Page images
PDF
EPUB

excluded to fixed moral relations, and truths which come earlier, or lie deeper, than individual experience, and also to later results, which flow onward, almost without limit, from every form of moral activity, the doctrine must contract itself into a mere registration of those emotions of liking or disliking, of praise or blame, which may successively arise in each human conscience and heart. It will thus have no power to distinguish between the most mischievous illusions, and the purest and noblest sentiments of a purified intelligence, and must wholly fail to supply the materials for a genuine science. To fulfil its main object, it must borrow more or less largely from the extremes which enclose it on either side. The emotions, from which it would construct its ethical creed or system, must involve a reference, more or less distinct, either to laws and principles of duty that go before, and awaken them, or else to results that follow after. The starting-point may be personal experience, and the actual record of moral emotions of the heart. But before the principle can rise into the amplitude and dignity of a science, it must expand and enlarge, till it comes to gaze on a firmament of moral truth that rises above us, and speaks of a higher world, or on a wide landscape of moral consequences, that are spread out around and beneath on every side.

The subjective moralists would be justly condemned, if they were to propound the direct study and registry of the moral emotions as the sole basis and main work of ethical science. The error would be much the same as an attempt to replace, by the mere study of the human eye, and its delicate mechanism of vision, the wide range of geometrical truth, with all the vast superstructure of science which is reared on this foundation. But their views are just and sound, so far as they assume a careful

observation of the feelings of the heart, and its emotions of approval and disapproval, when certain kinds of action are set before it, to be the proper and needful startingpoint of the whole inquiry. Are these feelings the same with those of simple hope and fear, or the prospect of personal gain or loss? Or do they include a higher element, which no true analysis can resolve into the instinctive desire for pleasure, or prudential reckoning of gain? In this case the pretended analysis, which arrives at such a result, only proves that the knife has done its work too thoroughly, that a corpse has been submitted to scientific dissection, but that the life is gone. Moral inquirers do well to be inductive so far, that they must begin with the question, what is the actual constitution and experience of the human mind as to moral feelings and truths. But if their progress is arrested at this point, it will soon be found impossible to build up what is really and essentially an ideal science by the mere observation of actual occurrences alone.

The Morality of Common Sense has its weak and its strong side. Its weakness consists in the want of unity, simplicity, symmetry, and ideal grandeur. It cleaves to what is real and actual, in a science which must cease to exist, as soon as the contrast between the actual and the ideal has disappeared from view. In this respect it bears some resemblance to those early navigators, who sailed close by headland, islet, and promontory, and feared to entrust themselves to the wide and trackless ocean by the help of the compass and the stars alone. For those stars are often blotted out and hidden by storms and clouds; and the compass might lead to fatal shipwrecks, being a strange, ill-understood mystery, and subject to many unknown causes of variation.

The strength of the doctrine resides in its inductive character, its tone of modesty and caution. It seeks to tread on firm ground. It distrusts abstract theories, and hasty generalizations. It begins by observing the actual sentiments of mankind, and their usual decisions on all the great questions of morals, and then seeks to eliminate from these the more patent causes of error and mutual divergence. It rests content with secondary moral axioms, confirmed by the general verdict and assent of men not wholly ignorant, or enslaved by passion and lust, even when it fails to trace them, upward and outward, into some wider and more comprehensive truth. A due regard to the importance of secondary axioms is a mark of the spirit of genuine induction, and its practical worth has been proved in every branch of physical inquiry. But morals are an ideal science. And hence the application of the principle needs here especial caution, and can only be limited and partial in its extent. We should else be in danger of abandoning the true ideal and standard of moral excellence, and of exalting the customs, opinions, and prejudices of each particular class of men, among whom our lot is cast, into the absolute and proper test of duty and virtue.

The objective moralists have been wrongly grouped by Bentham, along with the subjective or sentimental, under his principle of caprice, and thus a charge has been brought against them, from which, so far as their main doctrine is concerned, they are wholly free. Mr Mill commits an error of the opposite kind. He groups the moralists of emotion and internal feeling, along with those who appeal to reason and eternal truth, under a common complaint that they forsake induction, the method of true and sound philosophy, for mere intuition.

But the sentimental moralists, in principle, are further removed from this fault than utilitarians themselves. Their real danger is rather of an opposite kind. Professor Grote, in Ch. XVII. of his "Examination," has made the following just remarks on this representation of their views.

"Under the notion of intuitive moral systems, Mr Mill seems to confuse two entirely different lines of thought. Of these the sentimental or emotional satisfies itself with attributing great importance to the subjective feeling. The other, the school of duty, variously named according to its various forms, has a strong notion of the reality of facts and relations which the subjective feeling suggests to us; and which reason, they think, makes known to us on other grounds besides. Both schools are noticed by Bentham as hostile to utilitarianism. The one which he saw and described most clearly as such was the emotional. The other he speaks of under the name of asceticism, in a manner not making it readily recognizable as an important part of human thought. Now of these two schools the former is certainly not less inductive than utilitarianism itself. If we define right action to be that which is in accordance with our feelings of kindness, fairness, and generosity, we enunciate a principle which is as capable as the utilitarian of being put to the test of observation "...

"The moralists of last century, who spoke variously of a moral sense, or a faculty which might be made matter of psychological observation, all supposed that in doing this they were following Bacon and Locke, and setting moral philosophy on an inductive basis, on principles of observation, experience and à posteriori reason. In fact, if setting aside the truth of one or the other

system, we consider which of the two falls in most with the idea of going only by experience, I think the advantage lies with the emotional system. No fact of experience can be more clear, than that man, whenever he has feelings at all, has feelings of kindness, fairness and generosity, of moral approval of some things, and condemnation of others; and that these feelings, though endlessly various in the particulars, are in substance the same for all men, at least to the same extent that happiness is the same for all. Against this fact utilitarianism sets the consideration, true perhaps, but as compared with the other, possessing something of an à priori character, that people may feel wrongly, and that whatever their feelings, it is certain that no action can be good but such as is promotive of some happiness. By what process of thought a morality which consists, in the first instance, of the assumption of a principle like this, and then of deduction from it, can be considered a morality of experience or observation, as against a morality resting immediately on the experience of human feeling, is what I cannot understand."

Mr Mill justifies the strictures of Bentham on the subjective moralists by the following plea. "He did not mean that people ever asserted that they approved or condemned actions only because they felt disposed to do so. He meant that they do it without asserting it; that they find certain feelings in themselves, take for granted that these feelings are the right ones, and when called on to say anything in justification produce phrases which mean nothing but the fact of the approbation and disapprobation itself. A great part of all the ethical reasoning in books and in the world is of this sort. A feeling is not proved to be right, and exempted from the necessity of

« PreviousContinue »