The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
conjunction,--such as spending our money, yet growing rich; taking our
holiday, yet getting ahead with our work; shooting and fishing, yet
doing no hurt to the beasts; gaining no end of experience, yet keeping
our youthful freshness of heart; and the like. There can be no
question that such a system of things, however brought about, would be
the absolutely ideal system; and that if a philosopher could create
universes _à priori_, and provide all the mechanical conditions, that
is the sort of universe which he should unhesitatingly create.
But this world of ours is made on an entirely different pattern, and
the casuistic question here is most tragically practical. The actually
possible in this world is vastly narrower than all that is demanded;
and there is always a _pinch_ between the ideal and the actual which
can only be got through by leaving part of the ideal behind. There is
hardly a good which we can imagine except as competing for the
possession of the same bit of space and time with some other imagined
good. Every end of desire that presents itself appears exclusive of
some other end of desire. Shall a man drink and smoke, _or_ keep his
nerves in condition?--he cannot do both. Shall he follow his fancy for
Amelia, _or_ for Henrietta?--both cannot be the choice of his heart.
Shall he have the {203} dear old Republican party, _or_ a spirit of
unsophistication in public affairs?--he cannot have both, etc. So that
the ethical philosopher's demand for the right scale of subordination
in ideals is the fruit of an altogether practical need. Some part of
the ideal must be butchered, and he needs to know which part. It is a
tragic situation, and no mere speculative conundrum, with which he has
to deal.
Now we are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher's task by
the fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely
ordered already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally
highest, the others which we butcher either die and do not return to
haunt us; or if they come back and accuse us of murder, every one
applauds us for turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our
environment encourages us not to be philosophers but partisans. The
philosopher, however, cannot, so long as he clings to his own ideal of
objectivity, rule out any ideal from being heard. He is confident, and
rightly confident, that the simple taking counsel of his own intuitive
preferences would be certain to end in a mutilation of the fulness of
the truth. The poet Heine is said to have written 'Bunsen' in the
place of 'Gott' in his copy of that author's work entitled "God in
History," so as to make it read 'Bunsen in der Geschichte.' Now, with
no disrespect to the good and learned Baron, is it not safe to say that
any single philosopher, however wide his sympathies, must be just such
a Bunsen in der Geschichte of the moral world, so soon as he attempts
to put his own ideas of order into that howling mob of desires, each
struggling to get breathing-room for the ideal to which it clings? The
very best of men must not only be insensible, but {204} be ludicrously
and peculiarly insensible, to many goods. As a militant, fighting
free-handed that the goods to which he is sensible may not be submerged
and lost from out of life, the philosopher, like every other human
being, is in a natural position. But think of Zeno and of Epicurus,
think of Calvin and of Paley, think of Kant and Schopenhauer, of
Herbert Spencer and John Henry Newman, no longer as one-sided champions
of special ideals, but as schoolmasters deciding what all must
think,--and what more grotesque topic could a satirist wish for on
which to exercise his pen? The fabled attempt of Mrs. Partington to
arrest the rising tide of the North Atlantic with her broom was a
reasonable spectacle compared with their effort to substitute the
content of their clean-shaven systems for that exuberant mass of goods
with which all human nature is in travail, and groaning to bring to the
light of day. Think, furthermore, of such individual moralists, no
longer as mere schoolmasters, but as pontiffs armed with the temporal
power, and having authority in every concrete case of conflict to order
which good shall be butchered and which shall be suffered to
survive,--and the notion really turns one pale. All one's slumbering
revolutionary instincts waken at the thought of any single moralist
wielding such powers of life and death. Better chaos forever than an
order based on any closet-philosopher's rule, even though he were the
most enlightened possible member of his tribe. No! if the philosopher
is to keep his judicial position, he must never become one of the
parties to the fray.
What can he do, then, it will now be asked, except to fall back on
scepticism and give up the notion of being a philosopher at all?
{205}
But do we not already see a perfectly definite path of escape which is
open to him just because he is a philosopher, and not the champion of
one particular ideal? Since everything which is demanded is by that
fact a good, must not the guiding principle for ethical philosophy
(since all demands conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world)
be simply to satisfy at all times _as many demands as we can_? That
act must be the best act, accordingly, which makes for the best whole,
in the sense of awakening the least sum of dissatisfactions. In the
casuistic scale, therefore, those ideals must be written highest which
_prevail at the least cost_, or by whose realization the least possible
number of other ideals are destroyed. Since victory and defeat there
must be, the victory to be philosophically prayed for is that of the
more inclusive side,--of the side which even in the hour of triumph
will to some degree do justice to the ideals in which the vanquished
party's interests lay. The course of history is nothing but the story
of men's struggles from generation to generation to find the more and
more inclusive order. _Invent some manner_ of realizing your own
ideals which will also satisfy the alien demands,--that and that only
is the path of peace! Following this path, society has shaken itself
into one sort of relative equilibrium after another by a series of
social discoveries quite analogous to those of science. Polyandry and
polygamy and slavery, private warfare and liberty to kill, judicial
torture and arbitrary royal power have slowly succumbed to actually
aroused complaints; and though some one's ideals are unquestionably the
worse off for each improvement, yet a vastly greater total number of
them find shelter in our civilized society than in the older {206}
savage ways. So far then, and up to date, the casuistic scale is made
for the philosopher already far better than he can ever make it for
himself. An experiment of the most searching kind has proved that the
laws and usages of the land are what yield the maximum of satisfaction
to the thinkers taken all together. The presumption in cases of
conflict must always be in favor of the conventionally recognized good.
The philosopher must be a conservative, and in the construction of his
casuistic scale must put the things most in accordance with the customs
of the community on top.
And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing
final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as
our present laws and customs have fought and conquered other past ones,
so they will in their turn be overthrown by any newly discovered order
which will hush up the complaints that they still give rise to, without
producing others louder still. "Rules are made for man, not man for
rules,"--that one sentence is enough to immortalize Green's Prolegomena
to Ethics. And although a man always risks much when he breaks away
from established rules and strives to realize a larger ideal whole than
they permit, yet the philosopher must allow that it is at all times
open to any one to make the experiment, provided he fear not to stake
his life and character upon the throw. The pinch is always here. Pent
in under every system of moral rules are innumerable persons whom it
weighs upon, and goods which it represses; and these are always
rumbling and grumbling in the background, and ready for any issue by
which they may get free. See the abuses which the {207} institution of
private property covers, so that even to-day it is shamelessly asserted
among us that one of the prime functions of the national government is
to help the adroiter citizens to grow rich. See the unnamed and
unnamable sorrows which the tyranny, on the whole so beneficent, of the
marriage-institution brings to so many, both of the married and the
unwed. See the wholesale loss of opportunity under our _régime_ of
so-called equality and industrialism, with the drummer and the
counter-jumper in the saddle, for so many faculties and graces which
could flourish in the feudal world. See our kindliness for the humble
and the outcast, how it wars with that stern weeding-out which until
now has been the condition of every perfection in the breed. See
everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem
how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists, and free-lovers; the
free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and
civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists;
the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the
weak,--these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed
against them, are simply deciding through actual experiment by what
sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in
this world. These experiments are to be judged, not _à priori_, but by
actually finding, after the fact of their making, how much more outcry
or how much appeasement comes about. What closet-solutions can
possibly anticipate the result of trials made on such a scale? Or what
can any superficial theorist's judgment be worth, in a world where
every one of hundreds of ideals has its special champion already
provided {208} in the shape of some genius expressly born to feel it,
and to fight to death in its behalf? The pure philosopher can only
follow the windings of the spectacle, confident that the line of least
resistance will always be towards the richer and the more inclusive
arrangement, and that by one tack after another some approach to the
kingdom of heaven is incessantly made.
IV.
All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being
deducible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its
time, and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day. The
presumption of course, in both sciences, always is that the vulgarly
accepted opinions are true, and the right casuistic order that which
public opinion believes in; and surely it would be folly quite as
great, in most of us, to strike out independently and to aim at
originality in ethics as in physics. Every now and then, however, some
one is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary
thought or action may bear prosperous fruit. He may replace old 'laws
of nature' by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a
certain place, bring in a total condition of things more ideal than
would have followed had the rules been kept.
On the whole, then, we must conclude that no philosophy of ethics is
possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term. Everywhere
the ethical philosopher must wait on facts. The thinkers who create
the ideals come he knows not whence, their sensibilities are evolved he
knows not how; and the {209} question as to which of two conflicting