies to the
life that is still unborn.
A final question arises if one, desires to make converts
either for Eugenics or for the Ethics of Nature Society: the
old question of “What has posterity done for me?” or, in the
words of Shylock: “On what compulsion must I; tell me
that.” There is, of course, no obvious profit, and no obvious
reason, but what does the astronomer ask, who, spends his
life in amassing stellar data which, in perhaps five hundred
years or so; but not, till then, will be of immense cosmological
value ?
�11
We cannot promise on this theory any direct reward to< be
gained, but it will, nevertheless, be involved in the truth that
virtue is its own reward. That is to say, if there be in any
one of us a native, ineradicable instinct which is essentially
parental, a vital instinct, a desire to serve life, we will get out
of it just that same satisfaction which follows when we yield
to the prompting of any other instincts, whose satisfaction
satisfies themJust as in the1 case1 of the astronomer, the
labour given and the knowledge one day to be gained—so
here, the life one day to be made or saved—these are the in
volved reward. Beyond such reward as this, the Religion of
Life or the Ethics of Nature has none to, offer. But has any
ci her Religion or Creed the warrant to offer more; and is not
this enou.Q'h ?
�12
NATURAL
ETHICS
AND
EUGENICS.
Reprinted from the Ethics of Nature Review.]
The object of this lecture was to show that the* practical
principles of Eugenics are* not only compatible with, but are
the actual outcome of the moral evolution described in the
first lecture, and to explain the theory and practice of
Eugenics in their relation to human life.
“By Eugenics I understaind the project of making the
highest human beings possible.”
The chief factors in this
process, as especially named by Sir Francis Galton are
“Nature and Nurture.” The Eugenics which concerns itself
with the natural or hereditary causes, is called by Dr. Saleeby
the primary factor- The nurtural or environmental takes the
place of secondary factor.
This is inverting the* customary
order, where environment is generally represented as answer
ing most, if not the whole of the question.
But although
neither of the factors could stand without the other, Eugenists
on biological grounds insist that environment is distinctly
secondary.
Primary Eugenics must again be separately defined and sub
divided.
From the point of view of heredity it is evident
that'—assuming the existence of this fact—parenthood must
be encouraged on the part of the worthy. This is the first aim
of the Eugenist, and goes by the name of Positive Eugenics.
Secondly, it is quite evident that the converse of Positive
Eugenics must be to discourage' parenthood on the part of the
unworthy. This is known as Negative Eugenics. And
thirdly, the Eugenics which stands between healthy stocks*
and those prime causes of degeneration generally understood
to-day under the name of racial poisons, the Eugenics, in
short, which strives to keep the worthy worthy, is termed
Preventive Eugenics.
Now as regards the relation of Eugenics to the theory and
practice of Natural Ethics, Positive Eugenics, in the first
place, is a process evidently approved by Nature, being simply
the process of natural selection by which those beings who
�are capable of reproducing their species survive and multiply.
Only one point arises here, which has to be met: there are
some Eugenists (and Mr. Bernard Shaw is amongst the num
ber) who propose that this business of encouraging parent
hood oni the part of the1 worthy should be- carried out by the
abolition of marriage.
Marriage—and more especially
monogamous marriagei—is strictly in keeping with the prin
ciples of the Ethics of Nature Society, being conducive, not
to most life as concerns a high birth-rate, but certainly to
most life as concerns a low death-rate. Also', marriage makes
the father responsible psychologically and socially for his chil
dren; this aspect of monogamy has to be considered. Posi
tive Eugenics will endeavour to work through marriage, which
is a natural institution far older than any decree^ or church,
and to improve it for the Eugenic purpose. The chief method
of Positive Eugenics to-day, is education for parenthood. The
education of the young should be from the very start a pre
paration for parenthood, and should not cease, as it now
most commonly does, at that time when it is most needed;
namely, at the age of adolescence.
Negative Eugenics certainly has a natural sanction.
Natural selection might with equal truth be called. Natural
rejection. Now the question arises, are we to apply the- prin
ciple of Natural Rejection to mankind, with the object of
preventing the parenthood of the unworthy ? It would cer
tainly appear to be a natural proceeding.
But here- the
Ethics of Nature Society says: We are not to kill, on the
contrary, we are to fight for those who- cannot fight1 for them
selves; whereas Nature says these' are- to be exterminated.
This apparent opposition between the natural and the moral
course of action was dwelt upon at some length by Huxley,
in his Romanes Lecture, on “Evolution and Ethics.
In
this lecture he describes cosmic evolution as being a ruthless
process where life advances by means of a general slaughter,
and where it is merely a case of “each for himself and the devil
take the hindmost,.” Moral evolution, hei said, is the, absolute
antithesis to the natural; Moral evolution is the care of the
hindmost, and necessitates at all times a course- exactly o-ppo
site to the model we have in Nature.
There are different
opinions as to- Huxley’s reasons for expressing himself in this
�14
unjustifiable manner on a subject which he was obviously
viewing at the time in a totally false light. And perhaps the
simplest and clearest of all explanations is that this very Leer
ture was written at a period of unfortunate estrangement
between Herbert Spencer and Huxley, and may have been
meant deliberately to set at defiance the principles and tenets
of Herbert Spencer, who maintained that “ there is a natural
evolutionary basis for Ethics?’
Darwin, in his Origin of Species, confesses that we keep
alive numbers of persons who, by natural selection, would
certainly have been exterminated; but, he adds, in, this case
we cannot follow the natural model. And there Darwin left
it; there was this antinomy between the “natural” course
and man s higher nature, and although it was obviously a
wrong thing to let the degenerate multiply, Darwin felt that
we must be content to let him multiply, because we are under
a. moral obligation to keep him alive.
There are Eugenists when want us to, throw moral evolution
overboard, as being mere sentimentalism, and to go straight
for the destruction of the unfit by means of exposing degen
erate babies, as the Spartans did, by means of lethal chambers,
and by reverting to all the horrors, of our grandfathers’ time,
the gallows, chains, and death by starvation for the feeble
minded- These are: the Eugenistsi who take the sacred name
of Eugenics in vain. Eugenics has nothing to do with kill
ing anybody at any stage of life whatever.
Human life,
such as it may be, is a, sacred thing, and cannot, be1 treated
with contempt at any stage whatever of its development.
What the Eugenist may do; however, is> this; he, may distin
guish between the right to live and the right to become a
parent. And this is the simple solution which both Huxley
and Darwin missedIn this simple solution the antinomy
which both Huxley and Darwin saw between cosmic and
moral evolution disappears.
Negative Eugenics is going to proceed, first of all, along
the lines of killing nobody, and secondly, of taking' care of the
unfit under the best possible conditions.
The distinction
between the process of natural selection and the process advo
cated by Eugenists, might bei put thus: Eugenics replaces
a selective death-rate by a selective birth-rate.
Erom the
�15
point of view of philosophy and the Ethics of Nature Society,
this course of action furnishes thei solution of the apparent
antinomy between cosmic and natural evolution.
Passing to the third division of Eugenics, it seems that
whilst we try to encourage parenthood on the part of the
worthy, and to discourage it on the part of the unworthy,
we must be prepared also to oppose the degradation of healthy
stocks through contact with, or as a result of, racial poisons.
Of these poisonous agencies, there are some which we are
certain of; how many there may be that are yet unknown
remains to be proved.
Alcohol, lead, arsenic, phosphorus,
and one or two diseases are decidedly transmissible to the
future, commonly by direct transference from parent to off
spring.
These are the poisons which Eugenists must fight
against, and they are false to their creed and to' their great
mission, if they fail to do all they can to root them out. The
chief, most urgent, most important task seems to be to inter
fere with maternal alcoholism.
Eugenics has nothing to do with decrying attempts to im
prove environment. But unfortunately many Eugenists have
merely taken it up as an alternative programme to social re
form; also, in. these same hands, it has become a new instru
ment for the resurrection of snobbery, on the totally unwar
ranted view that certain classes, sections, or sets of society
are biologically or innately superior to others. No one has
yet adduced evidence to prove that what we call the “better”
classes are naturally better, though they certainly are better
looking, better fed, better rested. Nor has it yet been ascer
tained what would be the results of giving the food and
sleep of the better, to the lower class children.
Nurtural
advantages are responsible for most of, if not all, the
physical superiority of the upper as against the lower classes.
As to psychological superiority, evidence is absolutely nil.
It is said that a man’s way of spending his leisure gives the
man in his true light; and judging by the way in which the
“upper” classes spend their spare time, there is certainly no
indication of superiority.
Eugenics must not be taken as an alternative' to providing
the needful factors for a child, bom or unborn.
Only that
society is truly moral and well organised which makes
�16
provision for every child.
Adequate provision and
adequate nurture for every child, would be no great
tax on our purses, for it would bring as a natural
consequence the abolition of many prisons, hospitals,
and asylums.
It is curious that, whilst it is not Socialism
to spend money on hospitals for the care of tuberculous,
rickety, or otherwise diseased children, it is Socialism to spend
a fraction of this money on those children at an earlier stage
of their lives; though it is obviously much cleaner, cheaper,
and pleasanter to follow this method, than to continue in
cur present method of vainly attempting to1 cure what might
and should have been prevented.
In closing, Dr. Saleeby added that he considered the
Eugenic programme to consort completely with the canons' of
the Ethics of Nature Society.
Printed at tlie “Croydon Guardian11 Offices 145 and 147, North End Croyddii;
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Natural ethics in theory and practice : extracts from three lectures given for the Ethics of Nature Society
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Saleeby, Caleb Williams
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: Reprinted in part from Ethics of Nature Review. "The Ethics of Nature Society is an association for the harmonious development of life through the practice of ethics based on the laws of nature..." -- Inside front cover. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Please note that this pamphlet contains language and ideas that may be upsetting to readers. These reflect the time in which the pamphlet was written and the ideologies of the author.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Watts & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1912
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
N602
Subject
The topic of the resource
Ethics
Eugenics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Natural ethics in theory and practice : extracts from three lectures given for the Ethics of Nature Society), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Ethics
Eugenics
NSS
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/6750da5d7fa5d8df32e58b72bace857e.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=UxEJfTaYjRsLPXCMRmp3-v-RrkPkW2KY2mEkiI5v0zF91J3Tw5DOxC7m9jPz2snyym0A7YBXDUSRBws8ezX4v73JtVDVKMnQDfBlUgl1knElOQLksCM5HLAatHSCO5XdmatnXLw%7EsRBKu16FL0UjbzxxSvvavgR8EkMEIa1rWZz0SJ6PZ8Vc9t-HsUZ7O67qOG4FuLoUH-hUjfzio9ocIo4e-G7kaEOtPM0cDcTf9nS5W0hCPHEOYDXarGIBl1o1hnGkCNzvy4e6zHvPARnGQM0h5%7E9z6Il82S7fT8%7EWWWAZW3iWD1KQPV1JmXuqezGrNqYXrNd669e-6XlH2D5M%7EA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
55ae3f02b43d32bdbc6860fe293e1cc8
PDF Text
Text
SECULAR MORALITY:
WHAT IS IT?
AN EXPOSITION AND A DEFENCE.
CHARLES
WATTS.
PRICE TWOPENCE.
LONDON:
WATTS & CO., 84, FLEET STREET, E.C.
��SECULAR MORALITY.
Among the systems of moral philosophy that have
been promulgated as guides for human conduct, Utili
tarianism occupies the foremost place. It appears to Secu
larists as more definite and satisfactory than any other,
and certainly at the present time it is more generally
accepted by thinkers and that class of men whose views
mould the intellectual opinions of the age. The principle
of Utilitarianism has a regard solely to the uses of things ;
hence ail actions by it are to be judged of by their use
to society, and the morality of an action will consequently
depend upon its utility. An important question here
suggests itself: What is Utility, and how is it to be judged
of and tested ? What, it is urged, may appear useful to
one man, another may regard as altogether useless ; who,
therefore, is to decide resoecting the utility of an act? The
answer will be found in the greatest-happiness principle,
which is of itself a modern development of the doctrine,
and somewhat in opposition to the first form of Utili
tarianism. “ Usefulness,” observes David Hume, “is
agreeable, and engages our approbation.
This is a
matter of fact, confirmed by daily observation. But
useful? Tor what? For somebody’s interest, surely.
Whose interest, then? Not our own only, for our ap
probation frequently extends farther. It must, therefore,
be the interest of those who are served by the characters
or action approved of; and these we may conclude, how
ever remote, are not totally indifferent to us. But, open
ing up this principle, we shall discover one great source
of moral distinction.” Here it is clear that with Hume
the doctrine of utility was intimately associated with
�4
SECULAR MORALITY.
approbation—in fact, the two were inseparably con
nected.
The greatest-happiness principle, as will be
seen, grew very naturally out of this, but is a much more
recent development.
The utility of acts and objects have doubtless had
much to do with the estimation in which these are held
in society, whether the fact be recognised or not. Hume
says : “ It seems so natural a thought to ascribe to their
utility the praise which we bestow on the social virtues
that one would expect to meet with this principle every
where in moral writers, as the chief foundation of their
reasoning and inquiry. In common life we may ob
serve that the circumstance of utility is always appealed
to ; nor is it supposed that a greater eulogy can be given
to any man than to display his usefulness to the public,
and enumerate the services which he has performed to
mankind and to society. What praise, even of an in
animate form, if the regularity and elegance of its parts
destroy not its fitness for any useful purpose ! And how
satisfactory an apology for any disproportion or seeming
deformity if we can show the necessity of that particular
construction for the use intended. A ship appears more
beautiful to an artist, or one moderately skilled in naviga
tion, where its prow is wide and swelling beyond its
poop, than if it were framed with a precise geometrical
regularity in contradiction to all the laws of mechanics.
A building whose doors and windows were exact squares
would meet the eye, by that very proportion, as ill
adapted to the figure of a human creature for whose
service the fabric was intended. What wonder, then,
that a man whose habits and conduct are hurtful to
society, and dangerous and pernicious to every one who
has intercourse with him, should on that account be an
object of disapprobation, and communicate to every
spectator the strongest sentiment of disgust and hatred ?”
That this is so there cannot be the slightest doubt. Nor
is this principle a purely selfish one, as some have con
tended, since the uses of arts refer not simply to their
operation upon ourselves individually, but upon society
at large. Self-love is no doubt involved here, as, in fact,
st is in everything we do. But self-love is not the ruling
�SECULAR MORALITY.
5
principle any further than that it is identical with the love
of humanity. The great fact of mutual sympathy here
comes in. The reciprocal feeling of joy or sorrow has
been experienced probably by every person. The plea
sures arid pains of our fellows affect us largely, whether
we will or no. There is no man so selfish but he finds his
joys increased when they are shared by others, and his
griefs lessened when he sorrows in company. This fact
Hume has worked out at great length, with a view to
show why it is that utility pleases. Viewing Utilitarian
ism, therefore, as simply a question of utility in the
lowest sense of that word, it is yet a most potent agent in
society, and has much more to do with forming our con
clusions as to the morality of certain acts than is usually
imagined. The man of use is the man whom society
delights to honour; and very properly, for he is the real
benefactor of his species. To say that a thing is useful
is to bestow upon it a high degree of praise, while no
greater condemnation can be passed upon any piece of
work than to say that it is useless. Even the supposed gods
have been estimated by their utility • for Cicero charges
the»deities of the Epicureans with being useless and in
active, and declares that the Egyptians never consecrated
any animal except for its utility.
The principle of Utilitarianism as a moral system
cannot be said to have received a definite shape until it
was advocated by Jeremy Bentham. Even with him it
did not appear in that clear and explicit form which John
Stuart Mill has since imparted to it. In his writings we
have for the first time something like philosophicprecision.
Pleasure and pain are shown to form the basis of utility,
and to furnish us with the means of judging of what is
useful and what is not.
To speak of pain and pleasure to ordinary persons
conveys no idea as to the welfare or otherwise of society,
but leads the mind to revert to its own individual good
or evil, and then to impart a selfish basis to the whole
thing. This was not what was meant by Bentham, as the
following passage from his work will show : “ By utility
is meant that property in any object whereby it tends to
produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness
�6
SECULAR MORALITY.
(all this, in the present case, comes to the same thing);
or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the
happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the
party whose interest is considered : if that party be the
community in general, then the happiness of the com
munity ; if a particular individual, then the happiness of
that individual.” Bentham takes great pains to show
that the community is a “ fictitious body composed of
the individual persons who are considered as constitut
ing, as it were, its members.” and that therefore the inte
rest of the community is simply “ the sum of the interests
of the several members who compose it.” He then goes
on to affirm that “ an action maybe said to be conform
able to the principle of utility, or, for shortness’ sake, to
utility (meaning with respect to the community at large),
when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of
the community is greater than any it has to diminish it,”
which is really another way of saying the greatest happi
ness of the greatest number, or, to use a far more prefer
able phrase, the greatest amount of happiness for all.
“ The words ought and right and wrong, and others
of that stamp,” take their meaning from this principle.
This philosophy was full of the practical spirit of the age
which gave it birth, and it exhibited an utter disregard
for the unproductive theories of the past. The idea of
happiness very largely took the place of the old idea of
duty, wherein was seen a powerful reaction against the
sentimental ethics that had prevailed so long. Its
attempt was to base virtue on moral legislation, rather
than on feeling, and to construct an ethical code out of
the most matter-of-fact materials. Thus self sacrifice,
which, of course, is one of the highest and noblest duties
of man, is in no way incompatible with Utilitarianism
and the pursuit of happiness; since, whatever pleasures
he who practises self-denial may voluntarily forego, it is
always with a view of procuring, if not for himseif, yet
tor his fellows, some greater good. The martyr at the
stake, the patriot in the field of battle, the physician
penetrating into the midst of the death-breathing miasma
with a view to alleviate pain, each feels a sense of
satisfaction in the act, which is really the intensest kind
�SECULAR MORALITY.
7
of happiness to himself, and, what is more important, he
is procuring happiness on a large scale for his fellow
creatures. It is not individual, but general, happiness
that the Utilitarian has to keep before, his eye as the
motive of all his actions.
In any moral system it is essential that not only should
the code laid down be clear, but the motive to obey it
should also be made apparent. In other words, what is
termed the sanction of the principle must be pointed out.
It would be of little value to have a perfect method in
morals unless the sanctions were such as were likely to
influence mankind. Now, Mr. Mill has not overlooked
this fact in connection with Utilitarianism, but has
devoted considerable space to its consideration. He
seems to think, however, that no new sanctions are
needed for Utilitarianism, since in time—and in an im
proved state of society—it will have at command all the
old ones. He says : “ The principle of utility either
has, or there is no reason why it might not have, all the
sanctions which belong to any other system of morals.
These sanctions are either external or internal.” He then
enlarges upon these with a view to show that the greater
number of them belong as much to Utilitarianism as to
any other ethical code. The sanction of duty, upon
which so much stress is laid by the opponents of Utili
tarianism, becomes as clear and as powerful under the new
system as under the old. Whatever may be the standard
of duty, and whatever the process by which the idea has
been attained, the feeling will in all cases be very much
the same. The pain occasioned by a violation of what
is called the moral law, constituting what is usually
termed conscience, will be felt quite as keenly when the
law has been arrived at by a Utilitarian process of
reasoning, and when the moral nature has been built
up upon Utilitarian principles, as in any other case. The
ultimate sanction of all morality is very much the same
—a subjective feeling in our own minds, resulting from
physical conditions, country, and education.
This, then, is briefly the Utilitarianism which we hold
to constitute a sufficient guide in morals, and to be worthy
to supplant the old and erroneous systems that now pre
�8
•SECULAR MORALITY.
vail. As Secularists, we are content to be judged by
this standard. This system we accept as the ethical
code by which we profess to regulate our conduct. There
can hardly be conceived a higher aim than happiness,
especially the happiness of the race.
That perfect
happiness is not attainable we, of course, admit; but
neither is anything else in perfection. Nothing, however,
can be more certain than the fact that very many of the
present causes of unhappiness could be removed by welldirected effort on the part of society, and the result be a
state of things of which, at the present time, we can
hardly form any conception. The duty of each of us is
to do as much as possible towards bringing this about.
In Mr. Mill’s work upon “Utilitarianism” the fol
lowing passage occurs : “ The creed which accepts as the
foundation of morals utility, or the greatest-happiness
principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as
they tend to promote happiness ; wrong as they tend to
produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is in
tended pleasure and the absence of pain ; by unhappi
ness, pain and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear
view of the moral standard set up by this theory, much
more requires to be said ; in particular, what things it in
cludes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what
extent this is left an open question. But these supple
mentary explanations do not affect the theory of life of
which this theory of morality is grounded—namely, that
pleasure and freedom from pain are the only things
desirable as ends, and that all desirable things (which
are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme)
are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in them
selves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and
the prevention of pain.” It must be understood that
the word pleasure here is used in its very highest sense,
and includes, consequently, such enjoyments as arise
from the culture of the intellect, the development of the
sentiments, the use of the imagination, and the action of
the emotions. One of the errors into which the opponents
of utilitarian happiness frequently fall is that of confound
ing pleasure with the mere gratification of the animal
propensities. If this were so, the whole system would be
�SECULAR MORALITY.
a most despicable one, and unworthy the attention of
men of intelligence and moral worth. But it is not; and
he who brings this as a charge against it does so either
in gross ignorance, or with a view to pervert the truth.
Perhaps it was not wise to use the words pleasure and
happiness as synonymous, seeing that they are usually
employed to mean two very different things ; but the ex
planation having been given that they are so used, no
one can plead this use as an excuse for falling into error
on the subject.
Secular morality is based upon the principle that
happiness is the chief end and aim of mankind. And
although there are, doubtless, persons who would warmly
dispute this fundamental principle, it is very question
able whether their objection is not more verbal than any
thing else. That all men desire happiness is certain.
The doctrine enunciated in the well-known line of Pope
is frequently quoted, and generally with approval:
il Oh, happiness ! our being’s end and aim.”
When we meet with persons who profess to despise
this aspiration, it will be generally found that it is only
some popular conception of happiness of which they are
careless, while they really pursue a happiness of their
own, in their own way, with no less ardour than other
people. A definition of happiness itself is not easy to
give. Each person would, were he asked to define it,
in all probability furnish a somewhat different explana
tion ; but the true meaning of all would be very much the
same. To refer again to Pope, what truth there is in the
following couplet !—
“Who can define it, say they more or less
Than this, that happiness is happiness ?”
With one it is the culture of the intellect; with another,
the exercise of the emotions ; with a third, the practice of
deeds of philanthropy and charity ; and with yet another
—we regret to say—the gratification of the lower pro
pensities. In each case it is the following of the pursuit
which most accords with the disposition of the individual.
And wherever this course does not interfere with the
�IO
SECULAR MORALITY.
happiness of others, and is not more’ than counter
balanced by any results that may arise from it afterwards.,
it is not only legitimate, but moral. Broadly, then, Secu
lar efforts for the attainment of happiness may be said
to consist in endeavouring to perform those actions
which entail no ill effects upon general society, and
leave no injurious effects upon the actors. Such conduct
as is here intimated involves the practice of truth, self
discipline, fidelity to conviction, and the avoidance of
knowingly acting unjustly to others.
Mr. Mill points out—and herein he differs from Ben
tham—that not only must the quantity of the pleasure or
happiness be taken into consideration, but the quality
likewise. He remarks: “ It would be absurd that while,
in estimating all other things, quality is considered as
well as quantity, the estimation of pleasure should be
disposed to depend on quantity alone.” True, it may
not always be easy to estimate the exact respective value
of the different qualities of pleasure ; but this is not neces
sary. An approximation to it can be obtained without
difficulty. In all those who have had experience both
of the higher and lower kinds of pleasure—that is, of the
culture of the intellect and the gratification of the pas
sions—a preference is generally shown, at least in theory,
for the higher. And the rest are in no position to fairly
judge. It may be urged that many a man who possesses
the rare wealth of a cultured mind will be found some
times grovelling in the mire of sensuality, thereby show
ing a preference for a time for the lowest kind of pleasure,
To this it may be replied that the fact is only temporary,
and cannot, therefore, be set against the experience of
months and years—perhaps of the greatest portion of a
life ; and, secondly, he does not in his own opinion, even
while descending to indulge in the lower pleasure, giv
up his interest in the higher; so that the defection cannot
be looked upon in the light of an exchange. He feels
that he will be able to go back again to his intellectual
pursuits, and enjoy them as before. Ask him to make a
permanent exchange—to give up for ever the higher plea
sures, on the condition that he shall have a continuance
of the lower to his heart’s content, and probably he will
�SECULAR MORALITY.
II
treat the offer with scorn. “ Few human beings,” ob
serves Mr. Mill, “ would consent to be changed into any
of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allow
ance of a beast’s pleasures; no intelligent human being
would consent to be a fool ; no instructed person would
be an ignoramus; no person of feeling and conscience
would be selfish and base, even though they should be
persuaded that the fool, the dunce, or the rascal is better
satisfied with his lot than they with theirs. They would
not resign what they possess more than he for the most
complete satisfaction of all the desires which they have
in common with him.” Those who neglect their capa
cities for enjoying the higher pleasures may probably
imagine that their happiness is greatest; but their opinion
on the subject is worthless, because they only know one
side. On this question, therefore, we find a unanimity
—at least, with all who are competent to judge of the
question.
The most important point to be considered in con
nection with this question of Secular happiness is that it
is not the pleasure of the individual that is considered
paramount, but of the community of which he forms a
part. The principle of the greatest happiness is often
treated in a discussion of this subject as though it meant
the greatest possible pleasure that the individual can
procure for himself by his acts, regardless of the welfare
of his fellow creatures, which would be selfishness in the
extreme. Nothing can be more unselfish than Secular
morality, since the sole object it has in view is the happi
ness of the community at large. And every act of the
individual must be performed with this in view, and will
be considered moral or not in the proportion in which
this is done. In corroboration of this view, Mr. Mill
truly remarks : “ According to the greatest-happiness
principle, as above explained, the ultimate end with refe
rence to and for the sake of which all other things are
desirable (whether we are considering our own good or
that of other people), is an existence exempt as far as
possible from pain, and as rich as possible in enjoyments,
both in point of quantity and quality ; the test of quality
and the rule for measuring it against quantity being the
�12
SECULAR MUkn.
preference felt by those who, in their opportunities ot
experience, to which must be added their habits of self
consciousness and self-observation, are best furnished
with the means of comparison. This being, according
to the utilitarian opinion, the end of human action, is
necessarily also the standard of morality; which may
accordingly be defined, the rules and precepts for human
conduct, by the observance of which an existence such
as has been described might be, to the greatest extent
possible, secured to all mankind; and notto them only, but
to the whole sentient creation.” Two facts of great im
portance are to be noticed in this extract; first, that
happiness is the end of existence, and that all human
effort should be bent as far as possible to the attainment
of this object; and, secondly, that here, and here only,
can the true standard of morality be found. The second
principle flows as a necessary consequence from the first.
All human action must, therefore, be brought to the fest
of how far it is conducive to the promotion of the greatest
happiness of society at large. The consistent perform
ance of such action will tend to promote the Secular
idea of human happiness and the welfare of mankind.
The question is asked, Why is Secularism regarded by
its adherents as being superior to theological and other
speculative theories of the day? The answer is (i)
because we believe its moral basis to be more definite
and practical than other existing ethical codes; and (2)
because Secular teachings appear to us to be more
reasonable and of greater advantage to general society
than the various theologies of the world, and that of
orthodox Christianity in particular.
First, compare Secular views of morality with the
numerous and conflicting theories that have been put
forward at various times on the important topic of moral
philosophy. From most of those theories it is not easy
to reply satisfactorily to the question, Why is one act
wrong and another right ? There is no difficulty, gener
ally speaking, in pointing out what acts are vicious and
what others virtuous; but to say why one is immoral
and another moral is a very different matter. Ask for a
definition of virtue, and you receive in reply an illus
�SECULAR MORALITY.
13
tration. You will be told that it is wrong to lie, to steal,
to murder, etc.—about which there is- no dispute; but
why it is wrong to indulge in these acts, and right to
perform others, is the business of ethical science to
discover. But here again the method that will be re
sorted to, with a view to reply to this query, will depend
upon the moral code believed in by the person to whom
the question is put. This method it is, in point of fact,
which constitutes what is called ethical science. On look
ing over the history of moral philosophy, apart from
Secularism, we find such diversified and conflicting
theories advanced on this subject that it is frequently
difficult to arrive at the conclusion that there can be
any certainty in the matter whatever. Some hold, with
Dr. Samuel Clarke, that virtue consists in the fitness of
things; others, with Adam Smith, discover its basis in
sympathy; others, with Dr. Reed, Dr. Thomas Brown,
and Dugald Stewart, contend for a moral sense; another
class, with Miss Cobbe, maintain that there is such a
thing as intuitive morality ; others, with Paley, assert
that virtue consists in doing good to mankind in obedi
ence to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting
happiness; others, with Dr. Johnson, are content with
the will of God as a' basis, without adding the motive
introduced by Paley; and yet others, with George
Combe, fancy they have a key to the whole thing in
phrenology. Now, all these theories are resolvable
broadly into three great classes—first, those who regard
the “will of God” as the basis of moral action; secondly,
those who contend that the true guide of man in
morality is something internal to himself—call it con
science, moral sense, intuition, or any other name that
you please to give it; and, thirdly, those who urge that
moral science is, like other science, to be discovered by
the study of certain external facts. To the latter of these
the Utilitarian or Secular system belongs.
A small section of professing Christians have now
given up the will of God as the groundwork of their
morality. This, however, seems to us inconsistent with
their faith, for the following reasons : 1. If the Bible God
be the father of all, surely to act in accordance with his
�14
SECULAR MORALITY.
will should be the best guide in life. 2. Christian morality
is supposed to consist of the teachings of the Bible, the
alleged record of the will of God. 3. If God’s will is
not the basis of Christian ethics, what is, from the Chris
tian standpoint ? As Secularists, we cannot regulate our
conduct by the Bible records of God's will, inasmuch as
that book is so thoroughly contradictory in its interpre
tation of the said will. In one passage the killing of
human beings is forbidden by God, and in another
passage special instructions are given by the same bemg.
to commit the prohibited crime. The same conflicting
inju ictions are to be found in the “ inspired word ” in
reference to adultery, lying, retaliation, love, obedience
to parents, forgiveness, individual and general salvation,
and many other acts which form part of the conduct of
human life.
As to the internal guide to morality, nothing can be
more clear than the fact that, even if man possesses a
moral sense with which he is born into this world, and
which is inherent in his nature, its teachings are not very
distinct, and the code of law based upon it is by no means
definite. For not only do the inhabitants of different
countries vary considerably in regard to the dictates of
conscience, according to the nature of their education,
but the people of the same country will be found to be
by no means agreed as to what is right and what wrong,
except in a few well-marked deeds. One man feels a
conscientious objection to doing that which another
man will positively believe to be a praiseworthy act. In
this, as in other matters, education is all-potent over the
mental character. It would indeed be difficult to re
concile these facts with the existence of any intuitive
moral power.
Recognising the difficulties and drawbacks pertaining
to the above theories, Secularists seek for a solution of
this moral-philosophy problem elsewhere—that is to say,
in the eternal results of the acts themselves upon society,
and in the effects that invariably spring from them when
ever they are performed. It must be distinctly under
stood that we do not claim perfection for our moral
code; but we do believe that it is the best known at the
�SECULAR MORALITY.
15
present time, and that it is free from many of the objec
tionable features which belong to those theories which
we, as Secularists, cannot accept. It may be urged, as an
objection to the external test of the result of action,
that it tends to make morality shifting and dependent
very much upon the circumstances existing at the time.
This is doubtless true ; but it is of no value as an argu
ment against the doctrine of utility. For is not all that
we have to do with subject to the same law of varia
tion ? Fashions change, customs alter, and even religions
become considerably modified by external circumstances.
The following stanza in Lord Byron’s “ Childe Harold ”
portrays a great truth :—
“ Son of the morning, rise, approach you here ;
Come, but molest not yon defenceless urn.
Look on this spot, a nation’s sepulchre :
Abode of gods, whose shrines no longer burn.
Even gods must yield, religions take their turn ;
’Twas Jove’s, ’tis Mahomet’s ; and other creeds
Will rise with other years, till man shall learn
Vainly his incense soars, his victim bleeds ;
Poor child of doubt and death, whose hope is built on
reeds 1”
That Secular teachings are superior to those of ortho
dox Christianity, the following brief contrast will show.
Christian conduct is controlled by the ancient and sup
posed infallible rules of the Bible; Secular action is
regulated by modern requirements and the scientific and
philosophical discoveries of the practical age in which
we live. Christianity enjoins as an essential duty of life
to prepare to die ; Secularism says, learn howto live
truthfully, honestly, and usefully, and you need not con
cern yourself with the “ how” to die. Christianity pro
claims that the world’s redemption can only be achieved
through the teachings of one person ; Secularism avows
that such teachings are too impracticable and limited
in their influence for the attainment of the object claimed,
and that improvement, general and individual, is the re
sult of the brain-power and physical exertions of the brave
toilers of every country and every age who have laboured
�SECULAR MORALITY.
for human advancement. Christianity threatens punish
ment in another world for the rejection of speculative
views in this; Secularism teaches that no penalty should
follow the holding of sincere opinions, as uniformity of
belief is impossible. According to Christianity, as taught
in the churches and chapels, the approval of God and
the rewards of heaven are to be secured only through
faith in Jesus of Nazareth; whereas the philosophy of
Secularism enunciates that no merit should be attached
to such faith, but that fidelity to principle and good
service to man should win the right to participate in
any advantages either in this or in any other world.
Printed by
watts
& co., 84,
fleet street,
London,
e.c.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Secular morality : What is it? An exposition and a defence
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Watts, Charles [1836-1906]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 16 p. ; 19 cm.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Watts & Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1880
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
RA1579
N676
Subject
The topic of the resource
Secularism
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<p><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /> This work (Secular morality : What is it? An exposition and a defence), identified by <span><a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Morality
NSS
Secularism