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IN MIND AS IN MATTER
AND ITS
BEARING UPON CHRISTIAN DOGMA AND MORAL
RESPONSIBILITY.”
PART II.
THE TRUE MEANING OF RESPONSIBILITY.
BY
CHARLES
BRAY,
AUTHOR OF “A MANUAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, OR SCIENCE OILMAN,” “MODERN
PROTESTANTISM,” “ILLUSION AND DELUSION,” &C.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Sixpence.
�J
�THE
REIGN OF LAW IN MIND AS IN MATTER
Part
IL
THE TRUE MEANING OF RESPONSIBILITY.
‘ ‘ In the eternal sequence we take the consequence.” —H. G. A.
UT it is said, if men are not free, if they must act
in accordance with the laws of their being, if no
act could therefore have been otherwise than it was,
what becomes of virtue, what of morality ?
If a man could not have done otherwise, where was
the virtue ?
This doctrine of necessity or certainty, it is alleged,
is “ fatal to every germ of morality.”
For what, if it is true, becomes of Responsibility?
You cannot, it is said, properly or consistently use
either praise or blame, reward or punishment, if a man
is not free. The opposite, as I shall show, is really
the case.
Let me answer these questions as shortly as I have
put them. Virtue is not that which is free, but that
which is for the good of mankind, for the greatest hap
piness of all God’s creatures. Our goodness or virtue,
it is said, if necessary or dependent upon our nature, is
no goodness at all; but the goodness of God, which
also is dependent upon his nature, and could not be
otherwise, is the highest goodness of all. Man is good,
because he might, it is supposed, be otherwise; God is
B
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The Reign of Law
good, because he could not be otherwise. “ The good
ness of the nature of the Supreme, we are told, is neces
sary goodness, yet it is voluntary,” that is, in accordance
with the will, but which will is governed by the nature.
Still I do not suppose that if a man’s nature and
training were such that he could not do a mean thing,
he would be thought the worse of on that account.
Morality concerns the relation of man to his fellows,
—it comprises the laws and regulations by which men
can live together most happily, and the more they can
be made binding upon all, and not free, the better for all.
Responsibility only means that we must always
take the natural and necessary consequences of our
actions, whether such actions are free or not.
Responsibility, or accountability, in the ordinary
acceptance of the term, means—and this is the meaning
usually thought to be essential to virtue and morality—
that it will be just to make people suffer as much as they
have made others suffer; it means retribution, retalia
tion, and revenge. Some one has done wrong, some one
must make atonement—that is, suffer for it; it does
not much matter who it is, so that some one suffers,
and particularly since it is supposed that the wrath of
God has been appeased by an arbitrary substitute of the
innocent for the guilty. This kind of responsibility
or retribution is not only unjust, but useless.
External things or objects are moved by what we
call Force; the mind is moved by motive, which is
mental force; but equally in each case the strongest
force prevails. “ It may be, or it may not be,” in any
supposed two or more courses—not because this action
is free or contingent, but according as one or other force
or motive shall become the strongest and prevail. The
strongest force always does prevail, and any uncertainty
we may feel is only consequent on our want of know
ledge. In'Physics we know the force must always be
made proportionate to the end we wish to_attain; in
�in Mind as in Matter.
5
Mind this is overlooked, or left to what is called the
Will; hut it is equally true. This fact is overlooked
both by the Fatalists and by those who believe in the
freedom of the will. The first hold that things come
to pass in spite of our efforts; the latter, that they are
not necessarily dependent upon them. The will is
governed by motive, and as the strongest always neces
sarily prevails, what we have to do is to increase the
strength of the motive or moving power in the direction
we wish to attain. The Eev. Daniel Moore speaks of
“ his consciousness as prompting him to put forth an
act of spontaneous volition, and thus proving the moral
agent free.” “The force of instinct,” he says, “is
stronger than the conclusion of logic.” Certainly it
must be so in this case, or logic would say an act lost
its spontaneity just in proportion as it was prompted or
influenced. Praise and blame, reward and punishment,
are the ordinary means taken to strengthen motives.
If the will were free—that is, capable of acting against
motives, or if it acted spontaneously—these meaijs
would be useless and unavailing.
It is not till an action is passed that our power over
it ceases ; then God himself could not prevent it. We
may always say we can; never that we could. The
motive may have been good or bad, but whichever it
was, the strongest must have prevailed, and the action
could not thus have been different to what it was.
Eesponsibility can have relation to the future only—
the past is past. Punishment for an act that could not
have been otherwise would be unjust, and as the act is
past it would be useless.
Punishment, therefore, that has reference to the
future, and that has for its object the good of the
sufferer, or of the community of which he is a member,
alone can be just and useful.
As every act was necessary, and could not have been
otherwise, there is no such thing as sin, as an offence
against God—only vice and error.
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The Reign of Law
All vice and error must be to the detriment of the
person erring, and punishment that prevents it in
future must be for his good.
To pray, therefore, to be delivered from such pm-iishment—that is, for the forgiveness of sin—is praying
for that which would injure us rather than benefit.
Let us take an illustration. A schoolboy may have
been told that “we should not leave till to-morrow
what we can do to-day,” so he eats all his plumcake
before he goes to bed. He takes the natural conse
quences, and is ill the next day, and the master is very
angry; but the boy says very truly, “Please, sir, I
could not help it.” “ I know you could not, my dear
boy,” says the master, “ but when you have had a black
draft and a little birch added to your present intestinal
malaise, it will enable you to help it for the future,
and will teach you also that there is no rule without
an exception.”
Responsibility means that we must take the natural
and necessary consequences of our actions—of the
“ eternal sequence we take the consequence,” and which
natural consequence may be added to by others to any
extent, with the object of producing in the future one
line of conduct rather than another; but it does not
mean that a person may be justly made to suffer for
any action that is past.
Responsibility or accountability also includes that if
a person has done another an injury, he owes him all
the compensation in his power.
Dr Irons says :—“ To incur the consequences of our
actions, and feel that it ought to &e so—to be subject to
a high law, and feel it to be right, this is moral
responsibility” (“Analysis of Human Responsibility,”
p. 25). I accept this definition entirely, but in a dif
ferent sense to that accorded to it by Dr Irons. We
accept the consequences of our actions, and feel that
“ we ought to do so,” and therefore “ that it is right,”
because it is by its consequences that a reasonable man
�in Mind as in Matter.
7
guides his conduct; they govern his motives, and the
motives govern the will. But this is on the supposi
tion that the consequences of our actions will be always
the same in like circumstances—that the causes, under
like conditions, will always produce the same effects,
which could not be the case if the will were free, and
obeyed no law. It is this feeling, this intuitive
perception of consequences, that people call feeling
accountable —“the great and awful fact of human
responsibility.” This feeling is transmitted, or becomes
hereditary, and then it is called Conscience, and gives
the sense of “ ought.”
Dr Irons also says:—“ It is a fact of our nature that
wrong-doing, such as stirs our own disapproval, is
haunted by the belief of retribution.” No doubt of it.
In the early ages this retribution or revenge was the
■only law, and the fear of it was often the only thing
that kept people from doing wrong, and this fear has
been transmitted, and now haunts us; but that is no
reason why revenge, or retributive justice, as it is
called, is right. A sense of duty and responsibility—
that is, of what is due to our own sense of right, and
-of the consequences to ourselves and others—still
influences, and ought to influence, our conduct; but it
■cannot be otherwise than that the strongest motive
must prevail, and when the action it dictates is past,
it could not have been otherwise. It may have been
very well for a young world, when man had to fight
his way up from the lower animals, to entertain the
■delusion that things might have been otherwise, but
we require now an entire reconstruction of the accepted
modes of thought, which shall not only accept the inevi
table in the past, but conscience must cease to blame us
or others for what must have happened exactly as it
did happen.
The great question, as we are told, is, whether the
universe is governed and arranged on rational or nonrational principles ? and this question is asked by those
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The Reign of Law
to whom free will is a necessary article in their creed.
Certainly, if the mind or will obeys no law, then theuniverse must be governed on non-rational principles,
for reason is based upon certainty, as opposed to con
tingency, in the order of nature. Science alone gives
prevision, necessary to the guidance and regulation of
action.
If prayer had the efficacy which is ordinarily
assigned to it, it would make this “ order of nature ”
impossible, there would be a constant breach in the
chain of cause and effect, and prevision and the exer
cise of reason, which is based upon unbroken law and
certainty, could not exist. “ Requests for a particular
adjustment of the weather,” says the Rev. W. Knight,
“ are irrelevant, unless the petitioner believes that the
prayer he offers may co-operate to the production of
the effect.” The same must be said of all prayers;
they are efficacious only so far as they tend to answer
themselves, and they themselves produce the effect
desired. But wherever prayer is sincere, and not
gabbled over by rote in our public service, this is
generally the case. We are governed or moved by
motive, and sincere prayer is the greatest possible
strengthener of motive. Prayer thus acts through
motive upon man, and through man upon matter and
the universe. But in proportion as we recognise the
Reign of Law, and we become conscious that there is
a natural way by which all we desire may be brought
about, prayer will no longer take the form of asking
for what we can and ought to do for ourselves, but of
simple aspiration and devotion to that unity of which
we all form a part.
We feel that we ought to take the consequences of
our actions, and that it is right we should do so,
because we have no other rule to discriminate between
right and wrong. It is not in actions themselves, or
in the motives that dictate them—being all equally
necessary—that the right or wrong consists, but in.
�in Mind as in Matter.
9
their consequences to ourselves or others. If, as a rule,
the actions are attended with pain, they are wrong; if
with pleasure, they are right. This is God’s simple
and intelligible revelation to all the world alike. The
floral Governor carries on his moral government, not
by calling people to account ages after, when the record
of every idle word would be rather long and prosy even
in eternity, but by immediate intervention—by the
direct punishment or reward or pain or pleasure attend
ing their actions.
Jeremy Bentham says:—“No man ever had, can, or
could have, a motive different to the pursuit of pleasure
or the avoidance of pain.” This has not been generally
accepted, because it has not been understood. It has
been supposed to refer only to physical or bodily pains,
and not mental. We must discriminate also between
pleasure and what are usually called pleasures. The
stern delight of fortitude would hardly be called a “plea
sure;” still delight is a highly pleasurable sensation.
Men have certain impulses to action to attain certain
ends. When these ends are legitimately attained,
.pleasure attends the action; when the ends are not
attained, then there is pain. It is these ends that are
pursued, not pleasure or pain, but pleasure or pain
attending for our guidance and compulsion. The
.aggregate of these pleasures we call happiness—of the
pains, which are the exception, misery.
These impulses, which we call propensities and senti
ments, have various objects, and are more simple and
•calculable than is generally supposed. They are self
protecting, self-regarding, social, moral, and aesthetic.
They are all connected with the brain, and the im
pulses to action are ordinarily strong in proportion to
the size of the parts of the brain with which they are
connected, the dynamical effect being dependent upon
statical conditions in mind as in matter. The impulse to
action is pleasurable, becoming painful if not gratified.
Appetite is slightly pleasurable, hunger is painful, and
�io
The Reign of Law
the pleasure of eating is in proportion to the appetite
or hunger. All the other feelings have their appetites,
hunger, and gratification, with the pleasures and pains
attending them. The object of the intellect, the action
of which is very little pleasurable in itself, is the guid
ance of these feelings towards their proper ends, and
involves the element of choice in the selection of means.
Locke says, “The will is the last dictate of the under
standing,” but it is not the dictate of the understanding
itself, but of the impulses it may set in motion. It is
the feelings, not the intellect, that ordinarily govern
the will. Bentham’s “ pursuit of pleasure or avoidance
of pain” means the pleasures or pains attending the
action of all our mental faculties. If the propensities
predominate in a character, then the pleasures are only
of an animal nature ; if the moral feelings predominate,
then our pleasures are as intimately connected with the
interests of others as -with our own ; and these feelings
may be so trained and strengthened as to give the in
terests of others a preference over our own (i.e., we may
have more pleasure in promoting the interests of others
than our own). It is these moral feelings that make the
principal distinction between men and other animals,
subordinating individual interests to that of the com
munity. They enable men to combine and co-operate;
upon which their principal strength depends. They
probably do not so much differ in kind from those of
other animals as in degree. They are dependent upon
parts of the brain, which in animals are either absent
or merely rudimentary. The pains of conscience are
often stronger than any mere physical pains, and the
pain attending the breach of his word and the outrage
to all his highest feeling must have been greater to
Regulus than the fear of any physical pain, or other
consequences to which he could be subjected by his
enemies. Of course a man without these higher feel
ings would have sneaked away—there was no free-will
in the matter. But we do not admire Regulus the less,.
�in Mind as in Matter.
11
though few of us perhaps would be able to follow his
example. The habitual exercise of the highest, or un
selfish feelings as they are called, regardless of imme
diate consequences, produces the highest happiness,
although it may sometimes lead, as in Regulus’s case,
to the barrel of spikes; and this is only to be attained,
not by free-will, but by careful training and exercise.
It is exercise that increases structure, and the strength
of the feeling, and its habitual or intuitive action, de
pends upon its size. We love that which is loveable,
and hate that which is hateful; and if we are to love
our neighbour he must make himself loveable, or love
falls to the colder level of duty. The poor toad, not
withstanding the jewel in its head, aesthetically is not
beantiful, and it has few friends or admirers, and few
find out its virtues, and the blame that belongs to
others is laid upon its poor ugly back. We never in
quire if the toad made itself, or if it was its own free
will to be ugly. It is precisely the same with every
thing else—that which gives us pleasure we love, and
that which gives us pain we hate, with small reference
to whether this pain or pleasure was voluntarily given
to us or not. It is the same with all consequences ; as
they are required for the guidance of our actions, they
follow just the same, whether our actions are voluntary
or not. Whether we burn ourselves by accident or
voluntarily, the pain is just the same—the object of
the pain being to keep us out of the fire. This is true
responsibility or accountability which governs the will,
which is not free—no freedom fortunately being allowed
to interfere with God’s purposes in creation.
We are told that “no cogent reason has yet been
advanced why men should not follow their, own wicked
impulses, as well as others follow their virtuous ones.”
The best of all reasons I think has been assigned—
viz., that painful consequences attend the vicious im
pulses, and pleasure the virtuous ones; so that unless
a man prefers pain to pleasure, he has the strongest of
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The Reign of Law
all possible motives for good conduct. We indefinitely
increase the pains as additional motives, and where no
punishment is deterrent, as in some exceptional cases,
restraint, or even capital punishment, is justly re
sorted to.
The writer in the Edinburgh, to whom we have be
fore alluded, says : “ If these anti-christian and atheistic
sentiments should gain the wide acceptance which Dr
Strauss and his school anticipate for them, what is to
prevent a reign of universal chaos ? What is to stave
off the utter shipwreck of human society ? What hope
can survive for man when every redeeming ideal is de
stroyed; when blind destiny is enthroned in the seat
of God; and when the universe is come to be regarded
by all mankind as a dead machine, whose social law is,
that
‘ He may get who has the power,
And he may keep who can. ”
That universal anarchy will then begin, and that the
unchained passions of a human animal, devoid of the
usual animal instincts of restraint, will plunge both
himself and the social fabric he has for ages been
erecting into ruin, no one in his senses can reasonably
doubt. And such is the consummation for which
writers like these are diligently working. Such is the
chaos into which a merely destructive criticism, and a
‘ positive ’ science which, in the domain of religion, is
purely negative, and is therefore falsely so called, are
hurrying the deluded votaries of a godless secularism.”
This “ godless secularism,” as if there were any part of
the creation from which God could be excluded, would
appear to point clearly to the authorship of this article,
as none but a person whose “ calling ” was supposed to
be in danger could write like this, except it were the
American newspapers on the eve of a presidential elec
tion. The New York Herald has also its pious as well
as its political side. In commenting lately upon the
death of a rather notorious character, it says : “He
�in Mind as in Matter.
J3
•calmly fell asleep without a struggle, when, no doubt,
angels accompanied his soul to the peaceful shores of
eternity, there to dwell with his Maker for ever.” The
Edinburgh used to be considered an organ of advanced
liberalism, but think of being able to find a writer in
the present day who evidently knows something of
science, who believes that social order and progress de
pend upon a creed, and such a creed !
li It is the business of morality or moral science,”
says Herbert Spencer, “to deduce, from the laws of life
and the conditions of existence, what kinds of actions
necessarily tend to produce happiness, and what kinds
to produce unhappiness; and having done this, its de
ductions are to be recognised as laws of conduct.”
Morality relates, notwithstanding the high-flown lan
guage usually used with respect to it, simply to the
laws and regulations by which men may live together
in the most happy manner possible—the laws, in fact,
■of their wellbeing—and as it is the “law” of their
nature to seek their happiness or wellbeing, the interests
of morality are fortunately sufficiently assured. Of
-course this will be called a “ godless secularism,” and it
is said that these natural motives will be very much
.strengthened if we add to them the rewards and punish
ments of another world; but the highest morality is
independent of such low personal motives, and people
-do what is right because it is right—that is, because it
promotes the best interests of the community at large—
-of others besides themselves. As to the laws of “ an
eternal and immutable morality,” the laws of morality
have always varied according to the varying interests of
mankind, and with advancing civilisation; as the family
has extended to the clan, the clan to the country, the
country to the world. What has been right in one age
-and country has been wrong in another, as the interests
of the community were different at one time and place
to what they were in another. It is rather singular
that we should hear most of eternal and immutable
�14
The Reign of Law
morality from those whose whole theological system isbased upon vicarious atonement, upon the sacrifice of
the just for the unjust.
Coleridge says : “ It is not the motive makes the
man, but the man the motive.” This is ordinarily ad
duced to prove that as man makes the motive, and the
motive governs the will, the man must be free, and his
will also; but it is just the reverse. Objectively, a
man is judged by his motive; subjectively, it is man—
that is, the man’s nature that dictates the motive. If
he is of a benevolent disposition, this furnishes the
motive to kindly action; if he is conscientious, the
motive to act justly. The appeal of outward circum
stances will be answered according to the nature of the
man, and whatever you may want to get out of him, if
it is not in him, you cannot get it out of him. A man
does not always act in accordance with his conscience, or
sense of right and wrong; he acts according to his
nature, and the strongest feeling predominates, whetherthat be conscience, fear of punishment, or self-indul
gence at the expense of others. A man with the natureof a pig will act like a pig, whatever may be his know
ledge of his duties to others. To say that he has the
ability to act otherwise, is to say that a pig might be
an angel if he pleased, or at least act in accordance with
those higher human attributes which he does not possess.
As to an appeal to his free-will, there is no free-will in
the case, any more than a blind man is free to separatedifferent colours. All the preaching in the world would
not turn him into the higher man, any more than it
would the pig itself. He might be taught to talk
piously, but he would not be less a pig underneath.
Very little can be done towards a change of nature in
one generation. I am quite aware of the effect of what
has been called “ conversion,” but it does little more
than keep people outwardly correct in their conduct,
and give selfishness another direction; that is, turn
worldliness into other-worldliness. A man, however,.
�in Mind as in Matter.
15
is not the less responsible—i.e., is not the less liable to
take the consequences of his actions, whatever his nature
may be; the consequences, if painful, being intended
to improve that nature, and push him forward to a
higher grade. The conviction that different circum
stances act upon different individuals according to their
nature--which nature depends upon race, organisation,
civilisation, and education—is gradually extending, and
it must continue to extend, till all admit that no action
could have been otherwise than it was under the cir
cumstances. If you want to alter the action, you must
alter the man or alter the circumstances, and cease to
trust anything to free-will.
In the early days of our missionary societies, a savage
presented himself for baptism. Among other things
he was asked how many wives he had. He said five.
He was told that Christianity only admitted of one
wife, and that he could not be received into the Church.
The next year, when the missionary was on the station,
he presented himself again as a candidate, with only
one wife. He was asked what had become of the other
four. He said he had eaten them. This is among the
conditions to which wedlock is liable in some other
countries. The way in which the marriage ceremony
is initiated among the bushmen of Australia is equally
simple and humane, not to say loving, and it is less
costly than with us. The man, having selected his
lady-love, knocks her down with a club, and drags her
to his camp.
Sir Samuel Baker has lately told us of the interesting
customs of the people whom he has lately sought to
emancipate and bring within the borders of civilisation
in Africa. The king, who attacked his stronghold in
his absence, and whom he afterwards defeated, had just
celebrated his accession to the throne by burying all
his relations alive. If the young child of a chief dies,
the nurse is buried with it—sometimes alive, sometimes
she has her throat cut—that she may look after it in
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The Reign of Law
the next world. Sir Samuel found the natives verymuch opposed to slavery, and solicitous to aid him in
putting it down. They objected to it because the
traders took their wives, daughters, children, and fol
lowers without compensation. One of the strongest
objectors offered to Sir Samuel to sell his son for a
spade ■, this he thought the right thing.
These little differences of thought and custom be
tween these interesting people and ourselves will
scarcely, I think, be laid altogether to free-will. The
people and circumstances surely had something to do
with it.
But even this seems matter of opinion. Thus the
Bev. J. A. Picton, agreeing with me, says, “ Is the
will as free to give its casting vote for generosity and
righteousness in a Troppman, or a Nero, or a savage, as
in a civilized St. Francis, or a Washington ?” But why
not, if the will rules the motives, and not the motives
the will ? On the contrary, the Spectator thinks that
we can, by a heave of the will, without motive, and
undetermined by the past, alter our whole life. It
says, “ Certainly we should have said that if there is
one experience more than another by which the “ I ” is
known, and known as something not to be explained
by “ a series of states of feeling,” it is the sense of
creative power connected with the feeling of effort, the
consciousness that you can by a heave of the will alter
your whole life, and that that heave of the will, or
refusal to exert it, is not the mere resultant of the
motives present to you, but is undetermined by the past
—is free.”—(Feb. 21, 1874, p. 234.) It certainly
must have required a very considerable “ heave of the
will ” to have enabled the Spectator to arrive at such a
state of consciousness, and it must have been quite
“undetermined by the past” experience, or present
reason 1 I have no such consciousness of truly creative
power, that is, of something made out of nothing.
�in Mind as in Matter.
17
Quite as great differences as between these savages
and ourselves exist in the very midst of our civilisation.
There are a class of people amongst us whose animal
propensities so decidedly predominate, that, turned
loose upon society, they cannot help but prey upon it.
There are others whose animal and human faculties
are so nicely balanced that their conduct depends entirely
upon education and circumstances.
Others are so far a law unto themselves that if they
fall it must be inadvertently, or from strong temptation.
All these may plead “Not guilty” to our ordinary
notion of responsibility. Each may say truly, whatever
he had done, “I could not help it.” What, then,
vrould be our conduct towards them1? Why, exactly
that, and no more, which would enable them to pre
vent it for the future. The first we should confine for
life, or if it was a very dangerous animal, perhaps put
it out of the way altogether (capital punishment). But
if society will breed such animals, it ought to take the
responsibility, and be obliged at least to go to the
expense of keeping them for life. To the second we
should apply just that discipline that would incline the
balance of motive and action in favour of society for
the future. The third would require only to be put
into the path of right to go straight for the future.
“ Turn to the right, and keep straight forward,” are the
only directions required to be given to them.
The only effort that I know of to induce our
legislators to apply science in this direction, in the
discrimination of character and the classification of
criminals, was made by Sir George S. Mackenzie, in
February 1836. He petitioned the Right Hon. Lord
Glenelg, the then Secretary for the Colonies, that a
classification might be made of criminals in accordance
with the above threefold division. This was accom
panied by certificates from a long list of eminent men
that the Science of Mind we possessed was quite adequate
to the purpose. Sir George says, “ that a discovery of'
�18
The Reign of Law
the true mental constitution of man has been made,
and that it furnishes us with an all-powerful means to
improve our race. . . . That man is a tabula rasa, on
which we may stamp what talent and character we
please, has long been demonstrated, by thousands of
facts of daily occurrence, to be a mere delusion. Dif
ferences in talent, intelligence, and moral character, are
now ascertained to be the effects of differences in
cerebral organisation. . . . These differences are, as the
certificates which accompany this show, sufficient to
indicate externally general dispositions, as they are
proportioned among one another. Hence, we have the
means of estimating, with something like precision, the
actual natural characters of convicts (as of all human
beings), so that we may at once determine the means
best adapted for their reformation, or discover their
incapacity for improvement, and their being propdr
subjects of continued restraint, in order to prevent
their further injuring society.” Sir George says, with
reference to cerebral physiology, that “ attacks are still
made on the science of phrenology; but it is a science
which its enemies have never, in a single instance, been
found to have studied. Gross misrepresentations of
fact, as well as wild, unfounded assertion, have been
brought to bear against it again and again, and have
been again and again exposed.” This kind of injustice
I firmly believe to be quite as applicable, if not more
so, to the present time as it was then. The testi
mony then given by the anatomists, surgeons, eminent
physiologists, and others, was generally to the effect
■that “the natural dispositions are indicated by the
form and size of the brain to such an extent as to
render it quite possible, during life, to distinguish men
•of desperate and dangerous tendencies from those of
good disposition;” and that “it is quite possible to
determine the dispositions of men by an inspection of
their heads with so much precision as to render a
knowledge of phrenology of the utmost importance to
�in Mind as in Matter.
*9
persons whose duties involve the care and management
■of criminals?’ And, allow me to add, it will be found
of equal importance to all persons who have the care
and management of any one, whether schoolmasters,
doctors, or parsons. For want of this knowledge of
cerebral physiology, James Mill was very nearly killing
his son, John S. Mill, or making him an idiot for life,
by overworking a brain whose activity already amounted
-almost to disease. The brain gave way, however, when
he was above twenty years old, and he had one of
those fits of mental depression which are well known to
-attend its overwork. It is a singular fact that neither
he nor any of the reviewers of his autobiography seem
to be aware that it was not Marmontel’s “ Memoires ”
•or Wordsworth’s “Poems” to which he was indebted
for recovery, but to his wanderings in the Pyrenean
mountains, the love of natural beauty, and the rest of
brain. It has been J. S. Mill’s ignorance of cerebral physi
ology, and his diversion of the public mind from the
subject by his “Logic” and “Examination of Sir
William Hamilton,” that has mainly helped to bring
back P>erkeley and the reign of Metaphysics, and to put
off the true science of Mind, based on physiology,
half a century.
The discrimination of character is not so great a
mystery as some people suppose. Statistics show that
people act very much alike under the same circum■stances. People fall in love, and marry according to the
price of bread, and even the number of people who put
their letters into the post without an address are the same
in a given area; knowledge is constantly narrowing
the space between general rules and particular cases.
Of course Sir George Mackenzie’s advice could not
be taken; public opinion was not prepared for it;
neither is it at present, as is evidenced by the return
to torture (flogging) during the last few years, and the
whole spirit of the public press. Take an illustration
from one of our first-class Journals. The Pall. Mall
-Gazette of January 9, 1874, says :—
�20
The Reign of Law
“Imprisonment is not only fast losing its terrors, but,,
owing to the kindness of magistrates and judges, it is becom
ing a real boon to the dishonest and violent, to whom it is
doled out, like funds from the poor-box, according to their
necessities. The other day ‘ a novel and suggestive applica
tion,’ it is stated, was made to the Recorder in Dublin by a
female prisoner, aged twenty-nine years, who had been forty
eight times convicted of indictable offences, and pleaded
guilty to a charge of stealing 7s. 6d. from the pockets of a
drunken man in the streets. The Recorder was proceeding to
sentence the prisoner to twelve months’ imprisonment, when
she earnestly implored him to make the sentence one of five
years’ penal servitude, alleging as a reason for desiring the
change that she might then have a chance of earning an honest
livelihood, whereas if she only got twelve months’ imprison
ment she could do nothing but return to the streets. The
Recorder, ‘ believing her to be sincere in her desire to lead
an honest life, complied with her wish. ’ This was very kind
to the prisoner, but rather hard on those who will have to
support her for five years instead of for one, because she
requires the lengthened period for her own convenience. It
is of course most desirable that prisoners, when they leave
gaol, should ‘earn an honest livelihood;’ but imprisonment
is intended as a punishment, and not as a boon.”
That is, punishment is retributive, and not reformatory.
But I wonder society does not discover that this rough
and ready method of dealing with criminals does not
pay, and that forty-eight convictions in a person only
twenty-nine years old is a very expensive way of taking
its revenge. No, I suppose it would never do to.
admit that a man’s conduct was the result of his mental
constitution and the circumstances in which he was
placed—that there was no freedom in the matter,
except the freedom to act in accordance with the dic
tates. of the will. It would be most dangerous doctrine
to allow that no man could have acted differently to
what he did act—that the strongest motive, whatever
it was, must of necessity have prevailed; and that
all we had to do, therefore, was to alter the constitu
tion and circumstances, and prevent such motives,
whether of conscience—that is, sense of right—or of
fear, that would enable him to do differently for the
�in Mind as in Matter.
21
-future. No, the vengeance of the law must continue
still to be visited upon our Bill Sykeses, and Fagins,
and Artful Dodgers, although it is well known to others
besides M. Quetelet that “ society prepares crime, and
the guilty are only the instruments by which it is
■executed?’ We must still continue to dole out so
■much suffering for so much sin, without reference to
■cause and effect, either past or future; for is not a man
responsible for his actions—that is, may we not justly
■retaliate and make another suffer as much as he has
•entailed upon us ? To the popular mind vengeance
seems a divine institution; and it is impossible ‘ to love
•our enemies and to do good to those who despitefully
use us and persecute us,’ as long as this vulgar notion
of moral desert prevails. It is only Science—the
Science of Mind—that can put an end to this; and
that there is a Science of Mind is at present not even
recognized by the President of the Social Science Asso
ciation. When we have a Science of Man we may
have a Science of Society, and we shall then advance as
rapidly towards its improvement as we have done in
Physics since Bacon’s time. Induction is equally
-applicable to mind and matter, any supposed difference
is consequent upon our ignorance. Bree-will and spon
taneity will disappear as our knowledge extends, and
all will be brought within “the reign of law.” When
we have a Science of Mind we shall cease to take the
absorbing interest we now do in kitchen-middens and
the dust heaps and bones of the past, and shall take to
the study of cerebral physiology, upon which the laws
■of mind depend. Our attention will not be given, as
now, exclusively to short-horns and south-downs, or to
horses and dogs, but to improving the race of men. If
we wish to induce any special line of conduct which
we call moral—that is, more to the interest of society
at large than another—we must collect and direct the
force of mind that will produce it. This can only be
done and become habitual by growing the organization
�' 22
The Reign of Law
upon which it depends. Preaching and dogma go only
a very little way towards it; and education, upon which
so much reliance is now placed, will not do much more.
Education has a refining influence, and so far as it
may tend to direct the propensities, and call the higher
feelings into activity, it is of value. Its influence is
very much overrated; for, as we have said, it is the
feelings and not the intellect that govern the will, and
reading, writing, and arithmetic have little direct in
fluence upon them. It is on this account that many
well-disposed people are so anxious to add religion to
the instruction in our common schools. By religion
here little more is meant than, “ Be good, my boy, or
Bogie ’ll have you,” and surely it is not worth drag
ging religion into all the dirt, and familiarity which
breeds contempt, of our common schools for this, to the
injury of all that deserves to be called religion in after
life. It would be much better to teach the natural
consequences—the real responsibility that attends all
the children’s actions—how, if they lie, no one will
believe them; if they steal, no one will trust them,
&c., attended with short and sharp immediate punish
ment. Future rewards and punishments have a very
remote bearing upon immediate conduct, and I doubt
the policy of turning the Almighty into a sort of head
policeman, with his eye always upon them, ready to
strike if they do wrong. This may beget fear, but never
love, and children soon find out that as far as the imme
diate consequences to themselves are concerned it is not
true, and this damages their faith in their real liability.
But the Science of Mind will introduce a truer
knowledge of what really constitutes Education, which
means the developing and perfecting of all our facul
ties, social, moral, religious, and aesthetic,* as well as
the intellect. This only will make a complete man,
this only will make him find his happiness and there* See “Education of the Feelings,” 4th edition.
■& Co.
Longmans
�in Mind as in Matter.
23
fore his interest in virtue, and enable him to do his
duty here, without either hope of heaven or fear of
hell. The study of the nature of each mental faculty,
and-its direction towards its legitimate objects, is what
is required by Education. Of how much may be done
by education is seen in the cultivation of musical
talent.
Social evolution follows the law of organic modi
fication. It is the exercise of the feelings we wish to
predominate that alone will strengthen them and in
crease the size of the organs with which they are con
nected. The commercial age in which we live-—its
machinery and facility of intercourse—is making all men
better off, and binding all together by a common tie of
interest. When a man is well off and happy he desires
to make others so, exercising his benevolence. When
he is in daily close intercourse with his fellows it shows
him the necessity for honesty and integrity, and this
exercises his conscientiousness or sense of justice. Men
are thus obliged to live for others as well as for them
selves ; they everywhere find it their interest to help
one another, and as combination and co-operation thus
increase, so do civilization and the growth of those
mental habits which enable men to live most happily
together.
We thus progress surely, but slowly, not in con
sequence of, but in spite of, our conflicting creeds, and
when at last we arrive at the conviction that nothing
could have happened otherwise than it did; that the
present and the future only are in our power—-when
we have determined to “let the dead past bury its
dead ”—we shall have made a great advance towards
the more easy practice of justice and benevolence. Of
course, the usual cry about gross matter and materialism
and iron fate may be expected, but all that is highest
which man has ever reasonably looked forward to may
be more immediately expected when science and cer
tainty are welcomed in the place of chance and spon
�24
The Reign of Law
taneity. We are approaching daily in practice, if not
in theory, in this direction. At present our religious
creeds stand directly across our path. But utility, if
not philosopy, is teaching our law-makers that they
cannot mend the past, and this gradual application of
the Science of Mind to legislation will ultimately ex
tend to the people for whose benefit the laws are made,
until all will feel that nothing must be left to accident
in the moral world any more than in the physical.
The effect upon the individual of the reconstruction
of his ethical code upon a scientific basis is most
favourable to the growth of all the higher feelings
upon which conduct and happiness depend. The sup
position that things ought to have been otherwise, and
might have been otherwise, is the source of half the
worry in the world, and revenge, remorse, and retri
butive punishment cause half its misery. Revenge is
not only wicked, but absurd; as applied to the past, it
is like a child beating a table. When we have done
wrong, the experienced consequences are generally suf
ficient for our future guidance, and “ repentance whereby
we forsake sin” is admirable, but remorse for that
which could not have been otherwise is both absurd
and useless. An Irish priest told his congregation that
it was a most providential thing that death had been
placed at the end of life, instead of at the beginning,
as it gave more time for repentance. With this we
can scarcely agree. Our verdict, as it must be now,
would be rather that of the Irish jury, “ Not guilty,
but would advise the accused not to do it again.” But
is this verdict of not guilty just ? Certainly it is, as
regards the past; it could not have been otherwise.
But surely it will be said this is dangerous doctrine.
Is no one to be blamed for anything he has done?
Blame is both unjust and useless as applied to the>
past ; it is only so far as it may influence the future
that it can be of any use. This praise and blame is a
rough-and-ready way of influencing future action, which
�in Mind as in Matter.
25
has a very uncertain effect upon conduct. We assume
that people might have done differently, and, after
scolding or punishing, we leave them to do so, but
there is no certainty that they will. Would it not be
better to inquire into the causes that induced them to
act as they did, and alter them, otherwise they are
certain to do the same again. Society’s conduct with
respect to offences at present is very much like Bartie
Massey’s ideal of woman as cook, -— “ the porridge
would be awk’ard now and then; if it’s wrong, it’s
summat in the meal, or it’s summat in the milk, or it’s
summat in the water.” Is it not time that we, as well
■as our cooks, began to measure the proportion between
the meal and the milk ? As to dangerous doctrine, we
must not forget that “ philosophical certainty ” implies
that everything that will influence conduct in the pre sent or the future is still open to us, only in one case
we trust to science and law, in the other to chance and
free will. In proportion as we extend our dominion
over the darkness of ignorance, and are able to conquer
fresh fields of knowledge, as the domain of law becomes
every year wider and wider, and we gain enlarged
views of the eternal sequence and universal order, all
contingency and spontaneity must vanish. What we
call chance or free-will is nothing more than the action
of hitherto undiscovered causes. As to the past, that
we feel is inevitable, and more, it could not have been
otherwise—the causes then in operation must have pro
duced the effects they did—and when we know a thing
is inevitable we can “grin” and bear it; it is the
mental worry, not the mere physical pain that is hard
to bear. As the proverb says, “ It is of no use crying
over spilt milk.” Few know the peace of mind and
internal quiet which the habitual practice of this mental
attitude secures, but all may know it as science ad
vances, and it is this state of mind which it is the true
function of philosophy to enable us to attain.
There is infinite peace also in the conviction that we
�26
The Reign of Law.
are in higher hands than our own ; that the interests of
morality and virtue are ultimately assured, being based
upon law; that we may forget ourselves in the glory of
the whole of which we are so infinitely small a part;
and that we may thus rest satisfied that something
much better is being secured than the freedom of the
will, and with which that Will will not be allowed to
interfere.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS. PRINTERS. EDINBURGH.
�
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"The reign of law in mind as in matter, and its bearing upon Christian dogma and moral responsibility." Part II. The true meaning of responsibility
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Bray, Charles [1811-1884]
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THE
REIGN OF LAW
IN MIND AS IN MATTER,
AND ITS
BEARING UPON CHRISTIAN DOGMA AND MORAL
RESPONSIBILITY.
FART I.
BY
CHARLES
BRAY,
AUTHOR OF “A MANUAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, OR SCIENCE OF MAN,” “ MODERN
PROTESTANTISM,” “ILLUSION AND DELUSION,”„&C.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11, THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD,
UPPER NORWOOD, LONDON, S.E.
Price Sixpence.
��THE
REIGN OF LAW IN MIND AS IN MATTER,
AND ITS
■
BEARING UPON CHRISTIAN DOGMA.
“At first laying down, as a fact fundamental,
That nothing with God can be accidental.”
Longfellow.
ECKY’S admirable histories of Rationalism and
European Morals, show most clearly that there is
a law of orderly and progressive transformation to which
our speculative opinions are subject, the causes of
which are to be sought in the general intellectual con
dition of society. Every great change, therefore, in
the popular creed is always preceded by a great
change in the intellectual condition of the people,
and speculative opinions which are embraced by
any large body of men, are accepted, not on account
of the arguments upon which they rest, but on
account of a predisposition to receive them. Opinion
pervades society as water does a sponge, or like yeast
cells growing in a fermented mass. Reasoning, which,
in one age, would make no impression whatever, in the
next is received with enthusiastic applause. This is
owing to the fact, that, as a general rule,—not entirely,
however, without exception,—it is our feelings and
not the intellect that rule us; it is the feelings that
connect us with the prevailing state of public opinion
with which we are en rapport that shape our conduct,
and not our theoretical convictions. It is this that makes
L
�4
The Reign of Law
missionary efforts so fruitless, and proselytising almost
impossible in old and partially civilized countries
which have already a religion of their own. Mr Becky
shows us that the history of the abolition of torture,
the history of punishments, the history of the treatment
of the conquered in war, the history of slavery, all pre
sent us with examples of practices which in one age
were accepted as perfectly right and natural, and
which in another age were repudiated as palpably and
atrociously inhuman. In each case, the change was
effected much less by any intellectual process than by
a certain quickening of the emotions, and consequently
of the moral judgments.
Galileo was condemned because the Scripture says,
that “ the sun runneth about from one end of the earth
to the other,” and that “ the foundations of the earth
are so firmly fixed, that they cannot be moved.”
Science might show that the earth did move notwith
standing, but then many refused to look through Gali
leo’s telescope, and those who did were disposed to
compromise the matter like the young student who,
when asked by the examiners whether the earth moved
round the sun, or the sun round the earth, said, with
a spirit of “ reconciliation ” worthy of the present age,
“ Sometimes one, and sometimes the other.” Even the
great Lord Bacon was sceptical on this question of the
earth’s motion, although not quite in the same direc
tion ; he said, “ It is the absurdity of these opinions
that has driven men to the'diurnal motion of the earth,
which I am convinced is most false.” It took a cen
tury and a-half to reconcile mankind to the Copernican
Astronomy, and there are many now who refuse to
believe that the earth is round, the fact being con
trary to Scripture : for how in such case could people
at the antipodes see the Son of God descending in his
glory ? If there are some who thus suspect their geo
graphy to be unorthodox, there are others equally at
fault in their natural history. Being religiously
�in Mind as in Matter.
5
"brought up, and therefore in early possession of a
Noah’s Ark, they know perfectly well the truth of the
story about it■ but as they get older, they do not see
very well how all the animals could be got into it, and
in this discrepancy between Science and Scripture, df
■course, the former has to give way. They are not pre
pared to accept St Augustine’s road out of the difficulty,
that the assembling the animals in the ark must have
been for the sake of prefiguring the gathering of all
nations into the Church, and not in order to secure the
replenishing of the world with life.
But if it took so long to introduce the Copernican
system, it took much longer to get rid of witchcraft, or
the firm conviction which all had, that the Devil,
through ugly old women and others, interfered per
sonally in our affairs. The horrors attending this be
lief it is impossible to describe or even to conceive.
The way in which the truth of the accusation was
tested, had the logic that peculiarly distinguishes theo
logical controversy ; the witch was put into water, and
if she was drowned, she was innocent, if not, she was
guilty, and burned alive. Chief Baron Sir Matthew
Hale’s reasoning seems almost equally conclusive.
Charging the jury in the trial for witchcraft of Amy
Duny and Rose Callender in 1664, he says, “That
there are such creatures as witches, I make no doubt
at all ; for, first, the Scriptures have affirmed as much ;
and secondly, the wisdom of all nations, particularly of
our own, hath provided laws against them.” Among
•others, an Anglican clergyman, named Lower, who was
now verging on eighty, and who for fifty years had
been an irreproachable minister of his church, fell
under suspicion. He was thrown into the water, con
demned and hung, and we are told that, “ Baxter re
lates the whole story with evident pleasure.” Lecky,
Rationalism, Vol. i. p. 117. “As late as 1773, the
divines of the Associated Presbytery passed a resolu
tion declaring their belief in witchcraft, and deploring
�6
The Reign of Law
the scepticism that was general,” Lecky, Vol. i. p. 147..
John Wesley also was a firm believer in witchcraft, and
for some time we know inhabited a haunted house. He
said that the giving up of witchcraft was in effect
giving up the bible. But, notwithstanding the strenu
ous opposition of the clergy everywhere, the belief in
witchcraft died a natural death. It was not argument
that killed it, but it could not breathe the spirit of the
age, and it was then very naturally discovered that the
word translated witch in Leviticus may be translated
“ poisoner.” Both the translation and explanation of
the Bible have always admitted of great adaptation and
reconciliation.
The belief in the devil’s agents and imps having
gone out in the light of the age, the belief in the devil
himself is fast following ; he is getting very faint; in
fact, he is not admitted at all into polite society. The
belief in the existence of a personal embodiment of the
principle of evil may be said no longer to exist among
educated people, but at one titne it was a most vivid
reality. To Luther he was a constant presence, and the
black stain is still shown in the castle of Wartburg,
where he threw his inkstand at him. He gradually,
however, got more accustomed to him, and he tells us
how, in the monastery of Wittemberg, hearing a noise
in the night, he perceived that it was only the Devil,
and accordingly he went to sleep again.
We now ask, Is public opinion prepared to accept the
doctrine that the Reign of Law is universal in Mind as
in Matter ? That there is no exception to the Reign of
Law ? That there is no such thing as chance or spon
taneity, or a free-will, or a free anything, but that there
is a sufficient cause for everything ? I fear this ques
tion must be answered in the negative. Natural
Science has gradually substituted the conception of har
monious and unchanging law, for the conception of a
universe governed by perpetual miracle, or capricious
will, or chance in the world of matter; but that law, or
�in Mind as in Matter.
7
necessity, or certainty, equally pervades tlie world of
mind, is at present confined to philosophers, and to
those only who have made the Science of Mind their
study. Still it is a great truth which must ultimately
prevail, and when it does, it will bring as great and
beneficial a change in our system of ethics, as the Coper
nican system has in our Astronomy.
By reference to the first volume of Grote’s Greece,
we find that Socrates treated Physics and Astronomy
as departments reserved by the gods for their own
actions, and not subject to ascertainable laws, and that
human research was even impious. “ In China at the
present day,” says Eitel, “ the Chinese sages see a golden
chain of spiritual life running through every form of
existence, and binding together as in one living body
everything that subsists in heaven above, or in earth
below. But this truth is with them a mere hypothesis,
not a generalization from observed facts. Experimental
philosophy is unknown in China. They invented no
instruments to aid them in the observation of the
heavenly bodies, they never took to hunting beetles
and stuffing birds, they shrank from the idea of dissect
ing animal bodies, nor did they chemically analyse in
organic substances, but with very little actual know
ledge of nature they evolved a whole system of natural
science from their own inner consciousness, and ex
panded it according to the dogmatic formulae of ancient
tradition.” This is precisely the condition of our
clerical sages at the present time in the department,
not of physics, but of mental science. Things may or
may not happen, not according to any known or calcul
able law or order, but according to the free will of the
actor, which is supposed to obey no law. And this
free will is the key-stone of both their morality and
religion.
Mr Herbert Spencer truly says, “ There can be no
complete acceptance of sociology as a science, so long
as the belief in a social order not conforming to natural
�8
The Reign of Law
law, survives. Hence, as already said, considerations
touching the study of sociology, not very influential
even over the few who recognise a social science, can
have scarcely any effects on the great mass to whom a
social science is an incredibility.”
“I do not mean,” he says, “that this prevailing imper
viousness to scientific conceptions of social phenomena
is to be regretted. . . . The desirable thing is, that a
growth of ideas and feelings tending to produce modi
fication, shall be joined with a continuance of ideas
and feelings tending to preserve stability . . . That in
our day, one in Mr Gladstone’s position should think
as he does, seems to me very desirable. That we
should have for our working-king one in whom a
purely scientific conception of things had become
dominant, and who was thus out of harmony with our
present social state, would probably be detrimental,
and might be disastrous.” * Mr Gladstone has, how
ever, since explained (Contemporary, December 1873),
that he was misunderstood; that he does not either
affirm or deny either evolution or unchangeable law,
but that what he wished to imply was, that, be they
either true or false, certain persons have made an un
warrantable use of them. That a law-maker should
not be much in advance of his age may be true enough,
but that the “ prevailing imperviousness ” to the great
truth, that law and order equally prevail in mind as in
matter, is, I think, much to be regretted. The induc
tive philosophy applied to mind will work as great a
revolution as its application to physics has done since
Bacon’s time.
I shall first consider, then, what this great truth is,
and then its application both as to what it would de
stroy, and what it would build up. The great truth
is, that there is no such thing as freedom of will.
Men formerly believed that the sun went round the
earth : they saw and felt that it did. The supposed
freedom of will is equally an illusion and delusion.
* The Study of Sociology, p. 365.
�in Mind as in Matter.
9
J. S. Mill tells us that ££ The conviction that pheno
mena have invariable laws, and follow with regularity
certain antecedent phenomena, was only acquired gra
dually, and extended itself as knowledge advanced,
from one order of phenomena to another, beginning
with those whose laws were most accessible to observa
tion. This progress has not yet attained its ultimate
point; there being still one class of phenomena
(human volitions) the subjection of which to invariable
laws is not yet recognised. ... At length we are fully
warranted in considering that law, as applied to all
phenomena within the range of human observation,
stands on an equal footing in respect to evidence with
the axioms of geometry itself.” Such, I believe, is the
conviction of all the great leaders in science—certainly
in mental science—of the present day. I need quote
only a few. Let us first go back a generation. Jona
than Edwards, in his work on the freedom of the will,
has always been considered as unanswerable, but
having proved the certainty of all events by reason, he
accepts free-will from Scripture. Now, that any
thing can be certain but at the same time contingent
is a contradiction. He says, “ Nothing comes to pass
without a cause. What is self-existent must be from
eternity, and must be unchangeable; but as to all
things that begin to be, they are not self-existent, and
therefore must have some foundation for their exist
ence without themselves.” ££ In no mind,” says
Spinoza, ££ is there an absolute or free volition ; but it
is determined to choose this or that by a cause,
which likewise has been fixed by another, and this
again by a third, and so on for ever.” He also says,
££ Human liberty, of which all boast, consists solely in
this, that man is conscious of his will, and unconscious
of the causes by which it is determined.” That is, he
is often unconscious of the motives that govern the
will, and still more so of the causes that govern his
motives—the same action that always accompanies and
B
�]o
The Reign of Law
precedes every feeling and volition always goes on un
consciously, and the conscious volitions tell him nothing
of it.
Consciousness thus deludes us into the conviction
that our volitions originate in ourselves, we being un
conscious of the train of physical forces in which they
originate; hy ourselves meaning the aggregate of our
mental powers, and if there is no impediment to their
action that is what we call “ freedom.” Locke used to
say, “ That we should not ask whether the will is free,
hut whether we are free to follow its dictates,” for this
is really all that men mean hy their boasted freedom.
A free action, as to an accomplished result, can only
mean that the agent was not externally forced to do it.
This is probably all that Lord Houghton means by
freedom, hut he confounds this freedom of action with
freedom of will. He says, as president of his section
on Social Economy (1862), “I think we shall see that
there enters into this question an element which is
almost contradictory of strict scientific principle. That
element is human liberty, the free-will of mankind.
Without that free-will no man can have individual
power of action, no man can call himself a man,” &c.
It is this confounding the freedom from physical con
straint which enables us to act in accordance with the
will, with the freedom of the will itself, which dictates
the action, that produces the confusion on the subject.
When it is said freedom of will is a fact, that we feel
we are free to do as we please, &c., all that is meant is
this freedom from the constraint that would oblige us
to do, or leave undone, one thing rather another, and
not that the mind, or will, or what we please to do, is
free or independent of causation.
Professor Mansel, however, believed differently; he
says (Prolegomena Logica, p. 152), “ In every act of
volition I am fully conscious that I can at this moment
act in either of two ways, and that, all the antecedent
phenomena being precisely the same, I may determine
�in Mind as in Matter.
11
one way to-day and another to-morrow.” That is, the
same causes (all the antecedent phenomena) may pro
duce one effect to-day and another to-morrow, and all
who believe in the freedom of the will are obliged
logically to accept this conclusion. Choice, or to “ act
in either of two ways,” implies a preference or motive
for choosing one rather than the other ; if, as is almost
impossible, the mind is equally balanced, then somephysical cause, not within the field of consciousness,
dictates the choice. That the action has no cause is
impossible. This power of choice that we feel we pos
sess is simply that, when freed from physical constraint,
we can do as we please, but what we please to do de
pends upon our nature, which, in both mind and body,
is governed by its own laws.
It is upon this freedom from external constraint by
which we can do as we please, i.e., act in accordance
with our will, that the intuition, which with the many
is stronger than reason, is founded. Kant says, “ No
beginning which occurs of itself is possible,” and yet he
believed in the freedom of the will, thinking that the
intuition, based upon a delusive experience, was more
reliable than the reason.
Dr Laycock (Mind and Brain) says, “ There is, in
fact, no more a spontaneous act of will than there is
spontaneous generation. Strictly, such an act is a
creation, and belongs only to creative power.” There
are those who think that the creative power of God is,
or may be, exercised without cause or motive, and that
He has bestowed upon man, in a minor degree, the
same power, and that this is man’s distinguishing cha
racteristic from the brutes; but if so, this dignified
attribute is only that of a madman, who alone is sup
posed to act without cause or motive.
Lewes, in his new work, “ Problems of Life and
Mind,” p. 128, also gives his testimony in favour of ne
cessity ; thus, he says, “ The moralist will be found pas
sionately arguing that the conduct of men, which is
�12
The Reign of Law
simply the expression of their impulses and habits, can
be at once altered by giving them new ideas of right
conduct. The psychologist, accustomed to consider the
mind as something apart from the organism, individual
and collective, is peculiarly liable to this error of over
looking the fact that all mental manifestations are
simply the resultants of the conditions external and in
ternal.”
Professor Huxley’s utterances are a little more ob
scure. He is represented by C. B. Upton, B.A., as
“ rejecting almost contemptuously the freedom of the
will,” and he himself says (On the Physical Basis of
Life), “ Matter and law have devoured spirit and spon
taneity. And as sure as every future grows out of
every past and present, so will the physiology of the
future gradually extend the realm of matter and law
until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling,
and with action.” But he elsewhere says (Fortnightly
Review), “ philosophers gird themselves for battle
upon the last and greatest of all speculative problems.
Does human nature possess any free volition or truly
anthropomorphic element, or is it only the cunningest
of all nature’s clocks ? Some, among whom I count
myself, think that the battle will for ever remain a
drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this
result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the
day.” Would not “ sometimes one and sometimes the
other,” do quite as well as a drawn battle ? The Doc
tor evidently agrees with Kant, that “ no beginning
that occurs of itself is possible he appears to be also
of opinion :—
“ That what’s unpossible can’t be,
And never, never conies to pass.”
Colman’s “ Broad Grins.”
that is, very seldom, comes to pass !
There is nothing perhaps more remarkable in the
whole history of thought, than the intellectual shuffling
of all our great thinkers, to avoid meeting this fact of
�in Mind as in Matter.
*3
“ certainty ” face to face. I hope, however, to be able
to show that for all practical purposes it is most impor
tant that “ the realm of law should be co-extensive
with knowledge, with feeling, and with action.” But
the comparative recent discovery of the persistence of
force or the conservation of energy, furnishes the
modern practical proof that law is present everywhere;
as Herbert Spencer concisely puts it, “Force can
neither come into existence nor cease to exist. Each
manifestation of force can be interpreted only as the
effect of some antecedent force ; no matter whether it
be an inorganic action, or animal movement, a thought,
or a feeling. Either this must be conceded, or else it
must be asserted that our successive states of consci
ousness are self-created.” Which, of course, they must
be if the will is free : to determine is to use force,
which can “ be interpreted only as the effect of some
antecedent force.” Mr Spencer also says, “ If such co
existences and sequences as those of biology and socio
logy, are not yet reduced to .law, the presumption is,
not that they are irreducible to law, but that their laws
elude our present means of analysis for as Buckle
shows, “ the actions of man have the same uniformity
of connection which physical events have ; and the
law or laws of these uniformities can be inductively
ascertained in the same way as the laws of the material
world.”
The causational theory of the Will has hitherto been
called Philosophical Necessity, but just exception has
been taken to this, as we know of no necessity, we
know only of certainty. Mr J. S. Mill says, “ A voli
tion is a moral effect, which follows the corresponding
moral causes as certainly and invariably as physical
effects follow their physical causes. Whether it must
do so, I acknowledge myself to be entirely ignorant, be
the phenomenon moral or physical; and I condemn,
accordingly, the word necessity as applied to either
case. All I know is, that it always does." For myself,
�14
The Reign of Law
I regard all power or cause as will-power, and every
cause and effect as at one time consciously and volun
tarily established to serve a set purpose ; this mental
relation has passed in the ages into what we call
physical laws, that is, the unconscious or automatic
mental state, but the connection is not necessary, and
might be dissolved when the purpose was no longer
served. We have some curious illustrations, however,
of the habit being continued where the purpose is no
longer served; where organs that were useful lower down
in the scale are passed on to higher grades when they
are no longer of any use,—Nature, for instance, having
got into the habit of making teeth, makes them some
times—as in the guinea pig, who sheds them before it
is born—when they are not wanted. These apparent
exceptions to design are made the most of for atheist
ical purposes.
This view of things at present, I suppose, may be
said to be exclusively my own, but I do not see why
we may not fairly infer that what takes place at present
in man on a small scale, has previously been the law
of mind in Nature. If an action serves its purpose we
repeat it, and the action becomes habitual, then struc
tural, and is transmitted and becomes what we call
instinct, and what is instinct in men and animals
becomes invariable law in nature. We know of no
mind in the universe unconnected with body, and
therefore not liable to follow the same law. As Pope
well expresses it:—
“ All are but parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body nature is, and God the soul.”
That the order of nature was originally voluntary
to serve a purpose, and that its uniformity and invari
ability is consequent upon its being the nature of all
mind connected with structure to become automatic, I
think we may regard as highly probable. The prin
cipal purpose that this invariability now serves is that
�in Mind as in Matter.
*5
it enables men and animals to regulate their actions
and to adapt their conduct to the fact that what has
been will be. Of course, if the will, or anything, were
free, this invariability would not exist, and men could
not look forward or reason at all.
This certainty is very different to the iron-bound
necessity of the mere physicist and positivist, and
leaves room for special intervention if such should be
required j and as animal instincts adapt themselves to
new conditions, so according, at least, to our present
knowledge, there appears to be many a gap in evolu
tion, and many a space in Natural Selection and the
'Origin of Species to be filled up, that do so require it.
The missing link, after all, may be found in the direct
will-power of conscious intelligence, which has been
called' special providence. There is a whole field of
mesmerism, of clairvoyance, and of animal instinct at
present altogether inexplicable on what is known of
the natural laws of mind. It is said God cannot inter
fere with his own laws, but as their permanence—the
present connection between cause and effect—depends
entirely upon its utility, I do not regard this as a rule
without exception.
But this great truth of the philosophical certainty of
human volitions is at present a mere abstraction,
existing only in the brains of mental philosophers,
thought to be impractical and even dangerous by those
who acknowledge its truth; but is it for ever thus to
lie buried, and is it altogether at present incapable of
a practical application ? Popular prejudice and clamour
may be expected for some time to be against it, but is
it not a truth that even now ought to form the basis of
our legislation? There are two writers and lecturers
who have lately taken up this subject on the orthodox
religious side: the Rev. Daniel Moore on the part of
the Christian Evidence Committee of the Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, and the Rev. Dr Irons.
The first, one of the clearest writers and reasoners on
�16
The Reign of Law
■ the orthodox side, and the other, as it seems to me,,
with the especial gift of “ darkening counsel by words
without knowledge.” The Rev. D. Moore says, “■ Take
the theory of philosophical necessity. As an abstract
truth we accept it. As a fact of life-experience we
ignore it altogether.” {The Credibility of Mysteries,
p. 14.) Again he says, “ The will, of course, is deter
mined by motives, and so far the will is not free. But,
then, what governs the motives ? Why, the life, the
habits, the cherished states of mind and feeling, all
that enters into the liberty and spontaneity of the
personal man.” Of course, those things were as much
determined by motives as the present, so that it only
throws the difficulty, if there be one, a few stages back,
and there is evidently no more freedom or spontaneity
in one case than the other. He says, “ With the free
dom of the will, therefore, we have nothing to do.
We have only to do with the liberty of acting accord
ing to the determination of the will, — a liberty
which, as Hume observes, is universally allowed to
belong to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains.”
{Man's Accountableness for his Religious Belief, p. 15.)
It is evident that in theory there is no difference
between Mr Moore and ourselves,—freedom from ex
ternal constraint is all he contends for, and this is all
that people generally mean by freedom of will—the
freedom, for instance, to walk which way they choose
when their legs are not tied.
Dr Irons says {Analysis of Human Responsibility,
p. 11, in a paper read before the Victoria Institute) :
“ The position supposed in the Duke of Argyll’s
thoughtful and popular book, The. Reign of Law,—
viz., ‘ that all human actions are calculable beforehand^
may indicate a point now reached in England by the
prevailing ethics; and it may well arouse our attention,
though it would be wrong to conclude at once that the
calculable may not be contingent, a priori, as the doc
trine of chances may show.
�in Mind as in Matter.
*7
“ That this doctrine of the ‘ Reign of Law ’ is by no
means peculiar to a Scottish philosophy, will be felt
indeed by all who mark the ethical assumptions of our
best-known literature. The writings of Mr Buckle,
Mr Lewes, Mr Tyndall, Mr Mill, and others, are per
vaded by a kind of fatalistic tone, which society inclines
to accept as ‘ scientific,’ though an open denial of
responsibility is of course rarely ventured upon.
What is absolutely needed now is that men should he
compelled to say carefully and distinctly that which
they have been assuming vaguely, so that the prin
ciples may be known and judged.”
I quite agree with Dr Irons; it is quite time that
men did speak out, and I intend to do so, “ carefully
and distinctly,” and, I trust, truthfully and intelligibly.
Sir Wm. Hamilton is of opinion that the study of
philosophy, or mental science, operates to establish that
assurance of human liberty, which is necessary to a
rational belief in the dogmas of the church. Free-will
was a truth to him, mainly, if not solely, because it is
a necessary foundation for theology, i.e., for orthodox
theology.
The Rev. Baden Powell is obliged to admit (Chris
tianity without Judaism, p. 257) that 11 nothing in
geology bears the smallest resemblance to any part of
the Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to
whatever extent we may,” and we may say, with equal
truth, that “ The Reign of Law,” or the causational or
scientific view of human nature, is equally irreconcil
able with the Pauline cosmogony of the New Testa
ment, that is, with the popular or orthodox religion.
For although it brings us nearer to God, making it a
reality “ that in Him we live and move and have our
being,” yet it completely cuts up by the root the com
monly-received religious creed. Science and Religion
are here altogether irreconcileable.
Let us translate the scientific truth into more popular
language, and say exactly what it means, and then w&
�18
The Reign of Law
shall see better how to apply it. It means that no act
under the circumstances—the then present conditions
—could possibly have been other than it was. That
the same causes must always again produce the same
results, and that, consequently, if you wish to alter the
effect, you must alter the cause.
God, therefore, in placing our first parents in the
garden of Eden, must have known perfectly well what
would happen; and if He had wished things to have
happened differently, He must have altered the condi
tions. Either the “ forbidden fruit ” would not have
been forbidden, or He would have made Eve stronger,
or He would have kept out the serpent. Knowing
perfectly well what must happen, elaborately to prepare
a beautiful paradise, from which our parents were
immediately to get themselves turned out, was a mere
“ mockery, delusion, and a snare.” What could Eve
know of the consequences, which were death, never
having known death ? “ In the day that thou eatest
thereof thou shalt surely die,”—this was the threat,
but it was never kept. If it had been, we should have
had either another mother, or no race of men, a thing
comparatively of little consequence. But the conse
quences to Eve were to be, not death to herself on that
day, but death and damnation to all her posterity. I
should not think it worth while to mention this libel
upon our Creator, if this alleged fact of the Eall of
Man, now looked upon by intelligent people as a mere
allegory,* were not made the foundation of a libel
against our Creator still more atrocious. But it is
* “ Immediately after the return of the Jews from captivity we
find them re-editing their literature, and prefacing their own book
•of early traditions (Genesis) with the myths of the Persian cosmo
gony. . . The first chapter of Genesis, which relates the story
of Eve’s temptation and of Adam’s fall, is a plain and unmistakeable reproduction of one of the myths or legends of this ancient
(Pagan) faith. It is a copy of a tradition, or rather of a poetic
allegory, that belonged to the earlier world. But on this narrative
all the doctrinal systems of our modern churches depend,— it is the
•common foundation upon which they have all been built. The
�in Mind as in Matter.
*9
said Eve was free, and might have done otherwise. If
the will was free, what she would do was uncertain,
■contingent, dependent upon chance, upon her sponta
neous action, and not upon any rule or law : any speci
fied action might be, or might not be, and therefore
God himself could not tell what she would do : for how
nan that be foreseen which is uncertain and may not
-come to pass ? Dr Irons, however, thinks that it would
he wrong to conclude at once that the calculable may
not be contingent. I should also say, and I think
with more reason, that it would be wrong to conclude
at once that God would have left the beginning of a
new world and such awful contingencies to mere chance
.as to how a woman would act whose will was governed
by no motive and no law. This awful gift of free-will,
if it were possible to bestow it, which I deny, as every
thing or agent must act in accordance with its nature,
—the power to use this attribute to damn herself and
all her posterity no wise and benevolent being could
possibly bestow upon another.
This supposed fact of the Eall of Man is not only
opposed to reason and common sense, and all the
higher feelings of our nature, but it is equally opposed
to all history and experience. Geology, ethnology,
anthropology, all show man to have been very gradu
ally rising from the savage to a civilized state. Pro
gress, not retrogression, has been the law. It is true
people and states die like individuals, but it is only
fall of man is the only basis on which the doctrine of the atonement
can rest. If there was no fall, the atonement is a manifest super
fluity, and it could not then have been the mission of Jesus of Na
zareth to have made one. Our knowledge of the ‘ Tree and Serpent
worship’ of the ancient heathen world proves that the Jewish nar
rative of Adam and Eve, and the forbidden fruit, is but an old
heathen fancy—a fable, and not a fact—and, being so, there is but
one opinion at which reasonable men can arrive with regard to the
doctrine of the atonement which rests so exclusively upon it, and
which, apart from it, has no possible basis.” (Tree and Serpent
Worship, by J. W. Lake.)
�20
*
The Reign of Law
that, as with individuals, new and increased life and
vigour may spring up elsewhere.
If, then, there has been no fall of man; if, also, man
could in no case have acted otherwise than he did act,
the elaborate theological system, based upon the oppo
site suppositions, must fall to the ground.
Nothing has taken place contrary to the will of Om
nipotence, and it would be a contradiction even to
suppose that it could ever have done so; for if it were
really His will nothing could prevent it.
Neither is God expected to know that which may not
take place,—that is, is contingent or free,—that is,
may happen or may not happen.
Neither have we to reconcile God as Supreme Euler,
or as governing all things, with man’s freedom: also
God does not require to be reconciled to a world which
He himself has created.
God’s justice does not require to be satisfied by the
sacrifice of an innocent person for a guilty one, nor that
one “ who knew no sin should be made sin for us, that
we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,”
—if any one knows what this means, or how it is
possible.
God is not wroth with that which He has ordained,
and which could not have been otherwise ; neither are
His anger and vengeance to be feared, for they would
be unjust.
Atonement is not required, and vicarious atonement
is unjust. Neither are we required to believe that an
infinitely benevolent God is the creator of hell.
Those things, which are palpable contradictions to all
who dare to use their reason, are, in the Christian
scheme, only mysteries to be cleared up in another
world. This will be evident if we proceed to examine
what the orthodox creed requires us to believe about
them.
Justification by faith is the fundamental doctrine of
the Church; belief in the atonement—that Christ’s
�in Mind as in Matter.
21
-death was necessary as a satisfaction of God’s offended
justice. But let me, as far as possible, use the words
of the creeds themselves, lest I be accused of miscon
ception and misrepresentation. The Athanasian Creed,
which the English Church has recently resolved to
retain, as truly and clearly expressing the meaning of
Scripture, says, among other things—
“ Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the Catholic faith.
“ Which faith, except every one do keep whole and
undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
“ The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor
created, but begotten (and therefore, I suppose, began
to be, and yet)
“ The whole three persons are co-eternal together,
and co-equal. He therefore that will be saved must
thus think of the Trinity, . . . who suffered for our
salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day
from the dead.
“ He ascended into heaven, He sitteth on the right
hand of the Father, God Almighty; from whence He
shall come to judge the quick and the dead (His dis
ciples saw Him taken up, bodily into heaven; and a
cloud received Him out of their sight, and afterwards
St Stephen, looking up steadfastly into heaven, saw
the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand
of God).
“ At whose coming all men shall rise again with
their bodies, and shall give account of their own work.
(The hour is coming, Jesus said, when they that are
in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of man,
and they that hear shall live).
“ And they that have done good shall go into life
■everlasting; and they that have done evil into ever
lasting fire.
“ This is the Catholic faith : which, except a man
believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.
“ Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the
Holy Ghost.
�'ll
The Reign of Law
“ As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall
be, world without end. Amen.”
Perhaps no single error has produced more misery
in the world than the supposition that a man is “free”
to believe what he pleases. It is this that lighted the
fires of the Inquisition ■ and yet a man can only believe
what appears to him to be true j he could not believe
black to be white, even although he was to be damned
for not doing so ; and it is the same of all minor
degrees of belief. We can only believe what is credible,
and love what is loveable. It is true a man may play
the hypocrite, and profess to believe what it is made to
appear to be his own interest to believe ; he may de
ceive himself; he may hide the truth by refusing to
examine, and to this extent only is belief in his
own power. And yet salvation depends upon faith,
and in the early days of the Church “ in every prison
the crucifix and the rack stood side by side,” and good
men in their “ sweet reasonableness ” burnt their fel
low-men alive by a slow fire, to give them more time
to believe what appeared to them to be incredible, and
to repent that they had not done so. “That the
Church of Rome,” Lecky tells us, “ has shed more inno
centblood than any other institution that has everexisted
among mankind, will be questioned by no Protestant
who has a competent knowledge of history. . . . The
victims who died for heresy were not, like those who
died for witchcraft, solitary and doting old women, but
were usually men in the midst of active life, and often
in the first flush of active enthusiasm, and those who
loved them best were firmly convinced that their
agonies upon earth were but the prelude of eternal
agonies hereafter.”
“ What,” said St Augustine, “ is more deadly to the
soul than the liberty of error,” that is, the liberty
which we must all take, whether we will or no, of be
lieving what appears to us to be true. The error was
in the system and not in the persecutions which were
�in Mind as in Matter.
^3
only its logical and humane result, for what was the
burning here to an eternal burning. Consequently,
when Protestants got the upper hand, they did just the
same things ; Catholics are tortured and hung, and as
Lecky shows us, “ the Presbyterians, through a long suc
cession of reigns, were imprisoned, branded, mutilated,
scourged, and exposed in the pillory/’
These efforts to make men profess a religion they
could not believe, were of course attended with the
fruits that might have been expected. The fathers laid
down the distinct proposition, that pious frauds were
justifiable and even laudable, till the sense of truth
and the love of truth were completely obliterated, so
far at least as their influence extended. God was re
presented as He is now in the Athanasian Creed, as
inflicting eternal punishment for religious error; as
“ confining his affection to a small section of his crea
tures, and inflicting upon all others the most horrible and
eternal suffering j ” the fathers felt with St Augustine
that “ the end of religion is to become like the object
of worship,” and, as Lecky shows, “ the sense of divine
goodness being thus destroyed, the whole fabric of
natural religion crumbled in the dust.”
But it is not he that believeth, but he only that helieveth and is baptized that shall be saved, consequently
the belief of the Church is, that infants that have not
been baptized cannot be saved, but “ be punished, as
St Pulgentius says, by the eternal torture of undying
fire; for, although they have committed no sin by
their own will, they have, nevertheless drawn unto
them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal
conception and nativity.” As some other equally
pious saint expressed it, “ he doubted not there ■were
infants not a span long crawling about the floor of hell.”
The Gorham controversy with the late Bishop of Exeter
must remind us that Baptismal Regeneration, or the
necessity for infant baptism, is still the doctrine of the
Church of England. St Thomas Aquinas suggested
the possibility of the infant being saved who died
�.24
The Reign of Law
within the womb. “ God,” he said, “ may have ways
of saving it for ought we know,” a heresy, for which,
doubtless, in his time, he would have been burned if
he had not been a saint. In the English Church,
Chillingworth and Jeremy Taylor have also thought it
possible infants might be saved. The opposite, how
ever, has generally been deemed a mere truism, con
sequent on original sin and transmitted guilt.
Tertullian was of opinion that the Almighty can
never pardon an actor, who, in defiance of the evan
gelical assertion, endeavours, by high-heeled boots, to
add a cubit to his stature (De Spectaculis, cap. 23). But
as the late Professor Mansel and other eminent theolo
gians believe in “ complete fore-knowledge co-existing
with human freedom,” or, in other words, that God has
some means of foreseeing that which is contingent, or
may happen, or may not happen, let us hope that he
may find some way even of saving poor actors.
The Scotch Calvinists, following Jonathan Edwards,
are more logical than the Anglicans. They are quite
aware that what has been foreknown must come to
pass, with as much certainty as if it had already hap
pened. They, therefore, see clearly, that as God is
Almighty, and has created all things with a full know
ledge of all that would take place, that what is fore
known must have been also foreordained.
The Westminster Confession of Eaith, upon which
the Scotch creed is based, tells us here :—
“ By the decree of God, for the manifestation of his
glory, some men and angels are predestinated unto
everlasting life, and others foreordained to everlasting
death.
“ These angels and men, thus predestinated and
foreordained, are particularly and unchangeably de
signed ; and their number is so certain and definite,
that it cannot be either increased or diminished.
“ Neither are any other redeemed by Christ, effectu
ally called, justified, adopted, sanctified, and saved, but
the elect only.
�in Mind as in Matter.
25
“ The rest of mankind, God was pleased, according
to the unsearchable counsel of his own will, whereby
he extendeth or withholdeth mercy as he pleaseth, for
the glory of his sovereign power over his creatures, to
pass by, and to ordain them to dishonour and wrath
for their sin, to the praise of his glorious justice.”
“ To the praise of his glorious justice,” is not meant
ironically, as may be seen from the sermon of Jonathan
Edwards “ On the justice of God in the damnation of
sinners,” and from the diary of Mr Carey, which tells
us of the “pleasure ” and “ sweetness ” he had expe
rienced in reading that sermon. We are told some
must be saved, others cannot, still it is their own fault.
There we have free-will and necessity, and as all things
seem to have been fixed beforehand, it does not seem
to matter much, if, as Huxley says, it should always be
a drawn battle between them !
We must not suppose that this belief has become
obsolete as some would have us believe. The Rev.
Fergus Ferguson, of Dalkeith, in May 1871, was
brought to book by the U. P. Church, when, among
others, the following proposition was submitted to
him :—
“ That notwithstanding the inability of the will
through sin, as taught in our Confession, unbelievers
are fully answerable for their rejection of the offer of
salvation which the gospel makes to them.”
Or, as I lately heard it put in a good evangelical
-discourse in an English Church, “We are all dead in
trespasses and sins, with literally no more power to
help ourselves than a dead man, yet, if we would but
get up and go to Christ, he would save us.”
Mr Ferguson intimated his unqualified assent to the
proposition submitted to him, and Dr Cairns “ offered
thanks to God for the harmonious and happy result.”
Thus, here also as in the Garden of Eden, we have
another “ mockery, delusion, and a snare.”
We are called upon to believe, that God, “for the
�26
The Reign of Law
manifestation of His glory,” and “ for the glory of His
sovereign power over His creatures,” and “ to the praise
of His glorious justice,” doomed the great majority of
mankind from eternity to damnation, and then sent
His Son into the world to mock them with the false
promise of redemption He had previously decreed for
them should never be. Here we have the logical
outcome of the “ drawn battle ” between free-will and
necessity, or rather of accepting both doctrines, but is
there any one who really believes it, whatever they
may profess ? If any one tells me that I must believe
it, and “ without apology,” that I shall be damned if
I don’t, all I can say is, I’ll be damned if I do.
Surely, as Lord Bacon says, “It were*better to have
no opinion of G-od at all, than such an opinion as is
unworthy of Him.”
And yet this is the religion which a large party think
it necessary to have taught at the public expense in
our public schools. For instance in the New Board
Schools in Scotland, supported by a public rate, on
December 8th, 1873, a motion by Dr Buchanan, that
instruction in the Bible and Catechism should be given,
was carried by nine votes to six. The Catechism is
the Shorter Catechism, and contains all the above
soothing and salutary doctrine.
Neither are we much behind this in England. The
chairman of the London School Board, Mr Charles
Heed, M.P., speaking recently at the annual soiree of
the Leeds Young Men’s Christian Association, says he
does not see “ how it is possible to separate entirely
the secular and religious.” “ How, for instance, he
says, could I teach my child geology without referring
to Him who, having made all things, pronounced them
good ? How could I teach my child astronomy without
referring to Him of whom the Psalmist says, £ When
I consider Thy Heavens, the work of Thy hands, and
the moon and the stars which Thou hast created?’ I
cannot understand why it should be necessary, even if
�in Mind as in Matter.
it were possible, that these things which are so closely
and inseparably united should be disunited by any act
of man in the instruction of those who are under his
care.”
But surely Mr Reed would not teach geology and
astronomy from the old Jewish Traditions. He must
know that “ nothing in geology bears the smallest
resemblance to any part of the Mosaic Cosmogony,
and the astronomy which makes our little world the
centre of the universe, is worse than the geology.
“ Pronounced them good,”—good for what 1 If Adam
was to be immediately turned out of paradise, the
earth was to be cursed for his sake, and he and his
posterity damned from all eternity to all eternity, I can
not see the good of this, neither could the children, I
should think.
“ A salvation ordained before the foundation of the
world ” means, also, according to the popular creed, a
damnation equally ordained, and that, too, for the great
majority, and yet Diderot is accused of blasphemy for
saying, “ il n’y a point de bon pere qui voulut resembler
a notre Pere celeste.” And this creed that makes evil
absolute, and God the ordainer of it, is to be taught in
the common schools and at the public expense. No
doubt all is good, if men will but see things rightly.
The largest amount of enjoyment possible for all God’s
creatures is provided ; the greatest happiness of the
greatest number is secured. To the Necessitarian good
and evil are purely subjective, the mere record of our
own pleasures and pains—the pains the stimulant to,
and the guardian of, the pleasures.
I recollect, when a young man, being very much
impressed by John Foster’s Essay “ On some of the
Causes by which Evangelical Religion has been
rendered unacceptable to persons of cultivated taste.”
Polite literature was proclaimed to be hostile to that
religion, and Pope’s Essay on Man, which I had
for years carried about with me in my pocket, was
�28
The Reign of Law
peculiarly anti-Christian. I am not now surprised at
the distaste, as it is, and as it was by Foster stated to
be, opposed to the natural man, that is, to all the
higher instincts of our nature. A man must indeed
be born again to accept it. Vicarious suffering is
opposed to the moral sense, and every gentleman would
at once object to allow another to suffer for his sins,
and we cannot be surprised, therefore, at the exclama
tion and commentary of the old Scotchwoman, who,
bedridden, and living on the borders of a large parish,
had never before been visited by a parson, and had the
mysteries of redemption explained to her. When she
was told how Christ was crucified, not for any fault of
his, but to save sinners, that is, the few who were of the
elect, she replied, “ Eh, Sir ! but it is so far off, and so
long sin’ that we’ll e’en hope it is not true.” *
The Edinburgh Review, October 1873, accuses Dr
Strauss of “ ignorant blasphemy or hypocritical sarcasm”
for professing to understand these things literally, and
says that he had better go to school once more and
learn “what that really is which he blasphemes,
and what those precious truths really are which lie
enshrined in ‘ Oriental Metaphor,’ and mediaeval
•dogma.” . . . “What,” the writer asks, “has
been discovered, that should really justify any honest
* If the reader wishes to see the opposite view to this well put,
let him read the article in the January Contemporary .Review,
“ Motives to Righteousness from an Evangelical Point of View,”
by the Rev. F. R. Wynne. Of course, the elect regard the dam
nation, from which they are exempt, very differently, but how
any one can be so joyous and grateful over his own salvation, when
only one, much more the great majority, were left to an eternity
of misery, I cannot understand, and therefore cannot appreciate.
It appears to me to be the very essence of selfishness. The Evan
gelical creed is only possible by our completely ignoring the fact
that God is the author and disposer of all things—the evil (as it is
called) as well as the good. If it is to be regarded as a fight
between God and the Devil, in which the devil, in spite of all
God’s efforts, gets by far the best of it, then it is just possible to
understand the thankfulness and the enthusiasm of the reverend
gentleman that “a crown of glory” has been reserved for him
through his Saviour’s merits. Still we might wonder why it should
�in Mind as in Matter.
man in breaking -with the church as it is presented
in England ? ” I think we might ask him that ques
tion, and also whether the English Church admits, as
he affirms, that its “precious truths lie enshrined,
in Oriental Metaphor and mediaeval dogma,” or
whether it is yet willing to throw over the Old Testa
ment altogether, which he recommends. “We are
not Jews,” he says, “and there is no reason in the
world why we should be weighted with this burden of
understanding, and defending at all risks, the Jewish.
Scriptures.” Certainly there is increasing difficulty in
“ reconciling” the Old Testament either with science or
the modern conscience, but what becomes of the fall of
man and the whole scheme of redemption if we give it
up ? He also says, “ Is it right, is it truthful, is it any
longer possible in the face of all that is now known
upon the subject, to pretend that legendary matter has
not intruded itself into the New Testament, as well as
into the Old.” I should think not, but will the church
admit as much ? Dr Strauss is accused of having been
“so long absent from his place in church that he is
unaware of the great change which has come over the
minds of our ‘ pious folk ’ during the last twenty years.”
The Doctor is evidently unacquainted with the new
truth dug out of “ Oriental Metaphor and mediaeval"
dogma,” but, no doubt, great progress has been made
be laid up for him in particular, as he admits it was from no merit,
on his part. Mr Wynne says, “ What can bring hope for time and
eternity to the saddened heart, what can touch it with the sense
of God’s loving-kindness, like the simple faith that God forgives
all sin the moment the sinner takes refuge in Jesus Christ ? ” But
what of those who are left out and who do not take refuge ? And
how are we to reconcile God’s loving-kindness with his omnipotence
if any are left out ? Surely the fact that all punishment is for our
good, to warn us from evil and to effect our reformation, and that
forgiveness, therefore, would be an injury, and to show this direct
connection between sin and suffering, would be far higher and
more salutary doctrine. I do not doubt, however, all that is said
of the effect of Evangelical teaching among the lower class of'
minds, for I have often witnessed it, but it is not “the pure and
noble feeling that is fanned into a flame,” but the selfish fear of
punishment or hope of reward—the fires of hell or the crown of ’
glory. ”
t
�jo
The Reign of Law
in reconciling the spirit of the age to theological
doctrines. “ They may not,” as the writer in the
Edinburgh says, “ hitherto have been quite rightly
explained, they may not yet have been wholly divested
of their graceful drapery of fancy.”
Principal Tulloch, in an article in this month’s
Contemporary Review (January 3, 1874), entitled
“ Dogmatic Extremes,” seems to De little less angry
with Mr James Mill than the Edinburgh is with
Strauss. He complains of a “passionate and conten
tious dogmatism on the side of unbelief,” that literary
and philosophic unbelievers do not do justice to
Christian dogmas. They state them “ in their harshest
and most vulgar form,” instead of looking at them from
the spiritually appreciative point of view. J. S. Mill,
for instance, reports his father as speaking with great
moral indignation of “ a being who would make a hell,
who would create the human race with the in fallible
fore-knowledge, and, therefore, with the intention, that
the great majority of them were to be consigned to
horrible and everlasting torment.” “ Surely we are
■entitled,” he says, “ in the case of such men as James
Mill, to look for some wider thoughtfulness and power of
discrimination than such a passage implies.” Principal
Tulloch tells us that “ all creeds and confessions, from
the apostles downwards, are nothing else than men’s
thoughts about the Christian religion. . . . Tn so
far, as it is supposed possible or right to bind men’s
faith in the present age absolutely to the form of
Christian thought of the seventeenth century, or the
fourth century—in so far such a church is opposing
itself to an inevitable law of human life and history. .
. . . Creed subscription, in so far as it interferes
with this freedom, is a wrong at once to the people and
the clergy. . . . The question which is really
interesting and pressing is not how to get outside of
the church, but how to enlarge and make room inside
it for varieties of Christian intelligence and culture.
. . . To call in (with our scientific dogmatists) the
•
�in Mind as in Matter.
31
"Coarser conceptions of popular religion, those forms of
thought as to heaven or hell, or any other aspect of the
spiritual world, to which the religious mind naturally
falls, from sheer inability in most cases to preserve any
ideal of thought—to call in such coarser types of the
religious imagination as the normal dogmas of Chris
tianity, entering into its very life and substance, is as
poor and unworthy a device of controversy as was ever
attempted. Popular Christianity is no product of
religious thought. It is a mere accretion of religious
tradition. And “ the whole function of thought is to
purify and idealize inherited traditions here as in
every other region of knowledge.”
Consequently, any allusion to “ the naughty place ”
and its occupants is never made now in the week
days; it is thought coarse and vulgar, and only a
“ purified and idealized ” version of it is hinted at
on Sundays, while devils “with darkness, fire, and
chains” are only kept to frighten children within
our common schools, and without which religious
instruction, it is thought, it would never do to trust
them with secular knowledge.
The fact is, the tendency of a large party in the
church is to judge al] doctrines by their intuitive
sense of right, and when Bible doctrines do not accord,
they re-translate them to make them fit. Still admitting
to the full the usefulness of the church and the pre
sent necessity for its continued existence, the question
will recur to every honest man, as it has done to Dr
Strauss and to others, Are we Christians ? The
ethics of the New Testament we must reject as not
based on science, as we have already done the physics
of the Old, and the question is, Is it true, as a critic
affirms, that the religion which calls itself revealed,
contains, in the way of what is good, nothing which is
not the incoherent and ill-digested residue of the
wisdom of the ancients ? Still it is affirmed, and very
generally believed, that the difference between the
Caucasian and the inferior races of men is entirely
�32
The Reign of Law.
owing to Christianity, as also is the whole difference
between civilization and barbarism. Our progress, it
is said, is not owing to science and induction, but to
the Christian religion.
The tendency of the age, of the Broad Church party
especially, is not now to insist on dogma, but to fall
back on the morality of the New Testament. But the
Rev. J. M. Capes says that even “ The Sermon on the
Mount altogether must be interpreted by what people
popularly call common sense, or else it becomes imprac
ticable or even mischievous, and what is common sense
but the application of the test of general utility ?
{Contemporary, December 1873).
Barrington {On the Statutes, p. 461) proves the
superiority of Englishmen, because, as he says, more
men were hanged in England in one year than in
Erance in seven, and writers on the “Evidences” show
that the discrepancies and contradictions in the gospels
prove their inspiration a.nd genuineness, and Butler isof opinion that even the doubting about religion
implies that it may be true; but if the creed of either
the Catholic or Protestant Churches is really to be
found in Scripture, then we must agree with Matthew
Arnold “that the more we convince ourselves of the
liability of the New Testament writers to mistake, the
more we really bring out the greatness and worth of
the New Testament. . . . That Jesus himself may, at
the same time have had quite other notions as to what
he was doing and intending .... That he was far
above the heads of his reporters, still farther above the
head of our popular theology, which has added its own
misunderstanding of the reporters to the reporters’ mis
understanding of Jesus.” {Literature and Dogma, pp.
149, 150, 160).
With these admissions, which are becoming more
common every day, much may yet be made of the
Bible by way of popular instruction, and which may
help to carry us on to the general acceptance of the
Reign of Law in Mind as in Matter.
�
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"The reign of law" in mind as in matter, and its bearing upon Christian dogma and moral responsibility. Part I
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Bray, Charles [1811-1884]
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Thomas Scott
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Text
A FEW THOUGHTS
ON THE
^hilosopltg of ©toil anb (Suffering,
From the Stand-point of Reason and Intuition.
It is impossible for a reflective mind to
contemplate the wonders of creation with
out feelings of awe and admiration at the
manifestations of wisdom and power dis
played in its marvellous adaptations and
developments. The beauty, the grandeur,
the beneficence, that meet us at every
turn, speak of Intelligence and Design.
The Power that governs the varied pheno
mena of nature is apparently unlimited.
Our conceptions of this Almighty Power
will depend either upon the theo’ogical
education we have received, or upon the
deductions of our own reasoning faculties
from the phenomena of earth-life and expe
rience. Starting from premisses which of
necessity must be, to an extent, hypotheti
cal, we proceed to deduce certain principles
which appear to underlie the mysterious
phenomena of Evil and Suffering.
Almost all religious minds will admit the
following propositions: it is therefore not
intended in this paper to discuss them:—
1. That Deity is an Intelligent Principle,
Almighty in Power, and perfect in Good
ness.
2. That Man is an embodied Intelligence,
limited in Power, and imperfect in Goodness.
3. That Man is free to the extent of his
power.
4. That Man survives the change we call
death.
5. That by far the larger portion of
human experiences are pleasurable.
6. That a very large proportion of Evil
and Suffering may be traced to ignorance,
and to errors arising therefrom.
With the rejection of so-called infallible
revelations, the proofs we have of man’s
immortality are scientifically inconclusive.
The universality of the feeling in favour of
immortality may be regarded as a spiritual
instinct. The feeling, however, is not alto
gether one of intuition, but rests upon a
logical necessity, arising out of the utter
impossibility of reconciling the experiences
of life with the existence of a Ruling Power
of infinite Intelligence and Goodness, except
upon some such hypothesis.
A thoughtful mind can hardly rest satis
fied with a negation. When, from the force
of honest convictions, men are compelled
to reject any particular account of the
origin of Evil and Suffering, they are still
pressed with the necessity of forming some
theory to supply the void thereby occa
sioned. The facts are too painfully selfevident to be overlooked in any sytem of
philosophy men may consciously or uncon
sciously entertain. With a profound con
viction of the impossibility of any human
faculties being able to compass the mind of
Omnipotence, we would, with all reverence,
use the powers given to us in endeavouring
�2
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
to discover some beneficent purposes which
Evil and Suffering may serve in the Divine
economy.
Our conceptions of Deity will ever be the
reflex of our ideas of Perfection. The em
bodiment of all that is Powerful, Holy,
Righteous, and Good, is man’s highest
conception of God ; and, wherever these
attributes culminate in a high degree in
any human being, that being becomes
man’s best representation or manifestation
of Deity. The immeasurable distance be
tween the finite representation and the
infinite reality must, however, never be
overlooked. Nature, in all its varied phe
nomena, is a manifestation of the Mind of
God. The laws that govern creation are
the expressions of the Divine Will. Motion,
life, sensation, and intelligence, are exhibi
tions of God’s Wisdom and Power. These
manifestations are probably all that man
can know of his Creator in the present
state of existence.
It is impossible to suppose that the
creation of the Universe and all that it
contains is purposeless, or that Creation
can fail to glorify its Creator. If the glory
of God be the object of Creation, it follows
that a Being of infinite Power and Wisdom
must, of necessity, adopt the best means
for the attainment of His purpose. May
we now, without irreverence or presump
tion, assume a necessity even to Deity ?
From the constitution of our nature, we are
justified, I think, iu saying that, according
to finite conceptions, even Deity could not
possibly be glorified by intelligences who
were not free to give or withhold their
homage and affections. We have no facul
ties for perceiving how Infinite Intelligence
could be satisfied with ought less than the
spontaneous love and worship of His own
intelligent creatures. Here, then, in the
free will of man, appears to be the key
which unlocks many of the mysteries at
tached to the presence of Evil and Suffering
in a world created and governed by supreme
Love and Intelligence.
We postulate, then, the Love of the
creature as the desire of the Creator ; and,
if this hypothesis be correct, it follows,
that the free will of the creature is an
indispensable condition to the spontaneity
and perfection of that Love. If this be
allowed, we may be said to have arrived at
the conception of an adequate purpose in
Creation, viz., the generation, development,
and education of intelligences capable of per
ceiving, appreciating, and enjoying, by the
spontaneous efforts of their own free will,
the Love of their Creator. In this way we
may regard the Creator as providing an out
let for the overflowing warmth of His
Love, in the creation of individualized in
telligences capable of glorifying their Divine
Author, in the appreciation and enjoyment
of the endless manifestations of His Perfec
tions. On our hypothesis, it is necessary
that the will of man, though under laws,
should be absolutely free to the extent
of his power; and experience proves the
truth of this position. Hence arises the
necessity for an education, and this brings
us to the consideration of the plan by which
the Creator, as we conceive, is accomplish
ing His divine purpose.
In considering the phenoifiena of earth
experiences we naturally turn our attention
first to the material Universe in which we
find ourselves, and which, from our point
of view, is regarded as the projection of
the Mind of God into the plane of action,
resulting (possibly, through the condensa
tion of spiritual principles, by a process
incomprehensible by us) in the atoms out
of which the Universe has been developed.
These atoms, under the influence of the
Divine Spirit, fulfil, by chemical changes,
involving concentrations, combinations, and
separations, the will of Him from whom
�FROM THE STAND POINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
they emanated. It is the constant influx I
of the Eternal Spirit into these atomic con
densations, called matter, which appears to
give rise to the dualism of Life and Death,
Good and Evil, which we see throughout
nature.*
The action and reaction of this dualism
is the pulsation of the heart of Deity, pro- |
ducing and upholding at its every beat the
varied phenomena of mind and matter ;
and thus is evolved, in a perpetual series of
progressive and ascending degrees, the end
less variety of atomic combinations or
organisms of which the Universe, with its
varied productions, is composed ; each at
tracting that which it needs and is capable
of receiving from the fountain of Universal
Spirit ; the only limit being capacity, the
only condition receptivity. Thus, from the
most rudimentary atomic combinations to
the most refined human organism, all draw
from the same illimitable Source that which
they are capable of receiving and appropri
ating ; and this by laws which are immu
table, because infinitely wise.
Inanimate Nature thus derives the Motion
by which all its changes and developments
are effected : this is the character of its
receptivity, and this it attracts from the
energy of the Divine Spirit, which fills all
that is. The vegetable kingdom, by virtue
of its advanced organization, in addition to
Motion, is receptive of Life ; and, to the
extent of its capacity, is filled from the
same Divine source. The animal kingdom,
embracing the properties of the lower or
ganizations, advances a step higher in its
receptive capacity, and attracts to itself
Sensation, answering to the instinctive fa
culties, enabling it to fulfil its part in the
*“In the divine order,” says Emerson, '‘intellect
is primary ; nature secondary. It is the memory of
the mind. That which once existed in intellect as
pure law has now taken a body as nature. It existed
already in the mind in solution : now it has been pre
cipitated, and the bright sediment is the world.”
Divine drama of life; whilst, from the same
inexhaustible source in the progress of de
velopment (or order of creation), the human
organism, in all its endless varieties, attracts
to itself, in addition to the faculties pos
sessed by the lower organisms, all those
Spiritual powers of thought and ratiocina
tion which constitute Man a rational being
— an Embryo Spirit ; having, compared
with the animal world, increased perceptive
powers and a receptive capacity for higher
manifestations of the Divine intelligence.
From the reception of this intelligent
principle by the refined human organism,
arises that which constitutes the difference
between the human and animal kingdoms;
a difference not so much in kind as degree,
viz.: —of enlarged perceptive powers—more
refined susceptibilities, and a more acute
sensitiveness, enabling man, by the exer
cise of these improved faculties, to acquire
a knowledge of the constitution of his nature
and the laws that govern it. From an in
tuitive or emotional feeling, arising out of
the development of the intellectual faculties,
originated, most probably, man’s first con
ception of a Creator or God. As these
increased powers of perception and ratio
cination are evolved, the moral sense be
comes developed, and a knowledge of what
is not inaptly termed Good and Evil, with
its attendant responsibilities, is attained.
Thus, the first rays of Light from the
Divine Intelligence break through the dark
clouds of man’s animal nature (dark by
comparison only), producing within him a
consciousness, to an extent, of the dualism
of that nature, and a recognition, to an
extent, of the Will of the Divine Spirit
“in whom he lives, and moves, and has
his being.”
The Light of the Divine Spirit once re
cognised, Conscience may be said to be
formed; and, however dimly this light may
be discerned during the process of intel
�4
A FEW THOUGHTS ON T1IE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
lectual development, to that extent, and law, and can no longer shield himself under
that extent only, is man responsible to God the plea of ignorance. Man may, from ignor
for the action of his Will. Thus arises the ance, err and suffer; but if his conscience
conflict between so-called Good and Evil— reproach him not, he cannot be said to sin.
the higher and the lower Good—the Flesh The silent monitor, once recognized, ever
and the Spirit. This conflict originates in remains a witness and an accuser. In the
the dualism of our nature, educating us by torments of this inward self-condemnation
its action and reaction, through and by and remorse may be traced the chastening
ourselves, in the wise order of Providence, of a Father’s love, educating in suffering the
into the perception of that which alone can will of His wayward and erring child.
The more we search into the phenomena
make us intelligent, wise, good and happy,
of nature, the more impressed do we become
viz.The knowledge and love of God.
The active recognition of the Spiritual with the fixity of the laws that govern its
character of this warfare between the lower every change, and the marvellous adap
and higher natures, of which man, as an tation of means to ends. This produces in
entity, is a compound, may be well defined the observant mind a conviction amounting
as being “born again of the Spirit.” It to absolute certainty that the wisdom and
brings man into conscious contact with the beneficence here displayed cannot be lack
Divine Spirit, and man perceives, as of ing in the higher phenomena of human life
himself, the Will of God in the eternal and destiny. That the Creator is absolutely
principles of Love and Righteousness, which impartial in His government of the world, is
are the points of universal agreement be to the reflective mind so obvious, that it is
tween men of every creed. And here, needless to dwell upon the fact. Were it
as ever in nature, for God is absolutely not so, all science w'ould be at fault, and
impartial, the conditions of receptivity wise men would lose hope if once it could
are dependent upon the capacity of the be proved that the acts of God are capri
Organism and the direction of the Will. cious. On the contrary, the sun shines and
Experience testifies to the fact that, if the the rain falls on the evil and the good alike.
Light of the Divine Spirit is actively lived If this be so, and if it be allowed that all
out, the capacity to receive further light which emanates from the hands of Infinite
(all irrational influences apart) is corres Wisdom must of necessity be perfectly ad
pondingly increased, and this quite inde apted to the purpose it is intended to fulfil,
pendent of creeds or views which, when we are justified in regarding the world in
not the result of personal thought and which we live, with all the varied expe
investigation, are dependent mainly upon riences of humanity, as the best school for
the development and education of free
educational influences.
When the will of man is in harmony with intelligences, who are to work out their
the will of God, there is Peace, no matter own endlessly diversified individualities
what the stage of intellectual development, (which in itself we conceive to be a great
or what theological views its possessor has source of happiness), and develop by and
imbibed. If, on the other hand, the voice through their individual and combined
of Conscience is disregarded, then the light efforts the inherent possibilities of their
of the Spirit becomes obscured, but not ex nature.
Broken laws fail to explain the whole of
tinguished. When once the spirit of man
has perceived the will of God, he is under the mystery of Evil and Suffering, as is evi
�TROM THE STAND-TOINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
as necessary aids to man, in provoking
efforts which an atmosphere of ease and
security would most assuredly discourage.
Hence, while, on the one hand, the Love
of the Creator is displayed in providing a
series of ever advancing motives for man’s
progressive aspirations, so, on the other
hand, God’s Wisdom is equally displayed
in providing, by laws that may appear
harsh aud cruel, those necessary incentives
to action and effort by attention to which
man’s health, progress, and happiness, are
assuredly to be attained. Evil—that is,
lower good-and Suffering are the insepar
able conditions of sensitive organic life.
Without the aids of Evil and Suffering we
are unable to conceive any possible means
by which Man, as a free agent, could have
attained to the higher good, or appre
hended Truth and Goodness. Evil and
Suffering are the levers by which God
moves the world.
We are apt to overlook the compensatory
nature of the laws that prevail in connec
tion with Evil and Suffering. The unde
veloped mau has pleasures unappreciated
by the man of refinement. The hardships
ho is thought to endure are more apparent
than real, and his wants are comparatively
few. The anxieties attending material
prosperity, the nervous susceptibilities of
the cultured intellect, and the acute sen
sitiveness to pain of the refined organism,
are absent to a great extent in the ignorant
and undeveloped. The so called evil man,
whilst lacking the power of appreciating
and enjoying the higher pleasures attend
ant upon a perception and appreciation of
the higher good, is nevertheless compen
sated to a degree seldom duly estimated, in
the enjoyment he derives from the gratifica
tion of the appetites of his lower nature.
On the other hand, it must be allowed that
* “ The law of growth,” says a recent writer, “ is the finest, the noblest, and the holiest men
this, that all progress is preceded by calamity, that
this world has produced, have been mould
all improvement is based upon defect.”
dent in accidents by natural phenomena,
and the inevitable decay of the organism,
with its attendant weaknesses and ailments.
In some way, Evil and Suffering are neces
sary accompaniments to progress. Why it
is so we do not know ; but if we are able
to discover Love and Wisdom in the men
tal sufferings and remorse attending the
violation of those moral laws which are re
vealed to all in whom Conscience is formed,
we are justified in concluding that the lower
form of physical suffering is also the best
accomplishment of the Divine ends.
Where the intellect is undeveloped or
the conscience seared by the vacillation of
the human Will, producing a tendency to
physical disorganization or mental retro
gression, we can conceive how beneficent
may be, and probably is, human sensitive
ness to pain. The experience of pain leads
to the investigation of its cause, and this
tends to reflection, and ultimates in know
ledge of a physical and mental character,
the benefit of which, in the process of
human education, is incalculable. This
knowledge is cumulative; and, when men
are free enough to think and investigate
for themselves, and to live in harmony
with the Divine laws, progressively un
folded to the earnest searchers after Truth,
then may the first victory over evil and
suffering be said to be won
As, in the evolution of the world, physi
cal convulsions and disasters are the means
by which, in the inscrutable wisdom of
Providence, Progress, Order, and Beauty
are attained, so, in the development and
education of mind, does it seem a necessity
that human effort should be provoked by
convulsions and catastrophes, which com
pel observation, reflection, and effort.*
Thus considered, Evil and Suffering appear
�6
A PEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING,
ed and purified in the furnace of affliction
and suffering.
How could man know aught of sympathy
and love, were it not for sorrow and suffer
ing which draw them out ? How could man
appreciate the beautiful as beauty, if there
were nothing in the shape of contrast to
guide him to recognize it ? It appears im
possible that self-educated free intelligences
could ever have attained to a knowledge
of such circumstances as Virtue, Pleasure,
Peace, Knowledge, and Truth, without
coming into contact with their opposites,
Vice, Pain, Strife, Ignorance, and Error.
The one is learned by and through cont.ic'.
with the other. Thus, the so-called Evils
of life may truly be looked upon as lower
Goods. Again, the Good of one generation
has been the Evil of the next. The Good of
the ancient Hebrews was to destroy their
enemies. The Good of Jesus was to love
them. By far the larger portion of the hu
man race are still under the influence of
the Evil (lower Good), and desire to destroy
their enemies. The time will probably
come when the religion of Jesus and other
noble reformers will be understood, and the
higher Good they advocated be actively
displayed by the enlightened governments
of a civilized world.
The principle of selfishness, inherent in
sentient life, is an absolute necessity to its
progress, and affords an apt illustration of
the truth of the proposition that all socalled evil may be regarded as undeveloped
good. Selfishness, born of sensation, gene
rates desire, desire provokes action, action
stimulates thought, and the exercise of
thought (observation and reflection) deve
lops intelligence. Indigenous to the soil of
intelligence are those spiritual faculties or
perceptions which correspond to the moral
sense, in the exercise of which man inspires
eternal principles from the all-pervading
Spirit of Deity. The evolution and cultiva
tion of these spiritual faculties appear to
be at once the object and business of life.
Man thus learns by and through the selfish
ness of his animal nature, to perceive, by
comparison, the higher good of disinterested
unselfishness or love in its highest (spiritual)
sense.
Man, thus, is born in ignorance, and de
veloped gradually from the lower Good to
the higher, that he may learn for himself,
through the experiences of life, which are
alternately painful and pleasurable, of his
own free will to choose the higher and
forsake the lower Good. The evils and
sufferings of life from this point of view
may be truly and intelligently regarded as
beneficent necessities, through and by which
man is enabled to perceive God—first, in His
works, then, in the operation of His laws,
evidences of His will—and, finally, rise to
the power of appreciating and enjoying the
endless manifestations of the Divine love
and perfections. If we can thus trace, with
our present limited capacities and know
ledge, evidences of wisdom and goodness in
the so-called evils and sufferings of hu
manity, constituting a beneficent necessity |
in the development and education of free I
intelligences, we may reasonably infer that
the sufferings of the animal kingdom are I
neither vindictive nor purposeless. We are
here more in the dark, from the fact of our 1
being unable to enter into the experiences i
of the animal creation, or to gauge their
sensitiveness to pleasure or pain. Change h
and decay, life and death, good and evil, |,
certainly seem inseparable conditions to the |s
combination of spirit with matter, in its la
early stage of development. Thus, with |di
animals as with man, the individual amount Bn
of suffering can only be fairly reckoned in
i
the account; and again the term of suffering I: i
must not certainly be regarded without refer- »■■si
ence to the pleasure of existence. In the Ijj
case of slaughtered animals, or those who
�FROM THE STAND-POINT OF REASON AND INTUITION.
are the victims of beasts of prey, they pro
bably have none of those sufferings by sus
pense and anticipation which must be far
greater than the sudden, unexpected,
and, perhaps, unconscious separation of
life from the organism. In addition
to this, from the lack of sensitive
ness in the organisms themselves, the
sufferings of animals may possibly be re
duced to the minimum. The laws relating
to the conjunction of spirit with matter (if
God be impartial) are compensatory. The
capacity for enjoyment is coextensive with
the sensitiveness to pain ; hence, the more
refined and complex the organism the
greater the capacity for pleasure, the more
sensitive is it to pain. On the other hand,
the lower and simpler the organic combina
tion the less acutely it experiences either
pleasure or pain. Our ignorance as to the
experiences and destiny of the lower king
doms makes it more difficult for us to trace
a cause for their undoubted sufferings ; but
that there is no suffering without a reason,
a purpose, and a compensation, is shown to
us by those beneficent results of suffering
we are enabled to trace in the kingdom to
which we belong.
To sum up our thoughts. It appears
that all creation derives from the Divine
Spirit, who upholds and governs it, that
which it is adapted to receive and appro
priate in order to fulfil its destiny. Man,
an intelligent individuality, derives from
the Divine Energy which fills the Universe
that Life which the condition of his animal
organization enables him to receive and ap
propriate ; and, from the Divine Intelli
gence, that Light which from his condition
physically., mentally, and morally, he is ca
pable of receiving and appropriating. Phy
sical conditions are dependent upon the
bodily organism which, though capable of
considerable modification and improvement
by the action of man’s free will, neverthe
7
less, to an extent, retains its inherent in
dividuality. This involves an endless va
riety of receptive capacities, a wise and
beneficent arrangement, contributinggreatly
to human happiness. The condition of men
tal receptivity depends upon the degree of
intellectual development and mental culture,
the extent of a man’s knowledge, and the
perfect freedom he enjoys to observe, reflect,
and investigate. The condition of man’s
moral receptivity is dependent upon the ac
tion of his will. When a man is honestly
living out his conscientious convictions as to
what is Good and True, that man (with per
fect intellectual freedom) must of necessity
be progressing in the knowledge and love of
his Creator; and, where this is combined
with a healthy organism, we are justified
in regarding that man as possessing as much
of human happiness as humanity is capable
of enjoying. Thus, simply stated:—We
have what we are capable of receiving,
and are what we make ourselves. The in
comprehensible Intelligence, whom we call
God, governs His creation by laws that are
infinitely wise. The apparent contradic
tions and inexplicable expedients that
appear to be adopted in the evolution of a
world and the development of individualized
intelligences are the conditions by which the
immutable laws of God are transforming a
nebula of chaotic Atoms into a World of
beauty, grandeur, and intelligence, in
whose womb are generated, and on whose
bosom are developed, educated and puri
fied, immortal spirit-entities, who, in the
furnaces of affliction and suffering, and in
the warfare against the propensities and
passions of their lower nature, are made
thereby meet to glorify their Creator in an
active obedience to His will, in which is
involved their own everlasting happi
ness.
If this is clear to us, it follows that the
sufferings of the Animal Kingdom are also
�8
A FEW THOUGHTS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL AND SUFFERING/
the results of wise and beneficent laws, em
ploying apparently cruel agents in the ac
complishment of equally benevolent ends.
Under any circumstances, the difficulties are
enormously increased on the theory of Evil
and Suffering being the result of a single act
of disobedience committed in the infancy of
the race.* Earth-Life thus appears to be
the first chapter in a Book the pages of
which are endless, the theme of which is
the Wisdom, Power, and Goodness of God,
and its earliest teachings the rudimentary
principles of Spirit existence. To attain a
knowledge of these principles, appears to be
the work of every individual soul, and the
means best adapted to the purpose are, in
the wisdom of God, the experiences inci
dental to this stage of existence. In the
action and reaction of God’s immutable laws
(material and spiritual), men are ever learn
ing lessons, the full value of which, like
children at school, they will realize in after
life.
In a recent essay by Moncure D. Conway
on “ Theism, Atheism, and the Problem of
Evil,” he says, —“ Seeing so much, we re
member that we have come to it only very
gradually. We know that the human mind
once saw disorder in many regions where it
now sees order; that knowledge reveals
good in many things which ignorance held
altogether evil, consequently we are war
ranted in believing that more and more ex
perience, and increasing knowledge, will
make clear the surrounding realm of dark
ness.” .... “ If we could now by a
word remove from the world all that has
been done for it by pain and evil, we should
behold man relapsing from the height he
has won by struggle with unfriendly ele
ments and influences, falling back from
point to point, losing one after another the
energies gained by mastering evil, and sink
ing through all the stages of retrogression
to some miserable primal form too insigni
ficant to be attacked, too nerveless to suffer. ”
. . • . ‘ ‘ But even now this darkness
rests only upon the final cause of evil, that
is, upon the inquiry why the ends secured
by evil were not reached by a more merci
ful method. If, in reply to the question,
Why is not the universe painless ? we must
answer, We do not know. In reply to the
question, What good end does evil serve ?
we may answer, We know very well.”
I am here reminded of a question put to a
distressed parent by a little girl during a
prolonged and painful illness, ‘‘Why does
Maggie sutler so?” The parent was wise,
consequently silent. Religion may tranquilize, intuition whisper hope, and philo
sophyproduce resignation; but reason is here
out of its depth. We can but say,—we do not
know. Theories are propounded, and it is
impossible for thoughtfuT’taen, consciously
or unconsciously, to avoid entertaining some
views with regard to the presence of Evil
and Suffering in a World created by Infinite
Wisdom, governed by Infinite Love, and
upheld by Infinite Power; but so long as
we are under the influence of reason, and
alive to the dictates of conscience, we can
* The sincere evangelical Christian believes that not rest satisfied with any explanation of
the Evils and Sufferings of men and animals, and the
natural dissolution of living organisms, are all the re this mysterious phenomenon which involves
sults of “The Fall”; that death leads to an eternity
the contradiction of the highest and noblest
of misery for all who are unable intellectually to ap
impulses of our nature, or the absence of
prehend and consciously to lay hold of such doc
trines as “The Trinity” and “The Atonement.” It those principles of Righteousness and Jus
must be left to the reason and conscience of intelli
tice which are the intuitions of the civilized
gent men to judge on which side the balance of proba
conscience.
bility lies.
�
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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>
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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A few thoughts on the philosophy of evil and suffering, from the stand-point of reason and intuition
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Place of publication: [s.l.]
Collation: 8 p. ; 22 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed in double columns.
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[187-?]
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Rationalism
Evil
Ethics
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Conway Tracts
Evil
Reason
Suffering
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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.
�
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An outline of evolutionary ethics
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Cohen, Chapman [1868-1954]
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Ethics
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NATIONAL SECUL^SOCIETf
ART
AND
MORALITY
>
I
BY
F
COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.
1
”1!
c
REPRINTED FROM
AMERICAN REVIEW.
THE
£
Price Twopence.
--------------------- _—.
■
bonbon:
* PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY,
28 Stonecutter Street, E.O.
J
j
1888,
�LONDON :
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. FOOTE,
AT 28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�^332-
ART AND MORALITY.
Art is the highest form of expression, and exists for
the sake of expression. Through art thoughts become
visible. Back of the forms is the desire, the longing,
the brooding, creative instinct, the maternity of mind,
the passion that gives pose and swell, outline and
color.
Of course there is no such thing as absolute beauty
or absolute morality. We now clearly perceive that
beauty and conduct are relative. We have outgrown
the provincialism that thought is back of substance, as
well as the old Platonic absurdity, that ideas existed
before the subjects of thought. So far, at least, as
man is concerned, his thoughts have been produced by
his surroundings, by the action and inter-action of
things upon his mind; and so far as man is concerned,
things have preceded thoughts. The impressions that
these things make upon us are what we know of them.
The absolute is beyond the human mind. Our know
ledge is confined to the relations that exist between the
totality of things that we call the universe and the
effect upon ourselves.
�4
Art and Morality.
Actions are deemed right or wrong according to ex
perience and the conclusions of reason. Things are
beautiful by the relation that certain forms, colors, and
modes of expression bear to us. At the foundation of
the beautiful will be found the fact of happiness, the
gratification of the senses, the delight of intellectual
discovery and the surprise and thrill of appreciation.
That which we call the beautiful wakens into life
through the association of ideas, of memories, of ex
periences—through suggestions of pleasure past and
the perception that the prophecies of the ideal have
been fulfilled.
Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and
quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that we
put ourselves in the place of another. When the
wings of that faculty are folded, the master does not
put himself in the place of the slave ; the tyrant is not
locked in the dungeon, chained with his victim. The
inquisitor did not feel the flames that devoured the
martyr. The imaginative man, giving to the beggar,
gives to himself. Those who feel indignant at the
perpetration of wrong, feel for the instant that they are
the victims ; and when they attack the aggressor they
feel that they are defending themselves. Love and
pity are the children of the imagination.
A little while ago I heard a discussion, in regard to
the genius of George Eliot. The gentleman who
appeared as her champion took the ground that she was
a very great novelist, a most wonderful writer, and
gave as a reason that her books were written with a
distinct moral purpose; that she was endeavoring to
inculcate the value of character, of integrity, of an
�Art and Morality.
5
absolute, and utter devotion to duty, to the glory and
heroism of self-denial; that she did not create charac
ters for the sake of Art, but that under all, and in all,
and over all, was the desire to teach and enforce some
moral truth.
Upon this very question George Eliot has given her
views with great force and beauty : “ On its theoretic
and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its
■emotional side, art. Now, the products of art are
.great in proportion as they result, from that immediate
prompting of innate power which we call genius, and
not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and
the presence of genius, or innate prompting, is directly
■opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The
.action of faculty is imperious, and excludes the reflec
tion why it should act. In the same way, in proportion
as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with art, it
will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and
action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does
not say, ‘ I ought to love ’; it loves. Pity does not
say, ‘ It is right to be pitiful ’; it pities. Justice does
not say, ‘ I am bound to be just’; it feels justly. It
is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak»
that the contemplation of a rule or theory mingles with
its action, and in accordance with this we think experi
ence, both in literature and life, has shown that the
minds which are pre-eminently didactic, which insist
■on a ‘lesson/ and despise everything that will not
•convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emo
tion.” ....
“ A certain poet is recorded to have said that he
'4 wished everything of his burned that did not impress
�6
Art and Morality.
some moral; even in love-verses it might be flung in
by the way/
What poet was it who took this medicinal
view of poetry ? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery,
or some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety ?
Not at all. It was Waller. A significant fact in
relation to our position, that the predominant didactic
tendency proceeds rather from the poet’s perception
that it is good for other men to be moral, than from
any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who
is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy
left for simple emotion/'’
This tendency, this “ disposition to see a rebuke or a
yarning in every natural object,” was called by George
Eliot the “ pedagogic fallacy ” ; and yet a gentleman
well acquainted with her writings gives a reason for the
admiration he entertains for her genius that she would
have repudiated with the greatest warmth.
Nothing to the true artist, to the real genius, is so
contemptible as the “ medicinal view.”
John Quincy Adams had the goodness to write his
views about some of the plays of Shakespeare. He read
6‘ Othello,” and read it for the purpose of finding out
what lesson Shakespeare was endeavoring to teach.
Mr. Adams gravely tells us that the play was written
for two purposes ; first, to impress upon the minds of
men and maidens that no one should marry out of his
or her blood; and second, that where a girl married
contrary to the wishes of her parents she rarely ever
came to any good. He regarded Shakespeare very
much as he did a New England minister, and supposed
�Art and Morality.
7
that he wrote “ those plays ” for the purpose of inducing
children to mind their mothers.
Probably Mr. Adams believed that “ Romeo and
Juliet” was written for the one purpose of bringing
vividly before the mind the danger of love at first sight,
and that “ Lear,” the greatest tragedy in human speech»
was produced to show that fathers could not safely
divide their property among their children.
Our fathers read with great approbation the mechani
cal sermons in rhyme written by Milton, Young and
Pollok. Those theological poets wrote for the purpose
of convincing their readers that the mind of man is
diseased, filled with infirmities, and that poetic poultices
and plasters tend to purify and strengthen the moral
nature of the human race.
Poems were written to prove that the practice df
virtue was an investment for another world, and that
whoever followed the advice found in those solemn,
insincere and lugubrious rhymes, although he might
be exceedingly unhappy in this world, would with
great certainty be rewarded in the next.
These
writers assumed that there was a kind of relation
between rhyme and religion, between verse and virtue;
and that it was their duty to call the attention of the
world to all the snares and pitfalls of pleasure. They
wrote with a purpose. They had a distinct moral end
in view. They had a plan. They were missionaries,
and their object was to show the world how wicked it
was and how good they, the writers, were. They could
not conceive of a man being so happy that everything
in nature partook of his feeling; that all the birds
were singing for him, and singing by reason of his joy;
�8
Art and Morality.
that everything sparkleci ancl shone and moved in the
glad rhythm of his heart. They could not appreciate
this feeling. They could not think of this joy guiding
the artist’s hand, seeking expression in form and color.
They did not look upon poems, pictures, and statues as
results, as children of the brain fathered by sea and
sky, by flower and star, by love and light. They were
not moved by gladness. They felt the responsibility
of perpetual duty. They had a desire to teach, to
sermonise, to point out and exaggerate the faults of
others and to describe the virtues practised by them
selves. Art became a colporteur, a distributor of tracts,
a mendicant missionary whose highest ambition was to
suppress all heathen joy.
Happy people were supposed to 'have forgotten, in a
reckless moment, duty and responsibility.
True
poetry would call them back to a realisation of their
meanness and their misery. It was the skeleton at the
feast, the rattle of whose bones had a rhythmic sound.
It was the forefinger of warning and doom held up in
presence of a smile.
These moral poets taught the unwelcome truths, and
by the paths of life put posts on which they painted
hands pointing at graves. They loved to see the pallor
on the cheek of youth, while they talked, in solemn
tones, of age, decrepitude,' and lifeless clay.
Before the eyes of love they thrust, with eager hands,
the skull of death. They crushed the flowers beneath
their feet and plaited crowns of thorns for every brow.
According to these poets, happiness was inconsistent
with virtue. The sense of infinite obligation should be
perpetually present. They assumed an attitude of
�Art and Morality.
9
■superiority.
They denounced and calumniated the
reader. They enjoyed his confusion when charged
with total depravity. They loved to paint the sufferings
of the lost, the worthlessness of human life, the little
ness of mankind, and the beauties of an unknown
world. They knew but little of the heart. They
did not know that without passion there is no virtue
and that the really passionate are the virtuous.
Art has nothing to do directly with morality or
immorality. It is its own excuse for being; it exists
for itself.
The artist who endeavors to enforce a lesson becomes
a preacher ; and the artist who tries by hint and sug
gestion to enforce the immoral, becomes a pander.
There is an infinite difference between the nude and
the naked, between the natural and the undressed.
In the presence of the pure, unconscious nude, nothing
can be more contemptible than those forms in which
are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pretence
of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The undressed
is vulgar, the nude is pure.
The old Greek statues, frankly, proudly nude, whose
free and perfect limbs have never known the sacrilege
of clothes, were and are as free from taint, as pure, as
stainless, as the image of the morning star trembling
in a drop of perfumed dew.
Morality is the harmony between act and circum
stance. It is the melody of conduct. A wonderful
statue is the melody of proportion. A great picture
is the melody of form and- color. A great statue does
not suggest labor; it seems to have been created as a
joy. A great painting suggests no weariness and no
�10
Art and Morality.
effort; the greater, the easier it seems. So a great and
splendid life seems to have been without effort. There
is in it no idea of obligation, no idea of responsibility or
of duty. The idea of duty changes to a kind of drudgery
that which should be, in the perfect man, a perfect
pleasure.
The artist, working simply for the sake of enforcing
a moral, becomes a laborer. The freedom of genius is
lost, and the artist is absorbed in the citizen. The
soul of the real artist should be moved by this melody
of proportion as the body is unconsciously swayed by
the rhythm of symphony. No one can imagine that
the great men who chiselled the statues of antiquity
intended to teach the youth of Greece to be obedient to
their parents. We cannot believe that Michael Angelo
painted his grotesque and somewhat vulgar “ Day of
Judgment” for the purpose of reforming Italian
thieves. The subject was in all probability selected by
his employer, and the treatment was a question of art,
without the slightest reference to the moral effect, even
upon priests. We are perfectly certain that Corot
painted those infinitely poetic landscapes, those cottages,
those sad poplars, those leafless vines on weather-tinted
walls, those quiet pools, those contented cattle, those
fields flecked with light, over which bend the skies,
tender as the breast of a mother, without once thinking
of the ten commandments. There is the same difference
between moral art and the product of true genius, that
there is between prudery and virtue.
The novelists who endeavor to enforce what they
are pleased to call “ moral truth,” cease to be artists.
They create two kinds of characters—types and cari
�Art and Morality.
11
catures. The first never has lived, and the second
never will. The real artist produces neither. In his
pages you will find individuals, natural people, who
have the contradictions and inconsistencies inseparable
from humanity. The great artists “ hold the .mirror
up to nature,” and this mirror reflects with absolute
accuracy. The moral and the immoral writers that
is to say, those who have some object besides that of
art—use convex or concave mirrors, or those with un
even surfaces, and the result is that the images are
monstrous and deformed. The little novelist and the
little artist deal either in the impossible or the excep
tional. The men of genius touch the universal. Their
words and works throb in unison with the great ebb
and flow of things. They write and work for all races
and for all time.
It has been the object of thousands of reformers to
destroy the passions, to do away with desires; and could
this object be accomplished, life would become a burden,
with but one desire; that is to say, the desire for ex
tinction. Art in its highest forms increases passion,
gives tone and color and zest to life. But, while it
increases passion, it refines. It extends the horizon.
The bare necessities of life constitute a prison, a dimgeon. Under the influence of art the walls expand,
the roof rises, and it becomes a temple.
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher.
Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines.
The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct. The
harmony in music teaches without intention the lesson
of proportion in life. The bird in his song has no
moral purpose, and yet the influence is humanising.
�12
Ari and Morality.
The beautiful in nature acts through appreciation and
sympathy. It does not browbeat, neither does it
humiliate. It is beautiful without regard to you.
Roses would be unbearable if in their red and per
fumed hearts were mottoes to the effect that bears eat
bad boys and that honesty is the best policy.
Art creates an atmosphere in which the proprieties,
the amenities, and the virtues unconsciously grow. The
rain does not lecture the seed. The light does not
make rules for the vine and flower.
The heart is softened by the pathos of the perfect.
The world is a dictionary of the mind, and in this
dictionary of things genius discovers analogies, resem
blances, and parallels amid opposites, likeness in differ
ence, and corroboration in contradiction. Language is
but a multitude of pictures. Nearly every work is a
work of art, a picture represented by a sound, and this
sound represented by a mark, and this mark gives not
only the sound, but the picture of something in the
outward world and the picture of something within the
mind, and with these words which were once pictures,
other pictures are made.
The greatest pictures and the greatest statues, the
most wonderful and marvellous groups, have been
painted and chiselled with words. They are as fresh
to-day as when they fell from human lips. Penelope
still ravels, weaves, and waits; Ulysses’ bow is bent,
and through the level rings the eager arrow flies; Cor
delia’s tears are falling now. The greatest gallery of
the world is found in Shakespeare’s book. The pictures
and the marbles of the Vatican and Louvre are faded,
crumbling things, compared with his, in which perfect
�Art and Morality.
13
color gives to perfect form the glow and movement of
passion’s highest life.
Everything except the truth wears, and needs to
wear, a mask. Little souls are ashamed of nature.
Prudery pretends to have only those passions that it
cannot feel. Moral poetry is like a respectable canal
that never overflows its banks. It has weirs through
which slowly and without damage any excess of feeling
is allowed to flow. It makes excuses for nature, and
regards love as an interesting convict. Moral art
paints or chisels feet, faces and rags. It hides with
drapery what it has not the genius purely to portray.
Mediocrity becomes moral from a necessity which it
has the impudence to call virtue. It pretends to regard
ignorance as the foundation of purity and insists that
virtue seeks the companionship of the blind.
Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the highest
manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, of intui
tion. It is the highest form of expression, of history
and prophecy. It allows us to look at an unmasked
soul, to fathom the abysses of passion, to understand
the heights and depths of love.
Compared with what is in the mind of man, 'the
outward world almost ceases to excite our wonder. The
impression produced by mountains, seas, and stars is
not so great, so thrilling, as the music of Wagner.
The constellations themselves grow small when we read
« Troilus and Cressida/’ “ Hamlet ” or “ Lear.” What
are seas and stars in the presence of a heroism that
holds pain and death as naught ? W^hat are seas and
stars compared with human hearts 1 What is the
quarry compared with the statue 1
�14
Art and Morality.
Art civilises because it enlightens, develops,
strengthens, and ennobles. It deals with the beautiful,
with the passionate, with the ideal. It is the child of
the heart. To be great it must deal with the human.
It must be in accordance with the experience, with the
hopes, with the fears, and with the possibilities of man.
No one cares to paint a palace, because there is nothing
in such a picture to touch the heart. It tells of
responsibility, of the prison of the conventional. It
suggests a load, it tells of apprehension, of weariness
and ennui. The picture of a cottage, over which runs
a vine, a little home thatched with content, with its
simple life, its natural sunshine and shadow, its trees
bending with fruit, its hollyhocks and pinks, its happy
children, its hum of bees, is a poem—a smile in the
desert of this world.
The great lady, in velvet and jewels, makes but a
poor picture. There is not freedom enough in her life,
She is constrained. She is too far away from the sim
plicity of happiness. In her thought there is too much
of the mathematical. In all art you will find a touch
of chaos, of liberty; and there is in all artists a little
of the vagabond—that is to say, genius.
The nude in art has rendered holy the beauty of
woman.
Every Greek statue pleads for mothers and
sisters. From these marbles came strains of music.
They have filled the heart of man with tenderness and
worship. They have kindled reverence, admiration,
and love. The Venus de Milo, that even mutilation
cannot mar, tends only to the elevation of our race.
It is a miracle of majesty and beauty, the supreme idea
of the supreme woman. It is a melody in marble. All
�Art and Morality.
15
the lines meet in a kind of voluptuous and glad content.
The pose is rest itself. The eyes are filled with
thoughts of love. The breast seems dreaming of a child.
The prudent is not the poetic ; it is the mathemati
cal. Genius is the spirit of abandon ; it is joyous, irre
sponsible. It moves in the swell and curve of billows ;
it is careless of conduct and consequence. For a
moment the chain of cause and effect seems broken;
the soul is free. It gives an account not even to itself.
Limitations are forgotten ; nature seems obedient to the
will; the ideal alone exists; the universe is a symphony.
Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, to
a greater or less degree, an artist. The pictures and
statues that now enrich and adorn the walls and
niches of the world, as well as those that illuminate the
pages of its literature, were taken originally from the
private galleries of the brain.
The soul—that is to say the artist—compares the
pictures in its own brain with the pictures that have
been taken from the galleries of others and made visible.
This soul, this artist, selects that which is nearest per
fection in each, takes such parts as it deems perfect,
puts them together, forms new pictures, new statues,
and in this way creates the ideal.
To express desires, longings, ecstacies, prophecies, and
passions in form and color; to put love, hope, heroism,
and triumph in marble ; to paint dreams and memories
with words ; to portray the purity of dawn, the inten
sity and glory of noon, the tenderness of twilight, the
splendor and mystery of night, with sounds ; to give
the invisible to sight and touch, and to enrich the com
mon things of earth with gems and jewels of the mind—
this is Art.
�MISTAKES of MOSES
By Colonel R, G. Ingersoll,
The only Complete Edition Published *i,n*
Enqland.
17
a
_ Reprinted Verbatim from the Author's Edition '
Accurate as Colenso, and fascinating
as a Novel.
136pp.
Price Is.
In Cloth Is. 6d.
L » INGERSOLL’S
ORATIONS AND ESSAY
Live Topics
*r ¡Myth and Miracle
mReal Blasphemy Social Salvation The Dying Creed
Faith and Fact ' God and Alan
Defence of Freethought
Id..
Id. «
Id. :
Id/ r
2d.
2d. ‘ ,
2d.
6d.
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPA’p
‘ 28 Stonecutter Street, London, E.O,
�
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Art and morality
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the North American Review. Publisher's advertisements on back cover. Not in Stein checklist, but cf his Nos. 183 and 194. Printed by G.W. Foote. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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1888
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Art
Ethics
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Art and Morals
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NATIONAL SE
ART
AND
MORALITY
BY
COL ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.
REPRINTED EROM
THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW.
Price Twopence.
LONDON :
PROGRESSIVE PUBLISHING COMPANY
28 Stonecutter Street, E.O,
�LONDON :
PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY G. W. EOOTE,
28 STONECUTTER STREET, E.C.
�& '2.6 4 5
N333
Art and Morality.
Abt is the highest form of expression, and exists for
the sake of expression. Through art thoughts become
visible. Back of the forms is the desire, the longing,
the brooding, creative instinct, the maternity of mind,
the passion that gives pose and swell, outline and
color.
Of course there is no such thing as absolute beauty
or absolute morality. We now clearly perceive that
beauty and conduct are relative. We have outgrown
the provincialism that thought is back of substance, as
well as the old Platonic absurdity, that ideas existed
before the subjects of thought. So far, at least, as
man is concerned, his thoughts have been produced by
his surroundings, by the action and inter-action of
things upon his mind ; and so far as man is concerned,
things have preceded thoughts. The impressions that
these things make upon us are what we know of them.
The absolute is beyond the human mind. Our know
ledge is confined to the relations that exist between the
totality of things that we call the universe and the
effect upon ourselves.
�4
*
Art and Morality.
Actions are deemed right or wrong according to ex
perience and the conclusions of reason. Things are
beautiful by the relation that certain forms, colors, and
modes of expression bear to us. At the foundation of
the beautiful will be found the fact of happiness, the
gratification of the senses, the delight of intellectual
discovery and the surprise and thrill of appreciation.
That which we call the beautiful wakens into life
through the association of ideas, of memories, of ex
periences—through suggestions of pleasure past and
the perception that the prophecies of the ideal have been
fulfilled.
Art cultivates and kindles the imagination, and
quickens the conscience. It is by imagination that we
put ourselves in the place of another. When the
wings of that faculty are folded, the master does not
put himself in the place of the slave ; the tyrant is not
locked in the dungeon, chained with his victim. The
inquisitor did not feel the flames that devoured the
martyr. The imaginative man, giving to the beggar,
gives to himself. Those who feel indignant at the
perpetration of wrong, feel for the instant that they are
the victims; and when they attack the aggressor they
feel that they are defending themselves. Love and
pity are the children of the imagination.
A little while ago I heard a discussion in regard to
the genius of George Eliot. The gentleman who
appeared as her champion took the ground that she was
a very great novel st, a most wonderful writer, and
gave as a reason that her books were written with a
distinct moral purpose; that she was endeavoring to
inculcate the value of character of integrity, of an
�Art and Morality,
5
absolute and utter devotion to duty, to the glory and
heroism of self-denial; that she did not create charac
ters for the sake of Art, but that under all, and in all,
and over all, was the desire to teach and enforce some
moral truth.
Upon this very question George Eliot has given her
views with great force and beauty : “ On its theoretic
and perceptive side, morality touches science; on its
emotional side, art. Now, the products of art are
great in proportion as they result from that immediate
prompting of innate power which we call genius, and
not from labored obedience to a theory or rule; and
the presence of genius, or innate prompting, is directly
opposed to the perpetual consciousness of a rule. The
action of faculty is imperious/ and excludes the reflec
tion why it should act. In the same way, in proportion
as morality is emotional, i.e., has affinity with art, it
will exhibit itself in direct sympathetic feeling and
action, and not as the recognition of a rule. Love does
not say, ‘ I ought to love ’; it loves. Pity does not
say, ‘ It is right to be pitiful ’; it pities. Justice does
not say, ‘ I am bound to be justJ ; it feels justly. It
is only where moral emotion is comparatively weak,
that the contemplation of a rule or theory mingles with
its action, and in accordance with this we think experi
ence, both in literature and life, has shown that the
minds which are pre-eminently didactic, which insist
on a ‘lesson/ and despise everything that will not
convey a moral, are deficient in sympathetic emo
tion.” ....
“ A certain poet is recorded to have said that he
‘ wished everything of his burned that did not impress
�6
Art and Morality.
some moral; even in love-verses it might be flung in
by the way?
“ What poet was it who took this medicinal view
of poetry? Dr. Watts, or James Montgomery, or
some other singer of spotless life and ardent piety ?
Not at all. It was Waller. A significant fact in
relation to our position, that the predominant didactic
tendency proceeds rather from the poet’s perception
that it is good for other men to be moral, than from
any overflow of moral feeling in himself. A man who
is perpetually thinking in apothegms, who has an unintermittent flux of admonition, can have little energy
left for simple emotion.”
This tendency, this “ disposition to see a rebuke or a
warning in every natural object,” was called by George
Eliot the “ pedagogic fallacy ”; and yet a gentleman
well acquainted with her writings gives a reason for the
admiration he entertains for her genius that she would
have repudiated with the greatest warmth.
Nothing to the true artist, to the real genius, is so
contemptible as the “ medicinal view.”
John Quincy Adams had the goodness to write his
views about some of the plays of Shakespeare. He read
“ Othello,” and read it for the purpose of finding out
what lesson Shakespeare was endeavoring to teach.
Mr. Adams gravely tells us that the play was written
for two purposes; first, to impress upon the minds of
men and maidens that no one should marry out of his
or her blood; and second, that where a girl married
contrary to the wishes of her parents she rarely ever
came to any good. He regarded Shakespeare very
much as he did a New England minister, and supposed
�Art and Morality.
1
that he wrote “ those plays ” for the purpose of inducing
children to mind their mothers.
Probably Mr. Adams believed that “ Romeo and
Juliet ” was written for the one purpose of bringing
vividly before the mind the danger of love at first sight,
and that “ Lear,” the greatest tragedy in human speech,
was produced to show that fathers could not safely
divide their property among their children.
Our fathers read with great approbation the mechani
cal sermons in rhyme written by Milton, Young and
Pollok, Those theological poets wrote for the purpose
of convincing their readers that the mind of man is
diseased, filled with infirmities, and that poetic poultices
and plasters tend to purify and strengthen the moral
nature of the human race.
Poems were written to prove that the practice of
virtue was an investment for another world, and that
whoever followed the advice found in those solemn,
insincere and lugubrious rhymes, although he might
be exceedingly unhappy in this world, would with
great certainty be rewarded in the next. These
writers assumed that there was a kind of relation
between rhyme and religion, between verse and virtue;
and that it was their duty to call the attention of the
world to all the snares and pitfalls of pleasure. They
wrote with a purpose. They had a distinct moral end
in view. They had a plan. They were missionaries,
and their object was to show the world how wicked it
was and how good they, the writers, were. They could
not conceive of a man being so happy that everything
in nature partook of his feeling; that all the birds
were singing for him, and singing by reason of his joy ;
�8
A rt and Morality.
that everything sparkled and shone and moved in the
glad rhythm of his heart. They could not appreciate
this feeling. They could not think of this joy guiding
the artist’s hand, seeking expression in form and color.
They did not look upon poems, pictures, and statues as
results, as children of the brain fathered by sea and
sky, by flower and star, by love and light. They were
not moved by gladness. They felt the responsibility
of perpetual duty. They had a desire to teach, to
sermonise, to point out and exaggerate the faults of
others and to describe the virtues practised by them
selves. Art became a colporteur, a distributor of tracts,
a mendicant missionary whose highest ambition was to
suppress all heathen joy.
Happy people were supposed to have forgotten, in
a reckless moment, duty and responsibility. True
poetry would call them back to a realisation of their
meanness and their misery. It was the skeleton at the
feast, the rattle of whose bones had a rhythmic sound.
It was the forefinger of warning and doom held up in
presence of a smile.
These moral poets taught the unwelcome truths, and
by the paths of life put posts on which they painted
hands pointing at graves. They loved to see the pallor
on the cheek of youth, while they talked, in solemn
tones, of age, decrepitude, and lifeless clay.
Before the eyes of love they thrust, with eager hands,
the skull of death. They crushed the flowers beneath
their feet and plaited crowns of thorns for every brow.
According to these poets, happiness was inconsistent
with virtue. The sense of infinite obligation should be
perpetually present. They assumed an attitude of
�Art and Morality.
9
superiority. They denounced and calumniated the
reader. They enjoyed his confusion when charged
with total depravity. They loved to paint the suffer
ings of the lost, the worthlessness of human life, the
littleness of mankind, and the beauties of an unknown
world. They knew but little of the heart. They did
not know that without4 passion there is no virtue and
that the really passionate are the virtuous.
Art has nothing to do directly with morality or
immorality. It is its own excuse for being; it exists
for itself.
The artist who endeavors to enforce a lesson becomes
a preacher; and the artist who tries by hint and sug
gestion to enforce the immoral, becomes a pander.
There is an infinite difference between the nude and
the naked, between the natural and the undressed.
In the presence of the pure, unconcious nude, nothing
can be more contemptible than those forms in which
are the hints and suggestions of drapery, the pretence
of exposure, and the failure to conceal. The undressed
is vulgar, the nude is pure.
The old Greek statues, frankly, proudly nude, whose
free and perfect limbs have never known the sacrilege
of clothes, were and are as free from taint, as pure, as
stainless, as the image of the morning star trembling
in a drop of perfumed dew.
Morality is the harmony between act and circum
stance. It is the melody of conduct. A wonderful
statue is the melody of proportion. A great picture
is the melody of form and color. A great statue does
not suggest labor; it seems to have been created as a
joy. A great painting suggests no weariness and no
�10
Art and Morality.
effort; the greater, the easier it seems. So a great and
splendid life seems to have been without effort. There
is in it no idea of obligation, no idea of responsibility or
of duty. The idea of duty changes to a kind of
drudgery that which should be, in the perfect man, a
perfect pleasure.
The artist, working simply for the sake of enforcing
a moral, becomes a laborer. The freedom of genius is
lost, and the artist is absorbed in the citizen. The
soul of the real artist should be moved by this melody
of proportion as the body is unconsciously swayed by
the rhythm of symphony. No one can imagine that
the great men who chiselled the statues of antiquity
intended to teach the youth of Greece to be obedient to
their parents. We cannot believe that Michael Angelo
painted his grotesque and somewhat vulgar “ Day of
Judgment ” for the purpose of reforming Italian
thieves. The subject was in all probability selected by
his employer, and the treatment was a question of art,
without the slightest reference to the moral effect, even
upon priests. We are perfectly certain that Oorot
painted those infinitely poetic landscapes, those cottages,
those sad poplars, those leafless vines on weather-tinted
walls, those quiet pools, those contented cattle, those
fields flecked with light, over which bend the skies,
tender as the breast of a mother, without once thinking
of the ten commandments. Tnere is the same difference
between moral art and the product of true genius, that
there is between prudery and virtue.
The novelists who endeavor to enforce what they
are pleased to call “ moral truth,” cease to be artists.
They create two kinds of characters—types and cari
�Art and Morality.
11
catures. The first never has lived, and the second
never will. The real artist produces neither. In his
pages you will find individuals, natural people, who
have the contradictions and inconsistencies inseparable
from humanity. The great artists u hold the mirror
up to nature,” and this mirror reflects with absolute
accuracy. The moral and the immoral writers that
is to say, those who have some object besides that of
art—use convex or concave mirrors, or those with un
even surfaces, and the result is that the images are
monstrous and deformed. The little novelist and the
little artist deal either in the impossible or the excep
tional. The men of genius touch the universal. Their
words and works throb in unison with the great ebb
and flow of things. They write and work for all races
and for all time.
It has been the object of thousands of reformers to
destroy the passions, to do away with desires ; and could
this object be accomplished, life would become a burden,
with but one desire; that is to say, the desire for ex
tinction. Art in its highest forms increases passion,
gives tone and color and zest to life. But, while it
increases passion, it refines. It extends the horizon.
The bare necessities of life constitute a prison, a dun
geon. Under the influence of art the walls expand,
the roof rises, and it becomes a temple.
Art is not a sermon, and the artist is not a preacher.
Art accomplishes by indirection. The beautiful refines.
The perfect in art suggests the perfect in conduct. The
harmony in music teaches without intention the lesson
of proportion in life. The bird in his song has no
moral purpose, and yet the influence is humanising.
�12
Art and Morality.
The beautiful in nature acts through appreciation and
sympathy. It does not browbeat, neither does it
humiliate. It is beautiful without regard to you.
Roses would be unbearable if in their red and per
fumed hearts were mottoes to the effect that bears eat
bad boys and that honesty is the best policy.
Art creates an atmosphere in which the proprieties,
the amenities, and the virtues unconsciously grow. The
rain does not lecture the seed. The light does not
make rules for the vine and flower.
The heart is softened by the pathos of the perfect.
The world is a dictionary of the mind, and in this
dictionary of things genius discovers analogies, resem
blances, and parallels amid opposites, likeness in differ
ence, and corroboration in contradiction. Language is
but a multitude of pictures. Nearly every word is a
work of art, a picture represented by a sound, and this
sound represented by a mark, and this mark gives not
only the sound, but the picture of something in the
outward world and the picture of something within the
mind, and with these words which were once pictures,
other pictures are made.
The greatest pictures and the greatest statues, the
most wonderful and marvellous groups, have been
painted and chiselled with words. They are as fresh
to-day as when they fell from human lips. Penelope
still ravels, weaves, and waits ; Ulysses’ bow is bent,
and through the level rings the eager arrow flies ; Cor
delia’s tears are falling now. The greatest gallery of
the world is found in Shakespeare’s book. The pictures
and the marbles of the Vatican and Louvre are faded,
crumbling things, compared with his, in which perfect
�Art and Morality.
13
color gives to perfect form the glow and movement of
passion’s highest life.
Everything except the truth wears, and needs to
wear, a mask. Little souls are ashamed of nature.
Prudery pretends to have only those passions that it
cannot feel. Moral poetry is like a respectable canal
that never overflows its banks. It has weirs through
which slowly and without damage any excess of feeling
is allowed to flow. It makes excuses for nature, and
regards love as an interesting convict.
Moral art
paints or chisels feet, faces, and rags. It hides with
drapery what it has not the genius purely to portray.
Mediocrity becomes moral from a necessity which it
has the impudence to call virtue. It pretends to regard
ignorance as the foundation of purity and insists that
virtue seeks the companionship of the blind.
Art creates, combines, and reveals. It is the highest
manifestation of thought, of passion, of love, of intui
tion. It is the highest form of expression, of history
and prophecy. It allows us to look at an unmasked
soul, to fathom the abysses of passion, to understand
the heights and depths of love.
Compared with what is in the mind of man, the
outward world almost ceases to excite our wonder. The
impression produced by mountains, seas, and stars is
not so great, so thrilling, as the music of Wagner.
The contellations themselves grows small when we read
“ Troilus and Cressida,” “ Hamlet” or “ Lear.” What
are seas and stars in the presence of a heroism that
holds pains and death as nought ? What are seas and
stars compared with human hearts ? What is the
quarry compared with the statue ?
�14:
Art and Morality.
Art civilises because it enlightens, develops,
strengthens, and ennobles. It deals with the beautiful,
with the passionate, with the ideal. It is the child of
the heart. To be great it must deal with the human.
It must be in accordance with the experience, with the
hopes, with the fears, and with the possibilities of man.
No one cares to paint a palace, because there is nothing
in such a picture to touch the heart. It tells of
responsibility, of the prison of the conventional. It
suggests a load, it tells of apprehension, of weariness
and ennui. The picture of a cottage, over which runs
a vine, a little home thatched with content, with its
simple life, its natural sunshine and shadow, its trees
bending with fruit, its hollyhocks and pinks, its happy
children, its hum of bees, is a poem—a smile in the
desert of this world.
The great lady, in velvet and jewels, makes but a
poor picture. There is not freedom enough in her life.
She is constrained. She is too far away from the sim
plicity of happiness. In her thought there is too much
of the mathematical. In all art you will find a touch
of chaos, of liberty; and there is in all artists a little
of the vagabond—that is to say, genius.
The nude in art has rendered holy the beauty of
woman. Every Greek statue pleads for mothers and
sisters. From these marbles came strains of music.
They have filled the heart of man with tenderness and
worship. They have kindled reverence, admiration,
and love. The Venus de Milo, that even mutilation
cannot mar, tends only to the elevation of our race.
It is a miracle of majesty and beauty, the supreme idea
of the supreme woman. It is a melody in marble. All
�Art and Morality.
15
the lines meet in a kind of voluptuous and glad content.
The pose is rest itself. The eyes are filled with
thoughts of love. The breast seems dreaming of a child.
The prudent is not the poetic; it is the mathemati
cal. Genius is the spirit of abandon ; it is joyous, irre
sponsible. It moves in the swell and curve of billows;
it is careless of conduct and consequence. For a
moment the chain of cause and effect seems broken;
the soul is free. It gives an account not even to itself.
Limitations are forgotten; nature seems obedient to the
will; the ideal alone exists ; the universe is a symphony.
Every brain is a gallery of art, and every soul is, to
a greater or less degree, an artist. The pictures and
statues that now enrich and adorn the walls and niches
of the world, as well as those that illuminate the pages
of its literature, were taken originally from the private
galleries of the brain.
The soul—that is to say the artist—compares the
pictures in its own brain with the pictures that have
been taken from the galleries of others and made visible.
This soul, this artist, selects that which is nearest per
fection in each, takes such parts as it deems perfect,
puts them together, forms new pictures, new statues,
and in this way creates the ideal.
To express desires, longings, ecstacies, prophecies, and
passions in form and color; to put love, hope, heroism,
and triumph in marble ; to paint dreams and memories
with words ; to portray the purity of dawn, the inten
sity and glory of noon, the tenderness of twilight, the
splendor and mystery of night, with sounds; to give
the invisible to sight and touch, and to enrich the com
mon things of earth with gems and jewels of the mind
—this is Art.
�B»
WORKS BY COLONEL R. G. INGERSOLL.
MISTAKES OF MOSES
.....................
...
Superior edition, in cloth ...
Only Complete Edition published in England.
DEFENCE OF FREETHOUGHT
Five Hours’ Speech at the Trial of C. B.
Reynolds for Blasphemy.
REPLY TO GLADSTONE
...
With a Biography by J. M. Wheeler.
ROME OR REASON ? Reply to Cardinal Manning
CRIMES AGAINST CRIMINALS
FAITH AND FACT. Reply to Rev. Dr. Field
• ••
...
s. d.
1 0
1 6
0
6
0
4
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4
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0
3
2
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2
THE LIMITS OF TOLERATION
A Discussion with Hon. F. D. Coudert and
Gov. S. L. Woodford.
0
2
0
2
2
GOD AND MAN.
Second Reply to Dr. Field
THE DYING CREED
THE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH
DO I BLASPHEME ?
. THE CLERGY AND COMMON SENSE
THE GREAT MISTAKE
1
0
1
•..
0
1
REAL BLASPHEMY
Ji* ' ’4"
3 4*
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•. •
MYTH AND MIRACLE
. ..
...
LIVE TOPICS
ifc
if.
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0
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SOCIAL SALVATION
- ■ MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE ...
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— GOD AND THE STATE
t
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Part II.
0
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WHY AM I AN AGNOSTIC ?
WHY AM I AN AGNOSTIC ?
...
0
0
...
Progressive Publishing Co., 28 Stonecutter Street, E.C.
jr.
2
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Art and morality
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Ingersoll, Robert Green [1833-1899]
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 15 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Reprinted from the North American Review. "Works by Colonel R.G. Ingersoll" listed on back cover. Not in Stein checklist, but cf his Nos. 183 and 194. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
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Progressive Publishing Company
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1890
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N333
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Art
Ethics
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<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 (Art and morality), 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>
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application/pdf
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Text
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English
Art and Morals
NSS
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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
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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
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Atheism and suicide : a reply to Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Part of the NSS pamphlet collection.
Creator
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Foote, George W., 1843-1886
Date
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1881
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Freethought Publishing Company
Subject
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Atheism
Suicide
Ethics
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<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>
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N223
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Alfred Tennyson
Atheism
NSS
Suicide
-
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BIBLE MORALITY.
'Secularists have no desire to extol the Bible above its
merits, nor to depreciate it below its deserts. We gladly
admit that it contains some useful precepts; but these, as
a rule, are intermixed with so many teachings of an in
jurious character that their beauty is often overshadowed
and their utility annulled. Its coarse language in many
places renders it unfit for general perusal, and destroys its
value as a standard for every-day life. The true worth of
literature should be its moral tone. Novels are appreciated
by the intelligent reader in proportion to their being
“ adorned ” with a moral. And dramas fail to gain the
approval of the thoughtful public unless virtue is inculcated
in a chaste form. So with the Bible : if in its ethical tone
it is defective, or if it is questionable in its injunctions or
indelicate in its records, it cannot with advantage be accepted
as an absolute monitor in human conduct.
All correct codes of morals should be clear in their
authority and practical in their application. This is the
more necessary when severe penalties—as in the case of
Christian ethics—are threatened for non-acceptance and dis
obedience. Now, the ethics of the Bible are both contradic
tory and impracticable. The same line of conduct is enjoined
in one passage, and just as explicitly prohibited in another.
One man is blamed because he is not cruel enough, and
will not go on slaying the Lord’s enemies; another man’s
chief glory consists in being a mighty man of war and a
great destroyer of men, women, and children; while other
passages proclaim, “Thou shalt not kill,” and enjoin mercy
and “loving-kindness.” The most absolute rest is enjoined
on the Sabbath, and the fiercest denunciations are hurled
at the most vigorous Sabbatarian. Retaliation for wrong is
counselled, and forgiveness is enjoined. We are told to
“ love one another,” and we are commanded to hate our
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BIBLE MORALITY.
own flesh and blood. Industry is advised and also dis
couraged; lustful pursuits are condemned and also permitted.
Thus Biblical morality is destitute of the first fundamental
condition of all just ethics.
Among the general principles taught in the Bible and ex
pounded by orthodoxy in this country is that belief, not
conduct, is the foundation of virtue, and that uncharitable
ness towards opponents is justifiable. One of the first in
structions which a parent should enforce upon a child is
never to impute bad motives in matters of belief or non
belief. No lesson is more valuable than this, none more
calculated to render the child’s life happy and unsuspicious,
and to make its influence in the world more useful and
beneficial. The Bible permits just the opposite. Accord
ing to Christian teachings, if a man does an act of kindness,
we are not to accept it with gratitude simply as an act of
kindness, but we are to judge from the motives of his con
duct. Did he perform the act from love to God, or did he
do it only from respect for his fellow man ? If the former,
his services will go up as a sweet smelling offering to Deity;
if the latter, he merely performed a “ splendid vice.” The
motive, not the act, is the thing to be considered. If men
slay, ravish, and destroy for the glory of God, the motive
not only condones, but consecrates, the act. Hence, in the
early history of Christianity, the practice of lying for the
good of the Church was not only allowed, but considered
praiseworthy. To require universal belief in one particular
faith, and to condemn to eternal perdition those who are
unable to comply therewith, is not the most moral doctrine.
Truly, a book that teaches that “many are called but few
are chosen,” or, in other words, that the majority of our
fellow creatures are to be cast into a burning lake, cannot
assist to promote the happiness and good of mankind. The
tendency of such teaching as this cannot have a beneficial
effect, inasmuch as it often produces mutual hatred between
man and man. Artificial and unjust distinctions of govern
ment and of classes have often produced ill-feeling between
man and man; but that evil has been increased by the
religious distinctions based upon Biblical teaching. The
natural law of love is simple and clear. It is a duty to love
all men until we have reason to believe that the trust is mis
placed or abused. It then becomes necessary to slightly
�BIBLE MORALITY.
3
modify our conduct as an act of self-defence; hence the
enactment of laws for the repression of crime and the curtail
ment of injury. If a man’s belief teaches him that he can
persecute, we have a right to be upon our guard, for we
know from bitter experience that such belief has frequently
shaped itself into conduct. But whatever man believes
about matters that do not affect his conduct should produce
in us neither love nor hatred towards him. His belief may
be ever so curious, absurd, unreal, and fantastic, ever so
ridiculous and self-contradictory, and in proportion of its
partaking of those qualities it may excite and amuse us; but
it ought not to make us respect or dislike him one whit
more. With the Bible it is quite different: its defect con
sists in its teaching us to love and respect certain people
who believe certain things which have no direct beneficial
bearing on their conduct; while we are to avoid those whose
lives may be a model of purity and benevolence, but who
cannot subscribe to a certain faith.
The great principle of Bible morality is supposed to be
contained in the Ten Commandments. The Decalogue, we
are assured, enunciates moral lessons, against which no sub
stantial objections can be brought. There are two versions
of the Decalogue given in the Old Testament, varying in
certain not unimportant particulars. Moses brought down,
we are informed, the Ten Commandments from Mount
Sinai, where he had been having a tete-d-tete with the Lord.
They were written on stone, and were copied off for future
generations in Exodus xx. They are also given in Deuter
onomy v.; but that was merely from memory, when Moses
had become somewhat advanced in age. It is not surpris
ing, therefore, that he should insert certain interpolations in
the second giving of the law which are absent from the
first. How this incongruity can be reconciled with the doc
trine of the Divine inspiration of the Bible may be left for
Christians to decide among themselves. The Decalogue is
divided into two parts : that which relates to man’s duty to
God, and that which relates to the mutual duties of man to
man. It is worthy of notice that, although the second half
contains six commands, and the former half only four,
nevertheless the first half is a great deal longer than the
second. Most of the commands of the second half are con
tained in the most condensed form. The second, third,
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bible morality.
and fourth Commandments are all developments of the first.
7 he first really contains or assumes the three which succeed
it. The first? which is, “ Thou shalt have no other gods
before me,” of course involves the second against idolatry,
the third against blasphemous swearing, and the fourth en
joining restful remembrance of the creation of the world by
God. It is curious, while God in these Commandments
had so much to say in giving a complete code of conduct
to his creatures, and confining himself as he did within the
limits of a certain number of Hebrew characters, written on
a stone small enough for a man to carry down the side of a
steep mountain, that he should have wasted so much time
in telling them how to behave to him, and have left so little
space to contain what was far more important—viz., the
rules to regulate our conduct to each other. The whole
prescribed duty of man to man is contained in seventy
seven words. The second Commandment brings out that
particular character of the Christian God which is so con
spicuous in other parts of the Bible. We are not to make
and bow down to images. Very good advice, we readily
admit. But why are we not to do so ? Is there any appeal
to the generous and reverential sentiments of the human
heart ? Surely a noble and good God would have said
something similar to this : “ Thou shalt not bow down thy
self to them, nor serve them; for I, the Lord thy God, am
a great, beneficent, and generous God, with a wide, allembracing love. Thou shalt not degrade thy soul nor debase
thy being by worshipping the gods of the heathen. I am
your only father, who made and cares for you, and your
place of reverence and trust is in the all-sustaining hollow
of my hand.” Had the Deity said this, and proved his
sincerity by appropriate actions subsequently towards his
subjects, it would have done more to have won the affec
tions of his children to him than the whole of his present
recorded sayings contained from Genesis to Revelation.
But no; we find that a sordid appeal is made partly to the
mean fears, and partly to the paternal affections, of the Jews.
They are forbidden to worship other gods: “ For I, the
ILord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
rthe fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate me.” Fancy a great, Almighty
(God, creator of the earth, being jealous of the estranged
�BIBLE MORALITY.
5
affection of an unfortunate Jew! But this is in keeping
with the general character of the Christian Deity, and most
of his particular and immediate acquaintances. The part
of the Decalogue which has reference to us, as members of
society, is so brief, in comparison to that which has been
occupied by theology and the requirements of God, that
little room is left for the introduction of rewards and punish
ments which are to follow the fulfilment or non-fulfilment
of so important a behest as “ Thou shalt not kill.” But the
punishment of idolatry, a most cruel, unjust, and revengeful
one, is given at full length. The fifth Commandment,
“ Honour thy father and mother,” is certainly, as far as it
goes, an excellent one. It comes home to the heart of
everyone who has the feelings of love and duty within him.
We can take no possible exception to its request. But the
reason given for its fulfilment is as selfish as it is untrue.
Yielding to no one in the belief that filial affection and re
verence are not only duties, but carry with them (as all
virtues do to some extent) their own reward in the satisfac
tion of an approving sense of right, it has yet to be shown
that the keeping of the first part of this command will secure
the accomplishment of the second. Honouring parents
does not invariably carry with it the fulfilment of the pro
mise, “ Thy days shall be long in the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.” The best of sons have frequently
been called upon to pay the last debt of nature when still
in the bloom and vigour of their manhood, while some of
the worst of characters live to a comparatively old age, a
grief to their parents and a disgrace to themselves. Though,
therefore, we would echo the command, “ Children, obey
your parents,” we would also say : Do so, not from any selfish
hope of personal gain or long life, but for the love you
should have for those who have toiled for and protected you
through years of infancy and helplessness. Duty, gratitude,
and affection should be the inspiration to obedience, not
the grovelling incentive given by the Bible. But may not
this be taken as a fair sample of Bible teaching ? When
ever we discover a noble thought, a just precept, or a gener
ous sentiment, we generally find it surrounded by much
that is impracticable, misleading, and fallacious. The sixth,
seventh, and eighth Commandments call for no special
remark, save that, when they point out the extremes of
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BIBLE MORALITY.
certain vices, and forbid their indulgence, they fail to state
how far persons may go in their direction without commit
ting fatal errors; and this difficulty is all the greater when we
reflect that these were the very Commandments which most
of God’s favourites had the greatest predilection for break
ing- The chief object of the ninth Commandment is its
limitation. Why should the word “ neighbour ” be intro
duced in the prohibition of false swearing? It is equally a
wrong to swear falsely against a stranger as against a neigh
bour. The tenth Commandment is the only one of the
second part of the Decalogue which errs by excess of Puri
tanism. There can be no harm, for instance, in coveting a
neighbour’s house if sufficient compensation is offered to in
duce him to give up the lease; and, if we did not occasionally
covet our neighbour’s oxen, beefsteaks and surloins would
be even more scarce among the working classes than they
are at present. Speaking broadly, the one great objection
to the Decalogue is the absence of any noble, inspiring
principle of conduct. It teaches no real love, no true
charity; it is a penal code, not a rule of life.
Orthodox believers are continually proclaiming that love
is the foundation of Biblical ethics; the fact is, however,
that, if human actions were regulated by some teachings of
the Bible, there would be but few manifestations of love.
To kill the inhabitants of a conquered city, and to save none
alive (Deut. xx. io-i6),is a peculiar mode of exhibiting love to
our fellow men. The conduct of Christ was not calculated
to inspire us with a superabundance of love when he said:
“Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also
deny before my father which is in heaven ” (Matt. x. 33);
or when he stated : “ But those mine enemies which would
not that I should reign over them, bring them hither and
slay them before me” (Luke xix. 27). Here we have an
indication of that unforgiving and revengeful spirit which
destroys true affection. If there be any truth in the popular
notions of sin and forgiveness, it was not moral for Christ
to act as he did when speaking in a parable to his disciples.
They, not being able to understand him, asked him for an
explanation of what he then said. His reply was : “ Unto
you is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God;
but, unto them that are without, all these things are done
in parables; that seeing, they may see and not perceive,
�BIBLE MORALITY.
7
and hearing, they may hear and not understand, lest at any
time they should be converted, and their sins be forgiven
them ” (Mark iv.). This is not only partial and unjust, but
a planned determination to teach so mysteriously that people
should not learn the truth, in case they should thereby be
saved. Such a mode of advocacy would be deemed in
jurious, indeed, in these days, and is only equalled by the
following “ inspired ” information to certain persons : “ And
for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that
they should believe a lie; that they all might be damned
who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteous
ness ” (2 Thess. ii. n, 12). We are advised to be holy, even
as God is holy; but what is holiness according to Bible
morality? If a “Divine” sanction to a thing constitutes it
holy, then deceit, murder, lying, and the deepest kind of
cruelty are allied with Scriptural holiness. In 2 Kings x.
God is represented as rewarding the following crimes, and
thereby giving the Bible sanction to the worst kind of im
morality. Jehu, having become King of Israel, commences
his reign with a series of murders. Having resolved upon
the destruction of the house of Ahab, Jehu commences his
task in a manner possible only to those who fight with the
“ zeal of the Lord.” Killing all who were likely to obstruct
him in the carrying out of his base object, he arrived at
Samaria, his purpose being to slay all the worshippers of
Baal. In order, therefore, that he might entrap them all
into one slaughter house, he announced that he was a great
worshipper of Baal, and that he had come to offer a mighty
sacrifice to this idol. By this craft he succeeded in drawing
all the worshippers of Baal together. When the unfortunate
victims were assembled, tendering their sacrifices, Jehu
ordered his captains to go in and slay them, allowing none
to escape. Accordingly, they were all sacrificed to the
treachery of this “ servant of the Lord.” And this conduct
is approved by God; for in verse 30 is recorded : “ And
the Lord said unto Jehu, Because thou hast done well in
executing that which is right in mine eyes, and hast done
unto the house of Ahab according to all that was in mine
heart, thy children of the fourth generation shall sit on the
throne of Israel.” Bible morality is further illustrated in
the case of Samuel (1 Samuel xvi. 1-4). This prophet is
commanded by God to go on a certain mission under false
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BIBLE MORALITY.
pretences, and with a direct falsehood upon his lips. Now,
is it moral to deceive and murder ? If not, why did God
command and encourage such vices ? And why should
men be invited to imitate the example of one who practised
such immoralities ? Biblical ethics are alleged to be based
upon the “holiness of God.” In order to ascertain what
that “holiness ” really is, it is only necessary to read Genesisxxx. and xxxi., where immorality, ingratitude, deceit, and
theft are found to be ascribed to Jacob, who was encouraged
and beloved by God; Exodus ix. 13-16, where people are'
seen to have been raised up by God for the very pur
pose of being “cut off from the earth;” Exodus xxxii.,
for an account of the anger, injustice, and cruelty of Moses,
culminating in the slaughter of thousands of human beings
at the command of God ; Joshua vi., viii., and x., for a
record of his reckless murder of thousands of human beings,
among whom were men, women, and children, at the special
command of God; 2 Samuel xii. n-31, for adultery and
cruelty in connection with David; and then peruse Psalms
xxxviii. and cix. for a confession of a life of deceit, lying,
and licentiousness. Yet we are told that David “ was a
man after God’s own heart,” and that he “kept God’s com
mandments, and did that only which was right in his eyes ”
(1 Kings xiv. 8). Such maybe Biblical morality; but it is
certainly opposed to Secular ideas of ethical philosophy.
The teachings of the Bible in reference to slavery are
barbarously unjust. According to its permit, men and
women can be bought and sold like cattle, the weak being
compelled to serve the strong. In Exodus xxi. 2-6 we have
a most cruel law for regulating this “ Bible institution,”
the cruelty and injustice of which law are two-fold. First,
if the slave when he is bought be single, and if, during his
seven years of slavery, he marries and becomes a father,
then, at the expiration of his time, his wife and children are
his master’s, and the slave goes out free. Is this moral ?
What becomes of the poor man’s paternal affections ? Isthe love for his wife nothing ? Is he to be separated from
that he holds dear, and to see the object of his affectionsgiven to the man who for seven years had robbed him of his
independence and his manhood? If, however, the poor
victim’s love for his wife and children be stronger than his
desire for liberty, what is his fate? He is to be brought
�BIBLE MORALITY.
9
to the door, have his ear bored with an awl, and doomed to
serve his master forever. Thus Bible morality makes per
petual slavery and physical pain the punishments of the
exercise of the purest and best feelings of human nature.
Where is the moral lesson in the statement: “ And thou
shalt bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after;
for oxen or for sheep, or for wine or for strong drink, or for
whatsoever thy soul desireth ; and thou shalt eat there before
the Lord thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou and thine
household ” ? If this is not giving a license to the worst of
passions, words have no meaning. But Bible morality strikes
at the manhood and happiness of man. It stifles our
tenderest affections, and urges the exercise of the cruellest
passions by teaching that a man may kill the wife of his
bosom if she dare to entice him secretly from his God
(Deut. xiii. 6-9). Where is the man who will so far belie
his nature as to accept such morality as this ? Unfortunately,
Bible teachings have frequently caused a complete severance
and breaking up of the ties of affection in families. The
Bible commands its believers to leave father, mother, sister,
and brother to follow Christ. According to its teachings, it
is justifiable to break up a certain and a human bond that
we may get a problematical chance of a problematical
blessedness in a problematical future. There are few, doubt
less, who have not learned in their own sad experience how
the family tie has been often disunited by Christian teach
ings. Brothers and sisters have been separated for years
from the home of their childhood because they dared to
emancipate themselves from the shackles of the prevailing
faith.
Accepting the term “ moral ” as expressing whatever is
calculated to promote general progress and happiness, what
morality is contained in the following passages from the
Bible : “ Take no thought for your life “ Resist not evil
“ Blessed be ye poor“ Labour not for the bread which
perisheth “ Servants, be subject to your masters with all
fear, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward “ Let every man abide in the same calling wherein
he was called“ Submit yourself to every ordinance of man
for the Lord’s sake “ Let every soul be subject unto the
higher powers, for there is no power but of God............
Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the
�IO
BIBLE MORALITY.
ordinance of God, and they that resist shall receive to them
selves damnation”? Were these injunctions obeyed, health,
independence of character, and political progress would be
ignored. For the reforms we have hitherto secured we are
indebted to men and women who practically disregarded the
Bible, and based their conduct upon the principle of utility.
To teach, as the Bible does, that wives are to be subject to
their husbands in everything (Eph. v.); to “set your affections
on things above, not on things on the earth ” (Colos. iii.);
to “ love not the world, neither the things that are in the
world ’* (i John ii.); to “ lay not up for yourselves treasures
upon earth” (Matt, vi.), is not to inculcate the principle of
equality, or to inspire man with a desire to take an interest
in “the things of time.” Whatever service the Bible may
render in gratifying the tastes of the superstitious, it cannot,
to men of thought and energy, be of any great moral worth.
To persecute for non-belief of any teaching, but more
particularly of speculative questions, is not in accordance
with ethical justice. Is it true that the Bible encourages
persecution for the non-belief in, or the rejection of, its
teachings ? If yes, so far at least is its moral worth lessened.
For belief in the truth of a doctrine, or the wisdom of a
precept, is, to the honest inquirer, the result of the recogni
tion on his part of sufficient evidence in their favour. When
ever that evidence is absent, disbelief will be found, except
among the indifferent or the hypocritical. Now, in the
Bible there are many things that the sincere thinker is com
pelled, through lack of evidence, to reject. What does the
New Testament inculcate towards such persons? When
Christ sent his disciples upon a preaching expedition he said
(Matt, x.) : “Whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear
your words, when ye depart out of that house or city shake
off the dust of your feet.” This, we are informed by
Oriental writers, was a mode in the East of showing hatred
towards those against whom the dust was shaken. The
punishment threatened those who refused the administra
tions of the disciples is most severe, for “ it shall be more
tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day
of judgment than for that city.” In St. John xv. we read :
“If a man abideth not in me, he is cast forth as a branch,
and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into
the fire, and they are burned.” This accords with the gloomy
�BIBLE MORALITY.
II
announcement (2 Thess. i.): “ The Lord Jesus shall be re
vealed from heaven, with his mighty angels in flaming fire,
taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey
not the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be
punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of
the Lord, and from the glory of his power, when he shall
come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all
them that believe.” Again (Mark xvi.) : “ He that believeth
not shall be damned.” St. Paul exclaims (Gal. i.): “If any
man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have
received, let him be accursed.” He also says (1 Tim. vi.
3-5): “ If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to the
wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ
....... he is proud, knowing nothing......... From such withdraw
thyself.” “ Of whom is Hymenseus and Alexander ; whom
I have delivered unto Satan, that they may learn not to
blaspheme” (1 Tim. i. 20). In these passages persecution
and punishment are clearly taught for disbelief. And that
such teaching has had an immoral tendency the excommu
nications, the imprisonments, and sacrifice of the lives of
heretics in connection with the history of Christianity abun
dantly prove.
Orthodox Christians contend that the Bible is a necessary
factor in the educational system of all nations. While
admitting the necessity of instruction in the affairs of daily
life, they allege that a question of far greater importance is
the preparation for existence “beyond the grave.” They
profess to be impressed with the notion that there is a city
of refuge in store for them when they arrive at the end of
life’s journey; and, having to encounter many storms and
difficulties ere they reach this supposed haven of rest, they
feel assured that the Bible is a sufficient guide to carry
them safely over the sea of time, and land them securely in
the harbour of eternity. They therefore rely on this book
as if it were unerring in its directions and infallible in its
commands.
Now, there is ample reason to doubt the capability of this
Christian guide. Its inability, however, as an instructor and
guide does not arise from any lack of variety of contents.
The Bible contains a history of the cosmogony of the earth,
and the story of man’s fall from what is termed his first
estate of perfection and happiness. Then we have the
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BIBLE MORALITY.
history of God’s chosen people, from their uprise to their
national extinction, with a record of the Jewish laws, speci
fying those acts most calculated to propitiate the favour and
secure the rew’ard of heaven, and those which are con
demned, with their appropriate and stipulated punishments.
We have also glimpses of the histories of other nations, the
causes of their fall, and the account of their national sins,
which drew down upon them that wrath of heaven which
extinguished or sorely punished them. Following this, there
is the story of Job—the lessons to be derived from the sudden
collapse of his worldly greatness, and his soliloquies upon
the mysteries of nature and of providence. Next come the
Psalms—a copious manual of praise, prayer, cursing, and
penitence, followed by the woes, lamentations, and mis
fortunes of a host of prophets—some practical, some
mystical, and some evangelical—together with the four
different versions of the life, actions, and death of Christ;
a short account of the early doings of the Church, recorded
in several epistles written by sundry apostles, culminating
in the strange and extraordinary nightmare of St. John the
Divine. Now, any man who fails to discover in so large a
field materials by which to regulate his life must do so, not
from the scarcity, but the valuelessness, of the article
supplied.
In estimating the real value of the Bible as a moral guide
it must be taken as a whole, by which is meant those books
of the Old and New Testaments which are bound together
and commonly called the Word of God. And here a ques
tion arises that, if the knowledge of the whole Bible be
necessary to our future happiness, which according to St.
John it is, why is it that so many of the books that originally
constituted the Bible are lost ? If the testimony of the
book itself can be accepted, we have only a portion of what
at one time composed the Bible. In Numbers a quotation
is given from a book called “ The Book of the Wars of the
Lord;” in Judges and Samuel we read of “The Book of
Jasher;” in Kings mention is made of “The Book of the
Acts of Solomon
and in Chronicles of “ The Account of
the Chronicles of King David.” We further read of “The
Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Judah ” and “ The
Book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel.” Allusion
is also made to “ The Book of Nathan the Prophet ” and to
�BIBLE MORALITY.
13
“The Book of Gad the Seer.” Notwithstanding the loss
of these books, Christians exclaim, How wonderfully their
book has been preserved ! Even the portions that are re
tained are so full of mistakes, errors, and corruptions that
its intelligent supporters are compelled to give the greater
part of it up as incapable of defence, while those who still
contend for its “ divinity ” hesitate to come forward and
support it in public debate.
Another question suggests itself: Are we to consider the
Old. Testament as the Word of God ? If so, upon the
Christian hypothesis, its teachings are equally as deserving
of our respect as are those of the New Testament. If, on
the other hand, the Old Testament is not intended for our
acceptance, why is it preached and enforced as God’s Word ?
True, it is sometimes stated that the Hebrew writings are
useful for instruction, although they are not of the same
authority with Christians as the New Testament. But here
it is overlooked that the New Testament is founded upon
the Old, and often appeals to it to corroborate its statements.
Furthermore, the New Testament distinctly says that the
Old was written by good and holy men for our instruction,
etc. Besides, does not Christ emphatically state that he did
not come to destroy its authority ? “ Think not,” says he,
“ that I am come to destroy the law or the prophets : I am
not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto
you, till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in
nowise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. Whosoever,
therefore, shall break one of these least commandments, and
shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom
of heaven ; but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same
shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.” Here is
a command not to break even one of the least of the com
mandments. Again, Christ says: “The Scribes and the
Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat; whatsoever they bid you ob
serve, that observe and do.” Among a collection of Chris
tian stories occurs the following anecdote :—A person once
asked a poor, illiterate old woman what she deemed to be
the difference between the Old and New Testaments, to
which she replied : “ The Old Testament is the New Testa
ment concealed, and the New Testament is the Old Testa
ment revealed.” This has been triumphantly quoted by
Christian writers to show the harmony existing between the
�14
BIBLE MORALITY.
two books. But it is absurd and contradicts facts. The
assumption is, that the Old Testament is the partial statement
of a body of truths, from which the New Testament differs
not in kind, but only in degree. It is supposed that nothing
in the New Testament contradicts what is stated in the Old,
but only reveals and amplifies with a clearer light what had
already been stated partially and under allegorical semblance
in the Old. Now, so far is this from being correct that it
would be difficult to find any two alleged bodies of sacred
truths which differ from and contradict each other more than
the divine revelation made through Moses and the prophets,
and the revelation made through Christ and his Apostles.
For instance, Moses taught that retaliation was a duty, while
Christ strictly prohibits it. With Moses persecutors were
put to the edge of the sword; with Christ, however, they
were to be blessed. Under the old system, good works
and a virtuous life were the conditions of Divine favour and
reward, and bad works and a vicious life were to incur Divine
disfavour and punishment. Under the new system, faith is
the all-in-all, the essential condition of salvation.
A proof of the inadequacy of the Bible as a guide and
instructor is furnished by what are termed the “ liberal
Christians.” Here we have men of the best intentions and
of high intellectual acquirements refusing to accept the Bible
as an absolute guide, or as an infallible instructor. With
such persons the Bible has no value as “ infallible revela
tion.” If, however, the Bible is not an infallible record, it
is simply a human production, and has no more claim upon
us, except what its merits inspire, than any other book. Is
it not rather inconsistent to contend, as these liberal Chris
tians do, that certain portions of the Bible are “ divine,”
while the other parts are simply human ? If every Chris
tian sect put forward similar contentions, there would be
but few parts of the “ Holy Scriptures ” that would not be
divine and human at the same time, according to the respec
tive opinions of different classes of believers. But how are
we to decide what is “ divine ” and what is human ? To
what standard shall we appeal ? What criterion have we by
which to test its genuineness ? Shall we accept the authority
of the Protestant or the Catholic Church ? Shall we judge
from the standpoint of the Trinitarians or the Unitarians?
For the Bible to be trustworthy as a guide it should be
�BIBLE MORALITY.
15
reliable in its statements and harmonious in its doctrines.
That it is not so will be evident from the following reference
to its pages. The Bible teaches that God is omniscient and
omnipresent; yet in Gen. xi. 5 we read that the Lord came
down to see the city and the tower which the children of
menbuilded; and in Gen. xviii. 20, 21: “And the Lord
said, Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and
because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now, and
see whether they have done altogether according to the cry
of it, which is come unto me ; and, if not, I will know.” It
teaches that God is immutable ; yet, on several occasions,
we find him changing his mind, repenting, and sometimes
turning back from his repentance; as in the great instance
(Gen. vi. 6) : “ And it repented the Lord that he had made
man on the earth, and it grieved him at the heart ” (also
1 Sam. xv. 10, 11). God told Balaam to go with the men
(Num. xxii., 20), and was angry with him because he went
(Num. xxii. 21, 22). It teaches that God is invisible, yet we
read (Gen. xxxii. 30) : “And Jacob called the name of the
place Peniel; for I have seen God face to face, and my life is
preserved and (Ex. xxiv. 9, 10): “Then up went Moses,
and Aaron, and Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders
of Israel; and they saw the God of Israeland, again (Ex.
xxxiii. 11,23): “ And the Lord spake unto Moses face to
face, as a man speaketh unto his friend....... And I will take
away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts; but
my face shall not be seen and, finally (Gen. xviii.), we have
the remarkable though perplexed account of the Lord paying
a visit to Abraham in the plains of Mamre, and eating with
him of cakes, butter, milk, and veal. It teaches that God
is all good ■, yet we read (Isa. xlv. 7): “I form the light and
create darkness : I make peace and create evil: I the Lord
do all these things and (Lam. iii. 38): “ Out of the mouth
of the Most High proceedeth not evil and good ?” and
(Ezekiel xx. 25): “ Wherefore I gave them also statutes that
were not good, and judgments whereby they should not
live.” It teaches that God is no respecter of persons ; yet
we read (Gen. iv. 4, 5): “And the Lord had respect unto
Abel and to his offering ; but unto Cain and his offering he
had no respect;” and (Ex. ii. 25) : “ And God looked upon
the children of Israel, and God had respect unto them;”
and (Rom. ix. 11-13) : “For the children being not yet
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BIBLE MORALITY,
born, neither having done any good or evil, that the purpose
of God, according to election, might stand, not of works,
but of him that calleth ; it was said unto her, The elder shall
serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but
Esau have I hated.” And, in fact, nearly the whole Bible
story is that of a chosen people, preferred above all other
nations, surely for no superior goodness on their part! It
teaches (Ex. xx. 5) that God is a jealous God, “ visiting the
iniquity of the fathers upon the third and fourth generation
of them that hate me;” yet we read (Ezekiel xviii. 20):
“ The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither
shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” It teaches
that Christ is God (John i. 1, 14; Heb. i. 8); yet we read
(John viii. 40) : “ But now ye seek to kill me, a man that has
told you the truth, which I have heard of God;” also (1
Tim. ii. 5): “ One mediator between God and man, the man
Christ Jesus.” It teaches (John x. 30) that Christ and his
father are one ; yet we read (John xiv. 28): “For my father
is greater than I.” It teaches (John xvi. 30; Col. ii. 3)
that Jesus knew all things ; yet we read (Mark xi. 13): “And
seeing a fig-tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he
might find anything thereon; and, when he came to it, he
found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet■”
and, far more significant (Mark xiii. 32) : “ But of that day
and that hour knoweth no man ; no, not the angels which
are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” It teaches
of Jesus (John viii. 14): “ Though I bear record of myself,
yet my record is true; for I know whence I came, and
whither I go ;” yet we read (John v. 31): “ If I bear witness
of myself, my witness is not true.” It teaches further (1
Tim. ii. 6) that he gave himself a ransom for all; yet we
read (Matt. xv. 24): “ I am not sent but to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel;” and (Mark vii. 26, 27): “The
woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by nation; and she
besought him that he would cast forth the devil out of her
daughter. But Jesus said unto her, Let the children first
be filled; for it is not meet to take the children’s bread and
cast it unto the dogs.” It teaches that miracles are proofs
of a divine mission (Matt. ix. 6; John v. 36 ; Heb. ii. 4);
yet (Deut. xiii. 1-3; Matt. xxiv. 24; 2 Thess. ii. 9) warns
against false prophets and anti-Christs, who shall show great
signsand wonders. It teaches in many passages of the New
�BIBLE MORALITY.
17
Testament that the end of the world is at hand, as in
Matt, xxiv., 1 Cor. xv. 51, 52; 1 Thess. iv. 15; 1 Peter
iv. 7; yet we read (2 Thess. ii. 2, 3): “ That ye be not
soon shaken in mind, or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor
by word, nor by letter as from us, as that the day of Christ
is at hand. Let no man deceive you by any means.”
Further, on this subject, we read (Matt. x. 23), in which
Jesus is addressing the Apostles he sent forth : “Ye shall
not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man
be comeyet we read (Matt. xxiv. 14) : “ And this gospel
of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a
witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come
and, similarly (Mark xiii. 10): “And the gospel must first
be published among all nations.” It teaches (Luke i. 33 ;
Heb. i. 8) that the kingdom of Christ shall endure forever;
yet we read, in one of the most remarkable passages of the
New Testament (1 Cor. xv. 24, 25, 28) : “Then cometh the
end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God,
even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and
all authority and power. For he must reign till he hath put
all enemies under his feet........ And when all things shall be
subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject
unto him that put all things under him, that God may
be all-in-all.” It teaches that the Holy Ghost is God (Acts
v. 3, 4); yet we read (John xv. 26): “ But when the Com
forter is come, whom shall I send unto you from the Father,
even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father
and, again (John xiv. 16): “I will pray the Father, and he
shall give you another Comforter and, again (Acts x. 38);
“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and
with power.” Finally, it teaches that “ all Scripture is given
by inspiration of God, and is profitable” (2 Tim. iii. 16);
yet we read (1 Cor. vii. 6, 12): “ But I speak this by per
mission, and not of commandment....... But to the rest speak
I, not the Lord and similarly (2 Cor. xi. 17) : “ That which
I speak, I speak it not after the Lord, but as it were fool
ishly, in this confidence of boasting.”
The foregoing are but a few of “ apparent discrepancies,”
or, as we call them, direct self-contradictions; and, be it
remembered, they concern the essentials of Christianity—
the three persons of the God, the inspiration of the Holy
Scriptures, and the end of the world. The Bibliolater may
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BIBLE MORALITY.
be encouraged in the endeavour to reconcile them by the
assurance that an indefinite further number, just as perplex
ing, await solution.
Those Christians who are too enlightened to accept the
Bible, as it has chanced to come down to us, as in every
word the very Word of God, and too free-minded to
submit to the authority of a tradition which has varied
with all climes and ages, or a Church whose history is a
record of blunders, compromises, falsifications, self-contra
dictions, probably unequalled in the annals of any merely
secular institution whatever, manage to remain, in their own
estimation, Christians, by believing that God’s saving revela
tion to mankind is made in the Bible, and that everyone
may read it for himself if he studies the volume in a re
verent and prayerful spirit. They admit many errors of
copyists, reject many passages, and even books, as decidedly
spurious, and regard many others as doubtful; yet maintain
that, all deductions made, there is left a clear and sufficient
Divine message, whose essential character is untouched by
.any of the errors or defects, and unchanged by any of the
various readings.
Now, this theory is certainly the most illogical which a
Christian can hold ; for that of the thorough Bibliolater is
consistent in its blind submission of reason to faith ; and
the Roman and Church views are equally consistent in their
blind submission to faith and tradition and ecclesiastical
authority; while this new theory seeks and pretends to
•conciliate things which are essentially irreconcilable—reason
and faith, freethought and revelation, liberty and servitude,
the natural and the supernatural. But, as it is the theory of
some of the best and ablest of our religious fellow-citizens,
and of those who are most heartily with us in much sound
Secular work, it practically claims a fuller consideration here
than it intrinsically merits.
In the first place, it is evidently open to the fatal objec
tion that it makes man the measure and standard of his
God, setting up certain Scriptures as supernatural and
Divine, then subjecting them to the arbitrament of human
nature, the reason and conscience of the creature. Each
of those who hold it says in effect: “ Here are books pur
porting to contain the Word of God, and I believe they
do contain it, but mixed with many vain words of men;
�BIBLE MORALITY.
19
therefore, what suits me I shall consider Divine, and what
does not suit me I shall reject.” Numerous clever attempts
■have been made to smooth away this sharp self-contradic
tion ; but, so far as we are aware, and as was to be expected,
not one that can be deemed even plausible by any candid
outsider. There is but one mode of getting rid of it—a
mode swift and effectual, obvious, and facile in theory; but,
as long experience proves, very hard to put into practice—
.and this is to surrender the initial claim of Divine inspira
tion of the books, when, of course, it would be quite natural
and consistent to sit in judgment on them, as on any other
human writing, welcoming what in them we find good and
true, rejecting what we find bad and false.
It is indeed alleged that the special grace of the Holy
Spirit always illumines and guides every one who studies
these books in the proper frame of mind; but, as we find,
in fact, that no two serious students read quite alike—each
.reading in accordance with his peculiar temperament, intel
lect, training, and circumstances, precisely as he would read
were there no Holy Spirit in question—the said special
grace, having no perceptible effect, may be safely left out of
the calculation. Innumerable sectaries, all alike devout
and sincere, all alike drawing their inspiration from the
Bible, have differed widely on the very fundamental doc
trines of Christianity; and we never heard of the Holy
Spirit doing anything towards bringing these brethren into
unity. A Christian eclectic submits the Bible to the test of
his own reason and conscience, which have been educated
and purified, not by the book itself, nor by any supernatural
grace, but by the results of a long and gradual progress in
secular enlightenment and civilisation ; which progress has
been at nearly every step opposed on the authority of the
book, and in the name of the religion founded on it. Doc
trines that now revolt the common conscience did not in
former centuries revolt the consciences of men who were
taught by the book and purified by the Holy Spirit. It is
not by special grace, nor revelation of the Holy Scriptures,
but by critical scholarship, that men have come now to
decide as to the genuineness and authenticity, the date and
authority, of the various portions. Until free learning was
revived at the classical or heathenish Renaissance, the Holy
Spirit was content to leave all the most pious Biblical
�20
BIBLE MORALITY.
students in very deep darkness as to nearly all the points ott
which our eclectic Christians are now so clearly enlightened.
The family ideal set forth in the Bible is certainly not one
of a high ethical nature. The domestic relationship of
Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, and Solomon could
not be emulated to-day without practising gross injustice,and submitting to utter moral degradation. The IndoEuropean race has developed in morals as in knowledge,
and two thousand years ago, when Germanicus led the
Roman legions, he beheld with wonder the respect with
which the ignorant, rude, and warlike Germans treated their
wives and daughters. It is an insult to civilised women for
any one to commend the family ideal of those who made
woman a slave. Even Christ is represented as treating
women as if they were necessarily inferior to men ; while
his conduct to his mother, his commendation and personal
practice of celibacy, and his encouraging others to renounce
their own obligations to their families, are not calculated to
shed a halo of peace and happiness within the home circle.
Moreover, St. Paul’s doctrine of the absolute submission of
wives to their husbands can hardly be offered us to admire
as an ideal.
The Secularist family ideal is far superior to that of the
Bible, inasmuch as it is on a level with the ethics of our
societarian development. It teaches that marriage should
be the result of mutual affection, and that such a union
creates the responsibility of undivided allegiance, mutual
fidelity, and mutual consideration. It affirms that in the
domestic circle there should be no one-sided, absolute
authority; that husband and wife should be partners in
deed, not only in theory, animated alike by the desire to
promote each other’s happiness.
The basis of Bible morality, being God’s will, is very
delusive, for the simple reason that, if such a will has been
recorded, it is not known to us; and the conjectured repre
sentations of it given to us by theologians of all ages are
impracticable and conflicting. In the Bible there is not to
be found only one will ascribed to its Deity, but many;
and those are as contradictory as they are various. For
instance, murder, adultery, theft, deceit, and other crimes
can be proved from the Bible to be opposed to the expressed
desire of God, as given in the Scriptures; while upon the
�BIBLE MORALITY.
21
same authority these crimes can be shown to accord with
God’s will. The result is, it is impossible to regulate human
conduct upon the sanctions of either the “ inspired ” records.
It is this peculiar nature of Bible teachings which was, prob
ably, the cause of the early Christians lying for the glory of
the Church (see Mosheim’s “ Ecclesiastical History ”), and
of Christians at a more modern period robbing and murder
ing those whom they termed heretics. In doing what they
did in this persecuting business, the Bible believers, no
doubt, thought that they were acting in accordance with
•“God’s will,” as set forth in the “ Divine revelation.” The
founders and promoters of those body-and-mind-destroying
institutions, the Inquisition and the Star Chamber, were in
all probability sincere, and many of them in the affairs of
every-day life, apart from theology, good men. In religious
matters, however, they were cruel and inhuman in the
extreme. Why was this ? Because, no doubt, in punishing
even to death those who opposed the true faith, they thought
they were following the Bible as a guide (see Deuteronomy
xiii. 6-9).
The acceptance of the Bible as a standard of morality
involves also the recognition of teachings and doctrines that
are conflicting and impracticable. In one place we are told
that faith alone will save us (Romans iii. 27, 28); while in
another portion of this same “ authority ” we are assured
that works are necessary to secure salvation (James ii. 24).
In St. John we read, “No man cometh unto the Father but
by me ” [Christ] (xiv. 6); and in the same gospel it is
recorded, “ No man can come to me [Christ] except the
Father draw him ” (vi. 44). This makes salvation depend,
not upon man, but upon God. In John it is written, “ For
there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the
Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one
while Timothy states distinctly that “ there is one God, and
one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.”
The New Testament teaches that Christ brought glad tidings
for all men ; yet we are assured that he came but to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel—that many are called, but
few are chosen. In one chapter we learn that all sin can
be forgiven, while in another part of the same book it is
said that the sin against the Holy Ghost is never to be for
given. In Timothy we read : “ For this is good and accept
�22
BIBLE MORALITY.
able in the sight of God our Saviour, who will have all mento be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.’7'
But this cannot be if it is true that “ for this cause God
shall send them strong delusions, that they should believe a
lie.” If the delusions are sent by God, and if in conse
quence mankind believe a lie, and get punished hereafter
for such belief, it is only fair to suppose that God’s will was
that they should not come to a knowledge of the truth;
which contradicts what is stated in Timothy. John assuresus that “ whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and
ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.”
This is very consoling when we read the following : “ If any
man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and
wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters—yea, and his
own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” To be a disciple
of Christ you must hate your brother ; you are thus a mur
derer, and “no murderer hath eternal life.” If you wish,
therefore, to have eternal life, you must not become a dis
ciple of Christ. Martyrdom by death may not always be
the best way to advance a principle, inasmuch as more
good can generally be done by living for a cause than by
dying for it. But Christians say the martyrdom of the
early Christians proves the truth of their doctrines, and in
support of their contention they quote the words of Jesus :
“ And I [Jesus] say unto you, My friends, be not afraid of
them that kill the body, and after that have no more that
they can do.” These words, it is thought, prove that Jesus
taught and held life cheaply, in order to advance more
readily his doctrines. It appears, however, from John that
Christ did what many of his followers now do—taught one
thing and practised another; for on one occasion John says,
“ Jesus walked in Galilee; for he would not walk in Jewry,
because the Jews sought to kill him.” What are we to do
in this case—follow Christ’s teaching, or his example ? To
follow both is impossible. Some persons condemn all war
upon the ground that it is anti-Scriptural, and in their justi
fication they quote Matthew, where he says : “ Then said
Jesus unto them, Put up again thy sword into its place; for
all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”
The soldier, on the other hand, tells the peace man that we
ought to possess swords ; for in Luke it is said : “ He that
hath no sword let him sell his garments and buy one.”
�BIBLE MORALITY.
23
Both would be equally justified, and both would be equally
condemned, by the New Testament—a very perplexing
position to be in. But the man fond of fighting would
keep his sword, believing that the more Christianity became
spread the more use there would be for the sword, as Christ
declared: “ Think not that I am come to send peace on
earth : I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am
come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against
her mother-in-law.” If Christ had succeeded in his object
-—and he has partially—the advocate of the sword would
have had good grounds for justification.
St. Paul considers charity the highest of virtues, without
which all other acquirements are as nothing. But then he
immediately destroys the efficacy of such teaching by the
following command : “ As we said before, so say I now
again, if any man preach any other gospel unto you than
that ye have received, let him be accursed.” We are told
that “ wisdom is the principal thing, therefore get wisdom.”
But we are also assured that in much wisdom there is much
grief, and that he that increaseth knowledge increaseth
sorrow. It is folly to guide man to wisdom, telling him
that it is better than riches, while he is taught that “ the
wisdom of the world is foolishness with God.” Where is
the incentive for a youth to acquire knowledge when St.
Paul says, “It is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the
wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the pru
dent ” ?
From these samples of the incoherent nature of Bible
statements and teachings, it will be seen how impossible it
is to rely implicitly on such a book as a guide in human
conduct. True, Christians may urge that there is no con
tradiction in the cases cited; that the Bible is God’s Word,
and must therefore be all true. It is in vain that the
student points out that this revelation abounds with impos
sibilities and absurdities, for he is reminded that with God
all things are possible, therefore let “ God be true, and
every man a liar.” It is further urged that the mistakes
occur through our lack of comprehension ; that the Scrip
tures would be plain enough if we could only “ see our way
clear ” to accept them as gospel; and that the depravity of
our nature prevents us viewing revealed truth in a spiritual
�24
BIBLE MORALITY.
light. These are the sentiments of many who profess to
accept the Bible as a guide. Truly, we must become as
little children if we endorse the doctrine of Scriptural infalli
bility.
The conduct of those who, in the face of such incon
sistency, contend for Bible infallibility is something more
than foolish; it is criminal. To shelter all that the Bible
contains under the halo of “ divinity ” is to pay homage to
the worst of human weaknesses. If a man is to pursue an
intellectual career; if he is to foster a manly independence;
if he is to live a life of integrity, he must not be bound
either by ancient folly or modern orthodoxy; but, unfettered,
he should learn the lessons afforded by a knowledge of the
facts of nature, and from the discoveries of science acquire
those rules which through life will be a surer counsellor than
the Bible, and a safer guide than theology.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Bible morality
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Watts, Charles
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 24 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the NSS pamphlet collection. Title in KVK given as 'Bible Morality: Its Teachings Shown to be Contradictory and Defective as an Ethical Guide'. Publication given in KVK as London : Watts and Co., [19--].
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[19--]
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RA1582
N658
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Bible
Ethics
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<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><p>This work (Bible morality), identified by <span><a href="www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p>
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English
Bible-Criticism
NSS
Philosophy and Religion
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DOES MORALITY
DEPEND ON LONGEVITY?
BY
EDW. VAN SITTART NEALE.
PUBLISHED
BY
THOMAS
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
187|.
Price Sixpence.
SCOTT,
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. EEYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�A
DOES MORALITY
DEPEND ON LONGEVITY?
F any one were to maintain that it is impossible
to give children any sense of the excellence of
truthfulness and the evil of falsehood; that they
cannot be induced to exercise any control over their
tempers, or to keep from pilfering sweet things ; that
they cannot be brought to obey the commands given
them by their parents, though no eye may witness
the disobedience, because it is right to obey and wrong
to disobey them; that, in short, they cannot be
formed into virtuous and noble characters unless you
can assure them that they will certainly live to be
very old men and women, and during this long period
—endless to the imagination of a child—will reap
the fruits of all their childish virtues in a prosperous,
happy life, or gather up the bitter consequences of
a contrary conduct in a miserable existence;—we
should laugh at such a disputant as one who defied
the teachings of experience, and lived in a world of
self-deluding dreams. And no one, I think, could
expose this folly more forcibly than “ Presbyter
Anglicanus,” if he thought it worth while to pull
such notions to pieces. Yet, what is the doubt
which the Presbyter so seriously expresses in his
tract, part of this series, ‘ On the Doctrine of Immor
tality in its bearing on Education ’ ? “ Whether, if
I
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Does Morality defend
we cut existence short at the moment which we call
death, there can be any morality at all ” (p. 7), but
an exaggerated form of the proposition that children
cannot be induced to exercise childish virtues and
eschew childish vices, unless you can assure them of
a long extension of life, in which they will experience
the good or bad consequences of their childish
actions.
But if it be true of children, in whom the genuine
tendencies of our nature manifest themselves in their
most native purity, that in order to produce goodness
it is not necessary to appeal to remote future conse
quences, but that it is necessary only to awaken
into activity the instinctive feelings of truthfulness,
gentleness, self-denial for the sake of others—the
harmonies of love, hidden beneath the conflicting
impulses of passion, but as a directing power which,
once aroused to action, claims the right to rule,—why
should we question the sufficiency of the same force
if it is appealed to in our subsequent life, to carry on
the work commenced in childhood, without intro
ducing as a motive the calculation of future conse
quences either on the earth or after death ? I cannot
find in the reasoning of “ Presbyter Anglicanus ”
any ground for such a questioning, except the state
ment, which I do not dispute, that the present edu
cation of English youth “ is based upon the idea of
their existence hereafter as well as here ; that the
teaching of all our great schools, and, probably, of
all the schools of every denomination, is not only
founded upon, but steeped in, this idea.”
Now, no doubt if the alternative of not insisting on
this belief as the foundation of moral principle were
what the Presbyter seems to contemplate, namely,
that it must be based solely on an appeal to the
calculation of its advantages to the individual in the
conduct of life, combined with a positive assertion
on the part of the teacher “ that after this fife is over
�on Longevity <?
$
there is and can be. no future life,” the consequence
might be expected'to be a general break-down of
morality. But it appears to me that both our present
experience of human nature in children, and the his
tory of mankind, prove this alternative to be by i o
means the only one left us. And at the present time,
when, as “ Presbyter Anglicanus ” will, I am cer
tain, admit, the customary proofs of the doctrine of
immortality, drawn from the assumed infallibility
of the Scriptures, are giving way, on all sides, before
the progress of critical research into those Scrip
tures ; which must, sooner or later, force upon all
honest and well-informed inquirers the conviction
that, whatever is their value—and to me it is very
great—they are simply human productions, no more
able to reveal the state of things in unseen
wotlds than is the ‘ Phaedo ’ of Plato; it does
appear to me, also, of no small importance in the
education of the young, that we should rest the
principles of conduct upon the knowable and pre
sent, instead of upon a future about which we can
only dogmatize without knowing anything certain.
With this view I propose to adduce some considera
tions, such as seem to me to show that there is no
necessity for making this uncertain forecast in
order to gain a solid foundation either for religion
or morality.
I. Antiquity offers us the spectacle of two adjoin
ing nations, which have filled an important part in
the religious history of mankind—the Egyptians and
the Jews. We know now that the whole religious
System of Egypt was founded upon the firm convic
tion that the conscious spirit survived death, and
entered into a state determined by the deeds done in
the body. Among the Jews, on the contrary, notwith
standing their long intercourse with Egypt, the idea
of immortality appears scarcely to have found en
drance at all till after the Babylonian captivity, when
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Does Morality depend
they seem to have borrowed it from the Persians,
Even in the work which especially deals with the
matters now most commonly relied upon as postu
lating, so to speak, our own future being if we would
not deny the Being of God, namely, the unmerited
sufferings of the good,—even in the Book of Job,
this idea is wanting. For the Goel of chapter xix. is*
very clearly, no God to be seen after death; but a
deliverer in whom Job confides that He will appear
at last on earth to justify him, as, in fact, he does
appear in the concluding chapters of the Book. Can
anything be more startling ? Here are writings
which have furnished the storehouse of the profoundest religious feeling for successive ages; writings
which have been the well-spring of the living water of
trust in God. Yet it is clear that the writers by
whom they were produced had no firm hold on the
idea of their individual conscious existence after
death, if, indeed, they had any faith in it at all. Now
suppose that, instead of the Psalms and Prophets,
mankind had been fed upon extracts from the ‘ Book
of the Dead,’ or any similar Egyptian work, will any
one maintain that the religious or moral effect could
have been as great, and rich, and varied as the effect
of the knowledge of the Old Testament has been ?
But this is not all the lesson which the story of
the Jews teaches. After the captivity they learnt
from their Persian deliverers the idea of immortality.
Under its influence they produced, as we learn from
the recent critical researches into the Canon of the
Old Testament, the Books of the Ceremonial Law,
the Books of Chronicles, the Visions of Daniel and
accompanying Apocryphal writings, and that system
of the authoritative interpretation of the ancient
Scriptures, which first stifled their spiritual life
beneath the formality of Pharisaism, and ultimately
replaced the Bible by the Talmud. In exact contrast
with what modern theories would induce us to expect,
�on Longevity f
7
we find the Jewish spirit full of religious life when
it did not believe in the prolongation of individual
existence, and sinking into a mummified torpor when
it took a firm hold on this expectation.
II. At the opposite extremity of Asia Minor to the
home of the Jewish race, we find that of the most
highly-gifted member of the great Aryan family—the
Greeks. To them, as to the Egyptians, a future state
of reward and punishment for their conduct in this
life was a matter of religious faith. The popular
morality, the traditionally orthodox education of
their youth, was founded on it. Was the morality
thus based able to resist the influences of increasing
wealth, growing power, and the manifold temptations
which the life of cities brings with it ? The story of
Thucydides and Xenophon, the comedies of Aristo
phanes, and the complaints of Plato, offer abundant
evidence that it was not.
But within this corrupt civilisation there grew up a
body of men whose morality, however much we may
find to criticise in it, undoubtedly did rise to a level
far higher than that of their countrymen in general—
a body of men who, during a long succession of gene
rations, under the political annihilation which came
over Greece with the rise of the Macedonian and
Roman empires, continued to be the living witnesses
for the efficacy of principles of conduct not based
upon any calculation of external advantages, to pro
duce virtuous action—I mean, of course, the Greek
philosophers ; of whom we must remember that they
were not merely a few eminent men, but a numerous
body of persons, professing to follow certain fixed
rules of life, and who appear to have, for the most
part, fulfilled this profession.
Now, among these Greek philosophers, it seems
clear that the doctrine of individual immortality met
with very doubtful acceptance, and, even where it
was accepted, did not occupy a prominent place as the
�8
Does Morality depend
foundation of moral conduct. Socrates, for instance,
according to the account of the speech made by him
at his trial given by Plato, presents two alternatives :
E
’ ither, he says, death is a dreamless sleep, in which
case it cannot but be a gain, if we compare this per
fect quiet with any other night or day of our whole
life; or, it is a migration to some state where the dead
might live in delightful intercourse with the great
men who bad died before them.* And this is all that
he says about it. Again, in the intimate conversation
narrated in the ‘ Phtedo of Plato,’ to have taken place
on the day of his death, where he heaps up a variety
of arguments to establish the position that the soul
is eternal by its nature, he does not present'this con
ception at all as the foundation of morality, but only
as a consideration which should make the philosopher
welcome death rather than fly from it. “ For how,”
he asks, “in truth, should those who philosophise
rightly not wish to be dead, how should not death be
to them, of all men, the least terrible ? Would it not
be the height of unreason if those who have always
quarrelled with the body, and longed to possess the
spirit in itself, should be fearful and angry when this
happens, instead of eagerly going there, where, when
they arrive, they may hope to attain what they have
elected throughout their life ; for they have chosen
wisdom, and to be delivered from that with which they
quarrelled so long as they possessed it.’’f Of the
argument so much in favour with the moderns, which
identifies the prolongation of our individual existence
beyond the tomb, with trust in the goodness and
justice of God, there is scarcely a trace in the
‘ Phsedo the only approach to it being the “ cawZmn,”
that, if the soul is incapable of destruction, and death,
therefore, cannot deliver us from the consequences of
our past acts, the wicked cannot be freed by it “ at
once from their sins and their souls; but the only
* Apology towards the end.
t Phsedo, § 34.
�on Longevity?
9
deliverance from evil must lie in a good life.”* But
this conception is so far from having formed the basis
of the moral teaching of Socrates, that, to judge by
the tone of this conversation, his notions on the
immortality of the soul would appear to have been
kept by him as a subject for his private meditations,
and to have been communicated to his friends, only
upon the close approach of his own death. And
they rest, for their chief support, upon the persuasion,
entirely strange to our modern conceptions of immor
tality, that our souls come to us out of a previous
state of conscious existence, and bring with them the
knowledge of ideas, or general principles, which the
experiences of sensation gradually re-awaken in our
memories.
Passing from this beginning of philosophical specu
lation to a point far advanced in its course, to the age
of Cicero, we find a yet more striking absence of any
connection between the idea of immortality and the
principles of morality in the eloquent treatise where
this great Roman thinker sums up, in his old age, the
reasonings of Greek philosophy on this subject in the
first book of his Tusculan disputations. Although
he expresses his own belief in the Platonic doctrine
of immortality, which he rests principally upon an
argument ascribed to Socrates in the Phcedrus of
Plato, that that must be eternal which possesses the
power of self-motion, and, as this power is possessed
by the soul, the soul must be eternal; an argument
which he applies to all living creatures,f yet all the
concluding portion of the treatise is occupied in
demonstrating that death is not to be dreaded, even
although it should involve the total loss of conscious
ness. How little morality depended in his judgment
* Phsedo, § 130.
f Inanimum est enim omne quod pulsu agitatur externo, quod autem
est animal id motu cietur interiore et suo. Nam haec est propria natura
animi, atque vis ; quae, si ipsa semper moveat, neque nata certa est, et
eterna est.—Ch. 23.
�IO
Does Morality Depend
on the continuance of individual existence, we gather
from the declaration made by him towards the close
of this argument, that “ no one has lived too short a
time who has perfectly discharged the duties of per
fect virtue.” * It is still more conclusively shown by
the fact that his celebrated “ Offices,” his great work
on moral duty, is avowedly founded upon the treatise
by Pansetius, who on this point, as he tells us, “ dissented
from Plato; whom everywhere else he calls divine,
the wisest, the holiest, the Homer of philosophers,
but whose doctrine of the immortality of the soul he
Rejected on the ground that whatever is born must
die, and whatever is subject to disease must be sub
ject to death.f This, it should also be observed, was
the general doctrine of the Stoics, of whom Cicero
says that they “ likened men to crows, asserting that
the soul lasted a long time, but not always.” J Yet
the Stoics are notorious for having taught a morality
which, if open to the charge of being wanting in
tenderness, undoubtedly exercised a most powerful
influence over the' minds of those who embraced it,
moulding their whole course of life, and leading
them, in very numerous instances, to an almost
ascetic renunciation of the pleasures of sense.
We see, then, that the history of four of the most
remarkable nations of the ancient world by no means
supports the notion that man is not furnished by his
Maker with sufficient motives for noble action deriv
able from the world in which he finds himself placed,
and the faculties of which he finds himself possessed,
but must draw the stimulus to present goodness from
a future to which he has no access. On the other
hand, if we consider what have been the consequences
of acting upon the latter assumption, we shall, I
think, find still more reason for questioning its truth.
Six centuries after Semitic and Aryan thought had
effected a union in Christianity, took place that fierce
♦ Ch. 45.
t.Tusc. Quest., I., ch. 32.
J lb., ch. 51.
�on Longevity ?
II
outburst of Semitic faith in the absolute will and
unconditional sovereignty of God, called by us
Mahometanism. The great instrument by which the
triumphs of this creed were effected was its uncom
promising declaration of a future state, where the
faithful would obtain from Allah a recompense for
his toils and sufferings in endless joys, and the un
believer would be precipitated by his relentless com
mand into endless tortures. “ Hell is much hotter,”
was the reply of the Prophet to the remonstrances of
the Arabs who, on his proclamation of war against the
Romans, “ objected the want of money, or horses, or
provisions, the season of harvest, and? the intolerable
heat of the summer.” * “ Paradise is before you, the
devil and hell-fire in your rear,” was the pithy
exhortation of the Arab generals to their troops,
before the battle of Yermuk, which gave to the
Moslems the possession of Syria, f The imagination
enlisted on the side of Islam proved as powerful to
sustain the active courage of the fanatic warrior, as
it had been, in earlier times, to sustain the patient
fortitude of the Christian martyr.
IV. If the East has thus testified to the danger
which may await morality when it is built upon a faith
emancipated from the control of present experience,
the West has borne a not less powerful witness to the
same truth in the history of the attempts made within
the Christian Church to extinguish heresy. Gibbon,
basing his calculations upon the number of martyrs
whom Eusebius states to have suffered in Palestine
during the great persecution in consequence of the
Edict of Diocletian, and upon the probable propor
tion borne by the population of Palestine to that of
the rest of the empire, estimates the number of
Christians on whom capital punishment was inflicted
by judicial sentence throughout the Roman Empire
♦ Gibbon, ch. 50 ; Ed. 1855.
t lb., ch. 51; 76, 318.
�12
Does Morality defend
during the ten years that this persecution lasted, as
somewhat less than 2,000; * while Grotius declares
that, in the Netherlands alone, 100,000 of the subjects
of Charles V. suffered death as heretics under the
hands of the public executioner. Even if we assume,
as M. Guizot appears to do, that the estimate of
Gibbon is below the mark, and allow, with Ruinart,
in his ‘ Acts of the Martyrs,’ greater credence to the
vague statements of “innumerable witnesses,”! while
we reduce the victims of the persecution in the Nether
lands with Fra Paolo to 50,000,J there remains a
terrible witness, in this case, to the excess of cruelty
of which Christians have been guilty, on religious
grounds, towards other Christians above that of which
the ancient heathen world was guilty in its attempts
to repress the spread of Christianity. It is notorious
that this evidence is far from being a solitary testi
mony to the fact. To what are we to attribute a
result so astoundingly unlike what might have been
reasonably expected from the spirit of profound love
which animates the Gospels ? Can it be doubted that
the cause has been the belief in the endless duration
of the soul, combined with the belief that its welfare
during this endless period might be irremediably
destroyed by the opinions which it entertained while
on earth ? Accept these beliefs as true, and it becomes
a duty, far more sacred than the duty of preserving
man’s mortal body from violent assault, to preserve
his undying soul from the contamination of any
opinions as to which we may be convinced that they
have this appalling issue. Even the probability of
such a result is sufficient to raise this duty. For, if
we are mistaken, the injury we do to the individual
who suffers is insignificant, since his immortal soul
will not suffer ; while, if we are right, the good that
* Gibbon, ch. xvi., Ed. 1855, II. 284.
t Note in Milman’s Gibbon, Second Ed., I., p. 598.
t lb. ch. xvi.; I., p. 600.
�on Longevity ?
13
we may do to others, if not to the individual sufferer,
is incalculable.
Ko doubt, if we adopt the view of “ Presbyter
Anglicanus,” there would be no danger of our falling
into such excesses. If the whole of our unceasing
existence is assumed to be a continuous course of
education, by which all shall ultimately be “ brought
into a state where they will think rightly and act
rightly, because they will be filled through and
through with the love of God,—that is, with the love
of that which is true, and pure, and just,” we may
contentedly leave the Divine educator to work out
His own method of instruction, without stepping in
to His aid by abruptly dismissing any of His pupils
from one class to another in the never-ending school.
But when “ Presbyter Anglicanus ” maintains that the
religious instruction of the great schools throughout
England is “ not only founded on, but steeped in,
the belief ” in immortality, I would remind him that
it is certainly not such a belief as this. That instruction,
where it really dwells on our imaginations of the future
as the base on which our conduct in the present should
be founded, is, I conceive, far more closely represented
by the unbelieving belief of that self-important selfnullifier, Dr Pusey, that, if men make any impor
tant slip in what the teacher calls orthodoxy, no
matter what their conduct may have been in other
respects, “ their shrieks will echo for ever along the
lurid vaults of hell,” than by the loving trust of the
Presbyter. The doctrine of immortality, theoretically
taught in the great majority of English schools, where
any stress is laid upon it, is the doctrine of which the
fires of Smithfield were the legitimate fruit; and, if it
does not produce this fruit now, the reason is that,
practically, it is not believed,—that the only part of
the doctrine which has any general influence on men’s
minds at the present time is one scarcely connected
with morality at all, namely, the sentimental hope
�14
Does Morality depend,
of.reunion in “ another and better world ” with those
we have loved and lost in this.
How much hold the idea of continuous existence has
upon men’s minds under this form, we see by the rapid
growth of belief in the so-called Spiritual manifesta
tions. And when we consider how very unspiritual the
character of these alleged manifestations appears to
be ; how entirely destitute it is of any conceptions of
a nature likely to ennoble the lives of those whose
minds are occupied with them, we cannot form a high
estimate of the influence of the mere notion of con
tinuous existence upon the conduct of mankind, Of
the conception as “ Presbyter Anglicanus ” would pre
sent it to us, I must form a very different estimate ;
if, as he no doubt supposes, the continued life of the
individual is conceived to be a career of active use
fulness, in spheres of action of continually increasing
extent and importance, according to the perfection of
the will by which the active power is regulated,
certainly this conception would operate as a power
ful stimulus to the noblest use of all the faculties
which we possess here. Yet when we remember how
peculiarly liable such a stimulus is to be misdirected,
if we allow ourselves to dwell upon the dreams of a
future of which we know nothing rather than upon
the ideas which can be tested by present experience,
we shall, I think, be disposed to look upon the use of
this stimulus with great suspicion.
That morality alone, even in its purest and most
ideal form, is sufficient to be the permanent source
of spiritual blessing tomankind, I do not believe ; and
that not because our lives are short and uncertain, but
because morality belongs properly to the intellectual,
analytical side of our nature, and therefore, though it
is very efficient in telling us what we ought to do, is
very feeble in furnishing the motive power to do it.
‘ Conduct, to use the words of Mr Matthew Arnold,
in his remarkable ‘ Essays on Literature and Dogma ’
�on Longevity T
15
“ is the simplest thing in the world so far as knowledge
is concerned, but the hardest thing in the world so
far as doing is concerned.”* To gain this power of
doing, we require to turn to the other great factor of
Our being, the constructive principle of will, and the
impelling force of love by which this principle can be
at once strengthened and guided. Now, the spirit of
loving Will is the spirit of Religion.
Awake in man the trust that the power which can
glow in his own bosom governs the universe—that
God is no mere name for “ the true, the pure, the
just,” but is the Eternal Spirit of purity, justice,^
and truth, with whom the spirit of man can have
communion, on whom it may rely in death as in life,
in sorrow as in joy, and you will not require the
doubtful dogma of continuous existence to furnish
motives to action, which the present reality will
abundantly supply, but to use the beautiful words in
which Cicero winds up his argument against the fear
of death, will hold “ nothing to be evil that is deter
mined either by the immortal Gods, or Nature the
parent of us all; for not hastily, or by chance, are we
born and created, but assuredly there is a power
which takes counsel for the human race, and has not
produced and nourished it, that when it has gone
through all its toils, it should fall into eternal evil at
death ; rather should we think that it has prepared for
it a haven and place of refuge.”f
In regard to the place which the conception of con
tinuous individual existence should occupy in the
education of the young, I think Presbyter Anglicanus
will agree with me, that it cannot continue to be what
it has been. Whatever arguments Plato or. Cicero
could use in support of this faith, it is open to us to
use now. We may, perhaps, add to them others, from
the knowledge of Nature which scientific research
is opening to us. But with the faith in infallible
* ‘Cornhill,’ Oct., 1871, p. 485.
t Tusc. Quest. I., 49.
�16
Does Morality defend
teaching,—and to the Presbyter, if I am not much
mistaken, no less than to myself, this faith is gone,
irreparably gone,beyond remedy by decrees of councils
be they ever so imposingly vouched, or plasterings of
learned ingenuity be they ever so skilfully applied,—
there is gone also all certainty in any assertions about
that world of which we can know nothing unless,
indeed, we are ready to be “ rapped ” into conviction,
and delight ourselves with the fantastic Hades of our
new spiritual “ Home.” It must become us, then, to
substitute, on this subject, modest hope for dogmatic
arrogance. But it does not follow that our faith in
the eternal should be less vivid, because it ceases to be
identified with a belief in the Longeval.
For myself I am persuaded that the conception of
infallible teaching, and the certainty of so-called im
mortal life associated with it, has constantly inter
posed itself between man and God, and that the faith
in an ever-present Deity will never be generally rea
lised till the faith in these counterfeits of His pre
sence has died away. To God, the source of all
good, we must direct man’s thoughts alike for the
education of the young, and the solace and guidance
of maturer age. Once quicken mankind to trust in
His presence as a living reality, and we may conclude
with Schleiermacher, whom “ Presbyter Anglic anus ”
finds so hard to understand, that only those who “ care
to live well rather than to live long ” can partake in
that immortality which belongs to truth and love,
whether or not the conditions of existence allow a
continuous prolongation of individual being to those
who live in the aspiration after love and truth.
What, indeed, can be more absurd than for a man
to say to his Maker, “ 0 God, the love of Thee, and
the study of Thy acts, and the following of Thy
Spirit, would be sufficient to satisfy my soul for count
less ages, but it will not suffice for fifty years. For
so short a time it is not worth my while to be en-
�on Longevity ?
i7
lightened by Thy truth, and cheered and warmed by
Thy love. Every attraction of sensuous delight,
every dream of self-seeking gratification, every im
pulse of passion, is preferable. Give me endless
existence, and I yield myself up to Thy service, which
is perfect freedom. Deny it me, and I serve myself,
though to serve myself is to become slave to a devil.”
Yet what is the assertion that the belief in immor
tality is essential as a support to morality but this
sentiment in disguise ? The notion I take to be the
legitimate product of that false religious teaching
which, by substituting authority for conviction, con
verts morality into legality. Divines of the stamp of
Dr Pusey instinctively feel that the edifice of apparent
goodness which they may raise rests in the great
majority of cases upon a foundation of sand, to which
they can give solidity only by the pressure of fear.
It is perfectly consistent in them, therefore, to insist
on the faith in an endless duration of individual ex
istence, which furnishes the heavy rammer that they
require. But divines who, like “ Presbyter Angli
canus,” would build goodness upon love, should feel,
what Dr Pusey, I am persuaded, feels to be his own
case, that they need no such extraneous support—•
that “ the rain may descend ” and “the floods rise,”
and “ the winds blow upon that house,” but it “ cannot
fall,” for it is “ built upon the rock.”
�The following Pamphlets and Papers may be had on addressing
a letter enclosing the price in postage stamps to Mr Thomas
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Eternal Punishment. An Examination of the Doctrines held hy the Clergy of the
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Better and Spirit. By a Clergyman ok the Church of England. Price 6d.
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Questions to which the Orthodox are Earnestly Requested to Give Answers.
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A Few Self-Contradictions of the Bible. Price Is., free by post.
English Life of Jesus, or Historical and Critical Analysis of the Gospels; complete
in Six Parts, containing about 500 pages. Price 7s. 6d., 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. 7d., post free.
The Difficulties and Discouragements which Attend the Study of the Scriptures.
By the Right Rev. Francis Harb, D.D., formerly Lord Bishop of Chichester. 6d.
The Chronological Weakness of Prophetic Interpretation. By a Beneficed
Clergyman of the Church of England. Price Is. Id., post free.
On the Defective Morality of the New Testament. By Prof. F. W. Newman.
Price 6d.
The “ Church and its Reform. ” A Reprint. Price Is.
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Price Is.
Original Sin. Price 6d.
Redemption, Imputation, Substitution, Forgiveness of Sins, and Grace. Price 6d.
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Babylon. By the Rev. P. S. Desprez, B.D. Price 6d.
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Modern Orthodoxy and Modern Liberalism. Price 6d.
Errors, Discrepancies, and Contradictions of the Gospel Records ; with special
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“ James and Paul.” A Tract by Emer. Prof. F. W. Newman. Price 6d.
Law and the Creeds. Price 6d.
Genesis Critically Analysed, and continuously arranged; with Introductory Remarks.
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of the Church of England. Price 6d.
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In Two Parts. Price 6d. each Part.
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of England. Price Is.
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By a Country Parson. Parts I., II., III. Price 6d. each Part.
�
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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>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Does morality depend on Longevity?
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Neale, Edward Vansittart [1810-1892]
Description
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 17, [1] p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references. Publisher's list on unnumbered page at the end. Printed by C.W. Reynell, London. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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1871
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CT95
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Ethics
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<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 (Does morality depend on Longevity?), 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>
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Text
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English
Conway Tracts
Ethics
Longevity
Morality
-
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0601cbc80a9c2163684e49d060d4c575
PDF Text
Text
DOGMA versus MORALITY.
.
A
REPLY TO CHURCH CONGRESS.
BY
CHARLES VOYSEY, B.A.,
INCUMBENT OF HEALAUGIT, NEAR TABCASTER.
SECOND THOUSAND.
LONDON:
TEUBNEE AND CO., 60, PATEENOSTEE EOW.
1866.
Price Threepence.
�I
�PREACHED AT HEALAUGrH,
Sunday Morning, October 21st, 1866.
1 John iii. 7.—11 Little children, let no man deceive you: he that
doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous."
The week before last, at a Congress of Bishops
and Clergy held at York, a dignitary of the
church is reported to have said, that it was
“ better to have a religion without morality than
morality without a religion,” As I have not the
exact words before me, 1 will not mention the
name of the speaker; but, as far as I could gather
from the report, the whole speech was intended to
advocate the necessity for a dogmatic creed, and
to shew the superiority of creed over practice.
Painful as such a view must be both to you and to
myself, I am not at all surprised at a Church
dignitary putting it forth, nor at the applause
with which it was received by the assembled
clergy.
For, indeed, I have often before heard it
expressed and implied, in different ways, and in
different degrees of shamelessness. Some High
Churchmen have as good as denied the possibility
of being righteous, without being baptised and
�4
partaking of the Lord’s Supper; and Evangelicals
have gone so far as to say, that a moral life was a
hindrance, rather than a help, to our reception of
the Gospel. They deserve some credit for their
candour and consistency; and if it were not for
such utterances as these, the popular credulity
would never be shaken. When, however, one more
energetic than the rest follows out the principles of
his party to their legitimate consequence, then the
people have their eyes opened to a simple question,
on which they are quite competent to pronounce
an opinion. I am, therefore, under some consider
able obligation to the speaker of that remarkable
sentence, in which he deliberately prefers religion
to morality, as he makes it all the easier for me to
carry on the delightful work of drawing you on,
step by step, to think out for yourselves a true
faith, and to shake off irrational and ill-founded
beliefs and opinions. We must, however, first try
to get a clear notion of what we are talking about,
before we can derive any benefit from the discus
sion of this unwise maxim,— “Religion without
Morality is better than Morality without Religion.”
What do the words “religion and morality”
here mean? There is no doubt about the meaning'
of “morality.” We all mean by it “ Doing what
is right to our fellow-men;” “Loving our neigh
bour as ourselves;” “Doing as we would be done
by.” Both the speaker and ourselves agree in
calling this “morality.” But I am sure we do not
�5
agree with him as to the meaning of the word
“religion;” simply because he contrasts in this
sentence the one with the other. He draws a
distinction and makes a choice between religion
and morality; whereas you, if you have followed
my teaching for three years, as I believe you have
done, would never have dreamt of separating
religion from morality, nor morality from religion.
Your idea of true religion is, if I mistake not,
true obedience to God’s laws; and true obedience
to God’s laws is to do what is right, to love your
neighbour as yourself. You' believe that no
amount of doctrinal belief, of lip service, or
even of long and earnest prayers and praises
to God, will do instead of our being good;
or would at all please God, if we were not,
at the same time, working righteousness in
our daily lives. So with us, true religion and
morality must go together—must be so intimately
bound together as to be one and the same. Our
religion is our duty, and our duty is our religion.
We know of nothing which God demands of us as
religious duty which is not part and parcel of
moral duty. If I made any distinction between
them it would be this:—> Religion is morality with
a conscious reference to God’s authority over us,
or with a sense of His interest in our well-doing.
You see, then, when a Church dignitary talks of
religion and morality as if they could be separated,
as if one could exist without the other, he cannot
�6
mean by the word “ religion ” what we mean by it.
His idea of religion cannot be the same as ours, or
else he would never have thought of such a thing
as religion without morality, or morality without
religion.
Now, as he is not here to answer for himself the
question, “ What do you mean by religion as
separate from morality?” the only fair way of pro
ceeding is to suppose an answer, and to remember
all through that we are only supposing it. We
can only be certain of one thing, that he did not
mean by religion 'what we mean by it. That is
clear. Beyond this we can only guess. But, my
friends, if you will trust me, I will do my best to
tell you what the speaker meant by the word
“religion.” I am unhappily more familiar with
clerical notions than you are, and have dim recol
lections of having once thought and spoken as they
do now.
From the whole tenor of the speech referred
to, the speaker meant by “religion” a “ belief in
the articles of the Christian Faith.” I do not
think, as some have suggested, that he meant any
religious belief without morality to be better than
morality without any religious belief; but, espe
cially and definitely, that the maintenance of
Christian dogmas, such, for example, as the
dogmas of the Incarnation and Atonement, the
assertion of the Crucifixion, Burial, Resurrection,
and Ascension of Jesus Christ, and the dogmas
�7
about the Holy Ghost, the Church, and the for
giveness of sins—that the maintenance of all these
without morality was better than morality without
this religious belief. Incredible as it seems to you
that any minister of Christ should have so far
forgotten, or remained ignorant, of the Master’s
own religious belief and religious morality, it is
nevertheless true that hundreds of clergymen, and
some few laymen, whom they have misled, actually
prefer the maintenance of these dogmas to every
other cause in the universe. Indeed, as I told
you, the Evangelical, seeing that integrity of life
renders the mind incapable of being enslaved by
his fearful doctrines, frankly owns that a good life
is a hindrance to the reception of what he calls the
Gospel. It is indeed a hindrance, thank GodI
and if you want to be free from credulity
and superstition, begin betimes to “ amend your
lives, and live in charity with all men.” “ So
shall you be meet partakers” of that rich banquet
of truth, which God has spread for all upright
souls. So surely as you carelessly launch your
selves into the waves of sin and selfishness, you will
have to take refuge, if you ever get to land at all,
on some far distant foreign shore, terribly unlike
your own home and your native land.
Now, if the meaning of the speaker be, that
a belief in the articles of the Christian Creed
without morality is better than morality with
out this belief, I put it to you very simply, Do
�8
you think so? I frankly own that, though I
am a Churchman, I should much rather see them
put aside and torn up as rubbish, than to see
the cause of morality, which is true religion, for
a moment imperilled. I -would honestly prefer
a morality without any religious belief—nay,
even without any religious hopes and religious
consolations — than the most comforting, satisfy
ing creed without morality. I will not judge
other men — not even by their foolish words —
but I will say that God has taught me, or I
believe He has taught me, that the highest and
noblest thing to which we can aspire, is to be
righteous — to do what is right—to live and walk,
in love; that this is the Alpha and Omega, the
beginning and the end of all true religion, and
that if any religion were found unfavourable to
this personal righteousness, this divine morality,
it must be a false religion and not a true one;
that if any religion could be substituted for
morality, so as to make its professors sit down
contentedly without making moral effort, satisfied
and even happy,".while they are still unrighteous,
and morally* no^better for their religion, that
religion, whether spoken by men or angels, con
secrated or not with the testimony of ten thousand
miracles, would be a curse instead of a blessing;
and what is more, [could have no abiding roots
in a world where God has placed the sons of
men. For men will be true to the nature which
�9
God has given, them, and must learn, whether
they will or not, every lesson which their bitter
experience forces upon them, with regard to the
sovereign importance of righteous dealing.
It is from statements like the one which we
are considering, that the gravest attacks are made
upon existing religious beliefs.
The reverend
speaker little knew that those few words of his
would awaken enquiry, thought, and scepticism
which no after apologies can allay. Common
men and women like you and me, dear friends,
who have our daily work to do, our many self
denying duties to fulfil, our own rough or sour
tempers to control, our homes to guard and
our dear ones to cherish and to help—who know
how hard the battle between the flesh and the
spirit really is — who yearn after eternity, not
for its rest and its joy, but for its divine promise
of perfect righteousness—when we hear an advo
cate of modern Christianity talk in these, to us,
pagan—nay, worse than pagan—Pharisaical riddles,
we feel inclined to retort—“Keep your religion
and leave us our morality. Comfort your hearts
with incessant religious rites, and stimulate your
imaginations with contemplation of wonders which
tax human credulity without healing human
wounds, which stimulate your fevered selfishness,
and narrow up the channels of the love of God;
and leave us to ourselves, and to our unaided, un
seen struggle in the darkness of our own hearts.
�10
We would rather thus fight against our daily be
setting sins, from simple sense of duty, or regard
for fellow-men, even should we have to do so with
out a ray of hope from above, than give up our
march onwards, over the stones and briars of life,
to stop playing with you by the wayside, while
you are mimicking the grand rites of Ancient
Sacrifice/ and thinking to please your Maker, or
some of His subordinate deities, by your empty
and dreary conjuring!
“ Take your religion, with its mystifications and
its impossibilities, and leave us to our excommuni
cated morality, and to the uncovenanted mercies of
God!”
Truth must be spoken, Though God forbid it
should ever be said of us, it is certain that some
have been driven by these foolish priests into
downright Atheism. And an Atheist, you know, is
one who does not believe in the existence of God
at all. Inexpressibly sad as it is to us, who rejoice
in our Maker, and whose hearts pant for the Living
God, yet there are some who cannot believe in
Him at all. Some of these are kept stedfast in
duty, pure and upright in their lives, models of
good fathers and mothers, good husbands and
wives, and fulfilling God’s own law of love, which
in mercy He has not made dependent on Creed,
* See Letter, signed C.C., on St. Alban’s Church, Holborn, in
the Times, October 19th, 1866, and the article thereon.
�11
but lias engraven on our very hearts. They are
living evidences of morality without a religion;
and if I had to choose between the lot of the
righteous man who could not believe in a God, and
the man of unlimited credulity, who cared not to
be righteous so much as to be a believer, I would
infinitely sooner be the righteous Atheist. Simply
and solely from love of God I would thus choose.
Because I believe that God would be more pleased
with any one for doing his duty to his fellow-men,
than for being merely occupied with making
prayers, and singing psalms, and filling the mind
with all sorts of profitless imaginations respecting
the unseen. Even, as a poor selfish father, if I
must choose, I would rather my children behaved
well to each other, and to their mother, than to me.
And I would much prefer their doing this, to their
coming to me all day long, and making petitions,
and saying over the same words of praise to me.
But, never fear, there is no need of our having
such an alternative set before us. God will not—
at least, so we hope and believe,—God will not
require us to choose between a religion without
morality, and a morality without religion. To
“ love our neighbour as ourselves ” is to render the
best homage of our lives to our adorable Maker,
who has written this as His law upon our hearts.
“ To do righteousness is to be righteous even as
Christ was righteous.” These are not my words,
but St. John’s. u Let no man deceive you.” Be
�12
not put off with the enticing parade of religious
ceremonies, or the long list of religious dogmas
and religious miracles, to abandon your devotion
to God in the more difficult, but more honourable
conflicts of daily life. If religious belief, and the
cause of morality, should ever come into open
•1
collision, I know well which must give way. A
Creed crowned with the victories of twice .two
thousand years cannot stand a day when brought. .Jl
into open contrast with the Eternal Law oMoff,
M
the Law of Love, which man’s deepest heart yearns
to fulfil.
Priests may howl at you, “ He that believeth not
shall be damned” but you may cheerfully and
kindly reply, “ We know that we have passed from
death unto life, because we love our brethren.”
J. Wertheimer & Co., Printers, Circus Place, Finsbury Circus.
i*
�
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
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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
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
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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
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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
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Dogma versus morality: a reply to Church Congress
Creator
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Voysey, Charles
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 12 p. ; 21 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Preached at Healaugh, Sunday morning, October 21st, 1866. Printed by Wertheimer & Co., Finsbury Circus, London.
Publisher
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Trubner and Co.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1866
Identifier
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G5259
Subject
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Ethics
Rights
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<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 (Dogma versus morality: a reply to Church Congress), 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>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Conway Tracts
Religion and Morality