The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities,
uniformities, and necessities which are the fundamental element and
guiding principle of his own thought." (Sigwart, Logik, bd. 3, s. 382.)
[4] Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but
a connotation that is negative. Other things must be silent about
_what_ it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it
reveals itself.
[5] A favorite argument against free-will is that if it be true, a
man's murderer may as probably be his best friend as his worst enemy, a
mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first-born, and all of
us be as ready to jump from fourth-story windows as to go out of front
doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded from
debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free-will' does not
say that everything that is physically conceivable is also morally
possible. It merely says that of alternatives that really _tempt_ our
will more than one is really possible. Of course, the alternatives
that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical
possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do
murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their first-born, people
do jump out of fourth-story windows, etc.
[6] To a reader who says he is satisfied with a pessimism, and has no
objection to thinking the whole bad, I have no more to say: he makes
fewer demands on the world than I, who, making them, wish to look a
little further before I give up all hope of having them satisfied. If,
however, all he means is that the badness of some parts does not
prevent his acceptance of a universe whose _other_ parts give him
satisfaction, I welcome him as an ally. He has abandoned the notion of
the _Whole_, which is the essence of deterministic monism, and views
things as a pluralism, just as I do in this paper.
[7] Compare Sir James Stephen's Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862,
pp. 138, 318.
[8] Cet univers est un spectacle que Dieu se donne à lui-même. Servons
les intentions du grand chorège en contribuant à rendre le spectacle
aussi brillant, aussi varié que possible.--RENAN.
[9] The burden, for example, of seeing to it that the _end_ of all our
righteousness be some positive universal gain.
[10] This of course leaves the creative mind subject to the law of
time. And to any one who insists on the timelessness of that mind I
have no reply to make. A mind to whom all time is simultaneously
present must see all things under the form of actuality, or under some
form to us unknown. If he thinks certain moments as ambiguous in their
content while future, he must simultaneously know how the ambiguity
will have been decided when they are past. So that none of his mental
judgments can possibly be called hypothetical, and his world is one
from which chance is excluded. Is not, however, the timeless mind
rather a gratuitous fiction? And is not the notion of eternity being
given at a stroke to omniscience only just another way of whacking upon
us the block-universe, and of denying that possibilities exist?--just
the point to be proved. To say that time is an illusory appearance is
only a roundabout manner of saying there is no real plurality, and that
the frame of things is an absolute unit. Admit plurality, and time may
be its form.
[11] And this of course means 'miraculous' interposition, but not
necessarily of the gross sort our fathers took such delight in
representing, and which has so lost its magic for us. Emerson quotes
some Eastern sage as saying that if evil were really done under the
sun, the sky would incontinently shrivel to a snakeskin and cast it out
in spasms. But, says Emerson, the spasms of Nature are years and
centuries; and it will tax man's patience to wait so long. We may
think of the reserved possibilities God keeps in his own hand, under as
invisible and molecular and slowly self-summating a form as we please.
We may think of them as counteracting human agencies which he inspires
_ad hoc_. In short, signs and wonders and convulsions of the earth and
sky are not the only neutralizers of obstruction to a god's plans of
which it is possible to think.
[12] As long as languages contain a future perfect tense, determinists,
following the bent of laziness or passion, the lines of least
resistance, can reply in that tense, saying, "It will have been fated,"
to the still small voice which urges an opposite course; and thus
excuse themselves from effort in a quite unanswerable way.
{184}
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE.[1]
The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance. We
all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as we
contribute to the race's moral life. In other words, there can be no
final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other,
however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the acts
to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable conditions which
determine what that 'say' shall be.
First of all, what is the position of him who seeks an ethical
philosophy? To begin with, he must be distinguished from all those who
are satisfied to be ethical sceptics. He _will_ not be a sceptic;
therefore so far from ethical scepticism being one possible fruit of
ethical philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual
alternative to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every
would-be philosopher who may give up the quest discouraged, and
renounce his original aim. That aim is to find an account of the moral
relations that obtain among things, which {185} will weave them into
the unity of a stable system, and make of the world what one may call a
genuine universe from the ethical point of view. So far as the world
resists reduction to the form of unity, so far as ethical propositions
seem unstable, so far does the philosopher fail of his ideal. The
subject-matter of his study is the ideals he finds existing in the
world; the purpose which guides him is this ideal of his own, of
getting them into a certain form. This ideal is thus a factor in
ethical philosophy whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked;
it is a positive contribution which the philosopher himself necessarily
makes to the problem. But it is his only positive contribution. At
the outset of his inquiry he ought to have no other ideals. Were he
interested peculiarly in the triumph of any one kind of good, he would
_pro tanto_ cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an advocate
for some limited element of the case.
There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let them
be called respectively the _psychological_ question, the _metaphysical_
question, and the _casuistic_ question. The psychological question
asks after the historical _origin_ of our moral ideas and judgments;
the metaphysical question asks what the very _meaning_ of the words
'good,' 'ill,' and 'obligation' are; the casuistic question asks what
is the _measure_ of the various goods and ills which men recognize, so
that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obligations.
I.
The psychological question is for most disputants the only question.
When your ordinary doctor of {186} divinity has proved to his own
satisfaction that an altogether unique faculty called 'conscience' must
be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when your
popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that 'apriorism' is an
exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have gradually
resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of these persons
thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to be said. The
familiar pair of names, Intuitionist and Evolutionist, so commonly used
now to connote all possible differences in ethical opinion, really
refer to the psychological question alone. The discussion of this
question hinges so much upon particular details that it is impossible
to enter upon it at all within the limits of this paper. I will
therefore only express dogmatically my own belief, which is this,--that
the Benthams, the Mills, and the Barns have done a lasting service in
taking so many of our human ideals and showing how they must have
arisen from the association with acts of simple bodily pleasures and
reliefs from pain. Association with many remote pleasures will
unquestionably make a thing significant of goodness in our minds; and
the more vaguely the goodness is conceived of, the more mysterious will
its source appear to be. But it is surely impossible to explain all
our sentiments and preferences in this simple way. The more minutely
psychology studies human nature, the more clearly it finds there traces
of secondary affections, relating the impressions of the environment
with one another and with our impulses in quite different ways from
those mere associations of coexistence and succession which are
practically all that pure empiricism can admit. Take the love of
drunkenness; take bashfulness, the terror {187} of high places, the
tendency to sea-sickness, to faint at the sight of blood, the
susceptibility to musical sounds; take the emotion of the comical, the
passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,--no one of
these things can be wholly explained by either association or utility.
They _go with_ other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and
some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in
incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
discords and harmonies as these.
Well, a vast number of our moral perceptions also are certainly of this
secondary and brain-born kind. They deal with directly felt fitnesses
between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepossessions of
habit and presumptions of utility. The moment you get beyond the
coarser and more commonplace moral maxims, the Decalogues and Poor
Richard's Almanacs, you fall into schemes and positions which to the
eye of common-sense are fantastic and overstrained. The sense for
abstract justice which some persons have is as excentric a variation,
from the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or
for the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual
attitudes, as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the
essential vulgarity of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic
fussiness, etc.,--are quite inexplicable except by an innate preference
of the more ideal attitude for its own pure sake. The nobler thing
_tastes_ better, and that is all that we can say. {188} 'Experience'
of consequences may truly teach us what things are _wicked_, but what
have consequences to do with what is _mean_ and _vulgar_? If a man has
shot his wife's paramour, by reason of what subtile repugnancy in
things is it that we are so disgusted when we hear that the wife and
the husband have made it up and are living comfortably together again?
Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs.
Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's Utopias should all be outdone, and
millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a
certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of
emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an