The much-maligned Epicurus is reported to have delivered the oracular utterance,—“The man who is not virtuous can never be happy;” and poets and moralists have exhausted their ingenuity in devising variants of the well-worn line,—“’Tis virtue only makes our bliss below.”
Who would have supposed that philosophers should have been found—aye, and they of high degree—who toss overboard these venerable maxims as antiquated rubbish? Yet such is the surprising case.
The mighty Kant, tearing away the cobwebs of the dogmatic philosophy, feared not to declare,—“There is not in the moral law the slightest ground for a necessary connection between Morality and Happiness;” and again,—“The goal of a perfect harmony of Desire and Duty cannot be obtained;” while in our own day the critical Alexander Bain calmly observes,—“Happiness and Virtue are independent aims and not identical. The treatment of Happiness should be dissevered from that of Ethics.”
Scarcely could the contrast of the new and the old schools of thought be more vividly displayed than in these brief quotations. There are some, indeed, who have even gone farther, and maintained that the pursuit of happiness and that of virtue are not only independent, but even incompatible aims; because, writes Dr. Despine, a French psychologist of repute,—“Happiness is the satisfaction of desire, while virtue consists in doing good, not to satisfy the desire of doing it, but out of a sense of duty, and in opposition to desire.” This statement, however, overlooks the existence of a moral sense and the normal pleasure derived from its gratification.
Morality and the moral sense are not to be confounded. All men have a love for the beautiful, but nowise agree as to what is beautiful; and there is just as wide and just as impassable a gulf between the various conceptions of morals, although, in all, the moral sense is present.
Morality is nothing more than the conformity of the individual to the type of the society in which he lives. It is the recognition of the debt which he owes it for securing him the privileges of safety, liberty, and education, as I have explained in the last chapter. Not his own moral sense, but the society in which he is, lays down the terms on which that debt is to be paid; and while he feels on the one side entitled to these rights, he acknowledges, on the other, his liability for his social duties in exchange for them.
There is, therefore, no such thing as a universal or even a general code of morality, nor can there be. There is no act which may not sometimes be right and sometimes be wrong. I have heard of a French writer, who composed a work entitled “The Seven Cardinal Sins,” showing how under certain circumstances every one of them could be committed by a perfectly virtuous person. I have never read his book, but I delight in his doctrine. Take the Decalogue itself, written, as we are told, by the very finger of Divinity, and there is not a command in it that both Christian and Jew do not break most virtuously whenever occasion calls. “Thou shalt not kill;” and all nations spend more annually in preparations for killing by land and sea than they do in a generation for institutions of learning. “Thou shalt not rob;” and Abraham Lincoln with one glorious stroke of his pen robbed the citizens of the United States of a hundred million dollars’ worth of valuable slaves. Truth-telling? The observation of Socrates in the Symposium still holds good,—“In speaking of holy things or persons, there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should tell the truth about them;” witness the discussions that come up from time to time on the characters of “the Fathers of the Republic” or the books of the Bible.
In every code of morals there is one law for our friends and another for the rest of the world; our duty to our family is ever in conflict with our duty to our neighbor; and our duty to our country is opposed to our duty to humanity at large. A father who would treat other children as his own would be deemed unnatural, and a statesman who consulted the advantages of other nations would be cast out as a traitor. This is the “dualism of morals,” and its necessary existence destroys all possibility of a universal and inflexible code of morals. The antagonism is not likely to decrease. The most violent contradictions between the various views of life will be likely to be found precisely in the highest culture; because there the individual comes most to his own, and is least willing to sacrifice his own rights to a society whose claims he disallows.
Men now question the right of society to demand what it does from them in exchange for the benefits it confers upon them; and they are right. Society itself must be brought to the test of the Moral Sense. This faculty is that which we also call the sense of Duty, or of “the Ought,” or Conscience. It is a judge, not a lawgiver, and it derives its right of sitting in judgment from its ancient descent, dating back to the time when man first gathered together in hordes or clans under some sheltering rock for mutual aid. It is as much a part of human nature as is the love of association, and as such its satisfaction is as essential to happiness, but is by no means the whole of happiness, as so many have taught. In fact, it is often enough entirely absent, as in genuine criminals. It is now well known that these neither experience remorse for crime nor take pleasure in well-doing, whatever sentimentalists may say to the contrary.
The pleasure of the moral sense comes solely from the satisfaction of itself, and not necessarily, in the least, from the practice of virtue or benevolence or charity. The inquisitor, Torquemada, lighting the hellfires of the Inquisition, the anarchist hurling his bomb into the crowd, Judith yielding her maiden chastity to the embrace of Holofernes, all enjoyed the highest pleasure of the moral sense, because all acted in the complete conviction that they were doing right.
The man is moral who believes he is so, and the woman is chaste who considers herself such, no matter what their actions are. What we think the most fiendish crimes have been perpetrated by fervent Christians, and there are religions now numbering millions of intelligent adherents in which the prostitution of girls is considered a meritorious act.
When Adam Smith laid down the three requisites for individual happiness as health, freedom from debt, and a clear conscience, he framed a sensible prescription; but should have explained that a clear conscience in nearly all cases means simply conformity to the standard of our age and nation, not at all to any higher or abstract ideal. So far from the devotion to a lofty or unusual virtue bringing happiness, it always entails proscription, pain, and sorrow on him who advocates it. The crowd ever cry out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Every one of the noble army of leaders in ethical progress was in his own day branded as an infidel, cursed by the Churches, and driven forth from the enjoyments which a less developed moral sense would have permitted him to indulge. He who rises above the law is ever against the law.
Hence it is that with perfect truth, though with a lurking satire on the commonplaces of moral doctrine, Professor Bain writes,—“To realize the greatest happiness from virtue we should be careful to conform to the standard of the time and place, neither rising above nor falling beneath it; we should make our virtues apparent and showy, and perform them with the least sacrifice to ourselves; we should hold our associations with duty, as well as our natural sympathies with our fellows, only at a moderate strength.”
In certain natures the satisfaction of the moral sense yields a happiness worth all sacrifices, just as in others the feeling of unrestrained liberty will be gratified at the expense of everything that the majority hold dear. Both are exceptional, and there are quite as many who suffer nothing from a violation of the sense of duty or from the loss of liberty.
No platitude is more erroneous than this,—“To be vicious is to be miserable;” for were it so, we should not have the hordes of the vicious infesting society. Far more correct is the observation of that acute observer of life, Vauvenargues, that virtue cannot make the vicious happy, La vertu ne peut faire le bonheur des méchants. He might have added that virtue can never make the virtuous happy, for the really virtuous man is always above the standard of his time, and is sure to suffer in consequence from the antagonism he develops, and from his sorrowful appreciation of the sentiment that prompts it.
The education of the moral sense has hitherto been retarded by two popular but mistaken doctrines; the one that the moral life is “the chief end of man;” the other that it means obedience to a code of laws.
Again I repeat that the chief end of man is the symmetrical development of all his powers and faculties and the enjoyment which he will derive from their activity, and not at all the exclusive or preponderant attention to one or the other element of his nature. His moral sense is merely the guide of the duties he owes to others, duties indispensable to his own life and liberty, but by no means exhaustive of his nature; rather, merely giving him the opportunity for the higher aim of developing himself. The moral life is but a means to an end, and not an end in itself.
The confusion of the moral life with obedience to a moral code dates back beyond history, and is almost as active to-day as ever, in spite of the efforts of such teachers as Buddha and Christ to show the falsity of it. Both proclaimed the absolute independence of the moral sense from moral laws. Such laws are either religious, expressing supposed duties to God, as the Jews believe that He forbade them to eat pork, or, as they and the Christians, that He decided that one day in seven is more sacred than the others; or they are conventional or civil, which are merely the customs, mores, of the nation or community.
Independent of all these codes, which for the most part are survivals, and in the present day absurd, are the Benevolent Emotions, the gratification of which to the properly developed individual constitutes a large element of personal happiness. They arise not from a sense of duty, because they do not have reference to what is due the social compact, but from sympathy, acquired or inherited. The relief of the pain of others, the administration of efficient consolation, the diminution of the sorrows of those around us, yield to ourselves a pleasurable satisfaction, a sense of appropriate activity, which is so real that it is a wonder it is not more diligently cultivated. Too many, perhaps, look for a part of their return in the gratitude of those assisted, instead of in the pleasure of the act itself, and, being disappointed, find the field of charity less flowery than they anticipated. They commit the common error of placing the end of enjoyment external to themselves instead of the means only.
The only sure method to distinguish good from evil is first to learn to discriminate true from false.
A sincere lover of truth is never wholly in the wrong; chiefly because he never claims to be wholly in the right.
The finest thought I found in Chamfort’s writings—and it is wonderfully fine, deserving to be the motto of every work on the Art of Happiness—is this,—Le plaisir peut s’appuyer sur l’illusion, mais le bonheur repose sur la vérité, “Errors may yield us Pleasure, but truth alone can give Happiness.”
Only through fulfilling his duties to society can man secure from society that which is essential to his own welfare. This is why the inward realization of the moral law becomes a part of the Art of Happiness.
A moral act is simply one which, at the time and under the special circumstances, is useful to the society in which it takes place. Hence it has nothing to do with individual Motive, which is the only Mentor recognized by the educated moral sense.
The ancient Greeks believed that the laws of human society are laws of nature, and therefore absolute. In Sophocles’ tragedy, it is no excuse for Œdipus, when he kills his father and marries his mother, that he does so in absolute ignorance of the relationship. His remorse and punishment are not abated.
One school of modern writers maintains that all virtues are but vices disguised; another, that all vices are but virtues misdirected. As these terms are entirely relative, both schools are right,—and wrong.
So long as war is possible, a perfected social life is impossible; but when Justice will not be listened to in any lower notes, she must speak through the mouths of cannons.
Peace, not happiness, is the reward of virtue.
The man who professes duty as the sole guide of his life is either hypocritical or ignorant.
Weaklings and hypocrites like to extol the goodness of men; the former to allay their own fears, the latter because it reflects flatteringly on themselves.
It is no proof that a sentiment is noble because men are willing to die for it. More men knowingly sacrifice themselves to pleasure than to duty.
The lines of morality, observed Burke, differ from those of geometry; they have breadth as well as length, and for that reason will not form set and angular figures.