The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Chapter 3

by Josiah Royce

CHAPTER III.

THE WARFARE OF THE MORAL IDEALS.

Sure, if I find the Holy Grail itself,
It too will fade, and crumble into dust.

Tennyson, Holy Grail.

The spirits I have raised abandon me,
The spells which I have studied baffle me —
The remedy I recked of tortured me.
I lean no more on superhuman aid.

Byron, Manfred.

We are yet without an ideal, and as we come nearer to our task, its difficulties increase. We have described above the remarkable position in which every moral idealist finds himself. He says that his moral doctrine is to be more than a mere bit of natural history. He wants to find out what ought to be, even if that which ought to be is not. Yet when some man says to him: “Thy ideal is thus but thy personal caprice, thy private way of looking at things,” he does not want to assent. He wants to reply: “My ideal is the true one. No other rational ideal is possible.” Yet to do this he seems to need again some external support in reality. He seems to require some authority based upon facts. He must somewhere find his ideal in the world of truth, external to his own private consciousness. He must be able to say: “Lo, here is the ideal!” He must be able to show it to us, so that we shall see it to be more than his whim. But thus he is in danger of forsaking his idealism. His position so far has therefore seemed to us an uncertain one. We have felt the force of his needs; but we have not been able to see as yet just how they are to be satisfied. The satisfaction of them would in fact be a complete ethical doctrine. And the foundation of such a doctrine is just what we here are seeking.

It is incumbent upon us yet further to show how the search for a moral ideal has in the past been hindered by the weight of this doubt about the exact relation of the real and the ideal. The controversy that the last chapter considered is a controversy endlessly repeated in the history of moral doctrines. Everywhere we find a moral ideal maintained by some devoted idealist as the one perfectly obvious aim for human life. Everywhere there stands over against this ideal some critic who says: “The choice of this aim for life is an accident. I reject this boastful ideal. For where in reality is found the firm basis of fact on which the ideal is founded?” Then possibly the idealist, relaxing the rigor of his idealism, points out in the external world some real or mythical support for his ideal. And thereupon either his critics reject the creed about the external world thus offered to them, or they deny the moral force of the supposed realities, or, again, themselves assuming an idealistic attitude, they reproach the idealist with his unworthy desertion of his own high faith, in that he has yielded to realistic demands, and has founded the lofty Ought on the paltry Is. And thus the controversy continues. Often it seems to us that the struggle must be endless. At all events we must here look at some of its phases.

I.

In the days of the Sophists, Greek thought had reached its first great era of ethical skepticism. This skepticism was directed against the ideals of popular morality. “They are not self-evident and necessary ideals,” said in substance the Sophists. “They are conventions. They are private judgments.” The popular ideals were of course popularly defended against such assaults by the use of the national religion. “The gods made these distinctions,” it is replied. “The gods are able to enforce them; therefore, fear the gods.”

Skepticism had two answers to this defense. The one answer was simple: “Who knows whether there are any gods, or what the gods, if they exist, may choose to do?” The other answer was more subtle, because it really expressed in skeptical guise a new form of moral idealism. It is best preserved to us in a fine passage in the second book of Plato’s Republic. Here the young men, Glaucon and Adeimantos, confess that certain sophistic objections to the reality of moral distinctions are deeply puzzling to themselves. They ask Socrates to discuss the matter in some such fashion as to remove these doubts. They sum up the doubts in substance as follows: Grant that the gods are of irresistible might, and that they are disposed to enforce some moral law; still does that fact give any true distinction between good and evil as such? For whoever urges us to do right merely to get the favor of the gods, urges us in reality just to do what is prudent. Such doctrines make justice not desirable in itself, but desirable solely for what it brings in its train. And thus there would be no difference between good and evil as such, but only between what brings reward and what brings punishment. “Therefore, O Socrates,” they in effect say, “do thou defend for us justice in itself, and show us what it is worth in itself, and how it is different from injustice. But put us not off with stories about reward and punishment.” Such is a brief summary of their two speeches.

No better could either the need or the difficulty of the task of moral idealism be set forth than in these eloquent statements. How does Plato lay the ghosts that he has thus raised? How does he give an independent foundation to the ideal of justice? He surely felt how hard a problem he was undertaking. He has, in fact, attempted several answers to it. But the main answer, given in the Republic itself is insufficient, though noble. This answer is, in effect, that the properly balanced, fully and harmoniously developed soul, absorbed in the contemplation of eternal truth, cannot possibly desire injustice; that only the tyrannical soul, in which the desires have the upper hand, where nothing is secure, whose life is like the life of an ill-governed or even anarchic community, tumultuous, wretched, helpless before passion, only such a soul can desire injustice. Injustice, then, means desire for discord, it means the victory of the desires over the reason, it is inconsistent with the life of the soul that is given to blessed contemplation of the eternal ideas. For such a blessed soul its blessedness is, in the fine phrase that Spinoza long afterwards created, not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; so that such a soul will not do the right as a means by which it may procure the blessed contemplation of the eternal, but, being engaged in this blessed contemplation, it is thereby enabled to do right.

But to the wicked soul of the unjust man Plato seemingly has no inducement to offer in order to persuade it to become just, save the eloquent statement of the pains that accompany injustice, the picture of the warfare of desires, the proof of the wretched instability and of the possibly eternal misery in which the tyrannical soul must live. And thus Plato himself would be in so far open to the objection that his Glaucon and Adeimantos had made to all previous moralists, namely, that they never gave a reason why justice in itself was to be chosen, but always made justice desirable by reason of the rewards that result from it. For Plato’s view, as for that of less ideal moralists, the unjust man should seek to become just because, until he does become just, he will be wretched. Can no other basis for the virtue of justice be found save this one? If none can be found save this, then whenever a soul exists that prefers the tumult of desire, with average success in injustice, to the solemn peace of the contemplation of ideal good apart from the satisfaction of sensuous desires, for that soul Plato’s argument will be worthless. Such a tyrannical man will delight to remain a tyrant, and that will be the end of life for him.

The suggestiveness, the deeper significance of this Platonic doctrine, we do not deny. But, as it stands, the doctrine is not complete nor consistent. For Plato himself has given us as the support for his ideal, a fact, or a supposed fact, of human nature. A moral skeptic will deal with it as Glaucon and Adeimantos had dealt with the popular morality. The supposed fact, they will say, may be doubted. Perhaps some tyrant will actually feel happier than some struggling and aspiring soul far higher up in the heavens. But, leaving that doubt aside, there is the other objection. The ideal justice has come to be founded on a bare physical fact, namely, on the constitution of the soul, which might, for all we can see, have been different.

Important as he is in concrete ethical questions, Aristotle does nothing of importance to remove this fundamental difficulty, since his position as to this matter is too near to Plato’s. Still less do the Epicureans, for whom in fact just this difficulty does not exist. Plainly they declare that they merely state physical facts. Generosity, fidelity to friends, and other idealistic activities they indeed regard as the part of the wise man, but the end of all is very frankly declared to be his selfish advantage. As Cicero expresses their view:^[1] “Cum solitudo et vita sine amicis insidiarum et metus plena sit, ratio ipsa monet amicitias comparare, quibus partis confirmatur animus et a spe pariendarum voluptatum sejungi non potest.”

The Stoics have a new thought to offer, one that would have been as revolutionary as Christianity itself, if they could but have grasped and taught its full meaning. But that was for them impossible. Their new thought, which gave foundation to their moral ideals, was the thought of the perfect equality of all men in the presence of the universal Reason, to which all alike ought to conform. Everyone, they said, ought to be rational; everyone ought to try to extend the empire of reason. If one’s neighbor is a rational being, one can and must try to realize the rational in him almost as much as in one’s own self. Hence one’s duty to do good to men. This duty, to be sure, commonly did not for the Stoics extend to the point of very great practical self-sacrifice. But at any rate they gave a new foundation for justice. One works not only to conform one’s self to the ideal, but also to realize the ideal here in this world in others as well as in himself. The ideal Reason can be realized in yonder man through my efforts, much as, through my acts, it can be realized in me. All men are in so far brothers, members of one family, children of one Father, and so all alike objects

of moral effort for every one of their number.^[2]

II.

This thought was indeed a deep one, and if the Stoics gave but an imperfect practical realization of it to the world, they prepared thereby the way for the reception of the higher thought of Jesus, when that thought appeared. We may therefore more readily suggest the skeptical criticism of the Stoical thought by first looking at the well known completion of the notion of God’s fatherhood in the doctrine of Jesus.

Jesus founded his morality in his theology, yet he did not make moral distinctions dependent on the mere fact of divine reward or vengeance. An act is for him wrong, not because outside the kingdom of heaven there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; rather should we say that because the act is opposed to the very nature of the relation of sonship to God, as Jesus conceives this relation, therefore the doers of such acts cannot be in the kingdom of heaven, all whose citizens are sons of the King. And outside the kingdom there is darkness and weeping, simply because outside is outside. Therefore, if Jesus gives us a theological view of the nature of morality, he does not make morality dependent on the bare despotic will of God, but on a peculiar and necessary relation between God and his creatures. So long as God is what he is, and they remain his creatures, so long must this relation continue. Jesus in fact, as we know, gives us a higher and universal form of the morality of the prophets. They had said, Jahveh has saved his people, has chosen them from all the earth, has fed them with his bounty, has treated them as his well-beloved vineyard, has taken the nation as it were to wife. And so, if the people offend against the law of righteousness that is written in their hearts and known through the words of prophecy, they are guilty not alone of dangerous revolt against irresistible might, but also of something far worse, namely, of the basest ingratitude. Their sin is unheard of in all the earth. The heathen forsake not their wretched gods, that are yet no gods, and shall Israel turn against the will of its living, almighty lover? The waste vineyard, the unfaithful wife, these are the types of the iniquity of the people. Their sin is a miserable state of utter corruption. What the very beasts do, to know the masters that feed them, Israel forgets, whose master is not only the maker of all things, but also the loving spouse of his chosen nation.

This sanction for morality, not the might so much as the tender love of God, is by Jesus extended in range and deepened in meaning. Every man stands before God as beloved son. If he wanders, the Father would fain seek him as the shepherd would a lost sheep; would fain, like the prodigal’s father, fall upon his neck and kiss him, if he will but return; would fain feed and clothe him with the best; would not forget him amid all his sins. And the Father’s rain and sunshine are for just and unjust. Deeper and tenderer is this thought than the prophetic idea, because the relation is no political one, but a close personal one. To be conscious of it means, according to Jesus, to wish to live in accordance with it, so as to return to the Father love for love. Hence, in knowing this relation, one has the highest sanction for all good acts. The ultimate motive that Jesus gives to men for doing right is therefore the wish to be in harmony with God’s love. So the Father in his holiness wills for each of us, and so each son, conscious of the love of the Father, also desires, as soon as he is aware of the Father’s will. One cannot know of this infinite love without wishing to be in union with it. Even without knowing of the love, the very consciousness of the wretchedness of the lonely, separate life of selfish wickedness must lead one to want to forsake the husks and find the Father, even if he should be but the angry Father. Much more then if one has found the Father, has found him caring for the sparrows, and for the lilies, and for the least and the worst of his children, must one, thus knowing the Father, desire to submit to him. One is lost in the ocean of divine love. Separate existence there is no more. One is anxious to lose his life, to hate all selfish joys, to sell all that one has, to be despised and rejected of all the world, if so be that thereby one can come into accord with the universal life of God’s love, in which everything of lesser worth disappears.

Duty to one’s neighbor is but a corollary to all this. In the first place one’s neighbor is no longer a mere fact of experience, a rival, a helper, an enemy; but he is, instead of all this, a child of God. Every other aspect of his life is lost in this one. As child then he represents the Father. The highest messenger of God will say in God’s name at the last: Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these my brethren, ye did it unto me. And so each, brother is the ambassador of God. When Job had spoken of his duty towards the lowly, he had given the sanction for it in the thought: Did not one fashion us? Jesus gives a higher sanction: Does not one Father love you all? In the presence of the Father the children are to lose their separateness. They are to feel the oneness of their life. There is no longer any rival or enemy, any master or slave, any debtor or creditor here, for all are in infinite debt to the Infinite One, and all in his sight brethren.

The Stoics had conceived of a common Father. But they regarded him as an impersonal, all-pervading Reason. The thought of Jesus gave to his idea of the fatherhood of God a warmth and life unknown to any previous thought. And in this warmth and life he intended the idea of Duty to grow. The highest principle of the doctrine is: Act as one receiving and trying to return an Infinite Love. To thy neighbor act as it befits one so beloved to act towards his brother in love. And thus is Duty explained.

For our present skeptical inquiries this doctrine of Jesus in its original form is no longer enough. For one thing, Jesus himself did not intend it as a philosophy, but always expresses it as an insight. And in our time this insight is clouded by many doubts that cannot be lightly brushed away. This idea of God as a Father, — it is exactly the idea that our philosophy finds most difficulty, nowadays, in establishing. For many in all the future history of our race this idea will be harder to establish than will be the moral doctrine that was deduced by Jesus from it. For many who with steadfast faith accept the doctrine of God’s fatherhood, their ultimate reason will rather be that, first accepting the morality of Jesus, they find it most natural to accept therewith what they understand to be his theology. His moral doctrine will be to them the insight, the theology will be taken on trust. Many others will accept indeed the morality, but be unable to accept the theology. In ethical faith they will be Christians, in theology Agnostics. And therefore, to the philosophic student, who must prove all things, and hold fast only what he finds sure, it is impossible to take the theology of Jesus on simple faith, and not profitable to postpone the discussion of the moral problems until he first shall have established a theology. Morality is for us the starting-point of our inquiry. Theology comes later, if at all. And, as we shall presently see, the theology, if accepted, would not satisfy all the questions of the ethical inquirer.

Yet if the doctrine of Jesus does not belong among the purely idealistic theories of duty, since it gives duty the fact of God’s fatherhood as its foundation, it has one aspect that would make the recapitulation of it necessary even in the course of a study of purely ideal ethics. For, while this doctrine founds duty ultimately on the consciousness that God is a Father, and so on a belief in a physical or metaphysical truth, still the immediate ground of the idea of duty to one’s neighbor is the consciousness in each man that his neighbor is his brother. In the teachings of Jesus this latter insight follows from the sense of common sonship that Jesus wants to give to men. But, apart from the theology, the belief in the brotherhood of men, in case it can be made clear and definite, may have just the relation to the idea of duty that Jesus, in his theological ethics, wished the idea of the common sonship to have.

But it is our present purpose to see how doubt follows the track of the moral idealists. And to carry out even here this purpose, it is very important to note that however much the morality of Jesus seems to rest upon his theology, and did, for him, rest upon that theology, for us that basis would be of itself insufficient, even if we could unhesitatingly accept the theology. For the skeptical question might arise in the inquiries of the philosopher, to whom all questions are allowed. Why is it evident that one ought to return the Father’s love? Granting the fact of this love, how does it establish the ideal? And this question, easy as seems the answer of it to a believer, is just the question that the “almost persuaded” of all times have been disposed to ask. Any particular individual may believe in the theology of Jesus, and yet fail to feel the force of the moral doctrine. Why does this love constrain me? he may say. In fact the church has always found it necessary to construct for itself a process, or even a series of processes, through which the unbeliever must go, in order to reach the point of development where he could begin to feel the constraining force of the divine love. It has been recognized as a fact that the unregenerate could believe and even tremble and yet remain unregenerate. The saving faith was seen to be not identical with the mere belief in God as Father. For the saving faith, divine grace was necessary, adding to the unregenerate recognition of the bare truth the devotion of the loving child of God. And therefore the church has never been content with the doctrine of Jesus in its undeveloped simplicity.

But if all this is so, then for us the morality of Jesus, considered as morality, is founded, not on the theological theory alone, but also on a peculiar insight that each man is to have into the duty of returning the divine love. That the divine love is real, gives a basis for all duty in case and only in case one first sees that it is one’s duty to return the divine love. And wherein is this insight as such any clearer than the direct insight into the duty of loving one’s neighbor? If a man loves not his brother whom he has seen, how shall he love God whom he has not seen? Is not the duty of gratitude first evident, if at all, in man’s relations to his fellows? Is not love given first as a duty to one’s companions, and only secondarily as a duty to God, and then only in case one believes in God? In other words, are we not here, as in the discussion with the realist at the outset, led to the view that not a physical doctrine, nor yet even the sublimest metaphysical doctrine, as such, but only an ethical doctrine, can be at the base of a system of ethics? The doctrine that God loves us is a foundation for duty only by virtue of the recognition of one yet more fundamental moral principle, the doctrine that unearned love ought to be gratefully returned. And for this principle theology as such gives no foundation. But on the other hand, upon what should the ideal principle itself be founded? Why is unearned love to be gratefully returned? Is this principle founded once more on some doctrine of the constitution of human nature? The same objection would again appear. A physical fact is no ideal. So, then, this insight is just an insight, the acceptance of an ideal wholly for its own sake? But then returns the old objection. What is such an unfounded ideal but the individual caprice of somebody? Let the faithful be never so devoted; still there are the unregenerate, who are somehow to be convinced of a truth that they do not recognize. And how are they convinced, if at all? Not by showing them the facts, which they have already known without conviction; but by arousing in them a new feeling, namely, gratitude. Thus the Christian ideal seems to have for its sole theoretical foundation the physical fact that man often feels gratitude. It is true that no one can accuse Jesus of expressly giving this or any other theoretical foundation to his doctrine. He was necessarily wholly free from the theoretical aim in his dealings with the people. But for us now the point is the theoretical point. If the foundation of Christian ethics as popularly understood be not the physical fact of the Father’s love, then is it not just the physical fact of the frequent existence of gratitude? And is either of these a satisfactory foundation for an ethical theory as such? Nay, if Christian ethics be the highest from the practical point of view, still must we not dig much deeper to find the theoretical foundation on which this glorious structure rests?

III.

We have been seeking to illustrate our fundamental difficulty in ethics, — one that is too frequently concealed by rhetorical devices. The uncertainty here illustrated results from the difficulty of giving any reason for the choice of a moral ideal. Single acts are judged by the ideal; but who shall judge the judge himself? Some one, as Plato, or some Stoic, or Jesus, gives us a moral ideal. If we are of his followers, the personal influence of the Master is enough. Then we say: “I take this to be my guide,” and our moral doctrine is founded. But if we are not of the faithful, then we ask for proof. The doctrine says: “Behold the perfect Life, or the eternal Ideas, or the course of Nature, or the will of God, or the love of the Father. To look on those realities is to understand our ideal. If you remember those truths, you will hesitate not to do as we say.” But still the doubter may be unwilling to submit. He may say to Plato: “The tyrant is easy to find who will laugh at you when you talk of the peace of philosophic contemplation, who will insist that his life of conflict and of danger is fuller and sweeter in its lurid contrasts and in its ecstasies of sensuous bliss, than are all your pale, stupid joys of blank contemplation. And if the tyrant says so, who shall decide against him? Has not many a man turned with eagerness from the dull life of the thinker, once for a while endured, to the richer joys and sorrows of the man of the world? Have not such men actually held the pleasures of life, however dearly bought, to be better than the superhuman calm of your philosophic ideal?” Even so to the Stoic, the objector may say: “Granted that your eternal Reason does pervade all things and is our common Father, why should that cause me, who am one of his creatures, to do otherwise than I like? Who can escape from his presence? Even if I live irrationally, am I not still part of the Universal Reason? The bare fact that there is an Eternal Wisdom does not make clear to me that I must needs be very wise. My destiny may be the destiny of a being made solely to enjoy himself.” And, to the Christian doctrine, the skeptic may oppose the objection that if the truth does not at once spiritually convert all who know it, the proof is still lacking that the Christian Ideal actually appeals to all possible natures. “If I feel not the love of God,” the objector will say, “how prove to me that I ought to feel it?” Or, as human nature so often questions: “Why must I be loving and unselfish?”

Now, the simple, practical way of dealing with all such objectors is to anathematize them at once. Of course, from the point of view of any assumed ideal, the anathema may be well founded. “If you do not as I command,” so says any moral ideal, “I condemn you as an evil-doer.” “He that believeth not shall be damned.” But anathemas are not arguments. To resort to them is to give up theoretic ethics. We who are considering, not whom we shall practically condemn, but what we can say in favor of any moral theory, must be unwilling to be put off with mere oratorical persuasion, or to mistake practical adhesion for theoretical conviction. We want a code that shall seem not only admirable, but, if so it may be, demonstrable.

Such objections, then, blocking the path of our idealist, what is he to do with them? Is there any direction in which he can successfully seek a foundation for his ideals?

We have, indeed, much seeking yet to do ere we can find the right direction. For, in the next place, we shall have to show how just such objections as we have applied to other ethical doctrines will apply to all those doctrines that put the basis of morals in the often-used mass of instincts called Conscience. Conscience undoubtedly expresses the results of civilized ancestry and training. It no doubt must always prove an indispensable aid in making practical moral decisions; but if it be used to give a theoretical basis to ethics, one can say of it what has been already said of other realities. Its universal and uniform presence among men can be doubted, and its value where it is present can be called in question whenever it is employed to give a basis for ethics; since as a mere physical fact of the constitution of human nature, conscience is not yet an ideal, nor an obvious foundation for an ideal. Both of these objections have been frequently urged. Let

us venture to repeat the old story.

IV.

Instincts in general are useful, not because they are infallible, much less because they are rational (for they are neither), but because they work quickly and are less capricious than are our less habitual impulses, and so, in common life, are our substitutes for reason. But, in theory, no act is good merely because the instinct called conscience approves of it; nor does conscience in any man always instinctively approve of good acts. Therefore conscience is, for the purpose of founding an ethical theory, as useless as if it were a mere fiction. It gives no foundation for moral distinctions.

To be sure, we must be understood as referring here not to the moral consciousness of man in its highest rational manifestations; for that there is a rational and well-founded moral consciousness we ourselves desire to show. The conscience that we criticise is conscience as an instinct. When people say that so and so is the right because the immediate declaration of conscience shows it to be the right, they generally mean that so and so is right because it feels right. And when moralists found their ethical doctrine on conscience, they are in great danger of making their whole appeal to mere feeling. But such mere feeling can only give us problems; it cannot solve problems. To illustrate by a notable case: When Butler, in analyzing the data of conscience, in his “Dissertation of the Nature of Virtue,” comes upon the fact that benevolence, or the effort to increase the general happiness, is, for our common popular conscience, only a part of virtue, not in any sort the whole of it, he really discovers nothing positive about the nature of virtue, but only gives us a very interesting problem about the nature of virtue. If benevolence were the sole basis of virtue, then, says Butler, for our conscience treachery and violence would be “no otherwise vicious than as foreseen likely to produce an overbalance of misery to society.” Therefore, he continues, “if in any case a man could procure to himself as great advantage by an act of injustice as the whole foreseen inconvenience likely to be brought upon others by it would amount to, such a piece of injustice would not be faulty or vicious at all.” Even so, it would not be wrong, he points out, to take A’s property away and give it to B, if B’s happiness in getting it overbalanced A’s inconvenience and vexation in losing it. But since conscience disapproves of such actions, therefore, continues Butler, “the fact appears to be that we are constituted so as to condemn falsehood, unprovoked violence, injustice, and to approve of benevolence to some preferably to others, abstracted from all consideration, which conduct is likely to produce an overbalance of happiness or misery.” Were God’s “moral character merely that of benevolence, yet ours is not so.” All this now shows how full of problems our uncriticised conscience is. It is the starting-point, not the guide, of moral controversies. Conscience approves benevolence, and it also approves the repression of benevolence in cases where justice, distributive or retributive, seems to the popular mind to be opposed to benevolence. And when some moralist tries to reduce justice in all its forms to benevolence, the natural conscience is dissatisfied. Retribution it approves, not because retribution may ultimately increase happiness, but because retribution seems good to it. And if the natural conscience is again appealed to, and is at last brought to admit that benevolence is, after all, really the highest end, and punishment only a means, then this appeal is simply a setting of conscience against itself. The popular conscience is, as an instinct, once for all confused and uncertain about the true relations of justice and benevolence. It is useless to ask this instinct to do what the natural conditions that made it never prepared it to do, namely, to make a system of morals. A thinker like Butler, with his seriousness and depth of insight, defends the claims of conscience only by analyses which bring home to us that our conscience is a mystery, and that its assertions about all the deepest ethical questions become uncertain or confused as soon as we cross-question it. An instinct is, in short, like any other habit. You run fast down a familiar flight of stairs so long as you do not think what your feet are doing. Reflect upon your running, and ten chances to one you shall stumble. Even so conscience is a perfectly confident guide as long as you ask it no philosophical questions.

The objections here in question have been so frequently urged that it is hardly worth while for those who can feel their force to dwell on them very long. It is enough for the present purpose to add what all the moral skeptics from the time of the Sophists have insisted upon, namely, that the consciences of various men, nations and races, are conflicting in their judgments of acts. This objection, worthless when urged against a well-founded theory of the moral consciousness, is fatal to any theory that makes morality dependent upon a particular emotional or intellectual “constitution” of human nature, that declares morality to be known by men through one faculty or “sense” of a peculiar character. If there are many consciences, each claiming rank as the true conscience, and all conflicting, then the choice among these can only be made on the ground of something else than a conscience.

The caprices of moral instinct are not exhausted when one has enumerated, as nowadays men often do, as many practices as one can find approved or demanded by the consciences of filthy savages. Among civilized men, yes, in our own hearts, each of us can find numberless conflicting and capricious estimates of actions, and it has only a psychological interest to study them in detail, or to try to reduce them to any semblance of principle. Such conscience as we have about common matters is too easily quieted; and, as a mere feeling, the conscience that can be called moral is not readily distinguishable in this, or in any other respect, from a mere sense of propriety, from a reverence for custom, or from the fear of committing an offense against etiquette. That certain blunders hurt us more than our lesser crimes, and that our remorse for them is like our remorse for venial immorality, only more intense, is nowadays a matter of frequent remark. You ride using another man’s season-ticket, or you tell a white lie, or speak an unkind word, and conscience, if a little used to such things, never winces. But you bow to the wrong man in the street, or you mispronounce a word, or you tip over a glass of water, and then you agonize about your shortcoming all day long, yes, from time to time for weeks. Such an impartial and independent judge is the feeling of what you ought to have done. Shall ethics be founded on feeling, which to-day is and tomorrow is cast into the oven?

The traditional answer of the advocates of conscience, when these facts are urged against them, is well known. They say, various less dignified mental tendencies may at times be mistaken for conscience; but the moral sense is real and trustworthy notwithstanding all these mistakes. Shame, or love of praise, or sense of propriety may pass themselves off as conscience; but the genuine conscience, when you find it, is infallible. But we may still rejoin that, if the difficulty is of this nature, the consequence must be very much the same as what we are insisting upon. For if the question can arise whether a given impulse in me, which I take to be conscience, really is the voice of the infallible conscience or not, then this question cannot be decided by appeal to conscience itself; since the very problem then is: “Of two impulses, both pretending to represent conscience, which is the genuine conscience?” And questions of this sort must be appealed to some higher tribunal than the conflicting impulses themselves. It will not be enough to apply even Antigone’s sublime test to the warring impulses, and to say: This impulse is not of to-day nor of yesterday, and no man can tell whence it came, therefore it is the voice of infallible conscience. For, fine as that saying is, when applied to a genuine eternal truth, the test is not a sufficient one for us in our weakness to apply to the impulses that we find in our poor selves. For we soon forget whence came our prejudices and even our bad habits, and we can fancy that to be of immemorial antiquity which has begun to be in our own parish, and within the memory of the old men. A child born in one of our far western settlements grows up amid a community that is a few years older than himself, and not as old as his eldest brother. Yet he shall look upon all these rickety, wooden houses, and half-graded streets, full of rubbish, as the outcome of an immense past; he shall hear of the settlement of the town as he hears of ancient history, and he shall reverence the oldest deserted, weather-beaten, rotting log-cabin of the place, with its mud chimney crumbling to dust, quite as much as a modern Athenian child may reverence the ruins of the Parthenon. A time when all these things were not, shall be beyond his conception. Even so, if moral truth be eternal, we yet dare not undertake to judge what it is by merely examining ourselves to see what customs or tastes or moral judgments feel to our present selves as if they must have been eternal. Such absolute validity one might possibly feel as belonging to his mother’s way of making plum-pudding. Snow, to use a comparison of Aristotle’s, is as white after one day as if it had been lying untouched and unmelted for a thousand years. And high judicial authority lately expressed the opinion, a propos of a change in standard time, that usage may alter itself in a day as well as in a century, and be as authoritative in one case as in the other. Nothing feels older than a well-established custom, however recent it may be.

Conscience then cannot be recognized as infallible merely through the test of antiquity as judged by our feeling. Conscience furthermore, or emotions that pretend to the authority of conscience, may be found counseling or approving contradictory ways of action. Therefore conscience is no sufficient moral guide.

But even if all this were waived, if conscience were in actual agreement among all men, and if there were no difficulty in distinguishing the voice of conscience from the voice of passion, or from other prejudices or sentiments, it would remain true that no ultimate theory of the difference between right and wrong could be founded on the assertions of any instinct. Why an individual should obey his conscience unless he wishes to do so, cannot be made clear by conscience itself alone. Nor can the necessity and real truth of a distinction be made clear by the assertions of a faculty that, however dignified it may be, appears in the individual as a personal emotion, a prejudice or choice, determined by an impulse in him. Even if other people actually have this same impulse, that does not make their common prejudice necessary or rational. Conscience, if universal, would still be only a physical fact. If there are actually no differences among various consciences, it is still impossible to see why there might not be. And the possibility is as fatal to the authority of bare conscience as the reality would be. In conscience alone, without some higher rational test, there is no ground evident wherefore its decisions might not have been other than they are. But what the moralist wants is such a distinction between right and wrong as does not depend upon any mere accident of reality, even upon the accidental existence of a moral sense. He wants to find the eternal ethical truth. We insist then that one of the first questions of the moralist must be, why conscience in any given case is right. Or, to put the case otherwise, ethical doctrine must tell us why, if the devil’s conscience approves of the devil’s acts, as it well may do, the devil’s conscience is nevertheless in the wrong.

The discussion has, we imagine, after all, a practical importance in a way not always sufficiently remembered. In the name of conscience many crimes have been done. In the name of conscience men condemn whatever tends towards true moral progress, so long as this new element is opposed to popular prejudice. In the name of conscience they kill the prophets, and stone every one that is sent unto them. In the name of conscience wars are waged, whole tribes are destroyed, whole peoples are oppressed. If conscience is the great practical guide in common life, conscience is also, in many great crises, the enemy of the new light. It is the sensitive and penetrating eye of the heart, but it is often blind before the coming day, even because it has been so useful to us in finding our way in the night. It ought to be a commonplace of morals that there are certain times when the moral reason must cast aside the moral instinct, when the lover of the right must silence the voice of conscience. The more dangerous such moments are, the more dreadful the mistakes that people at such times are apt to make, the more necessary it is that the moralist should discover some criterion whereby to decide when instinct fails. And this criterion cannot be conscience itself. We must seek yet deeper.

V.

Our criticism of conscience is only another example of the method before applied to the criticism of the moral ideals. You make a distinction between right and wrong, you give to this distinction the dignity of a principle, you deduce special moral judgments therefrom. But then some one asks you for any foundation for the principle, beyond your own caprice. You thereupon seek to produce an ultimate reason for your faith. And your ultimate reason — what is it but some fact external to your choice and to your ideal judgments? But such dead external facts were just what you wanted to avoid. You had said that an ideal must have only an ideal foundation. And now you say that the ideally right thing depends on God’s nature, on the existence of the universal Reason, or on the assertions of Conscience. Say thus what you will, have you done what you intended? Have you made evident the necessity of your ideal? If, per impossibile, you suppose your present physical beliefs falsified, if the All-Father changed his mind, and came to hate his children, or if, per impossibile, the Devil triumphed, or the eternal Ideas melted away like snow, or the universal Reason became insane, or the Consciences of all men grew corrupt, would that alter the ideal for you? If the moral ideal assumes its desired position as judge of all things, then what matters it to the ideal if evil is triumphant in the world? “Fiend, I defy thee with a calm, fixed mind,” the idealist will say, after the manner of Shelley’s Prometheus, and that however much the real world may threaten him. Therefore how can the Is predetermine the Ought to be? But if the Ought to be be independent of the Is, how does discussion about the power of God, or his goodness, about the universality of conscience, or its inner strength as a feeling, affect our judgment of the ideal distinction between right and wrong?

Thus we are thrown back and forth between the conflicting demands of criticism. “Give us a moral system that is no caprice of thine,” say the critics of one sort. That seems reasonable. Therefore we affirm, “This system of ours is founded on a rock of eternal truth,” namely, on God’s will, or on the intuition of universal conscience, or on some like fact of the world. But thereupon other critics say to us: “Wherein do you differ from those who say that might is right, or that success determines the right, or that whatever exists ought to exist? For after all you say, something that is, ought to be, merely because it is.” And always still other critics are present, to doubt whether we are right about God or conscience as physical facts. Such critics very plausibly say, “Why found moral truth, which ought to be so secure and clear, on physical or metaphysical doctrines that are so often doubted and so hard to establish?”

Such is the general difficulty illustrated in the warfare of the moral ideals. They want some highest judge to decide among them. If they seek this judge in the real world, they seem to endanger their idealism. If they seek their judge among themselves, the warfare begins afresh. For what one of them can be the sole judge, when they are all judges one of another?

Notes

1. De Fin., I. 20, 66. Quoted in Zeller’s Philos. d. Griechen, Th. 3, Abth. I. (3d ed.) p. 460.
2. For a collection of the passages illustrative of this doctrine, see the quotations in Zeller’s Philos. d. Griechen, Th. 3, Abth. I. p. 285, sqq. (3d ed.). Marcus Aurelius is prominent in the list. Epictetus is responsible for the deduction of human brotherhood from the common fatherhood of God. Seneca has frequent expressions of similar thoughts. Yet for all that the wise man is to be independent and separate. In his respect for humanity, he is not to lose himself.