I ;-
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 

 
 LECTURES AND ESSAYS 
 
 NATURAL THEOLOGY AND ETHICS
 
 HENRY FROWDE, M.A. 
 
 PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 LONDON, EDINBURGH, AND NEW YORK

 
 Lectures and Essays 
 
 on 
 
 Natural Theology and Ethics 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM WALLACE 
 
 LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE 
 
 AND WHYTE'S PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD 
 
 EDITED, WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD CAIRO 
 
 MASTER OF BALLIOL COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 WITH A PORTRAIT 
 
 AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 1898
 
 PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 BY HORACE HART, M.A. 
 PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 PRINTED IN ENGLAND.
 
 & 
 Wl 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION vii-xl 
 
 I. GIFFORD LECTURES ON NATURAL THEOLOGY AND 
 THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 3 
 
 i. THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY .... 4 
 ii. THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY .... 24 
 in. THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST .... 42 
 iv. RELIGION AND MORALITYTHE DEFINITION OF RE- 
 LIGION 52 
 
 v. THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION ... 60 
 vi. MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' . . 73 
 
 vn. NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM THE SCIENTIFIC 
 AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW THE 
 MAIN CONDITIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF REASON . 93 
 
 vin. SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF ETHICS . 113 
 
 ix. MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE MATERIALISTIC AND 
 
 IDEALISTIC VIEWS OF IT 130 
 
 x. MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION THE MATERIAL BASIS 
 
 OF THE MORAL LIFE 147 
 
 1326983
 
 vi CONTENTS 
 
 PACK 
 
 xi. ON SOME RELATIONS OP MOKALS, SCIENCE, AND RE- 
 LIGION 168 
 
 xn. THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION AND ITS RELA- 
 TION TO MORALITY THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY 191 
 
 II. ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 i. OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 213 
 
 ii. PERSON AND PERSONALITY 265 
 
 in. RESPONSIBILITY 301 
 
 iv. DUTY 314 
 
 v. HEDONISM 343 
 
 vi. UTILITARIANISM 374 
 
 vn. THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 399 
 
 viii. THE RELATIONS OF FICHTE AND HEGEL TO SOCIALISM 427 
 
 ix. THE LEGAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SANCTIONS OF 
 
 MORALITY 448 
 
 III. CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 I. LOTZE 481 
 
 ii. NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY . . . .511 
 
 in. NIETZSCHE'S 'THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA ' . . . 530 
 
 iv. STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC, BY JOHN 
 
 M. E. MCTAGGART 542
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 I HAVE undertaken to write a short account of 
 the life and work of the late Professor Wallace as 
 an introduction to this volume of selections from 
 his manuscripts. The existence of a College Tutor 
 and University Professor is so quiet and uneventful, 
 and Wallace confined himself so closely to his 
 academic duties, that an elaborate biography of 
 him would be out of place. At the same time, his 
 influence over his pupils was so great, and his work 
 both as a writer and lecturer was so unique in kind, 
 that it has seemed desirable to put on record the 
 main events of his life, and to attempt, so far as 
 is possible, to estimate the main features of his 
 character and the general purport of his philo- 
 sophical teaching. 
 
 William Wallace was born on May n, 1843, 
 at Cupar, the county town of Fifeshire. His 
 father, James Wallace, began life as a mason, and 
 got on so well as to become a successful master- 
 builder. He and his wife, Jean Kellock, were a 
 quiet, industrious pair, who mixed little with their
 
 viii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 neighbours, and devoted themselves mainly to the 
 bringing up of their family, of whom there were five, 
 four sons and one daughter. William was the eldest 
 of the family, and the third son was Edwin Wallace, 
 afterwards Fellow of Worcester College and author 
 of an edition of Aristotle's De Anima, a man of 
 fine intelligence and generous character, who died 
 of consumption at a comparatively early age. The 
 parents were simple and truthful people, the mother 
 especially being a woman of considerable energy and 
 originality, and their example had no little influence 
 in developing in their son that quiet independence 
 and uncompromising devotion to ideal aims, which 
 were leading notes of his character. His ability and 
 steadfastness of purpose showed themselves very 
 early. Both at the Madras Academy, Cupar, and 
 subsequently at the University of St. Andrews, 
 he easily took the first place in all the studies to 
 which he gave his mind. His main interest at first 
 was in Classics, in which he had the advantage 
 of the teaching of Professor Sellar and Professor 
 (afterwards Principal) Shairp, but in the last years 
 of his course he came under the influence of Professor 
 Ferrier, to whose lectures he traced his first intel- 
 lectual awakening and his initiation in philosophical 
 study. He did not take to golf as an amusement 
 like most St. Andrews students, nor indeed did he 
 ever care much for athletics in any form ; but he 
 early developed a taste for natural beauty, which 
 he indulged in long country walks. At St. Andrews 
 he was specially impressed by his first view of the
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 sea, and used to spend much time in watching the 
 waves breaking on the rocks or rolling up the long 
 slope of the sands. 
 
 For such a studious youth in Scotland, the Church 
 seemed the natural profession ; and his parents 
 sent him to the University with that object. But 
 after spending four years in the Arts course at 
 St. Andrews, and especially after his philosophical 
 studies had awakened him to independent thinking, 
 Wallace came to feel himself not specially fitted for 
 that profession, and somewhat doubtful whether he 
 could comply with its requirements. On this subject 
 an interesting anecdote is told by a member of his 
 family. It had been arranged, in conformity with 
 the wish of his mother, that he should go to the 
 Divinity Hall in Edinburgh after having completed 
 his curriculum at St. Andrews. But at last, when 
 the day came that he should start, he said to her, 
 ' Do you really wish me to go? If you say the word, 
 I will go.' His mother, seeing that his heart was 
 not in it, turned away in silence ; she was much 
 disappointed, but was too wise to press him further- 
 in such a matter. 
 
 Having thus changed his plans, he was recom- 
 mended by his professors in 1864 to try for an 
 Exhibition in Balliol College, which he succeeded 
 in getting. At Oxford he showed the same easy 
 mastery of the work he had to do, taking a First 
 Class in Moderations 1866, and a First in Literae 
 Humaniores in the following year, gaining also the 
 Gaisford Prize for Greek Prose, and, not long after,
 
 x BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 a Craven Scholarship. I remember making his 
 acquaintance when he first came into residence in 
 Oxford, and the impression of youthful staidness 
 and self-command which he made upon me. In 
 Balliol, owing to his retiring disposition, his com- 
 parative maturity of mind, and his disinclination 
 to athletics, he was not well known to many of the 
 undergraduates, and a certain bluntness of manner, 
 partly the result of shyness, gained him the nick- 
 name of ' The Dorian.' But he was greatly respected 
 and admired, and his genuine kindness of heart and 
 rectitude of purpose made itself felt by all who 
 came into near relation with him. Jowett and 
 Green both had a high estimate of his character 
 and powers, and he was strongly influenced by both 
 in his mental development. From Green he received 
 a further stimulus towards the study of philosophy, 
 and especially of the philosophy of Germany ; and 
 long afterwards he spoke of what he owed ' to that 
 example of high-souled devotion to truth, and of 
 earnest and intrepid thinking on the deep things 
 of eternity.' On the other hand, the intellectual 
 influence of Jowett was more in the direction of 
 Classical scholarship and of literary style, and of 
 general balance of mind. In the preface to the last 
 edition of Wallace's Prolegomena to the Hegelian 
 Logic, which was written under the influence of 
 Jowett's recent death, he says a few words about 
 his ' old Oxford Tutor and friend,' touched no doubt 
 with the idealization of memory and regret, but 
 characterizing the nature of Jowett's influence as
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xi 
 
 truly as anything that has been written of him. 
 ' The late Master of Balliol,' he says, ' was more 
 than a mere scholar, a mere philosopher. He 
 seemed so idealist, yet so practical ; so realist, and 
 yet so full of large ideals ; so delicately kind, 
 and yet so severely reasonable. You felt that he 
 saw life more steadily, and saw it more whole than 
 others ; as one reality in which religion and philo- 
 sophy, art and business, the sciences and theology, 
 were severally but elements and aspects. To the 
 amateurs of novelty, to the slaves of specialization, 
 to the devotees of any narrow way, such largeness 
 might, with the impatience natural to limited minds, 
 have seemed indifference. So must appear those 
 who on higher planes hear all parts of the harmony 
 of humanity, and with the justice of a wise love, 
 maintain an intellectual Sophrosyne. On his pupils, 
 this secret power of an other-world serenity laid 
 an irresistible spell, and bore in upon them the 
 conviction that beyond scholarship and logic there 
 was the fuller truth of life, and the all-embracing 
 duty of doing their best to fulfil the amplest require- 
 ments of their place.' 
 
 In 1867, just after taking his Degree, Wallace 
 became a Fellow of Merton College, and was shortly 
 after appointed to a Tutorship, the duties of which 
 he continued to discharge till his death, in addi- 
 tion to those of Whyte's Professorship of Moral 
 Philosophy, to which he was elected 1882, as the 
 successor of T. H. Green. In 1872 he had married 
 Miss Janet Barclay, daughter of the Sheriff Clerk of
 
 xii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 Fife, who, with a daughter and two sons, survives 
 him. 
 
 The main after-events of his life were connected 
 with the publication of his books. In 1874 he 
 published his translation of the Logic of Hegel (from 
 the Encyclopaedie), with Prolegomena, in which he 
 dealt with the main preliminary difficulties of the 
 study of Hegel. His Epicurean Philosophy appeared 
 in 1880 (in the S.P.C.K. Series of Ancient Phi- 
 losophies). It contains a delicately appreciative 
 account of a philosophy to which we should hardly 
 have expected Wallace to feel any special attraction. 
 It traces the origin of the school, and dwells with 
 much sympathy upon the beautiful harmony and ideal 
 simplicity of the society of friends which Epicurus 
 created. In this work Wallace first showed that 
 desire to realize in all their details the circumstances 
 of the life of the thinkers in whom he was interested, 
 which was a marked characteristic of his writing. It 
 was not that he exaggerated the importance of such 
 secondary elements in biography ; he even apologizes 
 for paying so much regard to them ; but he took 
 very great pleasure in collecting even the least 
 important facts about the philosophers or poets 
 whom he was studying, and in visiting the scenes 
 associated with their lives. Generally he directed 
 his summer tours to such places, and in different 
 years sought to familiarize himself with the environ- 
 ment of Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and 
 finally, of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Thus, while 
 writing his book on Kant, published in 1882, for
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xiii 
 
 Blackwood's Philosophical Series, he paid a visit to 
 Konigsberg. The result is shown in the very inter- 
 esting and humorous biography in which he pictures 
 to us in a very lifelike way the surroundings of the 
 great critical philosopher and his faithful servant 
 Lampe. The part of the book relating to the 
 philosophy of Kant is an excellent resume, but 
 suffers from the fact that he had to cut it down 
 so much in order to reduce it to the required size. 
 His next book, the Life of Schopenhauer, pub- 
 lished in 1890, was written in a similar way. It 
 is perhaps the best of his smaller books, and con- 
 tains a very vivid account of that curmudgeon of 
 genius if we may be allowed the expression in 
 which the defects of his character and philosophy 
 are indicated, but at the same time full credit is 
 given to him for that deeper idealistic impulse that 
 runs through his works, and the wonderful gleams 
 of poetic or philosophic insight which he exhibits 
 from time to time. In this volume Wallace displays 
 a very rare biographical gift. I do not know any 
 biography which makes us to see more clearly that 
 the character and thought of its subject are different 
 aspects of the same thing. We are made to realize 
 how Schopenhauer's violent recoil against materialism 
 and empiricism, and the impatient and intolerant 
 idealism which was his mental characteristic, almost 
 inevitably resulted in his negative Pantheistic 
 theory of the world ; and how, at the same time, 
 he was enabled by a logical tour de force to give 
 to that negative view something of the value of
 
 xiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 a positive, and to maintain that the ultimate unity 
 has a sporadic manifestation in art and life, which 
 it is the open secret of genius to detect. Thus we 
 are enabled to understand the strange alternations 
 of depth and shallowness, of penetrative insight 
 and savage prejudice, of egoistic passion and self- 
 abnegation, which showed themselves in his life 
 and found expression in his philosophy a philo- 
 sophy whose influence upon some readers has been 
 so great, partly because it was such an immediate 
 reflex of the character of the author. Take one 
 passage : 
 
 ' One may say,' says Wallace, ' that there are two 
 Schopenhauers in the field. Even the meanest of 
 God's creatures, says the poet, 
 
 " Boasts two soul sides, one to face the world with, 
 One to show a woman when he loves her." 
 
 Schopenhauer's beloved was no mortal maiden, 
 but an angel vision or was it a reality ? of truth. 
 There is the Schopenhauer of the outward biography, 
 an irritable, petulant, paradoxical creature, plagued 
 by a most unconquerable vanity ; whose acts accuse 
 him of being selfish, harsh-mannered, and sordid, 
 with a history full of trivial incidents and vulgar 
 quarrels ; self-engrossed, dead to the sweet ties of 
 domesticity, and deaf to the call of public and 
 national interests ; sinking as the years passed by 
 into a solitary cave, whence, like the giant in 
 Bunyan's Allegory, he raged impotently at the 
 heterodox wayfarer. Unfortunately in some of his 
 books, especially in the later, this unpleasant self
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xv 
 
 is rampant. But these same books, at their best, 
 give the picture of another soul, which, freed from 
 the bond of temporal quarrels and the world's 
 litigiousness, draws closer to the great heart of life, 
 and tries to see clearly what man's existence and 
 hopes and destiny really are ; which recognizes the 
 peaceful creations of art as the most adequate 
 representations the sense-world can give of the true 
 inward being of all things ; and which holds the 
 best life to be that of one who has pierced through 
 the illusions dividing one conscious individuality 
 from another, into that heart of divine rest where 
 we are each members one of another, essentially 
 united in the great ocean of Being, in which and by 
 which we alone live V The chapter that follows 
 this gives not so much an analysis of Schopenhauer's 
 work, as rather a sympathetic rendering of its inner 
 spirit ; and the whole biography is a great illustration 
 of the principle that the most powerful criticism of 
 an author lies in a thorough appreciation of the 
 best that is in him. 
 
 In 1892 Wallace brought out the second edition 
 of his translation of Hegel's Logic, carefully revised, 
 and enriched with many notes ; and in the following 
 year he republished his Prolegomena, so much 
 modified and enlarged as really to constitute a new 
 work. Finally, in 1894, he published a translation of 
 the last part of Hegel's Encyclopaedic, The Philo- 
 sophy of Mind, with five Essays, in which he reviews 
 the subjects of the volume, dealing especially with 
 
 1 Life of Schopenhauer, ch. iv.
 
 xvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 the question of the method of psychology, and its 
 relation to ethics and theology. 
 
 In 1892 he was appointed Gifford Lecturer in the 
 University of Glasgow, and in the two following 
 years delivered two courses of lectures there on the 
 history of Natural Theology, and on the relation of 
 Morality and Religion. What of these lectures has 
 been preserved is printed in this volume. Wallace 
 had contemplated a complete rewriting of these 
 courses, and also the preparation of a volume on the 
 ethical ideas in the poets of the nineteenth century. 
 But the execution of these and other projects was 
 postponed till he should be released from the lectures 
 of the Merton Tutorship. In 1 898 he would have 
 earned a pension for thirty years' service in that 
 College, and have had much more leisure for literary 
 work. But in February, 1897, in riding down a hill 
 about eight miles from Oxford, he appears to have 
 lost control over his bicycle, and was dashed against 
 the parapet of a bridge at the bottom. He survived 
 until the following morning, but never recovered 
 consciousness. 
 
 Wallace's life was purely the life of a teacher ; he 
 never took any prominent part even in University 
 politics, though he frequently served on the Board 
 of Faculties and other committees for University 
 administration, and, both in these and in the meet- 
 ings of his College, his words had great influence. 
 He formed his opinions with much independence, 
 and his forceful, and often pointed and luminous 
 expression of them, was such as to lend them full
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xvii 
 
 weight and effect. He had not a little practical 
 insight, and much of what one might call mental 
 detachment and impartiality, and even those who 
 could not agree with him often felt that his words 
 cast a fresh light upon the subject. ' He was a quick- 
 tempered man,' writes a member of his College, who 
 had good opportunities of judging, 'but never bore 
 malice, was always inclined to think matters over, 
 and, if necessary, to express a change of opinion. 
 He had the strong and vigorous sense which enabled 
 him to strike at the root of practical questions.' 
 And the Warden of Merton speaks of ' the incisive 
 brevity, weight, and pertinency of his remarks at 
 College meetings,' and says that, in discussions on 
 discipline or examinations, his ' desire to be just was 
 evident, and he was not afraid to stand alone in his 
 judgement.' 
 
 While, however, Wallace did not decline such 
 University business as fell to his share, his main 
 interest lay in his work as a College Tutor, as Lecturer 
 on Philosophy, and as a writer on philosophical sub- 
 jects. As a College Tutor, he gained the respect of 
 many generations of Merton men ; and after he 
 became a University Professor his influence was 
 greatly extended. He was not indeed naturally 
 fitted to be a teacher of Passmen, and in later years 
 he did not take any share in that work. But as 
 a teacher of philosophy to men reading for the 
 Honour School of Literae Humaniores, he has had 
 few rivals in the history of the University. ' Of 
 this, indeed/ as Principal Fairbairn has said, ' only 
 
 b
 
 xviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 those who passed through his hands are qualified to 
 speak, and the most qualified have spoken in terms 
 of unstinted praise. It might be hard to some, 
 though to -none so hard as to himself, to break 
 through his habitual and constitutional reserve ; but 
 he was so true a man, so good a scholar, so high and 
 pure a thinker, and so conscientious a teacher, that 
 association with him could not but be to the capable 
 an education in itself.' To exercise his full educative 
 power, he required to be known, and he could hardly 
 be well known except to those who had some depth of 
 character and real interest in philosophy ; but upon 
 those whom he influenced at all, he had an almost 
 transforming power. His sincerity and simplicity of 
 manner, his absorbing interest in the real purport of 
 philosophy, and disregard of what was merely formal 
 and technical, his dislike of sham and pretence, and 
 his sympathy and power of entering into the diffi- 
 culties of a student, even his intolerance of idleness, 
 and the severity of the demands he made upon his 
 pupils, awakened in them an admiration and enthu- 
 siasm seldom felt for any teacher. 
 
 I have before me many letters from former pupils, 
 who are well qualified to estimate the value of the 
 instructions they received, in which he is spoken of 
 in language that might seem extravagant, if it were 
 not so obviously sincere. One old pupil writes : 
 ' I should think that no one who was taught by him 
 could fall into carelessness or insincerity of thought 
 without feeling rebuked. It was teaching that could 
 not pass away, because it gave one new powers and
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xix 
 
 a higher life.' Another says : ' When I was in 
 Oxford, I was simply saturated with his sayings, and 
 was always quoting him and writing about him to 
 my friends. I remember writing that he was a 
 Carlyle, but a Carlyle with eyes fixed on thought 
 rather than on practice.' Another says : ' All his 
 pupils must feel that he was their intellectual father 
 a sternish father at times. He provoked us to 
 thought, and his words stuck in one's memory like 
 burrs. I was warmly attached to him, and felt this 
 more strongly every time I saw him.' A Fellow of 
 Merton, who was quite recently a pupil under 
 Wallace's tuition, writes : ' It is extremely difficult 
 for so young a man as myself to attempt adequately 
 to appreciate the greatness of our late Professor ; 
 but an intercourse of two years, and the intimacy 
 into which that intercourse brought me, inspired in 
 me and here I am speaking for all his pupils, not 
 for myself alone an admiration, I might say a 
 reverence, which was never felt toward any other 
 teacher. From the first we could not but feel the 
 utter earnestness of the man, the intense seriousness 
 with which he approached the great subjects of 
 which he was trying to give us some faint con- 
 ception. His method was severely Socratic ; for the 
 first year of work with him he struck us sometimes 
 as stern and hard, as demanding too much ; but we 
 soon came to see that if he asked much from us in 
 the way of devotedness, enthusiasm, labour, and 
 self-denial, he asked much more from himself. To 
 have known him as I did for two years in almost 
 
 b 2
 
 xx BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 daily contact, was a high and generous inspiration. 
 He had more of the prophet about him than any 
 man I have known, and he was regarded by those of 
 his pupils who could at all appreciate him, with 
 a whole-hearted devotion such as few others ever 
 inspired. His memory is the most precious posses- 
 sion of my University life.' 
 
 Wallace's lectures were in many ways unlike the 
 usual University type ; they had an individual 
 flavour which it is not easy to characterize. They 
 were not systematic expositions of the subject, as 
 already formed and settled in the speaker's mind, 
 but rather like attempts to realize its significance 
 afresh, by approaching it now from one point of 
 view and now from another. He seldom read from 
 a manuscript, and when he did so, the constraint of 
 reading seemed to deprive him of the freedom neces- 
 sary to effective speaking. His custom was rather 
 before lecturing to fill his mind with his subject, 
 making many notes, and often writing out even 
 many pages of extracts from the authors criticized. 
 Generally, however, especially in later years, he made 
 no attempt to write out even a sketch of what he had 
 to say, but trusted for the expression to the impulse 
 of the moment and of the audience. Speaking thus 
 ex tempore, he never seemed to have any difficulty 
 in finding words for his ideas, and his sentences 
 flowed on without hesitation ; though he was some- 
 what dependent for his effectiveness upon the mood 
 and temper of the moment, and, we may add, upon 
 the state of his health. But by this method he
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxi 
 
 seemed to gain unusual power of putting himself en 
 rapport with his audience, and of communicating to 
 them, by a kind of infection, his own vivid percep- 
 tion of his subject, as it rose before his mind in the 
 moment of delivery. His hearers seemed to be 
 receiving thought in the making, and not as the cut- 
 and-dried product of the study. The play of his 
 mind upon the questions discussed, the strange 
 touches of humour with which his discourse was 
 lighted up, the subtle beauty and conclusiveness of 
 expression which he often attained, and, through it 
 all, the gravity and earnestness of his manner, pro- 
 duced an impression which was unique of its kind. 
 He did not aim at giving to those whom he addressed 
 the kind of things which might be useful in the 
 Schools, but rather at showing them how to think 
 and feel. His thought seemed never the working of 
 an abstract intellect, but rather an attempt to deepen 
 life by making it self-conscious and communicating 
 it to others. ' He is never other than stimulating and 
 suggestive, and, in a sense, he was always preaching,' 
 said an appreciative listener ; and it is not impos- 
 sible that the fact that he had looked forward to 
 the Church as his profession, as well as the strongly 
 ethical cast of his own mind, tended to give 
 a practical turn to his teaching. He might indeed 
 be fairly said to be a preacher of ideal truth, and 
 his lectures seemed to be to him an opportunity 
 in which he could free himself from the circum 
 praecordia frigus, which made it so difficult for 
 a man constitutionally reserved, and further trained
 
 xxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 to reticence by academic habits, to utter himself 
 freely on the highest subjects. 
 
 * To those who live in London/ writes Professor 
 Muirhead, ' his figure has not been unfamiliar for 
 some years past, when he has come to lecture at 
 Toynbee Hall, or the London Ethical Society the 
 tall and somewhat gaunt outline, the earnest and 
 thought-worn expression, the perfect mastery of 
 material and language, which enabled him to speak 
 for generally over an hour, without note or reference, 
 yet without a slip ; the graphic and humorous 
 illustrations must have stamped themselves on the 
 memory of many. His habit was to choose for his 
 subject some individual thinker (Rousseau, Epicurus, 
 Nietzsche, Wordsworth, were the titles of some of 
 his lectures) ; or if he chose some more abstract topic, 
 such as " Duty," he was careful to attach what he 
 said to some concrete instance ; the lecture last 
 referred to taking the unexpected turn of a vivid 
 characterization of Frederick the Great as a type of 
 devotion to duties of one's station. Ideas were to 
 him living forces, and unless he could show them in 
 actual operation in concrete instances, he had little 
 hope of making their scope and meaning clear V 
 
 In the published works of Wallace, what first 
 strikes the reader is their literary quality, which is 
 unusual in philosophical writing. His style, with 
 more continuity of thought, has much of the subtlety 
 and refinement which characterize the writings of 
 Jo wet t. One cannot read many pages without 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, May, 1897.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxiii 
 
 coming upon one of those ' Olympian sentences/ as 
 one of his pupils called them, those irea Trre/aoerra, 
 winged at once with thought and imagination, which 
 seem once for all to fix and define for us some aspect 
 of things. And on a closer view, one finds that this 
 power of speech is not a mere literary gift, but due 
 to the fact that he thinks (Platonically) not with 
 his intellect only, but with his whole soul, using his 
 imagination and his sympathies to aid him in identi- 
 fying himself with the object, and explaining it from 
 within outwards. It is due also to what, for want 
 of a better word, we must call the intuitive character 
 of his mind, which led him rather to see the whole 
 in every part, and therefore to attempt to realize it 
 as something with independent life, than to trace 
 out its connexions and relations with the other parts. 
 For, though his main work was devoted to the ex- 
 position of Hegel, the great modern systematizer 
 of Idealism, and though he had, as we shall see, 
 a subtle appreciation of the dialectical method of 
 Hegel's thought, it cannot be said that his own 
 tendency was to system, or to the close tracing of 
 the filiation of thought upon thought. His effort 
 was rather to realize by subtle criticism and sympa- 
 thetic insight the different aspects of the matter 
 with which he was dealing ; and then to gather up 
 the general result in some luminous imaginative 
 expression. His way was to ruminate upon a sub- 
 ject till ' the fire burned,' and clearness of vision led 
 to vivid and characteristic utterance. Or we might 
 say that reflexion was to him rather a means to an
 
 xxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 end, a way of securing more perfect vision, and that 
 he hardly cared to analyze or methodize it for itself. 
 He once spoke to me of the ' wretchedly episodic 
 character of his mind/ which seemed to be a strange 
 complaint from one who was always looking at his 
 subject, whatever it might be, in the light of the 
 unity of the whole. But w T hat he meant is, I think, 
 illustrated by many places in his writings, in which 
 he seems to suggest point after point, to view the 
 subject in aspect after aspect, and then to call upon 
 the reader to make the synthesis for himself, with 
 the aid of some striking metaphor, or else, as Pro- 
 fessor Muirhead indicates, of a sketch of the life and 
 character of some individual, in whom the idea he is 
 discussing was embodied. It is in harmony with this 
 that he quite as often seeks to illustrate his thoughts 
 from the poets as from the philosophers. He was 
 a constant and unwearied reader of all the great 
 ancient and modern classics, and he often made 
 a special study of any new appearance in literature. 
 And both in literature and philosophy what he 
 sought was not thought or system for itself, but 
 rather as the concentrated expression of life, the 
 quintessence of human experience. The Hegelian 
 philosophy had its strong hold upon his mind mainly 
 because he seemed to find in Hegel one w T ho united 
 idealism with a more than positivist insistence upon 
 the emptiness of abstract ideas, and whose thinking 
 was a continual effort after the comprehension of the 
 actual in its concreteness and complexity. 
 
 It is an indication of the same longing to get
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxv 
 
 close to reality that so much of Wallace's interest 
 was by preference drawn to writers whose ten- 
 dencies were just the reverse of his own. He 
 seemed to feel that philosophy was only to be 
 trusted if it could verify itself in the most unfavour- 
 able of instances. He was fearful lest his idealism 
 should become empty, if he did not continually bring 
 it into contact with the crudest empiricism ; that 
 his optimism might get shallow if he did not con- 
 tinually drag it up de profundis from the deepest 
 divisions and contradictions of thought and life. 
 I have already spoken of the great pains he took 
 to realize to himself, not only the intellectual atmo- 
 sphere in which the philosophers and poets about 
 whom he wrote were living, but also all the details 
 of their outward life. 
 
 Wallace's criticism is almost always appreciative, 
 and we might say, at times appreciative to a fault. 
 He was, indeed, not without some of the logical 
 pugnacity attributed to his countrymen, and which 
 made a friend of mine say that when a Scotsman 
 agrees with you on ninety-nine points, and differs 
 on one, he always chooses that one point to speak 
 about. He could occasionally fulminate with much 
 vigour against views and tendencies of which he 
 disapproved. But on the whole he disliked and 
 avoided the atmosphere of controversy, and generally 
 when he thought an author worthy of study, he 
 took infinite pains to enter into his point of view, 
 and even to suggest reasons to justify what seemed 
 paradoxical and extravagant. This may be noticed
 
 xxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 in his treatment of not only Kant and Hegel, but 
 of Epicurus, Hobbes, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and 
 others. Certainly the fault, if it is a fault, is more 
 than compensated by the subtle insight which is 
 the natural reward of this kind of criticism, and 
 which enables him to see the affirmation that is 
 working behind the negations of the authors he is 
 examining, and to find out all the grains of gold 
 which are hidden in their dross. 
 
 Wallace's most important work, of course, lay 
 in his exposition of the Hegelian system. In the 
 Prolegomena to Hegel's Logic, even in its first form, 
 he did much to remove the preliminary difficulties 
 that embarrass the student ; and in the enlarged 
 edition, he discussed very fully all the main aspects 
 of the Hegelian philosophy, giving also a sketch 
 of the whole movement of the Logic, and showing 
 its relation to the other parts of the system. The 
 main defect of the Prolegomena is one which I have 
 already indicated, viz. that while the topic of each 
 chapter is treated in a very suggestive and pene- 
 trative way, the links of connexion between the 
 different chapters are not always fully indicated ; 
 and in consequence the whole has the aspect of 
 being a series of essays, rather than of a connected 
 treatise. This, however, is more in appearance than 
 reality, and to any one who carefully studies the 
 volume as a whole, it will become evident that there 
 are few real difficulties in the subject, which have 
 not been thoroughly dealt with. The points upon 
 which Wallace dwells most fully are, first of all,
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxvii 
 
 Hegel's view of the relation of the point of view 
 of philosophy to that of the ordinary consciousness 
 on the one hand, and that of the sciences on the 
 other. In connexion with this, he takes up and 
 discusses very fully the various misunderstandings 
 of what is meant by Idealism, such as the supposi- 
 tion that it is the reduction of the objective world 
 to an appearance in the consciousness of the subject, 
 or that it involves the reference of the phenomenal 
 world to a transcendental world of ideas. Such 
 misconceptions he tries to meet by an historical 
 survey of the transition through Kant and Fichte 
 to Schelling and Hegel ; and again by showing that 
 the fundamental truth upon which Idealism exists, 
 is the relativity of all distinctions. In particular, 
 he seeks to prove that it does not set the object and 
 the subject against each other, or deny the reality 
 of the former any more than of the other, but that 
 it insists primarily on that ultimate unity of all 
 things which Plato adumbrated in the Idea of 
 Good. 
 
 ' The central or cardinal point of view of Idealism x 
 is/ he declares, ' its refusal to be kept standing at 
 a fixed disruption between subject and object, 
 between spirit and nature. Its idea is the identity 
 or unity (not without the difference) of both. In 
 its purely logical or epistemological aspect, one can 
 easily see that, as Schopenhauer was so fond of 
 repeating, there is no object without a subject, and 
 no subject without an object. The difficulty arises 
 
 1 Proleg., p. 193.
 
 xxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 in remembering these excellent truisms when one 
 of the correlatives is out of sight, and the other 
 seems to be independent, and to come before us with 
 a title to recognition apparently all its own. . . . The 
 basis of all consciousness and mental activity is an 
 original division, a "judgement" or dijudication of 
 self from self. But once the dijudication made for 
 such ends, it is a mistake to forget its initiation, 
 and lose sight entirely of the fact that the observing 
 mind is also the active, and that the object-self is 
 not merely in relation to the subject-self, but in 
 a higher unity is identifiable therewith. . . . What 
 Hegel, after Schelling, teaches, on the other side, is 
 that the process of sense impression and the manipu- 
 lations to which it is subjected by intellect pre- 
 suppose, for their existence and their objective 
 truth, a Reason which is the unity of subject and 
 object, an original identity uniting knowledge to 
 being.' 
 
 If, therefore, we attempt to separate spirit from 
 nature, we end in depriving of all meaning the 
 element which we try to treat as an independent 
 substance. As Schelling puts it l : ' Opposing and 
 separating the world of intelligence from the world 
 of nature, men have learned to see nature outside 
 God, and God outside nature, and withdrawing 
 nature from the holy necessity, have subordinated 
 it to the unholy which they name mechanical, while 
 by the same act they have made the ideal world 
 the scene of a lawless liberty. At the same time 
 
 1 Proleg., p. 165 ; Schelling, iv. 306.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxix 
 
 as they defined nature as a merely passive entity, 
 they supposed they had gained the right of defining 
 God, whom they elevated above nature, as pure 
 activity, utter " actuosity," as if one of these concepts 
 did not stand and fall with the other.' On the other 
 hand, we must not conceive the unity so asserted as 
 a transcendent Being, in which the difference of things 
 is simply lost, but simply as the unity of experience 
 fully thought out. ' This transcendental, absolutist, 
 a priori philosophy, which stands so strange and 
 menacing on the threshold of the nineteenth 
 century, is after all only, as Kant sometimes called 
 it, an essay to comprehend and see the true nearness 
 and dimensions of the much-quoted experience. 
 All knowledge exists in (not on) the unity of 
 experience. All the several experiences rest in the 
 totality of one experience, ultimate, all embracing, 
 absolute, unconditioned, universal and yet indivi- 
 dual, necessary and yet free, eternal, yet filling all 
 the works of time ideal, and yet the mother of all 
 reality, unextended, and yet spread through the 
 space of the universe. Call it, if you like, the 
 experience of the race, but remember that that 
 apparently more realistic and scientific process 
 connotes neither more nor less (if rightly understood) 
 than normal, ideal, universal, infinite, absolute 
 experience. This is the Unconditioned, which is the 
 basis and the builder of all conditions ; the Absolute, 
 which is the home and parent of all relations. 
 Experience is no doubt yours and mine, but it is 
 much more than yours and mine. He who builds
 
 xxx BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 on his experience, builds on and in the Absolute, in 
 the system, a system which is not merely his. In 
 his every utterance he claims to speak as the 
 mouthpiece of the Absolute, the Unconditioned ; his 
 words expect and require assent, belief, acceptance ; 
 they are candidates (not necessarily or always success- 
 ful) for the rank of universal and necessary truth ; 
 they are dogmatic assertions, and, even in their 
 humblest tones, none the less infected with the 
 fervour of certainty. For, indeed, otherwise it 
 would be a shame and an insult to let them 
 cross the lips V 
 
 Again, if this be so, we can understand that the 
 task of philosophy is not merely to sum up the results 
 of the sciences, or to show the harmony of their first 
 principles, but it is to transform our ordinary view 
 of the world as a collection of independent things, 
 or even of things acting and reacting on each other, 
 by thoroughly working out the idea of their unity. 
 In opposition at once to the mystic view that would 
 lose all things in God, and the empirical view that 
 would rest in their apparent independence as 
 phenomena conditioned by time and space, a true 
 philosophy must be guided by the idea of system 
 a system which does justice to all the divisions of 
 reality, yet attempts to show the organic or super- 
 organic unity of the whole. Philosophy cannot stop 
 short of this ; and if it be said that such system 
 is unattainable, the answer is, that the thing is 
 done by us all, and has to be done ' 2 . ' If not as men 
 
 1 Proleg., p. 169. 2 Philosophy of Mind, Essay i, p. 18.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxi 
 
 of science, yet as men, as human beings, we have 
 to put things together, and form some total estimate 
 of the drift of development, of the unity of nature. 
 To get a notion, not merely of the general methods 
 and principles of the sciences, but of their results 
 and teachings, and to get this, not as a mere lot 
 of fragments but with a systematic unity, is indis- 
 pensable in some degree for all rational life. The 
 life not founded on science is not the life of man. 
 But he will not find what he wants in the text- 
 books of the specialist, who is obliged to treat his 
 subject, as Plato says, "under the pressure of 
 necessity," and who dare not look on it in its 
 quality, " to draw the soul towards truth, and to 
 form the philosophic intellect so as to uplift what 
 we now mainly keep down" (Plato, Rep. 527). If 
 the philosopher in this province does his work badly, 
 he may plead the novelty of his task, to which he 
 comes as a pioneer, or even as an architect. He 
 finds little that he can directly utilize. The 
 materials have been gathered and prepared for very 
 special aims ; and the great aim of science that 
 human life may be made a higher, an ampler and 
 happier thing has hardly been kept in view at all, 
 except in its more materialistic aspects. To the 
 philosopher the supreme interest of the physical 
 sciences is that man also belongs to the physical 
 universe, or that Mind and Matter are (to use 
 Mr. Spencer's language) " at once antithetic and 
 inseparable." He wants to find the place of Man, 
 but of Man as Mind in Nature.'
 
 xxxii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 This view leads to a new conception of logical 
 method, in which the old difficulty of Plato, whether 
 inference proceeds from the known to the known, 
 or from the known to the unknown, receives its 
 solution. We cannot base knowledge on principles 
 which we know independently of the results based 
 on them, or on so-called 'facts' which remain to the 
 end what they were for us at the beginning. For 
 any such principle or fact, as thus isolated, must 
 be imperfectly conceived, and can be rightly con- 
 ceived only when we discern in it the relations and 
 connexions which at first we overlook ; nor can we 
 stop short in the process of regress and recon- 
 struction, of corrective interpretation and reinter- 
 pretation, till we find the whole in, or behind, our 
 first starting-point. 'Begin where you like, the 
 reason of things, if you allow it to w r ork, carries you 
 round till you see identity where you saw only 
 difference, or effects where you only looked for 
 causes. You begin, as the inductive logician, with 
 the belief that the process is from the known to the 
 unknown. You start with your basis of fact, as you 
 called it. The nemesis of things forces you to admit 
 that your facts are partly fictions, which waited for 
 the unknown to give them a truer and fuller reality. 
 You talk at first of induction, as if it were a single 
 and simple process, which out of facts builds up 
 generalities and uniformities. You learn as you go 
 on that the only induction which operates, except 
 in cases which have been artificially simplified by 
 supposing half the task done before you apply your
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxiii 
 
 experimental methods, is an induction of which the 
 major part is deductive, and where your conclusion 
 will be recurrently made your premiss. Your in- 
 duction only works on the basis of an hypothesis, 
 and must be itself linked in the " concatenation of 
 truths," a concatenation which is itself a criticism 
 and a correction V 
 
 From this it follows that the mechanical method 
 of construing the whole as the aggregate of the 
 parts, and also, what may be called the chemical 
 method, in which the unity of the parts appears 
 as a new partial existence with qualities that have 
 no apparent essential connexion with those of the 
 elements out of which they come, must be regarded 
 as abstract methods, which, though they work well 
 within a certain region, yet rest on a limited and 
 hypothetical construction of things. And they 
 must both ultimately yield to the 'method of 
 development which is the method that is applicable 
 to the full concrete reality, not like the others to 
 parts abstracted from and insulated in reality 2 / 
 a method which ' has to blend induction with reduc- 
 tion, and to start from both ends in the series of 
 causation at once,' and which goes upon the supposi- 
 tion that the determinations of each part can be 
 truly known only when we regard it as resting upon 
 and returning to the unity of the whole. This 
 method ' recognizes in the object it examines a 
 certain independence or originality, yet also the 
 pressure of an immanent law, which does not wait 
 
 1 Proleg.,p. 188. 2 Id., p. 214. 
 
 C
 
 xxxiv BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 for the outsider to put it together, but constructs 
 itself as it were after a plan of its own V It sees 
 in it the ' same subjective principle, both analytic 
 and synthetic, as we own in thought.' The object 
 is for it, ' neither a mere thing to be explained and 
 construed ab extra, nor a mystery of sudden trans- 
 formation to be passively accepted ; but a growth 
 to be sympathetically watched and understood 
 understood, because it follows the same order as the 
 movement of our own thought in the process of 
 knowledge. Similia similibus cognoscuntur.' 
 
 As an actual specimen of this method of treating 
 an object, and working towards the comprehension 
 of it by following its own dialectic, we may refer to 
 the eighteenth chapter of the Prolegomena, where 
 Wallace attempts to deal with the idea of Per- 
 sonality, and to show how the different views of 
 it may be regarded as steps in self-explication ; or 
 to the remarks in the next chapter on Genesis in 
 mental life. The concluding chapters of the Pro- 
 legomena give an account of Hegel's application 
 of this method to Logic itself, showing especially in 
 what sense the whole system is developed out of 
 the idea of Being with which it began, and in 
 which sense the beginning really presupposes the 
 system. 
 
 In the Essays prefixed to Hegel's Philosophy 
 of Mind, Wallace's last published work, there is 
 an attempt in the same spirit to discuss the value 
 of the different methods in their application to 
 
 1 Proleg., p. 221.
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxv 
 
 psychology, and to maintain the ultimate superiority 
 of the method of development. The following 
 passage may be sufficient to indicate the general 
 point of view. ' The vulgar apprehension of these 
 things seems to assume that we have by nature or 
 are born with a general faculty or set of faculties, 
 which we subsequently fill up and embody by the 
 aid of experience. We possess they seem to 
 imply so many "forms" or "categories" latent in 
 our minds ready to hold and combine the new 
 materials supplied from without. According to 
 this view, we have all a will and an intelligence ; 
 the difference is only that some put more into them, 
 and some put less. But such a separation of the 
 general form from its contents is a piece of pure 
 mythology. It is perhaps true and safe to say that 
 the human being is of such a character that will 
 and intelligence are in the ordinary course inevitably 
 produced. But the forms which grow up are the 
 more and more definite and systematic organization 
 of a graded experience, of series of ideas, working 
 themselves up again and again in representative 
 and re-representative degree, till they constitute 
 a mental or inner world of their own. The will is 
 thus the title appropriate to the final stage of 
 a process, by which sensation and impulse have 
 polished and perfected themselves, by union and 
 opposition, by differentiation and accompanying 
 redintegration, till they assume characters quite 
 unsurmised in their earliest aspects, and yet only 
 the consolidation or self-realization of implications. 
 
 c 2
 
 xxxvi BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 Thus the mental faculties are essentially acquired 
 powers, acquired not from without, but by action 
 which generates the faculties it seems to imply. 
 The process of mind is a process which creates 
 individual centres, raises them to completer inde- 
 pendence ; which produces an inner life more and 
 more self-centred, and also more and more equal 
 to the universe which it has embodied. And will 
 and intelligence are an important stage of that 
 process.' In what follows, Wallace gives a very 
 suggestive commentary on the way in which Hegel 
 follows out this idea, not only in psychology, but 
 also in ethics and the philosophy of religion. 
 
 As may be partly seen from the account just given, 
 Wallace was at once one of the most faithful of the 
 followers of Hegel, and at the same time the most 
 free from any clinging to mere verbal fidelity. 
 He does not deal much in Hegelian formulae, even 
 when he is explaining Hegel ; rather he is very 
 impatient of such literalness, and never rests in the 
 Hegelian thought till he has reproduced it in a new 
 form, or in many new forms. His allegiance means 
 that he seemed to himself to find in Hegel just what 
 he wanted for the development of his own tendencies 
 of mind. On the other hand, just for that reason, 
 I think his expositions of Hegelianism extremely 
 faithful, and little influenced by any preconceptions. 
 They seem to me to be explanations from within 
 outwards, and less embarrassed by subordinate 
 technicalities than almost any other treatment of 
 the subject I have met with. If there is a bias
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxvii 
 
 in them at all, it is, as I have already indicated, 
 that he emphasizes more the aspect of Hegel in 
 which he agreed with Schelling, and therefore lays 
 more stress upon the presence of the whole in each 
 part, than upon the negative dialectical movement 
 from one stage to another. But this is rather 
 a question of comparative emphasis than of any 
 essential difference of view. 
 
 In his general attitude to philosophy, Wallace 
 combined a strong, almost unswerving confidence 
 in the general idealistic point of view, with an 
 extreme distrust of his own power of stating it 
 adequately. This arose partly from a consciousness 
 of the complexity of things which made him con- 
 tinually ready to look at them in new aspects, and 
 to reconsider views of them which he had neglected, 
 or to which he felt he had not done sufficient justice. 
 It arose also partly from his high literary ideal, 
 which made him keenly alive to any defect of 
 exactness or refinement of expression. As I have 
 said, he took endless pains in gaining an intimate 
 knowledge of any subject or author whom he was 
 studying, even down to the most external and insigni- 
 ficant details of biography ; and when preparing any 
 work for publication he wrote and rewrote what he 
 had to say, till he was even in danger of losing the 
 spontaneity of his original draft. I hardly think 
 I have known any one who was so much oppressed 
 with the vision of perfection, or rather with the 
 combined and almost irreconcilable ideals of literary 
 and philosophical excellence. This is partly the
 
 xxxviii BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 reason why he did not produce more, though it was 
 also due to the fact that his circumstances, and 
 the various claims upon him, rendered it necessary 
 for him to combine the work of a Tutorship with 
 that of his Chair, and also to undertake other work 
 which left him comparatively little time for writing. 
 It is harder to speak of Wallace's personal cha- 
 racter, and of what he was to those who knew him 
 intimately. The somewhat abrupt speech and 
 manner, which might repel strangers, and made the 
 process of becoming intimate with him slow and 
 difficult, did not conceal from those who came nearer 
 to him the deep sincerity and reality of the man, 
 and the tenderness and strength of his affections. 
 And those who knew his private life know what 
 sacrifices of any kind he was capable of making for 
 those in whom he was interested. He was one who 
 hid his good deeds almost as if they were crimes. 
 Generally his innate reserve made it difficult for him 
 to show what he was, out of his own household, and 
 a comparatively narrow circle of friends. During 
 the work of the Term, he often seemed rather 
 oppressed than satisfied with what he could do. 
 But he had correspondingly keen enjoyment in the 
 times when the pressure was relaxed, especially in 
 the numerous tours which he made with his family 
 to places interesting from literary or philosophical 
 associations. He was a 'lover of the meadows, and 
 the woods, and mountains,' who had the deepest 
 enjoyment in natural beauty, and who would go 
 miles to see the first spring flowers and bring
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION xxxix 
 
 them back to his family. He loved the simple 
 and the natural, and he was intensely averse to 
 any kind of show or display. But one could not 
 be long in his company without feeling the in- 
 fluence of his strong rectitude of nature, and of 
 his latent and never directly expressed enthusiasm 
 for that ideal view of life which he regarded as 
 the truth. 
 
 In regard to the contents of the following volume, 
 only a few words need be said. Wallace was not 
 in the habit of writing out his lectures, and hence 
 some of his best work in later years exists only in 
 the form of notes, which are too disconnected and 
 unfinished for publication. But there remains a 
 considerable amount of w r riting, mainly on ethical or 
 theological subjects, from which I have selected the 
 parts that seemed most likely to interest the public. 
 With the exception of two reviews, none of the papers 
 included had been prepared for publication by the 
 author, and consequently some of them are lacking 
 in completeness and consecutiveness of treatment, 
 and others want that finish of literary expression 
 which his writings generally show. At the same time, 
 I think there is some gain on the other side, especially 
 for those who desire to search into the actual working 
 of a philosopher's mind. There is in them often 
 a certain spontaneity and freshness, a directness and 
 force, which more than compensate for any defect of 
 form. The Giflford Lectures, in spite of their frag- 
 mentary condition, contain a fairly adequate expres- 
 sion of his view of the relation of philosophy to
 
 xl BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION 
 
 theology, and of religion to morality. And some of 
 the papers, especially the Essays on Moral Philosophy, 
 have a tentative and heuristic character, as of a 
 mind testing different ways of thought and seeking 
 an outlet in one direction after another, which will 
 be specially attractive to those who like to see 
 thought, not ready made, but in the process of 
 development. On the whole, they do not seem to 
 me to fall below the usual high standard of the 
 author's philosophical writings, and they show more 
 completely than any of them his mind upon the 
 highest questions of Religion and Morality. 
 
 I have to offer my best thanks to Mr. Bernard 
 Bosanquet, to Professor Jones of the University of 
 Glasgow, and to Mr. J. A. Smith of Balliol College, 
 for assistance in selecting, from Wallace's manu- 
 scripts the papers that were most suitable for 
 publication. 
 
 EDWARD CAIBD. 
 
 BALLIOL COLLEGE, 
 Oct. 10, 1898.
 
 LECTURES 
 
 ON 
 
 RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY 
 
 [BEING THE GIFFORD LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF GLASGOW IN 1894 AND 1895]
 
 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 TO THE GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 PROFESSOR WALLACE delivered two courses of Gifford 
 Lectures in the University of Glasgow. In the first 
 course, delivered in 1894, he discussed the subject of 
 Natural Theology historically, giving a sketch of the 
 views of Greek philosophers, and showing their influence 
 on the development of Christian doctrine. The first three 
 of the following lectures belong to this course ; the other 
 lectures of this course exist only in the form of news- 
 paper reports, which are too imperfect and fragmentary to 
 be reprinted. The first two, dealing with the scope of 
 Natural Theology and the Greek Origins of Theology, do 
 not correspond with the newspaper reports, and seem to 
 have been written after the course was delivered, when 
 Mr. Wallace was thinking of preparing his lectures for 
 publication. The third, on the Natural Theology of Christ, 
 was actually delivered. 
 
 The second course, delivered in 1895, dealt with the 
 subject of the relations of Morality and Religion. Of 
 this course, nine lectures have been preserved. The first 
 five lectures were occupied with a review of the various 
 
 B 2
 
 4 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 
 iniluences, ethical, literary, and scientific, which are affect- 
 ing the religious thought of the present time, and changing 
 the old dogmatic conceptions with which religion was 
 formerly associated. Of this part of the course only two 
 lectures are preserved (the fourth and fifth of the lectures 
 following). The MS. breaks off abruptly at the end of 
 the second of these two lectures, at the point where 
 Mr. Wallace entered upon an examination of the influence 
 of modern scientific conceptions upon the religious idea. 
 The rest of the lectures of this course, from the sixth to 
 the twelfth lecture, are preserved. They begin with an 
 account and criticism of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of 
 Belief, and then proceed to discuss the - general subject 
 of the relations of morality and religion. These lectures, 
 though they have not been in any way revised or corrected 
 since they were first written, seem to me to contain some 
 of the most original and suggestive pages w r hich Professor 
 Wallace has produced. '
 
 LECTURES 
 
 NATURAL RELIGION AND THE 
 RELATION OF RELIGION TO MORALITY 
 
 THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 
 
 AT the present time, Natural Theology is apt to seem 
 a belated stranger, if not even an impertinent intruder, in 
 the circle of the sciences. The very term, the combination of 
 noun and adjective, suggests an ill-assorted pair, or perhaps 
 a contradiction in the conception. Theology, firmly estab- 
 lished on its rock of Scripture, looks down almost con- 
 temptuously on the feeble efforts of unassisted reason to 
 feel after God, if haply it may find Him. An impassable 
 gulf is declared to separate the range of nature, which is the 
 field of science, from the higher sphere of religion and of 
 divine things. In the latter, it is urged, mere human reason 
 is incompetent, or, where it is not altogether incompetent, 
 it is altogether subordinate. For theology the necessary 
 stimulus and starting-point must come from above, and has 
 in fact come in the shape of a supernatural revelation. The 
 mere natural man by merely natural means can know 
 nothing of God, and, if he is to know anything of Him, 
 must be directly or indirectly enlightened about God by God 
 Himself.
 
 6 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 Questions like these may be said no doubt to go to the 
 root of the matter. But it will perhaps also be admitted that, 
 before proceeding to these extremities, there are problems 
 of some importance connected with the scope of the terms 
 employed. To mark the problems which are under examina- 
 tion, the contrasts of natural and supernatural have to be 
 dealt with. The history of theological conceptions has to be 
 traced. 
 
 And, in the first place, we must try to rise out of and 
 beyond the conception of Natural Theology which is most 
 familiar to the English mind, the conception which was 
 adopted by Paley and the Bridgewater treatises of the present 
 century. Natural Theology is thus restricted to the study of 
 the evidences of design in nature, to an examination of the 
 mutual adaptations in the physical universe which seemed 
 to indicate as their origin an intelligence ordering all things 
 for a purpose, that purpose being on the whole understood 
 to be the welfare of man. So many and so striking are, 
 from this point of view, the appearances of wise arrange- 
 ment, moulding everything into materials for the use of 
 humanity, that it is impossible to suppose them to be the 
 result of chance, to be the undesigned consilience of indepen- 
 dent agents. 
 
 This kind of Natural Theology, though with Paley (1802) 
 and Chalmers it lasts on into the nineteenth century, is 
 really a survival of a mode of thought more appropriate to 
 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By Francis Bacon 
 (1605) Natural Theology, with an alternative title of Divine 
 Philosophy, is described as that 'knowledge or rudiment of 
 knowledge concerning God which may be obtained by con- 
 templation of His creatures.' ' It suffices,' he adds, ' to confute 
 atheism, but not to inform religion/ Even at that date the 
 subject was a popular one : on this topic, remarks the author 
 of the Advancement of Learning, 'I am so far from noting any 
 deficiency as I rather note an excess.' Bacon, in fact, seems
 
 i] . THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 7 
 
 thoroughly aware of the limited scope and negative character 
 of the remarks and observations included under the title of 
 Natural Theology, as indeed might have been expected from 
 one who has complained elsewhere of the unhappy results of 
 mixing up theology with science. 
 
 The authority of Sir Isaac Newton contributed, in England 
 at least, to subordinate science to certain presuppositions from 
 theology. In the Scholion Generale which concludes the third 
 book of his Principia (1687) Newton almost steps out of his 
 way to affirm, as against Cartesianism, his acceptance of the 
 creationist theory. Hypotheses like that of Descartes may 
 profess to explain the stability and symmetry of the planetary 
 world by a purely naturalistic or mechanical evolution of an 
 aggregate of material particles according to the laws of 
 movement. Newton, on the contrary, distinctly states his 
 conviction that ' All these regular movements do not have 
 their source in mechanical causes ' ; and in the (posthumously 
 published) letters to Bentley plainly says, ' the diurnal rota- 
 tions of the planets could not be derived from gravity, but 
 required a divine arm to impress them.' This argument is 
 indeed of little value : for it only means that the man of 
 science is unable to construct a scheme of evolution without 
 lacunae from the assumed primordial state of matter down to 
 the ordered system of the present epoch. Yet if we translate 
 the figuratively materialistic language of Newton into more 
 abstract terms, we may say that, however far back we retrace 
 the origin of the present scheme of things, we cannot really 
 escape the hypothesis of a system which even in its molecules 
 was instinct with the presence of law and order. 
 
 The whole tenor of Natural Theology betrays its connexion 
 with an age of practical and utilitarian science, which, how- 
 ever, had not cast off its religious faiths, and was solicitous 
 to keep the two sides of its life in some sort of correlation. 
 Works like that of John Ray, The Wisdom of Go/I manifested 
 in the Works of Creation (1691) popularized, and we may even
 
 8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 say vulgarized, the idea of making 'the book o nature 
 a commentary on the book of revelation/ The example 
 apparently ' caught on' and satisfied a need of the times. 
 The Boyle lectures, instituted for what is sometimes called 
 the proof of fundamental Christian doctrine against all out- 
 siders, of other religion or of none, offered a vehicle for such 
 reflections. The new natural knowledge, which had hitherto 
 struggled onward on its own resources, winning favour by 
 its intrinsic attractions, received a status of respectability in 
 the social hierarchy. Even as the older Church had given 
 an ex post facto consecration to movements and organizations 
 that had first started beyond its pale, so Protestantism allied 
 to itself the rising spirit of research, and sought to make the 
 sciences pay tribute to the religious and theological interests of 
 the age and country. 
 
 Among the early Boyle lectures were those of W. Derham, 
 in 1711-12, published under the title of Physico-theology. This 
 is the name which in the more careful use of words is specially 
 appropriated to the branch of Natural Theology now under 
 discussion, the argument from the contrivance and adaptation 
 supposed to be detected in nature to the existence of a designer 
 and contriver of more than human wisdom and power. In 1714 
 Derham followed with an Astro-theology, specially illustrating 
 the way in which the heavens declare the glory of God. 
 /These essays found imitators in England, and still more in 
 Germany, to which at that epoch England stood more in the 
 position of an ensample than she can be at present said to do. 
 It may be that by such observations the pious Christian mind 
 was enabled to strike up a relation between religion and the 
 other aspects of life and reality. Derham's two works were 
 translated into German by the notable scholar and compiler 
 John Albei*t Fabricius in 1728 and 1730, who also contributed 
 to the literature of the subject by a Hydro-theology in 1730, 
 and the outlines of a Pyro-theology in 1732. The philosopher 
 Christian Wolff dealt with the whole subject in his Theologia
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 9 
 
 Natitralis (1736), of which the first volume treated especially 
 of the a posteriori evidences, whilst the second gave the a priori 
 or metaphysical argument. One writer (F. C. Lesser) added 
 three special departments for pious reflection : viz. on stones, 
 insects and shell-fish, endeavouring (in the words of one of his 
 own titles) to show how, under the authority of Scripture and 
 reason, 'by attentive study of otherwise neglected natural 
 facts one may rise to a lively perception and admiration of 
 the omnipotence, wisdom, goodness, and justice of the great 
 God/ Other writers in the half-century preceding Kant's 
 first Kritik dealt with the religious lessons which may be 
 derived from the phenomena of snow, plants, birds, thunder, 
 locusts, fishes, bees, earthquakes. These treatises, long since 
 consigned to oblivion, were not without their particular 
 occasions and appropriateness : e. g. they preserve the memory 
 of the great snowfalls of 1726 and 1729, the plague of 
 locusts in central Europe between 1747 and 1749, and the 
 earthquake at Lisbon in 1 755. 
 
 Of this mode of bridging over the interval between science 
 and religion Paley's Natural Theology in 1802 is a belated 
 survival, a character still more attachable to the Bridgewater 
 treatises published more than thirty years later. But as it 
 reappeared, it had lost in naturalness what it professed to 
 gain in logical plausibility ; for with the larger apparatus of 
 scientific method the line of evidence grows artificial, and 
 rather reflects the acumen of the demonstrator than the skill 
 apparent in the works of nature. Meanwhile the conceptions 
 of matter and of nature had been passing beyond the phases 
 at which the argument for final causes took them. The 
 relationship of a creator to the creatures as that of an 
 architect or manager to his works was no longer deemed 
 adequate, nor did it seem the highest praise which could fall 
 to him that he had made the best of somewhat recalcitrant 
 materials. The great mechanician is only a mode, and an 
 insufficient mode, of conceiving God's supremacy; and even
 
 io GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 if it be specially suitable to the genius of a utilitarian age, it 
 cannot rank as more than an analogy under which we form 
 a partial conception of the divine mode of action. The 
 problems of the cosmos presuppose for their solution a greater 
 power of adapting matter than human agency as yet pos- 
 sesses : so that, if God works after our methods, He must 
 exhibit our powers in a transcendent degree : such is all that 
 the argument carries. 
 
 Religion had little to gain by these demonstrations : at 
 least any religion which had real vitality and was not a form 
 of words parasitically seeking to gain support from alien 
 growths. There is, indeed, a natural piety which sees God 
 in everything, and translates every word of nature into 
 a whisper of God. When the devoted Jesuits, who in the 
 early part of the seventeenth century carried the Gospel to 
 ' New France/ write back to their French superiors, ' To live 
 in New France is in sooth to live in the bosom of God and 
 to breathe only the air of His divine guidance ' ; when they 
 say, ' How good it feels in the sacred horrors of these forests, 
 and how much of heaven's light is found in the dense dark- 
 ness of this barbarian land/ we recognize the presence of that 
 faith which removes mountains, where the vision of dominant 
 conviction transfigures wilds and Indians into a rift through 
 which shine the glory and love of the Eternal. It is the 
 same when we find Jonathan Edwards describing his feelings, 
 when sometime between his seventeenth and twentieth years 
 his mind had first been visited with some insight into the 
 deeper realities of life, and he had retired to what he calls 
 a solitary place in his father's pasture. ' As I was walking 
 there and looking upon the sky and clouds, there came into 
 my mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace 
 of God that I know not how to express. . . . The appearance 
 of everything was altered : there seemed to be a calm sweet 
 cast or appearance of divine glory in almost everything. 
 God's excellency, His wisdom, His purity and love seemed to
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY n 
 
 appear in everything : in the sun, moon, and stars : in the 
 clouds and blue sky : in the grass, flowers, and trees : in the 
 water and all nature : which used greatly to fix my mind.' 
 Even the more terrible phenomena of nature participated in 
 this new spirit. ' Scarcely anything among all the works of 
 nature was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning. . . I felt 
 God, so to speak, at the first appearance of a thunderstorm/ 
 Even in such immature sentimentalism we can see that it is 
 only the sun-possessed eye that can behold the sun itself. It 
 is the pure in heart that see God : and Pectusfacit theolognm. 
 The dominant principle, idea, love, passion determines the 
 interpretation of facts. So while Charles Kingsley finds it 
 a nobler thought to hold that c Deity created primal forms 
 capable of self -development into all forms needful pro fen/pore 
 and pro loco' than to follow the old view of a creation once 
 and for ever established in its species, Mill is more inclined 
 to see in the evolutionist hypothesis the supplanting of the 
 old creator by what Darwin called 'my deity, natural 
 selection.' 
 
 To minds susceptible mainly to practical and material 
 considerations this form of Natural Theology, the physico- 
 theological argument from design, has seemed a sounder basis 
 than the ontological method which appeared to juggle with 
 ideas. In Mill's judgement it satisfied the requirements of 
 inductive inference so far at least as to suggest a considerable 
 probability in favour of an intelligent and powerful being as 
 the guide of the cosmic movements, but to be less cogent now 
 that it had been, if, as the Darwinian hypothesis suggested, 
 the same facts could also be explained as the cumulative 
 effect of accidental variations, and of the mutual actions 
 and reactions of all existences. Yet on a closer inspection 
 perhaps it may be said that the real effect of design argu- 
 ments is only seen when they are pushed back to their ultimate 
 presupposition in the radical unity and interdependence of all 
 things that are. Things are not external to each other and
 
 12 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 independent : they are not merely brought into affinity and 
 correlation by an outside impulse and guidance; but are 
 essentially and primordially in organic interconnexion, sym- 
 pathetic, interconscious, in a many-sided reciprocal attraction. 
 Its weakness is the tendency to regard humanity as the 
 centre or pivot on which the whole effort of creation con- 
 verges : whereas the human interest is only a relative and 
 partial centre, not to be elevated into absolute authority to 
 the exclusion and depreciation of others. 
 
 Besides this use of the term Natural Theology, restricting 
 it to the physico-theological argument from design, there is 
 a wider use of it to mean what is also called rational or 
 philosophical theology. Here we come in touch with what 
 has been called Natural or Rational Religion, and with the 
 naturalistic and rationalistic movements which mark the 
 course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is not 
 unfrequently said, and with some surface plausibility, that 
 Lord Herbert of Cherbury (J)e Verilate, 1624) gave in 
 modern times the impulse to this free-thinking movement. 
 The thinkers of the Renaissance and Reformation had been 
 occasionally touched by the larger spirit of religious faith. 
 Thus Erasmus in his Encheiridion could say ( Christum vero esse 
 puta non vocem inanem, sed nihil aliud quam charitatem, sim- 
 plicitatem, patientiam, puritatem, breviter quidquid ille docuit/ 
 To him it seemed that inspiration was not limited to the 
 Jews : the ethical scriptures of Cicero, Seneca, and above all 
 Plato, formed a catena of truths not unworthy to be linked 
 along with the theism of the Old and New Testament. It 
 is this 'natural religion' which is an inspiring principle to 
 writers so different as Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, and Mon- 
 taigne. It finds voice in the syncretism of Mutianus Rufus : 
 ( Quum Jovem nomino, Christum intelligo et verum Deum/ 
 Sebastian Frank (1495-1543) identifies the lumen naturale 
 with the ' word ' or invisible Christ : he sees in the historical 
 fact of Adam and Christ only a symbol of the eternal relation
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 13 
 
 of man and God: 'Omnis homo/ he says, 'unus homo: vita 
 una et eadem omnibus/ The older Realism revives, and sets 
 the eternal Spirit against the changing- history of the letter. 
 
 But the oldest example of the phase of Natural Theology 
 belonging to this pre- Reformation period is the Theologia 
 Natwalis of Raymond de Sabunde, published in 1438. It is 
 probably best known by Montaigne's Apology. Montaigne 
 knew little more of the author than that he was said to be 
 a Spaniard, and he is described on the title-page as doctor in 
 arts and medicine, and professor in theology. Montaigne, 
 who tells us he made a translation of the work (published 
 apparently in 1569), speaks mysteriously of the original as 
 ( basty d'un espaignol, baragouine en terminaisons latines/ 
 which seems an exaggeration of the character of the text as 
 we have it. The obnoxious matter is contained in the pro- 
 logue, which has been onfitted in all subsequent editions, as 
 condemned before 1500 by the Index 1 . The prologue in 
 a few pages states the scope of the book. There are two 
 books given by God to man. That originally given was the 
 book of nature, or of the Universitas creaturarum. But by 
 reason of his blindness man was unable to read it; and 
 another had therefore to be given, the book of Holy Scripture. 
 Unfortunately the key which Scripture affords is itself 
 a dubious and puzzling gift. Its obscurity requires in the 
 interpreter a special training, that of the scholar and priest : 
 its authenticity needs to be corroborated by research and 
 argument. Philology, grammar, logic, and rhetoric are 
 indispensable, if we are to make a proper use of the super- 
 natural key to the meaning of the world and life. 
 
 The case with the book of nature is very different. It is 
 a connatural part of the regular order of life, and can be 
 studied by the unassisted intelligence sine magistro. There 
 
 1 The full title of the book is Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum, 
 specialiter de homine et de natura ejus in quantum homo, et de his quae sunt ei 
 nccessaria ad cngn(,scendum seipsum et omne dcbitum ad quod homo tenetur et obliga- 
 tur tarn deo quam proximo.
 
 14 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 is no possibility of misunderstanding it, and no risk from 
 forgeries. It is an infallible science which any one can 
 acquire 'in a month and without labour, and it requires no 
 effort of memory/ This is the ' light of all the sciences/ 
 without which they are but vanities. It contains that rule 
 of nature by which a man learns all his duty. And now in 
 the end of the world it is necessary to every Christian that 
 he may be established in the Catholic faith. It argues, in- 
 fallibly, ' from those things which are most certain to every 
 man by experience, or from the nature of all the creatures 
 and of man himself, from those things which man most 
 surely knows of himself by experience, and especially by 
 inward experience ; and therefore it is a knowledge which 
 does not require any witness but man himself.' But before 
 dealing with man it considers the various orders of created 
 things. For 'the universe of things and beings is set as it 
 were a natural ladder having firm and immovable steps by 
 which a man may ascend into himself/ To grasp these 
 stages in their unity is to learn the meaning of the book of 
 the universe, in which the several creatures and their groups 
 form the letters and syllables. Man learns to see his own 
 purpose, his own dignity and duty, by seeing himself as the 
 convergent unity of lower orders of being, the culmination of 
 a process from mere existence to life, from life to sentiency, 
 and from sentiency to intelligence and will in a free person- 
 ality. But man himself points upwards to an absolute unity 
 and realization of all being, a being who is the principle of 
 love, the root of all good, and of an all-inspiring delight. 
 
 The interest of such a book is to be sought in its historical 
 surroundings and antecedents. Towards the past it gives an 
 echo of that liberal and mystical theology which stretches 
 across the Middle Ages, with here and there a half -heretical 
 thinker taking up the philosophical standpoint of the 
 Alexandrines and of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists. It 
 belongs to a movement which, so to speak, goes on behind
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 15 
 
 the Lutheran reformation, drawing its impetus from a more 
 literary, scientific, and rationalist current of ideas ; its basis 
 is not the reference from a corrupt tradition to an incorrupt 
 book of authoritative doctrine, but from all written texts 
 whatever to the everlasting- and unfailing gospel, of nature 
 and reason. It rises, however it may or may not admit this 
 to itself, above the ecclesiastical traditionalism which had 
 been the best-preserved part of the Church's inheritance from 
 Augustine, above the dependence on literal revelation, and 
 while adopting the basis of inner experience, it thinks 
 more of the systematized experience of natural life than of 
 the bare inwardness of mystical theology. If mediaeval 
 theology was determined to understand what it believed, this 
 postulate implied in the last resort the conviction of the 
 reasonableness of the faith, i.e. of its correspondence with 
 the entire system of reality as it had been otherwise ascer- 
 tained. This conviction is at the bottom of de Sabunde's 
 book. It is partly distorted by a certain boastfulness, marking 
 the intoxication of a discoverer who has learned that a truth 
 hitherto accepted on authority is intrinsically credible, and 
 concordant with fact. But, along with this, there goes 
 a tendency to see in religion an ally of ethics, and to find its 
 essence rather in the scope it assigns to our duty than in the 
 knowledge it gives of God as an abstractly independent 
 being. 
 
 Perhaps the earliest occurrence of the title Natural Theology 
 in Western thought belongs, however, to the system of 
 Stoicism. St. Augustine (De Civ. Dei, vi. 5-12) states, on the 
 authority of Varro, who probably but epitomizes the reflection 
 of Stoic teachers, that there are three species of theology, the 
 poetic or mythological, the civil or political, and the physical 
 or natural. The first is the scheme of divine acts and beings 
 which is suitable to the theatre, the world of literature and 
 art, and its hierophants are the poets. The second is the 
 mode under which a political community acknowledges its
 
 16 GIFFORD LECTURES [\ 
 
 dependence upon higher powers, and is under the charge of 
 sacerdotal officials. But the third is the way in which the 
 thinker and the man of science sees the great power of things. 
 His eye is not restricted to the narrow scope of the city, nor 
 is it content with the reflection of reality in myth and legend 
 of demi-gods and gods. He looks at the whole of things, at 
 the great system of nature, above the range of art and of 
 popular religion ; he finds the truest approach to divinity in 
 a philosophy that seeks the deeper reality, the universal truth, 
 which underlies the visions of poets and the conventional or 
 historical distinctions which national peculiarities have in- 
 troduced into divinity. To Varro, and to the philosophers for 
 whom he speaks, the two other species of theology were at 
 bottom erroneous, and were only suitable for such as by nature 
 and temperament, or by circumstances and authority, were 
 incapable of attaining the true vision of the essence of things. 
 Yet at the same time it is apparent that he can speak of 
 philosophy as a theology only in so far as he allows the two 
 other interpretations, the political and the artistic, to give 
 colour and form to the somewhat vague and unsubstantial 
 phases of the world-order. It is this confusion between 
 philosophy and practical needs which marks the Stoical 
 system, and which is the inevitable consequent of its pro- 
 fessing to give the world a guide through life and its duties. 
 The old antagonism between the philosopher and theologian 
 is smoothed down into that between an esoteric and an 
 exoteric doctrine, or between the inner truth and the accom- 
 modation of it to vulgar necessities, and popular incapacity 
 for the higher teaching. 
 
 We may thus learn that, under all its phases in history, 
 natural theology is the attempt at a synthesis of two factors 
 in human life, which at their first appearance and always 
 present to each other a certain incompatibility, or it may be 
 hostility. It is the application of science to religion, the 
 interpretation of faith and worship by the intellectual
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 17 
 
 principle, and in accordance with the results of ascertained- 
 knowledge. It may err by being premature and hasty : it 
 may err by an inadequate perception of the fact to .be 
 explained. The science which is dominant at a particular 
 age may be one-sided and imperfect as judged by a later and 
 more enlarged standpoint ; and the result of its verdict on 
 religious facts cannot in such a case be unprejudiced. It may 
 turn itself too exclusively to one aspect of reality, too much 
 to the world of physical fact and too little to the realm of 
 psychical life ; and it may on that account fail to give a 
 due place to certain aspects of religious phenomena which 
 are alien to its prepossessions. But in some degree the 
 rationalization of belief, the naturalization of religion, is 
 an inevitable problem. There are differences in the extent 
 to which reason carries this determination, but it is only a 
 question of degree. Even the primaeval f theologian/ whom 
 the philosopher seeks to dispossess, is a philosopher too in his 
 infinitesimal degree. He may be dubbed irrational, but that 
 only means that his reasoning stops short at an earlier stage 
 than we think proper. His development in the line of 
 intelligence has suffered arrest. 
 
 Yet nothing is more certain than that a widespread 
 jealousy meets the attempt to rationalize the faith. Not 
 merely natural theology, but theology altogether has seemed 
 to be an intruder on the religious field. The creation of 
 dogma is an injury to the spirit of faith : under pretence of 
 strengthening the living organism, it turns it into a lifeless 
 petrifaction. Nor is this merely a shrinking from intellectual 
 effort, which springs partly from an ignoble preference for the 
 animal luxury of dull feeling and stolid enjoyment, partly 
 from the effects of reaction against the illusions and dis- 
 appointments that have befallen others. The same tendency 
 is fostered by the preference for action, the sense that 
 theological speculation is an unnecessary, and perhaps a 
 shameful luxury, when so much of the world is lying in sin 
 
 c
 
 i8 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 and misery. There is also the delicacy of feeling which 
 shrinks from theological dogma as a kind of profanation, or 
 as at best but ' sound and smoke clouding over the glow of 
 heaven.' The deeper moments of religious experience, where 
 the soul is alone with God, shrink from the cold clear light 
 of analysis and reflection. The heart claims for its object 
 of devotion a unique and incomparable quality, which would 
 be destroyed when such object was classified and reduced to 
 the level of its kindred. 
 
 Yet when we come to think of it, we can see that this 
 protest of life against being reduced to mere logic is 
 exaggerated. What it really implies is a feeling that reason 
 is not omnipotent, a feeling that all our knowledge rests on. 
 and arises by contrast with, an unknown ; that consciousness 
 must be in perpetual antithesis, but also in perpetual correla- 
 tion with an unconscious. We may, no doubt, amuse ourselves 
 with the fancy of absolute beginnings and absolute ends. 
 But in sober fact it has to be admitted that all our knowledge 
 rests upon ignorance, that it always has a presupposition, 
 which it as continually displaces. We may speak of an ap-^r] 
 avvTidOeTos, but we shall be misled if we take this for one 
 single truth out of which others can be deduced by proper 
 analysis, and upon which others can be built. The true 
 method of science is neither a mere analysis (as the one 
 phrase suggests), nor a mere synthesis (as is implied by the 
 second). Analysis and synthesis are continually alternating 
 and complementary : in other words, analysis is only valuable 
 as a step to synthesis, and synthesis involves a preliminary 
 distinction of elements. 
 
 If it be said that it is the object of philosophy to construe 
 religion, that does not mean, as sometimes seems to be supposed, 
 that it has to construct it. To construe a thing is to set it in 
 its relation to other things, to give it its place in a system, 
 to deprive it of its mere individuality, and to understand its 
 place and value. As has been said, some such appreciation
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 19 
 
 or estimate is always made : but it may be made stealthily, 
 blindly, and without due sense of proportions. The whole 
 claim made by philosophy is that such evaluation of the 
 factors of life shall be made consciously and with due care, 
 and not at haphazard. It may be maintained, indeed, that, 
 as a matter of fact, the most prominent and widespread forms 
 of religion have grown up in a soil thoroughly saturated by 
 philosophic influences. This is certainly true of Christianity 
 and Buddhism. But, apart from this, we must distinguish 
 between philosophy as a life, and philosophy as logic. In 
 reference to life, philosophy is only instrumental and sub- 
 ordinate. It is the extension and deepening of intelligence; 
 the translation, it may be said, of the is into the is known ; 
 the organization of the fragments of life so at first they 
 appear into the complete structure which they really pre- 
 suppose. Philosophy in this case means the development of 
 intelligence into a united view of all the factors of reality 
 and life in their mutual relationships ; the correlation of all 
 departments of human activity with each other, in the light 
 of their being but severally parts and members in working 
 out the ideal of humanity. Philosophy is thus the surveillance 
 of the whole over the members, or rather the spirit of the 
 whole, awakening in each of these members, and making 
 them aware of their mutual dependence. It is the idea of 
 perfection realizing itself in each imperfect medium, seeking 
 to reduce the divergent factors of civilization to accord in 
 the idea of life, full and perfect. To perform such a task 
 a certain aloofness is required. But that is what always 
 happens in any department. To philosophize is to stand 
 apart from the bustle of life : yet the philosopher is after all 
 a man, and his philosophy is only a part of his life, for him 
 perhaps the most important, yet in the great system of 
 human collective life reduced to a factor and a share. 
 
 When philosophy arises, it comes because of felt contradic- 
 tions. It is stimulated by the presence of difficulties and 
 
 C 2
 
 20 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 incongruities, not to say inconsistencies, in the religious scheme. 
 It is all very well to say with Vincent of Lerinum (Common. 
 II. 3) that ' quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, credi- 
 tum est, hoc est vere proprieque catholicum/ But to discover 
 what possesses the marks of ' universitas, antiquitas, consensio ' 
 is a task that soon appears to be hopeless, unless we call in the 
 aid of reasoning and reflection. A mere statistical enumeration 
 and summation is in such a problem impracticable. The marks, 
 literally taken, are inapplicable : the universal and eternal is 
 not found in the range of sense-phenomena. To find it, we 
 must gradually educe from the facts some idea in which 
 they find their unity, and which again in its turn serves as 
 a standard of criticism. Not that such an idea is found once 
 and for all. It is itself but an ideal capable of indefinite 
 approximation, the organized product of a vast number of less 
 adequate steps towards it. 
 
 It is not therefore in a wilful aggression on a peaceful field 
 that we are to seek the origin of rationalizing in religion. 
 Such effort at rationalizing in religion is only the reaction 
 from the effects of hesitancy and dispute. The variety of 
 contemporary belief, the changes in the successive phases 
 of faith and doctrine, are sufficient to account for the attempt 
 to give a reasonable character to a faith. But this is not the 
 whole of the problem. There are other departments of human 
 life, and these in course of time develop with unequal speed 
 and to disproportionate extents. Contradictions thus emerge 
 between church and state, between art and religion, and 
 between science and theology, in the restricted senses in which 
 these terms are ordinarily used. It is partly in consequence 
 of such divergences that Natural Theology has found itself 
 in competition with theology in its narrower sphere. 
 
 It is, and should be, the business of philosophy to release 
 the human problem from this departmental division so far 
 at least as each of these elements of life tends to isolate 
 itself in one-sided supremacy. The antitheses between art
 
 l] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 21 
 
 and morality and religion, not to mention many others, have 
 their relative justification ; but they do harm when treated 
 as independent forces. For a large and philosophic view, 
 morality is a part and step in the great process of man's 
 self-development, a part which, if on one side it is in un- 
 broken continuity with the fulfilment of the elements of 
 psychical life to a free and full personality or true self, is on 
 the other hand building a framework of social relationships, 
 without which religion would hardly deserve that august 
 name, and would certainly not rank as the great humanizing 
 energy it is supposed to be. Such a philosophical view, again, 
 will free religion from the taint of an evil ' other- worldliness/ 
 which often befalls it, and give it its right place in the scenes 
 of daily life and the sympathies of common intercourse. 
 Keleased from its isolation and specious sacro-sanctity, religion 
 will appear as the crown and consecration of an actuality 
 which often in its details seems trivial and frivolous. Art, 
 again, as it releases the tension of desire, and reveals the 
 repose and self-completeness of existence, will keep religion 
 from falling away from the temporal scene, and protest 
 against the absoluteness of scientific analysis. And science, 
 in the narrower sense, will recognize its limitations, and above 
 all the hypothetical character of its constructions, which are 
 after all approximations to the infinitely complex structure 
 of the real, made practicable only through the self-restraint 
 of an abstraction. 
 
 Such a Natural Theology grows up inevitably as man 
 emerges from the cave of tradition and custom^ and realizes 
 that in him, as an intelligent and rational being, there is 
 something superior to the mere individuality which sets him 
 as only one among the many things of the world, and that 
 he is (in the phrase of Protagoras), in some sense, the measure 
 of all things. Nay, more, it may be asserted that man has 
 never been wholly without this faculty of raising himself 
 so as in some measure to survey and control his environment,
 
 22 GIFFORD LECTURES [i 
 
 instead of being wholly immersed in it, and forming a mere 
 part to be moulded and altered by agencies outside and above 
 him, of which he has no control. The degrees in which 
 this power has been exercised may range within an immense 
 space ; but the germ of such detachment, of such individuali- 
 zation, which lifts the individual above a mere passive par- 
 ticipation in the whole to which he belongs, seems to be 
 indispensable to characterize humanity. 
 
 The note of naturalness in theology, therefore, lies in its 
 superiority to restrictions due to special historic conditions. 
 The antithesis of natural is not to revealed : but to one type 
 of revealed, exalted as the alone revealed, to the exclusion 
 of all others. When it uses the term natural, it does not, 
 except in the restricted sense of physico-theology, mean to 
 exclude from its survey the field of history and of human life. 
 It rejects, indeed, the notion of special revelation, if that be 
 understood to imply the communication of full-made truths 
 by a miraculous importation of them into the human faculties. 
 But, on the other hand, it does not, by calling itself natural 
 or rational, imply that it turns its back upon history and 
 experience. It may be that at certain epochs, in a fit of 
 disgust at vulgar credulity and in hatred of superstition, it 
 imagined that unassisted reason could of itself construct a 
 creed. But in so far as it did so, it was labouring under 
 an illusion. There is no absolutely unassisted reason. Reason, 
 on the contrary, only lives by a perpetual antithesis to sense : 
 it only emerges from the soil of reality and life, from the fact 
 of experience : it is experience made more and more har- 
 monious, complete and self-explanatory. Its only conflict 
 with revelation arises because revelation is said to introduce 
 into the sphere of human knowledge and experience a fact 
 absolutel} 7 " unique and incommensurable. Unique and incom- 
 mensurable, in a way, every reality is : but not in the sense 
 that it forms no part in the compass of reality, giving to and 
 taking from its environment. Natural theology, the theology
 
 i] THE SCOPE OF NATURAL THEOLOGY 23 
 
 of reason, claims the prerogative of man to examine all things, 
 and is but an attempt in a special range of questions to carry 
 out that purpose fully, without bar or check from any specially 
 privileged province. 
 
 Christian theology is a different thing. That is no inquiry 
 into truth, no free scientific pursuit, no mere theory. It is 
 the redaction into a system of the non-historic and essential 
 constitution of the Church : the reflex of its life-spirit, its 
 needs and relationships, in a shape determined no doubt by 
 individual instrumentality, but by instruments pervaded by a 
 common faith, a historical experience, a sense of eternal 
 community, eternal with an eternity such as no nation can 
 boast, because the church, each and every visible church, 
 believes itself, through and above its earthly manifestation, 
 to be a city divinely founded and maintained.
 
 II 
 
 THE GREEK OEIGINS OF THEOLOGY 
 
 NATURAL Theology as already described in last lecture has 
 been almost identified with what in the present century would 
 be usually called the philosophy of religion. Either term may 
 be taken to denote a reflective study of the facts or phenomena 
 of religion, when that study is methodically or systematically 
 pursued. Such reflection can hardly be turned upon religion, 
 .until religious facts or phenomena have grown into the rank 
 of obviously objective material for observation. There must 
 be a tolerably well-defined group of performances, rites, cere- 
 monials, sacrifices, prayers, &c., upon which the vision can be 
 turned. Till that epoch has offered such material, religious 
 life, in feeling and act, may have been intense and vigorous, 
 and may have undergone various transformations ; but so long 
 as these phenomena have not been set in special relief, and 
 brought into a certain anomalous position in life, they will be 
 passed over with the indifference which awaits all that is 
 familiar and awakes no sense of curiosity. It needs the 
 stimulus of a trouble and a want to prompt laggard curiosity. 
 Religion must have come to be in some measure detached 
 from the observed : it must no longer form an organic part of 
 his life and being. With the process of social differentiation 
 the several aspects of life come to be more or less strangers to 
 many of those who share in the social unity. Religion will 
 thus have become the special care of a certain order, and 
 present more and more a mystery to those outside the sacred
 
 25 
 
 circle. Diversity of interests, and even of religious interests, 
 is a condition for the study of religious phenomena. Here as 
 elsewhere, it is when the first fervour of life and zeal is past 
 that .reflection begins. Theology, therefore, as an attempt 
 to note and correlate the phenomena of the religious life, 
 will have a certain antipathy to the first age of devotion. 
 Religion at such an epoch has become, instead of a common 
 all-embracing influence penetrating life, one interest among 
 many; a memory and a hope, rather than a present faith. 
 And such interest may come either from those professionally 
 interested in it, or from the outsider and the critic. To the 
 former the main work of theology is the codification of faith 
 in a creed. To the latter it may either be a subject of 
 disinterested study, or an interest which he would fain rescue 
 from the hands of the mere specialist, and base upon a wider 
 foundation than the mere authority of a text. In the latter 
 case we have what is called natural theology. The natural 
 theologian aims at widening the basis of faith by an appeal 
 to a wider range of corroborative fact, but he seldom studies 
 religious phenomena in a spirit of philosophic impartiality. 
 He has a special view of what constitutes the essentials of 
 religion as opposed to its accidents : a view which in the main 
 represents the average standpoint of his time and not a result 
 of critical inquiry. The natural theologian of this type has 
 a practical interest : he is anxious to purify religion from 
 what he regards as the extravagances of superstition and to 
 rest it upon a surer evidence than that of a supposed super- 
 natural authority. To such an one the nucleus of true religion 
 lies in its ethical context, or rather in its supposed guarantee 
 of three ethical needs : a God, to make the world of nature 
 co-operative to the success of duty; Freedom, to raise man 
 above the necessitation of purely physical influences; and 
 Immortality, to make man's capacities a match for duty's 
 infinite requirements. ' What Christ did/ said Leibniz in the 
 preface to the Theodicee, 'was to translate natural religion
 
 -26 GIFFORD LECTURES [n 
 
 into a law, and to give it the authority of a public dogma.' 
 Natural religion so understood is the warranty by metaphysical 
 fact to the absolute claim of duty. Morality is possible, 
 because nature is not omnipotent over man by its impulses, 
 nor victorious over him by the dissolution of his body, and 
 because God who holds the keys of nature is the warder 
 of morality. The emancipation of man from the tyranny of 
 nature is the essence of morals, and the purpose of religion is 
 to furnish a creed in which that liberation is guaranteed 
 by a metaphysical or supernatural theory of life and the 
 world. 
 
 The philosophy of religion cannot have the directly 
 practical aims of this so-called natural theology : its stand- 
 point is purely that of the critical observer who seeks to 
 understand. But the term theology has a further dis- 
 advantage as applied to denote the science of religion. In 
 a strict etymological use, the term may seem either defective 
 or redundant. It is defective, because it sets in peculiar 
 relief and isolates from its context one important term of the 
 religious life. It separates the object or outward projection 
 of religious faith from the faith and life to which it stands 
 in essential relation. It leaves God, so to speak, bare and 
 abstract, withdrawn from the witness of the spirit, and left 
 cold and dead on the analytical board. So left, the object 
 of theology loses its life and significance, and the theological 
 demonstrator is therefore obliged to begin his work of 
 exposition by a task not known in the same way to the 
 other branches of science : he has to establish the reality 
 of his object, which has become only a name, and to prove, 
 as it is called, the existence of God. 
 
 Yet, on the other hand, the name theology may seem 
 redundant as a title for the phenomena of religion. It is 
 possible that the object of religious life, the objective focus 
 of faith, may scarcely rise to the definiteness, individuality, 
 and stability which would fairly entitle it to the name of
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 27 
 
 God. Life may be controlled by the unseen, and what is 
 sometimes called the supernatural : faith and hope may turn 
 from the world to something- hardly unified and permanent 
 enough to be called a divinity. And so, without clear idea 
 of God, there may be that presence of the other world in this, 
 that dependence on something supernal or infernal, which 
 seems the central power of religion. It is evident, therefore, 
 that if theology is to be regarded as equivalent to the theory 
 of religion in general, it must not be confined to one precise 
 shape in which objectivity and quasi- sensible form is given 
 to the powers and influences on which human life is assumed 
 to depend. 
 
 Theology, as we know it, is a product of Greek civilization. 
 It is a trite confession to admit the debt we owe to Greece. 
 But perhaps it may be thought that it is not in the religious 
 sphere that that influence most obviously prevails. And no 
 doubt it is true that the germinal principle of the religious 
 life established amongst us comes from the Hebrews, and 
 especially from a movement arising in the later Judaism. 
 Yet, for all that, it was through Greek words and Greek 
 literature that the oracles of the new faith, the letters of its 
 first evangelists, were proclaimed and written ; it was through 
 the systems of ethics, and the schemes of virtues and vices, 
 worked out by Greek moralists, that it had to define its 
 relations to social life : and it was through the attempts of 
 Greek thinkers to determine the conditions of truth, and the 
 value of the various factors in reality, that the Christian 
 community had to justify its conception of life, and correlate 
 its view of the first and last things with the conventions of 
 civilization. Even before Christianity emerged upon the 
 scene, Greek influences had come to pervade Western Asia. 
 Not, of course, that the peasantry of Palestine, or the com- 
 monalty of Syria were familiar with Hellenic ideas, and 
 instructed in Greek philosophy. That, if ever possible, could 
 only have been accomplished in many ages. But, at the
 
 28 GIFFORD LECTURES [n 
 
 centres of light and leading through the East, it was Greek 
 thought and Greek culture that gave the tone to literature and 
 religion. Even in the stronghold of Judaism the influence of 
 Hellenism was felt at every corner, and it determined, by 
 its opposition, the movements that rose up to repel it. Greek 
 was the vehicle of intercommunication between races of alien 
 manners and speech. And thus even on the religious field 
 ' captured Greece took captive her barbarian conqueror.' 
 Even when St. Paul carried Christianity to Corinth and 
 the West, he carried it as one who had been born at Tarsus 
 and had gained some familiarity with that Greek culture; 
 which influenced even the teachers of the Law, as it had 
 influenced the later writers of the Apocrypha literature. 
 
 Greece, in fact, furnished the mould for the science of 
 religion, just as she supplied the grammatical categories in 
 which the study of language has been carried on. Practical 
 needs led ingenious instructors of Greek to formulate a scheme 
 for describing and defining the facts of language : to create 
 a system of rules for guiding the speaker and writer in 
 acquiring the phrase held to be alone correct in the multi- 
 plicity of practice. Thus grew up a grammar, meant 
 originally for Greek, which came to serve a like purpose 
 for other tongues. So long as the new languages were of 
 a kindred structure with Greek, all might go well : but 
 when in course of time the forms and rubrics so obtained 
 had to be applied to languages of quite other structure, like 
 the Semitic, or the languages of Africa and the New World, 
 the old scheme was found to fail. Gradually this incongruity 
 led to the perception of the need for a new method of the 
 study of languages : a method which should not force the 
 more primitive stages into forms and moulds suitable only 
 for an advanced stage of linguistic development. The 
 analysis of language had to be carried further and with 
 a wider reference in order to fulfil its purpose. It had to 
 find a new alphabet and syntax of more comprehensive scope.
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 29 
 
 So in some measure it has been with the philosophy of 
 religion. It is futile no doubt to ask how that philosophy 
 would have fared if speculation on religious phenomena had 
 by some freak of fate begun elsewhere and not in Greece. 
 And if it be an ignoble indolence which proclaims that what- 
 ever is is right, it is a still more mischievous conceit which 
 grumbles that whatever is is wrong. Yet it may not be with- 
 out its uses to reflect that theology would hardly have taken 
 the shape it has done had it grown up under other influences. 
 There is an unparalleled clearness and visual objectivity about 
 the Greek gods ; an individual independence, and a systematic 
 unity in their differences, which sets them in a unique position 
 in the world's pantheon. They need only be compared with 
 the strange impersonality of Chinese religion, whether we 
 regard the supreme imperial heaven or the ill-defined but 
 pervasive multitude of lesser spirits ; with the mystic haze 
 through which the Vedic gods emerge under the magic 
 efficacy of ritual and sacrifice; or with the abstract imps 
 of momentary act and quality, which were so often all that 
 stood for deities at Rome to let us see how different is 
 the atmosphere in which the Greek gods live and move. In 
 other races the religious process had stopped short at an 
 emotional or devotional stage. But with the Greeks the 
 divine power stands out in individualized shapes with clear- 
 ness of outline and definite personality, probably unparalleled 
 in religious development. The conditions of cultus or worship, 
 the prayer, sacrifice and ritual, fall into the background, and 
 allow the object of worship and of sacrifice to emerge in 
 brilliant and conspicuous form, standing out independent of 
 the religious process in which they had their birth. Theology 
 thus becomes a mythology, or, a history and a description 
 of certain divine persons, a collection of legends and sacred 
 tales about gods, who, separated from the religious interest 
 and motive in which they had their source, move about and 
 act with interests of their own, denizens, almost, of the real
 
 3 o GIFFORD LECTURES [u 
 
 world. The first fleoAo'yot are narrators who tell the history 
 of beings, no doubt related to man, but somehow raised to an 
 independent and collateral existence. 
 
 At least the religion of Greece upon its higher levels dealt 
 mostly in this region. It is a strange feature of Greek life 
 that a poem so secular as the work of Homer should be said 
 to give us the theology of the Greeks. We must always 
 remember that the poet and this is true even of Vedic 
 hymns gives a picture from a special point of view and 
 from a special level of culture. The works of Greek literature 
 and art reveal Greek life to us, in the first instance, as it 
 appeared on the heights to those emancipated from the baser 
 influences of ignorance and superstition. It is true there are 
 traces everywhere of the lower strata, the basis of common 
 life. They come out in isolated moments, and show the 
 abyss which always rolled under the sunlit tablelands of art. 
 The criticisms of Epicurus and Lucretius on the religion of 
 the masses, though possibly affected by fanaticism, may serve 
 to counterbalance the more aesthetically refined but perhaps 
 irreligiously trivial ideas of popular art. And thus, though 
 the Greek philosophers are not out of touch with the vulgar 
 needs of religion, they chiefly deal with it as it appears on the 
 literary level. The Aeio-tSat/xoyta which comes to the front in 
 Nicias and Xenophon, the foul rites which flourish in the 
 obscurity of antique custom or of modern licence, the freaks 
 of witchcraft and magic, are only seen at faint instants. 
 Greek religion, like everything Greek, was, until comparatively 
 modern times when closer research and the influence of wider 
 anthropological study had taught a different lesson, regarded 
 under an idealized and poetical halo, which separated it from 
 grosser reality. 
 
 When philosophy came upon the scene, it found the 
 phenomena of religion arranged under two heads. On one 
 hand, they had been to some extent regulated, licensed, and 
 reduced to a fixed type for the community. They had
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 31 
 
 adapted themselves to the ruling influence of the social 
 organization, stamped with an appointed ritual and an order 
 of worship and service. In Greece, as well as in Rome, 
 religion was an integral part of the social system, indis- 
 tinguishable in practice from other performances needful to 
 the stability of the political edifice. Religion, in this point 
 of view, had hardly separated itself from the general 
 political problem : the gods were part of the state, of the 
 system of custom and law. But there was also a poetical 
 theology, in which the gods had come to form a group of 
 realities, with a history of their own, independent and col- 
 lateral. Towards this mythology philosophy, following even 
 the more reflective poetry, began at an early period to take 
 up a critical attitude. Xenophanes had boldly accused men 
 of having formed the conceptions of these gods too much in 
 their own image, and of having attributed to the heavenly 
 ones all that was disgraceful among men. Philosophy thus 
 ignored the origin of these tales in the conditions of more 
 primitive life, and treated them simply as regards their effects 
 on the morals of the contemporary community. From that 
 point of view Plato laid down two canons or ' types ' to control 
 the eccentricities of popular mythology : the first, that evil- 
 doing must never be attributed to a divine agent ; the second, 
 that a divine being should be represented as always true and 
 unchangeable in his revelations of himself to man. 
 
 In Plato there is no discussion of the problem of religion as 
 a whole, in its psychological premisses and its metaphysical 
 presuppositions. There is indeed no one term in Greek which 
 can cover the whole field. Piety (ewe/3 aa) is at one time 
 counted as one of the more important characteristics of the 
 good man : but in the scheme of the Republic e. g. it finds 
 no distinct recognition. The service of religious observance 
 is relegated to the special care of priestly rules, and forms 
 no part of general humanity. But of the political value of 
 religion Plato is deeply convinced, especially, as it seems,
 
 32 GIFFORD LECTURES [n 
 
 in his later years. The gods of the commonwealth are for 
 him the sign and bond of its social unity, of its vigour as 
 a living and tKriving organism. The essence of their being 
 and nature, therefore, lies not so much in what they abstractly 
 are, as in their significance for the ethical life. So far as 
 Plato can be said to define God at all, it is as the form of 
 Good, something higher than being and than knowledge, 
 something neither to be treated as a mere objective nor as 
 a mere subjective, but as transcending that opposition. If, 
 therefore, we ask, as polemics has often asked, whether Plato 
 inclines to pantheism, or to a personal God, it is impossible 
 to give a simple answer. Unquestionably he is not all 
 things, either as aggregate or unity; for he is distinctly 
 declared to be above the contrasts of good and evil in this 
 world. Here, in this world, there must be always evil : 
 always, that is, truth can only be reality as presupposing 
 error, and goodness cannot free itself from the presence and 
 opposition of vice. For man there is left the effort to become 
 like unto God, in whom is no evil at all. There thus seems 
 to be two extreme or absolute poles, one all goodness, another 
 all evil, between which actual existence is a struggle : and 
 these poles seem to be real. To the modern relativist this 
 supposition of Plato seems a mistake. He recognizes the 
 opposition of good and evil, but he does not believe that that 
 means the struggle of two self-subsistent forces, which come 
 into external collision. He believes no more in an absolute 
 good and absolute evil, than in an absolute cold and hot. 
 Only that can be good, in the real sense of that word, which 
 is not wholly good : i. e. which has in it further possibilities 
 of goodness. A thing is evil which has fallen short of its 
 goodness, yet is not bereft of its goodness altogether. 
 
 But if we say that God is good, it must be in another 
 sense of the word. Thus the ( form of good ' is a directing 
 principle which draws mankind ever higher and higher on 
 the path toward perfection. It is, we may almost say, the
 
 ii J THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 33 
 
 form which Godhead presents to us, the shape in which His 
 presence and power appear; and yet it would be rash to 
 identify it with Him. The essence of religion, it may be 
 added, is in what it is for us. The gods or God are made 
 no better by worship which men offer them. But man by 
 such service wins his reward in an ennobled character. He 
 attaches his existence to the eternal tendency upward and 
 onward. Beyond all struggle, his attainment. Only if we 
 call this perfection of attainment goodness, we do not mean 
 that it is good merely, free from all taint of evil. At the 
 moment when evil ceases to trouble, then the word good 
 loses its old meaning. So much agnosticism at least seems 
 necessary to retain. Existence involves antithesis. 
 
 On another point Plato touches upon religion, and that is 
 the relation of God as maker and creator of the world. Here 
 too he tends to remove the creation from the direct contact 
 with the creator. The thesis in which he is interested is the 
 rationality of existence, i. e. its unity of meaning and 
 purpose. Here again the essential point is not the act 
 of God as creator, but the wisdom of order in nature which 
 permits man to work towards ends. There is intelligence in 
 things, an intelligence which however can only show itself 
 operative on a black gulf of unintelligence. Only, here too, 
 we must not follow Plato or his modern analogues, if he puts 
 a blind matter here, and a wise arranger there supervening. 
 We must not break up the two parts of the antithesis from 
 their inseparable solidarity. Matter is only for an intelligence 
 which manipulates : and an intelligence is a mere word 
 unless in relation to a matter which it penetrates. Or, as 
 intellect presupposes sense, and sense implies intellect, so 
 mind implies matter, and matter is only so by antithesis 
 to mind. 
 
 In Aristotle we can distinguish two levels of theology. 
 There is, first of all, the general assumption of teleology in 
 a united universe. There is nothing in vain, nothing random. 
 
 D
 
 34 GIFFORD LECTURES |_n 
 
 There are no inexplicable episodes in the world due to violent 
 and chance interposition. God does not interfere from with- 
 out. But, on the other hand, there is nothing- chaotic. The 
 world is all an ordered and co-operant unity. God is in a way 
 to be identified with nature : a self-centred, self-moving 
 system of things. There is an art in things : but it is 
 unlike human art, because it is immanent in the things 
 themselves, and not directing from without. God is not 
 banished from His universe. In all nature there is a source 
 of growth and movement, which in the last resort can only 
 be explained by an attraction a strong love by which 
 Aristotle in metaphorical language represents all things as 
 drawn towards the prime aim of desire and principle of 
 thought. In the very heart of all existence there is a craving 
 for perfect existence, for the fulness of being. Man, like 
 other things, has his place in this order, and a high place : 
 but the higher the seat, the harder the duty, the closer the 
 obligation. The son in the family is less left to the licence 
 of his own devices than the bondman. 
 
 Thus in the Aristotelian realm of nature there lives and 
 moves a principle which is quasi-intelligent and quasi- 
 volitional. It acts, if not with a purpose, yet never in vain. 
 All things natural have in them something divine. Nature 
 is alive, in eager and incessant motion, struggling onwards 
 towards greater perfection, wrestling with an obstacle which 
 is always present to it. Even without explicit consciousness 
 it is straining uniformly and regularly after the best. The 
 world of nature has thus an indwelling divinity, but 
 a divinity concordant and unanimous with being, and not 
 anarchic, unexpected, or irregular. This view is in sharply- 
 conceived opposition to the atoms of Democritus. Meno agitat 
 molem. Movement is not mere locomotion, but is the path 
 of self-realization, of the increase of being. 
 
 But at other times when Aristotle is engaged with the 
 transition from metaphysics to physics there is a tendency
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 35 
 
 to a kind of materialism. On the outskirts of the material 
 or visible universe is the home of the divine. Far away at 
 the limit of the world of time and place and movement, there 
 is a world of unmoved unvarying 1 being-, source of eternal 
 energy, where there is no void, but fulness of reality : 
 another world which, not by the force of mechanical impact 
 but by the strength of love-yearning, draws to its fruition 
 of perfect life all that in the sensible world is but in the 
 promise and potency of being. Materialistically understood, 
 at some far-distant verge of things the supreme reality, God, 
 comes into quasi-sensible contact with the great circle of the 
 cosmos, and causes to be initiated in it a movement which 
 thence descends through sphere after sphere, till it reaches 
 even this sublunary world and vivifies the things of earth. 
 In the heavens divinity is near : in the stellar and planetary 
 spheres it is powerfully present, but on earth it is marred by 
 disturbing influences. How much in this conception, which 
 has been familiarized by Dante, should be assigned to the 
 twilight of imagination, and how much is to be translated 
 into rational terms, is a point on which there might be long 
 discussion. Discount the metaphor : and to define God as 
 extramundane may mean that He is the key to the multi- 
 plicity of existence, the enveloping unity which gives cohe- 
 rence and meaning to all its parts. Regard the figurative 
 language as the essence of the matter : and it means that, far 
 away beyond the range of experience, there is another range 
 of existence of finer texture : an order of superior beings, 
 yet somehow things of like kind after all. 
 
 The source of these difficulties and contradictions in the 
 theology of Aristotle is, partly at least, to be sought in 
 his failure to get at the root of religion, and in his accepting 
 up to a certain point, and admitting to a certain authority, 
 the results of the process of religion, the theogonic process. 
 He is anxious apparently to show that popular theology and 
 the worship of celestial bodies has a philosophic value. To do 
 
 D 2
 
 36 GIFFORD LECTURES [n 
 
 that, he takes them as objects given, and for which an 
 appropriate interpretation has to be sought. But he is 
 premature in the identification of deity with the unity and 
 rationality of existence. The epistemologist, who examines 
 the history of our ordinary physical knowledge, shows how 
 the things we seem to see as many independent objects, each 
 out in a world of their own, unaffected by our being so or 
 otherwise, are really dependent for their separate existences 
 on a system of relations without which they would not be 
 what they are. It is not otherwise with the gods. The 
 aspects of deity are the result of a historical development : 
 they are for men, not indeed nothing in themselves, but only 
 symbolic of something more : they live in a covenant between 
 God and man. And the conception of God is more akin to 
 ethical problems than to the inquiries of physics. To under- 
 stand the gods or God, we must get to see the place and 
 scope of religion as a whole. 
 
 Now it may be said that such an inquiry hardly falls 
 within the scope of ancient philosophy. The idea of <v<ris 
 which holds so governing a position in the Greek systems 
 the conception of true reality as opposed to appearance and 
 accident, and the conception of philosophy as knowledge of 
 supreme quality do not fit into the view of things which 
 commends itself to the religious mind. But above all, 
 ancient philosophy was unaccustomed to the psychological 
 and epistemological standpoint. It had not learned to ask 
 for the origin in mental development of the realities which in 
 various grades composed the fabric of the world. It did not, 
 to use the Kantian phrase, think of ' deducing ' the deity, or 
 in a commoner phrase, of ' proving ' God's existence. To 
 ' deduce ' God is to exhibit the grounds on which a certain 
 conception claims to hold a place in reality, by showing that 
 without it reality will no longer be what it professes to be. 
 To ' prove ' God is similarly to show that there are tendencies 
 and purposes in things, which point beyond themselves, and
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 37 
 
 require a synthesis in absolute unity and power. It seems 
 strange at first sight to talk of proving the reality of your 
 object. But the reason may partially at least be made 
 evident. When Socrates, according to Aristotle, insisted on 
 the duty of definition as the guarantee of real knowledge, 
 it is obvious that he did not apply his method to all things 
 indiscriminately. What he defines are ethical and political 
 terms. He takes these vague words, and by an application 
 of real concrete instances, he reinstates them into their full 
 being and truth : shows them to be constituent elements of 
 the world of human life and fact. So we ' deduce ' or 
 'prove' the existence of what has become doubtful, what 
 has lost its place in the universe of things, and rolls about, 
 disinherited and expropriated, a nullity and a question. To 
 deduce it, is to show the inadequacy of the otherwise accepted 
 reality, if it be deprived of the element or principle in 
 question : to show that, in what we accept, there are other 
 things involved, other considerations potent, which we neglect, 
 but which must be there, otherwise what we suppose we have 
 would fade away into nothingness and collapse for want 
 of due coherency. And this deduction is necessary, because 
 in practical life first or ultimate principles tend to be 
 forgotten, while the mind is engrossed with the particulars 
 which imply them. 
 
 The whole tendency of Greek philosophy was to conceive of 
 God as the great principle of the natural order, as the supreme 
 reality, as the object of all objects. He is the order, or He is 
 the source and author of the order, of the physical universe. 
 He is the supreme condition, on which for the philosopher 
 depends the intelligibility of nature, the final source of all its 
 movement, the goal of all its becoming. But for the individual 
 who has to live and not merely to speculate, God must be 
 something more and different. Science, great as it is, is not 
 supreme : it is only an instrument of life, a part of the 
 machinery of intelligent existence.
 
 38 GIFFORD LECTURES [11 
 
 It was Kant who gave these questions their prominence in 
 modern philosophy. He dealt with science, with morality ; in a 
 less degree, with art and religion. Gradually as he proceeded 
 his problem was extended : it began with 'What can I know?' 
 or ' What are the conditions which make knowledge possible, 
 and which therefore draw certain limits to its range?' Scientific 
 reality and truth, the truth and reality which are implied in 
 our ordinary way of knowing things, may not be co-extensive 
 with the whole field of reality: it may indeed involve some- 
 thing over and beyond itself, on the existence of which it 
 tacitly counts. Now the conditions which Kant signalized 
 as necessary to knowledge were that a sensation should be 
 given, and that such sensation should be placed in an order of 
 time and place, and referred to objectivity by means of certain 
 concepts which he called categories. That the reality should 
 be given, not made, a sensation, not a thought, is not a new 
 principle: but when it comes to saying what is meant by 
 ' given/ and what precisely is the feature of ' sensation/ the 
 answer of Kant does not carry us far. Phrases like ' affect 
 the sensibility ' are after all only phrases. Kant distinguishes 
 between the ' receptivity ' and the ' spontaneity ' : and while 
 he identifies the former with the senses, gives the latter 
 characteristic to the intelligence. But, in the first place, 
 it is clear that to separate the receptive from the spontaneous 
 in this matter-of-fact way is impossible. There is no recep- 
 tivity without spontaneity, and a pure spontaneity does not 
 exist: both imply action, and that in reality is always 
 re-action. And, secondly, to identify sense with receptivity 
 is only possible on the assumption that we have already 
 defined and perhaps enlarged the scope of sensibility itself. 
 Defined it : in such measure as we have accentuated the 
 aspect of ' affection ' by something ' given/ Enlarged it : 
 in so far as there is no longer any restriction to the special 
 senses, or organs of sensibility. 
 
 But what Kant laid even more stress upon is that all
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 39 
 
 science, and therefore all we know as reality in the stricter 
 sense, lies within certain totalities. These are time, space, 
 and experience. None of these are given us as totals : yet on 
 the relations of elements within them as such totalities all 
 reality rests. That is real which has temporal and spatial 
 relations ; that is real which is an integral part of experience : 
 but experience, time, and space, are only ideal totals. There 
 is only one time, one space, one experience ; but such a unity 
 is not a fact : it is an ideal always approximated to, and 
 governing every increase in knowledge, but never realized. 
 Reality thus is always fragmentary, a part in relation to 
 other parts, an item in a system : it always presupposes 
 something beyond itself, and is only determinable by rela- 
 tions in a totality ; which, however, recedes perpetually, and 
 never comes within the range of knowledge strictly so 
 called. 
 
 Science is thus hemmed in by certain limits, or rests upon 
 our respecting certain conditions. It can only succeed by not 
 attempting too much : by attaching itself to a given point, 
 and by connecting this with something else, defining it in 
 one direction. If it attempts to grasp a totality, it must 
 inevitably fail. And yet its whole success is gained by the 
 conviction that each thing is in and of a totality, and has 
 infinite relations, which can be explored so as to determine it. 
 Thus it can only reach the totality by a succession of partial 
 efforts, each correcting and completing the other. Kant 
 hardly would say with Spinoza that God, the absolute unity 
 of being, is the presupposition of all knowledge : for his 
 favourite way of stating his view is that the original unity of 
 self-consciousness is the source from which all determination 
 flows. But when he comes to consider more clearly what this 
 consciousness is, he seems to admit that it is not an individual 
 mind (if such a thing there be), but consciousness in general. 
 And what is consciousness in general ? A consciousness not 
 limited to a localized person, not equivalent to a single soul,
 
 40 GIFFORD LECTURES [n 
 
 but something- in which all single psychical function lives : 
 a synthesis embracing the several minds. 
 
 What Kant seeks to bring out is really that God cannot be 
 regarded as an object of knowledge, or at least not merely as 
 that. He cannot be reduced to one object in the multitude 
 of things. Yet to treat Him as such an object seems inevitable 
 to human nature. Everywhere, after a step gained in advance, 
 it tends to throw itself upon some centralized conception, as if 
 that contained the key of the future, and formed a stand- 
 point on which one could rest. Again and again it is obliged 
 to cast away its idols, or at least to allow fresh objects of 
 worship to set themselves up at its side. But still the old 
 fallacy afflicts it: it translates the part into an image of 
 the totality, and reduces the godhead to the limits of one 
 of its parts. 
 
 What Kant is driving 1 at is that there are different grades 
 in the hierarchy of reality, that the order of physical 
 things or of nature is, as it is ordinarily described, i. e. as 
 a mechanical system of cause and effect rests upon presup- 
 positions which it is itself incompetent to explain. Science in 
 that sense, as a knowledge of causes and effects, cannot include 
 God : for He can only come under it as a ' first cause ' or 
 a ' final end ' two conceptions which equally contradict the 
 very implication of the term cause. You may style God a 
 causa sui ; but such a term really means that He is more than 
 a mere cause : or it means that in the full concept of ' cause ' 
 there is an originality involved which can never belong to 
 a single thing, but always implies a synthesis, or, as it is 
 called, a 'sum of conditions/ co-operating with the single 
 prominent antecedent. 
 
 Kant thus, on the one hand, declares that God cannot be 
 described by the categories, because these all presuppose 
 a variety of things in correlation; and yet that a quasi- 
 application of the categories to Him is inevitable, because 
 He is active under these restrictions. But over and above
 
 n] THE GREEK ORIGINS OF THEOLOGY 41 
 
 his negative results, he has insisted that God, with the 
 cognate positions of freedom and immortality, is required by 
 what he calls the moral law. Perhaps, for the present, we 
 may generalize Kant's teaching to the effect that, if God is 
 not an object of science in the narrow sense of that conception, 
 it is because He is above it and gives the very presupposition 
 of it. Even so Plato has described his 'idea' of Good, as 
 standing to all reality in the same relation as the sun does to 
 visible objects. As the sunlight is, in different aspects, the 
 cause of growth, and again, of the visibility of sensible things, 
 so the ' idea of good ' is the force which makes reality active 
 and operant, and enables the knower to understand it. Nor 
 is this agnosticism. Agnosticism holds that, behind all 
 single objects we know, there may be a total object which 
 we do not know. But, according to the present account, God 
 is not something behind or beyond other objects. Each of 
 them is, indeed, less than Him ; but all in their various degree 
 express them and involve Him. In none of them can we say 
 finally, ' Here He is ' : yet we may not say either, ' Beyond 
 all of them He is to be sought and possibly found/ He is 
 personal : yet, but at the same time, supra-personal : moral, 
 but at the same time more than moral. 
 
 The Greek philosophers, more perhaps even than Hebrew 
 prophets, emphasize the unity of God. The prophets, by the 
 intensification of their conception of Jahve, gradually made 
 him the God of all the earth : but in so doing they unawares 
 altered the conception, and repelled deity, as it were, into 
 greater depths of distance. The Greek philosophers saw in 
 him the unity of nature, the source of life and motion, but 
 Himself something above nature, and removed from the 
 sphere of change. They were not interested in the religious 
 acts and feelings in which He was efficient : they sought in 
 the conception of Him rather a counterpart to their doctrine 
 of the unity of all being.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 
 
 THE value of Christianity in the historical development 
 of natural theology does not in the first place lie in any 
 addition it makes to the conception of God, but rather in the 
 experiential demonstration it may give of the factual reality 
 or truth of that idea. In that sense it claims to be the 
 revelation of God, whereby, instead of being an objective 
 aim of worship, or an idea underlying all intelligence, He is 
 realized and present as the light and life and love in all that 
 lives and is. It thus verifies or evidences the conclusions 
 of reflection and criticism ; but in so doing sets them in a new 
 light. The transcendent God and heaven are seen as present 
 and within us, as in the world and in the soul, though they 
 knew it not, and had sought the missing principle even on 
 the further side of being. Christianity may thus be styled 
 emphatically natural religion, in so far as it professes to 
 realize the implications latent in all historical forms of faith, 
 but freed from the restrictions to which they were therein 
 subject. It claims to satisfy the realism of spontaneous 
 devotion and the idealism of the philosophical consciousness : 
 to be all that religion ever meant to be, and to bring forth 
 certainty unto truth. 
 
 It is difficult, however, if not impossible, to select any 
 special article of religious faith which is, in its general aspect, 
 a doctrine peculiar to Christianity. Its uniqueness lies rather 
 in what some would call the personality of the founder. So
 
 THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 43 
 
 far as one may venture to specialize the expression of that 
 uniqueness, we may say it consisted in his absolute and 
 plenipotentiary freedom, and in his utter realization of the 
 immanence of God in this present life. In this conviction 
 of the power of endless life and the presence of reconciling 
 love, theology lost its former aloofness and abstraction. It 
 might be paradoxically put that Christianity is atheism : 
 meaning- thereby that God, for it, ceases to be a mere object, 
 controlling- life and reality and becomes identical with the 
 reality of reality, the life of life. Prayer, for it, becomes 
 not a request for blessings from a separate being, but a com- 
 munion in which the soul essentially realizes its unity in 
 all things with God. Sacrifice there can henceforth be none ; 
 for man in turning upward from nature is not rejecting the 
 source of his being, but fundamentally working with God. 
 Yet, on the other hand, there is an initial and absolute 
 sacrifice : it is the ' baptism into death/ the ' taking up the 
 cross,' the 'imitatio C/iristi' becoming, as St. Paul puts it, 
 a slave of Jesus. But this, again, is only another aspect of, 
 and is dependent on, the sonship of God : the consciousness 
 of the grace of the Father, of universal mercy and love, or, 
 briefly, the eternal life. Thus of this death, it is true, mors 
 ianua vilae, and it had been so described by Plato. What 
 Christ affirms more distinctly than Plato, is that man has 
 not in this to struggle alone, but has on his side the power 
 and the goodness which is the life of all things, or, in the 
 familiar words, a Father in heaven. 
 
 Christianity thus sets in the forefront the omnipotence 
 of God and the liberty of man. But that omnipotence is 
 directed against all other authorities and constraints, against 
 everything in nature that might be supposed to control 
 human destinies. The Greeks and Romans made much of the 
 worship of Fortune, and, indeed, the whole conception of 
 popuLir religion is saturated with it, with ideas of chance, 
 luck and destiny. Ethics has always tended to teach that
 
 44 GIFFORD LECTURES [in 
 
 man is the architect of his own fortune, and that happiness 
 rests with our own activity. Religion, as expressed in 
 Christianity, not merely connects all fortune and event with 
 God, but insists that man has God upon his side, and by 
 faith can rise superior to his enemies in fate and circum- 
 stance. On the other side, the liberty of man essentially 
 consists in his sonship to God, in the realization by feeling 
 and thought and act, that his real life is not in the temporal 
 and transitory ; it consists in a predominant sense that in 
 and over all partial act and feeling, and deeper than all 
 separate objects of desire, there is an absolute unity and rest. 
 Thus the theology, strictly so called, of Christianity is com- 
 bined with what was in early days called an ' economy * : in 
 other words the doctrine of God is essentially a doctrine 
 of the relation of man to God, and of God to man, and 
 indeed of the actual (even if not the abstractly essential) 
 interdependence of the two. 
 
 The 'economy' of Christianity, however, takes a step 
 further, and that of vast historical importance. The realiza- 
 tion of this sonship, thus visibly and tangibly, is, in the first 
 instance at least, the work of one man, who brought life 
 and immortality to light, and who might thus be described 
 as the mediator between God and man. It is through his 
 vision that those first drawn around him see. He, therefore, 
 occupies an unique position : he is the bearer of tidings from 
 an only dimly apprehended land, and it is faith in him that 
 gives the message its reality. On the other hand, there 
 is struggling through this belief at second hand a faith in 
 the unseen reality itself through the witness of the spirit. 
 The first witness is only an elder brother who has been the 
 first to pass beyond the veil, the leader and vanguard of 
 many brothers. But on this point there gradually emerges 
 a profound difference in the religious world. For the majority, 
 faith comes to mean belief in a message authenticated, not 
 by its own merits, but by the special authority of the mes-
 
 in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 45 
 
 senger, that authority in the end being due to his essential 
 participation in another world and of a more than human 
 nature, i. e. more, in the sense of non-human and divine. This 
 view, in some degree and with many variations present from 
 the first, becomes the orthodox creed of the Church in the 
 fourth century. The other view, which again was always 
 represented and in not fewer variations, even while assigning 
 an unparalleled position to the founder, does not regard him 
 as a supernatural being, in any sense in which that term 
 implies a break of a new force into the realm of natural 
 powers. The supernatural, as a further province occasionally 
 trenching on the ordinary world of experience, it cannot 
 accept, believing the supernatural to be but the natural, seen 
 by faith as the garment of divine goodness. 
 
 The conceptions involved in the new idea of the relations 
 of God and man necessarily took time to clear themselves of 
 accidental accretions and stand out in all their significance. 
 And that the more, in proportion to their novelty, and the 
 distance at which they stood from the dominant habits of 
 contemporary thought. The seed, however good, gathered, as 
 it grew up and flowered and fruited, the consequences of its 
 soil and circumstances. No doubt the impression which was 
 forced upon those who saw and companied with the living 
 ensample and realization of the life of man in God, and 
 which spread with enthusiasm from disciple to disciple, and 
 from place to place, caused a profound change in the aims 
 and hopes which regulate conduct. But the so-called ' new 
 man/ though a new structure, built upon a new plan and 
 with ' new hopes aggrandizing the rags and tatters/ is after 
 all not divided by any abrupt breach of continuity from his 
 old past. Centred in the one thing new and needful, he 
 may no doubt for the moment exclusively note the gulf that 
 parts him off from his former self. But the novelty lies only 
 in the controlling or animating faith and idea : and when 
 that fails to hold its sovereignty over his will, when it sinks
 
 46 GIFFORD LECTURES [m 
 
 into the calm and cool of reflection, and becomes one among 
 many impulses of the man, the old propensities and acquired 
 habits resume their independence, and reassert themselves in 
 such force that they convert the new life they but now owned 
 as supreme into a vehicle and a minister of their glory. 
 
 New ideas which always and necessarily underlie and 
 vivify a new scheme of life and conduct cannot be received 
 with pure passivity. Often, it is true, something very like 
 passivity marks those who accept them. A wave of enthu- 
 siasm, an epidemic of imitation, sweeps like a natural and irre- 
 sistible force over all who come in its way. Hearts burn, new 
 powers awake, gifts almost miraculous display the presence 
 of sympathetic and generous excitement, in the gathering 
 where soul knits itself with soul, and each has the strength 
 of ten, or even of ten thousand, because the boundaries of 
 individuality are broken down, and the spirit works mightily 
 in each and all to comfort and convince with irresistible 
 inspiration of the universal in man. So it was in the early 
 days of Christianity, as in other like times : an unloosing of 
 curbed in energies, of hopes and fears, of ideals and passions, 
 of antipathies and regrets, all stimulated by the new idea, 
 on which in their turn they again reacted. A period of 
 fermentation, irregularities, impossibilities, signs of a new 
 and vigorous life, but signs also of old and vigorous passions 
 working together; a harvest of wheat and tares mingled, 
 needing time and patience to disentangle them, and defying 
 the best efforts of those who, like the apostle Paul, tried 
 occasionally to regulate the course of growth and check the 
 riot which ever and anon tended to cause social, political, and 
 domestic anarchy. Even from the first, though not with the 
 distinct classification a later and more reflective age was able 
 to import into it, there were great differences dividing into 
 sections and strata the Christian religiosity, and the relation 
 of man's spirit to things divine. The truth of the unity and 
 identity of man as man, of the incalculable individuality
 
 in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 47 
 
 which makes each as it were equally valuable in the sight 
 of God, is no doubt a never to be forgotten principle. But 
 equally memorable is the diversity and inequality of human 
 gift. And it shows itself everywhere, not least in the act of 
 faith. To some faith is an act of personal trust, a dependence 
 on another's word and an abandonment of the personal claim 
 or right to see and appreciate for one's self. In itself this 
 confidence in humanity, in the common feeling and bond of 
 life, is an indispensable principle of conduct. Without the 
 sense of solidarity, of community, of fellowship, the fortune 
 of man in this world would be but low and brute-like. 
 Members, one of another, and of the Church invisible, the 
 individuals of this community share in each other's advance 
 or backsliding. But that each should lean on the other, it 
 is necessary that each should also stand by and for himself. 
 Or, if there be one to lean on, that rock must be not temporal 
 but eternal, not man but God : or, in another way of putting 
 it, the stay is to be found finally not in the Church visible, 
 but in the Church eternal which is in the heavens. 
 
 Such faith as rests upon the immediate incident of personal 
 influence and sympathy is an implicit faith. Due in the 
 main to custom and circumstance, content to go with the 
 majority, organized or unorganized, it simplifies the burden 
 of life by allowing others to bear it. It finds its typical 
 expression in the words of Augustine, that, were it not for 
 the authority of the ecclesiastical organization, the Christian 
 faith would be for him incredible and absurd. Yet these 
 words, exaggerated as they seem, probably contain a glimpse 
 of truth which it is easier to let slip than to formulate in 
 proper proportion. They mean that the religious idea is 
 essentially not an individualist perception, not a single fact 
 which stands separate and palpable, but an organic and 
 organizing principle, which binds man to man, and of which 
 the Church is the embodiment and evidence. ' How can 
 a man love God/ it is said, ' if he love not his brother also?'
 
 48 GIFFORD LECTURES [HI 
 
 How, it may be added, can one see and realize God, unless he 
 see and realize the community and solidarity of man ? On 
 the coherence and coincidence of these two aspects all religion 
 depends : it is this which, when it is alive, makes it always 
 propagandist ; for you feel that it cannot be really true for 
 you unless it is true for others also. The Church, says the 
 allegorist, is the bride appointed and preparing for Christ. 
 She is, in other words, the visible and material organization 
 in which a great truth is maturing : and the wedlock of the 
 fact with the idea is again the full realization of the Unity, 
 when God shall be all in all. 
 
 In the kingdom of God are many mansions: and while 
 some are content, as it were, to live on tradition and authority, 
 to believe on trust, to repose on the common strength, it is 
 necessary that there should also be from time to time a few, 
 a select number, who resolve, or rather are compelled by 
 a necessity naturally laid upon them, to see for themselves. 
 Theirs also is faith: but it is the faith of insight and of 
 knowledge, the faith which is Gnosis. Hard things have 
 been said of Gnosis, and harder things of Gnosticism : but it 
 cannot be too clearly seen that Gnosis is the very life of the 
 Church, the blood of religion. It is the faith which is not 
 merely hearsay and dependence, but which really envisages 
 the unseen for itself. It does not believe on a person : it 
 believes in and into Him : it becomes, by an act at once 
 voluntary and impelled from without (as all human action 
 that is really entitled to that name), participant with Him 
 and through Him of a force of life and conduct. 
 
 Gnosis undoubtedly has its dangers, but so also has Praxis: 
 and after all the dangers of the one lie very much in the 
 same line as those of the other. And that is the line of 
 individualism and separatism. The truth lies in the subordi- 
 nation of all action and all knowledge to the common good, 
 i.e. to the ideal ends of the community which has realized its 
 unity in God, love, life. But as God and man are allowed to
 
 in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 49 
 
 fall apart, God there and man here : as speculation devotes 
 its energies to the former, and moral conduct is mainly con- 
 cerned with the latter, the speculation tends to become 
 frivolous and abstruse, the moralism to become cold and 
 superficial. If the latter tend to isolate good deeds, by which 
 name it complacently denotes almsgiving-, &c., the former 
 becomes a love of transcendent inquiry into powers and 
 beings which live and move in us, as we live and move in 
 them, but of which, taken abstractly, we can say nothing 
 wisely. 
 
 From age to age the genuine Gnosis has been the life-blood 
 of religion in the world : we may almost say it is the arduous 
 guest by which from time to time a new Prometheus brings 
 fire from heaven to relight the smouldering and all but extinct 
 altars of faith : or rather it is the channel whereby the winds 
 and waters of the spiritual life refresh the decaying garden of 
 God. Such Gnosis, which is firstborn and genuine faith, 
 was that of Paul, of Augustine, of Luther, and of many 
 thousands, named and unnameable, who have, in that daring 
 of soul which is the good providence of the world, sought not 
 an implicit but an explicit faith. That they, any or all of 
 them, should have seen the full reality is impossible : yet 
 amid the errors which must arise in the attempt to express 
 incomprehensible eternal things, they have, even when, as 
 always happened, their own vision faltered and their message 
 was but half followed or mainly ignored by contemporaries 
 and successors, still served to keep alive a light of that higher 
 world which otherwise fades from human sight. They 
 retrace by what is called experience, i.e. by the energetic 
 but necessitated reliving of our former life with full con- 
 sciousness, that perennial way of religion which has become 
 a tradition and a name. 
 
 The great deed that seems to emerge as the life of Christ 
 is the bringing into one of God and man : the discovery that 
 the supernatural is in the natural, the spiritual in the 
 
 E
 
 50 GIFFORD LECTURES [in 
 
 physical : the eternal life as the truth and basis of this : God 
 manifest in the flesh : removal of the partition wall between 
 God and man : the immanence of the divine, not as a new 
 and imported element in human life, a special bit of man 
 peculiarly holy, but as the truth and life in life. And the 
 practical corollary is twofold : first, it is absolute peace in 
 believing, the assurance of reunion, the good conscience 
 which is free from the bondage of the ' weak and beggarly 
 elements V the pure heart which rejoices in the Lord : the 
 removal of fear and doubt : the ' strength which is as the 
 strength of ten/ The veil is rent away which in the days 
 of ignorance hid God and made him an unknown God : clad 
 him in thick darkness and terrors of the mount, saw him 
 invisible in excess of light, heard him whispering indistinctly 
 in the separate events of natural and human history 
 a factor incalculable, mysterious, awful. Thus the heart is 
 made strong and cheerful : it has no hanging remorse, no 
 repentance in the sense of doubts and remorse ; for the true 
 repentance is a conversion of the whole soul to newness of 
 life, the appropriation of a new will. But there is another 
 side : the absolute freedom of the Christian man is absolute 
 allegiance to God : his independence rests in utter dependence. 
 His freedom is from the tyranny of partial claims, individual 
 desires and objects, from the halfnesses and weaknesses of our 
 nature : and it is won by identification with the universal. 
 It is, in short, here that there comes in what is called 
 humility. To define it exactly is difficult, if not impossible : 
 for, like all goodness, it has the defect of its quality, and to be 
 precious it must never part company with its correlative, 
 independence. Humility is the sense of solidarity and com- 
 munity: the controlling and regulating power of the con- 
 sciousness that we are not our own, that we are God's and 
 our neighbour's 2 . Humility is the attitude of an individual 
 who recognizes his individuality, his partiality, his dependence, 
 1 Gal. iv. 9. 2 And for our neighbour see the parable.
 
 in] THE NATURAL THEOLOGY OF CHRIST 51 
 
 his immanence in the whole, and his conformity with all the 
 parts, and yet of an individual who knows himself his own, 
 and not another's, a free man of God, a son and heir. To be 
 genuine, it must go hand in hand with the good conscience 
 and the faith unfeigned. 
 
 Finally, the most practical corollary is Love, 'Aya7r?j. 
 There are, said the Jew, two great commandments on which 
 hinge all the law and prophets. The first bids love God with 
 all strength and soul and intellect; the second, love the 
 neighbour as self. If we separate them and minutely try 
 to balance the several claims, it will lead to unpleasant and 
 profitless casuistry. But they are not separate, and they 
 cannot be balanced against each other. God, self, and 
 neighbour, they form an indissoluble trinity. Yet if the 
 central dogma of Christianity be the community of God and 
 man, the kingdom of the heavens, it is easily mistaken and 
 misconceived. It is not to be confused with mysticism. 
 Mysticism is the potent sense of the unseen, the vision of the 
 higher truth which sweeps the lower away. In it the soul 
 swoons away into the unseen : it passes by a bold act of 
 anticipation beyond the divisions of earth, and rests in utter 
 identification with the great source of life. The end of religion 
 is thus a certain deification : the finite and temporal sinks 
 absorbed in the great sea of being. God here tends to become 
 all in all: the individual and personal is utterly swamped, 
 and the great peace of the universe reigns unchecked. 
 
 Such mysticism can only be a mood a mood that needs 
 its corrective and antithesis. It is the reaction from battle 
 and struggle the lapse into the great bosom of nature, into 
 the identity of existence. To it the other world comes to be 
 a world to which we can only come by leaving this behind. 
 The mind that lingers on it may be more logically or more 
 aesthetically inspired : but in either case he will be apt 
 to lose religion in Theology, whether it be a mystical or 
 a scholastic theology.
 
 IV 
 
 .RELIGION AND MORALITY. THE DEFINITION OF 
 RELIGION 
 
 IN this second course of lectures it is my intention to deal 
 with the question of the inner relations of morality and 
 religion. There is what may be called a departmental view 
 of human life which sets religion here and science there, 
 which separates art from morality and morality from religion. 
 It is a view which is useful in its place, but we should not 
 allow it to influence us too far. I shall not deny that there 
 is an ethics which, to all appearance, is independent of 
 religion; but I think it may be safely said that at the 
 present day a mere ethics and a mere religion are equally 
 impracticable and undesirable. Neither without the other 
 can fulfil what it promises. I do not mean that religion is 
 always necessary as a schoolmaster to enforce morality, but 
 I mean that, if we look to the origin and foundation of 
 morality, in other words, if we ask what is the function and 
 the place of morality in life and the universe, whether it is an 
 accident or the essence of things, whether it is something 
 that may or may not be, or something that must be, if any- 
 thing be : if we ask such questions, we are driven to recognize 
 that religion is the complement and the implication of the 
 moral life. At any rate it will be my object in the following 
 lectures to try to show that it is so : or at least to point 
 out some directions in which ethics seems to imply or 
 postulate ideas, which lie at the very root of those religions
 
 RELIGION AND MORALITY 53 
 
 which have played the most important part in the history of 
 the world. 
 
 The phrase ' Religion of Morality ' has to the ears of the 
 purist a sound ominous of a confusion of kinds, a mixture 
 of heterogeneous natures. Religion, it is thought, is one 
 thing, and morality another and altogether different. From 
 the one side the scorn falls on what is called mere morality, 
 from the other there is equal suspicion of mere religion. The 
 fanatic will keep sedulously apart the human and the divine, 
 the service of this world's humanity and the devotion to 
 the other world of eternal life. The confusion, it may be 
 urged, is like that of one who speaks of architecture as 
 ' frozen music/ who breaks down the barrier lines between 
 epic and drama, who mixes poetry and prose, or blends 
 sculpture with painting. 
 
 Yet, it may be replied, is it not precisely the characteristic 
 glory of the highest art that, even in its definite department, 
 it speaks a language which awakes life and emotion in fields 
 seemingly far disparate ? Like the outpouring of the 
 prophetic spirit on the first Christian Whitsuntide, it is 
 understood in many alien tongues. The great poet, the great 
 composer, the great painter, are endowed with an inspiration 
 wider than the so-called legitimate scope of their art. They 
 do not indeed mingle or confuse kinds, do not bring in poetry 
 to help where painting fails, or try to turn prose into poetry by 
 any accidental efflorescence. But in the real artistic life, the 
 life in the soul and spirit, which is all form and harmony and 
 grace, each art, divided in mediocre artists from its sisterhood, 
 again draws in the strength of its undivided source, the com- 
 prehensive spirit of art itself. In its spirit and truth every 
 separate art ceases to be so separate ; it speaks with an utter- 
 ance which knows no limitation of departments, which spurns, 
 because it overcomes, the barriers fixed by grammar and 
 abstraction. The consummate artist concentrates in his 
 special gift the whole range of art-power ; the highest art
 
 54 GIFFORD LECTURES [iv 
 
 special to an age is in a way the epitome and quintessence of 
 all other arts as well. 
 
 Adam, says the old legend, gave names to all cattle and to 
 the fowl of the air and to every beast of the field : ' whatso- 
 ever the man called every living creature that was the name 
 thereof/ But ere Adam called them they were there, called 
 into being by forces greater than a man-imposed name, knit 
 together by the development of a history, a genesis, which 
 his glance could not in an instant surmise. Their true 
 name, may we say, only their maker could know ; and that 
 name, if it were true to their reality, would be perhaps 
 a myriad-syllabled vocable. The stranger, confronted with 
 the problem, gave them names : he is seldom at a loss for 
 that, this nomenclator man : but in the long lapse of years 
 since Eden he has gradually gained a glimpse of the vast 
 discrepance between what he, simply, naively, fancifully or 
 practically named them, and the true names which they bore, 
 or will one day bear, in the muster-roll of God. All science, 
 says one, is but a ' language well made/ a language which 
 shall not miss true affinities and underlying connexions ; 
 which shall trace, say, in evolutional fashion, the inner 
 genealogy of Nature. 
 
 It is the stranger and the outsider who gives the name, the 
 outward observer. The bosom friend, the member of an 
 organic unity, hardly needs a name. Our name, for each of 
 us, is for others to use, for others' convenience. A tribe does 
 not give itself a name; at least in the primitive course of 
 things its name is given perhaps mostly by its enemies, by 
 aliens. And it is oftenest a sort of nickname, the freak of 
 what we call chance, which settles on some conspicuous 
 feature that appeals to the imagination. 
 
 Not otherwise is it with names like religion, or morals. 
 When we have recourse in such cases to etymology, we should 
 be on our guard against a misconception of its evidence. The 
 history of the elements of the word will not tell us what
 
 iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 55 
 
 religion was to those who had it and lived in it : but it may 
 throw some light on what observers saw as they looked upon 
 it. It will tell us something of its outward phases and effects, 
 of the conduct and ceremony to which it gave rise. We 
 cannot tell what the Roman religion really and inwardly was ; 
 but whether we follow one etymology or another (re-ligere, 
 after Cicero, or re-ligare after Lactantius), the prominent 
 feature brought before the mind is (as in Lact. iv. 28, ' vinculo 
 pietatis obstricti Dei et religati') a strictness and conscien- 
 tiousness, a scrupulosity and care in behaviour, a diligent 
 observance of ceremony and form of worship (' religiosi = qui 
 omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinent diligenter retractant,' 
 De Nat. Deor. ii. 28), a watchful anxiety in presence of some 
 superior influence (' superioris cujusdam naturae . . . curam 
 ceremoniamque affert/ De Inv. ii. 53). 
 
 It is this idea of strict obligatory control over human 
 action which is prominent in the word as it meets us in its 
 older French and English uses, prior to the seventeenth cen- 
 tury. If Luther e. g. speaks of the ' old religion/ it is of its 
 objective ceremonial or ritual side that he is thinking. And 
 so Calvin (Instit. 66) says : ' j'estime que ce mot est oppose a la 
 trop grande licence et excessive que la plupart de monde s'est 
 permise. . . . Religion done comporte autant comme une 
 retraite et discretion mure et bien fondee/ It is the same 
 disciplinary consciousness of being ever in the great task- 
 master's eye that made Frenchmen speak of the Huguenots as 
 messieurs de la religion. And if we open the pages of Chaucer 
 or his contemporaries, we find perhaps a more restricted con- 
 ception of religion. Religion to him is special consecration of 
 place and conduct to direct special divine service. A place of 
 religion is e. g. a monastery : a man of religion is one in holy 
 orders. 
 
 Religion thus holds a separate and definite sphere in life, 
 confined as it seems to selected spots, and peculiar modes of 
 action. It surrenders as it were its claim to rule whatever we
 
 56 GIFFORD LECTURES [iv 
 
 do, and to be wherever we are, if only we give it and secure 
 it a special realm. 
 
 But whatever be the range of its sway, the obligatory 
 nature, the awe-inspiring and legal character attaches to it. 
 Religion is, in fact, divine law. Under that name it appears 
 in mediaeval language as Lex nostra, Lex Judaica. The 
 conception, of course, is, in part, that of the older Judaic, but 
 in a deeper sense it is a common, almost universal, attitude to 
 God. Religion is the sense of a covenant obligation, a bind- 
 ing tie. It need not surprise us, therefore, that in Parsifal 
 and the Nibelungen Lied the word for religion and its sanctity 
 is E (the modern JE//e, now used only of marriage) : e. g. in 
 Kristenlicher E, or den touf, und Kristen E. And so in 
 Shakespeare the commonest sense involves this emphasis on 
 conscientious obligation, strict fidelity, loyal obedience ; e. g. 
 ' Keep your promise with no less religion ' (As Yon Like It, 
 iv. T. 201) ; 'When the devout religion of mine eye' (Rom. 
 i. 2. 97) ; ' How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear 
 religious love stolen from mine eye' (Son. 31). 
 
 The decisive novelty of the Lutheran reform was in the 
 direction of a subversion of this apparent predominance of 
 objective religion. For the outward ordinance, the minute 
 and accurate performance of measured duties, it substituted 
 the inward feeling, the subjective attitude of faith. The word 
 for true religion in the Lutheran language is Glaule : and 
 the essence of Glaube isfu/ilen. ' Du musst bei dir selbst im 
 Gewissen fiihlen Christum selbst, und unbeweglich empfinden 
 dass es Gottes Wort sei/ 
 
 Yet it would be a mistake to speak of the movement as 
 a change of the emphasis merely from the objective to the 
 subjective side. To some extent the Catholic mysticism of 
 the later mediaeval times had done that before. The other 
 and perhaps more important step was that the Lutheran 
 reform sought to put an end to the restriction of religion to 
 a specially religious sphere, a higher and peculiar range of
 
 iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 57 
 
 sanctity. Not that Catholicism had failed to recognize the 
 presence of the divine law in all secular life. Marriage it had 
 declared a sacrament ; in other words, it had set the human 
 ethical relationship as part of the direct ordinance of God, as 
 a service of the kingdom of heaven; not as a convenient 
 arrangement for social well-being, but as a method of salvation, 
 and only to be engaged in as a way and means to the attain- 
 ment of eternal life. If the older Catholicism failed, it was 
 because its social or political organization created and enforced 
 grades of goodness, which were not in accordance with its 
 own essential doctrines. 
 
 Lutheranism could not long remain true to its own funda- 
 mental intuition. In the stress of conflict between reformation 
 and counter-reformation, reality and belief had to give way to 
 formulae or creeds. The term 'faith'' or 'belief as a volitional 
 act, an effort of the whole man, a lively personal apprehension, 
 was, by the force of objectivity and of words, turned into 
 a set of beliefs, a creed. The only apparent result was, it 
 might seem, that a new narrowness was substituted for the 
 old. Once it had been a special region of act, ceremony, 
 observance : now it was a special form and phrase of defini- 
 tion of doctrine. Religion, in Protestantism, thus gains a 
 dominantly intellectual, a sort of literary, character. According 
 to Calovius (p. 282) it 'comprehends all things which are 
 comprehended in theology, whether they are things to be 
 done, or things to be believed/ But to speak of a 'thing 
 to be believed ' is already to use language in which the great 
 vision of Luther runs a risk of being lost. Theology and 
 religion are in danger of coinciding to the injury of both. 
 Nor need we lay much stress on the fact that the two sides of 
 religion (theoretical and practical) are set side by side, uncon- 
 nected. It is only a further gliding on the same slope when 
 it is declared that faith proper (fiducia) is preceded by bare 
 knowledge (notitia) of the facts. 
 
 Religion had been transferred to the field of science : it had
 
 58 GIFFORD LECTURES [iv 
 
 been, that is, appropriated by the rising tide of the modern 
 world and of scientific civilization, of literature and popular 
 opinion. It comes forward, or rather is brought forward, into 
 discussion, by those who looked at it from the outside, and 
 tried to correlate it with the other aspects of life. It sought 
 to legitimate itself in the court of science, and became the 
 so-called science of theology, or, on the other hand, it was 
 decried and scorned by those who judged it by the canons of 
 physical science. With the Reformation rationalism, the 
 unchecked lust of reasoning and explaining, had been let 
 loose, and alike in orthodoxy and heterodoxy it ruled. 
 
 Yet, that the real sphere of religion was elsewhere, was 
 never utterly forgotten. It hardly needed Schleiermacher to 
 repeat that the essence of religious life is the sense of utter 
 and all-round dependency. When Kant had described the 
 essence of religion as the recognition of all our duties as 
 commands of God, he had said the same thing in balder 
 language, in language less mystically attractive than the 
 vaguer and suggestive words of Schleiermacher, and open 
 to obvious misinterpretation by those who would press the 
 meaning of terms like ' command/ or like ' recognition/ 
 where the old error of intellectualism might seem to lurk. 
 
 And, if we take a contemporary of Schleiermacher, let us 
 hear Schelling, who reiterates the essentiality of duty, but of 
 a duty inspired by something higher than subjection, a some- 
 thing which he calls at once heroism, faith, fidelity to yourself 
 and to God 1 . 
 
 'By religiosity, the inner power and spirit of religion, 
 I understand/ says Schelling l , ' not an instinct groping 
 towards the divine, and not mere emotional devoutness : for 
 God, if He be God, must be the very heart of life of all 
 thinking and all action, and not a mere object of devout 
 passion or of belief. That is no real knowledge of God, 
 where He is merely object : either God is not known at all, 
 1 Schelling, Werke, Erste Abtheilung, Band vi, p. 558-9.
 
 iv] RELIGION AND MORALITY 59 
 
 or He is at once subject and object of knowledge. He must 
 be at once our very self, our heart of hearts, and yet compre- 
 hending all hearts far beyond us. Religion is higher than 
 dim outstretching hope and feeling for God. The first 
 meaning of the much misused word is conscientiousness; it 
 expresses the law that knowledge and action are at one so 
 supremely, that action must inevitably follow knowledge. 
 He is not conscientious who in a given case must first set 
 before himself the command of duty, in order to decide 
 himself to act rightly through respect for its mandate. 
 Religion means that action is bound, obliged, that there is 
 no choice between opposites, but supreme decidedness for the 
 right, without option/ 
 
 Conscientiousness, it is true, does not always appear as 
 enthusiasm, or heroism ; it may consist in strict fulfilment 
 of duty, and, as in the case of Cato, show a certain hardness 
 and harshness in its features. But such strictness and scrupu- 
 losity is, like the strictness of life in the physical world, the 
 germ from which will yet issue true grace and real divinity. 
 When the divine principle at its root has sprung into life 
 through its strictness of sentiment, then virtue presents itself 
 as enthusiasm, as ' heroism, i. e. action which does not spring 
 from the finite nature of man, but is the free and beautiful 
 courage of a man to act as God instructs him, and not to fall 
 short in action from what he has seen to be true ' ; or if we call 
 such religion faith, the word is not to be taken to mean assent 
 to a proposition which is partly doubtful, and where assent 
 therefore is regarded as meritorious, but ' in its original sense 
 of a trust and confidence in the divine which excludes or 
 abolishes all choice. . . . This faith and this fidelity to your- 
 selves and the divine/ adds Schelling in his lecture, ' I wish 
 you to take with you into life as the sole true fruit of 
 philosophy/
 
 THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 
 
 ONE of the most important facts or problems in the life of 
 the present day is that which is best described as the ethical 
 movement in religion. That movement, as it obviously presents 
 itself, has two very distinct phases. It is a movement inside 
 the Churches (both the Christian Churches and also Churches 
 that are not exactly Christian) ; and it is a movement outside 
 the Churches, though not always or necessarily hostile to them. 
 It shows itself e.g. in the rise of what are called Ethical 
 Societies in America, in France, and in this country societies 
 which are, indeed, not very important, if judged by outward 
 bulk. A few human beings linked in action for the purpose 
 of bettering the general standard of ethical feeling, may seem 
 rather a subject for jest. But they are one indication of 
 a widely prevailing want of satisfaction with the results both 
 of religious and of scientific teaching : and the initiation of an 
 effort after something better, which the historian of the future 
 will not count unworthy of regard. 
 
 The pi'esent state of opinion upon ethics and religion may 
 remind the student of history of what happened at Athens 
 more than 2,000 years ago. Then also the old landmarks of 
 local religion and patriotism seemed to disappear. A little 
 town, by a series of achievements and struggles about which 
 the world has not yet grown tired of hearing, found itself 
 suddenly planted on a new scale of existence, with new duties 
 and outlooks, calling for new preparations. It entered upon
 
 a larger life, the life of a cosmopolitan centre cosmopolitan, 
 at least, so long as the world was a Mediterranean world. 
 There was a call for more virtue. But what, it may be asked, 
 was virtue ? It is a question which in the modern world has 
 had to be asked : for words, like other things, grow stale and 
 unprofitable, mere shadows of themselves. Again and again 
 in the course of history virtue has been taken in a purely 
 neutral sense ; or rather we should say, it has been taken in 
 a quite negative sense. It has come to mean, neither doing 
 something, nor the ability to do something, but the not doing 
 something, the power of abstinence. Instead of the idea of 
 force or manly energy, it has been used to express the nega- 
 tion of force, or at best the power of self-control ; nay, it has 
 sunk lower still. So too with propriety : in its first power the 
 word meant being all that one should be, realizing one's own, 
 self-realization, being true to one's own self and working out 
 one's own law. Even in Adam Smith the word still meant 
 the sense of proportion in things. But it too sank till it 
 expressed no more than negative merit, till it stood in a line 
 with mediocrity and meant or suggested something strait- 
 laced, cold, and formal. 
 
 Now virtue of the real stamp is positive ability, the power 
 to act, to act well and vigorously. And when we say ability 
 to act, let us add, that ability, if it be real, is itself action. 
 It is the initiative of act, inchoate action, tendency passing 
 forward into energy. It is not mere not doing something 
 which is to be condemned; it is doing, or readiness to do, 
 something which is required by law, by ideal, by social 
 demand, by the needs of life. 
 
 As new circumstances involve new work, the call of virtue 
 assumes a new phase. In a stagnant or decaying civilization, 
 such, for instance, as we meet in the later days of Greco- 
 Roman fame, when life and progress had died out, to all 
 appearance virtue came to be endurance, self-denial, restraint : 
 it acquired a passive tincture. At such times the world gets
 
 62 GIFFORD LECTURES [v 
 
 to move in a quasi-mechanical routine, and the great require- 
 ment is to step accurately in the line, and show no sign of 
 originality or independence. But at other seasons virtue must 
 be positive. It can no longer be a cold morality, a formal 
 compliance ; it must be warm, active, and onward-going. It 
 is fully all that it is, only when it is so active. Yet, perhaps 
 we do well to remember that resistance also is action ; that 
 much effort may sometimes be demanded merely to produce 
 equilibrium : that energy is not always best exhibited by 
 'agitation/ and that there may be a strenuous inertia, 
 a service of those ' who only stand and wait/ 
 
 To meet the demand in Athens arose a class of teachers who 
 professed to communicate the requisite ability, who taught 
 the virtue which fitted for the discharge of social and public 
 functions. It was urged against them by some observers that 
 in these departments teaching, specific training, culture was 
 unnecessary. Everybody, it was said, can speak Greek, and 
 he learns it naturally by the practice of life. Yet it was 
 found that speaking Greek required in certain cases more than 
 mother-wit and family example could supply. So, too, what- 
 ever differences may be between men, they may be all said to 
 be pretty equally endowed as regards a moral sense, shame of 
 wrong-doing, and sense of justice. Yet here too the new 
 complexities of social existence created cases where the old 
 average hardly met the needs of the situation. It is no doubt 
 true in a way that he who can rule his own soul can rule 
 a kingdom, yet perhaps a few considerations as to the aims, 
 methods, and machinery of political life may not be amiss. 
 
 The same questions arise for the modern world, and we 
 may say, if we like, that in both cases they are due to the 
 advent of what is called Democracy. What is Democracy? 
 To the observation of Plato, as of many observers since, 
 Democracy has seemed another name for Anarchy. Its very 
 name sounds amiss : it is mass-force, the violent power of the 
 great multitude, of the whole people. It is Kratos-torce
 
 v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 63 
 
 (remember Kpdros KOL Bta in the Prometheus). Monarchy and 
 oligarchy are rule and direction of one or few, but democracy, 
 it is said, suggests only absence of all direction, all principle, 
 all originative rule anarchy. 
 
 But Plato, if he is occasionally unjust, and gives scope 
 to sarcasm, is equally aware that democracy may be some- 
 thing better than anarchy. There is a democracy which is 
 according to law, a democracy in which there is no absence 
 of apx?], but where every citizen from the highest to the 
 lowest, from the least to the most capable, is in his measure 
 and degree an arche, archon, though, as we may add from 
 Aristotle, none is apya>v who is not also ap^o^evos, i. e. who 
 is not in his own person at once sovereign and subject, at 
 once lawgiver and law-bound, king and commoner. This 
 then is the true or ideal democracy, the organization of the 
 total power of a group of human beings, in which none is 
 merely a mean or instrument of service, but each also enjoys 
 the end of his own and others' action ; in which there is 
 fraternity, but not necessarily equality or even vulgar liberty; 
 or where the equality lies in common duty of service, and the 
 liberty in the removal of all mere passivity. 
 
 On its negative side, then, democracy is the power and 
 force of the whole body, as against the decided dominance 
 of one or of several classes in the body politic. As so 
 negative, it has an appearance of no direction, of anarchy. 
 But the positive side must not be ignored. And that, in one 
 word, is autonomy, self-direction, self-organization. It is not 
 the negation of direction or government, but its completion 
 and universalization. To realize that positive side is the 
 work of education : and, it is in the recognition of that 
 problem that the promoters of an ethical movement have 
 their place and function in the present as in the past. They 
 are the witness of a feeling that something is amiss; that 
 the order of the world is passing through a change, and that 
 a new effort is needed to set it right, to prevent stagnation
 
 64 GIFFORD LECTURES [v 
 
 and corruption. It is not quite so clear that they have dis- 
 covered the root of the evil, or that they are on the likely way 
 to a solution of the question. 
 
 More than this. If we are guided by the analogy of the 
 old world, we may well doubt whether the issue is at all 
 simple and near. Even where only material interests are 
 concerned, it is often long ere the great masses can be got 
 to discern the nature of the needs they labour under. It 
 requires the guidance of genius to show the place of the evil. 
 It is not for everyone to say where the shoe pinches. The 
 sense of the masses is a vague feeling of malaise, a vague 
 disgust, spite, indignation, against something wrong ; but to 
 discern what the wrong precisely is or in what it exactly 
 consists, that is just what the masses are unable to compass, 
 and what their leaders, good or false, try or pretend to make 
 possible for them. So it is alike in material and spiritual 
 evil. The remedy comes only by diagnosis, by the ascer- 
 tainment of the definite nature, the characteristic feature, of 
 the ailment. 
 
 So in the ancient Greek world, it was not a simple matter 
 to say what was the evil eating at the root of life. It was 
 easy of course to note symptoms : for a little natural inter- 
 pretation in a predisposed mind can turn any fact into a 
 symptom, and a spontaneous imagination may easily add to 
 their number. But the diagnosis of the disease of Greece 
 which Plato offered, and the ideal of the good and happy life 
 which he faintly indicated, were too alien to the ordinary 
 mind of his countrymen to find immediate response. Yet 
 the Greek philosophers by direct and indirect energies laboured 
 a soil of which other people reaped the fruits. It is by no 
 means fanciful to say that the organization of the mediaeval 
 Church was the realization of Plato's ideal, though a realiza- 
 tion of it which was deeply pervaded by a spirit of alien 
 tone. The early Christian writers themselves in their saner 
 moods spoke of Greek philosophy as the preparation of
 
 v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 65 
 
 Gospel, though sometimes in their blind zeal they styled it 
 devilish. 
 
 To us looking at the facts in the light of history, it is 
 hardly possible to say otherwise than that though it was well 
 done, it was far from being thoroughly well done, or so done 
 that it can be considered satisfactorily done for ever. But 
 we need cherish no illusions as to what we can learn from 
 the past. The cry is again and again raised. Back to 
 it may only be to Kant : it may be to Greece, it may be 
 to mediaeval Christendom, it may be to primitive Christianity, 
 or, as with Rousseau, it may be back to Nature. But in what 
 sense back ? What has been done, even the gods themselves 
 (says the adage) cannot make undone. All that historical 
 reversions can do is to suggest that in the onward move- 
 ment something precious had been left behind, which it 
 were well to recover before going further. But the Nature, 
 the Greece, the Christianity we go back to is not in the past ; 
 it is, seen through the arch of experience, the gleam of that 
 untrodden world to which we move. To seek them in the past 
 is to seek the living among the dead. The gates of one 
 Paradise are closed, the Paradise of infancy, of simple hours, 
 of naive faith. The gates of Paradise are eternally open. 
 
 The ethical movement, as it has been called, is the result 
 of various influences, and is an attempt to satisfy various 
 needs. It grows out of felt wants, and gropes about to find 
 a remedy. It is no solution, but a step towards a solution. 
 Its most obvious source perhaps is found in what some people 
 would rashly call the decline and fall of religious belief. But 
 what is thus called by the comprehensive title of religious 
 belief is only one part of the existing religious spirit and 
 institution, and perhaps not its most central or religious part. 
 What has fallen or is falling is not that central spirit of 
 religion which we found described as conscientiousness, de- 
 votion, reverence, loyalty, fidelity, enthusiasm, and heroism. 
 
 F
 
 66 GIFFORD LECTURES [v 
 
 What has fallen is not that trust in the world order, that 
 faithfulness unto death, that joy in well-doing-, that cheer- 
 fulness of good conscience, which made obedience no burden, 
 and service a delight. These things, it may be said, are now 
 seldom seen : but so, it may be answered, was it always. It 
 may be added perhaps that they are oftener to be seen for 
 those who have the eye to detect them than our cheap cynicism 
 admits. 
 
 What has changed lies in another part of the religious 
 system. W T hat has fallen, or rather what has become un- 
 certain and suspect, is the historical and metaphysical dogmas, 
 the cosmic theory, which have been knit up with religion. 
 In the history of the Christian Church in a way which 
 I endeavoured in my last year's course of lectures to trace 
 there grew up slowly and naturally a creed, a body or group 
 of articles, partly historical, partly philosophical, in which 
 an effort was made to express the fundamental Christian 
 conception of what man was, is, and would be; what God 
 is, how the world is related to God and to man; in other 
 words, to furnish a scheme of beliefs about life and death, 
 duty and reward, which should answer all demands that 
 legitimate curiosity on man's part could make. By those 
 who formulated this body of doctrine, these articles of faith, 
 it was believed that their labours and decisions only codified 
 and defined what originally, in some exceptionally favoured 
 epoch of history and in some peculiarly holy land, had been 
 given forth with an authority more than human, and from 
 a source veritably divine. In some way though precisely 
 how it happened, an unanalytical age barely presumed to 
 inquire God had communicated directly with men and given 
 them a message, in which the true purpose of existence was 
 revealed, and the means indicated by which the full fruition 
 of existence for man might be realized. That message was, 
 as it were, a bequest consigned to a trust, left in charge of 
 a community who, walking by the light of the revelation,
 
 v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 67 
 
 maintained it intact in their treasury-archives as a funda- 
 mental document, a title deed to the inheritance. That 
 document is of course the sacred Scripture. But while 
 maintaining the deed intact and seeing to the training of 
 a select body, the so-called clergy, which should be able to 
 read and interpret it, the main function which the Church 
 claimed as her abiding work was to celebrate, i. e. to repeat 
 and realize, in symbolic ceremony, the perpetual meaning of 
 the said message. A system of rites, a series of sacramental 
 observances, carried out in all departments of life the purport 
 of the fundamental conception of life and duty. The aim of 
 the Church was to make each individual feel and perceive 
 for himself that here and now the meaning of the everlasting 
 Gospel was enacted and realized. A symbolic ceremony was 
 by active participation of the celebrant the sign of an inward 
 process. Day by day, year by year, in appointed cycle, the 
 Church re-enacted the deed once done, the life once lived and 
 the death once died, not in vain repetition or impious travesty 
 of the accomplished fact, but in order to enforce by sensible 
 image the eternal and universal virtue of the truth, of the 
 law of life, the way to life which is true life, or, as the phrase 
 is, life eternal. If it be said that this is but opus operatum 
 operari, it might be replied : Even so, always, what God may 
 be said to do once for all, man, the child of time, can only 
 equal by eternal repetition. 
 
 But with the Reformation, which was also and most 
 obviously a Revolt, a new view of the Church's duty emerged. 
 It was supposed, not without reason, that the Church under- 
 took to do by her own authority what had been done once 
 and for all in a remote past. Not content to occupy till 
 He came who should restore all things, the Church, it was 
 said, had usurped the absent ruler's place, and claimed to rule 
 by right of her own, as if her dominion were irresponsible 
 and not merely vicarious. She was accordingly thrust aside 
 as illegitimately intervening between the soul and its God. 
 
 F 2
 
 68 GIFFORD LECTURES [v 
 
 The whole ritual was pronounced to be a work of idolatry. 
 And it was reasserted that not the ceremonial was the 
 essential, but the inward spiritual change which the cere- 
 monial typified. And if, indeed, the Church had so stepped in 
 between, if she had assumed a mediatorial function between 
 man and God, so far the change made was to be justified. 
 If, on the other hand, the Church had only acted in its 
 organic capacity as a whole, to guide and help the faint 
 efforts of its weaker members, the change was less excusable. 
 If the Church had meant to teach that not the temporary 
 event but its real significance was the essence of true religion, 
 if her symbolism was merely the means of making the dogma 
 approach the apprehension of ignorant minds, then who shall 
 say the Church was wholly wrong ? 
 
 Such in barest outline is the quarrel between Catholicism 
 and Protestantism. It is time perhaps to realize that, like 
 all violent changes, the Reformation only helped progress 
 by accentuating the fundamental issues involved in religious 
 life, as a life in the world. It did not answer the questions 
 it raised, and it imported a new bitterness into all attempts 
 to answer them. At any rate, what happened was that the 
 documentary evidence of Scripture came to be looked upon 
 as all important. The historical record took the place of the 
 Church. The title deed became more important than the 
 estate. Nominally at least, the individual was encouraged 
 to regard the document as a private promissory note, which 
 he could use by the light of his own soul, or by a light 
 privately vouchsafed, without regard to the community. It 
 was not long indeed before the right of private interpretation 
 was claimed. Protestantism gradually and perhaps inevitably 
 came to assert that the whole truth, the whole message 
 of God to man, was contained in the ' Testament/ There 
 each, even the cottager at her own door, could read clear 
 her title to a mansion in the skies. But the fact, which 
 remained unchanged by any formal declaration of indepen-
 
 v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 69 
 
 dence, was that the interpretation,, which fifteen centuries 
 had helped to consolidate, remained in its main features 
 dominant over those who renounced allegiance to the Pope 
 at Rome. The quarrel had in the first instance touched 
 only on the machinery. Like all quarrels, indeed, it induced 
 a spirit of suspicion which surmised evil everywhere. But, 
 in the deeper regions of belief, the old scheme still remained 
 in essentials unaltered as the theory of true life. 
 
 And, practically, in all the gamut of Protestantism down 
 to Congregationalism, and if there be ranges beyond it, the 
 individual never came merely and simply in contact with 
 the revelation. He might see with ' old lights ' or with ' new 
 lights,' but always he saw the truth revealed in Scripture 
 through some common light, a light burning in a community, 
 however narrow might be the limits he assigned it. When 
 he sought toleration, it was often because he wanted to 
 tyrannize in a body after his own mind. With an excusable 
 inconsistency Protestantism accepted in the main, though 
 with slight reservation and corrections, the doctrinal system 
 which the efforts of theologians in council had wrought out 
 of the data of the original documents. 
 
 Now in the course of last year's lectures I attempted to 
 show that it is a delusion to suppose that these doctrinal 
 systems are merely the pure colourless statement in logical 
 form of God-given truth. In all cases they are a synthesis, 
 a compound product, due to a reflection on the data of 
 Christianity, which was guided in the main by ideas derived 
 from Greek philosophy. They are a mixture of good metal 
 and other less worthy elements. And when I thus express 
 it, I do not mean that the dividing line between these 
 elements lies at the boards of the Bible. The line of dis- 
 tinction is harder to draw than that. The tares lie mixed 
 with the wheat even within the sacred precincts ; and the 
 separation of false from true is not to be made by simply 
 returning to a given tradition of the past, but in working
 
 7 o CIFFORD LECTURES [v 
 
 and waiting for what is called the ' end of the world/ the 
 revelation of the sons of God. These theological structures 
 were the result of attempts to rationalize the faith and the 
 articles of belief it embraces, and out of them to form a 
 system of doctrine. But such a system could not be final ; 
 the doctrine must grow, i. e. it must be altered and enlarged. 
 
 Since the Reformation dogmatic theology in the older 
 sense could make no advances. And why? It was then 
 asserted that the real theology lay in the limited words and 
 scope of the Scriptures, and that the creative process of 
 religion had been restricted to the space of a few years. Hence 
 the na'ive process by which the early Church built up theology, 
 seeking to give to religion and science, to faith and art, 
 a unity of scheme and idea, was henceforth condemned as 
 unscriptural and illegitimate. All that could be done was 
 to set the same old material in a slightly different light : 
 but to add to it was impossible. You see the results in the 
 endless series of German Dogmatics. A narrower view of 
 the position was to reject all theology or interpretation and 
 cling to the Scriptures alone. Hold to them, and you will 
 be safe. 
 
 But this standpoint is untenable, (i) The private inter- 
 pretation of the individual no less than that of the Church 
 involves the application of ideas of human and social origin. 
 Private theology is liable to all the additional recklessness of in- 
 dividual judgement. For individual judgement is what ? The 
 judgement of one biassed by an opinion due to surroundings, 
 to instruction, habit, and all the various mixture of ignorance 
 and knowledge. Always it is the product of class influences ; 
 its roots lie outside its apparent source, it is the work of 
 many causes, necessitated on all hands; and yet it comes 
 forward with the claim of freedom and independence. Wlr 
 freie Geister, says Nietzsche. But who gave us Ceist and 
 Freiheitt (2) The title-deeds themselves are subjected to 
 criticism. This applies to Catholic as well as Protestant
 
 v] THE ETHICAL MOVEMENT IN RELIGION 71 
 
 theology, so far as it is founded upon Scripture. Yet 
 Catholicism has still the living and actual faith and practice 
 of an abiding body to fall back upon. It has never com- 
 pletely pinned its faith to history and a limited tradition. 
 It has built on the universal tradition of all ages, i. e. really 
 on the essential humanity or rationality of its doctrines. 
 
 What was the crowning merit of Catholicism ? The very 
 thing which many a modern, accustomed to identify it with 
 the Inquisition and the Society of Jesus, or perhaps with 
 a caricature even of these, would probably deny to it. That 
 is, that in a rough and imperfect way the Church regarded 
 itself as a central and guiding principle of life, to which 
 indeed all other things were but ancillary ; but, just for that 
 reason, conceived it as a duty to give to each of them a place 
 and a function within itself. Hence science, art, social life, 
 political union, grew up as integral parts of its structure. 
 The unity, perhaps, was somewhat roughly compacted : and 
 it only held out against criticism so long as progress was slow 
 or imperceptible. But still, as Dante shows us, the synthesis 
 of life was there. Already, however, in the Cinquecento the 
 Renaissance indicates that disease has set in for the organism ; 
 that disease which consists in the too unequal growth of the 
 several members. And soon the Reformation comes to make 
 a deep rent in the one body of spiritual life. It breaks up the 
 unity of art, science, morality, and religion. And it does so, 
 though with characteristic variations in either case, both for 
 
 o * 
 
 the Reformed Church and for the Church of the Council 
 of Trent. 
 
 But, on the other hand, science in the mean time has 
 been setting itself up side by side with religion, taking 
 religion in the narrow sense. That is, a view of the world's 
 meaning and drift has been slowly growing up, parallel with 
 and partly antagonistic to the strictly religious view. The 
 latter has no doubt the advantage of being a more closely 
 wrought, complete coat of mail. But it is antiquated. The
 
 72 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 new view is growing, fragmentary, progressive, and therefore 
 incomplete. It is forming from different sources, by slow 
 processes of natural growth, here a little and there a little, 
 though it still remains the property of a few and are by them 
 known only in parts. It is chaotic, assertive, and self-con- 
 tradictory a . 
 
 1 At this point the manuscript abruptly stops. In the three following 
 lectures Professor Wallace examined the influence of modern science and 
 literature in changing our ideas of religion. The manuscript begins again 
 in the sixth lecture with an examination of Mr. Balfour's Foundations 
 of Belief, and is continuous to the end of the course.
 
 VI 
 
 MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF ' 
 
 THE title of Mr. Balfour's book promises to lay bare the 
 1 Foundations of Belief/ and ' to delineate, and if possible 
 to recommend' a particular way of looking at the world- 
 problems ' a way which may be briefly styled the theological, 
 perhaps even the Christian. The theme of the book is less 
 purely theoretic, and more polemical than its title suggests. 
 It is in the main an examination and an indictment of a 
 modern creed, to which the critic has given the name of 
 Naturalism, and which is, by definition, the negation of all 
 theology. The book falls into four parts. In the first 
 part there is an exposition of some ' consequences/ which in 
 Mr. Balfour's judgement follow from the naturalistic creed, 
 certain changes, which its uncompromising acceptance would 
 involve, in our estimate of the principles we call ethical, 
 aesthetical, and logical or intellectual : in other words, this 
 part seeks to show that the naturalistic standpoint, if 
 thoroughly adopted, would in the long run dry up and 
 cause to wither away every belief in the paramountcy of 
 righteousness and beauty and reason 1 . 
 
 Naturalism, it is therefore concluded, is practically insuffi- 
 cient. The second part, under the title of Some Reasons for 
 
 1 The book, perhaps by an oversight, describes this part as ' Some 
 Consequences of Belief ' ; it really treats of ' Presumable Consequences 
 of the Naturalistic Creed.'
 
 74 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 Relief, carries us to a point of outlook from which we can, at 
 a proper distance, survey the philosophers, the men of sound 
 common sense, and the professional theologians, at their work 
 of providing a rationale for a, or their, or the creed. First of 
 all and that from respect to their ' formidable following ' 
 come the Naturalistic Empiricists. By that name is meant 
 those who, in the first place, attempt to provide a theory 
 which may show on what the certainty and stability of the 
 sciences rest, a task in which they have failed ( c such/ remarks 
 Mr. Balfour, ' is after all the common lot of philosophies ') ; 
 and who, in the second place, disguising or ignoring their 
 failure, have, under cover of the successes of the sciences 
 which they profess to explain, contrived to foist upon the 
 blatant part of the world a theory of life and of all reality, 
 which is no necessary concomitant or part of genuine science, 
 and which at once fails to satisfy the conscience, and violates 
 the coherence of reason. In a second rank, as befits their scanty 
 numbers, and their foreign origin (for their utterances, made 
 English out of German, are such no ' ordinary Englishman 
 will consent to assimilate '), come the Idealists. ' Very remote, 
 indeed, from ordinary modes of expression/ the doctrines of 
 these ( Idealists/ or, as they are often doubly dubbed in the 
 text, ( Transcendental Idealists/ are for the general reader's 
 sake veiled in a chapter in smaller type, which he is recom- 
 mended to omit. For the present it need only be said that 
 under this head are weighed and found wanting certain views, 
 more or less attachable to Kant and T. H. Green; the net result 
 of the criticism being that these views have their natural 
 outcome in Solipsism, the theory that ' in the infinite variety 
 of the universe there is room for but one knowing subject, 
 and that for each one of us severally this subject is "him- 
 self/^ Such a conclusion, so obviously inconsistent with 
 science, morality, and common sense, seems indeed to justify 
 the place given to ' transcendental idealism ' on Mr. Balfour's 
 index expnrgatorius. Behind these Metaphysicians who are
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 75 
 
 poets of the abstract and supersensible, but to be sure, poets 
 with a difference (for it cannot often be said that the product 
 of their labours is a ' thing of beauty '}, come as third line of 
 array, the troop of Rationalists. These, otherwise known as 
 champions of common sense or enlightenment, are not, as such, 
 philosophers: they, indeed, ignore, if they do not despise, 
 metaphysics. They judge as men of the world, and test 
 every belief by one touchstone : they ask, of every article 
 of any creed, does it 'square with the view of the universe 
 based exclusively upon the prevalent mode of interpreting 
 sense-perception ' ? Rationalism, in short, is the method 
 which, in an age where the physical sciences have a pre- 
 ponderating eclat, inevitably leads to Naturalism. It is 
 ' Naturalism in embryo/ And its right to the name 
 Rationalism is based on its carrying out at least that 
 principal function of reason, which is to smooth away con- 
 tradiction, to remove inconsistencies. Lastly, as a fourth 
 group, with its own attitude to the problem of belief, comes 
 the band labelled ' Rationalist Orthodoxy/ Here muster 
 the Natural Theologians, who make theology c a mere annex 
 or appendix to science, a mere footnote to history ' ; or who, 
 in other words, profess, by an extension of physical methods 
 and the evidence of historical fact, to read God's word in the 
 rocks, in the struggles of animated life, and in the course of 
 civilization. The doom of Natural Theology is written : it 
 has appealed to natural science, but it is not by the method of 
 science that it can ( break out of the naturalistic prison-house/ 
 The third part propounds ' Some Causes of Belief/ It 
 supposes us to take the position of an observer from another 
 planet ( who, in a spirit of detached curiosity/ surveys beliefs 
 from the outside, so as to find out the place they occupy in 
 the natural history of the earth and its inhabitants. The 
 task of this observer is, it may be suggested, by no means 
 easy, not to say impossible: but let that pass. With 
 a penetrative power such as archangel cannot match, he sees
 
 76 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 where it exists (in certain vital forms) the correspondence of 
 neural change and psychic event : he sees the beliefs of external 
 things with their order in time and place forming in the indi- 
 vidual mind. But he soon discovers that other influences than 
 those of the physiological structure of the individual man are 
 at work in forming the individual's creed. Man's beliefs are 
 not all on one level : they rise in a kind of hierarchy. And to 
 explain such of them as are connected with the higher scientific, 
 social and spiritual life of the race, there is needed something 
 more than physiological structure : an appropriate environment 
 is required. In that environment one group of causes influ- 
 encing these higher beliefs is specially selected for notice. 
 This group is named briefly Authority. To fix its place and 
 function, according to Mr. Balfour's estimate of it, we need 
 only note that it is styled the c rival and opponent ' of reason. 
 It ' stands for that group of non-rational causes, moral, social, 
 and educational, which produces its results by psychic processes 
 other than reasoning/ To Authority we owe the order and 
 stability of the moral world : by it the efforts of reason to 
 rationalize are l coerced to a fore-ordained issue ' : throughout 
 the whole course of history its part in producing belief is 
 immense, inevitable, and, on the whole, beneficent: it is 
 through it that are generated ' psychological climates/ 
 i. e. general and irresistible habits of belief of which reason 
 is but the dupe or the captive. Even ' rationalism ' itself 
 rules those whom it rules, not by its reasonableness, but as 
 a mood and a fashion of the set, the age, or the place. 
 Political ( loyalty ' is one of the most valuable products of 
 authority. The believer, it is true, will often attempt by 
 reason to justify his faith ; and in the causes which, as 
 a matter of fact, have generated it, he will profess to discover 
 reasons which legitimate it. But in so doing, he is the victim 
 of an illusion which he would be the first to condemn in others. 
 ' It is from Authority that Reason itself draws its most im- 
 portant premises/ 'It is Authority rather than Reason to
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S < FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 77 
 
 which in the main we owe not religion only, but ethics and 
 polities'; and not these only, but the essential elements of 
 the premises of science, and the foundations and the super- 
 structure of social life. And, on the other side, we are 
 reminded, that ' reasoning is a force most apt to divide and 
 disintegrate/ 
 
 The fourth part offers ' Suggestions towards a Provisional 
 Philosophy/ i. e. towards the ' unification of all belief into an 
 ordered whole, compacted into one coherent structure under 
 the stress of reason/ Of these various and heterogeneous 
 beliefs, certain, viz. those about the world of phenomena, the 
 so-called material world, possess a peculiar prominence ; for 
 they seem inevitable and universal to a degree to which no 
 others can lay claim. But from the view of reflective reason 
 this pre-eminence is ' irrelevant/ The omnipresence of the 
 material world in our habitual moods is the product of an 
 irrational coercion ; it is forced upon us by the elementary 
 necessities of life, bred from infancy into our very flesh and 
 bone. The universality and necessity of oiir beliefs in the 
 reality of the material world cannot, therefore, confer on these 
 beliefs superiority of rank or dignity. The needs which a 
 scheme of belief must reasonably satisfy are not merely those 
 which we ' share with our brute progenitors/ It is on this 
 gradation of beliefs that the whole question hinges. The 
 postulate underlying all beliefs about ( phenomena/ as well 
 as about things other than what are ordinarily called phe- 
 nomena, is a ' harmony between our inner selves and the 
 universe of which we form a part ' ; a correspondence not 
 partial, but complete, between our essential selves and the 
 eternal reality of things. It is the assumption that the 
 human consciousness in its fundamental character, its essential 
 requirements, strikes a note which is answered in complex 
 harmony by the deepest heart in the ordered frame of the 
 universe. 
 
 At this point Mr. Balfour interpolates some remarks on the
 
 78 G1FFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 relation between beliefs and formulas especially in theology. 
 There, as he puts it, ' the explanation and the thing explained 
 are mutually dependent/ The abandonment of a theory 
 which formulates a religious experience often carries with it, 
 to popular apprehension, the negation of the fact on which 
 it is based. It is as if gravitation would cease to act, should 
 the gravitation theory be shaken. But there is another point 
 which gives a special character to the theological formula. 
 That formula is not merely a statement of theoretical agree- 
 ment : it is the index and the support of the unity of an 
 associated organization. Hence an alteration in the creed 
 tends to draw with it a revolution in the corporate life. 
 And even while the formula remains to outward appearance 
 the same, its inner meaning is almost certainly undergoing 
 a continuous and hardly perceptible change. The words of it 
 no longer are answered in those who repeat it by the 
 thoughts which they once awakened. And in any case the 
 thoughts themselves are, at the best, but inadequate repre- 
 sentations and expressions of the one all-embracing reality, 
 be that reality in the last resort what it may. ' What kind 
 of a universe/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would that be which we 
 could understand ?' It may be exaggeration to say that the 
 very absurdity and impossibility of a dogma are the best 
 witness to its truth ; but at any rate an excess of simplicity 
 in a theory is always a good ground for preliminary 
 suspicion. 
 
 These distinctions the distinction between the two functions 
 of formulas as expositions of doctrine and as a basis for common 
 action, and again the distinction between the formal precision 
 of formulas as modes of expression, and the material reality 
 of the belief they shadow forth may serve to moderate our 
 demands upon formulas and our criticism on their imperfec- 
 tions. They suggest how difficult it is to determine that 
 element in doctrine or dogma or belief which may be truly 
 styled immutable, which amid all variations of formula and
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 79 
 
 explanation may be regarded as the ark of truth, the veritas 
 vere catholica enshrined and hidden in formulas. What these 
 'immutable doctrines' are, Mr. Balfour does not take upon 
 himself to say. But that there are such propositions, charged 
 no doubt in course of time and progress of knowledge with 
 richer and richer content, 'propositions about the real world 
 capable of ministering unchanged for indefinite periods to the 
 uses of Mankind/ inalienable Krr;/xara es act, is what he is 
 concerned to asseverate. 
 
 The fourth chapter of this part is of the nature of an 
 arffvmentttm ad kominem. It is addressed to those who, while 
 ready enough to admit or insist upon the radical inadequacy 
 of all theological formulae, are under the fixed impression 
 that scientific statements bring us face to face with supreme 
 reality and touch the very foundation of things. By a few 
 pertinent questions, e. g. as to what is a ' thing/ and by some 
 deeper probing of Mr. Spencer's admissions as to 'ultimate 
 scientific ideas/ Mr. Balfour urges the inference that, if we 
 cannot clearly make out even what is a 'thing/ it is not 
 wonderful that we should come short in our knowledge of 
 God ; and that, if the basis of physical uniformity is admitted 
 to be a puzzle, some obscurity is not a wholly intolerable 
 offence in theories about the basis of moral law. 
 
 Science cannot solve all riddles. It cannot, as represented 
 by its theoretical exponents, even justify its own premises. 
 But it has its place. It is not, indeed, as Naturalism sup- 
 poses, the possessor and standard of all truth and reality, but 
 it is a province and an important one, co-operating with 
 others in the revelation of the one reality. These provinces, 
 physical science, ethics, aesthetics and theology, are (each in 
 its measure and kind) ' the expression of a reality beyond our 
 reach, the half-seen vision of transcendent truth'; and the 
 problem of philosophy is (with all its powers, be they what 
 they may) 'to harmonize the detached hints and isolated 
 fragments in which alone Reality comes into relation to us/
 
 8o GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 We have, however, not done with ' Naturalism/ It has to 
 sustain another and a closer assault. The early chapters 
 showed how utterly insufficient was its explanation of morality 
 and beauty to justify the place these hitherto have held in 
 the scheme of life. But, at the present stage, the point is, 
 that ' Naturalism ' is inconsistent with the very implication 
 or presupposition of knowledge itself. If Naturalism is to be 
 our ultimate creed, science or knowledge is a mere accident in 
 the course of evolution, a chance product in the development 
 of matter, with no claim, or at least no right, to be judged as 
 true or false. No doubt, if the ordinary assumptions of 
 Evolutionism are correct, ' knowledge/ since it actually exists, 
 (only how can it be entitled to the implications of the term 
 knowledge?) must have been advantageous to its possessors, 
 a useful weapon in the war of world-evolution. But the rank 
 of a critic of life or a theorist of ultimate truth it must sur- 
 render : for these, by its naturalistic genesis, it possesses no 
 competence. 
 
 Only on one hypothesis can we emerge from these abysses. 
 And that hypothesis is that, above and embracing us and the 
 world, there is Being, Reality, through whom if is intelligible 
 and we are intelligent. And if it be said that we cannot form 
 any conception of how this one reality, this transcendently 
 true, stands to us and the world how it, so to say, interferes 
 in things the retort is easy. No more can we tell how soul 
 acts on matter or matter on soul. Every self is in its turn 
 a creator in the world, endowed with a creative faculty which, 
 from the purely naturalistic point of view, is inexplicable. 
 Nor merely from the naturalistic point of view. Mr. Balfour 
 equally on his own part acquiesces in f the existence of an 
 unsolved difficulty/ The problem how man can be an agent, 
 in tautological phrase, a free agent, is a real difficulty in 
 psychology : but it is certainly not less intractable there than 
 it is in theology. 
 
 Science then cannot maintain its claim to be true, to be
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S ' FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 81 
 
 knowledge of reality, without postulating the idea of some- 
 thing not less real, which is the harmony of mind and the 
 world ; or, if we may borrow the language of another 
 philosophy, the identity (or unity) of subject and object. 
 It does not of course follow that this quasi-scientific Deity 
 is the God of religion. Yet compatible or connected the 
 idea in both departments must be, if the problem of philo- 
 sophy is to be solved, if science and religion are to be co- 
 ordinated. 
 
 The incompatibility between the two departments is sup- 
 posed to show itself most acutely in regard to the question 
 of Miracles. These are understood to be at variance with 
 the scientific principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Here 
 Mr. Balfour, retracing the ground of his former book, urges 
 that the uniformity of Nature is a fine-sounding but some- 
 what nebulous phrase, and that laws are not more than 
 abstractions formed for scientific purposes. He urges, what 
 is more obvious, that the modern definition of a miracle, if 
 definition that may be called which practically negatives the 
 existence of the definiendum, is entirely foreign to the epoch 
 of organic religious life, and implies a division between the 
 natural and something else, perhaps spiritual, which is no 
 less strange to the religious consciousness. Nor is it possible 
 to lay down canons generally acceptable as to what con- 
 stitutes a wonder : for these can only be based on a prior 
 determination of the whole meaning and scope of things, and 
 that ex liypothesi is not in existence. 
 
 If again a miracle be said to imply the ( special action of 
 God/ a special providence, or, in general, a ' preferential 
 exercise of divine power,' it may be noted that such ' pre- 
 ferential action ' seems an almost invariable presupposition 
 of religion, and not a mode confined to special times or places. 
 If so, at what point can we draw the limit to the range of its 
 operation ? And, on the other side, with what right dare we 
 represent the universal God as entering into more intimate 
 
 G
 
 82 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 relation with one part of creation than another ? We seem 
 shut up in an antinomy between God as alike near to all, and 
 as specially close to each. Nor is this a matter for religion 
 alone. Ethics also seems to lose grip, if God is regarded as 
 indifferent, or, still worse, as malevolent. An immoral or 
 an indifferent God must in the long run render ethics 
 impossible. 
 
 It would seem then that, if we assume that God is, ethics 
 and religion require us to believe or postulate that he enters 
 into special relations with individuals and nations ; and 
 evolution, as sometimes interpreted, suggests that the frame 
 of things is an ' economy/ a work carrying out step by step 
 a purpose, a striving towards something yet to be. 
 
 In short, whereas, according to a naturalistic creed, scientific, 
 ethical, and aesthetic beliefs are simply the products of 
 phenomenal causes or sources, non-rational, non-ethical, non- 
 aesthetic ; the truth rather is that we can only restore the 
 balance between cause and effect, can only get a real reason 
 for the alleged result, by postulating behind these non-rational 
 and non-moral forces a rational and moral God. Nor is the 
 beautiful in a position different from that of truth and morals. 
 Beauty may be no ' objective ' fact, as the phrase has it : still, 
 here too, we may and must believe that ' in the thrill of some 
 deep emotion we have for an instant caught a far-off reflection 
 of divine beauty/ Religion too ceases, on the same postulate, 
 to be a mere psychological phenomenon of the naturalistically 
 conceived individual. ' Mankind have almost always claimed 
 for their beliefs about God that they were due to God ' : or, 
 the cause of religion must be something adequate to the given 
 effect. And, if that be so, the distinction between the sphere 
 of the natural and the sphere of the supernatural must be 
 broken down. The effort, by which the human soul rises and 
 grows in wisdom, goodness, and truth, is unintelligible without 
 a counter-process, the process by which God continually 
 communicates himself to man. ' Unassisted reason is a fiction/
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 83 
 
 All progress is the product of two factors, a divine influence 
 and a human effort. In other words, ' Inspiration ' (if the 
 divine co-operation with humanity is to be so called) ' is 
 limited to no age, to no country, to no people/ ' Let us not/ 
 says Mr. Balfour, ' give colour to the opinion that God's 
 assistance to mankind has been narrowed down to the sources, 
 however unique, from which we immediately and consciously 
 draw our own spiritual nourishment/ 
 
 Can we then judge between the conflicting for conflicting 
 in many, though not all or perhaps even most, ways they are 
 can we judge between the conflicting claims of various 
 religions to authority over the lives and consciences of men ? 
 Or, putting the practical and immediate question which comes 
 first to the occidental, by what criteria shall we determine the 
 claim of Christianity to take precedence of a general Theism, 
 which speaks of God only as the one supreme Reality or 
 Transcendent Truth? The criterion, says Mr. Balfour, is 
 found in the degree in which a religion ' ministers to our 
 ethical needs.' What are these ethical needs ? ' They are the 
 aspirations and ideals which inspire conduct; they include, 
 above all, harmony between the interests of the individual 
 and those of the community/ And that harmony, urges 
 Mr. Balfour, can be perfectly secured only by the complete 
 correspondence between virtue and felicity in a future life. 
 Above all, the fundamental ethical need is to keep entire the 
 dignity of human nature, of man's essential self, as against 
 the mere immensity of the material universe. In these latter 
 times ' we search out God with eyes grown old in studying 
 Nature, with minds fatigued by centuries of metaphysics, and 
 imaginations glutted with material infinities/ Whether this 
 be so, whether the causes of the practical atheism of the world 
 are not to be rather sought in its petty cares and the deceit- 
 fulness of riches, we need not discuss. At any rate, even if 
 speculation by itself may discover that moral excellence is for 
 ever incommensurable with material bigness (Mr. Balfour says 
 
 G a
 
 84 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 ' grandeur/ but the word is out of place ; ' grandeur ' is always 
 moral), ordinary mankind can only get an ' imaginative grasp' 
 of this truth by a history and a doctrine such as that of the 
 ' Incarnation.' Physical science, again, as she more and more 
 reveals the immensity of the physical universe, makes us 
 realize more and more the dependence of mind on physical 
 organization and environment. And if speculative philosophy 
 here too shows the account given by materialism to be at 
 bottom inconsistent and meaningless, it needs a visible demon- 
 stration, an intuition of the faith-inspired imagination, such 
 as the same doctrine of Christianity presents, to transform 
 that speculative glimpse for the mass of mankind into a life- 
 controlling and life-exalting dynamic. And, last but perhaps 
 not least, if the problem of suffering calls for all the power 
 of philosophy to explain its function in the great whole, 
 Christianity, in its picture of a suffering God, ( ministers to 
 one of our deepest ethical needs/ 
 
 And, now, passing from the analysis of Mr. Balfour's 
 contribution to philosophy, let us try to ascertain its value. 
 Is it new, and is it true ? And first, let us welcome his 
 discovery of the function of philosophy. That function is to 
 put together ' under the stress of reason/ ' into one coherent 
 structure/ the contributions which art and morality, science 
 and religion, severally bring to the expression of the One 
 Reality. It is to systematize and harmonize the various 
 provinces and different aspects under which the Being of 
 Being is known, felt, perceived, and surmised by us. In the 
 long run, a double, divided truth, a truth in theology which 
 is indifferent to a truth in science, is intolerable to humanity. 
 The monistic, if that means the unificatory, instinct is irresis- 
 tible. To some, no doubt, the transcendent truth, the supreme 
 reality, the infinite Personality, may have a more pleasing 
 sound than has that pedantic term, the Absolute. If so, let 
 them remember that the obnoxious term means neither more 
 nor less than the others, so long as the others are kept at the
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S < FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 3 85 
 
 height of their meaning, and not used as a vehicle under 
 which casual associations may be insinuated. 
 
 Philosophy offers the great Eirenikon : a method of peace 
 and reconciliation. If it is to be monistic, its monism must 
 be one which leaves abundant iioom for difference, for dualism, 
 for further even than dual opposition. Unity requires at 
 least two, probably more, members of truth. It cannot 
 sacrifice religion to science, or science to religion : nor, in its 
 completeness, can it neglect even the rights of art. It is 
 true that many will probably join Mr. Balfour in his view 
 that it is forced and arbitrary to treat the ' artistic fancies of 
 an insignificant fraction of the human race during a very brief 
 period of its history' as important elements in building up 
 humanity and the spiritual world. They may, like him, 
 think ' most schemes of metaphysical aesthetics very absurd,' 
 and hold that there is ' no natural punishment attached to 
 bad taste/ Yet something may be said on the other hand 
 for those who hold that the beliefs of the cultivated races as 
 regards the place of art in life are only the more developed 
 manifestations of a faith, efficient and living, as early as any 
 traces of human life can be found : that the aesthetic theories 
 of metaphysicians are after all only the systematized efforts 
 to trace out and analyse that charm, which lights up the dull 
 levels of life, and of which most of us, if human, have at 
 times felt the power; and that bad taste carries with it 
 inevitably a lowering of tone, a confusion of judgement, 
 a perversion of aim, than which there can be no punishment 
 more exemplary. But, whatever may be our estimate of the 
 function of art in life and art, remember, is all that gives 
 life its grace, its dignity, its form, and not a thing to be 
 locked up and sometimes looked at in museums and galleries 
 it is at any rate true that, to the English public, the con- 
 trasting views of life are those derived from religion, which 
 in some dim way includes moral doctrine, and from physical 
 science. That there are other sciences which deal with the
 
 86 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 inner life, i. e. the completer reality ; that political effort and 
 ideal is the obverse and test of morality; and that national 
 righteousness is that without which individual righteousness 
 is a puny and diseased thing these are points which a few 
 realize, and which many painfully surmise. For the most, 
 however, the antithesis is set, simply and solely, between 
 religion (or theology) and science. And because it is so set, 
 without due regard to the environment or context, it is set 
 falsely and foolishly. There have indeed been times when 
 the conduct of the so-called theologian, in adjusting religion 
 to scientific advances, has reminded one of Miss Matilda 
 Jenkyns and her friend in protecting the colour of the new 
 drawing-room carpet. The sun in its course blazed through 
 and down on a strip of the Brussels, and the ladies spread 
 newspapers to shelter it from the withering ray. But as the 
 sun gradually moved on and on, the newspapers had to be 
 again and again taken up and placed on a fresh patch of 
 light. It is certainly not so that Mr. Balfour understands 
 the reconciliation. Each has its place. Science, such is his 
 plea, ' can only do what it claims to do,' i. e. ' reveal reality in 
 its special way, if it presupposes a theory of existence, very 
 like that which in its ultimate premises constitutes the base 
 of theology. But reconciliation thus acquired, through 
 identity in fundamental principle, is far from interfering with 
 a wholesome growth of either separately. As someone has 
 said of its relations to theology, ' non adjutrix nisi libera, 
 non libera nisi adjutrix philosophia/ ' In its labour/ says 
 M. Sabatier, ' the human race builds an eternal cathedral 
 of which the two main columns (colonnes mattresses) are 
 science and the holy life (la vie sainte). They spring slowly 
 from the soil, and rise parallel in the air. Amongst the 
 workmen who labour at this divine work, some are dis- 
 couraged and fear the two columns may never meet and form 
 the vaulted arch they dream of. Others, impatient, inflect 
 the severe rectitude of the lines of the construction, but the
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S l FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 87 
 
 false and apocryphal work they thus make, is self -ruined and 
 self -demolished, because it violates the rigour of the mysterious 
 plan of the invisible architect. The religious worker is 
 humble : he guards himself against the impatience which 
 makes us faithless, and the discouragement which makes us 
 cowardly. He lives by faith, not by sight : he raises the two 
 pillars of his inner life in obedience to the prescribed rules, 
 knowing that his duty is not to make them arbitrarily con- 
 verge and join before the time, but to build them stone 
 by stone, higher, straighter, more solid. Science is only 
 positively served by those who with all strictness apply 
 the laws of scientific research. Similarly, we advance in 
 the moral life by an undeviating obedience to the ideal law 
 of conscience 1 .' 
 
 Mr. Balfour therefore has risen to that idea of philosophy 
 to which Schelling and Hegel, following out the sugges- 
 tions of Kant, have given its characteristic modern form, 
 but which has really been the underlying aim of all the 
 higher modern, as it was in a great measure, of ancient 
 speculation. We can hardly indeed apply to Mr. Balfour 
 what the aged German poet, Fr. Riickert, has dared to 
 forebode (1864) 
 
 'Was Kant hat angebahnet, 
 Was Schelling vorgeahnet, 
 Was Hegel ausgeschliffen 
 Zu glanzenden Begriffen, 
 Bis es ward ausgepfift'en, 
 Es wird aus der Veraltung 
 Gewinnen Neugestaltung 
 In hOherer Entfaltung.' 
 
 That prophecy still awaits its fulfilment, when it shall come : 
 yet before it comes, it is necessary that the doctrine shall 
 sink as a simple rudimentary form into the common stock of 
 culture. As such, its appearance in a work like Mr. Balfour's 
 is a welcome symptom, that the general standpoint of 
 
 1 A. Sabatier : Esquisse d'une philosophic de la religion.
 
 88 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 philosophy is finding its way to the heart of the nation, 
 despite the uncouth tongue in which its oracles are written. 
 But, before this very general idea can be the principle or the 
 foundation of beliefs, it must explicate itself into something 
 less indefinite and scanty. It is not enough to say that four, 
 or it may be more, provinces must combine, that their several 
 glimpses of reality must be reconciled. A good deal remains 
 to be done before the terms of union are to be defined. Are 
 the provinces or faculties co-ordinate? Are they mutually 
 corrective and complementary ? What are their several 
 tasks ? To answer these questions is to indicate the founda- 
 tion of belief: and in common phraseology it is to write 
 a philosophy. A provisional philosophy will not answer the 
 purpose. Provisional, of course, every philosophy is, in 
 a sense : each exists only until there come a better to super- 
 sede it. But it must not build, on that account, a mere 
 shell, perfunctorily : it must do its work with all its heart, 
 and soul, and strength, as if it built its house for eternity. 
 
 Of all this positive work, to which contributions have been 
 made by many, here and elsewhere, after Kant had mainly 
 concerned himself with the critical and negative task, 
 Mr. Balfour does next to none. He simply does for the 
 English public what Kant had already done, but, according 
 to him, had not by his interpreters and commentators suc- 
 ceeded in teaching to the average insular mind. Whether 
 there are not more who have ceased to bow the knee to the 
 Baalim of Naturalism than Mr. Balfour suspects, is a question 
 we need not discuss. Yet to have impressed upon the public 
 that philosophy is the way to a complete theology not, we 
 need hardly say, to religion is a service which the religious 
 bigot, if such there be, may rate less than lightly, but which 
 most other people can only welcome. Our thanks would 
 have been less mixed, if Mr. Balfour had not, to generalize his 
 own confession, 'found it easier to satisfy himself of the 
 insufficiency . . . than of the absolute sufficiency, or any of
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF' 89 
 
 the schemes by which it has been sought to complete or 
 modify Naturalism/ That is the weakness of a man who 
 possesses considerable faculty of dialectic and enjoys the zest 
 of debate, and whose instinct is to look for weak points, 
 pulling a complex theory to pieces by piece-meal attack. It 
 is no doubt the accredited method of parliamentary warfare, 
 but even there its results are hardly so pleasing or useful as 
 to lead us to desire its extension to the more serious problem 
 of philosophy. 
 
 When Mr. Balfour again urges that ethics, aesthetic and 
 science, are only retainable in their truth, beauty and 
 righteousness, on the hypothesis that behind the phenomenal 
 process of sensation and movement there is an encompassing 
 ' reality/ if that is to be the word for the presence and power 
 of the Idea, we can only say that we are glad to see that the 
 fundamental dogma of Platonism still serves to the rest-and- 
 shelter-seeking soul as the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
 land. Plato too had to fight with the champions of what 
 Mr. Balfour has called ( Naturalism.' To them the whole 
 fabric of moral, aesthetic, and spiritual ideas was a matter 
 of physical history : thought was a fact of brain-movement, 
 and beauty a growth of associations, generated out of what 
 was utterly without aesthetic quality. The naturalistic 
 theory of life was as complete, if not as detailed, in Athens in 
 400 B. c. as it is to-day. And against that theory Plato lays 
 down his axiom that ' it is by the beautiful that things 
 beautiful become beautiful/ and that knowledge would not 
 have been at all, had not things and perceiver been at one in 
 the ' transcendent truth/ eTre/ceiya TOV OVTOS, which is, in our 
 modern phrase, at once real and ideal, and so above either 
 alone. In other words, you cannot completely explain the 
 higher form by the lower elements ; a true synthetic unity 
 is not a mere product or sum of its elements : it is unique ; 
 and they are, at best, its condition, or in an older phraseology, 
 its material, but not its final or formal, cause. To use words
 
 90 GIFFORD LECTURES [vi 
 
 like sum or product', is simply to ignore a principle of organiza- 
 tion, a law of crystallization, which rules and manipulates its 
 constituents. You trace, scientifically, the gradual evolution 
 of form from form : but, behind the facts and results, is the 
 agent and the life, the idea in its efficiency, the substance 
 of Spinoza, the Absolute of Mr. Bradley, the Reality of 
 Mr. Balfour, infinite, ever-new, ever-creative ; never a mere 
 putter together of the old, but with the old materials, by 
 a cosmic and divine phantasy, creating the new. Its 
 syntheses are more than syntheses : they are at each stage 
 a new birth : a fresh revelation of the infinite spirit of life, 
 the life of life, the cause of causes. Yes, here too, we miss 
 a deeper view. The religious mind, as well as the scientific 
 and the aesthetic and the moral mind, each are jealous of 
 their own : the reality behind science stands awful and grim 
 in presence of the ideal of art, the God of religion : and this 
 introduction to theology does little to bring them together. 
 When Mr. Balfour points out that, behind all the variety 
 of formula, and all the imperfection of dogma, there are 
 ' immutable doctrines,' nourished on which men have lived 
 and died in hope, faith, and love, the philosophy which I have 
 learned from is agreed. But it would hardly be satisfied 
 with the mere confession of an unknown God. That is 
 a hopeless search for God and reality, which is seeking him 
 in an ever receding reality behind and beyond phenomena. 
 Phenomena too are of God, nay, in their place and function, 
 they are the visible and sensible body of God. Sensible 
 matter too is part of the immutable doctrines. It is not, as 
 Mr. Balfour seemed to say, a mere ( irrelevancy that the 
 material body, the material world, stands with a pre-eminent 
 reality/ Far from it. The whole spiritual, the aesthetic, 
 moral, religious life, needs the body ; and with a bodiless, 
 a disembodied spirit, it ceases to have meaning, reality, and 
 power. You have heard what Mr. Balfour has to say of the 
 power of Christian dogma of Incarnation to fulfil our moral
 
 vi] MR. BALFOUR'S 'FOUNDATIONS OF BELIEF 1 91 
 
 needs. To my mind the central value of the doctrine of the 
 Incarnation is to teach that all men, as they live and are, 
 are sons of God ; sons, some of them prodigal, and some 
 conceitedly goody : but all, if they would but know it, and 
 knowing, realize it, sons of God ; with the Godhead in spirit 
 within them, suffering, enjoying with them, their bodies 
 temples of the holy one who inhabiteth Eternity. The eternal 
 reality is in it all : God is in it all : not, as Mr. Balfour 
 seems to think, alone by himself, enjoying an unchanging 
 beauty of which we can only catch glimpses, but with us and 
 in us, suffering in us and with us, the captain of our salva- 
 tion, the firstfruits of many brothers. We, if I, a mere 
 disciple, may speak for the great masters of those who know, 
 take the Incarnation as no mere temporary fact, but as the 
 eternal truth of human life and history. We can rise to the 
 poet's words : ' Lady, I fain would tell how evermore thy soul 
 I know not from thy body, nor thee from myself, neither our 
 love from God.' 
 
 Not less is Philosophy in general agreed, that the true test 
 of the truth of a religion is its capacity to satisfy our ethical 
 or moral needs. It would, perhaps, hardly be content with 
 a mere phrase, which is left open for interpretation by each 
 private sentiment. Still less, perhaps, would it, like Mr. Kidd 
 and Mr. Balfour, regard the consilience of individual and 
 social interest as the only nameable moral need, or treat 
 a future life, a vague word, as clenching the need. It would 
 probably take a different view about the place of punishment, 
 and it would certainly note that moral conceptions of the 
 future life were the fruit of moral life. But it would in 
 the main agree to accept Mr. Balfour's thesis. Only I think 
 it would put it in a less restricted phrase. It would hold 
 that we are primarily and essential beings who have to act, 
 to be agents. We are, as it were, endowed with a problem, 
 enriched with a task the task to live. It is only by slow 
 degrees that we gather all that it means, that we see what
 
 92 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 we really and truly will. All experience, all science, all 
 association, all suffering and joy, show it more and more fully. 
 But always it stands behind and before, above and within, 
 a light to our feet. Plato called it the idea of good; the 
 Gospel of St. John calls it ' the light which lighteth every 
 man that cometh into the world/
 
 VII 
 
 NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM. THE SCIENTIFIC 
 AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL POINT OF VIEW. 
 THE MAIN CONDITION OF THE EVOLUTION OF 
 REASON 
 
 Ax interesting range of questions is opened out by what 
 is said in Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief as to the nature 
 and function of theological formulas, as to the respective 
 place of Reason and Authority in forming beliefs, and 
 indeed as to the general scope of the two cognate habits of 
 mind or attitudes of thought which have been styled 
 Naturalism and Rationalism. 
 
 Perhaps there are few things more noteworthy, and yet 
 few things more neglected, in the study of the history of 
 human thought, than the tendency to accentuate the points 
 of partial difference and to ignore, as if taken for granted, 
 the deep and broad bases of fundamental agreement. Each 
 great philosopher an Aristotle, say, succeeding a Plato 
 builds in his turn upon the uncontested and accepted body 
 of doctrine and belief which is common to him with his 
 predecessors. For that very reason he says little about it. 
 What he lays stress upon and, to the careless reader, seems 
 alone to think essential, are certain favourite ideas of his own, 
 certain peculiarities of definition and detail, which are his 
 peculiar work, and which pass into history as the essentials 
 of Aristotelianism. So things seem from the outside. To
 
 94 GIFFORD LECTURES [viz 
 
 a profounder study Aristotle is himself a Platonist, sharing 
 the deepest convictions of Plato, but, like a true and perfect 
 man who is never a mere imitator, carrying the germ out 
 into the fulness and integrity of an individual system, without 
 which discipleship is a sham and a snare. It is not so merely 
 in philosophy. It is a general law that what counts at first 
 sight is difference. When we measure our income and our 
 resources, it is not wholly what we are and have that gives 
 the habitual tone to our mind. What we see as ourselves in 
 our mental vision, what we think others will estimate us at, 
 is the differential amount between our estate, our endowments, 
 and theirs. The nearer the fundamental equation of what 
 we are and have with what others are and have, the more 
 keenly do we set store by our petty prerogative, in that 
 imagination of compared dignity which haunts us like a 
 demon. It is not always his poverty that makes the poor 
 man's hardship : it is as often the sense that he is poorer than 
 others : poorer, above all, than others he would otherwise have 
 matched. 
 
 We may apply these principles to the judgements which 
 we have heard passed on Naturalism and Rationalism. An 
 '-ism' is by its inmost being always in opposition. It marks 
 a protest against a feature which is believed to be erroneous 
 and injurious. As it thus emerges, it is no complete theory 
 of the subject with which it is chiefly concerned. On the 
 contrary it subsists only because it has tacitly taken over into 
 itself, and accepted without question, the great bulk of the 
 general creed or system against which it raised a partial 
 objection. Utilitarianism e. g. protesting against what it 
 considered an irrational, ascetic, or sentimental vice in the 
 dominant formulation of ethical doctrine, still, in the first 
 instance, accepted the general lines of moral order and pro- 
 gress. Socialism, again, as it first appeared, was no com- 
 prehensive theory of the ideals and methods of collective life, 
 but chiefly a criticism of the chief evils of a disintegrating
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 95 
 
 individualism and a suggestion of remedies. But it is easy to 
 see that things cannot so remain. 
 
 In the first place, a struggle inevitably arises between the 
 old and the new. From some points of view the new is 
 obviously at disadvantage. It is the theory of a partial 
 point of view, and as it steps beyond its original limits, it 
 is almost sure to fall into inconsistencies, and make mistakes 
 in extending its principles. On the other hand, it is generally 
 backed by an enthusiasm and eagerness, which is only inten- 
 sified by anything that suggests the superiority of strength 
 that lies at the command of its opponent, the established 
 authority. It is inclined to credit itself with all or most 
 of the truth, and leave only force to its opponent. The older 
 and larger body of doctrine, again, is apt to attach too much 
 importance to formal and logical inconsistencies, and to forget 
 that there may be much in the new formularies which those 
 who hold them read, so to speak, between the lines, but do 
 not think it needful to express. But in the struggle it is 
 almost certain that each party will exaggerate its differences. 
 Forgetting altogether the many points where it might well 
 admit ( he that is not against us is on our- side/ each con- 
 centrates its view on those apparently cardinal issues, in 
 which it can raise its battle-cry, ' he that is not with us is 
 against us.' 
 
 Now the Rationalism, which we heard described as an 
 embryo Naturalism, is under that historic title mainly a 
 product of the eighteenth century. In its origin it was the 
 continuation of that protest against the men and works of 
 darkness, which Ulrich von Hutten waged by the side of 
 Luther, the war against superstition, idolatry, obscurantism. 
 But as a great authority reminds us, it is hard to pluck up 
 the tares without destroying some good wheat. You cannot, 
 i. e. the race of man cannot, draw a hard and fast line where 
 the true worship of God gives place to superstitious idol- 
 worship. It is not merely that good and evil grow so closely
 
 96 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 side by side : that were a minor difficulty : but in most of 
 human life it is hard to say where good does not grow out of 
 evil, and evil out of good. It is only the sword of God, 
 which pierces to the dividing asunder the bone and the 
 marrow, that can discern the secrets of life. A too ardent 
 assault upon superstition may itself become a superstition, 
 and a baleful one, for its champions. 
 
 But for that fault it was not the Rationalist who was 
 mainly or solely responsible. The least concession was 
 refused to his claim for more light. He was commanded 
 to bow reverently to the ever-revealing Church, or to the 
 revealed Scripture. In the presence of these oracles reason 
 must be dumb. There is a vulgar proverb to the effect that, 
 if you ask for a silk gown, you may get a sleeve. As the 
 Rationalist was given little, he natui-ally came to demand 
 more. When it came to the time of Voltaire, the cry Ecratez 
 I'Infame, which originally only meant a demand to clear the 
 temple of thieves and money changers, came to be the ominous 
 threat of a clean sweep of all that Christianity held and holds 
 most precious. Nor that alone. There were heard mutter- 
 ings : Ni Dieu ni maUre : down with all absolute irrational 
 authority, be it in realms secular or in realms sacred. And 
 all this, just because the cry for light was gagged, because 
 the stream of reason was stopped by a great dam piled ever 
 higher, until the stream, gathering into itself the myriad 
 impulses of human nature, high and low, became a wild flood 
 that for a while swept all institutions into ruin. 
 
 So it is with Naturalism. It in its origin was the protest, 
 not against the supernatural in itself, but against a super- 
 natural conceived as arbitrary, incoherent and chaotic : it was 
 the protest against the idle profanity which thinks it has 
 explained an event, when it has said, with pious gesture, that 
 it is the work of God, as if aught were not the work of 
 God. Naturalism is not the antithesis of theology, as 
 Mr. Balfour has assumed, though a vindictive theology has
 
 VH] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 97 
 
 often pushed it into such an attitude : nor is it the assumption 
 that the beggarly elements of sense-perception are enough to 
 frame for us the picture of the world, though a foolish 
 Spiritualism has often driven it into the arms of Materialism. 
 Naturalism and Rationalism must not be judged solely by 
 what they are at the worst, in the hands of sciolists and 
 polemics ; they must be judged altogether, in their worst 
 and their best, in the principles which at first gave them 
 direction not less than in the course which through the 
 intermixture of effects they have occasionally taken. It is 
 an easy-going Rationalism, unworthy of the name, which 
 thinks its only function is to knock off corners, and smooth 
 inequalities. f What/ cries Mr. Balfour, ' would be a world 
 which we should understand : ' or, as I suppose, which we had 
 thoroughly understood ? A world, clearly, without interest ; 
 the den of listlessness and dumb despair : or rather the ice- 
 age of humanity, when to be and not to be would for once be 
 absolutely alike. But, on the other hand, what were a world 
 which we did not understand, had not in any measure under- 
 stood ? A world full of fears rather than hopes : a perpetual 
 uncertainty, a grisly mystery, which made darkness cover the 
 earth, and gross darkness its peoples. The world which 
 reason claims is one where she may go for ever on and never 
 die : a world where nothing can be called utterly unknowable, 
 though much may remain for ever unknown : a world where, 
 as humanity accumulates more and more its intellectual and 
 spiritual capital, we shall move about more and more freely, 
 i. e. more and more wisely, as becomes those who are called to 
 inherit the kingdom. The world which the genuine Naturalist 
 desires is not different. It is a world of law : but in the ideal 
 sense law in Nature is even as law in the social sphere. To 
 the beginner in sociological study, laws are an aggregate of 
 commands of a general character, set by somebody who can 
 command to others, who will by some means and to some 
 extent be constrained to obey. To the idealist you will find 
 
 H
 
 98 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 him in antiquity amongst the great Stoics of the middle 
 period (as may be read in Cicero) to the idealist, law is one 
 system, one economy carried out in different grades, all 
 mutually interdependent, whereby the right working of each 
 member of the community may be attained, whereby each 
 may not only do his duty as past ordinances have appointed, 
 but may find an outlook and a stimulus to conceive and 
 execute ever fresh, ever higher codes of duty. 
 
 So it is also with the world of scientific law. The older 
 scientists looked upon laws as so many ascertained uniformities 
 of sequences, regularities in the succession of cause and effect, 
 which, as they grew more numerous, admitted of codification, 
 and some degree of system. The net result of them was 
 a hint to man in his practical endeavours, that certain things 
 can be done, certain others cannot be done. The reign of law 
 was thus a disguised reign of force : it seemed to consist of 
 a network of checks spread over the whole structure of the 
 universe, as so many barriers within which God, it might 
 perhaps be said, had tied his own hands, as well as limited the 
 possibilities of man. On the other hand, the idealist view 
 which has always lurked at the heart of religious faith, though 
 often strangely marred by foreign concretions looked at the 
 future rather than the past, at what was to be, rather than 
 what was. Put religiously, it subordinated the creational 
 (taking that term in its narrower sense) idea of God to the 
 providential. It looked at Nature as, not merely what was 
 and is, but also as what will be. It regarded the universe 
 (as Goethe has pictured it in that series of aphorisms which 
 he drew up under the stimulus of Frau von Stein's charm) 
 as at once Natura naturans and Natura Naturata, as an 
 organic community, an ideal, or as St. Paul might call it, 
 a spiritual body, working by myriad ways to an end which 
 only gradually reveals itself, and using methods or modes of 
 operation, which in parts we can discern, and when discerned 
 we call laws. The reign of law has here become, if not the
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 99 
 
 reign of grace, at least the kingdom of the spirit. All its 
 special laws are but fragments, from time to time abstracted 
 and isolated, which enter into the one unity of organization. 
 Nor dare we set limits to the possibilities of that organization. 
 If we exclude the old conception of miracle, we exclude equally 
 the conception of inflexible rules to which God must bow. 
 And if we could rise to the height of beatific vision, which 
 is difficult, not to say impossible, we might, turning round 
 Browning's words, say, ' All 's law, but all's love/ 
 
 This is a long way from Mr. Balfour's Naturalism. But it 
 has an equal right, nay, a far better right, to the name. It 
 is the Naturalism that full-grown science seems more and 
 more brought to adumbrate. Mr. Balfour, ' for reasons with 
 which it is not necessary/ he says, ' to trouble the reader/ has 
 selected the name Naturalism for what might equally have 
 been styled Agnosticism, Positivism, or Empiricism. When 
 reasons are concealed, it is improper perhaps to surmise them. 
 And yet it hardly seems going beyond a legitimate inference 
 to suggest that the name was chosen as a way to deal a more 
 crushing blow. To assault Naturalism and Rationalism is to 
 strike Nature and Reason : it is to support Supernaturalism., 
 and the Materialism of authority. It looks a little like 
 seeking to wound an opponent by an insult to his beloved. 
 
 But, as old Socrates pulls himself up, and admits that when 
 he saw his love Philosophy lightly dealt with, he spoke some- 
 what vehemently ; so here we may admit that after all 
 Mr. Balfour does not mean it : it is only an incident in the 
 polemical debate. 
 
 To the superficial glance, the history of philosophy seems 
 to be a mere succession of opinions, contradicting or con- 
 troverting opinions that have gone before, and to be in turn 
 contradicted by opinions yet to come. On a deeper view this 
 contradiction is a phenomenon like the supersession of the 
 flower by the fruit. For the plant's life under all apparent 
 incoherence is one process, continuous, incessant, in which 
 
 H 2
 
 ioo GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 one plant soul creates for itself a body which is ever chang- 
 ing 1 , yet which in some sense ever remains identical with 
 itself. So, reasoning 1 by analogy, the annals of philosophic 
 failure need not unduly depress us. It is, says Mr. Balfour, 
 the common lot of philosophies to fail. Even so to the 
 rash judgement is every human life and the greater its 
 scope and task, the more decidedly a failure. It comes 
 with promise of peace and good will, and when it is over, 
 it seems to have left a sword that pierces ever deeper 
 and deeper into the heart of humanity. It bourgeons out 
 with the fairest flowers of art and letters ; and yet, as the 
 times roll on, these flowers seem to corrupt, till the air is 
 too heavy and poisonous for men to breathe it and live. It 
 founds a great and glorious empire in which social energies 
 should find all room for their ameliorating play, conquering 
 and to conquer; and the political grandeur is there only as it 
 were to intensify and accelerate the ravages of the cancerous 
 growths under the sleek and prosperous surface. It spreads the 
 light of science ; and the chief use of the new weapons science 
 prepares is to rend asunder the fabric of social well-being. 
 
 And yet it would be rashness, on the strength of these 
 appearances, to pronounce a verdict on human life, on the 
 efforts of science, art, religion, and law, which would echo 
 the merely pessimistic cry as if failure were all. ' Thou 
 fool/ says the strong-hearted apostle, ' that which thou thy- 
 self sowest is not quickened except it die, and that which 
 thou sowest, thou sowest not the body which shall be, but 
 a bare grain ; and God giveth it a body even as it pleased 
 Him, and to each seed a body of its own/ Take this 
 phenomenon of life by death and death to life, as it shows 
 in our own inner and individual life. The resolution which 
 (we often can hardly tell how) emerges into the light of 
 rational volition, must, before it issues in outward act, plunge, 
 first, into the warring mass of other impulses, which, awhile 
 silent, as if they had yielded up the ground, only its existence
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 101 
 
 stimulated into activity ; and then, as it reappears, altered 
 and complicated from the struggle, it must again plunge 
 into the seething mass of outside efforts, the surge and swell 
 of the adjacent world, to re-issue with the body which the 
 providence of nature and history has been pleased, we co- 
 operating, to give it. To us, the spectators of our own selves 
 and of outward event, this drama, this Divina Commedia of 
 human life, presents itself so. We have hardly formed our 
 resolve, when we regret it : the voices of our other selves, 
 of that manifold pack of half-formed personalities within us, 
 none of which we dare honestly disown, are raised in protest 
 against the usurping monarchy of our overt resolve. The 
 democracy, or shall we call it the ochlocracy, of passion and 
 appetite has to be heard and reckoned with ; and a struggle 
 arises, of which the issue is a modification and enlargement, 
 for better or for worse, of the original purpose. It is the 
 same with the outward act. It never is exactly vckat we 
 meant it, and as we meant it. We are disappointed and 
 discouraged by the event : and often it seems as if, the 
 higher and purer our aim had been, the greater had been 
 the discomfiture in our achievement. What do these things 
 teach us? First, perhaps, that we must not judge what 
 manner of men we are by the thoughts and resolves that 
 come to the surface in our hours of clearest vision : that we are 
 not the simple and straightforward units we fancy ourselves 
 to be, but rather an undulating and varying unity of impulses 
 and powers, growing slowly by effort and discipline into the 
 unity of the perfect man. And secondly, that we, however 
 original, personal, individual, or monadic we may be, are 
 still units circling in, penetrated by, and fulfilled with, a 
 larger social life, a common, it may be, national spirit, which 
 is at once outside us and within us, at once containing us 
 and contained by us, on which we depend, and through which 
 we gain such independence as can ever be ours. 
 
 It is a mistake, therefore, and a fateful one, to isolate the
 
 102 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 phenomena of life from their context. Falsus in uno, says 
 a vulgar &da,ge,falsus in omnibus. One error entails another, 
 one lie involves a second, to try to cover it. So undoubtedly 
 it in part is : and so it would for ever be, if life and humanity 
 were what some people call logical, if pedantic consistency 
 were the rule. But the world is not in that sense of the 
 term logical or reasonable : though in a larger sense, and 
 with a more generous scope, it may still be called logical and 
 reasonable. To be reasonable is ; in the full sense of the 
 term, to be human : it is to cling to and follow after unity, 
 but not always to ensure mere consistency. The function 
 of reason is to seek totality, to be comprehensive. It is more 
 than abstract intelligence ; it is the faculty of ideals, the faculty 
 that dreams of and tries, of course never quite successfully, 
 and let us add, never without some success, to give com- 
 pleteness, system, rounded perfection to our lives. It soars 
 beyond science, because it springs from an impulse larger 
 than that which brings science to birth. It has been said 
 to be the purpose of science to find a theory of nature. That 
 is a scope which can only be claimed by science, if we 
 give to science a very wide meaning. Science, as such, 
 in its actual performance, has a humbler scope, a more 
 practical and more practicable aim. And this aim is, 
 within certain ranges approximately and roughly marked off, 
 under certain conventions, and with certain hypotheses which 
 work, i. e. admit of experimental treatment and confirma- 
 tion to constitute a system of coherent relations, of un variable 
 sequences and unconditional causality. For science, properly 
 speaking, there is no Nature: Nature is to science a poetic, 
 artistic, or metaphysical word. A science deals with a group 
 of phenomena, roughly demarcated by common sense, and 
 seeks to organize it into a system of coherent relations; 
 which, it may be added in case some one may dream that 
 you can have relations by themselves include things related. 
 Such, at least, is the scope of all the positive sciences.
 
 vii J NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 103 
 
 The scope of ideal science or philosophy is quite other. In 
 common talk, indeed, it is often implied that the science 
 of the ideal is only a generalization or an extension of the 
 positive sciences into a region where they grow large, but 
 at the same time vague and fantastic. But in truth, 
 philosophy is no mere sum or generalization of the positive 
 sciences. It is a view, or attempt at a view of Nature, i. e. the 
 whole sum of facts, lived, experienced, and believed in their 
 unity : it is the fulfilment of the task which, according to 
 Bacon, is appointed to man, to be the minister et interpret 
 Naturae. That is more than the special sciences do or 
 profess to do : it is the work of a science, which is ideal 
 no less than positive; a science which includes art, religion, 
 and morality as its handmaids, but handmaids who are maids 
 of honour and not mere helps in the kitchen of humanity. 
 
 Thus reason is the principle of unity : but of a unity which 
 works through, and in, diversity. The dispute between 
 reason and authority as to priority and posteriority is one 
 which may be paralleled with another more notorious con- 
 troversy. Did the hen come first or the egg ? To answer it, 
 let us ask how reason arose, and what it works : let us ask 
 what authority means, and not content ourselves with vague 
 nominal oppositions. Just because reason is so often opposed 
 to authority, they must have something in common, were 
 it only some common subject to dispute. And, indeed, a 
 quarrel unites as surely, and the cynic may say, more closely 
 and permanently, than a friendship. Indifference, presumably, 
 is not union. A certain propinquity of interests, a community 
 of purpose, is needed for a vigorous opposition. Nay, may 
 we not further say, that in many a case we quarrel more 
 fiercely with others, just because they say out aloud something 
 which we would fain keep silent in ourselves; and that the 
 rage against the enemy outside is only the evidence of an 
 inward struggle in our own breast, which we have failed to 
 quench ?
 
 104 GIFFORD LECTURES [vir 
 
 Now what is the fundamental feature of all reason, of all 
 ideal forms ? Surely this, that they rise from us, seem to be 
 our offspring, nay, perhaps, our product, and yet, without 
 any warning, turn round and lord it over us. Take con- 
 science : it is, says Butler, a principle of reflection, it is our 
 act of judgement : and yet it claims (and we cannot help in 
 a sneaking way admitting the claim) to be the voice of God. 
 Take fashion : it is a whim to which we seem to give 
 currency by our own act, and yet it plays the inflexible 
 despot. We calmly speak as if we made the laws, and talk 
 of ourselves as law-givers and law-makers ; and yet the law 
 rules in its own right. We love, and it seems the expression 
 of our freest personality; and lo, we have forged a chain 
 which, whether agreeable or not, binds us for perhaps a life. 
 We act purposely; and it seemed free for us to do or to 
 abstain : yet the deed is an irrevocable master ; the gods 
 themselves, says the Greek proverb, cannot undo what is 
 done. Even the light word, to which we unthinkingly give 
 voice, may one day chastise us with scorpions. 
 
 How can these things be? Are we really so little lords 
 of ourselves as they seem to show ? Can we only assert our 
 freedom in order to throw ourselves into a more effective 
 bondage ? Whence came this reason ? Reason, we have 
 lately heard from Mr. Kidd, is individualistic in the uttermost, 
 the weapon of disintegration. When we say, ' Come, let us 
 reason together,' it appears that we mean (not, as the men 
 of old time thought, ' Let us try to agree, and remove the 
 stumbling-blocks that cause jars between us ; ' but, in 
 the modern language), ( Let us dispute and divide/ Now it 
 is simply impossible to allow any one thus to play the fool 
 with language. No doubt, if the thing had been done long 
 enough ago, the rose might still smell as sweet had it had 
 another name. But as things are, names have been pre- 
 occupied, and to play false with them is neither more nor 
 less than stealing. And stealing a good name, as Falstaff
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 105 
 
 tells us, is a more serious crime than stealing the trash 
 that is in our purse. It is a kind of treason to humanity : 
 Nomina numina. 
 
 Is reason then a private property of the individual ? Is 
 conscience, is soul, is love ? In one thing- Mr. Balfour is quite 
 right : the higher spiritual life with its beliefs is not 
 explicable from the physiological or biological individual. 
 In that biological framework and function, as every one is 
 perhaps aware, we are of close kindred with the animal world, 
 and, comparatively speaking, of very close kindred with 
 certain members of it. We know that every human being, 
 as an embryo in his mother's womb, runs in a few months 
 through, we may almost say, the whole scale of animal life. 
 An ancient Greek sage, of supposed mystic tendencies and 
 oracular utterance, told in some verses the story of his life, 
 as he passed, still one soul, throvigh various animal forms, 
 in sea, in air, and on land ; and people thought him moon- 
 struck. It is now received as the soberest scientific truth 
 that each of ns and in the lapse of no long time, as 
 measured by the horologe of our daylight world has run 
 through a career more romantic and strange than old 
 Empedocles oif Agrigentum probably ever dreamed of. We j 
 are and the less we forget it the better, the higher we 
 may learn to become we are, in the substantial framework 
 and function of our being, animals, comrades of the dog, the 
 hare, the ape, and the tiger. They seem sometimes far apart 
 from us, brutes at the worst, poor relations at the best. Now 
 that I do not say, wisely or unwisely we have concluded 
 that we are made but a little lower than the Elohim, and no 
 longer see angels as an aristocracy of creation above us, but 
 fancy ourselves as its foremost rank, we are apt to forget 
 that the difference between us and the nearest mammals sinks 
 to at least apparent insignificance in comparison with the 
 gulf between them and the awotla, an apparently amorphous, 
 structureless mass, or rather molecule.
 
 io5 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 The evolution of reason, of authority, of morals, of art 
 and religion, that, is the problem. I spoke the other day of 
 the birth of a soul. I may come later to speak of the birth 
 of conscience. What is it that we can expect to find in this 
 mode of enquiry, in this path of evolution ? There was 
 a time when the word for the new birth was creation. But 
 the word was a little too abstruse for many who employed it, 
 and it led to strange fancies of a superhuman man moulding 
 creatures out of nothing. With all this confusion of vulgar 
 imagination, the philosophical conception of creation had 
 nothing to do. Something of the same confusion has 
 infected the modern term Evolution. Evolution has been 
 taken to mean a process of continuous change by which, 
 if you only give it time enough, an A will some day turn 
 into a B, an oak become a beech. So once on a time the 
 chemists but at that time they were called alchemists had 
 the fancy that, by some method of manipulation yet to be 
 discovered, iron or one of the baser metals would be trans- 
 muted into gold. The alchemist saw transmutations of 
 a kind going on everywhere in nature, and with a judgement 
 perverted by the lust of wealth, he came to look upon all the 
 mineral kingdom as a range of steps which, if we could 
 only get the secret of transmutation, would bring us nearer 
 and nearer to its final head and supreme development, the 
 royal Gold. 
 
 A similar frenzy seized some biologists at hearing the idea 
 of transformation of living beings. The whole kingdom of 
 animals presented itself to their minds as one continuous 
 development from some primary organism which, allowing 
 sufficient variation in circumstances and sufficient length of 
 time, might become, to put it briefly, anything in the possible 
 range of animality. Now that this is possible or impossible, 
 I am not concerned to say. The very word impossible, 
 indeed, is not one in favour with sensible men, and is one 
 that science will rarely use. Perhaps, like Napoleon, the
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 107 
 
 sciences may call it ' a blockhead of a word/ Science, i. e. 
 human knowledge of facts and laws of fact, can ascertain to 
 a certain extent that something has or has not been done. 
 But to pronounce that it cannot be done, is what it will 
 only do with the qualification: f so far as we at present 
 know/ 
 
 This holds in the region of biology as it holds elsewhere. 
 Transformation of animal form and function within certain 
 limits has long been a fact of common experience. It is 
 hard or, as things stand, impracticable, to lay down definitely 
 where these limits lie : they are often very elastic ; how 
 elastic, we dare not forecast : but all experience tends in the 
 direction that there are limits, and even impassable limits. It 
 is easy, but it is frivolous, to say that we can place no limits 
 to the power of adaptation which we actually observe. Such 
 a style of argument is after the fashion of the man who, 
 finding his horse did not perish under a gradual reduction of 
 his corn, proceeded with a so-called logical mind it is the 
 logic of the fixed idea, and common amongst the insane to 
 maintain him on no corn at all. We cannot place the limits, 
 perhaps, but the limits may be there. All observed varia- 
 tion in present nature, or in the historical process which 
 palaeontology partly reveals, takes place within limits : and 
 if the limits in the data afforded for long past ages by 
 palaeontology seem wider than those exemplified in the 
 present day, perhaps we may be permitted to suggest that 
 the evidence of the geological strata is a matter which has 
 not yet received its final interpretation, and should not be put 
 too much in the first brunt of battle. Evolution, in short, 
 is at present a working hypothesis. If any one asks what 
 that means, it need only be said that, by the assumption that 
 all living things may be conceived as forming links in a con- 
 tinuous chain of life, instead of being taken, as the casual 
 observer might suppose them, to be merely diverse and 
 apparently unconnected, we get a point of view for biological
 
 io8 GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 study which both suggests wise and far-reaching questions, 
 and makes it more easy to find answers. More than this 
 the Darwinian theory need never become : but this is quite 
 sufficient for scientific work ; though perhaps not enough to 
 gratify an ignorant and aimless curiosity, which would get 
 behind the beginnings of things, and, so to speak, see them 
 as they were before they were made. 
 
 The fact, then, which biology would seem to start from, 
 is the probability that man was once, when no one knows, 
 a creature in all appearance and in all structure very like an 
 ape, a creature closely allied to certain species of our existing 
 quadrumana, but yet somehow sui generis : a unique ape, an 
 ape which really was not an ape as we know apes, but which 
 had in him the promise and potency of humanity; just as the 
 human embryo of to-day, though in its earliest stages it 
 reminds the observer of certain animals, has in it, whether 
 the anatomist can detect it or not, a je ne sais quoi which 
 determines it to be man, and nothing but man. The starting- 
 point is, you observe, not entirely a fact : but it may fairly 
 be called, from the biological standpoint, a plausible and 
 workable hypothesis. There was then a time within the 
 present century, when each of us, man or woman, so far as 
 all the experimental tests could tell us, was the very nega- 
 tion of all we as adults claim to be : a time when for us 
 speech and thought, reason and morality, all the distinctive 
 peculiarities of human shape and structure, were not. As in 
 the old story of the creation of the terrestrial globe, so there 
 was a time when we were ' without form and void ' : an 
 amorphous, inorganized mass. And yet shape and organiza- 
 tion were there, though our organs and even our instruments 
 failed to detect them. 
 
 It is in that sense and with these limitations that I speak 
 of the evolution of reason or of morality. I can attach no 
 meaning to the statement that reason or morality was made 
 out of something utterly other than itself. Non-reason does
 
 vn] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM 109 
 
 never beget reason, nor does non-moral beget moral. We may 
 possibly lay down the conditions, the circumstances, the occa- 
 sions, which facilitated the event, its sine qua. non. But the 
 secret of the first birth, the secret of life's emergence at 
 conception, the mystery of origins, is well kept. Still, now 
 as of old, each birth is a creation. We have learned thanks 
 to Darwin, and, as I am more especially bound to add, to 
 others before Darwin that creation is a process law-governed, 
 a work of reasonable not arbitrary deity; that the whole organic 
 kingdom is a systematic unity, the unveiling in time and place 
 of one grand plan. We can guess with much probability the 
 scheme of architecture, but we have not forced the hand of 
 the architect, and stolen the secret of his work. We are, to 
 him, in a position not unlike that of the grammarian and the 
 critics to a great original genius in poetry or painting; we 
 can catch, or deem we catch, some of his tricks or his mode of 
 composition. But Raphael and Dante are always on another 
 plane than their imitators, and He that sits in heaven may 
 perhaps smile at those who so boldly identify the way they 
 construe his plan with that plan itself ; or who fail even to 
 surmise and this is the important thing that He is an 
 architect who draws no plan and directs no workers, but is 
 himself the life that inspires the worker and the source that 
 supplies the work. 
 
 It is the evolution of the human mind we study, with 
 reason as its governing function, with morality, art, and 
 religion as its characteristic products. And that means, 
 when, and under what conditions, can mind be seen emerging? 
 In what atmosphere did it draw its breath, from what 
 parentage did it spring? The psychologist who analyzes 
 mental phenomena assumes mind as a given fact ; or rather 
 for him the soul is a geographical term, used to denote the 
 range within which certain phenomena which he describes are 
 to be found, and sometimes equated with the sum or aggregate 
 of their phenomena. The comparative psychologist will show
 
 no GIFFORD LECTURES [vn 
 
 us by a process of guess-work and more or less plausible 
 analogical interpretation of stories of animal life, of move- 
 ments executed by animals how in the animal world with 
 varying degrees there are indications of the presence of several 
 of the faculties found in man. And these comparisons are 
 very interesting, if always a little liable to the defect of 
 alternative interpretation. But we must go a little further 
 than either of these, and ask : When or under what conditions 
 do we first observe the human, the rational soul ? 
 
 The answer briefly is and the same answer will apply to 
 morality, art, and religion that reason is a social product : 
 it appears and lives in human association. Just as cohesion, 
 or electricity, or any other material property only exhibits 
 itself in a correlation of elements, which are at once antithetic 
 and interdependent : so the human soul is a phenomenon which 
 appears and lives in the sociality of human beings. There is 
 doubtless a sentiency which is part of animal nature in general : 
 but even it, we may note, only exists in a great community of 
 physical life. The specially human soul is a social fact, the 
 resultant and index of a social effort. Society, the reciprocity 
 of man with man, is the atmosphere in which it breathes, the 
 soil in which it grows. Man, the individual physiological 
 being, exhibits in association with his fellows the products we 
 call rational, moral, aesthetic, and religious. And it is only 
 man, not all animals, that does so : a statement which need 
 not be pressed to exclude all approaches to reason in the so- 
 called lower animals. Hence we conclude that in him there 
 is a something which in the appropriate environment will so 
 develop. The soul is his potentially, let us say : and yet it 
 would never be actual any more than hydrogen and oxygen, 
 of their separate initiative, form water, without some con- 
 straining agent unless another soul were to be made at the 
 same stroke. 
 
 To some it may sound a paradox to say that reason is not 
 of the individual, as such, but only of the socialized or
 
 vi i] NATURALISM AND RATIONALISM in 
 
 civilized individual. It is not so long- ago that indignation 
 was lavished on the anthropologist, who dared to hint that 
 primaeval man in his birth-time had been speechless. And 
 yet the obnoxious fact reveals itself afresh in every human 
 infant. The doctrine that reason is the concomitant of 
 sociality is a common one to philosophy. Hear Hobbes : 
 1 Reason ' (which he defines in his rough way as conceiving 
 a sum-total from the addition of parcels, as in short ' reckon- 
 ing') 'is not, like sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten 
 by experience only ' (by experience Hobbes means ' the tear 
 and wear of life '), ' as prudence is, but attained by industry/ 
 Hear Fichte : ' Man would not be rational or human, were he 
 purely isolated and unsocial/ 
 
 Let us not, however, misunderstand, Juxtaposition, associa- 
 tion, in and by itself, could yield nothing. But where there 
 is a something which however we do not know in itself, and 
 can only discern in its effects this association leads to a new 
 development : it is the meeting of energies which causes birth. 
 The human being, to put it in materialistic figures, is charged 
 with force, energy, faculty: but energy requires solicitation 
 from without, to bring it into exercise and actuality. The 
 human individual, as such, is to all appearance simply an 
 animal : primus inter pares, perhaps, yet still only amongst 
 his peers. But under that appearance there are in him 
 possibilities of unique energies. There are tendencies and 
 potencies craving to meet each other, and to link hand in 
 hand, heart in heart. All the various ranges of Nature live, 
 if we speak the religious language, under some special dis- 
 pensation of God : in scientific phrase, they have each their 
 own law of development. The specific law of human existence 
 is sociality. It is that which makes us human beings. The 
 absolutely solitary, said Aristotle, is either a brute beast or 
 a god. This is a truth of which all exceptions prove the rule. 
 St. Simeon Stylites is as much dependent on a social environ- 
 ment for such life as he leads, as the most sociable and business-
 
 ii2 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 like citizen of Antioch. Even the Cyclops of the Odyssey, 
 who is said to live reckless of all neighbours, finds that they 
 will not stand his midnight howls. 
 
 But if sociality be the root, the medium, the atmosphere of 
 all that is distinctly human, there is one peculiarity about it 
 which cannot be passed by. To the rest of the natural world 
 their peculiar law, the guiding principle of their being, seems 
 (I will not at present go beyond f seems ') to be given to be 
 their own inalienable property ; a natural endowment, a fixed 
 law, which they have without effort, and which they cannot 
 or will not transgress. Man, doubtless, like the rest of Nature, 
 has his so-called inherent properties, his instincts and qualities. 
 But all that he can call specially his own is an effort, an 
 acquisition. As I put it before, he inherits a task, he is 
 endowed with a problem : his riches are all to be earned. 
 
 This sociality is not a quality but a tendency, craving for 
 fulfilment, tasking the energies. Man has been defined in 
 many ways. Let us for the present say that he is par 
 excellence the being who works, labours: that he is so in 
 tendency, in progress. Man the worker 'that which he 
 hath done but earnest of the thing which he shall do/ 'Tis 
 true that barbarian man, and still more savage man, is idle : 
 and that their survivals in modern days whether at one end 
 or other of the social scale still carry out the old animal 
 ideal. But with these exceptions which only prove the rule 
 for savage man can only idle while his women and other slaves 
 toil, and later barbarians nourish their idleness largely by 
 some sort of force and fraud the rule for man is not to 
 merely accept the given, but to mould and fashion it for 
 himself. In him nothing merely is : it is to be : it has 
 taken on it a new law, the law of becoming, as the law 
 which governs him and the things he deals with. With 
 his emergence on the scene, the world has, as it were, got 
 a new relative centre : all things have become, or rather are 
 more and more becoming, anthropocentric.
 
 VIII 
 
 SOCIAL AND INDIVIDUAL CONDITIONS OF THE 
 DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 
 
 THE point at which we had arrived in the last lecture was 
 a consideration of that sum or group of conditions under 
 which the characteristic features of humanity make their 
 appearance. In a broad general way we gave it the name 
 of sociality : meaning thereby to indicate the fact that reason 
 and morality, art and industry, science and philosophy and 
 religion, only present themselves in associated bodies of 
 human beings. It is perhaps in one way trivial, yet is it in 
 another way important to add, that association is not here 
 treated as a cause or a reason. If we say that morality or 
 religion or language is a social product, we must not deceive 
 ourselves. Mere association can do of itself nothing. 
 Association is, so to say, the outward visible sign of an 
 invisible inward grace : and the first thing to realize clearly 
 is, that you cannot have the one without the other. The 
 mere fact of there being two or three or more people together 
 would not make anything grow or become, which had not its 
 root in some way in the single individuals. So, too, the con- 
 clusion of a syllogism dare not, in one way of looking at the 
 matter, add anything new to the premises : whatever goes 
 beyond the premises is of evil, and erroneous. And yet, this 
 material identity does not prevent the conclusion being a real 
 addition to our sum of knowledge. You put, as the phrase 
 is, two and two together : and the result well, it is not quite 
 
 I
 
 H4 GIF FORD LECTURES [vm 
 
 two and two, but two and two put together. No doubt, if 
 you insist on overlooking the ' put together/ or treating it as 
 it' it were nothing what anybody can do, and so a neglige- 
 able quantity you may say we are exactly where we were. 
 Yet, when we are ourselves, and not playing the verbal 
 quibbler, we know that to put two and two together is to 
 create something new, something irreducible to, and incom- 
 parable with its factors or elements. All the data of Hamlet 
 were already somewhere, before Shakespeare touched them ; 
 and jet, except as implicit in the predeterminate laws of 
 life natural and social, or if you prefer it, in the determinate 
 will of God, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Hamlet of the modern 
 world, was not. Or, again, the musical notes are, in a way, 
 all there ; and yet each musical genius that comes upon the 
 scene is a creator of new constellations of harmony. 
 
 So here, the mother, already enriched with reason and love, 
 bending over her infant,- does not by her glance, her smile, 
 her touch, give it a soul, a spirit, a reason : and yet in that 
 glance, that smile, that touch, soul, spirit, reason, are as 
 surely born as the physiological life of the same child is 
 born, and so far as we know is only born, in the congress 
 of male and female. As in that case the elements of the 
 living being, the constituents which build up structure, are 
 older, far older than the tv^o parents, who to popular appre- 
 hension are the authors of the being of their progeny ; so in 
 the spiritual world, the child and its mother severally bring 
 to their union of soul a store of powers and faculties prepared 
 by, it may be, centuries of intiefited tradition. Yet it is in 
 the main true, that it is the mother's and father's look and 
 touch, charged with the fruits of life, of life both theirs 
 and that of myriad others which have gone to make up theirs, 
 which kindles into flame the dull materials of humanity, and 
 begins that second birth, that spiritual parentship which, at 
 least not less than the first, should be the peculiar glory 
 of human father and motherhood. And, to prevent mis-
 
 vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 115 
 
 conception, the gift of soul and spirit, if gift it be, is not 
 on one side only. If the parent, in a way, makes the child, 
 it is not less true that the child makes the parent. He 
 kindles new lights, and pierces out new depths, in the parent 
 soul ; builds his world anew, with other features and fabric 
 than of old : brings him nearer heaven or nearer hell ; but 
 at any rate, if the parent ever really sees his child eye to eye 
 and approaches him touch to touch and unfortunately we 
 dare not assume that this always happens, so many parents 
 and children have never seen each other's soul-face he is not 
 as he was before. 
 
 We are here concerned with facts, and with the funda- 
 mental condition of our human reality. With facts. It 
 might have been that each of us should have been sent into 
 the world, a fixed and complete quantity of energy charged 
 with a certain role; a germ, containing a certain bundle 
 of possibilities, and capable of developing all that was pre- 
 figured without help or hindrance from other things. It 
 might have been that each of us should have existed as an 
 independent individual, burdened indeed internally with 
 a certain drag or limitation or inertia of resistance, so that 
 the infinity, implicit in each of us, never became at any 
 moment wholly actual, wholly equal to the absolute and 
 perfect Being, but yet not hampered by anything without ; 
 and thus the outward happening, though it was to all appear- 
 ance perpetually about to interfere with what we did, would 
 yet never really come into contact with us, but would be 
 kept off, as by some plate-glass surface, or by some imper- 
 meable yet transparent adamant encircling our sphere of 
 being. So, it appears, thought the great Leibnitz. Each 
 real being he called it a Unit or Monad he thought to be, 
 as it were, a god, a potential never quite perfect god, but 
 filled with an instinct towards greater and ever greater com- 
 pleteness : a being, always fragmentary, in that there were 
 numberless other beings outside it, utterly independent of 
 
 i a
 
 ii6 G1FFORD LECTURES [vm 
 
 it, yet all somehow, more or Jess faintly, within its ken, 
 ideally present to it; it and all the rest again having the 
 full, real, true God above and over all as a sovereign, the real 
 bond which was represented in this ideal harmony. It is, 
 you say, an inconsistent conception. But the inconsistency 
 is partly, I may suggest, in the fact that it is the phraseology 
 of a compromise. Its voice is the voice of eighteenth- 
 century Deism, which was the final deposit of a Century 
 of Lutheran orthodoxy : but its hands are the hands of 
 something very much liker Spinozism than his contemporaries 
 fancied. 
 
 At any rate, without committing ourselves to any denial 
 that in a higher interpretation the idealism of Leibnitz may 
 hold its ground, for the present we must insist on the reality 
 of the fact of inter-action. The individual, so far as 
 phenomenal facts go, is what he is, through and in his 
 surroundings. But to call them surroundings or environment 
 is to mislead. The surroundings of the individual are, how- 
 ever paradoxical the phrase may sound, not merely around, 
 but in him. They are part and parcel of him : he is part 
 and parcel of them. The old idealists, such as the later 
 Stoics, were fond of insisting that things are what we make 
 them, or take them to be. Everything, say Epictetus and 
 Marcus Aurelius, is imoXri^is ; imagination, fashion, opinion, 
 rules the world. But if this is true, there is necessity for 
 reaffirming a corresponding and counter- truth : ( Things are 
 what they make us become.' Neither side, taken by itself, 
 has a monopoly of productiveness or creativeness. Things 
 are not, as an idealist like Fichte might be supposed to say, 
 mere stuff for us to cut and carve for our own sakes, and as 
 we please. They are and this is what Fichte, who was not 
 a mere idealist, did say the stuff by our manipulation of 
 which we become better or worse. In other words, they 
 subdue us to them, just as much as we subdue them to us. 
 And if that be so, it would seem to follow that what we call
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 117 
 
 our acting upon them, is, in equal degree, their acting 
 upon us. Action and re-action are always equal : because, 
 as a philosopher might say, they are the same thing, seen 
 from two ends. 
 
 External things are the tests of our reality. The so-called 
 Berkeleian idealist was supposed to hold that, in the case 
 of sensible things, their esse was their percipi : to say that 
 they existed, was only another phrase for saying that we 
 perceived them. And some scoffers jeered at the lunatic 
 philosopher who reduced all reality to a spectral phantasma- 
 goria in his, i. e. the philosopher's, mind ; or, as the cruder 
 critic said, in his brain. But these species of philosophical 
 propositions are only fully understood, when they are seen 
 to be reversible. It is equally true that the percipient gets 
 his being from the perceived. Not to know them, it is said 
 of some great ones, argues yourself unknown. Do not be too 
 rash, therefore I may perhaps say to the very young meta- 
 physician, do not be in a hurry to throw overboard the 
 sensible world. It is true that a metaphysician of fame has 
 declared that you cannot hope to be a genuine philosopher, 
 if you have not had at some time a serious doubt as to the 
 so-called reality of the material world. There is something 
 in this, I admit : but it reminds me of the encouragement 
 given to a beginner at the game, when he is told that he will 
 never turn out a crack golfer, unless he first breaks a club 
 or two : or of the general warrant sometimes thrown out to 
 the young that, if later years are to bring forth a crop of 
 good and valiant deeds, it is necessary to begin with sowing 
 some wild oats. In these cases I suspect there is a little 
 of the confusion which in the logic books is said to take post 
 hoc as if it were propter hoc. In other words : it may be 
 a grand and generous soul will, just because of his nobler 
 mettle, commit faults and break hearts, ere he, so to speak, gain 
 the full mastery of his machine, and learns to elicit the high 
 music that is in him ; and a player of the grand style may
 
 n8 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm 
 
 break an instrument or two, before he learns that even golf- 
 sticks are to be handled delicately and with respect, as 
 becomes what are no mere rigid things but organs of the 
 spirit. But it would be a perilous thing for the clown to 
 draw encouragement from the necessary mishaps of genius, 
 and suppose that he can only trundle his wheelbarrow with 
 its load, if he imitates the prancings and caprioles of some 
 high-bred steed. So it is with the way to philosophy. 
 Every one must take his own path, his own royal road. 
 There is no regulation pattern, no scheme of philosophical 
 salvation, which each must undeviatingly follow. It is not 
 necessary, in order to be a philosopher, to doubt the reality 
 of the external world ; but it is necessary to abandon two 
 beliefs before, philosophically, you can be saved. The first 
 is that the external world is the reality, and that our mind, 
 our ego, is a mere echo, a reflection, or epiphenomenon of it. 
 The second is that we are the reality we, the scheme of 
 ideas and that the external world is a mere dream, the 
 passing phenomenon of our minds. The former error is 
 Materialism, and some people call it Realism : the latter is 
 Spiritualism, and some people call it Idealism. Salvation, 
 philosophic or otherwise, can come only to one who has 
 disowned both errors, and who has learnt that the truth lies 
 in the utter qualification of one half-truth by the other. The 
 way to philosophy can only pass through a point where we 
 see that neither subject or object alone primarily is : where 
 we learn that things are, because we by reason understand 
 how things are what they are, and, not less, because the sense 
 passively receives the impress of their action. Inner and 
 outer must utterly coincide to give reality. 
 
 These epistemological considerations are not alien to our 
 present problem. For they tend to show that the bond of 
 reality, as Leibnitz hinted, is in something which compre- 
 hends us and things : that reality is not in things of any 
 grade whatever, but that things are in reality : or that reality
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 119 
 
 resides in the manifold system of relations, the complex, which 
 binds them together. None of the ring's which form the chain 
 of reality is itself strong enough to hang the others thereon ; 
 yet, on the other hand, each of the rings is charged by 
 implication with the whole. Each ?>, has being in itself, 
 but when we look carefully, it is in itself only through the 
 being of others. Each, as you view it from the standpoint of 
 the other, is only a phenomenon : and yet each must be real, 
 or it could not even be a phenomenon. Everywhere subjective 
 initiative is inseparable from passivity, as of an object, to 
 something else. 
 
 This reciprocal interdependence of aspects holds good, as 
 perhaps few can care to deny, in the relationship between man 
 and things. And to us, looking at the problem from our 
 present standpoint, here might seem to be the commencement. 
 We go forward to meet the world, to learn from it, to struggle 
 with it ; if possible (and it is not fully possible) to overcome 
 it. But it is we who go forward : we, the collective, the race 
 of man. Even when an individual David goes forth to meet 
 Goliath, he is a champion of an associated host, the bearer of 
 an ancestral and national interest, the worshipper of his 
 country's god, the wielder of the weapon which centuries of 
 customary skill have fashioned, strong in the sympathies 
 of his compatriots, and strengthened by burning hatred 
 against the uncircumcised Philistine. The individual in the 
 search for science is no less sustained, fortified, inspired, by 
 a long past, by many ages of struggling humanity. The 
 scholar, even the most rudimentary, does what he does only in 
 the strength of what his forefathers and their comrades have 
 done and suffered. By all means let him be proud of his 
 intelligence, his wit, his genius, his science, his freedom of 
 mind. But let him remember that if he is free born, some 
 one has had to pay for him the price of his emancipation. 
 When Renan at twenty-five years old entered on his brilliant 
 course of philological and historical achievement, he started
 
 120 GIFFORD LECTURES [vin 
 
 from a great capital of tradition, which he entered upon partly 
 by labour but largely by inheritance. He received, in the 
 dispensation of Nature, all that acquired power of patient 
 work, of sympathetic insight, of natural piety and human 
 tenderness, which his Breton peasant forefathers had laboured 
 for ; he entered upon all the august memories, the organized 
 strength, the systematized logic and learning, the grand 
 theistic conception of the Catholic Church: he gathered the 
 fruits of a scientific struggle, prolonged through centuries 
 of experimental research, of theoretical construction, and of 
 attempts to find a law in human life and human history. 
 Wirfreie Geister, we emancipated intelligences, is the favourite 
 cry of a modern German thinker, as he thinks of himself and 
 a band of advanced thinkers. It is a cry that calls for 
 humility at least as much as pride. One has read of armies 
 in retreat before some terrible destroyer, brought face to face 
 suddenly with a deep and precipitous ravine, and compelled by 
 the mere pressure of horror from behind to march on and on, 
 till the gap was filled with prostrate human forms, and the 
 survivors reached the other bank safely by the involuntary 
 self-sacrifice of their front ranks. Something like this is 
 always happening in the annals of each life. That each of 
 us can individually seek to develop our individual minds, 
 prosecute our separate studies, reach intellectual, artistic, or 
 social eminence, is possible only because we are raised on the 
 joined hands of many unknown to fame, who have formed by 
 stern resolve and hard clench a solid roof over that abyss of 
 mere animality into which we should otherwise fall. Science, 
 art, and religion, all that makes life glorious, all that con- 
 stitutes the special glory of individuals, grows out of the root 
 of sociality. They rest and grow, says Hegel, in the State. 
 But what, according to Hegel, is the State ? Not something, 
 assuredly, which lives in London, and has its holy of holies in 
 the offices of the Treasury : not something which lives for the 
 time being in the Cabinet, and in the upper and influential
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 121 
 
 circle of the bureaucracy. The State, as Hegel conceives it, 
 is the completed organization, the self-contained social form, 
 in which human life can develop its ideal activities : it is an 
 organization in which the family forms the perennial, and so 
 to speak the natural basis, the ever fresh, ever creative spring 
 of moral, intelligent, and artistic life : in which the inter- 
 dependence of industrial effort, commerce, social and com- 
 mercial demand and supply, constitutes the ever-widening 
 stream : while the more purely political organization itself 
 blends all these divergent interests and natural ties into one 
 single and comprehensive nationality or people, wherein the 
 members can both play their own part well, and contribute 
 their quota in orderly way to the total work of humanity. 
 
 Before the individual could deal successfully, reasonably, 
 well with the natural world around him, he had to deal with 
 his own kind, and, combined in action with them, to gain the 
 weapons and the machinery for carrying out his ends. Before 
 he could cultivate science and art, he had to live, and to live 
 he must live in a community. It is no doubt a temptation to 
 separate one part of this from another, to suppose that outward 
 activity created inward faculty, or that inward faculty 
 gradually evolved outward instruments. But the whole point 
 we here have to insist upon is, not the separateness of these 
 two, but their necessary interdependence. Man was not an 
 intelligent creature, who gradually devised newer and abler 
 tools ; nor was he an unintelligent creature, who became 
 intelligent by the reflex action of the machinery he had 
 devised. The old question at issue between Anaxagoras and 
 Aristotle, c Is man the cleverest animal because he has 
 hands ? or has he hands because he is the cleverest of animals ?' 
 can never be answered as it stands. The tu r o developments 
 go on pari passu , parallel to each other, each always cause and 
 always effect of the other. As Spinoza puts it, there is no 
 body without a soul, no soul except it be the idea, the life and 
 consciousness, of a body. The aptitudes of action belonging
 
 122 GIFFORD LECTURES [vin 
 
 to the body are exactly equivalent to the intelligence and 
 rationality of its soul. Soul is not something given a body 
 to direct ; body not something handed over to a soul's direc- 
 tion. The union of reasonable soul and animal body is 
 a deeper thing than either spiritualism or materialism. 
 Reality has, according to Spinoza, a double aspect : seen this 
 way, it is soul ; seen that way, it is body : this way, you 
 attribute to it modes of thought ; that way, you attribute 
 to it modes of extension. It is true, you may say, that this 
 is to exceed the facts ; for you only see in yourselves, and 
 infer in those like you, that there are two aspects. But, 
 answers Spinoza, you cannot have this doubleness of being 
 even in these cases, you cannot carry your reasoning a step, 
 unless you admit that, beyond and behind these two aspects 
 in you, there is an identity, i.e. a self -reaffirming coincidence 
 of these two aspects. 
 
 That intelligence and reason, conscience and language, 
 emerge only through social, collective, or combined action is 
 the point. Sociality is not mere juxtaposition, mere aggrega- 
 tion ; if it be ever describable as a quality or property of the 
 human animal, it is only so in the sense that in man there is, in 
 a degree and way unknown to the other animals, an impulse 
 which drives him to combined action. There are, of course, 
 what are called animal societies, of which certain species of 
 bees or ants form the typical instances ; though there are 
 others perhaps which in some respects come closer to their 
 human analogues. Between the almost stereotyped caste 
 scheme of the former, and the looser and more flexible 
 gregariousness of the latter, man steers a sort of mean. It 
 is not that we can say he is, in any line of distinction, 
 absolutely and utterly unique. To establish such an impass- 
 able gulf of division between himself and the whole animal 
 world, has no doubt been a dominant interest in human 
 curiosity on these matters. But it is hardly describable as 
 a noble, still less as a disinterested curiosity. It savours of
 
 vin] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 123 
 
 meanness to think our titles to grandeur will be securer, if we 
 can exclude the claims of the animal creation. Nobler, I think, 
 is the attitude of St. Francis, when he speaks of his 'brothers' 
 throughout creation, and, with the Hebrew psalmist, calls all 
 things from sun and moon to young men and maidens, old 
 men and children, to praise the name of the Lord. One thing 
 I know, that neither science nor philosophy are interested in 
 the question of excluding dogs from heaven, on the ground, 
 apparently, that the spaces of paradise would become incon- 
 veniently crowded. Perhaps the day may come when the 
 gospel can be preached for what some people complacently 
 call the ' beasts that perish/ So long as the device is ' Let 
 right prevail/ we may be confident no legitimate right will 
 come short. 
 
 But we are concerned with man : and with man sociality is 
 an effort. The physiological individual, the pure animal, if 
 we have a right to such an abstraction, tends to slip away 
 into isolation. At the best, he eats and drinks side by side 
 with his fellows ; but, unless provender is plentiful and space is 
 wide, he tends to quarrel with his neighbours, with those who 
 wander beside him. Even the attraction of sex is a fickle 
 and feeble bond. I do not know whether Professor Drummond 
 is right in saying that through the animal world ' the apathy 
 and estrangement between husband and wife is radical and 
 universal/ Too general utterances in these matters are 
 undesirable, and the cynic may point out, with too much 
 apparent justice, that this apathy and estrangement are not 
 confined to what is ordinarily called the animal world. But 
 at any rate it seems tolerably true that, in most cases, the 
 connexion not merely between animal husband and wife, but 
 generally between animals, is fairly described as indifference 
 tempered by occasional caresses and quarrels : while, in the 
 cases where a closer and more lasting union prevails, as in 
 the social animals, it has a stereotyped and mechanical 
 character, as if the several creatures were automata moved by
 
 124 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm 
 
 some necessitation behind them. The human association is 
 co-operation, society in work, or action. At first perhaps 
 it is an association of labourers cemented by their common 
 subserviency to some end; afterwards the association of 
 labourers who interest and attract each other, not merely 
 through their final end but also in themselves; not merely 
 for the temporary or lasting pleasure their deeds confer, but 
 also for their own sakes, as independent centres of action, 
 who can be for us all that they may be, only when they are 
 never mere instruments but always also sources of original 
 activity. 
 
 This is, in a nutshell, the evolution of ethics. It begins 
 when co-operative action first appears upon the scene, and 
 it marks the fact (first) that the single self has made a step 
 forward, has broken the mechanism of nature, and assumed 
 a direction, set forth an end ; and (second) that it did so in 
 a strength not entirely its own, through a will not completely 
 self-centred ; that it depended on help, on co-operation, and thus 
 submitted itself to a bond. At first, indeed, it lays the stress, 
 so far as it can, exclusively on one side. It treats the con- 
 tribution of others as a mere subserviency to its own initiative. 
 It is selfish, and makes its own utility the centre of all 
 judgement. It forms relations of inequality, of which the 
 type is that of master and slave. The human being is, at 
 this stage, only one among the instruments of production and 
 conquest, distinguished from the rest only by his flexibility, 
 his plasticity to the master's hand. Even this, however, is 
 an advance on a more primitive condition. For the merit of 
 the relation is that it has introduced order and stability, which 
 is the first and indispensable condition of all progress. The 
 worse preliminary stage was an age of chaotic, inconsistent, 
 erratic conjunctions, when each to other was as a comet 
 coming occasionally and at barely predictable intervals over 
 the other's path. Such would be the ideal state of savagery, 
 a state, it need hardly be said, which has left no traces and
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 125 
 
 which, indeed, in its utterness, is inconceivable. For by 
 savage we mean simply a degree of civilization far removed 
 from our own, in which all the more characteristic products 
 of advanced civilization are conspicuous by their absence. 
 
 The evolution of ethics, i. e. the process whereby these faint 
 traces of ethicality have been actualized more and more, is 
 the process in which the two elements in all ethics have 
 acquired increased light, and by which their solidarity has 
 become more and more real. These elements or factors, to 
 repeat, are the principle of direction of will-movement on the 
 one hand, and that of co-operation and co-ordination on the 
 other. The essence of all ethics is shut up in the word 
 ( Autonomy ' ; but shut up, perhaps, so as hardly to be per- 
 ceptible. Its first part is the idea of originality of action, 
 of initiation, of movement to end : its second part is the 
 idea of law, solidarity, community. Emphasize the first, and 
 ethics seems to be purely idealist, a chase for unattainable 
 perfections, for self-satisfaction, it may be, even, for pleasure. 
 But, as our most thoughtful novelist says : ' The cry of the 
 young for pleasure is actually I have studied their language 
 a cry for burdens/ It may be that a theoretical hedonist 
 may say of Lais, ' I have and hold her, not she me ' : yet if 
 Lais does not hold him, it can only be because some petty 
 care, some mean tie, binds him with a more constraining 
 force, and makes him lose even the best of Lais. At any 
 rate, it is true that the cry for pleasures is the cry for life, for 
 struggle, for tasks : and, inevitably, as life rolls on, it turns 
 round into another and an opposite ethics, the ethics of 
 realism, and of passivity. Thus ethics becomes compliance 
 with a code, obedience to a rule, the thraldom of law and 
 custom ; it becomes the negative sense of duty, and then, as 
 the same novelist adds, ' the old ones cry for having too many 
 burdens on their shoulders/ In this second stage ethics 
 leaves half its meaning behind : it grows negative, and 
 ascetic, the bondage of Sinai, a schoolmaster to be listened
 
 126 GIFFORD LECTURES [vm 
 
 to, a school to be submitted to. The very word 'school' is 
 a standing commemoration of this change. In its Greek 
 original, <TXO\T; is release from the distraction of petty tasks, 
 from the bondage of custom, the f ragmen tar iness of practice, 
 and the ascent into a freedom where we see things whole and 
 true, where we are our own full selves, enjoying the full 
 sense of accomplished and yet progressive being. Thus 
 school meant the leisure of free development and full self- 
 realization, the sense and enjoyment of life unimpaired, one 
 and complete, reserved for those who, having passed through 
 the trials of experience, the ups and downs of a much-divided 
 world, might now on the Delectable Mountains behold the 
 turrets of the celestial city rising out of its earthly prepara- 
 tion stage ; reserved also for those who have yet the world 
 before them, and can rest awhile, under the Interpreter's 
 care and in the House Beautiful, beholding all the wonder 
 of the world that might be. So are the glories of school 
 fallen. 
 
 Of these two elements, let us look at each in succession. 
 The first is effort, direction, onward movement, the discharge 
 of energy in pursuit of end ; an end which, however, only 
 comes clearly into view as it is realized. Its full name is 
 work, labour. The human animal, indeed, is not the only 
 worker. Some of the animal world have their work more 
 completely organized, as the phrase is, than man's has yet 
 been. It goes on almost with mechanical regularity. And 
 ancient aphorisms, as well as modern socialisms, sometimes 
 seem as if they deemed that man would be more perfect, if he 
 more nearly approached the painful regularity of the ant. 
 A world from which imprudence, folly, intoxication, heroism, 
 wantonness were utterly banished seems a promising ideal : 
 the ideal of life, not exactly as an eternal petrifaction, but as 
 one uniformly self -repeating round of tasks, discharged with 
 punctual regularity, in a prison-house from which there should 
 be no escape, no release. To organize life, or, more correctly
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 127 
 
 perhaps, to mechanize all its movements ; to reach a stationary 
 state where all would do well, or at least none could do ill ; to 
 remove all volition and substitute an unfailing determinism ; 
 such might be the vision that the sight of the ant should 
 produce, not merely on the sluggard. But, alas ! man is not 
 the industrious bee, the ever-virtuous and much-to-be-imitated 
 ant. These things are perfect in their way, precisely because 
 of their inferior nature. The anthropoid, as our scientific 
 friends prefer to call primitive man, had from the point of 
 view of the rest of Nature what is vulgarly called a ' bee in 
 his bonnet ' ; or, to take another phrase, he was at the begin- 
 ning an f ugly duckling/ He was an outcast amongst the 
 innumerable races of the animal world. If I may use for the 
 moment the language of a foul-speaking book, lately done 
 into English, he was from the very first a case of ' degenera- 
 tion.' He broke, this diseased, strange creature, through the 
 calm stupidity of the animal world. He ate at an immemorial 
 date from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ; and he 
 fell or, in modern slang, degenerated. Even so is the wheat, 
 which is our staff of life, a degeneration from some unknown 
 and probably little worth, but correct grass, which suffered 
 little from blights, and grew admirably even amongst thorns 
 and in stony places. 
 
 Let us not insist on both having our cake and eating it. 
 It may be that the ant is happier, better, more virtuous than 
 man. I know no way of determining it. Or rather it may 
 be, as I surmise, that these words used of ants are meaning- 
 less. At any rate, let us pluck up heart of grace and not 
 merely confess, but with all humility boast : Errare humanum 
 et. Let us feel quite clear on this point, that to abolish error 
 in this world is to make truth impossible. There may be 
 and we hope it at the consummation of all things a time 
 when the wheat and the tares will be eternally separated. 
 But, for this present temporal scene, let us maintain the 
 solidarity of opposites. You must pay for your white, if you
 
 128 GIFFORD LECTURES [vin 
 
 will have it, at the cost of black ; if not, you will get, if you 
 get anything, a dull monotonous grey. The virtues can only 
 grow on a soil which as necessarily will bear vices. The word 
 purity has no meaning save as against evil desires repressed, 
 against incipient impurity. Let the virtuous woman reflect 
 that her coronal only shines so bright because of what other- 
 wise had grown into her fallen sister. There is none good, 
 it was said, but God ; ' why callest thou me good ? ' And 
 I reply, with respectful decision, one may well call thee good, 
 in so far as thou fightest the fight of faith, not as if thou 
 hadst already attained, or wert already perfect. And we dare 
 not say, ' God is good/ because so to call him seems to bring 
 him down to the level of such an one as mortals are, and to 
 offer a cheap commendation of him whose ways are not as our 
 ways, nor his thoughts as our thoughts. 
 
 Man is not the industrious bee, or the ever- virtuous ant. 
 He is not that kind of pattern. Rather is he, equally at the 
 root of him, idle. His industry is an effort : his work is only 
 partly a pleasure : he constantly relapses from the strain. 
 Oftentimes, indeed, he looks round among the animal world 
 and would fain shake off in fancy the awful yoke that lifts 
 not night or day, the call of work to be done, aliquid facien- 
 dum. In a grand passage of the Metaphysics Aristotle has 
 remarked that in the economy of the universe, as of a human 
 household, it is not the highest in rank on whom life sits 
 easiest. The slave, as he is called, has his hours of rest, his 
 rude amusements : the laugh in the kitchen sounds often 
 louder and looser than in the drawing-room. The weight of 
 responsibility is removed : whereas in the ruling members, 
 noblesse oblige presses with perpetual weight. The roving 
 Bushman, with little to bless himself with in material wealth, 
 sings all day and far into the night for very lightness of 
 heart: while the latest products of civilization with some 
 exceptions, thank heaven ! go to their daily tasks with tense 
 and apathetic faces, as if they were prisoners.
 
 vm] SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF ETHICS 129 
 
 There are, in short, two spirits in man, and both seem 
 equally natural, equally essential in making him what he is. 
 He looks before and after, says the poet. The animals are 
 engrossed, it seems, with the present. But be this as it may, 
 man, visited by the glimpse of possibilities which arise for 
 him through social activity, has thus opened up for him 
 a vision of the recurring contradiction of what he is to be 
 with what he has been. He is an animal, and sometimes 
 would be glad to be nothing more. But there has been 
 realized within him, by social action and co-operation, the 
 sense of something better. He has risen above himself, yet 
 without leaving himself. He has gained a human soul, 
 a social spirit, that puts him into sympathy with a portion 
 of his fellow creatures, and has in it an expansion to which 
 no limits can be set. But it is a spirit which is only to be 
 maintained in struggle against his old animal self. It is the 
 spirit of a wider nature, born out of other elements besides 
 those of his own origination. Thus, though it grows out of 
 him, it has its source in a wider, a larger world. It is reason 
 in him, and not entirely his ; except in so far as his continual 
 effort is to be not only himself but more than himself. It is 
 conscience, the eternal witness to the ' ought ' against the 
 ' is ' : and yet a witness also that the ' ought to be/ in 
 a higher sense always ( is/
 
 IX 
 
 MANS RELATION TO NATURE. MATERIALISTIC AND 
 IDEALISTIC VIEWS OF IT 
 
 THE relation in which Man stands to Nature makes it to 
 him at once antithetical and inseparable. Nature, if we look 
 at it in a large way, is that which, whether we will or no, 
 goes on according to a law of its own, working out of itself 
 all the potentialities it contains. In simple dignity, unhast- 
 ing, unlingering, sometimes as it were with simplicity of 
 a child, and sometimes with the inflexibility of a formed 
 manhood, it marches on, governed no doubt, as we are gradu- 
 ally brought to surmise, by laws, but not troubled by any 
 of that consciousness of possible opposition between the law 
 and the fact, which is so frequent and so bitter an element in 
 our human experience. We may have by science convinced 
 ourselves that its course is hemmed in at every point by 
 uniform laws, but nature itself is to the mere obvious percep- 
 tion free, determined by no alien force, itself supplying the 
 very means by which it is made better. And as against such 
 nature uniform, complete, all-encompassing, man seems the 
 child of caprice, irregularity, and self-contradiction ; his 
 business, we should, if we spoke hastily, say was to thwart 
 and pervert, to defy and constrain the great power of things : 
 only that if he for a little slacken his efforts, and cease from 
 troubling, the other elemental forces resume their sway, and 
 in a few years or centuries leave no obvious traces of his 
 works. He builds his bridges, he forms his conventional
 
 MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 131 
 
 barriers and settlements over and across nature's surface : but 
 they are founded on the moving sand of his conceits, and are 
 in no long time swept away to the bourne from which there is 
 no return. Impotent and vain, brooding over ideals which 
 the natural conditions forbid him ever to realize, man seems 
 to the mere realist (who in this matter takes a pessimist 
 tone), to be an inexplicable and absurd freak of nature 
 a child born of nature in some foul hour of mysterious incest, 
 doomed from his birth to struggle, but to struggle for ever in 
 vain, against his mother and her ordinances, vexing her soul 
 with his vanity, his insanity, his despairs, by his ideals moral 
 and immoral; but doomed also, at some distant date per- 
 chance, to fade away into nothingness, and leave the weary 
 world at peace from the perverse iniquity of her Caliban, her 
 youngest and most froward child. To the mere idealist 
 perhaps, on the other hand, the antagonism takes a more 
 optimistic issue. He sees in man a being who already was, 
 in some higher sphere before nature came to be, and who still 
 will be after all the works of nature are shrivelled into nebula. 
 Or rather, perhaps, the idealist sees in him a being who in 
 his inmost essence has no past and no hereafter. His life, as 
 we, speaking the language of one short-lived race, call life, is 
 but the misconceived or half-understood representation of 
 something deeper, higher than it appears to be. The true 
 life, the 'life that knows no ending,' and perhaps knows no 
 beginning, is the invisible but real pre-supposition of the 
 struggle to be which we call life. Charged for a while with 
 the task of guiding some little portion of material nature, the 
 soul, as the old idealism named this imperishable germ of 
 being, has a watch to keep, a service to render ; it is, by some 
 dark law of universal order, submitted for a time and times to 
 a probation ; to, it may be, an exile in an alien world, with 
 an ever-present yearning for its true country, which is the 
 heavenly, and an occasional reminiscence of its spotless 
 beauty : and at length, after the campaign is over, the soldier 
 
 K 2
 
 132 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 spirit, according to its constancy or its cowardice, is given 
 back to the real, i.e. the invisible world, with due meed of 
 joy, of penal but purifying torments, or of unending pain. 
 
 Such are the schemes of conceiving the relation of Man to 
 Nature which have had an historical fame. The first, that 
 of the materialistic and pessimistic observer, sees in man 
 a revolter against nature, an unintelligible accident, the 
 sudden emergence of an unearthly, unnatural ideal, as of some 
 portentous star in a grey moonlight sky. It foresees, with 
 no shadow of a doubt, that the rebellion of man is foredoomed 
 to inevitable failure : that the meteoric light which he flashed 
 must and will be extinguished, and leave behind only a dead 
 meteoric stone more in the cosmos. And yet, while his scien- 
 tific senses force him so to judge, there is something else 
 in him which, with at least not less authority, obliges him to 
 declare that, notwithstanding the inevitable collapse which 
 sooner or later will come, he for one will fight, and ever fight, 
 whatever the issue. He hears the loud yelp of the Fenris 
 wolf coming ever nearer, more heart-crushing ; he sees the 
 powers of ancient darkness, the giants, gathering round 
 stonily imminent as the light grows dim, and on the face of 
 Loki the smile of assured triumph settling grislier and 
 grimmer ; the jaws of the world-serpent open for their prey ; 
 he feels the eternal frost creeping to the vitals of the earth, 
 he declares that he cherishes no hope of an ultimate reversal of 
 the doom impending : and yet, undaunted as a bridegroom to 
 meet his bride, he goes forth, mightier in his mood than the 
 elements which seek to engulf him, and bury him and his 
 revolt out of sight. It is unintelligible and absurd, you say : 
 but it is magnificent. But is it so unintelligible after all ? 
 Is it not rather the reason of life suppressing the reason of 
 logic, and of what the short-sighted call science ? ' All men 
 are mortal,' says the logic-book, ' and Peter is a man ; there- 
 fore Peter is mortal/ So far so good : but every man, every 
 woman, eternally supersedes that conclusion as a half-truth
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 133 
 
 for him and herself, and says by act, which is more rational 
 than the formal syllogism, Non omnis mortar; whereby they, 
 by deeds done in love, survive. 
 
 The second scheme may on the whole be styled the Platonic, 
 or, in special form, the idealist and spiritualist. In the develop- 
 ment of the Christian church, and partly even in the very 
 origins of Christianity, it has entered into the body of Christian 
 doctrine in a measure which has made it practically impossible 
 to separate the two elements. Perhaps most people hardly 
 realize, or even are aware, how thoroughly their conception 
 of life and immortality, of the here and the hereafter, which 
 they regard as essentially Christian, are in their origin and 
 form Platonic : though, be it added, of a Platonism which 
 has undergone much vulgarization in the process of incorpora- 
 tion, and even before it. But the fact is, the modern reader 
 of the sacred books can only with great difficulty, much self- 
 restraint, much purgation of mind, get into even tolerably 
 direct contact with them. In some works of religious art, 
 when symbolism took other forms than it does now, the 
 artist gave to his saintly figures a nimbus or aureola round 
 their head. What is that nimbus? It is the 'cloud of 
 witness,' the work of witnessing spirits, who, as the genera- 
 tions rolled past, have brought out in quasi-sensible shape 
 the significance of the bare fact or of the barely visible 
 personage, and stamped it, in always altering and increasing 
 complexity, on the face of the saint; even as, in a different 
 way, a painter by his finer symbolism may depict in a face 
 a depth of character which no casual observer had been able to 
 see. Even such a nimbus gathers round the plain words of an 
 ancient text. Such a text also lives and grows fuller of com- 
 plex life. It gathers up and bears around it a charmed halo, 
 of which in the end it seems almost sacrilege to try to strip 
 it. And to pause a moment in an inviting side-issue, let me 
 ask and try to answer the question : Is it well to strip it off ? 
 Yes, I reply, for certain purposes well : but not in all respects
 
 134 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 well. To illustrate by an analogous case, ' Let us/ says a 
 French writer l , ( see in woman nothing to trouble us, nothing 
 mysterious : let us strip her of all this romance : (dp&uitton- 
 la de tout ce lyrisme) which we throw, as it were long veils, 
 upon our troubles : let her for us be truly nature (qiielle soit 
 pour nous vraiment nature).' We know what to say to this 
 proposal of M. Barres ; or if any one will not say it, he can 
 hear it from Wordsworth. It is well for certain purposes 
 that we should, as he puts it, know the very pulse of the 
 woman's machine : should, i. e. know that like all humanity 
 she is animal, weak, capricious, fearful : should remember 
 that, as Schopenhauer was fond of putting it, ' under, or, 
 if you prefer it, over the lady, there is always the woman.' 
 But it is, on the other hand, emphatically not well that, as 
 the same Schopenhauer was inclined to do, the man should so 
 far strip himself of humanity as to wrench with brutal hand 
 from her all that developed and ordered grace and spirit of 
 womanliness which, through the age-long operation of asso- 
 ciation in the family bond with all its varying types, in social 
 organization, in natural union, have made her, though not 
 less 'truly nature,' still also and thereby, 
 
 ' A spirit still, and bright 
 With something of an angel light.' 
 
 And now for the application of the analogy. It is well 
 that the scholar and the critic should try to penetrate beneath 
 the accumulation of rags and patchwork which, they say, have 
 gathered about the ipsissima verba of a sacred book. The 
 present generation fancies, and in some respects no doubt 
 rightly fancies, that it has at length learned the right art 
 of interpreting the texts ; that by scholarship and history 
 it enters more sympathetically into their innermost central 
 meaning. On the whole I agree : I do not like to quarrel 
 with the Zeitgeist. Yet, at the risk of being more than 
 usually frivolous, I must just suggest a doubt as to our 
 
 1 M. Barres, Un Homme Libre, p. 44.
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 135 
 
 all-sufficiency. We all sometimes in a vacant hour turn to 
 old numbers of Punch, If we go back thirty years, we 
 come in its pages upon bonnets, dresses, shawls, which, in 
 proportion to our degrees of youth, we pronounce hideous, 
 tasteless, unnatural, or at best quaint, such a contrast do 
 they present to the naturalness of the present style. Yet 
 some of us can remember a time when, for reasons I stay 
 not to inquire into, these same pieces of garb seemed to earn 
 quite other epithets. So in other more scientific fields perhaps 
 I will not go further towards prophecy it may happen 
 that a later time surveying the labours of the nineteenth 
 century may pronounce our most impartial criticism preten- 
 tious and absurd ; or, without going so far, may venture to 
 say that our critics were under the influence of their time, 
 and saw its ideas and beliefs reflected in the works, which 
 they professed with due impartiality to do no more than 
 expound. 
 
 But, however this may be, one thing needs remembering; 
 and that is that all the books on which humanity has fed, 
 humanity has in its turn made to develop new growths. 
 And the same is true of its songs and its pictures. Have 
 you realized that those books we turn to, not often perhaps if 
 compared with our vulgar readings, but again and again when 
 we would, as it were, bathe ourselves (se retremper) in the fresh 
 bracing pools of some mill stream : that these books have 
 much written, so to say, in sympathetic ink between the lines ; 
 or, changing the metaphor, that the letters in them quiver and 
 glow in the throb of historical emotion ? A recent Hebrew 
 scholar e. g. gives us a book on the origin of the Psalms, and 
 their religious significance. In some respects it probably 
 matters little, and for the sake of truth and accuracy it may 
 be even a great gain, to ascertain that these lyrics are not the 
 effusions of that somewhat excessively amorous and cruel 
 adventurer king, David ben-Isai, but the outpourings of a 
 later, more cultured, and more devout, and even a more
 
 136 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 patriotic age. But the main thing- after all for humanity 
 at large, even for the scholar in his ex-scholar moments, is 
 the mental, moral, religious sustainment or inspiration these 
 hymns afford to universal human life in its struggle onwards 
 and upwards. It is the temptation of the scholar, especially 
 of the critical scholar, to isolate the text from its comment. 
 For purely historical purposes that is entirely right, and we 
 are not likely to have too much of it. But all the same, none 
 of us can afford to be pure or mere historians. The danger 
 therefore is that we go back to the ' beggarly elements/ under 
 the impression that we are thus getting nearer the real truth. 
 It is vain to talk of reading these books without note or 
 comment. The comment also has in course of time become 
 part of the text. Every reader is trained in a traditional inter- 
 pretation which, with what ability he may have, he helps to 
 develop and hand on. There is no private right of inter- 
 pretation, if that means privilege : private right is based on 
 common law. 
 
 And now to return. The Platonist idealism, which has 
 largely entered into the formation of the Christian idea, and 
 has again issued from it to form quasi-independent schemes 
 of idealism and spiritualism, has generally been disposed to 
 regard nature as an enemy, but also as an illusory enemy, 
 already in essence vanquished. Whereas, on the materialistic 
 theory, the sudden rise of the intellectual and moral warrior, 
 who defied the hosts of nature, is utterly surprising and un- 
 explained ; here, on the idealist hypothesis, the spirit is 
 distinctly declared to have descended from above and from 
 outside. ' Intelligence/ repeats Aristotle, following an older 
 theory, 'comes in from the door' (QvpaQtv). The soul has 
 come from heaven, i. e. from the supernal abodes of the 
 highest mind, to enter into and dwell with man. Itself 
 a divine germ, it has assumed the human form ; or, in 
 metaphor, it has entered a tabernacle of earth. In that 
 post, however, it has its task before it. It, a pure intelli-
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 137 
 
 gence, must co-operate with creatures of lower breed : as 
 Plato in his figurative language puts it, the soul is a 
 charioteer who can only drive through life with the help 
 of two unequally yoked horses, one gallant and violent, the 
 other sluggish and cowardly : or, as he varies his metaphor, 
 the man we seem at first sight alone to see, has, lurking 
 under that fair exterior, a being half -lion, half -serpent, and 
 another many-headed creature, more complex and grotesque 
 than poet's fancy has feigned. Thus, at least, in moods 
 which the dominant current of the later Platonism loved to 
 retrace though I think they are after all a by-path, and not 
 the royal highway which the great Athenian himself chiefly 
 loved thus did Plato present man in antagonism with what 
 some will now call his nature. In Plato's speech, nature is 
 the eternal order of righteousness, the law that works through 
 reason into good. A later age, indeed, came to speak of body, 
 or, as it is otherwise called, ' the flesh/ under the name of 
 nature. This, however, is not Plato's phraseology : nor is it the 
 phraseology of St. Paul. St. Paul's Greek and his philosophy 
 may not be always unexceptionable, but in his letter to the 
 converts at Rome, he is perfectly unmistakeable in the dis- 
 tinction between nature (which is the great common law for 
 all mankind, of which Judaic law is only as it were an 
 appendix or special edition, issued for the use of a stiff-necked 
 race) and those evil lusts which are against nature ; even as by 
 the law of the flesh he means the principle of an imperfect 
 life, which narrows its aim, and perverts its proportions to 
 partial, one-sided, fragmentary issues. It was a degradation 
 of language, in which Christian theologians have perhaps 
 helped, to speak of nature as the adversary of spirit. 
 
 Of the two views that wrestle in Plato's mind, the one sees 
 Nature as the starting-point of Spirit, as a germ which by 
 physical discipline and the moralizing stimulus of society (as 
 expressed e. g. in art and letters) may become more adequate 
 as a vehicle of the highest life. This tone of thought is
 
 138 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 shown in the contempt he pours on those who spoke as if 
 virtue was against the grain, was an unnatural thing. On 
 the contrary, he says, virtue is the very path of nature. And 
 to the last his theme is that the righteous are by nature happy, 
 and the happy must be righteous. Still, in his later writings, 
 a change has come over his spirit. He sees the world lying 
 largely in wickedness. Natural influences seem banded against 
 the life of the highest soul : and an ethics of asceticism ever 
 and anon crosses the older creed of free self -development. 
 The good recedes into the innermost soul and the utter- 
 most sphere of reality. Man's true life is elsewhere, and 
 not here. 
 
 Of these two views let me add only one word more before 
 I pass on. I have sympathies with both. The realistic or 
 materialistic interpretation of nature and man may be imper- 
 fect and may be inconsistent : yet it has at least, I think, the 
 merit of seeking to found itself on facts, not on illusions. Its 
 facts may be narrowly apprehended, crudely interpreted : yet 
 there is such a thing as a sturdy independence, which refuses 
 to borrow a crust or a coal which it deems not honourably 
 earned, and will rather fight the world starving than beg or 
 steal ideal hopes and transcendental beliefs. Of the idealistic 
 hypothesis, on the other hand, I will only say that it may be 
 true : in some essential points, perhaps, it must be true. But, 
 as it is ordinarily stated, it soars too daringly into the realm 
 of the unknown ; it draws too large cheques on the bank of 
 our ' ethical needs ' ; and above all, it introduces too vast and 
 arbitrary a gulf in the order of development of reality. If 
 animal life, though a new thing not reducible to its ante- 
 cedents, yet comes in the order of nature as their due sequel ; 
 in like manner we must postulate that the spiritual life, the 
 life of righteousness, beauty, and goodness, shall be a con- 
 tinuation of the same natural, which is thus in its essence also 
 a supernatural, order. 
 
 The soul, mind, or spirit, then, with all its objective, or
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 139 
 
 more than barely objective, creations in morals, science, art, 
 religion, is born, generated, produced in the social medium, 
 through the effort long prolonged, intermittently pursued, 
 and often misdirected, an effort of social co-operation. There 
 is, of course, in man, as in all animals ' that nourish a blind 
 life within the brain/ an animal sensibility, an animal pru- 
 dence, which we call instinct. There is in them, just as with 
 due degrees of variation in all living things, a sensitive soul : 
 it may be, if we follow the hypothesis of Fechner, that such 
 a soul is to be found even in stars, as in planets ; for they also 
 in their way exhibit what we call vital phenomena, the 
 appearances or exercises of living. And this soul, if we 
 for the present restrict our consideration to the animal world, 
 comes into existence under conditions of which biology can 
 give an approximately correct account. What is more, this 
 vital principle/ the principle of animal life, is not, as the 
 so-called ' vitalists ' are alleged to hold, a locally separate 
 being or presiding genius who sets in motion, guides, and 
 controls the whole stream and circulation of the vital phe- 
 nomena. That old idea so far as it was ever distinctly held 
 by any thinker, and not merely an attempt to express in 
 abstract generality the supposed kernel of popular opinion 
 on the subject was no doubt an analogue of other old- 
 fashioned ideas, not even now extinct in the sphere of 
 government and politics. In the pre-scientific rnind, in the 
 imaginative popular way of looking at fact, in the Vorstellung , 
 as Hegel would say, rather than the Hegrif, the initiative of 
 social effort was believed to lie with a governing power, and 
 to proceed thence to all the periphery of the body politic. So 
 in the world- government, God, to Leibnitz for example, was 
 the sovereign being, or the architectonic mind. And in 
 the microcosm, in the human mind itself, the will and the 
 intellect, the superior or aristocratic faculties, were understood 
 to rule the inner world, and to give the starting-point for 
 action and reflection.
 
 140 G1FFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 In the modern time, which we sometimes call the scientific, 
 and sometimes (with the qualification I before indicated) the 
 democratic time, we neither think so, nor, whatever our 
 politics be, can we think so. In this one point the modern 
 advanced liberal touches the conservative, and makes one of 
 those recurring conjunctions of extremes which puzzle the 
 adherent of the old party lines of distinction. The new idea, 
 indeed, is difficult to express, for its very nature is to be a 
 vague strong feeling and therefore inexpressible : once you try 
 to define it, either side will protest that was not their meaning. 
 It is, if I may again quote M. Barres l , ' the feeling that the 
 masses alone make us touch the foundation of humanity : the 
 people have revealed to us the human substance, the sap 
 of the world : or ' In coming near the simple, I have seen 
 how under each of my acts there co-operates with conscious 
 activity an activity which is unconscious, an activity like that 
 which is seen in the animals and the plants : I have simply 
 added to it reflection/ Or again : ' Yes, this force which 
 agitates in our veins, this absolute " me " which tends to 
 wurdre in the deplorable "me" that I am, this perpetual 
 restlessness, which is the condition of our perpetual coming to 
 be, they know it as we do, those humble companions, the goat 
 and the ass, which Berenice takes out to walk on the common. 
 In each is a superior being who would fain realize itself.' 
 Or again : ' It is instinct much more than analysis which 
 makes the future. It is instinct alone which dominates the 
 unexplored parts of my being, it alone which enables me to 
 substitute for the " me " I appear the " me " towards which 
 I march with eyes bandaged.' In one word, it is the idea of 
 the social solidarity as controlling and enabling individual 
 performance, of the whole psychic organism as a higher thing 
 than a mere system or hierarchy of powers, of the world itself 
 as immanent in God and God immanent in the world, which 
 rules our psychology, sociology and theology. 
 
 1 Le Jardin de Berenice, pp. 175-183.
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 141 
 
 I shall not for one moment seek to ignore the fact that the 
 new phraseology has its dangers like the old. We fight for 
 a conception, we get it : and yet we are not happy. Even the 
 successful suitor who has just got his mistress's yea- word, is 
 said to have a momentary shiver of self-searching. None of 
 these things, taken by themselves, can satisfy the souFs 
 infinite thirst for truth, beauty, good. Yet may one more 
 than another be, for the individual and the age, the appointed 
 means whereby he may not merely discern the relations of 
 things, but which is the unum necessarium may, to the 
 measure of his ability, set his life on everlasting foundations. 
 
 But those who have accepted the conclusions of biology, 
 are less consenting when they are asked to follow the march 
 onward into sociology. They admit that science is within her 
 rights, when she declares that life, animal and vegetable, is 
 a phenomenon equally open to study with the phenomena of 
 light and heat ; equally inexplicable, if we insist on going back 
 to an ' original' or ' ultimate' force ; equally intelligible, if we 
 have regard to the laws and conditions of its existence and 
 development. They admit that the power of the organism 
 cannot be assigned, either in perpetuity or in trust, to any 
 archaeus or single agent located in itself. They are content 
 to define life as the consensus of vital function, without feel- 
 ing much put about by the remark of that scare-crow, the 
 formal logician, who tells them that their definition involves 
 tautology. As if, foreooth, every definition that is worth its 
 salt did not, overtly or covertly, contain a circuits in flefi- 
 niendo, or, in other words, return into itself. 
 
 But when they come to the intellectual Psyche, what the 
 Aristotelians and their successors down to Kant's time called 
 the superior faculties, i. e. the intellect, reason, will, conscience, 
 aesthetic sense, they cry out against Materialism, Natu- 
 ralism, Empiricism and so on. They cry out : ( These things 
 are from above: they have a higher origin than the merely 
 sensitive and appetitive quasi-animal faculties.' And they do
 
 142 GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 well to cry out : these things are from above : these things 
 have a higher origin. Their mistake is to introduce the divine 
 stage-manager through a trap-door, or to lower him in a swing ; 
 to add, suddenly and at one stroke of magic, something which 
 the original structure of the play we call the universe, a play 
 into which he has certainly put himself, would not naturally 
 evolve by itself. One of the most significant utterances of 
 Him who loved to call himself Man (for that I need perhaps 
 hardly remind you is the plain English for the Semitic idiom 
 ' Son of Man ') is, t My Father goes on working, up to this 
 moment, and I work too.' Creation is incessant and per- 
 petual : the world is ever in the making : we do not know 
 what we are, because we know not yet what we shall be. 
 God, said the old legend, rested on the seventh day : but the 
 newer legend says with one voice, that God rests never, 
 neither slumbers nor sleeps; and with another voice that His 
 Sabbath remaineth for ever and ever. For if it be true even 
 of the human artist, that into his work he puts something of 
 himself, and that that something like the trees the ' laird ' 
 planted or bade his son plant will go on growing when he 
 lies sleeping; it is more emphatically true of the Divine 
 Artist or Artificer : for, with him, fine art and common 
 craftsmanship are indistinguishably one. The world is not 
 merely his work : it is, as Plato dared to say long ago in 
 bold metaphor, his own only offspring, his only-begotten, 
 the gradually realizing and realized image of himself, the 
 apparency (or, as it has been rendered, the glory, 5ou) of the 
 Father. 
 
 What we have said, then, was that the emergence of these 
 superior faculties in history by which I mean, not human 
 record but the process of becoming, or, as it is called, of 
 evolution is conditioned by the social effort of man; .of 
 man, i. e. originally to all appearance very like other animals, 
 but containing germs and tendencies unobserved, because 
 unsolicited, which would one day set him perspicuously dis-
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 143 
 
 tinct from those who yet are of his kind, the kindred of an 
 older lineage than stops at the days when Adam delved and 
 Eve span. Those things, powers and faculties, we have 
 called them, grow in him as a social being : a being, i. e. who 
 is born male and female, and so never quite without some 
 relations to pairing, to parentship, and blood - kindred ; who, 
 even apart from sexual ties, is forced, if he will live, to join 
 hand in hand, to lend a hand and an eye, to work for a 
 common aim ; who cannot be altogether alone at any moment 
 of life, and who, though common phrases seem to assert the 
 contrary, knows the pang of death through his ineradicable 
 sociality. 
 
 * Unassisted reason/ we heard the other day, ' is a fiction ' ; 
 that means that reason is the very breath of sociality. It is 
 not the work of the individual. What he ' is pleased to call 
 his mind ' is the evidence of something in him greater than 
 his narrower self. All that he is as a spiritual creature, he 
 is in the give and take of society. His own, as Shakespeare 
 has told us in Troihis and Cressida, is not his own till it 
 comes back to him from the life, eye, hand, of another 1 . 
 Our intellectual world, our morality, art and religion, are 
 built up, built up to some extent in each of us individually, 
 but always by an act which is collective and social. So 
 far this, perhaps, will be accepted. But I must press it 
 farther home. True, some will say, that the evidence forces 
 us to the conclusion that these objective and universal 
 creations just mentioned are the result of a national or tribal 
 co-operation. But surely you must admit on the other hand 
 that the human mind, and its superior faculties of will, 
 intellect, conscience, sense of beauty, religious sense, are 
 innate and original, the very substance and essence of man. 
 Well, without taking refuge in some obvious lurking places 
 suggested by the concluding terms, I will directly reply 
 with some hope of future counter-admission, that I cannot 
 
 1 Trail, and Cress, iii. 3. 96-123.
 
 144- GIFFORD LECTURES [ix 
 
 admit this proposition. I know nothing of faculties and 
 I doubt if you know much more, i. e. of faculties apart from 
 and utterly previous to their exercise. You would not probably 
 be in the way of saying 1 that a man runs because he has 
 a faculty of running, any more than you would repeat the 
 old joke, that opium causes sleep because it has a ( dormitive ' 
 faculty. The appeal to faculties is' very much like a justifica- 
 tion of one 'I think so' by another ' because I think so/ 
 Faculties are, firstly, only an inference, though I should like 
 to add a necessary inference, from the fact of their exercise. 
 If I did it, you say, I must have been able to do it, I must 
 have had a faculty for doing it. If you did it ! but are you 
 quite sure that you did it, you and you alone ? Or, is your 
 phrase an elliptical one ? Are you not, so to speak, sitting 
 in the chair of Nebuchadnezzar? That king (in a pretty 
 legend which the somewhat apocryphal book of Daniel has 
 preserved) was walking on the royal palace of Babylon, 
 and as he looked on his city for which he had done so much, 
 he could not refrain from saying were it but to himself : 
 * Is not this great Babylon which I have built by the might 
 of my power ? ' And, straightway, a voice fell from heaven : 
 the kingdom departed from him, he was driven out from 
 men and made his dwelling with the beasts of the field. 
 The punishment, you observe, is no arbitrary imposition : 
 it is only the acted, outwardized thought. For all that 
 glory of civilization, these fanes, academies, storehouses and 
 all they symbolize, were the combined work of uncounted 
 workers in many generations ; and he was but the foremost 
 minister of his kingdom, and, if you prefer it, the servus 
 servorum Dei. And as he said, so it was : he had dreamed 
 himself all alone, and alone he was, as one of the beasts of 
 the field. 
 
 True, where there is exercise, there must be faculty. If 
 it is done, it could (as least then) be done. But this some- 
 what trite or, as some call it, insignificant proposition hardly
 
 ix] MAN'S RELATION TO NATURE 145 
 
 warrants the assertion that each of us have the faculties 
 in question. You can, of course, carry on the war longer, 
 if you like; you can say, we must have had the faculty to 
 have the faculty we the individuals to become we the 
 social. But here I cease to pursue; if you adopt Scythian 
 tactics and retire into the wastes, I can do nothing : and 
 at present I am not prepared to follow the plan suggested 
 to Darius, and attack the sepulchres of your fathers. Let 
 me rather say, that, for all purposes of common intelligence, 
 real faculty is only where there is actuality: and that is only 
 in the reciprocal action and reaction of at least two agents, 
 or, if you prefer it, an agent and a patient, who are for ever 
 changing places. 
 
 But there is another thing to be said about the faculties, 
 which we thus severally tend to appropriate. When we have 
 them all before us, it gets a difficult matter to adjust their 
 mutual relationships. How far is conscience e. g. different 
 from will, or will different from intellect? How do they 
 severally stand to #, to our self or ego ? The phrenologist, 
 or, as we now know him, the brain physiologist, will perhaps 
 reply: 'Oh! but we have localized the faculties in the brain/ 
 I undei'stand they have localized, to a not very great extent, 
 and with some dispute, something in the brain : but I doubt 
 whether it is the faculties. I doubt whether you can, if 
 words are to be used plainly, speak of localizing faculties. 
 Perhaps, first, you will have to settle whether mind itself 
 is localized in the brain. That, some may answer, is a ' fore- 
 gone conclusion ' : to which, if I may give full meaning to 
 the words, I assent. ' If not there, then, where is it ? it 
 must be somewhere/ Well, these are questions I cannot 
 answer, or you insist on asking. Similarly, I cannot tell you 
 where God is : not that I do not draw a difference between 
 God and mind. God, it may be said, is everywhere: and 
 my mind, well, is not everywhere. One thing I will say : 
 as I do not know whether God is to be said to be within 
 
 L
 
 146 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 or without the world, so I cannot tell whether the mind 
 or soul is within or without the body. To fix your faith 
 on such words, is to play at metaphors with the Devil in 
 a game where he is almost sure to win. You do not, I pre- 
 sume, identify your heart, when you give it away, with the 
 central machinery of the blood-pump, nor is a broken heart 
 necessarily a rupture in the cardiac muscles. But you reply, 
 mind is a function of the brain, is it not? Happy, or shall 
 I say, unhappy man, to whom that ill-savoured word 'func- 
 tion ' gives repose. But, if I must use it, I will say : Yes, 
 mind is a function of brain, acting in conjunction with the 
 whole graduated universe of things. 
 
 At any rate, when we come to conscience, will, aesthetic 
 sense, we may cease to talk of brain localization. Of course, 
 these, like all mental exercise, involve action of brain cells : 
 they go, so to say, through certain tracts, and adopt certain 
 paths fitted for them. So some spiritual action uses the 
 hand, some the teeth, some the lungs. But it seems to me 
 as quaint to call this localization as it would be to say, digestion 
 resides in the stomach. These phrases, doubtless, have some 
 meaning, but it seems confusedly involved. No : it is in 
 the sphere of their action that we get the difference of 
 will and intellect, conscience and reason, intellect and aesthetic 
 sense. You gain nothing, and perhaps lose much, by hyposta- 
 tising a faculty of will, beside intellect. You will and 
 understand, you reason and have conscience : but if you 
 do, it is in the co-ordinated and combined work of society, 
 not by special drawers in your particular mind. Your reason 
 and conscience, your intelligent will, and your sense of God, 
 come to you in the course of an associate life, towards which 
 you co-operate : if they are in you, they are there as social 
 energies, for human service, and thereby for higher and wider 
 aims.
 
 MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION. THE MATERIAL BASIS 
 OF THE MORAL LIFE 
 
 THE question ' What is Civilization ? ' can, like many others, 
 be answered in two or three very different ways. We may, 
 for instance, looking round on the more striking- but familial- 
 features of our own national life and contrasting them with 
 others more remote or opposite in character, select certain of 
 these as marking out the boundaries of the word's denotation. 
 We know, of course, it is, indeed a commonplace and an 
 axiom, that we are a civilized people. And on these premises 
 it is concluded that civilization means railways, lighting of 
 streets by night, a certain legalized and moralized form of 
 marriage, the institution of property, churches, and so on, in 
 a list which may be as long, and consist of such items, as the 
 knowledge or aim of the observer suggests. Any group or 
 community of men which is without these features, or has 
 others opposite to them, is accordingly styled uncivilized. 
 We no longer for instance, at least in an offensively frank 
 way, buy our women to wife. That practice therefore stamps 
 a people as uncivilized. We no longer openly eat our fellow- 
 humans, though it is still a legitimate test of skill to be able 
 to prey upon our neighbours, and as an elegant phrase puts it, 
 suck their brains. The cannibal, therefore, is uncivilized. 
 We dress, or rather in ceremonious manner, we doubly dress, 
 when we dine : and the absence of clothes at the festive board 
 is a mark of uncivilizedness. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 So speaking, we take what we conceive as the essence of 
 our civilization to be an absolute standard, to be the civiliza- 
 tion of civilization; and every feature of it, except such as 
 those which we may, for some reason, think trivial or casual, 
 is regarded as an item in making up the total idea. A little 
 extension or experience, a little travel through history, helps 
 to dispel this illusion, or at least to modify it. Gradually, as 
 we escape from our ingrown prepossessions, and can look out 
 from a disinterested observer's standpoint, we come to speak 
 of a Greek, of an Egyptian, of a Chinese civilization, and the 
 rest. Of each of these foreign, and it may be vanished civili- 
 zations, we can, through the help of books and other monu- 
 ments, construct a picture, approximately correct : not, of 
 course, quite so complete or so well-compacted as we can 
 form of our own state; more confined to externals, and pene- 
 trating less to what is within, but still in essence a picture of 
 the same style as that which we delineate of our home 
 product. Each such delineation is what we term a ' descrip- 
 tion ' : and description, though the logicians seem very unwill- 
 ing to admit and register this plain fact, is, always of an 
 individual instance, always a constructed percept, never 
 a concept or general idea. And, so long as we keep to this 
 field of individuals, and do not dig deeper down to their basis, 
 that is, to the universal or general (which again, as the 
 logician knows, is always the sphere of definition as opposed 
 to description), there is really no good reason for drawing the 
 line anywhere, and saying that here civilization stops. Once 
 you cease to regard your own peculiar property, your private 
 and particular civilization, as the one and sole type of real 
 civilization, you are set moving on an inclined plane ; and, as 
 historians of civilization, you will have to speak of a Hottentot 
 or an Eskimo civilization. But having gone so far, can you 
 stop even there, and if so, why? Just as religion means, 
 first, and vulgarly, your religion : the dominant or predomi- 
 nant religion of your nation and time : then, secondly, a set of
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 149 
 
 phenomena, found in different and perhaps in all races, occu- 
 pying a similar or analogous place in their national life to 
 what ours does for us : so with civilization. Our own civili- 
 zation we know in a way, however imperfectly, both from 
 without and within, subjectively and objectively : the civili- 
 zation of others mainly from without, objectively. But 
 neither of these methods of knowledge is finally satisfactory. 
 
 The historical outlook inevitably leads to comparisons : and 
 comparisons lead to criticism, to selection, to judgements of 
 good or bad, and to the formation of a scale or order of merit. 
 Our ' boasted civilization ' is weighed in the balance against 
 others, known or imagined : and sometimes, and at some 
 points, it is pronounced wanting. With an imperfect con- 
 sciousness of what and why, there grows up in the mind thus 
 reflecting a sense of a direction or purpose, of a main end or 
 principle in the complex structure of civilization, by which its 
 parts and members can be judged as well or ill developed, as 
 degenerations or steps of progress, as survivals that have lost 
 meaning, or as rudiments which apparently have not yet 
 wholly found it. It may, as just hinted, be sometimes diffi- 
 cult to say in clear words what this central idea is : for, at 
 first, it is only a felt and experienced influence, it acts 
 instinctively, and, if you like, blindly as a clairvoyante, before 
 it comes to seize itself in the light of clear self -apprehension. 
 We come thus to a third stage in our way to the meaning of 
 civilization, in which we seek to get at the unity, which 
 underlies and holds together the various phenomena of our 
 own civilization, and which also is the organizing tie in all. 
 And, as a first step in that direction, we must look for what 
 Goethe used to call the Urphdnomen, the typical and, as it 
 were, aboriginal phenomenon : the single example which 
 projects the completest image of the fact in all its essential 
 elements : the body, as it were, which lets the soul most 
 translucently show through it. 
 
 In one way, the way, we may call it, of Nominalism, it is
 
 150 G1FFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 easy enough to see that civilization is citizenship. The fact 
 that it points to, or means, is a ' city/ And when we say 
 a city, we mean, if we but think of it, any gathering or 
 association of human beings which, within limits larger or 
 smaller and with more or less permanence, has a kind of 
 independent completeness ; which in a visible way shows 
 a co-ordination and subordination of individual actions to- 
 wards some common end that belongs to all, and can be 
 enjoyed by each. A city, in this sense, is equally to be seen 
 in the group of tents which shelters an Australian tribe, in 
 the commonwealth of ancient Greece, in the kingdom of 
 Israel, in the Chinese empire, in the United States. The 
 name, however, belongs originally, properly, and grammati- 
 cally, to only one period of these historical formations. The 
 city, as such, appears for the first time in Greece; and later, 
 by imitation, in Rome, in the Hellenized east, in mediaeval 
 Europe : and thence, by an extension backwards and forwards, 
 the name gets applied to all organized communities of men. 
 But why, one may ask, first in Greece? Because so at 
 least we can partially answer the question in Greece, and 
 especially at one period of Greek history, the inner thought or 
 idea took perceptible shape, visible form. A city, according 
 to Aristotle, the ancient theorist who has tried to tell us what 
 the Greeks meant by what they named a TTO'AIS, is of such 
 a size that you can easily survey it in a single view, of such 
 population that every citizen may know in a rough way every 
 other, and where all may be able to meet in such a place that 
 one speaker's voice can reach them all. This, you observe, is 
 unity to sight as well as unity to thought : it is idea wedding 
 fact in a very palpable, tangible way. But, we may, I think, 
 go beyond these Aristotelian notes of what makes the city 
 a perceived or seen unity. In various other directions, it had 
 no less visible and sensible symbols of spiritual oneness. It 
 had one central fortress, perhaps, where in extremity it might 
 concentrate its militant life; it had one temple, or it might
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 151 
 
 be, a conjunct group of such ; it had one market-place, where 
 the citizens saw their industrial and commercial unity realized, 
 and where, as the hours went round, the business of chaffering 
 about the merchandise oH each gave place to the business of 
 the common good; it had one, or an ordered series of great 
 common festivals, half-religious, half-social (if we use our 
 analytic terms to describe them), into which the whole com- 
 munity threw itself with zest and zeal ; it had, perhaps, one 
 common, and perhaps open-air, exhibition of art and litera- 
 ture, which was a gathering-place of the community in which 
 it specially felt itself one ; it had its meeting-place for the 
 fathers of the city, its public hearth with the ever-burning 
 hearth-fire of the land, and its public table where those 
 worthy of general honour found a home; it had its own 
 comparatively comprehensive yet simple code of laws ; and its 
 one great burial-place, where the living could linger and 
 dream with their departed. 
 
 Contrast all this with, say, Glasgow. There may be 
 physical obstructions other than size which here make a 
 synoptic view of the whole city impossible : but, even apart 
 from fog and smoke, it is plain that Aristotle's conditions 
 would not be realizable, even in a single one of its parlia- 
 mentary divisions. But it is when we come to the signs and 
 symbols of mental and moral unity that the contrast of the 
 modern city stands most obvious. There are some attempts, 
 costly and even grandiose, to give expression to municipal 
 unity, and what a fragment of unity that is, after all ! but 
 the most ardent admirer of Glasgow will scarcely assert that 
 they are adequate, whether one looks solely to the place they 
 take in the mere field of observation, or considers rather how 
 far they possess that vigour, that dynamic activity, that hold 
 on the lives and sentiments of men, which was exercised by 
 the monuments of Greece, and by many imitators of Greece in 
 later times. But, while one says this, one should add that 
 other things are to be taken into account. The modern city
 
 152 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 has an immense scheme of adjustments and arrangements, 
 a mechanism which works to keep it together, which is very 
 efficient, and yet not very conspicuous to the outward eye. It 
 is a rational or intellectual rather than a visible or audible 
 machinery. This rational machinery makes little show and 
 has but slender bulk. It does by a touch, a pen-stroke, what 
 in more sensuous ages required a vast display of force. What 
 in the sensible sphere rings loud and shows clear, that, when 
 translated into intellectual methods, grows a thin but efficient 
 breath. And yet, while we admit all this, the want is not 
 thereby made up. Still, as Coleridge says, the heart doth 
 need a language. Man does not live by forms or words : he 
 needs also the actual bread of deeds. The word by itself, the 
 bare general, unimpassioned, mechanical, reasoning method, 
 will never be enough without the bread of visible ceremony. 
 No doubt, if we may take an illustration, the civil marriage 
 by the formless formality of registration is the main thing ; 
 and it might be the sole thing, if we were only reasoning 
 machines. But as yet we are not citizens of Laputa, we are 
 still human, i. e. weak and reasonable. There is, as Plato 
 says, a child in each human being, a child that walks by sight 
 and touch, not by faith ; there is, not merely in women but 
 also in men, not merely in plain men but even in business 
 men and rationalists, a child-like being which craves for its 
 due, the meed of sensibility, the intuitive symbol. And what 
 is true of marriage, is true in a different way of all the organs 
 and systems in social life. Concept without percept, says 
 Kant, is empty. The truth has not merely to be said, and 
 posted up in formula, it must be done and made visible hour 
 by hour, day by day. The very word for the Greek city will 
 help to illustrate. We translate it, awkwardly enough, by 
 the phrase c city-state/ That is as if we were to say of a 
 human being (and it is what perhaps we dare say of the 
 fewest), that he or she was body-soul : the body the trans- 
 parent and perfect temple of the spirit : a dress, as it were, so
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 153 
 
 absolutely well-fitting, as to reveal while it veiled. And as it 
 is only a perfectly shaped person who can afford to wear 
 a perfectly fitting dress, so only a perfect state, which is the 
 spirit, can be embodied in a clear- formed city. 
 
 Civilization, then, was embodied, or seemed or be embodied, 
 at one period or rather instant of history, in a city. But 
 before it reached that point of development, before the spirit 
 had visibly come to dwell in mortal body, it had run through 
 a whole series of less adequate forms : and again, after it 
 reached that form, it has had to recommence the same 
 problem but with larger data, less easily manageable con- 
 ditions. Greece, as it were, created one visible form of union, 
 as an earlier world had created the family : and again and 
 again its example has been imitated, no doubt with much 
 divergence and defect, as e. g. by the Italian communes of the 
 middle ages, and similar institutions. But, partly through 
 the ever-increasing size of cities themselves, partly through 
 the further need for enabling several cities to form a lasting 
 and stable union, the social evolution of the modern world 
 has been towards an organization of a machinery which should 
 render immensely larger associations possible. The main 
 interest of this movement in its recent phases has, however, lain 
 in the discovery of the mechanical conditions of organization, 
 i. e. the means by which space and time can be practically 
 obliterated, and rational or intelligible methods of combination 
 made to operate, where the old sensible methods had become 
 impossible. This kind of progress is one that is ever going 
 on, even within the range of our organic senses. Thus the 
 mere primitive senses themselves, touch, with its specifications 
 and developments in taste and smell, have been in the higher 
 animals supplemented and in part superseded by eye and ear ; 
 each, in its own peculiar way, a vastly more rational sense 
 than that which it supplanted, bringing us by the mechanism 
 of light and sound waves into contact with regions to which 
 the primal touch seemed utterly inadequate to reach. And
 
 154 G1FFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 yet the rational beauties of a sight and sound world fail 
 ultimately to satisfy us. They are only surrogates at the 
 best. In the stress of strong emotion, in the keen instants of 
 life and of death, we seek to go back to the weak and beggarly 
 rudiments, the animal elements of mere touch. Even touch, 
 it may be said, does not bring spirit close to spirit. Yet the 
 hand grasp, if real, and not a mere play of callisthenics, is our 
 nearest approach in the sense world to the soul to soul of the 
 spirit. But in the human world, the chain of means and 
 methods between us as the agent or source, and us as the 
 recipient or end of action, is mainly a system of external 
 material things. The age of machinery is upon us, as, in one 
 way, it always has been ; but the chain of means by which we 
 come in touch with ourselves grows longer, the network of 
 mechanism grows denser and less penetrable. The vast range 
 of instruments, set in order and system, rises in pseudo- 
 independence, a self-subsistent thing, a real world, almost 
 like a second and more soulless nature, standing imperious 
 between our needs and their satisfaction. The prophetically 
 speculative chemist enthusiastically tells us that ere long we 
 shall cease to go to the animal or vegetable kingdom for our 
 foods, and that he will feed us by new methods from his 
 laboratory. Animals and plants will be allowed or encouraged 
 by destructive agencies to disappear, and man alone, by 
 a series of mechanical creatures of his own devising, will 
 gradually convert the realm of nature into his pabulum 
 and his dress. 
 
 These things may be only in their extravagance a dream, 
 and, as many may think, a hideous dream. But that they ex- 
 press a direction, and a prominent direction, in modern civiliza- 
 tion is undoubted. Poets, said old Homer, are strong in fiction, 
 and the modern scientific inventor occasionally runs them 
 hard in his promises. We have fallen on what Hesiod might 
 have called an iron age : in which the machinery of means 
 makes us almost lose sight of ends. Civilization has come to
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 155 
 
 stand for the means of civilization. But, after all, the life is 
 more than the food, whether that life and that food be bodily 
 or spiritual : and what we shall put on, is not as important 
 as what, within our clothes, we are. Like Martha, we are 
 careful and troubled about many things ; but many things 
 are not needed. The necessaries of life, as Jesus taught her, 
 are but few, perhaps but one ; but beyond the necessaries, 
 which are but means, come the real goods and true ends, the 
 things which, if chosen, are a good part that can never be 
 taken away. 
 
 ' The world/ says Wordsworth, as said the apostles before 
 him, 'is too much with us/ What is this world, against 
 which the religious man and the poet raise their voice ? It is 
 the skeleton, the carcase, the dry bones of life: it is the 
 machinery of living, left apart from the ultimate ends which 
 it subserves. The fool in the parable built larger barns and 
 increased his stores. He had multiplied machinery and 
 thought he had perfected organization. But organization 
 in its truth is machinery plus a soul, a heart, a life. These 
 alone are spiritual stores such as thieves cannot steal. ' To 
 love the world ' in this technical sense is to be devoted to the 
 things which are the means of true and good life, as if they 
 were ends in themselves. Property, wealth, health, honour, 
 and all institutions are goods ; but they are good for certain 
 ends more ultimate, or, if you like it, more fundamental. If 
 you seek them for themselves, and not for the service, the 
 action, they render possible, you become an idolater, a world- 
 worshipper. You are, in New Testament phrase, godless (or 
 without God) in the world. Without God, in one sense, no 
 one can be. But each man can, if he will, ignore him without 
 whom he cannot be. The old monastic ethics of the mediaeval 
 church said, in its bald and drastic way, that the flesh was 
 foul and devilish. Wherein lay the foulness and the possession 
 by the devil, thus attributed to the flesh and the world ? The 
 flesh that is so stigmatized is the body of one who has
 
 156 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 forgotten that the body is what it is by a great co-operation ; 
 that it has been wrought by kindred, parents, and society ; 
 that it is not its own, but bought by a great price, the burdens 
 carried by fatherhood and motherhood, by the whole society 
 in which it has been reared. Every body is a product of the 
 social capital, an investment of social energy and care. It has 
 a debt upon it from which it can never be emancipated. That 
 body which is stigmatized as the flesh, is a body of one who holds 
 it as his absolute own, an estate without debt or mortgage, to 
 dispose of as his separate soul may direct. Always, though 
 not solely a means, it has been made merely an end. 
 
 Not different is it with the world. The world, the materials 
 or mechanism of civilization, is also a social product. The 
 world is the realm of outward things, into which man has put 
 his activity, and through which .he has sought his satisfaction. 
 It came into existence, and can only be maintained in existence, 
 by constant effort and exercise, and by conjunct effort and 
 exercise. Every item is the fruit of consideration and service 
 from countless sources. Our comfort, our very existence, in 
 even the smallest matters depends upon the co-operation of 
 a complex of causes and energies, which no mathematician 
 could estimate. In our superficial moods, when we skim the 
 newspaper, we are sometimes ready to cry out at the iniquity, 
 the malice, the selfishness of men. But we may rest assured 
 that in the main it is far otherwise. The psalmist who said : 
 ' All men are liars/ was guilty in his haste of a double exag- 
 geration. All men certainly are not. But not even any man 
 is wholly a liar : he has his exceptions, and, if we knew him 
 better, we should find they were many. It is even doubtful 
 whether we can safely say of any one : He lies. Politeness 
 after all is nearer, as usual, to the truth, when it forbids such 
 language. For to lie, when we come to think of it, implies, 
 to make it complete, a diabolic malice which it is hard to 
 attribute to any one bearing the human form. Our coarse, 
 hasty judgement lumps all the qualities of a human being
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 157 
 
 under one head which he casually presents to us. He is 
 a thief, an adulterer, a liar, a murderer, and therefore bad 
 irretrievably and utterly bad. Can any good thing come out 
 of that ruffianly and barbarous land of Nazareth ? And it is 
 true that one fault by the logic of fact tends to entail another. 
 Yet it is also true that utter badness is, so far as we follow the 
 indications of experience, impossible. Even the vilest helps 
 in many, almost infinite ways, to keep together the political 
 frame. He is a thief, we say: but there is honour, and 
 a fortiori honesty even among thieves. Vice is possible, only 
 because its opposite, common, unrecognized virtue is so super- 
 latively dominant. The weakest, equally, we may say, with 
 the strongest, when either contribution is alike necessary, 
 help to create the materials of civilization ; the directing head 
 must be supported by the labouring hand ; and unless the 
 labouring hand gives free co-operation, born of a partly free 
 initiative, all the wisdom of social architects will be ineffective. 
 The leader, the director, can only lead and direct by the self- 
 leading and self-direction of those he yet is well said to lead 
 and direct. ' What/ asks one, ' moves the bell-wether ? ' 
 Who leads the leader ? Who sets the fashion ? Who forms 
 public opinion ? And the answer is, that in all these questions, 
 by the very way of asking, the answer is made impossible. 
 There is no independent starting-point of motion : no merely 
 passive units waiting to be led. The waiting units are silently 
 but surely giving their own direction : and he is the wise 
 leader in politics, or elsewhere, who, as it were, can hear 
 the grass growing, can by anticipation catch the first faint 
 breath of the coming storm. The dumb cattle need the 
 herdsman, yet the herdsman, to be worth much, must have 
 some insight of sympathy with the dumb herd he seems 
 to guide. 
 
 But here, as in the case of the corporeal organism, so when 
 he looks upon the part of social product, the world next to 
 himself, the individual may easily forget the social origin and
 
 158 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 therefore the social debt. He may look upon the means of 
 civilization as his own to be done with as he pleases. Or, for- 
 getting the end for which they exist, he may treat them as ends 
 in themselves. The world is at first the name for the mass, 
 ultimately the whole mass, of material things, considered as 
 means or machinery by which we may be, each of us, all that 
 we would be; i.e. means of self-realization. But when we 
 say self-realization, let us guard against a mistake. There is 
 a self which realizes and a self which is realized. They are, 
 and they are not, the same. The one is the germ, the 
 beginning ; the other the end, the full-grown organism ; 
 between them lies a world, an economy of means and ends, 
 a passage from all emptiness to all fulness. Yet in the 
 emptiness there was more than seemed present. For in that 
 germ, in that human thing, there dwelt all the fulness of 
 godhead, and the end was what it was, because omnipotence 
 lay in the cradle at the beginning. 
 
 We are perhaps now in a position to answer the question 
 what is civilization? We may (i) identify it with certain 
 objects, a collection or aggregate of things, a stock of objective 
 goods or materials, a machinery of useful and pleasant things, 
 of which we can draw up a list more or less complete. We 
 sometimes call it material civilization, and include in it 
 clothes, railways, &c., and in so styling it, we may perhaps 
 tend to despise it. Thus we are sometimes said to civilize 
 a country, when we get its inhabitants into clothes and 
 facilitate their means of communication. (2) In a natural 
 revulsion from all this we may declare that civilization is an 
 inner subjective thing, a state of mind and character. There 
 has been created a common medium, a social atmosphere, in 
 which the strangeness, uncouthness, roughness of individua- 
 lities ceases to trouble. This is formal, just as the other was 
 material civilization. Irregularities have been polished off, or, 
 at least, a world of common social forms has been created 
 society in the narrower sense a world of culture, of education,
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 159 
 
 regarded as the means for making us all citizens in this 
 world, ' the world ' as it is called. In this connexion we may 
 almost say that civilitas, which means something more com- 
 prehensive, has been well rendered as urbanity, civility, 
 politeness. It is an admirable and a necessary quality, at the 
 very root of much that is good. But it is obviously an inward 
 which is very much of an outward. At the best, it is only 
 a manner, a hypocrisy, which well imitates the deeper sense 
 of solidarity. The real unity of society may have gone while 
 the appearance of it still remains ; there is a sort of equality, 
 but there is no fraternity. (3) Civilization in the fuller sense 
 is the union, or, to say it better, the identity, i. e. the being-in- 
 oneness, of outer and inner, of subjective and objective. But 
 when we say, union or identity, we must note that this is not 
 juxtaposition or addition. It is not enough merely to add to 
 the abundance of material civilization a sufficient extension of 
 literary culture, of manners, of common sociality. The two 
 elements must become in a deeper way one. The material 
 must embody the formal; the intellectual life grow out of the 
 corporeal. Poetry, art, literature, must begin from home, 
 not take their inspiration from an alien world. And material 
 civilization must become the visibility of the spirit. Instead 
 then of the verbal admission of civility that we are all in 
 a way fellow- workers and have in some sort a common right, 
 what is wanted is the practical carrying out of that idea in 
 every detail of reality. A community is civilized in which 
 the solidarity of human effort is the first and foremost 
 principle, in which citizenship is realized as the governing 
 idea of all life. But realized and real it must be, and not 
 merely acknowledged as a mental principle or in words and 
 forms. A community is not civilized in which the subordina- 
 tion of all the materials of civilization to the commonweal 
 does not receive palpable expression. That is the point for 
 which the Socialists fight, however much they may sometimes 
 lose sight of it in side issues. It is an aim not, indeed,
 
 160 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 probably to be reached by what in their sense is called the 
 ' Socialization ' of the means of production. 
 
 If, however, it be important to note that civilization is at 
 its height morality ; that, in other words, the matter and the 
 form of civilization both receive their justification and sancti- 
 fication from the life of the spirit which they further and 
 realize; it is not less important, on the other hand, to note 
 that for morality the material conditions are all-essential, and, 
 indeed, are more than mere conditions : or, to put it otherwise, 
 they are not purely 'material' conditions, as that word is usually 
 understood, but themselves products and parts of the spiritual 
 life. It is true that the ordinary observer of modern times 
 has been apt to draw distinction between the moral life and 
 the economic or industrio-commercial life very much to the 
 glorification of the former. Yet, as against this, it must be 
 said that industry and trade are intrinsically parts of the moral 
 life, and that, in so far as they fail to be so, they at the very 
 same moment cease to fulfil their own proper function. 
 Economics is itself a part of moral science; it is a study of 
 certain abstracted parts of moral life with a view to deter- 
 mining their intrinsic relations and laws, ultimately with an 
 eye to the welfare of the body social. So, again, the modern 
 reader draws a distinction between the various elements of the 
 Judaic law : one part of it is moral, another ceremonial l ; 
 one is made up of precepts of universal significance, and the 
 other of rules of temporary authority, now supposed to be in 
 the main abrogated. But all this is a mistake, and a mistake 
 which is fraught with misleading consequences. Ethics is not 
 
 1 According to Wellhausen, Exod. xxxiv. 14 seq. is the original decalogue 
 of Jahve worship in old Israel. (Thou shalt worship no strange god : thou 
 shalt make thee no molten gods : the feast of unleavened bread shalt thou 
 keep : all that openeth the womb is mine: thou shalt observe ihe feast 
 of weeks, and the feast of ingathering : thou shalt not offer the blood of 
 my sacrifice with leavened bread : neither shall the sacrifice of the feast 
 of the passover be left unto the morning : the first of the firstfruits of thy 
 ground thou shall bring to the house of Jahve thy God : thou shalt not 
 seethe a kid in its mother's milk.)
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 161 
 
 solely concerned with general precepts ; the point of its 
 remarks lies in their application. Dolus latet in generalibus. 
 Nor again are the special and detailed precepts of a purely 
 ceremonial nature : they are commanded, it is not our business 
 here to ask how far rightly or wrongly, as conditions and 
 indeed parts of universal and individual welfare for Israel ; 
 they are therefore entirely ethical. But equally, of course, 
 Dolus latet in particular ibus. Each particular rule tends to be 
 set up as an independent aim, as a thing worthy and precious 
 in itself, apart from its relations and functions. 
 
 The prophets of old Israel and prophets, I hope I need 
 remind no one, are not predictors of events to come, but 
 those who speak to men what they believe to be the truth or 
 message of God probably, indeed certainly, made no utterly 
 new discovery when they declared that Jahve cared less for 
 sacrifice and burnt-offerings than for righteousness and truth 
 and mercy. Always the human heart has felt that ; though 
 always it has to be reminded of it, so apt is it to rest content 
 with what is behind, instead of pressing on to those things 
 which are before. And what the earlier prophets said, the 
 last of them, Jesus of Nazareth, seemed to corroborate. The 
 firstfruits of prophecy, in the movement which began with 
 Ezra and culminated in the age of the Maccabees, had been 
 an intensification of legal particularism. The nominal bond 
 of Judaism covered both those who called themselves the 
 righteous, and those who were called the ' sinners/ In its 
 nobler phases and no reader of the psalms and the later 
 literature can doubt of the existence of such noble phases 
 these antithetic names had their ground in the resolute 
 courage which realizes the ideal of God's kingdom, as con- 
 trasted with the weakness which cares for no such thing. 
 But, in certain conspicuous and dominant instances, as we 
 learn from the New Testament, it was far otherwise. The 
 1 righteous ' was the Pharisee, the punctual observer of detailed 
 rules, and the regular attendant on temple service, while the 
 
 M
 
 162 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 ' sinner 3 was any one without this circle ; what, in these parts, 
 we might call ' belonging to no denomination/ ' a joined 
 member of no religious body/ In the face of these facts 
 there is much in the language of the Prophet of Nazareth 
 which, to the careless hearer, might sound contemptuous of 
 special observance and detailed ordinance. What he really 
 warred against was the superstition which thought to sup- 
 plement moral defects by care in special observances ; the 
 idolatry which held particular ceremonies as absolute as 
 the ethical needs of man. But the language had its effect, 
 as had that of the prophets, when read casually and out of its 
 context. It was supposed by a section of those who called 
 themselves his followers, that ethics and religion henceforth 
 were to deal with the higher spiritual life, and that the 
 common round of duties was comparatively unimportant. 
 The error was taken up by an unintelligent Spiritualism, and 
 ethics, like religion, was treated as almost too good for 
 human nature's daily food. 
 
 It is against misconceptions like this that the older Hebrew 
 Scriptures, which Christianity presupposes and out of which 
 it grows, are of permanent value. It may be true, as says 
 John C. Calhoun, that 'they didn't know everything down 
 in Judea ' ; but they knew some things which it would have 
 been well if the later ages had not lost sight of. They knew 
 that, even if religion is not a matter of meats and drinks, 
 meat and drink are no trifles which religion may ignore. 
 They knew that religion is intimately wrapped up with the 
 tillage of the field, the pasture of the flocks, the rules and 
 modes of wedlock, the custom of the market, with sanitary 
 rules, with the treatment of disease. They may have been 
 mistaken in some of their views, but they were certainly 
 right in their main thesis ; and the whole bent of modern 
 progress is towards doing what they did in a completer way. 
 To them religion and ethics left no sphere of life untouched. 
 Every theological doctrine had for its converse a practical
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 163 
 
 command, or rather everything they believed about God was 
 ipso facto a law of life. No otiose theology this ; on the con- 
 trary, one submitting- itself to experiential verification, and 
 glorying- therein. It is no mere assertion that ' God is 
 good ' : it is ' Taste and see that God is good/ Jahve 
 is the God of his people : all their interests are his, 
 and he deputes none of them, and thinks none of them 
 unimportant. 
 
 The modern world thinks too gingerly of God. ' Thou 
 thoughtest that I was even such an one as thyself ; ' one, 
 that is, who does not care to dirty his hands with manual 
 labour, who dwells only in the high places of wisdom and 
 policy, who leaves to lower arts and vulgar attention the lesser 
 matters of the animal life. What is perhaps worse, some 
 have thought that they could tell what God is by the way of 
 scientific generalization. But God does not so reveal him- 
 self. He comes and comes alone to him who does well, i. e. 
 faithfully and heartily, the work which in the ordinances 
 of nature lies next to him to do. If he come at all, he 
 comes altogether, in the lowest as in the highest, sooner 
 perhaps to the day-labourer than to the speculative thinker, 
 because the latter perchance thinks he can find out God by 
 patience and resolution, while the former in honest effort, 
 seeking no great things, is perhaps readier to hear the voice : 
 1 Friend, come up higher.' The modern world can only gain 
 religion, and have such vision of God as man can have, when 
 it realizes to the intensest that the wise and foolish equally 
 enjoy his sunlight, that to him nothing is common or 
 unclean. The old churches at least saw this ; and if they did 
 amiss in trying literally to reproduce a code, that may have 
 suited the later Israel, for the use of Geneva or of Scotland, 
 yet their principle was right, absolutely right, the principle 
 that religion is no separate element, no function of a separate 
 organ, but a power governing all life and consecrating 
 democracy into theocracy. 
 
 M 2
 
 1 64 GIFFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 It is nearly half a century since a German scientist of 
 a school which we for brevity's sake call Materialistic, 
 scandalized many good people by the remark that Der Mensch 
 ist, was er isst-, an untranslatable pun. ' Man is what he 
 eats/ Nowadays we have grown accustomed to the scandal. 
 It is perhaps unnecessary at this date to note that ' eat ' must 
 here be taken to imply ' digestion/ to include drinking and 
 breathing, and perhaps other less definable modes of recep- 
 tivity. Even with these qualifications many people will 
 shrink from admitting it in its absolute plainness : they 
 will insist that there is something in the original structure, 
 and that there is more in any of us that can be, straight off, 
 equalled to any aggregate or mixture of carbon, nitrogen, 
 phosphorus, and the rest. With these good people I will 
 not attempt to argue. I will not even go into the problem 
 whether, when the ( heart ' of I' ami Fritz was captured by 
 a dish of apple fritters, there was not something of human 
 nature in it ; nor will I appeal to any housewife's experience 
 of the ratio between dinner and a husband's mind and temper. 
 I will rather say, Friends, are you not, to put it mildly, 
 a little wanting in apprehension ? The man who thought it 
 worth while to say : ' Man is what he eats,' must have 
 suffered much from a generation who said that it mattered 
 nothing, and that he, his morality, his intelligence, his 
 religion were things of a source far transcending what he fed 
 on. He spoke in some weariness, and uttered the other half 
 of the truth. No man, no, nor angel from heaven, if he 
 speaks human speech, can put a concrete truth, a truth, i.e. of 
 life-reality, into a simple proposition. 
 
 But what I touched upon this old phrase for, was not to 
 rake up the special controversy it awaked. It is to recall the 
 truth that morals, intellect, art, and religion, are all, pro- 
 foundly and in their very inwards, affected by the economic 
 condition of a people. Given a certain arrangement of the 
 means of production, and you can only have a certain kind
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 165 
 
 of morals, art, and religion. You may encourage schools of 
 art, apply the persuasions of punishment and training to 
 make people moral, and build churches till they fill every 
 corner of your streets, but it will not answer. The founda- 
 tions of things lie in the commonwealth, and these 
 foundations are its economic arrangements. You fancy, no 
 doubt, that fine art has nothing to do with vulgar craftsman- 
 ship or honest labour, but it is far otherwise. You think 
 religion will cure the wretched homes of horrid poverty and 
 insolent wealth : but it will not ; for religion will not and 
 cannot live where there are such abominations. You fancy 
 morality sits high and safe on the eternal rocks of reason : 
 but, probably, if you got nearer, you would find that the 
 venerable queen of life has long since been petrified in these 
 altitudes. 
 
 The foundations, perhaps even the ground-plan of the 
 moral, religious, artistic life, are laid and fixed in the form, 
 which at any given epoch is dominant, of providing and 
 distributing the means of subsistence. What was the 
 beginning of it all ? Of course, we cannot tell : we know 
 nothing of primitive man ; most likely we shall in the literal 
 sense never know primitive man. But we can go so far as 
 the most primitive races that are upon the earth at present. 
 Yet, if we speak of races, let no stress be laid upon that 
 word, and the differences it may involve. The vanities of 
 breed count for little here in comparison with the greater 
 uniformities of art, morality, and religion, which are found 
 wherever in the surface of the globe there is approximately 
 the same form of production of the means of subsistence. 
 
 The lowest rank is taken by tribes, found in widely 
 different localities, mainly supporting life by means of 
 hunting and fishing. Such tribes as the native Australians, 
 some Brazilian groups, the Eskimos, the Andamans, the 
 Bushmen in South Africa, and the Terra del Fuegians. The 
 terms hunter and fisher have first to be realized, before their
 
 166 G1FFORD LECTURES [x 
 
 force appears. To the modern citizen, hunting and fishing 
 are to some extent a by-play, a sport : in which the object, in 
 the majority of cases, is placed at a hopeless disadvantage. 
 We shall understand it better when, with Lady Nairne's 
 song, we remember that the herring which some call ' vulgar 
 faring } are to fisher wives symbolic of ' lives of men/ But, 
 even in the fishers' case, the primitive people have a sterner 
 war to wage : a war, in almost sober truth, between com- 
 batants not equally matched, when man had yet to mould his 
 weapons, and learn the secret of mastery: when, as tell the 
 Indian hunters' legends, he began to steal from the various 
 creatures their distinctive weapons, and made himself the sole 
 proprietor of all nature's wiliness. It was a struggle too in 
 which for long the victory was, to say the least, uncertain ; 
 in which there were many disappointments, long periods of 
 trying hunger, other times of rude gorging ; a wandering 
 life running round the cycle of the year, as game drew it 
 here and there ; with domestic life, fitful and but forced, 
 with all the illnesses and weaknesses which fasting and 
 feasting alternately followed can produce ; leisure for art of 
 a kind ; a passionate love of excitement in moments of full 
 meat; a dark, mysterious godhead, dimly connected with 
 woods and streams, with storm and cloud, with unknown 
 perils, with the beasts. Marriage and property, as we know 
 them, were not, save in their rudiments. Yet laws or 
 customs, rigid and numerous, complicated and terrible, grow 
 up. Nor is hunting all. Almost everywhere in these hunter 
 days, the woman has a province of her own. It may be, 
 as in Brazil, that she begins a rude cultivation of the soil ; 
 and while her mankind prowl in woods for a while and then 
 sleep or loll till hunger next appeals, she by feebler, but more 
 unremitting energy, gathers a stock of vegetables and fruits. 
 So long as life is so harassed, half the virtues we respect, half 
 the attributes we attribute to deity, half the developments 
 of art, cannot arise.
 
 x] MORALITY AS CIVILIZATION 167 
 
 It would be out of place here to try to follow out the steps 
 by which the pastoral stage emerged ; how the agricultural 
 followed : and how, industry always increasing, complexity 
 supervened. But if the survey could be made, it would show, 
 first, that art, religion and morality, and, we need hardly 
 add, science, grow up and take form in society, and that the 
 essence or ground-plan of society lies in its economical 
 arrangements. The lawgivers of old Israel saw clearly that 
 in them is the root of the matter for morals and religion. 
 The modern spiritualist laughs at the ancient believer, whose 
 god gave him corn and wine, and sat him down under his own 
 vine and fig-tree. But we may spiritualize our God over- 
 much. God is not merely the guardian or the rewarder of 
 the narrowly moral law. The real moral law of God is the 
 law of all life : and such a God is a living God, the strength 
 of all who believe in him, the shelter in the storm and the 
 heat. God, we may be sure, is not indifferent to morals 
 and still less is he immoral : but perhaps he may be less 
 like a moralist or a judge, a lawgiver or a king, than we are 
 sometimes taught to conceive. Perhaps, as many count 
 morality, he may be more than moral.
 
 XI 
 
 ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS, SCIENCE, AND 
 RELIGION 
 
 IT is not easy to describe the plain fact of morality ; for 
 if it be a fact, it is not as others with which we are more 
 familiar. It is not subject to what are ordinarily called 
 the scientific tests. It cannot be measured or weighed. You 
 can no more detect its presence by experiment strictly so 
 called than you can that of mind or will. You cannot prove 
 that an act of pure virtue was ever done. God is not the 
 only object, if object one may for the moment call Him, 
 that neither microscope nor telescope can discover. Scientific 
 instruments and methods, in the technical sense of their 
 terms, are as little able to detect the presence of intelligence, 
 of purpose, of goodness, of beauty. Psychology, as a strict 
 science in the older sense, must confine itself to the physio- 
 logical laboratory. 
 
 Kant himself has not ventured to assert, that in the world 
 accessible to the scientific, i. e. the sense-bound intellect, there 
 is such a thing as freedom, as morality, as God. All he 
 can say is, in the first place, that if morality be unreal, 
 or rather if it be not the central reality, the keynote of 
 all thought and life, then you have not merely lost the spring 
 from out your year, but you have ruined the fabric of reality. 
 At least something like this is implied in the course of his 
 argument. It is true that the world known by science seems 
 to remain as an assured and independent result, whether
 
 ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 169 
 
 there be a moral reality or no. Given a set of sensations, 
 and certain formal tricks of arrangement in them; given 
 an intelligence which gives to these sensations some unity 
 and consistency ; and the phenomena, the casual appearances 
 which, as the phrase is, impress themselves upon us, seem to 
 form groups and systems of sufficient stability and solidity 
 to deserve the name of empirical reality. And 'empirical 
 reality* is all Kant claims for so-called things or objects. 
 But a philosopher can hardly rest content with a phrase 
 like 'empirical reality/ Even to say, in words more 
 intelligible to the plain man, that the sense- world of science 
 is a real world, because we feel it inevitably, and because 
 we can calculate and predict its phenomena with a high 
 degree of security, is to say what is true, but what does 
 not go far enough. What is this feeling, this impression 
 we speak of as a self-evident datum, and of which we say 
 that it is inevitable ? Let us answer : this feeling is always 
 the reverse side of activity ; we are ' impressed,' because we 
 are active, and go forth to meet the world. Were we not 
 active, we could not be thus passive or receptive. The 
 physiologist knows that efferent and afferent nerve-conduction 
 are ultimately inseparable : the stimulus received from with- 
 out is only possible because of coincident stimulus from 
 within. The eye must strike the sun, in order that the sun 
 may dazzle the eye. So in the mental world, perception 
 were not, if volition were not. Only a being that wills 
 (I use the word in its widest sense) can perceive, as on the 
 other hand only a being that perceives can will. So it is 
 with the synthetic intelligence, with the scientific mind that 
 builds up the data of sensation into groups, types, classes, 
 uniformities, relations of cause and effect, and so on. To 
 say that all this is so, because of the original synthetic unity, 
 or of 'the transcendental unity of self -consciousness/ is no 
 doubt true also, but it does not go to the root of the matter. 
 Self-consciousness, what and why is it? Self-consciousness
 
 i yo GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 does not I fear I must apologize to the philosophically 
 trained hearer for making this remark does not in logic 
 mean the state of mind when a shy person imagines that 
 it is not what he or she does, but that it is he or she who 
 does it, which is the fact of supreme interest to all observers. 
 Self -consciousness to the philosopher means the emergence 
 of intelligence, from its mere awareness of outward fact in 
 a sort of mirror-like reproduction thereof, to an apprehension 
 of itself as co-agent, i.e. as in action and reaction with 
 an outward world, and yet at the same time, as, in some 
 mysterious way, supreme in surveying the play of its own 
 actions and reactions ; itself the scene, the play, and an 
 observer, who, in some strange league with author and 
 manager, is more than mere observer. Understanding, said 
 Kant, makes the world, makes nature. Whereat the wiseacres 
 who love to criticize where it is hard to understand, spoke 
 certain witty-sounding words about Solipsism, or the strange 
 fancy of some mad philosopher that his mind made all 
 things ; and also certain words intended to be witty, which 
 rested on the assumption that when Kant said 'nature' or 
 ' world/ he meant the whole lump of earth, and other lumps 
 of other earths, called suns and planets, with all the countless 
 fragments into which we are accustomed to divide the large 
 earthly lump, e.g. into coals, carts, &c. But intelligence, 
 as we have, I hope, already seen, is not a thing which can be 
 the sole property of any one being, or be supposed to be 
 included in one single brain : it is, as old Thomas Hobbes 
 said, the same in every man, a common atmosphere or spirit 
 in which - they live and act, and which finds its visible 
 embodiment and guarantee in what for shortness we call 
 the ' City ' or State. The understanding which makes nature 
 and the world is in no risk of falling into Solipsism : that 
 is the one thing it cannot do : sooner than do that, it must 
 perish. It cannot be self -confined, in the narrow sense; 
 its self is the universe, potential, if not actual.
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 171 
 
 But it is hardly less important to realize that the so-called 
 world or nature is not a mere aggregate of things. Nature 
 is an elliptical phrase for the order, the indwelling order, 
 the self-unfolding order, the progressive uniformity, of what 
 you loosely call ' the natural world ' without much thinking 
 what you mean. Each separate thing is, no doubt, also 
 and rightly, called nature : but it is so, because in each there 
 is the presence and power which animates the whole : a com- 
 plex of relations which we can never hope to completely 
 unveil, and which would, if we could but know it, bind 
 it in some way with every other item in the universe of 
 things. And so it is with what we call the World, with, 
 however, this difference. When we speak of the totality 
 of things as nature, we think mainly of that totality as a self- 
 directing, self-systematizing being, rolling on the cycle of its 
 changes, our vicissitudes even included, by laws of its own. 
 But when we talk of the world, we are in the first instance 
 more impressed by the practical aspect of reality. We see 
 in it, not so much a mere theoretical problem to be unravelled, 
 as a field of action in which order has been established, and 
 will yet more and more be established, in subservience to 
 human needs; needs of all kinds and all grades, some of 
 them what we call material, some what we call spiritual. 
 Even the world, as we saw the other day, tends to slip from 
 us into independence: yet always we feel it is the field of 
 action, a unity to which we (we and not I, or if I, then the 
 absolute ' I ' of Fichte, which is equal to the collective 
 infinity of 'we's) have given as it were the bond: we, as 
 humanity, as what we are and are not, but will be, when we 
 are all that we may be. To the view of the sum of things as 
 nature, which is the theoretical view, the outlook of the con- 
 templative spirit, man seems but a little thing: a part in 
 a great system, not merely bowed down before the physical 
 immensity of the spectacle, but even more abased before the 
 transcendent Power which seems to mould it* destinies and
 
 172 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 therefore his. The other view of it as the world the 
 Kosmos, mundus is taken from a different standpoint, that 
 of action rather than theory. It sees in the system of 
 things an order and an economy, of which man-humanity is 
 the central point, on which all things hinge. It implies that 
 in him lies the key to the mystery : a key, however, which 
 has yet many doors to open : or rather for metaphor must 
 break down here a key which has magic history and fairy 
 powers, which is not yet what it shall be. It is humanity, 
 social humanity, forming itself by slow steps : slow, though 
 sometimes, when we are immersed in some petty advance, 
 we think with pardonable, yet foolish pride that we have 
 made immense strides : forming itself by industry and com- 
 merce, by art and science, by philosophy and religion, to 
 decipher the mystery in which it was born, and thus better 
 and better understand itself. For this is perhaps the main 
 thing. Man, to use an old phrase, is the microcosm, the 
 little world. He becomes more and more himself in pro- 
 portion as, by work and thought, by art and science, he 
 more and more makes the larger world his own. 
 
 And this brings us round to the purport of an inevitable 
 digression. The 'Nature' which the philosophic theorist, 
 the metaphysician poet, sees as the background of unity in 
 which lie all the several materials, of which the several 
 sciences make their most by observation and experiment and 
 calculus : that nature, as Kant points out, is not itself a fact 
 of science, of sense, or of intellect, as he defines them. It is 
 the reflex of a mental unity, of a mysterious unifying power 
 we sometimes call imagination or the faculty of ideal construc- 
 tion, and at other times call the ( original unity of appercep- 
 tion/ ' Nature ' in this sense goes for its roots deeper than 
 perception or apperception (which means the organizing or 
 assimilating of perceptions into a concrete percept). It goes 
 back to the practical side, the active part, the will, the effort 
 to do and live, the effort to be more and more of what we are
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 173 
 
 as yet less, that nisus of self -conservation which can only 
 succeed in being that by being more than that, by being 
 a nisus or effort to become more than it was, to be all that it 
 had not been. Intelligence reads off one world of uniform 
 law, because will demands one world for life to be realized in : 
 reason theoretic gives a unity to nature, because reason prac- 
 tical, starting from a ' me ' or ' ego ' which is weak, incoherent, 
 unrealized, is ever seeking to elevate it to be a ' me ' or 
 ' ego ' which is one, comprehensive, and complete. If you 
 speak of nature as a unity governed by unfaltering law, it is 
 because human reason in its action, industrial, moral, artistic, 
 postulates the subservience of all events to one common end. 
 And that end, what is it ? 
 
 An old answer, most of us here are familiar with, tells us 
 that 'man's chief end/ at least, f is to glorify God, and to 
 enjoy him for ever/ It may be, I do not know, that those 
 who framed these words thought, as think some of those who 
 read them to-day, that the two parts of the answer represent 
 two stages, one here, another hereafter ; and that they 
 regarded the latter as a reward attached by grace to the 
 earlier. Yet perhaps too they may have entertained an idea 
 of a more intimate connexion between the two aspects, both 
 in time and in essence. To us at the present day, the words, 
 if we try to get their meaning and do not merely repeat them, 
 sound unfamiliar, echoes of a time when other fashions ruled 
 the social and intellectual world. To glorify God, ad maiorem 
 Dei ffloriam, are phrases which the sciolist, sometimes in 
 places where one would expect better things, finds an easy 
 subject of scorn ; and I am not concerned to deny that there 
 have been curious misapplications of them. But are our own 
 phrases so impeccable ? If, in a bald literal way, it be impos- 
 sible to glorify the Supreme, as it is impracticable to gild 
 refined gold, is it any more possible to organize God, him, 
 the supreme organizer and organization? But neither the 
 Presbyterian divines nor Renan altogether wasted words. If
 
 174 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 it be a truth that God created man in his own image, it is 
 no less a truth that every man recreates God in his image. 
 It is the Word, the only-begotten Son, who for ever reveals, 
 or, as I should translate it, describes and interprets the 
 Father. But to do that, man, so to speak, must be fully 
 himself : he must become not a separate sphere in creation, 
 but the organizing principle of all. He must more and more 
 realize the infinite possibilities that are in him, by realizing 
 more and more the unity of creation. Herein lies for him 
 a difficulty and a danger. He fancies in his impotence that 
 the less others can be, the more he makes them cease, the 
 more will he himself be. His grand impulse, his glory 
 perhaps and he sometimes thinks it for God's glory also 
 is to kill. He crushes down his fellows. He ruthlessly 
 sweeps away the lower races which check the free swing of 
 his interests. The beasts of the field and the fowls of the 
 air fall a victim often to the mere lust of killing; and the 
 choicest trees and shrubs have been irrecoverably cut down 
 by the maddened colonist and trader who knows no god but 
 Plutus. The terrestrial fauna and flora are fast losing their 
 variety. The earth's surface has been ravaged and rent into 
 unrecognizableness. He has captured and tamed some of the 
 beasts. His own species he has sought to enslave, i.e. to 
 destroy their separate personality, and make them mere tools 
 of his hand. And, almost universally, he has sought to make 
 his vassal or bondwoman out of the woman of his own kind ; 
 her, who, just because she is nearer to him and in all senses 
 dearer to him than aught else, has always been the most 
 unenslavable of all things and the most untameable of all his 
 captives. And yet he wonders that he is without peace, 
 security, and happiness : he wonders that his heart is 
 empty. But if there is one truth more certain than another, 
 it is that for every thing destroyed in its own nature and 
 independence, there is a corresponding lack created in the 
 destroyer. We can only be what we are meant to be, in
 
 xr] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 175 
 
 proportion as we can establish such a relation between us and 
 other things that they may realize their full being. It is not 
 merely human persons that are ends in themselves : though 
 their essential worth it may be especially our interest to 
 maintain. But in a way all things are such ends. And they 
 are so for us because, unless they attain their full develop- 
 ment, we fall short of ours. The enslaving man is a man 
 enslaved, in a worse sense, by his slave. There is nothing 
 single nor solitary, said the Stoic, in the city of God we call 
 the world. No doubt, we may shut our eyes to the essential 
 sociality of man : we may act as if it were not. But in that 
 case we pay the penalty, not in a punishment deferred, and 
 to be paid by some mysterious machinery, as the Christian 
 theologian, misconceiving Plato's metaphors, has sometimes 
 seemed to suppose ; but in a lowered vitality, an empty heart, 
 the sting of not, it may be, remorse, but of realized failure. 
 It is the eternal law of righteousness, that the soul which 
 falls short of the law of universal respect, and treats one of 
 the least of things as if it too were not God's creature, that 
 soul is struck with a withering of which the natural issue 
 is death. 
 
 For our own sakes, for our own interest, we must be tender, 
 respectful of all things. I know there are some to whom all 
 this will sound absurd, quixotic, fantastic, if not worse. To 
 such I would say, like Cromwell : ' I beseech you, brethren, 
 think it possible that ye may be mistaken/ It is possible. 
 I dare say, that a single soul may find salvation for itself : 
 but it may be doubted if such a salvation is greatly worth the 
 trouble. A great Christian has left on record the word that 
 he would almost be accursed himself rather than see his kins- 
 folk left to perdition. As Plato has it, a single traveller may 
 perhaps find shelter from the dust-storm that ever blows 
 across the way by retiring into the shelter of some wall : but 
 the only true hope of betterment is to save himself by forming 
 a company, and ultimately it must be a large company, of his
 
 176 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 kindred. They are poor creatures who press into the warm 
 hall, whilst any of their near and dear ones are still shivering 
 in the cold. 
 
 But more than that is here at stake. Freedom, says the 
 old Scotch poet, is a noble thing-. But they are of the fewest 
 who know what freedom really is. Its essence is, in each, 
 respect for the individuality of others. We sometimes hear it 
 said that the age of reverence is past, gone with the age of 
 chivalry. But if these good things have gone, it may be 
 that they were not wholly good ; and that in these ' good 
 customs ' God did not fulfil himself so fully as to justify 
 their eternal endurance. What ended the age of chivalry was 
 that it was not chivalrous enough. It is easy to be chivalrous, 
 if only the lady be but young and fair, if only your enemy be 
 nobly born and nobly bred, and when love and honour follow 
 on service rendered. But when chivalry passed beyond these 
 charmed bounds, its lance lay useless, and its knight errantry 
 grew cold. So, it may be, there was something false in the 
 ring of an old-time reverence. It was, perhaps, too one-sided, 
 too partial in its scope. Juvenal somewhere speaks of the 
 'reverence due to boyhood/ What he says in one special 
 sense has a wider meaning. There is room for Vice Versa 
 between fathers and sons, between husband and wife, between 
 many other relationships. Our reverences all round have 
 perhaps been but measured on one little patch of life, and 
 left all the rest desert. We wish, no doubt, to have others 
 in agreement with us, but agreement is worth little unless it 
 is genuine and spontaneous. Ibsen, in one of his plays, has 
 depicted a husband and wife who, after years of juxtaposi- 
 tion are still strangers, so that the relation between them is 
 one of fear and distrust, tempered by something that might 
 grow to love. An occasion arises when an old tie tends to re- 
 assert itself over the wife. The husband's natural impulse 
 is to assert and make good on the other side the legal, i. e. the 
 force-sanctioned, bond which marriage law gives him. But
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 177 
 
 a more reasonable impulse prevails ; and, by effacing his own 
 brute authority, he restores his wife to her self-command, 
 and the temptation is at an end. I do not inquire how far 
 such conduct might be in each case possible or advisable. 
 But I think I may say that half the embroglios of this 
 world arise from the substitution of mechanical for moral 
 suasion. And by moral suasion is meant, not counselling, or 
 advising, or recommending, or persuading, in so far as these 
 imply a foregone conclusion; but an effort on our part to 
 exclude the influence of all other than purely rational, i.e. 
 common or social motives, to efface all the brute force of 
 personality, and to trust only to that higher personality which 
 may well be called impersonal. The triumph of morality is 
 attained when, with all the earnestness of conviction, we can 
 resist the impulse to tyrannize over a wife, or a husband, or 
 a child, or any one whose legal relations to us puts them, as 
 it is facetiously called, at our mercy. If sons and daughters 
 revolt, if a whole sex is shaken by incipient mutiny, it is time, 
 not perhaps to tear up the institutions which are concerned, 
 but certainly to consider, and consider with practical effect, 
 whether there be not something rotten in the state of Den- 
 mark, to account for such fretfulness and protest. And these 
 remarks do not, I hardly need add, cut only one way. So 
 long as mere force is in any way directly influential in human 
 life, so long we are not civilized or moral. In an imperfect 
 world force is necessary, but only to protect rights : and 
 rights are, in their own nature and function, the modes of 
 realizing freedom. 
 
 Now the very conception of nature and a natural world, 
 with which the philosophy of science makes us acquainted, 
 has its justification in this prime moral need. As a world, 
 the material objects fronting us, whether persons or things 
 for materiality is a common attribute of them all are a means 
 for our self-realization. By it and them we become what we 
 are, and the larger and more organically one they become, the 
 
 N
 
 178 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 better developed are we. They are necessary to our fulfilment : 
 in and through them we are made perfect. But not merely 
 do they constitute our environment, as a kind of spring-board 
 by which we may rise to higher things; they are also a 
 natural world, a world of nature. As such, they one and all, 
 each through all, and all through each, follow a law of their 
 own. That is the great lesson which philosophy, as it follows 
 the lead of the natural sciences, continually impresses upon us. 
 Each part of nature, if you like to put it religiously, is alike 
 near and dear to God : alike, i. e. in so far as its nature is 
 in its measure his care, as peculiarly as if there were none to 
 compete with it. This was the truth which Spinoza expressed 
 when he identified God and nature, and refused to concede to 
 man a place utterly outside the natural range. It may be 
 that the phraseology of Spinoza was hardly adequate. But at 
 least, it taught to those who would listen, that the lordship of 
 man over nature is essentially a ministry and a stewardship. 
 
 If Kant, therefore, insists that Freedom is the essential of 
 humanity, it is clear that this freedom cannot overthrow the 
 necessity, such as it is, of nature. Rather freedom has 
 meaning only in correlation to such necessity. It lies and 
 Spinoza saw this as well as Kant in acting, and not in mere 
 being. Nobody /* free. All action is freedom. The world 
 which is and has been, and which must be because it has been, 
 cannot be the only world, or cannot be the full world, real 
 with the highest reality. The ordered cycle of changes and 
 uniformities must be the expression of an intelligent will, 
 and I, the agent, must participate in the direction ; I must be 
 not, merely a part of things, controlled and necessitated by 
 o.ther things, but also and essentially one with the whole, an 
 individual, so far independent and co-operative, in a greater 
 iftnd complete individuality. And lastly, Kant assumes, as 
 -has been even now implied, that, if morality is to be the 
 centre of reality, there must be God. So far Kant sees 
 clearly : but when he comes to ask more definitely what it is
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 179 
 
 that God does, his vision seems to grow unsteady. Christianity, 
 in Kant's day, had brought the world to a Deism, which had 
 ousted God from the present life of reality, and relegated him 
 to a Far beyond and Hereafter. From that Far away he 
 still came, supervising, rectifying, and punishing. And so 
 Kant was understood to speak of him as if it were his task 
 to adjust the failing proportion between virtue and happiness, 
 to compensate the good for their sufferings, and to make evil 
 in the end unprofitable. Yet, if Kant said so, we may be sure 
 that was not the true meaning at which he aimed. Even God, 
 we may assert, cannot undo what has been done. God does 
 not, as Plato supposed in his myth, let go the helm of the 
 world for a time, and again and again return to save the 
 vessel. He is not the synthesis or adjustment of nature and 
 moral order : rather in him they are one. We may not see 
 the convergency-point : but action and theory presuppose its 
 necessity. Kant, we may maintain even against appearances, 
 did not commit what Schelling calls the ' abomination ' of 
 'seeking to deduce God from the requirements of morality.' 
 And if we may even less care to adopt Schilling's phrase, ' It 
 is a duty to be convinced that all immorality is in its essence 
 and root unintelligent and irrational/ we may at least agree 
 with him in holding that ' to the wrong-doer, it is just the 
 diminished reality which gets expression by him that is his 
 punishment/ 
 
 But what is morality ? To this question Kant himself has 
 returned an answer which is historic. For Kant the fact of 
 morality is, as all the world knows, the sense of duty. 
 Kant's King Frederick II may be cited in support of this 
 view. Thus in 1760 (in the midst of the Seven Years' War) 
 he writes to D'Argens : c You must know it is not necessary 
 that I should live, but very necessary I should do my duty. 
 We are in this world to work. To do good ... is a duty 
 which every man ought to fulfil according to his means/ 
 Or again, ' Both my body and my mind must bend to their 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 duty/ Or, in a letter to the Electress of Saxony (1766), ' Do 
 to others only what you wish they should do to you : this 
 principle includes all virtue and the duties of man towards 
 the society in which he is placed/ Duty, no doubt, often 
 coincides with inclination ; obligation is often dissolved, as it 
 were, in pleasure. But if we wish to see it as it truly is, we 
 must, in Kant's view, look at it when it stands alone : we must 
 see it, as Plato hinted long before Kant, as it behaves when 
 unsupported by liking, opposed by desire. When so seen in 
 its purity, it comes upon man with a downright command, 
 ' a categorical imperative.' The latter phrase is Kant's : 
 but because the phrase is his, no one need suppose the fact 
 which it names was any discovery or novelty of his. The 
 categorical imperative is as old as humanity, as old as reason, 
 as old as love, as old as the faith in God, as old as the first 
 efforts of art to eternalize the passing show. It is a command 
 without a reason : because it is the supreme command of 
 reason itself ; but for the present, we need not meddle with 
 that, and simply note the fact alleged by Kant that its 
 authority is unconditional. 
 
 All this, be it said, was not new. But, as German biography 
 in the end of last century can show, it had a deep and stimu- 
 lating effect on the conscience. It disengaged a great fact 
 out of a mass of irrelevant details : and even if it a little 
 exaggerated it in so disengaging it, that is a fault which may 
 well be borne with. Even Goethe, who did not himself see 
 the moral life chiefly as duty, felt so far inspired as to make 
 it a theme of some stories. It needed some genius thus to 
 set duty in its high seat, to realize what Kant calls the 
 'grandeur and sublimity of its name.' Grammatically, all 
 that Kant did was only to set the singular for the plural, and 
 that you may say is a small thing. Perhaps, and yet, if 
 I may borrow an example to make the difference clear, what- 
 ever tone men may adopt when they speak about women, it is 
 generally a higher note they feel themselves obliged to strike
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 181 
 
 when they think upon woman. Duties, in the plural and 
 they go endlessly into the plural, into the detail of life 
 seem sometimes trivial, tiresome marks of bondage and 
 hampering conditions to free development. So even thought 
 a French moralist, Malebranche, rather more than a century 
 before Kant : les devoirs to him savoured of the lesson to be 
 learned, the exercise to be done, in consequence of command 
 issued yesterday, and to avoid a punishment expectable other- 
 wise to-morrow. And so Malebranche, turning half-con - 
 temptuously from mere duties, bade the seeker for true and 
 noble morality keep his eye ever bright with the love of order. 
 And there have been many ready to outdo Malebranche in 
 depreciating the yoke of duty. It is, they say, the mere 
 weight of tradition, the mere incidence of authority. To them, 
 the phrase about doing duty in that place and station to which 
 God has appointed us, has an air of feudal hierarchism, of 
 unchangeable caste, of a system which hangs blindly to the 
 past, and forgets the whole onward tendency to the future. 
 It seems to bar all progress, all reform. It may do for common 
 folk, ' for country folk who live beneath the shadow of the 
 steeple, the parson and the parson's wife, and mostly married 
 people.' But something better is needed for young men and 
 maidens, for all who would (if not leave the world better than 
 they found it, which they may think either a vain task or 
 a work of supererogation) yet raise themselves higher in the 
 scale of being. Why should they be bound by what was 
 done ages before them, by the remnants of custom and 
 observance handed down from an ignorant and half-barbarous 
 time ? Duties : why, the word is a bugbear to check progress ; 
 it is a catchword of the friends of order, of the party of 
 stagnation and perhaps of reaction. Or, again, they cry : 
 Duty is one of the ' fads ' of Christianity : and Kant him- 
 self in his ethical system was only putting in philosophical 
 formulae the memories of his youth, when under pious parents 
 he learnt the decalogue and the later commandments.
 
 i8a GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 So Schopenhauer has said and many have re-echoed since. 
 I will take the liberty of saying that it is a poor argument 
 against any part of a philosophic creed, to say that it has been 
 smuggled into it from Christian sources. We may all have 
 our own views about the personality of him who gave his 
 popular and prophetic name (Christ or Messiah) to the 
 Christian life : but there can be little dispute about the fact 
 that the ideas, the principles at the root of Christianity, are in 
 no sense peculiar to it, in no sense its special property. I say 
 with Schelling, the Schelling of his later time, Christianity is 
 as old as the world : its ideas, its hopes, its faith, its love, are 
 those on which the nobler sons and daughters of humanity 
 have in all ages and in all lands nourished in some measure 
 their inner life, gone forth to meet the world and death. It 
 also, like Kant, proclaimed no new truth, no truth which had 
 never been there before; but, as its adherents believed, in their 
 Master they saw one who gave to words and ideas the power 
 of a life, one who helped them to see the invisible world as 
 they had never seen it before, and with a strength of faithful 
 vision which shot past even the gates of death into the land 
 of eternal life. But the ideas of Christianity, its legitimate 
 ideas, are consonant with all reason, and kindred with all true 
 thought which has tried to fathom the mystery of life. And 
 it would be a poor system of ethics which, forsooth, because it 
 was proud to be called human or humane, should consider 
 itself either entitled or obliged to shut itself out from the 
 New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures, on the ground 
 that these were ' revealed/ If ethics is not to annex any of 
 the doctrines which in different ages and countries are believed 
 to have been revealed, ethics will have a rather narrow survey. 
 But it has annexed them, and will do so more and more. 
 
 And undoubtedly this conception of ethics, as, on the one 
 hand, a system of laws, and as, on the other, a duty to fulfil 
 or obey them, is one which stands out conspicuously in what 
 Hebrew philology has taught us to regard as the great products
 
 xi] O.V SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 183 
 
 of the so-called prophetic reform. A people of shepherds, 
 cradled in the desert, and there taught by some providential 
 method to realize the unity of their life in a God, who goes forth 
 with them to battle, rejoices with them in their joys and 
 has compassion on their sorrows, is through some course of 
 events led to occupy a territory half-agricultural, and to 
 exchange its nomadic habits for the ways and manners of 
 the townsman and the cultivator. As years roll on, its old 
 organization shows itself unequal to cope with the altered 
 circumstances. Internal dissensions, external violence, wreck 
 its prosperity and partially destroy it. A fresh effort of 
 concentration is needed : a reform, which is at the same time 
 a going back upon the old spirit of unity and obedience to 
 the one living and guiding principle of collective action. 
 Then arose a series of men, we know them as the prophets 
 of Israel, who, strong in the sense of their solidarity with the 
 one spirit which guided Israel in the distant and legendary 
 past, and will, as they believe, guide him in the years to 
 come, declare themselves the messengers of Jahve. Rebuking, 
 consoling, reminding, encouraging, they emphasize one central 
 truth that the whole people, and man by man, is the servant 
 of Jahve, charged with a work to be done, laden with a burden 
 never to be thrown off, but always sustained by the sympathy, 
 the help, if need be, the merciful punishment of the Lord 
 of Hosts. At first, the work which they conceive as thus 
 imposed is a particularist work for Israel's interest, and Jahve 
 is the God of Israel : but as prophet succeeds prophet, the 
 servant of Jahve, i. e. Israel, collectively and individually, 
 becomes, so to speak, an apostle for the human race, and 
 Jahve himself is seen to be the God of the whole earth, whom 
 heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain. And God 
 himself comes to be, as it were, embodied, though never quite 
 lost, in the conception of a Law, of a great order which he 
 reveals as determining the aim and methods of life, for the 
 nation and the individual. All life is part of a great duty,
 
 184 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 to reveal the glory, the wisdom and mercy of Jahve, and to 
 work out the spirit of righteousness. Yet is the Lawgiver the 
 friend, the lover of his people : if they have been as the un- 
 faithful wife, he is as the loving husband, who judges righteous 
 judgement, i. e. forgives, because he knows what humanity is. 
 The dominant note, therefore, is a harmony of two elements : 
 it is the sense of utter and everlasting dependence, the fear of 
 Jahve : but it is, in its highest moments, joy in the Lord : if 
 he is with us, who can be against us ? and though we faint 
 and fail, God is our strength and our everlasting own. 
 
 It is a mere injustice to Judaism to say that it had not 
 a spring of life and strength within it, a well of ethical water 
 springing up to everlasting life. What the last prophet came 
 to fulfil, that the earlier law and the prophets had taught. 
 This we may be sure of, that Judaism would not have lasted 
 through the fearful ordeal of Mediaevalism, had it not been 
 something nobler than a mere system of rules, codified into 
 endless multiplicity of detail. Do not let us abuse the Law 
 because of the lawyers (some of whom must be bad); or 
 charge the righteous with the petty conceits of Pharisaism. 
 The Law only came to be a grinding burden, an unfulfillable 
 task, when he that was Lord of the Law seemed to men to 
 withdraw into himself, to show himself no more to Israel, 
 and to leave as his witness and testimony a cast-iron code, or 
 a code which, if flexible, was flexible only that it might catch 
 more than it could ever do by its rigidity. The Law became 
 an evil to be cast forth, an idol to be burned, at such time as 
 it came to shut out God, the living God, from his people, and 
 left the Moloch of legalism in its place. But not so had the 
 prophets or the author of Deuteronomy understood the relation 
 of Law to God : not so the preponderating voice of the 
 Hebrew psalmists. Yet it is true that, in the struggle which 
 the Jewish race had to wage on its own soil for six centuries 
 till Titus scattered it to the winds, stress came to be laid on 
 the elements of exclusiveness ; that the fear of the Lord
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 185 
 
 tended to suppress hope and joy in believing ; and that the 
 Law degenerated to all appearance into a burden of precept 
 and deduction from precept, too grievous to be borne. 
 
 Yet if the central idea of Semitic religion took its place in 
 European culture, it was not without a profound alteration in 
 its structure and its relations to the other elements of national 
 life. A Semitic scholar has tried to make out that the great 
 contribution to religious thought by the Semitic race was the 
 idea of monotheism. It is perhaps a little difficult to say 
 what the monotheistic idea veritably is. But, in any case, it 
 may be asserted without unnecessary paradox that the strength 
 of the Semitic contribution to humanity does not lie, strictly 
 speaking, in ideas. The people of ' ideas/ of thoughts, in the 
 ordinary sense, are the Indo-European races. The Semite 
 and by Semite I mean in the main Hebrew and Arab is 
 a man of vision, a seer, one who envisages truth in its indi- 
 vidual concreteness. His genius is lyrical and historical,- not 
 dramatic or philosophical. What he sees, he utters ; what he 
 feels, he can reveal ; but it is a monologue, and no reflection. 
 And, secondly, he is a man of action, rather than thought ; 
 his beliefs are not articles of a creed, but postulates of action. 
 For him God speaks to man directly, face to face ; speaks in 
 the spirit of the moment, and for the thing to be done. His 
 great function is the imperative, the word of action ; not, ' so 
 am I to be rightly thought of/ but ' so must it be done/ 
 Creation itself is a mandate, not a making : its word is fiat. 
 
 Even the later appearance of Semitic religion is like the 
 earlier. Mohammed, too, is a man of simple sensuous vision ; 
 he sees his Lord as a beardless youth with locks of curly hair, 
 and on his feet golden sandals. God comes nigh. He de- 
 scends till he is only two bows' length from the prophet 
 and nearer : Mohammed sees Paradise, with its dark-eyed 
 maidens and the green-robed faithful at their side. But 
 observe it is all fresh and vigorous, with the hues of young 
 belief, and not a mere lingering image in some after-time.
 
 186 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 And it goes from the sensuous to the spiritual at one step. 
 ' Every night ' (or every Friday night according to another 
 form of the tradition) ' God comes down to the firmament of 
 the earth and says: Wherever there is a sinner who repents, 
 I will turn myself unto him, and him that begs for forgiveness 
 will I forgive.' But the thing ever present, occasionally 
 relieved by the idea of the compassionate and all-merciful, 
 is the sense of life's emptiness without God, and of God being 
 all in all. Once the prophet stood before a heap of dung and 
 said : 'So, such is the world/ and then he took rotten rags 
 and mouldering bones, and cried : ' That is the world.' And 
 the prophet said again : ' If ye knew what I know, ye would 
 laugh little and weep much. I see what ye see not, and hear 
 what ye hear not : .the earth groans, and well may it groan. 
 There is not one span-breadth whereon an angel does not 
 press his brow into the dust. By Allah, if ye knew what 
 I know, ye would laugh little and weep much. Ye would 
 cease dallying wantonly with your women and go forth into 
 the street and humiliate you before God.' When God's 
 omnipresence is so felt, one does not wonder to hear that 
 a certain verse of the Koran made Omar faint : or that one 
 day he took in his hand a corn-straw and said : Oh, that 
 I were this straw ! Oh, that I were forgotten and for ever 
 forgotten ! Oh, that my mother had never borne me ' : or 
 that Abubekr cried : ' Oh, that I had been created as a bird 
 and not as a man ! ' 
 
 The strength of Semitic faith, the religious gold it brings, 
 is not the discovery that God is, or that he is one, but that 
 he is alive, active, ruling the generations of men, that he is 
 the law and the spirit of life. Its God is not a ' being,' an 
 ' is/ but an ' ought' : not a God of the past but of the future: 
 not of the dead but of the living. He is not the great world- 
 source, the great object of all objects : if he is cause, he is 
 essentially active cause ; if he is substance, he is also acting 
 ' subject/ To his people he is as a father, a husband, a leader,
 
 xi ] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 187 
 
 a fellow-warrior ; at once above them and among them, their 
 own better half, their truer self, their conscience, their spring 
 of action. The shades in Islam are darker than the earlier 
 Judaism and the later Israelitism : God is perhaps too terrible. 
 But the faith in the power that makes for righteousness is 
 strong : the obedience to duty is enthusiasm, and if the visions 
 of Paradise shine too sensuously bright, who are we that we 
 should find fault ? 
 
 When Semitic faith reaches the lands of Aryan races, its 
 form and character change. The Greek spirit, the Indo- 
 European spirit, seizes upon it, and makes out of religion 
 a theology. It was so with Islam, when it penetrated into 
 regions under Persian and Greek influence. God came to 
 be an object for theoretic contemplation, for description and 
 analysis. The creed became a series of propositions, stating 
 scientific or quasi-scientific truth. God, if still defined as 
 the sum or supreme of reality, had only a logical thing-like 
 reality, not the reality of life and action. He -had to pass 
 into transcendence ; for how could a being so surpassingly 
 great co-exist with a world of beings so small ? Be content 
 to say merely that God is, and you are very near practically 
 affirming that he is not. You then become alarmed ; for old 
 memories cling to the name, and you begin to look about for 
 proofs of his existence. And when reality is lost, it is not 
 easy to find it by arguments. You may prove by a thousand 
 reasons that your friend must be faithful ; but if your faith 
 in her is gone, what are they worth ? That verb ' is ' is 
 always elliptical. It calls for a completion of its predication. 
 Give it no complement, and you may as well almost let it slip 
 altogether. And the complement of the predication in God's 
 case is : God is all in all, is ever-acting, is mine. Stop short 
 of these completing words, and your phrase misses fire, does 
 not catch, hangs inert. 
 
 But if this change, which in the Aryan mind so often came 
 over the religious life, was inimical to religion, it had also evil
 
 1 88 GIFFORD LECTURES [xi 
 
 consequences for morals. It took the life out of it, and left it 
 a law, a form, a ' cold morality.' If life, therefore, was to be 
 given, it had to be galvanized into the moral order from 
 without. That might be done by a supra-mundane God, who 
 byfiaf, corrects the defective correspondence between the sense 
 of duty and the sense of life. Perhaps, on the other hand, 
 like young Fichte, you may assert in words that we need no 
 god other than the moral order. But if you use such words, 
 you will probably be obliged to own, as Fichte afterwards did, 
 that a moral order so understood is very different from what 
 the phrase ordinarily means ; that it is not an order but an 
 ordering life ; that it is not moral but something to which 
 morality, strictly so called, is a means. 
 
 Christendom, as I showed more at length last year, drank 
 deeply, through St. Paul, and later through the Roman 
 legalism, of the Judaic spirit. Duty, the sense of ever- 
 pressing law, grew to be misconstrued as a regard for already 
 promulgated laws, a service to ordinances, a machinery of 
 order. But duty is more than order or obedience; and that 
 is what it was Kant's especial business to teach ; not to 
 emphasize though that also is good that man lives under 
 a categorical imperative. The ethical doctrine of Kant is 
 chiefly concerned with an argument to show that the moral 
 Jaw is freedom ; that its order is also progress : and that 
 the categorical imperative is only fully phrased by autonomy. 
 The moral law, if it be a command, is not a command from 
 without; if it comes from above and with authority, that 
 authority is not (in the ordinary sense) supernatural, and 
 that 'above' is to be taken not of locality, but of grade 
 of function. Every ethical precept must be judged by one 
 test : is it a co-operant part of the great ethical ideal of 
 growing perfection for the individual and for the collectivity? 
 Can it, in the fullest light, and with all clearness, be said to 
 be an integral part of that good will, that will to good, which 
 is the essential prerogative of man, however much in moments
 
 xi] ON SOME RELATIONS OF MORALS 189 
 
 he falls short of it, or in ignorance works against it ? This 
 will to good, which has no limits or dividing lines, which is 
 not will for the good of self, or of society, or of humanity, 
 but for all good and good in all, is another name for reason, 
 and another name for love. It is the spirit in man which is 
 his higher nature, ever enacting rules of good, ever setting 
 up new methods of reaching the ideal ; but always conscious 
 that they are, though good, not the good, and therefore, 
 though to be obeyed, not to be blindly obeyed. They are 
 to be obeyed, one might say, not as we would obey God, but 
 as we might bow before one of his angels. Progress through 
 order, and order for the sake of progress : yet, always 
 though it is a dangerous truth, as some may think the 
 order is progressive, duty is moving. Even so it is with 
 religion. Man, it has been said, never is, but always to be, 
 blest. So says one, ' the true God of Israel is not the god 
 who comes naturally (i. e. as result of previous process) to 
 the Israelitic consciousness : he must be apprehended by an 
 express act of the intelligence. All the patriarchs look forward 
 to a salvation to come : and God himself is only to be under- 
 stood as a God who becomes and lives, who for us is not what 
 he will yet be.' So duty is not adherence to a fixed post : the 
 soldier of duty has no doubt an obligation : but he will dis- 
 charge it ill, if he think it is all predetermined and within 
 the bond. 
 
 When in presence of Lear, her sisters and the court, her 
 father asked Cordelia his question, her reply was : 
 
 ' I love your majesty 
 According to my bond, nor more nor less." 
 
 And again : 
 
 ' You have begot me, bred me, loved me : I 
 Return those duties back as are right fit, 
 Obey you, love you, and most honour you.' 
 
 Cordelia defended herself against the charge of untenderness 
 by the claim to be at least true : and excused apparent coldness
 
 190 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 by the defence, ' I cannot heave my heart into my mouth/ 
 Her situation was, indeed, excusable; she was tempted. A 
 foolish father, hypocritical sisters, and a gaping crowd, might 
 well have been too much for her; and like a second Vashti, 
 she refused at the monarch's beck f to show the princes and 
 the people her beauty/ But natheless, even though her 
 tempter took the guise of an angel of light, the love of 
 truth, she fell, a not wholly innocent victim. For duty is 
 not perfectly rendered, when it is rendered as duty and no 
 more : it can never be merely debt paid, but always must 
 have added grace : it must not be paid, but as if freely given. 
 It is sad when the hypocrisy of over-statement drives one into 
 matter-of-f actness : for matter-of-factness just wants a gracious 
 touch to light it up into truth. Cordelia, for a moment, but 
 a moment of great issues, was prim and proper ; and considera- 
 tions, quite irrelevantly personal, closed the issues from the 
 heart to the lips. An evil spirit, the evil spirit of sisterhood, 
 subjugated nature and daughterhood, and the jealousy her 
 words let loose went on to work out all its tempestuous 
 mischief.
 
 XII 
 
 THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION AND ITS 
 RELATION TO MORALITY. THE BELIEF IN 
 IMMORTALITY 
 
 WE have seen more than once that it is hard to lay down 
 a line to distinguish religion from morality. In a phrase 
 quoted from Schelling, we found the religious spirit described 
 as conscientiousness, only however in order that such con- 
 scientiousness itself might be identified with heroism and 
 enthusiasm. But in each of the terms themselves there is 
 a corresponding antinomy. In religion, e. g. at whatever 
 stage we regard it, there is a strange antithesis between 
 the power attributed to the god or gods, and the implication 
 that the faithful worshipper has all this divine power as it 
 were at his command. Even in the lower forms of savage 
 religion the worshipper believes that, if only the right 
 methods are employed, the powers that rule in the various 
 parts of the natural sphere are at his disposal. The believer, 
 however, ascribing superhuman powers to his god, still, by an 
 apparently contradictory attitude, hopes confidently to find 
 these powers subservient to himself. There is thus, on the 
 one hand, fear, subjection, dependence : but there is equally 
 on the other, hope, confidence, and appropriation. There is 
 an underlying sense of essential kindred between man and 
 God, but between the two parties there is at the same time 
 a division or apparent hostility : a hostility which, however, 
 may be said to be implicitly overcome, because it can be over-
 
 i 9 2 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 come by means and methods at man's disposal. The face of 
 God may be often veiled and apparently averted, but, though 
 the friendship may be concealed, it is there, and by applying 
 the right means can be re-awakened. God and man are, as 
 it were, old friends, as Pindar said, from the same stock ; but 
 (shall we say, in the process of civilization ?) they have drifted 
 apart ; a variance has arisen, and requires to be removed by 
 communication, according to a certain set of observances. 
 These friendly observances, however, God himself has, it is 
 understood, revealed at some auspicious moment. He may be 
 jealous, he may be mischievous, he may be uncertain ; so it 
 has seemed at times to many of his worshippers; but under- 
 lying it all there is a certainty in the worshipper that, if he 
 follows the appointed methods of approaching his God, he can 
 by them secure for his interest the great powers of the world. 
 Thus understood, religion means a sense, on man's side, of 
 a Power superior, indefinitely superior to himself, controlling 
 him and things with absolute authority : yet graciously per- 
 mitting him, by an appointed or revealed series of observances, 
 to exercise control in his turn. Man, in his weakness, has 
 ultimately on his side God in his strength : if, that is, 
 a certain barrier between them be first removed, a mode of 
 doing which has in some way been disclosed to man by the 
 deity. Thus in the very forefront of religion stands the postu- 
 lated fact of revelation. Man, away from God and having 
 lost sight of him, is as constantly persuaded that he is opening 
 a way back to himself, as it were, giving signals and beckon- 
 ing from the darkness in which he dwells. 
 
 It is usual in these days to regard everything under the 
 conditions of the struggle for existence, and as a weapon for 
 use therein. Of material weapons man has invented or 
 appropriated many. He has wrested from the creatures their 
 own claws, tusks, bones, and used them to subdue others ; he 
 has chipped and shaped stones, and finally hammered and 
 fused metals into his tools. But all these implements are
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 193 
 
 slight in importance if compared with the metaphysical ally, 
 the supernatural aid, which he has secured in his contest. 
 All the ranges of nature, animate and inanimate, may resist 
 as they like his efforts to subdue them : but man has a 
 weapon in his possession stronger than anything they can 
 possibly bring against him. By an instinct earlier than 
 any history can trace, he sets the power in and behind 
 phenomena on his side. He is naturally a theogonic being : 
 he has at the very root of all his action an instinct, the 
 instinct of reason, which grows and becomes more deter- 
 minate, that he is, as it were, backed by great powers to the 
 extent of which he can and will fix no limits. He projects 
 his own self to be into the nature he seeks to conquer. Like 
 an assailant who should succeed in throwing his standard into 
 the strong central keep of the enemy's fortress, and fight his 
 way thereto with assured victory in his eyes of hope, so man, 
 with the vision of the soul, prognosticates his final triumph. 
 He sees, often faltering, the writing on the wall, which 
 announces for those who can read it the foe's defeat. Thus 
 behaves, thus exults, that reason in him, stronger and faster 
 than reasoning, which already reaching beyond his mere 
 physical individuality, knows ' no limits to its sway; its flag, 
 the sceptre all who meet obey/ It, the god-discovering, god- 
 begetting instinct, is, as it were, the long-neglected foundling 
 of some great hero by a lowly mother, who goes forth, 
 a Theseus, in search of home and adventures, working his 
 way slowly into recognition, the hidden father ever and anon 
 vouchsafing tokens of encouraging manifestations, till in the 
 fullness of all times the hour of unification and final 
 restitution shall come. 
 
 Such a power reveals itself especially, as it were palpably, 
 in particular incidents and events of his history. It takes 
 shape here and there, in the course of experience. It is, if 
 you like so to put it, the sense of the infinite ; but that only 
 means the feeling, and occasionally the vivid realization, that 
 

 
 194 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 behind the definite and the accomplished there is ever more 
 and more yet to be attained. For at first the conception 
 of the object of each feeling is very inadequate. Its infinity 
 only appears in an endless emergence of new and ever new 
 gods. We speak of the concluding result of such a theogonic 
 movement of the human spirit as polytheism. But polytheism 
 is only the summing up by reflection of a process which 
 comes upon God here, there, and anywhere, and which, now 
 that it has found so many instances of godhead, stops, and 
 gathering them together forms them into a system. Thus 
 the mere assemblage, the mere pantheon, of a polytheism is 
 not the primal religious fact, but a subsequent product of 
 theological study, seeking to arrange, codify, and co-ordinate 
 the forms of divinity, which have successively arisen in the 
 course of natural development. Each of its successive, or even 
 simultaneous, deities was a god, or, indeed, was God ; each 
 a specimen, as seen under the perspective of a special time 
 and place, of the great power of things : and it was only 
 when classification supervening found a multitude of such 
 beings awaiting its decision, and all claiming to be genuinely 
 accredited, that the question arose as to their mutual relation. 
 Each, as it first appeared in the form of deity, was God : 
 each even afterwards, when the religious worshipper took it 
 seriously as a divine power, was still God : but when the 
 deifying instinct had ceased, and there were only its results to 
 compile and compare, the products left for the artist and the 
 historian in the course of the theogonic process had to be 
 adjusted to each other. Theological ingenuity, taking each 
 of these products as an independent and individually real 
 entity, and asking how the multiplicity can be grouped, 
 creates a mythological pantheon or system of gods. If, on 
 the contrary, we remember that each god was only a frag- 
 mentary step in the evolution of God, we shall refuse to 
 recognize any of them in separateness as fully God ; though 
 each was for the time and place a symbol of true divinity.
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 195 
 
 We shall treat the variety, not as exclusive individuals to be 
 grouped in a collective body, but as fragments or faces or as- 
 pects of one supreme reality, one Godhead successively surmised 
 by man, and successively self -revealed in the course of history. 
 A real polytheism, if it were possible, would violate the 
 very postulate of religion. If the gods are many, they cease 
 to be God, the object of worship and power, and become 
 mere objects suitable for treatment in art and literature. So 
 it was in Greece, in India, in Germany, and indeed almost 
 everywhere : so it might have been in Israel. Always a 
 polytheism is rather an artistic than a religious phenomenon, 
 a category of theological reflection, not a directly religious 
 birth. In the truly religious field the God is one and com- 
 plete, at each time one and all. It may be that the 
 worshipper, who now paid his reverence to Aphrodite, at 
 another time to Demeter, could hardly tell what was the 
 relation of the powers he successively adored. But, on 
 the other hand, these were not problems that troubled him : 
 they are problems that concern the theologian. To the 
 faithful heart, seeking help and hearing, each at the moment 
 is God, each, omnipotent ; with, no doubt, the qualification 
 added as reflection steps in in his sphere. But, at each 
 moment in the stress and strain of real life, the many 
 practically converge into one. Here, as in so many other 
 instances, religion and theology separate. But theology 
 belongs to literature or to art : it deals not with the living 
 gods in their life and activity, but with their names and 
 historical place ; with the statical aspect of the pantheon, not 
 with its dynamic life ; and its difficulties of mutual arrange- 
 ment little perplex the real and earnest worshipper. These 
 matters are of externals, and do not touch the central meaning 
 of religion. They arise after you have left the shrine and 
 the presence of God. In brief, the multiplicity of gods is 
 but the reflex cast upon Olympus by an ill-organized com- 
 munity, which has put its parts together by mechanical 
 
 o 2
 
 196 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 juxtaposition : it is the field for sacerdotal learning- rather 
 than an interest of genuine faith. And when it seriously 
 exists, it is a sign that religious development has been 
 arrested for purposes other than religious : that political or 
 artistic interests have carried the day. To religion, therefore, 
 the glorious Greek literature and art gave no helping hand. 
 Just as in mediaeval Europe Greek science was spun out 
 into multiplicity of detail, but lost touch with the root of 
 science in reality; so Greek mythology was a gorgeous 
 parasite that left its parent to grow blanched and unnatural 
 under its shade. 
 
 The main difference in religions is due to the advance 
 of man in other fields, to the growth of man's knowledge of 
 the world, to the general result of his civilization : in other 
 words, it is determined by the advance of his knowledge 
 of nature and by the growth of his own sociality. By the 
 former, it is corrected and co-ordinated on its objective side : 
 by the latter, on its subjective. If it be asked which of 
 these is most important, perhaps, from the religious stand- 
 point, we shall not err in emphasizing the subjective. The 
 theory of objective godhead is essential : but its revelation in 
 and to man is the natural prius. It was e. g. in the former 
 direction that unity was given by philosophic reflection to the 
 theology of Greece, in the latter direction that unity was 
 given by prophetic effort to the religion of Israel. To the 
 man of scientific reflection, God was the central being, the 
 supreme cause and source of movement in the physical or 
 objective world : he was the reality of all reality, the object 
 in all objectivity. To the religious man, who did not analyze 
 his religion, God was the central source and rule of action, 
 the standard to live after, and the life to live by, of the 
 moral community. Thus the poetic remoulding of Greek 
 mythology was in the first instance mainly a matter of 
 theology : it did not directly touch the heart, and had little 
 or no effect on the popular religion. Of that religion,
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 197 
 
 at least of its inner life of faith, prayer, praise, we indeed 
 know but little : literature and art can tell us comparatively 
 little about it. It is the picturesque, the artistic, and finally 
 the historical and philosophical sides of the products of 
 religious genius that we see : of the devotional side we 
 can gather but little directly from the works of the sculptor 
 and the poet. But we are hardly, therefore, entitled to 
 suppose it non-existent. To the cultured classic writers, to 
 whom we owe the main part of our knowledge of Greek 
 civilization, religion was evidently a matter which lay in 
 the main outside their range of interests. And from several 
 indications we are almost entitled to assume that, even 
 as art was defective and almost prohibited in the more 
 religious phases of Semitic civilization, so religion, strictly 
 so called, was a defective and undeveloped element in Greece. 
 Non omnia possumus omnes. Religion in Greece always tended 
 to become identified with a sort of theology and theosophy. 
 It was a kind of tfecopi'a. Even the monastic Christianity of 
 the Greeks tended to be what the occidental worker calls idle 
 contemplation, that looked away and away into the easy calm 
 of nature and the peace of God ; a leisure of vision in which 
 the distraction of life and business were left behind, in 
 which even the strain of duty ceased, and the soul was at 
 peace with the universe, un tempted, unattracted, unoccupied. 
 The Greek Church has still a Christianity of its own, and 
 under Christian names it reproduces much of the spirit that 
 created the drama and the theoretic life. 
 
 If religion be what we have described, it would seem in its 
 first essence to have little or nothing to do with the community 
 and with morality. It is so to speak on a deeper level, a more 
 fundamental stratum than morality. Morality seems to be 
 but a means to better and higher life, while religion claims to 
 be or contain the fundamental postulate in the struggle for 
 life itself, the postulate or belief that the inmost and supreme 
 forces of the world are on man's side. Only in the earliest
 
 198 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 historical forms of religion this postulate is underlying and 
 implicit, hardly daring to own its presumption, and does not 
 with full self-confidence come to the front. It is rather a hope, 
 mixed with fears : a wish that has yet to be actualized and 
 fulfilled by strange and unintelligible methods. There is no 
 security in it : no faith that can cast out fear. It is a groping 
 upwards of feeble hands ; and though it never utterly fails that 
 were the death of deaths it recurrently droops and hesitates. 
 Man is not at inward ease, not at unity with himself, he has 
 not risen to possess his own soul ; and hence he finds no unity, 
 no stability, no rest in the powers which he postulates in the 
 world around him. Just because he is not fully and reasonably 
 man, but presents from time to time different and disconnected 
 parts of man, so is the God he finds ready in nature to support 
 him a self -divided, many-formed, unrestful being. Whether, 
 therefore, we assert with the German theologian Kaftan, that 
 the object sought in all religions is life and not perfect life, 
 that religion is based on the merely natural desire for good, 
 and not on any ethical obligation to realize an ideal ; or main- 
 tain with others, that it is only through religion that man can 
 uphold his inner independence against the obstacles which 
 nature throws in his way ; we must still say that life and 
 good are words that have no proper meaning for a being who 
 is entirely without ethical quality. To talk of ethical ideals, 
 unless these terms are carefully defined, is beside the question. 
 A desire for good is nob a mere desire for pleasant feeling, 
 but a desire for self-satisfaction, for a better, truer, more 
 real self; and thus in every way it implies an ideal. Life 
 is not a purely physical or animal state, but the self-centred 
 realization of an intelligent soul. 
 
 Morality, then, far from being a mere means to more perfect 
 life which implies that life would still be life apart from it 
 is essentially a part, or rather, as we have already ventured 
 to conclude, the centre and life of life in all human existence. 
 Or, in other words, it was through the social bond and social
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 199 
 
 effort that man became a true and living soul. That made 
 him in the human sense one life, one being-, and differentiated 
 him from the mere animal. For his unity as man lies not in 
 the physiological organism, but in the enveloping idea of 
 common sociality. It is precisely his quality, his privilege, to 
 have ideals, because in him always, to make him man, there 
 is the contrast between what he is and will be, between matter 
 and spirit ; there is the faculty of error, which is the faculty 
 of truth. He is always in division and tension between what 
 he is and what he would or ought to be. He is not a life 
 self -complete, to which a further grace of perfection may be 
 from time to time added as an ornament, but which can go 
 on in its normal course as mere life. To live is, for man, to 
 form ideals and to fall short of them : they may be very 
 lowly ones, not what popularly would be called ideals at all ; 
 but at any rate, from the day that the social sting entered 
 into him and made him a competitor, from the day that social 
 sympathy inspired him and made him a co-operator, there 
 has always been a contrast, however slight, between his Is and 
 his Ought to le, between the given and the postulated. What 
 may have been the case in that pre-social life which, according 
 to Hobbes, was, if it ever was anything, ' nasty and brutish Y 
 we need not greatly care ; at any rate, for human life in 
 general, we may say that always it is governed and constituted 
 by reason, which bids a man not to be what he is, but to 
 be such as the dictates of a larger and a society-postulating 
 consciousness requires. 
 
 Morality is not something without which man would still 
 be man, and his life still be life ; not a counsel of perfection, 
 but an unconditional universal imperative. No doubt, by 
 careless abstraction, we may speak of such a soulless life as 
 man's life, and imagine man as still man with all social 
 relations and all their hopes and fears and demands obliterated. 
 But these are plays of that old fallacy, called by logicians 
 
 1 Leviathan, Part I, ch. xiii.
 
 200 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 Acervus, which supposes that, because you can diminish 
 a quality till it becomes next to nothing, you can therefore 
 leave it out altogether. If we reject such false abstraction, 
 we may go back and assert that in the very beginnings of 
 religion there was morality. Non-moral, i. e. non-social and 
 non-civilized man, we know not. Morality, sociality, civility 
 is his prop num. His morality, indeed, may be quaint and 
 untasteful as judged by later specimens more familiar to us ; 
 yet that is a judgement which the lowest savage, as we 
 complacently call the savages of another type than ours, can 
 easily retort. But the rudest savage has a life only because 
 he lives in others, for others, by others ; because his life is 
 determined and formed by rules, customs, observances, pain- 
 fully numerous and apparently onerous. It is from this 
 superinduced backbone of his, this political framework and 
 spirit, which is his only because he is son, father, tribesman 
 and what not, that he derives the moral support that enables 
 him to claim the strength of nature, or of nature's inner self 
 on his side. The claim for life, the Anspruch auf Leben, of 
 which Kaftan speaks, is a cheque which he feels entitled to 
 draw, because nature has already singled him out for a special 
 prerogative, charged him, as it were, to be her interpreter or 
 steward. His citizenship, his appropriation of the materials 
 of the natural order for purposes of his life, seems to justify 
 his presumption that he has unlimited right to claim the 
 backing of the universe, or of Him who ultimately is the 
 reality of the Universe, when in any special instance he seems 
 baffled by obstacles in his path. 
 
 Indeed, were it not for the sociality in which he lives it 
 would be hard to see how man, in his individual weakness, 
 could claim the supports of the force or will that lies behind 
 the visible oppositions of things. It is in the conjunct action 
 of himself and his group that he feels himself able to hold up 
 his feeble self in the face of things. He belongs to a royal 
 race, a people chosen by the powers. It is in proportion as
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 201 
 
 by social union he makes life more of a certainty and less of 
 a weary struggle, that he rises to conceive himself as no mere 
 accident or epiphenomenon in things, but as their leading 
 purpose and chief interest. If he thinks that he is only 
 a little lower than the Elo/tim, it is because he has formed 
 a metaphysical reality which is his, and yet something greater 
 than his mere natural individuality can hold. If he feels 
 himself a match for the powers of the physical world, it is by 
 the strength of his community concentrated in consciousness ; 
 and if he dares to believe that the influences of the world ai-e 
 anywhere on his side, it is again because he is one of a group 
 which has entered into specially close relationship with a 
 certain physical region, has become, as it were, co-heir with the 
 powers that rule therein, and formed a sort of covenant of 
 alliance offensive and defensive with them, or with the main 
 Baal and lord of the land. The original gods are local gods, 
 of power and influence narrowly denned by the sphere of the 
 social power to which they are attached, but in that sphere 
 they are supreme. Outside their ordered circle there are other 
 natural powers, vague, treacherous, not yet as it were reduced 
 to the social order of human companionship, but even they 
 too are not wholly unreconcilable enemies. When we speak, 
 therefore, of nature-religions and ethical religions by way 
 of contrast, we use terms rather loosely, and a potiori. The 
 German anthropologist speaks of nature-peoples. But there 
 are no nature-peoples, Nattir-Vdlker, but only peoples which 
 to outside judgement leave much to be desired in the character 
 of their civilization ; so much as hardly to deserve the name 
 civilized at all : yet are they still in some degree civilized, 
 never mere children of unadulterated and non-rational nature, 
 and their very abominations are the proof of their humanity. 
 So in the other case. A nature-religion is only an ethical 
 religion of a rather less organized ethicality than is presup- 
 posed in other religions. There is no non-ethical man, though 
 the ethics of certain times may be very unlike those most
 
 202 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 familiar to us. But, as we have already seen, ethics, religion, 
 art and science are dependent for their development on the 
 degree in which the community has solved the problem of 
 sustaining life by the production and distribution of material 
 goods, so here it may be noted that in the early stages of 
 civilization the incident obligations of ethics are perpetually 
 dodged by the ever-pressing pangs of hunger. 
 
 And just as man believes that the life and emotion of the 
 Power in nature beats somehow in deep sympathy with his 
 own, and that a force greater than his own is on his side, 
 whatever obstacles may temporarily deflect his course, so he 
 believes that the visible life he and others lead here is not 
 altogether extinguished by death. If it be an indestructible 
 tendency of social man, i. e. of man as man, to claim the 
 support of the general principle at the heart of things, and 
 to have by appointed modes metaphysical aid always at 
 his beck, it is no less his tendency to assume his existence 
 prolonged into a world beyond death. Even to the savage, 
 and most of all perhaps to the savage, the idea of the ter- 
 mination of all his existence by death seems absurd and 
 unintelligible. But in this case, as in the others, it is in 
 the strength of the social tie that he is able to prolong the 
 vision of life in a perspective to which only the incompetence 
 of his imagination sets a limit. The tombs of his fathers, 
 these are his holy of holies : there is set up in visible 
 shape the enduring memorial of his conviction, that death 
 cannot break the invisible continuity of his real life. 
 
 In a passage of great power at the close of Fiji ne at 
 the Fair, Browning has given a sort of survey of human 
 civilization. Beginning with a vision of a great crowd in 
 the Square of St. Mark's at Venice, he proceeds to use it as 
 an emblem of that strange masquerade of change in per- 
 manence and permanence in change, which the movements 
 of art, science, morality and religion present. At length he 
 sums up all the work of human culture, in all its branches
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 203 
 
 and all its variety, in one single picture, reduced as it were 
 to its lowest denominator, its grayest and most unadorned 
 shape. And that epitome of all man's monumental labours 
 is one of those dolmen-tombs, the long, low, narrow avenue 
 ending in the funereal chamber with its great broad lid 
 and its foreignly curious stones, supporting as at Maezhow 
 a great memorial mound. That is the net result, the epitome 
 of civilization a tomb ! For in that grim structure, so 
 toilsomely reared as if for ever, man has boldly claimed to 
 be heir of the ages, he has extended his hopes into the 
 illimitable future, and with superb self-confidence declared 
 that he does not all die. Such a tomb is a temple, the 
 witness to a faith in life eternal ; for even the gods in older 
 legend had their sepulchre : was it not in Crete that men 
 showed the grave of Zeus ? But the tombs of the saints still 
 work wonders ; and the graves of the fathers are the pledge 
 to the sons of the times that are yet to be, as well as the 
 record of immemorial beginnings. 
 
 Let us not however misunderstand the evolution-formula. 
 There have perhaps been some who have regarded the pro- 
 tective defences, by which some persecuted race has survived 
 and escaped its assailants, as a happy trick by which it 
 suddenly endowed itself with new properties. So some seem 
 to think, man, like to be worsted in the struggle for life, 
 said to himself: Let there be gods, beings of my kindred, 
 but far more potent, on my side : Let there be a life hereafter, 
 so that I may not be haunted by the weakening thought 
 that all is vanity. If man so said to himself, it was, we may 
 be assured, by no idle jiat, but because in him spoke some- 
 thing other, and yet not wholly other, than himself. Scientific 
 writers sometimes remind us that the whole beauty of sight 
 and sound in the world is a sensuous illusion : really, they 
 tell us, there is no colour, save in the eye, no music but 
 in the ear. It is kind of them to stop where they do ; for 
 why there should be even weight, or force, or direction, if
 
 204 GIFFORD LECTURES [xir 
 
 the human senses are gone, some of us may be excused 
 for doubting. Certainly if f ifs' and <ans' are to be used 
 so boldly as good ware, we may expect crashes. It is a poor 
 jest to argue that, if something which is were not, something 
 else would be something still more else. It is not for us 
 to pick and choose the bits of reality we are to accept as 
 genuine. It hangs all together; and if you give up any 
 of it, its most sensuous or materialist part, you cannot be 
 sure of retaining even the spirit. And, equally, if you give 
 up the more spiritual, you endanger the more material. No 
 doubt the reasoning and rational being, generally young, 
 imagines he could pick and choose, so as to leave out certain 
 disagreeables. But experience (and experience is only matured 
 reason) shows that good cannot be got without evil : or 
 rather that those distinctions, though practically useful, are, 
 as Spinoza saw, not easily attributable to the supreme sub- 
 stance, the Dem, which is another word for Natura. 
 
 It is not man's single intellect that makes the gods, any 
 more than it is man's single intelligence that in Kant's 
 phrase makes nature. The intelligence in either case is more 
 than the physical individuality can contain, and the ' making ' 
 is in this case ( presupposing ' ; which means realizing that 
 there is something efficient in nature, which does not appear on 
 the surface. It is the discovery that the process of civilization, 
 which in its appearance and obvious tendency is a turning 
 away from nature, a departure by human inventions from 
 the rectitude of primaeval arrangements, is not so uniform 
 as it looks. It seems as if man were encroaching on the 
 divine, and stealing its prerogatives ; as if he were preparing 
 for himself the fate of Prometheus, to expiate his rebellion 
 against the universal law. But Prometheus has within him 
 a secret that keeps him confident even under the tortures 
 inflicted by an angry Zeus. He knows that Zeus, who thus 
 tyrannizes over earth and heaven, the blindly natural god, 
 is not to reign for ever : he knows that a saviour will come,
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 205 
 
 that in the struggle of man with the first nature a struggle 
 which, like all such, is not without the evils and violence 
 of wild war there is preparing a new heaven and a new 
 earth, wherein dwells righteousness. He knows that he has 
 on his side a better and a greater Zeus, a God who far from 
 being jealous or hostile to man, will yet reign through man, 
 and raise the son of man, in the consummation of all things, 
 to sit upon the throne of his kingdom. 
 
 There are two weapons, if we again turn to the .evolutionist 
 formula, which man has used against the waste and wear 
 of time and chance. In the strength of a living and active 
 sociality, man has defied the brute powers of nature ; and he 
 has appealed with faith to their inner spirit and purpose : or 
 rather he has taken the permanence of sociality as the pledge 
 and foretaste of an extension of his being, to which time and 
 space can set no limits. He has claimed God for his ever- 
 lasting ally, and been content with nothing less than immor- 
 tality. But if we say ' immortality ' we must guard against 
 any special limitation of its meaning, any special theories as 
 to what and when and where man is immortal. Our ideas on 
 that subject and I suspect, as I hinted the other day, 
 on many kindred topics are largely dependent on popular 
 and exoteric interpretations of Platonism : and, even if Plato's 
 ideas on this topic were much clearer or more undisputed 
 than they are, and personal immortality were a less ambiguous 
 phrase than it can honestly be said to be, we need not here 
 bring them into account. As I use the term, I take it, in its 
 very widest sense, to mean that our inner true being is not 
 a visible and a sensible thing, that it is that in us which 
 is unextinguished by death. ' Sentimus experimurque' says 
 Spinoza, ( no% aeternos esse ' : a personal experience tells us we 
 are above and beyond time. That is all. And if you say, 
 it is not much ; if you speak confidently of life and 
 immortality elsewhere brought to light, if you refer to the 
 speculation of St. Paul which we hear so often by the opened
 
 206 GIFFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 grave ; I will only say that, though as a human being- 1 would 
 fain like others be able to say more, and be glad, like the 
 children in the carol, to bring tidings strange yet true from 
 the land of the leal, I can see in both of these only the 
 reaffirmation of one doctrine, that man lives and fights 
 the world in the faith of a persistence, whose possibility he 
 can by science neither affirm nor deny, neither prove nor dis- 
 prove, but which in some shape and some grade seems as 
 essential an. element of humanity, whether externally formu- 
 lated or not, as the bejief in God. Both are still of faith 
 as of old ; if they were otherwise than of faith, they would 
 not move men as they have done. If they seem less obviously 
 prominent in the world than they once were, may it not be 
 that they have sunk as perpetual stimuli even into the hearts 
 of those who, when they consciously reflect, seem half- 
 inclined to reject them from their creed ? For as not every 
 one who says, ' Lord, Lord ! ' shall be admitted to the 
 kingdom, so, says one, ' loving hearts have thought they saw 
 in atheism a form, to their mind the most respectful, of modest 
 and profound piety ; ' and many, who in words have rejected 
 immortality, have done so because of their ideal faith that 
 ' flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God/ These 
 things, like others, are justified by their fruits. That is 
 a poor faith in immortality, which would seek in it another 
 chance to make up for neglected opportunities here, or to 
 replenish in after-time the now-kept-empty vessel of love : as 
 it is a poor faith in God, which is content with the belief 
 that, however slackly things go now, he will one day come 
 to be our judge. 
 
 But, as of the belief in gods, so of that in immortality, it is 
 true that, in a loose use of words, we may say that it is at 
 first without ethical significance. What does ' ethical ' mean 
 in this connexion? Probably to most people of an unre- 
 generate mind, it means that which is or ought to be visited 
 with rewards or punishment ; and to the most unregenerate
 
 xn] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 207 
 
 mind, especially the latter. Ethical, to this type of moralist 
 and he has long been a common one always connotes, in 
 the first instance, approval or disapproval, and, in the second, 
 a wish to see an example made and a whipping inflicted. 
 Such moralists take a fine personal interest in the moral law, 
 but perhaps scarcely an ethical interest. There is undoubtedly 
 a time in the history of civilization when punishment occupies 
 a foremost place amongst its machinery. There was a time 
 when, wild in woods, the noble savage and especially the 
 noble savage's children ran, little troubled with the fear 
 of discipline, and with no obvious penalty from political 
 sanctions. There was, no doubt, a sort of tit for tat : but 
 it had something of a sportive character about it: as when 
 the Australian savage, having injured a man, has to stand 
 as a goal for the missiles of his adversary or adversary's 
 relative. But as things went further, and civilization 
 advanced too fast for the natural pace of some who had to 
 follow, it was found necessary to apply sharper goads to the 
 slow and refractory so as to quicken their pace. And so it 
 continued, till punishment almost came to be looked upon as 
 the end for which civilization had been wrought, and jails 
 and scaffolds as its obvious symbols. At present we begin 
 to have some doubts as to the right to punish. Just as we 
 now recognize, if we but think, that physical sicknesses are 
 very largely due to our own misconduct, and therefore, in a 
 schoolmastering world, fit objects for penal treatment ; so we 
 recognize, on the other hand, that crimes have some of the 
 nature of disease, and are in many cases their own punish- 
 ment. And we have on the whole admitted, not that 
 criminals are faultless, but that casting stones at them is 
 not the best way of putting matters right, and has an 
 unpleasant tendency to generate fresh offences. At any rate, 
 punishment has ceased to be quite the noble function it was 
 half a century ago. 
 
 Now, when people spoke of the ethical transformation of
 
 ao8 G1FFORD LECTURES [xn 
 
 the religious idea and that of immortality, they were thinking 
 of the spirit of a time when, in the course of social and 
 political development, the important uses of punishment had 
 first dawned upon men. In Homer, e. g. where penal codes 
 are still defective, there is on the whole little use of the after- 
 life for penalty, except in the case apparently of some 
 extremely profane persons. In Pindar, again, the after-life 
 is partly conceived as a field for further development of things 
 set going here. But in Plato the penal machinery of the 
 other world is in full operation, and for the punishment craze, 
 i. e. the extravagant enthronement of it, he is considerably to 
 blame. Curious results, indeed, come about by the change of 
 view : and Zeus might have to punish in his modern capacity 
 what he (according to earlier creeds) might also be said to 
 have inspired. But that, perhaps, is an inconsistency not 
 confined to the Hellenic world. 
 
 And what Plato did in a mild way, the extravagances of 
 vulgar, and especially vulgarly theological, imagination carried 
 to terrible lengths in Christendom. Both perhaps got the 
 framework of their ideas from Egypt, where, as the Greeks 
 thought, the immortality of the soul was discovered. And 
 certainly, if not discovered, it was there applied as a great 
 disciplinary agent in accordance with the exemplarily bureau- 
 cratic spirit of the Egyptian regime. The world of the dead 
 was a great law-court sitting in permanence, and making an 
 exhaustive scrutiny of the deeds done in the body. 
 
 The important point for us is not to rest satisfied with the 
 restriction of ethical conceptions to a stage when they are 
 dominated by the rule of laws. Of laws, I say, not of Law : 
 for while laws are commands with penal sanctions attached, 
 Law is the voice of God, or the sweet reasonableness of 
 harmonious and self-completing life. The law, said one, 
 meaning the code of laws, was a schoolmaster to bring us to 
 the heirship of the promises. There is a period of discipline, 
 but it is subordinate, and a means of self -development ; its
 
 XH] THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF RELIGION 209 
 
 justification is to anticipate the end, and so give direction to 
 effort, that would otherwise hurt itself and others, and waste 
 precious time. But it has its limits in its end : it must never 
 extirpate, though it may accelerate and facilitate, self -education 
 and freedom. And of God, therefore, we need not think too 
 much as an authority to coerce an erring- world. True morality 
 is not a thing of rules and observances. Far, indeed, should 
 any man be from speaking scornfully of forms, traditions, and 
 the bonds of social authority. Without them we should be 
 poor and miserable creatures ; through them is all progress. 
 But they are not everything. When Michael Angelo's great 
 vision of the last judgement was set open to view, a certain 
 high official at the Papal court complained that its nudities 
 were indecencies, worthy of places unnameable rather than of 
 the buildings in charge of the Vicar of Christ. Michael 
 Angelo's first notice of the criticism, says the legend, was to 
 give his critic a place amongst the evil shameless ones. But 
 he had at length to reckon with the Pope, who echoed the 
 complaint. ' That,' replied the artist, ' is a fault easy to set 
 right : there are harder things to amend than that.' And the 
 order was forthwith given to Daniele da Volterra, to be known 
 hereafter in art history as II Braghettone, the breeches-maker, 
 to veil the offending members. Now breeches-making in this 
 sense is a comparatively easy matter ; and a great many people 
 are of opinion that it is the most important of all matters. 
 And its necessity to some extent is undoubted. Only the 
 tailors must not be too proud. It is a nobler task to mould 
 fine limbs, strong, graceful and active; and for that end 
 tailoring, otherwise commendable, sometimes stands in the 
 way. It is excellent again to clean the outside of the cup 
 and the platter : but there is still the business of the inside. 
 
 And so, let us not forget we all do forget that the art of 
 morality is not, how not, to do it. Its function is not merely 
 to keep us from falling, nor is it to help us to become proper. 
 It is to teach us to love God with all our hearts and strength 
 
 p
 
 210 GIFFORD LECTURES 
 
 and mind, and our neighbours as ourselves. The old Stoics 
 used to say, ' Follow Nature ' : and Bishop Butler has 
 remarked that this is but a loose way of talking. The 
 Stoic perhaps might have retorted that it was a lax way of 
 talking to say, ' Obey conscience.' For all formulas in nut- 
 shell fashion are lax. 
 
 The Stoic and Butler also said, ' Follow God/ In each case 
 you must realize that, whichever you do, you take your life in 
 your hands ; you enter on a grand enterprise, a search for the 
 holy Grail, which will bring you to strange lands and perilous 
 seas. For you cannot say, interpreting, 'Thus far and no 
 further, merely according to the bond and the duty/ In fol- 
 lowing God, you follow by what has been, what is ruled and 
 accomplished, but you follow after what is not yet. ' It may 
 be that the gulfs will wash us down'; it may be that the 
 gods of the past will rain upon us brimstone and horrible 
 tempest. But he that is with us is more than all that are 
 against us. Whoever keeps his ear ever open to duty, always 
 forward, never attained, is not far from the kingdom. The 
 gods may be against him, the demi-gods may depart, but he, 
 as said Plotinus, ' if alone, is with the Alone.'
 
 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 P 2
 
 OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 
 
 THE phrase ' natural rights ' is, we are sometimes told, 
 a survival from the obsolete language of a controversy long 
 since forgotten. The very words that make up the phrase 
 are ambiguous. Each has in turn been the confusing battle- 
 cry in a combat where the fighters knew not what they 
 fought for. And yet, if we look into it, the question 
 underlying the phrase is not of a merely antiquarian 
 interest. It touches on problems which never cease to 
 excite curiosity which each age has to face and to seek to 
 solve for itself. 
 
 The history of the idea we need not here attempt to draw 
 out in full. Perhaps germs of the claim to natural justice 
 have never been altogether absent from the world, even in 
 primitive conditions of society, but it may fairly be said that 
 such demands hardly rise into the clear light of reflection 
 till the last days of the ancient world, and the time when 
 modern Europe slowly emerged from the disintegrating 
 structure of the Roman Empire. The idea of natural rights 
 inherent in man as man seems to indicate its source in 
 a period when the atoms that had been solidly built up into 
 ancient society began, as dissolution of that society set in, 
 to feel themselves entrusted with their own fortunes, masters 
 of their scanty savings from the ruin of the old world. That 
 old regime of Greek and Roman times at least had taught 
 the few who were favoured by social status to be free and
 
 214 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 equal : and had inspired thinkers to suggest that, apart from 
 the ordinances of statecraft, such liberty and equality were 
 the birthright of each member of the human race. The 
 history of the early centuries of modern Europe, the so-called 
 Dark and Middle Ages, is the record of an attempt, prolonged 
 through centuries, to create a tolerable order of human life 
 out of the dislocated and scattered elements which were left by 
 the changes during the first centuries of that period. The 
 old order did not entirely lapse into nothingness ; it survived, 
 however, not as a visible empire, but as an idea of order and 
 unity, an idea animating the efforts of many individuals, 
 governing the actions of more, and rising in a few to the 
 height of a bright and passionate devotion. This idea of 
 human unity, which was the legacy of the decaying system of 
 antiquity, was brought into contact with another idea, the idea 
 of voluntary attachment, of fidelity to comrades, of loyalty 
 to a self-imposed leadership, the idea of community based not, 
 as the old world had been, on local ties, or on family neces- 
 sities, but on free and independent combination to attain 
 some common end. The typical associations of the mediaeval 
 world, the orders of chivalry, the monastic brotherhoods, the 
 industrial guilds, found their unifying principle in partici- 
 pation in a work for some general good, in giving them- 
 selves up to the realization of some object freely chosen, 
 but, when once accepted, claiming the sacrifice of the whole 
 breadth and depth of life. The Church itself both directly 
 and indirectly fostered this sense of individual independence. 
 Over against the visible local kingdom and its claims upon 
 the subject, Religion set up the idea of a higher and uni- 
 versal kingdom, which was above and beyond the secular 
 authority. If it often sank into only another and a subtler 
 tyranny, still in theory the Church was to the members of 
 the petty principalities of Europe ruled by their local despots 
 one of the safeguards of personal liberty. It cannot be too 
 clearly stated that in the darker periods of mediaeval history
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 215 
 
 there were learned and wise priests who upheld the reign 
 of impersonal law, of justice and mercy, amid the struggles 
 and brutal violence of selfish chiefs. 
 
 Thus the very methods, through which order emerged as 
 a self-won product from the chaos of the transition period 
 between the old world and the new, made it only too likely 
 that a sentiment of individual autonomy, of free and inde- 
 pendent contribution to the result, should remain as a settled 
 conviction in the mind. The services rendered in this process 
 by the idea of citizenship, as a natural law in which lived 
 transfigured the political results of the old world, were hardly 
 remembered. It is not therefore to be wondered at, if, as 
 soon as political speculation began to awake, as soon as 
 attention was turned on the nature of sovereignty, the view 
 gained expression that kingdoms and commonwealths were 
 the work of the voluntary efforts of individuals. Such 
 speculation, first started into keen activity when the con- 
 troversy between Pope and Emperor reached a climax, was 
 invested with new and more general interest by the wars 
 of religion in the sixteenth century. We there find Jesuit 
 and Protestant alike (with different motives) proclaiming the 
 theory of the divine right of the peoples to choose their own 
 form of government. A fresh stage of the controversy was 
 due to the fifty years' struggle between the Stuart kings and 
 the leaders of Parliamentary government. The advocate of the 
 Puritan revolution, John Milton, lays it down that ' all men 
 were naturally born free, . . . born to command, and not to 
 obey ' : that the ' authority and power of self-defence and 
 self-preservation ' is a ' natural birthright/ whereas the 
 ( power of kings and magistrates ' is ' only derivative, trans- 
 ferred and committed to them in trust from the people/ So 
 too John Locke, the advocate of the ' glorious revolution ' of 
 1688, taught that men, being by nature 'free equal and 
 independent/ surrendered their ' natural power ' and freely 
 consented to abide by the decisions of the majority so long as
 
 216 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 they were thus the better enabled f to preserve themselves, 
 their liberty and property/ 
 
 When we come to the middle of the eighteenth century, 
 we find Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of 
 England (1765), expounding the lessons of Locke as a funda- 
 mental doctrine. t The principal aim of society/ he explains, 
 ' is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute 
 rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of 
 nature/ These 'absolute rights of man,' summed up in the 
 general name of the ' natural liberty of mankind/ which 
 means ' a power of acting as one thinks fit without any 
 restraint unless by the law of nature/ have in most other 
 countries been restricted or altogether destroyed, but in 
 England they are coeval with our form of government. Thus 
 though founded upon nature and reason, or even on the will 
 of God, they have in this country, according to Blackstone, 
 the peculiar advantage of being defined by different laws in 
 a number of private immunities. They include three principal 
 or primary articles, the right of personal security, the right of 
 personal liberty, and the right of personal property. These 
 broad terms, however, are whittled away by definition. 
 Personal liberty, e. g. is explained to consist in the absence 
 of slavery, and the freedom from arbitrary or illegal arrest. 
 
 Ten years afterwards the question of natural rights was 
 transferred from the region of academical discussion to the 
 arena of public meetings. The ideas of the revolutionary 
 party in Europe were carried to America by Thomas Paine, 
 the author of Sound Common Sense (1776) and The Crisis. As 
 early as 1773 a meeting at Mendon in Massachusetts had 
 adopted resolutions ' that all men have an equal right to life, 
 liberty and property/ and 'that a right to liberty and 
 property (which are natural means of self-preservation) is 
 absolutely inalienable and can never lawfully be given up 
 by ourselves or taken from us by others/ The 'principle 
 of self-preservation/ which holds the central place in this
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 217 
 
 document, is pronounced necessary alike to the well-being 
 of individuals and to the order of the universe. In the 
 American declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776, the 
 same views are reproduced : ' We hold these truths to be 
 self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are 
 endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that 
 among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness : 
 that to secure these rights governments are instituted among 
 men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the 
 governed, and that whenever any form of government be- 
 comes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to 
 alter and to abolish it, and to institute a new government, 
 laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its 
 powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to 
 effect their safety and happiness/ 
 
 The attitude of Burke on the subject of natural rights 
 is worth noting. In his Thoughts on the Cause of the 
 Present Discontents (1770) he maintains in a most outspoken 
 manner the origin of all government in the popular will. 
 1 The King/ he says, ' is the representative of the people : so are 
 the Lords : so are the Judges. They are all trustees for the 
 people, as well as the Commons : because no power is given 
 for the sole sake of the holder : and although government 
 certainly is an institution of Divine Authority, yet its forms 
 and the persons who administer it, all originate from the 
 people/ But on the whole he declines to enter upon ultimate 
 questions of principle. His consideration, he says, in his 
 Speech on Conciliation with America (1775), is 'limited to 
 the policy of the question/ ' I do not examine whether the 
 giving away a man's money be a power excepted and reserved 
 out of the general trust of government : and how far all 
 mankind, in all forms of Polity, are entitled to an exercise 
 of that right by the Charter of Nature/ ' The question 
 with me/ he adds, ' is not whether you have a right to render 
 your people miserable : but whether it is not your interest
 
 218 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 to make them happy. It is not what a lawyer tells me I may 
 do, but what humanity, reason and justice tell me I ought to 
 do/ He contrasts titles and compacts with what ' the reason 
 of the thing ' requires. 
 
 In his Reflexions on the Revolution in France he con- 
 trasts the historical and legal character of the English 
 Revolution with the abstract theories of the French. ' No 
 experience,' he says, ' has taught us that in any other course 
 or method than that of an hereditary crou-n, our liberties can 
 be regularly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary 
 right! When our liberties are thus considered ' in the light of 
 an inheritance, . . . our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It 
 carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree 
 and illustrating ancestors. . . . We procure reverence to our 
 civil institutions ... on account of their age and on account 
 of those from whom they are descended/ The French declined 
 to follow this path and give to their recovered freedom 
 a correspondent dignity by recalling the privileges that had 
 been discontinued. ' They have " the rights of men/' Against 
 these there can be no prescription : against these no agreement 
 is binding, these admit no temperament and no compromise/ 
 For Burke these rights are a piece of ' political metaphysics/ 
 dangerous only because they afford a ground of quarrel with 
 all government, on ' a question of competency and a question 
 of title/ Not that he denies what he calls the ' real rights of 
 men/ f Civil Society is an institution of beneficence : and law 
 itself is only beneficence acting by a rule. Men have a right 
 to justice : they have a right to the fruits of their industry, and 
 to the means of making their industry fruitful. They have 
 a right to the acquisitions of their parents : to the nourish- 
 ment and improvement of their offspring : to instruction in life 
 and consolation in death. Whatever each man can separately 
 do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right to do for 
 himself ; and he has a right to a fair portion of all which 
 society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do in
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 219 
 
 his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights, 
 but not to equal things/ 
 
 But man, in the convention by which society is formed, 
 'has divested himself of the first fundamental right of un- 
 covenanted man, that is, to judge for himself and to assert 
 his own cause.' ' That he may secure some liberty, he makes 
 a surrender in trust of the whole of it/ ' Government,' 
 however, ' is not made in virtue of natural rights/ It ' is 
 a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants/ 
 And if ' men have a right, that these wants should be provided 
 for by this wisdom/ then, as amongst these wants is ' the 
 want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their 
 passions/ it follows that ' the restraints on men, as well as 
 their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights/ And 
 'the moment you abate any thing from the full rights of 
 men each to govern himself/ 'from that moment the whole 
 organization of government becomes a consideration of con- 
 venience/ Thus the science of constructing a commonwealth 
 is not to be taught a priori. It presupposes a long experience. 
 { Political reason is a computing principle. It calculates 
 morally and not mathematically/ Whereas the pretended 
 rights of men are ' all extremes/ ' morally and politically 
 false in proportion as they are metaphysically true,' the rights 
 of men in government are their advantages : consisting 
 often in balances and compromises. ' By the theorists of the 
 revolution the right of the people is almost always sophistically 
 confounded with their power/ But ' till power and right are 
 the same, the whole body of the people has no right incon- 
 sistent with virtue/ ' Men have no right to what is not 
 reasonable and to what is not for their benefit/ 
 
 Burke notes the influence which the legal profession 
 exercised on the course of the American as of the French 
 Revolution. ' I have been told/ he says, (Conciliation with 
 America) ' by an eminent bookseller that in no branch of 
 his business, after tracts of popular devotion, were so many
 
 220 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 books as those on the law exported to the plantations. . . . 
 I hear that they have sold nearly as many of Blackstone's 
 Commentaries in America as in England/ 
 
 The language of the American declaration of independence 
 is vague and rhetorical ; it reduces the language of popular 
 philosophy to the form of doubtful maxims. It proclaims in its 
 fantastic simplicity not merely the right, but the duty of insur- 
 rection against an unfaithful government, and suggests in the 
 ' unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness ' a justification of 
 any acts of a human being whatsoever. What may not a man 
 dare to do in such a quest? Similar assertions of 'inherent 
 rights/ ' unalienable and indefeasible/ occur in the special 
 declarations of principles or bills of rights drawn up by the 
 single states. But side by side with these appeals to abstract 
 rights, to general principles, borrowed from the dominant 
 philosophy, there is, as we noticed in Blackstone's remarks, 
 an appeal to historic precedents. The Congress of New York 
 in 1765 claims f all the inherent rights and liberties of the 
 king's natural-born subjects within the kingdom of Great 
 Britain/ They are entitled to ' the undoubted rights of 
 Englishmen, and appeal to the principle and spirit of the 
 British Constitution/ The people of Connecticut takes its 
 stand on the liberties, rights, and privileges which it has 
 received from its forefathers. And the declaration of rights 
 drawn up by the Congress of Philadelphia in October, 1775, 
 bases the American claims on the old rights which were 
 brought from the mother country, on the English Constitu- 
 tion and inherited privileges founded on the acknowledged 
 acts and practices of the British Empire. The two grounds 
 of argument are directed to different classes. The reference 
 to historic facts is intended for the diplomatic world, for those 
 accustomed to the language of statesmanship, who count 
 a single precedent worth a hundred principles. The appeal 
 to natural justice to ' imprescriptible ' rights is for the 
 popular heart, for the crowd which rolls like a sweet morsel
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 221 
 
 under its tongue the large sounding phrases o vague and 
 flexible ideals. 
 
 The success of the Americans in their insurrection had 
 been largely due to the help of the French fleets and armies. 
 Among the French officers, the most distinguished was the 
 noble and brave, but vain and imprudent, Marquis de La 
 Fayette. When the news of the uprising in America reached 
 France, La Fayette, then nineteen, and a captain of dragoons, 
 enthusiastically resolved to espouse the cause of liberty, and 
 braving all opposition of friends and the dangers of arrest by 
 his own Government, hurried across the seas to take part in 
 the struggle for independence. After the war had ended in 
 success, La Fayette returned to France, and in 1787, at the 
 still juvenile age of thirty, was elected as one of the Notables 
 whom the king had summoned to advise him on the measures 
 to be taken for the redress of grievances throughout the 
 country. In the Constituent Assembly which succeeded, we 
 find La Fayette on July n, 1789, presenting the proposal 
 for a declaration of rights modelled on that which Jefferson 
 had framed for the Americans. 
 
 The sound of ' rights } was far from unfamiliar to the 
 French ear, but hitherto it had been associated with a very 
 different set of ideas. The rights that most promptly 
 occurred to a French lawyer were the feudal rights, governing 
 the tenure of property and regulating the lives of almost all 
 dwellers in the country. It was not that these rights were 
 peculiar to France : they were found, and sometimes in a 
 stricter form, in almost every country. But in France the 
 peculiarity in the position of the privileged classes, the nobles 
 and the clergy, was that for more than half a century before 
 the Revolution they had ceased to occupy any direct place in 
 the political administration of the country. When the long 
 struggle between the monarchy and the feudal lords was 
 ended, and in 1 756 the last of the feudal brigands was taken 
 and beheaded, the king Louis XV was left in a position where
 
 222 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 he could fairly say, as he did ten years later say, ' It is to me 
 alone that the legislative power belongs, independently and 
 without participation. The whole of public order emanates 
 from me.' When that result had been reached by the efforts 
 of Richelieu and Louis XIV, the justification of the feudal 
 system had ceased. The great nobles had practically 
 abandoned their place in the country in order to dance 
 attendance at court, and the smaller nobility who still resided 
 on their lands were often poor and had no real participation 
 in the management of local affairs. The same was true of 
 the clergy : neither they nor the nobility performed any 
 public service, or had a sense of public and national duty. 
 An administrative centralization had been established long 
 before the Revolution ; France was governed by central 
 bureaux ; the king felt the sovereignty as his heritage and 
 managed the public revenues by his own ' intendants ' in each 
 province. 
 
 But though the territorial lords had been deprived of their 
 supremacy, many of them had still many ' fine rights ' (de 
 beaux droits) attached to them. Though he neither dis- 
 charged a useful function as local magistrate and adminis- 
 trator, or as representative at the seat of central authority, 
 the seigneur had a number of privileges which were felt as all 
 the more burdensome by his peasant neighbours just because 
 they were no longer in any legal political dependence upon 
 him. His seigneurial jurisdiction one of the prime con- 
 sequents of feudal superiority (for la justice suit le Jief), was 
 still left to him, and he had those rights (Faubaine, cFepaves, 
 &c., which followed from the feudal sovereignty of the land- 
 holder, besides the so-called lanalites (the obligation of the 
 tenant to use the superior's mill, &c.) and the corvees (or 
 obligation to perform so many days' work for the superior). 
 Besides these the noble class enjoyed in many cases either 
 a total or partial exemption from taxation, and public places 
 were often in their hands : they had the exclusive right of
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 223 
 
 sport, and the game-laws were a constant offence to the 
 cultivators. The nobility and clergy, in short, had sunk into 
 the position of privileged classes, who no longer justified their 
 position by exceptional services. They were the inheritors of 
 imposts and dues felt as oppressive by those who saw no 
 reason for them, and as insulting by those who had come 
 to feel themselves comparative freemen. Feudalism, as 
 De Tocqueville remarks, ceasing to be a political institution, 
 still remained the greatest of all the civil institutions of 
 France. ( The seigneur had ceased to govern : but his 
 presence in the parish and his privileges effectually prevented 
 any good government from being established in the parish in 
 place of his own.' To such a position had sunk those knights 
 who, says a Spanish chronicle in the tenth century, kept their 
 horses in the hall where they slept with their wives, to be 
 ready at any moment to repress disorder in the land. 
 
 From the earlier part of the century onwards a pervasive 
 influence had been making itself supreme in France. The 
 practice of social intercourse among all who belonged to the 
 privileged classes, or could for temporary reasons be reckoned 
 amongst them, became the main problem of life : encroaching 
 on and gradually suppressing the intimacies of conjugal life 
 and of parental affection. A uniform code of manners, la 
 bienseance, imposed upon the select multitude a characteristic 
 form which was so finely balanced, so soon impressed, and so 
 universally spread that it seemed hardly to be felt as a gene, 
 and became to a large class a sort of second nature. It 
 taught the art of sympathy, the form of friendship ; it gave 
 the skill of concealing pain and weakness, of checking 
 unseasonable individuality, of putting on a smiling and serene 
 face in trouble, and of not offending others by the assertion 
 of personal prejudices. The great vice to such a period lay 
 in being une espece, an original. But even this wide empire 
 of the salon had its limits. The distinction between the gentil- 
 homme and the rotnrier remained uneffaced and apparently
 
 224 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 uneffaceable. The nobility and the ' third estate ' grew more 
 and more hostile to each other : and France offered the 
 spectacle of a country broken up by class distinctions, into 
 groups almost caste-like in their nature. 
 
 But beyond all these divisions there lay a common meeting- 
 ground in literature. And the literature of that period is 
 a literature which is dominated by philosophy, by speculation, 
 by the search for and the worship of abstract and absolute 
 ideas. Political theory which had been fostered in the 
 seventeenth century in England found during the middle part 
 of the eighteenth century its home in France. In a social 
 state, founded on inequalities and permeated by conventions, 
 inquiry dealt by preference with the theory of natural justice 
 and the nature of political power. The list of writers who 
 lay the foundations of social and political science is headed by 
 the name of Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws (1748) did 
 not do all that its admirers have sometimes said : it did not 
 discover and restore to humanity its long lost titles. But it 
 did, on the basis of the vague definition of law as a ' necessary 
 relation derived from the nature of things/ partly show that 
 laws are in the last resort facts beyond the arbitrary inter- 
 ference of governments, dependent on circumstances of nature 
 and history, and governed by scientific pi-inciples no less 
 inflexible than those of the physical universe. Before such 
 a theory, arbitrary powers and incoherent privileges must 
 necessarily hide themselves. Other theorists, dazzled, as even 
 Montesquieu himself at times is, by the splendours of Greek 
 and Roman history, and misled by the legendary glories of 
 early Sparta, preached doctrines more tempting to the dis- 
 satisfied and unsuccessful. The Abbe" Morelly in his Code de 
 la Nature (1755) laid down three fundamental laws : the non- 
 existence of private property : the character of public 
 functionary attached to every citizen : and the duty of every 
 citizen to contribute to the public welfare. The fountain 
 of Socialism flows in his postulate that ' every citizen is
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 225 
 
 to be supported, maintained, and employed at the public 
 expense.' 
 
 One of the most instructive of these writers, especially as 
 dealing with the question of natural rights, is Mercier de la 
 Rivie're, in his book De I'ordre natnrel et essenliel des societes 
 politiques (1767). The first of all rights according to him 
 is that of individual liberty, or ' personal property ' : from 
 which as a necessary consequence flows first that of property 
 in movables (mobiliere) and secondly in land (fonciere\ the 
 latter to be justified by noting the necessity of continued 
 possession for making proper use of the soil. These three 
 fundamental species of property are linked together and 
 justified by the maxim : that duties are the justification of 
 rights, and rights give the means of exercising duties : ' Point 
 de droits sans devoirs, point de devoirs sans droits/ But if the 
 right of property thus understood is a necessary consequence 
 of human duty, it is no less evident that it further involves 
 liberty and security : and that all institutions which are 
 indispensable to maintain these three ends are parts of the 
 ' essential order ' of political societies. So far Mercier follows 
 the common track of the liberal theorists of his day. But in 
 what succeeds he makes a new departure, and follows a line, 
 afterwards adopted by Fichte, in opposition to the maxims 
 of Montesquieu as to the separation of the c three powers ' of 
 government. His view is briefly stated in the words: 'la 
 puissance executrice est toujours et ne'cessairement puissance 
 legislative;' and his reason is that the distinction if made can- 
 not be maintained : either will inevitably usurp the functions 
 of the other. But the real justification of this view is to be 
 found in his distrust of the sway of personal opinions and 
 arbitrary pretensions among the various claimants of supreme 
 power. The ideal institution of government is, he maintains, 
 to be sought in the direction which will leave least room to 
 the rivalry of individual interests, to the varying chances of 
 a majority. The best government is therefore a hereditary 
 
 Q
 
 226 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 monarchy a despotism, but one founded not on ignorance, 
 but on a knowledge of the true laws of the social order. It 
 is in short the ideal of paternal government, of a ' legal 
 despotism/ of the authority of one man who is supreme 
 and sole, but who has no other interests than those of the 
 community, and whose knowledge is adequate to his 
 function. 
 
 What Mercier de la Riviere thus lays down is the view of 
 the great economists of the century. Political liberty, as 
 the active participation in legislation by each member of the 
 community, is what they hardly consider worth striving for. 
 These writers are the panegyrists of the State. The main 
 security for Liberty which they thought necessary was 
 a wide-spread system of popular education. According to 
 Quesnay, ' public, general, and continual instruction in the 
 principles of essential justice and natural order' are the means 
 to render despotism impossible. And he has nothing but con- 
 tempt for representative assemblies and all the machinery of 
 popular checks to the preponderance of the central power. 
 
 What the economists desired was a social and administrative 
 reform : the removal of abuses, the destruction of unnecessary 
 restrictions to free intercourse and commerce; they wanted 
 to simplify government and give administration uniformity. 
 Turgot, Vincent de Gournay, and Francois Quesnay are the 
 chief names amongst these writers who, as the advocates of 
 the emancipation of agriculture, industry, and trade were 
 originally known as ' Fjconomistes/ but since the time of Dupont 
 de Nemours have been commonly styled ' Physiocrates/ The 
 title ' Physiocrat ' gives expression to one of the two principles 
 which Gournay is said by Turgot to have discovered : that 
 the industrial and commercial life of nations is governed by 
 laws as unbending as those of physical nature. The other 
 principle is the practical application of these laws to explain 
 by their habitual violation the misery of the poor and the 
 straits of the government in France. For in France there
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 227 
 
 prevailed a complex system of regulations interfering at every 
 stage with the freedom of trade,, a system on which province 
 was set against province, town against town, on which free 
 initiative was impossible, and invention had to contend 
 against established prescriptions. The programme of Gournay 
 was Laissez faire, laissez passer. It was the protest against 
 the exaggerations by which the royal intendants in the 
 provinces fixed the length to which a piece of cloth should be 
 woven, the pattern to be selected, the number of threads of 
 which it was to be composed. Such was the founder of the 
 doctrine that Turgot (1727-81) sought to make his country- 
 men understand. Quesuay (1694-1774), the physician of 
 Louis XV, is the author of the Moximes Generales du gourerne- 
 ment economique (Tun royaume agricole (1768). He believed 
 that agriculture had been depressed by an undue pursuit of 
 the manufacture of articles of luxury, and directed his 
 attention towards methods for increasing the production of 
 grain and wine, in which he believed lay the national wealth 
 and strength. What he demanded was the liberation of the 
 farmer from those burdens which pressed so heavily abolition 
 of forced labour, reduction of the taille, and complete libera- 
 tion of the trade in corn both within and without the 
 kingdom. Thus Quesnay claimed for agriculture and original 
 production, what Gournay asked in the interest of manu- 
 factures the removal of useless and harmful restrictions. 
 After all they only repeated and repeated almost in vain the 
 advice that Boisguillebert, that ( insense pour Famour du public ' 
 (1697, Le detail de la France), and Marshal Vauban (1707, 
 Projet cV une dime royale] had given long before. Vauban 
 pointed out that le menu penile was the part of the nation 
 which bears all charges, which has suffered and does suffer 
 most, and which yet by its labours and its taxes enriches both 
 the king and the kingdom. To remedy that state of affairs 
 Vauban suggested the abolition of all existing taxes and 
 replacing them by an income tax of a tenth on all. 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 These aims the emancipation of labour and trade from 
 fatal bondage, and the economical constitution of the finance 
 system the economists hoped to get from the hand of a strong- 
 monarch who had learned the true laws which govern the 
 production and distribution of wealth. Once the state had 
 thoroughly learnt its duty, it was to be altogether unrestrained 
 by checks. The form of liberty matters little : the substance of 
 good government is all important. And there is no doubt 
 that in this view the economists practically coincided in their 
 results with what the Revolution actually brought about. 
 The levelling process which they commended, the erasing of 
 old barriers and divisions, was carried out, and the despotism 
 of an enlightened representative of the scientific order was 
 apparently realized. The great achievement of the revolu- 
 tion was certainly not the attainment of political freedom as 
 it is commonly understood : its real result is what was finally 
 consolidated in the Civil Code, in an equal system of private 
 law, a regular and open administration, a removal of 
 hampering inequalities which prevented the development 
 of agriculture and industry. Political and social life is 
 a thing of slower growth, which needs intelligent co-opera- 
 tion and careful interest on the part of individuals. It 
 implies an effort of reorganization. 
 
 The declaration of the rights of man which Lafayette 
 proposed was, after some discussion and several alterations, 
 promulgated on November 3, 1789, as a preface to the Con- 
 stitution (of 1791), under the title of a Declaration of the 
 Rights of the Man and the Citizen. The assembly begins 
 by setting forth the sentiments that animated the young 
 and generous men whom the philosophy of the age had made 
 enthusiasts for freedom. ( The representatives of the French 
 people, constituted as a National Assembly, considering that 
 ignorance, forgetfulness, or contempt of the rights of man 
 are the sole causes of the public misfortunes and of the cor- 
 ruption of governments, have resolved to set forth in a solemn
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 229 
 
 declaration the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of man, 
 in order that the declaration, being- constantly present to all 
 the members of the social body, may continually recall to 
 them their rights and their duties. ... In consequence the 
 national assembly recognizes and declares, in the presence and 
 under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following rights 
 of the man and the citizen. Art. i. Men are born and 
 remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be 
 based only on common utility. 2. The end of every political 
 association is the conservation of the natural and impre- 
 scriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, security, 
 property, and resistance to oppression. 4. Liberty consists in 
 being able to do everything that does not harm others : thus 
 the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits 
 besides those which assure to other members of society the 
 enjoyment of the same rights. These limits can only be 
 determined by the law. n. The free communication of 
 thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of 
 man : every citizen may therefore speak, write, print freely, 
 on condition of answering for any abuse of that liberty, in 
 cases determined by the law. 17. Property being an inviolable 
 and sacred right, none may be deprived of it, unless public 
 necessity, legally certified, evidently so demands, always under 
 the condition of a just and pre-payable indemnity/ In the 
 sequel to this declaration the assembly makes some promises 
 of no slight range, which seem to be consequent upon it. It 
 guarantees the establishment of secours publics a system of 
 public reliefs : and proposes to create a public education, 
 common to all the citizens, gratuitous, so far as regards those 
 parts of instruction which are indispensable for all men. It 
 engages in short to help all who cannot help themselves, and 
 holds out a scheme of free elementary schools. 
 
 The constitution of 1793 substantially agrees with these 
 provisions, perhaps seeking after greater accuracy. Article I 
 is : The end of society is the common happiness. Government
 
 230 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 is instituted to guarantee to man the enjoyment of his natural 
 and imprescriptible rights. 2. These rights are equality, 
 liberty, security, property. 3. All men are equal by nature 
 and before the law. 6. Liberty . . . has for its principle nature, 
 for rule justice, for safeguard the law : its moral limit is in 
 the maxim : Do not do to another what you do not wish 
 should be done to you. 8. Security consists in the protection 
 accorded by society to each of its members for the con- 
 servation of his person, of his rights, and of his properties. 
 1 6. The right of property is that which belongs to every 
 citizen of enjoying, and of disposing at his will of, his goods, 
 his income, the fruit of his labour and of his industry. 21. 
 Public reliefs are a sacred debt. Society owes subsistence 
 to unfortunate citizens, whether in procuring them work or in 
 assuring the means of subsistence to those who are incapable 
 of working. 22. Instruction is the need of all. Society 
 ought to favour with all its power the progress of the public 
 reason, and put instruction within the reach of all the citizens. 
 33. Resistance to oppression is the consequence of the other 
 rights of man. 
 
 The Constitution of 1795 (August 22), drawn up after the 
 fall of Robespierre, departs somewhat both in form and matter 
 from the two earlier statements. Among the list of rights, 
 it preserves silence on the right of insurrection, either as 
 primary or derivative right : and it observes the same dis- 
 cretion as to the claims of the unfortunate poor. With regard 
 to equality it lays down (Art. 4) that it 'admits of no 
 distinction of birth, no hereditary transmission of powers ' : 
 a phrase which for vagueness probably gains the prize amid 
 the whole collection. The main novelty, however, of this 
 paper is its title : it is a Declaration of the Rights and Duties 
 of the Man and the Citizen. Under the head of the Duties of 
 man we find, Art. 2. All the duties of man and citizen follow 
 from these two principles, graven by nature on all hearts : 
 Do not do to others what you would not wish any one
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 231 
 
 to do to you: Do constantly to others the good you would 
 like to receive from them. 4. None is a good citizen who 
 is not a good son, a good father, good brother, good 
 friend, good husband. 5. No one is a good man who is 
 not sincerely and religiously observant of the laws. 8. On 
 the maintenance of property depends the cultivation of the 
 field, all production, every means of work, and the whole social 
 order. 
 
 Whatever may be the faults of these documents, it is clear 
 that they do not sin by their revolutionary character. Their 
 tendency is eminently sober and conservative. No thorough 
 equality, no licentious liberty is promised or praised : but 
 moderation in all things, and a mild sort of fraternity, in- 
 volving no very severe services to humanity. The liberty 
 sought is absence of illegal and arbitrary interference by 
 individuals : the equality is only an equality in rights or 
 before the law. Property is expressly and evidently placed as 
 the keystone of the social fabric, and the control of his goods 
 entrusted to the proprietor is ample. We know indeed that 
 on this last point there were debates : and at one time 
 Robespierre thought it well to argue against Condorcet and 
 the Girondists, who held that ' man is master of disposing at 
 his will of his goods, his capital, his income, and his industry/ 
 and to insist that the right of property was borne comme les 
 autres. But this acknowledgement of the right of the com- 
 munity was not seriously proclaimed, especially after Babeuf 
 had in his newspaper insisted that each citizen should have 
 secured to him la siiffisance, mais rien que la suffisance, and 
 had added that, as the soil of a state ought to secure the 
 existence of all its members, the population should, if need 
 be, suffer diminution to the requisite extent. And the con- 
 demnation to death of Babeuf and Darthe was the answer of 
 the majority of the revolutionary authorities to the demand 
 of Sylvain Marechal, another of this baud, for egalite dufait, 
 real equality, and la Communaule des liens. The revolutionary
 
 232 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 movement was in its accredited utterances far from being 
 socialistic, or antagonistic to the rights of private property. 
 Indeed, the charge most readily brought against it would be 
 that it appealed to the baser prejudices of the bourgeoisie, 
 and was too much a mere middle-class movement, which 
 ended in elevating the third estate to a level with the two 
 older privileged classes. 
 
 It has often been remarked in similar cases that the general 
 phraseology of a document must receive its interpretation 
 from the special circumstance to which it applies. People 
 talk large and wide : but they have definite facts in view. 
 Partly from incapacity to formulate in definite and precise 
 terms, partly from the weakness of rhetoricians, men are in 
 the habit of clothing their meaning in preposterously ample 
 vestments. At the time this difference between the sign 
 and the thing signified is not so striking for those whose 
 situation helps them to interpret the language, but as distance 
 of place and time intervenes the gap between word and 
 meaning grows more conspicuous. The accent, the tone, 
 the sentiment, which qualified the sense and pointed the 
 hearer to the fact, are now absent : and one has to wonder, 
 and wonder in vain what the orator had precisely in view. 
 Now in the case of these declarations it is evident that they 
 are drawn up by journalists, half trained in philosophic 
 thought, and hurried by the appetites of their clientele ; 
 anxious to formulate in a few brief propositions and catching 
 phrases of apparent simplicity the cardinal principles on 
 which society ought to be reformed, which were also in their 
 opinion the principles always underlying social life, though 
 now and for a long time past ignored and despised. It is 
 undoubtedly true that the course of the revolution is marked 
 both in the very beginning and during the reign of the 
 Terror by wild excesses, lawless orgies of passion-driven and 
 base-hearted individuals and multitudes ; that a system 
 of terroristic administration prevailed during considerable
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 233 
 
 periods ; and that low selfishness and degraded hatreds sought 
 their gratification under the guise of a demand for legal 
 fairness and punishment of accumulated misdeeds. But in 
 its general and legitimate current and tendency, to which 
 these documents are an attempt to give a logical expression, 
 the revolution was only a levelling up of the tiers etat to the 
 condition of the two others, and a removal of the disabilities 
 which checked the free growth of arts and industry. The 
 revolution of 1789 in fact was the victory of the tiers etat. 
 When the abbe Sieyes at the beginning of the struggle 
 asked his famous question, ' What is the third estate ? ' the 
 only reply he gave was * Nothing ' : it had by the revolution, 
 as he predicted, become ' Everything/ It had swallowed up 
 the privileged classes. It had succeeded in quashing the 
 old feudal entanglements, which still were potent enough to 
 make life for the peasant and the townsman full of real or 
 supposed indignities. No doubt in course of that process 
 the poorest class had gained incidental relief. Dependence, 
 like that described by Voltaire as prevailing in the vicinity 
 of his own country seat, was no longer possible. The serfs 
 or dependent bondsmen (mainmortables) of the great monas- 
 teries had been emancipated. But what was chiefly attained 
 was a common law, without privileged exceptions (aucun 
 privilege ni exception au droit commun de tons les Franqais}, 
 and a removal of the old guild restrictions (il rfy a plus ni 
 jurandes ni corporations de professions, arts et metiers). There 
 were to be no more lettres de cachet, or arbitrary arrests of sup- 
 posed dangerous characters. And as to that fraternity which 
 is so often coupled with liberty and equality, perhaps the 
 only mention of the thing is when it is spoken of as an 
 object to be secured by the institution of fetes nationales. 
 For the spirit of fraternity we must go elsewhere : go for 
 example to the Scotch poet, Burns, who welcomed the New 
 Year of 1795 with the spirit-stirring ode which concludes 
 with the lines
 
 234 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 'Then let us pray that come it may 
 
 (As come it will for a' that), 
 That sense and worth o'er a" the earth 
 
 Shall bear the gree an' a' that. 
 For a' that, an' a' that, 
 
 It's comin' yet for a' that, 
 The man to man the world o'er 
 
 Shall brothers be for a' that.' 
 
 But in Burns the cry is not in the first instance for either 
 liberty or equality; but for something very different, inde- 
 pendence. ' The man o' independent mind/ ' the honest man, 
 tho' e'er so poor, is king o' men for a,' that/ 
 
 The declarations state the rights of the man and the citizen. 
 The second epithet qualifies and limits the first. They say 
 nothing of the woman and the child. The very document 
 which lays down the principles of liberty and equality, pro- 
 ceeded to exclude from their operation a large portion of the 
 population of France, or at least to draw a far-reaching 
 division between two classes of citizens. Section II of the 
 constitution of 1791 marks off from the rest what it calls 
 the active (as opposed to the passive) citizen. An active 
 citizen must be a man and a French man, not less than twenty- 
 five years of age, paying rates equivalent to three days' work, 
 not engaged in menial service, not under accusation of crime, 
 nor under decree of bankruptcy. By the constitution of 1793 
 the age of active citizenship was reduced to twenty- one years, 
 and no other debarring conditions were allowed, except con- 
 demnation to peines injamantes ou afflictive*', but the consti- 
 tution of 1795 again refuses citizenship to the bankrupt 
 debtor and to the menial servant. 
 
 These facts are enough to show that the large professions 
 of the creed must be cautiously interpreted. The same point 
 is involved in some of the arguments by which Bentham, in 
 his chapter on 'Anarchical Fallacies/ has criticized the 
 declarations of 1791. Is the relation of husband and wife, 
 of master and apprentice, of hired servant, consistent with 
 the assertion of such rights of equality? Are not the
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 235 
 
 principles of equality and liberty in their literal statement 
 sufficient grounds for destroying all social order whatever? 
 The so-called right of resistance to oppression says in effect : 
 ' Submit not to any decree or other act of power, of the 
 justice of which you are not yourself perfectly convinced : ' 
 and the practical result of the formula is ' to excite insur- 
 rection at all times against every government whatsoever/ 
 Bentham starts from the principle that 'natural rights is 
 simple nonsense : natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical 
 nonsense nonsense upon stilts/ 'A reason for wishing 
 that a certain right were established is not that right/ 
 ' Right, the substantive right, is the child of law : from real 
 laws come real rights, but from imaginary laws, from laws 
 of nature, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters/ 
 Bentham further attacks the contract theory of government 
 on which the doctrine of the superiority of natural rights 
 to law is based. The theory, he says, ' is a pure fiction, or in 
 other words, a falsehood/ 'All governments that we have 
 any account of have been gradually established by habit, 
 after having been formed by force/ And, as he adds, ' What 
 signifies it how governments are formed ? Is it the less 
 proper that the happiness of society should be the one end 
 kept in view by the members of government in all their 
 measures ? ' The protest of Bentham is mainly directed 
 against the vague and impractical nature of the resolutions, 
 and the danger which such indefinite formulations carry for 
 the uneducated who are unable to supply the necessary cor- 
 rectives. Once assert that ' the laws have no right to forbid 
 certain actions/ or 'that whatever is not forbidden by law 
 cannot be hindered/ and you destroy all habits of obedience 
 to government, and 'annihilate for the time being and for 
 ever all powers of command ; all power the exercise of which 
 consists in the issuing and enforcing obedience to particular 
 and occasional commands : domestic power, power of the 
 police, judicial power, military power, power of superior
 
 236 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 officers, in the line of civil administration over their subor- 
 dinates/ There is one thing and one thing only superior to 
 the laws, superior i. e. to this or that particular law ; but 
 that is not a natural right, it is the law of the constitution, 
 the fundamental principles, which particular laws are so many 
 attempts to express in detail. Of the conformity of these laws 
 with this general spirit of union no single man is the judge, 
 although each is entitled to his opinion : he is free to think 
 as he pleases, and we may add that he has a right to express 
 his opinion. 
 
 The declarations themselves are shallow and uncertain, 
 whenever they are pressed to disclose a consistent meaning. 
 They fail either to present in clear conception, or to define 
 in a satisfactory mode, the comparative claims of natural 
 rights and the common happiness. They make no attempt 
 to define that law before which all are equal, which determines 
 the limits of liberty of speech and of the right of property, 
 as of liberty in general. They hint, but dare not say, that 
 liberty is only realized by law, and that all law is in its 
 very essence coercion. For in short they are trammelled by 
 the situation. It was, on the one hand, necessary to throw 
 a decent covering over the accomplished insurrection, over the 
 revolt made against constituted authority : and this is done 
 by affirming a right of resistance to oppression and by a 
 protest against hereditary privileges. But it was, on the 
 other hand, no less incumbent on the framers of these docu- 
 ments to make order possible for the future : and to this end 
 they insist upon the limits of the natural rights and on the 
 majesty of Law. Thus double-faced is the catalogue. As 
 for the reference to public relief of the poor, and a general 
 system of education, they were for the time ' sacred duties/ 
 i. e. pious wishes. 
 
 These rights of man, like much else in the Revolution, drew 
 some of their inspiration from Rousseau. But Rousseau was 
 a deeper philosopher and a less narrow mind than the leaders
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 237 
 
 in the political strife, and had a wide human scope which was 
 foreign to their whole attitude. The social problem had 
 exercised him deeply in its various aspects. In the year 
 1732, he tells us, as he was making his way on foot through 
 France, he had allowed himself to be drawn from the road 
 by the interests of the landscape, and had wandered so long in 
 his entrancement that he entirely lost his way. Weary and 
 faint, he at length gained a peasant's hut, at which he made 
 bold, after the manner of his native mountains, to ask for 
 refreshments, for which he was willing to pay. The peasant 
 gave him and it was all that he had, according to his own 
 account a dish of skim-milk and a piece of coarse bread. As 
 the young man greedily swallowed his repast, his entertainer, 
 concluding from his appearance that he was a lona fide 
 traveller, proceeded to open a trap-door by which he descended 
 to a cellar, soon to reappear with a good white loaf,, an 
 appetizing ham, and a bottle of wine. But when, after this 
 more generous meal, his guest offered payment, the peasant's 
 suspicions revived that his visitor was a spy of the tax- 
 collector ; for as it appeared, unless every sign of a prosperous 
 homestead were obliterated and abject poverty stamped on 
 whatever met the eye, ruin from exactions was inevitable. 
 Rousseau left the spot, he says, with the germ of that 
 inexhaustible hatred he ever afterwards felt against institu- 
 tions which enabled the oppressor to wrench from the toilers 
 those gains which nature had in her bounty destined for 
 them. 
 
 Some people tell us that in every man there are two natures, 
 two selves : but it is seldom that the two beings within a man 
 are so at variance as in Jean Jacques Rousseau. The very 
 name is a symbol of antagonism. On the one side, the 
 commonplace and ordinary John James, doubly common, by 
 its two common names : on the other, the distinctive character 
 of Rousseau. A union of aristocrat and democrat : of man 
 and woman : of child and sage : of sinner and saint. His life
 
 238 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 up nearly to his fortieth year was passed in a silence and 
 secrecy, which we should be unable to get over, were it not 
 for his own revelations in his later years. Left without 
 a mother at his birth, his earliest years were spent in unequal 
 companionship with a father, not much more settled in man- 
 hood than himself ; and the two would sit for hours entranced 
 over the fortunes of some hero of romance, or the scarcely less 
 fantastic story of some of the great men of classic biography. 
 At the age of ten he was deprived of this snatch of home life. 
 His father, involved in the consequences of a brawl, sought 
 relief in flight from Geneva, and abandoned his son, who was 
 taken under the protection of an uncle, and brought up for 
 a few years in a way that failed to supply the discipline he 
 had hitherto lacked. The youth grew up with no real world of 
 duty and drudgery to limit his straggling impulses, but rather 
 in a fantastic world filled with the ideals of sensuous and 
 sentimental gratifications ; ready always, like a Don Quixote, 
 to deck out the real with visions of fair and pure femineity 
 and grace, but also inclined, more like Sancho Panza, to sink 
 these high ideals in the realities of vulgar or worse than vulgar 
 prose. His first contact with the requirements of steady work 
 was a failure. He seemed incapable of becoming a clerk, and 
 he found his apprenticeship at the engraver's intolerable : 
 and so in his sixteenth year he absconded from Geneva and 
 began that life of wanderings and vicissitudes which lasted 
 for more than twenty years. He became to appearance an 
 adventurer and a vagabond : a stranger to his country, and 
 a recreant to the religion of his native town : a hanger-on now 
 on one patron or patroness, now on another : obliged to descend 
 to the position of a menial and a lackey, in order to earn 
 a livelihood : gaining strange experiences of woman in a love 
 that was an inextricable labyrinth of passion and calculation, 
 of delicacy and coarseness : sinking into depths of pruriency 
 and meanness, and vulgarity that one is hardly obliged to 
 believe literally even on his own showing. And yet in that
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 239 
 
 strange nature with its keen and erratic sensibility and its 
 defiance and distrust of convention and decorum in that 
 incessant contradiction between ideal independence and real 
 subjection to the implied or expressed wishes of some noble 
 protector, there was something pure and noble, which was 
 dimmed but not extinguished by the vulgarity and rudeness 
 which clung to many of his outward acts. It has been said 
 by an ancient thinker that the true physician should be one 
 who has himself run through an experience of the ills that 
 flesh is heir to, who has learnt by suffering what maladies 
 really are. Perhaps it may be sometimes so in moral malady 
 and weakness also. If we believe, as we may, that he who 
 sins does not wholly sin, but still preserves a principle of moral 
 health which, though driven back into the central citadels, still 
 does not altogether yield the fortress, then we may think that 
 Rousseau had emerged from the night of spiritual sickness 
 and uncertainty with a tenderer perception of the inroads of 
 evil, a more clairvoyant sympathy with the temptations 
 of weakness and doubt, than he could have had if he had 
 himself been whole and sound. The inconsistency in Rousseau's 
 behaviour is not so inexplicable as it seems. To the majority 
 of the world the intercourse of life takes place by forms and 
 symbols, by external ordinances, which are as it were the organs 
 and feelers connecting soul with soul. In Rousseau's case 
 these intermediate helps which divide while they connect were 
 dispensed with. He lived in direct and immediate rapport 
 with his environment. As on summer afternoons he rambled 
 alone with his dog through the woods of Montmorency his 
 spirit was wrapt up into sympathy with the nature around him ; 
 he abandoned himself to a stupor of ecstasy and could only 
 utter the words 6 Grand fitre ! 6 Grand fitre I For such a spirit 
 passing in immediate spirituality from itself to the life and 
 heart in all around, it must have been hard to keep pace with 
 those who only moved and felt by means of the material 
 organs, the garb and fashion in which they had moulded
 
 240 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 themselves. And such disengagement from human ordinances, 
 from form and symbol, is impossible without loss. If it is the 
 spirit alone which can truly inspire communion, and convert 
 mechanism into life, it is no less true that without a definite 
 mechanism, without external signs and objective manifesta- 
 tions of the inner will there is no real communication, but 
 only an intention of it, an unreality which is blown about by 
 every wind of fancy and feeling. It is impossible really to 
 live the solitary life in which the society of the hermit is 
 created for him by the vigorous intuitions of imagination. 
 So when Rousseau tells us that he began to live on April 9, 
 1756 (the day he settled at the Hermitage), because he left 
 behind him the intrigues and frivolities of Paris ; when he 
 speaks of himself as surrounding himself in these solitudes 
 with an ideal society worthy of their beauty, we must 
 remember that though he holds the peasants of Montmorency 
 to be more useful members of society than the well-fed idlers 
 of erudite Paris, still the society of his Therese, of his well- 
 beloved dog, and his old cat, have their corresponding defects 
 and mar the perfect development and freedom of his spirit. 
 Disdaining the graces of civilization because of its hollowness, 
 he finds relief in a vulgar liaison which has its own deceptions : 
 and when he asserts the independence of the sage, he some- 
 times falls into the rudeness of the egoist. When he made the 
 great discovery which so many Stoic souls have made before 
 and since, that the source of men's misery and wickedness lies 
 in their false opinions, he forgot that it is impossible even for 
 the solitary to avoid and leave behind him the dangers of 
 mistaken estimates of the goods of life. He was engaged in 
 an impossible struggle, and in a world where forms must exist, 
 his every act solicited that inevitable contradiction which 
 keeps asunder the ideal and the real. It is hardly to be 
 wondered at if his overstrung brain, assailed by real persecu- 
 tions and pestered by designing friends, at length gave way 
 to the strong and often baseless delusions that embittered his
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 241 
 
 later years. We must take him for what he is, and not refuse 
 to accept the prophecy and the poetry, because the poetic 
 harmonies gave but a shrill sound and his visions of the 
 perfect had but a shabby translation in his actual life. ' An 
 indolent soul scared at every care, an ardent, bilious, and too 
 susceptible temperament ' (it is so he analyzes himself) are bad 
 endowments for an honest and honourable life : but they 
 could not destroy the sympathy which went forth for all 
 beings, which grasped humanity in its folds, and entered even 
 into the unconscious life of the nature around. 
 
 The first lesson which Rousseau had to teach his generation 
 was, like almost all his writings, a paradox to his age. All 
 truth at its first announcement must be a paradox : a shock to 
 existing opinion : ' to scholars a stumbling-block and to the 
 world foolishness/ The current belief of the literary circles 
 of his time its belief ever since the time when Bacon and 
 Descartes had pleaded for freedom of thought, for more light, 
 for the increase of knowledge was that in widening our 
 acquaintance with the laws of nature lay the panacea for the 
 evils of the world. Multiply science and art, and you 
 accelerate the millennium. To that opinion Rousseau in his 
 first work threw down his gage, and he continued to the end 
 to maintain the thesis then set up. That thesis is not that 
 science and philosophy are pernicious, that civilization in the 
 sense of increasing culture is a mistake, but that they are 
 not all in all, that they are instruments and not ends ; that 
 life is more than art or science. Mere knowledge is but a 
 poor thing. What Burns puts in his simple words : 
 
 ' It 's no in books, it 's no in lear, 
 
 To make us truly blest, 
 If happiness has not her seat 
 And centre in the breast ; ' 
 
 or what is implied in Bishop Butler's words, 'the science 
 of improving the temper and making the heart better ' 
 is the theme of Rousseau's first essay. This was what 
 

 
 242 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 Kant meant when he said that Rousseau first taught him 
 that the supreme work and glory of arts and sciences lay 
 in the service of humanity, not in the mere scholar's joy in 
 discovery and creation. 
 
 The second step taken by Rousseau is in form a discourse 
 1 on the origin of inequality amongst men/ That inequality 
 it deduces as the inevitable consequence of the development of 
 the human faculties, due to the freedom by which man com- 
 mands nature and seeks to rise to greater and greater perfec- 
 tion. But when the moral authority conferred by law is out 
 of all proportion to the physical inequalities, it is contrary to 
 natural right. Such contrast to natural right is seen ' when 
 a child commands a gray-beard, when an imbecile conducts 
 a wise man, and when a handful of people is ready to burst 
 with superfluities, while the starved multitude is in want of 
 necessities.' The original man, the uncivilized child of nature, 
 is indolent and easy, he lives in himself, ' il ne veut que vivre 
 et rester oisif/ But the civilized man is never at rest, he 
 seeks for power and reputation, he works himself to death in 
 order to gain the means of living; because it is from the 
 opinion of others and in their judgement alone that he gets 
 the feeling of his own existence. The civilized man thus lives 
 only in appearances, he sees himself through the opinion of 
 others, arid hence an universal dissimulation, 'de Fhonneur sans 
 vertu, de la raison sans sagesse, et du plaisir sans bonheur/ 
 This is the true theme of the essay. It is the demonstration 
 that man in society has lost the mastery of himself, that he 
 has handed himself over to an authority which deprives him 
 of all real initiative, all spontaneous action, all sincerity. 
 
 The same theme appears in the fimile and in the Nouvelle 
 Helo'ise. The Nouvelle Heloue is a dissertation, presented 
 under the form of a romance, upon love, marriage, and family 
 life. Few subjects connected with these interesting questions, 
 whether sentimental, moral, practical, educational, economical, 
 are not to some degree touched upon or even examined at con-
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 243 
 
 siderable length. The &mile is a treatise on education. It is 
 an education not for a special end : ' vivre est le metier que je 
 lui veux apprendre ' ; and its hope is to produce a man who 
 in one and the same course shall be prepared to transcend that 
 contradiction in life as it is, which makes nature drag- a man 
 one way, and men drag- him another; that contradiction 
 between the moral and the physical which afflicts humanity. 
 Civilized man is born, lives, and dies in slavery : his first ideas 
 are those of empire and servitude. The method of Rousseau, 
 which he holds is the method of nature, is to treat the child 
 for many years as a purely physical being, to let him feel in 
 good time the heavy yoke of necessity, la necessile des choses, 
 but to give no place in his dictionary to the words ' obey and 
 command,' and still more those of duty and obligation. The 
 child is not a reasonable being, and ought not to be treated as 
 such : but just for that reason he must not be made to feel 
 himself the puppet of human will. His rights as an indivi- 
 dual in the natural world ought to be respected : he also must 
 learn 'Fhabitude de s'asservir sans peine a la necessite des 
 choses.' It is absurd to speak to children of their duties 
 before you speak of their rights : the first sense of justice is 
 not from what we owe, but from what is due to us. 
 
 The fundamental idea is the slavery in which society holds 
 us. But it would be unjust to Rousseau to suppose that he 
 wishes us to return to the state of the unspoiled savage who is 
 sufficient for himself and lives a real totality, not a mere frag- 
 ment of the social body. Rather the aim of education is to 
 secure for man his independence as a member of society. The 
 ancient philosophers sometimes discussed the problem if the 
 best man was also the best citizen : and they answered it 
 by saying that the two ideals would coincide only in the 
 perfect commonwealth. Rousseau, as it were, answers from 
 the other side. When man is so educated as nature pre- 
 scribes, he will, when the age of reason comes, be able to 
 take his place in the true commonwealth. But the moral 
 
 R 2
 
 244 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 and political life must not be permitted to thwart and pervert 
 the natural. 
 
 If Rousseau has given in his view of education a new con- 
 ception of the rights of the child not to be a plaything of men, 
 but to be subject only to the laws of nature, until he becomes 
 of an age to understand reason ; he has in the same treatise, in 
 the book entitled Sopfiie ou la Femme, based the education of 
 women upon the indications of nature. 
 
 The treatise on the social contract is an attempt to give 
 new force to the old doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. 
 But who are the people who are thus declared sovereign ? 
 Not the multitude, or any portion of the multitude, which has 
 been separated and distinguished from the governing body. 
 The people which is sovereign is the organized people, actually 
 assembled in its completeness ; if it is sovereign at other times, 
 what it has is a passive sovereignty, a background of authority, 
 vast, indivisible, inalienable, which rounds off and underlies 
 the several exercises of authority in the existing government. 
 The people is sovereign, but the sovereign does not govern ; 
 he does not exercise executive functions, he does not put his 
 own hands to work : like the immortal gods, the mortal god 
 called the state only works by his delegates. 
 
 The people is sovereign : what it wills is the law, the prin- 
 ciples which guide the exercise of the magistrates. But how 
 is this will to be ascertained ? The people is a multitude, it 
 consists of individuals, one of whom may wish this, and 
 another wish that. Can we find out what they will by 
 counting votes, and conclude that what all have willed is the 
 will we are seeking for ? No, replies Rousseau, the general 
 will is not the will of all. Each is guided, naturally or 
 directly guided, by his own interest : and only if we suppose 
 the more and less to cancel each other, would we get the 
 general will. The people, if left to itself, always wishes or 
 wills the good; but of itself it does not always see it. The 
 judgement which guides the general will is not always
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 245 _ 
 
 enlightened. What the general will requires, then, is not 
 identical with the decisions of a majority or even of a unani- 
 mous vote : for if the voters are blind, their decision does not 
 truly represent their will. The people thus is represented as 
 a blind but good-natured giant, who needs to be enlightened 
 as to what he really wants : to be taught the ' conditions of 
 civil association ' which we call laws. 
 
 To teach it that, to let the people see what it really wishes, 
 is the function of the legislator. Thus, strange anomaly, the 
 people must get some one to teach it what is its real will. 
 Such a teacher must be a superior intelligence, sympathetic 
 with human passion, and yet himself passionless : indepen- 
 dent of our happiness, and yet ready to charge himself with 
 its care : in one w r ord, a God. The legislator is not a magis- 
 trate, nor is he sovereign. Having no authority, he yet has 
 before him the enterprise of transforming human nature. 
 Unable to employ either force or reasoning, he must have 
 recourse to an authority, the intervention of heaven, which 
 can constrain without violence and persuade without convinc- 
 ing. The fundamental laws of a nation, its action of supreme 
 power, come as it were from something in man which is 
 higher than man : they reveal themselves to him as the 
 central tendency and drift of his being. The general will, 
 in short, transcends the individual and can never be confused 
 with the tyranny of democracy. 
 
 A somewhat curious instance of the effect of the ideas of 
 Rousseau and the Revolution upon a mind of ordinary 
 qualities, though in extraordinary mass and mixture, is seen 
 in a youthful composition of Buonaparte. The following are 
 extracted from an unfinished essay he wrote in December, 1 790 
 (he was then twenty-one), in competition for a prize offered 
 by the Academy of Lyons for an answer to the question 
 ' Quelles verite"s et quels sentiments importe-t-il le plus d'in- 
 culquer aux hommes pour leur bonheur?' (Buonaparte, it may 
 be noted, was then at Ajaccio full of plans for the emancipation
 
 246 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 of Corsica.) He begins by defining man's happiness as c la 
 jouissance de la vie la plus conforme a son organisation/ 
 That organization is partly physical and partly moral. With 
 regard to ' notre organisation animale/ it has as its indispen- 
 sable wants food, sleep, and sexual pleasure (manger, dormir, 
 engendrer *). It is only emphasizing the last point when he 
 remarks that ( Sans femme il n'est ni sante ni bonheur/ But 
 man is more than animal : ' notre organisation intellectuelle 
 a des appe'tits non moins impe'rieux : sentir et raisonner/ 
 And man must learn f que sa vraie gloire est de vivre en 
 homme/ And happiness lies especially in the feelings (not 
 in the reason). Le sentiment is the bond (lien) of life, of 
 society : it is by it that we enjoy ourselves, nature, our country, 
 and the human beings who surround us. Such enjoyment 
 does not require great wealth as its means. In fact the rich 
 live to their hurt under ' Pempire de ^imagination dereglee/ 
 Still all men have a claim to be listened to for so much as is 
 necessary to enable them to carry out the life required by their 
 organization. Hence not merely a wife, but a certain amount 
 of terrestrial property is a sine qua non. ' I/homme en naissant 
 porte avec lui les droits sur la portion des fruits de la terre 
 ne"cessaires a son existence : ' and it follows that the legislator 
 (the organ of society) must resolve the political problem ' de 
 maniere que le moindre ait quelque chose/ 
 
 One may compare with this what George Sand (Hisfoire de 
 ma Vie, i. 50) says of her grandmother Madame Dupui de 
 Francueil. Among other papers the latter left behind an 
 essay ' Du Bonheur/ which began ' Tous les hommes ont 
 un droit egal au plaisir/ The word plaisir, according to 
 George Sand, means 'un bonheur material, jouissance de la 
 vie, bien-etre, repartition des biens.' 
 
 The demand for the maintenance of natural rights was 
 almost a new feature of political life in the eighteenth 
 
 1 Cf. Xenoph. Hiero, 7. 3 atriais Kal iroroTs Kal vnvois KOI d<ppo5iffiois irdvra 
 opoiajs ijStaffcu totKf TO. wa.
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 247 
 
 century. In the Petition of Rights exhibited by Lords and 
 Commons to Charles I, in 1628, the claim is made to 
 a ' freedom inherited by the laws and statutes of the realm ' ; 
 the rights and liberties prayed for are those according to the 
 laws and franchise of the land, ' the laws established in 
 the realm, either by the customs of the realm or by acts of 
 parliament/ And in the Bill of Rights of 1689 ' the rights 
 and liberties asserted and claimed are the true ancient and 
 indubitable rights and liberties of the people of this kingdom/ 
 and the acts complained of are distinctly stigmatized as illegal 
 usurpations of power. Everything asked for is a corollary of 
 the same liberties, rights, and grants, which in Magna Carta 
 secured the supremacy of the law of the land and justice over 
 arbitrary power of the king or the king's officials. The 
 tendency prevalent throughout is what may be called 
 Legitimism, the doctrine of historic rights, of hereditary 
 privilege. The claim of the present is founded on a posses- 
 sion of the past ; it is the consequence of a precedent. 
 Liberty and right rest upon a charter, a special historical 
 fact. The rights and liberties have the same justification in 
 a line of long descent, as the nobility and the monarchy have 
 put forward for themselves against the parvenu and the 
 radical. Unable or unwilling to raise the difficult questions 
 of right and wrong, the advocates of national freedom and 
 of justice contented themselves with the appeal to a distinct 
 past a past which was never present, a supposed and believed 
 primeval use and wont. It is the same appeal to the custom 
 of our forefathers which leads Antigone in the Greek play to 
 appeal against the commands of the king to the unwritten 
 and sure statutes of heaven whose origin is in immemorial 
 antiquity. What the race holds dear it credits with birth in 
 the beginnings of the ages l . 
 
 1 Heine, Englische Fragmenfe, xiii : ' Die friiheren Bestrebungen, die wir 
 in der Geschichte der Lombard ischen und Toskanischen Republiken, . . . 
 verdienen nicht die Eh re eine Volkserhebung genannt zu werden : es war 
 kein Streben nach Freiheit, sondern nach Freiheiten, kein Kampf fur
 
 248 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 The eighteenth century was not satisfied with the results 
 of this doctrine of historic rights and of legitimism. It 
 despised the weakness which, rather than confront the real 
 issue of right and wrong, took refuge in an alleged creation 
 of the right by primitive custom and statute. It would have 
 no more of those liberties (franchises) which are the creations 
 of charters and royal grants. It came to the conclusion that 
 rights were something which monarchs and governments 
 could not bestow, that liberty was ' above their sceptred 
 sway ' ; that rights and liberties had a basis in the nature of 
 things, independent of rulers who might acknowledge and 
 declare, but could never make them. The mission of govern- 
 ment, one of the philosophers of the time had said, is not 
 to make laws, but to promulgate those laws which are 
 necessary and natural, which are relations inherent in the 
 nature of things. To ascertain these rights therefore is 
 according to the philosophers the province of reason : and 
 what is from one point of view called natural right may from 
 another be called rational rights. 
 
 A right, it is said, is always the creature of law. But law 
 is itself an ambiguous term, or rather there are laws and laws ; 
 and it is and has been a problem to say what are the differ- 
 ences and what the analogies which subsist between moral 
 and positive law, between law political and law physical, 
 
 Rechte, sondern fiir Gerechtsame : Korporationen stritten um Privilegien. 
 . . . Erst zur Zeit der Reformation wurde der Kampf von allgemeiner und 
 geistiger Art, und die Freiheit wurde verlangt, nicht als ein hergebrachtes, 
 sondern als ein ursprungliches, nicht als ein erworbenes, sondern als 
 ein angebornes Recht. Da wurden nicht mehr alte Pergamente, sondern 
 Principien vorgebracht.' See also Goethe, Faust, p. 72, ed. 1858, Mephisto- 
 philes to the student : 
 
 'Es erben sich Gesetz' und Rechte 
 
 Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort : 
 
 Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte 
 
 Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort. 
 
 Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage, 
 
 Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist ! 
 
 Vom Rechte das mit uns geboren 1st, 
 
 Von dem ist, leider ! nie die Frage.'
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 249 
 
 laws of nature and laws of society : or generally between 
 what is called the law of man and the law of God. And the 
 usage of language can here be no certain guide. It is easy of 
 course to begin by propounding the view that every law is 
 a command, issued by a well-marked superior to those in 
 habit of submission within a political community knowing no 
 master outside, and a command moreover which says not 
 merely ' Do this thing/ but ' Do this sort of thing/ For the 
 rough and ready practice of jurists such a definition may be 
 sufficient : and it is then natural to add that laws of nature 
 and moral laws are comparatively improper generalizations in 
 the usage of the term. But it has to be pointed out that for 
 the most part laws, even political and civil, are not so much 
 commands to do a sort of thing, as statements that, if some- 
 thing is done or left undone, certain painful consequences are 
 intended to fall upon the doer or the negligent person. Each 
 so-called law has its place in a system of law, and has its 
 meaning governed and determined by that system : it is 
 subject to the canon of consistency. The laws of a country 
 are thus the successive and continuous explication of the con- 
 ditions of social welfare, inherent in the general characteristics 
 of human nature and in the special situation and qualities of 
 the special community. A semblance of consistency at least 
 is therefore indispensable, if they are to be laws. But if this 
 be so, the laws of a country are only in a very secondary sense 
 the commands of an assignable authority. The popular con- 
 sciousness has always seen in the laws something above the 
 control of individual will, of dictation or caprice. Actual 
 law, it is true, has not unfrequently seemed due to the 
 individual will : but this was and is possible because of 
 the ignorance in which the community lives as to its 
 true will, because, at the time when the law was enacted, 
 the discrepancy between the decision of one and the demand 
 of the universal was not apparent. 
 
 The dispute which, as it was formulated during the Middle
 
 250 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 Ages, raged round the origin of law from will or from reason 
 was, as is usual with such disputes, partly a question of names. 
 When Grotius held that natural right is so immutable that it 
 cannot be changed even by God ; or when Gabriel Biel pro- 
 claimed with the true scholastic piling up of impossibility to 
 a climax : ' If, which is impossible, there were no God, who is 
 divine reason, or if that divine reason were in error, still if any 
 one were to act against the right reason of angels or men, or 
 any other there may be, he would do wrong : and if no right 
 reason at all existed, still if any one were to act against what 
 right reason would dictate if there were any, he would do 
 wrong,' they certainly seem to run counter to the view 
 attributed to Occam that law originates solely from the 
 divine will, and binds only in virtue of his command. Yet it 
 is only the old question of Christian philosophy puzzling over 
 the distinction of faculties of intellect and will. The eternal 
 and necessary conditions of existence and of welfare rule us 
 whether we will or no : and a mere perception of their 
 existence elevates them into the position of laws. But in the 
 case of human welfare there are peculiarities. Human life is 
 governed by the conception of ends, by ideals. Its charac- 
 teristic feature consists in the formation of common aims, of 
 ideals in which a community or society are interested. The 
 human being is essentially a social animal : a creature which 
 enters into confederacy with others, which forms groups or 
 unities. Or rather, to speak more truly, the human being is 
 from the beginning, so far as we can see, differentiated from 
 all animals by a something in him, which makes him not 
 merely a creature of momentary impulse but a unity of self 
 through diverse times : which makes him at one with others 
 so far at least that, in order to realize his own existence, he 
 must conceive and set it forward as bound up with others in 
 a unity a unity of greater or less compass, according to the 
 circumstances and the time. There thus is ever present within 
 him, but in greater or less degrees of force and range, the sense
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 251 
 
 of community, of a common basis or unity, a common life in 
 which he and others share. This sense is what in some 
 respects we call the work of reason, in others of sympathy. 
 In other words, what forms the unity is partly an unconscious 
 principle, natural fellow feeling- founded on sensuous and 
 visible ties : partly it is a reflective and reasoning- principle, 
 which carries him from more obvious and more sensibly 
 palpable ties to the more universal, generic, and intellectually 
 realizable. 
 
 Now this community only exists by means of the minds 
 of those who constitute it. These partial unities which are 
 formed, no doubt make use of natural facts and rest upon 
 physical boundaries : but, strictly speaking-, there are no 
 boundaries in nature. One part passes on into another and 
 the world is a single totality. A river, a sea, or a mountain 
 only becomes a boundary in virtue of the action of those who 
 live beside them. Energy and enterprise can practically 
 annihilate the barriers which nature interposes : whether a 
 particular natural feature shall be a barrier or a link of con- 
 nexion, depends on the human beings who have to deal with 
 it. Thus the principles of union in the actual community 
 rest upon the will and intellect of those who make it up. It 
 is not a natural fact ; but is made what it is by the conception 
 and loyalty of its members. 
 
 This is the place at which arise the two opposite concep- 
 tions of a political unity as, on one view, a work of human wills, 
 of deliberate and intentional compact, of action originating in 
 individuals ; and as, on the other view, a natural structure, 
 a necessity of human nature, a fundamental fact which must 
 be accepted but cannot be explained. The theorists of the 
 eighteenth century, as has been already pointed out, were led 
 to regard as most prominent the part of individual enterprise 
 in forming- the social body : it seemed, in short, as if they 
 regarded the state as depending for its existence on the good- 
 will, the caprice even of the individuals, who with a view to
 
 252 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 further their private ends entered into a compact of con- 
 federacy. Now as against this view it was perfectly fair for 
 writers like Paley to urge that all government, having begun 
 either from the power of a parent over his family, or of 
 a commander over his fellow-warriors, had from these natural 
 beginnings been maintained by the three motives of 
 prejudice, reason, and self-interest on the part of the 
 governed. But it was wrong in them not to recognize more 
 explicitly than they did that the authority alike of the 
 patriarch and of the leader in war rested upon reason and 
 sympathy from its very commencement, was at least dimly 
 felt to be the vehicle for attaining a common utility, and 
 presupposed the indistinct conception of a unity and system 
 of things. Even from the first we may make bold to say the 
 human unity, however constituted, was not founded on mere 
 naked force, but owed a certain homage to will and reason. 
 The despot who wilfully applies the resources of a family or 
 a community solely and singly for his individual good is 
 a rare phenomenon : he generally is himself persuaded and 
 manages to some extent to persuade others that he is sub- 
 serving permanent and general interests. For, as Paley 
 remarks, the physical strength almost in all cases resides in 
 the governed, not in the government. 
 
 It would seem to follow then that the authority of a govern- 
 ment rests upon the idea of a common good, upon a general 
 will, which it is supposed to interpret and promulgate and 
 enforce upon recalcitrant members. For indeed the very 
 existence of government implies first, ignorant, and secondly, 
 malignant members : i. e. people who do not know the 
 general good which embraces their own, and people who 
 prefer their own interests instead of the universal. As 
 against the first class, government can avail itself of the 
 instrument of education, of instruction in the rights and 
 duties of human life : and for those who believe that a know- 
 ledge of the right is a certain method of realizing it, the
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 253 
 
 second object would in this way also gradually be attained by 
 removing- the main cause of their recalcitrancy to authority. 
 Such obviously are the two chief functions of government : 
 and if the duty of punishment is the more directly incum- 
 bent, the duty of educating-, i. e. of giving- them all necessary 
 and desirable means to enable them to perform their civic 
 functions, is even more fundamental. 
 
 The ideal perfection of a state then would apparently involve 
 its own suppression. But practically such a result does not 
 come within the bounds of possibilities. For the conception 
 of the duties of the commonwealth is not a fixed and settled 
 quantum : it grows from age to age : and hence the necessity 
 of education and of restriction is always incumbent. For as 
 the existence of the state lies in the active conscience of its 
 members, every new aperqu of its duty and function arises 
 in a single mind, and has to work its way by the growing 
 association of several, until it becomes the dominant belief of 
 the majority. Thus the practicable ideal of a state is that 
 its constitution shall be in accordance with the wishes and 
 intelligence of the largest possible numbers, shall rest upon 
 the widest possible basis of popular agreement. But this 
 necessity of the nearest possible approximation to unanimity, 
 as a practical condition of a working polity, must never put 
 out of sight another side of this question ; and that is, that the 
 material points in which the popular majority agree, shall be 
 the true and abiding interest of the whole community and so 
 of each member. A mob and a multitude in agreement is no 
 guarantee of the right of truth of its conclusions. ' Private 
 judgement and public deliberation/ said William Godwin, 
 ' are not the standard of right and wrong : they are only the 
 means of discovering them.' ' The functions of society extend 
 not to the making, but only to the interpreting of laws : it 
 cannot decree, it can only declare that which the nature of 
 things has already decreed/ In other words, while it is the 
 aim of the prudent politician to take measures such that
 
 254 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 the vast majority of a country shall be on the side of truth 
 and justice, and so to secure what is called political liberty, 
 or the participation of each in the making of the law, it is 
 equally the duty of the wise statesman to take means for 
 making- the majority realize the true issues and complete 
 bearings of the measures which may be set before them. He 
 must, in short, get them to see that they are on the side of 
 reason and nature, that their resolutions are not creating 
 a right, but recognizing the conclusion forced on them by 
 the events of history and the circumstances of nature. The 
 human mind must be disabused of the delusion that it makes 
 laws, must discover that there are conditions governing the 
 common life of human beings whether they will or not, and 
 that it will never be well with it till these are recognized. 
 
 Does what has thus been said leave room for the distinction 
 between absolute and relative rights, as they are severally 
 called by Blackstone, between natural and adventitious rights, 
 as they are called by Paley ? It is evident, and hardly need 
 be said, that the term natural need not be taken to imply 
 a state of nature previous to that of civilization. The natural 
 is neither equivalent to the savage, nor to the paradisaic 
 stage of the world's life. Savagery and civilization are alike 
 within the realm of nature, and alike show departures from 
 the natural. It is no doubt the case that longing eyes are 
 sometimes cast from the confines of advanced civilization 
 towards the apparently unfettered ranges of savage life. But 
 experience soon shows that the bonds of convention are not 
 solely to be found in the higher levels of society ; that the 
 rule of custom and usage rules with iron rigidity the primitive 
 barbarian. It has often indeed been supposed that innocence 
 and natural grace have taken up their abode in the country 
 with the peasant, in the borders of civilized lands, in the 
 primitive barbarism of the tropical islands. But the truth 
 in this only is that the savage and the civilized man have got 
 different vices and virtues. Nature can govern life in all
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 255 
 
 levels of civilization, and unnatural life is enforced to no grade 
 or landscape. 
 
 Natural rights then are consequences of the fundamental 
 laws of social existence, of those laws which make life-in- 
 communion possible in all countries and all times. Now 
 though it is true that we can to a certain extent choose our 
 company, the extent to which we can do so is limited. We can 
 to some measure change the incidence of social pressure : but 
 get rid of it altogether w r e cannot. In certain states of society 
 it is reduced we may say to a minimum. But it is the 
 very condition of human life that we cannot get rid of it 
 altogether. We may therefore dismiss the hypothesis of 
 a meeting of individuals previously isolated and independent 
 with the view of constituting an association. Individuals 
 thus absolutely individualized would never have come together 
 at all. Sometimes indeed speculative theorists, in order to 
 put in an emphatic light the necessity of a recognition by 
 each of something higher than these petty selves, have put 
 forward the picture of the brutishly chaotic state of affairs 
 which would be inevitable, if each were in his acts to behave 
 as if he were alone in the universe, if each in short were 
 resolutely to pretend to be what he knew he is not. But the 
 picture of such a social state is only the reductio ad absurdnm 
 of pure egoism, a demonstration that pure egoism vigorously 
 carried out is self-destructive. And pure egoism can only be 
 carried out, if it is ever carried out, because so many other 
 principles of salvation for society are in operation, that its 
 effects for evil are swallowed up in the general tide of good. 
 
 The question therefore is society being the condition of 
 human life will we adapt ourselves to its indispensable terms 
 or not ? Now it is evident that those terms will vary to some 
 extent from place to place and from age to age. The conditions 
 on which society is possible for a group of hunters will be 
 very different from those incumbent on a society partly 
 agricultural and partly manufacturing : the conditions for
 
 256 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 a country village will be different from those of the closely 
 packed inhabitants of a large town: those of a set of peasant- 
 farmers will be other than those for a body of ecclesiastics. 
 And yet it is scarcely less evident that amid all these 
 diversities there will be certain analogies, certain principles 
 common to all forms of association. Not of course that we 
 can find these general principles as so many separate conditions 
 on which the peculiar and local principles supervene. The 
 world is not made in that way. Rather it is that we, coming 
 later and reflecting comparingly on what we see, can detect in 
 the characteristic constitution of each certain features which 
 can be stated approximately in general terms. These general 
 features of life, never presented abstractly by themselves, but 
 always realized in a special type, are what give rise to what 
 have been called the absolute or natural rights of man. 
 
 There is another sense in which we may speak of natural 
 rights. By what is natural, we mean the opposite of 
 artificial and affected or forced. A thing is natural when 
 it flows from one principle in all its details, when it is not in 
 one part out of accordance with itself in another, but exhibits 
 a solidarity and unity of all its members and functions. The 
 natural is marked by unsought harmony, by consilience, as if 
 each element by some magic power in itself sprang up to 
 meet and join hands with every other. In the course of 
 history a society like a clock gets out of order. The one 
 spirit which ought to pervade it, the one law which ought to 
 govern it, is replaced by a number of petty principles. Under 
 a superficial bond of unity, for example, under a strong cen- 
 tralized financial administration, there may yet be no real 
 unity of life throughout the kingdom. Such, for example, 
 was the condition of France before the Revolution. Such 
 more or less tends to be every great social union. There 
 arises a state of affairs which may be illustrated by comparison 
 with the conditions of the physical body in disease and in 
 dissolution. In disease what happens is a disruption of the
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 257 
 
 social continuity : some of the organs and tissues acquire 
 a partial independence, and work by other principles than the 
 general consensus of the bodily organs. 
 
 After dissolution a similar process is repeated with intensi- 
 fication. New organisms arise and take the place of the 
 former vital structure. Something similar to this occurs in 
 a state of society. Parts of it get ossified : one part has gone 
 on, while others have got left behind : some have developed 
 abnormally and, as privileged bodies, attracted more than 
 their fair share of the supplies of vitalizing matter. In such 
 a state of affairs the cry for natural rights is a demand for 
 justice, equity, equality, for the removal of narrow restric- 
 tions, for the destruction of complexities that have ceased 
 to be useful or intelligible, and for greater simplicity and 
 uniformity in the administration of business, especially in 
 application to law and business. 
 
 Thus in these ways we may agree both with the school 
 which speaks highly of natural rights, and with the school 
 which disparages them as misleading and unmeaning verbiage. 
 Where they are dangerous is when they are supposed to be 
 something which the individual cai'ries about with him from 
 his birth onwards, something so peculiarly his own that he 
 can at pleasure retain them or surrender them to others. To 
 this theory no mercy can or should be shown. All that is 
 a man's own is what he can do : what belongs to the physical 
 individual is mere power or force. Even the word ' can ' is 
 ambiguous : it sometimes means what one ' may ' do and in 
 that case is not applicable to the mere individual, considered 
 out of relation with others. But a man's rights are not mere 
 powers ; they are powers sanctioned or recognized by some- 
 thing transcending the mere individual. They are claims 
 which he has on the behaviour of others, grounds for inter- 
 ference, justifications for action in certain contingencies. 
 Such grounds for claiming from another some specified 
 behaviour presuppose a common standpoint, a public ground 
 
 s
 
 258 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 on which persons meet ; or, in other words, rights belong 
 only to persons, and a person is an individual who 
 subordinates himself to some comprehensive or uniting 
 principle, something which puts them in relation to each 
 other. The right implies a controlling authority on which 
 these persons can fall back, something (at least logically) ante- 
 cedent to and inclusive of the individual, which makes him 
 more than an individual, by giving him the entry to a sphere 
 in which other individuals also enter. The mere individual 
 has no rights as such ; he has rights only as a person, i. e. as 
 member of a society, as embodying in himself, at least partially, 
 the larger aggregate of which he is a unit. The person has 
 rights, because though an individual he is also implicitly the 
 species: in him we find exemplified and realized the law of the 
 class to which he belongs. A person in short is an individual 
 who has what we may call a public character, a social function 
 to perform. He is raised above himself by his conscious 
 adoption of the class to which he belongs, by his sense of 
 being constituted and governed by the general system or idea 
 which is exemplified in him. A person is an individual 
 realizing the universal. He is not merely one amongst many, 
 not merely a single being in the multitude whom we note as 
 we pass over them in review, not merely a being with pecu- 
 liarities or idiosyncrasies of his own, out of which we can by 
 an effort of abstraction disentangle the general properties. As 
 a person he is conceived of as having respects and relations 
 to the whole of which he is a part, and to the individuals who 
 are his fellow-members. Thus the person is the individual which 
 has lost its unrelatedness, which is a member of a group 
 a conscious and co-operating unit of a society. 
 
 There are legal and moral persons just as there are legal 
 and moral rights. The term moral is ambiguous. At times 
 it merely denotes the opposite of the physical : as when we 
 distinguish a man's physique from his morale, or physical 
 from moral sciences : a sense in which the words mean pretty
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 259 
 
 much the same as the antithesis between material and im- 
 material. The moral in this general sense is what cannot 
 be brought to book in definite objective fact, what eludes the 
 test of experience and observation. Something of that wider 
 meaning always attaches to the term moral : the moral is 
 intangible ; it cannot be weighed, counted, and measured. As 
 such it is especially opposed to the legal, as the outer and 
 obvious shell is opposed to the inner kernel, as the potential 
 to the actual ; as the great ' may be ' to the definite and ascer- 
 tained ' is/ But the antithesis must not be pressed too far, or 
 treated as absolute. They are two partial aspects of a single 
 fact, that fact being the fact of human society : of which 
 they respectively present the statical and the dynamical 
 element, the element of order and the element of progress. 
 The legal is the moral cooled and stationary : the moral 
 shows us the same element still fluid and energetic, shapeless 
 and indefinite, but alive. The total fact is the social life of 
 the world, where the principle of progress is in a healthy state 
 always in union with the principle of order, the dynamical 
 always keeping up the statical. Law is but the deposit, the 
 fixed result, of the operation of that instinct, which while 
 still heaving shapelessly is called morality. In the actual 
 world they are never wholly separate : one without the other 
 is dangerous to the community. 
 
 The merely moral is the purely internal : the merely legal 
 the purely external. And just as it is true that ' summum 
 jus summa injuria/ so it is occasionally found that nothing is 
 so immoral as the conscience which refuses to be enlightened 
 by objective order. Law, moreover, in constituting obligations 
 and rights, does not constrain the holder of the right to make 
 use of it. Morality, on the contrary, issues in the inexorable 
 imperative of duty. Rights permit : duty constrains and 
 obliges. Or, perhaps, while rights control another, duty 
 controls one's self. And carrying this a little further we 
 may see that rights are strictly speaking concerned, not with 
 
 8 2
 
 260 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 the inner relations of a man to himself, but with his relations 
 to others. A man's rights refer to his external aspects, to 
 those points on which he comes into contact with others, to 
 his objective manifestations. So long- as he remains purely 
 inward, rights have no application to him. Thus if we say 
 a man has a right to his opinions, we must mean, if we speak 
 correctly, to refer to the expression or utterance of his opinions, 
 so long as they remain merely opinions, and do not affect 
 the existence of others injuriously. So again the right to 
 freedom of conscience would have no meaning, unless it 
 included the outward expression to what extent of course 
 is a problem of the beliefs and ideas which conscience 
 cherishes. And as conscience is primarily negative in 
 function, it at least will cover the right of not taking part 
 in any performance to which conscience objects. 
 
 It is for the same reason that the person means in the 
 first instance the physical body; for that is obviously for 
 external purposes the primary objectification of the self. In 
 the body the will and intelligence is present or presumed 
 to be present for the outsider : and any injury done to the 
 body is an injury distinctively done to the person. No doubt 
 we can speak of the moral person ; and the person as moral 
 is independent of the body, is purely inward and spiritual. 
 And such a power of abstraction has sometimes been claimed 
 by those who maintained that the beauty of the soul remained 
 untarnished by whatever was done in the body who supposed 
 in short that the sanctified spirit could lead a life of its own 
 in lordly indifference to the claims of the grosser nature. 
 Such is the tendency of some forms of mysticism. But 
 a humbler philosophy, which follows the track of experience 
 and confines itself to the fortunes of the embodied spirit, holds 
 that in the main the soul is sympathetic with, suffers and 
 acts in and along with the body. It refuses to admit, except 
 for moments of difficult and dangerous abstraction, the separa- 
 tion of the inward and the outward of human nature; and
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 261 
 
 while it maintains and allows the distinction of inward and 
 outward, it denies their separate and independent existence as 
 a fact coming- within the purview of science. 
 
 Rights then are conditioned by law, and law only exists 
 where there are external relations forming a system, consti- 
 tuting a social group. Rights mark out the place which 
 belongs to each in that system, and are only valid where such 
 a system, economy, or constitution prevails. Outside it and 
 apart from it, an individual has no claim to be called a person, 
 and to be charged or invested with rights. Belonging to 
 different societies, more or less co-ordinated with each other, 
 an individual sustains several persons and thus possesses a 
 variety of different rights. The basis of his rights then 
 lies in the system to which he belongs ; and to belong to 
 a system is to perform the functions which are required of 
 him in that system, not merely to be a passive and idle 
 member of infringe* consiimere natus. A right is thus, as it is 
 said, correlative with a duty. My rights, or the sphere of 
 my rightful existence, are the consequence of my performance 
 of certain external acts, of my making my existence felt by my 
 prescribed conduct. 
 
 At this point comes in the right of coercion. So long as 
 my entry into a society is an entirely voluntary act, so long 
 the right of coercion in that society can only exist in a very 
 moderate degree. I enter it upon a definite understanding, 
 and can only be responsible to the extent of the bargain. 
 Even here the society naturally expect me to make good 
 any loss which my conduct may have caused it to sustain. 
 The way in which it accomplishes that result is as follows. 
 Strictly speaking all men form in the last resort one vast 
 society. But for practical purposes that comes to mean that 
 all civilized men form one society. The extent of that 
 confederacy has varied from time to time. In the ancient 
 world it was an oasis on the shores of the Mediterranean : 
 indeed it was so much as this, only in the concluding days
 
 262 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [i 
 
 of the Reman Republic. In modern times it comprehends 
 a large minority of the world. Slowly through the ages pro- 
 gress is made towards realizing actually the implicit community 
 pointed to by the Stoic saying : homo sum, -nihil humani alle- 
 uum : changing the moral into a legal community, and creating 
 a real/ gentium, a true international law, not in the sense of 
 a public law governing various nations as nations, but in 
 the sense a common law dealing in a uniform way with the 
 acts of individuals in society. So-called international law, as 
 a collection of diplomatic usages, conventions and courtesy- 
 rules of intercourse especially in war, is of course no law at 
 all, but a set of inferences from the common practice of belli- 
 gerent states, supplemented by an indefinite number of pious 
 ' wishes. 
 
 In reality the summit of real unity is reached in the 
 independent political state, which so far acknowledges its 
 solidarity with other civilized states as to assist them by 
 the extradition of criminals against the common law. The 
 state then, for all practical purposes, may be taken for the 
 supreme society : and up to it all subordinated societies 
 ultimately refer ; or it finally takes cognizance of all inferior 
 societies, as if they were its delegates and instruments. The 
 state then is the ultimate creator, guardian and guarantee 
 of all right in this world. It exists by the combined action 
 of its members, and exists more or less clearly in the con- 
 sciousness of each. It is important that this consciousness 
 of the whole in each should receive an objective manifestation 
 in a special body, told off for the purpose a universal 
 estate, separated as far as possible from individual interests 
 and entrusted with the guardianship of the common weal. 
 This estate is what we call the government, the executive 
 and judicial body, the permanent administration. It is 
 charged with the duty of seeing that the conditions of public 
 order and progress laid down, or to be laid down, in the laws 
 are complied with. In order to carry out that mandate
 
 i] OUR NATURAL RIGHTS 263 
 
 it has the right to punish. That right to punish does not 
 belong to the government in virtue of any compact, by which 
 the members of the state bound themselves on entering it 
 to submit themselves to chastisement, if they violated the 
 term of their engagement. As we have seen already, the 
 state as society is the condition of human life ; and although 
 at first a community may feel itself as merely a little 
 usurpation amidst the general chaos, and so allow its 
 defaulters to escape if they can beyond its limits, it gradually 
 comes to see that the earth is one, and that it is bound to 
 pursue the criminal from land to land through the world. 
 The state, in short, must realize that it is the mortal 
 God, and that in this world it should be ubiquitous and 
 omnipotent. 
 
 Its duty as a government is then to see that the laws 
 or conditions of social (i. e. human) order and progress shall 
 be obeyed and realized in the conduct of individuals ; in 
 other words, that the rights of each, both his general rights 
 and those special rights he possesses as member of special 
 associations guaranteed by the general order of the state, 
 shall be respected and maintained. To this end punishments 
 are available. What is a punishment? A punishment in 
 the first instance is an act of restitution, if possible: a re- 
 investment of the injured party into rights of which he was 
 deprived, and a denudation of the violator from the rights 
 which he had misappropriated. But this is only sufficient 
 in certain cases : those cases, viz. where examination shows 
 that a right has been interfered with; where loss has been 
 sustained, but where no malice or intentional hurt can be 
 shown to exist, where there was good faith on one side as 
 on the other. There all that government has to do is to see 
 that the goods removed are replaced by an equivalent, as 
 nearly as may be to the loss sustained. But in such cases 
 it is not enough to show that no malice was intended; it 
 may also be required that no criminal neglect of ordinary
 
 264 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 precaution be proved. It is an assumption based on the 
 very nature of society that certain obvious and fundamental 
 relations shall be continually present to the mind and govern 
 the conduct. 
 
 But punishment proper only steps in where the injury is 
 designed, or where the carelessness is of the degree styled 
 culpable, i. e. is such as to show a dereliction from the 
 ground of the first principles of social life. If it be asked, 
 does the law then take cognizance of the motive and of the 
 character, the answer must be both yes and no. Of the 
 motives affecting the agent law has no regard, except so far 
 as they modify the action; but in so far as they give the 
 action a new character and constitute it what it is, law must 
 take regard of the motive. If the action is conformable to 
 law, is overtly in accordance with social terms, the state 
 by its authorities is satisfied : if it is not in conformity, the 
 state may have a very considerable interest in the reasons 
 of that non-conformity. For though law deals only with 
 actions (which are all outward) it cannot lose sight of the 
 fact that an action is made such by a purpose, an act of will, 
 and that an act of will is due to the adoption by the whole 
 acting man of some desire or appetite which arises within 
 him. It has therefore to consider the demerit of that 
 appetite as a principle of action and overt consequence. 
 Accordingly the punishment will be heavier or lighter not 
 in proportion to the character of the individual, but in pro- 
 portion to the more dangerous character of the dispositions 
 which evidence their existence in his actions. If drunkenness, 
 for example, is the immediate motive of the action, then 
 the action will be more severely punished by those who hold 
 that the temptation to indulgence in liquor is supremely 
 pernicious to the interests of the community.
 
 II 
 
 PERSON AND PERSONALITY 
 
 A PERSON is commonly defined as the ' subject of rights ' : 
 it is sometimes added, 'and of duties/ The two ideas of 
 ' rights ' and 'persons ' are thus closely connected and perhaps 
 interdependent. 
 
 Persons are distinguished as ' natural ' or fictitious : as 
 ' physical ' or ' moral ' : as simple or compound. In other 
 words, they are either (i) individual human beings, or 
 (2) corporate groups invested with powers of individual 
 action, such as the state, a municipality, &c. 
 
 Some confusion may arise by applying the word ( moral ' 
 to corporate personalities, as when Rousseau (and others) call 
 the state a personne morale : artificial associations, corporations, 
 colleges, &c., coming under this head, and denoting aggregates 
 which are formed of units already existing in the shape of 
 individual human beings. But these human beings, as mem- 
 bers of the corporation, seem in part to surrender their original 
 personality. They are called ' moral ' in distinction from the 
 individual persons, human beings who seem to derive their 
 personality from nature. 
 
 But, strictly speaking, we may hold that all true personality 
 is moral. Pufendorf seems right in holding that personality 
 is always ' moral/ always, i. e. due to a relation of thought, 
 and to be carefully distinguished from mere natural indi- 
 viduality. A person is, according to him, an ens morale ; it is 
 originally (he speaks the language of the contemporary logic)
 
 266 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 a modus (not a substantia), though it is constantly in danger 
 of being (' ad norraam entium physicarum ') treated as itself 
 a substantia, i. e. hypostatized in an individual reality. Per- 
 sonality, in short, is a quality of the human being that expresses 
 his moral nature. And the moral nature of man lies in his 
 being subordinate to a general law, or being a member of 
 a community, in which he forms an integral part and performs 
 a function. Or, personality, like morality, only belongs to 
 man in so far as, though a physical individual, he is implicitly 
 universal. 
 
 The community to which man belongs is in its idea 
 absolutely universal : i. e. if expressed in terms of space and 
 time, it is a community of all times and places ; eternal 
 and omnipresent. In fact, it is only of limited range, or 
 of restricted universality : a community consisting of a special 
 group of human beings in a special country and age. The 
 physical individual, as member of this absolutely ideal king- 
 dom (of humanity and of God), is a moral person : as a member 
 of a particular and definite kingdom, he is or has a legal 
 person. In practice, the moral personality is not always 
 widely separated from the legal. The moral is just a step 
 or two ahead in extent : we do not rise at once from the 
 special to the absolute universal, but rather in certain direc- 
 tions seek to diminish the narrowness of the actual scope of 
 life and advance a little way towards that infinite which we 
 can never attain in actual accomplishment. 
 
 In the other or common sense of the phrase ' moral person/ 
 however, nothing of this sort is implied. It only means 
 a ' person ' made up by the aggregation and organization of 
 individuals into a unity, which acts and suffers in common, 
 and has recognized organs for the expression and enforcing of 
 its will. And, strictly speaking, it would seem that such an 
 aggregate only receives the title of a person, in the legal 
 sense, when it is itself treated as a unit by a larger unity 
 in which it inheres. Thus the corporation in a political
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 267 
 
 community is invested with its personality by charter or 
 similar authorization from the supreme sovereign. On the 
 other hand, an independent state is only a person, in so far as 
 the consciousness of the state at any moment is governed by 
 the idea of its ultimate end or function, of its place in the 
 system of humanity: it is a person in so far as it has what 
 we may call an eternal and infinite consciousness, or as it 
 recognizes above it the authority of conscience and of God. 
 And in practice it is a person in so far as it regards other 
 states and other states regard it, not merely as so much 
 power, but as power controlled by moral ends, regulated by 
 reason, freely setting before it good aims i. e. aims con- 
 formable and contributory to the general good. 
 
 It may be of some use to note historically the usages of 
 the word ' person.' ' Persona ' in Latin means a ' mask ' an 
 ' assumed or fictitious countenance } in contradistinction to the 
 natural face ('facies sua/ Sen. Ep. 24. 13). Secondly, it 
 means the part or character played by an actor : his assumed 
 part : and thus by degrees the individual himself considered 
 as having a certain outward presentment. Thus even a thing 
 may be said to have a ( persona/ when it is conceived of as 
 presenting a certain aspect or front, an appearance as distinct 
 from its reality. In this sense ' personatus ' means ( assumed/ 
 c counterfeit/ ' unreal.' The general meaning of the word, 
 however, does not include this suggestion of deception : it 
 merely connotes the particular aspect and character in which 
 a man appears to the world : and from this it is easy to see 
 that a human being may sustain several persons, or play more 
 than one part in the complex organization of any existing 
 society. 
 
 In law the contrast is put between person and thing, 
 between ' persona' and 'res.' A persona is thus a human 
 being, but considered as invested with a certain function and 
 social character; not a mere abstract human being, but one 
 having a special place in the body politic, one who counts as
 
 268 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 something in the world. Hence in a state of society which 
 legitimates slavery, the slave is in legal language said to have 
 no persona or public character. His social existence is, so far 
 as the law goes, entirely absorbed in that of his proprietor : 
 6 6oA.os -riapa. rot? VOJJLOLS airpoa-anros eon, Toure'cm, ovbe ooKfl 
 rjv oiide cbrfTvai 1 . His presence or absence makes no difference 
 in the social sum : he counts only as a chattel. It is tolerably 
 evident that such personality is a quality inhering in the 
 individual through his place in a system : or that to transform 
 the merely living human being into a legal person there is 
 required recognition on the part of the state. 
 
 In mediaeval Latin the word persona is found in several 
 shades of meaning. To lose one's persona is to become a 
 slave. But more commonly it denotes a dignity or faculty, 
 and secondarily the person charged with such dignity, func- 
 tion, or right and obligation. Thus we hear of a ' persona et 
 potestas emendi et vendendi ' : and Boniface speaks of ' Laicus 
 quidem magnae personae ad nos veniens/ It is especially 
 used, however, of the holder of a clerical dignity : hence the 
 modern English parson, which in Chaucer is still 'persoun/ 
 A persona is in John of Salisbury a beneficed clerk (as opposed 
 to a curate). Personatns is the dignity of a persona. A piece 
 of Old French of the twelfth century speaks of a meeting 
 where ' erent del pais li barun assemble, deien, arcediachre, 
 persones (= cures) et abeV A 'personnat' is a sort of 
 benefice in a cathedral church. It is evident, in short, that 
 the dignity and office par excellence of the mediaeval period 
 has usurped to itself the title persona : the ' parson ' is the 
 clerical functionary, the most distinct representative of a 
 public character. 
 
 As we come down we find the word ' person ' extended like 
 
 other dignities to a larger and larger sphere. Even in 
 
 Madame de Sevigne' it has still a certain distinction attached 
 
 to it : speaking of a lady, she says ' elle lit, elle travaille, 
 
 1 Theodor. Herm. vii. 6. 2 See Littre and Du Cange.
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 269 
 
 enfin c'est une personne' : she is in short ' somebody 1 .' But 
 at last it seems in a phrase like ' etre content de sa personne ' 
 = to be satisfied with one's self, one had got to the bottom. 
 Even here perhaps a careful observer might allege that there 
 was a distinction between the judging self and the apparent, 
 presented self, which appears to others. In English a person 
 is about the least one can say of one : when one speaks of 
 a ' young person ' one has come close to a state where the 
 human being has ceased to be even a woman and become 
 a mere link in the chain of society. 
 
 There is another use still however. A law treatise on the 
 Liberty of the Subject speaks of laws relating ' to the body 
 or person/ and of ' the security of the person or body/ And 
 it is from the same reason that we speak of a woman's person, 
 meaning thereby her physical appearance. ' My face is my 
 fortune, sir, she said : ' it may be that in the case of a woman 
 there is an especial ground of regarding her physique as 
 specially constituting the character or part she has to play in 
 the world. 
 
 The theological application of the term ' person ' need not 
 detain us. It is now well known that the so-called Athanasian 
 creed, in which the doctrine of the three persons of the Trinity 
 is so conspicuously presented, is a document compounded about 
 the time of Charlemagne in the Latin language, and only 
 assigned to the authorship of Athanasius in order to give it 
 venerable authority. The Greek term corresponding to per- 
 sona is irpoVooTroy : but the Greek word on which turned the 
 
 1 Cf. Keller, Leute von Seldwyler, i. 31 : 'Sie machte ganzlich den Eindruck 
 von etwas Einzigem und PersOnlichem : es war, kurz gesagt, eine 
 Person.' Schiller, 10. 308 : ' Die Abstraction unterscheidet in dem 
 Menschen etwss das bleibt und etwas das sich unaufhOrlich verandert : 
 das bleibende nennt sie seine Person, das wechselnde seinen Zustand.' 
 See Zietelmann, Ecgrlff und Wesen der juristischen Person (Leipzig, 1873'. 
 Cf. Luther, Wider Hans Worst : ' Die Person wird euch nichts helfen, 
 wenn euch das Recht verdampt.' Goethe, 43. 5 : ' Der Schauspieler muss 
 seine PersSnlichkeit verlaugnen ;' 25. 364 : 'Der Mensch wirkt alles was 
 er vermag auf den Menschen durch seine Personlichkeit.'
 
 270 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 disputes of the Arian controversy in the fourth century was 
 vTToo-rao-i?. An hypostasis is represented in Latin by sub- 
 tfanfia, and the question of hypostasis is closely allied to the 
 question of essence or nature. In the ' condemning clauses ' 
 of the original form of the Nicene creed rebuke is addressed 
 to those who teach that the Son is trepas vTroo-rao-eco? T/ owi'as. 
 Gregory of Nyssa is the Eastern advocate of the Trinity in 
 Unity : according to him, Scripture is found ^uAdrrourra 
 ravrorrjra fleo'rrjro? tv idiorrjrt vTroo-Ta.crf.utv, and he seeks to 
 reconcile to the mind the antithesis between the fj rf/s $vo-eo)? 
 fvorrfs and f] Kara ra? VTrotrrao-ei? SiaKptms 1 . The same lan- 
 guage appears in Augustine 1 , who declares that the same 
 whole is a Trinity 'propter proprietatem personarum/ and 
 one God ' propter inseparabilem divinitatem ' ; but he differs 
 from the Greek Fathers in holding that in each Person the 
 Godhead is fully realized, not, as they maintained, merely the 
 particular aspect of universal deity. 
 
 If we next ask what attempts philosophers have made to 
 examine the ultimate principles involved in a term which 
 jurisprudence is content to handle without too minute analysis, 
 we may first turn to Locke. Dealing in Book II, chap, 
 xxvii. of the Essay on Human Understanding with the 
 question of personal identity, he is careful to maintain that 
 it cannot be based on, or consist in some mysterious 
 identical substance, a solid substratum of hard matter at 
 the centre and kernel of life. It lies and can only lie in 
 an active consciousness, a ( thinking thing/ which attributes 
 actions to itself. Personal identity lies in consciousness ; 
 it is the sameness of a rational being and consists in 
 the act of intelligence, in the consciousness which, while 
 distinguishing itself from itself, still refers the passing, 
 variable mood to the permanent self ; shows the variations of 
 consciousness as phenomena of one consciousness, and realizes 
 the one consciousness (out of time) in the succession of con- 
 1 De Civ. Dei, xi. 24.
 
 ii ] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 271 
 
 scious states in time. A person, says Locke, is a ' thinking- 
 intelligent being- that has reason and reflection, and can con- 
 sider itself as itself (the same thinking- being) in different 
 times and places/ A little further on he tells us that 
 ' Person is a forensic term, appropriating- actions and their 
 merit, and so belongs only to intelligent beings, capable of 
 a law and happiness and misery/ He means that, when we 
 punish, we presuppose that we are dealing with a person, and 
 by that we mean an agent whose acts are recognized as part 
 and portion of himself, as proceeding- from himself and all 
 connected together in one sequence or consistence, forming 
 parts of a single unity. But he also means that in merely 
 intelligent beings, without feeling- of pain or pleasure, this 
 idea of a self, a responsible self, would never arise. In us, 
 however, the ' concern for happiness ' is ' an unavoidable 
 concomitant of consciousness.' 
 
 The last point may be compared with some remarks of 
 Lotze. It is impossible, he says 1 , to define the meaning 
 of 'mine' by a logical combination of concepts. It is a 
 primary experience, by which the difference of the mine and 
 not-mine is first felt and realized. This form of experience 
 consists in the feeling- of interest, of pleasure or pain. What 
 pains or gladdens me is absolutely distinct from what I repre- 
 sent either as indifferent, as painful, or as pleasant, without 
 feeling the supposed weal or woe. And so in his Psycho- 
 logy ( 51) he maintains that a mere act of knowledge cannot 
 be the motive of this distinction (between me and not me). 
 'Mine' comes before 'I' or 'me' : and we must distino-uish, 
 
 O * 
 
 he adds, between feeling our self as a self, and knowing out- 
 own being : between the sense of self and self-knowledg-e. The 
 latter is the subsequent interpretation of what came earlier as 
 an experience of feeling. Thus the consciousness expressed in 
 ' I ' does not belong to a merely intelligent being. We must 
 accordingly distinguish between the spiritual nature common 
 1 EeHgionsphil. 33.
 
 272 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 to all, the general essence of soul or universal appearing in 
 all individuals : and the nature of the ego by which each soul 
 distinguishes itself from all others l . Each is not a mere 
 specimen of a class, a mere particular case : he is also and 
 more essentially a being-for-himself, a self-centred being, 
 referring all that he is to himself. This is the secret of life, 
 which is inapprehensive to logic : of personality, which refuses 
 to be dissolved in the universality of philosophy. 
 
 As yet we have only seen that personality was based on 
 reason and intelligence, on the power of self -disruption and 
 of self-reunion, but, further, on a reason which is not mere 
 intellect but is an intelligent life, feeling and realizing its 
 concepts, and realizing them indeed before it can properly be 
 said to know them. It was natural for Butler, commenting 
 upon Locke, to raise a question as to what Locke meant by 
 the ( substance' he perhorresces, and how it differs from 
 ' being ' : and to declare that, though consciousness may 
 ascertain for us our personal identity, it can hardly be main- 
 tained to constitute it. The discussion touches on a radical 
 problem of philosophy what existence applied to spiritual 
 being or to ' ideal reality' can properly be held to mean 
 which hardly came forward for clear examination till Kant 
 and Fichte. 
 
 Mansel 2 can hardly be said to throw much light on 
 the question. Distinguishing between the ' accidents of 
 consciousness and its essential constituents' he points out 
 that, though 'the matter of consciousness is continually 
 changing, the form abides permanent and immutable.' No 
 great gain perhaps follows from applying to the question this 
 Kantian distinction of form and matter. It however empha- 
 sizes itself in a phrase like this : ' I exist as a person 
 only as I am conscious of myself, and I am conscious of 
 myself only as I exist.' Our being is a conscious being : 
 a phrase which is too bald not to stand much in need of 
 
 1 Cf. Lotze, Medic. Psychol. pp. 493 seqq. 2 Metaphysics, p. 359.
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 273 
 
 exposition. Mansel adds that there are two conditions indis- 
 pensable to personal existence, time and free agency : there 
 must be a succession in time (of modifications in a persisting 
 subject), and also a power of attention or volition. The 
 last seems to mean that a person must not be a mere drift 
 of events upon a stage, but must also possess a power 
 of surveying and so far controlling the stream, a power 
 of comparison, unification, and initiative. We come back 
 very much in this to the phrase of Leibniz : ' Persona est 
 cuius aliqua voluntas est, seu cuius datur cogitatio, affectus, 
 voluptas, dolor/ Clearly in other words a person is not 
 a thing. 
 
 It is only very incidentally that Kant has given any 
 exposition of the idea of a person 1 . We call a rational being 
 a person, he says, because his nature points him out as 
 something which can never be a mere means, but must 
 always be treated as at the same time an end in itself. As 
 persons, rational beings are possessed of a certain worth or 
 dignity, in that they obey no law but a self-imposed one. 
 A person thus has the special prerogative of guiding his 
 course by principles derived at once from his own point of 
 view and from that of every other, as a legislative being. 
 Our person is distinguished from our state (Zustand}: out- 
 personal value from the pleasant or painful condition in 
 which we are. And thus finally our personality reposes upon 
 the power we have of regarding ourselves from an ideal or 
 intelligible point of view, as purely free, originative beings. 
 And so Kant comes to a conclusion like that of Ahrens, 
 that human personality lies in the union of the contingent 
 and finite element of individual life with the absolute 
 and divine reason : and implies a power of the mind to 
 detach itself from the given fact by an act of utter spon- 
 taneity. A person is one who has been able consciously to 
 grasp and make his own all the varied qualities of mind and 
 
 1 P. i. 1 10. 
 T
 
 274 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 soul which belong to him as an individual. This power of 
 reducing to unity and stamping as his own every mental 
 element and faculty is what belongs to every person as such : 
 and it constitutes the common generic aspect of human 
 personality. Hence, says J. H. Fichte, 'the normal man is 
 one who has raised his individuality in all its parts to 
 personality, who has brought all mere instincts, &c., to the 
 full property of intelligence 1 .' Yet in all men this person- 
 ality is imperfect. There always remains an insoluble residue 
 in the background, from the depth of which continually rises 
 the unexpected and the undesirable. 
 
 The movement towards personality is thus a realization 
 and concentration of the characteristics of the individual. 
 These, scattered and isolated, are appropriated and unified by 
 the act of the genius or inner self: they are no longer mere 
 fragments of being, but fused into an instrument and symbol 
 of the self. But in this act each sets himself in antagonism 
 to others : he becomes a person by asserting and determining 
 himself against others : he marks off his own sphere of 
 personality; and in constituting himself a person shuts 
 himself off from others, who yet are recognized as independent 
 of him in that very act of renunciation. Thus the person is 
 essentially an individual, one among many. But the forma- 
 tion of personality is a process which goes on in each by 
 reflection on others, whom he at once acknowledges and 
 excludes : the creation of this reduplicated individuality thus 
 implies a movement pari passu towards community, or the 
 recognition of another self another yet the same in others. 
 The subject thus measures the value of his personality by the 
 reflection of it he imagines he can trace in the judgement of 
 others. The individual or free subject thus attains to per- 
 sonality only in company and competition with others ; and 
 from this social relation flow both his rights and his duties, as 
 he alternately seems to exclude others and to include them 
 
 1 Anthropol. 251.
 
 ii ] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 275 
 
 with him in the same community. Those rights which follow 
 from the mere fundamental conditions of community, before 
 any definite and special free relations have been formed, are 
 the original and inalienable rights of men, the rights in which 
 all men, as members of any community whatever, are equal to 
 each other. It is in these everlasting rights that personality 
 as such consists : the abstract right of free self-development 
 and self-determination the equal right to exist and live his 
 nature out. 
 
 But as J. H. Fichte has hinted, and as Lotze has enforced 
 at some length, the finite being finds himself on all hands con- 
 fronted by forces with which he did not invest himself, and by 
 laws which he has to accept, as well as by wills different from 
 his own : nay, even in the recesses of his own being he seems 
 to meet with a dark strange substance which is in him, but is 
 not he ; and to which as a vehicle his whole personal develop- 
 ment is attached. We have grown up as it were by piecemeal, 
 and are never wholly ourselves ; we identify ourselves with the 
 particular point of view at which we stand in a particular stage 
 of our development. The complete sanity of self-control, of 
 self-mastery, and absolute possession and appropriation of all 
 our souls is what we never fully attain. ' It is only to a 
 limited degree,' concludes Lotze 1 , 'that we can say that it 
 is we who act : for the most part action is carried on in us 
 by the several groups of ideas or feelings to which our 
 mental machinery at each instant has given predominance. 
 Still less are we in time quite all our own. Much vanishes 
 from memory : most of all does it gradually lose hold of the 
 individual moods of feeling. Many grooves of ideas, in which 
 when young we were at home, come before us in later years 
 as foreign phenomena : we can hardly find our way back to 
 feelings in which we once indulged with enthusiasm ; the 
 power they once wielded over us has left scarcely a trace 
 behind. In the walks into which later life brings us we 
 1 Mlcroc. in. 574. 
 T 2
 
 276 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 come to regard as unintelligible aberrations those aspirations 
 which we once held to be inalienable members of our inmost 
 self : we cannot understand how we could ever have felt such 
 impulses. In truth, therefore, we have little ground for 
 speaking of the personality of finite beings : personality is an 
 ideal, which like all ideals is proper only to the Infinite in its 
 unconditioned nature, but to us is, like every other good 
 thing, only vouchsafed under conditions and therefore im- 
 perfectly/ Thus, he sums up, ' a full personality is possible 
 for the Infinite alone : the peculiarities of the finite are only 
 hindrances to its development/ 
 
 It is necessary, however, to examine briefly this attribution 
 of personality to the Infinite or Absolute. The point on 
 which Lotze seems to lay special weight is the imperfect 
 character of such personality as is exemplified by human 
 nature. The same thing may be said also of morality, and 
 even perhaps of religion. Each of these has a something 
 in it which presses onwards to a perfection, the attainment 
 of which would be its own annihilation. The religious man 
 aims at a growing and increasing divinity or likeness to 
 God : if this likeness reach its ideal limit in identity with 
 the divine nature, then it is no longer strictly entitled to 
 be called religion. It has passed beyond itself into the 
 reality which it aimed at, and in the continual but unending 
 approximation to which its very life and existence consists. 
 But the state thus imagined is one which it is impossible 
 to realize in clear thought. The truth rather seems to be 
 that religion, like everything else in humanity, only exists 
 in what we may call a radical antithesis, a synthesis of two 
 aspects, neither of which can be severed from the other. It 
 is, on the one hand, a sense of the dependence on the divine, 
 of the infinite littleness of human nature, and on the other 
 a sense that God is with man and that even now, in this 
 world, God and man are reconciled in one. 
 
 And so it is also with morality. The law of duty is a
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 277 
 
 standard which, as it is approached, ceases to bear the old 
 aspect of obligation, and passes into the guise of autonomy. 
 A perfect morality would be a state of soul in which the 
 struggle between conscience and appetite has been com- 
 pletely transcended in a willing union, where the appetites 
 become the ready messengers, or organs instinct with good 
 doing their master's will as their own. Morality, as Kant 
 says, arises because man regards himself as a citizen of 
 a higher world, a spiritual kingdom; regards himself as 
 a legislative and spontaneously legislative member of that 
 kingdom, embodying a law universal in his every single 
 resolve and action. But man, though obliged by something 
 within him to put himself in that position, to assume that 
 high place and rank, finds himself as matter of fact a citizen 
 of the sense world, the world of nature, a mere link or rather 
 an aggregate of mere pieces in a physical system, which 
 governs his movements. He is moral only by an effective 
 act to make himself; to realize his vocation, and affirm the 
 initiative and independence of physical law which he claims. 
 He finds himself a fragment; he believes himself to be a 
 whole. His life is a struggle between his realization of this 
 faith and his acceptance of the position of fragmentary fact. 
 Neither aspect can be ignored, and so long as that is so, 
 man cannot be perfectly moral, just because he is a sensible 
 creature. Morality thus is founded upon an idea the idea 
 of a spiritual nature, the faith in an ' intelligible world ' an 
 idea which can never in this world be realized. Perfect 
 morality and perfect religion carry us beyond themselves to 
 an absolute in which we may suppose them to be satisfied : 
 satisfied, however, by being carried out to that consummation 
 which destroys what is their very essence. 
 
 It is the same with personality. The ideal of personality 
 is the complete penetration of all that comes within the 
 compass of the person : it is the animation of all the parts of 
 the human mind and body, and all that subserves these, with
 
 278 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [it 
 
 one mind and spirit : the thorough appropriation of every 
 particle that is mine with the full reality of me, so that 
 I may be complete and at home in every part. But such 
 an appropriation rests upon a distinction of mine and thine 
 which is fundamental and immediate : it involves an indi- 
 viduality, feeling and asserting its own distinct existence 
 amongst other individualities. The personality therefore is 
 only a position assumed to mark out and define individual 
 existence. If it could be what it would fain be, it would 
 be universal, all-embracing : for at no point can I stop and 
 say : Thus far do I go, and what is beyond is to me indifferent. 
 Any limit which is to be drawn must be imposed by the 
 existence of other personalities equally self-assertive in the 
 region to part of which I am obliged in this way to confine 
 my claim. Just as religion only exists because man is always 
 differenced from God, and morality because the appetites 
 are not absorbed and annulled by the reasonable will, so 
 personality only exists because we are not pure spirits and 
 mere ideal beings, but have a visible and sensible basis to 
 our existence, in passions, limbs, and material conditions. 
 We are persons because we have an excluding individuality, 
 ' ein bestimmtes materiales Ich ' ; though that personality is 
 only inherent in the definite materiality by virtue of an 
 implicit universality of appropriative and unifying thought. 
 It is only because they act in a sense world that rational 
 beings come into connexion with each other, and, while 
 excluding one another, yet somehow keep up their unity with 
 that which they have excluded. Hence personality can only 
 belong to a member of a world, to one who is not everything, 
 but stands in contact and relation with others outside him- 
 self. Such a position cannot belong to the Absolute or 
 Infinite. We cannot indeed say that the absolute is im- 
 personal, but we may at least say he is something more than 
 a person. 
 
 Personality then is an idea which, as we know it, is realized
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 279 
 
 in the case of a person, or of persons. As in other cases, 
 we must distinguish between the singular form of the 
 universal idea, and the singular or plural of its several mani- 
 festations. Thus truth is an idea; its real aspect is seen 
 in particular truths, none of which are ever adequate to the 
 absolute idea. Nor can we deduce from the idea of truth 
 any particular truth whatever, or find in any higher concep- 
 tion a criterion or standard by which all subordinate truths 
 may be recognized. We can only say that all truths must 
 be consistent with each other; that a truth which is incon- 
 sistent with another truth shows itself or the other to be 
 no truth; that wherever there is a want of clearness and 
 distinctness or of coherency with the whole system there 
 there is error or falsehood. When we refer our perceptions 
 to experience, we do not merely mean that one perception 
 is coherent with perceptions of the past, we mean that 
 they both form members of that united world in which all 
 experience is embraced. 
 
 Similarly we distinguish duty from duties : and we dare 
 not try to deduce the latter from the former. We can only 
 say here again that duty is (not indeed an abstract, merely 
 identical unity, but) a system of unity in which perfect 
 harmony prevails ; or that, in the language of Kant, the only 
 criterion of moral law lies in its absolute compatibility in 
 every part its adaptation to hold good in action under 
 every circumstance. ' Les devoirs/ as Malebranche said x , are 
 infinitely various they are only the external fact, the ' devoirs 
 exterieurs ' : but true virtue is only one the ' amour de 1'ordre/ 
 ' II ne faut pas confondre les devoirs avec la vertu/ What 
 Malebranche called ' la vertu/ Kant called ' die Pflicht.' It is 
 this inner spirit which is his ' great, sublime name ' : an inward 
 or ideal, which can never be proved by experiment to have an 
 outward existence, or ever to be a fact. The duties are given 
 us by the conditions of human life in society, and we cannot 
 1 Traits de Morale, c. 2.
 
 2 8o ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 deduce them from any idea of duty, any more than we can 
 deduce a given animal from the general idea or law of life. 
 
 So too, according to Plato, we rise from the diversity and 
 accidentality of outer conduct, of justice as the world knows it, 
 viz. as this or that St/catof, to the conception of inner SiKcuoawTj, 
 the justice in the soul, the systematic disposition of faculty in 
 the system of human nature. The just act as such may flow 
 from various characters : it may be the product of prudence, of 
 calculation, of caprice, of impulse, of hatred or of love. But 
 it has only one true and genuine cause, the proper balance 
 and co-operation of the several principles which constitute 
 human nature : the proper subordination of the impulses which 
 crave for enjoyment, for pleasure, under the conception of the 
 true reality and good of life, and their supplementation by 
 a due development of that spirit of independence and activity, 
 which in its excess delights in war and struggle, and of the 
 intellectual energy which by itself might be lost in mere con- 
 templation of speculative conceits. The man in whom such a 
 balance of forces was established, would be in himself a prin- 
 ciple of justice. And being such a principle, he would, if he 
 could exist, have no need of external arrangements and systems 
 of polity : he would be a law to himself. Unfortunately such 
 a unified being is only an ideal, a standard man, with whom 
 we compare the man developing each of these interests to 
 a more than due extent. And in the city which Plato con- 
 structs we have a machinery by which the ideal, not realizable 
 perhaps in the individual, may be attained by the influence 
 which in the fabric of the state each part exerts on the other. 
 
 So personality is only known as a person among persons, 
 as a visible and sensible one among others, maintaining his 
 ground amongst others, keeping up a unity and consistency 
 of his being in all its details. But each of these details, and 
 they are infinite in number and minute complexity, is part of 
 other connexions ; each enters into a variety of relationships, 
 and has so to speak interests and laws of its own. The person
 
 ii J PERSON AND PERSONALITY 281 
 
 therefore is a fictitious unity, an artificial product, so long- as 
 he has not completely identified himself with all his parts, and 
 them with himself. But such complete identification is for 
 a finite being impossible. Each part of him carries him out 
 beyond his actual self into another world, a world in which he 
 is not supreme, and where other persons hold sway. Hence 
 the person soon begins to compare the implicit or potential 
 universality that he felt himself striving to be, with his own 
 partial attainment of it, and with the like attainments and 
 claims of others. The result is a mixture of oppositions. On 
 one hand he seeks to carry the claims of personality farther 
 and farther, to extend his being in range, even if he cannot 
 master its ground in intensity of penetration. Such is the 
 instinct of power. On the other hand, he seeks to get the most 
 out of his actual possession, to identify himself completely 
 with what he does appropriate, and to gratify the instinct of 
 pleasure. Or again he may seek more and more to realize for 
 himself that his personality is something transcending all that 
 is visible and sensible, that he is other than the things he sees, 
 feels, and conquers ; and this in its excess is the instinct of 
 the mystic and the quietist. For him the external world is 
 annihilated : his personality is wholly inwai'd and invisible : 
 and his only actions are done in his soul. Instead of using 
 the invisible self as a stepping-stone or point of view, he 
 essays to dwell in this upper world. The conflicts which arise 
 in the visible world deter him from venturing into it. He 
 surrenders the corporeal embodiment of self, and withdraws 
 himself into his purely spiritual being. He concerns himself 
 solely with the internal unity, and resigns to alien control 
 that outer world where supremacy is always imperfect and 
 can only be kept up by constant effort and is constantly liable 
 to interferences which no skill or prudence can wholly provide 
 against. 
 
 Real human personality must be something different from 
 this. It uses the world as not abusing it : or, in every tie
 
 282 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 which it forms with external things, it remembers that the 
 conjunction is a temporal one. Or, feeling itself in essence 
 eternal, it does not on that account make light of its 
 existence in time, from moment to moment and in local 
 and limited spheres. Human personality is essentially a unity 
 of oppositions. And we may even go so far as to say that its 
 special appearance is in the visible and outward sphere. As 
 a person, we are primarily what we are to our neighbours : 
 we occupy a certain place and discharge a certain function in 
 the visible world. Hence a man's personality is not his mere 
 intellect, but his whole being : it is more than his books, more 
 than any definite work he may have accomplished. A great 
 personality is a sum of influences, each of which may so far 
 be exercised apart, but which produce their chief effect in 
 virtue of some individual bond which holds them altogether 
 and makes us feel more than we can consciously explain on 
 analysis. Thus the personality is not the body merely, but 
 the body and matter as informed, controlled, organized by 
 mind and soul. 
 
 But the essence of personality is undoubtedly shown in the 
 distinction of I and Thou. To be a person is thus not merely 
 to be an individual, but an individual which recognizes an- 
 other individual as possessed of the same essential character- 
 istics. The person, while marking off self from others and 
 claiming a certain sphere as his own, does at the same time 
 admit the existence and rights of the other. Each has as it 
 were a double order of organs. His grosser organs are exposed 
 to the influence of the external world, whether he will or not. 
 He cannot choose but hear, when mighty noises convulse his 
 ear. But so long as a certain point is not passed, he is 
 independent, and can only hear by an inward sympathy or 
 participation. He hears only when he imitates by an inner 
 and more delicate organ the tones which are echoed in his 
 outer organs. He must help if the effect is produced. This 
 is the right of personality : and it is violated when another
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 283 
 
 individual by physical violence forcibly induces a change in 
 the organism of the first to which he does not respond. 
 
 When so looked at, personality or personal identity (on 
 which, as Locke says, ' is founded all the right and justice of 
 reward and punishment 3 ) is made an ideal of complete uni- 
 fication and self-control of all the parts and aspects of a 
 man's nature. We begin with what may be termed ' psycho- 
 logical personality ' : the ' I ' which ' is not a conception, 
 but a mere consciousness that accompanies all conceptions.' 
 Thus the c I think ' is a conception (or judgement) which 
 is the vehicle of all concepts whatever l . Or, as it is put in 
 the Proleg. 46, note, e the "\" is no conception, but only 
 a designation of the object of the inner sense, so far as we do 
 not apprehend it under any specific character : it is nothing but 
 a " sense of existing'" (Gefuhl eines Daseyns] without the least 
 conception, and only represents to us something to which 
 all thinking stands in relation.' Kant's point, it must be 
 observed, is that the ' I ' is not a thing or object among other 
 things : we cannot put it before us as an object : if we could 
 do so, the ' I ' would cease to be an ' I/ and become a Not-I. 
 Or, as he otherwise puts it, the ' I ' is not something of which 
 we have a ' standing and abiding impression,' a steady clear 
 image. It is always a subject, always active, and never 
 to be conceived as a passive object, or permanent substance. 
 Thus Kant maintains against metaphysical (rational) psycho- 
 logy that the Ego is a bare apperception, which underlies and 
 makes possible all our forms of conception : but we can never 
 so far objectify it, and put it in the order of objects, as to 
 treat it as a substance, the simple persistent something which 
 underlies all mental change. Thus he calls it a mere ' feeling 
 of existing,' as distinguished from the intellectual ideas of 
 relations. 'Subject' can never become 'object/ or it ceases 
 to be ' subject/ There is a profound and indelible distinction 
 between the idea of a thing (which is a formula expressing 
 1 Kritik der R. V., Dialektik, bk. ii. ch. i, Paralog. 3.
 
 284 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 the relations between the parts constituting it, and between 
 it and other things which are connected with it) and the 
 existence of that thing, its real being, life and actuality. 
 As Kant remarked, in dealing with the scholastic arguments 
 for the divine being, existence is not an attribute of a thing, 
 not a mere part and portion of the idea : but something 
 unique and sul generis. The reality, as distinct from the 
 idea, is something active, something which appropriates and 
 holds the idea, and feels resistance or contradiction of the 
 idea as a disturbance of its own being ; something which 
 exerts an effort and sustains opposition. Existence then in 
 its last resort is not something which can be touched and 
 measured, but something which is felt, felt above all in the 
 immediate self -experience of mental life. Existence therefore 
 is properly spoken of only where there is susceptibility to 
 influence, capacity of action and reaction. 
 
 Hence, as was already hinted, no being can be called 
 a person who is not capable of feeling and action, as well as 
 a mere idea of the intellect, a mere object of apprehensive 
 judgement. Personal action is distinguished from the 
 operation of necessary laws, or from the authority of mere 
 ideas, which are true, but do not exist. Mere ideas, mere 
 concepts, have no power in themselves : they are made alive 
 and real only in a living consciousness. The idea has to be 
 incarnated in flesh and blood. Hence the influence and place 
 of great men in history, the force of a real personality. The 
 theorem may be there : the facts may arrange themselves in 
 the very act of expressing a law : but unless the living heart 
 and voice take up the burden of the idea it is ineffectual. 
 The mere words even may be present; but they are only 
 (fxavdevTa <rvviToi<riv. They require, as Plato says, the father 
 of the word to cherish and defend the children of his thought, 
 and strengthen their ghostlike forms with his own life and 
 blood. The soul or central self is more than the mere intel- 
 lectual concept : than a type, plan, or idea on paper or in
 
 ii] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 285 
 
 mere words : it is the actual concentration of all the system 
 of relations in one source of power, making 1 the words breathe 
 and the thoughts burn. It is only as a state of the soul that 
 the concept enters as a force into the real world and changes 
 the material. That the idea may live, it must be embodied in 
 a person or an institution: and an institution is after all 
 only a moral person a complex person. 
 
 Kant then seeks to show that the Ego cannot be treated on 
 the same level as the mental or physical phenomena which it 
 observes : it cannot be well or adequately described by such 
 terms as ' substance/ ' thinking thing/ and the like. It is 
 the perpetual concomitant of all mental acts, but not the 
 single object of any : if it be made an object, it is of a 
 peculiar sort a subject-object. We may to some extent 
 consider it in abstraction from its special phases or attach- 
 ments, but we ought not to speak of it as existing apart from 
 them. We cannot take the 'I' out of ourselves and put it 
 ' there ' before us. It is true the consciousness ' I think ' is 
 a simple and unanalyzable consciousness ; whenever we go into 
 further detail, we leave the simplicity of the condition of con- 
 sciousness and descend into the detail of actual consciousness 
 of this or that object. But a simple consciousness does not 
 entitle us to speak of the simple nature of the subject of 
 consciousness : consciousness cannot get behind itself and 
 consider its own cause or principle. The Ego is only the 
 ' form of apperception attached to every experience ' : an 
 epithet noting the subject condition on which all knowledge 
 depends. All the categories on which knowledge depends are 
 only special and detailed forms of this ultimate power and 
 principle of synthesis. Being itself the ultimate condition of 
 all knowledge, we cannot get behind it to see its conditions. 
 It is an irreducible and ultimate sentiment of reality, a feeling 
 of being. 
 
 So much for psychological personality, the condition of 
 moral action, or the prius of morality. It consists in the
 
 286 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ir 
 
 presence of a central unity of apperception, a feeling that we 
 exist in our several modifications, that the various feelings, 
 desires, emotions are ours, belong to us, have a common 
 ground and a mutual interdependence, thus constituting a 
 system with necessary relations. Personality, moral person- 
 ality, has a double aspect : it is the relation and inter-connexion 
 of elements claiming some measure of independence. Within 
 us personality presupposes a nature which is one and yet 
 many : which has from the beginning a potency of unification 
 of instincts and principles, and which can occasionally at least 
 raise that potency to an actual symmetry and solidarity. It 
 presupposes various apyjai, which ultimately fall under the 
 guidance or control of one ap-^i] : and in that relation, implicit 
 or actual, of the central monad to the others in our being, 
 personality as an inner quality consists. But there is also 
 an outer personality : a personality for the eyes of others and 
 in an external community. In this aspect personality depends 
 upon a system of society, in which each has his place 
 appointed, and therefore occupies a special restricted position. 
 But still in fulfilling that place his inner and moral per- 
 sonality must remain intact. He is no doubt a mere unit : 
 but a unit which can embrace and reproduce in himself the 
 whole society of which he forms a part. 
 
 It is for this reason that Kant calls personality ' eine 
 Achtung erweckende Idee.' Moral personality is nothing 
 but the freedom of a rational being under moral laws (whereas 
 psychological personality is merely the power of being con- 
 scious of one's self in the various states of one's identical 
 existence) : from which it follows that a person is subjected 
 to no other laws than those which it imposes on itself (either 
 alone, or at least at the same time with others). ' A Person/ 
 in short, ' is that subject (agent) whose actions are capable of 
 imputation : whilst "a thing" is capable of no imputation 1 / 
 In virtue of being an end in himself man possesses a dignity 
 1 Rechtslehre, EM. p. 24.
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 287 
 
 ( Wiirde) l . Personality 2 , as ' freedom and independence from 
 the mechanism of the whole of nature/ elevates him as 
 a moral being above his sensible nature, which attaches him 
 to the order of things. Personality belongs to a being 
 endowed with inward freedom with the power of absolute 
 initiative. 
 
 Thus, as Hegel remarks, 'to be a person is the grandest 
 thing a man can be : and yet the bare abstraction a person 
 is somewhat contemptible in the very expression/ It is 
 different from the subject or psychical person, the mere possi- 
 bility of personality which is found wherever we find a living 
 human being. As an individual, I am a being defined in 
 various ways, of such and such an age, so tall, in this or that 
 space, with such and such a temper, character, and modes of 
 thought. But all the while as a person I can set aside all 
 this particular aspect of myself and recognize it as something 
 separable from me : can look at myself as a pure personality, 
 in which all speciality and limitation of my nature is can- 
 celled and lost to view. So viewing myself I see myself as 
 absolutely unconstrained and unlimited, as infinite, universal, 
 and free. Thus if I can be said to see myself here as an 
 object, it is an object absolutely simple, general, and self- 
 identical. It is not till an individual and a nation have 
 reached the point at which they can dismiss as irrelevant to 
 themselves any special phase of being to which they are 
 accustomed, that they can be said to attain personality. Thus 
 in personality we have the contrast between the limited 
 actuality and the unlimited possibility, between the pheno- 
 menal aspect and the essential being, between the particular 
 definiteness and the latent universal. Personality is the 
 power of realizing and keeping in view the universal, free, 
 and unlimited being, amid the particular and definite or 
 isolated forms which threaten to overwhelm it. It is as 
 tending to sink the particular in a mere general relation- 
 1 Tugendl. 38. 2 Kr. d. Pr. Vtr. p. 214.
 
 288 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 ship that the term person seems occasionally a term of 
 reproach. 
 
 Thus a person is, on the one hand, an individual or indi- 
 vidualized being, one among 1 many in ordinary cases, a single 
 living human body which, on the other hand, has the 
 capacity of regarding itself as a universal, not bound by 
 limits of actual achievement, but as infinite and free. This 
 is the so-called mystery, grandeur, or contradiction of per- 
 sonality. In the little physical individuality which is alive 
 in the single subject or living soul which is a mere point 
 excluding all others and excluded by them there is a potential 
 universality, a claim to absolutely unconstrained existence, to 
 complete independence of action, utter spontaneity. Un- 
 checked this may degenerate into disease; the individual 
 may see himself in his petty individuality as all-embracing 
 and deserving universal empire. 
 
 But on two sides this danger is guarded against. In the 
 individual consciousness there is the sense of the moral law, 
 which gives moral personality : i.e. the individual sees himself 
 subject to a law which categorically regulates his actions and 
 appoints his sphere. And around him he, as a living indi- 
 viduality, is confronted by others, who implicitly claim the 
 same universality as he does : and with whom therefore, if he 
 is to live, some modus vivendi must be established, on the 
 ground that each of them is equally a person, and that what- 
 ever be their implicit universality, in the bounds of their 
 external manifestation, their personal existence, they must 
 mutually recognize each other. 
 
 Thus personality has a double aspect : neither part of 
 which can be absent, though the one is mainly emphasized 
 as moral, the other as legal personality. The legal personality 
 is always found in a thing, a material body, or something 
 which can represent or stand for a material thing. Even the 
 human body comes under this head. It is more closely 
 connected with the person than other things : but of it too
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 289 
 
 it can be said that the person can divest himself of parts of 
 it and yet retain a visible personality. But also of things 
 external to the body it may be said that I cannot be alto- 
 gether without them : I must have something mine in the 
 external world, or my personality will cease to exist. Thus 
 my organic body is the first and most rudimentary realization 
 of my personality, but of it, as of other things, I must take 
 possession by an act of will, forming and appropriating my 
 body as an organ of myself. My body and my property are 
 means of objectifying, realizing and maintaining my freedom, 
 my universality, my independence. In them I am present, 
 and by them I carry out that absolute claim to all things, to 
 self-mastery and complete sovereignty, which is inherent in 
 personality. The human will goes forth with the conviction 
 that things are lordless, appliable by the first comer, waiting 
 for a meaning and soul to be given them. 
 
 The legal personality is under the rule of right or law. Its 
 principle lies in the restraint imposed upon the freedom of 
 each by the recognition of the (in principle) equal freedom 
 of all. The rule of right is, ' Be a person and respect 
 the personality of others V As the will of a person towards 
 things, as the instinct of realizing personality in a material 
 world, the range of personality is unbounded. The mere 
 thing is impersonal, and has no rights. Hence man, 
 individual man, has towards things an unlimited right of 
 appropriation 2 : he treats the purely natural world as pos- 
 sessed of no substantial existence, as a mere vehicle for his 
 manifestation. But the position is altogether altered by 
 the existence of other persons : and now there arise two 
 conditions of existence. On the one hand, each recognizes 
 the existence and right of the other : or perhaps it is now 
 first of all that we can properly speak of rights, meaning 
 that each recognizes a certain sphere of action as belonging 
 to the other, and gets a certain sphere recognized as his own. 
 1 Hegel, RechtsphU. 36. 2 Ib. 44. 
 
 U
 
 290 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 But on the other hand, each may persist in the original 
 instinct and ignore the other: we have then the rule of 
 might, where they take who have the power, and they keep 
 who can. When this rule of might is regarded as an outrage 
 on the natural law of right or mutual recognition, it is 
 describable as the dominion of wrong and transgression. 
 
 The moral personality is not under an external, but an in- 
 ternal law : it is a member of a spiritual and invisible, not of 
 a visible and material kingdom. The moral law commands : 
 the law of right only forbids and restrains. The sphere of 
 law is the range of what is permitted, or of what is forbidden : 
 it does not say, Do this or that, but rather, Do not do this or 
 that. The sphere of moral law is the sphere of obligation 
 and duty. The latter commands categorically : the former 
 only permits. Thus while legal personality concerns in the 
 first place my relation to other beings, moral personality deals 
 with my relation to myself, or with the relation of my sensible 
 to my spiritual nature. Legal personality therefore depends 
 upon the institution of a common law, of a sovereign judge, 
 of a commonwealth organized and united. Moral personality 
 is independent of all outward law: and if all beings were 
 perfectly moral, i.e. subject to the inward law, there would 
 be no need of a law of rights. But man is very far from 
 being so constituted : he can only make himself moral (which 
 he is not through nature) by means of the labour and 
 discipline of education. The law of right is part of such 
 education. It attains its object indirectly. 
 
 Logically it may be said that law comes before rights, and 
 that rights are the creations of law : they exist only because 
 they receive the public sanction. But historically the process 
 often seems to present the opposite aspect. Law is only the 
 gradual accumulation of a number oijnra, or rights, indepen- 
 dently asserted and determined by special acts. Law at first 
 only exists in petto, in the consciousness of the people, and is 
 elicited by its chosen interpreters. The judge in Homer has
 
 IT] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 291 
 
 for his function 81*071; lOvvrara eiirety, to pronounce the right 
 most straightly : he is a SiKatnroAo? avrip : he has no law to fall 
 back upon as a written and systematized body of laws. Law 
 at first only exists as a fundamental and underlying principle 
 of right and equity in the biKaios avr\p. It is created as 
 a system in accidental or occasional decisions, which affirm 
 the special right in an individual case. Gradually such 
 isolated jura, or asserted and accepted rights, grow in number, 
 come more and more into relation with each other, and 
 require consolidation and harmonizing. For as they grow up 
 singly, and, though resting on a common consciousness, have 
 to be got at by a special fact and through the judgement of 
 a single human being, they may possibly conflict with each 
 other. Again, considering the strength of the tendency to 
 imitation, there is a chance of precedents gaining ground in 
 cases which are hardly in pari materia. Still in some ways 
 it may be that, while law thus remains in the common con- 
 sciousness, it is less likely to get stereotyped than when it is 
 reduced to a written code. But on the other hand, the legal 
 administration passes from the people to the judgement of 
 a special class or person, who in German is said to shape the 
 verdict or doom. When that happens, formality, pedantry 
 and ossification are apt to set in. 
 
 Still we may say that law makes its first appearance in the 
 shape of so many rights or decisions actually given. These 
 rights present themselves as belonging to the individual, and 
 it is in battle for such rights that revolutions take place. 
 And while law seems to come from above and be imposed on 
 the unwilling, rights spring from beneath and only require 
 to be affirmed and accepted. Jus is right : jus civile is the 
 right attaching to the citizen (of Rome). The struggle for 
 legal right takes the form of an effort on the part of individuals 
 and classes to claim something, which they believe to belong 
 to them and to be unjustly withheld. Thus legal rights 
 arise as the claims of personality, of individual human beings, 
 
 U 2
 
 292 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 as the claim of the individual to a recognition from others. 
 It is only gradually that the idea of rights sink into the idea 
 of a common law. 
 
 Rights then are the claims of individuals upon others, and 
 they are only affirmed as rights by the recognition and 
 acceptance of them on the part of these others. It is 
 moreover as against others, against individuals, that the 
 individual has rights : not as against the state or organized 
 community as such. They are the boundaries between 
 individuals, denoting the range of power and influence which 
 the community has recognized as belonging to its several 
 members. Such rights therefore need not be equal : they are 
 simply the powers belonging to the individual, which are 
 licensed, accepted, or recognized by the state. The principle 
 of right is reciprocity : what you would not wish done to 
 yourself, you are not to do to another. This is the respect of 
 personality, the negative condition of virtue. Right assigns 
 to each his place and prevents one from encroaching upon 
 another. Its real origin is a moral one, the claim of personality 
 to be master of its own development, to be subject to no law 
 but that which it imposes upon itself. But to attain that 
 end, it must recognize in others the same claims as it makes 
 itself, and so restrict its own plenitude. No one can claim 
 a privilege strictly so called, that is, a right which departs 
 from the general equity and balance of the system. 
 
 Thus the right of personality is the right never to be 
 treated as a thing. No person, however, can claim that right 
 unless he himself admits and practises it. ' Persons/ says 
 Fichte *, 'treat each other mutually as persons, only so far as 
 each acts only on the higher sense of the other, and therefore 
 leaves it to his free will to accept the action, leaving his lower 
 organs wholly unassailed and unchecked/ 
 
 In practice this view is confronted by the difficulty of 
 determining whether the conditions of personality have been 
 1 Nalurrecht, p. 87.
 
 ii ] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 293 
 
 complied with. But here it is probably best to err on the 
 side of presuming personality to exist, and therefore requiring 
 to be respected. As we have seen, personality in its full 
 phase is an unrealized ideal. It is therefore difficult to 
 discover any inferior limit where it may be presumed absent. 
 At what time, for example, is personality to be recognized as 
 present in children ? It is true that the law fixes with some 
 show of agreement a time when the infant acquires the full 
 rank of person, when he emerges from minority and is invested 
 with the charge of himself. But the period of majority is 
 fixed in view of certain domestic and social interests, and 
 cannot be regarded as an answer to the scientific question. 
 Nor can we altogether accept the poetic dictum that 
 
 'The baby, new to earth and sky, 
 What time his tender palm is prest 
 Against the circle of the breast, 
 Has never thought that this is I : 
 But as he grows, he gathers much, 
 And learns the use of I and me ',' 
 
 as meaning more than that the feeling of ' defined isolation ' 
 is not yet clearly conceived and set before him. Personality 
 may exist in very real germ long before the use of the per- 
 sonal pronouns has been mastered. And even the baby has 
 something more than the thing, as also in another measure 
 has the animal : they each appear in some degree to be con- 
 scious of an inherent principle, a right to their own unim- 
 peded development. 
 
 This right of personality then is never to be treated as 
 a mere means, but always as having its end and principle in 
 itself. Thus the body in which the personality is primarily 
 objectified must always be treated as the cause of its own 
 movements, and still more the mind. A person e. g. is not 
 treated as a person, if external action upon him is so vehement 
 and violent that it moves and affects him without his own 
 consent. Any loud speaking, e. g. which bursts through the 
 1 In Memoriam, 45.
 
 294 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 barriers of his organs, is thus disrespectful and obtrusive. 
 Any rough handling or fondling, which in the least forces his 
 organs to comply with those of another, is an outrage on 
 personality, which is not penal, only because it is commonly 
 vulgar. Where personality is presumed to be fully developed, we 
 must always ask the other to co-operate with us, to respond, 
 to do himself what we wish or teach him to do. Only partial 
 imbecility can justify any intrusion. But on the other hand, 
 if non-intrusion be a right, affability and readiness to meet 
 another is equally a duty. 
 
 Still the person must be allowed, so to speak, to choose his 
 own company, ideas, movements, &c. All that he can be 
 fairly expected to do is not to shut himself up to the sugges- 
 tions of others, and not without special reason to close the 
 organs of sense to the communication of others. The very 
 essence of personality is equality, liberty, and fraternity. 
 Liberty is a peculiarly negative word : it means that the in- 
 dividual as a person is not to be made to do anything against 
 his own will : it means freedom from assault, intrusion, and 
 outrage : but it does not always mean liberty to do everything 
 which he might like to do. It is guarded by equality and fra- 
 ternity. But equality in this phrase does not mean equality 
 of powers, natural or acquired : such an equality is partly 
 impossible, partly undesirable to secure. It is sometimes said 
 that the equality meant is equality in rights or equality before 
 the law : i. e. that in all affairs of public interest there shall 
 be no privileged treatment of individuals or classes : it 
 means, in short, a claim to equity and impartiality. But it 
 also is a postulate that beneath social differences and natural 
 distinctions there is a common meeting-ground, an average 
 standard to be presumed, a dignity of man and of woman, as 
 such, which puts them on a level. And this equality therefore 
 is bound up with fraternity : the equality is that of brothers 
 and sisters, of children of the same father; members of 
 a community. Liberty is checked by equality, and the excess
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 295 
 
 of equality prevented by liberty : and both are humanized 
 by fraternity by the identity of a common humanity. 
 
 How far the conditions of personality are satisfied in an 
 individual is not easy to say. It requires possession of mental 
 and bodily health. But what, it may be asked, is health? 
 The answer is supplied by Plato. The body, like the soul, 
 is an organism : a system of parts mutually adapted, each 
 possessing 1 a certain independence and proper function : which 
 however in a healthy state never actually rises to utter 
 severance from the general. The whole adjustment in its 
 details in the body is governed by the laws of mechanism : at 
 no point can we say that a special principle of life, a vital 
 principle, steps in and directs the interaction. The principle 
 is one with its parts, it is in each part and in the whole : it 
 is the supposed explanation of the fact that there is this 
 solidarity, this unity which transcends and interpenetrates the 
 separation of parts, tissues, and organs : it is the principle of 
 equality and fraternity in the body : and also the principle 
 of liberty. No part can encroach on another, no part can be 
 held less essential, no part be treated as separable from the 
 others, without in each case inducing a perturbation of the 
 general fabric. Each has its own province, its own right or 
 duty : but none can permanently act in independence of the 
 others ; and all must practically experience that the general 
 law of life, of self-maintenance of the total organism, is a 
 principle overriding particular rights. 
 
 It is equally so in the soul, in the psychical range, only 
 that here something further seems to supervene on the mere 
 organism. The vital principle is always engrossed in its part, 
 and can never be regarded as an independent agent. The 
 unity of the body is a unity of co-operation, the result of 
 factors which work in obedience to a common law. But that 
 common law is out of sight. In the soul, on the contrary, 
 the very essence of the whole movement is that it rises in 
 some degree into the light of consciousness. And the peculi-
 
 296 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 arity of consciousness is that it is a whole conception or form 
 which gradually fills itself in detail with the fullness of its 
 partial shapes. The unity, however implicit and potential, 
 underlies and realizes itself in each step towards particular 
 manifestation. The unity is primary : and it is only because 
 duration as a whole of time lies as an undeveloped basis that 
 we come to make distinctions of the duration of special states. 
 We count these, not by the summation of their separate 
 periods, but by the means of a common basis of consciousness 
 which, while parting itself out, does not lose hold of the whole. 
 
 This unity of consciousness reacts, if we may say so, upon 
 the body. The body has other than the merely organic 
 movements, which follow according to impenetrable laws of 
 instinctive nature. The purely animal movements are 
 governed by an idea; and the body itself is by mind 
 transformed (i) into a sense, (2) into an instrument. It 
 is in this double capacity that the body is strictly ours, 
 the organ of our mind, of our intelligence and our will. 
 The word 'organ,' indeed, covers both meanings. As such 
 the body is organized or articulated by the mind : i. e. its 
 parts are differentiated in use and function, made to some 
 extent independent of each other and under the direct control 
 of each other, and capable at the same time of co-operation in 
 executing a complex movement. 
 
 Now bodily health consists in this completeness of organiza- 
 tion and articulation of the body as an organ or instrument of 
 the soul, no less than in the mere regular movement of the 
 purely organic life. The difference however between the 
 normal soul and the normal body is considerable. Of the 
 proper proportion of parts and distribution of functions in the 
 normal body, it is easy to get a tolerable definite conception. 
 But as Lotze remarks 1 , we have no type of the definitive 
 shape which ought normally and necessarily to be taken by the 
 several psychical powers. In order to estimate how far a soul 
 1 Medic. Psych, p. 580.
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 297 
 
 is or is not in a healthy state, we have recourse to two methods. 
 On the one hand, we gradually form some ideal picture of the 
 state which the soul in its collective capacity ought to reach. 
 On the other, we consider how far the various means at our 
 control for that purpose may enable the soul, not alone, 
 but when aided by the average amount of favourable condi- 
 tions presented by life, to attain this normal end. That is, 
 we first have a rough idea of what mental sanity ought to be, 
 and then we ask how far the given facts in ordinary conditions 
 are likely to realize it. 
 
 Now as regards the first, we see that mental health and 
 wealth do not depend on a mere accumulation of single 
 facts, but on solid ideas of what life is and ought to be, 
 and what the world around us really means : it does not lie 
 in confinement to a fragmentary life, limited in its range of 
 view, and moving for ever in the same monotonous routine, 
 but in a large and free scope of experience : nor does it 
 lie in the degree of variety and intensity to which we 
 can bring our sensations and aspirations, but in acquiring 
 the proper estimate of values, in calming the turmoil of 
 temper and gaining at once ' sweetness and light,' that 
 gentle reasonableness which, though not less free to receive 
 impressions than in the beginnings of life, is at the same 
 time matured by experience to a wiser judgement of their 
 comparative worth. The true ideal of a fully developed per- 
 sonality does not consist merely in a keen intellectual acumen, 
 nor in an intense but inactive susceptibility to the moods of 
 happy feeling, nor in a perpetual unresting activity ; it 
 involves a balance of all these elements. But few, if any, 
 reach this ; and if this be perfect health, ' wir sind,' as Lotze 
 says, ' fast alle krank/ 
 
 Yet we are not in the habit of applying this rigid standard. 
 We are indeed ready to admit that we are far from having 
 made the best of our possibilities. We see, as we look back 
 on ourselves and others, that many faculties which had the
 
 298 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [n 
 
 germ of almost endless expansion and usefulness, have turned 
 out mere single accomplishments, petty facilities of pro- 
 duction in one department, whilst others have taken lines of 
 growth of which we thoroughly disapprove. Hours of self- 
 examination come, when we are ill at ease in reviewing the 
 result to which time has brought abilities that promised so 
 fair. And yet in spite of this self-condemnation, we still do 
 not hesitate to pronounce ourselves spiritually sound. To 
 explain this contradiction, we must take note of the second 
 point of view, our judgement on the possibility of reaching 
 the ideal by the help of normal and average conditions. 
 
 We admit that our course of mental growth has taken 
 false directions : but we do not believe that the psychical 
 formations are equally irrevocable with the corporeal. We 
 separate the permanent reality from what we suppose the mere 
 appearance. We fancy ourselves, even after all these mental 
 misgrowths, to be still fundamentally unaltered in our general 
 capacities as when we began our career. And when the 
 failures of development have been cast away, as the withered 
 leaves are stripped from the trunk of the tree, we expect that 
 the indestructible root of life and character within us will 
 throw out fresh shoots, perhaps more vigorous and better 
 than those which went before. So long as the derangement 
 has not penetrated to the very root and centre of our life, we 
 conceive it possible that alongside the actual depravity and 
 failure there still survives a better spiritual principle, an unex- 
 tinguishable source of fresh spiritual health. It is only when 
 we find that movements originating within us, or obstacles 
 which we can trace to some bodily infirmity, hinder us either 
 for a time or for ever from giving birth to new and fresh 
 life from the old source of life, that we recognize the com- 
 mencement of spiritual disease. And it follows from this 
 way of thinking that we are indulgent in our judgements : 
 we do not regard as intolerable departures, either eccentricities 
 of feeling and sentiment, or disagreeable specimens of intel-
 
 n] PERSON AND PERSONALITY 299 
 
 lectualism cultivated in one line solely, or excess of un- 
 reasoning- passions. It is only when, on actually experi- 
 menting, we find that there is no longer the capacity of 
 applying the general potentiality of mind to even simple 
 objects, that we admit the existence of mental derangement. 
 
 But this hypothesis, which would so much simplify the 
 problems of mental diagnosis, cannot be accepted. We cannot 
 always distinguish the permanent health of the faculties from 
 the perversity of their actual applications. There are no 
 ready-made faculties of permanent quality and power, which 
 can be manipulated without alteration of their structure and 
 nature. As Plato said, the food of the mind cannot be 
 conveyed in vehicles alien to itself, but only in the mind 
 itself which is modified according to its content 1 . The 
 soul cannot be conceived of as exerting side by side a variety 
 of utterances, good or bad, according as outward circum- 
 stances suggest, while the root and stem remain sound and 
 unaltered : every application of the general faculties of mind 
 is at the same time a modification of the instrument we use. 
 Nor can it be denied that the employment of the faculties, as 
 it varies, leads to changes in our powers of judging things ; 
 the eye is perverted when the heart is turned on base material. 
 There is danger in the tendency to treat these prejudices, 
 peculiarities and whims of character, as mere superficial in- 
 equalities not affecting the sound heart and judgement at the 
 bottom. The outside angularities, irregularities, and so-called 
 originalities of mind which are thus engendered, are symptoms 
 of a state verging towards mental insanity. Still there is 
 some excuse for the distinction between the faculties them- 
 selves and their applications. In derangement proper there 
 is a thorough-going unrest, a want of proportion between 
 the inner faculties. But in the product resulting from 
 cramped and perverted development, the mental forces have 
 got some sort of equilibrium. The weak, ill-grown mind of 
 1 Piotag. 3146.
 
 300 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 one tied down to a narrow round of life may be compared to 
 a chronic disease, when a species of mutual accommodation 
 has made the defects suit each other, and produce an existence 
 which in ordinary conditions goes on without much friction. 
 The sick man's mind is not violently or conspicuously ill, 
 exhibits no great lesions. But it is all on a false scale. His 
 want of sanity has grown into a bearable system, but still 
 it is removed from true health of soul. 
 
 Mental derangement then, as ordinarily understood, does 
 not merely mean the state in which, from whatever causes, 
 the estimates of things and the sense of their importance are 
 perverted, or in which the views formed about circumstances, 
 in themselves distant and indifferent, show a want of intel- 
 lectual balance, an inequality of judgement : it means that, 
 whether from these conditions or others, the ordinary facts of 
 everyday life, open to what may be called ocular demonstra- 
 tion, are falsely apprehended or are misinterpreted. 
 
 But when the law treats a person as a responsible agent, this 
 is the ultimate limit which it lays down. A responsible agent 
 must not be suffering from mental derangement : he must be 
 in possession of sound senses and sound mind ; and by this 
 the minimum meant is that he is capable of ordinary percep- 
 tion of single facts and has ordinary capacity of interpreting 
 or inferring from these facts. Without this a being is said to 
 be utterly irresponsible. He is not strictly speaking a person, 
 is not possessed of the common foundation of rationality. 
 Yet it may be doubted whether it is possible to lay down 
 definitely the conditions required to prove responsibility. 
 Jurisprudence certainly has not done so. In the nature of 
 the case it is obvious that no absolute rules can fix how much 
 power of judgement and perception is sufficient to constitute 
 rationality and responsibility ; and in any given case it can 
 hardly be possible to prove that these conditions have not at 
 all been satisfied. Thus we are forced, like Aristotle, to be 
 content with general and vague considerations.
 
 Ill 
 
 RESPONSIBILITY 
 
 THERE are two points of view from which responsibility 
 like personality may be regarded. "We may deal with it, 
 looking- at the individual or at the community. In either 
 aspect we get a part of what is meant by responsibility. 
 
 The word is partly synonymous with terms like account- 
 ability, imputability, and is closely connected with punish- 
 ment. 'The term responsibility/ says Bain, 'is a figurative 
 expression. Seeing that in every country where forms of 
 justice have been established, a criminal is allowed to answer 
 the charge made against him before he is punished, this 
 circumstance has been taken up and used to designate punish- 
 ment. We shall find it conduce to clearness to put aside 
 the figure and employ the literal term. Instead therefore 
 of responsibility, I will substitute punishability/ To the 
 same effect J. S. Mill trenchantly says : ' Responsibility 
 means punishment/ 
 
 On this, however, two remarks suggest themselves. The 
 first is that, when punishment is made the practical index 
 or proof of responsibility, ' the real question/ as Mill himself 
 says, 'is one of Justice the legitimacy of retribution or 
 punishment ' : not punishment merely, but the conditions in 
 the individual which make it right to punish him. And 
 secondly, though responsibility is a condition of punishment, 
 it is not limited to acts which deserve punishment. It is 
 a feature of the world, which might perhaps be explained,
 
 302 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in 
 
 that the good that is done is accepted much more passively 
 than the evil : 
 
 ' Men's evil manners live in brass : their virtues 
 We write in water l ; ' 
 
 and 
 
 ' The evil that men do, lives after them : 
 The good is oft interred with their bones V 
 
 People are responsible for the good they do no less than 
 for the evil : but no one is curious about the authors of our 
 blessings. The public treats all its servants as bound to the 
 full discharge of all the benefits their faculty affords, and only 
 attends to their special performance when it falls short of the 
 normal average. 
 
 The terms ' accountability ' and ' responsibility ' undoubt- 
 edly seem to refer to a ' scrutiny ' or examination, to which 
 the deeds of a person are liable in consequence of his 
 occupying a public function. Such is the vircvOvvos apyi] 
 which has to give an account of his administration who, 
 unlike the fjuwpapxta 3 or autocracy, is subject to law. The 
 idea is one of dependence subjection to a higher will. A 
 ev6vva or account has to be rendered : the person so rendering 
 an account being evidently treated as a deputy or servant 
 charged with a function, and not as a wholly independent 
 (irresponsible) or self-centred agent. But while the term 
 vTtfvOvvos is in Greek specially applied to public functionaries 
 and a public scrutiny, the term curios and alnao-Ocu has 
 a wider range. The term alriaaOai means, to bring a charge 
 against, to accuse ; but it has also the more general meaning, 
 to allege as the cause : and similarly while alrLa generally 
 means an accusation or change of crime, a crimen, it is some- 
 times used by Plato for a cause or source (atria ayaOov). Thus 
 in Pindar, Nem. vii. II, a ntXlfypov alriav poala-i. fj-ova-av means 
 ' a pleasing subject (motif} for the flow of song' : and alrios, 
 
 1 JT. Hen. VIII, Act iv, sc. a. 2 Jul. Caesar, Act iii, sc. 2. 
 
 3 Her. iii. 80.
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 303 
 
 though usually ( the culprit ' or ' accused/ is also the author 
 or originator 1 : so Plato, Rep. 379, T&V ptv ayaQu>v ovbfva 
 aXXov alnarlov. In Greek therefore, while virevOvvos denotes 
 especially the liability to a public account and examination, 
 the idea in CUTLOS is that of authorship or causality, of source 
 or origination. 
 
 In Latin again the term reus is usually applied to the 
 accused person, culprit, both before and after trial ; but it 
 is also used to mean ' one under obligation to get or supply, 
 e. g. reus dotis, or voti reus, i. e. bound by a vow ' : the reus, 
 in short, is the party who has made a covenant : and a res is 
 a ground of action, a reason, or plea. A causa similarly is 
 an interest or reason for acting : like res, it seems originally 
 a forensic term which has come into wider use. Res means 
 the object of a right : a reus is a human being who is the 
 object (not subject) of a right. 
 
 Responsibility, it thus appears, has something to do with 
 causality. The term ( imputation' means the same as attribu- 
 tion : imputare often means ' to make a merit of/ ' to take 
 credit for/ or 'to give credit for/ Thus Tacitus, Germ. 21 : 
 'gaudent muneribus, sed nee data imputant, nee acceptis 
 obligantur ' i. e. they take no credit for giving, and count 
 it no obligation to receive. So ascribere is literally to place 
 a thing to a person's credit, to count it among his debts : 
 i. e. to treat it as part of his property and dependent upon 
 his will. 
 
 The notion of desert (merit), good or ill-desert, falls in the 
 same group. ' The idea of ill-desert,' says Butler, ' does not 
 merely mean that it is for the good of society that the agent 
 should suffer : it follows (as a perception) on finding that an 
 action is unsuitable, or out of proportion to the capacities of 
 the agent/ In other words, an action has good desert, not 
 because of the rewards which law or custom may attach to it, 
 but intrinsically by its natural and inherent adaptation to the 
 
 1 Thuc. iii. 22 fftovvro 8^ oiirtp KCU rf/y Trtipas ainoi
 
 304 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [m 
 
 constitution and circumstances of human nature. In Latin 
 bene mereri is to earn a place on the credit side (de republica, 
 on the books of the commonwealth) : to pay a debt or perform 
 a duty is mereri : whilst the epithets bene or male connote that 
 the obligation has been more than or less than equally dis- 
 charged. Thus the idea of ill-desert is to have fallen short 
 in duty, to have failed in extinguishing the debt. Meritum 
 means debt or due ; or, otherwise, the same thing is on one 
 hand a debt, on the other a credit : hence the word has both 
 the meaning of ( benefit ' and ' fault/ So the debts belong- 
 ing to a person may mean his rights of action against others, 
 i. e. what is to his credit in their books, no less than what 
 it is his duty to pay. 
 
 Through the whole phraseology there shows the close 
 parallelism between the moral and the economical use of 
 the terms, between the moral and the legal. Nor need 
 this cause surprise. The moral, though it form the basis 
 of both legal and economical, is later in coming to distinct 
 expression. The juridical moreover includes the economical. 
 And all of the terms imply a system of things, an 
 established order: they connect with ideas of order and 
 authority. Responsibility implies an ordered world, in which 
 all things (act) have their place and are related to one 
 another, have mutual connexions. The fixing of responsi- 
 bility is like the search for causes : a responsible agent is 
 a cause in the moral world. And just as each cause is 
 also an effect, so each responsible being is also, from certain 
 aspects, only a link in the change of causality. He is not 
 airtoy, but only o-wcunos. Just as we may say that the 
 cause of an event is the sum of the whole antecedents or 
 conditions, and yet can select as the cause one circumstance, 
 which directly produces the effect that up to the moment of its 
 appearance had not seemed to begin, so the responsible agent 
 is the last or decisive moment in leading desire into action. 
 
 In ordinary life we are under the belief that a healthy
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 305 
 
 mental organization is responsible for the direction of the will. 
 No question is here raised as to free will as a metaphysical 
 problem. It may be maintained by the metaphysician that 
 the will is always governed by the law of sequence of effect 
 upon cause. The question now before us regards a difference 
 between individual wills. Are there any wills which are under 
 the sway of a malformed mind so completely that responsibility 
 is to be denied them ? It is generally admitted that there is 
 a class of human beings thus incapacitated. To say precisely 
 who are insane is not an easy task for medical or juridical 
 psychology. Such definitions as that ' it is a chronic disease 
 of the brain inducing chronic disordered mental symptoms' 
 are little more than verbal, with the addition that ' mental 
 aberration' is a predominant symptom of brain disease. But 
 how much of this 'physiological' disease is necessary to 
 constitute the irresponsibility of the insane, is a question 
 to which probably no general answer is possible. We must 
 content ourselves with saying that there are mental states 
 (dependent apparently most directly on nervous conditions) 
 which, in certain cases and under certain respects, deprive 
 a man of those faculties on which mental responsibility is 
 based. 
 
 Such conditions required for a rational direction of will are 
 (i) a correct apprehension of the external world, and of the 
 precise point in it towards which action is directed ; (2) suffi- 
 cient collectedness to see the present aim of action in its 
 general bearings on our life and circumstances ; and (3) a 
 healthy sense of reality, which makes this estimate of con- 
 sequences no mere dreamy conception but a vital active 
 apprehension. Where we are under a delusion as to outward 
 facts, and especially of the physical laws governing the matter 
 we propose to manipulate ; where we are infatuated by a 
 present passion to such an extent as to lose all sense of 
 proportion and to be unable to keep our permanent well- 
 being in view, and where we see the world and ourselves, 
 
 x
 
 306 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in 
 
 but see them like phantoms in a world which we have no 
 connexion with there responsibility in the fullest measure 
 is absent. But there are shades of difference in this general 
 sphere. Sometimes, as in the case of a passionate outburst, 
 or of acts done under unreasoning panic, or under the effect 
 of stimulants, the responsibility for the single act is in 
 abeyance; but it is replaced by a general responsibility for 
 the habitual character which facilitated their perturbations. 
 Many of our actions originate in a very fragmentary self- 
 consciousness. But, merely on that account, we should not 
 lose responsibility : imputation ceases only when there are 
 causes working not merely in the moment of action, but per- 
 sistently causes, not susceptible of our modification, which 
 make the average amplitude of clear and realized perception 
 and conception impossible. 
 
 For law fixes, or at least assumes, an average standard of 
 sanity, an average duty of self-possession and attention. It 
 calculates on every man in a way doing his duty. This is the 
 basis of responsibility as of obligation. Nor, when we say 
 that the individual is responsible to society, do we mean only 
 legal responsibility. Legal responsibility as a rule looks only 
 to the past : for the aim of law is to maintain or preserve the 
 established and attained order of things. For law is mainly 
 the instrument and guarantee of order and security : it is little 
 concerned with progress, and has its interest in the conserva- 
 tion of the past. Law does not anticipate and lay down lines 
 for future development, but rather fortifies what has been 
 achieved against the risks of innovation. But moral responsi- 
 bility looks upon the order of things not merely as fixed but 
 as progressive; it treats man as a member of a progressive 
 system, and as having duties other than the mere maintenance 
 of the past. 
 
 It is thus assumed that every man has a sort of public 
 interest a conception of a good common to him with a social 
 body : that he regards his action as entering into and forming
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 307 
 
 part of a system or realm of conduct, and as not remaining 
 isolated and ineffectual amid a foreign mass of other actions. 
 In consequence of such a postulate, a man is bound to know 
 the law so far as the law is an expression, made public, of 
 those conditions and relations under which his acts must 
 adapt themselves to the general body of action. There are 
 cases where ignorance of the law does excuse ; but in general 
 it is assumed that a man, as a G>oi> TroAm/coV, recognizes him- 
 self as a perfect self only in his relations with his community, 
 and is aware of the recognized and published conditions of his 
 partnership. Similarly, a man is presumed cognizant of the 
 general notions of morality current in his place and time. In 
 all of these points it is taken for granted that the individual 
 lives consciously the common life, participates in the common 
 ideas, and knows what is definitely and generally expected of 
 him. These common obligations or expectations he is bound 
 to fulfil, answer to, and satisfy. 
 
 He is also expected to have a tolerable idea of a common 
 system of things into which his action enters : a capacity of 
 knowing the nature and consequences of acts, the general 
 rules and probabilities of sequence in events. It is from 
 this point of view that a man is held responsible for the 
 consequences of his acts, and that these consequences enter 
 into our estimate of his moral character. But the con- 
 sequences which are thus taken into account are the normal, 
 natural, and necessary consequences the outward utterance 
 of the inward intention. But a man is not responsible merely 
 for the consequences of his acts which he intended : he is 
 responsible no less for those which with ordinary foresight he 
 could have known to follow inevitably from them. This ex- 
 tension of responsibility will be variously measured in different 
 cases. But undoubtedly there is a culpable negligence, 
 and a minimum of attention to facts and conditions is 
 presumed from every citizen. 
 
 Similarly a man is presumed to be capable of some amount 
 
 X 2
 
 3o8 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in 
 
 of self-control. He is credited with the power of attending 
 to general principles of conduct and to distant motives, and 
 of comparing them calmly with immediate incitements. A 
 man must be able to control himself, just as he must know 
 the nature of his own acts. He must not lose sight of general 
 duties and considerations in the moment and under the 
 pressure of the momentary sentiment. His power of self- 
 control may be limited in two ways. He may be subjected 
 to compulsion by means of threats, or perhaps of bribes. But 
 compulsion of this sort does not remove responsibility : it 
 forms no excuse for crime, though it may be admissible as 
 a ground for mitigating the punishment. The only compulsion 
 in question is that which destroys freedom and responsibility. 
 Such compulsion is physical constraint, which properly speaking 
 leaves the doer no longer an agent, but only an instrument in 
 the hands of brute force. But in ordinary practice, com- 
 pulsion is allowed to embrace motives which are exceeding 
 terrible and powerful such as, in the words of Aristotle, 
 no man could withstand, or which exceed the measure of 
 human nature. There is a gradation, not fixed on any 
 principles, but introduced on particular occasions, between 
 such constraints from external suasion as average self-mastery 
 is considered equal to resist, and those which tax to the 
 uttermost the most heroic virtue. Here, as in the question of 
 knowledge of act and circumstances, jurisprudence follows on 
 each occasion a vague tact, or popular sense of discrimination 
 a common cuadrjais rather than any definite rule or logical 
 principle. 
 
 But as there is a violence, an encroachment on the will 
 from without, which may culminate in actual violence, or 
 physical constraint by the force of others, so there is an 
 internal violence, which may culminate in a state of pure 
 passivity to the solicitations of any whim or fancy, without 
 power or wish to resist it. Such a state of insanity of 
 idiocy, when the judgement is absent and reason or knowledge
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 309 
 
 is impaired, or of mania or melancholy, when passion b linds 
 the will and prevents the employment of reason is recog- 
 nized as destroying responsibility no less than external 
 violence, or fraud or deception. The case is not so simple 
 with the lesser degrees, in which impulses cognate with 
 insanity are prevalent. Here it is obvious that, just as we do 
 not regard any threat as proof of practical compulsion because 
 it was successful, so we cannot hold every insane impulse to 
 be irresistible, merely because it is not resisted. And just as 
 with compulsion, persuasion, instigation, &c., we hold that 
 a man for practical purposes is not so free and responsible as 
 without them, but yet that he might resist them if he would; 
 so, in regard to the stimulation of appetites and instincts which 
 tend to carry towards unlawful action, we do not consider the 
 difficulty of overcoming them a reason for holding it not 
 possible to overcome them. 
 
 Rather the current view is loath to regard any one as not 
 in some measure a free agent. Practical law insists no doubt 
 that one must draw a line somewhere ; it cuts the Gordian 
 knot which it cannot untie. Law has to do with averages, 
 and makes rough assumptions, subject always to a certain 
 amount of modification and correction in applying them to any 
 case. But for all except those who are proved to belong to 
 another category, the law assumes their sanity and responsi- 
 bility. And in so doing it does them honour : it credits them 
 with the possession of the common attributes of social 
 humanity. It assumes, that is, that they are not ' dumb 
 driven cattle/ but can always it rests with them become 
 ' heroes in the strife.' It treats them as men free and 
 responsible, self -controlled, self -legislative, persons who are 
 their own masters, who have reduced their own impulses to 
 unity and subjection, and who have raised themselves to the 
 common or universal standard of their age and country. It 
 does not degrade them to the position of automata or 
 machines moved by forces of which they have no mastery,
 
 3 io ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in 
 
 which they are barely conscious, and even if conscious, are 
 powerless to alter. 
 
 But if the popular sentiment shrinks from degrading any 
 human being to the level of irresponsibility, it is otherwise 
 with the scientific inquirers of modern times. On the one 
 side, emphasis is laid on the preponderant influence exercised 
 by heredity. Each at his birth receives by descent from his 
 nearer or more remote parents a physiological endowment 
 with a corresponding temperament, proclivities, instincts, 
 which so far predetermine his conduct for him, and render his 
 responsibility for his actions a rapidly vanishing quantity. 
 On the other hand, it is alleged that the statistics of crime 
 prove, by their comparative uniformity through periods of 
 years, that criminality depends more upon the constitution 
 of the social environment in manners, morals, ideals, than 
 on that of the individual personality : who is thus freed 
 from a responsibility which is transferred to the shoulders 
 of the community. 
 
 According to a recent development of these theories, con- 
 nected with the names of Cesare Lombroso 1 and Enrico Ferri 
 in Italy, and of Prof. Benedict of Vienna, and which are 
 fanatically adopted by some Russian writers, the criminal is 
 a distinct and hitherto unrecognized species of human being, 
 marked off by definite peculiarities both from the sane and 
 from the insane. According to Benedict, human beings fall 
 into four groups, which comprise, besides the mentally sane 
 and insane, the two classes of the degenerate and those who 
 are congenitally deficient in psychical calibre (neur-asthenics). 
 There are thus found amongst us, partly from inherited 
 qualities and partly through the acquired effects of certain 
 modes of life, a large class of individuals who are beneath the 
 normal definition of human beings, whether that definition 
 be purely physiological, or moral, or aesthetic, or intellectual. 
 To beings so constituted the ordinary stimuli appeal with 
 1 L' Uomo delinquente.
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 311 
 
 little or no force. If their physiological force is under par, 
 they become skulkers from work, fond of vagabondage and 
 indolence. If their debility is moral and aesthetic, they are 
 unsusceptible to the voice of sympathy and beauty, of art and 
 nature, of duty and social ties. Intellectual feebleness is 
 shown in the inability to follow the links of a continued 
 argument beyond the first and simplest steps l . 
 
 According to these writers crime is due to four main causes 
 or conditions. These are social circumstances, pathological 
 states of the agent, degeneration, and atavism. The first of 
 these may be afterwards considered. The others may now be 
 examined. No one is prepared to deny the influence of 
 heredity. It is an undoubted fact that peculiarities of parents 
 are reproduced in their children : that not merely are their 
 general characters physical and moral often repeated, but that 
 even apparently incidental and temporary conditions of the 
 progenitor are exhibited in effects on the progeny. Every 
 one can quote examples of famous parents with famous 
 children : of personal peculiarities which mark families 
 through several generations, of the frequent occurrence of 
 physical resemblances. And, in the next place, there is 
 a general agreement upon the interdependence of physical and 
 psychical characters. No one seriously believes nowadays, 
 if they ever did, that in the phenomenal world, the only 
 world of which there is science, the spiritual is not inseparably 
 conjoined with the corporeal. It is further admitted that 
 nowhere do we find the normal man or woman the abstract 
 generic type without any specific modifications. If we define 
 man as the rational animal, we do not mean that he is never 
 unreasonable : and if we call him a social animal, we are 
 aware of a rooted instinct of independence and isolation 
 in him. 
 
 If heredity is a fact, so likewise is variation. If on the one 
 hand the progeny resemble the parents, on the other they tend 
 1 Cf. Rev. des Deux Mondes, April, 1887 ; Unsere Zeit, Feb. 1888.
 
 312 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [in 
 
 to vary from them. Natural and artificial selection, the action 
 of circumstances and the operations of human purpose, tend to 
 alter the hereditary nature into new forms. And these forms 
 in certain cases tend again to reproduce themselves, and again 
 to be subjected to the modifying agency of man and nature. 
 In some cases the acquired characters remain a permanent part 
 of the stock ; in others they last only for a few generations, 
 and then revert to the original stock ; in others they do not 
 descend by inheritance at all, but each individual has to 
 acquire them afresh. 
 
 These facts would seem enough to show that, though 
 heredity is a fact, it is premature to speak of a law or laws 
 of heredity. M. Ribot in his work on Uheredite psychologique 
 admits that it is indeed impossible to determine ' scientific 
 laws ' of heredity, but proceeds to lay down four ' empirical 
 laws/ as a convenient classification founded on experience. 
 These are as follows : ( i ) tendency of parents to bequeath 
 psychical characteristics; (2) preponderance tendency towards 
 inheritance from one parent ; (3) tendency to resort to remote 
 ancestral type, atavism ; (4) heredity exhibited at corre- 
 sponding periods of life. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say that such vague tendencies 
 can scarcely be called laws. There are laws in the same 
 inexact sense in which we speak of the ' laws of association of 
 ideas/ For a law in a proper sense, more is needed than 
 a mere discovery that one fact is sometimes, or generally, or 
 often, connected with another. We want to know the precise 
 conditions in the one which are influential upon the other 
 the numerical evaluation of the amounts, ratios, &c. 
 
 Heredity has been admitted as a fact. Strictly speaking it 
 might be urged that it is only a theory or interpretation of 
 a fact. This fact is the occurrence in progeny of qualities and 
 characteristics similar to or identical with those exhibited by 
 their parents or ancestors, near or more remote. To say that 
 these qualities are inherited is to use metaphorical language
 
 in] RESPONSIBILITY 313 
 
 borrowed from the sphere of Jaw. But in the case of in- 
 heritance strictly so called, what is inherited is an existing 
 right, which has a continuous existence and can be passed on 
 from one person to another. In the case of heredity strictly so 
 called, there is no such persisting right, property or thing. It 
 is easy to say that the characteristics inherited are, while non- 
 apparent, in a state of latency, dormancy, or abeyance. But 
 these terms are only covers of ignorance, and convey no real 
 or positive meaning. A latent or dormant object is existent, 
 but inactive, concealed and asleep. But to say that the 
 characters in question are in any true sense existent, is to talk 
 the language of figure. 
 
 It is much the same here as in the case of memory and 
 recollection. The ordinary language of heredity is parallel to 
 the crude conception of ideas or images stored up in the mind 
 or brain and recalled from their latency into active conscious- 
 ness. A little reflection shows that we can only in a meta- 
 phorical way talk of the furniture of the mind, and regard 
 the mind as possessed of store-rooms and presence chambers. 
 And if we adopt the language of some scientific specula- 
 tors, and speak of hereditary qualities as organic memory, 
 this transference is more interesting than really edifying. 
 We may, if we please, indulge in a supposition that the 
 elements of our original constitution are a limited number of 
 elements, which, like the coloured pieces of glass in a kaleido- 
 scope, present a succession of different forms as they revolve, 
 but occasionally in consequence of their small number recur at 
 intervals in the same form, or if they once assume a peculiarly 
 stable grouping, may for some time recur in almost identical 
 shape. At any rate, if the number of original elements in each 
 stock is limited, clearly the number of permutations is also 
 limited, and it may even be that one combination will, while 
 certain influences predominate, recur very frequently.
 
 IV 
 
 DUTY 
 
 THERE are two judgements which according to our 
 changing moods we are inclined to make about our species. 
 At one time we are especially struck by the diversities which 
 part man from man and race from race. At another we are 
 apt to feel the influence of that touch of nature which makes 
 the whole world kin. Perhaps the abstract philosopher is too 
 ready to assume the permanent identity of human nature 
 everywhere, and the mere historian and naturalist too likely 
 to take every variety as a unique specimen. If this be 
 generally the case, it is also specially applicable to man as 
 a moral being. 
 
 First of all, it is clear that, in every period of history and 
 every sphere of life, man has a life to lead under circumstances 
 and conditions which are the same to all. Rich and poor, 
 learned and unlearned, have alike to traverse the path from 
 birth to the grave, alike to learn the terms of life, alike to 
 struggle with enemies and with circumstances, alike to win 
 friends and love, alike to learn some measure of wisdom and 
 character. Up to certain limits nature allows no exceptions to 
 her law : omnes eoclem cogimur. It can hardly be said too 
 emphatically that in the deeper realities and the fundamental 
 problems of life, savage and civilized, king and peasant, have 
 nothing to envy each other. But on the other hand, if the 
 fundamental notes and harmonies of the tune are the same, 
 there is immense variation possible in the minor details,
 
 DUTY 315 
 
 details too so numerous that in their succession and multi- 
 plicity we often lose sight of the main movement, and 
 imagine we hear an unique performance. There are the 
 general differences of rich and poor, strong and weak, wise 
 and foolish, which entail corresponding intervals between 
 lives, as they show more rapid movement, more elaborate 
 detail, and more precise systematization, or the reverse. Even 
 length of years may seem to involve such additional wealth, 
 though in most cases it hardly affects the substantial value 
 of the life. Specific differences again of different posts and 
 offices in life, entail a variety in the qualities required to make 
 them exhibit in their special range a reflection of all that life 
 ought to be. 
 
 But there are other differences between human beings. 
 Hitherto they have been considered as single beings, in 
 essentials the same, though differing in natural endowments, 
 and in the accumulated powers which these natural endow- 
 ments have permitted them to acquire. But human beings 
 are not known to exist in this unqualified individuality. 
 Historically and really every human being is a member of 
 a group. That group may be a nation, a tribe, a family ; 
 it may also be an association with which the ties of kinship 
 have very little or nothing to do. But always anomalies 
 like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island do not make an 
 exception men and women are members of such a group. 
 And what is implied in being a member of such a group ? 
 Very much ; and that mainly because such membership is not 
 a mere matter of arbitrary choice, and is not a mere juxta- 
 position of individuals, each of which remains as independent 
 and self-centred as before. What brings people together into 
 such groups is not their will, but their need ; ' their poverty, 
 and not their will consents.' The cause which combines 
 people in a society is not a matter of their choice; it is 
 an idea which confronts them more or less consciously as 
 essential to their welfare, as expressing their need and
 
 316 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 demanding their service. People realize, not always equally 
 clearly, that there is a work waiting to be done, a work 
 which they have to do, and which can only be done by con- 
 joined effort. The world without them, the national world, 
 for example, of field and wood and river, is not cut up into 
 parts distinctly separated from one another : rather each 
 part is dovetailed into another, and all form a unity. There 
 is no absolute boundary line anywhere, if we inspect closely 
 and minutely : to a microscopic glance there are connecting- 
 links and transition lines to be detected everywhere : but 
 it is otherwise to a rough practical survey. For practical 
 purposes there are many demarcations apparent between parts 
 of nature some of them no doubt arbitrary and artificial, 
 others however decidedly more natural and scientific. As an 
 instance take national boundaries. An absolute dividing line 
 might be said perhaps to exist in an impassable range of 
 mountains, in an innavigable water, in a trackless desert, or 
 a malarious swamp. But there are no such mountains, waters, 
 deserts, or swamps. Yet for practical purposes there are 
 many changes of geological formation which interpose 
 sufficient barriers. And a thousand other circumstances, some 
 physical, others dependent on history and tradition, combine 
 to magnify the obstructions of these geographical circum- 
 stances, and to form national and political groups, in their 
 totality quite distinct from their neighbours. So it is in 
 other divisions. Each trading and industrial group tends at 
 its extreme to pass over into some other : every rank or order 
 in society fades away into others adjacent : every association 
 of believers in any creed tends to lose itself at its margin in 
 a class, who are hardly distinguishable from those who hold 
 the opposite creed. But for practical purposes the distinctions 
 hold good : the world is an aggregate of parties and societies, 
 in which individuals have their place and subsistence. In the 
 long run the whole inhabitants of the world form a unity of 
 will and purpose, just as the earth is one whole and its
 
 iv] DUTY 317 
 
 differences sink into unimportance when we note how they all 
 pass at their limiting verge into each other. 
 
 Such a vision of unity in the world in the world visible 
 and material, and in the world human and moral was 
 not, and could hardly be, clear in the early days of history. 
 More limited horizons, both material and spiritual, spanned 
 the survey of early humanity. Yet whatever was its range, 
 the collective world gave to the view of the single members 
 within it a power and a system which they could not otherwise 
 lay claim to. Built up into the compact unity, they shared in 
 the power, the interests, the joys, the sorrows of all the rest. 
 Their little souls with tiny range and scanty powers, it may 
 be were expanded and elevated by the partnership of others 
 in the group of higher genius and character : and these last 
 gained a fulcrum for their energies in the sense of solidarity, 
 the willing hearts and hands around them. So there grew up, 
 and always in some measure grows up, a common, a social, 
 a collective life ; a spirit only realized by the energies of 
 individuals, and yet living on above and beyond them, 
 taken singly. It is in the light of that common life that we 
 look at and judge our own special lives. In the background 
 of our consciousness, dominating it though never coming 
 much into view, stands a collective life, a common enter- 
 prise, a general achievement, in which our contribution 
 and effort takes its place and does its part. On such 
 a support and such an embracing unity we all singly fall 
 back, and in the light of it we form our plans, and carry 
 them out. 
 
 Such grouping also gives an ideal extension to our life. 
 Before we came into the world and after we leave it, that 
 world has no direct bearing upon us. But by means of those 
 who associate with us, and with whose lives our own is bound 
 up, we find ourselves living in idea both in the past and the 
 future. The members of the family e. g. thus get a con- 
 ception of life and work, which invests them with the burdens
 
 3i8 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 and the pleasures of a vast brotherhood a kindred which 
 ramifies out in many directions, both towards the generations 
 that have passed away and those which are to follow. And to 
 this ideal extension of the scope given to the individual 
 there are barely any limits assignable except the limits 
 which practically arise because, as successive circles of 
 influence carry us further from the self, the vision grows 
 fainter and at length sinks exhausted. Still far beyond the 
 range of actual touch, historical sympathy sets the individual 
 amid a kindred of great names. Even in the barbarian tribe 
 the individual has set in his soul, embalmed in sweet 
 memories of old achievement, the heroes of his race, whose 
 acts he almost feels to be re-enacted in himself again. In 
 their strength his strength is as the strength of ten, because 
 his heart is the great heart of his race. And even in our 
 associations of to-day, half the secret of our life is hidden in 
 the social groups, to which we belong and from which we 
 draw our influences. 
 
 It is because and in so far as we live thus not for ourselves 
 but in the common life, the general work, of some portion of 
 the world, that we are moral beings. To be moral is to be 
 raised out of our selfish isolation. Purely and wholly isolated 
 indeed we cannot be. We are parts of the world and have 
 a share in the common activity, whether we will or not. 
 But it makes a great deal of difference how we enter upon 
 our inheritance and take our part in the community of toil 
 and pleasure. And it makes a great deal of difference what 
 community our lot and circumstances have cast us into. In 
 the ideal, as we have seen, each community, each group, dove- 
 tails into another, and by degrees a federation of communities 
 would bind the inhabitants of the world into one great con- 
 sentient realm of humanity. The real aspect is very different 
 from this : there is no such hierarchy or gradation, or harmony 
 of the different associations. They grow up at haphazard, 
 here and there, without plan, and without adaptation to each
 
 iv] DUTY 319 
 
 other : they necessarily fight against each other, as each sticks 
 persistently to its own aim, and ignores or thwarts the others. 
 
 Yet in each community there is some good ; each of them 
 is relatively and comparatively a moral influence. Even the 
 band of robbers and thieves nourishes within it some virtues. 
 Seen from the outside indeed, all seems dark and terrible. 
 But we must never judge by the outside alone. It would be 
 difficult to find any community in which all the influences 
 were hopelessly and utterly bad. And as Bret Harte is fond 
 of illustrating in his stories, not merely is there honour among 
 thieves, but there is love and self-sacrifice amongst the 
 degraded. As we penetrate into the heart of a society, we 
 find it different from its mere superficial character. 
 
 We have then no actual community which is all-embracing 
 either in place and time. Even our oldest societies, even our 
 national existence, or our ecclesiastical institutions, carry us 
 after all but a little way back into the history of the past. 
 We trace our national history back for a thousand years, but 
 long before we reach even the Conquest it has lost all close 
 connexion and touch with us. And so it is in the divergence 
 of associations throughout the world. Nowhere is there more 
 than a side of humanity represented. Nationality rises up 
 against nationality. And it hardly seems possible to hope 
 that it will ever be otherwise : nor if it were possible, does it 
 seem desirable. At times it seems as if national differences 
 were fading away : but probably the change, when it occurs, 
 is only a passing phase, a transient step on the way to 
 the formation of new groups. So long as the natural 
 diversities of soil, climate, and production exist, so long- 
 probably there will be partitions of grouping amongst the 
 inhabitants ; and so long as human nature varies in indi- 
 viduals, so long they will league themselves together in a 
 variety of disparate groups. But in and through each aspect 
 and branch of life there shines the faint light of an idea greater 
 than itself : each nation in its own conception has ennobled,
 
 3 20 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 perfected, and rounded off the circle of its life : and through 
 its limited actuality it has given expression to an idea much 
 grander (because really infinite and eternal in its aspiration) 
 than its framework would let us suppose. 
 
 We turn to some of the great historical societies of the 
 world to illustrate how their moral idea is rooted in their 
 principle of community and takes a special form according to cir- 
 cumstances. Let us begin with the people of Israel. There are 
 two things about that people which at once strike the stranger : 
 its Law and its God. In history there have been codes and 
 laws, ancient and modern : nowhere perhaps has a nation been 
 so wedded to its law, and that law so grand, as among the 
 Hebrews. The very life of the later Judaism is based upon 
 its law : a law not in the modern sense only, but a complete 
 guide of life, moral as well as political. And that law the 
 law of God the God of the nation. Then, as never else- 
 where, a community felt itself the especial favourite, and 
 therefore the more than ordinarily obliged subject of the 
 Lord of universal life. And that Lord was finally regarded 
 as commanding ' to do justly and to love mercy ' ; ' to let 
 judgement roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty 
 stream ' ; 'to set right the oppressor, judge the fatherless, 
 plead for the widow/ The good Jew therefore had his 
 undoubted temptations to national pride, because he was of the 
 chosen people, and to attachment of excessive importance to 
 the letter of the law ; and by these temptations he fell. But 
 in his idea he was greater than in his performance. He and 
 his nation was the 'servant of Jehovah/ the servant i.e. of 
 him whose revelation lay in the law of mercy, righteousness, 
 and truth. That is the truth which Judaism reached at its 
 point of highest development, and which it has handed down 
 for all like-minded in after ages. We have sneaking proverbs 
 amongst us, to the effect that Honesty is the best policy, and 
 that God helps those who help themselves. How much 
 grander the confidence of the Jew when he says, ( Thou hast
 
 iv] DUTY 321 
 
 loved righteousness and hated wickedness : therefore God, thy 
 God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy 
 fellows/ For all humanity the Jew has expressed the faith 
 that the path of the just, the wise, the merciful, is the path 
 that shineth more and more unto the perfect day : that it is 
 the path traced by the stars in their courses, the law of the 
 world. Some say the moral law is only a human concern, 
 perhaps even a human and temporary convention. The Jews 
 had seen it in another light. There were days in their history 
 when they had thought their God concerned mainly with 
 incense and with offerings. They learned otherwise, as one of 
 their later teachers says : Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the 
 God of Israel, I spake not unto your fathers concerning burnt 
 offerings and sacrifices : but this thing I commandeth them, 
 saying, Hearken unto my voice, and I will be your God. . . . 
 Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the Lord, 
 the temple of the Lord are these : but if ye throughly amend 
 your ways and your doings; if ye throughly execute judge- 
 ment between a man and his neighbour, if ye oppress not the 
 stranger, the fatherless and the widow, . . . then will I cause 
 you to dwell in this place 1 . 
 
 Let us next turn to the Greeks. Here the circumstances 
 are altogether different. In Palestine, an isolated people, 
 hardly holding its own between the great powers of the 
 Euphrates and the Nile, a little enclave in the desert of Syria, 
 clings firmly to its national unity and its national God, and 
 sees itself a royal nation, with a sacred law : and when it 
 sinks from its height, still clings to its legal obedience, still 
 maintains its isolated place. In Greece, a people open to 
 influences from all hands, and spreading in all directions into 
 the adjacent lands : a catholic and versatile race, but a race 
 which had broken up into scattered communities, and which 
 had advanced beyond the patriarchal into the industrial and 
 civic age. Here the characteristic form of society is based on 
 1 Jer. vii. 4-6, 22. 
 Y
 
 322 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 the existence of an aristocratic order, a class of organizers and 
 rulers, removed from the necessity of daily toil in all its 
 severity, and yet not far enough removed to be made idle 
 and luxurious. They are just so far above want as to be 
 released from its terrors, and their minds are still free and 
 vigorous, open to all the curiosity of the child, eager to under- 
 stand and ready to enjoy. In the age of Greek history which 
 gave rise to this ideal the Athenian could boast : 0tAoKo- 
 Aof'juev p.T > tyre \eias. To us at the present day art is a costly 
 thing. We pay our best painters paltry sums : and when 
 they are gone, we lavish thousands on the picture-dealers, 
 professional and amateur, who have speculated on their works. 
 The great artist of Greek antiquity found his customer in the 
 community : but it was a customer who worked with him, 
 and with whom he was in sympathy. 
 
 What governed the member of such an aristocratic class in 
 his conduct ? The idea of his class, no doubt, its opinions, 
 and judgements. But who were that aristocracy ? Not, as 
 in modern times, a select few, far beyond the common level, 
 nor a crowd of rich, possessed of something far exceeding 
 the common means. They were a great body of citizens, of 
 various grades, but not separated by the great gulfs of modern 
 society, members of some town, small as judged by modern 
 standards. Theirs was a select opinion, unquestionably, but 
 not so select as to be strikingly narrow. It was freed from 
 a depressing utilitarianism, one which is careful about imme- 
 diate and vulgar utilities : and could give itself up to those 
 higher and wider utilities, which are not of the moment, but 
 for ever. Hence the standard was the beautiful. The 
 ' beautiful ' means to the Greek a great deal more than it 
 does to us : more of an ideal and less of a mere sensuous 
 quality. Of all the powers which can act upon a people to 
 inspire morality perhaps the yoke of this is the lightest. And 
 yet even here the standard is not purely subjective. The idea 
 of beauty grows up in the consciousness of the community
 
 iv] DUTY 323 
 
 and under the stimulus of an environment. But it is as it 
 were in a region above the law, not something 1 required, but 
 something freely given for the sake of the thing's own grace. 
 And so, in the days of Athenian greatness, the spirit which 
 animated men to do great deeds was not sense of gratitude to 
 the state, so much as a desire to keep up the consciousness of 
 high and noble achievement. The word was virtue rather 
 than duty. People did not realize that to do all they could 
 do was after all only what was required : they aimed at dis- 
 tinguishing themselves by adding some new glory to their 
 common mother, by raising higher the name of the common- 
 wealth. They fancied themselves glorified in and through 
 their country, which did not stand as a sovereign over them, 
 but as the expression of their best activity and to be carried 
 further by fresh energy. Their loyalty is evvoia : not devotion, 
 but good will : and their ideal of a community is one where 
 all are free and equal, and where to rule and to be ruled are 
 always alternating. 
 
 Turn to another epoch of the world, the Middle Ages, 
 when out of a general disturbance of relations order is slowly 
 establishing itself in the world. Countries that had gained 
 some measure of industrial and intellectual civilization, but 
 had failed to organize themselves otherwise than for purposes 
 of taxation, are overrun, and, as the phrase is, conquered by 
 tribes of semi-barbai'ians headed by some chief. The chief, 
 who merely owes his authority to his warlike supremacy and 
 his control over those who have banded under him so as to 
 win power and substance, is gradually turned into a monarch, 
 and his chieftains or captains into so many rulers of provinces. 
 It takes a long time before the mere warrior learns that he 
 has other duties than those of plundering strangers and 
 enriching himself. What violence has gained can only be 
 maintained by further violence. Hence the old feudal barons 
 and their men in the tenth and eleventh century are brutal 
 and barbarous : they live in a world full of strife, treachery, 
 
 y 2
 
 324 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 cruelty, and they flourish by their fitness in these arts. But 
 it was only an uncomfortable sort of survival after all : the 
 conqueror was miserable in his conquest. And alongside of 
 him there was an order protesting against murder, against 
 bloodshed at first even against soldiering in every shape. 
 But the church, gradually departing from this strictness, 
 which Augustine had maintained, had come to express a 
 toleration of war, if war was just. Partly through Chris- 
 tian teaching, partly through the common protest for mercy 
 and gentleness, which cannot long be altogether absent 
 where human hearts beat, a change had come over the view 
 of the soldier's work. Chivalry appeared as the fair flower 
 and spirit of feudalism. The latter had been hereditary : 
 knighthood could only be acquired by steps of probation and 
 showing one's self worthy of the post. How it first grew up 
 one cannot tell. ' Elle naquit d'elle-meme/ says one author. 
 Or like the Romance order of architecture, ' elle est nee 
 partout a la fois, et a ete en meme temps 1'effet naturel des 
 memes aspirations et des memes besoins.' It was founded on 
 the German usage of pledged allegiance to a leader, but it sub- 
 stituted allegiance to a moral ideal. And it appears as a full- 
 grown institution in the Chanson de Roland (1066-1095 ?), 
 i.e. it is always more of an ideal than an institution properly 
 so called. It was the sacrament, baptism, consecration of the 
 warrior. He was still a soldier, but his ' sauvagerie ' had 
 become ' prouesse ' (' nul chevalier sans prouesse '), and he 
 had added c courtoisie/ The knight of the crusading epoch 
 was no doubt bound, first of all, to fulfil the divine law 
 (' essamplir la loi Dieu ') : he was presumed to be loyal to 
 the Christian faith and to the Church: and in his special duty 
 of courage, he was expected to let the unbelieving Saracen 
 feel the weight of his arm. 
 
 One of the greatest defects noticeable in certain philo- 
 sophers' books on Morals is that they confound the duties 
 (devoirs) with the virtues, or that they give names of virtues
 
 iv] DUTY 325 
 
 to simple duties : so that though, properly speaking-, there is 
 only one virtue, the love of order, they produce an infinity of 
 them. This puts confusion everywhere, and so embarrasses 
 the science of ethics that it is hard enough to see clearly 
 what one ought to do to be a good man (Jiomme de lien). 
 
 It is evident that virtue ought to render its possessor 
 virtuous : and yet a man may discharge his duties, may do 
 with ease acts of humility, of generosity, of liberality, without 
 having any of the virtues. The disposition to discharge this 
 or that duty is not properly speaking virtue without the love 
 of order. When a person discharges his duties, he is virtuous 
 in men's eyes. But a man is not always such as he appears : 
 and he who never fails in the outward duties of friendship, 
 except when the order, which alone is our inviolable law, 
 prevents him, though he may sometimes appear a faithless 
 friend, is truer and more faithful, or at least more virtuous 
 and more amiable, than those excited friends who sacrifice to 
 their friend's passions their relatives, their life, and their 
 everlasting salvation. 
 
 Virtue then ought not to be confounded with duties, on 
 account of the conformity of names. That deceives men. 
 Some of them imagine they follow virtue, though they only 
 follow the natural inclination (penchant) they have to perform 
 certain duties : and as it is by no means reason which guides 
 them, they are actually vicious to excess, when they suppose 
 themselves heroes in virtue. 
 
 Malebranche, when he thus writes in his Trait e de Morale 
 (1684), is instructive both by his approach to Kant in doctrine 
 and his divergence in terminology. Though he is barely consis- 
 tent in his use of terms, and sometimes himself interchanges 
 the duties and the virtues, his main contention is that duty 
 is the mere act what falls in the eyes of men the visible 
 conformity to requirement, which may be done for any 
 motive, and is mostly done in response to our inclinations, 
 our humours, our imagination. It is only when these
 
 326 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 outward acts are done through the promptings of the 'love of 
 order/ of that 'immutable order/ the 'inviolable law of all 
 intelligences and of God himself/ a willing subjection to the 
 universal system of reasonable truth. (For to be animated 
 by the love of order is to be guided by reason.) But as it 
 needs a e very grievous sort of labour ' to be guided by reason, 
 men renounce its direction, and abandon themselves to the 
 easier direction of imagination, to vague and confused ideas, 
 rather than make the effort to get clear and distinct ones. 
 
 Examples of duty and of dutiful conduct may be found in 
 every sphere of life. But for some purposes one may see 
 what duty involves, what the sense of duty can prompt and 
 how it may mislead, if one takes a case conspicuously set 
 forth before all men. A convenient hypothesis reigns among 
 many of us who are not kings that they are given or have 
 been given to take duty lightly : that their life is one of 
 pleasure and pleasure only. A common ignorance and a 
 commoner envy lead us to look at the high and mighty ones 
 of the earth with unfair eyes. We try them by a sterner 
 standard than common men. Our feeble imagination enters 
 but slightly into their difficulties and dangers. We expect 
 them to be made of harder stuff than ordinary, and we allow 
 nothing for extraordinary temptations. In modern times 
 when so many direct rivals of kings exist in the shape of the 
 vast army of the uncrowned kings of journalism, monarchy 
 fares but badly in the balance of public opinion. This self- 
 complacency by which we thank our stars that we are not 
 even as these princes is a little Pharisaical. Let us see how 
 once on a time a king found his inspiring principle in the sense 
 of duty. 
 
 If we were to call Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, 
 a hero, some people might object against his right to the 
 name. To hear them, the term is only applicable to an 
 ideal, a blameless king. Not so was the word used : not so 
 ought it to be used. A hero is far from being a perfect man.
 
 iv] DUTY 327 
 
 He is a man who in some one or more aspects of conduct 
 rises above the average level, and resists fears or temptations 
 which ordinarily are victorious. A single gallant act may 
 justify the name, even though other weakness come to cast 
 a shade over the glory. So we may speak of Frederick as 
 a hero, and not the least of them, if also not rising to the 
 utmost heights of heroism. He had fallen, we may say, on 
 an unpicturesque age, a humdrum and commonplace time. 
 Yet for that reason he may the better serve as a model for 
 common imitation. He represents upon the throne the general 
 tendency of the eighteenth century : the mixture of science 
 with utility, the reduction of science to human enlightenment 
 for bettering and beautifying life. It is the spirit of Lord 
 Bacon's philosophy : that knowledge and art should justify 
 themselves by ameliorating the estate of man. With Frederick 
 that philosophy ascended the throne. 
 
 In 1739, the year before he became king, he had finished 
 his Anti-Macchiavel (which appeared in 1740 anonymously). 
 It professes to be a criticism of the Prince of Macchiavelli. 
 The great Italian who wrote it spoke the language of an age 
 when treachery was universal and tyranny and falsehood 
 had corrupted all. But he spoke it with the view that, in the 
 aim of reuniting Italy into one state, and casting forth the 
 strangers who preyed upon it, no terms should be used and no 
 quarter should be given. It was the desperate device of 
 a patriot who, when his country's interest seems to demand 
 it, calls out that no compact, no right, no duty, shall stand 
 in the way of realizing his aspirations for independence. The 
 cry is a mistaken one, but one can at least sympathize with 
 the end, and pity those whose desperation seems to justify 
 to them such means. But Macchiavellism came to mean 
 something else. It came to mean that a government, in order 
 to preserve itself against internal and external enemies, need 
 be held back by no claims of right or principles of duty. In 
 the holy duty of asserting legitimate authority of sovereigns
 
 328 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 the subjects were to be treated by the reason of state, i. e. 
 cajoled, deceived, and if need be imprisoned. Macchiavellism 
 was another name for political Jesuitry. 
 
 Frederick had grown up under two influences, which com- 
 bined to mould him into a man unlike the average sovereign 
 of his time. On the one hand he had been a scholar of the 
 philosophy and literature of his age : he had learned to admire 
 Wolff, and was devoted to Voltaire. From the former he 
 learned the principles of liberal and reasonable morals and 
 politics : from the latter a wide humanitarian culture. 
 Wolff taught him to reason the principles of conduct : 
 Voltaire taught him to rise superior to the narrownesses of 
 superstitious religion. He gathered, in short, the ideas of the 
 reforming and liberal thinkers of his time, both in their 
 constructive moderation and in their critical flippancy. And 
 for a while it seemed as if he were going to lose himself in 
 the life of a dilettante and amateur in literature. But he 
 had grown up under another rule which, though he spurned 
 it at the time, left profound traces. His father was 
 intellectually of little breadth of view, liable to fall into 
 pedantry and bigotry ; but under these excesses there were 
 concealed the sterling qualities of punctuality, dutifulness, 
 willing service to the country he ruled. And one is glad to 
 know that Frederick Wilhelm before he died was known by 
 his son to be a true-hearted father to his people, doing his 
 duty to the full measure of his knowledge, even if that know- 
 ledge itself was small. 
 
 Frederick, so influenced, was not likely to accept the 
 ordinary Macchiavellism. He was indeed no believer in the 
 virtue of either kings or common men. ' Le gros de notre 
 espece est sot et mechant. Tout homme a une bete feroce en 
 soi/ The human species when it is left to itself is brutal, 
 ferocious, and barbarous. And what men in general are, 
 sovereign princes exhibit in a more conspicuous way. Between 
 man and man, in short, there are no hereditary distinctions.
 
 iv] DUTY 329 
 
 f Everything-/ he says, ' would be lost in a state, if birth were 
 to carry the day over merit.' ' Le prince doit etre sans cesse 
 attentif a ne distinguer que le merite personnel, et a ne 
 temoigner que du mepris pour 1'opulence sans mreurs et sans 
 vertus/ ' Birth is only a chimera, if it is not sustained by 
 merit/ ( Les hommes, ce me semble, sont tous d'une race 
 egalement ancienne.' He protests therefore against the view 
 common amongst his contemporaries, that a ' king's subjects 
 are only meant to be the ministers and instruments of his 
 ill-regulated passions/ 
 
 A prince, on the contrary, should realize that ' ce rang dont 
 ils sont si jaloux (leur elevation) n'est que 1'ouvrage des 
 peuples/ Hence the sovereign is strictly the representative 
 of the state : he and his peoples form only a single body. 
 Far from being 1 the absolute master of the peoples under his 
 dominion, he is only ' le premier domestique/ A sovereign 
 prince f est le premier serviteur et le premier magistrat de 
 Fetat ' ' obliged to act with probity, with wisdom, and with 
 entire disinterestedness, as if at each moment he ought to 
 give account of his administration/ Thus the true glory 
 of the rulers consists ' a remplir les devoirs de leurs charges, et 
 a repondre en tout a ^intention de ceux qui les ont revetu 
 de leur pouvoir, et de qui ils tiennent la grandeur supreme V 
 
 The general maxim of government is this : ' La base de ces 
 systemes (de lois, politique, &c.) doit toujours etre relative au 
 plus grand bien de la societe/ The sovereign thus becomes 
 a far-seeing and kindly householder. He must direct his 
 conduct by a prudent estimate of the common need. ' Tout 
 souverain attache au bien public est oblige de se pourvoir de 
 mag-asms abondamment pourvus, pour suppleer a la mauvaise 
 recolte et pour prevenir la famine/ He will have specially to 
 realize to himself the needs and difficulties of the poor. ' Le 
 souverain doit se souvenir de Petat du pauvre peuple,' ' se 
 mettre a la place d'un paysan et d'un manufacturer, et se 
 1 Consider, s. le corps polit. de I' Europe.
 
 330 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 dire alors, si j'etais ne dans la classe dont les bras font le 
 capital, que desirerais-je du souverain ? ' 
 
 In his own view he was ' born for the arts/ and it was, as 
 he once puts it, chance which decreed that a philosopher 
 should sway the sceptre. From the battlefield he yearns for 
 the time when he can reason with his friends ' sur le vide 
 et sur la nullite de toutes les choses de cette vie/ But in the 
 true spirit of the Stoic, he corrects himself : ' II faut prendre 
 Pesprit de son etat/ For, as the Stoics had long ago recog- 
 nized, it was not every day, if it was anywhere short of the 
 ideal world, that the sage could perform a naTopQupa, 
 a thoroughly right and successful action, a deed of perfect 
 virtue. More essential was it that he should know how to 
 deal with ra KaOi]Kovra } i. e. with the requirements of his post 
 and situation, as they severally came upon him in life and 
 demanded his energy. And Frederick feels that he is born 
 a prince, and is only anxious to realize all the requirements 
 of the post. Thus though he confesses to the Electress of 
 Saxony that, if the choice had been his, he would have pre- 
 ferred the quietude of private rank, the remark is only one of 
 those imaginations of the great may-be. His real conviction 
 is that ' Fhomme n'est pas fait pour etre oisif : il faut qu'il 
 s'occupe a quelque chose, et qu'il ait toujours pour but le bien 
 de la societeV A good citizen is a man who makes it his 
 inviolable law to be as useful as is in his power to the society 
 of which he is a member : and as a type of the citizen who 
 does his duty in the narrow circumstances of an artisan, the 
 king depicts his shoemaker Reinhart. 
 
 On what principles does the king found this morality ? Not 
 on what is ordinarily called religion. ' I/ amour de nous- 
 memes, Fhumanite, la nature enfin, nous retient et nous 
 retiendra plus que la religion/ Of religion his view is that 
 it consists of two parts, a superstitious and fabulous element, 
 and, on the other hand, a moral creed necessary for the 
 maintenance of society. Of the former he is contemptuous,
 
 iv] DUTY 331 
 
 he sees in it little better than falsehood and deceit ; but he 
 is hardly prepared to admit that all orders of society can 
 dispense with the necessity of such an admixture. It is 
 otherwise with himself and the selecter souls who have got 
 enlightenment. For, according to Frederick, the interests of 
 morality can be benefited only by the spread of sound 
 knowledge. ' Le meme esprit qui donne le gout des sciences 
 porte ceux qui Font a remplir exactement le devoir/ 
 
 The first principle of all action, he says after the Stoics, is 
 self-interest. But it is the special province of education to 
 give a true and enlightened view of self-interest. Always ' la 
 plus grande et essentielle partie de Feducation est celle des 
 mceurs/ But whereas to the great mass this teaching is by 
 precept or catechism, by example, and above all by the inter- 
 mingling sanctions of religion, in the enlightened mind the 
 teaching must be a fuller revelation of the intimate ties 
 which bind things together. How individual and general 
 interest combine Frederick does not clearly explain. They 
 act reciprocally : ' La societe doit faire notre bien, et nous 
 devons travailler reciproquement a son avantage/ In his 
 letters against the political indifference of the Epicurean he 
 lays it down that to the country which has done for him 
 everything he owes a thorough and absolute gratitude. Sains 
 publica is his suprema lex. Whatever his country needs he will 
 cheerfully yield : if its interest bid him renounce a treaty with 
 another nation, then that renunciation will be made. His 
 principle of duty he professes is much the same as that of the 
 gospels. ' Ne faites aux autres/ he says in 1776 in a letter to 
 the Electress of Saxony, ' que ce que vous voulez qu'ils vous 
 f assent : ce principe renferme toute la vertu et les devoirs de 
 rhomme envers la societe ou il est place/ It is in short the 
 principle of reciprocity, and, as it stands, it is in need of 
 some support from the idea of the. unity through which the 
 reciprocity is made possible. 
 
 For him then self-interest is identified with labour for the
 
 332 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 benefit of the community. ( I have a people that I love/ he 
 says. ' I must bear the burden which lies upon me. I must 
 remain at my post/ We see that Frederick envisages 
 his ideal under the form of attachment to the State, as 
 the highest earthly realization of his conception. He has 
 a religion ; it is a pure theism : not very dogmatic or firm, 
 any more than are his views on the immortality of the soul, 
 or on the freedom of the will. On all of these points, which 
 in earlier years he had been so ready to discuss, his attitude is 
 rather that of an aspirant hope and craving for the ideal's 
 realization than that of a firm belief. He falls back therefore 
 on reasoning to justify his faith in virtue : but after all that 
 faith itself is its own best justification. The utility of virtue 
 is such a noble utility as does not admit of a single and ocular 
 demonstration : and only appeals to those who, as it is said, 
 'aiment la vertu pour Famour d'elle-meme/ Hence in his 
 epistle to Keith (1751) he represents himself and his friend 
 as one of those who cherish a disinterested love of virtue : 
 
 ' Le bien du genre humain, la vertu, nous anime ; 
 L'amour du devoir seul nous a fait fuir le crime : 
 Oui, finissons san.s trouble et mourons sans regrets, 
 En laissant 1'univers comble de nos bienfaits.' 
 
 This sense of duty is his constant consolation. It is the gift, 
 he says, of philosophy which, as he put it (1760), was the 
 staff on which he stayed himself, his support in adversities. 
 In calmer times he aimed at combining the inclination to 
 be happy with the claims of duty. He would be at once 
 Stoic and Epicurean. ' Pour moi,' he writes to his sister 
 (Oct. 7, 1747), 'je suis heureusement desabuse de cette passion 
 (ambition) ; j'ai cuve le filtre qu'elle m'avoit donne, et je ne 
 songe qu'a ecouler d'une fa^on tranquille les jours que le ciel 
 me depart, de profiter du plaisir sans en abuser, de faire tout 
 le bien que je puis, et d j abandonner Ferreur, 1'astuce, et la 
 vanite a ceux qui en veulent etre les dupes/ But in the 
 darker days of the Seven Years' War he falls back on the faith
 
 iv] DUTY 333 
 
 in duty. Thus he writes to Voltaire (July, 1759), ' J'aime 
 a etre heureux autant qne qui que ce soit. . . . Quoique je 
 desire tous ces biens, je ne veux cependant pas les acheter par 
 les bassesses et les infamies. La philosophic nous apprend 
 a faire notre devoir, & servir fidelement notre patrie, a lui 
 sacrifier tout notre etre/ As he had said on his accession, 
 ' Pai cru que depuis la perte de mon pere je me devais entiere- 
 inent a la patrie/ so he writes to d'Argens (1760), 'vous 
 devriez savoir qu'il n'est pas necessaire que je vive, mais bien 
 que je fasse mon devoir/ And again (1768), ' il faut que mon 
 corps et mon esprit se plient a leur devoir. Faire le bien 
 c'est un devoir que tout homme doit remplir selon ses moyens/ 
 So (in ] 759), ' je vais mon chemin : je ne fais rien centre la 
 voix interieure de ma conscience/ It is not necessary that 
 I live : but quite necessary that I do my duty. 
 
 Thus in January, 1757, he left instructions that, if he was 
 captured by the enemy, not the least account was to be taken 
 of his person, or any attention be paid to what he might 
 write under imprisonment. So in the Reasons de ma Conduits 
 Militaire, ' I have held it my duty to render account to the 
 state and posterity of my position and the grounds which 
 determined me. . . . When the question is about love to 
 country, I challenge the whole world for rival, and to these 
 sentiments I will stand fast to the last breath of my life/ 
 Our life, said his testament (written 1769)^8 a long passage 
 from birth to death : during this span of life it is man's chief 
 end to work for the weal of the community he belongs to. 
 
 The cardinal or ' essential trait of the moral consciousness is 
 the control of some feeling or feelings by some other feeling 
 or feelings/ says Mr. Spencer 1 , such subordination being of 
 course conscious, i.e. being what is called self-restraint. But 
 if it be a conscious relinquishment of personal for general good, 
 such moral self-control presents features which may be pro- 
 duced by several external motives, by fear, (a) of a visible ruler; 
 1 Data of Ethics, 113.
 
 334 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 (^) of the general opinion of society ; (cj of an invisible or 
 supernatural ruler. All of these sanctions of duty, the 
 political, 'social, and religious, as they are usually called, 
 bring about results which are apparently identical with 
 those of the properly moral self-control, of the self-control 
 fully and strictly so called. According to Spencer, they are 
 at first co-extensive with and indistinguishable from moral 
 self-control : i. e. it is impossible for us to penetrate into the 
 inside of an action, and say definitely what principle prompted 
 it. Further, he adds, the socio-political and religious or 
 sacerdotal controls are preparatory to the moral, which evolves 
 under their shadow or protection, and only finally emerges, 
 after a course of social evolution, as an independent principle. 
 These non-moral controls of action, again, are essentially 
 coercive, i.e. they have joined with them the thought of 
 external coercion, and are based upon or refer to certain 
 extrinsic, incidental, or factitious consequences, generally evil 
 consequences. The dictates of moral self-restraint, on the con- 
 trary, have a ' perceived rectitude/ or an ' essential propriety ' ; 
 they refer to the intrinsic effects of the acts in question. 
 
 Thus in the conception of duty or obligation the sense of 
 restraint or control has a double source. The one is a certain 
 coerciveness or compulsory quality, due to the extrinsic effects 
 of the socio-political and the sacerdoto-religious sanctions. 
 This element is obviously, thinks Mr. Spencer, of only 
 temporary value a feeling due to transitory circumstances, 
 which will fade away, when these other restraints have done 
 their schoolmaster work, when the Law has prepared the 
 ground for the Gospel. The other element in self-control is 
 the superior authoritativeness of the representative or more 
 complex feelings, of the ' ideal ' feelings, as compared with 
 the simple sensations and appetites. Those feelings which 
 are representative or ideal, which are concerned with indirect 
 rather than immediate effects, and with effects general rather 
 than with effects special, have on the whole, by their own
 
 iv] DUTY 335 
 
 character, and still more by the influence of tradition, educa- 
 tion and experience, a preponderant authority over mere present 
 impulses or sensations referring to immediate gratification. 
 But here too, as moral ization increases, the sense of authority 
 diminishes : whereas originally we feel in our immediate pro- 
 pensions constrained, as UTTJJKOOI or subjects of the ruling 
 (apyjov] reason or general feeling; as we grow more morally 
 self-restrained, the sense of restraint disappears in a a-v^ayvia 
 or opovoia between the two orders of feeling, so that they fall 
 naturally and normally into one harmonious tone or utterance. 
 In that ideal state of consummated morality, the essential 
 trait of the moral consciousness will itself disappear : there 
 will be no conscious control or subordination of feeling to 
 feeling or, in commoner language, of passion to reason but 
 the very possibility of discord will have been removed. Thus, 
 as we may conclude, the end or consummation of morality is 
 to be absorbed, to render itself unnecessary: at its moment 
 of perfection the antithesis in which it lived will disappear 
 and be merged in a complete unity. 
 
 The first point which calls for examination in this sketch 
 of moral progress is the commencement. The moral idea 
 appears (according to Spencer's account) at first in a sort of dis- 
 guise, so mixed up with the company of the socio-political and 
 religioso-sacerdotal controls, that it is indistinguishable from ; 
 and co-extensive with, them. Gradually it emerges from this 
 subjection into the place of an independent principle, only 
 however in the close to disappear and fade away in the efful- 
 gence of the blessed life of the ideal or absolute social state : 
 a state f so constituted that man's spontaneous activities are 
 congruous with the conditions imposed by the social environ- 
 ment'' (p. 275), and that the remote pleasures have been made 
 in all their force immediate. Now that moral self-control has 
 in all ages been mixed up with external controls, is a fact 
 so palpable that perhaps none will dispute it. But when 
 we ask the relation between these various controls, and the
 
 336 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 explanation of their authority, some divergence of opinion 
 may appear probable. Or, in more general language still, we 
 may ask, what is authority and how does it stand related to 
 coercion ? The answer to these questions is that authority in 
 its proper and original sense does not imply compulsion and 
 constraint, but rather a priority of origination and superiority 
 of idea. Authority originally belongs to those whose voice 
 was foremost, whose thought was rapidest, whose energy 
 was most effective. The socio-political sanction is in its 
 origin the influence of the pioneer, the leader, the earlier and 
 abler. So only without factitious aids could it have esta- 
 blished itself. In other words, it rested originally on identity, 
 on solidarity of view and interest between the ruler and the 
 ruled. 'Apx?7 is essentially authority of the pioneer or com- 
 mencer. But no less unquestionably and inevitably this 
 rightful sovereignty, this natural and normal dptoTOK/xma, 
 takes on less pleasing characters: and it does so by the opera- 
 tion of the family principle. The leader hands down to his 
 sons the superiority which he owed to nature and reason, as 
 a gift passing by inheritance. Then the mischief begins, when 
 the natural basis of authority is gradually replaced by mere 
 imposition and force of inertia. When authority rests upon 
 tradition upon what was, but is not, or even when a judge- 
 ment is accepted a second time merely because its author had 
 found acceptance before then it rapidly passes into the false 
 position of an extrinsic director, an arbitrary and coercive 
 influence. That all authority degenerates into such a com- 
 pulsory force, may with a cei'tain propriety be admitted : but 
 no less it should be maintained that before it could become 
 degenerate, and as a necessary backbone even to support its 
 occasional and frequent acts of degenerate character, it must 
 possess a general acceptability of leadership, a strength 
 derived from its being the interpreter and spokesman of 
 a public sentiment. Before the king could impose a violent 
 restraint in arbitrary ways, he must have acquired the intelli-
 
 iv] DUTY 
 
 337 
 
 gent confidence of the majority; and before the priestly 
 power could wield the superstitious instincts of a people in 
 crafty ways, it must have gained what authority it has by 
 the work of the natural instincts of the people themselves. 
 
 When Othello is charged by Brabantio with stealing his 
 daughter's affections by drugs, and charms, and conjurations 
 for how else could 
 
 ' A maiden never bold, 
 
 Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion 
 Blushed at herself 
 
 how could such a maid ' fall in love with what she feared to 
 look on'? the accused succeeded in convincing his judges 
 that the only witchcraft he had used had owed all its efficacy 
 to the fact that that seeming-quiet maiden had subdued her 
 heart and consecrated her soul and fortunes to her lord the 
 Moor. So it is with the control of the visible ruler, the 
 invisible ruler, and the general social pressure : they are not 
 originally superimposed upon an unwilling people, but are the 
 objectification of tendencies and ideas inherent in that people. 
 It is the natural result of the way in which the mind regards 
 phenomena and interprets the sequence of cause and effect, 
 in other words, of the ruling ideas that it imports into its con- 
 ception of natural processes that a religious authority arises 
 in this world to represent the dicta of the invisible world. 
 The king and ruler is made such ultimately by the willing 
 suffrage of those who obey him, and ceremonies often keep up 
 a memory of the original process long after it has ceased to be 
 a reality. 
 
 Such is not Mr. Spencer's view of the philosophy of history 
 or of the law of sociological development. That process he 
 reads apparently as consisting in the preliminary existence 
 of a military to be followed by the dominance of an industrial 
 age. This view, which seems to repose largely on the super- 
 ficial aspect of the change from mediaeval to modern Europe, 
 can hardly stand a close inspection. It is a strange delusion, 
 
 z
 
 338 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 fostered in part by the different form in which modern war 
 presents itself, and partly due to hasty inferences from the 
 exceptional circumstance of Great Britain. Industrialism and 
 military life are not separated in this gross fashion, any more 
 than egoistic and altruistic impulses. Far from being sepa- 
 rated, they are constantly united in their development. The 
 industrial type of each is reflected in its military type, and 
 the latter reacts upon the former. The organization of 
 industry reappears in the organization for war, and the fact 
 that one is industrially engaged is no reason why one 
 should not also perform military functions. In a primitive 
 community all have certain industrial functions, even the 
 women and children : and similarly all are obliged to perform 
 their part in war. As civilization advances, some are excluded 
 from direct participation in industry, and the same applies to 
 the service of war. In the modern world both industry and 
 war are practised on more scientific principles : i. e. they are 
 more socialized, carried on by great companies, systematically 
 organized and not liable to the casual and intermittent phases 
 they severally used to display. 
 
 It is possible no doubt to imagine that the modern world 
 should surrender its local patriotisms, its national prepossessions. 
 Instead of the inhabitants of a certain coast or valley seeking 
 to get the best market for their peculiar produce and trying 
 every means to oust their rivals from the supply of that 
 produce throughout the world, we may fancy to ourselves 
 a general federation of states, which should organize the trade 
 of the world in such a way that every district would have its 
 speciality of produce, and would receive in return for its con- 
 tribution a proper and proportionate share in the other articles 
 making up the total production of the world. Thus inter- 
 nationally the principle that each shall produce by labour 
 according to his faculties and shall receive for consumption 
 according to his wants, would be established, say, at first for 
 Europe. But such a consummation, not to mention that it
 
 iv] DUTY 339 
 
 would only make the situation worse for externals, is some- 
 thing 1 toward which we see no tendency ; to which, indeed, 
 the fierce recrudescence of nationalism within the last half- 
 century runs entirely counter. When every country of 
 Europe is waging an internecine industrial war through the 
 savage continents and the islands of the Pacific, it is a curious 
 thing to commend the age for the growing superiority of the 
 industrial over the military spirit. The modern form of 
 industry and trade gives a wider range to the weapons of war. 
 What we see, and are likely to see in the future, is a keener 
 phase of the struggle for existence between nations. No 
 doubt by the constitution of modern states, which has afforded 
 a certain sphere of comparative security, a rapid extension of 
 industry has been made possible : and the few states, or the 
 one which was able to take advantage of the situation thus 
 produced, have had a fine time of it for a little while. But 
 as the numbers of competitors have increased, the profit has 
 rapidly waned. Each nation is forced to discover rude and 
 unknown markets, where it may for a while extract an ex- 
 travagant rate of profit. Its whole aim is to make immediate 
 gain, and in doing that it cares not one whit what may come 
 next after it has left the scene. The European commercial 
 world is doing on a grand scale what the Arab ivory and slave- 
 trader does in a more forcible way in Africa. He looks only 
 to immediate returns, and in an attempt to secure them he 
 wastes recklessly the materials of wealth. Every European 
 country is tending more to depend for the substantial 
 necessaries of life on the barbarous parts of the globe : and 
 retains its supremacy only by a certain control of the 
 mechanical arts and practical technology. But these are 
 easily transferable in this age of mechanism, and when 
 that transformation is accomplished, the countries of modern 
 Europe will find themselves face to face with a difficulty 
 which they have not previously encountered. 
 
 To return then to the views of Mr. Spencer with regard to 
 
 z 2
 
 340 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [iv 
 
 the evanescence of duty, an idea which is due to the coercion 
 of political and religious authorities, and which tends to disap- 
 pear with the advance of civilization, we may say that, as 
 he himself admits, it is not of the essence of morality, which 
 means free self-restraint or self-control. The mere coercion 
 of external order does not generate a moral act, but only an 
 act which in its outward aspects can hardly be distinguished 
 from it. The laws, as Aristotle said long ago, speak about 
 everything : they bid us do all the acts which are the character- 
 istic performances of the good man in each department of life. 
 The visible, the invisible, and the indefinite (or mob) ruler 
 extend their voice and decree over all that a human being can 
 do. And the majority of the world, as we found Malebranche 
 saying, are apt to confine their view to these requirements. 
 Nor, if we look facts fairly in the face, have we any reason 
 to suppose that this coercion is becoming less and that the 
 individual is gradually accommodating himself to the environ- 
 ment. It is true that in some places phenomena point in that 
 direction : but they are hardly such as make one long for the 
 ideal of society when the sense of legal and social compulsion 
 has ceased. Mr. Bryce has described what he calls the 
 ' fatalism of the multitude ' : meaning thereby ' the loss of 
 resisting power, the diminished sense of personal responsibility 
 and of the duty to battle for one's opinions, which disposes 
 a minority and an individual to submit without the need of 
 a command, to spontaneously renounce its own view, and to 
 fall in with the view which the majority has expressed 1 / 
 That, however, is not what Mr. Spencer means. For beyond 
 this mere mechanical moulding of the individual as an un- 
 resisting unit or member in the social mechanism, he directs 
 his view toward an ideal society, where each has become his 
 own government and supplies his own ruler. In such a case 
 obviously coercion is needless; each naturally and normally 
 does what is right and finds pleasure in it. But hardly any- 
 1 American Commonwealth, iii. 127.
 
 iv] DUTY 341 
 
 where are there obvious tendencies to realize this complete 
 independence of the righteous individual. Rather everywhere 
 the yoke of social and political and religious coercion seems to 
 continue, though it may occasionally change its aspect. Till 
 the possibility of crime has been eradicated from human 
 nature, we may spare our attention to the details of this 
 evolutionist utopia. 
 
 There is somewhat more to be said on the second point in 
 his doctrine of the evanescence of the sense of duty or 
 obligation, namely, his view as to authority of conscience, 
 the moral imperative of duty. Authority and obligation, as 
 Butler long ago maintained, naturally belong to the prin- 
 ciple of reflection or conscience l . Judgement, direction, 
 superintendency is a constituent part of the idea of con- 
 science 2 . As a principle of reflection, it is manifestly superior 
 to a mere propension. So, according to Spencer, the repre- 
 sentative, complex, and general feelings possess a superior 
 authoritativeness, as compared with simple sensations and 
 appetites. How they get this is not very clearly explained, 
 but he seems partly to claim acceptance for it as a self- 
 evident truth. Partly also he would accept Darwin's view, 
 that the sense of duty is caused by the felt contrast between 
 a higher social instinct or acquired character and a mere 
 natural and original instinct. But this is again to revert 
 to the explanation of authoritativeness from coercion or ex- 
 ternal pressure. And in that direction there seems to be no 
 hint of any explanation of the word 'higher/ if that be 
 taken as something different from mightier : or of the idea 
 of authority as distinct from coercion which after all means 
 only an application of strength or power. And, as Butler 
 remarks, there is an essential difference between mere power 
 or strength and authority : between superiority de jure and 
 de facto. 
 
 Now Spencer does appear to acknowledge an inherent or 
 
 1 Preface. * Ser. ii.
 
 342 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 intrinsic superiority as an element in moral self-control, 
 which fact self-control he regards as the basis and essential 
 trait of morality. But he has a strangely hesitating way of 
 approaching the fact. ' The feelings have authorities/ he says, 
 'proportionate to the degree in which they are removed by 
 their complexity and ideality from simple sensations and 
 appetites/
 
 V 
 
 HEDONISM 
 
 THE hedonist school lays down that the end of all action is 
 to attain pleasure, and, indeed, to get the maximum of pleasure 
 or of enjoyment. We profess, no doubt, it is said, to seek now 
 for this, and now for that object : for health, wealth, power, 
 knowledge, of ourselves and of others; but in reality the 
 secret aim, at the root of all this variety of professed goods, is 
 pleasure. For surely, it is urged, it is obvious that whatever 
 we do, we do because we believe it will afford us satisfaction : 
 and satisfaction is only another name for pleasure. Or, to 
 follow the language of James Mill : Desire is only another 
 name for ' idea of a pleasurable sensation/ It is this idea of 
 pleasure and nothing else which originally and really sets the 
 will in motion. By degrees, it must be owned, we get into 
 the habit of speaking as if we desired not pleasure, but the 
 things which bring the pleasure. But this is only a figure of 
 speech, which has grown upon us by association, but need not 
 deceive us. 
 
 Now in this there seems to be a nest of confusions. One of 
 them, which is comparatively simple and not equally obvious 
 in all languages, is the identification of will and pleasure. Tel. 
 est notre plaisir : the Latin placet and bene placif.um are similar 
 instances. With it may be compared the use of the Greek 
 Soe and bo-y^a rijs Tro'Aecos to express not an intellectual 
 opinion, but an imperative resolution. The lesson to be drawn 
 from all such language is, that in real life the psychological
 
 344 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 abstractions of quasi-independent faculties are not treated with 
 much respect. We may for our own purposes distinguish 
 between the intellectual, the emotional, and the volitional ; 
 but none of these exists really without some tincture of the 
 other. The human intellect is not a dry light, but suffused 
 with a strain of passion. The will has no real existence, 
 except as containing an intellectual conception. We have 
 allowed ourselves to be over-influenced by the ideal separa- 
 tion of different faculties. Above all, the intellectual classes 
 and they naturally are chiefly engaged with the present 
 problems are apt to forget that books are not life and 
 reality, but only the reservoirs in which the materials of life 
 have been stored up, dried food, so to speak, or goods in tins. 
 They confound a vast and always increasing stock of words 
 and formulae with an actually realized enjoyment and posses- 
 sion of ideas. A great deal of our scientific stores is, like the 
 works of art in our museum and galleries, in the shadowy 
 state of the ghosts in Hades which need to drink living blood 
 before they can communicate their message. The average in- 
 tellectual, i. e. bookish, life breeds in those who come under it 
 a habit of treating words as we do the coinage ; never realizing 
 that in every coin are represented and embodied the labours 
 and the means of enjoyment of real human beings, that 
 i>6fj,i(Tp.a is only vTraAAay/xa TT}J xp et/as - But the central con- 
 fusion in the whole statement is the hypostatizing of pleasure. 
 And that in two stages : first it is treated as ^coptcrroz; ri, as 
 a something independent, existing per se : this is the fallacy 
 of the transcendentalist, who invests the forms of our thought 
 and sensibility with an existence as things. Secondly, it is 
 treated as a series of sensible objects ra TroAAa ^8ea : 
 pleasures are spoken of as so many kinds or individuals : 
 this is the fallacy of the vulgar, who tend to identify 
 a quality or characteristic with the particular things 
 which ordinarily or habitually manifest that characteristic. 
 The victims of the first fallacy treat of Pleasure, with
 
 v] HEDONISM 345 
 
 a capital P ; and if they do not, as they are very liable to do, 
 take the further step of personifying their pleasure, they at any 
 rate fail to realize the essential relativity of the notion. By 
 that relativity is meant that pleasure is simply the sense of 
 a correspondence between the agent and his surroundings, or 
 the sense that a movement initiated by the organism has not 
 gone off at random, but has, as it were, returned and con- 
 verged in the organism as its end. Pleasure is not another 
 thing beside life, but it is the sense of life, and in par- 
 ticular, of life as a process of outgoing or differentiation, 
 immediately transforming itself into the obverse process of 
 in-going or redintegration. In health and vigour these two 
 processes are almost synchronous, and certainly inseparable : 
 the activity which is put forth is not spent on some ulterior 
 end, but immediately reverts into self, is at once apperceived 
 and realized in the self. At other times there is a long in- 
 terval possibly between the forth-putting and the ingathering. 
 The distinction between the two cases is rendered by 
 Aristotle as that between eWpyaa and yeVecrt?. The latter is 
 activity of which the end or fruition is outside itself : it is 
 work done under direction, and having its issue or result in the 
 future. It is not being, but a coming to be : it is a\\ov eve/ecu 
 Such is the life of business in its dtrxoAia, plagued as it is 
 with the hope of an end or consummation yet to be reached. 
 It is the 7rpa/cnKos fiios, if 7Tpat? is taken in its narrower 
 sense as negotium, the antithesis of cr^oA??, as the action of 
 one who has set his aim, his goal, in the future. But in the 
 wider sense of Trpaft?, in which it is equivalent to ere'pyeta, the 
 activity is self-realization, fruition as well as action, not 
 merely irpafis in the limited acceptation, but also flecupuz. It 
 was indeed a tendency of the Greeks, fostered by their political 
 and social condition, to find such tvep-yeia more especially in 
 o-xoArj, and to identify it with Sictyooy?}, that activity which is 
 so little of an effort that it is little beyond the tranquil easy 
 consciousness of life passing on, like the ceaseless rippling,
 
 346 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 glittering, and whispering of a brook over its pebbly bed, or 
 like the dm/'pi0^oz> yeAao>ia of the waves breaking gently on 
 a sunny shore. But whether we take eWpyeia after the calmer 
 mood of the Greek, or the more energetic of the modern, it is 
 essentially not action which is, so to speak, commanded by 
 a power outside it, and directed to a foreign end, but action 
 self-initiated and self -enjoyed. If we may believe the writer 
 of the seventh book of the Nicomachean Ethics, the Platonic 
 school attempted to get from ytWo-is to tvipytia by describing 
 the latter under the title of a yeVeo-i? dyejuTro'Siorro? : an activity 
 which was free and self-contained, released from subjection, 
 and attaining its natural end. They added, however, that 
 the ylvfo'i.s in question must be ata-OrjTr] : i. e. the activity 
 must be a felt activity, must be consciously apprehended as 
 free or self -realizing energy. This is a point to which 
 Aristotle himself returns in the tenth book. There we get 
 a sort of supplement and correction to the view of evcu/xozna 
 given in the first book. Happiness had been there defined as 
 eWpyeta ^vxrjs, and it might be said that if the activity is 
 psychic, it must be self-conscious activity. But this is 
 hardly correct for the standpoint of Aristotle whose whole 
 tendency (in accordance with what we may call the pre- 
 vailingly objective character of Greek philosophy) is not to 
 regard happiness as consciousness, but rather as a function 
 of the self, a form of the mental life, a realization rather 
 than a possession, but without any special emphasis on the 
 purely subjective side. This subjective element, however, 
 comes out, though still very imperfectly, in the statement 
 that pleasure has special connexion with a'io-drja-is and TO 
 ai(r6av6fji.evov } that it is kv r// fvepyfia, but rather as a super- 
 vening consummation (eitiyiyvo^vov TI reAos) than as a faculty 
 which can consummate : i. e. rather as a natural resultant 
 which action puts on to crown itself, than as a special power 
 which itself yields that consummation. It is the unbought 
 and unbuyable grace of life : the electric spark, as it were,
 
 v] HEDONISM 347 
 
 which flashes out at the point where the outgoing line of 
 action returns upon itself and is just completing its redin- 
 tegration with self : it is the consciousness that the object, 
 which is presented by natural causes, or which we have 
 ourselves produced by an act of will, is in harmony and co- 
 operation with the subjective conditions and forces of life, 
 which reveal themselves in our voluntary agency. 
 
 It follows from this examination that pleasure is no sub- 
 stantial or independent entity, no object per se : but, as the 
 Stoics called it, an kmykw^a, a sort of surplusage, like the 
 striking of the clock, which may keep equally good time 
 whether it strikes or not. Of course this does not mean that 
 pleasure is not a real or important element of consciousness. 
 As Aristotle long ago remarked, pleasure is the sign or 
 symptom of self-realization : the witness that an action is 
 not done for external motives, but that it is the exhibition of 
 a !is, i. e. of a faculty which has been made part of the 
 original self, has been in short acquired or made our own 
 second nature, if it was not our first. Pleasure, or as we may 
 now call it, satisfaction, means that we have attained our end : 
 it is not itself the end. The idea of pleasure, which Mill 
 speaks of let alone the doubtful use of the word idea means 
 the idea of ourselves pleased, i. e. of ourselves attaining the 
 object of our effort, the idea of ourselves satisfied, of ourselves 
 self -realized. Such an idea is not an invariable presence in 
 consciousness. In cases where the self-realization has its out- 
 going and its incoming moment in immediate juxtaposition, 
 where indeed the one is at every instant becoming the other, 
 where action is pleasure, there is no previous idea of pleasure, 
 no anticipation of it in faint consciousness to compensate 
 us for the reality which is as yet absent. The statement, 
 indeed, that the idea of pleasure stimulates to action, is on 
 a par with its converse doctrine that it is present uneasiness 
 of desire which determines to voluntary action. 
 
 Deeper than pleasure and pain are the stimuli themselves,
 
 348 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 the impulses, appetites, or natural propensities of human 
 nature. These are the various aspects in which the great 
 fact or process of life is partially and in detail represented. 
 That great fact or process may be described as a process of 
 metabole, with its two sides of anabole or katabole : or in 
 plainer language, life is the continuous ridge or acme of a 
 double process, which consists, on the one hand, in the assimi- 
 lation of material or in the acquisition of matter to realize 
 its formative powers, and, on the other, in the rejection 
 and disintegration of the formed material as soon as the 
 process of formation is completed. Life, in short and this 
 seems the essential thing to remember is the process, and 
 not the product. It is not, as has sometimes been said, the 
 correspondence of inward changes to outward changes, or the 
 correspondence of a moving equilibrium within to another 
 without. It is the inferior half of a truth to say that life is 
 adaptation to the environment : rather where life is, the 
 environment is adapted and assimilated, employed in the 
 service and for the realization of formative energy, or, in 
 other words, to body forth that molecular movement up and 
 down in which life as a physical fact or process consists. 
 
 But life, more and more conspicuously in proportion to 
 the visible complexity of the organism which it inhabits, is 
 parted up into a number of partial processes of self-realiza- 
 tion. These initial movements, which we call impulses and 
 appetites, are the primary details, the several exemplifications 
 of the great movement of life. With regard to the large 
 number of them, impulse and actualization go hand in hand, 
 with little gap or interval. The impulses which find vent in 
 exercise of most of the organs, such as those of sense, are 
 to some extent of this character. It is different with the 
 appetites strictly so called : and it is in problems connected 
 with them that ethics is strictly concerned. There the forth- 
 putting of energy has to be undertaken for a remote end. 
 Work, labour, in short becomes necessary to procure the
 
 v] HEDONISM 349 
 
 means of satisfaction, to complete the circuit. And so we 
 are again confronted with the distinction between work and 
 play : the latter being activity which is immediately felt 
 and found to be at. harmony with the self, and thus directly 
 pleasant, whereas the former does not immediately carry its 
 own fruition with it, and is therefore either neutral, or, if 
 contrasted with some possible direct pleasure, may become 
 decidedly painful. 
 
 As so regarded, the impulses fall into two classes; one, 
 in which the pleasure is normally immediate, the other, in 
 which the pleasure is only to be found at a greater or less 
 distance. On the one hand are the impulses craving imme- 
 diate exercise, on the other the appetites of hunger and 
 thirst, which demand not so much exercise as satisfaction or 
 repletion. The former are tendencies to expend or explode 
 what has been acquired; they are processes of katabolism. 
 accompanied with liberation of energy. The latter are 
 tendencies to acquire and assimilate, to concentrate and 
 unify ; they are processes of anabolism, gathering up energy 
 and embodying it in structure. The two must go on simul- 
 taneously, and tlxe ideal of human life at this stage would 
 seem to be reached if the expenditure of energy from 
 muscle and nerve could be so arranged, that the individual 
 was able to appropriate the amount of material goods re- 
 quisite for the maintenance of his own being and well- 
 being. It would be a legitimate development of this idea 
 if we were further to suppose that a social group might 
 be constituted, of such a magnitude and such elements, 
 that the parts of the total product, needed for the main- 
 tenance of the whole group, should so be distributed amongst 
 the members as to make the work of each at once socially 
 useful and individually pleasant to the agent. Such was 
 the ideal of society formed by Fourier. But it is tolerably 
 evident that, although by wise arrangements something 
 might be secured much better than our existing society,
 
 350 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 the realization of the conversion of all work into play 
 can only be treated as an ideal the greatest possible approxi- 
 mation to which, however, remains the duty of the social 
 reformer. No organization will ever make labour cease 
 to be trouble : but probably a great deal more might be 
 done by organization to make it a labour in which delight 
 is taken. It is no great curse to be obliged to gain one's 
 bread by the sweat of the flesh, or the toil of the brain : 
 but it is a curse when the sweat and the toil do not bring 
 the bread, or even when they bring it, not as a direct fruit 
 or remote result of the toil, but as a supervening some- 
 thing, attached to it by a social mechanism of which the 
 recipient understands little, and for which he entertains little 
 faith. And to reverse this state of affairs is a problem which 
 cannot be solved by any reduction of hours of labour, but 
 which will require a training in the mechanism of the social 
 organism such as few have yet dreamt of. 
 
 But to return. Before pleasure emerged, impulses and 
 appetites had sought their way to actualization. They had 
 found it by natural channels, by the outlet of energy, i.e. 
 in those ways which opposed least resistance to its expendi- 
 ture. Similarly the appetites had learned the matter required 
 for stilling their demands, learned it, no doubt, by a course of 
 irregular experiments. In the next stage, however, we see the 
 clearer emergence of the idea of pleasure as an element in 
 the business. Man thus passes from the stage of instinct to 
 the dominion of intelligence. He came into the world with 
 tendencies and impulses for which he is not responsible, with 
 a complicated living organism, which is ultimately a system 
 of 6pfj,ai appearing one by one, and appearing first of all by 
 the action which they spontaneously initiate. That action 
 reveals to him his own nature, at least in its elements, in 
 partial or fragmentary aspects, as they occasionally occur. 
 And so he has offered to him at least a pathway of escape 
 from the immediate and utter subjection of action to impulse.
 
 v] HEDONISM 351 
 
 So long as impulse, fortuitously appearing 1 , spontaneously 
 works its way to realization, one is no more in control of it 
 than the savage is of the flood and the hurricane. But once 
 consciousness represents to reflection the whole range of 
 the spontaneous movement from the first dim uneasiness of 
 impulse to the final stage of satisfaction, and does this for 
 impulse after impulse and satisfaction after satisfaction, two 
 or three consequences are entailed. In the first place, the 
 idea of a satisfaction of impulse and appetite takes its place 
 as an initiative of movement. It is a misinterpretation of 
 this when James Mill defines desire as an ' idea of a pleasurable 
 sensation/ The misinterpretation consists in treating a ' plea- 
 surable sensation ' as an independent object. Of a pleasurable 
 sensation as such, there can be and is no idea. What there is 
 and can be an idea of, is a definite kind of action, an indi- 
 vidual phenomenon, which will give, as it is believed on 
 experience to have given, satisfaction. It is the idea of 
 a definite pleasure, meaning by that the idea of a definite 
 event, occurrence, or thing which was found pleasant. It is 
 not then an abstract pleasure, not even an abstractly pleasurable 
 sensation i.e. a sensation which is pleasant and nothing 
 more but an objective and definable fact, which has been 
 found to be a realization, a furthering and perfecting of some 
 one side of what we know as our self. The idea of a 
 pleasure means the idea of a pleased self, and that again 
 means no general or indefinite ego, but the real ego or per- 
 sonality of a particular moment, generalized perhaps, but still 
 perfectly determinate and precise. Desire then is and is not 
 of pleasure. It is the desire of pleasure, if pleasure be under- 
 stood to mean not a general something which is pleasure and 
 nothing else, but a specific object which by its correlation 
 with some aspect of the total organic being has acquired the 
 attribute ' pleasant.' 
 
 One more remark on the phrase ' idea of a pleasure ' as equiva- 
 lent to a desire. This conception goes along with that manner
 
 352 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 of psychology which was first made familiar by Hume, and 
 has since been reproduced by Mr. Spencer. That is the dis- 
 tinction of mental facts or phenomena into two orders, a fainter 
 and a more vivid, not separated by any hard and fast line, but 
 still sufficiently apart to warrant us in regarding 1 the distinction 
 as important. It is partly like the old Aristotelian distinction 
 between ovi-apis and eW/ayaa : partly like that between mole- 
 cular and molar movements : between latent process and per- 
 ceptible change. At a certain stage movement fails to be 
 detected by the unaided senses ; at a further stage it escapes 
 the notice of our most accurate instruments of research, while 
 it is still pursuable by our inference and logic to further 
 depths. So, according to the psychologist, our mental states 
 or exhibitions of mental (psychical) action have a variety of 
 grades, from their first grosser reality as actual impressions, 
 vivid sentiencies, to their finer and more imperceptible reality 
 as ideas, the distant echoes or images of these stronger exci- 
 tations; and finally to the stage of apparent quiescence or 
 latency, the stage of what may be called by the somewhat 
 contradictory name ' unconscious idea/ or idea latent in con- 
 sciousness. Such ideas, of satisfactions emerging by some 
 accident from their latency, find themselves occasionally re- 
 inforced by the circumstances of the moment, when these all 
 point decidedly in one direction : and they are developed to 
 a still greater extent, when through innate want of energy 
 or absence of other external stimuli, the whole soul is allowed 
 to dwell and fasten on that single image. Such overmastering 
 impulses, due not to the idea of a pleasure, but to the idea of 
 an action with which satisfaction is imagined to be intimately 
 involved, are the natural experience of the untrained and 
 undisciplined young, of the barbarian in all societies, and 
 attain their worst exhibitions perhaps in the ill-disciplined 
 and ill-proportioned minds of those who by a sudden revolu- 
 tion have gained imperial position. Of the first Napoleon, says 
 M. Taine : ' Chez lui, aucune idee ne demeure speculative et
 
 v] HEDONISM 353 
 
 pure : aucune n'est une simple copie du reel, ou un simple 
 tableau du possible : chacune est une secousse interne qui 
 spontanement et tout de suite tend a se transformer en acte.' 
 And Taine explains this absence of self-control, not merely by 
 the fact that the emperor was tout imagination, but by his early 
 upbringing in an island, where the administration of justice is 
 a farce, and where the public opinion bestows a frank admira- 
 tion on well-laid ambuscades and successful acts of treachery. 
 
 But it is by this same faculty of guiding his course by ideas 
 of pleasures that the voluptuary is generated. The voluptuary 
 seems to be a victim of reason and imagination. The animal 
 is comparatively safe because of his defective range of in- 
 telligence. But the human being, at a very early stage of 
 civilization, or rather in very low levels of barbarism, soon 
 learns to misuse the motive power of ideas, and begins to seek 
 for pleasure over and above what comes in the normal and 
 average performance of function. Idleness and want of varied 
 interest are the great parents of intemperance, and the savage 
 is fully qualified in both respects. He knows nothing of the 
 discipline of labour, and nothing of the other ideal discipline 
 which gives a man ideal interests, public aims, social plans to 
 pursue. And what is true of the savage, is repeated in some 
 measure by the gangs of vagrants and tramps in modern 
 times. 
 
 A more dangerous development, however, judged by its 
 ultimate effects, is seen in the voluptuary proper. He is 
 generally, like the tramp and the beggar, a product of a highly 
 civilized society ; i. e. a society in which the construction of a 
 well-jointed and secure form of social institutions and the estab- 
 lishment of a solid and safe property system have been carried 
 to their height without any corresponding growth of the sense of 
 moral solidarity, of public duty, of general human fraternity. 
 For such an one the regulative influence of normal work has 
 been removed, and has not been replaced by any zeal for ideal 
 ends or common good. He becomes not a seeker for pleasur- 
 
 A a
 
 354 55.4 YS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 able sensations in general, but a very close approach to that 
 creation of abstraction. Not pleasure in general, but the greatest 
 possible variety and multiplicity of pleasures is his aim. In the 
 pursuit of art, he is the dilettante who sips only the honey 
 that can be got from the selected flowers. In science, his 
 range is measured by what he finds interesting, what gratifies 
 his taste, or personal whim. But above all his motto is to 
 extract pleasure from as many sources as he may, to turn 
 everything if possible into a cause of pleasure, and, if that be 
 impossible, to surround himself as far as he can with a well- 
 arrayed system of materials, out of each of which as they 
 revolve around him he may get its quota of enjoyment. 
 
 That such an art of pleasure is altogether illegitimate it 
 would be wrong to say. Under the common name of volup- 
 tuary hasty thought is apt to confound two persons altogether 
 different. Or we may say that there is a true and a false 
 Epicureanism. The false Epicureanism makes the acquisi- 
 tion of versatility of pleasure-taste and the accumulation of 
 a stock of pleasure-means an aim in itself, or for the ultimate 
 enjoyment of the agent. But within proper limitations, 
 Epicureanism may present itself as the effort to make the 
 setting and framework of human life free from unnecessary 
 jar and fret, so as to leave the energies unimpaired for higher 
 and better work. We are told by Mr. Spencer that ' pleasure- 
 giving acts are life-sustaining acts/ and ' every pleasure 
 increases vitality,' and ' raises the tide of life.' Both of these 
 propositions, as Mr. Spencer well knows and subsequently 
 admits, are misleading, because we are not yet in that social 
 millennium, where actions are at once and simultaneously 
 completely right and completely pleasant. In the world as it 
 is, a great deal of readjustment is required before mankind 
 can trust the guidance of their emotions, or of their sensations *. 
 And this adjustment is not merely, as the author seems to 
 suppose, between mankind and the social state ; it is equally 
 
 1 Data of Ethics, p. 99.
 
 v] HEDONISM 355 
 
 an adjustment needed in the organism of the individual man. 
 Except on the idea that the organism is a perfectly normal 
 one, exactly adjusted in every detail, the pleasure which 
 results from an action is no sure indication of the life- 
 sustaining or vitality-increasing qualities of the said pleasure. 
 We may almost go so far as to say that there is a pleasure 
 which is a sure symptom of imminent death : the satisfaction 
 which is felt when the morbid structure is so thoroughly 
 pervaded by disease that the sense of struggle and dispropor- 
 tion vanishes in an ease which is the forerunner of collapse. 
 But in general we may say that, in an organism which is 
 liable to partial disruption of continuity of function, and 
 where each part in turn usurps the prerogative of the whole, 
 there may be a great variety of pleasures which, far from 
 attesting the health of the whole, only attest the private 
 convenience of one organ, and which, though they raise the 
 tide of life in a one-sided way, really do so at the cost of other 
 parts, and thus depress the general vitality. Such usurpations 
 of language which applies only to the ideal and normal man 
 in whom every part performs its function in due subjection 
 to the common function, without any tendency to separation 
 or isolation of life are utterly inappropriate and perilous 
 when applied as a guide to the more or less abnormal 
 creatures which the great mass of humanity are. Let us 
 keep ideals and normals in their place as standards of 
 perfection, and remember that each actual individual has 
 always a problem of his ow r n which cannot be settled by 
 generalities. 
 
 We are on safer ground if we adhere to the negative pro- 
 position that every pain is evidence of incongruity between 
 the part and the whole organism, and between the whole 
 organism and its circumstances of life. We may even say 
 that pleasure is evidence of a congruity somewhere, but 
 for practical purposes that proposition is of little value. It is 
 a poor consolation for one dying of some organic disease to 
 
 A a 2
 
 356 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 know that at a certain point there will be such harmony 
 established between the diseased centre and its immediate 
 surroundings that he will feel a great ease and calm. Nor, 
 again, when we are told that, if the actions are life-sustaining, 
 the pleasures which they bring with them will be life-sus- 
 taining too, do we learn anything of very much value as 
 a guide of life. If you are a normally constituted human 
 being in a normally constituted and thoroughly adapted society, 
 you may be pretty sure that your pleasures are all on the 
 side of normal and ideal existence : but only an irrational 
 optimism will treat that hypothetical idea or principle as 
 a presumption to be taken for granted in actual life. 
 
 And yet on the other side it is to be remembered that the 
 influence of pain and pleasure is not a simple or plain matter. 
 Here again facts force us to abandon the general lumping 
 of pleasures under one abstract category. To the popular 
 apprehension at any rate it would seem evident that some 
 pleasures enervate and others stimulate : that some pains 
 benumb and others fire with zeal. Mr. Spencer on one 
 occasion seeks to prove his point by pointing to the effect 
 of what he calls 'good spirits' on work and play. It is 
 but a loose style of argument which can put ' good spirits ' 
 as an equivalent for pleasure, or 'low spirits' for pain. A 
 deal of mischief is done by this fancy for levelling away 
 all distinctions, so as to be able to point out pleasure here, 
 pleasure there, pleasure everywhere, and then get a simple, 
 uniform principle. In short, if a general law of duty is 
 complained of as giving but a poor light in difficulties of 
 moral detail, a general law of pleasure can hardly escape 
 a blame for the same fault. 
 
 So to return to our Epicurean with the good heart, in 
 bonam partem. He is one who has learnt that a great deal 
 of vice is due to the pains of misery : who has observed that 
 every irritation and vexation which befalls a human being 
 tends to remain in his inner consciousness ready to burst
 
 v] HEDONISM 357 
 
 forth on the first available object, however innocent. There 
 are hundreds of troubles which are not of importance enough, 
 or are too much part of a portentous system, to be got rid 
 of by a bold act which takes up arms against them and 
 by opposing ends them. Pains that at once awake activity 
 to overcome them are not unmingled evils. The others, 
 which we dare not or cannot treat with these vigorous 
 reprisals, are the bane of life. The sufferer feels as if he 
 had a general grievance against the world and humanity, 
 sometimes even against God : and unable probably to charge 
 the offence on a specific cause, he discharges his irritation 
 on those who are nearest and ought to be dearest to him. 
 Some such evils come through the organization of society; 
 and the individual, feeling himself for the most part powerless 
 to remedy the mischief by direct action, is content with, as the 
 children say, passing it on, and probably with some interest 
 added to the principal burden. But other such irritations 
 come from causes less amenable to social agency : to the 
 effects of an overheated and ill-ventilated room, of an ill- 
 cooked and ill-compounded meal, of malarious locality, of 
 tasteless and aggravating furniture, of ill-pitched voices, 
 of misfitted articles of apparel, of discordant colours, and 
 so on. The Epicureanism which for itself and others seeks 
 to abolish the causes of these pains, is a noble Epicureanism. 
 No one need suppose that, when these are removed, the world 
 will be a paradise of lotus-eaters, where it is always afternoon. 
 When these curable evils are removed, there will be plenty 
 of real evils still, and as the eye is no longer pestered by the 
 mists which always accompany a fretful atmosphere, it will 
 see work to be done in directions hitherto unsurmised. 
 Before the brotherhoods who aspired to live a religious life 
 could settle down to their task, it behoved them to clear away 
 the thorns and briars, which less wise ascetics might have 
 kept in hand to torture themselves withal. 
 
 It follows then that though ethics must be concerned with
 
 358 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 pleasures and pains, the problem for it is, first, to determine 
 what are the right or true pleasures and pains, and secondly, 
 to consider the means by which these may also be the actual 
 pleasures and pains of the individual. Every activity, be 
 it bad or good, may have its pleasures : and according to 
 the general verdict of hedonist writers, the only distinction 
 between them is one of quantity, however variously in 
 detailed methods that quantity may be estimated. Now, 
 of an individual it might be true to say that in a deliberate 
 choice between two or more courses of action his choice is 
 due to a belief that the results, taken altogether, of the 
 action i. e. the action taken in its full and entire range will 
 give him more pleasure, or be more in accordance with and 
 afford more satisfaction to his whole nature, than those likely 
 to follow another course. But is this equivalent to the 
 doctrine of a pleasure-tariff or pleasure list ? Can a general 
 list of pleasures be drawn up, not confined to the estimates 
 of an individual subject, but dominating the tastes of a large 
 multitude ? 
 
 That such a list can to some extent be made out would 
 seem to be generally allowed : and if so, what implications 
 seem to be contained in it ? To answer this question we may 
 compare an analogous economic question. In the course of 
 trade we find that prices are not fixed by the will of isolated 
 individuals but by the chaffering and higgling of the market, 
 i. e. by a process of offer (hypothesis) corrected by other 
 offers, by tentative steps, which aim at arriving at the general 
 or common estimate put upon articles brought to the mart. 
 The dyopa, mart or guildhall, is the place of public and 
 common resort : it is the scene of the respublica, the ground 
 on which the Koivuuia is actualized. The price is fixed by 
 a social act an act not carried out artificially at one step, 
 but, after the manner of natural processes, by a series of 
 adjustments and readjustments. In some stages of society, 
 it is true, the price is settled by a direct act of the organs
 
 v] HEDONISM 359 
 
 appointed by the sovereign people. But any difference in 
 method need not conceal the fundamental fact that the price 
 and the value of commodities is settled by the whole social 
 group, and settled by it not arbitrarily, but after comparison 
 of the place of the given article in the systematic aggregate 
 of social want. Price is fixed not by one man's demand and 
 by one man's supply, but by the total demand and total 
 supply in the social group to which they belong. It varies 
 therefore with the fluctuations in the total social system. 
 
 Somewhat similar is the tariff of pleasures. Each indivi- 
 dual has no doubt a standard of his own in these matters. 
 Just as he has a stronger demand for certain commodities, 
 so he has a bias towards certain pleasures. But his enjoyment 
 of the latter, like his appropriation of the former, is not 
 a matter in which he alone is concerned. If we set aside 
 for the moment abnormal cases, we may say that all pleasures 
 have a social element, and that they cease to be real pleasures 
 except in so far as they are correlated to the consciousness of 
 other men. The pleasures of ambition, power, love, sensuality, 
 are complete only when they are responded to by the feelings 
 of others. The pleasure of each therefore depends upon the 
 social consciousness : i. e. upon the conception of life and work 
 held by the common group to which an individual belongs. 
 For that reason the quantity of pleasure in acts is measured 
 in any group by the amount in which the activity, to which 
 they are attached, is felt or believed to contribute towards the 
 production of the common well-being or general comfort. But 
 if we say common well-being, we mean well-being as deter- 
 mined not by a formal or official creed, but by the intrinsic and 
 natural belief in the group and its members. We mean the 
 actual conception of happiness which pervades the group : the 
 governing ideal of TO e5 T)V : the more or less systematized 
 aggregate of actions and feelings which constitutes the contents 
 of the idea of life for that group. The happiness which is thus 
 put as a governing conception is again not a general or abstract
 
 360 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 conception. It may be vague in parts not sufficiently detailed 
 but it is the strictly individualized and determinate conception 
 held by a particular group, epoch, and people. The concep- 
 tion of Evbai.fj.ovia implies, when fully wrought out, a hierarchy 
 of activities and enjoyments, a systematic conception of life. 
 
 It is built up, no doubt it may be said, of single pleasures, 
 and these pleasures of the individual. So, it may be said, the 
 total scientific conception of the facts of the world, alike in 
 its more popular and its more elaborate phase, rests upon 
 what are called single experiences, individual observations ; on 
 what we may call in the last resort mere passing sensations 
 of the individual. But, as Kant may probably be considered 
 once for all to have demonstrated, human consciousness is not 
 such a mere disjunct sequence in the single mind, nor such 
 a mere otiose co-existence of conceptions in several minds one 
 beside the other. It is true that Kant has mainly insisted on 
 the fact that ours is a systematizing consciousness : that just 
 as our alimentary system analyzes and builds up the mere 
 aggregate of elements contained in a piece of food into 
 a living organic fabric, so our intellectual and cognitive 
 system, in its two digestive apparatus, called respectively 
 sense and understanding, constructs the material of experience 
 into that formed and systematized experience, which in its 
 most formed and systematized degree we call knowledge or 
 science. But we may carry Kant's argument a step further. 
 Our consciousness is not merely a systematic organ in itself : 
 but it is an integral part in the constitution of the general or 
 common consciousness of humanity, in each of its various grades 
 of association, up to the very highest and most universal. 
 
 What is thus laid down implies that experience is a process 
 of continual self-correction : first (if we may distinguish and 
 treat separately what goes on pari passu), in the individual 
 consciousness, secondly, in the collective or co-operant conscious- 
 ness, self-correction and self -adjustment. And that, because 
 every patch and item of experience, every so-called single
 
 v] HEDONISM 361 
 
 observation, and mere sensation is for the human being 
 a self-extending, self -asserting, and thus a self-universaling 
 fact. Every single perception is a possible infinity : not a 
 mere perception, but an apperception of itself, a self-appre- 
 hension; and that means, that it always carries us a little 
 way, and sometimes a great way, beyond itself. The rudi- 
 mentary idea, just because it arises in a self-consciousness, 
 has in it a little of the prophetic and anticipatory : it travels 
 a little way into the unknown, it is not merely its bare single 
 self, but is symbolic of a wider behind or beyond it. This 
 anticipatory tendency, to round off the part into a postulated 
 totality, to carry on the present moment into the future and 
 thence back to the past, is the rudimentary or essential nature 
 of human reason. It is the tendency to interpret the given, 
 i. e. to see it not merely as it stands, but in its meaning, in its 
 bearings, in its context and implications, in its generality. 
 To interpret nature and thus to anticipate her next word 
 is the fundamental function of man the ground-function 
 through which both truth and falsehood alike become possible. 
 Error arises when the process of interpretation and anticipation 
 is abruptly or arbitrarily fore-closed at one step, or is carried 
 too far at one step without due caution. Truth, on the con- 
 trary, can only be secured through a continual revision and 
 correction of the idea or interpretation in the light of fuller 
 data, which, put face to face with the already made accu- 
 mulation in idea and interpretation, have to unite in furnish- 
 ing out a fuller and more authentic symbolism. 
 
 Let us apply this to pleasures. There also we begin with 
 single experiences of individual souls, mere transient, isolated, 
 and momentary emergencies of pleasant feeling, i. e. occasional 
 perceptions that some act of our own, some circumstance about 
 us, is in harmony and response to the needs of our organi- 
 zation as a whole. But what is revealed to us of our 
 organization as a whole in consciousness is not much at first. 
 Yet we can certainly say that the mere felt feeling is never
 
 362 ESSAYS .IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 left wholly uncorrelated with a little range of possible feeling 
 around it : it makes us, as a pleasure, feel ourselves as pleased 
 it awakes the vacant idea of self and gives it a real content. 
 But the satisfaction which is awaked by an incipient idea of 
 self, or rather which awakes such an incipient idea, is an 
 interpretation : it has symbolized more than it actually is. 
 What we call experience, meaning the succession of circum- 
 stances that affect our lives and feelings, comes to test such 
 interpretations, and to be itself tested : for each such expe- 
 rience is itself to us interpreted, and will only be interpreted 
 well, when it is taken in connexion with the whole available con- 
 text in our mind. Gradually there grows up a conception of 
 happiness which is strong enough to impose itself as a regula- 
 tive on each aspirant to the title of pleasure. 
 
 But that strength especially comes to it because it is not 
 a mere isolated or individual idea, but is backed up by the 
 power of a social consciousness, which has fostered it and 
 brought it to maturity. And had the individual been reared 
 and had his consciousness developed under a simple single and 
 equal social influence, the domination of the social standard 
 over his individual feeling would have been supreme, and 
 monstrous in its autocracy. An illustration of what the 
 dominancy of the social conception of happiness is, is seen in 
 the manners, and as in this natural stage the distinction 
 of manners and morals is at a minimum in the morals of 
 savage races. There, we may say, the whole group is a toler- 
 ably uniform and homogeneous mass, well isolated from sur- 
 rounding and disturbing, i. e. variety-introducing influences. 
 Hence the influence of vo^os is despotic, and even in the private 
 consciousness there is apparently no sign of any rebellion or 
 assertion of the rights of the individual. And something 
 analogous is seen even at the present time in narrow self-con- 
 tained groups, little islets of opinion which manage to maintain 
 their isolation in the general movement of currents to and fro. 
 The possibility of individual freedom, i. e. of the divergence
 
 v] HEDONISM 363 
 
 between manners and morals, comes with the contending claims 
 of several groups, to all of which the individual belongs, though 
 without falling precisely under any : or it comes with the 
 appearance of divergences of sub-groups inside of the general 
 uniformity. Such sub-groups are probably never wholly 
 absent in any group, constituted of individuals so variable as 
 men, and in circumstances so different as the world affords. 
 But in some countries, e. g. in great expansive plains and small 
 secluded valleys, the uniformity often becomes oppressive. 
 
 Along with this variety of groups, within the radius of the 
 same general circle to which the individual belongs, there is 
 given room for variety in the social standards from which 
 the individual gets his rule. He is still overpowered by 
 social influences, but in the multiplicity of contending 
 masters there is an opening for freedom. That such freedom 
 should be complete it is necessary (i) that every aspect of 
 human nature should find strength and support in some social 
 institution, and none be left to languish in the merely indivi- 
 dual consciousness : (2) that these various institutions should be 
 so co-ordinated and subordinated in an organized system that 
 none can claim more than its due share of the individual life, or 
 attempt to cancel the claims of other aspects. To secure this 
 latter condition is the business of the State, which seeks to 
 organize social institutions in such a way that it may be an 
 exact reproduction of the whole tendencies of the whole man 
 in their normal hierarchy and system. In such a State man is 
 free, really free, i. e. not liberated from the social yoke alto- 
 gether, but liberated from its one-sided, fractional, and partial 
 tyrannies, which are what make the social yoke intolerable. 
 A false emancipation, on the contrary, is the withdrawal from 
 the yoke of society altogether, or the pretence of withdrawal, 
 which arbitrarily selects an agreeable environment, and leaves 
 the rest to look after itself. 
 
 Such is the perfect idea of human society, as it is secured 
 in what has been called the free and less appropriately the
 
 364 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 democratic state. Man is essentially social : his whole develop- 
 ment is accomplished through social influences. But these 
 influences, if they took the form of the simple and uniform 
 pressure of a homogeneous environment on the individual, 
 would generate a heavy and retarding social tyranny. Even 
 when they part into a variety of influences, working through 
 their several institutions and associations on the individual, 
 they tend, when left to themselves, to affect him unequally 
 and irregularly. What happens is as follows. A variety of 
 different ideals presents itself to the acceptance of the indi- 
 vidual. But they present themselves piecemeal and as it 
 were by accident : not co-ordinated with each other on any 
 plan, not referred to any higher principle. Life has become 
 a chaos, amid which the individual, with what resources he 
 may, is obliged to select some portion in which to work 
 out his own function, leaving the rest to their confusions. 
 In such a condition of affairs the political unity may exist 
 in name; but in reality it is only one amongst a number 
 of contending principles of association, side by side with the 
 religious, the economic and the educational principles. The 
 true or reasonable State must be more than this. It must be 
 supreme visible organization of all principles of organization 
 whatever. With the invisible kingdom of art, science, religion, 
 it cannot, even if it would, deal : in the region of temporalities, 
 i.e. of materialized and tangible existence, the State is supreme 
 not as a supervening domination, but as an indwelling 
 organization. With art, science, religion, as such, as spiritual 
 principles of human energy, the State has nothing directly to 
 do : but wherever they appear as organizations, wherever they 
 rise into materialized actions, there the State is present, not 
 as something alien and antagonistic, but as the whole organiza- 
 tion controlling the eccentricity of the parts. 
 
 Such a State is an ideal, but it is the supreme ideal of the 
 visible development of humanity. Yet every State, so far 
 as it deserves that name, has the ideal aim. Each State is
 
 v] HEDONISM 365 
 
 in its measure the idea, or it is nothing : in so far as it 
 seeks to afford to each of its members a common stock of 
 goods, out of which they can individually derive the strength 
 necessary for each, and yet seeks to present to each what he 
 specially wants, not indiscriminately in a great aggregate of 
 omnigenous goods, but in special organizations and institutions 
 accommodated as far as is possible to all the existing varieties 
 of human temperament and endowments. The State is thus 
 in the best sense a socialistic agency, a system in which each 
 finds his interest satisfied, in which each gains the appropriate 
 scope for his outward development. But it should be added, 
 while we are on this point, that the socialisting organization 
 has been created and must be maintained by the persistent 
 exercise of human function. The stock from which each takes 
 what he needs for his private use, he must at the same 
 moment replenish, and replenish with interest as well as 
 principal. It is a wide-spread and constantly recurring 
 fallacy that the State (TO K.OIVOV] has an independent and 
 self-subsistent stock of resources upon which individuals can 
 draw at will. The fallacy was a natural one w r hen the State 
 was not when, as Plato says, it consisted of two antagonistic 
 states, the rich and the poor, one of which supposed that it 
 was solely entitled to draw on the civic bank, while the other 
 had the less pleasing duty of keeping it supplied. But such 
 an abnormal condition of affairs, when a community can 
 for ages live by plundering their neighbours and foreign 
 communities, or in which one class of the community makes 
 the honey which the other will consume, cannot be made the 
 basis of political theory, as distinct from the art of politics. 
 In the ideal or theoretical State the common stock only exists 
 in so far as the associated individuals produce year by year 
 and age by age more than they spend. The produce of 
 successful brigandage, whether in open war or in commercial 
 rivalry, cannot be permanently reckoned upon as sufficient to 
 compensate the absence of industrial habits of hand and head.
 
 366 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 Pleasure then is socially determined, just because the self 
 is socially realized, i. e. realized by the help of a more or less 
 complex social organization. Pleasures and pains, so far as 
 ethics is concerned with them, are social pleasures and pains, 
 not the mere natural organic accompaniments of psychical 
 activity or susceptibility. These, of course, we have to begin 
 with : they are the elements, the raw material, out of which 
 the life-product, the finished works of the art of life, are to be 
 made. The successive experiences of pleasures are part of the 
 general experience of life : and as in all experience they partly 
 help to build it up, partly receive correction from it. No 
 single experience is infallible : it has to be confronted with 
 the total idea as its critic, though it serves in turn to suggest 
 a criticism of that idea. What experience thus helps to 
 establish is a bulwark of sound judgement, of laws and 
 general principles, which protect against any casual, desultory, 
 and irregular inroads of experience. So in the case of pleasure, 
 the total and collective experience (i. e. of the individual, as 
 transcending his several moments, and as included in or 
 enlarged by his social medium) corrects the mistaken judge- 
 ments or interpretations of early sensation. For, as has already 
 been said, we live not as a whole at any instant, but by 
 partial aspects and occasional flashes of sensation, here a little, 
 and there a little. And each pleasure is the defined and indi- 
 vidualized pleasure of a moment of one aspect or phase of 
 life. It reveals to us our own nature, but in a partial or frag- 
 mentary revelation : and it is only through a process of 
 constructive comparison that we come to learn what we in 
 a fuller and fullest sense are. Above all, the evidence of the 
 social pleasures is- given towards the doctrine of the social 
 solidarity of human beings. 
 
 Thus the general conception of human happiness will 
 determine the character of the particular pleasures. They 
 no doubt have served to constitute that conception, but in 
 constituting it they have themselves been altered and shaped
 
 v] HEDONISM 367 
 
 in adaptation to the total system. And the conception of 
 happiness is, as Aristotle pointed out, a conception of activity 
 and of activities : of life in short, as actualization, rather than 
 of the pleasant consciousness which attends the actualization. 
 As such it is objective, rather than subjective : rather some- 
 thing done than something felt, or, perhaps, something not 
 merely felt but also done, realized, objectified. The dominant 
 idea is thus not satisfaction, but self-realization involving 
 satisfaction, and involving always a greater and greater 
 degree of self-realization. The end is happiness : happiness 
 is self-realization, but the self which is realized is not the 
 mere self living a solitary life, but a self which, with varying 
 grades of attraction, draws first family, then city, and lastly 
 the whole human kind into the circle of its self-interest. 
 
 Pleasure thus is useful as an index to the line of life ; yet 
 taken singly it is not an infallible index, but one which calls 
 for correction, first by an united and growing experience of 
 the whole individual life, secondly by the coincidence and 
 opposition of other pleasure-experiencers. To this point Plato 
 directs himself in the Philebus. The crude positivist starts 
 with the assumption that every sensation is true and real. 
 A further process of reflection serves to show that to which 
 these epithets are applicable is not the sensation as such, but 
 the interpretation or implication which is given to it. But 
 sensations when thus understood, as they must be in the case 
 of human sensation, are not more true and real than they 
 may be untrue and unreal. Their truth and reality comes to 
 them from their implication and relations, i.e. from their 
 connexion with a context. It is only by an ellipse of language 
 that we speak of a single object as real : it is real only as 
 part of a world in which it acts and suffers. So with 
 pleasures. A pleasure is a species of interpretation an 
 instantaneous interpretation generally of something as a 
 constituent part and parcel of our life and activity : a per- 
 ception or rather a feeling of agreement or harmony, of
 
 368 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 adaptation of environment to self, and of expansion of self 
 without loss in the environment. Such perceptions like all 
 others may err, and may err persistently, as in the case of the 
 stick seen to bend at its point of immersion in the water, 
 or the square tower which at a sufficient distance puts on 
 a round shape. The positive Positivist of course refuses to 
 call this an error of perception : it is, he says, an error of 
 judgement : as if there were any perceptions which did not 
 include an act of judgement and rapid or latent inference, 
 i.e. extension beyond the mere seen to the suspected. And, 
 similarly, he will have it that every pleasure is an ultimate 
 and irreducible real element, an ultimate brick of the set of 
 bricks out of which life is made. There are no such ultimate 
 bricks or atomic (i. e. irreducible and indivisible) pleasures : 
 pleasures like other perceptions are what they seem, i.e. what 
 they are thought to be ; and what has been called real from 
 one point of view, is from another made unreal, i.e. is trans- 
 muted into another fact. Thus arises in the last resort the 
 final or penultimate conception of life, which has been formed, 
 not out of an addition of pleasures, but out of a testing and 
 mutual correction of pleasures in the medium of experience ; 
 where reason, acting on the broad field of time and space, 
 through its synthetic powers builds up a world, a living 
 world, not by putting piece to piece, but by that subtler and 
 higher mode of composition which we may call metabolism 
 and metaphorically illustrate by fire where the very mole- 
 cules and invisible organisms of each constituent are so 
 amalgamated that the result is, as it were, the secretion, the 
 distillation, the organic product of inorganic elements. Such 
 a process of life is the form, idea, or standard by which all 
 future experience of pleasures is dominated : just as the 
 increasing bulk of scientific knowledge and the clearer con- 
 ception of fundamental laws and principle of physical existence 
 come to dominate experience, and serve as a criterion by 
 which alleged experiences of an abnormal character can be
 
 v] HEDONISM 369 
 
 tried. It is true that neither in the one case nor in the other 
 can absolute finality be attained. Not in science, because 
 here the unexplored regions are still vast : new lights may 
 throw into the shade much that is now approved, and the 
 whole system of the physical universe is a moving 1 and 
 advancing equilibrium, of which the sciences have only traced 
 the contemporary form. Still we hold it probable that no new 
 discovery will utterly destroy and annul the old, though it 
 may cause its proud proportions to dwindle and to lose all 
 independent place in the new palace of truth. Nor in 
 conduct : it is perhaps too early to say that all the possi- 
 bilities of human nature have been exhausted and realized, 
 and new ranges of human life may be made acceptable by 
 pleasures hitherto unexperienced, so that the very centre of 
 gravity of human existence will be displaced. Yet here too, 
 probably, the lesson of the past is rather in favour of the view 
 that, though there may be considerable alteration in the 
 general arrangement, the main constituents of human life will 
 retain a place not very different from what they now possess. 
 Thus the moral and social control the physical : happiness, 
 as a general idea of well-led life, of activities perfectly 
 realized, lays down the law to pleasure in its individual 
 appearances. The systematized totality, which is not a mere 
 sum of pleasures, but the organic unity in which pleasures 
 tend to become completely harmonious, is the standard and 
 the measure as against the individual and the occasional. Life 
 organized is the judge as against the several unorganized detail- 
 performances of life. Happiness is the summum loniim as against 
 the single or several pleasures. But the judge is after all only 
 the bUaiov f^v^ov, the law which, partly visible only in the 
 several cases, becomes clear and strong in their organized and 
 systematic grouping. It is not an alien authority, except in 
 so far as the part claims an independence and sets itself out 
 over against the totality and system to which it ought to 
 belong ; in which case the law appears as coercion, constraint, 
 
 Bb
 
 37 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 and compels obedience. And, further, happiness is a law only 
 when and because it has acquired objective and permanent 
 shape, because it is an habitual mode of life, a solidified form 
 of action, an institution. Happiness must no doubt have its 
 seat and centre in the breast : but it will not be happiness if 
 it have not also a permanent visible objectivity. Only as 
 such is it secure and real, protected against the dangers which 
 attend isolated and individual pleasures, against individual 
 recklessness and fluctuations. Thus the demand for happi- 
 ness, if it is not to degenerate into a mere clutching at 
 a maximum of pleasures, and so eventually to contradict 
 and destroy itself, must be regulated by the organization of 
 human life, by its objective manifestation in institutions and 
 modes of life. 
 
 Such a conception of life in its entirety, in its full deve- 
 lopment, in its objective manifestation, in its organized 
 systematization, is what the Greek philosophers understood 
 by Nature. Averts, says Aristotle, is the sum of existence 
 regarded as containing its own rule and origin : it is the con- 
 stitution of the universe and of each thing in it, when that 
 thing has attained the full completeness of its being: it is 
 the normal and thoroughly adapted existence, that existence, 
 as Plato says, which is not mere ova-ia, or reality bare of 
 organization, but the higher reality of the good which rises 
 far beyond its phenomenal existence in power and glory. 
 For Nature, to Aristotle and Plato, is not merely the 
 sum of existence, but the organization and the organizing 
 principle of existence, definable on the one hand as God and 
 the good, doing nothing without purpose; on the other as 
 the multitudinous realm of life and actuality in which all 
 things work together. 
 
 When the early philosophers spoke of <vo-ts, they regarded 
 it, whatever might be their private diversities of interpreta- 
 tion, as a synthetic and organizing matter, principle, law 
 a universal which transcended all the several particulars,
 
 v] HEDONISM 371 
 
 though not itself another particular outside of them, but 
 rather the centrality and unity of all principles and particular 
 phases. It is the cardinal doctrine of Greek thought, as it 
 is the inspiring principle of Greek practice that, over and 
 above the superficial differences and divisions which the con- 
 ditionary forms of time and space force upon our appre- 
 hension, there is a unity out of which these differences can be 
 explained, and by the gradual and fragmentary action of 
 which they arise. Philosophy in fact consists in the effort 
 to realize this unity to transcend these differences of detail, 
 which to the impatient and non-persevering glance seem to 
 be all. A partial philosophy, an imperfect culture, puts its 
 own sense upon the cry, ( Back to nature/ It says, with 
 Thrasymachus its mouthpiece, that the institutions of mankind 
 are only the despotic devices of the few to avail themselves of 
 the services of the many, or that moral rules are but arbitrary 
 lines of demarcation breaking up and keeping asunder what 
 nature has meant to be united. It infers that such institu- 
 tions and such rules will be discarded by the 'advanced 
 thinker ' and the ' intelligent members of society/ If it is 
 mildly sentimental in its love of unity and harmony, it may 
 stop short at a half -mystical, half-sensuous absorption in the 
 charm of undifferentiated and Adamic life, discarding the 
 grosser forms of convention and bathing itself in an idyllic 
 complacency of natural sympathy. If it is more turbulently 
 concupiscent, it seeks fiercer pleasures and more tyrannic 
 usurpations of the means of enjoyment. 
 
 It may, indeed, be said that the exhortation to follow 
 nature is for a moralist but a loose way of talk. The charge 
 is one which may be equally brought against any of the 
 general or abstract forms in which an ethical principle is 
 couched. None of them in epitome are without similar dangers 
 of misuse. And the abuse made by the Sophists of this phrase 
 is only parallel td that which has been made by other 
 moralists of other phrases. There is no one phrase, no one 
 
 B b 2
 
 372 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [v 
 
 idea, which is adequate to convey the content of morality, or 
 ethics would have been settled long ago. As Plato remarked, 
 the idea of good is at least composed of three distinct ideas : 
 and Herbart has treated it as only completely constituted by 
 the synthesis of five. 
 
 But Plato and Aristotle with their Stoic followers, when 
 they clung to the faith that good conduct consists in the 
 life conformable to nature, explained what they meant by 
 declaring that man's nature especially lay in Koivcavia and 
 Ao'yos. According to Plato, human life is essentially com- 
 munity, because its economic needs cannot otherwise be 
 satisfied. Without community none is secure of existence : 
 only in a common organization can the individual life be 
 guaranteed. Such a complete organization is the Kara <j)v<nv 
 oiKicr0eio-a Tro'Ats. But, as Plato goes on, he perceives that his 
 principle changes its aspect, and what he began with as <v<ri? 
 reappears later as the ZSect TOV byaOov. The difference in 
 point of view is significant : it marks the stage at which 
 Greek philosophy tends to emancipate itself from the con- 
 ditions of its time, and enters upon a line of thought where it 
 comes into touch with the higher Christianity. That is, Plato 
 was dissatisfied with the limitations of the conception Nature. 
 Nature, he half feels, is blind, is neither this nor that, is all 
 things at all times, is too much sunk in the immediate and 
 fragmentary, and emerges too little as the ideal or spiritual 
 principle ; for this, though it appears in the visible and 
 temporal organization, is yet never quite exhausted by the 
 actual, but looks before and after, and is not merely the 
 movement in time and space, but the eternal identity in which 
 that movement is only a stage or phase. One can hardly say 
 that in Plato this identity is a self -consciousness ; rather it is 
 the permanent law or outline of movement which the several 
 phenomena of the world partially reproduce, and which the 
 philosopher after long preparatory study may learn to detect. 
 It is the eternal ordinance and co-adaptation of things, which
 
 v] HEDONISM 373 
 
 exists for those, says Plato, who can so train their vision that 
 it no longer sees phenomena merely but penetrates to the 
 truth of things, the ultimate and objective synthesis of the 
 universe, the final laws, which determine man's problems in 
 life and death. To us it would perhaps be otherwise con- 
 ceived. Some would hold it to be but a subjective synthesis, 
 the mere effort made by the individual to put together for 
 his aims and according to his preconceptions the elements of 
 his experience. Others would rather note that the eternal 
 ordinance must be conceived after the analogy of an eternal 
 ordainer : as a self -consciousness which sees its own travail 
 and is satisfied in the work, and which yet is also a npovoia 
 that transcends the actual and is the indwelling spirit of 
 a continuous and intelligent self -adjustment.
 
 VI 
 
 UTILITARIANISM 
 
 ONE great shortcoming of Utilitarianism was that, as 
 K. Marx says 1 , ' it took the modern shopkeeper, especially the 
 English shopkeeper, as the normal man/ But ' he that would 
 criticize all human acts, movements, relations, &c., by the 
 principle of Utility, must first deal with human nature in 
 general, and then with human nature as modified in each 
 historical epoch/ Bentham belonged to an unhistorical or 
 rational age, it is said. Perhaps it would be truer to say that 
 he represents a relative or comparative truth : the truth that no 
 social institution, law, or ceremony can claim to be received or 
 obeyed except in so far as it contributes to produce social wel- 
 fare. He is perpetually at hand therefore with his question 
 Cui Bono ? On nis principles no rule can subsist in authority 
 without being justified by its effects : all rules must be in 
 harmony and co-operation with each and form a system. 
 Hence his proposals for the reform of the law and its 
 codification. 
 
 Secondly, Bentham taught that, when we say society or 
 community, we mean only the individuals forming it, the 
 community being otherwise a figment. Here also there was 
 a truth ; but error, at the same time, had inserted the thin end 
 of the wedge. The truth is, that the community has no 
 universal or transcendent existence apart from its particulars 
 (TO, roTjra iv rots alaOrjTols). The error which insinuates itself 
 is, that the community owes its existence to the conscious 
 
 1 Capital, p. 622, Eng. tr.
 
 UTILITARIANISM 375 
 
 choice or option of these individuals : that they have made it 
 of their own free will, and that at that will they can unmake 
 it, and resume, if they can indeed ever be said to have surren- 
 dered, their independence. This, the common error of the 
 century which culminated in the Revolution, is the error of 
 Bentham, who inveighed against the rights of man. Hence 
 the happiness of the community is only the sum of individual 
 happinesses. And Bentham only avoids seeing the possible 
 opposition between individual happinesses, and hence the im- 
 possibility of treating their relations in the state as expressed 
 by a sum of addition, because he holds a naive faith in 
 the unforced accordance between public interest and rightly 
 understood private interest. It is only in curious and excep- 
 tional cases, cases which wise precautions of legislature would 
 render almost incapable of occurrence, that there will be any 
 serious conflict between the claims of virtue or duty and the 
 impulses craving self-satisfaction. 
 
 But further, when Bentham is asked to explain the mean- 
 ing of Utility, or to what kind of human being certain acts 
 or relations are useful, his answer is, To a being which can feel 
 pleasure and pain. That is what man has been reduced to. 
 The question which settles whether any thing is or is not 
 a subject of ethics, is not, Has it reason ? but Can it suffer ? 
 Can it feel pain and pleasure ? Thus all the reality of life, 
 all its positive aims and occupations, sink out of sight and 
 leave only the mere creature who can be managed through his 
 two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. But here Bentham 
 is kept in company by more than one English writer, e. g. by 
 Mr. Spencer. Pleasure is a ' necessary form of moral intuition/ 
 Pleasure somewhere, at some time, to some being or beings, is 
 ' an inexpugnable element ' of the ' ultimate moral aim/ Only 
 that the later author is so far more careful, and means only 
 that, had man not been a being subject to pleasurable and 
 painful feelings, morality would have had no meaning. Thus 
 instead of saying like Bentham that pleasure is all, we find
 
 376 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 him treating it as a ' necessary form ' or ' inexpugnable 
 element ' oi: morality : a proposition which no school of 
 moralists is concerned to deny, though there is great diversity 
 of opinion as to the place where it comes in. 
 
 "We may perhaps better understand the position of Bentham 
 if we compare him with Hobbes. Hobbes, too, begins with an 
 assumed primitive normal man : but his eye is not so exclu- 
 sively bent on pleasure as that of Bentham's man. The 
 great aim of the Hobbesian crude-man is power, predominancy, 
 self-assertion. He is not content to suffer pleasure or pain : 
 but would fain see the fruit of his soul's three great passions, 
 desire of safety, of gain, and of glory. He is essentially 
 a competitive, quarrelsome, active, and domineering being. 
 Of course Hobbes got his man, as Bentham did, from the 
 society round him : he stereotyped in an absolute and uni- 
 versal form the restless revolutionary man of the English 
 revolution, as Bentham did the placid bourgeois type of the 
 nation of shopkeepers, little anxious for glory, and watching 
 only for comfortable ease. Neither type is fundamental man : 
 and yet as on Bentham's man was built the conception of 
 life which still lingers disconsolate in our Liberalism, so 
 on Hobbes' man was built the theory of sovereignty and 
 authority which has been used at different dates to support 
 the practice of absolute monarchy. 
 
 Hobbes saw man in the stage of criticism, of transition 
 from one system of life to another, in the agonies and 
 struggle of a new birth. The feudal system of personal rule 
 had been gradually centralized : instead of many feudal lord- 
 ships with separate subordinate jurisdictions there had been 
 substituting itself, by a process which culminated in the Tudor 
 monarchy, a concentration of all jurisdiction and power in one. 
 But that one power had retained, as far as might be, the same 
 characteristics which belonged to its divided and local prede- 
 cessors. It was essentially a personal monarchy : and the 
 personal monarchy, though with many signs of coming
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 377 
 
 disruption which the Queen was shrewd enough to note, cul- 
 minated in Elizabeth. With her two successors the prudent 
 via media ceased almost everywhere to commend itself. The 
 democracy, which had uplifted its kings to supreme authority 
 over their nobles, became fully conscious of its sovereignty, 
 and proceeded in a wild outburst of zeal to realize its ideas of 
 right and impose them as a sacred duty on the recalcitrant 
 world around. Each not merely did and thought what was 
 right in his own eyes, but was bent on making others do like- 
 wise. But the prevailing element was the recrudescence of 
 the religious spirit. During the whole of the Middle Ages 
 the individual sense or spirit of religion had been dead, or 
 had only burst out here and there in isolated and therefore 
 heretical fits of personal devotion. The English nation, like 
 the rest of modern Europe, had been converted to Christianity 
 in the gross in battalions and counties according to the 
 influence of the political power. Even when in Henry "V Ill's 
 time it became Protestant, political initiative had a great deal 
 too much to do with the change. But in the latter part of 
 the sixteenth century the reformation movement assumed 
 a more personal subjective character. For the first time since 
 the early days of Christianity religion becomes a real, living, 
 and governing interest in men. But under the guise of 
 religious, or even of Biblical enthusiasm, which made human 
 ordinances ultimately rest for their sanction on divine models 
 (these divine models being differently perceived by Puritan and 
 Prelatist), there was another principle alive the principle of 
 private judgement, of individualism, of anarchism. It is dis- 
 guised, because one party appeals to the written word, the 
 plain witness of honest interpretation, the other to the tradi- 
 tional form, the sanctions of long authority. But both alike, 
 the sacerdotal ritualist and the biblically minded Puritan, 
 were departing from the via media of English tradition, and 
 to each other they seemed respectively to be lapsing into 
 superstition, or to be wandering into religious anarchy.
 
 378 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vr 
 
 It is such an individualistic man, in the stress of contest, 
 casting 1 off allegiance to the old institutions, which yet, even 
 without his will, control his action, that we meet with in the 
 one-eyed and one-sided picture of human nature given by 
 Hobbes. He is far from the primitive or normal man. He 
 is rather a full-grown product of civilization an old civiliza- 
 tion who, not alone, but simultaneously with multitudes, 
 throws off these integuments, and with full-grown faculties 
 proceeds in a competitive spirit to construct a social habita- 
 tion de now. Above all, he is a being in whom self-con- 
 sciousness, self-assertion is abnormally developed : a being 
 who has realized his independence and is bent on carrying 
 it to the uttermost. Such a man is far removed from the 
 primitive being, whose life is largely under the bondage of 
 environment, tradition, family, and social order. He has an 
 individuality, exaggerated and conscious, which to the more 
 primitive types is unknown. 
 
 In some respects the man of the Benthamite age is the 
 very reverse. If in the sixteenth century the effect of 
 renaissance and reformation, of inventions and discoveries, 
 had been to stimulate individuality, to produce a burst of 
 originative and creative genius, the effect of the scientific 
 and philosophical movement from 1680 to 1780 was to 
 generate a common average of convention, culture, and 
 judgement, a well-informed, comfortable, and well-mannered 
 society. The eighteenth century having laid up, as it 
 thought, much capital for many years, was engaged in an 
 effort to arrange the world, evenly, systematically, and agree- 
 ably for its future habitation. It was of opinion, indeed, 
 that kings and priests had too much in their hands, and that 
 they managed the affairs of the world neither wisely nor 
 honestly. But the spread of enlightenment, it thought, 
 would naturally put an end to these pretensions of the secular 
 and the spiritual guides. Only let plenty of light in upon the 
 dark chambers of the law, the civil administration, and the
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 379 
 
 churches, and the melancholy spectres which haunted them 
 would flee away, as in Diirer's picture, and leave the world 
 to enjoy itself. What was the mistake that these worthy 
 reformers laboured under ? It was what we may call a very 
 inadequate conception of the structure of society. They sup- 
 posed that society consisted of a number of separate bits : and 
 as some of these were inconveniently placed, and crowded 
 others a little too much, they expected to make themselves 
 easy by casting- away the obnoxious and unnecessary appurte- 
 nances. This theory was a mistake. As the phrase goes, the 
 social structure is a living- organism, not a mechanism : which 
 means that if some of its parts are removed, the others are 
 seriously affected, and the whole organism may possibly perish. 
 They tended to conceive the social organism after the fashion 
 of animals which are acephalous, without thereby ceasing to 
 live : or after the fashion of others, in which, if one member 
 is cut off, the force of the total organism soon succeeds in 
 throwing out a new member to take its place. In this last 
 point, indeed, they w r ere partly right : but it is necessary to 
 add that such powers only appear in the very elementary forms 
 of social union, and that the theory has not much application 
 to the highly developed states of modern Europe, where after 
 the head has once been cut off, it shows a persistent reluctance 
 to bud out again. And there was another fault in their 
 premises. Those theorists, who thought men would be happy 
 if only governments ceased to trouble and priests to confound, 
 had not realized that, invisible or dimly visible to them, 
 there was a large multitude who looked upon themselves, 
 much as they looked upon their stumbling-blocks. 
 
 The Benthamite therefore imagined that, if the incon- 
 veniences of certain effete institutions were got rid of, man 
 would be left in possession of certain eternal dwelling- 
 houses, where his soul need only consider how for many years 
 it might best eat, drink, and be otherwise merry. He had 
 not realized that the social house in which he fancied himself
 
 380 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vr 
 
 secure for ever, as in a structure of nature, was the work of 
 human minds and hands, that for mankind to live actively and 
 energetically is the business of businesses, without which no 
 pleasure permanently can be secured, and that this business 
 must often be carried on, whether pleasure comes very directly 
 in the work or not. A century of peace for the colonial 
 conflicts with France and other transient brushes in con- 
 nexion with German affairs never seriously disturbed the 
 insular tranquillity had led England to believe that the 
 comfortable abodes, which each man of the dominant middle 
 and upper class had carved for himself in the social system, 
 were founded upon natural rock, and not on something which 
 could only be held up by the same strenuous effort which 
 had been originally necessary to found it. 
 
 In short, both Hobbes and Bentham had been strictly 
 bound down in their conclusions by the immediate data of 
 their age. Their desire to be practically and at once effective 
 made them forget to institute a further comparison, and base 
 their conclusions on a wider experience. They have given us 
 philosophies which are in many respects identical, with this 
 important difference, that Hobbes heads a line which leads to 
 collective and despotic socialism, while Bentham gave fresh 
 impetus to a movement which can hardly stop short of anarchic 
 individualism. Hobbes' main idea is security, organization, 
 power : Bentham's is comfort, convenience, pleasure. 
 
 As against theories like those of Hobbes and Bentham, 
 the evolutionist and historical view of the ethical problem 
 endeavours (i) to get over the confusion of the specimen of 
 one historical period with the normal or natural man, and (2) 
 to lay a deeper foundation for its investigations than they had 
 laid, (i) As specially historical, it brings to our recollection 
 that man and society are in a process of development, which 
 to a large degree takes the shape of continuously growing 
 complication, an increasing multiplicity of elements; and 
 that, as organization grows and extends, there is a strong
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 381 
 
 tendency for a large part of it to go out of sight, and 
 leave in public view only certain portions, which portions 
 thus, to careless observers, seem all that needs be noticed. 
 As we compare civilization with civilization, we find certain 
 general regularities or uniformities of succession and con- 
 nexion in each. Within certain limits, we may say that 
 there is in Greece an age of feudalism and of chivalry; an 
 age which reminds us of the revival of letters ; and an age to 
 which we come so near that we should almost call it modern. 
 We see that at analogous stages of development certain 
 doctrines or ways of looking at life and conduct get pre- 
 dominant. Thus we are led to the idea of a law governing 
 not merely the connexion of one stage of development as 
 a whole with its successor, but also determining the various 
 aspects of a state of society which are at a given moment 
 in correlation with each other. We learn to analyze 
 a given social group or organism into the various organisms 
 which exist within it, and that in considerable independence 
 of each other. We are forced to recognize differences of 
 shading, often very deep, between institutions and virtues, 
 which at a superficial examination looked of one homogeneous 
 piece. Further, we find frequently that social structures in 
 course of time tend to amalgamate into one forms which were 
 originally separate : that e. g. when a number of institutions 
 and ideas compete for existence, the victorious result is not 
 without considerable admixture of elements and only gains its 
 survival by conscious or unconscious adaptation or compromise. 
 Thus, as we go back in history, the number of forms of social 
 Organism does not perhaps so much diminish, as their com- 
 plexity gives place to simpler structures. But we shall be 
 disappointed if we suppose that among the primitive forms 
 we can find the special form, historical or prehistoric, which 
 may be regarded as the parent or ancestor of our modern 
 systems of life, and our modern types of character. The 
 biological attempts at reconstructing the genesis of man have
 
 382 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 led to the conclusion that we cannot trace the descent or 
 filiation in any one historic line to definite ancestors. None 
 of the quadrumana exactly fit the requirements for the 
 ancestor of homo sapiens. The fish cannot be treated as the 
 parent-form of the reptile. So, in sociology, the form and 
 institutions of savage life, either as observable to-day, or as 
 inferrible from the records and monuments of the past, cannot 
 be taken as a historic starting-point for explaining our develop- 
 ment. There is no such continuity as thus implied. For, if 
 this were accepted, then a social group, especially endowed in 
 nature and circumstances, would have to be conceived as 
 ultimately passing over into another organization which also 
 has started from its peculiar faculty and conditions. We 
 cannot suppose Greek civilization e.g. descended from the 
 character and conditions of a non-Greek type : nor need we 
 imagine how, for example, Japanese nature and conditions will 
 show themselves under the guise of occidental modes and 
 institutions. In such matters the lesson of the historical and 
 evolutionist method is that uniformity and identity of develop- 
 ment is a fiction ; that each nation has a law and career of 
 its own, similar in what we may call essentials, but unlike 
 also in conspicuous features, to the law and career of other 
 national types ; and that any national group, which puts 
 on in a freak of admiring imitation the modes and institutions 
 of another of widely different endowment and resources, is 
 surely and rapidly preparing its own dissolution. 
 
 But though our materials are and must for ever remain 
 inadequate for constructing a genealogical tree of human 
 society, they can serve, if cautiously used, to throw light on 
 the mystery of our own development. We can learn from 
 them what may be termed the laws of the structural growth 
 of society, and of the formation of human faculty and 
 character. Not indeed, as has been already explained, that 
 we can directly transfer the law of one period, the causality 
 of one group and age, to determine the law of another. The
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 383 
 
 more we regard the problem of causation, the more we are 
 led to see that the vulgar idea of a knowledge of causes 
 enabling us to predict must be carefully guarded and defined. 
 Popular usage no doubt justifies us in asserting that, once 
 we have ascertained a true sequence of cause and effect, we 
 can transfer our knowledge to any point in the universe 
 we may wish to explain. More reflective habits suggest 
 the practical difficulties in the way of such transference. 
 A cause, instead of being one conspicuous mark or symptom, 
 as it is to the uncultivated, becomes to the scientific or 
 logical mind, a whole group of constituent conditions; and 
 in like manner the effect, in place of being an obvious 
 incident or change, is analyzed into a complex and fully 
 defined group of modifications in some substance or thing. 
 When this change of view has been made in the estimate 
 of cause and effect, it is an easy step to the perception that 
 two strictly identical cases can hardly or can only rarely 
 occur, and that every inference therefore is more or less 
 a mere analogy, to be carefully verified, like any other 
 hypothesis, when it is made to a new and very different case. 
 Thus we can learn in some measure the laws of social 
 evolution : i. e. some general features, as illustrated in par- 
 ticular instances of social change and social interdependence. 
 We may get better to understand the growth of society out of 
 its elements, its general aspects of differentiation and integra- 
 tion ; in other words, we may discover the way in which it 
 buds forth into a variety of outward organs, and then receiving 
 and internalizing these in the individual consciousness, binds 
 them together into a comparatively homogeneous principle, 
 destined however in its turn to repeat the same process. 
 We may even within limits endeavour to get a general view 
 of the historical process over a considerable period, and so 
 far as we can trace a fundamental identity of structure and 
 ideas we may carry our philosophy of history. But such a 
 philosophy has its obvious limits. There are great natural
 
 384 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 divisions in human history, as there are in natural history. 
 Existing history may draw these lines of division somewhat 
 prematurely, and may fix the boundaries at very ill-chosen 
 epochs. The capture of Rome and of Constantinople, 
 the Reformation and the Revolution, may not mark real 
 dividing lines, any more than Salamis and the Catalaunian 
 fields. But as our present knowledge goes and probably 
 for a long time to come we must submit to accept the 
 existence of ethnic and historic groups, which stand out 
 in tolerably clear separation from each other, and of which 
 it is at present impossible to detect any connecting or 
 transition points of importance. It may not be exactly true 
 for us still to say that European history began with the 
 siege of Troy, and goes down from that date in one con- 
 tinuous stream : for (i) research carries us by gradual steps 
 beyond the Trojan hosts to kindred predecessors, and (2) new 
 streams of influence have since then profoundly modified 
 the current of development. But still it remains true that 
 for practical purposes there are streams of history and social 
 life so virtually independent of our European career, that 
 no philosophy of history can at present or for a long time 
 hope to show that one continuous movement has been going 
 on, with fresh tributaries, each bringing its quota, to supply 
 the material of the main stream. 
 
 But (2) the study of history as a process of evolution for 
 human faculty, guided, we may almost say, by the pre- 
 suppositions 1 that 'all the natural capacities of a creature 
 are destined some time or other to develop themselves com- 
 pletely and appropriately/ and 'that in man all those 
 capacities which are directed to the use of his reason only 
 develop themselves completely in the species, not in the 
 individual ' gives a new view of the present intellectual and 
 moral structure of man. The infinite complexity and diversity 
 of human faculty presents itself from the point of view of 
 
 1 Cf. Kant, Ideen zu einev attgemeinen Geschichte.
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 385 
 
 this theory as acquired and transmitted not by natural 
 generation, but by spiritual parentage, by the means of that 
 social and intellectual and moral capital which is stored up 
 by successive generations, but which, if it is not to become 
 a purely dead thing, has to be revivified, or kept vivified by 
 the vital energy of actual men. Such capital is simply the 
 utterance or forth-putting of human energy and formative 
 skill in material things appropriating and stamping them 
 with man's mark : it is the extension of human personality, 
 its realization in an outward or natural world, consisting 
 of human bodies, animals, and other material objects. In 
 such action man expands, differentiates, and realizes himself 
 into a material organism, in literary, religious, artistic, 
 economic and other forms. But man also concentrates, 
 reflects, or redintegrates these material and separate elements 
 he has 'acquired/ or in which he has lost himself and put 
 part of his own life and force. The economic stock e. g. he 
 redintegrates, partly by consuming or enjoying it (frui), 
 partly by using (uti), i. e. energizing it. But always the 
 passive expression, the lifeless acquisition, must be enlivened 
 by the breath of life from the vital agent. The very spoken 
 word, which otherwise disappears, has to be taken up, repro- 
 duced internally, and understood by the hearer. The written 
 words are always only tyavavTa (rvvtroia-iv. The arts need 
 the same spirit which nurtured them originally to keep them 
 away. And the outward ordinances, rites, creeds, holy places, 
 sacred personages of religion need to be assimilated, and made 
 an inner life and feeling by the worshipper, if they are to be 
 more than stocks and stones and vain repetitions. 
 
 Thus we come to throw a new light on the problems of 
 psychology. Since the time of Locke it has become a settled 
 maxim that the true method of philosophical study is the 
 psychological. For the study of logic, aesthetics, ethics, 
 and whatever else may be held philosophy, it was said that 
 the only safe and sure method was to examine our own 
 
 c c
 
 386 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 ideas, arid see what was their original or primary stock : 
 and that thus only we might learn what could be built 
 upon them, how far they could be made to go, and what 
 certainty we could have about their objective application. 
 But by psychology we must be careful first of all to 
 explain that we mean something more than the ultimate 
 analysis of the mental structure. Up to a certain part or 
 point, the study of psychology for man is similar or analo- 
 gous to what it is for the animals. Man, like them, is 
 a being endowed with senses, with faculties of memory, 
 imagination, and something of the nature of intelligence : he 
 has various appetites or attractions towards objects, is sensi- 
 tive to pleasure and pain, subject to impulse and passion. 
 These faculties are directly connected with his special endow- 
 ment of a nervous system, with its central organs in the 
 brain. We are not entitled to say that even in these points 
 he is identically constituted with them : he has what Aristotle 
 called an cuo-flrjriK?/ ^fv^ji, but his sensitive soul, we may be 
 sure, is characteristically his own, though its structure evinces 
 a certain parallelism to that of the nearest animals, just as is 
 the case with his general physical structure. It is further 
 obvious that in this department of psychology, the psychology 
 of the sensible nature in the widest sense, great help is to 
 be had from physiology or that branch of it which is called 
 psychophysics. Indeed it would hardly be going too far to 
 say with Comte as Aristotle himself had hinted in anticipa- 
 tion of the spirit of the Baconian philosophy that unless 
 we can reach the physical or physiological realities, i.e. the 
 molecular movements which underlie and constitute the so- 
 called elementary faculties, we shall get very little better than 
 a verbal treatment, SiaAe/crt/cus KO! KCV&S. In this branch 
 then of psychology we are mainly referred to general bio- 
 logical problems, which here, as elsewhere, are ultimately 
 soluble only by those molecular theories which apply to 
 muscular and nervous movements.
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 387 
 
 The psychology which Locke's Essay inaugurated is on 
 a different level. It is more characteristically human. Not, 
 of course, that we need maintain that any brand-new faculties 
 emerge into view when we come to deal with human nature. 
 The difference of grade is not definable in any such simple 
 way as the intervention or addition of new faculties. It is 
 much more subtle and complex. We may be able plausibly 
 e.g. to show how one after another of the higher human 
 endowments has its close parallel in some animal nature : and 
 yet the total impression and effect may be altogether different. 
 And in {his characteristically human field the field, as 
 Aristotle calls it, of the yorjrtKjj or Aoytfoj ^ux 7 ? the help ^ 
 physiology fails us. We are now concerned with phenomena 
 which cannot plausibly be connected with any peculiarities of 
 nervous structure, any characters proper to the physical 
 organism. And yet here as there introspection, which was 
 the method mainly employed by Locke, leads to no valuable 
 results issues in little better than verbal distinctions and 
 what Bacon calls abstracta. In the literal sense introspection 
 is vain. And this does not simply mean that we cannot 
 observe ourselves, because (i) we cannot both be the agent 
 and patient ; and (2) we alter the fact in resolving to observe 
 it. For perhaps it might be said that we can note it the very 
 instant after, and that instantaneous memory is as good as 
 observation. There is of course a large amount of truth in 
 the remark that we cannot easily observe ourselves : but it is 
 a truth which is equally illustrated by the difficulty of taking 
 our own pulse, or observing the phenomena of one's own 
 physical system, and arises from what may be styled the 
 explosive force of ideas, i.e. the involuntary transmission of 
 vivid sensitive ideas into the motor system. The objection 
 goes deeper. The ' I ' who observes a psychical fact is the same 
 1 1 ' that observes a physical fact. As observer it is distinct 
 from what is observed in one case as well as in the other. It 
 only observes well in so far as it is at once disinterested and 
 
 C C 2
 
 388 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 interested : disinterested, because the object is not connected 
 by any material interest; interested, because the object has 
 become the centre of interest. That is, the object of observa- 
 tion is the resting-point round which observation circles : the 
 object is not carried round at the pleasure of the observer. 
 Hence the object, even if it originates in the current of our 
 own mental life and interest, must be observed in virtue of an 
 act of detachment or abstraction, which sets it apart from us 
 in the ideal field of observation. But as Aristotle long ago 
 remarked, Oecapelv p.ak\ov TOVS TreActs bwapfOa r\ ecturovs. 
 In other words, such self-survey, if it is to come to any 
 good, must be a social survey, i.e. a sympathetic appre- 
 hension through our own feelings of other's acts, and of 
 their feelings through our acts. It is in the mutual play 
 of thought and fancy that light reveals the recesses of the 
 mind : in what Plato sometimes calls StaAeicriKJ/ and some- 
 times "Epd)s, meaning by the former the more reflective 
 unravelling of the common web of humanity, by the latter 
 the more spontaneous and intimate sympathy which must 
 underlie the intellectual discussion, if it is really to penetrate 
 the barriers of self-conceit which keep man apart from man, 
 and is to make the two dialectician fellow-devotees of the 
 truth, counting nothing too dear or interesting if so be they 
 may get at the inner vision of reality. 
 
 If then by psychology we mean an attempt such as Locke 
 made to get at the source and history of our ideas, we shall 
 not learn much by groping in what we choose to call ourselves, 
 and still less by consulting the physiologist as to the nature 
 of our muscular, assimilative, vascular, or nervous system. 
 These things have their place, but we have passed beyond it 
 when we come to consider the characteristically human 
 aspects, the ideas into which the bare natural endowment 
 has blossomed forth. Physiology e.g. will have a good deal 
 to say on the elements of language, on sounds, letters, 
 syllables : but physiology has no say in the problem of words
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 389 
 
 as such, of language. The problem of language only begins 
 to trouble when other questions than those of the physical 
 basis of speech emerge for consideration. 
 
 And now, as we have said that psychology in its first grade 
 will get her real illumination from physiology or psycho- 
 physics, we might say that in this higher grade psychology 
 must seek the help of sociology. But in saying so, we could 
 not fail to note the immense difference of our position in the 
 two cases. Nerve-physiology has not gone very far : but it 
 has a certain amount of consistency, and a certain idea of its 
 method of research. Sociology, on the other hand, is rather 
 a word which denotes a great group of problems waiting for 
 solution than any compact and systematic body of doctrine. 
 Works with the title of Sociology are not unheard of, but 
 they are essays to find the handle of a science, than real 
 exhibitions of its systematic content. What then are the 
 problems which sociology is an attempt to grapple with ? 
 Briefly they spring from the growing perception in the 
 present century that all characteristically human phenomena 
 such as religion, art, science, property, language are social 
 and not individual functions, i. e. that they issue through 
 and are the permanent form of the action of individuals, but 
 of individuals co-operating with each other, forming necessary 
 and natural groups, spontaneously as well as reflectively 
 realizing their personality in that of others. 
 
 But the peculiar function of sociology in this matter of our 
 ideas may be best illustrated from Plato, who was the first, 
 and for long the only one, distinctly to understand its principle. 
 It is impossible to get a clear idea of what the characteristic 
 forces of human nature are by looking within the breast, by 
 introspection : a mere faculty for that matter can hardly be 
 said to be an object of observation at all. Even if we turn 
 to observe the actions of the individual, we are not much 
 further advanced. By what means shall we discover the lines 
 of demarcation between his actions, and how be led to refer
 
 390 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 these actions to principles or parts supposed to animate him ? 
 Evidently our search is completely at sea. We see what 
 human nature is by considering it in its actions (which, as we 
 saw, are only the objectivation of inner motive and character), 
 and considering not the actions of this or that individual, but 
 the actions collectively of the mass of individuals. Such 
 action, recurrent and universal, was, we saw, the real essence 
 of an institution. And in the different social institutions, 
 i. e. the habitual and organized modes of action, we have the 
 revelation of the inner faculty or nature of man, or the 
 realization in visible or perceptible shapes of that imper- 
 ceptible organization which is the germ of all development, 
 the protoplasm which is differentiated and integrated into 
 organs and system. Thus, according to Plato, we see what 
 reason is by looking at the facts of guidance, government, 
 initiative, legislative, executive, and judicial, in the common 
 or political life. In the governmental organ the common 
 function of intelligence, present in some degree in every 
 human being, has concentrated itself : just as the clothes- 
 forming faculty realizes itself first distinctly and obviously in 
 the rise of a tailor class. The institutional form, the social 
 tjlass, is only the outward realization of one aspect, one 
 comparatively independent member of the human organism, 
 when it is, so to speak, written large, magnified, and made 
 uniform, stereotyped. By such objectivation in an organism 
 or institution of its own, the aspect of human nature first 
 realizes its internal unity as also a substantial force. The 
 inward faculty, be it of discernment or of passion, instead of 
 being backed up now and then by some other force, in- 
 cidentally operative with it, receives back into itself the 
 consciousness of its essential unity with the same faculty in 
 a thousand others. 
 
 f ln examining the way by which opinion is formed,' says 
 Mr. Bryce l , f we cannot fail to note how small a part of the 
 1 Bryce, iii. p. 6.
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 391 
 
 view which the average man entertains when he goes to vote 
 is really of his own making. His original impression was 
 faint and perhaps shapeless : its present definiteness and 
 strength are mainly due to what he has heard and read. 
 He has been told what to think, and why to think it. 
 Arguments have been supplied to him from without, and 
 controversy has imbedded them in his mind. Although he 
 supposes his view to be his own, he holds it rather because 
 his acquaintances, his newspapers, his party leaders hold it 
 and his acquaintances do the like. Each man believes and 
 repeats certain phrases, because he thinks that everybody else 
 on his own side believes them, and of what each believes only 
 a small part is his own original impression, the far larger 
 part being the result of the commingling and mutual action 
 and reaction of the impressions of a multitude of individuals, 
 in which the element of pure personal emotion, based on 
 individual conviction, is but small/ 
 
 In this fashion what was originally a mere passing stage in 
 the entire conduct of a human being gradually gains a quasi- 
 independent position. Each nation acquires a psychology of 
 its own : and that psychology locates or sets inwardly in each 
 individual mind a division and hierarchy of faculties, which 
 being at first in each only a mere sketch or potentiality, has 
 come by sympathetic action and reaction to appear in a visible 
 organization, and finally, when consciously reproduced in the. 
 individual, to take rank as a substantive agent in his system 
 of mind. The individual has his possibility or germ, an 
 invisible organization, but not yet differentiated into distinct 
 faculty : as he works with others, plays with them, fights 
 along with them, the points in each which are similar to 
 those in others get, as it were, attracted together, associated, 
 and through this associated body or organ which they produce, 
 they are reflected into consciousness, become internalized, and 
 constitute that second or reflective nature and constitution 
 which is found in every social being after he has been
 
 392 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 subjected to social influences. Society cannot, it seems 
 probable, put into the individual anything which was 
 absolutely without germ or foundation in him before : cannot 
 give him in the literal sense a new faculty. But in an 
 intelligible sense of the words, society does and can give new 
 faculties : that is, society can strengthen what was weak, can 
 lend force from the super-endowed to the sparsely- endowed, 
 can and does create a common capital or stock of language, 
 literature, science, art, method, whereby, as Bacon said, the 
 disparity between natural talents is largely diminished. This 
 is in fact what society means : and a one-sided insistence on 
 this duty or function of society is what is generally under- 
 stood by Socialism. But society, be it remembered, is only 
 a short name to express the sum of the co-operation and 
 mutual modification of influences issuing from individuals, 
 who amid all diversities in detail are similarly constituted in 
 the main. 
 
 The psychology of an individual then is the resultant stage 
 of a process, wherein the native or natural basis of faculty, 
 issuing out and entering into combination with like tendencies 
 or germs in others, is reflected back into the individual con- 
 sciousness with the distinct and definite quasi-independence 
 which it has received in the associated life of the community. 
 At each period of history, therefore, in each organization, or 
 .institution, new faculties are created in individuals. That is, 
 possibilities in them, called forth in new measure, or in new 
 combination, by each variety of circumstances, acquire through 
 reflection and sympathy certain typical and comparatively 
 permanent forms of association, which become so many new 
 species. If it be asked what are the initial or native possi- 
 bilities out of which all this variety is generated, the only 
 answer is that as yet we cannot completely tell. Human 
 life is self-realization, and its law self-realization through 
 society. Till the end of that process is reached, it would be 
 rash to offer a complete list of the initial faculties, the
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 393 
 
 rudimentary basis. Indeed, it would not only be rash, it 
 would be impracticable. We only see these faculties when 
 they have ceased to be natural, spontaneous and rudimentary : 
 when they have become reflective, formed, and magnified 
 into specific organs. To use the latter aspect to describe 
 the former would only lead to misconceptions. 
 
 On this point the ancient philosophers were probably more 
 cautious than some of the modern. They recognize that the 
 human faculties, moral and intellectual, are so many eeis, 
 or habits, acquired and formed powers, stereotyped abilities, 
 which result from a fyvaua] bvvap.is. Of what that natural 
 potentiality or germ is in special cases, they do not give any 
 systematic explanation. Of one point they are sure, that the 
 absolute presupposition of all moral and intellectual faculty, 
 the apx'n, is reason or vovs : that originative and systema- 
 tizing faculty which, when it has become differentiated and 
 organized by objective utterance into a reflective shape, is 
 called Xoyos. On this ultimate basis, a differentiation takes 
 place by the division of two groups of organs what in 
 modern language we call the sensory and motor nerves, 
 what in Greek psychology are known as aladrja-Ls and o/>eis. 
 As to ala-drja-Ls, they follow the popular distinction into five 
 organs : as to opets, they are less clear, till at any rate the 
 Stoics lay down the fundamental bp^ri as the impulse TO tavrov 
 Tiqpelv. The moderns, on the other hand, have till quite 
 recently contented themselves with classification. But classifi- 
 cation is, in its commoner form, only the preliminary of science, 
 and a preliminary which advancing science has to correct and 
 sometimes to discard. The real science of psychology has the 
 further business of explaining the diversity of faculties by 
 showing how it has arisen. In that task it will probably 
 derive some help, as we have seen, from those experimental 
 researches which touch upon nerve physiology. But in dis- 
 tinctively human psychology it will gain much more light 
 from the study of phenomena which are sociological, which
 
 394 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vi 
 
 consist, that is, in the action of human beings on each other 
 in a social body. 
 
 In attempting to trace the process of mental evolution, 
 then, care is required to prevent exclusive notice being given 
 to one side or factor in the process. We must get a clear 
 view of social process, social action, social organism. Man 
 forms himself, i. e. his mind, his speech, his manners, his 
 law, his wealth, by his own action ; but that action is a social 
 action. Nor again is society an agent supervening upon 
 man, giving him by its organs what he had not before. 
 Society and its organs and institutions are simply human 
 beings in action, uttering their possibilities, but uttering 
 them under the law of intelligence, sentience, or sympathy, 
 which prevents the individual from being a mere individual, 
 and forces him to act, at first with the bare sense or feeling, 
 then with the clearer feeling, then with the more conscious 
 intelligence of intuition, and lastly with the comprehension 
 of the general principle, as consciously objectified rule or law 
 (Ao'yo?). But it is man the individual, who is the vehicle of 
 all that social sympathy and solidarity : and while the influ- 
 ence of the circumjacent multitude is continually reducing 
 this to a common rule, a hard and fast law, there is 
 a tendency in the individual to step further, to start on 
 a fresh course. 
 
 This view of the relation of man's ideal nature to his real 
 social environment that environment being itself created 
 under the influence of physical conditions by those who live 
 under it leads us to say a word on differentiation and 
 integration as factors or rather as stages of development. 
 Differentiation and integration correspond respectively to 
 what in the Hegelian system are called the stages of reality 
 and ideality. Just as a seed may be said to integrate into 
 a simple sum or expression what in the real plant has been 
 differentiated into a multitude of organs and structures, so 
 we may call the seed the vehicle, which contains idealiter
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 395 
 
 all that the plant was realiter. But this description applies 
 in a higher sense to social and human evolution. There, as 
 we found, the germ of social life, which is present in all the 
 members of a group just because of their common humanity, 
 appears in the realization as an external structure, falling 
 into parts and organs, liable to assume a certain independence 
 of each other. In the consciousness of the members, at least 
 of some of them, that organization is reflected, but reflected 
 not in parts, but in its totality, or whole function : and thus 
 is invested with a unity it did not to the outward sense so 
 obviously possess. On all its members indeed the institution 
 exercises a silent influence, moulding their thought and 
 temper in definite ways, creating as it were new faculties, 
 giving powers of apprehension and resolution not originally 
 found by the individual in himself. It is so with language, 
 religion, morality, economic fact. They deposit in the indi- 
 vidual mind habitual or customary modes of conception, 
 forms of feeling, laws of thought, conditions of action, which, 
 though not consciously perceived in their general or ideal 
 form, still mould and constitute the whole scheme of life 
 and conduct. 
 
 But in almost every society a further circumstance and 
 source of action has to be taken into account. The even level 
 of the society and the uniform and unanimous course of 
 development is interfered with by two influences. First, by 
 contact with foreign societies. Plato and Aristotle sometimes 
 talk of isolating their ideal community from all external 
 influences. And this might possibly be a commendable plan, 
 if we could accept the practicability of their hypothesis that 
 an ideal state, perfectly planned and equipped, could be set on 
 foot at once with all that is essential to it. But the evidence 
 of history teaches too clearly that, although there are periods 
 to which the epithet of degeneration and declension can be 
 applied in a relative way, they do not subvert the general law 
 of human history that acquired or permanent faculties are
 
 396 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vr 
 
 evolved out of the yet slumbering potentialities of nature to 
 meet the requirements of a perpetually changing environment. 
 Thus the ideal becomes a problem, not a fact : the summary, 
 in a provisional way, of the future convergence and com- 
 pletion of tendencies, of needs and of powers, which are yet 
 in their infancy: a preliminary anticipation of the path and 
 the landscape to some distance beyond the range which is 
 actually visible or has been actually surveyed. 
 
 It is then in the contact between group and group that we 
 find the first cause which breaks up the general level and 
 monotony of life, and initiates what we call progress. The 
 dweller on the borderland, less immersed in his social system 
 as a natural ordinance, sees it more and more as a whole, and 
 in contrast with surrounding ideas. One need only point to 
 the rapid movement of ideas which characterizes colonial life, 
 or to the anti-conservative tendencies of commerce. But also 
 in the group itself there emerge differences. With all the 
 sameness of humanity, which leads to identical institutions 
 and manners, as it leads to a common language, there is also 
 a radical individuality in each member of a group, which gives 
 rise in each to a different combination of what we may call 
 the fundamental impulses and powers of human nature. Thus 
 each ultimately may be said to understand and appreciate the 
 social institutions in a way of his own. Thirty millions e. g. 
 are described as speaking the same language. But unless that 
 group form literally as well as figuratively a single family, 
 living together in identical circumstances a condition which 
 the numbers render impossible and which could only be carried 
 out with a small tribal union there will be all shades or 
 degrees of difference embraced under that surface agreement. 
 Possibly each individual, and in a clearer degree each family 
 has an individualized language of its own. Every profession 
 has its own technical phraseology. Things hardly change 
 with us so rapidly as they are alleged to do in certain hunting 
 tribes, where a new generation grows up with a language of
 
 vi] UTILITARIANISM 397 
 
 its own. But unquestionably in any larger group, where 
 pronounced habits of life and thought mark off some im- 
 portant section, dialects are formed which insensibly come 
 to effect the main tongue. Where a large portion of society 
 engages habitually in pursuits and is conversant with insti- 
 tutions which belong to the vicious and semi-vicious range, 
 such as the criminal classes, the demi-monde, and the betting 
 and sporting world, we find a large development of slang or 
 argot, and its incursion into literature. 
 
 So it is in every social organ and institution. The normal 
 or average level is a conventional estimate which, as Hume 
 remarks, we use for the purposes of social intercourse. When 
 I speak to you, I assume that we use the same language and 
 speak vocables which bear only one sense, else mutual under- 
 standing would be impossible. But experience obliges us 
 to admit that our hypothesis is never perfectly realized, 
 and that in many cases the fact very widely departs 
 from the hypothesis. Psychically, no less than physically, 
 each man hears a different language : because to hear it he 
 must reproduce it by his own psychical organs, which are 
 developed in each individual under influences more or less 
 different. Nor is a perfect understanding to be secured by 
 the discovery of what is termed a philosophical language. 
 It is possible no doubt to mend matters. But the root 
 of the evil lies in other causes than the mere words we use. 
 And a nearer approach to a remedy lies for each in the effort 
 to realize and recognize his limitations as well as those of 
 others, and to accustom himself as early and persistently as 
 possible to shun the habit of resting content with words as 
 ultimates. 
 
 But it is in the existence of these differences and these 
 mutual disabilities that the hope of progress for finite beings 
 lies. If all merely and entirely agreed in everything, this 
 would not go far to prove that their consensus was right and 
 truth, unless we start with the assumption that their voice was
 
 398 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the voice of God. The agreement which proves truth and 
 right is not such a mere abstract agreement and nothing more : 
 it is an agreement which admits of differences and even 
 antitheses, but in which these differences tend to find, if they 
 do not actually find, reconciliation. The vox populi, which 
 is the vox Dei, is not the cry of the mob where ten thousand 
 shout as one. It is the voice which, out of difference and 
 disputes, tends more and more to display itself as the one in 
 the many, the ultimate identity which issues out of difference, 
 and which has embraced all that was worth keeping out 
 of these antithetic sides. 
 
 Thus progress is achieved through the formation of new 
 and divergent institutions. In the larger group a smaller is 
 inserted and this grows as did the other. A new factor 
 germinates in an individual mind, i. e. through some variation 
 which arises fortuitously or spontaneously (so far as our know- 
 ledge goes) in the general endowment of some group of the 
 human species. But such an original, though unique, is not 
 altogether alone. The same ideas which have forced them- 
 selves upon him will force themselves by degrees on a smaller 
 or larger number who in the particular point feel and see 
 like him. Feeling and acting with considerable uniformity, 
 they mark themselves out as an association, and create for 
 themselves an institution. But the process does not stop 
 here. If, as it may happen, the ideas and aspirations are 
 local, personal, and of temporary interest, the institution 
 will gradually disappear. But in proportion as they are 
 universal, essential, and permanent, they pass into even wider 
 and wider circles, until finally they become an institution of 
 the whole group, and mould the character of every member 
 in certain forms of thought, feeling, and action.
 
 VII 
 
 THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 
 
 SOCIALISM is one of the f lsms/ It indicates a tendency 
 and a propaganda in some direction, rather than an accom- 
 plished fact or a definite doctrine. Our humanity has been 
 compared to the ' weary Titan/ As he tosses on his uneasy 
 bed or struggles along his toilsome way, one ache or pressure 
 or stumbling-block seems abnormally hard to bear. And as 
 this particular Titan has many heads and many hands, there 
 may be simultaneously more than one misery to shrink from, 
 more than one trial to encounter. But in each age there are 
 some wants that are felt in many breasts at once, and 
 a common cry rises more or less clearly from a multitude 
 of throats. The age feels its wants, but it does not always 
 clearly understand what they are, and still less has it clear or 
 distinct ideas of how they are to be relieved. 
 
 Socialism is the evidence of such a felt defect the 
 symptom of an unquestioned evil. But it is far on that 
 account from being a definite conception either of the evil, 
 and of its causes, or of the mode by which these evils may 
 be eradicated. More than that : two further considerations 
 serve to complicate the question. First, it is no easy problem 
 to probe the mysterious paths of social operation, and only too 
 easy or probable that the inquirer, unless endowed with grave 
 judgement and practised skill, may rashly lay hands on 
 agencies that are not to blame. Second, in the concatenation 
 of human life, it is barely ever possible to keep the many 
 strands asunder, which as left to themselves cross and recross
 
 400 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 each other's path and actually unite for considerable lengths 
 into a single thread. We label these strands by various 
 names : religious, political, artistic, economic, legal, industrial, 
 scientific, and whatever others there may be. But, as it 
 has been said, the subtilty of nature is too much for the 
 subtilty of our dialectical distinctions. The real world does 
 not conform to our academic precision. 
 
 So it is always with ' Isms/ They are a battle-cry, a watch- 
 word, a catchword : but they are not the names of any 
 definite idea. Their force even depends on a certain necessary 
 vagueness, and their ill-defined forms stand out provocative 
 of curiosity and interest as they loom through the mist. 
 They are none the less real or vital on that account. But 
 they are the more dangerous to meddle with, alike for their 
 admiring followers and for their critics and foes. They are 
 never phantoms and fancies, however blurred their outlines 
 may be in the darkness. And they are seldom as fair or as 
 foul as they are dreamed to be. Each of them in its turn 
 gathers under its name hopes and aspirations, hates and 
 horrors, from the other quarters of the souls of those who 
 adopt this battle-cry. The best ideals and the foulest 
 desires may and do come to shelter themselves under the 
 cover of the dominant idol of man's devotion. 
 
 It has not been long since the word Socialism with its 
 companion Communism was first heard, just about half a 
 century. In a way the thing, i. e. the feeling or craving 
 which the word implies, is much older. And whence comes 
 that feeling or craving? From the beginnings of recorded 
 time man has been a social being, has lived in and formed 
 what has been called society. He has been linked to his 
 fellow-humanity by sympathy, by language, by reasoning, by 
 common endowments, by natural dependences and artificial 
 ties, by war and by peace, by arts and industries, by religion 
 and by science. This social solidarity remains, as it was, 
 a natural fact, which cannot be altered, though it may be in
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 401 
 
 part ignored. But on a grand scale the history of our race, 
 and in miniature the history of each individual, shows another 
 process going on. The child who began as almost a part 
 of the parental group, and in childlike unity with his brothers 
 and sisters, gradually passes out into independent life, and in 
 many cases becomes a stranger to those who were once near 
 and dear to him. In the greater world the cares of daily life 
 and the self-preserving effort which has been painted as 
 a ' struggle for existence/ make each individual more or less 
 become a self-centred and self-seeking unit, who in his 
 habitual mood is apt to forget his common humanity. Each 
 finds his own narrow groove, and inhabits his own peculiar 
 den, whence he comes forth only as duties and pleasures 
 require his temporary exit. Or, if we modify this too strict 
 picture to commoner fact, the individual is by the effect of 
 circumstance, of momentary passions, of partial interests, 
 bound up with a few others in some local, petty, particular 
 league, serving only immediate, limited, accidental ends. 
 It is still self-seeking which governs him : but it is the self- 
 seeking of a clique, a party, a section. 
 
 Against such a fractional existence, such a surrender of the 
 human birthright which in early life seemed so indefeasibly 
 ours, there keeps rising up, from time to time, a protest in 
 every heart that has not altogether lost its humanity. We 
 may sink the man under the office, the title, the shop, the 
 costume, the civic and social badge, but though he is silent 
 and even the eyes bear no sign, it would be rash to infer that 
 nothing has been left but a form of clothes and of ceremonial. 
 And even if there be those whose soul is dead within them, it 
 remains true that there are others in all ages of history and 
 of human life who revolt against the worship of temporary 
 idols and local divinities, and bid man again remember that 
 Allah alone, the living, the self-subsisting, is one God, that he 
 has made of one blood all upon the earth, and that ' a man 's 
 a man for a,' that/ The sense of human brotherhood revives 
 
 Dd
 
 402 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 in them : they feel the cords of sympathy drawing hard 
 through all the entanglements of selfishness. 
 
 But here a divergence makes its appearance between these 
 aspiring souls who seek to rise above divisions and partisan 
 littleness. Some of them, content in a kind of hopelessness 
 or careless because the object of conflict seems so unimportant, 
 would leave the real divisions alone and seek refuge in the 
 life of the spirit, the inward peace, the ideal calm. They 
 see or seem to see through the contentions, the separations, 
 the hollow relationships of the visible life into the ever- 
 lasting repose, the beatitude of that indwelling of the spirit 
 with itself, which is at the same time its intimacy with the 
 world of all human souls and with God. And when we say 
 spirit, we mean no more or less than that human, central 
 unity of being which is the deep source of all noble, simple, 
 honest life, and of all the warmth of real human love and 
 heart. Such is the Mysticism, such the Quietism, in which 
 men of purer natures and more limpid founts of life have 
 dwelt in the company of others like themselves, and, seeing 
 events sub specie aeternitatis, have recreated, were it only in 
 a gorgeous vision of faith, that heaven which is the true 
 home of the soul. 
 
 But such men were ever a select few, and the ages grow 
 less and less favourable to their ecstasy. The eye of faith no 
 longer penetrates the distance so boldly to find its home in 
 God. Man has become more and more convinced that the 
 divine must dwell among us, that it must be realized on 
 earth as in heaven, and realized not in the heart merely, 
 but in tangible and visible forms. Or, to put it more 
 definitely, the enthusiast, whose glance passes through the 
 dividing shams to the underlying unity, is not content to 
 build that long-lost heritage of humanity in the spirit only ; 
 he will not tamely submit to the actual fragmentariness of 
 life, content, if so be he can still enjoy the comforting sense 
 of its ideal wholeness. He protests against the breaking-up
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 403 
 
 into fractions of human unity and demands its restitution. 
 He criticizes the casual, unsystematic, inharmonious character 
 of the minor groupings which actually prevail ; he shows how 
 they are not duly dovetailed into each other, and that they do 
 not tend to converge and form any collective universe of life : 
 he condemns the inequalities which by slow accumulations 
 have shut many men out of the common sunlight of humanity, 
 and forced them either to cower despairingly under falling 
 hovels, or to entrench themselves defiantly in palatial prisons. 
 He demands that the social basis of human life and action 
 shall be realized, not as a mere general supervision and police 
 of occasional interference, not as a system of laws which, 
 when definite acts against the common weal have been traced 
 to their author, shall restore the balance and the status quo 
 ante, but realized as a reasonable organization, which watches 
 so carefully, so closely, so wisely, that every part of the social 
 machine shall never fail to keep in mind its social duty, that 
 no part shall be other than an individualized organ or 
 missionary of the whole, that no stagnation, no block, no 
 purely special or local movement shall arise to mar the 
 uniformity of action. Natural laws, he will admit, tend after 
 all to compensate all divergences, to bring all selfishness to 
 become in the end the servant of the common good : a law 
 other than the conscious motive of their actions and business 
 constrains individuals and parties to further the general 
 organism. But the process, he complains, is slow and costly : 
 and meanwhile many a sigh, many a death, many a torture 
 has to be endured, which a reasonable method of organization 
 might have prevented. The world must band itself together 
 to enforce on each by the instrumentality of all that he is 
 nothing, and has nothing, except his moment's life and work : 
 that all else, which through the gift of nature, through the 
 process of history, is gathered and kept around him, is 
 a common stock, which, as the poet says, 
 
 ' Nulli manciple datur, omnibus usu.' 
 D d 2
 
 404 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 Such ideas, like all ideas, are not first heard from those 
 who are deepest in the social slough, who are in the greatest 
 measure disinherited of the common goods of social life. It 
 is from observers, not utterly merged in the social whirl, nor 
 yet quite untouched by its revolutions, that come the first 
 words demanding a renovation of the order of human life. 
 Such voices, indeed, had been heard, ' rari nautes in gurgite 
 vasto/ here and there from age to age. But it is only 
 in the present century that the catena of the witnesses of 
 socialism becomes continuous. First comes Henri, Comte de 
 Saint Simon, a survival of the old chivalry, but in a new 
 medium of finance, a knight errant of the industrial age. 
 His life and it is that which fits him to interpret his 
 generation runs on from the time of Louis XV through the 
 Revolution to the Empire and the Restoration of the Bourbons. 
 The Revolution had hurled the old system from its founda- 
 tions and broken it to fragments : but it had founded 
 nothing, and left nothing permanent, except a code. But 
 a code is but scanty furnishing for an empty house l . And 
 Saint Simon, already past his prime in the days of the 
 Empire, a broken-down but indomitable hearted man, gave 
 utterance to a dream, which drew around his declining years 
 some of the finest youth of intellectual promise in France. 
 And that dream? That the industrial chiefs, the great 
 bankers, financiers, capitalists, who really ruled the world 
 from their quiet bank -parlours, should assume the real duties 
 of their function, should become true captains of industry, 
 leaders of men's movements, because concerned with that 
 aspect of life, the economical, which is the basis of all else. 
 And beside and behind these magnates, whose practical skill 
 and mastery in the art of manipulating men pointed them out 
 
 1 The important question, according to St. Simon, is not about remodel- 
 ling the powers and forms of government, but the law which cvnstitue les 
 proprietes et qui en regie (exercise. The natural means of reaching liberty is 
 reconstituer la propriete. St. Simon emphasizes bonheur instead of justice et 
 raison.
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 405 
 
 as fit to take the place of an effete feudalism, stood the men 
 of science and art, the disciples of Newton and Raphael, 
 throwing- rays of sweetness and light into the harder and 
 darker money-souls, intermediaries as it were between the 
 practical agent and the celestial source of wisdom and 
 kindness. The disciples who drank up these suggestions, 
 and who remembered their master's dying words, that 
 ' Nothing great is ever done without passion/ rushed with 
 the headstrong and fantastic eagerness of converted youth to 
 carry out their mission. Youthful extravagance, and the 
 friction between warring ambitions, soon burnt out their 
 flame, and many of the inspired apostles of the Saint 
 Simonian Church cooled down into sober citizens and practical 
 utilitarians. But, even though the propaganda failed in 
 immediate reformation, it left everlasting seeds, and began 
 a permanent ferment. It created the dream of an organiza- 
 tion of social life on a single, and that a real basis, not 
 a fiction legitimated only by its antiquity. It maintained 
 for natural capacity the rights of free development, and of 
 just retribution for service done. And besides justice, it 
 preached fraternity as its new Christianity a Christianity 
 of this world, which holds true religion to consist in all 
 work aiming at ameliorating the condition of human kind. 
 
 These were the ideal aims of this Aristocratic Socialism, 
 which creates a new feudalism, an industrial feudalism of 
 light and leading, binding the capitalist to be the bene- 
 factor and the guide of his workman. It was a dream, but 
 a dream of that glorious age of French Romance when 
 Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand saw like high visions 
 of the possibilities for human nature, if only it lived freely 
 and openly by its self-appointed ideals. 
 
 The next step in the march of Socialism is on a humbler 
 level. A little younger than Saint Simon, but of far other 
 origin : a petty shopkeeper's son, himself a shopman and 
 commercial traveller, Charles Fourier was especially impressed
 
 406 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 by the unnecessary frictions, the senseless competition, the 
 commercial struggle for life, which went on around him, and 
 which were due, he thought, entirely to the present absurd 
 arrangements which broke men and women up into separate 
 families, and forced each person throughout life, not merely to 
 retain the partners of their original choice, but to follow one 
 trade and one only from year to year thus sinking deeper 
 into an isolation from all other human beings, finding life 
 more and more monotonous in his narrow routine, and fretting 
 his soul in a base endeavour to overreach his neighbours. The 
 ideal of Fourier is Harmony, in which competition is trans- 
 formed into emulation, friction into co-operation, and work 
 becomes veritably play. This magic change follows attention 
 to the fundamental laws of human nature the law of 
 passional attraction. The ordinary life proceeds on the 
 assumption that man is a monotone a being of a single and 
 consistent wish. In truth, says Fourier, he is a twelve- 
 stringed instrument in his normal fullness, and admits of all 
 possible variations in the strength of the various impulses, 
 the combinations or groupings of these impulses, and the 
 dominant moods which regulate their play. Hence to let 
 these aspects of a many-sided human nature have free course 
 and realization, a new social order must appear, in which vice 
 will disappear because only due to natural bent which man's 
 misplacement has turned into a curse. To that end the mono- 
 gamous family must go, and in its place must arise a social 
 unity of larger numbers, some 2,000 souls, old and young, 
 who shall form a phalanx of the new social army. In 
 each such group where likings, varying from hour to hour, 
 determine each man's work and his companions, and where 
 ingenious arrangements take its sting from the primitive 
 curse of labour, a combined organization, freely built up by 
 natural impulse, aims at the production of some species of 
 product : and as the whole world will one day be covered 
 with similar phalanxes, each engaged with zest and skill on
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 407 
 
 a special product, the adjustment of one canton's product to 
 another will flow from spontaneous harmony of passions, and 
 hardly need any interference from the titular omniarch, who 
 sits ruling- the nations from Constantinople. When the loss 
 due to war, friction, and irregular production is thus removed, 
 the wealth of the world will fabulously mount. But let us 
 do Fourier the justice to say that, if he had these gallant 
 visions of future weal and wealth, he was consistent enough, 
 at least in his earliest work, to dream that, as a glorious 
 aurora rose triumphant in the northern sky, the harmonious 
 world would find nature's fauna equally ready in the service 
 of peace and increase. 
 
 A fantastic dreamer, doubtless. But the fantastic element 
 may in part be easily discounted, and was so by his early 
 followers. What remains? A first systematic attempt to 
 show the mechanism of the appetites and propensions of 
 human nature, and to claim for man's senses their right 
 to a beautiful, fit, and harmonious environment, instead of 
 the present hideousness which stares upon us from a dress, 
 manners, and habitation which have no living relation to the 
 beings they enclose. A protest against the selfishness of life, 
 and a plan, capable no doubt of much amendment, for making 
 freedom of social intercourse and expression of public spirit 
 a possibility. And thirdly, a plan for giving to talent, to 
 capital, and to labour, a proportionate share in the social 
 product : a plan which puts labour decidedly first, capital 
 second, and leaves talent largely to that self-approbation 
 which must always be its main reward. 
 
 Out of these two prophets of socialism comes all that is 
 pictorial in its literature, distinct in its conception of the 
 future society, attractive to the needs of the human heart, 
 and inspiring to the souls who here and there aspired to an 
 ampler life, a less selfish companionship. But as yet the 
 mission had only touched these higher souls, in France, in 
 England, in America, and in Germany, who felt dissatisfied
 
 408 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 with the chaos and coldness of life, and with the wayward 
 ignorance and hopelessness of the masses. The next step 
 required therefore was to popularize the ideas, to give them 
 a more artistic grouping, and to bring them into closer 
 contact with the ordinary needs and conceptions of common 
 men. That was done by the social Romance of Cabet. Here 
 a communistic state was portrayed in its supposed actual 
 working in some as yet undiscovered land beyond the 
 Atlantic. It is a nation entirely composed of working men 
 and women, but where the working-day never extends beyond 
 seven hours, where each worker feels that he or she is a public 
 functionary, no less than if he or she is invested, as may any 
 day happen, with the official titles and duties of authority. 
 It is a land in which all that comfort and care, all that 
 co-operation can accomplish, has been attained. Woman, the 
 ouvriere and there are no ladies who are not ouvrieres is 
 acknowledged in every family to be the social queen : and 
 family life runs on sweet and pleasant throughout, as it does 
 in our present world only in its halcyon days. Strict but 
 gracious decorum prevails in every province of life, maintained 
 by an imperious order, which, like a predestined fate, fears no 
 obstruction and is strong with the strength of the universal 
 will. A wise directory sees that everything is done as reason 
 and justice demand, and as secures the common good. Every 
 step in life from beginning to end is taken under the direction 
 and by the measures of the public authority. The child is, if 
 possible, ushered into the world in a hospital : and early 
 education, uniform for all, and the same for both sexes at 
 first, is traced out by comprehensive orders of council. The 
 choice of professions is conducted under official supervision, 
 and, if need be, determined by examination. Every branch 
 of industry is fixed as regards its extent and conduct by 
 regulation from above, and the whole social capital is the 
 property of the community, which must directly command its 
 administration. The dress, the food, the hours of meals, are
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 409 
 
 all the subject of regulation lists, which are the fruit of the 
 best consideration which science and experience can give to 
 these problems. Courtship is by no means conducted in 
 a corner, and celibacy is the subject of severe reproach. Art 
 and letters are under a moral and political censorship, which 
 forbids e. g. the exhibition of the nude, and allows only an 
 official press, suppressing the firebrands of journalism. 
 Government is conducted in the fullest light of public 
 criticism, and no excuse of need of diplomatic secrecy or 
 reasons of state tolerated for an instant. And as for religion, 
 why, though heaven and hell are convenient beliefs for the 
 wretched who look onward to compensation for themselves 
 and their oppressors, they are meaningless in this Icarian 
 community, where religion is replaced by an ethical system, 
 'sans ceremonie ni pratique qui sente la superstition.' At 
 last comes the end of life, and the deceased Icarian, after 
 finally serving his country by being submitted to dis- 
 section and having the report, nameless, entered in the public 
 register, is dissolved by cremation into his elements. 
 
 Such was the work which its author, a Frenchman, who 
 had lived some years in England, and read Sir Thomas More, 
 put forward to give the imagination of the masses. And, 
 ever since, the pictures of that romance in spite, be it 
 added, of the poor little homesteads which were all that came 
 visibly out of the attempts to realize the Icarian community 
 in Illinois and Iowa these pictures, modified here and there, 
 even illuminated more brightly in parts by later hands, 
 have served as the basis of the portraitures of the Socialist 
 millennium. But if Cabet and his imitators furnish the 
 doctrine of the latter-day things, his apocalypse of the New 
 Jerusalem, we must go elsewhere for the Gospels and the 
 Epistles of Socialism : and pass from the prophets to the 
 evangelists and teachers. 
 
 In the latter half of the reign of Louis Philippe, the social 
 restlessness which had brought him to the crown had
 
 4io ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii 
 
 continued to penetrate deeper and deeper, as his own bourgeois 
 selfishness and stolidity, the prudish pedantry of his ministers, 
 and the general stagnation of political life, made the heart 
 sicker and sicker with hopes deferred. The rosewater 
 landscapes of Cabet might please inexperienced milliners 
 or poetical enthusiasts. The real workman in his times of 
 misery, the thinker considering the false and selfish ends 
 of social ambition, and the agitator, anxious to see his ideas 
 of liberty and justice victorious over the old powers of 
 legitimate monarchy, took a sterner view of the needs of the 
 time of the Condition-of-Europe question. In England, 
 France, and Germany the irritation is at a height. Theo- 
 logians, poets, essayists, politicians, all in various tones 
 discuss the evil, and examine or propose remedies. In 
 England perhaps there is least talking, just because there 
 is most acting. In the early years of the post-Napoleonic 
 period Robert Owen had come forward with proposals for 
 moulding men into happy and productive citizens by a more 
 real, practical, and all-embracing education, physical, moral, 
 and intellectual, and by a co-operative system of labour com- 
 munities. But Owen's work was in the main a personal, 
 practical work, done at New Lanark ; done, it may be added, 
 before his theory had been definitely dogmatized. His 
 theoretical contribution is in quality and real content incon- 
 siderable : and that for two reasons. The first is his own 
 organizing personality, which was everything and every- 
 where : bent, as his phrase was, on forming men's character 
 for them by the circumstances and influences he could bring 
 to bear on them, treating them in short as passively plastic to 
 his wise master-hand. The other reason was his conflict with 
 the instincts and prepossessions nearest to the heart of 
 England : his mechanical system, his calm declaration of 
 favour of a purely reasonable religion, and his proposals 
 towards loosening the traditional securities of the family or 
 domestic relationship. Yet, as has been pointed out more
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 411 
 
 than once, while other nations have developed socialistic 
 theory, England during the second quarter of the present 
 century entered by the Factory Laws on that long series of 
 socialist measures, by which the free will or caprice of indi- 
 vidual owners to do what they liked with their own, even if 
 that own were but the labour-power which they had to sell, 
 was subjected to regulation, inspection, and positive require- 
 ment of beneficial service, in the interest, so far as that 
 interest was understood, of all those immediately concerned, 
 and, in consequence, of the community at large. 
 
 Elsewhere the fires, which corn-law abolition and factory 
 inspection had calmed at least for a time in England, burned 
 vigorously enough, if largely in secret. In the manufacturing 
 towns of Western and Northern Switzerland, in the plains of 
 the lower Rhine, and sporadically in other parts, the working 
 classes were being drawn into associations when they learned 
 their strength and began to realize their wants. Many 
 motives worked together in founding these clubs and secret 
 societies. The most prominent and at first probably the 
 most efficient was the spirit of republican freedom, which had 
 been fostered and flattered in the Great War of Liberation, 
 but which, in the twenty years after Waterloo, had been, by 
 exasperation from within and unwise repression from above, 
 gradually turned into a bitter hatred of the Prussian 
 monarchy, and an ardent desire to see the three-and-thirty 
 princedoms of Germany absorbed in one great free Father- 
 land. Next to this motive was an ideal tendency, to foster 
 a higher public spirit in the federations of the labouring class, 
 to raise their standard of education, and give them a taste 
 for nobler pleasures, social interests of permanent value. And 
 lastly and more potently there was a communistic motive : 
 a desire to level all ranks down to one standard, to eliminate 
 all special authorities and orders from society, and to band 
 the labourers together into the one all-embracing class, which 
 is really no class but the generality.
 
 412 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 The centre of this system of fiery agitation was for a long 
 time Paris. As early as 1 836 a Communist League had been 
 founded there by Germans. Four years later it emigrated to 
 London, where it has since remained, connected with the 
 associations of similar aims throughout Europe and America. 
 In 1846 the League offered a place in its councils to one 
 who according to common report had at length succeeded 
 in founding socialism on strictly ' scientific ' views of the 
 development of the social state. Karl Marx, the most 
 notable and original advocate of these germs of economico- 
 social theory, was then in his twenty-eighth year. In 1847 
 he and his friend Engels issued the Manifesto of the Com- 
 munist Party an appeal to the ' proletarians ' of all nations 
 to combine to overthrow the capitalist party by the attain- 
 ment of political power. But the cry was heard in a desert : 
 and the sanguine anticipations which Marx and other leaders 
 entertained of a favouring juncture in German policy were 
 signally disappointed. The London Exhibition of 1862 gave 
 an occasion to a renewal of the attempt to federate the 
 revolutionary elements among European workmen : and in 
 1864 the International Working Men's Association was 
 founded with a somewhat similar aim. But this associa- 
 tion was a conglomerate of many elements some, like the 
 followers of Mazzini, being quite opposed to Socialism. But 
 the Socialistic element carried the day, and Marx remained 
 practically supreme in the Association till about 1872, when 
 the growing strength of the Anarchist elements at the Hague 
 Congress led to its lapse and the transference of these 
 elements to America. Since that date the strength of the 
 Socialist party has lain in Germany. When Karl Marx died in 
 1 883, the socialist parties of Germany who in 1871 had polled 
 only about i in 40, and in 1877 nearly i in 10 votes, suc- 
 ceeded, notwithstanding the Socialist Law of 1878, in slightly 
 increasing their votes even beyond that proportion. 
 
 But, leaving these statistics which are more pretentious
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 413 
 
 than edifying, and throw almost no light on the real numbers 
 of believers in Socialism, and still less as to what their belief 
 involves, let us return and try to understand the scientific 
 basis on which Marx based Socialism. His chief work, Das 
 Kapital, of which the first volume was originally published 
 in 18^7, is the sacred book of Socialism. The work is 
 incomplete: but, as it stands, it forms the text to which 
 almost socialistic literature of later times is but the com- 
 mentary. In form the work is no treatise on Socialism : it 
 is a criticism of the current political economy and of the 
 capitalist mode of production. 
 
 To understand the position of Marx we must remember 
 that he began life in an intellectual atmosphere thoroughly 
 pervaded by the spirit of German philosophy. Fichte had 
 shown his view of public rights by such utterances as that 
 the State is bound to see that every one is able to live by his 
 labour, and that the blameless poor has an absolute com- 
 pulsory right to support by the State : that mines and forests 
 are properly state property ; and that ' the first aim of 
 hunting is the protection of agriculture and by no means the 
 possession of game/ Fichte had even planned an economic 
 state, where everything was organized for the general good, 
 and not by the individual profit. Hegel in his Philosophy of 
 Law had been equally decided. The trader is virtually a public 
 functionary and servant, and the community ought to see 
 that he fulfils his part. Free-trade requires a general super- 
 vision to mitigate and shorten the periods of violent con- 
 vulsion which arise in the course of natural adjustments of 
 supply and demand. Society has taken the place of the 
 parents and is bound to fulfil their duties to its members, 
 especially the poor, and that not merely by relieving their 
 distress, but by taking steps to save them from the vices 
 which their position, with its sense of wrong, naturally 
 generates. When society is left to its own unregulated 
 activity, the growing interdependence of men upon each
 
 414 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 other leads to the generation, and the more and more rapid 
 generation, of a small class of immensely rich, and a numerous 
 class, depressed in its resources below the normal level of sub- 
 sistence, lost consequently to all sense of law and honesty 
 and honour a rabble, or, as it was afterwards called, a Pro- 
 letariat. In this way it appears that with all its excessive 
 wealth, economic society is not rich enough to suppress such 
 a proletariat. The immediate remedy which Hegel sees is 
 in the revival of the mediaeval guilds and corporations in 
 a form appropriate to modern circumstances. The corporation 
 or guild gives its members a wider family home, a common 
 stock of repute, character, capital, on which he is saved from 
 the oscillations of individual competition, and is trained in 
 a school of at least comparative devotion to a common cause. 
 Isolation of the individual worker leads to a race for riches : 
 and the advantage of belonging to a chartered guild in the 
 light of publicity is to check the tendency to individual 
 prodigality on one hand, or individual lagging behind in the 
 work of industry and commerce on the other. The corpora- 
 tion, limiting what is called the natural right to dispose of his 
 skill as he pleases, really elevates him to be a conscious 
 contributor to a common end. And above the corporation 
 is the State, which keeps the highest common good alive in 
 the several minor or particular associations, where particu- 
 larities are only too likely to harden and ossify. 
 
 It can hardly be wondered at that words like these were 
 as wormwood to the German liberals, as similar doctrines 
 were and are to the extremer free-traders among ourselves. 
 But Karl Marx was not likely to suppose that such functions 
 could be entrusted to the Prussian Government. The real, 
 i. e. the ideal, state, of which Hegel had thus spoken, he saw 
 in quite another direction, and he approached the considera- 
 tion of it from quite another level. All the socialists from 
 Saint Simon and Fourier downwards had poured out con- 
 tempt on the moralist, the philosopher, and the metaphysician.
 
 Vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 415 
 
 To them these were the word-mongers of idealism dealers in 
 some distillation or other from that spiritualist theory which 
 finds its best-known shape in religion. All alike attempted 
 to rule the world by unrealities, by figments. Duties, says 
 Fourier, are only the caprices of philosophers : they are 
 human and variable : but the passions are the voice of nature 
 and God, and the end of all desire, the fullness of happiness, 
 is that ' graduated opulence which puts one above want/ and, 
 through and in it, the satisfaction of all one's passions. 
 Marx does not deal with the basis of life in this popular and 
 grossly materialist way. And yet his materialism is in its 
 own way equally decided. 
 
 The true basis on which all the phenomena of human 
 life, and therefore of history, find their explanation is the 
 economic. Economic needs and the mode of satisfying them 
 are the ultimate factors which in slightly concealed or com- 
 pletely disguised aspects meet us under the names of politics, 
 morals, and religion. The phenomena may seem to hover 
 about celestial regions, to centre on ideas, and to consist in 
 questions of just or unjust policy. But these are illusions, 
 which have been fostered by certain malformations in the 
 economic structure, and which will disappear when once 
 economic phenomena have returned to their normal limpidity, 
 and permit every one to see clearly that man's activity to 
 supply his needs of life is the only permanent fact behind 
 all the phantasmagoria of metaphysics and theology. The 
 relations of labour and its reward are therefore at the basis 
 of all history are the only reality in all history. Behind 
 the history of creeds, dogmas, and philosophies, behind the 
 struggles of constitutional and religious history, behind wars 
 and diplomacy, behind the organization of family and state, 
 behind democracy and oligarchy, behind the developments 
 of art and science, there is the great record of the gradual 
 stages in that process whereby labour became divorced from 
 enjoyment, the means of life from the labourer, and the free
 
 416 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 man in direct appropriation of nature is replaced by a society 
 in which the vast majority are disinherited of the right of 
 direct approach to the means of subsistence, and those who 
 are their reputed possessors are only holders of a bond 
 endorsed by the society of the period. 
 
 There was once a time, perhaps, in primitive ages and 
 backward civilizations, when the members of a little com- 
 munity were all comparatively on a level, and each had his 
 traditional place assigned him in the commonwealth, directly 
 serving it and serving himself, but not dependent on indi- 
 viduals, and so in a modicum of comfort enjoying the sense 
 of independent work. But at the beginning of our European 
 history in the classical period a change had been nearly con- 
 summated, which ended in breaking up mankind into two 
 groups, the slave-holding proprietors on one hand, and their 
 slaves on the other. The few independent members of society 
 hardly count when that form of society reached its climax. 
 This is succeeded in due course by the mediaeval society, with 
 its contrasts between feudal lords and their serfs, and the 
 master with his assistants in the trade guilds. The workman 
 in that period has not acquired his general or abstract 
 character of labourer : and the master is not a mere employer 
 for wages. The relation between the two parties is a personal 
 and human one : the serf does a definite and particular labour 
 in kind, and receives a definite and particular protection : the 
 subordinates in the guild-relation are bound to their master 
 by ties almost domestic. The social character of labour 
 is not veiled in its exchangeability for a money price, 
 and the social relation of the producers not disposed of by 
 a commercial transaction. But these relations are inflexible 
 and narrow, and tend to sink into a mere dependence on 
 particular individuals, where the only gain is that one 
 has a definite master, a definite attachment, and is not 
 a ' miserable ' cut off even from the privilege of being ruled. 
 
 Where Karl Marx really enters fully and with zeal into
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 417 
 
 the history of economic movement, however, is when he traces 
 the stages which have led to the capitalist production of 
 modern times. The rise of the commercial and mercantile 
 class, the progress of industrial undertakings on a large 
 scale, the character given to manufacture by the introduction 
 of machinery, are all described with force and abundant 
 illustration. We hurry on to the denouement. ' Self-wrought 
 private property, resting so to speak on the coalescence 
 of the isolated and independent individual laboui-er with 
 the conditions or means of his labour, is displaced by the 
 private property of the capitalist, which rests on the exploita- 
 tion of the labour of others, yet labour which in form is 
 free. ... As soon as this transformation-process has dis- 
 integrated the old society deeply and widely enough, i. e. as 
 soon as the labourer is thoroughly divorced from the means 
 of existence, then the further step in socializing labour, and 
 in transforming the earth and other means of production 
 into instruments worked by the organized effort of the com- 
 munity in short, the next step in expropriating the private 
 proprietors is taken. What is now to disinherit is no longer 
 the labourer working on his own stock of goods, but the 
 capitalist who gets the work out of many labourers. This 
 expropriation is carried out through the law inherent in the 
 very nature of capitalist production, through the concentra- 
 tion of capitals. Every one capitalist is the death of many. 
 Hand in hand with this concentration or the expropriation 
 of many capitalists by a few, the co-operative form of the 
 labour process grows more and more extensive. Then the 
 monopolizing of capital grows a fetter on the mode of pro- 
 duction, which has sprung up with it and under it. At 
 last the centralization of the means of production and the 
 associative mode of labour reach a point where they become 
 incompatible with their capitalist integument. The integu- 
 ment is burst up. The hour of capitalist private property 
 has struck. The expropriators are expropriated/ 
 
 E e
 
 418 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [VH 
 
 The main work of Marx may thus be said to fall into two 
 parts, a theoretical and a practical. The general purport of 
 the theory is a refutation of the claims of the current economics 
 to be considered a science of the general group of phenomena 
 with which it deals. In this, he on the whole may be said to 
 join sides with the critics who point out that political economy 
 has not risen to the scientific height of surveying its facts 
 from a universal or comprehensive point of view, but has 
 remained immersed in local and temporary aspects of the 
 phenomena in question, treating the present order of things 
 as an absolute or eternal truth, instead of one stage in a 
 process, the whole laws of which form the only adequate 
 object of economic science. In the practical tendency of his 
 argument, however, Marx stands on a somewhat different 
 ground. The pure and abstract historian, if such a creature 
 there be, is content with pointing out sequences, and is 
 cautious in presuming he can detect causes, still more un- 
 willing to profess to foresee tendencies and immanent laws. 
 The human being, who has not so learned to mutilate his 
 mind, is forced to look at things otherwise. To him the 
 past is big with the future. However uncertain may be his 
 footing, he must use it to jump, or at least to step, into the 
 problems that wait for him. They cannot be put off till 
 uncertainty be annihilated. And so, as we saw, Marx, doing 
 his best to gather the drift or normal tendency of social- 
 economic movement, proclaims it as the only light we can 
 have to guide our path and fix in some way the goal. He 
 doubtless erred, as all prophets have inclined to err, in 
 supposing that the end was close at hand, that the process 
 of socializing capital _was all but complete. But a little 
 error in calculation does not seriously interfere with the 
 truth of the general principle. And that principle is that 
 the present line of movement is tending in what may briefly 
 be called a socialist direction. To us, imitating him, the true 
 attitude towards this movement is neither to ban nor to
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 419 
 
 bless it. If we hesitate, as we should, to term it a natural 
 law, a necessity of social evolution, we cannot deny that it 
 is one, a prominent, perhaps the dominant tendency of our 
 modern civilization. Those who fight against it are by the 
 inner dialectic of antagonism compelled to use its own weapons, 
 and undertake its work. They fight in fact not against it, 
 but against the men who advocate it. Just as the heathen 
 sages and kings sought to stay Christian progress by evincing 
 the inner Christianity of the Pagan theology, just as the 
 conservative defeats the radicals by showing that, on occa- 
 sion and in his heart of hearts, he is more reforming than 
 they, so Prince Bismarck outbids the socialist by a series 
 of laws enforcing the very duties which the workmen's unions 
 have been aiming at. The good landlord and the bad, almost 
 equally, though by different modes of motion, support the 
 socialist argument. Every syndicate formed to regulate the 
 price of a commodity, in a particular interest, shows the 
 imminence of socialization. The more our individual and our 
 collective welfare hangs upon vast congeries of machinery, 
 partially dependent of each other, and beyond individual super- 
 vision and control except for selfish and, it may be, sinister 
 ends the more a collective, i.e. a centralized administration, 
 is necessary. Since the first railroads were carried across 
 private property for the common good by coercive law, barely 
 half a century has elapsed, and not so much since the factory 
 acts really exercised any considerable influence : yet how 
 much has already been done in the same direction. And if 
 we look nearer home, it is plain that university legislation and 
 university practice have alike tended towards consolidation, 
 subordination to common ends, the socialization of intellectual 
 capital, and the recognition by the individual labourer of his 
 social or communitarian function. 
 
 Are we then to conclude that by a quiet and easy transition, 
 society, as it now is, will be so internally transformed by the 
 many molecular changes going on slowly and imperceptibly 
 
 E e a
 
 420 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 within it, that one fine morning the world will awake and find 
 itself socialist in name, as it has long been tending to become 
 in fact ? Or, will the change from the old order to the new 
 be a violent one, the pang of a revolution, abruptly and sharply 
 rending the continuity of life ? No man will wisely attempt 
 the task of prophet, save in decorous generalities. Of old 
 time one said, the kingdom of heaven cometh even as a thief 
 in the night ; and yet again, Heed not them who say Lo here 
 or Lo there, for the kingdom of heaven is within you. So 
 perhaps will it be with this generation. It must be that 
 stumbling-blocks bar the way, and there will be some rough 
 jolting, perhaps even some deadlier accidents in the movement. 
 But, on the other hand, the end is not yet. Prophetic socialism 
 lifts up its eyes to the hills ; but it hardly realizes how far off 
 they are ; how, indeed, to the thinker they are already ascer- 
 tained to be the hills of heaven, though more cynical observers 
 might be inclined to call them the fabled mountains of the 
 moon. Philosophy does not much sympathize with the popular 
 conceptions or misconceptions of what is meant by progress. 
 To the vulgar rhetorician the word, uttered too often in 
 Pharisaic self -commendation, suggests the image of a long 
 straight road, which, as it goes on, becomes wider and fuller, 
 and filled with a wiser, a merrier, a richer assemblage a 
 continuous accumulation of good things, with perhaps just 
 a few movements of malaise, an occasional time of trial, but 
 not more than enough to season and enhance the general sense 
 of getting on. And another view, held by those who fancy 
 they give accuracy to their conceptions by a mixture of 
 exact science, regards progress as taking place along some 
 complicated curve, where, like the traveller through the 
 Saint Gothard following his way gradually through a succes- 
 sion of circles which land him at each outlet on higher and 
 
 O 
 
 higher planes, we seem alternately to recede from and approach 
 the end in view. Perhaps a sober philosophy, not too con- 
 temptuous of the past, nor too sanguine of the future, will
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 421 
 
 hesitate to assess the difference of culture-level : and will be 
 inclined to say that it is sufficient faith in God and nature to 
 think that all is for good, without venturing to transcend our 
 data and say it is all either for the better or the best, much less 
 that all is for the worst. To that frame of mind it will be 
 suitable to suppose that each age has its own problem : and that 
 as its day is, so will its strength be. If the problem is more 
 complex, we may fairly hold that the powers of solving the 
 problem are multiplied in proportion, but we shall not therefore 
 conclude that the result is of a higher value. We may shrink 
 from assuming that anything beyond a transference of energy 
 can take place, and hesitate to commit ourselves to theories 
 and they are those of our current philosophy that the 
 world goes on accumulating virtue, able at once to eat its 
 cake and store it up. 
 
 And what is the bearing of these generalities on human 
 progress on the present question ? This : that socialism is no 
 solution of the human problem, but that in its general outline 
 it is rather an indication of its nature, and an attempt to 
 formulate how it has arisen, and in what it consists. That 
 problem is the perennial problem of human association : a 
 problem which at intervals becomes more aggravating and 
 threatening, and therefore calls forth by natural and normal 
 response new efforts to comprehend the difficulty and to find 
 the way out of it. In such an accentuated phase now stands 
 the problem of freeing man's life from its recurrent tendency 
 t.o become as Hobbes said, ' solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and 
 short/ It is easier in such a case either to minimize or to 
 magnify the evil : but there is safety in saying that socialism, 
 whatever its aberrations, has the credit of keeping people alive 
 to the fact that the social compact is always making and 
 never made, and that it has now become like an ill-fitting 
 dress, which is displacing the assimilative system of society, 
 causing irregular excitation of the heart, and clogging the 
 organs of breathing.
 
 422 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vn 
 
 Not merely does it indicate that there is a problem : it 
 diagnoses fairly well the central seat of the disease, or, 
 perhaps we should say perturbation. The old Saint-Simoniau 
 society talked about the rehabilitation of the flesh. The word, 
 it is urged, has a dangerous sound. ' Why, that 's certain ; ' 
 we reply with Hotspur : ' 'tis dangerous to take a cold, to 
 sleep, to drink ! but out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this 
 flower, safety/ Socialism is part of the general protest 
 which has been raised in the realistic interest against a 
 fantastic and unsubstantial idealism, or spiritualism, or intel- 
 lectualism. When mediaeval Christendom said in its early 
 artists, teste Browning, 
 
 'To bring the invisible full into play, 
 Let the visible go to the dogs, what matters?' 
 
 it spoke a very aspiring and, let us retort, a very dangerous 
 dogma. The modern socialist might and perhaps does demand 
 the whole charter of man : but he naturally begins by re- 
 demanding what was last taken from him. That the physical 
 life of the body is the basis of everything else, bright with the 
 promise of all life, in art, morals, science and religion, is the one 
 conviction that emerges more and more definitely and palpably 
 in all modern ethics. The soul, indeed, is highest : but we cannot 
 now believe that the soul may be saved without the body, or 
 that physical health and vigour are other than absolutely indis- 
 pensable to enable the higher life, the real life, to become all 
 that it was meant to be. And this ' rehabilitation of the 
 flesh/ if properly understood, is not contradictory of the pre- 
 cept which bids us deny the flesh. If for one moment I may 
 borrow a Hegelian formula, I should say that our proper 
 attitude in this matter is a negation of a negation. If the 
 denial of the flesh means discipline and culture, means self- 
 control, means the consecration of natural powers to ideal 
 ends, then is such denial praiseworthy. But a mere rejection, 
 ignoring, soaring above the flesh, is vain and false. And the 
 rehabilitation of the flesh means only that the passionate nature,
 
 vii] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 423 
 
 at first silenced as an intruder into the life of the spirit, must 
 cease that silence and learn a new language. 
 
 The movement is part of that tendency of the modern 
 world to put the state and secular functions supreme. In the 
 Middle Ages the Church stood foremost. Mediaeval life 
 seemed to centre in the Church, as the mediaeval town 
 clustered round the towers and buttresses of its cathedrals. 
 But it needs not much acquaintance with mediaeval life to say 
 that the semblance must not here, more than elsewhere, be 
 taken for the reality. As you examine more carefully, you 
 see that the sacred place is the home of art and science, and 
 that in the carvings on its walls you can trace the evidence of 
 the same jovial and not over sanctimonious mirth which laughs 
 out in the farces and fabliaux of the period. Round the 
 consecrated altar-slab, the nave and aisles of the church, 
 were ground in which plays and marketing were neither 
 vulgar nor unclean : and I need not tell a Cambridge audience 
 that as late as the reign of Elizabeth a play of Plautus was 
 performed in King's College Chapel. There came afterwards 
 a period of differentiation. It was a result, fostered by the 
 Reformation, and still more by the counter-Reformation, to 
 make broad and stern the distinction between the secular and 
 the sacred : and out of this there issued in the sixteenth and 
 seventeenth century the real struggle between the sacerdotal 
 and religious element on the one hand, and the secular and 
 scientific on the other. By the close of the seventeenth 
 century the Church and religion seemed on the whole vic- 
 torious. But the eighteenth century reversed the process, and 
 by the close of it the triumph of this world and the secular 
 commonwealth seemed secure. Further experience has shown 
 the delusion of those who thought so. The secularistic move- 
 ment of the present century has had to go deeper and to 
 embrace a wider range. To go deeper : instead of the mere 
 light, intellectual enlightenment, which the eighteenth century 
 held to be the highest gift, it has had to seek for a more
 
 4^4 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vii 
 
 adequate basis of knowledge, to penetrate beneath the surface 
 of civilization into the workman's lodging, the factory, and 
 the peasant's hut to realize the existence of what has been 
 called a fourth class behind the tiers etat which emancipated 
 itself a century ago. But at the same time the enlightenment 
 of the nineteenth century, as it has found a profounder basis 
 of fact and knowledge, so it has taken up into itself an ideal 
 spirit, an influence of poetry, art, and religion, which formerly 
 seemed to it absurd and intelligible. The same society which 
 bade put on the flesh the new robe of honour, also declared that 
 all its energies were to be enlisted in the service of humanity. 
 
 Thus socialism has done well, if it has succeeded in producing 
 any conviction in the general mind that political party, religious 
 service, and scientific study, all derive their permanent value 
 from the direct service they render in eliminating the eliminable 
 causes of human wretchedness. If it can break in pieces any 
 of our political, religious, or educational fetiches, and bring 
 the priest, the politician and the schoolmaster and bookman to 
 realize that the question of questions ultimately is, Whom have 
 thy labours made better, what hungry and thirsty and stranger 
 and sick hast thou endowed and helped with thy sympathy 
 and aid, socialism will not have been fruitless of good. 
 
 Socialism, as was pointed out, is an acute phase of the 
 general social question. It contains in itself, and raised to 
 the highest pitch, the two opposite tendencies which govern 
 the whole process of history. These tendencies appear in 
 socialism in an aggravated, an almost inconceivable antago- 
 nism. They are individualism, the proclamation of freedom 
 and equality : and communism, the principle of fraternity or 
 of something to which fraternity is only an approach. On 
 one hand, the demand for absolute independence, for suppres- 
 sion of all authoritative interference from without, for the 
 right to free development from without. On the other, 
 the cry for organization, for socialization, for intensifying 
 the solidarity of all social action and life.
 
 vn] THE ETHICS OF SOCIALISM 425 
 
 It is sometimes said, and there is a superficial truth in the 
 saying, that there are two sets of socialists, the collectivists 
 and the anarchists. But it is nearer the fact to say that 
 there are two warring- tendencies inherent in socialism 
 which, to repeat it again, is only conscious and intensified 
 society two tendencies, of which one is more prominent in 
 certain minds, or at certain times, and in certain circum- 
 stances, or more specially adapted to the conditions of certain 
 classes. 
 
 A word on f Anarchism/ It is an ugly word, and, if 
 associated with bombshells or dynamite, it becomes uglier still. 
 But listen to two of the anarchists who were put to death at 
 Chicago in 1886. 'Anarchism/ says one, 'does not mean 
 bloodshed : does not mean robbery, arson, &c. Anarchism 
 means the reorganization of society upon scientific principles. 
 Anarchism is a free society without kings or classes, a society 
 of sovereigns in which the liberty and economic equality of all 
 would furnish an unshakable equilibrium as a foundation and 
 condition of social order/ 'Anarchy/ says another, 'is the 
 natural law, instead of the man-made statute. Laws, natural 
 laws, just laws, are not made, they are discovered. Every 
 human ill is produced by the denial of man's natural rights/ It 
 is clear that such anarchism as this is a deduction, an applica- 
 tion of a very respectable doctrine, the doctrine to which 
 John Milton and John Locke have lent their names. It is also 
 fair to remember that anarchism, as it arose in minds like 
 those of the Russian Bakunin, is the normal reaction from 
 despotism and autocracy, the sovereignty of a despotic church 
 or state. And lastly, when men like Mr. William Morris 
 take an analogous position and cover it with the name of 
 Communism, while expressing their doubts of the permanent 
 value of the socialistically-organized state, it is clear that the 
 doctrine is only an exaggeration of a truth. Anarchism, then, 
 is an unfortunate name, a distorted expression of the view 
 that, the more human action proceeds from internal motives
 
 426 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 and the less it is vitiated by ' all the paraphernalia of official 
 authority, which is after all a burden/ the better will be the 
 results for human welfare and individual development. If 
 thus conceived as an ideal of the state where each is a law to 
 himself, because his basal principle is a faith of solidarity with 
 others, and where free play is given to faculty in all its 
 individuality of growth, because it draws its force from a 
 common soil, anarchy is transformed into an angel of light. 
 And if it adopt the name of Communism, it is a communism 
 which all true theories of the State have maintained, when 
 they conceived it not as a hindrance but as a help to develop- 
 ment, as the common foster-mother, out of whom proceed 
 all useful and precious functions, differentiating into endless 
 forms of individual and class performance, but never losing 
 allegiance to the central idea of a common life in which they 
 live, from which they issue, and to enrich and diversify which 
 they contribute. If Mr. Morris thinks that our modern states 
 are too large to give a real home, and that lesser social unities 
 or 'communes' should gather together under the shelter of 
 the State as the mighty mother of ' communes/ that is 
 a form of home rule to which no objection can be taken, 
 provided you can be sure that the members of your petty 
 groups are worthy citizens, who can keep their local patriotism 
 in subordination to, or rather in essential harmony with their 
 general partnership in the community 1 . 
 
 1 This lecture seems to have been the introduction to a fuller discussion 
 of the subject, of which there remains only a few notes, and the section 
 which follows dealing with the views of Fichte and Hegel.
 
 VIII 
 
 IT is urged by writers like Schaffle that Hegelianism is the 
 true parent of Socialism. Hegel, they say, as the anti-refor- 
 mation said of Erasmus Hegel laid the egg, if the Socialists 
 hatched it. Yet it used to be maintained by writers of the 
 extreme Liberalist School in Germany that Hegel's work 
 on the Philosophy of Law, published in 1821, was a philosophy 
 in the interests of Prussian absolutism. The facts of such 
 opposing accusations seem to indicate that that philosophy 
 was, as it claimed to be, superior to the disturbing influences 
 of partisanship or political bias. From the days of Socrates 
 and Plato downwards no eminent philosopher has escaped 
 this assault from partisans, who, finding their theories were 
 not entirely accepted and defended by him, concluded he had 
 gone over to the side of the enemy. The vulgar and the 
 common politician is always vulgar parts all mankind by an 
 ( Either, Or/ ' Either he is with us, or he is against us/ His 
 little mind cannot see that a larger intelligence may embrace 
 what he cannot may put his shibboleth and its antagonist 
 cry alongside of each other, and show they only need a little 
 mutual explanation in order to attain the common aim they 
 pursue by opposing means. Against the impatient cry ( He 
 that is not with us is against us/ Hegel set the calmer ' He 
 that is not against us is on our side/ 
 
 Fichte, as we have seen, had attempted a sort of a priori 
 construction of the State. In his usual method of step by
 
 428 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vin 
 
 step deduction he had shown that human beings, if they are 
 to live together in the same sphere or range, must inevitably 
 arrange their community of life on general and all-embracing 
 principles. A common and uniformly accepted organization 
 must grow up. For Fichte is not looking at what happens 
 with human beings as they are. As they are, they are, most 
 of them, figuratively half -asleep : they let life drift on, and 
 get into new situations and relations almost at haphazard. 
 One person, and one group of persons organizes life a little 
 here, and another organizes it a little there. But, even in 
 what is called one State, two conterminous often live largely 
 in unconcern of each other. In such a community, visibly 
 and outwardly one, there are a million centres of organization, 
 sometimes indifferent to each other, sometimes crossing and 
 thwarting each other, but never going on in any direction 
 more than a little way. So the world has grown up by 
 patches here and there : each province, it may be each 
 parish, with a way and system of its own, and in none 
 very thoroughly carried out. And individuals do likewise : 
 their minds are like cupboards, each drawer of which has 
 been filled from a separate source : they keep their thoughts 
 in isolated compartments. 
 
 Fichte, on the contrary, was the Son of the Revolution, 
 full of its Titanic spirit of radical reconstruction. He sets 
 before his mind the process of a state-formation in which 
 every individual would be wide-awake, would be fully alive 
 to his own interests, would take no step without seriously 
 considering all its bearings, and would stop nowhere short 
 of the ultimate conclusion. He is the prince of doctrinaires, 
 the undaunted and somewhat impatient champion of freedom 
 and of reason. In his constructions we assist at the work 
 of a people of dialecticians who, when they have said A, 
 know that they must say B, and will not shrink from the 
 resolute development of every element till they have come 
 to their Z. This is what is meant by the State of Keason,
 
 VHI] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 429 
 
 the Reasonable State. In a sense every state which people live 
 under is a reasonable state : it has its meaning 1 , its justifica- 
 tion, its historic value and truth. But reasonable in Fichte's 
 sense it is not. To be literally reasonable in that sense, 
 it must be a transparent system of deductions, one stage 
 emerging from another, one condition implicating 1 another, 
 in the reasoning vision of a single intelligence. Fichte's 
 idealism will be content with nothing short of constructing 
 the state by a logical process from its first wide outlines to 
 its closely compacted organization. 
 
 We need only note a few points in which Fichte's 
 rationalizing spirit brings him somewhat on the lines of the 
 Socialists. Not that Fichte was of the general metal of 
 which Socialists are made. But the poor weaver's son of 
 Rammenau in Lusatia had seen the bitterness of the peasant's 
 lot : he had observed the social disorder of his age : and his 
 heart rose against those who seemed to claim that man was 
 made to obey the laws, whereas laws are only sanctified by 
 their constituting a well-doing community. He had not before 
 him, like the Socialists of 1840 and onwards, the degrada- 
 tion of the industrial population of large towns : but the 
 German peasantry were sufficient instance to give point 
 and meaning to his general principles. And he resolves at 
 one bound as it were to put himself in the heart of the 
 situation. He, Fichte, becomes the multitudinous nation : 
 he in his own reflection relives their gathering into social 
 and national unity : he brings under the focus of his powerful 
 mind all the movements that were really transacted in a 
 million brains, and which for that reason were loosely and 
 incoherently transacted : he, strongly grasping his discordant 
 elements together, constructs the organized State, so that 
 it is a perfect mechanism, with not a joint loose or cranky, 
 and with a thorough system of telegraphy and communica- 
 tion making it all advance and move as one man. It is 
 a splendid machine a little too perfect perhaps in theory
 
 430 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 but that will do no great harm in a philosophical specula- 
 tion, which has a long way before it till it works down into 
 practice. 
 
 In such a state there will be no privileged classes none 
 entitled to an exemption from the common burden. There 
 will of course be distinctions, and each individual will have 
 his special work : but none will be excused work altogether. 
 The State cannot in its issue deny the ends which were fore- 
 most in the less compacted aggregate of human lives out of 
 which it arose. And so each must claim his original right 
 to the means of subsistence : in other words, society is con- 
 demned, if it has become so organized that any part of the 
 population is against his will prevented from earning his 
 living. This is the assertion of the drolt au travail. For 
 had the development of the social order been carried out with 
 clairvoyant eye, men would have protested against the first 
 step which locked up the means of subsistence in private 
 hands, inaccessible to the common administration. Property 
 and its rights, he remarks, are not strictly speaking in the 
 land and its natural powers : these remain common ground : 
 what is property, is the definite use of these materials, the 
 right to transform them or their products into means of 
 human subsistence and enjoyment. Accordingly wherever 
 the proper utilization of natural products does not require 
 their being put for a period into private hands, there it is 
 desirable to retain the control and working directly in the 
 administration of the whole community. Private property in 
 land and natural agents is only valid under these limitations, 
 and only justified by the argument that it is the method of 
 getting the utmost product from nature, and so providing the 
 largest amount for general consumption. But the proprietor's 
 rights do not extend to leaving a natural product unused at 
 his will and pleasure, nor do they include the liberty of de- 
 stroying the peasant's crops in the pursuit of his lordly sport. 
 
 Fichte has thus realized that the anarchy of industry and
 
 vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 431 
 
 commerce could not possibly be willed, if one intelligent con- 
 sciousness had continuously guided the evolution of society. 
 The antagonism between the landed or agricultural interest, 
 the manufacturing or craftsman interest, and the commercial 
 or shopkeeper and merchant interest, seemed to him a scandal 
 and an absurdity. Each class, as it appeared to him, and 
 each individual of that class or profession, pursued his 
 business, on that tacit understanding or latent compact 
 which Plato called justice that the other was in his turn 
 performing his part of a great national work, realizing 
 a common national stock or capital, out of which the wants 
 of all its members were to be supplied. Each would have 
 refused to enter upon a specialized work, to tie himself to 
 a limited range of labour, had he seen reason to suppose that 
 he would thereby be putting himself at a permanent dis- 
 advantage. Hence, concludes Fichte, the organization of the 
 trades and professions must be the business of the State : 
 the State must see what is the balance of farmer, artisan and 
 merchant, needed to maintain the whole social fabric in 
 a wholesome condition : and it must so arrange the details 
 that none shall be damnified by having undertaken (on State 
 authority) a labour which does not bring in immediate and 
 material reward. Fichte lived in an age which was eagerly 
 uprooting the old restrictions on industry imposed by the 
 gilds and corporations originating in the Middle Ages. He 
 saw that the rage for rejecting all organization was overreach- 
 ing itself : and foreseeing the rapid approach of a day when 
 the corporationless artisans would feel the need of associa- 
 tion to help them to attain a worthy life, he declared that the 
 gilds which were abolished nevertheless are bound to exist. 
 
 A few passages may illustrate Fichte's view. He supposes 
 
 a complete free- trade throughout Europe, and this he says 
 
 is the result ] : ( In the trading public there arises an endless 
 
 war of all against all, a war between buyers and sellers : and 
 
 1 Fichte's Werke, vol. iii. p. 457.
 
 432 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 this war grows more violent, unjust, and dangerous in its 
 consequences, in proportion as the world grows more populous, 
 as the commercial state grows larger by additional acquisi- 
 tions, as production and arts rise higher, and as the com- 
 modities in circulation thus become more numerous, and the 
 general demand increases and multiplies. What in simple 
 conditions of national life passed off without great injustice 
 and oppression, is transformed after the intensification of 
 demand into the most crying wrong and a source of great 
 misery. The buyer seeks to squeeze out commodities from 
 the seller : and so he calls for free-trade, i. e. liberty for the 
 seller to glut his markets, to find no sale, and from necessity 
 to sell his commodities far below their value. In like 
 manner he calls for strong competition of manufacturers and 
 merchants, in order that from the difficulties thrown in the 
 way of a sale, because ready money is indispensable they 
 may be compelled to give him the commodities at any price 
 which he in his magnanimity may offer. Should he succeed, 
 the labourer is impoverished, and industrious families sink in 
 want and misery, or emigrate from an unjust nation. Against 
 this oppression the seller defends himself, or assails the stock 
 and supply of goods by the most diverse means, by buying 
 them up, by artificial dearth, &c. He thus places the buyers 
 in peril of being suddenly cut off from their habitual wants, 
 or of paying unusually dear for them, and having to pinch 
 in some other quarter. Or he reduces the excellence of 
 his goods, after he has been forced to reduce their price. 
 The buyer accordingly does not get what he expected to 
 get : he is cheated : and for the most part there arises with 
 bad, careless work, a further sheer loss in public energy and 
 time and in the products which are so badly manufactured. 
 In short, no man has the slightest guarantee that if he 
 continue to work he will continue to subsist : for men are 
 resolved to be completely free, mutually to bring each other 
 to ruin/
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 433 
 
 ' The first and original property, the ground of all property, 
 is an exclusive right to a specific free activity. This free 
 activity may either be named and defined by the object to 
 which it refers, or by its form and manner only ; of the first 
 kind is property or possession in a thing, e. g. property in the 
 soil, of which however Fichte remarks: "the earth is the 
 Lord's, man has only the power of cultivating and using it 
 for good ends." Of the second kind of property is the right 
 to practise a certain craft, and to prevent all other men from 
 the exercise of the same art. But in both cases the basis 
 of all right of property is to be placed in the right to 
 exclude others from a certain free activity reserved for us 
 alone, by no means in an exclusive possession of objects V It 
 is clear, therefore, that not merely the agriculturist, but every 
 inhabitant in the State must have an exclusive property of 
 his own, because otherwise he cannot be bound to recognize 
 the agriculturist's right of property, cannot be legitimately 
 prevented from ousting the latter from his field, and robbing 
 him of its fruits. And what would be the exclusive property 
 of the non-agriculturist, the manufacturer, the merchant, in 
 return for which he would have surrendered to the agri- 
 culturist the exclusive right of property to the soil? His 
 art and trade-skill he owes to nature and himself, not to the 
 State. In respect of these he is not bound to the State, 
 as the agriculturist to his piece of land. Thrown naked on 
 any shore he can say, ' Omnia mea mecum porto/ What 
 then can the State still give him? Evidently only the 
 guarantee that he shall constantly find work or sale for his 
 commodities, and that for them he shall receive the share 
 that falls to him of the goods of the land. It is through 
 this security that the State attaches him to itself. But this 
 guarantee the State cannot discharge unless it closes the 
 number of those who pursue the same branch of industry, 
 and undertakes to care for the necessary subsistence of all. 
 
 1 P. 444- 
 pf
 
 434 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vin 
 
 It is by this closing that the branch of work becomes property 
 of the class which pursues it : it is by this provision for 
 subsistence that it becomes a property from which they 
 can live : and it is only in return for this their property 
 that they can resign their claims to the property of the 
 agricultural class. 
 
 ' National wealth/ says Fichte, ' has many meanings. To 
 me the inner essential prosperity consists in being able to 
 procure the most specially human enjoyments with the least 
 labour of a severe and persistent kind. And this must be the 
 prosperity of a nation not of a few individuals, whose highest 
 prosperity is often the most striking symptom and true ground 
 of the supreme ill-condition of the nation V ' It is not a mere 
 pious wish for humanity, but it is the indispensable require- 
 ment of its right and of its destiny that it should live so 
 freely, so easily, so commandingly over nature, so genuinely 
 humanly on the earth, as nature at all permits. Man has to 
 work : but not like a beast of burden that sinks to sleep under 
 its load, and after the minimum refreshment of its exhausted 
 forces is again stirred up to carry the same load. Man ought 
 to labour, without anxious fright, with pleasure and joy, and 
 have time left to raise his mind and eye to heaven, for whose 
 gaze he was formed. He ought not precisely to eat with his 
 beast of burden : his food should be distinguished from its 
 fodder, his dwelling from its stall, just as in his corporeal 
 structure he is different from it. This is his right, just because 
 he is a man V 
 
 ' Here we have reached 3 the source of the greatest part of 
 the still subsisting abuses. In modern Europe there were for 
 a long period no States. At present we are in face of attempts 
 to form some. Further, the task of the State has been hitherto 
 conceived in a partial and half-hearted way, as if it were 
 an institute to maintain by law the citizen in that estate of 
 possession in which he is found. The deeper lying duty of 
 1 P. 423- * P. 422. 3 P. 453.
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 435 
 
 the State to invest each with the possession that is his due, 
 has been left out of sight/ ' Conceive a definite sum of 
 possible activity in a certain sphere of action as the one 
 magnitude. The comfort of life which ensues from this 
 activity is the value of this magnitude. Conceive a definite 
 number of individuals as the second magnitude. Divide the 
 value of the first magnitude in equal parts among the indi- 
 viduals, and you find what each should receive under the 
 given conditions. . . . The part which each gets is his own by 
 right : he should get it if it is not already promised him. In 
 the State of reason he gets it : in the division which was 
 made by chance and force before the awakening and the rule 
 of reason, each of course did not get it, because some appro- 
 priated more than fell to their share. Thus for the actual 
 State which by art approximates to reason the wish must 
 be to help each to his own, in the sense of the word just 
 explained 1 .' ' The source of all evil in our make-shift States 
 is solely and singly anarchy, and the impossibility of creating 
 order V 
 
 The method of Hegel has a decidedly more conservative 
 look, but it is not less scathing in its criticisms or less 
 progressive in its results. Fichte resembles an advocate 
 who, by a bold effort of sustained construction, displays 
 step by step the hidden process of some crime, showing how 
 motive arose out of action and consequences trammelled the 
 will until the final issue burst out as it stands before us : and 
 who at the close of his demonstration exclaims, So must it 
 have been. Hegel is rather like the judicious cross- examiner 
 who, by experienced suggestion of topics and by manipulation 
 of data, forces the criminal to tell his own story, to reveal the 
 hidden movements, hopes and fears, weaknesses and troubles 
 of his inner life and intimate circumstances, to be the crowning 
 witness against himself, and the real expounder of those by- 
 ways and windings of motive which the wiliest outward 
 1 P. 402. 2 P. 302. 
 
 Ff 2
 
 436 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 interpreter is never quite sure of not missing- or mistaking. 
 Observers indeed will be inclined to suggest that the perform- 
 ance is a cleverly laid trick, and that the advocate has suborned 
 his patient to make out his own case as he has prepared it. 
 They may allege, in other words, that Hegel has the historical 
 puppets secretly under his control : that he can make the 
 history say what he wants. In reply, it may be said, that no 
 defender of this method will readily pledge himself to main- 
 tain that the cross-examiner may not occasionally be unjust, 
 and may not now and then, by putting things together, cause 
 the professedly independent witness of his victim to bear out 
 the colour of his own presuppositions : but no one who has 
 carefully studied the method will believe that even a master 
 of thought like Hegel could produce marionettes which looked 
 so surprisingly alive and intelligent, or will allow an occasional 
 arbitrary interference to thwart the general conclusion of a 
 trustworthy and decisive self -revelation. 
 
 The Hegelian method professes to show in the real history, 
 prepared, as the experimenters say, by discarding unessentials 
 and trivialities, the very law of growth and construction of 
 our moral, religious, economic, and political world. The 
 world in its history, i.e. in the revelation of its own real 
 time-movement, sits in judgement upon itself, and betrays 
 its own secret. But if it displays how far in each effort or 
 stage it has departed from the normal path, it also shows how 
 in each age and epoch there was a larger principle, a fuller 
 heart at work, and that, though the actual performance was 
 one-sided, it was always accompanied by a compensating and 
 alternative principle which so far mended the mischief the 
 other had caused. Beneath the superficial order of move- 
 ment the alternate dominance of one-sided motives, and 
 the appearance of a mere see-saw of principles, a chaos in 
 which brilliant performance is suddenly swallowed up in 
 blank collapse there is disclosed a real, and much slower, 
 because much more complex and encumbered, process of
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 437 
 
 social life. This underlying process is the movement of the 
 infinite behind the finite : the march of God in history as 
 opposed to the march of man. Yet they are not two move- 
 ments, the phenomenal distinct from the noumenal: the 
 former seen in fragments, in seeming regression, in involved 
 curves, and general disorder : the latter a uniform, systematic 
 series a total and harmonious idea. The appearance is one 
 with the reality for those who can see it from that com- 
 manding position in which its inequalities and discontinuity 
 are reduced to their proper place where, in short, they cease 
 to disturb the total view. 
 
 The Philosophy of Law and Outlines of the State follow this 
 method. They show us first of all that the State has a 
 development from simpler stages, and that in all its stages 
 it is the product of two elements, two principles, law the 
 principle of an objective order, and conscience the principle 
 of a subjective freedom. In the State we have the meeting, 
 the synthesis, of the legal and the moral : the union of an out- 
 ward form of order or organization with the inward spirit of 
 self-realization. The republican idea had tended to reduce the 
 State to a purely secular and outward institute for the main- 
 tenance of rights, for the security of property, and for fencing 
 round a sphere in which human life might develop individually 
 at its own will and pleasure. On this view the State was but 
 the protecting shell, the restricting framework, of peculiarly 
 human life to be carried on by individual agents within for 
 their several interests. Opposed to this was a conception 
 which ignored the value of such mere organization, and 
 which laid down that the good will is everything, that 
 the conviction and persuasion of being in the right is what 
 defines the moral nature of an action. Here the aspect of self- 
 determination becomes supreme. Thus there had grown up 
 an antithesis between order, which is the fruit of law, and 
 liberty or self -initiation which is guaranteed by conscience. 
 
 The State is the full and final reconciliation of order and
 
 438 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vin 
 
 liberty, of law and conscience, of manners and morals, but it 
 only appears in its character of reconciler if we look at the 
 two phrases or aspects which constitute it, and each of which 
 has some claim to be identified with the State. The one of 
 these phases is the family, the true ' State of nature ' or 
 natural State, if we consider it, not in any peculiar form it 
 has taken or may now take, but in its general features and 
 type in all ages. With this natural aggregation human beings 
 have both liberty and order; but so mixed up and packed 
 together, that neither of these ends is duly secured, till by later 
 expansions (in the developed State) the family, freed from 
 duties and burdens with which it could not well cope, is better 
 able to perform its appropriate functions. 
 
 The other phase of the State is what Hegel calls Society 
 Citizen Society ' bourgeois ' or ' tradesmen ' society the 
 society of industry and commerce. This ' bourgeois ' society 
 is the ' make-shift state ' of Fichte (Nothstaaf). It is a system 
 generated in the first instance by the dependence of each 
 for his welfare and subsistence on the welfare and subsistence 
 of all. The narrow range of family life soon proves itself 
 inadequate to the growing multitude of wants and needs 
 which emerge in the course of experience. Human nature 
 soon develops its capacities of multiplying, subdividing, 
 and varying its wants as well as the means for satisfying 
 them. Division and co-operation of the labours needed to pro- 
 duce the means of subsistence and enjoyment know no limit 
 to their extension. This partition of the sum-total of labours 
 required to bring forth the materials of subsistence goes on 
 according to natural accidents, following the lines laid down 
 by the natural endowment of individuals, the advantages 
 of situation, and all the variety of fortuitous circumstance. 
 It is, in short, a process of natural selection which settles 
 what varieties of industry and commerce flourish, and what 
 persons devote themselves to each. The only general laws 
 that can be laid down are the general tendency of the
 
 vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 439 
 
 systematic groups which deal with the modes of procuring 
 the common subsistence to fall into three main bodies. 
 These are (i) the class which is engaged in appropriating 
 for human use the more immediate products of nature; 
 (2) the class which transmutes these natural products into 
 more and more artificial forms (including the labour of 
 artisan and manufacturer), and which finally secures the 
 entrance of its several products into the general field of con- 
 sumption (including the work of commerce) ; (3) the class 
 to which are entrusted the more general interests of the whole 
 society. Such estates and orders of society are the final form 
 which its somewhat imperfect unity can present. 
 
 In such a society each has a chance afforded him of 
 securing a certain capital of his own. But not more than 
 a chance : circumstances may be too hard on him. Still 
 the accidental and unequal development by which individuals 
 variously take their place in such and such an estate, such 
 and such a profession or trade, is on the whole a natural and 
 unforced process ; and it gives rise in course of time, as it 
 repeats itself again and again, to certain fixities, uniformities, 
 or regularities of social arrangement. Laws to protect such 
 personal property as has grown up in this natural and 
 unequal way are only the expression in verbal formulae of 
 that precipitate, in the mind, of customs which are the 
 subjective reflex of habitual occurrence. Laws, therefore, are 
 only the consecration of the existent order : they follow the 
 lines laid down by the natural, which is far from being the 
 pre-eminently or strictly just, method of human socialization. 
 But when law is enforced in public courts and by public officials, 
 it means that the community as a whole is resolved to stand 
 by and keep up the status quo, to protect the infringement of 
 those individual appropriations which have grown up by ways 
 and means of which it has no direct cognizance, but to which 
 it gives a right, by its general resolution to hold those in 
 possession as presumably the rightful proprietors.
 
 440 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 But society has other duties than merely to protect rights 
 by punishing those who infringe them. It must further 
 seek to prevent the occurrence of such infringements by 
 maintaining a system of police, which shall maintain indi- 
 viduals in a continuous security, and by anticipating and 
 thwarting crime shall guarantee the welfare of individuals 
 as well as uphold the majesty of the law. And this 
 anticipatory action of the police is soon found to have 
 a wide range. 
 
 As the wants of the day are indefinitely multiplied and 
 intertwined, says Hegel l , there emerge points of view 
 which are equally the interest of all, and where one man's 
 business is also a common concern. Every one relies on there 
 being no obstacles to make it impossible to procure and 
 exchange the means for satisfying these wants : and every 
 one is concerned in shortening, as far as may be, the 
 investigations and transactions called for to that end. Hence 
 also various methods and arrangements come to be employed 
 in the common interest ; and these general concerns and 
 arrangements for the common good call for the inspection and 
 supervision of the public authority. Again ( 236) the several 
 interests of the producer and the consumer may come into 
 collision with each other. It is true that on the whole the 
 proper equilibrium will be spontaneously established. Still 
 the adjustment requires regulation, and that regulation must 
 be supplied by an intelligent power which stands above both 
 sides. Whence then the right to regulate such details, as e. g. 
 the assizes or fixing the price of the commonest articles of con- 
 sumption? It arises from the fact that the public show of 
 goods for sale, when these are of quite general and everyday 
 use, is not so much put before the individual as such, as before 
 him in his general capacity, i. e. before the public. If the 
 public then has a right not to be cheated, the inspection 
 of the quality of commodities may, as an affair of common 
 
 1 235-
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 441 
 
 concern, be undertaken and cared for by a public authority. 
 But a general supervision and direction is above all things 
 entailed by the dependence of great branches of industry 
 on the state of foreign nations, and on remote combinations, 
 of which the persons specially assigned and attached to 
 these departments are unable to get a complete and compre- 
 hensive view. 
 
 Free trade and free industry is one extreme in economic 
 life. The opposite extreme is seen when a public organiza- 
 tion both supplies the needs of all and fixes their work. 
 Thus in the case of the ancient work on the pyramids and 
 other monstrous works of Egypt and Asia, they were pro- 
 duced for public ends, but without the private option or 
 private interest of the individual labourers having any 
 influence on the direction of his labour. It is this private 
 interest to which free trade appeals against regulation from 
 above. But the fact is that, just because such private 
 interest is blindly engrossed on selfish ends, it requires a public 
 supervision, if it is to be made conformable to the universal 
 good, and if it is desired to mitigate the dangerous con- 
 vulsions and to cut short the duration of the interval, wherein 
 the collisions would have to adjust themselves by the methods 
 of mechanical necessity. There exists ( 237) indeed for the 
 individual a possibility of taking his part in the common 
 stock, and that possibility is guaranteed by public authority. 
 But it is not only that this guarantee must remain imperfect. 
 It is further, on the side of the individual himself, liable to 
 all sorts of accidents, and the more so the more it presumes 
 him possessed of the pre-conditions of skill, health, capital, 
 &c. Originally ( 238) the family was the basis of unity, 
 out of which the individual sprung, and in which he grew. 
 The family had the duty of seeing to this private aspect 
 of the individual : to see that he had the means and the 
 skill so as to acquire a stock of his own out of the social 
 stock, and that he was cared for and supported in case of his
 
 442 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 being rendered incapable. But economic society has torn the 
 single human being out of the family unity : has made 
 the members of the family strangers to each other, and 
 treated them as independent persons. Instead of inorganic 
 nature without and the paternal soil, in which the individual 
 found his subsistence, society has substituted its own soil ; 
 and the stability of the whole family thus undermined is 
 made dependent on society and subject to the chapter of 
 accidents. The individual has thus become a son (not of his 
 natural parents, but of) society : society has claims on him, 
 and he has rights against it. Society thus ( 239) becomes 
 the universal family : and in this capacity it has the duty 
 and the right, as against the wilful and casual behaviour 
 of the parents, to supervise and influence the children's 
 education. It does so, so far as education has bearings on 
 the capacity of becoming a member of society, especially if 
 that education is to be finished by others than the parents 
 themselves. Further, so far as a common mechanism can be 
 provided for that purpose, it has to take the necessary steps. 
 In like manner ( 240), where the extravagance of a person 
 renders his own and his family's subsistence insecure, society 
 has the duty and the right to assume the guardianship, and 
 to carry out in their stead the purposes of society and their 
 own. Such a state ( 241) of dependence, indeed, may not 
 be due to personal wilfulness. Accidental circumstances, 
 depending on nature or on outward conditions of life, may 
 bring individuals down to poverty. And what poverty does is 
 to leave them all the wants of society, while it deprives them 
 more or less of all its advantages, such as the facility of 
 acquiring technical skill and education, even of the protection 
 of law, sanitary precautions, and even the consolations of 
 religion. For society has withdrawn from them the natural 
 means of acquiring wealth (by its recognition of private rights 
 of property), and it destroys the clan or tribe that form which 
 the expanded family assumes. Thus for the poor, the general
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 443 
 
 authority takes on itself the duty of the family, not only in 
 reference to relieving their immediate distress, but also with 
 a view to reforming their disposition to laziness, their 
 malignity, and the other vices which spring from such 
 a situation and the sense of the wrong done them. 
 
 But poverty ( 242) and all forms of distress to which the 
 individual in his natural sphere of action is exposed, has an 
 inner or subjective aspect as well : and it thus requires 
 a subjective or personal assistance to deal with its special 
 circumstances of every case, as well as to satisfy the claims 
 of the heart and love. This is the point where, whatever 
 general scheme of action be adopted, personal and individual 
 morality will find enough to do. But this assistance is liable 
 to fortuitous influences, both for its own awakening, and in 
 its effects : and society accordingly does all it can towards 
 eliciting the permanent features of the distress and the 
 general principles governing, so as to reduce it to a regular 
 system, and to dispense in some degree with individual 
 assistance. 
 
 The fortuitousness of alms-giving, of charitable institutions 
 (and of the burning of lamps at the images of saints, &c.), 
 is supplemented by public poor-houses, hospitals (public 
 lighting of the streets, &c.). Private benevolence has still 
 enough left to do, and it is a mistake to claim this relief 
 of distress as solely belonging to the moods of individuals, 
 and the casual character of their temper and knowledge, and 
 to feel injured and annoyed by obligatory general regulations 
 and orders. The state of the public is, on the contrary, 
 to be regarded as more perfect, the less is left for the 
 individual's own personal and particular fancy, in comparison 
 with what is reduced to a general organization. 
 
 Where society ( 243) is left to its own unchecked action, 
 its course is marked by a progressive advance in population 
 and industry. As the interdependence of men upon each 
 other through their wants (demands) becomes more and more
 
 444 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vin 
 
 general and comprehensive, and as the modes of preparing 
 and supplying the means of gratifying these wants become 
 also more general, so does the accumulation of wealth 
 increase, just because from this multiplied generality there 
 is drawn the greater profit. But this accumulation of wealth 
 on one side is met on the other by the narrow and highly 
 special character of the special labours, and by the dependence 
 and distress of the classes which are bound down to these 
 labours : a dependence which entails an incapacity to feel 
 and enjoy wider liberties, and in especial the intellectual 
 advantages of society. 
 
 A large body of men ( 244) is thus depressed beneath the 
 standard of subsistence, which naturally fixes itself as neces- 
 sary for the members of any given society. It loses the sense 
 that it is right, and honest, and honourable to support itself 
 by its own activity and labour. The result is the production of 
 a rabble (Pobel = proletariate), which in its turn involves an 
 increased facility of concentrating a disproportionate amount 
 of wealth in a few hands. 
 
 Supposing ( 245) the burden of maintaining in a decent 
 state of subsistence this mass which gravitates towards 
 pauperism is imposed upon the wealthier class, or supposing 
 direct means for this purpose are found in other public 
 property (rich hospitals, charitable foundations, monasteries), 
 the result would be to guarantee the subsistence of the 
 needy, without their being obliged to labour for it. Such 
 a result would run counter to the principle of society and 
 to the sense of personal independence and honour. If, on 
 the other hand, the subsistence of the needy is made to 
 depend on labour (by supplying work to do), then the stock 
 of products would be increased. But the evil lies in surplus 
 production, and in the absence of the proportionate number 
 of consumers, who were themselves productive. In both 
 ways then the evil is only magnified. In this way it 
 becomes obvious that with all its excess of wealth, economic
 
 vm] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 445 
 
 society is not rich enough, i. e. does not possess in the 
 capital that is peculiar to it enough to keep clear of the 
 excess of poverty and the generation of the proletariate. 
 
 These phenomena may be studied on a grand scale in the 
 example of England, as well as the consequences that flow 
 from the poor-rate, boundless charitable foundations, and no 
 less unlimited private beneficence, and above all from the 
 abolition of the corporations. In that country it has been 
 found (especially in Scotland) that the directest means against 
 pauperism, as well as and especially against throwing off 
 all shame and honour, the subjective basis of society, and 
 against the laziness and profligacy, &c., from which the 
 proletariate issues, is to leave the poor to their fate, and to 
 refer them to public begging. 
 
 In this way, it is shown, colonization becomes necessary, 
 and commerce with lands at a more backward stage of 
 civilization. 
 
 But when ( 349), instead of realizing the permanent and 
 general elements of society as a mere external order and 
 machinery for the protection of masses of personal aims 
 and interests, the several branches of the social body try 
 to make these permanent elements, implicit in their class 
 interests, the object of their will and activity, society assumes 
 a moral character in itself, and presents itself in corporations. 
 It is in the industrial order, and especially among the artisan 
 class, that the corporation flourishes. Such a corporation 
 takes the place of a second family a position which general 
 society, in its greater remoteness from individuals and their 
 special distress, could only perform in a vague and general way. 
 
 In the corporation ( 253) the family gets a solid basis, 
 a guarantee of subsistence which is conditioned by capacity, a 
 solid basis of capital. But it not merely has such a guarantee : 
 the fact is invested with open recognition, so that the member 
 of a corporation does not require to exhibit any further external 
 certificates to prove that he is something, to evidence his
 
 446 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [vm 
 
 qualifications, his competence and ability to make his way in 
 the world. In this way too it is recognized that he belongs 
 to a group, which is in its turn a member of general society, 
 and that he is interested in, and takes trouble for, the more 
 unselfish aim of this group. Thus in his order or estate he 
 has his honour. 
 
 The institution of corporations, securing to the individual 
 his craft and skill as capital or source of revenue, corresponds 
 to the introduction of agriculture and private property (in 
 land, &c.) at another stage. If complaints are made about 
 the luxury and prodigality of the industrial classes, and the 
 consequent production of a proletariate or rabble, we must 
 not forget, over and above the other causes (e. g. the tendency 
 of labour to become more and more mechanical), the moral 
 reason which has just been given. Without becoming a 
 member of an authorized (chartered) corporation and it is 
 only as authorized that the association is a corporation the 
 individual has no class honour; by his isolation he is reduced 
 to the selfish side of industry, and his subsistence and enjoy- 
 ment want stability. In such a case he will seek to get himself 
 acknowledged, by external exhibitions of his proficiency in his 
 trade exhibitions which are lawless because, as his class or 
 order has no existence (for no association has existence and 
 place in society, except such as are legally constituted and 
 acknowledged), there is no possibility of living according to 
 his class-requirements. Thus he is without any more general 
 mode of life appropriate to him. In the corporation the aid 
 which poverty receives loses its fortuitous character and its 
 unjustly humiliating aspect: wealth again, in its duty towards 
 the fraternity, loses the arrogance which it stimulates in its 
 possessor, and the envy it excites in others : and honest worth 
 receives its rightful acknowledgement and honour. 
 
 The corporation ( 254) involves a certain limitation of 
 what is called the natural right to exercise one's skill, and 
 thus to make what profit can be made. But this limitation
 
 vin] FICHTE AND HEGEL ON SOCIALISM 447 
 
 amounts only to rendering that right reasonable : i.e. it is 
 freed from its self-conceit and fortuitousness, risks to itself as 
 well as for others : it is acknowledged, guaranteed, and thus 
 elevated to conscious activity for a common end. 
 
 After the family ( 255) the corporation constitutes the 
 second of the moral roots of the state a root founded in civil 
 economic society. The family, or first root, holds in undiffe- 
 rentiated unity the two principles of subjective personal life, 
 and objective life for the community. These same two principles 
 appear in economic society as the principle of particularization 
 of wants and enjoyment on the one hand, and the principle of 
 abstract legal generality on the other. The corporation, or 
 second root of the state, brings them together in an inward 
 way, and in this combination the welfare of individuals is 
 realized and in a legal institution. 
 
 Thus sanctity of marriage, and honour in the corporation, 
 are the two points at which the disorganization of society 
 makes itself felt. 
 
 But the corporation ( 256) is restricted and finite. And 
 thus it, no less than that separation of aspects and their 
 comparative identity which is found in the external order of 
 social regulations, finds its full truth in a purpose which is 
 and is known to be universal, and in the absolute actuality of 
 that purpose. Thus the sphere of civic society passes over 
 into the State. 
 
 In the State the inequalities of economic society are corrected. 
 In days of peace, when all the departments of social life go 
 on side by side as if independent, people lose sight of the fact 
 that they and all they possess repose on the State. But in 
 war what Hegel calls the ' ideality ' of all private interests is 
 made manifest, and devotion to the State is presented as 
 universal duty and the very basis of all life.
 
 IX 
 
 THE LEGAL, SOCIAL, AND RELIGIOUS SANCTIONS 
 OF MORALITY 
 
 ETHICAL writing in England, as befits the supposed character 
 of the nation, has had a predominantly practical aim. The 
 more eminent of the authors who have touched upon or who 
 have treated the subject have had their eyes mainly turned to 
 the interests of moral training and social discipline. So it 
 was with the great thinker of the Elizabethan age, when he 
 noted with censure the too exclusively speculative and abstract 
 inquiries of the Greek philosophers, and indicated the new 
 needs and purposes of the modern spirit, which from his pro- 
 phetic soul already received the expression of its under-current 
 tendencies. The moral philosopher of the future, said Francis 
 Bacon, instead of wasting his time and talent in a minute 
 delineation of a superhumanly grand ideal or Exemplar of 
 Good, ought rather to lay down the methods and means by 
 which this ideal might be realized, by tracing the roots and 
 fibres of good in the physical order, and showing how natural 
 conditions might be manipulated by superinducing habits and 
 so ' framing and subduing the will of man to become true and 
 conformable ' to the pre-established pattern. 
 
 In Bacon's footsteps his successors have largely continued 
 to travel. Hobbes is hampered by no suspicions of the quick- 
 sands which beset the voyager who would carefully thread the 
 channels of investigation into moral principles. A few simple 
 calculations from maxims that lay claim to an axiomatic self-
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 449 
 
 evidency, a few deductions from the great natural law of 
 equality and proportion, which reason, being- the same in all 
 men, enunciates and commands, are enough, in his opinion, 
 to construct the outlines of a sufficient moral philosophy, to 
 establish, in other words, a science of ' the means of peaceable, 
 social, and comfortable living-/ To discover the law of nature 
 and of reason that moral law, whereof he is as careful as any 
 of his opponents to affii'm the eternal and immutable obliga- 
 tion is a problem which does not require profound meditation, 
 but may be solved with comparative ease. What is to him 
 the problem of problems is to find how this ideal authority, 
 which only obliges in the inner man, may become a power in 
 the actual world, a ruler over the deeds and lives of men. And 
 to get this real power, to secure the practical force of uniformity 
 and order, which is of the very essence of law, no price seems 
 to him too high, no sacrifice too costly. 
 
 Even Locke, with all his love of moderation, does not 
 hesitate to state his conviction tb.at, if people were only honest 
 and plain with themselves, morals might with the greatest 
 ease be reduced to the certainty of a mathematical science. 
 But it is in Bentham that this aversion to speculative theory 
 in ethics reaches its maximum. He tosses aside, with con- 
 tempt, and perhaps a mutter of impatience, the subtleties of 
 discussion on the origin of moral distinctions, or on the bases 
 of moral obligation. To him such questions so prolonged into 
 unending dialectics seem to betray a stupid and perverse habit 
 of mind, a mind overgrown by prejudices. Any open mind, 
 he asserts, can see at a glance that nothing can claim moral 
 approval except what tends to the greatest happiness of the 
 greatest number, and when you have seen that, you have 
 grasped the one principle necessary. Such a principle is 
 rather more vague than it at first seems, and is not quite free 
 from the double edge of confusion that lies in wait for the 
 believer in platitudes. But Bentham, strong in possessing 
 at least an apparent standard for adjusting measures of 
 
 G ff
 
 45 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 action, turns his entire energies on the problem of moral 
 education, and, in particular, on the methods of discipline. 
 The principles of social paedagogics, the rationale of rewards 
 and punishments, the modes of adapting his stimuli of pleasure 
 and pain, our two sovereign taskmasters, to the almost endless 
 variety in human natures these are the points towards which 
 Bentham devotes his powers of analysis, and on which he is 
 anxious to effect a thorough reformation. 
 
 The facts as alleged are as follows. First, you have each 
 human being, by an instinctive impulse we may call a law, 
 doing what gives him pleasure and refusing to do whatever 
 causes him pain. Then you have the great fact that there is 
 a moral law, in the sense that each man is expected in case of 
 conflict of pleasures to surrender his particular share, if by so 
 doing the greater pleasure of the majority or entire body is 
 gained or secured. A state of things may perhaps be imagined 
 in which this conflict would be reduced to a minimum. In 
 such a state so clear would be the mutual sympathy, so 
 complete the identity and harmony of aim, so inextricably 
 interwoven the aims and desires of all members, that each 
 would see that his own best interest was secured by serving 
 the community, and that in serving others he was serving 
 himself. But the solidarity and the intelligence involved in 
 such a supposed state, though possibly not so entirely absent 
 as the satirist would insinuate, is not to be assumed without 
 many drawbacks and shortcomings. Passion and prejudice 
 distort or blind the judgement, inferior and partial ties between 
 individuals clash with others equally partial, and with the 
 general aims of the collective community ; abnormal tempera- 
 ments and unusual experiences disturb the harmony of taste 
 and purpose. In the shortness of life it is found impossible 
 to get the long time needed for the generation of that sound 
 knowledge and steadfast conviction, which is the only sure 
 means of maintaining the social harmony and realizing the 
 social end. We must, therefore, fall back upon a lower
 
 ixj SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 451 
 
 range : we must fight pleasure-seeking by pleasure-seeking, 
 or pain by pain. We cannot wait till the right thing be 
 done in the right way and in the right spirit. It has to 
 be done: that from the outside social point of view is the 
 one thing needful ; and if it only can be got done, we shall 
 not be very curious to ask how. 
 
 Such pleasures and such pains, having for their effect 
 (and possibly for their object) to minimzie the conflict so 
 prone to arise in ill-regulated souls between their immediate 
 impulses, appetites, and instincts which they would fain 
 gratify, and the commandments of social welfare, the felicific 
 order of the moral law, are what have been called the sanctions 
 of morality. The term most properly refers only to punish- 
 ments, or threats of punishments, to the law-breaker : but it 
 is perhaps no unwarrantable stretch of application to make 
 it cover also rewards for the law-keeper. Sanctions, then, 
 refer to a law : and it must be understood that morality is 
 thus paralleled to, what it is so often contrasted with, a law. 
 The phrase, 'the Moral Law/ is indeed a commonplace. It 
 is perhaps not so much of a commonplace that the name in its 
 origin denoted a portion of the positive code of the Jews, 
 distinguished from other enactments bearing less directly 
 on everyday social welfare : whereas the use of the word, 
 especially since the days of Kant, has carried it into regions 
 where law positive is altogether unmeaning. But, again, if 
 morality be taken as a sort of law, the sanctions which help 
 to enforce it bear reference solely to actual performances. The 
 morality that is secured by sanctions is the morality of outward 
 behaviour : it is what has sometimes been called legality. And 
 to those who speak thus of the sanctions of morality, morality 
 means partly the acts required by the public law or law of the 
 land, but partly, and perhaps even more especially (in virtue 
 of contrast with law positive), it means the acts or forbearances 
 called for, or in various ways enforced, by the customs and 
 fashions of society in its various groups, as well as by the law 
 
 Gg2
 
 452 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 of God or the law sacred, ceremonial and religious. Should 
 morality mean something more than this, or something different 
 from this, something that lies within the heart and will, between 
 the man and himself, between the soul and God, then, it may 
 be asserted, with such a sphere the sanctions cannot directly 
 intermeddle. 
 
 Bentham, with his fondness for classifications, has drawn 
 up a brief list of the chief sources whence pains and pleasure 
 may flow to corroborate the general tendency, which we may 
 assume to exist in the human being, to subordinate his 
 wishes to the dominant condition of subserving the common 
 welfare. They fall into two great groups, according as the 
 rewards and penalties are directly or indirectly introduced 
 into the facts by the agency of rational beings, or are 
 spontaneous operations of the natural forces, enforcing the 
 ethical requirements, and tending to show that the moral 
 order is in harmony with the general physical laws. The 
 latter of these is the so-called physical sanction. There 
 are obviously cases in which an act, called forth by an 
 immediate stimulus of pleasure, is followed by a greater 
 balance of pain and loss : and there may even be acts in 
 which the performances required by law and custom are 
 directly pleasant. In such cases an ordinarily intelligent 
 person will by mere prudence be led to conduct in accordance 
 with moral laws. For practical purposes, perhaps, we should 
 limit the applications of the physical sanction to those results 
 or effects which are obvious and undisputed, even, we may 
 say, visible and tangible ; to cases where the causality is 
 unmistakeable, or traceable with a kind of arithmetical 
 accuracy. And such experience is perhaps most accessible 
 in the case of many of the virtues and vices which directly 
 regard our own persons, our full selves, corporeal as well as 
 spiritual. And beyond this personal morality with its 
 discipline of the appetites, where prudence manifests itself 
 as temperance and self-control, it is undesirable, at least in
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 453 
 
 the first instance, to extend the range of the physical 
 sanction. It is by such considerations of retributory pain 
 following on excess, that the sobriety and moderation which 
 society requires are commended to the reason, which, if at 
 first it seems only the ministering servant of the several 
 appetites, soon becomes, like a wise servant, the master 
 who . rules them, were it only by playing off one against 
 another. 
 
 It is possible indeed to go beyond this narrow limit, and 
 to lay down that the moral law coincides with the law of 
 nature, and that morality and physical well-being tend in the 
 long-ran always to go together. But if we thus assert that 
 the very stars in their courses fight against evil and make 
 for righteousness, that all things work together for good for 
 those who follow the right in scorn of consequence, we are, 
 in the first place, running the risk of destroying the practical 
 efficiency of the sanction, by boldly assuming it to extend 
 to a region where the warrant of verification is hardly 
 possible. And that is not all. Even if the doctrine of the 
 identity of goodness and happiness be true, its truth is 
 reached only by giving to the words an interpretation other 
 than what they usually bear. In that high sphere where 
 moral goodness is its own reward and happiness ultimately 
 implies virtue, it does so because happiness and virtue have 
 alike been raised above their ordinary meaning into something 
 which it has not entered into the ordinary heart of man to 
 conceive. The natural order of which we spoke must be 
 transformed into a nature which would better be styled 
 supernatural. The nature which the moralist assumes as 
 his sanction, that supernatural nature which is the final 
 moral order of the world, is a law which he could only read 
 in the apparent chaos of the sense-world, because he had 
 more or less clearly seen it with the inward and intellectual 
 eye in the world of his own spirit. If moral philosophy 
 may, as Bacon said, save itself much futile inquiry by
 
 454 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 carefully gathering 1 up the hints afforded by the unity in 
 difference, by the attractions and proportions, the gradation 
 and centralizing organization of the material universe, it 
 must begin by spiritualizing nature, before it can extract 
 from nature the law of the spiritual world. It is, on the 
 other hand, just because the physical sanction goes but a little 
 way, that its work has to be taken up and continued by 
 sanctions derived from spirit and intelligence. 
 
 For man is not merely a part of nature, a sentient 
 organism affected by the material structures of the universe ; 
 he is also a social being, a member of what has been called 
 the social organism. The term serves to emphasize the 
 dependence of individual on individual through the totality 
 of the group to which he by nature or choice belongs. It 
 recognizes the essential teleological relationship of each to 
 all and of all to each : but it falls short of giving expression 
 to the fact that this relationship in ever-increasing measure 
 works through ideas and not by mere mechanical impacts or 
 material pressure. It forgets that here the unity, which had 
 erewhile been immersed in matter and only manifested in 
 systematic and harmonious movements, has now assumed 
 independence and a being of its own : that it has an existence 
 not merely in, but also above its envelope : that it rises, in 
 short, above itself so as to survey itself, and even to 
 reorganize itself in further forms. It is at once immanent 
 and transcendent : the organizing principle embodied in the 
 mass, and the spirit detaching itself from its absorption, yet 
 not from its connexion, rising into ever more controlling and 
 commanding phases of activity, creating a social organization, 
 a special order of superintendent agency, a literature and 
 art, a religion and a philosophy. 
 
 But for the present we need only consider the agency 
 of this social structure as it surveys itself and guides its 
 organization in the light of its double disciplinary function : 
 first, as an organized total, and, secondly, in its looser and
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 455 
 
 more particular groups, as yet but imperfectly cohering with 
 the spirit of the total body. These give the so-called legal 
 or political sanction, embodied in the laws of the country, 
 and the social or popular sanction, lying in the censures 
 of class opinion, of general opinion, scandal, reputation, fame ; 
 in some cases, not going beyond a mental judgement telling 
 through sympathy in the minds of those who feel it, but 
 in other cases accompanied, in the lesser groups where it 
 prevails, with more or less of material loss and pain in those 
 who are subjected to it. In early times and small unde- 
 veloped societies there was no hard and fast line of distinc- 
 tion between these, any more than between law and custom. 
 Yet even there, there are fundamental conditions of social 
 life felt to be essential and common, and others on which 
 opinion still fluctuates and varies from person to person and 
 from group to group, which refer more to the sentimental 
 and ideal side of life. There are things and acts which by 
 a palpable and visible effect injure the community, at least 
 its members, and there are others which indicate divergencies 
 of taste and aim, differences of judgement, annoyances which 
 can be felt, though it is not so easy to define their precise 
 causes or modes of operation. 
 
 To discuss the legal and the social sanction is to ask 
 what is the influence of laws and of social observances upon 
 morals. Or, we may even say, it is to ask a more com- 
 prehensive question : what are the actions and reactions on 
 each other of law and custom on one hand, and of morality 
 on the other? Probably a little reflection will show that, 
 although it is for some purposes convenient to oppose law 
 and custom to morality, and even to set law against custom, 
 these distinctions should never make us lose sight of the 
 interdependence of the outward and the inward, of the 
 general and the particular, in one comprehensive idea. In 
 plainer words, it has to be remembered that in the average 
 community the conduct required by the laws and by social
 
 456 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 opinion is what in a way is done or supposed to be done by 
 the predominant majority of the population, and that the 
 conduct to which legal penalty or social stigma is attached 
 is the sort of behaviour only likely to be exhibited by 
 a comparatively insignificant minority. What the society 
 believes itself to do, what each recognizes in the case of every 
 other to be right (however he may in practice except himself 
 from the obligation), is what it requires by law and custom. 
 The law states what is done by the vast mass of the com- 
 munity, and not merely what ought to be done : or it 
 presents what ?'# done by the majority as what ought to be 
 done by the small minority. 
 
 Law and custom thus represent the result of a process 
 by which, out of the fluctuating mass of what is actually 
 done, there emerges a solid nucleus which serves as a rule 
 or standard, when conscious reflection upon conduct seizes 
 upon the common element, the dense central mean of conduct, 
 around which the divergencies tone off on either side. Just 
 as, in the individual human being, the experience of life 
 enables him to fix on a more or less definite pivot of belief 
 and thought within him, on which his various opinions and 
 tendencies turn and which he regards as a permanent higher 
 self, so the intelligence of a community gradually detects, 
 and at length fixes in independent outlines the broad middle 
 way on which its movement tends more and more to 
 accumulate itself. In apprehending this, the community, 
 like the individual, has as it were come to itself, has reached 
 the unity and essential principle of its existence, the universal 
 of its particularity. 
 
 But with the separation of the common and universal 
 nucleus from its variations and outrunners, there arises an 
 antagonism and a danger. An antagonism : the average 
 presents itself as a normal : what z> as what ought to be : 
 what all in a rough sort of way do as what each definitely 
 and precisely has to do. Compulsion and constraint and
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 457 
 
 coercion are in the air : the individual sees the law as an 
 external force, an alien control. The law confronts him 
 embodied in a judge, an officer, a government ; personality 
 is set against personality, will against will : organic inter- 
 dependence is replaced by a more mechanical relationship: 
 the sense of free agency, of autonomy, is replaced by require- 
 ment ab extra. The state and the community may in their 
 essence and theory be an organic unity : as they appear in 
 the practice of government, they sink into a machinery, which 
 involves a good deal of friction. 
 
 So far as the laws proper are concerned, we have to note 
 a difference in their operation. The older codes of laws 
 content themselves in the main by noting the injuries to the 
 members of the community or to its peace and security in 
 general, which they deem desirable to punish by various 
 inflictions and sufferings. What these are, will of course 
 depend on the social and political system which has become 
 established. But the punishment is in each case directed 
 against an actual violation or outrage on the social order as 
 it exists. In course of time legislation embraces a secondary 
 order of crimes, which are crimes only as it were constructively 
 and ex Jiypothesi. Penalties are imposed upon acts which 
 lead, or which are for good reasons believed to lead, to results 
 which will be injurious to the common welfare. Here we 
 have the prophylactic action of the state. Trusting to the 
 lessons of experience and the inferences of science, it attempts 
 to catch an evil before it has assumed actuality, while it is 
 yet in embryo and possibility. In these cases to omit 
 a precaution, which experience has shown to be a valuable 
 safeguard against the emergence of notable calamities, 
 renders the culpable negligence liable to a penalty. Here 
 the State no doubt uses the knowledge gained of the physical 
 sanctions waiting on certain forms cf imprudence : but its 
 action is not so much in the interest of the agent, as of 
 the other members of the community, who may probably
 
 458 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 suffer through his neglect. Here, where unassisted nature 
 may be supposed to let the children suffer for the fathers, 
 or the neighbour for the neighbour's sin, the State en- 
 deavours to bring home the remote result to the original 
 offender by replacing the ultimate result by an immediate 
 penalty. 
 
 Thus, as a rule, while the earlier laws do not require a 
 performance, but only punish the commission an act they 
 forbid, the later punish the omission of a prophylactic act 
 they require. In this department of law it is evident that 
 we come close to the kind of observances required by society 
 in its non-political and private aspect. It insists upon 
 uniformity : it lays down a particular way of action or 
 behaviour and insists upon conformity. Thus grow up 
 manners and customs, rites and observances, usages and 
 fashions, ritual and ceremonial. While the laws are directed 
 at special performance or non-performance, the social sanction 
 is jealous of any departure from its one course, it craves 
 an unvarying obedience and will hardly permit even 
 a divergence in thought and opinion. This is the vop.o$ 
 Seo-TroTTjs : the custom which pries into and seeks to direct 
 the heart, which persecutes every non-conformant, which 
 would impress on all the stamp of a single model. 
 
 But it may be well to point out the source of the tyranny. 
 In its origin custom is wholesome : it is to a large extent 
 the unforced product of common insight and common need 
 in common circumstances. As such, it is no tyrant, but the 
 spontaneous sympathetic action of individuals. Yet as a 
 matter of fact this coincidence is often unreal and super- 
 ficial. The natural differences of originality and creative or 
 perceptive power, the tendency to imitate in one part of 
 a population which supplements the claim of leadership in 
 the other part, the habit of accepting what is asserted and 
 of imagining that one believes what one has not force enough 
 to discuss- -all these proclivities make custom and fashion
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 459 
 
 dictatorial and arbitrary, make them represent the verdict 
 of a dominant clique rather than the result of a common 
 effort and a consensus of original opinion. In its ideal the 
 vox populi may be the vox del : but in its actual appearance 
 it is often the accidentally predominant opinion of a minority 
 which has put on the semblance of a majority. In such 
 a case, we speak of the tyranny of public opinion, and 
 of the obedience of a multitude to a fancied authority which 
 only a little courage is needed to reject. 
 
 The common law is a realm of liberty compared with the 
 iron bond which these social requirements cast around the 
 members of a society. But in either case it has to be 
 remembered that these sanctions operate as moral or quasi- 
 moral agents ; not as external forces, but as inward con- 
 straints. Neither the law nor the custom has its force from 
 its mere mechanical weight. Its strength resides in the inner 
 confession of the sufferer from its penalties that he deserves 
 his doom. As mere brute force, they are on a level with the 
 forces of nature : they may smite the defaulter down, but 
 when they do so, they rather stimulate and corroborate his 
 will than subdue it. They are felt to be mere accidents from 
 the force of an alien world, a world for which he has no 
 respect, which lies utterly outside him, and outside the world 
 in which he lives. It is otherwise when they are felt as the 
 objectified utterance of his own substance, of his permanent 
 and underlying self, of the world and the life with which 
 his momentary self and life are bound up. To the criminal, 
 in whom the sense of his own partnership in the system to 
 which these laws give expression is utterly absent or dead, 
 the law and its penalty have the same deterrent force as the 
 terror of man's vengeance has on the bloodthirsty or mis- 
 chievous animal. But wherever the sense of social solidarity 
 still exercises its force, wherever the culprit realizes his own 
 fundamental unity with the authority which made the laws, 
 there the sanction of law and social observance exerts its
 
 460 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 potent psychological force. It is the esprit <h> corps, the 
 social conscience (and conscience is essentially social, essen- 
 tially the voice of a common reason), which makes the 
 mere loss, suffering-, and injury a punishment. The sanction 
 after all does not operate from without : but by its identifica- 
 tion with what is within. It becomes a punishment only 
 when, or in so far as, it is recognized by the sufferer as the 
 necessary sequel of his own act, its inevitable consequence 
 in a world so constituted, and that world as the framework 
 and substantial reality on which his own life is founded. 
 Punishment as an ethical force only emerges when this 
 sense of social solidarity is awake and active : and it was 
 this condition to which Becearia gave such absurd expression 
 when he based the right of the community to punish its 
 members on their actual or implied agreement to accept the 
 penalty of their deeds. 
 
 There is, however, a question that falls to be considered 
 here. How far are the acts and observances demanded by 
 these sanctions moral in their essential quality ? How far 
 do law and custom encourage or forbid in accord with the 
 requirements of the moral sense ? Of the law it may be 
 said that what it insists upon is rather the sine qua non 
 of morality than morality itself. And of a great deal of 
 social ethics it may be said that they are prophylactic 
 of morality, but not themselves moral. They are the sign 
 and symptom indicating with greater or less accuracy an 
 essential and underlying frame of mind and direction of the 
 will. This, moreover, is not the whole. The social form and 
 legal enactment remains unchanged even when it is no 
 longer in harmony with the inner state of affairs. It comes 
 to possess an authority of its own, independent of what it 
 represents : it asserts itself as a separate structure, with 
 a life and interests of its own. Such an organ of the 
 common life, thus invested with a separate vitality and with 
 a standing of its own, is a morbid growth :
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 461 
 
 ' Es erben sich Gesetz" und Rechte 
 
 Wie eine ew'ge Krankheit fort : 
 Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zum Geschlechte 
 
 Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort : 
 Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage.' 
 
 But this is a disease and a discord not confined to laws. 
 Art and science, literature and religion, also, in the objective 
 institutions and quasi-materialized shapes which they assume, 
 and must assume if they are to be powers in the real world, 
 tend to become stereotyped in a traditional form and to be 
 transmitted from age to age, as if they had a value of 
 their own, and were not essentially valuable as factors only 
 and elements in the total life and action of humanity. 
 The inward spirit of morality, in itself inclined to antinomi- 
 anism and autonomy, inclined, in other words, to claim an 
 abstract and one-sided right of self-determination, is the 
 natural and legitimate enemy of mere conformity, uniformity, 
 and obedience to traditional restraints ; but they both are 
 elements in the social life, where moral order unites with 
 moral liberty, and the conservative impulse is in conjunction 
 with the progressive. The moral life, the idea of the social 
 organism, is only maintained in vigorous antagonism, where 
 resolute adhesion to all that is worthy in the past is matched 
 with resolute endeavour to reach the fruition of a worthier 
 ideal. 
 
 It is in the consideration of this antagonism at the root 
 of social life that we find the ground of the tragic character 
 of the ethical process. The human being who is to reach 
 true happiness, who is, in other words, to attain the full 
 fruition of his being, to compass high ends and rejoice in his 
 performance, must, as Plato says, have a suitable and pro- 
 portionate community ; he must, as Aristotle says, have 
 a complete life and fortunate environment. But such duly 
 graduated and harmonious development between man and 
 man, between group and group not to mention between man 
 and nature is far from universal, or even very common.
 
 462 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 Every part, like every man, has the defects of its qualities : 
 it is the nature of finite thing's that they can only win some- 
 thing by ignoring or letting slip something else. No one 
 party has a monopoly of social virtue. In the tangled skein 
 of human affairs, to draw out one strand clean and clear 
 requires you to cut or maltreat others. The one view, more- 
 over, in its extremer form inevitably calls forth an opponent 
 with equal one-sidedness but in an opposite direction: yet 
 the two antagonists only come by their antagonism because 
 in their imperfection they yet have a latent sense of their 
 totality and turn angrily against the side which reminds 
 them most keenly of what they have missed. The persecutor 
 when he tortures a dissident belief is angriest because in his 
 heart of hearts he feels that he is fighting against an enemy 
 that is of his own house and has an echo in his own breast ; 
 and the sufferer partly undergoes vicarious punishment for 
 this inner foe. Just as, in a very different sphere, one, who 
 has already felt the power of love but unwillingly, struggles 
 hard against its chain, and in blind passion vexes the loved 
 one as the source and object of his or her own weakness ; so 
 the violence of party strife is often an involuntary and uncon- 
 scious recognition of the, at least partial, Tightness of the 
 other side. Thus when Saul is loudest in breathing slaughter 
 against those of the Christian way, he is already in the mood 
 that may at any moment break out into conversion to the 
 faith he denounces. 
 
 So it is also that the essential sanction or rather impulse 
 given by law and custom is that they embody our own will 
 and mind : the will which, though permanent, we had 
 forgotten. They are the image of our true selves, of sides 
 and depths in our nature which the pressure and distraction 
 of life had obliterated. They speak, as Plato says, with 
 the voice of aged parents and once-esteemed friends whom 
 we would rather not meet, but whose monitions, whether 
 we will or not, haunt us with the power of an insuperable
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 463 
 
 necessity. They are the face of his country as it presents 
 itself to the deserter and exile. 
 
 If it be the failure of the sanction-aspect of political and 
 social laws that they are looked at solely as external forces, 
 and not as deriving their efficacy from their kindred with the 
 forces within the soul, this is still more apparent in the 
 ordinary way of looking at the religious sanctions of which it 
 is now time to speak. In one sense of the term where 
 however it would be better to speak of the ecclesiastical 
 sanction it only denotes a peculiar variety of the social 
 sanction in general. The church, e. g. as forming a special 
 organization in the State and in society, may exert an 
 influence by separate ecclesiastical penalties on its members, 
 and even create within its bounds a moral standard of its 
 own; or a theocracy, a sacerdotal order, claiming to govern 
 as the vicegerents of a divine inspiration, may produce a type 
 of conduct and character unlike that of the ordinary commu- 
 nity. In a community where the pow r er of the civil state 
 is ill-established and its functions of social regulation ill- 
 performed, the ecclesiastical organization especially when it 
 wields the influence of a more than national union, as it did 
 in the case of the mediaeval church may assume the post of 
 a judge and regulator, and thus do the work which the secular 
 government is unequal to perform. It is true that, in so far 
 as the religious creed adopts to the secular life an opposition 
 of ideal and aim, such enforcement of morality through the 
 consecrated order may err on the side of asceticism. But 
 these are tendencies not necessarily connected with religious 
 sanctions. 
 
 In any case, indeed, the sanctions of religion form part 
 of the established social and political order : sometimes as 
 one of the many social influences, sometimes in close alliance 
 with the secular arm of the state. But ordinarily the 
 sanction of religion means either the occasional direct inter- 
 ference of God in human affairs, punishing acts and omissions
 
 464 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 that escape the meshes of human justice, whether legal or 
 social, or the inevitable final penalty and reward attached 
 to these and other acts in the future world. The former is 
 the belief in a divine power, outside nature, yet supreme 
 over it, which punishes great criminals whom human justice 
 fails to overtake, and secret evil-doers of whose acts the 
 ordinary sanctions have no cognizance. The latter is the 
 belief that all conduct, besides its obvious effects, and its 
 obvious accompaniments in reward and punishment in this 
 world, has future effects and infinite issues : or, in vulgar 
 language, that the good done in this world is rewarded here- 
 after, and the evil done in this world is hereafter punished. 
 The beliefs, we have said : for here also it is not the outward 
 force of an angry deity, but the faith of the religious mind 
 that creates or contains the sanction. It is the belief in the 
 validity of a sanction which for moral purposes constitutes 
 its force. 
 
 It is here that we are often introduced to the ( super- 
 natural/ But this term, with its antithesis the ' natural/ 
 are words to which we should not much pin our faith. What 
 nature is in all the actuality of its detail, is what none of us 
 know. Nature is simply a way we look at the world, a law, 
 condition or conception, under which our mind compels us 
 to look at all facts or supposed facts : it is the statement that 
 whatever exists, exists in complete interdependence ; that 
 there is nothing irregular, nothing chaotic, nothing absolutely 
 isolated and unconnected in the natural world. Of this 
 we are absolutely sure : or rather it is the fundamental 
 condition of all certainty and knowledge. But it is a very 
 different thing to assert that the particular uniformities 
 of event which we have ascertained, the particular sequences 
 which have actually been observed, are all the uniformities 
 which exist, and that they exhaust the possibilities of 
 sequence which may be observed. On this sure foundation 
 rests the fabric of our life and knowledge; and therefore if
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 465 
 
 we speak of the ' supernatural ' we cannot mean another 
 province of our lives and knowledge, which lies in a sort 
 of local juxtaposition, and occasionally, as it were, forms 
 a sort of enclave in the territories of the natural. We can 
 only mean that the forms and terms, under which we 
 ordinarily grasp the unity of nature, are not the only forms 
 in which that unity may reveal itself : we can only mean, in 
 particular, that the forms of time and place are forms beyond 
 which our thought is sometimes compelled to range. If 
 nature be restricted, as it legitimately enough may, to denote 
 a time and space world, a world in which there is always 
 externality, where the unity of the idea is only as it were 
 interpreted into it from some further source ; then by the 
 supernatural, we mean the inward and abiding unity which 
 refuses to disappear from the multiplicity, and yet which 
 cannot find adequate expression in the multiplicity : the 
 natura naturans, as opposed to the natura naturata. 
 
 If we ask then how far the religious belief that whatever 
 men's sanctions may do or fail to do, and whatever the 
 ordinary course of nature may do, there is still a Providence 
 that controls the operations of nature so as to realize his 
 moral will, and punishes where man and nature fail, if we 
 ask how far this belief is agreeable with the ' uniformity 
 of nature/ it will be necessary to note the meaning we 
 assign to our statements. And, first, the words may be 
 taken in an obviously pictorial sense. They may mean that 
 occasionally God does directly and personally interfere with 
 the phenomena of the world, that he appears as an agent 
 upon the scene, and takes a place among second causes, 
 instead of remaining as the great first cause, i. e. not, strictly 
 speaking, as a cause at all, but as the life and thought and 
 spirit of all causes. At momentous issues in individual, 
 national, or universal human life, at peculiar places where the 
 world-drama has for the time concentrated its interest for 
 the observer, God, as it were, rends asunder the veil which 
 
 Hh
 
 466 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 is ordinarily supposed to cover him, and an almighty right 
 hand is stretched out to make itself felt in human affairs. 
 Such a view is one into which the observer readily falls, who 
 sees events from his limited standpoint and with his limited 
 and particular interests. He views things, as the philosopher 
 would say, from the ground of his senses and his imagina- 
 tion, not from the standpoint of reason. Absorbed in his 
 own, or his nation's aims, he see things from a false point 
 of view, and can only explain the marvellous in his survey 
 by the hypothesis of extraordinary forces. If he is right 
 in his general assumption that no event happens without 
 God, he is wrong by the partial way in which he confines the 
 divine action to a special interference in his affairs. Such 
 a belief may be and often is pictorially effective; and for 
 those to whom pictorial effect is as it were the last word 
 of thought, there is probably some good in even this partial 
 realization of the dependence of all that we are and do on the 
 great source of life. 
 
 Yet perhaps the truer meaning of the phrase is that the 
 ways of the world are not all explained and classified in our 
 philosophy or science, and are not all in subordination to 
 the detailed structure of causes and effects we have actually 
 ascertained ; that the uniformities we know are only parts, 
 and the order of nature extends far beyond those details of 
 that order of which we are actually aware. It is, however, 
 to the believer in the moral order of the world more than 
 this. It is a far-reaching faith that whatever is, is right. 
 Such a faith does not imply that an adequate and sufficient 
 good has been attained and that we should rest and be 
 thankful. It is rather the full acceptance of the system 
 of nature and of science, as involving that there is reason in 
 the world, and that it is only a partial or defective view that 
 can speak of absolute unreason. This does not mean that 
 every stage in the process of individual or of cosmic life is in 
 its isolation admirable : it means only that what appears dark
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 467 
 
 or dismal in the details becomes bright and cheering in the 
 totality. It is the confident anticipation o the ultimate 
 identity of spirit and nature : a monistic faith in the unity of 
 man's permanent purposes with the cosmic order and move- 
 ment : a doctrine which is perhaps Spinozist in its emphasis 
 on the essential identity of the ordo rerum and the ordo 
 idearum, though hardly Spinozist in its tendency to regard 
 the latter as the superior phase of the former. 
 
 With regard, again, to the belief in future rewards and 
 punishments, here also we have a statement in the pictorial 
 language of imagination, whereby the timeless truth of 
 necessary law is translated into the successive events of 
 a history. "What cannot be conveniently discharged at the 
 time, is to be wiped off at some coming day, with a massive 
 weight of penalty and reward which should not fail to 
 impress the observant mind. God, as it were, stands aside, 
 and leaves the human agent free- play for a season : only to 
 step in with awful rigour when the day of reckoning comes 
 round in the end of all things. But what these pictures 
 tear asunder into scenes is the truth that, beyond the utmost 
 consequences of acts as they reveal themselves to us, there 
 are further and further consequences ; that, though for us 
 it is forbidden to trace beyond a slight range the effects of 
 acts upon ourselves and our neighbours and the world at 
 large, such effects do not stop where their influence becomes 
 inaccessible to palpable tests. It is a statement that the 
 temporal is only a part of the Eternal, and that, when 
 the thread of life and conduct disappears to the sensuous 
 vision, it has only entered on a new phase, with issues 
 infinite and indestructible. 
 
 And if we ask what are the effects of such beliefs on 
 morality, we must reply that the religious sanction operates 
 in one way, when it forms an integral part of the social 
 system, intricately allied with general ideals, observances, and 
 requirements, and when it has a real hold on the life and 
 
 H h. 2
 
 468 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 thought of the individual soul in short, when it is in 
 harmony with the whole other aims and beliefs, the environ- 
 ment and organization. And it operates in another way, when 
 it exercises an influence alien to the general tone and temper, 
 when it owes its place to a traditional reverence, and the 
 power of a narrow organization with its imperium in imperio. 
 There is a living religion, and there is a mere skeleton of 
 organization. The religious organism, the objective form in 
 which it is embodied, may like other organizations become 
 self-engrossed, detached from the general life, and drawing 
 into itself, like a morbid structure, the materials which ought 
 to go to maintain the general well-being. 
 
 But what is a religion ? It has apparently several elements 
 and grows up from several sources. But as we consider 
 them, it behoves us first of all and above all to remember 
 that it grows and lives in the heart and soul of man, and 
 that it exists there in intimate and perpetual interaction 
 with all other human agencies. It varies with the con- 
 ditions of the individual and of the community. We must 
 think of it as in touch with the other factors and agencies 
 in human life, receiving and transmitting, as well as 
 exerting influences. To treat it as if it existed and acted 
 by itself is to make an abstraction, which for certain 
 purposes may be just or necessary, but which is none the less 
 likely to be misleading and dangerous. To say that it does 
 this or that, is to attribute to one prominent quality of 
 an agent the effect which the whole agent produces. In the 
 first place, it is the religious man, the religious community 
 which is the real agent. And, secondly, in that agent 
 religion never acts alone. Its operation is conditioned, is 
 stimulated and checked by other interests, other pursuits, and 
 ideals. It is in equal correlation too with the manners and 
 customs, the organization or, it may be, the disorganization 
 of the community. 
 
 Man, it is sometimes said, is par excellence the religious
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 469 
 
 animal. So too man has been defined or specified as 
 a cooking-, or as a visible, animal. But this far from 
 implying 1 that man always cooks or laughs : and it need 
 not be inconsistent with the statement that certain savages 
 are unacquainted with the use of fire, and have never been 
 known to relax in a smile. Nor is it inconsistent with the 
 further fact that the style of cookery varies from country 
 to country, and that the taste for the ridiculous is no less 
 uncertain. By the assertion that man has these qualities 
 we mean that the experience of history can only be explained 
 on the assumption of certain uniform tendencies or form- 
 principles of human intelligence, which lead, when sub- 
 mitted to appropriate stimuli, to certain tolerably uniform 
 developments. A religion then will be the response of 
 certain tendencies in the human organization to certain con- 
 ditions in the world around. But there may be all sorts 
 of irregularities and what seem anomalies in the general 
 development. The conditions which promote one line of 
 development may be unfavourable to another. It is equally 
 true that a human being is an artistic, or that he is a com- 
 mercial being : but the mode in which his artistic or com- 
 mercial activity may issue admits of all shades and degrees. 
 The circumstances which call out one of these activities may 
 dwarf another. Though art e. g. may be justly called the 
 natural and normal result of certain tendencies in mankind, it 
 is quite true that there are many races and many individuals 
 who would be baldly pronounced inartistic. But the term, 
 like so many of the kind, expresses only a comparative 
 defect, not an absolute want. It means that the art is bad, 
 and does not come up to its ideal. So also there are 
 individuals and races in whom the religious instinct appears 
 dormant, if not dead : others in which science and philosophy 
 are practically non-existent : others in which commerce is 
 nearly unknown. And yet as we survey the history of 
 our race we have a conviction that what man has done, man
 
 470 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 may do : and we credit him always with potentialities which 
 are only occasionally realized. This is perhaps a conviction 
 that expresses rather the postulate of a complete and all- 
 round development, than a belief which can be actually 
 substantiated by experience. It is the ideal of the perfect 
 man, of a perfect humanity, in which the several excellencies 
 of individuals form a social nucleus, a spiritual substance, 
 in which each partly acquires a faculty he would never have 
 acquired by himself, and yet each gives to the total a some- 
 thing- none could render but himself. It is the normal social 
 man who is essentially religious and artistic, not always in 
 his obvious individuality any single man we meet in the 
 street, though even in his case we hold the faith that some- 
 where within him, however hard to get at and however deeply 
 buried, there is an element which, under the proper stimulus 
 of education, will respond to the call from the art and 
 religion without. Sometimes, indeed, it seems so difficult to 
 find the fulcrum on which to rest our motor, that we incline 
 to deny the susceptibility altogether, and are ready to believe 
 that there are human beings bereft by nature of a moral, 
 a religious, or an artistic sense, just as there are some born 
 blind and others deaf. And yet, perhaps, the homonymy of 
 the term ' sense ' here misleads us, and makes us forget that, 
 while the senses strictly so-called presuppose a very definite 
 physical organ, the other so-called senses rest upon a much 
 broader basis, and can arise in a great variety of methods, 
 by very various solicitations; and that they represent to 
 a large extent the individualized form of a faculty which 
 is essentially social, and lives in the conjunct organization 
 of the community, largely independent of accidental and 
 particular variations in the single members of such a body. 
 
 The essence of religion seems to lie in the sense that this 
 life and this world, this visible and temporal scene, is only 
 a part, or only an appearance, of a greater life, a grander 
 world, which is out of sense and is eternal : a sense that the
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 471 
 
 motors of this changing scene are in a world beyond and 
 behind them ; that the meaning of existence is not contained 
 in the facts and phenomena patent to observation, but 
 postulate for their explanation agencies and forces unacces- 
 sible to the mere eyes and ears. But under this common 
 tendency there may be distinguished more than one shade of 
 motive. There is an aesthetic demand for a completeness 
 and symmetry such as the isolated fragments of existence do 
 not always supply : there is a need of explanation, which 
 primitive ignorance and inexperience call for at a very early 
 stage, but which advancing knowledge pushes further and 
 further off : there is a moral need, which would seek some 
 reconciliation of the unfinished and discordant struggles seen 
 in actual life. Yet this sense of dependence of the seen upon 
 the unseen has in all cases been accompanied by the sense 
 that man, who is, on one hand, a part of the visible and 
 temporary, and so subordinate, is, on the other hand, a part 
 of the invisible and the eternal : so that in him there is 
 a meeting place, as at a point, of the finite and the infinite. 
 While, therefore, he feels his kindred with the things 
 that perish and pass away, he feels also his kindred 
 with the abiding and the invariable, with the gods who 
 live for ever. 
 
 Thus if, on the one hand, religion is the feeling of all- 
 entwining dependence, the utterness of subjection of the part 
 to the total, of the imperfect finite to the complete and limit- 
 less, it implies no less, on the other hand, the anthropopathic 
 conviction that the universe is not without a being or beings 
 who throb with sympathy or antipathy to man, who, at any 
 rate, are not indifferent to him, and who, if occasionally they 
 may be his enemies, can by various methods be made friendly 
 and kind. How far in a given case either of these aspects may 
 be prominent will, as already noted, depend upon the grade 
 of development of the other functions of human energy. 
 A rich, full, active life, unchecked in its activity and
 
 472 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 achieving the self-satisfaction of its aims, will feel, no doubt, 
 the grandeur and majesty of the great powers who envelop 
 human existence, but it will not anxiously crave their help or 
 fear their enmity : it will see in their nature and existence 
 a reflex of its own avrapneia ; it will worship, but with the 
 calm, self-satisfied jubilation of those who glory in their 
 kindred with the immortals, and cheerfully own the vast 
 superiority of those who after all are indissolubly linked with 
 the national life. If, on the contrary, the bond of national 
 life has no outward symbol, if individuals have to find, as 
 best they can, a refuge from the storm of life and a fortress 
 against its perturbations, then the powers of the other world 
 will rise supreme and dominant over the present : they will 
 grow turbid with awful grandeur, and demand the offering 
 of complete surrender. Such are the gods of nations rejoicing 
 in their strength and supremacy projections into the infinite 
 of the national vigour in its finite forms of achievement : 
 and such, on the other hand, are the gods of the needy and 
 down-pressed individuals, seeking in some strange new 
 divinity from lands remote the help that the national gods 
 do not give. Till finally, out of the latter, there emerge 
 religions which tend to supplant the local divinities as well 
 as the gods created to supply a special need, or to be the 
 partial solution of a difficulty religions which in varying 
 measure are an expression of the need and satisfaction of 
 man as man, in his fullest individuality and in his widest 
 humanity. 
 
 Still, not at all times, nor in all circumstances will the 
 religious instinct awake ; or if we must say that it is always 
 there, it takes sometimes forms which prevent us recognizing 
 it for religion. It is not for nought that it is sometimes 
 said that to many people wealth is a god, or art, or beauty. 
 All things, said an ancient philosopher, are full of gods. By 
 their actions, at least, such people seem to credit the objects 
 of their devotion with a permanence, a fundamentality,
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 473 
 
 a central and all-supporting nature. The eye of the devotee, 
 like that of the poet, sees things in their ideal completeness, 
 in a brilliancy and power they never have to ordinary 
 mortals. It gathers round the finite object the wealth of its 
 infinite forebodings, and under the veil of the visible it 
 worships an invisible glory. But for religion in its more 
 specific phase, some greater detachment is necessary : we 
 must rise above practice to contemplation, from engrossment 
 in business to calm abstraction from ourselves and our 
 pursuits. If the world is too much with us, we cannot hope 
 to see God : distracted by its various pursuits, our eye only 
 fixes upon one temporal object after another, and has neither 
 the concentration nor the power to rise to the totality, or to 
 penetrate to the unity and inner meaning. 
 
 We may perhaps note three ways in which this power of the 
 One and All touches. First, there is the sense of loneliness 
 in nature, the feeling of the primitive stranger in a natural 
 environment which in ways many and mysterious comes as 
 a disturbing, or favouring, a controlling influence into his 
 life : a feeling which in the intoxicating attractions of our 
 artificial surrounding's is reduced to a minimum, but which 
 
 O * 
 
 may be aroused in one who for longer or shorter time feels 
 himself an outcast and solitary in a great multitude, or who 
 suddenly finds himself in the vast loneliness of nature 
 possessed by that peculiar sense of the haunting mystery 
 of the outer wilds, so well depicted by the modern French 
 romancer, as speaking to the sailor on dim and distant seas 
 of the misty north, or to the sojourner amid the environing 
 forests of some island in southern seas. But as is the 
 individual, in his feelings and training, so is the articulation 
 of the voice that speaks to him from the circumambient world. 
 Whereas a Wordsworth sees behind the light of setting suns 
 a motion and a spirit that impels all things, the primitive 
 savage finds a deity in more prosaic and proximate objects ; 
 yet always perhaps, not so much in them, as behind them, be
 
 474 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 they but stock or stone. It seems somehow as if by many 
 an incident our eyes and hearts, otherwise given away to petty 
 and partial objects and aims, had the veil suddenly taken 
 away from them ; as if for a moment they were enabled to see 
 the outlying- provinces of life, and to feel the vaster issues 
 of that roar of worlds, which in daily routine we contrive to 
 forget, and which for many purposes we must, if not 
 absolutely forget, at least hear only as a distant and subdued 
 accompaniment to the melody of life. 
 
 But if the variety of human fortunes and experiences is 
 felt to be only a department in the great all-embracing 
 universe, if acts and their issues are believed to depend on 
 the unaccountable influences of external forces, or to be 
 a consequence and a detail of the one great cosmic unity ; 
 if a dimly seen but intensely felt destiny or overruling 
 influence of fate carries along with it in its train and sweep 
 the lives and works of men, there is also a closer and 
 a kindlier tie which binds the generations each to each, which 
 gives the individual a permanent abiding-place and a sub- 
 stantial immortality. This is the solidarity of human life 
 as first realized in the family and its extensions. But, here 
 too, the full awareness of the bond only comes when the 
 visible unity of the family passes away at death. It is the 
 family deserted of its head which learns to look on that unity 
 as subsisting on and on, yet subsisting in a certain ghostly 
 wise, hardly real, only embalmed in memory ; existing in the 
 subjective devotion of those who abide, but supposed to exist 
 quasi-objectively in the ghostly realm of the dead. If the 
 former source of religion consists in the presupposition of 
 a unity in all the incidents of life in the endless range of 
 universal space, the latter welds together present, past, and 
 future in one continuous line of being, and beholds a per- 
 sistent life running throughout. The infinitesimally short 
 lapse of the momentary and present sojourn of man is felt to 
 be rooted in the past and to have its meaning in onlook to
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 475 
 
 the future. It is here that we find what in some ways may 
 be regarded as an equivalent to the modern hypothesis of the 
 continuity of the germ-plasm. 
 
 Yet the dead, who have become thus the object of worship, 
 are also changed. If they have lost some of the attributes 
 of humanity, and are thus in worse estate than before their 
 decease, they are also freed from certain of its limitations. 
 They are superior to the ordinary restrictions of time and 
 space: they gain an ampler, less defined, more universal 
 being. Still belonging to our general kindred, they have 
 a wider and less determinate range of operation, a subtler 
 power of penetration. Through them the code of family 
 ethics acquires a consistency and authority such as it had not, 
 while they lived : their personality, with all its peculiarities 
 and interfering accidents, disappears, and leaves only the 
 vague, but more emphatic spirit of their general function. 
 Gradually, even, they lose the limits of humanity altogether, 
 and become great spirits of influence : they breathe an 
 ampler ether, a diviner air. They become one with the great 
 forces of nature, with the lordly spirits of the natural world. 
 The father of men becomes also the ruler and principle of the 
 nature. 
 
 The fusion is accomplished under the influence of the 
 rise of civilized communities. In such a community man 
 gradually arrives at a new sense of his position in nature 
 and of his relation to his fellows. He ceases to be so 
 directly dependent on the mere grace and bounty of nature : 
 directly, i. e. at the mercy of the accidents of a single 
 place and time. Between the individual and the gratification 
 of his wants is now interposed the whole instrumental 
 machinery of the social union. The concentration and 
 unification of the dependence has in the religious sphere 
 a tendency to substitute monotheism for polytheism, or at 
 least to raise certain deities to a prominence and a per- 
 manence unknown before. But the political society is not
 
 476 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY [ix 
 
 merely an economic organism : it also comes to discharge, and 
 on an ampler scale, the functions of the family and its head. 
 The unity of social life, which under the sway of family 
 ideas was mainly felt as a ghostly influence, inhabiting the 
 realm of the departed, is now realized as a present and active 
 force, distinguishable even from the actual persons in whom 
 it is visibly embodied, Occasionally, indeed, the living 
 monarch, the actual state, may be actually treated as divine, 
 as representing for the time being the eternal majesty of the 
 social force. And in this social force, be it noted, we have 
 a sort of synthesis of man and nature. The culture of the 
 state represents, as Bacon would say, the wedlock of mens 
 with nalura : of the human mind with the physical world. 
 Yet even the organized state leads the mind beyond itself : 
 it too is dependent dependent, so to speak, at its circum- 
 ference only but along that circumference the dependence is 
 now seen to be more complete and all-embracing than ever. 
 Yet something further has been gained in the process. The 
 union of man and nature which has been actually accom- 
 plished in the arts and sciences of civilization, suggests a far- 
 reaching unity in the principles underlying the two sides. 
 God now becomes in a higher degree than before the ultimate 
 purport and therefore the very basis of the social union, of 
 its moral code as well as its material conquests. He has 
 given man the arts of life, has promulgated the law of 
 conduct. That is, here again, the actual sees its warrant and 
 sanction in an exalted ideal, a reasoned-out perfection which 
 is more everlasting and determinate than itself : but that 
 exalted perfection is more than ever in harmony with the 
 actual. Heaven, at this stage, recalls for us the prototype 
 the moralized and organized world of this earth. 
 
 But is heaven only the glorified image, the abiding source 
 and sanction, of the actual moral world, the world of social 
 institutions, the social politico-economical organism ? No : 
 religion is more than the sanction of morality ; and when
 
 ix] SANCTIONS OF MORALITY 477 
 
 it is dragged down to this position it is ill both for 
 religion and for morality. The ethical world is but a step, 
 though an all-important step, on the path that leads to 
 God. The social organism, the state, is after all essentially 
 a human and secular mechanism : perhaps, as Hobbes says, 
 the mortal God, but not wholly adequate to the invisible 
 and infinite type. Religion loses its freshness and power 
 when it is treated as no broader and deeper than a moral 
 sanction : and morality is deprived of its human freedom 
 and self-developing growth when it is abruptly described 
 as a command from a celestial sovereign possessing unlimited 
 power and wisdom, or even (after the example of Kant) 
 as the law of a realm of intelligent agents, whereof God 
 is the lord. It would be a strange thing, said Aristotle, 
 to consider God as a moral agent. There is a something 
 higher than the life of conduct and practice ; and that higher 
 is the life which is essentially self-realization, and not merely 
 a process to something higher than itself. The moral sphere, 
 as we may otherwise put it, has about it a certain unrest ; 
 it is an effort to obey an alien law, to work out a problem 
 imposed, to attain an end outside itself. And the problem is 
 by the nature of it insoluble, in the terms in which it is 
 stated. For the very aim of moral action could only be 
 reached by making moral action henceforth impossible. If 
 the world were what it ought to be, what need of further 
 endeavour to make it better. Good itself can only be, on the 
 assumption that evil is there to be overcome : such is the 
 doctrine of many a Theodicee. 
 
 It has been remarked that more than one philosophy has 
 endeavoured to base its moral doctrine on its metaphysical 
 theory, which in the last resort is an article of faith. Thus 
 to one who holds that the end of the cosmic process is the 
 evolution of intellect till it completely subdues will, the 
 ethical rule will take the form of asceticism and quietism. 
 The duty of the microcosm, man, is represented as the normal
 
 478 ESSAYS IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 
 
 tendency of the macrocosm or universe. So the Stoic taught 
 that the wise man would but cheerfully fall in with a destiny 
 which, even should he refuse, would infallibly carry him 
 with it. It is implied in all this that the moral and social 
 order and progress is from one point of view a part in 
 the great cosmic evolution. In the phases and fortunes 
 of human society there is a great law operative which over- 
 rules all individual perturbations and renders impossible all 
 that seems arbitrary or artificial.
 
 CRITICAL ESSAYS
 
 HERMANN LOTZE 
 
 NEARLY four years have elapsed since Hermann Lotze died 1 . 
 His removal from the scene left a sense of real loss, both 
 personal and public, in a large body of friendly readers who 
 hoped that he had yet in store for them a fuller revelation of 
 that subtle spirit of wisdom which had often helped them in 
 the doubts and confusions of modern controversy. It could 
 not be said indeed that one of the great lights of the philosophic 
 sky had gone out ; yet at least a bright star had set and left 
 the eye without one of its familiar means of orientation. 
 There was more than the common ground for the trite words 
 uttered over the closing grave that the world was a poorer 
 place since he had gone, and that if he had lived longer, he 
 might have taught us something more. And therefore it 
 hardly needs the appearance of an English translation of his 
 two last volumes, done by a group of Oxford scholars, to 
 suggest a motive for trying to give in English some outline 
 of Lotze's place in the history of philosophy, of his method 
 and his ruling ideas. 
 
 For some years back an ill-defined mixture of fascination 
 and repulsion has kept curiosity alive in the neighbourhood 
 of that all but inaccessible peak of adamant, the Hegelian 
 philosophy. Latterly it has been suggested that the sure 
 way to reach its summit, or possibly to attain a more 
 commanding altitude, is to wend along the e critical ' path 
 which Kant made. But that path seems to lead else- 
 where : and the wanderers who have gone out by it, are 
 1 Written in 1885. 
 
 I i
 
 482 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 still struggling through endless hills of difficulty, no nearer 
 the mountain top. It can do little harm to suggest a 
 study of Lotze as an alternative approach to Hegel. The 
 age in which Lotze first shaped the ideas which characterize 
 him was an age saturated in the conceptions of aim and 
 method of the great German idealists, and yet keenly sensitive 
 to the flaws and failures of their systems. Even if this 
 suggestion turn out abortive, and the access to Hegelianism 
 remain doubly barred, the study of Lotze will not have 
 been fruitless. Apart from his dogmatic burthen of ideas 
 and metaphysic, the example of his method his patient 
 unravelling of tangled arguments, his delicate refusal to 
 precipitate a conclusion till every appeal has been heard 
 will remain a classic standard for the philosophical critic. 
 Lotze has besides a special claim on our attention. A student 
 of medicine before he turned to the study of philosophy, he 
 had familiarized his mind with the methodological principles 
 of physical science, and carried into the discussion of meta- 
 physical questions a lively conscience of the requirements of 
 analysis and explanation, which is rare among professional 
 philosophers. Thus if, on the one hand, he may afford a line 
 of regress to idealism, on the other he is not without points 
 of attachment, progressively, to those realistic researches of 
 modern German experimental psychology, which M. Ribot 
 and Mr. Sully have chronicled for their countrymen. 
 
 Captious censors may pronounce Lotze to be only ' common 
 sense ' in philosophy. Even so, the faculty is not so common 
 that it need be disparaged. Others may allege that he lacks 
 the direct decision of a great teacher, that he guards himself 
 in every dictum by reservations and conditions, and that, 
 though dogmatic in abstract principles, he hesitates and gives 
 forth an uncertain sound when he comes to settle an individual 
 problem or make a concrete application. The latter charge 
 cannot be rebutted. But, it may be added, it is not the 
 highest virtue of a philosopher to solve the Gordian knot by
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 483 
 
 a blow of the sword. That is the way of 'practical' men. 
 And ' practical ' in that sense Lotze was not. One can under- 
 stand the worry it must have cost him Saturday after Saturday 
 to sit on the board for testing candidates for the higher educa- 
 tional posts; and undoubtedly it could only have been the 
 effect of the diminution in the numbers at his lectures during 
 the period he was 'out of the Schools' (1875-9) that he 
 returned to the distasteful task. In his voluminous works 
 there is scarcely a page which touches upon the topics 
 currently agitated in the social, political and religious worlds. 
 He does not, it is true, write wholly for the school, but he is 
 academic in tone and theme, and the world for which he 
 thinks is the world of cultivated reflection and scholarly taste. 
 A solitary chapter of his Logic discusses the methods for 
 getting a true vote, when it is needful to pronounce between 
 a number of measures or of men. Yet in a time which 
 swarms with doctrinaires ready for action, it is absurd to give 
 a grudging welcome to the voice of one who neither bans 
 unreservedly nor blesses altogether, but with calm yet sympa- 
 thetic judgment weighs good and evil, careful to shun the 
 fallacies of words and the pronounced bias of a transient 
 majority. No doubt to the practical man such a position 
 looks like scepticism. Such a sceptic, too, unsatisfied with 
 the certainty and solidity of much that the specialist looks 
 upon as proved and discovered, Lotze appeared from the 
 first, in his work on the principles of medicine. But when 
 philosophy shall cease to be so sceptical, shall leave the post 
 of criticism to become finally dogmatic, philosophy will be on 
 the eve of euthanasia, with the sciences now made perfect 
 waiting to carry their elder sister to her tomb. It is just 
 because Lotze throughout his teaching never sunk criticism 
 in mere exposition, but worked up to results by the recurrent 
 correction of successive guesses at truth in a way that 
 simulates the movement of a living Logos leading him 
 whithersoever it would that he did knightly service, not 
 
 i i 3
 
 484 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 only as a writer of some repute and popularity, but perhaps 
 even more as a stimulating lecturer for nearly forty years in 
 German universities. 
 
 For philosophy in the hands of a professoriate has too often 
 proved unfaithful to her trust. Commissioned by her original 
 charter to keep clean and open the highways of intellectual 
 communication, to light a perpetual lamp in the dark labyrinth 
 of human purposes, and to show through her perspective glass 
 the reality which is hardly visible under the phenomenal 
 aspects of the world, philosophy has sunk once and again into 
 a mere lackey of academic routine and a colporteur of the lore 
 of old tradition. After such a lapse from her high estate, 
 some observer is sure to ask the warrant for her claims, and 
 her title to the rank conceded her by the arrangements of 
 civilization. Her professors meanwhile either smile like the 
 Roman augur at their own hypocrisy, or complacently take 
 stock of an assured position. They reflect that logic is now 
 more than ever une langue bien faite really to be installed into 
 the memories of pupils ; that ethical questions are all practically 
 settled, except for irreconcilables who still rage around free- 
 will, and for revolutionaries who watch for the upheavings of 
 the social storm ; and that metaphysics has been finally sent 
 by a sane mental science to rest on the shelf with other 
 historical curiosities, in that vast gallery of the anthropological 
 museum which holds samples of human aberration. In the 
 hardness of human hearts, it is almost inevitable that dis- 
 tribution should thus usurp the place of production ; teaching 
 the place of research. The professor of philosophy has been 
 turned into a spoke of the educational wheel, and is no longer, 
 as Plato dreamed, a spectator of all time and all being. The 
 grand instrument of reform, the chief agent in helping men 
 out of the slough of despond, has often sunk into a chief 
 warder of the prison-house of the human mind. 
 
 In the history of academic philosophy, that phase of 
 conservative inertia, which has gained the typical name of
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 
 
 scholasticism, breaks out again and again. In different ages 
 it names its altars after different gods, but they are all 
 honoured only as avatars of the same undying One, the 
 demon of classification. These great names, like Aristotle or 
 Locke, are often much worthier than the mediocrities into 
 which the originals have been fashioned by the hands of 
 faithful but ignorant devotees. Yet the deadly besetting sin 
 of scholasticism is its comfortable persuasion that the school 
 was not made for the world, but the world for the school. 
 This delusion, that learned institutions were an end in them- 
 selves, was notably prevalent in the school which had long 
 time buried in its borders the treasures of ancient ideas. Its 
 dogmatic slumber was broken in the seventeenth century to 
 some extent by that reveillee which was sounded nearly 
 simultaneously in England and France. The very pillars of 
 traditional belief were shaken by the summons of Descartes 
 to submit every dogma to the test of lucid and complete 
 thinkableness ; and for the wantonness of controversy Bacon 
 substituted the effort of research to establish definite rela- 
 tions between definite elements, with a view to free and 
 strengthen the hands working for human welfare. By this 
 first revolution logic, which had hitherto been used as the 
 handmaid of arbitrary reasoning, received a foundation which 
 one day might serve to support a theory of knowledge and of 
 the method of science. 
 
 A second reformation tardily consequent on the first 
 undertook for metaphysics what the other did for logic. It 
 is associated with the name of Kant. The new metaphysics 
 sprung from a perception that the older system had started 
 from an unknown God and worked down to familiar man: 
 and it proposed to show that the true synthesis of phenomena 
 could only be reached by a system which began with the 
 analysis of our own endowment of conscious power, and traced 
 out the indications thereon afforded until they offered, if they 
 so should offer, a scheme to explain the secret structure of the
 
 486 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 macrocosm. At first, as managed by Kant himself, the new 
 metaphysics was fearful of its own shadow. It would fain 
 discourage any belief in the higher ideas as more than neces- 
 sary fictions for ordering and rounding off both knowledge 
 and life. Yet it owned that life would be a bestial chaos, 
 and the theory of organic existence and the sense of beauty 
 an inexplicable deception, unless the symmetry which mind 
 reflected upon the world was a real animating law in the 
 phenomena themselves. As younger heads caught the con- 
 tagion of the new way of ideas, men plucked from their own 
 consciousness a key to unlock all the doors of the universe. 
 A race of Titans began. Fichte, magnifying the hero for 
 whom circumstances are only materials for aiding his own 
 development, treated the whole of nature as but a background, 
 delineated as it were gradually into the shape of a world, in 
 order that self-consciousness, in antithesis to a given range of 
 objects, might realize its potentialities in their full form and 
 body. Schelling, a less fiery spirit, vindicated for nature 
 a parallel rank to man, and saw by intellectual intuition their 
 common source in a non-human and non- natural Absolute, 
 an ultimate assumed sameness from which proceeded two 
 co-ordinate provinces of operation. Hegel, partially learning 
 from both, put mind above nature, and yet made the eternal 
 systematization of thought the 'idea' the basis and the 
 resiilt of both. To him the universe was a trinity in perpetual 
 unity. The world of consciousness, while to the cursory 
 observer it seemed a mere incident occasionally varying the 
 even course of physical machinery, was pronounced on closer 
 inspection to be the essential aim and meaning of the opera- 
 tions of nature the ' idea ' or form of law with all its sub- 
 clauses which, not being adequately expressed in the physical 
 processes, or even in conscious life (for which, however, it was 
 presupposed), came into manifestation, dimly and sensuously in 
 art and religion, clearly in philosophy : of which it was thus 
 the mission to reveal God out of nature and man.
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 487 
 
 In this new metaphysics the note of distinction lay in the 
 profession to gather from the human reason the organizing 
 principle of the heavens and the earth. The old metaphysics 
 had inherited its dogmas from various sources, Hellenic and 
 Hebrew. What it accepted it did its best to reduce to logical 
 shape and order, and thence to deduce lower phenomena. The 
 new scheme proposed to Supply the premises leading up to the 
 original dogmas, to rationalize theology, and to found religion 
 on philosophy. It dared to prove, for those who could follow 
 its nights, that existence must affirm the reality of those ideas 
 which were postulated by an adequate unfolding of thought as 
 necessary for the maintenance of the spirit. Yet for those 
 who pondered these promises, it seemed as if the reduction of 
 a dogmatic to a speculative theology led necessarily to a third 
 revolution. It would then appear that metaphysics is not 
 a mere piece of logic and reasoning, but the work of the 
 concrete human soul, which feels no less than thinks, and is 
 dominated by ethical and aesthetical ideals not less than by 
 logical rules and forms. It is an ethical reformation which 
 would thus be the necessary climax of the movement which 
 modified logic and metaphysics. 
 
 It was at the very culmination and crisis in this fever of 
 ideas that Lotze first played a part on the philosophic scene. 
 Of his outward life, apparently, there is not much to tell. An 
 inward balance of powers and tendencies, and probably unre- 
 corded influences of youthful training, issued in one of those 
 symmetrical lives which leave behind but little waste for the 
 chronicler to garner up. Born on May 2 1 , 1 8 1 7, at Bautzen in 
 the Ober-Lausitz (Upper Lusatia), in the kingdom of Saxony, 
 the son of an army-doctor, who soon after migrated with his 
 corps to Zittau (nearer Bohemia), and who died when his boy was 
 only twelve, Rudolph Hermann Lotze (he dropped the Rudolph 
 ere long) received his schooling at the latter town, after 1828 
 in its High School or Gymnasium. At the age of seventeen 
 he went up to the University of Leipsic, where four years
 
 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 later (1838) he graduated both in medicine and philosophy 
 (Anglice, Arts). After a little retreat for preparation, and 
 a brief stay in the probationary stage of P rival-decent, Lotze 
 was in 1 842 elevated at Leipsic to the post of professor-ex fra- 
 ordinarius, and in 1844 was called to Gottingen to fill the 
 philosophy chair left vacant since Herbart's death. At 
 Gottingen he remained for thirty-seven years; and when he 
 left it in 1881 to take a chair of philosophy at Berlin, it was 
 only after a few weeks' lectures to die on the first of July 
 of that year. Thus, at the age of sixty-four, was closed 
 a blameless, strenuous, and fair-proportioned life, spent in 
 a round of study, writing, teaching, with snatches of rural 
 leisure in vacation, environed with domestic sympathies, and 
 separated by habits and interests from the social restlessness 
 of the time. 
 
 The surest way marks to trace the course of a scholar and 
 thinker are his literary performances : in Lotze's case they 
 are numerous. His first offering to the muses was a little 
 volume of poems in 1840. After this act of grace, each of 
 the three years following saw a solid work appear under his 
 name: Metaphysics in 1841 : General Pathology and Thera- 
 peutics as mechanical sciences in 1842: and Logic in 1843. 
 The sterling merits of his medical work indirectly helped him 
 to his Leipsic professorship : and his translation to Gottingen 
 was chiefly promoted by Prof. Rudolph Wagner, to whom he 
 was commended by a similarity of scientific method and 
 attitude in the conflict between faith and science, and for 
 whose Dictionary of Physiology he wrote articles that caused 
 no small stir in the spiritualist dovecots on the subjects : Life, 
 Soul, Instinct. As early as 1841 he began his contributions 
 to periodical literature by articles in Fichte's Zeitschrift fur 
 Philosophic : from 1 844 he contributed papers to the Gottinger 
 Studien (notably two on the principles of aesthetics), to the 
 Gelehrte Anzeigen (reviews of books), and other journals a . 
 
 1 Amongst them, a year before his death, appeared in the Contemporary
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 489 
 
 A second period of literary activity began in 1851 with the 
 General Physiology of Bodily Life, followed in 1852 by 
 Medical Psychology or Physiology of the Soul, and in 1 856 by 
 the first volume of the Microcosmns : Ideas on the History of 
 Nature and Man, the two remaining volumes of which appeared 
 in 1858 and 1864 respectively. Connected with this the 
 crowning achievement of his life, in which he has summed up 
 in a comparatively popular form everything of general interest 
 that he has discussed elsewhere, and added not a few fresh 
 ingredients, was a reply to some strictures of the younger 
 Fichte. This pamphlet (professedly the first of a series of 
 'Polemics') in 1857 supplies a want of the biographer in 
 dealing with one who seldom or never cares to season with 
 personal talk the dullness of mere abstract discussions. In 
 the same year he issued a Latin version of the Antigone of 
 Sophocles no doubt an intellectual holiday excursion, during 
 the strain of composing the Microcosmns ) into that Greek world 
 and that ' unique self-enjoyment of existence which' as he 
 elsewhere says, ' everywhere presents its cheering face there/ 
 In 1868 he contributed to the series of histories of the sciences, 
 issued under the direction of the Munich Academy, a History 
 of Aesthetics in Germany : a book which occupies among his 
 writings a position of its own, consisting of a series of 
 thoughtful essays on various aesthetic theories as connected 
 with the general doctrines of their propounders, on the aspects 
 of the aesthetic faculty, and on modern conceptions of Art. 
 His third and last period of literary work was intended to 
 recapitulate the main results of his more purely academic 
 teaching, under what may in his case be called the somewhat 
 conventional name of a ' System of Philosophy/ Of this 
 total only two parts appeared : Logic in 1874, and Metaphysic 
 in 1879. The remaining portion, which should have treated 
 of Ethics and Aesthetics subjects so cardinal in the theory 
 
 Review (Jan. 1880) the first instalment of a sketch of ' Philosophy in the 
 last forty years.'
 
 490 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 of one who was always repeating that the beginning of 
 metaphysics is in ethics was never written. Of all these 
 writings only the two last have been translated into English : 
 the metaphysics also into French. The Microcosmns, of which 
 an English translation ! has for some time been promised, was 
 long ago translated into Russian. There is a French version 
 (in the Bibliotkdque de Philosophic Contemporaine) of the first 
 book of the Medical Psychology. 
 
 Rarely does a philosophic teacher write, and in such 
 comparative youth, on the fundamental topics of metaphysics 
 and biology, and certainly it is one of the salient features in 
 Lotze's career that at an age, where many men are still 
 fighting for a creed to live by, his standpoint was already- 
 taken and his views on a wide range of questions already 
 formed. Nothing can well offer a greater contrast than his 
 mental history to the frequent change of course which marks 
 the voyage of Kant in search of a centre of knowledge, or 
 the slow a,nd secret struggle which keeps many a thinker 
 silent till he has passed middle life, and then leaves him 
 barely time enough to give perspicuous form to the truths he 
 deems himself to have discovered. Temperament and environ- 
 ment had combined to give to Lotze an early, almost pre- 
 mature stability of judgement. The pi'ocess by which opinions 
 crystallize into a theory had glided on precipitately and yet 
 quietly to a conclusion. There are those who pay for truth 
 by toilsome wanderings on fruitless quests. He came, by the 
 influence of circumstances, into an easy possession of doctrines 
 which, if not absolutely centralizing, are at least amongst the 
 inner range of verities. By the time he was twenty-six Lotze 
 had formulated his views on the weightier matters of philo- 
 sophy, and on the limits of the principles of science : and by 
 his fortieth year he had published the outlines of his peculiar 
 idealism and discussed the whole compass of subjects on which 
 he allowed himself to dilate. 
 
 1 Now published.
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 491 
 
 To a person acquainted only with the practice of English 
 universities, the range of subjects embraced by a German 
 professor of philosophy must seem enormous and unmanage- 
 able. Logic, psychology, metaphysics, practical philosophy, 
 aesthetics, philosophy of religion, philosophy of nature, history 
 of philosophy, such was Lotze's list of subjects, alternating at 
 intervals during his whole career at Gottingen. For most 
 men such a burden would be unbearable : even for him who 
 can endure it heavy costs must be paid out of personal health 
 and opportunity for special development. One is sometimes 
 led to sigh for that division of labour which prevails so 
 generally elsewhere. And undoubtedly there are obvious 
 limits to the extent to which mastery of details can be carried 
 in each of the branches. Yet unless the Positivist contention 
 is to be admitted, and a corresponding branch of physics or 
 physiology to take the place erewhile occupied by the siib- 
 divisions of philosophy (and Lotze in his own youth had 
 maintained the thesis that ' Aesthetics should be treated as 
 a physical science'), the separation of teaching between 
 branches like logic, metaphysics, ethics, cannot be regarded 
 as an unmitigated gain. No doubt matters will be made 
 easier for the teacher who has received a definite subject- 
 matter, to be dealt with historically and by classifications and 
 analysis, as other sciences are. He will no longer have to 
 complain of being expected to make bricks without straw. 
 But, says the Greek adage : the things that are beautiful are 
 difficult. In the nature of things, an idea will never be 
 made so tangible as a stone : the ultimate laws of existence 
 must always be perceived by fewer eyes than can recognize the 
 special uniformities. And on two grounds one may plead for 
 some compensation to set against the dispersive tendencies of 
 specialization. In the first place, the doctrines included under 
 philosophy possess a community of purpose, which makes it 
 impossible to sever logic from metaphysics, or either from 
 ethics, impossible at least, so long as any of them trench on
 
 492 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 first principles, or fail to be content with a mere reckauffee of 
 ancient and vulgar observations. In one branch indeed you 
 may largely observe silence about the other, but only because 
 you have prejudged it and assumed your conclusions. And 
 secondly, when philosophy has come to be broken up into 
 a group of special and detailed inquiries, which differ from 
 other branches of knowledge only because they are less likely 
 to soil the fingers and perhaps to vulgarize the taste of their 
 disciples, it will cease to subserve its main end; which is to 
 keep clear and wholesome the heterogeneous mass of general 
 culture, and to further the universal and liberal interests of 
 man and the commonwealth. 
 
 If the traditions of his chair seemed to impose upon Lotze 
 the survey of every province in philosophy, it may be added 
 that the speciality of his own training brought its limitations 
 in the interpretation of that task. Certain aspects of the 
 problems displaced or concealed others. The contact of 
 physics and metaphysics, of body and soul, of nature and 
 history, of mind and matter, of psychology and logic, of the 
 real and the ideal, of God and the world is under many 
 names perhaps his one favourite theme. Another scarcely 
 less frequently recurring tendency is to distinguish adjacent 
 problems, to strip the mask from impossible questions, to 
 expose pretended solutions, to define the limitations of popular 
 maxims and the fallacies in current maxims. But in what- 
 ever line, the fruit of his early systematization appeared in 
 the compact and finished formulation of the summaries of 
 doctrine given in his lectures. These cliciata, delivered not 
 from manuscript notes but from the memorial stores of 
 a formed judgement to which the way the conclusion was got 
 seemed as essential as the result itself, present in careful 
 miniature a sketch of Lotze's philosophy, which often serves 
 as a key to the larger picture, too luxuriantly labyrinthine, 
 given in his later works. Since his death (18824), they 
 have been published from the note-books of his students,
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 493 
 
 in eight thin octavos, of less than 100 pages each, dealing 
 with the eight courses, which formed the staple of his teaching. 
 These lectures given at Gottingen, generally in two courses 
 of four lectures each weekly, both in the summer and winter 
 sessions delivered, it might be at the hours of 10 a.m. and 
 4 p.m. respectively to audiences varying from less than ten 
 in the less popular (e. g. aesthetic) to more than a hundred in 
 the more popular classes (e. g. psychology), probably produced 
 on the student youth of Germany a deeper effect than his 
 published writings. Enthusiasm is hardly the word for the 
 feeling of his pupils : but there was a quiet strong attraction 
 in his earnest manner, and the sense that you were listening 
 to one who did not teach like the mere commentator, but 
 spoke with the authority of philosophy itself. His oral 
 teaching had one decided advantage over his written. The 
 reader of the Microcosmus and subsequent works often faints 
 bedazzled by the uniform brilliancy of the exposition where 
 no salient abruptness breaks the general polish, and few 
 epigrammatic touches happily print themselves in the 
 memory. Sometimes he loses his reckoning like one who 
 sails along some sinuous channel, where each promontory 
 threatens to close the way and each zigzag of the course 
 discloses a new scene, like, yet strangely unlike the last ; 
 and so, growing reckless as to progress, gradually, as he 
 looks on the rhythmic dance of dallying argument, is soothed 
 into somnolent repose. The lingering tendencies of an equit- 
 able and reflective mind are combined in Lotze with a too 
 favourable leaning to a quasi-poetical imagery and a falsely 
 rhetorical re-arrangement of words in his sentences. The 
 lesson he had learnt, to look for the deceit lurking both in 
 generals and in particulars, made him interrogate every catch- 
 word, and every proffer of narrative in place of explanation 
 of the changeling Mythos put where Logos should have been. 
 These tendencies, which have free play in his later writings, 
 were checked in lecture by the need of being emphatic and
 
 494 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 definite. His earlier writings, though they betray the halting 
 and guarded march of one who knows how narrow is the way 
 of truth, and how many partial truths must be qualified and 
 supplemented if one wants to be honest, are still marked by 
 a greater directness of style. The earlier logic and meta- 
 physics in many ways the most obscure and difficult to 
 understand of his books are written throughout with a 
 certain youthful verve and almost impetuous onwardness. 
 And in his pamphlet and reply to Fichte's censures there 
 is much of the same straightforward vigour. 
 
 An author has occasionally been heard to lament that some 
 homonym among contemporaries confused his account books 
 with fame. Lotze has apparently been the victim of an 
 opposite mistake. Like an ancient hero, he has been doubled 
 in order to find a subject proper for the different parts he 
 plays. Two histories of German literature (those of Kurz and 
 Gottschall) seem to distinguish between a Lotze the poet and 
 Lotze the philosopher. The poet, whom Kurz finds obscure 
 though full of promise, is by Gottschall styled mystical. The 
 poems appeared on the eve of his engagement to his future 
 wife : and doubtless came along with that pure warm blush of 
 imagination which the spring-time of sweet emotions awakes 
 in every nature. But in Lotze the poetry had a deeper source 
 in a perennial power of mind which in the language of an old 
 fantasy never allows the discord and dullness of the present 
 to deaden the sense for the harmony and beauty of the cosmic 
 spheres. It might mislead to call Lotze a Mystic : but only 
 because he was much more than that or any similar nickname 
 would imply. Mysticism, it has been said, plays a part in 
 every genuine philosophy. But there is mysticism and 
 mysticism. Sometimes it is taken to mean that at every 
 moment the finite must be dipped into the infinite and thence 
 return saturated with fresh life : that the smallest trifle has to 
 wait for a special intervention of the absolute. One world is 
 in turn immersed in another and released from its influence.
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 495 
 
 Lotze, on the contrary, holds that the phenomenal world is 
 also the real : that the infinite is everywhere present in the 
 finite and gives to the finite all its force. But he nevertheless 
 separates the work-day view of mechanical science from the 
 blissful Sabbath of the spiritual theory. Scientific method 
 must once for all discount the infinite and absolute and 
 prosecute the inquiry into phenomena, mental as well as 
 material, on the hypothesis that definite elements when 
 brought into definite relations with each other exhibit the 
 finite result with invariable regularity. But though it is 
 for scientific calculations needful to ignore the infinite, the 
 principle cannot be allowed more than an instrumental value. 
 The material is only intelligible as the manifestation of an 
 immaterial : mechanism must presuppose a living mind, and 
 the universal reign of law proceed from the personality of 
 God. 
 
 With ideas like these, we are not surprised to learn from 
 himself that it was a lively inclination towards poetry and art 
 which first made him philosophize. He came to the study 
 with a head trained in scientific conceptions, and a heart full 
 of the eternal romance of that light which never was on sea 
 and land. His teacher at Leipsic was Christian Weisse. 
 Weisse, originally an admirer of Hegelian method, had 
 gradually diverged from the main current of the system, and, 
 whilst still retaining the form, had sought to find other 
 material, more consonant with established beliefs, which 
 might be systematized by its means. Like the younger 
 Fichte, Weisse tried to put on a better footing those ideas 
 of God, free-will and immortality, which the theory of Hegel 
 had left as exoteric names, not admitting of precise interpre- 
 tation in the terms of the system. It was with this type of 
 thought, in which the great circle of ideas connected with the 
 names of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had come to form 
 ' more a characteristic kind of culture than a rigid system of 
 doctrine,' that Lotze was brought into contact in ' that fair
 
 496 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 time of earlier youth/ In its very vagueness he found the 
 liberty he wished : yet amid the varying matter of private 
 interpretations he gained, he says, a ' nucleus of convictions ' 
 which he never surrendered. 
 
 The year 1841, in which Lotze's Metaphysics appeared, 
 marks a crisis in German philosophy. Hegel had died ten 
 years before : Herbart that very year : and Schelling had 
 just gone to Berlin to begin his latest phase. Trendelen- 
 burg's Logical Researches, published the year before, marked 
 a change in the philosophic tone of the age. But the most 
 characteristic feature of the time was the rise of natural 
 science on the one hand, and the great schism in the Hegelian 
 school on the other. A few Hegelians were still to be found 
 who clung, with a fair degree of orthodoxy, to the doctrine 
 of the master in its integrity. But they were far outstripped 
 in popularity and influence by the pseudo- Hegelians like 
 Weisse, and by the so-called Young-Hegelian group, which 
 includes the names of Arnold Huge, Bruno Bauer, Strauss, 
 and Feuerbach. The bond of sympathy between men so 
 dissimilar was their common antipathy to the conventional, 
 the non-natural, and the super-natural, their endeavour to 
 reduce imposing historical authority to its matter-of-fact 
 basis, to eliminate the theological from the field of human 
 history, and to c paint man, man, man whatever the issue.' 
 Accepting the criticism which history passes upon acts, they 
 used it, not, as Hegel did, to show that the rational is the 
 real, but to tear up the roots of old beliefs and institutions in 
 order to show the sordid materials and base nutriment from 
 which their strength had come. They rejected the idealism 
 which judges a thing's truth and reality by its function and 
 meaning, and adopted the realism which lays main stress on 
 the origin, the means, and machinery. 
 
 With these Realists Lotze had little relation. Nor had 
 he very much closer connexion with the realism of Herbart. 
 It is indeed common with those who love to classify philo-
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 497 
 
 sophers by schools, after the manner of the ancient gram- 
 marians, to call Lotze a Herbartian. There would be at 
 least as much justification for naming- him a Hegelian. He 
 has himself protested against the Herbartian title : and de- 
 clared that his realism, such as it is, was not the realism of 
 Herbart, but the realism of the physicist. The very word 
 has been so bandied about as an antithesis that it may 
 almost mean anything. In Herbart it refers to the prin- 
 ciple that the difficulties in the apparent data of experience 
 postulate for their explanation a true and non-contradictory 
 reality, which under certain relations presents the aspects, 
 the contradictions in which perplex our logical require- 
 ments. This reality however is not one : the true reality 
 consists of an indefinite plurality of real beings, each 
 simple, and completely independent of all the others. Still 
 they are ' together/ and they can (not must) stand in 
 relation to one another. In such a case, when the juxta- 
 position occurs, there may to the eye of a spectator be 
 presented an apparent fusion of their elements, by means 
 of an analysis which substitutes for the two invariable 
 ( reals ' two equivalent expressions admitting of comparison. 
 Yet the real beings remain at last as they were at first : any 
 disturbance that may have been threatened is at once annulled 
 by their self-conserving power, 'like the trees in a wood, 
 which stand out from each other as they approach the eye 
 and at a distance gather into one mass, whilst they them- 
 selves undergo no change/ In psychology Herbart made 
 two important points. The first is his doctrine that the soul, 
 one of these simple and indestructible ' reals/ when brought 
 ' together ' with the others, conserves itself under the form 
 of an idea, or object of consciousness ; that once the soul 
 has thus acted and produced sensations or ideas, it ceases 
 to be more than a passive scene, on which through the 
 action and reaction of the various ' ideas ' upon each other 
 by mechanical laws, and without need of postulating a number 
 
 Kk
 
 498 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 of other and higher faculties, there is gradually produced the 
 varied structure of mental life, such as feelings of pain and 
 pleasure, general ideas, volitions, judgments, &c. The second 
 point carries out this view into the conception of the application 
 of mathematics to psychology : of treating the processes of 
 association according to the principles of mechanical science. 
 
 In none of the peculiar doctrines of Herbart has Lotze 
 been his follower. Where he agrees with Herbart is in 
 insisting on analytical investigation instead of constructive 
 imagination, and on the absurdity of beginning with the 
 deduction of everything from one supreme principle ; in the 
 important function he attributes to the method of substituting 
 for indivisible totals the analytic expressions derived for them 
 by ' accidental views ' ; and in the secondary place he assigns 
 to relations instead of inner states of the active elements 
 themselves. But his antagonism is hardly less marked. He 
 refuses, for example, to treat the soul as a mere background for 
 the evolutions of the atom-like ' ideas/ in which they thwart 
 or promote each other, fuse into a homogeneous mass, or are 
 partially disrupted by some new attraction, and where con- 
 cepts and judgements are mere casual products, collateral 
 results of the fore-play of ideas. According to Herbart 
 attention is merely the strength of an idea driving others 
 before it. According to Lotze thought is activity : the soul 
 directs, watches, and above all criticizes the processes which 
 go on mechanically between ideas : it does voluntarily, with 
 comparison and attention, what the psychical machinery did 
 as it were by chance. Thought in short is an original act 
 of interference with the mechanism of association : the laws 
 which express the general principles guiding that critical 
 interference are the laws of thought, whilst the special forms 
 of thought, such as concept and judgement, are the modes 
 under which the mind forces the results of sense-association 
 to comply with the general conditions of reality, the meta- 
 physical categories.
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 499 
 
 If Lotze thus differs from Herbart in denying that thought 
 is a mere occasional result of senses and association, and 
 maintaining the essential spontaneity of the ' relating' in- 
 tellect, he no less differs from his view that ideas and 
 sensations are the sole primary elements, giving rise to feelings 
 and volitions in their dynamical effects. For Lotze, the soul 
 is not a simple real : there are nowhere indeed any such 
 simple reals : and the soul, above all others, has something 
 of the infinite in its nature, which needs, indeed, the stimulus 
 of other presences to unfold, but which is notwithstanding 
 the source of its own internal state. Still less can Lotze 
 be satisfied with the doctrine of independent realities in 
 a mere 'together' in a vacuity of juxtaposition. We have 
 already seen the antithesis in psychology where metaphysical 
 differences naturally appear in the most pronounced form : 
 and we have only to substitute for the soul the universe. 
 Here too there is one directing principle, critically guiding 
 the whole of event according to a plan, supplying in each 
 apparent centre of being those states of activity, which, by 
 his common purpose, have the power of carrying along with 
 them corresponding states in other centres of activity. 
 
 The points at which Hegelianism most repelled Lotze need 
 scarcely be noted. Over and above the common defects of 
 idealism r that it is too much concerned with ends to pay the 
 proper attention to means, and that it begins at the wrong 
 point a special objection to Hegelianism is its claim to have 
 discovered a movement of thought which is the native move- 
 ment of the reality : its deification of method, and neglect 
 of realities. f lt is/ he says, 'a, philosophy of philosophy, 
 which ceases to occupy itself with the problems and deals 
 only with itself/ He has stated in the beginning of his 
 early Metaphysics his own idea of what philosophy has to do, 
 and of its relation to life. When it first addresses itself 
 to the mind, it enters no vacant ground. The mind as a 
 whole is already there, with truth possessed and exercised, 
 
 K k 2
 
 500 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 though without scientific knowledge of it. An instinctive 
 sense or law within, existing in the shape of opinion, but 
 not formulated in definite rules, serves as a repellent and 
 protective power to negative whatever is out of harmony 
 with it. Though we do not know what or where is the 
 unknown which we seek, we are still able to reject the sug- 
 gestion that it is this or is here. As each inappropriate 
 suggestion is set aside, the outlines of opinion acquire 
 a fuller definiteness. And so it may almost seem as if the 
 clearness grew by a motor in the ideas themselves, without 
 our interference. But this allusion arises only because of 
 the vagueness of that inward truth, which only comes 
 forward into action when stimulated by the felt disproportion 
 between it and each overt judgment. 
 
 The truth in the mind which carries us beyond the given 
 to something not given, standing as its necessary comple- 
 ment is an activity of the whole mind. And the mind 
 in so doing is exerting its supreme category the ' ought 
 to be.' Thus philosophy comes up in consequence of the 
 tendency in the mind to seek for the fragmentary comple- 
 ment needed to clear off the contradictions found in each 
 several phenomenon : and its business is to give a distinct 
 and, as far as may be, a detailed account of this instinctive 
 activity, this real though indefinable opinion, and to make 
 its laws no longer a means only but also an object of know- 
 ledge. Nor is it only in this desultory way that we are 
 carried by an indwelling feeling for truth beyond the given 
 fact to the totality of which it forms part. There comes also 
 to every mind a time of longing and ethical emotion, Lotze 
 reminds us, when it is visited by a vision, carried away by 
 an enthusiasm, the burden of which is infinitely good and 
 precious a true reality which is unlimited and unchangeable. 
 In the inward glow of youthful imagination a consciousness 
 grows that beyond the ordinary course of thought there lies 
 another and more real world no single phenomenon, not
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 501 
 
 liable to the limited and transitory conditions of finite things 
 describable by no words except by the uncertain sounds, 
 t one, infinite and eternal/ But it is to be added that only 
 
 ' In a season of calm weather, 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither, 
 Can in a moment travel thither.' 
 
 Oftener in duller moods, when this splendid vision fades into 
 common day, we feel the want of some means to give the 
 shadowy outlines permanence, to combine the results of our 
 several questionings of sense and outward things with this 
 feeling of a presence of something which gives the true 
 meaning and purpose to all existence. To give to this con- 
 ception of true being (and the weight of truth lies in its 
 ethical significance) that persistence and definiteness which 
 as a mere dream of faith and suggestion of passing moods 
 it lacks to make it a substantive part of our common 
 thought is the aim of philosophy. Ordinary civilization 
 has done something to establish a comparatively fixed notion 
 of what is real and what only an illusion. To carry this 
 work a stage further is the aim of philosophy. Her aim 
 is primarily formal, she does not propose to create ideas, 
 which must be gained by the training of art and experience : 
 but to bring greater unity and system into the vague assump- 
 tions which underlie all thinking and action. The aim of 
 the school is therefore to elevate the transient convictions 
 of individuals into a common estate of science. It is reserved 
 for faith and conduct acting through laws and manners to 
 make the truth thus ascertained a real and permanent pos- 
 session of the whole being. 
 
 Traced in such words the problem of philosophy has a more 
 human interest than Lotze seemed to find in contemporary 
 systems. If, on the one hand, they cherished aims and 
 employed methods which his scientific studies showed him 
 to be impossible and wrong, on the other hand, they failed
 
 502 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 to supply him with that support for ethical and aesthetical 
 cravings which had led him to philosophy. He has no 
 liking for the apotheosis of knowledge for its own sake for 
 the cold intellectualism he found rampant. The resistless 
 movement of self -development in the 'idea/ the evolution 
 which has no further purpose than fullest evolution, were 
 to him meaningless and repulsive specimens of a curiosity 
 which revelled in its logical dexterity and mastery of method. 
 A mere plan which was carried out inexorably without any 
 regard to the worth of the principle it subserved, he held 
 to be an offer of a stone when one asked for bread. That 
 everything is one vast process without beginning or end, 
 each stage only a preliminary to the next, with no permanent 
 result except the exhibition of certain uniformities of suc- 
 cession and coexistence, sounded to him a vain mockery of 
 human cravings. There must be something somewhere, which 
 has intrinsic value, and that something can only be conscious 
 self-enjoying being. Existence is no mere machinery for 
 working out a logical operation, or illustrating relations of 
 fact. There must be something, that can justify the bother 
 and pother of existence some meaning and purpose, over 
 and above the mere regularity, system, and development. 
 Something must develop as well as be developed, enjoy the 
 order as well as move in submission to it. 
 
 The basis of his conviction is embodied in the statement 
 that the root of metaphysic lies in ethics. But he has 
 nowhere given expression to all that is implied in this 
 assertion. It is probably so deeply imbedded in all his 
 thought, both by early influences and by the special form 
 it received through his first philosophic teacher, that it lay 
 beyond the range of introspective criticism. His first 
 writings did not specially discuss the theme. An essay on 
 the idea of Beauty (1845) touches upon this faith in the 
 ideal. But during the first part of his professorial career 
 he did not deal with specially ethical problems. The lectures
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 503 
 
 on l Practical Philosophy ' were first given in 1 857, and those 
 on the ' Philosophy of Religion ' in 1 858. On ethics the 
 only parts of his published writings that we can refer to 
 are a few chapters in the Microcosmus, and a paper which 
 appeared after his death under the title of e Principles of 
 Ethics/ but which really traverses only the ground of the 
 old battles between experience and the a priori. One may 
 doubt whether the unwritten last volume of the ( System ' 
 would have carried us much further. 
 
 His point of view has some light thrown upon it by the 
 following words addressed in 1857 to J. H. Fichte (who 
 was his senior by twenty years) : c With your illustrious 
 father, most honoured friend, I am associated not merely 
 by the to me pleasant accident of a common Lusatian 
 nationality, but by a fundamental theory of things, to which 
 I bring the same inflexible energy as he showed in its 
 defence : the conviction, to wit, that it is only in what, 
 for want of a sufficiently comprehensive name, I will for 
 the nonce call the import of the ' idea of the good/ that 
 the adequate motive is to be sought for the whole burthen 
 of existence and event, or, as I have elsewhere described it, 
 that the world of values is also at the same time the key 
 to the world of forms ... I could not agree with your father 
 in the detail of his opinions, neither in his initial subjective 
 idealism, nor in the restriction by which he exclusively laid 
 stress on action, as the form in which what ought to be 
 is to find its existence, and made it the sole aim and 
 destination of the world to supply the conditions needful 
 for realizing action. For me the quiet bliss of beauty, 
 the sanctity of that disposition which neither does nor 
 desires, the intrinsic self -consistency of truth with the place 
 of its harmonies, were counted elements too essential in the 
 constitution of that postulated ideal world to let me do 
 otherwise than look upon the restlessness of action as merely 
 the means for reaching that higher aim/
 
 504 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 There is in these words the force of a persuasion which 
 he always reverts to : the belief that movement and progress 
 is not a good for its own sake, but that in the words of 
 Aristotle, sckole is the end of all ascholia self-enjoyment is 
 the truth of work. It is the protest and reaction against 
 an attitude which in the eighteenth century took the shape 
 of a deification of moral and intellectual progress in society, 
 and which, in the logical philosophy of the nineteenth, became 
 a worship of evolution and development. His scepticism 
 anent the cry of progress had started early. One of his 
 theses in 1840, when he 'habilitated,' was 'that there was 
 no progress in human conduct: that the difference between 
 civilization and its obstacles was a constant quantity/ It 
 seemed to him that in all these matters men mistook the 
 means for the end ; and that the loud self -approbation of 
 material civilization over its advances was a delusion. As 
 every quality has its defects, so every new instrument and 
 institution calls for a fresh effort to guard against a new 
 series of dangers. People do not realize that nothing can 
 be got for nothing : a delusion which in various forms, 
 more or less gross, misleads more than half the energy of 
 the world. The deifying of machinery and movement forgets 
 that no machine creates force, but only transfers it to a place 
 where it may be used without being dissipated beforehand. 
 
 His general quarrel is with what for want of a better name 
 may be called formalism the belief that there is a saving 
 virtue in forms, methods, movements, by themselves. It 
 is this which leads him to criticize the Kantian moral 
 principle on the ground that mere conformity to law for 
 the sake of law, as such, can never be a true motive for 
 the behaviour of a being, who is something more than a 
 mere intelligence, pleased with uniformities for their own 
 sake. It similarly leads him to object to the tendency in 
 Hegelianism, as he understands it, to lay the main emphasis 
 on its method on the formal symmetry of a movement of
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 505 
 
 thought which proceeds more geometrico, and revels in the 
 achievements of mere dialectic. ' It is not a mere blind 
 fate' he says in the last pages of his Metapkysic (1841) 
 ' which has appointed a tedious triadic development as the 
 law of this world : but, because the good is the true substance 
 of the world, and is what it is only by this process (from 
 end proposed by means of instrument to end realized), all 
 being is moulded in the form of the good/ His metaphysical 
 system is thus named by himself a ' teleological idealism/ 
 The good must be : such is the initial presupposition, and 
 on that is based the necessity for the machinery of existence 
 and of thought. The so-called categories of metaphysics 
 are conceptions of the nature of being which are rendered 
 necessary, if we accept the conviction that the true cause of 
 events, the very substance of all that is, is a moral meaning 
 or plan. And this assumption unprovable by logic is 
 a conviction forced upon the mind as not a mere intelli- 
 gence, but an intelligence suffused with emotion and inspired 
 by conceptions of what ought to be. 
 
 When Lotze gives expression to these ideas, there is no 
 doubt that he believes himself to be carrying out the idea 
 of Plato. From the intellectualism of his own time, Lotze 
 turned not merely to Leibnitz but further still to the 
 philosophy of Greece. There form and law had not yet 
 celebrated their exaltation to supreme power. Duty for 
 duty's sake was subordinated to the dominant influence of 
 the beautiful and the good. It is in accordance with this 
 origin that Lotze puts in the front of his practical philosophy 
 that idea of a chief good which Kant had deposed from its 
 primacy. When the ancient Greek was asked what this 
 good was, he was perplexed between two answers. The 
 one answer was Pleasure, the other was Intelligence. Some- 
 times he tried to combine both, more frequently he felt struck 
 by their incompatibility. Lotze does not join in the common 
 hunt which zealots urge against the value of pleasure.
 
 506 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 Though foolish courtiers have profaned her palace, this is 
 no justification for joining- the rout of ascetics who clamour 
 for her head. And so Lotze finds himself in disagreement 
 with Kant, who allowed no fellowship between pleasure 
 and duty, or between the beautiful and the pleasant : for 
 there is no good which is not pleasure, nothing beautiful 
 which fails to please. He turns away from a theory which 
 finds nothing more in beauty than a formal symmetry, or 
 in virtue than the recognition of universal law. 
 
 The question, it may be remarked, is not whether Lotze 
 was correct in so interpreting either Kant or Hegel. That is 
 a question which concerns the study of these philosophers : 
 though it may be said that Lotze came to the task of 
 interpretation with a mind too definitely formed to allow 
 him to do more than observe the salient contrasts or resem- 
 blances with his own line of thought. The point for present 
 consideration is the light these antipathies throw on his own 
 point of view. What they evidence is his realism : the 
 realism which cannot suppose an act without an agent, an 
 idea without a thinker, a form without a form-giver. He 
 has no sympathy with the language which uses words like 
 humanity, as if there were a common spirit over and above 
 the forces active and co-operative in the individual men. 
 To him humanity is no mere generic character, still less 
 a mere multitude -of individuals only co-existing in our 
 thought. ' It consists/ he says l , ' in that real and living 
 community which comprises in one totality of reciprocal 
 being the temporally separate and disrupted numbers of 
 spirits ; a totality in which each, as if they were all 
 numbered, has his peculiar place pre-arranged and reserved/ 
 The personal must never be swallowed up in the impersonal. 
 ' If we had to believe/ he says 2 , ' that all personal life was 
 employed only as a transition-point for the development of 
 an impersonal absolute, we should either give up the efforts 
 
 1 Micr. iii. 51. '* P. 41.
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 507 
 
 to do good, since we discover no obligation to co-operate 
 towards the support of a process which is equally unin- 
 teresting to itself and to us, or, if we should still hold fast 
 the treasure of love, duty, and sacrifice, which we find 
 within us, we should at the same time admit that a human 
 heart in all its finitude and transiency is a far nobler, richer, 
 and more sublime being than that absolute with all its 
 necessary development/ 
 
 To conclude this part of the statement. It is true that 
 Lotze has not given us an ethical philosophy on which 
 his other views can rest. But he has given significant 
 utterance to the conviction that no metaphysical system 
 which does not satisfy the wants of our moral nature will 
 ever be a permanent creed. And he has put forward with 
 distinctness two points of importance in ethical theory. One 
 is the supremacy of conscience in morals. ( All theoretical 
 knowledge we have conceived to begin from simple truths 
 innate in the nature of the mind, and to apply which the 
 mind is awakened by the force of observation : no knowledge 
 of the actual sprung up without the experiences which supplied 
 those principles with the matter for their estimation. Con- 
 versely experience alone could never generate the highest 
 principles, by which it is fain to be estimated. Practical 
 philosophy offers a complete analogy. A moral judgement 
 upon our actions can only proceed from the consciousness 
 of unconditionally obligatory ideals, to realize which is 
 binding upon us under all circumstances that urge us to 
 action : but similarly these ideas will realize what they 
 command only in the definite shapes rendered possible by 
 the real circumstances to be learned by experience . . . These 
 ultimate principles we shall seek where we sought the cor- 
 responding principles of our knowledge : in our own mind, 
 in that immediate sense of certainty with which our con- 
 science, when interrogated in reference to the simplest forms 
 of our possible actions, utters its irrevocable judgement of
 
 508 CRITICAL ESSAYS [i 
 
 approval or disapproval. For this beginning we can allow 
 no other : no pretended interpretation of the plan of the 
 world, from which, as if it were possible for us, the obligatory 
 commandments of our behaviour might be deduced ; still less 
 that silly and offensive custom which at present plumes 
 itself with so great aplomb on descending into the enter- 
 taining incidents of natural history, and out of a tendency, 
 which is imagined to have been discovered in the animal 
 world, to ascending development construing the summit, 
 which logically ought to form the behaviour of humanity. 
 If we could not find in our own conscience the irrevocable 
 criterion of our moral judgement, we should certainly not get 
 it from the beasts : for what observation of them might teach 
 us that the series of development we suppose we find in 
 them goes upwards to the perfect and not downwards to the 
 bad we could know, only if it were beforehand completely 
 clear to us, which we should regard as the better and the 
 worse end of this scale.' 
 
 Such is the expression given to a cardinal truth generally 
 neglected by those moralists who devote their study to 
 the ways and means by which these ideals are gradually 
 realized in the scientific consciousness and in actual 
 life. The other point to which reference has already been 
 made is the rehabilitation of pleasure from the attacks of 
 ascetic formalists. f Somewhere the mere bringing about 
 of outward events must open into an internal activity of 
 pleasure. Pleasure is the seal set upon perfect life, and 
 we crave for pleasure not in mere selfishness, but because 
 we feel that the world without it would be an incomplete 
 world an absurdity even, if the good for which genera- 
 tions laboured were lost to them and only the blessing of 
 generations to come. Pleasure must be no longer identified 
 with an egoism which sees everything only as a means to 
 its petty enjoyment : but considered as ' the light in which 
 every objective excellence and beauty of the actual, first
 
 i] HERMANN LOTZE 509 
 
 becomes truly luminous/ No doubt Lotze was aware of 
 the difficulties that arise for ethics and aesthetics in trying 
 to reconcile the subjective and apparently variable ground- 
 work of pleasures with the objective universality commonly 
 predicated of the good and the beautiful. He has touched 
 in the following passage from the General Physiology^ on 
 the opposition between scientific law and the poetical truth 
 of morals : 
 
 ' It is the problem of an ethical philosophy to show how 
 the fabric of the world, though directed to the production 
 of goods, may not seek this end at any cost, but only while 
 maintaining the original sacredness of certain relationships 
 or rather to show how from the true conception of the highest 
 good itself there immediately flow certain indispensable forms 
 of existence and development, which in all formations re- 
 appear as limits to the range of configuration, and which, 
 without being aimed specially at a result of pleasure, possess 
 an immediate necessity as evidence for the principle of the 
 whole . . . Much is still wanting before this problem can be 
 solved and the full cogency of a scientific truth acquired 
 for those ideal interpretations of life, under the influence 
 of which we all unconsciously prosecute our work. Whether 
 we should complain of this, we know not. Even now we 
 have not lost the sense of those dim ideas, and the greater 
 definiteness of theoretically moulded form the only addition 
 we can expect from science would scarcely compensate us 
 for the sacrifice of the intuitive vividness of its aesthetic 
 impression. It is not needful that everything should become 
 science. Much is completely clear and open which yet shrinks 
 from definition/ 
 
 So far all that has been done is to attempt a sketch of 
 Lotze's place in the history of modern philosophy and the 
 general attitude of his speculations. On the whole he executes 
 a retreat .from the advanced idealist philosophy of the absolute 
 
 1 P. 163.
 
 510 CRITICAL ESSAYS 
 
 and to a more generally human ground. But the retreat 
 is not equivalent to a surrender. All that was precious in 
 idealism may still be kept, but kept partly as a faith and 
 a conviction, partly as a series of inferences gradually reached 
 by confronting these ideals with the data of everyday 
 experience, finding in the former a guide through the com- 
 plications of the latter, getting from the latter real bits 
 of knowledge to piece out the vague suggestions of the 
 former. On the other hand, the truth of science claims 
 her own, and Lotze admits it with no grudging measure. 
 Truth of science must be made independent of truth of 
 poetry. Yet the truth of poetry, when lifted out of the 
 changeful moods in which it usually lives into the stable 
 shape of a philosophic doctrine, is the higher. So that 
 after all what Lotze has done is to carry idealism home 
 to those humbler latitudes where dwell the ordinary men 
 and women, who feel uncomfortable on the cold heights 
 of speculation and find the absolute ' uncanny.' And thus, 
 as was suggested in the beginning, Lotze may perhaps to 
 some be as it were a porch whence they may enter into 
 the Hegelian courts, not so dreary perhaps as they have 
 been represented.
 
 II 
 
 IT is no easier in Nietzsche's case than in the case of any 
 other ' philosopher ' to sum up in a single principle or tendency 
 the general drift or spirit of his writings. When we ask 
 for such a summary, we really ask to see him as he could 
 not see himself. Self-consciousness is no doubt understood 
 to be a foremost quality of thoughtful minds. But what 
 such self-consciousness brings to light is not the total 
 impression of the intellectual and moral self : but rather 
 a series of particular pictures, a set of self-manifestations 
 in a special circle of circumstances. It is by reflections from 
 other things that the mind, that most pure spirit of sense, 
 sees itself. What is thus revealed by those thoughts or 
 writings which are the self-manifestation of any thinker, 
 is a product of the mind and its circumstances conjoined, 
 and that not in one finished and rounded work, but in 
 a succession of partial efforts at self-expression. Each man's 
 life, as long as its visible utterances last, is a continued 
 but varying attempt to utter his full purpose or achieve 
 his full task. But of that purpose and of that task he 
 has no final and perfect intuition or vision. His essential 
 work, after all, is to be, without knowing it. The work 
 of the historian is, on the contrary, to know what he can 
 scarcely hope to be. And this is true in relation to the
 
 512 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 thinker's efforts and achievements not less than in relation 
 to those of other men. 
 
 He too, no less (it may be, even more) than others, has 
 certain partial revelations of what manner of man he is 
 and of what kind of work he is ultimately doing. But 
 the completer objectivity which history requires must take 
 all such autobiographical dicta as mere elements in the 
 problem it seeks to solve elements of priceless value, occa- 
 sionally, but still only factors in the delineation of its object. 
 What a man seemed to himself to be and to do, is perhaps 
 a predominant element in determining what he was and did, 
 but it is not final or complete. History hears his evidence, 
 and, it may be, regards it as supremely important : but its 
 task requires an analysis and a synthesis on a wider scale. 
 
 These remarks are suggested by Nietzsche's own attempts 
 to describe or name his problems or define his task. These 
 problems are, we may expect, more than one, and their names 
 are not always the same. Nietzsche, indeed, is a man of 
 problems. Where the ordinary person sees only a fact to 
 be accepted, Nietzsche stumbles on a host of difficulties, 
 puzzles, questions. Everything, as it were, sets him thinking 
 on the What and the Why, the Whence and the Whereunto. 
 And at the same time every discovery and every idea forces 
 into prominence the question of what ultimately is to be 
 done of what he is by his nature bound to effect or to 
 help in effecting. 
 
 Nietzsche was originally and professionally a philologist 
 whose interests lay in tracing the growth of ideas in 
 literature, and in scrutinizing the documentary evidence 
 for early history. His first literary performances which 
 saw the light were essays on the poems of Theognis, and 
 on the sources of Diogenes Laertius (1867). But philology 
 was in his case only a remedy to check that f mania for 
 universal knowledge' which he felt as a danger of develop- 
 ment, and to stave off the full emancipation of 'disposition
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 513 
 
 to refer the individual problem to its deepest and remotest 
 grounds/ And he was not long in finding out that he could 
 no longer stay in any such half-way house, and that scholar- 
 ship in its ordinary limitations could not finally satisfy his 
 cravings for truth. ' Philology ' he finds ' lacking in great 
 ideas ; ' and in the absence of a grand enthusiasm ' the 
 workers in it have grown like workers in a factory : the 
 interest of the whole is lost to their sight.' ' Our philologists 
 ought/ he adds, 'to give up higgling about single passages, 
 and take to heart the large methods of philosophy.' For 
 even philology has its final reason of existence in its 
 ministering to human life. f The dynamic of all research 
 lies in those unknown far-off regions where the results of 
 research are seen to harmonize with those of life/ ' The 
 fruitfulness of philology lies in the points where its studies 
 touch upon humanity at large/ And so there had inevitably 
 to come a time when he would say : ' I have journeyed forth 
 from the house of scholars : too long had my soul sat hungry 
 at their table/ He refused because his nature refused 
 to spend life in ' settling the business of the enclitic/ 
 
 The love for individual fullness of life which will be content 
 with nothing short of all reality for its province is not 
 however to be identified entirely with a dislike to restraint 
 and discipline. If he loves ' freedom and the air above fresh 
 earth/ it is because of a certain hardness and love of solitude 
 which turns away from everything vulgar and shuns the 
 crowd. Call it pride the ' pathos of distance ' or by 
 worse names, you must recognize in Nietzsche a coldness 
 and indifference to the commonplace ideals of snugness and 
 what is known as happiness. As a student at Bonn (1864) 
 he soon felt himself out of tone with the drinking and 
 smoking habits of the clubs : he grew indignant at the 
 Bier-materialismns and Bier-gemuthlichkeit which they foster : 
 and found that such company lowers the moral tone and 
 destroys all clearness and singleness of aim. An occasional 
 
 Ll
 
 5T4 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 ascetic fit makes him try to harden himself, for example, 
 by shortening- his hours of sleep. If other mortals say to 
 him, like carbon to diamond, Why so hard, brother, he 
 replies, Why so soft. 
 
 There are, as he says, in a letter to his sister, written 
 at this time, a lot of half-and-half standpoints. But there 
 is notwithstanding 1 a clear bifurcation of paths of life, such 
 as was shown to Herakles : the path to truth and the 
 path to happiness. ' If you would aim at peace of soul 
 and happiness, then believe : if you will be a disciple of 
 truth, then inquire/ And the truth is to be accepted even if it 
 prove ug-ly and deterrent. Nay, Nietzsche flaunts, as it were, 
 a sort of preference for the sterner and more repellent truth, 
 a certain readiness to esteem more highly the belief that costs 
 most in the loss of ease and vulgar comforts. His critical 
 intelligence in philosophy has ' an earnestness which is never 
 content except in presence of the naked truth, and a fearless- 
 ness to meet hard and wicked conclusions, perhaps an affection 
 towards them.' A fatal facility to believe in uncomfortable 
 truths and to distrust everything that is associated with ease 
 and indolence ! It seems at times as if life were really to 
 him only a means of knowledge, and knowledge itself the 
 end : and ' with this principle in the heart/ he says, ' we 
 can live not only bravely, but even cheerfully/ and, as 
 the doubt emerges : ' It may be that in following out this 
 passion of knowledge, humanity will perish */ still ' even 
 this thought has no power over us/ These are bold words : 
 perhaps also not a little paradoxical. 
 
 Two influences had contributed to modify the effect of 
 a purely philological training, one of them was a considerable 
 susceptibility to the aesthetic and artistic side of life, especially 
 a love of music, and some actual achievement both in writing 
 songs and setting them to music. So far as mastery in that 
 direction is concerned, however, he soon came to the conclusion 
 
 1 v. 295.
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 515 
 
 that he had no supreme distinction to hope for. But it 
 was otherwise as regards the general tone and mental 
 attitude which music and perhaps art in general can give. 
 ' Art/ he says in one place l , ' has taught the world to 
 look with interest and pleasure on life in every shape/ 
 f Art is the supreme task/ he puts it elsewhere, ( and the 
 properly metaphysical activity of this life/ But when he 
 says art, we must remember that the art properly so called, 
 as shown in what are technically called ' works of art/ is 
 only an appendix of that larger sense to which he extends the 
 term. Without its help and 'its great, over-great task is 
 to embellish life ' by concealing or interpreting away every- 
 thing that is ugly pessimism would reign unchecked 2 . Its 
 network is spread over all existence : called sometimes religion, 
 sometimes art, sometimes science. The homines religiosi may 
 in fact be reckoned among the artists, and considered as 
 their highest order. All in their several degrees, art, 
 religion, and science, are illusions spread over things 
 devices by which human creatures may keep themselves in 
 life : for ' all life/ it is declared 3 , ' rests on semblance, art, 
 illusion, optic, necessity of perspective and of errors.' 
 
 In this there is partly an echo of Schopenhauer, with 
 whose ideas he first made acquaintance in his first term 
 at Leipsic (1865). 'I am far from believing/ he writes later, 
 ' that I have correctly understood Schopenhauer : it is only 
 myself that I have learnt to understand a little better through 
 Schopenhauer's means, that is why I owe him most gratitude/ 
 Not in short the specific doctrines or arguments which 
 Schopenhauer uses, but the value of him and his philosophy 
 for life, is the cardinal point on which Nietzsche's interest 
 turns. Two things there were in Schopenhauer which 
 attracted him, as they did others. The first was the feeling 
 that here at least philosophy was no matter of names and 
 disputation only, but a serious attempt to get at the meaning 
 1 ii. 206. 2 i. 109. 3 i. 9. 
 
 LU
 
 516 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 and drift of reality, and to examine into the worth of life. 
 It seemed as if here the 'one thing- needful' were the aim, 
 to the exclusion of all side issues and all logomachy. The 
 second was the show of independence of all established 
 and endowed dogma and institution which Schopenhauer 
 exhibited. Philosophy was not only an attempted codification 
 of what was thought and believed, but a criticism of ordinarily 
 accepted values. 
 
 And a third and that, the central idea of Schopenhauer 
 was the reduction of intelligence to a secondary and derivate 
 rank, combined within the enthronement of Will as the 
 supreme reality. It is perhaps impossible to give to Will 
 in Schopenhauer's pages a clearly consistent meaning : but 
 so much at least is negatively certain, that he meant, in 
 some way, to assert the phenomenal, superficial, and partial 
 character of the reason or thought which philosophers 
 generally put in the front rank or at the very foundation 
 of reality. Intelligence is an exception and a parergon, 
 not the essential being of things. It is at the best a means 
 to an end, the evidence of an imperfection in the organism, 
 a machinery to supply the want of deeper and essential unity. 
 A Spinoza-like treatment of intellect, as only a special phase 
 in a wider animateness or cogltatio which does not want or 
 deserve the epithet ' conscious,' is characteristic of this mood 
 of thought. Human thought and all animal consciousness 
 which is more or less analogous to it is a mark of provin- 
 ciality. The fully free citizen of the universe regards it as 
 a mark of imperfection, a pis-aller. 
 
 ( The mind counts for us/ says Nietzsche, ' only as a symptom 
 of a relative imperfection of the organism, as a stage of 
 experimenting, feeling about, and missing its aim 1 / The 
 great business of life is for us, as for nature, in general 
 transacted in silence : it is done, and needs not the intermediary 
 of speech and thinking. ' Consciousness,' he further notes, 
 
 1 viii. 230.
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 517 
 
 ' does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, 
 but only to that part in him which is of the nature of com- 
 munity and gregariousness/ It is a social product and if 
 it be assumed, as Nietzsche does assume that sociality is but 
 an accident of man, due to a weakness which will not let 
 him stand alone then it too is a result of his infirmities, 
 a part of the great sin of ' herding ' and seeking shelter, with 
 its inevitable contaminations, behind others in a mass. ' The 
 nature of the animal consciousness, therefore, involves that 
 the world of which we and these gregarious animals are 
 conscious is only a superficial world, a world of signs, a 
 generalized world V It is hardly going farther when we 
 are told that ' everything good is instinct ' : that the 
 ' so-called motive is only a surface-phenomenon of con- 
 sciousness/ The doom of intellectualism and rationalism 
 could not be pronounced more clearly. 
 
 Partly, at least, this is in accord with a wider movement 
 in which physical science has had its part. There is a con- 
 viction abroad that we have been imposed upon by names. 
 We have confused the expression and the interpretation, which 
 varies from time to time, with the reality which underlies it 
 and is the same always. Reason, intelligence, logic, is but 
 a receiver and transmitter of a prime reality which is given. 
 We are passive recipients : the only word that properly 
 describes our individual and conscious attitude to being 
 is ' pregnancy 2 ' : we turn over again and again a material 
 which we did not create. The home of our true being 
 and of our best wisdom is our body our spirit and mind 
 is but an interloper, a bleared or at best a one-eyed reduction 
 of that which is all eye and all ear, the universal life. 
 A great deal of our morality and religion is but a mis- 
 interpretation of physical or physiological reality. We take 
 a nervous or stomachic uneasiness and describe it in terms 
 of morals and religion, as, e.g., guilt or sin. Call it 
 1 v. 293. 2 v. 362.
 
 518 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 realism, or materialism, this revolt of naturalism is a protest 
 against some sort of spiritualism which seemed inclined 
 to deny or ignore the matter-of-fact of life, and to sub- 
 stitute the comment and the translation for the original 
 text. 
 
 Man, however, as we have seen, lives by these illusions 
 
 or, in milder phrase by these interpretations. The lowest, 
 
 and apparently the least satisfactory of them is science. The 
 
 type of the ' scientific ' or purely theoretic man according 
 
 to Nietzsche is Socrates. For Socrates, myth and mystery 
 
 are standpoints to be left behind : the spirit of science or 
 
 rationalism will brook nothing short of absolute clearness 
 
 and intelligibility. Logic in the vulgar sense as cut- 
 
 and-dry reasoning, must rule life and reality : dialectic 
 
 must prescribe laws to the world. But Socrates so 
 
 Nietzsche treats, as a parable, the story of the Phaedo 
 
 begins to doubt at the close of life whether he has adequately 
 
 fulfilled the command to make music. Hitherto he had 
 
 supposed he was carrying out the oracle when he sought, 
 
 in and out of season, for the reasons and the definitions of 
 
 things, for was not philosophy ' the greatest music ' ? But 
 
 in the house of prison Socrates begins to see so Nietzsche 
 
 methodizes the tale that perhaps science with its clear-cut 
 
 distinctions is not all-in-all. Perhaps there is a deeper and 
 
 truer than science something nearer the fountain-head of 
 
 life. Is it art? and above all, music, that art which, 
 
 according to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, reveals the whole 
 
 force of being, the undivided will of reality? Behind 
 
 science, and even beyond the arts of painting or sculpture, 
 
 there is the spirit of music, and its child, the tragic drama. 
 
 That drama such is the theme of his earliest work is 
 
 the revelation, so far as the forms of Apollo the god of 
 
 light allow, in words and act, of the Dionysiac mystery of 
 
 being: the scene which bodies itself out in the eye of the 
 
 chorus (through whom the poet speaks) to express the
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 519 
 
 otherwise unutterable burthen of passion and emotion which 
 surges indefinitely in the musical tones. 
 
 What science is unequal to perform, art and religion may 
 in some measure hope to accomplish. The enthusiasm for 
 Richard Wagner which Nietzsche displayed in his first 
 writings, is connected with these hopes. In Wagner he 
 imagined he had found one who was more of the true 
 artist, and less of the" mere rationalist, than other musicians : 
 the promise, if not the performance, of an 'art which knows 
 no longer the opposition of educated and uneducated, and 
 speaks no more the language of a caste/ In Wagner he 
 hears 'the language of an art which speaks not to nations, 
 but to man : which is no longer narrowly rational, but human 
 though it waits for a humanity of the future to give its 
 appropriate audience. f Wagner,' says Nietzsche, 'is a true 
 poet : he thinks in myths, as the people always have 
 thought.' And what is a myth? It is the complete 
 concrete individuality or fact, of which a theory is only 
 an abstract and mutilated copy. ' The myth is not based 
 on a thought, as the children of an artificial education 
 suppose : but is itself a kind of thinking, which imparts 
 a conception of the world : but imparts it in a sequence 
 of events, acts, and sufferings.' 'A myth is a single exem- 
 plar of a universal truth which has infinite significance/ 
 In Wagner, in short, Nietzsche fancied he saw the fulfilment 
 of what Schelling demanded 1 , a new mythology in which 
 the ideal (i. e. the truly real) world would no longer be, as 
 it is with the philosopher, subject to limitations and tainted 
 by the weakness of subjectivity. It is the merit of Wagner 
 to have seen, he thinks, that art is no accident on the shores 
 of life, but in intimate connexion with all political, social, 
 and moral activity. 
 
 Religion again is a kind of art perhaps the supreme 
 form of art. It, too, is a bulwark against pessimism : an 
 
 1 iii. 628.
 
 520 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 instrument which the will to live uses in its struggle against 
 the hostile forces of the universe the forces deadly to man. 
 As such it has its value, its justification. To ask if faith 
 is true, is to ask amiss : and to seek to prove the reality 
 and truth of religious belief by pointing to the fervours and 
 vigours of enthusiasm which it inspires, is to be illogical 
 and absurd 1 . The sole question in the first instance is, 
 does it sustain life? does it give strength in the struggle 
 for existence? If it does that, it has justified itself as 
 religion, and it were a preposterous demand to ask it to 
 conform to the canons of science 2 ; for ' between religion 
 and genuine science there subsists neither relationship, nor 
 friendship, nor even hostility : they live on different stars/ 
 Yet, apparently, they cannot be quite so unconnected: for 
 in man they inhere, by man they live : just as, conversely, 
 it is true that according as man lives in one or other of 
 these stars, he rises to different heights of his potentiality 
 of being, and religion and art must give place to a fuller 
 manifestation. 'We must have loved religion and art, as 
 one loves mother and nurse : otherwise one cannot grow 
 wise. But we must look beyond them and outgrow them. 
 If we stay within their confines, we understand them not V 
 They are only steps on the upward ladder of humanity, not 
 its goal. 
 
 The present age looks with pride upon itself as the historical 
 age par excellence. It is so, however, chiefly because it is 
 without strength or originality of its own 4 . The historic 
 sense is in its origin a sequel of that mixture of orders and 
 races, of creeds and ideals, into which the democratic progress 
 of modern Europe has turned the modern man. Itself 
 possessed of no intrinsic and characteristic quality, modern 
 Europe is open to receive the stamp of all the ages, and finds 
 in itself a chord which is sensitive to all varieties of opinion. 
 
 1 viii. 286. 2 ii. 119. 3 ii. 206. 
 
 4 Jens. 224.
 
 ii] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 521 
 
 It is liberal and not exclusive in its appreciations. It has 
 plenty of taste for all fashions and phases, and probably 
 cannot be expected to cling 1 to anything so narrow as good 
 taste. It has no home, no narrow altar of its own, but in 
 cosmopolitan laxity seeks anywhere and everywhere for 
 excellence, for an object of worship. 
 
 Man himself may be said to be par excellence the historical 
 animal. He is not solely the present and the moment. ' He 
 has to hold himself up against the great and ever greater 
 burden of the past it weighs him down, or turns him aside, 
 it impedes his walk as an invisible and gloomy load which 
 he may deny, but only in appearance/ The irrevocable and 
 indestructible past, the It was, is the human doom. ' Even 
 the child learns to understand the meaning of that It was, 
 the watchword with which battle, suffering, and vexation 
 draw close to man, to remind him what his existence at 
 bottom is a never- to-be-completed imperfect/ We walk 
 through life with the consciousness that we are epigoni : 
 ' Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist : ' that things have 
 been said and done which have left us no longer our own 
 masters, and bind us to the authority of the past. 'There 
 is much talk of free personality, and in louder tones than 
 were ever before heard : ' but it is the outcry of want and 
 longing. ' Nowhere do we see a personality, still less a free 
 personality there is nothing but beings concealed under the 
 identical mantle of a generalized humanity/ 
 
 In such a condition of affairs the study of history is 
 a fresh danger. We take to it, as the invalid takes to 
 what is most consonant with his own debility. It does 
 not strengthen, but paralyzes or lulls to indolent acquiescence. 
 The useful reading of history belongs only to those who have 
 thrown out their roots and branches widely and strongly 
 in the present. ' It is only from the highest force of the 
 present that you should interpret the past: it is only in 
 the strongest exertion of your noblest qualities that you
 
 522 CRITICAL ESSAYS [11 
 
 will surmise what in the past is great, and worth knowing 
 and admiring/ The greatest men in all ages have been 
 those who have dared to ignore the past: the great epochs 
 of history have been those which acted as if the world 
 was new for them. To act, to achieve something, it is 
 necessary to be able to forget the past, and to shut your- 
 self up within a limited horizon. It is necessary to wrap 
 yourself in the unhistorical to throw around you its 
 enveloping atmosphere in which alone is life generated. 
 Annihilate that atmosphere, which gives at least a temporary 
 unity and finality to life, and life itself must vanish. ' For 
 he who cannot stablish himself on the threshold of the 
 present in forgetfulness of all that is past, will never know 
 what happiness is : and worse still, he will never do anything 
 which makes others happy/ 
 
 Hence the maxim : Forget once and for all the superstition 
 that you are of the epigoni one of the later generations. 
 Draw around you the fence of a great arid comprehensive 
 hope, of effort embraced in hope. Form within you an 
 image to which the future shall correspond and work 
 immersed in present actuality. There are, of course, other 
 difficulties, which threaten to break up this isolative effort. 
 Against them you must call in what Nietzsche calls the 
 ' supra-historical ' powers. These are Art and Religion. 
 In them the existence has acquired the character of some- 
 thing eternally and uniformly significant : they carry you 
 beyond and above the fluctuations of time and change. 
 These are the antidotes against the disease of history. 
 
 ' The thing which has most profoundly engaged me/ says 
 Nietzsche, 'is the problem of decadence.' It is the pheno- 
 menon of the present, as Nietzsche sees it. The present is 
 an age of deterioration, of degeneration, of descending life. 
 ' The symptoms of decadence,' he declares, ' are an anarchy of 
 the atoms and a disgregation of wills.' The sense of social 
 solidarity and of personal unity have been lost. The con-
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 523 
 
 fidence of instinctive life, the strength of undivided will 
 have given way to a distrust of self, a leaning upon 
 suggestions and authorities, and of authorities largely incom- 
 patible or contradictory. ' We all have values, formulae, 
 words, morals, of opposite descent in our body.' We are 
 ruins, in short, crumbling to pieces, but held together by 
 extraneous supports and foreign ligatures. Like invalids, 
 or neurasthenics, we can only continue to exist on an 
 artificial regimen : our worn-out systems are attracted by 
 what is injurious to them, and have no longer the vigour 
 or resolution which finds nutriment in things hard and 
 dangerous. We can no longer trust our instincts : we can 
 no longer be generous to our passions. And yet ' to be 
 forced to fight against the instincts is the very formula 
 of decadence ' ; and ' to attack the passions at the root 
 is to assail the roots of life/ 
 
 What Nietzsche thus describes as decadence, is not unlike 
 the state of soul and society which Plato was pleased to call 
 democratic. It seemed to him the proper name for a state 
 of affairs which has lost centrality of aim and leading in 
 social and individual life. There have been many who 
 used the term (democracy) as an ideal of a different kind, 
 just as there have been a few who made an ideal of 
 anarchy. To these idealists anarchy meant a condition in 
 which all external and obvious restraint has been removed 
 a sort of self-abolition and idealization of governmental in- 
 terference, when outward and visible thought is unnecessary 
 because each unit carries out under his individual stimuli 
 all that external means of repression could conceivably 
 secure. So, in the ideal sense, democracy, in contrast 
 to all terms which recognize the limitation of the highest 
 manifestations of political life to a special and numbered 
 order, denotes a state of associated action, in which there 
 is no amorphous mass, set in motion by forces alien to it, 
 but the whole body freely and completely organized, is
 
 524 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 the master of its own movements. But such democracy 
 is not what Plato meant, and such anarchy is not that 
 condemned by Nietzsche. The state of anarchy is one 
 in which the principle of order and unity is reduced to 
 a minimum : and democracy, in Plato's sense, is a sweltering 
 muddle of constitutional forms, in which none has emerged 
 to rule and domination, to a domination, that is, which is based 
 ideally not on force, but on harmony of aim and purpose. 
 
 But Nietzsche himself has said elsewhere that ' corruption is 
 only a term of abuse for the autumn time of a nation/ This, 
 too, is only a metaphor : but it may serve to indicate some 
 doubts as to Nietzsche's thorough-going disjunction of periods 
 of ascending and descending life. It is in that, respect to be 
 compared with another corresponding distinction between 
 organic and critical periods in history : ages which build 
 up larger unities, and ages which analyze the given into 
 its elements. Loosely taken, perhaps, such distinctions, like 
 the analogous contrasts between the heart and the head, 
 do no great harm. At certain epochs life seems to proceed 
 spontaneously, unconsciously, constructively, as if moved 
 altogether by an inward spring : at other epochs doubts and 
 uncertainties call for reflection, examination, discussion : 
 the forward step seems suspended: there is little apparent 
 action, and much thinking and talking. But it will surely 
 be found, when one looks below the surface, that the so-called 
 organic period owes the secret of the advance to hints and 
 discoveries made in the tentative and abortive efforts of 
 hesitation ; and that just as there is not except when 
 seen from an outlook too distant to permit of close scrutiny 
 an absence of criticism from an organizing period, so 
 the apparently fruitless movements of criticism really repre- 
 sent those starting-points, which are more than the half 
 of the subsequent progress. 
 
 Terms like decadence and deterioration or degeneration 
 savour of a prejudice which is scarcely scientific. They
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 525 
 
 are, as Bentham has phrased it, dyslogistic, and have a 
 tone of quasi-disapproval about them. They imply a tacit 
 assumption of the merit of unchangeableness and stability 
 of kind : an assumption which perhaps might be tenable of 
 kinds existing in total independence of their surroundings. 
 They imply, perhaps, in addition, a belief in the fallacy of the 
 golden age of that idealization which raises the past into 
 a contrast against the mixed reality of the present. To 
 use them is to show a forgetfulness of the various factors 
 in the situation. It is to assume that instincts have been 
 given as ready-made states, instead of being what they 
 apparently always are, a product of a long series of efforts, 
 gradually succeeding in reaching some unification which, 
 for the time at least, has a certain sufficiency. In a 
 changing world it is unwise to be too trustful of mere 
 instincts. As we look upon the present in its disruptions 
 and chaotic effort, we are apt to forget how rare and how 
 short-lived were those moments of balanced and harmonious 
 activity when the race and people was one and single-minded. 
 We forget, too, how no unification thus attained is perfect : 
 that, such as it is, it has only been achieved by what may 
 be called an arbitrary simplification of the problem : and 
 that at the very moment when success is assured, it becomes 
 apparent that a heavy price has been paid in exclusiveness 
 and partiality. Nietzsche knows none better that all 
 RecJite or rights are in their origin Vorrechte or privileges 
 and distinctions that liberties always imply a corresponding 
 check upon the action of others. Ascend the stream of 
 history as far as you can, you do not thereby emerge 
 from the range of mixed races. All such f pure races ' as 
 are alleged to exist are apparently only artificial and 
 temporary restrictions, due to special conditions, but power- 
 less to check the general movement of differentiation and 
 integration. Far from being the aboriginal state of society, 
 purity of race is rather a device of dominant classes to thwart
 
 526 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 the tendency of evolution in the interests of a special aggre- 
 gation of social elements. And when it is claimed that the order 
 of progress shall rest at some stage in a fixed institution, it is 
 a sign that there are movements which would lead beyond, 
 and which it is deemed desirable to check. But unity is not 
 a datum : it is a goal, or rather a law guiding development. 
 
 One should not accordingly lay too much stress on the 
 alleged phenomenon of decadence, as if it stood alone, and 
 were not a part of a complete process. It is, on the 
 contrary, only an aspect of the total phenomenon of evolution. 
 The breaking up of old forms the disruption of institutions 
 is only a step in a complete movement, and changes its 
 look according to the environment in which we see it. It 
 is also a necessary step without which progress is impossible. 
 In the tentative efforts which are the concomitants and causes 
 of advance, all kinds of impossible combinations are made, 
 and these must perish. But it is only by such sacrifices 
 that progress is attained. The decadent is an experimenter 
 who fails. And he may fail in various ways, either by 
 precipitancy or by sluggishness : he may fall behind the 
 line of march, or he may rush on to overwhelming dangers. 
 The decadent must have ideas, but they are not adequately 
 co-ordinated with the facts around him. He is unwisely 
 clinging to old rules and beliefs, or he is rashly running 
 on unexplored territory with half-formed plans. 
 
 It is not altogether wrong to say that we are all decadents. 
 But in the same way it may be maintained that all walking 
 is a continual falling. It is so : but it is also a continued 
 rectification of the process or falling. To act is always 
 a little tainted by folly and rashness. It cannot wait till 
 everything is certain : if it were to do so, it would hardly 
 be action. The straight course is only the resultant of 
 innumerable divergences on this side and that. The ultra- 
 conservative who clings blindly to a passing and falsified 
 ideal carries movement to one extreme : the ultra-radical
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 527 
 
 who wishes to unsettle everything drives it in another. Both 
 in relation to the middle course are decadents and de- 
 generates. But both are necessary adjuncts to the car of 
 progress. Both are experiments which prove an impasse : 
 safety does not lie in that direction. But in the darkness 
 and blindness through which all discovery and advance is 
 made, no 'decadent can be considered superfluous. The 
 obstinate survival of old beliefs helps to strengthen and 
 clarify the new rivals to their place, and prevents the 
 steadying influence of the past from passing away without 
 leaving a trace behind. The extravagances of new com- 
 binations disclose the variety of circumstance with which 
 the problem is beset, and the conditions which have to be 
 satisfied. 
 
 The problem of decadence, therefore, seems to lie in a failure 
 to recognize its place in the law of existence which we call 
 development. Man and it is with him that we are con- 
 cerned is in no wise finished. The other creatures represent 
 so many formed types, each adapted to its peculiar circum- 
 stances and its province of nature. But man is yet to be 
 made : he is still in the making. As yet he is only 
 a beginner : his true day has not yet come : and before it 
 dawns there must be passage from day to day, between 
 which intervenes the fall of night. ' Man/ says Nietzsche, 
 ' not only the reason of centuries, but also their frenzy breaks 
 out in him.' We are a bundle of contradictions, just because 
 we are a growing and self-forming creature. Nay, every 
 great step in advance must be bought at terrible cost. 
 ' Almost everywhere it is madness which paves the way 
 for the new thought that breaks through the barrier of 
 revered usage and superstition/ The vast detachment which 
 unlooses the tie of immemorial habit is only possible with 
 a general unsettling which gives its victim a repute of being 
 beside himself. 
 
 ' To every progress on a large scale a partial weakening
 
 528 CRITICAL ESSAYS [n 
 
 must be antecedent ' : the strongest natures keep the type 
 permanent : the weaker help towards its further development. 
 Thus in all evolutionary progress, while there must be, on 
 the one hand, an ' augmentation of the stable force by faith 
 and sense of solidarity/ there must be, on the other, in the 
 'occurrence of degenerating natures 1 the possibility of 
 attaining to higher goals/ Such is the law of history 
 through night to light. 
 
 The man of the future the man that is yet to be 
 a humanity which shall be to the present as sunlight and 
 moonlight, and as wine unto water, is the goal of development. 
 To bring him forth is shall we say the aim of the process 
 of the world at any rate the aim of all genuine reform. 
 But as things have hitherto gone, the process is singularly 
 unequal and inadequate. Nowhere is there such a failure 
 as man. The higher and the less definite the goal, the 
 greater the risk of complications and collisions in the effort 
 to reach it. History is strewn with wrecks with possibilities 
 unrealized, experiments that seemed to shut up the way of 
 advance. It seems at times as Nietzsche himself often 
 appears to think as if the only fairly successful man were 
 the primitive ' blond beast/ the beast of prey, without 
 a conscience and a faith, save the unhesitating faith in 
 his instincts. But such a primeval man is probably not 
 less of an illusion than many other ideals inhabiting the 
 golden age. Between him and the primeval man of anthro- 
 pology there is indeed an abyss, a Fall from the Eden 
 garden of dreams into the earth of gross reality. It is 
 not wrong perhaps to say that to bridge over that interval 
 between the perfect man and the perfect animal from which 
 he sprung, no means were great enough, llather at the 
 beginning we should place him whom Nietzsche and others 
 call the decadent. He has fallen but it is a fall upstairs. 
 The abnormal outburst of reason is simultaneous with
 
 n] NIETZSCHE'S CRITICISM OF MORALITY 529 
 
 a disorganization of instincts, or rather as the term dis- 
 organization is question-begging the elasticity and liberty 
 in his instincts was the curse without which development 
 would have been impossible. And at every step in his 
 future progress the same laxity and differentiation had to 
 be repeated. The attainment of truth is only possible in 
 proportion as you increase the liability to the influence of 
 error. 
 
 The common method of training proceeds upon another 
 view. It forgets that ' without the errors which are at 
 work in every pleasure and pain of the soul, a humanity 
 would never have arisen V ( The individual is treated by his 
 educators as if, though he was something new, he ought 
 to be a repetition 2 / Whereas, it remains true that 'the 
 terrible energies what is called the Wicked are the 
 Cyclopean architects and road-makers of humanity 3 . History 
 speaks almost only of those bad men who have subsequently 
 been visited with approval 4 . The object of common educa- 
 tion is therefore to dam up individuality and originality 
 under the bounds of the traditional rule. 
 
 There is indeed a degeneration (Entartung) which Nietzsche 
 cannot abide : which to him is bad and worst. It is the 
 degeneration which may always be surmised when the gift- 
 making principle is lacking in the egoistic soul which cries 
 'Everything for me/ But that is not degeneration which 
 throws itself away in order to gain itself in others ; which 
 goes through history, a body in growth and combat, and 
 a spirit which is the herald of its victories 5 , their comrade 
 and their echo 6 . 
 
 1 iii. 199. - ii. 217. J ii. 231. 
 
 4 v. 29. s vi. in. 
 
 6 This was intended to be the first chapter of a detailed criticism of 
 Nietzsche, which was not completed. Partially to supply what is want- 
 ing, I have added the following review from the International Journal of 
 Ethics, which was the latest thing written by Professor Wallace. 
 
 M m
 
 Ill 
 
 THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA l 
 
 THESE things are an allegory: and the man who ' spake ' 
 them is no kinsman of the Persian Zoroaster. Friedrich 
 Nietzsche, the new wearer of that prophet's mantle, picked it 
 up as he walked one day in January, 1883, along the wooded 
 hills around Rapallo and looked on the fairest scenery of the 
 eastern Riviera. He was then in his thirty-ninth year, and 
 had for about seven years been a wanderer in search of health 
 on the uplands of the Engadin and on the shores of the 
 Mediterranean. In 1872 he had begun a career of meteoric 
 brilliancy as a writer and a thinker on man, his aims, ideals, 
 and illusions, and drew upon himself the attention, if not 
 always the approval, of those who, throughout the world, fight 
 under the banners of ' advanced thought/ This career came 
 to an abrupt end in 1889 by a mental and bodily collapse, 
 which has left the daring spirit a complete and apparently 
 hopeless wreck. 
 
 The book, called Thus Spake ZaratJiustra , consists of a series 
 of chapters, composed in a figurative and fantastic prose, which 
 caricatures rather than imitates the style of an Oriental sacred 
 book, and is laden with a varied store of epigrammatic re- 
 flections on life and criticisms of morals and religion. It is 
 divided into four parts. The first three, written during the 
 years 1883-84, were published in 1886. The fourth part, 
 
 1 Thus Spake Zarathustra: a Book far All and None. By Friedrich Nietzsche. 
 Translated by A. Tille. London : Henry & Co., 1896, pp. xxiii, 488.
 
 THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 531 
 
 a sort of interlude or satiric drama following on the trilogy 
 of passion was printed for circulation among Nietzsche's 
 friends in 1885 (having been written that same year at 
 Mentone), but did not become public till 1892. To under- 
 stand properly the utterances of Zarathustra-Nietzsche some 
 knowledge of the life and letters of the author during these 
 years would be almost indispensable, and this biographical 
 material would have to be supplemented by a history of the 
 movements in the world of thought and letters for the last 
 twenty-five years. Some light as regards the personal 
 element in the work may be derived from Lou Andreas- 
 Salome's Fr. Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Wien, 1894), but 
 for complete and authentic information more may be expected 
 from the second volume, yet unpublished, of Nietzsche's life 
 by his sister. 
 
 When the scene opens, Zarathustra is supposed to have 
 spent from his thirtieth to his fortieth year in the quest of 
 truth, making his home in a mountain cavern, with an eagle 
 and a serpent as his familiars. He has at length resolved to 
 go down from his hermitage and offer men the gifts won in 
 his aerial meditations. These gifts are summed up in a new 
 gospel, the gospel of a new humanity, which, instead of sacri- 
 ficing the individual to the mass, and the earthly Here to 
 a heavenly Hereafter, shall be realized on earth in a more 
 than human race, which it is the present duty to prepare and 
 make possible, a race for which society shall not be an obstacle, 
 but, as it were, a fostering garden where they may grow in 
 grace and strength, and for which deity shall be the inspiring 
 faith in perfectibility, not a fixed power impending as a menace 
 and a check upon the path of progress. The multitude, how- 
 ever, shows no taste for such revelations of spiritual truth, and 
 prefers the marvels of charlatans. Zarathustra, accordingly, 
 who does not wish ' implicit believers/ but fellow- workers 
 who will ' write new values on new tables ' i. e. will destroy 
 the old misconception of good and bad and create other ideals 
 
 M m 2
 
 532 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in 
 
 of perfection turns away from the masses and resolves to sing 
 his song e to single and to dual recluses.' These chants form 
 some eighty chapters, more or less concordant in theme, but 
 far from continuous or systematic : the outpouring of varying 
 moods of gloom and gladness, hope and disgust; often wild 
 and fiery in tone, with many traces of the struggle with self 
 and with old associations, but often also gracious with quaint 
 charms, and touches of tenderness. 
 
 European civilization, as Nietzsche sees it, is the victim of 
 ideals which mislead it in two directions. On one side it is 
 dominated by a low-toned Utilitarianism, whose watch-words 
 are mass-happiness, comfort, conservation of general and in- 
 dividual welfare. To these ends learning and morality, en- 
 lightenment and virtue, are made alike subservient. To-day 
 is the day of the masses and the vulgar. The 'Philister' 
 is supreme, and gives the keynote both to the science of the 
 scholar and to the ethics of the just and good. On another 
 side, civilization is attracted and distracted by ascetic and 
 pessimistic ideals, which, according to Nietzsche, have found 
 their typical expression in Christianity. These disparage 
 natural impulses ; instead of manly action they preach self- 
 sacrifice, compassion, and, in general, an altruism which leaves 
 no room for healthy self-regard. As against the greatest- 
 happiness idea, Nietzsche insists on the view that self-conser- 
 vation must not be identified with stagnation, and that the 
 welfare of humanity has yet to be discovered and rightly 
 conceived. Man, far from having surmised or learned his 
 true meaning and drift, is still in the making : he is, as he 
 stands, only ' the rope between the animal and the super- 
 human/ ' What is great in man is that he is a bridge and 
 not a goal/ His being has yet to be made by effort, suffering, 
 and sacrifice. So far Nietzsche may seem to be an ally of 
 ascetic morality. But he sharply disclaims the connexion. 
 Asceticism has in his eyes treated the body as something 
 extraneous, which hampers, and only hampers, the spiritual
 
 in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 533 
 
 life ; its overstrained spirituality has dehumanized man, and 
 set up a conception of truth and goodness which is hostile to 
 the requirements of human nature. ' Everywhere/ he cries, 
 ( sounds the voice of the preachers of death/ 
 
 ' Dead are all gods : it is now our will that the superhuman 
 live/ are the words which conclude the first part ; and when 
 Zarathustra, after months and years of renewed retirement, 
 again, in Part II, utters his message, it begins with the same 
 refrain : ' The old God is dead/ or, for those who have not 
 yet gone so far, Deus est delendm. ' There was a time/ as 
 he puts it, ' when, as men looked out on far-away seas, they 
 said God/ but the surmise thus uttered was, according to 
 Nietzsche, one which paralyzed man's effort, set up an insur- 
 mountable barrier to his progress, and subjected his life to an 
 influence of incalculable instability. Such a deity is or rather 
 is part of the inscrutable power whom primitive man (if 
 Epicurus and Nietzsche tell us true) saw haunting human life 
 from lonely places and holds of darkness. And, perhaps, if 
 man is to rise above his lower self, suck a God must disappear. 
 We may even say that, if this be atheism, such an atheism 
 has many adherents among the followers of the true God. 
 The godhead which is to be, Nietzsche sees as the ideal end, 
 consummating a process whereby the man of to-day, if he 
 fulfils his true mediating position, will build up in many 
 children of glory the kingdom of the superhuman the as yet 
 undiscovered, but still-to-be-pursued, ' land of his children and 
 his children's children in remotest seas/ But if the gods of 
 primitive tradition are to go and leave man free space to 
 create many exemplars of the godhead which is to be, other 
 fetters on human development must go too. Foremost among 
 these drags is, in Nietzsche's eyes, the dogma of the eternity 
 and immutability of moral rules and of particular moral ideals. 
 All detached ethical precepts, all single and limited ethical 
 ideas, all detailed moral standards, have in them elements 
 arbitrary, provincial, temporary. The law which shall not
 
 534 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in 
 
 pass away is not written with earthly pens or graven on 
 earthly tables. Nichtx ist wahr: Allen ist, erlaubt. There is 
 nothing in even the most sacred observances and institutions 
 of human life which has not, when tested by history, a ten- 
 tative and provisional character. Even the best of manners 
 and customs, if allowed to remain for ever, i.e. beyond its 
 implied conditions, would corrupt a world, the distinctive 
 mark of which is to be ever on the march. Hear Nietzsche : 
 
 ' Oh ! my brothers ! where lies the greatest danger for all 
 men's future ? Is it not from the good and just ? 
 
 ' For they are those who say and feel in their heart, We 
 know already what is good and just ; we have it, too. Woe 
 to those who still seek for it ! ... 
 
 ( Oh ! my brothers ! there was once one who saw into the 
 heart of the good and just ; and he said, They are Pharisees. 
 But men understood him not. 
 
 ' The good and just themselves might not understand him : 
 their mind was fast in the stocks of their good conscience. 
 Unfathomably shrewd is the stupidity of the good. . . . 
 
 ' But the second who discovered their land land, heart, and 
 world of the good and just he it was 'that asked, Whom do 
 they hate most ? 
 
 ' It is the maker of new things they hate most : him who 
 breaks tables and old values, the breaker. Him they call 
 peace-breaker (criminal). 
 
 ' The good, verily, they cannot make anything new : they 
 are always the beginning of the end. They crucify him who 
 writes new values on new tables : they sacrifice the future ; 
 they crucify all men's future. . . . 
 
 ' Break, break in pieces the good and the just. 
 
 ' Ye flee from me ? Ye are scared ! Ye tremble at this 
 word ! 
 
 ' Oh ! my brothers ! when I bade you break in pieces the 
 good and the tables of the good, then first did I put man 
 aboard to sail his high sea.
 
 in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 535 
 
 ' Then only comes there upon him the great terror, the great 
 looking about, the great illness, the great qualm, the great 
 sea-sickness. 
 
 * False shores and false securities the good taught you : in 
 good men's lies had ye birth and bield. Sly and awry have 
 the good made everything to its very heart. 
 
 1 But he who discovered the land Man, discovered also the 
 land Man's future. So shall ye become my seafarers, valiant, 
 patient. 
 
 ' Walk upright betimes. Oh ! my brothers ! learn to walk 
 upright. The sea is in storm, and many will fain hold them- 
 selves upright on you. 
 
 1 The sea is in storm. Everything is in the sea. Up ! up ! 
 ye old seamen's hearts. Fatherland, say ye ? Our helm is set 
 thitherwards where is our children's land. Thither, stormier 
 than the sea, storms our great longing/ . . . 
 
 Should any one, stimulated by the call of this patriotism of 
 the future to serve and to create a nobler posterity, be unwilling, 
 like a prudent person, to throw away the old tables until he 
 receives assurance of what is to take their place should he 
 ask, What is the way ? and what are the signs which betoken 
 the approach to truer goals ? he will not find, I fear, much 
 comfort from the new prophet. He does not reveal a way ; 
 he seeks fellow-travellers who are fellow-seekers. He knows 
 that he is only a forerunner ; and not very infallible even at 
 that. If he be ' a bridge unto the future/ he is also and that 
 is his cross ' a cripple at the bridge/ He knows that the 
 work of self-teaching and self-discipline unto self-growth is 
 a task not to be accomplished at a single stroke ; knows, too, 
 that every good quality, every nobility, has its defect and its 
 temptation. f Whoso wisheth to learn to fly one day must 
 first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance/ 
 There is no one infallible road either, because there is no 
 single goal : ( noble ones of many kinds are needful, if there 
 is to be nobility/ ' That is my way ' is his answer to those
 
 536 CRITICAL ESSAYS [HI 
 
 who question him as to the way. ' The way there is none 
 such.' ' By many ways and modes I have come unto my 
 truth : . . . a trying and questioning of ways was all my going/ 
 Clearly, there are many dangers attending such experimenta- 
 tion in life. It cannot be tried ' on a worthless thing ' ; the 
 cost of the experiment must be borne by the living experi- 
 menter. This has to be borne by every one who, like 
 Nietzsche, has felt : ' I am of to-day and the past ; but 
 something is within me that is of to-morrow and the day 
 after/ Whoso goes on this path is not without his work. If 
 he has broken the tablets of duties, he has still upon him the 
 unwritten law of duty to the Man that is to be. Past and 
 present forms of family may be in his view but provisional 
 inductions ; but the ideal of marriage still remains ' the will 
 in pairs to create the one which is more than those who created 
 it. Mutual reverence name I marriage reverence before 
 those who will such a will. 1 
 
 It was said by Francis Bacon of his Atlantidean sage that 
 his look was of one who pitied men. And so may it be said 
 of Nietzsche. Yet is his a mixed feeling : there is in it pity 
 that men ' bear so many strange things on their shoulders/ 
 and make their ' life so hard to bear'; there is contempt that 
 they sit so complacently resigned under their burden, and 
 regret the irrevocable, and leave their existence a meaningless 
 fragment ; but there is also active energy urging to transform 
 the future by a creative will. But of vulgar compassion 
 Nietzsche is impatient. ' What in the world,' he asks, ' has 
 done more harm than the follies of the compassionate?' 
 Setting more importance on relief of momentary pain and of 
 temporary ailments than on the sure but protracted process 
 of rebuilding health and strength, weakly and sentimental 
 pity leads astray, and neglects the one thing needful, the 
 development of the higher man. ' Compassion makes dull and 
 heavy air for all free souls/ Its function in life is entirely 
 secondary ; and to allow it to claim more is high treason
 
 in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 537 
 
 against the majesty of future humanity. So the master- 
 builder, who labours for the higher world he surmises and longs 
 for, must often be hard, sparing neither his neighbour nor 
 himself in the rigour of his devotion. ' Myself I sacrifice unto 
 my love, and my neighbour as myself ; thus runs the speech 
 of all creators/ Nietzsche's protest against the idolization of 
 emotional pity and sympathy, which the sensitive and senti- 
 mental have sometimes spoken of as the essential teaching of 
 Christianity, and which Schopenhauer dignified with the title 
 of ethical principle, is not unneeded. And if we remember 
 the extravagances of altruism, we shall better understand his 
 emphatic counterblasts. ' There is a wholesome and healthy 
 selfishness which springs from mighty soul from mighty 
 soul to which belongs the high body, the beautiful, victorious, 
 refreshing body, around which everything is a mirror; the 
 flexible, persuading body, whose image and epitome is the self- 
 joyous soul/ Such selfishness is not a light thing, any more 
 than true compassion is identical with the gush of sympathetic 
 emotion. ' By all means/ says Nietzsche, ' love your neigh- 
 bour as yourselves, but let me first see you such as love 
 yourselves/ But ( to learn how to love one's self is the finest 
 and cunningest of arts/ 
 
 To hear Nietzsche, one might sometimes think as if all that 
 was needed for the seeker after higher life was to burst the 
 bonds around him by an effort of vigorous will. ' Willing 
 delivers.' But what if will itself be a prisoner ? Gods and 
 moral imperatives may be discarded ; but the past stands 
 irrevocable, menacing and marring the present, and man can, 
 it seems, only gnash his teeth impotently, and seek in vain 
 anger and vainer punishments to get relief for his vexation. 
 Will beats wildly against its prison-bars and kicks against the 
 pricks ; and how is it to unlearn the spirit of revenge ? ' Who 
 taught it reconciliation with time, and something higher than 
 all reconciliation ? ' How is it to unlearn the pessimism which 
 arises as it sees in all the past, in every ' It was/ a ' fragment,
 
 538 CRITICAL ESSAYS [m 
 
 an enigma, a dismal accident ' ? Only, replies Nietzsche, 
 ' when a creative will saith unto the " It was/' Thus would 
 I have it be/ But for Nietzsche, at least, the ' It was ' has 
 a further significance and a deeper horror than to the com- 
 monalty. Following out an idea which has again and again 
 in different forms risen up to awe the inquiring spirit, he sees 
 in all existence an eternal recurrence. The burden of the 
 irrevocable past grows heavier as age is added to age. ' A 
 demon/ so he puts it, ' in an hour of utmost solitude thus 
 whispers : This life, as thou now livest and hast lived, thou 
 must live once more and countless times more ; and there will 
 be in it nothing new, but each pain and pleasure and each 
 thought and sigh and all the ineffably little and big of thy 
 life must return to thee, and all in the same order and sequence/ 
 And what retort does the tempted will make ? Does it curse 
 the demon who so spoke, or fall crushed to the ground in 
 despair? or may there come a moment when it -rises to the 
 height of the awful decision and, in full amity with life, 
 affirms its resolve to have this moment once more and count- 
 less times over again. From the depth of Nietzsche's pessi- 
 mism from the horror in which he shrinks at the ghastly 
 idea of the ' ring of existence,' the ' eternal recurrence ' 
 there emerges the final utterance of the world-affirming, life- 
 ascending will. The free spirit the pioneer on the way to 
 the superhuman is one who has so accepted the fact of life 
 that ( he will have it again, as it was and is, for ever and ever, 
 insatiably calling da capo, not merely to himself, but to the 
 whole piece and play, and not only to the play, but at bottom 
 to him to whom this play is just what is needed, and who 
 makes it needful, because he always needs himself again, and 
 makes himself needful. How ? And would not this be 
 circulus vitiosus Deus ' ? The problem of life, it seems, has 
 brought us round by a ' vicious circle/ perhaps to God. 
 Life, on the assumption of the demonic idea, can only be 
 lived a paralyzing pessimism can only be escaped if the
 
 in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 539 
 
 individual , born, as it appears, to struggle with an alien and 
 irremovable sum of antecedents, as a mere incident and single 
 fragment in the stream of time, boldly accepts and asserts his 
 identity, in the root of his being, with the supreme freedom 
 and unchartered spirit of life in all its range and sweep. We 
 are now, it may be said, in the full tide of unverifiable meta- 
 physic ; or we have passed from morality even Nietzsche's 
 morality into religion. The final and fundamental step is 
 a mystic salto mortale an act of faith by which the 
 individual seems to reach what more pensive thinkers call 
 the ' beatific vision ' and ' intellectual love of God/ 
 
 It is principally in the second and third parts that these 
 vaguely adumbrated ideas find a place : and they are not 
 touched in Nietzsche's other works except in passages such as 
 Aph. 341, from 'the Gay Science' (publ. 1882), and in the 
 ' Other side of the good and bad ' (Aph. 57). They are the 
 evidence of the last stages of a Titanic struggle of the struggle 
 which man seems inevitably compelled to make to give himself 
 a secure standing-ground in the battle of life. In Nietzsche's 
 case they seem especially full of terrible pathos. If all life, as 
 he holds, has been hitherto built and taught to rise by illusions ; 
 if man in his science, his art, and his morality has only clutched 
 at semblances helping him to keep and foster life ; if these 
 creations of his mind are only something spread over existence 
 to cheat or stave off an ineradicable pessimism j-^-it is hard to 
 find anything solid elsewhere. Then the circle of inference is 
 indeed vicious ; and man only steps into the vacant place of 
 God, or simulates the post of conductor in the chariot of life 
 and nature, because otherwise he must perish. But, on the 
 other hand, it may be urged, only by such declaration, of what 
 the old thinker otherwise expressed by saying that all our 
 movement, life, and being was in God, can art, science, and 
 morality be made anything more than illusions and artificial 
 perspectives. The creator of art, science, and morality, if they 
 are to be real and solid elements in a real world, and not
 
 540 CRITICAL ESSAYS [in 
 
 mere devices and tricks to escape ruin a mimicry which 
 deceives enemies in the struggle for existence must be a real 
 superhuman or a real Deity. And by an inverted path 
 Nietzsche would have arrived at the old Greek dogma of 
 man's essential divinity. 
 
 But these conclusions were not formulated by Nietzsche ; 
 he, at least, has not, like R. Wagner, recited a palinode ; and 
 we cannot say that any decided trace exists of the recoil, which 
 the acceptance of a theo -centric, instead of an anthropo-centric, 
 position for man seems to involve, had clearly presented itself 
 to his mind. His hour apparently had come ; his sun set 
 when the great noon promised a fruitful evening, and his 
 message hardly goes beyond that awakening of the sleepers, 
 that stimulus to a new step in development, which thorough 
 scepticism, honest and unresting, may give. The fourth part 
 of the book is not properly a continuation of the rest. It is 
 rather a grimly farcical indictment of those specimens of the 
 higher culture and advanced thought, who fancied themselves, 
 and at one time were fancied by Nietzsche himself, to be his 
 comrades and fellow- workers in the emancipation of the human 
 spirit. They are all, on closer inspection, somewhat cranky 
 and ill-favoured instances of the type higher-man suitable 
 for doing odds and ends of rough work in the wilderness, but 
 hardly genial and hale and gracious enough to enter into the 
 land of promise. Towards the close of the book they are all 
 the several types of the radical, emancipated, agnostic, and 
 free-thinker gathered in Zarathustra's cave, where the utmost 
 they arise to is (in allusion to a mediaeval caricature of religion) 
 the worship of the Ass. Whereby, perhaps, is signified that 
 although they have surmounted the gloomier depths of 
 religious dogmatism, and surmised the presence of an ineffable 
 simplicity in things, they have reached but a somewhat jejune 
 and negative conception of the higher truth. But of the 
 interpretation of these scenes, which are evidently not with- 
 out the spice of direct personal reference, it would be out of
 
 in] THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA 541 
 
 place to say more than to hint that they occasionally sound 
 a jarring note and offend against the canons of good taste. 
 
 In the main, this notice has contented itself with giving 
 a brief exposition of the contents of this volume, without 
 going into criticism or discussion. Some of Nietzsche's 
 opinions are of such obvious extravagance, judged by common 
 standards, that examination of them may be thought un- 
 necessary. But of most, a much longer discussion would be 
 required than could find a place here. Perhaps enough has 
 been said on various points to excite a desire to hear more. 
 Some, indeed, may think that these are poisonous opinions 
 and best left in silence and neglect. But to this it may be 
 rejoined that the growth of such opinion is itself a symptom 
 that certain corners in the fields of ethics and religion have 
 been left to an abandonment which favours the upspringing of 
 strange plants, with both weeds and good grain among them. 
 Nietzsche is at least always honest, pure, and thorough. One 
 of his faults is a natural perversity, if one may so style it, 
 which positively refuses easy and flattering solutions of 
 problems, and would always seek its rest on the hardest and 
 barest of rocks, with inveterate suspicion of any suggestion 
 that happiness and truth can lie down together. Another is 
 a fatal facility to follow the track of epigram, and to wander 
 in the pleasant but devious mazes of verbal conceits. It has 
 been impossible in a bare abstract like this to give much of 
 an idea of his style. Its variety and sparkle naturally tend 
 to disappear in the monotony of a summary statement of his 
 positions. 
 
 Of the translation it is difficult to speak favourably ; but it 
 may be admitted that to translate Nietzsche well would be 
 a task of no small skill.
 
 IV 
 
 HITHERTO, with slight exceptions, the studies in Hegelian 
 philosophy published in this country have been chiefly in the 
 line of exposition. Criticism has in the main been incidental, 
 and found in works dealing with HegePs views on special 
 questions whose discussion engaged the chief attention. 
 Mr. McTaggart's book marks a distinct advance. It is 
 a thoughtful and acute attempt, conducted with marked 
 good taste and ability, to determine what Hegel actually 
 tried to effect and how far he succeeded, to clear away 
 misconceptions as to his method and its relation to ordinary 
 experience, to point out problems which Hegel suggests to 
 reflection but cannot be said himself either to see or to give 
 a solution to, to indicate some directions in which his system 
 seems to need supplement or correction, and to examine the 
 value of his philosophy in general, as well as of certain appli- 
 cations he made of it to the several departments of sociological 
 history. Even for those who are unable to accept all its con- 
 clusions it is a stimulating and enlightening book, full of 
 quiet reflectiveness and penetrating remark, and high-toned in 
 its conception of the problem of philosophy. 
 
 The seven chapters conjoined under the title of Studies in 
 the Hegelian Dialectic, if they do not exactly form an organic 
 unity, offer at least a fairly continuous discussion of certain 
 
 1 Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. By John M. E. McTaggart, M. A., Fellow 
 of Trinity College, Cambridge. 8vo. Cambridge, 1896. Pp. xvi, 259. 
 (Mind, no. 20, snd series, 1896.)
 
 STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 543 
 
 difficulties and corollaries which sooner or later present them- 
 selves to the student of Hegelianism. They fall, it may be 
 said, into three or four tolerably distinct groups. In the first 
 of these groups will go the three chapters (i-iii) entitled 
 1 The general nature/ ' Different interpretations/ and ' The 
 validity/ ' of the dialectic/ Too much should not of course 
 be expected under these somewhat comprehensive headings. 
 The three chapters are written with, on the whole, a definite 
 reference to views taken of HegeFs work by critics of the two 
 generations since his death (e. g. by Trendelenburg, Herr v. 
 Hartmann, and Prof. A. Seth), and offer a line of arguments 
 narrowed (even if it be also pointed) by the occasionally 
 accidental and personal qualities of the objections against 
 which they are directed. Such objections to a large extent 
 are but symptomatic of the course of development in the 
 individual soul which makes them, and to deal with them in 
 a satisfactory way would require (as, obviously, one cannot 
 hope to traverse the endless multitude of single censures) 
 either to assure ourselves that they may safely be taken as 
 typical of the dubieties raised by Hegelianism in the average 
 human mind, or to seek to discover the fundamental views as 
 to the problem of philosophy, as to the relations or no-relations 
 of thought and reality, to discover (to put it roughly) the 
 idola of the den and the theatre, which underlie and give 
 growth to the incessant efflorescence of cavils. Instead of 
 this all but impossible method of dealing with objectors, 
 Mr. McTaggart takes the praiseworthy course of testing 
 general demurrers by a patient confrontation of them with 
 the evidence of the original texts, by distinguishing what is 
 valid in their remarks from what is exaggerated for the sake 
 of a thesis. Probably there are other and more penetrating 
 criticisms of the Hegelian principle and method which it would 
 have been desirable for him to tackle. Those of Trendelenburg 
 were written too much in the shade of that reaction which 
 made asceticism in speculation a positive, and perhaps the sole
 
 544 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 intellectual, virtue, and looked back on the speculative epoch 
 as a time of philosophic paganism : Von Hartmann's essay 
 on the ' dialectical method ' is but a hasty spoil of the times 
 when he was scouring the domains erewhile held by the three 
 kings of thought who reigned before him, and trying to carve 
 out for himself a new realm ; and as for Prof. Seth, perhaps 
 one may venture the hope that he will yet employ his eminent 
 conciliatory talent to bridge over the gulf between the deep- 
 rooted instincts of 'personal' life and the 'meditation of 
 death 7 which seems to take their place when life is viewed 
 ' under a certain species of eternity/ instead of intensifying 
 the inevitable conflict between them by an appeal ad 
 populum. 
 
 Chapters iv and v which have been already published, 
 ' nearly in their present form ' in Mind 1 form a second group 
 of different aspect. Chapter iv, entitled ( The development of 
 the Method/ taking the phenomena as presented first in Hegel's 
 Logic, and then in the whole cycle of his philosophy, 
 endeavours to show that in the progress of the Hegelian 
 system the method undergoes a continuous alteration like an 
 instrument which acquires new capabilities by being used; 
 that in its beginning the element of negation and contradic- 
 tion takes a more prominent position than it holds later, so 
 that a period of struggle gives place finally to an easy evolu- 
 tion ; that, in a way, the conclusion thus serves to show the 
 incorrectness or ' subjectivity ' of the process by which it was 
 reached, or, in other words, that ' the dialectic does not give 
 a fully adequate account of its own nature/ This, it must 
 be owned, sounds at first hearing a very awkward doctrine for 
 the ' dialectic/ even though Mr. McTaggart is careful to 
 circumscribe its consequences. He further points out that 
 Hegel might, if he had chosen, have adopted for the relations 
 of Nature and Mind to pure Logic a scheme of movement, 
 analogous to that adopted in the transitions of Being and not- 
 1 N. S. i, 2, 8, io.
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 545 
 
 being, rather than that suggested by the relation of subjective 
 and objective in the ( idea/ To the thesis of this chapter, 
 that Hegel had not himself realized or seen what was implied 
 in the gradual but decisive change from the inadequacy of 
 the earlier categories to the increasing truth of the later, 
 Mr. McTaggart attaches much importance : ' it is only/ he 
 remarks, ' by the aid of some such theory ' (of a subjective 
 element in the dialectic) ' that we can regard the Hegelian 
 system as valid at all/ 
 
 Chapter v, e The relation of the dialectic to time/ will be 
 to many the most difficult passage in the book. The author 
 is always acute and subtle in argumentation, and the discus- 
 sion of the place of time in the system of ultimate reality is 
 not a less fertile field of ambiguity now than it was in the 
 days of Augustine. That the development in the dialectical 
 system, both pure and applied, is not a development in time 
 (i. e. the story of a growth) may be taken as settled : Hegel 
 distinctly negatives the suggestion of so treating it ; and 
 indeed the confusion between a record of events and an exposi- 
 tion of meaning seems too gross to be deemed possible. But, 
 it is argued, this technical treatment of it does not really 
 abolish the difficulty. If philosophy is the comprehension of 
 what is, if it aims at ' discovering the ultimate nature of all 
 reality,' and does so by showing ' reality' ordinarily so-called 
 to be an inadequate stage or partial truth of what in its fullest 
 ( realization ' is an ' idea/ it seems not unnatural to say with 
 Mr. McTaggart that the purpose of philosophy is to ' establish 
 the rationality of the universe/ and that all idealism (and 
 HegeFs system is confessedly and professedly a complete or 
 ' absolute ' idealism) declares the world or universe to be 
 ' fundamentally rational and righteous throughout/ Does 
 not the veriest tyro know that Hegel asserted that whatever 
 is real is rational, and whatever is rational is real ? And if 
 so, is not the actual fact, present anywhere, justified ; and is 
 not the ' must be ' and ' ought to be ' of the ' rationalist ' 
 
 N n
 
 546 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 invested with a title to existence ? Yet ' if all reality is rational 
 and righteous/ how are we to explain the notorious facts of 
 unreason and wrong everywhere protruding- ? We are, it is 
 obvious, confronted by the ' problem of the origin of evil/ 
 According to Mr. McTaggart the solution of the problem lies 
 in accepting both the opposed propositions that the universe 
 is eternally rational, and that imperfection does exist and 
 hoping that in some as yet unknown and unsurmiseable way 
 a reconciliation may be found in a higher synthesis. Perhaps 
 this is to throw too hard a task on the divine might of Higher 
 Synthesis, and it may more profitably be asked whether the 
 universe which is eternally rational and righteous is directly 
 identifiable with the universe in which imperfection prevails. 
 Or it may even more profitably be considered what is to be 
 understood by ' eternally reasonable and righteous/ and how 
 far these epithets are clear and unequivocal. 
 
 The two concluding chapters (vi. and vii.) treat of ' The 
 final result of the dialectic' and 'The application of the 
 dialectic/ The l final result ' or the terminus of the dialectic 
 is made by Hegel to be Philosophy, and one hardly sees how 
 he could do otherwise in an encyclopaedia, where philosophy 
 is alpha and omega. But philosophy, urges Mr. McTaggart, 
 must be considered to be ' merely a state of knowledge/ 
 Deduct the ' merely/ and the equation seems no great error : 
 but what is the force of the ' merely ' ? It is the separation 
 of knowledge, first, from the thing known, from the * this ' 
 which we know, and then we have before us the thing-in-itself 
 named knowledge, but to which neither gods nor men can 
 attach any meaning or allow any reality ; and, second, its 
 separation from volition and from pleasure and pain that 
 pure, disinterested knowledge, which human beings at least 
 neither desire nor care for. Philosophy so understood as 
 a state of knowledge cannot (it is further inferred) be 
 regarded as the 'culminating point of reality/ or as the 
 ' supreme activity of spirit ' ; it cannot even form a part in
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 547 
 
 that supreme activity, for it is for ever vitiated by its anti- 
 thesis to volition, and by its dependence upon an ' immediate ' 
 and a ' given ' which is alien to it. Philosophy is not ' capable 
 of acting as a synthesis between art and religion/ It, like 
 them, is ' endeavouring ' (says the author) ' to find a harmony 
 between the individual spirit and the rest of the universe.' 
 But all three alike fall short of their aim. A new synthesis 
 is required : ' some state of conscious spirit/ 'as direct as art, as 
 certain and universal as philosophy/ in its faith, vision, and 
 assurance that all things (ourselves included) are in harmony. 
 Of the essay on the application of the dialectic the drift is 
 briefly to show that the dialectic itself is worth much more 
 than its applications. ' The really valid part of Hegel's 
 system is his Logic, and not his applications of it/ And if 
 we farther ask what the value is of what is thus pronounced 
 valid, an answer comes that ' the value of philosophy lies more 
 in the domains of religion than in those of science or practice,' 
 and that that value consists in the ' general determination of 
 the nature of true reality' and in the certainty Logic gives 
 that ' all reality is rational and righteous.' The application 
 of the method to portions of the concrete historical field in 
 religion, law, or art is invalidated, according to Mr. McTaggart, 
 by three considerations : first, that we have there no fixed 
 beginning or end as in the Logic, no bare rudiment or ' com- 
 plete realization ' of the c absolute idea ' where we can set our 
 foot down ; second, that all real life and history is more than 
 logic, that the. dialectic process is continually disturbed by 
 external causes ; and third, that a philosopher cannot possibly 
 have the extensive and thorough knowledge of particulars, 
 which the ' rationalization of reality ' particularly if under- 
 stood to be the 'reconciliation of it with our aspirations' 
 must demand as a pre-requisite. In consequence of the 
 last deficiency it is suggested that a more promising field 
 in which to apply logic will be found by taking abstract 
 (moral) qualities and considering them as thesis, antithesis, 
 
 N n a
 
 548 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 or synthesis of other qualities (or mixed modes) of the same 
 abstract stamp. 
 
 It is a commonplace that every age has its own difficulties 
 and prejudices ; and that each individual also has his own. 
 The thoughts and interests of a period, a class, a single person, 
 are set in a particular direction, and reflect or construct the 
 world in a special way. An age which in the gross may be 
 called idealistic is replaced by a period where realistic currents 
 prevail. Faith fastens at different dates on widely diverse 
 foci, or calls them at least by widely disparate names. New 
 catchwords are abroad, new aims pursued, new gods worshipped. 
 We ask the philosopher of other days questions which imply 
 a standpoint he would find it difficult to assume. We want 
 to see him from the outside, all round, as a single object, to 
 be, as it may seem desirable, appropriated or rejected, according 
 to its adaptability or inadaptability to our needs. What to 
 him was at least an effort to reconstruct the world in the light 
 of the Absolute, his readers will for practical purposes treat as 
 only a petty contribution to a task (that of rationalizing the 
 mass of things) which each reader must de novo undertake for 
 himself. But so to take stock of themselves to put them- 
 selves in a nutshell to adjust themselves for consumption by 
 the public jaws is what the great thinkers have not done, 
 and could not do without self -derogation and self-destruction. 
 Hegel, in the introductory chapters of the Encyclopadie, made 
 an attempt : but it was not more successful than Wordsworth's 
 exposition of the theory of the relations of Nature to Art and 
 to Man which governed his poetry. He had not studied his 
 own method from without : it was not for him detachable 
 from his subject-matter, just as, conversely, the subject- 
 matter was not detachable from it. Such a subject-matter, 
 detached and made a body of dogma, would be but dry bones, 
 suitable for a museum : such a method, reduced to an 
 abstract trick of manipulation, would be but an instrument 
 of logomachy.
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 549 
 
 Hegel has spoken more than once of the movement of 
 thought in his argument as that of the matter or fact itself 
 (der Saclie sellst}. He did not mean that the abstractly 
 objective did or could move : that a selfless world could exert 
 the life of change. The fact itself ot which he speaks is the 
 real world, which is a unity of subjective and objective : it 
 is a thought-permeated objectivity, and a subjectivity which 
 has made itself at home in external body, and is no longer 
 a floating will-o'-the-wisp of opinion. When Hegel's Logic 
 begins its dogmatic march and enters on the sicJieren Gang 
 der Wissenschaft, the processes of nature and history and 
 especially that of mental history (and Mind is always and par 
 excellence the Historical process das Historische) have been 
 already traversed. It is a fundamental hypothesis of his 
 system that philosophy as self-contained knowledge is a circle 
 that it returns into itself and that the beginning has its 
 full force only for him who has gone already through what 
 is called its end. The mind which logicizes is a mind which, 
 if it at its one end grows out of the organized concretion of 
 space and materiality known as Jiomo sapiens, attempts at its 
 other to raise itself up to, and seek a higher firmament in, that 
 spiritual structure of the Idea, which is the intangible and 
 inapprehensible God, as he may be said to exist (if such 
 being can be called existence) before the realm of nature 
 and the realm of history (which is freedom and humanity) 
 had emerged. If this be kept in mind and it is implied 
 in Mr. McTaggart's phrase that the process of Hegelian 
 logic is a reconstruction rather than construction it seems 
 to cut away the ground from some loose talk about 'pure 
 thought/ about the passage from Logic to Nature, and about 
 the relation of philosophy to religion and art. A parallel 
 case may set this in a clearer light. Just as Kant is some- 
 times estimated on the basis of an arbitrary restriction of 
 his teaching to the more palpable features of the Criticism 
 of Pure Reason, so Hegel has suffered by the subordination
 
 550 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 of his philosophies of Nature and Mind to the Logic. Nor 
 is it sufficient to say that the Logic presupposes experience : 
 that it is based upon the general nature or ' common character- 
 istics of all experience ' an experience which, contains within 
 it the ' nature of pure thought ' to be elicited or ascertained 
 by dialectic. ( Experience ' is but a vague, much- worn word ; 
 and, like its neighbour ' reality / it is employed perhaps a 
 little too much as a conjuror's cry. The specific experience 
 which philosophy always, according to Hegel, presupposes 
 is an experience which has in it the characters of morality, 
 art, and religion : and the still more specific experience which 
 Hegelianism presupposes is the concentrated ideal life in the 
 Geisterreich or World of Soul, Mind and Spirit, which is the 
 abiding fruit gained from the historic movement of art and 
 religion, and above all of philosophy. The bare shell of 
 experience is and gives nothing : we must know what it 
 is an experience of : for experience is not a reality, a self- 
 subsistent, nor on the other hand is it so much ' pure thought ' 
 combined with so much ' data of sense ' or ' matter of intuition/ 
 Data of sense which are ( indispensable and yet negative/ 
 which are 'not positive causes, but conditions,' shrivel up 
 into something very hard to talk about at least if they 
 are to be talked about with profit. 
 
 Mr. McTaggart has entitled these interesting and sugges- 
 tive chapters essays in the Hegelian dialectic. He has spoken 
 freely of categories. He has used as descriptive of the three 
 steps of the logical movement the names thesis, antithesis, 
 and synthesis. He may plead great example for so doing, 
 and may urge the convenience of distinct terms. But 
 something may be said on the other side. The three last 
 names are the literary property of Fichte, and oust a multitude 
 of very untranslateable Hegelian terms, such as setzen and 
 aufkelen, an und fur sick, which, with their various shades 
 and as some may even think ambiguities, constitute (may 
 one say ?) the charm and the stimulus of Hegelianism. The
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 551 
 
 others, I think, give a mechanical regularity and discrete- 
 ness to the process which, as Mr. McTaggart well points 
 out, is or would be continuous and organic. Synthesis^ in 
 particular, is misleading. No doubt in some modern uses 
 it denotes a finer, ideal composition an inner and intimate 
 union of hearts and bodies ; but it may be doubted whether 
 the word can fairly bear this meaning, and it is unadvisable 
 so to treat it, in the face of Hegel's relegation of it to a lower 
 level than that of a ' speculative ' unity. ' Category/ again, 
 is a name Hegel occasionally introduces : but it is only 
 to facilitate the way .of the historical student (in a similar 
 way to Kant's so calling the Stammbegriffe of intellect), 
 and tends to mix up matters of diverse origin and purport. 
 An elastic term like this has its disadvantages. 
 
 The case is somewhat different with Dialectic. In HegeFs 
 primary use it designates a real, though frequently unnoted, 
 phenomenon in life and knowledge, whereby the thing or 
 concept, which temporarily or ordinarily seemed stable, 
 definite and simple, turns out to be unstable, multiform 
 and contradictory. Common practical life rests upon the 
 assumption of temporarily ultimate points, absolute principles, 
 and the like. It may, if probed, own them to be relative 
 and abstract, but it deals with them as if they were absolute 
 and total. And it is natural and good for it so to act, so 
 long as it is immersed in the necessities of practical life 
 which insensibly and gradually call up the complementary 
 re-action. It is otherwise when it philosophizes and rests 
 in reflection on the single step. Then the context and the 
 complementary is lost sight of; and a series of independent 
 atoms of thought seem to be left as severally real. Theory 
 in its first stage tends to give independent fixity to elements 
 which life keeps flexible and organic. It is the business 
 of a higher philosophy to find a more adequate expression 
 of concrete experience than the ordinary efforts of reflection, 
 divorced from life and action, are able to supply.
 
 552 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 The business of dialectic, therefore, in its most legitimate 
 sense r is to be the bridge which continually throws itself out 
 to span the abyss between the land of so-called common 
 sense, or first impression of ordinary reflection, and the land 
 of reason or philosophy. It serves to demonstrate that the 
 irrefragable data and solid ground of the theorizing practician 
 are not really so solid and impregnable as they seem. In 
 practice no doubt the impermanence and the interdependence 
 of things is again and again flashed upon even common 
 observation. But in the world of theory which is for ever 
 being built up by man, this truth of observation is forgotten, 
 treated as an extrinsic and accidental phenomenon of things, 
 instead of being recognized as what Plato has called a irdOos 
 aOavarov re KOL ayrip<i>v. ' To be a philosopher,' says Nietzsche 
 in his drastic way, ' is to be a mummy/ That at least is the 
 common danger of the hasty theorizer. His ideal world leaves 
 out the pathos and the action of life, and converts it into 
 a statuesque collection or a mechanical conjunction of what 
 are called ideas. This is where Hegel pressed his dialectic 
 into service to show that these ideas, even when hardened 
 into the stability of things, have intrinsic and intestine life 
 and motion. It is directed against the half-and-half measures 
 of popular philosophy of the philosophy which seeks a com- 
 fortable pillow of sound principle to sleep again, and which 
 perhorresces nothing so much as seeing a f bacchantic 
 intoxication' convulsing the old stolidly respectable ideas. 
 The human mind in its unregenerate nature craves for a TTOV 
 or<3, some solidly apprehended reality, some impregnable rock 
 of experience, whence it may possibly seek to move other 
 things, or where it may itself rest in tranquillity. Such 
 a rest Hegel does not give : or if he gives it, he gives it 
 in the ' absolute idea,' where there is room in ' identity ' 
 and ' unity ' for all transitions and correlations and develop- 
 ments through negation and contradiction; or he gives it 
 in that absolute philosophy which includes all that is true
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 553 
 
 in art and religion, and, in including, transcends and 
 transmutes. But the absolute idea and the philosophy are 
 both unlike the rest of sleep : and if they are to be called 
 reality, then reality is that immeasurably far-off divine event 
 to which all things in their finitude move, as from it in their 
 finitude they proceed. 
 
 The function of the dialectic is therefore mainly intro- 
 ductory. It is none the less eternally necessary. Here and 
 there, in every tongue and tone, some reflective spirit cries 
 that he has found the solid bit of fact, reality, experience, 
 out of which he will ( if you allow him time enough, and 
 operations sufficiently multiple of memory, construction, 
 generalization, abstraction, and so on ) build you up the 
 real round world you know. Only let him sit on his patch 
 of the solid earth of present reality and primitive appre- 
 hension even though his datum, or ' given/ be a very little 
 one , and he will be at ease. Hegel's whole energy is 
 engaged in a contest against this belief in a datum. Make 
 it as small as you like call it pure being : and his argument 
 tends to show that you have got nothing, You say you 
 do not want a pathological process of knowledge ; a know- 
 ledge which grows through disturbances and tempests and 
 morbid states: you would like 'pure health/ a normal and 
 natural development. Hegel replies, you are crying for 
 the moon: pregnancy and birth have their morbid features: 
 all life is tainted with sickness : nay, all life is lived only 
 through the victory over perturbing elements; and if the 
 conquest be too thorough, and the struggle collapse through 
 want of antithesis, the life itself is at an end. You would 
 like positive, out-and-out positive, truth. But truth only 
 lives by the side of error : it has its value and validity 
 only in the error which it serves to refute, i. e. to explain : 
 remove the error it lives upon, and the truth hangs flaccid 
 and sere. In ordinary everyday experience this dialectic, 
 as we have seen, goes on quietly enough. But it assumes
 
 554 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 more terrible proportions on the field of history, when ideas 
 have, by causes not here to be discussed, grown into great 
 concrete powers, and summed up in a single term the result 
 of long processes. Then the phenomena are called disease. 
 But there is no absolutely normal health except in a visionary 
 standard which only youthful impatience can expect to see 
 realized in his own sturdy growth. 
 
 But Hegel has not used the term ' dialectic ' as the 
 supremely descriptive name of his method, or made it, as 
 Mr. McTaggart does, serve to cover the whole process of 
 introducing order and connexion into the mass of terms 
 and forms of thought which are built into the fabric of 
 reality. Dialectic proper perhaps belongs most to the field 
 of what Hegel at one time called Objective Logic. Objective 
 Logic deals with a number of ' categories ' or ' kinds of 
 nameable things ' which are taken as, in a way, part of the 
 f external ' universe of fact, bits of reality. There are other 
 categories more commonly taken as ' forms of thought' 
 which fall within the scope of what Hegel once called 
 Subjective Logic. These, such as final cause, and the formulae 
 of judgement and conception, are treated as ideal vestments 
 on reality : ways the human mind has of putting together 
 or disjoining facts which are in the last resort independent 
 of this dressing. Hegel's purpose may be said to be to 
 break down the absoluteness and ultimateness of this dis- 
 tinction. It was not a new step, but only a systematic 
 prosecution of a view which had come out decidedly in 
 Kant, been deepened and extended by Fichte and Schelling, 
 but had never been absent when philosophy went vigorously 
 to work in its effort to unify the theory of life. That 
 view had been that the so-called objective is essentially 
 a subjective-objective : that not merely in the modal or 
 properly logical terms, but also in such as put forward 
 a claim to metaphysical, and even materialistic value, there 
 is the pulse and life of subjectivity. With being, you
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 555 
 
 suppose yourself to be on the ground of reality : you fancy 
 that on given qualities you can build as on primitive rock. 
 Causes are valid, you say, even if final causes are foibles : 
 there is power in number, even if organism be an ill- 
 compounded mode of synthesis. But the Hegelian logic 
 claims to show that if you are safe on being, it is only 
 because it is one plank on the deck of the ship of thought, 
 and that the single solid plank involves and postulates the 
 concrete complexity of the whole structure. If you are 
 in earnest with being, or trust the data of intuition 
 (apprehension), you are committed to the absolute idea, 
 i. e. to the concrete system of correlativity, transition, and 
 development, which is the god of the abstract logical world : 
 and in the long run you are committed to something larger 
 still, to an organic natural realm, and to the omnipresence 
 of intelligent and volitional life. It was this conviction 
 which in partial and therefore paradoxical shapes led to 
 the Berkeleian theory of vision, to the analysis of the more 
 abstruse ideas by Locke into simpler co-adjusted elements, 
 and to Hume's much maligned interpretation of causality 
 in things as connexion between thoughts. It is the same 
 principle which in Descartes appears in the personal form, 
 cogito, ergo sum, and in his finding the safeguard of each 
 single perception in their coherence with that supreme 
 harmony of all true or ' perfect ' reality which he called 
 God. "What merit Hegel has is perhaps only the persistent 
 exploitation of this idea throughout the whole range of terms 
 in which blank and bare reality emerges into name, inter- 
 relation, and value. The real world in its essential fabric 
 is a work of ideas : while the admittedly ideal terms are only 
 the development to a further stage of what has come to be 
 commonly taken as real and constitutive of reality. 
 
 But dialectic is after all only the negative side of his 
 philosophy: and Hegel does not rest content with the 
 demonstration of the power of negation, even in the highest.
 
 556 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 His own name for bis method would be Speculative : and 
 as Speculation he designates the positive and unificatory 
 operation of intelligence which holds contradictions in unity 
 and identity. But the ' unity ' and ' identity ' of contra- 
 dictions does not, however crassness or perversity may assert, 
 mean that it is all the same whether we say yes or no. It 
 means rather that the meanest of God's creatures boasts at 
 least two soul-sides, one to show to the world and the enemy, 
 another to show to the self and the friend. It means that 
 in the view of science or fuller knowledge, the simplicity 
 which is the assumption of practical life is an illusion. The 
 plain man and the practical judge expect a plain answer, yes 
 or no, to a plain question. But the investigator and the 
 criminologist have learned that plain questions and plain 
 answers are only possible for those of hurried and blunted 
 senses ; guilty and not-guilty are terms of a limited province 
 and are conditioned in their application by a social convention. 
 The plain answers are neither quite unreal nor quite untrue, 
 be it added : but they are not expressive of the whole truth 
 or the whole reality. The problem which is strictly called 
 speculative is to find a more adequate expression, to formulate 
 the question in terms which will allow a more equitable 
 answer. But it must not be supposed that the speculative 
 simply undoes the effect of the dialectical act : or if we say 
 that it reconciles, reconciliation does not consist in glossing 
 over or ignoring the opposition. We may declare that the 
 disruption is overcome, or cancelled, or suppressed, or tran- 
 scended: but we shall misinterpret these terms if we think 
 that thereby that which once was has been made as if it 
 were not. The 'new life which rises upon the ruins of 
 the old' is a phrase which, as is the way of metaphors, 
 makes us forget that the new life owes its structural grace 
 and wealth to the fragments and jarring elements which 
 it reconstructed. Mr. McTaggart remarks that 'if we find 
 contradictions in our notion of a thing, we must give up
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 557 
 
 its reality/ This seems an unnecessarily hard saying. No 
 doubt contradiction is a symptom of incompleteness and 
 therefore of comparative unreality of defective 'truth/ It 
 is a sign that you are not on the absolutely solid ground. 
 But the ground may be fairly real ground for all that. 
 A pure unreality would hardly be worth the trouble of 
 contradiction. It is only the ' concrete notion/ says the 
 author, which is ' found in the world of reality/ and he 
 tells us that according to Hegel * thought can only exist 
 in its complete and concrete form' as absolute idea. Surely 
 there is exaggeration and misconception present or suggested 
 here. The world of reality in which the concrete idea is 
 found existent is not the world known as real to ordinary 
 mortals : for them its light is not visible on sea or land : 
 it is a world which for him who has eyes only for the actual 
 (das Wirklicke] is a veiled world. The full and concrete 
 notion the 'absolute idea' surely only exists (if the word 
 is even there appropriate) in the totality of nature and of 
 mind, in the universe natural and spiritual. But the absolute 
 truth (' truth' and not ' reality' is the Hegelian term of 
 supreme sweep) does not annihilate partial truths, and seat 
 itself in their place. Apart from their partial reality or 
 truth, it itself were the emptiest reality and the poorest 
 truth, just because the most pretentious. The Absolute 
 must not merely have room for, but must contain all the 
 Relatives : the concrete must contain all the abstracts : the 
 harmonious unity, all the contradictories. 
 
 Mr. McTaggart remarks that in the Logic we have fixed 
 points at the two termini : Being at the commencement and 
 Absolute idea at the close. He speaks, it often seems, as 
 if there were two points as realistically denned and located 
 as the two ends of a road. But this may be misleading if 
 we forget that the road leads across the infinite and eternal. 
 The start with being is equivalent, he thinks, to the postulate 
 that ' experience really exists,' or that ' something is ' : the
 
 558 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 dialectic 'assumes the validity of the idea of being.' What 
 precisely is meant by ' validity/ I hardly feel sure : but in 
 any case I do not think the philosophy which characteristically 
 asserts that ' Being and Nothing is the same thing ' can have 
 a very high estimate of the idea of being and its validity. 
 It would be truer to say that the dialectic demonstrates the 
 invalidity of the idea of being ( that impregnable stronghold 
 of those who fear the eddying tides of thought) until it has 
 been supplemented by factors which are decidedly idealistic, 
 subjective, thought-born. And ' Is,' which is no more than 
 a bare ' Is/ being in its blank purity, far from serving as 
 a solid standpoint, is a tight-rope from which you are 
 incessantly rolling off into nought. It is the beginning 
 of the dialectic, not because it is warranted by the common 
 nature of experience (the common nature of experience, 
 if it can warrant anything, can warrant a great deal more 
 than the bare pin-point of being), but because as mere or 
 pure being it is the pole of truth in closest contact with 
 nonentity, and at an inappreciable distance from it. 
 
 But if jmr-e Being is the minimum of reality, what shall 
 be said of the Absolute Idea? One may have the highest 
 respect for the serried array of the dialectic, and feel unable 
 to detect a serious flaw in the links of its chain ; one may be 
 amazed at the incompetence which allows some of its critics 
 first to mistranslate and then to misconceive its argument ; 
 and yet one may not be clear that here is the absolutely 
 fire-proof structure of thought, embracing all details, and 
 complete for all time to come. Even a disciple may regard 
 his master as human, and be content if he finds in him 
 a light to lighten the past and to convert its chaotic voices 
 into harmony or at least coherent speech, though he fails 
 to prophesy unambiguously of the after-times. As Hegel 
 approaches the terminus the absolute idea (in Logic) and 
 philosophy (in Mind) he grows terse and enigmatic. And 
 why ? One may say with Mr. McTaggart that the ' Idea '
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 559 
 
 is 'the idea of the human mind, acting theoretically or 
 (and ?) practically.' But this is but a piece of verbal informa- 
 tion, till we know the human mind know it, as Plato says, 
 not in its crushed and degraded or ' degenerate ' form on 
 these shores of time, but in its pristine or perfect (eternal) 
 nature as revealed in philosophy. And when that knowledge 
 comes, shall we be anxious to retain the epithet ( human ' as 
 distinct from ' superhuman ' and ' divine ' ? The ' absolute 
 idea' can have little said of it, because it represents 
 a postulated maximum just as the other terminus (being) 
 represented a minimum of truth. Once we get beyond 
 ' Object ' in the Logical order and enter on ' Idea ' we 
 cross the Rubicon which separates the philosophic movement, 
 as it was directed by Kant and his successors, from all the 
 past. Up to that point Hegel had been reproducing what 
 may, not irreverently, be called ancient history. In the 
 rest of the Logic he is engaged on the modern field 
 a much more complex and concrete field. The relation 
 between life and intelligence, between intellect and will, 
 the problems of Schelling and Schopenhauer, the questions 
 of evolution theory, emerge and come to the front. But 
 even if ( organism ' and ' vitality ' were clear and assured . 
 conceptions (and they are far from being so, they are rather 
 battle-grounds of the advanced sciences), it is difficult to 
 surmise how we are to go beyond them, and where we shall 
 find ourselves if we do. We may say with Mr. McTaggart 
 that 'the universe is a super-organic unity/ But just as 
 ' organic ' gets most of its meaning by its antithesis to 
 { mechanical/ so super-organic is only a plus ultra sort 
 of word, tending to indicate that 'organism 7 is not the 
 mountain summit, but only a subordinate height of truth. 
 ' Absolute idea ' therefore can only be regarded as a name 
 for the problem of philosophy, not as a solution : it 
 emphasizes the need of a synthesis. The very title itself 
 (with its epithet absolute) suggests this : and Hegel's (like
 
 560 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 Kant's) use of 'knowledge' as a genus embracing the 
 two species of theoretical and practical reason hints the 
 same approach to * undiscovered territory/ When the idea 
 is absolute, it ceases to be only idea. 
 
 I cannot agree with Mr. McTaggart therefore when he 
 speaks of the highest category as 'without contradictions/ 
 A nursery rhyme tells of the tumultuous and interesting 
 scenes of life and death that were transacted in relation 
 to the House that Jack built. This House so built is in 
 its way a supreme category : but I think it would be a rather 
 lame affair if all the contradiction and negation of which 
 it was the centre were removed. The pith of the story 
 would be gone. So when we are reminded that in the 
 advance of thought and knowledge ' the presence of negation 
 is a mere accident, though an inseparable one, and that its 
 importance continuously decreases/ one may in a way admit 
 that the later chapters have less of it, and yet seek the causes 
 in other quarters. These causes are partly that this part 
 of the Logic had been treated in the 'Phenomenology of 
 Mind ' and comes up again in the discussion of organic and 
 mental phenomena : partly that the battles on this field were 
 largely yet to fight, and that not even a Hegel can anticipate 
 the debates of the future in their detail. 
 
 It is Mr. McTaggart's conviction that ' reality is not in its 
 truest nature a process, but a stable and timeless state/ I 
 pass over the antithesis of a process and a timeless state, and 
 its implications : they are perhaps scarcely in accordance with 
 the statements of chapter v. I must note that Hegel speaks 
 not of reality which to him is a very subordinate category 
 but of the Absolute, when he describes it (if and when he does 
 describe it) as a process. But I think it is impossible to 
 accept the description given by Mr. McTaggart as true to 
 Hegelianism. The absolute the Hegelian God (if we for 
 a moment adopt language of accommodation which will not 
 improbably mislead) is at least Life, at least Ego : and if
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 561 
 
 these are not process, self -surrendering, self-renewing process, 
 it is difficult to see where we are to look for examples of 
 process. To speak of Him or It as the ' supreme being ' or 
 ' ultimate reality/ as the ' reality which underlies all finite 
 things' is to use expressions, capable perhaps of profitable 
 interpretation, but which certainly lead, by their obvious 
 suggestions, towards the cave of Spinozan substance, rather 
 than to Hegelian Subjectivity which is Personality, or 
 rather Tri-personality. And there is iii Mr. McTaggart's 
 language if not in his thought, a recurrent proclivity in this 
 direction. It shows itself in the pre-supposition of an irre- 
 ducible minimum of being as datum, an undeduced and given 
 This ; a reality which lies behind and which ' the inadequacy 
 of our finite thought ' never permits us to express completely ; 
 a reality ' supplied by sense ' sense without which ( we can 
 perceive nothing of the nature of thought/ It shows itself in 
 the dictum that it is the office of thought to mediate, and only 
 to mediate : to ' relate ' alien elements, given and apprehended 
 somethings. When it is added that ' thought actually exists, 
 or it could not mediate/ we are face to face with the ojd 
 mythology of 'efficient' causes, powers which mediate like 
 persons, and are entangled in the inextricable confusion 
 between thought, the thinker, and his thoughts. As against 
 such conceptions there is here only space to say that a thought, 
 which does not do more than mediate, must presuppose and 
 postulate another (if it be another) thought which calls for 
 mediation and submits to it : a thought which, to use 
 language we have already demurred to, is synthesis, anti- 
 thesis, and thesis which 
 
 ' Creates, creator and receiver both.' 
 
 Thought mediates : but to do so, it has to be more than 
 a mediator, and must have in it the natures of the two 
 extremes which it reconciles, otherwise its would-be mediation 
 is waste and nullity, or accident. The only ground for holding 
 
 O
 
 562 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 otherwise would seem to lie in a confusion of terms. Say 
 that an unrelated being is as good as nothing-, and you are 
 immediately supposed to have been refuted, if it is pointed out 
 that by your own admissions the being must be before it is 
 related. The refuter does not take ' unrelated' in all its 
 bitter truth, its absoluteness and utterness : he still leaves it in 
 its comparative sense, indicating the absence of those relations 
 without which the being may still exist and perform its 
 function. 
 
 There is however another feature in Mr. McTaggart's con- 
 ception of the dialectic process which has to be noted in this 
 connexion. We have seen already how he supposes negation 
 to be banished from the bosom of ultimate reality and contra- 
 diction to be removed from supreme truth. He prefers, it is 
 evident, the faith and the historical event of religion to the 
 triplicity of syllogism into which philosophy dissolves the tale. 
 If it be the declaration of religion, as he says, that ' all things 
 are dependent on a reality' in which our ideals find their 
 embodiment, if religion, as Hegel suggests, keeps in the view 
 of suffering humanity the prospect of a glittering rest which 
 lights up the scene of present toil, philosophy certainly 
 endeavours to ' secularize,' i. e. to reduce to an immanent law 
 of life what revelation presents as an event and a drama. But 
 does philosophy supervene as a new stage, utterly differing 
 from what has gone before ? Is it, as we have heard it called, 
 a state of knowledge only ? To say so of HegeFs conception 
 of philosophy is one need not put it more, and one dare not 
 put it less, bluntly seriously to misconceive Hegelianism. 
 When Hegel says * that ' religion is the general title of the 
 supreme sphere ' of intelligence, he only expresses his prevail- 
 ing tendency to accentuate that religious tone and aspect of the 
 higher mind which he accused even Kant, and still more his 
 predecessors, of unduly neglecting in their systems. Philo- 
 
 1 Ency. 554.
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 563 
 
 sophy no doubt is knowledge ; but even distinguished critics 
 have failed to show that it is only knowledge. It is the 
 knowledge of religion: the credo as intelligo. Philosophy 
 (to Hegel) is that stage of truth the highest, if evanes- 
 cent, vision of reality which is called religion turned, or 
 attempted to be turned, into the grip of a pervading prin- 
 ciple of immanent life and conscious action, not set in 
 antagonism and relief to the present actuality, but read 
 more and more into it, and in its turn steadied and inter- 
 preted by it. 
 
 I do not think the dialectic intended to teach us that 
 ' matter must be reduced to spirit,' unless that means that in 
 vulgar matter (so to call it) there are promises and potencies 
 which call for revelation or manifestation. It is not the case, 
 I submit, that, in Hegel's view, ' explanation by a higher 
 category relieves us from the necessity of finding a consistent 
 explanation by a lower one/ Hegel had read his Anaxagoras 
 and his Leibniz to better advantage than that, and knew that 
 the supreme Now never works without the instrumentality of 
 machinery, and that final causes never supersede, but only 
 complete, the laws of mechanical causation. The higher 
 categories are not thus ungrateful. If theirs is the glorious 
 prerogative of crowning the edifice, it is a prerogative which 
 only the patient and laborious co-operation of many minor 
 craftsmen made possible. No doubt we all feel sympathy 
 with the critic who complains that the three volumes of 
 HegePs Logic, with their recurrent demonstration of the 
 inadequacy of concepts whose practical reality and use we 
 all accept, are a weary pull up barren steeps. But it is 
 according to Hegel only on the partial truth of these 
 materials of which dialectic proves the partial inefficiency that 
 the higher and distant stages of the pyramid of knowledge 
 can be reached. And each later category has to keep trans- 
 muted and adjusted the earlier, not leaving them behind. 
 
 002
 
 564 CRITICAL ESSAYS [iv 
 
 It is therefore questionable policy to declare that ' philosophy 
 can tell us a priori that nature and spirit do exist.' When it 
 so speaks, philosophy perhaps reveals no more profound secret 
 than M. Jourdain heard when he learnt he had been talking 1 
 prose all his life. Phrases, like ' a priori' and 'deduction/ 
 are out of place in this phase of method, and serve only as 
 stumbling-blocks. If philosophy can predict nature and 
 spirit, it is because nature and spirit have produced or grown 
 into philosophy. 
 
 Lastly, a word on some phrases by which the purpose of 
 philosophy is here described. It 'aims at discovering the 
 ultimate nature of all reality': and its final conclusion, we 
 are informed, is, at least for Hegel, that e all reality consists of 
 spirits which are individuals' or of self-conscious beings exist- 
 ing only in their connexion with one another a connexion 
 which is closer than an organism. Such is the ontology ; and 
 it has beside it a theology which declares God to be ' the reality 
 which underlies all finite beings.' It would have been desirable 
 perhaps to give more definite justification from Hegel for the 
 assertion that he had arrived at the former conclusion, and to 
 supply some indication as to the relation between the reality 
 which underlies appearance and finitude, and the reality which 
 consists of individual self-conscious beings. But when it is 
 stated that, according to Hegel, philosophy is the 'culminating 
 point of reality/ we fall into an almost grotesque bundle 
 of equations, to correlate which will require an interpreta- 
 tion of God, philosophy, and reality involving a portentous 
 effort of reconstructive thought. ' Reality ' at least will not 
 "help us much in these latitudes, when it has become as empty 
 a term as thing or being. But I do not linger long on these 
 ontological dogmas : for as Kant long ago remarked in 
 his 'Dreams'* it is not easy to say how much you 
 commit yourself to when you cross the boundary into Spirit- 
 land.
 
 iv] STUDIES IN THE HEGELIAN DIALECTIC 565 
 
 Philosophy, however, has its less metaphysical side. It 
 ( establishes the rationality of the universe ' : and Hegel 
 himself is said to show that ' the universe is fully rational/ 
 ' altogether rational and righteous/ A German poet, Novalis. 
 I think, is reported to have said that though philosophy can 
 bake us no bread, she can give us God, freedom, and immortality. 
 Not on one side only, but on both, this aphorism smacks 
 of the enthusiasm and pseudo-idealism of the Romantic 
 epoch. Directly philosophy can do the second as little as the 
 first : in her place in the organism of intellect she can help 
 much both towards better bread, and a worthier life in the 
 light of these three ideas. But let us not be in a hurry to 
 suppose that a discovery of the harmony of the universe, its 
 rationality and righteousness, will reconcile it with our 
 aspirations or with our ethical needs, at least unless we 
 first make our aspirations and our ethical needs both 
 rational and righteous. Our aspirations are no doubt legiti- 
 mate in their way, and our ethical needs are possibly even 
 ' daughters of the voice of God ' and so are in another way 
 the harmonies of art and the consolations of religion. But the 
 righteousness of the true and rational world of the kingdom 
 which is, in a practical sense, to come, if it be also the kingdom 
 which is within us exceeds the righteousness of the Scribes 
 and Pharisees. And we are all perhaps in our lower moments 
 to be found in the camp of the Scribes and Pharisees. We are 
 proud of our justice and our benevolence. But Fiat justitift, mat 
 caelnm is but a relatively-worthy flaunt cast at weak-kneed 
 pity. The righteousness and rationality of the intelligible 
 world may not entirely square with our notions borrowed 
 from our earthly jurisprudence and our practical aims. If 
 philosophy therefore seeks to rationalize the world, it does so 
 in continuation of those efforts which in all ages have been 
 made in the direction of realizing the unity and coherence of 
 all being, in carrying ever further the process of discovering
 
 566 CRITICAL ESSAYS 
 
 and constituting the truth of things, the harmony of mind 
 and nature, the synthesis of all the aspects and appear- 
 ances of experience. Of ultimate and absolute reality 
 it will say positively and dogmatically but little, though 
 it may hint much of what we have to do in temporal 
 and relative service to further the coming of the kingdom of 
 truth.
 
 OXFORD 
 PRINTED AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 
 
 BY HORACE HART, M.A. 
 PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY
 
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