PART II: ETHICS
CHAPTER VII
LAW, FREE WILL, PERSONALITY
THERE is, according to Mr. Herbert Spencer, a question lying at the root of all ethics, a question which must be “definitely raised and answered before entering on any ethical discussion.”125 This is “the question of late much agitated, Is life worth living?”126 I confess that this question does not seem to me at all a radical or pressing one in comparison with another of which Mr. Spencer, in his Data of Ethics, takes no account whatever—the question whether we have any real choice in the way we ought to live so as to make life of value, or in other words whether there is an ‘ought’ in the business at all. Can any man regulate his own living? Is he not, even while he lives and thinks,
as much a helpless victim of external forces as they are? Does the realm of natural law extend to human actions and volitions; and if so, must it not be an illusion to suppose that these can possess any ethical quality whatever?
A great deal of the perplexity attaching to the old problem, how to reconcile human free will with divine predestination and omniscience, has, it seems to me, been carried forward quite needlessly into the new problem of the reconciliation of free will with the reign of natural law. The problem in the old form which occupied Milton’s rebel angels has scarcely any meaning for modern thought. Human actions are a part of the world of phenomena, existing in time and space. When we think in that sphere of things we conceive the Deity as the synthesis of all things, and as the intellect can never arrive at this synthesis, it follows that we can never represent the Deity in terms of the intellect. An infinitely wise, infinitely good and powerful Being has no definable relation to the phenomenal world at all. Therefore there can be no question either of reconcilement or of opposition between the attributes of each. God has not planned beforehand the course of the world because (speaking in this sphere) God is the world—past, present, and to come; and His being is in process of completion by the world’s development. In another sphere, behind the veils of space and time, of causality and of sense, resides the Eternal Beauty, the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Love, approachable indeed by those who come to it “as a little child,” but evading the questionings of the intellect.
But the modern problem of Determinism and Free Will has meaning enough for us all, without bringing any transcendental relation into the question. Let us state briefly the position of the Determinists. It is held by them that every human thought—in fact, every mental change whether of the nature of volition, thought, or emotion—is a necessary effect of certain antecedent causes, just like every change in the material world. Every act of will is, on this view, the mechanically accurate resultant of two forces: (a) the particular nature of the man who wills; (b) the circumstances which supplied the occasion for the volition. It would seem to follow from this that no man can be held morally accountable for his actions. Were we sufficiently acquainted with his nature and with the course of external circumstances, we could predict his action throughout his whole lifetime as surely as we can foretell an eclipse. He is what he has been made by the circumstances of his life acting on the whole mental and temperamental make-up which he inherited from his parents. He does good or ill as a tree bears good fruit or bad according to its nature and to the treatment it has received.
The old theory of Free Will, which was content to declare that each man’s choice in any ethical situation presented to him by life was not imposed on him by the will of a Deity but was his own choice, thus making him responsible to God and man for his acts, evidently requires to be restated in view of the conception of scientific Determinism just described, which does not seek to impose on man the will of any other personal being. But when we come to restate it, the distinction between Free Will and Determinism appears to be by no means so clear and intelligible as it seemed at first sight. The essence of the Determinist theory is simply that the same man will always, under the same set of external circumstances, act in exactly the same way. But how far does the advocate of Free Will really deny this? Imagine a man whom we regard as a type of honour and integrity, a General Gordon, for instance, in the position of being offered a bribe to betray a trust reposed in him. We are quite assured that he would reject it, and that he would reject it again and again to the end of the chapter. So long as his mind and character remained unchanged, his action would never vary. Was his will therefore not free? And if so, how do we distinguish its freedom from scientific Determinism?
We shall find that while the statement of the Determinist position is quite easy and simple, the statement of Free Will, the explanation of what we really mean when we talk of the will being ‘free,’ is, when we look closely into it, a matter of much intricacy. Believers in Free Will, says J. S. Mill in his essay ‘On Social Freedom,’ are those who “believe, in fact, that they themselves can, within certain limits, do what they please.”127 This is, indeed, the answer which comes at once to the lips of the average man when Socratically interrogated as to what he means by Free Will. But the nature of the limits is just the critical part of the question. I cannot fly because I please. I cannot write a line of poetry because I please. Can I live a saintly life because I please? Perhaps not, it may be replied; but after all Free Will does not essentially mean the external fact of doing, it means the internal act of choosing—let us substitute the word ‘choose’ for the word ‘do’ and see what we arrive at. Very well, then; I can choose what I please: let us try this formula. But at once we perceive that this is a tautological expression, for what I ‘please’ to do is simply what I choose. So the formula is finally stripped to this bare expression, ‘I can choose.’ But now the Determinist will say, ‘Who denies it?’ The psychological process known as ‘choosing’ is within every one’s experience. The question as to what governs the choice remains untouched. The core of the problem, then, has been found to lie not in the word ‘do,’ not in the word ‘please,’ not in the word ‘choose.’ Where is it then? It is not in ‘can,’ for ‘I can choose’ adds nothing philosophically to the contents of ‘I choose.’
The core of the problem is the word ‘I.’ And until we have settled what ‘I’ am, we shall not reach a clear issue between Free Will and Determinism.
So the test which we have applied to human actions with a view to finding out whether they conform to law as do physical phenomena or not—the test, namely, whether they always come out the same under the same circumstances or not—breaks down. The ‘circumstances’ include the man himself, and the question ‘What is a man?’ turns out to be the real point at issue.
The Determinist usually belongs to a school which has a clear and simple answer to this question. Man, for him, is a complex of vessels, nerves, ganglia, and molecular configurations of brain matter responding to external stimuli as uniformly and inevitably as a plant. Consciousness is merely a sort of by-product of this mechanism, which would go on just the same without it.128
But this view is in direct contradiction to the deepest and clearest deliverance of human consciousness, which affirms that I am a deliberative and ruling Mind, and bids me regard my Will as Reason in action. I seem to know this so intimately and profoundly that if it is an illusion there appears to be nothing else in the world of which I can ever venture to feel sure. We know the outside world only at two removes. The external object has first to impress itself in some as yet unexplained manner on our physical organism, and the latter has then in a manner equally mysterious to produce a state of consciousness in the observer. But consciousness, in Man, can turn upon and interrogate itself; it is subject and object in one; and its deliverances, so far as they go, so far as they are pure deliverances of consciousness with no argumentative deduction subtly mingled with them, are the truest things we know or ever can know. I do not see how they can possibly be brought to the test by any other kind of knowledge: they are the test of everything.
We find, then, that when we talk of ‘free’ choice as the prerogative of man what we mean at bottom is the choice of a self-determining Mind. We find, also, that while for every event in the physical world we are obliged to assume an antecedent cause, we are under no such obligation as regards Mind. When we have traced any sequence of causes and effects up to a Mind, we require to go no further. We can conceive a self-determining Mind. If man is such, or so far as he is such, his will is what we call free.
But to say that we are profoundly conscious of the existence of our will does not by any means get rid of the difficulties connected with this belief, and it is incumbent on us either to attempt a solution of them or frankly to dismiss them as, for the present, insoluble.
If possible, to begin with, we must obtain a clear idea of the difference of the will from other forms of vital action.
At one end of the ascending scale of organic life we see an animalcule swimming in the direction in which it is attracted by food. At the other end, we find a man in the full flush of conscious life going deliberately to a shocking death rather than deny his faith or break a trust. What is the essential difference between the action of the animalcule and that of the martyr? To the Determinist there is none. Both are alike the inevitable response to certain stimuli from the outside world acting on a certain nervous system. But there is one difference in the circumstances of the action which will be admitted by all. The animalcule has no choice. The martyr has. The animalcule-consciousness has not been developed to the point at which it can take in alternative courses of action and compare them with one another. It is doubtful to me whether any of the lower animals or even of the lower races of man can really do this. At any rate there can clearly be no Will where there is no distinct consciousness of at least two possible courses of action. The Will, therefore, must be regarded as coming for the first time into action when a certain stage in the development of consciousness has been reached, the stage at which man is fully conscious of more than one motive. Furthermore, even when the consciousness has been developed to this point we cannot recognize a true act of will unless, on that particular occasion, two or more motives were fully present. For instance, a lad brought up in a thieves’ kitchen, when he sees an opportunity for stealing a purse, cannot properly be said to have any counter-motive to the theft. And common sense, without having philosophically analyzed the matter, quite recognizes this position of affairs and graduates the moral responsibility of every criminal action roughly in accordance with the facilities which the subject has had for ‘knowing better.’
Two or more motives, then, fully present to consciousness, form the conditions under which alone the Will can be said to act. This is in accord with the whole scheme of evolution. The presence of certain conditions gradually evokes the faculty or organ which deals with them. But here an important question arises. When these motives differ from each other morally, can the Will be said ever to choose the evil one? Has it any moral bent? And if not, what is the use of it?
There is no doubt that the ascription to the Will of a certain moral character, and that a very lofty one, is characteristic of nearly all thinkers who accept its existence at all. “Ill for him,” writes Tennyson in lines of Sophoclean dignity,
“Who, bettering not with time
Corrupts the strength of heaven-descended Will,”
as though evil came from the corruption and slackness of Will, not from its wrong direction.
In the ethics of Plato it was a cardinal principle that men did evil only through ignorance. Make the soul conscious of goodness, and it could not fail to follow it. Yet it seems that this doctrine, strongly as it appeals to the moral sense of man, would, if held with philosophic rigour, really make the Will unfree. No man can truly choose the good who is unable to choose the evil. The Platonic doctrine may, however, be fully accounted for, and even put in a form in which it can, to a great extent, be justified, if we give weight to the following considerations. Moral action is usually recognized in the renunciation of a strong personal gratification for the sake of some social or other altruistic end. Now in such cases we are always sure that the two motives have been duly present, the moral motive, for otherwise it would not have been followed, and the personal motive, for these are common to all living things, they are at the base of our being, and our own experience tells us only too well how insistent and powerful such motives are. The volitional character of such an act is therefore manifest. But if the lower motive be followed, the significance of the event is more obscure. For we all understand these lower motives,129 and they are fairly uniform over the whole of humanity. We can always take for granted that they are present in full force. The martyr undoubtedly hates the idea of being burnt. But we are not so sure of the other class of motives. We cannot in every case feel certain (unless the event has verified it) that they were distinctly in view, for man’s moral nature is still only at the beginning of its development, we are still far from having evolved anything like a universal moral code, not to speak of the instincts for obeying it. We are inclined to assume, therefore, and I think we are perfectly right in assuming, that when the Will appears in human action it is far more often to good purpose than to evil. In order that it may be free to act on any ethical question, there must be a sufficient degree of ethical development; the character of moral worth must have been impressed upon the spirit. In the strength and stay which it affords to such a spirit, the faculty of Will is most clearly recognized and honoured.
We are now in a position to meet one of the gravest of the objections which have been brought against the doctrine of Free Will. If temperament and circumstance, it is urged, determine human action, there is, of course, no place for the Will—it is a mere illusion. But if Will is present and is supreme, how can temperament and circumstance play the part they manifestly do—how does the history of man come to present, as we have seen, an aspect so strikingly similar to that of the orderly evolution of physical organisms under natural law? If you bring in Will at all as an arbiter of human action, do you not thereby drive out everything else?
The answer will be clear to those who accept the foregoing analysis of the elements of choice. The Will is neither a faculty of perception nor a faculty of judgment, but a power of free choice. Free as it is, it can only act on what is presented to it; and here, beyond question, it is subject to serious limitations. Every man has round his soul, as it were, a refracting medium, through which the external objects that excite the Will to action must normally pass before they reach the centres of decision and control. And this medium is probably never quite the same in any two individuals. Often it is very widely different. The sight of an unguarded heap of treasure may appear to one man simply in the aspect of a perfectly legitimate opportunity for enriching himself. To another man it may come as a violent temptation to do what he knows in his soul to be wrong. A third, equally needy, equally capable of enjoying all that wealth represents, may never have a thought on the subject except that of protecting the treasure for its true owner. The object is the same, the physical perception of it is the same, but the ‘apperception’ in each case is as different as Peter Bell’s perception of the “primrose by the river’s brim” was from that of Wordsworth. This difference is caused by the modifying influence of temperament, training, all that forms a man’s disposition, whether acquired or inherited. It is as though each man moved in an atmosphere, an aura of his own which colours all the objects of his thought. Whether every invitation to action that can be presented to the Will must necessarily pass through this aura is a very obscure question and one on which I do not at present wish to dogmatize. But it is certain that the great majority pass through it.
Thus on every occasion where the Will is exercised, it has to act not only on the facts which are perceived but as they are perceived. Now so far as the influence of what is called apperception is concerned we are in the realm of natural law. Each man, to that extent, is unquestionably under the dominion of his environment, that is to say of geographic, historic, social, and other influences which affect whole communities, and which vary but slowly when they vary at all. The Will, in fact, acts within the framework of nature and its laws exactly as does that directive agency to which, in the view of the writer, is to be attributed the phenomenon of progressive evolution from lower forms of life to higher forms, that is, from forms which admit of less life to those which admit of more. The Will is really this directive agency coming into consciousness in Mind.
In all life, whether human, animal, or material, there is an element of change and an element of constancy. Between these poles it moves and has its being, nor could life, as we know it, exist for a moment if either of these two opposing but complementary principles were withdrawn. We have now seen that with a full belief in the innovating and incalculable quality of the Will, with the infinite vistas which that belief opens up to human hope and effort, there is yet ample room for the opposing and equally necessary element in life, the element of constancy, uniformity, law. Human Will does not come into nature as a catastrophic force—it develops pari passu with the development of consciousness; and it will naturally be found in its highest development where the whole nature is most wholesomely attuned to the purposes of the cosmic Will.
We have now to notice certain grave objections which every student of modern science and philosophy will expect to see dealt with by a defender of the principle of Free Will.
It has been objected from the evolutionist standpoint that, as no one attributes Free Will to the lower forms of animal life, it is impossible to conceive it as having arisen in man except by a miracle. At what point, it is asked, did it first appear? And if one cannot fix the point, the presumption is supposed to be that it has never appeared at all. It will be remembered that some scientific thinkers such as Mr. A. R. Wallace, and one may add Prof. Reinke, have been so much impressed by the mental difference between man and the beasts that they have assumed the gulf to have been bridged by a catastrophic or miraculous act and not by any evolutionary process.
Now I quite admit that one cannot conceive mind being evolved from not-mind. But neither can I conceive life being evolved from not-life, nor, in fact, when one looks into the process minutely, can I believe in anything whatever, physical or spiritual, turning into something else. I conceive the evolutionary process strictly as the ‘unfolding’ of latent capacities, faculties, organs, by means of psychic agencies acting within the framework of the fixed relations which we call natural law. The fact that one cannot lay one’s finger on the exact point in the history of nature where mind and will began to be is not relevant to the question whether they are now present or not. As well might one be challenged to fix the moment when the embryo becomes a man. There are no such exact points in nature. If there were, nature would be discontinuous, and the smallest real discontinuity in nature would be enough to shatter the frame of the universe.
From another side it has been urged that the conception of the continuity or oneness of the universe is fatal to Free Will. The Monist, according to that brilliant champion of chaos, Mr. William James,130 must believe in a universe fixed like cast-iron in all its parts, for, being all interrelated, not one of them can be different without altering the whole structure of things.
But does not Mr. James here overlook the fact that essential oneness is not incompatible with temporal incompleteness? The universe is one, true—but this one universe comprises not only all that has been and that is, but all that will be. It is to be conceived at present as a growing organism; it will not be a fixed and completed whole till time is at an end. On this basis I see no difficulty in fitting into a Monistic scheme of thought Mr. James’s admirable statement of the Free Will position:—
“Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not be the actual turning-places and growing-places of the world—why not the workshop of being where we catch fact in the making?”131
The next and last objection I propose to deal with cuts closer to the heart of the question and will have to occupy us, I hope not unfruitfully, for some time.
I instanced some time ago the case of martyrdom as one in which every one would recognize the action of the Will, if it can be recognized anywhere. Let me recall that extremest form of martyrdom which John Stuart Mill once declared himself ready to face rather than outrage his moral sense. Speaking in his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy of what passed in his day for the ‘orthodox’ conception of the Supreme Being he wrote:—
“Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.”132
Mill, as we see, relied on his personal freedom of Will to stiffen his neck against any homage to a Power whom his moral sense declared unworthy of reverence. But a modern physiologist would tell him—and even if the fact be not fully demonstrated at present, it would, I think, be very rash for any psychologist to deny it—that by a slight change in the molecular configuration of the brain cells the heroic recusant could have been turned into a devout worshipper of any being who was able to exhibit the credentials of superior force. Such a change would certainly not be beyond the powers of a being who had heaven and hell at his disposal; even a skilful surgeon might accomplish it. What, then, is the freedom of the Will worth (it may be asked) if the direction it takes is at the mercy of the physical configuration of our brain-matter? And the ‘I’ which, we say, wills—if material changes can thus profoundly alter its character, how can we attribute to it any kind of real and independent existence? Must not the complete dispersal of the molecules of the brain at death cause the ‘I’ to vanish altogether like a blown-out flame? Must it not be at their mercy during the brief illusion of existence?
Our discussion has thus plunged us into the intricate question of the relations of mind and matter, and we must pause to dwell on it for a while.
What is matter? Nobody can tell. It is that which resists when we push against it—a tactile or muscular sensation. It is that of which two portions cannot occupy the same space at the same time—a visual sensation. It is the source of certain sensations; and the most recent physical investigations points to its being composed of innumerable centres of force. But force manifesting itself in orderly and harmonious fashion is Reason. If, then, Reason is at the base of things, Matter ceases to be a bogey.
Still the fact remains that it is not I and it is not You, and the real cogency of the physiological argument against Free Will and the soul (which, as we saw, must stand or fall together) is that something done, perhaps by mere accident, to this Not-me, can, it appears, powerfully influence and change the Me in spite of all the will I can exert to the contrary. The fact that I, the innermost I, can be got at through my brain, means philosophically exactly the same as the old superstition according to which I can be got at by an enemy who sticks a waxen image of me full of pins and dissolves it before a fire. And normally (there seem to me good reasons for not going further than that), normally, it is only through Matter that the Me can be reached and influenced at all, even by the other Me’s in the universe. Now Matter, whatever else we may say about it, is certainly under the law of causation.
From the other, the spiritualistic, side of the argument, it has been sought to meet the above considerations by an interesting analogy. Matter (the brain in this case) may, it is urged, be regarded as the instrument by which, under present conditions, Thought manifests itself and acts. You can take a piano and put it out of tune or otherwise damage it, so as to render it incapable of conveying the real mind of the performer, who, nevertheless, remains quite unaffected. The soul is the invisible performer. You can damage the brain so that the soul can no longer express itself under the conditions of our present existence, but it is an entirely unwarrantable inference to say that you have thereby damaged or destroyed the soul itself. The analogy of physical energy will make this clear. You can make an engine work by the oxidization of coal, but this process can only loosely be described as the source of the energy which is manifested by the engine. All that one does by burning the coal is to turn potential energy into active or kinetic energy. When the engine goes to pieces, or the coal burns out, not a particle of energy is lost; it merely goes back into the shape of potential energy again.
I think this reply is substantially a sound and effective one. At the same time it must be allowed that the physiological argument is more subtle than is usually recognized by those who try to meet it as above. You may so damage a piano as to render it incapable of being properly played on—you may get from it the incoherent janglings of insanity, without affecting our belief in the existence of a real musician behind these unintelligible manifestations. But how if it can be shown that certain mechanical alterations will result, not in nonsense but, let us say, in bringing out mere Offenbach when the performer has always hitherto been wont to play Beethoven? A simple injury to the instrument, it may justly be argued, has no such vital significance as this change in the nature of the thing expressed. Shall we not have to conclude that the man really is the instrument, that the mind is a phenomenon accompanying the temporary combination of certain material constituents, lasting only as long as that combination shall endure and varying pro tanto with everything that causes it to vary?
Now, for my own part, I must confess that if mind with all its nobler manifestations such as Will, Love, Duty, and so forth, be a mere rainbow hovering above the cataract of material force, it does not seem to me worth while to discuss anything, for we, mere particles that glimmer for a moment, can never affect anything, and must soon be where nothing can any longer affect us. It is happily quite true as Santayana says in his Reason in Science,133 that people who do not think about these matters at all may “know how to live cheerily and virtuously for life’s own sake” on the strength of the normal source of vitality which has made for its own ends from the beginning of things without the aid of our consciousness or criticism. But this consciousness, turning inward as well as outward, this questioning and speculative spirit, are themselves forms of vitality, phases in the gradual conquest of Nothingness (i.e. undifferentiated Being) by Life. We stunt and maim ourselves if we try to keep them aloof. It is true that in encouraging them we may often seem to be turning the terrible, two-edged weapon of Analysis against our own higher life. Be it so! We have taken that sword in hand; we have cut down with it a hundred forms of superstition and wrong; and the time to sheath it is not yet. Whatever dangers there may be in it, we must face those dangers; and though it may be left to another generation completely to overcome them, let that generation, at least, say of us that we did not drop our weapons on the field of battle, even if our own life-blood sometimes flowed upon the blade.134
Let us now return to that analogy of the piano and the unseen player and see if we can get some more light from it than has yet appeared. In view of the last considerations which were urged in this connexion—the possibility of effecting not merely the ruin of the instrument but the more vital change of the character of the music it will perform, we must slightly alter one of the terms of the comparison. The analogy will be a strikingly close and suggestive one if we bring into view the latest development in musical mechanism, the pianola. Suppose that the music-rolls of a pianola were made of different sizes and shapes according to the different classes of music. There would then, let us say, be one kind of roll for classical music, another for Italian opera, another for Palestrinian polyphony, another for music-hall ditties, and subvarieties of all these. Now let us suppose that each pianola were so constructed as to take some particular type of music easily, other types with more difficulty, and others, again, not at all, and let us assume that all these types are continually being presented for performance. The construction of the pianola will then correspond to the physical constitution of the brain. This constitution, in each case, is the material equivalent of the dominance of a particular kind of personality, or what we have called above aura. But the records which have lately been so much studied of cases of what is called ‘multiple personality’ tend to show that in each of us there are several distinct personalities—or if that word seems to beg an important question as to the unitary character of personality, let us say streams of consciousness—which are pressing for manifestation. The brain selects automatically among these, and normally keeps one particular type to the front. But just as a mechanical alteration in our hypothetical pianola might entirely change the type of music it would play, so a lesion or shock of any kind might change, more or less, the type of personality which a particular brain was fitted to express; and such cases are, of course, well known to occur.
But now we come to a fact than which none is better known, none more absolutely verifiable in experience, but to which there is nothing in the least analogous in the pianola or any other piece of mechanism taken by itself. I can, with time and toil, with patience and resolution, change the structure of my brain and make easy for it that which before was difficult or impossible. Within limits which cannot be defined (because human life is too short), I can even adapt it to the expression of a new type of personality. No musical instrument can do that to itself. One would have to call in for that purpose the initiating and controlling force of the man who made it.135
A conscious pianola, even if we supposed it to possess the endowment of memory, would only recognize itself as a succession of sensations. The hegemonic faculty, the sense of command and control, which Plato136 laid his finger on, as indicating the difference between a human personality and a musical mechanism, and which Hermann Lotze,137 in the full light of modern science, still thought valid for the same purpose, would be wanting. Man does not live in the moment. As Goethe wrote in some of his greatest lines—lines that read like hammer-strokes nailing up the charter of human right:—
Behind the mechanism of the pianola, behind the mechanism of the brain, there stands this living directive force of which we can give no scientific account whatever—we can only say that it is there. Indeed, it is just at this point that all comparison between mechanism, as usually understood, and vital action of any kind must break down. But the fact is that mechanism is usually not understood at all. I spoke above of a piece of mechanism taken by itself. But in truth we cannot take it by itself. Nothing in nature can be truly isolated, it only exists in relation to other things. Every machine has a soul, the soul of the man who made or who works it. Without that it would be merely scrap-iron; and even as scrap-iron it has relations with things about it—air, water, acids, and the like. In these relations we detect the soul of nature. Nothing exists by itself—nor even, permanently, as itself. The living universe of our experience is not a Being but an Acting and a Becoming. It is precisely this fact which, on the one hand, imposes a mysterious limit on the intellect, and, on the other, opens a boundless horizon before the will.
The human brain, the most highly organized form of protoplasm known to us, may be called in one sense a machine through which the personal will, the moral emotions, the æsthetic sense, the faculties of reasoning, have to assert themselves in action. But to say that they would never have existed but for this special form of protoplasm is to say that they were created by it out of nothing. And, no doubt, one can say that, one can say anything; but one cannot think it. I do not see how to represent the matter to our thought except by supposing that every stage in physical evolution is accompanied by what has been called ‘involution,’ a drawing in, from the potentialities of Being, of powers and faculties of living for which the opportunity to become actual had ripened.
An image may make clearer what I mean, and I offer it only for this purpose, well knowing that “the best in this kind are but shadows.” Suppose that a man were enclosed in a sheath composed of metal having certain peculiar properties: it is opaque when cold, but when heated it becomes transparent, and the hotter it is the more transparent it grows. Such a substance might easily exist, at any rate it is entirely conceivable. We must assume in addition that the heat is not such as to be injurious to the occupant. Now a man enclosed in such a sheath would, when it was at the proper temperature, see what was going on around him; he could also be seen, he could hold communication with other men, and direct operations which he wished carried out. If the sheath, in addition to being transparent at the right temperature, were also, under the same conditions, flexible, and fitted him like a skin, he could do things himself. If it got cold, however, and thereby became, in the measure of its coolness, opaque and rigid, the man would be shut off from all communication or interaction with the world outside, he would be what we call dead.
I suggest that Consciousness with all its attendant phenomena is represented by the man, the sheath is Matter, the heat is Life. Matter, historically, precedes the manifestation of consciousness, but as it is never without a certain degree of life, so, even in the nebular form in which it exists before it has cohered into worlds and systems, it is not without the element of directivity, of harmonious inter-relation and interaction. A higher organization of life makes possible the subtler sensitiveness of the vegetable kingdom. The most vital, the most highly organized form of matter we know is the human brain and nervous system. Here the sheath has assumed a considerable degree of transparency and flexibility. But doubtless a far higher degree of organization is possible, and when this is reached the capacities of consciousness will have developed to an extent altogether inconceivable to us at present, though every now and then some exceptionally constituted individual gives us a hint of stages of development as yet far beyond the capacities of the race in general.
We may conceive matter, then, as being constantly fanned up into the heat of life, i.e. as elaborating forms into which consciousness can enter and through which it can act. And we observe that consciousness, when it has found a suitable form, can act on it and improve it. Two questions now arise. The first is: Why should consciousness have need of these forms at all? And the second is: If it has this need, what becomes of the individual consciousness when the form has grown finally cold in death and is resolved into its inorganic elements?
To the first question I cannot suggest any answer, except the obvious one that an individual consciousness must have some forms through which it can have relations with things not itself. In the world, as we have it, it is generally true—it would be unwise to venture any absolute statement on the subject—that consciousness only enters into relation with another consciousness, or with matter, by means of the peculiarly organized form of matter which we call a brain. I must leave the question there. Thought and research, and the advance in physical organization which I have referred to, may, in the near or distant future, throw further light upon it. It is not a difficulty, but it is certainly a mystery.
As regards the second question, that of personal immortality, all we are justified in concluding on the negative side is that when a certain body and brain have perished, consciousness can express itself through that form no more. But consciousness itself cannot be less indestructible than everything else that exists. We may, so far as I can see, either conceive an individual consciousness at death as being resolved into the general consciousness from which it sprang, even as the matter composing any organic being is resolved into inorganic matter, or we may suppose that, having won and consolidated its selfhood by what it has done and what it has endured in the flesh, the selfhood is thenceforth capable of an independent existence under forms at present beyond our ken.
Either of these conceptions implies what we call the ‘immortality’ of the soul, the real and permanent significance of the experiences of the soul. Here a little further elucidation may be desirable. I have spoken of the possibility of the soul or self being resolved into something which one can only describe as a general spiritual substance related to individual souls as matter in general is related to particular material organisms. But the parallel with matter must not be pushed too far. A material organism, being composed of different substances, can be disintegrated. But consciousness cannot, strictly speaking, suffer disintegration, for it has no different substances into which to disintegrate. It can, however, as we see, appear in the form of a number of different personalities; and this, the normal existing condition, is the psychical analogue to physical disintegration. If these personalities are again to merge into one impersonal consciousness, the process would not be comparable to disintegration; it would be the very reverse; it would be reintegration; and the process, therefore, implies nothing resembling the loss or dissipation of any form of psychic being.
Further, we have to observe that when a material organism perishes and is disintegrated, there is, so far as we can see, an utter and complete end of it. The human brain, for example, quite apart from its association with a consciousness, has in the course of its development and activity gone through a marvellous chain of processes, in which electric and molecular force, undulations, radiations, and probably other physical factors of which we have no conception at present, have played a part. Yet when the brain dies and is resolved into so much ammonia, phosphorus, carbon, gases, and what not, these elements differ in no whit from other ammonia, phosphorus, and carbon in the world. For any ulterior purpose they are neither better nor worse; they are wholly unchanged, by all the extraordinary history which they have passed through under the spell of life. This is equally true of the elements, nervous and other, of any living being. But the physical system of every living being below man is organized for two ends only: (1) the upkeep, during its lifetime, of its own physical powers; (2) the reproduction and multiplication of its kind.139 When an organism has fulfilled these functions, it is justified; the object of life has been attained. These functions, of course, persist in man, but he has added to them many others; his brain has to serve him for ethics, art, philosophy, religion, and is therefore organized with a subtlety quite unknown in the animal world. Here, then, is a kind of organic action which has no significance whatever except in relation to consciousness. If it have none there it has none at all, it is absolutely irrational and futile. Now the molecular and other action of a beast’s brain has reference to its physical life, and it passes on this physical life to its descendants. But the action, or a great part of the action, of a man’s brain has reference to his consciousness, and of this he passes on at most the potentiality. A lion’s cub is a lion; a philosopher’s child is not necessarily or even probably a philosopher. That path of development, whatever we may say about the lion, must have its goal elsewhere. We must, if the universe is not irrational, believe that in some way consciousness, whether after the death of the body it persists in individual form or not, carries forward into the new state the results of its experiences, its acquisitions, its losses, in the bodily relation. These are not transitory, not indifferent; “great or small they furnish their parts toward the soul.”
The reader will have probably noticed that one consideration of the greatest moment has been left untouched. I have spoken of matter and consciousness as of two separate things, and of the former as prior to the latter. This is a form of thought imposed upon us by the space and time relations by which our being is conditioned. But it is evident that the interaction of the two cannot be fortuitous. We cannot suppose that matter pursued its long course of evolution, refining and subtilizing at every stage to admit more and more of the activity of consciousness, in total disconnexion with that consciousness. The two must be co-ordinated in some higher synthesis. Could we escape from the limitations of our thought we should see them, therefore, not as two, but one, and we should see that the meanest form of being has an aspect in which it belongs to eternity.
CHAPTER VIII
THE ETHICAL CRITERION
“Things have life—God is life.”—Spinoza.
“I am come that they may have life, and that they may have
it more abundantly.”—Rabbi Bar-elahin.
THE view of the meaning and purpose of cosmic development set forth in the preceding chapters must clearly have a bearing on the principles of human conduct. Men above a certain stage of culture do not live by blind instinct. They endeavour to harmonize their lives with some conception of the ratio essendi of the world in which they find themselves, and in so doing they are most truly men. The Stoic expressed this attempt in the simple formula, ‘Live according to Nature.’ But nature is not simple, and the endeavour to interpret nature has led to some very divergent ideals of human conduct.
Every one who has meditated on the subject at all has become aware that the world which we see and hear and feel, the world of sense-perception, is not all that we have to do with. Behind the visible and material world there lies the invisible, the X world, which we cannot weigh and analyze, but the existence and potency of which we are compelled to assume. It is the literal truth to say that no man can take a single step even in the most mundane and practical affairs of life without a belief, implicit or explicit, in the spiritual unity and reality underlying the fleeting panorama of sense-impressions. Nothing else can give him any assurance of the constancy, the orderly inter-relation, of the phenomena with which he has to deal, and with which he could not deal intelligently did not this constancy exist. Now when man begins to be aware that there is something more in the world than is immediately apparent to sense, his thinking on the subject may take several different lines, but it is probable that all of them may be referred to one or other of two main divisions, the Dualistic and the Monistic.140 The Dualist will regard the world of sense-perception, whether originally produced and organized by the invisible or not, as now more or less independent of the latter, or even hostile to it, and he will generally interpret his own being as something properly belonging to the invisible world but for a time mysteriously and unhappily entangled, through the flesh, with the other. This is Platonic theology, carried by Paul into Christianity, and it eventuates, when driven to its conclusion by a rigorous and inhuman logic, in Asceticism. Instead of the Stoic, ‘Live according to Nature’ (a formula in complete harmony, it may be noted, with the Stoic Pantheism), we get, as the formula for ideal conduct, ‘Deny Nature, think the flesh a burden and a shame, fit yourself for the time when your real self will cast it off as a filthy garment.’
On the other hand the Monistic view represented in ancient Europe by the great Stoic school, and in modern times by names such as those of Spinoza, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Lotze, Walt Whitman, refuses to separate the visible and the invisible worlds. The former is the latter, made partially accessible to our minds. Man is a part of nature, bound up in all his being with the framework of the Universe. The flesh is not a bond on the spirit but an instrument of life, and what we acquire through it is just as valuable and as eternal as anything else. “Objects gross and the unseen soul are one,” says Whitman—the distinction between subject and object, the perceiver and the perceived, as Schopenhauer argues, is but a mode of cognition.
That the human mind can rest only in some kind of Monism, that Dualism must be regarded as a natural but a passing phase of thought, based on a hasty interpretation of certain aspects of man’s moral experience, would seem to follow from what has been urged previously from the a priori side of the question.141 Indeed, it may be doubted whether there are any thinkers who seriously maintain the Dualistic view as a philosophic doctrine. Many, however, including the whole school of Catholic theology, with its ascetic ideal and its doctrine of eternal hell, turn practically Dualist in the sphere of ethics, while they would be horrified at a suspicion of anything but the purest Monism in their conception of the ultimate reality of being. The cause of this inconsistency is evident. We feel instinctively that no distinction in the world of our present experience goes deeper than the distinction between moral good and moral evil. We feel the danger of obliterating this distinction, and setting loose the greedy and violent passions of man to work their will unchecked by any sense of right and wrong. And undoubtedly the Monistic principle might, by a shallow interpretation of it, be held to obliterate the distinction. If God is One, it might be argued, and God is All, then evil is justified in the world equally with goodness, and the sense of duty is, what shall we say? an illusion, a superstition, a relic of fetishism. Hence the practical Dualism on the ethical and eschatological side which has found its way into Monistic thought. It is brought in to save morality. But inconsistencies like this do not last for ever; they can only persist where thought has become atrophied, and Dualism is now rapidly disappearing from the religious thought of Europe. What is to take its place? The problem before us is to discover a basis for ethics on the Monistic hypothesis without the slightest acceptance of the facile solutions offered by Dualism. If we succeed in that, and establish a real Monistic meaning for the terms right and wrong, we shall next have to deal with the sanction of the law of righteousness, and to show why it should be obeyed even, if necessary, at the cost of pain and death.
And first, let us unreservedly admit that on the Monistic view the distinction between right and wrong, moral good and moral evil, is not fundamental. Both must be regarded as moving towards comprehension in some unity as yet unimaginable by man. Without renouncing his faith, the Monist can never escape from that position, and he must be true to the light whatever the apparent consequences may be. A greater Power than he will look after the consequences: ταῦτα τῷ θεῷ μελήσει.
But, on the other hand, this distinction may be just as real and vital as any other in the world of experience. Nobody thinks that pleasure and pain are indifferent because they are both necessary forms of active life, or that beauty and ugliness are indifferent, or that success and failure are indifferent. How we strain for success in a game, for instance, although we are perfectly well aware that the game is the real object, not the triumph! Yet without the possibilities of triumph or defeat, there would be no game. The problem is really part of the primal mystery of the origin of cosmic life. If we assume at the beginning of things (so far as we can conceive a beginning) one infinite, homogeneous, absolutely undifferentiated Existence, and then conceive this Existence as impelled to act, and to become conscious of itself, it is plain that to do so it must differentiate itself. There must arise within it the relations of subject and object, simple and complex, better and worse, and all that is involved in change, variety, progression. And this applies as much to the moral life as to the life of the senses. It has often been pointed out that if there were no Wrong to strive with there would be no visible and active Right. Were there no hate, love would be incapable of the noblest part of its ministry. Were there no weakness, strength could never have been called on for the strain by which it is developed. And if good should ever overcome and absorb evil the stage thus attained will assuredly reveal some new contrast of pursuit and avoidance perhaps as strange to us now as moral distinctions would be to the lower animals.
The Monist will also urge that nature, as we behold it, is not a fixed and rounded entity, but is something in process of completion. We must therefore interpret nature not alone by its contents at any given moment, but by its drift and tendency. This is precisely the consideration which separates Pantheism as enlightened by science from the Pantheism of a primitive nature-worship. In it, the Greek and the Hebrew ideals are blended and reconciled.
But what, for ethical purposes, is this drift and tendency? What significance do I mean to attach to the terms moral good and moral evil? It is hardly necessary to say that I do not propose in a couple of chapters of one short book to elaborate an ethical system with all its groundwork, and with details ramifying into every branch of ethical action, as Mr. Herbert Spencer has essayed to do in his Data of Ethics. All I can do here, or in any section of this book, is to indicate a way of looking at things—at nature, at human life, at art—in which the meaning of the universe has seemed to become intelligible and satisfying to my own thought. Having found the way, every one must use it for himself or herself. I can, in the present work, go no further into detail than is necessary to make my meaning clear; to set whatever readers I may find at my point of view. If I can at all succeed in doing this, let them use their own eyes: they will find a wonderful landscape, vital, fresh and boundless, opening before them.
The conception of ethical law which I wish to put forward differs from what is commonly understood as evolutionary or scientific ethics at the present day. This system appears ultimately to rest on Jeremy Bentham as its founder, but Bentham’s later disciples have modified his doctrine at various points by a deeper appreciation of the difficulties of the position. They have approximated more closely to what I consider to be the truth, but they have never shaken off the entanglement of the original false position of the modern founder of the school. Bentham, who pursued “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” through the medium of the most depressing system of philosophy which the world has ever known, made Pleasure the ultimate criterion of moral action and declared for the summary striking out of the word ‘ought’ from the language of morals, as corresponding to an idea which, so far as it rested on any reality, was merely a relic of primitive superstition.142 But J. S. Mill saw that the sentiment of duty and moral obligation was based on something deeper and more instinctive than a word misunderstood, and that it often survived in persons singularly free from superstition. He sought its origin in the psychology and physiology of man, and interpreted it, on the principle of association of ideas, as a survival of the deep impression made by punishments and rewards attached respectively to different classes of actions in each man’s early life.143 The position was a more rational and scientific one than that of Bentham, but it still failed to account for the a priori character of the moral sense, the ready responsiveness with which early training evokes in man the sentiment of duty.
It seemed, as it were, to have been somehow prepared beforehand and to lie latent awaiting only the right touch to spring into action. Finally, Herbert Spencer, who may be said to have brought all this line of thinking to its climax, seized on the evolution doctrine as explaining this intuitive and innate quality of ethical feeling. It was prepared beforehand, far back in the ancestry of the race. Not the punishments and rewards applied to the modern individual in his own person, but those which affected his near and remote progenitors, had, in the course of countless generations, built up “moral perceptions” resulting from “inherited modifications caused by accumulated experiences.”144 The moral sense, therefore, is now really innate because inherited, but was once acquired by the operation of pleasures and pains arising from man’s intercourse with nature and with his fellows. And the ultimate moral criterion in the present day remains simply the striking of a balance between pleasure and pain.145
It is clear that if the Lamarckian doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is a delusion, the bottom is at once knocked out of the Spencerian system of ethics. But apart from this, that system, on the historical side at least, is vitiated by the cardinal defect in Mr. Spencer’s mind—his failure to appreciate the true nature of the data with which he had to deal. The philosophic mind is not a mere logic-machine. It must include the faculty of vision, the vital perception of the objects of thought, as well as the faculty of observing and of generalizing about their action and reaction on each other, and from this point of view Mr. Spencer’s deficiency as a philosopher is enormous. A vital perception of the object in this case makes us at once aware that you cannot evolve a sense of Duty, “stern daughter of the voice of God,” out of pleasures and pains. Pleasures and pains per se will yield nothing to the end of the chapter but the sense or the recollection of pleasure and of pain. It is as impossible in psychology as it is in mechanics to juggle more power out of the end of a sequence of causes and effects than you put in at the beginning.
But what has a natural ethics to put in the place of pleasure as the goal of right action? The question is answered when we ask, What does Nature herself put? Nature is said to have no morals, yet a mother bird will imperil and often lose its life for the sake of its young. Is it seeking pleasure then? Certainly not—it is protecting and fostering life, the life of the race. And here, as we have insisted so often, is the master-impulse of nature. We are taking a false and contracted view when we assume that a living thing can have no other goal of action except pleasure. Far earlier than the appearance of man in the world is the appearance of the social instinct which prompts the individual to live, and if necessary to die, for the larger life of the race. What really begins in man is the power to think of himself, to choose, to analyze, the power to say, Why? To this question the science of ethics must provide an answer if it can—that, in fact, is its origin and function. But if it binds itself to provide an answer in terms of pleasure, it is entering the lists with naked Egotism at a fatal disadvantage. On that ground, it seems to me, Egotism must always win. But it is not the only ground. Nature knows a whole world of impulse and effort which has nothing to do with pleasure. Nature does not directly want pleasure at all, but is resolved, at the cost of pleasure and everything else, to have life. Now life is maintained at its highest point by harmony—a harmony of the faculties with each other and, as a whole, with the mighty life outside them. And, as Santayana admirably says, “harmony when made to rule in life gives reason a noble satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven by craving, pleasure, and fear.”146 In this sense we may say that happiness is organically connected with right action.147 But right action in itself is simply the action which best subserves the central purpose of nature. If that purpose is summed up in the one word Life, we must think of the moral sense, if we would not go astray and be bewildered, in terms of living and not in terms of enjoying. To take the greatest of exemplars, who can venture to affirm that Christ had more pleasure living as he did and uttering to the last syllable the message that was given him to deliver, than if he had prudently restrained himself and led the life of a decent and respectable artisan in his Syrian village? Indeed, even if we take very long views, who can affirm that, on the whole, he has by his life and death increased the sum of pleasure in the world? I doubt it very much. No one can deny that it is most questionable. To think of the matter in terms of pleasure seems to lead to nothing but perplexity and doubt. But there can be no doubt whatever that he lived to the full the life that it was in him to live, and that he immensely deepened and enriched the spiritual life of man. When we fix our minds on life as the goal and depth and fulness of life as the criterion, we come out at once into the clear light where high inspirations are born and justified. But it is not only the conception of life as existing for pleasure that I think a true ethics will repudiate. We must clear our minds of the idea that life has any goal outside itself—pleasure, moral discipline, or what not. We must fully realize the conception of life as its own goal, its own complete satisfaction and justification. Whoever has done this will feel as if he had escaped from a jungle of contradiction and gloom, where man can only live at all by clearing some little space for his church and his homestead, and giving up the rest to the powers of darkness. Yet a step brings him to a point of view from which the physical, the animal and the human features of the world’s vast landscape seem to flow into a happy and organic union, where every part becomes luminous with meaning and charged with divine purpose.
Moral action then, I conceive, as a certain kind of life-promoting action. It is action which promotes life in the whole as opposed to the part, which sacrifices the lower, narrower, more immediate life for the fuller, nobler, more permanent life, whenever they are found to clash. It does not differ in kind from other wholesome vital action, but it differs in the heightening, the saliency, the intention conferred upon it by the circumstances under which it is taken. And if we ask how it was evolved in man, the answer is that it was there already in the instincts of the lower animals, which are never, as man often so sadly is, at odds with their true functions and duties. It is not morality which has been evolved in man, but the capacity for immorality, due to his personal self-consciousness.
The ultimate question, then, as regards the abstract morality of any act or class of acts must be, Does it make for life? Does it tend to help man towards the maximum development of all his faculties and capacities? These faculties and capacities are what the universe has now evolved at the highest level of which we have any knowledge. None of them is evil, except in so far as it may thwart and stunt the development of others. In the harmony of the whole range of man’s powers of sense and spirit lies the golden ideal which none of us may realize, but for which each of us may strive; or—for such is the supreme and fatal prerogative of man—which he may set himself to dishonour and deny.