From the sociological point of view Morality is the bond which unites the individuals in a community, the foundation upon which alone society can be built up and maintained. For it implies a victory over self, consideration for one's neighbour, recognition of his rights, concession of his claims, even when valued possessions must unwillingly be given up and painful renunciation of attainable satisfaction is required. This is neighbourly kindness and the charity of the Bible, Hutcheson's and Hume's benevolence, Adam Smith's sympathy and Herbert Spencer's altruism; it is the necessary condition on which alone individuals can live peaceably together and helpfully assist each other to make life easier. If most or all individuals lack it, we have Hobbes's war of all against all; then man is as a wolf to other men, and each one is condemned to the state of a beast roaming in loneliness. If a few, a minority, lack it, then the majority will not tolerate them in its midst, but will expel them from the community as a dangerous nuisance and deprive them of the privilege of mutual aid and of the advantage of joint responsibility.
The species of man, like every other species of organism and like every individual, wants to live. It can only achieve this by adapting itself to existingnatural conditions. The more suitable and perfect the adaptation the more easily and securely it lives. Under the present conditions of the universe and the earth a solitary human individual could not manage to exist, let alone develop into an intelligent being. The form his adaptation to circumstances has taken is that of union in an organized community. For the existence of society and the adjustment of the individual in it is the indispensable condition for the life of the species as well as of the individual. Society can only continue to exist if individuals learn to consider one another and practise benevolence towards each other. Society therefore created Morality and inculcated it in all its members, because it was its first need, the essential condition which rendered its existence possible, just as the species created society, because it could only continue to live as an organized society.
Thus Morality with the strictest logical necessity has its place in the totality of efforts which human beings had to make, and still have to make, in order to preserve life, to make it sufficiently profound and to enrich it with satisfactions, that is, with pleasurable emotions of every kind, so that they may continue to have the will and the eager desire to maintain their existence by effort and struggle; in short, in order to make life seem worth living, even at the cost of constant toil and moil. Without society it is impossible for the individual to exist; without Morality it is impossible for society to exist; the instinct of self-preservation furnishes society with habits and rules governing the mutual relations of its membersand with institutions for economizing force; all these together we call civilization. The development and improvement of civilization is obvious; it is proved by the fact that it draws nearer and nearer to its goal, namely, the establishment of satisfactory relations between individuals and groups, and the attainment of a maximum of satisfaction with a minimum of individual effort. But it would be incomprehensible if Morality, the essential condition for the existence of society which creates civilization, should have no part in the indisputable, because easily demonstrable, progress of the latter.
Morality occupies such a large place in civilization that the mistaken view has arisen among many moral philosophers that it is the aim of civilization and has no aim other than itself. Closer investigation shows this to be an error, a reversal of the true relation. Morality is no aim, certainly no aim to itself, it is a means to an end, the most important, most indispensable means to the one end, to bring about civilization, to maintain and refine it, and adapt it more and more to its task. But the task of civilization, as I have shown, is to preserve, facilitate and enrich the life of the individual and the species. Morality therefore is the most important form in which the instinct of self-preservation in the species is manifested, and to deny progress to it implies the assumption that the species does not possess the impulse to preserve and beautify its existence, that its instinct of self-preservation flags, that it does not recognize its aim and is ignorant of the path leading to its goal. This assumption, however, is contradicted by all, and supported by none,of the phenomena observable in the life of the species—the absolute increase of the population of the earth, the prolongation of individual life and of the age of efficiency, the combating of every kind of harmful thing.
The steadfast self-control of civilized man compared with the unreliability of the savage, who appears capricious and unaccountable because he freely obeys every impulse, proves the progressive development of the faculty of inhibition in the individual organism. The order and definite organization of modern society, the rule of law, men's equality before the law, the guarantee of freedom and respect for the person, all these compared with the state of nations in earlier times (actually anarchy under a mantle of tyranny and the unlimited power of a few mighty ones over the helpless masses) prove the progressive development of civilization in the social organism. But logically the progressive development of Morality itself must correspond to the progressive development of its instrument, inhibition, and of its product, civilization.
The conclusion to which we are forced by theoretical considerations is fully endorsed by observation of actual life. It is sufficient to indicate broad facts to one who denies moral progress. Slavery, which Aristotle thought a law of Nature, which Christianity tolerated, which modern states, such as England, France, the United States and Brazil, defended and protected by law, was everywhere abolished some years ago. The objection is raised that modern hired labour is merely slavery ofthe proletariat under another name, that the exploitation of workmen by employers is a hypocritical continuation of serfdom. But that is sophistry. The hired labourer is not bound to his contract. He can break it. "Yes, at the price of starvation." That used to be the case, but nowadays organized working men are no longer at the mercy of powerful capital, and therein lies progress. They are in a position to make conditions and not seldom to force their acceptance. They have the right to strike, to move from place to place, to form unions. The community has recognized the duty of mitigating, at least to some extent, the evils to which faulty economic organization exposes the workman. It has instituted accident and health insurance, old age pensions, and, in some places, assistance for those who are out of work through no fault of their own. All this is still very defective, but these are hopeful beginnings, all the same, and, above all, it shows the awakening of a social conscience that earlier ages did not know.
Justice is administered more and more humanely, that is, morally. It is a century since legal torture was abolished. Society is ashamed to get at the truth easily by torturing a suspect who after all may be innocent. The condemned man is no longer branded or mutilated; he suffers no corporal ill-treatment of which the results can never be obliterated. Capital punishment is still a blot on the honour of civilization. But for more than a century now, since the time of Beccaria, it has been violently opposed and has already been abolished in some states; the others will no doubt have to follow suit within a short time.Consider that in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century a thief was hanged if he had stolen a thing of no more value than the rope that was to hang him, and even children of fourteen years were condemned to this fate. To-day the judge pronounces sentence of death, even where it is still legal, with grave misgivings and searchings of conscience, and the execution, formerly a public spectacle, is carried out more or less secretly, because the conviction is gradually ripening in society that by the cold-blooded killing of a man it is perpetrating a crime which it must keep as secret as possible. The sentence is now almost everywhere deferred, and thus the conviction becomes a very emphatic warning which points out the path of repentance, of conversion and improvement to the guilty man, and leaves him the possibility of becoming a decent human being again. Special courts for children mitigate the stern penal code and modify it according to the needs of unripe, youthful characters. Imprisonment for debt is a half-forgotten thing of the past and regarded more or less as a joke. What these changes have in common is that they one and all indicate a deepening of the community's feeling of duty and responsibility towards the individual, greater respect for persons on the part of the law, an increase of the will to resist the first impulse of anger, revenge and mercilessness. These tendencies, however, are the very essence of Morality.
I forbear to adduce as a proof of progress that the Inquisition no longer rules and nowhere burns its victims. For actually there is no greater tolerationof those who hold other opinions than there was formerly. Religious toleration is explained by the fact that the people's consciousness no longer attaches such enormous importance to religion as in past centuries. But political, æsthetic and philosophical antagonisms arouse as much bloodthirsty rage to-day as did formerly heresy in religion, and opponents would unhesitatingly apply torture and the stake to one another if the great mass of the people would develop sufficiently enthusiastic zeal for their views to allow their raging fanaticism to have recourse to violence, as it once permitted domineering religious orthodoxy to do.
Other aspects of civilization, not so essential, are hardly less encouraging than the developments on which I have hitherto dwelt. Drunkenness, formerly an almost universal vice, is on the decrease. Among the educated classes it is only met with exceptionally, and is recognized as a morbid aberration; among the lower classes it continually grows less. The statistics of the savings banks show an ever-growing determination to save. The masses who used to rejoice in dirt now manifest an increasingly vigorous desire for a cleanliness that demands soap and baths. This indicates control of impulse, of the inclination for alcoholic drinks and the tendency to squander, and an increase of self-respect which recognizes dirt to be humiliating. These are activities of the moral feelings, their material activities.
If, in spite of these material proofs of the progress of Morality in all social functions and in many individual habits, serious-minded men still maintainthat it stands still or even that it shows retrogression compared with former times, this view, which is undoubtedly a mistaken one, is due to wrong interpretation of facts.
Bouillier's remark that "social progress instead of increasing individual Morality weakens it, because society, in proportion as it is better organized, saves the individual the trouble of a number of virtuous actions" has a perfectly correct point of departure. Many tasks of neighbourly kindness and humane joint responsibility which used to be left to the inclination, the free choice and the noble zeal of individuals, and could be carried out or neglected by them, are now methodically fulfilled by the community. Saint Martin no longer needs to divide his cloak to give half to a poor shivering man. The public charity commission gives him winter clothes if he cannot afford to buy any. No knights are needed to protect innocence, weakness and humility from oppressors. The oppressed appeal successfully to the police, the court of justice, or, by writing to the papers, to public opinion. There is no need for Knights Templar or Knights of St. John to care for strangers and tend the sick. Inns and public hospitals are at their disposal. To-day there would be neither occasion nor reason for the miracle of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who against the orders of her hard husband took to the starving bread which was turned into roses. The poor are regularly fed in municipal and communal kitchens. Individual deeds of mercy are less necessary now than formerly, when, if they occurred, they were the outcome of exceptionally noble and devout sympathy and heroic self-sacrifice.
One is therefore inclined to believe that men are less capable of such deeds than they were in the past. But that is doing them a grave injustice. Dr. Barnardo, who opened a home for the little waifs and strays of the East End of London, is not inferior to St. Vincent de Paul who adopted and brought up forsaken children. John Brown who suffered a martyr's death by hanging because he attempted with arms to liberate the negro slaves of the Southern States, Henry Dumont who devoted the efforts of a lifetime to founding the Red Cross to help those wounded in war, Emile Zola who sacrificed his fortune, his reputation as an author, his personal safety, and suffered persecution, calumny, exile, a shameful condemnation in court, and violent threats to his life in order to get justice for Captain Dreyfus who had been wrongfully accused—all these can well compare with the saints in the Golden Legend. Virtue exists potentially in as many cases as formerly, probably in more; and it is actively practised whenever and wherever it is appealed to.
Another result of the long evolution of civilization and Morality is the development of an ethical instinct in all except abnormal, degenerate individuals, which causes men to act morally in nearly all situations without conscious reflection, choice or effort. The individual who is ethically well grounded, in whom moral conduct has become an organized reflex action, does what is right without any conscious effort, and therefore does not in so doing evoke anyidea of merit either in himself or in witnesses. But to do right habitually, carelessly and almost without thought, as one breathes and eats, easily makes one unjust in one's judgments. The battle between Reason and blind instinct, between the Will and refractory Impulse, the victory of the lofty principle, of spirituality over what is irrational and materialistic, which give us the illusion that free humanity is superior to the fatality of cosmic forces, have something so elevated and beautiful about them that we are disappointed if they are absent, and practical Morality without this dramatic setting does not appear to be real Morality.
Nevertheless we must not give way to this æsthetic point of view. We must always remember that Morality has a biological and sociological aim and must soberly admit that it is all the better if this aim is realized without in every single case depending on uncertain individual decisions. It would be an ideal state of affairs if in a society there were such clear knowledge of all its vital necessities, and this had been so inculcated in all its members, that their harmonious life together and their co-operation for the common weal would never more be troubled by the revolt of ruthless individual selfishness against the love of one's neighbour and willingness to sacrifice oneself for the community. The ideal of Morality would be attained, but the concept of Merit would be transferred from the individual to the community. Superficial observation might object to finding in individuals no victorious struggle against resistance, hence no virtue, and might bemoan the stagnation, nay, the retrogression, of Morality. But whoever views matters as a whole would have to admit that it would imply the greatest progress in virtue if the latter from being an individual merit had become an attribute of the community. I am far from maintaining that we have reached this ideal state; but evolution tends unmistakably in this direction; and this is one of the reasons why Morality may appear to make no progress.
The very rise of the community to a higher stage of Morality may be a fresh cause of error concerning the progress of Morality. The work of the strongest and most clear-headed thinkers for many thousand years, who have bequeathed as a legacy to the community their lifelong labours for the amelioration of the lot of mankind, has developed in us an ideal of active and passive Morality which is always present, even to the mind of the weak or bad man who cannot or will not live up to it. By this ideal, which is that of the community and which we bear within us, we involuntarily judge real life as we observe it, without applying the necessary corrections. We necessarily note a discrepancy between theory and practice, which appears to us to be not mere inadequacy but a contradiction of principles, not a quantitative, but a qualitative difference, and thus he who is not forewarned easily becomes doubtful, pessimistic, and bitterly contemptuous of mankind.
This is the theme with which light literature unweariedly deals. Novels and the drama constantly show us types: "Pillars of society" and other worthy men, who pretend to be honourable,who are full of good principles, preach unctuously and condemn others with pious indignation, but who themselves in all situations behave with the most horrible selfishness and are sinks of iniquity. The creators of these rogues professing virtue, of these secret sinners, think they are mightily superior; they think they know mankind, that they are deceived by no one and can see deep down into men's souls; they call their method realism, and they look down with the greatest contempt upon poets who depict good, unselfish, noble, in short, moral characters, and call them optimists, flirts, distillers of rosewater, who are either too silly or too dishonest to see the truth or to confess it. If realism happens to be the fashion, the public believes these men who depict what is ugly and disgusting, admires them, is impressed by them, and scorns the idealists who have a better opinion of mankind.
However, realism is onesided and exaggerated, and therefore just as far from the truth as enthusiastic idealism. It picks out certain characteristics of human nature, generalizes from them and neglects the others, thereby libelling mankind. The same people who in their flat, insipid daily life unhesitatingly indulge their poor little vanities, their naïve selfishness, their childish jealousy, their secret sensuality and their moral cowardice because it is of no consequence, because it alters nothing in the general constitution of society, because the community takes good care that moral principles shall be maintained, these same people can, on great occasions, which, however, seldom occur, reveal virtueswhich they themselves never suspected and which we gaze at in blank astonishment with reverent awe. The hypocritical Philistines of realistic literature, rotten at the core, when theTitanicsank, during the plague in Manchuria, at the earthquake of Messina, in the mine disaster at Courrières, and on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, proved to be heroes who came very near to the theatrical ideal of Morality, if they did not quite reach it. If one takes the valet's point of view and observes man in his dressing-gown and slippers when he does not feel called upon to pull himself together, one may very well form a poor opinion of him. But if one considers the actions of the community and dwells on the loftiest deeds of individuals, one will no longer believe that the Morality of the present time is inferior to that of any other age.
There is one phenomenon, though, which seems to prove that those who deny moral progress are in the right, and that is war. This is indeed the triumph of the beast in mankind, a bestial trampling under foot of civilization, its principles, methods and aims, and it might be adduced as a crushing proof of the stagnation or retrogression of Morality that to this very day its horrors can devastate the earth, as they did hundreds and thousands of years ago, only to an incomparably greater extent, more cruelly and more thoroughly. But this, too, would be a false conclusion. It is certain that the men who take it upon themselves freely, purposely and intentionally to make war are monsters; their action is a crime that cannot be expiated. Unhesitatingly they have recourse to massacre, robbery, fire and all other horrors in order to satisfy their devilish self-seeking which desires the fulfilment of their ambition, that is, of their self-love and vanity, which covets riches, increase of power, a ruling position and its privileges. These they pursue either for themselves or for a family or caste, and they pretend that they wish to defend their country from its enemies, to acquire new boundaries for it affording better protection than the old, to promote the development of the nation by getting fresh territory, to spread its civilization and secure a glorious future for it.
Nations, however, which allow their rulers to plunge them into a war of aggression may be foolish and clumsy, but they need not be immoral. They are made drunk with phrases which appeal to their noblest feelings, which their government and its intellectual bailiffs pour out to them in overflowing measure; they believe the shameless lies which are told them boastfully; and this is undoubtedly a lamentable, mental weakness which drew from Dante the bitter cry: "Often one hears the people in their intoxication cry: 'Long live our death! Down with our life!'" But having simply accepted these preliminary ideas the people act with such Morality as one cannot forbear to admire. In a grand flight they rise superior to all thought of self, raise their feeling of joint responsibility to the pitch of heroism and martyrdom, and gladly sacrifice to their duty to their neighbour and to the community their possessions, their comfort, their health and their lives. That is very great virtue whose subjective merit is no whit diminished by the fact that it is manifested in a cause that is objectively unjust. And this virtue on the part of nations which have been misled was never so widespread or so real as now. The attitude of mercenaries who served the highest bidder, the lack of ideals among the soldiers who followed foreign conquerors at whose command they tyrannized over nations who did not concern them at all, the cynicism of the leaders who unhesitatingly went over to the enemy and fought against their own country and people, these are things that are not to be found nowadays and are almost unthinkable. No Napoleon of to-day could lead the men of Würtemberg and Bavaria to Spain and Russia, nor could an Elector of Hesse sell recruits to England for the conquest of North America; no Louis XIV could induce a Bernard of Saxe-Weimar to fight his battles against German adversaries, no Constable of Bourbon ally himself with Spain against his native France. Leonidas, once admired and praised as an exception, is to-day the rule. "The guards who die but do not yield" are to be found on every battlefield nowadays.
In modern warfare a higher, more perfect Morality of the masses obtains than was the case in the past. That war itself is the most immoral thing does not detract from the moral worth of those who are led and misled. The masses lack insight and judgment, their understanding is not sufficiently developed to realize the bestiality of the rulers who put them to such evil use; but the way they suppress their own feelings, the way their will controls their impulses,their social discipline, in short, their Morality, is admirable. Moreover, the conscience of mankind revolts more and more against the wickedness of war, and the best men of the time are striving to bring the mutual relations of nations, like those of individuals, within the jurisdiction of Law and Morality. Morality will doubtless at no distant date do away with war, as it has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, blood feuds, head hunting and cannibalism.
No phenomenon of individual worthlessness observed within a narrow sphere can detract from the fact that the community constantly improves. A pessimistic view of the development of Morality has no justification. Progress of civilization implies progress of Morality, its most important instrument in the work of adapting the race to the immutable conditions of its existence.
The concept of Morality includes an idea of compulsion, of coercion. A voice says to man: "You must!" or "You may not!" It commands him to do, or to refrain from doing, something. If he obeys, all is well; but if he takes no notice of it, pays no heed to it, the question arises: "What now? Will the voice rest content with crying in the wilderness? Will it not mind speaking to deaf ears? Will the refractory individual not suffer for disregarding it, or has it means to enforce obedience, and what are these means?"
The answer to this question depends on what view one holds as to the nature of this monitory, warning, commanding voice. Whoever believes in Kant's categorical imperative must admit that this word of command is denuded of all power of coercion and must absolutely rely on the good will of the individual in whose soul it makes itself heard. According to Kant the moral law aims at no extraneous result, no utility. It is its own aim and object. But its own aim is fulfilled as soon as the categorical imperative has spoken, whether the individual acts in accordance with it or not. It has therefore in principle no sanction.
True, Kant contradicts himself, for after havingsternly excluded from his doctrine all utility as the end of Morality, all trace of feeling from moral action, he smuggles blissful happiness in by a back door; the result of submission to the moral law and its dutiful fulfilment, he declares, will be bliss. Bliss, however you interpret it, is a pleasurable emotion. Whether you act morally with the declared intention of attaining the pleasurable emotion of bliss, or whether this pleasurable emotion comes of its own accord as an undesired reward when you have acted morally merely from a feeling of duty, without a thought for such a result, without a wish to attain it, it makes no difference to the fact that moral action actually meets with a reward. Kant does not openly promise this, but with a wink he whispers in your ear that there is a prospect of it.
Nor does it alter the further fact that Kant, having contemptuously expelled Eudæmonism from his system, reinstates it with full honours. Once it has been conceded that moral conduct makes man blissful, in other words gives him a reward, the categorical imperative also has a sanction, albeit a very insufficient one. He who fulfils the moral law attains bliss; that is a spur whether you admit it or not. But he who does not fulfil it loses this advantage, otherwise, however, nothing happens to him. The sanction, therefore, is onesided. A reward is offered for the fulfilment of the moral law, but there is no punishment for its non-fulfilment. For it is no penalty if bliss is withheld from him who has no conception of it and no desire for it. No matter, then, if the moral law be eternal and immutable as the stars above us,if it be categorical, if it be fulfilled, not owing to a conception of its effect, not from liking for this effect, but from an inner necessity, it ceases to be a living force for mankind or to have any practical significance; for the single thread which unites it with human feelings—the whispered, vague promise of bliss—is too thin. Feeling which has no knowledge of this misty bliss, and therefore no yearning for it, is uninfluenced by the categorical moral law. Reason is not necessarily convinced that it is right and valid. The moral law abides like the stars with which it is arbitrarily compared, itself a star in airless space, pursuing its course regardless of humanity, having no relation to it or connexion with it; regard for or disregard of the moral law makes no perceptible difference, and it ceases to have any but a kind of astronomical interest for mankind, a purely theoretical interest for purposes of scientific observation and calculation, and is in no way applicable to the feelings, thoughts and actions of men.
Theological Morality adopts a widely different point of view. Its logic compels it to provide the most effective sanctions. God is the lawgiver of Morality. He prescribes with dictatorial omniscience what is good, what is bad, what should be practised and what avoided. Obedience earns a glorious reward, revolt entails the most terrible punishment. Reward and punishment are eternal, or may in certain circumstances be so, and this, by the way, is cruelty which ill accords with the universal goodness ascribed to God. For human understanding will never be persuaded, will never be able to grasp, thata sinner, however grave and numerous his sins committed during the brief period of the fleeting life of man, can ever deserve an eternity of the most fearful punishment. The lack of proportion between the deed and the penalty is so monstrous that it is felt to be the gravest injustice, against which both Reason and feeling revolt. Imagination can conceive hell fire that lasts a certain time and has an aim, like life with its praiseworthy and wicked deeds, but it boggles at the idea of a hell from which there is no escape and the agonies of which are endless.
The Old Testament conceives the sanctions of the moral law enunciated by God in a thoroughly realistic manner. Fulfil the commandment "that thy days may be long in the land." If you disobey, the curse of the Lord will be on you and you will be pursued by His anger unto the fourth generation. Christianity considered it dubious to make this life the scene of reward and punishment. It is imprudent to let divine justice rule here below, so to say, in public, before an audience and representatives of the Press who attentively follow the proceedings, watch all its details, and can judge whether the verdict is put into execution. Prudence demands that the trial should take place in the next world, where it is protected from annoying curiosity. Mocking onlookers cannot then observe that it is only in the dramas of noble-minded poets that in the last act vice is inevitably punished and virtue rewarded, while in real life only too often merit starves, suffers humiliation and poverty and altogether leads a miserable existence, while sin flourishes in an objectionable manner and to the veryend revels in all the good things of this earth. However, the religious moralists painted such a vivid and arresting picture of what awaits the sinners in the next world, that if men had not been obdurate in their disbelief they must have shudderingly realized it, as if it actually happened in this world. Words from the pulpit admonishing men to obey God's law under penalty of most terrible punishment were greatly emphasized by the paintings and sculpture over the altars and the church doors, where all the tortures of hell were depicted by great artists who put all their imagination and all their genius into the work.
As innumerable people have testified, these representations were taken so literally, not only by the simple-minded masses but also by the more highly educated, that they were haunted by them, waking and sleeping, and imagined that in their own flesh they felt the torture of flames, of boiling pitch, of the prick of the pitchfork as the devil turned them on the grid, of the teeth with which the spirits of hell tore their flesh from their bones. The fear of hell poisoned many a life up till quite recently, especially in Scotland, and kept people in a constant state of agitation and anguish which occasionally rose to mad despair. It is remarkable that only punishment was so impressively held up to man's view, but not reward. Pictures of paradise are much less rich and varied than those of hell, and its joys are peculiarly modest. The inventive powers of painters, sculptors, and poets did not rise above a beautifully illuminated hall where the blessed areranged around God's throne and with folded hands sing hymns of praise to Him, while angels play an accompaniment on trumpets and fiddles. A prayer meeting, a choir and a concert of music, that is all that Christian eschatology holds out as an eternal reward to virtue. It redounds to its credit that it assumes a sufficiently modest taste among the good to make them long for these joys and find infinite happiness in them.
Islam does not count on such moderation. The joys of paradise that it promises are so crudely sensual that they may well arouse lust in coarse natures, and can counterbalance the fear of hell fire. The ideas of the reward of merit in the hereafter held by the northern nations, Germans and Scandinavians, are just as low and coarse. For the Mohamedans paradise is a harem; for the worshippers of Odin it is a pot-house where there are free drinks and a jolly brawl to end up with. Heroes who fall in battle—they knew no virtues but a warlike spirit and contempt of death—enter Valhalla, where they partake of the everlasting orgies of the gods, drink unlimited quantities of mead and beer, and fight for them to their heart's content without taking any harm. The North American Indians hope, after leading a model life, to be gathered to the Great Spirit, and in the happy hunting grounds of heaven evermore to kill abundant game. Only Buddhism comforts the virtuous man with finer and more spiritual hopes. From out his world of weariness and pessimism it opens up the prospect of Nirvana to him, that is, of the end of all feeling, which afterall can only be painful, and of all thought, which after all is only melancholy and despair, and of the volatilization of the personality, the only real release; while it condemns the sinner to the worst punishment, continued existence in ever new incarnations.
These are indeed extraordinarily vigorous sanctions, which, though they fail to have any effect on the unbeliever, make a very deep impression on the believer, and are well fitted to determine his actions. But they imply a debasement of the motives for leading a moral life, which are no longer the outcome of insight and a convinced desire for good, but the result of fear and avidity, a speculation for profit, a prudent flight from danger. The practice of morality becomes a safe investment for the father of a family who hopes to find his savings augmented by interest in the hereafter, and the avoidance of vice becomes a schoolboy's fear of punishment. Nevertheless, the view is widely held by superficial, practical men that these imaginary and deceptive sanctions of Morality cannot be dispensed with, that only the fear of hell can keep the masses from giving themselves up to every form of vice and crime, that only the promise of paradise is capable of inducing them to act unselfishly and make sacrifices, and that all bonds of discipline would be loosened if they ceased to believe in a last judgment and an hereafter with its rewards and punishments.
This whole system of sanctions in a future life is a transcendental projection (according with primitive, childlike thought) of immanent practices and forms in the positive administration of justice whichare transferred to a class of actions that successfully evade it. Traditional and customary Law, as well as written Law, puts its whole emphasis on sanctions; it partakes itself of the nature of a sanction. Without sanctions it has no meaning. It is not kindly counsel, nor fatherly admonition, nor wise advice, it is a stern command, it is coercion, and this arouses only scorn if it is not armed with the means to make itself a reality to which the unwilling must also submit, because they cannot help themselves. There is no law, there can be no law, which is not supplemented by arrangements that make it binding for everyone.
In the British House of Commons it has been customary for many hundred years to designate members as the representatives of their particular constituency. Only if a member commits a grave offence against the rules of the House does he run the risk of the Speaker's calling him by name, but this case has not arisen within the memory of man. A disrespectful Irish member of Parliament, urged by perverse curiosity, asked the Speaker one day: "What would happen if you called me by my name?" The Speaker thought for a short time and then answered with impressive gravity: "I have no idea, but it must be something terrible." Such a mysterious threat of an unknown catastrophe may suffice for a picked assembly whose members would no doubt maintain order and observe all the rules of parliamentary decency, even if they were not held in check by the fear of some dark danger. It would not be sufficient by a long way to guarantee the ruleof Law in a society which includes individuals of the most varied disposition, mind development, education and strength of impulse.
Positive Law, as I have shown, presents a very simplified excerpt of Morality for the use of coarser natures. It is a summary of the minimum of self-denial, consideration for one's fellow men, and the feeling of joint responsibility, the observance of which the community must pitilessly demand from all its members if it is to continue to exist and not fall back within a very short time into the state of Hobbes's war of all against all. The necessity of self-preservation makes it a duty for the community to provide for the case that one of its members refuses to accept the minimum of discipline and to recognize the claims of another personality. The community prevents this revolt, which would frustrate its aim and endanger its existence, by employing physical force to break all resistance to the Law which it must, for the common weal, impose on all its members. That is an extraneous compulsion that certainly has something brutal and unworthy of man about it and may well arouse discomfort in more highly developed minds. It would undoubtedly be more dignified and better if there were no need for the handcuffs of the police, for prison cells and executioners, if man's own insight and the admonition of his conscience were enough to constrain everyone to respect the Law, that is, to practise a minimum of Morality.
But the community cannot wait until this stage of moral development has been generally attained. It refuses to entrust its existence to the spiritualpurity of all its members. On principle it disregards processes in the consciousness of the individual—I have cited in an earlier chapter the few exceptions to this rule: investigation as to premeditation, accountability, freedom from undue influence—and keeps to actions which alone it judges. It declares itself incompetent to pronounce sentence upon a "storm inside a skull," to quote Victor Hugo. Its sphere is that of obvious facts. Not until subjective impulses and decisions are manifested in outward form does it intervene with methods of the same order, with outward coercion. The sanctions of its law are material, are punishments and fines. It hits the wrongdoer over the head and on his hands and forcibly empties his pockets. To look into his soul and set matters to rights there is a task undertaken much later by law-givers. It was only after they had remembered that the source of law is Morality and that its ultimate aim is not the bare attainment of a state of mutual respect for one another's rights, but the education of the community to a universal condition of self-discipline, consideration and neighbourly love, that the law-givers made a point not only of requiting the bad man's misdeeds, but also of trying to elevate him morally.
At different times, at different stages of civilization, and according to the current views of the universe, society has interpreted in different ways the punishment it inflicts and which it carries out by forcible means, so as to ensure respect for its laws. Its original character is that of revenge for an offence. The wrongdoer has offended the community, it attackshim furiously and breaks every bone in his body just as an angry individual would do in his first access of indignation. That is Draco's penal code. That is the law of literal requital. The special characteristic of this sanction is its violence and lack of moderation. It does not trouble to find the right proportion between punishment and crime. It does not carefully and fairly weigh the force of its blows. The club falls with a frightful crash, but its dynamical effect is not calculated beforehand in kilogrammetres. "The stab of a knife is not measured," as an Italian proverb says. Thus conceived, punishment has something primitive about it, something intolerably barbarous. The community does the very things it was created, by Morality and Law, to prevent; it exercises the right of the stronger against the challenger; it promotes war, not that of all against all, but of all against one, and its punishment is an act of war.
In a strongly religious society which lives in the idea of immediate community with the deity, every transgression of the law is felt to be a sin against the gods, and the punishment becomes an expiation offered to them so as to avert their dangerous anger from the commonwealth. In the administration of justice dim religious ideas are mingled, punishment is tinged with a veneer of civilization, the culprit is, so to speak, offered as a sacrifice to the gods. This supernatural view was prolonged by the Inquisition, at least for a certain class of offences, until almost modern times.
When society awakens to the consciousness thatits bond of union is Morality, and that its most important task is to educate its members in Morality, it introduces the concept of betterment into its penal system. It wants not only to punish the wrongdoer sharply but also to transform him inwardly and purify him. He is to feel that the punishment is not only a requital but a mental benefit. In the Austrian army, until corporal punishment was abolished, it was a rule that the soldier, after being flogged, should approach the officer on duty and say, as he saluted, "I thank you for the kind punishment." That is the attitude that society, when it gives a moralizing tendency to its penal laws, wishes the person who has been punished to attain. In this there is much pleasing self-deception not unmixed with a good deal of hypocrisy. Penal law offers the wrongdoer but little scope for improvement.
All misdemeanours and crimes flow from three sources: ignorance, passion and innate, anti-social self-seeking. Ignorance is the main, almost the exclusive cause of wrongdoing among young criminals who have been badly brought up or neglected, who have never had anything but bad examples before them, and who cannot distinguish between good and evil. Society may hope to improve these by right treatment; it must not punish, it must educate them. Men who commit crimes from passion are those who possess a consciousness of Morality and a conscience, who know quite well what is right and what wrong, but have not sufficient strength of character, that is, not an adequately developed power of inhibition, to resist an opportunity, a temptation, aturmoil of their instincts. To want to improve them is senseless, for they are not bad; they are weak, or at any rate not strong enough. What they need is a strengthening of their character, of their faculty of inhibition, and to achieve this is beyond the power of society. All it can do is to humiliate the guilty party by publicly exposing his lapse and by condemning him, and then grant a delay of the execution of the sentence. In so doing it says to him: "You have acted basely and ought to be ashamed of yourself, now go and do not do it again." If the warning is unavailing and he relapses, then the earlier sentence, as well as the new one, is executed. Fear of this is added to his motives for acting honestly, and may possibly strengthen his resistance to the onslaught of his evil instincts. But his good conduct will always be at stake in the struggle between his power of inhibition and his instincts, and the stronger of the two will always carry the day. And finally, upon the man whose organic disposition makes him anti-social, upon Lombroso's born criminal, society can have no educative effect whatever. It is a hopeless case. Society can render him harmless, it cannot alter him. Consideration for his neighbour will never find a place in his consciousness. He will never learn to resist his impulses and desires. His spiritual insensibility makes him indifferent to the sufferings of others. Incapable of continuous and equable effort, he will always want to prey on society by begging, deceiving, stealing and robbing. He has no conscience and does not hear the voice of society in his mind. He knows nothing of good and evil, which are both emptyphrases for him, words without any meaning, and he is convinced that he acts rightly every time he seeks to satisfy his appetites. In his case it is love's labour lost to try and give a moral meaning to the sanctions of the law. Punishment is not directed against the soul of the born criminal, only against his body. It overwhelms him, fetters him and makes him either for the time being, or permanently, harmless; but his organic tendency continues to sway him, and whenever he recovers his liberty he is the same as before he was punished.
The Mystics give to punishment the character of fatherly and chastening discipline by which the sinner expiates his crime and is purged of the sin; thus it purifies him and leads him back to the state of innocence; a kind of anticipatory hell fire which enables him to enter paradise. In "Gorgias" Plato says explicitly: "He who is punished is liberated from the evil of his soul." And the Apostle Paul teaches us: "Punishment is ordained for the betterment of man." Criminal anthropology recognizes that it is useless to expect this moralizing and redeeming effect from punishment. Lombroso altogether rejects punishment as a means of discipline and expiation, and before him Bentham and J. S. Mill, and simultaneously with him and after him Fouillée, Guyau and Maudsley adopted the same view. According to them the sanction of criminal law, which extends and completes it and ensures its efficacy, can have no other aim than the law itself, and this aim is to defend society against its active enemies, if possible by converting them, if necessary by forcible subjugation.
In a book which is full of interest, but whose value is considerably diminished by a strong admixture of mysticism, "Esquisse d'une morale sans obligation ni sanction," M. Guyau goes much farther than the criminal anthropologists and sociological opponents of punishment, and expresses the somewhat paradoxical view that "the real sanction seems to imply complete freedom from punishment for the crime committed, as punishment for any action that has been accomplished is useless." It is quite correct that no punishment under the sun can undo what has been done. But it is not feasible for that reason to dispense with all punishment for misdeeds and to call this systematic freedom from punishment a sanction. Guyau overlooks the fact that the punishment is directed not to the crime but the perpetrator. It certainly alters nothing in a past transgression of the law, and that is not its object, but it may possibly have the effect of preventing fresh misdeeds on the part of the same wrongdoer or of others, and that would justify it.
If society must renounce the idea of improving the misdemeanant, especially the man whose organic tendencies make him a criminal and who is the most dangerous and commits the most numerous and worst crimes, it nevertheless assumes that it makes an impression on morally doubtful characters by punishing misdemeanours and crimes, that it warns them and prevents them from erring. That is the theory of intimidation, which also has many opponents. It will hardly be denied that psychologically it is well founded. The conception of the evil consequencesfor himself that his action may entail strengthens the impulsive man's power of inhibition when he is about to do wrong, and perhaps enables him to overcome his immoral instinct. Only it is difficult to measure the force which the thought of punishment adds to the effort of inhibition. This force does not come into question at all with the man who sins occasionally from passion. The flood of his impulses sweeps away all barriers which reason may oppose, and their power of resistance is not materially increased by the fear of consequences, because the mental horizon is completely darkened at the time of the storm and no prevision is possible. The criminal from organic causes exercises no inhibition. He knows that society condemns his actions, but he is convinced of his personal right to carry them out, and fears no punishment, because he hopes to escape it, and tries his utmost by means of planning, prudence and self-control to outwit society. The theory of intimidation is not applicable to these two classes of criminals, and they constitute a large proportion of the army of wrongdoers against which society has to defend itself by force.
But there remains the great number of mediocre natures whose sympathy with their fellow men, the emotional foundation of the subjective impulse to Morality, is only slightly developed, who have a superficial veneer of Morality, who act honourably out of prudence, but who would feel no repugnance towards perpetrating profitable misdeeds, if they were certain that they would incur no risk. These insipid characters whose emotional temperature oscillates round about freezing point and who are incapable of greatexcitement, of passion, would see no reason to resist any temptation, to disregard any favourable opportunity, if the penal code, the judge and the policeman did not warn them to be careful. For this kind of man the penal sanction is really a useful and perhaps an indispensable means of prevention, and it has been thought out and developed by the community with a view to such people.
Not content with theoretical considerations, people have also appealed to practical experience to test the theory of intimidation. In some countries capital punishment was either legally abolished or tacitly suppressed, the judges either refraining from pronouncing the sentence on the prisoner or the head of the state, when appealed to, commuting it by an act of pardon to loss of liberty. Statistics seemed to show that serious crimes meriting the death penalty increased, and capital punishment was reintroduced or the practice of systematic pardons was abandoned, with the alleged result that the worst crimes grew less numerous. I express myself doubtfully, because I do not think that the statistics were sufficiently conclusive. They embraced too small a number of cases and too short a period of time. It cannot be conclusively proved that the abolition of the death penalty resulted in an increase of capital crimes; but it is certain that crimes were never more frequent or more horrible than in the times when criminal justice was most cruel and made use of the most terrible sanctions. Up to the dawn of modern times legal torture was administered, at every street corner there were gallows, the poor wretch under sentence of death was pinched withred-hot pincers, the executioner tore the flesh from his bones, poured boiling pitch over him, cut out his tongue, hacked off his hands, broke him on the wheel or burnt him alive; executions were a sort of public entertainment or popular holiday, and efforts were made to attract as many spectators as possible; every inhabitant of one of the larger towns was familiar from childhood with the horrid spectacle of mutilated human bodies writhing in torture, and there rang in his ears the echo of the screams of pain and of the shrill death rattle of the victims. But these impressions were so far from intimidating the gaping crowd that many hurried from the place of execution to commit the most execrable crimes, the punishment of which they had just witnessed; consequently punishments have gradually been made less cruel, and the public is excluded from executions, which clearly indicates a decisive rejection of the theory of intimidation.
The truth is that the severity of the punishment has no effect upon the frequency or the savagery of crimes. The criminality of a community depends on the value and emphasis of the moral education which it bestows upon the rising generation. It can prevent its members, at any rate the average, normal type, from developing into criminals. But the fear of punishment has no deterrent effect upon those whose criminal impulses have not been subjugated by social discipline. The severity of the punishment does not contribute anything to the defence of society. It only proves that the lawgiver and the criminal judges are on the lowest level of civilization which correspondsto a widespread and barbarous criminality, and that their modes of thought and feeling are horribly like those of the criminals whom they sentence to torture, the gallows, and the wheel.
Positive law aims at defending society, and tries to attain its end by punishing transgressions. It provides no reward for conscientious obedience. The law has no honours to bestow on blamelessness and virtue. Society felt the want of this and made attempts to encourage honourable conduct by conferring distinctions, just as it tries to intimidate vice by punishing crime. These attempts were not particularly happy. The bestowal of titles and orders is no recognition of virtue, but a means adopted by governments to ensure devotion to power. An arrangement was made in some places to honour model citizens in public and crown them with laurels, but it soon came to grief owing to indifference and mockery. A private individual wanted to fill this gap in social institutions. The Count of Montyon, a son of the eighteenth century, whose philosophy he had imbibed, instituted the prizes for virtue which are distributed annually by the French Academy. They are bestowed on modest integrity in humble circumstances which has manifested a sense of duty, neighbourly love and self-sacrifice. This friend of man has had few imitators, and that is understandable. Sound common sense realizes that rewards like the Montyon prizes for virtue do not with the infallibility of a natural law fall to the lot of merit, but are nearly always adjudicated to the prizewinner by chance, by recommendation, and by all sorts of influences thathave nothing to do with virtue; and it seems unjust that among equal claims some should be satisfied while others, the great majority, are not. It would be vain to contend that one virtue which goes empty-handed is not unfairly treated when another gets a benefit on which it has not counted, and that in a moral character, such as alone would be eligible for a prize for virtue, there is no room for envy. That would be the moral of the Gospel concerning the labourers who came at the eleventh hour, which has met with opposition from others besides the contemporaries of Jesus.
On the whole, the community has never felt called upon to solve the moral problem of the reward of virtue. It has always contented itself with the punishment of vice and has given its law threatening, but not encouraging, sanctions. This attitude shows that it has always had a clear conception of its moral task. In its positive law it never included anything but that minimum of Morality that was absolutely necessary to its existence, and without which it would dissolve into its original elements, its order would be replaced by chaos, by the war of all against all. It must insist on the observance of this minimum; it must use forcible means to achieve this. But it does not feel justified in demanding more than this minimum, because more is not claimed by its instinct of self-preservation. A surplus of virtue over and above the amount necessary for the life of society is desirable; but it does not lie within the scope of the natural functions of the community, determined by its organic necessities, to achieve this by compulsion andthe provision of legal rewards as an encouragement. It is the business of the individual to work at his own moral improvement, and the community cannot interfere directly in the matter. It is enough that it encourage this work indirectly by bestowing care on the culture and education of the individual, by making it the duty of its public schools to inculcate good principles, and by creating a public opinion which surrounds all the activities of higher morality with admiration, respect and gratitude. The moral education of the individual is not an object with which laws are concerned; it is the result of the constant, vital influence of the community, and can have no sanction other than the increase of well-being of every single person within the social union, which is a natural consequence of raising the moral level of the community.
The penal sanctions of positive law have a gross materialism about them corresponding to the definite concreteness of the actions with which positive law deals. The broad field of Morality, however, which is outside the narrow sphere of the laws, has no room for sanctions of a material nature. The penalties prescribed by law are directed to actions which, if they became general, would in a very short space of time result in the dissolution of society. The community essays by forcible measures to prevent this kind of action, and these measures more or less fulfil their aim, whether you interpret their use on the theory of discipline, of expiation and purification by repentance, of improvement and moral re-birth, or of intimidation. All these theories were invented lateron, after the community had been convinced by experience that punishment, if it does not entirely prevent crime, at least limits it sufficiently to make the continued existence of society possible, and more or less to guarantee to its members the safety of their life, their property and their personal dignity.
Against transgressions of the moral law, the results of which are not immediately obvious, such as ruthless selfishness, blunted sympathy and lack of active neighbourly kindness, the community does not proceed with forcible measures; firstly, because it cannot establish their existence convincingly and hence cannot try them in a court of justice, and secondly, because it does not recognize them as constituting an immediate danger to its existence. Now, as the sanctions set up by society are not applicable to these transgressions, an individual whose mind does not penetrate very far into matters is disquieted, for accustomed as he is to the spectacle of the steady justice of the state, he seeks the counterpart in the forms of this justice in the world of Morality, and does not discover it at the first glance. He asks anxiously where are the police, the public prosecutor, the examining magistrate, the criminal court, the prison for sins against Morality, and invents them, since he cannot find them. He transfers to the hereafter the sanctions of Morality, which are not visible on earth. He cannot make up his mind to renounce them, because the fact that sins against the moral law go unpunished would seem to him to indicate intolerable anarchy, comparable with the state of a community where everyone could murder, rob andmutilate to his heart's content without incurring the risk of the least personal unpleasantness.
In the sphere of the moral law punishment certainly does not follow hot foot upon crime, but it nevertheless does not fail to appear, and becomes visible when the eye is capable of embracing long periods of time and of tracing intricate connexions. The sanctions of the moral law differ from those of criminal law, but they are not wanting. They are of a subjective and of an objective character. The subjective punishment for a sin against the laws of Morality is remorse. It is inflicted by the inner judge who rules in the consciousness of the individual, by conscience, and penetrates to the very deepest depths of a person's mind which no outward punishment imposed by the community ever reaches. It is not only religious and political martyrs who endure torture and death with proud serenity, conscious that they are morally immeasurably superior to their executioners; even common criminals remain perfectly unmoved by their punishment and regret only that they are weaker than their captors. Prisons are full of convicts who look upon their condition as that of prisoners of war. They have been worsted in their battle with law. That seems to them a misfortune but not a disgrace. They are neither humble nor contrite, but revengeful. They are determined and ready to take up the duel with society as soon as an opportunity offers and they may hope to do so with some prospect of success.
But remorse is an unresisting submission to the verdict of conscience and the consciousness of one's own unworthiness. It is the recognition of the justiceof the sentence which brands one, and the constant, anguished realization that one's personality has been deservedly humiliated, dishonoured and deprived of its rights. As a spiritual process, remorse causes the sinner continually to relive the misdeed he committed, while at the same time he is fully conscious of its atrocity. The ego becomes dual, one part active, the other watching and judging. The one again and again perpetrates its misdeed, the other looks on horrified and suffers agonies. It is one long torture and disgrace of self. Remorse condemns the sinner perpetually to repeat in his mind the deed which fills him with horror of himself. This state of mind is the nearest approach to eternal damnation in hell. There is only one means of temporary escape: to extinguish memory by narcotics. That is why remorse not seldom leads to drunkenness. Shakespeare, with a poet's infallible insight into the soul, has grasped and depicted the nature of remorse, the uninterrupted, torturing presence of the misdeed in man's consciousness. Lady Macbeth sees her hands ever stained with the blood of the innocent royal victim whom she herself did not even murder, and she complains that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Leontes, in the "Winter's Tale," on hearing of Hermione's alleged death, of which he believes himself guilty, mourns:
"Once a day I'll visitThe chapel where they lie; and tears shed thereShall be my recreation: so long as natureWill bear up with this exercise, so longI daily vow to use it."
Remorse is the most effective of the subjective sanctions of Morality; it is almost too effective, for owing to its duration and severity the punishment easily grows disproportionate to the crime. But it has one great disadvantage, it affects only better natures who have an active conscience and spiritual delicacy, while it spares the wicked who have no conscience, who perpetrate their misdeeds contentedly, without a qualm, and regret them only when they are discovered and lead to unpleasantness.
Nevertheless, the actions of these hardened sinners do not go quite unpunished. Moral law always takes vengeance for transgressions, but not directly on the evildoer. In addition to the subjective, it also has an objective sanction; when it is violated retribution falls on the community. The masses have a dim idea that every evil deed meets with requital and express it in the proverb that "Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." They have noticed that the curse of an evil deed never fails to come, and is consummated with crushing force, only that it does not happen at once. It seems objectionably unjust that the culprit should not feel the effect of his crime, whilst others do who were not born when it was perpetrated. But the concept of retributory justice is as little applicable to the far-reaching relations in the life of humanity as to the actions of the laws of Nature, for instance gravity or electricity. Morality is, as I have shown, an adaptation of the species to the natural conditions in which it is forced to live. Morality, therefore, has an aim, which is to make social life in common possible for the individual, this life alone enabling him to maintain his existence amid the conditions obtaining on this earth. The discipline which Morality imposes on the individual leaves him a certain amount of free play. If he escapes from this discipline to a certain small extent which does not threaten the existence of society, this revolt has no ill effect upon the life of the species, the latter has no grounds for punishing him, and the only, yet sufficient, sanction of the loose Morality of an undisciplined individual lies in the fact that he is more or less inferior to the most perfect type of the species, and visibly bears the stamp of his worthlessness in his character, his bearing and his mode of thought. But if in his disregard of Morality the individual goes so far as to frustrate its aim and endanger the existence of society, then the latter must either find ways and means of rendering the culprit harmless or else it overlooks his misdeed and thereby becomes an accessory and justly suffers the evils consequent upon a deterioration of Morals which is universally tolerated.
The means by which a society must defend the Morality necessary to its existence can only be spiritual, for it is not a question of breaches of the positive law which result in the intervention of justice and of material penalties, but of a disregard of the commands of Morality, which are not drawn up in paragraphs. Public opinion suffices to rouse the individual who despises the Moral law to an uncomfortable sense of his unworthiness; if he finds himself treated with contempt and sees disapprovaland dislike in everyone's face, either he will be spurred to an effort to overcome his immoral instincts or his self-respect will suffer from the universal contempt with which he meets; and this suffering is his punishment, therefore it is the sanction of a breach of the Moral law.
If public opinion does not keep careful and severe watch, such as may be termed the function of a higher moral police, then inevitably the moral tone of the whole society will sink to a lower level, and this will result in making life harder and more difficult, and in certain circumstances may lead to dissolution. This is not a theoretical assumption, but an observed fact, a lesson taught by history. It tells us of epochs in which the licentiousness of individuals, favoured by a society too dull, weak and indifferent to stand up against bad examples, succeeded in corrupting all classes. Such a period is exemplified by the fall of Rome. Common natures indulged and wallowed in every vice, the better ones felt such disgust for a life without nobility and virtue that they discarded it, and the community lost all excuse of joint responsibility and became so loosely knit together that it was incapable of common effort or sacrifice, and collapsed miserably at the first onslaught of a foreign aggressor tempted by its depravity.
The disintegration of a society, the sanction of its sins against Morality, is a slow process. It does not often take place catastrophically, with theatrical effect, so that even a dull observer can grasp the connexion between cause and effect. But whoeverinvestigates closely will realize that all evils from which society suffers, which make life more bitter and harder for its members, are ultimately due to defective Morality. What are class struggles with their consequent hostilities between groups of the same nation, their coercion and damage, but manifestations of self-seeking, lack of consideration and injustice, that is, of Immorality? Would they be possible if members of all classes, capitalists and workers, agriculturists and townsmen, rulers and subjects were inspired by neighbourly kindness, understanding and appreciation of the needs, pretensions and feelings of their opponents, and by a spirit of self-sacrifice? Would the decay of character, the arbitrariness and arrogance of the mighty, the cowardly slavishness of the masses, with the resultant rottenness of public affairs, be conceivable if individuals were conscious of their dignity and their duty to themselves and the community, and if they had the strength and the determination to overcome their fear of men? Could wars of aggression bring ruin upon mankind if leading personalities did not give way to the desire for outward honours, to the hunger for power, to avarice, to the itch of vanity, that is to the lowest forms of selfishness, and if the masses out of stupidity or fear of a mental effort, and out of dread for their personal responsibility did not allow themselves to be misused for base purposes?
Thus we find insufficient Morality in individuals, or the complete lack of it, to be at the root of all evils with which the community is afflicted,and we are justified in conceiving war, party quarrels, collisions between groups representing different interests, revolutions, in fact, all tragedies of life in societies with the suffering and destruction they entail, as the penal sanction of sins against Morality. Morality, which was created to facilitate life for the individual or to make it at all possible for him, is no longer able to fulfil its aim, and the society finds itself by its own fault back in the condition of misery and fear, owing to which its instinct of self-preservation originally forced it to make the effort of setting up the Moral law. Even the most merciless zealot cannot wish for a more efficacious and painful punishment of Immorality.
But Morality does not possess the sanction of punishment alone, it has also the more amiable one of reward. We have seen that by strengthening the faculty of inhibition it raises the individual to a higher level of organic development, that by the inculcation of consideration and neighbourly kindness it affords the community the possibility of working together peacefully and profitably. But it does more than that. It gives life an incomparably higher value than when it is dull and uniform, by enriching and beautifying it with heroism and with ideals.
Ideals and heroism are direct creations of Morality and inconceivable without it. The ideal is a conception of perfection; the thought of attaining it is accompanied by the most pleasurable emotions, and the individual regards it as his life's task to strive for it. The struggle for the ideal implies effort at all times, renunciation of the ease of a thoughtlessand care-free existence, an endless series of difficult victories over appetites clamouring for immediate satisfaction, that is, constant work in the service of Morality. He who has an ideal is never troubled by the problem of the meaning of life. His life has an aim and significance. He knows whither he goes, why he lives, for what he works. He knows nothing of the doubts of the aimless wanderer, of the discouraging consciousness of one's own uselessness, and his assurance, his conviction that his efforts are useful and worthy come very near to happiness. Heroism is the noblest victory of a thinking and volitional personality over selfishness; it is altruism which rises to self-sacrifice, the proud subjugation by Reason of the most primitive and powerful of all instincts, that of self-preservation. It is the highest achievement of which Morality is capable. It is never developed for the profit of an individual, but always for that of a community, for a thought, for an ideal. His heroic conduct raises the hero out of the rut of his existence, liberates him from the trammels of his individuality and enlarges this to represent a community, its longings, its resolutions, its determination. At the moment of his heroic action the hero lives innumerable lives, the lives of all for whom he risks his own, and if death reaches him, it can destroy only his single person, but cannot put an end to the dynamic activity of the community which is included in the hero, while he is magnificently elevated far above himself. The faculty of forming an ideal of existence and activity, and of rising to the heights of heroism, is the royal reward of Moralitywhich the perfect subjection of animal instincts to the rule of human Reason has achieved. Its punishment for those retrograde individuals who never learn to control their instinctive reflex actions is that they are denied the sight of the glory of the ideal, that heroism is unknown and incomprehensible to them, that they lead their lives fettered and imprisoned, unconscious of any task, without prospect or exaltation, as if they dwelt in a cellar or in a dark dungeon. These are the sanctions of Morality. It has no others, nor does it need them.
In one passage of the book cited above Guyau makes the doubting remark: "Who can tell us whether Morality is not ... at one and the same time a beautiful and useful art? Perhaps it bewitches us and deceives us." Let us assume that it is an illusion. That would not detract from its value for mankind. Is not all our knowledge of the world, is not our whole view of Nature an illusion? We are made conscious of the universe by its qualities, and these qualities are conferred on it by our senses. But all knowledge that we derive from our senses is an illusion. For the senses do not convey reality to us, but the modifications which the influence of reality produces in our sense organs. The universe has neither sound nor colour nor scent. But we perceive it as sounding, coloured and scented. These qualities we attribute to reality are illusions of our senses, but these illusions make up all the beauty of the world which without them would be dumb, blind and without charm for us.