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ADVICE TO THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD. | Seeking for peace in toil, which only brought

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From The Fortnightly Review.
RIGHT AND WRONG.

-

wrong

|jurisconsult, Justitia est constans et perpetua voluntas jus suum cuique tribuendi. I SUPPOSE the words right and Wrong has been referred, not to the exteenter more largely into human life than rior act but to the interior mental state, any other. They are among the first Mens rea facit reum. The world on the words that are uttered by children at their whole has not doubted that what is just play: "You have no right to do this!" exists by nature, that universal obligation That is wrong!" They are most prois a prime note of right, that a violation of fusely used, or abused, in the commonest right entails, according to the laws of the universe, retributive suffering upon the affairs of daily existence by the most ignorant and uncultivated, and generally wrong-doer. I do not, of course, mean which is noteworthy with an appeal to that the vast majority of men have ever held these views as philosophers. They the universal validity of the conceptions they represent, as though, in the secure made their way into the popular mind judgment of the universe, the gainsayer through the religious traditions which are must be in bad faith. Every one talks of the only philosophies available for the right as if it were the easiest thing in the multitude. The morality of the old civilization of Egypt, of India, of Judea, was world to pronounce upon. And yet in bound up with their religions. The same practice it is the hardest. Consider how terrible are the problems which may be may be said of the ancient phase of Helraised regarding even the simplest and lenic and, more strongly still, of Roman civilization. It is the special glory of least-questioned rights. Parental right, for example, springing as it does from the Buddhism that it established the supremmost sacred of human relations, how easy acy of the moral law over gods and men to deride and decry it, if we regard merely and the whole of sentient existence. To the blind, irrational impulse to which each Christianity the human race owes the individual, the accident of an accident, supreme enforcement of the autonomy of owes his procreation! Again, think how conscience as the voice of Him whom it large a part of human activity is consumed is better to obey than man. in the endeavor, mostly fruitless, to settle old ethical conceptions are everywhere questions of right. The whole machinery falling into discredit. The very princi of justice, with its legislatures, its courts ples on which the ideas of right and wrong of various instance, its judges, advocates, have hitherto rested are very widely quesand attorneys, attends continually upon tioned, nay, more than questioned. this very thing. And yet the glorious one," observes a recent thoughtful writer, uncertainty of the law has become a bycan deny either the reality or the intenword. Fleets and armies are still the last sity of the actual crisis of morality. resource of civilization for determining the is the crisis confined to certain questions rights of nations. Now, as in the time of of casuistry. On the contrary, it extends Brennus, the sword is the ultimate make- to the most general rules of conduct, and weight in the scale of justice. It may be through those rules to the very principles said that the history of right throughout of ethics themselves."*"By-and-by," a the ages is one long martyrdom. It is popular professor in the Paris School of ever being crucified afresh and put to an Medicine recently prophesied to his adopen shame. But, speaking generally, we miring pupils, "by-and-by, when the rest may assert that the idea of right has hith- of the world has risen to the intellectual level of France, and true views of the erto been venerated by mankind at large as absolute, supersensuous, divine. The nature of existence are held by the bulk rights, whether of nations or of the individ- of mankind, now under clerical direction, uals of whom they are composed, have been held to rest upon ethical obligation, and that upon noumenal truth. Justice has been accounted a matter of the will, according to the dictum of the Roman

66

But now the

66 'No

Nor

the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality, religion, divine providence, Deity, the soul, and so forth, will be swept entirely away, and the dicta of

Beaussire, Les Principes de la Morale, p. 26.

science will remain the sole guides of sane and educated men. . . . Churchmen and moral philosophers represent the old and dying world, and we, the men of science, represent the new." And similarly, Mr. Herbert Spencer assures us that "the establishment of the rules of right conduct upon a scientific basis is a pressing need." †

Now let us inquire what is the substitute for "the present crude and vulgar notions regarding morality" proposed to the world by "men of science," as physicists modestly call themselves, in disdainful ignorance of all sciences except their own. The inquiry is of much pith and moment for this among other reasons, that the public order reposes upon the idea of right. Social relations can be explained and justified only by moral relations. Of course there is diversity of operation in the attempts at ethical reconstruction. But in all worketh one and the self-same spirit. They all aim at presenting the world with "an independent morality," by which they mean a morality deduced merely from physical law, grounded solely on what they call "experience," and on analysis of and deduction from experience; holding only of the positive sciences and rejecting all pure reason, all philosophy in the true sense of the word. They all insist that there is no essential difference between the moral and the physical order; that the world of ideas is but a develop ment of the world of phenomena. They all agree in the negation of primary and of final causes, of the soul and of freewill. Instead of finality, they tell us, necessity reigns; mechanical perhaps, or it may be dynamical, but issuing practically in the elimination of moral liberty as a useless spring in the machinery of matter. I venture to say that in the long run there are only two schools of ethics the hedonistic and the transcendental. There are only two sides from which we can approach a question of right and wrong the physical and the spiritual. There are only two possible foundations of morality

Quoted by Professor Davis in his article, "The Moral Aspects of Vivisection," in the North American Review for March, 1885.

† Data of Ethics, Pref. IV.

conscience and concupiscence; the laws of universal reason, or what Professor Huxley calls "the laws of comfort." The "men of science" are agreed in anathematizing the transcendental. Their method is purely physical. They conceive of man merely as "ein geniessendes Thier," an animal whose motive principle is what they call "happiness;" who, in Bentham's phrase, "has been placed by nature under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure." Such are the foundations of the new independent morality. Let us now follow it out in some of its details.

And first let us learn of one concerning whom a well-informed writer recently testified that "in this country and America he is the philosopher," and whose works, if less implicitly received as oracles in France and Germany, have done much to shape and color current speculation in those countries. I need hardly say that I speak of Mr. Herbert Spencer. The doctrine unfolded at such great length by this patient and perspicuous thinker appears to me to amount to this, in the last resort: that all the actions of society are determined by the actions of the individual; that all the actions of the individual are regulated by the laws of life; and that all the laws of life are purely physical. Turn we to another eminent teacher, hardly less influential. Consider the following account of human nature which Professor Huxley sets before us in his "Lay Sermons," enforcing it by an epigram of Goethe: "All the multifarious and complicated activities of men" — all, remember, without exception - "are comprehended under three categories. Either they are directed towards the maintenance and development of the body, or they effect transitory changes in the relative

I use the word in its proper philosophical sense: "a certain power and motion of the mind, whereby men are driven to desire pleasant things that they do not possess." Listen in this connection to Professor Huxley's dogmatic utterance: "I say that natural knowledge, seeking to satisfy natural wants, has found the idea which alone can still spiritual cravings. I say that natural knowledge, in desiring to ascertain the law of comfort, has been driven to discover the laws of conduct, and to lay the foundations of a new morality" (Lay Sermons, p. 11). "A new morality" based ultimately on "the law of comfort"! Glad tidings of great joy, indeed, to a benighted nineteenth century.

positions of the body, or they tend towards knowledged facts. It cannot depend upon the continuance of the species. Even a subjective consciousness unable to manthose manifestations of intellect, of feel- ifest itself intellectually. Professor Huxing, of wit, which we rightly name the ley, like Mr. Spencer, really treats ethics higher faculties, are not excluded from as a branch of physics. And this is in this classification, inasmuch as, to every truth the doctrine- whether explicitly one but the subject of them, they are avowed or not - of the whole Positivist known only as transitory changes in the and experimental school. Further, right, relative position of parts of the body. they will have it, is not absolute but relaSpeech, gesture, and every other form of tive, a matter of calculation and reasoning; human action are, in the long run, resolv- it is nothing but the accord of the indiable into muscular contraction." * I do vidual instinct with the social instinct; not overlook the words "to every one but the momentary harmony of the need manithe subject of them." And most certainly fested in me, and of the exigences of the I have no desire to force upon Mr. Hux- species to which I belong. In like manley's language a meaning which it does ner wrong is the absence of such accord, not logically convey. But surely he will the want of such harmony; "a natural agree with me that knowledge which is phenomenon like any other, but a pheconfined to one's inner consciousness, and nomenon that at a given moment is found can never become the property of another, to be in opposition to the eventual good cannot have much effect upon society at of the race." And this agrees with Benlarge. It may be dismissed by any phi- tham's doctrine that what we call a crime losopher aiming at the practical, which is really a miscalculation, an error in arithassuredly is Professor Huxley's aim. A metic. The old conception of conscience man, dwelling in the depths of his own as the formal principle of ethics, the inconsciousness, he tells us, may think, if ternal witness of the Supreme Judge, "a he pleases, in terms of spirit. But the prophet in its informations, a monarch in moment that man attempts to influence its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessanother, he must put away everything that ings and anathemas," is put aside as outis not muscular contraction. "Weiter worn rhetoric. The moral sense, we are bringt es kein Mensch," says the incom- assured, is not primitive, not innate, but a parable genius who, in three lines, reduces mere empirical fact transformed and eshuman life to an affair of feeding oneself, tablished by heredity; a "phenomenon begetting children, and doing one's best (so they call it) variable and varying with to feed them. I know it may be answered, the exigences of the race. General utility, "Well, but the professor leaves us the the good of the species is, then, the only unknown and unknowable subject, beyond scientific and experimental criterion of the limits of consciousness as of physical human action, the sole rule of right and science." What of that? Pray what has wrong; and morality consists in the apmorality to do with the unknown and un- prehension of that principle, and in conknowable? "Nihil volitum quin præcog-formity with it. And so Mr. John Morley, nitum" is indeed a mediæval axiom, and in his book on "Compromise," dogmatiso, as I fear-mindful of a former con- cally affirms, "Moral principles, when they troversy in this review - may be "sus- are true, are only registered generalizapect" to Professor Huxley. But although tions from experience." Human society, mediæval, it is unquestionably true. On in the view of this sage, is not an organism morality, the unknown and unknowable but a machine-just as the individual can have only a nominal influence. The real influence is left to the teaching which sees in the exercise of our highest faculties only "muscular contraction." Public morality must be founded on publicly ac

• Page 122.

men of whom it is composed are ma chines; * a kind of company, as some one has happily expressed it, which insures against risks by applying the principles of

"The good man is a machine whose springs are adapted so to fulfil their functions as to produce bene ficial results." Morley's Diderot, vol. ii., p. 178.