DOCTRINE OF PHILOSOPHICAL NECESSITY
——‘For I had learnt a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.’
——‘For I had learnt a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.’
——‘For I had learnt a sense sublimeOf something far more deeply interfused,Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,And the round ocean and the living airAnd the blue sky, and in the mind of man,A motion and a spirit that impelsAll thinking things, all objects of all thought,And rolls through all things.’
——‘For I had learnt a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.’
Perhaps, the doctrine of what has been called philosophical necessity was never more finely expressed than in these lines of a poet, who, ifhe had written only half of what he has done, would have deserved to be immortal. There can be no doubt that all that exists, exists by necessity; that the vast fabric of the universe is held together in one mighty chain, reaching to the ‘threshold of Jove’s throne’; that whatever has a beginning, must have a cause; that there is no object, no feeling, no action, which, other things being the same, could have been otherwise; that thought follows thought, like wave following wave; that chance or accident has no share in any thing that comes to pass in the moral or the physical world; that whatever is, must be; that whatever has been, must have been; that whatever is to be will be necessarily.
I never could doubt for a moment of the truth of this general principle, and I never could comprehend the inferences which have commonly been drawn from it, both by friends and foes. All the moral consequences which have been attributed to it appear to me mere idle prejudices against it on one side, and equally gratuitous concessions on the other. The doctrine of necessity leaves morality just where it found it. It does not destroy goodness of disposition or energy of character, any more than it destroys beauty or strength of person. It does not take away the powers of the mind any more than the use of the limbs. That every thing is by necessity, no more proves that there is no such thing as good and evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong, in the moral world, than it proves that there is no such thing as day or night, heat or cold, sweet or sour, food or poison, in the physical. Merit and demerit, that is to say, praise and blame, reward and punishment, have no place in the physical world, but that is because they have no effect there; and for the same reason they have a place in the moral, because they have an effect there. All the practical conclusions which have been ascribed to the difference between liberty and necessity, may be equally accounted for (as they really had their rise) from the difference between moral and physical necessity.
Man acts from a cause; and so far he resembles a stone; but he does not act from the same cause, and herein he differs from it. There is a print which I have seen from a picture by Ludovico Caracci, in which a female figure, with a lion by her side, is represented striking a flame of fire at her feet with a drawn sword. I do not very well understand the allegory, but it appears to me to furnish a very tolerable illustration of the difference between moral and physical necessity: for whether this figure strikes the flame with the flat or the sharp side of the sword, it divides and rises again equally; it is incapable of punishment for it has no sense of pain, nor does it apprehend a repetition of the blow. Is it the same with the humanmind? No; for it has both the sense of pain and the sense of consequences, which render it liable to punishment, by making that punishment one effectual and necessary means of influencing its conduct. A man differs from a stone in that he has feeling and understanding; and it is this difference that makes him a moral and responsible agent in the true meaning of the terms, by connecting his present impulses with their future consequences. It may be said that animals have feeling, and a certain degree of understanding: and so far they are liable to correction and punishment. A dog or a horse is terrified at the whip or the spur as well as encouraged by kindness. We very properly, therefore, threaten them with the one and allure them with the other, though we neither preach to them of heaven nor hell, because they have no notion about either. As far as they have understanding, they have free-will, for these two words mean one and the same thing. Man is the only religious animal, because he alone (from a greater power of imagination) extends his views of consequences into another state of being.—The application of praise or blame, as well as of reward and punishment, is proper, wherever it is likely to have an effect. We do not talk to the deaf: we do not shew pictures to the blind; we do not reason with a wild beast; we do not quarrel with a stone. Because it would be useless. But wedotalk to those who can hear; we shew pictures to those who can see; we reason with prejudice; we quarrel with ill-nature. The human mind differs from an inanimate substance or an automaton, inasmuch as it is actuated by sympathy as well as by necessity. We indeed praise a flower, a statue, or a beautiful face, because they give us pleasure: we praise a virtuous action, as an additional incentive to virtue. ‘Praise and blame, reward and punishment’ (says Mr. Hobbes) ‘are just and proper, because they fashion the will to justice.’
Merit, in the scholastic sense, means something self-caused, and independent of motives. This sense of the term is flat nonsense, for there is nothing without a cause—nothing which is not owing to some other thing. The whole theory of merit may be said to turn upon the capacity of any person or thing to mould itself according to the opinion entertained of it. A stone has not this capacity; and therefore there is no merit in a stone. If you tell a country girl that she is handsome or well made, her answer generally will be, that ‘She is as God made her.’ This however does not prove that she is not well made. It is only meant to shew, that as she has had no hand in her own shape, and can do nothing to mend it, the merit is so far none of hers. But if you praise the neatness of her dress, she has not the same evasion left, but thinks the flattery well bestowed, for sheis conscious that this depends upon herself; that she can stay a longer or a shorter time at her glass as she pleases; and that the pains she has taken have been with a view to the good opinion you express of her. The difference between natural and acquired graces is an obvious dictate of common sense; unless we adopt the opinion of the Clown, that ‘a good favour is the effect of study, but reading and writing come by nature.’ It is a piece of brutality and ill-nature to point at a hump-backed man, and call him My Lord: but there is no great harm in laughing at a person with an aukward slovenly gait, for the ridicule may remedy the defect. A person has it in his power to turn his toes out instead of in, whenever he chuses: he cannot get rid of a natural deformity by any effort of will. Beauty and power of every kind excite our love and admiration, whether in nature, in morals, or in art; but still with a difference. St. Paul’s is a much nobler as well as larger building than St. Dunstan’s. We accordingly admire the one much more than the other; but we allow no more merit to the one than the other. All the difference of merit we ascribe to the architect, and not to the building. Why so? Because all the vanity belongs to the architect, and not to the building.—St. Paul’s stands where it does; it lifts its majestic dome to the skies, whether it is seen or not, whether it is admired or not. It has (familiarly speaking) done nothing to deserve our good opinion, for it has done nothing with a view to it. Now for the same reason that the building has not, the builderhasmerited our good opinion, for he did what he has done with that very view; was sensible to that good opinion, and stimulated to exertion by it. It is evident that the admiration we bestow on any work of art, as an actual object, is involuntary; it makes no difference in the object whether we bestow it or not; we therefore do not make a point of bestowing it: the praise we give to the artist is voluntary, and merited in this farther sense, that we are bound to bestow it as a means to an end: we indulge it not merely as a sentiment naturally excited by the contemplation of excellence, but the expression of which is a reward due to the pains taken by the artist, and to the encouragement of genius. Disapprobation and punishment on the other hand necessarily give pain to the person who is the object of them, but it is to produce a remote good. However, it equally follows in either case, that our love and hatred of what is amiable or odious in conscious agents must be different from our feeling towards unconscious ones, from the sense of the difference of the consequences. The lever, the screw, and the wedge, are the great instruments of the mechanical world: opinion, sympathy, praise and blame, reward and punishment, are the lever, the screw, and the wedge, of the moral world. A house isbuilt of stones; human character depends on motives. Is there therefore no difference between one character and another? As well might it be said that there is no difference between one building and another. If merit means something in character, independent of motives and of all other things, then there can be no such thing as merit: but if by merit we mean something which excites our approbation of one character more than another, and which something is still farther entitled to our approbation, because it depends upon it for its motive and encouragement, then undoubtedly this word has a rational meaning in it. To deny praise or blame, reward or punishment, to actions, because they are produced by motives, is to take away the prop from a house, because it supports it.—Necessity only supersedes merit by superseding the operation of motives. It is pretended, that if any action is not perfectly gratuitous, if it can be traced to any other cause, the merit must be transferred to that other cause, and so on without end. This infinite series may be cut short by observing, that any action is entitled to our good opinion which is affected by it. If our opinion had no influence on the actions of others, there would so far be no merit. If any one going up Holborn-hill is pushed by a stronger man against a window and breaks it, who is the responsible person? The one who pushed the other, and not the one who broke the glass. Because punishment or correcting the moral sense will not prevent a weak man from being pushed against a window by a strong one, but it will prevent the strong man from pushing him against it. It makes no difference that this person did not act at first without a motive; the point is, that here is another motive which will counteract the former one. The true cause of any thing in the practical and moral sense, is that, by removing which the effect ceases. A man is a moral agent only in so far as he can do what he will: for motives can only operate on the will. A man in chains or held by force is not accountable for what he does, for blame or praise him ever so much, and he will do, not what you wish him, but what others force him to do. You may reasonably exhort a man not to throw himself over Westminster Bridge, but it is in vain, after he has thrown himself over, to call out to him to stop. Morality means that we have the power to do certain things,if we will, or help them,if we please.
Merit is moral energy. It is the sense of merit which is the great stimulus of exertion. One thing is more difficult, requires a greater effort than another. The sense of merit is in proportion to the sense of difficulty. The highest praise is given to the highest exertions, the greatest rewards are due where the greatest sacrifices have been made. The degree of merit depends then on the degree of voluntarypower exerted: for exertion deserves every kind of encouragement and assistance as it becomes difficult. We give a boy sixpence for going a mile; a shilling for going two. We need not offer rewards and largesses to vice and indolence; for all the sanctions of religion and morality are not sufficient to correct them. The admiration with which the story of Marvell and his leg of mutton is read has not prevented the facility of some modern patriots in commencing courtiers; but if it should only save us from a single birthday ode, it will be something. The phlegmatic Dutchman, in playing at skittles, follows his bowl with his eye, writhes his body to make it turn right, and cheers it with his voice. If the bowl had sympathy so as to bend with his body, and to be encouraged to go a little farther by his praising it, there would be some sense in his doing so. Amphion is said to have raised the walls of Thebes with the sound of his lyre: in one sense the fable might be true, for he might have drawn together and civilized his followers by the power of song. The words which Madame de Staël some time ago addressed to the Germans,Allemagne, tu es une nation, et tu pleurs, were not without their effect. Neither perhaps would the same words be so now, addressed to her own country—France, tu es une nation, et tu pleurs!
We have been led to these remarks by receiving an epistle from an elderly maiden lady, who complains that she has spent her whole life in censuring and back-biting her neighbours, and that by what we let fall some time ago, about there being no such thing as merit and demerit, we had debarred her of the only use of her tongue and pleasure of her life. We are sorry to have interrupted her, and hope she will now proceed. We have a good deal left to say on the subject:—
‘But there is matter for a second rhyme,And we to this must add another tale.’
‘But there is matter for a second rhyme,And we to this must add another tale.’
‘But there is matter for a second rhyme,And we to this must add another tale.’
‘But there is matter for a second rhyme,
And we to this must add another tale.’