The Religious Aspect of Philosophy/Chapter 6

by Josiah Royce

CHAPTER VI.

THE MORAL INSIGHT.

Love is like understanding, that grows bright,
Gazing on many truths.

Shelley, Epipsychidion.

We have needed to dwell on our ethical skepticism, to experience the real strength of its doubts, in order that we should be able to get new and better methods of construction for our own doctrine. Deep as is the truth that lies at the basis of many ethical doctrines now either doubted or abandoned, one thing always seems defective about their fashion of building. This one defect has made us question their worth as theories. And our theoretical doubt, as we dwelt upon it, has become practical. We have seen how this ethical skepticism leads to the gloomiest pessimism. Both the skepticism and the pessimism we must meet fairly and fearlessly. And we must ask them how even they themselves are possible.

I.

Our skeptical criticism of ethical theories has been so far either internal or external. We have criticised each doctrine in itself, questioning either its consistency or its inner completeness; or else we have criticised it with reference to other doctrines. In the first case our criticism led to no general skepticism, and had importance only in the special case. But the other kind of criticism was of more importance, and took another turn. We said to the doctrine: “Perfect as your system may be in itself, your assumption of your highest end always finds over against itself an equally stubborn assumption of an exactly opposing end. And you have no proof to offer for your rejection of that end. You simply insist upon calling it a diabolical end; you hurl at it your anathema. Now we, who have wanted proof, not mere enthusiasm, we, who stand critically before your doctrine, and view it from without, and desire to know why we are to accept it, we feel a skeptical indifference about your end, as soon as we compare it with the opposing end, and as soon as comparing, we find the difference between them to be one that rests, not on demonstrable truth, but on a mere kind of caprice. Practically we may agree with you in choosing, as men of action, your aim. Our personal caprice may agree with yours. But theoretically we cannot justify this aim. We find, in all that you say, no objective moral truth, but only somebody’s capricious resolution. And even if we chance to accept your resolution, who knows when we shall change our minds, and begin acting in some new way, so that what we now call good shall be called evil? In brief, if there is to be possible anything more than moral preaching, if there is to be anything worthy of the name of demonstrated moral doctrine, then all your discussion must lead to something not dependent on the bare choice of individual moral agents. But in truth what you give us is just the fact of your choice. And hence it is that we are skeptics.”

What does this our skepticism mean? Unreflective, self-satisfied skepticism always means mental death; but in self-critical skepticism, observant of itself as of everything else, moves the very life-blood of philosophy. And of this the whole of the present book will try to be an illustration. Just here, therefore, we want to be as watchful of our skepticism as we were of the systems whose theoretical weakness led us hither. What is the sense of this theoretical skepticism of our present attitude? On our reply all else turns. And our reply is: This skepticism expresses an indifference that we feel when we contemplate two opposing aims in such a way as momentarily to share them both. For the moment we realize equally these warring aims. They are ours. The conflict is in us. The two wills here represented are our will. And for this reason, and for this only, can we feel the skeptical indecision. Had we the will to choose the one end alone, we should unhesitatingly choose it, and should not see enough of the opposing will to be skeptics. Had we only the will that chooses the opposing end, we should feel equally indifferent to the first. Had we neither will at all in mind, did we realize neither one of the opposing ends, we should be feeling no hesitation between them. Our doubt arises from the fact that momentarily and provisionally we are in the attitude of assuming both. Our indifference is not the indifference of ignorance, but of knowledge; not of failure to understand either end, but of readiness to realize both ends. Hence it follows that moral skepticism is itself the result of an act, namely, of the act by which we seek to realize in ourselves opposing aims at the same time. This observation is of the greatest importance to us, and we must dwell upon it. It shows us that above all our skepticism is the supreme End that makes the skepticism itself possible.

The ethical aims themselves are all of them the expression of somebody’s will. Their conflict is the conflict of wills. Doubt about them depends upon the realization of their existence and of their opposition. Therefore this doubt depends for its very existence on the conditions of this realization. We have tried to state what the conditions are. To realize opposing ends so completely that one feels a genuine doubt which of them to accept, implies, we say, the simultaneous provisional acceptance of both. And this may be shown in a more popular psychological way, as well as in a more general philosophical way. We take the psychological way first.

How can I know that there is anywhere a will, W, that chooses for itself some end, E? Really to know this implies something more than mere outer observation of the facts. One must repeat in one’s own mind more or less rapidly or imperfectly this will, W, that one conceives to exist in somebody else. And this need of repetition is a well-known psychological truth, very easily illustrated by all sorts of commonplace facts. Let us refer to some of these. To think of a bodily act is to perform the act, or at least mentally to initiate the performance of the act. According to Professor Bain’s now generally accepted principle, the memory or the conception of an act is physiologically connected with the fainter excitation of just the same nerve-tracts as would be more intensely excited in the real performance of the act. Therefore it is true that to think of yawning is to initiate a yawn, to think of walking is to initiate steps; and, in case of any excitable person, or in case of any momentary predisposition to perform the act, the conception may immediately become the act, because the nascent excitation involved in the conception of the act may at once pass over into the completer excitation, and the ideal deed may become a visible fact. Thus the excited man, if not checked by company, may at once talk aloud to himself, his thoughts becoming words. If very much excited, he may mutter to himself even in the presence of company. He is much more apt to do this if he thinks not only of the words themselves, but of the act of speaking them, namely, if he imagines himself talking to somebody, and emphatically bringing his thoughts home to that other. In a weak state of body, this tendency to repeat an act whenever one conceives it may become quite distressing. To think of vomiting may mean to vomit. Or again, to think of laughter or of tears may in such a case make one laugh or cry. Hence the weak man may dislike to begin laughing, because he knows that, other exciting causes apart, the mere memory that he has laughed may keep him laughing afresh long after the sense of the ridiculous has passed away, so that to begin laughing may mean total exhaustion before he can stop.

Imitation rests at least in part upon this tendency. An act is performed, we witness it, we see or know how it is done, we conceive the effort that would lead to the performance of it, and forthwith this conception becomes the performance. We imitate the gesture of the actor or of the story-teller before us, and we feel an inner imitation of many acts, even though we suppress the outward signs. In general, for us to realize an act means that we shall do it, either in outward fact, or through a nascent performance that is not outwardly visible. Much of the recently so-called “mind-reading,” more accurately named by some psychologists “muscle-reading,” rests upon this foundation. For the conception of acts that are not outwardly performed is often indicated by slight motions or tensions of arm or of fingers, or of the whole body, and the muscle-reader, getting some close contact with his subject, amuses a company by interpreting these unseen, but readily felt signs of the thoughts of his subject. Very deeply do such facts enter into the structure of our mental life. Mr. Galton, investigating word-associations, found in many cases that the idea immediately aroused by a word was a sort of dramatic reproduction of the act expressed by the word. This dramatic reproduction consisted, at least in part, in the feeling of effort in those muscles that would be concerned in performing the act itself. If the momentary association first aroused by the sudden and unexpected sight of the word involves this dramatic imitation of the act named, how much more would the thought involve the dramatic repetition of the act, if one were to dwell upon the nature of this act, and were fully to realize its nature in his own mind. So much then for psychological illustration of the view that we are here advancing. If two opposing fashions of action are present to our minds, and if mentally we are trying to realize them both, then mentally we are seeking to reproduce them both. Our skeptical hesitation between them expresses our effort to attain mentally both these ends at once. For what we have said about bodily acts will apply equally well to what we usually call mental acts, and even to general resolutions, all of which have a physical side, and are apt to be symbolized by some bodily gesture that we mentally or outwardly repeat when we think of the act or of the resolution in question.

But all this is not a bare accident of the psychological structure of our minds; it is a philosophical necessity. What represents a Will but a Will? Who would know what it is to have an end unless he actually had ends himself? Who can realize a given aim save by somehow repeating it in himself? And so it is rationally and universally necessary that one shall realize the end of a moral system by reproducing in himself the will that accepts this end. But, on the other hand, in so far forth as he reproduces this will alone, he cannot refrain from accepting the end. In so far forth as he reproduces this will, it is his will. And the end is his end. Therefore our skepticism itself was a hesitation, resulting from the realization of several opposing ends, and from a simultaneous reproduction of the wills that aimed at them. Therefore, as we see, absolute ethical skepticism would not really be total absence of moral aim, but would rather be the neutrality that would result from a provisional acceptance of all the conflicting aims in the world of action. Absolute ethical skepticism, if it were actually possible without self-destruction, would still presuppose an end, namely, the effort to harmonize in one moment all the conflicting aims in the world of life. It would not be what it had supposed itself to be. Absolute skepticism would thus be founded on absolute benevolence. Its own aim would he harmony and unity of conduct. But just for that reason is absolute skepticism self-destructive.

Possibly this result may be somewhat unexpected. But did not the very pessimism of our last chapter illustrate it? Why this pessimism? This despair of life, what was it but the sense of the hopelessness of our task? What made the task seem hopeless? And what was the task? The task was the formation of an harmonious ideal of life. This task seemed hopeless, because we felt that the actual ideals of life among men are in deadly conflict. Our pessimism was after all not what it seemed to us to be. It was not the bare renunciation of all aims; it was the effort to satisfy them all, embittered by the sense that they were in seemingly hopeless conflict. Even our pessimism had its ideal. Without its ideal it would have experienced no despair. The conflict of aims would have meant no evil. The pessimistic despair was the natural outcome of our skepticism, solely because our skepticism was itself a realization of the aims with which men live, and of the warfare of these aims.

From the world of dead facts, we had said, you can get no ethical doctrine. Physical truth never gives moral doctrine. Therefore the world of facts seemed to stand on one side, and the world of moral aims seemed to stand on the other, no logical connection being discoverable between them. This was our theoretical objection to the ethical doctrines that we examined. Separate as they were from the world of facts, they seemed to dwell alone, ungrounded and conflicting acts of caprice. Yet for them to pass over to the world of facts was to lose their ethical character. But now we seek to overcome our difficulty by considering, not the world of physical facts themselves, but the world of ends. And this world we consider, not now in detail, but as a whole. What highest end is suggested, we ask, to him who realizes for himself this whole world of ends? The very end, we answer, that, as first dimly seen, forced upon us our skeptical pessimism. Whoso realizes an end, his, for the time being, is that end. And since it is his end, he mentally wills to realize it in ideal perfection. But whoso realizes the various conflicting aims in the world, his are all these aims at the moment of insight, when, so far as in him lies, he realizes them, and mentally desires their success. In proportion as his realization is or can be catholic and genuine, his will becomes, for the time, these conflicting wills. In him is now the warfare. He feels in his own person the bitterness of the universal strife. And therefore it is that, in the first moment of his new insight, the pessimism comes to him. “This warfare cannot be ended,” he despairingly says. But has he thus uttered the final word? For he has not yet added the reflection that we are here insisting upon. Let him say: “Then I too have an end, far-off and unattainable though it seems, and so my will is not aimless. I desire to realize these aims all at once. Therefore I desire their harmony. This is the one good that comes up before my fancy as above all the various conflicting individual goods of the various separate aims. This Higher Good would be attained in a world where the conflict ceased. That would be the Ideal World, where all possible aims were pursued in absolute harmony.”

Barren at first sight this reflection may appear. It may have been unexpected, but we shall certainly be disposed at first to call it fruitless. For here are the aims, and they do conflict. In the actual world there is ceaseless warfare. Only the wager of battle can decide among the opposing ethical faiths. But now, if some idealist comes who says that his insight gives him the higher ideal of Harmony, then one may reply that his ideal is, in its confessed nature, a mere fantasy of his benevolent imagination. Such harmony never can be realized, unless indeed some day, by the aid of bigger battalions, some one of the ideals overcomes all the rest. Yet is our idealist so lightly to be answered? Can he not at once reply: “My Ideal is thus defined, and fantastic though it be, far-off though it seems, it is still an ideal towards which I can direct my efforts. For behold, made practical, brought down from its lonesome height, my Ideal very simply means the Will to direct my acts towards the attainment of universal Harmony. It requires me to act with this my insight always before me. It requires me to consider all the conflicting aims that will be affected by each one of my acts, and to dispose my act with reference to them all. It sets up this new moral principle before me, a principle perfectly catholic, and above all that skepticism which we have felt with regard to the special moral aims. This Principle is: So act as thou wouldst will to act if all the consequences of thy act for all the aims that are anywhere to be affected by this act, could be realized by thee now and in this one indivisible moment. Or more briefly put: Act always in the light of the completest insight into all the aims that thy act is to affect. This rule is no capricious one, chosen for some individual reason, but an universal maxim, since its choice depends on the general realization of all the conflicting aims of the world of life. And thus we have after all found, in the very heart of our skepticism itself, a moral doctrine. In the midst of the warfare of individual wills, we have caught sight of an Universal Will.

II.

“But no,” some one will say: “All this is still mere caprice. Has it not in fact fallen already a prey to the same skepticism that pursued other moral aims? For first, you have tried to found it on a physical fact, namely, on the fact that only by a given effort of will one thinking being can realize the will of another. But does this tell me that I ought thus to realize the conflicting wills that are in the world? And if I do not, what significance has this physical fact for me? But, on the other hand, physical facts aside, is not your doctrine just your capricious determination to respect the conflicting aims that exist in the world?”

This objection, if made, would be founded on a misunderstanding of what we have discovered. We have discovered something that has a value for us quite independently of its importance as a mere physical fact. We set out to find a distinction between right and wrong. Our difficulty always was that, since this distinction involves the acceptance of a highest aim as the standard of judgment, and since there are numerous aims possible, we always were confused by the fact that among these manifold aims there was found no ground of choice. For to show any reason why we have chosen in a given way between two of these aims, is to have a third aim that includes one and excludes the other. And the choice of this third aim seemed again just as accidental as the first choice would have been without this third aim to justify it. Thus our original thought of an aim, as the foundation of an ethical doctrine, had been shattered before our eyes into a spray of separate possible or actual aims, and we saw no way of collecting this spray again into unity. If that was the reason for our skepticism, then of course anything more that we may say about ethics must presuppose a hearer who can feel such skepticism, at least provisionally. The physical fact that he can understand the nature of our doubt is indeed presupposed ere we can go further, but that is no objection to our progress. The physical fact that we have an intelligent hearer must always be presupposed by us. If one cannot feel the doubt, then he cannot undertake any ethical inquiry. We only say to him: “If you doubt about the acceptance of a moral aim, this that we have pointed out to you is the real reason for your doubt. If now you understand your doubt, then you are actually in the state that we have described above. Your doubt has in fact a general character. It means a provisional moral skepticism, founded on an insight into the conflict of aims. This insight means skepticism because, and only because, you are at the moment of insight yourself possessed of the conflicting aims, yourself at war with yourself, and therefore undecided. This spray of aims into which your first pure idea of a moral aim as such has been scattered, this confused and blinding cloud of purposes, represents for you your own moral position. Divided in yourself, disunited, confused, you float cloud-like and inactive, seeking unity of aim and finding none. But if you reflect on all this, you see that in truth you occupy the position that we have above described. You really have still a highest aim. You seek unity. You desire the warfare to cease. You have an ideal. All this is, to be sure, a physical fact, dependent on your nature as voluntary being; but it is not valuable just for that reason alone, but for the reason that, in discovering this fact, you have discovered what you were seeking for. You have found that you are in possession of an ideal. You cannot get away from that ideal save by repeating the very process that has brought you to it. Your moral insight is attained, and the foundation of your doctrine is no longer a particular aim that is accepted by a mere caprice of one individual, but it is the necessary aim that arises in the mind of any one who actually realizes the warfare of the particular aims. It is the ideal of ideals. It is the absolute ideal that arises for you out of the consideration of the separate ideals. Each of them was relative to the mood of the man who happened to choose it; this Ideal is relative only to the insight that comprehends the whole moral world. Unable as we men are fully to realize just the actual nature of every single aim in the world of life, still we are able fully to realize certain conflicting aims; and, realizing this conflict, we can form for ourselves the notion of that absolute realization that means, as we have seen, first the skeptical despair of our last chapter, and then, by a deeper reflection, the ideal that we have just set forth above. Thus we no longer are capriciously deciding upon the worth of physical facts as such. We are passing a necessary judgment upon ideals as ideals.

And we have tried to show that this our resulting ideal is not a barren one. At first sight it seems so. At first sight one says: “This harmony is a self-contradictory dream.” But no, not self-contradictory is the dream; for, if we cannot perfectly realize this new ideal, if absolute harmony is unattainable, one can still walk in the light of the ideal. One can say: “I will act as if all these conflicting aims were mine. I will respect them all. I will act in the light that has brought me my moral insight. And to that end I will act at each moment as one would act who saw himself about to suffer in his own person and at one time all the consequences of his act for all the aims that are to be affected by what he does.” But now the ideal becomes practical, now it ceases to be barren. It is no longer the mere wish that was at the heart of our skepticism, a wish gloomy, inactive, terrified at the warfare that is in the world. It is a cool determination. It says: “This disease of conflicting aims cannot now be cured, but it shall be dealt with. These aims are as my own. I will deal with them as such. I will work for their harmony.” If one doubts this ideal, then he doubts the very foundation of ethical doubt itself. But this is not all that our absolute ideal accomplishes. Not merely for the moment of insight does this ideal give an aim; but it extends itself to the other moments of life. It says: “The highest good would be realizable only in case not merely the aim of this moment of insight itself, but the aims of all the conflicting wills in the world, were brought into conformity to this insight. The highest good would be attainable if all the conflicting wills realized fully one another. For then, not abandoning each its own aim, each would have added thereto, through insight, the aims of the others. And all the world of individuals would act as one Being, having a single Universal Will. Harmony would in fact be attained.” Therefore our ideal has another precept to give us. It says: “Act in such wise as to extend this moral insight to others.” Here is a definite practical aim, and it justifies us in saying to all the conflicting wills: “You should respect one another.” For so in fact they all would do if they had the moral insight. And to have it, as we now see, is the prerequisite to the attainment of the highest good, namely, this ideal Harmony that we seek at the moment of moral insight.

III.

We fear that such general discussion of what we have called the moral insight may seem, at first sight, too abstract to be real. We hasten to a more concrete study of this insight. Leaving those more abstract aims that have been used as the foundation of moral systems, let us study our moral insight as it applies to the special aims that come into conflict when a man is dealing with his neighbor. Let us see how just the considerations that we have applied to the conflict of ethical aims in general apply directly to the conflict between selfishness and unselfishness, which we so long and so vainly considered in the last chapter. This warfare of selfishness and unselfishness is indeed not the deepest of moral problems, and to solve the problem here involved is not, as some have supposed, to define forthwith the Highest Good. Yet we shall do well to fix our minds for the time on this special problem.

Why is selfishness easier to me than unselfishness? Because it is easier for me to realize my own future, and my own desire about it, than to realize the desires of my neighbor. My will is the datum; his the dimly-conceived, remote fact. Hence it seems to me obvious that his will must be to me less significant than my own. Therefore he and I are often in deadly warfare, just because I realize his will not in its inner nature, but as a foreign power, and because he deals even so with me. We stand over against each other like two moral systems, condemning and fighting each the other. Now, however, there often appear disinterested moralists, who try to patch up our differences. We have seen how and why they have so often failed. They tell me that my neighbor and I shall give each other much more selfish delight if we stop fighting and begin coöperating. But that wise advice in no way touches the root of the difficulty between us. If we did coöperate for this reason, we should still be two foreign powers, virtually discordant. And whenever it happened that either of us could do better by oppressing or by crushing the other than by continuing to coöperate with him, he not only would do so, but, so far as we have seen, must do so. Another moralist hopes that if we keep on coöperating long enough, we may evolve into purely unselfish beings some day. The hope is a pious one, but gives us no sufficient reason why we ought to coöperate unselfishly now, when in fact we are selfish. Yet another moralist asks us to reflect on the nature of our emotions of pity and sympathy for each other. We reply that these feelings are indeterminate in character, and may lead us to do anything or nothing: for each other. So all these moralists leave my neighbor and me just where we were. If it is to our personal advantage to fight, we shall do so; otherwise we may by chance remain for a while in practical harmony; but, throughout, our moral aims will remain what they were, selfish and conflicting.

Forsaking these unsatisfactory attempts to found a moral doctrine concerning one’s duty to one’s neighbor, let us try to do what Schopenhauer so haltingly suggested, namely, to see what moral insight as moral insight, and not as pity or as far-sighted egoism, tells us about the moral relations of selfishness and unselfishness. If a man not merely pities but knows his neighbor’s will, what moral ideal does he get? We affirm that insight into the reality of the neighbor’s will, insight that considers his will as it is in itself, and that accordingly repeats it in us, gives us a position above the struggle of self and neighbor, and lets us see the higher ideal of Harmony, whose precept is: Act as a being would act who included thy will and thy neighbor’s will in the unity of one life, and who had therefore to suffer the consequences for the aims of both that will follow from the act of either. This insight is not the mere emotion of pity nor yet sympathy, but something different from these, namely, something that involves the realization, and therefore the reproduction in us, of the opposing will of the neighbor. This insight therefore deprives each will in its separateness of its absolute significance, and commands that we should act with an equal reference to both. It says not merely, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” but, “In so far as in thee lies, act as if thou wert at once thy neighbor and thyself.” “Treat these two lives as one life.”

We must try to show how this insight leads to this result. We must try so to bring home the insight to the reader that he shall in his person accomplish the act of which we speak, and so come to accept the ideal upon which we are insisting. It is in himself that he is to experience this ideal, or else he will not be able or willing to accept it. We can only suggest the way. And so we shall try forthwith to suggest what is the nature of that common imperfect realization of our neighbor’s life which does not lead to the moral insight, and then to dwell upon this insight itself.

IV.

The common sense, imperfect recognition of our neighbor implies rather realization of the external aspect of his being, as that part of him which affects us, than realization of his inner and peculiar world of personal experience. Let us show this by example. First, take my realization of the people whom I commonly meet but do not personally very well know, e.g. the conductor on the railway train when I travel. He is for me just the being who takes my ticket, the official to whom I can appeal for certain advice or help if I need it. That this conductor has an inner life, like mine, this I am apt never to realize at all. He has to excite my pity or some other special human interest in me ere I shall even begin to try to think of him as really like me. On the whole, he is for me realized as an automaton. But still frequently I do realize him in another way, but how? I note very likely that he is courteous or surly, and I like or dislike him accordingly. Now courtesy and discourtesy are qualities that belong not to automata at all. Hence I must somehow recognize him in this case as conscious. But what aspect of his consciousness do I consider? Not the inner aspect of it as such, but still the outer aspect of his conscious life, as a power affecting me; that is what I consider. He treats me so and so, and he does this deliberately; therefore I judge him. But what I realize is his deliberate act, as something important to me. It seldom occurs to me to realize fully how he feels; but I can much more easily come to note how he is disposed. The disposition is his state viewed as a power affecting me.

Now let one look over the range of his bare acquaintanceship, let him leave out his friends, and the people in whom he takes a special personal interest; let him regard for the first the rest of his world of fellow-men: his butcher, his grocer, the policeman that patrols his street, the newsboy, the servant in his kitchen, his business rivals whom he occasionally talks to, the men whose political speeches he has heard or read, and for whom he has voted, with some notion of their personal characters, — and then all the rest of the outside world, the Turks or the Indians, the men of historic fame. Napoleon, Cicero, Cæsar, the imaginary people in fictions that have excited little of his stronger emotional interest: how does he conceive of all these people? Are they not one and all to him ideal or real ways of behavior towards himself or other people, outwardly effective beings, rather than realized masses of genuine inner life, of sentiment, of love, or of felt desire? Does he not naturally think of each of them rather as a way of outward action than as a way of inner volition? His butcher, his newsboy, his servant, — are they not for him industrious or lazy, honest or deceitful, polite or uncivil, useful or useless people, rather than self-conscious people? Is any one of these alive for him in the full sense, — sentient, emotional, and otherwise like himself; as perhaps his own son, or his own mother or wife seems to him to be? Is it not rather the kind of behavior of these beings towards him which he realizes? Is it not rather in general their being for him, not for themselves, that he considers in all his ordinary life, even when he calls them conscious? And this being for him is what he calls their dispositions. They are all good fellows or bad fellows, good-humored or surly, hateful or admirable. They may appear even sublime or ideal beings, as a Caesar might to a student of history. Yet their inner life need not therefore be realized. They remain powers, ways of acting, dispositions, wonderful examples of energy. They are still seen from without. Not their inner, volitional nature is realized, but their manner of outward activity; not what they are for themselves, but what they are for others.

Such then is our natural realization of our fellows even when we call them conscious. The imperfect realization in question extends even to the case of closer affection. Lear realizes in his daughters, or thinks that he realizes, only the dispositions that they express. Real effort to enter into the inner life of their emotions is foreign to his simple and imperious mind. Even when I delight in another’s love, I am still apt to realize rather the disposition than the inner and more personal emotional life that is the cause of this way of behavior. The act is what I want,^[1] the voice, the look, thegift, or the other assurance of an energy in harmony with my will. The ordinary emotion of gratitude is another very good illustration of the imperfect realization of our neighbors that accompanies even the plainest verbal recognition of their conscious existence. As I write these words, my heart is just now going out in admiration and respect, not to say affection, to a man whom I but imperfectly know. I feel a desire to do him a favor, if it were possible. Why? Do I reflect on his true nature and needs as a being like myself? Do I feel our common weakness, our common longings? Have I dispelled the illusion of selfishness that separates us? No, — I grieve and am ashamed to confess it, — this being is to me almost as wholly external as my plumber, not much better realized than my walking-stick. I am dwelling not on his own inner life at all. In my mind’s eye I see just his outer form. Yet he has written me a graceful and pleasing letter, expressing his interest in some of my plans, and his desire to help me. I am selfishly delighted to find such help. I have an instinctive feeling that it demands compensation. I feel an animal delight in being in friendly company. My gratitude is here no moral emotion at all.

The emotion of sympathy does indeed often tend to make me realize the other and more completely internal aspect of my neighbor’s reality; but sympathy does this in the halting and uncertain way described in a previous chapter. And at all events, whatever sympathy leads to, it is not by itself the insight. And so, to sum up our present way of studying the illusions of selfishness, we find by these examples that by nature our neighbor’s conscious life is realized for us rather as an active agency that affects our fortunes, than as an inner experience, or as it is in itself, namely, as a Will; and hence it is that we are disposed to treat it with coldness, rather than to respect its true nature. Resistance, conquest, employment of this agency, seem to us axiomatic aims of prudence; unselfish respect for its inner accompanying experiences seems to us a hard if not a meaningless task. Such is the nature and ground of the illusion of selfishness.

If now our activity of realization were confined to the range of common-sense emotions, there would be no escape from all this. It is our critical reflection that appears on the scene, saying: “O common sense, what thou hast realized cannot be all. We must resolve to recognize more, else will our resolutions never lose their inconsistency and darkness. Be honest, O common sense. Is not thy neighbor after all just a dead fact of nature, an automaton with certain peculiar energies?” And common sense answers: “No, for is he not most assuredly a conscious agent, whose action I realize?” “Dost thou then know that he wills, and not realize what this will means for him, namely, that he experiences it?” “No,” answers common sense, “if he wills as I do, he must experience as I do.” “Realize it then, and see what thou then wilt do with him.” And common sense must, we affirm, so realizing, simply reply, “As he is real, he is as much an object for my effort as I myself am, in case I can affect him. Ours is one life.” This common sense must see, if it fully realizes the neighbor. And if it realizes his activity, as it always in some fashion does, then it must come to realize his experience, and so to realize him fully, so soon as it undertakes to complete the incomplete act by which it has begun to realize his will. This completion may be hastened by pity, or may be hindered by the weakness that pity often involves; but when it comes, it must be an act of clear insight, made possible by the rational nature of our mental life. Whatever in our thought is done in part, we are ready either to abandon wholly, or to finish altogether, so soon as we realize that we have been doing it in part. Our resolution to recognize an existence cannot remain confused or self-contradictory when we come to realize where the confusion and self-contradiction lie. And as we simply cannot give up recognizing our neighbor, we must of necessity resolve, when we see this inconsistency of our natural realization, to realize him wholly.

Such is our reflective account of the process that, in some form, must come to every one under the proper conditions. In this process we see the beginning of the real knowledge of duty to others. The process is one that any child can and does, under proper guidance, occasionally accomplish. It is the process by which we all are accustomed to try to teach humane behavior in concrete cases. We try to get people to realize what they are doing when they injure others. But to distinguish this process from the mere tender emotion of sympathy, with all its illusions, is what moralists have not carefully enough done. Our exposition has tried to take this universally recognized process, to distinguish it from sympathy as such, and to set it up before the gates of ethical doctrine as the great producer of insight.

But when we say that to this insight common sense must come, under the given conditions, we do not mean to say: “So the man, once having attained insight, must act thenceforth.” The realization of one's neighbor, in the full sense of the word realization, is indeed the resolution to treat him as if he were real, that is, to treat him unselfishly. But this resolution expresses and belongs to the moment of insight. Passion may cloud the insight in the very next moment. It always does cloud the insight after no very long time. It is as impossible for us to avoid the illusion of selfishness in our daily lives, as to escape seeing through the illusion at the moment of insight. We see the reality of our neighbor, that is, we determine to treat him as we do ourselves. But then we go back to daily action, and we feel the heat of hereditary passions, and we straightway forget what we have seen. Our neighbor becomes obscured. He is once more a foreign power. He is unreal. We are again deluded and selfish. This conflict goes on and will go on as long as we live after the manner of men. Moments of insight, with their accompanying resolutions; long stretches of delusion and selfishness: That is our life.

V.

To bring home this view in yet another way to the reader, we ask him to consider very carefully just what experience he has when he tries to realize his neighbor in the full sense that we have insisted upon. Not pity as such is what we desire him to feel. For whether or no pity happens to work in him as selfishly and blindly as we have found that it often does work, still not the emotion, but its consequences, must in the most favorable case give us what we seek. All the forms of sympathy are mere impulses. It is the insight to which they bring us that has moral value. And again, the realization of our neighbor’s existence is not at all the discovery that he is more or less useful to us personally. All that would contribute to selfishness. In an entirely different way we must realize his existence, if we are to be really altruistic. What then is our neighbor?

We find that out by treating him in thought just as we do ourselves. What art thou? Thou art now just a present state, with its experiences, thoughts, and desires. But what is thy future Self? Simply future states, future experiences, future thoughts and desires, that, although not now existing for thee, are postulated by thee as certain to come, and as in some real relation to thy present Self. What then is thy neighbor? He too is a mass of states, of experiences, thoughts, and desires, just as real as thou art, no more but yet no less present to thy experience now than is thy future Self. He is not that face that frowns or smiles at thee, although often thou thinkest of him as only that. He is not the arm that strikes or defends thee, not the voice that speaks to thee, not that machine that gives thee what thou desirest when thou movest it with the offer of money. To be sure, thou dost often think of him as if he were that automaton yonder, that answers thee when thou speakest to it. But no, thy neighbor is as actual, as concrete, as thou art. Just as thy future is real, though not now thine, so thy neighbor is real, though his thoughts never are thy thoughts. Dost thou believe this? Art thou sure what it means? This is for thee the turning-point of thy whole conduct towards him. What we now ask of thee is no sentiment, no gush of pity, no tremulous weakness of sympathy, but a calm, clear insight.

But one says: “All this have I done from my youth up. Surely I hold and always have held my neighbor to be real and no automaton. Surely I have feared his reproof, have been angry at his ill-will, have rejoiced in his sympathy, have been influenced by his opinions, all my life. And yet I have remained selfish.” Nay, but just at the moment when thou hadst to act towards him so or so, thou wert no longer quick to realize him. Then it was that thy passion made him for thee a shadow. Thou couldst not love him, because thou didst forget who he was. Thou didst believe in him enough to fear him, to hate him, to fight with him, to revenge thyself upon him, to use his wit as thy tool, but not enough to treat him as real, even as thou thyself art real. He seems to thee a little less living than thou. His life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires. He is a symbol of passion to thee, and imperfectly, coldly, with dull assent, without full meaning to thy words, thou dost indeed say, when asked, that the symbol stands for something real, as real as thyself. But what those words mean, — hast thou realized it, as, through selfish feeling, thou dost realize thy equally external future Self?

If he is real like thee, then is his life as bright a light, as warm a fire, to him, as thine to thee; his will is as full of struggling desires, of hard problems, of fateful decisions; his pains are as hateful, his joys as dear. Take whatever thou knowest of desire and of striving, of burning love and of fierce hatred, realize as fully as thou canst what that means, and then with clear certainty add: Such as that is for me, so is it for him, nothing less. If thou dost that, can he remain to thee what he has been, a picture, a plaything, a comedy, or a tragedy, in brief a mere Show? Behind all that show thou hast indeed dimly felt that there is something. Know that truth thoroughly. Thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different in sort from thine. Thou hast said: “A pain in him is not like a pain ill me, but something far easier to bear.” Thou hast made of him a ghost, as the imprudent man makes of his future seK a ghost. Even when thou hast feared his scorn, his hate, his contempt, thou hast not fully made him for thee as real as thyself. His laughter at thee has made thy face feel hot, his frowns and clenched fists have cowed thee, his sneers have made thy throat feel choked. But that was only the social instinct in thee. It was not a full sense of his reality. Even so the little baby smiles back at one that smiles at it, but not because it realizes the approving joy of the other, only because it by instinct enjoys a smiling face; and even so the baby is frightened at harsh speech, but not because it realizes the other’s anger. So, dimly and by instinct, thou has lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast even desired his pain, but thou hast not fully realized the pain that thou gavest. It has been to thee, not pain in itself, but the sight of his submission, of his tears, or of his pale terror. Of thy neighbor thou hast made a thing, no Self at all.

When thou hast loved, hast pitied, or hast reverenced thy neighbor, then thy feeling has possibly raised for a moment the veil of illusion. Then thou hast known what he truly is, a Self like thy present Self. But thy selfish feeling is too strong for thee. Thou hast forgotten soon again what thou hadst seen, and hast made even of thy beloved one only the instrument of thy own pleasure. Even out of thy power to pity thou hast made an object of thy vainglory. Thy reverence has turned again to pride. Thou hast accepted the illusion once more. No wonder that in this darkness thou findest selfishness the only rule of any meaning for thy conduct. Thou forgottest that without realization of thy future and as yet unreal self, even selfishness means nothing. Thou forgottest that if thou gavest thy present thought even so to the task of realizing thy neighbor’s life, selfishness would seem no more plain to thee than the love of thy neighbor.

Have done then with this illusion that thy Self is all in all. Intuition tells thee no more about thy future Self than it tells thee about thy neighbors. Desire, bred in thee by generations of struggle for existence, emphasizes the expectation of thy own bodily future, the love for thy own bodily welfare, and makes thy body’s life seem alone real. But simply try to know the truth. The truth is that all this world of life about thee is as real as thou art. All conscious life is conscious in its own measure. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere even as in thee. The result of thy insight will be inevitable. The illusion vanishing, the glorious prospect opens before thy vision. Seeing the oneness of this life everywhere, the equal reality of all its moments, thou wilt be ready to treat it all with the reverence that prudence would have thee show to thy own little bit of future life. What prudence in its narrow respectability counseled, thou wilt be ready to do universally. As the prudent man, seeing the reality of his future self, inevitably works for it; so the enlightened man, seeing the reality of all conscious life, realizing that it is no shadow, but fact, at once and inevitably desires, if only for that one moment of insight, to enter into the service of the whole of it.

So the illusion of selfishness vanishes for thy present thought (alas! not for thy future conduct, O child of passion!), when thou lookest at what selfishness has so long hidden from thee. Thou seest now the universal life as a whole, just as real as thou art, identical in joy and sorrow. The conflict of selfishness and unselfishness vanishes. Selfishness is but a half realization of the truth expressed in unselfishness. Selfishness says: I shall exist. Unselfishness says: The Other Life is as My Life. To realize another's pain as pain is to cease to desire it in itself. Hatred is illusion. Cowardly sympathy, that hides its head for fear of realizing the neighbor’s pain, is illusion. But unselfishness is the realization of life. Unselfishness leads thee out of the mists of blind self -adoration, and shows thee, in all the life of nature about thee, the one omnipresent, conscious struggle for the getting of the desired. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor’s power; in the boundless sea, where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in the hearts of all the good and loving; in the dull, throbbing hearts of all prisoners and captives; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope; in all our devotion; in all our knowledge, — everywhere from the lowest to the noblest creatures and experiences on our earth, the same conscious, burning, willful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thy own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away and forget it as thou canst; but if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.

VI.

But this unity that the moral insight has found for us in life must not be falsely interpreted. Rightly interpreted, the moral insight will solve for us many very difficult problems; but we must not imagine that it shows us all this individual life as in any mystical sense already actually in the harmony that we seek. Not because these aims are already in themselves one, but because we, as moral seers, unite in one moment of insight the realization of all these aims, for that reason alone is this life one for us. It is in this sense alone that the moral insight gives us a solution of the problem of egoism and altruism, as well as a foundation for a general doctrine of the Highest Good. The moral insight does not enable us to say: These beings have always actually but blindly sought what was in itself the Highest Good. We can only say: Each one has sought in his blindness only what was to him desirable. And not, save by the realization of the conflict of desire, can the truly highest good be conceived. The moral insight discovers harmony not as already implied in the nature of these blind, conflicting wills, but as an ideal to be attained by hard work. We point this out in order to show that we do not fall into the hackneyed error of those moralists who insist that they merely tell men what one thing it is that men have all been blindly seeking. Such moralists often say: “Our system is but an expression of the tendency that was always there, latent in men. It tells them in plain words what they always wanted, and then it tells them how to get this end.” This specious pretense of so many moral systems we have implicitly condemned in the previous part of our discourse. It constitutes in many cases that appeal to the physical facts which we have set aside as always useless and often ungrounded. If one looks the pretense fairly in the face, how flat and stale it seems! Yonder vast wealth of conflicting aims among men, base and noble, devilish and divine, — what moralist has been able to sum all of them up in any formula, save in the wholly abstract formula that we have above referred to, namely, that all these beings seek what seems to them desirable. How presumptuous to say to them: “In fact you all desire this that I formulate in my text-book of morals.” In fact they do not. And it is absurd to watch the turnings and twistings of language by which a moralist tries to make out that they do. For instance, let the moralist be J. S. Mill, and let him declare, as he does, that happiness is the one goal of all men. If happiness includes the attainment of any possible object of anybody's desire, then indeed the theory is a truism. But with this truism, of course, no sort of progress would have been made in ethics. Mill must tell us something about what sorts of happiness there are, and about what sorts ought to be sought most of all. He says, as we know, that there are “higher” and “lower” pleasures, and that higher pleasures ought to be sought in preference to the others, the pleasure of the intellect, of generosity, etc., instead of the sensual pleasures. What can be the proof? That happiness was the goal we were to learn, because all men actually seek it. But that the “higher” happiness is the goal, rather than a lower form, how do we learn that? Because men always choose it? In fact they do not. So Mill has to shift the ground a little. They do not all of them actually seek it, but they would seek it if they knew it. Most of them are ignorant of what they would prize most, namely, of these “higher” pleasures. But here again Mill meets a disheartening fact. Most men, if they ever love “higher” pleasures at all, are found loving them more for a while in the ideal enthusiasm of youth than later in the prosaic dullness of middle life. Men who have known the “higher” happiness do then deliberately turn away from it. This is a regular fact of life, well known, and often lamented. How does this agree with Mill’s doctrine? Alas! it does not agree, and only by worthless devices can he conceal from himself the fact. The people who enjoy the higher know the lower and reject it. The people who enjoy the lower do not know of the higher, or, if they ever knew it, they have forgotten it, or if they have not quite forgotten the higher, they have “lost capacity for it.” As if all this could not just as plausibly be said from the side of the “lower” pleasures. Just as if it were not constantly said from that side in every good drinking-song, with a result precisely opposed to Mill’s. In fact Mill is driven in this controversy with imaginary opponents to the worst subterfuge possible for so skilled a thinker, when he at last says that the pleasure which seems the higher of two pleasures to the “most of those who have experienced both” is actually the higher. For thus, to keep up the show of merely interpreting to men their actual will. Mill has to appeal to the opinion of the majority, has to use a purely practical habit of deliberative assemblies for the purpose of deciding a question of theory, and then has most absurdly to declare that a man's experience about his own pleasure is worth nothing as a test of its value unless the majority of his fellows agree with him in his judgment.

In fact all this is benevolent trifling. Men declare at one time one pleasure to be “highest,” that is, most desirable, and at another time they declare another pleasure to be the only desirable one. Different men persist in having different aims. To define their duty by telling them that they all have one aim is wrong. From the point of view of the moral insight all this struggling life becomes one; but that is not because it as yet ceases to struggle, but because the being possessed of the moral insight comes to realize it all at once. For him it is one, because he identifies himself with the struggling aims. He seeks their harmony, and must do so if he have the insight. But they are not in harmony as yet at all; else would he have no work to do. Let him then not deceive himself. The conflict itself is real and not illusory. The illusion lies in the fact that no one of the fighters realizes the inner life of the others. But to overcome that illusion in any soul is not to show that all the fighters have been desiring the same thing.

J. S. Mill is by no means our only case of the effort to convince people that they always have had one object of search, which the moralist has but to name in order to bring peace on the earth. Bentham undertook the same task, and showed in his blunt way as much skill in subterfuge as he ever accused his opponents of showing, while he tried to make out that all men always have been Benthamites, to whom pleasure was the only good. Mr. Spencer in his turn tries to define the Good so that it shall agree not only with the popular usage of the word good, but also with the Spencerian notion of what constitutes the Good. If anywhere a usage of the word appears that does not agree with the Spencerian usage, Mr. Spencer insists, sometimes, that, if cross-questioned, the man who so uses it would have to come over to the Spencerian usage, and sometimes that the usage in question is a survival in culture of a savage notion, or that it is in some other way insignificant. Thus the proof of Mr. Spencer’s view about the nature of the ideal becomes so simple and easy that when, a little further on, it is necessary to recognize the existence of pessimists, Mr. Spencer finds no difficulty in regarding it as perfectly plain that a man can become a pessimist only in case he believes that the Spencerian ideal of the Good is unattainable. Thus axioms are manufactured whenever we need them.

All this is mere neglect of whatever ideals do not at once fit into one’s own ideal. Such neglect is unworthy of an ethical inquirer. Yet it has been frequently committed in recent times, and it is committed whenever a man endeavors or pretends, as Professor Clifford also very skillfully endeavored and pretended, to found ethical science wholly upon the basis and by the methods of natural science. Such attempts are like the efforts of a man trying to build a steamboat, who should first drop the steam-engine into the water, and then seek to build the boat up about the engine so as to float it and be driven by it. For natural science will indeed give us the engine of our applied ethics, as indispensable as the steam-engine to the boat. But first we must lay the keel, and we must get the boat ready for the engine, the ideal ready for the science that is to apply it. All such attempts as those that put the “scientific basis” first, lamely strive to conceal their helplessness behind a show of appealing to the “facts of human nature and of the social structure, as science discovers them.” But these facts reveal a confused warfare of aims among men, no one aim being actually chosen by the whole of men. And then the “scientific moralist” tries to show by all sorts of devices that all men really have the same aim. But he cannot show that, because it is not true. What aim is common to the whole life of any one of us? Much less then is any aim common to all men. But this mistake is not specially modern. Not only the modern scientific moralists have been guilty of it, but moral preachers of all schools since Socrates have been prone to insist on occasion, for purposes of persuasion, that somehow or other all evil conduct arises from mere ignorance of what one wants. This view is a mistake. One may want anything, and may know it very well. There is no known limit to the caprice and to the instability of the human will. If you find anybody desiring anything, the only tolerably sure and fairly universal comment is, that he will stop desiring it by and by. You can seldom get any ultimate analysis of the motive of such a desire.

But we do not found our moral system on any such analysis. We do not say even that it is physically possible for any of us to get and to keep the moral insight long together. What we affirm can once more briefly be summed up as follows: —

1. Moral insight, whenever, however, to whomsoever it comes, consists in the realization of the true inner nature of certain conflicting wills that are actual in the world.

2. An absolute moral insight, which we can conceive, but which we never fully attain ourselves, would realize the true inner nature of all the conflicting wills in the world.

3. The moral insight involves from its very nature, for those who have it, the will to harmonize, so far as may be possible, the conflicting wills that there are in the world, and that are realized at the moment of insight. 4. If the moral insight be concerned directly with two conflicting wills, my neighbor’s and my own, then this insight involves the will to act as if my neighbor and myself were one being that possessed at once the aims of both of us.

5. If the moral insight be concerned with conflicting general aims, such as could express themselves in systems of conduct, then the moral insight involves the will to act, so far as may be, as if one included in one’s own being the life of all those whose conflicting aims one realizes.

6. Absolute moral insight would involve the will to act henceforth with strict regard to the total of the consequences of one’s act for all the moments and aims that are to be affected by this act.

7. The moral insight stands in all its forms opposed to ethical dogmatism, which accepts one separate end only. The insight arises from the consciousness that this one aim is not the only one that is actual. Imperfectly and blindly ethical dogmatism also realizes this truth, and so hates or even anathematizes the opposing aims. But the hatred is imperfect realization. The moral insight therefore says to those who possess the dogmatic spirit: “In so far as you seek a reason for the faith that is in you, you can find none short of the assumption of my position.” The moral insight says to itself, “I ought not to return to the dogmatic point of view.” So the moral insight insists upon giving itself the rule, “Dogmatism is wrong.”

8. The only alternatives to the moral insight are: (a) ethical dogmatism, which once for all gives up the effort to get any basis for ethics save its own irrational caprice; and (b) ethical skepticism, which, as we have seen, is only a preliminary form of the moral insight, and passes over into the latter upon reflection.

9. There is no other distinction between right and wrong save what the dogmatic systems on the one hand give as their capricious determinations, and what the moral insight on the other hand shows as the expression of what it involves.

Our conclusion so far is therefore this: Remain blind if you will; we have no means of preventing you. But if you want to know the whole ethical truth, you can find it only in the moral insight. All else is caprice. To get the moral insight, you must indeed have the will to get the truth as between the conflicting claims of two or more doctrines. This will being given, the moral insight is the necessary outcome even of skepticism itself.

Yet now, after all our argument and enthusiasm, the reader must know that what we have so far portrayed is only the most elementary aspect of the moral insight. The unity that we have insisted upon is so far an empty unity, a negative freedom from conflict. To show the real worth of this whole view, we must pass from the beggarly elements of duty to more advanced conceptions. The moral insight must be so developed as to tell us about the Organization of Life. The empty unity must be filled with content. We must discuss more in concreto what men possessed of the moral insight will do.

Notes

1. “I’d give all my income from dreamland

   For a touch of her hand on my cheek.”