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LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 Class 
 
PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
PRACTICAL ETHICS 
 
 A COLLECTION OF 
 
 ADDRESSES AND ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 HENRY SIDGWICK 
 
 Knightbridge Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge 
 
 author of 
 "thh methods of ethics"; "the elements of politics" 
 
 ETC. etc. 
 
 '- UNIV 
 
 LONDON 
 SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO., Lim. 
 
 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN CO. 
 1898 
 
THE ETHICAL LIBRARY. 
 
 Edited by Professor J. H. Muirhead, M.A. (Oxen.) 
 
 The Civilization of Christendom, and other Studies. 
 
 By Bernard Bosanquet, M.A. (Oxon.), LL.D. (Glas.) 4j. 6./. 
 
 Short Studies in Character. 
 
 By Sophie Bryant, D.Sc. (Lond.) 4s. ^d. 
 
 Social Rights and Duties. 
 
 By Leslie Stephen. 2 vols. 9j. 
 
 The Teaching of Morality in the Family and the School. 
 
 By Sophie Bryant, D.Sc. (Lond.) Zs. 
 
 Practical Ethics. 
 
 By Professor H. Sidgwick. 4j. 6^. 
 
 Other Volumes to follow. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE greater part of the present volume consists 
 of addresses delivered before one or other of 
 the Ethical Societies that were founded some ten 
 years ago in London and Cambridge. These societies 
 were partly — though not entirely — modelled on the 
 " Societies for Ethical Culture " which had been 
 started in America a few years before : they aimed 
 at meeting a need which was believed to be widely 
 felt for the intelligent study of moral questions with a 
 view to elevate and purify social life. At the first 
 meeting of the Cambridge Ethical Society, in May, 
 1888, I endeavoured, in an address which I have 
 placed first in this volume, to set forth my con- 
 ception of the work that the Society might profitably 
 undertake. Four years later, at a meeting of the 
 London Ethical Society, of which I was at the time 
 President, I attempted a somewhat fuller analysis 
 of the aims and methods of such an association. 
 This stands second in the volume. In three other 
 addresses, delivered before one or other of these 
 societies, I endeavoured to apply my general con- 
 ception to particular topics of interest and difficulty 
 
vi PREFACE 
 
 —the "Morality of Strife," the "Ethics of Con- 
 formity," and " Luxury." These stand respectively 
 fourth, fifth, and seventh in the volume. These 
 addresses, except the first, have already appeared in 
 the International Journal of Ethics, 
 
 Along with these addresses I have included four 
 papers, having, either in whole or in part, similarly 
 practical aims. Two of these, on " Public Morality " 
 and " Clerical Veracity," and part of a third, on 
 the " Pursuit of Culture," are published here for 
 the first time. I have placed each of the three either 
 before or after the address that appeared most 
 cognate in subject. The connection is closest in the 
 case of the paper on " Clerical Veracity " ; which is, 
 in fact, a fuller exposition — called forth by contro- 
 versy — of my views on a portion of the subject 
 of the address that precedes it. The last paper in 
 the volume — on " Unreasonable Action " — I have not 
 included without some hesitation, as it was written 
 primarily from a psychological rather than a practical 
 point of view : but on the whole it appeared to 
 me to have sufficient ethical interest to justify its 
 inclusion. 
 
 HENRY SIDGWICK. 
 
 Newnham College, Cambridge, 
 November^ 1897. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I, The Scope and Limits of the Work of an 
 
 Ethical Society. 
 
 II. The Aims and jMethods of an Ethical Society 
 
 «^III. Public Morality 
 
 - IV. The Morality of Strife 
 
 - V. The Ethics of Religious Conformity 
 
 ^VI. Clerical Veracity . 
 
 . VII. Luxury . . . • 
 
 /VIII. The Pursuit of Culture 
 
 IX. Unreasonable Action 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I 
 
 23 
 52 
 
 83 
 
 142 
 178 
 
^ UM' 
 
 I. 
 
 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF THE WORK 
 OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY* 
 
 I HAVE to ask you to regard this as a preliminary 
 meeting of the newly-formed Ethical Society, 
 which will commence its ordinary meetings in the 
 Michaelmas Term. This preliminary meeting is held 
 with the view of arriving by frank discussion at a 
 more full and clear notion of the aims and methods 
 of such a society than could conveniently be given 
 in the printed definition of its objects that has been 
 circulated. 
 
 In order to set an example of frankness, I will 
 begin by saying that I am not myself at all sanguine 
 as to the permanent success of such a society in 
 realizing what I understand to be the design of its 
 founders, i.e., to promote through discussion the 
 interests of practical morality. I think that failure 
 
 * An address delivered at the preliminary meeting of the Cambridge 
 Ethical Society, Friday, May i8th, 1888. 
 
 B 
 
THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 in such an undertaking is more probable than 
 success : but, lest this prognostication should be too 
 depressing, I hasten to add that while permanent 
 success in realizing what we aim at would be a result 
 as valuable as it would be remarkable, failure would 
 be a very small evil ; indeed, it would not necessarily 
 be an evil at all. Even supposing that we become 
 convinced in the course of two or three years that we 
 are not going to attain the end that we have in view 
 by the method which we now propose to use, we 
 might still feel — I have good hope that we shall 
 feel — that our discussions, so far as they will have 
 gone, will have been interesting and, in their way, 
 profitable ; though recognizing that the time has 
 come for the Ethical Society to cease, we may 
 still feel glad that it has existed, and that we have 
 belonged to it. 
 
 This cheerfully pessimistic view — ^^if I may so 
 describe it — is partly founded on an experience 
 which I will briefly narrate. 
 
 Many years ago I became a member of a Meta- 
 physical Society in London ; that was its name, 
 although it dealt with ethical questions no less than 
 those called metaphysical in a narrow sense. It 
 included many recognized representatives of different 
 schools of thought, who met animated, I am sure, by 
 a sincere desire to pursue truth by the method of 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 3 
 
 discussion; and sought by frank explanation of their 
 diverse positions and frank statement of mutual 
 objections, to come, if possible, to some residuum 
 of agreement on the great questions that concern 
 man as a rational being — the meaning of human 
 life, the relation of the individual to the universe, 
 of the finite to the infinite, the ultimate ground of 
 duty and essence of virtue. Well, for a little while 
 the Society seemed to flourish amazingly ; it was 
 joined by men eminent in various departments of 
 practical life — statesmen, lawyers, journalists, bishops 
 and archbishops of the Anglican and of the Roman 
 persuasion : and the discussions went on, monthly 
 or thereabouts, among the members of this hetero- 
 geneous group, without any friction or awkwardness, 
 in the most frank and amicable way. The social 
 result was all that could be desired ; but in a few 
 years' time it became, I think, clear to all of us that 
 the intellectual end which the Society had proposed 
 '^ to itself was not likely to be attained ; that, speaking 
 broadly, we all remained exactly where we were, 
 
 " Affirming each his own philosophy," 
 
 and no one being in the least convinced by any one 
 else's arguments. And some of us felt that if the 
 discussions went on, the reiterated statement of 
 divergent opinions, the reiterated ineffective appeals 
 
THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 to a common reason which we all assumed to exist, 
 but which nowhere seemed to emerge into actuality, 
 might become wearisome and wasteful of time. Thus 
 the Metaphysical Society came to an end ; but we 
 were glad — at least, I certainly was glad — that we 
 had belonged to it. We had not been convinced by 
 each other, but we had learnt to understand each 
 other better, and to sympathize, in a certain sense, 
 with opposing lines of thought, even though we were 
 unable to follow them with assent. 
 
 I have not, however, brought in this comparison 
 merely to show why I am not afraid of failure ; I 
 have brought it in partly to introduce one counsel 
 that I shall give to the Ethical Society with the view 
 of escaping failure, viz., that it should be as much 
 as possible unlike in its aims to the Metaphysical 
 Society to which I have referred. I think we should 
 give up altogether the idea of getting to the bottom 
 of things, arriving at agreement on the first prin- 
 ciples of duty or the Summum Bonum. If our 
 discussions persist in taking that line, I can hardly 
 doubt that we shall imitate the example of failure 
 that I have just set before you; we shall not convince 
 each other, and after a little while each of us, like 
 >^ the Irish juryman, will get tired of arguing with so 
 many other obstinately unreasonable persons. In 
 the Metaphysical Society we could not avoid this ; a 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 5 
 
 metaphysician who does not try to get to the bottom 
 X of things is, as Kant would say, an " Unding " : he 
 has no raison d'etre. But with our Ethical Society 
 the case is different ; the aim of such an Ethical 
 Society, in the Aristotelian phrase, is not knowledge 
 but action: and with this practical object it is not 
 equally necessary that we should get to the bottom 
 of things. It would be presumptuous to suppose 
 that in such a Society as this, including, as we hope, 
 many members whose intellectual habits as well as 
 their aims are practical rather than speculative, we 
 can settle the old controversies of the schools on 
 ethical first principles ; but it may be possible by 
 steering clear of these controversies to reach some 
 results of value for practical guidance and life. But 
 how exactly are we to do this ? 
 
 The question may be put in a more general form, 
 in which it has a wider and more permanent interest 
 than we can presume to claim for the special purpose 
 for which we are met here to-night. What, we may 
 ask, are the proper lines and limits of ethical dis- 
 cussion, having a distinctly practical aim, and carried 
 on among a miscellaneous group of educated persons, 
 who do not belong exclusively to any one religious 
 sect or philosophical school, and possibly may not 
 have gone through any systematic stud}' of philo- 
 sophy t The answer that I am about to give to this 
 
THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 question must not be taken as in any way official, 
 nor do I intend it to be in any way cut and dried. I 
 should like to be free to adopt a materially different 
 view as the result of further experience and inter- 
 change of opinions. But at present the matter 
 presents itself to me in this light. Moralists of all 
 schools have acknowledged — and usually empha- 
 sized, each from his own point of view — that broad 
 agreement in the details of morality which we 
 actually find both among thoughtful persons who 
 profoundly disagree on first principles, and among 
 \ plain men who do not seriously trouble themselves 
 about first principles. Well, my view is that we 
 ought to start with this broad agreement as to the 
 dictates of duty, and keeping close to it, without 
 trying to penetrate to the ultimate grounds, the first 
 principles on which duty may be constructed as a 
 rational system, to make this general agreement 
 somewhat more explicit and clear than it is in ordinary 
 thought. I want to advance one or two degrees in 
 the direction of systematizing morality without 
 hoping or attempting to go the whole way ; and 
 in the clearer apprehension of our common 
 morality thus gained to eliminate or reduce the 
 elements of confusion, of practical doubt and dis- 
 agreement, which, at the present day at least, are 
 liable to perplex even the plainest of plain men. 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 I sometimes wonder whether the great Bishop 
 Butler, who lays so much emphasis on the clear- 
 ness and certainty of the dictates of a plain 
 man's conscience, — I wonder whether this generally 
 cautious thinker would use quite the same language 
 if he lived now. It certainly seems to me that 
 the practical perplexities of the plain man have 
 materially increased in the century and a half that 
 have elapsed since the famous sermons to which I 
 refer were preached. Take, e.g.^ the case of com- 
 passion. The plain man of Butler's time knew 
 that when he heard the cry of distress he ought to 
 put his hand in his pocket and relieve it ; but now 
 he has learnt from newspapers and magazines that 
 indiscriminate almsgiving aggravates in the long run 
 the evils that it attempts to cure; and, therefore 
 now, when he hears the cry of woe, it is apt to 
 ^ stir in his mind a disagreeable doubt and conflict, 
 instead of the old simple impulse. Well, there is 
 a solution to this perplexity, on which thinkers of 
 the most different schools and sects would probably 
 agree : that true charity demands of us money, but 
 also something more than money : personal service, 
 sacrifice of time and thought, and — after all — a 
 patient endurance of a partially unsatisfactory result, 
 \ acquiescence in minimizing evils that we cannot 
 cure. 
 
THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 But this answer, though it does not raise any of 
 the fundamental questions disputed in the schools, 
 is yet not altogether trite and obvious ; to give it 
 in a fully satisfactory form needs careful thinking 
 over, careful development and explanation. Thus 
 this case may serve to illustrate my view of the 
 general function of ethical debate, carried on by such 
 a society as ours : to bring into a more clear and 
 consistent form the broad and general agreement 
 as to the particulars of morality which we find 
 among moral persons, making explicit the general 
 conceptions of the good and evil in human life, of 
 the normal relation of a man to his fellows, which 
 this agreement implies. We should do this not 
 vaguely, but aiming cautiously at as much precision 
 as the subject admits, not avoiding difficulties, but 
 facing them, so as to get beyond the platitudes of 
 copybook morality to results which may be really 
 of use in the solution of practical questions ; and 
 yet not endeavouring to penetrate to ultimate 
 principles, on which — as I have said — we can 
 hardly hope to come to rational agreement in the 
 present state of philosophical thought. We must 
 remain as far as possible in the " region of middle 
 axioms " — if I may be allowed the technical term. 
 But how shall we mark off this region of dis- 
 cussion, in which we look for middle axioms, from 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 the region in which first principles are sought ? 
 Well, I shall not try to do this with any definite- 
 ness, for if I did I should inevitably pass over 
 into the region that I am trying to avoid ; I should 
 illustrate the old Greek argument to prove the 
 necessity of philosophizing. "We must philoso- 
 phize, for either we ought to philosophize, or, if 
 we ought not, we must philosophize in order to 
 demonstrate that we ought not to philosophize." 
 So if I tried to make definite our general con- 
 ception of the kind of topics we ought to avoid, 
 I should be insensibly drawn into a full discussion 
 of these topics. I shall, therefore, leave the line 
 vague, and content myself with describing some 
 of the questions that lie beyond it. 
 
 To begin, there is all the discussion as to the 
 nature, origin and development of moral ideas and 
 sentiments, which — in recent times especially — has 
 absorbed so large a part of the attention of 
 moralists ; when we want them to tell us what 
 morality is, they are apt to slide off into enter- 
 taining but irrelevant speculations as to how, in 
 ^ pre-historic times, or in the obscurity of the infant's 
 consciousness, it came to be. I think that, for our 
 present purposes, we must keep clear of all this ; 
 we must say, with the German poet, "Wir, wir 
 leben . . . und der lebende hat Recht." We must 
 
lo THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 make as workable a system as we can of our own 
 morality, taking it as we find it, with an inevitable 
 element of imperfection and error which I hope 
 posterity will correct and supplement, just as we 
 have corrected and supplemented certain errors and 
 deficiencies in the morality of preceding ages. 
 
 So again, I hope we shall not waste words on 
 the question of the freedom of the will, so promi- 
 nent in the writings of some moralists. I do not 
 think that ought to be included among the problems 
 of practical ethics. Whether, and in what sense, 
 we could have realized in the past, or can realize 
 in the future the ideal of rational conduct which 
 we have not realized, is not needed to be known 
 for our present purposes. All we need to assume 
 — and I suppose we may assume this of persons 
 joining an Ethical Society — is that they have a 
 desire of a certain force to realize their common 
 moral ideal, and that they think it will help them 
 to get their conception of it clearer. 
 
 And this leads me to another topic, more difficult 
 to excise, but which yet I should like to omit. 
 When we try to get the conception of rational 
 conduct clear we come upon the " double nature 
 of Good," which, as Bacon tells us, is "formed in 
 everything " : we are met with the profound difficulty 
 of harmonizing the good of the individual with the 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. ii 
 
 good of the larger whole of which he is a part 
 or member. In my professional treatment of ethics 
 I have concerned myself much with this question, 
 — considering it to be the gravest formal defect of 
 the Utilitarianism of Mill and Bentham, under whose 
 influence my own view was formed, that it treats this 
 problem so inadequately. But I do not want to 
 introduce it into the discussions of our Society ; 
 I should prefer to assume — what I think we are 
 all prepared to assume — that each of us wants to 
 do what is best for the larger whole of which he 
 is a part, and that it is not our business to supply 
 him with egoistic reasons for doing it. In saying 
 this, I do not dispute his claim to be supplied with 
 such reasons by any moralist professing to construct 
 a complete ethical system. When J. S. Mill says, 
 in the peroration of a powerful address, " I do not 
 attempt to stimulate you with the prospect of direct 
 rewards, either earthly or heavenly ; the less we 
 think about being rewarded in either way the better 
 for us," I think it is a hard saying, too hard for 
 human nature. The demand that happiness shall 
 be connected with virtue cannot be finally quelled 
 in this way ; but for the purposes of our Society 
 I am ready to adopt, and should prefer to adopt, 
 Mill's position. 
 
 And this leads me naturally to a point of very 
 
12 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 practical moment — the relation of our Society to 
 
 the Christian Churches. For one great function of 
 
 the rehgious teaching of the Churches — in all ages 
 
 — has been the supply of extra-mundane motives 
 
 stimulating men to the performance of duty. Such 
 
 motives have been both of higher and lower kinds, 
 
 appealing respectively to different elements of our 
 
 nature — fears of hell-fire and outer darkness, of 
 
 A\. wailing and gnashing of teeth, for the brutal and 
 
 selfish element in us, that can hardly be kept down 
 
 without these coarse restraints ; while to our higher 
 
 part it has been shown how heavenly love in saints 
 
 has fused into one the double nature of good ; how 
 
 — like earthly love in its moments of intensity — it 
 
 has 
 
 " Touched the chord of self that trembling passed in music out 
 of sight." 
 
 Well, in all this — if my view be adopted — the Ethical 
 Society will make no attempt to compete with the 
 Churches. We shall contemplate the relation of 
 virtue to the happiness of the virtuous agent, as 
 we believe it actually to be in the present world, 
 and not refer to any future world in which we may 
 hope for compensation for the apparent injustices 
 of the present. And in thus limiting ourselves to 
 mundane motives we shall, I hope, keep a middle 
 path between optimism and pessimism. That is, 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 13 
 
 we shall not profess to prove that the apparent 
 
 sacrifices of self-interest which duty imposes are 
 
 never in the long run real sacrifices ; nor, on the 
 
 other hand, shall we ignore or underrate the noble 
 
 and refined satisfactions which experience shows to 
 
 attend the resolute choice of virtue in spite of all 
 
 such sacrifices — 
 
 " The stubborn thistles bursting 
 Into glossy purples, which outredden 
 All voluptuous garden-roses." 
 
 It may, however, be said that it is" not merely the 
 function of Churches to supply motives for the 
 performance of duty, but also to teach what duty 
 is, and that here their work must inevitably coincide 
 — and perhaps clash — with that undertaken by an 
 Ethical Society. My answer would be that there 
 is at least a large region of secular duty in which 
 thoughtful Christians commonly recognize that an 
 ideal of conduct can be, and ought to be, worked 
 out by the light of reason independently of revela- 
 tion ; and I should recommend our Society to 
 confine its attention to this secular region. Here 
 no doubt some of us may pursue the quest of moral 
 truth by study or discussion in a non-religious spirit, 
 others in a religious spirit ; but I conceive that we 
 have room for both. As a Society, I conceive that 
 our attitude ought to be at once unexciusive as 
 
14 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 regards the non-religious, and unaggressive as re- 
 gards all forms of Christian creed. 
 
 In saying this, I keep in view the difficulty that 
 many feel in separating at all the ideas of morality 
 and religion, and I have no wish to sharpen the 
 distinction. Indeed, I myself can hardly conceive 
 a working Ethical Society of which the aim would 
 not include in essentials the apostle's definition of 
 the pure service of religion. We might characterize 
 it as the aim of being in the world and yet not of it, 
 working strenuously for the improvement of mun- 
 dane affairs, and yet keeping ourselves, as the apostle 
 says, "unspotted of the world" — that is, in modern 
 phrase, keeping clear of the compromises with sordid 
 interests and vulgar ambitions which the practical 
 standards of all classes and sections of society are 
 too apt to admit. Of such compromises I will say 
 a word presently : my point now is that the main- 
 tenance of an ideal in this sense unworldly must be 
 the concern of any Ethical Society worthy of the 
 name, nor do I see why those who habitually con- 
 template this ideal from a religious point of view 
 should be unable to co-operate with those who 
 habitually contemplate it from a purely ethical point 
 of view. I do not say that there are no difficulties 
 in such co-operation ; but I am sure that we all 
 bring with us a sincere desire to minimize these 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY 
 
 difficulties, and if so, I do not see why they should 
 not be avoided or overcome. 
 
 To sum up : the region in which we are to move 
 I conceive as, philosophically, a middle region, the 
 place of intermediate ethical generalizations which 
 we are content to conceive in a rough and approxi- 
 mate way, avoiding fundamental controversies as far 
 as we can ; while from a religious point of view it 
 is a secular but not therefore irreligious region, in 
 which we pursue merely mundane ends, but yet not 
 in a worldly spirit. 
 
 But it remains to define more clearly its relation 
 to particular practical problems. In the present age 
 it is impossible that any group of educated persons, 
 spontaneously constituted by their common interest 
 in practical ethics, should not have their attention 
 prominently drawn to the numerous schemes of 
 social improvement on which philanthropic effort 
 is being expended. In this way we may be easily 
 led in our ethical discussions to debate one after 
 another such practical questions as, " Shall we work 
 for State-aided emigration, or promote recreative 
 education, or try to put down sweating } Shall 
 we spend our money in providing open spaces for 
 the poor, or our leisure on a Charity Organization 
 Committee } " Now I have no doubt myself that 
 persons of education, especially if they have com- 
 
i6 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 parative wealth and leisure, ought to interest them- 
 selves in sonae or all of these things ; and I think 
 it belongs to us in Cambridge, not only to diffuse 
 a general conviction of the importance of this kind 
 of work, but also to encourage a searching exam- 
 ination of the grounds on which particular schemes 
 are urged on the public attention. But in this 
 examination a detailed study of social facts 
 necessarily comes in along with the study of 
 principles, and — though I have no wish to draw a 
 hard and fast line — I should be disposed to regard 
 this study of facts as lying in the main beyond 
 the province of our Society, whose attention should 
 be rather concentrated on principles. I should 
 propose to leave it to some economic or philan- 
 thropic association to examine how far an alleged 
 social want exists, and how urgent it is, and by 
 what particular methods it may best be satisfied 
 or removed. What we have rather to consider is 
 how far the eleemosynary or philanthropic inter- 
 vention of private outsiders in such cases is in 
 accordance with a sound general view of the relation 
 of the individual to his society. It is with the 
 general question, " What social classes owe to each 
 other," that we are primarily concerned, though in 
 trying to find the right answer to this question we 
 may obtain useful instruction from a consideration 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 17 
 
 of the particular fields of work to which I have 
 referred. 
 
 But the moral problem offered by the social 
 relations of different classes — though specially 
 prominent in the thought of the present age — is not 
 the only problem causing practical perplexities that 
 such discussions as ours might reduce. There are 
 many other such problems in our complicated 
 modern life — even omitting those obviously unfit 
 for public oral discussion. One class of them which 
 specially interests me is presented by the divergence 
 of the current practical standards of particular 
 sections of the community, on certain points, from 
 the common moral ideal which the community as 
 a whole still maintains. We feel that such diver- 
 gences are to a great extent an evil, the worldliness 
 which we have to avoid ; but yet we think them 
 in some degree legitimate, and the difficulty lies 
 in drawing the line. Any careful discussion of such 
 deflections must lead to what bears the unpopular 
 name of Casuistry. I think, however, that the odium 
 which in the seventeenth century overwhelmed the 
 systematic discussion by theologians of difficult and 
 doubtful cases of morals — though undeniably in part 
 deserved — went to an unreasonable length, and 
 obscured the real importance of the study against 
 which it was directed. There is no doubt that 
 
 C 
 
i8 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 individuals are strongly tempted to have recourse to 
 casuistry in order to find excuses for relaxing in 
 their own favour the restraints of moral rules which 
 they find inconvenient; and hence a casuist has come 
 to be regarded with suspicion as a moralist who aims 
 at providing his clients with the most plausible 
 excuses available for this purpose. But though 
 certain casuists have been reasonably suspected of 
 this misapplication of their knowledge and ingenuity, 
 the proper task of casuistry has always been quite 
 different ; the question with which it has properly 
 been concerned is how far, in the particular circum- 
 stances of certain classes of persons, the common 
 good demands a special interpretation or modifi- 
 cation of some generally accepted moral rule. This, 
 at any rate, is the kind of casuistical problem that 
 I have now in view : and I think that any morality 
 that refuses to deal with such problems must confess 
 itself inadequate for the practical guidance of men 
 engaged in the business of the world ; since modifica- 
 tions of morality to meet the special needs of special 
 classes are continually claimed, and more or less 
 admitted by serious and well-meaning persons. 
 Thus it is widely held that barristers must be 
 allowed to urge persuasively for their clients 
 considerations that they know to be false or mis- 
 leading; that a clergyman may be a most virtuous 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 19 
 
 man without exactly believing the creeds he says or 
 the articles he signs ; that a physiologist must be 
 allowed to torture innocent animals ; that a general 
 , in war must be allowed to use spies and at the same 
 time to hang the spies of the conflicting general. I 
 do not say that most educated persons would accept 
 broadly all these relaxations, but that they would at 
 least admit some of them more or less. Especially 
 in the action of states or governments as such is 
 this kind of divergence admitted, though vaguely 
 and rather reluctantly. When Pope asked — using 
 the names of two noted criminals : 
 
 " Is it for Bond or Peter, paltry things. 
 To pay their debts or keep their faith like kings ? " 
 
 the epigram was undeniably deserved : still we do 
 not commonly think that governments are bound 
 to keep their faith quite like private individuals ; 
 we do not think that repudiating a treaty between 
 nation and nation is quite like breaking a promise 
 between man and man. On all these and similar 
 points I think it would be of real practical utility 
 if discussion could help us to clearer views. For 
 there is a serious danger that when the need of 
 such relaxations is once admitted they may be 
 carried too far; that, in the esoteric morality of 
 any particular profession or trade, ordinary morality 
 will be put aside altogether on certain particular 
 
20 THE SCOPE AND LIMITS OF 
 
 questions, as the opinion of ignorant outsiders ; and 
 no result could be more unfavourable than this to 
 the promotion of ethical interests. 
 
 So far I have been speaking of particular and 
 limited conflicts between what may be called 
 sectional morality and general morality. But there 
 are departments of society and life of which the 
 relation to ethics is perplexing in a more broad 
 and general way, just because of the elevated and 
 ideal character of their aims — I mean art and 
 science. The practical maxims of some classes of 
 artists and scientific men are liable to collide with 
 common morality in the manner just mentioned — 
 e.g.^ certain painters or novelists may deliberately 
 disregard the claims of sexual purity — but it is not 
 of these limited conflicts that I now wish to speak, 
 but of the perplexity one finds in fixing the general 
 relation of the ends of Art and Science to moral 
 ends. Perhaps it will be impossible to deal with this 
 without falling into the metaphysical controversies 
 that I have abjured; but the problem often presents 
 itself to me entirely apart from the questions of 
 the schools. When I surrender myself to the pur- 
 suit of truth or the impressions of art, I find myself 
 in either case in a world absorbing and satisfying 
 to my highest nature, in which, nevertheless, morality 
 seems to occupy a very subordinate place, and in 
 
THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 21 
 
 which — for the more efifective reah'zation of the 
 aesthetic or scientific ideal — it seems necessary that 
 morahty should be thus subordinated. The difficulty 
 seems to be greater in the case of the aesthetic 
 ideal, because the emotional conflict is greater. The 
 lover of truth has to examine with neutral curiosity 
 the bad and the good in this mixed world, in order 
 to penetrate its laws ; but he need not sympathize 
 with the bad or in any way like its existence. But 
 this is harder for the lover of beauty : since evil — 
 even moral evil — is an element in the contrasts and 
 combinations that give him the delight of beauty. 
 If, as Renan says, such a career as Cesar Borgia's 
 is " beautiful as a tempest or an abyss," it is difficult 
 for a lover of beauty not to rejoice that there was 
 a Cesar Borgia. One may even say that in pro- 
 portion as the sentiment of beauty becomes absorbing 
 and quasi-religious, this divergence from morality is 
 liable to become more marked : because what is bad 
 in a picturesque and exciting way comes to be more 
 and more felt as discord artfully harmonized in the 
 music that all things make to God. 
 
 Well, is this feeling in any degree legitimate } and 
 if so, how is it to be reconciled with our moral 
 aspirations .'' I do not expect to attain a single 
 cogently-reasoned answer, which all must accept, to 
 either of these questions. They will probably always 
 
22 THE WORK OF AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 be somewhat differently answered by different sets 
 and schools of thoughtful persons. But I think 
 they may illustrate the kind of questions on which 
 we may hope to clear up our ideas and reduce 
 the extent of our mutual disagreement by frank 
 and sympathetic discussion. 
 
 [The limits above suggested were thought to be too 
 narrow by the leading spirits of the London Ethical 
 Society. Accordingly, as the reader will see, in the next 
 address — delivered as President of the latter body — I tried 
 to adapt my general view of the nature of the work that 
 such a society might profitably undertake to a wider 
 conception of its scope.] 
 
II. 
 
 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF AN 
 ETHICAL SOCIETY* 
 
 T N taking this opportunity, which your committee 
 ^ has given me, of addressing the London Ethical 
 Society, in the honourable but gravely responsible 
 position of their president, I have thought that I 
 could best fulfil the duties of my station by laying 
 before you one or two difficulties which have oc- 
 curred to my mind, in thinking how we are to 
 realize the declared aims of our Society on the basis 
 of its declared principles. I hope, indeed, not 
 merely to put forward difficulties, but to offer at 
 least a partial solution of them ; but I am conscious 
 that it is easier to raise questions than to settle them, 
 and that there is a danger lest the effect of my 
 remarks may be to repel some minds from the study 
 which we are combined to promote. Still, after 
 anxious thought, I have determined to face this 
 
 * An address delivered to the London Ethical Society on April 23, 
 1893, 3-nd published in the International Journal of Ethic s^ October, 
 1893, under the title " My Station and its Duties," 
 
 23 
 
24 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 danger. For I do not think we ought to conceal 
 from ourselves that the task we have proposed to 
 our Society is one of which the complete accom- 
 plishment is likely to be very difficult. Indeed, 
 were it otherwise, it would hardly have been left for 
 us to accomplish. 
 
 I will begin by explaining that the difficulties of 
 which I am to speak only affect a part of the aims 
 and work of our Society ; there is another part — 
 and a most important part — which they do not 
 affect. The first and most comprehensive of the 
 aims that we have stated is 
 
 " To assist individual and social efforts after right living." 
 
 Now, what are the obstacles to right living } Why 
 does not each of us completely fulfil the duties of 
 his station } 
 
 First, I put aside such obstacles as may seem to 
 lie in external circumstances and material con- 
 ditions. I do not mean that such circumstances 
 and conditions may not cause the gravest hindrances 
 to right living, which a Society like ours should 
 make the most earnest efforts to remove. But 
 important as it is to diminish these hindrances, it is 
 no less important for an ethical society to lay stress 
 on the old truth — sometimes apt to be overlooked 
 in ardent efforts for economic improvement — that it 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 25 
 
 is possible to act rightly under any material con- 
 ditions. On this point I need hardly say that there 
 is an overwhelming agreement among moralists. 
 The ancient thinkers went too far, no doubt, in 
 saying that a perfectly wise and good man would 
 be perfectly happy in the extremest tortures. We 
 moderns cannot go so far as that ; but we must still 
 maintain, as a cardinal and essential ethical truth, 
 that a perfectly wise and good man could behave 
 rightly even under these painful conditions. In 
 short, the immediate obstacles to right conduct, 
 however they may be caused, lie in our minds and 
 hearts, not in our circumstances. 
 
 Looking closer at these obstacles, we find that 
 they lie partly in the state of our intellect, partly 
 in the state of our desires and will. Partly we 
 know our duty imperfectly, partly our motives for 
 acting up to what we know are not strong enough 
 to prevail over our inclination to do something else. 
 The two kinds of obstacles are essentially different, 
 and must be dealt with by different methods ; each 
 method has its own problems, and the problems 
 require very different treatment. In what I am to 
 say to-day I shall treat mainly of the intellectual 
 obstacles — the imperfection of knowledge. But 
 before I proceed to this I will illustrate the manner 
 in which the two obstacles are combined, by recalling 
 
26 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 an anecdote from the early history of ethics. It is 
 told of Socrates that he once met a professional 
 teacher of Wisdom, who informed him that he had 
 discovered the true definition of Justice. " Indeed," 
 said Socrates, " then we shall have no more dis- 
 putes among citizens about rights and wrongs, no 
 more fights of civic factions, no more quarrels and 
 wars between nations. It is, indeed, a most magni- 
 ficent discovery ! " 
 
 Now, the first impression that this remark makes 
 on us is that Socrates is speaking ironically, as no 
 doubt he partly is. We know that men and nations 
 continually commit injustice knowingly ; we remem- 
 ber the old fable of the wolf and the lamb — where 
 the wolf pleads his own cause, and then pronounces 
 and immediately executes sentence of capital punish- 
 ment on the weaker animal — and we surmise that 
 the practical result of this famous debate would not 
 have been altered by our supplying the wolf with 
 the clearest possible formula of justice ; the argu- 
 ment might have been cut short, but it would have 
 been all the same in the end to the lamb. 
 
 But let us look at the matter again, and we shall 
 see that the master's meaning is not entirely ironical. 
 Let us suppose that our notion of justice suddenly 
 became so clear that in every conflict that is now 
 going on between individuals and classes and nations, 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 27 
 
 every instructed person could at once see what 
 justice required with the same absolute certainty 
 and exactness with which a mathematician can now 
 see the answer to a problem in arithmetic ; so that 
 if might anywhere overbore right, it would have to 
 be mere naked brutal force, without a rag of moral 
 excuse to hide its nakedness ; suppose this, and I 
 think we see at once that though all the injustice in 
 the world would not come to an end — since there 
 is a good deal of the wolf still left in man — yet 
 undoubtedly there would be much less injustice ; 
 we should still want policemen and soldiers, but 
 we should have much less occasion for their 
 services. 
 
 Now, let us make a different supposition : let 
 us suppose the state of our knowledge about justice 
 unchanged, but all the obstacles on the side of 
 motive removed ; let us suppose that men's ideas 
 of their rights are still as confused and conflicting 
 as they are now, but that every one is filled with 
 a predominant desire to realize justice, strong enough 
 to prevail over every opposing inclination. Here 
 again we must admit that we should not thus get 
 rid of injustice altogether. I am afraid that it 
 would still be true, as the poet says, that 
 
 " New and old, disastrous feud. 
 Must ever shock like armed foes," 
 
28 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 and we must still look to have serious and even 
 sanguinary conflicts between nations and parties, 
 conscientiously inscribing on their banners conflicting 
 principles of Right. But though unintentional in- 
 justice of the gravest kind might still be done, 
 what a reHef it would be to humanity to have got 
 rid of all intended wrong ; and how much nobler, 
 less exasperating, more chivalrous, would be the 
 conflicts that still had to go on, if each combatant 
 knew that his adversary was fighting with perfect 
 rectitude of purpose. 
 
 I have laid stress on this comparison of imaginary 
 improvements, because I think that those who are 
 earnestly concerned for the moral amelioration of 
 themselves and others are often apt to attend too 
 exclusively to one or other of the two sets of 
 obstacles that I have distinguished. They are either 
 impressed with the evils of moral ignorance, and 
 think that if anyone really knew what the good 
 life was, he must live it ; or, what is more common, 
 they are too exclusively occupied with the defects 
 of desire and will, and inclined to say that anyone 
 knows his duty well enough if he would only act 
 up to his knowledge. Now, I hope we shall agree 
 that an ethical society worthy of the name must 
 aim at removing both kinds of defects; success 
 in both endeavours is necessary for the complete 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 29 
 
 accomplishment of our task ; but as success in either 
 is difficult, it may encourage us somewhat to think 
 how much would be gained by success in only one of 
 these endeavours, even if the other is supposed to 
 fail altogether. In the education of the young and 
 in the practical work of our Society the aim of 
 developing the motives to right action, of intensi- 
 fying the desire for the good life, must always be 
 prominent. This endeavour has its own difficulties 
 and dangers of failure, and I do not propose to deal 
 with them to-day. But before I pass on to my 
 special subject — the other endeavour to remove 
 the defects of moral knowledge — may I say one 
 thing, out of my observation of human life, as to 
 the endeavour I leave on one side. Though the 
 gift of inspiring enthusiasm for duty and virtue is 
 like other gifts, very unequally distributed among 
 well-meaning persons, I do not believe that anyone 
 who had himself an ardent love of goodness ever 
 failed entirely to communicate it to others. He may 
 fail in his particular aims, he may use ill-devised 
 methods, meet with inexplicable disappointments, 
 make mistakes which cause him bitter regret; but we 
 shall find that after all, though the methods may have 
 failed, the man has succeeded ; somewhere, somehow, 
 in some valuable degree, he has — if I may use an old 
 classical image — handed on the torch of his own 
 
30 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 ardour to others who will run the race for the prize 
 of virtue. 
 
 We are agreed, then, that much may be done if 
 we simply take the current ideal of what is right, 
 and earnestly endeavour to develop a desire to realize 
 it in ourselves and others. But this is not the whole 
 of our aim. We are conscious of defects in this 
 current ideal, and it is impossible for us really to care 
 for it and at the same time to sit down content 
 with these defects. Hence we state it as our second 
 aim "to free the current ideal of what is right from 
 all that is merely traditional and self-contradictory, 
 and thus to widen and perfect it." 
 
 With this view we invite all our members "to 
 assist in constructing a Theory or Science of Right, 
 which, starting with the reality and validity of moral 
 distinctions, shall explain their mental and social 
 origin, and connect them in a logical system of 
 thought." 
 
 It is to the difficulties involved in the task thus 
 defined that my thoughts have chiefly turned in 
 meditating what I was to say to you to-day. 
 
 I think that no instructed person can regard it 
 as other than arduous. Speaking broadly, what we 
 propose to do is what ancient thinkers had been 
 trying to do for many centuries, before the Christian 
 churches monopolized the work of moralizing man- 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 
 
 kind in this quarter of the globe ; and it is also what 
 a long line of modern thinkers have been trying to do 
 for several centuries more, since independent ethical 
 thought revived in Europe, after the long mediaeval 
 period of submission to ecclesiastical authority. 
 
 Yet the phrase we use — " assist in constructing " — 
 implies that after all these efforts the construction yet 
 remains to be effected. We must, then, hardly be 
 surprised if we do not find it easy. 
 
 Still there is a Greek proverb that says "the fine 
 things are difficult," and I by no means wish to say a 
 word to dissuade anyone from devoting his energies 
 to so noble a cause, especially since a large part of 
 my own life has been spent in working for this end. 
 
 And in order that I may be as little discouraging 
 as possible, I will begin with a difficulty which seems 
 to me sufficiently important to be worth discussing, 
 but which I hope to be able to remove completely. 
 
 At first sight it might seem as if the task that we 
 have undertaken, the task of " explaining the mental 
 and social origin of moral distinctions, and connecting 
 them in a logical system of thought," was one that 
 could only be carried out by experts — i.e.y by persons 
 who have gone through a thorough training in 
 psychology, sociology, and logic — in short, by 
 philosophers. But the plan on which our Society 
 has been framed — and I believe the same is true of 
 
32 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 all other ethical societies which have been founded — 
 invites the co-operation of all thoughtful persons who 
 sympathize with its principles and aims, whether they 
 are experts in psychology and sociology or not. And 
 if our movement succeeds, the element of non-experts 
 is evidently likely largely to outnumber the experts, 
 unless the philosophers of the community should in- 
 crease in number more than is to be expected, or 
 perhaps even desired. 
 
 The question then arises, can this unphilosophic 
 majority really aid in the task of constructing a 
 Theory of Right which shall eliminate error and 
 contradiction from current morality, reduce all 
 valid moral perceptions and judgments to their 
 elements or first principles, and present them as 
 connected in a logical system of thought ? Ought 
 we not, at least, to divide and distribute our task 
 more clearly and thoroughly ? Does not our in- 
 vitation at present seem to hand over a work of 
 intellectual construction, requiring the highest gifts 
 and the completest training, to persons who are not, 
 and who cannot be expected to become, duly qualified 
 for the work ? Will not these untrained builders 
 build with untempered mortar ? 
 
 I have stated this difficulty plainly, because I at 
 first felt it strongly myself, and therefore think that 
 others may have felt it. But reflection convinced me 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. ^-^ 
 
 that if your society has been right — and I hope 
 experience may show that it has been right — in 
 undertaking the noble but arduous task which it 
 has proposed to itself, there is much to be said for 
 the broad and comprehensive basis which it has 
 adopted. There are serious reasons for thinking 
 that the work undertaken cannot be thoroughly well 
 done by philosophers alone ; partly because alone 
 they are not likely to have the requisite knowledge 
 of facts ; and partly because their moral judgment 
 on any particular question of duty, even supposing 
 them to have obtained all available information as 
 to the particular facts of the case, is not altogether 
 to be trusted, unless it is aided, checked, and con- 
 trolled by the moral judgment of persons with less 
 philosophy but more special experience. 
 
 First, as I say, the philosopher's knowledge is likely 
 to be inadequate for the accomplishment of our aim. 
 Our aim is to frame an ideal of the good life for 
 humanity as a whole, and not only for some par- 
 ticular section ; and to do this satisfactorily and 
 completely we must have adequate knowledge of 
 the conditions of this life in all the bewildering 
 complexity and variety in which it is actually being 
 lived. This necessity is imposed on us by the modern 
 ethical ideal which our Western civilization owes to 
 Christianity. We cannot any longer decline — as 
 
 D 
 
34 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 Aristotle would have declined — to work out an ideal 
 of good life for mechanics and tradesmen, on the 
 ground that such persons are incapable of any high 
 degree of virtue. But if we are to frame an ideal 
 of good life for all, and to show how a unity of moral 
 spirit and principle may manifest itself through the 
 diversity of actions and forbearances, efforts and 
 endurances, which the diversity of social functions 
 renders necessary — we can only do this by a com- 
 prehensive and varied knowledge of the actual 
 opportunities and limitations, the actual needs and 
 temptations, the actually constraining customs and 
 habits, desires and fears, of all the different species 
 of that " general man " who, as Browning says, 
 " receives life in parts to live in a whole." And this 
 knowledge a philosopher — whose personal experience 
 is often very limited — cannot adequately attain unless 
 he earnestly avails himself of opportunities of learn- 
 ing from the experience of men of other callings. 
 
 But, secondly, even supposing him to have used 
 these opportunities to the full, the philosopher's 
 practical judgment on particular problems of duty 
 is liable to be untrustworthy, unless it is aided and 
 controlled by the practical judgment of others who 
 are not philosophers. This may seem to some a para- 
 dox. It may be thought that so far as a philoso- 
 pher has a sound general theory of right, he must 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 35 
 
 be able to apply it to determine the duties of any 
 particular station in life, if he has taken due pains 
 to inform himself as to that station and its cir- 
 cumstances. And this would doubtless be true if 
 his information could be made complete ; but this it 
 cannot be. He can only learn from others the facts 
 which they have consciously observed and re- 
 membered ; but there is an important element in 
 the experience of themselves and their predecessors 
 — the continuous experience of social generations — 
 which finds no place in any statement of facts or 
 reasoned forecast of consequences that they could 
 furnish ; it is only represented in their judgments 
 as to what ought to be done and aimed at. Hence 
 it is a common observation that the judgments of 
 practical men as to what ought to be done in 
 particular circumstances are often far sounder than 
 the reasons they give for them ; the judgments 
 represent the result of experience unconsciously as 
 well as consciously imbibed ; the reasons have to 
 be drawn from that more limited part of experience 
 which has been the subject of conscious observation, 
 information, and memory. This is why a moral 
 philosopher, in my opinion, should always study 
 with reverent care and patience what I am 
 accustomed to call the Morality of Common Sense. 
 By this I do not mean the morality of " the world " 
 
36 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 — /.^., the moral notions and judgments of persons 
 who are not seriously concerned about their moral 
 duty — who are always perhaps in a majority. Such 
 persons, indeed, have a morality, and it is better 
 than their actions ; they approve rules which they 
 do not carry out, and admire virtues which they 
 do not imitate. Still, taking the morality of the 
 worldly at its best, it would be wasted labour to 
 try to construct it into a consistent system of 
 thought ; what there is in it of wisdom and truth 
 is too much intermixed with a baser element, 
 resulting from want of singleness of heart and 
 aim in those whose thoughts it represents. What 
 the worldly really want — if I may speak plainly — 
 is not simply to realize the good life in virtue of 
 its supreme worth to humanity, but to realize it 
 as much as they can while keeping terms with 
 all their appetites and passions, their sordid in- 
 terests and vulgar ambitions. The morality that the 
 world works out in different ages and countries 
 and different sections of society, under the influence 
 of the spirit of compromise, is not without interest 
 for the historian and the sociologist ; but it was 
 not to this mixed stuff that I just now referred 
 when I said that the moral philosopher should study 
 with reverent and patient care the Morality of 
 Common Sense. I referred to the moral judgments 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 37 
 
 — and especially the spontaneous unreflected judg- 
 ments on particular cases, which are sometimes 
 called moral intuitions — of those persons, to be 
 found in all walks and stations of life, whose 
 earnest and predominant aim is to do their duty ; 
 of whom it may be said that 
 
 " though they slip and fall, 
 They do not blind their souls with clay," 
 
 but after each lapse and failure recover and renew 
 their rectitude of purpose and their sense of the 
 supreme value of goodness. Such persons are to be 
 found, not alone or chiefly in hermitages and retreats 
 — if there are still any hermitages and retreats — but 
 in the thick and heat of the struggle of active life, in 
 all stations and ranks, in the churches and outside 
 the churches. It is to them we have appealed for 
 aid and sympathy in the great task that we have 
 undertaken ; and it is to their judgments on the 
 duties of their station, in whatever station they may 
 be found, that the moral philosopher should, as 
 I have said, give reverent attention, in order that 
 he may be aided and controlled by them in his 
 theoretical construction of the Science of Right. 
 
 Perhaps some of my audience may think that in 
 what I have just been saying I have been labouring 
 the wrong point ; that it needs no argument to show 
 that the moral philosopher, if he tries to work out 
 
38 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 a reasoned theory of duty by which all the particular 
 duties of particular stations may find their places in 
 one harmonious and coherent system, cannot dis- 
 pense with the aid and guidance of the special moral 
 experience of practical men ; but that what requires 
 to be proved is rather that the practical man, who 
 desires earnestly to know and fulfil the particular 
 duties of his particular station, has any need of 
 the philosopher. And certainly I must admit that 
 there is a widespread opinion, supported by moralists 
 of great repute, that he has hardly any such need ; 
 that, as Butler says, " any plain honest man in almost 
 any circumstances, if, before he engages in any course 
 of action, he asked himself, ' Is this I am going about 
 right, or is it wrong ? ' would answer the question 
 agreeably to truth and virtue." Or if it be granted 
 that such a plain honest man has any need of philo- 
 sophers, it is said to be only to protect him against 
 other philosophers ; it is because there are bad philoso- 
 phers — what we call sophists — about, endeavouring to 
 undermine and confuse the plain man's naturally clear 
 notions of duty, that there has come to be some need 
 of right-minded thinkers to expose the sophistries 
 and dispel the confusions. It is held, in short, that if 
 any assistance can be obtained from the moral philo- 
 sopher by a plain man who is making serious efforts 
 after right living, it is not the positive kind of 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY, 39 
 
 assistance which a physician gives to those who 
 consult him for rules of diet, but a merely negative 
 assistance, such as the policeman gives who warns 
 suspicious characters off the premises. 
 
 This view is so often put forward that I cannot but 
 
 infer that it is really very widely entertained, and 
 
 that it corresponds to the moral experience of many 
 
 persons ; that many plain honest men really do 
 
 think that they always know what their duty is — at 
 
 any rate, if they take care not to confuse their moral 
 
 sense by bad philosophy. In my opinion such 
 
 persons are, to some extent, under an illusion, and 
 
 really know less than they think. But whether I 
 
 could convince them of this, or whether, if I could 
 
 convince them, it would be really for their advantage, 
 
 are questions which I need not now consider, because 
 
 I think it hardly likely that such persons have joined 
 
 our Ethical Society in any considerable numbers. 
 
 For to practical men of this stamp the construction 
 
 of a theory or science of right must seem a work 
 
 of purely speculative interest, having no particular 
 
 value whatever ; a work, therefore, which persons 
 
 who have not studied psychology or sociology 
 
 had better leave to those who profess these subjects. 
 
 It is not to plain men of this type that our appeal is 
 
 made, but rather to those whose reflection has made 
 
 them aware that in their individual efforts after right 
 
40 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 living they have often to grope and stumble along 
 an imperfectly-lighted path ; whose experience has 
 shown them uncertainty, confusion, and contradiction 
 in the current ideal of what is right, and has thus led 
 them to surmise that it may be liable to limitations 
 and imperfections, even when it appears clear and 
 definite. Practical men of this stamp will recognize 
 that the effort to construct a Theory of Right is not 
 a matter of mere speculative interest, but of the 
 deepest practical import ; and they will no more try 
 to dispense with the aid of philosophy than the 
 moral philosopher — if he knows his own limitations 
 -*^will try to dispense with the aid of moral 
 f/common sense. 
 
 Well, may I say that here is one difficulty re- 
 moved ? But I am afraid that removing it only 
 brings another into view. We have seen how and 
 why philosophers are to co-operate with earnest and 
 thoughtful persons who are not philosophers in con- 
 structing an ethical system ; but the discussion has 
 made it evident that the main business of construc- 
 tion and explanation — on the basis of psychology 
 and sociology — must be thrown on the philosophers ; 
 and then the question arises, how are they to co- 
 operate among themselves } The reason why the 
 work remains to be done lies in the fundamental 
 disagreement that has hitherto existed among 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 41 
 
 philosophers as to the principles and method of 
 ethical construction ; and so long as this disagree- 
 ment continues, how is co-operation possible? 
 Well, I think it may be said on the hopeful side, 
 that there " is more willingness now to co-operate 
 than there has been in other times not very remote. 
 Fundamental disagreements on principles and 
 methods can only be removed by systematic con- 
 troversy ; but it was difficult to conduct philo- 
 sophical controversy in a spirit of mutual aid and 
 co-operation, so long as philosophers had the bad 
 habit of arguing in as exasperated a tone as if each 
 had suffered a personal injury through the publica- 
 tion of views opposed to his own. This bad habit 
 has now nearly passed away, and a glance at the 
 names of our committee will show that moralists of 
 the most diverse philosophical schools are willing 
 to combine in the work of an ethical society. But 
 this willingness does not altogether remove the 
 difficulty, or rather it removes it as regards a part 
 of our aims, but not as regards another part. It 
 is easy to see how philosophers of diverse schools 
 may, by sympathetic efforts at mutual understand- 
 ing and interpenetration of ideas, assist each other in 
 constructing a theory or science of right ; but even 
 under these favourable conditions the labour of this 
 construction is likely to be long, and how, in the 
 
42 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 meantime — so long as their fundamental disagree- 
 ments are unremoved — can they effectually combine 
 to assist individual and social efforts after right 
 living? So long as they are not agreed on the 
 ultimate end of action — so long as one holds it to 
 be moral perfection, another "general happiness," 
 another " efficiency of the social organism " — how 
 can any counsels they may combine to give, as to 
 the right way of living so as best to realize the end, 
 be other than discordant and bewildering to those 
 who seek their counsels? The difficulty would be 
 avoided if all the philosophers of the Ethical Society 
 belonged to the same school, for then they could 
 assist those who were not philosophers by reasoned 
 deductions from the accepted principles of the 
 school. They would have to admit that other 
 philosophers held fundamentally different principles, 
 but they would explain to their hearers that the 
 other philosophers were wrong. But, then, if our 
 movement flourished and was found to meet a social 
 need, these other philosophers would be led to form 
 ethical societies of their own. The non-philosophic 
 members of the different societies could not be 
 thoroughly competent judges of the philosophical 
 disputes ; but loyalty and esprit de corps would 
 lead them to stand firmly by their respective 
 philosophers ; and the result must be that any 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 43 
 
 assistance rendered by these competing ethical 
 societies to individual and social efforts after right 
 living would be hampered by the grave drawbacks 
 of sectarian rivalries and conflicts. In short, it 
 seemed to me that the ethical movement was in a 
 dilemma ; if each school had its own ethical society, 
 it incurred the dangers of sectarianism ; if different 
 schools combined to work in the same society, it 
 incurred the danger of a bewildering discord of 
 counsels. 
 
 In this perplexing choice of alternatives, I think 
 that our Society has adopted the right course in 
 accepting the difficulty that attaches to combined 
 efforts ; and I think that if this difficulty is con- 
 templated fairly and considerately, though we 
 cannot completely remove it, we can find a pro- 
 visional solution of it sufficient for practical 
 purposes. 
 
 I find this solution in the generally-admitted fact, 
 that there is much greater agreement among thoughtful 
 persons on the question what a good life is, than on 
 the question why it is good. When they are trying 
 to define the ultimate end of right actions, the 
 conceptions they respectively apply seem to be so 
 widely divergent that the utmost efforts of mutual 
 criticism are hardly sufficient to enable them even 
 to understand each other. But when, from the effort 
 
44 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 to define the ultimate end of right conduct, we pass 
 to discuss right conduct itself, whether viewed on its 
 inner or its outer side — the spirit in which a good 
 life is to be lived, the habits of thought and feeling 
 that it requires, the external manifestations of this 
 inner rectitude in the performance of duty and the 
 realization of virtue — then the disagreement is 
 reduced to a surprising extent. I do not say that 
 it becomes insignificant, that there is no important 
 difference of opinion among philosophers as to the 
 details and particulars of morality. Were this so, 
 the task of an ethical society would be less arduous 
 than I have felt bound to represent it ; but it is at 
 any rate not sufficient to prevent a broad, substantial 
 agreement as to the practical ideal of a good life. 
 And I think that philosophers of the most diverse 
 schools may combine on the basis of this broad and 
 general agreement with each other, and with earnest 
 and thoughtful persons who are not philosophers in 
 their practical ideals ; and letting their fundamental 
 differences on ultimate principles drop into the back- 
 ground may hopefully co-operate in efforts to realize 
 the second of our aims, to free this current ideal 
 from all that is merely traditional and self-con- 
 tradictory, and thus to widen and perfect it. 
 
 But I am afraid you will think that our task, as 
 I conceive it, is like the climbing of a mountain, of 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 45 
 
 which the peaks are hidden one after another behind 
 lower peaks ; for when one difficulty is surmounted it 
 brings another into view. We have agreed that our 
 business is to " free the current ideal of what is right 
 from all that is merely traditional " ; but we are also 
 agreed — it is one of our express principles — that the 
 good life " is to be realized by accepting and acting 
 in the spirit of such common obligations as are 
 enjoined by the relationships of family and society." 
 But when we look closer at these common obliga- 
 tions, we find that they are actually determined by 
 tradition and custom to so great an extent that, if we 
 subtracted the traditional element, it would be very 
 difficult to say what the spirit of the obligation was. 
 This is not perhaps clear at first sight, because the 
 moral tradition, familiar to us from childhood up- 
 ward, blends itself so completely with our conception 
 of the facts that it seems to the unreflecting mind to 
 arise out of them naturally and inevitably ; but if 
 we take any such common obligation and compare 
 the different conceptions of it as we find them in 
 different ages and countries, the large space occupied 
 by the traditional element becomes clear through the 
 great range of its variations. Take, for instance, the 
 family relations. As we trace these down the stream 
 of time we see them undergoing remarkable changes, 
 both in extent and content. The mutual claims of 
 
46 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 kindred more remote than the descendants of the 
 same parents or grandparents, which in primitive 
 times are strong and important, become feeble and 
 evanescent as civilization goes on ; while within the 
 narrower circle, within which the tie still remains 
 strong, the element of authority on the one hand and 
 of obedience on the other — authority of husbands 
 over wives and parents over children — is subject to 
 a similar, though not an equal, diminution ; on the 
 other hand, the interference of the State in the 
 domestic control and provision for children's welfare, 
 which was at first left entirely to parents, is a marked 
 feature of recent social progress. During the whole 
 of this process of historic change the recognized 
 mutual obligations of members of the family have 
 been determined by the actual state of traditional 
 morality at any given time ; when, then, from this 
 historic survey we turn to scrutinize our own ideal 
 of family duty, how are we to tell how much of 
 it belongs to mere tradition, which the river 
 of progress will sweep away, and how much 
 belongs to the indestructible conditions of the 
 well-being of life, propagated as human life 
 must be propagated? And the same may be 
 said when we pass from domestic to social and 
 political relations : what social classes owe to 
 each other, according to our commonly - accepted 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 47 
 
 ideal of morality, depends on traditions which 
 result from a gradual development, are going 
 through a process of change, and are actually 
 assailed by doubts and controversies often of a 
 deep and far - reaching kind. How can we find 
 in this moving, though slowly moving, mass of 
 traditional rules and sentiments, which is the element 
 in which our outward moral life is necessarily lived, 
 any stable foundation on which to build, and to 
 invite others to build, the structure of a good life? 
 And yet, on the other hand, we have pledged our- 
 selves not to acquiesce in " mere tradition " when 
 recognized as such, for which indeed we can hardly 
 feel, or hope to inspire, any enthusiasm. 
 
 Of this difficulty there is, I think, no complete 
 solution possible, until our task of constructing a 
 theory or science of Right has been satisfactorily 
 accomplished ; but some suggestions may be made, 
 helpful towards the provisional solution which we 
 practically require, and with these I will now briefly 
 conclude : 
 
 First, the same historic survey which shows us the 
 process of continual change through which human 
 morality has passed also shows us that, — like the 
 structures of physical organisms, — it tends to be 
 continually adapted, in a subtle and complex 
 manner, to the changing conditions and exigencies 
 
48 THE AIMS AND METHODS OE 
 
 of human society. This tendency does not, indeed, 
 suffice to place traditional morality above criticism ; 
 since we have no ground for regarding its adaptation 
 to social needs as being at any time perfect, and 
 critical discussion is an indispensable means of 
 improving it. But a contemplation of the pro- 
 foundly important part played by morality, as it 
 changes and developes along with other elements 
 in the complex fact of social evolution, should make 
 our critical handling of it respectful and delicate, 
 and should quell that temper of rebellion against 
 tradition and convention, into which the reflective 
 mind is apt to fall, in the first reaction against the 
 belief in the absolute validity of current and accepted 
 rules. 
 
 Secondly, though the traditional and conventional 
 element of current morality cannot belong to our 
 moral ideal as abstractly contemplated, it may none 
 the less incontrovertibly claim a place in the concrete 
 application of that ideal to present facts. For in- 
 stance, a refined sense of justice will require us to 
 fulfil the expectations warranted by any implied 
 and tacit understandings into which we may have 
 entered, no less than those which depend on express 
 and definite contracts: and the implied and mutually- 
 understood conditions of our voluntary social relations 
 are in most cases largely determined by tradition and 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 49 
 
 custom. On the other hand, if in reflecting on the 
 moraHty of our age we find it to contain palpable 
 inconsistencies ; if accepted particular rules cannot 
 be reconciled with equally accepted general principles, 
 or tolerated practices reconciled with accepted rules ; 
 if there is an arbitrary inequality, based on no 
 rational grounds, in the commonly approved treat- 
 ment of human beings ; if, to take a simple case, 
 we find that we can find no real moral distinction 
 between conduct which we have judged legitimate 
 on our own part towards others and conduct which 
 we have judged illegitimate on the part of others 
 towards us — then in such inconsistencies we may 
 recognize a sure sign of error and need of change 
 in our ethical view. 
 
 Thirdly, in considering difficulties of detail we 
 should never lose grasp of the importance of that 
 rectitude of purpose, that mental attitude and habit 
 of devotion to universal good, which constitutes the 
 core and centre of the good life. Whatever else 
 shifts, as life and thought changes, this central 
 element is stable and its moral value indestructible ; 
 and it not only consoles us to rest on this certitude 
 when practical doubts and perplexities assail us, but 
 it may sometimes afford a solution of these doubts. 
 It is, indeed, a dangerous error to hold that it does 
 not matter what we do so long as we do it in the 
 
 £ 
 
50 THE AIMS AND METHODS OF 
 
 right spirit. But though a dangerous error, it is still 
 only an exaggeration of the truth ; for there are 
 many cases where it really does not matter very 
 much to ourselves or to others which of two alterna- 
 tive courses we adopt, so long as we take whichever 
 we do take in a spirit of sincere devotion to the 
 general good, and carry it through in the manner 
 and mood of thought and feeling which belong to 
 this spirit. 
 
 Further, we may make this old and abstract con- 
 ception of the general good more full and definite by 
 combining it with the more modern conception of 
 society as an organism : in which each individual 
 worker in any trade or profession is to be regarded 
 as a member of an organ, having his share of re- 
 sponsibility for the action of this organ. We shall 
 thus recognize that the right condition of any such 
 organ depends on the service it renders to the whole 
 organism ; so that if the accepted moral rules and 
 sentiments of any such social class are seen to tend 
 to the benefit of the part at the expense of the 
 whole they stand condemned. It does not follow 
 that the rules should be at once set aside — as this 
 might cause a greater evil in the way of disappoint- 
 ment and disturbance — but we must recognize the 
 need of change and begin the process. Similarly, 
 if we find that elements of human good, such as 
 
AN ETHICAL SOCIETY. 51 
 
 knowledge and art, important in the life of the 
 whole, are not sufficiently recognized in our current 
 moral ideal, the same principle will require us to 
 enlarge and extend this ideal to admit them. 
 
 And if it be said that after all is done the moral 
 ideal of our age, however purged of inconsistencies 
 and inspired and expanded by a steady self-devotion 
 to the most comprehensive notion of good that we 
 can form, is still imperfect and mutable ; and that it 
 must be expected to undergo, in the future, trans- 
 formations now unforeseen ; it yet need not painfully 
 disturb us that the best of our possessions should be 
 thus subject to the inexorable conditions of mundane 
 existence. It need not hinder us from cherishing and 
 holding to the best we have so long as it remains the 
 best. Life is essentially change, and the good life 
 must be essentially life ; it is enough if it contain 
 unchanged amid the change that aspiration after the 
 best life, which is itself a chief source and spring of 
 change. 
 
III. 
 
 PUBLIC MORALITY^ 
 
 ^ I ^HERE are two distinct ways of treating ethical 
 -*- questions, the difference between which, in 
 respect of method, is fundamental ; though it does 
 not necessarily lead to controversy or diversity of 
 systems. We may begin by establishing funda- 
 mental principles of abstract or ideal morality, and 
 then proceed to work out deductively the particular 
 rules of duty or practical conceptions of human good 
 or well-being, through the adoption of which these 
 principles may be as far as possible realized, under 
 the actual conditions of human life. Or, we may 
 contemplate morality as a social fact — "positive 
 morality" as it has been called — i.e.y the body of 
 opinions and sentiments as to right and wrong, good 
 and evil, which we find actually prevalent in the 
 society of which we are members ; and endeavour, 
 by r eflective analysis, removing vagueness and 
 
 * An essay read on Jan. 26, 1897, at a meeting of a Cambridge 
 essay-club called "The Eranus." 
 
 52 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 53 
 
 ambiguity, solving apparent contradictions, correct- 
 ing lapses and supplying omissions, to reduce this 
 body of current opinions, so far as possible, to a 
 rational and coherent system. The two methods 
 are in no way antagonistic : indeed, it may reason- 
 ably be contended that if pursued with complete 
 success, they must lead to the same goal — a 
 perfectly satisfactory and practical ideal of conduct. 
 But in the actual condition of our intellectual and 
 social development, the respective results of the two 
 methods are apt to exhibit a certain divergence, 
 which, for practical purposes, we have to obliterate — 
 more or less consciously — by a rough compromise. 
 
 In the present discourse, I shall adopt primarily 
 the second method. I shall accordingly mean by 
 " public morality '' prevalent opinions as to right and 
 wrong in public conduct ; that is, primarily in the 
 conduct of governments — whether in relation to the 
 members of the states governed, or in dealings with 
 other states. We must, however, extend the notion, 
 especially in states under popular government, to 
 include opinions as to the conduct of private indi- 
 viduals and associations, so far as they influence or 
 control government ; or we might put it otherwise, 
 by saying that in such states every man who 
 possesses the franchise has a share in the functions 
 and responsibilities of government. Thus, in such 
 
54 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 states the morality of party strife is a department 
 of public morality. The limits of my discourse will 
 compel me to concentrate attention mainly on 
 government in the ordinary sense — the persons 
 primarily responsible for governmental action, and 
 to whose conduct the judgment of right and wrong 
 applies in the first instance. But it seemed desirable 
 to notice at the outset the wider extension of govern- 
 mental responsibilities that belongs to democracy ; 
 because on this largely depends, in my view, not 
 the theoretical interest, but the practical urgency 
 of the question that I am about to raise. 
 
 For the most important inquiry which my subject 
 at the present time suggests is whether there is 
 any deep and fundamental distinction between 
 public and private morality ; any more difference, 
 that is, than between the moralities belonging 
 respectively to different professions and callings. 
 We all, of course, recognize that in a certain 
 sense the application of moral rules varies for 
 different professions : certain kinds of duty be- 
 come specially important for each profession, and 
 accordingly come to be defined for it with special 
 precision ; and certain minor problems of conduct 
 are presented to members of one profession which 
 are not presented to another. In this way some 
 variations are thus caused in the practical casuistry 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 55 
 
 belonging to different callings ; so that we might 
 speak of clerical morality, legal morality, and 
 medical morality ; but in so speaking we should be 
 commonly understood to refer to variations in detail 
 of comparatively minor importance. It would be 
 a violent paradox to maintain that the ordinary 
 rules of veracity, justice, good faith, etc., were 
 suspended wholly or partially in the case of any of 
 these professions. But the case is different with 
 the department of morality which deals with the 
 conduct of states or governments. In this region 
 paradoxes of the kind just mentioned have been 
 deliberately maintained by so many grave persons 
 that we can hardly refuse them serious attention. 
 Indeed, if anyone will study the remarkable catena 
 of authorities quoted by Lord Acton in his intro- 
 duction to Burd's edition of Machiavelli's Prince, 
 he will, I think, be left in some doubt how far the 
 proposition, that statesmen are not subject in their 
 public conduct even to the most fundamental rules 
 of private morality, can properly be called para- 
 doxical any longer, for persons duly instructed 
 in modern history, and modern political thought. 
 It is still, no doubt, a paradox to the vulgar. 
 It is not a proposition that a candidate for 
 Parliament would affirm on a public platform ; 
 but the extent to which it is adopted, explicitly 
 
56 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 or implicitly, by educated persons is already 
 sufficient to introduce into popular morality an 
 element of perplexity and disturbance, which it 
 would be desirable, if possible, to remove ; and this 
 perplexity and disturbance must be expected to 
 increase, in proportion as democracy increases the 
 responsibility — and the sense of responsibility — of 
 the ordinary citizen. 
 
 Observe that in speaking of "morality" I have 
 in view the standard by which men are judged, not^ 
 the standard of their practice. It is not merely that 
 the statesman frequently violates the rules of duty, 
 for that we all do. Nor is it merely that, in view 
 of the greatness of his temptations or the nobleness 
 of his patriotic motives, more indulgence is shown 
 to his breaches of justice, veracity, or good faith, 
 than would be shown to similar transgressions in 
 private life ; that the historian is " a little blind " 
 to the faults of a man who has rendered valuable 
 services to his country. For this kind of indulgence 
 is also sometimes shown to persons in other voca- 
 tions, when subject to special temptations or moved 
 by fine impulses ; but it does not commonly amount 
 to a modification of the rule by which men are 
 judged, but only to an alteration in the weight 
 of the censure attached to a breach of the rule. 
 Thus public opinion is indulgent to the amorous 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 57 
 
 escapades of gallant soldiers and sailors, though 
 it would condemn similar conduct severely in 
 schoolmasters ; but no one would gravely argue 
 that the Seventh Commandment is not binding on 
 military men. So again, we all sympathize with 
 the Jacobite servant who " would rather trust his 
 soul in God's hands than his master in the hands 
 of the Whigs," and therefore committed perjury to 
 avoid the worse alternative ; but our sympathy 
 does not lead us to contend that domestic loyalty 
 has a licence to swear falsely on suitable occasions. 
 Nor, further, is the fact I am considering merely 
 that there is, or has been, an esoteric professional 
 morality current among politicians, in which con- 
 siderable relaxations are allowed of the ordinary 
 rules of veracity, justice, and good faith. This is 
 doubtless a part of the fact ; but if this were all, 
 it would be easy to find analogies for it in several 
 other professions and callings, which are all liable 
 to similar esoteric relaxations of ordinary morality. 
 For instance, I suppose that there is now an 
 esoteric morality widely spread among retail traders 
 which allows of secret payments to cooks and 
 butlers in order to secure their custom ; but we 
 do not hear the bribery approved or defended 
 outside the circles of retail tradesmen and domestic 
 servants. So, again, it would seem that in certain 
 
58 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 ages and countries the current morality among 
 priests has regarded " pious fraud " as legitimate ; 
 but the success of this method of promoting the 
 cause of religion would seem to depend upon its 
 being kept strictly esoteric ; and I am not aware 
 that it was ever openly defended in works pub- 
 lished for the edification of the laity. The 
 peculiarity of the divergence of political from 
 ordinary morality is that it has been repeatedly 
 thus defended, not only by the statesmen them- 
 selves, but by literary persons contemplating the 
 statesman's work in the disengaged attitude of 
 students of life and society. 
 
 Nor, finally, is it merely that the statesman's 
 breaches of morality, if successful, are liable to be 
 approved by the popular sentiment of the nation 
 which profits by them, so that the writers of 
 this nation are inadvertently led into fallacies and 
 sophistries in order to justify the immoralities in 
 question. This doubtless occurs, and cannot much 
 surprise us. Adam Smith has explained how con- 
 science — the imaginary impartial spectator within 
 the breast of each of us — " requires often to be 
 awakened and put in mind of his duty by the 
 presence of the real spectator"; and how, when the 
 real spectator at hand is interested and partial, 
 while the Impartial ones are at a distance, the 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 59 
 
 propriety of moral sentiments is apt to be cor- 
 rupted. No doubt this partly explains the low 
 state of international morality, and of the morality 
 of party warfare, as compared with ordinary private 
 morality; but this explanation will not suffice to 
 account for the divergence that I am now con- 
 sidering. It is^not merely that particular cases in 
 which leading statesmen have employed immoral 
 means for patriotic ends are sophistically defended 
 by patriotic contemporaries belonging to the same 
 nation. The point is that the approval of such 
 breaches is formulated in explicit general maxims, 
 raised into a system, and deliberately applied by 
 eminent students of history and political science to 
 the acts of statesmen in remote ages and countries. 
 This seems to be especially the case in Germany, 
 where men of letters have in recent times taken 
 the lead in advocating the emancipation of the 
 statesman from the restraints of ordinary morality. 
 It is not merely that the German defends his 
 Frederic or his Bismarck to the best of his ability ; 
 his historical and philosophical soul is not content 
 with that. To do him justice, he is equally earnest 
 in defending the repudiation by Rome of the treaty 
 with the Samnites after the incident of the Caudine 
 Forks, — or any similar act of bad faith or aggression 
 perpetrated by that remarkably successful common- 
 wealth. 
 
6o PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 Let us contemplate more closely the principles 
 of this charter of liberation from the ordinary rules 
 of morality, issued to statesmen and states by 
 respectable thinkers of our century. And, first, I 
 may begin by distinguishing the explicitly anti- 
 moral propositions that I have in view from other 
 propositions in some measure cognate, which yet 
 do not definitely imply them. For instance, when 
 a writer speaks of the "irresistible logic of facts," 
 or tells us that history furnishes the only touch- 
 stone for political ideals, that great designs and 
 great enterprises can only prove themselves such 
 by succeeding, that achievement is the only criterion 
 of the true statesman, etc., etc. — this does not 
 necessarily imply the emancipation of the states- 
 man from ordinary moral restraints. It may merely 
 mean that the construction of the finest possible 
 Utopia is not statesmanship, and that the true 
 statesman's ideas must be adapted for realization 
 with the means at his disposal and under given 
 conditions ; it need not be taken to deny that the 
 restraints of common morality are among these 
 conditions. No doubt this kind of language strongly 
 suggests the 
 
 Si possis rede si 7W7i quocu7ique modo 
 
 of Horace ; but though it suggests this meaning, 
 it does not strictly justify us in attributing it to 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 6t 
 
 the writer. For one might similarly say that the 
 possession of the art of medicine can only be 
 proved by success, and that the one business of 
 the physician is to cure his patient, without in- 
 tending to imply that it does not matter what 
 commandments the physician may break, provided 
 only the cure is effected. 
 
 So, again, when it is said that morality varies 
 from age to age, and from country to country, 
 that the code shifts with the longitude and alters 
 with the development of society, and that in 
 judging any statesman we must apply the standard 
 of his age and country, — all this seems directed 
 rather to the emancipation of the historian from 
 moral narrowness in his judgments than to the 
 emancipation of the statesman from moral restraint 
 in his conduct. For this language assumes that 
 the statesman is bound by the established moral 
 code of his society ; it only points out that that 
 court for the award of praise and blame, in which 
 the historian from time to time appoints himself to 
 sit as judge and jury, is subject to the difficulties 
 arising from the diversity and conflict of laws, and 
 that the judicious historian must take care to select 
 and apply the right code. Whether this view is 
 sound or not, it has no logical connection with the 
 doctrine that sets a statesman free from the funda- 
 
62 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 mental rules of morality, recognized as binding in 
 his own age and country. 
 
 One more distinction, and then I come to the 
 point. I suppose that if there is any one his- 
 toric name with which this anti- moral doctrine 
 is to be specially connected, it is the name of 
 Machiavelli ; I might indeed have referred to it 
 briefly as " Machiavellianism," only that I am 
 anxious to examine it rather in its nineteenth 
 century than its sixteenth century form. Now, 
 competent historians of thought have regarded it as 
 the essential principle of Machiavelli that "the end 
 justifies the means"; and certainly this principle is 
 expressly laid down by the great Florentine, not 
 only in the paradoxical and variously interpreted 
 Prince^ but in the more moderate and straightforward 
 Discourses 07t Livy, — which have largely escaped 
 the reprobation piled on the more famous treatise. 
 He lays this principle down in treating of a case 
 so remote from modern interest as the slaying of 
 Remus by Romulus ; he admits that this fratricide 
 was objectionable in itself, but holds it justified when 
 we take Romulus' ends into account. "A good 
 result excuses any violence." And probably for 
 ordinary readers this statement sufficiently charac- 
 terizes Machiavelli's doctrine as anti-moral ; but it 
 must be obvious that it cannot so characterize it 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 63 
 
 for those who, like myself, hold that the only true 
 basis for morality is a utilitarian basis. I desire 
 here to digress as little as may be into this con- 
 troversy of the schools : but I must refer to it to 
 avoid confusion and misunderstanding. For in the 
 view of utilitarians the proposition that " the end 
 justifies the means" cannot possibly be taken to 
 characterize the anti-moral position of Machiavelli 
 or his nineteenth century followers. In our view 
 the end must always ultimately justify the means — 
 there is no other way in which the use of any 
 means whatever could possibly be justified. Only 
 it must be a universal end ; not the preservation of 
 any particular state, still less its aggrandisement or 
 the maintenance of its existing form of government; 
 but the happiness or well-being of humanity at 
 large — or, rather, of the whole universe of living 
 things, so far as any practical issue can be raised 
 between these two conceptions of the universal 
 end. According to us, then, the immorality of 
 Machiavellianism does not lie in its affirmation that 
 the bindingness of all moral rules is relative, or 
 that the moral value of actions is to be estimated 
 by their consequences — if only a sufficiently wide 
 view is taken of these consequences. It only 
 begins when the end in view and the regard for 
 consequences is narrowed and restricted; when 
 
64 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 the interest of a particular state is taken as the 
 ultimate and paramount end, justifying the em- 
 ployment of any means whatever to attain it, 
 whatever the consequences of such action may be 
 to the rest of the human race. 
 
 And this " national egoism " is, I think, the 
 essence of the Neo-Machiavellianism, which, — though 
 views somewhat similar have frequently found ex- 
 pression from the sixteenth century onward,— has 
 been especially prominent in the political thought 
 of the last forty years, and, as I have said, has 
 found the most unreserved and meditated expression 
 in the writings of Germans. I may give as an 
 example the statements of an able and moderate 
 writer, who is by no means an admirer of Machiavelli. 
 " The state," says Rumelin,* " is self-sufficient." 
 "Self-regard is its appointed duty; the maintenance 
 and development of its own power and well-being, — 
 egoism, if you like to call this egoism, — is the 
 supreme principle of all politics." "The state can 
 only have regard to the interest of any other state 
 so far as this can be identified with its own interest." 
 " Self-devotion is the principle for the individual, 
 
 * These sentences are taken from an address, " Ueber das 
 Verhaltniss der Politik zur Morale," published in 1875, among the 
 Reden und Aufsdtze of Gustro Rumelin, Chancellor of the University 
 of Tubingen. 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 65 
 
 self-assertion for the state." "The maintenance of 
 the state justifies every sacrifice, and is superior to 
 every moral rule." 
 
 It may perhaps be said that this adoption of 
 national interest as a paramount end does not 
 necessarily involve a collision with established 
 morality : that it may be held along with a belief 
 that veracity, good faith, and justice are always 
 the best policy for states and for individuals. But 
 the common sense of Christendom does not affirm 
 this of individuals, if mundane consequences alone 
 are taken into account : and though Bentham and 
 an important section of his earlier followers were 
 prepared to base private morality on pure self- 
 interest empirically ascertained and measured, this 
 doctrine has few defenders now. And the cor- 
 responding doctrine as regards national interest is 
 certainly not to be attributed to the German 
 writers to whom I refer : their practical aim in 
 affirming national egoism is almost always expressly 
 to emancipate the public action of statesmen from 
 the restraints of private morality. 
 
 The origin of this Neo-Machiavellianism may be 
 traced to various causes. It is partly due to a 
 reaction from the political idealism of the later 
 eighteenth century — a reaction in which moral 
 rules have been thrown overboard along with con- 
 
 F 
 
66 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 stitutional principles ; partly to a reaction from the 
 cosmopolitanism of the same period, tending to an 
 exaggerated affirmation of the self-sufficiency and 
 absolute moral independence of the nation-state ; 
 partly, perhaps, to a kind of Neo-paganism, striving 
 to make patriotism take the place of Christianity. 
 Partly it seems to be connected with the triumph 
 of the historical method, influenced in its earlier 
 stage by the Hegelian change of Idealism through 
 Optimism into its opposite, summed up in the 
 famous declaration that the Real is Rational; from 
 which it seems an obvious inference that the man 
 who succeeds is always in the right, whatever his 
 path to success, the man who fails always in the 
 wrong. In any case, I think the nineteenth century 
 study of history has tended to enlarge and systematize 
 the demand for the moral emancipation of the 
 statesman. Doubtless from the time of Machiavelli 
 downwards it has been a common view of practical 
 politicians that " good men " are unsuited for 
 political crises, because they will not, as Walpole 
 puts it, "go the necessary lengths." But so long 
 as Traditional and Ideal Legitimacy were carrying 
 on their constitutional struggle with confident 
 conviction on both sides, the required relaxation 
 from moral restraints was commonly limited to crises 
 sincerely believed to be exceptional. " Revolutions 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 67 
 
 and wars are not made with rose water," said 
 the political idealist; "but when once we have 
 emancipated nations, and established in them free 
 and equal democratic governments, revolutions and 
 wars will be things of the past." "We have to 
 violate rules of right to defend the right," said 
 the party of order, "in the present tempest of 
 revolutionary madness ; but, once the madness is 
 over, the powers ordained of God will, of course, 
 conform to the moral order which they are essentially 
 required to maintain." But the convictions of both 
 parties belong to a stage which the movement of 
 nineteenth century thought has now left behind it. 
 The study of history has caused the view to prevail 
 that " the great world " is to 
 
 "Spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change"; 
 
 and, consequently, at every turn of this rotatory 
 movement forward, there would seem likely to be 
 an ever recurrent need for the morally emancipated 
 \ statesman — the statesman who, when circumstances 
 drive him to cruelty, rapacity, breach of faith, false- 
 hood, will not waver and whine about the "painful 
 necessity"; but, with simple decision, unhampered 
 by scruples, take the course that leads straightest 
 to the next stage of the everlasting progress. 
 In the extreme form which this doctrine not 
 
68 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 unfrequently assumes, and in which I have, for 
 clearness, presented it, it neither invites nor requires 
 a formal refutation; since it neither appeals to the 
 common moral consciousness of mankind, which, 
 indeed, it frankly claims to override, nor to any 
 principles which have ever been accepted by 
 philosophers. For egoism pure and simple, the 
 doctrine that each individual's interest must be for 
 him ultimately paramount to all other considerations, 
 there is, in abstract ethical discussion, much to be 
 said ; but I have never seen, nor can I conceive, any 
 ethical reasoning that will provide even a plausible 
 basis for the compound proposition that a man is 
 bound to sacrifice his private interest to that of the 
 group of human beings constituting his state, but that 
 neither he nor they are under any similar obligation 
 to the rest of mankind. And to do them justice, 
 the advocates of this doctrine do not commonly 
 resort to ethical deductions to justify their position. 
 They prefer to appeal to facts ; and certainly it is 
 not difficult to find examples of statesmen who 
 have attained their ends by such breaches of current 
 morality as this doctrine defends: but obviously no 
 appeal to facts can settle the question of right 
 without a palpable petitio principii. 
 
 There is, however, one objection that may be 
 taken to this doctrine on the purely historical 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 69 
 
 ground on which its advocates usually argue. I do 
 not think that the history of polity and of political 
 ideas gives us any reason for believing that this 
 emancipation from morality, if once admitted, will 
 stop where the Neo-Machiavellians desire it to 
 stop — at national egoism. The moral emancipation 
 allowed to governments for the promotion of the 
 interests of the nation will be used by governments 
 for the maintenance of their power, even against the 
 interests of the nation ; the distinction between what 
 may be done to hold power and what may be done 
 to acquire it will come to be recognized as arbitrary ; 
 and so by an easy inclined plane we shall pass 
 from the Machiavellianism of the Discourses o?i Livy 
 to the Machiavellianism of the Prince. Or, again, 
 granting that some kind of corporate sentiment is 
 maintained, there is still no ground for confidence 
 that it will always attach itself to the particular 
 corporation called the state. If everything is per- 
 mitted in national struggles for the sake of the 
 nation, it will be easy to think that everything is 
 permitted in party-struggles or class-struggles for 
 the sake of the party or class. The tendencies of 
 modern democracy are running strongly towards 
 the increase of corporate sentiments and the habits 
 of corporate action in industrial groups and classes, 
 and so towards dividing civilized humanity by lines 
 
^o PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 that cut across the Hnes separating nations ; and 
 history certainly does not justify us in confidently 
 expecting that when the rules of private morality are 
 no longer held to apply to public action, patriotism 
 will still keep class feeling and party feeling within 
 the bounds required by national peace and well- 
 being. It is in the later period of free Greece — the 
 civilized fourth century — that the class conflict is 
 most disintegrative, which makes, as Plato says, 
 "two cities in one, the city of the rich and the 
 city of the poor": and similarly in mediaeval Italy, 
 whereas in the twelfth century the chronicle ran 
 simply, " Parma fights Piacenza," before the end of 
 the thirteenth it ran, " Parma, with the exiles from 
 Piacenza, fights Piacenza." 
 
 I conclude, then, that this Neo-Machiavellian 
 doctrine is really condemned by history — the Caesar 
 to which it appeals — no less than by the old- 
 fashioned moral philosophy that it despises. But 
 I am far from wishing to dismiss it with a bare 
 negation. The extent to which it has found favour 
 with thoughtful persons affords a prijua facie pre- 
 sumption that there are elements of sound reason 
 in it, which have been exaggerated into dangerous 
 paradox ; and, if so, it seems very desirable to get 
 these clear. The most important of these elements 
 — especially as regards international conduct — is, I 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 71 
 
 think, more easily discernible in the work of Hobbes 
 than in that of Machiavelli ; the Englishman being 
 a more systematic and philosophical thinker than 
 his Florentine master, though a less acute and 
 penetrating analyst of political experience. Hobbes, 
 as is well known, accepted fully the Machiavellian 
 view of human relations — outside the pale of a 
 (political society compacted through unquestioning 
 obedience into peace and order. Outside this pale 
 he certainly held any aggression or breach of 
 compact conducive to self-preservation to be lawful 
 to the human individual or group, struggling to 
 maintain its existence in the anarchy called a state 
 of nature ; but he justified this licence on the ground 
 that a member of such a "natural society" who 
 may observe moral rules can have no reasonable 
 expectation of reciprocal observance on the part of 
 others, and must therefore merely " make himself 
 a prey to others." In Hobbes' view, morality — 
 the sum of the conditions of harmonious human 
 living in society — is a system that man is always, 
 bound to keep before his mind as an ideal ; but.. 
 his obligation to realize it in act is conditional 
 on a reasonable expectation of reciprocity. This 
 condition is, I think, with careful limitations and 
 qualifications, sound ; and the error of Hobbes 
 does not lie so much in making this demand for 
 
72 PUBLIC MORALITY, 
 
 reciprocity — though he makes it too unguardedly — 
 as in his palpable exaggeration of the difference 
 between human relations in a so-called " natural " 
 society and in the state of political order. The 
 exaggeration is palpable — since {e.g) the mere fact 
 that the habit of making compacts prevails among 
 states is evidence of a prevalent confidence that 
 they will be more or less observed — but the 
 exaggeration should not blind us to the real 
 divergence that exists between the rules of public 
 and of private duty, or to its connection with the 
 cause that Hobbes assigns for it. 
 
 This divergence, observe, does not arise in the 
 main from any fundamental difference in the general 
 principles of ideal morality for states and individuals 
 respectively, but from the actual difference of their 
 relations. A similar, if not an equal, divergence 
 would exist for a virtuous individual who found 
 himself in a society where, whether from anarchy 
 or from other causes, the moral standard maintained 
 in ordinary conduct was as low as the moral 
 standard of international conduct actually is. 
 
 As Mr. Spencer* forcibly says — 
 
 *' Ideal conduct .... is not possible for the ideal 
 man in the midst of men otherwise constituted. An 
 
 * Principles of Ethics^ Part I., chap, xv., p. 280. 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 73 
 
 absolutely just or perfectly sympathetic person, could not 
 live and act according to his nature in a tribe of cannibals. 
 Among people who are treacherous and utterly without 
 scruple, entire truthfulness and openness must bring ruin. 
 If all around recognize only the law of the strongest, one 
 whose nature will not allow him to inflict pain on others, 
 must go to the wall. There requires a certain congruity 
 between the conduct of each member of a society and 
 others' conduct. A mode of action entirely alien to the 
 prevailing modes of action, cannot be successfully persisted 
 in — must eventuate in death to itself, or posterity, or 
 both." 
 
 I do not mean that the customary conduct of 
 nations to each other is accurately represented by 
 Spencer's description ; but it is liable to resemble 
 this description much more closely than the 
 customary conduct of individuals in a civilized 
 society. Nor, again, do I mean that a state, any 
 more than an individual, can justify conduct which 
 ideal morality condemns by simply alleging the 
 similar conduct of other states — even the majority 
 of other states : if this u^ere so, moral progress 
 would be almost impossible in international relations. 
 From the fact that unprovoked aggression, com- 
 mitted with impunity and successful in its immediate 
 aims, is a phenomenon that continually recurs 
 throughout modern European history, I do not infer 
 that it is right for a modern European state to 
 
74 PUBLIC MORALITY, 
 
 commit an act of unprovoked aggression ; what I 
 contend is that this fact materially alters the moral 
 relations between states by extending the rights and 
 duties of self-protection. 
 
 The difference thus introduced is unmistakably, 
 though vaguely, recognized in ordinary moral 
 thought; all we have to do — according to the 
 plan of the present essay — is to bring it clearly 
 before our minds, and assign its limits as pre- 
 cisely as we can. Thus it has long been tacitly 
 recognized that in international relations the con- 
 ditions are wanting under which the morality of 
 passive submission and resignation, specially distinc- 
 tive of Christianity, is conducive to the general 
 well-being. It has been comprehended by the 
 common sense of the Christian world that the 
 precept to turn the other cheek, and repay coercion 
 and encroachment with spontaneous further con- 
 cessions, was not given to nations ; and that the 
 meek who are to inherit the earth must be under- 
 stood to be meek individuals, protected by a 
 vigorous government from the disastrous conse- 
 quences to themselves that meekness in a state of 
 anarchy would entail. 
 
 The case is different with the rules of veracity, 
 good faith, abstinence from aggression on person or 
 property, which are not specially Christian : it would 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY, 75 
 
 be absurd to interpret popular morality as allowing 
 governments a general licence to dispense them- 
 selves from the obligation of these rules when they 
 find it convenient, in view of the general tendency to 
 transgress them. But to an important extent, in 
 special cases, such a licence is commonly conceded. 
 Take the case of veracity. We should not condemn 
 a general in war for disseminating false statements to 
 nuslea<l_ttl£„£aeiny^_or for sending spies to obtain 
 information as to the enemy's movements by pro- 
 cesses involving an indefinite amount of falsehood. A 
 similar licence is commonly conceded to governments 
 — or at least to their subordinates — in performing 
 the task of maintaining order within the community 
 governed. We recognize that in the ceaseless contest 
 with secret crime, the business of the detective police 
 — which involves continual deception — is practically 
 indispensable ; and must therefore be regarded as 
 a legitimate, if not highly honourable, calling. There 
 is at present no such general toleration of the use of 
 falsehood and spies and stratagems in diplomacy ; 
 times are changed, I am told, since the definition of 
 a diplomatist as a person " sent to lie abroad for the 
 benefit of his country," was from a scientific point of 
 view admissible. But here again, I think, a reason- 
 able expectation of reciprocity is practically accepted 
 as a condition of the stringency of the rule prohibit- 
 
76 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 ing such artifices — a plot would be held to justify 
 a counterplot, at any rate if there were no other 
 effective means of defeating it. 
 
 In the case of breach of engagements, the exten- 
 sion of the scope of self-protection is of a somewhat 
 different character. Our common morality does not 
 justify treacherous promises, made without intention 
 of fulfilling them, even in dealing with states that 
 have been guilty of such treachery. Speaking 
 broadly, the right mode of dealing with such a 
 state is clearly to treat its promises as idle words, 
 unless there is some adequate ground, other than 
 the promise itself, for expecting its fulfilment. 
 But when modern states have failed to carry out 
 their compacts — and history abounds in instances 
 of such failure — they have usually made excuses, 
 alleging ambiguity of terms, material change of 
 circumstances, or the non-fulfilment of promises on 
 the other side. Now, in dealing with a government 
 which — in order to free itself from inconvenient 
 treaty-obligations — is in the habit of using pleas of 
 this kind in a strained and unreasonable manner, 
 I conceive that any other government would not 
 be liable to censure for claiming a similar freedom 
 — at any rate, in case of urgent need. 
 
 It will be observed that, according to the moral 
 view that I am endeavouring to express, urgent 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY, 77 
 
 need is held to be required — as well as the ante- 
 cedence of similar acts on the other side — in order 
 completely to justify a breach of veracity or good 
 faith. Without urgent need, the fact that any 
 particular act of unveracity or bad faith is merely 
 imitative and retaliatory affords an excuse, but not 
 an adequate justification ; since even a retaliatory 
 act of this kind has the mischievous effect of a 
 bad precedent, and tends to depress the customary 
 standard of morality between nations. 
 
 I may here mention one special difference between 
 public and private morality arising from the same 
 absence of a common government which has hitherto 
 rendered wars between nations inevitable, — the 
 different view that is and must be taken of the 
 bindingness of compacts imposed by force in the 
 two cases. In an orderly state, a promise obtained 
 from any person by unlawful force has, of course, 
 no legal validity : and it is at least doubtful whether 
 it has any moral validity. If in England a robber 
 were to force me, under threat of death, to promise 
 him a large sum of money, I conceive that no 
 thoughtful person would censure me for breaking 
 my promise, though he might feel a sentimental 
 preference for the opposite course. But in the case 
 of states, we cannot similarly treat wrongful force 
 ^s invalidating obligations deliberately undertaken 
 
78 PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 under its pressure : to do this — as I have elsewhere 
 said — " would obviously tend to aggravate the evils 
 of unjust victory" in war : " as the unjust victor, 
 being unable to rely on the promises of the van- 
 quished community, would be impelled by self- 
 interest to crush it utterly." At the same time, 
 there is an opposite danger in treating oppressive 
 conditions thus imposed as finally and permanently 
 binding : as this would increase the temptation — 
 already sufficiently strong — to skilfully-timed acts of 
 violent aggression. In this dilemma, international 
 morality has, I think, to adopt a somewhat vague 
 compromise, and to regard such obligation as having 
 I a limited validity, but tending to lose their force 
 ; through lapse of time, and the change of circum- 
 stances that lapse of time brings with it.* 
 ' So far I have been speaking of international 
 relations ; but the general principles that I have 
 applied to them must, I think, be admitted to some 
 extent in respect of internal crises in the life of a 
 political society. Here, however, I must guard 
 against a misunderstanding. I do not think we 
 should assume that the changes — even the greater 
 changes — in internal polity, which the future has 
 
 * This general view may be made a little less vague by distinguish- 
 ing different kinds of conditions imposed by unjust force. See my 
 Elements of Politics., chap, xvi., p. 6. 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 79 
 
 doubtless in store for European states, must neces- 
 sarily involve violent breaches of political order, 
 in respect of which the ordinary rules of morality 
 are to be suspended. Revolutions and coups d'etat 
 are fraught with such wide and far-reached mischief 
 that the efforts to avoid them should never be 
 relaxed : if political meteorologists unite in affirming 
 that one or other must come "sooner or later," the 
 true patriot should answer, with Canning, that he 
 "prefers it later." The same is, of course, true of 
 wars : but there is at present more reason to hope 
 for the ultimate success of such efforts in the case 
 of internal strife owing to the greater strength of 
 the bonds of interest and sympathy that unite 
 members of the same state. But if ever such efforts 
 seem doomed to fail, and the minds of men are 
 turning to the violent courses that appear inevitable, 
 an enlargement of the right of self-protection — 
 somewhat similar to that which we have just 
 recognized in international relations — must be 
 conceded to any of the sections into which the 
 state is suffering a transient moral disintegration ; 
 or rather to the statesmen acting on behalf of such 
 a section. 
 
 The last sentence leads me to notice a reason 
 sometimes given for divergence between public 
 and private morality, which I have not yet con- 
 
8o PUBLIC MORALITY. 
 
 sidered. It is said that the actions of states have 
 generally to be judged as actions of governments ; 
 and that governments hold a position analogous 
 to that of trustees in relation to the community- 
 governed, and therefore cannot legitimately incur 
 risks which a high morality would require individuals 
 to incur in similar cases. I think that there is some 
 force in the argument, but that it is only applicable 
 within a very narrow range. Trustees, whether for 
 private or collective interests, are bound to be just ; 
 and the cases are at any rate very rare in which 
 the highest morality applicable in the actual 
 condition of international relations would really 
 require states to be generous at the definite sacrifice 
 of their interests. For a state to embark on a 
 career of international knight - errantry would, 
 generally speaking, be hardly more conducive to 
 the interests of the civilized world than to those 
 of the supposed Quixotic community. Still I 
 admit that cases may occur in which intervention 
 of this kind, at a cost or risk to the intervening 
 community beyond what strict self-regard could 
 justify, would be clearly advantageous to the world, 
 and that in such cases the "quasi-trusteeship" 
 attaching to the position of government might 
 render its duty doubtful. It would seem that in 
 a case of this kind the moral responsibility for public 
 
PUBLIC MORALITY. 8i 
 
 conduct is properly transferred in a large measure 
 from the rulers to the ruled. The government may 
 legitimately judge that it is right to run a risk with 
 the support of public opinion which it would be 
 wrong to run without it ; so that it becomes the 
 duty of private persons — in proportion as they 
 contribute to the formation of public opinion — to 
 manifest a readiness to give the required support. 
 
 To sum up briefly the main result of a long 
 
 discussion. So far as the past conduct of any 
 
 foreign state shows that reciprocal fulfilment of 
 
 international duty — as commonly recognized — 
 
 cannot reasonably be expected from it, I admit 
 
 that any other state that may have to deal with 
 
 it must be allowed a corresponding extension of 
 
 the right of self- protection, in the interest of 
 
 humanity at large no less than in its own interest. 
 
 ' It must be allowed to anticipate attack which it 
 
 has reasonable grounds for regarding as imminent, 
 
 ; to meet wiles with wiles as well as force with force, 
 
 I and to be circumspect in the fulfilment of any 
 
 i compact it may make with such a state. But 
 
 I do not regard this as constituting a fundamental 
 
 difference between public and private morality ; 
 
 similar rights may have to be exceptionally claimed 
 
 and exercised between man and man in the most 
 
 orderly society that we have experience of; the 
 
 G 
 
82 PUBLIC MORALITY, 
 
 difference is mainly in the degree of exceptionality 
 of the claim. It remains true that in both cases 
 equally it must be insisted that the interest of the 
 part is to be pursued only in such manner and 
 degree as is compatible with the interests of the 
 larger community of which it is a part ; and that 
 any violation of the rules of mutual behaviour 
 actually established in the common interests of this 
 community, so far as it is merely justified by its 
 conduciveness to the sectional interest of a particular 
 group of human beings, must receive unhesitating 
 and unsparing censure. 
 
\ ^* 
 
 IV. 
 
 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE* 
 
 A LL who have thought earnestly on moral 
 -^^^ questions, and in particular have reflected on 
 the causes of and the remedies for the failure to 
 do what is right in themselves and others, must have 
 recognized that the causes of this failure divide 
 themselves naturally under two distinct heads. 
 Firstly,, men do not see their duty with sufficient 
 clearness ; secondly, they do not feel the obligation 
 to do it with sufficient force. But there are great 
 differences of opinion among thoughtful persons as 
 to the relative importance of these different sources 
 of wrong conduct. The commonest opinion is 
 disposed to lay most stress on the latter, the defect 
 of feeling or will, and even to consider the defect 
 of intellectual insight as having comparatively little 
 practical importance. It is not uncommon to hear 
 it said by preachers and moralizers that we all 
 
 * An address delivered to the London Ethical Society in the year 
 1S90. 
 
 83 
 
84 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 know our duty quite sufficiently for practical pur- 
 poses, if we could only spur or brace our wills 
 into steady action in accordance with our convictions. 
 And it is no doubt true that, if we suppose all 
 our intellectual errors and limitations to remain 
 unchanged, and only the feebleness of character 
 which prevents our acting on our convictions re- 
 moved, an immense improvement would take place 
 in many departments of human life. But it is 
 important not to overlook other inevitable results 
 of the supposed change, which would certainly not 
 be improvements. We all recognize the dangers 
 of fanaticism. But what is a fanatic? Surely we 
 all mean by a " fanatic " a person , who .acts up to 
 his convictions, resolutely and perhaps vehemently, 
 when they are opposed to the common sense of 
 mankind, and when — in the judgment of common 
 sense — his acts are likely to lead to gravely mis- 
 chievous consequences. If, therefore, we suppose 
 that the element of intellectual error in the causes 
 of wrong action remains unchanged, while the 
 element of feebleness of character, weakness of 
 motive or will to do duty, is entirely removed, we 
 must suppose fanaticism greatly increased. We 
 must also suppose an increase in the bad effects 
 of more widespread errors in popular morality, 
 which are now often prevented from causing the 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 85 
 
 full evil which they tend to cause, by the actual 
 feebleness of the mistaken resistance which they 
 oppose to healthy natural impulses. Hence, when 
 we had to strike the balance of gain and loss to 
 human happiness resulting from the change — though 
 I have no doubt that the gain on the whole would 
 be great — we must recognize that the drawbacks 
 would be serious and substantial. 
 
 Considerations of this kind have led some thought- 
 ful minds to take an exactly, ^opposite view, and 
 to regard it of paramount importance to remove 
 the intellectual source of error in conduct, holding 
 with Socrates that the true good of each individual 
 man is really consistent and harmonious with the 
 true good of all the rest ; and that what every man 
 really wants is his own true good, if he only knew 
 it. But this view also is too simple and unqualified ; 
 since, in the first place, a man often sacrifices what 
 he rightly regards as his true interest to the over- 
 mastering influence of appetite or resentment or 
 ambition ; and, secondly, if we measure human 
 well-being by an ordinary mundane standard, and 
 suppose men's feelings and wants unaltered, we 
 i must admit that the utmost intellectual enlighten- 
 ment would not prevent the unrestrained pursuit 
 of private interest from being, sometimes, anti-social, 
 anarchical, and disorganizing. Still, allowing all 
 
86 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 this, it seems to me not only that a very substantial 
 gain would result if we could remove from men's 
 minds all errors of judgment as to right and wrong, 
 good and evil, even if we left other causes of bad 
 conduct unchanged ; but that the gain in this case 
 would be more unmixed than in the former case. 
 Suppose, for instance, that every one who is liable 
 to drink too much had clearly present to his mind, 
 in the moment of temptation, the full amount of 
 harm that his insobriety was doing to his bodily 
 health, his reputation, his means of providing for 
 those dependent on him ; some, no doubt, would 
 drink all the same, but the great majority of those 
 not yet in bondage to the unnatural craving would 
 draw back. Suppose, again, that any one who is 
 wronging a neighbour saw, as clearly as any im- 
 partial judge or friend would see, the violation of 
 right that he is committing; surely only a thoroughly 
 bad man would persist in his wrong-doing. And 
 thoroughly bad men are after all rare exceptions 
 among the beings of mingled and chequered moral 
 nature of whom the great mass of mankind consists, 
 and who on the whole mean only to maintain their 
 own rights and not to encroach upon the rights 
 of others; though doubtless, from a mixture of 
 intellectual muddle with passionate impulse or selfish 
 negligence, they are continually liable to wrong others. 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 87 
 
 I have drawn attention to this fundamental 
 distinction between (i) improvement in moral in- 
 sight and (2) improvement in feeling and will, 
 because I think it important that we should have 
 a clear view of its general character before we enter 
 on the special discussion of the " Morality of Strife," 
 which is the subject of the present paper. I ought 
 perhaps to explain that in speaking of strife I 
 shall have primarily and chiefly in view that most 
 intense form of conflict which we call war, in which 
 masses of civilized men elaborately try to destroy 
 each other's lives and incidentally to take each 
 other's property. This is the strife which, from its 
 fundamental nature and inevitable incidents, causes 
 the most intense and profound moral aversion and 
 perplexity to the modern mind. At the same time 
 it seems to me that the deepest problems presented by 
 war, and the deepest principles to be applied in dealing 
 with them, are applicable also to the milder conflicts 
 and collisions that arise within the limits of an orderly 
 and peaceful community, and especially to those 
 struggles for wealth and power carried on by classes 
 and parties within a state. Indeed, these latter — 
 though conducted by the milder methods of debate 
 and vote — often resemble wars very strongly in the 
 states of thought and feeling that they arouse, and 
 also in some of the difficulties that they suggest. 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE'. 
 
 Now, in considering the morality of strife, the 
 difference of opinion which I have been discussing, 
 as to the causes of wrong conduct in general, meets 
 us with especial force. Thus many will say, when 
 they hear of moralizing war, that the moralist ought 
 not to acquiesce in its existence ; he ought to trace 
 it to its source, in the lack of kindly feeling among 
 human beings. Spread kindness and goodwill ; 
 make altruism predominate over egoism ; and wars 
 between states will come to an end among civilized 
 men, because there will be no hostile emotions to 
 rouse them, while within states strife will resolve 
 itself into a competition for the privilege of doing 
 good to others. I do not deny that a solution of 
 the problem of war for the world might be found 
 in this diffusion of kindly feeling, if sufficiently 
 ardent and universal. But for this effect the uni- 
 versality is necessary as well as the ardour. The 
 increase of the "enthusiasm of humanity" in a 
 moral minority, in a world where most men are 
 still as selfish as now, would have no decisive 
 tendency to prevent strife ; for if around us some 
 are wronging others, the predominance of altruism 
 in ourselves, though it will diminish our disposition 
 to fight in our own quarrels, will make us more 
 eager to take part with others who are wronged ; 
 and since, so long as we are human beings, our 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 89 
 
 kindly feelings must flow more strongly in special 
 channels, as they grow in intensity we shall exhibit 
 greater energy in defending against unjust attacks 
 the narrower communities and groups in which we 
 take special interest. Increase of sympathy among 
 human beings may ultimately do away with strife ; 
 but it will only be after a long interval, during which 
 the growth of sympathetic resentment against wrongs 
 seems not unlikely to cause as much strife as the 
 diminution of mere selfishness prevents. The 
 Founder of Christianity is recorded to have said 
 that he "came not to bring peace on earth, but 
 a sword," and the subsequent history of Christianity 
 offers ample and striking confirmation of the truth 
 of the prediction. And the same may be said, 
 with at least equal truth, of that ardour for the 
 secular amelioration of mankind which we find 
 presented to us in these latter days as a substitute 
 for Christian feeling. 
 
 The extinction of strife through the extension 
 of amity being thus at best a remote event, we 
 may allow ourselves to dwell for a moment on the 
 brighter aspects of the continuance of war. War 
 is an evil ; but it is not, from an ethical point of 
 view, an unmixed evil. Indeed, its value as a school 
 of manly virtue led the greatest thinkers of ancient 
 Greece — even in the civilized fourth century — to 
 
90 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 regard the fighting part of the community as the 
 only part on whose education it was worth while 
 to bestow labour and care ; the occupations of the 
 trader and the artisan being considered an in- 
 superable bar to the development of fine moral 
 qualities. Christianity and the growth of free 
 industry combined have carried European thought 
 so far away from the point of view of Plato and 
 Aristotle, that their utterances on this topic now 
 seem to most of us startlingly narrow-minded and 
 barbaric ; but the element of truth that they contain 
 still, from time to time, forces itself on the modern 
 mind, and finds transient expression in a modified 
 form. There are, I believe, even at the end of 
 the nineteenth century, some thoughtful persons 
 seriously concerned for moral excellence, who would 
 regret the extinction of war ; attracted not so 
 much by the showy virtue of valour in battle, but 
 by the unreserved devotion, the ardour of self- 
 sacrifice for duty and the common good, which war 
 tends to develop. If this acceptance of war as 
 an indispensable school of virtue were widespread 
 enough to impede the drift of modern opinion and 
 sentiment towards universal peace as an ideal, it 
 might be necessary to argue against it as a 
 dangerous paradox. In such an argument we 
 should not lay stress exclusively or even mainly 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE, 91 
 
 on its physical mischief; but still more on its 
 moral evils, its barbarous inadequacy as a means 
 of settling disputes of right, the frequent triumphs 
 of injustice and their demoralizing consequences, 
 the constant tendency of the bitter resentments and 
 the intensification of national self-regard, which war 
 brings with it, to overpower the sentiments of 
 humanity, and confuse and obscure those of justice 
 and good faith. But I need not labour these points ; 
 the evils of war are so keenly felt that the moralist 
 may without danger allow himself to make the 
 most of the opportunities of moral development 
 that it affords. 
 
 What I rather wish now to point out is, that 
 the moral benefits of war, such as they are, 
 depend largely on the fact that war is not usually 
 — as cynics imply — a mere collision of passions 
 and cupidities; it is a conflict in which each side 
 conceives itself to be contending on behalf of 
 legitimate interests. In the wars 1 have known, 
 as a contemporary, this has been strikingly mani- 
 fested in the sincere belief of religious persons 
 generally — ordinary plain honest Christians on either 
 side — that God would defend their cause. In the 
 wars of ancient history a people's belief in special 
 divine protection was not equally an evidence of 
 its belief in the justice of its cause, since each 
 
92 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 nation had its own deities who were expected to 
 take sides with their worshippers ; but in a war 
 between modern Christian nations, worshipping the 
 same God, the favour of heaven impHes the justice 
 of the cause favoured ; and it is sometimes starthng 
 to see that not only is each side convinced of its 
 overwhelming claims to the favour of heaven, but 
 it can hardly believe in a similar sincere conviction 
 on the other side. Perhaps some of my readers 
 may remember how, in the Franco -German war of 
 1870, the pious utterances of the Emperor William 
 excited the derision of Frenchmen and their friends ; 
 it seemed to the latter not only evident that the 
 invading Germans were brigands, but even impossible 
 to conceive that they did not know that they were 
 brigands. This strikingly shows how war among 
 human beings, supposing them to possess the degree 
 of rationality that average civilized humanity has 
 at present reached, is normally not a mere conflict 
 of interests, but also a conflict of opposing views 
 of right and justice. 
 
 I must not exaggerate. I do not mean that in 
 modern times unscrupulous statesmen have never 
 made wars that were substantially acts of conscious 
 brigandage, and have never been applauded for so 
 doing by the nations whom they led, who have 
 suffered a temporary obscurity of their moral sense 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE 93 
 
 under the influence of national ambition. I do not 
 say that this has not occurred ; but I do not think 
 it is the normal case, and I shall leave it out of 
 account, partly because it does not seem to me to 
 give rise to any moral problem which we can 
 profitably discuss. The immorality of such un- 
 scrupulous aggression is simple; and the duty is 
 no less clear for any individual in the aggressing 
 country to use any moral and intellectual influence 
 he may possess — facing unpopularity — to prevent 
 the immoral act. It may be difficult to say exactly 
 how far he should go in such opposition ; but the 
 answer to this question depends so much on cir- 
 cumstances that an abstract discussion of it is 
 hardly profitable. 
 
 It is still more true that in any strife of parties 
 and classes within a modern civilized state, when 
 there is a conflict of interests, it is not of bare in- 
 terests, but of interests clothed in the garb of rights — 
 and in the main the garb is not hypocritically worn. 
 In such a state the sentiment of fellow-citizenship, 
 the habit of co-operating for common ends, the 
 community of hopes and fears stirred by the 
 vicissitudes of national prosperity, tend powerfully 
 to reinforce the wider sentiments of humanity and 
 justice to men as men. Hence, though the pre- 
 datory type of human being cannot be said to 
 
94 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 be rare in any civilized society, it is still an ex- 
 ceptional type ; the average member of such a 
 society is too moral to enter into a struggle on 
 behalf of interests which he knows to be " sinister 
 interests" — to use Bentham's apt phrase. I do not 
 say that he is not easily led to believe that what is 
 conducive to his interests is just — men's proneness 
 to such belief is proverbial — but the belief is 
 generally sincere ; and though, again, in the heat 
 of party conflict many things are done from passion 
 and eagerness to win which are known to be wrong, 
 these are deplorable incidents of party strife, they 
 do not make up its moral texture. 
 
 If, then, normal human strife is due not merely 
 to colliding interests, but to conflicting views of 
 rights, it would seem that we might hope to reduce 
 its worst eflects to a sporadic and occasional evil, 
 if we could only find and make clear the true 
 definition of the rights in question. For though 
 the interests of all individuals, classes, and nations 
 are not harmonious, their rights are ; that is the 
 essential difference between the two. You cannot 
 be sure of bringing disputants into harmony and 
 peace by enlightening them as to their true interests, 
 though you may in some cases ; but you must do 
 this if you can really and completely enlighten them 
 as to their true rights, unless they are bad enough 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 95 
 
 to fight on in conscious wrongful aggression. Such 
 completeness of enlightenment, however, we cannot 
 reasonably expect to attain ; the complexity of 
 human relations, and the imperfection of our intel- 
 lectual methods of dealing with them, preclude the 
 hope that we can ever solve a problem of rights 
 with the demonstrative clearness and certainty with 
 which we can solve a problem of mathematics. The 
 practical question therefore is, how we can attain 
 a tolerable approximation to such a solution. 
 
 To many the answer to this question seems simple. 
 They propose to settle the disputes of right between 
 nations, and the disputes of right between classes 
 and sections within any state, by applying what 
 I will call an external method ; i.e.^ by referring 
 the dispute to the judgment of impartial — and, if 
 possible, skilled — outsiders, as the legal disputes of 
 individual members of a civilized community are 
 referred to arbitrators, judges, and juries. I call this 
 an external method, because it does not require 
 any effect to be produced on the intellects and 
 consciences of the disputants ; they are allow ed 
 to remain in their onesided and erroneous con- 
 victions ; indeed, they are almost inevitably left to 
 concentrate their attention on their own onesided 
 views, and — if I may so say — harden themselves 
 in their onesidedness, because their function in the 
 
96 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 process of settlement is to advocate their own case 
 before the outside arbiter ; they are not supposed 
 to be convinced by his decision, but merely to 
 accept it for the sake of peace. 
 
 The method takes various forms, according to 
 circumstances. In the case of disputes between 
 nations it takes the form of a substitution of 
 arbitration for war ; the practical — or, perhaps I 
 may say, the technical — problem comes to be how 
 to get a wise and impartial court of international 
 arbitration. A similar method is widely advocated 
 for the settlement of those disputes between em- 
 ployers and employed — within the limits drawn 
 by the existing law — which have been so long a 
 prominent feature of our present industrial condition. 
 But in the still deeper disputes between classes 
 and sections within a community, which tend to 
 changes in the established legal order, the expedient 
 commonly recommended is somewhat different ; it 
 consists in the construction of a legislature on the 
 representative system, so adjusted and balanced that 
 each class and section has enough representatives 
 to advocate its claims, but not enough to constitute 
 it a judge in its own cause ; the decision on any 
 proposed change in laws or taxation, affecting the 
 interests of different sections in opposite ways, is 
 always to rest with the presumably impartial repre- 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE, 97 
 
 sentatlves of other sections. Now, I do not wish 
 to undervalue the external method in any of these 
 cases ; I think the attention of statesmen should 
 be seriously directed to making it as perfect as 
 possible. But I cannot believe that it is in any 
 case safe to rely on it for a complete and final 
 removal of the evils of strife. 
 
 Let us place ourselves at the point of view of 
 a nation that is being drawn into what it regards 
 as a just war, according to the received principles 
 of international justice. It is obvious that any 
 serious and unprovoked violation of international 
 duty must be held to give a state whose rights 
 are violated a claim for reparation ; and if repara- 
 tion be obstinately refused, it would seem that — 
 so long as states are independent — the offending 
 state must be held to have a right to obtain it by 
 force, with the aid of any other states that can be 
 persuaded to join it. This exercise of force need 
 not necessarily amount to war. For instance, if 
 the property belonging to a state or any of its 
 members has been unjustly seized by another state, 
 reparation may be obtained by reprisals ; but it is 
 most probable that such reprisals, being resisted, 
 will lead to the thorough-going appeal to physical 
 force as a means of settlement, which we call war. 
 Well, at this point it is asked, by many earnest 
 
 H 
 
98 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE 
 
 philanthropists, " Why should not the offended state 
 make a proposal to submit its claims to arbitration, 
 and why should not the offending state be made, 
 by the pressure of public opinion, to accept this 
 proposal?" I am far from waiving this suggestion 
 aside as out of the range of practical politics. 
 Much may be hoped, in the way of reduction of 
 the danger of war between civilized states, from 
 improvements in the machinery of arbitration, and 
 a more extensive adoption of the improved ma- 
 chinery ; and the efforts of those who keep urging 
 these points on the attention of statesmen and of 
 the public deserve our warmest sympathy. But I 
 think that such efforts are more likely to attain 
 the limited success which can alone be reasonably 
 hoped, if those who urge them bear in mind the 
 inevitable limitations of the applicability of arbitra- 
 tion to the disputes of right between nations. 
 
 In the first place, the violation of right which 
 leads to a conflict may be a continuing evil, which 
 requires immediate abatement as well as reparation ; 
 and the violence required for this abatement is 
 likely to lead to further violence on the other side, 
 so that the conflicting states may be drawn into 
 the condition of war by a series of steps too rapid 
 to allow of the delay necessary for arbitration, and 
 which involve so many fresh grounds of complaint 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 99 
 
 that the decision of the original dispute may easily 
 sink into insignificance. But there are other reasons 
 of more importance and wider application. On the 
 one hand, the interests at stake may be so serious 
 that a state, believing itself able to obtain redress 
 by its own strong hand, cannot reasonably be ex- 
 pected to run the risk of arbitration, unless it can 
 feel tolerably secure of impartiality in the arbitrator ; 
 or, to keep closer to the moral problem actually 
 presented, I should rather say that the government 
 of a community cannot feel justified in thus risking 
 the interests of the community intrusted to it. On 
 the other hand, where the quarrel is one that in- 
 volves a conflict of principles, widely extended 
 among civilized states, there may be an insuperable 
 difficulty in finding an arbiter on whose impar- 
 tiality both sides could rely. A similar difficulty 
 may be caused by the ties of interest and alliance 
 binding nations into groups. Thus, in the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries it would have been almost 
 impossible to find such an arbiter in Europe in 
 any quarrel between a Catholic and a Protestant state. 
 In the nineteenth century it would be almost im- 
 possible to find such an arbiter in any quarrel 
 caused by the claims of a nationality struggling 
 for independence ; while in the intervening period 
 the combinations of states — formed, to a great 
 
loo THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 extent, for the legitimate end of maintaining the 
 "balance of power" — presented a similar obstacle. 
 
 Now, I think that history shows that minor 
 violations of international rights — such as arbitra- 
 tion undoubtedly might settle — have rarely been the 
 real causes, though they have often been the osten- 
 sible causes and the real occasions^ of momentous 
 wars. The most serious wars of the European 
 group of states have resulted from conflicting 
 fundamental principles, religious or political, or 
 conflicting national interests of great real or sup- 
 posed importance, or more often a combination 
 of the two. Hence, though the international law 
 which arbitrators can administer may be most useful 
 in removing minor occasions of controversy and 
 in minimizing the mischief resulting from graver 
 conflicts, we can hardly look to it to provide such 
 a settlement for the graver controversies as will 
 enable us to dispense with war. This will perhaps 
 appear more clearly if we reflect for a moment 
 on the special difficulties that beset the definition 
 of international rights, in consequence of which 
 opposite views of imperfectly- defined rights tend 
 to be combined with discordant interests. Such 
 difficulties arise partly from the absence of a central 
 government of the community of nations ; partly 
 from the imperfect unity and cohesion of a nation 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. loi 
 
 as compared with individual human beings ; partly 
 from the great difference in degrees of civilization 
 in the society of nations ; and practically we have 
 also to take into account the comparatively small 
 number of civilized states, and the consequent 
 greater importance of an individual nation — and 
 still more of a group of allied nations — relatively to 
 the whole community whose affairs international law 
 is designed to regulate. The first of these causes 
 renders necessary and legitimate an extension of 
 the right and duty of self-defence, which it is very 
 difficult to limit. War is not only obviously just 
 against actual aggression, but when aggression is 
 unmistakably being prepared, the nation threatened 
 cannot be condemned for striking the first blow, 
 if this is an important gain for self-defence. But 
 this easily passes over into anticipation of a blow 
 that is merely feared, not really threatened. Indeed, 
 this enlarged right of self-protection against mere 
 danger has often been further extended to justify 
 hostile interference to prevent a neighbour growing 
 strong merely through expansion or coalescence 
 with other states. I think that moral opinion should 
 set itself steadily against this latter extension of the 
 right of self-protection ; still, it is obviously difficult 
 to define exactly the degree of alarm that would 
 justify hostile action. It is still more difficult to 
 
ro2 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 decide, on any clearly just principles, how far the 
 right of national self-preservation may be legiti- 
 mately extended into the right to prevent interference 
 with " national development " — e.g., if nation A 
 appropriates territory over which nation B is hoping 
 to extend its sway some time or other. At the 
 same time, this is a cause of strife that we must, 
 I think, expect to operate more intensely as the 
 world gets fuller. With each successive generation 
 the demand for expansion on the part of civilized 
 nations is likely to grow stronger ; and the more 
 serious the interests involved, the more difficult it 
 will be to obtain acquiescence in the rules deter- 
 mining the legitimate occupation of new territory, 
 which must inevitably be to some extent arbitrary. 
 And the question is complicated by the differences 
 in grade of civilization, to which I have referred ; 
 for the nations most advanced in civilization have 
 a tendency — the legitimacy of which cannot be 
 broadly and entirely disputed — to absorb semi- 
 civilized states in their neighbourhood, as in the 
 expansion of England and Russia in Asia, and of 
 France in Africa. As, I say, the tendency cannot 
 be altogether condemned, since it often seems clearly 
 a gain to the world on the whole that the absorp- 
 tion should take place; still it is obviously difficult 
 to define the conditions under which this is legiti- 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 103 
 
 mate, and the civilized nation engaged in this process 
 of absorption cannot be surprised that other civiHzed 
 nations think that they have a right to interfere and 
 prevent the aggression. 
 
 When we turn to the part of the earth tolerably- 
 filled with civilized nations — to Western Europe — 
 it seems that the duty of avoiding substantial en- 
 croachment would be so clear that it could not 
 be violated without manifest immorality, if only 
 such nations had perfect internal unity and co- 
 herence. I do not see, e.g., how any quarrel could 
 easily arise between France and Spain — apart from 
 collisions of interest in other parts of the world — 
 except of the minor kind which arbitration might 
 settle, unless there was something like avowed 
 brigandage on one side or the other. But we have 
 only to look at Germany and Italy to see that 
 even Western Europe is far from being composed 
 of states of this type ; and even if internal unity 
 were attained for a time, it might always be broken 
 up again by some new division. 
 
 I therefore think it inevitable that, at least for 
 a long time to come, every nation in the most 
 important matters — as individuals in matters not 
 within the range of law courts — must to an im- 
 portant extent be judge in its own cause ; it may 
 refer some of its disputes to arbitration — and I 
 
I04 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 hope the number may increase — but there are others 
 which it cannot so refer, and its judgment must 
 determine the Hmits of such reference. Other con- 
 siderations might be adduced, tending to restrict still 
 further the normal application of arbitration in inter- 
 national controversies ; e.g.^ it might be shown that 
 even where both sides in such a controversy are 
 animated by an adequate and preponderant desire 
 for peace, an acceptable compromise is often more 
 likely to be attained by direct negotiation than by 
 reference to an arbitrator. But it belongs to a 
 political rather than an ethical discussion to dwell 
 on points like these. I have said enough to show 
 why even civilized nations, in which the majority 
 are so far moral as to be sincerely unwilling to 
 fight for a cause clearly known to be wrong, cannot 
 be expected to avoid war by arbitration, except to 
 a very limited extent. 
 
 If, then, a moral acquiescence in war is at present 
 inevitable, what is to be the aim of morality with 
 regard to it ? Chiefly, it would seem, twofold : to 
 reduce its causes by cultivating a spirit of justice, 
 and to minimize its mischievous effects by the 
 prevalence of a spirit of humanity. Now in this 
 latter point the progress of modern civilization 
 shows a steady and considerable improvement, — 
 though it must be admitted that the progress starts 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 105 
 
 from a very low level. The growth of humane 
 , sentiment has established rule after rule of military 
 'practice, tending to limit the mischief of war to 
 the minimum necessary for the attainment of its 
 ends. Thus bond-fide non-combatants have been 
 more and more completely exempted from personal 
 injury, while as regards their property, the old 
 indiscriminate pillage has given place to regulated 
 requisitions and contributions, the severity of which 
 at any rate falls short of cruelty. In the case of 
 combatants, the use of instruments — such as ex- 
 plosive bullets — which tend to cause pain out of 
 proportion to disablement has been expressly pro- 
 hibited, and the old liberty of refusing quarter 
 practically abandoned ; while elaborate provision has 
 been made for humane tending of sick and wounded 
 soldiers ; and humane treatment of prisoners, even 
 at considerable inconvenience to their captors, is 
 decisively imposed by the opinion of the civilized 
 world. Much, no doubt, might yet be done in the 
 same direction ; but considering the aims of war, 
 and the deadly violence inevitable in its methods, 
 I think that civilized humanity, at the end of the 
 nineteenth century, may look with some complacency 
 on the solid amount of improvement achieved. 
 
 The case is different when we turn to the 
 other duty of cultivating a spirit of justice. We 
 
io6 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 all admit that — as we must be judges in our own 
 cause — we ought to endeavour to be just judges ; 
 but there is hardly any plain duty of great im- 
 portance in which civilized men fail so palpably 
 as in this. Doubtless the impartiality required is 
 difficult ; still, I am persuaded that even the im- 
 perfect beings who compose modern nations might 
 perform with more success the judicial function— 
 which, in a modern state under popular government, 
 has become, in some degree, the business of every 
 man — if national consciences could be roused to 
 feel the nobility, and grapple practically and 
 persistently with the difficulties of the task. At 
 any rate, the thoughtful and moral part of every 
 community might fit themselves for this judicial 
 function with more care, and perform it under a 
 sense of graver responsibility than is now the case. 
 I am not urging that they should keep coldly aloof 
 from patriotic sentiment ; but at any rate before 
 the struggle has actually commenced, when the 
 cloud of discord that is to cover the sky is as 
 yet no bigger than a man's hand, it is surely the 
 imperative duty of all moral persons, according to 
 their gifts and leisure, to make an earnest and 
 systematic attempt to form an impartial view of the 
 points at issue. 
 
 There are three stages in such an attempt, which 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 107 
 
 are not always distinguished. First, we may en- 
 deavour to put ourselves in the opponent's place, 
 carrying with us our own principles and views of 
 right, and see whether, when we look at the 
 opponent's case from the inside, there is not more 
 to be said for it than appeared when we contem- 
 plated it from the outside. Secondly, if we have 
 no doubt that our opponent is in the wrong, 
 according to principles of right that we sincerely 
 hold, we still have to ask ourselves whether we 
 apply these principles not merely in claiming our 
 rights, but also in practically determining the per- 
 formance of our duties. For if there has been 
 divergence between our actions and our principles, 
 though it may not always be a reason for abandoning 
 a present claim — for two wrongs do not make a right 
 — it is an argument for mildness and for a spirit 
 of compromise. And, thirdly, if there seems to 
 us to be a real difference of principles, then comes 
 the most difficult duty of endeavouring to place 
 ourselves in an impartial position for contemplating 
 the different sets of principles, and seeing if there 
 is not an element of truth in the opponent's view 
 which we have hitherto missed. It is hard to bring 
 a man to this when once the complex collision of 
 principles and interests has begun, and it is still 
 harder to bring a nation to it ; but it is a plain 
 
io8 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE, 
 
 duty imposed on us by reason, and it is the most 
 essential part of the internal method of aiding 
 the transition from strife to concord, without which 
 the perfecting of the machinery of arbitration does 
 not seem to me likely to achieve very great results. 
 Fortunately it is not, for practical needs, indispensable 
 that the opposing views of justice should be com- 
 pletely harmonized ; it is practically sufficient if the 
 divergence be so far reduced by reciprocal admissions 
 that the difference remaining may appear to both 
 less important than the evils of war. Thus the effort 
 at mutual comprehension, even if it does not lead 
 to anything like agreement, may still avert strife. 
 For, finally, one great argument for the strenuous 
 use and advocacy of what I may distinguish as 
 the spiritual method of avoiding the appeal to 
 brute force in international disputes — the cultivation 
 of a spirit of justice — is that it tends to promote 
 the application of the external or political method. 
 If we school ourselves to seek no more than is 
 our due in any dispute, and to take pains to 
 ascertain what this is, we shall be practically more 
 willing to submit our claims to arbitration; and, 
 further, if a keen interest in international justice 
 spreads through civilized nations, confidence in 
 arbitrators will tend to increase. 
 
 I pass to consider briefly the burning question 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 109 
 
 of the strife between industrial classes, that is an 
 increasingly prominent feature of modern civilized 
 society ; the strife which, so far as physical violence 
 is excluded by political order, is carried on between 
 two groups of producers — ordinarily manual labourers 
 and employers — by means of concerted refusals to 
 exchange productive services except on terms fixed 
 by one or other of the opposing groups. There is 
 no kind of strife to which the application of the 
 method of arbitration appears at first sight more 
 reasonable, or is more commonly demanded ; but 
 there is none in which the nature of the case 
 ordinarily presents greater obstacles to the satis- 
 factory application of it. The difficulty here is not 
 so much to find an arbitrator adequately free from 
 bias as to find principles of distributive justice 
 which the common sense of both the classes con- 
 cerned accepts. This is a difficulty that seems to 
 reach its maximum in the present state of society, 
 which is distracted between two opposing ideals. 
 According to the individualistic ideal, monopoly 
 and combination would only exist to an insignificant 
 extent, and every individual worker would obtain, 
 through unlimited competition, the market value — 
 representing the social utility — of the services 
 rendered by him to society. On the other hand, 
 so far as we can conceive a completely socialistic 
 
no THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 regime to exist at all, we must suppose that the 
 remuneration allowed to different classes of pro- 
 ducers — beyond the minimum which anyone could 
 obtain from the state in return for the work which 
 it would have to provide for him somehow — would 
 be determined by some administrative organ of 
 government, on principles laid down by the legis- 
 lature. In neither case would there be an opening 
 for the industrial strife that naturally occurs in our 
 present intermediate system, in which the pursuit 
 of self-interest is more and more prompting to 
 combined instead of simply competitive action. In 
 this system the problem of determining the just 
 or equitable division of any product, between two 
 or more groups of the persons who have produced 
 it, only admits of a rough and, to a great extent, 
 arbitrary solution. Compulsory arbitration in the 
 disputes thus arising would involve serious risks in 
 a fully-peopled state ; for the rules to be applied by 
 the arbitrator would in the last resort have to be 
 determined by government ; and a state that under- 
 took to fix the terms of industrial bargains would 
 be responsible for any want of employment that 
 might result, and would therefore be in a logically 
 weak position for refusing to provide employment on 
 the terms thus laid down ; while if it attempted any 
 such provision, full-blown Socialism would be well 
 
THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. in 
 
 in sight. And even voluntary arbitration is, under 
 these conditions, only applicable when the two parties 
 have been somehow brought to agreement as to 
 the general rules by which any particular dispute 
 should be decided ; and the difficult problem is 
 how to bring them to this agreement. Here again, 
 therefore, the external method of composing strife 
 requires the aid of the spiritual method. For the 
 reason I have explained, to appeal to the sense of 
 justice, strictly speaking, of the opposing parties 
 would be rather ineffective rhetoric. But we may 
 none the less endeavour to develop the elements 
 from which the moral habit of justice springs — on 
 the one hand, sympathy, and the readiness to 
 imagine oneself in another's place and look at things 
 from his point of view ; and on the other hand, the 
 intelligent apprehension of common interests. In 
 this way we may hope to produce a disposition to 
 compromise, adequate for practical needs, even when 
 the adjustment thus attained can only be rough, 
 and far removed from what either party regards 
 as ideally equitable. 
 
 My limits do not allow me to discuss the larger 
 questions raised by the other external method of 
 realizing justice between classes in a state — I mean 
 the construction of a supreme government that will, 
 in legislation and taxation and the control of adminis- 
 
112 THE MORALITY OF STRIFE. 
 
 tration, keep a just balance between different sections 
 of the community. I can only express my conviction 
 that the most skilfully-adjusted representative system 
 will not really protect us against a majority, formed 
 by a combination of selfish interests, becoming 
 practically judge in its own cause ; and the belief in 
 the natural right of the majority of any community 
 to do what it likes is a political superstition which 
 is rapidly passing to the limbo of such superstitions. 
 The only sure way of preventing strife within modern 
 states from growing continually more bitter and 
 dangerous lies in persuading the citizens, of all 
 classes and sections, that it is not enough to desire 
 justice sincerely ; it is needful that they fit them- 
 selves, by laborious and sustained efforts to under- 
 stand the truths mingled with opposing errors, for 
 the high and deeply responsible function, which 
 democracy throws on them, of determining and 
 realizing social justice so far as it depends on 
 government. Otherwise, there seems grave reason to 
 fear that the strife of sections within a community 
 may lead to war in the future, as it has done in 
 the past. 
 
V. 
 
 THE ETHICS OF RELIGIOUS 
 CONFORMITY* 
 
 T HAVE taken as the subject of my address to- 
 -■- day the " Ethics of ReHgious Conformity." What 
 I wish to discuss is the duty which the persons who 
 form the progressive — or, to use a neutral term, the 
 deviating — element in a religious community owe to 
 the rest of that community ; the extent to which they 
 ought to give expression and effect to their opinions 
 within the community ; and the point at which the 
 higher interests of truth force them to the disruption 
 of old ties and cherished associations. There can, I 
 think, be little doubt that this is an ethical question 
 of much importance. But it may reasonably be 
 doubted whether it is one with which we are here 
 called upon to concern ourselves. I will begin by 
 trying to remove this doubt. 
 
 * A lecture delivered to the West London Ethical Society, Novem- 
 ber 24, 1S95, and published in the International Journal of Ethics, 
 April, 1896. 
 
 I ZI3 
 
114 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 The aim of our Society is to be a moralizing 
 agency, to assist "individual and social efforts after 
 right living." Now, actually, in the world we live 
 in, the great moralizing agencies are the Christian 
 churches ; and the most advanced thinker can hardly 
 suppose that this will not continue to be the case for 
 an indefinite time to come. If so, surely none can 
 be more seriously concerned than members of an 
 Ethical Society that the vast influence exercised by 
 the churches on social morality should be as pure 
 and elevating as possible. 
 
 It is true that our work proceeds on a different 
 basis : our principles are that " the good life has a 
 claim on us in virtue of its supreme worth to 
 humanity," and "rests for its justification" simply 
 "on the nature of man as a rational and social 
 being." But, in the view of the wiser and more 
 thoughtful teachers in the Christian churches, this 
 is not a basis to be rejected, though it needs to be 
 supplemented. I will mention one or two great 
 names. The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas has 
 been for centuries the dominant philosophy in the 
 Church of Rome. In the Anglican Church, and 
 beyond its limits in England, there is no repre- 
 sentative of orthodox Christian morality who has 
 gained more esteem than Joseph Butler. Yet no 
 one can doubt that in the view of Aquinas and of 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY, 115 
 
 Butler equally it was a matter of the highest im- 
 portance to show how — putting aside the Christian 
 revelation — a life of virtue (not saintly virtue, but 
 ordinary human virtue) might be justified on a 
 consideration of the nature of man as a rational 
 and social being. 
 
 Accordingly, in our Cambridge Ethical Society — 
 though this is not, any more than yours, founded 
 on the basis of acceptance of traditional Christian 
 dogma — we have always invited, and, I am glad to 
 say, obtained the co-operation of persons of orthodox 
 views. It may seem, however, that this unexclusive 
 attitude is incompatible with your express principle 
 that the good life " rests for its justification on no 
 external authority, and no system of supernatural 
 rewards and punishments " ; but I venture to in- 
 terpret this principle as opposed not to Christian 
 doctrine, but to a superficial and unphilosophic form 
 of such doctrine. For in a more profound and 
 philosophical view divine authority is not conceived 
 as external ; it is the authority of that Universal 
 Reason through community with which all knowledge, 
 all truth, comes to human minds. So, again, the 
 rewards of virtue and the penalties of vice to which 
 Christianity looks forward in the future lives of in- 
 dividuals are not " supernatural," since the conditions 
 under which, if at all, those lives will be lived are 
 
ii6 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 conditions forming part of one system of nature — a 
 system deriving its unity from the One Mind which 
 is its ground. I am far from imposing this as an 
 authoritative interpretation of your formula, but I 
 trust I am right in regarding it as an admissible 
 interpretation ; since it is in this view of the scope of 
 your principles that I accepted the honour of being 
 your President, and of addressing you here to-day. 
 
 For while I have always sympathized with the 
 movement that has led to the formation of Ethical 
 Societies here and in America, I have always held 
 that they ought to maintain — and I hope that they 
 always will maintain — towards the churches an 
 attitude of fraternal sympathy, without either con- 
 flict or competition. The work that the churches 
 are doing, with their vast resources and traditional 
 influence over men's minds, is work in the eflicacy 
 of which we must always be keenly interested ; while 
 any work that we may accomplish in our little 
 measure, towards the realization of our avowed aims, 
 is work which the thoughtful among them will equally 
 desire to be well done — though, of course, in their 
 view it cannot be by itself adequate for the guidance 
 of life. 
 
 It is, then, in this spirit that I address myself to 
 the subject that I have announced. 
 
 The student of history sees that hypocrisy and 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 117 
 
 insincere conformity have always been a besetting 
 vice of established or predominant religions ; and a 
 grave drawback to their moralizing influence after 
 the first period of ardent struggle is over, and they 
 have attained a stable position of power and in- 
 fluence over men's minds. Indeed, we may say that 
 in the popular classification of professional failings, 
 just as lying is the recognized vice of diplomatists, 
 chicanery of lawyers, solemn quackery of physicians, 
 so hypocrisy is noted as the temptation of priests 
 and of laymen who make a profession of piety. 
 And in most of these cases, on the margin of the 
 vice, there is a region of doubt and difficulty for 
 persons desiring to do what is right : it is not easy 
 to say exactly how far a diplomatist may legitimately 
 go in concealing state secrets, or a lawyer in using 
 his professional skill to defeat justice. It is on this 
 margin of doubt and difficulty, in the case of religious 
 conformity, that I wish now to concentrate attention. 
 With the vice of hypocrisy, so far as it is conscious 
 and unmistakable, I am not concerned. The 
 thorough-paced hypocrite — 
 
 " Who never naming God except for gain, 
 So never took that useful name in vain " — 
 
 we may leave to popular censure; — which is, perhaps, 
 at the present time sufficiently active in reprobating 
 
ii8 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 him. It is the excusable hypocrisy, the well-meant 
 pretence of belief — the region not of vice, but of 
 error in judgment, if error there be — that I wish 
 now to examine. 
 
 And here I may pause to note another aspect in 
 which the question I am raising interests us as an 
 Ethical Society. I conceive that it is largely a 
 sense of the value of the churches as moralizing 
 agencies — as supplying both in their regular common 
 worship and their weekly discourses, an assistance 
 to individual and social efforts after right living — 
 which leads men who do not really believe impor- 
 tant doctrines formally adopted by their church to 
 cling to it in spite of intellectual divergence ; and 
 even, perhaps, in some cases to hold office in it and 
 preach in its pulpits. They feel that the teaching 
 received by them in childhood from their church or 
 under its guidance has made them better men than 
 they would have been without it, and they wish 
 their children to be brought up under similar 
 beneficent influences. Without denying that there 
 are good men and women outside the churches, 
 they think that — making a broad and general 
 comparison of the religious and the irreligious — 
 the conditions and habits of life of the latter are, 
 on the average, manifestly less favourable to morality 
 than those of the former. They think, therefore, 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 119 
 
 that separation from the church would be — from an 
 ethical point of view — a greater evil than a more 
 or less suppressed intellectual disagreement with 
 some of the doctrines in the creeds that they allow 
 themselves to appear to believe. 
 
 The question then is, How far are they right? 
 I need hardly explain, after what I have already 
 said, that I propose to treat this question merely 
 from an ethical point of view, and not at all as a 
 theological question. Doubtless, in an age like the 
 period immediately following the Reformation — 
 when Christians still believed almost universally 
 that there was some one ecclesiastical organization 
 and some one system of doctrines to which the 
 divine favour was exclusively attached, but were 
 profoundly disagreed as to which organization or 
 system enjoyed this privilege — any but a theo- 
 logical treatment of these topics would naturally 
 seem idle. The inquiry then could only be, what 
 degree of variation from the true standard involved 
 deadly error. Even now, it may be held by some, 
 that if a man has the misfortune to hold erroneous 
 opinions he ought to keep them to himself, and 
 outwardly appear to believe what he does not 
 believe, rather than aggravate his guilt by the open 
 rejection of saving truth. Or they may hold that 
 such a heretic must do wrong, whatever he does ; 
 
I20 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 he is in the miserable dilemma of being inevitably 
 either a hypocrite or a schismatic, and it is an 
 unedifying exercise in casuistry to discuss which is 
 worst. On the other hand, men may still believe 
 vaguely that the favour of heaven rests in some 
 mysterious and supernatural way on a particular 
 religious community, even though they may be 
 unable to accept its distinctive theological opinions ; 
 or, rather, though they may have renounced most 
 of its dogmas, but not the one dogma that asserts 
 the peculiar salvatory efficacy of its discipline. To 
 minds in any of these attitudes I do not attempt 
 to appeal. Indeed, the mere statement of these 
 views — though I believe them to be actually and, 
 perhaps, even widely held — suffices to show how 
 opposed they are to the general movement of 
 thought in the present age, among Protestants at 
 least, both within and without the churches. On 
 the whole, the recognition of the necessity of free 
 inquiry, and the respect for conscientious difference 
 of opinion, is now so general among thoughtful 
 persons that I believe most educated Englishmen 
 — whether orthodox or not — are prepared to regard 
 my question as one to be determined on ethical 
 principles common to all sects and schools. 
 
 It is necessary, however, to separate this question 
 from another one, that in many minds blends with 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 121 
 
 it and predominates over it. It is very difficult for 
 men in any political or social discussion to keep the 
 ideal quite distinct from the actual, and not some- 
 times to prescribe present conduct on grounds which 
 would only be valid if a distant and dubious change 
 of circumstances were really certain and imminent. 
 It is peculiarly difficult to do this in discussing the 
 conditions of religious union ; for in theological 
 matters an ardent believer, especially if his beliefs 
 are self-chosen and not inherited, is peculiarly prone 
 to think that the whole world is on the point of 
 coming round to his opinions. And hence the 
 religious persons who, by the divergence of their 
 opinions from the orthodox standard of their church, 
 have been practically led to consider the subject of 
 this lecture, have often been firmly convinced that 
 the limits of their church must necessarily be en- 
 larged at least sufficiently to include themselves ; and 
 have rather considered the method of bringing about 
 this enlargement, than what ought to be done until 
 it is effected. But when we survey, impartially, the 
 development of religious thought from the Reforma- 
 tion to the present time ; when we observe how the 
 diversity of beliefs throughout the Christian world 
 has continually increased, the interval between the 
 extremes widening, and the intermediate opinions, 
 or shades of opinion, becoming more numerous ; 
 
122 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 when we see how Httle the outward organization, 
 symbols, and formulas of the different religious 
 communities have been affected by the discoveries 
 of science or the changes of philosophy, or the 
 successive predominance of novel ideas, novel hopes 
 and aspirations, in the political and social spheres; — 
 we shall feel it presumptuous to prophesy that any 
 revolution is now impending in the nature, extension, 
 and mutual relations of the recognized creeds of 
 Christendom, so great as to render a discussion like 
 the present unnecessary. 
 
 Here, however, it may perhaps be said, " Granting 
 the question to be still one of practical importance, 
 it is not one of fresh interest ; it is surely an old 
 question which must have been raised and settled^ — 
 so far as ethical discussion can settle it — long ago." 
 My answer is that the change of thought to which 
 I just now referred — the movement in the direction 
 of wide toleration — materially alters the conditions 
 of the question ; for this movement at once intro- 
 duces a new danger and imposes a new duty. On 
 the one hand, there is a danger that the disposition 
 to tolerate and respect even widely divergent 
 opinions, when held with consistency, clearness, and 
 sincerity, may degenerate into a disposition to think 
 lightly of conscious inconsistency and insincerity, 
 and so to tolerate the attitude of sitting loose to 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 123 
 
 creeds. On the other hand, every step society takes 
 towards complete civil and social equality of creeds 
 really diminishes the old excuse for lax and insincere 
 conformity. Further, though the toleration of which 
 I have spoken has, like other drifts of current opinion 
 and sentiment, baser and nobler elements, its best 
 element consists of the growing predominance of the 
 love of truth over mere partisanship in theological 
 controversy, which leads to a comprehensive effort 
 after mutual understanding among persons who hold 
 conflicting opinions. As a result of this we find, 
 among the best representatives of orthodoxy, a 
 temperate dogmatism which holds opinions firmly 
 and earnestly, and yet is able to see how they look 
 when viewed from the outside, and to divine by 
 analogy how the opinions of others look when viewed 
 from the inside ; and this attitude carries with it a 
 legitimate demand for respectful frankness on the 
 part of their opponents. 
 
 And this demand is continually strengthened by 
 the growing influence of positive science as an 
 element of our highest intellectual culture. I do 
 not refer to any effect which the progress of science 
 may have had in modifying theological opinions ; 
 but rather to the necessity, which this progress lays 
 with ever-increasing force on theologians, of accept- 
 ing unreservedly the conditions of independent 
 
124 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 thought which in other departments are clearly seen 
 to be essential to the very life of knowledge. This 
 is a necessity of which the recognition is quite 
 independent of any particular view of theological 
 method or conclusions. It is sometimes said that 
 we live in an age that rejects authority. The state- 
 ment, thus unqualified, seems misleading ; probably 
 there never was a time when the number of beliefs 
 held by each individual, undemonstrated and unveri- 
 fied by himself, was greater. But it is true that we 
 are more and more disposed to accept only authority 
 of a particular sort; the authority, namely, that is 
 formed and maintained by the unconstrained agree- 
 ment of individual thinkers, each of whom we 
 believe to be seeking truth with single-mindedness 
 and sincerity, and declaring what he has found with 
 scrupulous veracity, and the greatest attainable exact- 
 ness and precision. For this kind of authority the 
 wonderful and steady progress of physical knowledge 
 leads educated persons to entertain a continually 
 increasing respect, accompanied by a correspond- 
 ing distrust of any other kind of authority in 
 matters intellectual. Now, from theologians of an 
 earlier generation, it seemed hopeless to look for 
 acceptance of the conditions under which alone the 
 authority of a " consensus " of experts can be 
 obtained ; owing to the onesided stress which they 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 125 
 
 were accustomed to lay on the imbecility of the 
 inquisitive intellect, the inadequacy of language to 
 express profound mysteries, and the unedifying effect 
 of truth upon an unprepared audience. It is because 
 a change is tailing place in this respect, because 
 among the most orthodox theologians there are men 
 imbued with the best qualities of the scientific spirit, 
 because the tide of opinion is moving in this direc- 
 tion among earnestly religious Protestants of all 
 shades, that the time seems to me opportune for 
 a fresh discussion of my present subject. If we 
 accept as a fact, which at any rate cannot be rapidly 
 altered, that the divergence of religious beliefs, con- 
 scientiously entertained by educated persons, is great, 
 is increasing, and shows no symptom of diminution ; 
 if we admit the principles of complete toleration and 
 complete freedom of inquiry; if we also admit the 
 growing demand of educated laymen, that when they 
 are instructed on matters of the highest moment 
 they should feel the same security which they feel 
 on less important subjects, that their teacher is 
 declaring to them truth precisely as it appears to 
 him, — then surely the old question as to the nature 
 and limits of the duty of religious conformity may 
 reasonably be examined afresh in the light of these 
 considerations. 
 
 Now I find two views — opposed to each other, but 
 
126 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 both somewhat widely spread — which stand in the 
 way of a full and frank discussion of this question. 
 It is said that the question is so simple that it is not 
 worth while discussing it at any length ; an honest 
 man can easily settle it on the principles of ordinary 
 morality. Again, it is said that the question is so 
 difficult and complex, and the right solution of it 
 dependent on so many varying conditions, that it 
 had better be left entirely to the conscience of the 
 individual, which can take account of his special 
 nature and circumstances. The truth seems to me 
 to lie between these two extremes. On the one 
 hand, I do^ not think it very difficult to find the right 
 general answer to the question ; though at the 
 same time I do not think that this — for the persons 
 whom it practically most concerns — is quite a simple 
 answer. I think it requires both impartial sympathy 
 and careful distinctions to conceive and state it accu- 
 rately. On the other hand, I think that the best 
 general answer that we can obtain is not one that 
 by itself gives decisive guidance to any individual : 
 it leaves, and must leave, much to be variously 
 determined by the divergent views and sentiments 
 and varying circumstances of different individuals ; 
 but I think we ought to confine these variations — 
 in determining the conduct to which moral approval 
 is to be given — within somewhat narrower limits than 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 127 
 
 those within which the practice of well-meaning 
 persons actually ranges. 
 
 The argument of those who treat the question as 
 a simple one may be briefly given thus. A church 
 is an association of persons holding certain dis- 
 tinctive doctrines ; — not necessarily theological doc- 
 trines, since the essential differences between one 
 church and another may relate to questions of ritual 
 or of ecclesiastical organization rather than to 
 questions strictly theological, but in any case 
 doctrines or beliefs of some kind. An individual 
 belongs to a church because he holds these distinctive 
 doctrines ; or at any rate because he once held them, 
 and his intellect has not yet decisively rejected any 
 important part of them, though it may be in a state 
 of doubt and suspense of judgment on some points. 
 It would be generally granted that, so long as he 
 remains merely doubtful and wavering, he is right in 
 maintaining his old position. But — according to this 
 view — as soon as he has made up his mind against 
 any important doctrine explicitly adopted by his 
 church, it is proper for him to withdraw. Or at any 
 rate — for I do not wish to state the view in the most 
 extreme form — this withdrawal is a clear duty in the 
 case of any church which exacts, as a condition of 
 admission to the privileges of membership, an 
 express declaration of adhesion to certain doctrines 
 
128 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 selected as fundamental in the teaching of the 
 church. 
 
 This view of the basis of religious association 
 cannot, I think, be rejected as an inadmissible view : 
 we cannot say that an individual does wrong in 
 holding and acting on it. I should go further and 
 say that it is the most natural and obvious view to 
 take. But it would, I think, be a grave mistake to 
 impose it as the only view ethically admissible. 
 
 First, the view clearly does not correspond to the 
 actual facts, — the actual basis of common under- 
 standing on which a church, in modern society, holds 
 together. It is not only that the members of such a 
 body do not always withdraw when they have ceased 
 to hold any of its fundamental doctrines ; but it is 
 not expected that they should withdraw: they violate 
 no common understanding in not withdrawing. 
 
 And this is because feelings that every one must 
 respect make it impossible for a man voluntarily to 
 abandon a church as easily as he would withdraw 
 from a scientific or philanthropic association. The 
 ties that bind him to it are so much more intimate 
 and sacred, that their severance is proportionally 
 more painful. The close relations of kinship and 
 friendship in which he may stand to individual 
 members of the congregation present obstacles to 
 severance which all, in practice, recognize, if not in 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 129 
 
 theory ; but even to the community itself, and its 
 worship, he is still bound by the strong bands of 
 hereditary affection, ancient habit, and, possibly, 
 religious sympathies outliving doctrinal agreement. 
 Let us grant that these considerations ought not 
 to weigh against disagreement on essential points. 
 The question remains, Who is to be the judge of 
 essentiality? For it often happens — probably most 
 often at the present day — that the point at issue, 
 though selected as fundamental by the church, is 
 not so regarded by the divergent individual : it 
 may very likely appear to him to possess no religious 
 importance whatsoever, and therefore to give him no 
 personal motive for secession. A man who feels no 
 impulse to leave a community, and sees no religious 
 or moral gain in joining any other, can hardly be 
 expected to excommunicate himself; others, sym- 
 pathizing with his motives, shrink from excommuni- 
 cating him ; and thus " multitudinism " — as it has been 
 called — creeps tacitly into churches whose bond of 
 union is prima facie doctrinal. And the principle 
 thus admitted receives a continually widening appli- 
 cation, until from the mere fact that a man is a 
 member of a religious body we can draw no inference 
 whatever as to his beliefs, even in the case of a 
 generally upright and conscientious man, and even 
 though the body to which he professedly belongs 
 
 K 
 
I30 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 has a perfectly definite and express basis of theolo- 
 gical doctrine. 
 
 It may be said that this result, however, is not 
 legitimate or desirable, but merely a concession to 
 human weakness, inevitable perhaps in fact so long 
 as men are weak, but to be firmly rejected in deter- 
 mining the moral ideal. The reason, in my opinion, 
 for adopting an opposite view is, that the service 
 which religion undeniably renders to society lies 
 primarily in its influence on the moral and social 
 feelings, and that Multitudinism tends to keep this 
 influence alive in many cases in which a strict Doc- 
 trinalism would tend to destroy it. If a man severs 
 himself from the worship of his parents and the 
 religious habits in which he has grown up he will, in 
 many cases, form no new religious ties, or none of 
 equal stability and force ; and in consequence the 
 influence of religion on his life will be liable to be 
 impaired, and with it the influence of that higher 
 morality which Christianity, in all our churches, 
 powerfully supports and inspires ; so that his life 
 will in consequence be liable to become more selfish, 
 frivolous, and worldly, even if he does not lapse into 
 recognized immorality. I need hardly say that I do 
 not regard this as an inevitable result of breaking 
 away from an inherited creed and worship. I do not 
 even say that it is to be expected in a majority of 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 131 
 
 cases. Many are saved from it by devotion to a non- 
 religious ideal — to science or social progress ; others 
 by the bracing effect of onerous duties faithfully dis- 
 charged ; others by intense and elevating personal 
 affections. But — though I have no means of 
 estimating the proportion with any exactness — I 
 am disposed to think that this moral decline is to 
 be feared in a number of cases sufficient to constitute 
 it a grave danger. 
 
 Here I would note, because it is apt to be over- 
 looked, one moral advantage of membership of a 
 church for ordinary men — which remains even when 
 the authoritative creed of the church no longer 
 seriously affects their belief as to the moral order 
 of the world — namely, that it constrains them, gently 
 but effectively, to a regular and solemn profession of 
 a morality higher than their ordinary practice. This 
 may sound a paradox, since the gap between 
 Christian professions and Christian practice is one 
 of the tritest themes of modern satire. And I quite 
 admit that for men deliberately and contentedly false 
 to their avowed standard of duty the express accept- 
 ance of this standard is no gain, but a loss : they 
 merely add the evil of hypocrisy to the evil of vice or 
 selfish worldliness. But the case is otherwise with 
 the average well-meaning persons who are numeri- 
 cally most important ; however much their practice 
 
132 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 may fall below their professions, it is higher than it 
 would have been if they had not, by professions not 
 consciously insincere, given their fellow-men the right 
 to try it by the exacting standard of Christian duty. 
 
 I need not labour this point here, since surely a 
 leading motive for the formation of ethical societies 
 is the desire to gain, for oneself and for others, the 
 moral support to be derived from sharing in the 
 social expression of lofty ethical aims and interests. 
 
 For these reasons I think that in defining the 
 moral obligation of church-membership it is right 
 and wise to admit what I have called Multitudinism, 
 and concede to it as much as can be conceded without 
 violating the principles of Veracity and Fidelity to 
 promises. 
 
 Now probably you would allow me, if I wished, to 
 assume that the rules of Veracity and Fidelity to 
 promises are rules to be obeyed at all costs ; that 
 the evils of violating them at all are graver than 
 any trouble and disturbance and pain that may be 
 caused by strict adhesion to them. But this is not 
 exactly my own view, and I wish here to explain my 
 position with perfect frankness and precision. My 
 philosophical principles are on ethical questions 
 utilitarian. I think that these and other virtues are 
 only valuable as means to the end of human happi- 
 ness, and when I examine the matters discussed for 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 133 
 
 ages by casuists, I find exceptional cases in which 
 I have to approve of unveracity. For instance, I 
 should not hesitate to lie to a murderer in pursuit 
 of his victim, nor — if I thought it prudent — to 
 deceive a burglar as to the whereabouts of the 
 family plate. And there have been ages of violent 
 and inquisitorial religious persecution when it was 
 excusable, though not admirable, in a heretic to keep 
 his view of truth a secret doctrine, and simulate 
 acceptance of the creed imposed by fire and sword. 
 But in an age like the present, when even aggressive 
 atheism has in England been found no bar to a 
 political career and parliamentary success, the last 
 shadow of this excuse for unveracity has vanished. 
 
 But again, I admit cases in which deception may 
 legitimately be practised for the good of the person 
 deceived. Under a physician's orders I should not 
 hesitate to speak falsely to save an invalid from a 
 dangerous shock. And I can imagine a high-minded 
 thinker persuading himself that the mass of mankind 
 are normally in a position somewhat analogous to 
 that of such an invalid ; that they require for their 
 individual and social well-being to be comforted by 
 hopes, and spurred and curbed by terrors, that have 
 no rational foundation. Well, in a community like 
 that of Paraguay under the Jesuits, with an en- 
 lightened few monopolizing intellectual culture and 
 
134 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 a docile multitude giving implicit credence to their 
 instruction, it might be possible — and for a man with 
 such convictions it might conceivably be right — to 
 support a fictitious theology for the good of the 
 community by systematic falsehood. But in a 
 society like our own, where every one reads and 
 no one can be prevented from printing, where doubts 
 and denials of the most sacred and time-honoured 
 beliefs are proclaimed daily from house-tops and 
 from hill-tops, the method of pious fraud is surely 
 inapplicable. The secret must leak out; the net of 
 philanthropic unveracity must be spread in the sight 
 of the bird : the benevolent deceiver will find that he 
 has demoralized his fellow-men, and contributed to 
 shake the invaluable habits of truth-speaking and 
 mutual confidence among them, without gaining the 
 end for which he has made this great sacrifice. The 
 better the man who sought to benefit his fellow-men 
 in this strange way the worse, on the whole, would be 
 the result ; indeed, one can hardly imagine a severer 
 blow to the moral well-being of a community than 
 that that element of it which was most earnestly 
 seeking to promote morality should be chargeable 
 with systematic unveracity and habitual violation of 
 solemn pledges, and be unable to repel the charge. 
 
 I conclude, then, that while we should yield full 
 sympathy and respect to the motives that prompt a 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 135 
 
 man to cling to a religious community whose in- 
 fluence on himself and others he values, even though 
 he has ceased to hold beliefs which the community 
 has formally declared to be essential ; and while we 
 should concede broadly the legitimacy of such ad- 
 hesion ; still all such concessions must be firmly 
 limited by the obligations of Veracity and Good 
 Faith. 
 
 This conclusion, however, is somewhat vague and 
 general. I will try to make it rather more definite — 
 but much must always be left to the varying senti- 
 ments and judgments of individuals, and it is an 
 important gain to get the principle clear. In illus- 
 trating its application, I will consider first the case 
 of pledges expressly taken on admission to member- 
 ship. Here I should understand my principle to 
 mean that the obligation to fulfil any such pledge 
 should be held as sacred as any other promise, but 
 that as broad an interpretation as is fairly admissible 
 should be put on the terms of the pledge. In 
 determining this I hold it reasonable to be largely 
 guided by common understanding. This is not 
 always easy to ascertain, but if an individual is in 
 doubt, any serious danger of bad faith may usually 
 be avoided by making his position clear to others 
 who do not hold his views. The important point is 
 that he should neither betray the confidence reposed 
 
136 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 in him by others, nor give them fair reason for believing 
 that he holds opinions which he does not hold. 
 
 I may make this clearer by taking a particular 
 example ; and I will select the case of the Church 
 of England, both because it is practically for us 
 the most important case, and because in an estab- 
 lished church with a prescribed form of worship, 
 and an elaborate official creed more than three 
 centuries old, the difficulties of the present question 
 reach their maximum. Now there can be no doubt 
 that a member of the Church of England is formally 
 pledged to believe the Apostles' Creed. But it is 
 clearly impossible to take this pledge literally. If 
 it comes into conflict with the necessity or duty of 
 believing what appears to a man true, it can be 
 no more binding than any other promise to do what 
 is either impossible or wrong. Can we say, then, 
 that in the case of such conflict there is an implied 
 pledge to withdraw ? This is, I think, the most 
 natural view to take, and, for a long time, I 
 thought it difficult to justify morally any other 
 view. But as the pledge to withdraw is at any 
 rate only implied, and as the common understanding, 
 of orthodox and unorthodox alike, gives the implica- 
 tion no support, I now think it legitimate to regard 
 the obvious though indirect import of the verbal 
 pledge as relaxed by the common understanding. 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 137 
 
 At the same time, considering how necessarily vague 
 and uncertain this appeal to a tacit common under- 
 standing must be, and how explicit and solemn the 
 pledge taken is, I do not think anyone who is a 
 candidate for any educational or other post of trust, 
 in which membership of the English Church is 
 required as a condition, ought to take advantage of 
 this relaxation without making his position clear to 
 those who appoint to the post ; so as to make sure 
 that they, at any rate, are willing to admit his inter- 
 pretation of it. I do not mean that such a person 
 is bound to state his theological opinions — I think 
 no one should be forced to do that — but I think 
 he ought to state clearly how he interprets his pledge 
 to believe the Apostles' Creed. 
 
 I might pursue this question into much more 
 detail, but this kind of casuistry is apt to weary, 
 unless it is pursued for the practical end of personal 
 choice or friendly counsel ; and I am anxious not 
 to seem to dogmatize on points on which I should 
 readily acquiesce in minor differences of judgment. 
 I pass on, therefore, to examine the obligation implied 
 in taking part in a form of worship — especially one 
 which, like that of the Church of England, includes 
 the recital of one or more creeds. Here, however, I 
 think that the only practical question admitting of 
 a precise general answer relates not to the duty 
 
138 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 of a private member of the church, but to the duty 
 of its appointed teachers. For the mere presence 
 at a religious service — by a clear common under- 
 standing — does not imply more than a general 
 sympathy with its drift and aims ; it does not 
 necessarily imply a belief in any particular statement 
 made in the course of it, as an ordinary member of 
 the congregation is not obliged to join in any such 
 statement unless he likes. And how far it is desirable 
 that an individual should take any part in a social 
 act of religious worship, while conscious of a certain 
 amount of intellectual dissent from the beliefs 
 implied in the utterances of the worship, is a 
 question which may properly be left to be decided 
 by the varying sentiments of individuals ; the effect 
 of public worship on the worshipper is so complex 
 and so various, that it would be inexpedient to 
 attempt to lay down a definite general rule. The 
 minds of some are so constituted, that it would 
 be a mockery to them to take part in a service 
 not framed in exact accordance with their theological 
 convictions ; to others, again, quite as genuinely 
 religious, but more influenced by sympathies and 
 associations, the element of intellectual agreement 
 appears less important. 
 
 The case of the teacher, the officiating minister, 
 is different, for on him the imperative duty falls — 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 139 
 
 in the Church of England — of solemnly declaring 
 his personal belief in the fundamental doctrines of 
 the church, as stated in the Apostles' Creed and 
 the Nicene Creed. And here, I think, we come to 
 a point at which the efforts made for more than 
 a generation in England to liberalize the teaching 
 of the English Church, and to open its ministry 
 to men of modern ideas, must find an inexorable 
 moral barrier in the obligations of veracity and 
 good faith. For the priest who recites any one 
 of the precise and weighty statements in the 
 Apostles' Creed,* while not really believing it, can 
 hardly be acquitted of breaking both these rules of 
 duty;t since he states falsely that he believes a 
 theological proposition which he has implicitly 
 pledged himself to teach with genuine belief, and 
 in his case no common understanding can, I think, 
 be held to have relaxed the force of this pledge. 
 I believe that there are men who make these false 
 statements regularly with the best intentions, and 
 with aims and purposes with which we shall all 
 
 * I mention the Apostles' Creed because its position in the Baptismal 
 Service attaches to it with special emphasis the character of a summary 
 of the doctrine which the minister has been appointed to teach. 
 
 t No doubt if he at the same time makes clear that he does not 
 believe the statement, his unveracity is merely formal ; but then his 
 breach of his ordination vow, **so to minister the doctrine ... as 
 this Church hath received the same," becomes still more palpable. 
 
I40 THE ETHICS OF 
 
 here sympathize ; but the more we sympathize with 
 them, the more it becomes our duty to urge — from 
 the purely ethical point of view which we here take 
 — that no gain in enlightenment and intelligence 
 which the Anglican ministry may receive from the 
 presence of such men can compensate for the 
 damage done to moral habits, and the offence given 
 to moral sentiments, by their example. Let me 
 not be misunderstood. I should desire and think 
 right that in determining the scope of the obligation 
 imposed by the creeds the utmost breadth of inter- 
 pretation should be granted, the utmost variety of 
 meanings allowed which the usage of language, 
 especially the vagueness of many fundamental 
 notions, will fairly admit. Christianity, in the course 
 of its history, has adapted itself to many philoso- 
 phies ; and I do not doubt that there is much 
 essentially modern thought about the Universe, its 
 End and Ground and moral order, which will bear 
 to be thrown into the mould of these time-honoured 
 creeds. But there is one line of thought which is 
 not compatible with them, and that is the line of 
 thought which, taught by modern science and 
 modern historical criticism, concludes against the 
 miraculous element of the gospel history, and in 
 particular rejects the story of the miraculous birth 
 of Jesus. I would give all sympathy to those who 
 
RELIGIOUS CONFORMITY. 141 
 
 are trying to separate the ethical and religious 
 element in their inherited creed from the doubts 
 and difficulties that hang about the "thaumato- 
 logical " element, and so to cherish the vital ties 
 that connect the best and highest of our modern 
 sentiments and beliefs, religious and moral, with 
 the sacred books and venerable traditions of Chris- 
 tianity. I think the work on which they are 
 engaged a good work and profitable for these times ; 
 but I cannot think it is a work that can properly 
 be done within the pale of the Anglican ministry. 
 
VI. 
 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 THE foregoing address was published in the 
 International Journal of Ethics for April, 1 896. 
 In January, 1 897, a reply from the Rev. H. Rashdall, 
 of Hertford College, Oxford, combating at some 
 length the view taken in my address as to the moral 
 position of the Anglican clergy, appeared in the 
 same journal. Mr. Rashdall's paper is ably and 
 earnestly written, and I have endeavoured to give 
 full weight to the considerations urged by him. 
 But the main conclusions expressed in my address 
 remain unchanged ; and as the question seems to me 
 one of profound social importance, I propose in this 
 essay to return to it and give such further explana- 
 tions and further arguments as Mr. Rashdall's paper 
 suggests. I do not, however, find it convenient to 
 throw my statement into the form of a simple re- 
 joinder to Mr. Rashdall, because he has, to an impor- 
 tant extent, misunderstood my position ; and the 
 detailed discussion of such misunderstandings is 
 
 142 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 143 
 
 almost always wearisome and unprofitable to the 
 reader. The misunderstanding is partly due to the 
 comparative brevity with which I treated the subject 
 — Mr. Rashdall's thirty pages being in fact directed 
 against the last page and a half of my address ; and 
 perhaps I ought to offer some explanation of this 
 brevity. The truth is that though Mr. Rashdall 
 regards my position as extreme on the side of 
 strictness, "almost what might have been expected 
 from a Kantian rigorist," this was not at all my own 
 view of it. I do not merely mean that I aimed at 
 keeping a judicious middle course, avoiding with 
 equal care right-hand rigour and left-hand laxity; 
 for that, I suppose, is the aim of every one who forms 
 a disinterested conclusion on a controverted matter. 
 The point is rather that, while composing my address, 
 my "judicious mean" seemed to myself much more 
 assailable in respect of laxity than in respect of 
 rigour. Before writing it, I had tried to study im- 
 partially the Baptismal Service and the Confirmation 
 Service of the Church of England ; and had been 
 strongly impressed with the definiteness and force 
 with which the doctrinal basis of membership is there 
 put forward. A member of the Church has been 
 " baptized in the faith " defined by the Apostles' 
 Creed ; at confirmation he has solemnly " acknow- 
 ledged " himself " bound to believe " it. I had. 
 
144 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 therefore, some hesitation in arguing, on the ground 
 of anything so vague as a tacit common understand- 
 ing, that a layman who definitely rejects any precise 
 and important statement made in this creed may still 
 legitimately claim the privileges of membership. 
 I felt that if this claim were denied by any one of 
 the many orthodox persons who regard the Apostles' 
 Creed as the indispensable minimum of Christian 
 doctrine, I should have considerable difficulty in 
 defending the position that I had still, on the whole, 
 determined to maintain. On the other hand, the 
 proposition that an ordained minister of the Church, 
 who is required by his office to declare solemnly 
 every Sunday his belief in the Apostles' Creed, is 
 chargeable with unveracity if this declaration is 
 palpably false — this proposition seemed to me hardly 
 controvertible. I was, indeed, aware that a portion of 
 the Anglican clergy were in the habit of thus affirm- 
 ing falsely their belief in the miraculous birth of 
 Jesus Christ ; because Mr. Haweis, in an interest- 
 ing article in the Contemporary Review (September, 
 1895) had stated this as a fact within his knowledge. 
 " We have in our midst," said Mr. Haweis, " clergy 
 within the Church holding two views of the incarna- 
 tion. There are what I may call the prenatal infusion 
 clergy and the postnatal transfusion clergy. The 
 Postnatalists admit human parentage on both sides." 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 145 
 
 I had no doubt that these Postnatalists* were for the 
 most part making their weekly false statements with 
 the best intentions ; but it never occurred to me that 
 they would claim to be acquitted of unveracity in so 
 doing. I rather supposed them to hold that any 
 harm that might be done to religion and morality by 
 this falsity was outweighed by the loss that the 
 Church would suffer if men of enlightenment, open 
 to modern ideas and fearlessly accepting the methods 
 of modern criticism, were excluded from its pulpits. 
 This was a plea that I was prepared to discuss more 
 fully if necessary ; but on the point of veracity 
 I thought I might be brief 
 
 It is partly owing to this brevity that Mr. Rashdall 
 has occupied a considerable part of his article with 
 arguments really irrelevant to my position. Thus he 
 argues at length against the view that a clergyman is 
 bound to believe in miracles as such, and in all the 
 miracles recorded in the New Testament. But I did 
 not intend to suggest this ; my contention was merely 
 that veracity requires him to believe the marvels 
 affirmed in the creeds. He is quite at liberty — so far 
 as my argument is concerned — to hold that these 
 marvels were " not breaches of natural law." 
 
 * I propose in this article to adopt Mr. Ilaweis' term, as a convenient 
 designation for " Christians who do not believe in the miraculous birth 
 of Jesus Christ." 
 
 L 
 
146 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 I cannot, however, admit that Mr. Rashdall's 
 misunderstandings are entirely due to my brevity. 
 For instance, he understands me to suggest that a 
 clergyman is bound to believe " in the most literal * 
 interpretation of everything contained in the creeds." 
 But in the paragraph against which he was arguing I 
 had expressly said " I should desire and think right 
 that in determining the scope of the obligation 
 imposed by the creeds, the utmost breadth of inter- 
 pretation should be granted, the utmost variety of 
 meanings allowed, which the usage of language, 
 especially the vagueness of many fundamental 
 notions, will fairly admit." My contention is simply 
 that the widest licence of variation that can be 
 reasonably claimed must stop short of the permis- 
 sion to utter a hard, flat, unmistakable falsehood; and 
 this is what a clergyman does who says solemnly 
 — in the recital of the Apostles' Creed — " I believe in 
 Jesus Christ, .... who was conceived by the Holy 
 Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," when he really 
 believes that Jesus was, like other human beings, the 
 son of two human parents. He utters, of course, a 
 similar falsehood in affirming the belief that Jesus 
 " on the third day rose again from the dead," when he 
 does not believe that Jesus had a continued life as an 
 individual after death, and a life in some sense 
 
 * The italics are mine. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 147 
 
 corporeal. But since the conception of the resur- 
 rection body — which, in a theology based on the 
 canonical scriptures, is naturally formed by com- 
 paring the language of St. Paul (i Cor. xv.) with 
 the language of the third and fourth evangelists — 
 is somewhat ambiguous and obscure, "^ I propose in 
 this discussion to concentrate attention mainly on the 
 first-mentioned statement, which presents a perfectly 
 simple and definite issue. 
 
 * The difficulty in making the conception precise arises thus. St. 
 Paul, expounding the distinction between the •^vx'lkov and the 
 TuevfiaTiKov aQjua, says that ' ' flesh and blood cannot inherit the 
 kingdom of God." But according to St. Luke the resurrection body 
 of Jesus is seen to have "flesh and bones," and to eat fish and honey- 
 comb ; according to both St. Luke and St. John the risen Jesus ofters 
 His body to be handled; and it is clearly contrary to the meaning of the 
 Evangelists to suppose these appearances and offers deceptive. On the 
 other hand, the form of Jesus appears and vanishes mysteriously (Luke 
 xxiv. 31, 36), and seems to have passed through closed doors. (John xx. 
 19, 26.) 
 
 I observe that Alford (on Luke xxiv. 39) suggests that the resurrec- 
 tion body had flesh and bones, du^ not blood. This strikingly illustrates 
 what I have ventured to call the "obscurity and ambiguity" of the 
 conception ; but it is not easy to treat the suggestion with the respect 
 due to a learned and thoughtful commentator. The declaration 
 appended to the Anglican Communion Service, on the contrary, 
 affirms that " the natural Body and Blood oi our Saviour Christ are in 
 heaven." 
 
 The scriptural data being what I have just stated, I think that a large 
 freedom of interpretation of the term "body" may be legitimately 
 claimed by any one who affirms a belief in the "resurrection of the 
 body." 
 
148 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 This issue is frankly accepted by Mr. Rashdall. 
 He definitely holds that a man may reject the mir- 
 aculous birth and yet solemnly recite in church the 
 Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed, without doing 
 anything " really inconsistent with the duties of 
 veracity and good faith," according to the " principles 
 which are generally recognized." 
 
 His reasoning is as follows i"^ 
 
 1. "The clergy do not profess their beliefs in the 
 
 Creeds in any other sense and to any other 
 degree than they assent to the whole of the 
 Prayer Book and Articles." 
 
 2. There are few clergymen who literally believe 
 
 all the Thirty-nine Articles ; and even in the 
 Apostles' and the Nicene Creed there are 
 clauses which '' most orthodox clergymen 
 would explain in a way different from that 
 which was intended by their authors " — e.g,^ 
 those relating to the descent into hell, and 
 the Resurrection of the Body. 
 
 3. We have to recognize, accordingly, a " general 
 
 agreement that subscription does not imply 
 a literal acceptance of the formulae." 
 
 * In what follows I have endeavoured faithfully to represent Mr. 
 Rashdall's arguments, keeping his own words as far as possible, but I 
 have found it necessary for clearness to give them in a different order. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 149 
 
 4. The liberty thus gained might with advantage 
 
 be increased ; and, with a view to this 
 increase, " the principle of liberalizing inter- 
 pretation may be carried a little further than 
 can be justified by strict insistence upon" 
 the rule that " words must be taken to mean 
 what they are generally understood to mean." 
 By so doing a clergyman will " contribute to 
 a further step in that process of religious 
 development which has proved so beneficial 
 in times past." 
 
 5. This principle justifies a clergyman in affirming 
 
 his belief that Christ was born of a virgin, 
 when he really believes that He had two 
 human parents, provided he thinks the 
 matter "of no spiritual significance." 
 
 6. No doubt such a man ought, before taking 
 
 orders, to satisfy himself that this " disbelief 
 is of the same order as those which public 
 opinion has already recognized as falling 
 within the permissible limits " ; and Mr. 
 Rashdall appears to concede that he may 
 have some little difficulty in satisfying him- 
 self of this : but he thinks that he is 
 "justified in throwing the responsibility" 
 on the bishop to whom he applies for 
 
ISO CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 ordination. If the bishop consents to ordain 
 him, as an avowed unbeHever in the miracu- 
 lous birth, he may feel assured that his 
 disbelief " does not exceed the limits of 
 the liberty which the Church by its practi- 
 cal conduct has proclaimed." Nor need he 
 — if I understand Mr. Rashdall — communi- 
 cate to the world or to his congregation his 
 unbelief in the miraculous birth. It is 
 sufficient if he informs his bishop and the 
 incumbent who gives him his title, and lets 
 his congregation know " by the general tenor 
 of his teaching" in what sense he interprets 
 his acceptance of the formularies. 
 
 7. For confirmation of his general view of the 
 liberty allowed to the clergy, Mr. Rashdall 
 appeals to ** the Courts, the authorized inter- 
 preters of the obligations imposed by law 
 upon the clergy." He finds that the 
 " decisions of the Judicial Committee of the 
 Privy Council in the case of the various 
 writers in Essays and Reviews go far to 
 constitute, within the limits contended for 
 in this article, a charter of theological 
 freedom for the clergy of the Church of 
 England." 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 151 
 
 This is, I think, a faithful summary of the reason- 
 ing by which Mr. Rashdall tries to prove that the 
 conduct he recommends is " not really inconsistent 
 with the duties of veracity and good faith." I cannot 
 say that he has convinced me on either point ; but 
 after considering the lines of his argument, I think it 
 better to separate the duties of veracity and good 
 faith, and, for clearness of issue, to concentrate 
 attention here mainly on the former. The pledges 
 given by a priest at his ordination are no doubt given 
 immediately to the bishop ; and it is at least a 
 tenable view that the bishop is an authorized inter- 
 preter of the ordination vows ''so to minister the 
 doctrine as this Church hath received the same," and 
 "with all faithful diligence to banish and drive 
 away all strange doctrines contrary to God's Word." 
 Hence the question, whether in the exercise of 
 this interpretative authority he may properly dispense 
 an enlightened candidate from the duty of believing 
 and teaching such portions of the Apostles' Creed 
 as conflict with modern historical criticism, may 
 perhaps be regarded as a question of ecclesiastical 
 order with which an outsider should not presume 
 to deal. I should myself have thought that this 
 episcopal dispensing power was rather a mediaeval 
 than a modern idea ; but I do not claim to be an 
 expert on such points. I will only say that if this 
 
152 CLERICAL VERACITY, 
 
 dispensing power be once admitted, I do not see how 
 it is possible to limit it to the particular modern 
 ideas that Mr. Rashdall wishes to admit. Suppose, 
 for instance, that a disciple of Matthew Arnold, 
 glowing with ardour to exhibit the " true greatness of 
 Christianity," purified from the '' '^o'^yAds Aberglaube'' 
 of the Apostles' Creed and the ''false science" of the 
 Nicene Creed, presents himself for ordination before 
 a bishop who — like the present Dean of Ripon"^' — 
 is more or less in sympathy with Literature and 
 Dogma. Is it not probable that the enlightened 
 prelate would stretch his dispensing power to admit 
 the enlightened candidate? and could a colleague 
 who had himself consented to ordain a Postnatalist 
 reasonably censure the transaction ? f I can hardly 
 think that the Church of England will ever willingly 
 entrust such a power to any single bishop. 
 
 But in any case we shall agree that this episcopal 
 
 * See Fortnightly Reviezv, vol. xlviii. pp. 452-8. 
 
 t I do not know that any bishop has actually gone quite so far. Mr, 
 Rashdall, indeed, informs us that "the most learned and universally 
 respected theologian among the English bishops of this generation 
 consented to ordain a candidate who confessed to him that the question 
 of the miraculous birth was to him an open question." But there is 
 a not immaterial difference between saying that one believes what one 
 disbelieves, and saying that one believes something about which one is 
 suspending one's judgment. Mr. Rashdall's bishop may have allowed 
 himself to hope that the balance of his candidate's judgment would 
 shortly incline on the orthodox side. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY, 153 
 
 dispensing power cannot extend to the general duty 
 of veracity : the bishop cannot Hcense a deacon or 
 priest to speak falsely to his congregation. And 
 here I must express my astonishment at Mr. 
 Rashdall's assertion that the clergy do not profess 
 their belief in the Creeds in any other sense or degree 
 than they assent to the whole of the Prayer Book 
 and the Thirty-nine Articles. For he himself points 
 out that the assent required to the Prayer Book and 
 Articles is only a "general declaration of assent, 
 deliberately substituted by Parliament and both con- 
 vocations in 1865 for certain very much stronger 
 and more explicit declarations ; so that in dis- 
 tinguishing between a general belief in the Articles 
 and Prayer Book, and an explicit belief that every- 
 thing in the Articles and Prayer Book is true, no one 
 can be accused of pressing an accidental selection 
 of phrases." But an "explicit belief that every- 
 thing " in the Apostles' Creed " is true" is just what 
 everyone who performs clerical functions has to 
 declare ; moreover, he has ordinarily to declare 
 it every Sunday, whereas his general assent to the 
 Articles is only required when he is ordained or 
 licensed to a curacy, or instituted to a benefice. IMr. 
 Rashdall's arguments to show that hardly any 
 clergyman really believes everything in the Thirty- 
 nine Articles would only be to the point if every 
 
154 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 clergyman were required periodically to repeat all the 
 Articles, prefacing each with the words " I believe " : 
 under the conditions which have now existed for 
 a generation such arguments are, by his own 
 showing, irrelevant to the present issue.* 
 
 At the same time the considerations which Mr. 
 Rashdall urges against a pedantic insistence on what 
 he calls " technical veracity," in dealing with formulae 
 prescribed for assent or repetition, seem to me to 
 a great extent sound. My complaint is that, instead 
 of stating and applying these considerations with the 
 care and delicacy of distinction required for helpful- 
 ness, so as to show how the essence of veracity may 
 be realized under peculiar and somewhat perplexing 
 conditions, he rather uses them to suggest the 
 depressing and demoralizing conclusion that no 
 clergyman can possibly speak the truth in the sense 
 
 * For this reason I have not thought it worth while to discuss Mr. 
 Rashdall's tii qtioque, addressed to the High Church party. I should 
 admit that it would have had some force before 1865 ; but now any 
 difficulty that a High Churchman may find in agreeing to the statements 
 of any particular Article 2x0. prima facie met by the difference between 
 general assent and explicit belief in particulars, on which Mr. Rashdall 
 lays stress. It is possible, indeed, that the divergence between the 
 opinions of some extreme High Churchmen and the general scheme of 
 doctrine set forth in the Articles may be too great to be fairly covered 
 by this difference. But Mr. Rashdall has made no serious attempt to 
 prove this ; and it would be difficult to demonstrate it cogently, owing 
 to the inevitable indefiniteness of the effect of the change made in 1865. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 155 
 
 in which a plain layman understands truth-speaking ; 
 so that any clergyman may lie without scruple in the 
 cause of religious progress, with a view to aiding popu- 
 lar education in the new theology, and still feel that 
 he is as veracious as his profession allows him to be. 
 Or perhaps I should rather say that Mr. Rashdall's 
 conception of substantial veracity is what gram- 
 marians call proleptic ; the duty of truth-speaking 
 is, he thinks, adequately performed by a Postnatalist, 
 if he may reasonably hope that the falsehood he now 
 utters will before long cease to deceive through the 
 spread of a common understanding that he does not 
 mean what he says. In this way what is sound in 
 Mr. Rashdall's arguments comes to be inextricably 
 mixed up with what I regard as dangerously mis- 
 leading. It appears to me therefore desirable that 
 I should state and illustrate in my own way the 
 general view of the moral obligation of veracity in 
 which we on the whole agree, and then try to show 
 that, properly understood, this does not support his 
 particular conclusions as to clerical duty. 
 
 Two considerations appear to me to modify the 
 duty of truth-speaking in such a case as that before 
 us. 
 
 (i) Ordinarily a man may choose his own words 
 to express his belief, and therefore has no excuse 
 for deliberately choosing ambiguous words ; he 
 
156 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 ought, generally speaking,* to choose words which 
 appear to him freest from ambiguity. But where 
 the words are prescribed for him this choice is 
 precluded ; and in such a case, I conceive, he 
 should be held to speak truthfully, if he employs 
 the terms in any sense which they will fairly admit, 
 according to the common usage of language. I 
 think that this is the rule which a conscientious 
 man practically applies in any of the cases — not 
 rare in modern political life — in which he is asked 
 to sign a document which he has had no share in 
 drawing up. If it contains any statement as to a 
 matter of fact which he regards as clearly false, he 
 will refuse to sign the document, however much he 
 may sympathize with its object ; but he will sign 
 it — in a good cause — although the document may 
 contain some phrases which he can only accept by 
 taking them in a sense different from that which the 
 majority attach to them, and perhaps different from 
 that intended by the framers of the document, 
 provided the vague and varying usage of common 
 speech may be fairly held to include the different 
 meanings. It is the common usage and under- 
 standing which fixes the limits of variation in such 
 
 * I should hold that even when we choose our own words, there are 
 cases in which regard for the feelings of others may properly lead us to 
 prefer words to some extent ambiguous. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 157 
 
 cases, not simply the opinions and sentiments of the 
 framers of the document. 
 
 (2) This leads us to the second consideration. The 
 common understanding may change gradually, so 
 that certain phrases in certain relations may come 
 to be understood in a sense quite different from that 
 which they originally bore, or which the words 
 would convey if used in other connexions. The 
 stock instance of this is the language of compliment 
 or politeness : thus the phrase " Dear Sir " in com- 
 mencing a letter is understood to express not 
 affection, but a certain minimum of social respect ; 
 similarly the words " Right Reverend " might be 
 applied without deception to a bishop by a Non- 
 conformist, who both hated prelacy and despised the 
 particular bishop to whom he was writing. In some 
 cases the new meaning thus given to a phrase by 
 current usage is designed to be ambiguous, because 
 ambiguity is required by social convenience. Thus 
 the phrase "not at home" is now understood to 
 mean " eitJier out or unwilling to receive visitors " ; — 
 a phrase with this ambiguous meaning being con- 
 venient, because the uncertainty between the two 
 alternatives tends to prevent social friction. 
 
 This last example has a peculiarity which deserves 
 special attention from our present point of view. 
 The meaning now attached to the phrase "not at 
 
158 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 home" is the result of a gradual process of change 
 during which the phrase has been, in a continually- 
 decreasing degree, deceptive. Now the original decep- 
 tive use is obviously condemned by the general rule 
 of truth-speaking, and few thoughtful persons would 
 deny that it was morally objectionable : it was a 
 falsehood not justified by the social convenience 
 which prompted it. The question then arises whether 
 this deception in the process of change — granting it 
 wrong — renders it wrong to avail ourselves of the 
 results of the process? I agree with Mr. Rashdall 
 in thinking that this question must be answered in 
 the negative. In the political and social life of man 
 good continually comes out of evil, and bad actions 
 have, as a part of their consequences, beneficent 
 results, — as when a prosperous and well-ordered state 
 has been founded by unscrupulous aggression and 
 conquest. In all such cases we may, I conceive, use 
 the results freely without approving the process. 
 
 A more subtle question, somewhat less easy to 
 answer, arises in respect of the later stages of the 
 process to which I have referred. The new meaning 
 may be understood by a large number of the persons 
 to whom the phrase is addressed, but not by all ; 
 there may still be a certain amount of deception 
 caused by its use, and some of those who use it may 
 be conscious of deceiving. Is it at this stage legiti- 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 159 
 
 mate to use it? and, if so, at what point of the 
 gradual process has it become legitimate? The 
 general answer is, that it becomes legitimate when 
 the evil of social annoyance which the phrase would 
 prevent becomes less than the evil of deception ; 
 but in the case supposed the line cannot be drawn 
 exactly, and the practical decision must be left 
 entirely to the varying judgment of individuals. 
 We shall find, however, that the corresponding 
 problem is to some extent easier to solve in 
 dealing with the more important matters with 
 which this essay is concerned — to which I now 
 return. 
 
 There can be little doubt that old prescribed 
 expressions of religious belief do tend to have their 
 meaning changed by changes in prevalent theological 
 opinion ; and in some cases the early stages of the 
 process may have involved conscious deception, — of 
 which, according to the rule just laid down, we shall 
 disapprove, while at the same time allowing as 
 legitimate the employment of the phrase in the new 
 meaning, when the change in common understanding 
 has been brought about. But it is by no means 
 necessary that any conscious deception should take 
 place, as the change of meaning may be so gradual 
 that neither speaker nor hearer is at any time aware 
 that he is using words in a non-natural sense. There 
 
i6o CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 seem to be two chief forms of this process : (i) 
 Words originally used literally come to be used 
 metaphorically, and (2) words originally intended to 
 be understood without qualification come to be used 
 with tacit qualifications and reserves, which materially 
 modify their meaning. 
 
 Both these kinds of changes have certainly taken 
 place in respect of the common understanding of 
 the formulae of the Church of England ; and I 
 should regard them both as legitimate, so long as the 
 new meaning is one which the phrases in question 
 will admit without any violent straining. 
 
 Let me give one or two examples. The Apostles' 
 Creed makes the following assertions with regard 
 to Jesus Christ : 
 
 "On the third day He rose again from the dead, 
 He ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right 
 hand of God the Father Almighty; From thence He 
 shall come to judge the quick and the dead." 
 
 It seems clear that the original meaning of these 
 phrases is that unmistakably expressed in the Fourth 
 Article : " Christ . . . took again His body, with 
 flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the 
 perfection of man's nature; wherewith He ascended 
 into heaven and there sitteth, until He returns to 
 judge all men at the last day." 
 
 That is, the older belief clearly was that Jesus 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. l6l 
 
 not only went from the earth upwards with " flesh, 
 bones, etc.," but that He is now existing with these 
 elements of bodily life in a certain portion of 
 space called heaven. And the same view is no 
 less definitely expressed in the declaration appended 
 (for quite another purpose) to the Communion 
 Service : " the natural body and blood of our 
 Saviour Christ are in heaven, and not here ; it 
 being against the truth of Christ's natural body 
 to be at one time in more places than one." 
 
 Now I think that this belief hardly survives at 
 all in the minds of educated persons at the present 
 time. At any rate among the educated laity I 
 doubt if even the most orthodox — however firmly 
 they believe that in the actual existence of Jesus 
 Christ the spiritual union of human and divine 
 natures is perpetually maintained — are now ac- 
 customed to imagine him as actually occupying 
 a certain portion of space with a bodily organism, 
 containing flesh, bones, and blood. The conception 
 of physical facts and possibilities which modern 
 science has established among us has unconsciously 
 rendered any such imagination quite alien to us. 
 Accordingly I believe that the weekly repetition 
 of the Creed in most cases no longer suggests this 
 idea either to the clergy or to the educated laity 
 who repeat it. The meaning has changed for them 
 
 M 
 
1 62 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 gradually, without a shade of conscious unveracity 
 at any stage of the process. But that is because 
 the words of the Creed present no definite barrier 
 to the change : had the words of the Article been 
 used, the case would have been quite different. 
 As it is, a phrase, which was always in part a 
 metaphor,* has come to be understood as completely 
 metaphorical or symbolical, by a perfectly smooth 
 transition of thought. 
 
 A similar but slighter change has taken place 
 in the common understanding of the phrase "de- 
 scended into hell," which has lost the idea of 
 downward movement — and even, perhaps, of spatial 
 movement altogether — and come to mean simply 
 "passed to the abode of departed spirits." The 
 figure of local motion downward has been accepted 
 without difficulty, from old habit and association — 
 perhaps aided by some vague connexion between the 
 known position of the buried bodies of the dead 
 relatively to the living and the imagined position of 
 their souls.f 
 
 * The apparent anthropomorphism of the phrase ' * at the right hand 
 of God the Father" must have been intended figuratively by the 
 framers of the Anglican formularies : as the first Article declares that 
 God is " without body, parts, or passions." 
 
 t It is curious to note how the imagination — as distinct from the 
 thought — of the region of departed spirits as being beneath the region 
 of living men, still survives in the modern mind, notwithstanding the 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY, 163 
 
 I pass to another instance, where an important 
 affirmation has undergone a distinct change of 
 meaning, from the introduction of a qualification 
 not originally intended. 
 
 A candidate for ordination as deacon is solemnly- 
 asked by the bishop, " Do you unfeignedly believe 
 all the Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New 
 Testament ? " There seems to be no doubt that this 
 was originally intended to import a belief in the 
 truth of every statement in the Bible, the whole 
 aggregate of books included in the Old and New 
 Testament being regarded as literally the "Word 
 of God." But as the development of historical 
 method and scientific knowledge rendered it more 
 and more difficult for educated persons to hold 
 this belief, the phrase gradually came to be under- 
 stood with a tacit limitation expressible by some 
 such words as "so far as they convey religious 
 teaching." It is possible that this change originally 
 involved some degree of deception, — the bishops 
 and the common understanding of the Church 
 
 long domination of a conception of the physical universe that might 
 have been expected to exclude it. We find it even in so intensely 
 serious and profoundly modern a poem as Tennyson's In Menioriam : 
 
 " So, dearest, now thy brows are cold 
 I see thee what thou art, and know 
 Thy likeness to the wise bel(nv, 
 Thy kindred with the great of old.'' 
 
i64 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 taking the words in one sense, and a few exception- 
 ally enlightened candidates taking them in the 
 more limited sense, conscious that it would have 
 been repudiated by the bishops and the Church 
 generally. But it seems equally probable that the 
 new meaning came in gradually without any such 
 consciousness ; and in any case it has now been 
 recognized as admissible for more than a generation. 
 For when the matter came before the Ecclesiastical 
 Courts in the trial of Dr. Rowland Williams for 
 heresy (1862), the stricter view of the scope of the 
 deacon's declaration seems to have been unhesita- 
 tingly rejected by the judge of the Arches Court. 
 Dr. Lushington held that the nature of the Old and 
 New Testament " must be borne in mind in con- 
 sidering the extent of the obligation imposed by the 
 words 'I do believe.'"* This expression, he said, 
 "must be modified by the subject-matter," — there 
 must be a bond fide " belief that the Holy Scriptures 
 contain everything necessary to salvation, and that to 
 that extent they have the direct sanction of the Al- 
 mighty." The view here expressed was illustrated and 
 further defined in dealing with the particular charge 
 that Dr. Williams' statements about the book of 
 Daniel contradicted the declaration in the Deacon's 
 
 * See Ecclesiastical Juiigfnents of the Privy Council^ by Brodrick 
 and Fremantle, p. 256. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 165 
 
 Ordination Service. Dr. Williams had explicitly 
 affirmed that the " admitted necessities of the case " 
 undoubtedly bring our book of Daniel " as low as 
 the reign of Epiphanes " ; the writer of the book 
 having " used a name traditionally sacred, with no 
 deceptive intention, as a dramatic form which digni- 
 fied his encouragement of his countrymen in their 
 great struggle against Antiochus." All this, says 
 the judge, " may be wholly erroneous, but ... I do not 
 see any repugnance to the deacon's declaration." * 
 
 I conceive that an Ecclesiastical Court may fairly 
 be taken as an authorized interpreter of the meaning 
 and scope of an ecclesiastical formula ; so that any 
 one who accepts the canonical books, in any real 
 sense whatever, as a divinely-inspired source of 
 religious teaching, may with perfect veracity make 
 the deacon's declaration, although disbelieving many 
 statements made in these books as to historical facts. 
 
 But in this appeal to judicial authority it is impor- 
 tant to distinguish clearly between the major and the 
 minor premiss of the judicial syllogism. I have more 
 than once seen arguments to the following effect : 
 "The legal obligations of a clergyman are a fair 
 measure of his moral obligations ; the essayists and 
 reviewers were acquitted by the courts ; therefore 
 a clergyman may legally — and therefore morally — 
 
 * u., p. 259. 
 
i66 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 hold opinions similar to theirs, however apparently 
 inconsistent with the Creeds he recites." And I under- 
 stand Mr. Rashdall's reference to the failure of judicial 
 prosecutions for heresy to imply reasoning of this 
 kind ; but it seems to me quite fallacious. In one 
 sense, indeed, I think it plain that the legal obliga- 
 tion is the measure of the moral one ; i.e., I think 
 that a clergyman cannot be morally bound to take a 
 stricter interpretation of his declarations and pledges 
 than that adopted by the Ecclesiastical Courts in 
 stating the general principles of their decisions. But 
 it cannot reasonably be inferred that the writer of an 
 essay is morally guiltless of holding — or even of de- 
 signedly communicating — opinions that contravene 
 his solemn affirmations, merely because this contra- 
 vention cannot be proved from the language of the 
 essay by the strict methods of proof required to 
 justify a legal sentence. It is easy for a writer with 
 any literary skill to suggest to his readers in a manner 
 practically unmistakable, and persuasively commend 
 to their acceptance, heretical opinions which he yet 
 does not avow in the explicit and precise form 
 required to bring them into demonstrable conflict 
 with the Creeds and Articles ; and there can be no 
 doubt that the Essayists and Reviewers had repeatedly 
 adopted this course. 
 
 I may give as an illustration Dr. Williams' 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 167 
 
 language in regard to the particular doctrine with 
 which I am primarily concerned in the present 
 discussion. His article — which was a sympathetic 
 review of Bunsen's Biblical Researches — contained 
 the following sentences : * " Thus the incarnation 
 becomes with our author as purely spiritual as it 
 was with St. Paul. The Son of David by birth 
 is the Son of God by the Spirit of holiness. What 
 is flesh is born of flesh, and what is Spirit is born 
 of Spirit." No intelligent reader can doubt that 
 Dr. Williams designed to suggest that the accounts 
 of the miraculous birth of Jesus are legendary, 
 and that He was in reality the son of Joseph. 
 Accordingly he was charged with contravening the 
 statement in the Second Article that the Son of 
 God "took man's nature in the womb of the 
 Blessed Virgin." But his dexterous use of the 
 language of St. Paul — who certainly shows no 
 knowledge of the miraculous birth — had enabled 
 him to suggest the desired conclusion without any 
 explicit denial of the traditional doctrine ; and the 
 judge naturally finds it impossible to condemn 
 what cannot be denied to be a " not unfair ex- 
 pression of the substance of what St. Paul wrote." f 
 This non-condemnation, however, cannot reasonably 
 
 • Essays and Reviews^ p. 82. 
 
 t Ecclesiastical Judgments, p. 258. 
 
i68 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 be argued to imply that a clergyman is not bound 
 to believe in the miraculous birth ; since there can 
 be no doubt that Dr. Williams would have been 
 condemned at once if he had explicitly denied it. 
 
 To sum up : by a gradual introduction of a meta- 
 phorical or symbolic meaning into words originally 
 understood in a more literal sense, and by a gradual 
 introduction of tacit qualifications and reserves into 
 phrases originally understood in an absolute and 
 unqualified sense, changes in some cases important 
 have no doubt taken place in the common un- 
 derstanding of the Anglican formularies ; and 
 whether or not such changes have involved de- 
 ception in the past — which I conjecture to be 
 not the case for the most part — I hold that any 
 person may now, without unveracity, use the 
 phrases in the newer meaning. And I see no 
 reason why similar changes should not take place 
 in the future with perfect legitimacy. I quite 
 admit that either process may conceivably be 
 applied so as to involve substantial unveracity; but 
 I do not think it possible to draw in general terms 
 a clear line between the legitimate and the illegiti- 
 mate introduction of new meanings in either way. 
 The common understanding of language, changing 
 with changes in knowledge and habitual sentiment, 
 must be the test; but the appeal to this may in 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY, 169 
 
 particular cases give a doubtful result. There are 
 always likely to be differences of opinion on such 
 questions among conscientious persons, which may 
 be reduced, but can hardly be altogether removed, 
 by frank and temperate discussion. Hence the 
 decisions of Ecclesiastical Courts — taken with the 
 limitation that I have explained — are useful as 
 authoritatively declaring the limits of legitimate 
 variation in the use of terms. But they are not 
 the only means available for attaining this end. A 
 general expression of opinion on the part of bishops 
 or recognized theological experts — at any rate, if 
 received with acquiescence by the Anglican clergy 
 and laity generally — would have a similar effect. 
 Such an expression of opinion has, in fact, taken 
 place with regard to the damnatory clauses in the 
 Athanasian Creed, declaring these to be applicable 
 only to those who wilfully reject the doctrines of 
 the Creed ; and, however little any individual clergy- 
 man may think that this declaration represents the 
 original meaning of the clauses, it would in my 
 opinion be now over-scrupulous in him to make 
 a difficulty about reciting the Creed on account of 
 these clauses. 
 
 But, however difficult it may be in certain cases 
 to decide exactly when a divergence in thought 
 from the literal sense of any affirmation becomes 
 
I70 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 illegitimate and evasive, it is easy to say that some 
 divergences are quite beyond any defensible line ; 
 and that seems to me the case with the affirmation 
 defended by Mr. Rashdall. The assertion that 
 Jesus Christ was born of a virgin has a perfectly 
 simple and definite negative meaning ; it is based 
 on well known and unmistakable statements by two 
 evangelists, a belief in which it must certainly be 
 understood to imply unless the opposite is expressly 
 stated ; it is impossible to conceive — and no one has 
 ever suggested — any admissible qualification by 
 which the phrase could be adapted to the thought 
 of a man who believes that Jesus was the son of 
 Joseph. Mr. Rashdall suggests that the phrase may 
 be used to mean that Jesus was without sin from His 
 birth ; but I find it difficult to treat the suggestion 
 seriously. A metaphor, to be undeceptive, must 
 be accepted as such by hearers as well as speakers ; 
 whereas there is surely not the slightest chance that 
 any part of any congregation would — without an 
 express declaration that this was the speaker's 
 meaning — understand the affirmation of the miracu- 
 lous birth to mean an affirmation of the infant's 
 sinlessness. And Mr. Rashdall hardly suggests that 
 they would now so understand it ; but he seems to 
 think that they might be educated up to accept the 
 meaning. I do not believe such education to be 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 171 
 
 possible ; but granting it possible, I submit that to 
 save the statement from unveracity it must be made 
 after the education has been performed, and not 
 before. 
 
 It may be replied that if the Postnatalist makes 
 his real opinion known, the mere repetition of the 
 Creed becomes no longer unveracious, because there 
 is no deception. I quite agree that if any one 
 declares plainly the sense in which he utters any 
 words, then, however alien this sense may be to 
 the common understanding of the words, there is 
 no substantial unveracity. But in order that his 
 act may have this character the declaration must 
 be made publicly ; a private explanation to a bishop 
 and an incumbent is not sufficient ; it would only 
 make them accomplices in deception. Further, 
 I cannot consider that a false statement in the 
 recital of a Creed is rendered unobjectionable by 
 a public declaration of its falsity ; because it is likely 
 still to give a shock to the moral sentiment of 
 a plain man, who cannot be expected to distinguish 
 clearly between formal and substantial unveracity ; 
 moreover, the solemn utterance of untrue words will 
 seem to him a mockery of sacred things and offend 
 his religious sentiment. Still, if such an express 
 public declaration were made, the responsibility for 
 these consequences would be thrown, in a great 
 
172 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 measure, on the Church. The Postnatalists would 
 have fairly and frankly challenged the Church to 
 say whether it tolerated them or not ; it would 
 be for the Church to consider whether this toleration 
 did not of necessity involve the removal of the 
 Apostles' Creed from its place in the service. 
 
 In any case I admit fully that a Postnatalist 
 clergyman, who has frankly stated his views to his 
 congregation and to the world, is not open to the 
 charge of unveracity in the sense in which I am 
 here mainly concerned with it. But it is important 
 to insist that for this purpose the declaration must 
 be perfectly frank and explicit. A heretic cannot 
 fairly argue that the common understanding of the 
 Church has tolerated his heresy, because he — or 
 someone holding similar views — has not been prose- 
 cuted, or has been prosecuted and acquitted, so 
 long as the escape from legal penalties may be 
 reasonably attributed to the absence of a candid 
 and explicit statement of his opinions.* 
 
 Nor is it, I conceive, of any avail to urge that 
 the belief in question has — at least for the Post- 
 natalist, who is also a Trinitarian — "no spiritual 
 importance." This is, indeed, a consideration of 
 
 * As I have shown in the case of Dr. Williams, the failure of the 
 prosecution of the Essayists and Reviewers in 1862 may be fairly 
 attributed to this cause. 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY, 173 
 
 much weight when the question is of his remaining 
 in the Church and continuing to attend its services 
 as a layman ; but when it is a question of solemnly 
 affirming a proposition without believing it, he 
 ought to consider the significance of the belief to 
 others rather than to himself. Now it cannot be 
 denied that the rejection of the miraculous birth 
 is, in the view of the great majority of Christians, 
 a divergence of no light moment from " the faith 
 delivered to the saints." And this prevalent opinion 
 appears to me well founded. For if the methods 
 of modern criticism are by any one allowed to 
 prevail so far, against scriptural narratives and 
 ecclesiastical tradition, as to lead to the rejection 
 of the miraculous birth of Jesus, it must be an 
 exceptionally constituted mind that can find the 
 authority of the evangelists still sufficient to sustain 
 the vast weight of Nicene Theology. Most of those 
 who have gone so far will find themselves drawn 
 further ; other miraculous stories will have to be 
 given up as legendary ; the marvellous cures of 
 Jesus will sink into remarkable cases of faith- 
 healing, and the accounts of the post-resurrection 
 apparitions into a remarkable ghost story, swollen 
 into legend by the unconscious fictions of witnesses 
 and reporters. Thus Christianity will soon come 
 to have a purely ethical import, and the divine 
 
174 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 sonship of Jesus, so far as it is still affirmed, will 
 only be affirmed in the sense of unique consciousness 
 of the relation existing, essentially or ideally, be- 
 tween the human spirit and the divine. No doubt 
 there is so much friction on this inclined plane of 
 thought that individuals may stop at almost any 
 point : but of the general force of logic, impelling 
 to the ultimate result that I have indicated, I can 
 entertain no doubt. 
 
 Now I am far from any wish to disparage the 
 form of religion resulting from the reduction of 
 Christian dogma to this minimum ; on the contrary, 
 I should, in the present state of thought, welcome 
 any increase of influence that it may obtain by fair 
 advocacy; but I think that even Mr. Rashdall will 
 agree with me in deprecating any attempt to pour 
 this new wine into the old bottles of the Anglican 
 formularies. And if so, it seems clearly unreasonable 
 to ask the Church of England to throw over the 
 Apostles' Creed, in order to admit to its ministry the 
 handful of Postnatalists who stop at Postnatalism. 
 But even assuming that this momentous breach with 
 tradition is to lead to no further consequences, I 
 should still urge — in the interest of religion, morality, 
 and free thought at once — that it ought to be 
 effected openly, and not through the stealthy and 
 secret approaches recommended by Mr. Rashdall : 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 175 
 
 that the new reformers should not profess loyalty 
 to this time-honoured doctrine weekly with their 
 lips, while their heart is far from it. 
 
 Mr. Rashdall dwells on the importance of main- 
 taining and extending " the Christian Koivuivla" and 
 on the "spiritual and social loss of multiplied schism." 
 I may remind the reader that the argument of the 
 preceding address does not lead to external separa- 
 tion as a necessary result of intellectual disagreement; 
 quite the contrary. At the same time, I think that 
 Mr. Rashdall's language misrepresents the actual 
 conditions of thought and social life ; his ideas of 
 " unity " and " schism " are either too far behind the 
 age or too far in advance of it — or perhaps both at 
 once. External unity is a hollow form without 
 spiritual unity, unity of thought and feeling ; and 
 spiritual unity will only be completely possible for 
 the modern mind when competent students of 
 theology have come to an agreement on funda- 
 mental questions of principle and method, similar to 
 that which has been already attained by students of 
 physical science. Suppose this result reached, then 
 the question of substituting a single for a multiple 
 ecclesiastical organization becomes a mere question 
 of mechanism — I do not say unimportant, but 
 certainly of secondary importance from a religious 
 point of view. On the other hand, until this result 
 
176 CLERICAL VERACITY. 
 
 is reached unity cannot but remain a sentiment, an 
 aspiration, an unrealized ideal ; though doubtless the 
 sentiment may be developed, and the realization of 
 the ideal brought nearer, by moral as well as intel- 
 lectual methods; — by the cultivation of sympathy 
 between different churches, by the cordial co-operation 
 of their members in philanthropic work, by temperate- 
 ness in controversy, by a sustained desire to recognize 
 the merits and do justice to the motives of opponents. 
 Progress is already being made in this direction, and 
 the spiritual and social evils of schism are being 
 thereby steadily diminished ; but this progress, I 
 conceive, will be aided, rather than impeded, by such 
 external separation as will allow teaching to be 
 candid, forms of prayer to be adapted to the real 
 beliefs of the worshippers, and clerical pledges to be 
 taken and fulfilled in the sense in which they are 
 commonly understood. I quite agree with Mr. 
 Rashdall that under no conditions would it be 
 desirable that a clergyman should flaunt before a 
 comparatively uneducated audience novel opinions 
 that would shock and perplex them ; but he should 
 be in a position to speak frankly to thoughtful 
 members of his flock, and such frank speaking 
 should be reconcilable with the solemn expression 
 of beliefs which his office prescribes. The Preacher 
 has said that there is "a time to speak and a time 
 
CLERICAL VERACITY. 177 
 
 to keep silence," and this ancient wisdom is not yet 
 antiquated. But he has not said that there is a time 
 to speak truly and a time to speak falsely ; and I 
 think that, in religious matters, the common sense 
 of Christendom will reject this addition to the 
 familiar proverb. 
 
 N 
 
VII. 
 
 LUXURY.* 
 
 T HAVE chosen Luxury for the subject of my 
 -*■ address this evening ; because I think that the 
 employment of wealth, in what we should agree to 
 call luxurious expenditure, is a source of considerable 
 perplexity to moral persons who find themselves in 
 the possession of an income obviously more than 
 sufficient for the needs of their physical existence, 
 and for the provision of the instruments necessary 
 to their work in life. Such persons commonly wish 
 to do what common morality regards as right ; yet 
 for the most part they cannot deny that they live in 
 luxury; while at the same time it can hardly be denied 
 that luxurious living is commonly thought to be in 
 some degree censurable. We should be surprised to 
 hear an earnest and thoughtful man say, except 
 jocosely, that it was part of his plan of life to live 
 in luxury ; or to hear an earnest and thoughtful 
 
 * An address delivered to the University Hall Guild, London, 
 January, 1894 ; and subsequently to the Cambridge Ethical Society. 
 
 178 
 
LUXURY. 179 
 
 father, toiling to accumulate by industry adequate 
 wealth for his children, say that he wished to enable 
 them to live in luxury. Yet often there would be no 
 doubt that the habits of his life, and the habits and 
 expectations which he is allowing his children to 
 form, are habits and expectations of luxurious 
 living. 
 
 Possibly some of my hearers may think that this 
 is only the familiar phenomenon of human frailty; 
 that the most moral persons are continually doing 
 many things which they know to be wrong, and that 
 luxurious living is only one of these many things. 
 But I submit that it would be difficult to find a 
 parallel case in the familiar errors and shortcomings 
 of moral persons. For these errors and shortcomings 
 are mostly occasional deflections from the way in 
 which they regularly walk, due to transient victories 
 of impulse over settled purpose. Doubtless appetite, 
 resentment, vanity, egoism, frequently lead the most 
 earnest persons astray; but it is commonly only for 
 a brief interval, after which they reject and repudiate 
 the seductive impulse and return to the path of reason 
 and duty. But the luxurious living of the high- 
 minded and earnest among the possessors of wealth 
 is obviously not an occasional deflection of this kind : 
 it is a high-road on which they travel day after day 
 and year after year, systematically and — I was going 
 
i8o LUXURY, 
 
 to say comfortably, but that would not be quite true ; 
 my point rather is that they travel it with a certain 
 amount — I think at the present time a growing 
 amount — of moral uneasiness and perplexity. 
 
 Here, perhaps, some one may think that this per- 
 plexity, if it is a perplexity, is one which interests 
 only a very limited circle, at least from a moral point 
 of view. It may be said that the difficulty that the 
 rich find in trying to enter the kingdom of heaven was 
 long ago made known to us by the highest authority ; 
 but that, fortunately for the human race, this par- 
 ticular obstacle affects only a few, for whose moral 
 troubles we can hardly be called on to feel much 
 sympathy, since to get rid of the obstacle is only 
 too easy. I think, however, that this would be a 
 hasty and superficial judgment. No doubt it is only 
 a small minority of persons who are privileged to 
 dwell in marble halls, adorned with damask hangings, 
 and surrounded by acres of park and garden-beds ; 
 who are liable to dinners costing two guineas a head, 
 and who habitually wear whatever substitute for 
 purple the aesthetic fashion of this modern age pre- 
 scribes. But if luxurious living is morally censurable, 
 the censure must extend far beyond the limits of the 
 few thousand persons who enjoy these privileges ; it 
 must extend to all who watch this glorious profusion 
 with mingled sympathy and envy, struggle and long 
 
LUXURY. i8i 
 
 to get a share of it whenever opportunity offers, and 
 meanwhile pay it the homage of cheap imitation. 
 Indeed, if the sin of luxurious living, like many other 
 sins, lies mainly in the spirit and intention of expen- 
 diture, it would be easy to write an apologue that 
 should be the reverse of the tale of the widow's mite, 
 and show how the spirit of luxury may be fully 
 manifested in the expenditure of sixpence on lolli- 
 pops or feathers or gin. 
 
 But further, even if it were granted that the costly 
 luxuries of the rich are really the only kind of 
 luxuries that can possibly deserve the unfavourable 
 judgment of the moralist, it would still be important 
 to all classes of the community that this censure 
 should be well considered and discriminating. For 
 any material change in the expenditure in question 
 would inevitably, in one way or another, have 
 economic and social effects of a far-reaching kind, 
 however it was brought about ; and if such a change 
 ever should be brought about, it will be largely due to 
 the pressure of the moral opinions and sentiments of 
 persons other than the rich. 
 
 My aim, then, this evening will be to arrive at as 
 clear a view as possible on the following questions : 
 (i) What luxury is; (2) Why and how far it is 
 deserving of censure. 
 
 Let us begin by considering the definition of the 
 
i82 LUXURY. 
 
 term. Political economists sometimes use the term 
 " luxury " in a wide sense, to include all forms of 
 private consumption of wealth not necessary for the 
 health or working efficiency of the consumer ; all 
 consumption — to put it otherwise — which is neither 
 directly nor indirectly productive, and which, there- 
 fore, would be uneconomical, if we regarded a man 
 merely as an industrial machine. It may seem, 
 however, that we should keep nearer to ordinary 
 thought and language by recognizing one or more 
 kinds of expenditure intermediate between luxuries 
 on the one hand and necessaries on the other. 
 Certainly we commonly speak of '' luxuries, com- 
 forts, and necessaries " ; or, again, of " luxuries, 
 decencies, and necessaries of life " ; and I think we 
 may get a clearer idea of what we mean by ''luxury" 
 if we examine its relation to each of these inter- 
 mediate terms. 
 
 When we reflect on the ordinary distinction 
 between "luxuries" and "comforts," the difference 
 seems to be this : " comforts " are means of pro- 
 tection against slight pains and annoyances such 
 as do not materially injure health or interfere with 
 efficiency — such annoyances as we call "discom- 
 forts " ; — " luxuries," on the other hand, are sources 
 of positive pleasure whose absence would not cause 
 discomfort. It is commonly, I think, not difficult 
 
LUXURY. 183 
 
 for an individual to apply this distinction in his own 
 case, so far as his feelings at any particular time 
 are concerned. Thus, when I take a long railway 
 journey on a frosty day, a thick great-coat is neces- 
 sary to me, because without it I am likely to catch a 
 cold which will impair my efficiency ; a railway rug 
 is a comfort, because without it I shall be disagree- 
 ably cold from the knees downward ; a fur cloak is 
 a luxury. But reflection shows that the difference 
 on which this distinction turns is very largely an 
 affair of habit, since the privation of luxuries that 
 have become habitual usually causes discomfort and 
 annoyance. We are told that a famous Roman 
 epicure — Apicius — committed suicide when he had 
 reduced his fortune to eighty thousand pounds, feel- 
 ing that life was not worth living on this meagre 
 scale; and though this is an extreme case, it is 
 generally recognized that a rapid fall from great to 
 moderate wealth is liable to cause positive discomfort 
 from the sudden break of luxurious habits that it 
 entails. But it is not, perhaps, generally recognized 
 how very far-reaching this effect of habit is, and how 
 largely what we call comforts are — apart from habit 
 — really luxuries. I suppose there can be no doubt 
 that the vast majority of Englishmen might without 
 discomfort dispense through life with all such nervous 
 stimulants as tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco — at any 
 
i84 LUXURY. 
 
 rate, if they had been reared from infancy without 
 them. I do not say this without experience. I lived 
 myself in perfect comfort between the ages of twelve 
 and nineteen, drinking only water at all meals ; and 
 I remember that I could not imagine why people 
 took the trouble to manufacture tea, coffee, and wine. 
 Yet the most hard-headed modern economist would 
 not deprive an old woman of her tea in the work- 
 house ; and I am told that whatever deterrent effect 
 the prospect of imprisonment under present con- 
 ditions has on our criminal classes depends largely 
 on the deprivation of their habitual alcohol and 
 tobacco. 
 
 It seems clear, then, that the line between luxuries 
 and comforts is necessarily a shifting one. The 
 commonest comforts might — apart from the effect 
 of habit — be classed as luxuries; the most expensive 
 luxuries may, through habit, become mere comforts, 
 in the sense that they cannot be dispensed with 
 without annoyance. 
 
 We have now to observe that often the annoyance 
 which the loss of wealth causes to the loser arises 
 solely from the fall in social position and reputation 
 which it is rightly or wrongly believed to entail. 
 This leads me to my second distinction : — that 
 between "luxuries" and the "decencies" of life. I 
 here use " decencies" in a wide sense, to mean all 
 
LUXURY. 185 
 
 commodities beyond necessaries which we consume 
 to avoid not physical discomfort, but social dis- 
 repute. Perhaps I may make my distinction 
 between " decencies " and " comforts " clear by a 
 homely illustration. Many men, I believe, find 
 that their coats, hats, and boots are liable to be 
 condemned by domestic criticism as not "decent" 
 to wear in public, just when they have become 
 most thoroughly adapted to the peculiarities of 
 the wearer's organism, and so most thoroughly 
 comfortable. Half a century ago I believe that 
 boots were altogether a " decency " rather than a 
 comfort for a valuable and thriving part of the 
 population of our island ; at least a political 
 economist* of that date tells us that a " Scotch 
 peasant wears shoes to preserve not his feet, but 
 his station in society." 
 
 It will, therefore, be clear at once that just as the 
 line between "luxuries" and "comforts" varies 
 almost indefinitely with the habits of individuals, 
 the distinctions between " luxuries " and " decencies " 
 varies similarly with the customs and opinions of 
 classes. 
 
 Now, if we are passing judgment on an individual 
 accused of luxury in a bad sense, or giving advice to 
 one desirous of avoiding it, the consideration of his 
 
 * Senior, 
 
1 86 LUXURY, 
 
 formed habits and the customs of his class must be 
 taken into account. It may sometimes be even un- 
 wise in him to break habits which it would yet have 
 been wise not to have formed ; for a struggle with 
 habit sometimes involves a material temporary 
 decrease of efficiency, and a hard - working man 
 reasonably objects to impair his efficiency. The 
 principle is no doubt a dangerous one, and easily 
 abused ; but I do not think we can deny its legiti- 
 macy within strict limits. So, again, though we 
 should usually admire an individual who breaks 
 through a custom of useless expenditure, we should 
 usually shrink from imposing this as an absolute 
 duty, and sometimes should even condemn it as 
 unwise. A fight with custom is, like other fights, 
 inspiriting and highly favourable to the development 
 of moral courage ; but usually, like other fights, it 
 cannot be carried on without cost and sacrifice of 
 some kind ; and it is the part of a wise man to count 
 the cost before undertaking it, and to measure his 
 resources against the strength of the adversary. 
 
 But at present I only mention these considerations 
 to exclude them. I do not now wish to consider 
 how we are to judge individuals, but rather how we 
 are to judge habits and customs regarded as social 
 facts. For such habits and customs are being modi- 
 fied continually though slowly ; and if they are bad, 
 
LUXURY. 187 
 
 it is desirable that the pressure of public opinion 
 should in one way or another be brought to bear 
 to modify them. " They may say it is the Persian 
 fashion, but let it be changed," as Shakespeare 
 has it. 
 
 From this point of view I think it convenient to 
 avoid the necessarily shifting and relative definitions 
 of decencies and comforts, and to fall back on the 
 simpler distinction between "luxuries" and "neces- 
 saries " ; extending, however, the term necessaries 
 to include expenditure required by such habits 
 and customs as we consider generally necessary to 
 physical or moral well-being ; e.g., habits of due 
 cleanliness and such customs in respect of decency 
 — in a strict sense — as we judge important, if not 
 indispensable, to morality. This extension is, I 
 think, required by ordinary usage, for no one would 
 apply the term "luxurious" in an unfavourable mean- 
 ing to expenditure of this kind. And I think we 
 shall further agree that the term is not properly 
 applicable to expenditure that increases a man's 
 efficiency in the performance of his industrial or 
 social function, so long as the increase of efficiency 
 is not obtained at a disproportionate cost. But this 
 requirement of due proportion between expenditure 
 and increase of efficiency should be kept carefully in 
 view, because in all kinds of work it is possible to 
 
1 88 LUXURY. 
 
 increase efficiency really but wastefuUy by adding 
 instruments which are of some use, but are not worth 
 their cost. In the application of wealth, by which a 
 competent man of business makes his income, this 
 proportion of efficiency to cost is easily estimated, 
 and clearly unremunerative conveniences — e.g.^ 
 machines that clearly cost more labour than they 
 save — are carefully excluded ; but in the application 
 of wealth by which an income is spent^ this economic 
 care is often thrown aside, and instruments are 
 purchased which, while not absolutely useless for 
 the purchaser's ends, are at any rate of very little 
 use in proportion to their cost, — not unfrequently of 
 so little use that they do not even compensate the 
 loss of time and trouble spent in taking care of 
 them. May I take an illustration from my own 
 calling ? I have heard of a scholar who did good 
 work in his youth and attained fame and promotion ; 
 but then his work slackened and stopped. On 
 inquiry this was found to be due not to laziness, 
 but to his increasing absorption in the task of 
 buying, housing, binding, classifying, arranging, and 
 looking after the splendid collection of books that 
 he had formed to aid his researches. 
 
 For this form of luxury, these inconvenient 
 conveniences, there is no defence. But I dwell on 
 it now because, ever since moral reflection began 
 
LUXURY, 189 
 
 in Europe, there have been thoughtful persons who 
 have held that the customary luxurious expenditure 
 of the rich on food, clothes, houses, furniture, 
 carriages, horses, etc., consisted mainly in con- 
 veniences that were really quite uneconomic, because 
 one way or another they caused more trouble and 
 annoyance than they saved to their possessor. I 
 will quote an expression of this view from a source 
 which may surprise some of my hearers ; ix.^ from a 
 work* by the founder of the long line of modern 
 political economists who are commonly supposed 
 to exalt wealth too exclusively, and to value it 
 unduly. Adam Smith, in 1759, wrote that "wealth 
 and greatness are mere trinkets of frivolous utility, 
 no more adapted for procuring ease of body or tran- 
 quillity of mind than the tweezer-cases of the lover 
 of toys ; and, like them, too, more troublesome to 
 the person who carries them about with him than all 
 the advantages they can afford him are commodious. 
 . . . In ease of body and peace of mind all the 
 different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and 
 the beggar who suns himself by the side of the 
 highway possesses that security which kings are 
 fighting for." 
 
 I have quoted this not because I believe it to 
 be really true, but because it is interesting to find 
 
 * Theory of Moral Senthnents, part iv., chap. i. 
 
I90 LUXURY. 
 
 that Adam Smith believed it, and because it was a 
 tolerably prevalent belief in his age. There is a 
 story told by a writer of this period which may serve 
 as another illustration : a story of a Persian king, 
 afflicted with a strange malady, who had been 
 informed by a wise physician that he could be cured 
 by wearing the shirt of a perfectly happy man. It 
 was at first supposed that there could be no difficulty 
 in finding such a man among the upper ten thousand 
 of Persia ; but the court was searched in vain, 
 and the city was searched in vain ; and the 
 messengers sent to prosecute the search through 
 the country found that landowners and farmers had 
 all their sorrows and anxieties. At length the 
 searchers met a labourer, singing as he came home 
 from work. Struck with his gaiety, they questioned 
 him as to his happiness. He professed himself 
 perfectly happy. They probed him with minute 
 inquiries, but no flaw in his happiness was revealed. 
 The long-sought remedy seemed to be in their 
 hands ; but, alas ! the happy man wore no shirt. 
 
 Well, I think this story will show how far the 
 thought of the nineteenth century has travelled from 
 the view of life that was prevalent in the age of 
 Adam Smith and Rousseau. Perhaps it has travelled 
 a little too far. Adam Smith was — what Rousseau 
 certainly was not — a shrewd, calm, and disengaged 
 
LUXURY. 191 
 
 observer of the facts of civilized life. He sometimes, 
 as here, gives the rein to rhetoric, but he never lets it 
 carry him away. And I think that his view contains 
 an important element of truth ; that it signalizes 
 a real danger of wasted effort, growing in importance 
 as the arts of industry grow, against which civilized 
 man has to guard. I think that every thoughtful 
 person, in planning his expenditure, ought to keep 
 this danger in view, and avoid the multiplication of 
 useless, or nearly useless, instruments, — houses larger 
 than he at all needs, servants whose services are not 
 materially time-saving, a private carriage when 
 walking is ordinarily better for his health and 
 adequate for his business, and many minor super- 
 fluities which absorb the margin of income that 
 would otherwise be available for results of real 
 utility. Still, taking Adam Smith's statement in its 
 full breadth, I cannot but regard it as a paradox 
 containing more error than truth. I see no reason 
 to doubt that the steady aim of civilized man to 
 increase the pleasures of life by refining and compli- 
 cating their means and sources — an aim which in all 
 ages has stimulated and directed the development of 
 industry and commerce — has been to a great extent 
 a successful aim, so far as its immediate end is 
 concerned. 
 
 Let us, then, putting out of sight expenditure 
 
192 LUXURY. 
 
 prompted by bad habits, or imposed by useless 
 customs, and expenditure on illusory conveniences 
 that give more trouble than they save, concentrate 
 our attention on luxury successful in its immediate 
 aims — i.e., consumption that increases pleasure with- 
 out materially promoting health or efficiency ; and 
 let us consider how far and on what grounds this 
 may reasonably be thought deserving of censure. 
 Now — if we put aside the paradoxes of stoical 
 moralists who deny that pleasure is a good — the 
 arguments against increasing an individual's pleasure 
 by superfluous consumption seem to be chiefly three. 
 It may be urged, first, that the process usually injures 
 his health in the long run ; secondly, that it impairs 
 his efficiency for the performance of his social 
 functions ; thirdly, that the labour he causes to be 
 spent in providing him with the means of pleasure 
 would have produced more happiness, on the whole, 
 if it had been spent in providing the means of 
 pleasure for others. The first two of these consider- 
 ations form the main staple of the older arguments 
 against luxury ; the third is more prominent in 
 modern thought. I will briefly consider each in turn. 
 On the first of these heads — the effect of luxury 
 on health — there is much need to meditate, but little 
 for a layman to say. That persons of wealth and 
 leisure are in danger of excess in sensual indulgences; 
 
LUXURY, 193 
 
 that this excess is continually being committed ; that 
 it is not difficult to avoid it by care and self-control ; 
 that those who do not avoid it are palpably foolish ; 
 what more is there to say for one who is not a 
 physician ? 
 
 I remember that in one of the most polished and 
 pointed poems that Pope ever wrote, he speaks of 
 his father as having had a long life — 
 
 " Healthy by temperance and by exercise." 
 
 The line, you see, is neither polished nor pointed ; 
 and I used to wonder how Pope's fine taste ever 
 came to admit such a platitude, until I read the 
 brilliant chapter in Trevelyan's Early History of 
 Charles James Fox, on the manners of London 
 society in the middle of the eighteenth century. It 
 then occurred to me that the fact of a man of means 
 having lived to old age, " healthy by temperance 
 and by exercise," may have seemed to Pope so rare 
 and remarkable that its bare statement would be 
 impressive without any verbal adornments. Well, I 
 hope that this has been changed in the nineteenth 
 century ; but I leave the question to the social his- 
 torian ; the philosopher may be permitted to pass on, 
 only remarking that the folly of sacrificing health to 
 sensual indulgence is not the distinctive privilege of 
 any social class. I remember that Pope, whom I 
 
 O 
 
194 LUXURY. 
 
 have just quoted, sneers at legislation that spares the 
 vices of the rich, 
 
 " And hurls the thunders of the laws on gin." 
 
 But the legislators might have answered, that 
 while champagne and burgundy were slaying their 
 thousands, " gin " was slaying its tens of thousands. 
 But, secondly, it is urged that, without positively 
 injuring health, the refinement and complication of 
 the means of physical enjoyment tend to diminish 
 efficiency for work. Looking closer at this argu- 
 ment, we find that it combines two distinct 
 objections : one is that luxury makes men lazy^ 
 disinclined for labour ; the other is that it makes 
 them soft, incapable of the prolonged, strenuous 
 exertion and the patient endurance of disagree- 
 able incidents which most kinds of effective work 
 require. On the point of laziness I will speak 
 presently. As regards softness, the objection has 
 this element of truth in it — that the powers of 
 sustained exertion and endurance are developed, 
 like other powers, by practice, and that the lives 
 of the poor provide normally an unsought training 
 of these powers from childhood upwards, which 
 has to be supplied artificially, if at all, in the lives 
 of the rich. But I think experience shows that 
 the objection is not very serious, at least for our 
 
LUXURY. 195 
 
 race. Certainly, Englishmen brought up in luxury 
 seem usually to show an adequate capacity of 
 exertion and endurance when any strong motive 
 is suppHed for the exercise of these qualities. 
 
 We come, then, to the question of laziness, 
 meaning by laziness a disposition to work clearly 
 less than is good for one's self and others. There 
 can be no doubt that the luxurious tend as a 
 class to be lazy ; the possession of the means of 
 sensual enjoyment without labour disposes average 
 men, if not to absolute inertia, at any rate to 
 short working hours and long holidays. On the 
 other hand, if luxury makes men lazy, the prospect 
 of luxury makes them work ; and if we balance 
 the two effects on motive, I think there can be no 
 doubt that, other things remaining the same, a 
 society from which luxury was effectually excluded 
 would be lazier than a society that admitted it. 
 If it be said that the desire of luxury is a low 
 motive, I might answer in the manner in which one 
 of the wisest of English moralists — Butler — speaks 
 of resentment. I should say that " it were much to 
 be wished that men would act on a better principle " ; 
 but that if you could suppress the desire of luxury 
 without altering human nature in other respects, you 
 would probably do harm, because you would diminish 
 the general happiness by increasing laziness. 
 
196 LUXURY. 
 
 This argument is, I think, decisive from a political 
 point of view, as a defence of a social order that 
 allows great inequalities in the distribution of wealth 
 for consumption. But when I hear it urged as con- 
 clusive from an ethical point of view, I am reminded 
 of Lord Melbourne's answer to a friend whom he 
 consulted, when premier, as to the bestowal of a 
 vacant garter. His friend said, "Why not take it 
 yourself? no one has a better claim." " Well, but," 
 said Lord Melbourne " I don't see what I am to gain 
 by bribing myself" The answer is cynical in ex- 
 pression, but it contains a lesson for some who 
 profess a higher moral standard than Lord 
 Melbourne was in the habit of professing. For 
 when we have decided that the toleration of 
 luxury as a social fact is indispensable to the full 
 development of human energy, the ethical question 
 still remains for each individual, whether it is 
 indispensable for him ; whether, in order to get 
 himself to do his duty, he requires to bribe himself 
 by a larger share of consumable wealth than falls 
 to the common lot. And if one answers the 
 question in the affirmative, one must admit one's 
 self to belong to the class of persons character- 
 ized by George Eliot as " people whose high ideals 
 are not required to account for their actions." 
 
 Further, the moral censor of luxury may rejoin 
 
LUXURY. 197 
 
 that he admits the danger of repressing luxury with- 
 out repressing laziness, and is quite willing to divide 
 his censure equally between the two. He may even 
 grant that, of the two, more stress should be laid 
 on the discouragement of idleness ; and that the 
 moral repression of luxury can only be safely 
 attempted by slow degrees, so far as we succeed 
 in substituting nobler motives for activity — i.e., so 
 far as we can make it natural and customary for 
 all men, whatever their means, to choose some 
 social function and devote themselves strenuously 
 to its excellent performance. 
 
 But if the censor takes this line — and I think 
 it practically a wise line — he by implication admits 
 the inconclusiveness of the argument against luxury 
 as an inducement to idleness ; for it implies that the 
 two are separable, and that idleness, like softness 
 and disease, is not an inevitable concomitant of 
 luxurious living, but only a danger that may be 
 guarded against. 
 
 I come, then, to the third argument — viz., that 
 a man who lives luxuriously consumes what would 
 have produced more happiness if he had left it to 
 be consumed by others. It is to be observed that 
 this is an argument not against luxury itself, so 
 far as it is successful luxury, but against its unequal 
 distribution ; it is an argument in favour of cheap 
 
198 LUXURY. 
 
 luxuries for the many instead of costly luxuries for 
 the few. And this, I think, is generally the case 
 with the modern censures of luxurious living as 
 contrasted with the more ancient censures ; the 
 modern attack is rather directed against inequality 
 in the distribution of the means of enjoyment than 
 against the general principle of heightening the 
 pleasures of life by refining and elaborating their 
 means and sources ; or, at any rate, if this elab- 
 oration is attacked, it is only because it involves, 
 from a social point of view, a waste of labour. But 
 though this makes a fundamental difference in the 
 grounds of the attack, it does not make much 
 difference in its objects; since it is the consumer of 
 costly luxuries who in all ages has stood in the 
 forefront of the controversy and borne the brunt 
 of moral censure. Accordingly, in the little I have 
 yet to say of luxury, I shall use the term in the 
 special sense of costly luxury. 
 
 It must be admitted that this third objection, 
 so far as it is valid at all, is more inevitable than the 
 preceding ones. A man may avoid disease by 
 care and self-control ; he may avoid idleness and 
 softness by bracing exercise of his faculties, physical 
 and mental, while still systematically heightening his 
 enjoyment of existence by elaborate and complex 
 means of pleasure ; but just as he cannot both eat 
 
LUXURY. 199 
 
 his cake and have it, so he cannot both eat his 
 cake and arrange that other men should eat it 
 too, or that they should consume the simpler 
 products of the baker's art which might have 
 resulted from the same labour. 
 
 Need I say a word about the hoary fallacy that 
 a man by eating his cake provides employment — 
 and therefore cake, or at least bread — for the baker ? 
 " Time was," as Shakespeare says, " that when the 
 brains were out the man would die " ; and as the 
 brains have been out of this fallacy generations 
 ago, I shall consider it as slain, even though it 
 still walks the earth with inextinguishable vitality, 
 and occasionally reappears in the writings of the 
 most superior persons. I shall venture to assume 
 that, speaking generally, a man benefits others by 
 rendering services to them, and not by requiring 
 them to render services to him. 
 
 Can we accept it as a generally satisfactory 
 defence of the costly luxuries of the few that, 
 owing to the exquisite delicacy of the palates of 
 certain individuals, the general happiness is best 
 promoted by the consumption of cake being 
 reserved to them ? that they are to be regarded, 
 in fact, as the organ of humanity for the apprec- 
 iation of cake ? There is some truth in this, if we 
 are considering a siiddeti change ; since experience 
 
200 LUXURY. 
 
 shows that refined luxury is liable to be wasted 
 on persons suddenly transplanted into it late in 
 life. But the arguments do not go far, since the 
 same experience shows that the task of educating 
 any class up to the standard of capacity for enjoy- 
 ing luxury, which is reached on the average by 
 the wealthiest class of the age, is not a difficult 
 task, though it requires time. It is, indeed, in most 
 cases, an educational problem peculiarly easy of 
 solution. Hence I do not think this consideration 
 can weigh much against the broad fact that, even in 
 the case of successful luxury, increase in the means 
 of enjoyment consumed by the same individual is 
 accompanied by increase of enjoy n>ent in a con- 
 tinually diminishing ratio ; so that inequality in the 
 distribution of consumption is uneconomic from a 
 social point of view. 
 
 A really valid defence of luxury, then, must be 
 found, if at all, in some service which the luxurious 
 consumer as such renders to the non-luxurious. 
 That is, it must be shown that so-called luxury is 
 not really such, according to our definition, but is 
 a provision necessary for the efficient performance 
 of some social function. 
 
 From this point of view it is sometimes said 
 that luxury is a kind of social insurance against 
 disaster, as providing a store of commodity on 
 
LUXURY. 201 
 
 which society can draw when widespread economic 
 losses occur through war or industrial disturbance. 
 Such disasters would no doubt cause far graver 
 distress if they fell on a body of human beings who 
 had among them hardly more than the necessaries of 
 life ; but though this is an argument for habitually 
 producing a certain amount of commodities not 
 required for health or efficiency, it is not a strong 
 argument for distributing them unequally. The 
 social surplus required might be nearly as well 
 created by the cheap superfluities of the many as 
 by the costly superfluities of the few. 
 
 Passing over other inadequate defences of luxury, 
 I come to the only one to which I am disposed to 
 attach weight — viz., that inequality in the distribution 
 of superfluous commodities is required for the social 
 function of advancing culture, enlarging the ideal of 
 human life, and carrying it towards ever fuller per- 
 fection. Here it seems desirable to draw a distinction 
 between the two main elements of culture — (i) the 
 apprehension and advancement of knowledge, and 
 (2) the appreciation and production of beauty, as it 
 is in respect of the latter that defence is most 
 obviously needed. No doubt in the past learning 
 and science have been largely advanced by men of 
 wealth ; no doubt, also, the scholar or researcher at 
 the present day requires continually more elaborate 
 
202 LUXURY. 
 
 provision in the way of libraries, museums, apparatus. 
 But these we shall properly regard not as luxuries 
 but as the instruments of a profession or calling of 
 high social value ; and, generally speaking, there 
 seems no reason why the pursuit of knowledge 
 should suffer if the expenditure of the student, 
 inclusive of the funds devoted to the instruments of 
 his calling, were kept free from all costly luxury and 
 "high thinking" universally accompanied by "plain 
 living." And the same view may be, to a great 
 extent at least, legitimately taken of the expenditure 
 on the pursuit of knowledge incurred by that large 
 majority of educated persons who can hardly hope 
 to contribute materially to the scientific progress of 
 mankind : so far as this expenditure tends directly or 
 indirectly to increase the efficiency of their intellectual 
 activities. Some portion of this may no doubt be 
 wasted in the gratification of idle curiosity, so as to 
 leave no intellectual profit behind ; and theoretically 
 we must except this portion from our defence of 
 costly expenditure on intellectual pursuits. But I do 
 not think that this exception is practically very 
 important, considering the hesitation that a wise man 
 will always feel in pronouncing on the uselessness of 
 any knowledge. 
 
 Can we similarly defend the costly expenditure of 
 the rich on the cultivation and satisfaction of aesthetic 
 
LUXURY. 203 
 
 sensibilities — on literature regarded as a fine art, on 
 music and the drama, on paintings and sculptures, 
 on ornamental buildings and furniture, on flowers 
 and trees and landscape - gardening of all kinds ? 
 Such expenditure is actually much larger in amount 
 than that incurred in the pursuit of knowledge : 
 and in considering it we reach, I think, the heart of 
 this ancient controversy on luxury. Here, however, 
 I have to confess that personal insight and experience 
 fail me. I only worship occasionally in the outer 
 court of the temple of beauty, and so I do not 
 feel competent to hold the brief for luxury on 
 the ground of its being a necessary condition of 
 aesthetic progress. But though I cannot hold the 
 brief I am prepared, as a member of the jury of 
 educated persons, to give a verdict in favour of the 
 defendant ; so far, at least, as a sincere love of 
 beauty is the predominant motive of the costly 
 expenditure defended. I find that the study of 
 history leads me continually to contemplate with 
 sympathy and satisfaction the opulence and luxury 
 of the few amid the hard lives of the many, because 
 it presents itself as the practically necessary soil in 
 which beauty and the love of beauty grow and 
 develop ; and because I see how, when new sources 
 of high and refined delight have thus been pro- 
 duced, the best and most essential of their benefits 
 
204 LUXURY. 
 
 extend by degrees from the few to the many, and 
 become abiding possessions of the race. It is possible 
 that in the future we may carry on artistic and 
 aesthetic development successfully on the basis of 
 public and collective effort, and dispense with the 
 lavish and costly private expenditure of the few ; 
 but till we are convinced that this is likely — and I 
 am not yet convinced — I think we should not hamper 
 the progress of this priceless element of human life 
 by any censure or discouragement of luxurious living, 
 so long as it aims at the ends and keeps within the 
 limits which I have endeavoured briefly to determine. 
 
VIII. 
 
 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE* 
 
 \T THEN I was invited to deliver an incidental 
 ^ ' lecture to the students of the London School 
 of Ethics and Social Philosophy, it seemed to me 
 desirable to choose a subject that on the one hand 
 should have an interest for students of Ethics, from 
 a practical as well as theoretical point of view ; and 
 on the other hand, should not be customarily in- 
 cluded — or, at least, only introduced in a very cursory 
 and subordinate way — in the systematic treatment of 
 Ethics. It seemed to me that the pursuit of culture 
 as an ideal would fulfil these two conditions. Culture 
 is a fundamentally important part of the human 
 good that practical morality aims at promoting ; at 
 the same time, its importance in the general view 
 of practical morality and philanthropy has grown 
 very much during the last generation, with the 
 enlargement of our conception of the prospective 
 greatness of human life to be lived on this earth. I 
 
 * An address delivered before the London School of Ethics and 
 Social Philosophy on October 24th, 1897. 
 
 205 
 
2o6 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE, 
 
 think no more remarkable change has ever taken 
 place in human thought than this enlargement, due 
 to the advance of science, especially of the historical 
 sciences — geology, evolutional biology, archaeology, 
 and anthropology, and the comprehensive but still 
 rudimentary science sociology, which has taken 
 nearly a century to get itself fairly born. The 
 mundane life of the individual is as transient as 
 ever ; but the mundane life of the larger whole of 
 which he is a part — the life of the human race — now 
 spreads out before our imagination as all but infinite 
 in its probable duration and its possibilities of 
 development. Its past life is reckoned by tens of 
 thousands of years : and the gloomiest forecasts of 
 physicists as to the cooling of the sun allow it more 
 millions of future years than I need try to count. 
 Thus the problem of making human life on earth 
 a better thing has become more and more clearly the 
 dominant problem for morality, comprehending 
 almost all minor problems, and determining the 
 lines on which their solution is to be sought ; and 
 in the doubtless imperfect conception we form of 
 this betterment, mental culture, which, — according to 
 usage, I shall speak of briefly as culture, — has, as 
 I said, a prominent place. 
 
 And the dominance of this problem has been 
 further established by the change in current political 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 207 
 
 ideas, of which our newspapers have long been so 
 full, — the reaction against the individualism of the 
 earlier political economists, which left the culture of 
 the individual to his self-interest well understood, 
 or, in the case of children, to parental affection, and 
 merely aimed at protecting individuals and parents 
 against interference in its pursuit. The enlarged 
 conception of social and political duty which is now 
 prevalent is impelling us with increasing force to 
 promote positively the attainment of a good life 
 for all ; — through the action of the State, so far as 
 experience shows this to be prudent, but also through 
 private and voluntarily associated effort, outside and 
 apart from, or in co-operation with, government. 
 And this good life, as I have said, means for us a 
 cultivated life, a life in which culture is in some 
 degree attained and exercised. 
 
 Indeed, I think it may be said that the promotion 
 of culture, in one form or another, is more and 
 more coming to be recognized as the main moral 
 justification for the luxurious expenditure of the 
 rich. Observe that in saying this I wish clearly 
 to distinguish the moral from the political justi- 
 fication. I have no hankering after sumptuary laws ; 
 and men being what they are, I have no doubt 
 that the liberty to spend one's income luxuriously 
 is — quite apart from any question of culture — an 
 
2o8 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 indispensable spring of economic progress. But 
 what men ought to do is often very different from 
 what they ought to be made to do. And if culture, 
 like the greater goods, Religion and Morality, 
 could be equally well promoted by scanty and re- 
 stricted personal expenditure, it would seem to me — 
 in view of the multiple evils of the penury around 
 us — a clear moral duty for most persons with ample 
 means to restrict their expenditure to the minimum 
 necessary for the health, and the efficiency in pro- 
 fessional or social work, of themselves and their 
 families. The superfluity could then be spent in any 
 of the ways of relieving distress which the Charity 
 Organization Society would sanction ; and in spite 
 of the severity commonly attributed to that society, 
 such sanctioned ways of spending are, I can assure 
 you, both numerous and absorbent of funds. What 
 stands in the way of this moral judgment is the 
 widespread conviction that the lavish expenditure 
 of the rich on the elements of culture, the means 
 of developing and gratifying the love of knowledge 
 and the love of beauty in all their various forms, 
 meets an important social need, — wastefully no doubt, 
 but still more effectively than it could at present 
 be met in any other way; since the gain in know- 
 ledge and in elevated and refined delight obtained 
 through this expenditure does not remain with the 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 209 
 
 rich alone, but extends in a number of ways to other 
 classes. Whether this conviction is sound or not 
 I do not now consider : I only refer to it as illus- 
 trating the importance that we have come to attach 
 to the notion of culture in our moral judgments. 
 
 And this comes out more clearly if we note what 
 among the advantages which the rich actually derive 
 from their superfluous expenditure — I mean expendi- 
 ture not needed for health or efficiency — the genuine 
 philanthropists among them are keenly desirous to 
 giwQ to others less fortunate. Surely — apart from 
 the general and technical education required for 
 economic efficiency — they consist almost entirely 
 in the means of developing the elevated faculties 
 and refined sensibilities which we include in the 
 notion of culture. I do not mean that such a 
 philanthropist would object to manual labourers 
 feasting on grouse and champagne — as certain 
 miners in the North were once said to do when 
 wages were high — but he would not make efforts 
 and sacrifices to spread these delicacies. Perhaps 
 you may say that if wealthy philanthropists really 
 put so high a value on culture, they would not spend 
 so much of their wealth in giving themselves plea- 
 sant things which have little or nothing to do with 
 culture. I might answer this in various ways. I 
 might dwell on the tyranny of custom, and the 
 
 V 
 
2IO THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE, 
 
 conventional forms in which the time-honoured 
 virtue of hospitahty necessarily has to express 
 itself. But perhaps the answer that goes deepest 
 is that suggested by an old remark that the precept 
 "Love thy neighbour as thyself" might — when it 
 has attained general acceptance and serious efforts 
 are made to fulfil it — be advantageously supple- 
 mented by the converse precept " Love thyself as 
 thy neighbour " : since a genuine regard for our 
 neighbour — when not hampered by the tyranny 
 of custom — prompts us to give him what we think 
 really good for him ; whereas natural self-regard 
 prompts us to give ourselves what we like. Thus 
 the spontaneous expression of altruism, rather than 
 the spontaneous expression of egoism, corresponds 
 to our deepest judgment, the judgment of our best 
 self, as to the good and evil in human life. 
 ■^ If it were needful to give further more detailed 
 proof of this growing recognition of the importance 
 of culture, and the growing desire for its wider 
 diffusion, I might draw attention to several different 
 features in recent social movements. I might point, 
 e.g., to the burning question of the " eight hours 
 day," and the eagerness shown by the advocates 
 of the workmen's side in this controversy to convince 
 the public that it is really leisure they want for their 
 clients, and not merely additional wages. No im- 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 211 
 
 partial outsider objects to their getting as much 
 wages as the conditions of industry may allow ; but 
 they know that the demand for leisure to lead a 
 more cultivated life will stir the keenest sympathy 
 of lookers on. I might remind you of the resolu- 
 tion recently passed at a Socialistic Congress, that 
 University education should be effectively open to 
 all classes of the community, from the highest to 
 the lowest ; for even an extravagance of this kind 
 is a straw that shows how strongly the current of 
 opinion is flowing. I might refer to the efforts to 
 render picture-galleries and museums of art really 
 available for the delight and instruction of the 
 poorer classes of the community ; and I might point 
 to what is sometimes attacked as the " encroachment 
 of primary education on the province of secondary 
 education " ; which is, at any rate, evidence of the 
 widespread determination to aim, even in elementary 
 teaching, at something more than the viinhninn 
 required for economic efficiency. 
 
 I only suggest these topics, as they are familiar 
 to us all from the daily papers. I have said enough 
 to show the growing importance of culture in our 
 common conception of human good, in the ideal 
 that morality aims at realizing. What I propose 
 in the remainder of the present discourse is not 
 to discuss the methods by which culture is to be 
 
212 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 promoted and diffused, but to free this fundamental 
 notion, so far as possible, from obscurity and am- 
 biguity, so that our philanthropic efforts to promote 
 culture may have a clear and precise aim. 
 
 The question, what is culture? carries the thought 
 of a man of my age irresistibly back to the delight- 
 ful writer, who made the term familiar as a household 
 word to the English reading public a generation ago 
 — Matthew Arnold. I know that his poems are not 
 forgotten by a younger generation, and I hope his 
 essays are not forgotten either ; — at any rate the less 
 controversial of them, since the interest of contro- 
 versy is usually somewhat ephemeral. I know no 
 writings in English that plead the cause of literary 
 culture with an earnestness so light and graceful, 
 and so persuasive a charm. It was early in the 
 sixties that he began his efforts to penetrate the 
 hide of self-complacency which, then as now, was 
 a characteristic feature of his fellow-countrymen ; 
 and to make us feel the want of true culture in all 
 the three classes into which he divided our society — 
 Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace. He told us — 
 he was never tired of telling us, and his style could 
 make the most incessant iteration tolerable if not 
 agreeable — he set forth to us in memorable phrases 
 what culture was, and what great benefits we should 
 gain if we would only turn and seek it with our 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 213 
 
 whole heart. Unfortunately, Matthew Arnold was 
 not — as he humorously confessed — a systematic 
 thinker with philosophical principles duly coherent 
 and interdependent ; and consequently it is not 
 surprising that he did not always mean the same 
 thing by culture ; indeed it is interesting to watch 
 his conception expanding and contracting elastic- 
 ally, as he passes from phase to phase of a long 
 controversy. 
 
 When his preaching began he appeared to mean 
 by culture merely a knowledge of and taste for fine 
 literature, and the refinement of feeling and manners 
 which he considered to spring naturally from this 
 source. Thus, when he remarks regretfully that the 
 English aristocracy has declined somewhat from the 
 " admirable " and " consummate " culture which it had 
 attained in the eighteenth century, what he regrets 
 is the time when the oracle of polite society — Lord 
 Chesterfield — could tell the son whom he was training 
 for a political career, that "Greek and Roman learning 
 is the most necessary ornament which it is shameful 
 not to be master of," and bid the nascent diplomatist 
 " let Greek without fail share some part of every 
 day." And Arnold here seems to signify by culture 
 almost entirely the aesthetic value and effect of the 
 study of fine literature and not its value for thought : 
 since he speaks of a " high reason " and a " fine cul- 
 
214 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 ture " as two distinct things, and tells the middle class 
 — his " Philistines " — that they want both " culture " 
 which aristocracy has, and " ideas " which aristocracy 
 has not But as the controversy went on and waxed 
 a little hot, the limits of the notion came to be greatly 
 enlarged. When John Bright sneered at culture as 
 a " smattering of two dead languages," and when Mr. 
 Frederick Harrison, in his "stringent manner," said 
 that culture was a desirable quality in a critic of new 
 books, but a poor thing when you came to active 
 politics, Arnold was moved to unfold a much wider 
 and deeper view of the essential quality of this divine 
 gift. In the first place, culture was now made to 
 include an openness to ideas, as well as fine manners 
 and an appreciation of the beauty of fine poetry 
 and fine prose. Indeed, of the two, the intellectual 
 element is now the most prominent ; the most 
 powerful motive, according to Arnold, that prompts 
 us to read the best books, to know the best that has 
 been thought and said in the world, is now identified 
 with the genuine scientific passion for " seeing things 
 as they really are." But this is not all : Arnold will 
 have us go deeper still and take a yet more compre- 
 hensive view. The passion for culture is not, he says, 
 the mere desire of seeing things as they are, for the 
 simple pleasure of seeing them as they are, and 
 developing the intelligence of the seer ; though this 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 215 
 
 is a noble impulse, eminently proper to an intelligent 
 being. But culture, true culture, aims at more than 
 this : it aims at nothing less than human perfection, 
 a perfect spiritual condition, involving the " har- 
 monious expansion of all the powers which make 
 the beauty and worth of human nature," and thus 
 necessarily including perfection of will and of the 
 moral feelings that claim the governance of will, no 
 less than perfection of intelligence and taste. Its 
 dominant idea being that of a human nature perfect 
 on all its sides, it includes and transcends religion, 
 which on its practical side is dominated by the more 
 limited idea of moral perfection, and which, there- 
 fore, tends to concentrate effort on conquering the 
 " obvious faults of our animality." So viewed, culture 
 cannot be sought by anyone who seeks it for himself 
 alone. " Because men are all members of one great 
 whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature 
 will not allow one member to have a perfect welfare 
 independent of the rest, the expansion of our 
 humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which 
 culture forms, must be a gefteral expansion. . . . 
 The individual is obliged, under pain of being 
 stunted and enfeebled in his own development if 
 he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his 
 march towards perfection, to be continually doing 
 all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the 
 
2i6 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 human stream sweeping thitherward." In this wider 
 conception "all the love of our neighbour, the im- 
 pulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the 
 desire for clearing human confusion and diminishing 
 the sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to 
 leave the world better and happier than we found it " 
 — all these motives " come in as part of the grounds 
 of culture and the main and pre-eminent part." This 
 culture is seen — if we see with Arnold's eyes — to 
 move by the force not merely or primarily of the 
 scientific impulse to pure knowledge, but also of the 
 moral and social impulse to do good : it has '' one 
 great passion for sweetness and light " ; and " one 
 greater, for making reason and the will of God 
 prevail." 
 
 Well, this was a noble ideal, and the words in 
 which Arnold set it before us had the genuine ring 
 of prophetic conviction ; but we felt that we had 
 travelled a long way from the Earl of Chesterfield 
 and the admirable and consummate culture of the 
 English aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Our 
 historical reminiscences seemed to indicate that the 
 passion for making reason and the will of God 
 prevail, and carrying on the whole human race in 
 a grand march towards complete spiritual perfection, 
 which these fine gentlemen as a class derived from 
 their studies in Greek and Latin, was of a very 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 217 
 
 limited description ; hardly, indeed, perceptible to 
 the scrutiny of the impartial historian. Even in 
 the latter half of the nineteenth century the desire 
 to cultivate the intellect and taste by reading the 
 best books, and the passion for social improvement, 
 are not — if we look at actual facts — always found 
 together ; or even if we grant that the one can 
 hardly exist without some degree of the other, at 
 any rate they co -exist in different minds in very 
 varying proportions. And when Arnold tells us 
 that the Greeks had arrived, in theory at least, at 
 a harmonious adjustment of the claims of both, we 
 feel that his admiration for Hellenism has led him 
 to idealize it ; for we cannot but remember how 
 Plato politely but firmly conducts the poets out of 
 his republic, and how the Stoics sneered at Aristotle's 
 praises of pure speculation. In short, we might allow 
 Arnold to define the aim of culture either as the 
 pursuit of sweetness and light, or more comprehen- 
 sively as the pursuit of complete spiritual perfection, 
 including the aim of making reason and the will 
 of God prevail ; but in the name of culture itself 
 we must refuse to use the same word for two such 
 different things ; since the resulting confusion of 
 thought will certainly impede our efforts to see 
 things as they really are. 
 
 And when the alternatives are thus presented, it 
 
2i8 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 seems clear that usage is on the side of the 
 narrower meaning. For what philanthropy is now 
 increasingly eager to diffuse, under the name of 
 culture, is something different from religion and 
 morality ; it is not these goods that have been with- 
 held from the poor, nor of which the promotion 
 excuses the luxurious expenditure of the rich. 
 Poverty — except so far as it excludes even adequate 
 moral instruction — is no bar to morality ; as it is 
 happily in men's power to do their duty in all 
 relations of life, under any pressure of outward cir- 
 cumstances ; and it is the rich, not the poor, that the 
 Gospel warns of their special difficulty in entering the 
 kingdom of heaven. Again if the pursuit of culture 
 is taken to transcend and include the aim of pro- 
 moting religion and morality, these sublimer goods 
 cannot but claim the larger share of attention. 
 Indeed Arnold himself told us in a later essay, 
 that at least three-fourths of human life belong to 
 morality, and religion as supplying motive force to 
 morality ; art and science together can at most 
 claim the remaining fourth. But if so, in dis- 
 cussing the principles that should guide our effort 
 after the improvement of the three-fourths of life 
 that morality claims, the difficulties that such 
 effort encounters, the methods which it has to 
 apply, we shall inevitably find ourselves led far 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 219 
 
 away from the consideration of culture in the 
 ordinary sense. 
 
 For practical purposes then we must take the 
 narrower meaning. But I have not referred to 
 Arnold's wider notion in order merely to reject it, 
 or to divorce the pursuit of culture from the larger 
 aim at complete spiritual perfection and harmonious 
 development of all sides of human nature. What 
 God has joined together, I do not presume thus to 
 put asunder. No one who has risen to the grand 
 conception of the study of perfection as a com- 
 prehensive and balanced whole, the harmonious 
 development of human nature on all its sides, can 
 ever consent to abandon it ; and therefore we cannot 
 put it out of sight altogether, in considering the 
 more restricted aims of culture in the narrower 
 sense. This narrower notion is an abstraction 
 needful for the purpose of clearer view and prac- 
 tical working out of methods of pursuit ; but it 
 should never be forgotten that the separation cannot 
 be made complete without loss of truth. I propose, 
 therefore, in what I have yet to say, first to 
 analyse somewhat further the narrower conception 
 of culture ; and then to consider its relation to 
 other elements of the wider notion of complete 
 spiritual perfection. 
 
 The first question that arises when we concentrate 
 
220 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 attention on culture in the narrower and more usual 
 sense is to determine its relation to knowledge. We 
 certainly often distinguish the two : we speak of 
 diffusing knowledge and culture ; and yet it is not 
 easy to conceive a cultivation of the mind that 
 does not give knowledge. Here again it may help 
 us to follow the course of Matthew Arnold's thought. 
 In his earliest view, as we saw, culture seems to 
 lie in the development of the taste rather than the 
 intellect ; the aristocracy, he finds, has culture but 
 lacks ideas. But in his later and more meditated 
 view he appears to blend the two completely, taking 
 the development of the intellect as the more 
 fundamental element. His favourite phrase for 
 the essential spring of culture is the desire or 
 passion for " seeing things as they are." The activity 
 of culture, he tells us, lies in reading, observing, 
 thinking. Hellenism — which is another term for 
 culture in the narrower sense — " drives at ideas " ; 
 has "an ardent sense for all the new and chang- 
 ing combinations of them which man's activity 
 brings with it, and an indomitable impulse to know 
 and adjust them perfectly"; it drives at "an un- 
 clouded clearness " and flexibility of mind, an 
 " unimpeded play of thought," an " untrammelled 
 spontaneity of consciousness." This is its essential 
 aim ; and the sweetness, the grace and serenity, the 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 221 
 
 sensibility to beauty, the aversion to hideousness, 
 rawness, vulgarity, which Arnold no less values, are 
 conceived to have an intellectual root and source ; 
 they are to come from " harmonized ideas." 
 
 Now, I agree generally with the view here ex- 
 pressed as to the primacy of the intellectual element 
 of culture. Since the most essential function of the 
 mind is to think and know, a man of cultivated mind 
 must be essentially concerned for knowledge : but it 
 is not knowledge merely that gives culture. A man 
 may be learned and yet lack culture : for he may be 
 a pedant, and the characteristic of a pedant is that 
 he has knowledge without culture. So again, a load 
 of facts retained in the memory, a mass of reason- 
 ings got up merely for examination, these are not, 
 they do not give culture. It is the love of know- 
 ledge, the ardour of scientific curiosity, driving us 
 continually to absorb new facts and ideas, to make 
 them our own and fit them into the living and 
 growing system of our thought ; and the trained 
 faculty of doing this, the alert and supple intelli- 
 gence exercised and continually developed in doing 
 this, — it is in these that culture essentially lies. 
 
 But when we consider how to acquire this habit 
 of mind, we must, I think, regretfully take leave of 
 the fascinating guide whom I have so long allowed 
 to lead our thoughts on this subject. The path 
 
222 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 which at this point he shows us is a flowery one ; 
 but it does not cHmb the pass that we have to cross ; 
 it cannot bring us to the solution of our problem. 
 For Matthew Arnold's method of seeking truth is 
 a survival from a pre-scientific age. He is a man 
 of letters pure and simple ; and often seems quite 
 serenely unconscious of the intellectual limitations 
 of his type. How the crude matter of common 
 experience is reduced to the order and system which 
 constitutes it an object of scientific knowledge ; how 
 the precisest possible conceptions are applied in the 
 exact apprehension and analysis of facts, and how 
 by facts thus established and analysed the concep- 
 tions in their turn are gradually rectified ; how the 
 laws of nature are ascertained by the combined 
 processes of induction and deduction, provisional 
 assumption and careful verification ; how a general 
 hypothesis is used to guide inquiry, and after due 
 comparison with ascertained particulars, becomes an 
 accepted theory ; and how a theory, receiving further 
 confirmation, takes its place finally as an organic 
 part of a vast, living, ever-growing system of 
 knowledge ; — all this is quite alien to the habitual 
 thought of a mere man of letters. Yet it is this 
 complex process that the desire to see things as 
 they are must, in the present state of knowledge, 
 prompt a man to learn, to follow, and to apply. 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 223 
 
 Intellectual culture, at the end of the nineteenth 
 century, must include as its most essential element 
 a scientific habit of mind ; and a scientific habit of 
 mind can only be acquired by the methodical study 
 of some part at least of what the human race has 
 come scientifically to know. 
 
 Now of all this Arnold has a very faint and inter- 
 mittent conception. His method of "seeing things 
 as they are " is simply to read the best books of all 
 ages and countries, and let the unimpeded play of his 
 consciousness combine the results. We ought, he 
 thinks, to read a good many books, to give our con- 
 sciousness room to play in, and acquire the right 
 flexibility of spirit ; but we must especially read the 
 books of great writers — such as those of whom he 
 incidentally gives a list : Plato, Cicero, Machiavelli, 
 Shakespeare, Voltaire, Goethe. Now imagine a man 
 learning physical science in this way. I will take 
 astronomy as the example most favourable to 
 Arnold's view that I could choose ; since students 
 do still read the great work of Newton, though 
 two centuries old : but imagine a learner, desirous 
 of seeing the starry universe as it is, set down 
 to read the treatises of Ptolemy, Copernicus, 
 Galileo, Kepler, and let his consciousness play 
 above them in an untrammelled manner, instead of 
 learning astronomical theory from the latest books. 
 
224 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE, 
 
 and the actual method of astronomical observation 
 in a modern observatory ! And the suggestion 
 would seem still more eccentric if applied to physics, 
 chemistry, and biology. 
 
 It may be replied that, granting this true as to 
 the knowledge of nature, the case is otherwise with 
 knowledge of the human spirit. But the antithesis 
 is misleading. Man, whatever else he is, is part of 
 the world of nature, and modern science is more 
 and more resolutely claiming him as an object of 
 investigation. The sciences that deal with man 
 viewed on his spiritual side — psychology and 
 sociology — are certainly in a rudimentary condition 
 compared with the physical sciences, and have 
 fundamental difficulties to overcome of a kind no 
 longer found in those more established methods. 
 But literature supplies no short cut for overcoming 
 these difficulties : the intuitions of literary genius 
 will not avail to reduce to scientific order the 
 complicated facts of psychical experience, any more 
 than the facts of the physical world. And this 
 is no less true of those special branches of the 
 study of social man, which have attained a 
 more advanced condition than the general science 
 of society that, in idea, comprehends them : — 
 economics, political science, archaeology, philology. 
 Let us take philology, because, being concerned 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE, 225 
 
 about words, it is in a way akin to literature. 
 Reflection at once shows that the kinship lies entirely 
 in the object and not at all in the manner of study. 
 This is true even of the most limited species of 
 philology, the study of the grammar of a particular 
 language. The Iliad read by a man of letters differs 
 in aspect from the Iliad scrutinized by the student 
 of Greek philology, much as the Niagara of the 
 ordinary cultivated tourist differs from Niagara 
 as observed by the student of hydrodynamics. In 
 short, in dealing with the human spirit and its 
 products, no less than with merely physical pheno- 
 mena, we shall find that " letting our consciousness 
 play about a subject" is an essentially different 
 thing from setting our intellect at work upon it 
 methodically: and it is the latter habit that has 
 to be resolutely learnt by any modern mind, that 
 is earnestly desirous of "seeing things as they 
 are." 
 
 And when this is clearly apprehended, it becomes 
 manifest that the aim of science, and the aspect 
 which things scientifically known present to the 
 mind, is profoundly different from the aim of art, 
 and the aspect of things which the study of beauty 
 aims at seizing and presenting. There is, indeed, at 
 the same time, a deep affinity traceable between the 
 two. Things seen as they are by science afford the 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 seer the pleasure of complex harmony, through the 
 unity of intelligible order and system that is seen 
 to pervade the vast diversity of particular facts, when 
 we are able to bring them under general laws : and 
 the pleasure of harmony, of a subtle unity of effect 
 pervading a diversity of sensible impressions, is a main 
 element of the delight derived from a great work of 
 art. But the harmony and its elements are essentially 
 different in the two cases ; and in the case of science 
 the harmony is essentially known, intellectually 
 grasped, the feeling of it secondary ; whereas in 
 the case of art the feeling is of primary importance, 
 the intellectual explanation of it secondary. So 
 again the technique of art always involves know- 
 ledge of some kinds, and in the representative arts 
 especially, careful observation of facts : but the 
 knowledge is not sought for its own sake, and there 
 is no general need that the facts should be scientific- 
 ally understood. It would seem therefore that these 
 two elements of what we commonly call culture, 
 the love of truth along with the trained faculty for 
 attaining it, and the love of beauty duly trained and 
 developed, are — speaking broadly — as different in 
 their aims and points of view as either is different 
 from morality. 
 
 At this point Arnold would answer — this answer 
 is, in fact, his final utterance on the subject — 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 227 
 
 that it is the special function of literature to 
 comprehend and mediate between these divergent 
 aims and views. He urges that what the spirit of 
 man — even the most modern man — demands is to 
 establish a satisfactory relation between the results 
 of science and our sense of conduct and sense of 
 beauty ; and that this is what humane letters, poetry 
 and eloquence, stirring our higher emotions, will do 
 for us. In this answer there is an important element 
 of truth ; but the claim goes too far. For to satisfy 
 completely the demand to which he appeals, to bring 
 into true and clear intellectual relation the notions 
 and methods of studies so diverse as positive science 
 and the theory of the fine arts is more than literature 
 as literature can perform ; the result can only be 
 attained by philosophy, whose peculiar task indeed 
 it is to bring into clear, orderly, harmonious relations 
 the fundamental notions and methods of all special 
 sciences and studies. But we must admit that it is 
 not a task which philosophy can yet be said to have 
 triumphantly accomplished : the height from which 
 all normal human aims and activities can be clearly 
 and fully contemplated in true and harmonious 
 relations is a height not yet surmounted by the 
 human spirit. And perhaps it never will be sur- 
 mounted ; perhaps — to change the metaphor — the 
 accomplishment of this task is an ideal whose face is 
 
228 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 " Evermore unseen, 
 And fixed upon the far sea-line," 
 
 which changes with every advance in the endless 
 voyaging of the human spirit. 
 
 In the meantime it may be conceded to the 
 advocates of humane letters that literature of the 
 thoughtful kind — such poetry and eloquence as really 
 deserves to be called a criticism of life — may supply 
 even to philosophers an important part of the matter 
 of philosophy, though it cannot give philosophic 
 form and order, and may give a provisional substitute 
 for philosophy to the many who do not philosophize. 
 It gives, or helps to give, the kind of wide interest 
 in, the versatile sympathy with, the whole complex 
 manifestation of the human spirit in human history, 
 which is required as a corrective to the specialization 
 that the growth of science inexorably imposes ; and 
 giving this along with beauty and distinction of 
 form and expression, it does at any rate bridge the 
 gulf we occasionally feel between the divergent aims 
 of science and art. It helps to produce a harmony 
 of feeling in our contemplation of the world and life 
 presented under these diverse aspects ; if not the 
 reasoned harmony of ideas which only philosophy 
 could impart. And it is this function of literature, 
 I think, that affords the best justification for the 
 prominence given to it in our educational system. 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 229 
 
 So far, in analysing the conception of culture in 
 the narrower sense, we have found divergence, at first 
 sight wide, between the two elements of it which we 
 have distinguished, but we have not found discord. 
 Can we say that this is still the case when we turn 
 to consider culture in relation to other elements of 
 the wider notion of spiritual perfection ? Is there 
 any natural opposition between the devotion to 
 moral excellence and the devotion to knowledge or 
 to beauty? and if so, how are we to deal with it? 
 These are questions of some practical importance on 
 which it remains to say a few words. 
 
 First, as regards science and the scientific habit 
 of mind. Here we may say broadly that morality 
 is disposed to welcome science as a sef^ant, but 
 somewhat to dread it as a master. No moralist 
 would deny that we shall be better able to promote 
 human well-being or cure human woes the more we 
 can learn from science of the conditions of both : 
 discord can only arise because science is not al- 
 together willing to accept simply this subordinate 
 and serviceable relation to ethics. I shall not here 
 treat of the deepest element of this discord : the 
 tendency of the scientific study of man, in explain- 
 ing the origin and growth of moral ideas and senti- 
 ments, to explain away their binding force ; so that 
 the "law so analysed" ceases, as Browning says, to 
 
230 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 " coerce you much." This is a difficulty with which 
 only a systematic moral philosophy can deal. But, 
 assuming that all such presumptuous invasions of 
 science are repelled, and ethics allowed to be valid 
 within its own domain, the question still remains how 
 far the study of science tends to produce a habit of 
 mind unfavourable to moral ardour. I think some 
 such effect must be allowed to be natural. Scientific 
 curiosity naturally adopts a neutral attitude towards 
 the evil and good in the world it seeks to know ; it 
 aims at understanding, explaining, tracing the causes 
 of the former no less than the latter ; and so far as 
 cases of vice and "wrongdoing present interesting 
 problems to science, the solution of which throws 
 light on psychological and sociological laws, the 
 passion for discovering truth seems inevitably to 
 carry with it a certain pleasure in the existence of 
 the facts scientifically understood and explained, 
 which is difficult to reconcile with the aversion to 
 vice and wrongdoing that morality would inculcate. 
 
 We may illustrate this by comparing the similar 
 attitude towards physical evil sometimes noticed in 
 students of medical science. We have all heard of 
 the surgeon who, when bicycles came in, rubbed his 
 hands with delight over the novel and beautiful 
 fractures of the lower limbs resulting from this 
 mode of progression ! But though the surgeon's 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 231 
 
 sentiments towards an interesting fracture are differ- 
 ent from a layman's, and may have an intermingling 
 of scientific satisfaction from which the latter recoils, 
 we all know that this does not normally affect his 
 active impulses ; in the presence of the need of 
 action he is none the less helpful, while the layman 
 is comparatively helpless. And perhaps the parallel 
 may suggest a tolerable practical solution of the 
 deeper discord between the scientific and the moral 
 views of man's mental nature. That is, though there 
 must perhaps be some interference in the region of 
 feeling between the passion of scientific activity and 
 normal ethical sentiment, there need be none in 
 respect of habits of action. And any loss in the 
 region of sentiment will not be uncompensated ; for 
 the keener and correcter insight into the bad con- 
 sequences of our actions which science may be 
 expected to give, must tend to direct the sentiment 
 of moral aversion to matters other than those on 
 which ordinary morality concentrates its attention, 
 and thus to make its scope at once broader and 
 truer. 
 
 When we turn to contemplate the pursuit of 
 beauty in relation to the pursuit of moral excellence 
 we find an occasional antagonism even more sharply 
 marked, just because of the affinity between the two. 
 Morality and Art sometimes appear as the proverbial 
 
232 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 ''two of a trade" that cannot agree ; — and in speaking 
 of art I mean only work worthy of the name, and 
 do not include the mere misuse of technical gifts for 
 the gratification of base appetites. Both art and 
 morality have an ideal, and the aim in both cases 
 is to apprehend and exhibit the ideal in a reality 
 that does not conform to or express it adequately ; 
 but the ideals are not the same, and it is just where 
 they most nearly coincide — in dealing with human 
 life and character — that some conflict is apt to arise. 
 Morality aims at eradicating and abolishing evil, 
 especially moral evil ; whereas the aesthetic con- 
 templation of life recognizes it as an element 
 necessary to vivid and full interest. The opposition 
 attains its sharpest edge in modern realistic art and 
 literature ; but it is by no means confined to the 
 work of this school. Take, for example, the Paradise 
 Lost of Milton — a writer as unlike a modern realist 
 as possible. The old remark, that Satan is the real 
 hero of Paradise Lost^ is an epigrammatic ex- 
 aggeration ; but he is certainly quite indispensable 
 to the interest of the poem ; and the magnificent 
 inconsistency with which Milton has half humanized 
 his devil shows that he felt this. If the description 
 of Adam and Eve in the Miltonian Paradise is not 
 dull — and most of us, I think, do not find it dull — 
 it is because we know that the devil is on his way 
 
THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 233 
 
 thither ; the charm of the placid, innocent Hfe 
 requires to be flavoured by the anticipated contrast. 
 Thus, aesthetically speaking, the more we admire the 
 poem the more satisfaction we must find in the 
 existence of the devil, as an indispensable element 
 of the whole artistic construction ; and this satis- 
 faction is liable to clash somewhat with our moral 
 attitude towards evil. 
 
 I do not think that this opposition can be 
 altogether overcome. Its root lies deep in the 
 nature of things as we are compelled to conceive it ; 
 it represents an unsolved problem of philosophy, 
 which continually forces itself to the front in the 
 development of the religious consciousness. The 
 general man is convinced that the war with moral 
 evil is essential to that highest human life which 
 is the highest thing we know in the world of 
 experience ; and yet he is no less convinced that 
 the world with all its evil is somehow good, as 
 the outcome and manifestation of ideal goodness. 
 The aim of art and of the effort to apprehend 
 beauty corresponds to the latter of these convictions ; 
 and thus its claim to have a place along with moral 
 effort, in our ideal of human nature harmoniously 
 developed, is strongly based. If so, it would seem 
 that we must endeavour to make the moods of 
 aesthetic and ethical sentiment alternate, if we cannot 
 
234 THE PURSUIT OF CULTURE. 
 
 quite harmonize them ; the delighted contemplation 
 of our mingled and varied world as beautiful in its 
 mixtures and contrasts, though it cannot be allowed 
 to interfere with the moral struggle with evil, may 
 be allowed to relieve it, and give a transient repose 
 from conflict. 
 
 And on the whole we must be content that science 
 and art and morality are for the most part working 
 on the same side, in that struggle with our lower 
 nature through which we 
 
 " Move upward, working out the beast." 
 
 Perhaps they will aid each other best if we abstain 
 from trying to drill them into perfect conformity of 
 movement, and allow them to fight independently 
 in loose array. 
 
IX. 
 UNREASONABLE ACTION.^ 
 
 IN the present paper I wish to examine the con- 
 ception of what I think it on the whole most 
 convenient to call the " unreasonable action " of sane 
 persons in an apparently normal condition ; and to 
 contribute, if possible, to the more precise ascer- 
 tainment of the nature of the mental process involved 
 in it. The subject is one which attracted considerable 
 attention in Greek philosophy ; since the cardinal 
 doctrine of Socrates "that every man wishes for 
 his own good and would get it if he knew how" 
 naturally brought into prominence the question, 
 " How then is it that men continually choose to 
 do what they apparently know will not conduce 
 to their own good?" Accordingly the Aristotelian 
 treatment of ethics t included an elaborate discus- 
 sion of the "want of self-restraint" exhibited in 
 such acts, considered primarily in the special case 
 
 • This essay was printed in Mind {\o\. ii., N.S. No. 6). 
 t I refer to book vii. of the Nicotnachean Ethics. 
 
 235 
 
236 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 of indulgence of bodily appetites in spite of a 
 conviction that they ought not to be indulged. 
 The discussion, apart from its historical interest, 
 may still be read with profit ; but the combination 
 of " dialectical " and " naturalistic " methods which 
 the writer uses is somewhat confusing to a modern 
 reader ; and the node of the difficulty with which 
 he deals seems to me to be rather evaded than* 
 overcome. In modern psychological and ethical 
 treatises the question has, from various causes, 
 usually failed to receive the full and systematic 
 treatment which it appears to me to deserve ; and 
 this is the main reason why I wish now to draw 
 attention to it. 
 
 I must begin by defining more clearly the pheno- 
 menon that I have in view. In the first place, I wish 
 to include inaction as well as positive action ; — the 
 not doing what we judge that we ought to do, no 
 less than the doing what we judge that we ought 
 not to do. Secondly, I mean action not objectively 
 but subjectively unreasonable ; i.e., not action which 
 is contrary to sound judgment, but action which is 
 done in conscious opposition to the practical judgment 
 of the agent at the time. Such practical judgment 
 will in many cases be the result of a process of 
 reasoning of some kind, either performed imme- 
 diately before the act is done or at some previous 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 237 
 
 time ; in these cases the term " unreasonable " seems 
 obviously appropriate. I shall, however, extend the 
 term to cases in which the judgment opposed to the 
 act is apparently intuitive, and not inferential. The 
 propriety of this extension might, I admit, be 
 questioned : but I want a term to cover both the 
 cases above distinguished, and I can find no other 
 familiar term so convenient. I wish then to examine 
 consciously unreasonable action, in this sense, as a 
 fact of experience capable of being observed and 
 analysed, without reference to the validity of the 
 judgment involved in it, or of the process (if any) 
 of reasoning by which it has been reached ; simply 
 with the view of finding out, by reflective observation, 
 exa.ctly what it is that happens when one Jknowing^ly^ 
 acts against one's " better judgment." 
 
 Again, by "practical judgment" I do not neces- 
 sarily mean what is ordinarily called " moral judg- 
 ment " or " dictate of conscience," or of the " moral 
 faculty." I mean, of course, to include this as one 
 species of the phenomenon to be discussed; but in 
 my view, and, I think, in the view of Common- 
 sense, there arejnany cases of consciously unreason- 
 able action where morality in the ordinary sense does 
 not supply the judgment to which the act is opposed. 
 Let us suppose that a man regards ordinary social 
 morality as a mere external code sanctioned by 
 
238 UNREASONABLE ACTION 
 
 public opinion, which the adequately instructed and 
 emancipated individual only obeys so far as he con- 
 ceives it to be on the whole his interest to do so : 
 still, as Butler pointed out, the conflict between 
 Reason and Unreason remains in the experience 
 of such a man in the form of a conflict of passion 
 and appetite with what he judges from time to time 
 to be conducive to his interest on the whole. 
 
 But if the notion of subjectively unreasonable 
 action is thus, from one point of view, wider than 
 that of subjectively wrong action, it would seem to 
 be from another point of view narrower. For action 
 subjectively wrong would be widely held to include 
 action which conflicts with the agent's moral senti- 
 ment^ no less than action which is contrary to his 
 practical judgment ; — moral sentiment being con- 
 ceived as a species of emotion not necessarily 
 connected with a judgment as to what "ought to be 
 done " by the agent or what is ** good " for him. 
 Indeed, in the account of the moral consciousness 
 that some writers of repute give, the emotional 
 element is alone explicitly recognized : the moral 
 consciousness appears to be conceived merely as a 
 species of complex emotion mixed of baser and 
 nobler elements — the baser element being the vague 
 associations of pain with wrong acts, due to ex- 
 periences of the disagreeable effects of retaliation, 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 239 
 
 punishment, and loss of social reputation, and 
 associations of pleasure with acts that win praise, 
 goodwill and reciprocal services from other men ; 
 the nobler being sympathy with the painful conse- 
 quences to others of bad acts, and the pleasurable 
 consequences of good acts. 
 
 This is not my view : I regard it as an essential 
 characteristic of moral sentiment that it involves a 
 judgment, either explicit or implicit, that the act to 
 which the sentiment is directed " ought " or " ought 
 not " to be done. But I do not wish here to enter 
 into any controversy on this point : I merely desire 
 now to point out that conduct may be opposed 
 to moral sentiment, according to the view of moral 
 sentiment above given, without having the character- 
 istic of subjective unreasonableness ; and, again, this 
 characteristic may belong to conduct in harmony with 
 what would be widely regarded as moral sentiment. 
 Suppose (e.g^ a religious persecutor yielding to a 
 humane sentiment and remitting torture from a weak 
 impulse of sympathy with a heretic, contrary to his 
 conviction as to his religious duty ; or suppose 
 Machiavelli's prince yielding to a social impulse and 
 impairing his hold on power from a weak reluctance 
 to kill an innocent person, contrary to his conviction 
 as to what is conducive to his interest on the whole. 
 In either case the persecutor or the tyrant would act 
 
240 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 contrary to his deliberate judgment as to what it 
 would be best for him to do, and therefore with 
 ' subjective unreasonableness ' ; but in both cases the 
 sentiment that prompted his action would seem to be 
 properly classed as a moral sentiment, according to 
 the view above described. And in the latter case 
 he certainly would not be commonly judged to act 
 wrongly, — even according to a subjective standard of 
 wrongness ; — while in the former case it is at least 
 doubtful whether he would be so judged. 
 
 By " unreasonable action," then, I mean voluntary 
 action contrary to a man's deliberate judgment as to 
 what is right or best for him to do : such judgment 
 being at least implicitly present when the action is 
 willed. I therefore exclude what may be called 
 *' purely impulsive " acts : z>., acts which so rapidly 
 and immediately follow some powerful impulse of 
 desire, anger, or fear, that there is no room for any 
 judgment at all as to their rightness or wrongness : 
 not only is there no clear and explicit judgment with 
 which the will conflicts, but not even a symbol or 
 suggestion of such a judgment. But often when 
 there is no explicit judgment there is an uneasy^ 
 feeling which a pause for reflection might develop 
 into a judgment : and sometimes when we recall such 
 states of mind there is a difficulty in saying whether 
 this uneasy feeling did or did not contain an implicit 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 241 
 
 judgment that the act was wrong. For it often 
 
 I happens that uneasy feehngs similar to ordinary 
 
 I moral sentiments — I have elsewhere called them 
 
 \ ^^ quasi -morsX" — accompany voluntary acts done 
 
 i strictly in accordance with the agent's practical 
 
 j judgment ; i.e., when such acts are opposed to widely 
 
 i accepted rules of conduct, or include among their 
 
 I foreseen consequences annoyance to other human 
 
 ' beings. Hence in trying to observe and analyse my 
 
 own experiences of unreasonable action I have found 
 
 a difficulty in dealing with cases in which a moral (or 
 
 prudential) judgment, if present at all, was only 
 
 implicitly present: since when subsequent reflection 
 
 shows a past deed to have been clearly contrary 
 
 to one's normal judgment as to what is right or best, 
 
 this subsequent conviction is apt to mix itself with 
 
 one's memory of the particular state of mind in 
 
 which the deed was actually done. In this way 
 
 what was really a quite vague feeling of uneasiness 
 
 may be converted in memory into a more definite 
 
 symbol of a judgment opposed to the volition that 
 
 actually took place. I have tried, however, to be 
 
 on my guard against this source of error in the 
 
 observations which have led me to the conclusions 
 
 that I am about to state. 
 
 Finally, I must define somewhat further the 
 limitation of my subject to the experience of persons 
 
242 UNREASONABLE ACTION, 
 
 apparently sane, and in an apparently nornaal con- 
 dition. I mean by this to exclude from discussion 
 all cases of discord between voluntary act and 
 rational judgment, when the agent's will is manifestly 
 in an abnormal condition, — either from some distinct 
 cerebral disease, or from some transient disturbance 
 of his normal mental condition due to drugs, extreme 
 heat, sudden calamity, or any other physical or 
 psychical cause. Cases of this kind — in which there 
 appears to be no loss of sanity, in the ordinary 
 sense, the mental disturbance affecting the will and 
 not the reason — are highly interesting from a 
 psychological point of view, as well as from that of 
 medicine or jurisprudence. Sometimes they are cases 
 of " aboulia " or impotence of will, when in spite of 
 perfect clearness in a man's practical judgment he 
 feels it simply impossible to form an effective volition 
 in accordance with his judgment ; sometimes, again, to 
 use M. Ribot's* terms, he suffers from "excess" and 
 not " defect " of " impulsion," and appears to himself 
 compelled to commit some atrocious crime or 
 grotesque folly, or otherwise to act in a manner con- 
 trary to his practical judgment, under the constraint 
 of an impulse which he feels to be irresistible. But 
 in either case the very characteristics that give these 
 
 • See Les Maladies de la Volonti^ par Th. Ribot. 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 243 
 
 phenomena their striking interest render it desirable 
 to reserve them for separate discussion. 
 
 The Hne between " normality " and " abnormality " 
 cannot, indeed, be precisely drawn ; and certain phe- 
 nomena, similar in kind to those just mentioned, though 
 much slighter in degree, fall within the experience of 
 ordinarily sane persons free from any perceptible or- 
 ganic disorder or disturbance. I can myself recall 
 momentary impressions of something like "aboulia"; 
 i.e., moments in which I was transiently conscious of 
 an apparent impossibility of willing to do something 
 which I judged it right to do, and which appeared 
 to be completely within the control of my will. And 
 though I have not myself had any similar experience 
 of irresistible " excess of impulsion," I see no reason 
 to doubt that others have had such experiences, 
 apart from any recognizable cerebral disorder ; it 
 would seem that hunger and thirst, aversion to death 
 or to extreme pain, the longing for alcohol, opium, 
 etc., occasionally reach a point of intensity at which 
 they are felt as irresistibly overpowering rational 
 choice. But cases of either kind are at any rate 
 very exceptional in the experience of ordinary men ; 
 and I propose to exclude them from consideration 
 at present, no less than the more distinct " maladies 
 de la volont(^ " before mentioned. I wish to con- 
 centrate attention on the ordinary experiences of 
 
244 UNREASONABLE ACTION 
 
 "yielding to temptation," where this consciousness 
 of the impossibiHty of resistance does not enter in ; 
 where, however strong may be the rush of anger or 
 appetite that comes over a man, it certainly does 
 not present itself as invincible. This purely sub- 
 \ jective distinction seems to afford a boundary line 
 \within which it is not difficult to keep, though it 
 would doubtless be difficult or impossible to draw it 
 exactly. 
 
 It may tend to clearness to define the experiences 
 that I wish to examine as those in which there 
 is an appeara7ice of free choice of the unreasonable 
 act by the agent, — however this appearance may 
 be explained away or shown to be an illusion. At 
 the same time I do not at all wish to mix up 
 the present discussion with a discussion on Free 
 Will. The connection of " subjective irrationality " — 
 or, at least, " subjective wrongness " — and " freedom " 
 is, indeed, obvious and natural from a jural point 
 of view, — so far at least as the popular view of 
 punishment as retributive and the popular concep- 
 tions of Desert and Imputation are retained : since 
 in this view it would seem that "subjective wrong- 
 ness" must go along with "freedom" in order to 
 constitute an act fully deserving of punishment. 
 For the jurist's maxim " Ignorantia juris non 
 excusat" is not satisfactory to the plain man's 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 245 
 
 sense of equity : to punish any one for doing 
 what he at the time did not know to be wrong 
 appears to the plain man at best a regrettable 
 exercise of society's right of self-preservation, and 
 not a realization of ideal justice. But in a 
 psychological inquiry there seems to me no ground 
 whatever for mixing up the question whether 
 acts are, metaphysically speaking, " free " with the 
 question whether they are accompanied with a 
 consciousness of their irrationality. 
 
 I incline, however, to think that the tendency 
 to fuse the two questions, and the prominence in 
 the fusion of the question of Free Will, partly 
 explain the fact that the very existence of unreason- 
 able action appears to be not sufficiently recognized 
 by influential writers of the most opposite schools 
 of philosophy. 
 
 I find that such writers are apt to give an account 
 of voluntary action which — without expressly 
 denying the existence of what I call subjective 
 irrationality — appears to leave no room for it. 
 They admit, of course, that there are abundant 
 instances of acts condemned, as contrary to sound 
 practical principles, not only by the judgment of 
 other men but by the subsequent judgment of 
 the agent ; but in the analysis which they give 
 of the state of mind in which such actions are willed, 
 
246 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 they appear to place the source of error in the 
 intellect alone and not at all in the relation of 
 the will to the intellect. For instance, Bentham 
 affirms that "on the occasion of every act he 
 exercises, every human being is led to pursue that 
 line of conduct which, according to his view of 
 the case, taken by him at the moment, will be in 
 the highest degree contributory to his own greatest 
 happiness";* and as Bentham also holds that the 
 " constantly proper end of action on the part of 
 every individual at the moment of action is his 
 real greatest happiness from that moment to the 
 end of his life,"t there would seem to be no room 
 for what I call "subjective unreasonableness." If 
 Bentham's doctrine is valid, the defect of a volition 
 Which actually results in a diminution of the agent's 
 happiness must always lie in the man's "view of 
 'the case taken at the moment": the evils which 
 reflection would show to be overwhelmingly probable 
 consequences of his act, manifestly outweighing any 
 probable good to result from it, are not present 
 to his mind in the moment of willing ; or if 
 they are in some degree present, they are, at any 
 rate, not correctly represented in imagination or 
 
 * Bentham, Constitutional Code, Introduction, p. 2 (vol. ix. of 
 Bowning's edition), 
 t Bentham, Memoirs, p. 560 (vol. x. of Bowning's edition). 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 247 
 
 thought. The only way therefore of improving | 
 his outward conduct must be to correct his / 
 tendencies to err by defect or excess in the intel-/ 
 lectual representation of future consequences : as / 
 he always acts in accordance with his judgment 
 as to what is most likely to conduce to his greatest 
 happiness, if only all errors of judgment were 
 corrected, he would always act for his real greatest 
 happiness. (I may add that so acting, in Bentham's 
 view, he would also always act in the way most 
 conducive to general happiness : but with the 
 question of the harmony of interests in human 
 society we are not now concerned.) 
 
 I do not think that Bentham's doctrine on this 
 point was accepted in its full breadth by his more 
 influential disciples. Certainly J. S. Mill appears 
 to admit important exceptions to it, both in the 
 direction of ^self-sacrifice and in the direction of 
 self-indulgence. He admits, on the one hand, 
 that the " hero or the martyr " often has " volun- 
 tarily" to "do without happiness" for the sake 
 of " something which he prizes more than his own 
 individual happiness"; and he admits, on the other 
 hand, that " men often from infirmity of character, 
 make their election for the nearer good, though 
 they know it to be the less valuable ; and this 
 no less when the choice is between two bodily 
 
248 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 pleasures, than when it is between bodily and 
 mental. They pursue sensual indulgence to the 
 injury of health, though perfectly aware that health 
 is the greater good."* But though Mill gives a 
 careful psychological analysis! of the former devia- 
 tion from the pursuit of apparent self-interest, he 
 does not pay the same attention to the latter ; 
 and yet it is difficult to reconcile the conscious 
 self-sacrifice — if I may be allowed the term — of 
 the voluptuary, no less than the conscious self- 
 sacrifice of the moral hero, with Mill's general 
 view that "to desire anything, except in propor- 
 tion as the idea of it is pleasant, is a physical 
 impossibility." For in balancing "sensual indulgences" 
 against "injury to health," distinctions of quality 
 hardly come in ; the prudential estimate, in which 
 the pleasure of champagne at dinner is seen to be 
 outweighed by the headache next morning, is surely 
 quantitative rather than qualitative : hence when the 
 voluptuary chooses a " pleasure known to be the less 
 valuable" it would seem that he must choose some- 
 thing of which — in a certain sense — the "idea" is 
 less "pleasant" than the idea of the consequences 
 that he rejects. If so, some explanation of this 
 imprudent choice seems to be required ; and in order 
 
 * Utilitarianism, chap. ii. f Ibid.^ chap. iv. 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 249 
 
 to give it, we have to examine more closely the 
 nature of the mental phenomenon in which what 
 he calls " infirmity of character " is manifested. 
 
 But before I proceed to this examination, I wish 
 to point out that the tendency either to exclude the 
 notion of "wilful unreasonableness," or to neglect 
 to examine the fact which it represents, is not found 
 only in psychologists of Bentham's school ; who 
 regard pleasure and the avoidance of pain as the 
 sole normal motives of human action, and the attain- 
 ment of the greatest balance of pleasure over pain — 
 to self or to other sentient beings — as the only 
 " right and proper " end of such action. We find 
 this tendency also in writers who sweepingly reject 
 and controvert the Hedonism of Bentham and Mill. 
 For example, in Green's Prolegomena to Ethics, both 
 the psychological doctrine that pleasure is the normal 
 motive of human action, and the ethical doctrine 
 that it is the proper motive, are controverted with 
 almost tedious emphasis and iteration. But Green 
 still lays down as broadly as Bentham that every 
 person in every moral action, virtuous or vicious, 
 presents to himself some possible state or achieve- 
 ment of his own as for the time his greatest good, 
 and acts for the sake of that good ; at the same 
 time explaining that the kind of good which a 
 
 person at any point of his life " presents to himself 
 
 R 2 
 
250 UNREASONABLE ACTION 
 
 as greatest depends on his past experience." * From 
 these and other passages we should certainly infer 
 that, in Green's view, vicious choice is always made 
 in the illusory belief that the act chosen is conducive ^ 
 to the agent's greatest good ; although Green is on 
 this point less clearly consistent than Bentham, since 
 he also says that " the objects where good is actually 
 sought are often not those where reason, even as in 
 the person seeking them, pronounces that it is to 
 be found." f But passages in the former sense are 
 more common in his book, and he seems to make 
 no attempt to bring them into harmony with that 
 last quoted. 
 
 I cannot accept the proposition "that every man 
 always acts for the sake of what he presents to 
 himself as his own greatest good," whether it is 
 offered in a hedonistic or in a non-hedonistic form. 
 At the same time, I think that the statements which 
 I have quoted from Bentham and Green are by no 
 means to be treated as isolated paradoxes of in- 
 dividual thinkers ; I think they point to a difficulty 
 widely felt by educated persons, in accepting and 
 applying the notion of "wilful wrongdoing," i.e.^ 
 conscious choice of alternatives of action known 
 to be in conflict with principles still consciously 
 
 * Green, Prolegomena to Ethics^ book ii., chap. i. , f. 99. 
 t I.e., book iii., chap, i., f. 177. 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 251 
 
 acce pted b y the agent On the other hand, this 
 notion of wilful wrongdoing is so clearly a part of 
 the common moral experience of mankind that 
 it seems very paradoxical to reject it, or explain it 
 away. 
 
 Under these circumstances it seemed to me worth 
 while to make a systematic attempt to X)_bserve with/ 
 as much care as possible — and as soon as possible 
 after the phenomenon had occurred — the mental 
 process that actually takes place in the case of 
 
 unreasonable action. I have found some difficulty : 
 
 i 
 
 in making the observations ; because action con- \ 
 ^ously unreasonable belongs to the class of 
 phenomena which tend to be prevented by 
 attempts to direct attention to them. This result 
 is not, indeed, to be deprecated from a practical 
 point of view ; indeed, it may, I think, be fairly 
 urged as a practical argument for the empirical 
 study of the present psychological problem, not 
 only that the results of systematic self-observation 
 directed to this point are likely to aid the observer 
 in his moral efforts to avoid acting unreasonably, 
 but that the mere habitual direction of his attention 
 to this problem tends to diminish his tendency 
 to consciously unreasonable conduct. But though 
 practically advantageous, this latter result is, from 
 a scientific point of view, inconvenient. This 
 
252 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 direction of attention, however, cannot be long 
 maintained ; and in the intervals in which it is 
 otherwise directed the psychological observer is 
 probaby as liable to act unreasonably as any one 
 else ; though probably the phenomenon does not 
 last quite as long in his case, since, as soon as he 
 is clearly conscious of so acting, the desire to observe 
 the process is likely to be developed and to interfere 
 with the desire which is stimulating the unreasonable 
 volition. 
 
 I also recognize that I ought not to put forward 
 confidently the results that follow as typical and 
 fairly representative of the experiences of men in 
 general. It is a generally recognized obstacle in the 
 way of psychological study, especially in the region 
 of the intellect and the emotions, that the attitude 
 of introspective observation must be supposed to 
 modify to some extent the phenomena observed ; 
 while at the same time it is difficult to ascertain 
 and allow for the amount of effect thus produced. 
 Now in relation to the experiences with which I am 
 here concerned, the attitude of disengaged observant 
 attention is peculiarly novel and unfamiliar, and 
 therefore its disturbing effect may reasonably be 
 supposed to be peculiarly great. I have, accordingly, 
 endeavoured as far as possible to check the con- 
 clusions that I should draw from my own experience 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 253 
 
 by observation and interpretation of the words and 
 conduct of others. My conclusion on the whole 
 would be that — in the case of reflective persons — a 
 clear consciousness that an act is what ought not to 
 be done, accompanying a voluntary determination to 
 do it, is a comparatively rare phenomenon. It is, 
 indeed, a phenomenon that does occur, and I will 
 presently examine it more closely : but first it will 
 be convenient to distinguish from it several other 
 states of mind in which acts contrary to general 
 resolutions deliberately adopted by the agent may 
 be done ; as most of these are, in my experience, 
 decidedly more common than unreasonable action 
 with a clear consciousness of its unreasonableness. 
 These other states of mind fall under two heads : 
 (i) cases in which there is at the time no conscious- 
 ness at all of a conflict between volition and practical 
 judgment ; and (2) cases in which such consciousness 
 is present but only obscurely present. 
 
 Under the former head we may distinguish first 
 the case of what are commonly called thoughtless 
 or impulsive acts. I do not now mean the sudden 
 purely impulsive " acts of which I spoke before : 
 but acts violating an accepted general rule, which, 
 though they have been preceded by a certain amount 
 of consideration and comparison, have been willed in 
 a state of mind entirely devoid of any application 
 
 ;k 
 
254 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 of the general rule infringed to the particular case. 
 Suppose, for instance, that a man has received a 
 provocative letter in relation to some important 
 business in which he is engaged : he will sometimes 
 answer it in angry haste, although he has previously 
 adopted a general resolution to exclude the influence 
 of angry feeling in a correspondence of this kind by 
 interposing an interval of time, sufficient ordinarily to 
 allow his heated emotion to subside. I conceive that 
 often, at least, in such cases the rule is simply for- 
 gotten for a time, just as a matter of fact might 
 be : the effect of emotion is simply to exclude it 
 temporarily from the man's memory. 
 
 I notice, however, that in the Aristotelian treatise 
 before mentioned an alternative possibility is sug- 
 gested, which may sometimes be realized in the case 
 of impulsive acts. It is suggested that the general 
 rule — say ' that letters should not be written in anger ' 
 — may be still present to the mind ; though the 
 ' particular judgment, ' My present state of mind is a 
 f state of anger ' — required as a minor premiss for a 
 I practical syllogism leading to the right conclusion — 
 is not made. And no doubt it may happen that an 
 angry man is quite unaware that he is angry ; in 
 which case this minor premiss may be at the time 
 absent through pure ignorance. But more often he 
 is at least obscurely conscious of his anger ; and if 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 255 
 
 he is conscious of it at all, and has the general rule 
 in his mind, it seems to me hardly possible that he 
 should not be at least obscurely aware that the 
 particular case comes under the rule. 
 
 More commonly, I think, when a general resolu- 
 tion is remembered, while yet the particular 
 conclusion which ought to be drawn is not drawn, 
 the cause of the phenomenon is a temporary 
 perversion of judgment by some seductive feeling 
 — such as anger, appetite, vanity, laziness. In such 
 cases a man may either consciously suspend his 
 general rule from a temporary conviction caused by 
 the seductive feeling that he has adopted it without 
 sufficient reason, or he may erroneously but sincerely 
 persuade himself that it is not applicable to the 
 case before him. Suppose he is at dinner and the 
 champagne comes round : he is a patient of Sir 
 Andrew Clark,* and has already drunk the very 
 limited amount allowed per month by that rigid 
 adviser ; but rapidly the arguments of Dr. Mortimer 
 Granville occur to his mind, and he momentarily but 
 sincerely becomes persuaded that though an extra 
 glass may cause him a little temporary inconvenience, 
 it will in the long run conduce to the maintenance of 
 
 * I have left unaltered the name of this eminent physician, who was 
 alive when the article was written ; since there is no other name that 
 would, at that time, have seemed equally appropriate. 
 
256 UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 his physical tone. Or, as before, he has received a 
 letter that rouses his indignation : he remembers his 
 rule against allowing temper to influence his answer ; 
 but momentarily — under the influence of heated 
 feeling — arrives at a sincere conviction that this rule 
 of prudence ought to give way to his duty to 
 society, which clearly requires him not to let so 
 outrageous a breach of propriety go unreproved. Or 
 having sat down to a hard and distasteful task which 
 he regards it as his duty to do — but which can be 
 postponed without any immediate disagreeable con- 
 sequences to himself — he finds a difficulty in getting 
 under way ; and then rapidly but sincerely persuades 
 himself that in the present state of his brain some 
 lighter work is just at present more suited to his 
 powers, — such as the study, through the medium of 
 the daily papers, of current political events, of which 
 no citizen ought to allow himself to be ignorant. 
 
 i have taken trivial illustrations because, being not 
 [complicated by ethical doubts and disagreements, they 
 exemplify the phenomenon in question most clearly 
 and simply. But I think that in graver cases a 
 man is sometimes sincerely though very temporarily 
 convinced by the same kind of fallacious reasoning — 
 under the influence of some seductive feeling — that 
 a general resolution previously made either ought to 
 be abrogated or suspended or is inapplicable to the 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 257 
 
 present case. Such a man will afterwards see the 
 fallacy of the reasoning : but he may not have been 
 even obscurely conscious at the time that it was 
 fallacious. 
 
 But, again, these examples will also serve as illus- 
 trations of a different and, I think, still more common 
 class of cases which fall under my second head ; in 
 which the man who yields to the fallacious process 
 of reasoning is dimly aware that it is fallacious. 
 That is, shortly, the man sophisticates himself, being 
 obscurely conscious of the sophistry. 
 
 Moralists have often called attention to sophistry 
 of this kind, but I think they have not fully re- 
 cognized how common it is, or done justice to its 
 persistent, varied, and versatile ingenuity. 
 
 If the judgment which Desire finds in its way is 
 opposed to the common-sense of mankind, as mani- 
 fested in their common practice, the deliberating mind 
 will impress on itself the presumption of differing 
 from a majority so large : if, on the other hand, the 
 restraining dictate of reason is one generally ac- 
 cepted, the fallibility of common-sense, and the 
 importance of the individual's independence, will be 
 placed in a strong light. If a novel indulgence is 
 desired, the value of personal experience before finally 
 deciding against it will be persuasively presented ; 
 if the longing is for an old familiar gratification, 
 
258. UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 experience will seem to have shown that it may- 
 be enjoyed with comparative impunity. If the 
 deliberating mind is instructed in ethical controversy, 
 the various sceptical topics that may be culled from 
 the mutual criticisms of moralists will offer almost 
 inexhaustible resources of self-sophistication — such 
 as the illusoriness of intuition, if the judgment is 
 intuitive ; if it is a reasoned conclusion, the fact that 
 so many thoughtful persons reject the assumptions 
 on which the reasoning is based. The Determinist 
 will eagerly recognize the futility of now resisting the 
 formed tendencies of his nature ; the Libertarian will 
 contemplate his indefeasible power of resisting them 
 next time. The fallacies vary indefinitely; if plausible 
 arguments are not available, absurd ones will often 
 suffice : by hook or by crook, a quasi-rational con- 
 clusion on the side of desire will be attained. 
 
 Often, however, the seductive influence of feeling 
 is of a more subtle kind than in the instances above 
 given, and operates not by producing positively 
 fallacious reasoning, but by directing attention to 
 certain aspects of the subject, and from certain 
 others. This [e.g^ is, I think, not uncommonly the 
 case when an ordinarily well-bred and well-meaning 
 man acts unreasonably from egotism or vanity : he 
 has an obscure well-founded consciousness that he 
 might come to a different view of his position if he 
 
UNREASONABLE ACTION. 259 
 
 resolutely faced certain aspects of it tending to reduce 
 his personal claims ; but he consciously refrains from 
 directing attention to them. So, again, in cases where 
 prompt action is necessary, passion may cause a man 
 to acquiesce in acting on a one-sided view, while 
 yet obscurely aware that the need is not so urgent as 
 really to allow no time for adequate consideration. 
 
 In both the classes of cases last mentioned we 
 may say that the wrongdoing is really wilful though 
 not clearly so : the man is obscurely conscious either 
 that the intellectual process leading him to a con- 
 clusion opposed to a previous resolution is unsound, 
 or that he might take into account considerations 
 which he does not distinctly contemplate and that 
 he ought to take them into account. But though 
 he is obscurely conscious of this, the sophistical or 
 one-sided reasoning which leads him to the desired 
 practical conclusion is more clearly present. 
 
 Finally, there remains pure undisguised wilfulness 
 — where a man with his eyes open simply refuses to 
 act in accordance with his practical judgment, al- 
 though the latter is clearly present in his conscious- 
 ness, and his attention is fully directed towards it. 
 I think it undeniable that this phenomenon occurs : 
 but my experience would lead me to conclude that 
 — at least in the case of habitually reflective persons 
 — it more often takes place in the case of negative 
 action, non-performance of known duty : in the case 
 
26o UNREASONABLE ACTION. 
 
 of positive wrong action some process by which the 
 opposing judgment is somehow thrust into the back- 
 ground of consciousness seems to me normally 
 necessary. In other words, it seems, so far as this 
 experience goes, to be far easier for a desire clearly 
 recognized as conflicting with reason to inhibit action 
 than to cause it. 
 
 Even in the exceptional case of a man openly 
 avowing that he is acting contrary to what he knows 
 to be both his interest and his duty, it cannot be 
 assumed that a clear conviction of the truth of what 
 he is saying is necessarily present to his conscious- 
 ness. For a man's words in such a case may express 
 not a present conviction, but the mere memory of a 
 past conviction ; moreover, one of the forms in which 
 the ingenuity of self-sophistication is shown is the 
 process of persuading oneself that a brave and manly 
 self-identification with a vicious desire is better than 
 a weak, self-deceptive submission to it ; — or even than 
 a feeble fluctuation between virtue and vice. Thus, 
 even a man who said, " Evil, be thou my good," and 
 acted accordingly, might have only an obscured con- 
 sciousness of the awful irrationality of his action — 
 obscured by a fallacious imagination that his only 
 chance of being in any way admirable, at the point 
 which he has now reached in his downward course, 
 must lie in candid and consistent wickedness. 
 
 WilUam Brendon and Son, Printers, Plymouth. 
 
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