LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 'Received Accessions No. ^^^^ Class No. Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/ethicaorethicsofOOIaurrich ETHICA OR THE ETHICS OF REASON BY SCOTUS NOVANTICUS AUTHOR OF "METAPHYSICA NOVA ET VETUSTA SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND EXTENDED 'TJ'iriVERSIT •SIPO ^^ WILLIAMS AND NOEGATE 14 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON AND 20 SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH 1891 /3 J/ ^^63 PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. The following treatise, which is an analysis of the nature and growth of the ethical in man, is the complement of Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta. Accordingly the argument presumes through- out that the reader has perused that work. Ethics without psychology is empty : without Metaphysics it cannot be Science. I have to thank the critics of the Metaphysica for the reception accorded to it. There is only one remark which, as coming from an eminent philosopher, I would here advert to. He says in a letter to me that there can be no objection to the term *'Will," as I use it, if taken for ''Reason in activity." My position, however, is that Reason is itself the product of Will ; that the moments of Will constitute Reason. Kant's Vorstellung of Man is ''a rational being endowed with Will." The Metaphysica regards fv Preface to First Edition, him as "a being endowed with Will, and Ifience rational." In this, as in the former treatise, I have laboured to be succinct, avoiding seductive bye- paths of controversy as much as possible, with a view to concentrate attention on the main line of argument. February 1885. PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION. In this edition I have elaborated the argument more fully, and correlated it more frequently with the book entitled Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta. Rhetorical expressions have been excised as having no rightful place in a treatise which aims at being scientific. Certain chap- ters have been inserted here and there — e.g. on Politics, though I wish to guard myself by saying that on this perplexing subject I speak only from the ethical point of view. S. S. LAUEIE. University of Edinburgh, October 1891. CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chap. I.— Ideas Generally— Moral Ideas and their Realisation in Conduct — Questions put ... 4 Chap. II.— Impulse to Realise the Good — Subjective Feeling in Relation to the Good .... 8 Chap. III. — The End of Man is Self-Realtsation — Know- ledge OF Man Necessary to a Definition of this . 12 Chap. IV. — Notion and Ideas— Knowt:.edge of Man — His Dual Nature : (a) The Attuent Man, or, Empirical Self; (6) The Rational Man ...._. 20 Chap. V.— The Good Will 27 Chap. VI.— Will-Reason does not bo : it only aots . 29 Chap, VII. — Man as an Object of Investigation — He has to Constitute his own Ethical Organism- Harmony AND the Good 32 Chap. VIII. — Supreme End is the Ego itself, and is Formal — The Criterion of the Real End is Har- mony IN Feeling 36 Chap. IX.— The Object of Human Volition is Reason- given Law ; for Harmony is Possible only through Law 42 Chap. X. — Rationality the Ground of the Possibility OF Morality — Instrumentary Mediation— Conscious Mediate Ends 48 vi Contents. PAG ■Chap. XI. — Self-Conscious Ends of Volition are always Subjective — Procedure of Reason in Determining Ends— The Legislative and Executive ... 54 Chap. XIL— Mediation of Will through Self-conscious Ends does not itself Constitute Morality ... 61 €hap. XIII. — The Discrimination of the Law of Self- realisation OR THE Good, the Good being Con- formity TO Law — Intuitionism — Hedonism— Relation of State to Persons 63 Chap. XIV, — The End or Good for Man being Law in Sensibility, the Doctrine here Expounded is not Subjective Eud^monism 72 Chap. XV. — Does Law Instruct us to Ends? — Intuition- ism AND Kant 74 Chap. XVI. — Law is Implicit in the Idea or End . . 84 Chap. XVII. — Must — Categorical Imperative — Law — Ought — Obligation or Duty — Absoluteness of Law — Supports of Law — Law is Reason- Sprung . . 89 Chap. XVIII. — It is the Moral Law and Duty to it that Man seeks 97 Chap. XIX.— The End of Man, Formal and Real: (1) The Supreme Formal End .• (2) The Supreme Real End . 102 Chap. XX. — The Law (or Conditions of Harmony) in the Sphere of Appetition . . . . . .114 Chap. XXI. — The Altruistic Emotions— Terminal and End— Quality and Quantity Generally, Discussed — Idea in Relations 130 Chap. XXII. — Altruistic Emotions {continued)— Quaistity in its Specific Relation to Benevolence — The Idea OF Humanity 147 Contents, vii PAGE Chap. XXIII. — Altruistic Emotions — The Idea in Rela- tions—Negative Justice — Basis of Society — Hedon- ism AND Externalism 156^ Chap. XXIV. — Altruistic Emotions and Justice (i?e- capitulation). Hedonism as Criterion . . . .16^ Chap. XXV. — Positive Justice — Benevolence as a Virtue— Relative Obligations 181 Chap. XXVI. — The Ethical Ideal and Relative Obliga- tions 188 Chap. XXVII.— Positive Justice in the State with Re- ference TO Limits of State Action .... 197 Chap. XXVIII. — State Action in Relation to the Ethical Ideal , . 210 Chap. XXIX. — Emotions of Reason 234 Chap. XXX. — Retrospect and Summary .... 238 Chap. XXXI. — Virtue or Mediation through Pain . 253- Chap. XXXII.— The Moral Sense ..... 259- Chap. XXXIII. — The Sanctions of the Moral Act, inner AND OUTER 268- Chap. XXXIV.— Subjective and Objective Ethics — Self- reference of the Moral Act 273^ Chap. XXXV.— The Chief Good 284 Chap. XXXVI. —Law in its Twofold Sense— Moral Order 289 Chap. XXXVII. — Naturalism and the Idea . . . 292 Chap. XXXVIIL— Free- Will 298 Chap. XXXIX.— Is the Will always Good? ... 327 Chap. XL. — Historical Ethics 33^ Survey and Conclusion 34ft ETHICA. INTRODUCTION. In the book which preceded this, the analysis of the knowing energy led us out of the ego to a universal standpoint. The a 'priori categories were seen to con- stitute the spiritual or thought reality of all that exists, while the a posteriori categories instructed us in the phenomenal forms of existence in all their infinite variety. These phenomenal forms constitute one side of a veritable dualism — not given to us at all as opposed to the spiritual or thought ground, but merely as its modus operandi. To this conclusion — a monistic dualism — we were forced, not as a hypothetical specu- lation, but as the actual fact yielded to us by an analysis of knowing. From this universal standpoint we may now turn round and look on Man ah extra, regarding him as one organic unit in the midst of an infinite number of units like and unlike himself, and as actually related to all through a continual and necessary reciprocity. It is because we are men that the organic unit Man is of surpassing interest to us ; but even if we were not men, but something greater, that interest A 2 Ethica, would still exist because of man's high position in the scale of organisms, and because of those distinc- tive peculiarities which seem to constitute him, both in a material and a spiritual sense, a kind of microcosm. If our examination of him were entirely ah extra, we should be compelled to construct an account of him by watching his movements — we should be limited to what a recent writer has called ejects. But however accurate and complete might be our summary of his ejects, it is evident that we should still be restricted in our inter- pretation of these by our capacity for understanding the motive forces which caused them. This would be pos- sible only to the extent to which we could reproduce in ourselves (of whatsoever sort our nature might be) a consciousness of these motive forces; in other words, our knowledge would be dependent on our capacity for sympathy. Through ourselves and our own capacities, accordingly, would knowledge of the object Man be alone possible. For a man to render any account of Man, therefore, otherwise than through his own Subject, is impossible : nor could any other Intelligence render an account, unless its own nature comprehended the nature of Man within itself. It is Man who has to render an account of Man : his experimental laboratoiy is himself, and his instrument of observation and dissecting-knife is in his own self- consciousness. But just as the observer in the field of Biology is not content with the examination of an indi- vidual of a species and is always open to the observed results of other inquirers ; so, both the metaphysician Introduction. 3 and the psychologist will go beyond themselves, and test and verify their conclusions by the observations which other analysts in the same field have made, and by the general way in which the subject of investigation behaves in various conditions normal and abnormal. And this he will do even when his analysis has for its aim the discovery of the universal and necessary. Still more will he look outside himself if he has to give an account of Man, not merely as a knowing being, but in his concrete relations to other men and to the finite world in which he is placed. Here, contemporary observation of the actual and the study of historical records are necessary to accurate analysis and adequate generalisation. But still, even in the sphere of concrete relations in which the environment and history of man count for so much, the analyst is ultimately driven back to his own self-consciousness for the interpretation of all he sees. What is in Man now was in him poten- tially from the first. Even the evolutionary moralist assumes that he is from the first dealing with Man, not with those prior manifestations of animal life which result in Man. We are supposed to have the specific entity Man before us before we begin to speak of morality and of Ends, either as analysts or as historians.^ ^ Even in the hands of Mr. Spencer, ethical evolution is the evolution of what is already in Man as germ from the beginning. The whole so-called evolutionary process is with him simply the unfolding of the categories of quantity in respect of what is already, from the first, present in a definite, specific form. Is this Evolution at all in the Darwinian sense ? Ethica. CHAP. I. — IDEAS GENERALLY — MORAL IDEAS AND THEIR REALISATION IN CONDUCT— QUESTIONS PUT. The use and abuse of the word Idea is a common- place of philosophy. As the term has to be employed in this discussion in its application to inner feeling, it is incumbent on me to explain in what sense I use it. Idea may mean merely the memory or image of what has once been a presentation to consciousness ; or it may mean the hypostasised geneiic concept ; or it may be used to denote the differentiated essence of a com- plex. Let me begin at the beginning. In a large number of particular acts I experience a feeling which is the same in each, e.g., hunger. I have a specific desire or craving which I recognise as the same, how- ever often or in whatever circumstances it is experi- enced. There is thus a feeling prehended by my will (cognised) as distinct from other feelings but the same in many particular experiences, and this feeling, as thus held before consciousness as a general when the par- ticular feeling is absent, may be called the idea of hunger. So with the idea of the feeling of Goodwill or Love (in the philosophical sense) ; the idea of Jus- tice ; of Purity ; of Holiness, or any of the numerous vices or virtues. In the primary or simple feelings such as hunger or Ideas generally. 5 goodwill, the idea is also, at the same time, the essence — that whereby the feeling is what it is in its differen- tiation from other things. So also, when we have a moral complex present to us, the idea lies in the differentiation of one complex from another, and is often used in the sense of definition ; e.g., the idea of holiness = 0;, of justice = ^', X being an attempt to make explicit in words the precise qualitative determination which constitutes the feeling or virtue or sentiment we are dealing with. In this sense the word Idea must inevitably be in common use in all ethical investigation. In the sphere of mere Feeling there is no Morality. But the primary feelings — which are impulses to do something — are contemplated and analysed by reason, and certain ideas which are complexes are thus, in the course of experience, recognised as legitimate motives of the good will : e.g., Benevolence, Courage, Fortitude, Justice, Integrity, Purity, Holiness, etc. These are by way of distinction called moral ideas (sentiments, vir- tues), their opposites being called vices, of which also, as has been indicated above, w^e may, and do, have ideas. When I use the phrase " moral ideas," I mean those ideas which, in common philosophical parlance, as well as by the consensus of society, are the recognised legiti- mate motives of a will which is good. In the sphere of cognition of the external we say, when we have accurately seen what is to be seen, that the affirmation of what we have accurately {dare et clis- 6 Ethic a. tincte) seen is a true affirmation or an affirmation of the truth. In the subjective sphere of feeling, while not excluding the predication of trueness, we are conscious of a new element in the truth ; and this is popularly called the "good." This peculiarity seems to arise, largely at least, out of the fact that feelings are in- volved, and that they issue, or may issue, in the doing of something, while pure reason merely affirms. Thus in the practical domain — the domain of conduct, as opposed to the speculative — the truth is the truth of the affirmed motive, and the good in conduct is the willing of the truth. Now, however it may be explained, there is no doubt of the fact that we have a feeling of the obligatoriness of moral ideas as motives, and if we act in negation of them, we are conscious that we have acted wrongly ; we are conscious, also, of inner self-contradiction ; and further, that we have broken a law to which we owed service. Three questions thus arise — (1) On what grounds do we constitute an idea a moral idea, i.e. an idea which it is desirable to make actual in conduct ? (2) On what grounds do we constitute this moral idea obligatory as motive of conduct? and (3) What is the nature of the obligation ? The correct philosophical use of the term " idea " is when we apply it to a complex. The elements of all complexes have an infinite number of relations positive and negative, and taken as a whole we call a completed Questions put. 7 consciousness of the total the notion of the object. But this complex is determined thus and not otherwise, and to this differentiating determination all the ele- ments in the notion and thing are subordinated. This is the idea in the notion or thing, and, as idea, it governs and must govern the total complex, for the idea is also the end or purpose in the thing. Etkica. CHAP. II. — IMPULSE TO REALISE THE GOOD — SUBJECTIVE FEELING IN RELATION TO THE GOOD. Just as man speculative seeks for truth as content of his will -reason, so does man practical seek for truth as content of his will-reason ; and the truth he seeks is the good content of his will in volition. The will as a free self-determining activity is always a 'priori in search of truth in the theoretical sphere ; it cannot help itself, for this is its essence — a free activity (stimulated by the form of end) in search of ideas and the Idea: and in the practical sphere it is similarly always, through the ages, in search of Good or " The Good " for its filling. This a priori energy of reason (which, as conscious movement of will towards end, is rightly called "purpose") is restless, insatiable, and unappeasable, except in a completion which by the very conditions of finite thinking can never be attained. The truth of doing is the affirmation of a moral idea — that complex of feeling which constitutes the legitimate content of will in willing^ or volition. How we ascertain this truth of doing is a question of the philosophy of Ethics ; but this is clear, that inasmuch as it is " doing " that we are concerned with, any attempt to ascertain the truth of doing must compre- hend in its range the perception of the effects produced ^ The distinction between will and willing will be considered in the sequel. Impulse to realise the Good, 9 by the doing. And this for the simple reason that (to hegin with, for we are of course not speaking of trans- mitted experience) I can have no knowledge of the real character of a volition till it completes itself It is not till then before me, as act and fact. This is all the truth there is in sensational, or superficial, externalism. And yet it is not by the external effects that I deter- mine the truth and goodness of a volition, or rather of the motive which is its content, but by the effect of those effects on me, the doer. The ultimate test then of the character of a volition — its goodness or badness — is subjective. Not subjective in the sense of indivi- dual, for the subject is not a man but Man ; and, accordingly, the test may be said in its relation to indi- vidual men to be objective. Before passing on, let me repeat that the moral idea is such a content of the will in volition as I have found true, good, legitimate in the effect on me (^.e. on Man, in so far as I can read, interpret, and define him) of its effects. For example : if the rude barbarian found that an act of goodwill to his fellows produced pain to him- self (if that be a possible conception), the actualising of his desire to be kind would defeat itself. The volition as completed would not return to himself to satisfy the motive desire which initiated the volition. It would be a self-contradiction. By the nature of the case also, pain produced in his fellows as the visible result of his deed could not excite pleasure in him — that kind of pleasure which we call the feeling or emotion of good- will. It is the pleasure which is excited in himself lo Etkica, through the pleasing effects of his volition which satis- fies the demand of the emotion, and makes it an emo- tion worth repeating. So with other feelings. And this is what I mean by saying that it is the effect on himself of the visible effects of his volition that consti- tutes the desirableness of the volition to the agent. His pleasure is through the pleasure of others ; but it is none the less his pleasure. To say, however, that he does the kind act for the sake of the pleasure to himself is an inference not justified by what has actually taken place in his consciousness. This point is of much importance in ethical discussions, and will be after- wards considered. In fine, a man is a complex of various feelings, the activity of some of which terminates in himself (only indirectly affecting his fellow-men), while the activity of others passes out to men, before returning to himself. In both alike he has to see their completion in their effects before he can be fully conscious of them, or in any sense be said to know them ; but, in both alike, it is the effect of the completion of the feeling (call it desire or emotion) on himself that determines him to the repe- tition of the volition as a desirable volition and is the basis of his judgment of the character of the volition.^ We are at present speaking of man as a bundle of feel- ings of various kinds — a mere attuent subject-conscious- ness — prior to the emergence of will-reason. And it 1 The sensational and evolutionary moralist is always fixing his attention on overt acts and their consequences : but these are effects only of certain causal impulses or forces within the man, and arising out of the constitution of his organism as certainly as the act of a fly-catcher or a sea-anemone. Subjective Feeling, 1 1 follows from what I have said that if man were merely an attuent consciousness, however superior he might be to other animals, his conduct would be determined by particular feelings alone, and any moral life for such a being (if such may be imagined) would be subjective eudsemonism in the full sense of subjective indivi- dualism. His life would be a succession of feelings in a series unregulated. The only difference between such a being {e.g., a horse or an ape) and man is, according to certain ethical theorists, that the former could not work a sum, and so secure the maximum of pleasurable sensations. But man is not merely attuent : he is a reason ; and the change, if not revolution, which this fact causes in our point of view has in the sequel to be considered. This much we may here curtly say by anticipation, that the function of reason in the practical or moral sphere is the knowledge and the regulation of the complex aggregate of feeling which impels a man to will and to do within the sphere of his own organism, or the larger organism of society as reflected in himself. Further, by way of anticipation, let me say : The central fact of reason is the central fact of Ethics : and that central fact is Will, and its movement towards completion in end as actualised in volition. As regards knowledge : end is all the while to-hand in things and has simply to be detected ; in ethics end is projected as a universal for the containing of the particular, whicli universal contains the truth of the individual as a rational self-directing organism. 1 2 Ethica, CHAP. III. — THE END OF MAN IS SELF-REALISATION — KNOWLEDGE OF MAN NECESSARY TO A DEFINITION OF THIS. For ages Man gropes, only gradually and painfully finding his way to the law of his life ; but the reflective moralist of any period is justified in trying to show what it is that man has been doing, what he has been striving more or less consciously to become. He takes him as he now is, but he does so in order that he may bring into view the end he has been seeking and the inner process of the search. It is only when the human race has advanced a con- siderable way in developing its capacities in an uncon- scious manner that the reflective question suggests itself, " What, after all, is the end or purpose of this being of ours — the Good for it ?" The answer is neces- sarily given in general terms, such as Happiness, Plea- sure, Perfection, Virtue, Benevolence (for the last I take to be the answer of the universalistic utilitarian or Hedonist, if it has to be given in one word). Such answers give little information. Of all the attempted answers the best, I think, is one which looks at man ab extra simply as an organic intelligent unit, and also as a unit of the larger organism of society, and which, at the The End of Man is Self-realisation. 1 3 same time, least of all hegs a solution of ethical questions. That answer is, the Good for man is Self-realisation. In other words, Man lives to fulfil himself, to develop in activity all his powers, and this in their most excel- lent activity. Altruism is not his end, save in so far as altruism is embraced within the conditions of Egoistic completeness. But when we have said this we have said no more than can be said, and is said, of every other organism. A phrase so generalised provides ns with no guidance for the conduct of life. We have still to ascertain wherein that self-realisation consists, and what are its conditions. Nor can we be said to receive much illumination when we are told that we are to further in ourselves a good will, or a will in union with the Good. No one I suppose doubts that the ethical life for each man in his striving for self-realisation is such a life as shall promote the development of human capacities and possibilities, and so further " the Good for himself and the race." But when this has been said, we are brought only to the threshold of the subject, and are left help- lessly in the hands of vague and generalised exhorta- tions which teach us nothing, save the fact that the truly good will is always seeking and aspiring, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is only in so far as man is reason that he ever does, or can, seek or aspire. It may be confidently said, that the persistent and affected ignoring of psychology by a certain school will not abolish psychology in ethics. One may show (and 1 4 Ethica. in the former treatise I have endeavoured to show) the metaphysical unity of the process we call intelligisiug ; but none the less are there different movements in that process, different attitudes of the will-process to the subject-matter with which it deals, which justify us in talking abstractly of the separate powers of Perception, Judgment, and Eeasoning. If this be so even of the formal intelligence, which unquestionably is a unity, how much more are we required to treat the whole man — especially in the domain of Eeeling where he is an aggregate of different kinds of desires and emo- tions — as a complex of potential impulses pushing him hither and thither in his blind groping after a true self- realisation. Even Spinoza {Be Em. Int.) says that we must " have an exact knowledge of the nature which we desire to perfect, and also know as much as possible of nature in general." If a man were a mere trumpet (and his being con- scious that he was a trumpet would not alter the case except for the worse) through which the eternal con- sciousness blows, making discord for thousands of years in a striving, more or less successful, to find a final melody, we might then, perhaps, accept vague surmises as to the potentialities and final destiny of our race. But if man be, as we believe him to be, a distinct and differentiated personality cast upon this planet for a few years to realise that personality, we cannot, when we are asked to tell him his duty, decline to consider him as a complex organism material, moral, and intel- lectual, and to endeavour by a consideration of that Knowledge of Man. 15 organism to find the law of it. We cannot content ourselves with vague or subtle discussions of tendency and of the historical evolution of the spiritual life in man's strivings after the good, however interesting and instructive such discussions may be. For our function is not that of reflective moralisers, to which moralising there is no limit except the temporary boards of a book, but of analytic and constructive moralists. What we desire to see into is the science of man, that we may ascertain and determine the law for him : nor does it seem to me possible even to begin to lay the founda- tions of this supreme science without first inquiring into the nature of the complex being we are dealing with, and the inter-relations of the various constituents of his life, inner and outer. The deeds, customs, laws, sayings, and ideals of man in the past are only so much material accumulated for the scientific investigator which, aided by the experiences of a man in his own person and in the acts of his contemporaries, enables him to find his way to the truth about Man and the pur- pose of his life. The definition of " Man " must contain the whole science of ethics in so far as it is deductive and necessary ; but we have to look further. The practical issue of the unscientific treatment just referred to exposes its inadequacy. For when I come to ask, " What ought I, a man, to do ? " both the neo-utilitarian and the philosophers who sing the Eternal Consciousness, have substantially the same answer — " Promote what has hem ' good ' in its effects and initiate what is likely to be good in its effects." 1 6 Ethica. By all means ; but what is good — the good for man ? The criterion of a good motive, we are told, is that which is good in its effects. But must I not further ask — " Are the effects you call good, really, after all, good ? What is the criterion of that which is good in its effects ? " Is not the criterion man himself ? Surely then, the first question of all is this — " What is man ? What constitutes good for him ? " i.e. What makes him as a rational and feeling organism all that he may be — all that he ought to be? When I have ascertained this, I am then, and only then, in a position to promote that good, for only then do I know what that good or well-being is. And when I have ascei- tained it, the answer to the further question, whether I, an individual, shall promote it or not, will depend entirely on my caprice, and be neither moral nor immoral, unless I can show that the conditions of my self-realisation — the law of my organism — reqidre that I shall do it. It is law, then, and the law of a particular organism that the student of the science of man seeks. Again, were we asked to say wherein the highest life for man consists, we should probably fail to find a better answer than that given by Aristotle — a life according to virtue, in the Greek sense of excellence. The use, in the most excellent way, of all a man's capacities is as good a formulation of an answer to the general question as any other we are likely to find. Nay, we may go even further with Aristotle, and hold, with certain qualifications, that the highest ex- Knowledge of Man, 1 7 cellence is the excellence of the most excellent thing in man, viz., Eeason, and that the highest life conse- quently is philosophic contemplation — substantially also Spinoza's answer. But this is no solution of the ethical question which has to do with the conduct of life in all its manifold relations. In the meantime we may say that self-realisation, in any adequate meaning, must, of course, comprehend Aristotle's ethical ends : for self-realisation is possible only through the excel- lent activity of all that is most excellent in man. By common consent this is the highest life for man. But when we have said this, we have not answered, I re- peat, the ethical question, either in its philosophy or in its practical relations. We seek for a law in those relations of human life which is universal, which is common to the savage and the sage, and which, setting aside special excellences of the philosophic and aesthetic life as always desirable, and in truth the ultimate and ideal function of man, is supreme over all, — a law of such a kind that the poorest and the rudest may be raised through it in their daily round of activity to a higher level in the scale of being than that of a devotee of philosophy and art who should fall short of the fulfilment of the law. The philosopher, the theosophic mystic, the scientific investigator, and the artist may lead a life on a higher rational plane than the humble slave, and yet the latter may, notwithstanding, be their moral and spiritual superior. This is a truism; but it is a truism which merits our attention as ethical inquirers, for it limits B 1 8 Ethica. and restricts the range of investigation mainly to those conditions whereby alone a man can, as an ethical being, fulfil himself, whatever may be his special activities or however lofty these may be. It is not to be doubted, that whatever disciplines a man's intelligence and extends the range of his vision, whatever exalts him through art, science, or religion above the material interests of living, makes the ethical life more possible for him, and imparts, further, a certain dignity, beauty, and colour to that life ; but none of these things, nor all of them together, constitute by themselves the ethical life. It is, of course, assumed that to the ethical life a certain amount of intellectual activity is necessary, as also are certain material conditions ; but it is not much of these that is wanted to enable a man to accomplish his moral and spiritual destiny. To enable a man to accomplish this destiny, however, it is essential that he be inspired with the ethical purpose of life: and, as it is not life in general, but his spiritual man-life that has to be directed to its true ends, it is impossible to ascertain its law without knowing its nature. We conclude, therefore, that if we desire to be able to speak intelligently of either man or mollusc, we must first know the man or the mollusc, and regard each as an individual organ- ism, having certain innate capacities, aptitudes, and ends, which it seeks to fulfil, and which for it is the Good. Now, the " good " of a thing is the End of that thing, and the End is the " good " for it. The end of every existence is its own realisation, for only so can Knowledge of Man. 1 9 it live. The nature and conditions of self-realisation for Man are to be found in his nature, and in his rela- tions to the rest of creation. By self-realisation (as may be gathered from the pre- vious treatise) I mean realisation of self hy self. 20 Ethica. CHAP. IV. — NOTION AND IDEAS — KNOWLEDGE OF MAN — HIS DUAL NATURE : (a) THE ATTUENT MAN : (&) THE RATIONAL MAN. When we say that it is necessary to know man in all his various activities, potential and actual, if we would find the law of his life, we are not to be supposed to hold that man, as we know him in these days, is the man of ten thousand years ago. We have been in the reflective stage for three thousand years at least ; but, even prior to that, men were exercising their activities in accordance with their needs and environ- ment, and feeling their way through action to a knowledge of their own nature, their own powers, possibilities, and ends. The philosopher reflects, and endeavours to analyse and interpret what has been, and now is, going on within men ; and this reflective activity is essential to the progress of mankind beyond a certain stage, apart from its interest as a mere matter of science. But while the thinker is very far from supposing that any analysis he may present of the activities of man as he now is, was the conscious possession of men in primitive ages, he yet maintains that these activities were already there in man as man, and were gradually working their way through the experiences of life to a clear self-definition and to explicit consciousness. Notion and Idea, 2 1 When, therefore, a fresh attempt is made to solve certain ethical questions and man's self-relation to the aggregate of feelings and energies which go to consti- tute him, the writer does not pretend to do more, in analysing man as he is now, than attempt to reveal the process of the moral life as that process has been going on from the first and will continue to the last. When we turn our eyes on man as an object of investigation, our procedure in endeavouring to know him is, I have said, the same as our procedure in endea- vouring to know anything else. We desire to ascertain the Notion and the Idea of the object Man. The notion of a thing we previously found to be that which contains all its positive and constitutive elements and relations : the idea we found to be those relations in the notion which negated all else and were thus dif- ferentiating. We might put it thus : the notion is that whereby a thing is what it is, and the idea, which is contained within the sphere of the notion, is the emphasising of the negative relations to all else by the affirmation of a positive, and may be said to be that without which the thing would not be what it is. To know the total function of any organism it is necessary to know it in its notion : to know it in its ultimate or supreme function it is necessary to know and determine its idea — be the object plant, animal, or man. The notion of man contains many things. Apart from his animal organism and all the processes implied 2 2 Ethica. in this, he is, from the beginning, an aggregate of feel- ings and emotions and energies. The idea of man, on the other hand, is simple. As an attuent consciousness man is slave to an infinite variety and series of feelings. This aggregate of feelings is the Bml in man. As attuent merely, he is an offspring of nature, a part of nature, which moves in him and sways him hither and thither. He is a slave of nature protected only by the coercive forces of Love and Aversion (Pleasure and Pain). This is the empirical subject or individual. The idea of man, his differentiating and negating positive characteristic, is will and its movements which together constitute reason, the initial act being (logi- cally) the subsuming of the empirical subject, thereby transforming it into Personality or Ego. This sums the Formal in man. The real and the formal together constitute the notion. Hence the dual nature of man. The universal spirit works in his conscious subject through feeling, but is tied down, so to speak, to the conditions of the subject, and manifests itself in a phenomenal series. The same spirit finally liberates itself by a new movement within the conscious subject whereby the subject emerges from itself as will. This will is freedom ; and by and through it self-consciousness or free personality is constituted. This differentiate is the idea of the complex entity Man and, as such, it governs jure divino all the other ele- ments in the Notion. The Attuent Man, 23 {a) The Attuent Man {or empirical self). We have seen^ the attuent man as the subject of impressions on outer sense (the inner sense having been only casually adverted to) ; and we have seen what he does with these impressions. We have now to regard him as an organism within which there arise feelings, impulses, and potencies of which the same subject is the recipient. The outer impressions reach us in infinite variety, but the character of the facts they convey can be generalised ; and this is done in what are called a posteriori categories as these may be conceived prior to the transforming presence of will-reason in the subject of these impressions. So with inner feelings. To show to what extent these a posteriori categories are applic- able to inner feeling, and how far the difference in the subject-matter makes that application impossible, is be- yond the scope of the present treatise. But this at least we can discern, that the feelings arise in the subject as different one from the other ; and, speaking generally, that the categories of quantity, quality, and relation are applicable to the perception and co-ordination of them. The category of Quantity as applied to feelings is intensity (more or less), extensity, and duration ; Quality is likeness or unlikeness or kind ; while Eela- tion is determined by quantity and quality, and is illus- trated in the possibility or impossibility of co-existence in time. 1 It is necessary to assume here, and indeed throughout, a know- ledge of the former Treatise by me. 24 Ethica. The feelings have been variously named impulses, propensions, desires, emotions. They are all impulses of some kind. It is better, I think, to reserve the term " emotion " for those feelings which have not directly to do with nutrition, propagation, and self-preservation — in other words, with man as a material organism con- cerned in the preservation of his material life. To render a complete account of the feelings is not here attempted, nor, indeed, is it necessary to the solu- tion of questions in the philosophy of ethics. To dis- criminate and classify them, and to separate the primary and simple from the complex, is the task of empirical psychology. We may say generally, however, that these stirrings or forces of nature in the attuent subject are : — Propensions or desires for nutrition. „ „ propagation, power. Feelings of fear. „ daring. „ love of activity. „ love of rest. Vague sympathy or a feeling of community of being. Emotion of the love of others. „ „ love of the love of others. It will be seen that man shares all these elements of his constitution with the lower animals. These desires and emotions seldom enter singly into any volition : they are constantly complicated one with another, and in a treatise on morality this would have to be con- The Rational Man, 25 stantly present to our minds ; but in our investigation into the philosophy of morals their single action is all that need occupy our attention. (&) The Rational Man. Will, emerging in the form reason or as dialectic, turns on the subject and discriminates and names the inner data of feeling which till then had been only vaguely attuited, as in the case of animals. But just as reason brings itself into the interpreta- tion of the presentations of outer sense, so does it bring itself into the domain of inner feeling; and this not merely as a discriminator, co-ordinator, and regulator of what is already there, but as itself a constituent element in the feelings. Even the pure act of reason- ing becomes, after it has been experienced, an emotion. Again, the mere feeling of the attuent subject as a subject becomes transformed into the consciousness, and with this into the emotion, of personality, giving rise to a sense of individual rights. Then, the action of reason on the primary feelings and their relation to personality on one side and to the environment of the person on the other, gives rise to new emotions which, though really complex, present themselves to the ordinary consciousness as simple. When a primary feeling has been thus ration- alised under the influences above mentioned, we call it a sentiment or moral idea. The predicate " moral " is more commonly confined to those sentiments or ideas ^>^ OF THE 26 Ethica. which reason has ascertained to be right and good, that is to say truly promotive of the being of man in all his relations. Thus it is that we have, in rela- tion to the person, the moral ideas of Integrity, of Temperance, of Fortitude, of Perseverance, of Courage, of Purity, of Holiness ; and in relation to environment, the sentiment or moral idea of Benevolence (the love of others affirmed by reason as right and good), the Love of the love of others (approbation, reputation, fame, etc.), Justice, with all the social virtues which flow from it — such as Honesty, Truthfulness, and that consideration for the feelings of others which we may call Courtesy. A complex of the love of power and the love of reputation gives Ambition; and so forth. Fear, again, directed to an object of reason becomes reverence, awe, devotion, and also, one may say, humility in the Christian sense, as opposed to craven servility which is a purely animal feeling. An exposition and analysis of these and other complex states would be a natural history of the Passions, — full of interest in itself, and still more in its relation to the formation of character. But enough has been said for our purposes here. The Good Will. 27 CHAP. V. — THE GOOD WILL. 1 ASK the question here simply as a psychologist. What do we find the good will to be as a matter of fact when we consult our own conscious experience and study that of other men ? The good will is that will which habitually subsumes moral ideas as motives of its willing or volition. These ideas must be concrete in so far as they are content of formal will-reason ; and they will, further, certainly be found to promote the welfare of man and men. But, as ideas, they have lost a clear knowledge of their own history. They exist in the civilised man as part of his mental furniture, and constitute objects of spiritual contemplation as things of reason and as the end, and therefore motive, of all moral striving. They thus become for a self-conscious reason an absolute good. At the same time these ideas can be traced to their origins and be shown to be founded in real relations. Were it not so, life in them, which is the life of the good will, and therefore the perfect life, could not be a life of active virtue : it could not be the Christian, but only the Buddhistic, life. To suppose, however, that because these moral and spiritual ideas rise out of the real, through the operation of reason, they are some- 28 Ethica. how tarnished and their absoluteness destroyed, is a banality of speculation. The whole process in constituting moral ideas is precisely the same as in constituting ideas of other concrete relations that are not moral. All possible external presentations to the consciousness of man are taken up by the will-reason, and as thus held in self- consciousness, are interpreted in and through the cate- gories, and having been interpreted, they are then given out in terms of thought. Thought is the truth of things. Precisely in the same way all possible data of inner feeling which suggest and stimulate volition have to be taken up, and the volition has to effect itself in terms of thought if it is to be right and good volition. . The Socratic doctrine, in so far as it made knowledge a necessary basis for all action that can be strictly called moral, was correct : the inference, on the other hand, that a distinct perception of the right and good made it impossible to do anything save the right and good ignores the whole field of impulse, and the relation of intelligence to doing which is treated in the next chapter. In short, it confounds Will and willing. The sum of the matter is, that when will-reason has rendered an account of feeling and its external relations in terms of thought, it affirms the True; when it sub- sumes the true as motive of volition, it actualises the Good. It is a good will. In both cases alike the real may be said to have become identified with the Ego ; in the one case for affirmation, in the other for actualisation. Will-reason does not do it : it only acts. 29 CHAP. VI. — WILL-REASON DOES NOT do : IT ONLY acts. The Will-reason exhibits itself in the search for truth and it exhausts itself in the affirmation of truth. The energies and impulses of the attuent or animal man thereafter come into operation, and, supported by feel- ings generated by reason (of which in the sequel), carry thought out into the region of matter and the pheno- menal, to which region indeed belongs all feeling. The state of the case seems to be this : Will-reason affirms, and it does so by subsuming the object — i.e. the moral idea (not into the attuent subject, but) into the personality or ego. When the attuent subject becomes endowed with will, its first silent act is, through will, to subsume itself and so constitute personality or ego. Other acts of percipience presume this as the logical prius of all. With the completed perceptions which follow, there arises an instinctive necessity to urge the percepts into the sphere of the phenomenal — to externalise again that which has been subsumed into identity with the Ego. This external- isation is utterance (o^^^erance) or Speech. Now all the propensions, desires, and primary emotions which go to constitute the attuent subject, and which we share with animals, also seek external- isation, but in another way. The affirmation, whether 30 Ethic a, inner or uttered, does not exhaust the feeling-energy in it until it has forced the individual to do something in the region of the phenomenal, to be himself a visible and palpable force among other forces. In so far as these attuent feelings and incitations externalise themselves without the intervention of the will-reason, they are either immoral or (at best) non-moral. They are the deeds of the attuent subject, not of the person. The will-reason seeks and finds a certain content of volition, affirms it as end, law, and motive. The personality subsumes this into itself and the willing or volition follows. But will is not to be confounded with willing or volition. Will exhausts itself in the affirma- tion of idea, motive, and law ; but the energy which gives effect to the will is an energy drawn from the domain of feeling — that particular feeling or complex of feelings which forms the matter of the motive and law which have been affirmed. When, for example, I have affirmed and subsumed as right and law into my personality, a motive of benevolence, will-reason and personality have done their work. At least, any further work is the spiritual concentration of will (or of the personality in so far as it is will) on the motive- end ; ^ but the actual willing, the passing of the will into deed (which I call volition), is entirely the dis- charge of the emotion of benevolence which belongs to me, not as a rational, but as a merely attuent conscious- ness, supported, however, by an emotion of reason. Will, then, as pure reason and as a constitutive ^ This is further explained in the sequel. Will-reason does not do it : it only acts, 3 1 element of personality, ads in the affirmation of the idea or true end. I say constitutive element ; for per- sonality is not simple ; nor is will an isolated simple entity, but initiation of a movement (a moment in a movement) which contains End and Process as well as Kinetic initiation.^ I say this Personality of which will is only one moment acts and that is all : but the doing or externalisation at the bidding of will-reason is left to the feelings and emotions which make the attuent man and which are inextricably involved in the matter and energy of the physical universe, aided (as will be afterwards explained) by the emotions generated by reason itself. Thus pure will, as deter- mining reason, brings no new energy (in the physical sense) into the world of the phenomenal; it simply regulates and commands the direction in which physi- cal energy is to be discharged : in other words, imposes rule or law on sensibility, just as it imposes (in the sense of discriminating and interpreting) rule and law on the material of outer sensation. ^ Vid, previous Treatise. Ethica. CHAP. VII. — MAN AS AN OBJECT OF INVESTIGATION: HE HAS TO CONSTITUTE HIS OWN ETHICAL ORGANISM — HARMONY AND THE GOOD. An external organic object of sense realises itself through certain dynamical relations of elements which are effected in it and for it by the necessary rela- tions and sequences of nature. When the object, being now on a higher plane of existence, is a conscious organic object, we find that it realises itself, in so far as it is conscious, through certain elements in itself which we call feelings — the aggregate of which in the unity of the subject constitutes that subject, in so far as it is conscious. These feelings are partly external excitations, partly inner incitations, if we look to the source of them. The conscious object (now also, however, a subject entity) attains to its realisation through the harmonious play of these feelings, as accomplished in it ; for it is still in subjection to the necessary laws of nature. Pain and Pleasure determine it thus or thus. 'When next there is evolved in a conscious subject the higher potency of will, it thereby and therein becomes rational ; and while mechanical and vital and conscious processes are still accomplished in and for it by the necessary processes of nature, the conscious elements of feeling are now subject to the interference and Ma7i constitutes himself, 33 regulation of will. This will is not an atomic centre of pure activity, but a threefold movement, viz., kinetic initiation, process, and end. Its essential life, its signi- ficance in the man-organism lies in this, that it co- ordinates feelings to ends and to a supreme end. This end is accomplished in the harmonious relation of the elements in the self-conscious subject, just as it is accom- lished in any other object presented to our contemplation, — that is to say, the harmonious relation of parts to each other within the object itself and to the environment of the object, as governed by its idea. Beings endowed with will, and consequent reason, have to seek and find the adjustment of relations for tlieTnselves ; and herein lies the ethical differentiation of man. Other organic unities are, so to speak, moralised by nature itself working rationally in them and for them. Man is moralised by the self-conscious realisa- tion of his own ends, and supreme end as an organic intelligent unit ; and further (with reference to his en- vironment) as unit of a larger organism called Society, through which alone his completion or realisation as an end to himself is possible. His search must always be for end with a view to the harmonious co-ordination of elements now let loose from the grip of necessary nature and handed over to will-reason to adjust. It must be so, because of the nature of will-reason. Such is Man. That harmony of inter-relations whereby a thing realises itself and is what it is, is the " good " for each thing. A similar harmony attained by man for himself c 34 Ethica, through the free operation of his will-reason is the '' good " for man. Harmony and " the Good " then are substantially one : it is this which man at every stage of his long history is painfully seeking. The Good, however, is a more general term than harmony. The latter indicates vikerein the good for man (as for all else) consists. As the elements to be dealt with are feelings, the good is the harmony of feelings — the feelings of the subject. For man's relations to his environment are known to him only through his feelings — at least so far as doing is concerned and motives to doing. All external effects of a man's volition, including in these its effects on the well-being or ill-being of others, have to be interpreted and finally adjudicated upon by the effect on the agent himself ; that is to say, by the extent to which they furnish true and adequate content for his reason and his capacities for feeling. The web which the spider spins is out of its own body : and the whole complex social organism, at whatever stage of man's historical progress we regard it, is only an expression and projection of man's inner life, his needs, limitations, aspirations, and ends. It is the externalisa- tion of his personality. In brief, while other organisms are co-ordinated to their end by nature, man, through the emergence of will and reason in him, is thereby constituted the co- ordinator of his own organism. On him is placed the responsibility for himself It is he himself that is an end to himself, and it is for him to organise the Harmony and the Good. 35 complex elements which constitute his " notion " into a harmonious whole — into the " Good " for him. We are not, as searchers for the law of obligation, concerned (as I have already pointed out) with the conditions of this harmony and completeness in its widest comprehension, but only with those governing conditions which must be alw^ays present, which the terms "better" and " worse " do not adequately designate, but only the terms " right " and " wrong," " good " and " bad," in the moral signification. As to all else that concerns the full function of man there is a consensus. It is true that in these days there is a consensus also as to what constitutes the good man. But the aim of ethical philosophy is to inquire into moral origins, to define the true character and quality of the moral volition, and to explain the source and nature of law and obligation. 36 Ethica, CHAP. VIII. — SUPREME END IS THE EGO ITSELF, AND IS FORMAL — THE CRITERION OF THE REAL END IS HAR- MONY IN FEELING. We are now in a position briefly to gather to a point our argument thus far. To know man we must approach him just as we approach any other object of knowledge, and seek to know him in his notion and idea. The formal in man, hefore the subject rises through the emergence of will to reason and personality, is the same as the formal in nature and in animals. It is reason working under the restriction of natural conditions and as necessary law. The real in man is feeling (desires and emotions). So in animals. In animals pleasure and pain is nature's way of securing the maintenance of the organism of life. In man the formal liberates itself out of mere feeling and necessary sequence, and becomes the subject- initiated movement of will which constitutes reason and transforms conscious subject (which itself functions will) into self-conscious subject or personality. The notion of man, as of everything else, embraces both the real and formal ; but the " idea " in the notion is will and consequent reason and personality. Supreme End the Ego itself a?id is FormaL 37 The end of man, as of every other organism, is self- realisation. This self-realisation is possible only through living : and living comprehends the full extent of the notion. Life in all its fulness and abundance is the self-realisa- tion of man — his function, But the function of every organism is finally deter- mined and governed by the idea in the notion. In the case of man this idea is, as I have said, will-reason, the first logical issue of which is personality — will trans- forming the subject into ego. The idtimate function of man, then, is the dominancy of will and personality ; free movement of will in knowing and affirming, and free movement of the same will in actualising its affirma- tions, i.e. in volition or doing. Self-realisation, then, is possible only through the constant presence of the formal (the idea) in the real — of will in feeling, and its perpetual supremacy in that domain. The sovereignty of the "idea" in man is the supreme end or purpose of his complex existence. The real in man is feeling, as has been said, and this is wholly in and through the subject prior to person- ality, the subject being merely the unity of basis for the aggregate of feelings. Feeling in and through reason, guaranteed by reason as a system of ends, — this is Morality. The Eeal, in and through which the life of formal reason is alone possible, must, inasmuch as it consists of ^S Etkica. many elements (feelings), have some conditions whereby it may recognise the truth of its realisation by means of reason. The law of universal existence is one, and we must seek for these conditions as we seek for the conditions of realisation in any other organism. These conditions we ascertain in the case of other organisms through the a 'posteriori and a priori cate- gories. Quantity, quality, relation, ground, end, have to meet in one conception of an object, and they consti- tute that object for knowledge, as that object actually is in its Notion. We do this from a position outside the object, and, thus studying it, we reveal the opera- tion of the formal universal reason in a physical thing as given for our interpretation in quantity, quality, and relation ; in other words, as elements and relations of elements — these being data a posteriori. This interpre- tation is physical science. These elements and their relations are in the stream of necessary causation. So with the elements and relations in conscious animal objects, and in man as a mere subject and aggregate of feelings. But here enters a peculiarity. Because of will-reason and the duality of man's nature thereby constituted, man has to treat his subject and its feelings not only as an object of knowledge, but of co-ordination and regu- lation. He, as a will and self-conscious through will, is the centre of his own organism, and has so to arrange and regulate the real elements and their relations in himself as to secure the realisation of himself. In brief, he as a will-reason has to do for his own organism what Criterion of the Real End, 39 nature through necessary laws does, with sure march, for all else. Self-realisation for any organism is " the good " for that organism. Man has to find " the good " for him- self. He is an end to himself. Accordingly, a man while always recognising the supremacy of the " idea" in himself, viz., will-reason, or the formal, as dominant and supreme end — is yet at a loss to discover those relations of elements in the real of himself, viz., his feelings, which will realise " the Good " for himself. How shall he know this ? By what criterion shall he say " this is the good for Man and not that " ? Thus it is that through man's freedom to constitute the raw material (so to speak) of his own organism into a complete organism, there arise the perplexities which we call moral questions. The task of the moral philoso- pher is to ascertain the true good for man, to organise him, so to speak. When he investigates any organism not himself, the thinker, under the stimulus of the a 'priori categories, is seeking for that inter-relation and reciprocity of elements and dynamic states which in due subjection to the idea of the thing before him, its ultimate and governing function, effect " the good " for that thing. This, when ascertained, he calls the law of, or, more correctly, in and for, that thing. When he sees this, he experiences an intellectual satisfaction, which, when looked at, is an emotion of rational pleasure or satisfac- tion in the conception of parts and motions seen as 40 Ethica. fitting into each other and effecting that balanced inter- relation which is the outcome of the law. In other words, he enjoys the sense of intellectual harmony. Man can see, as outside himself, the law of other organisms ; but being at the centre of himself, he mani- festly can know nothing of the law of the real in him- self, except through consciousness of the real within himself ; that is to say, through feeling. Nay more, the organism which he has to know — to constitute in the knowing and know in the constituting — is all feeling, outside the formal action of the will- reason. Eeason, therefore, in constituting an organism out of the raw material of feeling, has no guide save feeling. Through the ages man is groping his way to such a constitution of his own real or feeling organism as will be its true Good ; and the evidence that he has found it is in feeling — the feeling of harmony. As the process is formal or rational while yet in and through the real, the feeling of harmony will be at once intellectual and real. Thus self-realisation of a self-conscious organism is another name for " the Good " of that organism, and the good for the organism is guaranteed by a sense of harmony in which alone there is rest and there is peace, — in which alone that organism finds itself and truly lives. Our aim as reflective or philosophical moralists then is to ascertain the conditions of the harmony of man as an organic intelligent unit, and further as a unit of that larger organism, society, through which alone he can be Criterion of the Real End, 41 truly man. And our aim as practical moralists or educators is to see to it, by whatever means may be possible, that each man is trained to harmonious living and thus fulfils the km of his being. But after all, as reflective moralists, we are not con- cerned (as has already been pointed out) with the harmonious living of man in the widest sense. On that there is already a consensus among educated men of all schools of thought. What we are specially con- cerned with is rather the conditions without which harmonious living is impossible — whatever, and how- ever high, the plane of mere intellectual life may be, — the nature and grounds of these conditions, and the nature and source of the law and duty to law that are in them. 42 Ethica CHAP. IX. — THE OBJECT OF HUMAN VOLITION IS REASON- GIVEN LAW; FOR HARMONY IS POSSIBLE ONLY THROUGH LAW. Harmony is the universal and necessary predicate of self-realisation or the Good. In material things we see it as attained through necessary relations ; in conscious beings it must be felt, and in self-conscious beings it is the end of the action of will-reason in its endeavour to constitute for itself a perfect organism of feeling. It is not to be supposed that will-reason deliberately and purposely sets this end before itself. All that is meant is that this is implicit as end in the will-reason, seeking satisfaction for itself under the a priori stimulus of the form of end at the heart of it.^ All men, as men, have the same potentialities, but the Papuan and the ancient Greek and the modern Christian find harmony on very different planes of feelings and voli- tions. Even the conception which satisfied Aristotle will not satisfy Christ or Paul. And this being so, the feeling of harmony is, in the unreflective stage of man's history (or of any individual man's life here and now), the criterion of ethical life — of the attainment of the good for him : and in the reflective stage, the demonstration of the law of harmony 1 See Ma. Nov. et Vet. Object of Volition is Reason-given Law. 43 — of the conditions of harmony — determines the uni- versal truth in respect of the ethical life. And this not merely in respect of man as an organic intelligent unit, but also of man as a unit of a social organism. The difficulty lies in the ascertainment and demon- stration of the Law. It is the law of feeling or sensi- bility we seek, and hence arises in all moral inquiries a tendency to reason in a circle, which it is very difficult to avoid. For the domain of the real is here the domain of feelincr, and we seek the law in feeling. How are we to rationalise feeling into law save by applying the criterion of feeling as our measuring standard ? We answer that there is no other way. It is through feel- ing that reason can alone ascertain the law of feeling. To illustrate : — Just as the real of sense instructs reason as to the law of things of sense through quantity, quality, and relation, so does the real of feeling instruct reason as to the law of feeling or sensibility. To suppose that there can be any external standard of the law of an organism is absurd. If we say that the law resolves itself into the good of our fellow-men, the answer is, that the good of his fellows is nothing to any man, and cannot by any possibility be anything, save in so far as he feels it, and in so far as it satisfies him. Besides, any such external standard (we say nothing here of the "will of God," for that expression is theological in the superstitious sense) cannot solve the question of the Good for my many-sided organism. I have other things to think of besides the good of my fellow-men. I have to seek the fulfilment 44 Ethica. or perfection of my whole nature, for its own sake and as its own end, if I am to be true to the work given me to do here and now. Moreover, as we have said before, and shall probably have to say again, I must first ascertain " the Good " for man, before I can move a finger to promote the good of men. And this is true not merely of the reflective moralist, but of the unre- flecting prehistoric nomad. The sensational moralist has a tendency always to speak of acts and their effects. He is a victim of a fallacy which lies in the equivocal use of the word " act." An act is either a doing or a thing done, in which latter meaning it is factum rather than actum. An act in its moral meaning emerges in the crisis of volition as determined by motive : and the whole of the moral question is accordingly a question of motive — of cause, not of effect. The effect or externalisation merely shows whether the good volition has truly effected itself or has, in the special circumstances, been not good — a lesson to the agent when he has subsequently to voli- tionise in the same or similar circumstances. The motive is the same, but his mode of acting, and the machinery by which he attains the end of the good volition, are different. The intuitional moralist, again, tells us, if I under- stand him, that, apart from pure reason and apart from mere sensibility, there is in man's rational organism a special faculty called Conscience, which at once affirms the right or wrong, good or bad, of every possible voli- tion, either directly or through the general principle of Harmony possible only through Law. 45 which each volition is a particular case : and affirms it, moreover, as law and duty. Now, as a matter of psychological fact, this is the actual experience of each one of us in our daily life. But I would point out that to the philosopher this inner result of organised moral experience is precisely the object of investigation, and that after we have admitted what the intuitionalist affirms, philosophy begins. Philosophy has to do with origins. The ultimate question, however, underlying this theory, but which the intuitionalist himself is often too confused to see, is this : " Does an inner and inex- plicable utterance of law instruct as to the content of volition ? " Kant has given scientific dignity to the intuitionalist view, speaking generally ;• but his theory itself is not to be identified with it. The intuitional theory, in truth, resolves itself ultimately into the " Will of God " theory ; for it manifestly rests on a categorical utterance of the Will of God as law in us, instead of from Mount Sinai. Meanwhile, let us distinctly understand this, that while it is true that reason can, through feeling alone, ascertain the law of feeling, it is law that we seek. Law, however, is determined in and through feeling as ultimately a sense of harmony in feeling, and thus feel- ing may be said to instruct law. But, inasmuch as feel- ing is always more or less consciously feeling its way to harmony, it contains in itself, by implication, conditions of harmony — a law of harmony. The result is not pleasure — which, strictly defined, is the gratification of particular feelings in endless succession — but yet it is 46 Etkica. felicity or happiness ; for a feeling of harmony is happi- ness. But it is reason that seeks and finds what feeling dimly gropes for. Thus Eeason, both in the unreflective stage of man's history and in the reflective, must, in its search for law in the sensibility, refer itself ultimately to sensibility, in order that it may know when it has found the law. Eeason a priori, then, is always seeking an end, which end is " the Good " for the organism, and therefore is seeking law ; but as the ultimate criterion of the ascertainment of law is a feeling of harmony, the ulti- mate criterion is happiness ; but it does not follow from this that Eeason has for end and aim happiness, which, after all, is only a predicate. As all particular feelings are to be subordinated to harmony, there is in- volved in harmony repression and pain. There are, in short, certain conditions of harmony ; and among these conditions is discord. None the less is the ultimate criterion the joy of reason in the laiu of feeling ascer- tained in and through feeling. Not harmony as your happiness or my happiness, is the object of search, but the happiness of Man — the organic intelligent unit we call man, to which each man must subject himself as the law of the man-creature. Inasmuch as it is the law of a " general," not of a par- ticular, it reposes on "collective experience" in the individual. It is a universal to which each individual is subject. In the unreflective ages of mere cnstom-morality. Object of Volition is Reason-given Law, 47 reason is always groping its way to this law of man : in reflective times it makes the consideration of it a con- scious object of inquiry as part of the science of man. But always the law is not subjective or particular, but objective and universal, as all law must be. The end, then, of will, both in its search and in its volitions, is not pleasure, nor yet happiness, but reason- given law — the law of harmony ; but this necessarily ascertained through feeling, and therefore through happiness, and having, as its resultant, inner non-con- tradiction or harmony in feeling, or rather, the complex of feelings. 48 Ethica. CHAP. X. — RATIONALITY THE GROUND OF THE POSSI- BILITY OF MORALITY — INSTRUMENTARY MEDIATION — CONSCIOUS MEDIATE ENDS. Keeping in view the dual nature of man — the formal and the real in him — we have now to consider the character and aims of inner feeling. The aim or end of will-reason in dealing with the external is knowing ; but in the region of feeling we have to consider certain movements — blind forces of nature in us seeking satis- faction — which reside in the attuent subject as an aggregate of inner feelings so intense as to be called Desires. The term Feeling is used by us generically to include desires and emotions. A feeling of want, accompanied by an inner movement or impulse to satisfy it, is desire. Desire perhaps might be defined as a feeling so intense as to insist on discharging itself. Emotion differs from desire in this respect only, that the term is rightly re- served for those desires which seek an object other than the satisfaction of the material organism of the subject. The end of the movement of a desire or emotion in a non-rational being, and in man in so far as non- rational, is simply its own satisfaction. There is nothing interposed between the feeling and its satisfaction, save the object by means of which it effects itself; for example, the feeling of hunger satisfies itself by means Rationality the Grotind of Morality. 49 of food. It may be said accordingly that the feeling (having the tension of desire) mediates itself through an object. But the object is merely instrumentary. There is no interposition, in consciousness, between the feeling and its completion in its own satisfaction. In like manner, Man, in so far as he is an attuent subject, — feeling and desiring — is purely animal. When will-reason enters, it arrests the flux of feeling and impulse, and, having thus learned to know its desires one from another, begins to deal with these. Under the stimulus of the a 'priori form of end, it con- templates its feelings (simple or complex) as ends. Accordingly, animals, and man in so far as he is merely an attuent consciousness, are stimulated to do a particular thing, not by any particular object, but by a desire for or aversion to some particular object. This doing of non-rational desire is non-mediate : that is to say, there is nothing interposed between the mere desire and its satisfaction except the object through which it is to obtain that satisfaction. The object, it is true, may be said to stand between the desire and its satis- faction as the medium of satisfaction ; but it is a medium merely in the sense of an instrument. After some experience of pleasure in this and pain in that, objects certainly stimulate desires ; but the desires pre- cede all possible objects, and seek these as their filling, — as the external conditions of their own fulfilment or satisfaction. All such activities are outside the moral sphere, and are in themselves neither moral nor immoral. They are indifferent. D 50 Ethica. Now when reason enters, it begins to arrest these inner feelings and to deal with them with a view to their regulation — the suppression of this and the modera- tion of that. This interference of the will, as a power among the natural forces in a man, is probably first called into activity when one natural motive- force is found to conflict with itself or with another. Animals in such circumstances become the prey of the stronger force; reason entering, determines tliat one of two or more forces which is to be allowed to actualise itself. When will-reason thus enters into the attuent sphere it enters as containing in itself the form of end. This end is, in the first place, completed in perception and affirmation — mere knowing or cognition. This knowing must precede all rational doing. Eational doing (as has been before said) is merely rational affirmation ex- ternalised, that is to say, carried out into the world of the real or concrete, the finite and the phenomenal. Thus man as a reason must first seek the \;Yv.\hoi know- ing in the sphere of feeling, if he is to find the truth of doing or volition. In the cognition of the external, will-reason manipu- lates, so to speak, phenomenal presentations which concern man as a cognitive being alone : in the cognition of inner feeling it seeks to know by a similar process ; but the matter of its knowledge is now pheno- menal presentations whose specific character is that they incite to do ; they stimulate a man to carry himself out of himself with a view to impress himself Rationality the Ground of Morality. 5 1 on himself reflexly or on others, and through others again on himself. The will-reason is always seeking — cannot help seeking — ends of volition. All incitements of feeling are arrested just as, in the cognition of the external, the presentations of sense are arrested; and they are co-ordinated towards ends. And although man is constantly acting under the impulse of mere desire, yet in so far as he is rational and therefore moral, he is always acting with reference to ends. In so far as a man knows and holds present to his consciousness as separate desires, hunger, the sexual propensity, the love of power or the emotion of good- will, he has an idea of these various feelings, but the term " idea," so used, is simply representation. But just because man has the power to hold these representa- tions present to himself and compare them, he is able to affirm that one desire should be satisfied and not another, and this he does with reference to himself as a man. The question which even the primitive Papuan asks himself in a vague and rudimentary fashion is, " Which volition will most promote my own happiness — that is to say, the fulfilment or realisation of myself as a man ? " He is as yet little more than an indivi- dual, and his morality is subjective hedonism — the only morality possible for any being until Eeason grows and universals are formed. When that stage is reached, the notion of man, not merely of me, governs. But even in the case of the said Papuan, it is apparent that the moment an ulterior consideration becomes the true end 5 2 Ethica. of his particular volitions, he is withiu the moral sphere ; and he is so, simply because reason is now operating in the midst of his feelings. Eeason now determines what he ought to do with reference to end as that can be conceived by him in his uncultured savagedom. Thus there now works in him a self- conscious end or purpose which is his motive of action. It is to this self-conscious end (as to all self-conscious ends gradually acquired) that the term idea, or moral idea, is applicable. The idea now mediates his parti- cular volitions, or at least affirms the particular voli- tions that are rightful, whether he gives effect to these volitions or yields (as is most probable) to the natural force of immediate desire. But if he so yields, he must be conscious that he has done what contradicts his true self-realisation, and that he has chosen the worse instead of the better, the wrong instead of the right. This consciousness may be, and will be, weak in him until social disapprobation enters (as happens, in the course of time), to strengthen it and to help to bring out its true character. It may be said that the Papuan may set before him what is an immoral end : true, but, in so far as he subjects desires with a view to an end at all, he is formally moral. It would appear, then, that morality enters with will-reason and personality, and that will-reason pro- ceeds in the matter of inner feeling as it does in the matter of outer sense : that is to say, it seeks first to know and to perceive ends and so brings with it law. The difference lies here that, whereas in the sphere of Rationality the Ground of Morality. 53 outer cognition it perceives and affirms ends, in the sphere of inner cognition it perceives ends and in the act of affirming them, constitutes them ends for itself. To will-reason is committed, so to speak, the charge of the organism of which it is creator and master, and it has to realise, that organism in the sphere of doing as in that of knowing. This is self-realisation : which is not merely realisation of self, but the realisation of the notion Man 'by self, for self, and in self. But we are not at every minute of our lives under moral conditions, save negatively. The attuent subject is at times transacting its own business of feeling and doing under the influence of habit, and is entitled to the licence of this spontaneous activity until some desire conflicts with a self-conscious end of action. There is in truth no moral condition at all — nothing which can be called moral or immoral — except in so far as reason determines, or has determined, ends or ideas. This determination, it is needless to say, is not in the earliest stages of primitive life always explicit. It is only when man becomes reflective that he seeks to give explicit enunciation to the ends or ideas which, notwithstanding, are all the while implicitly governing his volitions in relation to his own personality or to that of his fellow-man in society, and slowly working their way to explicit recognition — nay, establishing themselves as customs, and even formulating themselves as social usages which have the force of public law. 54 Ethica, CHAPTER XI. — SELF-CONSCIOUS ENDS OF VOLITION AEE ALWAYS SUBJECTIVE — PROCEDUKE OF REASON IN DETERMINING ENDS — THE LEGISLATIVE AND EXECU- TIVE. Will, as we see, under the stimulus of the form of end, is constantly seeking and determining for itself ends of volition or doing. All inner incitements, all desires, are arrested, and determined or co-ordinated to some end. There is thus interposed, between the first crude impulse to do and the actual doing, an affirmed or self-conscious end or idea, which is motive to voli- tion. The doing of a rational being, unlike that of a mere attuent organism, is thus mediatised through a self-constituted end or idea. But nothing external can move a man to volition. I mean, that just as in non-mediate desire the moving force is a subjective unrest, and the terminal of the movement is a subjective satisfaction, the object through which the satisfaction is achieved being a mere instrument; so, in the sphere of morality or reason, the end or idea contemplated as motive of voli- tion must contain implicitly a want of the rational subject itself, and, when volition is effected, the result is a satisfaction of that want. However complex the idea which moves to volition may be, it is always some form of a primary feeling and, mingled with it, a reason-feeling (Vid. " Emotions Ends always Subjective, 55 of Beason " in the sequel). The idea of Justice is complex, that of Goodwill is simple ; Loyalty, again, is complex, and also Integrity, and so forth. But it would not be difficult in a natural history of the passions to show that, whether simple or complex, they all contain primary feelings inciting to do in various relations to the life of man. The external object and act through which these moral ideas effect themselves are the mere occasions for the emergence of the ideas, and the vehicle for their actualisation. It is the satisfaction of the rational subject in the subsumption and volitionis- ing of the idea that is the end of the movement, and therefore the true motive ; that is to say, hefore the notions of law and duty, and the emotions which they engender, enter — (of these hereafter). Just as in the attuent animal subject, the source and completion of desire are in the subject ; so in the rational subject, the source of the movement to sub- sume an idea as motive of volition is in the rational subject, and the movement completes itself there. Many shrink from such a conclusion ; but their fear of the practical results of a subjective morality is due to an inadequate conception of the function of reason whereby morality is made objective. Surely it is quite manifest that the well-being of my fellow-men can be nothing to me, except in so far as I feel well- being in their well-being. Subjective is a word of equivocal meaning, and here it means " within the self- conscious subject." The whole theory of the " greatest happiness of the 56 Ethica. greatest number" (or "on the whole") is concerned in what I have just said. The happiness of the com- munity can, I repeat, be nothing to me as object of my volitions, except in so far as certain external manifestations of pleasure exhibited by my fellow-men as a consequence of my volition, appeal to certain emotions which belong to me as an organism con- stituted thus and not otherwise. The ultimate appeal is to these, and it is ivithin that I must look for the ground of the truth and goodness of volition. True, I am always bound to consider the effect of my individual doing on the happiness of others. But this is merely to say that I must not volitionise at the bidding of the impulse in the subject, nor yet at the instigation of the first end that suggests itself to me as a rational being, but that I must follow out my contemplated doing into all its consequences in order that I may truly discriminate its nature. However good my will or my proposed volition may be, it has a history after it leaves me; and it is only when I have all its effects before me, that I can judge of the harmony of the result with the idea that determined the volition; just as in pure knowing, I must have all the facts before me before I can truly know and truly affirm. But as consequence after consequence of my proposed volition unfolds itself before my analytic investigation or predictive imagination, each, in turn, verifies itself by an appeal to emotions within me ; until finally I determine, by the state of feeling set up in me, the end which in the particular case is to Procedure of Reason. 57 determine the volition. That end, as an external end, may involve, for example, civil rebellion with all its horrors ; for the end may be a change in the governing forces of society. But this change in the governing forces of society is not the motive of my volition, but the mere external instrument by means of which my motive effects itself. The motive-end is the idea of Benevolence or Justice. It is this I seek to satisfy. The motive force or end of my volitions must always be within myself. The changes which these volitions effect in the world outside me are merely the resultant issue in the sphere of the concrete, harmonising with the end that moves me to volitionise.^ There is apparent, then, in conduct in so far as it is moral, that is to say, in right or wrong willing : — First, the operation of will-reason in discriminating or knowing the feelings or complex of feelings within me. Secondly, the continued operation of this will-reason in discriminating and affirming the truth or rightness of a feeling or complex of feelings contemplated as ends or ideas of volition, and through which my voli- tion is to be mediated. Such an end we call an " idea/' because it is an impulse or feeling, or a complex of these, rationalised. It would appear then that the work which man has to do, as a being of reason, and as by this constituted the centre of his own organism, is to discriminate and regulate, with a view to true self-realisation, the 1 These remarks apply to Mr. Herbert Spencer's argument also, as well as to Bentham. 58 Ethica. desires and emotions of the attuent subject. Will- reason is a sovereign in the midst of a democracy, and whatever else a man may thinli, he is doing, it is the regulating of this democracy by law as contained in end — the end being ultimately within himself — that is really occupying him in so far as he is a self- conscious moral being. Note here again with reference to a previous chapter, that it is the kinetic movement of will under the stimulus of the a 'priori form of end which forms ideas, and so determines the truth of a volition. At this point, however, it exhausts itself. It has been dealing with external things and relations apparently, but, in fact, it is with internal feelings it has been engaged — the external being merely the occasion for the activity of these, the vehicle of their life ; and the moment it has affirmed the truth or true content of volition it hands over the volitionising to feeling — natural and rational. Feeling takes up its task and does. The will ads within the sphere of reason, but it does not do. It merely affirms rightness in doing, truth in doing, and guarantees that rightness and truth. It is the sove- reign which issues a commission to feeling under the royal seal; but its function is legislative, not executive. The executive are the feelings which are dynamic nature in us, or the feelings generated by reason itself, and are themselves involved (how we know not) in matter and energy. It is, accordingly, nature in us which discharges itself in volition, thus or thus, within the sphere of the phenomenal. Recapitulation. 59 To recapitulate some important points : — 1. A being who can act only from immediate impulse — impulse not mediatised through end or idea — is neither moral nor immoral. Morality enters with reason. 2. When there is an impulse within my conscious organism to do, to transact something in the sphere of the phenomenal (my own body being part of the phenomenal) the element of morality, of right or wrong, originates in the fact that there is at the same place and time more than one possible motive of volition. 3. The will-reason arrests these and seeks for the true or right motive or content of volition, i.e. searches for an end of volition (" the good "), under the stimulus of the a priori form of end inherent in the fact and act of pure will. It proceeds somewhat as follows : — {a) It first considers the hypothetical content of volition in relation to the objects to be effected by its being actualised ; and it contemplates all probable consequences, in order that it may thus ascertain the true nature of the particular volitions. (&) Having ascertained this, will-reason is now in a position to legislate ; that is to say, to affirm the true and right content of volition. (c) This content is a feeling or complex of feelings, and the object of the volition is the satisfaction of the rational subject through the actualising of the end or idea which has been affirmed to be right and good, volition being thus mediated by the end. [A feeling affirmed as end is a rationalised feeling or idea — crude 6o Ethica. feeling taken up by reason and so constituted a con- ceived end. Even benevolence as mere emotion is neither moral nor immoral.] {d) The object, be it the happiness of another or anything else, is itself merely the vehicle or medium and not the end or purpose of the volition; — the " objective point/' so to speak, of the whole movement. It is instrumentary ; while the end is the moral idea which has to be subsumed into my personality as motive : — the result being the satisfaction of reason in and through this idea.^ ^ The question of subjectivity will be further considered in the Mediation of Will is not Morality, 6 1 CHAP. XII. — MEDIATION OF WILL THROUGH SELF-CON- SCIOUS ENDS DOES NOT ITSELF CONSTITUTE MORALITY. A SELF-CONSCIOUS being then can be neither moral nor immoral until he can have for his motive of volition, self-conscious ends, purposes, or ideas. And when he has these, his morality or immorality, as an indi- vidual (and the same remark applies to societies), is to be measured, not by any absolute standard, but by the extent to which he has been taught, or has ascer- tained for himself, or may ascertain for himself, self- conscious ends or moral ideas. Keason then it is which, intromitting with mere feelings and impulses, renders morality possible. It would appear then that a being, in so far as he does not yield to the impulse of immediate desire, but proposes to himself a self-conscious end or purpose, is iipso facto a moral being, even though the self- conscious end, which he subsumes as motive, be evil. A being who, with self-conscious purpose, is actuated in his volitions by malice, we commonly call a devil ; and, although it may be painful to admit it, we fear that there have been, and are, men who are devils. And yet, in so far as they seek and affirm an end and subsume that end as motive, they are, in a sense, 62 Ethica. moral beings. But we are only as yet dealing with the process by which morality or virtue is gradually constituted for man by himself. That process is formal merely ; and formally virtuous even a devil, it would appear, may be. Such a being as we imagine is not right in his determination of ends ; the ends are not within " the good/' and his will is a bad will, not a good will. For while the first condition of all morality is certainly the conscious supremacy of will-reason, morality has to do mainly with the character of the content of the will, i.e. with the real, and only as a pre-condition, with the formal. What now is the right and good idea, or end, and how does man attain to a knowledge of it? The formal process whereby he attains to a knowledge of it, we see : it is the same as that whereby he attains to a knowledge of anything else. But, setting aside for the present the question how he knows that he has found the truth of the real in nature, we have to ascertain by what head-mark, so to speak, he ascertains that truth of motive which is the " good " in volition. For the will which is mediated through self-conscious ends, which ends are right and good, alone constitutes the moral, virtuous, or good will. Discrimination of the Law. 63 CHAP. XIII. — THE DISCRIMINATION OF THE LAW OF SELF- REALISATION OR THE GOOD, THE GOOD BEING CON- FORMITY TO LAW — INTUITIONISM — HEDONISM — RELATION OF STATE TO PERSONS. We see that tlie final aim of the object we call Man is the same in kind as that of any other object — the realisation of itself. This, however, is in Aristotelian phrase Teko^ rekeLov. The question now is, wherein consists this self-realisation on the side of content : and how does man attain to a knowledge of what it is. It ought certainly to surprise us if, in the inquiry into the nature of man and those ends of action which enable him to realise himself, we found that the mode of procedure differed from that which has to be followed in the case of other objects. We desire to know man in his notion and idea with a view to conduct. When we have ascertained this, we shall then, and only then, be in a position to affirm the way in which he may realise himself — that is to say, to affirm the law of his nature which is the good for Man ; and therefore for each man. The subject-matter of investigation is certainly unlike what we have hitherto been accustomed to in the things of sense, for the elements we have to deal 64 Ethica. with are feelings, desires, and emotions. The complex within us has to be analysed and co-ordinated. Thns far, it will be admitted, the question of what (the reader will excuse my pressing this point) constitutes, as a mere matter of fact, the notion and idea of man is not different in kind from the question of the constitution of the notion and idea of a rose or any other thing. True, the subject-matter of our inquiry in the case of man is a series and correlation of dynamical conditions ; but so in a rose the notion and idea contain the inner dynamical conditions which effectuate a rose and not something else. A difference of conditions, however, enters at this point; for a rose is subject to the necessary laws of phenomenal nature, and is not at liberty (so to speak) to depart from its own dynamical processes without involving itself in contradictions which end in disease and death. In man (whatever opinion we may hold as to free will), there can be no doubt of the fact that he may or may not conform to those inner dynamical con- ditions which enable him to realise himself, and which are in accord with the law of his being, whatever that law may be. It is for man himself to find that law, and to regulate his desires and emotions so as to secure conformity with it. We have a good analogy in man as a knowing being. The presentations of outer sense are a confused blur until he has co-ordinated them and finally categorised them, and so discovered the law of their existence. So the presentations of inner impulse are a confused and Discrimination of the Law. 65 anarchic mob until he has co-ordinated them and dis- covered the law of their life. Man has, in brief, to discover a system of mediating ends or ideas for his activity, and this system will be law and the ideal life for him. It would certainly be a very easy way out of the difficulty were we to find in man a faculty or sense which at once affirmed the right and wrong — that is to say, the desire or emotion which at any moment of action was right, or in accordance with the law of his being. But there is no such moral faculty, save thus far, that just as a man discriminates the objects of outer presentation, quantitatively and qualitatively and rela- tively, so he can discriminate the impulses of inner pre- sentation, one from another. But this is no new power, but simply the same power engaged on new matter. And if this be all that is meant by a moral faculty, it is opposed not only to the law of parcimony, but to common sense, to invent a wholly new engine of know- ledge when what we already possess suffices.^ But this is not all that is meant by a moral faculty by some writers. We unquestionably feel a sense of obligation or duty in connexion with that desire, or emotion, or maxim of conduct — the end or idea — which we have discriminated as right and good. And why ? Because we have ascertained it to be law. tTow the theory presented to us is substantially this, that the ^ The sense in which we have a *' moral sense " will be explained in the sequel. 66 Ethica, moral faculty is a faculty of law. There emanates from the depths of my being a legislative utterance — *' Thus or thus shalt thou do." The categorical impera- tive is thus not only an utterance of law or command but through law discriminates one kind of motive and end from others, and gives it there and then, in each particular case, supremacy. The law of my being is thus not a subject for inquiry — at least it is a question of secondary importance — if there be a power in my nature which at once determines law in each particular case, or class of cases, emerging, for the mere purpose of doing so, like the dsemon of Socrates, from the recesses of consciousness. That there is a categorical imperative — an utterance of law, there can be no doubt ; but to say (and this is the point) that the said categorical imperative is also a discriminator of motives and ends through law is an uncritical position. It is analogous to the " common sense " position in the question of causality. Still, as I have said, the search is a search for a system of ends and a search for law, just as in all other scientific inquiries. Hedonism, again, as the antithesis of intuitionism, and as a guide to a system of ends, presents itself to us in two leading forms — (1) Subjective eudiemonism according to which, if it be consistent, the motive of the individual is the pleasure of the individual. Irradiate the doctrine with what halo we please, it is still ultimately this ; and if this, there can be no law, for law is universal, objective, and absolute ; (2) Or, it is Discri?mnaizon of the Law, 67 utilitarianism, i.e. it determines the moral character of a volition by its tendency to produce pleasure in others, irrespectively of the motive of the agent ; although it is admitted to be desirable and laudable that he should have pleasure in the pleasure of others. To this as to the Benthamite "greatest happiness of the greatest number " is to be opposed — (a) That I cannot, even with the best intentions, tell what will truly promote the greatest happiness of others until I know what man is and what he ought to he. I must find the law in man before I can promote his true well-being. When I have once found this, I shall find wherein the good will in man, as determiner of his own conduct, with a view to his self-realisation, consists ; and, in doing so, I shall also doubtless find among the conditions of that self-realisation in each, the duty of promoting, in the widest sense, the self-realisation (not of the greatest number but) of all men. (b) The greatest happiness of the greatest number theory yields moreover, if logi- cally applied in politics, a system of despotism which ignores and crushes the minority, (c) Again (even if we suppose our knowledge of man's true well-being — the law of his being — to be complete), according to this form of hedonism the essence of the morality of an act — nay the sole morality of it — consists in its tendency to produce happiness among others. If a man sub- scribes one hundred pounds to a charity (which we shall suppose to be productive of an increase of true well-being all round), he has performed a moral act, although his motive may have been, by securing the 6S Ethic a, favour of some individual, to increase his own income. If a. man, under the impulse of duty and with a dis- interested love of his kind (by a disinterested motive I mean a motive which seeks its own pure satisfaction without regard to any ofher kind of moral or material interest) subscribes five shillings, his act is not so moral as that of the other man because it does not effect so much happiness ! There is manifest confusion here between the good-will and the good results of the good-will. It is generally understood that the ethi- cal man is a man of a good habit of will. He may be mistaken in the direction of his volitions, but his will is, notwithstanding, good. Let us have faith, that if we seek for the law of man's nature, that law will be found to comprehend in its sweep the diftusion of universal well-being. I certainly am not entitled to coerce my fellow-men, except in the name of the universal law, which is identical with the end, the good, for all and each. (Civil society is, except on this assumption, impossible.) It is true that further observation shows me that man cannot, and certainly does not, attain to his com- pletion, save as a part of a larger organism which we call society or the state. We must, therefore, if we are to ascertain " the Good " for man, think about him, not merely as an organic whole in himself, but as a part of a larger organic whole — the state — a unit in an organism; for the state is not an aggregation, but an organism, of individuals. There is nothing peculiar to man in this ; for in like manner every object has its Discrimination of the Law, 69 external relations which constitute an integral part of its life. But we must never lose sight of the fact, that the final aim is " the Good " for the organic unit — a man and each man — and that the state is simply the means through which each man realises in and for himself the good. For the end of man, as of other units, is himself — his own self-realisation as man — the fulness and preservation of his own distinctive life. It is a mis- take then to regard the State or the social organism ^ as the supreme end — as that for which the individual exists, the State realising itself through him. This is understood to be the Hellenic idea. If a State be so constituted that the individual is sacrificed to its forms of existence, there is something wrong in its constitution and aims. The State, at best, is the work of man's feeble hands, working with unsteady purpose ; the person, with all his claims, is the work of God. True, the State realises itself through the individual, and equally true it is that the individual can realise himself only through a State : but the one conception is not so potent as the other, and the governing con- sideration must always be : " Is it possible in this or that State for each individual man to realise himself — to secure for himself 'the good' — i.e. the good for man ? " The individual does not exist for the State, but the State for the individual. It is the mark, however, of a crude and uninstructed mind to be in haste to condemn States in which the ^ In what sense an " organism " we shall consider in the sequel. yo Ethica. good of the individual has been wholly or partially lost sight of. The historical conditions and environ- ment of these States may have justified their constitu- tion as the only possible constitution. The Spartan State, for example, was a camp. None the less are States to be moulded by the growing moral sense of the community, if only we exercise caution, and always bear in mind that any sudden breach of historical continuity is the longest road to the end we seek. Our conclusion is that in determining the conditions of the TeXo9 or good for man, we must regard him — first, as an organic unit ; and, secondly, as the unit of an organism ; but this latter in subordination to the former. The end of volition is never, as we found, the objective point of the volition, but the satisfaction of individual reason itself as this is mediated through ends or ideas. In reply to the doctrine that the laws of the State, combined with the unwritten law of custom and public opinion, constitute morality for man, we have to point out that men precede their own organisation. State-law and custom are simply the external expression of the moral will of humanity — a reflex of an inner force in it. Whatever power or virtue they possess is due to the prior humanity which has so externalised itself for its own purposes. To take up again the thread of argument. Man finds the content of the law in feeling. It is will, as dialectic and transcendental, that seeks law by an inner Discrimination of the Law. 71 necessity of its nature, but it is law among feelings that it seeks. In the search for this — a search always unconsciously or consciously going on in the history of humanity — it has no resource but to be guided by the a ^posteriori categories of quantity, quality, and relation, just as it is guided to the discernment of law in nature. 7 2 Ethica. CHAP. XIV. — THE END OR GOOD FOR MAN BEING LAW IN SENSIBILITY, THE DOCTRINE HERE EXPOUNDED IS NOT SUBJECTIVE EUD^MONISM. If man is through the ages seeking for that adjust- ment of his inner feelings and the motive forces in him, which constitutes, when found, the law of har- mony for him, and if the criterion of this be the sense of harmony — itself a feeling, morality, or the system of ends, it may be said, rests ultimately on subjective feeling; and we have thus a system of subjective eudsemonism. The doctrine here laid down, however, is, not that the happiness of this or that individual constitutes the moral life for him — the system and ends being thus subject to the caprice or idiosyncrasy of each. What we say is that will-reason, under the pressure of the categories, seeks in man for law, just as it does everywhere in nature — the law of harmony. We ascertain the fact of the supremacy of will through cognition alone apart from feeling, for will is the idea within the notion Man ; but in the sphere of volition, which is always instigated by feeling, the criterion is necessarily feeling, and this both in relation to the subordinate ends which make up our complex life, and to the supreme and governing end within the real; which end, I say, is harmony : not your harmony or my harmony, but the harmony of man-universal. The End or Good' for Man. 73 As I stated in the introduction, a man can know Man only ultimately through himself as a man. To say say that the criterion is, therefore, subjective is in a sense true; but the term subjective is used equivocally. I know the necessary formal laws of thought only through and in my own subject. Are they, therefore, subjective in the sense of individual or idiosyncratic ? Are they not the laws operating in all of the man-kind ? Are they not, in short, objective ? All law is, as law, objective. I may venture an illustration from the outer senses : Colour is subjective in the sense of being individual and idiosyncratic. But the laws of colour are not subjective but objective. And yet how can these be ascertained except through the subject ? I could not, perhaps, take exception to the name objective eudjemonism in tlie above sense of objective, inasmuch as Happiness is a predicate of Law ; but it would be misleading. For happiness is to reason in its search simply a means to an end — a means of ascertain- ing the true law for man, which is an end in itself, as being the completed satisfaction of the dialectic of (or in) reason. Hence the name Ethics of Eeason. 74 Ethic a. CHAP. XV. — DOES LAW INSTRUCT AS TO ENDS ? — INTUITIONISM AND KANT. I HAVE shown that the apparently external criterion of ends and motives is, when properly understood, an internal or subjective one ; but yet objective.^ Before going further it is desirable, if not indeed necessary, to consider again that mode of discovering the true and good motive of volition which intuitionism offers to us and to which I have already referred. We may put the question in an ultimate form thus: — Does the categorical imperative restrict itself to "Thou shalt do," or does it go further and say, ''This particular thing thou shalt do " ?• If we keep to our parallel in metaphysical investiga- tion as to the nature and origin of knowledge, the answer must be, that just as the will in the various moments of energising, which we call the categories, is dependent on the real for the possibility of knowing or affirming anything, and is further instructed by the real {a posteriori categories) as to the particular affirmation to he made ; which affirmation is, " This is right — this is the truth of things : " so, the same will in dealing with the matter of feeling and motive is instructed by that matter or content as to the particular affirmation to be made ; which affirmation is the utterance, " This is ^ Of this again in the sequel. Does Law instruct as to Ends ? 75 right — this thou shalt do, if thy end as man is to be reached." Of this more fully hereafter. The intuitional position I understand to be, that an inexplicable utterance of law (and therefore a coercing feeling) arises within the soul of man when two or more possible motives of volition are present to his consciousness, and discriminates or marks off that one of the motives which is the right and good. In other words, law determines content of volition and thus instructs feeling. With reference to this theory I would say : — (1) That if it be true, the historic growth of morality in any proper sense is impossible. To the reader who realises all that this means, no further redarguing of intuitionism is necessary. But the subject, in this aspect of it, is too large a one to pursue here. (2) In the second place, if law discriminates the right motive, it must do so without the material for discrimination, or at least independently of that material, and thus must descend casually on the right motive. Now, in such a casual descent the law might not alight where it ought, unless it be guided by a power outside man's will. It would thus be a case of dynamical inspiration. It is not credible that man should be so constituted as to require the aid of a deus ex machind like this. Besides, it is not necessary to resort to such a superstitious explanation, and the law of parcimony is contravened. (3) In the third place, the feeling or sense of law is the sense of a formal command that contains in itself 76 Ethica. nothing, save the bare fact of imperativeness. If the inner utterance of law leap into consciousness without a history or genealogy, as the most mysterious as well as the greatest fact in the moral economy of man, it could never alter or modify this its essential characteristic — that of pure command. There could not be one law which, qiid law, is stronger or more imperative than another. Now, it will not be averred, we suppose, by any, that every utterance of law is of equal strength, or imposes on the will of man an equally imperative obligation. The law which demands that we give prior- ity to the sense of the beautiful over that of a bodily surfeit, when they stand in antagonism in presence of the suspended will, is imperative; but it is not so imperative and obligatory as that sense of law which elevates the sentiment of goodwill towards others above the satisfaction of the most refined aesthetic sentiments, while this, again, is much less imperative than the complex sentiment of Justice. No man, I imagine, will maintain that his remorse in so indulging his love of festive enjoyments (for example) as to exclude him- self from the higher felicities of external nature and of art can be for a moment compared with that which burdens him when inevitable memory recalls to him an unjust, a cruel, a mean, or an impious act ? No one will, even in the cause of a philosophical party, so say. But an unanalysable law is always law, and as a formal utterance of mysterious command, it ought not to vary its quality or imperativeness ; and as a consequence of this, the remorse of violation ought not Does Law instruct as to. Ends ? yy to be greater in one case of immorality than in another : which is contrary to fact. Therefore, moral law, in this mysterious, unanalysable sense, which makes it appear to be a sudden and inexplicable projection of the Divine Will into the consciousness of man, does not exist. [Transfer this doctrine to the State as ex- ternal law, and the stealing of a pin would then merit the same punishment as matricide.] (4) In the fourth place, the force of law grows in strength. The fact that law is associated, in one place and at one epoch of human history, with acts which, at another time and in another place, are condemned or regarded as of minor importance, can be explained without damage to the foundations of morality, or to the supremacy of law in the human consciousness, when the moral sentiment is properly understood. The true explanation of the nature and source of inner law, which we shall in due course offer, does not shake law or its authoritativeness, although it implies that the individual and the race exhibit an ever-progressive growth in the knowledge of morality and of its sanctions. Nor is anything else compatible with the facts of experience. The personal history of each man from infancy to maturity, and the larger history of mankind, is a history of moral progress, not only in respect of the perception of the right, but also of the extent of its sanctions, and in an ever-deepening feeling of the imperativeness of moral law. The varying force of the imperativeness of law is conspicuous, I may remark, not only when motives of y^ Ethica. different qualities conflict in consciousness, but also when the will is balanced between different quantities of the same kind of felicity. The savage, for example, finds one of his chief pleasures in gorging. The pain that follows brings penitence in the sense of regret, but both are alike short-lived. The unpractised will has not yet sufficiently emerged above the sensational naturalism of barbarism to fix in consciousness the past as well as the present, and to forecast the possible future arising out of both. The untutored and un- fashioned will breaks down under the pressure of pre- sent desire. It is only by degrees that a man attains to the rank of a "being of large discourse, looking before and after," and is able to seize in thought the greater quantity and quality of felicity, and constitute it the rightful master of his will. The moment, how- ever, that he begins to entertain the wish to do this, he must attach to the act of gorging the perception of wrong and the feeling of violated law; the now discerned law (discerned by the help of the schoolmaster, pain, for it is only through penalty that quantitative or prudential maxims are constituted) being that he shall control his appetite, with a view to a larger amount of physical felicity than could be attained by not control- ling it. If we compare this very elementary sense of law with that which the cultivated man of Christian civilisation feels with reference to the same act, and ascertain the grounds of the greater intensity and imperativeness of the latter, we shall find that the sense of law, associated with a certain class of temperate acts. Does Law instruct as to Ends ? 79 groios with the growth of reason. And this is to say, that it grows with man's ever-extending perceptions of the large bearing, both direct and indirect, of control of appetite on his physical welfare ; and this again is revealed to him through the pains of different kinds, to which, as his widening experience teaches, the violation of the law exposes him. Again, to keep still within the same range of illus- tration, there are at this moment intellectual convic- tions, growing up into moral laws, before our very eyes. There are men who, under the influence of a desire for immediate physical ease, avoid, if they do not abhor, bathing; there are others at the opposite end of the scale, who so fully realise the effects beneficial or hurtful of washing or not washing respectively, that they regard a proper attention to the skin of the body as a law of health, by which they understand a law of the human organism, and therefore imperative. Such men feel what may be truly called a moral pain when, under the influence of some love of ease, they weakly intermit the physiological duty: they feel that they liave done wrong, and that they have broken a law — a law of much lower intensity than certain other laws of conduct ; but yet a law. The above polemic is valid as against the uncritical intuitionist, but only, I am aware, partially as against Kant. It has been the fashion for the former to seek support in Kant as the great bulwark of his faith. I think that Kant's position has been misapprehended by the intuitionist. Had Kant written only one-third 8o Ethica. of what he has written on the subject of Ethics, his position would have been clearer to others at least, if not also to himself. This prolixity of a great man is no excuse, however, for wholly misunderstanding him. Law, descending on particular alternative volitions, is the true position of the intuitionist ; but this is not Kant's position. It is true his phraseology often justifies a reader in so concluding ; for he says more than once, that Law (emanating from reason where it contemplates the practical) " determines the concept of good," and once, if not oftener, he says that Law " determines duties " (plural number). But no one can peruse the whole of Kant's ethical writings without feeling that he labours heavily; that he has a con- clusion always before him, and that he struggles in a Titanic fashion to compel us to accept it. His posi- tion being untenable, Kant is driven frequently to use language which is not in perfect harmony with his thought. None the less is his central thought quite clear. From reason in contact with the practical — which can only be this or that possible volition — there issues a law or categorical imperative, which says in unmistakable accents, " Thou shalt, thou oughtest (and since thou oughtest, thou canst)." But this imperative is mere emptiness and can give no guidance, either to the savage or the sage. If any understand Kant to go on to say, " Thou oughtest to do a and not &," then our polemic against the intuitionist holds good as against him also. But I do not so understand him. Eor the content of the Ought he is as dependent on experience Does Law instruct as to Ends f 8 1 as any other Moralist. Kant is quite aware that the imperative as such affords no means of connecting the abstract a 'priori category with the volitions of man. Conscious of this, he proceeds to build a bridge from the a priori to the a posteriori — a kind of moral schema, and it is this : Law utters the command, " Let thy maxims (or motives) be such as can be valid for law universal without self-contradiction." This is the synthetic utterance of a priori law, and, as such, it manifestly furnishes for every possible maxim of action a test or criterion by which it may be tried. Without this synthetic utterance, Kant's " law " would be up in a balloon. It is this utterance which constitutes his universal form of legislation. Kant's a priori law is said by him to be prescribed hy reason ; but it is not in reason nor through reason at all. It is a deus ex machind descending without credentials on reason, and forcing it to the synthetic construction of the universal form of legislation. This is unscientific. There is manifestly no way of dis- covering a concrete motive which shall be universally valid, save in and through the concrete itself. On the other hand, Kant is right in holding that law is a priori, for it has its genesis in the categories of reason, and its origin is thus unveiled. Its absoluteness and imperativeness as law are not weakened by the fact that we can trace and exhibit its genesis. Law, when ascertained, is by its very nature universal and necessary, and greater than the reason in and through which it is sought for and affirmed. It is supreme, F 82 Ethica. absolute, authoritative, and evokes a sense of subjection of self to it, of reverence for it. Through law and its correlative duty I, as a practical reason, alone have worth. None the less, however, as in the theoretical sphere of knowing, so in the ethical sphere of doing, law is to be found in rebus. But the stimulus to seek law, and the form of law, are both a priori. The a priori categories act in ascertaining the truth of doing, just as they do in ascertaining the truth of existence, ll^or can Kant give us better insight. For, the universal form of legislation, since it does not determine specific laws and duties, imposes on the moralist the task of ascertaining what those maxims of volition are which can he universally valid. How can we tell this, until we have seen this and that maxim in operation and thus found what its real nature is in its relation to man's constitution as an organism of feeling as well as of reason ? There must be some criterion of the uni- versal validity — either the happiness of the agent, the possibility of society, or the ideal of man. If so, then it follows that the law is found in and through the concrete and phenomenal (the real) and attaches itself to that which promotes certain ends. Thus Kant's categorical imperative is itself at bottom what he calls a hypothetical imperative. Either it is this, or, the law as pure law discriminates among volitions, which, as we have shown in our criticism of intuitionism, it cannot do. Kant is, however, unquestionably (as I have said) so Does Law instruct as to Ends f Z^^ far right. The particular matter of sensibility cannot give law. Law and the affirmation of law can come from will-reason alone ; is therefore, as such, a 'priori and transcendental. But will-reason sees the law in the truth of sensibility — in the idea. It is thus in- structed by the idea which gives the content of law. Law thus ascertained is, as such, universal and abso- lute. For in the whole sphere of things the Truth is the Law. Note how the matter stands : — The personality has been constituted by the act of will subsuming the subject into itself. Genetically it is so : and per- sonality is thereupon and now a distinct positive and self-referent fact in the universal scheme which cannot be ignored, but must be taken account of. It is posited once for all in the universal scheme. This personality is solicited on all sides to volitionise through feeling, that is to say, the inner movements of the attuent subject which has been lifted into personality, and now, as subject become person, forms the total concrete fact. The same will-reason which has con- stituted personality, finds out for it the true end or idea of its doing, and out of the perception of this the law of its doing springs — the " ought " for a free being. The idea and law are a universal for my personality before which it bows in reverence — must bow, or its dignity, nay (as will afterwards appear), its very exist- ence, is compromised. The categorical imperative is " A is the law for man," whereupon Ego at once says, " I will the law " ; i.e. I will the truth of my being. 84 Ethica. CHAP. XVI. — LAW IS IMPLICIT IN THE IDEA OR END. I HAVE said that the mode of ascertaining the law, — the process or procedure within the organism which conditions self-realisation, — is the same as the mode of ascertaining the law in any other object submitted to cognition. The difference consists in the difference of the matter of knowledge alone, for we are dealing now not with physical dynamical processes but with the new matter of feeling, as exhibited in the desires and emotions of a conscious subject. In the former case, the matter is in sense, in the latter it is in sensibility. The phenomena of sensibility, accordingly, have to be known in quantity, quality, and relation, in order that the universal of law and duty (of which universal the content is as yet unknown) may be rightly filled. The idea or essence of a thing is that whereby it is what it is and is not any other thing, — the differentiat- ing element in the notion. The elements and energies which, with their inter-reciprocities, constitute a thing are governed in their correlations by the supreme end which they seek, or which is sought for in and through them. No doubt the end is the total of the thing — tJie notion in its completion — but as all the elements are governed by the specific and differentiating element in the notion to which they are subordinate, we may correctly say that the end is the idea, and the idea is Law is Implicit in the Idea or End, 85 the essence of the thing : the end may be also spoken of as the ultimate function. When, now, we turn to man as a doing conscious subject, we are not restricted to a mere outside view of the elements and energies which constitute him : we are intimately conscious of them and lie close to them in ourselves. Of these we have given a general and superficial view (but sufficient for our purposes) which it is tlie business of empirical psychology to make adequate. The difference which first meets us is that, whereas each element in an object is an end to itself while also contributing to a higher organic unity, these ends in the case of man are now conscious (in the sense of felt) ends. Conscious these ends are : they have been trans- muted, in the organic evolution of the cosmos, from mere mechanical or vital processes into feelings and desires ; but, while conscious, they are, as we have seen, immediate in their activity and completion ; that is to say, their only mediation is of the nature of instrumentation through an object on which the desire fastens. Further, we have found that through the emergence, or rather functioning, of will in the attuent subject, the elements supplied to consciousness in the form of impulses and immediate ends (or what more strictly should be distinguished as terminals) of action, become self-conscious or purposed ends — true ends in the philosophic sense : that is to say, they effect them- selves mediately through a more general or more uni- versal end than any single and particular desire can supply. S6 Ethica. An end or idea is thus always, however subordinate to the function of an object as a whole, or to the ultimate function of an object, so far a universal. The object under consideration being an organic unit, it has to find its way to a true reciprocity or inter- relation of ends subject to the end of the object as a whole — as determined by its supreme end, idea, or ultimate function. Accordingly, the idea, essence, reXo?, supreme end of any organism, contains the governing law of that organism. The organism is what it is (and not any other thing) by virtue of the processes which constitute it. The law of a thing is in the notion of a thing as a whole ; but the supreme and governing element (or dynamic force) in the law is in the supreme end of the thing — its idea, Te\o<;, essence. In a self-conscious organism capable of conceiving and contemplating ends, the completion or realisation of itself is possible only through the self-conscious con- ception of its supreme end, and of the subordinate ends which, as contributing to the supreme end, contain contributory laws. The governing law of a self-conscious being is im- plicit in the supreme end, and the right or wrong of all particular desires and emotions is determined by the extent to which the supreme law is obeyed. On the formal side, the dominancy of will-reason and consequent personality is, we have found, supreme end ; this is the ultimate function of man — his supreme end and supreme law, because it is the truth of him. The supreme end of man — the fact and domination of will and personality as containing will (and, indeed, Law is Implicit in the Idea or End. Z^j constituted by will acting on the subject and so trans- forming it) is, however, only the supreme formal end and the supreme formal law of his being. That is to say reason, and the free self-determining action which is implicit in reason, must be present in every motive of action as the nerve of it, if it is to be moral. But there is a content or real in man as in any other organic unit : that content is, in his case, feeling in the form of conscious desire and emotion. The moralist accordingly is under obligation to find the real as well as the formal end of the organic conscious unit man, if he is to ascertain the law of life for the desires and emo- tions, and if the man is truly to live, or to live the truth. In doing so, he at the same time brings to light the process through which humanity gradually finds its way to the right conduct of life, and rises step by step from one ideal to another. The essential characteristic (let me repeat iisqiie ad nauseam) of the elements which he now deals with in order to ascertain end, and consequent law, is that they are what we call feelings — elements of which the organic unit under consideration is itself conscious. The real end, consequently, must be ultimately determined by reason operating in the field of feeling whether we like it or not ; nay more, feeling of some sort must tell us when we have reached the end of our search. The desires and emotions, we have already shown, complete themselves, and so find their end, in their own satisfac- tion ; that is to say, within the subject. The criterion, therefore, of the law — the right and wrong — is subjec- tive feeling, and can be nothing else; that is to say, it is 88 Ethica, the resultant of the quantitative, qualitative, and relative in feeling. Just as in an object of sense, we ascertain the nature, and therefore the end and law or truth, of the real in the thing before us through quantity, quality, and relation, so do we in the higher sphere of a self-conscious and willing organism. But it is not a particular feeling or combination of feelings we are in search of, but the conditions under which a complex feeling-organism of a particular kind, can realise itself — can truly live. The searcher is free reason, and the result of search, what- ever it may be, is an offspring of reason. The feelings we speak of impel to do something, and we seek the truth of the doing, which is reason-afifirmed and is the '' good," because it is the end and the law. Let it not be for a moment forgotten that we are not in search of something in the sensibility which, of itself (like the demon of Socrates), is to determine directly the real end. We are in search of something which will tell us when the end of the real of feeling has been found, and which may be constituted an idea and law of reason for sensibility. The a priori categories, •constitutive of reason, are in the practical sphere, as in the theoretical, always in search of law ; only, this law in the case of feeling must be ascertained through feeling, with a view to regulate and determine feeling as proximate determiner of doing or volition. Meanwhile we must consider a little longer the con- tention that law and obligation are implicit in end, that the perception of end is the perception of law which, when affirmed and formulated, is alone the categorical imperative. Obligation or Duty. 89 CHAP. XVII. — MUST : CATEGORICAL IMPERATIVE : LAW : OUGHT : OBLIGATION OR DUTY : ABSOLUTENESS OF LAW : SUPPORTS OF LAW : LAW IS REASON- SPRUNG. Up to this point, let me repeat, our mode of procedure in endeavouring to ascertain the truth of doing or the system of ends for man is of the same kind as our pro- cedure with a view to ascertain the truth of things. We always seek the end, which is at the same time the idea or essence, of an object, be it plant, animal, or man. Nor does the parallelism of the method of investiga- tion end here : for even in the most vital question of law and duty we find that the mystery which over- hangs these abstract conceptions (or sentiments) disap- pears, when we regard man ab extra and deal with him as we deal with any other problem in the organic world. When we apply the categories to any object of knowledge we find that in that object there are certain elements and causal inter-relations of these elements whereby the thing before us is what it is and not any other thing. These inter-relations of elements and energies are the laws of that thing in and for itself. Law is not imposed on a thing : it is in its process. Abolish one or more elements, and the " thing " ceases to be what it has been. Now, the necessity of the causal nexus in 90 Ethica. the thing enables us to say that these conditions must take effect if the thing is to be equal to itself and to attain its end. It is a question of identity. So with man : if we have attained to the notion and idea of the man-object — his end as an organic, intelligent, and emotional unit — then, all the conditions necessary to the attainment of the end, viz., man as he is striving to be, translate themselves from the word must into the word ought. The reason why a new term with a dif- ferent connotation is needed, is simply this, that the organism we are considering has within itself, through the suspension of will or the misapprehensions of the understanding (in brief through the abrogation or perversity of will, or through ignorance), the power and the tendency to defeat the end of its own being. The organism is removed from slavish subjection to the necessary laws of nature through the fact of will, and through its dependence on the operation of this free- moving energy for knowing its own ends and regulating them. This removal out of the sphere of natural neces- sity necessarily carries with it the possibility of error. Herein lies the prime and supreme characteristic of this organic unity, man. And hence it is, that, owing to the inherent possibility of deviation, inherent in the fact of freedom, the expression, " what must occur " if an organ- ism is to be complete of its kind, has to be translated into "what ouglit to occur" — what the individual is under obligation to do, what he owes to law if he is to be truly himself. The possibility of divergence from the path of law is Must and Ottght. 91 caused by this very emergence in man of will-reason and its consequent law as given through itself, from which the desires inherent in the attuent consciousness (individual subject) turn us aside. The expression, what must be if the thing is to be what it is — in other words, the law of the thing — now enters ; but looking to the facts of the case, and the power residing in man to defeat the law — i.e. to ascertain it, and then to follow it or the reverse, we are forced to employ another word to denote the change of conditions. This word, " must!' denotes what is involved in or due to the law of a thing : when we transfer this notion to an object which has the power of deviating from its law, " must " be- comes " ought," " obligation," " duty." " Ought," then, is merely " must " moralised. It follows from this that the conception (or senti- ment) of law in the moral sphere, has its source in reason with its categories. There are not two sources of illumination for man — reason as theoretical, and reason as practical. It is one and the same reason, operating under precisely similar inherent laws, — the necessary dialectic, but in different matter. The categorical im- perative arises out of the perception and affirmation of the true end of doing, and thus the philosophy of morality is brought back to a question of ends as the supreme question. To repeat : — the law of each thing is in the end of each, which end is its idea. In the physical world I call this law the " must " ; in the moral world I call it the " ought." The essence, idea or end is also, in truth, the law ; the latter being merely the name we 92 Ethica. assign to the idea viewed with reference to a movement or progress. That is to say, it is a name for the causal relations of the elements and energies that determine the attainment of the idea or ultimate function of a thing as itself and not anything else. Kant rests the proof of the a ^priori universal form of legislation (the feeling of which is the feeling of the absoluteness of Duty) on this, that, as a matter of fact, every man acknowledges the " supreme practical prin- ciple as the supreme law of the will " — a law not depend- ing on any sensible data. Now, it is true that the moral law, as in this treatise expounded, is ascertained through sensible data, but it is not to be found in any one sensible datum, nor in any aggregate of data. It is ascertained by the operation of a priori reason ; law as such is affirmed by a 'priori reason, and consequently as such is a priori, imperative, and absolute. It is imperative and absolute as a positive utterance of law and duty — as the necessary condition of the life of a rational soul. And yet, it is ascertained only after intromitting with various feelings, any one of which may be ground of a volition. Consequently, in affirming a particular moral idea as containing positive law for man in any particular case, it negates or restricts other possible impulses to volition. Law is thus not only positive, but negative or restrictive. This restriction or negation is so far a process of pain, because it involves the suspension or repression for the time of natural desires — the desires of the attuent subject. All law in the domain of feeling thus involves Supports of Law. 93 sacrifice and pain, and these are the necessary ac- companiments and conditions of Virtue. Law is thus at once positive and negative. Law continued : — Supports of Law. If the mere perception and affirmation of ends by Eeason, contains implicitly the law, it may be asked how are the majesty and awfulness of the categorical imperative thereby explained and vindicated? The answer is another question : From what source more awful could law proceed ? Let us bear in. mind that the Absolute-Causal-Being — itself at once kinetic, efficient, formal, and final cause of all that is — the Supreme and Universal Will, immanent in all things and in man as a mere attuent and animal organism, has, further, in the same man delivered itself from the burden of the phenomenal and emerged as still that very Will, though under finite conditions. It has emerged to render reason and law and duty and Itself possible objects of knowledge for us through its own inherent and essential moments of activity in us — as we have seen in the fornier treatise. The divine reason itself, as conditioned, constitutes man in his idea; — why should it not then be the source of duty for man ? It constitutes for man, God. Why not then, for man, moral law ? What more supreme fountain of " the good " than this do we seek ? What more authoritative and ultimate ground of duty? We are wont to seek for both Law and God in the ends of the earth, while all the time both are in our own bosoms. We have to 94 Ethica. teach ourselves to discern the Divinity that lies in familiar fact. Kant's position is that moral law emanates from reason (practical), and to it the will must subordinate itself, irrespective of inclination or the sum of inclina- tions: in this way we receive into consciousness the concepts of law and duty as a 'priori. My purpose is to show that, while law formally is a priori, there is a way in which we become cognisant of it, — i.e. that formal law is in the perception of end or idea; and thus we see at once the what of law as well as the how of its entrance into consciousness. It is an inadequate analysis that reduces the sense of moral law to " moralised force " — that is to say, traces its origin to the inner pains that accompany and follow obedi- ence to a lower as opposed to a higher motive. But while unquestionably this inner penal sanction confirms law, it is not the origin of the consciousness of law. Law is a pure utterance of reason — " This thou shalt do " — and it has no immediate regard to inner penal conse- quences. It precedes them. These consequences are the inner pains of disobedience to law, which, though within us, are external to law as such and consequent on the breach of law. We find penalties also in public opinion and the whole machinery of society. The whole range of both inner and outer penalties belongs to the sanctions of moral law : and to these we shall again refer. But above all, it is the additional force and authority which enter into the sense of law, when a man learns to discern in all reason-affirmed right Growth of Law. 95 ends the Will of God immanent, that consummate the sentiment by carrying it into the infinite and eternal. If there be a moral law — a categorical imperative (in the sense in which the term has been explained), how is it that moral truths are so slow of growth ? Does not the very existence of such an inner fact as law carry with it of necessity the conclusion that morality, as a completed system, must leap out of the heart of law into the consciousness of man from the first? These are pertinent questions. But the answer is already given ; for we have seen that law is implicit in the perceived end or idea, and consequently must wait on the "perception of ends, and follow in the wake of such perceptions. It is not so easy a matter to find the ends subordinate and supreme of a creature so complex as man, at once an organic intelligent unit and a unit of an organic whole — Society. Moral law has a history, because knowledge of man and his ends and the varying character of his environment has a history. And there is nothing peculiar in this, nothing that as yet leads us away from the parallelism between theoretical and ethical investigation. The knowledge of all other objects in their essence, idea, and end, is equally slow and gradual. There is a history of moral and religious development, just as there is a history of astronomy and biology, and the history is through the empirical to the scientific; but it can never divorce itself from experience. The conclusion is, that the law of doing as law 9 6 Ethica. —the categorical imperative — is reason-sprung and a 'priori — a priori, however, only in the sense that reason and its categories are a priori, demand law, necessarily search for law, and contain the form of law. The mere search for ends is under the stimulus of the a priori form of end, and its issue in the affirmation of ends and laws is a birth of reason, and not of crude Feeling. The affirmation of law as such is pure, and does not arise out of the sensibility or anything external as its source, any more than the notion of law in nature is found in the impressions of sense. And yet, ends and the real instruct law. For Truth is the Law. Moral Law and Duty, 97 CHAP. XVIII. — IT IS THE MORAL LAW AND DUTY TO IT THAT MAN SEEKS. AYiTHOUT reserve and in the fullest sense, we can say with Kant, that " the notion of duty is in itself already the notion of a constraint of the free elective will by the law" (Pref. to "Met. of Ethics"). It is the law of volition which man seeks and is always seeking. Kant is very solicitous (and rightly so) to show that the causality of will is determined by pure reason heginning luith principles, and that this is the foundation of all true moral doing. This, however, it seems to me, is rather to be put thus : Theoretic knowledge, as well as practical, logically begins in principles. Our search is always for the filling of the a priori Categories, and this implies a projection of the notion of law, and an anticipation of law, both in outer sense whereby man receives, and in inner sensibility at the bidding of which man energises. The reason of man is, by virtue of the fact of reason itself, in continual pursuit of law, though continually stopping short in a delusive satisfaction with that which is only partial, provisional, and relative. The most uncultivated man is engaged in this search,, whether he knows it or not. In his relations to the external world he soon gives up the search and allows G 98 Ethic a. himself to be overwhelmed by the complexity and infinitude of nature, except, perhaps, where his imme- diate animal needs are concerned; but in the moral world — the special field of his own causality among other causalities — he cannot give it up : it always abides with him, and popular maxims and proverbs are the record of it. But all the while, if our prior metaphysical investi- gation be sound, it is not happiness which man is seek- ing for, but law as the condition and prms of self- realisation. None the less, the only happiness possible for man always attends on the fnlfilment of law — the law of his organism. So with all other organisms, if we may extend the term happiness to the unconscious. This must be kept in view in all that follows. However man may reach law, it is law in doing which he necessarily seeks. Law in nature is not the less law that it is found in nature, whether by nature we mean outer sensation or inner sensibility. When in the investigation of nature I seek for law I have a painful felicity in the pursuit and a supreme joy in the flash of discovery : but I do not investigate nature in order to have this joy, but in order to discover truth or law. The consequent joy is not the purposed end of my activity. So in the ethical sphere. To sum up : — Law comes into consciousness as a positive categorical imperative emanating from reason which seeks, perceives, and affirms right or true ends — the Good ; but law is implicit in the end, and the percep- Moral Law is the Object of Search. 99 tion of law in the perception of end (truth). Keason thus gives the law to itself, and a virtuous volition is the taking back into reason what reason has generated, affirming it as true motive of volition, and continuing it into actualisation. It is a 'positive categorical imperative ; by which I mean that law is not negatively engendered — that is to say, through the experience of inner coercive penal- ties, much less through external penalties and social disapproval, as the sensationalist vainly holds. True, pleasure and pain in the large general sense guide reason to the affirmation of the positive law in and for man. But penalty or negation is not the ground of law, for law rests on the perception of true ends, that is to say, of the truth of the life of man. Inner and outer penalties are, while inevitable, yet adventitious supports or sanctions of law and duty, and are various and complex in their character. Further, the sentiment of obligation or duty — the correlative of law — is a feeling of what we owe to law purely as law, and, like law itself, is a priori, obligation being involved in law. When I say that law is a priori, I mean that will-reason, by its essen- tial nature as dialectic, a priori seeks law, must seek law in all content of experience, and, further, contains the form of end or law. Accordingly, law, as ascer- tained and affirmed, is, as law, lifted clear out of aU pathological relations and conditions, and commands obedience in the name of pure reason. There is a joy or satisfaction of reason in the identity with itself which lOO Ethica. conformity to law brings with it ; but this is the joy of reason and not in any sense pathological — nay, by its very nature and aim is a contradiction of the patho- logical, negating it in its various forms of desire as motive of conduct to a being of reason. And yet, if pure law, as we have shown above, cannot as mere law, discriminate, then the categorical impera- tive is unable to give us a single concrete principle of morality. Law in itself, and consequently duty, is purely formal ; and it demands, we have seen, both general and particular content, arising, as it does, out of a perception of the truth of ends. Formal law, in short, is empirically instructed by end or idea and cannot itself instruct experience, just as in our metaphysical analysis we found reason to be empirically instructed in the whole range of sense-phenomena (a j^osteriori categories). Thus we are driven to the consideration of ends as alone revealing to us the substance or content of moral motive as opposed to the form. We have to ascertain the end of this organic unit — man ; and when we have ascertained it, we shall know what is for him "the good" and, therefore, the law in conformity with which the right conduct of life consists. But the law will be none the less uncompromising in the presence of inclination because we unveil its " how *' as well as maintain its " that." "We shall still be able to maintain with Kant that pure law, i.e. law as such, restricts the sensibility and determines all that is pathological in man by the condition of obedience to itself Moral Law is the Object of Search. loi law. For law and the possibility of law are wholly a 'priori ; nor is this a priori character of law affected by the fact that it is ascertained by reason after a process, instead of being blurted out (so to speak) by reason without any apparent reason. Law as motive to volition, and supreme motive to volition, is free and self-constituted. Kant (we may note in passing) says, in illustration of his position, that the notion of law as restrictive cannot apply to the Divine Being. Perhaps the less any one says of the ratio essendi of the Divine Being the better ; but we may be permitted to point out that it follows from this and the preceding book that idea and law are in the creative energy one, and that every movement of the Divine Being is itself ipso facto kw. I02 Ethica. CHAP. XIX.— THE END OF MAN, FOEMAL AND EEAL. 1 . The Bwpreme Formal End. We now know the object of our search, the method of procedure, and the fact, the supremacy, the source, and the characteristics of law. What follows is of less importance philosophically, though of vital importance practically. We have to deal with man in the whole extent of the notion ; and, in so doing, we enter upon empirical ground where the complexity of the subject to be dealt with may lead to inadequate views. We are in search of the law of man in his practical relations — his real relations to his own organism and to other men. The notion is the complete record of an object — the filling of the categories in its .respect : the idea is that in the notion which we emphasise as the positive whereby it is itself and not anything else — the notion in its negative relations. To this term, idea, the term " essence " is equivalent ; and end or " final cause " is simply the idea contemplated by the imagination as effectuated after a presumed series of movements. The notion of man is highly complex : he has a stomach and heart as well as nobler elements. As a mere attuent subject, he is part of the concrete and phenomenal world (homo phenomenon). The Formal End of Man. 1 03 The idea of man we have already, in our meta- physical exploration, ascertained. It is pure will — that is to say, will as root of reason, as first moment in the unity reason, as constitutor of the subject into per- sonality or ego — at once primal act and fact of freedom. Each man is entitled to realise for himself the notion of man in all its extent, but only as subject to the idea of man, and through this to law and personality. And mainly herein lies the objectivity of the moral law. Will and its movements are, in so far as they can be content, content to themselves alone. In. respect of all else, they are formal and hyper-phenomenal. The dominancy of will-reason and of the law thence eman- ating, is thus the supreme good for man ; because it is the idea of him. In those elements of the notion of man which lie outside the supreme idea, we have to find the Beal end. Whatever difficulty may attend this, it is a matter of vital significance to have determined the supreme formal end — the dominancy of will, law, and person- ality. For thus we see that the supreme formal end implies not merely autonomy but autocracy. We now know what each man ought to make his supreme end ; and in seeking the real end we know that it must always be subject to the supreme formal end. Before doing so, let us note the stage we have reached. Law is in idea or end, which end is its content. We now see that the content of a man's volition is first of all a formal content, viz., the will-reason and (consequent) ego, and this because Will-reason is the idea I04 Ethica. in the notion of man, and so is above all question. Identity with self, in short, is the prime content. If, then, the desire or emotion which immediately determines my volition is itself determined by will- reason and thereupon subsumed into my personality, identified with it, the said volition (or rather its motive) is good, it matters not what it is. But it is good only formally. To be good really, the reason- affirmed motive must be in accord with the supreme real end. And it is real ends — the real good — which man is always laboriously striving after in the course of his painful and devious history. Whether that good is to be pleasurable, or painful, or mixed, he cannot, to begin with, say ; but of this we may be assured that if it do not satisfy the reason in him and so give a rational joy, in the midst of what pain soever, God is not the Father of the human spirit; but some arch- demon rather. 2. The Supreme Real End. The law of duty is imperative as such and formally : the search for the idea in the real is the search for that which constitutes duty in concreto. Only in the real can I find real content for my volition. Since law can neither furnish real content nor discriminate among possible real contents, we must in some other way determine what a man ought to make the real (as opposed to the formal) content of his volitions. [The emotions of reason^ can give real content: but I am here confining myself to sensibility alone.] 1 Sequel. The Real End of Man. 105 All the feelings, whether propensions or emotions, that enter into the subject, have their right to live established by the fact of their existence. The questions of the moralist, accordingly, are brought into clear relief only when one end (desire or emotion) conflicts with itself, or with another : when it conflicts with itself the question is a quantitative one, when with another it is qualitative, and it may be at the same time also quantitative. But among the multitude of ends there must be a relation not only of equality but of subordination if man is to have a supreme real end, and this, whether we regard him as an organic unit or as a unit of the larger organism — society. We naturally seek first the supreme end, that thereby we may determine other ends in relative subordination ; but we cannot allow ourselves to be put off with such vague general terms as Happiness, the Good, the Fit, Pleasure, the Will of God, complete living, social vitality, etc. etc. These are mere empty sounds: so much so that we may rationally hold that the supreme real end is all of them together and each of them separately. Of this we may be assured that will-reason never rests till it has discovered inner harmony. As man progresses, the constitution of ever-higher ideals com- pels a fresh arrangement of the elements of feeling in subordination to the new ideal. The question before us is an important one, but not so vital as it seems. For if we have disentangled from the confusion of ethical inquiries the true method of io6 Ethica. investigation and the question of law, and have further found that the dominant will and personality, and the consequent irrefragable claims of law, are to be con- stantly present in every volition entitled to the name of "moral," we can afford to discuss with equanimity the question of the real or empirical content of law. [And this remark suggests to us to signalise, as a con- ciliator of schools of thought, the twofold nature of every ethical act, as that has now clearly emerged — the formal will and consequent law on the one hand, and the real content of will and law on the other. It is in this twofold nature of an ethical act that we find the reconciliation of the Stoic and Cyrenaic. The combatants were occupied with the contemplation of different sides of the same shield. The Stoic, however, had the better point of view, for he discovered the inherent supremacy of the formal, and saw that through it alone could a man be a king. But this in passing.] . The question is. How are we to find the law of sensibility whereby it can fulfil itself as a complete organism"? In approaching this question, the reader will condone, I hope, the repetition of what has been already in other forms said, in order to preserve the solidarity of the argument. When we contemplate any object in the natural world, it is at first a mere confused aggregate or totality. To know it, we proceed to categorise it in quantity, quality, and relation. Under the stimulus of the a priori cate- gories, which are the form of our knowing, we grasp the The Real End of Man. 107 object as having an end within itself, and so forth. We thus constitute a unity, which unity is the notion of the thing. This notion is made up of infinite parts and relations whose inter-reciprocity constitutes the thing in relation to its end. Among the elements of this notion we find, with much that is common to the rest of nature, certain distinctive determinations which negate the rest of nature, and constitute the differentia of that thing, which differentia we emphasise as it is emphasised in the object, and call the idea. It ultimately is, a single — a differentia, though con- stituted in " moments." The whole play of inter- relation in the notion is thus determined by the ultimate function as expressed by the idea; that is to say, the inter-relations play up to it or are sub- ordinated to it. When we come to consider the organic unit, man, we do not find that the process whereby we can know him has to be other than that whereby we know other things. We discover the idea easily, viz., will and the will-reason with their consequent impli- cations. Thus the formal in all doing (and doing is simply the externalising of my affirmations in the world of phe- nomena) is settled for me, but only the formal; and we have now to approach those parts and relations in the rest of the complete notion of man which constitute him a doing being. Here, now, instead of the material parts and dynamical inter-relations of a physical object, we find what stands for them, viz., feelings of various kinds, and we are thus able to know more about io8 Ethica, man — we being men — than we can ever know about any physical object. For the play of elements now is in me : in fact, they constitute me a real. We have first, then, speculatively — i.e, as a mere matter of cognition — to ascertain these elements, to define to ourselves the cliaracter of their activity, and their quantity and quality. We then have to ascertain the law of their active inter-relation, subject always to the supreme formal end or idea of man. Just as in a physical object, there are certain elements, and dynamical inter-relations of these elements, where- by a thing is, and alone can be, what it is ; so, in the region of feeling — the attuent or non-rational consciousness — there are certain dynamical inter- relations whereby alone a man can be a man, and so fulfil himself. But the peculiarity here is, that we not only can through will ascertain and co- ordinate these as mere matter of cognition, but that the same power, will, which through its reason-movement ascertains them, has \ki^ further task imposed on it of regulating the play of these elements (either positively or negatively) at every successive moment of existence with reference to a conceived real end. The actual living inter-relations in a physical object are determined in that object /or that object ; in the case of man they are determined in him hy himself. Shall this or that or the other motive, or dynamical force, operate in me, and externalise itself, is for me to determine. In the case of the physical object we are in search of the dynamical inter-relations, a^, 5^, c^, whereby the The Formal and Real. 109 statical elements a, h, c, constitute or make possible the thing. Our inquiry is causal and teleological, for it has to do with the processes necessary for the end to be attained. And these we must see either directly or inferentially. We can see that if a^ suddenly became a* or a^y the " thing " would disappear, it would be some other thing. We are in search then of that statical and dynamical equilibrium or harmony whereby the thing is what it is. While this search then is a search for what is in the thing, it is an object of search projected by reason. The very conception of an end of search is possible only for a priori reason striving to satisfy the categories. So, in the sphere of feeling ; the end is a rational end, for here too we are seeking for that harmony, statical and dynamical, which will make it possible for the attuent consciousness, which is an aggregate of poten- tial forces, to live as a unity. Without that harmony it manifestly has simply failed to realise itself We already possess a supreme end for this possible organism of feeling — possible because it depends on me to constitute it an actual organism — viz., Will as reason and as ground of personality. The supremacy of this or these is the ultimate function of the whole man ; but it is necessary to find the end of the feeling-organism as such, for so only can our will-reason ascertain and determine the inter-relations which constitute the actualisation or true life of the said feeling-organism. Here, too, then the aim of our search is harmony. In physical inquiry we seek a harmonia rei and rerum, in moral inquiry we no Ethica, seek a Tiarmonia morum within the man. This harmony is " the good " for the subject entity of feeling and emotion which we are investigating : it is through this that it becomes the organism which it is intended to be. Thus it fulfils itself as life. The projected aim of pure reason is law, which as law in the real is not itself harmony, but the formal expres- sion of the conditions of harmony : it finds its filling in a feeling of harmony in the sensibility, and the " law " is then guaranteed to be " the good." The " good " (or as we have hitherto said, the end or idea), as feeling, fills the formal schema of law, and, in filling it, instructs it, — tells it that law is satisfied. When formal reason first begins to seek for law among the elements and dynamical inter-relations of feeling, it must have some criterion of truth. This criterion can be ultimately only in feeling, and is harmony in feeling. Our search for a system of ends thus resolves itself into a search for the conditions of harmony ; but harmony itself is, first of all, within the domain of feeling. When we have to deal with a physical object, we ascertain by observation and experiment the conditions of harmony relatively to it ; but when we have to do with a conscious entity, and the matter of our inquiry is feelings, how else than through feeling can we take a single step ? There may be more or less of pain in the adjustment of our feelings and consequent volitions, but the ultimate criterion of the attainment of the end, harmony, can only be a feeling — a feeling of peace guaranteed by law. If the dynamical inter-relations be End Generally, 1 1 1 relations between elements of the same quality but differing in quantity, a^ a^, a^, the rightful activity of c? may involve the repression and consequent pain of a}- and (^ ; if there be a difference in higher and lower quality, then a must yield to I and h to c, thereby involving pain to a and h in order that the resultant may be peace through discord, happiness through un- happiness, joy through sacrifice. But this peace and joy, let us note, are not exclusively pathological, as is the pleasure which any particular feeling as such yields. Feeling is satisfied, and reason is satisfied through the law in the real of feeling which it sought for and now makes its own. The satisfaction, accordingly, is the peace and the joy which attend law and duty. The joy is a rational joy, inasmuch as it is the issue of the organising of the chaotic elements of feeling in subjection to a reason-idea and the law in it. [See sequel — Emotions of Eeason.] End generally. Harmony, then, as a reason-idea, is the end which will-reason — the ever supreme formal in man — seeks as end, and consequently law, in the sphere of the real : and the governing element in this harmony is the pure satisfaction of reason. Tor the affirmation of the con- ditions of harmony is rational ; and thus it arises that the consciousness of harmony is not in any proper sense pathological, feeling having been penetrated and in- terpreted by reason and transformed into law of feeling. Logically, it is true, the mere feeling of harmony must 112 Ethica, precede the perception of law, but it cannot arise save in and through this perception. Eeason and feeling flash into a unity at the same moment. Eeason is realized, reality is rationalized. Feeling is always feeling towards an end, and reason is always striving towards that end. The harmony as ascertained is the " good " for man affirmed as law. In this harmony alone can the total notion of Man be fulfilled for each man : it is the affirmation of the union of each individual in his particularity with the universal and objective in him. Living in this harmony, he lives in the universal in which alone his being can truly realise itself, *' Each thing endeavours to persist in its own essence," says Spinoza. " N'ature demands that each love him- self and seek what is useful to himself" — qxLod revera utile est (Pt. iv., 18. 8.), et id omne quod hominem ad majorem perfectionem revera ducit. Virtue again, he says, is living according to the laws of our own nature. So said the ancient Stoic, and we cannot take exception to either.^ Such generalisations, however, do not, any more than the Epicurean " pleasure," give us the slightest information. We want to know what is " utile " (in the Spinozistic sense), i.e. what are the laws of our nature, and wherein we have the guarantee that we have found them ? The next question, accordingly, in terms of this argument, is, What are the conditions of harmony or perfection or virtue, as these can be ascertained through 1 Naturalism in ethics is the subject of a subsequent chapter, The End of Man, 113 feeling ? Are all the elemental forces in the attuent con- sciousness of the same quantity and quality, or can we discriminate quantity and quality among them ? If we can discriminate quantity and quality, then we have a '* moral sense" of a kind. But such a rudimentary moral sense {i.e. a primary feeling of the differences of inner feelings as motive forces) cannot regulate conduct, but is merely one of the instruments which will-reason uses for ascertaining how conduct is to be determined — in other words, the right or true determination of the reason-idea which is to govern conduct. And this this idea is an idea of relations, as we shall see. 36 Perhaps we can best show that " the good " for man is harmony (which is fulness of life), and that this harmony is sought for, a 'priori, by reason, with its inherent form of end and law, and (when found) in- structs law, if we confine ourselves, in the first instance, to the propensions or appetitive desires, on the 'pro- msional presicmption that they alone exist in man. 114 Ethica, CHAP. XX. — THE LAW (OR CONDITIONS OF HARMONY) IN THE SPHERE OF APPETITION. We are in search of law in the sensibility, and in that restricted portion of the sensibility which has to do with the appetitive desires — animal feelings arising out of the material organism. The reflective moralist, observe, in prosecuting this search, is simply repeating and bringing into clear consciousness what man has been unreflectively doing through the ages in his coni- stant efforts to organise himself from within, with due regard to his environment, including in his environ- ment, of course, other men, first as loosely aggregated and then as organised into communities. He sets con- sciously before himself, as the a 'priori object of search, law in harmony, which men, dimly and sub-consciously, have had before them as the aim of their endeavours after true life since the dawn of reason. This law, when he finds it, will (as we have said) be at once positive and negative, for it will af&rm a posi- tive law in man's members arising out of their relations, and it will restrict particular sensibilities in the in- terests of the life of the whole as determined by this law. I should like as much as possible to avoid the word " pleasure." The connotations of that word make it wholly inapposite in any strictly moral reference. The Sphere of Appetition. 115 Pleasure is the satisfaction of immediate desires — a succession of pleasing states of consciousness, and is in its essence and notion transitory. Mere sense contains no ethical element whatsoever, and can contain none. There is a perverseness in the continued employment of the word by certain moralists, which originates either in a combative or a cynical temper. Pleasure as such can never be a moral end to man, who is an end to himself. Kationalised pleasure might be a moral end, but the mere introduction of the word " rational- ised " introduces an entirely new element— an element so new as to annihilate pleasure as end. On the plane of mere appetition we find that will as reason comes into contact with the real, just as it does in things of the outer sense, and that as the latter are discriminated by quantity, quality, and relation, so must the real in appetition be in like manner dis- criminated, if we are to know it. No new engine of intelligence or of method is available. The sphere of the empirical, however, which we now encounter, is more complex in its character than the empirical of external sense, mainly because it concerns desires which have to complete themselves in all their external relations before we can even have them present to us as objects of thought. When a child or a primitive man first gorges himself, he is not aware that he is doing wrong, for he is simply gratifying a natural desire. When he realises the consequences of gorging, that is to say, when the vjhole desire in its completion is before him as an object of consciousness, he begins to doubt whether he has done rightly. At this stage ii6 Ethic a. he is in a purely animal or non-mediate condition. The reason with which he is endowed, however, now further enables him to consider the desire in its relation to its own conditions of satisfaction, and also in relation to other desires equally clamant which are defeated by the over-indulgence of the first. He at once thereby raises himself out of the purely animal condition and begins to act mediately, or morally. That is to say, he can hold present to consciousness, not merely the conditions of the satisfaction of a particular desire, but the fact of other desires, and out of regard for these conditions, and for the other desires and their legitimate gratifica- tions, he interposes a restriction on the particular desire, and similarly on each of the other desires in their turn. His desire to drink may be unduly limited by his gorging, his love of activity is restricted, and his love of ease is restricted because the results of gorging are painful ; further, the desire to eat is itself in the long- run defeated (he finds) by unrestricted indulgence. In pursuing this mental process he is not seeking pleasure but the regulation of pleasures. There thus gradually arises a feeling and a law of harmony involving restriction all round, which law we know under the name of Temperance or Self-control, though as yet in a rudimentary form. This reason-born conception, Temperance, mediates his future volitions in so far as they are good. It constitutes the idea and governing end in the future activity of the appetitive desires, and through that idea or end, as now a substan- tive rational entity present to his consciousness, he hence- forth acts, by subsuming it into his personality as " the The Sphere of Appetition. 1 1 7 good," and thereupon willing his particular volitions through it. To put it otherwise, and more abstractly, he identifies these volitions with his Ego, as being volitions self-determined through the mediation of the reason-idea, Temperance. Man as a feeling animal and as a rational animal is thus by reason constituted a moral animal. The measure or standard is, it is true, merely quantita- tive, so far as mere animal pleasure is concerned, and yields and can yield only a crude and prudential morality. But yet, a man who is under the guidance of mere quantitative and prudential morality is a moral being because he acts mediately through the idea of " a good" although his perception of ends may be as yet very limited. The resultant state of being to a man who thus morally acts may be called pleasure, i.e. happiness ; but happi- ness in what ? Happiness of two elements in one complex feeling — happiness in ideal law fulfilled, which is the happiness of reason in reason, and, on the real side, a feeling of harmonious balance, which is not any one " pleasure," but lies in the relation of actual and possible pleasures to each other. It is, in short, feeling, but feeling inreasoned ; it is reason, but reason concreted. The range of quantitative morality is determined by the number of primary appetites which psychology may now or ultimately furnish us with. We recognise among these primary appetites, hunger, thirst, sexual desire, love of power and possession, love of bodily activity for its own sake, love of ease and of rest, fear, resistance, daring. The psychologist, with the help. ii8 Etktca. above all, of comparative psychology, must determine these for us. Within the sphere of appetition, we are dealing, I have said, with quantity alone. True, one man may find a keener or intenser pleasure in one desire than in another, but the difference in such a case is still quantitative. Again, inasmuch as one desire can be differentiated from another, there always is a difference of quality in the merely logical sense of kind. Like many other words in morals, the term " quality " is used equivocally. It strictly means only a difference of kindj but it is also used to connote such a differ- ence of kind as involves the conception of higher and lower. Aesthetic enjoyment, for example, is said to be higher in quality than animal enjoyment, and the fact of an inherent restraining authority of the higher over the lower is at the same moment insinuated. But we may pass this meanwhile, merely explaining that when we say that the various animal appetites are the same in respect of quality, we mean that they are all on the same plane in man's conscious organism, and that the dynamic force of each is designated by the same index- figure ; or, that the dynamic value of each in contributing to the harmonious living of the organism is the same. At the same time, I concur with those who hold that there are certain feelings native to the man-organism, the quality of which is higher than that of others ; that is to say, which have an intrinsically higher dynamic value in contributing to the ideal completion and har- mony — in other words, the realisation — of the notion and idea of Man in each man. Of these again. The Sphere of Appetition, 1 1 9 The terminal of quantitative morality is always a man's animal organism, however disguised this fact may be. And yet it is morality ; because the governing aim of volition is law, the identification of the self with law in the act of volition. The morality of a great por- tion of mankind is, especially among the " respectable " classes, quantitatively determined on the plane of vulgar appetition, though disguised under civilised forms. And as regards the mass of men it must always be so, wherever the social condition is such as to yield the prima vitce with a niggard hand, a state of things which may exist, not only in a primitive society, but in the heart (as we know too well) of the highest material civilisation. To expect from men, living under the pressure of want, life on a high ethical plane, or indeed any plane that can be called "ethical," is vain. The only social force which can raise men so situated is Eeligion. But what does religion mean in such cases and at this stage of de- velopment, if we except a few simple souls gifted with natural piety ? The vague feeling of an unseen Power which can give and take away, and a belief in another state of existence after this, which is influenced by what we do here, and where we may possibly receive com- pensation. The considerations which are called (and rightly called) religious, are thus at this stage of society purely quantitative in their character. Worldliness is reinforced by other- worldliness. Under the con- ditions I have referred to, joy in the contemplation of God, the Good, the Beautiful, Law as such, and of all ethical ideas and ideals, is, generally speaking, im- possible. The self-indulgent respectable rich man lives 1 20 Ethica, on the same plane as the barbarian of civilisation with- out his excuse. His system of life is more complex, self-delusive, and hypocritical ; that is all. The End in the sphere of Appetition. Now in this quantitative or prudential region, the end or object of search, it will be said, is pleasure, however disguised it may be ; and in the case of those whose circumstances would admit of a higher life, but who yet live on the lower plane, the aim is still pleasure in more refined forms. Keputable acts may be done by such men, but being done with an ulterior purpose which sinks their inherent virtue in a material and selfish aim, the agent is moral only in so far as Temperance controls the animal desires. As to this; I would repeat that the term "pleasure" is, like "utility" and "use," an unfortunate inheritance of the moralist. These words have connotations which confuse discussion. If the aim of an agent is the immediate satisfaction of his animal desires one after another, that aim is rightly called pleasure. But if the aim both of his search, and of the ultimate habit of volition based on the results of that search, be lavj in appetition, then it is absurd to say that the aim is "pleasure" (unless we find a puerile amusement in perplexing ourselves and others with words), simply because it is through feeling, a feeling of harmony, that reason has found its way to concrete law. This feeling of harmony, which is the " good " and, as " the good," the content of the empty form of a priori law, may be named happiness or felicity or joy if we like, but End in the Sphere of Appetition, 1 2 1 certainly not pleasure. The feeling is complex : it is the felicity of resultant relations in the real and the joy of reason in law ascertained and affirmed. And yet, it may be said that the above analysis shows that man finds his way to morality empirically. Certainly; just as he finds the law of everything empirically, i.e. by a process of analysis and synthesis of the real of experience. The law of " Temperance " may nowadays be deduced from Physiological science, but the starting-point of the imposing deduction has itself been empirically reached by the man of science himself, just as in the case of a primitive man feeling his way. Even after accepting the term happiness or felicity as fairly denoting the feeling of harmony, it is not this happiness that the will-reason of man has been all the while seeking in its a 'priori search for end, idea, or law : still less is it happiness that is the aim and object of his subsequent volitions after he has found the " end "; but law as it has been instructed by " the good," after this " good " has been apprehended as idea of relations, or, in brief, as the True. But after all, it may be objected, is it not, in any case, organised pleasure that is the object of search and of volition alike ? I answer, no : it is the or- ganisation of pleasure — the law which is revealed through that feeling which tells us that the "good" of our nature is attained. The a 'priori formal cate- gory of end, which contains law, is now filled with the real in feeling ; and this real is harmony or " the good" in and of the man-system — necessary to the true life of that system, as guaranteed by reason. 122 Ethica. Now the moment we have got this term Harmony, we find that it is equivocal. As it is yielded to us by a process of reason in sensibility, and is a complex of the two factors, it may be regarded either from the formal or real side. In the former case, it is the idea which reason has found in and imposed on feeling as law of it ; in the latter case, it is feeling as finding its own idea in reason — the idea of the relations of feelings in a complex whereby their organic unity is indicated with a view to their true life in a system. The two elements, reason and feeling, lie concealed in the one final term. It is, however, the element of feeling or the real which instructs reason and the formal in its search for idea and law. A creature whose living and doing is thus quanti- tatively organised by the action of its own intelligence on the raw material of desire, is, we have said, a moral being. For there is even on this plane, as we see, legislation — the legislation of reason — and the resul- tant, law — a categorical imperative. To the extent to which a man fails to obey the law in appetition he does an immoral act by yielding to brute non-mediate desire. When this desire is so intense that we call it passion, the activity of self-consciousness or reason is for the time obliterated ; but in all ordinary cases, man being, in his differentiation, a self-conscious organism, his Ego is always present even in the illegitimate desire, though only, it may be, as a " still small voice." Let us look again and ascertain the ground of the law. We are dealinoj with the satisfaction of a certain End in the Sphere of Appetition. 123 number of desires or appetites that are inherent in the creature called man and constitute a complex which ought to be an organic complex. The end of each desire is simply its own satisfaction and nothing else : it is absolutely indifferent to all else. Law resides in end, and the law (if we may here use the term " law ") of each separate desire may therefore, viewed as an isolated desire, be said to be fulfilled in its own gratification. But man finds himself to be an organism, not an aggre- gate ; — a conscious subject in which arise many desires, all seeking their respective ends, and each of them an clement in a complex whole. He, as a will-reason, has to intervene if he would live as an organism^ and not merely as a passive victim of the play of natural forces. He has to organise himself from within. By what standard or criterion does he measure the law he imposes ? He enters on the anarchic ochlocracy of desire with the a priori purpose of legislation, and legislates. But how does he know that he has truly found the law of his organism — the idea of and in the relations ? The matter with which he is dealing is feeling, and it is clearly not possible to find the law save through feeling ; — ultimately, through a feeling of balance, equilibrium, peace, non-contradiction, harmony. In other words, the criterion is the attainment within himself of quantitative justice. Law, then, in the region of the quantitative, is ultimately instructed by the feel- ing of harmony. This, as end, is idea ; and it is this idea of harmony as ground and instructor of law that has been all the while, unseen but not unfelt, operating, and continually projecting itself in the search for law. 124 Ethica, This process of rationalisation is necessarily a slow one. Hence morality has a history, and is a growth. Men grope their way slowly to the true life. Harmony within the limits of appetition is known as Temperance or Self-control — doi^podvvriy in the more restricted sense of that term. The thought and name are, it is manifest, both drawn from the side of reason, not of feeling, because it is reason which has detected and imposed the law, just as it was reason (or as I prefer to call it will-reason) which from the first set out to find law, and without which there would be no law. Here then is a reason-sought and a reason-affirmed law in sensibility — ascertained through experiences of sen- sibility, and presented to reason as idea and law through a supreme experience of sensibility, viz., harmony. The word " harmony," as I have before said, is equivo- cal, and may be used to mark the character both of the mere feeling and of the rational idea. Harmony is a reason-idea, for it is an idea of relations which can emanate from a reason alone ; but it is instructed by feeling, and is thus the unity of the rational and the real. Through sensibility the law has been ascertained ; but it has not been ascertained by sensibility drifting hither and thither rudderless until it casually hit upon a stable equilibrium. It was from the first sought for by a 'priori reason in search for end, idea, and the therein contained law. To separate therefore the idea of harmony from reason is impossible ; feeling and reason pass into each other. Thus it is that the satisfaction of desires non- Appetitive Justice. 1 2 5 mediately gives place to their satisfaction mediately, each desire being mediated by reason, subject to a more or less conscious supreme end, which though in feeling is projected as end of search by reason, and is a rational end. This end dominates over all other lesser ends as the law of our members, and so dominates simply because it is in the supreme end that law always resides — there found by reason, and by reason affirmed.^ Justice in this sphere, it will be observed, is not equality, but equality as subject to a higher end than that contained in any particular desire. Man is now thus far a true concrete, for the subsump- tion of the real into the formal of reason and its externalisation in volition or conduct, is the actual — the truth of the man, the true and final concrete. At the risk of repetition, I would press the argu- ment that it is law we have been seeking and law we have found — a purely rational, and, so far, formal, result. Just as the action of reason on a thing of the external world finds its fit completion and resting-place in the apprehension of the idea of that thing which is the rule of that thing ; so, in the appetitive sphere of impulses, reason has now sought and found an idea — the idea of an organism of impulses. That idea, which on the side of mere feeling we call the feeling of harmony, is, on the side of reason, the idea of harmony ; it is designated by the word temperance or self-control, and is apprehended as law. All is subordinated to the end of life, which we have found to be possible only in and 1 The question of the summum bonum will be considered in the sequel. 126 Ethic a. through reason. The supreme end of the inter-related appetites is harmonious living, and therefore the idea of the appetitive nature of man is harmony. And how is this result attained ? Simply by the action of the formal will- reason on appetite, discriminating, balancing, regulating. That idea as ascertained, is not in any single desire ; it is not in the aggregate of desires. It is engendered on the matter of consciousness by will-reason, which as formal is a priori. The categories are operative for cognition and direction within a man's own organism just as they are in matter of outer sense : they consti- tute end or idea out of the raw material, and so find the actual. It does not follow that this explanation is wrong because it is obvious, simple, and intelligible. The idea is engendered by reason, and is a rational entity, though guaranteed by feeling whose function is, in giving this guarantee, finally discharged. An idea is a thought- object emanating from the individual reason, but yet projected by it as not itself that reason. It is the air which reason breathes. And no sooner is this rational entity constituted out of the elements of feeling than it becomes, as the sum of the meaning of particulars, a universal, through which my doing is henceforth to be mediated. This idea, this universal, this rational entity is now the end of all my particular willing, to which I subordinate all the desires of my natural organism, towards identity with which I must honestly strive, and which I love with a quality of love unknown in the region of desire.^ As progeny of my reason it is alone me ; as truth of things it is the universal in me ; and on 1 See sequel — Emotions of Reason. Law in Appetition Pure. 127 its altar I must be prepared to sacrifice each desire in its turn.^ Will-reason, then, has legislated for sensibility, and its end, aim, or object in all future activity is not pleasure, not sensibility in any form, but law — the law which, as such, has emanated from itself. Law affirmed in any conscious subject is, of course, duty demanded; and thus reason, whose essence is freedom, and which freely has afi&rmed law, demands duty if a man is to be free. For what is duty save what is due to law, and what is law save the affirmation of reason — that function in man whereby alone he is free ? Thus to reinforce the mere feeling of harmony there enters the emotion of law obeyed, duty done.^ It is psychologically a fact that once law is afiirmed, the object, end, and motive of action is henceforth law (just as the object of search has been all along law) and not feeling. The feeling of felicity is now com- plex, and it is always consequent on obedience to law. And we might even say that it matters not what the theory of the genesis of morality may be, the search for ends yields the fact of moral law, and establishes this in consciousness ; and, accordingly, henceforth it is only in so far as they are under law that the motive and act of a man are moral. If it be maintained that men subsequently act virtuously because of their feeling of pleasure in the law, let it be maintained. It wiU not do much harm. For if any man should pit his " pleasure " in sensuality against it, we can tell him authoritatively that he is 1 See sequel— Emotions of Reason. 2 /j^^ 128 Etkica. wrong, because the law is an objective fact not depen- dent on the pathological variations of any individual,^ and, that inasmuch as the " idea " of man is will-reason, and the idea in each organism governs that organism, he, in so preferring sensuality, is not a man. Thus Freedom, Reason, Law, Duty, are involved one in the other, and are short expressions for the domin- ancy of Will in feeling — Will as reason, and as legis- lative.2 We have, in the former treatise, seen that the light of man's reason is the light of Eeason-universal which emerges in him. The creature, groaning and travailing till now, a mere slave of natural forces — a mere thing, is born into the world of reason, and is now a person. Nay, he is no longer merely a moral being ; from the moment the light and power of the universal immanent Spirit flashed into him, he became a spiritual being, for he was put in communion with God : reason in man is the universal Eeason become conscious of itself in a finite form. The universal, as law in idea, is greater than I, though it comes into being through me ; I bow before it as divine law ; I, as a reason, am captivated by its truth and beauty, but I am also awed by its authority. To this ^ "Conduct," says Mr. Spencer, "is good or bad according as its total effects are pleasurable or painful " {Data of Ethics, p. 28). Again, " The good is universally the pleasurable " ! 2 Attention is directed to these psychological facts here, because it will be seen that they may and do furnish the elements of a Moral Sense (or Feeling) of which we shall in the sequel speak ; but not, it is scarcely necessary to add, of a raovsl faculty y which is the peculiar possession of the intuitionist alone. Source of Law in Appetition, 129 and for this I as a man must now live. In this I find my true life — my supreme end. In and through the universal do I alone, can I alone, find my finite self. Thus, the psychological fact is this — that through that which is not self can I alone find myself ; and I would point to this here as affording explanation in the sequel of the non-self-reference of the moral volition. Were I to seek my own personality as such, and fix my con- templation there, I should shrivel up ; were I to seek ^' pleasure," I should become as the beasts that perish. It is to be concluded, then, that on the formal side the supreme end of man is will-reason as dominating energy, at once autonomous and autocratic: and that on the real side the supreme end is the peace of harmony, which as the " good " is an idea, a universal, an entity of reason though necessarily ascertained through feeling : it is a state of feeling, but instinct now with reason and law. And all this is true of that simple and prosaic word "temperance," or appetitive justice. Doubtless, the way that we traverse to find the idea is the way of pleasure and pain. For we have found that even in the region of animal desire our happiness, i.e. life, is to be found in a peace which involves repression. Through pains of repression and sacrifice we make good our inheritance of a supreme felicity — felicity in the reason-born idea. Dependence on feeling need not surely alarm the moralist. For feeling, no less than reason, is of God. 1 30 Ethica. CHAP. XXI. — THE ALTRUISTIC EMOTIONS — TERMINAL AND END — QUALITY AND QUANTITY GENERALLY, DIS- CUSSED — IDEA IN RELATIONS. In thertiselves, and prior to the introduction of fur- ther matter, the self-regarding appetitive propensions, which we have been considering apart in relation to conduct, do not directly involve other men in their end of action, be that action immediate and animal or mediate and moral. But man is not a closed circle of appetitive desires dominated by reason. As a being of feeling he is much more than this. There are emotions in him that incite to doing, and which involve in their end the wellbeing of others, and of self through others. It is the possession of these emotions, as rationalised, which enables man to rise from the position of an isolated savage, or member of an anarchic herd of individuals, to the position of a member of an ordered society. Ere long, he finds that it is through the social organism as emerging out of these feelings that he can alone fully realise himself in any direction whatsoever. Man, as has been in old times said, is a member of a State before he is a man. He is consequently to be regarded by the moralist not merely as an organic intelli- gent unit, but as a unit of an organism, which organism is society ; or, when it formulates itself, the State. Prior to the emergence of will, the purely attuent or animal consciousness of man experiences a feeling of com- Altruistic Emotions, 131 munity of "beiifig with other existences ; and further, as regards his own kind, a feeling of sympathy, which is a feeling of the feelings of others. These exist in a very crude and rudimentary form in animals, and in man also before the advent of reason. It is reason, as will, that enables him consciously to realise in himself the feel- ings of others and the feelings of himself in others. This is an immense step ; for the rudimentary feeling which we call sympathy (community of feeling) is thereby raised into clear relief and vastly extended in its possible range. Besting on this rudimentary sympathy as condition and basis, we find, as primary feelings, goodwill and love of goodwill, which have been previously referred to as the love of others and the love of the love of others. These altruistic emotions belong to animals as well as to man, the difference, in so far as it is not caused by the operation of reason, being chiefly a difference of degree or quantity only. They incite to do something ; they are impulses or desires — feelings of such a kind that they insist on externalising themselves. Pleasure is pleasure and happiness is happiness, and there can be between pleasures or between happinesses as suck only quantitative differences. But the content of a feeling will determine whether it yields a higher quality of pleasure than others or not. These emotions differ from the self-regarding impulses in this, that the subjective feeling of goodioill directly involves the wellbeing of others: this is of its essence. 1 3 2 Ethica, The love of approbation, again, makes my wellbeing dependent on the goodwill of others : this is of its essence. Thus out of an undefined basis of sympathy, become explicit by virtue of reason, arise these two potent emotions, which in man assume large propor- tions, and constitute in fact the two pillars of the social fabric. The former supports (as we shall see) the sentiment of justice ; the latter is the efficient support of all custom, convention, law, virtue [and vice] — the great conservative force in the social system. Let me here again point out the equivocal use of the word " end," which has led to so many fallacies and logo- machies. End is either simply the terminus of a move- ment, or it is (as in a self-conscious being) the conscious projected terminus, or purpose, of a movement. The end, i.e. terminal, of desire is its satisfaction : the end or conscious purpose of volition within the appetitive circle is, in so far as it is moral, the idea or law of Temperance, through which desire is mediated. The terminal point of all desire, we have just said, is the satisfaction of desire, and the end, in the sense of " terminal," is consequently to be found in the subject desiring : so with altruistic desires or emotions, the end is the satisfaction of emotion, and is therefore in the sub- ject. The difference consists simply in this, that the altruistic emotion of goodwill is greater in quantity and not only different, but higher, in quality than those that are self -regarding : greater in quantity, lecause we are conscious that it involves the wellbeing of others as well as of self; higher in quality, because we are so constituted Quality and Quantity. 133 that we feel it to be higher, just as the satisfaction of the feeling of the beautiful is of higher quality than the gratification of the palate. Even a rat we may believe to have a higher quality of emotion in helping his blind friend to find his food (as it is reported rats have been seen to do) than in satisfying his own hunger. We have alluded to the qualitative in this sense before, and it deserves further consideration. For in a system of morality resting on pathological elements as its matter of investigation, it is impossible to avoid the question whether there is a gradation of felicities, the assump- tion being that the higher by an innate and intrinsic, and therefore divine, right, control the lower. ^ But, even if we can discriminate a higher and lower in quality, it is not to be presumed that morality can rest on such pathological foundations, though it seeks for content in pathological states, and must take account of them. For through the inevitable operation of a priori reason man is ever in search of law — not pathological satisfaction, or happiness, and the question is one of relations, and of reason. Man as an abstract isolated being is incapable of fulfilling himself. This is an ethic^ truism. His self- conscious Ego would be little more than a barren formula were it not that he is first of all an animal, and, secondly, a member of a community, and lives his ^ Mr. Spencer assigns an intrinsic authority to what he calls complex or representative feelings. This is manifestly authority resting on purely quantitative grounds, to which, so far, no excep- tion can be taken. 134 Ethica, life in and through nature and other men. It is thus only that from being an individual man he becomes participator in the processes of nature and, as a sharer in the universal Man, takes humanity to himself as his proper nutriment. His realisation is through the real, and the real is all experience. In like manner, he would as an isolated Ego be a mere formula in the sphere of cognition did he not live in the real of experience and reduce it to himself. On no side is there any life for the Ego save through the real of sense and feeling : with- out this there is little more than the possibility of life. The necessity of a community for men thus arises from the nature of man, which cannot satisfy itself save in a community, for he has in him a need for his fellow- men, and the interchanges of goodwill are as imperative as is the need of food for his natural body. Why, then, is it that this need does not rest content with that mere herding or aggregation which we see in animals ? The answer is, Because man is a being of reason as well as feeling, and as a reason he must, whether he will or not, constitute for himself, with more or less of explicit consciousness, ends, ideas, and ideals in and through the real. He finds in man-universal the support and nutriment which his own narrow individual manhood needs in order to fulfil its functions and to attain to its true proportions. By virtue of reason in him, he is driven, from the earliest times, to find some law of community which will sustain the parts of the community of which he is a member in an equilibrated activity. Quality and Quantity. 135 All this, however, is a generalised statement, and, though true, is infected with the emptiness of generalisa- tion. We have to condescend to contemplate those innate energies and necessary manifestations of man's complex nature which form the subject-matter of psychology, if we are to give content to generalisation and meet the empirical thinker on his own ground. The desires and emotions which enter into and con- stitute man as an attuent organism, and which furnish reason with the raw material of feelings, just as the external world furnishes the confused material of impressions, can be discriminated from each other. They can also be classified in ascending order ; for we recognise (it will be admitted by all) the quality of the altruistic and aesthetic emotions to be higher than that of the appetitive desires. It is a perversity of specula- tion to ignore the facts of experience : it is experience that we have to interpret. It will not do, therefore, to confound all the elements of a man's nature in seeking for the law of that nature, and to shut our eyes to the distinctive forms in which the energising of the organism insists on exhibiting itself. Such a mode of procedure seems to me to be as unscientific as it is vague, indefinite, and confusing, though doubtless it is the easiest way, and has irresistible attractions for the moral essayist. But, even if we had accomplished the analytic task and had discriminated the various specific innate activi- ties, we should have only arranged them just as we eo-ordinate the facts of outer sense prior to the investi- gation into the end, idea, and implicit law of the organic 136 Ethica. unity which, by anticipation, we know the object of sense to be. This is mere cognition, and no moral law is yet apparent in such cognition. As, in the external world, we seek for those processes in the organism which must effectuate themselves if the thing before us is to be what it is : so in the world of man's activity we seek for what ought to effect itself if man is to be, and realise, himself. To be himself he must see and actualise the idea in the relation of feelings, not one feeling after another or in juxtaposition. This idea is at once supreme end and categorical law. Our search as moralists is for this. We have already instituted this search in the sphere of appetition and found the idea to be temperance or self-control as guaranteed by the content of feeling — harmony and the peace of harmony (justice). Harmony as idea, ascertained and constituted by reason, is thus a rational product, and owes its origin neither to any particular desire or emotion, nor to the aggregate of desires and emotions. As a rational entity it becomes the end of conduct — an end to be attained for the satis- faction of reason and, as regards the real, only through the pains of repression and sacrifice. The introduction, at this further stage of our inquiry, of the altruistic emotions cannot affect the supreme real end of the organism, which is still harmony ; nor can it affect the method of investigation. We are com- pelled to ask the question : What, now, are the conditions of harmony in this extended field of emotion? Is Quality and Quantity. 137 harmony here, as in the sphere of appetition, an equi- librium of equal forces in subordination to an idea which is a rule? Is harmony possible in this extended sphere only through the subordination of certain inner forces to certain others ? Let me refer the reader to what has been said as to the possibility of feeling-energies of greater or less dynamical value. We can readily admit that an organism may he such that the various elements that constitute it stand in a relation which is not merely qualitative in the merely logical sense, but in the sense of higher and lower quality: that is to say, certain real elements may be more potent than others in a conscious organism functioning itself, more potent in determining that balance of inner reciprocity which constitutes the full life and reality of the organism. This is conceivable, nay is probably a truth, in uncon- scious physical nature. When we pass from the matter of outer sense to the matter which we designate by the general term feeling, it is evident that such a difference of potency can be indicated to us only, if at all, by certain motive forces being on a different 'plane, of feel- ing from that occupied by others. And this again can only be known by a peculiar quality in that feeling which compels us to recognise a certain supremacy in it. There is no other possible source of information. As to the rat referred to above, it may be said : " If all this be true, why then does not that animal give effect to its sympathetic and altruistic emotions consis- tently, and under a consciousness of law ?" The answer 138 Ethica. is, because it is not a reason, and so cannot use the real of itself to determine its ultimate function as an organism, thereby constituting an ideal up to which it is under obligation to live. Kant would not deny that the feelings can be differ- entiated from each other, and that in the logical sense they are qualitatively different. But as to the rest : they differ only in degree or quantitatively, not in kind. The whole question of degree and kind has always presented difficulties in philosophy, and it has, owing to the Darwinian conception of animal evolution, been again thrown into the arena of controversy. I doubt if we can always separate quality and quantity ; but perhaps we may put it thus : a quantitative difference is an ad- dition to or subtraction from a thing, the addition or subtraction being homogeneous with the thing that is increased or diminished. A quantitative difference then, may we not say (as between a small diamond and a big diamond), is not in a strict sense a difference. Difference strictly speaking is always qualitative. The qualitative difference maybe able to effect itself through a quantitative addition, but the qualitative difference does not lie in the quantitative addition. But we may pass this question ; for it would not be denied by Kant or any one that the feelings differ quali- tatively. What I understand to be denied is that one feeling yields a higher quality of pleasure (the sense in which "higher" and "lower" are used has been explained) than another, and has therefore more intrinsic authority in the system of feelings — more right to be heard and Quality and Quantity. 139 even a right, inherent in its higherness, to control other feelings to the extent of taking precedence of them. Let me not be misunderstood. It seems to me to be an anachronism to discuss the question whether feeling alone — a pathological state — can by itself yield anything of the nature of moral law or end. It matters little whether certain feelings are of a higher quality than others or not ; on the other hand, it would not be necessary to demonstrate their higher quality to give them authority if we had quantity to fall back on. If a feeling — be it desire or emotion — is by its nature quantitatively greater either in respect of intensiveness or extensiveness than others — we have in this measurable quantity a far surer basis for ascer- taining the due place of this feeling in the motive forces of an organism than we could have in the less definite and more subjective category of quality. But apart from reason and law, the activity of desires and emotions, even where there was a greater activity in the feelings quantitatively greater, could, at best, still be only the activity of an unregulated series of pathological states. When reason enters (and this is the point) and takes cognisance of certain feelings as higher in quality or greater in quantity than other feelings, it is not only entitled to take cognisance of this obvious fact in the search for the law of the organism, but bound to do so. Nay, it cannot help itself. It will do so whether philo- sophers wish it or not. To reason in search for law in sensibility, the greater dynamical potency of this or that feeling must, as a bare fact of the real presented to 'UNI7BE 140 Ethica, consciousness, be taken into account by reason as a factor when searching for the law of the complex organism, inasmuch as this law is the idea in the rela- tion of the elements of the complex as these elements are found to exist. Whether it be in the external world of sense or the inner of feeling, reason can deal only with such material as is presented to it, and in the form in which it is pre- sented to it. It has presented to it an aggregate of appe- titive desires which, as necessary to its own finite animal existence, have, taken together, the maximum of quantity in respect of intensiveness, and are commonly designated selfish. It has further certain emotions which have, it may be, an equally great quantity, in respect of intensive- ness, but in any case have, unquestionablyj a greater quantitative extensiveness — an extensiveness, moreover, which continues to grow daily with experience of social life. These are well enough designated by the term " altruistic." The work of reason under the stimulus of the a 'priori form of end is to find the law of this feeling- organism by unveiling the idea in the relations of these factors. Let us take one or two illustrations : — Were a man endowed with only selfish, appetitive desires, then so long as he held the satisfaction of these subject to the reason-idea of harmony as denoted by the word temperance or subjective justice, we should not think of questioning his preference of one desire to another, say of drinking to eating. No moral question here arises. It is a matter of personal idiosyncracy Qttality and Quantity. 141 alone, and if any moral element should, perchance, enter into our judgment of his act, it would be on grounds other than those pertaining to the act itself simply as such. Now, there are other feelings in the man- organism which we call emotions, and which we shall here assume the concurrence of the reader when we name them, rational, aesthetic, and religious or theopathic, without attempting any analysis of them. They are not selfish, in the above sense, but they are certainly self -regarding, and as such distinguished from the altruistic. We have, however it may be generated, a sense or feeling of the beautiful, though its manifestations in savage man are of a very crude and inchoate kind. Now if a man were to prefer at any one moment the pleasure of eating and drinking to the pleasure of contemplating the beauty of nature or of a work of art, we do not judge that he does wrong. If, on the other hand, he habitually gives priority to the appetitive desires as a whole, we say that he prefers the lower pleasure to the higher happi- ness, although he may not exceed the law in appeti- tion. There is in this judgment an element of moral disapprobation, and rightly so. The moral disapproba- tion is conveyed by the word " lower," and this mani- festly assumes the subordination of one state of feeliug to another in the nature of man when properly under- stood — which again means, when we have truly ascer- tained his nature, his end or idea (real). The word " higher " thus carries with it a certain authority. Now, it is not necessary, in the interests of a moral theory, to demand that the altruistic emotions which 142 Ethica. are constituent elements in the nature of man should give rise in us to a higher quality of feeling than the sense of the beautiful does. I doubt very much if any psychologist could maintain that they do ; for the only source of knowledge is the subjective experience of those individuals who are conscious of both kinds of feeling ; and they might differ. No one, however, in whom the altruistic emotions are normally developed, hesitates to assign a higher quality to them than to the appetitive desires, any more than he hesitates in the case of the sense of the beautiful. Yet, some men would be found to maintain that the sense of the beautiful claims as high a place in the scale of quality as the altruistic emotions, or even a higher place. Still more manifestly is this position tenable in the case of the rational and the religious emotions. As a matter of fact, however, is it not the case that a man who prefers in any one instance the satisfaction of his sesthetic or even his religious emotions to the satisfaction of the altruistic emotions, when they are brought into conflict as competing motives, is morally condemned ? We do not content ourselves with merely saying, " He prefers the less important to the more im- portant," merely insinuating a mild reprehension ; but we regard him as having done wrong and as having broken the moral law. Why so ? However we may answer the question, it must be conceded that, in the popular consciousness, the altruistic emotions have a greater rightful potency in man than the feeling of the beautiful. The same remark applies to the religious or Quality and Quantity. 143 theopathic emotions ; for if a man, having to choose be- tween the enjoyment of a cathedral service and the doing of a benevolent act which it clearly fell to him to do, should yet prefer the former, we should condemn him. The altruistic emotions, then, stand, as a matter of fact, higher in the hierarchy of feelings as motive forces ; but it would be a bold thing to maintain that the quality of these, as tested by the consciousness of those who have experienced them all, is higher than that of the others. If so, we must look elsewhere than to quality for the ground of that supremacy of the altruistic over the aesthetic, and even the religious, which gives it such a position in the constituent elements of the man- organism as to entitle it to instruct the sense of law ; that is, to cause to emanate from the perception of the altruistic end the perception of a governing force (not yet to be called law) in determining conduct, when it is weighed in the balance with other emotions. The con- clusion, then, is that the altruistic emotions are (however it may be explained) dominant in the consciousness of all normal men, and yet it is impossible to say that in all normal men they yield a quality of feeling higher than the aesthetic, the rational, or the theopathic. Though it be difficult to maintain the qualitative superiority of the altruistic, there can be no doubt that if I have before me a fellow-being of whose pressing need for help I have no doubt, and I pass him by, I carry with me a sense of inner discord, even if my motive for ignoring the claim be the pursuit of aesthetic, religious, or rational emotions 1 44 Ethica, (e.g. the love of investigation); much more will this discord assert itself if the motive be the satisfaction of appetitive desires. However it may be explained, I repeat that this is unquestionably the mental condi- tion of the ordinary consciousness. It will be said that we are speaking of man as he now is — the product of ages of civilisation — the last result of time. This is obvious ; but it is precisely this last re- sult of time which is the corpus of ethical analysis : there is no other. And the strand of our whole argument is that man is always through the ages in search of the idea and law of himself, and that we can find nothing in the present consensus which has not grown out of past history, and grown necessarily. The end is in the begin- ning, the oak is in the acorn. We seek to analyse the complex ethical result of to-day in order to ascertain, by a concurrent analysis of the nature of man and the records of his moral history, out of what primary and innate characteristics of his organism the present has emerged, and necessarily emerged. The whole ethical question, as a philosophical question, is a question of origins ; but it is the origins of what we now see that we seek. The altruistic emotions, then, dominate all other emotions and desires in the normal cotemporary man, and we wish to ascertain whether, in the primitive man or the child (who is the ever-recurrent primitive man), there is any explanation of this which justifies and vindicates the now-existing dominancy. The ex- planation and vindication do not, we found, lie in the quality of the emotions, though that may be accepted Idea in relations. 145 as an element in determining the potency of the altruistic in their relation to the appetitive desires. Quality of feeling may yield the ground for an ideal state of being and activity, and have thus a certain moral authority; but it will not serve as a basis for an objective law of universal obligation. There is (as has been already indicated) in the first origins of society a quantitative explanation of the potency of the altruistic emotions as contributive to the moral law. But, before going further, it is necessary to recall in explicit terms what is implicitly contained or assumed in the preceding discussion. The supreme end of a man's activity is self-realisa- tion — realisation of self }yy self, or, to put it otherwise, the reduction of the whole sphere of the real to self- conscious activity. The ethical question is, What are the conditions of that self-realisation ? Further, the basis and condition of man's existence being physical, the realisation of himself demands the fulfilHug of that animal existence, the persevering in its specific life ; and the first of all claims on his activity is, consequently, the maintenance of his own physical organism. How can there be self-realisation if the basis of life be cut away ? We proceed on this assump- tion : The right of the selfish or individualistic in man is granted. Finally, man being an organism, the dominancy of any one part of the organism cannot be a dominancy that K 146 Ethica, involves the suppression and extinction of any other parts, it matters not what the claims, qualitative or quan- titative, of these other parts may be. The claims of any one part are restricted by the mere fact of the existence of other parts, and it is only when conflicting motives arise that the ethical question, as a question of moral obligation, arises. The altruistic emotions in all their quality and quantity, accordingly, have to be taken account of in determining their idea in relation: and this is all they can rightfully claim. Altruistic Emotions, 147 CHAP. XXII. — ALTRUISTIC EMOTIONS (continued) : QUAN- TITY IN ITS SPECIFIC RELATION TO BENEVOLENCE: THE IDEA OF HUMANITY. The preceding chapter contains, it is presumed, a true statement, so far as it goes, of man's emotional nature ; but it does not follow that he will in the beginning of his career, or. at any period of it, so feel the potency of altruistic emotions as to act in accord- ance with them as dominant. We would not imperil moral law by resting it on subjective feeling alone. Even if a man were to maintain that the altruistic emotions, though of unquestionable potency in deter- mining the true life of man, are yet not dominant, the past and subsequent argument of this treatise would not be affected thereby. All desire, all emotion, all feeling is (like the impres- sions on outer sense) anarchical. They contain no law, but merely the materials for law, as ascertained by reason in their relations. All the impulses to activity within man may be entitled self-regarding if they do not involve in their purposed activity the happiness or wellbeing of others. But in seeking for the idea in the relations of self- regarding and altruistic feelings we keep in view, as regards the former, mainly those self-terminating desires which are generalised as appetitive. These are very wide in their range and complicated in their 1 48 Ethica, manifestations, above all in civilised communities, inasmuch as they include the means of satisfying them- selves, e.g. J property and social position, which give power over the materials and instruments of satisfaction. Those who seek these are so far on the level of the primitive man, although they may be surprised to learn it. The altruistic emotions are commonly spoken of as if they were summed up in goodwill — the desire to pro- mote the wellbeing of others. Now, goodwill presumes, first, community of being, and, secondly, sympathy, in the sense of a community of feeling, and further, reason, whereby the condition and needs of others can alone be conceived. On the basis of this sympathy, in its strict sense (not in the sense of compassion), arises a feeling of the needs felt by others so strong as to insist on externalising itself for the satisfaction of those needs. This is goodwill, or the active love of others. A goodwill which confined itself to a feeling of love is not goodwill at all, but a mere state of being, an emotional sensibility, by the indulg- ence of which many people persuade themselves that they have fulfilled their obligations, whereas they have only added a new luxury to the sum of their selfish enjoyments. It must be a matter of common observation, indeed, that persons of keen sensibility are often singularly selfish; and, so far from being dominated, as they imagine, by a laudable altruistic emotion, are not even ordinarily just in their relations to others. But this by the way. Altruistic Emotions — Benevolence, i'49 Goodwill, as active love of others, finds its subjective satisfaction, which is the terminal of its activity, tlwoiigh the happiness of others. In other words, it is a sub- jective satisfaction or life-completion, objectively medi- ated. This satisfaction is thus, apart from quality, greater in quantity than the satisfaction of any one self-regarding desire, because the happiness of others as well as of the agent is of its essence. If a man actively promotes the happiness of another in order that he may secure some material benefit for himself, he is simply selfish in a roundabout way. Goodwill does not exist at all in such- a case. So, again, goodwill involves itself in a self-contradiction if it is exercised with a view to the emotional satisfaction of the subject ; and the contradiction kills it. (Of this again.) Let us not, however, omit to take account of that other element in the altruistic feelings to which we have referred above, viz., the love of the love of others. This is an emotion, like the love of others, native to man (and animals), and its satisfaction, while necessary to subjective life-completion, also involves the happiness of others — is, in fact, dependent on the " pleasurable sensations " excited in others by the agent. It is a reflex of acts of goodwill, and as being always associated with it as an effect with its cause, adds largely to the quantity of the altruistic emotions. It is, in fact, another emotion involved in that which is commonly regarded as alone altruistic, of such surpassing intensity that it will constantly furnish the sole motive of a man's whole life-activity. 150 Ethica. Thus the altruistic emotions in their complex form possess oh initio a mass or quantity in extension possessed by no other emotion or series of emotions, and can, as all know, become so potent as to cause a man to sacrii&ce his life in their service. Now, the primitive man has these altruistic feelings ; in fact, even animals have them ; but man, like the animal, begins his career under the pressure of the instinct of self-preservation, and his environment is such that he cannot afford, if he is to live at all, to give the altruistic feelings rein. But they are in him and active in him. Their large quantity in ex- tension is, however, counteracted by the quantity in intension which is inherent in the appetitive desires, on the reasonable satisfaction of which all primarily depends. The 'prima vitce claim him, engaged as he is in forcing from nature the satisfaction of his more immediate necessities : the other potencies in him are kept in the background, yet even in the rudest form of social life they exist, and are active. It is only as successive generations accumulate both the experi- ence and material necessary to the conservation of life, and societies gradually evolve themselves, that those higher potencies of man and nature have room to actualise themselves in any large sense. We need not follow the moral history, already sufi&ciently set forth by evolutionary writers, further than to point out that with every numerical individual addition to the society of which a man forms a part, and with every fresh per- Altruistic Emotions — Benevolence. 1 5 1 ception of his complex relations to others, there is a further extension in quantity of the altruistic emotions as emotions, helping them more and more to hold in check the selfish desires. And accordingly, as the vision of man extends beyond the family to the commune and tribe, beyond the tribe to the nation, beyond the nation to the world, the altruistic emotions attain to a power in the economy of feeling which may even threaten the extinction of the claims of personality itself. Evolution in the above sense is beyond question, and has never been questioned from Aristotle till now. But we start from man, not anthropoid apes. Whatever the process of creation may have been in Time, there is a point at which we may say " There before us is a man." Again, we are not concerned with a man living the isolated life of a beast (an imaginary but convenient hypothesis), but with man when he first lives with other beings like himself — in a very loose relationship, doubtless, but still a relationship — which, as a matter of fact, seems to have existed from the first ; for the state of isolation and war is a fiction. Not only at this early stage, but own at this day, the fundamental instinct of the individual organism to preserve it- self exists. If at the earliest stage it is dominant, at all stages it must be active. Notwithstanding, even at the earliest stage the altruistic emotions existed, and were operative in forming communities. This simply means that man is always in need of man, because of the existence of sympathy and emotion in him. Total disregard of the pains of another must have left a feel- 152 Ethica, ing of dissatisfaction in a man's breast from the day on which man consorted with man. It could not have been a very deep feeling, because the discords within us are determined in their degree by the conscious or unconscious ideal of human life working in us, and implicit in all our volitions. Both in the barbarous and civilised man, also, other purposes may intervene, and justify to himself his total disregard of others ; but this is itself further evidence of the existence of the feeling.^ With the progress of society the ideals of life become higher and more complex, the pain of the disregard of the urgent needs of a fellow-man becomes more vivid, and we find ourselves bound to him by closer ties than we had imagined. So potent does the primary emotion become in an advanced state of civilisation that it may grow to such proportions as to lead men not only to "sell all and give to the poor," but to sacrifice their very lives for the need, or even fancied need, of others. In our own days we may see the emotion take sometimes the most irrational and hurtful forms. But what we are concerned about now is simply the existence and activity of the emotion of goodwill to others supported by the love of the goodwill of others (both resting fundamentally on sympathy) from the beginning even until now, and that in such mass that the suppression of it will always cause inner discord, except in so far ^ We are not concerned here with abnormal cases of pure malig- nity, nor with the numerous cases in which men show a total want of sympathy with their enemies or their slaves. Community of feeling is in all such cases negated to start with, and, as negated, affirmed. Altruistic Emotions — Humanity. 153 as that suppression is justified to a man's conscience by the primary instinct of self-preservation. As to self-preservation, every man has to justify himself to himself by his conception of his own needs. It is impossible for us always to say that any man's action in a particular case is to be condemned, because it is often merely a question of feelings and impulses, not a question of obligatory law. There may be an over- activity as well as an under-activity of altruistic emo- tions. The whole question of justification in particular cases is so subjective a matter that we wisely abstain from condemning, and sometimes also from approving. 1S.Q\ will a man always condemn himself when we think he ought to do so. There is no obligatory moral law on the breach of which we can put our finger, while we keep ourselves within the domain of feeling alone. Meanwhile man is from age to age groping for law in the relations of these his innate feelings — something which shall be not subjective but objective — something which is imperative and obligatory on all. But the emotions themselves are always there : in the beginning fitful, capricious, arbitrary it may be, but only wanting an experience of their effects on the life of the individual and the community to become the most powerful of all social agencies, and even to obscure other elements in the life of man. Nay, were I to choose to employ a larger phraseology, I would point to these nascent emotions as the germ of the feeling of universal humanity. And this would be quite correct. 154 Ethica. For it is precisely the deep sentiment of humanity as a universal which is stirring into birth and life in the heart of man when he first experiences the altruistic emotions — the sentiment of that moral whole of which he is only a unitary part. This great emotion, though ultimately resting on a non -rational sense of community of being and feeling, may sweep all before it, and every other feeling may go down in its presence. It is long, doubtless, before the emotion passes out of a rudi- mentary state, because it demands certain intellectual and social conditions for its full activity. It is only in the gradual unfolding of the life of man that these feelings extend themselves fully even to the community of which each forms a part, and thereafter to all men. As knowledge grows and thoughts are widened, the feelings are broadened and deepened, and pass into the region of ideas, and become in their unity the idea of humanity, which supersedes the more vague sentiment, and as such may evoke an almost religious fanaticism. In certain circumstances the wave of humanitarian enthusiasm may even become a temporary madness, and, seeking vague and unattainable ends, overwhelm all the institutions of society, and bring in its train " red ruin and the breaking up of laws." While, then, man has to give full weight to the altruistic emotions, they are not in themselves obliga- tory. The emotion of benevolence, like any other feeling, is "per se neither moral nor immoral as law. And yet we applaud its activity. But why ? Because, as we shall immediately see, it is that element in man A Itruistic Emotions — Humanity. 155 which, above all, has to be fostered if the idea in relations — the moral law — is to be initiated and sus- tained : this moral law is, as we shall see. Justice. A little excess, therefore, in goodwill is pardoned, and even lauded ; and this while, in itself, it is not only- non-moral, but, in a large number of cases, immoral. An indiscriminately " kind " man is generally a great favourite, save with those who have serious dealings with him ; and the public philanthropist will, on self- examination, too often find that in the service of a generalised emotion he is sacrificing individuals who have a rightful and prior claim on his benevolent energies. 156 Etkica. CHAP. XXIII. — ALTRUISTIC EMOTIONS : THE IDEA IN RELA- TIONS : NEGATIVE JUSTICE : BASIS OF SOCIETY : HEDONISM AND EXTERNALISM. The conclusion of the last chapter points to the true significance of the altruistic feelings in the economy of man, and helps to answer the question, — What is their function in the constitution of a human being, the system of ends, the kingdom of moral order ? It is the interpretation and reduction of the real to self-consciousness which makes the real of any value or significance to man as a cognitive being. The Ego, the person, the self-consciousness, goes out from its unitary centre to find the universal — ideas and the idea which explain experience ; it fulfils its function of identifying itself with the universal in order that it may return into itself a completed living Ego — a real Ego, no longer a merely formal entity, little more than bare dialectic. So in the region of the feelings which constitute the real of the man-organism. All desires and emotions have to find their object, and satisfy themselves. In so far as pure feeling, apart from cognition, is concerned, the universal, the idea, is not yielded by feeling in any form. Feelings are, by their nature, forces in and of nature, and, as such, chaotic. The function of man is to find their idea. And when we find that feeling takes Altruistic Emotions — Idea in relations, 157 various forms (as the external world in sensation does), we have to accept these various feelings as pos- sibly constituting a system of relations, and find the idea in these relations, with a view to an inner harmony of moral order. And when this harmony is found, it is found for us as individual Egos; it is reduced to self-consciousness, and its function is to deepen and strengthen personality, not to melt it down into a universal. The whole of morality consists in the identity of ideas and idea in feeling with the self- conscious Ego, just as the whole of knowledge is a similar identity. And this is true not only of the self- regarding and altruistic emotions, but of the aesthetic and religious and rational as well. By personality we live, but through the universal as condition of the life of personality. Even man is nothing to me, save in so far as I make him mine. It has already been pointed out that the primary claims of the self-conserving instincts must, in the cir- cumstances in which primitive man is placed, have occupied the field of inner consciousness to the suppres- sion of those feelings which comprehended in their satis- faction the needs of others ; but it has been further pointed out that, first in the family, then in the tribe or commune, and finally in large associations, goodwill and its reflex love of goodwill would be operative — must be operative. Thus the emotion itself would grow in mass and force as it grew in extension. Man as a rational Ego is in search of the adjustment of his system 158 Ethica, of feelings, and he is necessarily dependent on circum- stances and occasion for their activity and consequent growth. Each generation inherits the gains of its pre- decessor, and thus advance becomes possible. The search is, meanwhile, always persistently directed by man, con- sciously or unconsciously, to the realising of himself, and this, in so far as he is an ethical being, through the har- monising of the feelings within his complex organism. It is manifest that the altruistic feelings with which he is endowed are constantly counteracting in him the, self-preserving and self-regarding desires, and that, if their adjustment is possible at all, it can only be through the ascertainment, by reason, of the idea in the relations which constitutes the condition of their harmonious activity. That idea is ere long found to be what we call Justice ; although in regard either to intensiveness or extensive- ness it would be absurd to expect that this idea, towards which man has always been moving from primitive times, could in the remote past be characterised by the attributes with which we now invest it. Moral progress is, for long, unconscious and always gradual. But, unless there be, within the individual, on the one hand the self-regarding desires, and on the other altruistic emotions, it is not possible for the sentiment or idea of justice, even in an inchoate shape, to arise at all in the mind of any man in any circumstances. Let us take the idea (and inherent law) of justice as we now have it, and analytically exhibit its conditions and elements : Altruistic Emotions— Justice. 159 First. We find in the notion justice the consciousness of self, and the instinct of self to persevere in its own existence, and to take possession of all that contributes to that existence — which we may call the " rights " of self. Secondly. We find sympathy — a community of being and feeling with others ; vague and indefinite at first, but raised by the action of will in reason into a clear representation in ourselves of the feelings of others, and of our own feelings in others. Thirdly. But a consciousness of self and the rights of self, 'pltis sympathy with other selves, would not, could not by possibility, give rise to justice. Through sympathy, and by virtue of community of being and feeling, I should be able to extend my own conscious- ness so as to embrace the consciousness of the self and the rights of self in others ; but I should remain inactive as regards these rights. (By "rights" I merely mean their self-activity in maintaining their own exist- ence.) It is for them to look to their rights ; I have enough to do looking after my own. The third ele- ment, which we desire to emphasise, enters, viz., good- will — an active and innate, and therefore inexplicable, impulse in favour of others, which leads me far beyond the mere understanding and recognition of their rights to the promotion of them in so far as consistent with my own. The ultimate basis of this is (as has been frequently said), community of being and feeling. Each is only one in a universal which holds all together, and gives i6o Ethica. to the one what true greatness it has. We are bound to all existence by this community of being; we are further bound by the community of feeling to those creatures which are truly ourselves, though separated from us in their numerical individuality. At this point man encounters a practical difficulty ; for inasmuch as the preservation of his own natural life and wellbeing has prior claims on him, he is pretty sure to give it more than its due, unless he is endowed with a larger measure of goodwill than is the common lot. Hence, as societies form themselves, jus, in the sense of custom-law and positive law, arises to interpret justice. ■ Meanwhile, the love of the goodwill of others, itself also resting on community of being and feeling, is an enormous collateral power in promoting the activity of goodwill towards others, and in binding men together in mutual co-operation. Justice, then, is a complex concept, and is the " idea " of the relations of a man to his own inner competing emotions and impulses. This idea, as idea and rational, restricts the altruistic emotions as it restricts the indi- vidualistic. It is emotion rationalised. In so far as it is emotion, justice is a feeling, a sentiment, of conciliation and harmony : in so far as it is reason, it is the idea of relations and law as in the idea. As such it is pure. And, in so far as it is justice at all, it obstructs, with a view to regulate, all desires and emotions alike, and is therefore essentially non-pathological. The external relations of persons merely furnish Negative Justice, 1 6 1 occasion for the conflict of inner feelings in these persons, and the resultant is an inner resultant which thereupon externalises itself. Justice, accordingly, in the mind of a man when brought face to face with other men — the necessary external condition of its existence — is a balance of the altruistic and self -regarding feelings within the man, the egoistic and altruistic being assigned each their place and relation in the inner kingdom of motives and ends. As reason advances to greater consciousness of itself, it first formulates the idea in the relations thus: "the freedom of each person in a society to realise himself in so far as this is compatible with the freedom of every other member of the same society." This is the primary form of justice, and is to be designated Negative Justice. It yields the conception of a community, a con- vivium which (while protecting the whole against alien intrusion) protects each member of the community in doing what he can for himself with a view to the satisfac- tion of his self-regarding desires so long as he respects the activities and rights of others. We refer here only to the primary conception of justice, not to its future evolution; but this primary conception has to be insisted on as of vast importance, and that any State which, under the temporary pressure of political and social exigencies, ignores it, weakens the whole basis of society. In considering the future growth of the idea of justice out of its negative form, we shall find much guidance from our analysis, a few pages back, of the genesis of L 1 62 Ethica, the sentiment and idea. It is impossible, we said, for the idea to emerge at all except at the bidding (so to speak) of the altruistic feelings. To this, its emotional source, is to be attributed the inevitable instability of the idea in the minds of men, and, consequently, in their external activity in realising justice. We know well the intensity of the self-regarding desires and the claim of personal rights which arise out of them ; and these may be always relied on to put themselves too much in evidence, supported, as they seem to be, by the consciousness of personality. On the other hand, the ebb and flow of altruistic emotion is as noticeable as is the steady pull of individualistic desire. Hence the idea of justice must always be in unstable equilibrium — sometimes being deflected, under the influence of altruistic emotion so as to obscure the just claims of the individual himself : sometimes the deflection must be the other way. While this arbitrary oscillation is going on, there must early arise the conviction, from a perception of the consequences of various acts, that this great conception of reason is that which makes corporate society possible at all. The need for the regulation of an idea which in its concrete relations is so unstable, leads to reference to older and wiser citizens as arbiters, and thus gradually arise certain particular definitions of the general idea in its prac- tical relations to the various and complex intercourse of men. In the course of time we have authorised judges, written laws, and an executive. But these judges and these laws, as representing the Justice, 163 sovereign power in the State, do not make justice, but merely interpret the idea as it affects the particular relations of men, and so aim at maintaining a stable equilibrium in the minds of the citizens. Justice, in short, makes jus in the sense of positive law ; and all positive law is merely declaratory of the consensus of a society, or at least of those who lead and govern society for the time, and represent its mind ; that is to say, the effective members of a society, whom the rest follow. In so far as positive law is based on a partial view of conflicting rights, needs, and interests (and as social conditions change this must constantly be the case),yws is not justice. In this idea of relations — justice — lies the law of conduct, by which we mean the law of motive ; — in this lies moral obligation. But, as many do not seem to be able to find its sphere and limits for themselves in its varied external relations, the State, when positing external law, is justified in supporting it with external penal sanctions, that it may coerce those who in the intensity of their self-regarding impulses and crass individualism, would imperil the social bond. Thus, there slowly arise judicial and executive systems, simple in their origins, highly complex, in an old and civilised society. The justification of penal coercion lies in the right of the State to preserve its own exis- tence as a State and as against individuals. But the moral relations of men which thus find expression in positive law are not, let me repeat, in- vented by the policeman, any more than those moral 1 6zj Ethica, relations which are not yet made " positive " law but which have established themselves as social opinions, and which, as society advances, may possibly pass from custom to the statute-book. The duty which a man owes to the State is thus (and thus only) a duty which he owes to the moral law within him, and this because the act of the State is based on the inner idea and inner law. The disturbance of civil order is consequently never justifiable except when jus is conspicuously not justice. The true sanction of civil law is that it is moral law, and of civil order that it is moral order. It is because positive law, whether civil or criminal, is moral law that I, as a moral being, obey it. The civil law of the society of which I am a member is my law : it emanates from me. Doubtless, because of other considerations, which also, however, are ultimately moral in their character, I may provi- sionally obey a civil law which contradicts moral law, under protest, and while " agitating " for a change. But in so far as I obey civil law through fear of material civil penalties alone, I am simply coerced into my line of conduct as a dog or an ox is coerced : there is no morality in my obedience, because there is no free- dom ; and there is no permanent safety or possibility of growth for a State where the citizens live under these conditions. Owing to the powerful emotions and desires which are always moving within it, and which (as our analysis shows) enter into its idea, justice, as an idea, is always, as I have said, in unstable equilibrium in the minds of men. Justice. 165 A State which understands its function endeavours to keep the balance true. But besides this, justice, owing to the same emotional causes, is an elastic idea ; and as the idea of humanity and the ideal of self-realisation grow, y^^s must grow with them, or the forces of society will burst the bonds which bind it, not to return to primitive anarchy, but with a view to a better " fit." We are not speaking of the origin of society, although we do not lose sight of its problems, while leaving them to prehistoric historians. We speak of the philoso- phical basis, the fons and source, not the origo of society — that element in man and in the ultimate purpose of the existence of man which makes a com- munity necessary to the individual if he is to be truly man — truly a person, and not merely an individual; and makes that community possible by evoking the moral element of law within each individual conscious- ness. Of course, the origin of society is individuals : what else could it be ? But they do not contract to live together under constituted authority on certain conditions; they fall together, because they cannot help it. An infant community, if it be a community, can only be, even in its rudest form, the external ex- pression of the inner need of men for each other, and of the sentiment and reason of the persons comprising the community, as these attributes are most conspicuously active in its most effective members. Thus the morally weak are strengthened by the corporate strength, and the common or objective will, dominating, gives shape to individual wills, so that, as the ages pass, the person, as 1 66 Ethica. we know him now, is nrnch more the product of society and the past, than of the present or of himself. The end or idea of a community, however uncon- sciously operative, is always, from the very first, Justice ; and to this, in its full evolution, all civil organisations tend, if they are truly alive. Were it not so, society would not have arisen, except for temporary and quickly dissolved associations of defence against ex- ternal enemies. When justice is not paramount, the State is in perpetual contradiction with its own idea, and therefore with itself. Where there is no public justice {justitia civilis) there is no true State. And why? Because there is no ethical element in it. It is merely an anarchy of aggregated atoms, held together by main force in the interests of a class — the simulacrum or parody of a true State. This law of justice, as moral law for the individual beyond the range of positive law, is very wide-reaching, and, as determining reciprocities among persons, has infinite channels of activity. It penetrates, indeed, every possible relation of man to man, thus comprehending the majority of the virtues, and reacting on the personal well- being and fulfilment of each man in countless ways. In respect of quantity and complexity it is, in truth, as civi- lisation advances, practically immeasurable. Hence the position assigned to it among men as supreme, and the conviction that nothing may be done by any man or any State which conflicts with the idea of justice. Man finds that he can live and realise himself only through Justice. 167 society, and society again is possible only in and through the paramountcy of justice. In the moral economy of each man — the kingdom of motive and end — the altruistic emotions have discharged their function, in so far as the obligation of inner law is con- cerned, when they have seated justice on the throne. The idea is so great that, when externalised in positive law and judicial courts, it ought, in the moral as well as material interests of all men, to be always invested with the attributes of awe and majesty. He who does not make justice the law of his inner life is not only an enemy of society, but makes his own realisation impossible ; for (like a State in a similar predicament) he must ever remain in contradiction with himself. The basis of Society, then, is justice, however crude the original conception may be ; and the existence of society is due to the need of man for other men, that he through them, and they through him, may fulfil them- selves in accordance with the law of their nature. The individuals contribute of their moral instincts to the whole, and the whole returns to the individuals with the sanction and authority of a human universal. To return to the person : — The obligation of justice is an obligation of reason giving the rule to the complex of inner feeling, with a view to harmony or non-contradiction. This being attained, and the law of temperance being also observed, morality or virtue is attained ; the precise mode of actualising the inner state of being is dependent on the intelligent discrimination of external relations alone. Even in a rudimentary 1 68 Ethica. coalescing of individuals, when first the outward occa- sion evokes the innate feelings and powers, the large quantity in extension of altruistic emotions are busy counteracting the ever-enduring intensity of self-con- serving desires. Eeason is working towards an adjust- ment apparently of outward conditions, really of inner feelings and motives. It may be a groping activity, but so also is the rational activity which is busy under- standing and correlating the objects of outer sense. It was said above, that with every addition to the mere numbers of a society, not to speak of its ever-growing complexity of relations, the extensive quantity of altruistic emotion is increased until it passes ultimately into the idea of universal humanity, against the power of which over the minds of men justice itself has sometimes a hard task to hold its own — a harder task, perhaps, we may some day find, than it had to hold its own against the self- conserving desires in the dawn of social life. Community of feeling, as it be- comes more explicit in the consciousness of each, gives a universal and objective character to the inner law, and is the most potent of all the additions to the primary quantitative supremacy of the idea or sentiment of justice, just as that sympathetic community is, to start with, the fundamental fact in human nature which makes justice possible to all. The individual is now supported by the human universal, and, in the majority of cases, also disciplined by it into the negation of his own isolated individuality. He feels, if he does not see, that it is only through humanity that he can be truly human. In civilised societies, all but the savage Altruistic Emotions and Justice. 169 survival — the brute individualist who lies at the bottom — are alive to the fact that justice must be maintained at all hazards ; for on this depend the very existence of the community and the possibility of men realising themselves in any direction whatsoever. It is the sole guarantee of freedom. We say, accordingly, that any citizen who consciously acts unjustly, however lofty his motives be — rational or sesthetic or religious — is an enemy within the citadel, and disloyal to that which alone makes it possible for him to pursue his self- regarding aims, and is thus unfaithful to the very conditions of his own self-regarding activity. CHAP. XXIV. — ALTRUISTIC EMOTIONS AND JUSTICE {Recapitidation). HEDONISM AS CRITERION. 1 HAVE failed in my analysis if these things are not patent to the reader : first, that the altruistic emotions are not in themselves obligatory, much less governing, emotions, but that the idea in relations of feeling as moulded by altruistic emotions — in other words, justice — is alone obligatory and imperative ; secondly, that the idea and sentiment of justice are not of ex- ternal origin, the relations among men only furnishing occasion and stimulus to the native forces innate in every man as regulated by reason, which affirms the moral law in them ; thirdly, that it must follow that a just act, in so far as it is moral, completes itself in the crisis of volition, all else being a question of the 1 70 Ethica, adaptation of the volition to the external circumstances of the moment, and a matter for intelligence alone. But we have not limited justice as a sentiment and idea to the narrow limits of State requirements. Justice is, in truth, a large and ever-growing word. It embraces all the social virtues, but those which receive the external sanction of positive law and those which do not. Not only truthfulness, honesty, integrity, but also loyalty, consideration for the circumstances of others, regard for the feelings of others, control of our own irritability in our intercourse with others, civility, courtesy, equality of manner (a great virtue, because the fruit of many other virtues) which enables a man to set aside and to forget the adventitious advantages which wealth or rank gives him and to deal with others on the basis of a common humanity — all these character- istics of a true man, of a formed personality, a rightly fashioned will, are comprehended under the term Justice. The State, by positive enactment, recognises the fact that these are not all equally obligatory on each, partly because it can safely deal only with the external and visible results of men's conduct towards each other as these directly or indirectly affect material interests, and partly because some are not so obligatory as others inherently. The act of the State is here, as everywhere, the reflex and record of the individual consciences of men. And this fact of the common conscience — that all just acts, taking the larger ethical view of justice presented in the preceding paragraph, are not equally obligatory — turns us back to the ultimate ground of Moral Question an Inner Question, 171 moral distinctions. Why, for example, are our regret and remorse for actions which do not affect the life of others not so intimate and intense as they are for such acts as dishonesty, lying, and so forth ? Not because of the lesser evil done, but because the greater evil done is a greater outrage to our moral sense. For the idea and sentiment of justice in us are supreme, as resting on community of feeling, and are thus an offence against humanity at large. The ethical question is always an inner question, not an outer one. I say the moral question is always an inner question. It is true that the consciousness of wrong done by us is in most cases greatly intensified when the act has been proscribed by positive law and has a sequel of external penalty. But what does this mean when we look at it closely ? It simply means that the common conscience has decided that these acts are so very hurtful that they must be prohibited under penalty. But the common conscience is merely the focusing of an aggregate of individual consciences, and the individual conscience feels that volitions in a certain direction are a greater breach of the community of feeling which binds men together than other reprehensible volitions are. That is to say, they are the causes of effects which affect more profoundly our altruistic emotions as ration- alised in the sentiment of justice. And if at any time (as indeed often happens) we pronounce certain volitions of which positive law takes no cognisance because of the impossibility of putting the finger of the State on the injury done to material interests by them, to be really 172 Ethica. more immoral than many offences which the State punishes, that again is because of the greater shock they give to our altruistic emotions, or rather, to these emo- tions as imbedded and rationalised in the idea of justice. Let us remember, too, that the altruistic emotions comprehend the love of the good-will of others — an immense support to virtuous volition. It is sometimes cynically said that remorse is often merely the fear of being found out. But a reasonable estimation of the opinion which society at large may entertain of our conduct is itself a moral motive, because it is based on that community of feeling which makes of individuals a one social organism. State-penalties for certain voli- tions (whose effect on material interests can be traced) are dreaded for two reasons; because they emphasise the organised opinion of society, and are thus the pro- foundest shock that can be given to the humanity in a man ; and, secondly, because they inflict physical pain. But it is notorious enough that it is only the crude and semi-barbarous whom the physical pains deter: it is the moral pain of social condemnation which is the true deterrent outside the consciousness of the breach of inner law. It may be thought that in the preceding remarks we have been on the confines of casuistry — especially when we speak of certain immoral volitions being less immoral than certain others. But so it is as a matter of fact. The experience of life, which is the percep- tion of effects of conduct, intensifies certain moral conceptions and weakens others. This is patent enough Supremacy of Justice. 173 in the individual history of each of us, as well as in the history of the race. It appears, then, from the preceding argument, that the ultimate ground for the supremacy of justice in our economy, or system of motive, may be summed in these propositions : — (1.) The altruistic emotion out of which the idea of justice springs is another name for the universal in humanity, and the universal necessarily overshadows and controls the particular : Man is more powerful and authoritative than individual men. (2.) The altruistic emotions are thus vastly greater quantitatively than any other emotion or group of emotions. (3.) The idea of justice is found by reason to be the 'primary condition of the social relation through which alone man can realise himself. For shortness, we may say it is the primary charac- ter and quantitative superiority of the idea of justice which gives it rightful supremacy in man's consciousness over all other possible motives of conduct that may obtrude themselves. The idea of justice as dominant can alone secure that inner harmony of feeling which is the true life of the complex organism of feeling which we call man. Justice is an expression for the law of that inner organism as ascertained by reason. To this reason-afiirmed law the procession of feelings which traverse consciousness have to yield their several rights, that they may truly 174 Ethica. live as part of an organism. As a reason-ascertained law in feeling, it is the reduction of feeling to self- consciousness — the " idea " of harmony : the feeling ele- ment is the real, and we call the law on that side of its dual character, harmony. There is an effected identity of reason and feeling. All the while, the whole process is simply an inner adjustment of forces in individual minds which finds its guarantee of truth within, and which has made use of external relations as having significance only in so far as they are illustrations of the true character of motives as that is revealed in their actualisation. The Criterion of Universal Hedonism, Effects (it has just been implied) have only a reflex influence in constituting or modifying moral ideas. All they do is to interpret the true nature of particular volitions in their concrete issue. Thus, by enlightening intelligence, they reach feeling, and affect the future direction of volitions. If, e.g., I did not feel the misery which a well-intentioned volition caused, I could be taught nothing by the consequences of my volition. It is only as they reflexly touch my emotional nature that they have any moral significance : otherwise they are merely external facts, as isolated from me as are the motions of icebergs at the poles. Morality is thus always, in its crude beginnings as in its most complex forms, inner : it is wholly within the sphere of reason, feeling, moral idea and motive. It begins from within, and it ends within. Uiziversal Hedonism, 175 Accordingly, an external criterion is no criterion at all : it cannot possibly be so. It is the law of self- realisation of man that we seek, and the external is merely raw material which has to be interpreted by feeling and reason in man as it affects these. The wellbeing of man, in the sense of his pleasure or happiness, is, moreover, not only incommensurable, but pre-supposes a settlement of the question, What is the wellbeing of man ? Wherein does it truly consist ? How, in short, can he realise himself? What are the conditions and laws of self-realisation ? We are, as a matter of fact, not so much bound to promote the well- Jem^ of men as to promote their "WQW-doing. We always find in arguments for this external criterion a necessary undercurrent of assumption that the wellbeing of man is to be identified with his material satisfactions. There seems to be something here which is solid and intelligible. But it is mani- fest that we are not so much under obligation to promote the material interests of our fellow-men as to teach them to be honest and truthful, and so to raise their ideal of human life that they may be prepared to sacrifice those very material interests, and even their very lives, on the altar of ethical ideas. The "wellbeing" of man is, then, a mere ad captandum expression to ensnare the unthinking, and presumes the prior settle- ment of the whole ethical question. We ask for a criterion, and we are offered a phrase. Again, the altruistic moral theory, which identifies itself with the doctrine of wellbeing, is in its extreme 176 Ethica. form under the domination of an emotion — especially potent in these days — and forgets that no mere feeling whatsoever is entitled to free play in the mind of man. We have to analyse man, and to impose the law of reason on the complex aggregate of feeling which con- stitutes the matter, but only the matter, of a rational organism. Without this, all feelings tend to fanaticism, just as the suppression of feeling likewise tends to fanaticism — in the one case the fanaticism of the enthu- siasm of humanity, in the other of ascetic austerity. Nor can the Hedonistic criterion of which we are speaking ever yield anything save a mechanical theory of society. What is the wellbeing of another man to me except in so far as it evokes an innate something in my complex nature, the satisfaction of which is in itself and in numerous ways necessary to my self- realisation as a moral being, or except in so far as I may expect a quid jpro quo ? The advocates of the theory seem to feel this difficulty, for they admit that the altruistic emotions become, as such and in their purity, more and more largely operative, and indeed necessary, as society progresses in civilisation and becomes more complete as an organism. But if early societies and primitive justice form themselves on the "give and take" of personal rights alone as determined by material interests and the dictum of an external sovereign, at what point does the goodwill of man to man begin to show itself ? And why does it arise at all ? If it be, as it unquestionably is, an elementary feeling, it must have a potent share in the motives of Universal Hedonism. 177 human association, both in the initiation of communities and throughout every stage of progress ; the end is in the beginning, and in the whole intermediate process : if it be not an elementary feeling, its birth can be attributed only to material self-interest, in which case the emotion has no existence at all. Goodwill, in short, in all its forms, including self-sacrifice and patriotism, and even the courtesies of personal inter- course, would be only self-seeking elaborately dis- guised. If this were so, it could not be goodwill ; for thus an effect would be produced which was not in the cause; or, to put it otherwise, the emotion, held in the interest of polemics to exist, would admittedly be always committing suicide by negating itself. And yet we have writers attempting an explanation of goodwill and justice on this very basis of disguised self-interest, forgetting that (as Aristotle says) " no one would call a man just who did not take pleasure in doing justice, nor generous who took no pleasure in acts of' generosity " (Eth. I. 8, 12). Society grows out of an ethical need in man and men — the inner unconscious striving after fulfil- ment of being. If justice were possible without the elements of goodwill towards others and the love of the goodwill of others (the sentiment of humanity in its genesis), it might yet, I admit, hold society together, were there a strong enough physical force behind it ; but in that case the State would be only a piece of hard mechanism, not a moral community in which the idea of humanity could ever by possibility take root. 178 Ethica. Without goodwill and the love of goodwill emerging out of the sympathetic community of being and feeling as a universal, the vital principle of a social organism is absent, and the ca'put mortuum called the State must soon disintegrate. Nay, is it not the forgetfulness of this fact, and the exaggerated estimate of personal rights on the part of the wealthy and powerful — an estimate ultimately resting on a mechanical conception of human relations — that sow the seeds of revolutions ? Finally, without this bond of love as rationalised in justice, the individual man himself (as has again and again appeared in past pages) cannot grow to virtue in his relations to other men; for virtue would in that case be summed up in external and enforced obedience for selfish ends. Through this moral bond alone is self- realisation possible. Such is the constitution of man as evoked by his external relations to other men. The social virtues, if they do not ultimately rest on sym- pathetic emotions native to man, and essential to his realisation as a person, are merely clever devices for preventing breaches of the peace, dressed up in illusory forms to deceive the simple, while State-law is merely a system of rules for the benefit of those who " have," maintained by brute force and enforced by material penalties against those who " have not." • Note, Mr. L. Stephen very properly takes objection to the utilitarian criterion of the morality of acts in so far as they regard merely the consequences of acts, whereas Hedonism, ijg the morality lies in the motive. But the same writer himself builds up the system of inner motive out of the experience of the consequences of acts in their bearing on social welfare or 'vitality' as revealed in history. This criterion is, with him, it is true, a continually moving and progressive point on the line of evolu- tionary advance. But I cannot see that the writer thereby succeeds in differentiating himself from the ordinary utilitarian. It is a truism that individual men, as well as societies, differ in their ideals of the system of motive and end, as time elapses and experi- ence increases ; but at any one point of time the ideal and the criterion of that ideal, must be, according to this writer, utilitarian, when stripped of the associa- tions which gather round all moral conduct. The same remarks apply mutatis mutandis to Mr. Spencer. Again : the moral motives of action, as constituting in their aggregate the virtuous man, Mr. Stephen identifies with " instincts " which ''have hecome orgastic" in the pro- cess of history and of accumulated experien ce of the health of the social organism. To the virtuous cotemporary man the virtuous emotion or law within him is actually Tioiv within him seeking (so to speak) activity, and is an end in itself. But how has it " become organic '* and an end in itself? If the virtues do not owe their origin and source to the nature of man — requiring, of course, external occasion and opportunity for their emergence into activity, just as the eye requires light before it can see — they must then owe their origin to external considerations solely, and the profounder analysis to which Mr. L. S. has subjected the growth of ethics only lands him in a position which is essen- tially utilitarian. The sense of the beautiful is not i8o Ethica, created in me by a sunset or a Greek statue. No doubt it is the external relations of men which make possible the moral life of man and evoke it ; nay, it is these relations which give specific characters and names to the various virtues. For example, when speaking to a man, my relations are different from those which exist when I do something in which his person- ality as well as mine is involved. I call virtue in the former case truth-speaking, and in the latter (it may be) honesty, but they are both at bottom governed by the sentiment of justice. The same essential virtue gets many names, which are determined by external relations. Many moral motives, again, are of course complex in their nature, and not so easily traced to their roots, but it is the business of the moral analyst to separate the strands of the complex motive. In fine, I cannot see in what respect the utilitarian standard, " happiness to men in society," differs from that of '' social utility," nor is the matter to be mended or discussion to be evaded by using the vague expres- sion " social vitality." Positive Justice. 1 8 1 CHAP. XXV. — POSITIVE JUSTICE — BENEVOLENCE AS A VIRTUE — RELATIVE OBLIGATIONS. Altruistic emotions as regulated, or rather inter- preted, by the idea justice, are the basis of society. Justice, doubtless, concerns the relations of persons, but the external relations of persons are in themselves mere counters on the board. They are the external conditions and visible expression of inner relations of desires and emotions in the moral agent. It is in this causal region, first of feeling and then of idea, that we have to look for the true character, significance, and even the possibility, of justice as a regulated system of external relations between persons. When certain writers speak of the absolute necessity of an " external standard," the only sense in which the moralist can attach a meaning to the words is this, that we must see a motive effectuated and externalised before we can truly know it. Who doubts this ? A cause is known in its effects. And we may go further and say that the external direction given to moral motives, which are themselves permanent, must vary with external conditions. The rudimentary form of the true relation among 1 82 Ethica, persons has been named negative justice. This idea of negative justice does not, however, exhaust the rela- tions in which men stand to each other, unless we stretch its specific meaning until it vanishes. Our analysis has shown that the heart of justice is an altruistic emotion, and that, this being so, it is impos- sible for the term "justice" to preserve any hard and fast definition. The force of the humane emotion is in many, perhaps most, natures so strong that the boundary line between strict negative justice and benevolence is always being obliterated. As individuals we feel constantly called upon to remedy obvious inequali- ties which, by their very nature, make the self-realisa- tion of man impossible in the case of a large number of citizens. We seem to see in these inequalities, if not clearly self-caused, a standing injustice due, if not to the world-order (or disorder) then to the society which has permitted them to grow up and exist. We ourselves, as parts of society, feel that we share the responsibility for them. Accordingly, we pass beyond the require- ments of strict justice, and in the name of benevolence, philanthropy, humanity, seek to remedy the evils we see around us and give our fellow-men a chance. If negative justice had a mechanical and external explanation, this tendency to pass beyond its limits, still in the name of justice, could not exist ; the question constantly present to the best of us would be a purely intellectual one, and would take this form. What is the least I can do for others in order to have free scope for my own desires? It is the altruistic Positive Justice, 183 element in justice that compels us to take a positive instead of a negative view of our relations to other men. Some will say that in so doing we pass into the sphere of benevolent emotion and leave justice behind us. But is it so ? Do we rightly class many of these acts as benevolent ? Is it not a duty to help our fellow-men to realise themselves ? If a duty, the motive and act belong to the sphere of moral law, not of emotion alone. The state of the case seems to me to be this : — In so far as our fellow-men are unable to realise themselves, owing to obstructions for which not they, but we, are, directly or indirectly, responsible, our activity in their interest is not to be called benevolence at all, but positive, as distinguished from negative, justice. There is in positive justice more of the emotion of goodwill, more of the sympathy of each with others than in negative justice; but the conception of justice is not thereby strained. It is impossible for any man to lay down a rule for himself which will enable him to deter- mine whether the help he affords to his neighbour is demanded in the name of justice or of pure benevolence ; because it is impossible always to distinguish those obstructions for which we are directly or indirectly responsible, and those which are caused by the persons themselves who expect or claim our help. Hence, even assuming in two men an equal impulse to be kind, the conscience of one will be oppressed by the omission of certain acts, while that of the other will in the same circumstances be free, because he has differ- ently judged the circumstances of the particular case. 184 Ethica, At the same time there can be no doubt that, given a clear case of obstructions for which I am directly or indirectly responsible, I am under moral obligation to remove them ; and this is to bring the motive and act within the sphere of what I call positive justice, and to take it out of the sphere of ex gratia benevolence. A great many acts for which men get credit as being spontaneously benevolent are in truth to be regarded as no more than just, and as such their duty. The recipients have a right. The virtues are not always, nor generally, mutually exclusive : they are circles which cut one another. But we are not on this account to ignore distinctions as some writers on the philosophy of law seem disposed to do. Negative justice has been defined in accordance with the tradition of jurists : positive justice is a conscious positive desire and effort to help others to realise them- selves within this limitation — that our activity is con- fined to the removal of obstructions or impediments directly or indirectly caused by ourselves or others whose responsibilities we share. In both negative and positive justice there are thus rights inherent in the object of our duties. But when our goodwill extends to the helping of others to realise themselves by sharing or removing burdens self-caused, or not due directly or indirectly to us or others with whom we are associated (and whose responsibilities, therefore, we share), the motive is one of benevolence ; what we give is a boon, and the recipient has no rights as against us. . Whatever value the expressions "perfect " and "im- Relative Obligations. 185 perfect" may have in jurisprudence, they have no place in the ethical sphere, within which obligation is always obligation. And yet they point with wavering and uncertain finger to a real distinction which I would venture to explain thus : — All are familiar with the conflict of duties which brings us face to face with the question of relative obligations. Certain motives of action are, in the event of a conflict, supreme and governing. The ex- planation of the governing character of one among several competing obligations lies where the explana- tion of the supremacy of justice is to be found, and it is this : the motive most extensive in respect of quantity and which is primary and which thus belongs to that class of motive which conditions the realisation of man in any form whatsoever, is always supreme. If, e.g., self-control or temperance, which makes physi- cal life and all moral activity possible, is in conflict with emotions and motives aesthetic or religious or rational, the former is the more imperative relatively. In like manner, the very existence of society in any form whatsoever depends on the supremacy of justice : it is primary and also quantitatively more extensive. Even benevolence cannot be regarded as a virtue if it contradict justice. Further, as regards benevolence itself ; it is a virtue only in so far as it is beneficence. Like all other feelings and emotions, it is anarchic and hurtful, and has to submit to a rule of reason if it is to take its 1 86 Ethica, place in the ethical scheme of life. If we desire to find a rule, we find it where we find the fundamental principle which regulates both negative and positive justice, viz., this, that the ethical end is the realisation of self hy self. Consequently, a seemingly benevolent act on my part is in truth maleficent if I do for another what he can do for himself. Benevolence is, in these circumstances, immoral, and is nothing but the selfish indulgence of a subjective emotion at the expense of our fellow-men. Benevolence, as beneficence, is the " ideal " of altru- istic emotion, and is to be applauded because it is the pursuit of ideals which alone makes ethical and rational progress possible. Hence it is that we judge its occa- sional excess or aberrations leniently. In every society there is a vast field for the virtue of benevolence. Not to speak of the daily relations of man, all bringing numberless opportunities for acts of kindness, considerateness, courtesy, and mutual help- fulness, outside the obligations of positive justice, there is the standing invitation to every man to seek out those conditions of life which hinder other men in their self-realisation, and which, wlien found, are seen to fall within the sphere of positive justice. Such benevolence is beneficence. Then there are the large and constantly recurring opportunities given by those various misfortunes for which the suffering individual is not responsible, or responsible only in a remote degree. We have only to take care that our benevolent activity is so wisely calculated as to further Benevolence, 187 the end we have in view, and that in seeking the good of others we do not paralyse their self-endeavour and so work their ethical ruin. The formula is not " Do unto others as I would they should do to me," but " Do to others what they ougM to do to me in similar circumstances." It is manifestly impossible to draw a hard and fast line here ; but none the less ought each man to aim at regulating his benevolent and self- sacrificing activity by the rule that he should do nothing for others which they can reasonably be expected to do for themselves. If he contravenes this rule, he is striking at the roots of the ethical conception which is the realisation of self hy self. The standard is objec tive : — Not what I should lilze to do, but what I ougM to do while keeping in view the supreme ethical end for all human beings and for society at large. If this condition of my activity is ignored, my efforts will ultimately fail, and misery ensue where I had thought to promote wellbeing. Everything we do under the potent influence of the idea of humanity is unquestion- ably unjust if it weaken the personality of others. Benevolence is moral only when it is truly beneficent as measured by a standard of life. 1 88 Ethica, CHAP. XXVI. — THE ETHICAL IDEAL, AND RELATIVE OBLIGATIONS. The whole ethical question, I have more than once said, is an inner question, and has to do with causal motives of volition — the effects of volitions being often difficult to trace, and the happiness they pro- duce in diverse individuals being at the mercy of various circumstances and idiosyncrasies. Even if good effects could always be traced, the initiation of the volition to produce these could have no raison d'etre save a desire, emotion, or an idea. When a man ascertains that the effects of his volition contra- dict the motive which determined it, his duty is to reconsider — not his motive, but — the direction of his volition, so as to avoid the disturbance and deflection caused by complicated or misunderstood external con- ditions. But, even then, his duty is to the idea, the motive ; in short, to the law in himself. Moral ideas and ideals grow with experience of life and the growth of society. It is surely superfluous to point out that it would be absurd to expect in a primitive barbarian a full-blown sentiment of justice. Man is a unity, and the rational and the real of feeling play into each other and grow together. It is one of the The Ethical Ideal. 1 89 objects of this treatise to show that this is so. And it would be as reasonable to expect to find a well-defined sentiment of justice in a prehistoric barbarian seeking painfully, in company with his fellows, for scanty and precarious sustenance, as to find him elaborating the law of the conservation of energy. None the less, even in the crude beginnings of life, are those innate emotions operating which are the root of the idea and the sentiment, just as reason is there — neither more nor less. From the beginning, he is in search uncon- sciously of the moral order — the harmony of feeling within him as determined and constituted by reason — simply because he is man and cannot help it. He is from the very first a rational and ethical being, and not wholly animal ; and his specific function in the system of things is to find the law in himself for him- self by himself, and to actualise that law in conduct. We do not expect an infant, when he first opens his eyes, to discriminate forms and colours, much less to be sensible of the charms of nature. He is not even conscious of himself, and yet he is a self, an Ego. Justice, we find, is supreme within that region of feel- ing and emotion as yet within the scope of our argument. Is it equally supreme in the whole man ? To put the question crucially. Is a man ever morally justifiable in ignoring justice in the interests either of benevolence or of the highest activities of his nature ; e.g. aesthetic activity or philosophic and religious contemplation ? The question has been already answered, but will bear 1 90 Ethica, further consideration, as it is one of no small importance in its bearing on human life. We have been dealing hitherto with finite relations and finite obligations ; but man is a being of relations infinite in their character, because he is a reason. There are emotions which determine to action, with a view to the fulfilment or realisation of a man, which have only indirectly to do with his relations either to his own physical organism or to his fellow-men. These, too, by their quality and their infiniteness of reference tran- scend all other emotions. They may be roughly classified as aesthetic, religious, and rational. I make no attempt to analyse these emotions here, but assume a general knowledge of their character sufficient for our present purpose. These activities belong to the completion of man's life ideally conceived. All else indeed, including the whole social system, seems to be little more than a preparation for them. They act downwards on the lower sphere of morality, furnishing fresh motives and communicating to the moral all the strength and ele- vation of the ideal — they carry the infinite into the finite. It is because they furnish fresh motives of conduct, and thus enter into the complex of man as an ethical being, that we are bound to take note of them here. In the concluding chapter of a former treatise on which this ethical discussion rests, I speak of the neces- sary impulse of reason to create ideals. I would The Ethical I deaL 191 impress this as the teaching of that treatise, viz., that were will-reason not pure activity there would be neither idea, ideal, nor Ego ; that the essence of rea- son is pure activity, and that it has the stimulus of end and spring of movement within itself ; and further, that the infinite is inherent in the formal content of will-reason as pure activity. Kant, when he calls the ideal the idea in coTwreto, uses this much-worn term " idea " not in the strict and true sense of essence and end ; but, rather (if not in a popular, certainly in a loose way), as imaged perfection. The idea in strict metaphysical use is singular, but the notion, within which lies the idea as controlling and governing element, is itself a complex or synthesis. By a necessity of reason we seek the synthesis in all things as ultimately completion or perfection. The elements in a synthesis or notion, when we deal with sense-elements alone, finally coalesce in an image of perfection more or less vague. If the elements of a thing are not of sense, the imagination — prime source of metaphysical error — yet seeks to give a sensuous form to the synthesis of the elements present to consciousness. Thought-universal is in and through matter ; and finite thought in its first encounter with thought-universal encounters it in matter, and for ever has difficulty in liberating pure thinking from its necessary form of externalisation. Thus it is that in constituting the ideal of an intellectual synthesis, we become a second time entangled in matter through the action of the sensuous imagination. The imagination. 192 Etkica. however, does not construct ideals, but is the mere tool of reason in their construction — the schematic instrument of construction. What specially concerns us here, however, is the inner necessity of reason to construct ideals. A con- crete ethical ideal exists in every normal man in this sense — that he moves towards it, and, more or less con- sciously and explicitly, possesses it. The stage of culture which a man has reached determines his ideal ; and by a man's culture we mean the extent to which he has brought into activity his various capacities for feeling and knowing. Different races of men, too, and the same race at different periods of its civilisation, have different moral ideals. Though it must always be difficult for the mass to form adequate ethical ideals, the few early attained to them. We should not find much to quarrel with, probably, in the ideal of manhood of a wise Egyptian priest, of Zoroaster, of Plato, or of Aristotle. Difficult as it may be for the mass to attain to an ideal conception consciously entertained, still more to live on an ideal plane, all (with few exceptions) show their capacity for the ideal by recognising it, and even worshipping it, when it is presented to them in concrete form. Witness Christ as concrete ideal, and the whole action of the Church, whose specific function in the social economy is, in so far as it is a teacher, the holding forth of ideals of life and action. The ideal life is the spiritual life which subsumes the finite into itself, resting on it as its basis. In stamping the finite with the seal of the infinite, The Ideal and Obligation. 193 however, we do not, and dare not, cancel it. The finite relations are ever of primary obligation. [This has been already explained in the preceding chapter.] Now, what are the marks of the ideal as a life ? The man who breathes this higher air, loves knowledge for its own sake, pursues it, and entertains it as an ever-welcome guest ; he seeks the beautiful in nature and art, also for its own sake, and so lives in the ideal of the sensuous ; he cultivates a close and intimate communion with Being and Eeason-universal. Out of this habit of mind there spring, in his finite relations to his fellow-men, generosity and liberality of sentiment, for he now carries the infinite into these relations, regarding them as part of the universal order, as the divine law of life. Thus he " glorifies God." The common characteristics of these various manifestations of the ideal life are thought and universality ; and we see in it the fulfil- ment of finite self-conscious reason in its manifold relations to experience and the real. Is it incumbent, now, on all men to strive towards this ideal life ? " To will to wear himself and never rest Until he reach the ripest fruit of all ? " In what sense is it obligatory ? The " idea " in the notion governs in all existences ; and reason being the idea in the notion, man, he is under perpetual obligation to it. Consequently, inas- much as this idea, viz., reason, is the source and main- spring of the ideal, man is, unquestionably, under obli- gation to seek the ideal and to realise it in himself as a N 1 94 Ethica, person or self-conscious Ego : that is to say, such ideal as time, place, and circumstances enable him to conceive. But the obligation is manifestly an " imperfect obliga- tion" when compared with the observance of law in our finite relations. For a man to do an unjust act is a breach of law; but for a man to live on the moral plane of an ordinary English farmer, observing the law as a good citizen should, but without an effort to realise even his own ideal of a farmer, much less the ideal of man-universal, does not involve a Ireach of law, but only a shortcoming or delinquency. That the ultimate end of man is life in the ideal is put beyond controversy by the fact that the ideal life is reason working for the sake of reason. It is the idea in the notion, man, fulfilling itself for the sake of itself in various directions. The light which the ideal sheds on human life and destiny, its irradiation of the common virtues, the stimulus it gives to every fresh effort to realise self by self, the guarantee of social pro- gress which it alone has given, can give, and for ever gives, the dignity with which it invests our daily exis- tence in the midst of prosaic needs and dull routine, reveal to even the half-opened eye the beauty and truth that are in it. In this consummating and creative act of finite reason God himself — reason-universal — is made manifest, and, with the joy of the contemplation of the infinite thus revealed, comes not only the reverence of worship but the abnegation of self But, while imperative law is inherent in those ideas which are the essence and interpretation of relations of The Ideal and Obligation. 195 feelings in their finite reference, it is not a characteristic of the ideal in the same degree. That is to say, it is, in the latter, relatively less imperative. The obligation of the finite virtues, as fairly well summed up in the words "temperance" and "justice," is obligatory for the reasons already given in past pages — their primary character and their quantitative extension. The most stringent obligation, obviously, must always belong to those laws of human life which make life possible, and which are the pre-conditions of ideal perfection itself. To thought, the beginning and the end are one ; but all things are in time, and one movement, as the j^ius of the next, is invested with an importance, value, and authority, which are reflected back on it from the end to which it is subservient and contributory. Hence it is that even in the name of science, art, or religion no man can do an unjust act — he cannot even lose his temper, without self-contradiction, inner discord, and subversion of the moral order. In brief : In the ideal life we find the true signi- ficance of man, the perfect flower of his nature, the realised purpose of his existence, his excellence, and, as such, it is law for him ; but this ideal activity, as ulti- mately self-regarding, is not obligatory in the same degree in which temperance or self-control and justice are obligatory. Why ? Simply, I repeat, because the latter are, as a matter of fact, primary in their char- acter and, at the same time, quantitatively greater. Both the finite and the ideal, however, are equally obligatory in the sense of being imposed as an obli- 196 Ethica. gation on our wills ; and when we say that the latter is of imperfect obligation we are merely using a tradi- tional juridical phrase to point out that under no ideal pretext can the " perfect," and prior, and supreme obligation of finite relations be ignored. In fact, closely viewed, the neglect of ordinary duties in pursuit of ideal aims is glorified individualism. We find in the laws of Manu this : " Let the wise man constantly perform his moral duties with more care than even the duties of piety : he who neglects moral duties will fall, even though he observe all the duties of piety." When there is a conflict of duties then, there can be no doubt where the supreme obligation lies. And we are, as scientific thinkers, at one with the conscience of the vulgar. Positive Justice in the State. 197 CHAP. XXVII. — POSITIVE JUSTICE IN THE STATE WITH KEFERENCE TO THE LIMITS OF STATE ACTION. It will be found that what is true of the person is also true of the corporation of persons — the State. The questions of political science, however, are com- plicated and difficult, and it is only as an ethicist, and not as a publicist, that I would venture to speak of them at all. Negative justice is the expression by which we desig- nate the fundamental relation of one person to other persons in community. Accordingly, the primary func- tion of a free corporate State is, next to defence against external enemies, the maintenance of negative justice — the freedom of each citizen to realise himself consist- ently with the freedom of every other. This function, it seems to me, can never be allowed to fall out of sight : as it is the primary, so it is the essential, function. It matters not under what sounding name an attempt to disturb the basis of society may present itself to men, be it Humanity, Science, Keligion, or God; freedom cannot survive when the fundamental condition of civil order is not paramount. Principles of State-organisa- tion which make it impossible for each individual to realise himself, strike at the root of personality and free- dom as well as property, and so undermine the ethical 198 Ethica, purpose of man's existence. Children are doubtless, theoretically, as being in statu jncpillari, members of a society so organised in so far as they are members of the family (the school is simply an annex of the family and a portion of it). But, even with children, moral education will fall short of its possible results if it does not respect the prime ethical condition and leave room for self-activity, carefully abstaining from a system of control which hedges round the child with law and rule, and demands of him only external obedience under threat of punishment. Without entering far into questions of political philosophy, it may be safely affirmed that the extension of even a wisely-conceived pupillary system to grown men and women would destroy personality ; nor, looking to the essential nature of man as a free self-determining Ego, is it possible that any such system could maintain itself against the disruptive forces within it, except among the less virile races of mankind. All starts from personality ; and as acquisi- tion of property is implicit in the fact of personality, communism is essentially non-ethical. In truth, any excessive interference with the freedom of the indivi- dual, even under non- communistic conditions, may become so harassing and vexatious as to lead to justifi- able rebellion. But, on the other hand, a State which is dominated by the idea of justice in the strict negative sense may find itself in presence of evils to which justice so defined has itself given rise. Under its protection rampant individualism may have undermined justice. Positive Justice in the State. 199 Inequalities in wealth and power (which is virtually wealth), due to original inequalities of character and opportunity — inequalities made permanent on the side both of the poor and the rich by inheritance, physio- logical, moral, and economic — may reach such a point as to demand the intervention of the sovereign power in the name of justice itself. It is unnecessary in these days to give illustrations: enough to say that the gutter child of dissolute parents and the born pauper para- lytic must forthwith die in the presence of a political system which contemplates only negative justice. To talk of their freedom to realise themselves is absurd. The whole question of the limits of State action accordingly seems to me to be this : In how far shall the sovereign pass laws and set up institutions to remedy the evils which must necessarily arise in all societies com- posed of self-realising persons : in other words, how far is political action to go in giving effect to ^os^Y^ve justice? First : If the State has not an ethical basis, the question of limitations cannot even arise except as a question of self-defence from internal enemies. In a non-ethical state the sole business of the sovereign is to keep the peace ; the political con- stitution on the mechanical theory is merely a machine, and the more automatically it acts the better. But if the State, that is, the sovereign, be always only an expression for the corporate will of society, it is not mechanical but ethical, for it merely focuses the wills of persons. It is a reflection of the conscience of the community — an incorporated moral consensus. To.it 200 Ethica. every citizen gives that he may receive; he receives that he may give. A law promulgated by the sovereign which is not the summing up of the moral judgment of the citizens, cannot endure. Occasional injustice matters little : sovereigns are men. We submit to these : even of chronic injustice, we may say that sudden revolu- tion rarely cures it : like chronic disease in the body, it demands a chronic cure. In short, the State (and here I use that term as including both the sovereign and the people) is to be called an organism only in so far as in it all the parts are subordinated to an idea — an ethical idea — Justice. Now, what do we precisely mean when we say that a State is an organism ? Even a State in which the idea of negative justice alone is realised is, I hold, an ethical community ; that is to say, it exists for certain ethical ends, to which ends the means are presumed to be adapted, and for which the various parts {i.e. individuals) are utilised. Still more is this true of the larger conception of the State — the Hellenic conception. If this be so, then, it is an organism ; for it has, as a complex whole, an idea, an ethical purpose, which governs the parts. But it is not an organism in any external sense. It is only in so far as each individual citizen, more or less consciously, thinks the State as an organism that it can be an organism at all. Even as based on the comparatively barren idea of negative justice, the State is thought as an organism; and, as such, it is greater than any individual, because it is the formulated expression of an idea and an Positive Justice in the State. 201 ideal, which, as a universal, holds up a standard of life to all the individuals who have contributed to it ; and, reacting on them, moulds them. Each receives back much more than he gave. Through this universal, each finds his particularity guided, enriched, and strengthened. It would be absurd, however, to suppose that the State is always consciously conceived as an organism by all or any. Such a conception belongs to the reflective period of a people's history, but the conception is none the less working underground like the roots of a tree, influ- encing all political acts, and forming itself with ever- growing explicitness in the consciousness of the citizens. This organic conception of a complex is (as my pre- vious treatise shows) inevitably a ' whole ' — must by dialectical necessity be so felt, if not also explicitly conceived : and this whole is an organic whole, involv- ing the idea of each in all and all in each. The sense, however, in which this most useful and fruitful con- ception of the State as an organism is to be entertained will be explained in the sequel : and it has to be limited as well as explained. Secondly : The State being merely a big man among men, has, in the matter of positive justice, the line of its political activity in the achievement of the ends of society indicated by the action of the individual man as that has been set forth in the preceding chapters. The community of being and feeling makes each man feel his neighbour's need as his own : at least this is the tendency in those men who really lead a community and form its moral code and its social usao^es. In 202 Ethica, the sovereign is focused the consciences of persons. What is the Church, guaranteed if not instituted by the State, but an organised expression of human oneness ? What are systems of education but an attempt to equalise the opportunities for self-realisa- tion ? What are poor-laws, factory acts, etc. etc., and the countless benevolent associations within the State but attempts to remove obstructions in the way of each citizen realising himself, and in some cases even directly to aid him in the realisation of himself ? What, finally, is positive law giving effect to the idea of posi- tive justice but a declaratory and formal utterance by the sovereign of a consensus of moral judgment ? In short, the ethics of the man make the ethics of the State. If this be so, then the question, " What are the limits of State action in the domain of positive justice?" is only another form of the question, " What are the limits of individual action?" which we endeavoured to find in the preceding chapter. And the answer is, There are no limits save the negative limit of negative justice, and the positive limit imposed by ethics. The ethical pur- pose of man is to realise himself ; that is to say, freely to realise self 'hy self. Free willing in search of idea and law, and spontaneous activity under law — this is the supreme purpose of man's existence : this is of the essence of reason, and reason is the idea in the notion, man. Neither the State any more than an individual, accordingly, is at liberty to do for any man what he can do for himself : a commonplace conclusion, certainly ; none the less philosophically sound because it accords Positive Justice in the State, 203 with common sense. Doubtless it is difficult so to administer positive justice as to obey the negative limits of its activity, but this is precisely where the statesman enters and shows his capacity to govern. The tendency to over-activity in social legislation is explained by the fact that a powerful emotion lies at the heart of the conception of justice. The tendency of this dynamic ethical force which first constitutes, and thereafter moulds, political societies is, with democratic constitutions, towards despotism in the name of justice. This is the result of allowing a mere emotion to escape the limits and restrictions of reason. All feelings must submit to the rule of reason if they are not to defeat the very ends which they are intended to subserve. The freedom of the person, which lies at the root of all ethical possibilities, is thus imperilled by certain socialistic doctrines, and, in the name of humanity itself, injustice may be done and liberty crushed through the triumph of a sentiment which has become a passion. It is the function of the State, as the " corporate reason of the community," to watch and regulate the proposals which have their origin in the blind and turbulent emotions of men, but not rashly to suppress them. For what is true of the indi- vidual, in relation to his own complex organism, is here again true of the State : mere appetite has its rights. The business of statesmen is to meet questions as they arise, and decide them as wisely as may be, under the guidance of some general principle; and 204 Ethica, that must be an ethical principle. No preconceived theory of the political future of the organisation of society can possibly be a safe guide. No one in these days can doubt that many evils exist which the mere existence of civilised orga- nised communities tends necessarily to generate along- side the vast benefits it confers. It involves us in no socialistic theory to say that it is the business of the State, in the name of positive justice, to remedy these unhappy results of negative justice, because they are really of the nature of unforeseen, and sometimes artificial, obstructions in the path of men, or of classes of men, desiring to fulfil their lives as ethical persons. It is only on the mechanical theory of society that laissez /aire can be the principle of State action. On this principle, even a poor-law is a contradiction, factory acts are impertinent, and the education of the people a poli- tical monstrosity. The ethical conception of the State teaches a very different lesson. The end and idea of the whole organisation is justice, positive as well as negative, and to permit the continuance of unjust rela- tions among the citizens under the protection of physi- cal force, is for the State to forego the very purpose of its existence, and to use its might in defiance of right. So soon as the public conscience is awakened to the existence of certain unjust relations among men, the State is under obligation to go as far in alleviating the conditions of life as the public conscience will let it go. If the State be only the reflex of the con- science of the society whose power it wields, and if Limits of State Action. 205 the conscience of society is simply the consciences of a mass of individuals, the exclusive dominancy of the primary element in justice — the negative, must, under certain social conditions, give way to the positive con- ception, in order that justice may truly reign. For as in the individual, so in the State, the idea of justice comprehends positive as well as negative elements. In truth, it is only by frankly recognising this en- larged conception of justice that a State is an ethical society in the fullest sense ; and, as an ethical society, the only limit of its sovereign action is an ethical limit. Thus the State becomes by its legislation, but still more by the spirit that animates it, an ethical teacher of its citizens ; it disciplines the immoral, while each well- disposed member of the society is strengthened in his purpose of virtuous living. The remarks which we have made on the limits of State intervention in doing for persons what they should do for themselves, apply with equal force to the inter- ference of the State with the free activity of its citizens by way of repression, an interference based on the sup- posed interests of the whole.^ To say, as Mill does, that ^ The perusal of the fourth and fifth chapters of Mill On Liberty y of the second edition of Sir J. Stephen's Liberty^ Equality, and Fraternity, of some of Mr. Spencer's writings, and such books as Mr. Montague's, will convince any one of the impossibility of the delimitation beforehand of the spheres of the State and the person respectively. While it is possible to propound a general ethical principle for the limitation of the action of the State, it is impossible to enumerate in detail the cases in which the interference of the whole with the parts is justifiable, or the reverse. The path of history is strewn with the failures of well-intentioned laws, civil and ecclesias- tical. The conditions of life vary from age to age. The State cannot 2o6 Ethica. it is justified in interfering only for the " security of others," and that the right of " each is absolute " ex- cept when its exercise hurts others, gives no direc- tion. For there is not even an opinion, much less an act of any one citizen, which may not affect others for good or evil. In the history of political societies there is, in point of fact, a continual oscillation between the rights of persons and the supreme authority of the sovereign, and it is impossible for any man to "redd the marches by anticipation." Here again, the only conclusion is that it is the function of the wise states- man to find the limits from age to age; and he will always have enough to do. exceed its duty, so we may safely say, in so far as it removes im- pediments to free activity for its citizens, or provides (as we shall endeavour to show in the next chapter) the means of cultivating the ideal life in all its forms. But, in giving effect to positive justice in its wide sense (that is to say, otherwise than by removing impedi- ments), it may easily, under the influence of a passing wave of altruistic emotion, trespass on the rights of persons, and weaken the whole social fabric. State Action and the Ethical Ideal. 207 CHAP. XXVIII. — STATE ACTION IN RELATION TO THE ETHICAL IDEAL. We have been speaking of a political society which is an organism — in which, therefore, each part is con- scious of its material and moral relations, and conse- quent obligations, to every other part. The organism is of a peculiar kind, as I shall shortly make apparent ; but yet it is rightly enough to be called an organism. In the preceding chapter, our remarks have been limited to those relations of the State to the citizen which concern their physical and industrial relations, and those moral laws of finite reference whereby men promote justice, negative and positive. What shall be said of the relations of the State to the higher life of man ? As in the sphere of positive justice, so now, when we approach the question of human life in its higher ethical meaning, we can say nothing relevant or pertinent as regards the State which is not first, and first of all, shown to be true of the individual man. The ethics of the man are also the ethics of an organised community of men when legislat- ing in the interests of the ideal, no less than in the sphere of justice. The whole has no existence except as a whole of individual parts. The parts make it, and it gives back to the parts the culture and 2o8 Ethic a strength of the whole, in order that each part may be truly itself as a striving personality, and not a mere tooth on the wheel of a machine. The now fashionable use of the word "organism" when speaking of the State compels us to advert to cer- tain prevalent conceptions of civil society, in so far, at least, as these involve ethical questions. The mechanical theory of the State has not been misrepresented by likening such a State to a machine " minded " by the policeman, at the back of whom is the sovereign, represented in the actual practice of life by the judge with his coercive penalties. This system ultimately reduces all social ethics to the single virtue of obedience. On the other hand, the mechanical con- ception of civil society as particles held together by external force, has in modern times, curiously enough, been raised into the dynamical idea of an organism, and an organism of such a kind that its laws " can be studied apart from those of the individual atom," and that the " properties " of the organism " cannot be inferred directly from the character of the component individuals." Such a conception, it is manifest, arises from that love of abstract generals, which always seem to simplify and explain, but generally do so by the sacrifice of facts. Having once admitted this illusory organic entity into their system of thought, it is not surprising that an effort should be then made to get the whole of ethics out of the " ejects " (to use Professor Clifford's words) State Action and the Ethical Ideal. 209 of such an organism, and that too without any help from metaphysics or psychology. The "organism," it seems, finds certain kinds of acts useful to itself and suited to its environment, and so there gradually emerges a system of such useful acts and of the corresponding motive forces within men — the particles of the organism. These motive forces constitute the ethics of the individual as they do of the organism, working themselves, in the course of the ages, into the individual from the outside. [The object makes the subject.] This seems to me to be a fair enough statement of the central conception which governs the ethical think- ing of many minds, and which might be logically held either by an absolute idealist or a positivist. I would remark that the term "organism," useful as it is, is not applicable to the State at all save in a metaphorical way. An organism is a complex of atoms such that each atom has a life of its own, but a life so controlled as to be wholly sub- ject to the " idea " of the complex, which complex is the total " thing " before us. Each part contributes to the whole, and the idea of the whole subsumes the parts into itself with a view to a specific result, and can omit no part. As regards such an organism we can say that no part has any significance except in so far as it contributes to the resultant whole, which is the specific complex indivichmm. It is at once apparent that this furnishes an analogy which aids and may determine our conception of an harmonious State, 2 1 o Ethica. just as it does of an harmonious man; and it is to be admitted that it is a good working practical conception. But it is at best an analogy merely. Where is this organic entity which we call the State ? The conception of the State as an organism can exist at all only in so far as it exists in the individual consciousness of each member of the presumed organism. There is no aggre- gate consciousness of organism apart from a multitude of particular consciousnesses of it. It is strange that it is those writers who would conciliate what is called the " scientific spirit/' by flaunting a cynical superiority to metaphysic, who ask us to believe in this abstract organic entity, and so would commit both themselves and us to what is in truth a latent Pantheism — a meta- physical theory of the whole universe of things. Thus metaphysic avenges itself on those who think that there can be a true science of anything save on the basis of a true metaphysic. Unlike the atoms of a true organism, it has to be pointed out that the atoms of society are individual, free, self-conscious Egos, which seek each its own com- pletion — its own completion, I repeat, through and by means of the whole. And this whole is created by these very same free self -determining organisms, and exists only in the thought of each. These free atoms have a certain constitution and certain potencies which bring them into a specific relationship to their environment, including in that environment other free atoms. It is that independent constitution and these potencies which, seeking their own fulfilment as vital State Action and the Ethical Ideal. 211 parts of tlie organic spiritual whole which we call a man, find the whole world, including other persons, to be only an occasion and opportunity of self-fulfil- ment ; and on these it has to seize if it would be itself. Brought by the necessity of its own nature into com- munities of like Egos, each gradually finds the condi- tions whereby its life as an individual can be best fulfilled. It is the law of their inner activity as beings of reason, of desire, and of emotion, which gradually becomes the external law which we call political con- stitutions, positive statute, and social usage. Thus generalised and externalised, the "relations of per- sons" become an entity of thought, but this abstract entity exists only in so far as it exists in each person. To this generalisation of ends and relations we may fitly enough apply the word and notion "organism," for the metaphorical expression here, as in many other fields of intellectual activity, helps us to realise the whole. But we have to beware of the tyranny of phrases. Where the idea of a State-organism is realised in the fullest sense, it does not exist in the air, or any- where save in the reason of each individual, and society fails utterly in its ethical purpose except in so far as the whole finds its raison d'etre, in the fulfilling of each individual, and enabling each to be his completed self. The State is simply the individual man writ large (as has been often said) — part of the self-created machinery for his ethical completion. The Ego does not exist for what is called the "objective will," but the reverse. So far from the "atom," the self-conscious Ego, having 2 1 2 Ethica, . significance only in so far as it contributes to the organism, the so-called organism has ultimate signifi- cance only in so far as it exists for the free Ego. The "organic" conception, if accepted in an unqualified sense, would reduce all individuals to slavery, and all personal ethics to slavish obedience to existing law. In speaking of the functions of the State, accordingly, we must regard these as primarily emanating from and guaranteed by the functions of the person in search of his true and complete life, and not as somehow emerg- ing out of a conflict of atoms. To speak of the State as if it were an abstract entity is to speak of what has no existence any more than " Humanity " has. The State takes its cue from the persons constituting it. Hence, indeed, the vast importance, in the interests of genuine human progress, of a sovereignty which is formally or virtually representative. Then only can the thought in each find a channel for its activity, and so help to mould the life of the whole. Keeping these things in view, let us look at the limits of State action in the sphere of the ideal life of man — his ethical completion. The moral ideal, as he can con- ceive it, is the system of moral law for each man, and he is under inner command to fulfil that law, and to correlate all his volitions with that system. But, as we have seen, the command is not in the ideal sphere so imperative in its demands as in the case of ordinary finite obligations. The perfect and supreme obliga- tion of justice has been explained as due to the quan- State Action and the Ethical Ideal. 213 titative superiority of the sentiment in each man's own consciousness — a quantitative superiority ever growing larger; to the fact that it is a primary obligation (that is to say, an obligation which is the prior condition of living at all, for himself as well as for others) ; to its having in itself all the force, universality, and objec- tivity derivable from a community of feeling and reason; and, finally, we may add, to the sanction and guarantee of public opinion and of positive law sup- ported by penal sanctions. We cannot so speak of the imperativeness of life in harmony with the ideal. Now, if the law that commands life in the ideal is for the individual of "imperfect "obligation as compared with the imperativeness of the law of finite relations, we must conclude that the action of the State in promoting this life in its citizens is also of imperfect obligation. Further, as in the individual, we find the explanation of the moral supremacy of obligation in finite relations, e.g. temperance and negative justice, over ideal relations and activities,- so in the State we expect to find that all organisation of its resources to promote the ideal life in the general body of citizens must always be subject to the supreme claims of justice, negative and positive. Herein, then, lies one of the limits of State action (as of individual action) in the sphere of the ideal. How- ever the stage of civilisation which a nation may have reached may justify the transgression of those limits for educational or political purposes, yet from the point of view of political science as resting on ethics, the State is not permanently justified in imposing any ideal of 2 14 Ethica. religion, ethics, art or science, on its citizens in defiance of the supreme and governing idea of justice. As in the individual, so in the State it is to be granted that the highest function is the furtherance of the life of man in its ideal relations, and yet it is not the indispensable and primary function. The ideal aim constitutes the ultimate purpose for which all finite activities both in the individual and the State exist; but, that which is first in order of time and necessity is first also in order of intrinsic obligation, and the ideal is subject to that which precedes it as its con- dition. The nature of the duties of the State in its ideal relations are sufficiently indicated for our purpose in Aristotle's Politics and, indirectly, in the speech of Peri- cles to the Athenians. Within the limits implied in the writings referred to, the action of the State would seem to be safe enough. Are there, then, any limitations on the action of the State in its relation to the ideal life of man save the ethical limitation already spoken of when we were considering positive . justice — this limitation being that the action of the State shall not weaken the ethical significance and purpose of life in each person, which purpose is realisation of self hy self? I think there are none, so long as negative justice governs ; and negative justice is itself obviously implicit in the ethical limitation. The State must neither super- sede nor repress spontaneity of action on the part of any, but rather endeavour to evoke it. There is less State Action and the Ethical Ideal. 215 danger, however, of weakening individuality, and doing injustice to a portion of the community by corporate action in the sphere of the ideal — the promotion of re- ligion, art, and science — than in that of positive justice, so long as there is no penalty attached to non-conformity. There is in ideal relations a need for the help of the whole in the service of each which can only be benefi- cial, whereas, in finite and economic relations, the intru- sion of the State, though in many directions inevitable and in many others desirable, has always a tendency to relax the primary obligations of persons, the discharge of which are essential to a virile and self-dependent life. The State, then, may use the resources of a com- munity to hold up before the citizens a standard of life, but it cannot impose it under penalties without infringing justice. Men are by nature prone to rest content with the fulfil- ment of finite obligations, if ever, indeed, they reach so high. It was the perception of this fact, doubtless, that led even early civilisations to promote, and even formally to institute, or (what amounted to much the same thiug) to recognise, protect, and endow religion, art, and science. And the crass bourgeois politician was, and always has been, fairly well content to continue what owed its origin to the emotion and thought of the practical idealist, because, by occupying men's minds with life in its infinite relations, he secured a sanction for those ordinary and prosaic virtues which made men good citizens and gave security to possessions. . It has to be remembered that, generally speaking, 2 1 6 Eth tea. individuals cannot do for themselves in the sphere of the ideal what the State can do for them ; and so long as the limitations already referred to are observed, it is the State that, by a generous activity in all that con- cerns the higher life of man, first makes at all pos- sible for each the realisation of himself by himself. Even the ordinary politician of the hustings will, I suppose, say, with Plato, that a society limited to the satisfaction of physical wants does not deserve the name of a State ; and he will add that the name is only in a restricted sense applicable even where the society further afi&rms and administers justice {jicstitia civilis) with a view to the regulation of the self-assertion of each member of it. The state exists, says Aristotle, fft)^9 reXecd^ %«p*^ ^al avTdpKov<; {Politics, iii. 9). We may grant all this : but is the State so to act as to take the ideal out of the province of individual liberty, and place it under statute-law, or the still more potent obligation of superstitious custom with its ex- treme penalties? The question is already answered, but I may answer it again and say that in the ideal relations of man to a teleological conception of life, the action of the State, except for educative purposes in certain barbaric or transitional states of society, should involve no coercion. Coercion belongs to the finite relations of men, and in the State, as in the indivi- dual, the ideal (though the highest expression of man's nature) falls within the moral category of imperfect obligation. Opportunity, inducement, exhortation, would appear to sum up the action of the State, State Action and the Ethical Ideal, 2 1 7 and when it departs from this it contravenes funda- mental justice. Even in the elementary education of the people, the State, while entitled to insist on all that is demanded by negative and positive justice, should not he too obtru- sive as to methods and aims. It should be held in check by local convictions and ideals. The tendency of central authority must always be towards educa- tional mechanism and stereotyped permanence. The State is too powerful an agency to be allowed to formulate its own ideal of man, and then to be invited to usurp all the resources of society in order by a systematised education to give effect to its ideal. A secular Catholicism is as opposed to the ethical freedom, and therefore to the true ethical life, of man as a spiritual Catholicism. The Athenians knew this : the Spartans did not. I am speaking, of course, of States generally : where the sovereign is a truly representative authority the evils indicated are less likely to occur. So long, however, as the State restricts its action to the giving of opportunity, inducement, and exhortation, it is essential to the realising of the life of the citizen, as distinguished from his mere living, that the public authority should dispense opportunity with a liberal hand, and regard education, in the large interpretation of that word, of the adult as well as the child, as its chief function after it has provided for national defence and the administration of justice. Our conclusion then is, that while the State can be 2 1 8 Ethica. safely encouraged to take a generous view of its duty in all that promotes the ideal life of its citizens, it has to avoid ^00 much activity in regulating social and economic relations. It may be urged to legislation by emotion unregulated by reason, which after doing much harm will have to be abrogated. To sum up :: — Personalities can fulfil themselves only tlirough the organism of society, and society or the State can fulfil itself only through personalities, out of which it emerges and for v/hich it exists. There is a constant interchange and balancing of the two factors, and a harmony, and not either individualism or communism, nor yet an equilibrium, would be a perfect society. The person lives for the organisation of persons, and the organisation of persons lives for the person : and just as man the individual began the history of human- ity, so does man the person end it. Crude individualism, which exhibits itself as the mere instinct to get all that is possible for self, perished on the day society was first born. From that moment it had to subject itself to conditions of activity imposed by the corporate will. This crude individual- ism of primitive men, little more than animal in its character, soon began to recognise a rule of reason as the universal through which alone it could effect its ends, and progress then first became possible. The individual no longer existed, but instead thereof the rational self, which we call personality: this proceeded to reduce all within its range to itself, including the corporate State Action and the Ethical Ideal, 2 1 9 laws which are the offspring of the common reason, and are necessary to the completion of the person. It was a moral self-conscious being that was then at work creating the " objective will." Accordingly, as the spiritual life of society organises itself more and more by the hardening down of tradition and the creation of new precedents, the question which arises is not one of individualism versus State socialism or collectivism. Individualism is long since dead, and the more barbarous survivals of the dead past we com- monly imprison and hang. The question in truth has not been for ages a question of individualism at all, but a question of personality — the self-conscious reason of each (witness religious laws and persecutions) versus a large organised personality which vicariously trans- acts the work of each person, and in presence of which each person is of no account. Such a vicarious State (the State being primarily and ultimately ethical) is, I say, in contradiction with its own idea. Civilised individualism, again, and the nefarious doc- trine of absolute rights represent material interests alone (the appetitive desires more or less disguised), and, as such, in so far as they are still active under legal forms, they have to go in the name of personality and justice. Individualism is at bottom anarchy. It is in and through society that the self-conscious spirit can alone find the real elements of spiritual sustenance, and con- ceive the possibility of ideal aims. By the abnegation of itB individualistic interests and by its life in the whole, the self-conscious spirit is simply fulfilling the 2 20 Ethica. conditions of fulness of life for itself. That which on a lower plane was individualism and material existence, is, on the higher plane, transformed into personality with its rational life and ethical function as possible only through an organism. The personality thus finds its ethical enrichment only by losing itself in the whole. This is the spiritual "order." On the other hand, none the less is the terminus of the whole move- ment the fulfilment of each conscious self. The uni- versal -exists for the particular. A State collectivism accordingly, in which the unqualified conception of an " organism " logically lands us, by restraining the free activity of each self-conscious personality, strikes not only at the liberty of the citizen in the vulgar acceptance of the term '* liberty," but cuts off at the fountainhead the spring of the entire spiritual life of man. It is profoundly immoral : for, with free activity must perish all that distinguishes man from animal, and all must go in religion, philosophy, literature, and art by which human life has been exalted and dignified. If these things still held a place in the life of the race it would be as a dim tradition of happier epochs. It has not been the race as a col- lective body which has created literature, and art, and religion — no, not even political institutions and laws — but great personalities, in presence of whose genius the mass bowed the head in submission or acquiescence. An organised and consistent collectivism would, like an absolute paternal despotism, be the grave of distinctive humanity. Coercion and the Ethical Ideal. 221 In conclusion, one word may be said on the general question of coercion in a free State. The subject is a large and complicated one, and the problem presents itself in a different form at different periods of civilisa- tion. But this generally seems to flow from the pre- ceding chapters. 1. In the sphere of negative justice the State is a coercive power, or it is not a State at all. 2. But the State is ethical, and, therefore, in the sphere oi positive justice also, it may, and must, coerce minori- ties' (and majorities if it can), in the removal of impedi- ments to the self-realisation of the citizens; nay, in aiding the citizens generally in their self-realisation it must also coerce those who are not willing to aid or to acquiesce. Coercion is implicit in the notion of a State. The matters in which it may coerce are alone open to dis- cussion. 3. But when we come to the sphere of the ideal and have to deal with the ethical life of man out- side his finite relations (what he is to believe, e.g., and how he is to perfect his life), the State is not justified, if our ethical limitation be correct, in coercing either the whole or a part, in the sense of inflicting statutory penalties for non-conformity ; but it is entitled to coerce to the extent of taking the goods of a recalcitrant minority (or majority, if it can), for the purpose of pro- moting ideal aims, on the ground that all benefit ultimately. This, no doubt, is giving great power to the strong arm, but social progress is impossible on any other terms. A mechanical State having its functions limited to negative justice alone, could not impose taxation 2 2 2 Ethica. even for the British Museum, universities, public parks, etc. etc., much less for religion, ethics, or art. I freely grant that if the State is not from first to last an ethical organism my argument is worthless. Hedonism as Externalism. Again I would advert to the criterion of morals in specific relation to the immediately preceding chapters. Much evil is done by accustoming men to the theory that happiness or pleasure is the end of man's exist- ence on earth. Socialism seems to find its moral support in the assumption that happiness or wellbeing is the ultimate aim of life; for it is this which it offers to man. Whereas, as a matter of fact, happiness, in the sense either of complete satisfaction of a series of desires, or of a complete fulfilment of the law in us, or of a rounded contentment of feeling, is, by the very nature of man's constitution, for ever unattainable. The individual is not in search of the happiness, but of the law, of his organism; and all law involves the daily pain of the sacrifice of that which contradicts law — in so far as the virtuous effort is successful. And again, inas- much as law is primarily the affirmation of the obliga- tion to reduce the forces of nature within us to the service of rational ends, it can never at all times be fulfilled. Thus, whether we fulfil the law or fall short of the law, there is pain. Still worse is the case of the higher type of man who forms ideals towards which he rightly strives, but to which he can never attain. Hedonism and Politics, 223 Life is a struggle from first to last, whether it be the life of the body or the life of the spirit. So with the State as an organism : it does not exist for the purpose of realising corporate happiness, because there is no such entity as corporate happiness, but for the purpose of finding the law of its own organism as an incorporation of persons, enforcing that law in so far as enforcement may be necessary, and in many ways promoting its fulfilment inside the legitimate coercive sphere. The State, doubtless, like the individual, finds the criterion of the law in the happiness of men, but only by first ascertaining what the law is in and for man as an individual organism. The term " happiness " is thus to be translated into true, life. The State then directs its legislation and administration towards the fulfilment of that law or the removal of impediments in the way of its fulfilment, as occasion demands. The strength of the whole thus comes to the help of the weakness of each. " Wellbeing " is another of the phrases whereby attention is directed from the real question at issue, while it is, in truth, but a cover for the " happiness " or " pleasure " theory. By a strange confusion, even some who tell us that ethics has nothing to do with political science insist that the wellbeing of society (which, I suppose, means men) is the end and aim of all political institutions. Surely the motive force (the wellbeing of men) which determines politics must have something to do with politics ; and no one will question that the well- being of men is an ethical conception. It would be 2 24 Ethica. strange, indeed, if the motive and end of individual and corporate action were the ill-being of men. Now, as I have endeavoured to show, we cannot take a single step in giving effect to this ethical conception without first instituting a whole ethical and metaphysical investiga- tion. For we are here concerned with an organic rational unit, as being also the unit of a larger organism, which larger organism is confessed to be the necessary pre-condition of his living the life which the potencies in him show he is meant to live. Now, among other things, we find that he is distinctively a reason, and reason has not only its own right to live, but to live as govern- ing idea in the man. And were we so to organise society as to obstruct or weaken that spontaneity of reason which seeks idea and law for itself, we should not pro- mote the wellbeing of man, but, on the contrary, his ill-being. Free spontaneous will-reason fulfilling itself in the real, and in all the relations of the real, is the prime ethical consideration. This itself would suffice to show that the wellbeing of men cannot be the conscious aim of our conduct until we have decided wherein consists the wellbeing of man-universal — the thing man as notion and idea. It is not the pleasure or happiness of this or that, or even of all men, that must regulate my conduct towards them, but that which, according to the law of their nature, ougM to be their happiness. Neither an individual nor the State can by possibility make men happy. A gift of a thousand a year to every man and woman in Whitechapel would give much so-called ''pleasure" and "happiness," but, in popular phrase, Hedonism and Politics . 225 would it be good for them — would it promote their wellbeing ? If not, why not ? Is it not evident, then, that a scientific basis for mor- ality, not only for the individual but where it concerns public polity, must rest on the science of man — the must or ougM in him whereby alone he can fulfil himself ? We can know wherein consists the wellbeing even of a cabbage only by an analytic process which enables us to ascertain the " must " within it, which, again, is the law within it whereby it can be what it can be. Men, and tribes, and nations of men feel their way empirically, unconsciously, and bit by bit to the analysis of man and the conditions of his wellbeing. Law and religion, art and philosophy, are all engaged in offering provisional interpretations. The consensus already attained is very remarkable. The difficulty lies in the doing, and in the practical application of recognised principles to the complexities of civilised life. Another aspect of wellbeing as end, is conveyed to us in the phrase, *' The sum of pleasurable sensations." All these are, of course, in feeling, and if feeling is the ultimate criterion of acts it must be the criterion of the causes of acts, viz., motives ; and it is surely an inevi- table conclusion from this that there can be no morality, because there can be no intrinsic obligation. Nay, for the same individual his (so-called) morality may vary from day to day. Obligation can, in that case, be gene- rated only by the externally imposed law of a govern- ing class. It is the presumption that the man-organism is an organism of law, of must, of ought, of obligation, p 2 26 Ethica. like every other organism — a presumption which is the a priori birth of reason — that makes morality possible ; for morality is law and obligation, or it is nothing save a name for the way in which this or that man, or tribe of men, may choose to behave. Opposed to this titillation theory is the bare fact that reason must seek idea and an ideal — it cannot help itself As little can it help affirm- ing the idea as law of itself in its intercourse with the real, and living for that, all consequences notwithstand- ing. That it reaches this result through feeling, the feeling of happiness in the sense of true life, and that the consequences of its life in idea and law are " pleasant," though pain and effort are ever there, does not make either pleasure or happiness the end ; it is a means of ascertaining the end, and it follows the fulfilment of end. But if it were itself an end (that it contemplates pleasure in the pleasure of others does not affect the ques- tion), it would be the stultification or suicide of reason. Were man an isolated being there would be no ques- tion of this. It is because he is essentially a social being that the other-regarding motives (which are yet as essential to his organism as the desire to eat and drink is), by the largeness and complexity of their possible relations to others, obscure the ultimate questions, which are: How shall the self-conscious being, man, realise himself ? In other words — What is the law in and for man ? And further, How does man ascertain that law — the law of his fulfilled life in and through the real of experience ? It follows, from the whole argument of this book, Ethics and Jurisprudence, 227 that the ideal and criterion for society as a quasi- organism is the same as the ideal and criterion for each man, and that society can never be either better or happier than the individuals that compose it. And if this be so, the socialistic conception of rounded happiness in some possible future is as illusory as the myth of a golden age in some dim antiquity. Note. Ethics, Jurisp7mdence, and Politics. A recent writer of eminence tells us that Aristotle separates Ethics from Politics. But if Aristotle says, as he does, that the State comes into existence for the sake of mere living, and goes on for the sake of well- living (Fol. I. 2), in what sense can it be maintained that he separates ethics from politics ? After mere living is secured by laws which declare elementary justice (themselves, as we have shown, ethical in source and aim), let any law subsequently enacted be pointed out which is not ethical in its source and aim, if it be a law for the good of the whole, and not of a section, of the commonwealth. Let it further be shown that it is possible to criticise that law with a view to its amendment, save on ethical grounds, implicit or explicit. Ethics on the practical side simply means the conduct of human life, and political arrangements exist for the sake of the conduct of life in association. Is an international convention to put down the slave-trade not a political act ? And is it not a direct outcome of ethical emotion — a mere declaration by sovereign power of a humane conviction ? 2 28 Ethica. The ethical basis of all politics seems to me so clear that I imagine I must misunderstand those who main- tain the possibility of the separation of the two. Aristotle, it is true, writes a separate book on politics ; but he must be a blind man who does not read ethics between the lines of that book. The whole object of politics, at least the supreme object, he tells us, "is to make the citizens of a certain character, that is, good and apt to do what is noble." And he cannot speak even of finance and exchange without involving himself in ethical questions. It is precisely because he takes this ethical view that he says that the politician must study the nature of the soul of man. And, as to modern life, do we not see every year ethical considera- tions modifying politics and inventing new interpreta- tions of justice ? It was always so. The same re- mark applies, of course, to law, which is part of politics. There is positive law, and there is also posi- tive jurisprudence, that is to say, the treatment of jurisprudence, " as dealing rather with the various relations which are regulated by legal rules than with the rules themselves which regulate these relations." (Sir T. E. Holland, p. 7.) But such a jurisprudence is not science, but merely a co-ordination of materials for the science of jurisprudence as part of the science of man, and as emanating from the necessary characteristics of his inner organism of thought and feeling which externalises itself in law as it does in political societies, the precise form which these take being determined by time, place, and environment. Every one will recognise the distinction between the State as sovereign and source of positive law on the one hand, and public polity on the other hand, as explained, justified, and guaranteed by the nature Ethics and Jurisprudence. 229 of man and his relations to other men (ethics). But it ought to be clear enough that an investigation into the former can escape ethics (and metaphysic too for that matter) only by limiting itself to an analysis and co-ordination of the existing positive law and machinery of legislation and government, and an exhibition of its historical origin and growth — a most important and necessary task. But this is not, I repeat, to be called theory or science without the misuse of words, even though the subject is handled in a scientific spirit. It is possible that even comparative politics might be dealt with in this way, and human nature successfully excluded; but this, again, would not be theory or science, but only the materials for science which ever seeks ultimate causes and ends, with a view to reasoned knowledge and progress. 230 Ethica, CHAP. XXIX. — EMOTIONS OF KEASON. It is scarcely necessary to dwell further on the fact that the true state of the case is this : Man, as the creator of his own moral organism — creator because he is in his essence a free will whose necessary movement is a dialectic — is ever seeking the idea and law of that organism in its relation to itself, to its environment, and to other like organisms or persons — and finally to the universal. Granting that it is through feeling as the " form " of life that he ascertains law, and, granting further (as I shall subsequently show), that a volitionary act is determined proximately by feeling — is, in truth, the discharge of feeling, it has at the same time to be noted that the range and function of feeling are much wider than is commonly supposed. For, there emerge in man certain feelings or emotions which are the offspring of pure reason, and of reason in its deal- ings with the content of human life : these are present and potent in the determination of volition. Ascertained law, as has been frequently pointed out, whether it fall under the generic heads of justice or of temperance, is, as such, non-pathological ; except as generated by reason on feelings, these ideas or laws have no existence. Yet feelings, in the sense of pathological states, are concealed in the law, inasmuch as they are Emotions of Reason, 231 taken up by reason in law. This will form subject of remark again, and we may pass on meanwhile to certain feelings which seem to be very much ignored in psychological ethical analysis. In affirming law and its correlative duty, man experi- ences a new kind of emotion, which belongs neither to the appetitive class nor the altruistic class, but has a character and significance of its own. Man cannot help doing so ; it is his function to transmute feeling into reason, and then to find that he is again thereby brought into the region of feeling, but on a new and higher plane. How this is accomplished no one can tell, but the fact is patent enough. These new emo- tions — offsprings of reason, — like all other feelings which attain a certain amount of intensity, seek actual- isation, and discharge themselves in volitions. I should wish to give them a distinguishing predicate, and call them feelings of joy, as I would call altruistic emotions feelings of happiness, and appetitive desires, in the crisis of satisfaction, feelings of pleasure. A state of being in which these reason-emotions are dominant, is an ethical state of being : activity deter- mined by them is ethical conduct. They sustain man in that distinctive sphere of reason to which he alone of all animals belongs. (1) There is the emotion of joy in the exercise of the will in knowing. There is a satisfaction in the mere exercise as such, but the true stimulus and sustainer of the activity lies in the end, — knowledge or truth. There is a joy in this pursuit and perception of 2^2 Ethica, truth for its own sake and as an end. There is indeed probably no joy so intense and so pure, as there is cer- tainly none which, in respect of effort, involves so much pain. Now what is this emotion fundamentally ? It is the joy of reason finding itself in identity with itself through and in the real. (2) There is the emotion of personality. The first- fruit (logically and implicitly) of the will-movement in knowing is the subsumption of the attuent subject where- by personality is constituted. This is the logical 'prius of all future subsumptions of the real, whether of outer sense or inner sense. It is this personality or Ego which, since it contains will as its primal and supreme factor, must be supreme in and through all volitions, if the volitions are to be formally good and virtuous, and have the further guarantee of law and freedom. But over and above this, there is the emotion of the worth of personality as such. What is this emotion funda- mentally ? I do not pretend to say, but certainly it is a rational emotion. (3) There is the emotion of joy in law and duty to law simply and purely as such. The mere perception of law is necessarily accompanied by a sense, feeling, or emotion of obligation or duty to law — of the moral neces- sity which is in it as law, and without which it would not be law. But, over and above this, after a man has once experienced volition in accordance with law, there arises a sentiment or emotion of joy in the law. The law, which resides in idea or end, necessarily precedes, as an authoritative and imperative utterance, any possible Emotions ' of Reason, 233 joy in the law, and for the sake of the " ought " in it we obey. But after we have once obeyed, there arises an emotion of joy in obedience and duty which thereafter becomes (with its opposite) one of the inner sanctions of law ; and not only so, one of the emotions which determine volition. What is this joy fundamentally ? It is, again, the joy of reason in identity with itself in and through the real. (4) There is the emotion of harmony. Eeason, in presence of a complex object which it desires to know, projects the idea of harmony (implicit in the a 'priori formal notion of end, law, and idea as object of search), and finds it realised in the feding of harmony or the good. But it is reason that alone perceives, as well as projects, harmony of parts in so far as it is harmony^ that is to say, in so far as it is the idea of harmony, and not mere pathological state, though (as we have seen) it necessarily ascertains harmony through pathological states. Like all moral ideas, harmony is a birth of reason, and reason has a specific joy in itself and its own legitimate progeny. This, again, is a joy of reason in reason as illuminating the real. (5) There is the emotion of the beautiful. This seems to be a complex of the sense-perception of pleasing forms and colours (the pleasingness being wholly depen- dent probably on mathematical conditions) and of the rational perception of ends as fulfilled in the complex real outside us and constituting it a living thing — the formal fulfilled in the real as an ideal. In other words, it is a sense of the palpitating and breathing being and life of 2 34 Ethica. the universal, as distinct from the merely formal dialectic ground of all existence. It is a sense of the real as the sensuous living of God. This emotion is interwoven with the moral and spiritual life in their deepest and most complex relations. The sense of the real as the living of the formal and universal seems to be the ultimate basis of the feeling of the sublime which we have in presence of the thunder-cloud rolling among a waste of deso- late mountain-peaks, and of the more subtle and placid feeling with which we contemplate the com- ing and departing day, or the face of a tranquil ocean. This joy is fundamentally the joy of rea- son in the marriage of reason with the sensuous — the emotion generated by the presence of the con- crete ideal. (6) The profoundest and most potent emotion of all is the emotion of God. "It feeds the mind wholly with joy," says Spinoza. God is, as I have shown in my previous treatise, no mere "postulate of the practical reason." The dialectic of finite reason, when infinitely apprehended, is, God as reason or thought. He is interwoven with finite thought as thought. The immanent and universal reason is thus beheld face to face as in all and through all. This perception of God as in all, as that on which nature and the reason of man, subject and object, alike repose, gives rise to the most potent of all emotions, and in presence of the divine vision human personality itself totters, as the vagaries of mysticism amply show. (7) There is an emotion in contemplating the moral Emotions of Reason, 235 ideal, which is the satisfaction of reason in its perfected product. From first to last these emotions are the joy of reason in itself as the ultimate reality of the real of experience. These emotions of reason stimulate to the elevation of human life and the perfecting of character. They present to man the higher, but not the obligatory in its strict and primary sense. Devotion to the most excellent life by the gifted few raises the standard of the possible for all mankind. Such devotion achieves also an ethical result for the individual; for the pursuit of the higher objects of human contemplation, by rais- ing a man into the sphere of pure reason, strengthens him. But moral investigation, strictly speaking, has to do with the ascertainment of that which is im- perative law for all, not of that which is possibility for some. Even the emotion of God, as immanent in all law and idea, is not necessary to the moral life, though it illumines and re-inforces the moral, and is the essence of the spiritual, life. From Plato downwards it has been usual to say that if the qualitative in feeling is to determine the authori- tative or obligatory in volition, he alone is competent to give an opinion who has experienced feeling in all its range. But, at best, this would rest authority on subjective states. Authority rests not merely on their higher quality in feeling, but on their quantity, and, above all, on the objective fact that they arise out of the specific activity of reason as reason. These emotions, inasmuch as they flow from that which 236 Ethica, is the idea of the organism man, have an autho- rity purely objective and wholly independent of any individual man's subjective feelings. It is in so far as a man is an attuent subject only, that ethics takes account of empirical feelings of quantity, quality, and relation. Of all the virtues indeed we may say that not only are they constituted by reason in search of idea, and that as idea, end, and truth, they contain law implicit, but that they yield a distinctive joy which is the joy of reason in reason and of self in law. When, then, ethicists talk of volitions being at the mercy of feelings let them not forget the feelings generated by reason. I am well aware that an acute critic might here urge that, after all, the end of man is always happiness — if not pathological, then rational. And if the said critic granted that every "thing" is governed by its idea, that the idea of man is reason, and that con- sequently the joy of reason in reason as it touches the real is always objectively supreme, I should say that he was not very far from the kingdom of God. But I am prevented conceding even this much by the actual facts of the case. To begin with : It is law man seeks under the stimulus of the a priori form of reason, and he does not know beforehand what this law will yield to him in the way of happiness. And it is the psychological fact that, even when he has experienced the reason- joy which follows on volitions that actualise law, he does not, when deliberating as to this or that volition, put reason-happiness over against selfish pleasure, but Emotions of Reason, 237 simply law over against particular desires single or aggregate. That associations of the peculiar happiness — more accurately of the full life^ which is the charac- teristic note of law obeyed, gather round law is un- questionable, and these are potent in determining my volition; but apart from them, and in the heart of the whole process, there is law for law's sake, reason seeking identity with itself in the real, independently of all consequences. When I first seek for law there can he no content save the form of law itself ; when I habitually act in accordance with law found and pro- mulgated, I act as servant of a higher, which is pure law. (Of this again.) 238 Ethica. CHAP. XXX. — EETKOSPECT AND SUMMARY. Self-realisation is the ultimate end of man as it is of all other organisms — Te\o<^ reXeiov. In the case of man it is realisation of self ly self. The realisation of any complex thing whatsoever — the process or law whereby it becomes what it is — is governed by the " idea " of the thing. Looking at man as we should look at any other object we would interpret, we find that the idea of man is will and its dialectic moments, together constituting reason, and that through the movement of will the individual or attuent subject transforms itself into Ego or personality. Hence, in the relations of man both to the real of outer sense that he may know, and to the real of inner sensibility that he may know and do, the supreme con- dition of all possible realisation is the presence and supremacy of will-reason in cognising the truth in the real of sensibility, and, further, the presence of the same will as root of reason and constitutor of personality. The supreme ethical end on the formal side is the sovereignty of will-reason in the heart of all volitions. As regards the real of sensibility ; will, under the stimulus of the a priori form of end, one of the essential Summary and Retrospect, 239 moments of reason, seeks the law of the real elements, just as it seeks law in the study of any other object. It seeks always the truth of a thing, and the truth of a thing is that idea of the thing in which is its law. The perception of the law in a thing of outer sense, which is always a complex, is the perception of har- monious adjustment and inter-reciprocity of its parts statical and dynamical, under the government of the differentiating idea in it. But here enters a peculiarity. The Ego is not merely searcher for idea and law, which are already there present to it when it investigates a thing of sense with a view to know it, but it has to find the idea and law in and through the constituting of the harmonious adjustment of elements in itself and by itself. It is the self -determining centre of its own complex system in which it does not find the law but makes the law. The elements which self as will-reason has to adjust into a harmony or system of law are feelings. Hence the only guarantee of its having found the law is a feeling of inner harmony within its complex self and with its outer relations. In constituting the law of feeling and volition for itself, the Ego has to feel its way. How else can it take note of the real which, here, is feeling ? Morality has to do with motive-forces within, not with resultant effects in the external ; but the motive cannot fully know itself as cause until the effects are seen, and the adaptation to external relations is found to vindicate and illustrate the law. 240 Ethica. Just as law is instructed by outer sense in the various ways which are summed up in the a posteriori categories, so it is instructed by quantity, quality and relation in the matter of inner sense. Accordingly will-reason has to work its way quite em- pirically through quantity, quality, and relation in feel- ings and consequent volitions in order to ascertain the law of these; and the guarantee that it has found the law can only be feeling, that is to say, the feeling of har- monious adjustment and reciprocity. What is called "collective experience" is only individual experience multiplied : the experience of other men, when known to me, is simply part of my experience. This feeling of harmony may be called a feeling of happiness or felicity, but it is more properly a feeling of life — the fulfilment of function. The notion of law is a priori : it is yielded by the a priori categories, for the form of end contains in it the causal category (which consists of three moments in a unity), and thus the end or idea of a thing is seen to contain the law of that thing. Just as in the sphere of outer cognition the form of law receives its filling from the real of sense, so, in the sphere of inner sensibility, it receives its filling from the real of feeling — the feeling of harmony which is the idea — the "good" as distin- guished from the law in it, life as distinguished from form. But the " law " and the " good " of anything are simply names for the formal and real sides of the same fact. Law and its correlative duty are a priori and formal ; Summary and Retrospect, 241 in this is to be found the source of the categorical imperative. Eeason by the necessity of its nature seeks Law ; for it is of its essence to grip all things as within the three moments of the causal notion, and the " good," which, as ascertained end, is the fulfilment of the real in us, instructs law and, in so doing, at once passes into the category of law. Feeling can never hy itself yield law, any more than external impressions can by themselves yield the law of nature. Law is begotten by reason on and in feeling, and as such is non-pathological. It legislates for feel- ing, and is rational. An inquiry, therefore, into the feeling-content is an inquiry into the conditions of harmony among inner feel- ings and desires. This harmony has a two-fold character : the rational idea or law which is formal, and the real side, which is the resultant feeling of non-contradiction and peace — of formal reason fulfilled in the real. In this sense the rational is the real and the real is the rational. The feelings native to the natural man are the appe- titive desires (either in their simple or their complex and secondary forms), and the altruistic emotions. These in themselves are mere elemental forces, and, as such, anarchical. The law is to be found in the " idea of or in their relations," which is also the end of their complex existence — the moral order so far as they are concerned. In the case of the appetitive or selfish desires, e.g.y the idea and law is self-control or temperance, and, in the case of the altruistic emotions, it is justice. The altruistic emotions are on a higher plane of Q 242 Etkica. quality than the selfish desires, but this does not give them authority though it helps to sustain it. They pro- claim their authority in their greater quantity of ex- tension — a quantity necessarily ever growing with the extending relations of men — and in their primariness as conditions of life. This may be put thus : The altru- istic emotions and justice which they generate are, at bottom, the sense of community of being and feeling among creatures of a like kind; consequently, they are the feeling, and, finally, the idea, of humanity, which is not only larger and more potent than any one man, but is an objective universal, and, as such, must govern. Where the idea of justice as based on this universal does not govern in the kingdom of motive, there can be no inner harmony, — there must be, on the contrary, inner contradiction, and an obstruction of life. Will-reason, with its a priori form of law, having ascertained the law, the sense of duty is simply the feeling of what is due to imperative law as revealed in consciousness. Eeason, acting on and through the real of sensibility, has subsumed the real into itself, and imposed the law on it. Moral law is thus a resultant of two elements — the formal and the real ; but, in so far as it is law, it is not this or that feeling or aggregate of feelings, but wholly non-pathological. Further, the operation of reason on the real of sensi- bility, itself generates new feelings — the feeling of joy in law which is simply joy in reason, the aesthetic feel- ings, the concept and feeling of ideals, and the feeling of joy in reason as simply and purely knowing, and in Summary and Retrospect. 243 the identity of reason with itself which is the fulfilled life of reason. These reason-emotions are supreme over all others in respect of quality: also objectively supreme and governing, because the highest in man is the idea in the notion of him, and that idea is will-reason. They point to the ideal state of man and indicate the high- water mark of his life. These feelings or emotions of reason support all action of reason and communicate their feeling-force to volitions. Will is not to be confounded with willinhg or volition. The proximate cause of volition is feeling ; ^ but this cause is always complex. Moral volition is preceded by the pure affirmation of law which, as such, stops at this point and does not volitionise ; the volition is proxi- mately determined by natural feelings which have been subsumed under law, and which as the real have been taken up into it, and, further, by the reason-feelings which are generated by the law itself. Wherever reason is, I am; and joy in reason is joy in idea, joy in law, and finally, joy in volition as the externalising of reason. The real, when impregnated by reason and consti- tuted idea and the good and thus enthroned as law, is enthroned by reason, whose offspring it is. An ethical state of being is the subsumption by will- reason (as right motive of volition or willing), of the idea in the relation of natural feelings which it has ascertained and constituted law for itself. It is thus the identity of a product of reason with reason. ^ I anticipate here : see chapter on Free-will. 244 Ethica. An ethical ad is a volition at the bidding of reason-affirmed law, though it is proximately deter- mined by feeling.^ It is thus the identity of the whole man with reason, and the actualisation of that reason. This constitutes ethical completeness : in it will- reason and volition are one, but the former as sovereign and legislator. In all this there is a presupposition — the presupposi- tion that the end is life. Harmony of parts and pro- cesses in subordination to the " idea " of any organism is its health, its life. So in man. His task is to " per- severe in his own being," as it is the task of any other organism. We have said that the " idea " is not only sought and ascertained by reason in its pure activity, but that it is a product of reason, and has no pathological element in it. At the same time, reason has been patho- logically instructed as to end and law by the feeling of harmony; but even this feeling is not exclusively pathological, but feeling reason-informed. Eeason and Feeling have passed into each other. Be my volition an effecting of a particular feeling or of a complex of feeling, it is always determined by feeling as restricted and laio -directed, if it be moral. Immorality is the letting loose of feeling in opposition to the idea and the law in it; it is individuality in opposition to personality. The complex daily volitions which do not take account of law at all, because there is no possible conflict, are indifferent as regards morality ^ I anticipate here : see chapter on Free-will. Summary and Retrospect, 245 ^not immoral, but simply non-moral or outside the moral sphere. Doubtless it may be said that, after all, the end of all action is a state of myself. Certainly ; what else could it be a state of ? But it is a state which has abolished crude individualism, and has taken into my finite personality the universal and its objective law. Moral law is thus a concrete of two elements — the idea of harmony, formal and a priori, and the feeling of harmony: it is an identity of Eeason with itself in the Eeal; and we cannot separate them without making the one empty and the other chaotic. As to the absolute imperativeness of law I would refer back to the analysis in the chapter on " Must " and "Ought." Kant can get nothing more absolute than is there propounded, because he makes man an end to himself. Happiness is not the end of action but only its ter- minal. Even in the search for law, happiness or life is only the index-finger on the dial-plate — a means to the ascertaining of the end, which end is the idea or truth of the real and, as such, law. Virtue in a man is the true life of the man because it is the affirmation of his personality : it involves pain because it is the negation of his crude individuality. Finally, the State exists as the creation of personali- ties that it may secure for each free personality the liberty which is the law of its being, and give the strength of the whole to the parts, of the universal to the particular. Its function is ethical. 246 Ethica. Briefly, in the individual, as in history, the whole ethi- cal movement is a movement of the a pi-iori categories in search of law, just as we find a similar movement in the knowing of physical nature — in the latter, of the law that there exists, in the former of the law that must be (ought to be), if man is to be truly man. Law is pro- jected as that which reason always seeks — law in end or idea. Kot, of course, that there is, prior to philo- sophical reflection, a self-conscious projection or antici- pation before we find the law, but that the form of end in will-reason works in reason, through reason, and by reason — first unconsciously and then reflectively — up to law. As to the political conclusions of the argument : I have said that I do not pretend to deal with the large questions of political science, but merely to look at the foundation and purpose of communities in their inner ethical relations. What I have said may be summed up as follows : — The State — that is to say, a community of persons under a sovereign — is man, writ large. Man, as an organism, is an organism by virtue of the idea in the notion of him which governs and determines the rest of the organism, all the parts being subordinated to this idea, and living in and for that in an inter-related and correlated whole. Further, this idea is reason, as giving law of conduct and otherwise seeking its own complete fulfilment and identity with itself in the real of life. Man is thus distinctively Summary and Retrospect. 247 an ethical being. The State, in like manner, in so far as it is an organism, is in all its parts living, in so far as it can be said to live at all, for reason and reason- law, and is an ethical organism. In reason and reason- law the might of "the sovereign" ultimately resides. Might rests on Eight. A State may, however, be an organism without recog- nising this its ultimate significance, provided it has an idea governing and controlling the parts. Sparta, e.g., had the idea of military discipline which welded all separate activities of the State into a harmonious whole. But the parts of the State are self-conscious Egos, and cannot be utilised for a general aim or idea as if they were things.^ And the State is an organism, not as an abstract entity dominating the self-conscious indivi- duals which compose it, but in and through the con- sciousness of these self-conscious individuals ; and it is an organism in so far only as these free Egos entertain the consciousness of the organism and of themselves as contributing to the whole. It is an incorporation in a visible form of the common reason. The State accordingly is an organism of a peculiar kind, inasmuch as it depends on this conscious contri- bution of persons. Laws and social usages are thus the summed will of self-conscious persons, and emerge as definite enacted forms of life for the sake of these self-conscious persons. There is, just in consequence of this peculiarity of the parts as self-conscious, no organism in the strict sense ^ So in labour associations, e.g. factories, etc. 248 Ethica, in which we use that word, as when applied to non-self- conscious creatures. Everything in the whole exists for the parts. The universal is for the particular, and the particular, again, lives in and through the universal. All emanates from persons, becomes through sym- pathy a common possession, and returns to persons to help each in his independent self-realisation. There is nothing which a person may rightly do which the State as a collective unity may not rightly do, subject only to the restriction that, having to coerce individuals, it has the general consent. The collective unity, as represented by the sovereign, deals with the relations of all persons with a view to the realising of the collective self-consciousness. For, in all that the State does or can do, it simply exter- nalises, and, by enactment or otherwise, gives visible shape to an inner of moral relations as these exist in persons. That inner of moral relations in the person is an inner of relations of desire and emotion to which reason gives law: and the external relations, if harmonious, are a mere copy of an inner harmonious state of related feel- ings and laws ; if discordant, a mere copy of an inner discord. That is to say, my relations to this or that man are merely an entering of the relations subsisting between motives of action within my own conscious self. The State carries these relations into the sphere of objective law according to the fitness of time, place, and circumstances. The acts of persons to persons, of the person to the State, and of the State as a whole, Summary and Retrospect. 249 are thus visible effects of an invisible cause, viz., the relations subsisting between the various elements of the complex whole of possible motive in the consciousness of the citizens. I am not drawing a parallel, or constructing .an analogy, of the person and the State. The statutory -act of " the sovereign " is an utterance of the mind of a man focusing the minds of men — their thoughts re- garding the relations of persons, which again is their thoughts regarding the harmony of their complex inner selves. In finding that harmony, they find that, in the person and in the State alike, the primary and therefore supreme governing forces in the perfecting of the ethical function of each is justice and freedom — which two notions are in truth mutually implicit. These inner relations cannot be said to lim until they have effected themselves and become visible and exter- nal as acts. We cannot finally estimate the law of feeling within us in its relations to the particular and give to the inner its fitting name, as good or bad, until we have seen it actualise itself. Hence it is that men naturally fasten on the sensible and external effects and think to find in these the explanation of ethics, whereas they only, as a matter of fact, afford an illustration of the silent inner process working itself out in each person in the effort after his own self-realisation. So with the State and its enactments and administration. The end of the State-organism is not happiness but law, and therefore an ethical end, just as in the case of the person. Through the law and ethical realisation 2 50 Ethica, the State as a State is virtuous, just as a man is in the same circumstances, but it is not thereof ore happy. It is, however, happier than it can be under any other conditions. Like the person, again, the State as virtuous is always in pain : the crude individualism, the assertion of which in the consciousness of each person perpetuates the inward struggle with animal individuality, exists also in the State in the multitude of persons who are yet wholly, or partially, crude anarchic individuals and not self-conscious servants of the ethical idea. These have to be governed. This individualism takes two forms in the State just as it does in persons — the brute individualism of anarchic passion and the living and law-abiding in- dividualism of organised material selfishness which parades as civic respectability. Both alike as indivi- dualists have to be . controlled by the whole, and, if necessary, coerced. As to limitations : It is because the State is an ethical organism (i.e. has an ethical idea to which all the parts are subordinate and have to be correlated) that it can have no limits prescribed for its activity except an ethical limit. It is because the State is an ethical organism that positive justice and the ideals of personal and social life fall within its province as well as self-preserva- tion and negative justice : all are in the ethical sense Summary and Retrospect. 251 obligatory ; but in the juridical sense some are of im- perfect obligation. It is because the State is an ethical organism, just as a person is an ethical organism, that it encounters a conflict of duties, and that the element of degree in relative obligations enters into polity, and that primary (perfect) obligations must always govern secondary (im- perfect) obligations. In these primary and vital obliga- tions which make life possible at all, the State is not only entitled but bound to coerce, just as the person is primarily under obligation to similar governing condi- tions (justice, negative and positive) of a harmonious life. The right to coerce arises out of the right of the State to live as a State. Without this, a State would be in contradiction with itself. But, on the other hand, the State as an objective whole or organism exists for self-conscious parts, and must, therefore, avoid interference with the liberty of these parts, if it is to effect its ethical function, which is to leave free the ethical realisation of each member of the State, for which freedom, indeed, under the name of justice, the State primarily exists. Accordingly, it can- not rightfully use the might of the whole to coerce the parts so as to encroach on this ethical freedom, save only with a general consensus of effective citizens, and on the plea that it increases true freedom. [Even the rights of property it cannot restrict save where these restrict the rational freedom of other citizens unduly.] Within these limits the State is entitled to coerce, because as an ethical organism it is progressive, and 252 Etkica. new ideals cannot be realised without the restriction of the wills of some for the present or ultimate good of free men as a whole. Who shall fix the boundaries of these mutually- exclusive conceptions ? It is manifest that the State, like the person, suffers from opposing obligations, and is in its action to a large extent conditioned by time and circumstance with one supreme governing restric- tion of all its activity — ^justice, negative and positive. For with the ethical State, as with the ethical person in his relations to other persons, the limitation arises out of the duty imposed on every man to realise self hy self, and therefore freely. The balancing of conflicting duties does not find its point of stability in a mechanical equilibrium — a barren conception : the conciliation of opposites is, in the person and in the State alike, a dynamic harmony, which is an ethical conception. It is the business of the statesman, while striving for this, to ascertain what may be wisely done at any one moment or epoch. The philosopher can only ascertain the principles on which a community rests and the purpose of its existing at all, and so prescribe the attitude of mind in which the statesman should regard problems as they arise. On the political sagacity of governing men we depend from generation to generation for ascertaining what may, or may not, be done. To "redd the marches " between personal rights and the collective will, by anticipation, is impossible. The free citizen may some- times even have to be coerced into true freedom. Virtue: or Mediation through Pain. 253 CHAP. XXXI. — VIRTUE : OR MEDIATION THROUGH PAIN. Tugend die rmralische Gesinnung im Kampf. — Kant, K. d. p. Y., Chapter III. Virtue is a general name for the fulfilled function of man as man ; the " virtues " are the partial functions which enter into the complex whole of his activity, and are subordinated to a supreme end. A man who is happy, is not, therefore, virtuous any more than a well-fed pig ; if he is virtuous he is not happy, but he is as happy as he can be. Our business as students of the science of man is to find the laiv of life to which each man must subject himself as con- dition of his true self-realisation. It is a universal that we seek and find ; and while virtue is a good name for the only happiness possible for man, as so explained, it is not to be had for nothing. In the very heart of pain, it is true, we find a supreme rational joy, but this joy is itself conditioned by pain. This because of man's dual nature — the will-personality and the subject-individual. Prometheus, on the Caucasian rock, was happier than he could possibly have been had he submitted to the tyrant Zeus. Virtue is, above all, virility. It is the maintenance of the supremacy and dominancy of will and person- ality — the idea of man — in all the thoughts and voli- 2 54 Ethica, tions of man. True manhood in man is formal virtue ; and conversely. But Will in conflict with the real is, from first to last, an exertion : it is an emergence out of subject, or attuent, consciousness for the pur- pose, on the one hand, of knowing and co-ordinating the outer real which we call impressions, and, on the other hand, of knowing and co-ordinating the inner real which we call feelings and so discharging the responsi- bility imposed on us as moulders into a harmonious unity of our own mental organism. This function of control it is constantly engaged in, for its essence is pure activity : it arrests on all sides the play of the outer and inner natural forces, which we call the phenomenal world. By these natural forces it is constantly in danger of being overwhelmed. It has, therefore, to strive ; and this striving is of the essence of virtue which is, thus far, purely formal. The man who stands majestic and serene amidst the storms of impressions and impulse, in the name of law, is the virtuous man (formally). Thus it is that virtue is the mother of all the virtues. Hence, too, the significance of the Stoic saying, that he who possesses one virtue possesses all. We have honestly to accept the fact that the world is based on the principle of contradiction. Pain, evil — both alike seemingly unmerited and purposeless, — are unquestionably there before us in countless forms. It is as disingenuous to question this as it is absurd to quarrel with it. Life is permeated with misery; and the condition of human life, both intellectual and moral, is that it shall be a struggle — sometimes a hopeless one. Virtue : or Mediation through Pain, 255 Human life is always pathetic : as the battle goes on we may score a few successes — never a victory. What is true of the individual person is true also of the State. The virtuous man, in endeavouring to subsume into his will, as ground of all volition, the good as ulti- mately determined by the idea and law of harmony, has, unlike a tree or a dog, responsibility for the regula- tion of the elements which compose him. He thus finds himself, in constituting a harmonious organism of law in himself, under oUigation to repress natural desires and emotions, first one and then another. Eor the law, as we have shown, is not merely positive, but also negative and restrictive. The formal mediation, accordingly, is always impossible save through the real mediation of pain or sacrifice. A day without effort and pain is a lost day, for it is a day without virtue. Let it not be supposed, however, that the virtuous man endures certain pains for the sake of some surpassing felicity. George Herbert says : — If thou do ill, the joy fades, not the pains : If well, the pain doth fade, the joy remains. And this is true; but we do not, in a particular concrete case, sacrifice our own interests and those of all who are dear to us, because we find, let us say, the just or truthful volition yield a higher or more permanent felicity to ourselves. This ground of action furnishes no explanation of morality ; we do so because of the law that is in the idea — in the just and the truthful. 256 Ethica. The idea of the just, as necessary condition of all social relations, is ascertained doubtless by the speculative action of reason on felicities as indicating life-function ; but it is for the sake of the law in the idea that we act. And that law, though duty to it is always itself a joy of reason, precedes the possibility of feeling pleasure in the law, and exists (so to speak) in the predictive or a 'priori imagination. Some writers seem to be scared by the phrase " plea- sure in duty," as if the whole fabric of morality would fall to the ground if such a thing were possible. As a matter of psychological fact, it is beyond the power of thought to dissociate satisfaction with the perception and effecting of law. But it is not the satisfaction which is the end of obedience to law : it is only the terminal. From the first the reason of man is in search of law, and, when found, he at the same moment, finds satisfac- tion in it. It would be a strange universe in which the observance of law did not yield a specific joy of its own, and it would be a remarkable mind which, once having tasted that joy, could dissociate it ever after from law. But the motive, in so far as pleasure enters into it, is not the desire for pleasure in pleasure, but for pleasure in law. Law is ascertained through happiness and harmony in feeling, and thereafter happiness and harmony in feeling is possible only through law. Law formal is a priori and in reason, and as such is pure ; and the prior condition of our attaining to the supreme joy of reason in reason is that we recognise and fulfil law as such. My individual or subjective pleasure is Virtue : or Mediation through Pain, 257 possible only through the abnegation of that pleasure. Through the objective and universal alone can I, a per- son, fulfil myself ; but that fulfilment is at one and the same moment joy of reason in reason and law. So when I seek, at the instigation of the dialectic in me to know an external object, I am seeking the law (not of it, but) in it as a real — the process whereby it fulfils itself as a harmonious thing, attaining ifs end or good. The per- ception of the law in the thing is accompanied by a flash of joy in the perception of law purely as such ; but I was not in search of this joy — a merely resultant predicate of a mental achievement — but in search of law alone, which, as law, is, relatively to all such things, objective and universal. Through the influence of heredity, education, and the daily exercise of the virtues, the practice of virtue in- volves, as time goes on, less and less of pain. Moral volition becomes easier, in some directions even auto- matic ; and automatic moral action may be described as due to crystallised motives, as these enter into and constitute what we call character. The question of * merit' is a purely subjective one. What is an ordi- nary discharge of duty in me, may be heroic in another, so great are the differences of natural constitution, in- herited aptitudes, and education. There is no deed, we may almost say, which a man is capable of doing, that it is not his ditty to do when the current of cir- cumstance brings the call to his door. When there is a perfect interpenetration of the formal and the real, pain doubtless will disappear. On this R 258 Ethica. elevated plane of life the good is so good, the beautiful so beautiful, that will-reason lives in them, is identified with them, and victory is assured before the strife is begun. The virtuous state thus passes into a state which has been called blessedness or holiness. But this is a purely ideal conception. No such state is possible for man. A man may perform a virtuous act and die of the misery of it. As Fichte pointed out, the struggle to reconcile will with the conditions under which human existence is carried on is itself necessary to the existence of virtue. The Moral Sense. 259 CHAPTER XXXII. — THE MORAL SENSE. The expression " moral faculty " is an unfortunate one, and we may dismiss it. It is the personal property of the Intuitionalist, of whom we have said enough. Conscience, in the popular, which is also the theological sense, is simply the aggregate of governing ideas, and the precepts founded on them, with which the mind is furnished by tradition and education. It is the con- solidation of transmitted experience in each of tis. Hence it is that men in a civilised society have no doubt, in all ordinary circumstances at least, as to the dictates of duty, without any calculation either of their own interest or the interests of others. Philo- sophy, however, has to interpret experience, and its questions are not answered by reciting the answers to a moral catechism : these questions have to do with the nature, origin, and primary ground of authoritativeness and obligation in the moral ideas. The expression " moral sense " or moral feeling, on the other hand, like the expression " sesthetic sense," or feeling of the beautiful, denotes an actual experience of consciousness, however it may be interpreted. By a moral sense I mean a feeling of the quality and char- acter of feelings and emotions, and, therefore, of motives of conduct. "We have such a feeling, just as we have a 26o Ethica. feeling of the quality and character of the objects of external sense. This, it may be presumed, no one doubts ; but the question is whether the feeling is the result of association and education, or is native to the mind of man, and, if native, in what sense and with what limitations it operates. The past discussion shows that we have a feeling of the quality and quantity of certain primary emotions which constitute the real in each man ; and these pri- mary emotions are evoked into life and nourished into maturity by life-experience. Out of the action of reason on these primary elements in their various rela- tions morality arises. Accordingly, we may put the affirmative answer to the question. Has man a moral sense ? thus : — (1) We are immediately conscious of differences of quantity and quality (in the logical sense) in primary desires and emotions. We are further conscious of a higher and lower in respect of quality. These two consciousnesses enable us to discriminate the relative dynamic force of diverse feelings. This is the moral sense (or feeling) in its primary form. But this moral sense does not determine moral motive. As sensibility, it has no inherent claim to do so, any more than the construing of an external object as a series of impressions in quantity, quality, and relation can determine that object for us, or in any way interpret it. Eeason, with its implicit form of end, comes on the field, and out of the confused record of inner sensibility, finds and constitutes end or idea and law. The Moral Sense, 261 Mere feeling or sensibility in itself can give neither end nor law. The felicities and infelicities of the subject are merely the instrument of discrimination, but no particular felicity or aggregate of felicities can be the end to a being of reason. Eeason intromits with these phenomena of inner sensibility as it does with the phenomena of outer sense, and out of the raw material constitutes the end of human conduct — the " good " for man. This end is not in felicities, but is the birth of reason, which, in the perception of end, perceives and affirms law. Out of the primary feelings, then, end or idea is generated; but the processes of reason would mani- festly be impossible in this field were there not a moral sense ; that is to say, a sense or feeling of the quality and dynamical relations of feelings whereby they are discriminated one from another. It is a primary moral sense, then, in this restricted signification, which enables reason to constitute law for sensibility. (2) There is the feeling of harmony in the sensibility, which harmony is the empirical instructor of law. (3) Further : there is, as we have shown, in connec- tion with all genuine products of reason in search for truth of idea, a feeling of joy which is an emotion of reason itself. We have joy in the discovery and contem- plation of a rational product — the idea or truth of any- thing whatsoever. So, when we deal with the matter of feeling, we have a joy in the contemplation of the moral idea simply as such : temperance, purity, goodwill, jus- tice, integrity, and so forth. The fact that the moral idea 2 62 Ethic a. is, as idea and law, a product of reason, gives to it that supremacy in respect of quality which rightfully be- longs to will-reason itself as supreme formal end of man. Eeason and personality are put into this idea, or rather pass into it. They are in truth necessarily in it. The light which is reflected back from it, and which irradiates my consciousness, is the light of reason itself. I say we have joy in the idea simply as such, because, though we have travelled by the way of sub- jective felicities and infelicities to find the idea, the idea has a strength and potency in itself, derived from reason ; it in truth i^ reason. This is clear enough when we contemplate the supreme governing ends or ideas, whether formal or real (will-reason with its idea and law on the one side, and the feeling of harmony on the other) ; but it is equally patent when we contemplate subordinate ends or ideas. Eor example, if we take the virtues commonly so called, we find them to be moral ideas which have been first projected as such by will-reason, and with which this same will-reason, as formal, thereafter desires union through activity in the field of the real or concrete ; which union is actualisation. The moral ideas of justice, integrity, purity, temperance, courage, love, holiness, and so forth (which it is not our business here to analyse), actually exist for me as rational entities, and have to be subsumed by me as determinants or mediators of my particular volitions as occasion demands. It could be shown that they all contain formal and real elements, and my recovery or subsumption of them. The Moral Sense. 263 after they have been projected, is the life of the formal in and through the true real. For life is possible only in and through the real, just as the life of the Universal Keason itself is effected through the real. On this plane of life we no longer act, if we act virtuously, at the bidding of the desires or emotions of the mere subject or attuent consciousness. All our moral action is mediated through rational ideas. And just at this point there is an emotion, a feeling of joy ; and we may with truth say that a feeling of joy in an idea which is to be content of volition, is a moral feeling, a moral sense. But the feeling is not now of the sensibility, but is a feeling of rational joy — joy in reason, and, as such, is supreme over all else, because reason itself is supreme as the " idea " of and in man. The rudimentary or elementary moral sense as a mere discriminator among felicities .is now lost sight of, and, in its true and final form, it is a spiritual sense — an emotional joy of reason in reason. This is the true life of the spirit of man. In this complete union, or rather identity, of the formal and real, which is the penetration of sensibility by reason, man finds his completed func- tion as an organism — his good. (4) Nor is this all ; for, the idea is end. Out of the perception of true end the perception of what must be, if end or truth is to be attained, arises : this is the idea of law in the external world. The end and sole sig- ficance of reason is to bring all things within the causal notion in its three moments. Law, accordingly, apart 264 Ethica. from all else, is what it seeks. In like manner, in the sphere of conduct or life, reason seeks law as such, and the perception of law leaps out of the heart of the perception of true end — what mglit to be, if the idea is to be attained. "Ought" is moralised "must," — the duty-side of the categorical imperative. Thus man is not left to the attractions of rational joy alone to enable him to strive for the union of reason with reason, but finds also in himself the authority of majestic law to which he owes duty, and discord with which is inner disruption or spiritual death. Keason, and reason alone, determines the moral law as such, and the law is given, in the first instance, independently of all feeling of pleasure in it as law. It is a purely rational and formal utterance ; but, after it has been experienced, in fact, joy in it must arise ; and not only joy in it, but awe of it. Accordingly, the moral sense in its final form is joy in the idea, and joy in the law as such, and reverence for it. It is thus as purely rational as anything can be, save the dialectic percepts of reason and their conse- quent categories which are purely formal. Here let me interpose a distinction which may be carried retrospectively into the past argument, viz., that to speak of happiness ^^ following on a certain volition or state is to separate in words what has no separation in reality. The happiness is itself in the satisfaction of the desire or the idea, and is not some separate state of consciousness which follows on it, except in this sense, that the vibration of pleasure or pain prolongs The Moral Sense, 265 itself after the act, as the reverberations of thunder do among the hills. What, now, of religion as an element in the moral life and in the moral sense ? I would answer, in terms of the previous treatise, that just as man is always in search of the law and idea in the real of the external world and in the real of inner feeling, whether he is aware of it or not, so, the thought of Being and Eeason-universal maintaining a system of which the subject and object are parts, is always present in man himself, whether he is aware of it or not. This thought of God rests on the feeling of Being- universal and on the dialectic of Percipience which yields to him the same Being as Eeason-universal. This Being and Eeason-universal we do not find as an abstract, but as given in rerum natura — as immanent. It is in and through the action of our will-reason on and through things — the real — that the universal is given to us at all, and it is given as immanent reason. We cannot shake ourselves free from it : there it is, in all and through all. Thus, and thus only, do we as a matter of fact take up the phenomenal into percipient consciousness, — sub specie ceternitatis. It may be long before this notion of God comes into clear consciousness in the race ; but in the fulness of time it becomes explicit. Now, the moment that a man be- comes alive to universal Being and Eeason as immanent, all ideas — the truth of things, as well as the truth of conduct and life — are seen to be the truth and manifes- tation of the Universal in the man, whose individual 266 Ethic a. reason is, all the while, only the emergence of that very universal in him, but under finite conditions. In thinking the ideas which are to control his ethical life he now, to use an expression attributed to Kepler, *• thinks the thoughts of God after Him," The finite or phe- nomenal conditions under which the Absolute-Causal- Being lives are determined by itself, i.e. created ; those under which finite reason lives are determined for it, as facts and environment, but reason retains a free regu- lative and legislative power over them, and the truth of reason is the truth of God. The conception of God, slowly working in nature and in man, necessarily assumes crude and sensuous forms in the halting progress of the evolution of the consciousness of the race. Sophists, when they attack these temporary forms, think that they attack the notion. But they are mistaken. They cannot rid themselves of the concept, God, until they first rid themselves of their own reason. It is reason which furnishes them, at the same moment, with object of attack and the means of attacking it. God has a firm hold on man, for He is woven into the web of human reason. Jacob would not let the angel of God go till he blessed him ; the fact is rather that God will not let man go till he blesses His holy name. "He stands at the door and knocks;" nay rather, the living God is already within the temple, and that temple is the mind of man. It is this emotion of God — the feeling of universal Being as Eeason — that lifts man and all his acts into the sphere of the eternal, and gives even The Moral Sense. 267 to his smallest duty, if done for duty, an infinite character. The moral life is the life of duty to law in ideas : the ideal or spiritual life, again, is life in the ideas of reason consciously contemplated as in immanent Eeason. It is at once evident that there is a manifest danger in this elevation of the human spirit. Men distinguished by their undoubted spirituality of character have often had a high-handed way of dealing with the ordinary moralities. They have dissociated what cannot be put asunder — the universal and the particular. In certain natures, again, spirituality, which is life in God, is apt to lead to mysticism, fanaticism, and a self-indulgent luxuriating of the intellectual imagination — a sublime egoism. But this effect it will not have, if we bear in mind that the idea is not an abstract but a concrete: it is always the product of reason in and throiighthQ real, and can therefore truly live only in real relations — the real relations of our daily common life. This, indeed, is Christianity as opposed to perverted Budd- hism. A state of mere being and feeling, however exalted, is as unproductive as it is indefinite. Only through activity and the finite is life at all possible. 268 Ethica, CHAP. XXXIII.— THE SANCTIONS OF THE MORAL ACT, INNER AND OUTER. The primary utterance of law, itself as such absolute and imperative, is supported by penalties and rewards, inner and outer. The penalties are complex, because the virtuous or vicious volition is complex, and they are to be easily deduced from what has already been said of the moral idea and law in the preceding pages. It is worth while, notwithstanding, to try to enume- rate them : — 1. There is the pain attending the fact of law dis- obeyed simply as law, from which no man can escape. Our past analysis shows that it is the law we are in search of as aim, object, and ground of all volition, and that for the sake of pure law alone the agent, who is in the strictest sense moral, acts. 2. There is the pain attending the consciousness of the degradation of that will and personality which con- stitute me man, when I find it overwhelmed by the desires of the attuent subject or individual. The pain, we may call this, of virility foregone. This is closely connected with the pain of law broken, for it involves the source of law. 3. There is the pain attending the consciousness that The Sanctions of the Moral Act. 269 the supreme rational felicity (even though it be a felicity involving pains) of union with the idea in its content is foregone ; and this apart from law. 4. There is the pain of inner disturbance and discord, of self-contradiction, inasmuch as the reason-affirmation of right and law is denied its rightful externalisation, which is its completion of itself. The identity of self with itself is thus arrested on its way, self-conscious- ness has failed to reduce the real to itself as a com- pleted actual ; and thus there is discord. 5. Community of being (which man shares with all existences), when it takes the higher and definite forms of community of feeling which we call sympathy, and, thereafter, of community of rational conviction, is the basis of all moral obligation outside the individual reason. Far too little has been made of this : it is so familiar as to escape notice ; it lies, however, as a pro- found assumption in all our reasoning. It cannot of itself be the source of obligation, there must be a com- munion in respect of something which the person already has. That something is the perception of law in the idea which is to motive conduct, and which car- ries with it its own intrinsic authority. The com- munity and identity of feeling and reason simply confirms and strengthens the law by the power of innumerable individual wills. It gives it a universality which dwarfs the individual, and gives rise in the mind of each to a consciousness of the objective, and there- fore, irresistible, character of moral law. This community of being and feeling is an inner as 270 Ethica. well as an outer phenomenon, for it is the reflection of one's-self from a thousand mirrors, and so intensifies in each person the feeling or idea which is reflected. This fifth guarantee of obligation is not to be con- founded with the love of the love of others, which also emerges out of sympathy as its pre-condition. It exists prior to it, and has an independent strength of its own, as the voice of humanity. 6. The sixth support of obligation is the deliberate judgment of others on the motives and conduct of the agent : this cannot by possibility be evaded, because, among the innate feelings of our nature, the love of the love of others stands side by side with the love of others as making society possible, and as tyiug men together by bonds of feeling which are independent of the individual will. This guarantee of obligatoriness is thus also inner as much as it is outer, for it depends on the existence of a native emotion. It is the public declaration of man to men coming to the help of each man. 7. So with the seventh sanction : in a sense it is external, but in truth, when we fully understand the necessary nature of man, it is internal, — the authority of God working in him, and, consequently, of the whole system of things. In some form or other the notion of God, however crude, is always present, and as a universal of some sort exercises an influence on moral conduct. We find in the rudest the germ of a consciousness which, in the more developed intelli- gence, ultimately takes the form of God immanent in The Sanctions of the Moral Act. 271 ethical ideas as He is in the external world, or, at least, as the source of law. The idea, with its inherent law, is seen to be God revealing ** the good " to the consciousness of man, just as law in astronomy is God determining the order of the stars. Law in the causal and teleological sense becomes, in the sphere of doing, law in the sense of command ; because it now concerns the doing of a self-directing person. But it can be law as command only in so far as it is first of all law in the sense of ratio micndi} It is God, accordingly, who ulti- mately says, " Thus thou shalt do, and not otherwise." This thought gives to right and wrong the sanction of the Keason-universal, and all which that sanction implies at different stages of social progress. It is in man the consciousness of a moral order within which he lives and moves. Eeverence for the law is reverence for Eeason-universal in the finite and particular. 8. It is only after these sanctions (always in the heart of the ethical movement, though historically and in time they may only slowly emerge into clear conscious- ness), that the sanctions of the positive law of the State enter. The State can, at best, never be more than the embodiment of the already existing moral con- sciousness of man — a mere reflex. As external law it reacts powerfully on the conduct of individuals, and is a schoolmaster to bring them to the recognition of the sanctity of the inner law and of God the source of that law. We need not enter into these purely external sanctions : ^ See sequel, p. 289, " Law in its two-fold sense." 272 Ethica. they are patent to all, and may be found in the writings of sensationalist and utilitarian moralists passim. With these writers they are the basis and source of all moral law and obligation, while, in point of fact, they are purely adventitious. They are external supports of law. They embody the police of morality ; but that is all. They appeal to private interests, to fear, and to the various physical consequences of social disapproba- tion. They are potent as a moral discipline, and the weak or wilful man who has foregone his place in an organism and in a moral order needs them. But we shall be slow to believe that the shell of the mussel makes the mussel, or even that the moral nature of man is the inner result of the absorption of a something or other which escapes like a vapour from an abstract non-existent entity called the social organism. Such externalist moral theories presume a theory of mind which sees the evolution of reason itself by means of impressions out of — nothing (!), or, at best, out of a spoonful of tangled cerebral tissue. Subjective and Objective Ethics. 273 CHAP. XXXIV. — SUBJECTIVE AND OBJECTIVE ETHICS. Self-reference of the Moral Act. If the fulfilled Notion of Man, as governed by the idea within the Notion, the formative dynamic of the Notion, be that which each individual has to realise in himself hy himself, if imperative law be implicit in the ideas generated in the search for law, ethics rests on an ob- jective basis, and not on the pathological states or caprice of individuals. The law has objective validity : it is a Universal. Notwithstanding, the old question, that, namely, of the self-reference of even the highest moral volition, will sometimes recur, and disturb the belief of some in the absoluteness of law. It is impossible, of course, to expel the felicity of the subject-self from the moral life. Joy of reason in the idea accompanies all success- ful strife. There is joy also in law and duty simply as such. It would be a travesty of creation were pure pain the result of accordance with law. And yet, men of a morbid tendency will trouble themselves because of the fact that the pain at- tending disobedience is the pain of the rational self, and the joy of obedience is the joy of the rational self The truth is, that they are haunted by the fear lest, by the recognition of felicity in any form S 2 74 Ethic a. whatsoever, morality is thereby placed on a purely subjective basis, and relapses into Protagorean indivi- dualism. But this fear is foundationless, in the light at least of the argument of this treatise : for morality has been removed from its personal ground, and placed on the objective basis of " Man," which gives it both universality and supremacy over the individual : even the most elementary savage is constantly seeking this universal because of the community of being and feel- ing, without which he cannot be a person save in a naked formal sense. There is, further, the fear lest, by the recognition of the fact of the felicity of reason in pure duty, we may be substituting the happiness of the agent for the inner imperativeness of the rational affirmation and for the universality of the law as divine law. But this fear also is groundless, for the agent having once ascer- tained wherein the true good of man, as contained in the notion and idea of man, consists, cannot, even if he would, suspend the utterance of the imperative law, which confirms and ratifies what he has discerned to be true. Still a lurking dissatisfaction may remain. The foun- dation of morality may be an objective universal, the imperativeness of the right and good may spring from within, and freedom and manhood and life itself may be possible only through law and duty ; yet the felicity of reason in the reason-born ideas of feeling-relations and the law in them, seems to survive as the ultimate spring of all action. For the will-reason seems to set itself in Subjective and Objective Ethics. 275 motion for the purpose of securing the happiness of self in the sense of the fulfilment of self, however lofty- its aims may appear, and however sublime its sacrifices in the dread names of Law and God. Now, as regards the object or aim of Will. The idea that is to be subsumed as motive, that is to say, which will-reason contemplates and seeks to bring into union or identity with itself through volition — is not there present to my consciousness as a pathological felicity but as a reason-idea, and, as such, law. The object, then, is not happiness, but law (though primarily ascer- tained through the real of feeling). The remits however, of the subsumption and conse- quent volition is doubtless the satisfaction of reason in the sense of fulfilment of itself, or identity with itself in the real. And it is to be admitted that, were not this the result, the motive and the volition would be abjured by reason. There seems, then, to be ultimately some egoistic standard of good. And this undoubtedly there is. There is the satisfaction of reason in a reason -idea which has been identified with itself through actualisa- tion. In other words, there is the satisfaction of reason in reason. And why not ? This is the life, of reason. It is not the satisfaction of the attuent subject or individual {h,omo pTieTwmenon), but of will-reason and personality [{homo Tioumenon). It is not a pathological and subjective satisfaction, but objective and rational. This is a sufficient answer. But let it be noted further, that the satisfaction of reason in reason (self-identity) is not the ' objective 276 Ethica. point ' of the volition, but only the terminal and con- sequent. There has been in operation a psychological process which demonstrates this. For the condition of the satisfaction of reason in reason is that the idea and the law in it shall be the self-conscious end of my willing. The satisfaction of reason in the good is thus mediated through the subjection of reason itself to the idea and law which it has generated in its search for law. If it be not law in idea which is the ' objective point ' and end of my volition, but if I consciously substitute the satisfaction of my 'personal reason (if this be psycho- logically possible), the volition loses its character. The volition as an ethical volition does not, in fact, take place at all. The essence and definition of the ethical movement is that the will-reason shall seek that which, though of and through itself (as the idea is), is yet not itself, but a projected idea — a law universal, which transcends its egoistic source and mediates the self- identity of reason. This doctrine may be illustrated thus from the general domain of psychology : We found that the end (or rather the terminal, for it is not self-conscious) of this or that desire in the attuent or individual subject is simply the satisfaction of that desire. Hunger is a craving for the satisfaction of a felt want, but to satisfy it, the attuent subject must go out of itself and mediate the desire through a material object — food. True, we have previously called the satisfaction of desire immediate ; but this is merely to signalise the fact that between the felt desire and its gratification no Subjective and Objective Ethics. 277 other consciousness in the sense of idea (however we may take this word), intervenes: such mediation as exists in the satisfaction of desire consists in the use of an external medium, or instrument, or thing. A new case (and a much more instructive one) seems to arise when the highest attuent emotion — goodwill or love — seeks actualisation. In one sense there can be no such thing as " disinterested " benevolence, for the very essence and definition of benevolence is the well- being (realisation) of the agent in and through the well- being of others. But the same definition shows us that there can be no benevolence which is not disinterested. If it be not disinterested, it contravenes the definition and the thing. For the notion of benevolence contains this, that the wellbeing of the agent is obtainable only by his making the wellbeing of others the aim or objective point of his volition, and thus the mediating ground of his own wellbeing, which is the result of the former. At this attuent stage (to which I am still confining myself) the agent cannot propose his own wellbeing to himself as end, because he is as yet only in the attuent condition : I or Ego do not yet exist, and I, therefore, can propose nothing at all to myself as end. There is only the vague feeling of pleasure in the pleasure of another, which can be satisfied only by the flow of energy towards that other, returning to me through the other. This outflow is the indispensable condition of the resultant inflow of satis- faction of the emotion ; just as the outgoing of activity towards food as objective point of volition is the indis- 278 Ethica. pensable condition of the resultant satisfaction of the vague craving, hunger. Now, we note in the above illustrations a law, or rather let us say, a process in the satisfaction of attuent desire (that is to say, the feelings we share with non- rational creatures). The medium is the objective point ; and the resultant end, in the sense of a terminal, is satisfaction of the vague but tense feeling which stimu- lated the energising. The very animal finds himself by forgetting himself. When now reason enters on this field of attuent sensibility, it enters as a priori and under the a priori stimulus (not of desire, but) of form of end, in order to transmute the subject into ego or personality, and further, to find ends — that is to say, to construct ends or ideas — out of the raw material of attuitiou. It seeks the supreme end of itself, formal and real, and various particular ends in their subordination to the supreme end of a complete organism. These ends are the attuent feelings (the real in man) rationalised, constituted moral ideas and projected as self-conscious reason- ends of volition. Spite of the invasion of this new energy, there is still going on, parallel with it, a large and complex activity of mere attuent and instinctive desire ; but, in so far as this does not conflict with reason-ends, it is neither moral nor immoral, but indifferent. It is ends or ideas only that are determined by reason, and law through them ; and thus the moral sphere is the sphere of reason, law, and duty. Subjective and Objective Ethics, 279 These self-conscious ends or ideas, be they per- sonal or intransitive, e.g., purity, resolution, fortitude, integrity, etc., or social and transitive, e.g., love, justice, honesty, and the numerous virtues derived from these, now constitute the objective point of my will and willing. To take the love of others as idea and motive : — if for love of others, as idea and law of my activity, I substitute or in any way insinuate love of myself, and do certain things which, certainly contribute to the good of others but, are willed with a ']per- sonal reference, I simply fail altogether to secure the satisfaction of my reason. For, I have flouted the very essence and definition of the idea which was supposed to motive my activity. It has, indeed, entirely evapo- rated, and something else, viz., my individual subject and its interests, has taken its place. It is through devotion to the idea, as objective point, and as a uni- versal, that it is alone possible to attain to the satisfaction of my personal reason : this satisfaction, consequently, is the result, not the aim, of good volition. If a man were to constitute it his aim he would not get what he wanted ; the fruit which he plucked would be ashes in his teeth. So with justice or any other idea. It is the humble that are exalted. It is only by reason reverentially laying itself at the foot of idea and law that it can find itself and rejoice in itself as holding the good — in other words, as reason-concrete — self-identity in and through the real. It is the same, indeed, in the sphere of cognition : 28o Ethica, reason has to go out of itself if it would be other than formal, a mere nude system of unclothed categories. It goes out in order to know idea and law in nature, and returns enriched with the spoils of the real to enjoy itself in contemplation. But its objective point is not itself, but the vast and complex " other " in which it has to find law. This reason, let us always remember, is the immanent Eeason in us, restricted by the limitations of our subject both as regards sense-im- pression and inner feeling, and therefore finite though capable of an outlook into the infinite. Working in us and hy us as personalities, it formulates sense into the truth of knowing, and sensibility into the truth of doing — a physical order and a moral order. Now, the investigator is pursuing the reason or law in things, and in doing so he has " pleasure " in the mere activity of his own reason : but so far as the law he is searching for is concerned, his end is not the " pleasure " which the discovery will yield, but the law simply. His discovery is the identification of his reason with the reason in things, and he rejoices in the joy of reason fulfilled. This is the true state of the case j and the argument will be further illustrated if we consider the equivocal meaning of the word end. End (as has been pointed out) denotes both terminal point of movement and also conceived purpose of movement. The terminal point of creation, for example, is God, we might say, who is also the Beginner ; but his movement as Creator has signifi- cance only as a movement towards the completion of Subjective and Objective Ethics. 281 ends as conscious purposes. This is its true character. Ends, as effectuated, return into their source to bring joy to that source, which is thus, as I have said, their Ur- mirval point; but they do so only hy virtue of their being a movement beyond and out of self — a movement of love (if we may use the term in this relation) which con- templates the purpose, the conceived end alone. And how does it stand with man as a moral agent or person ? He also moves towards a conceived end, be it idea, law, or God, through which idea as something other than self, his will is mediated. His felicity is, as a matter of fact, to be found outside his bare personality — in idea, law, or God, which return to him in reason-joy which is self-identity. But even this reason-joy, noble as it is, is not his aim, although the emotions of reason are certainly associated with truth of doing, and help to sustain will in its striving to fulfil itself. It is by goins out of himself that a man can alone effect self- realisation. It is a universal, therefore, which he seeks, and in which alone he spiritually lives or can live. The terminal of the movement certainly is joy of the rational self, but the end in the sense of con- ceived and 'projected purpose is, and must be, the other — a universal ; or it defeats itself. Not self, therefore, nor the joy of self, nay, not even the universal for the sake of self is the " end " ; for this would be a subordinating of the universal to self and its consequent extinction as a universal, and the re-establishment of subjectivity in morals. The '' end " is the " other " as holdinoj self — the universal, as 282 Ethica. holding the particular. In order that I may truly find self or realise self, it is necessary that I should go out of self into the universal and be of it. I first affirm the universal, and seek it, as object and end, without conscious regard to self; and thereafter I find that the universal is me ; that in it, and through it, and by it alone, I am what I am. My reason is thus satisfied. Self, then, cannot by possibility find self, if it be conscious end to itself ; it must seek that which holds self, and in finding that, it finds all. This is not rhetoric : it is simply the psychological fact, and this analysis of the psychological fact seems to explain the old vexed question of self-reference. We are told by some that it is only by my will sub- suming and actualising the universal and objective will of society that my individual will is good and I am moral. Now, if we, either on an idealistic or sensational basis, lend ourselves to the idea of a social organism in which the person exists simply as a functional part of that organism, we subject personality to an objective law and rule which may be wrong in itself.^ Were I a citizen of Eussia at this moment I do not think I should much like the philosophy of the " objective will." I would suspect that its defenders had a retaining fee from the minister of police. I certainly, as a thinker (in a humble way), would assert my personality in the teeth of the objec- ■^ I see little to choose between this objective will and Hobbes's sovereign. The germ of morality is in both obedience to an external. Subjective and Objective Ethics. 283 tive will, in the hope of transforming the objective will into something better. So if I were a Central African savage who felt himself to be head and shoulders above his fellows. Most assuredly the will of each person is a good will only in so far as it subsumes the objective will and actual- ises it ; but the objective will which it subsumes is the Will of God as made manifest in the nature of man and in the moral order of the spiritual society of which each is a member, and which men, as persons, have, as the world grows in years and wisdom, to find out as best they can, just as they have to find the laws of the physical order. By personalities society at first took form, by personali- ties it grows, and by personalities alone will the objec- tive will, both as regards men-individual and men in communities, be brought ultimately, by the grace of God, into conformity with the Divine Will — in which ultimately resides the universal imperative. 284 Ethica. CHAP. XXXV. — THE CHIEF GOOD. Let us return to this subject. The attempt to name by one word the supreme end or " chief good " of man has been a conspicuous failure, partly because the word or phrase chosen is pre- sumed to fix a criterion while furnishing an end ; and for this it is too abstract. Virtue, perfection, duty, happiness, pleasure, plea- surable sensations, wellbeing, life, the wellbeing of society, social vitality, have all had their turn. These terms are used in so general a sense that the writers using them have to supply their content each for him- self, and the necessary result has been logomachy. This content may be, and generally is, such as to contain a petitio principii, and to involve the mind in circular reasoning. Utilitarians have complained of the purely formal and empty character of such " ends " as virtue and perfection, but have been blind to the fact that universal happiness is itself formal and empty, and that it proceeds on a presupposition as to what happiness is. The end of every existence is itself — that is to say, the fulness of its specific life, such fulness as is com- patible with the conditions under which it lives and its place in time. Fulness of life is in every existence attainable only by the laio in it having free course. The Chief Good. 285 Now, the law in anything is to be conceived in terms of the moments of the dialectic process, viz., kinetic initiation; the process or series of determined move- ments, which mediates ; and the end, idea, or essence of the concrete thing before us. These three moments are one movement, and collapsing into each other consti- tute the causal notion in things. We have here the kinetic, the formal, and the teleological present in our completed notion of anything whatsoever. But, it is the second term to which we commonly assign the notion of law. Now, if we take these moments in their separateness, we might say, taking the kinetic moment by itself, that the end of man in the sense of the " chief good " is the realisation of will; or, taking the second moment, we might say that it is the fulfilment of law — the process whereby will is mediated into a con- crete ; or, finally, we might say that it is the fulness of life as the realised concrete end. The " chief good " might again be said to be a com- bination of two moments, viz., law in the concrete real of feeling : but this too is, though approximately correct, inadequate. No one moment and no two moments give the truth : if, for example, we conclude that the chief good is fulness of life or being, this would be to emphasise the third or teleological moment, and is also open to criticism as an inadequate statement on the ground that it is too vague and general. Again, this fulness of life itself might be identified 286 Ethic a. with its consequential predicate, a perfectly happy state of being; and " happiness " might then be said to be the highest good. That a feeling of happiness in a conscious being — as much of that feeling as is possible for it — must be a characteristic of fulness of life in it is not to be questioned ; but happiness is not a state brought about as a consequent but is in the fulness. How mis- leading any attempt at defining " the supreme good " as happiness may be, is familiar enough to those who concern themselves with ethical discussion. If ful- ness of life be itself inadequate to sum the "good," how much more a mere predicate of this achieved life ! Man does not live for a predicate, but for a state of being and activity of which certain predications may be made. It is doubtful whether we should commit ourselves to vague and fallacy-concealing generals at all in attempting to define the chief good or end of man, especially as there can be no doubt of the supreme good on the formal side (that being settled for us by the fact of its existence as " idea " within the complex man), viz., the dominance of will-reason ; or, to put it otherwise, of will in' and through reason actualising itself. If this be true, it would follow that, on the side of the real di feeling, the end is the satisfaction of the reason-emotions. The simimum honum, accord- ingly, would be the satisfaction of reason. But the natural feelings are, in this answer, omitted or sup- pressed. If we are to go further than this, we must, I think, The Chief Good, 287 embrace the causal moments in one phrase, especially as it is now clear that the signalising of any one moment at once invites contradiction. Perhaps the best expression for the chief good (in light, at least, of the past discussion) is — Fulness of Life achieved through Law hy the action of Will as Reason on Sensibility. This is the self-realisation of man, and comprehends both the formal and the real. The law is found to be the rational idea, which idea is the essence in the relations of feelings, and which on its rational side is called the idea of harmony {e.g., justice), and on its real side harmony of feeling : (and this latter, and not the "epicurean stye," by the way, is the true Cyrenaic *' happiness " or " pleasure "). At the same time it has been shown, in a former treatise, that there are two ideal tendencies in the reason of man, and we are here speaking of one of these only — the ideal of a total. This ideal must vary according as the " thoughts of men are widened," and as their relations to external conditions become more complex. But it is always silently operative in man as an ultimate standard of conduct. The moral sense is from the first and always pre- sent and operative in the building up of conscience, and, while the direction and manner of its actualisation not only may, but must, vary, morality is always essentially the same, for it has to do with the regulation of emotive forces within the man as man, and these remain always essentially the same. Men are slow in ascertaining 288 Ethica. moral ideas and the law in them, because it is an operation of reason, and reason demands the materials of experience on which to work. We see this in chil- dren. If axiomata media change, as they must, the old is always contained in the new and subsumed into it. Man is always seeking the law, and by whatever name called, it is always the law and duty to it which constitute the common conscience. The actual realising of the chief good as defined is, in finite minds, manifestly impossible. The necessary impulse towards the ideal involves us in a perpetual hopelessness of achievement. Before it could be pos- sible for man to fulfil the ideal of the chief good in himself, it would be necessary to destroy him as man. Incompleteness is of his essence ; for the affirmation of the ideal is of the essence of his reason, as has been else- where shown. Law 171 its Twofold Sense, 289 CHAP. XXXVI. — LAW IN ITS TWOFOLD SENSE. MOEAL ORDEK. Law is simply the discrimination and affirmation of the process, or series of movements, whereby a thing is what it is — the second moment of the causal notion in and under which we must take into consciousness all existence. It assumes in the sphere of doing the character of an imperative command. There, however, is no essential difference in the two uses of the word. In the latter use, it is to be translated thus : " This thou must do if thou wilt fulfil thyself " (the ought) : — this, in short, is the process whereby alone you can be what you can be. It is the fact that a man can be something else than he ought to be; and this explains the modified form of the expression of the fact of law. For moral law as command is only the affirmation of the " must " written as a command. If there is moral law for man, there is a moral order. The moral order is not, however, in the ex- ternal relations of men, but within each man himself. The external relations are consequential on the order within. Let this be what it ought to be, and all else is secure. T 290 Ethica. Man's chief function on earth is the discovery of his own moral order which is determined in and for other existences. It is a hard task. Through much toil and misery the moral law, in the course of ages, makes known its majesty. It will condone nothing. Greek literature — all literature is full of the record of the unequal struggle between the subjectivity of men and the objectivity of the moral order. That man must be very young, or be abnormally constituted, who has not suffered in his own experience from the almost savage retribution of the broken law of his nature. The moral order is always operative within a man, but not always explicit in his consciousness and clear in its dictates. There is, however, ever a striving towards an ideal, which ideal is the moral order — the effort to make idea or principles explicit and operative. What is justice but a name for the idea of inner rela- tions which, by governing, constitute, the true inner life of feeling and, consequently, the moral order. There is nothing more remarkable in the slow discovery of the moral order by self-conscious Egos than there is in the slow discovery of the law of the stars. But the moral order and the science of the stars are all the while there,, awaiting the coming of self-conscious Egos to interpret them. The guide in the moral sphere, how- ever, is happiness and unhappiness, i.e. the conscious- ness of the completion or non-completion of life in the man. So in the external moral order of society. What is history save the record of the failures to find the truth by help of the pain and disorder to which inade- Law in its Twofold Sense, 291 quate conceptions, for a time dominant, have given rise? Hard as iron are the truths that bind by a stern and relentless necessity the moral series as they do the stars in their ordered course. Each man, however indebted to tradition and education, has to work out the problem for himself afresh. Man's function in the system of things is thus a painful one, and when he nears its fulfilment, he dies. He is as a tale that is told. And yet he is always above nature : the stars themselves are under his feet. That by which they exist, he is. And yet, again, he is not master of his fate. To conclude : law as perceived moral order operates as command ; but it is first of all conceived as the necessary process whereby alone a being like man can truly be. Hence, it is law in the same sense as when applied to nature — " summa ratio divinse sapientise," to borrow a phrase from S. Thomas. When Hooker speaks of universal law as having her "seat in the bosom of God," he used an expression equally applicable to the moral order. 292 Ethica, CHAP. XXXVII. — NATUEALISM AND THE IDEA. To seek the idea and live in the idea is " natural " to man : it is the necessary form of his activity. The true naturalism, accordingly, is idealism. A certain class of writers must not be allowed to usurp words to which they have no right of succession, and thereby give a semblance of reasonableness to their own inadequate theories. If reason be not a pure energy of the conscious subject directed against the content of sensations (already constituted " objects " in attuition) — pure and containing its princi^pium movendi in itself as prin- cipium essendi — I say, if what we call reason be not this, then there is no such thing as reason, but only a sensorimn reflexly co-ordinating casual impressions. The principium or central stimulus of the reason- movement is the third moment, viz., " end," which end, as idea or truth, is the reduction to itself — to conscious- ness as self -consciousness — of the content of recipience as already reflexly constituted "object." This reduc- tion is knowledge ; in other words, the rationalising of conscious experience. The reason-movement is (as has been pointed out) a series of successive moments — initiation or kinetic, form or process, and end or completion, which last is Naturalism and the Idea. 293 the satisfaction of the movement in the conquest and reduction of the object. We speak of the analytic act of mind, but what is this as fundamentally perceived 1 It is the moments of process in the above-mentioned one reason-move- ment — the formula of which process is, "the vague attuited object before me is not b nor c, etc., therefore, it is a" I thus push the object before me into a corner and establish for it its own identity. It is thus, and thus only, that I can reach the truth of the thing reducing it in the very act of reason to self-conscious- ness. This inevitable dialytic movement, which seeks always bare and single terms, would stop at these terms, were not experience presented to sense as a complex containing an infinite series of complexes. The com- plexes being there as matters of fact, I have to replace the abstracted single terms within each complex in order that I may truly know it as a complex or synthesis. This self-conscious synthesis is the notion, and necessarily contains all the a p-iori and a posteriori categories. Each complex and the universal totality in experience are thus, and thus only, grasped by reason and reduced in its crisis of activity to self-conscious- ness. The pure energy or act we may call Will as a total movement; but we commonly and popularly assign that term to the initiatory kinetic nisits alone. I have elsewhere emphasised the distinction between abstract general percepts and abstract general concepts. Idea has also been identified with essence — that is to 294 Ethica, B>di,Yj that by which a thing is not anything else and by which therefore it is itself — the truth of itself. Essence is not a mere punctuin of negative relations, but con- tains its negations in its positive affirmation. The abstract percept again, we saw, is its own idea. The abstract general concept, if by possibility it can be reached, is that in each particular complex concept or notion whereby it negates all that it holds in common with the rest of the universe and is its sole self — the truth of itself, the bare self-identity of the individuation. Like the percept, it is a single. This is the idea, and a life in ideas is simply a life in the essences or truth of things. These ideas or essences are at once the end and the beginning of themselves and also the mediation by which they exist. They contain the inseparable moments which constitute the one notion of cause — the kinetic, the formal, and the teleological. They are the moments of universal objective Eeason. Hence a life in ideas is a life in God made manifest in space and time, and the religious life-theoretical is nothing save a contemplation of the one in many and the many in one. Transfer this to morality — the sphere of volitionary motive. Here we have for our real the feelings gener- ated in the human organism of which we can give no account, and it is left to each of us as free self-conscious spirits to constitute the truth of this organism for himself — to ascertain first of all its idea, and then the ideas in the relations of feelings to each other and to a man's environment which are to govern conduct. Naturalism and the Idea. 295 if a man is to be himself and not something else. The preceptive judgments which affirm justice, truth- fulness, self-control, purity, etc., is the combined result of innate tendency or moral instinct and the infinitely various particulars of concrete relations. They sum external relations in so far as these are determined by reason and native impulse. They are sufficient for the ordinary work of the world. This preceptive morality is recognised as the moral order which must permeate human relations if man is to be truly man. But, the moral idealist — the man who lives in moral ideas by the combined force of the reason and the intensity of emotion in him — carries the common element in affirmations as to the just, etc., further, and contemplates them apart in their purity as idea. They are no longer to him the mere order-book out of which he takes his instructions for this or that volition. Their finite relations are superseded (but not cancelled) by the vision of their eternal truth. They are contemplated as God made manifest in the human mind. He has, in fact, pursued, under the impulse of reason, the common element of each virtue until he has isolated its essence or idea, and the idea is greater than he because it is the utterance of the universal in him. This idea may be capable of exact statement in so far as it is purely rational ; but in so far as it contains, as all moralities do, the element of feeling, it remains vague and in the region of emotion. Hence it is, as has been already pointed out, that a man may so foster in himself the life in moral ideas 'per se as to disconnect them from I7BIISIT7). 296 Ethica. the finite relations out of which they sprang and of which they are the truth, and be less observant of those finite relations than the man of prosaic understanding who never is conscious of the moralities save in their concrete relations. The life in ideas, disconnected from the life in finite relations, may thus become a life in dreamland, and a man become a victim to the illusion that ideas can exist apart from their concrete and particular relations in and through which they have been first of all ascertained : just as in nature we know the idea in and through the concrete. And yet the spiritual (or pure reason) life as con- trasted with the preceptive moral life is alone life in the truth of things, provided it comprehends the finite acts which the ideas exist (in reason) to govern and control : just as they do in the concrete^ of sense. We have endeavoured to show, in our references to Intuitionalism and our analysis of law, the unscientific character of the doctrine of innate and inexplicable imperatives : we have also pointed out the inadequacy of a system of ethics based on environment — externalism as we may call it. What we contend for, in truth, is naturalism, which sets aside at once a vulgar super- natural, and an inadequate, though imposing, empiri- cism. We have to take account of inner forces — the striving (to use theological language) of the Spirit of God within us — as well as of the relations of our spirits to other spirits and to the universe in which we have to fulfil ourselves. This is naturalism, for this is the nature of man. It is the function of the poet to detect and uncover Naturalism and the Idea. 297 the ideas or essences of things in their relation to the life of the spirit of man, and to clothe them in the forms of the beautiful — their only fitting vesture. He thereby raises the level of human life. He is the supreme ethical philosopher. In the understanding of his utterances men who are less gifted awake to the joy of reason and the emotion of art, as indissolubly inter- fused, and thus live, for a little while, in the truth. Just as reason must seek the idea in each and all, so it must seek the ideal of the complex concrete total.^ The philosopher thinks these ideals, the poet presents them sensuously. This again, is naturalism, for this is the nature of man. The ideal of man — the perfectness of the notion as governed by the idea within it, viz., will-reason — is always present in some form to men, though a changing value may, according to the necessities of society, be given to some of its constituents. It is because Christ fulfils that ideal that He holds our worship. The fulness of God — that is to say, the law in man emanating from the divine source of all law is in Him. In Him we see revealed that the specific function of man is an ethical function. It demanded no breach of the divine movement in the universe to produce Him. He falls within the naturalistic series of the spiritual order. By means of such a concrete ideal of humanity can we alone raise men to manhood : and, assuredly, it is only by the presentation of this ideal in all its spiritual and ethical significance that we can ever hope to reach the masses of mankind. 1 MeU Nov. et V. last chap. 298 Ethica, CHAP. XXXVIII. — FKEE-WILL. The attuent subject Qiomo phenomenon) with all its desires and emotions, and its consciousness of external things — mere reflex co-ordinates ^ — is a part of nature and of necessary law. The impressions of outer sense and the inner feelings, which together constitute the real of the subject-individual, govern his activity. The particular volition at any one moment is determined by the greater mass or intensity of feeling at that moment. The volition is a case of reflex action. With- out distinctly seeing and accepting this basis of deter- mination, discussions on free-will cannot avoid con- fusion and logomachies. In all volition, man, in so far as he is an attuent subject, is arbitrium se7'vum. Let us postpone the question of free-will in its cosmical relations, and confine ourselves to the object under investigation — Man. That man as a rational subject is free, appears from our analysis of the genesis and nature of knowing. There we find freedom as a metaphysical reality. The conscious-subject functions will, and thus becomes self-conscious and a reason. This initial ener- gising, or will-movement, in and out of subject- 1 Vide Met. Nov. et Vet. Free- Will. 299 consciousness (call it evolution if it sounds better) has no heteronomous motive. It can have none : for it has as yet, in its primal movement, no possible content. It is pure : in itself it contains its motive as a priori form of end. This form is its never-ceasing stimulus. Will, therefore, or rather the subject as will, is in its essence free and self-determining. It is in this initial movement of the conscious sub- ject that freedom lies ; not in personality, unless we use this word in a general sense, and as containing will. Personality, or Me, in truth, is itself the product of will as dialectic, grasping, as its content, the attuent or empirical subject out of which it emerges. Even Spinoza, entangled as he is in a system of necessary sequence, is constantly employing the term conatus to mark that movement of cogitatio which results in "adequate ideas." Is there no difference between the conatus of a molecule to preserve its own essence (to use Spinozistic phraseology) and the conatus of a self-conscious Ego ? If there is, what is it ? Will, as dialectic or reason, emerges for the purpose of categorising the content of experience — the categories being its moments, and causal in the true sense of the causal notion as that has been explained. It then illegitimately seeks to include itself as content, and to reduce itself to its own self-initiated causal categories. Hence our difficulties. As source of the categories, it cannot be subject to them. The fact of freedom, accordingly, appears in our analysis of the genesis and nature of knowing. The Ego has to 300 Ethica. seek and find law in all things for itself. This would be an unmeaning utterance, save on the assumption of freedom. And yet, either this proposition is true or its contradictory is true, that the law is made for the Ego by its environment, and driven into it from without, and that man is a thing. Not only would moral law be driven in from without, but all knowledge also would be ultimately a reflex return of impressions. For the cognitive relation of will, as will-reason, to feeling and impulse, is precisely the same as to external impression or impact. If freedom is established for the act of knowing, it is established all round. It is scarcely necessary (in view of the previous treatise) here to interpose that we must get rid of the habit of regarding reason as one entity and will as another — an atomic point, so to speak, flitting about in the centre of consciousness, and alighting here and there arbitrarily. When the conscious-subject moves into the higher sphere of will, it moves in three moments which are a unity of movement, viz., kinetic initiation, process, and end. The previous treatise also presents the human mind as a conscious-subject, in which all the material is material of feeling or receptivity, the formal will-reason being not some new and novel addition to the animal or attuent subject, but more properly to be regarded as a functioning of the said conscious-subject : this function- ing accordingly carries with it into its own sphere of pure reason all its matter of feeling, desire, and emotion in order to constitute the full concrete man. Thus it is that Free- Will. 301 volition or willing is possible only as the issue of feeling. Man is a creature of being and feeling, and maintains his relations with the universe of things through being and feeling, and he is a passivo-active recipient, except in so far as pure dialectic is concerned. The whole is a unity, the parts of which we logically distinguish in order to present a true synthesis of the whole — the notion ; the idea within which notion (not set over against it as if it were a separate and antagonistic entity) is dialectic functioning. If it be true that the freedom of each thing consists in its being truly itself, nothing impeding; then the freedom of man consists in his being always, and at all times, truly himself — that is to say, a will — for will is root of reason, and reason is the "idea" of and in man. The initial act of the formal movement (logically speaking, for it is implicit only) is the prehension and subsumption of the attuent subject, therein and thereby raising it to personality. The subject is now no longer a mere entitative organised aggregate of ever-changing units of sensation arranging themselves in a subject in accordance with an associative law in them, but a self- conscious unity — an Ego or person. The strands or moments which enter into the unity can, however, be reflectively distinguished. Of this formal dialectic movement which we call reason. Will is root. To speak of will as free is, accord- ingly, a tautology. As to ends : — If there be no free-will there can be no idea and no ideal. We have to confine our view here 302 Ethica. to ends of conduct, and it is certain that there can, in the absence of free-will, be no moral philosophy other than a record of statical conditions as we happen to find them. Not even movement, much less the move- ment we call progress, is in that case possible save as the result of some extraneous shove. Ends, which become motives, are constituted by will as dialectically moving, for will. Without the free kinetic movement of will and the categories implicit in its activity, there could not be knowledge. The highest effort of attuent consciousness^ is passivo-active, and reaches only to a reflex co-ordination of impressions of which the subject is in truth a slave. So in the region of human organic feeling there is a mere play of propensions, which are determined for the attuent subject not hy it : the movement of desire in this sphere is immediate and completes itself in particular acts determined by the movements of nature, of which desire is itself a part. Within this sensuous automatic sphere the representative elements in consciousness, as well as the presentative, operate. Accordingly, the animal, and man, in so far as he is a mere attuent subject, are conscious automata, because they are de- termined entirely by pathological conditions. Man, indeed, even as a rational creature, is in most of his daily and hourly actions automatically determined, that is to say, he acts without a self-conscious process. In the moral sphere we call this automatism " habit." But (as we saw) the initial act of will, as root or ^ Vide Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta. Free- Will. 303 first moment of reason, directs itself to the arrestment of the flux of external sensations and pathological states alike. In and through these it seeks end — the truth of the real, — and having found it, it has therein reduced the real, to identity with reason. In thus passing from imme- diate to mediate motive of volition man becomes moral; the will subsumes through its dialectic movement the end whereby it is determined — which end has been from the first freely sought, freely found, and freely affirmed by will's own dialectic movement. Ends are projected by will-reason, and will as root of reason is transcendental. As in its cognitive energy, so in the constituting of moral end and law, which is simply again cognition in the matter of feeling, will is free, autonomous, hyper-phenomenal, self-legislative. Free- will is not to be regarded as a " property " of rational beings, but rather as the condition of the possibility of rationality. The idea which determines the law of conduct, and, through law, the right and good volition, does not, as we saw, belong to sensibility though ascertained by a criticism of feeling ; it is a product of reason and yet feeling is there subsumed into it and regulated. It is reason in the complex mental result that determines the law ; the feeling in it, however, contributes to the determination of the subsequent volition : only contri- hutes, for we have to note that there are feelings or emotions of reason operative in volition, as well as pathological feelings. The phenomenal worlds, in brief, of the inner and outer are alike and similarly subject 304 Ethica. to will, which in both worlds seeks the idea, essence or truth, and the law therein implicit, and thus determines nature, identifying it with the Ego, and is not deter- mined by it. The will of man, accordingly, is, as regards his whole activity, free, inasmuch as, and in so far as, it is moved to actualise itself by its own self-sought and self- determined ideas under the stimulus of the form of end. If freedom or spontaneity is not to be found in a pure movement of will as reason in search of idea and ideals, and in the initial moment of that movement, it is, assuredly, not to be found anywhere. Granting this, it can only be a much-confused brain which, while admitting that will is free in the search for the deter- mination of an idea, maintains that it becomes suddenly a slave when, in volition, it actualises that idea. I would fain not continue the discussion, but it would seem to be the fate of all who are'involved in it to weigh certain hostile positions, if it be only for the purpose of redarguing them. The remarks that follow may have the aspect of obiter dicta, but they are truly arguments to the reader who has accepted the immedi- ately preceding pages. Will, it is at once manifest, as used above and throughout is distinguished from willing or volition. Free will is transcendental or it is non-existent. Will cannot be found in feeling ; if it is anywhere it must be in the heart of the reason-movement. Hobbes says that the so-called free willing is simply the " last appe- tite in deliberation" — yes; but what of the delibera- Free- Will, 305 tion ? Do / hold before my consciousness two possible motives or do they hold me ? As to freedom in the ought : — It may be pointed out that although we have explained moral law in a way and in a relation different from the critical dogmatism of Kant, we are yet as much entitled to the argument for freedom as he is. " Thou oughtest, and thou camt because thou oughtest " — is only a more fundamental formulating of the common argument from personal responsibility. But Kant has, in his metaphysic, left freedom a mere possibility, and is driven to rest its actual existence on the utterance of the categorical imperative alone. In other words, it is a mere postu- late of Practical Eeason. This is an inadequate ground for freedom ; but it is a valid support (if support be needed) to the metaphysical reality. At the same time I would remark that an ultimate analysis would show that freedom lies concealed in the notion " ought." As to the Antinomy: — Eeason necessarily takes up all experience as in a causal series, but it does not, as a simple matter of fact, take itself up so. There is no question, accordingly, of reconciling the antinomy of Cause and Freedom, because they are not in the same spheres. At the same time, it is a perfectly fair ques- tion — ' How is freedom possible for any existence in a system of Reason-universal V But it is a quaestio cosmologica, and, as such, a quaestio speculativa, and out- side the strict domain of Metaphysic as a science. As to the vulgar and empirical consciousness of free- dom : — We are not justified in rejecting this as a U 3o6 Ethica, weapon in polemics. This " common-sense" argument may be best reduced to its ultimate form in the fol- lowing proposition : — Will can subsume the person- ality, and so far itself, as its own motive. The formula is " I will because I will " (or the negative of this). Will is thus content to itself. This may be called the " liberty of resistance." In such an affirma- tion, however, and its consequent volition, though free- dom is implicit, there is no morality (except of a purely formal and empty kind) because there is no idea and no law. Again, when it asks the question, " Why should I do this or that ? " the ordinary consciousness is conscious of its freedom — conscious that it is not a stone nor even an ape. I am far from saying that the verdict of the empirical consciousness can, by itself, demonstrate free-will, though it may suffice for all practical purposes ; but, most certainly, no speculation on free-will can possibly be adequate which does not explain this empirical consciousness. A higher form of the ordinary consciousness as to will lies in the power of abstraction and self-identity as opposed to objects in consciousness. I can negate an object however importunate, separating it from myself and falHng back on my own bare personality. This I have shown elsewhere to be one of the marks of the rational as opposed to the attuent conscious subject. In the sphere of emotion this volition is in- hibitory ; but there is no such thing as bare inhibition : inhibition is itself mediated through an idea — the worth of self, or something else. Free-Will. 307 As to the ass of Buridanus and his eternal suspension of volition between two bundles of hay, the only perti- nent answer is, " Is thy servant an ass that he should do this thing?" Determinism is the term adopted of late years to veil fatalism and confound issues. As alone I can understand certain determinist utterances they affirm freedom to choose a or 6 ; but it is surely evident that it is already, on their own showing, determined by antecedent causes that you must choose a. Those causes, it may be rejoined, are in your character, but what and lulunce is your character? (See Note at end of chapter.) All are determinists in one sense, for willing or volition has always a motive. The "liberty of indifference" {lihertas arhitrii) is, I presume, no longer in debate. It is otherwise with will. The true question for the modern determinist is not as to the determi- nation of this or that act of volition, but as to the determination of the determination by a preceding determination within the man : is this outside of, or heteronomous to, the Ego ? It is no new question this of determinism, but merely an attempt to evade an old question by the help of a convenient and misleading term. The strict determinist says, " given a certain volition as having taken place, nothing else could have hap- pened." The only truth in this is that, given certain pre-conditions which stim up the volitionary act as well as the forces with which it had to contend, the volition must follow. There can be no question as to this : 3o8 Ethica. the question is as to the place that the free movement holds in the midst of these forces — first in determining ends of conduct, and then in sustaining the free move- ment, by identifying itself with the end. If reason be not fundamentally Will moving towards knowledge by the necessity of its own essential freedom under the stimulus of the form of end, it cannot be free in the effort to identify volition with a moral idea in any par- ticular case. The moral idea becomes simply (however it may have originally found lodgement in conscious- ness) one of the factors in the sum of forces operating with other factors, e.g., self-interest, passion, or dyspepsia, to determine volition. These forces drag and compel me to volitionary action in the particular case, and I have nothing to do with the act, save that I am aware, more or less, of what is going on inside me, and am under the illusion that / am doing what is, in truth, done through me after a struggle of forces carried on as a drama in my consciousness at which I am privileged to " assist " as a spectator. No " man in the street" will accept this as an explanation of his volitions, and therefore such a philosophy fails to inter- pret experience. The man in the street says, if he is an educated man, " I see the force of your reason- ings, and I cannot answer you, save by saying that you leave something out, and that something is me." With Spinoza, we say, " Ilium liherum esse dixi quia sola ducituT ratione," ^ and " freedom in necessity " may be also accepted with a certain interpretation. For, 1 Eth., Part iv. prop. 68, Dem. Free- Will, 309 there is a sense in which will is then only absolutely free when it is necessary. If we yield to feeling un- guaranteed by reason, we are in bondage. This is what the Stoic meant when he said that the vicious man was a slave ; and what St. Augustine meant when he said that the will is only then free when it does not serve vice. He alone is free, another has said, who can will what he ought. If will-reason, the activity of which is the pre-condition of the possibility of morality has affirmed the truth, and therefore the law, of feel- ing, thus reducing it to identity with Ego, and if I volitionise in accord with this, I am free. But truth is one ; and, consequently, the relations subsisting in the real, and the true perception of these relations, are one. That is to say, these relations and the perception of them cannot be other than they are without being inadequate or false. These relations are, therefore, necessary, in the sense that they are the conditions of the truth. They constitute the moral order. Accord- ingly, it is quite correct, in this sense, to say that will- reason is wholly free only when it is wholly under necessity — the necessity of the " ought " of the moral order ; the freedom of identification with the universal : but to conclude from this that a volition is under necessity in the sense of being heteronomously deter- mined, is manifestly fallacious. While granting this, we must still say that, even when the personality (in the heart of which is will as constitu- tive of it) is so dimmed and obstructed with passion that the free movement of will out of it into the real of feel- 3IO Ethica. ing is hindered, and the perception of the truth in the real is so obscured that the personality, under the in- fluence of what Spinoza calls " inadequate ideas," sub- sumes the evil into it as end and purpose, the move- ment of will, so far as it is able to go, is still a free movement. It is obstructed, as it is constantly being obstructed, by the whole system of Nature, the sub- duing of which is its function. Accordingly, free reason may deliberately seek to effect what is evil. We say that, in such circumstances, the will-reason is the slave of passion ; but in so saying, we use the language of imagination. Keason is simply misled. Will is then only a slave of passion when our volitions are the issue of feeling so tense and forceful that will-reason and personality are not called on to act at all. They are overborne in the rush, and the subject- individual with its impulses, usurping the throne of the rightful sovereign, volitionises as part of nature and outside spirit. The volition is in such cases im- mediate. But wherever law is, though it be mistaken law, there, too, is reason : wherever reason is, there is freedom. The significance of this will appear in the following analysis. Analysis of the Process of Will in Volition. Let us now endeavour to analyse the process of Will in willing or volition, a difficult task : — Conscious subject, we have said, functioning will, there-through seizes itself and lifts subject into per- sonality or Ego. This Ego, through the will which is Free- WilL 311 in it and constitutive of it, subsumes presentations into itself, that thereby it may know them. Prehension, subsumption, affirmation — this is knowledge in its beginning. There is, at the crisis of affirmation, an impulse to externalise the truth of fact in utterance or speech. This is accomplished physically under con- ditions of matter and energy, of whose connection with thought we know nothing. The same process goes on in the sphere of inner feel- ing ; but with a difference. Feeling or desire seeks to externalise itself immediately and blindly. The will as constitutive of Ego seeks, as we have seen, the truth of feeling, finds the idea or end which ought to determine the externalisation of feeling (in the particular case), and having subsumed it as knowledge, or truth of feel- ing, the Ego affirms the externalisation and actualisation of itself mediately through this idea. Thus far will- reason has freely sought, found, and legislated. But more than this : the truth of externalisation, the law which is to determine its character, is identified with the Ego through subsumption, and thus we have not merely the legislative affirmation, ''A ought to be actualised," but an a 'priori utterance of purpose, " I will that A be actualised." At this point, however, will-reason exhausts itself: it acts, but does not volitionise or do. In fact, the legislated A is still in conflict with feelings which the law as law restricts, but cannot pre- vent asserting themselves. These feelings go on endea- vouring blindly after their own satisfaction spite of the 3 1 2 Ethica. law ; and any one of them, if sufficiently strong, may take the volition out of the teeth of will and effect itself. All the while, how^ever, will-reason goes on silently affirming the law and duty to it as its will. Ego has put the seal of both law and purpose on A ; Ego has given to it, in the exercise of its regal prerogative, a charter of liberty to actualise itself as law : but, not- withstanding, B is externalised or volitionised as if it were me, w^hereas it is in fact the desire of the attuent subject alone, and not will as constitutor of Ego. B is a usurper; it is not the Ego, nor is it in the Ego, except thus far that it is an object of consciousness. Feeling seems to be wrapt up with the material con- ditions of consciousness, and is thus involved in the general system of physical energy: thus it is that communication is maintained {how we know not) be- tween pure reason and the external world. We cannot tell how will-reason can communicate with the external ' not-itself/ either in sense or sensibility : all we know is that as a matter of fact it does so communicate. In all volition there is motive. In the choice be- tween a glass of water and a glass of wine, the volition is not arbitrary. It is not in the sense of arbitrariness that free-will is to be contended for. Doubtless, I am able to say, in reply to a challenge, I volitionise the glass of water simply because I will to do so. But the choice is not arbitrary in the sense of being motive- less : the motive is to signalise my independence, my Egohood. Cases of pure obstinacy come under this head. But, even in these, there is an end which mediates. Free- WilL 3 1 3 Free will, or simply will, let us remember, is not an atomic entity acting as it pleases and when it pleases. As an atomic entity it could please to do nothing, and would have to descend on this or that particular volitionising quite casually. Will in this, its vulgar acceptation, is not will. Such a conception of will is a misunderstanding of the first (and so the most prominent) moment in a one movement ever seek- ing end. This movement is formal or rational ; and so we say that the a priori form of end is in will, the stimulus or spring of will being thus within itself. But, when we pass from true will in this its tran- scendental significance, we pass into the concrete of volition, and there must now be determining content. That content is feeling ; and it is in the ascertainment of end through feeling that will operates. Feeling, as proximate determinant of volition, is thus regulated and rationalised by will with a view to ends : these rational ends consequently contain feelings, but these now im- pregnated with reason, and therefore constituted law. I have now identified with my rational Ego certain ideas or principles of conduct as motives, and they now are me. Accordingly, if I volitionise at the bidding of mere feeling, I volitionise immediately as an animal does ; if I volitionise as the result of a judgment as to ends, in other words, rationally and self-consciously, I volitionise mediately : and the character of my volition can be altered only by further instruction as to ends and motives. Where an immediate feeling or desire and one or more ends or motives are present, I deli be- 3 1 4 Ethica, rate ; that is to say, I seek the true end which ougM to constitute my motive. Here I act freely, for it is a purely formal and (as regards content) empty will- reason which is searching for its true filling in the particular case, and always. But when I have found and affirmed, the pure (free) will ceases, except in so far as the spontaneous and necessary striving after end enables me, nay compels me, through the inner stimulus of the form of end, to hold present to myself the ascertained end as affirmed law. At this point, too, persistence in the contemplation of the true end is re-enforced by an emotion of reason — the contemplated satisfaction, or life, of reason ; and further, by the stimulus of the emotion of duty — that is to say, of what I owe to reason and its judgments as supreme in me. The purely abstract considerations involve (as has been shown) emotions of reason, and if I volitionise as I ought, I find the happiness of formal reason and formal duty, as such, to be at the same time the happiness of the real element of pathological feeling which lies concealed as content of the formal. Thus volition is not so simple a matter as it seems : it is the issue of complex states. The combined power of these complex motives ought, one would think, always to ensure right action; but all the forces of nature and of blind desire are against me, and as the proximate feeling-determinant, or the sum of proximate feeling-determinants, is the cause of volition, I may volitionise the wrong and the false — all the while, however, condemning myself and laying up remorse. Free- Will. 315 I have not worked freely at all, in so far as I have departed ever so little from the reason-affirmed end and motive. I act freely only when / act as / affirm. It is to be admitted, that it is feeling which finally discharges itself in the act of volition. Pure will and reason have fulfilled their function in the discrimina- tion of idea and the affirmation of law, in generating the emotions of reason, and in sustaining by innate neces- sity the striving after identification of self with the idea. Note, however, that all this involves feeling on the plane of reason. And not only so : for the law in the real of feeling, e.g., temperance, justice, etc., is not pathological but rational. The law is the idea in relations of feel- ings, constituted in feeling and for feeling, and yet, as law, it is rational, and non-pathological. But, it may be said, a volition in obedience to law, e.g., a just volition after prior deliberation and affirmation, con- sists in the subsumption of the idea of justice into self, and the consequent volition emerging out of that identity; and how can this volition to actualise a rational idea, be said to be the discharge of feeling ? The answer is, that feeling is always present in the volition. Eeason takes up feeling and inreasons it, but does not cancel it. And, again, as part of the same movement, feeling enters into reason and emotionalises it. There lie concealed, accordingly, in the idea, law, and motive-end of "justice," the feelings and the rela- tions of feelings and desires which have been legislated 3i6 Ethica, for. The movement of volition, in this particular case, first arose in the feelings of the conscious-subject as an attuent-subject, and these feelings have not been sup- pressed, but only directed by will-reason. For example ; within the appetitive sphere (presuming no moral sentiment as yet existing outside and above it) the idea "temperance" is dominant, and restrains the further indulgence of desire. This is the prospective feeling of the pain or discord which will follow excess, rationalised and enriched with the emotions of reason (including in these the striving after end), discharging itself in counteracting or inhibiting immediate desire. In the just act, again, there lie concealed in the rational idea of justice, affirmed as law, the altruistic feelings which, struggling against the permanent and steady pull of the self-regarding feelings, have obtained the mastery by the help of law-giving will-reason and the sustaining emotions of reason itself; and thereupon have discharged themselves in action. Will, then, or will-reason, is transcendental in that its function is, in Mr. Martineau's phrase, to determine the as yet undetermined. But the actual volition is involved in the concrete of feelings and real ends, strengthened by the transformation of reason itself into the real of feeling, and so volition is brought within the sphere of determining forces. The objection, accord- ingly, that free-will introduces fresh " energy " into the phenomenal world is met. It merely utilises the energy that already exists in man's own body, and if that is exhausted, I cannot either will or volitionise or think. Free-Will, 317 In the free determinations of reason there may be error (inadequate ideas), through the influence of weak- ness, or of obliquity of vision, or of passion. But we must assume that there is no error if we are to un- derstand how the embattled forces are drawn up on either side ; and though it involves repetition, let me enumerate them : — (1) We have the pure action of will-reason, determining end and law; and so affirming the idea which ought to control volition. But it is not in its nature, in so far as pure, to volitionise ; its function is already discharged. (2) This, however, it can do : under the stimulus of the form of end within it, it can and does sustain the continuity of its own activity in the continual repeti- tion to itself of the end, and in straining and hunger- ing after the end which is the fulfilment of itself. Its essence is movement continually returning into itself and going forth again under the stimulus of its final moment " end"; and this movement is further stimulated by the consciousness of the truth of the end whose autho- ritative claim as law it cannot repudiate (for this w^ould be to repudiate itself), though, under stress of weather, it may fail to obey. The reader will pardon my pressing this point: In a former treatise I have shown (briefly, it may be, but at sufficient length for metaphysical readers) that will, as initial moment in a dialectic movement, is the essential differentiate of man, that this first moment is pure activity, and that it seeks, and must always by 3 1 8 Ethica. its very nature seek, end. It is the striving of free spirit out of nature. Further, that the ends sought are in the sphere of the complex real and are at once dialytic idea which is a single, and a synthetic ideal, which is a rounded complex. In the field of motive, as else- where, will must constantly be moving towards idea and the ideal. It cannot help itself. In the crisis of volition it is always striving, with more or less consciousness, to identify itself with the moral ideal which has been generated by its own native activity. If my analysis of reason is sound, the characteristic of man striving after the idea and the ideal is very simply explained, and with it the character of the movement which we call free-will. (3) Will-reason has a further stimulus to actualise itself in the consciousness of abstract law and of duty, — of the moral " must," as content of its movement. (4) The above facts of pure reason yield the emotions of reason in which reason itself is seen to pass into the domain of feeling and volition. This is, again, a real content, though generated by reason. (5) There is in the idea and law, which has been affirmed, the content of pathological feeling, e.g.^ in the case of a volition involving justice, there are the altruistic feelings. As issue of the whole, the volition actualises itself — that is to say, it is either determined by the idea and the law in it, and identity of self with self, of reason with reason, already in thought attained, is actualised : or otherwise, the volition contradicts law and Ego. Free- Will. 319 For the forces on the other side are all the se//-regarding feelings, and all the stress of anarchical passion, which are very potent : with these the struggle is carried on. These, it may be, succeed in actualising themselves, and while there is thus a resultant identity of the attuent-^Vih]QQ.t Yfiih. itself, there is ipso facto a contra- diction of the Ego as will-reason and giver of law — a contradiction in the heart of reason. This argument is of some importance, as those who recall Kant's insoluble difficulty must know. It may seem strange that with so many forces on the side of good, evil should ever be done. But such is man, and so deeply is he involved in the forces of nature ; and the real as nature is anarchy. It is only man's head that is above the streaming waters of neces- sary sequence. He transcends nature, but he is yet so involved in it that he can only, after a long education, establish his practical sovereignty and bring nature into identity with reason. The whole question is at bottom a metaphysical question as well as a psychological one, and without metaphysic there can be no science of ethics, as with- out free-will there is no ethics at all. Man is, in the latter event, rolled round with " stones and stocks and trees." Freedom or fate, these are the sole alternatives ; and whether we call the ground of the necessary sequence God or Devil matters not one jot. The moral is that man should be trained and train himself to the habit of sustaining will in the persistent contemplation of idea and law. In this habituation lies 320 Ethica, his safety. This is ethical discipline, the discipline of duty, as distinguished from ethical instruction, which consists in the filling of the mind with ideas — the nutriment of moral sentiment as distinguished from the discipline of the free self-determining will. And here let me introduce another consideration. The will of man, as dialectic, is the Divine Will, emerg- ing out of the attuent subject under finite conditions and in such a manner that the subject functions it. Let a man recognise this (and this is the essence of religion) and he will find that not only can his will, through its self-determining essence, sustain itself in steadfast con- templation of the idea as the truth of doing with a view to actualisation, but that by habituating himself to the daily contemplation of the infinite Will-reason of which he is a finite manifestation, he can draw strength from an inexhaustible fountain. This is prayer. " He that seeks shall find." Here, again, the question of educa- tion enters — the young should be accustomed to pray to God, the father of spirits. Eeligion is an essential part of the education of a human being. The true relation of religion to ethics is indicated in what has just been said. Theology, as distinguished from religion, has unhappily too often denied Christ, and thrown itself on the side of the materialistic theory of other-world pain and pleasure. If that which is affirmed as law is not volitionised, will does not effect itself: will is defeated, the per- sonality overcome, and the attuent subject it is which Free- Will. 321 volitionises, just as a dog volitionises. The subject takes possession of the personality and uses it for its natural desires. We can thus say, with Kant, but on better scientific grounds it seems to me : " Freedom, in relation to the inner legislation of the reason, is alone a power : the possibility of deviating from this is an impotence." If volition or willing be in accordance with will, it is free ; if not so determined, it is deter- . mined by that which is not in the ivill. The will is always autonomous, always free; and a willing or volition in discord with will is always, in its relation to the Ego, heteronomons. The man so willing is always conscious of inner discord with law and freedom and of the enslavement of his true self. We are thus personally responsible for our volitions, and freedom may assert itself in each and every voli- tion. Doubtless there are many particular cases where passion is in truth a madness, and the personality is for the time dethroned. This we find also where an evil habit is formed. The habit of vice is then a kind of chronic insanity. But, as both Aristotle and Kant as well as others, have pointed out, the responsibility is simply to be dated back to the innumerable prior acts whereby character has been self-consciously formed, and in every one of which the man was a free self- referent will. In conclusion, it will be noticed that I gave the go- bye, to start with, to the only argument which could lead any man even to raise the question of free-will. The X 32 2 Ethica, cosmical physical series is necessary : not only is its end in its beginning (a strange position, by the bye, for sen- sationalists who deny final cause), but every step in the time-series which leads to the end is determined in the beginning, and the whole reeled off in pre-determined sequence. Therefore, so it is with every movement of mind. Now here, it is manifest, the assumption is that mind is a physical fact. But if mind be not a physical fact, then surely the " scientific " mind will not be so unscientific as to carry a necessary conception out of the physical and plant it in the heart of that which is opposed to the physical. The theological necessarians saw much more deeply into the problem than modern determinists have done. The government of a One God — primal cause and con- tinuous sustainer of all things — His providence. His prescience, His omniscience, His sovereignty, His omni- potence seemed to them to be all imperilled by the breaking of the least link in the iron chain of fate. Spinoza, too, was a theological fatalist (though he pre- sented God as Nature). Now the answer to this is that I have no rational right to such a conception — in other words, that an absolute synthesis which will explain the inner- relations of the infinite to the finite is impossible to man. He cannot even find materials for answering the prior question, liow is the finite pos- sible at all? Given a time-less Being, how is time possible to that Being ? And yet the finite exists, time exists, nay all things are constructed on the very prin- ciple of finite individualism infinitely repeated. If it Free-Will. 323 be impossible for us to say how these things are pos- sible, we are still less competent to put onr finger on the relation subsisting between the infinite and the finite — the all-being and the particular atom. I decline to attempt to solve an insoluble problem. I am finite, and I confine myself within my own limits. I do not deny that it is possible to form universal conceptions which will seem to explain the organic whole in its parts and the parts in the one organic whole, and that a man may rest in some such explanation as a sub- jective conviction. But objective and demonstrable truth is here quite beyond us, and we have to resort to anthropomorphic analogy and the philosophical imagination to eke out our guesses. At best or at worst, there is a remote possibility that it may all be otherwise than experience and the criticism of experi- ence teach. But the loaf in my hand is solid eating, and I will not decline to eat it because of a remote pos- sibility that after all it may not be a loaf. Life is too urgent to allow standing-room to such nugae difficiles. No thinker, of course, is insensible to the antinomy. Finite reason presents itself in the scheme of things as freedom — the freedom of spirit. This very same reason then proceeds by a necessary dialectic to affirm an iron- bound sequence of universal causation. Thus, freely acting, reason freely places itself in chains. Where does it find grounds for this inner contradiction ? Only in the fact that the sequence of necessary causality is the category under which it must conceive the physical universe. But we are not dealing with the physical 324 Ethica. and its categories, but with spirit and its categories, the first and chief of which is freedom, out of which indeed self-consciousness springs. The necessarian conceives Mind-universal as ground of things under a physical category. What, now, does he linow of Mind-universal ? Very little ; and what he does know has no significance, no probability, nay no possibility as knowledge, except in so far as it is a universalising of mind-finite. And this mind-finite, we know, emerges out of an enslaved conscious-subject as freedora — as a power placed in the midst of what to it is infinite contingency, which contingency its specific function is to control to ends of knowledge and conduct. Accepting the analogy, are we not bound rather to dismiss the physical category altogether, and either to conceive Mind-universal as itself dealing with a (some- how self-created) contingency, or to decline entirely the task of correlating it with the finite or the possi- bility of the finite ? Eather than admit a discord and contradiction in the very heart of reason, is it not more reasonable to posit the possibility of a circle of con- tingency within the orb of the All-Being, and so to deny the right of the categories of the phenomenal to usurp a place which is not theirs, which is what they do when they proudly affect to bring the noumenal — God Himself — under their sway? Is any man pre- pared to say (to use the words of an acute contem- porary writer), that " possibilities that fail to be actu- alised never were possibilities at all " ? Remember that there actually is an inner discord Free- Will, 325 revealed by reason, and that the only alternative to freedom is to conceive the universe of things and spirits as from the first necessarily discordant, and free reason as necessarily committing suicide in the very crisis of afi&rming its freedom. Is it not wiser, is it not more ' scientific,' to limit ourselves to what we hnow, and to believe that what we do not, and cannot, know is some- how in accord with knowledge and knowing? We who start from the Ego and its genesis as basis, and all sound philosophy must do this, may believe in con- tingency as somehow within the sphere of God's neces- sary activity. Note. No man is annoyed by such recognition of the neces- sity under which he acts (a determinist writer says, and thinks it clinches his argument), as is involved in our predicting how he will in a given case certainly act. True, but consider how this is to be understood : — In the moral sphere, outside the legal, it is the motive which I identify with myself, and proceed to actualise outside myself, which is to be approved or reproved, lauded or reprehended. Self is merely formal to begin with ; but I have now given it a real content, and, as such, it has become my real concrete self, and consequently / am to be praised or blamed. It is simply a case of the dualism of the universe — in which the identification of the " other " with finite self- conscious reason is effected — an identification which, from the cosmical point of view, is always operative : the one projecting the ' many ' and recovering the differ- ences into itself. Accordingly, a man is so far from 326 Ethica. being annoyed that you can predict his actions, i.e, the motives which will govern his volitions under par- ticular circumstances, that he is indignant if you predict of him anything save what he did (if he did the right). Why so ? This is no impeachment of his freedom, for his personality has been busy all his life identifying the real (the "other") with himself — the formal self- identical ' somewhat ' which constitutes him. The real is no longer outside him, but is only the real side of his formal self. It is himself as now actualised by himself in a particular volition ; and to say that he might act in contradiction to it is to accuse him of a self-contradiction, and to deny his freedom. The Ego and its dialectic is a universal, and an individual man, as distinguished from other individual men, is precisely that portion of the real which he has reduced to his own identity. Is the Will always Good? 327 CHAP. XXXIX. — IS THE WILL ALWAYS GOOD ? It may seem to follow from what we have said that the Will, as distinguished from willing or volition, is always good. And this is the fact, in so far as will- reason is legislative. The will-reason, when reflecting in calm moments on past volitions and their motives, or on the volitions and motives of others, or of the thinker himself in imaginary cases, may of course err in its determination of the good content of will in this, that, or the other special case, as it has often erred in the historical evolu- tion of ethical standards. It af&rms the best possible, and the best possible for an intelligence at any one stage of his progress to perfect vision is good and right. Ideas and ideals have a history, both in the individual and in the race. Having affirmed the true end and (therefore) content of will, of which the formula is "this ought to be/' and having subsumed that end as law into the pei- sonality, of which act the formula is " this shall be, and the worth of my personality is involved in this being, the motive-content of my volition," the will- reason, as has been said, is then, as a pure process, exhausted. The actualising volition is the work of the feeling or complex of feelings which are then 328 Ethica. and thereafter the strongest. This being so, the will-reason or will in man is in its operation always good ; and the essence of evil is to be found in the suspension of will and the independent and un- guaranteed volitionising of non-rational feeling. The question is a curious and delicate one, and merits the attention of moral analysts. The mental state which we have to consider is that in which the volition, as effected, is in contradiction to the law of good as at the same moment affirmed by reason (will) ; and this has to be considered under two aspects — {a) The volition of the wrong and evil caused by the abnormal excitement of the feeling which is the content of that volition. ' This is the case in which a man is said to yield to the brute strength of passion or temptation. In these circumstances a man does what he certainly would not do if he gave himself time for passion to cool. Even in the highest excitement of passion, provided it falls vshort of madness, there runs alongside the passionate volition (say the avenging of a sudden insult by immediately plunging a knife into the insulter's body), a thread of conscious disapproval. The interesting point here is, in what relation does the volition — the discharge of mere feeling — stand to the will-reason and personality of the agent ? Is the volition a mere outcome of the animal or attuent man (as when one beast springs upon another), or is the will-reason, the Ego, in any way involved ? The answer, I think, is that just as sense-impressions of the external may be so exciting in their character as Is the Will always Good? 329 to make perception impossible, so feeling-impulses may be so exciting as to make the action of will-reason impossible. The mass or intensity of the " real " is such as to prevent the " formal " in man from working. Consequently, however blamable the agent may be on other grounds, his blamableness in the particular case is resolvable into the total suspension of his will- reason. Accordingly, the will-reason has no part in the act, and is, therefore, neither good nor bad — in- deed, in so far as it asserts for itself a vague exist- ence in consciousness, it is good : good as formally legislative. (J) But the second case presents more difficulty. A man has a deliberate purpose of injustice or malice, and seeks, under the influence of this passion, to give effect to his hate. There is apparently no excitement of passion in the ordinary sense. He takes his time, and calmly adapts means to ends, and even may undergo much bodily suffering and sacrifice in order to carry out his diabolical purpose. And, yet, there is here too an intense excitement of feeling ; but it diffuses itself over a longer period, and is persistent and pertinacious. What is wanting in mass is present in intensity. It would seem that the man has calmly subsumed into his personality a motive purely malignant and makes use of all the powers of his reason (the root of which, remember, is will) to give effect to his malicious purpose — even, as in the case of the traitor, assuming a mask of friendliness. This question has been referred to before, when it ^^o EtJiica. was pointed out that such a man might be said to be formally virtuous. He is not truly virtuous because virtue means the effecting of a good and law-affirmed motive through an effort which involves restriction and pain in sensibility. There is no such moral effort in the case of the malignant man : his course is easy in so far as the sensibility is concerned. But it may be difficult, or even arduous, so far as reason and the adaptation of means to ends are concerned. The will-reason in search of ends, of motives, of the truth of doing, is never morally wrong. It affirms the best, in the given circumstances, as right and law. But the same will has, in the supposed case, sub- sumed an evil motive into the personality, the for- mula of purpose being " I will to do this evil." Under the influence of a strong emotion it subsumes the wicked feeling as purpose and content of volition and pursues it deliberately, even though it be in contra- diction to the will itself as reason and as legislative of ends and law. f Thus not only may momentary passion, like madness, overpower the will ; but the will itself may, in the very teeth of the law-afifirmed conclusion of its own reason- movement, lend a kind of sanction, and consequently all the powers of free reason, to the bad motive. " Evil, be thou my good." That this is unfortunately a true record of experience we shall see more clearly if we set aside the excitement and constraint of a passionate purpose of evil and con- ceive a very ordinary case — a life of deliberate and Is the Will always Good ? 331 calculated selfishness or individualism. Will, with reason and personality, is brought into the service of an unworthy end — a man's lower interests — his interests as a subject-individual as opposed to his good as a per- sonality. 1^0 volition in such a case is disinterested, because every volition has an end ulterior to the apparent and ostensible end. Thus we are led to the conclusion that while will as searcher for truth and law — in brief, as legislative — is always good, it may yet hand over itself, and all its powers, to the service of evil. There may be, therefore, a bad will. In short, men may be devils. With a wrong volition, arising from ignorance, or effected under the stress of passion, our duty is to deal tenderly: with deliberately wicked wills our business is to reform them, or, if that is impossible, to find a way of sup- pressing them. While this is true, it is wrong to say that even in cases of deliberate and sustained malignity there is inner harmony. The agent is constantly justifying himself to himself in the vain effort to get rid of the inevitable discord within him. He cannot but have a certain ideal of duty; but it is as a "still small voice." It follows from this that while passion can use even the Ego and the transcendental free-will implicit in it for its own purposes, the freedom is a delusive freedom — a formal freedom merely. There is an end, but the end is not afi&rmed as law. Spinoza is right when he says that the will is then only free when the volition is in harmony with the affirmation of the true law of 332 Ethica. human nature in general, or in the given case. And thus we may say that the true law is the necessary law — that is to say, it is that whereby alone a man can truly realise himself: perfect freedom is (so ex- plained) necessity. Indeed we may say generally that the individual will is then only absolutely free when it is the organ of the universal Will. But, on the other hand, the individual would not even in such an event be free had it not first in its free functioning, as reason, subsumed the universal will into the individual will. The in- dividual will seeks and subsumes the universal and makes it its own, just as it does in its relations to universals in nature. By the universal Will we do not of course mean the moment of will in the universal dialectic but the dialectic itself — that is to say, Keason- universal. But while will or will-reason is always good formally as legislative, and also really inasmuch as it does the best it can, it may yet, as I have said, err — that is to say, it may both affirm and subsume the wrong volitionary motive. In the individual as in the race the progress towards moral truth (end, idea, and law) is slow and by devious paths, because the content of feeling is as various and complex as are the ever- varying external relations in which it is involved. This leads us to consider the evolution (so-called) of ethics. Historical Ethics, 333 CHAPTER XL. — HISTORICAL ETHICS. It will now appear that in the matter of inner sensi- bility, as in that of outer sense, will, under the stimu- lus of its implicit form of end, projects a priori ends, which ends, when ascertained, are not merely substance of knowledge, but motives of volition. They command doing because of the " ought " in them, and they impel to doing because of the element of feeling in them. All experience, all external relations, merely feed the native inner forces in man, and make them grow to their true proportions of maturity. The final aim is, as in the case of all organisms, self-realisation. But man stands apart from other organisms in the essential respect that as a self-conscious Ego he has to organise himself. Self- realisation is realisation or fulfilment of self hy self. Being lifted as will-reason out of the stream of neces- sary series, he has to find a way for himself, i.e. law for himself. This is the practical ethical problem for each individual and for the race. As in the field of pure cognition he seeks the truth of knowing which is the science of things, so also he seeks the truth of doing which is the science of personal life. This truth of doing, however, in view of its ultimate significance for him as a person, is no longer mere science or truth, but the "good" as end and sum of his nature, and as such, the " ought." 334 Ethica. The true and good generally are to constitute the permanent ends and motives of his free activity; but the various subordinate ends or ideas, which together con- stitute the true and good, and which he is to subsume as law-given motives, can be determined finally only by their relation to a supreme end formal and real — the fulness of life through law. A man may err in respect of the idea which his will formally subsumes as motive, but this does not affect the goodness of his will {i.e, his truthful search for law) nor yet of his willing or volition. The will-reason, when it retains its domin- ance and subsumes law-given idea, is never other than good. The whole " notion " of man comprehends an attuent conscious subject, 'plus the will and its effluent cate- gories ; but we saw that this does not mean that the will, or reason of which it is the root, is of the nature of a separate entity, mechanically attached to the conscious subject as a crown may be put on a king's head : it is, on the contrary, a new self -initiated move- ment in and through an organised conscious entity, which, up to the moment of the new energising, is to be regarded as mere subject — not Ego. This conscious subject functions will. It is not to be supposed that the science of life, which is a system of ends and processes, is to be attained in a day, any more than the science of things which also is a system of ends and processes. The true and good is not this or that desire, or emotion, or aggregate of desires or emotions: it is an end prescribed by free Historical Ethics. 335 reason after intromitting with desires and emotions as raw material merely ; and with these in all their rela- tions to nature and to other men, i.e. to environment. For it is only by the externalising of a motive that we become fully conscious of its character, and ascertain whether in a specific act it fulfils itself or not. An individual man, therefore, like humanity at large, can only gradually find his way to the true and good, and, at each successive stage of his progress, do the best he can in accordance with the ideals possible at the time. Tradition, which is our education, hands down certain attained results in the form of motive-ideas, which we call virtues or duties ; and this transmitted experience each generation corrects, purifies, and amplifies. In the progress of ages and under the influence of changing circumstances and ever-widening experience, as well as of the inner striving after the ideal, man finally attains to the science of himself which is the law of that self. There then stand revealed to him, in their full amplitude, the conditions of the law : and it only remains that he be disciplined, by himself and by the general forces of humanity, into willing or volition in accordance with law, so that thereby the formal reason may find full and adequate content, and enjoy a perfect harmony in and with the real. This perfect union, interpenetration or identity of formal and real, is alone the fulness of life — self-realisation. Accordingly, morality is a growth. The movement, which is to be consummated in the union of formal and real, in which the real is penetrated by reason and 2,^6 Ethica, reason penetrated and filled with the real, is, so to speak, asymptotic. There must ever be a strife, until the man passes away into a sphere where he has cast off the burden of the phenomenal, and the ' subject ' is finally identified with reason in the unity of the Ego. The law, to which man owes duty, lies implicit in ideas, and, ultimately, in the true notion and idea of man ; but as the idea is completed knowledge or truth, ideas and the idea must have a history, just as a know- ledge of the ideas and laws of external nature has a history. Each man is, after all, only a unit of force and feeling in a movement which is universal : nor is he always aware of the end to which he is tending. In so far as this universal movement concerns man, we call it the history of humanity. It is ethical forces that are the most potent in shaping the life of a nation and its relations to the rest of mankind. They primarily determine religion, jurisprudence, education, and domes- tic and foreign polity ; nay, it is of ethical conceptions that Art is mainly the reflex, though Art has other functions. The capacity for progress lies, as we have seen, in reason ; but that there should be such a thing as pro- gress at all does not lie in the possession of a certain capacity for thinking, but in the fact that man is a reason which by its essential nature must always initiate, must always search for idea and the ideal, must always strive. The correlation of himself with external forces with a view to the maintenance of his animal organism, for long exclusively, and always to a large extent, neces- Historical Ethics. ^iZl sarily engages the energies of man. It is partly on this account, partly because certain external social conditions alone afford the occasion and possibility of advance, that he is slow to find his way to a perfect and harmonious organisation of himself; but, from first to last, the organisation is an organisation of inner forces and potencies, the external being only either the occasion or the resultant of the inner co-ordination of feeling and of legislation for feeling. The question which he has through the ages to solve is a very complex one, as regards the operation and direction of even good springs of activity; and hence, in all attempts to philosophise ethics, the reflective moralist is often baffled by the complex nature of the subject-matter of his investigation. As the notion and idea of man unfold themselves in the course of the ages, the law progresses with this unfolding. The stable equilibrium of harmony exist- ing in any one age is disturbed, and we have to readjust our centre of gravity. !N"one the less are the law and the idea there from the beginning. The fruit- tree, with its spring promise and its autumnal fruit, contained all its potencies in the unconsidered germ. It is the conception which men have of Man as an organic unit, and as the unit of an organism, that from age to age determines moral conceptions and moral law. The facts, however, of moral law and duty, and their essential characteristics in relation to the real of feeling, are from the first, and they are permanent : it is the knowledge of the nature, full significance, and area of law that pro- Y 338 Ethica, gresses and gradually grows richer. Nature and spirit alike move in Time to the fulfilment of themselves. Among many lesser steps in human progress we shall find some more clearly defined than others. That the progress is evolutionary is unquestionable, if by evolution we mean that the lower and simpler con- ceptions precede the higher and more complex, lead to the higher and more complex, and make the higher possible. If, again, we use the term "evolution" in a Darwinian sense, and say that moral progress and intellectual progress advance by gradations in- finitely small, that the stronger or better elements in man's nature, — those elements which from the first trvly constitute his nature, — kill off the weaker and them- selves alone survive, their strength or betterness being shown by their harmony with inner and outer environ- ment, i.e. with the conditions of the possibility of the self-realisation of a rational and emotive being, we do not doubt that this is true : were it not true, God and nature would be on the side of evil. But it is only, after all, a way of stating the always admitted fact of historical growth. The evolution hypothesis can give us, at best, simply the modus operandi of growth ; and I am not sure that we may not daily see it complete all its stages before our eyes in the intellectual and moral growth of our own children Thus far evolution is true, and not new. But evolution as a merely mechanical process wherein num- berless accidental variations or spurts of a purposeless nature perish, while one survives because of its chance Historical Ethics. 339 fitness to its environment, is, it seems to me, a mere passing phase of the philosophy of nature. The simple and obvious fact of a steady progress (allowing for occa- sional deviations, mistakes, and failures) from simpler to more complex, from lower to higher, is itself evidence of a persistent purpose. There is in things an inner law of growth, and of growth which is on the way upward. That natural selection, in the sense of survival through adaptation to actual external conditions, is an expression for one of the agencies in this evolutionary process, — this upward movement to the fulfilment of cosmical ends, — may be freely admitted ; for each individual is part of a system of things on which he acts and which reacts on him. More than this evolution is not ; and I cannot doubt that a future generation of men of science will assign its true place to the Darwinian hypothesis on purely physico-scientiiic, and not merely (as I now per- haps rashly do) on philosophic, grounds. In this connection the words of Spinoza, in his Be Intellectus Emendatione, are, if we give them a moral reference, not inapt : " As men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater per- fection, and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools and to fresh feats of workmanship until they arrived at making, with small expenditure of labour, the vast number of 340 Ethica. complicated mechanisms which they now possess; so in like manner the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself intellectual instruments whereby it acquires strength for performing other intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom." In this sense there is evolution, but it is not evolution from one specific entity to another specific entity, and no one would say that it is Darwinian evolution at all; iQ,\,fTom the first, moin is man and not anything else. In any case it perhaps matters little ; for the process of cosmical evolution, which is supposed ultimately to have culminated in man (and a process there must have been) does not affect the interpretation of man as a distinctive organism when once we have got him. In our ethical and metaphysical speculations we start from man. Granting Darwinian presumptions, there is yet a ;point at which the immanent universal Will moves within the subject-consciousness and constitutes self-conscious Man. It is from this point that we must begin, in our endeavours to say what man is and what he must do. Evolution is a much-abused word — a phrase which is constantly being thrown at us to cover loose thinking, affecting to explain by what itself needs explanation. There is growth, certainly, in the ethical conceptions of man, but I cannot see the evolution in the specific Darwinian sense, unless we are to apply the term to the growth of a tree. From the moment men lived Historical Ethics. 34 1 in companies, for example, there was always altruism. They coalesced in societies 'because there was, in each individual, altruistic emotion, and the needs of human nature had to find expression in external forms. The advances made in moral conceptions of an altruistic kind have been in two directions : (1) The progress towards the inner harmony of justice — the balance of the altruistic emotions with self -regard- ing desires as motives of volition. Every day of our lives this is still going on within each of us. Every existence has for its prime task perseverance in suo esse. But the esse of the existence of man, which is the health of the whole man as made possible through harmony, takes, by virtue of the felt community of hei7ig of which each is a fragment, and by virtue of the capacity of reason for universals, a wide sweep, comprehending, indeed, the uni- verse of things, and by virtue of the further community of feeling embracing other existences of a like kind. Were man not a self-conscious being, and so capable of recognising this community as a universal, he would be simply an animal individuum, like any other. He is an animal individuum, it is true, and hence all activity, even moral activity, starts from that basis. But he is more than animal; as a self-conscious Ego he has higher purposes which must be embraced and satisfied in his life, if he is to persevere in suo esse. The most potent of all these, as mere dynamic forcCy is precisely this community of being and feeling, and the capacity for universals which distinguishes the Ego from the mere conscious empirical subject, harmonises 342 Ethica. its complex nature and so enables it to attain to health. As experience, individual and collective, grows, he feels his way to the end which self-conscious reason, more or less explicitly, seeks ; which end is Justice. He may, he must, err either in the too much or too little. All we imperatively demand of him is justice. We applaud the hero who errs by excess, because we see in his ethical idealism a sublime vindication of altruistic emotion ; that is to say, the victory of community of feeling over individual isolation — the universal over the particular ; we applaud, in short, the self-sacrifice of a man to the idea of humanity. But it is justice as imperative law (and not heroism), that we are seeking; and we advance from negative justice as law to positive justice as law in proportion as the feeling of humanity, of the universal, grows in us. Meanwhile, we from time to time record our distinct advance in the form of positive public enactment or recognised convention. (2) The second direction in advance — the outer — has been, like the first, in respect of the sweep of our altruistic activities. In our personal relations from hour to hour we have constant difficulty in correlating our emotions and desires. So complex is life. And when we contemplate the infinite complication of our relations to the community of which we are citizens, it is not surprising that we should do evil with the best intentions. We see misery, for example, and this intensifies our innate altruism, and leads us to ask per- tinent questions as to the form and direction which our emotion of justice has taken in the past, and as to the Historical Ethics. 343 adequacy of our conception. The external relations of man are thus gradually moulded so as to be a truer reflex of his inner advance. He makes mistakes, doubtless, — mistakes are made all round; but they are not moral blunders, but the result of intellectual confusions. And this is the moral history of a Society — the history of the inner growth of justice, and the record of the conformity of customs and positive laws with this inner ever-advancing movement. I can see no more evolution (in the strict sense which involves the emergence of new instincts, new functions, and new organs) in all this growth than I see in the growth of the knowledge of the stars. Both alike are fed by experience, both alike are the search for law at the command of will-reason at the heart of which is the form of end, and which is ever producing and reproducing its own stimulus to activity, ever put- ting questions in its own dialectic form, and finding its answers in the frank response of the real, because the real also is itself instinct with Eeason-universal. The empiricist who finds a universal solution in Darwinism (at least, as that is expounded) belongs to the class who, in their supreme self-satisfaction, cannot think of the religious superstitions of the past or present without impatient contempt. Does he himself not make as great a demand on the credulity of sane intel- lects as the basest superstition ever did, when he asks them to regard the universe as a series of happy-go- lucky mechanical and casual spurts or sports, whose 344 Etkica. continuity has depended on their finding the necessary bread and cheese all ready provided by a series of other casual spurts, antecedent or concomitant ? There is, in truth, no moral evolution in any sense different from the evolution of reason, which is conse- quent on the contact of reason with the real in all its complexity. The nascent, but innate, characteristics of emotion and reason are in the man, and they grow to a full consciousness of themselves through external relations. The content of the emotions, their richness, their quantity, their quality, and their direction, but not their existence, depend on the real relations of life. But notwithstanding this, all morality, every moral act, is transacted within the man, and the inner debate is a debate as to the reason-regulated emotion — the idea, which, as law, is to be now, or at any time, causally active and actualised. Inner non-contradic- tion or harmony is the guarantee of that law. It may not be irrelevant here to say a word on Eeligion, as the final expression of the ideal absolute synthesis, in its historical aspect. The religious sentiment whose object is God, is, as we now experience it, highly complex. If moral con- ceptions are of slow growth, and largely dependent on outward occasion and experience, still more gradual must be the evolution of the religious consciousness, as at once determining its | object and determined in return by the nature of that object. It is more gradual, because a system of moral ends has an opportunity of Historical Ethics, 345 correcting itself from day to day by the perceived results of human activity, inner motive being constantly made visible and palpable as externalised, whereas the idea of the Universal in things can always be discon- nected from the actualities of life, and there is no external corrective of the false and inadequate. Hence the crude conceptions of a power "not ourselves" nor yet the sensible things around us, neither subject nor object, but above and behind them, must wait for their elevation and purification on the progress of moral ideas and reasoned thought on nature, and, above all, of thought on thought itself. The origin of the notion — God — has to be sought for in attuent feeling as well as in pure reason. The essential characters of the notion (as has been already said) are the feeling of Being-universal, and the causal movement (one moment in which is the teleo- logical) as that is woven into the form of percipi- ence in its simplest and most rudimentary activity, and constituting human reason. In and through this movement we apprehend a universal movement out of Being-universal which satisfies its own need by moving towards ends which are ideas, and to these in coTicreto (ideals). Thus, Being-infinite and primary causal ground, process and ideals (as first and last in one and the same movement), are all implicit in the notion — God, in so far as it is an intellectual notion. Thus man is not, never is, without God. On the side of the mere attuent subject, the feelings of fear, hope, and subjection to power greater than ourselves (in 34^ Ethica. whatever form or forms it may present itself to the untutored imagination) associate themselves with the unknown, and thus stimulate the vague strivings and apprehendings of reason. And it is the function of this reason, by the gradual revealing of the science of man and nature, gradually to transmute these mere animal feelings into awe, reverence, devotion, and submission ; and finally, to exhibit God as the God of law and of love. The fears which in an inchoate civilisation led man to appease the terrible and infinite power by which his life was encompassed and threatened, now give place to faith and rational worship. Thus faith is at once belief and trust in God as the God of love through law, and as the Father of human spirits which he is leading by a way that He knows. The union of reason and feeling in the notion we thus form of God is consummated; and perfect love casteth out fear. God and man are reconciled. The daily spiritual sacrifice to the ideal, transacting itself within the soul of every striving man, is now seen to be the true mean- ing of those external oblations which were the crude, but significant, expedients of infant man to harmonise himself with the universal. His purpose in doing so was simply to appease the wrath of a possibly hostile, certainly, to his limited vision, arbitrary, power. It requires no argument to show that the true notion of God on the side of feeling and of reason must be of very slow growth, and dependent on many prior con- clusions as to man and life. The history of the notion Historical Ethics, 347 is the history of religion. But from the beginning the notion is there. In its crude and even grotesque, no less than in its rational, forms, it exercises a direct influence on conduct: but ethics would remain were the religious idea to vanish. When we say that the moral law is the law of God, we merely say that the universal reason has so constituted man that through the moral law alone can he fulfil himself and attain the good. The divine process in man is towards a moral order, as in the physical universe it is towards a physical order. Universals must govern the particular by the mere fact of their being universals. They carry their might in their bosom — the might of truth and law ; but emptied of the notion of God they lose touch with the Infinite. Thus step by step man rises, until he sees the One- universal as the sole real, and becomes aware that he, as a person, has to identify himself with that sole real in its activity in himself and in the world which world is God, seeking the fulfilment of his own eternal reality in time and space. Between the personality of each and God there is no chasm ; on the other hand, the self-surrender always presumes the denial of self. For have we not found both in this and the previous treatise that the law of the personality is that it can fulfil itself only through that which is not itself and yet itself, that is to say, in and through universals; and finally, in and through the sole universal, the one living and true God ? 348 Ethica. Has such a conception of the relations of man's finite spirit to the universal Spirit no influence on morality ? Does it not transform and exalt man's life to realise these relations ? Conclusion, 349 SURVEY AND CONCLUSION. In the previous treatise, to which I have had fre- quently to refer in the course of the past argument, I endeavoured to subject knowing in its genesis to a new analytic. In the course of analysis, it appeared that certain dialectic percepts are given to us in the rudi- mentary act of perceiving a sense-presentation, and that these (given as a unity, the moments in which are only logically, but not really, separable) constitute the pure notion of God as reason, and also the true causal notion in its completeness. The universal beent- reason, so ascertained as in rebus, is thus revealed to us as a unity — the unity, which we name Absolute- causal-being ; cause containing in it the kinetic as well as the formal and teleological moments, and being con- stitutive at once of nature and of the notion, God. For the symbolic words Natura naturans, Natura naturata, we accordingly substitute Ratio innaturans, Ratio innatttrata. "We are thus necessarily conscious of things as in God. The kinetic moment in cause, which must be the first movement out of pure and infinite Being (the unconditioned possibility of condi- tions), is, if we are to separate the moments of the one rational reality, to be called Will. Absolute-causal-being is thus immanent universal 350 . Ethica, being and reason, immanent in all things and in the subject or attuent consciousness of man ; but at that stage, being as yet in nature, subject to its own phenomenal (material) conditions of space and time, and involved in a necessary sequent series. At this point, immanent reason rises clear of the phenomenal, and what has hitherto been hypo-phenomenal becomes, in that emergence, hyper-phenomenal or transcendental. As pure will, functioned by the attuent conscious subject and therefore still under finite conditions, it now turns back on phenomena and its own conscious subject to interpret them ; and its moments in doing this constitute the pure reason of man, or the a priori categories. These are all implicit in the one primal movement, which is percipience. The movement, then, in man which we call will- reason is the immanent Universal Eeason still sub- ject to the limitations of nature (and therefore individual and finite), though above them to the extent of surveying, co-ordinating, and regulating them. This will-reason knows its own finitude, it is true, and so far may (fallaciously) be said to be infinite. An entity which knows its own finitude knows ipso facto the fact of the infinite as outside itself. But it is the infinite as Twt itself which it knows, whereas it is the finite as itself which it at the same time and in the same act knows. Out of the necessary moments of will, the a priori categories, of which we have spoken, spring as a unity. As regards the conscious subject: — the first result Conclusion, 351 of the movement within it is the constituting of Ego or Personality out of mere subjectivity (this from -a logical point of view being first, but, chronologically, being the last result to become explicit). As regards nature again, or the real of sense, the total of the external : — the data of impression were summarised in the a posteriori categories. These are existent and alive to sense, and are the feeling side of the fundamental dualism ; but they are dead to knowledge, until will-reason comes on the scene, and, through the a priori categories, articulates and interprets them, but in no sense (natural or non-natural) projects or creates them. The reason which finite reason finds in them is already there. What is thus interpreted is, in truth, the real of Absolute-causal-being set over against me and independent of me, but not an independent or substantial real in itself. Substantial reality of the external is simply not to be found in the analysis of the matter of knowledge, as a datum. The external is the modus existendi of the universal immanent Reason, which also, like man himself, lives a dualistic life. To this immanent Reason the spirit of man is closer than it can be to the external real. For, It is his being and his finite reason. It he knows ; all else he can but partially know. Nay more, he cannot perceive anything save as in God, for He is given to reason as Absolute- causal-being in the very primal act of the rational pro- cess, which primal act is percipience. All this is not put forth as opinion, but is submitted as the demon- strated result of what may be called a genetic analytic. 352 Ethica. True metaphysic, it has also been apparent, in so far as it is a possible science as opposed to " speculation" (which, however, is legitimate — nay, an inevitable essay of reason — as concerned with an absolute synthesis), can be yielded only by a criticism of knowing; and this criticism will yield its most stable results if pur- sued in accordance with the genetic method. Passing to Ethics, I have endeavoured to show that will, as kinetic initiation containing within itself a 'priori form of end as perpetual stimulus, is metaphysic- ally free and supersensible ; that while the aim of all science is the filling of the a priori categories, thereby to reduce to self-consciousness the idea of each thing as a harw.onia rei — ultimately as part of a harmonia rerum; so, in the ethical sphere, the aim is such a harmonia morum — a harmony of inner causal motive — as shall complete the self-realisation of man ; that is to say, the realisation of Self by Self. To discover the law of self-realisation, we have to proceed as in the investigation of law generally, the object here being the organic unit, man. The idea within the notion, man, being formal (dialectic or reason), the formal in him is supreme in the practical as it is in the theoreti- cal spheres of activity, and is source of moral law as law, and its correlative, duty. Thus, ethical complete- ness may be said to be a realised self-consciousness or self-identity of reason in and through the real — the transformation of the real of feeling into reason* As regards the real of feeling, or the content of Conclusion, 353 volitions — the natural body of the Ego, the attuent subject which functions will-reason — I have said that the will-reason projects, as aim or end of search, a harnionia morum in a complex organism: this harmony is the instructor of law, and is ascertained, empirically through feeling. It is concerned with motive forces within : and with external results, only in so far as they fulfil or fail to fulfil motive. It thereby discovers, slowly, the law or conditions of self-realisation, finding this law, which is always the final aim (implicit or explicit) of search, to be not only positive but restrictive, and, as such, realisable only through pain and sacrifice, the final realisation being the identity of the real with the formal — a concrete, as opposed to a merely formal, self-identity. The Ego must be always stretching forward to new ideas and ideals by the necessity of its own nature as revealed in the moments of the dialectic. As, inter alia, self-realisation is shown to be possible only through the satisfaction of goodwill and the love of goodwill as dynamic forces in the domain of feeling, a link is supplied for ethics with politics, and the latter is shown to have an ethical, and not a merely mechan- ical, basis. If society be the soil out of which human virtues spring, ethical emotion, on the other hand, is the soil out of which society itself springs. The end of the social organism is ethical, and, con- sequently, the highest function of the State is the education of its citizens. 354 Ethic a. As regards free-will and reason : — (1) If will be not root of reason, can "will," as distinguished from desire, emerge in consciousness at all ? if so, how ? (2) Eeason is said by all thinkers worth considering to be pure activity. How can it be pure activity or anything save passivo-active activity, if it is not, in its prime moment, will ? (3) If will be not root of reason, how can reason ever seek end ? and how can it ever project universals as ideals ? If there are no ideals, there is no morality, for the "ought-to-be" is always an ideal, it matters not on what humble and barbaric plane of life man may be. (4) If will be not root of reason, what is reason ? Self-consciousness ? True; but this itself is a result in consciousness of an inner movement of some kind; if it be the issue of a movement, then reason is only a piece of clock-work set on the apex of the attuent consciousness — the empirical subject. (5) If will be not root of reason, where is freedom? Eeason, as a mere clock-work arrangement concealing a machinery of categories evoked on a stimulus not loitliin itself, cannot be free. (6) If will be not a functioning of the attuent or empirical conscious individual subject lifting it, or evolving it, into a higher sphere — the sphere of reason — this empirical subject leing always present as functioning, and so carrying with it into the sphere of reason all the matter of nature, inner and outer, how can pure reason be in contact with the real at all ? (7) If will be root of reason, it must be found in the rudimentary act of reason, which is percipience ; and all Conclusion. 355 the moments of its dialectic must be found in that act. (8) Eeason has sometimes, and with a true instinct, been identified with free-will. But the reason-process cannot 'produce free-will unless it be itself and in its genesis essentially free and self-determining — actus puTus. (9) If the attuent conscious, or empirical, subject be not the functioner of will and con- sequent reason, there can be no communication, I have said above, between the two : how then can the moral duality of man be explained ? The Ego would then be in antagonism to the empirical subject — that is to say, with nature : it would be an empty, abstract universal: no articles of peace would be possible: nature would have to be obliterated in order that man might be truly man; whereas it is truly in nature and as nature, but under the universal form of reason, that man lives, as it is in nature that God Himself lives. (10) If it be any satisfaction to certain thinkers to call this functioning of will by the subject — the said subject carrying with it its whole past nature-history — an evolutionary result (from a cosmic point of view), they are welcome. Finally, self-realisation is the reduction ly self of all feeling and experience that concern life to self or reason as giving laws, — the transmutation of the real into the rational, and the identity of the two in their duality. This is ethical completeness. Let me conclude with the words of Kant in his Critiqice of Practical Reason (I. 1, 3) : — " We may justly 35^ Ethica, entertain the expectation that one day we may be able to attain to an insight into the unity of the whole pure reason-capacity (theoretical as well as practical) and to deduce all from one principle, and this is the in- evitable need of the reason of man, which finds full satisfaction only in a completely systematic unity of its cognitions." To the accomplishment of this task I find that I have been endeavouring to contribute in these two treatises, by showing that the form of universal legisla- tion is one and the same, in nature external and nature internal. [TJHI71ESIT7; Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty, at the Edinburgh University Press. METAPHYSICA NOVA ET VETUSTA: A Eeturn to Dualism. By Scotus Novanticus. (Professor S. S. Laurie.) Second Edition. 300 pp., pt, 8vo, cloth, 6s. " I congratulate you very sincerely on the production of this remarkable little book. Its results are among the best in philosophy ; at the same time that your deduction of them from the simple act of percipience is at once original and happy."— i^rom Dr. Hutchison Stirling. " The book is an analysis of Perception independently undertaken, but with full knowledge of, and reference to, the Kantian investigation. . . . The whole is worked out with much sureness of touch and with real philosophical insight. The author's knowledge and use of German tliought is flavoured by a certain sturdy Scotch independence as well as by an infusion of Scotch caution. . . . The book makes the impression of having been written by one who has held himself at some distance from the philosophical schools, and who has embodied in his work the results of liis mature thought. . . . Relativity (with the author) is something quite different from Relatedness. . . . What is said by the author Is said with admirable clearness."— ii'rom "Mind," October 1884. "... As a connected reasoned body of doctrines, the explanation offered by 'Scotus Novanticus ' constitutes a new philosophical theory. . . . By the help of this versatile will-force, the writer endeavours to solve the great problems of philosophy. . . . If the reasonings and concltisions are not always satisfactory, the book will still be interesting to the readers of philosophy on account of the light it throws on several important points of speculative inquiry, and also for the thoroughness with which the doctrines are developed and carried out." — From " The Scotsvian." " The anonymous work ' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta,' by ' Scotus Novanticus,' well deserves the careful attention of all who can appreciate a sustained piece of reasoning. . . . The book displays much maturity of thought throughout, and the autlior, whoever he is, possesses a complete grasp of philosophical distinctions. . . . Though he works out his theory forcibly in his own way, he has evidently been largely influenced by Kant and the post-Kantian Idealists, particttlarly perhaps by Fichte. ... It may be described as a succinct but comprehensive sketch of a metaphysical psychology."— i?'ro7n, " The Contemporary Review." "... In the instance before us, while the subject handled is a large one, the treatment it receives (notwithstanding the brevity of the book) is wonderfully full. 'Scotus Novanticus' wastes none of his space in rhetorical verbiage nor in wordy excursions into the picturesque fields adjoining his subject proper, but confines himself strictly to the province within which it lies. His style is terse yet lucid, and his book, though hard reading, as it is almost bound to be from its nature as from its sucmnctness, never fails to be interesting. ... In this little work the anonymous author attempts nothing less than to trace the genesis and history of our knowledge— our knowledge of tlie outer world as well as of the workings of mind itself. ... It would be impossible for us here to give anything like a full and explicit account of the contribution which is here offered. 'Scotus Novanticus' wastes no words, and his treatise reads like a mathematical demonstration. . , . The work will well repay a careful study, and is a valuable contribution to the subject with which it deals. We heartily commend it to students of Pliilosoi>hy whether they may be materialists or not." — From " The Scottish {Quarterly) Review." " The categories or dialectic percepts which Professor Laurie brings forward stand very well on their own basis ; they are shown in a powerful argument to be the Notices of the Press. underlying presupposition of our ordinary perception of phenomena ... a searching and original analysis." — Frcym " T/ie Scots (novj National) Observer." " While, as we shall afterwards point out, we consider this work a failure as an argument for Dualism, we cannot help congratulating the author on the production of a work so distinguished by subtle analysis and philosophic power. . . . "We say his Dualism is illogical, because in no work have we seen the activities of the mind more clearly exhibited or their necessity for the constitution of knowledge more convincingly argued. More than this, he has freed himself from the paralogisms which strangled Kant when dealing with such notions as Being, Causality, and the Absolute. ... It only remains to add that the style is clear, terse, and vigorous."— From " The Glasgow Herald." "This is the work of a powerful and original thinker." — From "The Modern Review," October 18S4. "... Professor Laurie's ingenious and original little book. . . . Comprehensive treatise ... it abounds in admirable expositions and acute criticisms : and especially indicates a clear insight founded upon accurate knowledge into the insufficiency of the empirical psychology as a base of metaphysical philosophy." — From a "Study of Religion " hy Dr. James Martineau, 1888. "EUe (Metaph. N. et V.) a attire I'attention speciale des critiques par la finesse des analyses, la profondeur des deductions et la rigueur, un pen tendue, de la methode dialectique . . . livre de haute valeur." — From " Im Revue Philosophique." NOTICES OF FIRST EDITION OF '' ETHICA." ETHICA, OE THE ETHICS OF REASON. By ScoTUS NovANTicus, Author of '* Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta." " About twelve months ago the author of this volume published a work entitled 'Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta : a Return to Dualism,' in which he advanced a notable theory regarding the origin and nature of human knowledge. . . . " In the ' Ethics of Reason' the direct influence of Kant and Hegel is especially evident ; still these old elements of doctrine, as well as the terminology, are here used in an independent way by a writer who elaborates a theory marked by distinctive features. . . . "To understand fully the doctrines thus propounded by 'Scotus Novanticus,' his reasonings must be studied in his own expositions, and as he has reasoned them out and connected the difterent parts into a system. All we can say is that the various branches of the subject are unfolded with ability and ample knowledge of existing moral theories. . . . " The work is the production of an original and profound thinker who is well aware of tlie difficulties of his thesis. The argument is managed with skill and dialectic power. The treatise is well entitled to the attention of students of Philosophy." — From " The Scotsman." " The 'Ethica' repeats the characteristics of the 'Metaphysica' and is an equally noteworthy contribution to the determination of ultimate philosophical positions. The book is not controversial in character, and is as sparing as its predecessor in the specific allusions to other writers, but we are able to feel that the abstention is advised, and that the author's theory has been elaborated in full view of modern discussions. As he proceeds on his own way, doctrines receive their correction, amplification, or quietus, though their authors are not referred to. . . . " Enough has perhaps been said to prove that the argument deserves to be studied by all who aim at clear thinking on ethical questions." — From "Mind," October 1885. " As we expected, the acute and logical author of ' Meta,physica Nova et Vetusta ' has followed up that work with another, in which his leading principles are applied in the field of ethics. Here, as in his former work, he is very close and cogent, Notices of the Press, scorning to allow himself any of the easy and rhetorical illustrations with which some writers in philosophy are prone to make up their chapters. Whatever may be said of his ideas, his style, It will be admitted, is one that is to be commended alike for its directness, simplicity, and serviceableness. We have read the book with an increasing conviction of the author's originality and power, and of the benefit that his books may confer, even in this regard, on philosophical students. So carefully is his main argument drawn out that we cannot find space to outline it here, but must content ourselves with indicating one or two of his salient positions. ... "The author's application of his principles to the development of the Altruistic Emotions, to Law and Justice, is admirably consistent and suggestive ; tliough, of course, in the process he has to deal somewhat severely with the definitions of the moral sense, the moral faculty, and conscience, which have been given by not a few WTiters on philosophy, ethics, and theology. Many of Kant's positions are incisively criticised, and lacuncp, as the author conceives, supplied. As a criticism of ethical systems, no less than as a piece of dialectic, and a positive contribution to ethical science, it is suggestive and thorough. We can cordially commend the book. It will raise questions, no doubt, and answers will be forthcoming on various points ; but the questioners would do well to take a hint from the author in the style of answering them." — From " The British Quarterly Review." " Instead of the psychological method of inquiry formerly so much in fashion in the treatment of ethics, we have here a method which is transcendental in character. ... " Here, as indeed throughout the volume, ' Scotus Novanticus ' shows how ably he can conduct a process of reasoning throughout its various stages, avoiding every temptation to depart from the definite line of argument which he has marked out for himself. . . . " This is an exceedingly able work. It contains much forcible writing, and shows the author to possess a singular power of sustained thought. We admire the way in which he keeps himself free from entanglement in view of side issues, and at the same time is able to indicate their bearings on the main theme. For the expression of abstract thinking the style could hardly be better. It is direct, and hence forcible, and, though using the language of philosophy, is free from unnecessary technicalities." — From " The Glasgoiv Herald," April 10, 1885. "The author's mode of working out his thought may seem to symbolise his ethical theorj' itself. The sense of effort that is a part of all moral action ends, as he shows, in a sense of harmony. Now 'Scotus Novanticus' requires from his readers a distinct intellectual effort in order to grasj) his thought ; but if they are willing to make this effort, they are really rewarded by having in their minds an idea of a coherent system which has many features of originality, and which, regarded as a whole, produces (whether we agree with it or not) that sense of power to contemplate the world and'action from a general point of view which is characteristic of the philosophic attitude as distinguished from the attitude of science and common sense." — From "The Westminster Review." " This volume is characterised, we need hardly say, by all the excellent qualities that distinguished our author's previous work. , . . ' Scotus Novanticus ' is a skilful and patient analyst of the phenomena of mind, and writes in a style that conveys very clearly what he wishes to express. It is a case of clear thought mirroring itself in clear language. . . . We remarked in regard to his ' Meta- physica ' that it read like a mathematical demonstration : we have the same to say of this. 'Scotus Novanticus' has evidently a wholesome horror of 'padding.' His argument is about as condensed as it could well be. Then he is so careful in the use of his terms that we ruu a risk of misleading our readers by employing them without also giving his precise definitions of them. We refer our readers, therefore, to the work itself. It will amply repay careful study, and only by careful study can the argument be fully appreciated. . . , ' Ethica ' is a careful study, and a valuable contribution to ethical science." — From " The Scottish (Quarterly) Review." "The present treatise contains a very close discussion of the chief points in debate between the different schools of moralists ; and the author seems, in my judgment, to be remarkably successful in harmonising the elements of truth in each. . . . It is not possible here to do more than single out a few points from a book which rewards a careful study." — From, " The Contemporary Review." Notices of the Press, ON THE ''METAPHYSICA" AND "ETHICA" TOGETHER. " There is nothing absolutely new in [Dr. Martineau's] doctrine [as to necessity of conflict, etc.]. ... It has been admirably expounded in a recent volume of great force of thought and scientific precision of analysis, under the title of ' Ethica, or the Ethics of Reason.' This volume bears to be by ' Scotus Novanticus,' author of a preceding volume entitled ' Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta.' Both volumes are marked by much vigour and lucidity, grasp of philosophic distinctions, and capacity of following and combining threads of thought to their end. . . . We have pleasure in recommending them to the attention of all students of Philo- sophy." — From " Thi, Edinhurgh Eeview." " Das erste dieser beiden eng zusammengehorigen Biicher desselben ungenannten Verf. (des Prof. S. S. Laurie) lasst sich als eine Phenomenologie des Geistes behufs der Constituirung einer erkenntnisstheoretischen Metaphysik bezeichnen, die von Kantischen, streng rationalistischen Gesichtspunkten ausgehend, sich von da mit Hiilfe weiterer an Fichte und Hegel erinnernden Elemeute zu einer vollstandigen, eigenthlimlichen Ansicht der Sache erhebt." ****** ** " In der Behauptung der Idee der Personlichkeit steht der Verf. durchaus auf Kantischem Boden ; sein Streben ist aber die theoretische und praktische Seite der Vernunft einander moglichst zu nahern, um eben aus ihr als einem einheitlicheu Princip eine vollstiindige systematische Erkenntnisseinheit zu deduciren, wobei er sich dem absoluten Idealismus der nachkantischen deutschen Philosophic annji- hert. Das Unternehmen des 'Sootus Novanticus' kann als einer der achtbarsten Versuche unserer Zeit, in Ankniipfungan diedurch Kantbegonnene philosophische Bewegung zu einer, mehr als bisher geschehen ist, abschliessenden Form eines speculativen Systems zu gelangen, betrachtet werden." G. S. (Professor Schaar- schmidt). — From " Die philosophische Monntshefte," xxii. 6, 7. " . . . . deux ecrits recents fort remarquables signes du pseudonyme de 'Scotus Novanticus.' Ce sont des essais fort ingenieiix de conciliation entre les methodes objective et subjective appliquees a la recherche des origines de la connaissance et de la loi morale." M. G. Rolin-Jacquemyns. — From " La Revue de Droit inter- national." Williams and Norgate : London and Edinburgh. BY THE SAME AUTHOR. OCCASIONAL ADDEESSES ON EDUCATIONAL SUBJECTS. Cambridge University Press. " Professor Laurie is our greatest living \vriter on education. . . . Even in popular addresses he never loses sight of his philosophic principles." — Journal of Education, London. "This volume contains ten addresses by a writer of world-wide reputation on educational topics." — Jourrml of Education, Boston, U.S.A. " This admirable book. ... a thoroughly practical book in the best sense. . . The work of a real expert." — The Academy. THE LIFE AND EDUCATIONAL WEITINGS OF JOHN AMOS COMENIUS. Third Edition. — Cambridge University Press. THE TRAINING OF THE TEACHER AND OTHER EDUCATIONAL PAPERS. C. Kegan Paul and Co. THE RISE AND EARLY CONSTITUTION OF UNIVERSITIES, WITH SURVEY OF MEDI- AEVAL EDUCATION.— LECTURES. C. Kegan Paul and Co. PRIMARY INSTRUCTION IN RELATION TO EDUCATION. Fourth Edition. J. Thin, University Bookseller, Edinburgh (1 890). LECTURES ON LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC METHOD IN THE SCHOOL, 1890. Cambridge University Press. 14, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London ; and 20, South Frederick Street, Edinburgh. WILLIAMS AND NOEGATE'S LIST OF ixtm^, (S^rmatt, |talmtt, ^alirr antr (Sneh, AND OTHER SOHOOI. BOOKS AIsTD MAPS. For Public Schools where Latin is taught. Eugene (Gr.) The Student's Comparative G-rammar of the French Language, with an Historical Sketch of the Formation of French. For the use of Public Schools. Witli Exer- cises. By G. Eugene-Fasnacht, French Master, West- minster School. 1 2th Edition, thoroughly revised. Square crown 8vo, cloth. 5s. Or Grammar, 35. ; Exercises, 25. 6d. " The appearance of a Grammar like this is in itself a sign that great advance is being made in the teaching of modern languages The rules and observations are all scientifically classified and explained." — Educa- tional Times. " In itself this is in many ways the most satisfactory Grammar for begin- ners that we have as yet seen." — Athenceum. Eugene's French Method. Elementary French Lessons. Easy Eules and Exercises preparatory to the " Student's Com- parative French Grammar." 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