The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
influence of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. But
again, how can such an inorganic abstract character of imperativeness,
additional to the imperativeness which is in the concrete claim itself,
_exist_? Take any demand, however slight, which any creature, however
weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sole sake, to be satisfied?
If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could
adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should make a
demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason there can be
why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a phenomenon actually is
desired. Any desire is imperative to the extent of its amount; it
_makes_ itself valid by the fact that it exists at all. Some desires,
truly enough, are small desires; they are put forward by insignificant
persons, and we customarily make light of the obligations which they
bring. But the fact that such personal demands as these impose small
obligations does not keep the largest obligations from being personal
demands.
If we must talk impersonally, to be sure we can say {196} that 'the
universe' requires, exacts, or makes obligatory such or such an action,
whenever it expresses itself through the desires of such or such a
creature. But it is better not to talk about the universe in this
personified way, unless we believe in a universal or divine
consciousness which actually exists. If there be such a consciousness,
then its demands carry the most of obligation simply because they are
the greatest in amount. But it is even then not _abstractly right_
that we should respect them. It is only concretely right,--or right
after the fact, and by virtue of the fact, that they are actually made.
Suppose we do not respect them, as seems largely to be the case in this
queer world. That ought not to be, we say; that is wrong. But in what
way is this fact of wrongness made more acceptable or intelligible when
we imagine it to consist rather in the laceration of an _à priori_
ideal order than in the disappointment of a living personal God? Do
we, perhaps, think that we cover God and protect him and make his
impotence over us less ultimate, when we back him up with this _à
priori_ blanket from which he may draw some warmth of further appeal?
But the only force of appeal to _us_, which either a living God or an
abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the 'everlasting ruby
vaults' of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive and
not irresponsive to the claim. So far as they do feel it when made by
a living consciousness, it is life answering to life. A claim thus
livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity and fulness which
no thought of an 'ideal' backing can render more complete; while if, on
the other hand, the heart's response is withheld, the stubborn
phenomenon is there of an impotence in the claims {197} which the
universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal nature of things can
gloze over or dispel. An ineffective _à priori_ order is as impotent a
thing as an ineffective God; and in the eye of philosophy, it is as
hard a thing to explain.
We may now consider that what we distinguished as the metaphysical
question in ethical philosophy is sufficiently answered, and that we
have learned what the words 'good,' 'bad,' and 'obligation' severally
mean. They mean no absolute natures, independent of personal support.
They are objects of feeling and desire, which have no foothold or
anchorage in Being, apart from the existence of actually living minds.
Wherever such minds exist, with judgments of good and ill, and demands
upon one another, there is an ethical world in its essential features.
Were all other things, gods and men and starry heavens, blotted out
from this universe, and were there left but one rock with two loving
souls upon it, that rock would have as thoroughly moral a constitution
as any possible world which the eternities and immensities could
harbor. It would be a tragic constitution, because the rock's
inhabitants would die. But while they lived, there would be real good
things and real bad things in the universe; there would be obligations,
claims, and expectations; obediences, refusals, and disappointments;
compunctions and longings for harmony to come again, and inward peace
of conscience when it was restored; there would, in short, be a moral
life, whose active energy would have no limit but the intensity of
interest in each other with which the hero and heroine might be endowed.
{198}
We, on this terrestrial globe, so far as the visible facts go, are just
like the inhabitants of such a rock. Whether a God exist, or whether
no God exist, in yon blue heaven above us bent, we form at any rate an
ethical republic here below. And the first reflection which this leads
to is that ethics have as genuine and real a foothold in a universe
where the highest consciousness is human, as in a universe where there
is a God as well. 'The religion of humanity' affords a basis for
ethics as well as theism does. Whether the purely human system can
gratify the philosopher's demand as well as the other is a different
question, which we ourselves must answer ere we close.
III.
The last fundamental question in Ethics was, it will be remembered, the
_casuistic_ question. Here we are, in a world where the existence of a
divine thinker has been and perhaps always will be doubted by some of
the lookers-on, and where, in spite of the presence of a large number
of ideals in which human beings agree, there are a mass of others about
which no general consensus obtains. It is hardly necessary to present
a literary picture of this, for the facts are too well known. The wars
of the flesh and the spirit in each man, the concupiscences of
different individuals pursuing the same unshareable material or social
prizes, the ideals which contrast so according to races, circumstances,
temperaments, philosophical beliefs, etc.,--all form a maze of
apparently inextricable confusion with no obvious Ariadne's thread to
lead one out. Yet the philosopher, just because he is a philosopher,
adds his own peculiar ideal to the confusion {199} (with which if he
were willing to be a sceptic he would be passably content), and insists
that over all these individual opinions there is a _system of truth_
which he can discover if he only takes sufficient pains.
We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and
must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is
a truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gained
the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws,
or an abstract 'moral reason,' but can only exist in act, or in the
shape of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. There is,
however, no visible thinker invested with authority. Shall we then
simply proclaim our own ideals as the lawgiving ones? No; for if we
are true philosophers we must throw our own spontaneous ideals, even
the dearest, impartially in with that total mass of ideals which are
fairly to be judged. But how then can we as philosophers ever find a
test; how avoid complete moral scepticism on the one hand, and on the
other escape bringing a wayward personal standard of our own along with
us, on which we simply pin our faith?
The dilemma is a hard one, nor does it grow a bit more easy as we
revolve it in our minds. The entire undertaking of the philosopher
obliges him to seek an impartial test. That test, however, must be
incarnated in the demand of some actually existent person; and how can
he pick out the person save by an act in which his own sympathies and
prepossessions are implied?
One method indeed presents itself, and has as a matter of history been
taken by the more serious {200} ethical schools. If the heap of things
demanded proved on inspection less chaotic than at first they seemed,
if they furnished their own relative test and measure, then the
casuistic problem would be solved. If it were found that all goods
_quâ_ goods contained a common essence, then the amount of this essence
involved in any one good would show its rank in the scale of goodness,
and order could be quickly made; for this essence would be _the_ good
upon which all thinkers were agreed, the relatively objective and
universal good that the philosopher seeks. Even his own private ideals
would be measured by their share of it, and find their rightful place
among the rest.
Various essences of good have thus been found and proposed as bases of
the ethical system. Thus, to be a mean between two extremes; to be
recognized by a special intuitive faculty; to make the agent happy for
the moment; to make others as well as him happy in the long run; to add
to his perfection or dignity; to harm no one; to follow from reason or
flow from universal law; to be in accordance with the will of God; to
promote the survival of the human species on this planet,--are so many
tests, each of which has been maintained by somebody to constitute the
essence of all good things or actions so far as they are good.
No one of the measures that have been actually proposed has, however,
given general satisfaction. Some are obviously not universally present
in all cases,--_e. g._, the character of harming no one, or that of
following a universal law; for the best course is often cruel; and many
acts are reckoned good on the sole condition that they be exceptions,
and serve not as examples of a universal law. Other {201} characters,
such as following the will of God, are unascertainable and vague.
Others again, like survival, are quite indeterminate in their
consequences, and leave us in the lurch where we most need their help:
a philosopher of the Sioux Nation, for example, will be certain to use
the survival-criterion in a very different way from ourselves. The
best, on the whole, of these marks and measures of goodness seems to be
the capacity to bring happiness. But in order not to break down
fatally, this test must be taken to cover innumerable acts and impulses
that never _aim_ at happiness; so that, after all, in seeking for a
universal principle we inevitably are carried onward to the most
universal principle,--that _the essence of good is simply to satisfy
demand_. The demand may be for anything under the sun. There is
really no more ground for supposing that all our demands can be
accounted for by one universal underlying kind of motive than there is
ground for supposing that all physical phenomena are cases of a single
law. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart from
the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be so
used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale.
A look at another peculiarity of the ethical universe, as we find it,
will still further show us the philosopher's perplexities. As a purely
theoretic problem, namely, the casuistic question would hardly ever
come up at all. If the ethical philosopher were only asking after the
best _imaginable_ system of goods he would indeed have an easy task;
for all demands as {202} such are _primâ facie_ respectable, and the
best simply imaginary world would be one in which _every_ demand was
gratified as soon as made. Such a world would, however, have to have a
physical constitution entirely different from that of the one which we
inhabit. It would need not only a space, but a time, 'of
_n_-dimensions,' to include all the acts and experiences incompatible
with one another here below, which would then go on in