The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no limitation, any more than to thoseof the Pope; he held himself practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true source of morality.”[325.1]After this we need inquire no further. The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to attain by ἡδονὴ orpleasure, another class by striving after the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or thegood. This language, founded on the healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with apig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,—that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians havebeen roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical, and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even worshipped as a saint—(he was a saint in his own peculiar way unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. Oneof their foremost spokesmen wasJames Mill, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitledAn Analysis of the Human Mind. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which—near Montrose—he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we callmind, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to think worth remembering.Among living thinkers there is none who stands before the public more prominently as the exponent of the Utilitarian ethics thanJohn Stuart Mill.[329.1]But whatever may be the merits of this distinguished writer in the domain of logic, politics, and economics, which seem most cognate to his genius, there can be little doubt in the minds of thoughtful persons that his book on Utilitarianism has done more to undermine than to sustain the doctrine which it professes to expound. And the reason of this lies in a cause which is not less condemnatory of the doctrine than it is complimentary to its champion. Mr. Mill is too good a man to be the consistent advocate of a system which, as compared with other systems, is fundamentally bad. He is too earnest an apostle of the real moral progress of man to be a thoroughgoing disciple of a school whose natural element is Epicurean ease, sensual indulgence, and prudential calculation. His heart revolted against the degrading tendency of a philosophy which gave a primary importance only to what is low, and left the highest elements of human nature to make a respectable show before men with a borrowed and secondary vitality. But at the same time, he was a disciple of the school, and the son of his father, and thus by education and a sort of intellectual heritage, his head was committed to a doctrine for which his heart was naturally a great deal too good. The consequence was a sort of sophistry which, while we see through it, we cannot but admire. Departing from the original idea of his school, that pleasure is the only good, and that pleasures differ from one another only in intensity, he interpolates intothe general idea of quantity of happiness the discriminating element of quality; and thus is thrown back virtually on those innate ideas which it is the characteristic boast of his school to have discarded. For the essential difference in the quality of high and low pleasures is not a matter to be proved by any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual and emotional nature of man, asserting its own innate superiority precisely as light asserts itself over darkness, and order over confusion. And thus, while he defends Utilitarianism successfully, so far as results go, he succeeds only by throwing overboard all that is most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents. In ancient times, between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked line of demarcation, which, whether in speculation or in practice, no person could miss; now under Mr. Mill’s manipulation, this distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is sublimated into the love of virtue, and an ideal enthusiasm for the greatest possible happiness of all sentient creatures is substituted for the real and direct stimulus of pleasure which every man understands; and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result; for the whole platform of morality inmodern times has been so elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain—keeping Bentham’s language—how the original, individual, and personal love of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after theirown favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.After J. S. Mill, the only other living champion of the Utilitarian school who demands special notice here is ProfessorBain. This subtle, various, and accomplished writer, while agreeing with Hume and Mill in reverting to the old Socratic principle of original benevolent instincts in man, and thus denying pure externalism in one important part of the human soul, is nevertheless upon the whole a much more thorough-going and consistent externalist than Mr. Mill; so thorough, indeed, as not to have hesitated to assert, in the most unqualified language, that conscience in the breast is a mere reflection of the external model in the statute-book, instead of the statute-book being, as the Idealists teach, a very fragmentary and inadequate projection from the moral pattern in a normal conscience. This revival of Hobbism in one of its extreme forms is not likely to meet with much acceptance in a country where the popular conscience, from long centuries of combined Christian and chivalrous culture, has attained a very high degree of refined sensibility; and the numerous admirers of Mr. Mill, who are grateful to that gentleman for the skill with which he has disposed the ethics of Empiricism in the drapery of Idealism, will scarcely be thankful to Mr. Bain for presenting their pet system in the naked prose of its early cradle. The acute northern professor would certainly havebeen more consistent, though less amiable, if he had asserted in its broadest form the Hobbesian doctrine of an original war of all against all; and he would have found no greater difficulty in evolving from the primeval tiger a Xavier or a Howard, than others have found in elevating the primeval monkey into a Newton or La Place.We have now concluded our proposed survey of the Utilitarian philosophy, and the result may be summarily stated thus:—Utilitarianism generally is a method of thinking which, while professing to clear up dim ideas, brings confusion and disorder into every region of human thought and action; and specially—1. Which, by deriving thought from mere sensation, by deducing the one from the many, instead of the many from the one, and thus reducing mind to a mere blank impressibility, confounds the essential distinction between necessary and contingent truth, and renders all science impossible.2. Which, by confounding causation with sequence, pulls up philosophy by the roots, disembowels theology of all substance, and freezes the breath of all natural piety.3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of external consequences.This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it does not by any means followthat Utilitarianism has proved utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted. It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear, in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on thecontrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it, for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element ofNumberis made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also, will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void whichits absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair.[The End]FOOTNOTES.[1.1]See the splendid eulogy of the philosopher in J. S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty.”[1.2]See the famous sentence in the Deontology (vol. i.), which a man to believe must have seen,—so gross is the amount of ignorance, conceit, and dogmatism that it parades without a mask.[26.1]The reader will not suppose that we have penned the above sentences about the position and character of the Sophists without having seriously weighed the evidence on the subject, and especially without having taken into account the very able chapter on Socrates and the Sophists in Grote’s History of Greece. On the contrary, we have read that chapter carefully over several times, and have on each occasion returned from the perusal with the confirmed conviction that the learned author wrote it as a special pleader rather than as an impartial historian, and that the light in which he presents this important subject is essentially false, and distorts, or rather inverts, the real position of the principal figures in the picture. The main features in Grote’s account of the matter are that the Sophists are a much calumniated class of men; that Socrates was the head of that class, rather than their antagonist; and that not the real facts of the case, but the imagination of the transcendental Plato, and the caricatures of Aristophanes, carelessly accepted as true history, have been the sources of modern ideas on the subject. In all this we think Mr. Grote is decidedly wrong, running counter at once to the inherent probabilities of the case, and to the unhesitating and concurrent testimony of all antiquity. The hollowness of the case of Mr. Grote has been shown in detail by Mr. Cope in the Cambridge Philological Journal and by myself in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; so that we may content ourselves here by simply stating what appears to be therationaleof the process by which the distinguished author of the History of Greece was led into the maintenance of such an untenable position. Now the influences which acted on the learned historian’s mind in this matter seem reducible to three—(1.) Mr. Grote is characteristically a polemical historian; from beginning to end of his book he has in his eye, and is writing against, a class of writers who had made it a business, in writing the history of Greece, to write against the Athenian democracy, and through that, against democracy in general. With such a literary mission, Mr. Grote, however triumphant in the main, was constantly exposed to the strong temptation of vindicating characters that had been previously abused, and abusing those whose respectability had hitherto stood unquestioned; (2.) In the course of his sweeping progress of knocking down old ideals and setting up new ones, no figures were more likely to call his chivalrous faculty of vindication into play than the Sophists; for they were, as we have seen, the natural guides of the lusty young democracy, and as such the special favourites of a historian whose business it was to justify and glorify the Athenians in all the characteristic phases of their social and political life. And to a certain extent no doubt the distinguished historian was right in maintaining that the antagonists of Socrates were not so black as they had been painted by many, but represented a considerable element of civic worth and respectability. But he was certainly not justified in wiping out that antagonism altogether from the record,—an antagonism which was just as marked in Athens as that more famous one in Jerusalem four centuries later, between the Scribes and Pharisees and the first preachers of the Gospel. The manner in which Mr. Grote endeavours to confound Socrates with the herd of Sophists, from the mere external resemblance of the weapons which they used, is unworthy of a great historian. It was enough that such a confusion should have blinded the eyes of the Athenian vulgar, and their great jest-maker Aristophanes, without being made at this time of day to serve as a serious vindication of the great mass of Sophistical teachers; but (3.) Mr. Grote was led to elevate the Sophists, and so, comparatively, to degrade their great antagonist, not only from his position as the champion of Athenian democracy, but from his sympathy with the philosophical principles of the Sophists, as opposed to those of Socrates and Plato. These principles are those of the Sensational as opposed to what is commonly called the Ideal or Intellectual philosophy, the philosophy which gathers its conclusions exclusively from what is external, while looking with suspicion on any categorical intuitions, God-given instincts, or God-seeking aspirations that may assert themselves from within. With this temper Mr. Grote is naturally led to take the part of those ancient Greek teachers who held similar principles; and these are to be found not on the side of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but on the side of Protagoras and the Sophists. How strongly his speculative tendencies gravitate in this direction the learned historian has amply shown in his book on Plato, a work in which the reader will more readily find an eager and acute advocacy of the adversaries of Plato than an intelligent and loving estimate of the great idealist himself. In expounding Plato Mr. Grote put himself pretty much in the same position that Voltaire would have done had he undertaken to write a commentary on the Gospel of John. It is not enough, in order to see a thing, that a man have sharp eyes; he must have a soul behind the eye, to teach him both what is to be seen, and what it signifies when it is seen.[32.1]See the singular dialogue with Theodote, afterwards mistress of Alcibiades, in theMemorabilia.[42.1]Professor Grote says—“Law is the public reason of a society, participated in more or less by the mass of individuals, enforcible upon all who will not participate in it.”—On Utilitarianism.[43.1]The Communists, who declare war against Capital, can get over this only by saying that every society is entitled to demand of its members that they shall sacrifice any part of their natural rights for the good of the whole to which they belong, and further, that man being essentially a social animal has no right to anything except as a member of society. The question will then be, whether it is good for society to be so exclusively society as to swallow up all individualism and what naturally belongs thereto.[49.1]εὐδαιμονία happiness, literally, well-goddedness,—the state of a creature to whom the gods are kind.[49.2]So Austin (Province of Jurisprudence, Lecture iv.) calls “Good the aggregate of pleasures,” a language borrowed from Bentham, which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would with one consent have repudiated.[66.1]On the Philosophy of Ethics. By S. S. Laurie: Edin. 1866.[70.1]“Atheism is repugnant to moral and political economy, for it necessarily destroys the idea of morality. If there is no law in the material world, there can be no law in the spiritual and social worlds. Every motive for self-restraint is removed; for the idea of an object for which to strive is rejected.”—Baring-Gould,Development of Religious Belief, vol. i. p. 283. An original and powerful work.[74.1]This seems the best way of translating the τὸ δαιμόνιον in the mouth of Polytheists. It is a sort of vague step towards Monotheism.[75.1]As if it were the destiny of modern philosophers to pervert the wisdom of the ancients into ridiculous caricature, so we find in reference to this matter Helvetius in a well-known passage saying seriously that if horses had had hands they would have been men, and if men had had hoofs they would have been horses! In this way the ingenious fool always makes a knife out of every instrument to cut his own fingers.[75.2]See this point stated more formally in Hegel,Encyclopädie, 50.[81.1]Darwin, by the use of the termselection, turnedaccidentintodesign, and was the first to do so.—Stirling on Protoplasm (Edinburgh, 1869), p. 69.[85.1]Stirling on Protoplasm, p. 33.[86.1]The opposite and characteristically modern view of the origin and character of religious duties may be stated most shortly in a sentence from a distinguished modern thinker:—“If there be a God, then man bears relations to Him,and his duties to God are of a private nature, and therefore not of interest to the State, and in no way coming under the jurisdiction of Science. And what the duties are which man owes to God can only be ascertained by aRevelation, for they cannot be discovered experimentally.”There are two propositions here essentially anti-Socratic, and, in my opinion, essentially false:—(1.) That religion belongs to man only as a private individual, and not as a citizen. This is a favourite idea of the most recent times, and has its only root in the fact that on account of the growth of a certain stout and stubborn individualism in Christian Churches it has been found practically impossible to make Christian men combine socially for the performance of any religious function. This difficulty, however, belongs not to the nature of religion, but to the imperfection of moral culture in our existing ethical associations called Churches. The social recognition of the Supreme Father still remains as much an ideal in modern times as it was a real in ancient times. The ancients sacrificed in this matter the individual to the State; we, for the glorification of the individual, allow the State to sit shorn of one of its greatest glories. Whatsoever a man is bound to do as a moral being individually, he is bound to do socially,if it be possible. The so-called Voluntary system is a mere shift to save the trouble and shirk the difficulty which narrow-minded Christians feel in working together to give a national expression to common religious feelings and common religious convictions.(2.) The second proposition here is, that religious duties can only be ascertained by Revelation, and come in no way under the jurisdiction ofScience. To this Socrates answers that religious duties are three,reverence,gratitude, andobedience, and that the first two of these have their root in the commonest instincts and most rudimentary notions of reasonable beings, while the third, depending, as it does, partly on general science, partly on special intellectual culture, falls directly under the jurisdiction of Science. For to obey the laws of God we must know them, and we know them, as we know other things, by observation and reflection; for they are not hidden, as some men count hidden, but written everywhere, both within us and without, in the most legible scripture, and pressed upon us daily by the most cogent arguments; and no man can escape from their obligation. If by duties to God Mr. Gould understands only special religious observances as expressive of our religious sentiments and convictions, then no doubt it is quite true that these special forms of expression must either be revealed directly from Heaven, or vary considerably, according to the character and condition of the people who use them; but such a narrowing of the idea of religious duty, confining it to the accidental instead of the essential, depriving it in fact of its soul and vital principle, is most unphilosophical; and I am more willing to suppose that such a thoughtful writer as Mr. Gould should have been led astray by a fashionable phase of modern thought, than that he should be deliberately guilty of the impertinence of giving his readers the shell of a thing as its definition, when they had a right to look for the kernel.[88.1]Since writing the above I have stumbled on an excellent passage on the inherent germ of Monotheism in Polytheism, contained in Baring Gould’sDevelopment of Religious Belief, vol. i. p. 268, etc. To the same purpose the reader may consult my notes on Homer’s Iliad, viii. 2.[89.1]Baring-Gould on theDevelopment of Religious Belief(London, 1869), p. 124.[101.1]This was written twelve months before the startling events of the late Franco-German war brought the deficiencies of our British military system so prominently into public view.[117.1]This passage teaches us all that can profitably be said on the so-called δαίμων or familiar spirit of Socrates. It was plainly nothing but an inward voice dissuading from certain courses of action, which, as it rested on no grounds of human argumentation, and did not pretend to explain itself, fell to be classed with what we call mysterious instincts and presentiments, and which, as a pious man, Socrates, and in my opinion wisely, attributed to the Source of all original vital power and spiritual energy, viz.,God. If men eat and drink, and sleep and perform other essential functions of vitality, by a law which the Creator keeps in His own hands, and over which human volition exercises no control, there is no reason why in the higher region of our moral and intellectual life, behind and beyond the domain of our purpose and volition, the great Source of all cosmic energy should not reserve for Himself a field of deeper influence, and by us necessarily inexplicable. Our understanding, with all its pretensions, is a petty faculty, which asserts its power lightly in dissecting what is dead, but proves itself feeble and powerless in all that concerns vital origination. Homer constantly represents his heroes as receiving inspirations of strength, and wisdom from the Infinite Source of all strength and wisdom; and in accordance with this healthy human instinct Socrates taught that on great and critical occasions he was often directed by a mysterious voice, or intimation from the τὸ δαιμόνιον. The only thing about the matter which ought to require explanation is the method in which this divine power acted. Its method of action was negative, never positive, and warning on each occasion from what was not to be done, never inciting to what should be done. The reason of this, we think, is not far to seek. Socrates was both personally, and in virtue of the people to whom he belonged, a reasoner; logic was his lamp through life, and by this clear light he was habitually guided in all common cases. But there are dark and doubtful moments in the brightest lives, when even the wisest and the most conscientious can find no sure direction in the pros and cons that suffice for general guidance; in such cases one is thrown back on those radical and fundamental instincts of character which underlie all reasoning and all purpose; and the particular God-given instinct which was strong in the nature of Socrates wasnotto meddle with certain matters, from which it was doubtful whether his character would come out unscathed. It was therefore a mysterious instinct of caution that God had implanted in the breast of the philosopher, an instinct of the utmost value to all men who live in the world, but especially useful to one who, like Socrates, was always in danger of being drawn by his strong and wide sympathies into regions from which, in the interest of his higher mission, it was better that he should retire.[130.1]Luther’s Briefe, anno 1516.—De Wette, i. p. 16.[131.1]Life of Harris, by the Earl of Malmesbury.[131.2]Hume’s life, i. p. 92.[152.1]ἕξις, ἦθος, ἔθος, with which again St. Paul agrees, Heb. v. 14, where Aristotle’s favourite word is used.[173.1]It is interesting here to observe how Aristotle, concurring with Homer (Od.xiii. 289), makes the distinction, unquestionably just, through the neglect of which Burke fell into his notable error that beautiful things are always small. He ought to have known that there is the same distinction betweenbeautifulandprettyin English, as between καλός and ἀστεῖος in Greek.[181.1]The scholar will observe that throughout this passage, and specially in this last sentence, I have paraphrased the author a little, to bring out more clearly his meaning. His style is too curt and bald, not to suffer in some cases by strict literalness.[184.1]Grant’sEthics of Aristotle, vol. i. p. 147.[192.1]Lecky,History of European Morals, vol. i., Introductory Discourse.[194.1]See the doctrine of Heraclitus in Ritter and Preller’s admirable compend—Historia Philosophiæ Græco-Romanæ—one of the best manuals of the many that we owe to the erudition and judgment of the great German people.[198.1]Life of Martin Boos, 1855, p. 25.[198.2]Life of Franklin in theEncyclopædia Britannica.[200.1]ὁ θεὸς ὁ ἀναγεννήσας ἡμᾶς εἰς ἐλπίδα ζῶσαν δι᾽ ἀναστάσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐκ νεκρῶν.—1 Pet. i. 3.[202.1]Westcott,The Gospel of the Resurrection, London, 1867.[205.1]To persons ignorant of Greek, who may wish to receive a vivid impression of the moral influence of Stoicism, I recommend Long’sTranslation of Antoninus, Lecky’sHistory of European Morals, and Farrar’sSeekers after God.[213.1]Ἔστι γὰρ δὴ ὡς ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος, καὶ ἡ σωφροσύνη, καὶ ἡ ἀνδεία καὶ ἡ πᾶσα ἀρετὴ, κάθαρσις, καὶ ἡ φρόνησις αὐτὴ· διὸ καὶ αἱ τελεταὶ ὀρθῶς αἰνίττονται τὸν μὴ κεκαθαρμένον καὶ ἐν ᾅδου κείσεσθαι ἐν βορβόρω, ὅτι τὸ μὴ καθαρὸν βορβόρῳ διὰ κάκην φίλον, οἶα δὴ καὶ ὗες, οὐ καθαραὶ τὸ σῶμα, χαίρουσι τῷ τοιούτῳ.—Plotinus,Enn. i. 6, p. 55; edit, Kirchhoff, i. 6.[214.1]Professor Ferrier on Consciousness;Works, vol. i. p. 221.[223.1]Usque-beatha—whisky.[229.1]Read Mr. Farrar’s delightful little work,Seekers after God.[229.2]Burton’sLife of David Hume, vol. ii. p. 195.[234.1]Lines on the death of Faraday.—Punch, September 7, 1867—a periodical which though sometimes unjust is never vicious, and always knows to appreciate real excellence.[235.1]βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα,—1 Pet. ii. 9.[240.1]The Rev. J. W. Fletcher, Rector of Madeley, Shropshire.[245.1]Pædag. ii. 1-3.[255.1]It is to be observed, however, that the friends of agricultural improvement in Strasburg used their interest to get the merits of their pastor known in Paris; and the consequence was that he was rewarded with a gold medal after having worked fifty-one years in the unnoticed useful obscurity of his parish. Altogether his golden pastorate lasted for the long space of fifty-nine years.[255.2]Westcott,Gospel of the Resurrection(1867), p. 96.[261.1]Westcott,Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 98.[267.1]οὐ γὰρ ἄν πώποτε εἶδεν ὀφθαλμός ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος, οὐδὲ τὸ καλὸν ἄν ἴδοι ψυχὴ μὴ καλὴ γενομένη.—Plotinus, i. 9; Kirchhoff.[267.2]Locke, ii. 21, 68.[274.1]Austin.[274.2]Schwegler,Geschichte der Philosophie. Translated by Stirling.[277.1]Logic, chap iii.[278.1]Ferrier on Consciousness; Posthumous Works, vol. i. p. 255.[289.1]Analysis, ii. 137, 139.[293.1]Emotions and Will, xv. p. 290.[293.2]On Consciousness;Works, i. 195.[296.1]
The state of feeling here sketched is the only thing that, in my opinion, can afford a satisfactory explanation of the extraordinary one-sidedness and dogmatism of Bentham’s moral philosophy. It was the creature of a reaction; and such a reaction as is apt to exhibit itself most emphatically in the case of the most highly-gifted young men, who however sometimes, as increasing years bring extension of view, contrive to work their way to some Aristotelian mean point which permits the recognition of two opposite truths. But such was not the nature of Bentham. He worshipped the great goddess Consistency, and could see and work only in a straight line. To his dicta there was no limitation, any more than to thoseof the Pope; he held himself practically infallible. So the first thing that he determined to do was to re-establish the Epicurean doctrine that “Pleasure is the chief good;” for “Epicurus,” he expressly says, “was the only one among the ancients who had the merit of having known the true source of morality.”[325.1]After this we need inquire no further. The novelty of this sentence is too dear a price to pay for its manifest error in elevating a species into the dignity of a genus, and for its manifest danger in stamping that which is highest in human nature with a label familiarly used to mark what is lowest. The great ancients whom Bentham despised made εὐδαιμονία or happiness the genus; and this happiness, they said, one class of men sought to attain by ἡδονὴ orpleasure, another class by striving after the τὸ ἀγαθὸν or thegood. This language, founded on the healthy instincts of human nature, the apostles of Christianity sanctioned with their authority when they talked of persons being “lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God;” and to the present hour “a man of pleasure” is a phrase familiarly used in the English language to express one of the most trifling, contemptible, and useless members of society. And the reason of this use of language is obvious. Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite; no doubt they both produce enjoyment, but the enjoyment in the one case is often passive, in the other always active; in the one case generally shunning difficulty, in the other rather provoking it; of the former the senses are the main organ, of the latter the reason; the sensuous enjoyment man has in common with apig, the rational only as a man. It was therefore a strange service that Bentham assumed himself to have done to moral philosophy by confounding the poles of moral distinction; and his conduct can only be palliated, not justified, by the tendency of every reaction to swing itself into an extreme. Any peculiar provocation in Bentham’s time calling upon him to reinstate the gospel of the flesh in the rights of which it had been deprived by St. Paul, one does not exactly see. Whatever faults he might have discovered in the morality of the clerical exclusives, purple doctors, and minute grammarians of Oxford, asceticism certainly was not one; feastings rather than fastings were the order of the day among the Dons; there remains, therefore, only the puerile delight of using a strong phrase, to palliate this gross confusion of the received terminology of moral science which he introduced. As for any other principles of morality that Bentham might have, they were merely what every other body had always professed. It did not require Hume, or any other sceptical solver of sceptical doubts, to teach mankind that Benevolence was naturally a good thing, and that no virtues were true virtues which did not tend to the public good. It happened therefore to Bentham, as it had happened to other promulgators of new gospels,—that what was most new in his system was least true, and what was most true was least new. The doctrine that Pleasure is the chief good, and that Epicurus was a better philosopher than Aristotle, will scarcely now, we apprehend, be seriously maintained; while, on the other hand, the maxim, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” has always been the war-cry by which the most generous politicians havebeen roused, and the load-star by which the most far-seeing statesmen have been guided. It is not, indeed, in the kingdom of ethics, strictly so called, that Bentham’s merit is to be sought; specially rather in the outlying fields of jurisprudential and legislative economy, where that doctrine of consequences justly sways, which Paley erroneously sought to make regulative in the region of personal purpose, pure motive, and noble deed; and for his services in applying his favourite maxim to various departments of political, juridical, and social reform, the world can scarcely be sufficiently grateful It is not often that so pure a philanthropist enters with victorious axe and mattock into domains bristling so rankly with all sorts of professional prejudice and professional selfishness. In this domain let him be loved as a man, reverenced as a patriarch, and even worshipped as a saint—(he was a saint in his own peculiar way unquestionably); but let him not be lifted into Christian pulpits or academic chairs to indoctrinate the ingenuous youth of this country in a curious moral arithmetic how to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. Not by such teaching, certainly, were heroes wont to be made in Sparta, in Athens, or in Rome.
With Bentham the edifice of Utilitarianism is complete, and there is little more to say about the matter. Those who came afterwards were expositors, not founders; they employed themselves in explaining the doctrines of their master, sometimes also in explaining them away; for, while bound to maintain the honour of the sect, they were sometimes dimly conscious and more than half ashamed of the base element out of which it sprang. Oneof their foremost spokesmen wasJames Mill, the father of the present distinguished logician and politician, John Stuart Mill. This gentleman, who is much respected by the school to which he belongs, in the year 1829 published a work entitledAn Analysis of the Human Mind. This treatise I have read carefully, and am constrained to say that it appears to me an extremely meagre production; somewhat as if the mind of the author had been blasted and frosted by the arid and sharp east wind in the face of which—near Montrose—he was born. From his life it would appear that he studied at the University of Edinburgh in the days of the great metaphysical school there, and that he devoted considerable attention to Plato. I have not the slightest reason to believe that the great idealist was much known even to the best thinkers in our Scottish metropolis at that time; but if Mill did study Plato thoroughly, it must have been, as Grote has done in our time, for the purpose of not understanding him. Certainly in his book I have found nothing but the materialistic side of Locke and Hartley worked out into a monstrosity; a cold thin horror of all spiritual mystery, and the shallow conceit that the primary divine force, which we callmind, can be explained by a laboriously minute dissection of a merely physical machinery. Whatever that great juggler Association can be made to do in order to explain knowledge out of sensation, mind out of matter, and unity generally out of multiplicity, has been done in this book. For the special ethics of Utilitarianism there is nothing in James Mill that the student of Hume and Bentham will be likely to think worth remembering.
Among living thinkers there is none who stands before the public more prominently as the exponent of the Utilitarian ethics thanJohn Stuart Mill.[329.1]But whatever may be the merits of this distinguished writer in the domain of logic, politics, and economics, which seem most cognate to his genius, there can be little doubt in the minds of thoughtful persons that his book on Utilitarianism has done more to undermine than to sustain the doctrine which it professes to expound. And the reason of this lies in a cause which is not less condemnatory of the doctrine than it is complimentary to its champion. Mr. Mill is too good a man to be the consistent advocate of a system which, as compared with other systems, is fundamentally bad. He is too earnest an apostle of the real moral progress of man to be a thoroughgoing disciple of a school whose natural element is Epicurean ease, sensual indulgence, and prudential calculation. His heart revolted against the degrading tendency of a philosophy which gave a primary importance only to what is low, and left the highest elements of human nature to make a respectable show before men with a borrowed and secondary vitality. But at the same time, he was a disciple of the school, and the son of his father, and thus by education and a sort of intellectual heritage, his head was committed to a doctrine for which his heart was naturally a great deal too good. The consequence was a sort of sophistry which, while we see through it, we cannot but admire. Departing from the original idea of his school, that pleasure is the only good, and that pleasures differ from one another only in intensity, he interpolates intothe general idea of quantity of happiness the discriminating element of quality; and thus is thrown back virtually on those innate ideas which it is the characteristic boast of his school to have discarded. For the essential difference in the quality of high and low pleasures is not a matter to be proved by any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual and emotional nature of man, asserting its own innate superiority precisely as light asserts itself over darkness, and order over confusion. And thus, while he defends Utilitarianism successfully, so far as results go, he succeeds only by throwing overboard all that is most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents. In ancient times, between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked line of demarcation, which, whether in speculation or in practice, no person could miss; now under Mr. Mill’s manipulation, this distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is sublimated into the love of virtue, and an ideal enthusiasm for the greatest possible happiness of all sentient creatures is substituted for the real and direct stimulus of pleasure which every man understands; and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result; for the whole platform of morality inmodern times has been so elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain—keeping Bentham’s language—how the original, individual, and personal love of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after theirown favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.
After J. S. Mill, the only other living champion of the Utilitarian school who demands special notice here is ProfessorBain. This subtle, various, and accomplished writer, while agreeing with Hume and Mill in reverting to the old Socratic principle of original benevolent instincts in man, and thus denying pure externalism in one important part of the human soul, is nevertheless upon the whole a much more thorough-going and consistent externalist than Mr. Mill; so thorough, indeed, as not to have hesitated to assert, in the most unqualified language, that conscience in the breast is a mere reflection of the external model in the statute-book, instead of the statute-book being, as the Idealists teach, a very fragmentary and inadequate projection from the moral pattern in a normal conscience. This revival of Hobbism in one of its extreme forms is not likely to meet with much acceptance in a country where the popular conscience, from long centuries of combined Christian and chivalrous culture, has attained a very high degree of refined sensibility; and the numerous admirers of Mr. Mill, who are grateful to that gentleman for the skill with which he has disposed the ethics of Empiricism in the drapery of Idealism, will scarcely be thankful to Mr. Bain for presenting their pet system in the naked prose of its early cradle. The acute northern professor would certainly havebeen more consistent, though less amiable, if he had asserted in its broadest form the Hobbesian doctrine of an original war of all against all; and he would have found no greater difficulty in evolving from the primeval tiger a Xavier or a Howard, than others have found in elevating the primeval monkey into a Newton or La Place.
We have now concluded our proposed survey of the Utilitarian philosophy, and the result may be summarily stated thus:—Utilitarianism generally is a method of thinking which, while professing to clear up dim ideas, brings confusion and disorder into every region of human thought and action; and specially—
1. Which, by deriving thought from mere sensation, by deducing the one from the many, instead of the many from the one, and thus reducing mind to a mere blank impressibility, confounds the essential distinction between necessary and contingent truth, and renders all science impossible.
2. Which, by confounding causation with sequence, pulls up philosophy by the roots, disembowels theology of all substance, and freezes the breath of all natural piety.
3. Which, in the realm of the fine arts, for the harmonies and congruities of eternal reason, substitutes the arbitrary associations of ephemeral fashion, local habit, and individual conceit.
4. And which, in the all-important science of human life, degrades morality from a manifestation of true expression, pure emotion, and lofty purpose, into a low consideration and a slippery calculation of external consequences.
This may seem perhaps a sufficiently condemnatory sentence; but it does not by any means followthat Utilitarianism has proved utterly useless in the world, or that its power for good is exhausted. It is only as a philosophy of human thought, feeling, and action that it is weighed in the balance and found wanting; as an aspect of social morals, and in the hands of good men like Bentham and Mill, as an amiable half of moral truth giving itself out for the whole, it has done good service in its day, and may be expected to do more. No man certainly can quarrel with the zealous endeavour to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, provided it be made clear, in the first place, wherein human happiness and the true dignity of human nature consists. And though thinking men abroad, who take a cosmopolitan review of our insular sects and parties, will continue to look upon Paleyism and Benthamism as only the natural rank product of the unweeded garden of Locke’s empiricism, practical men in this country, who are more politicians than philosophers, and more anxious to reform their institutions than to remodel their thinking, will continue to find in the Utilitarian principle a useful war-cry against traditional abuses, and a motto of which no lover of his kind requires to be ashamed. Scientific men also working correctly with Baconian tools on the forces of the external world, may be ready to ally themselves with a system of ethical philosophy which professes to make no assumptions, to proceed by cautious induction, and to educe the role of right not from dim feelings, flaming passions, and lofty aspirations, but from statistical tables and other externalities that can be felt and fingered. As a practical power, therefore, in this country, Utilitarianism cannot be considered as extinct; on thecontrary, the recent upheaval of the democratic element which Whigs and Tories have conspired to produce, cannot but carry along with it, for a season, the glorification of that maxim which so felicitously seems to foretell the doom of all aristocratic privilege and oligarchic abuse. To deal with men in one gregarious mass, counting them only by units without respect to quality, seems characteristic no less of Benthamite philosophy than of democratic policy; the element ofNumberis made prominent in both; and both seem to aim at a sort of general level of social bliss which can be most easily attained by taking the superfluities from the few and dividing them amongst the many. The heretical and anti-theological tendencies of the age also, will aid the Utilitarian movement; partly, no doubt, because theologians have not always sufficiently considered that a clean cottage is sometimes as necessary for the well-being of a people as a clean conscience, and partly because those who find in the several creeds of Christendom ground of moral offence, may not be unwilling to welcome in the Utilitarianism of the present day an ethical system which jealously shuns the contagion of piety, and scarcely with a cold and distant reverence recognises God. But this manifest hostility to religion which so characteristically separates the modern Utilitarian writers from Locke and Hartley will in all probability be the first thing that shall cause a salutary reaction against them. For religion is as essential to human nature as poetry; and however violent men may attempt to stamp it out, or supercilious men to overlook it, or meagre men to deny it, it will always know to assert its own place, and ever the more powerfully from the void whichits absence has occasioned. With democracy, presenting as it does, from every point, the most flattering appeals to individual self-importance, the masses of men readily become intoxicated; but from absolute irreligion, except in fits of social madness, they revolt, and stagger back from the brink of the black abyss which it reveals. The difficulties of the Church Articles may be removed by judicious pruning or happy inoculation; but in Atheism there dwells no healing; it is sheer emptiness and despair.
[The End]
[1.1]See the splendid eulogy of the philosopher in J. S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty.”
[1.2]See the famous sentence in the Deontology (vol. i.), which a man to believe must have seen,—so gross is the amount of ignorance, conceit, and dogmatism that it parades without a mask.
[26.1]The reader will not suppose that we have penned the above sentences about the position and character of the Sophists without having seriously weighed the evidence on the subject, and especially without having taken into account the very able chapter on Socrates and the Sophists in Grote’s History of Greece. On the contrary, we have read that chapter carefully over several times, and have on each occasion returned from the perusal with the confirmed conviction that the learned author wrote it as a special pleader rather than as an impartial historian, and that the light in which he presents this important subject is essentially false, and distorts, or rather inverts, the real position of the principal figures in the picture. The main features in Grote’s account of the matter are that the Sophists are a much calumniated class of men; that Socrates was the head of that class, rather than their antagonist; and that not the real facts of the case, but the imagination of the transcendental Plato, and the caricatures of Aristophanes, carelessly accepted as true history, have been the sources of modern ideas on the subject. In all this we think Mr. Grote is decidedly wrong, running counter at once to the inherent probabilities of the case, and to the unhesitating and concurrent testimony of all antiquity. The hollowness of the case of Mr. Grote has been shown in detail by Mr. Cope in the Cambridge Philological Journal and by myself in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh; so that we may content ourselves here by simply stating what appears to be therationaleof the process by which the distinguished author of the History of Greece was led into the maintenance of such an untenable position. Now the influences which acted on the learned historian’s mind in this matter seem reducible to three—(1.) Mr. Grote is characteristically a polemical historian; from beginning to end of his book he has in his eye, and is writing against, a class of writers who had made it a business, in writing the history of Greece, to write against the Athenian democracy, and through that, against democracy in general. With such a literary mission, Mr. Grote, however triumphant in the main, was constantly exposed to the strong temptation of vindicating characters that had been previously abused, and abusing those whose respectability had hitherto stood unquestioned; (2.) In the course of his sweeping progress of knocking down old ideals and setting up new ones, no figures were more likely to call his chivalrous faculty of vindication into play than the Sophists; for they were, as we have seen, the natural guides of the lusty young democracy, and as such the special favourites of a historian whose business it was to justify and glorify the Athenians in all the characteristic phases of their social and political life. And to a certain extent no doubt the distinguished historian was right in maintaining that the antagonists of Socrates were not so black as they had been painted by many, but represented a considerable element of civic worth and respectability. But he was certainly not justified in wiping out that antagonism altogether from the record,—an antagonism which was just as marked in Athens as that more famous one in Jerusalem four centuries later, between the Scribes and Pharisees and the first preachers of the Gospel. The manner in which Mr. Grote endeavours to confound Socrates with the herd of Sophists, from the mere external resemblance of the weapons which they used, is unworthy of a great historian. It was enough that such a confusion should have blinded the eyes of the Athenian vulgar, and their great jest-maker Aristophanes, without being made at this time of day to serve as a serious vindication of the great mass of Sophistical teachers; but (3.) Mr. Grote was led to elevate the Sophists, and so, comparatively, to degrade their great antagonist, not only from his position as the champion of Athenian democracy, but from his sympathy with the philosophical principles of the Sophists, as opposed to those of Socrates and Plato. These principles are those of the Sensational as opposed to what is commonly called the Ideal or Intellectual philosophy, the philosophy which gathers its conclusions exclusively from what is external, while looking with suspicion on any categorical intuitions, God-given instincts, or God-seeking aspirations that may assert themselves from within. With this temper Mr. Grote is naturally led to take the part of those ancient Greek teachers who held similar principles; and these are to be found not on the side of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, but on the side of Protagoras and the Sophists. How strongly his speculative tendencies gravitate in this direction the learned historian has amply shown in his book on Plato, a work in which the reader will more readily find an eager and acute advocacy of the adversaries of Plato than an intelligent and loving estimate of the great idealist himself. In expounding Plato Mr. Grote put himself pretty much in the same position that Voltaire would have done had he undertaken to write a commentary on the Gospel of John. It is not enough, in order to see a thing, that a man have sharp eyes; he must have a soul behind the eye, to teach him both what is to be seen, and what it signifies when it is seen.
[32.1]See the singular dialogue with Theodote, afterwards mistress of Alcibiades, in theMemorabilia.
[42.1]Professor Grote says—“Law is the public reason of a society, participated in more or less by the mass of individuals, enforcible upon all who will not participate in it.”—On Utilitarianism.
[43.1]The Communists, who declare war against Capital, can get over this only by saying that every society is entitled to demand of its members that they shall sacrifice any part of their natural rights for the good of the whole to which they belong, and further, that man being essentially a social animal has no right to anything except as a member of society. The question will then be, whether it is good for society to be so exclusively society as to swallow up all individualism and what naturally belongs thereto.
[49.1]εὐδαιμονία happiness, literally, well-goddedness,—the state of a creature to whom the gods are kind.
[49.2]So Austin (Province of Jurisprudence, Lecture iv.) calls “Good the aggregate of pleasures,” a language borrowed from Bentham, which Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would with one consent have repudiated.
[66.1]On the Philosophy of Ethics. By S. S. Laurie: Edin. 1866.
[70.1]“Atheism is repugnant to moral and political economy, for it necessarily destroys the idea of morality. If there is no law in the material world, there can be no law in the spiritual and social worlds. Every motive for self-restraint is removed; for the idea of an object for which to strive is rejected.”—Baring-Gould,Development of Religious Belief, vol. i. p. 283. An original and powerful work.
[74.1]This seems the best way of translating the τὸ δαιμόνιον in the mouth of Polytheists. It is a sort of vague step towards Monotheism.
[75.1]As if it were the destiny of modern philosophers to pervert the wisdom of the ancients into ridiculous caricature, so we find in reference to this matter Helvetius in a well-known passage saying seriously that if horses had had hands they would have been men, and if men had had hoofs they would have been horses! In this way the ingenious fool always makes a knife out of every instrument to cut his own fingers.
[75.2]See this point stated more formally in Hegel,Encyclopädie, 50.
[81.1]Darwin, by the use of the termselection, turnedaccidentintodesign, and was the first to do so.—Stirling on Protoplasm (Edinburgh, 1869), p. 69.
[85.1]Stirling on Protoplasm, p. 33.
[86.1]The opposite and characteristically modern view of the origin and character of religious duties may be stated most shortly in a sentence from a distinguished modern thinker:—
“If there be a God, then man bears relations to Him,and his duties to God are of a private nature, and therefore not of interest to the State, and in no way coming under the jurisdiction of Science. And what the duties are which man owes to God can only be ascertained by aRevelation, for they cannot be discovered experimentally.”
There are two propositions here essentially anti-Socratic, and, in my opinion, essentially false:—(1.) That religion belongs to man only as a private individual, and not as a citizen. This is a favourite idea of the most recent times, and has its only root in the fact that on account of the growth of a certain stout and stubborn individualism in Christian Churches it has been found practically impossible to make Christian men combine socially for the performance of any religious function. This difficulty, however, belongs not to the nature of religion, but to the imperfection of moral culture in our existing ethical associations called Churches. The social recognition of the Supreme Father still remains as much an ideal in modern times as it was a real in ancient times. The ancients sacrificed in this matter the individual to the State; we, for the glorification of the individual, allow the State to sit shorn of one of its greatest glories. Whatsoever a man is bound to do as a moral being individually, he is bound to do socially,if it be possible. The so-called Voluntary system is a mere shift to save the trouble and shirk the difficulty which narrow-minded Christians feel in working together to give a national expression to common religious feelings and common religious convictions.
(2.) The second proposition here is, that religious duties can only be ascertained by Revelation, and come in no way under the jurisdiction ofScience. To this Socrates answers that religious duties are three,reverence,gratitude, andobedience, and that the first two of these have their root in the commonest instincts and most rudimentary notions of reasonable beings, while the third, depending, as it does, partly on general science, partly on special intellectual culture, falls directly under the jurisdiction of Science. For to obey the laws of God we must know them, and we know them, as we know other things, by observation and reflection; for they are not hidden, as some men count hidden, but written everywhere, both within us and without, in the most legible scripture, and pressed upon us daily by the most cogent arguments; and no man can escape from their obligation. If by duties to God Mr. Gould understands only special religious observances as expressive of our religious sentiments and convictions, then no doubt it is quite true that these special forms of expression must either be revealed directly from Heaven, or vary considerably, according to the character and condition of the people who use them; but such a narrowing of the idea of religious duty, confining it to the accidental instead of the essential, depriving it in fact of its soul and vital principle, is most unphilosophical; and I am more willing to suppose that such a thoughtful writer as Mr. Gould should have been led astray by a fashionable phase of modern thought, than that he should be deliberately guilty of the impertinence of giving his readers the shell of a thing as its definition, when they had a right to look for the kernel.
[88.1]Since writing the above I have stumbled on an excellent passage on the inherent germ of Monotheism in Polytheism, contained in Baring Gould’sDevelopment of Religious Belief, vol. i. p. 268, etc. To the same purpose the reader may consult my notes on Homer’s Iliad, viii. 2.
[89.1]Baring-Gould on theDevelopment of Religious Belief(London, 1869), p. 124.
[101.1]This was written twelve months before the startling events of the late Franco-German war brought the deficiencies of our British military system so prominently into public view.
[117.1]This passage teaches us all that can profitably be said on the so-called δαίμων or familiar spirit of Socrates. It was plainly nothing but an inward voice dissuading from certain courses of action, which, as it rested on no grounds of human argumentation, and did not pretend to explain itself, fell to be classed with what we call mysterious instincts and presentiments, and which, as a pious man, Socrates, and in my opinion wisely, attributed to the Source of all original vital power and spiritual energy, viz.,God. If men eat and drink, and sleep and perform other essential functions of vitality, by a law which the Creator keeps in His own hands, and over which human volition exercises no control, there is no reason why in the higher region of our moral and intellectual life, behind and beyond the domain of our purpose and volition, the great Source of all cosmic energy should not reserve for Himself a field of deeper influence, and by us necessarily inexplicable. Our understanding, with all its pretensions, is a petty faculty, which asserts its power lightly in dissecting what is dead, but proves itself feeble and powerless in all that concerns vital origination. Homer constantly represents his heroes as receiving inspirations of strength, and wisdom from the Infinite Source of all strength and wisdom; and in accordance with this healthy human instinct Socrates taught that on great and critical occasions he was often directed by a mysterious voice, or intimation from the τὸ δαιμόνιον. The only thing about the matter which ought to require explanation is the method in which this divine power acted. Its method of action was negative, never positive, and warning on each occasion from what was not to be done, never inciting to what should be done. The reason of this, we think, is not far to seek. Socrates was both personally, and in virtue of the people to whom he belonged, a reasoner; logic was his lamp through life, and by this clear light he was habitually guided in all common cases. But there are dark and doubtful moments in the brightest lives, when even the wisest and the most conscientious can find no sure direction in the pros and cons that suffice for general guidance; in such cases one is thrown back on those radical and fundamental instincts of character which underlie all reasoning and all purpose; and the particular God-given instinct which was strong in the nature of Socrates wasnotto meddle with certain matters, from which it was doubtful whether his character would come out unscathed. It was therefore a mysterious instinct of caution that God had implanted in the breast of the philosopher, an instinct of the utmost value to all men who live in the world, but especially useful to one who, like Socrates, was always in danger of being drawn by his strong and wide sympathies into regions from which, in the interest of his higher mission, it was better that he should retire.
[130.1]Luther’s Briefe, anno 1516.—De Wette, i. p. 16.
[131.1]Life of Harris, by the Earl of Malmesbury.
[131.2]Hume’s life, i. p. 92.
[152.1]ἕξις, ἦθος, ἔθος, with which again St. Paul agrees, Heb. v. 14, where Aristotle’s favourite word is used.
[173.1]It is interesting here to observe how Aristotle, concurring with Homer (Od.xiii. 289), makes the distinction, unquestionably just, through the neglect of which Burke fell into his notable error that beautiful things are always small. He ought to have known that there is the same distinction betweenbeautifulandprettyin English, as between καλός and ἀστεῖος in Greek.
[181.1]The scholar will observe that throughout this passage, and specially in this last sentence, I have paraphrased the author a little, to bring out more clearly his meaning. His style is too curt and bald, not to suffer in some cases by strict literalness.
[184.1]Grant’sEthics of Aristotle, vol. i. p. 147.
[192.1]Lecky,History of European Morals, vol. i., Introductory Discourse.
[194.1]See the doctrine of Heraclitus in Ritter and Preller’s admirable compend—Historia Philosophiæ Græco-Romanæ—one of the best manuals of the many that we owe to the erudition and judgment of the great German people.
[198.1]Life of Martin Boos, 1855, p. 25.
[198.2]Life of Franklin in theEncyclopædia Britannica.
[200.1]ὁ θεὸς ὁ ἀναγεννήσας ἡμᾶς εἰς ἐλπίδα ζῶσαν δι᾽ ἀναστάσεως Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἐκ νεκρῶν.—1 Pet. i. 3.
[202.1]Westcott,The Gospel of the Resurrection, London, 1867.
[205.1]To persons ignorant of Greek, who may wish to receive a vivid impression of the moral influence of Stoicism, I recommend Long’sTranslation of Antoninus, Lecky’sHistory of European Morals, and Farrar’sSeekers after God.
[213.1]Ἔστι γὰρ δὴ ὡς ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος, καὶ ἡ σωφροσύνη, καὶ ἡ ἀνδεία καὶ ἡ πᾶσα ἀρετὴ, κάθαρσις, καὶ ἡ φρόνησις αὐτὴ· διὸ καὶ αἱ τελεταὶ ὀρθῶς αἰνίττονται τὸν μὴ κεκαθαρμένον καὶ ἐν ᾅδου κείσεσθαι ἐν βορβόρω, ὅτι τὸ μὴ καθαρὸν βορβόρῳ διὰ κάκην φίλον, οἶα δὴ καὶ ὗες, οὐ καθαραὶ τὸ σῶμα, χαίρουσι τῷ τοιούτῳ.—Plotinus,Enn. i. 6, p. 55; edit, Kirchhoff, i. 6.
[214.1]Professor Ferrier on Consciousness;Works, vol. i. p. 221.
[223.1]Usque-beatha—whisky.
[229.1]Read Mr. Farrar’s delightful little work,Seekers after God.
[229.2]Burton’sLife of David Hume, vol. ii. p. 195.
[234.1]Lines on the death of Faraday.—Punch, September 7, 1867—a periodical which though sometimes unjust is never vicious, and always knows to appreciate real excellence.
[235.1]βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα,—1 Pet. ii. 9.
[240.1]The Rev. J. W. Fletcher, Rector of Madeley, Shropshire.
[245.1]Pædag. ii. 1-3.
[255.1]It is to be observed, however, that the friends of agricultural improvement in Strasburg used their interest to get the merits of their pastor known in Paris; and the consequence was that he was rewarded with a gold medal after having worked fifty-one years in the unnoticed useful obscurity of his parish. Altogether his golden pastorate lasted for the long space of fifty-nine years.
[255.2]Westcott,Gospel of the Resurrection(1867), p. 96.
[261.1]Westcott,Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 98.
[267.1]οὐ γὰρ ἄν πώποτε εἶδεν ὀφθαλμός ἥλιον ἡλιοειδὴς μὴ γεγενημένος, οὐδὲ τὸ καλὸν ἄν ἴδοι ψυχὴ μὴ καλὴ γενομένη.—Plotinus, i. 9; Kirchhoff.
[267.2]Locke, ii. 21, 68.
[274.1]Austin.
[274.2]Schwegler,Geschichte der Philosophie. Translated by Stirling.
[277.1]Logic, chap iii.
[278.1]Ferrier on Consciousness; Posthumous Works, vol. i. p. 255.
[289.1]Analysis, ii. 137, 139.
[293.1]Emotions and Will, xv. p. 290.
[293.2]On Consciousness;Works, i. 195.
[296.1]