The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Chapter 5

by Josiah Royce

CHAPTER V.

ETHICAL SKEPTICISM AND ETHICAL PESSIMISM.

Long is the night to him who is awake; long is a mile to him who is tired; long is life to the foolish who do not know the true law. — Dhammapada.

To turn skeptic himself, we said, seemed the only way open before our idealist. If only he had placed his standard a little lower! If only he had not insisted on getting his ideal by ideal methods! Then he might have remained safe in some one of the positions that he temporarily assumed. But always he drove himself out of them. Some stupendous external reality, some beautiful mental state, would suggest itself to him, and he would say: “Lo, here is the ideal that I seek.” But forthwith his own doubt would arise, accusing him of faithlessness. “What hast thou found save that this or that happens to exist?” the doubt would say, and our idealist would be constrained to answer, “Not because it exists, but because I have freely chosen it for my guide, is it the Ideal.” And then would come the repeated accusation that caprice is the sole ground for the choice of this ideal. Skepticism, then, total skepticism as to the foundation of ethics, seems to be the result that threatens us. We must face this skepticism and consider its outcome.

I.

It is in fact in such skepticism as this that one finds the real power and meaning of most genuine modern Pessimism. Not so much in the hopelessness of our efforts to reach our ideals once chosen as in our perpetual hesitation or unsteadiness in the choice of ideals, we most frequently find the deepest ground for pessimistic despair. Choose an ideal, and you have at least your part to play in the world. The game may seem worth the trouble; for far off as may be what you seek, there is the delight and the earnestness of free self-surrender to a great aim. But pessimism is almost inevitable if you have been long trying to find an ideal to which you can devote yourself, and if you have failed in your quest. Therefore those advocates of pessimism are most formidable who dwell less upon the ills of life, as bare facts, and more upon the aimlessness of life. Von Hartmann, therefore, to whom pessimism is more the supposed result of a process of summation, and thus is a belief that the sum of pains in life overbalances the sum of pleasures, produces little effect upon us by his balance-sheet. But Schopenhauer, who dwelt not only upon the balance-sheet, but still more upon the fundamental fact that life is restless and aimless, — he is nearer to success in his pessimistic efforts. It is here that one finds also the true strength of Schopenhauer’s model, the Buddhistic despair of life. Choose your aim in life, says in effect Buddhism, let it be wife or child, wealth or fame or power, and still your aim is only one among many, lost in the eternal strife, at war with all the rest, and never able to prove its right to supremacy in the world. From life to life you pass, now a Brahman, now a king, now a worm, now a tiger, now a beggar, now in hell, now among the demons of the air; your aims alter everlastingly with each new birth, and nowhere do you find life anything but a succession of aims, no one of which is intrinsically more significant than the others. The world of aims is a world of strife, and no life has any real significance. No desire is of any essential worth. Therefore, seeing all this, give up desire. Have it as your one aim to have no aim. Such is the outcome of the insight into the eternal warfare of aims. The Buddhist parables try to make plain this insignificance of life both by dwelling on the fact that men must finally fail to get their aims, and by insisting that, if men temporarily succeed, their condition is no less insignificant than it is when they fail. The failure is used to show a man not so much the difficulty of getting his aim in this bad world, as the worthlessness of his aim. The success when it comes is embittered for the successful man by reminding him that all desire is transient, and that what he now loves will come to seem hateful to him. In both cases the lesson, whether of the success or of the failure, is, not that the order of things is diabolical, and therefore an enemy of mankind, but that the desires themselves are hopelessly confused and worthless. If Buddhism dwelt only on the hopelessness of our efforts to get the good things that we want, the doctrine would result in a sort of Promethean defiance of the physical world, our powerful and cruel enemy. But Buddhism insists upon it that we know not what are the good things that we pretend to want. Our desires being ignorant, and endlessly changeable, we have no right to hope for success. The moral of their stories is not a protest against the physical evils about us, but a general condemnation of the vain aims that are in us.

The same aimlessness of life is the subject of lament in much of our modern romantic poetry. Here is, for the melancholy romantic poet, the great evil of existence, that we know not what is good. Here is the great disappointment of life, that we have no object in life. Here is the great failure, that we cannot make up our minds to undertake anything. Here is the great emptiness, that we have nothing to fill. And thus the ethical skepticism that has so far beset our path in the present investigation becomes, when we dwell upon it and fully realize its meaning, an ethical pessimism. We shall then illustrate afresh our problem if we consider how this difficulty of the choice of an ideal has affected the search of certain among our modern romantic poets for what they would call the ideal emotion.

II.

Of all the subjects of reflection in romantic poetry, none is more familiar than the question of the meaning and worth of human life as a whole. The first and natural answer of the modern poet to this question is well known. Human life means for him the emotional side of life. The highest good, when found, must be an emotional good. The romantic poet, criticising life, must aim to make clear what kind of emotional condition is the most satisfactory one. In this view we have no mere truism. Many forms of Hedonism would oppose the doctrine that in the intenser emotions can be found the ideal states of consciousness. The common sense of men of the world sees in the more moderate pleasures of polite leisure, in the attainment of practical knowledge, in a successful professional or business career, the sources of permanent satisfaction. Several schools of ancient philosophy regarded tranquillity as constituting the essence of a blessed life. But to all this the spirit of modern poetry was from the outset violently opposed. Tranquillity, once exchanged for storm and stress, is not again regarded as the goal. Active emotion, intense in quality, unlimited in quantity, is what the poets of the revolution desire. One need only mention “Werther,” “The Robbers,” “The Revolt of Islam,” “Manfred,” “Faust,” to suggest what is meant by this spirit of the revolutionary poetry.

Life, then, can be of worth only in so far as it is full of the desirable forms of poetic emotion. But is such fullness of life possible? Is the view that makes it the ideal a tenable view? Must not the consistent following of this view lead ultimately to pessimism? The answer to this problem is the history of the whole romantic movement. Here must suffice a sketch of some of the principal results of the movement. The stir of modern life, then, has awakened sensibility, quickened desire, aroused the passion for freedom, disturbed old traditions. Above all, the theological ideals of life have been, for the romantic poet, disturbed, perhaps shattered. His highest good must be sought in his own soul. What is the consequence? First, of course, a sense of splendid independence, a lofty spiritual pride. The joy of freed emotion is equaled by few delights on earth. The self-worship of poetic genius is surpassed by few forms of conceit. Shelley, rejoicing in his strength, writing “The Necessity of Atheism,” and defending, in all innocence of evil, adultery and incest, is a good example of the expression of this spirit. Lavatar’s account of the nature of genius is another instance: “As the apparitions of angels do not come, but are present, do not go away, but are gone, as they strike the innermost marrow, influence by their immortality the immortal in men, vanish and yet still influence, leave behind them sweet shuddering and tears of terror, and on the countenance pale joy, so the operation of genius. Describe genius as you will, — name it fruitfulness of soul, faith, hope, love, — the unlearned, the unlearnable, — the inimitable, the divine, — that is genius. ’Tis inspiration, revelation, that may be felt, but not willed or desired; ’tis art above art, its way is the way of the lightning.”^[1] We cannot quote a tenth part of this rhapsody, wherein the self-admiration and the mutual admiration of the young men about Goethe, in the years just before and after 1780, receive a characteristic expression. This pride leads directly to the effort to build up a wholly new set of ideals. The patience of the statesman, of the student of science, of the business man, is unknown to these forceful young men. They must make a world of their own, and in a day too. At the same time they are without any definite faith. In fact, definite faith would endanger for them the freshness of their emotions. They fear any creed but one self-made. And they can more easily tear down than build up. One of the most interesting of the young geniuses of the age of the German romantic development^[2] is the early lost Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), a representative, like Shelley after him, of the emotional or romantic poetry in its pristine innocence. A truly noble soul, joined to a weak body, oppressed by many troubles, unable to grow to full manly spiritual stature, he shows us the beauty and imperfection of the emotional movement in close union. He writes pages of vague philosophy, which afterwards impressed the young Carlyle as an embodiment of a sense of the deep mystery of life. You find delight in wandering through the flowery labyrinths of such speculation; you learn much by the way, but you come nowhere. Only this is clear: the young poet persists that the world must in some way conform to the emotional needs of man. And he persists, too, that a harmonious scheme of life can be formed on a purely romantic plan, and only on such a plan. He actually explains no reality and completes no scheme of life. He hints, at length, that the Catholic church is the best expression of the needs of man. With this unsatisfactory suggestion, the little career of wandering ends in death. But in what could it have ended had life continued?

Perhaps in what was called by the close friend of Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the romantic irony. This is the next stage in the growth, or, if you like, in the decay of the romantic spirit. Emotion is our guide and our goal. But what is emotion? Something changeable and by nature inconsistent. Each emotion sets up a claim to fill the whole of life. For each new one, the earnest poetic soul feels willing to die. Yet each is driven away by its follower. The feet of them that shall bear it out are before the door even while the triumphant emotion is reigning over the heart within. Fullness of such life means fickleness. Novalis, upon the death of his betrothed, made a sort of divinity of the departed, and dated a new era from the day of her death. His diary was for a while full of spiritual exercises, suggested by his affliction. He resolved to follow her to the grave in one year. Within this year he was betrothed anew. If such is Novalis, what will be a lesser spirit? Conscious of this inevitable decay of each emotion, Friedrich Schlegel suggests that one should make a virtue of necessity, and declare that the higher life consists in a sort of enthusiastic fickleness. The genius must wander like a humming-bird in the garden of divine emotions. And he must be conscious and proud of his wanderings. Activity, or rather agility, is his highest perfection. The more numerous his emotions, the nobler the man. The fickler the man, the more numerous his emotions. This conscious union of nobility and fickleness is the romantic irony, which consists in receiving each new enthusiasm with a merry pride. ’Twas not the first, and will not be the last. We see through it, even while we submit to it. We are more than it is, and will survive it. Long live King Experience, who showers upon us new feelings!

So much for an ingenious and thoroughly detestable view of life, in which there is for an earnest man no rest. This irony, what is it but the laughter of demons over the miserable weakness of human character? The emotion was to be our god. It turns out to be a wretched fetich, and we know it as such. ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands. It is gone, though we trusted in it. It was our stay, and it has flowed away like water. This is not fullness, but hollowness, of life. And how shall the romantic irony supply the vacancy? This irony is but the word of Mephistopheles about the ruin of Gretchen: Sie ist die erste nicht. Not the first change of emotion is this present one; not the first breaking up of the fountains of the great deep within us; but what misery in that thought! Then there is nothing sure, nothing significant. In our own hearts were we to find life, and there is no true life there; only masks with nothing beneath them; only endless and meaningless change.

The consciousness of this result is present in another form of the romantic spirit. The consequence is what Hegel, in the Phänomenologie des Geistes, described under the name of Das Unglückliche Bewusstsein, and what is more familiarly known to us as the Byronic frame of mind. The very strength of the previous emotion renders this consciousness of the hollowness of emotion the more insupportable: —

“When the lamp is shattered

The light in the dust lies dead.”

The brighter the lamp, the deeper the darkness that follows its breaking.

The romantic despair thus described took many forms in the poetry of the early part of the century. To describe them all were to go far beyond our limits. A few forms suggest themselves. If we are condemned to fleeting emotions, we are still not deprived of the hope that some day we may by chance find an abiding emotion. Thus, then, we find many poets living in a wholly problematic state of mind, expecting the god stronger than they, who, coming, shall rule over them. Such a man is the dramatist and writer of tales, Heinrich von Kleist. “It can be,” writes this poet to a friend, December, 1806, “it can be no evil spirit that rules the world, only a spirit not understood.” In such a tone of restless search for the ideal of action, Kleist remains throughout his life. No poet of the romantic school had a keener love of life-problems purely as problems. Each of his works is the statement of a question. In so far Kleist resembles that more recent representative of the problematic school of poetry, Arthur Hugh Clough. Kleist answered his own questions at last by suicide. Others have other ways of fleeing misery. Ludwig Tieck, after running through the whole round of romantic questions, rids himself of his demons by turning his attention to other literary work, and lets most of the old romantic ideals alone, or playfully writes amusing stories about them. Friedrich Schlegel finally escapes from himself by means of a scholarly toil and Catholic faith. Hölderlin takes refuge in a mad-house. Shelley manages to endure his brief life, by dint of childlike submissiveness to his emotions, joined with earnest hope for yet better things. Schiller had joined with Goethe in a search for perfection in the ancient Greek world. There are many fashions of quieting the restlessness that belonged to the time, yet what one of them really answers the problems of the romantic spirit? There is still the great question: How may mankind live the harmonious emotional life, when men are driven for their ideals back upon themselves, when traditional faith is removed, when the age is full of wretchedness and of blind striving, when the very strength of poetic emotion implies that it is transient and changeable? The conscious failure to answer this question is more or less decided pessimism.

Could modern poetry free itself from that reflective tendency in which we have found its most prominent characteristic, the pessimism could disappear with the criticism of life. But this is impossible. Omit part of our lyric poetry, some of our comedy and of our satire, and the rest of our best nineteenth century poetic work is a more or less conscious struggle with pessimism. The grounds and the nature of this struggle have been set forth in the foregoing. The poet once for all accepts the emotional criterion of the worth of life. Determining to see in the harmonious emotional life the best life, feeling as the most certain of principles that “there is a lower and a higher,” the poet seeks to picture the perfect existence thus defined. Failure means for him pessimism; not von Hartmann’s really quite harmless “eudämonologischer Pessimismus,” but the true pessimism of the broken will, that has tried all and failed. The life that ought to be, cannot be; the life that is, is hollow and futile: such will be the result of disappointed idealism. In our time, the idealistic poets that are not pessimists have all fought more or less consciously the same battle with pessimism. Think only of the “Excursion,” or of the “In Memoriam,” or again of “Faust,” that epitome of the thought of our century.

But before we allow ourselves a word on the relation of “Faust” to our problem, let us look a little more closely at Byron. “Faust” is the crown of modern poetic effort. If that fails as a solution, all in this field has thus far been lost. But in Byron there is a confessed, one may add a professed, moral imperfection, whose nature throws light, not so much on the solution of the problem of pessimism, as on the problem itself.

The development of Byron’s poetry has two very marked periods, the sentimental and the critical. The sentimental Byron of the years before 1816 is not of very great present interest. The Byron of “Manfred,” “Cain,” and “Don Juan,” represents an independent phase of the romantic movement, whose faults are as instructive as its beauties. This period of Byron’s poetry is of course but very roughly described by the word critical, yet that word is at any rate suggestive. A sensitive man, and yet heroic, strong in spirit, but without fixed ideals of life, a rebel by nature who yet finds no greater soul to lead him, no faithful band to follow him in any definite effort for mankind, Byron is a modern likeness of him that in the legend afterwards became St. Christopher. Only Byron seeks the strongest without finding him, learns to despise the devil, and never meets the devil’s master. Worn out with the search, the poet flings himself down in the woods of doubt and dreams “Don Juan.” We look in vain for the right adjective with which to qualify this poem: it is so full of strength, so lavish of splendid resources, and yet in sum so disappointing. It has no true ending, and never could have had one. It is a mountain stream, plunging down dreadful chasms, singing through grand forests, and losing itself in a lifeless gray alkali desert. Here is romantic self-criticism pushed to its farthest consequences. Here is the self-confession of an heroic soul that has made too high demands on life, and that has found in its own experience and in the world nothing worthy of true heroism. We feel the magnitude of the blunder, we despise (with the author, as must be noticed, not in opposition to him) the miserable petty round of detestable experiences — intrigues, amours, dinners — in brief, the vulgarity to which human life is reduced; but the tragedy is everywhere to be read between the lines, not in what is said. The romantic spirit has sought in vain for the satisfactory emotional state, and for the worthy deed to perform, and now rests, scornful and yet terrified, in dizzy contemplation of the confused and meaningless maze of sensations into which the world has resolved itself. “There is nothing there to fear or hope,” this spirit seems to say.

“When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter,

And proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.”

Or again: —

“‘To be or not to be?’ Ere I decide

I should be glad to know that which is being;

’Tis true we speculate both far and wide,

And deem, because we see, we are all-seeing.

For my part, I’ll enlist on neither side,

Until I see both sides for once agreeing.

For me, I sometimes think that life is death,

Rather than life, a mere affair of breath.”

In “Manfred” the same spirit seeks another, and not quite so successful, a form of expression. The only peace that can come to this world-weary spirit, Manfred expresses at the sight of a quiet sunset. The only freedom from eternal self-examination is found in an occasional glance at peaceful nature.

“It will not last.

But it is well to have known it though but once;

It hath enlarged my thoughts with a new sense,

And I within my tablets would note down

That there is such a feeling.”

The famous last words of Manfred, —

“Old man, ’tis not so difficult to die,” — coming as they do after all Manfred’s vacillation

upon just this point, indicate the final resolution of despair to brave all possible wretchedness from without for the sake of feeling within, in all its strength, though but for a moment, the fierce defiance of the rebellious Titan. Hungry for deeds, finding nothing to do, fearing the possible future life, and hating the present, the hero at last resorts to an untrue but stirring assertion of absolute personal independence of all the hateful universe here and hereafter; —

“Thou didst not tempt me, and thou couldst not tempt me.

I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey —

But was my own destroyer, and will be

My own hereafter.”

This is pessimism that overleaps itself. The outcome of self -analyzing romanticism is the determination to build afresh a world that shall be nobler than this poor world of decaying passive emotions. Feeling will not do. Manfred attains something by action, even though he first acts in the moment of death. Doing work of some kind is, then, that to which we are necessarily driven. But if the action of defiance can make death tolerable, why might not some kind of activity make life tolerable? Is not the worthy life then to be found, not in emotion, but in work? Is not the ideal state the ideal activity, not the ideal feeling? This suggestion had been at the foundation of the prototype of Manfred, the Faust of Goethe.

Praise of the first part of Goethe’s “Faust” is nowadays superfluous. Doubtless the work is a torso,^[3] but so is the life of man. Extravagant encomium of “Faust,” such as that wherewith Hermann Grimm has marred, as with a showman’s harangue, the conclusion of his otherwise most instructive “Lectures on Goethe,” seems as out of place as applause in a cathedral. The poem is grand and profound, because the life problems it so truthfully portrays are grand and profound; in form, if you except digressions, it is sublimely simple and unassuming. Its imperfections are as open to view as is its grandeur. The doctrine of the poem may be thus briefly suggested. Here is a world wherein nature, the expression of divine intelligence, is perfect; wherein man, by the same divine wisdom, is left in darkness and confusion. The angels, who simply contemplate nature’s perfection, are the “true sons of God.” But they do nothing. They only see and think. Man is to act. By his action he is freely to create such perfection as already passively exists in nature. That is, his life is to become an harmonious whole. The postulate of the Lord is that this is possible. Mephistopheles holds the opposite opinion. The question is to be solved by the case of Faust.

Faust is a man in whom are combined all the strength and weakness of the romantic spirit. No excellence he deems of worth so long as any excellence is beyond his grasp. Therefore his despair at the sight of the great world of life. So small a part of it is his. He knows that he can never grow great enough to grasp the whole, or any finite part of the whole. Yet there remains the hopeless desire for this wholeness. Nothing but the infinite can be satisfying. Hence the despair of the early scenes of the first part. Like Byron’s Manfred, Faust seeks death; but Faust is kept from it by no fear of worse things beyond, only by an accidental reawakening of old childish emotions. He thereafter feels that he has no business with life, and is a creature of accident. He is clearly conscious only of a longing for a full experience. But this experience he conceives as mainly a passive one. He does not wish as yet to do anything, only to get everything.^[4] But at the same time with this desire for a tempest of new feelings, Faust has the consciousness that there never can be a satisfactory feeling. Mephistopheles, stating the case of the contented man of the world, assures him that the time will come for enjoying good things in peace. Faust indignantly replies that pleasure can never deceive him, the tolerable moment never come. In making this very assertion, however, and in concluding his pact with Mephistopheles upon the basis of this assertion, Faust rises above his first position, and assumes a new one. The satisfactory pleasure can never be given to him, and why? Because he will always remain active. Satisfaction would mean repose, repose would mean death. Life is activity. The meaning of the pact is of course that, for good or for evil, all the existence of a man is work, and that no one is ever wholly lost so long as the power of accomplishment remains his. But if work is the essence of life, then satisfaction must be found not in feelings but in deeds. The world is good if we can make it so, not otherwise. The problem of Faust is therefore the discovery of the perfect kind of activity.

With this insight the romantic spirit has risen beyond itself. The essence of romanticism is the desire for fullness of personal experience. The essence of this new spirit is the eagerness to accomplish something. The difference is vast. Faust, following this new tendency, might be led to an obscure toiling life of endless self-sacrifice. His pessimism (for in the early scenes he is a pessimist) might give way before unquestioning heroic devotion to some great end. Does this take place? We know too well the answer. The whole poem is indeed a conflict between the two tendencies in Faust, but the first, the desire for manifold passive experiences, is until the last scenes of the second part predominant. Faust is active, but his activity is mainly a continual pursuit of new experiences. Even at the end he is not active as other men are active; his work is done by magic; and the accomplishment for whose sake he is at last willing to say, This is the highest moment, is an anticipation, not a reality. In the real world the satisfactory work is never found. And thus the solution of the problem is not fully given, though the poet, while suggesting it, has done more than any other modern poet. The revolution had furnished as life-ideals grand emotion and heroic action. The two cannot wholly be harmonized. The highest forms of activity imply self-sacrifice, drudgery, routine, cool-headed calculation. The highest forms of emotion, pursued by themselves, intoxicate and enervate. It is the purpose of Goethe to lead his hero through the various stages of emotional life, for the sake of making him prefer in the end a mode of action to all forms of simple emotion. The result is to be a man above the deadness of ordinary work-a-day realism, yet as devoted to toil as the stupidest realist. There is to be a free surrender of a full self to the service of some high end. Nothing is lacking to the conquest over pessimism, except the clear statement of that for which the converted Faust is to work. The goal of activity once found, the problem will be solved, and the devil’s wager lost. But the dim allegorical suggestions of the second part will not suffice to give us the account of what is wanted. Faust is to work for human progress, and progress means the existence of a whole nation of hard-laboring, fearless men who fight forever for their freedom. To have been the father of such a people is the highest blessedness. Good, indeed, we say; but to have wrought by the devil’s aid, through magic and oppression, is this the highest? Is this the type of the best activity? And is the great problem after all really solved? For what is the ultimate good of the eternal warfare with nature in which mankind are thus left? Faust leaves behind him a nation of toilers, whose business it will be to build dikes to keep the sea out. A worthy end of romantic hopes, truly! That Goethe himself is not wholly content therewith is proven by the epilogue in heaven, which means, if it means anything, that the highest end of human activity is something very fine, but altogether inexpressible, invisible, inconceivable, indefinite, a thing of ether and dreams. One longs in this last scene for the presence of Mephistopheles, who surely has as much right there as in the prologue, and who would be sure to say, in his terse and sinewy fashion, just the right and the last word about the whole business.

The incompleteness of “Faust” is the incompleteness of modern thought. The poet is silent about the final problem, because modern thought is still toiling away on the definition of the highest human activity.

Thus we have found that our moral problem is shared by others than the moral philosophers. Almost at random we have taken a few suggestive illustrations of this same moral problem as it appears to the poets. Had we made use of the poets of the present day, we could have illustrated still other aspects of the question. The restless dramatic genius of Browning, for instance, always giving us glimpses of new ideals that men of strange fashions have or may have, unweariedly warns us not to pretend to narrow the possible objects of life down to one, however sacred we may think that one to be. Life, thus viewed, seems a grand everlasting warfare of ideals, among which peace is impossible. And with this insight into the actual and seemingly irreconcilable warfare of human aims, ethical doctrine must begin. The outlook is gloomy, but the

problem must be faced.

III.

Such are some of the motives that give genuine meaning to modern pessimism. This instability of all ideals is the greatest danger to which idealism can be subject. And the problem is not one of mere theory, nor yet even of poetic emotion alone. The problem is one of daily life. We choose some fashion of life in the morning, and we reject it before night. Our devotional moments demand that all life shall be devotional; our merry moments that all life shall be merry; our heroic moments that all life shall be lived in defiance of some chosen enemy. But we are false to all these our ideals, even while we pretend to have them. And the most disheartening aspect of the whole matter lies in the fact that we cannot prove even our faithlessness to be unworthy, unless we can bring ourselves steadfastly to accept some ideal by which our faithlessness itself can be judged. And this would imply that we were no longer faithless.

We have thus reached the root of moral skepticism. The worst that moral skeptics can say is that all choice of ideals is an accidental caprice, that ideals have no basis but this caprice, and that a moral code depends for its successful propagation wholly on the persuasive personal force of the man that happens to have it and to teach it.

For the first, then, we provisionally accept this skeptical view. We shall regard the moral ideals in this light. We shall seek no impossible proof for any of them. But we shall try to see whither the skeptical view itself leads us. If we look now for a final and perfectly cold-blooded statement of this moral skepticism, a statement that shall let us see once for all its meaning, its foundation, and its scope, the present author knows of no better expression of it than the one that is contained in the appendix to Mr. Arthur Balfour’s “Defense of Philosophic Doubt,”^[5] under the title “The Idea of a Philosophy of Ethics.” Mr. Balfour has shown us by the book in question that he has a very useful office in philosophic discussion, and we can only thank him for having made positive advance in ethics easier, by his clear statement of the difficulties that in the past have barred the way.

“Scientific judgments and ethical judgments deal,” says Mr. Balfour, “with essentially different subject-matters.” Scientific propositions state “facts or events, real or hypothetical.” Ethical propositions do not “announce an event,” nor yet do they tell any “fact of the external or internal world.” Ethical writers too often consider the “psychology of the individual holding the moral law.” But this is no matter for ethics, but only for psychological science. In fact, “if a proposition announcing obligation require proof at all, one term of that proof must always be a proposition announcing obligation, which itself requires no proof.” “There is no artifice by which an ethical proposition can be evolved from a scientific or metaphysical proposition, or any combination of such.” “The origin of an ultimate ethical belief can never supply a reason for believing it, since the origin of this belief, as of any other mental phenomenon, is a matter to be dealt with by science; and my thesis is that (negatively speaking) scientific truth alone cannot serve as a foundation for a moral system; or (to put it positively), if we have a moral system at all, there must be contained in it, explicitly or implicitly, at least one ethical proposition, of which no proof can be given or required.”

The reader may ask: Is all this the loftiest idealism, or is it simply philosophic skepticism about the basis of ethics? We may leave the reader to examine for himself Mr. Balfour’s very ingenious discussion, but one or two very obvious and simple consequences may be quoted from the rest of the essay, and these will serve well enough to show here the drift of the discussion.

“An ethical proposition is one that prescribes an action with reference to an end.” Every such proposition “belongs to a system.” “The fundamental proposition of every such system states an end, which the person who receives that system regards as final — as chosen for itself alone.” “When two such systems conflict, their rival claims can only be decided by a judgment or proposition not contained in either of them, which shall assert which of these respective fundamental ‘ends’ shall have precedence.” “If revenge against a particular individual is for me an end-in-itself, a proposition which prescribes shooting him from behind a hedge may be one of the dependent propositions belonging to that particular system.” “Though under the name ethical are included not only moral, but also non-moral and immoral systems, the distinctions regarded from the outside between these subdivisions are not essential, and have no philosophic import.” Such then is the skeptical outcome of this very idealistic position from which we ourselves started. Thus viewed, the moral world seems essentially chaotic. Each end, if chosen, has its own way of marshaling acts as good and bad. But one end cannot establish itself theoretically over against another. The warfare among them is practical, but is not rationally to be judged or ended. Each says, “In me is the truth about right and wrong. I am the Way.” But for one another they have, not arguments, but anathemas. They give no proof, only assertion and condemnation. It is the contemplation of this chaos that has suggested to us that plausible and yet dreadful pessimism of which modern thought has had so much to say, and of which this chapter has tried to give some notion.

Notes

1. See the passage at much greater length in Koberstein’s Gesch. der deutschen. Nationalliteratur, bd. iv., p. 26, of the 5th edit.
2. The age in question extends from 1770 to 1830. No special effort is here made to follow chronological order. Our purpose is to cite illustrations, not to give a history.
3. Cf. the opinion of M. Edm. Scherer as quoted in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s essay, A French Critic on Goethe, in the Mixed Essays, p. 291.
4. Cf. the lengthy discussion of this point in Friedrich Vischer, Goethe’s Faust, Neue Beiträge zur Kritik des Gedichts, especially p. 291 and p. 304. “Er (Faust) weiss also für jetzt nur von der Lust.”
5. London, MacMillan & Company, 1879.